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7,218,488 | 7,216,260 | 1 | 2 | 7,215,834 | train | <story><title>Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?</title><url>http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moskie</author><text>This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry.<p>For example, the letter &quot;d&quot; in German corresponding to &quot;th&quot; in English:<p><pre><code> die&#x2F;der&#x2F;das -&gt; the
drei -&gt; three
Donner -&gt; thunder
Ding -&gt; thing
daher -&gt; therefore
</code></pre>
and, most relevant to this discussion:<p><pre><code> du -&gt; thou
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m sure this connection can be better explained than I&#x27;m able to, but it was a mini-epiphany for me while studying the language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lupatus</author><text>Part of the explanation is the convoluted history of the people who lived in the British isles.<p>Originally, it was inhabited by gaelic-speaking Celts. Some of their words that are still used today ():<p>plaide -&gt; plaid<p>tàrmachan -&gt; ptarmigan<p>triubhas -&gt; trousers<p>peata -&gt; pet<p>Then, it was conquered by the Romans. Latin words that found their way into English (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_English_derivatives" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Latin_words_with_Engli...</a>):<p>honor -&gt; honor<p>imbecillus -&gt; imbecile<p>inferus -&gt; inferior<p>vulgus -&gt; vulgar<p>Then, after the fall of the Romans, Britain was conquered by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who brought the old German words mentioned below.<p>After this, the area was Christianized, and the priests and proselytizers brought even more latin with them because that was the language of the Church.<p>After this, large portions of England were conquered by the Vikings, who introduced more Scandinavian-origin words that others have mentioned here. In fact, King Canute was once simultaneously king of England, Denmark, and Norway.<p>After the Vikings, England was conquered by the Normans by William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Viking raiders who settled in northwestern France and who had turned in francophones. They introduce french-origin words like:<p>boef -&gt; beef<p>mouton -&gt; mutton<p>veal -&gt; veal<p>porc -&gt; pork<p>After which, all these language influences congealed, vaguely, into the English we know and love today.<p>For this graphed: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...</a><p>Edited for formatting.</text></comment> | <story><title>Did English ever have a formal version of “you”?</title><url>http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moskie</author><text>This relates well to one of the fascinating things I realized while learning German: the fact that so many English and German words and sounds have phonetic connections, coming from their common Germanic ancestry.<p>For example, the letter &quot;d&quot; in German corresponding to &quot;th&quot; in English:<p><pre><code> die&#x2F;der&#x2F;das -&gt; the
drei -&gt; three
Donner -&gt; thunder
Ding -&gt; thing
daher -&gt; therefore
</code></pre>
and, most relevant to this discussion:<p><pre><code> du -&gt; thou
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m sure this connection can be better explained than I&#x27;m able to, but it was a mini-epiphany for me while studying the language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tikwidd</author><text>This is the result of the High German Consonant Shift [1]. English - many accents, at least - retain the dental fricatives (th-sounds) that were shifted to alveolar stops (d and t sounds) in High German. Dental fricatives are relatively rare sounds among the world&#x27;s languages. Icelandic and European Spanish are the only languages I can think of that have dental fricative phonemes.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High_German_consonant_shift</a></text></comment> |
21,347,175 | 21,346,686 | 1 | 2 | 21,342,648 | train | <story><title>Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation. There is some dopaminergic itch that must be scratched here, and I find like most itching, it doesn&#x27;t end up paying off for more than a second.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>Worth noting that the ability to indulge practically any idle curiosity (&quot;who was that guy in that one movie again?&quot;) with almost no effort is <i>very new</i>. Unless you happened to have the relevant book of trivia, or maybe a good encyclopedia for some things, <i>and</i> you were at home or otherwise somewhere those were physically located, you couldn&#x27;t find out without quite a bit of effort. That kind of stuff just dropped out of one&#x27;s mind almost as quickly as it came up. You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn&#x27;t remember, oh well, off it goes.<p>If you wanted to know something, you had to <i>work</i> at it or <i>premeditate and spend time and&#x2F;or money</i> to be ready to find out information in a certain category (having the right books, mostly).<p>Your brain didn&#x27;t <i>nag</i> and <i>insist</i> that you go find it out <i>right now</i>, generally, for every little question of near-zero importance that happened to cross your mind. That&#x27;s a curse of the Internet age.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text><i>&gt;A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation.</i><p><i>&gt;, can we have screen-free time together?</i><p><i>&gt;, or can we look at each other and shrug and move on with connecting with other humans and not screens.</i><p>I wasn&#x27;t there at your meetings so if you truly felt ignored, I can&#x27;t argue with feelings.<p>That said, let me offer a different perspective: someone quickly going to a smartphone screen to look something up that&#x27;s relevant to our conversation shows they are <i>more engaged</i> with me and our conversation. It&#x27;s like being in a professor&#x27;s office and we discuss something and it prompts the professor to get up from his chair and pull a specific book from the shelf and page through it to clarify a fact. That shows caring. Or when you talk to a friend and you mention something about a specific place and they say &quot;Oh, I happen to have a photo of that&quot; so they go get their photo album and show it to me. That&#x27;s staying connected with our conversation. I don&#x27;t say, <i>&quot;I wish our real-life interactions were book-free and photo-album-free.&quot;</i><p>It really isn&#x27;t the screen hardware that&#x27;s the measure of (dis)engagement. <i>It depends on what they&#x27;re specifically doing on that screen.</i> If the person is distracted with typing Facebook replies, then yes, they&#x27;re totally ignoring our conversation. On the other hand, if they&#x27;re visiting wikipedia or doing a google search to enhance our talk, that&#x27;s great.<p>EDIT to add an example weaving in some &quot;screen time&quot; to enhance a conversation. A priest talking to Google employees on how he uses their search engine during conversations with friends to clarify facts. Deep link at 2m40s and watch for about 1 minute: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&amp;t=2m40s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&amp;t=2m40s</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation. There is some dopaminergic itch that must be scratched here, and I find like most itching, it doesn&#x27;t end up paying off for more than a second.</text></item><item><author>shantly</author><text>Worth noting that the ability to indulge practically any idle curiosity (&quot;who was that guy in that one movie again?&quot;) with almost no effort is <i>very new</i>. Unless you happened to have the relevant book of trivia, or maybe a good encyclopedia for some things, <i>and</i> you were at home or otherwise somewhere those were physically located, you couldn&#x27;t find out without quite a bit of effort. That kind of stuff just dropped out of one&#x27;s mind almost as quickly as it came up. You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn&#x27;t remember, oh well, off it goes.<p>If you wanted to know something, you had to <i>work</i> at it or <i>premeditate and spend time and&#x2F;or money</i> to be ready to find out information in a certain category (having the right books, mostly).<p>Your brain didn&#x27;t <i>nag</i> and <i>insist</i> that you go find it out <i>right now</i>, generally, for every little question of near-zero importance that happened to cross your mind. That&#x27;s a curse of the Internet age.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_Nat_</author><text>&quot;<i>Check facts</i>&quot; as in investigating tangential issues, or as in fact-checking assumptions?<p>If the latter, then that&#x27;d seem very healthy. People can come to all sorts of strange conclusions about topics like politics if they&#x27;re allowed seemingly reasonable assumptions that they sincerely believe to be probably true. If they&#x27;re not fact-checked, then discussions on topics like politics can quickly devolve into meaningless hot air.<p>Wikipedia shows that the [principle of explosion](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Principle_of_explosion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Principle_of_explosion</a>) can quickly lead to absurd results in a few short examples, but the short examples are for brevity. In common practice, it&#x27;s long discussions involving a lot of seemingly innocent approximations&#x2F;assumptions that get off the tracks so subtly that many folks don&#x27;t seem to realize it.
