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23,226,947 | 23,225,479 | 1 | 2 | 23,224,399 | train | <story><title>Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/smashing-eggs-dumping-milk-farmers-waste-more-food-than-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LB232323</author><text>When people talk about food costs in America, an extremely crucial element is often overlooked.<p>For all the moral posturing about animal treatment in factory farms and sustainability, which I can sympathize with, there is a massive army of illegal migrant workers that are invisible both legally and socially.<p>These migrant workers grow and harvest the food that Americans survive on every day. Not to mention cleaning homes, landscaping, and even raising families.<p>This is a major factor in why food is so cheap and abundant in America. Illegal migrant workers who are paid sub-minimum slave wages to feed the citizens of the United States.<p>Until we take a hard look at this labor system and widely acknowledge its economic role, these debates are empty. If you know your history, you understand why this system exists.</text></comment> | <story><title>Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/smashing-eggs-dumping-milk-farmers-waste-more-food-than-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fasteddie31003</author><text>I imagine some of this comes from the waste of the restaurant system. So far in the lockdown, I&#x27;ve made every meal I&#x27;ve eaten and I have only wasted a couple of sweet potatoes and some onions that went bad. And seeing those ingredients go to waste really upset me. From my past experiences working at restaurants tons of food goes into the garbage every week.</text></comment> |
39,687,942 | 39,686,262 | 1 | 3 | 39,680,997 | train | <story><title>Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineering/building-metas-genai-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougdonohoe</author><text>Having lived through the dot-com era, I find the AI-era slightly dispiriting because of the sheer capital cost of training models. At the start of the dot-com era, anyone could spin up an e-commerce site with relatively little infrastructure costs. Now, it seems, only the hyper-scale companies can build these AI models. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Open-AI, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>herval</author><text>I’m not sure we went through the same dot-com era, but in my experience, it was extremely expensive to spin up anything. You’d have to run your own servers, buy your own T1 lines, develop with rudimentary cgi… it was a very expensive mess - just like AI today<p>Which gives me hope that - like the web - hardware will catch up and stuff will become more and more accessible with time</text></comment> | <story><title>Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure</title><url>https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineering/building-metas-genai-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougdonohoe</author><text>Having lived through the dot-com era, I find the AI-era slightly dispiriting because of the sheer capital cost of training models. At the start of the dot-com era, anyone could spin up an e-commerce site with relatively little infrastructure costs. Now, it seems, only the hyper-scale companies can build these AI models. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Open-AI, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andy99</author><text>So far it&#x27;s been pretty &quot;democratic&quot; - I feel in no way disadvantaged because I can&#x27;t train a foundation model myself. Actually the ecosystem is a lot better than 25 years ago - there are open source (or source available) versions of basically everything you&#x27;d want to participate in modern AI&#x2F;ML.</text></comment> |
31,081,436 | 31,081,358 | 1 | 3 | 31,079,253 | train | <story><title>Debian and firmware</title><url>https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mschuster91</author><text>I get the trouble for networking chipsets, but not for the video card - <i>all</i> x86 systems should be able to fall back to ye goode olde days of at least a text console using the old BIOS interface. A default setup of <i>any</i> Linux distribution should in my opinion at least automatically detect if there is something lacking for a framebuffer console or a GUI, and fall back to a plain console.</text></item><item><author>fxtentacle</author><text>I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu&#x27;s) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD.<p>Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really drive the point home.<p>Yes, I agree that a default Debian configuration should be clean. But I also know the reality of needing at least Atheros (Wifi), Intel (Ethernet), and NVIDIA firmware blobs to get my tower to boot correctly. Not including any firmware repository on the CD or on a fully installed system is just a recipe for users to get frustrated while they are trying to follow a half-outdated tutorial on one of those spammy tech support blogs.<p>So in my opinion, the most common blobs should be cached by default, but not activated by default. If the machine boots without them, they can be deleted upon first reboot. If not, we can let the user decide if they are willing to compromise their principles in order to boot the system ;)</text></item><item><author>b5n</author><text>As a long time Debian user I&#x27;m reluctant to criticize developer ergonomics as I&#x27;m not an _active_ contributor. That being said, _as a user_, I&#x27;ve not had any issue locating and using non-free firmware when required, and I would be disappointed to see the project change course by including non-free components in an offical manner. Removing the slight inconvenience (literally clicking a link _on the installation page_ and downloading the firmware included image) further dilutes the project&#x27;s free software position and will encourage users to install software that does not respect their freedoms. If users never brush up against the inconvenience they&#x27;ll be much less likely to seek out hardware alternatives or even educate themselves on the topic at all, this is damaging to the community as a whole.<p>I know I&#x27;m in the minority, and expect my opinion to be weighted accordingly, but principle is a key factor I use when choosing anything - including software. My loyalty to Debian would be significantly impacted by such a change.<p>Is Debian missing projected growth KPI&#x27;s or shedding users? Is this a key hurdle to onboarding new contributors? I&#x27;m aware there may be other considerations that those actively participating in the community or leadership may be aware of that I am not, and I might be ignorant to the full value of the proposition. Debian is amazing and I have the upmost respect for everyone involved over the decades, but a move in a direction that weakens its position on non-free components would most likely drive me to using Guix exclusively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tremon</author><text>This isn&#x27;t what the radeon driver does for AMD gpu&#x27;s, and hasn&#x27;t for years: loading the driver automatically enables the full rendering engine and disables the VESA modes, even if no firmware has been loaded. Which means that on a normal system with radeon.ko present but not the firmware files, you get a few seconds of kernel output followed by a black screen. For the systems where I don&#x27;t want the firmware (servers), I must be very careful to blacklist the radeon driver or I completely lose the local console.<p>This has been the case since the SI chipsets in 2012. I&#x27;m not sure if the fault lies fully with the driver, maybe the hardware doesn&#x27;t allow querying the state of the engine firmware before enabling the engine.</text></comment> | <story><title>Debian and firmware</title><url>https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mschuster91</author><text>I get the trouble for networking chipsets, but not for the video card - <i>all</i> x86 systems should be able to fall back to ye goode olde days of at least a text console using the old BIOS interface. A default setup of <i>any</i> Linux distribution should in my opinion at least automatically detect if there is something lacking for a framebuffer console or a GUI, and fall back to a plain console.</text></item><item><author>fxtentacle</author><text>I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu&#x27;s) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD.<p>Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really drive the point home.<p>Yes, I agree that a default Debian configuration should be clean. But I also know the reality of needing at least Atheros (Wifi), Intel (Ethernet), and NVIDIA firmware blobs to get my tower to boot correctly. Not including any firmware repository on the CD or on a fully installed system is just a recipe for users to get frustrated while they are trying to follow a half-outdated tutorial on one of those spammy tech support blogs.<p>So in my opinion, the most common blobs should be cached by default, but not activated by default. If the machine boots without them, they can be deleted upon first reboot. If not, we can let the user decide if they are willing to compromise their principles in order to boot the system ;)</text></item><item><author>b5n</author><text>As a long time Debian user I&#x27;m reluctant to criticize developer ergonomics as I&#x27;m not an _active_ contributor. That being said, _as a user_, I&#x27;ve not had any issue locating and using non-free firmware when required, and I would be disappointed to see the project change course by including non-free components in an offical manner. Removing the slight inconvenience (literally clicking a link _on the installation page_ and downloading the firmware included image) further dilutes the project&#x27;s free software position and will encourage users to install software that does not respect their freedoms. If users never brush up against the inconvenience they&#x27;ll be much less likely to seek out hardware alternatives or even educate themselves on the topic at all, this is damaging to the community as a whole.<p>I know I&#x27;m in the minority, and expect my opinion to be weighted accordingly, but principle is a key factor I use when choosing anything - including software. My loyalty to Debian would be significantly impacted by such a change.<p>Is Debian missing projected growth KPI&#x27;s or shedding users? Is this a key hurdle to onboarding new contributors? I&#x27;m aware there may be other considerations that those actively participating in the community or leadership may be aware of that I am not, and I might be ignorant to the full value of the proposition. Debian is amazing and I have the upmost respect for everyone involved over the decades, but a move in a direction that weakens its position on non-free components would most likely drive me to using Guix exclusively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fxtentacle</author><text>You&#x27;re correct, there might be a text-mode fallback. It&#x27;s just that it is effectively useless for me. If I don&#x27;t have network access, how am I going to install the firmware for the network card?<p>That&#x27;s why I believe the most common firmware .deb packages should be cached during installation so that they are on-disk in case they are needed.</text></comment> |
32,092,354 | 32,089,985 | 1 | 2 | 32,081,051 | train | <story><title>Unity merges with IronSource</title><url>https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-ironsource</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>failrate</author><text>Oh, yeah, Unity is in the &quot;PE folks are wearing your organization as a skin suit&quot; phase.</text></item><item><author>datalopers</author><text>IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benedelman.org&#x2F;news-021815&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benedelman.org&#x2F;news-021815&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.infostruction.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.infostruction.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;adware-empire-iron...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text>I have used Unity since 2007, Unity 2. This is by far the biggest blunder in their history. Did John Riccitiello get a visit late at night and capitulate? What happened? As a long time user, pusher and investor now, this concerns me deeply.<p>Microsoft why couldn&#x27;t you have bought Unity...</text></comment> | <story><title>Unity merges with IronSource</title><url>https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-ironsource</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>failrate</author><text>Oh, yeah, Unity is in the &quot;PE folks are wearing your organization as a skin suit&quot; phase.</text></item><item><author>datalopers</author><text>IronSource is known for leveraging their ad network and installers to distribute spam, malware, and adware bundlers. What the fuck Unity.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benedelman.org&#x2F;news-021815&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.benedelman.org&#x2F;news-021815&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.infostruction.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.infostruction.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;adware-empire-iron...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darkteflon</author><text>Great turn of phrase, perfectly captures both the state of Unity-the-company and the broader zeitgeist.</text></comment> |
20,740,255 | 20,739,990 | 1 | 2 | 20,739,535 | train | <story><title>Rendering on the Web</title><url>https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-on-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deedubaya</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s perfectly okay to mostly ship HTML with minimal JS<p>Some might even say it is <i>better</i> to mostly ship HTML with minimal JS.<p><i>ducks</i></text></comment> | <story><title>Rendering on the Web</title><url>https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/02/rendering-on-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vorpalhex</author><text>This is insightful and deep, but it begs the question:<p>Does my text only newspaper article really need all this crap? Like, it&#x27;s text, with maybe one image or two. Just give me the damn text and cut out the cruft.<p>Why are browsers now competing with reader modes? We&#x27;re sending a bunch of data just to have the browser remove it. Just don&#x27;t send it to begin with!</text></comment> |
21,906,006 | 21,905,238 | 1 | 3 | 21,904,041 | train | <story><title>The Ecosystem Is Moving [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sweden</author><text>Every time I see Moxie talking about decentralization, I can&#x27;t help to think that this is all a big disguised agenda used to promote his own business for selling the Signal technology to any messaging vendors (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, etc.)<p>He keeps bringing data privacy and data encryption as the sole motive for decentralization but that&#x27;s not really the point. The main point is data ownership and freedom of usage.<p>WhatsApp and Signal are good messaging services indeed but:<p>- We are tied to their official clients.<p>- Which means that we are tied to the platforms they support<p>- We are also required to have Google Play services installed on our Android phones<p>- We are tied to phone numbers<p>- And if (for whatever reason) we trip on their abuse detection services, we might get banned and completely prevented of using their own service (mistakes on their side can happen as we have been seeing with Google)<p>The point of decentralization is to avoid all these annoying constraints. Encryption and privacy are a bonus, not the selling point.<p>Also, all of his points about centralization are completely refuted by the efforts of the Matrix project.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Ecosystem Is Moving [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bertman</author><text>This talk is basically an elaboration of Moxie&#x27;s blog post from 2016 with the same name [1].
See also a response to this blog post by Daniel Gultsch, developer of the popular Android XMPP app Conversations [2].<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gultsch.de&#x2F;objection.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gultsch.de&#x2F;objection.html</a></text></comment> |
23,702,783 | 23,702,899 | 1 | 2 | 23,700,999 | train | <story><title>Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says</title><url>https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-turkey-security-socialmedia/turkey-determined-to-control-social-media-platforms-erdogan-says-idUKKBN2425Y4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>salmonfamine</author><text>I think we&#x27;re encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn&#x27;t have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn&#x27;t fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fact that anyone on the so-called Left supports the rights of these corporations to wield that influence by appealing to laissez-faire principles -- (&quot;they&#x27;re private companies, they can do what the want!&quot;, &quot;If you don&#x27;t like Twitter&#x27;s policies you can go start your own site!&quot;) -- is mind-boggling.<p>I think we need social media to operate as a non-profit like Wikipedia, and I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won&#x27;t work. A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.</text></item><item><author>briefcomment</author><text>In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well.<p>Social media vastly amplifies loud minorities. Democracy assumes that the majority of people are reasonable, so majority rule will also be reasonable. Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants. This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.<p>Add to that the fact that social media is highly game-able and scalable, and you have small groups of people working against the majority of the country.<p>Social media is also a prime playground for international enemies.<p>In that light, I&#x27;m moving away from the idea that all social media should be allowed, and seeing actions like this as something worth exploring. I hate imposing restrictions, but social media is a strange and unbelievably influential paradigm, which needs to be handled &quot;like a weapon instead of some toy&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briefcomment</author><text>Lots of worthwhile points here.<p>&gt; And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight.<p>This is probably the biggest threat to democracy, and to 90% of the population</text></comment> | <story><title>Turkey determined to control social media platforms, Erdogan says</title><url>https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-turkey-security-socialmedia/turkey-determined-to-control-social-media-platforms-erdogan-says-idUKKBN2425Y4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>salmonfamine</author><text>I think we&#x27;re encountering a fundamental conflict between an unregulated free market and a digital economy that doesn&#x27;t have any notion of scarcity or cost. The old paradigm just doesn&#x27;t fit. And the result is that a handful of tech employees and billionaires can wield outsized influence over the dominant media channels and public forums of the entire world without any democratic input or regulatory oversight. The fact that anyone on the so-called Left supports the rights of these corporations to wield that influence by appealing to laissez-faire principles -- (&quot;they&#x27;re private companies, they can do what the want!&quot;, &quot;If you don&#x27;t like Twitter&#x27;s policies you can go start your own site!&quot;) -- is mind-boggling.<p>I think we need social media to operate as a non-profit like Wikipedia, and I think drastic action is the only way to do so. Building alternatives won&#x27;t work. A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.</text></item><item><author>briefcomment</author><text>In a dictatorship, cracking down on social media is a no brainer. But I think social media undermines democracies as well.<p>Social media vastly amplifies loud minorities. Democracy assumes that the majority of people are reasonable, so majority rule will also be reasonable. Loud minorities undermine majority rule. Loud minorities have always existed, but social media is now amplifying them to the point of obscuring what the majority of the country actually wants. This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.<p>Add to that the fact that social media is highly game-able and scalable, and you have small groups of people working against the majority of the country.<p>Social media is also a prime playground for international enemies.<p>In that light, I&#x27;m moving away from the idea that all social media should be allowed, and seeing actions like this as something worth exploring. I hate imposing restrictions, but social media is a strange and unbelievably influential paradigm, which needs to be handled &quot;like a weapon instead of some toy&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hoasi</author><text>&gt; A for-profit model is just not compatible with the nature of social media.<p>I agree and would add that the same argument stands for the traditional press as well.</text></comment> |
24,794,185 | 24,793,079 | 1 | 2 | 24,788,850 | train | <story><title>Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-letting-all-employees-work-from-home-permanently-2020-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I guess it&#x27;s not surprising but I am super disappointed by some of the comments here that show a total lack of empathy for people who aren&#x27;t like you. I mean, you love working from home? Congrats, more power to you. But the number of comments stating that &quot;only people who are good at office politics like going to the office&quot;, &quot;only incompetent managers need to see you in person&quot;, &quot;your co-workers aren&#x27;t your friends&quot;, etc. are, as I would generously put it, tone deaf.<p>For many (most?) people this has been the worst working situation of their lives, and attempts to minimize that are insulting. I believe it will be <i>especially</i> bad for those early in their careers, trying to find their footing, get mentorship, and build their network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hombre_fatal</author><text>I agree that the comments you&#x27;ve cited are a bit ridiculous.<p>But it&#x27;s also important to acknowledge that pre-Covid, only a tiny fraction of jobs were remote at all. People who preferred remote work had very little choice in the matter. Our society assumes that commuting to work and sitting in a cubicle (or worse) is fitting for 99% of the work force.<p>So what I mainly see here aren&#x27;t the comments you cite, but a &quot;ugh but I <i>like</i> the office&quot;, which gets very little sympathy from me in a society where, virus aside, the majority of jobs are office-only. Like, the world is already tipped in your favor.<p>To put it into perspective, I was so desperate for a fully remote job that I took a $50,000 salary for it when I was making $130,000 in Austin, Texas. Now I live in South America on a beach doing exactly what I want to be doing.<p>I don&#x27;t like the optics of calling Covid a &quot;good thing&quot;, but it must be pointed out that it got offices (like my former job) that were adamantly ass-in-seat only to go remote-only. It spurred fundamental (hopefully lasting) shifts in our work culture. And a lot of them were a long time in the making and waiting. How many of these companies that were firmly ass-in-seat are now fully or mostly remote realizing that the sky isn&#x27;t falling? I hope we reach a better equilibrium.<p>Ideally our employment options would have something for everyone without you needing to go for a $50k job to get what you want. Another culture change I&#x27;d like is for WFH options to come with a signing bonus to get your home office sorted out, something that&#x27;s sorely lacking.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dropbox Converts to Permanent WFH</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/dropbox-letting-all-employees-work-from-home-permanently-2020-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I guess it&#x27;s not surprising but I am super disappointed by some of the comments here that show a total lack of empathy for people who aren&#x27;t like you. I mean, you love working from home? Congrats, more power to you. But the number of comments stating that &quot;only people who are good at office politics like going to the office&quot;, &quot;only incompetent managers need to see you in person&quot;, &quot;your co-workers aren&#x27;t your friends&quot;, etc. are, as I would generously put it, tone deaf.<p>For many (most?) people this has been the worst working situation of their lives, and attempts to minimize that are insulting. I believe it will be <i>especially</i> bad for those early in their careers, trying to find their footing, get mentorship, and build their network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>Thank you for highlighting this. As others have said, I could not agree more.<p>As a Product Manager, working remotely 100% of the time is absolute hell. And I say this as someone who was already working from home ~70% of the time before (and I was mostly ok with that).<p>I also wanted to pick on a few of the categories you mentioned:<p>&gt; &quot;only incompetent managers need to see you in person&quot;<p>Some of the best work I&#x27;ve done is when I&#x27;m able to go brainstorm in a room with my leadership. Lacking the ability to do this as we plan our next release, or the next 3 year strategy or whatnot is extremely difficult.<p>Having competent management means that they understand when this is valuable and when it&#x27;s not.<p>&gt; &quot;your co-workers aren&#x27;t your friends&quot;<p>I hear this a lot, and I have to feel bad for people who have never experienced true friendship at work. At each of my jobs, I&#x27;ve made lifelong friends. Friends I&#x27;ve since vacationed with, stood up as a groomsman in a weeding for, etc. This is part of what made those jobs so rewarding.<p>I think the general thought is that &quot;jobs change, so that &#x27;friend&#x27; might not be around next week&quot;, and that&#x27;s true. But in my experience, if they&#x27;re true friends, changing jobs doesn&#x27;t change that.<p>This says more about me than anything, but where else am I going to meet friends?<p>---<p>All of this to say, in addition to being tone-deaf in light of the current reality in the world, these sentiments are also suspect under normal circumstances.<p>These things may be true for some people at their place of employment, or for them personally, but it&#x27;s hard to understand where this comes from.</text></comment> |
40,049,726 | 40,049,364 | 1 | 3 | 40,048,657 | train | <story><title>My battle with Tesla: I want to clear my name before I die</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3q95ednqwo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spiderfarmer</author><text>Reportedly, Tesla is having a big issue with their accelerator pedal right now.<p>The thin metal cover of that pedal is not always thoroughly secured and slides off easily, wedging itself into the carpet behind the pedal. This causes the accelerator to be stuck (at high velocity!).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;716031&#x2F;tesla-cybertruck-stuck-accelerator-pedal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insideevs.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;716031&#x2F;tesla-cybertruck-stuck-acc...</a><p>As a Tesla customer, you are part of the QA team. That&#x27;s what you get when they make the employees of that company to afraid to speak up and report serious issues.</text></comment> | <story><title>My battle with Tesla: I want to clear my name before I die</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3q95ednqwo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjerem</author><text>&gt; Tesla has never provided any details about the alleged incident, either to her or in public, she says.<p>Well, unfortunately it looks like a classical case of &quot;someone with some power in the company didn’t like you&quot;.</text></comment> |
2,187,800 | 2,187,776 | 1 | 2 | 2,187,738 | train | <story><title>AOL buys Huffington Post for $315mm in cash</title><url>http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110206/youve-got-arianna-aol-buys-huffington-post-for-315-million-in-cash/?mod=tweet</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jarin</author><text>I think the key news bit here is that Ariana Huffington will be in charge of all of AOL's blog/news properties.</text></comment> | <story><title>AOL buys Huffington Post for $315mm in cash</title><url>http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110206/youve-got-arianna-aol-buys-huffington-post-for-315-million-in-cash/?mod=tweet</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beagledude</author><text>I'm just amazed AOL still has money</text></comment> |
40,733,532 | 40,730,944 | 1 | 2 | 40,729,809 | train | <story><title>The return of pneumatic tubes</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/19/1093446/pneumatic-tubes-hospitals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexwasserman</author><text>In NYC Rsosevelt Island solved their trash problems (which plague the rest of the city) with an underground pneumatic trash network: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;suck-it-roosevelt-island-s-pneumatic-trash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;suck-it-roosevelt-isla...</a><p>Buildings have a connection into which trash is sucked away to the central yard for processing. It&#x27;s pretty neat and helps keep the island tidy. You don&#x27;t get any of the normal huge trash piles that litter Manhattan on trash day.<p>Conversely, our local hospital is now using robots for deliveries. They trundle around and deliver things like meds to the nurses stations on request, and announce it with &quot;Your delivery has arrived&quot;.<p>Just watching robots trundle around as though it&#x27;s normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. Now our local supermarkets (BJs and Stop and Shop) have robots that trundle around checking inventory as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Xophmeister</author><text>I used to live in an area with a similar system for rubbish (near Wembley Stadium, in north west London). While it worked, it suffered from a number of “quality of life” issues.<p>The chute terminals had quite a small aperture, with a sealed door; presumably to make it easier to create the necessary pressure differential. This happened regularly; every 30 minutes (or so) during daylight hours. It was loud. Really loud! With several terminals in a courtyard, running in a sequence, it was almost a never ending reverberation.<p>Of course, you can’t use them while they’re in this cycle. If anyone overfilled them — which was very easy — or ended up jamming the door open with some misshapen detritus then, try as it might, it just wouldn’t work at all. The building management were regularly seen wielding a broom, to try to force stuck loads down. Then, if you had anything that just couldn’t be made small enough for the chute, you had to use the (limited) dumpsters anyway; many did, because it was often just easier.<p>That’s not to say I think it wasn’t a good idea. It just needed its rough edges smoothed out a bit.</text></comment> | <story><title>The return of pneumatic tubes</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/19/1093446/pneumatic-tubes-hospitals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexwasserman</author><text>In NYC Rsosevelt Island solved their trash problems (which plague the rest of the city) with an underground pneumatic trash network: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;suck-it-roosevelt-island-s-pneumatic-trash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;suck-it-roosevelt-isla...</a><p>Buildings have a connection into which trash is sucked away to the central yard for processing. It&#x27;s pretty neat and helps keep the island tidy. You don&#x27;t get any of the normal huge trash piles that litter Manhattan on trash day.<p>Conversely, our local hospital is now using robots for deliveries. They trundle around and deliver things like meds to the nurses stations on request, and announce it with &quot;Your delivery has arrived&quot;.<p>Just watching robots trundle around as though it&#x27;s normal is an interesting slow creep towards what seemed so futuristic in Star Wars in the 70s and 80s. Now our local supermarkets (BJs and Stop and Shop) have robots that trundle around checking inventory as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fusslo</author><text>my office adjoins a factory where we produce what we engineer in the offices.<p>The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar.<p>the robots use the same walkways as the humans.<p>It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we&#x27;re designing the robots to make the humans give way: they&#x27;re slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it&#x27;s because humans are a much better robot.<p>humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example)<p>though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop &amp; shop</text></comment> |
13,165,071 | 13,164,155 | 1 | 3 | 13,164,026 | train | <story><title>Opendoor, a startup worth emulating</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/opendoor-a-startup-worth-emulating/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>harmmonica</author><text>Have you given thought to opening up your pricing model&#x2F;algorithm to the public for every home in a market (a la Zestimate&#x2F;Redfin estimate) as a means of eventually driving seller inventory even if someone is not ready to sell today?<p>If someone could look up what their place is worth and, unlike Zillow and Redfin, actually be told explicitly why it&#x27;s worth that as opposed to being told a &quot;black box&quot; value, you&#x27;ll open the top of the funnel by driving folks who aren&#x27;t yet ready to sell (today&#x27;s owner is tomorrow&#x27;s seller). And since those values change frequently the not-ready-to-sell owner could track the changes to value and the underlying data driving that value, which would keep you on the tops of their minds when they&#x27;re ready to sell down the road.<p>If you think the pricing model&#x2F;algorithm is too proprietary to share beyond the &quot;I&#x27;m ready to sell today&quot; market, I&#x27;ll stop by for a coffee to try and convince you otherwise.<p>Good luck. I&#x27;m stoked to see someone trying to fundamentally change the residential market.<p>Edit: oh, btw, not advocating sharing the actual algorithm, but the results of it (e.g. your house is worth 5 psf less than the comp from 3 blocks over bc your place is directly under the airport&#x27;s flight path).</text></comment> | <story><title>Opendoor, a startup worth emulating</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2016/opendoor-a-startup-worth-emulating/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tommynicholas</author><text>One thing not mentioned: Opendoor absolutely does not have to carry the balance sheet risk of owning the homes forever. They can chop up those assets and sell them to anyone (hedge funds, banks, individual investors, etc) at any point. At scale, they&#x27;d be able to do this and still maintain most of the upside.<p>At some point, Opendoor will be able to let businesses that simply manage financial risk for a living (i.e. banks) spread the downside risk out over the entire financial system, while Opendoor takes advantage of its customer acquisition and data advantages to capture the bulk upside. It&#x27;s not a perpetually risk model if they don&#x27;t want it to be.</text></comment> |
21,117,025 | 21,117,157 | 1 | 2 | 21,116,037 | train | <story><title>F-35's radar invisibility cloak in question</title><url>https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/sensors/2019/09/30/stealthy-no-more-a-german-radar-vendor-says-it-tracked-the-f-35-jet-in-2018-from-a-pony-farm/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This isn&#x27;t strictly just about a weakness in the F-35&#x27;s radar resistance, but that the whole concept of &quot;stealth&quot; aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves (making effective, passive, &quot;radar&quot; that cannot be easily overcome). But as the article points out, this cannot yet be used for guided missiles, and is very early tech regardless.<p>I suspect the future won&#x27;t be &quot;super weapons&quot; like the F-35, but instead just &quot;mass&quot; weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn&#x27;t to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses (essentially the World War I strategy, but without the massive numbers of dead soldiers).<p>PS - The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn&#x27;t seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that&#x27;s irrelevant. The F-35 could be broadcasting a transponder, and it wouldn&#x27;t undercut the technology discussed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vonmoltke</author><text>&gt; The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn&#x27;t seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that&#x27;s irrelevant.<p>It is relevant, and this system is absolutely using radio signals for detection and tracking; it just doesn&#x27;t transmit them. The system described is a bi-static radar system that uses transmitters of opportunity (technical term &quot;non-cooperative transmitters&quot;) to generate the signal and listens for the return from those signals hitting the target.</text></comment> | <story><title>F-35's radar invisibility cloak in question</title><url>https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/sensors/2019/09/30/stealthy-no-more-a-german-radar-vendor-says-it-tracked-the-f-35-jet-in-2018-from-a-pony-farm/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This isn&#x27;t strictly just about a weakness in the F-35&#x27;s radar resistance, but that the whole concept of &quot;stealth&quot; aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves (making effective, passive, &quot;radar&quot; that cannot be easily overcome). But as the article points out, this cannot yet be used for guided missiles, and is very early tech regardless.<p>I suspect the future won&#x27;t be &quot;super weapons&quot; like the F-35, but instead just &quot;mass&quot; weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn&#x27;t to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses (essentially the World War I strategy, but without the massive numbers of dead soldiers).<p>PS - The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn&#x27;t seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that&#x27;s irrelevant. The F-35 could be broadcasting a transponder, and it wouldn&#x27;t undercut the technology discussed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ranger207</author><text>&gt;the whole concept of &quot;stealth&quot; aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves<p>I have to disagree. Manufacturers will continue to build stealthy planes and drones, simply because it makes it harder to detect them. Yes, you may be able to detect a stealthy plane at, say, 100km, but using the same techniques you would be able to track a non-stealthy plane at 200km. Stealth isn&#x27;t an end-all be-all tool that makes vehicles completely invincible, as the Bosnian shootdown of the F-117 showed, but it does make it harder, and I don&#x27;t know of any technologies that could render it completely useless.</text></comment> |
