chosen
int64 353
41.8M
| rejected
int64 287
41.8M
| chosen_rank
int64 1
2
| rejected_rank
int64 2
3
| top_level_parent
int64 189
41.8M
| split
large_stringclasses 1
value | chosen_prompt
large_stringlengths 236
19.5k
| rejected_prompt
large_stringlengths 209
18k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
33,151,146 | 33,150,941 | 1 | 2 | 33,149,938 | train | <story><title>iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally</title><url>https://weblog.antranigv.am/posts/2022/10/ios-dvorak/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chairmanwow1</author><text>I use dvorak for my computer, but I think the design goals of QWERTY are actually useful for the small keyboard of a phone being used with thumbs.<p>It was designed to put diphthongs on opposite sides of the keyboard so that a mechanical typewriter wouldn’t jam as frequently. I think avoiding “jams” with my thumbs is definitely the way to think about it.<p>All of this is speculation because I haven’t had the chance to try it our yet ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>I use swiping almost exclusively, and HN has discussed before how Dvorak is actually <i>really bad</i> for that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7110619" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7110619</a> , but the article is broken, so see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150320170000&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minuum.com&#x2F;model-your-users-algorithms-behind-the-minuum-keyboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150320170000&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minuum.com...</a> .<p>Having all the vowels next to each other, and so many words in English that differ just by vowels, is actually really hard on the swiping algorithm. As I mention in the comments of that article, it is likely that QWERTY is not optimal for that use case either, but it&#x27;s a lot closer. Despite using Dvorak for almost everything else, including typing this comment right now, I have no use or desire for it on mobile phones. YMMV, of course.</text></comment> | <story><title>iOS Ships Dvorak, Finally</title><url>https://weblog.antranigv.am/posts/2022/10/ios-dvorak/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chairmanwow1</author><text>I use dvorak for my computer, but I think the design goals of QWERTY are actually useful for the small keyboard of a phone being used with thumbs.<p>It was designed to put diphthongs on opposite sides of the keyboard so that a mechanical typewriter wouldn’t jam as frequently. I think avoiding “jams” with my thumbs is definitely the way to think about it.<p>All of this is speculation because I haven’t had the chance to try it our yet ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skrap</author><text>As a former iOS engineer at Apple, and a dvorak user, I can verify that this is <i>exactly</i> the thinking (during my time) of why dvorak support wasn&#x27;t a development priority. The properties which make it good for typing make it bad for a phone keyboard.</text></comment> |
32,703,721 | 32,703,070 | 1 | 2 | 32,701,003 | train | <story><title>From Prison to Programming</title><url>https://corecursive.com/prison-programming-with-rick-wolter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lostboomerang</author><text>Rick Wolter seems to be quite balanced. Read the last paragraph &quot;Life’s Not Fair&quot;.<p>Problem is that some people read his story and thinks. &quot;Oh, so teaching felons programming is a great way to reduce recidivism&quot;.<p>This kind of be-all-end-all solution always fails. Some years ago journalists in the US loved to tell coal miners that they should &quot;learn to code&quot; when the mines shut down due to Washington politics. How hard could it be?<p>When media corporations started laying off journalists in droves a few years later, the journalists did not find &quot;Learn to code&quot; suggestions useful or even funny.<p>A more general solution to reduce recidivism should probably consist of two initiatives:<p>1) Educate felons when they&#x27;re in prison. It doesn&#x27;t have to be programming. It can be a craft, something academic, programming (if they feel like it) or some other skill. Whatever.<p>2) Reform the prison system, so inmates are treated as humans. E.g. with private corporations running prisons in the US, they have a strong motivation to create &quot;recurring guests&quot;. Contrast this with e.g. prisons in Scandinavia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0IepJqxRCZY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0IepJqxRCZY</a>) that have the lowest rates of recidivism.<p>We know how to reduce recidivism. It is not an easy &quot;learn to code&quot; exercise. But are the US willing to make the changes necessary to create meaningful impact on the rates of recidivism - or shall we continue to be fed &quot;pull yourself up by the bootstraps! We found one guy who did it, and so can you!&quot; stories?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>satysin</author><text>God I fucking <i>hate</i> the response &quot;learn to code!&quot; to everything.<p>People seem to think everyone being a programmer is needed otherwise humanity will fall. Honestly it is one of the stupidest things I have heard.<p>Could more [good] programmers be a good thing? Sure, we can always do with more good programmers.<p>However the truth is we need more of many, many types of people. Teachers, personal care workers, doctors, nurses, etc.<p>Not everyone <i>wants</i> to be a programming. Not everyone <i>can</i> be a programmer.<p>Can I teach anyone to write Hello World or a simple number game in Python? Of course, same way I can teacher anyone to track their budget in a basic Excel file.<p>But I can&#x27;t take <i>anyone</i> and teach them Excel to be a spreadsheet wizard for the finance department. Believe me I know this from first hand experience :)<p>What we need is an open, fair and <i>free</i> education system to encourage people of [almost] all ages to do what they are good at and enjoy. We put far too much positive spin on learning to code as if it is the answer to every god damn problem in the world.</text></comment> | <story><title>From Prison to Programming</title><url>https://corecursive.com/prison-programming-with-rick-wolter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lostboomerang</author><text>Rick Wolter seems to be quite balanced. Read the last paragraph &quot;Life’s Not Fair&quot;.<p>Problem is that some people read his story and thinks. &quot;Oh, so teaching felons programming is a great way to reduce recidivism&quot;.<p>This kind of be-all-end-all solution always fails. Some years ago journalists in the US loved to tell coal miners that they should &quot;learn to code&quot; when the mines shut down due to Washington politics. How hard could it be?<p>When media corporations started laying off journalists in droves a few years later, the journalists did not find &quot;Learn to code&quot; suggestions useful or even funny.<p>A more general solution to reduce recidivism should probably consist of two initiatives:<p>1) Educate felons when they&#x27;re in prison. It doesn&#x27;t have to be programming. It can be a craft, something academic, programming (if they feel like it) or some other skill. Whatever.<p>2) Reform the prison system, so inmates are treated as humans. E.g. with private corporations running prisons in the US, they have a strong motivation to create &quot;recurring guests&quot;. Contrast this with e.g. prisons in Scandinavia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0IepJqxRCZY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0IepJqxRCZY</a>) that have the lowest rates of recidivism.<p>We know how to reduce recidivism. It is not an easy &quot;learn to code&quot; exercise. But are the US willing to make the changes necessary to create meaningful impact on the rates of recidivism - or shall we continue to be fed &quot;pull yourself up by the bootstraps! We found one guy who did it, and so can you!&quot; stories?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KBeyo</author><text>I work with people in prison, or as they are commonly referred to within some circles, justice involved individuals.<p>The issue here is not skilling these people in trades, it’s really about working on mental health and the underlying reasons why they are in prison. Until those challenges are addressed, these people mostly will not succeed. Many have not experienced much of a « normal » family life or friendships that promote personal growth, or mentorship.<p>On top of that, when many are released they have nothing. So, imagine trying to stay employed for a week when you have nowhere to live (especially hard to rent a place also when you have a record[1].<p>Anyway, we might know how to reduce recidivism, but society sure doesn’t seem interested in taking the steps to invest what’s needed.<p>[1] I recently spoke in front of the Colorado Senate concerning Assembly Bill 99 which will auto-erase the records of non-violent offenders in the state with some outcomes being that they can more easily find employment and rent places to live.</text></comment> |
6,980,009 | 6,979,971 | 1 | 3 | 6,979,778 | train | <story><title>I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ck2</author><text><i>The feed is so pixelated, what if it&#x27;s a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people</i><p>If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.<p>Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?<p>We need an international ban on armed drones before it is too late.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>melling</author><text>There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments.<p>We used to napalm people. Lots of &quot;wrong people&quot; get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17&#x27;s and B-52&#x27;s was pretty ugly too, we just couldn&#x27;t record the carnage on video. There&#x27;s probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren&#x27;t killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a &quot;clean&quot; war, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s possible.<p>The real solution, of course, is to avoid wars, and violence, in general. Supposedly, the world is more peaceful now than ever, even with Syria, the train station suicide bomber is Russia today, etc.<p>Personally, I don&#x27;t want to see the US be the world police. There&#x27;s a high cost in both money and American lives. Still, for the foreseeable future, the world needs to address the problems and try to solve the remaining problems. Otherwise, decades from now, people on HN will be complaining about how future weapon systems are killing innocent people.</text></comment> | <story><title>I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-us-military</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ck2</author><text><i>The feed is so pixelated, what if it&#x27;s a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people</i><p>If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed.<p>Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA?<p>We need an international ban on armed drones before it is too late.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yummyfajitas</author><text>You act as if the alternative to drones (20 year old kids with guns) never kills the wrong person.<p>Yvain&#x27;s essay asking &quot;what if drones came first&quot; is highly relevant here.<p><a href="http://squid314.livejournal.com/338607.html?thread=9878703" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;squid314.livejournal.com&#x2F;338607.html?thread=9878703</a></text></comment> |
13,338,525 | 13,338,367 | 1 | 3 | 13,330,532 | train | <story><title>MuGo: A minimalist Go engine modeled after AlphaGo</title><url>https://github.com/brilee/MuGo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cr0sh</author><text>Something I&#x27;m finding interesting is how so many of these deep-learning neural nets use RELU for their activation function; RELU is known as a &quot;lazy engineer&#x27;s activation&quot; function - very simple to implement, and despite looking like a hack, seems to work very well for many tasks.<p>I tend to wonder - beyond &quot;ease of implementation and good &#x27;nuff&quot; reasons - if there are other reasons to use RELU, over other activation functions like TANH or Sigmoid?<p>I&#x27;m beginning to suspect that we may be seeing the &quot;engineering side&quot; of neural networks coming into play; that instead of using the more &quot;biologically accurate&quot; activation of the sigmoid function, we instead use RELU (and other ELU derivatives) because it works well, and is easier to understand?<p>Much like how things progressed better in heavier-than-air flight once engineers realized that flapping wings weren&#x27;t absolutely needed, and low-weight engines turning propellers, with fixed wings, worked better for flying than what nature uses...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimfleming</author><text>The reasons to use ReLUs are sparsity and improved gradient flow. ReLUs encourage sparsity because when the input to the ReLU is less than 0 as the activation becomes 0. This means some fraction of activations in a given layer will be omitted which can encourage better representations. They also have improved gradient flow because the gradients are zero or constant and thus don&#x27;t suffer from vanishing&#x2F;exploding gradients.<p>In deep learning, I would _generally_ not look towards biology for the reasons behind why things are done as this is usually an after-the-fact explanation. When in doubt, blame the gradients.</text></comment> | <story><title>MuGo: A minimalist Go engine modeled after AlphaGo</title><url>https://github.com/brilee/MuGo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cr0sh</author><text>Something I&#x27;m finding interesting is how so many of these deep-learning neural nets use RELU for their activation function; RELU is known as a &quot;lazy engineer&#x27;s activation&quot; function - very simple to implement, and despite looking like a hack, seems to work very well for many tasks.<p>I tend to wonder - beyond &quot;ease of implementation and good &#x27;nuff&quot; reasons - if there are other reasons to use RELU, over other activation functions like TANH or Sigmoid?<p>I&#x27;m beginning to suspect that we may be seeing the &quot;engineering side&quot; of neural networks coming into play; that instead of using the more &quot;biologically accurate&quot; activation of the sigmoid function, we instead use RELU (and other ELU derivatives) because it works well, and is easier to understand?<p>Much like how things progressed better in heavier-than-air flight once engineers realized that flapping wings weren&#x27;t absolutely needed, and low-weight engines turning propellers, with fixed wings, worked better for flying than what nature uses...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xiphias</author><text>What&#x27;s interesting is that Jeff Dean noted that ReLU was one of the big things why deep learning took off. Wikipedia summarizes tha advantages, but my guess is getting rid of the vanishing gradients problem:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rectifier_%28neural_networks%29?wprov=sfla1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rectifier_%28neural_networks...</a></text></comment> |
2,051,549 | 2,051,255 | 1 | 3 | 2,050,968 | train | <story><title>The (Real) Hot Girl Effect and Networking</title><url>http://blog.shrewple.com/post/2520650113/the-real-hot-girl-effect-and-networking</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brandnewlow</author><text>Ultimate Hot Girl Effect Evilness:<p>My 30-year-old uber lawyer buddy has a gorgeous blonde fiance. She's in med school and is crazy smart. She's awesome.<p>My buddy decided at 27 that he wanted to get into chess. He got really into it, hired a teacher and by 29 or so was moving his rating up pretty well.<p>As a newcomer though, he often finds himself competing against 13-15 year old boys at his weekend tournements. In fact he's often the only person over 18 playing in some of these tournaments.<p>He has a good sense of humor about it, but some of these kids, he says, are just total turds to the other kids they compete against.<p>When he learns he has to play against a kid who's mean to other kids, he calls in the Fiance and has her sit behind him while he plays, just reading whatever she has to read for med school. She'll spend a whole Saturday sitting there behind him while he plays, her nose stuck in a book.<p>It just destroys the kids. He catches them trying to steal glances at her all the time during the games. Just breaks their chess mojo.<p>For the cool kids, kids who are struggling to figure out women at that age, he introduces them to her and she knows to treat them like the coolest guys in the room. Meanwhile, the mean bully kids get ignored and seethe in the corner.</text></comment> | <story><title>The (Real) Hot Girl Effect and Networking</title><url>http://blog.shrewple.com/post/2520650113/the-real-hot-girl-effect-and-networking</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>This post depresses me. I'm a man and certainly no feminist, but posts on the usefulness of attractive, female RoR developers leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. I was going to comment on the nature of our field, but it's probably the same almost everywhere, from banking to bricklaying to hacking.<p>I'll be in my terminal.</text></comment> |
30,899,750 | 30,899,887 | 1 | 3 | 30,895,331 | train | <story><title>CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/31/student-mental-health-decline-cdc/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnold</author><text>As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement:<p>There is no room for mistakes.<p>Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…<p>And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.<p>They see this never ending cycle of<p>turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.<p>Many are going to bed after midnight every night.<p>Something has to give.<p>This is really disturbing to me.<p>How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nynx</author><text>I&#x27;m a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I&#x27;m now much more capable of reasoning of whether it&#x27;s true or if I just feel that it&#x27;s true.<p>I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There&#x27;s so little leeway. Fail a class -&gt; you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -&gt; Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.<p>Something will eventually give.</text></comment> | <story><title>CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/31/student-mental-health-decline-cdc/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnold</author><text>As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement:<p>There is no room for mistakes.<p>Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…<p>And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.<p>They see this never ending cycle of<p>turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.<p>Many are going to bed after midnight every night.<p>Something has to give.<p>This is really disturbing to me.<p>How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prepend</author><text>&gt; Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…<p>As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.<p>When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.</text></comment> |
25,286,347 | 25,284,564 | 1 | 2 | 25,281,164 | train | <story><title>A Japanese shop is 1,020 years old</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/business/japan-old-companies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agar</author><text>A colleague took me to Tamahide restaurant in Tokyo, which opened in 1760 and is known for creating oyakodon, a chicken and egg rice bowl. (Oyakadon translates to &quot;parent and child donburi&quot; which somehow makes eating a combination of chicken and egg a little less appealing).<p>Looking at reviews today, people apparently see the food as a mixed bag - some are clearly disappointed. In my opinion, it was excellent, with the signature dish having balanced flavors that seem to have been refined for generations. I found it endlessly fascinating that a humble lunch place with a simple dish could survive for 250+ years - but it also makes perfect sense that simple things last.<p>My colleague (a local in our Japan office) told me that emperors of old had ordered the dish to be delivered to them, well before Japan had even been &quot;opened&quot; to the world. Perhaps the stories were apocryphal (he was a sales guy after all), but still entertaining and gave a sense of the history behind the meal.<p>Tokyo is an amazing city, though it can be very lonely for an expat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drak0n1c</author><text>Oyakodon is one of the blandest dishes in Japanese cuisine (typically made with no sauces or spices - or just a tiny dash of shichimi), so I&#x27;m not surprised foreign travelers found it disappointing. Growing up with the context of the dish helps - and so does a sensitive tongue!</text></comment> | <story><title>A Japanese shop is 1,020 years old</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/business/japan-old-companies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agar</author><text>A colleague took me to Tamahide restaurant in Tokyo, which opened in 1760 and is known for creating oyakodon, a chicken and egg rice bowl. (Oyakadon translates to &quot;parent and child donburi&quot; which somehow makes eating a combination of chicken and egg a little less appealing).<p>Looking at reviews today, people apparently see the food as a mixed bag - some are clearly disappointed. In my opinion, it was excellent, with the signature dish having balanced flavors that seem to have been refined for generations. I found it endlessly fascinating that a humble lunch place with a simple dish could survive for 250+ years - but it also makes perfect sense that simple things last.<p>My colleague (a local in our Japan office) told me that emperors of old had ordered the dish to be delivered to them, well before Japan had even been &quot;opened&quot; to the world. Perhaps the stories were apocryphal (he was a sales guy after all), but still entertaining and gave a sense of the history behind the meal.<p>Tokyo is an amazing city, though it can be very lonely for an expat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smukherjee19</author><text>Living in greater Tokyo for the past 5 years, can speak the language fluently. Added the Tamahide restaurant to visit sometime, thanks!<p>The biggest thing I&#x27;ve felt since moving here: whether or not you can speak and interact in Japanese makes a world of difference. Seriously. I have interacted with expats who have not studied any inkling of Japanese, nor have tried any kind of interactions apart from other expats, and it felt their life was so bland. For example, they&#x27;d struggle to order anything except at big chain restaurants that have English menus, so that small alleyway restaurant that serves super nice ramen? Or that washoku (Japanese food) restaurant that&#x27;s famous for its signature dish in Japanese? Very hard.<p>And that&#x27;s without all the intricacies of interacting with Japanese people (beyond asking for directions where people are very helpful). Boy, that&#x27;s a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you strike up conversations with people so easily because you can speak the language. Sometimes you get hurt because of differences in ways of thinking. Sometimes you try to put yourself in a Japanese person&#x27;s shoes and try to understand what they&#x27;re thinking. To me, it&#x27;s been one of the most fun parts so far.<p>And I feel much more welcome. For example, the bento (packed lunch) shop run by a family where I buy a takeout from once a week? They know my name and can tell my voice when I call to order a bento. I ask them how&#x27;s life and they do as well as we chitchat while visiting their shop. I leave the shop with both of us saying &quot;Thanks as always!&quot;. These small things do make a difference when you&#x27;re living thousands of miles away from your home country.<p>I&#x27;m not complaining that there should be more English stuff in general; I feel people are trying to improve the situation. Nor that I&#x27;m saying not knowing Japanese will make your life hell; it won&#x27;t. But, it will be bland. Especially if you happen to end up at a local town in rural Japan. That has its own charm points but you&#x27;d miss out most of them.<p>TLDR: Speaking from experience, if you ever plan to stay long-term in Japan, learn Japanese. I&#x27;m sure you won&#x27;t regret it.<p>(Sorry for the long rant.)</text></comment> |
11,340,687 | 11,340,783 | 1 | 2 | 11,339,909 | train | <story><title>Integrating a VT220 into my life</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-my-life.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickpeterson</author><text>Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>Quasi-related:<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they&#x27;re not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power.<p>So far the easiest approach I&#x27;ve found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into another system, which I think is a sensible access mode.<p>Ideally, something like the AVR PicoPower microcontrollers would be fantastic - they run on ultra-low-voltage, eat 1 mA&#x2F;MIPS, and idle down to basically nothing (&lt;1ma active and a few dozen microamps during sleep). ssh is probably out of the question but I could toss a VT100 stack on it. Unfortunately the eInk display is the hard part there - most eInk parts have very poor documentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cieplak</author><text>Funny you bring that up, I was just reading about this:<p><i></i><i>When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript, or DPS. DPS added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functions to allow the GUI to inspect the diagram. Additionally, a set of &quot;bindings&quot; was provided to allow PS code to be called directly from the C programming language. NeXT used these bindings in their NeXTStep system to provide an object oriented graphics system. Although DPS was written in conjunction with NeXT, Adobe sold it commercially and it was a common feature of most Unix workstations in the 1990s.</i><i></i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PostScript#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PostScript#History</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Integrating a VT220 into my life</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2016/03/22/Integrating-a-VT220-into-my-life.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickpeterson</author><text>Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>Quasi-related:<p>I&#x27;ve always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they&#x27;re not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power.<p>So far the easiest approach I&#x27;ve found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into another system, which I think is a sensible access mode.<p>Ideally, something like the AVR PicoPower microcontrollers would be fantastic - they run on ultra-low-voltage, eat 1 mA&#x2F;MIPS, and idle down to basically nothing (&lt;1ma active and a few dozen microamps during sleep). ssh is probably out of the question but I could toss a VT100 stack on it. Unfortunately the eInk display is the hard part there - most eInk parts have very poor documentation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulmd</author><text>This reminds me of Terry Davis&#x27; TempleOS, which features an ubiquitous hyperdocument system.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codersnotes.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;a-constructive-look-at-templeos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codersnotes.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;a-constructive-look-at-temp...</a><p>Terry himself is schizophrenic but it&#x27;s a fascinating piece of outsider art in many respects. He&#x27;s even posted on HN under several accounts, but he&#x27;s aggressive and disruptive and inevitably ends up banned.</text></comment> |
17,198,546 | 17,197,750 | 1 | 2 | 17,196,558 | train | <story><title>Logo design trends of 2018</title><url>https://www.logolounge.com/articles/2018-logo-trends</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>We changed the URL from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1292403&#x2F;the-dark-age-of-soulless-sans-serif-logos-is-coming-to-an-end&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1292403&#x2F;the-dark-age-of-soulless-sans-serif-l...</a>, which points to this.<p>Some comments below might make less sense outside the context of the qz.com article&#x27;s polemic. But it&#x27;s more substantive (not to mention fairer) to link to the original source.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Logo design trends of 2018</title><url>https://www.logolounge.com/articles/2018-logo-trends</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pdkl95</author><text>&gt; The traditional excuse for stripping away ornament has been about improving legibility, especially for small screens. This is a fallacy<p>No, serifs really do have legibility issues, but not for small <i>screens</i>; they cause problems at (very) small font sizes where glyphs are only a handful of pixels tall.<p>&gt; You can render a serif letter in seven pixels<p>Yes, but that&#x27;s pushing it and the legibility will depend on the quality of the font hinting, how the font rasterizer antialiases, and the way subpixels are utilized[1]. Legibility will even depend on the display technology: low resolution fonts on a CRT can be a lot harder to read compared to an LCD. (a shadow mask means phosphors do <i>not</i> align 1-to-1 with pixels[2])<p>Of course, legibility is in the eye of the beholder, and many people find serifed fonts to be easier to read, while others prefer sans-serif, and some people just don&#x27;t care. For some people, anything smaller or more complicated than high-contrast 96pt simple sans-serif is unreadable.<p>&gt; drops the serifs from its logo<p>A logo, however, is probably (much?) larger than the small font sizes where serifs often have legibility issues.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.antigrain.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;font_rasterization&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.antigrain.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;font_rasterization&#x2F;index.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ea6tw-gulnQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ea6tw-gulnQ</a></text></comment> |
33,183,019 | 33,180,239 | 1 | 2 | 33,178,301 | train | <story><title>MAR1D: First-Person Mario</title><url>https://mar1d.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samwillis</author><text>I think it would require one eye above the other to have depth perception in his 2d world.<p>Eyes can’t even be side-by-side as that axis doesn’t exist.<p>Having said that, the human brain is capable of reconstructing a 3d perception with only one eye through learnt understand and interpreting the picture change over time as you move. I image it’s the same for Mario, but in 2d.</text></item><item><author>worewood</author><text>Well, we see the world as a 2d projection BUT we (usually) have 2 eyes so we have some amount of 3d-info.<p>Maybe mario has 2 eyes too, which would give him some amount of 2d-info. (Just like an MRI can construct a 2d slice from 1d info). So the first person game should have maybe a depth info on those pixels.<p>What I mean, mario does not see only a line. He sees a silhouette of what lies ahead of him.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bmitc</author><text>&gt; I think it would require one eye above the other to have depth perception in his 2d world.<p>Is his world actually 2D though? Or a 3D world projected down to 2D? The latter is what I would expect.</text></comment> | <story><title>MAR1D: First-Person Mario</title><url>https://mar1d.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samwillis</author><text>I think it would require one eye above the other to have depth perception in his 2d world.<p>Eyes can’t even be side-by-side as that axis doesn’t exist.<p>Having said that, the human brain is capable of reconstructing a 3d perception with only one eye through learnt understand and interpreting the picture change over time as you move. I image it’s the same for Mario, but in 2d.</text></item><item><author>worewood</author><text>Well, we see the world as a 2d projection BUT we (usually) have 2 eyes so we have some amount of 3d-info.<p>Maybe mario has 2 eyes too, which would give him some amount of 2d-info. (Just like an MRI can construct a 2d slice from 1d info). So the first person game should have maybe a depth info on those pixels.<p>What I mean, mario does not see only a line. He sees a silhouette of what lies ahead of him.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diob</author><text>Yeah, as someone with a lazy eye 3d honestly isn&#x27;t much different than 2d.</text></comment> |
10,460,822 | 10,459,919 | 1 | 2 | 10,457,099 | train | <story><title>Prison Architect, a gaming crowdfunding success story</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/prison_architect_s_crowdfunding_proves_the_kickstarter_model_for_video_games.single.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Chathamization</author><text>Not just the economic aspect, but the game aspect. Board games and role-playing games have been around much longer, and aren&#x27;t considered art (and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any push for them to be considered as such).</text></item><item><author>Kalium</author><text>Games are frequently something that most instances of arts culture struggle with - commercial. This means that trying to treat games as artistic artifacts, made of beauty and aesthetics, free of the drudgery of economics, is a misguided thing at best.<p>Games are not generally produced as solely artistic works. The economic aspect is significant. Attempting to discuss and critique games as solely artistic artifacts means missing one of largest influences on any such artifact. It&#x27;s like discussing architecture without admitting that materials and physics and humans impose limits.</text></item><item><author>tailgate</author><text>Games are sadly just on the cusp of developing a true arts culture - but we have yet to move out of the consumer mentality, where the only value of a game is if you were entertained by it at your most base level. It also doesn&#x27;t help that a lot of internet commentators can&#x27;t distinguish between someone criticizing something they like and personal attacks.</text></item><item><author>the_af</author><text>A bit of an off-topic rant, but:<p>I think the author is wrong to dismiss Ian Bogost&#x27;s article as &quot;as an opportunity to ignore gameplay in order to pontificate on race and show off the Foucault they read in college&quot;. The author is probably unfamiliar with Bogost, and also misunderstands that Bogost&#x27;s article in The Atlantic about <i>Prison Architect</i> isn&#x27;t a game review. I found the analysis of the game and how it relates to cultural perceptions of imprisonment in America (and the world, really) very interesting.<p>It&#x27;s political and it&#x27;s about games-as-culture. It&#x27;s not a shopping recommendation, and I think this is what the author of TFA misunderstood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lawtonfogle</author><text>I could definitely seem board games as art. As for RPGs, the books themselves are art as are the stories produced. A given session of play would also be art; akin to some kind of improv&#x2F;acting, though not done with any thought given to an outside viewer. As for the system of rules... that one I&#x27;m left unsure of but it may be art in a same way some see elegant code as art.</text></comment> | <story><title>Prison Architect, a gaming crowdfunding success story</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/prison_architect_s_crowdfunding_proves_the_kickstarter_model_for_video_games.single.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Chathamization</author><text>Not just the economic aspect, but the game aspect. Board games and role-playing games have been around much longer, and aren&#x27;t considered art (and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any push for them to be considered as such).</text></item><item><author>Kalium</author><text>Games are frequently something that most instances of arts culture struggle with - commercial. This means that trying to treat games as artistic artifacts, made of beauty and aesthetics, free of the drudgery of economics, is a misguided thing at best.<p>Games are not generally produced as solely artistic works. The economic aspect is significant. Attempting to discuss and critique games as solely artistic artifacts means missing one of largest influences on any such artifact. It&#x27;s like discussing architecture without admitting that materials and physics and humans impose limits.</text></item><item><author>tailgate</author><text>Games are sadly just on the cusp of developing a true arts culture - but we have yet to move out of the consumer mentality, where the only value of a game is if you were entertained by it at your most base level. It also doesn&#x27;t help that a lot of internet commentators can&#x27;t distinguish between someone criticizing something they like and personal attacks.</text></item><item><author>the_af</author><text>A bit of an off-topic rant, but:<p>I think the author is wrong to dismiss Ian Bogost&#x27;s article as &quot;as an opportunity to ignore gameplay in order to pontificate on race and show off the Foucault they read in college&quot;. The author is probably unfamiliar with Bogost, and also misunderstands that Bogost&#x27;s article in The Atlantic about <i>Prison Architect</i> isn&#x27;t a game review. I found the analysis of the game and how it relates to cultural perceptions of imprisonment in America (and the world, really) very interesting.<p>It&#x27;s political and it&#x27;s about games-as-culture. It&#x27;s not a shopping recommendation, and I think this is what the author of TFA misunderstood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vaskivo</author><text>[EDIT] Why is my parent being downvoted? It is a legitimate question, and we should try to answer it.<p>Yet there are a lot of board and roleplaying games pushing their boundaries regarding theme and mechanics:<p>You have boardgames exploring difficult themes (Train[0]) and others being defined as they are played (Fluxx[1])<p>On RPGs, You can have rpgs about simple themes as being a housecat (Cat RPG[2]) or serious one like rape and domestic violence[3]. In terms of mechanics, there is Dread[4], a horror game that uses a Jenga tower instead of dice.<p>There is no push to be considered art, but there are folks doing some really cool stuff with the medium.<p>What is happenning with videogames is that there are people who thing &quot;videogames should grow up&quot; and &quot;stop playing around&quot;. That, in my opinion, is stupid. You don&#x27;t tell a 15 years kid to &quot;grow up&quot;. It will come out naturally. KLEt games mature on their own.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.wsj.com&#x2F;speakeasy&#x2F;2009&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;can-you-make-a-board-game-about-the-holocaust-meet-train&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.wsj.com&#x2F;speakeasy&#x2F;2009&#x2F;06&#x2F;24&#x2F;can-you-make-a-boa...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fluxx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fluxx</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnwickpresents.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;cat-a-little-game-about-little-heroes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnwickpresents.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;cat-a-little-game-about-...</a><p>[3] sorry, the internet failed me :(<p>[4]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreadthegame.wordpress.com&#x2F;about-dread-the-game&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreadthegame.wordpress.com&#x2F;about-dread-the-game&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
33,809,312 | 33,809,553 | 1 | 2 | 33,801,973 | train | <story><title>The Casino-Chip Society</title><url>https://brettscott.substack.com/p/casino-chip-cashless-society</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmeacham98</author><text>This article is bad, and contains several falsehoods, but the worst one is about fractional reserve banking:<p>&gt; banks are able to issue out far more digital chips than they have in a state money ‘behind the counter’<p>&gt; Imagine a person arriving a casino with no money but requesting chips nevertheless - this is pretty much what happens when someone approaches a bank and asks for a loan.<p>This is just completely wrong - banks only loan out money they have. If you go to a bank and get a loan the bank didn&#x27;t just edit a database entry - they had that money. Banks loaning out money they don&#x27;t have is extremely illegal.<p>The reason that banks &quot;&quot;create&quot;&quot; money is because when you loan money it &quot;&quot;duplicates&quot;&quot; it. You don&#x27;t have to go through a bank to see this in action: Alice loans Bob $20 and then Bob goes and loans $20 to Charlie. The world now has $40 &quot;more&quot; in it, and remains that way until the loan is settled. Banks just do this process with your money and pay you interest for the privilege.<p>This is the reason that banks are sometimes required to keep some percentage of their money in reserve (and thus where the name fractional reserve banking comes from), because otherwise the same money could be loaned out forever and the maximum money supply would be infinite.<p>=======<p>EDIT: Because everybody seems to be ready to link the same Bank of England paper.<p>Yes, this is an simplified and slightly incorrect model of how it works in real life. In reality, this process is asynchronous: the government gives banks permission to loan out the money _now_ and figure out the backing cash later.<p>They don&#x27;t have to keep track of who&#x27;s money is loaned out to who as long as the balance sheet works out at the end of the day, and some percentage of assets are kept in liquid form (I believe it&#x27;s something like 4%-5% in the US).<p>In the end, the point is the same: the government controls the creation of money, even if banks are the agents by which they do so.<p>The analogy the author has of a casino just going into debt by creating chips out of thin air is inaccurate and extremely misleading.<p>If everybody were to claim their chips, the casino would go bankrupt. If everybody were to simultaneously pay off their loans and withdraw their money from the banks, the banks would be fine (and have the interest payments they collected left over).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>milderworkacc</author><text>&gt; This is just completely wrong - banks only loan out money they have. If you go to a bank and get a loan the bank didn&#x27;t just edit a database entry - they had that money. Banks loaning out money they don&#x27;t have is extremely illegal.<p>I&#x27;m afraid to say that <i>this</i> is completely wrong. Commercial banks do in fact create money via lending! The 101 textbook explanation offered here is at best outdated and at worst misleadingly perpetuates a myth that simply must die.<p>The Bank of England&#x27;s note on money creation in the modern economy [0] is the place to start - and more or less reflects the explanation in the article.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankofengland.co.uk&#x2F;quarterly-bulletin&#x2F;2014&#x2F;q1&#x2F;money-creation-in-the-modern-economy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankofengland.co.uk&#x2F;quarterly-bulletin&#x2F;2014&#x2F;q1&#x2F;m...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Casino-Chip Society</title><url>https://brettscott.substack.com/p/casino-chip-cashless-society</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmeacham98</author><text>This article is bad, and contains several falsehoods, but the worst one is about fractional reserve banking:<p>&gt; banks are able to issue out far more digital chips than they have in a state money ‘behind the counter’<p>&gt; Imagine a person arriving a casino with no money but requesting chips nevertheless - this is pretty much what happens when someone approaches a bank and asks for a loan.<p>This is just completely wrong - banks only loan out money they have. If you go to a bank and get a loan the bank didn&#x27;t just edit a database entry - they had that money. Banks loaning out money they don&#x27;t have is extremely illegal.<p>The reason that banks &quot;&quot;create&quot;&quot; money is because when you loan money it &quot;&quot;duplicates&quot;&quot; it. You don&#x27;t have to go through a bank to see this in action: Alice loans Bob $20 and then Bob goes and loans $20 to Charlie. The world now has $40 &quot;more&quot; in it, and remains that way until the loan is settled. Banks just do this process with your money and pay you interest for the privilege.<p>This is the reason that banks are sometimes required to keep some percentage of their money in reserve (and thus where the name fractional reserve banking comes from), because otherwise the same money could be loaned out forever and the maximum money supply would be infinite.<p>=======<p>EDIT: Because everybody seems to be ready to link the same Bank of England paper.<p>Yes, this is an simplified and slightly incorrect model of how it works in real life. In reality, this process is asynchronous: the government gives banks permission to loan out the money _now_ and figure out the backing cash later.<p>They don&#x27;t have to keep track of who&#x27;s money is loaned out to who as long as the balance sheet works out at the end of the day, and some percentage of assets are kept in liquid form (I believe it&#x27;s something like 4%-5% in the US).<p>In the end, the point is the same: the government controls the creation of money, even if banks are the agents by which they do so.<p>The analogy the author has of a casino just going into debt by creating chips out of thin air is inaccurate and extremely misleading.<p>If everybody were to claim their chips, the casino would go bankrupt. If everybody were to simultaneously pay off their loans and withdraw their money from the banks, the banks would be fine (and have the interest payments they collected left over).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thewanderer1983</author><text>I don&#x27;t mean to be rude. I really like Hacker news. It&#x27;s a great place to get a wide range of interesting posts with a technology focus, and great talking points from people who have specialization within these areas. It reminds me of the early days of slashdot and even digg. However, it frequently falls short when it moves into areas outside of this. Especially when it&#x27;s finance or fintech related fields. I think too many people here are well regarded in their tech field and think whatever thoughts they have on areas outside their lane is wisdom, even if they haven&#x27;t spent much thinking of or gaining much knowledge in said field.</text></comment> |