([Obligatory xkcd](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2217&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;2217&#x2F;</a>).)</text></comment> |
31,014,839 | 31,014,838 | 1 | 2 | 31,013,988 | train | <story><title>Iron Cycle based energy storage and generation</title><url>https://teamsolid.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dragontamer</author><text>1. Iron is heavy -- This means it costs more to transport iron fuel, compared to lighter fuels like methane, propane, or butane (aka: gasoline).<p>2. Iron is dense -- ?? Not discussed in the webpage. But something like Hydrogen (despite being very light) takes up a lot of space. Hydrogen is so light that its volume becomes a problem. Iron does seem to solve that issue at least.<p>3. Iron is renewable -- Iron turns into Rust, and the rust can turn back into Iron easily. This makes Iron more comparable to Redox-flow batteries or Hydrogen.<p>----------<p>Funny thing is: I was just discussing with someone else in my social circles about how Iron&#x2F;Rust is exactly the same process as battery-chemistries. Just... worse. Iron-electricity has less voltage than Li-ion or Zinc, or other elements.<p>But the Iron -&gt; Rust -&gt; Iron process is a well known process for &quot;storing energy&quot;. We just usually don&#x27;t care about the energy storage part, and more about the physical properties of Iron, and preventing it from turning into Rust (which is weaker, redder, more stains, etc. etc.).<p>Experimenting with Iron-based energy storage seems like it&#x27;d be destined for failure? Its one of the oldest elements and the chemical process has been known for a while. However, the only way to be sure that its a bad idea is to try it. So we should experiment with it, at least a little bit, to really make sure that we didn&#x27;t miss anything here. Iron is a hugely abundant element after all... if at all else, it can be used as a &quot;cheap&quot; energy storage mechanism as opposed to a &quot;quality&quot; energy storage mechanism.<p>After all, a lot of our energy is just wasted (ex: Solar Panels during the peak days just turn off). Instead of turning off solar panels when the grid is overloaded, maybe store the excess electricity in cheap iron? 40% round-trip efficiency is still better than 0%.</text></comment> | <story><title>Iron Cycle based energy storage and generation</title><url>https://teamsolid.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Looks pretty interesting. Note this is a coupling technology, i.e. the power input is at the reduction stage when iron oxide is reduced back to metallic iron via the use of hydrogen (generating water). To make it a non-fossil process, you have to scale up hydrogen-from-water using wind&#x2F;solar:<p>&gt; &quot;The resulting iron oxide is a solid material, so it can be captured after the combustion process. It is then reused by regenerating it with green hydrogen into flammable iron fuel. In this way, iron fuel offers a revolutionary method to store energy in a circular and carbon-free fashion.&quot;<p>It has some real advantages over shipping hydrogen, as hydrogen is tricky to work with, relative to methane. There is an alternative process, developing direct-air-capture of atmospheric CO2 and using the hydrogen to reduce the CO2 to CH4, which has the advantage of being able to use existing natural gas pipelines for transport and distribution. In contrast this iron process has some long-term storage advantages; it could serve as a way to store excess wind&#x2F;solar power over longer periods i.e. months. The notion it could be used to fuel long-distance shipping is also intriguing: ships could use hydrogen to regenerate their iron fuel at the end of each voyage.<p>However this all depends on massive scale-up of hydrogen-from-water. That hydrogen can be used in many industrial processes, including also fossil-fuel-free steel production. Without that, this iron process can&#x27;t be run at any scale.</text></comment> |
33,187,749 | 33,186,763 | 1 | 2 | 33,186,412 | train | <story><title>Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings</title><url>https://blog.akatz.org/fixing-macos-zsh-terminal-history-settings/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>This is zsh specific, but here&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been burned by enough times that I specifically wanted to mention it: save your history in a file other than the default one. Why? Because if you increase the history limit, and your profile isn&#x27;t sourced for any reason, the shell will read your history file and use the default history size, clobbering everything that&#x27;s there. If you use a non-default history file this rogue shell (missing your settings) will dump its history into the default file and leave your custom file untouched.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fixing macOS Zsh Terminal History Settings</title><url>https://blog.akatz.org/fixing-macos-zsh-terminal-history-settings/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matthberg</author><text>I often have multiple concurrent sessions of terminal open, which leads to messed up history interactions. One solution I&#x27;ve encountered (but have not tested yet) is zsh-histdb [0]. It stores sessions&#x27; history to a SQLite db instead of a single appended file, with extra metadata about when commands were run, what session, etc. If you&#x27;ve already got your .zshrc file open to mess with the history settings it might be worth checking out that tool while you&#x27;re at it.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;larkery&#x2F;zsh-histdb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;larkery&#x2F;zsh-histdb</a></text></comment> |
2,519,122 | 2,519,103 | 1 | 3 | 2,518,881 | train | <story><title>Why linux doesn't have a "wheel" group</title><url>http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/the-wheel-group/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudonim</author><text>Ironically, "sudo su" works really well if you do need to get to root. But yeah, "sudo" is a much safer practice.</text></item><item><author>kwantam</author><text>A simpler explanation is that many Linux distributions discourage the use of su altogether in favor of sudo, which gives you finer grained control over this sort of thing than wheel ever did.<p>In any case, if you really care, just enable pam_wheel.so in your pam configuration for su (usually /etc/pam.d/su) and be sure to add yourself to the appropriate group.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkassis</author><text>If you have a saddist sysadmin he wouldn't allow you to use su or any other dangerous command that are not approved. Sudo is a rather impressive tool. If you need to give someone access to root for one or two commands, it can do that. It's logging ability is lost when you do sudo su. You should avoid it as much as possible on servers with many admins. That log trail can be a real butt saver.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why linux doesn't have a "wheel" group</title><url>http://administratosphere.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/the-wheel-group/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudonim</author><text>Ironically, "sudo su" works really well if you do need to get to root. But yeah, "sudo" is a much safer practice.</text></item><item><author>kwantam</author><text>A simpler explanation is that many Linux distributions discourage the use of su altogether in favor of sudo, which gives you finer grained control over this sort of thing than wheel ever did.<p>In any case, if you really care, just enable pam_wheel.so in your pam configuration for su (usually /etc/pam.d/su) and be sure to add yourself to the appropriate group.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akent</author><text>"sudo -i", please!</text></comment> |
23,538,572 | 23,538,525 | 1 | 2 | 23,535,528 | train | <story><title>Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require-sat-act-for-admissions-next-year-11592272825</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filereaper</author><text>I highly recommend watching the video by Scott Galloway on The College Implosion. [1]<p>&quot;Colleges have become luxury brands and are adopting a strategy of artificial scarcity to create irrational margins&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a large movement right now where many are saying the large tuition fees for Zoom lectures aren&#x27;t worth it.<p>Colleges sell themselves for the experience and are a luxury lifestyle brand almost, but with covid the lifestyle aspect of it is wiped out, so its reasonable that students are asking why they&#x27;d pay such high premiums.<p>I think removing SAT, ACT casts a wider net and hopefully allows more students to enroll, what&#x27;s the scaling limitation if everyone&#x27;s doing lectures on Zoom? Presumably everyone&#x27;s also getting graded electronically in some way.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;d8kwzSTITP0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;d8kwzSTITP0</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrxr</author><text>If the learning experience is simplified to listening to a lecture, either live or recorded, and all grading is done algorithmically, then yes, there is no scaling limitation. This would be considered a very poor learning experience though. Even in the School of Engineering at Harvard, even for the CS classes, very few use autograding. Students expect individual feedback on their work. They expect the ability to personally interact with teaching staff. They expect group work, labs, office hours, reading groups, and some level of supervision over these activities.<p>I work at Harvard, and I can tell you there is a real push to create a quality experience in remote learning, and a lot of resources are being directed towards this. It is not just the same classes via Zoom. Of course these enhanced learning environments could be replicated on campus as well, there&#x27;s nothing particularly special about the remote learning environment.<p>But as you suggest, it is the residential experience that most folks are paying for. Harvard considers the residential experience as one of their primary value propositions. That is why Harvard and other schools are working very hard to get students back to campus. It&#x27;s a difficult balancing act between this and maintaining the health of the campus. A major outbreak amongst undergrads would be a serious blow to everybody involved, so health is always going to come first.<p>Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;college.harvard.edu&#x2F;financial-aid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;college.harvard.edu&#x2F;financial-aid</a>. So if you&#x27;re smart enough, and&#x2F;or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard? What&#x27;s the risk there?</text></comment> | <story><title>Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-university-wont-require-sat-act-for-admissions-next-year-11592272825</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filereaper</author><text>I highly recommend watching the video by Scott Galloway on The College Implosion. [1]<p>&quot;Colleges have become luxury brands and are adopting a strategy of artificial scarcity to create irrational margins&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a large movement right now where many are saying the large tuition fees for Zoom lectures aren&#x27;t worth it.<p>Colleges sell themselves for the experience and are a luxury lifestyle brand almost, but with covid the lifestyle aspect of it is wiped out, so its reasonable that students are asking why they&#x27;d pay such high premiums.<p>I think removing SAT, ACT casts a wider net and hopefully allows more students to enroll, what&#x27;s the scaling limitation if everyone&#x27;s doing lectures on Zoom? Presumably everyone&#x27;s also getting graded electronically in some way.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;d8kwzSTITP0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;d8kwzSTITP0</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>not_a_moth</author><text>Anyone intimate with Germany&#x27;s vocational training system, that&#x27;s used as an alternative to college by approximately half of all graduating high school students?<p>2-3 years small salary vocational training straight out of HS at 1 of 400k participating companies in 1 of 400 role types.<p>I want to know why implementing this isn&#x27;t a national debate in US, it seems like such an obviously good idea.</text></comment> |