30,377,376 | 30,377,105 | 1 | 2 | 30,376,140 | train | <story><title>Static B-Trees: A data structure for faster binary search</title><url>https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/data-structures/s-tree/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ot</author><text>Very interesting post. The best results I knew of for static ordered search [1] were from the 2015 Khuong-Morin paper [2], which is not cited in the article but the author cites it in the previous post, and in their benchmarks Eytzinger+prefeching performed best. The improvement on top of that is pretty impressive. At the larger sizes, the latencies are basically 1 cache miss (~50ns).<p>However, I have some comment on the benchmark, the iterations have no loop dependency on the previous result, so the CPU is allowed to pipeline some loads. This is rarely representative of real workloads, where the key being searched comes from other computations, so this is more a measure of highest possible reciprocal throughput than actual latency. Would be interesting to see what happens if they make the key being searched a function of the result of the previous lookup. (EDIT: as gfd below points out, the article actually discusses this!)<p>Also some of the tricks only work for 32-bit keys, which allow the vectorized search in nodes. For larger keys, different layouts may still be preferable.<p>[1] Ordered search is when you need to look up keys that are not in the dataset, and find predecessor&#x2F;successor. If you only do exact lookups, a hashtable will almost certainly perform better, though it would require a bit more space.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1509.05053.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1509.05053.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Static B-Trees: A data structure for faster binary search</title><url>https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/data-structures/s-tree/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ignoramous</author><text>An interesting resource.<p>Just this past day, I prototyped a Skip List backing a sorted key&#x2F;value store, and it was super simple to do so (as compared to AVL &#x2F; Red Black).<p>B-Trees are notorious for their complexity, and so SingleStore (memSQL) reasoned that their move to use Skip Lists to back their tables was justified: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Qhpgn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Qhpgn</a><p>It would be interesting to see the author attempt faster Skip Lists, as their expertise in this topic seems deep enough.</text></comment> |
41,135,455 | 41,133,040 | 1 | 2 | 41,104,789 | train | <story><title>Artificial intelligence gives weather forecasters a new edge</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/science/ai-weather-forecast-hurricane.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lainga</author><text>Sigh... don&#x27;t make me bind a hotkey to paste my spiel about how these non-primitive-equation-based models are bad at long tails and freak weather...<p>Ed.: too late! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40577332">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40577332</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Majromax</author><text>Long tails and freak weather are the hottest topics of research in the area of data-driven weather forecasting. ECMWF, highlighted in this article, is attempting to extend its ML forecast system to ensemble predictions (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecmwf.int&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;media-centre&#x2F;aifs-blog&#x2F;2024&#x2F;enter-ensembles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecmwf.int&#x2F;en&#x2F;about&#x2F;media-centre&#x2F;aifs-blog&#x2F;2024&#x2F;e...</a>).<p>If these methods work, they&#x27;ll likely <i>improve</i> our ability to model long tails. Traditional NWP is extremely expensive, so cutting-edge models can have either high resolution xor large ensembles. You need high resolution for the detail, but you need large ensembles to see into the tails of the distribution; it&#x27;s a persistent problem.<p>In inference, ML-based models run a bit over two orders of magnitude faster than traditional NWP, with the gains split between running on GPUs (possibly replicable) and fantastic levels of numerical intensity thanks to everything being matrix-matrix products (much harder to replicate with conventional algorithms). That opens a lot of freedom to expand ensemble sizes and the like.</text></comment> | <story><title>Artificial intelligence gives weather forecasters a new edge</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/science/ai-weather-forecast-hurricane.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lainga</author><text>Sigh... don&#x27;t make me bind a hotkey to paste my spiel about how these non-primitive-equation-based models are bad at long tails and freak weather...<p>Ed.: too late! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40577332">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40577332</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kardos</author><text>The limitations of the non-physics-based models is under rapid exploration and the bounds of their utility will be a lot more clear in a year or two. For now, they seem to outperform physics-based models in larger scales. The future may be a hybrid: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2407.06100v2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2407.06100v2</a></text></comment> |
40,383,935 | 40,383,940 | 1 | 2 | 40,383,029 | train | <story><title>Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code</title><url>https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>babypuncher</author><text>Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like the true successor to Winamp.</text></item><item><author>bcraven</author><text>I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it&#x27;s excellent. I&#x27;ve tried other media players but always come back here.<p>I&#x27;m not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>LocutusOfBorges</author><text>Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it&#x27;s still nice to see.<p>Interesting that there&#x27;s no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it&#x27;s only available following email enquiries, of all things. I&#x27;m surprised they&#x27;re even bothering, at this point - the software&#x27;s so obsolete that it&#x27;s not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koito17</author><text>foobar2000 has been my go-to player on both Windows and Mac for about a decade now. Particularly, I like the dense (yet uncluttered) interface and functionality I take for granted, like selecting a dozen files and editing metadata all at once.<p>A few of my friends complain that the layout &quot;sucks&quot; or foobar lacks functionality they need, but for my use case, it&#x27;s in a Goldilocks state. With that said, for people used to the functionality of Winamp, I think MusicBee is more likely to be the successor, in terms of out-of-the-box functionality and layout extensibility.</text></comment> | <story><title>Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code</title><url>https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-code</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>babypuncher</author><text>Have you checked out foobar2000? To me, it always felt like the true successor to Winamp.</text></item><item><author>bcraven</author><text>I use the community update of Winamp, WACUP, and it&#x27;s excellent. I&#x27;ve tried other media players but always come back here.<p>I&#x27;m not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>LocutusOfBorges</author><text>Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it&#x27;s still nice to see.<p>Interesting that there&#x27;s no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it&#x27;s only available following email enquiries, of all things. I&#x27;m surprised they&#x27;re even bothering, at this point - the software&#x27;s so obsolete that it&#x27;s not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leeoniya</author><text>you&#x27;d have a hard time replicating this UI [1] or other winamp skins in foobar2000, so i&#x27;m not sure i&#x27;d call it a successor except in the sense that it can play anything you throw at it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;screenshots&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwacup.com&#x2F;screenshots&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
39,849,821 | 39,848,833 | 1 | 2 | 39,844,960 | train | <story><title>Misunderstanding about the details of how Apply Pay works</title><url>https://birchtree.me/blog/digital-wallets-and-the-only-apple-pay-does-this-mythology/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>&gt; But what is Apple and Google&#x27;s special proprietary sauce then?<p>There isn&#x27;t any. Many banks across the world offer their own HCE wallets, but these only run on Android (Apple simply doesn&#x27;t offer the necessary APIs, although that&#x27;s now changing in the EU).<p>What does matter a lot are defaults: You can only have one default Visa, Mastercard etc. wallet per device (that you don&#x27;t need to specifically need to open before tapping your phone), so Google Pay has a huge advantage there, since it supports cards by many banks and not just one as would be the case for an issuer HCE wallet.<p>&gt; However, I&#x27;m sometimes under the impression that Apple&#x2F;Google take on the role of a payment gateway or a payment method themselves.<p>They don&#x27;t. They&#x27;re involved in mediating the initial setup of a new card on a given device, but aren&#x27;t part of the actual transaction flow at all (at the POS, in any case).<p>&gt; Moreover, I noticed that some merchants refuse my payment when I use e.g. Google Pay with my Amex instead of my MasterCard.<p>The underlying card brand still needs to be accepted by the merchant. Unlike e.g. early Google Pay (or what it was called back then; I lost track) and some other solutions, modern-day Google Pay and Apple Pay aren&#x27;t &quot;proxy cards&quot; (which can sometimes change the card brand, e.g. from Visa to Mastercard; an example of that would be Curve).<p>&gt; it also seems payment terminals at the grocery store needed special support for the Apple&#x2F;Google Pay apps.<p>They don&#x27;t. Unless a given POS terminal is buggy, it&#x27;ll work anywhere that otherwise accepts the underlying card scheme. The physical and logical protocols are exactly the same as for actual plastic cards and mostly indistinguishable to the terminal; actually breaking Apple Pay&#x2F;Google Pay support needs a lot of destructive energy on the merchant&#x27;s&#x2F;PSP&#x27;s side.<p>On the web it&#x27;s a different story; explicit support by both the store website and payment service provider is needed there.</text></item><item><author>codethief</author><text>Can anyone ELI5 how Apple &amp; Google Pay work in detail? I used to think they simply pass on my CC details to the merchant or the merchant&#x27;s chosen payment gateway in one way or another (obfuscated or not), and the OP suggests the same. Moreover, I noticed that some merchants refuse my payment when I use e.g. Google Pay with my Amex instead of my MasterCard.<p>However, I&#x27;m sometimes under the impression that Apple&#x2F;Google take on the role of a payment gateway or a payment method themselves. After all, they collect all my transaction data, and it also seems payment terminals at the grocery store needed special support for the Apple&#x2F;Google Pay apps. Interestingly, this comment[0] is saying the opposite, namely that at least Apple Pay is very much rooted in standards.<p>But what is Apple and Google&#x27;s special proprietary sauce then? Why are these apps so hard&#x2F;impossible to replace by open-source alternatives? Is it because only Apple&#x2F;Google get full access to the NFC chips on iOS&#x2F;Android?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39845805">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39845805</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andylynch</author><text>This is underrated.
Eg I have Garmin Pay on my watch. It works anywhere Apple&#x2F;google etc works, even though the merchants and quite possibly whoever set up their terminals have never heard of it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Misunderstanding about the details of how Apply Pay works</title><url>https://birchtree.me/blog/digital-wallets-and-the-only-apple-pay-does-this-mythology/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>&gt; But what is Apple and Google&#x27;s special proprietary sauce then?<p>There isn&#x27;t any. Many banks across the world offer their own HCE wallets, but these only run on Android (Apple simply doesn&#x27;t offer the necessary APIs, although that&#x27;s now changing in the EU).<p>What does matter a lot are defaults: You can only have one default Visa, Mastercard etc. wallet per device (that you don&#x27;t need to specifically need to open before tapping your phone), so Google Pay has a huge advantage there, since it supports cards by many banks and not just one as would be the case for an issuer HCE wallet.<p>&gt; However, I&#x27;m sometimes under the impression that Apple&#x2F;Google take on the role of a payment gateway or a payment method themselves.<p>They don&#x27;t. They&#x27;re involved in mediating the initial setup of a new card on a given device, but aren&#x27;t part of the actual transaction flow at all (at the POS, in any case).<p>&gt; Moreover, I noticed that some merchants refuse my payment when I use e.g. Google Pay with my Amex instead of my MasterCard.<p>The underlying card brand still needs to be accepted by the merchant. Unlike e.g. early Google Pay (or what it was called back then; I lost track) and some other solutions, modern-day Google Pay and Apple Pay aren&#x27;t &quot;proxy cards&quot; (which can sometimes change the card brand, e.g. from Visa to Mastercard; an example of that would be Curve).<p>&gt; it also seems payment terminals at the grocery store needed special support for the Apple&#x2F;Google Pay apps.<p>They don&#x27;t. Unless a given POS terminal is buggy, it&#x27;ll work anywhere that otherwise accepts the underlying card scheme. The physical and logical protocols are exactly the same as for actual plastic cards and mostly indistinguishable to the terminal; actually breaking Apple Pay&#x2F;Google Pay support needs a lot of destructive energy on the merchant&#x27;s&#x2F;PSP&#x27;s side.<p>On the web it&#x27;s a different story; explicit support by both the store website and payment service provider is needed there.</text></item><item><author>codethief</author><text>Can anyone ELI5 how Apple &amp; Google Pay work in detail? I used to think they simply pass on my CC details to the merchant or the merchant&#x27;s chosen payment gateway in one way or another (obfuscated or not), and the OP suggests the same. Moreover, I noticed that some merchants refuse my payment when I use e.g. Google Pay with my Amex instead of my MasterCard.<p>However, I&#x27;m sometimes under the impression that Apple&#x2F;Google take on the role of a payment gateway or a payment method themselves. After all, they collect all my transaction data, and it also seems payment terminals at the grocery store needed special support for the Apple&#x2F;Google Pay apps. Interestingly, this comment[0] is saying the opposite, namely that at least Apple Pay is very much rooted in standards.<p>But what is Apple and Google&#x27;s special proprietary sauce then? Why are these apps so hard&#x2F;impossible to replace by open-source alternatives? Is it because only Apple&#x2F;Google get full access to the NFC chips on iOS&#x2F;Android?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39845805">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39845805</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codethief</author><text>&gt; Google Pay has a huge advantage there, since it supports cards by many banks and not just one as would be the case for an issuer HCE wallet.<p>Ah, so it&#x27;s the integration with issuer banks in the background that requires a lot of effort. That makes sense!<p>Thanks so much for enlightening me! :)</text></comment> |
14,294,520 | 14,294,697 | 1 | 3 | 14,294,069 | train | <story><title>U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/08/u-s-life-expectancy-varies-by-more-than-20-years-from-county-to-county/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_life-expectancy-11am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generj</author><text>One possible partial explanation for this is the same reason why the Bill Gates Foundation wasted a bunch of money fostering small high schools. Smaller high schools were some of the best performing schools...but also some of the worst [0].<p>The answer is just that small counties have high variance. By chance some small counties will be a lot higher or lower than the national average.<p>I would be interested in seeing a Cox Proportional Hazards Model would show if the remaining changes are related to pollution, meth, economics, etc.<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-small-schools-myth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;the...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nacraile</author><text>Sample-size-based variance is a nice nit to pick, but it doesn&#x27;t really seem to match the data presented in the article. Outcomes are strongly correlated in adjacent counties across the map, which is not predicted by sample-size (which would produce uncorrelated noise, in inverse proportion to population density). On the other hand, there is substantial correlation between the given geographic distribution of life expectancy changes and geographic distribution of wealth, as observed in the article.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. life expectancy varies by more than 20 years from county to county</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/08/u-s-life-expectancy-varies-by-more-than-20-years-from-county-to-county/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_life-expectancy-11am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generj</author><text>One possible partial explanation for this is the same reason why the Bill Gates Foundation wasted a bunch of money fostering small high schools. Smaller high schools were some of the best performing schools...but also some of the worst [0].<p>The answer is just that small counties have high variance. By chance some small counties will be a lot higher or lower than the national average.<p>I would be interested in seeing a Cox Proportional Hazards Model would show if the remaining changes are related to pollution, meth, economics, etc.<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-small-schools-myth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;the...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flexie</author><text>But even the small counties have populations in the several hundreds or thousands, right? Outliers that die at 33 or 103 affect the average little when you have a population of 2,000.</text></comment> |
23,193,442 | 23,192,943 | 1 | 2 | 23,191,493 | train | <story><title>In Defense of the Modern Web</title><url>https://dev.to/richharris/in-defense-of-the-modern-web-2nia</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rich_harris</author><text>&quot;If you remove some of the data, the data tells a different story&quot;</text></item><item><author>ss3000</author><text>If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I&#x27;d suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don&#x27;t install more than a handful of native apps.<p>If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a vastly different story (that might not be in the best interest for a site that relies on pushing &quot;Launching mobile apps for your WordPress site&quot; to highlight ofc).</text></item><item><author>rich_harris</author><text>&gt; your 10k npm dependencies<p>Believe me, you&#x27;re preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here:<p>&gt; The web is a success<p>The web is <i>not</i> a success. It&#x27;s dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobiloud.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobiloud.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web&#x2F;</a>) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.</text></item><item><author>grey-area</author><text>This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web&#x27;s largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls &#x27;artisanal js&#x27;.<p>You probably don&#x27;t need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app.<p>The web is a success because it is simple, accessible, fast, and nobody cares how the server makes the html they are reading. Let&#x27;s keep it that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>Alternately, “If you don’t assume that all usage is fungible, the data tells a different story”. There are a few apps - music&#x2F;movies&#x2F;ebooks and Facebook - which get a disproportionately large amount of activity. If you’re not competing with them, the global numbers are going to be skewed.<p>This is especially true when you think about tasks rather than screen time. If I’m Facebook or Spotify selling ads, I want people glued to the app for a long time. If I’m selling things, giving information or customer service, etc. the story is completely different: someone placing an order faster is actually a win.<p>EDIT: My experience is colored by being in the cultural heritage space where the flurry of “we’re in the App Store!!!” entries met the hard reality of every engagement metric being much lower than web sites. There is huge variation hidden in global averages.</text></comment> | <story><title>In Defense of the Modern Web</title><url>https://dev.to/richharris/in-defense-of-the-modern-web-2nia</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rich_harris</author><text>&quot;If you remove some of the data, the data tells a different story&quot;</text></item><item><author>ss3000</author><text>If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I&#x27;d suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don&#x27;t install more than a handful of native apps.<p>If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a vastly different story (that might not be in the best interest for a site that relies on pushing &quot;Launching mobile apps for your WordPress site&quot; to highlight ofc).</text></item><item><author>rich_harris</author><text>&gt; your 10k npm dependencies<p>Believe me, you&#x27;re preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here:<p>&gt; The web is a success<p>The web is <i>not</i> a success. It&#x27;s dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobiloud.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobiloud.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web&#x2F;</a>) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.</text></item><item><author>grey-area</author><text>This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web&#x27;s largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls &#x27;artisanal js&#x27;.<p>You probably don&#x27;t need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app.<p>The web is a success because it is simple, accessible, fast, and nobody cares how the server makes the html they are reading. Let&#x27;s keep it that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karatestomp</author><text>Well, &quot;90% of user time on devices is in native apps, 10% web&quot; does paint a rather different picture than &quot;70% of user time is in social media and messaging apps, 10% media apps like Netflix or Spotify, 5% mobile games, 5% all other apps including all the built-in ones other than the browser, 10% web&quot; if you&#x27;re not in social media, media, or games and trying to decide whether to go web or native.</text></comment> |
17,024,557 | 17,024,564 | 1 | 3 | 17,023,936 | train | <story><title> Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/google-announces-a-new-generation-for-its-tpu-machine-learning-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sabalaba</author><text>This is great news. It’s extremely important to the research community that large companies enter into the DL silicon space to contend with NVIDIA’s monopoly.<p>NVIDIA is now exerting pricing power to the point where they’ve decided to train their sales people to disregard the metric that is most important to customers: cost of training. Talk with one of their enterprise sales people and you’ll find they’ll say things like “FLOPS &#x2F; $ doesn’t matter” to justify a 10x increase in price for their TESLA line. As history has shown, a monopolist sows the seeds of their own destruction and, by disregarding the metrics that matter, they alienate their customers.<p>Here are open source projects that you can contribute to to break the monopoly:<p>ROCm: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocm.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocm.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>MIOpen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&#x2F;MIOpen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&#x2F;MIOpen</a><p>TensorFlow: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tensorflow&#x2F;tensorflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tensorflow&#x2F;tensorflow</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twtw</author><text>Instead of being able to buy your own nvidia gpu and run any cuda or opencl on it, now you can run only tensor flow on a tpu only in Google cloud.<p>How fantastic.</text></comment> | <story><title> Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/google-announces-a-new-generation-for-its-tpu-machine-learning-hardware/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sabalaba</author><text>This is great news. It’s extremely important to the research community that large companies enter into the DL silicon space to contend with NVIDIA’s monopoly.<p>NVIDIA is now exerting pricing power to the point where they’ve decided to train their sales people to disregard the metric that is most important to customers: cost of training. Talk with one of their enterprise sales people and you’ll find they’ll say things like “FLOPS &#x2F; $ doesn’t matter” to justify a 10x increase in price for their TESLA line. As history has shown, a monopolist sows the seeds of their own destruction and, by disregarding the metrics that matter, they alienate their customers.<p>Here are open source projects that you can contribute to to break the monopoly:<p>ROCm: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocm.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rocm.github.io&#x2F;</a><p>MIOpen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&#x2F;MIOpen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ROCmSoftwarePlatform&#x2F;MIOpen</a><p>TensorFlow: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tensorflow&#x2F;tensorflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tensorflow&#x2F;tensorflow</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tehsauce</author><text>TPUs seem like great hardware. Unfortunately google&#x27;s insistence on keeping them in a walled garden is a major deterrent to building something that relies on their platform.</text></comment> |
15,873,438 | 15,871,876 | 1 | 2 | 15,870,114 | train | <story><title>Quantum Computing Explained</title><url>http://www.clerro.com/guide/580/quantum-computing-explained</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vtomole</author><text>We are currently living in an exciting time for quantum computing. Most leading companies like Google and IBM have 20 qubit devices. IBM has a 50 qubit prototype [0].<p>Google has plans to show quantum supremacy in the next couple of months: where a quantum computer will perform a task that cannot be simulated on a classical computer [1]. These near-term (5-10 year) quantum computers will likely be used for simulating quantum chemistry and solving optimization problems [2].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;609451&#x2F;ibm-raises-the-bar-with-a-50-qubit-quantum-computer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;609451&#x2F;ibm-raises-the-bar...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;609035&#x2F;google-reveals-blueprint-for-quantum-supremacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;609035&#x2F;google-reveals-blu...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;commercialize-quantum-technologies-in-five-years-1.21583" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;commercialize-quantum-technologi...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Quantum Computing Explained</title><url>http://www.clerro.com/guide/580/quantum-computing-explained</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>reikonomusha</author><text>Here is another introduction that actually uses a quantum computing Python API to explain the fundamentals of quantum computation [0], geared to a programmer audience.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pyquil.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro_to_qc.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pyquil.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;intro_to_qc.html</a></text></comment> |
36,970,926 | 36,969,848 | 1 | 3 | 36,967,594 | train | <story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I&#x27;m not convinced yet that I&#x27;ll be getting anything out of it, other than my own satisfaction. After my colleagues and I got our paper (on real-time depth estimation with an event camera and a laser projector [0]) accepted at a workshop, we could have just dumped the convoluted, messy research code on GitHub and be done with it. For other people to figure it out, if they really cared.<p>But I sat down and completely rewrote all the scaffolding around the presented algorithm, to make for a smooth and fast demo. Wrote up documentation for the implementation, gave it a command line interface, set up a script to reproduce the measurements in the paper with a single execution (downloading the required data and comparing several methods). Broadcast in all channels available to me (institution press release, LinkedIn posts, GitHub awesome list linkings). And I actually brought the demo to the workshop, which wasn&#x27;t required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.<p>The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I&#x27;m sitting here with my 5 GitHub stars on the repo, after I put like 2.5 extra months of work into it. Maybe it led to more people noticing it, and finding it useful. Maybe not.<p>Getting stuff out there to be noticed is difficult, a lot of work, and going the the last 10% does not guarantee any more success.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarface_74</author><text>I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech. We have a very straightforward open source approval process where we can open source any code (MIT-0) that we write for a client as long as we scrub the business processes and anything proprietary to the customer.<p>It does take some work (not two months) to sanitize the project, write documentation, put the boilerplate open source documentation and go through the approval process.<p>I’ve released 8 projects to GitHub using this process over 3 years and collectively may have gotten 15 stars in total. But the way I see it, it’s a great portfolio and the only chance in my career that I could actually show production code from work I’ve done professionally along with my resume.<p>Also, how many times have we changed jobs and had to solve the same problem from scratch because we couldn’t legally or ethically use code from a previous company? This solves that problem too.<p>Your work represents you. Even if no one stars it, you now have a portfolio of work you can be proud of that you can point to when you’re interviewing instead of yet another to do app.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I&#x27;m not convinced yet that I&#x27;ll be getting anything out of it, other than my own satisfaction. After my colleagues and I got our paper (on real-time depth estimation with an event camera and a laser projector [0]) accepted at a workshop, we could have just dumped the convoluted, messy research code on GitHub and be done with it. For other people to figure it out, if they really cared.<p>But I sat down and completely rewrote all the scaffolding around the presented algorithm, to make for a smooth and fast demo. Wrote up documentation for the implementation, gave it a command line interface, set up a script to reproduce the measurements in the paper with a single execution (downloading the required data and comparing several methods). Broadcast in all channels available to me (institution press release, LinkedIn posts, GitHub awesome list linkings). And I actually brought the demo to the workshop, which wasn&#x27;t required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.<p>The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I&#x27;m sitting here with my 5 GitHub stars on the repo, after I put like 2.5 extra months of work into it. Maybe it led to more people noticing it, and finding it useful. Maybe not.<p>Getting stuff out there to be noticed is difficult, a lot of work, and going the the last 10% does not guarantee any more success.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sidmitra</author><text>There might be people years from now that could benefit from your work. Caring about something and putting it out there is never in vain.</text></comment> |
21,505,073 | 21,505,090 | 1 | 2 | 21,504,606 | train | <story><title>The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots at the Top</title><url>https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_n_5d9fb1c9e4b06ddfc516e076?ri18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FussyZeus</author><text>&gt; The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state<p>This part I agree with.<p>&gt; and it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should still exist today.<p>This part I absolutely do not. Perhaps the social mobility wouldn&#x27;t be exactly the same, but surely we can do better than the current state of affairs? I wonder how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status with all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different extravagant homes?<p>And that&#x27;s to say nothing for the cost of college going through the roof while conferring even less benefit to people&#x27;s careers, stagnant wages, ever-rising taxes on the 99% since the IRS finds it difficult to audit the wealthy...</text></item><item><author>swalsh</author><text>&gt; America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.<p>I think it&#x27;s not unimportant to remember that Americas economic position in the world was dramatically different then. With the end of WWII, we had the Brenton Woods system, and the Marshall Plan. Those 2 systems drove economic growth, and placed America in the center of it. It was an unprecentented period of economic development worldwide, but especially so for America. The tech boom drove quite a bit of growth too, but it was narrower, and not in the same level of magnitude.<p>The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state, and it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should still exist today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tachyonbeam</author><text>&gt; how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status with all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different extravagant homes?<p>More fundamentally: money is created through debt. Central banks print money to increase the money supply. This money is being used to buy assets to float up the stock and real estate markets. In other words, central banks are a form or corporate welfare for the rich. It doesn&#x27;t have to be this way. We could print money and use it to build housing for those who can&#x27;t afford it. That would also stimulate the economy. The problem is that we think of real estate as an investment, when housing is actually a fundamental need.</text></comment> | <story><title>The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots at the Top</title><url>https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/the-glass-floor-is-keeping-americas-richest-idiots-at-the-top_n_5d9fb1c9e4b06ddfc516e076?ri18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FussyZeus</author><text>&gt; The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state<p>This part I agree with.<p>&gt; and it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should still exist today.<p>This part I absolutely do not. Perhaps the social mobility wouldn&#x27;t be exactly the same, but surely we can do better than the current state of affairs? I wonder how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status with all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different extravagant homes?<p>And that&#x27;s to say nothing for the cost of college going through the roof while conferring even less benefit to people&#x27;s careers, stagnant wages, ever-rising taxes on the 99% since the IRS finds it difficult to audit the wealthy...</text></item><item><author>swalsh</author><text>&gt; America has a social mobility problem. Children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of earning more than their parents. For children born in 1984, the odds were 50-50.<p>I think it&#x27;s not unimportant to remember that Americas economic position in the world was dramatically different then. With the end of WWII, we had the Brenton Woods system, and the Marshall Plan. Those 2 systems drove economic growth, and placed America in the center of it. It was an unprecentented period of economic development worldwide, but especially so for America. The tech boom drove quite a bit of growth too, but it was narrower, and not in the same level of magnitude.<p>The point is, 1944 - 1991 is a HIGHLY unusual economic state, and it&#x27;s not reasonable to expect that the mobility that existed then should still exist today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swalsh</author><text>&gt; I wonder how many people could be elevated to comfortable middle class status with all the money hoarded so Jeff Bezos can have over 20 different extravagant homes<p>I think this is ultimately the crux of the issue. Without rapid economic growth, the only way to make society rapidly more &quot;fair&quot; is to focus on redistribution. I&#x27;m actually not completely against the idea either. I can think of a number of institutions, like education, healthcare, and childcare (pre-k) that make a whole bunch of sense to make more &quot;equitable&quot;. But I do believe we need to have a level sense about what is reasonable to expect. It&#x27;s not ever going to be close to the levels we had in the second half of the twentieth century. If we go at it too aggressively, we&#x27;re risking a lot.</text></comment> |