8,895,171 | 8,895,099 | 1 | 2 | 8,894,874 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk Will Build a Hyperloop Track for Ultra-High Speed Transport Tests</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/elon-musk-will-build-a-hyperloop-track-for-ultra-high-speed-transport-tests/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grecy</author><text>I&#x27;m excited that Elon is taking steps to make this happen.<p>Is it a good idea? will it work? will it be as cheap as his team estimated? will it be safe? Will people want to ride it? Will terrorists blow it up? Will earthquakes tear it apart? Will it make enough solar power to be self-sustaining?<p>Nobody knows for certain the answers to those and ten million other questions.<p>Elon is forging ahead to find out - rather that sitting around nay-saying.<p>Bravo. I wish there were more people in the world like this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk Will Build a Hyperloop Track for Ultra-High Speed Transport Tests</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/elon-musk-will-build-a-hyperloop-track-for-ultra-high-speed-transport-tests/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saturdayplace</author><text>As far as I can tell, this tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555803747792609280" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;555803747792609280</a> is the only thing he&#x27;s said about it at the moment.<p>Looks like he&#x27;s also planning on having an annual pod-racing competition: <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/555804403504918528" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;555804403504918528</a></text></comment> |
27,112,282 | 27,111,443 | 1 | 3 | 27,107,820 | train | <story><title>Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis</title><url>https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>olivermarks</author><text>A lot of the reason for these design trends is that no one has the courage to think differently, so you get huge numbers of companies all looking virtually identical.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like &#x27;nobody gets fired for buying IBM&#x2F;McKinsey&#x27; etc...no one challenges product managers and marketing when yet another adobe illustrator generated Memphis style brand identity &amp; UI is unveiled, complete with multi cultural inclusive visual banality. At some point this will suddenly be deader than an animated gif of a flame and the next trend will quickly become ubiquitous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joe_the_user</author><text><i>...no one has the courage to think differently...</i><p>Almost no ordinary company wants to present themselves as wholly bizarre and strange. Many companies want to present themselves as basically normal but with a few interesting quirks and affections. Getting that balance right is hard, so you get the system that the article describes; it lets a variety of organizations appear slightly different in more or less the same way.<p>People manage &quot;coolness&quot; effectively for upward mobility integrate the unusual into something that&#x27;s mostly mainstream - have a leather jacket or a quirky haircut or whatever. I&#x27;ll spend time at industrial music festivals where no one expects to get but that&#x27;s a decision and not the sort that anyone should expect a business to make.<p>(also, you&#x27;d do well to avoid the multiculturalism issue)</text></comment> | <story><title>Why does every advert look the same? Corporate Memphis</title><url>https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>olivermarks</author><text>A lot of the reason for these design trends is that no one has the courage to think differently, so you get huge numbers of companies all looking virtually identical.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like &#x27;nobody gets fired for buying IBM&#x2F;McKinsey&#x27; etc...no one challenges product managers and marketing when yet another adobe illustrator generated Memphis style brand identity &amp; UI is unveiled, complete with multi cultural inclusive visual banality. At some point this will suddenly be deader than an animated gif of a flame and the next trend will quickly become ubiquitous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lwhi</author><text>I think it&#x27;s more ultitarian than that. Companies have traditionally got what they need by using these conventions.<p>Hopefully that will change, because it sure is boring.</text></comment> |
10,977,761 | 10,977,565 | 1 | 2 | 10,974,929 | train | <story><title>Disabling npm's progress bar yields a 2x npm install speed improvement</title><url>https://twitter.com/gavinjoyce/status/691773956144119808</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbell</author><text>I agree, but I&#x27;m curious what other build systems have a lock file?<p>Ruby does through bundler, who else does this right? I can&#x27;t think of any.</text></item><item><author>juandazapata</author><text>That&#x27;s frustrating, I got bitten by that a couple of times. I&#x27;m wondering when will they add a LOCKFILE like every other build system out there :&#x27;(</text></item><item><author>yunong</author><text>Even more important, npm doesn&#x27;t reliably reproduce builds. Different runs of the same shrinkwrapped build could either fail or succeed -- which is odd given that builds should be deterministic. Additionally, shrinkwrap is also broken in the same way.<p>This is the first time I&#x27;ve heard of ied, a little competition could go a long way!</text></item><item><author>untog</author><text>Progress bar or not, npm has gotten extremely slow with v3, to the extent that someone is working on a performance-centered alternative called ied:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gugel.io&#x2F;ied&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gugel.io&#x2F;ied&#x2F;</a><p>installs are literally the #1 thing npm needs to do well, and I really hope we see some improvement soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbeta</author><text>You get a similar effect for free with any language whose community defaults to non-floating transitive dependencies, e.g most JVM languages.</text></comment> | <story><title>Disabling npm's progress bar yields a 2x npm install speed improvement</title><url>https://twitter.com/gavinjoyce/status/691773956144119808</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbell</author><text>I agree, but I&#x27;m curious what other build systems have a lock file?<p>Ruby does through bundler, who else does this right? I can&#x27;t think of any.</text></item><item><author>juandazapata</author><text>That&#x27;s frustrating, I got bitten by that a couple of times. I&#x27;m wondering when will they add a LOCKFILE like every other build system out there :&#x27;(</text></item><item><author>yunong</author><text>Even more important, npm doesn&#x27;t reliably reproduce builds. Different runs of the same shrinkwrapped build could either fail or succeed -- which is odd given that builds should be deterministic. Additionally, shrinkwrap is also broken in the same way.<p>This is the first time I&#x27;ve heard of ied, a little competition could go a long way!</text></item><item><author>untog</author><text>Progress bar or not, npm has gotten extremely slow with v3, to the extent that someone is working on a performance-centered alternative called ied:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gugel.io&#x2F;ied&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gugel.io&#x2F;ied&#x2F;</a><p>installs are literally the #1 thing npm needs to do well, and I really hope we see some improvement soon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sync</author><text>Mix, Erlang&#x27;s package manager (used by Phoenix &#x2F; Elixir)<p>Cargo, Rust&#x27;s package manager<p>Meteor</text></comment> |
10,522,825 | 10,521,004 | 1 | 2 | 10,520,639 | train | <story><title>24/192 music downloads make no sense</title><url>http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It&#x27;s ruining everything, I&#x27;d say. Heck, I&#x27;m sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality.<p>Recommended reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loudness_war" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loudness_war</a><p>edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beat</author><text>I&#x27;ve played acoustic and electric instruments for over 30 years, and recorded numerous albums.<p>Compression is the <i>best</i> tool we have for accurately reproducing the musicality and emotion of a musical performance. Without compression, most recordings would be unlistenable.<p>Don&#x27;t confuse the foolishness of the loudness wars for &quot;compression is bad&quot;. That&#x27;s like saying the internet is bad because there&#x27;s porn on it.</text></comment> | <story><title>24/192 music downloads make no sense</title><url>http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It&#x27;s ruining everything, I&#x27;d say. Heck, I&#x27;m sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality.<p>Recommended reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loudness_war" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Loudness_war</a><p>edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hammock</author><text>Dynamic range compression is an important part of the aesthetic of pop music today, like it or not. Pop hits don&#x27;t sound the same without it. For this reason (unaffected by normalization on itunes&#x2F;youtube) it will be slow to go away.</text></comment> |
34,657,502 | 34,656,954 | 1 | 2 | 34,654,809 | train | <story><title>Open Assistant: Conversational AI for Everyone</title><url>https://open-assistant.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naasking</author><text>&gt; it is frustrating to be blocked from doing a lot of research in this space due to computational<p>Do we need a SETI@home-like project to distribute the
training computation across many volunteers so we can all benefit from the trained model?</text></item><item><author>chriskanan</author><text>I&#x27;m really excited about this project and I think it could be really disruptive. It is organized by LAION, the same folks who curated the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion.<p>My understanding of the plan is to fine-tune an existing large language model, trained with self-supervised learning on a very large corpus of data, using reinforcement learning from human feedback, which is the same method used in ChatGPT. Once the dataset they are creating is available, though, perhaps better methods can be rapidly developed as it will democratize the ability to do basic research in this space. I&#x27;m curious regarding how much more limited the systems they are planning to build will be compared to ChatGPT, since they are planning to make models with far less parameters to deploy them on much more modest hardware than ChatGPT.<p>As an AI researcher in academia, it is frustrating to be blocked from doing a
lot of research in this space due to computational constraints and a lack of the required data. I&#x27;m teaching a class this semester on self-supervised and generative AI methods, and it will be fun to let students play around with this in the future.<p>Here is a video about the Open Assistant effort: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Izfm24FKA">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Izfm24FKA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zone411</author><text>Long story short, training requires intensive device-to-device communication. Distributed training is possible in theory but so inefficient that it&#x27;s not worth it. Here is a new paper that looks to be the most promising approach yet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2301.11913" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2301.11913</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Open Assistant: Conversational AI for Everyone</title><url>https://open-assistant.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naasking</author><text>&gt; it is frustrating to be blocked from doing a lot of research in this space due to computational<p>Do we need a SETI@home-like project to distribute the
training computation across many volunteers so we can all benefit from the trained model?</text></item><item><author>chriskanan</author><text>I&#x27;m really excited about this project and I think it could be really disruptive. It is organized by LAION, the same folks who curated the dataset used to train Stable Diffusion.<p>My understanding of the plan is to fine-tune an existing large language model, trained with self-supervised learning on a very large corpus of data, using reinforcement learning from human feedback, which is the same method used in ChatGPT. Once the dataset they are creating is available, though, perhaps better methods can be rapidly developed as it will democratize the ability to do basic research in this space. I&#x27;m curious regarding how much more limited the systems they are planning to build will be compared to ChatGPT, since they are planning to make models with far less parameters to deploy them on much more modest hardware than ChatGPT.<p>As an AI researcher in academia, it is frustrating to be blocked from doing a
lot of research in this space due to computational constraints and a lack of the required data. I&#x27;m teaching a class this semester on self-supervised and generative AI methods, and it will be fun to let students play around with this in the future.<p>Here is a video about the Open Assistant effort: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Izfm24FKA">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=64Izfm24FKA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>8f2ab37a-ed6c</author><text>That&#x27;s brilliant, I would love to spare compute cycles and network on my devices for this if there&#x27;s an open source LLM on the other side that I can use in my own projects, or commercially.<p>Doesn&#x27;t feel like there&#x27;s much competition for ChatGPT at this point otherwise, which can&#x27;t be good.</text></comment> |
28,195,791 | 28,192,654 | 1 | 2 | 28,190,481 | train | <story><title>Reining in the thundering herd: Getting to 80% CPU utilization with Django</title><url>https://blog.clubhouse.com/reining-in-the-thundering-herd-with-django-and-gunicorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Tangent, but I always had a different understanding of the “thundering herd” problem; that is, if a service is down for whatever reason, and it’s brought back online, it immediately grinds to a halt again because there are a bazillion requests waiting to be handled.<p>And the solution to this problem is to slowly, rate-limited, bring the service back online, rather than letting the whole thundering herd go through the door immediately.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>That&#x27;s really not the traditional meaning of thundering herd, which is about waking up all the processes when a connection comes in, then they all try to accept it and it&#x27;s a lot of work for nothing. You get much better results if only a single process is woken up for each event.<p>Your problem is a real problem though. Where I worked, we would call that backlog, and we would manage it with &#x27;floodgates&#x27; ... When the system is broken, close the gates, and you need to open them slowly.<p>In an ideal world, your system would self-regulate from dead to live, shedding load as necessary, but always making headway. But sometimes a little help is needed to avoid the feedback loop of timed out client requests that still get processed on the server keeping the server in overload.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reining in the thundering herd: Getting to 80% CPU utilization with Django</title><url>https://blog.clubhouse.com/reining-in-the-thundering-herd-with-django-and-gunicorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Tangent, but I always had a different understanding of the “thundering herd” problem; that is, if a service is down for whatever reason, and it’s brought back online, it immediately grinds to a halt again because there are a bazillion requests waiting to be handled.<p>And the solution to this problem is to slowly, rate-limited, bring the service back online, rather than letting the whole thundering herd go through the door immediately.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ozzie_osman</author><text>Yea you are right. It could be a service being down and requests piling up, or a cache key expiring and many processes trying to regenerate the value at the same time, etc.<p>I think the article just used this phrase to describe something else. (Great article otherwise).</text></comment> |
20,534,962 | 20,533,710 | 1 | 2 | 20,532,763 | train | <story><title>Mozilla debuts implementation of WebThings Gateway open-source router firmware</title><url>https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/25/mozilla-debuts-webthings-gateway-open-source-router-firmware-for-turris-omnia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>This the closest we have so far to an answer to the point raised in the IETF 105 Technical Plenary a few days ago.<p>Encrypting everything means that IoT devices represent an unknown threat - your &quot;smart&quot; TV connects to Sourceforge and downloads... something every week. What for? Your &quot;smart&quot; thermostat calls the IP of the vendor, maybe to get firmware updates, but it also calls the Disney corporation - what for? You can&#x27;t snoop any of this because it&#x27;s using encryption with pinned keys, so MITM doesn&#x27;t work. Obviously hardcore reverse engineering is possible, but it&#x27;s extremely expensive. So in practice it won&#x27;t get done.<p>But, if we can popularize a safe option, we can just flag all the unsafe approaches that are popular today. We can teach vendors that this is a bad idea and they shouldn&#x27;t do it, and (cross fingers) it might go away, like X-ray shoe sizing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>degenerate</author><text>I was fascinated by your X-ray example. Here&#x27;s a link for others: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Mozilla debuts implementation of WebThings Gateway open-source router firmware</title><url>https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/25/mozilla-debuts-webthings-gateway-open-source-router-firmware-for-turris-omnia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>This the closest we have so far to an answer to the point raised in the IETF 105 Technical Plenary a few days ago.<p>Encrypting everything means that IoT devices represent an unknown threat - your &quot;smart&quot; TV connects to Sourceforge and downloads... something every week. What for? Your &quot;smart&quot; thermostat calls the IP of the vendor, maybe to get firmware updates, but it also calls the Disney corporation - what for? You can&#x27;t snoop any of this because it&#x27;s using encryption with pinned keys, so MITM doesn&#x27;t work. Obviously hardcore reverse engineering is possible, but it&#x27;s extremely expensive. So in practice it won&#x27;t get done.<p>But, if we can popularize a safe option, we can just flag all the unsafe approaches that are popular today. We can teach vendors that this is a bad idea and they shouldn&#x27;t do it, and (cross fingers) it might go away, like X-ray shoe sizing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eb0la</author><text>&gt; if we can popularize a safe option, we can just flag all the unsafe approaches<p>I am not a lawyer, but I think under european privacy laws those approaches are probably ilegal, too.<p>If some manufacturer (probably chinese) wants to grab data from people in Europe, they must comply with EU laws even if they don&#x27;t have an office in the EU.<p>Not beign able to sell to a huge market is probably a better tactique, but not the only one to use.</text></comment> |
33,784,791 | 33,784,304 | 1 | 2 | 33,779,720 | train | <story><title>The Buy and Hold Mindset</title><url>https://avc.com/2022/11/the-buy-and-hold-mindset/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csense</author><text>I&#x27;ve never understood real estate investing...<p>- You have to do a bunch of physical maintenance of the property and be on-call to unclog toilets<p>- You have to know landlord-tenant law inside and out, there are a lot of hidden gotchas that can get you sued for big money or even criminally prosecuted<p>- You have to see stuff that&#x27;s wrong with the property and understand how much you&#x27;ll need to fix it<p>- You have to know how to find all sorts of contractors who will do a good job and not rip you off<p>- You can&#x27;t invest in say the $500-$5000 range to get your feet wet at small scale, every property with any sort of building on it at all is like $50,000+, and building a brand-new house is even more expensive<p>- Enormous leverage seems to be the norm, and in most states, the bank doesn&#x27;t forgive debt that&#x27;s not covered by sale of the collateral (house)<p>- Anyone with enough money can do it, it&#x27;s a perfectly competitive market where it seems difficult to have any kind of edge over professional landlords or house flippers that have built a career in this area, have a lot of capital and a staff of full-time experts optimizing every aspect down to a science<p>- If I get on e.g. Zillow it says, &quot;Such-and-such property in location A is worth $X and such-and-such property in location B is worth $Y where Y = 3X&quot; and I say &quot;Wait why is it that? Y = 2X or Y = 4X also seems equally reasonable, heck Y = X or Y = 5X don&#x27;t seem unreasonable.&quot; I have no intuitive sense for what property value should be.<p>- Your investment&#x27;s locked up for a long time, it takes weeks &#x2F; months to sell real estate.<p>- In 2022, you&#x27;d be lucky if a computer from 2002 sells for maybe 5% - 10% of what it sold for in 2002. In 2022, you&#x27;re telling me a house sells for.. enough more (in real terms) than what it sold for in 2002 that it would have been a worthwhile investment despite now being 20 years old(er)? That feels like some kind of violation of whatever is the financial equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics<p>- You can do all your landlording right and still get screwed by tenants from hell.<p>For me, a stock and an investment property both yielding 6.4% are in no way equivalent. Given all the downsides, the ROI on property would need to be like 5-10 times as high for stocks for me to even consider it.. and that gets into too-good-to-be-true returns.<p>I know there are people who are experts in this area and people who say real estate&#x27;s a good investment. But I don&#x27;t understand real estate anywhere near well enough to put in the sums of money that seem to be required.</text></item><item><author>somethoughts</author><text>There&#x27;s also an unmentioned aspect to the real estate to stocks analogy. There is a spectrum in the types of real estate that is somewhat akin to the spectrum of value stocks to growth stocks to pure speculation based stocks.<p>There are income producing properties such as apartment buildings, duplexes, strip mall commercial real estate in average cities. These are similar to consumer staples stocks like P&amp;G, Walmart, utilities, etc. The income is generated via rent from reliable consumer demand. They are priced for boring cashflow (with high cap rates and low PE) but should endure.<p>There are reliable growth properties in trendy cities that are legitimately and secularly growing where future increases in rents are derived from rising local salaries and demand. These are like FAANMG stocks. They are priced for growth (i.e. low cap rates - high PE) - such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, Austin.<p>On the flip side of the spectrum, there is properties which are designed for speculation (and optionally money laundering) not based on any sort of rental income - almost like the physical manifestation of bitcoin. Think never unoccupied 3rd vacation homes in Miami and New York. These are like ARK ETFS or crypto coins - both do well in speculative times and see less growth when interest rates go up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>choeger</author><text>Seriously, what do you expect? Money doesn&#x27;t work. If you invest and want to turn an above-average profit, you need to put up something, be it knowledge, skills, or effort. As you said, owning a house requires a certain skillset, but that&#x27;s exactly where your money would come from.<p>So if you&#x27;re already in the construction business, or a real-estate lawyer, or simply have lots of experience and spare time, it&#x27;s a good choice. If you&#x27;re a software engineer who can&#x27;t tell drywall from masonry and simply wants to do a few mouse clicks to gain a passive income, it&#x27;s definitely not for you.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Buy and Hold Mindset</title><url>https://avc.com/2022/11/the-buy-and-hold-mindset/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csense</author><text>I&#x27;ve never understood real estate investing...<p>- You have to do a bunch of physical maintenance of the property and be on-call to unclog toilets<p>- You have to know landlord-tenant law inside and out, there are a lot of hidden gotchas that can get you sued for big money or even criminally prosecuted<p>- You have to see stuff that&#x27;s wrong with the property and understand how much you&#x27;ll need to fix it<p>- You have to know how to find all sorts of contractors who will do a good job and not rip you off<p>- You can&#x27;t invest in say the $500-$5000 range to get your feet wet at small scale, every property with any sort of building on it at all is like $50,000+, and building a brand-new house is even more expensive<p>- Enormous leverage seems to be the norm, and in most states, the bank doesn&#x27;t forgive debt that&#x27;s not covered by sale of the collateral (house)<p>- Anyone with enough money can do it, it&#x27;s a perfectly competitive market where it seems difficult to have any kind of edge over professional landlords or house flippers that have built a career in this area, have a lot of capital and a staff of full-time experts optimizing every aspect down to a science<p>- If I get on e.g. Zillow it says, &quot;Such-and-such property in location A is worth $X and such-and-such property in location B is worth $Y where Y = 3X&quot; and I say &quot;Wait why is it that? Y = 2X or Y = 4X also seems equally reasonable, heck Y = X or Y = 5X don&#x27;t seem unreasonable.&quot; I have no intuitive sense for what property value should be.<p>- Your investment&#x27;s locked up for a long time, it takes weeks &#x2F; months to sell real estate.<p>- In 2022, you&#x27;d be lucky if a computer from 2002 sells for maybe 5% - 10% of what it sold for in 2002. In 2022, you&#x27;re telling me a house sells for.. enough more (in real terms) than what it sold for in 2002 that it would have been a worthwhile investment despite now being 20 years old(er)? That feels like some kind of violation of whatever is the financial equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics<p>- You can do all your landlording right and still get screwed by tenants from hell.<p>For me, a stock and an investment property both yielding 6.4% are in no way equivalent. Given all the downsides, the ROI on property would need to be like 5-10 times as high for stocks for me to even consider it.. and that gets into too-good-to-be-true returns.<p>I know there are people who are experts in this area and people who say real estate&#x27;s a good investment. But I don&#x27;t understand real estate anywhere near well enough to put in the sums of money that seem to be required.</text></item><item><author>somethoughts</author><text>There&#x27;s also an unmentioned aspect to the real estate to stocks analogy. There is a spectrum in the types of real estate that is somewhat akin to the spectrum of value stocks to growth stocks to pure speculation based stocks.<p>There are income producing properties such as apartment buildings, duplexes, strip mall commercial real estate in average cities. These are similar to consumer staples stocks like P&amp;G, Walmart, utilities, etc. The income is generated via rent from reliable consumer demand. They are priced for boring cashflow (with high cap rates and low PE) but should endure.<p>There are reliable growth properties in trendy cities that are legitimately and secularly growing where future increases in rents are derived from rising local salaries and demand. These are like FAANMG stocks. They are priced for growth (i.e. low cap rates - high PE) - such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, LA, Austin.<p>On the flip side of the spectrum, there is properties which are designed for speculation (and optionally money laundering) not based on any sort of rental income - almost like the physical manifestation of bitcoin. Think never unoccupied 3rd vacation homes in Miami and New York. These are like ARK ETFS or crypto coins - both do well in speculative times and see less growth when interest rates go up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kodah</author><text>Owning a home takes a huge amount off of your taxes in the United States. This mainly applies to single people or people who don&#x27;t file with dependents as they&#x27;re taxed the most.<p>A home acts as a way to store and grow cash (mostly) securely. They also, generally, have higher than (stock) market rates of returns for the cash that you stuff in them. For instance, do a $50k kitchen renovation and that may entice a future buyer to buy at $100k more. There&#x27;s a lot of examples like this throughout the housing renovation industry. Some home renovations are going to net you nothing, but defer something negative. For instance, I had to install a Radon system in my home because radioactive gas was leaking out of the crust deep beneath my basement. I won&#x27;t get that $3k back <i>but</i> I won&#x27;t live in a radioactive container and future buyers won&#x27;t be scared off (rightfully so).<p>If you&#x27;re renting (since you mentioned landlords) the economics change a bit. You need the house to look nice but you either need it super-durable or inexpensive to repair. What usually happens is that a rented home gets a makeover that will put it squarely in the price the landlord wants per month. This is done as cheap as possible because a fair amount of tenants are radioactive and will destroy everything not nailed down.<p>If you&#x27;re selling your home after five years you may have some nominal value increase coupled with equity. For me, that amounted to about $35k on a $215k home. To replicate that in the markets you&#x27;d have to get involved in a life insurance plan that acts as a tax-free market account, which is significantly more complicated to manage. I know because I almost did it when I moved to California!<p>If you plan to stay in a house less than 5-8 years, I just wouldn&#x27;t buy. You&#x27;ll be somewhat upside down depending on your market.</text></comment> |
22,224,780 | 22,224,867 | 1 | 2 | 22,222,588 | train | <story><title>How to decrypt WhatsApp end-to-end media files</title><url>https://blog.erratasec.com/2020/01/how-to-decrypt-whatsapp-end-to-end.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>londons_explore</author><text>It&#x27;s possible the forensics experts couldn&#x27;t extract the video encryption key because the malware itself had decided to corrupt&#x2F;remove it.<p>It would make sense - if you&#x27;re distributing a (very expensive) zero day exploit to a target, you want to make sure that as soon as the exploit code runs and leaves the payload, the exploid code is removed and scrubbed, and any evidence of how the payload got there is hidden or removed. Deliberately changing the encryption key stored in whatsapps message database would be a good way to do that, as would locking down backups, usb ports, and generally things that make forensics difficult.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to decrypt WhatsApp end-to-end media files</title><url>https://blog.erratasec.com/2020/01/how-to-decrypt-whatsapp-end-to-end.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kdeldycke</author><text>Another tool which was posted on HN a couple of days ago to demonstrates how to decrypt encrypted media files downloaded from WhatsApp: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ddz&#x2F;whatsapp-media-decrypt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ddz&#x2F;whatsapp-media-decrypt</a></text></comment> |
33,233,127 | 33,232,014 | 1 | 3 | 33,230,402 | train | <story><title>How to build software like an SRE</title><url>https://www.willett.io/posts/precepts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rytis</author><text>&gt; Extremely strict RPC settings. I’m talking zero retries (or MAYBE one) [...]<p>I disagree. If we&#x27;re talking about distributed systems, then one thing is guaranteed - network is not going to be reliable. And if we have 10&#x27;s or 100&#x27;s of services, this policy means that at the smallest blip the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. If the concern is &quot;it&#x27;s hard to troubleshoot&quot;, well then perhaps implement better logging (&quot;connectivity to service X has been unreliable with X% failure rate over the last Xhrs&quot; instead of &quot;connection terminated&quot;, or no logging at all).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonhansel</author><text>The answer is to &quot;kick retries up the stack&quot;; when you fail to reach a service, you return a 503 and have <i>your</i> clients retry, to avoid a case where every service in the stack starts retrying all at once and causes a massive increase in traffic.<p>IMHO you should only add retries if it proves necessary <i>in practice</i> to reach your SLA, if you&#x27;re building something that isn&#x27;t itself triggered by an RPC, or if you&#x27;re performing an operation that can never be made idempotent.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to build software like an SRE</title><url>https://www.willett.io/posts/precepts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rytis</author><text>&gt; Extremely strict RPC settings. I’m talking zero retries (or MAYBE one) [...]<p>I disagree. If we&#x27;re talking about distributed systems, then one thing is guaranteed - network is not going to be reliable. And if we have 10&#x27;s or 100&#x27;s of services, this policy means that at the smallest blip the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. If the concern is &quot;it&#x27;s hard to troubleshoot&quot;, well then perhaps implement better logging (&quot;connectivity to service X has been unreliable with X% failure rate over the last Xhrs&quot; instead of &quot;connection terminated&quot;, or no logging at all).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saiya-jin</author><text>This particular concern costed some 10 folks 2 mandays per head last week across the globe and due to consequences of the issue got escalated to higher management.<p>Different topic a bit - messaging &amp; routing ecosystem working 10 years without flaw suddenly started exhibiting slowness and randomly would just stop, needing restart of client. We debugged like crazy, java messaging system by me on one end, Tibco ems system on the other. Tibco refused to help due to server being out of support (note for us&#x2F;US team). We had network guys on 13h call too, but they didn&#x27;t have as much experience with WANs.<p>After 2 days, they discovered some internal backbone network system between US and Switzerland just failed out of blue in the worst way possible - dropped some +-20% of the packets, so things kept chugging along somehow, till they didn&#x27;t (some Acks on transaction commits rarely didn&#x27;t happen and then all got blocked without a hint why).<p>2 lessons - don&#x27;t always doubt yourself and your skills when SHTF. And don&#x27;t take things like servers, OS, network for granted. Don&#x27;t expect some clever monitoring already in place will figure out issues for you.</text></comment> |
28,706,959 | 28,706,232 | 1 | 2 | 28,705,699 | train | <story><title>PostgreSQL 14</title><url>https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-14-released-2318/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hyper_reality</author><text>PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and reliable pieces of software I&#x27;ve seen run at large scale, major kudos to all the maintainers for the improvements that keep being added.<p>&gt; PostgreSQL 14 extends its performance gains to the vacuuming system, including optimizations for reducing overhead from B-Trees. This release also adds a vacuum &quot;emergency mode&quot; that is designed to prevent transaction ID wraparound<p>Dealing with transaction ID wraparounds in Postgres was one of the most daunting but fun experiences for me as a young SRE. Each time a transaction modifies rows in a PG database, it increments the transaction ID counter. This counter is stored as a 32-bit integer and it&#x27;s critical to the MVCC transaction semantics - a transaction with a higher ID should not be visible to a transaction with a lower ID. If the value hits 2 billion and wraps around, disaster strikes as past transactions now appear to be in the future. If PG detects it is reaching that point, it complains loudly and eventually stops further writes to the database to prevent data loss.<p>Postgres avoids getting anywhere close to this situation in almost all deployments by performing routine &quot;auto-vacuums&quot; which mark old row versions as &quot;frozen&quot; so they are no longer using up transaction ID slots. However, there are a couple situations where vacuum will not be able to clean up enough row versions. In our case, this was due to long-running transactions that consumed IDs but never finished. Also it is possible but highly inadvisable to disable auto-vacuums. Here is a postmortem from Sentry who had to deal with this leading to downtime: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;transaction-id-wraparound-...</a><p>It looks like the new vacuum &quot;emergency mode&quot; functionality starts vacuuming more aggressively when getting closer to the wraparound event, and as with every PG feature highly granular settings are exposed to tweak this behaviour (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;featurematrix&#x2F;detail&#x2F;360&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;featurematrix&#x2F;detail&#x2F;360&#x2F;</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; Also it is possible but highly inadvisable to disable auto-vacuums.<p>When I was running my first Postgres cluster (the reddit databases), I had no idea what vacuuming was for. All I knew was that every time it ran it slowed everything down. Being dumb, I didn&#x27;t bother to read the docs, I just disabled the auto vacuum.<p>Eventually writes stopped and I had to take a downtime to do a vacuum. Learned a few important lessons that day. I also then set it up to do an aggressive vacuum every day at 3am, which was the beginning of low traffic time, so that the auto-vacuuming didn&#x27;t have as much work to do during the day.</text></comment> | <story><title>PostgreSQL 14</title><url>https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-14-released-2318/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hyper_reality</author><text>PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and reliable pieces of software I&#x27;ve seen run at large scale, major kudos to all the maintainers for the improvements that keep being added.<p>&gt; PostgreSQL 14 extends its performance gains to the vacuuming system, including optimizations for reducing overhead from B-Trees. This release also adds a vacuum &quot;emergency mode&quot; that is designed to prevent transaction ID wraparound<p>Dealing with transaction ID wraparounds in Postgres was one of the most daunting but fun experiences for me as a young SRE. Each time a transaction modifies rows in a PG database, it increments the transaction ID counter. This counter is stored as a 32-bit integer and it&#x27;s critical to the MVCC transaction semantics - a transaction with a higher ID should not be visible to a transaction with a lower ID. If the value hits 2 billion and wraps around, disaster strikes as past transactions now appear to be in the future. If PG detects it is reaching that point, it complains loudly and eventually stops further writes to the database to prevent data loss.<p>Postgres avoids getting anywhere close to this situation in almost all deployments by performing routine &quot;auto-vacuums&quot; which mark old row versions as &quot;frozen&quot; so they are no longer using up transaction ID slots. However, there are a couple situations where vacuum will not be able to clean up enough row versions. In our case, this was due to long-running transactions that consumed IDs but never finished. Also it is possible but highly inadvisable to disable auto-vacuums. Here is a postmortem from Sentry who had to deal with this leading to downtime: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.sentry.io&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;transaction-id-wraparound-...</a><p>It looks like the new vacuum &quot;emergency mode&quot; functionality starts vacuuming more aggressively when getting closer to the wraparound event, and as with every PG feature highly granular settings are exposed to tweak this behaviour (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;featurematrix&#x2F;detail&#x2F;360&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;featurematrix&#x2F;detail&#x2F;360&#x2F;</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattashii</author><text>&gt; Each time a transaction modifies rows in a PG database, it increments the transaction ID counter.<p>It&#x27;s a bit more subtle than that: each transaction that modifies, deletes or locks rows will update the txID counter. Row updates don&#x27;t get their own txID assigned.<p>&gt; It looks like the new vacuum &quot;emergency mode&quot; functionality starts vacuuming more aggressively when getting closer to the wraparound<p>When close to wraparound, the autovacuum daemon stops cleaning up the vacuumed tables&#x27; indexes, yes. That saves time and IO, at the cost of index and some table bloat, but both are generally preferred over a system-blocking wraparound vacuum.</text></comment> |
37,338,963 | 37,338,027 | 1 | 3 | 37,336,013 | train | <story><title>Chandrayaan-3 confirms presence of sulfur and other elements on lunar South Pole</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/31/isros-chandrayaan-3-confirms-presence-of-sulfur-and-other-elements-on-lunar-south-pole/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perihelions</author><text>Was this written by a machine? It looks cogent, but its comprehension feels pretty off if you look closely. I.e. it refers to the bulk elements comprising lunar regolith – aluminum, oxygen, etc. – as &quot;traces&quot;. Or that odd line about &quot;faster than traditional sample returns&quot;.<p>Or <i>&quot;The instrument’s success highlights Chandrayaan-3’s potential for unlocking lunar secrets through creative engineering.&quot;</i> What??</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamal-kumar</author><text>Turns out when people try to write press release copy when English isn&#x27;t their first language it sounds kind of funny. I see this alot in my own line of work. Honestly they&#x27;re just making their best emulation of the kind of stodgy copy we tend to write in better english that&#x27;s honestly so samey you don&#x27;t even need AI to make it, you can just use a cheapo markov chain generator. [1] I use this for my lorem ipsum personally, fun to watch bosses actually try to read it.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pasta.phyrama.com:8083&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;live.exe" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pasta.phyrama.com:8083&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;live.exe</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Chandrayaan-3 confirms presence of sulfur and other elements on lunar South Pole</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/31/isros-chandrayaan-3-confirms-presence-of-sulfur-and-other-elements-on-lunar-south-pole/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perihelions</author><text>Was this written by a machine? It looks cogent, but its comprehension feels pretty off if you look closely. I.e. it refers to the bulk elements comprising lunar regolith – aluminum, oxygen, etc. – as &quot;traces&quot;. Or that odd line about &quot;faster than traditional sample returns&quot;.<p>Or <i>&quot;The instrument’s success highlights Chandrayaan-3’s potential for unlocking lunar secrets through creative engineering.&quot;</i> What??</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qingcharles</author><text>I don&#x27;t get that vibe from the article at all. And I deal with thousands of pages of AI content on a regular basis.</text></comment> |
14,547,515 | 14,547,151 | 1 | 2 | 14,545,825 | train | <story><title>Apple Mac computers targeted by ransomware and spyware</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40261693</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caseyohara</author><text>I use a Mac for work and personal, and I feel like I take the reasonable precautions to avoid malware&#x2F;ransomware&#x2F;spyware&#x2F;*ware (ex. prefer the App Store when possible, only download stuff from trusted sources, etc.) What more can I do to be safe? In 2017, is it recommended to use some kind of antivirus on a Mac? I&#x27;ve always been told it&#x27;s unnecessary, but it seems like nefarious software is becoming more commonplace on the Mac.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mayoff</author><text>Use a cloud-based backup service like BackBlaze or CrashPlan that saves old versions of your files. Since these backups are not connected like regular read-write hard drives, there should be no way for the ransomware to encrypt or delete the old versions.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Mac computers targeted by ransomware and spyware</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40261693</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caseyohara</author><text>I use a Mac for work and personal, and I feel like I take the reasonable precautions to avoid malware&#x2F;ransomware&#x2F;spyware&#x2F;*ware (ex. prefer the App Store when possible, only download stuff from trusted sources, etc.) What more can I do to be safe? In 2017, is it recommended to use some kind of antivirus on a Mac? I&#x27;ve always been told it&#x27;s unnecessary, but it seems like nefarious software is becoming more commonplace on the Mac.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jorvi</author><text>If you seek a heuristic way to prevent ransomware on Mac, RansomWhere[1] by Objective-See is awesome and free of charge. It constantly monitors the file system, and if it sees a sudden burst of encryption, will freeze the concerning process. Yes, you&#x27;ll &#x27;lose&#x27; at least a few files, but major loss is prevented. Obviously, you&#x27;ll need to turn it temporarily off if you want to do any legit encryption.