20,712,172 | 20,710,548 | 1 | 3 | 20,708,522 | train | <story><title>Chemists make first-ever ring of pure carbon</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02473-z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apo</author><text>&gt; Gawel and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard ‘wet’ chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen–carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. “I never thought I would see this,” says Scriven.<p>The molecule (an all-carbon cycle of 18 atoms) was prepared in a very unusual way - by directly manipulating the atoms using an atomic force microscope.<p>In other words, each molecule is made individually. This is not the way that chemists typically work, and will not result in quantities of material that can be seen.<p>The abstract says nothing about chemical stability, but I suspect C-18 quite unstable and may never be prepared in gram quantities.<p>Higher cycles containing more carbons may be more stable, but this is likely to remain a curiosity for some time.<p>Still, this is a new kind of &quot;allotrope&quot; of carbon. The cyclic, relatively rigid nature of the structure and the potential for electrons to circulate under applied fields could lead to some unusual applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>What a trip. They brute forced the sucker.<p>I have been a chemist, and also played with explosives as a child. So it&#x27;s my experience that C≡C bonds are <i>very</i> unstable. I mean, liquid HC≡CH (acetylene) must be diluted with acetone, and stored in tanks packed with diatomaceous earth, to keep it from falling apart explosively. A lot like nitroglycerine, really.<p>And AgC≡CAg (silver acetylide, with the Ag-C bonds being almost ionic) is a damn fine primary detonator. They used to use it in party poppers and cigarette&#x2F;cigar &quot;loads&quot;. But you could use it instead of lead azide or mercury fulminate, and it&#x27;s <i>much</i> easier to make. But it&#x27;s also much more expensive.<p>So anyway, I can&#x27;t imagine that you&#x27;d <i>want</i> gram quantities of this stuff. Even if you could prepare it.<p>Edit: A gram of silver acetylide would punch a hole through 15-20 gauge mild steel. Uncontained. Just sitting there, in a little pile.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chemists make first-ever ring of pure carbon</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02473-z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apo</author><text>&gt; Gawel and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard ‘wet’ chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen–carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. “I never thought I would see this,” says Scriven.<p>The molecule (an all-carbon cycle of 18 atoms) was prepared in a very unusual way - by directly manipulating the atoms using an atomic force microscope.<p>In other words, each molecule is made individually. This is not the way that chemists typically work, and will not result in quantities of material that can be seen.<p>The abstract says nothing about chemical stability, but I suspect C-18 quite unstable and may never be prepared in gram quantities.<p>Higher cycles containing more carbons may be more stable, but this is likely to remain a curiosity for some time.<p>Still, this is a new kind of &quot;allotrope&quot; of carbon. The cyclic, relatively rigid nature of the structure and the potential for electrons to circulate under applied fields could lead to some unusual applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xDEFC0DE</author><text>&gt;In other words, each molecule is made individually. This is not the way that chemists typically work, and will not result in quantities of material that can be seen.<p>Is there not merit in doing it via this &#x27;hard way&#x27; first before optimizing stuff and finding a production pathway? (IANAchemist)</text></comment> |
33,633,521 | 33,632,917 | 1 | 2 | 33,629,734 | train | <story><title>FTX's collapse strands scientists</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/crypto-company-s-collapse-strands-scientists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trompetenaccoun</author><text>&quot;Watchers of the cryptospace&quot; had been critical of FTX since its inception out of seemingly nowhere. SBF is not a crypto guy despite being presented as such in the mainstream. He&#x27;s a trader and even in trading he&#x27;s only been in cryptocurrencies five years or so, prior to that is was trading more traditional assets like ETFs.<p>I agree with you regarding regular people having no clue and no way to vet donors but keep in mind most folks on HN are part of this. The public knows what they get from news pieces they read, written by journalists who also don&#x27;t have a clue. SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason. Talked to a lot of politicians too and spoke out in favor of regulation. Probably tried to sacrifice what he didn&#x27;t care about anyway (actually decentralized chains) in order to present himself has a crypto person regulators can work with, all while committing fraud. Gary Gensler is supposed to have had private meetings with him several times. Curious how the agency who&#x27;s supposed to regulate these exchanges never actually does and is even completely oblivious to multi billion dollar theft until the whole thing implodes. Meanwhile parties accept huge donations from Bankman-Fried and the SEC goes after smaller crypto projects that aren&#x27;t even certain to be their jurisdiction.</text></item><item><author>skycatcher</author><text>The comments saying the lesson here is that recipients of donations like non-profits and foundations should be vetting their donors better seem unreasonable to me.<p>If FTX investors, customers, and watchers of the crypto space did not catch what FTX and SBF were doing until the shit hit the fan, what kind of due diligence can we reasonably expect of these recipients that would’ve alerted them to something being wrong here?<p>And consider that the number of donors for most institutions would be much larger than the number of companies FTX investors would’ve had to keep an eye on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brindlejim</author><text>I love how the crypto community has decided that SBF is &quot;not a crypto guy&quot; now that he&#x27;s done crimes.<p>And he&#x27;s somehow &quot;establishment&quot; because he gave to political parties, and Democrat because we&#x27;re ignoring the GOP contributions.<p>SBF was more of a crypto guy than 99% of crypto. And he was way more crypto than he was establishment.<p>And the problems in crypto that his actions highlighted (centralization, fraud, lack of consumer protections) cannot be waved away with &quot;no true scotsman&quot; arguments.<p>He&#x27;s your boy. Own it or the industry will not correct its own deep, ongoing mistakes, currently being made by entities like Binance.</text></comment> | <story><title>FTX's collapse strands scientists</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/crypto-company-s-collapse-strands-scientists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>trompetenaccoun</author><text>&quot;Watchers of the cryptospace&quot; had been critical of FTX since its inception out of seemingly nowhere. SBF is not a crypto guy despite being presented as such in the mainstream. He&#x27;s a trader and even in trading he&#x27;s only been in cryptocurrencies five years or so, prior to that is was trading more traditional assets like ETFs.<p>I agree with you regarding regular people having no clue and no way to vet donors but keep in mind most folks on HN are part of this. The public knows what they get from news pieces they read, written by journalists who also don&#x27;t have a clue. SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason. Talked to a lot of politicians too and spoke out in favor of regulation. Probably tried to sacrifice what he didn&#x27;t care about anyway (actually decentralized chains) in order to present himself has a crypto person regulators can work with, all while committing fraud. Gary Gensler is supposed to have had private meetings with him several times. Curious how the agency who&#x27;s supposed to regulate these exchanges never actually does and is even completely oblivious to multi billion dollar theft until the whole thing implodes. Meanwhile parties accept huge donations from Bankman-Fried and the SEC goes after smaller crypto projects that aren&#x27;t even certain to be their jurisdiction.</text></item><item><author>skycatcher</author><text>The comments saying the lesson here is that recipients of donations like non-profits and foundations should be vetting their donors better seem unreasonable to me.<p>If FTX investors, customers, and watchers of the crypto space did not catch what FTX and SBF were doing until the shit hit the fan, what kind of due diligence can we reasonably expect of these recipients that would’ve alerted them to something being wrong here?<p>And consider that the number of donors for most institutions would be much larger than the number of companies FTX investors would’ve had to keep an eye on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>comte7092</author><text>&gt;he&#x27;s only been in cryptocurrencies five years or so<p>Crypto has only seriously been around for 10-15 years. This is somewhat like saying “he’s only been a react dev for 5 years”</text></comment> |
20,343,442 | 20,343,267 | 1 | 3 | 20,343,041 | train | <story><title>My low cost provider of GPUs has run out of capacity. Good alternatives?</title><url>https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>etaioinshrdlu</author><text>Hetzner has provided a quality service for a long time but now they have no more GPU servers available. That makes it hard to scale.<p>Any other options out there without going bankrupt on AWS?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jfindley</author><text>I&#x27;ve used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paperspace.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paperspace.com&#x2F;</a> in the past, and they seem reasonable. They&#x27;re cheaper than AWS but I don&#x27;t know how they compare to hetzner.</text></comment> | <story><title>My low cost provider of GPUs has run out of capacity. Good alternatives?</title><url>https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>etaioinshrdlu</author><text>Hetzner has provided a quality service for a long time but now they have no more GPU servers available. That makes it hard to scale.<p>Any other options out there without going bankrupt on AWS?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fs111</author><text>scaleway has GPUs now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;gpu-instances&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scaleway.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;gpu-instances&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
20,044,713 | 20,044,769 | 1 | 2 | 20,041,321 | train | <story><title>Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/uber-will-start-deactivating-riders-with-low-ratings/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>First, using an arbitrary number of stars is part of the problem. Too much opportunity for legitimate differences of rating to come into play. Just make the question &quot;would you do business with this driver&#x2F;rider again?&quot; and leave it at that. At the very least the rating should be market-specific, since there is so much cultural influence over such ratings.<p>Second, Uber should not be making the choice based on some arbitrarily chosen numerical value. Present the rating to the drivers, maybe with some comments, let them choose who they want to take. After all, if Uber isn&#x27;t employing the drivers and is just the middleman, wouldn&#x27;t they want to avoid being seen as a crucial decision maker?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hombre_fatal</author><text>I saw my girlfriend rate our driver 3&#x2F;5 stars for a ride that was perfect. When I asked her what problem she had with the driver to rate him so low, she said &quot;huh? it was just an average ride, nothing special.&quot;<p>I think of this whenever people suggest that a star rating system is ideal.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/uber-will-start-deactivating-riders-with-low-ratings/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>First, using an arbitrary number of stars is part of the problem. Too much opportunity for legitimate differences of rating to come into play. Just make the question &quot;would you do business with this driver&#x2F;rider again?&quot; and leave it at that. At the very least the rating should be market-specific, since there is so much cultural influence over such ratings.<p>Second, Uber should not be making the choice based on some arbitrarily chosen numerical value. Present the rating to the drivers, maybe with some comments, let them choose who they want to take. After all, if Uber isn&#x27;t employing the drivers and is just the middleman, wouldn&#x27;t they want to avoid being seen as a crucial decision maker?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>Uber should not be making the choice based on some arbitrarily chosen numerical value</i><p>It’s tough to judge the measure without understanding the distribution. Uber has to compete for drivers. They aren’t incentivised to throw them away without good reason.<p>Most people I know default to 5 stars. Anything below means something went wrong.<p>(I do 4 for nuisances, like odour; 3 for discomfort, like jerky driving; 2 for minor safety issues, like being on the phone; and 1 for major safety issues, like threatening my fellow Pool passenger or nearly hitting a pedestrian lawfully using the crosswalk. Maybe once every few weeks I’ll rate a ride less than 5.)</text></comment> |