32,093,329 | 32,093,078 | 1 | 3 | 32,092,637 | train | <story><title>World's oldest tree still growing near the Norwegian-Swedish border</title><url>https://sciencenorway.no/dna-forests-trees/worlds-oldest-tree-still-growing-near-the-norwegian-swedish-border/2037756</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vesinisa</author><text>That title is rather clickbaity for a &quot;science&quot; magazine. Crucially, the tree prominently featured in the large picture is not 10,000 years old and only its root system originates from that period:<p>&gt; Today Old Tjikko’s tree trunk is only five metres high. Although the spruce may have had many such trunks over the millennia, the tree&#x27;s root system has survived all these years. No part of today’s living tree is as old as 9 500 years, but genetically, the tree is exactly the same individual as when it began to germinate.<p>Indeed if we allow equating the plant to the age and extent of its root system (genetically the same organism, although no part of the present plant is as old), I already found this other tree root system named &quot;Pando&quot; in Utah, USA, that is estimated to be up to 14,000 years old - making the Swedish spruce&#x27;s claim to world&#x27;s oldest dubious:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pando_(tree)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pando_(tree)</a><p>Pando is also thought to be the largest and heaviest known single organism, covering 43 hectares and weighing 6,000 tons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alkonaut</author><text>The cool thing about it and what does give it the 10k year feel is that it grows in a spot that was only low enough for trees to grow 10k years ago because the mountain has risen 100 meters since, and it couldn’t start growing there now.</text></comment> | <story><title>World's oldest tree still growing near the Norwegian-Swedish border</title><url>https://sciencenorway.no/dna-forests-trees/worlds-oldest-tree-still-growing-near-the-norwegian-swedish-border/2037756</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vesinisa</author><text>That title is rather clickbaity for a &quot;science&quot; magazine. Crucially, the tree prominently featured in the large picture is not 10,000 years old and only its root system originates from that period:<p>&gt; Today Old Tjikko’s tree trunk is only five metres high. Although the spruce may have had many such trunks over the millennia, the tree&#x27;s root system has survived all these years. No part of today’s living tree is as old as 9 500 years, but genetically, the tree is exactly the same individual as when it began to germinate.<p>Indeed if we allow equating the plant to the age and extent of its root system (genetically the same organism, although no part of the present plant is as old), I already found this other tree root system named &quot;Pando&quot; in Utah, USA, that is estimated to be up to 14,000 years old - making the Swedish spruce&#x27;s claim to world&#x27;s oldest dubious:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pando_(tree)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pando_(tree)</a><p>Pando is also thought to be the largest and heaviest known single organism, covering 43 hectares and weighing 6,000 tons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>__alexs</author><text>What is a &quot;tree&quot;?<p>None of the leaves on Methuselah are 5000 years old, but we say that the tree is that old.<p>Kind of a Tree of Theseus situation going on.</text></comment> |
7,983,244 | 7,983,151 | 1 | 2 | 7,982,430 | train | <story><title>Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!</title><url>http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ris</author><text>Technically email isn&#x27;t the web.<p>That&#x27;s not to say the web isn&#x27;t being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their &quot;aol keyword&quot;?<p>The reality of &quot;the cloud&quot; is we&#x27;re squeezing things back into a few giant silos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>&gt;Technically email isn&#x27;t the web.<p>I see this very same things on the web. Heaven forbid you use internet explorer as your browser or are a version behind. The amount of smarmy, &quot;Use a real browser&quot; messages I&#x27;ve gotten when testing things in IE is unacceptable. I have no love for IE, but lots of people use it, and I need to support it at work. Just because its difficult to write html for for certain use cases doesn&#x27;t mean its useless. I understand when using something IE doesnt support yet, but that didn&#x27;t seem to be the case with these websites. Often these sites are run by 20-somethings straight out of school with some kind of &#x27;stick it to the man&#x27; identity politics. Yeah if you&#x27;re a middle class person who went to college, have healthcare, have a non back-breaking computer job, etc guess what, you&#x27;re the man.<p>I feel like we&#x27;ve never transcended the proprietary mindset and popularity still rules. This email client may be an extreme example, but the web is pretty unfriendly if you&#x27;re not using firefox or a webkit based browser. Oh, the opposite was true in the past? So what. That doesn&#x27;t make the current status quo acceptable. I love how we justify the various ways we refuse to learn from history.<p>On mobile its even worse. We&#x27;re not even shoving things into silos. We&#x27;re saying, &quot;Look, this featureset which could be trivially be put into a HTML5 webpage is now a local app proprietary to this platform. Install it, deal with its constant updates, its crappy UI, etc.&quot; Does every newspaper in the world and forum really think I want to install their app? I&#x27;d have hundreds of apps on my phone if I did.<p>I really think we&#x27;re regressing a bit. The cloud-ification and foolproofing of things just leads to a handful of megacorps providing near-mandatory services and applying their own policies and politics onto those services. We keep losing ground to them on things like privacy, stability, ownership, etc for convenience. Not sure where this is going to lead to in the end, but it won&#x27;t be anything like we&#x27;re used to. I doubt it&#x27;ll be for the better. MSN and AOL tried to build a walled web garden in the 90s and were laughed at by the tech-savvy. Now the tech-savvy are the ones sporting ipads and android phones and willingly entering these new walled gardens.</text></comment> | <story><title>Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!</title><url>http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ris</author><text>Technically email isn&#x27;t the web.<p>That&#x27;s not to say the web isn&#x27;t being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their &quot;aol keyword&quot;?<p>The reality of &quot;the cloud&quot; is we&#x27;re squeezing things back into a few giant silos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stronglikedan</author><text>&gt; over which they have full control<p>That may just be the problem. When everyone has full control over how they present themselves, then everyone presents themselves differently. The problem with this approach is the inconsistency - a user has to learn their way around a different UX for each entity&#x27;s presence.<p>With Facebook and Twitter, it&#x27;s a familiar UX for the end user, and the information related to different entities is presented in more or less the same format for all entities. This makes is easier for the end user to find the information they are looking for, and sometimes that&#x27;s better than branding.<p>So, while it&#x27;s important for an entity to have a branded web identity, I think that it&#x27;s equally important for an entity to have and promote a presence on popular social media as well. It&#x27;s a sort of dumbed-down identity for the masses.</text></comment> |
22,831,026 | 22,831,067 | 1 | 2 | 22,830,330 | train | <story><title>Make Linux Fast Again (2019)</title><url>https://make-linux-fast-again.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pantalaimon</author><text>Don&#x27;t browsers fudge the accuracy of the available clocks already to mitigate SPECTRE?</text></item><item><author>danShumway</author><text>To be clear, SPECTRE leaks privileged memory at an OS-level -- up to in some cases allowing arbitrary virtual memory reads.<p>While Javascript is the most likely attack vector for most people, you should not use this command on a system that&#x27;s running untrusted code from anywhere in any context, and you should consider moving sensitive information like passwords off of the computer.<p>I use uMatrix to disable Javascript by default on every site I visit, and I still would not feel safe running this command on anything other than a single-purpose device.<p>That&#x27;s not to say that there would <i>never</i> be a good reason to run it. A very imprecise, easy test I would propose is, &quot;is your Linux system vetted enough or just unimportant enough that you would feel comfortable getting rid of users and running all of your software as root?&quot; In which case, SPECTRE &amp; friends is probably not a credible threat to you on that machine.</text></item><item><author>jcelerier</author><text>Yes, that&#x27;s the point of this site - if your workflow is hurt by the perf impact of mitigations and SPECTRE &amp; friends are not a credible attack, for instance because you disable JS by default, then you can just curl and pipe this to your kernel parameters</text></item><item><author>miles</author><text>The GRUB parameters that appear on Make-Linux-Fast-Again.com apparently disable Spectre&#x2F;Meltdown mitigations:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;rizalp&#x2F;ff74fd9ededb076e6102fc0b636bd52b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;rizalp&#x2F;ff74fd9ededb076e6102fc0b636bd...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securitronlinux.com&#x2F;bejiitaswrath&#x2F;how-to-get-a-nice-speed-boost-for-ubuntu-this-really-does-work-well&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securitronlinux.com&#x2F;bejiitaswrath&#x2F;how-to-get-a-nice-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=Spectre-Meltdown-Easy-Switch-52" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=Spectre-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>I would appreciate someone else who knows more than me about the current state of these attacks and more than me about Linux security in general answering this question. Take what I&#x27;m about to say with a grain of salt.<p>My understanding is that Firefox still reduces timer accuracy, Chrome <i>did</i>, but increased timer accuracy again after adding other protections. I&#x27;m not sure if Chrome&#x27;s protections rely on Meltdown vulnerabilities being patched on the OS level or not. It&#x27;s been a while since I checked back on what the status was there, so I might be wrong.<p>There are also some concerns about shared memory buffers, which is why I think some of the features around them haven&#x27;t been enabled in WASM yet. I haven&#x27;t checked the status on that stuff in a while either.<p>In any case, for a vulnerability of this scale I bias towards saying people should practice defense in depth. Sometimes browsers have bugs in them, and this would be a particularly bad one. And again, there are userland native apps and systems and package managers that people need to worry about that go beyond browsers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Make Linux Fast Again (2019)</title><url>https://make-linux-fast-again.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pantalaimon</author><text>Don&#x27;t browsers fudge the accuracy of the available clocks already to mitigate SPECTRE?</text></item><item><author>danShumway</author><text>To be clear, SPECTRE leaks privileged memory at an OS-level -- up to in some cases allowing arbitrary virtual memory reads.<p>While Javascript is the most likely attack vector for most people, you should not use this command on a system that&#x27;s running untrusted code from anywhere in any context, and you should consider moving sensitive information like passwords off of the computer.<p>I use uMatrix to disable Javascript by default on every site I visit, and I still would not feel safe running this command on anything other than a single-purpose device.<p>That&#x27;s not to say that there would <i>never</i> be a good reason to run it. A very imprecise, easy test I would propose is, &quot;is your Linux system vetted enough or just unimportant enough that you would feel comfortable getting rid of users and running all of your software as root?&quot; In which case, SPECTRE &amp; friends is probably not a credible threat to you on that machine.</text></item><item><author>jcelerier</author><text>Yes, that&#x27;s the point of this site - if your workflow is hurt by the perf impact of mitigations and SPECTRE &amp; friends are not a credible attack, for instance because you disable JS by default, then you can just curl and pipe this to your kernel parameters</text></item><item><author>miles</author><text>The GRUB parameters that appear on Make-Linux-Fast-Again.com apparently disable Spectre&#x2F;Meltdown mitigations:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;rizalp&#x2F;ff74fd9ededb076e6102fc0b636bd52b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;rizalp&#x2F;ff74fd9ededb076e6102fc0b636bd...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securitronlinux.com&#x2F;bejiitaswrath&#x2F;how-to-get-a-nice-speed-boost-for-ubuntu-this-really-does-work-well&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;securitronlinux.com&#x2F;bejiitaswrath&#x2F;how-to-get-a-nice-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=Spectre-Meltdown-Easy-Switch-52" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;px=Spectre-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>Yes, but this doesn’t actually fix the issue; it just makes exploiting it harder. Fundamentally, even if you fudge clocks you can still average out things with enough measurements, and if you remove all of them you can busyloop and count iterations of <i>that</i> instead as a “timer”.</text></comment> |
7,934,807 | 7,934,514 | 1 | 2 | 7,934,177 | train | <story><title>We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today</title><url>http://www.christophmccann.com/blog/2014/6/23/we-have-the-potential-to-solve-the-biggest-problems-of-today</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skywhopper</author><text>Unfortunately, this line of criticism works equally well about all games, art, haute cuisine, movies, national parks, and about 96% of our economy.<p>More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn&#x27;t care for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jal278</author><text>I don&#x27;t believe that the article&#x27;s criticism would be effective also against art (also, games can be art) -- striving to make something beautiful that illustrates the human condition or makes us feel something, is a non-trivial effort; art can galvanize us socially [0] [1] and can effect meaningful change.<p>While Yo may prove to have some value, the author&#x27;s post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_California" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_Califor...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin</a></text></comment> | <story><title>We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today</title><url>http://www.christophmccann.com/blog/2014/6/23/we-have-the-potential-to-solve-the-biggest-problems-of-today</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skywhopper</author><text>Unfortunately, this line of criticism works equally well about all games, art, haute cuisine, movies, national parks, and about 96% of our economy.<p>More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn&#x27;t care for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>forgottenpass</author><text>None of those fields beat the &quot;change the world&quot; drum as hard as tech startups do. This article seems to be an attempt to an attempt to reconcile action and rhetoric by asking &quot;us&quot; to live up to it.<p>So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that&#x27;s just pretending to miss the point.<p>Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It&#x27;s self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.</text></comment> |
23,914,268 | 23,913,925 | 1 | 2 | 23,901,779 | train | <story><title>We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs</title><url>https://community.chronicle.com/news/2283-why-we-need-a-yelp-for-doctoral-programs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups.<p>The truly disillusioned won&#x27;t mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.<p>The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Professor A may be exploitative, while Professor B may fight tooth-and-nail for student success. The statistics are low, too. Most professors will only graduate a few students per decade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>In many disciplines, too, the answer is &quot;don&#x27;t go to <i>any</i> program.&quot; Most humanities fields, for example, have numerous essays written about why doing grad school in them is a poor life choice, like my contribution: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;what-you-should-know-before-you-start-grad-school-in-english-literature-the-economic-financial-and-opportunity-costs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakeseliger.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;what-you-should-know-befo...</a>.<p>One could say the same of most social sciences.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Need a Yelp for Doctoral Programs</title><url>https://community.chronicle.com/news/2283-why-we-need-a-yelp-for-doctoral-programs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ISL</author><text>Good luck getting honest reviews. Graduates and recent post-docs are dependent upon good letters of recommendation from their advisors for perhaps a decade after leaving their research groups.<p>The truly disillusioned won&#x27;t mind complaining, but those with even constructive criticism will feel constrained in their ability to speak out and be specific.<p>The graduate-student experience is deeply advisor-specific. Professor A may be exploitative, while Professor B may fight tooth-and-nail for student success. The statistics are low, too. Most professors will only graduate a few students per decade.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dopu</author><text>Completely agree. I&#x27;ve become increasingly convinced that we&#x27;ll need a fundamental restructuring of the academy if we want to fix any of these issues. The fact that places like MIT or Stanford will hire professors simply because they output Nature papers every year, regardless of the fact that they are totally abusive to their trainees, is a perfect demonstration of it.</text></comment> |
37,846,560 | 37,845,527 | 1 | 3 | 37,844,225 | train | <story><title>A suicide crisis among veterinarians</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suicide-crisis-among-veterinarians-youre-always-going-to-be-failing-somebody</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GlenTheMachine</author><text>My wife is a vet.<p>One big issue is that most people don’t have pet insurance. But they do have medical insurance. As a consequence they are completely surprised by the out-of-pocket costs of medical procedures.<p>Hip surgery (to pick something at random) is hip surgery, even if it’s for a dog. It still costs thousands of dollars. But a significant portion of the population expects to pay what they would pay for insurance-covered human surgery, eg a couple hundred dollars at most. And when they see the bill they accuse the vet of “only being in it for the money” if they won’t significantly discount the price.<p>Meanwhile, the vet is paying back $150,000 in student loans, same as a human doctor, but only making a third of the pay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flatline</author><text>The cost of preserving life, human or otherwise, has skyrocketed. When I was a kid, it cost $25 for a vet visit and something like $100 for a minor surgical procedure. Adjusted for inflation those are probably about the same today, the difference being there were no <i>major</i> surgical procedures available for pets. Also, the vet did not carry $150k in student loan debt.<p>A decade ago I had a kitten with heart arrhythmia. The vet suggested we go to a cat cardiologist. To me that seemed insane, it was going to be $1000 just to get inspected. The cat is alive and well today with no cardiologist visit.<p>What is the value of the kitten’s life when it was a rescue and there are thousands more to pick from if it passed?The reality is that creating life is cheap and plentiful on planet earth. The resources to preserve life are not. If you are privileged you can afford to pay for your pet’s care. That is a sentimental choice for most people, not a practical one. The equation is different for human life, but only by degree. Insurance is only going to do so much, there is a real cost to medical treatment.</text></comment> | <story><title>A suicide crisis among veterinarians</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suicide-crisis-among-veterinarians-youre-always-going-to-be-failing-somebody</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GlenTheMachine</author><text>My wife is a vet.<p>One big issue is that most people don’t have pet insurance. But they do have medical insurance. As a consequence they are completely surprised by the out-of-pocket costs of medical procedures.<p>Hip surgery (to pick something at random) is hip surgery, even if it’s for a dog. It still costs thousands of dollars. But a significant portion of the population expects to pay what they would pay for insurance-covered human surgery, eg a couple hundred dollars at most. And when they see the bill they accuse the vet of “only being in it for the money” if they won’t significantly discount the price.<p>Meanwhile, the vet is paying back $150,000 in student loans, same as a human doctor, but only making a third of the pay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unshavedyak</author><text>Also, not sure how common it is, but an extended friend of mine was a vet tech. She quit due to the emotional toll of seeing animal abuse. Specifically sexual abuse. Apparently they had very limited tools to actually deal with the problem and instead had to give the dogs back to the abusers. That was not an emotional burden that she could continue with.<p>Not something I would have thought vets would have to deal with.</text></comment> |
27,323,042 | 27,322,170 | 1 | 3 | 27,321,780 | train | <story><title>Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer</title><url>https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/05/27/nersc-debuts-perlmutter-worlds-fastest-ai-supercomputer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boulos</author><text>Disclosure: I used to work on Google Cloud.<p>Perlmutter seems like an awesome system. But, I think the “ai exaflops” is a “X GPUS times the NVIDIA peak rate”. The new sparsity features on A100 are promising, but haven’t been demonstrated to be nearly as awesome in practice (yet).<p>It also all comes down to workloads: large-scale distributed training is a funny workload! It’s <i>not</i> like LINPACK. If you make your model compute intensive enough, then the networking need mostly becomes <i>bandwidth</i> (for which multi-hundred Gbps worth of NICs is handy) but even without it there are lots of ways to max out your compute.<p>Similarly, <i>storage</i> is a serious need for say giant video corpora, but not for things like text! GPT-2 had like a 40 GiB corpus.<p>For those asking about largest-scale cloud <i>GPU</i> runs, there are basically three examples (chronological)<p>- the work OpenAI did on Five (thousands of V100s on GCP)<p>- the IceCube science work [1] on many clouds (51000 GPUs at peak!)<p>- OpenAI’s 10000-V100 cluster they used for GPT-3<p>The <i>A100</i>s used here are recently released and another step-change in perf per part (and memory). All major providers now offer them, though with different density and networking configurations (GCP went with 16 in a single box, most folks went with 8, some have lots of networking, etc.).<p>What everyone should be asking is: what awesome stuff is NERSC &#x2F; LBL going to do with Perlmutter? You can’t just rent one for a few hours on GCP or any other provider :). (But, fwiw, most usage will be small slices: this is the sad fate of giant supercomputers!)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insidehpc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;sdsc-conducts-50000-gpu-cloudburst-experiment-with-wisconsin-icecube-particle-astrophysics-center&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insidehpc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;sdsc-conducts-50000-gpu-cloudb...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Berkeley Lab Debuts Perlmutter, World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer</title><url>https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/05/27/nersc-debuts-perlmutter-worlds-fastest-ai-supercomputer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mooneater</author><text>&gt; Python programmers will be able to use RAPIDS, Nvidia’s open software suite for GPU-enabled data science<p>Ah not to be confused with OpenAI Rapid described at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;openai-five&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;openai-five&#x2F;</a> ^_^</text></comment> |
39,580,759 | 39,580,279 | 1 | 3 | 39,579,833 | train | <story><title>An Unbelievable Demo (2021)</title><url>https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pbronez</author><text>This is indicative of a more general phenomenon: the world is big enough that attention is stretched thin. If you invest a few weeks of thoughtful work into a specific corner, just because YOU care, you can quickly surpass broader experts.<p>This doesn’t devalue broad expertise in general. Focused amateurs benefit significantly from access to experts, and you need some level of training&#x2F;experience before you can pull this off. The point is that attention and persistence are valuable.<p>Consider someone with human body. There’s a lot going on. You can go to a doctor. You can go to specialists. It takes weeks and months to get seen and you get minutes of their time. If you have a complex condition, it’s very hard to find and capture the attention of an expert who can address the breadth of the problem.<p>You have to get informed. Not the “do your own research” trope that leads to anti-vax and flat-earth nonsense. You have to document your symptoms. Figure out how to tell your story concisely. Learn what the relevant specialties are and the language they use. Dig into primary sources for early studies and experimental interventions. Nobody else will do this work for you. For much of it, nobody else can - because only you have direct experience of the problem.<p>The software ecosystem is the same. It’s huge, interconnected, with silo’d experts and communities of practice. A competent, motivated person can chart unique, rewarding paths. Keep pushing!</text></comment> | <story><title>An Unbelievable Demo (2021)</title><url>https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gtirloni</author><text><i>&gt; The belief at Sun that only Sun could make good use of its own technologies, and anything created outside of Sun was trash.</i><p>Exactly my impression during the OpenSolaris time.<p>Every time criticism of Sun&#x27;s open source strategy was raised, people seemed in disbelief that Sun! could be doing anything bad. They were sacred.</text></comment> |
33,412,858 | 33,407,493 | 1 | 3 | 33,406,790 | train | <story><title>I’m taking some time away from Comma</title><url>https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-heroes-journey.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generationP</author><text>George Hotz is my canary for the question &quot;is there still adventure to be found in computing&quot;. I hope he finds some, because if he can&#x27;t, then there is probably none.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>This reminds me of all the &quot;born too late to explore the world&quot; people, who in reality have never left their house. There is limitless adventure right across the street if you actually want to go seek it out.</text></comment> | <story><title>I’m taking some time away from Comma</title><url>https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/10/29/the-heroes-journey.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generationP</author><text>George Hotz is my canary for the question &quot;is there still adventure to be found in computing&quot;. I hope he finds some, because if he can&#x27;t, then there is probably none.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thejackgoode</author><text>That’s one huge projected canary</text></comment> |
9,417,552 | 9,417,016 | 1 | 2 | 9,416,490 | train | <story><title>NASA data API</title><url>https://data.nasa.gov/developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dluan</author><text>So excited for this. If anyone wants to start experimenting with this data set in cool and open ways, I will personally fund your small micro experiments.<p>NASA&#x27;s APOD is so awesome and that&#x27;s just a picture, imagine all the potential fantastic content that&#x27;s now available and what you could do with it.</text></comment> | <story><title>NASA data API</title><url>https://data.nasa.gov/developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pierrec</author><text>Is there a compilation of applications and experiments using each API?<p>The classical example of cool stuff you can do with this kind of API is the world wind map:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earth.nullschool.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earth.nullschool.net&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
1,372,799 | 1,372,825 | 1 | 2 | 1,372,720 | train | <story><title>The latest version of the LittleDog robot </title><url>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUQsRPJ1dYw&feature=player_embedded</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vitobcn</author><text>I find amazing how difficult it is to successfully perform apparently trivial tasks such as walking.<p>There's more information about the 'LittleDog' on the Boston Dynamics website: <a href="http://www.bostondynamics.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bostondynamics.com/</a><p>I was really impressed 2 years ago by their video of the 'BigDog':
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww</a> (check out t=40s)</text></comment> | <story><title>The latest version of the LittleDog robot </title><url>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUQsRPJ1dYw&feature=player_embedded</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>Anyone with some robotics experience able to explain more about the floating base inverse dynamics control system and what sort of accommodations make it so much more powerful than PD?</text></comment> |
36,227,449 | 36,226,902 | 1 | 2 | 36,225,550 | train | <story><title>Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/dell-in-hot-water-for-making-shoppers-think-overpriced-monitors-were-discounted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>I just straight-up ignore &quot;sale&quot; claims now, unless I have personal experience that says this really is a sale. This is mostly limited to groceries where I definitely know that the $4 bag of chips really is on sale at $1.50. Along with all the active deception, I also just count all the times I&#x27;ve gone price shopping for non-trivial things and the prices I see and how festooned with the word &quot;sale&quot; the page is is simply uncorrelated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfandango</author><text>I have been truck shopping lately which means I&#x27;m constantly hounded all day long by every dealership in the 4 state region. Last weekend they ALL had &quot;Memorial Day Sales&quot;! So I asked them all about the sale details... Every single one said if I came in they would try to make a deal with me. That&#x27;s the same thing as no sale. Actually, it is worse for cars where a sale might entail negotiating against a dealer markup.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dell in hot water for making shoppers think overpriced monitors were discounted</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/dell-in-hot-water-for-making-shoppers-think-overpriced-monitors-were-discounted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>I just straight-up ignore &quot;sale&quot; claims now, unless I have personal experience that says this really is a sale. This is mostly limited to groceries where I definitely know that the $4 bag of chips really is on sale at $1.50. Along with all the active deception, I also just count all the times I&#x27;ve gone price shopping for non-trivial things and the prices I see and how festooned with the word &quot;sale&quot; the page is is simply uncorrelated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway173738</author><text>Also just because something is in a larger size, it doesn’t always make the prices better. Once I was at Fred Meyer and the 1 pound bags of lentils were $1.50 but the two pound bags were $4.00. They were charging more for larger handling units.</text></comment> |
10,963,515 | 10,963,409 | 1 | 2 | 10,963,257 | train | <story><title>As Zika virus spreads, El Salvador asks women not to get pregnant until 2018</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/as-zika-virus-spreads-el-salvador-asks-women-not-to-get-pregnant-until-2018/2016/01/22/1dc2dadc-c11f-11e5-98c8-7fab78677d51_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop_b</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geertj</author><text>Terrifying. Doing some quick back of the envelope calculations: 1,000,000 people in Brazil got the virus, and there are 4,000 cases of microcephaly. Let&#x27;s assume that most of these are caused by the virus (pre-virus level of microcephaly were very low) and assume half of the people are women. Also assume roughly two pregnancies over a women&#x27;s life, and an average life expectancy of 73 years.<p>This would mean that of the 500,000 women that got the virus, roughly 2% of these women were pregnant while getting the virus, which equates to 10,000 women, resulting in 4,000 cases of microcephaly. This would be a 40% chance of microcephaly when a woman catches the virus during pregnancy. That is absurdly high for a virus that is starting to become (or already is) an epidemic.<p>There&#x27;s many assumptions in the calculation and I&#x27;m sure the medical profession has much better numbers. As I said it&#x27;s a back of the envelope. But even if the chances are 20% or 10%, that is still extremely high and worrying. The recommendation not to get pregnant in countries where the virus is active suddenly makes sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>As Zika virus spreads, El Salvador asks women not to get pregnant until 2018</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/as-zika-virus-spreads-el-salvador-asks-women-not-to-get-pregnant-until-2018/2016/01/22/1dc2dadc-c11f-11e5-98c8-7fab78677d51_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop_b</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>navaati</author><text>This, on top of all the other mosquito-born diseases, may finally convince the authorities&#x2F;ethical commitees&#x2F;whoever has the decision power to use this CRISPR specie-killing scheme talked about some time ago. It&#x27;s scary, but it&#x27;s badly needed.