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;objective-see.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ransomwhere.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;objective-see.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ransomwhere.html</a></text></comment> |
34,404,095 | 34,402,175 | 1 | 3 | 34,378,985 | train | <story><title>New Sony Walkman music player</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/new-sony-walkman-music-players-feature-stunning-good-looks-android-12/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The best MP3 (and FLAC) player ever made is the Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox firmware.<p>$50 when new. Size of a matchbox -- not the car, the small thing that restaurants and bars used to hand out as advertising. MicroSD slot for storage. 20+ hours of playtime, recharged via USB. Appears as a USB Mass Storage device, too. 3.5mm headphone jack. Small 2-part monochrome OLED display. Physical buttons: D-pad, OK, Menu, power, and volume up and down. After a day you don&#x27;t need to look at it to pause&#x2F;play, skip a track, change the volume or turn it on and off.<p>With Rockbox installed (ten minute process), you can play FLAC, use a parametric equalizer, customize the display, change playback speed for audiobooks, and generally do a few dozen things more than the factory firmware.<p>Rockbox lets you do the same on a large number of devices, but the Clip+ is the best.</text></item><item><author>mg</author><text>I am a huge fan of standalone mp3-players.<p>So much so, that at some point I made a comparison site for mp3-players. But nobody cared. I made comparison sites for smartphones, laptops and monitors which became quite popular. But for mp3-players, it seemed like I am the only person on planet earth who uses them.<p>Personally, I still use a Sony Walkman NWZ-E585. For me, that is the best mp3 player ever made. It has a nice form factor, feels very good haptically, the navigation interface is ok, the sound quality is great, the noise cancelling too, and you can access the storage without having to install propriatery software on your computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>Yeah, the Clip+ with Rockbox was just incredible. Got me through a lot of workdays in the corporate &quot;no software allowed on your computer&quot; days.<p>I was using mine in the very early days of Android existing. Some people had them, but I didn&#x27;t yet. I got my first Android phone, moved my music over, and was ... massively disappointed. My favorite phone incident was sitting on some flight, trying to listen to music, and my phone wouldn&#x27;t play it through the headphones, speakers only, annoying everyone nearby. I didn&#x27;t listen to music on that flight and promptly switched back to a device that did not have a physical speaker.<p>Over time, phones rebuilt trust and I got a lot of use out of that, until Google Play Music got shut down and deleted all my music (no problem, I have it all locally). Now I have no idea what people do and simply go without. I guess people don&#x27;t have music libraries any more and just listen to the radio for $10&#x2F;month? No thanks. (I use foobar2000 on my desktop, and don&#x27;t listen to music away from my home anymore. Thanks technological progress?)</text></comment> | <story><title>New Sony Walkman music player</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/new-sony-walkman-music-players-feature-stunning-good-looks-android-12/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The best MP3 (and FLAC) player ever made is the Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox firmware.<p>$50 when new. Size of a matchbox -- not the car, the small thing that restaurants and bars used to hand out as advertising. MicroSD slot for storage. 20+ hours of playtime, recharged via USB. Appears as a USB Mass Storage device, too. 3.5mm headphone jack. Small 2-part monochrome OLED display. Physical buttons: D-pad, OK, Menu, power, and volume up and down. After a day you don&#x27;t need to look at it to pause&#x2F;play, skip a track, change the volume or turn it on and off.<p>With Rockbox installed (ten minute process), you can play FLAC, use a parametric equalizer, customize the display, change playback speed for audiobooks, and generally do a few dozen things more than the factory firmware.<p>Rockbox lets you do the same on a large number of devices, but the Clip+ is the best.</text></item><item><author>mg</author><text>I am a huge fan of standalone mp3-players.<p>So much so, that at some point I made a comparison site for mp3-players. But nobody cared. I made comparison sites for smartphones, laptops and monitors which became quite popular. But for mp3-players, it seemed like I am the only person on planet earth who uses them.<p>Personally, I still use a Sony Walkman NWZ-E585. For me, that is the best mp3 player ever made. It has a nice form factor, feels very good haptically, the navigation interface is ok, the sound quality is great, the noise cancelling too, and you can access the storage without having to install propriatery software on your computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperpl</author><text>I agree. There was something magical about these especially how good the sound quality is for its size and portability. I use mine at the gym and when running since you can barely feel it. It has a nice selection of apps too.<p>I&#x27;ve collected 3 over the years in case any of them die off. While the battery life is still good I should probably get around to researching replacement batteries&#x2F;cells while I still can.</text></comment> |
31,963,576 | 31,962,781 | 1 | 3 | 31,962,014 | train | <story><title>AWS Nuke – delete all resources associated with AWS account</title><url>https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orf</author><text>Shout out to AWS batch, where if you delete the role assigned to a compute cluster the cluster itself becomes impossible to delete.<p>Found this out after using AWS nuke</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggawatts</author><text>This is because neither AWS nor Azure use referential integrity in any of their &quot;cloud scale&quot; databases. For example, Azure uses some hideous JavaScript-based document DB where things like renames, moves, and deletes are hit &amp; miss at best. A never-ending whack-a-mole of bugs and issues.<p>Remember boys and girls: Being &quot;cloud scale&quot; means data corruption and referential integrity violation!</text></comment> | <story><title>AWS Nuke – delete all resources associated with AWS account</title><url>https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orf</author><text>Shout out to AWS batch, where if you delete the role assigned to a compute cluster the cluster itself becomes impossible to delete.<p>Found this out after using AWS nuke</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Marazan</author><text>Even better if you have your cloud formation with the iam role in the same stack and there is something wrong the the rollback can happen such that the iam role gets deleted standing the compute environment and failing the rollback.</text></comment> |
25,091,711 | 25,091,720 | 1 | 3 | 25,090,760 | train | <story><title>Files Are Fraught with Peril (2019)</title><url>https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>This situation is so terrible, and its embarrassing that despite decades of work, our industry doesn&#x27;t seem to be able to solve this problem in any modern operating system. (Edit: Apparently except for windows vista!)<p>It seems obvious to me that we need a transactional filesystem API with methods like:<p><pre><code> fbegin()
fwrite() &#x2F; rename &#x2F; etc
fcommit()
</code></pre>
Most of the write calls wouldn&#x27;t return errors directly. Then the fcommit() call would atomically flush the locally buffered changes to the filesystem. If an error happened, the API should guarantee that the final state either contains all changes or none of them. The commit call should either block the thread until changes are safely stored on disk, or use a completion callback. This API probably couldn&#x27;t span multiple filesystems, but thats fine in practice. And bonus points if the API supports snapshot reads within the transaction.<p>This would dramatically simplify the code in every program that wants to safely interact with the filesystem. And it would remove the perennial, justified anxiety database engineers carry that they&#x27;re doing something subtly wrong without even knowing. Because fsync() is so coarse, I suspect performance would <i>improve</i> with this API, too. (So long as the transactions are mostly small.)<p>But why don&#x27;t we have this API already? My theory is that kernel developers don&#x27;t write enough userspace software to understand how bad the status quo is. And most people writing software in userland don&#x27;t understand the kernel well enough to feel empowered to change it. Adding an API like this might also need changes in the filesystems.<p>But wow, it would be a huge boon to humanity to have a filesystem API which isn&#x27;t so braindead. How many more decades do we need to have our files corrupt by default when errors happen? I wince every time I&#x27;m playing a video game and it has that &quot;saving - don&#x27;t turn off your console!&quot; animation. Or during OS updates. Data corruption happens because we implemented the wrong abstractions 50 years ago and somehow forgot that code is mutable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the8472</author><text>&gt; Because fsync() is so coarse<p>You can do some work in advance with sync_file_range. fsync is still needed to write out the metadata, but it&#x27;ll have to do less work and you may be able to get better pacing and backpressure that way.<p>&gt; Then the fcommit() call would atomically flush the locally buffered changes to the filesystem. If an error happened, the API should guarantee that the final state either contains all changes or none of them.<p>Many existing filesystems simply cannot support such an API because they&#x27;re not journaling or CoW.
Another issue might be that multiple transactions could overlap and be of unbounded size, so now you would need MVCC, exclusive locking or the ability for the kernel to provide feedback to userspace that it will immediately rollback the transaction due to resource limits or conflicts. This suddenly looks more and more like a database than a posix filesystem.<p>There are many use-cases that don&#x27;t need such hard guarantees and want throughput, minimal overhead and latency instead. Lazy writes that the kernel can flush to disk whenever it feels like provide a lot of the performance that we take for granted when working with large amounts of data.<p>&gt; And it would remove the perennial, justified anxiety database engineers carry that they&#x27;re doing something subtly wrong without even knowing.<p>I think the postgres&#x2F;fsync error saga raised awareness of that and there were some proposals how to provide a better error channel to userspace.</text></comment> | <story><title>Files Are Fraught with Peril (2019)</title><url>https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>This situation is so terrible, and its embarrassing that despite decades of work, our industry doesn&#x27;t seem to be able to solve this problem in any modern operating system. (Edit: Apparently except for windows vista!)<p>It seems obvious to me that we need a transactional filesystem API with methods like:<p><pre><code> fbegin()
fwrite() &#x2F; rename &#x2F; etc
fcommit()
</code></pre>
Most of the write calls wouldn&#x27;t return errors directly. Then the fcommit() call would atomically flush the locally buffered changes to the filesystem. If an error happened, the API should guarantee that the final state either contains all changes or none of them. The commit call should either block the thread until changes are safely stored on disk, or use a completion callback. This API probably couldn&#x27;t span multiple filesystems, but thats fine in practice. And bonus points if the API supports snapshot reads within the transaction.<p>This would dramatically simplify the code in every program that wants to safely interact with the filesystem. And it would remove the perennial, justified anxiety database engineers carry that they&#x27;re doing something subtly wrong without even knowing. Because fsync() is so coarse, I suspect performance would <i>improve</i> with this API, too. (So long as the transactions are mostly small.)<p>But why don&#x27;t we have this API already? My theory is that kernel developers don&#x27;t write enough userspace software to understand how bad the status quo is. And most people writing software in userland don&#x27;t understand the kernel well enough to feel empowered to change it. Adding an API like this might also need changes in the filesystems.<p>But wow, it would be a huge boon to humanity to have a filesystem API which isn&#x27;t so braindead. How many more decades do we need to have our files corrupt by default when errors happen? I wince every time I&#x27;m playing a video game and it has that &quot;saving - don&#x27;t turn off your console!&quot; animation. Or during OS updates. Data corruption happens because we implemented the wrong abstractions 50 years ago and somehow forgot that code is mutable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>martinhath</author><text>This [0] mail from Linus might shed some light over this.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;2009&#x2F;3&#x2F;25&#x2F;632" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;2009&#x2F;3&#x2F;25&#x2F;632</a></text></comment> |
23,985,218 | 23,984,906 | 1 | 3 | 23,984,102 | train | <story><title>AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/15935/amd-reports-q2-2020-earnings-notebook-and-server-sales-drive-a-record-quarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mythz</author><text>Interesting to compare Q2 2020 results between Intel &amp; AMD:<p>Intel
Revenue: 19.7B, Net Income: 5.1B, Market Cap: 209.42B, P&#x2F;E: 9.06<p>AMD
Revenue: 1.93B, Net Income: 157M, Market Cap: 79.2B, P&#x2F;E: 133.82<p>But by the sentiment of all media reports INTC is in sharp decline &amp; AMD is killing it, yet even in their most recent results Intel revenue&#x2F;earnings still dwarfs AMD&#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WJW</author><text>1. It is possible to be bigger and still be in decline, that just indicates you had an even bigger lead before.<p>2. Everybody loves a good &quot;underdog takes over from the big bad empire in decline&quot; story, both the press and the commenting public. The stories about big companies absolutely crushing their competitors in quality are just not as interesting.<p>3. AMD can&#x27;t scale up as rapidly as a SAAS because fabs take a while to build. I&#x27;d wager Intel has (at least) five to ten years to come up with a good processor design before they get overtaken by AMD in sheer volume.<p>4. There are no doubt Chinese competitors with even lower sales and even higher P&#x2F;E and growth rate than AMD. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how that plays out.</text></comment> | <story><title>AMD Reports Q2 2020 Earnings</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/15935/amd-reports-q2-2020-earnings-notebook-and-server-sales-drive-a-record-quarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mythz</author><text>Interesting to compare Q2 2020 results between Intel &amp; AMD:<p>Intel
Revenue: 19.7B, Net Income: 5.1B, Market Cap: 209.42B, P&#x2F;E: 9.06<p>AMD
Revenue: 1.93B, Net Income: 157M, Market Cap: 79.2B, P&#x2F;E: 133.82<p>But by the sentiment of all media reports INTC is in sharp decline &amp; AMD is killing it, yet even in their most recent results Intel revenue&#x2F;earnings still dwarfs AMD&#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nokinside</author><text>Intel is 10 times larger than AMD.<p>AMD can&#x27;t ramp up the manufacturing volume it has from TSMC up quickly. TSMC builds capacity to match roughly what it is contracted for. I can just assume that any extra capacity they planned sells for a very good price.<p>Neither AMD nor TSMC can fully exploit Intel troubles because they can&#x27;t foresee what happens in Intel manufacturing. Intel is selling chips like hotcakes.<p>TL;DR Intel has high manufacturing volume and the ability to make money with less competitive product.</text></comment> |
39,618,070 | 39,618,277 | 1 | 2 | 39,612,443 | train | <story><title>Leaving LinkedIn</title><url>https://corecursive.com/leaving-linkedin-with-chris-krycho/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bgirard</author><text>&gt; Okay. Well, I can keep butting my head against this wall. I had conversations with that manager where I was told in literally so many words, ‘You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values.’ And I was like, no, nope, that’s not how this is going to work, man. Uh, outside I did the politic.<p>To me that&#x27;s the most interesting quote of the podcast and that&#x27;s the impression I had gotten before reading this quote. Sounds like they received valuable feedback along the way and ignored it on purpose.<p>My career lesson is that being right isn&#x27;t the hard part of being a senior staff engineer. Being right isn&#x27;t enough. It&#x27;s building alignment across the entire org towards the right solution. That&#x27;s the hard valuable problem that I&#x27;m paid to solve.<p>I worked on the facebook.com rewrite to React in 2019. I find this story particularly interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chriskrycho</author><text>There&#x27;s an element of truth to this! I alluded to this (and Adam totally reasonably cut even more of it for time) but I definitely was not as effective organizationally as I could have been; that is one of the major things I learned from my time at LinkedIn. The biggest challenge for DX teams remains figuring out how to (a) communicate but more importantly (b) <i>align</i> their work with the key priorities of the business. I got to be okay at (a) but never particularly succeeded at (b) in my time at LinkedIn. Some of that is on me! Some of it… is on LinkedIn.<p>That said, in this case, the person telling me “You’re too idealistic” literally meant it in the sense of “You should not care about <i>anything</i> unless it directly moves the bottom line,” and I reject that to my bones. The bottom line matters. So, though, do things like user experience, developer experience, and for that matter just basic ethics about what we build (though happily the latter wasn’t in view here).</text></comment> | <story><title>Leaving LinkedIn</title><url>https://corecursive.com/leaving-linkedin-with-chris-krycho/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bgirard</author><text>&gt; Okay. Well, I can keep butting my head against this wall. I had conversations with that manager where I was told in literally so many words, ‘You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values.’ And I was like, no, nope, that’s not how this is going to work, man. Uh, outside I did the politic.<p>To me that&#x27;s the most interesting quote of the podcast and that&#x27;s the impression I had gotten before reading this quote. Sounds like they received valuable feedback along the way and ignored it on purpose.<p>My career lesson is that being right isn&#x27;t the hard part of being a senior staff engineer. Being right isn&#x27;t enough. It&#x27;s building alignment across the entire org towards the right solution. That&#x27;s the hard valuable problem that I&#x27;m paid to solve.<p>I worked on the facebook.com rewrite to React in 2019. I find this story particularly interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ejb999</author><text>&gt;&gt;My career lesson is that being right isn&#x27;t the hard part of being a senior staff engineer.<p>Not only that, but your own definition of &#x27;right&#x27; may or may not align with what is &#x27;right&#x27; for the people paying your salary - pretending otherwise is just silly.<p>In any organization, you advocate for what you believe is &#x27;right&#x27; the best you can, someone else (or a consensus of others) will likely decide if they agree - you get to decide if you are willing to live with it&#x2F;compromise, or move on - I have done both in my career.</text></comment> |
28,070,267 | 28,069,711 | 1 | 3 | 28,068,542 | train | <story><title>Airyx OS</title><url>http://airyx.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>&gt; source compatibility with macOS applications (i.e. you could compile a Mac application on Airyx and run it)<p>Hard to see how this can be done legally. The libraries (sorry, Frameworks) that make up the user-space runtime for macOS are all proprietary. There&#x27;s no replacement for the most important parts of it.</text></item><item><author>3np</author><text>More information and motivation in the git repo[0], the link to which I didn&#x27;t spot easily in the site header.<p>The main design goals are:<p>* source compatibility with macOS applications (i.e. you could compile a Mac application on Airyx and run it)<p>* similar GUI metaphors and familiar UX (file manager, application launcher, top menu bar that reflects the open application, etc)<p>* compatible with macOS filesystems (HFS+ and APFS) and folder layouts (&#x2F;Library, &#x2F;System, &#x2F;Users, &#x2F;Volumes, etc)<p>* self-contained applications in folders or a single file and a (mostly) installer-less experience for &#x2F;Applications<p>* mostly maintain compatibility with the FreeBSD base system and X11 - a standard Unix environment under the hood<p>* compatible with Linux binaries via FreeBSD&#x27;s Linux support<p>* eventual compatibility with x86-64 macOS binaries (Mach-O) and libraries<p>* pleasant to use, secure, stable, and performant<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mszoek&#x2F;airyx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mszoek&#x2F;airyx</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3np</author><text>This is addressed in the README I linked to. Reimplementation of APIs is not legally sketchy. See Oracle vs Google.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;cases&#x2F;oracle-v-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;cases&#x2F;oracle-v-google</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...</a>.</text></comment> | <story><title>Airyx OS</title><url>http://airyx.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>&gt; source compatibility with macOS applications (i.e. you could compile a Mac application on Airyx and run it)<p>Hard to see how this can be done legally. The libraries (sorry, Frameworks) that make up the user-space runtime for macOS are all proprietary. There&#x27;s no replacement for the most important parts of it.</text></item><item><author>3np</author><text>More information and motivation in the git repo[0], the link to which I didn&#x27;t spot easily in the site header.<p>The main design goals are:<p>* source compatibility with macOS applications (i.e. you could compile a Mac application on Airyx and run it)<p>* similar GUI metaphors and familiar UX (file manager, application launcher, top menu bar that reflects the open application, etc)<p>* compatible with macOS filesystems (HFS+ and APFS) and folder layouts (&#x2F;Library, &#x2F;System, &#x2F;Users, &#x2F;Volumes, etc)<p>* self-contained applications in folders or a single file and a (mostly) installer-less experience for &#x2F;Applications<p>* mostly maintain compatibility with the FreeBSD base system and X11 - a standard Unix environment under the hood<p>* compatible with Linux binaries via FreeBSD&#x27;s Linux support<p>* eventual compatibility with x86-64 macOS binaries (Mach-O) and libraries<p>* pleasant to use, secure, stable, and performant<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mszoek&#x2F;airyx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mszoek&#x2F;airyx</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jhawk28</author><text>You would need to reverse engineer what the frameworks are supposed to do and provide new implementations. (You can see all their external APIs) This is what Google did with Java on Android. The courts currently view this as legal (Google v Oracle).</text></comment> |
2,736,514 | 2,736,429 | 1 | 2 | 2,736,257 | train | <story><title>Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t</title><url>http://blog.aaroniba.net/2011/07/06/a-lesson-from-my-ios-users-they-dont-teach-at-mit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>trentfowler</author><text>The author is one cocky guy. This article mostly annoyed me.<p>&#62;I figured that I, the author of the game, with my degree in mathematics from MIT, and years of puzzle-solving experience, would be much better at solving my own puzzles than random users downloading my app would be.<p>&#62;I thought there was a mistake because some users were solving puzzles faster than I was! Were they cheating?</text></comment> | <story><title>Users of my iOS Game Teach Me a Lesson MIT Didn’t</title><url>http://blog.aaroniba.net/2011/07/06/a-lesson-from-my-ios-users-they-dont-teach-at-mit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geuis</author><text>tldr: MIT doesn't teach everything. Author discovers rapid iteration, the value of throwing away code, and possibly source version control because users of his game solved it faster than he did with superior "logical" reasoning.</text></comment> |
14,505,243 | 14,505,317 | 1 | 2 | 14,505,070 | train | <story><title>Performance comparison between 2017 iPad Pro and 2012 iMac</title><url>http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=231758</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lorenzhs</author><text>It might make more sense to compare to a current-gen laptop, not a Desktop machine from five years ago: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;v4&#x2F;cpu&#x2F;compare&#x2F;3036382?baseline=3041332" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;v4&#x2F;cpu&#x2F;compare&#x2F;3036382?baseline...</a> (archive: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;EVcuE" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;EVcuE</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>Performance comparison between 2017 iPad Pro and 2012 iMac</title><url>http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/3036382?baseline=231758</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>There is an... interesting post by Linus Torvalds about GeekBench:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?threadid=136526&amp;curpostid=136666" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realworldtech.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;?threadid=136526&amp;curposti...</a><p>In other words, Linus claims it&#x27;s mainly testing the speed of specialised instructions implemented in hardware, and not general-purpose computing. For a similar analogy, compare the speed of a Bitcoin mining ASIC vs. a GPU or even a CPU. At the same clock speed, dedicated hardware will vastly outperform the software implementation.<p>I think it&#x27;s somewhat ironic then, that the &quot;RISC&quot; CPU is getting higher scores due to the presence of such CISC-y instructions.</text></comment> |
39,627,030 | 39,626,317 | 1 | 3 | 39,625,917 | train | <story><title>Fractional scales, fonts and hinting</title><url>https://blog.gtk.org/2024/03/07/on-fractional-scales-fonts-and-hinting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smallstepforman</author><text>Haiku OS in my opinion solves this better by basing everything on default font size (in pixels). Eg it defaults to 12px, I used 20px for a 3840x2160 monitor. Some GUI widgets scale based on this. All text (when using be_default_font) scale based on this. Spacing &#x2F; layout depends on this. The key difference (compared to a global x1.5 scaling factor) is that developers of each app decide how to use this information, so different parts of the GUI are scaled disproportionatily. Sloppy apps ignore this, but the devs are quickly notified. So you end up with text larger but GUI widgets can grow dis-proportionatily, so you can fine tune what is 125%, 150%, etc. Eg. ScrollBar can be 125%, toolbar 150%, text 233%. Haiku has had this since the beginning (even BeOS in the 90’s had this). By 2024, almost all non compliant apps have been fixed and support this.<p>What Haiku needs is font setting per screen&#x2F;resolution for multimonitor support. This way you can support mismatched monitors with different factors.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fractional scales, fonts and hinting</title><url>https://blog.gtk.org/2024/03/07/on-fractional-scales-fonts-and-hinting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>unwind</author><text>As a long-time developer against GTK (I started using it back in the 1.x days in the late 90s) this is really awesome to see.<p>I enjoyed the side-by-side comparisons of the old vs new renderer, and especially the idea of homing in on particular letters (&#x27;T&#x27; and &#x27;e&#x27;) and extracting them, that really made the improvement clear.<p>Cool stuff, and many thanks to the developers who keep pushing the GTK stack forwards.</text></comment> |
27,947,304 | 27,947,238 | 1 | 2 | 27,946,382 | train | <story><title>Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipaddr</author><text>That&#x27;s a junior approach thinking you know more than your pm and have no respect if they didn&#x27;t come from your ranks.<p>In the end if you are difficult you become easy to replace.</text></item><item><author>emptysongglass</author><text>&gt; And that&#x27;s why things like &quot;Agile&quot;, &quot;DevOps&quot;, etc will fail.<p>I completely disagree. Most team leads and technical managers where I&#x27;ve worked get promoted up from within a highly technical position. I wouldn&#x27;t have any respect for my team lead or my PM if they didn&#x27;t know what they were talking about.<p>If my PM is going to try to tell me that I should work on this feature over this other feature or I should implement it in this way over this other way do you really think I&#x27;m going to listen to them if it&#x27;s clear they have no idea what the implementation details are let alone the tools? Of course not.<p>I&#x27;m making DevOps happen and I do that by knowing the tools and practices. I&#x27;m being given the power I need to make it happen. I earn the respect every day I come in and write the code or identify the weaknesses we need to shore up to move faster.</text></item><item><author>throwaway290232</author><text>Agile is a generic umbrella term that involves a vast array of complex, subtle knowledge and skills. It&#x27;s like saying &quot;Engineer&quot;, or &quot;Chef&quot;. Each has a shared skillset, to be sure. But each category&#x27;s members can&#x27;t just work the same way at all jobs, and there&#x27;s no book on how to be an Engineer or Chef everywhere.<p>The Agile Manifesto is a failure at trying to make Agile happen because it can&#x27;t tell you how to make it happen, because it varies wildly. No manager can read a book on how to &quot;Agile-ify&quot; their org, they have to apply their brains and figure out how their specific version of &quot;Agile&quot; will work. But the skill-set required to do this is not a Managerial skill, it is a lower-level-worker skill. But it&#x27;s also a very <i>advanced</i> lower-level-worker skill.<p>And that&#x27;s why things like &quot;Agile&quot;, &quot;DevOps&quot;, etc will fail. People at the higher end have no clue how to make it happen, and people at the lower end who have an idea how to make it happen don&#x27;t have the power to make the organizational changes to do so. You need a way for the lower-end people to tell the higher-end people what to do, and have the higher-end people listen to them, and make the changes happen. This is very hard in a traditional organizational hierarchy, because higher-end people have big egos and bigger concerns over things like politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperman1</author><text>I&#x27;ll give 2 examples.<p>One was a CEO who hadn&#x27;t any technical background, but he knew what ICT could and could not do for his company.<p>One day we rewired all of our network, a massive weekend job. He was there, even if the only thing he could do was pulling network cables out of bags and straightening them. He saw who and what worked or not, he saw where we struggled even if he didn&#x27;t understand a word of our technical mumbo jumbo.<p>I found out he was always there on the ground for every major operation in his company, not only ICT. The result was he knew the company inside out. Nobody ever tried bullshitting him. I still have massive respect for him, years later.<p>Then there is exhibit B, a manager from the &#x27;you dont have to understand ICT to manage it&#x27; school. Everybody under him spends 3&#x2F;4 of the time in meetings or filing useless forms. Nobody dares touching important things, so hard decisions get pushed in the future. It happens urgent work needs doing and the only person capable of doing it sits twiddling thumbs as the spreadsheet says maximum team capacity has already been reached. He redefined the words &#x27;major incident&#x27; as there were to many under the old definition. His teams keep losing important members, everybody hates each other, work that should take 10 minutes takes months. But he always has a spreadsheet demonstrating it is not his fault.<p>I know who gets the respect.</text></comment> | <story><title>Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion</title><url>https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipaddr</author><text>That&#x27;s a junior approach thinking you know more than your pm and have no respect if they didn&#x27;t come from your ranks.<p>In the end if you are difficult you become easy to replace.</text></item><item><author>emptysongglass</author><text>&gt; And that&#x27;s why things like &quot;Agile&quot;, &quot;DevOps&quot;, etc will fail.<p>I completely disagree. Most team leads and technical managers where I&#x27;ve worked get promoted up from within a highly technical position. I wouldn&#x27;t have any respect for my team lead or my PM if they didn&#x27;t know what they were talking about.<p>If my PM is going to try to tell me that I should work on this feature over this other feature or I should implement it in this way over this other way do you really think I&#x27;m going to listen to them if it&#x27;s clear they have no idea what the implementation details are let alone the tools? Of course not.<p>I&#x27;m making DevOps happen and I do that by knowing the tools and practices. I&#x27;m being given the power I need to make it happen. I earn the respect every day I come in and write the code or identify the weaknesses we need to shore up to move faster.</text></item><item><author>throwaway290232</author><text>Agile is a generic umbrella term that involves a vast array of complex, subtle knowledge and skills. It&#x27;s like saying &quot;Engineer&quot;, or &quot;Chef&quot;. Each has a shared skillset, to be sure. But each category&#x27;s members can&#x27;t just work the same way at all jobs, and there&#x27;s no book on how to be an Engineer or Chef everywhere.<p>The Agile Manifesto is a failure at trying to make Agile happen because it can&#x27;t tell you how to make it happen, because it varies wildly. No manager can read a book on how to &quot;Agile-ify&quot; their org, they have to apply their brains and figure out how their specific version of &quot;Agile&quot; will work. But the skill-set required to do this is not a Managerial skill, it is a lower-level-worker skill. But it&#x27;s also a very <i>advanced</i> lower-level-worker skill.<p>And that&#x27;s why things like &quot;Agile&quot;, &quot;DevOps&quot;, etc will fail. People at the higher end have no clue how to make it happen, and people at the lower end who have an idea how to make it happen don&#x27;t have the power to make the organizational changes to do so. You need a way for the lower-end people to tell the higher-end people what to do, and have the higher-end people listen to them, and make the changes happen. This is very hard in a traditional organizational hierarchy, because higher-end people have big egos and bigger concerns over things like politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emptysongglass</author><text>My PM does know more than me. And he&#x27;s good at directing where the team should invest it&#x27;s efforts. That&#x27;s why he&#x27;s my PM.<p>You seem to have completely missed my point, which is that technical leads and PMs should have domain knowledge and that this is why DevOps is not in danger of failing at competent companies.</text></comment> |
20,022,444 | 20,021,223 | 1 | 3 | 20,019,874 | train | <story><title>On SQS</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/05/26/SQS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>I use Postgres SKIP LOCKED as a queue.<p>I used to use SQS but Postgres gives me everything I want. I can also do priority queueing and sorting.<p>I gave up on SQS when it couldn&#x27;t be accessed from a VPC. AWS might have fixed that now.<p>All the other queueing mechanisms I investigated were dramatically more complex and heavyweight than Postgres SKIP LOCKED.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewstuart</author><text>Here is a complete implementation:<p><pre><code> import psycopg2
import psycopg2.extras
import random
db_params = {
&#x27;database&#x27;: &#x27;jobs&#x27;,
&#x27;user&#x27;: &#x27;jobsuser&#x27;,
&#x27;password&#x27;: &#x27;superSecret&#x27;,
&#x27;host&#x27;: &#x27;127.0.0.1&#x27;,
&#x27;port&#x27;: &#x27;5432&#x27;,
}
conn = psycopg2.connect(**db_params)
cur = conn.cursor(cursor_factory=psycopg2.extras.DictCursor)
def do_some_work(job_data):
if random.choice([True, False]):
print(&#x27;do_some_work FAILED&#x27;)
raise Exception
else:
print(&#x27;do_some_work SUCCESS&#x27;)
def process_job():
sql = &quot;&quot;&quot;DELETE FROM message_queue
WHERE id = (
SELECT id
FROM message_queue
WHERE status = &#x27;new&#x27;
ORDER BY created ASC
FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED
LIMIT 1
)
RETURNING *;
&quot;&quot;&quot;
cur.execute(sql)
queue_item = cur.fetchone()
print(&#x27;message_queue says to process job id: &#x27;, queue_item[&#x27;target_id&#x27;])
sql = &quot;&quot;&quot;SELECT * FROM jobs WHERE id =%s AND status=&#x27;new_waiting&#x27; AND attempts &lt;= 3 FOR UPDATE;&quot;&quot;&quot;
cur.execute(sql, (queue_item[&#x27;target_id&#x27;],))
job_data = cur.fetchone()
if job_data:
try:
do_some_work(job_data)
sql = &quot;&quot;&quot;UPDATE jobs SET status = &#x27;complete&#x27; WHERE id =%s;&quot;&quot;&quot;
cur.execute(sql, (queue_item[&#x27;target_id&#x27;],))
except Exception as e:
sql = &quot;&quot;&quot;UPDATE jobs SET status = &#x27;failed&#x27;, attempts = attempts + 1 WHERE id =%s;&quot;&quot;&quot;
# if we want the job to run again, insert a new item to the message queue with this job id
cur.execute(sql, (queue_item[&#x27;target_id&#x27;],))
else:
print(&#x27;no job found, did not get job id: &#x27;, queue_item[&#x27;target_id&#x27;])
conn.commit()
process_job()
cur.close()
conn.close()</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>On SQS</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2019/05/26/SQS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>I use Postgres SKIP LOCKED as a queue.<p>I used to use SQS but Postgres gives me everything I want. I can also do priority queueing and sorting.<p>I gave up on SQS when it couldn&#x27;t be accessed from a VPC. AWS might have fixed that now.<p>All the other queueing mechanisms I investigated were dramatically more complex and heavyweight than Postgres SKIP LOCKED.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sorokod</author><text>Using SKIP LOCKED - do you commit the change to the dequeued item (ack it) at the point where you exit the DB call. If so what happens if the instance that dequeued the messages crashes?</text></comment> |