13,268,472 | 13,268,552 | 1 | 3 | 13,268,344 | train | <story><title>Valve fined for poor customer service</title><url>https://technicality.io/valve-fined-for-poor-customer-service/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brandur</author><text>Valve should admit fault and pay the fine. Although they finally have a refund system in place on Steam these days, previously their system could be considered borderline fraudulent.<p>In the past, I bought ~3 3-D games that claimed Mac support, but turned out to be completely non-functional on the platform because I had an Intel GPU. Upon pointing it out to Valve and the developers, they would deny fault, and reply that I should have read the system requirements more carefully. That may be true, but given that the majority of all Macs sold today come with Intel chipsets, there should have been a marquee warning in a 50 point font indicating that Mac is &quot;kind of&quot; supported, but not really.</text></comment> | <story><title>Valve fined for poor customer service</title><url>https://technicality.io/valve-fined-for-poor-customer-service/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>unsquare</author><text>Valve where advertising laws don&#x27;t apply to you.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;N3dEPjE.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;N3dEPjE.jpg</a><p>The image above doesn&#x27;t do justice to how bad the experience is as a customer, the tv show is already released in the US, but they make international customers wait to watch it. ( after buying it as if it was fully released ) and of course customer support tells you to post in the forums for help...</text></comment> |
27,097,604 | 27,096,044 | 1 | 3 | 27,094,382 | train | <story><title>There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically</title><url>https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carapace</author><text>I&#x27;ve been looking into plants recently and they are mind-blowing.<p>I don&#x27;t even know where to start.<p>In re: TFA, most annuals that we use for crops have perennial versions. I just planted a &quot;thicket bean&quot; (Phaseolus polystachios) which should grow for years! There are perennial kales that grow into small tree-like &quot;canes&quot;. There&#x27;s a thing called a &quot;strawberry tree&quot; that is exactly what it sounds like: a tree that grows strawberry-like fruit. It goes on and on.<p>One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. :( Check out Gabe Brown&#x27;s videos on regenerative agriculture to see how we can grow food and increase fertility and volume of soil by incorporating more species and doing less work. See also the &quot;food forest&quot; concept: imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible. It takes a while to set up but then it is self-sustaining with low labor, you mostly just harvest.<p>Another take-away is that we mostly already have all the technology we need to make a really fun and enjoyable civilization. We have all these species that can develop food, medicine, clothing, fiber, wood, etc. such that the vast majority of our needs can be fulfilled in a garden.</text></comment> | <story><title>There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically</title><url>https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>a_bonobo</author><text>&gt;Why don’t more plants evolve towards the “grass” strategy?<p>Fun story!!! Seagrasses are like whales, in that their ancestors lived on land, and now they live completely submerged.<p>Seagrasses are nowhere closely related to grasses. Quote: &#x27;They just… both did that.&#x27; They&#x27;re at least three, maybe four distinct &#x27;back to the sea&#x27; events in the seagrasses, with distinct lineages that went back separately, but show convergent loss of genes.<p>Most seagrasses look a lot like grasses, bringing me back to OP&#x27;s &#x27;grass strategy&#x27; - under water it&#x27;s a very successful strategy!</text></comment> |
8,574,835 | 8,574,917 | 1 | 2 | 8,574,184 | train | <story><title>Rust and Go</title><url>https://medium.com/@adamhjk/rust-and-go-e18d511fbd95</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>The article is a lightweight analysis by someone who writes small programs. He does get that, for Rust, &quot;If the compiler accepted my input, it ran — fast and correctly. Period.&quot; That&#x27;s was a common experience with the very tight languages, such as Ada and the various Modulas. It&#x27;s been a while since a language that tight was mainstream. We need one now, badly.<p>Go isn&#x27;t bad for writing routine server-side web stuff that has to scale and run fast, which is why Google created it. Go is a modern language with a dated feel. No user-defined objects, just structs. No generics or templates. It was designed by old C programmers, and it looks it. Go has generic objects - maps and channels - and syntax for creating object instances - &quot;Make&quot;. Only the built-in generics are available, though; you can&#x27;t write new ones.<p>Go&#x27;s &quot;reflection&quot; package thus tends to be overused to work around the lack of generic. This means doing work for each data item at run time for things that could have been done once at compile time. &quot;interface{}&quot; (Go&#x27;s answer to type Any from Visual Basic) tends to be over-used.<p>Go (especially &quot;Effective Go&quot;) has a lot of hand-waving about parallelism. Go&#x27;s mantra is &quot;share by communicating, not by sharing&quot;, but all the examples have data shared between threads. The channels are just used as a locking mechanism. Race conditions are possible in Go, and there&#x27;s an exploit which uses this. (That&#x27;s why Google AppEngine limits Go programs to single threads.)
Go doesn&#x27;t use immutability much, which is a lack in a shared-data parallel language with garbage collection. If you can make data immutable, you can safely share it, which is a way to avoid copying without introducing race conditions.<p>Rust, like Erlang, takes a much harder line on enforcing separation and locking. I haven&#x27;t used Rust myself yet, so I can&#x27;t say more on what it&#x27;s like to use it. My hope is that Rust will provide a solution to buffer overflows in production code. After 35 years of C and its discontents, it&#x27;s time to move on. I really hope the Rust crowd doesn&#x27;t fuck up.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rust and Go</title><url>https://medium.com/@adamhjk/rust-and-go-e18d511fbd95</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>freyr</author><text>It&#x27;s not clear how much experience the author really acquired with each language, and whether that experience was sufficient experience to justify his statement:<p><i>Go felt that way to me — it was good at everything, but nothing grabbed me and made me feel excited in a way I wasn’t already about something else in my ecosystem.</i><p>He&#x27;s apparently using each language to write relatively small command-line utilities. If Go is &quot;amazing&quot; at anything, its usually cited as a language of choice for (1) networked systems, and (2) large yet maintainable systems. I&#x27;m not sure his initial foray into the language would have provided enough experience to accurately assess those merits one way or the other.<p>Rob Pike once expressed surprise that people migrating to Go weren&#x27;t C++ programmers, but Ruby&#x2F;Python&#x2F;etc. programmers who needed more performance. That leads you to wonder: (EDIT: removed pejoratives) if a programmer desired to switch from C&#x2F;C++ to another language but hasn&#x27;t by now, why not?<p>1. They require the performance benefits of C&#x2F;C++ (and as humanrebar pointed out, manual memory management).<p>2. They&#x27;re tied to legacy code, with too little incentive to switch.<p>3. They have an organizational mandate.<p>Any programmer who wasn&#x27;t subject to the above constraints and wanted to switch could have done so before Go showed up on the scene. And if a programmer uses C or C++ solely because the above constraints, Go isn&#x27;t likely to change that.<p>Rust may have a better chance of converting C++ programmers, if it offers the performance and control demanded by programmers who are using C++ by necessity. It will be interesting to see if people migrating from Python&#x2F;Ruby to a higher performance language will choose Go or Rust in the future. Kind of like the OP, I like Go but I&#x27;m excited about Rust.</text></comment> |
36,933,731 | 36,933,293 | 1 | 3 | 36,932,524 | train | <story><title>One week of empathy training (2019)</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joker_minmax</author><text>I do think this is important as an awareness exercise, however, it is worth noting that a lot of the issues CANNOT be seen unless you actually do bring the wheelchair. I learned this in 2018 when as a student I attended a conference with a fellow disabled student in Chicago. I was responsible for pushing her (she could use her arms but it was faster to navigate the city if one of us pushed). Not all train stations have a wide enough platform for wheelchairs to roll across, so your mobility is limited by which stations you can use for the train, which means walking farther from the station to where you actually wanted to go. Accessible hotel room with a pushbutton door shut too quickly for her to get into the threshold. Thankfully one of us was there to hit the button again each time she needed it reopened, but sometimes you had to physically catch and push the (heavier than normal) door before the button would re-open it. If you were just &quot;thinking&quot; about being a wheelchair user, and not actually trying to navigate this, you would not have a sense of the timing of this door. Another complication was her foot in a cast sticking out. The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd. The general attitude toward the disabled, in that environment, is unkind at best.<p>When I was a child (in the US), the science museum in my hometown had an exhibit dedicated to the ADA. You got into a wheelchair and tried to do tasks. It showed how payphones at a certain height are too high to reach, how difficult it would be to go up a ramp with an unapproved slope, etc. I wonder if it&#x27;s still there, because that was my first foray into thinking this way. The Chicago trip however, basically radicalized me.<p>The article has a reference point of the UK and I don&#x27;t know what their laws are with regards to accessibility. But it&#x27;s clear that in both countries public attitudes toward accessibility have a very long way to go. And I&#x27;m sure most other countries can say this as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blahedo</author><text>&gt; <i>in Chicago. ...</i><p>And the sad thing is, in this respect Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US and <i>way</i> less bad than many (most?) cities in other countries, including many that are much more progressive than the US. Chicago has been working on curb cuts for years and is in the midst of a years-long quest to upgrade all El (metro&#x2F;subway) platforms for accessibility, and the ADA---33 years old---has much stronger requirements than, as far as I can tell, even current legislation elsewhere. In Canada, France, Spain, Germany I&#x27;ve seen whole rows of storefronts that are a half-storey up or down from street level, curb cuts are rare, and it&#x27;s more usual for stores and other business to have steps than not. In other realms of accessibility, I&#x27;ve also noticed a lot more Braille and&#x2F;or headphone access on ATMs and public kiosks in the US, and fire alarms that are rigged with lights as well as sound.<p>It&#x27;s not a perfect mechanism, and the US gets a <i>lot</i> of other things wrong, but the ADA is something we got really, really on the right track (and keep improving).</text></comment> | <story><title>One week of empathy training (2019)</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joker_minmax</author><text>I do think this is important as an awareness exercise, however, it is worth noting that a lot of the issues CANNOT be seen unless you actually do bring the wheelchair. I learned this in 2018 when as a student I attended a conference with a fellow disabled student in Chicago. I was responsible for pushing her (she could use her arms but it was faster to navigate the city if one of us pushed). Not all train stations have a wide enough platform for wheelchairs to roll across, so your mobility is limited by which stations you can use for the train, which means walking farther from the station to where you actually wanted to go. Accessible hotel room with a pushbutton door shut too quickly for her to get into the threshold. Thankfully one of us was there to hit the button again each time she needed it reopened, but sometimes you had to physically catch and push the (heavier than normal) door before the button would re-open it. If you were just &quot;thinking&quot; about being a wheelchair user, and not actually trying to navigate this, you would not have a sense of the timing of this door. Another complication was her foot in a cast sticking out. The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd. The general attitude toward the disabled, in that environment, is unkind at best.<p>When I was a child (in the US), the science museum in my hometown had an exhibit dedicated to the ADA. You got into a wheelchair and tried to do tasks. It showed how payphones at a certain height are too high to reach, how difficult it would be to go up a ramp with an unapproved slope, etc. I wonder if it&#x27;s still there, because that was my first foray into thinking this way. The Chicago trip however, basically radicalized me.<p>The article has a reference point of the UK and I don&#x27;t know what their laws are with regards to accessibility. But it&#x27;s clear that in both countries public attitudes toward accessibility have a very long way to go. And I&#x27;m sure most other countries can say this as well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>13of40</author><text>&gt; The lovely, welcoming residents of Chicago catcalled her using wheelchair-related phrases, one guy on the train pointed at her and told her to kill herself, and someone kicked her cast in a crowd.<p>Dear god. My wife broke her leg about a month ago, and I&#x27;ve been pushing her in a wheelchair when we go out. The spectrum of reactions so far has run from a quick smile to strangers coming up to ask what happened and wish her well. This is in the eastern Seattle suburbs. WTF, people?</text></comment> |