Because as sibling comment said, asking people not to get pregnant will never work, anytime anywhere in the world.</text></comment> |
24,288,913 | 24,288,495 | 1 | 2 | 24,287,566 | train | <story><title>Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim</title><url>https://github.com/iggredible/Learn-Vim</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMcguigan</author><text>When I was first learning Vim I remapped caps lock to escape, and it was a huge improvement. But as I became more comfortable in Vim I realized I was using the control key a lot.<p>I&#x27;ve since remapped caps lock to control, and use ctrl-[ as escape (this is default behavior). I find having an easily accesible control key is very useful, even outside Vim. You can see in your link that it is actually the control key that used to be in the position we now put the caps lock key.<p>It does seem like remapping caps lock to escape when pressed alone and control when pressed with another key would be nice, but that wasn&#x27;t an option for me (on wayland) as far as I know.<p>I bring this up only because there was a week or two transition period when I made this change, and I probably would have been better off if I had mapped caps lock to control from the start.</text></item><item><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>Two things that helped me more than anything with &quot;learning&quot; vim and or ever wanting to use it:<p>1. Remap your &quot;capslock&quot; key to &quot;escape.&quot; Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catonmat.net&#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catonmat.net&#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys</a> has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap &quot;capslock&quot; to &quot;escape&quot; when pressed alone, and &quot;ctrl&quot; when pressed with another key.<p>2. Make your leader key something easy like the comma character &quot;,&quot; E.g. to make a horizontal split, I press (not including quotation marks) &quot;,h&quot; or &quot;,v&quot; to make a vertical one.<p>Once I did those two things it all made so much more sense... It&#x27;s also great because most editors these days support vim bindings, so even if you don&#x27;t want to use vim you can still benefit from its really-awsome-once-you-figure-it-out UX.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmohseni</author><text>On Linux and Mac it’s possible to have caps be escape when pressed alone or control when pressed with another key. On Linux the software is called xcape. :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Learn Vim (the Smart Way): a book to learn the good parts of Vim</title><url>https://github.com/iggredible/Learn-Vim</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JoshMcguigan</author><text>When I was first learning Vim I remapped caps lock to escape, and it was a huge improvement. But as I became more comfortable in Vim I realized I was using the control key a lot.<p>I&#x27;ve since remapped caps lock to control, and use ctrl-[ as escape (this is default behavior). I find having an easily accesible control key is very useful, even outside Vim. You can see in your link that it is actually the control key that used to be in the position we now put the caps lock key.<p>It does seem like remapping caps lock to escape when pressed alone and control when pressed with another key would be nice, but that wasn&#x27;t an option for me (on wayland) as far as I know.<p>I bring this up only because there was a week or two transition period when I made this change, and I probably would have been better off if I had mapped caps lock to control from the start.</text></item><item><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>Two things that helped me more than anything with &quot;learning&quot; vim and or ever wanting to use it:<p>1. Remap your &quot;capslock&quot; key to &quot;escape.&quot; Vi was written using an ADM-3A terminal and its keyboard, which you can see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catonmat.net&#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;catonmat.net&#x2F;why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys</a> has the escape-key in a sane place. On modern keyboards, if you can, remap &quot;capslock&quot; to &quot;escape&quot; when pressed alone, and &quot;ctrl&quot; when pressed with another key.<p>2. Make your leader key something easy like the comma character &quot;,&quot; E.g. to make a horizontal split, I press (not including quotation marks) &quot;,h&quot; or &quot;,v&quot; to make a vertical one.<p>Once I did those two things it all made so much more sense... It&#x27;s also great because most editors these days support vim bindings, so even if you don&#x27;t want to use vim you can still benefit from its really-awsome-once-you-figure-it-out UX.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cbcoutinho</author><text>I recently learned this trick since getting a new MacBook pro with the touch bar esc key. I couldn&#x27;t stand the lack of travel and didn&#x27;t want to remap keys, now I use the ctrl-[ combo on all keyboards out of habit</text></comment> |
32,553,308 | 32,551,286 | 1 | 2 | 32,549,604 | train | <story><title>Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google</title><url>https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>&gt; They&#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them<p>But if they don&#x27;t know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to?<p>The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?</text></item><item><author>akie</author><text>&gt; But I can&#x27;t imagine Google would know how to do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.<p>They&#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of &quot;free&quot; developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.</text></item><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate portrayal?<p>Like, I&#x27;ve been working on a web project that doesn&#x27;t contain <i>any</i> analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise.<p>But, I just can&#x27;t imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwkrt</author><text>You’re not thinking on a big enough scale. No big tech company cares about “your” data. They care about everyone’s data in aggregate as much as they can get from every location at every granularity. Even thinking of a tech company as collecting all of “your” data to create an ad profile “for you” is rather inaccurate. They’re collecting everyone’s data to create an ad profile for everybody, tailored to what makes the most money in aggregate across all ad slots.<p>When you think of it like this you’ll stop asking questions like “what would they do with this piece of data?” Because the answer is always that it is a drop in a giant ocean of machine learning data.</text></comment> | <story><title>Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google</title><url>https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>&gt; They&#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them<p>But if they don&#x27;t know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to?<p>The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?</text></item><item><author>akie</author><text>&gt; But I can&#x27;t imagine Google would know how to do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.<p>They&#x27;re not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them. Their whole suite of &quot;free&quot; developer tools (google analytics, google fonts, firebase, ...) are just a means to get information about what people do online.</text></item><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>Not to make excuses for Google, but is this an entirely accurate portrayal?<p>Like, I&#x27;ve been working on a web project that doesn&#x27;t contain <i>any</i> analytics, but which stores and retrieves JSON data in Google Firebase. I imagine if I opened my website with this tool, I would hear lots of noise.<p>But, I just can&#x27;t imagine how Google could do anything useful (to them) with my random JSON blobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weberer</author><text>If the requests are client side, they know that the user has accessed your domain. They can analyze the frequency and timestamps of these requests and add that information to the ad profile they have built for that user.</text></comment> |
26,116,010 | 26,116,027 | 1 | 2 | 26,114,863 | train | <story><title>SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</title><url>https://www.eisfunke.com/article/svg-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simias</author><text>&gt;Furthermore the XML-based syntax is pretty ugly and needlessly verbose. It’s tiring to write by hand and just as tiring to parse or generate automatically.<p>What&#x27;s even worse is that because XML is a garbage fire of a format, SVG actually builds its own micro-DSL to work around limitations.<p>So for instance you have something like:<p><pre><code> &lt;circle cx=&quot;10&quot; cy=&quot;10&quot; r=&quot;2&quot; fill=&quot;red&quot;&#x2F;&gt;
</code></pre>
Ok, fair enough. Readable, self-describing.<p>But then you have:<p><pre><code> &lt;path d=&quot;M 10 10 H 90 V 90 H 10 L 10 10&quot;&#x2F;&gt;
</code></pre>
Oh. You can almost hear the designer saying &quot;well fuck it, we&#x27;ll just jam it all into a string.<p>The fact that SGML-based formats managed to become as popular as they are is really proof that there&#x27;s something fundamentally rotten in software engineering.<p>I do quite like SVG though. I mean, if the alternative is drawing with CSS, it&#x27;s pretty amazing. I don&#x27;t really agree that it&#x27;s hard to generate programmatically either, you just have to decide what subset of the format you need, look at what inkscape generates and go from there. If you need to generate basic shapes it&#x27;s fairly straightforward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colllectorof</author><text>Can&#x27;t wait for the improved JSON version:<p><pre><code> {&quot;path&quot;: {&quot;d&quot;: [&quot;M&quot;, 10, 10, &quot;H&quot;, 90, &quot;V&quot;, 90, &quot;H&quot;, 10, &quot;L&quot;, 10, 10]}}</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>SVG: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</title><url>https://www.eisfunke.com/article/svg-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simias</author><text>&gt;Furthermore the XML-based syntax is pretty ugly and needlessly verbose. It’s tiring to write by hand and just as tiring to parse or generate automatically.<p>What&#x27;s even worse is that because XML is a garbage fire of a format, SVG actually builds its own micro-DSL to work around limitations.<p>So for instance you have something like:<p><pre><code> &lt;circle cx=&quot;10&quot; cy=&quot;10&quot; r=&quot;2&quot; fill=&quot;red&quot;&#x2F;&gt;
</code></pre>
Ok, fair enough. Readable, self-describing.<p>But then you have:<p><pre><code> &lt;path d=&quot;M 10 10 H 90 V 90 H 10 L 10 10&quot;&#x2F;&gt;
</code></pre>
Oh. You can almost hear the designer saying &quot;well fuck it, we&#x27;ll just jam it all into a string.<p>The fact that SGML-based formats managed to become as popular as they are is really proof that there&#x27;s something fundamentally rotten in software engineering.<p>I do quite like SVG though. I mean, if the alternative is drawing with CSS, it&#x27;s pretty amazing. I don&#x27;t really agree that it&#x27;s hard to generate programmatically either, you just have to decide what subset of the format you need, look at what inkscape generates and go from there. If you need to generate basic shapes it&#x27;s fairly straightforward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cdrini</author><text>How is XML a garbage fire? In comparison to what? Also, representing paths succinctly as text is inherently complicated. You&#x27;re trying to represent a very 2D thing in a linear 1D syntax. It&#x27;s not a limitation of XML, it&#x27;s a limitation of text being 1D.<p>XML&#x2F;SGML are a very effective way of representing tree data (again, non-1D data) in 1D strings. And they&#x27;re wonderfully extensible, while still keeping a well defined schema. Is there an alternative language that is better? How is it better?</text></comment> |
15,187,766 | 15,102,022 | 1 | 3 | 15,099,019 | train | <story><title>A Preview of C# 8 [video]</title><url>https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/A-Preview-of-C-8-with-Mads-Torgersen</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajennings</author><text>Very excited about the Nullable Reference Types.<p>Besides that, the feature I want most in C# is enum exhaustion checking. So I can write:<p><pre><code> enum Color { red, green, blue };
public static string SuperheroFromColor(Color c)
{
if (c == Color.red)
{
return &quot;Superman&quot;;
}
else if (c == Color.green)
{
return &quot;Green Lantern&quot;;
}
else if (c == Color.blue)
{
return &quot;Spiderman&quot;;
}
}
</code></pre>
and not get a compiler error (that not all code paths return a value). But if I added &quot;yellow&quot; as an enum option, then I would get a compiler error. I realize that Color can be cast from an out-of-range int, so it&#x27;s a little complicated. I&#x27;m willing to put something extra after the last else:<p><pre><code> unreachable return null;
</code></pre>
or use a special switch statement. I just want something so the compiler checks that I have accounted for all normal enum values.<p>Is anyone talking about such a feature, or where would I request it? Can I write it myself as a Roslyn extension?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajennings</author><text>I wrote myself a compiler extension to check this for me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;abjennings&#x2F;EnumAnalyzer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;abjennings&#x2F;EnumAnalyzer</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Preview of C# 8 [video]</title><url>https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/A-Preview-of-C-8-with-Mads-Torgersen</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajennings</author><text>Very excited about the Nullable Reference Types.<p>Besides that, the feature I want most in C# is enum exhaustion checking. So I can write:<p><pre><code> enum Color { red, green, blue };
public static string SuperheroFromColor(Color c)
{
if (c == Color.red)
{
return &quot;Superman&quot;;
}
else if (c == Color.green)
{
return &quot;Green Lantern&quot;;
}
else if (c == Color.blue)
{
return &quot;Spiderman&quot;;
}
}
</code></pre>
and not get a compiler error (that not all code paths return a value). But if I added &quot;yellow&quot; as an enum option, then I would get a compiler error. I realize that Color can be cast from an out-of-range int, so it&#x27;s a little complicated. I&#x27;m willing to put something extra after the last else:<p><pre><code> unreachable return null;
</code></pre>
or use a special switch statement. I just want something so the compiler checks that I have accounted for all normal enum values.<p>Is anyone talking about such a feature, or where would I request it? Can I write it myself as a Roslyn extension?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wvenable</author><text>Use the switch statement without a default clause. If you haven&#x27;t exhausted the options, you get an error.</text></comment> |
15,146,719 | 15,145,732 | 1 | 2 | 15,145,226 | train | <story><title>Insane state of today's advertising part 3</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/53n5LdCYTbF</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rahimnathwani</author><text>If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B&#x27;s pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn&#x27;t want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented.<p>&quot;What am I missing?&quot;<p>Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on the page. The auction happens quickly, but it adds latency. Adding a reverse proxy would add further latency, and would remove the ability for ad networks to properly target ads (e.g. using cookies) and account for impressions.</text></item><item><author>allanbreyes</author><text>I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I&#x27;m surprised why sites don&#x27;t just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?</text></item><item><author>doctorless</author><text>I&#x27;m actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren&#x27;t offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it&#x27;s pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especially if there was an auxiliary script you could load from your own domain. Not that I&#x27;m endorsing the idea, it&#x27;s just that it seems like an obvious solution to the usage of ad blockers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belorn</author><text>Which reveals a problematic truth. The tracking is worth more than getting rid of ad blocking.</text></comment> | <story><title>Insane state of today's advertising part 3</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/53n5LdCYTbF</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rahimnathwani</author><text>If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B&#x27;s pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn&#x27;t want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented.<p>&quot;What am I missing?&quot;<p>Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on the page. The auction happens quickly, but it adds latency. Adding a reverse proxy would add further latency, and would remove the ability for ad networks to properly target ads (e.g. using cookies) and account for impressions.</text></item><item><author>allanbreyes</author><text>I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I&#x27;m surprised why sites don&#x27;t just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?</text></item><item><author>doctorless</author><text>I&#x27;m actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren&#x27;t offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it&#x27;s pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especially if there was an auxiliary script you could load from your own domain. Not that I&#x27;m endorsing the idea, it&#x27;s just that it seems like an obvious solution to the usage of ad blockers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kakarot</author><text>Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim?<p>Thanks!</text></comment> |
30,306,648 | 30,306,480 | 1 | 2 | 30,305,770 | train | <story><title>Privacy preserving attribution for advertising</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgift</author><text>I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it&#x27;s hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies.<p>In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist?<p>If the answer is no, that&#x27;s it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow. This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all.<p>If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There&#x27;s no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. So, if a proposal isn&#x27;t somehow either accepted by Facebook or forced on them it is already dead. I don&#x27;t think Mozilla has the market power for the second variant, so only the first one is possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap. So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ProAm</author><text>&gt; Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist?<p>It&#x27;s not the advertising, is the intrusive, extensive, cross-site, cross-industry, non-opt-out, forever tracking that is the problem.<p>We&#x27;ve normalized that the two go hand in hand and are ok.</text></comment> | <story><title>Privacy preserving attribution for advertising</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgift</author><text>I am trying my best to not knee-jerk here, even though it&#x27;s hard to see Mozilla working with Facebook of all companies.<p>In the end it seems to come down to one question everyone has to answer for themselves: Do you agree that advertising on the Internet should exist?<p>If the answer is no, that&#x27;s it. This is a bad thing. Mozilla should instead built in an ad blocker today rather than tomorrow. This probably also means people have to be willing to accept that they have to pay for more things. Someone has to foot the bill after all.<p>If the answer is yes, it gets more complicated. Facebook is - in my mind - a bad actor. There&#x27;s no way around it. But Facebook is also one of the biggest platforms for advertising in the world. So, if a proposal isn&#x27;t somehow either accepted by Facebook or forced on them it is already dead. I don&#x27;t think Mozilla has the market power for the second variant, so only the first one is possible for them. We then want to make ads as good citizens of the internet as possible: No tracking of users, no executing scripts (which then cryptomine ..) and so on. None of that crap. So, a protocol which is a) accepted by Facebook and b) leads to these outcomes could be a good idea. In theory. In practice people with appropriate knowledge will have to check the protocol, suggest ways to make it better etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kvark</author><text>I don&#x27;t think Mozilla is in the right to decide whether advertising should exist or not. Firefox provides a fair choice - you can install adblocking solutions and mess with your content view of the web as much as necessary. But there is still value in improving the ethics of advertising that other people see.</text></comment> |
4,782,750 | 4,778,407 | 1 | 2 | 4,777,907 | train | <story><title>Dictionary app auto-posts piracy accusations on users’ Twitter accounts</title><url>http://www.pocketables.com/2012/11/enfour-inc-screws-up-big-time-makes-dictionary-app-auto-post-false-accusations-on-users-twitter-accounts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gilgoomesh</author><text>If you're an iOS app developer...<p>The correct way to check if your app has been pirated requires two steps:<p>1) You must be running on a jailbroken system. Check this by trying to read from outside the sandbox.<p>2) Check if your app's signature is invalid. Checking this is fairly involved. Look around for code.<p>If <i>either</i> of these two are false, then you've <i>not</i> been pirated (point (2) will be true when your app is checked by Apple but point (1) will be false).<p>For Mac App Store apps, only point (2) is required.<p>The author of the app in the article has only checked point (1) (and additionally checked an <i>irrelevant</i> point by checking for Installous).<p>Incidentally, the preferred action if you've detected a pirate situation is to exit(173).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DHowett</author><text>You can normally read from outside the sandbox on iOS: there are data in /usr/lib and /usr/share that are important to libraries shipped as part of the dyld cache (also incidentally found outside of the app container.)<p>The main question is: what exactly lays outside the sandbox? A good thing to search for could be Cydia, but there are alternative package managers. MobileSubstrate isn't a sure bet either, but I suppose it's a far cry safer than Cydia. An additional method could be trying to map a page you can both write to and execute, which should fail unless specific kernel patches indicative of a jailbreak have been applied (or you're a webview with Nitro enabled.)<p>The best method, however, is to <i>not care</i>, because if you do it's for the sake of either tracking/analytics or screwing over your users.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dictionary app auto-posts piracy accusations on users’ Twitter accounts</title><url>http://www.pocketables.com/2012/11/enfour-inc-screws-up-big-time-makes-dictionary-app-auto-post-false-accusations-on-users-twitter-accounts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gilgoomesh</author><text>If you're an iOS app developer...<p>The correct way to check if your app has been pirated requires two steps:<p>1) You must be running on a jailbroken system. Check this by trying to read from outside the sandbox.<p>2) Check if your app's signature is invalid. Checking this is fairly involved. Look around for code.<p>If <i>either</i> of these two are false, then you've <i>not</i> been pirated (point (2) will be true when your app is checked by Apple but point (1) will be false).<p>For Mac App Store apps, only point (2) is required.<p>The author of the app in the article has only checked point (1) (and additionally checked an <i>irrelevant</i> point by checking for Installous).<p>Incidentally, the preferred action if you've detected a pirate situation is to exit(173).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikecane</author><text>Does checking for those things slow down the load time of the app? Wouldn't that punish paid users?</text></comment> |
28,936,763 | 28,935,652 | 1 | 3 | 28,934,715 | train | <story><title>Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair</title><url>https://americasfuture.org/eliminating-gifted-programs-wont-make-education-fair/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thegrimmest</author><text>Are you saying you agree? It seems bordering on absurd to me. Why can&#x27;t it be true that not every child has gifts? Isn&#x27;t the point of being exceptional having qualities that set you apart from most people? Are there no exceptional children? Adults?<p>In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought the passages below were key. Instead of the constant &quot;Tall Poppy Syndrome&quot; that many education &quot;reformers&quot; engage in, would be better to improve these programs for a wider array of students:<p>&gt; If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.<p>&gt; For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asoneth</author><text>&gt; I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased<p>While there are some concerns that have been raised about bias within the tests themselves[1], in my experience the concern about testing among actual educators is usually that the tests are pitched as objectively &quot;measuring intelligence&quot; when in reality they measure a confluence of factors.<p>Intelligence is certainly a major factor but external factors such as having a stable home with quiet times that are conducive to studying, good nutrition, good role models, and good teachers play a major role as well.<p>There have been controversial attempts to control for those factors, for example by including information about the test takers socioeconomic status, but for the most part &quot;intelligence tests&quot; do not attempt to control for external variables. So it&#x27;s impossible to tell how much of the delta in scores between two individuals reflects actual differences in their intelligence compared to differences in their environment and starting conditions.<p>The risk of tracking students solely based on such tests is that you end up compounding the existing penalties of having a bad environment.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think testing has an important role to play, but we should be honest and stop pretending that these are &quot;intelligence tests&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Race_and_intelligence#Test_bias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Race_and_intelligence#Test_bia...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Eliminating gifted programs won’t make education fair</title><url>https://americasfuture.org/eliminating-gifted-programs-wont-make-education-fair/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thegrimmest</author><text>Are you saying you agree? It seems bordering on absurd to me. Why can&#x27;t it be true that not every child has gifts? Isn&#x27;t the point of being exceptional having qualities that set you apart from most people? Are there no exceptional children? Adults?<p>In regards to identifying, I fail to see how IQ tests are racially biased, even if the results are not perfectly representative of racial diversity. Do you?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I thought the passages below were key. Instead of the constant &quot;Tall Poppy Syndrome&quot; that many education &quot;reformers&quot; engage in, would be better to improve these programs for a wider array of students:<p>&gt; If advocates of equity are bothered by anything with “gifted and talented programs,” it should be their names. The program’s names might insinuate not every child has gifts; instead, they should be rebranded as “accelerated learning programs” or another name that avoids implying that only certain children are gifted. In addition, equity-minded education reformers could also identify problems within the gifted programs instead of canceling them altogether.<p>&gt; For example, gifted programs notoriously have a problem identifying the students who are fit for their programs, usually resulting in racial disparities. Reformers could advocate for solutions that better identify which children who are advanced by changing current admittance approaches, considering that students are admitted mainly based on standardized testing performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>There is a great, and true, line from a very old Simpson&#x27;s episode [1] about how early childhood &quot;sorting&quot; can have an outsized impact on someone&#x27;s life. And there is plenty of other evidence (e.g. see Malcolm Gladwell&#x27;s Outliers) that a lot of arbitrary differences are just magnified by this early childhood sorting.<p>The argument against the name &quot;gifted and talented&quot; isn&#x27;t that some children have gifts that are different from others, it&#x27;s that the sole arbiter of whether a child is &quot;gifted&quot;, as if it were something anointed by Jesus, is not that they did well on some standardized test in kindergarten.<p>I definitely agree with the author, something like &quot;accelerated learning&quot; is a much better name<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;O2f_MlZtjuY?t=9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;O2f_MlZtjuY?t=9</a></text></comment> |
6,115,072 | 6,115,074 | 1 | 2 | 6,114,698 | train | <story><title>My Doctor's Office Asked me to Lie (2011)</title><url>http://stallman.org/articles/asked_to_lie.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shmageggy</author><text>So are you saying that in order to comply, the office needs to furnish every patient with a 3000 page binder of privacy practices and that systematic failure to do so should mean over a million dollars in fines? I really hope I&#x27;m misunderstanding something because this seems insane.</text></item><item><author>haldujai</author><text>IANAL but I&#x27;m responsible for HIPAA compliance in my startup:<p>Assuming this is a standard private practice, this office has several violations of 45 CFR §164.520(a)(b)(c), assuming that he was also not provided this privacy statement within 30 days with a reason for why it was not provided on the first visit.<p>This makes them liable for $50,000 in fines per failure to a max of $1.5 mm (this would be a clear cut case of reckless indifference.) The DHHS OCR is always looking for some head to serve on a platter to justify themselves as well.<p>His amendment to the form is damning evidence and that receptionist should be fired, there is no excuse for basic HIPAA noncompliance in 2011 (8 years after the fact).<p>Edit: What some people don&#x27;t seem to understand is that signing the privacy practices notice (the form in question here) <i>does not</i> mean you agree to the terms and conditions outlined. You only sign that you have <i>received</i> them. Additionally, whether you sign the form or not it applies to you, and whatever that form states HIPAA clearly outlines what powers the covered entity (the doctor in this case) has over your information.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text>The only reason to believe the privacy statement is 3,000 pages long is because the receptionist said it was, and given the rest of her statements there&#x27;s little reason to believe she knew what she was talking about. She may have just made up a large number to try and scare him off from inquiring further.<p>I&#x27;ve been given privacy statements from my doctors&#x27; offices in the past, and they&#x27;ve never been more than a couple of pages.</text></comment> | <story><title>My Doctor's Office Asked me to Lie (2011)</title><url>http://stallman.org/articles/asked_to_lie.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shmageggy</author><text>So are you saying that in order to comply, the office needs to furnish every patient with a 3000 page binder of privacy practices and that systematic failure to do so should mean over a million dollars in fines? I really hope I&#x27;m misunderstanding something because this seems insane.</text></item><item><author>haldujai</author><text>IANAL but I&#x27;m responsible for HIPAA compliance in my startup:<p>Assuming this is a standard private practice, this office has several violations of 45 CFR §164.520(a)(b)(c), assuming that he was also not provided this privacy statement within 30 days with a reason for why it was not provided on the first visit.<p>This makes them liable for $50,000 in fines per failure to a max of $1.5 mm (this would be a clear cut case of reckless indifference.) The DHHS OCR is always looking for some head to serve on a platter to justify themselves as well.<p>His amendment to the form is damning evidence and that receptionist should be fired, there is no excuse for basic HIPAA noncompliance in 2011 (8 years after the fact).<p>Edit: What some people don&#x27;t seem to understand is that signing the privacy practices notice (the form in question here) <i>does not</i> mean you agree to the terms and conditions outlined. You only sign that you have <i>received</i> them. Additionally, whether you sign the form or not it applies to you, and whatever that form states HIPAA clearly outlines what powers the covered entity (the doctor in this case) has over your information.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haldujai</author><text>Notices of privacy practices for practices are a boilerplate form that shouldn&#x27;t be more than 10 pages long. Whatever they write is meaningless if it gives them more power than the law does, most places just use the AMA or state agency recommended forms.<p>The law actually states what needs&#x2F;should be written.<p>Here is an example [doc file]: www.ama-assn.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;doc&#x2F;hipaa&#x2F;privacy-practices.doc<p>That said, places with their own websites need only upload the form and tell patients it is able to be viewed at at whatever link and have the binder accessible in the office for viewing.<p>Uploading to dropbox&#x2F;filesharing without a website is not a valid option.</text></comment> |
1,053,612 | 1,053,559 | 1 | 2 | 1,053,420 | train | <story><title>JQuery 1.4 released</title><url>http://jquery14.com/day-01/jquery-14</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mark_h</author><text>They're using the Google Closure compiler as their minifier now.<p>Resig in this presentation (warning: video autoplay), in response to the last question, said that while it's slick if you simply throw jquery into it you'll just get broken javascript out: <a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=resig-testing" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=resig-tes...</a>
I wonder what has changed?<p>(Maybe just not running it in advanced mode; at any rate, they're reporting a 13% decrease in file size: <a href="http://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/3fd62eae9df3159fc238a515bb748140a942313d" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/jquery/jquery/commit/3fd62eae9df3159fc238a...</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>JQuery 1.4 released</title><url>http://jquery14.com/day-01/jquery-14</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>defen</author><text>The performance boost is great but I think the thing I'm most excited about is "All Events Can Be Live Events". Thanks jQuery team!</text></comment> |
9,408,025 | 9,407,472 | 1 | 2 | 9,406,465 | train | <story><title>Lessons Learned in Software Development</title><url>http://henrikwarne.com/2015/04/16/lessons-learned-in-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bpyne</author><text>All the advice is well-worth reading. Number 16 (&quot;Rubber Ducking&quot;) is my particular favorite. It kills my ego every time, but the thought process involved in explaining the goal, attempted solution, and the problem seems to make the problem clearer. Explaining it in writing does not seem to have the same effect for me. It has to be audible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons Learned in Software Development</title><url>http://henrikwarne.com/2015/04/16/lessons-learned-in-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paco3346</author><text>I wish I would have had something like this when I first started developing. 90% of what&#x27;s in here are things I learned over time (and some at great cost).<p>One I would add is to not throw a fellow dev under the bus when talking with a user. Give praise to specific team members but take the hits as a team. It helps build comradery when you see a colleague take the hit for you and builds a certain trust amongst the team knowing that others have your back.</text></comment> |
3,923,896 | 3,923,505 | 1 | 3 | 3,923,346 | train | <story><title>Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income</title><url>http://www.patrick-wied.at/blog/let-the-adventurous-journey-begin-passive-income</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>webwright</author><text>To OP: Your passive income ideas are pretty grandiose. Those are legit startup ideas. For passive income think: solve the smallest problem possible. Simple SaaS software. A lead-gen blog (I know a guy who puts up reviews of expensive niche products and gets hundreds per month in amazon affiliate fees). Simple mobile apps? An ebook with information that people need? Find something that is ALREADY SELLING and do it better/different.<p>Also, think cheap marketing. SEO? Or is there a product that you could sell whose use would be inherently social? Passive income is barely a software problem-- you shouldn't be building anything super-complex. It's more a marketing problem. How do you talk about it? How do you find customers? If you can solve THAT on paper before you write a line of code, you're way ahead of most people who take a shot at this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let the adventurous journey begin: Passive Income</title><url>http://www.patrick-wied.at/blog/let-the-adventurous-journey-begin-passive-income</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cheald</author><text>I've done a few passive income projects, and by far the most lucrative have been:<p>a) Self-serve subscription services (SaaS/hosting platforms have a high buy-in, but are very low maintenance once they're revved)<p>b) Ad-supported projects targeted at loyal niche markets. (Building enough audience for any ad-supported project is hard enough already; if you can build a tool that hooks into an existing community, go for it!)</text></comment> |