40,263,901 | 40,263,916 | 1 | 2 | 40,262,190 | train | <story><title>Judge mulls sanctions over Google's destruction of internal chats</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanctions-over-googles-shocking-destruction-of-internal-chats/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike_d</author><text>Everyone bitches about it when they first start and eventually learns a better way. The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge (design docs, documentation, commit&#x2F;review messages, etc) rather than trying to dig around in streams of consciousness hoping to find the bits of info you need later.</text></item><item><author>_huayra_</author><text>I haven&#x27;t worked at Google, so maybe there are better channels than &quot;chat that&#x27;s holding everything together&quot;, but I can&#x27;t imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful. I use it all the time to look up some random useful command a coworker told me long ago that I neglected to write down, for instance, or to follow up with a long-stale thread to revive it.<p>I suppose that&#x27;s what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that &quot;organizational glue&quot; in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?</text></item><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>This comment[1] provides a good explanation on why this analogy is absurd:<p>&gt; Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.<p>&gt; That is, Google&#x27;s theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don&#x27;t need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.<p>&gt; Which is....a.....theory!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35587100">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35587100</a></text></item><item><author>edarchis</author><text>&quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements.&quot;<p>They didn&#x27;t ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>This is such a Googler comment, because it applies to basically everything at the company. “Everyone hates this when they join, but eventually they’re enlightened of the better way to do things, and it’s all good.” Dude, no. People write docs about stuff they care about but nobody writes docs about the weird error they got once that they needed a workaround for or whether their internal tool is named after a Pokémon or their favorite food. Believe me, I worked there, it was a massive pain. To say nothing of sending your boss something at 4 PM on a Friday and it being as if you never messaged them when they opened their laptop on Monday.</text></comment> | <story><title>Judge mulls sanctions over Google's destruction of internal chats</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanctions-over-googles-shocking-destruction-of-internal-chats/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike_d</author><text>Everyone bitches about it when they first start and eventually learns a better way. The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge (design docs, documentation, commit&#x2F;review messages, etc) rather than trying to dig around in streams of consciousness hoping to find the bits of info you need later.</text></item><item><author>_huayra_</author><text>I haven&#x27;t worked at Google, so maybe there are better channels than &quot;chat that&#x27;s holding everything together&quot;, but I can&#x27;t imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful. I use it all the time to look up some random useful command a coworker told me long ago that I neglected to write down, for instance, or to follow up with a long-stale thread to revive it.<p>I suppose that&#x27;s what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that &quot;organizational glue&quot; in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?</text></item><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>This comment[1] provides a good explanation on why this analogy is absurd:<p>&gt; Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.<p>&gt; That is, Google&#x27;s theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don&#x27;t need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.<p>&gt; Which is....a.....theory!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35587100">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35587100</a></text></item><item><author>edarchis</author><text>&quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements.&quot;<p>They didn&#x27;t ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pyrale</author><text>&gt; The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge<p>In the case of Google, the culture was, explicitly, about destroying potential evidence of wrongdoing [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ia601707.us.archive.org&#x2F;28&#x2F;items&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.364454&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.364454.385.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ia601707.us.archive.org&#x2F;28&#x2F;items&#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.3...</a></text></comment> |
31,379,134 | 31,378,960 | 1 | 2 | 31,377,405 | train | <story><title>Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/coffeezilla-the-youtuber-exposing-crypto-scams</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>johnebgd</author><text>Blockchain has two proven use cases:<p>1.) Speculative investment assets.<p>2.) Moving value outside of a financial system.<p>Unregulated stable coins have proven to be as stable as the titanic was unsinkable.<p>Number 1 is really a problem because of Number 2. Number 2 is a fancy way to describe a primary use case being money laundering. Of course though there are some instances where that’s helpful like backing a foreign government you agree with. Unfortunately, it also means countries like North Korea can use it to evade sanctions.<p>Blockchain is largely a solution in search of a problem with speculators throwing money into stuff they don’t understand.<p>I’m a reformed blockchain enthusiast.</text></comment> | <story><title>Coffeezilla, a YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/coffeezilla-the-youtuber-exposing-crypto-scams</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danieldevries</author><text>I&#x27;ve followed Coffeezilla for a while. I was doing an AI course from another youtuber named Siraj Raval in 2019. The course ended up being totally amateur and full of empty promises.<p>Mr Zilla did a video about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7jmBE4yPrOs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7jmBE4yPrOs</a>
&#x27;AI Guru makes $238,800 with misleading paid course. doesn&#x27;t credit developers. | Siraj Raval FGF&#x27;<p>Then Zilla started exclusively focusing on crypto&#x2F;NFT scams. The first few were interesting. Now... its a quite tedious, &quot;the blockchain never lies...look they pulled the rug...&quot; <i>yawn</i><p>I hope he goes back to covering other interesting topics again.</text></comment> |
31,240,242 | 31,239,839 | 1 | 2 | 31,239,403 | train | <story><title>Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/twitter-blocked-my-account-for-a-tweet-i-did-not-make/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m confused - was OP&#x27;s account compromised, or not?<p>I do not know. The tweet certainly looks like it was made by my account, but definitely not from this computer and <i>definitely</i> not using my password. I&#x27;m pretty precise about stuff like that and Twitter would be the least of my problems if my passwords were hacked. For now I am assuming either someone social engineered Twitter to change my password or a compromise of Twitter of some sort.<p>&gt; but he doesn&#x27;t seem very fussed about how it happened or keeping it from happening again<p>Lack of information... of course I&#x27;m &#x27;fussed&#x27; but I just don&#x27;t know. All I know is that as far as I can see my setup here is still secure and was not a factor in this.<p>&gt; just annoyed that Twitter&#x27;s response to it isn&#x27;t faster.<p>No, mostly annoyed that Twitter would not detect a fairly obvious Joe-Job.<p>&gt; Is it this commonplace for twitter accounts to be taken over?<p>Good question, I don&#x27;t know.<p>&gt; Also, is saying things like &quot;Go die&quot; an insta-ban on twitter?<p>Apparently, but even then: I didn&#x27;t say that...</text></item><item><author>ineptech</author><text>I&#x27;m confused - was OP&#x27;s account compromised, or not? It sounds like it was, but he doesn&#x27;t seem very fussed about how it happened or keeping it from happening again, just annoyed that Twitter&#x27;s response to it isn&#x27;t faster. Is it this commonplace for twitter accounts to be taken over?<p>Also, is saying things like &quot;Go die&quot; an insta-ban on twitter? I don&#x27;t use it but I thought it took more than that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dec0dedab0de</author><text><i>For now I am assuming either someone social engineered Twitter to change my password or a compromise of Twitter of some sort.</i><p>Try to log in with a clear cache or in a private window. If you get redirected back to the page saying to delete the tweet, then you know your password wasn&#x27;t changed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make</title><url>https://jacquesmattheij.com/twitter-blocked-my-account-for-a-tweet-i-did-not-make/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m confused - was OP&#x27;s account compromised, or not?<p>I do not know. The tweet certainly looks like it was made by my account, but definitely not from this computer and <i>definitely</i> not using my password. I&#x27;m pretty precise about stuff like that and Twitter would be the least of my problems if my passwords were hacked. For now I am assuming either someone social engineered Twitter to change my password or a compromise of Twitter of some sort.<p>&gt; but he doesn&#x27;t seem very fussed about how it happened or keeping it from happening again<p>Lack of information... of course I&#x27;m &#x27;fussed&#x27; but I just don&#x27;t know. All I know is that as far as I can see my setup here is still secure and was not a factor in this.<p>&gt; just annoyed that Twitter&#x27;s response to it isn&#x27;t faster.<p>No, mostly annoyed that Twitter would not detect a fairly obvious Joe-Job.<p>&gt; Is it this commonplace for twitter accounts to be taken over?<p>Good question, I don&#x27;t know.<p>&gt; Also, is saying things like &quot;Go die&quot; an insta-ban on twitter?<p>Apparently, but even then: I didn&#x27;t say that...</text></item><item><author>ineptech</author><text>I&#x27;m confused - was OP&#x27;s account compromised, or not? It sounds like it was, but he doesn&#x27;t seem very fussed about how it happened or keeping it from happening again, just annoyed that Twitter&#x27;s response to it isn&#x27;t faster. Is it this commonplace for twitter accounts to be taken over?<p>Also, is saying things like &quot;Go die&quot; an insta-ban on twitter? I don&#x27;t use it but I thought it took more than that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vorpalhex</author><text>Could this be a 3rd party twitter client that has been infiltrated? Maybe someone reused a session somewhere?<p>I&#x27;m assuming you are using unique passwords per application.</text></comment> |
20,626,614 | 20,626,895 | 1 | 3 | 20,626,287 | train | <story><title>Health insurance companies are useless</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-05/health-insurance-useless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martythemaniak</author><text>As an outside observer, sure, you don&#x27;t strictly speaking need them in some theoretical America, but in the America I see there&#x27;s a large group of people who do not believe government can or should do this work and will work very actively to make it happen. The last bit is crucial.<p>Suppose that you are disappointed that Obamacare did not contain a public option. Suppose that Obamacare did contain this provision in the law, it would most likely be implemented the way the cfpb was. The cfpb is great, except how good it is depends on how good the government in place is. If there&#x27;s people in government that want it to fail it will simply fail. Thus merely incorporating the public option into law is not enough to have to have a dedicated political body that wants to make it work. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the case in America.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is, the specificity of the law doesn&#x27;t seem to be as important as peoples dedication to making things work</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digikata</author><text>A majority of voters of both parties support Medicare for All policy proposals.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;403248-poll-seventy-percent-of-americans-support-medicare-for-all" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;healthcare&#x2F;403248-poll-seventy-pe...</a><p>Voters were split on the ACA mandated carriage of private insurance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Health insurance companies are useless</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-05/health-insurance-useless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martythemaniak</author><text>As an outside observer, sure, you don&#x27;t strictly speaking need them in some theoretical America, but in the America I see there&#x27;s a large group of people who do not believe government can or should do this work and will work very actively to make it happen. The last bit is crucial.<p>Suppose that you are disappointed that Obamacare did not contain a public option. Suppose that Obamacare did contain this provision in the law, it would most likely be implemented the way the cfpb was. The cfpb is great, except how good it is depends on how good the government in place is. If there&#x27;s people in government that want it to fail it will simply fail. Thus merely incorporating the public option into law is not enough to have to have a dedicated political body that wants to make it work. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the case in America.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is, the specificity of the law doesn&#x27;t seem to be as important as peoples dedication to making things work</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tarq0n</author><text>The Netherlands has mandatory private insurance and it works well for them. The insurers are heavily regulated though.</text></comment> |
22,434,478 | 22,434,058 | 1 | 3 | 22,432,358 | train | <story><title>Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths</title><url>https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mns</author><text>I do have one question and I&#x27;m asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, &quot;I think this is way worse, it&#x27;s going to get way worse&quot; and so on. It&#x27;s like there is this thirst for disaster or some global drama everywhere, and this is not something that I would expect from Hackernews. If the numbers don&#x27;t align with our hopes or fears, we should take them with a grain of salt and trust the gut feeling of whoever comments. It&#x27;s quite weird to see that when it comes to this, people seem to think that it&#x27;s some sort of conspiracy, China is hiding numbers, now EU is not doing things properly, as I see it everywhere &quot;my country can&#x27;t have 0 cases, I know that our airport is a big hub and it can&#x27;t be, we will be doomed as we probably have hundred of cases instead of none and our government is not doing anything&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that this virus is not a threat and I worry for my parents as this could be a big issue for their condition, but we&#x27;ve gone down the rabbit hole with the hysteria in the press and online and it&#x27;s scary to see this need for a global pandemic and the urge to constantly feed the panic monster.</text></item><item><author>nik_s</author><text>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead&#x2F;(infected + dead)) is that you&#x27;re assuming that the infected won&#x27;t die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead &#x2F; (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of SARS of 9.6% [2].<p>Nevertheless, I think all these statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt - I doubt that the numbers we are seeing are of very high quality, given the political and cultural pressures in China to underreport, the lack of test kits, corona virus deaths being attributed to other diseases, ... On the flip side, it&#x27;s very likely that mild cases will never be reported, which in turn would decrease the mortality rate.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;opsdashboard&#x2F;index.html#&#x2F;bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;opsdashboard&#x2F;index.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...</a><p>[edit: corrected the formula - thank you @anhner and @11thEarlOfMar for spotting the mistake]<p>[edit: indicated that there&#x27;s also a chance of under-reporting mild cases - my edit coincided with @Tenoke&#x27;s post - sorry for noticing this late @Tenoke]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajsnigrutin</author><text>The problem is in the healthcare capacities.<p>I live in a country with ~2mio people. If you&#x27;re patient zero here, you get a comfy private room, your own bed, 5 doctors, 10 nurses, whole research teams, respirators, priority with all the tests, examinations, etc. Same for patient 1, 2, 3.<p>If 200k people get infected (10% of population), and only 10% of those need extra medical care, that&#x27;s 20.000 people. We don&#x27;t have that many hospital beds, doctors, respirators.. probably not even enough medicine (some test have shown that malaria medicine and aids medicine works on some people). You get thrown into an army tent or a school gym with many more ill people, and you get almost zero resources. Need a respirator? Sorry, only 5 available at that location, and are used on other people.. or kids.. or pregnant women... and you can just slowly suffocate.<p>China built a hospital in a couple of days. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a country in EU that can do anything remotely fast as that.. we probably need 10 days just to discuss where to put the emergency tents, and even then we&#x27;d get protesters not wanting them there. Same probably in the USA.<p>We also don&#x27;t have companies making respirators and other medical equipment. Large countries who do, are making them for their own hospitals (if they&#x27;re not stuck in paperpushing hell with the government).<p>Basically, if there&#x27;s a wide-spread epidemic, a lot of people will get really really fscked.</text></comment> | <story><title>Age, Sex, Existing Conditions of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths</title><url>https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mns</author><text>I do have one question and I&#x27;m asking this seriously, not to start an argument or to attack someone. I also saw this here in a lot of the posts about covid-19. We have numbers, but every time people tend to ignore them or say we should not trust the numbers, take them with a grain of salt, &quot;I think this is way worse, it&#x27;s going to get way worse&quot; and so on. It&#x27;s like there is this thirst for disaster or some global drama everywhere, and this is not something that I would expect from Hackernews. If the numbers don&#x27;t align with our hopes or fears, we should take them with a grain of salt and trust the gut feeling of whoever comments. It&#x27;s quite weird to see that when it comes to this, people seem to think that it&#x27;s some sort of conspiracy, China is hiding numbers, now EU is not doing things properly, as I see it everywhere &quot;my country can&#x27;t have 0 cases, I know that our airport is a big hub and it can&#x27;t be, we will be doomed as we probably have hundred of cases instead of none and our government is not doing anything&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that this virus is not a threat and I worry for my parents as this could be a big issue for their condition, but we&#x27;ve gone down the rabbit hole with the hysteria in the press and online and it&#x27;s scary to see this need for a global pandemic and the urge to constantly feed the panic monster.</text></item><item><author>nik_s</author><text>The general issue with this measure of mortality (dead&#x2F;(infected + dead)) is that you&#x27;re assuming that the infected won&#x27;t die. In a disease that is exponentially growing, a better approximation of evaluating your survival chances is to look at the death to recovery rate (dead &#x2F; (recovered + dead)). Based on the available data [1], we are closer to 7.8% than 2% mortality, which is closer to the final mortality rate of SARS of 9.6% [2].<p>Nevertheless, I think all these statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt - I doubt that the numbers we are seeing are of very high quality, given the political and cultural pressures in China to underreport, the lack of test kits, corona virus deaths being attributed to other diseases, ... On the flip side, it&#x27;s very likely that mild cases will never be reported, which in turn would decrease the mortality rate.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;opsdashboard&#x2F;index.html#&#x2F;bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;opsdashboard&#x2F;index.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...</a><p>[edit: corrected the formula - thank you @anhner and @11thEarlOfMar for spotting the mistake]<p>[edit: indicated that there&#x27;s also a chance of under-reporting mild cases - my edit coincided with @Tenoke&#x27;s post - sorry for noticing this late @Tenoke]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>I think being skeptical of numbers from China is reasonable.<p>Historically speaking even inside China it is a pretty well known quantity (even openly spoken of in China) that local governments are hesitant to give bad news to the central government until it is too late and so on. The result usually is the central government is behind the ball dealing in broad (sometimes less than useful) strokes until things are resolved.<p>As far as any conclusions you can draw such as &quot;well it must be much worse&quot;. I think that is pure speculation.<p>Specific speculation that isn&#x27;t founded in much and IMO not helpful. The scale and wonkyness of China&#x27;s efforts could be because this is a very dangerous &#x2F; misunderstood disease ... or the massive efforts simply a byproduct if poor internal information &#x2F; a product of the political nature of China.. panic by their leadership (historically they&#x27;re very wary of any unrest of their own population), or both.<p>Skepticism of some information from countries with proven track records of not being forthcoming &#x2F; have had issues with accurate information is reasonable. Conclusions based in nothing, not so much.</text></comment> |
17,060,713 | 17,060,602 | 1 | 2 | 17,060,437 | train | <story><title>Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]</title><url>https://ripe76.ripe.net/presentations/9-2018-05-17-ipv6-reasons.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ktpsns</author><text>Maybe still ISPs suffer poor field reports.<p>I was client at &quot;Kabel Deutschland, Germany&quot; and they offer native IPv6 for their customers, with &quot;Dual stack lite&quot; as the routing option to reach the IPv4 world. It performed poorly for me, perhaps due to bad load balancing of the IPv4-gateways. I switched to a buisness plan (+10EUR&#x2F;month) of the same ISP and now have an own static IPv4 adress and not even native access to IPv6 any more. This is a clear statement how they think about their IPv6 support.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]</title><url>https://ripe76.ripe.net/presentations/9-2018-05-17-ipv6-reasons.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mino</author><text>This talk will be presented on Thursday 17th at RIPE76.<p>I assume that as usual, it will be streamed live and the video recording should appear here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ripe76.ripe.net&#x2F;programme&#x2F;meeting-plan&#x2F;ipv6-wg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ripe76.ripe.net&#x2F;programme&#x2F;meeting-plan&#x2F;ipv6-wg&#x2F;</a><p>This upcoming RIPE meeting has so many interesting talks... I invite you to &quot;invest&quot; some time going through the program (not all slides are available yet, as it starts tomorrow)!</text></comment> |
39,830,410 | 39,830,608 | 1 | 2 | 39,827,266 | train | <story><title>Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses</title><url>https://www.wbaltv.com/article/baltimore-bridge-collapse-key-bridge/60303975</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hgfghj</author><text>That ship had a 10,000 TEU capacity and was actually hauling a little under 5,000 TEUs. An empty container weighs a little over 5,000lbs, and a full one can be up to 67,000lbs.<p>If you do the math, you find that it’s just an astronomical amount of momentum, and there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water.</text></item><item><author>bastardoperator</author><text>The video is surreal, it looks like it barely bumps the bridge and 2 seconds later the entire thing is gone. I don&#x27;t know what I was expecting, the bridge just looked extremely fragile, makes me wonder what other bridges are at risk of an event like this.</text></item><item><author>paddy_m</author><text>Youtube tracking analysis from a knowledgeable mariner.<p>He says that at about 1:24 AM the ship loses power (from video feed) while traveling 8.5 knots.<p>at 1:25.30 power is restored.<p>at 12:25.59 the ship shows smoke. The ship has already drifted in the channel. It is believed that at this time the ship applied full reverse power as evidenced by the black smoke. (My analysis: the ship drifted but hasn&#x27;t turned in the channel, more of a translation)<p>By 1:26.45 the ship has obviously turned in the channel pointing at the pier. Full reverse would cause prop walk to change heading angle;<p>1:28.52 impact at 7.6 Knots. Camera says 1:28.52, AIS reports the ship still moving at 1:29:35<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>semi-extrinsic</author><text>Throwback to the scene in The Day After Tomorrow where the cargo ship comes to an almost instant halt after impacting a bus wreck under water. For some reason it managed to stand out as ridiculous even in that movie.</text></comment> | <story><title>Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses</title><url>https://www.wbaltv.com/article/baltimore-bridge-collapse-key-bridge/60303975</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hgfghj</author><text>That ship had a 10,000 TEU capacity and was actually hauling a little under 5,000 TEUs. An empty container weighs a little over 5,000lbs, and a full one can be up to 67,000lbs.<p>If you do the math, you find that it’s just an astronomical amount of momentum, and there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water.</text></item><item><author>bastardoperator</author><text>The video is surreal, it looks like it barely bumps the bridge and 2 seconds later the entire thing is gone. I don&#x27;t know what I was expecting, the bridge just looked extremely fragile, makes me wonder what other bridges are at risk of an event like this.</text></item><item><author>paddy_m</author><text>Youtube tracking analysis from a knowledgeable mariner.<p>He says that at about 1:24 AM the ship loses power (from video feed) while traveling 8.5 knots.<p>at 1:25.30 power is restored.<p>at 12:25.59 the ship shows smoke. The ship has already drifted in the channel. It is believed that at this time the ship applied full reverse power as evidenced by the black smoke. (My analysis: the ship drifted but hasn&#x27;t turned in the channel, more of a translation)<p>By 1:26.45 the ship has obviously turned in the channel pointing at the pier. Full reverse would cause prop walk to change heading angle;<p>1:28.52 impact at 7.6 Knots. Camera says 1:28.52, AIS reports the ship still moving at 1:29:35<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=N39w6aQFKSQ</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HarryHirsch</author><text><i>there’s no effective defense for a bridge that needs support in more than 30 or so feet of water</i><p>You put in sheet piling 50 meters upstream, and you fill the box with rocks. That&#x27;s state of the art practice, nowadays, but that bridge was 50 years old.</text></comment> |
27,177,788 | 27,175,898 | 1 | 3 | 27,173,967 | train | <story><title>The Awful German Language (1880)</title><url>https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>locallost</author><text>As someone who&#x27;s had to (or maybe wanted to) learn both english and german, I&#x27;d say german has a steeper initial learning curve, but it becomes easier later, whereas english can be easy to get going, but it&#x27;s difficult to master (obviously the spelling, but also the more advanced use of tenses etc).<p>Regarding Twain&#x27;s complaints, the biggest lesson I learned from learning german at an older age was: languages are nonsensical, illogical, and the sooner you stop trying to make sense of it all, the faster you will advance. Children do not learn languages by being analytical and by comparing to what they already know, they learn by just accepting it as it is. This leads to a funny phenomenon that foreign speakers know the actual rules of a language better than most native speakers, simply because native speakers know things are as they are, but not why. Whether adults are capable of this is a different question, but trying to find logic in a language will only lead to frustration.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Awful German Language (1880)</title><url>https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bumbada</author><text>For those that learn a new language, it is a good idea to suspend criticism on the language while you learn it.<p>Every language has its pains. German using Sein and haven for auxiliary verbs in the past makes things way more complicated to learn. Not to talk about the irregularities of the past participle of verbs(that are not used in speech) that makes reading and writing way harder.<p>But if you focus your mind on that you will for sure stop learning the language because you will have an excuse. The fact is that you could learn it like Germans could too, and in the end English is part germanic.<p>And you can cheat. I learned Mandarin very fast, simplified and traditional script, which is crazy for most people because I cheated. I created my own software tools of spaced repetition software and because as a foreigner I did not have to follow the rules like Chinese nationals do.<p>For example, Chinese take the order of writing characters and the process itself as sacred. For Chinese there is only one way of writing a character, but it doesn&#x27;t need to be that way, you can cheat and learn to identify most important symbols you find on the street fast. The order and calligraphy is secondary.<p>Ironically, the faster you use a language and can read things, the faster you will be able to write it. Just blocking yourself not being able to read a newspaper or novel because you can not write perfectly a symbol does not make sense.<p>The phonetics of Mandarin unless you create software to repeat and repeat and repeat every day is simply impossible for any adult foreigner, because we as children have not learned the basic sounds. German phonetics by comparison is trivial in a tenth of the time.</text></comment> |
7,670,187 | 7,668,544 | 1 | 2 | 7,668,395 | train | <story><title>Mathematicians trace source of Rogers-Ramanujan identities, find algebraic gold</title><url>http://phys.org/news/2014-04-mathematicians-source-rogers-ramanujan-identities-algebraic.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tokenadult</author><text>This appears to be the arXiv.org link to the paper in question, &quot;A framework of Rogers-Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties.&quot;<p><a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7718" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1401.7718</a><p>(Submitted on 30 Jan 2014 (v1), last revised 10 Mar 2014 (this version, v2))<p>I&#x27;m surprised that there is no other discussion of this in an actual news publication about mathematics (I read those for my occupation, and am a member of several online groups that discuss mathematical research), so I wonder if the recycled press release submitted here is really the only interest that this paper has gathered in the mathematical community.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mathematicians trace source of Rogers-Ramanujan identities, find algebraic gold</title><url>http://phys.org/news/2014-04-mathematicians-source-rogers-ramanujan-identities-algebraic.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carstimon</author><text>&quot;Although no other algebraic units are as famous as the golden ratio, they are of central importance to algebra.&quot;<p>Arguably more famous algebraic numbers include:
0, 1, The square root of two, the square root of any integer, i, any integer, the nth root of any integer,...</text></comment> |
24,149,265 | 24,149,377 | 1 | 3 | 24,148,204 | train | <story><title>Epic Games releases "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" ad</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiSHuaw6Q4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziddoap</author><text>I&#x27;m not a fan of what Apple is doing, and am happy to see it be tested in court.<p>But, I&#x27;m not a fan of another multi-million dollar company making such a blatant appeal to emotion, as if Fortnite needs to be &quot;freed&quot;, to the common person who has no concept of how nuanced the legalities of this entire thing are.<p>I&#x27;ll be happy when the theatrics are over with, and we can simply view the outcome of the legal precedent that is about to be set. This is a battle for the courts, not Twitter.</text></item><item><author>arduinomancer</author><text>The whole strategy here feels pretty unprecedented.<p>Usually these kind of lawsuits happen in the background but Epic seems to be going full force with making it a public campaign.<p>&gt; Apple is blocking your ability to get the latest Fortnite updates! All players should have a choice in payment providers and save up to 20%. Apple wants to limit your payment choices! Join the fight against @AppStore on social with #FreeFortnite<p>Can&#x27;t imagine being in the room of Apple&#x27;s PR team reacting to this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dgudkov</author><text>That&#x27;s correct, Epic&#x27;s not altruistic here. But who else would be able to fight Apple&#x27;s lawyers if not another multi-million dollar company?</text></comment> | <story><title>Epic Games releases "Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite" ad</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euiSHuaw6Q4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziddoap</author><text>I&#x27;m not a fan of what Apple is doing, and am happy to see it be tested in court.<p>But, I&#x27;m not a fan of another multi-million dollar company making such a blatant appeal to emotion, as if Fortnite needs to be &quot;freed&quot;, to the common person who has no concept of how nuanced the legalities of this entire thing are.<p>I&#x27;ll be happy when the theatrics are over with, and we can simply view the outcome of the legal precedent that is about to be set. This is a battle for the courts, not Twitter.</text></item><item><author>arduinomancer</author><text>The whole strategy here feels pretty unprecedented.<p>Usually these kind of lawsuits happen in the background but Epic seems to be going full force with making it a public campaign.<p>&gt; Apple is blocking your ability to get the latest Fortnite updates! All players should have a choice in payment providers and save up to 20%. Apple wants to limit your payment choices! Join the fight against @AppStore on social with #FreeFortnite<p>Can&#x27;t imagine being in the room of Apple&#x27;s PR team reacting to this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darth_avocado</author><text>You should take a win when you get one.<p>Yes it&#x27;s another Billion dollar company going against Apple, but then, who else can actually go against them and not financially ruin themselves? Smaller Indie studios definitely can&#x27;t</text></comment> |
28,172,901 | 28,173,192 | 1 | 3 | 28,171,964 | train | <story><title>It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record</title><url>https://www.noaa.gov/news/its-official-july-2021-was-earths-hottest-month-on-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crispyambulance</author><text>Yeah, I heard about that but was skeptical that people could take that position non-sarcastically until recently when driving on the PA Turnpike, I saw this...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;co2coalition&#x2F;status&#x2F;1397912884756107269" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;co2coalition&#x2F;status&#x2F;1397912884756107269</a><p>The cynical dishonesty of an organization creating a billboard like that boggles my mind.</text></item><item><author>SigmundA</author><text>Most of the deniers I know have shifted from it doesn&#x27;t exist to either its not man made and just a natural cycle or it may actually be a good thing because plants like CO2 and warmth...</text></item><item><author>lmilcin</author><text>Who still believes global warming does not exist?<p>I am currently listening to audiobook of Tom Clancy&#x27;s Rainbow Six (1998). It has a paragraph on global warming and trying to convince POTUS it is real. And POTUS not wanting to act on it because it would be too large economic drag on US.<p>This book is almost quarter of century old.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rtkwe</author><text>It&#x27;s the same thing Exxon did in the 80s when it&#x27;s own researchers came to the conclusion that climate change was going to happen and then spent several decades clouding the issue to keep from being regulated so they could keep making money on drilling.</text></comment> | <story><title>It’s official: July was Earth’s hottest month on record</title><url>https://www.noaa.gov/news/its-official-july-2021-was-earths-hottest-month-on-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crispyambulance</author><text>Yeah, I heard about that but was skeptical that people could take that position non-sarcastically until recently when driving on the PA Turnpike, I saw this...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;co2coalition&#x2F;status&#x2F;1397912884756107269" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;co2coalition&#x2F;status&#x2F;1397912884756107269</a><p>The cynical dishonesty of an organization creating a billboard like that boggles my mind.</text></item><item><author>SigmundA</author><text>Most of the deniers I know have shifted from it doesn&#x27;t exist to either its not man made and just a natural cycle or it may actually be a good thing because plants like CO2 and warmth...</text></item><item><author>lmilcin</author><text>Who still believes global warming does not exist?<p>I am currently listening to audiobook of Tom Clancy&#x27;s Rainbow Six (1998). It has a paragraph on global warming and trying to convince POTUS it is real. And POTUS not wanting to act on it because it would be too large economic drag on US.<p>This book is almost quarter of century old.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colpabar</author><text>Haha I drive the turnpike all the time and these ones make me laugh the most. The ones that say &quot;the green new deal is america&#x27;s off switch&quot; and the ones that were pro coal at least <i>kind of</i> make sense (their message is that people will lose their jobs), but these new pro-CO2 ones are just so absurd.</text></comment> |
14,118,261 | 14,118,296 | 1 | 2 | 14,118,052 | train | <story><title>Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/business/american-express-chase-sapphire-reserve.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patejam</author><text>&gt;“I don’t think it would be American Express,” one diner said. “I feel like that would be braggy, like I’m trying to prove I’m a big shot.”<p>&gt;Others nodded in agreement. “I’d probably use this,” said another, pulling out a blue-tinged credit card. “An Amex says you’re rich, but this says you’re interesting.”<p>Where did they find these people? When did using the CSR become a statement? Everyone I know got it for the free money, and uses whatever card gets the most points for whatever purchase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swang</author><text>Yeah that feels like it was planted in there.<p>Does anyone really think owning a credit card makes you interesting? Especially one that is produced for the masses? (at least the ones who can afford the $ amount for it....)<p>Almost every single friend&#x2F;acquaintance I know has _that_ card and no one thinks each other is more interesting because of it. It was essentially for the 100,000 points (+ travel perks)</text></comment> | <story><title>Amex, Challenged by Chase, Is Losing the Snob War</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/business/american-express-chase-sapphire-reserve.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patejam</author><text>&gt;“I don’t think it would be American Express,” one diner said. “I feel like that would be braggy, like I’m trying to prove I’m a big shot.”<p>&gt;Others nodded in agreement. “I’d probably use this,” said another, pulling out a blue-tinged credit card. “An Amex says you’re rich, but this says you’re interesting.”<p>Where did they find these people? When did using the CSR become a statement? Everyone I know got it for the free money, and uses whatever card gets the most points for whatever purchase.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>praneshp</author><text>It&#x27;s a NYT shtick. It&#x27;s not that difficult to find a person that speaks like that, and NYT finds that person for their articles. Since getting a subscription, I&#x27;ve also been turned off by the tone of their reporting on political articles, where they border on sarcasm without actually saying anything negative.</text></comment> |