4,641,138 | 4,641,013 | 1 | 2 | 4,640,529 | train | <story><title>How Linux 3.6 Nearly Broke PostgreSQL</title><url>http://lwn.net/Articles/518329/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cs702</author><text>Unintended adverse side effects from a tiny change to a small component of a complex OS kernel that runs on complex modern processors that are part of mindbogglingly complex computer systems, on which we run the ridiculously vast software ecosystem which makes possible the massively complex global network of applications and services we call "the Web."<p>Every time I read or hear about unintended-consequence incidents like this one, I'm reminded me of Jean-Baptiste Queru's essay, "Dizzying but Invisible Depth" -- highly recommended if you haven't read it.[1]<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/u/0/112218872649456413744/posts/dfyd...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How Linux 3.6 Nearly Broke PostgreSQL</title><url>http://lwn.net/Articles/518329/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>efuquen</author><text>"A potentially simpler alternative is to let the application itself tell the scheduler that one of its processes is special. PostgreSQL could request that its dispatcher be allowed to run at the expense of one of its own workers, even if the normal scheduling algorithm would dictate otherwise."<p>I don't see how this is so bad, it seems like the best solution too me. If you're writing a specialized high performance piece of software I feel like the application developer should be the one tasked with making sure the kernel knows certain things about it's application. It's pretty clear a project like postgres is doing all sorts of tricks and optimizations already, I don't see how this would be any more or less burdensome.<p>Overall I feel like it's a fair trade-off to have kernel be told specific things by the application so it can make the better scheduling decisions vs it having to guess and potentially make poor decisions at the expense of most common applications.</text></comment> |
27,497,292 | 27,493,977 | 1 | 2 | 27,492,616 | train | <story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treis</author><text>&gt; there really are not a lot of real world use cases.<p>It&#x27;s effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. That&#x27;s a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on. Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.</text></item><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.<p>That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.<p>But most of these products&#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid&#x2F;pay for when you trade&#x2F;borrow&#x2F;lend&#x2F;invest&#x2F;stake your other tokens. Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.<p>The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&#x2F;finance.<p>Right now it just feels like pump&amp;dump&#x2F;frontrunning&#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success. It&#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tim333</author><text>You&#x27;ve missed speculation and gambling. Not to say it&#x27;s a great use case but it&#x27;s the biggest. Most people buy them because the number goes up, not to buy drugs etc. Which is perhaps a bad idea but not actually illegal.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treis</author><text>&gt; there really are not a lot of real world use cases.<p>It&#x27;s effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. That&#x27;s a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on. Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.</text></item><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.<p>That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.<p>But most of these products&#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid&#x2F;pay for when you trade&#x2F;borrow&#x2F;lend&#x2F;invest&#x2F;stake your other tokens. Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.<p>The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&#x2F;finance.<p>Right now it just feels like pump&amp;dump&#x2F;frontrunning&#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success. It&#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xwolfi</author><text>I dislike crypto too, but let&#x27;s give them the benefit of the doubt: it&#x27;s also presented&#x2F;sold as a sort of easy stock, pure of anything other than an inflation prevention.<p>It&#x27;s as electronic as a stock, as purely abstract as a piece of gold, as resistant to inflation (theoretically) as anything having an intrinsic value that won&#x27;t depend on currency.<p>Ofc, criminal transactions are also supposed to be eased but you know what, I think a bank made entirely to dodge annoying regulators will have a bit more success than an amateurish exchange: they&#x27;ll give all your info, and therefore all your public transactions at the first little threat, while a big bank like Credit Suisse, would try to leverage lobbying power at first.</text></comment> |
5,458,540 | 5,457,962 | 1 | 2 | 5,457,312 | train | <story><title>Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/amazon-acquires-social-reading-site-goodreads/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>austenallred</author><text>This acquisition makes so, so much sense. I have a goodreads account, but I never update it, mostly because it's too much time. If it were well-connected (or synced?) with my Kindle, I would use it literally weekly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>radicaldreamer</author><text>My biggest complaint about Good Reads is it's confusing user interface. I would really use it a lot more if it was a little less clunky to use.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/28/amazon-acquires-social-reading-site-goodreads/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>austenallred</author><text>This acquisition makes so, so much sense. I have a goodreads account, but I never update it, mostly because it's too much time. If it were well-connected (or synced?) with my Kindle, I would use it literally weekly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krschultz</author><text>100%. I'm looking forward to auto-syncing my Goodread account to paper books I bought, e books on my Kindle, etc.</text></comment> |
18,315,867 | 18,315,296 | 1 | 3 | 18,314,555 | train | <story><title>The Periodic Table of Data Structures [pdf]</title><url>https://stratos.seas.harvard.edu/files/stratos/files/periodictabledatastructures.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sirupsen</author><text>I am fascinated with unifying theories such as the periodic table (Mendeleev&#x27;s) and the Copernican view of planets orbiting the sun. The previous, Earth-centric model had more deviations than predictive power. The periodic table is also an example of a structure with tremendous predictive power.<p>I think it&#x27;s also interesting to distinguish between systems that reveal intrinsic order (e.g. periodic table), and systems that superimpose external order (e.g. a performance review framework).<p>Behavioural economics is an example of a field that desperately needs a modern-day equivalent of Mendeleev to come around and structure.<p>I am craving more examples of this, please, anyone, share!</text></item><item><author>sytelus</author><text>This is very inspirational but not sure if this is done in the best way. The core value of Mendeleev&#x27;s approach is to find gaps and predict things that should exist but we haven&#x27;t found yet. However for this to happen, one must isolate the <i>&quot;atoms&quot;</i> that can&#x27;t be further broken down and identify the pattern in these atoms. The periodic table created in Figure 4 of this paper doesn&#x27;t exactly sounds like isolation of &quot;atoms&quot; of data structures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r-bryan</author><text>I can&#x27;t find it now but I recently read of one or two guys who systematically tabulated juggling tricks. Gaps in the table led to new tricks which astonished experienced jugglers -- the way gaps in the periodic table led Mendeleev to predict properties of undiscovered elements. One guy gives talks on juggling at math conferences and on math at juggling conferences.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Periodic Table of Data Structures [pdf]</title><url>https://stratos.seas.harvard.edu/files/stratos/files/periodictabledatastructures.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sirupsen</author><text>I am fascinated with unifying theories such as the periodic table (Mendeleev&#x27;s) and the Copernican view of planets orbiting the sun. The previous, Earth-centric model had more deviations than predictive power. The periodic table is also an example of a structure with tremendous predictive power.<p>I think it&#x27;s also interesting to distinguish between systems that reveal intrinsic order (e.g. periodic table), and systems that superimpose external order (e.g. a performance review framework).<p>Behavioural economics is an example of a field that desperately needs a modern-day equivalent of Mendeleev to come around and structure.<p>I am craving more examples of this, please, anyone, share!</text></item><item><author>sytelus</author><text>This is very inspirational but not sure if this is done in the best way. The core value of Mendeleev&#x27;s approach is to find gaps and predict things that should exist but we haven&#x27;t found yet. However for this to happen, one must isolate the <i>&quot;atoms&quot;</i> that can&#x27;t be further broken down and identify the pattern in these atoms. The periodic table created in Figure 4 of this paper doesn&#x27;t exactly sounds like isolation of &quot;atoms&quot; of data structures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frutiger</author><text>Physics is full of such examples.<p>Newton’s theory of gravitation unified the motion of apples falling from a tree, cannonballs thrown into walls, the motion of planet earth around the sun, and even motion of all the known planetary bodies.<p>Electromagnetic waves gives us one understanding of X-rays, gamma radiation, visible light, infrared, radio waves, etc.<p>Quantum field theory unifies every microscopic theory of matter and energy we have ever known.<p>This list could be much longer.</text></comment> |