19,821,875 | 19,820,287 | 1 | 3 | 19,819,778 | train | <story><title>You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs</title><url>http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordability/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robertnealan</author><text>Several years ago I asked my mom why she lived so far from where she worked (Vallejo, CA to San Ramon, CA), and she claimed they were saving money on cheaper rent. Five minutes of napkin paper math later I pointed her and her partner were spending roughly $700&#x2F;month commuting in gas, bridge toll, and basic wear+tear on their vehicles (based on ~$0.45&#x2F;mile).<p>It seems like most people don&#x27;t account for vehicle costs when accounting for cost of living. Why I&#x27;m not positive, though it seems to just be the general abstractness of the cost spread out over time, and the assumption in America that you&#x27;re going to drive everywhere anyway so it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>Even worse we see this with numerous Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;delivery &quot;contractors&quot; who are putting endless miles on their personal vehicles without accounting for the inevitable cost of replacing them.</text></comment> | <story><title>You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs</title><url>http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordability/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dsfyu404ed</author><text>The fact that this article does not break down the various transportation costs sets off massive red flags.<p>The $3k&#x2F;yr number mentioned for the cost of transportation via car in Houston is on the same order as an MBTA rail pass in the Boston area. Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.<p>Yes of course transit is not free but that&#x27;s true whether regardless of your mode of transit. The premise is solid. The analysis is lacking.</text></comment> |
36,953,512 | 36,953,372 | 1 | 2 | 36,951,140 | train | <story><title>Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16802</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djtango</author><text>We also don&#x27;t have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs.<p>Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented &quot;magic tricks&quot; (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.)<p>I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in one exact lab because reasons.<p>Turns out there&#x27;s just as much art as there is science in experimentation...</text></item><item><author>dmvdoug</author><text>Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s <i>In the Pipeline</i> blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something. And yes, eventually you figure that out and stop jiggling your foot but two years have passed.</text></item><item><author>lucubratory</author><text>Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can&#x27;t even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn&#x27;t this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they&#x27;d apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don&#x27;t believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.<p>Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn&#x27;t expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.<p>I don&#x27;t know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.<p>As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it&#x27;s not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers&#x2F;&quot;makers&quot; attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>techdragon</author><text>The simple truth is we don’t have a culture of replication because no one is paying and no one is paying because no one is demanding it as part of the incentive system that the money is part of…<p>If a prerequisite of publication in a top tier journal was someone having replicated the work… anyone at all… then the quality of write up would improve dramatically because all the stuff that never gets written up would be written up so that the second lab costs them less money to do the replication work, so the second lab doesn’t spent a month failing because they didn’t bake the powder in a vacuum for a week before performing the entire synthesis under dry nitrogen purge when the methodology just said the powder had been dried and the synthesis was performed at ambient pressure in a zero humidity atmosphere…</text></comment> | <story><title>Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16802</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djtango</author><text>We also don&#x27;t have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs.<p>Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented &quot;magic tricks&quot; (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.)<p>I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in one exact lab because reasons.<p>Turns out there&#x27;s just as much art as there is science in experimentation...</text></item><item><author>dmvdoug</author><text>Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s <i>In the Pipeline</i> blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something. And yes, eventually you figure that out and stop jiggling your foot but two years have passed.</text></item><item><author>lucubratory</author><text>Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can&#x27;t even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn&#x27;t this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they&#x27;d apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don&#x27;t believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.<p>Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn&#x27;t expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.<p>I don&#x27;t know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.<p>As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it&#x27;s not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers&#x2F;&quot;makers&quot; attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>The problem IMHO is funding related. Often enough the original lab&#x27;s grant is <i>barely</i> enough to account for the research and a shoddily put together paper, the rest is filled with a crapload of un(der)paid&#x2F;&quot;voluntold&quot; labour.<p>It&#x27;s rare for researchers to get the budget to replicate someone else&#x27;s work - this case might be one of the few exceptions given that everyone and their dog want to be the first one to show the world a successful replication. Hell, there are Youtube and Tiktok streamers on the task as well, that way you know just how nuts everyone is going.</text></comment> |
29,906,757 | 29,906,844 | 1 | 3 | 29,906,496 | train | <story><title>US consumer prices soared 7% in past year, most since 1982</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/consumer-prices-inflation-c1bfd93ed1719cf0135420f4fd0270f9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hartator</author><text>&gt; A significant portion of consumer inflation is still being driven by pandemic-driven mismatches between demand and supply.<p>Or maybe printing 40% more dollars is the main driver here? This feels like a very dishonest take.</text></comment> | <story><title>US consumer prices soared 7% in past year, most since 1982</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/consumer-prices-inflation-c1bfd93ed1719cf0135420f4fd0270f9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonathan-adly</author><text>I feel a lot of sympathy to kids graduating in this decade in most careers. Tons of debt, ever increasing asset prices, and terrible job market with stagnating wages.<p>If you don&#x27;t have rich parents, you are in a terrible spot.</text></comment> |
20,535,350 | 20,534,426 | 1 | 2 | 20,533,026 | train | <story><title>Users hate change</title><url>https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c245e57dc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>flohofwoe</author><text>My pet theory is that every software product has a &quot;peak version&quot;. Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to &#x27;keep the team busy&#x27;.<p>Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the &quot;maintenance surface&quot; becomes bigger and bigger.<p>What <i>should</i> happen of course is that the product&#x27;s feature set is frozen at the &quot;peak version&quot;, and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that&#x27;s a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and &quot;software as a service&quot; which they like so much. From the customer&#x27;s point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don&#x27;t add any value, right?<p>Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the &#x27;average customer&#x27; (which doesn&#x27;t exist btw) isn&#x27;t pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yoz-y</author><text>Subscription model is actually way better if you don&#x27;t want to end up with feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever fix bugs and improve performance.<p>If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.</text></comment> | <story><title>Users hate change</title><url>https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c245e57dc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>flohofwoe</author><text>My pet theory is that every software product has a &quot;peak version&quot;. Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to &#x27;keep the team busy&#x27;.<p>Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the &quot;maintenance surface&quot; becomes bigger and bigger.<p>What <i>should</i> happen of course is that the product&#x27;s feature set is frozen at the &quot;peak version&quot;, and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that&#x27;s a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and &quot;software as a service&quot; which they like so much. From the customer&#x27;s point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don&#x27;t add any value, right?<p>Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the &#x27;average customer&#x27; (which doesn&#x27;t exist btw) isn&#x27;t pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrunkel</author><text>The problem with your theory is that &quot;peak version&quot; is different for every user of the software.</text></comment> |
4,009,963 | 4,009,723 | 1 | 2 | 4,009,507 | train | <story><title>Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD</title><url>http://www.buildtheenterprise.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breckinloggins</author><text>There's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound.<p>A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!<p>If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.<p>But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.<p>How. Incredibly. Disappointing.<p>I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.<p>I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.<p>In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").<p>Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?<p>So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>As a huge fan of space I agree we need progress, but we can achieve that by no longer 'visiting' space and instead 'moving' there.<p>I was talking with a JPL engineer about SpaceX and he said something which really knocked me for a loop. He said "We don't live in space, we camp there." And by example he suggested what if there was no food, fuel, or running water in Barstow California. Everyone would have to carry what they expected to use from Los Angeles, stay for a while and then go back to Los Angeles to reload with supplies. Now imagine there is a toll gate on I15 outside San Bernadino that charges you $100M to use the road between LA and Barstow. Now what kind of town would Barstow be? A ghost town.<p>Space, and low earth orbit in particular, is the same way. We don't have any infrastructure up there. Just a single campsite. Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit. If you consider just that one problem, keeping fuel around. You see how far we are from living in space vs just visiting.<p>At $54M/pop SpaceX will make somethings a lot more accessible in space. Putting some infrastructure in space like a gas station and a space tug, will go a lot further.</text></comment> | <story><title>Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD</title><url>http://www.buildtheenterprise.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breckinloggins</author><text>There's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound.<p>A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!<p>If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.<p>But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.<p>How. Incredibly. Disappointing.<p>I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.<p>I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.<p>In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").<p>Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?<p>So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text><i>&#62; A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s</i><p>So the solution is to build a ship based on a design from 1965?</text></comment> |
6,463,656 | 6,462,153 | 1 | 2 | 6,461,893 | train | <story><title>We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers-fiction.html?smid=tw-nytmag&_r=1&</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>psn</author><text> I&#x27;m a employee of a large tech company that&#x27;s being parodied here, and I found this really disconcerting. The scenes with the boss and HR are completely different to my experience. No one cares what I do at the weekend. No one cares about my social media presence. No one cares if I use the company&#x27;s products or not.<p>A few clear examples: one of my grandparents passed away, and the company was as supportive as possible. I asked if I could work from my parents house to be with my grandmother, and I got back &quot;You can work from another country for an open ended period. If you aren&#x27;t getting anything done, let me know, and we&#x27;ll call it compassionate leave&quot;. There are people who go out socializing, but I&#x27;ve never felt pressured to go along. There are people who work long hours or the weekend, but again, I&#x27;ve never felt pressured to do that either.<p>Edit: When the company was newer, the employees worked very long hours and weekends. They worked, mind you. Everyone I know from that era is remarkably well off. The vast majority of the early employees have retired to spend more time with their wealth. I&#x27;m much more concerned, as a person, about either the big companies that do massive crunches (see ea spouse) or the startups that fails despite everyone working really hard, the employees don&#x27;t get the 100 million dollar payday.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers-fiction.html?smid=tw-nytmag&_r=1&</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>creamyhorror</author><text>Perfect. A much friendlier, much more social, much more <i>corporate</i> 1984.<p>(Another heartbreaking work of staggering genius?)<p>edit: Yes, it&#x27;s pretty transparently a reference to Google. Zings sound more like tweets, though. And monitoring everything has turned out to be primarily the NSA&#x27;s job, but I guess he finished the book before that scandal came to real light.</text></comment> |
8,755,830 | 8,755,714 | 1 | 3 | 8,755,087 | train | <story><title>Confidentiality at FastMail</title><url>http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/security-confidentiality/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sgentle</author><text>In security it doesn&#x27;t make sense to ask &quot;is it compromised?&quot; but rather &quot;can it be compromised?&quot;<p>For that reason, I don&#x27;t think &quot;we don’t participate in blanket surveillance&quot; and equivalent statements are even worth the pixels they take up on your screen. It may as well say &quot;our security is endorsed by His Holiness The Dalai Lama&quot;<p>The Australian government has the power under the recently passed National Security Legislation Amendment [0] to issue a secret warrant compelling access to any number of computers or networks for anything that will &quot;assist&quot; in &quot;obtaining intelligence related to security&quot;. The warrant allows surveillance, as well as &quot;addition, deletion or alteration of data&quot;. Disclosing that warrant&#x27;s existence is punishable by up to 10 years in jail. This is without even considering the reciprocal spying possibilities of the Five Eyes network.<p>There is no equivalent in Australia to the US fourth amendment. Even illegally gathered evidence can be used in a trial depending on the discretion of the judge. [1]<p>If you think &quot;we don&#x27;t participate in blanket surveillance&quot; is an acceptable response to that legal reality, I ask you to consider what you would think of a company that, when asked if they store passwords in cleartext, respond &quot;yes, but we don&#x27;t look at them.&quot;<p>[0] <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/s969_first-senate/toc_pdf/1417820.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;parlinfo.aph.gov.au&#x2F;parlInfo&#x2F;download&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;bil...</a>
[1] <a href="http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1245&amp;context=facpubs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholarship.law.wm.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=12...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Confidentiality at FastMail</title><url>http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/security-confidentiality/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moe</author><text><i>We have spelled out in our privacy policy and public communications that we don’t participate in blanket surveillance. We are an Australian company, and to participate in such programs would be in violation of Australian law.</i><p>Are you really this naive?<p>Australia is a member of Five Eyes[1]. Your local laws don&#x27;t apply to intelligence agencies.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_Eyes</a></text></comment> |
8,378,256 | 8,378,022 | 1 | 2 | 8,377,591 | train | <story><title>Twitter image bots stuck in an automated loop</title><url>https://twitter.com/a_quilt_bot/status/514483044724776960</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wayspurrchen</author><text>Whoa! Didn&#x27;t expect to see this here! One of the bots, @pixelsorter, is my bot which you can read more about here: <a href="http://wayspurrchen.com/pixelsorter/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wayspurrchen.com&#x2F;pixelsorter&#x2F;</a><p>Some background information: This first got started because I tweeted an image at @pixelsorter and @badpng (see the thread here: <a href="https://twitter.com/wayspurrchen/status/514246071464521728/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;wayspurrchen&#x2F;status&#x2F;514246071464521728&#x2F;p...</a>, I wrote a blog post here: <a href="http://wayspurrchen.com/blog/2014/09/the-eternal-robot-love-story-of-badpng-and-pixelsorter/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wayspurrchen.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-eternal-robot-love-...</a>), which spawned a really interesting infinite loop. Eventually, the other bot&#x27;s creator reset her bot and that infinite loop ended, but people caught wind of it and have been making my bot enter infinite loops with other image bots ever since.<p>I think @a_quilt_bot and @pixelsorter are a particularly interesting pairing though, because @a_quilt_bot can generate new sources of imagery that my bot can further resort, resulting in a neverending stream of new, automatically generated imagery. My bot is also rate-limited by the Twitter API (350 API calls per hour), so there&#x27;s no technical reason my bot and another rate-limited bot couldn&#x27;t keep communicating forever. I&#x27;m actually really interested in this idea, and it&#x27;s the center concept behind my next project idea.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter image bots stuck in an automated loop</title><url>https://twitter.com/a_quilt_bot/status/514483044724776960</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dividuum</author><text>Reminds me of the interaction between two automated amazon pricing algorithms: <a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.michaeleisen.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=358</a></text></comment> |
9,164,321 | 9,164,135 | 1 | 3 | 9,163,368 | train | <story><title>Why do we care about Xiaomi?</title><url>http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/1/18/why-do-we-care-about-xiaomi</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jusben1369</author><text>There&#x27;s a really major difference between the Windows&#x2F;PC argument and the Android&#x2F;HW one. It&#x27;s important to remember because without it you end up describing symptoms as causes and not the other way around. Phones are much more of a fashion&#x2F;status&#x2F;tribe statement for better or worse than your desktop or laptop was and you use them way more in social settings than you do a laptop or desktop. So while this is true &quot;PC OEMs mostly failed to differentiate in design&quot; it&#x27;s because that&#x27;s not what drove sales. Corporate PC buyers didn&#x27;t care and personal buyers really didn&#x27;t care enough to spend $200 for better design because no one saw it (or if you did care you went with a Mac).<p>Same goes with &quot;Second, PC OEMs never managed to create any meaningful differentiation in software&quot; - Even if you had it&#x27;s unlikely to have made much of a difference unless it had productivity differences. Because that&#x27;s why you cared - you were (are) on these things for 8 - 10 hours a day trying to make a living vs 1 - 3 hours on your phone for work&#x2F;social blend. We&#x27;re not arguing that Xiamoni&#x27;s suite of software makes the user more productive. It&#x27;s just a &quot;feel good&quot; thing tied up in &quot;Well I can&#x27;t afford Apple but this thing is actually pretty sweet too&quot; and&#x2F;or &quot;I&#x27;m not going with stock Android because that&#x27;s too boring&#x2F;crowdlike&quot; Whatever the exact reasons they&#x27;re emotional not productivity driven.<p>The reason this all matters is that the argument appears to be that Xiamoni may not be Dell - destined to rise and flame out in a commodity hell - but something that&#x27;s neither Apple nor Dell but a third way. However, if the things it&#x27;s differentiating on are different to what PC manufacturers differentiated but only because of unique aspects to this vertical then they&#x27;re different barbarians but nevertheless still just barbarians.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why do we care about Xiaomi?</title><url>http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/1/18/why-do-we-care-about-xiaomi</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nemik</author><text>&quot;There&#x27;s a widespread belief that an Android device without Google services (really, this means Maps and the app store) is unsaleable outside China (I&#x27;m not entirely sure about this, as I wrote here)&quot;<p>Like you said in that link, Amazon has tried this and I&#x27;m not seeing it really working out all that well for them. I think the only reason phones without Google Services work in China is because the entire country blocks them and gives their domestics an artificial advantage. Amazon might be there too but only because they&#x27;re too small to even worry about. Not so with Google and its Android services.</text></comment> |
19,187,630 | 19,187,672 | 1 | 2 | 19,186,795 | train | <story><title>WireGuard for MacOS</title><url>https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-February/003853.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KenanSulayman</author><text>I had been using wireguard-go (macports) on the Mac for a few months now and I&#x27;m simply amazed by the performance. Also using it on my phone. Weirdly enough when it&#x27;s on my connection is more stable, probably because it bypasses the traffic shaping by my ISP through its UDP use.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find any information on whether or not this uses wireguard-go internally? Or maybe even the Rust implementation?<p>p.s. the snow on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-for-macos-screenshots-february-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-for-macos-screenshots-febru...</a> is pretty hilarious</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guessmyname</author><text>It was a surprise because I’ve been using the same effect in my personal website [1] for several years <i>(since 2003)</i>, as an Easter Egg during Christmas season. I got the script from this website <i>(in case anyone is interested)</i> [2]. I also have an Easter Egg for Valentine’s Day [2] which I’m always proud to show to my partner.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cixtor.com&#x2F;?christmas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cixtor.com&#x2F;?christmas</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;schillmania.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;snowstorm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;schillmania.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;snowstorm&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cixtor.com&#x2F;?valentine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cixtor.com&#x2F;?valentine</a></text></comment> | <story><title>WireGuard for MacOS</title><url>https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-February/003853.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KenanSulayman</author><text>I had been using wireguard-go (macports) on the Mac for a few months now and I&#x27;m simply amazed by the performance. Also using it on my phone. Weirdly enough when it&#x27;s on my connection is more stable, probably because it bypasses the traffic shaping by my ISP through its UDP use.<p>I couldn&#x27;t find any information on whether or not this uses wireguard-go internally? Or maybe even the Rust implementation?<p>p.s. the snow on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-for-macos-screenshots-february-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-for-macos-screenshots-febru...</a> is pretty hilarious</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>js2</author><text>Apparently it&#x27;s using wireguard-go as on iOS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-ios&#x2F;tree&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.zx2c4.com&#x2F;wireguard-ios&#x2F;tree&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
24,514,002 | 24,510,244 | 1 | 2 | 24,503,153 | train | <story><title>How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? (1996) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.gwern.net/docs/math/1996-hoare.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hcarvalhoalves</author><text>It didn&#x27;t - but most errors are simply tolerated because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale, very few applications are on a regulated field or have a well-defined quality standard to meet, and unreliable software tends to at least fail consistently, so it&#x27;s still a win to diagnose and fix processes compared to humans making creative mistakes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twblalock</author><text>The other major factor is fault tolerance. Software has bugs, and hardware breaks, but that&#x27;s accepted. Programmers in industry have invested a lot of time in routing around the problems. That buys time for human operators to get paged and fix things.<p>For every major outage that makes the news, there are thousands of smaller problems that users never notice because of CDNs, failover, graceful-ish service degradation, autoscaling and&#x2F;or overprovisioning, and fallbacks. Services can be reliable even when the software and hardware that backs them is not.<p>In other words, &quot;reliability&quot; is a property of the whole system, including the human operators, not just the code. The code can actually be pretty bad, yet the entire system can still be reliable in terms of being available and functional when the users want to use it.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? (1996) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.gwern.net/docs/math/1996-hoare.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hcarvalhoalves</author><text>It didn&#x27;t - but most errors are simply tolerated because imperfect automation still has absurd economy of scale, very few applications are on a regulated field or have a well-defined quality standard to meet, and unreliable software tends to at least fail consistently, so it&#x27;s still a win to diagnose and fix processes compared to humans making creative mistakes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MattGaiser</author><text>It is also replacing humans most of the time as well, who are prone to making all sorts of errors. Worse, humans can make the same error twice even after being corrected.</text></comment> |
35,826,593 | 35,825,127 | 1 | 2 | 35,821,748 | train | <story><title>Show HN: GPT-JSON – Structured and typehinted GPT responses in Python</title><url>https://github.com/piercefreeman/gpt-json</url><text>Hey HN, I&#x27;ve been using GPT a lot lately in some side projects around data generation and benchmarking. During the course of prompt tuning I ended up with a pretty complicated request: the value that I was looking for, an explanation, a criticism, etc. JSON was the most natural output format for this but results would often be broken, have wrong types, or contain missing fields.<p>There&#x27;s been some positive movement in this space, like with jsonformer (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1rgs&#x2F;jsonformer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1rgs&#x2F;jsonformer</a>) the other day. But nothing that was plug and play with GPT.<p>This library consolidates the separate logic that I built across 5 different projects. It lets you prompt the model for how it should return fields, inject variable prompts, handle common formatting errors, then cast to pydantic when you&#x27;re done for typehinting and validation in your IDE. If you&#x27;re able to play around with it, let me know what you think.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazyedgar</author><text>I like the idea, but I think a library that focuses on producing requests and parsing responses according to schema is better. Sending requests to the server is orthogonal to the purpose.<p>What we&#x27;ve found useful in practice in dealing with similar problems:<p>- Use json5 instead of json when parsing. It allows trailing commas.<p>- Don&#x27;t let it respond in true&#x2F;false. Instead, ask it for a short sentence explaining whether it is true or false. Afterwards, use a small embedding model such as sbert to extract true&#x2F;false from the sentence. We&#x27;ve found that GPT is able to reason better in this case, and it is much more robust.<p>- For numerical scores, do a similar thing by asking GPT for a description, then with the small embedding model write a few examples matching your score scale, and for each response use the score of the best matched example. If you let GPT give you scores directly without explanation, 20% of the time it will give you nonsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IanCal</author><text>&gt; Don&#x27;t let it respond in true&#x2F;false. Instead, ask it for a short sentence explaining whether it is true or false. Afterwards, use a small embedding model such as sbert to extract true&#x2F;false from the sentence. We&#x27;ve found that GPT is able to reason better in this case, and it is much more robust.<p>Have you tried just getting it to do both? It reasons far better given some space to think, so I often have it explain things first then give the answer. You&#x27;re effectively then using gpt for the extraction too.<p>This hugely improved the class hierarchies it was creating for me, significantly improving the reuse of classes and using better classes for fields too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: GPT-JSON – Structured and typehinted GPT responses in Python</title><url>https://github.com/piercefreeman/gpt-json</url><text>Hey HN, I&#x27;ve been using GPT a lot lately in some side projects around data generation and benchmarking. During the course of prompt tuning I ended up with a pretty complicated request: the value that I was looking for, an explanation, a criticism, etc. JSON was the most natural output format for this but results would often be broken, have wrong types, or contain missing fields.<p>There&#x27;s been some positive movement in this space, like with jsonformer (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1rgs&#x2F;jsonformer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1rgs&#x2F;jsonformer</a>) the other day. But nothing that was plug and play with GPT.<p>This library consolidates the separate logic that I built across 5 different projects. It lets you prompt the model for how it should return fields, inject variable prompts, handle common formatting errors, then cast to pydantic when you&#x27;re done for typehinting and validation in your IDE. If you&#x27;re able to play around with it, let me know what you think.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazyedgar</author><text>I like the idea, but I think a library that focuses on producing requests and parsing responses according to schema is better. Sending requests to the server is orthogonal to the purpose.<p>What we&#x27;ve found useful in practice in dealing with similar problems:<p>- Use json5 instead of json when parsing. It allows trailing commas.<p>- Don&#x27;t let it respond in true&#x2F;false. Instead, ask it for a short sentence explaining whether it is true or false. Afterwards, use a small embedding model such as sbert to extract true&#x2F;false from the sentence. We&#x27;ve found that GPT is able to reason better in this case, and it is much more robust.<p>- For numerical scores, do a similar thing by asking GPT for a description, then with the small embedding model write a few examples matching your score scale, and for each response use the score of the best matched example. If you let GPT give you scores directly without explanation, 20% of the time it will give you nonsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icyfox</author><text>Thanks for the thoughts! I&#x27;ve deployed a few meta models that act like you&#x27;re describing for second stage predictions, but for fuzzy task definitions have actually seen similar luck with having GPT explicitly explain its rational and then force it to choose a true&#x2F;false rating. My payloads often end up looking like:<p><pre><code> class Payload:
reasoning: str = Field(description=&quot;Why this value might be true or false),
answer: bool
</code></pre>
Since it&#x27;s autoregressive I imagine the schema helps to define the universe of what it&#x27;s supposed to do, then the decoder attention when it&#x27;s filling the `answer` can look back on the reasoning and weigh the sentiment internally. I imagine the accuracy specifics depend a lot on the end deployment here.</text></comment> |
9,718,784 | 9,718,146 | 1 | 3 | 9,716,897 | train | <story><title>Pidgin working on implementation of Facebook Messenger protocol</title><url>https://hg.pidgin.im/soc/2015/jgeboski/facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbhl</author><text>Have you <i>seen</i> XMPP? Chat is so much more than just text now; it&#x27;s &quot;voicemail&quot;, and &quot;photos&quot;, and &quot;videos&quot;, and &quot;stickers&quot;, and &quot;Western Union&quot; and &quot;voice calls&quot; and &quot;video calls&quot; and so much more. Plus, XMPP, is, like, XML.<p>Open protocols and federation are cool and all, but XMPP is not the protocol that will let someone be competitive in this space.<p>(Disclaimer: I work at Google. This is my opinion. I do not work on Hangouts.)</text></item><item><author>jkarneges</author><text>This really ought to be the other way around. If Facebook wants to be accessed by popular client software, then it should expose its service using standard protocols. So Facebook pulls XMPP and the community reacts by rewarding them with a custom integration? How are we supposed to get ahead here?<p>I know Pidgin is a pragmatic project, not a political one, but this doesn&#x27;t sit well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavenlyhash</author><text>Having recently started working on a chat client that was intended to speak first-and-foremost XMPP, I have to agree: XMPP is... it&#x27;s decades out of date and missing a number of absolutely critical, central ideas that are essential to making stuff <i>work</i>.<p>Examples:<p>- unique message IDs? Absent. XEPs kind of provide; but I can&#x27;t tell you which of the three or for relevant ones are the <i>most</i> relevant (AMP IDs from XEP 0079? Stream Management from XEP 0198? Acking from XEP 0184? Something from Carbons or MAM in 0313 or 0280? You know, if you wanted some light reading...).<p>- multi device? Oh. My. God. It&#x27;s bananas. The spec behavior is that whenever a client sends a message, the server is supposed to consider that one the most alive, and then route all future messages <i></i><i>exclusively</i><i></i> to that one. So you send a message on your phone? Yeah, your desktop is just going to <i>silently stop receiving messages</i>.<p>- there&#x27;s a concept of &quot;message carbons&quot; to deal with this. This involves re-sending all your messages back to the server after you receive them, with special instructions to send them back again to your other clients. The amount of redundantly redundant XML involved is eyewatering.<p>Combine that multidevice behavior (messages can get randomly routed anywhere at any time) with the wild-west nature of message delivery acks, and you can see how ridiculously difficult this makes the basic idea of &quot;all clients should see the same picture&quot;.<p>Overall, the XEP process, conceptually, is a great example of open extensibility. The trouble is, so much of this stuff is <i>core</i> to sane message delivery semantics that it really, practically speaking, causes huge problems when it&#x27;s all considered &quot;extensions&quot;. Stuff like message IDs fundamentally shouldn&#x27;t be an extension because it&#x27;s just too critical that all minimum-viable clients agree. You just can&#x27;t build higher level stuff without that. XEPs are great. A community process for extensions should exist. It just needs to exist for extensions, not subsume the total set of realistic minimum viable features.<p>I want an open chat protocol.<p>I thought XMPP might be the one. Then, as the parent comment jibes, I actually looked at it. Tried to write something with it.<p>XMPP is not prepared to be the one, in any sense at all except for legacy support. I have all the respect in the world for all the folks who put effort into trying to make an open chat standard, but... honestly, we need a stronger foundation than this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pidgin working on implementation of Facebook Messenger protocol</title><url>https://hg.pidgin.im/soc/2015/jgeboski/facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbhl</author><text>Have you <i>seen</i> XMPP? Chat is so much more than just text now; it&#x27;s &quot;voicemail&quot;, and &quot;photos&quot;, and &quot;videos&quot;, and &quot;stickers&quot;, and &quot;Western Union&quot; and &quot;voice calls&quot; and &quot;video calls&quot; and so much more. Plus, XMPP, is, like, XML.<p>Open protocols and federation are cool and all, but XMPP is not the protocol that will let someone be competitive in this space.<p>(Disclaimer: I work at Google. This is my opinion. I do not work on Hangouts.)</text></item><item><author>jkarneges</author><text>This really ought to be the other way around. If Facebook wants to be accessed by popular client software, then it should expose its service using standard protocols. So Facebook pulls XMPP and the community reacts by rewarding them with a custom integration? How are we supposed to get ahead here?<p>I know Pidgin is a pragmatic project, not a political one, but this doesn&#x27;t sit well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jkarneges</author><text>Standards tend to run behind the state-of-the-art, but that&#x27;s not a reason to avoid them. For example, the iPhone continues to support SMS for interaction with non-iPhone users, even though the iMessage protocol is richer.<p>If Facebook valued compatibility with as many different products as possible, then they would keep XMPP support. The issue is not about features or XML. Most likely, it&#x27;s about them wanting full control over the end-user experience: &quot;We recommend people access Facebook Messages on the desktop via Facebook.com or Messenger.com.&quot;</text></comment> |