5,587,879 | 5,587,530 | 1 | 2 | 5,587,450 | train | <story><title>Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? (2010)</title><url>http://alan.blog-city.com/has_amazon_ec2_become_over_subscribed.htm</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dotBen</author><text><i>I'm loathed to perpetuate a 3 year old article, but...</i><p>One of the key contributing factors to this kind of network degradation of AWS (/or other cloud vendor) is the abundance of the "bad neighbor test" - where a client performs tests to see if they can achieve a <i>'preferred'</i> amount of CPU/IO on the host of their new instance.<p>Resource sharing rules at the host level actually means that if everyone is trying to max out their instance, you would still get the equal share you are entitled to and guaranteed with your instance, so what the bad neighbor test really means is whether you can actually go into your neighbor's CPU allocation due to their under-use.<p>Well, if <i>everyone</i> does that then the system degrades as <i>someone</i> has to a party using less than their allocation and the amount of instance spots that don't fail the 'bad neighbor test' become non existant.<p>The overall health of the entire network would actually be better if folks didn't do this practice and instead everyone simply evened out their use across their instances that enjoy additional resources and stuck it out with the %age of their instances that only achieved their guaranteed minimum resource use and no more.<p>My company uses another "cloud-like" vendor and although we don't perform 'bad neighbor' tests upon new instances, it is fair to say our application benefits from the fact that the majority of the instances on their network are under-utilized and we can push into the max CPU of the host beyond the limits we pay for. Where instances do share 'bad neighbors' (ie we can only get what we paid for and no more - boo hoo, etc) we still keep the instance but simply route around that and distribute less load than on other nodes in our network.<p>That doesn't become the most cost effective mechanism, but the "savings" of the <i>'bad neighbor test'</i> are probably negligible and ironically by not doing this we become the "good neighbors".</text></comment> | <story><title>Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? (2010)</title><url>http://alan.blog-city.com/has_amazon_ec2_become_over_subscribed.htm</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>trotsky</author><text>I was trying to figure out how this guy could be so behind the times - just discovered internal network latency at AWS?<p>Then I saw:<p>Published:
9:01 AM GMT, Tuesday, 12 January 2010</text></comment> |
38,816,972 | 38,816,828 | 1 | 3 | 38,816,429 | train | <story><title>DRµGS: Deep Random Micro-Glitch Sampling</title><url>https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>madamelic</author><text>I appreciate the README etc, it&#x27;s very funny and cute.<p>As a bit of a layperson &#x2F; just an AI integrator, I want to get some clarification of how this interfaces with a generative AI. I haven&#x27;t dug too deep in and I have a mostly elementary understanding of neural nets. No need to _entirely_ dumb it down though, just needing a smarter person to confirm or correct my understanding. :)<p>Is this influencing the probabilities of token output? My understanding is that currently it is a static value that is essentially &quot;how wild do you want it to be&quot; where each generation has a different consistent static value of &quot;wildness&quot;.<p>So rather than using a static value for an entire generation, this dynamically injects randomness in so rather than the output being &#x27;monotone&#x27;, it is more dynamic rather than by-the-book that AI tends to be?</text></comment> | <story><title>DRµGS: Deep Random Micro-Glitch Sampling</title><url>https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kstrauser</author><text>I appreciate the commitment to the metaphor. Bravo.</text></comment> |
14,883,075 | 14,882,885 | 1 | 3 | 14,881,781 | train | <story><title>Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals</title><url>http://fair.org/home/worlds-richest-person-escapes-scrutiny-from-his-own-paper-and-its-rivals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.</text></item><item><author>RodericDay</author><text>&gt; America is owed robust news organizations<p>Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.<p>However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via &quot;the free market&quot;, and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.<p>It&#x27;ll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.</text></item><item><author>x0x0</author><text>It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don&#x27;t pay for do or don&#x27;t do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>It&#x27;s not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.<p>The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barrkel</author><text>This is an American canard, but it&#x27;s not really true. Usually, public broadcasting reflects the consensus of where the middle is, with a slant towards social justice, almost unavoidable when criticizing public policy - usually stories are about something the government isn&#x27;t doing, or is doing wrong, rather than shouldn&#x27;t be doing.<p>If a public broadcaster publishes plainly biased stories, independent media can lambast them. But the shaming only has effect if the independent media is itself taken seriously; so the critique has to come from the middle ground.<p>What you won&#x27;t get from publicly funded news is a rounded perspective on what opposing camps think. The extremes are lopped off; you won&#x27;t get small government conservative ideology, and you won&#x27;t get communist ideology. Being anodyne and factual is the best defense against criticism from both independent media and political sources.<p>If one&#x27;s own position is significantly to one side of the political spectrum, naturally the middle looks like it&#x27;s on the other side.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jeff Bezos Escapes Scrutiny from His Own Paper–and Its Rivals</title><url>http://fair.org/home/worlds-richest-person-escapes-scrutiny-from-his-own-paper-and-its-rivals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.</text></item><item><author>RodericDay</author><text>&gt; America is owed robust news organizations<p>Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.<p>However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via &quot;the free market&quot;, and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.<p>It&#x27;ll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.</text></item><item><author>x0x0</author><text>It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don&#x27;t pay for do or don&#x27;t do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>It&#x27;s not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities.<p>The #1 marketplace, #1 social network, and #1 search engine companies all lend themselves to natural monopoly, much like the oil and railroad companies at the beginning of the twentieth century.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>halter73</author><text>I think you&#x27;re misreading the parent comment. They&#x27;re not advocating for tax funded news organizations, but instead for a stronger social safety net. They&#x27;re theorizing that this would enable people to pursue journalism without fear of losing their livelihoods because of struggles in that market sector.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.</text></comment> |
12,446,019 | 12,446,430 | 1 | 3 | 12,445,437 | train | <story><title>Apple Unveils the Apple Watch Series 2</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-unveils-the-apple-watch-series-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grandalf</author><text>While I love gadgets, the idea of wearing something on my wrist whose sole purpose is to interrupt me with notifications (most of which I would not want) and that offers an extremely bright display is pretty much the last gadget I&#x27;d want.<p>Even with the new color temperature adjustments on the iPhone, looking at the screen in the dark is quite unpleasant.<p>I would much prefer an e-ink smart watch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesjyu</author><text>You can customize the notifications. The biggest value I&#x27;ve found for the watch is that I take out my iPhone less, and actually spend less time looking at notifications.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Unveils the Apple Watch Series 2</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/apple-unveils-the-apple-watch-series-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grandalf</author><text>While I love gadgets, the idea of wearing something on my wrist whose sole purpose is to interrupt me with notifications (most of which I would not want) and that offers an extremely bright display is pretty much the last gadget I&#x27;d want.<p>Even with the new color temperature adjustments on the iPhone, looking at the screen in the dark is quite unpleasant.<p>I would much prefer an e-ink smart watch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeta0134</author><text>On the subject of e-ink smart watches, I <i>love</i> my Pebble Time for exactly this reason. One of the backlight settings is Off, and the display is gorgeous. I forget it&#x27;s even e-ink, because I&#x27;m so used to thinking of Kindles when I think of e-ink, with their weird flickering page refreshes. This thing has buttery smooth animations and looks like any other screen to me. The 5-day battery life is certainly helped by this.<p>The notifications thing really did bug me at first, but fortunately the app allows you to silence notifications. I have mine set to ping me about calendar appointments and text messages, and pretty much nothing else. That strikes a good balance for me.</text></comment> |
6,919,607 | 6,919,354 | 1 | 2 | 6,919,216 | train | <story><title>PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length</title><url>http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>The site is extremely slow at the moment. In case anyone has trouble accessing it, I managed to load it, and here&#x27;s the relevant bit:<p><pre><code> Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn&#x27;t too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TOGoS</author><text>That he futzed around with function name lengths instead of just fixing the hash function is a pretty good analogy for both the design of the language as a whole and to much of the code that&#x27;s written in it.<p>Queue &quot;it&#x27;s popular and therefore must be good&quot; trolls.</text></comment> | <story><title>PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length</title><url>http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>The site is extremely slow at the moment. In case anyone has trouble accessing it, I managed to load it, and here&#x27;s the relevant bit:<p><pre><code> Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn&#x27;t too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>That can&#x27;t possibly be true. I refuse to believe it.</text></comment> |
23,535,549 | 23,535,386 | 1 | 2 | 23,532,662 | train | <story><title>AWS’s Share of Amazon’s Profit</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/14/Amazon-profit-from-AWS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rb808</author><text>&quot;printing money&quot; yes today, but if GCP&#x2F;Azure or something else comes in and competes heavily the margins could easily shrink to something negative.</text></item><item><author>mbesto</author><text>Profit can be a really weird number, especially when it comes to data centers. So looking at pure earning statements numbers is likely going to be misleading no matter how you try to look at (unless you actually look at bank statements, you can create as many interpretations as you want).<p>First, data centers require A LOT of upfront capital. This capital is then capitalized over years, which is how it ultimately affects &quot;profit&quot;. So depending on the capitalization schedule, how much they are investing in future growth, etc. will all affect this number. It&#x27;s why, in short, Bezo&#x27;s doesn&#x27;t ever look at these numbers, but instead free cash flow (FCF).<p>“Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.”[0]<p>So, the real metric to look at is the FCF&#x2F;DCF generated by AWS. If we had that number, I think you could basically conclude that it&#x27;s &quot;printing money&quot;.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;25iq.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-from-jeff-bezos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;25iq.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vl</author><text>There are so few clouds, that it doesn’t work like this. When I saw it first hand the way it was done is prices were set to match competition. Occasionally somebody would reduce the prices, and others would match it. Since offerings are not exactly the same, there are variations, but overall for basic services like VMs and storage neither cloud will give you significant advantage in price.</text></comment> | <story><title>AWS’s Share of Amazon’s Profit</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/14/Amazon-profit-from-AWS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rb808</author><text>&quot;printing money&quot; yes today, but if GCP&#x2F;Azure or something else comes in and competes heavily the margins could easily shrink to something negative.</text></item><item><author>mbesto</author><text>Profit can be a really weird number, especially when it comes to data centers. So looking at pure earning statements numbers is likely going to be misleading no matter how you try to look at (unless you actually look at bank statements, you can create as many interpretations as you want).<p>First, data centers require A LOT of upfront capital. This capital is then capitalized over years, which is how it ultimately affects &quot;profit&quot;. So depending on the capitalization schedule, how much they are investing in future growth, etc. will all affect this number. It&#x27;s why, in short, Bezo&#x27;s doesn&#x27;t ever look at these numbers, but instead free cash flow (FCF).<p>“Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It’s the absolute dollar free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that’s something that investors can spend. Investors can’t spend percentage margins.”[0]<p>So, the real metric to look at is the FCF&#x2F;DCF generated by AWS. If we had that number, I think you could basically conclude that it&#x27;s &quot;printing money&quot;.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;25iq.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-from-jeff-bezos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;25iq.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgalt212</author><text>I guess, but these products have such strong lock in.</text></comment> |
5,959,024 | 5,958,585 | 1 | 3 | 5,958,381 | train | <story><title>A Practical guide to StatsD/Graphite monitoring</title><url>http://matt.aimonetti.net/posts/2013/06/26/practical-guide-to-graphite-monitoring/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>another</author><text>In addition to this helpful guide, note that statsd &#x2F; graphite both spring some unfortunate surprises on new users, e.g., graphite changing your data across retention rates and time scales [0], graphite changing your data at different plot widths (?!) [1], statsd believing that only count and time data deserve to be aggregated [2], etc.<p>I have no alternative to suggest, however. Perhaps Cube [3], but unclear if it has any user community.<p>[0] <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10820119/graphite-is-not-graphing-anything-for-ranges-bigger-than-7-hours" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;10820119&#x2F;graphite-is-not-...</a>
[1] <a href="http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/1.0/functions.html#graphite.render.functions.cumulative" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;graphite.readthedocs.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;1.0&#x2F;functions.html#graphi...</a>
[2] <a href="https://github.com/etsy/statsd/issues/98" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;etsy&#x2F;statsd&#x2F;issues&#x2F;98</a>
[3] <a href="https://github.com/square/cube" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;square&#x2F;cube</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Practical guide to StatsD/Graphite monitoring</title><url>http://matt.aimonetti.net/posts/2013/06/26/practical-guide-to-graphite-monitoring/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pearkes</author><text>I use a statsd compatible alternative called statsite.[1]<p>It&#x27;s written in pure c and behaves like you would expect statsd to, with some additional improvements. I&#x27;m definitely more comfortable deploying it as opposed to installing and managing a node.js application.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/armon/statsite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;armon&#x2F;statsite</a></text></comment> |
27,015,943 | 27,015,705 | 1 | 2 | 27,015,416 | train | <story><title>AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/News/50145/airtag-teardown-part-one-yeah-this-tracks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>caturopath</author><text>The lack of loophole was disorienting, but then I went and looked up how they want you to attach it, and the hangtag accessories look so pretty <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;apple-introduces-airtag&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;apple-introduces-airt...</a> -- things like the appearance and the sound quality really show a commitment to making polished products rather than practical ones. I&#x27;ve been fairly negative on Apple for a few years and they still need to pull bigger rabbits out of their hat until I completely reverse that, but it&#x27;s really impressive that they&#x27;ve turned a Tile into a status symbol.<p>It&#x27;s hilarious to a certain extent that they built the thing smaller than all the competition and bulk it up with a wad of leather anyhow.</text></comment> | <story><title>AirTag Teardown Part One: Yeah, This Tracks</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/News/50145/airtag-teardown-part-one-yeah-this-tracks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jpoliachik</author><text>&gt; But why bother putting a real driver in here at all? Magnets not only add weight, they take up a lot of space. Looks like one corner Apple refused to cut on this tiny disk is sound quality.<p>I find it fascinating what tradeoffs are decided upon. Apple is arguably the best luxury brand in the world - and this is why.</text></comment> |
30,647,744 | 30,647,280 | 1 | 2 | 30,647,047 | train | <story><title>Pull Request File Tree Feedback</title><url>https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/12341</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eloisius</author><text>I’d settle for them making PRs as useful as they were in 2015, before they messed up some of the most basic functionality: showing the diff, and showing review comments. They hide big diffs behind a “load more” link, and as a result people often fail to code review the most substantial part of a change because they scan right past it, thinking it’s a removed file or binary or something. Then, once you submit a review, they only show 10 comments. In the middle, there’s an easy-to-miss “load more comments” button.<p>These are the two most fundamental features of a PR. How could they decide so few as 10 is the right number of comments?</text></comment> | <story><title>Pull Request File Tree Feedback</title><url>https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/12341</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ydnaclementine</author><text>Not sure if this is well known, but press period `.` when viewing a PR, repo, or file and github will send you to a in-browser visual code editor. Able to make commits in there too, perfect for [nit] comments</text></comment> |
7,294,345 | 7,294,368 | 1 | 2 | 7,293,776 | train | <story><title>Computing 10,000X more efficiently (2010) [pdf]</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hershel</author><text>Singluar computing have built a chip based on this tech, and deployed in a military UAV. It enabled tracking of objects(which ws impossible before due to power constraints), at 6400x the performance&#x2F;power of other best known methods.<p><a href="http://www.defensetechbriefs.com/component/content/article/17021" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defensetechbriefs.com&#x2F;component&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;1...</a><p><a href="http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1693583" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org&#x2F;proceeding.aspx?ar...</a><p>From the paper:
&quot;The hardware is designed to perform high dynamic range arithmetic with roughly 1% error per operation. Singular has
developed and studied varied algorithms for producing high quality results despite the approximate hardware. These
studies use a perfect simulation of the accelerator’s arithmetic. Tasks that have been explored include summing
thousands of numbers without accumulating error, k-nearest neighbor classification (KNN), foreground&#x2F;background
separation using Gaussian mixture models, iterative reconstruction tomography, deblurring using the Richardson-Lucy
deconvolution algorithm, FFTs, radar processing, neural net learning, and other tasks. Most of these algorithms need
slight adaptations to prevent cumulative effects of the 1%
error, but with those adaptations all perform as desired.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Computing 10,000X more efficiently (2010) [pdf]</title><url>http://web.media.mit.edu/~bates/Summary_files/BatesTalk.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>valarauca1</author><text>This topic was already discussed albeit satirically in another publication. Namely the, &quot;The Slow Winter.&quot;[1] Which while comedic makes good points about hardware architecture.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;1309_14-17_mickens.pdf</a></text></comment> |
22,989,172 | 22,989,142 | 1 | 2 | 22,988,323 | train | <story><title>Seattle’s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York’s did not</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>listenallyall</author><text>Vast simplification that undermines working-class people. Tens of millions of people have lost their job and income, while bills continue to accumulate. It&#x27;s fair to acknowledge the potential risks of contracting COVID-19, and still decide, I&#x27;d prefer to work, observing sanitization &amp; social distancing measures, than to have my entire financial life ruined.<p>We just had the NFL draft this week. Plenty of these players will have their bodies seriously harmed in the next few years, while others will get multiple concussions and potentially set themselves up for CTE or other brain damage. Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn&#x27;t go into this line of work...</text></item><item><author>thomascgalvin</author><text>There are basically three groups of people now: those who are taking this seriously and social distancing, those who think this is some kind of hoax and are gleefully ignoring any advice or orders from the government, and those that are &quot;essential&quot; and have no choice in the matter.<p>The hoaxers are a clear and present threat to the essential workers. The number of MBTA staff infected with COVID-19 has more than doubled in the past week; they <i>can&#x27;t</i> avoid people, and they&#x27;re being infected by those who <i>won&#x27;t</i>.</text></item><item><author>jniedrauer</author><text>The social engineering aspect of pandemic control is fascinating and something I had never considered before. It&#x27;s not enough to put the right policies in place. You have to get people to actually follow them (voluntarily). It&#x27;s like writing a user story on a grand scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dpau</author><text>The 99% of us who are losing our jobs and eating through our savings shouldn&#x27;t be forced into a moral dilemma of working to remain solvent vs. quarantine&#x2F;distancing to protect others. This is entirely a failure of government to quickly and effectively manage the pandemic with country-wide health measures as well as adequate economic support, especially for the most vulnerable. A check for $1200 is an insult.</text></comment> | <story><title>Seattle’s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York’s did not</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>listenallyall</author><text>Vast simplification that undermines working-class people. Tens of millions of people have lost their job and income, while bills continue to accumulate. It&#x27;s fair to acknowledge the potential risks of contracting COVID-19, and still decide, I&#x27;d prefer to work, observing sanitization &amp; social distancing measures, than to have my entire financial life ruined.<p>We just had the NFL draft this week. Plenty of these players will have their bodies seriously harmed in the next few years, while others will get multiple concussions and potentially set themselves up for CTE or other brain damage. Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn&#x27;t go into this line of work...</text></item><item><author>thomascgalvin</author><text>There are basically three groups of people now: those who are taking this seriously and social distancing, those who think this is some kind of hoax and are gleefully ignoring any advice or orders from the government, and those that are &quot;essential&quot; and have no choice in the matter.<p>The hoaxers are a clear and present threat to the essential workers. The number of MBTA staff infected with COVID-19 has more than doubled in the past week; they <i>can&#x27;t</i> avoid people, and they&#x27;re being infected by those who <i>won&#x27;t</i>.</text></item><item><author>jniedrauer</author><text>The social engineering aspect of pandemic control is fascinating and something I had never considered before. It&#x27;s not enough to put the right policies in place. You have to get people to actually follow them (voluntarily). It&#x27;s like writing a user story on a grand scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carapace</author><text>&gt; Not once did anyone raise any alarms about, maybe these young people shouldn&#x27;t go into this line of work...<p>Maybe you&#x27;re just going for rhetorical force but you are factually wrong. Plenty of people have &quot;raised alarms&quot; about e.g. concussions caused by playing football.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.espn.com&#x2F;nfl&#x2F;story&#x2F;_&#x2F;id&#x2F;22226487&#x2F;nfl-concussions-rise-highest-level-league-began-sharing-data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.espn.com&#x2F;nfl&#x2F;story&#x2F;_&#x2F;id&#x2F;22226487&#x2F;nfl-concussions...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Concussions_in_American_football" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Concussions_in_American_footba...</a><p>And there have been consequences.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nflconcussionsettlement.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nflconcussionsettlement.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
14,461,709 | 14,461,890 | 1 | 2 | 14,460,810 | train | <story><title>Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/paul-buchheit-on-lessons-learned-from-investing-in-200-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rabidrat</author><text>&gt; For example, Facebook had an offer from Yahoo for a billion dollars, which everyone told Zuck to take. Fortunately, he said no. Had he said yes, it would have been another failed Yahoo acquisition and Facebook would not have nearly as much impact.<p>It seems to me that the world would be overall a better place if FB had sold to Yahoo. Yahoo would have screwed it up (like AOL with Myspace) and there would be more competition in the space all around. Monopolies are good for the investors, not for the customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mandeepj</author><text>Zuck dropped the offer because Yahoo lower the price to ~$700 million. He has famously said he would have sold FB if yahoo kept the $1 billion tag.<p>Buying companies for billions and billions of dollars is a skill in itself and requires a vision also which is not very common. I mean to say only people like Zuck can do it<p>Edit - Added some more meat</text></comment> | <story><title>Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/paul-buchheit-on-lessons-learned-from-investing-in-200-startups/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rabidrat</author><text>&gt; For example, Facebook had an offer from Yahoo for a billion dollars, which everyone told Zuck to take. Fortunately, he said no. Had he said yes, it would have been another failed Yahoo acquisition and Facebook would not have nearly as much impact.<p>It seems to me that the world would be overall a better place if FB had sold to Yahoo. Yahoo would have screwed it up (like AOL with Myspace) and there would be more competition in the space all around. Monopolies are good for the investors, not for the customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imjk</author><text>When it comes to social networks, I believe the network affect generally leads to a winner takes all (or most). Certainly tech and usability is a determining factor, but another company would have nailed those and dominated the market anyway.</text></comment> |
19,635,455 | 19,635,161 | 1 | 3 | 19,634,570 | train | <story><title>A private spacecraft from Israel will attempt a moon landing Thursday</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/a-private-spacecraft-from-israel-will-attempt-a-moon-landing-thursday/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JshWright</author><text>I took my daughter to this launch (we happened to be vacationing in the area). It was an evening launch and we spent the day at KSC. On the bus tour around the launch pads we happened to sit right behind a couple members of the SpaceIL team (including the chief systems engineer). They were extremely friendly and happy to answer all sorts of questions.<p>Best of luck to the team on this exciting day!</text></comment> | <story><title>A private spacecraft from Israel will attempt a moon landing Thursday</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/a-private-spacecraft-from-israel-will-attempt-a-moon-landing-thursday/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Faaak</author><text>Citing wikipedia because it&#x27;s not on the article:<p>&quot;In October 2015, SpaceIL signed a contract for a launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, via Spaceflight Industries.[15][40] It was launched on 22 February 2019 at 0145 UTC (20:45 local time on 21 February) as a secondary payload,[4][6][23] along with the telecom satellite PSN-6.[41] Beresheet is being controlled by a command center in Yehud, Israel.[42]<p>From 24 February to 19 March, the main engine was used four times for orbit raising, putting its apogee close to the Moon&#x27;s orbital distance.[43] The spacecraft performed maneuvers so as to be successfully captured into an elliptical lunar orbit on 4 April 2019, and has adjusted its flight pattern in a circular orbit around the Moon. Once in the correct circular orbit, it will decelerate for a soft landing on the lunar surface, planned for 11 April 2019.[44] &quot;</text></comment> |
18,923,201 | 18,922,685 | 1 | 2 | 18,921,827 | train | <story><title>Illinois Bet on Video Gambling and Lost</title><url>https://features.propublica.org/the-bad-bet/how-illinois-bet-on-video-gambling-and-lost/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tofof</author><text>It really is a blight. Everywhere you go (other than Chicago) there are sleazy-looking banners offering video gambling. Even unexpected places. Literally every strip mall I&#x27;m aware of has at least one, regardless of the income tier the strip mall targets. Even the mom &amp; pop diner just off the highway now has its windows plastered with adverts for video slots and video poker.<p>Searching for video gambling will only turn up the dedicated establishments (it doesn&#x27;t turn up that diner, nor many dozens of bars) but you can still see how ridiculous it is from searching any downstate community.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;search&#x2F;video+gambling&#x2F;@40.1167747,-88.2827851,16z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;search&#x2F;video+gambling&#x2F;@40.116774...</a><p>Here, the same chain has locations barely a thousand feet from one another, and they&#x27;re not even the only dedicated dens in that immediate area.<p>Bar - doesnt show up when searching &#x27;video gambling&#x27;:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.117862,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97.9h,80.65t&#x2F;data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVdErxAGriHxia1Zwr4JBDQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.117862,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97...</a><p>Family Diner - every window is now covered with gambling advertisements, but street view is from 2015, before they converted. Still useful for understanding how persvasive the spread is and the types of businesses that are converting to stay competetive.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.1329083,-88.2190425,3a,75y,68.14h,79.47t&#x2F;data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLvwPz8saESAYSb_XSSJoew!2e0!7i13312!8i6656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.1329083,-88.2190425,3a,75y,6...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clucas</author><text>Forest Park (my home for less than a year now) voted to prohibit video gambling in November, two years after it had been voted in. I&#x27;m not sure what the impact has been, but perhaps it could serve as a model for other municipalities looking to do the same thing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chicagotribune.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;politics&#x2F;ct-met-vkdeo-gambling-voted-out-forest-park-election-20181107-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chicagotribune.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;politics&#x2F;ct-met-vk...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Illinois Bet on Video Gambling and Lost</title><url>https://features.propublica.org/the-bad-bet/how-illinois-bet-on-video-gambling-and-lost/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tofof</author><text>It really is a blight. Everywhere you go (other than Chicago) there are sleazy-looking banners offering video gambling. Even unexpected places. Literally every strip mall I&#x27;m aware of has at least one, regardless of the income tier the strip mall targets. Even the mom &amp; pop diner just off the highway now has its windows plastered with adverts for video slots and video poker.<p>Searching for video gambling will only turn up the dedicated establishments (it doesn&#x27;t turn up that diner, nor many dozens of bars) but you can still see how ridiculous it is from searching any downstate community.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;search&#x2F;video+gambling&#x2F;@40.1167747,-88.2827851,16z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;search&#x2F;video+gambling&#x2F;@40.116774...</a><p>Here, the same chain has locations barely a thousand feet from one another, and they&#x27;re not even the only dedicated dens in that immediate area.<p>Bar - doesnt show up when searching &#x27;video gambling&#x27;:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.117862,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97.9h,80.65t&#x2F;data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVdErxAGriHxia1Zwr4JBDQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.117862,-88.2040812,3a,75y,97...</a><p>Family Diner - every window is now covered with gambling advertisements, but street view is from 2015, before they converted. Still useful for understanding how persvasive the spread is and the types of businesses that are converting to stay competetive.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.1329083,-88.2190425,3a,75y,68.14h,79.47t&#x2F;data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLvwPz8saESAYSb_XSSJoew!2e0!7i13312!8i6656" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@40.1329083,-88.2190425,3a,75y,6...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>O5vYtytb</author><text>I know the owner of a relatively large family-run restaurant, and apparently the few video slot machines they have in a small back room make more profit than the food.</text></comment> |
36,091,103 | 36,090,554 | 1 | 2 | 36,088,783 | train | <story><title>Times New Bastard</title><url>https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bonyt</author><text>Neat. By a strange coincidence, I made something similar yesterday in a script to make each letter in HTML into a different font. I wanted to see if it would end up as an OCR-proof font:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;tonyb486&#x2F;0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56cc3b6d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;tonyb486&#x2F;0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56c...</a><p>An example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;chbgr.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;chbgr.htm</a><p>Rasterized and OCR&#x27;d: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;ocr.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;ocr.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tailspin2019</author><text>Very cool concept</text></comment> | <story><title>Times New Bastard</title><url>https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bonyt</author><text>Neat. By a strange coincidence, I made something similar yesterday in a script to make each letter in HTML into a different font. I wanted to see if it would end up as an OCR-proof font:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;tonyb486&#x2F;0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56cc3b6d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;tonyb486&#x2F;0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56c...</a><p>An example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;chbgr.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;chbgr.htm</a><p>Rasterized and OCR&#x27;d: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;ocr.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tmp.tonybox.net&#x2F;ocr.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jredwards</author><text>Seems you were at least partially successful</text></comment> |
7,898,888 | 7,898,814 | 1 | 3 | 7,898,143 | train | <story><title>An even slimmer pdf.js</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/an-even-slimmer-pdf-js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annnnd</author><text>I don&#x27;t want to sound negative and I certainly don&#x27;t want to start a war here. I also really appreciate what Mozilla is doing and I am an otherwise happy user of FF on both desktop and mobile.<p>That said, FF memory usage (not just pdf.js) is sometimes just insane. Granted, I only have 2GB on this Linux, but FF invariably eats most of it (with just 10-20 tabs) if left running for long periods. Interestingly enough, once I restart FF and reopen the same tabs, memory usage is far lower. Memory leak? Inefficient caching? Who knows...<p>Every now and then there is a version of FF that claims to be using less memory, but in my experience the differences have been negligible. So as far I am concerned memory friendly FF is something like fast Java... I am still waiting to meet one of these beasts in the wild. :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nnethercote</author><text>Sorry to hear you&#x27;re having problems. We need more data to take any kind of action. Are there particular sites that cause problems? Do you have any extensions installed?<p>Even better: can you visit about:memory and use the &quot;Measure and save...&quot; button to get a snapshot of memory usage when it gets high? You can then either email it to me or (preferably) file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org and CC me. Bugzilla can be intimidating, but don&#x27;t worry too much about getting every field right. Just make sure the description is clear.<p>If all that is too hard (hopefully not!), you could try just resetting Firefox: <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;reset-firefox-easily-fi...</a>. That&#x27;s not a guaranteed fix, but it does help in a lot of cases.</text></comment> | <story><title>An even slimmer pdf.js</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/an-even-slimmer-pdf-js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annnnd</author><text>I don&#x27;t want to sound negative and I certainly don&#x27;t want to start a war here. I also really appreciate what Mozilla is doing and I am an otherwise happy user of FF on both desktop and mobile.<p>That said, FF memory usage (not just pdf.js) is sometimes just insane. Granted, I only have 2GB on this Linux, but FF invariably eats most of it (with just 10-20 tabs) if left running for long periods. Interestingly enough, once I restart FF and reopen the same tabs, memory usage is far lower. Memory leak? Inefficient caching? Who knows...<p>Every now and then there is a version of FF that claims to be using less memory, but in my experience the differences have been negligible. So as far I am concerned memory friendly FF is something like fast Java... I am still waiting to meet one of these beasts in the wild. :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ygg2</author><text>You can just use the latest Nightly or Aurora to see how fast these things are compared to yours. I had a same problem, Firefox being slow and clunky so I switched to Nightly and it did <i>really</i> increase the speed.<p>I think Firefox is getting faster but fact is that users also acclimate to new speed and expect it to be faster.<p>EDIT: Right now with about 10 tabs open FF is eating around 580 MB of RAM.</text></comment> |