21,084,158 | 21,084,206 | 1 | 2 | 21,082,523 | train | <story><title>The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-forbes-30-under-30-hustle?pu=hackernews7r16e7&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>How do you &quot;cash out&quot; on brand building if your company isn&#x27;t doing anything? Motivational speaking?</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives.<p>However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype.<p>I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories.<p>Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Roritharr</author><text>Jumping into a high paying bullshit job, being on advisory boards, networking yourself into circles where your Rolodex becomes valuable that intro&#x27;s from you can get you 70% into raising VC...<p>I&#x27;ve seen quite a few of these people in my area and they disgust me every time, coming from a &quot;work is only valuable if it&#x27;s hard&quot; work-ethic family.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Hustle</title><url>https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-forbes-30-under-30-hustle?pu=hackernews7r16e7&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>How do you &quot;cash out&quot; on brand building if your company isn&#x27;t doing anything? Motivational speaking?</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I know two people on the “30 under 30” list. Both of them are incredibly charismatic and charming in person. Their Instagram and Twitter accounts churn out constant brand building material. They both have pseudo-startups with noble causes and vibrant websites. Their startups have a list of impressive advisers, including B-list senators and industry executives.<p>However, neither of them have made any progress on building an actual business. One of them has supposedly been developing the same simple product for almost 7 years now, but they’ve never been able to produce even a proof of concept prototype.<p>I thought I was missing something for the longest time, until I let go of the idea that they were really trying to build a company. They’re not. They’re building their personal brand, and succeeding wildly thanks to publications like the “30 under 30” list that have an insatiable appetite for underdog success stories.<p>Surely some of these companies are legitimately successful with great business models, but they’re mixed into these lists with the brand builders who know how to game the system. I’d be interested in reading an honest “Where are they now” follow up series that checks in with these founders at the 5-year mark after they make this list to see who the real successes are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>knzhou</author><text>There is no &quot;cashing out&quot;, prestige seeking is just the result of a primitive drive. It&#x27;s like asking how I&#x27;m going to &quot;cash out&quot; all the french fries I&#x27;m eating. I don&#x27;t have any plan to, it just feels good to eat them.</text></comment> |
36,327,676 | 36,327,130 | 1 | 2 | 36,325,349 | train | <story><title>Always the same warning signs</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/always-same-warning-signs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaptheimpaler</author><text>The big takeaway here for me is to make liberal use of the phrase &quot;Shoo, little people! Out of my way!&quot; when they don&#x27;t approve my code reviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>I prefer the less disparaging, &quot;Well, I&#x27;m going to check it in anyway&quot; and as a bonus, it doesn&#x27;t directly acknowledge the existance of other people.</text></comment> | <story><title>Always the same warning signs</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/always-same-warning-signs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaptheimpaler</author><text>The big takeaway here for me is to make liberal use of the phrase &quot;Shoo, little people! Out of my way!&quot; when they don&#x27;t approve my code reviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluGill</author><text>Arrgh, why didn&#x27;t I.think of that? I just left for vacation with an open code review that should have been easy because some new junior found some issues that I couldn&#x27;t resolve before packing my suitcase.<p>Thanks junior, the issues you found were real, even if small, and things will be better when I return and fix them.</text></comment> |
21,715,230 | 21,712,998 | 1 | 2 | 21,711,808 | train | <story><title>Making a text adventure game with GPT2</title><url>https://quicktotheratcave.tumblr.com/post/187432425523/shall-we-play-a-game-a-gpt-2-text-adventure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duskwuff</author><text>There&#x27;s definitely not enough training data being used here. In particular, the GPT2 output:<p>&gt; YOU ARE IN THE PIT, SO TO SPEAK, BELOW THE RAMPARTS. THERE IS A NARROW PASSAGE FROM EAST TO WEST AND A STONE STAIRWAY LEADING DOWN. THE ROOM IS DEAFENINGLY LOUD WITH AN UNDETERMINED RUSHING SOUND. THE SOUND SEEMS TO REVERBERATE FROM ALL OF THE WALLS, MAKING IT DIFFICULT EVEN TO THINK.<p>is largely copied from the Loud Room in Zork 1:<p>&gt; This is a large room with a ceiling which cannot be detected from the ground. There is a narrow passage from east to west and a stone stairway leading upward. The room is deafeningly loud with an undetermined rushing sound. The sound seems to reverberate from all of the walls, making it difficult even to think.<p>Similarly, the response to &quot;kill the spirits&quot;:<p>&gt; THE SPIRITS, SENSING A GREATER POWER, FLEE THROUGH THE WALLS<p>is a direct quote from a similar (and much more dramatic) scene in Zork 1:<p>&gt; Each word of the prayer reverberates through the hall in a deafening confusion. As the last word fades, a voice, loud and commanding, speaks: &quot;Begone, fiends!&quot; A heart-stopping scream fills the cavern, and the spirits, sensing a greater power, flee through the walls.<p>And a lot of the more original output from GPT2 (like &quot;ROAD NEAR BRIDGE&quot; and &quot;THE SHAPEK FAN&quot;) is simply incoherent. So this isn&#x27;t really a very good showing, overall.</text></comment> | <story><title>Making a text adventure game with GPT2</title><url>https://quicktotheratcave.tumblr.com/post/187432425523/shall-we-play-a-game-a-gpt-2-text-adventure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>GPT2 is fascinating. I like the idea of achieving a kind of immortality by training GPT2 on the sum total of your life&#x27;s data: all your comments, all your tweets, all your text messages, everything. Presto, now you have an unkillable version of yourself that can answer questions about your life. Your loved ones might like it when you&#x27;re gone, at least.<p>Maybe in the future we&#x27;ll have &quot;harry potter photos&quot; that use GPT2 + speech synthesis to pretend to be you.</text></comment> |
20,656,101 | 20,653,966 | 1 | 3 | 20,653,942 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Tailwind.run – An Online Playground for Tailwind CSS</title><url>https://tailwind.run</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Etheryte</author><text>While semantic styling has been around for quite a while in different shapes and forms, this is essentially the same as inlining all of your styles in a style attribute on every element, albeit just a bit shorter to write.<p>It&#x27;s an interesting idea to entertain as a thought, and some utility classes certainly hold value in general, but I don&#x27;t see how you would ever reasonably want to use this in a project. It has all the same drawbacks as writing inline styles on elements, not to mention the large size.<p>Say you have a number of views and decide (or a client decides) you want all of the buttons to have a bit more padding. If anything else happens to completely accidentally also use the same padding class you&#x27;re always left with manually checking every single instance just for a small change like this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Tailwind.run – An Online Playground for Tailwind CSS</title><url>https://tailwind.run</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>utkarshkukreti</author><text>Hey everyone!<p>I tweeted a video of the app in action here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;utkarshkukreti&#x2F;status&#x2F;1158323716515778560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;utkarshkukreti&#x2F;status&#x2F;115832371651577856...</a><p>I made this TailwindCSS Playground over the last two weeks. I really like the core idea of Tailwind and the productivity gains it gives and would like to build more stuff with it in the future!<p>Features:<p>* Compile custom @tailwindcss config and CSS in the browser<p>* Live preview in 5 screen sizes<p>* Class name autocompletion with CSS definition preview<p>* Save code online or export .zip<p>* Vim&#x2F;Emacs&#x2F;Sublime key bindings + Emmet</text></comment> |
25,897,002 | 25,896,639 | 1 | 3 | 25,895,631 | train | <story><title>Japanese companies fight for share of EUV chip technology sector</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Electronics/Japanese-companies-fight-for-share-of-EUV-chip-technology-sector</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>As much as the US sits around hand wringing about manufacturing being outsourced, does anyone have a good perspective on how this has played out in Japan? From our perspective, they&#x27;re one &#x27;generation&#x27; of outsourcing from us, two if you count Taiwan, and we&#x27;ve had at least South Korea and Mainland China since then.<p>I got a little taste of their recession in the 1990&#x27;s, but not much information since then. Are they as worried now as we were when Toyota ate everybody&#x27;s lunch?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>totalZero</author><text>I have been thinking about this a lot recently, and I think Canon and Nikon, both of whom produce Deep UV machinery (ie, equipment that uses a laser wavelength about an order of magnitude wider than EUV&#x27;s 13.5nm), have an opportunity due to demand for legacy foundry processes. They are a tiny part of the photolithography equipment sub-sector, but the present moment is marked by overwhelming demand for semiconductors for automotive applications, and those chips aren&#x27;t running on leading-edge nodes like TSMC 5nm or Intel 10nm (there&#x27;s no reason for them to). If I were the CEO of a global automaker, I&#x27;d be buying legacy (22nm and older) foundry equipment in order to make chips in-house because the eventual product mix transition (ICE vs EV) means I&#x27;m going to need more custom semiconductors than ever before.<p>The semiconductor industry is so complex that it depends upon companies in many nations, including Japan. No one nation owns the semiconductor lifecycle, but each part of the process is dominated (but not entirely owned) by one nation. Japan dominates wafer production. One company in the Netherlands dominates photolithography equipment. The United States dominates processor design. China dominates device assembly. Korea dominates NAND. Taiwan dominates foundry. Companies in all of these places are laying out a bunch of CapEx so clearly there&#x27;s an anticipation of a rising tide that lifts all boats, rather than a rejiggering of market share that hurts one economy (forgetting China for a second) while helping another.</text></comment> | <story><title>Japanese companies fight for share of EUV chip technology sector</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Electronics/Japanese-companies-fight-for-share-of-EUV-chip-technology-sector</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hinkley</author><text>As much as the US sits around hand wringing about manufacturing being outsourced, does anyone have a good perspective on how this has played out in Japan? From our perspective, they&#x27;re one &#x27;generation&#x27; of outsourcing from us, two if you count Taiwan, and we&#x27;ve had at least South Korea and Mainland China since then.<p>I got a little taste of their recession in the 1990&#x27;s, but not much information since then. Are they as worried now as we were when Toyota ate everybody&#x27;s lunch?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scheherazade</author><text>Although your question has merit for this case specifically as ASML is a Dutch company there is very little hand wringing about outsourcing. For the forseeable future the Dutch are going to toe Washington’s line. In fact in some ways it’s desirable to throw middle powers a bone every now and then as it gives Washington an additional geopolitical bargaining chip that can be more easily called.</text></comment> |
32,861,366 | 32,860,517 | 1 | 3 | 32,859,256 | train | <story><title>Plasma Bigscreen</title><url>https://plasma-bigscreen.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deusum</author><text>If I understand correctly it uses a RPi or other ARM device attached to the TV.<p>Is there anything out there tbat overwrite the TV&#x27;s &quot;smart&quot; firmware? Something analogous to OpenWRT and its router support?<p>It would be bet cool if you could use the controller and buttons &quot;natively&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pabs3</author><text>If Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio for GPL violations in their TVs, you will probably be able to install open source Linux distros with KDE Plasma Bigscreen or Kodi on any Vizio TV and soon afterwards lots of other smart TV vendors will be similar. Allowing the vendor operating system to remain on the device after you purchase it basically means spyware these days.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;copyleft-compliance&#x2F;vizio.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;copyleft-compliance&#x2F;vizio.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Plasma Bigscreen</title><url>https://plasma-bigscreen.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deusum</author><text>If I understand correctly it uses a RPi or other ARM device attached to the TV.<p>Is there anything out there tbat overwrite the TV&#x27;s &quot;smart&quot; firmware? Something analogous to OpenWRT and its router support?<p>It would be bet cool if you could use the controller and buttons &quot;natively&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>denkmoon</author><text>&gt;It would be bet cool if you could use the controller and buttons &quot;natively&quot;.<p>This is what LibCEC is for.</text></comment> |