25,206,514 | 25,206,440 | 1 | 2 | 25,204,789 | train | <story><title>Next.js Commerce store, one-click deploy to Netlify</title><url>https://github.com/chec/commercejs-nextjs-demo-store</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZephyrBlu</author><text>8.2 MB initial page load and slow as hell (1-2sec) when trying to navigate between pages. It was so slow I thought the site wasn&#x27;t doing anything.<p>It looks like rendering a new page is blocked until API requests to both &quot;categories&quot; and &quot;products&quot; endpoints are completed, which is terrible. They should be background requests that aren&#x27;t render-blocking. Also, these requests fire _every time_ you click a link.<p>Right now, the user experience is 0&#x2F;10. Would not recommend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thawab</author><text>One of the reasons is that the page is not using next.js 10, which has image optimization built in, for comparison you can check the ecommerce app built in next.js 10 here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.vercel.store&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.vercel.store&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Next.js Commerce store, one-click deploy to Netlify</title><url>https://github.com/chec/commercejs-nextjs-demo-store</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZephyrBlu</author><text>8.2 MB initial page load and slow as hell (1-2sec) when trying to navigate between pages. It was so slow I thought the site wasn&#x27;t doing anything.<p>It looks like rendering a new page is blocked until API requests to both &quot;categories&quot; and &quot;products&quot; endpoints are completed, which is terrible. They should be background requests that aren&#x27;t render-blocking. Also, these requests fire _every time_ you click a link.<p>Right now, the user experience is 0&#x2F;10. Would not recommend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akmittal</author><text>Culprit is large image than necessary as its always the case. Out of 8.4 MB transfered 7.5 are just images. Product images which they are showing in 400x500 viewport has actual size of 2400x3600 (7x). I think NextJS introduces &lt;Image &#x2F;&gt; component im not sure how much that would have been useful.</text></comment> |
10,841,630 | 10,841,717 | 1 | 2 | 10,841,493 | train | <story><title>Shut Up, Paul Graham: The Simplified Version</title><url>http://eev.ee/blog/2016/01/04/shut-up-paul-graham-the-simplified-version/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gregdoesit</author><text>&quot;Perhaps someone with millions of dollars could give more of their money to organizations fighting poverty rather than investing in a premium coffee subscription service.&quot;<p>I do look up to Paul Graham and don&#x27;t like to see him attacked unrightfully. However reading the several responses made me ask as well: why does someone like PG just accept economic inequality, and blog about it, instead of using some of his visiblity to reduce it, however little this might be.<p>I don&#x27;t like economic inequality which is why I do a small bit of my own - loans on Kiva and volunteering every now and then. I&#x27;m just a software engineer and this is what I decided to do based on my belief and my available resources. Bill Gates has more of the means and he is also using some of his resources to reduce poverty, and thus economic inequality. There are many other people who care about it, and do something, and even more who just don&#x27;t care and don&#x27;t do anything about it.<p>We know PG also cares about economic inequality, as this is his second blog post. It only is fair to ask: what is he doing to help reduce it? If he shared some of this, it would make his post much more credible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Shut Up, Paul Graham: The Simplified Version</title><url>http://eev.ee/blog/2016/01/04/shut-up-paul-graham-the-simplified-version/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chiaro</author><text>Kevin Systrom made around $400M before tax when he sold Instagram. After 15% CGT, there&#x27;s $340M left in cash. Whether this is a &quot;fair&quot; reward or not is a political opinion. I&#x27;ll put forward mine here:<p>1. Equity stake is a poor proxy for share of value added, or risk assumed. One man alone did not create $400M worth of value.<p>2. Massive payouts provide incentives, but is $340M such a greater incentive than, say, $100M? If founders knew they could not make more than $100M, they would work just as hard.<p>3. The amount of money gained exceeds both the value created and the amount required to be sufficiently motivating. The remaining $300M, could therefore more equitably be used to save around 60,000 lives with negligible ill effect.<p>This is one case (sorry Kevin) but I think it illustrates how out of whack things can seem.<p>The whole pg post came off as very defensive, almost kind of persecuted. Which is understandable, that&#x27;s the knee-jerk reaction to criticism levelled at one&#x27;s moral standing. Here&#x27;s hoping he&#x27;ll be a little more analytical and take his ego out of the analysis in future.</text></comment> |
20,844,524 | 20,844,491 | 1 | 2 | 20,844,039 | train | <story><title>Telegram moves to protect identity of Hong Kong protesters</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-telegram-exclusive/exclusive-messaging-app-telegram-moves-to-protect-identity-of-hong-kong-protesters-idUSKCN1VK2NI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spondyl</author><text>re: needing an ID for SIM cards, that&#x27;s interesting!<p>Here in New Zealand, I can freely purchase any prepay SIM without ID and use it straight away. Most, if not all dairies carry them too.</text></item><item><author>Mediterraneo10</author><text>&gt; The app automatically matches phone numbers with the user names in the group. Chinese authorities then only need to request the owners of the phone numbers from the local telecom service in order to learn the users’ true identities.<p>This is a flaw common to services that rely on phone numbers as IDs. In many countries, one cannot purchase a SIM card without showing ID (and the seller makes a photocopy of the ID to provide to the authorities). That means that there cannot be true anonymity. Know the phone number, know the person.<p>I am always baffled when people claim that PGP-encrypted e-mail is passé because it leaks metadata, when Signal and Telegram leak metadata too and, furthermore, metadata that can be immediately associated with a specific person in many countries.</text></item><item><author>myself248</author><text>&gt; Protesters believe Chinese security officials have exploited the function by uploading large quantities of phone numbers.<p>&gt; The app automatically matches phone numbers with the user names in the group. Chinese authorities then only need to request the owners of the phone numbers from the local telecom service in order to learn the users’ true identities.<p>&gt; Telegram has detected evidence that Chinese authorities may have uploaded numbers to identify protesters, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation.<p>Signal does&#x2F;did this too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12590979" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12590979</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddeck</author><text>The same is true in Hong Kong, no ID required.<p>You can even purchase cards without ID that also work in Mainland China and aren&#x27;t subject to the great firewall.</text></comment> | <story><title>Telegram moves to protect identity of Hong Kong protesters</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-telegram-exclusive/exclusive-messaging-app-telegram-moves-to-protect-identity-of-hong-kong-protesters-idUSKCN1VK2NI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spondyl</author><text>re: needing an ID for SIM cards, that&#x27;s interesting!<p>Here in New Zealand, I can freely purchase any prepay SIM without ID and use it straight away. Most, if not all dairies carry them too.</text></item><item><author>Mediterraneo10</author><text>&gt; The app automatically matches phone numbers with the user names in the group. Chinese authorities then only need to request the owners of the phone numbers from the local telecom service in order to learn the users’ true identities.<p>This is a flaw common to services that rely on phone numbers as IDs. In many countries, one cannot purchase a SIM card without showing ID (and the seller makes a photocopy of the ID to provide to the authorities). That means that there cannot be true anonymity. Know the phone number, know the person.<p>I am always baffled when people claim that PGP-encrypted e-mail is passé because it leaks metadata, when Signal and Telegram leak metadata too and, furthermore, metadata that can be immediately associated with a specific person in many countries.</text></item><item><author>myself248</author><text>&gt; Protesters believe Chinese security officials have exploited the function by uploading large quantities of phone numbers.<p>&gt; The app automatically matches phone numbers with the user names in the group. Chinese authorities then only need to request the owners of the phone numbers from the local telecom service in order to learn the users’ true identities.<p>&gt; Telegram has detected evidence that Chinese authorities may have uploaded numbers to identify protesters, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation.<p>Signal does&#x2F;did this too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12590979" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12590979</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codedokode</author><text>In Russia one cannot (in theory; actually it&#x27;s possible sometimes). In Japan an ID is required as far as I know.</text></comment> |
7,665,876 | 7,664,139 | 1 | 2 | 7,663,539 | train | <story><title>The 64-core Parallella is alive</title><url>http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-kickstarter/the-64-core-parallella-is-alive/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fragsworth</author><text>They are making a <i>critical</i> mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says &quot;Sold Out&quot; and you can&#x27;t do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they&#x27;re fucking blocking everyone from paying for it.<p>Most of the folks like me who <i>would have bought something today</i> while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>runeks</author><text>&gt; They are making a critical mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch.<p>It&#x27;s possible that we can thank the FTC for this:<p><i>The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) Mail or Telephone Order Rule covers all merchandise ordered by mail, phone, over the internet, or via the fax machine. It stipulates that, if a merchant does not promise a specific delivery time, the merchandise ordered must be delivered within 30 days of the merchant’s receipt of the order (or the date merchandise is charged to your credit card). If the company is unable to ship within the promised time, the company must give the buyer the choice of agreeing to the delay or canceling the order and receiving a prompt refund. However, if you are applying for credit to pay for your purchase and a company doesn&#x27;t promise a shipping time, the company has 50 days to ship after receiving your order.</i><p><a href="http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~scas/wp/wordpress/?page_id=24" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hcs.harvard.edu&#x2F;~scas&#x2F;wp&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;?page_id=24</a><p>In other words, in the United States, it is not legal to take pre-orders, and incur a delay, without offering customers their money back. So 100,000 pre-orders could come in, and in case of a delay -- since they are forced to offer a refund -- they could lose, potentially, all of their funding.<p>Imagine ordering parts for 100,000 boards and having 50% of your customers take their money and run, in case of a delay. That&#x27;s a fairly unmanageable risk.</text></comment> | <story><title>The 64-core Parallella is alive</title><url>http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-kickstarter/the-64-core-parallella-is-alive/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fragsworth</author><text>They are making a <i>critical</i> mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says &quot;Sold Out&quot; and you can&#x27;t do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they&#x27;re fucking blocking everyone from paying for it.<p>Most of the folks like me who <i>would have bought something today</i> while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Consider that the Parallella is not their intended product. The Parallella is a dev platform&#x2F;proof of concept to get people to design the Epiphany into new products.<p>They&#x27;re not likely making money on the Parallella - in fact a lot of the delay for the Kickstarter campaign was due to issues related to cost (e.g. the design is cut to the bone, and they managed to eventually get very good pricing from Xilinx for the Zynq etc.). It looked like they were in trouble for a while until they got a cash injection from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures early this year.<p>As such, while they&#x27;d certainly benefit from more exposure, and getting it in the hands of more people, they also have every reason to manage the process so building boards doesn&#x27;t get in the way of actually evolving their chip designs etc. too.</text></comment> |
13,012,887 | 13,012,486 | 1 | 3 | 13,011,594 | train | <story><title>Debian considers merging /usr</title><url>https://dralnux.com/debian-considers-merging-usr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeena</author><text>So what are the arguments actually?<p>A couple of days ago I was reading some POSIX book from 1991 and there the layout of &#x2F;bin &#x2F;lib &#x2F;shared &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;bin &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;lib &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;shared and so on was much more logical than what we have now which is just weird as far as I can see because I don&#x27;t understand it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hawski</author><text>The best explanation goes from Rob Landley:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.busybox.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;busybox&#x2F;2010-December&#x2F;074114.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.busybox.net&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;busybox&#x2F;2010-December&#x2F;074...</a><p>Some fragment:<p>&gt; When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their
root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the
user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called &#x2F;usr). They
replicated all the OS directories under there (&#x2F;bin, &#x2F;sbin, &#x2F;lib, &#x2F;tmp...) and
wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of
space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on &#x2F;home and relocated all
the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both
disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).<p>&gt; Of course they made rules about &quot;when the system first boots, it has to come up
enough to be able to mount the second disk on &#x2F;usr, so don&#x27;t put things like
the mount command &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin or we&#x27;ll have a chicken and egg problem bringing
the system up.&quot; Fairly straightforward. Also fairly specific to v6 unix of 35
years ago.<p>It was discussed here few times:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3519952" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3519952</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9554134" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9554134</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Debian considers merging /usr</title><url>https://dralnux.com/debian-considers-merging-usr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeena</author><text>So what are the arguments actually?<p>A couple of days ago I was reading some POSIX book from 1991 and there the layout of &#x2F;bin &#x2F;lib &#x2F;shared &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;bin &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;lib &#x2F;usr&#x2F;name&#x2F;shared and so on was much more logical than what we have now which is just weird as far as I can see because I don&#x27;t understand it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavanky</author><text>Here is some discussion from ArchLinux[1] and Fedora[2]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.archlinux.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;arch-dev-public&#x2F;2012-March&#x2F;022625.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.archlinux.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;arch-dev-public&#x2F;2012-M...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoraproject.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Features&#x2F;UsrMove" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fedoraproject.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Features&#x2F;UsrMove</a></text></comment> |
6,203,257 | 6,202,881 | 1 | 3 | 6,201,586 | train | <story><title>Hyperloop</title><url>http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Anechoic</author><text><i>I don&#x27;t believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.</i><p><i>Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, &quot;Oh, do whatever you like with your tube.&quot;?</i><p>These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn&#x27;t magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.<p>Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.<p><i>(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn&#x27;t California design with this goal [350 km&#x2F;h] in mind?)</i><p>There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves &quot;build up&quot; in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a &quot;sonic boom&quot; that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don&#x27;t have a good way to handle this yet.</text></item><item><author>goodcanadian</author><text>I am intrigued, but not overwhelmed. Many of his reasons why his hyperloop is superior to high speed rail are not specific to the hyperloop. For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground. It is common to do this in urban areas, but it is rarely done in rural areas because it is flat out cheaper to put it on the ground. I don&#x27;t believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.<p>Now, I am not trying to defend California&#x27;s HSR, specifically. I agree with Musk that it appears to be very poorly done. However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, &quot;Oh, do whatever you like with your tube.&quot;?<p>Now, in an attempt to end on a positive note, I do like his proposal as a possible next step beyond HSR. Rail can go up to 350km&#x2F;h currently (perhaps more in the future--why wouldn&#x27;t California design with this goal in mind?), but Musk&#x27;s hyperloop is proposed up to ~1000km&#x2F;hr. It is definitely an idea worth exploring, but I think it falls far short as a serious alternative to the current high speed rail plans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yk</author><text>&gt; one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour.<p>Perhaps a stupid question, but the shock wave forms because the trains is moving continuously over the ground? So if you put the entire thing on stilts, there would be one wave formed at t0, x0 when the train reaches pylon 0 and the next wave would be at t1, x1 etc. So the interference pattern for the waves would look vastly different. ( This holds of course only for point like trains... )</text></comment> | <story><title>Hyperloop</title><url>http://www.spacex.com/hyperloop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Anechoic</author><text><i>I don&#x27;t believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.</i><p><i>Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, &quot;Oh, do whatever you like with your tube.&quot;?</i><p>These are extremely important issues that advocates seem to be glossing over. Putting the guideway on pylons doesn&#x27;t magically eliminate land issues, you will still have to deal with visual impacts, along with any number of anticipated and unanticipated problems.<p>Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles, build a 10-20 mile test section someplace and demonstrate that is analysis is sound.<p><i>(perhaps more in the future--why wouldn&#x27;t California design with this goal [350 km&#x2F;h] in mind?)</i><p>There are a variety of reasons, but one important reason I have to deal with is that the speed of shear waves through soil is only on the order of a couple of hundred miles per hour. When a train exceeds the shear wave speed, ground-borne vibration waves &quot;build up&quot; in a manner similar to the shock wave created in air when a plane exceeds the speed of sound, causing a ground-borne vibration equivalent of a &quot;sonic boom&quot; that can cause problems for wayside structures. I believe the French have started to experience this with some of their higher-speed TGV experiments and we don&#x27;t have a good way to handle this yet.</text></item><item><author>goodcanadian</author><text>I am intrigued, but not overwhelmed. Many of his reasons why his hyperloop is superior to high speed rail are not specific to the hyperloop. For example, you can put railway tracks up on pylons, too, with very little impact on the ground. It is common to do this in urban areas, but it is rarely done in rural areas because it is flat out cheaper to put it on the ground. I don&#x27;t believe that an experimental tube is going to be somehow magically cheaper and easier to route and build than train tracks.<p>Now, I am not trying to defend California&#x27;s HSR, specifically. I agree with Musk that it appears to be very poorly done. However, the answer, to my mind, is to do it properly rather than propose a wild experiment with hand-wavy arguments as to why it would be politically easier to do. Do you really think the special interests that are making HSR so difficult and expensive would say, &quot;Oh, do whatever you like with your tube.&quot;?<p>Now, in an attempt to end on a positive note, I do like his proposal as a possible next step beyond HSR. Rail can go up to 350km&#x2F;h currently (perhaps more in the future--why wouldn&#x27;t California design with this goal in mind?), but Musk&#x27;s hyperloop is proposed up to ~1000km&#x2F;hr. It is definitely an idea worth exploring, but I think it falls far short as a serious alternative to the current high speed rail plans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javert</author><text>&gt; Musk should do what the Germans did with the TR0x series of maglev vehicles<p>Musk has already given more than enough for the world and done more than enough. Somebody should do it, but we should not expect him to do it.</text></comment> |
32,641,954 | 32,636,629 | 1 | 2 | 32,634,700 | train | <story><title>Teenager invented a low-cost tool to spot elephant poachers</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-teenager-invented-a-low-cost-tool-to-spot-elephant-poachers-in-real-time-180980522/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>But it was a teenage girl who &quot;solved&quot; something you engineers couldn&#x27;t, so take that!<p>I always found it funny, how journalists manage to take something a kid did, without knowing the specifics, and inflate the story, just because a kid did it.<p>Even if it&#x27;s useless in real world, and the people working on that professionally, could already tell you that...<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s even a direct scam: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc</a></text></item><item><author>Avalaxy</author><text>So it doesn&#x27;t detect poachers, it detects humans. And it requires drones flying non-stop over gigantic masses of land.<p>Edit: having dabbled in this field myself during my studies, I know from research that one of the biggest problems is simply corruption among rangers. It doesn&#x27;t really matter if you can spot a poacher if a whole group of rangers will decide to not do anything about it (because for them the financial incentive of doing nothing can be HUGE). Of course the corruption problem stems from very low incomes and poor living conditions in those countries. If your monthly income is $100, it&#x27;s quite tempting to accept a $10.000 bribe.<p>Edit 2: I worked on this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackthepoacher.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackthepoacher.com&#x2F;</a>. We tried it with cell phone detection.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raman325</author><text>Wow, have a little heart why don&#x27;t you. Sure, this isn&#x27;t going to revolutionize anti-poaching, but it shows two things:<p>1. Teenagers can build cool things too! We need more kids interested in STEM and females are underrepresented, so these &quot;puff&quot; pieces are great inspiration for the next kid who happens to come across it.<p>2. All that was needed for her solution was a cheap FLIR camera connected to an iPhone 6, meaning you don&#x27;t have to be rich&#x2F;VC funded to experiment with hardware solutions.<p>This is Smithsonian Magazine, not the Wall Street Journal. I say bring on more stories like this!</text></comment> | <story><title>Teenager invented a low-cost tool to spot elephant poachers</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-teenager-invented-a-low-cost-tool-to-spot-elephant-poachers-in-real-time-180980522/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>But it was a teenage girl who &quot;solved&quot; something you engineers couldn&#x27;t, so take that!<p>I always found it funny, how journalists manage to take something a kid did, without knowing the specifics, and inflate the story, just because a kid did it.<p>Even if it&#x27;s useless in real world, and the people working on that professionally, could already tell you that...<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s even a direct scam: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=otjvUz7qKXc</a></text></item><item><author>Avalaxy</author><text>So it doesn&#x27;t detect poachers, it detects humans. And it requires drones flying non-stop over gigantic masses of land.<p>Edit: having dabbled in this field myself during my studies, I know from research that one of the biggest problems is simply corruption among rangers. It doesn&#x27;t really matter if you can spot a poacher if a whole group of rangers will decide to not do anything about it (because for them the financial incentive of doing nothing can be HUGE). Of course the corruption problem stems from very low incomes and poor living conditions in those countries. If your monthly income is $100, it&#x27;s quite tempting to accept a $10.000 bribe.<p>Edit 2: I worked on this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackthepoacher.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackthepoacher.com&#x2F;</a>. We tried it with cell phone detection.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kzrdude</author><text>At the same time, I think it&#x27;s ok if news stories are not about only world-changing stuff. It can be about “mundane” stories of “this young person did something” too. We can read the story and give it space on the page, even if someone else is already doing the same thing better (?)</text></comment> |
26,431,711 | 26,431,862 | 1 | 2 | 26,431,507 | train | <story><title>Self-supervised learning: The dark matter of intelligence</title><url>https://ai.facebook.com/blog/self-supervised-learning-the-dark-matter-of-intelligence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>montenegrohugo</author><text>One of the problems we have to be conscious about with self supervised learning is that the already existing problem of transparency and understandability gets worsened by orders of magnitude. If current billion parameter models are opaque, the result of SSL is, or will be, the equivalent of a black hole. How do you understand what the model has learned? Why has it learned that way? What things could have possible gone completely, horribly wrong in its quest to optimize its loss function?<p>This somewhat humorous but also worrying paper comes to mind:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Lu56xVlZ40M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Lu56xVlZ40M</a><p>I think we really need to consider how we can mitigate the risk of raising completely ununderstandable yet scarily capable machines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iujjkfjdkkdkf</author><text>I dont agree with this, either we know what the pretext task was, or we fine tune with labels, but in either case, it&#x27;s no different to analyze than supervised models.<p>I do agree that more parameters and a bigger training set makes the models more opaque (or at least more expensive to understand), but the self supervision is not the reason.</text></comment> | <story><title>Self-supervised learning: The dark matter of intelligence</title><url>https://ai.facebook.com/blog/self-supervised-learning-the-dark-matter-of-intelligence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>montenegrohugo</author><text>One of the problems we have to be conscious about with self supervised learning is that the already existing problem of transparency and understandability gets worsened by orders of magnitude. If current billion parameter models are opaque, the result of SSL is, or will be, the equivalent of a black hole. How do you understand what the model has learned? Why has it learned that way? What things could have possible gone completely, horribly wrong in its quest to optimize its loss function?<p>This somewhat humorous but also worrying paper comes to mind:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Lu56xVlZ40M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Lu56xVlZ40M</a><p>I think we really need to consider how we can mitigate the risk of raising completely ununderstandable yet scarily capable machines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Forge36</author><text>I have this same problem with people. Just because we don&#x27;t understand perfectly doesn&#x27;t mean the output is not useful.</text></comment> |
41,186,834 | 41,185,561 | 1 | 2 | 41,182,847 | train | <story><title>Puppeteer Support for Firefox</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2024/08/puppeteer-support-for-firefox/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jesprenj</author><text>What I very dislike about current browser automation tools is that they all use TCP for connecting the browser with the manager program. This means that, unlike for UNIX domain sockets, filesystem permissions (user&#x2F;group restrictions) cannot be used to protect the TCP socket, which opens the browser automation ecosystem to many attacks where 127.0.0.1 cannot be trusted (untrusted users on a shared host).<p>I have yet to see a browser automation tool that does not use localhost bound TCP sockets. Apart from that, most tools do not offer strong authentication -- a browser is spawned and it listens on a socket and when the controlling application connects to the browser management socket, no authentication is required by default, which creates hidden vulnerabilites.<p>While browser sessions may only be controlled by knowing their random UUIDs, creating new sessions is usually possible to anyone on 127.0.0.1.<p>I don&#x27;t know really, it&#x27;s quite possible I&#x27;m just spreading lies here, please correct me and expand on this topic a bit.</text></comment> | <story><title>Puppeteer Support for Firefox</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2024/08/puppeteer-support-for-firefox/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yoavm</author><text>I know this isn&#x27;t what the WebDriver BiDi protocol is for, but I feel like it&#x27;s 90% there to being a protocol through which you can create browsers, with swappable engines. Gecko has gone a long way since Servo, and it&#x27;s actually quite performant these days. The sad thing is that it&#x27;s so much easier to create a Chromium-based browser than it is to create a Gecko based one. But with APIs for navigating, intercepting requests, reading the console, executing JS - why not just embed the thing, remove all the browser chrome around it, and let us create customized browsers?</text></comment> |
2,687,065 | 2,686,816 | 1 | 3 | 2,686,580 | train | <story><title>Q: Why can I access an out-of-scope C++ var? A: So you rent a hotel room...</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6441218/c-local-variable-can-be-accessed-outside-its-scope/6445794#6445794</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codexon</author><text>I'll probably get downvoted, but I think elaborate real-life analogies like this are more likely to confuse novices than help them.<p>A better explanation in my opinion is to draw a diagram of a stack and showing that returning from a function just decreases a pointer. C++ programs don't scrub the top of the stack once you finish a function because it is a waste of time.<p>If another function was called before the 2nd call to foo(), then the variable on the stack would be overwritten.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olavk</author><text>The analogy is supposed to explain the concept of <i>undefined behavior</i>, not the details of memory management.<p>If you are used to safe languages, the concept of undefined behavior might be confusing. In those languages, an operation is either allowed or not allowed, and if it is allowed it has well-defined behavior. In C a number of operations does not have well-defined results, but is still technically possible to perform, or might be possible depending on circumstances. But you shouldn't use them. The analogy is supposed to explain that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Q: Why can I access an out-of-scope C++ var? A: So you rent a hotel room...</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6441218/c-local-variable-can-be-accessed-outside-its-scope/6445794#6445794</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codexon</author><text>I'll probably get downvoted, but I think elaborate real-life analogies like this are more likely to confuse novices than help them.<p>A better explanation in my opinion is to draw a diagram of a stack and showing that returning from a function just decreases a pointer. C++ programs don't scrub the top of the stack once you finish a function because it is a waste of time.<p>If another function was called before the 2nd call to foo(), then the variable on the stack would be overwritten.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>schleyfox</author><text>While that is more accurate and I think that programmers should understand how computers work, as well as C calling conventions, in this case the analogy helps. People who know what the stack is (other than something that can be overflowed) as well as how functions are implemented would likely never think to ask this question. By the time you give the satisfactory "real" answer, you've written the better part of an intro architecture lecture (at my school, I think we probably had 2 or 3 lectures and a lab to get to this point, with other digressions).<p>The real explanation would also be less complete than the analogy as going into the "construction of a football stadium", etc. would have to consider optimizing compilers, virtual memory, and the other things that could get really mucked up. The analogy is accessible even to people who don't program, rather than to just those who have seen %ebp and %esp.</text></comment> |
33,106,907 | 33,104,235 | 1 | 3 | 33,102,582 | train | <story><title>So you're using a weird language</title><url>https://morepablo.com/2022/09/so-you-re-using-a-weird-language.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxwelljoslyn</author><text>I&#x27;m about to embark on my master&#x27;s thesis, in a domain[1] which could realllllly use the &quot;attach to running process; re-evaluate code and have the system just keep going&quot; aspect of Lisp languages.<p>I know Python best. But I have reached my breaking point with its syntax, and its lack of binding constructs, and lack of symbol datatype, quote, etc. I am intending to use Clojure ... but I have to <i>ship</i> this thing by May 2023 come hell or high water.<p>All else being equal, I will proooobably be able to go further with Python. But I&#x27;m concerned it will hamstring me from doing the crucial feature of &quot;extending the design [ie code] of a game as it runs&quot; since, AFAIK, it&#x27;s difficult to get a Lisp-ish experience of total live reloadability in Python... jurigged[2] and reloading[3] not withstanding.<p>I know some common lisp so I&#x27;m not a total lisp noob. I&#x27;ve learned enough CLJ to be dangerous ... but I&#x27;m worried I&#x27;m backing myself into an endless hole by using a language I&#x27;m not yet master of. Yet, I think the features of the ecosystem (total live reloadability of a CLJ&#x2F;CLJS app! with current state preserved even down to what a user has typed in the HTML UI!) are so tempting...<p>Just venting out loud. comment&#x2F;contact if you have suggestios or are curious about the project; i&#x27;m soon to begin blogging as I develop it.<p>[1] I&#x27;m reinventing the &quot;virtual tabletop.&quot; Current ones are so fucking shallow.
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;breuleux&#x2F;jurigged" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;breuleux&#x2F;jurigged</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;julvo&#x2F;reloading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;julvo&#x2F;reloading</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samatman</author><text>I would urge you to go ahead and use Clojure here.<p>A big part of the value proposition is access to the entire JVM and JavaScript ecosystems. Bindings will be available for the more popular libraries, and if there aren&#x27;t, well, Clojure is designed to make that easy.<p>It might not be pretty, it might not be idiomatic, but you&#x27;re never going to hit a wall where &quot;oh, if only I was using a popular language, I&#x27;d be able to do $obscure-thing&quot;. $obscure-thing is available for the JVM.</text></comment> | <story><title>So you're using a weird language</title><url>https://morepablo.com/2022/09/so-you-re-using-a-weird-language.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxwelljoslyn</author><text>I&#x27;m about to embark on my master&#x27;s thesis, in a domain[1] which could realllllly use the &quot;attach to running process; re-evaluate code and have the system just keep going&quot; aspect of Lisp languages.<p>I know Python best. But I have reached my breaking point with its syntax, and its lack of binding constructs, and lack of symbol datatype, quote, etc. I am intending to use Clojure ... but I have to <i>ship</i> this thing by May 2023 come hell or high water.<p>All else being equal, I will proooobably be able to go further with Python. But I&#x27;m concerned it will hamstring me from doing the crucial feature of &quot;extending the design [ie code] of a game as it runs&quot; since, AFAIK, it&#x27;s difficult to get a Lisp-ish experience of total live reloadability in Python... jurigged[2] and reloading[3] not withstanding.<p>I know some common lisp so I&#x27;m not a total lisp noob. I&#x27;ve learned enough CLJ to be dangerous ... but I&#x27;m worried I&#x27;m backing myself into an endless hole by using a language I&#x27;m not yet master of. Yet, I think the features of the ecosystem (total live reloadability of a CLJ&#x2F;CLJS app! with current state preserved even down to what a user has typed in the HTML UI!) are so tempting...<p>Just venting out loud. comment&#x2F;contact if you have suggestios or are curious about the project; i&#x27;m soon to begin blogging as I develop it.<p>[1] I&#x27;m reinventing the &quot;virtual tabletop.&quot; Current ones are so fucking shallow.