6,526,277 | 6,526,328 | 1 | 3 | 6,526,098 | train | <story><title>Don’t email me</title><url>http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2013/10/08/dont-email-me/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>casca</author><text>For some context, Daniel Stenberg is the lead developer in the widely used curl and libcurl OSS. He is extremely responsive on the mailing lists and will often provide detailed answers to difficult questions.</text></comment> | <story><title>Don’t email me</title><url>http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2013/10/08/dont-email-me/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jaggederest</author><text>It&#x27;s funny, because from his point of view mailing lists are awesome.<p>But from the point of view of everyone else they&#x27;re pretty terrible - it&#x27;s extremely rare I&#x27;ve had mailing lists deliver value.<p>For most open source projects, the correct way has been to find the backchannel - the mailing list is only a source of frustration and bikesheds. You must either contact maintainers personally or find an IRC or other real time method.</text></comment> |
11,846,612 | 11,845,457 | 1 | 3 | 11,844,574 | train | <story><title>Flow vs. Typescript</title><url>http://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs-typescript/2016_hhjs.html#/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greenspot</author><text>Really wondering: who is developing Node&#x2F;JS on Windows nowadays? Not that I don&#x27;t like Windows (I like W10 + the new Ubuntu within efforts a lot), but the ecosystem around Node is so much tailored around Linux. Even with OSX where we have an excellent support, there&#x27;s still some slight friction when deploying to Ubuntu.<p>Or is Windows 10 a viable alternative for Node devs?</text></item><item><author>Skinney</author><text>The main problem for me, is that Flow doesn&#x27;t support Windows (yet?). I&#x27;ve been working solo on a frontend a couple of months now, and the team has just been extended with a new developer (yay). However, he uses Windows, and so all my type annotations are worthless. We&#x27;re making the switch to TypeScript once 2.0 is released (easier to port with strictNullChecks).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>&gt; <i>but the ecosystem around Node is so much tailored around Linux</i><p>I really don&#x27;t understand why people keep saying this, it&#x27;s simply not true. Node works <i>fantastically</i> on Windows. I&#x27;ve yet to come across a library that won&#x27;t work on my Windows box (barring obviously platform specific stuff). Node-gyp works fine too, and many libraries with native code offer Windows versions.<p>Especially when comparing to e.g. Ruby or Python, it&#x27;s a world of difference. With Ruby you can&#x27;t even use bundler on Windows and then deploy on Linux.<p>It seems all the basic fundamental design choices of Node and NPM were made with portability in mind. I&#x27;m frankly quite impressed.<p>Source: been running teams doing frontend and node for almost 3 years now, every team had at least one Win dev and at least one OSX dev, every team deployed to Linux. 0 problems, ever.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flow vs. Typescript</title><url>http://djcordhose.github.io/flow-vs-typescript/2016_hhjs.html#/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greenspot</author><text>Really wondering: who is developing Node&#x2F;JS on Windows nowadays? Not that I don&#x27;t like Windows (I like W10 + the new Ubuntu within efforts a lot), but the ecosystem around Node is so much tailored around Linux. Even with OSX where we have an excellent support, there&#x27;s still some slight friction when deploying to Ubuntu.<p>Or is Windows 10 a viable alternative for Node devs?</text></item><item><author>Skinney</author><text>The main problem for me, is that Flow doesn&#x27;t support Windows (yet?). I&#x27;ve been working solo on a frontend a couple of months now, and the team has just been extended with a new developer (yay). However, he uses Windows, and so all my type annotations are worthless. We&#x27;re making the switch to TypeScript once 2.0 is released (easier to port with strictNullChecks).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LionessLover</author><text>I do, and I&#x27;m a Unix person, even having contributed code to the Linux kernel and I&#x27;ve used Unix - Solaris, HP-UX, NeXTSTEP, Linux, Reliant Unix (Siemens), IRIX (SGI) since 1994.<p>It&#x27;s just that over time I fond it more and more of a -useless - hassle to keep a VM with Linux on my desktop, and pure Linux desktop never was a question (for various reasons).<p>When I install git for windows and ConEmu64 I have a good terminal and a bash and the basic Unix command line tools. The IDE and node.js are the same anyway. I configure the IDE and git so that my projects only have one type of line endings (Unix).<p>I have zero Windows server experience since that is all Unix for me, but on the (developer) desktop I don&#x27;t feel any need for Unix.</text></comment> |
33,927,351 | 33,927,162 | 1 | 2 | 33,926,564 | train | <story><title>The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks</title><url>https://twitter.com/torynski/status/1600968583055826944</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a4isms</author><text>I am not a trucker, so I can&#x27;t comment on the veracity of TFA&#x27;s claims. But this rant reminds me of many similar things I&#x27;ve read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.<p>A lot of the things that matter aren&#x27;t necessarily obvious to the designer or engineer who knows little about the nuts and bolts of every field. The usual remedy is to either follow a design process that incorporates user viewpoints, or to hire people with direct experience in the field.<p>Take the &quot;wiping the mirrors&quot; complaint. One design makes it easy to lean out the window and wipe the mirror by hand. Another design might make the mirrors retractible.<p>If I read a complain that retracting the mirrors was unnecessary complexity, I would think &quot;Hmm, maybe, but then again it&#x27;s a tradeoff because the narrow cab is more aero and increases range.&quot; I&#x27;d have a feeling that the designers knew this was an important use case, but this person complaining doesn&#x27;t like their solution.<p>But it worries me that a number of use cases that seem quite obviously common even to a layperson... Are neglected outright. I don&#x27;t get the impression that Tesla knew about all this and decided not to do anything about them, I get the impression that this is a company who thinks &quot;design&quot; is all about styling, and not about usability.<p>Somebody resurrect Steve Jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Eji1700</author><text>To me, this point alone continues to highlight that musk is just focusing on looks instead of function-<p>&gt; Tablets. I drove a modern Mercedes truck with tablets and it&#x27;s pin in the arse. Tablets are simply not designed for use in moving vehicles. You need a physical button, so you can reach for it even without taking your eyes off the road and feel it. (10)<p>This is a KNOWN issue. There&#x27;s very very little upside to any sort of touchscreen in a moving vehicle. And while in normal cars they move units because features over functionality is acceptable, trucks aren&#x27;t status symbols first. They do, at the end of the day, have to do the job they&#x27;re designed for efficiently, and things like this are clearly just &quot;trendy&quot; not practical.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks</title><url>https://twitter.com/torynski/status/1600968583055826944</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a4isms</author><text>I am not a trucker, so I can&#x27;t comment on the veracity of TFA&#x27;s claims. But this rant reminds me of many similar things I&#x27;ve read about products that were designed by people only had superficial experience with the industry they are trying to disrupt.<p>A lot of the things that matter aren&#x27;t necessarily obvious to the designer or engineer who knows little about the nuts and bolts of every field. The usual remedy is to either follow a design process that incorporates user viewpoints, or to hire people with direct experience in the field.<p>Take the &quot;wiping the mirrors&quot; complaint. One design makes it easy to lean out the window and wipe the mirror by hand. Another design might make the mirrors retractible.<p>If I read a complain that retracting the mirrors was unnecessary complexity, I would think &quot;Hmm, maybe, but then again it&#x27;s a tradeoff because the narrow cab is more aero and increases range.&quot; I&#x27;d have a feeling that the designers knew this was an important use case, but this person complaining doesn&#x27;t like their solution.<p>But it worries me that a number of use cases that seem quite obviously common even to a layperson... Are neglected outright. I don&#x27;t get the impression that Tesla knew about all this and decided not to do anything about them, I get the impression that this is a company who thinks &quot;design&quot; is all about styling, and not about usability.<p>Somebody resurrect Steve Jobs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spaceman_2020</author><text>I&#x27;m not a designer but one principle I&#x27;ve adopted in most things I purchase is to minimize complexity. My goal is always to optimize for &quot;least willpower consumed&quot;. Because I know that if its not easy to do, I&#x27;ll just skip it after a long day.<p>If I was making something for professionals who might use the tool for long, tiring hours, I&#x27;d probably want to give them the least bit of complexity possible. At the end of an 8 hour shift, how many truckers will have the energy (or rather, spare willpower) to press a button, wait for the mirrors to retract, clean it, and press the button to get it back into its original position? Compare that to the much simpler single-step current process (grab cloth, clean mirror).<p>The fewer clicks, the fewer steps, the fewer movements something takes, usually, the better.</text></comment> |
11,005,185 | 11,004,981 | 1 | 2 | 11,004,659 | train | <story><title>Is It Time for Swift?</title><url>https://realm.io/news/ben-sandofsky-time-for-swift/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>st3fan</author><text>Pretty happy the Firefox for iOS team made the decision to go fully Swift about 14 months ago :-) Almost 60,000 lines later, no regrets. It is awesome.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is It Time for Swift?</title><url>https://realm.io/news/ben-sandofsky-time-for-swift/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BuckRogers</author><text>I knew there was some churn in the Swift language but didn&#x27;t think it was going to continue. I&#x27;m not using Swift now but will likely hold off a bit longer as a result. I did think they nailed the open source launch. Swift on the server is an exciting prospect, more competition is always good. While I&#x27;m not a Swift dev yet (I don&#x27;t have a Mac thus mainly interested in the libre crossplatform launch), I&#x27;ve been keeping my eye on it with Swift Weekly.<p>I think 2016-2017 could well be the year(s) of Swift&#x27;s ascension.</text></comment> |
23,457,666 | 23,457,925 | 1 | 3 | 23,438,399 | train | <story><title>Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)</title><url>https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? I stopped playing those types of games when I got into high school, so I don&#x27;t really have any concept of if EVE and WoW and the like were actually definitively better, or just different and more successful do to being easier for beginners.<p>I haven&#x27;t played any of the Larian games (e.g. Divinity: Original Sin II), but noticed that only recently with these sorts of graphics do these new 3D isometric games actually have the same kind of feeling that UO had at the time when it came out, if that makes any sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chongli</author><text><i>has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet?</i><p>Nope. UO was one of a kind. What made it special is the way it brought together people with many different play styles and allowed them to form their own communities which were self-policed.<p>Every multiplayer game since UO has tried to learn lessons from it by policing the players centrally, through the limitation of player interaction. The result is that all of the different play styles have gone their separate ways to games which cater specifically to them.<p>This phenomenon mirrors the filter bubble phenomenon that resulted from search engines and social media recommendation engines giving people more of what they want.<p><i>Edit: for examples of the games that cater to the play styles I’m referring to, look at Fortnite, League of Legends, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Diablo 3... When I look at this list it’s rather shocking to me that one game could house all these diverse play styles. The magic of it was that it worked, for a time, until more specialized games came along and started drawing away the player base. Then EA brought in Trammel and split the player base which was the beginning of the end.</i></text></comment> | <story><title>Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)</title><url>https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-uo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet? I stopped playing those types of games when I got into high school, so I don&#x27;t really have any concept of if EVE and WoW and the like were actually definitively better, or just different and more successful do to being easier for beginners.<p>I haven&#x27;t played any of the Larian games (e.g. Divinity: Original Sin II), but noticed that only recently with these sorts of graphics do these new 3D isometric games actually have the same kind of feeling that UO had at the time when it came out, if that makes any sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>egfx</author><text>&gt;if that makes any sense.<p>Makes perfect sense. I was an Elder in UO (a player character with special powers that advanced the storyline) Or basically; as I realize today, an unpaid intern at Origin. And afterwards QA lead on WOW and I can definitively say UO wasn’t a game. It was an alternate universe. It was transcendent unlike any game and blizzard games included.<p>It wasn’t the first as there was “Meridian59” which came out before and people were basically divided into 2 camps. After “City of Heroes” and “Dark Age of Camelot” came out, then it (mmo) became a genre.</text></comment> |
20,647,316 | 20,647,291 | 1 | 2 | 20,646,743 | train | <story><title>TV detector van</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The warrant revealed that a BBC contractor had used an &quot;optical detector&quot; to reveal the possible presence of a TV.[10] The warrant stated that: &quot;the optical detector in the detector van uses a large lens to collect that light and focus it on to an especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals, which can be electronically analysed. If a receiver is being used to watch broadcast programmes then a positive reading is returned.&quot; [10] The BBC stated that this was strong evidence that a set was &quot;receiving a possible broadcast&quot;.<p>According to The Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office, &quot;where the BBC still suspects that an occupier is watching live television but not paying for a licence, it can send a detection van to check whether this is the case. TVL detection vans can identify viewing on a non‐TV device in the same way that they can detect viewing on a television set. BBC staff were able to demonstrate this to my staff in controlled conditions sufficient for us to be confident that they could detect viewing on a range of non‐TV devices.&quot;<p>---<p>That device description is entirely consistent with a video camera, perhaps with a telescope in front of it, used for peering through people&#x27;s windows.<p>Does this put the BBC at risk of violating anti-peeping-Tom legislation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jarvist</author><text>No, it sounds like a telescope focusing onto a single pixel (i.e. just the back of the curtains), and then using the output from this pixel with a lock-in amplifier tied to the broadcast signal. The sensitivity would be enormous due to the lock-in.<p>With a CRT you would be able to do this with &lt;microsecond resolution as the scan lines went across.<p>In today&#x27;s LCD world, I guess something similar could be done for a whole pixel-average of a whole frame, and then look at the time-series of that to correct for lag in digital television &#x2F; internet etc..</text></comment> | <story><title>TV detector van</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The warrant revealed that a BBC contractor had used an &quot;optical detector&quot; to reveal the possible presence of a TV.[10] The warrant stated that: &quot;the optical detector in the detector van uses a large lens to collect that light and focus it on to an especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals, which can be electronically analysed. If a receiver is being used to watch broadcast programmes then a positive reading is returned.&quot; [10] The BBC stated that this was strong evidence that a set was &quot;receiving a possible broadcast&quot;.<p>According to The Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office, &quot;where the BBC still suspects that an occupier is watching live television but not paying for a licence, it can send a detection van to check whether this is the case. TVL detection vans can identify viewing on a non‐TV device in the same way that they can detect viewing on a television set. BBC staff were able to demonstrate this to my staff in controlled conditions sufficient for us to be confident that they could detect viewing on a range of non‐TV devices.&quot;<p>---<p>That device description is entirely consistent with a video camera, perhaps with a telescope in front of it, used for peering through people&#x27;s windows.<p>Does this put the BBC at risk of violating anti-peeping-Tom legislation?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnode</author><text>It&#x27;s not a video camera in the conventional sense, necessarily.<p>You could also collect unfocused light emissions, such at those reflecting from walls and ceiling, and correlate their luminance and chroma fluctuations over time with those of live TV. This would not intelligibly perceive non TV light signals, and so be less of a privacy concern. Additionally this would work if the TV&#x27;s image is not visible.</text></comment> |
27,827,524 | 27,827,439 | 1 | 3 | 27,827,203 | train | <story><title>Dividend Cripples Saudi Aramco</title><url>https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Huge-Dividend-Cripples-Worlds-Largest-Oil-Company.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moralestapia</author><text>I can&#x27;t feel bad for them.<p>I lived there for four years (at KAUST), I am deeply familiar with the country and its people. The Saudis are nice and well-intended, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch.<p>I left after my 4yo daughter was kidnapped(!) when I refused to sign some papers regarding my work situation. I am not making this up. The kidnapping was carried away by an Australian professor and a couple American guys working there, but when I tried to look for help I was horrified that this seemed to be business as usual and no one even batted an eye, no jurisdiction. Fortunately, we are safe now and doing better than ever, but, what a story.<p>Until they fix many of these things it will be very hard for them to establish a thriving economy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dividend Cripples Saudi Aramco</title><url>https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Huge-Dividend-Cripples-Worlds-Largest-Oil-Company.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stefan_</author><text>Surely the stakeholders that are paid this dividend remain overwhelmingly Saudi (government) interests. So they made up this dividend to loot the place. I&#x27;m sure they had other ways of looting prior. What&#x27;s the big difference?</text></comment> |
28,907,921 | 28,907,821 | 1 | 3 | 28,907,323 | train | <story><title>AMD Laptops finally reach the 4k screen barrier</title><url>https://amd-now.com/amd-laptops-finally-reach-the-4k-screen-barrier-with-the-lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-gen-2-and-thinkpad-p14-gen-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>StillBored</author><text>The P14 has reasonable ram configurations from what I can tell. Its insane to think that 16G max on a 16 thread processor is enough for any serious workloads that scale with core count (aka a lot of them) as is provided with the T14. But I still don&#x27;t get why lenovo still provides _soldered_ ram at all on the T&#x2F;P series machines, I&#x27;ve been repeatedly gimped by that with my work provided machines (besides the inability to match timings when the socket has 2x the capacity installed&#x2F;etc).<p>But what I really want to know is where the full bios manual is, so that I can see if its possible to enable S3 standby. My use case for a laptop generally involves putting it in my bag overnight&#x2F;etc and I expect the battery to basically be where I left it over the weekend&#x2F;etc. I&#x27;ve yet to have a &quot;modern standby&quot; machine that can pull that off without hibernating the machine. Frequently even with hibernation it will wake repeatedly and drain the battery anyway. Toss in the fact that i&#x27;ve not had good luck with AMD machines power savings and that makes it doubly important that S3 works.<p>The lack of a pre-installed linux option doesn&#x27;t provide much confidence.<p>Acer and some of the smaller vendors seem to be the only ones providing a full suite of BIOS options on their machines (they also have two dimm slots). The problem is that their machines are plasticy and have crummy form factors.</text></comment> | <story><title>AMD Laptops finally reach the 4k screen barrier</title><url>https://amd-now.com/amd-laptops-finally-reach-the-4k-screen-barrier-with-the-lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-gen-2-and-thinkpad-p14-gen-2/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IntelMiner</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised at the authors reverence for the Lenovo T14. I purchased one in September of last year and returned it in less than a month!<p>While it was quite performant, the screen shipped with it was unusably color inaccuarate. Reviews online stating that it had a color accuracy of just 37% NTSC.<p>In addition to having horrible color accuracy in general usage (tomatoes would look like oranges for instance) using something like &quot;F.Lux&quot; or &quot;Windows Nightlight&quot; would cause this level of color-inaccuracy to appear<p>Windows: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QgjqeDF9c50</a><p>Linux: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UhLBx4mmPrM</a><p>Microsoft&#x27;s own demo of the technology shows what it &quot;should&quot; look like on a more proper display <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2QCRDn8-qLo#t=1m58s</a></text></comment> |
5,727,760 | 5,726,149 | 1 | 3 | 5,725,579 | train | <story><title>EFF now accepting Bitcoin again</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-will-accept-bitcoins-support-digital-liberty</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fianchetto</author><text>EFF taking Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin but they won't get a single satoshi from me. I joined EFF not long after the Steve Jackson days and supported them until relatively recently.<p>I didn't believe their original "we don't want to be the story" explanation for not wanting to accept bitcoins. The EFF didn't want to get tagged as 'fringe' in their DC circles by accepting bitcoins in the wake of the Wikileaks/bitcoin story. Now that Bitcoin is being backed by startup money, EFF sees Bitcoin as socially safe again.<p>EFF alienated me by letting go of principle when it was more important to hang onto it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hristov</author><text>You have to keep in mind that the EFF get into some very important political battles and earn some very fearsome enemies.<p>In DC politics your enemies will not kill you but they will sue you, or they can do even worse -- they can ask their friends in Congress to open an investigation or to ask the DOJ to do so.<p>Thus, the lawyers for the EFF have to be really really careful and make sure that there are no open avenues of attack. When you are potential target, you have to be much more cautious than you would usually be. Especially if your enemies are very powerful and well connected lawyers, powerbrokers and publicity people. These people can take the slightest infraction, real or imagined, and weave it in a complex and snowballing story that ends with you having lost all credibility.<p>Note what happened to Julian Assange.<p>So no you cannot blame the EFF for refusing to be adventurous vis-a-vis bitcoin.<p>Furthermore, their change of policy is probably not related to startup money but to the government providing guidance for virtual currency.</text></comment> | <story><title>EFF now accepting Bitcoin again</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-will-accept-bitcoins-support-digital-liberty</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fianchetto</author><text>EFF taking Bitcoin is good for Bitcoin but they won't get a single satoshi from me. I joined EFF not long after the Steve Jackson days and supported them until relatively recently.<p>I didn't believe their original "we don't want to be the story" explanation for not wanting to accept bitcoins. The EFF didn't want to get tagged as 'fringe' in their DC circles by accepting bitcoins in the wake of the Wikileaks/bitcoin story. Now that Bitcoin is being backed by startup money, EFF sees Bitcoin as socially safe again.<p>EFF alienated me by letting go of principle when it was more important to hang onto it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>streptomycin</author><text>They didn't want to get tagged as fringe, so they wait to accept bitcoins until right after the largest bitcoin exchange had funds seized by the DHS?</text></comment> |
19,886,407 | 19,886,377 | 1 | 2 | 19,886,145 | train | <story><title>Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/japanese-railway-company-starts-testing-249mph-bullet-train-speeds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cheerlessbog</author><text>Faster trains make longer distances competitive with air travel. Assuming a similar price per mile, the cutoff is T * deltaV where T is the extra time to travel to and from the airport and get through security and deltaV is the difference in speed. Assuming 3 hours and 250mph (500 - 250) the cutover is 750 miles.<p>Reality is less simple as price varies as well. In Europe the cutover (in time and price) seems about 200 miles [1] although the CO2 emissions are up to 30x higher by air. Of course speeds are lower, maybe 150mph which would suggest a 450mi cutoff.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of-travel&#x2F;a-45209552" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;trains-vs-planes-whats-the-real-cost-of-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Japanese railway company starts testing 249mph bullet train speeds</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/japanese-railway-company-starts-testing-249mph-bullet-train-speeds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CPLX</author><text>Meanwhile, we still can’t take the subway to LaGuardia despite a few billion dollars in recent renovations.</text></comment> |
14,637,749 | 14,637,620 | 1 | 2 | 14,635,013 | train | <story><title>I decided to disable AMP on my site</title><url>https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sturmen</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, &#x27;stories you might like&#x27; suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the user experience that people want but lights a fire under web developers to give them that experience without relying on Google&#x27;s walled garden. How many stories of &quot;Company X made a great product Y, but Company X is anti-consumer&#x2F;evil&#x2F;eats puppies, so the OSS made their own and it has grown into something great&quot; have you heard? I think AMP is another one.<p>The web has become bloated, where people use heavy JS frameworks like React to make their blog and then load 5MB of ad JS to load 10MB autoplaying videos. I dream of a day when static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll are the norm. Let&#x27;s flex our muscles and make that happen and show the world that AMP is good but openness is better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boramalper</author><text>&gt; However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, &#x27;stories you might like&#x27; suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are.<p>You don&#x27;t need AMP to get rid of them though. We can appreciate that Google <i>encouraged</i> developers to get rid of bloat <i></i>AND<i></i> to opt-in for AMP, but that doesn&#x27;t make AMP <i>technically</i> superior. I think we should give a critique of ourselves and ask why did we wait for a corporation G to push us to get rid of the bloat we created?</text></comment> | <story><title>I decided to disable AMP on my site</title><url>https://www.alexkras.com/i-decided-to-disable-amp-on-my-site/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sturmen</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of backlash against AMP on principle, which I agree with and support. However, as a non-principled web consumer, I think AMP pages are 10x better than the ad-filled, slow as molasses, jump-around-as-JavaSript-loads, video autoplaying, &#x27;stories you might like&#x27; suggested bullshit, auto-loading 20MB heaps of steaming garbage that current news sites are. I think that AMP is a stepping stone that shows the user experience that people want but lights a fire under web developers to give them that experience without relying on Google&#x27;s walled garden. How many stories of &quot;Company X made a great product Y, but Company X is anti-consumer&#x2F;evil&#x2F;eats puppies, so the OSS made their own and it has grown into something great&quot; have you heard? I think AMP is another one.<p>The web has become bloated, where people use heavy JS frameworks like React to make their blog and then load 5MB of ad JS to load 10MB autoplaying videos. I dream of a day when static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll are the norm. Let&#x27;s flex our muscles and make that happen and show the world that AMP is good but openness is better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kavok</author><text>On iOS I usually find AMP pages to be less usable. It forces a bar at the top and I can&#x27;t easily share the link. Sometimes sites don&#x27;t seem to work at all. For a long time any Reddit link on the Google Search results just didn&#x27;t load on iOS for me.<p>I run an adblocker and use reading mode frequently. I do not usually suffer any issues with ads even without AMP. It is solving a problem I do not have and creating more problems in the process.</text></comment> |
30,327,082 | 30,326,726 | 1 | 3 | 30,326,338 | train | <story><title>Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email</title><url>https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-pharmacy-started-with-a-cold-email.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>On one hand, we should obviously applaud anyone doing anything to bring down drug prices.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m increasingly uncomfortable with just how much free marketing and PR is being applied to the &quot;Mark Cuban Pharmacy&quot; without much critical examination of what&#x27;s going on here.<p>Taking one of the examples straight from their homepage: They will sell you 30 Prozac tablets for $3.90: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsule&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsul...</a> They list the &quot;Retail price at other pharmacies&quot; as $22.80 and claim to save you $18.90. Fantastic, right?<p>Except nobody should actually be paying $22.80 for generic Prozac. You can drive to any local Walmart and get it for $4 <i>and</i> they will bill your insurance, which will count toward your deductible. (Walmart has a list of their $4 and other cheap prescriptions here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664</a> )<p>Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy, however, refuses to deal with your insurance and they&#x27;re going to charge an extra $5.00 shipping at checkout. So now you&#x27;re paying basically twice as much to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy even though they&#x27;re telling you the entire way that you&#x27;re actually saving money.<p>I also checked my personal insurance and my negotiated rate for the same medication is also less than $5 at local pharmacies.<p>Now of course it&#x27;s likely that other drugs will work out to be cheaper on Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy than any other combination of your personal insurance and local pharmacies, but that&#x27;s far from guaranteed.<p>I&#x27;m concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people&#x27;s lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company&#x27;s website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they&#x27;ll check for you). His profit margins, however small, rely on people skipping their insurance and going straight to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy. That could be fine in some circumstance, but in others, perhaps many other cases, the customer would come out behind by opting out of their insurance.<p>I wish some media outlets would actually dig into this instead of endlessly recycling the company&#x27;s own talking points verbatim.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briHass</author><text>&gt;I&#x27;m concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people&#x27;s lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company&#x27;s website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they&#x27;ll check for you)<p>That certainly hasn&#x27;t been my experience. Most pharmacies I&#x27;ve tried this with need to actually &#x27;fill&#x27; the script and run it through insurance to get a final price. And, in the era of &#x27;COVID-related staffing shortages&#x27;, good luck calling the pharmacy and actually getting someone on the line.<p>The sad thing is, all these pharmacies know about GoodRx and other discount providers. They could stop playing games and just run all scripts through these providers to get a &#x27;cash price&#x27;, but they don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s honestly like shopping at Kohls where if you aren&#x27;t stacking coupons, you&#x27;re the sucker paying too much.<p>I don&#x27;t know about Cuban&#x27;s mechanics here, but a website that shows you the final price, no games&#x2F;codes, is a great addition to the market.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mark Cuban's pharmacy started with a cold email</title><url>https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/mark-cuban-s-pharmacy-started-with-a-cold-email.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>On one hand, we should obviously applaud anyone doing anything to bring down drug prices.<p>On the other hand, I&#x27;m increasingly uncomfortable with just how much free marketing and PR is being applied to the &quot;Mark Cuban Pharmacy&quot; without much critical examination of what&#x27;s going on here.<p>Taking one of the examples straight from their homepage: They will sell you 30 Prozac tablets for $3.90: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsule&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;costplusdrugs.com&#x2F;medications&#x2F;fluoxetine-10mg-capsul...</a> They list the &quot;Retail price at other pharmacies&quot; as $22.80 and claim to save you $18.90. Fantastic, right?<p>Except nobody should actually be paying $22.80 for generic Prozac. You can drive to any local Walmart and get it for $4 <i>and</i> they will bill your insurance, which will count toward your deductible. (Walmart has a list of their $4 and other cheap prescriptions here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walmart.com&#x2F;cp&#x2F;4-prescriptions&#x2F;1078664</a> )<p>Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy, however, refuses to deal with your insurance and they&#x27;re going to charge an extra $5.00 shipping at checkout. So now you&#x27;re paying basically twice as much to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy even though they&#x27;re telling you the entire way that you&#x27;re actually saving money.<p>I also checked my personal insurance and my negotiated rate for the same medication is also less than $5 at local pharmacies.<p>Now of course it&#x27;s likely that other drugs will work out to be cheaper on Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy than any other combination of your personal insurance and local pharmacies, but that&#x27;s far from guaranteed.<p>I&#x27;m concerned that Mark Cuban is capitalizing on people&#x27;s lack of understanding about how insurance works and how easy it can be to look up drug prices (use your insurance company&#x27;s website or just pick up the phone and call your pharmacy, they&#x27;ll check for you). His profit margins, however small, rely on people skipping their insurance and going straight to Mark Cuban&#x27;s pharmacy. That could be fine in some circumstance, but in others, perhaps many other cases, the customer would come out behind by opting out of their insurance.<p>I wish some media outlets would actually dig into this instead of endlessly recycling the company&#x27;s own talking points verbatim.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ctoth</author><text>&gt; In 2020, 8.6 percent of people, or 28.0 million, did not have health insurance at any point during the year[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2021&#x2F;demo&#x2F;p60-274.html#:~:text=In%202020%2C%208.6%20percent%20of,part%20of%202020%20was%2091.4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;library&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2021&#x2F;demo&#x2F;p60-27...</a>.</text></comment> |
4,999,762 | 4,999,801 | 1 | 2 | 4,999,454 | train | <story><title>Python: The Dictionary Playbook</title><url>http://blog.amir.rachum.com/post/39501813266/python-the-dictionary-playbook</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elbear</author><text>You mentioned it a bit, but I want to make it clear that, even if you don't use 2.7, you can still count by doing:<p><pre><code> from collections import defaultdict
counter = defaultdict(int)
</code></pre>
There is a difference though, because you have to count manually, i.e:<p><pre><code> for i in 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocius':
counter[i] += 1
</code></pre>
Also, because defaultdict accepts any callable, you can have a dict of counters by doing:<p><pre><code> counters = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(int))
for word in ['apple', 'berry', 'grape']:
for letter in word:
counters[word][letter] += 1
</code></pre>
This is not very obvious, so I don't use it a lot, but sometimes it's the most elegant solution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Python: The Dictionary Playbook</title><url>http://blog.amir.rachum.com/post/39501813266/python-the-dictionary-playbook</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avolcano</author><text>You know a guide is good when it makes you want to go back and refactor old code. Great information, thanks :)</text></comment> |