28,402,055 | 28,401,859 | 1 | 3 | 28,401,256 | train | <story><title>A new way to detect ‘deepfake’ picture editing</title><url>https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/06/07/a-new-way-to-detect-deepfake-picture-editing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Etheryte</author><text>It&#x27;s hard to see this as much anything but snake oil. While the technique allegedly allows you to target multiple models, it still requires you to know what adversarial model you&#x27;re targeting before the fact. If the adversary sees there&#x27;s visible artifacts they&#x27;ll just change a few parameters or use a different model and be good to go none the less. In short, while this might be academically interesting, I can&#x27;t help but feel that this is a futile field to work in. A good way to see why is to look at it this way: a skilled human can manually manipulate an image so that it isn&#x27;t possible to tell that the image has been manipulated. It is then a matter of teaching the model to do the same, which might take time or be computationally prohibitive for now, but eventually it will be done.</text></comment> | <story><title>A new way to detect ‘deepfake’ picture editing</title><url>https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/06/07/a-new-way-to-detect-deepfake-picture-editing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>d--b</author><text>Adversial techniques are specific to the model used, no?<p>You&#x27;d need to know all the models that one might use to tamper with a picture and modify the image in such a way that it screws them all.<p>And the first thing that will happen is that people are going to train their models with these new &#x27;tamper-protected&#x27; images...</text></comment> |
22,630,667 | 22,630,578 | 1 | 2 | 22,615,317 | train | <story><title>LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking</title><url>https://www.liquidtext.net/liquidtextadeeperdive</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tduberne</author><text>I am more and more reluctant to use any note taking app. Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. No app can offer that kind of guarantee. I switched to using plaintext files, and do not look back. The only thing one needs is to have a clear workflow to make sure notes remain accessible and useful. I like the Zettelkasten method for this (see eg <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zettelkasten.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zettelkasten.de</a>, no affiliation).<p>Not to criticize this app in particular, I actually quite like the concepts listed (which remind me of the Zettelkasten idea). Just the whole idea of keeping my thoughts in an app. Even if it does allow to export the data, it is probably in a format that is difficult to use outside of the app, and thus close to useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmortin</author><text>&gt; notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. No app can offer that kind of guarantee<p>Emacs + Org Mode<p>You can be sure Emacs will still be around in 20 years and Org Mode stores notes in text format.</text></comment> | <story><title>LiquidText: A tool for academical note taking</title><url>https://www.liquidtext.net/liquidtextadeeperdive</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tduberne</author><text>I am more and more reluctant to use any note taking app. Ideally, notes I take on the book I am reading today should still be available to me in 20 years. No app can offer that kind of guarantee. I switched to using plaintext files, and do not look back. The only thing one needs is to have a clear workflow to make sure notes remain accessible and useful. I like the Zettelkasten method for this (see eg <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zettelkasten.de" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zettelkasten.de</a>, no affiliation).<p>Not to criticize this app in particular, I actually quite like the concepts listed (which remind me of the Zettelkasten idea). Just the whole idea of keeping my thoughts in an app. Even if it does allow to export the data, it is probably in a format that is difficult to use outside of the app, and thus close to useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fabiospampinato</author><text>&gt; No app can offer that kind of guarantee.<p>Actually the one I&#x27;m developing offers that [1], as it stores notes as plain Markdown files on disk, it doesn&#x27;t get any more future-proof and no vendor lock-in than that.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notable.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notable.md</a></text></comment> |
23,973,991 | 23,973,645 | 1 | 2 | 23,962,632 | train | <story><title>We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015)</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont-need-to-work-so-much</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moksly</author><text>I chose to work in the public sector of Denmark because I’m ideologically inclined that way. That was decades ago, today I would chose to work here because of how much less hours I work compared to my old university friends in the private sector. They earn more money than me, but except for one of them who founded and now manages a successful company, it’s not that much more money. In fact when you calculate in all the extra hours they work, my extra weak of paid vacation, my better paternityleave, the two extra paid child’s sick leave days I get (per time your child is sick), the two yearly extra vacation days (per child under the age of 7) and my pension, I probably only earn around 10-20% less than them, and I get to spend so much more time not working. Hell I even bumped my hours to 30 a week for a while when my daughter was born. That was expensive, but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs.<p>I can’t begin to imagine how you guys in America get through life working so much. Let alone how on Earth you raise a family, maintain a relationship and have time for yourselves while you do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckNorris89</author><text>I feel like you are incredibly privileged that you can afford to to have a family while working so little hours in the public sector and I suspect your situation is not the norm in DK.<p>Friends of mine who moved to SE&#x2F;NL&#x2F;DE&#x2F;DK are definitely working the full 40h&#x2F;week and sometimes more since, as they say, living there is very expsensive.<p>From my experience, the Europeans who toot their <i>&quot;life is so good here, why do other people work so much?&quot;</i> horn are privileged enough to have a hand-me-down property bought&#x2F;inherited from their (grand)parents, and since rent&#x2F;mortgage is the biggest expense here, with property prices rising 8 times faster than wages, that property ownership early in life, which they take for granted, gives them the clear advantage that allows them to not bother with the rat race and could even live comfortably on minimum wage.<p>That of course, is not the norm for everyone and especially not if you&#x27;ve just emigrated here, so anyone wishing to own their own property one day has no choice but to jump in the meat grinder and join the rat race.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Don’t Need to Work So Much (2015)</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont-need-to-work-so-much</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moksly</author><text>I chose to work in the public sector of Denmark because I’m ideologically inclined that way. That was decades ago, today I would chose to work here because of how much less hours I work compared to my old university friends in the private sector. They earn more money than me, but except for one of them who founded and now manages a successful company, it’s not that much more money. In fact when you calculate in all the extra hours they work, my extra weak of paid vacation, my better paternityleave, the two extra paid child’s sick leave days I get (per time your child is sick), the two yearly extra vacation days (per child under the age of 7) and my pension, I probably only earn around 10-20% less than them, and I get to spend so much more time not working. Hell I even bumped my hours to 30 a week for a while when my daughter was born. That was expensive, but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs.<p>I can’t begin to imagine how you guys in America get through life working so much. Let alone how on Earth you raise a family, maintain a relationship and have time for yourselves while you do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ampgt</author><text>&gt; but it’s something you aren’t offered in a lot of private sector jobs.<p>To an extent isn’t this because these types of benefits aren’t affordable? The pension, extra vacation, etc wouldn’t be possible without the tax revenue raised from your friends who are working more hours.<p>In America there is a saying “good enough for government work.” I think a lot of public sector jobs get a bad rep because they hand out middle class lifestyles (arguably maybe even upper middle class in Washington DC metro area) at the expense of the private sector.<p>A lot of government employees (and contractors) just got paid to sit at home for 3-4 months during the pandemic if they worked in secure areas (can’t take classified information home). That’s a benefit that the private sector just can’t provide.<p>I guess I don’t really agree with the article. We need hard work, it’s what keeps the system going. We have it so much better than other parts of the world and we shouldn’t take that for granted.</text></comment> |
38,346,254 | 38,346,032 | 1 | 2 | 38,345,858 | train | <story><title>YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m4tthumphrey</author><text>This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT&#x27;s way of &quot;annoying&quot; me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the &quot;You cant use Adblockers modal&quot; and now I just tolerate the ads.<p>So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.</text></item><item><author>ayhanfuat</author><text>From reddit discussion (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9w3ei4&#x2F;?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9...</a>):<p>&gt; To clarify it more, it&#x27;s simply this code in their polymer script link:<p>&gt; setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);<p>&gt; which doesn&#x27;t do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_pol...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluescrn</author><text>When I ran into the adblocker-blocker (Firefox + uBlock Origin), I noticed that I could watch videos if logged out. So I just stayed logged out, and haven&#x27;t seen an anti-adblock message since. Or an ad.<p>Added bonus, I&#x27;m less tempted to venture into the comments section...</text></comment> | <story><title>YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m4tthumphrey</author><text>This is interesting as I had noticed this happening to me (in Chrome) when the anti-ad-blocking started. I assumed that it was YT&#x27;s way of &quot;annoying&quot; me still while no ads were shown... It was eventually replaced with the &quot;You cant use Adblockers modal&quot; and now I just tolerate the ads.<p>So I wonder if that 5s delay has always been there.</text></item><item><author>ayhanfuat</author><text>From reddit discussion (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9w3ei4&#x2F;?utm_source=reddit&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;17ywbjj&#x2F;comment&#x2F;k9...</a>):<p>&gt; To clarify it more, it&#x27;s simply this code in their polymer script link:<p>&gt; setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);<p>&gt; which doesn&#x27;t do anything except making you wait 5s (5E3 = 5000ms = 5s). You can search for it easily in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.vflset&#x2F;desktop_polymer_enable_wil_icons.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;96766c85&#x2F;jsbin&#x2F;desktop_pol...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lacerda69</author><text>It&#x27;s weird but I saw the anti-blocker modal a week or two but them it stopped appearing and never saw it since <i>shrug</i></text></comment> |
5,297,568 | 5,297,367 | 1 | 3 | 5,297,204 | train | <story><title>Typeplate - A Typography Template</title><url>http://typeplate.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>abcd_f</author><text>Tangentially related -<p>The demo page is a representative case of the "designer font-size" setting. I get exactly 4 lines of text on the first pageful. Not everyone surfs on Retina displays or humongous iMac panels at 1080 vertical resolution. As much as I appreciate being able to admire individual glyph curves up close and personal, it comes at the expense of being actually read the page without constant scrolling.</text></comment> | <story><title>Typeplate - A Typography Template</title><url>http://typeplate.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Trezoid</author><text>Please don't use #444 for body copy. Anything lighter then about #222 (which typeplate has used throughout their own site) is just too low contrast on light backgrounds.</text></comment> |