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;breuleux&#x2F;jurigged" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;breuleux&#x2F;jurigged</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;julvo&#x2F;reloading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;julvo&#x2F;reloading</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mathnerd314</author><text>If you don&#x27;t mind being stuck on Windows you could use Visual C# or Visual Basic, they have edit-and-continue too. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;visualstudio&#x2F;debugger&#x2F;edit-and-continue?view=vs-2022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;visualstudio&#x2F;debugger&#x2F;edit...</a> I&#x27;ve worked with the SuperTux C# level editor in the past. C# was actually pretty nice for GUI stuff.<p>There doesn&#x27;t seem to be a good GUI framework for Clojure. There was Seesaw but it hasn&#x27;t been updated since 2019 (no maintainer). There is a guy developing a new framework <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HumbleUI&#x2F;HumbleUI&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;HumbleUI&#x2F;HumbleUI&#x2F;</a> but it&#x27;s WIP. I guess you could sidestep this by making it a webapp and using figwheel + web framework of choice.</text></comment> |
20,818,509 | 20,818,375 | 1 | 2 | 20,817,352 | train | <story><title>Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum</title><url>https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/28/pay-a-visit-to-cambridges-computer-museum/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SmellyGeekBoy</author><text>The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is well worth a visit, too!</text></comment> | <story><title>Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum</title><url>https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/28/pay-a-visit-to-cambridges-computer-museum/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gerjomarty</author><text>Well worth a visit if you&#x27;re in or around Cambridge.<p>Huge props to the person in charge when we visited for letting us upstairs to their usually closed storage space with hundreds of old games, magazines, and boxes of old tech.</text></comment> |
25,168,842 | 25,168,628 | 1 | 3 | 25,165,752 | train | <story><title>Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers</title><url>https://lukerissacher.com/blog/optimizing_your_web_app</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otabdeveloper4</author><text>&gt; Yeah, but &quot;making your code 100x faster&quot; might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers.<p>Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent.<p>Unfortunately, programming talent doesn&#x27;t scale with cost at all. In that it&#x27;s like a creative endeavor: you can hire 10000 &quot;professional writers&quot; if you want, but that won&#x27;t get you another Shakespeare.<p>Which is why I find the &quot;software engineer&quot; moniker silly. Software isn&#x27;t at all like engineering.</text></item><item><author>nmfisher</author><text>&gt; So making your code 100x faster saves you more than 100 servers.<p>Yeah, but &quot;making your code 100x faster&quot; might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers.<p>As with most things, the only absolute rule is &quot;it depends&quot;.</text></item><item><author>hinkley</author><text>The biggest thing we&#x27;re going to regret looking back on the early Cloud era is the foolish notion that you need 100x as many servers to do 100x as much work.<p>Servers don&#x27;t scale linearly. It&#x27;s more likely you&#x27;ll need, at a minimum, 107-110x as many servers. Between 100 + log(100) and 100 + sqrt(100). So making your code 100x faster saves you more than 100 servers.<p>I think the arguments never end because it&#x27;s all fuzzy math. Get too attached to running the whole thing on one server, and your architecture starts making irreversible decisions about where the source of truth is, and you get locked into a single server.<p>Give up too early, and you spend a lot of energy herding cattle instead of building features. And speed is something you outsource to the guys who write the checks. That&#x27;s fine if you lock in your vertical, but I&#x27;ve worked on projects that lost out to a more responsive or financially efficient competitor. It really, really sucks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doctor_eval</author><text>The term “software engineer” was invented to describe the work being done by Margaret Hamilton and her team, when developing the guidance software for the Apollo moon landings. It definitely is a form of engineering.<p>From Wikipedia:<p>&gt; When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new &#x27;term&#x27; per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Optimizing Your Web App 100x Is Like Adding 99 Servers</title><url>https://lukerissacher.com/blog/optimizing_your_web_app</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otabdeveloper4</author><text>&gt; Yeah, but &quot;making your code 100x faster&quot; might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers.<p>Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent.<p>Unfortunately, programming talent doesn&#x27;t scale with cost at all. In that it&#x27;s like a creative endeavor: you can hire 10000 &quot;professional writers&quot; if you want, but that won&#x27;t get you another Shakespeare.<p>Which is why I find the &quot;software engineer&quot; moniker silly. Software isn&#x27;t at all like engineering.</text></item><item><author>nmfisher</author><text>&gt; So making your code 100x faster saves you more than 100 servers.<p>Yeah, but &quot;making your code 100x faster&quot; might cost significantly more than just adding 100x servers.<p>As with most things, the only absolute rule is &quot;it depends&quot;.</text></item><item><author>hinkley</author><text>The biggest thing we&#x27;re going to regret looking back on the early Cloud era is the foolish notion that you need 100x as many servers to do 100x as much work.<p>Servers don&#x27;t scale linearly. It&#x27;s more likely you&#x27;ll need, at a minimum, 107-110x as many servers. Between 100 + log(100) and 100 + sqrt(100). So making your code 100x faster saves you more than 100 servers.<p>I think the arguments never end because it&#x27;s all fuzzy math. Get too attached to running the whole thing on one server, and your architecture starts making irreversible decisions about where the source of truth is, and you get locked into a single server.<p>Give up too early, and you spend a lot of energy herding cattle instead of building features. And speed is something you outsource to the guys who write the checks. That&#x27;s fine if you lock in your vertical, but I&#x27;ve worked on projects that lost out to a more responsive or financially efficient competitor. It really, really sucks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hamuko</author><text>&gt;<i>Cost? No. But it certainly requires more talent.</i><p>Talented people usually cost a lot to optimize your code to be faster. And the more time they spend optimizing existing code, the less time they spend writing new code.</text></comment> |
25,593,769 | 25,591,347 | 1 | 2 | 25,588,712 | train | <story><title>LibrePhotos: A Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative</title><url>https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tauntz</author><text>What&#x27;s the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don&#x27;t mean manually via Google Takeout (that&#x27;s a dumpster fire and doesn&#x27;t work most of the time) but I&#x27;d like to automate it for periodic backups. You never know when you Google Account might be killed, taking tens of years of pictures and videos with it :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daehee</author><text>Check out this google photos export tool by the perkeep team: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;perkeep&#x2F;gphotos-cdp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;perkeep&#x2F;gphotos-cdp</a><p>&gt; This program uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol to drive a Chrome session that downloads your photos stored in Google Photos. By default, it starts at the most ancient item in the library, and progresses towards the most recent. It can be run incrementally, as it keeps track of the last item that was downloaded. It only works with the main library for now, i.e. it does not support the photos moved to Archive, or albums. For each downloaded photo, an external program can be run on it (with the -run flag) right after it is downloaded to e.g. upload it somewhere else.</text></comment> | <story><title>LibrePhotos: A Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative</title><url>https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tauntz</author><text>What&#x27;s the current recommended way of getting your photos out from Google Photos? And I don&#x27;t mean manually via Google Takeout (that&#x27;s a dumpster fire and doesn&#x27;t work most of the time) but I&#x27;d like to automate it for periodic backups. You never know when you Google Account might be killed, taking tens of years of pictures and videos with it :(</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olliebennett</author><text>Be aware that Google Photos&#x27; API does not provide geolocation (lat&#x2F;long) information from the photos; it&#x27;s wiped.<p>AFAIK The only way to get the photos with all metadata intact is to use Google Takeout.</text></comment> |
39,841,578 | 39,837,001 | 1 | 3 | 39,836,745 | train | <story><title>FuryGpu – Custom PCIe FPGA GPU</title><url>https://www.furygpu.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PfhorSlayer</author><text>So, this is my project! Was somewhat hoping to wait until there was a bit more content up on the site before it started doing the rounds, but here we are! :)<p>To answer what seems to be the most common question I get asked about this, I am intending on open-sourcing the entire stack (PCB schematic&#x2F;layout, all the HDL, Windows WDDM drivers, API runtime drivers, and Quake ported to use the API) at some point, but there are a number of legal issues that need to be cleared (with respect to my job) and I need to decide the rest of the particulars (license, etc.) - this stuff is not what I do for a living, but it&#x27;s tangentially-related enough that I need to cover my ass.<p>The first commit for this project was on August 22, 2021. It&#x27;s been a bit over two and a half years I&#x27;ve been working on this, and while I didn&#x27;t write anything up during that process, there are a fair number of videos in my YouTube FuryGpu playlist (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL4FPA1MeZF440A9CFfMJ7F6YoZ1Jvxu5j" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL4FPA1MeZF440A9CFfMJ7...</a>) that can kind of give you an idea of how things progressed.<p>The next set of blog posts that are in the works concern the PCIe interface. It&#x27;ll probably be a multi-part series starting at the PCB schematic&#x2F;layout and moving through the FPGA design and ending with the Windows drivers. No timeline on when that&#x27;ll be done, though. After having written just that post on how the Texture Units work, I&#x27;ve got even more respect for those that can write up technical stuff like that with any sort of timing consistency.<p>I&#x27;ll answer the remaining questions in the threads where they were asked.<p>Thanks for the interest!</text></comment> | <story><title>FuryGpu – Custom PCIe FPGA GPU</title><url>https://www.furygpu.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gchadwick</author><text>Cool! I found the hello blog here illuminating to understand the creators intentions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.furygpu.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hello" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.furygpu.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hello</a><p>As I read it, it&#x27;s just a fun hobby project for them first and foremost and looks like they&#x27;re intending to write a whole bunch more about how they built it.<p>It&#x27;s certainly an impressive piece of work, in particular as they&#x27;ve got the full stack working, a windows driver implementing a custom graphics API and then quake running on top of that. A shame they&#x27;ve not got some DX&#x2F;GL support but I can certainly understand why they went the custom API route.<p>I wonder if they&#x27;ll open source the design?</text></comment> |
31,304,715 | 31,302,837 | 1 | 3 | 31,302,174 | train | <story><title>Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell</title><url>https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1523010444570419200</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vessenes</author><text>This is an intriguing peek into some upper echelon MS politics. He notes he got busted down from L69 to L68 - L68 is a significant cutoff inside MS, titled “Partner”. L70 is “Distinguished Engineer”. For recent years, L68 all-in comp is probably right around $1mm a year, although I’m sure that was a bit lower when PowerShell was being written, and much higher in toto if you held on to your RSUs.<p>What surprises me is everything <i>not</i> said here - I know a number of MS Partner-level folks, and they all strike me as perfectly capable of funding and hiding a reasonable-sized team to work on anything they think is important; in fact reducing and removing precisely this practice is one of the reforms Satya has made — getting upper echelon fiefdoms more aligned.<p>So, I think the full story is actually a lot <i>more</i> interesting than the tweets. I’d personally like a short memoir instead of the tweets. In any event, don’t feel too bad for him - he did fine, and PowerShell is one of the features that let Windows stay competitive with Linux as the world transitioned to the cloud.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShell</title><url>https://twitter.com/jsnover/status/1523010444570419200</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>omega3</author><text>I find this twitter thread frustrating.<p>Q: What was the justification for the demotion? What became of the leaders that made that decision?<p>A: It was stranger than you can possibly imagine<p>I think the gist of the story is that he was assigned to work on X but worked on Y instead. Notwithstanding how great Y idea turned out to be it seems he was demoted for insubordination?</text></comment> |
15,734,351 | 15,733,885 | 1 | 2 | 15,731,913 | train | <story><title>Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA&t=</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jononor</author><text>Could forbid weapons to take kill actions themselves, each instance having to be activated by a human operator.<p>Could also forbid self-replication of weaponized robots.</text></item><item><author>nradov</author><text>How would you write such a treaty? Limit the CPU speed of weapons systems or something? Totally unenforceable.</text></item><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>We can make it considered unacceptable and against international law. Like chemical weapons. Which still happen, but not as much as they would if the U.S were, say, planning on using them all over the place, doing heavy R&amp;D into them, and selling them to other people. Like, you know, robot kill bots.</text></item><item><author>neuro_imager</author><text>Unfortunately I don&#x27;t see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different.<p>A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstanley</author><text>Why not go one step further and say that nobody is allowed to take a kill action? Killing is murder.<p>Not sarcastic.</text></comment> | <story><title>Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA&t=</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jononor</author><text>Could forbid weapons to take kill actions themselves, each instance having to be activated by a human operator.<p>Could also forbid self-replication of weaponized robots.</text></item><item><author>nradov</author><text>How would you write such a treaty? Limit the CPU speed of weapons systems or something? Totally unenforceable.</text></item><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>We can make it considered unacceptable and against international law. Like chemical weapons. Which still happen, but not as much as they would if the U.S were, say, planning on using them all over the place, doing heavy R&amp;D into them, and selling them to other people. Like, you know, robot kill bots.</text></item><item><author>neuro_imager</author><text>Unfortunately I don&#x27;t see a way this can be avoided.There has never been a weapon humanity imagined, designed, and built that it has not used. AI will be no different.<p>A ban would be impossible to implement. What exactly would you ban? AI? Drones? facial recognition? Once you have a certain level of capability in these technologies, weaponising these things is the easy part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeri</author><text>If you deploy automated drone factories that send out millions of these things, and then have an army of people all pressing &quot;kill&quot; buttons as if they were doing a quick-fire arcade game, without even seeing what they were killing, it would comply with the rules you describe.</text></comment> |
9,328,811 | 9,328,643 | 1 | 3 | 9,328,494 | train | <story><title>Can they see my dick pic?</title><url>http://cantheyseemydick.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>natural219</author><text>First of all, I want to say, this is one of the most brilliant things I&#x27;ve seen in a while and I think is exactly the line of reasoning you need to pursue to make effective action in the world: Find a <i>highly visible</i> line in the sand that everyone can agree is bad, and draw a clear metaphor to a current problem to show why that problem is bad. Bravo to the creators.<p>I came here to comment that it&#x27;s interesting this story has gotten flagged off the front page immediately. A more immature mind would have jumped to &quot;OMG! The NSA trolls are burying this story!&quot;, but in this case, it&#x27;s pretty clear that some people flagged purely because of the title.<p>It creates an interesting problem for the HN community, because (as a long-time hacker news reader) I feel this is <i>exactly</i> the type of content that would be interesting to most <i>hackers</i>, but probably least interesting to non-hackers who come here because of YCombinator&#x27;s prominence as a non-strange attractor and just simply don&#x27;t want to hear genitalia words in their news.<p>I&#x27;m sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but there was a Hacker News once that would have brook&#x27;d the eternal VC industry to keep his state in Hackerdom, as easily as a (hacker-king? I&#x27;m stretching here)</text></comment> | <story><title>Can they see my dick pic?</title><url>http://cantheyseemydick.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jastanton</author><text>Screenshot of the website for those who don&#x27;t want to click it at work: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;5EQuKlO.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;5EQuKlO.png</a></text></comment> |
3,498,586 | 3,496,714 | 1 | 3 | 3,496,497 | train | <story><title>OSX Lion in CSS3</title><url>http://www.alessioatzeni.com/mac-osx-lion-css3/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>compay</author><text>Color me jaded, but the "excitement" about HTML5 is hardly ever about doing new things, it's about doing the same old things, but with different tools.<p>Almost every HTML5 demo I've seen just reproduces something we could already to with technologies that ran on the desktop years ago. We're supposed to be excited that we can now implement - barely, and extremely laboriously, and with a clunky, buggy, incompatibility-ridden toolkit - the same kinds of things desktop apps programmers have been doing for a long time.<p>As a web developer pushing 40, I dread seeing our profession head towards making desktop-style apps in the browser, and along way spending the next 10 years repeating the mistakes and relearning the lessons of current desktop app developers. I'm not sure I've got enough time left to stomach that.</text></comment> | <story><title>OSX Lion in CSS3</title><url>http://www.alessioatzeni.com/mac-osx-lion-css3/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adamtulinius</author><text>"I'm sorry to inform you that your browser sucks!"<p>If the message had been, uhm, polite, i would maybe have considered opening another browser to look at it in.<p>I mean. Is it too much to expect just a little more class than that?<p>EDIT: Now i tried it in Chrome since it was open. No error message, but logon doesn't work. Honestly, i'm not impressed.</text></comment> |
17,506,529 | 17,506,470 | 1 | 3 | 17,506,044 | train | <story><title>Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-employment-20180710-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I worked for a Canadian company that&#x27;s absolutely hemmoraging talent because they refuse to pay well. I&#x27;m now paid about 50% more to work remotely for a US company in an environment that is far far more fitting of my life goals of being with my kids as they grow up.<p>It&#x27;s beyond bizarre to watch them continue to refuse to pay anyone properly despite their imminent collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eloff</author><text>It&#x27;s bizarre. Even Amazon Seattle pays 2x the salaries of Amazon Vancouver, even although they are separated by only 200km and are the same company! I ask every Canadian developer I meet, why are you still here? I like living in Canada, so I work remotely even although I don&#x27;t really like remote work. Instant 70% raise.</text></comment> | <story><title>Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-employment-20180710-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I worked for a Canadian company that&#x27;s absolutely hemmoraging talent because they refuse to pay well. I&#x27;m now paid about 50% more to work remotely for a US company in an environment that is far far more fitting of my life goals of being with my kids as they grow up.<p>It&#x27;s beyond bizarre to watch them continue to refuse to pay anyone properly despite their imminent collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text>Are they selling into a market that pays enough for them to raise wages?<p>I&#x27;m not defending them there, just wondering if the imminent part of the collapse might be external.</text></comment> |
14,712,568 | 14,712,603 | 1 | 2 | 14,712,050 | train | <story><title>Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?</title><url>https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epmaybe</author><text>Why wouldn&#x27;t you always use something that is tried-and-true? MongoDB is relatively new compared to something like postgresql or even mysql.</text></item><item><author>Daishiman</author><text>The misplaced hype cycle is real.<p>10gen is <i>not</i> a company dedicated to databases, at least not if the initial code quality of MongoDB is a signal (and it should be, since if you know a thing or two about storage you wouldn&#x27;t take the compromises it initially did)<p>Unfortunately, many fresh graduates with no experience in storage decided to evaluate the technology based on its very visible merits, without considering that scalability is not really a top priority even in companies that have to &quot;scale&quot;, and that reliability trumps every other metric.<p>Mongo has failed spectacularly in being a reliable data store, and its scalability is mediocre, given that it&#x27;s a lot more about query planning, analytics and optimization than having out-of-the-box sharding.<p>This is one of those areas having some seniority does wonders. Storage concepts are not easy to grasp, and evaluating a database&#x27;s reliability takes much longer than most product cycles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>memracom</author><text>Not only that but you can use PostgreSQL as a NoSQL and there are benchmarks showing that it outperforms MongoDB.<p>And if you do not want to commit to either SQL or NoSQL, the PostgreSQL has you covered. You can put a JSONB column in any of your tables to handle the part of your data that is schemaless, and you can still index the data in that JSONB column.<p>There are a very few applications that need distributed scalability beyond what Oracle or PostgreSQL can provide, and those ones need NoSQL. They also need highly skilled competent developers who are capable of reimplementing some needed functionality of RDBMSes at scale.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Did So Many Startups Choose MongoDB?</title><url>https://www.nemil.com/mongo/1.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epmaybe</author><text>Why wouldn&#x27;t you always use something that is tried-and-true? MongoDB is relatively new compared to something like postgresql or even mysql.</text></item><item><author>Daishiman</author><text>The misplaced hype cycle is real.<p>10gen is <i>not</i> a company dedicated to databases, at least not if the initial code quality of MongoDB is a signal (and it should be, since if you know a thing or two about storage you wouldn&#x27;t take the compromises it initially did)<p>Unfortunately, many fresh graduates with no experience in storage decided to evaluate the technology based on its very visible merits, without considering that scalability is not really a top priority even in companies that have to &quot;scale&quot;, and that reliability trumps every other metric.<p>Mongo has failed spectacularly in being a reliable data store, and its scalability is mediocre, given that it&#x27;s a lot more about query planning, analytics and optimization than having out-of-the-box sharding.<p>This is one of those areas having some seniority does wonders. Storage concepts are not easy to grasp, and evaluating a database&#x27;s reliability takes much longer than most product cycles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubyn00bie</author><text>My guess...<p>SQL is a lot for newcomers to grasp on top of learning the rest of their stack. The appeal of &quot;no schema&quot; is most likely what gets them as it seems easier than SQL. Simple things at first seem daunting like: constraints, joins, and indexes. What they fail to see is that doing these database level things in the application layer becomes the final level hell and you get to live it.<p>People also undervalue their data and it&#x27;s integrity.<p>I personally do not like mongo and see zero reason for it except perhaps in some very niche use cases and even then, I&#x27;d still choose another document store over it.</text></comment> |
16,384,667 | 16,384,679 | 1 | 2 | 16,383,395 | train | <story><title>Peter Thiel Parts Ways with Silicon Valley</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-luminary-peter-thiel-parts-ways-with-silicon-valley-1518696120</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overthemoon</author><text>What topics, exactly, are so taboo? McCarthyism was about a specific ideology. And, mind you, people were getting dragged into court over it, which Ferris is certainly not at risk of. In fact, this is in a thread about a guy who shut a media outlet down. What is Ferris worried that he can&#x27;t talk about?</text></item><item><author>SirensOfTitan</author><text>Tim Ferris on the same issue:<p>&gt; Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism</a>) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I&#x27;m as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn&#x27;t this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That&#x27;s the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it&#x27;s a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It&#x27;s weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There&#x27;s way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say &quot;Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there&#x27;s a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine...&quot; we&#x27;re headed for big trouble.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7erct8&#x2F;i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and&#x2F;dq6zrh1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7erct8&#x2F;i_am_tim_ferri...</a><p>I&#x27;ve witnessed this first hand, and alongside the congestion and housing problems that no one wants to handle, it was a big reason I decided to leave the Bay Area for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbooth</author><text>There are a tiny minority of liberals who, rather than embracing breaking down barriers and a hunky-dory co-existence like the rest of us, erect barriers of purity and constantly call people out.<p>They&#x27;re annoying.<p>On the other hand, that&#x27;s the dominant mode for the entire right half of the spectrum so take their complaints with a grain of salt. And who gives the above-mentioned annoying liberals their biggest platform? Right wing media. Gotta feed the wurlitzer.<p>It&#x27;s not a &quot;differing and diverse political opinion&quot; to think people of color and women are inherently less worthy, it&#x27;s just racist&#x2F;sexist.</text></comment> | <story><title>Peter Thiel Parts Ways with Silicon Valley</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-luminary-peter-thiel-parts-ways-with-silicon-valley-1518696120</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overthemoon</author><text>What topics, exactly, are so taboo? McCarthyism was about a specific ideology. And, mind you, people were getting dragged into court over it, which Ferris is certainly not at risk of. In fact, this is in a thread about a guy who shut a media outlet down. What is Ferris worried that he can&#x27;t talk about?</text></item><item><author>SirensOfTitan</author><text>Tim Ferris on the same issue:<p>&gt; Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism</a>) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I&#x27;m as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn&#x27;t this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That&#x27;s the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it&#x27;s a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It&#x27;s weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There&#x27;s way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say &quot;Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there&#x27;s a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine...&quot; we&#x27;re headed for big trouble.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7erct8&#x2F;i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and&#x2F;dq6zrh1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IAmA&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7erct8&#x2F;i_am_tim_ferri...</a><p>I&#x27;ve witnessed this first hand, and alongside the congestion and housing problems that no one wants to handle, it was a big reason I decided to leave the Bay Area for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cm2187</author><text>I understand the grievance against McCarthyism was mostly about preventing people from getting work if they held the wrong political views. In that respect what Thiel complains about isn&#x27;t too dissimilar.</text></comment> |
19,982,727 | 19,982,404 | 1 | 2 | 19,981,596 | train | <story><title>Xcel Energy Says It Will Close Two Coal-Fired Power Plants a Decade Early</title><url>https://finance.yahoo.com/news/xcel-energy-end-coal-upper-154800947.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>Natural Gas prices have done a great deal to reduce coal usage. Shutting down a plant is no easy decision.<p>It is clear coal is just being priced out of the equation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Xcel Energy Says It Will Close Two Coal-Fired Power Plants a Decade Early</title><url>https://finance.yahoo.com/news/xcel-energy-end-coal-upper-154800947.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>atonse</author><text>Imagine how much faster we&#x27;d go if we actually had the help of the federal government (via grants, etc) instead of fighting these utilities tooth and nail and forcing them to make these upgrades under court settlements and to wait until they haven&#x27;t exhausted every penny of profits before moving to renewable energy?</text></comment> |
11,688,805 | 11,688,276 | 1 | 2 | 11,688,212 | train | <story><title>Apple invests $1B in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-idUSKCN0Y404W</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devy</author><text>There were a few ideas floating around Chinese tech blogs, of the most possible reasons are:<p>1. Integrate Apple Pay into Didi Chuxing apps, which is estimated to have 300MM users in China[1]. Didi currently only accepts payment with Weixin(aka WeChat) Pay and Ali Pay (aka Ant Financial Services Group, owned by Alibaba Group).<p>2. Massive data points for developing Apple&#x27;s self-driving technology. Didi operates in 400 Chinese cities with over 11 million rides per day, and accounts for 80% private car hailing market and 99% taxi hailing market.[2]<p>3. And yes, investing into Chinese tech sector give them a better leverage in negotiations with the government and also like sbuccini said, association with other Didi&#x27;s major investors.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;5&#x2F;12&#x2F;11669178&#x2F;apple-invests-1-billion-in-chinese-transportation-service-didi-chuxing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;5&#x2F;12&#x2F;11669178&#x2F;apple-invests-1-b...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Didi_Chuxing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Didi_Chuxing</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Apple invests $1B in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-china-idUSKCN0Y404W</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sbuccini</author><text>Apple has huge stores of cash sitting overseas. They can&#x27;t bring it home without subject to large tax penalties. With that cash stockpile growing, it seems like they&#x27;re having trouble finding ways to put that money to work overseas. I wonder if they would have still made this investment if they had the ability to bring that money back stateside without hefty tax liabilities.<p>Regardless, a $1B is not a small chunk of change, even for Apple. Clearly, natural synergies could arise when Project Titan matures. But Apple tightly coupling itself with a rising player in the Chinese tech sector is a smart play (not to mention associating itself with other notable Didi investors like Alibaba). We&#x27;ve seen similar moves by Uber, who took a large investment from Baidu.<p>Interesting times ahead.</text></comment> |
20,509,350 | 20,509,394 | 1 | 2 | 20,508,465 | train | <story><title>Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/want-hire-best-programmers-offer-growth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>logifail</author><text>&gt; when someone pays you more, they respect you more<p>The counter-example to that could be that once you&#x27;re senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you <i>will</i> get called back to work.</text></item><item><author>chadash</author><text>&gt; <i>&quot;Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I&#x27;m good, I will be paid a massive premium for it.&quot;</i><p>And it&#x27;s one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k&#x2F;year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior equipment. Making $200K&#x2F;year? I&#x27;ll be you also have top of the line equipment, no one keeping close tabs on your hours, 4 weeks or more vacation, money to go to conferences, etc.<p>A mentor of mine once told me that I should seek to make more money, even if that&#x27;s not my motivation. He said that more money is always nice to have, but also that when someone pays you more, they respect you more, so you get all the benefits that come along with that.</text></item><item><author>nscalf</author><text>I&#x27;m a software engineer with ~3 years of experience. I also want professional growth. Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I&#x27;m good, I will be paid a massive premium for it. levels.fyi sort of convinced me that being a good engineer is a life changing event for more than 1 generation. I answer questions like these as growth primarily because I know growth is an investment for my life long earning potential, and I just so happen to have a passion for growth to begin with---it&#x27;s a lucky combination to be drawn to.<p>I&#x27;d love to see questions like this phrased to account for this:
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, to grow my future earning potential.&quot;
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, because I enjoy learning new things.&quot;
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, to reach a role I cannot fill with my current skills.&quot;<p>I know the article tried to address this with the responses, but that&#x27;s sort of the default answer you give in this field. No one really says, or enjoys hearing, &quot;I want to learn more so I can make more money&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>natefox</author><text>I give my boss&#x2F;coworkers my wife&#x27;s phone number when I go on vacation. I tell them you have to talk to her to get to me. I then put my phone in airplane mode 95% of the time and use it as a camera. I&#x27;ll occasionally undo airplane mode to upload photos or check the internets for something, but vacation for me is usually unplugging as well.<p>I&#x27;ve yet to be called with this strategy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Want to hire the best programmers? Offer growth</title><url>https://triplebyte.com/blog/want-hire-best-programmers-offer-growth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>logifail</author><text>&gt; when someone pays you more, they respect you more<p>The counter-example to that could be that once you&#x27;re senior enough, you are never 100% on vacation. If enough goes wrong, you <i>will</i> get called back to work.</text></item><item><author>chadash</author><text>&gt; <i>&quot;Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I&#x27;m good, I will be paid a massive premium for it.&quot;</i><p>And it&#x27;s one of the unfair things in life that jobs that pay more often get other benefits as well. Making $40k&#x2F;year? Chances are you get 2 weeks vacation, inflexible work hours, inferior equipment. Making $200K&#x2F;year? I&#x27;ll be you also have top of the line equipment, no one keeping close tabs on your hours, 4 weeks or more vacation, money to go to conferences, etc.<p>A mentor of mine once told me that I should seek to make more money, even if that&#x27;s not my motivation. He said that more money is always nice to have, but also that when someone pays you more, they respect you more, so you get all the benefits that come along with that.</text></item><item><author>nscalf</author><text>I&#x27;m a software engineer with ~3 years of experience. I also want professional growth. Partially because I enjoy learning and growing my technical skills, partially because I want to move into more leadership roles, but a huge part of it is because I know that if I&#x27;m good, I will be paid a massive premium for it. levels.fyi sort of convinced me that being a good engineer is a life changing event for more than 1 generation. I answer questions like these as growth primarily because I know growth is an investment for my life long earning potential, and I just so happen to have a passion for growth to begin with---it&#x27;s a lucky combination to be drawn to.<p>I&#x27;d love to see questions like this phrased to account for this:
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, to grow my future earning potential.&quot;
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, because I enjoy learning new things.&quot;
&quot;Opportunity for professional growth, to reach a role I cannot fill with my current skills.&quot;<p>I know the article tried to address this with the responses, but that&#x27;s sort of the default answer you give in this field. No one really says, or enjoys hearing, &quot;I want to learn more so I can make more money&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bcyn</author><text>That has nothing to do with seniority, it&#x27;s 100% about how you draw personal boundaries between work hours and personal hours. You can make it clear that you will be completely unplugged during vacation.</text></comment> |