29,060,926 | 29,060,473 | 1 | 2 | 29,057,121 | train | <story><title>Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back</title><url>https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Misdicorl</author><text>God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don&#x27;t understand why we haven&#x27;t invested significant resources in trying to communicate with the other animals on our own planet. What an incredibly weird and non translatable experience it will be to (finally?!) start this adventure with whales.<p>Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you&#x27;ll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn&#x27;t relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn&#x27;t apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren&#x27;t as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to <i>far</i> outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tsol</author><text>I mean.. hate to be a party pooper, but just because we created a the equivalent of gpt3 for whales, does that mean we can do anything useful? Like talking to whales.. we haven&#x27;t even established how their language works.<p>What language even is, is a good question. I read it once demonstrated as this; some species of monkey has a specific call they do when they see a panther, and it results in all the monkeys who hear it to run up their trees. Now what does this call mean? It could mean &quot;jaguar alert!&quot;, pointing to a very specific concept-- a certain animal is here and we all know they&#x27;re dangerous.<p>It could also mean &quot;I&#x27;m scared!&quot;, and maybe it&#x27;s just monkey see monkey do. It could also mean something more abstract, like a blood curdling scream-- there&#x27;s no one thing that it means, but as humans we instinctively know that people don&#x27;t scream like that unless something legitimately awful is happening. So maybe the call communicates emotion rather than an intellectual concept-- it&#x27;s a call of fear that makes other monkeys who hear it also scared.<p>Just breaking down what animal language even _is_, is a challenge. I&#x27;m not optimistic on hearing any oral histories of whales, or even that they record history. I mean humans only started recording history for its own sake like 2000 years ago with herodotus. Before then we have tablets to keep track of stock, letters, and murals which were often made to depict the strength of the reigning emperor and the foes he vanquished. So maybe if we talk to whales it&#x27;ll be a little like if aliens came to ancient Egypt to talk to the pharaoh; we&#x27;ll just get a dictator whale telling us about all the other whales he&#x27;s killed and how he&#x27;s the greatest.. haha probably not that, though.</text></comment> | <story><title>Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back</title><url>https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Misdicorl</author><text>God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don&#x27;t understand why we haven&#x27;t invested significant resources in trying to communicate with the other animals on our own planet. What an incredibly weird and non translatable experience it will be to (finally?!) start this adventure with whales.<p>Tangent time. If you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you&#x27;ll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn&#x27;t relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn&#x27;t apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren&#x27;t as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to <i>far</i> outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franky47</author><text>&gt; Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.<p>Somehow I pictured whales as the engineers in this sentence. It makes it even better.</text></comment> |
2,932,118 | 2,931,656 | 1 | 2 | 2,931,446 | train | <story><title>Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27102/?ref=rss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>powertower</author><text>How does this prove that gravity is not an emergant phenomena?<p>Doesn't this only claim that gravity and entropy don't have some type of a first order (direct) relationship?<p>Rant:<p>I never understood how you can explain gravity as 1) a bending of space-time caused by mass and then 2) pretend it's a force transmited by "gravitons".<p>If 1) is true then it's an effect (phenomena), not a cause (force). If 2) is true than it's a cause (force), not an effect (phenomena).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinutheraj</author><text>Feynman has expressed his opinion on this in one of the Messenger lectures on the Character of Physical Law that he gave at Cornell.<p><i>This is an example of the wide range of beautiful ways of
describing nature. When people say that nature must have
causality, you can use Newton's law; or if they say that
nature must be stated in terms of a minimum principle,
you talk about it this last way; or if they insist that nature must have a local field - sure, you can do that. The question is: which one is right? If these various alternatives are not exactly equivalent mathematically, if for certain ones there will be different consequences than for others, then all we
have to do is to experiment to find out which way nature
actually chooses to do it. People may come along and argue
philosophically that they like one better than another; but
we have learned from such experience that all philosophical
intuitions about what nature is going to do fail. One just
has to work out all the possibilities, and try all the alternatives. But in the particular case I am talking about the
theories are exactly equivalent. Mathematically each of the
three different formulations, Newton's law, the local field
method and the minimum principle, gives exactly the same
consequences. What do we do then? You will read in all
the books that we cannot decide scientifically on one or the
other. That is true. They are equivalent scientifically. It is impossible to make a decision, because there is no experimental way to distinguish between them if all the consequences are the same. But psychologically they are very
different in two ways. First, philosophically you like them
or do not like them; and training is the only way to beat
that disease. Second, psychologically they are different
because they are completely unequivalent when you are
trying to guess new laws.</i></text></comment> | <story><title>Experiments Show Gravity Is Not an Emergent Phenomenon</title><url>http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27102/?ref=rss</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>powertower</author><text>How does this prove that gravity is not an emergant phenomena?<p>Doesn't this only claim that gravity and entropy don't have some type of a first order (direct) relationship?<p>Rant:<p>I never understood how you can explain gravity as 1) a bending of space-time caused by mass and then 2) pretend it's a force transmited by "gravitons".<p>If 1) is true then it's an effect (phenomena), not a cause (force). If 2) is true than it's a cause (force), not an effect (phenomena).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattheww</author><text>No, this paper claims that introducing gravity as an emergent phenomenon in Verlinde's framework breaks quantum mechanics. He shows that Verlinde's proposal changes the Hamiltonian. However, the solutions to the standard Schrodinger equation have been measured in experiments with ultra-cold neutrons and shown to agree (ergo, disagreeing with Verlinde's theory).<p>Regarding your "rant": either way, it's still a force. Gravity still causes things to move. How that force is explained is clearly different in different theories. General Relativity suggests (1). Quantum Gravity theories suggest (2). Newton didn't really explain how it was mediated.<p>You could apply the same rant to QED: Either electrodynamics is caused by the bending of a vector potential by electric charge or it's a force transmitted by photons. The two statements are equivalent. But with gravity, we're not sure if quantum part is true.</text></comment> |
36,392,848 | 36,388,880 | 1 | 2 | 36,388,680 | train | <story><title>AI has poisoned its own well</title><url>https://tracydurnell.com/2023/06/18/ai-has-poisoned-its-own-well/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sogen</author><text>An aspect never mentioned is that this data only fed from active users, which are the minority of people.<p>Majority of online users are lurkers, so all of these models are extremely biased on whom they got their information from.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI has poisoned its own well</title><url>https://tracydurnell.com/2023/06/18/ai-has-poisoned-its-own-well/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raxxorraxor</author><text>If the generated content is vetted by an adversarial network, we theoretically have a recursively improving AI. Perhaps by introducing more randomness we could even reach some form of evolution that can introduce new concepts, since limited scopes is still what gives AIs away in the end. That is the optimistic perspective at least.<p>On the net, search and content quality is already pretty low for certain key words. If a word is part of the news cycle, expect hundreds of badly researched news paper articles, some of which might be generated as well. Or if they weren&#x27;t, you wouldn&#x27;t notice a difference if they become that.<p>But I don&#x27;t believe the companies made a mistake. They could even protect their position with the data they already acquired and classified. Maybe a quality label would say genuine human®.<p>If all that fails large companies would also be able to employ thousands of low wage workers to classify new content. The increasing memory problem persists, I think that is a race where the model that can extract data as efficiently as possible will win. But without the data sets, there is no way to verify performance.</text></comment> |
38,811,735 | 38,806,346 | 1 | 2 | 38,805,439 | train | <story><title>The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)</title><url>https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grugq</author><text>I have the full story on that incident. It is actually really funny.<p>If the guy who did it wants to come forward, that is his decision. [edit: I won&#x27;t name names.]<p>He did provided me the full story. He told me with the understanding that the story would go public, so I will dig it up and post it.<p>I also interviewed the sysadmins who were running the box at the time.<p>1. it was not an NSA operation, it was done by a hacker.<p>2. it was discovered by accident, not because of clever due diligence.<p>Basically, there was a developer who had a flakey connection and one time his commits didn&#x27;t go through. To detect this in future he had a script that would download the entire tree from the server and compare it against his local copy to make sure that his changes had been committed.<p>It was discovered because of the discrepancy between his local working copy and the upstream copy. Which was checked not for security reasons, but because sometimes the two were out of sync. That&#x27;s all. Just dumb luck.<p>The sysadmins are still quite bitter about it. I know how it feels when your box is hacked and you really take it personally.<p>The code wasn&#x27;t added by hacking the CVS, as far as I remember, but rather through a hacked developer with commit rights.<p>that&#x27;s the story as I was told</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epcoa</author><text>Geez, this crowd. The clearest evidence that it was not an NSA attack is that it was not very good. It modified a CVS mirror. At no time was the source of truth (the bitkeeper repo) in any danger. Anybody that knew how this stuff worked at the time would have known it would be caught immediately. Not very state level expertise, pretty sad if it was the NSA.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Linux backdoor attempt of 2003 (2013)</title><url>https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grugq</author><text>I have the full story on that incident. It is actually really funny.<p>If the guy who did it wants to come forward, that is his decision. [edit: I won&#x27;t name names.]<p>He did provided me the full story. He told me with the understanding that the story would go public, so I will dig it up and post it.<p>I also interviewed the sysadmins who were running the box at the time.<p>1. it was not an NSA operation, it was done by a hacker.<p>2. it was discovered by accident, not because of clever due diligence.<p>Basically, there was a developer who had a flakey connection and one time his commits didn&#x27;t go through. To detect this in future he had a script that would download the entire tree from the server and compare it against his local copy to make sure that his changes had been committed.<p>It was discovered because of the discrepancy between his local working copy and the upstream copy. Which was checked not for security reasons, but because sometimes the two were out of sync. That&#x27;s all. Just dumb luck.<p>The sysadmins are still quite bitter about it. I know how it feels when your box is hacked and you really take it personally.<p>The code wasn&#x27;t added by hacking the CVS, as far as I remember, but rather through a hacked developer with commit rights.<p>that&#x27;s the story as I was told</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>causal</author><text>Wait was the guy you know the hacker or someone who discovered the hack by accident? If the latter, how do you know anything about the hacker&#x27;s identity or motive?</text></comment> |
36,909,716 | 36,908,392 | 1 | 3 | 36,907,248 | train | <story><title>Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse</title><url>https://blockworks.co/news/worldcoin-privacy-concerns</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unboxingelf</author><text>Worldcoin is simply another pre-mined, VC backed shitcoin - albeit worst because they’re building a biometrics database.<p>- VCs dump money in (SBF, a16z, etc)<p>- 25% of the coins are kept for the founders + investors<p>How many times do people have to get burned on these scams?<p>Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curiousllama</author><text>&gt; Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.<p>Quite the opposite. Congress usually doesn’t give a shit until something is actually relevant to politics. They don’t care about weird VC grifts</text></comment> | <story><title>Worldcoin isn’t as bad as it sounds: It’s worse</title><url>https://blockworks.co/news/worldcoin-privacy-concerns</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unboxingelf</author><text>Worldcoin is simply another pre-mined, VC backed shitcoin - albeit worst because they’re building a biometrics database.<p>- VCs dump money in (SBF, a16z, etc)<p>- 25% of the coins are kept for the founders + investors<p>How many times do people have to get burned on these scams?<p>Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lern_too_spel</author><text>&gt; Obviously Sam has some street cred with the govt else they would have pulled him infront of congress like when zuck tried to launch Libre.<p>He got around US regulations by not making it available in the US. No street cred required.</text></comment> |
37,231,956 | 37,231,542 | 1 | 2 | 37,230,843 | train | <story><title>Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson’s disease up to seven years before diagnosis</title><url>https://www.moorfields.nhs.uk/news/eye-scans-detect-signs-parkinson-s-disease-seven-years-diagnosis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheBlight</author><text>The idea of knowing you&#x27;re going to get dementia sometime in the next decade is interesting. But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s straight-forward as to whether or not knowing is a good idea.<p>It&#x27;s also a little amusing to take the idea to its logical extreme: What if it becomes a societal norm to know? Would public venues allow soon-to-be dementia patients line cutting priority etc? Think amusement parks, transit reservations, hotel booking, bars, movie theaters -- all of it. There could be a whole industry built overnight of catering to this specific demographic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aurornis</author><text>&gt; The idea of knowing you&#x27;re going to get dementia sometime in the next decade is interesting. But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s straight-forward as to whether or not knowing is a good idea.<p>It&#x27;s not fun, but being able to do long-term planning around challenging medical conditions is without a doubt better than not knowing. This includes everything from financial planning to finding a house that is ideal for your condition (no stairs, single level, etc.)<p>Ideally we&#x27;ll have a better understanding of disease-modifying drugs in the near future that can slow progression of Parkinson&#x27;s. If we get confirmation that drugs like Exenatide actually do slow the progression of Parkinson&#x27;s (trials ongoing) then you&#x27;d definitely want to know as early as possible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson’s disease up to seven years before diagnosis</title><url>https://www.moorfields.nhs.uk/news/eye-scans-detect-signs-parkinson-s-disease-seven-years-diagnosis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheBlight</author><text>The idea of knowing you&#x27;re going to get dementia sometime in the next decade is interesting. But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s straight-forward as to whether or not knowing is a good idea.<p>It&#x27;s also a little amusing to take the idea to its logical extreme: What if it becomes a societal norm to know? Would public venues allow soon-to-be dementia patients line cutting priority etc? Think amusement parks, transit reservations, hotel booking, bars, movie theaters -- all of it. There could be a whole industry built overnight of catering to this specific demographic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ekianjo</author><text>Knowing you will have something incurable has only downsides. You will dread the time ahead of you instead of enjoying your present time.</text></comment> |
29,006,589 | 29,006,718 | 1 | 2 | 29,005,669 | train | <story><title>Alphabet Third Quarter 2021 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q3_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HWR_14</author><text>Once more, I don&#x27;t understand how advertising revenue keeps growing. Once people install ad blockers, they don&#x27;t typically remove them. And ad-blockers keep growing.<p>So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going <i>up</i>?<p>I understand, intellectually, that not everyone thinks like me. But I don&#x27;t fundamentally understand why people allow ads on their devices when they can prevent it. Then again, I don&#x27;t understand a lot of behaviors people exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>The price of the ads could be going up at a quicker rate, especially as more and more viewers from previous ad spending channels (such as TV channels) move to online options (such as Youtube).<p>Also, the number of people using ad blockers must be extremely low. Even crazier, most people who I talk to about content blockers on iOS zone out of the conversation before I can even get to how easy it is. They do not even care that much about the ads or notice how annoying they are.<p>Then again, many or most people still watch live sports and old school TV channels, which are chock full of ads. I cannot even stand too obvious product placement, much less ad breaks. So while I will go out of my way to remove ads from my life, there are probably 9 others who will not spend a single second thinking about it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alphabet Third Quarter 2021 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q3_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HWR_14</author><text>Once more, I don&#x27;t understand how advertising revenue keeps growing. Once people install ad blockers, they don&#x27;t typically remove them. And ad-blockers keep growing.<p>So who is actually seeing these ads? How can those numbers be going <i>up</i>?<p>I understand, intellectually, that not everyone thinks like me. But I don&#x27;t fundamentally understand why people allow ads on their devices when they can prevent it. Then again, I don&#x27;t understand a lot of behaviors people exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vgeek</author><text>They can adjust Quality Score parameters or bid floors to increase the CPC and&#x2F;or make ads look more like organic results to increase the ad CTR. Both will increase their earnings per pageview.<p>More auction participants mean higher bids.<p>Removing match types such as phrase, while automatically shifting phrase to broad modified helps increase their fill rate &amp; number of participants per auction.<p>Eliminating second price proxy auctions in display ads (search likely soon to follow?) will likely yield measurable increases in CPC.<p>A few years back they went from up to 10 ads to 7 on most-- they have that dial to adjust if necessary.<p>Products like Google Shopping take up more and more space on the SERPs and are <i>typically</i> pay to play. They have higher CTR due to carousel images &amp; once you click into that ecosystem, nearly every click yields ad revenue.<p>Chrome behavior with URLs is conditioning users to search for brands (versus typing in the full domain name), who then have to pay to defend their brand terms from brand poachers.</text></comment> |
7,593,883 | 7,591,694 | 1 | 3 | 7,591,432 | train | <story><title>Raising a moral child</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-a-moral-child.html?emc=eta1&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>The experiments this op-ed describes are really neat. I especially like the one that demonstrates the importance of &quot;practice what you preach.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s another cool experiment related to social&#x2F;moral development, which you can perform on your own kid:<p>Have two grown-up friends each show your baby a toy. The first friend should offer the toy to your kid but then retract the offer and keep the toy to himself. The second friend should offer the toy to your kid but &quot;accidentally&quot; drop it out of reach.<p>Now, give your baby a different toy, and then prompt her to share it with one of the friends.<p>Your baby is very likely to share it with the friend who dropped the toy, rather than the one who withdrew the toy.<p>The above experiment is based on a 2010 study involving 21-month-olds. It found that two-thirds of the kids shared with the person who dropped the toy -- and the other third kept the toy to themselves. Not a single one shared with the person who offered the toy then retracted the offer. (I talk about this more in &quot;Experimenting With Babies&quot; <a href="http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.experimentingwithbabies.com</a>)<p>Not only is this fascinating because it shows that babies act preferentially toward people who are kind to them ... but it holds true <i>EVEN IF</i> the person who initiates a kind act is unable to complete it, but demonstrates the proper intent. Think about the complexity of the cognitive processes that are going on in that evaluation. It&#x27;s amazing!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gohrt</author><text>That book has interesting <i>experiments</i>, but suffers psychology&#x27;s common problem (especially baby psychology): massively over-extending the experimental data into unsupportable conclusions that ignore loads of confounding factors.<p>Example, quoted from the website:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;
The babies in the unjustified group spent more time looking at the adult&#x27;s discordant expression and exhibited more checking behavior. Additionally, the babies&#x27; facial expressions only displayed empathy for the adult when a negative emotional response fit the scenario.<p>The takeaway:<p>Parents, take note: Your toddler can see through your &quot;stiff upper lip&quot; routine.<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>The &quot;takeaway&quot; is completely unsupported. In no way does the experiment suggest that hiding pain is useless.<p>For one thing, &quot;stiff upper lip&quot; (aka &quot;faked neutrality&quot;) is different from faked <i>happiness</i>.<p>For two, the experimental methodology only applies to cases where the baby <i>knows</i> that the experience&#x27;s standard emotional response. That applies to hammer strikes on a finger, but not something like divorce or losing a job.<p>For three, &quot;spent more time looking at the adult&#x27;s discordant expression&quot; shows that the babies <i>learn</i> from their parents reactions, as they expend effort to understand counterintuitive behavior. &quot;Counterintuitive&quot; is not the same as &quot;fake&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot;.<p>So the &quot;takeway&quot; may in fact be the <i>opposite</i> of what the data suggests!</text></comment> | <story><title>Raising a moral child</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/opinion/sunday/raising-a-moral-child.html?emc=eta1&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>The experiments this op-ed describes are really neat. I especially like the one that demonstrates the importance of &quot;practice what you preach.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s another cool experiment related to social&#x2F;moral development, which you can perform on your own kid:<p>Have two grown-up friends each show your baby a toy. The first friend should offer the toy to your kid but then retract the offer and keep the toy to himself. The second friend should offer the toy to your kid but &quot;accidentally&quot; drop it out of reach.<p>Now, give your baby a different toy, and then prompt her to share it with one of the friends.<p>Your baby is very likely to share it with the friend who dropped the toy, rather than the one who withdrew the toy.<p>The above experiment is based on a 2010 study involving 21-month-olds. It found that two-thirds of the kids shared with the person who dropped the toy -- and the other third kept the toy to themselves. Not a single one shared with the person who offered the toy then retracted the offer. (I talk about this more in &quot;Experimenting With Babies&quot; <a href="http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.experimentingwithbabies.com</a>)<p>Not only is this fascinating because it shows that babies act preferentially toward people who are kind to them ... but it holds true <i>EVEN IF</i> the person who initiates a kind act is unable to complete it, but demonstrates the proper intent. Think about the complexity of the cognitive processes that are going on in that evaluation. It&#x27;s amazing!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cstavish</author><text>Who would have thought that 21-month-olds are predisposed to Kantian ethics?</text></comment> |
35,383,362 | 35,382,866 | 1 | 3 | 35,381,755 | train | <story><title>When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets</title><url>https://leonidasv.com/til-svg-specs-almost-got-raw-socket-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&gt; it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure.<p>Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues. Just as browsers eventually got their own PDF implementations because Adobe&#x27;s sucked, I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.<p>&gt; We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor.<p>We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&#x27;m not convinced we&#x27;re a lot better off in practice.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>As someone that helped a little bit in bringing Flash to WebOS, it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure. Adobe was caught really off guard by mobile and never prioritized flash. If little else, the modern web is infinitely more secure than the flash player and Adobe would never have prioritized it. We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor. So structurally things are also infinitely healthier. That the web is a cesspool in turns of content is an orthogonal problem that would have always been the case (but also a flash laden website are up way more RAM and CPU than the equivalent html)</text></item><item><author>lmm</author><text>Have they? I would say the subsequent ~10 years of the web have vindicated Flash. HTML5 video hasn&#x27;t made websites lighter or less annoying - quite the opposite (indeed video ads are a worse problem than Flash ads ever were). Meanwhile creativity and innovation on the web have taken a hit. 10+ years on there&#x27;s still nothing that allows a lone auteur to produce a web experience as easily and effectively as you could with Flash (it seems to be <i>possible</i> to match Flash, a la the NYT&#x27;s Snow Fall or the previous Madogatari intro, but not at a level that&#x27;s accessible to an individual creator), and we&#x27;re all worse off for it.</text></item><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>Flashback to Steve Jobs&#x27; famous &quot;Thoughts on Flash&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslang.ch&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;Thoughts-on-Flash.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslang.ch&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;Thoughts-on-F...</a><p>It was not well received at the time. Oh how things have changed.</text></item><item><author>Gigachad</author><text>Good summary, only thing I&#x27;d add is that the iPhone didn&#x27;t drop support for flash, they never had it to begin with and made it clear they never would. Android vendors at the time used to use flash support as selling point until they too dropped it.<p>Being the first to call the death on something seems to be an ongoing trend with Apple.</text></item><item><author>hadlock</author><text>You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played &quot;stick figure skiing&quot; or &quot;stick figure fighting&quot; games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of &quot;multimedia&quot; apps existed inside the &quot;flash&quot; container&#x2F;spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally &quot;large&quot; (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop<p>SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was &quot;somebody elses&#x27; problem&quot; so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn&#x27;t exist yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geocar</author><text>&gt; Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues.<p>Of course not. These are just some of the many many needles of crap that broke Flash.<p>&gt; I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.<p>Perhaps you underestimate just how complicated &quot;Flash&quot; is: It&#x27;s 2023 and despite everything you can do in a modern Web browser with HTML5, SVG, JavaScript, Video and so on, we still don&#x27;t have a second full reimplementation of Flash. No emulator or converter that preserves all of the authors intentions, not even with a server-side-helper to cover the differences in networking policies between the web and Flash. I still think it would take serious cash&#x2F;time to do this.<p>And for a large company to do it would risk being sued by Adobe. They promised. I think if Adobe couldn&#x27;t fix the crap-needles for whatever reason, nobody else could either. Adobe made sure of that. And nobody wants to pay the Adobe tax when Flash hurts users so bad.<p>PDF on the other hand, is easy enough to implement on screens in a month or less, spec-in-hand. Users who use Adobe&#x27;s PDF reader deserve what they get.<p>&gt; We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&#x27;m not convinced we&#x27;re a lot better off in practice.<p>I do feel a little better off. I remember a time when every flash bug was an opportunity to airdrop malware, just buy an ad and get on every desktop PC in the world for chump change. I had to browse the Web in a VM, back when VM&#x27;s on workstation PC&#x27;s were still painfully slow, because I needed the ability to rewind state so often. I really don&#x27;t miss that.<p>A small number of players working (largely) openly (i.e. we have webkit and gecko&#x27;s source code!) allowed features to the Web be deployed relatively quickly, and problems fixed fast and usually with the smallest-possible harm. And I think people are sufficiently suspicious of closed-source infrastructure that people (mainly purchasing VPs at big enterprises) will be able to resist any attempts to change that.</text></comment> | <story><title>When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets</title><url>https://leonidasv.com/til-svg-specs-almost-got-raw-socket-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&gt; it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure.<p>Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues. Just as browsers eventually got their own PDF implementations because Adobe&#x27;s sucked, I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.<p>&gt; We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor.<p>We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&#x27;m not convinced we&#x27;re a lot better off in practice.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>As someone that helped a little bit in bringing Flash to WebOS, it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure. Adobe was caught really off guard by mobile and never prioritized flash. If little else, the modern web is infinitely more secure than the flash player and Adobe would never have prioritized it. We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor. So structurally things are also infinitely healthier. That the web is a cesspool in turns of content is an orthogonal problem that would have always been the case (but also a flash laden website are up way more RAM and CPU than the equivalent html)</text></item><item><author>lmm</author><text>Have they? I would say the subsequent ~10 years of the web have vindicated Flash. HTML5 video hasn&#x27;t made websites lighter or less annoying - quite the opposite (indeed video ads are a worse problem than Flash ads ever were). Meanwhile creativity and innovation on the web have taken a hit. 10+ years on there&#x27;s still nothing that allows a lone auteur to produce a web experience as easily and effectively as you could with Flash (it seems to be <i>possible</i> to match Flash, a la the NYT&#x27;s Snow Fall or the previous Madogatari intro, but not at a level that&#x27;s accessible to an individual creator), and we&#x27;re all worse off for it.</text></item><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>Flashback to Steve Jobs&#x27; famous &quot;Thoughts on Flash&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslang.ch&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;Thoughts-on-Flash.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslang.ch&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;Thoughts-on-F...</a><p>It was not well received at the time. Oh how things have changed.</text></item><item><author>Gigachad</author><text>Good summary, only thing I&#x27;d add is that the iPhone didn&#x27;t drop support for flash, they never had it to begin with and made it clear they never would. Android vendors at the time used to use flash support as selling point until they too dropped it.<p>Being the first to call the death on something seems to be an ongoing trend with Apple.</text></item><item><author>hadlock</author><text>You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played &quot;stick figure skiing&quot; or &quot;stick figure fighting&quot; games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of &quot;multimedia&quot; apps existed inside the &quot;flash&quot; container&#x2F;spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally &quot;large&quot; (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop<p>SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was &quot;somebody elses&#x27; problem&quot; so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn&#x27;t exist yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eyelidlessness</author><text>Blink (Chrome&#x2F;Chromium-derived browsers) is a fork of WebKit but has diverged for <i>many years</i>. To treat them as the same, you should call them KHTML as that’s their common lineage. But that would be obviously absurd.<p>WebKit and Blink are not the same browser engine.</text></comment> |
11,384,151 | 11,384,011 | 1 | 3 | 11,383,044 | train | <story><title>Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/google-large-scale-robotic-grasping-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanjshaw</author><text>I always thought this was the only way to build a true AI -- build a &#x27;virtual baby&#x27; that has to go through much the same experiences as a human baby. I&#x27;m sure this idea has been explored somewhere already - anybody have any pointers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackhack</author><text>This is precisely the approach taken at MIT under Prof. Rod Brooks: &quot;Within our group, Marjanovic, Scassellati &amp; Williamson(1996) applied a similar bootstrapping technique to enable the robot* to learn to point to a visual target. &quot;
*named Cog, short for &quot;Cognition&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;brooks&#x2F;papers&#x2F;CMAA-group.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;brooks&#x2F;papers&#x2F;CMAA-group.pdf</a><p>If I may paraphase, his model is biologically inspired -- believing hierarchical layers of behaviours, lack of a central planning model (distributed processing), and physical and temporal placement in the world (rather than abstractions of the world, or observe&#x2F;process&#x2F;react loops) are essential to the formation of a truly intelligent machine.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/google-large-scale-robotic-grasping-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanjshaw</author><text>I always thought this was the only way to build a true AI -- build a &#x27;virtual baby&#x27; that has to go through much the same experiences as a human baby. I&#x27;m sure this idea has been explored somewhere already - anybody have any pointers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>Physical babies take a long time to adapt and form complex connections (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbanchildinstitute.org&#x2F;why-0-3&#x2F;baby-and-brain" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbanchildinstitute.org&#x2F;why-0-3&#x2F;baby-and-brain</a>). There are probably a lot of shortcuts one could take to train it for specific tasks.<p>In &#x27;The Matrix&#x27; they had developed programs that could be uploaded to a physical brain to essentially pre-wire the brain with complex synaptic connections (or so I imagine was the effect). That would be a lot more efficient than waiting 3 years just to get to the point of trimming useless connections. We may have to &#x27;grow&#x27; a virtual brain via training to develop the basic platform, but then pre-load it with operations to save time.</text></comment> |
12,796,649 | 12,796,422 | 1 | 3 | 12,795,665 | train | <story><title>West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/west-antarctica-begins-to-destabilize-with-intense-unbalanced-melting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>staticelf</author><text>This is why big countries suck. They are slow to change and a wrong move is horribly damaging. Look at the US or China, no matter how I or all my countrymen live in Sweden it won&#x27;t really matter if climate change deniers get in charge in the US for example.<p>I just think it&#x27;s so sad to see everything go to shit due to some greedy assholes that won&#x27;t invest in solutions that are effective AND sustainable.<p>I plan to become a climate change prepper in the future because shit will hit the fan sooner or later.</text></comment> | <story><title>West Antarctica Begins to Destabilize with ‘Intense Unbalanced Melting’</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/west-antarctica-begins-to-destabilize-with-intense-unbalanced-melting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>youeeeeeediot</author><text>Investment in coastal flood prevention technology for major city centers that can legitimately be helped. Places below sea level today - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_places_on_land_with_elevations_below_sea_level" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_places_on_land_with_el...</a> - need to be abandoned.</text></comment> |
33,020,685 | 33,020,805 | 1 | 3 | 33,016,217 | train | <story><title>RootMyTV is a user-friendly exploit for rooting/jailbreaking LG webOS smart TVs</title><url>https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>julianlam</author><text>&gt; Around June-July 2021 LG started rolling out updates which added some minor mitigations that broke our original exploit chain.<p>It&#x27;s a damn shame companies feel incentivised to do this.<p>People hacking on their own TVs is quite literally a victimless crime (besides yourself, if you brick your one TV), because you knowingly void the warranty.<p>Mazdas have a great third-party firmware called Mazda AIO Tweaks[0] that fixes a whole host of bugs and allows you to customize the infotainment system. The best part is you can use it to enable Android Auto on older Mazdas (this was before AA was even released for Mazda!)<p>Mazda then proceeded to lock down the firmware so much you now need to take apart some consoles and attach a serial connection. Disgusting behaviour.<p>(vis-a-vis plugging in an SD card with the scripts you want to run.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mazdatweaks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mazdatweaks.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>These exploits should certainly be fixed, they&#x27;re security holes which can let malware into the TV. The same exploit that lets us root our TV would also allow anyone else to root it.<p>On the other hand, the ability to physically flash our own software into any hardware we buy should be a basic consumer right. There should be no need for exploits in the first place, it should be a built in feature.</text></comment> | <story><title>RootMyTV is a user-friendly exploit for rooting/jailbreaking LG webOS smart TVs</title><url>https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>julianlam</author><text>&gt; Around June-July 2021 LG started rolling out updates which added some minor mitigations that broke our original exploit chain.<p>It&#x27;s a damn shame companies feel incentivised to do this.<p>People hacking on their own TVs is quite literally a victimless crime (besides yourself, if you brick your one TV), because you knowingly void the warranty.<p>Mazdas have a great third-party firmware called Mazda AIO Tweaks[0] that fixes a whole host of bugs and allows you to customize the infotainment system. The best part is you can use it to enable Android Auto on older Mazdas (this was before AA was even released for Mazda!)<p>Mazda then proceeded to lock down the firmware so much you now need to take apart some consoles and attach a serial connection. Disgusting behaviour.<p>(vis-a-vis plugging in an SD card with the scripts you want to run.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mazdatweaks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mazdatweaks.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gormo</author><text>&gt; People hacking on their own TVs is quite literally a victimless crime (besides yourself, if you brick your one TV), because you knowingly void the warranty.<p>Nitpick: it&#x27;s not a victimless crime, on account of not being a crime at all.</text></comment> |
2,203,922 | 2,203,931 | 1 | 3 | 2,203,697 | train | <story><title>Mubarak says that he will not be leaving office</title><url>http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-feb-10-egypt-protests</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeromec</author><text>You're right that according to the site's guidelines (<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>) political stories are usually off-topic.<p><i>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.</i><p>However, there is an exception given for "interesting new phenomenon". I would say revolutions of a scale not seen in a region for thousands of years would qualify.</text></item><item><author>obiefernandez</author><text>I'm glued to AlJazeera at the moment and have definitely been following the whole story with enthusiastic interest since the beginning.<p>BUT<p>Why are we discussing this topic here again? Seems completely off-topic...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>It is completely off-topic.†<p>People will want meat to dig into for a meta-argument about global politics and I'm not going to offer it up, but let it just be said: it's very bad for HN that this stuff is being covered so prominently on the site. It absolutely, positively a slippery slope.<p>The site is clearly tacking away from serving entrepreneurial hackers and towards serving smart people who want a place to talk about everything they care deeply about.<p>I'm not writing my goodbye note or anything, but I'm having more and more of my best conversations in private cliques and off HN because HN is becoming less and less hospitable to those kinds of conversations.<p>† <i>Need evidence? Graham appears to have manually weighted it off the front page; just a little while ago, a Mubarak story was parked there with 237 votes.</i></text></comment> | <story><title>Mubarak says that he will not be leaving office</title><url>http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-feb-10-egypt-protests</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeromec</author><text>You're right that according to the site's guidelines (<a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>) political stories are usually off-topic.<p><i>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.</i><p>However, there is an exception given for "interesting new phenomenon". I would say revolutions of a scale not seen in a region for thousands of years would qualify.</text></item><item><author>obiefernandez</author><text>I'm glued to AlJazeera at the moment and have definitely been following the whole story with enthusiastic interest since the beginning.<p>BUT<p>Why are we discussing this topic here again? Seems completely off-topic...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>siavosh</author><text>And also for the fact that social networks have played such a large role.</text></comment> |
40,861,759 | 40,861,767 | 1 | 2 | 40,861,057 | train | <story><title>Brazil data regulator bans Meta from mining data to train AI models</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/brazil-tech-meta-privacy-data-93e00b2e0e26f7cc98795dd052aea8e1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benreesman</author><text>This proposal gets made pretty frequently in one form or another, and (at least on HN) seems to usually get struck down on this or that procedural ground.<p>But as the various regulatory and judicial and legislative processes grind through different parts of the modern intellectual property issue made so abundantly legible by the modern AI training data gold rush it seems ever more clear that one way or another, we’re going to get a new social contract on IP.<p>Leaving aside for a moment the thicket of laws, precedents, jurisdictions, and regulatory inertia: we can vote with our feet as both customers and contributors for common sense now.<p>So how about the following compromise: promote innovation by liberalizing the posture around training on roughly “the commons”, but insist that the resulting weights are likewise available to the public. Why do I have to take someone’s word for it that they’ve got a result around superposition or whatever on mech interp? I’d like to see it work given it’s everyone’s data pushing those weights.<p>I speak only for myself but plenty of people seem to agree: I don’t mind big companies training on generally available data, I mind the IP-laundering. Compete on cost, compete on value-added software stacks, compete on vertical integration. There is lots of money to be made building a better mousetrap in terms of code and infrastructure and product innovation.<p>Conduct the research in the open. None of this would be possible without an ocean of research and data subsidized in whole or in part by the public. Asserting any form of ownership over the result might end up being legal, but it will never be ethical.<p>Meta isn’t perfect on this stuff, but they’re by far the actor pulling the conversation in that direction. Let’s encourage them to continue pushing the pace on stuff like LLaMA 3.</text></comment> | <story><title>Brazil data regulator bans Meta from mining data to train AI models</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/brazil-tech-meta-privacy-data-93e00b2e0e26f7cc98795dd052aea8e1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Cheer2171</author><text>&gt; Compliance must be demonstrated by the company within five working days from the notification of the decision, and the agency established a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,820) for failure to do so.<p>$8,820 * 365 = $3.2 million a year is pretty cheap for Meta to be able to do whatever they want with all the data from all 200 million Brazilians. Their annual net income is $39.10 billion, so 0.008%.</text></comment> |
5,266,214 | 5,265,865 | 1 | 3 | 5,265,563 | train | <story><title>A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon</title><url>http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarrett</author><text>To expand upon the author's idea, the problem is not just that credit card data is reusable, but that <i>possession of credit card data amounts to permission to charge any arbitrary amount to it</i>. Not <i>legal</i> permission, mind you, but permission in the sense that the infrastructure lets you do it, and you have to sort out the consequences through social/legal channels after the fact.<p>Not only should future payment systems be based on cryptography, but they should also require an <i>affirmative step on the part of the payer</i> to initiate a given transaction of a given amount. In other words, it shouldn't be a matter of handing over your card number, or even a one-use cryptographic token, and letting the merchant fill in the details. You should have to explicitly <i>send</i> an amount of money that you specify. Then, of course, a smart merchant would verify that the amount is correct before fulfilling her end of the bargain.<p>In other words, the process should be that the payer <i>gives</i> money to the payee, not that the payee <i>takes</i> money from the payer.<p>Unfortunately, as the author points out, progress on this front has been almost nonexistent with respect to the established credit card networks. We may have to hope/work for a totally new system to replace it. (Perhaps Bitcoin, or something inspired by it.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyland</author><text>&#62; possession of credit card data amounts to permission to charge any arbitrary amount to it<p>The word you're looking for is "capability", not permission. Permission requires consent, which is something you give separately from the actual card number.<p>A minor point, but I think it changes the tone of that statement.<p>&#62; possession of credit card data amounts to the capability to charge any arbitrary amount to it<p>I'm not sure anyone is ignorant of this fact though, and yet everyone seems OK with it.<p>&#62; Not only should future payment systems be based on cryptography, but they should also require an affirmative step on the part of the payer to initiate a given transaction of a given amount. In other words, it shouldn't be a matter of handing over your card number, or even a one-use cryptographic token, and letting the merchant fill in the details. You should have to explicitly send an amount of money that you specify. Then, of course, a smart merchant would verify that the amount is correct before fulfilling her end of the bargain.<p>Ugh, no thanks. The system you describe is more like cash. I have to actively dole out the necessary amount, and then receive change that is counted at each transition. I abhor these types of transactions.<p>Convenience is a significant motivator in the adoption of credit cards. Any competing system will have to compete on simplicity. The fact that consumers and merchants haven't fled from credit card use as fraud rates (and costs) have increased is evidence that the market is willing to bear them.<p>The legislative changes that allow merchants to charge a CC-use surcharge will resolve the significant matter of ignorance. I do agree that consumers are largely ignorant of the hidden costs of fraud associated with the current CC model. The question is whether they'll pay these costs once they're brought to light. I believe they will continue to pay them in exchange for convenience.</text></comment> | <story><title>A simple solution to credit card fraud, and why you won't see it any time soon</title><url>http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/a-simple-solution-to-credit-card-fraud.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarrett</author><text>To expand upon the author's idea, the problem is not just that credit card data is reusable, but that <i>possession of credit card data amounts to permission to charge any arbitrary amount to it</i>. Not <i>legal</i> permission, mind you, but permission in the sense that the infrastructure lets you do it, and you have to sort out the consequences through social/legal channels after the fact.<p>Not only should future payment systems be based on cryptography, but they should also require an <i>affirmative step on the part of the payer</i> to initiate a given transaction of a given amount. In other words, it shouldn't be a matter of handing over your card number, or even a one-use cryptographic token, and letting the merchant fill in the details. You should have to explicitly <i>send</i> an amount of money that you specify. Then, of course, a smart merchant would verify that the amount is correct before fulfilling her end of the bargain.<p>In other words, the process should be that the payer <i>gives</i> money to the payee, not that the payee <i>takes</i> money from the payer.<p>Unfortunately, as the author points out, progress on this front has been almost nonexistent with respect to the established credit card networks. We may have to hope/work for a totally new system to replace it. (Perhaps Bitcoin, or something inspired by it.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbreit</author><text>But "pushing" has proven to be problematic for US consumers. They've basically traded the 5 or 10 basis points of fraud losses for a substantially better user experience (although they didn't really get to make that tradeoff decision).</text></comment> |
24,851,732 | 24,851,781 | 1 | 2 | 24,850,298 | train | <story><title>Quibi Is Shutting Down</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-problems-mount-11603301946</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>causality0</author><text>Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It&#x27;s not a service it&#x27;s a hostage negotiation.</text></item><item><author>adrr</author><text>YouTube premium has 20mm paying users. Educated guess most of users consume through a mobile device.<p>Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.</text></item><item><author>dvt</author><text>&gt; Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don&#x27;t care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...<p>People <i>do</i> want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don&#x27;t want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it&#x27;s way better than the free alternative.</text></item><item><author>mgadams3</author><text>Wow, that honestly happened much sooner than I thought that it would.<p>Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough.<p>Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don&#x27;t care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...<p>Who knows, maybe in 10 years we&#x27;ll all be like &quot;Quibi was really ahead of it&#x27;s time&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dageshi</author><text>Based on the sheer volume of content consumed on youtube, some people might genuinely want to support the creators they watch without seeing ads. I&#x27;m forever seeing people on HN saying &quot;just let me pay for it instead of watching ads&quot; well youtube gave that option.</text></comment> | <story><title>Quibi Is Shutting Down</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-problems-mount-11603301946</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>causality0</author><text>Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It&#x27;s not a service it&#x27;s a hostage negotiation.</text></item><item><author>adrr</author><text>YouTube premium has 20mm paying users. Educated guess most of users consume through a mobile device.<p>Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.</text></item><item><author>dvt</author><text>&gt; Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don&#x27;t care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...<p>People <i>do</i> want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don&#x27;t want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it&#x27;s way better than the free alternative.</text></item><item><author>mgadams3</author><text>Wow, that honestly happened much sooner than I thought that it would.<p>Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough.<p>Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don&#x27;t care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...<p>Who knows, maybe in 10 years we&#x27;ll all be like &quot;Quibi was really ahead of it&#x27;s time&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CydeWeys</author><text>Why would you be entitled to any level of service for a product that you aren&#x27;t paying any money for? YouTube isn&#x27;t free to run. All that bandwidth, engineering work, and creator compensation don&#x27;t pay for themselves. You either pay with ad views or you pay with cash. YouTube doesn&#x27;t owe anyone a free experience. They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow, and thus be exactly like Netflix, Disney+, HBO, etc., and they&#x27;d be entirely within their rights to do so.</text></comment> |
1,810,766 | 1,810,817 | 1 | 2 | 1,810,704 | train | <story><title>London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux</title><url>http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3244936/london-stock-exchange-smashes-world-record-trade-speed-with-linux/?cmpid=sbycombinatorrplant</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whatajoke</author><text>Is this the same system that replaced the failed Microsoft platform? <a href="http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...</a><p>Microsoft had run huge ads on how LSE was using .NET and Windows in critical financial applications. Within a year LSE had suffered crashes in the same critical areas.</text></comment> | <story><title>London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux</title><url>http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3244936/london-stock-exchange-smashes-world-record-trade-speed-with-linux/?cmpid=sbycombinatorrplant</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lrm242</author><text>World record? Not quite. Let's see full details on the numbers. NASDAQ publishes their latency numbers weekly, including average, 99th percentile, and 99.9th percentile: <a href="http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet</a>. Their average latency on order entry is 98 microseconds and their average latency on market data is 92 microseconds. Perhaps by "world record" they mean "european record".</text></comment> |
31,737,377 | 31,737,157 | 1 | 3 | 31,736,919 | train | <story><title>Scotland starts renewed case for independence</title><url>https://www.gov.scot/publications/independence-modern-world-wealthier-happier-fairer-not-scotland/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carnitine</author><text>I’d say post-Brexit England has drifted <i>away</i> from the far right. The whole EDL&#x2F;Britain First&#x2F;UKIP sentiment has only waned massively since then. The ruling government has not come close to far right at any point.</text></item><item><author>cstross</author><text>For non-UK people:<p>There are four nations in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).<p>But England has roughly 90% of the population of the UK. So what England votes for in an all-nations referendum, the rest of the UK gets.<p>England voted for Brexit by a narrow-ish majority. But Scotland voted against Brexit by a huge margin -- 62&#x2F;38, or approximately 3:2.<p>Ironically, the year before the Brexit referendum there was a Scottish independence referendum where &quot;remain part of the UK&quot; won, 55&#x2F;45. One of the promises the remain campaign made was that staying in the UK was the only way to guarantee Scotland could stay in the EU.<p>So there&#x27;s a strong sense here in Scotland that we were misled, and presented with a bait-and-switch last time round.<p>Finally, Scotland has a very different political climate from England, with a much weaker far right, stronger far left, and a dominant centre left government. While since 2017, England has increasingly drifted towards the far right.</text></item><item><author>afavour</author><text>As a Brit that didn’t want Scotland to be independent last time around: good luck to them. Brexit has shown very clearly that Scotland wants to chart a different path to England and IMO they should be allowed to do it.<p>…just be generous to English folks seeking asylum from Tory rule, yeah?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilverBirch</author><text>Excuse me, but literally today is the first day that the government starting flying asylum seekers to Rwanda[1], and yesterday they published legislation with the intention of breaking international law[2]. They&#x27;ve also recently curtailed rights to legal protest[3]. The Prime Minister has a history of law breaking including illegally shutting down our parliament[4]. This government only got their majority when UKIP candidates stood down in favour of the Tory party at the last election. By any reasonable definition England is currently governed by the far right.<p>[1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-61791994" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-61791994</a><p>[2]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.sky.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;a-mess-unrealistic-doctrine-of-necessity-three-views-on-northern-ireland-protocol-divisions-12633349" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.sky.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;a-mess-unrealistic-doctrine-of-ne...</a><p>[3]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-56400751" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-56400751</a><p>[4]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;uk&#x2F;scottish-court-uk-parliament-prorogation-intl&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;uk&#x2F;scottish-court-uk-parliame...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Scotland starts renewed case for independence</title><url>https://www.gov.scot/publications/independence-modern-world-wealthier-happier-fairer-not-scotland/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carnitine</author><text>I’d say post-Brexit England has drifted <i>away</i> from the far right. The whole EDL&#x2F;Britain First&#x2F;UKIP sentiment has only waned massively since then. The ruling government has not come close to far right at any point.</text></item><item><author>cstross</author><text>For non-UK people:<p>There are four nations in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).<p>But England has roughly 90% of the population of the UK. So what England votes for in an all-nations referendum, the rest of the UK gets.<p>England voted for Brexit by a narrow-ish majority. But Scotland voted against Brexit by a huge margin -- 62&#x2F;38, or approximately 3:2.<p>Ironically, the year before the Brexit referendum there was a Scottish independence referendum where &quot;remain part of the UK&quot; won, 55&#x2F;45. One of the promises the remain campaign made was that staying in the UK was the only way to guarantee Scotland could stay in the EU.<p>So there&#x27;s a strong sense here in Scotland that we were misled, and presented with a bait-and-switch last time round.<p>Finally, Scotland has a very different political climate from England, with a much weaker far right, stronger far left, and a dominant centre left government. While since 2017, England has increasingly drifted towards the far right.</text></item><item><author>afavour</author><text>As a Brit that didn’t want Scotland to be independent last time around: good luck to them. Brexit has shown very clearly that Scotland wants to chart a different path to England and IMO they should be allowed to do it.<p>…just be generous to English folks seeking asylum from Tory rule, yeah?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samwillis</author><text>I think in the context of today specifically with the Rwanda flight I would find it hard to agree with you.<p>True they aren’t all far right, but they do capitalise on decisive policies to invigorate their core supporters.</text></comment> |
35,680,148 | 35,678,634 | 1 | 3 | 35,678,032 | train | <story><title>AMD’s 7950X3D: Zen 4 Gets VCache</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/04/23/amds-7950x3d-zen-4-gets-vcache/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>From the article -- <i>&quot;Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of uneven performance across cores as manufacturers try to make their chips best at everything, and use different core setups to cover more bases.&quot;</i><p>I don&#x27;t find this unfortunate. Engineering is compromise and being able to make things that do a particular thing well can get you more performance per $ and per watt than you might otherwise see. The whole GPU thing that kneecapped Intel[1] is an example I use of how a compute element optimized for one thing can boost overall system performance.<p>I have worked on a number of bits of code for &quot;big&#x2F;little&quot; ARM chips and while it does make scheduling more complex, overall we&#x27;ve been able to deliver more capability per $ and per watt. That is perhaps more important in portable systems but it works in data centers too.<p>I had an interesting discussion inside Google about storage and whether or not using a full up motherboard for GFS nodes was ideal. The prevailing argument at the time was uniformity of &quot;nodes&quot; meant everything was software, nodes could be swapped at will and you could write software to do what ever you needed. But when it comes to efficiency, which is to say what percentage of available resource is used to deliver the services, you found a lost of wasted watts&#x2F;cpu cycles. All depends on what part of the engineering design space you are trying to optimize.<p>[1] The &quot;kneecapped&quot; situation is that since the PC&#x2F;AT (80286) on, Intel generally made the most margin of all the chips that went into a complete system. Now that it is often NVIDIA.</text></comment> | <story><title>AMD’s 7950X3D: Zen 4 Gets VCache</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/04/23/amds-7950x3d-zen-4-gets-vcache/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>metadat</author><text>I wish they&#x27;d also test xz andaune also RAR compression for vanilla vs vCores.<p>It&#x27;d be interesting to learn if &#x2F; how the results differ depending on compression implementation.</text></comment> |
29,703,158 | 29,702,104 | 1 | 2 | 29,692,087 | train | <story><title>Ten Years of Logging My Life</title><url>https://chaidarun.com/ten-years-of-logging-my-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Netcob</author><text>A few days ago I finally stopped doing something very similar.<p>As fascinating as the data could be (I never managed to transform it like this), the constant recording of every single thing made me stop enjoying things. It made me hyper-conscious of everything going on in my body as the primary goal was to figure out some health issues. Everything I felt or did seemed to have an &quot;event handler&quot; attached to it.<p>I now just stick to one line a day in a spreadsheet as a sort of diary.<p>To anyone attempting it:<p>1. Figure out what you want to do with the data first. Even if you just want some pretty graphs, create some random test data and set everything up so you can see these graphs. Don&#x27;t just throw data into a black hole for years.<p>2. Make sure recording the data is as easy and comfortable as possible. That android app from the article looks good, but you have to be absolutely sure it&#x27;s okay to use many times a day. Be aware that there&#x27;s no good answer to &quot;why do you keep reaching for your phone all the time?&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andreilys</author><text>A simpler solution is to embrace lazy tracking.<p>Apps like RescueTime (time spent online) and Withings (sleep and steps) are simply running in the background of your life, with no additional input needed from the user.<p>I&#x27;m always impressed when I see people who maintain these massive data-entry systems, I know personally I would never be able to maintain them which is why I opt for lazy tracking. The less data entry I need to do, the better.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ten Years of Logging My Life</title><url>https://chaidarun.com/ten-years-of-logging-my-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Netcob</author><text>A few days ago I finally stopped doing something very similar.<p>As fascinating as the data could be (I never managed to transform it like this), the constant recording of every single thing made me stop enjoying things. It made me hyper-conscious of everything going on in my body as the primary goal was to figure out some health issues. Everything I felt or did seemed to have an &quot;event handler&quot; attached to it.<p>I now just stick to one line a day in a spreadsheet as a sort of diary.<p>To anyone attempting it:<p>1. Figure out what you want to do with the data first. Even if you just want some pretty graphs, create some random test data and set everything up so you can see these graphs. Don&#x27;t just throw data into a black hole for years.<p>2. Make sure recording the data is as easy and comfortable as possible. That android app from the article looks good, but you have to be absolutely sure it&#x27;s okay to use many times a day. Be aware that there&#x27;s no good answer to &quot;why do you keep reaching for your phone all the time?&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>medstrom</author><text>&gt;Even if you just want some pretty graphs, create some random test data and set everything up so you can see these graphs. Don&#x27;t just throw data into a black hole for years.<p>&quot;Avoid black holes&quot; is a good tip when you struggle with forming the habit of logging. If you have a graph that auto-updates as you add data, it&#x27;s fun and the habit will stick better.</text></comment> |
19,182,613 | 19,181,372 | 1 | 2 | 19,179,272 | train | <story><title>Cygwin 3.0.0-1</title><url>https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2019-02/msg00229.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neonscribe</author><text>What is the use case for Cygwin vs. WSL at this point?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shawxe</author><text>WSL filesystem performance is garbage, for one thing. Chances are good that if you&#x27;re using Windows but you want to be using a Unix OS, it&#x27;s your work that&#x27;s forcing you to use Windows. And, if that&#x27;s the case, chances are also good that the reason for that has something to do with a slew of legacy software that only runs on Windows. If both of those things are the case and you&#x27;re trying desperately to develop a Unixy workflow, very clean integration with native Windows binaries is an unfortunate must. Cygwin delivers in that area much more effectively than WSL. Obviously Unix is my preference, but if I can&#x27;t have Unix than I&#x27;d rather have Unix tools on the OS I&#x27;m being forced to use than a Unix sandbox will always be less than a real Linux&#x2F;BSD install but fails to integrate properly with the OS I&#x27;m using by necessity.<p>The funny thing about both Cygwin and WSL is that, in my experience, many of the people who make use of them wish that they didn&#x27;t have to make use of them. For me, Cygwin makes it a little easier for me to forget I&#x27;m not where I want to be (especially with things like winpty and apt-cyg). In Cygwin I can run URxvt just like at home, and run all the nonsense legacy software I need to for work, just like it were actually reasonable. In WSL, I can do none of that. It just doesn&#x27;t work. I have a few co-workers who run WSL alongside cmd.exe. If I&#x27;m going to have to do that, I&#x27;d rather just stick to Cygwin.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cygwin 3.0.0-1</title><url>https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2019-02/msg00229.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neonscribe</author><text>What is the use case for Cygwin vs. WSL at this point?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kazinator</author><text>Cygwin programs are (almost) native Windows programs. You can compile a POSIX-y program under Cygwin and it becomes a Windows program; you can ship it to a user if you just include a few DLL&#x27;s that it needs.<p>I forked Cygwin&#x27;s main DLL (cygwin1.dll) to create &quot;Cygnal&quot;: an drop-in alternative that provides more Windows-like behaviors in various areas. Programs built under Cygwin can be bundled with Cygnal. Then (for instance) they have path handling that is familiar to Windows users.</text></comment> |
19,087,210 | 19,087,220 | 1 | 2 | 19,085,534 | train | <story><title>HTTP/3 explained</title><url>https://http3-explained.haxx.se/en/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shereadsthenews</author><text>The TCP state machine sucks and all of its timing parameters are outdated and unsuitable for modern networks. QUIC frees us from the tyranny of the kernel. Being in userspace is a feature.</text></item><item><author>jlouis</author><text>I&#x27;m worried, not because of the standard itself, which seems well thought out, even if rushed.<p>I&#x27;m worried because you have a protocol implemented in the userland for a few mainstream languages. It seems everyone now has to pay the price of a protocol implementation on top of a protocol implementation on top of a protocol implementation. Big players---either because they have thousands of open source developers, or is backed by a corporation---they have it easy. Smaller players? Not so much.<p>Also, note that the exact problem that HTTP&#x2F;3 tries to solve was known in the design process of HTTP&#x2F;2 and some people even noted having multiple flow control schemes at multiple layers would become a problem. We are letting the same people design the next layer, and probably too fast in the name of time to market.<p>This should definitely live in a way people can make use of it easily, with an API highly amenable to binding. If it gains traction, we need a new UDP interface to the kernel as well, for batching packets back and forth. This kills operating system diversity as well, or runs the risk at doing so.<p>OTOH, I see the lure: SCTP never caught on for a reason, and much of this is the opposite of my above worries.</text></item><item><author>1_player</author><text>So much negativity in this thread.<p>Personally I am _very_ excited by HTTP&#x2F;3 (and QUIC), it feels like the building block for Internet 2.0, with connection migration over different IPs, mandatory encryption, bidirectional streams and it being a user-space library – sure, more bloat, but from now on we won&#x27;t have to wait for your kernel to support feature X, or even worse, your ISP-provided router or decade old middleware router on the Internet.<p>I haven&#x27;t had the chance to read the actual spec yet, but it&#x27;s obvious that while the current tech (HTTP2) is an improvement over what we had before, HTTP&#x2F;3 is a good base to make the web even faster and more secure.<p>HTTP&#x2F;3 won&#x27;t be IPv6: it only requires support from the two parties that benefit from it the most: browser vendors and web server vendors. We won&#x27;t have to wait on the whole internet to upgrade their hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jandrese</author><text>The rallying cry of everybody who later comes to the realization that they have re-implemented TCP.</text></comment> | <story><title>HTTP/3 explained</title><url>https://http3-explained.haxx.se/en/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shereadsthenews</author><text>The TCP state machine sucks and all of its timing parameters are outdated and unsuitable for modern networks. QUIC frees us from the tyranny of the kernel. Being in userspace is a feature.</text></item><item><author>jlouis</author><text>I&#x27;m worried, not because of the standard itself, which seems well thought out, even if rushed.<p>I&#x27;m worried because you have a protocol implemented in the userland for a few mainstream languages. It seems everyone now has to pay the price of a protocol implementation on top of a protocol implementation on top of a protocol implementation. Big players---either because they have thousands of open source developers, or is backed by a corporation---they have it easy. Smaller players? Not so much.<p>Also, note that the exact problem that HTTP&#x2F;3 tries to solve was known in the design process of HTTP&#x2F;2 and some people even noted having multiple flow control schemes at multiple layers would become a problem. We are letting the same people design the next layer, and probably too fast in the name of time to market.<p>This should definitely live in a way people can make use of it easily, with an API highly amenable to binding. If it gains traction, we need a new UDP interface to the kernel as well, for batching packets back and forth. This kills operating system diversity as well, or runs the risk at doing so.<p>OTOH, I see the lure: SCTP never caught on for a reason, and much of this is the opposite of my above worries.</text></item><item><author>1_player</author><text>So much negativity in this thread.<p>Personally I am _very_ excited by HTTP&#x2F;3 (and QUIC), it feels like the building block for Internet 2.0, with connection migration over different IPs, mandatory encryption, bidirectional streams and it being a user-space library – sure, more bloat, but from now on we won&#x27;t have to wait for your kernel to support feature X, or even worse, your ISP-provided router or decade old middleware router on the Internet.<p>I haven&#x27;t had the chance to read the actual spec yet, but it&#x27;s obvious that while the current tech (HTTP2) is an improvement over what we had before, HTTP&#x2F;3 is a good base to make the web even faster and more secure.<p>HTTP&#x2F;3 won&#x27;t be IPv6: it only requires support from the two parties that benefit from it the most: browser vendors and web server vendors. We won&#x27;t have to wait on the whole internet to upgrade their hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mehrdadn</author><text>How does it work with a debugger? With TCP the connection didn&#x27;t die just because you paused the program. But when everything is in userspace then that can&#x27;t happen anymore?</text></comment> |
20,396,617 | 20,396,820 | 1 | 2 | 20,391,134 | train | <story><title>Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908726</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smsm42</author><text>But unlike stealing the TV, if somebody stole a bunch of codes, isn&#x27;t it the same as pirating the game? However the devs claim it&#x27;s actually worse than pirating - it actually costs them more when codes are resold. Why? Where the additional cost is coming from?</text></item><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>The claim is that G2A acts as the equivalent of a fence.<p>Let me explain. Many crooks want money. A lot of illegal activities generate what looks like value but it&#x27;s hard to turn into money and unless you do it&#x27;s useless. A stolen television is valuable but why would I pay 60% of retail price to some geezer in a lock-up at 2am for what is obviously a stolen TV? The Fence buys stolen things from crooks for a fraction of their value, then operates a seemingly legitimate business which sells those things to ordinary punters to collect the difference.<p>Being a Fence is a crime. &quot;Receiving stolen goods&quot; we call it in most places. You&#x27;re guilty if you know or should reasonably have known that the goods you got were stolen.<p>The argument against G2A is that logically the stuff they&#x27;re buying for cheap can only exist if it&#x27;s being obtained by crooks. A week after a game is released for $25 the _only_ reason somebody wants to sell 100 codes for $5 each is that they used stolen credentials to get those codes and are cashing out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cas8</author><text>If I use a stolen credit card to buy a code for your game, eventually there is likely to be a chargeback&#x2F;refund processed when the credit card owner&#x2F;company realizes that it was fraudulent. Chargebacks&#x2F;refunds can sometimes be things that have real penalties associated with them and that can require time investment from you the developer to deal with.<p>Another, less concrete cost is that of incentivizing bad behavior. If I cannot sufficiently move a certain type of stolen goods, I&#x27;m less likely to attempt to steal that type of good again in the future. However, if people choose to pirate a game instead, the bad actor is not rewarded and might realize that he can no longer move that type of product.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908726</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smsm42</author><text>But unlike stealing the TV, if somebody stole a bunch of codes, isn&#x27;t it the same as pirating the game? However the devs claim it&#x27;s actually worse than pirating - it actually costs them more when codes are resold. Why? Where the additional cost is coming from?</text></item><item><author>tialaramex</author><text>The claim is that G2A acts as the equivalent of a fence.<p>Let me explain. Many crooks want money. A lot of illegal activities generate what looks like value but it&#x27;s hard to turn into money and unless you do it&#x27;s useless. A stolen television is valuable but why would I pay 60% of retail price to some geezer in a lock-up at 2am for what is obviously a stolen TV? The Fence buys stolen things from crooks for a fraction of their value, then operates a seemingly legitimate business which sells those things to ordinary punters to collect the difference.<p>Being a Fence is a crime. &quot;Receiving stolen goods&quot; we call it in most places. You&#x27;re guilty if you know or should reasonably have known that the goods you got were stolen.<p>The argument against G2A is that logically the stuff they&#x27;re buying for cheap can only exist if it&#x27;s being obtained by crooks. A week after a game is released for $25 the _only_ reason somebody wants to sell 100 codes for $5 each is that they used stolen credentials to get those codes and are cashing out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>squeaky-clean</author><text>Aside from the cost of credit card charge backs, consider that these are (mostly) customers who think they are buying the game legitimately and just getting a good deal. That money is going straight to g2a instead of the devs&#x2F;publishers.<p>Maybe a customer wouldn&#x27;t buy the game at the full price, but since they&#x27;re not pirating from the get-go, that shows they are a customer willing to spend money. Maybe they wouldn&#x27;t buy the same game or as many games, but it&#x27;s possible they&#x27;d still be spending some money on games through legal (but more expensive) means if they knew g2a was just piracy with more steps.</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.