32,086,004 | 32,086,343 | 1 | 2 | 32,084,023 | train | <story><title>Teams is killing my Mac every day</title><url>https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams-is-killing-my-mac-every-day/td-p/2790094</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamJacobMuller</author><text>This is great especially because there is still no M1 version of teams and running the Intel version of teams on M1 makes the whole computer slow to a crawl.<p>But, at this point, I have to wonder if teams is just abandonware. Stuff like this thread and the lack of M1 support 2.5 years after the M1 transition was announced and over a year after you could walk into an apple store and buy an M1 computer? I don&#x27;t understand what could prevent them from releasing an M1 version besides a complete lack of will to do so.</text></item><item><author>jasoneckert</author><text>If you don&#x27;t want to use the Microsoft Teams app (which uses a lot of resources), you can:<p>1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on your Mac<p>2. Log into <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teams.microsoft.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teams.microsoft.com</a><p>3. Click ... &gt; Apps &gt; Install this site as an app<p>This will create an Edge app for Teams that uses almost no resources but has feature parity with the regular Microsoft Teams app.<p>We tell all of our students to do this, and it has solved all Microsoft Teams performance issues on student Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solarkraft</author><text>Almost all Microsoft software feels like abandonware, which is wild when you consider how heavily they&#x27;re promoting and profiting from it and how many and how heavily people use it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Teams is killing my Mac every day</title><url>https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams-is-killing-my-mac-every-day/td-p/2790094</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamJacobMuller</author><text>This is great especially because there is still no M1 version of teams and running the Intel version of teams on M1 makes the whole computer slow to a crawl.<p>But, at this point, I have to wonder if teams is just abandonware. Stuff like this thread and the lack of M1 support 2.5 years after the M1 transition was announced and over a year after you could walk into an apple store and buy an M1 computer? I don&#x27;t understand what could prevent them from releasing an M1 version besides a complete lack of will to do so.</text></item><item><author>jasoneckert</author><text>If you don&#x27;t want to use the Microsoft Teams app (which uses a lot of resources), you can:<p>1. Install the Microsoft Edge Web browser on your Mac<p>2. Log into <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teams.microsoft.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teams.microsoft.com</a><p>3. Click ... &gt; Apps &gt; Install this site as an app<p>This will create an Edge app for Teams that uses almost no resources but has feature parity with the regular Microsoft Teams app.<p>We tell all of our students to do this, and it has solved all Microsoft Teams performance issues on student Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haxxorfreak</author><text>If you&#x27;re running an Apple Silicon Mac you can get an early build of Teams osx-arm64 from the exploration build link listed here.[0]<p>I&#x27;ve been running a daily build for a few weeks and it&#x27;s noticeably better than the Intel build on an M1 Pro. It launches in half the time and feels far more responsive (probably due to not needing to use the Rosetta JIT for Electron). That said it&#x27;s still a daily &quot;exploration&quot; build so YMMV.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;ItzLevvie&#x2F;MicrosoftTeams-msinternal&#x2F;master&#x2F;defconfig" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;raw.githubusercontent.com&#x2F;ItzLevvie&#x2F;MicrosoftTeams-m...</a></text></comment> |
14,529,529 | 14,529,301 | 1 | 3 | 14,529,079 | train | <story><title>Area code 710</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_710</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yodon</author><text>When I was in college in the &#x27;80s, My roommate and I got curious about unused area codes (and&#x2F;or prefixes? I forget). We started dialing some. Within about 15 minutes we stumbled on some government service with a scary-official sounding operator on the other end (I&#x27;ve no idea if it was this service or a different one).<p>The really scary part was after dialing the number and encountering the operator, we were unable to hang up (any time we hung up and picked back up, the operator was still there, even after waiting about two minutes). Fortunately this was (a) at MIT which still had a central electromechanical telephone switch for student phone lines in the &#x27;80s and (b) I had keys to the switch as a student phone repair tech.<p>I still remember grabbing my keys, running over to the switch, and physically pulling the relay contacts to release the call and prevent a trace to our location in case that was the motivation for holding the line (nowadays traces are digital and instantaneous, but when looking at old-school electromechanical switches you really did need time to trace the call physically through the relays).<p>Yes, we were aware the operator was probably just messing with us by showing he could hold our line against our will to discourage us from calling again, but it still scared the crap out of us just in case.</text></comment> | <story><title>Area code 710</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_710</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>813594</author><text>I have a GETS account too (I work in healthcare). T-Mobile provides WPS service free, whereas Verizon charges $5&#x2F;month per enrolled line. More info here
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;publication&#x2F;getswps-documents" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;publication&#x2F;getswps-documents</a>
and
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;publications&#x2F;HOW%20IT%20WORKS%20THE%20GOVERNMENT%20Emergency%20Telecommunications%20Service%20_May%202017%20FINAL%20508C.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;publications&#x2F;HOW%20I...</a></text></comment> |
32,608,345 | 32,608,419 | 1 | 2 | 32,608,287 | train | <story><title>Hooking Go from Rust</title><url>https://metalbear.co/blog/hooking-go-from-rust-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-go-laxy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>metadat</author><text>This is badass, thanks for sharing @carride. In celebration that it&#x27;s Friday, I&#x27;m going to test it out right now.<p>In case the author happens to see this and can respond, how did you figure all of this out? Would really enjoy a deep dive covering your process. This is brilliant.<p>I also wonder if it could be extended to Nim, Zig, or any other less-straightforward hookable languages [than C&#x2F;C++].<p>Edit: Apologies, maybe this is not that interesting of a wonderment. I did a little research and both Nim and Zig interface with libc.<p>I&#x27;m not yet clear on whether node.js or Deno use libc, if any fellow HNers know please leave a reply! If they don&#x27;t use libc, they could be interesting targets.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hooking Go from Rust</title><url>https://metalbear.co/blog/hooking-go-from-rust-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-go-laxy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zasdffaa</author><text>&gt; Golang doesn’t use libc on Linux, and instead calls syscalls directly<p>Could someone explain this. I&#x27;m not familiar with low level linux stuff. Why would you choose not to use libc, what are the implications?</text></comment> |
25,897,124 | 25,897,174 | 1 | 2 | 25,896,626 | train | <story><title>Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/military-intelligence-buys-location-data-instead-of-getting-warrants-memo-shows/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2OEH8eoCRo0</author><text>Why should they need a warrant for information that&#x27;s being sold or public?</text></item><item><author>sneak</author><text>US military intelligence already believes that they don&#x27;t need warrants; they&#x27;ve decided (in a secret, internal opinion) via the (again, secret) FISA court that the FISA Amendments Act, section 702, permits them to retrieve data on anyone they like directly from the service providers, even if those people are suspected of no crime, and are citizens&#x2F;residents of the US. This has been going on for <i>fourteen years</i>, since Microsoft became the first partner in the program on (lol) 11th September, 2007, and started giving them dumps of people&#x27;s hotmail email boxes and such.<p>It&#x27;s the #1 source for NSA reporting, eclipsing even their bulk cable wiretaps. They can hit a button and get Google Takeout, but for all major US online services, for anyone they choose, no warrant required.<p>These sorts of headlines pretend that their &quot;normal&quot; way of spying <i>does</i> require warrants. It absolutely does not.<p>A lot of people seem to still carry the misconception that the FISA orders (again, not warrants, no probable cause, issued by a classified court (also run by US military intelligence) that never denies a request) are only for foreigners (&quot;foreign&quot; is right in the name). That&#x27;s also not true: they use it to target US citizens too.<p>This specific circumstance was cited by Ed Snowden as one of the main reasons he came forward and told everyone that this was happening.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;702-spying" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;702-spying</a><p>The participants in this system as of 2013: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;prism-slides-nsa-document" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;pr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cbozeman</author><text>Because of this:<p>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.</text></comment> | <story><title>Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/military-intelligence-buys-location-data-instead-of-getting-warrants-memo-shows/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2OEH8eoCRo0</author><text>Why should they need a warrant for information that&#x27;s being sold or public?</text></item><item><author>sneak</author><text>US military intelligence already believes that they don&#x27;t need warrants; they&#x27;ve decided (in a secret, internal opinion) via the (again, secret) FISA court that the FISA Amendments Act, section 702, permits them to retrieve data on anyone they like directly from the service providers, even if those people are suspected of no crime, and are citizens&#x2F;residents of the US. This has been going on for <i>fourteen years</i>, since Microsoft became the first partner in the program on (lol) 11th September, 2007, and started giving them dumps of people&#x27;s hotmail email boxes and such.<p>It&#x27;s the #1 source for NSA reporting, eclipsing even their bulk cable wiretaps. They can hit a button and get Google Takeout, but for all major US online services, for anyone they choose, no warrant required.<p>These sorts of headlines pretend that their &quot;normal&quot; way of spying <i>does</i> require warrants. It absolutely does not.<p>A lot of people seem to still carry the misconception that the FISA orders (again, not warrants, no probable cause, issued by a classified court (also run by US military intelligence) that never denies a request) are only for foreigners (&quot;foreign&quot; is right in the name). That&#x27;s also not true: they use it to target US citizens too.<p>This specific circumstance was cited by Ed Snowden as one of the main reasons he came forward and told everyone that this was happening.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;702-spying" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;702-spying</a><p>The participants in this system as of 2013: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;prism-slides-nsa-document" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;nov&#x2F;01&#x2F;pr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjevans</author><text>If the government would need a warrant to collect that data it should be illegal for any company to collect, sell, or in any other way utilize that same data.<p>That is basic consumer protection common sense; but even without the pandemic and the other four horseman of the apocalypse crisis of democracy facing the US, and most if not all other nations on the planet right now, don&#x27;t expect any such consumer goods to be on the agenda.</text></comment> |
23,595,506 | 23,595,135 | 1 | 3 | 23,594,707 | train | <story><title>WireGuard Merged into OpenBSD</title><url>https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=159274150512676&w=2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zx2c4</author><text>WireGuard project announcement is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.zx2c4.com&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;wireguard&#x2F;2020-June&#x2F;005588.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.zx2c4.com&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;wireguard&#x2F;2020-June&#x2F;005588...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>WireGuard Merged into OpenBSD</title><url>https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=159274150512676&w=2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>atonse</author><text>I’ve always wanted to run OpenBSD for our Wireguard bastion host (the one machine that is “open”. Not sure it makes a difference over Linux but OpenBSD has an even stronger security culture.<p>Was satisfied with the state of affairs before but genuinely excited about this development.</text></comment> |
30,996,640 | 30,996,286 | 1 | 2 | 30,991,368 | train | <story><title>Security Comics</title><url>https://securityzines.com/#comics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>h4waii</author><text>I&#x27;m gonna go against the grain here, infographics are great and all that, but these comics are a terrible way to convey information.<p>The font is almost unreadable, the colors have no semblance of unity or denoting anything, and it&#x27;s just plain difficult to follow along, even as someone who already groks these topics.</text></comment> | <story><title>Security Comics</title><url>https://securityzines.com/#comics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>These are fun, but they&#x27;re pretty dense and hard to read (even for someone with good vision, native high English literacy, and no known major cognitive deficits).<p>Is there a &quot;plain HTML&quot; version of these somewhere? The diagrams are nice, but I feel like I&#x27;m squinting at a chalkboard through a window.</text></comment> |
10,690,416 | 10,690,565 | 1 | 3 | 10,690,112 | train | <story><title>I fit the description…</title><url>http://artandeverythingafter.com/i-fit-the-description/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delinka</author><text>I understand the reason for fear in the current law enforcement climate in the US. But this quote really misses something:<p>&quot;...they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them.&quot;<p>Well ... no. If you are indeed close to the given description of a criminal complaint, they&#x27;re going to check. The have to check. If they&#x27;d come across the actual criminal and he&#x27;d behaved similarly (and lying by producing plausible ID, acceptable home address, etc) and then let the actual criminal go, that&#x27;d be terrible.<p>Now, the situation could indeed have been improved by the cops: the &#x27;suspect&#x27; made no threatening moves, NO need to reach for a gun; simply act like a reasonable human being having a conversation; call for another officer with the same (similar?) ethnicity...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>Indeed. The only thing in this story that really disturbed me is that the officer apparently went for his gun immediately. This whole situation could, and should, go in a friendly manner, &quot;like a reasonable human being having a conversation&quot;. The US really needs to work on reducing the amount of fear in the society - among both general population and law enforcement officers.</text></comment> | <story><title>I fit the description…</title><url>http://artandeverythingafter.com/i-fit-the-description/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>delinka</author><text>I understand the reason for fear in the current law enforcement climate in the US. But this quote really misses something:<p>&quot;...they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them.&quot;<p>Well ... no. If you are indeed close to the given description of a criminal complaint, they&#x27;re going to check. The have to check. If they&#x27;d come across the actual criminal and he&#x27;d behaved similarly (and lying by producing plausible ID, acceptable home address, etc) and then let the actual criminal go, that&#x27;d be terrible.<p>Now, the situation could indeed have been improved by the cops: the &#x27;suspect&#x27; made no threatening moves, NO need to reach for a gun; simply act like a reasonable human being having a conversation; call for another officer with the same (similar?) ethnicity...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cmiles74</author><text>Eyewitness identification is known to be extraordinarily weak, yet in this case police officers were letting that decide if this man should be taken in. Even worse, we know that cross-racial identifications are often more inaccurate than the already poor identifications of people we don&#x27;t know.[0]<p>No, I do not believe that the police are picking everyone &quot;close to the given description of a criminal complaint&quot;. Perhaps they were trying to pick up everyone close to the description in _this_ criminal complaint.<p>IMHO, this is simply an excuse to pursue racial profiling. In this story, the police readily admitted that he didn&#x27;t match the description (he was heavier) but they didn&#x27;t really notice until after the fact and this didn&#x27;t prompt them to let him go. Then what was the point of detaining him? Clearly for show, everyone in the area was reminded of how active the police were. Again, in my opinion, I suspect that the way people felt about said activity would likely break along racial lines.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heinonline.org&#x2F;HOL&#x2F;LandingPage?handle=hein.journals&#x2F;ajcl28&amp;div=15&amp;id=&amp;page=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heinonline.org&#x2F;HOL&#x2F;LandingPage?handle=hein.journals&#x2F;a...</a></text></comment> |
14,305,601 | 14,305,496 | 1 | 2 | 14,305,392 | train | <story><title>Apple acquires sleep tracking company Beddit</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/apple-acquires-sleep-tracking-company-beddit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dchuk</author><text>Oh please please please make a smart alarm that will make me up by only vibrating on my wrist. I want to be able to wake up early for stuff without having to wake up my wife and dogs.<p>I want an alarm app on my Apple Watch that:<p>1) Wakes me up when I&#x27;m in light sleep rather than REM<p>2) Only vibrates on my wrist at first (let&#x27;s say for 5 minutes) and then falls back to a traditional alarm sound so I get my ass up just in case<p>I&#x27;ve gotten to the point of almost buying some Udemy courses on Apple Watch development to build the damn thing myself. Only thing really holding me back is figuring out the algorithm for sleep tracking, but I&#x27;m sure that wouldn&#x27;t be really hard to do.<p>Maybe I&#x27;ll just do it still.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple acquires sleep tracking company Beddit</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/apple-acquires-sleep-tracking-company-beddit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thedz</author><text>I read this as &quot;BBEdit&quot; at first and thought wow, they pivoted to sleep tracking?</text></comment> |
19,674,472 | 19,674,674 | 1 | 2 | 19,674,218 | train | <story><title>5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-weather-forecasting-at-risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derekp7</author><text>I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer &#x2F; communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website&#x27;s loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).<p>The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on &quot;unlimited&quot; plans wouldn&#x27;t be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can&#x27;t do with current 4G&#x2F;LTE?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrMember</author><text>With data caps I don&#x27;t see much use for it. I still think it&#x27;s hilarious that carriers advertise download speeds that would blow through most people&#x27;s monthly data allowance in at most a couple of minutes.</text></comment> | <story><title>5G Is Likely to Put Weather Forecasting at Risk</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2019/04/16/5g-buildout-likely-to-put-weather-forecasting-at-risk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derekp7</author><text>I was wondering, what exactly 5G will bring us. For the most part, all the tasks I need to do on a phone (pocket computer &#x2F; communicator) can be done even with 3G (video, streaming music, and any website&#x27;s loading time is more than acceptable at 3G speeds).<p>The only thing I can think of is 5G will allow for more overall network bandwidth, so the data caps on &quot;unlimited&quot; plans wouldn&#x27;t be needed. But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can&#x27;t do with current 4G&#x2F;LTE?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text><i>&gt;But compared to how we use our phones today, what new items will be be able to do with 5G that we can&#x27;t do with current 4G&#x2F;LTE?</i><p>5G has the potential to provide throughput and latency that is comparable to a fixed broadband connection. In reasonably competitive markets (i.e. not the US), that&#x27;s A Big Deal. Latency is a particularly acute issue in many applications; 4G generally adds about 50ms in the best case scenario, but 5G can easily provide sub-millisecond latency. Imagine a near-future where it simply doesn&#x27;t matter whether you&#x27;re on WiFi or cellular, because they both provide the same experience.</text></comment> |
28,248,244 | 28,247,179 | 1 | 2 | 28,246,054 | train | <story><title>Princeton Researchers Who Built a CSAM Scanning System Urge Apple to Not Use It</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/university-researchers-csam-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>atlgator</author><text>&gt; A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That&#x27;s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.<p>This sums up the concern. CSAM is just the excuse because who would come out against protecting children, right? But this will absolutely be used for political purposes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sam0x17</author><text>&gt; pre-screening<p>Pre-screening would be the kind way of implementing this feature. They could make it so if CSAM is detected, just don&#x27;t upload those files to the cloud and delete them locally. Then they are still doing due-diligence to prevent that material from entering their cloud and to remove that material from circulation, but they don&#x27;t get random people arrested for false positives. When they detect hash matches on a device, they are under zero legal obligation to do anything about it because it could easily be a false positive (as the public has demonstrated on HN and elsewhere), so they&#x27;d be in the clear with this approach. This will have the effect they desire without pissing tons of people off.<p>Instead they have taken the aggressive stance of manual review + tipping off law enforcement, which goes against their entire mantra of protecting privacy. Your phone will now be an informant against you. If you are an activist or a whistleblower, a false positive could be enough to get your device searched and seized.</text></comment> | <story><title>Princeton Researchers Who Built a CSAM Scanning System Urge Apple to Not Use It</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/university-researchers-csam-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>atlgator</author><text>&gt; A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That&#x27;s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.<p>This sums up the concern. CSAM is just the excuse because who would come out against protecting children, right? But this will absolutely be used for political purposes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>The more I think about it, something that concerns me greatly is the <i>silent</i> use of this for political purposes.<p>By silent I mean they don&#x27;t arrest you or put you on any public lists. Instead they just gather information, lots of information, and they use it in future Cambridge Analytica style propaganda campaigns.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to imply that only Republicans would do this. After Trump&#x27;s successful use of this kind of political propaganda every single political party and PR agency on the planet is working on duplicating it.<p>Arresting people is old fashioned. Modern totalitarianism is built on disinformation, microtargeted propaganda, surveillance, and nudge theory.</text></comment> |
18,313,569 | 18,312,656 | 1 | 2 | 18,309,308 | train | <story><title>Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory</title><url>https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munchbunny</author><text>That used to be my experience as well. However, I do think two different things happened. One is that I&#x27;m getting older. I&#x27;m not in my mental prime anymore.<p>But the second is that everything is more complicated. In high school, you could just sit down and crank out some homework while watching Youtube videos and chatting with friends. And you would just sit down and crank out some homework.<p>Yesterday, I got into work thinking I was going to write some code, and... oh wait, this depends on chasing down an issue in code owned by someone else, and I need to get answers to some questions about how this other component works that I depend on, and this other piece of code I need to modify doesn&#x27;t actually work the way I thought it did. Even within the same task, I&#x27;m constantly context switching between mental modeling, communicating with other people, and code reading&#x2F;writing. Also, I&#x27;m reconciling all of this against a multi-stage rollout plan where different people will see different behaviors. It&#x27;s complicated in a way that teenage me never really had to deal with.<p>It&#x27;s no wonder I&#x27;ve spent several days feeling like I got nothing done. I did a lot of unwinding hidden dependencies, but very little of it was actually writing code. Most of my time was spent figuring out what questions were the right ones to ask in order to get the answers I needed, which might not end up being what I thought I needed.<p>Teenage me never had to deal with that kind of complexity.</text></item><item><author>cgriswald</author><text>I used to have &#x27;buckets&#x27; I would stick things into, and they would stay there forever. Context switching was not a problem. Whatever I had put in that bucket was so strongly associated with the context, that when I switched, the bucket would be there waiting for me. I think I basically had built something like a memory palace before I had the concept of a memory palace.<p>Best way I think I can discribe it... it&#x27;s almost like in my short term memory rather than trying to cram in every individual variable, I was just including a pointer to a struct containing the variables for those contexts. When I would call up that pointer, I&#x27;d get the entire struct and just keep going.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s age, alcohol use, stress, always-on internet, genetics, or what, but now I&#x27;m lucky if I can remember what task I&#x27;m in the middle of if I start thinking about something else while doing it. I find myself just as able to solve problems <i>when I can remember things</i>, but a lot less able to remember things, making me feel a lot stupider and&#x2F;or slower than I used to be. Context-switching is a real challenge now. FWIW, I used to be A LOT better at tuning out the world&#x2F;distractions than I am now; I feel like that changed when my kid was born.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elihu</author><text>I suspect that when most organizations hire software developers, they&#x27;re not really looking for great programmers. What they&#x27;re really looking for is people who are capable of dealing with enormous complexity without getting confused. Those things might sound related, but I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re the same thing. I expect that most software developers don&#x27;t spend most of their time designing beautiful, elegant solutions to interesting problems; they spend their time blundering around in an over-complicated and poorly designed code-base using tools that barely work and trying not to trip over myriad corner cases or buried in technical debt. (Even in well-designed systems, you&#x27;re often still dealing with mountains of technical debt inherited from the industry at large.)<p>Maintaining bad code is in a lot of ways harder than creating good code. Or at least, a person good at one of those things might not be good at the other.<p>I have a related theory that software development as a profession is starting to increasingly resemble being an air-traffic controller; as the actual programming parts get easier (languages, tools, and libraries get better, awful code-bases notwithstanding), the non-programming tasks tend to take up more and more time. So, you end up spending a lot more time talking to people and figuring out what to build.</text></comment> | <story><title>Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory</title><url>https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munchbunny</author><text>That used to be my experience as well. However, I do think two different things happened. One is that I&#x27;m getting older. I&#x27;m not in my mental prime anymore.<p>But the second is that everything is more complicated. In high school, you could just sit down and crank out some homework while watching Youtube videos and chatting with friends. And you would just sit down and crank out some homework.<p>Yesterday, I got into work thinking I was going to write some code, and... oh wait, this depends on chasing down an issue in code owned by someone else, and I need to get answers to some questions about how this other component works that I depend on, and this other piece of code I need to modify doesn&#x27;t actually work the way I thought it did. Even within the same task, I&#x27;m constantly context switching between mental modeling, communicating with other people, and code reading&#x2F;writing. Also, I&#x27;m reconciling all of this against a multi-stage rollout plan where different people will see different behaviors. It&#x27;s complicated in a way that teenage me never really had to deal with.<p>It&#x27;s no wonder I&#x27;ve spent several days feeling like I got nothing done. I did a lot of unwinding hidden dependencies, but very little of it was actually writing code. Most of my time was spent figuring out what questions were the right ones to ask in order to get the answers I needed, which might not end up being what I thought I needed.<p>Teenage me never had to deal with that kind of complexity.</text></item><item><author>cgriswald</author><text>I used to have &#x27;buckets&#x27; I would stick things into, and they would stay there forever. Context switching was not a problem. Whatever I had put in that bucket was so strongly associated with the context, that when I switched, the bucket would be there waiting for me. I think I basically had built something like a memory palace before I had the concept of a memory palace.<p>Best way I think I can discribe it... it&#x27;s almost like in my short term memory rather than trying to cram in every individual variable, I was just including a pointer to a struct containing the variables for those contexts. When I would call up that pointer, I&#x27;d get the entire struct and just keep going.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s age, alcohol use, stress, always-on internet, genetics, or what, but now I&#x27;m lucky if I can remember what task I&#x27;m in the middle of if I start thinking about something else while doing it. I find myself just as able to solve problems <i>when I can remember things</i>, but a lot less able to remember things, making me feel a lot stupider and&#x2F;or slower than I used to be. Context-switching is a real challenge now. FWIW, I used to be A LOT better at tuning out the world&#x2F;distractions than I am now; I feel like that changed when my kid was born.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wlll</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s no wonder I&#x27;ve spent several days feeling like I got nothing done. I did a lot of unwinding hidden dependencies, but very little of it was actually writing code.<p>Oh man, this really resonates with me. So much of my work time is spent manipulating the yak stack it&#x27;s crazy. The feeling when you can just crank out some code with no external speedbumps is magical though.</text></comment> |
19,703,679 | 19,703,691 | 1 | 2 | 19,703,075 | train | <story><title>Malware researcher Marcus Hutchins, known as ’MalwareTech’, pleads guilty</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/malwaretech-legal-case-over/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chx</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t make the fundamental problem here go away: they arrested someone who was not in the United States when allegedly violated a law of the USA. The USA does not have jurisdiction over the entire world. If they thought they had a case, the right way to do this is to issue an arrest warrant and ask the UK to arrest and extradite him. If this was a thing, international travel would halt because you would need to countercheck everything you&#x27;ve ever done online with the laws of the country you are flying to.<p>Consider this fictionary tale: you fly to Budapest for a fun trip. You are jailed for posting the Soviet hammer and sickle on your Facebook two years ago -- it&#x27;s a crime under Hungarian law to use that symbol. Do you think this is right?<p>Here&#x27;s the law:<p>Any person who:
a) distributes,
b) uses before the public at large, or
c) publicly exhibits,
the swastika, the insignia of the SS, the arrow cross, the sickle and hammer, the five-pointed red star or any symbol
depicting the above so as to breach public peace - especially in a way to offend the dignity of victims of totalitarian regimes and their right to sanctity - is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by custodial arrest, insofar as the did not result in a more serious criminal offense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlarocco</author><text>I&#x27;m okay with how the US handled this. The crime he pleaded guilty to caused innocent people real financial harm, and it&#x27;s not like the US sent FBI agents over to the UK to pick him up. He flew here on his own, knowing (presumably) that he had committed a crime that could get him arrested here.<p>Kinda stupid to commit crimes against people in a country and then travel to that country before the statute of limitations has expired.<p>I might have a different opinion for victimless crimes, but it&#x27;s irrelevant to this discussion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Malware researcher Marcus Hutchins, known as ’MalwareTech’, pleads guilty</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/malwaretech-legal-case-over/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chx</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t make the fundamental problem here go away: they arrested someone who was not in the United States when allegedly violated a law of the USA. The USA does not have jurisdiction over the entire world. If they thought they had a case, the right way to do this is to issue an arrest warrant and ask the UK to arrest and extradite him. If this was a thing, international travel would halt because you would need to countercheck everything you&#x27;ve ever done online with the laws of the country you are flying to.<p>Consider this fictionary tale: you fly to Budapest for a fun trip. You are jailed for posting the Soviet hammer and sickle on your Facebook two years ago -- it&#x27;s a crime under Hungarian law to use that symbol. Do you think this is right?<p>Here&#x27;s the law:<p>Any person who:
a) distributes,
b) uses before the public at large, or
c) publicly exhibits,
the swastika, the insignia of the SS, the arrow cross, the sickle and hammer, the five-pointed red star or any symbol
depicting the above so as to breach public peace - especially in a way to offend the dignity of victims of totalitarian regimes and their right to sanctity - is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by custodial arrest, insofar as the did not result in a more serious criminal offense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vertex-four</author><text>&gt; If this was a thing, international travel would halt because you would need to countercheck everything you&#x27;ve ever done online with the laws of the country you are flying to.<p>I mean, for many of us that’s already a problem, and has been for a long time. Ever mentioned your same-sex partner somewhere a Government might be able to find it? There’s now a whole bunch of countries you can’t visit or pass through without being at risk of imprisonment or worse, yay.</text></comment> |
29,235,397 | 29,235,211 | 1 | 3 | 29,233,852 | train | <story><title>Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-air-cargo-suddenly-more-affordable-compared-to-ocean-shipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>winslow</author><text>I&#x27;m having a hard time understanding this snippet:<p><i>The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.</i><p>Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I&#x27;m misreading it.</text></item><item><author>jeromegv</author><text>Anchorage is because they found out that they can fill their planes with more inventory and less gas if they stop in Anchorage instead of doing the full pacific route.<p>Good article here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchorage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...</a></text></item><item><author>noduerme</author><text>I ordered an M1 Max the day after it was announced. It&#x27;s supposed to arrive today. The route it took to get to Portland, Oregon, was Shanghai to Zhenzhou (where it spent a week), on to South Korea, then Anchorage, then a weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. How this makes any sense in terms of efficiency is totally beyond me.<p>As a side note, I&#x27;m mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkurz</author><text>Shanghai to Oakland is about 10,000 km: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-OAK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-OAK</a><p>Adding a stop in Anchorage adds about 200 km:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.greatcirclemap.com&#x2F;?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK</a><p>The plane is probably limited by takeoff weight: body plus fuel plus cargo. By adding a stop in the middle, the plane can take off with less fuel from Shanghai. Since it has 45000 kg less fuel, it can instead carry 45000 kg more cargo. Total fuel consumption for the trip ends up slightly higher, but fuel per kg of useful cargo is much less.</text></comment> | <story><title>Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-air-cargo-suddenly-more-affordable-compared-to-ocean-shipping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>winslow</author><text>I&#x27;m having a hard time understanding this snippet:<p><i>The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.</i><p>Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I&#x27;m misreading it.</text></item><item><author>jeromegv</author><text>Anchorage is because they found out that they can fill their planes with more inventory and less gas if they stop in Anchorage instead of doing the full pacific route.<p>Good article here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchorage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...</a></text></item><item><author>noduerme</author><text>I ordered an M1 Max the day after it was announced. It&#x27;s supposed to arrive today. The route it took to get to Portland, Oregon, was Shanghai to Zhenzhou (where it spent a week), on to South Korea, then Anchorage, then a weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. How this makes any sense in terms of efficiency is totally beyond me.<p>As a side note, I&#x27;m mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcims</author><text>Because they can fill their tanks halfway and not fall into the ocean.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Boeing_747#Specifications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Boeing_747#Specifications</a></text></comment> |
26,507,438 | 26,506,338 | 1 | 3 | 26,504,661 | train | <story><title>ShellCheck: A static analysis tool for shell scripts</title><url>https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>If curious, the interesting past threads seem to be:<p><i>Lessons learned from writing ShellCheck</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22279585" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22279585</a> - Feb 2020 (46 comments)<p><i>Shellcheck: a static analysis tool for shell scripts</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9001931" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9001931</a> - Feb 2015 (46 comments)<p><i>ShellCheck: a static analysis and linting tool for sh&#x2F;bash scripts</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8777705" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8777705</a> - Dec 2014 (20 comments)<p><i>ShellCheck – Online shell script analyzer</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8182745" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8182745</a> - Aug 2014 (14 comments)</text></comment> | <story><title>ShellCheck: A static analysis tool for shell scripts</title><url>https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>This is one of my favorite tips for almost effortlessly improving devops productivity (along with using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mvdan&#x2F;sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mvdan&#x2F;sh</a> for auto-formatting) — by now shellcheck has good editor support in e.g. VSCode and I have a standard pre-commit.com hook for all of my projects. I&#x27;ve seen so many long iterations where people flail at a complex shell script for something like a cron job which was immediately flagged by shellcheck. I generally recommend rewriting in Python but this is a good less invasive step.<p>One thing which might be worth considering is adding this to your personal ~&#x2F;.shellcheckrc to make it more pedantic:<p>enable=all</text></comment> |
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