16,364,197 | 16,363,227 | 1 | 2 | 16,363,038 | train | <story><title>ZFS 128 bit storage: Are you high? (2004)</title><url>https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>&gt; Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 264 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore&#x27;s Law
for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we&#x27;ll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a decade. Storage systems tend to live for several decades, so it would be foolish to create a new one without anticipating the needs that will surely arise within its projected lifetime.<p>So exactly 14 years passed, does someone have 2^64 bytes for a single ZFS filesystem (or anything close to that)? I don&#x27;t really feel like storage capacity (or 1&#x2F;price) doubles every year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrb</author><text>They had to be on the conservative side, so they assumed a doubling every 9-12 months. In reality we have seen one doubling every ~34 months in the last 14 years. In 2005 I bought 250GB HDDs for $110 each. In 2018 you can find 8TB HDDs for $150 each. That&#x27;s 5 doublings.<p>So with 5 doublings, if we saw datasets on the order of 2^50 back then, we should see datasets on the order of 2^55 today (30 PB). And sure enough, here is a computer with a 30 PB global filesystem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fujitsu.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;TC&#x2F;sc11&#x2F;k-computer-system-overview-sc11.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fujitsu.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;TC&#x2F;sc11&#x2F;k-computer-system-...</a><p>So another 9 doublings to go to 2^64 bytes. With one every 34 months, this should happen in 25 years (2043). But again, if you are a filesystem developer you should be on the conservative side and assume it might double every ~12 months.</text></comment> | <story><title>ZFS 128 bit storage: Are you high? (2004)</title><url>https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/128-bit-storage:-are-you-high</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>&gt; Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 264 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore&#x27;s Law
for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we&#x27;ll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a decade. Storage systems tend to live for several decades, so it would be foolish to create a new one without anticipating the needs that will surely arise within its projected lifetime.<p>So exactly 14 years passed, does someone have 2^64 bytes for a single ZFS filesystem (or anything close to that)? I don&#x27;t really feel like storage capacity (or 1&#x2F;price) doubles every year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bhouston</author><text>I think the largest file systems in the world are Amazon&#x27;s S3, and maybe Glacier. I guess Google&#x27;s internal system used for YouTube and Gmail probably outrank it but there are no numbers for it. But I doubt that they are in a single address space on a single file system.<p>So basically we moved away from singular large unified file systems and built swarms of little file systems.</text></comment> |
30,622,343 | 30,620,918 | 1 | 2 | 30,617,021 | train | <story><title>Four years on, new experiment sees no sign of ‘cosmic dawn’</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-new-experiment-astronomers-see-no-sign-of-cosmic-dawn-20220228/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deanCommie</author><text>For any physicists reading, I have a question about the Big Bang: Is the standard consensus that the specific physical description is literal or just the closest approximation&#x2F;visual model we have that matches the data?<p>I ask because I was in my 30s before I learned that Dark Matter and Dark Energy are effectively metaphors. There is something that contributes more gravity in the universe than our understanding of the it predicts. And there is something that contributes energy to accelerating the expansion of the universe, and we have no idea what. So we call them &quot;matter&quot; and &quot;energy&quot; but TECHNICALLY they don&#x27;t have to be right? It could also be that something exists that is completely beyond our bounds of understanding.<p>I ask because this feels very much the situation with the Big Bang. Even if all the data shows the universe rapidly expanding in fractions of a second, it is incomprehensible to understand where the energy for it came from, or what happened &quot;before&quot;. And the answer &quot;nothing happened before because that&#x27;s when time started&quot; feels like an acknowledgement of the limitations of our human understanding.<p>So here&#x27;s my follow-up question: Obviously we build an understanding of the universe based on observations of the data. And sometimes the data doesn&#x27;t match and we have to upgrade Newtonian Physics to Einsteinian, or introduce Quantum Mechanics, etc. So are there comparable&#x2F;equivalent investigations&#x2F;experiments going on today that reveal numbers&#x2F;observations that are basically fundamentally unexplainable without looking beyond the realms of our understanding of the limitations of our universe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lisper</author><text>IANAP but I&#x27;ve done a lot of reading about this.<p>&gt; &quot;nothing happened before because that&#x27;s when time started&quot; feels like an acknowledgement of the limitations of our human understanding.<p>&quot;Nothing happened&quot; is not the correct answer. The correct answer is that we don&#x27;t know what happened because before you get to the big bang, our current theories of physics stop working. If you run the equations of general relativity backwards from current conditions you get to a singularity and at that point you can&#x27;t go back any further. That singularity is called the &quot;big bang&quot;. But we know that this is (almost certainly) <i>not</i> an accurate model of what actually happened because we know that GR is (almost certainly) just an approximation of some as-yet-undiscovered theory of quantum gravity, just as Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of GR (in the case of weak gravitational fields).<p>&gt; So here&#x27;s my follow-up question: Obviously we build an understanding of the universe based on observations of the data. And sometimes the data doesn&#x27;t match and we have to upgrade Newtonian Physics to Einsteinian, or introduce Quantum Mechanics, etc. So are there comparable&#x2F;equivalent investigations&#x2F;experiments going on today that reveal numbers&#x2F;observations that are basically fundamentally unexplainable without looking beyond the realms of our understanding of the limitations of our universe?<p>They&#x27;re trying. The big problem is that all of the low-lying experimental and theoretical fruit has been picked, and doing experiments that will actually advance fundamental physics (i.e. whose outcomes cannot be predicted accurately by GR and QFT) is fantastically difficult. The math turns out to be really hairy too. No one has been able to figure out out to quantize gravity so that GR and QFT can be combined into a single theory, let alone propose an experiment that could test such a theory. It&#x27;s a major problem, almost at the level of a crisis. Fundamental physics essentially has made no progress since the standard model was finished 50 years ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Four years on, new experiment sees no sign of ‘cosmic dawn’</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-new-experiment-astronomers-see-no-sign-of-cosmic-dawn-20220228/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deanCommie</author><text>For any physicists reading, I have a question about the Big Bang: Is the standard consensus that the specific physical description is literal or just the closest approximation&#x2F;visual model we have that matches the data?<p>I ask because I was in my 30s before I learned that Dark Matter and Dark Energy are effectively metaphors. There is something that contributes more gravity in the universe than our understanding of the it predicts. And there is something that contributes energy to accelerating the expansion of the universe, and we have no idea what. So we call them &quot;matter&quot; and &quot;energy&quot; but TECHNICALLY they don&#x27;t have to be right? It could also be that something exists that is completely beyond our bounds of understanding.<p>I ask because this feels very much the situation with the Big Bang. Even if all the data shows the universe rapidly expanding in fractions of a second, it is incomprehensible to understand where the energy for it came from, or what happened &quot;before&quot;. And the answer &quot;nothing happened before because that&#x27;s when time started&quot; feels like an acknowledgement of the limitations of our human understanding.<p>So here&#x27;s my follow-up question: Obviously we build an understanding of the universe based on observations of the data. And sometimes the data doesn&#x27;t match and we have to upgrade Newtonian Physics to Einsteinian, or introduce Quantum Mechanics, etc. So are there comparable&#x2F;equivalent investigations&#x2F;experiments going on today that reveal numbers&#x2F;observations that are basically fundamentally unexplainable without looking beyond the realms of our understanding of the limitations of our universe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonh</author><text>The idea that the universe rapidly expanded in a fraction of a second right at the beginning is called inflation theory, it&#x27;s a supplemental modification of the big bang theory and not all physicists that accept the big bang theory also accept inflation theory. There are also some theories that try to explain what there might have been &#x27;before&#x27; the big bang, conformal cyclic cosmology for example. Then there&#x27;s zero energy universe hypothesis, which suggests the universe may have arisen from a random quantum fluctuation - though a fluctuation of what is unclear.<p>So there are quite a few alternative variations on big bang theories. The observation that the universe is expanding seems solid, and the detection of the cosmic microwave background means something must have happened long ago that blasted out all that energy, seemingly everywhere at once. When you go beyond those though things start to get less certain.</text></comment> |
36,055,393 | 36,055,153 | 1 | 2 | 36,051,185 | train | <story><title>A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health</title><url>https://www.thecompanion.app/philip-k-dick-psychosis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blippage</author><text>I was talking to a guy who was into drug counselling. He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there <i>legitimate</i> medical uses.<p>He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.<p>Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it&#x27;s the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.<p>Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won&#x27;t know about it in advance, but if
you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.<p>And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.</text></item><item><author>TeaBrain</author><text>Philip K Dick&#x27;s A Scanner Darkly contains an Author&#x27;s Note at the end of the book on this topic. This is the note from the copy I have:<p>&quot;AUTHOR&#x27;S NOTE:<p>This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.<p>Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is &quot;Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,&quot; but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. &quot;Take the cash and let the credit go,&quot; as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.<p>There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.<p>If there was any &quot;sin,&quot; it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:<p>To Gaylene deceased<p>To Ray deceased<p>To Francy permanent psychosis<p>To Kathy permanent brain damage<p>To Jim deceased<p>To Val massive permanent brain damage<p>To Nancy permanent psychosis<p>To Joanne permanent brain damage<p>To Maren deceased<p>To Nick deceased<p>To Terry deceased<p>To Dennis deceased<p>To Phil permanent pancreatic damage<p>To Sue permanent vascular damage<p>To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage<p>. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The &quot;enemy&quot; was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.&quot;</text></item><item><author>roody15</author><text>Interesting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :&#x2F;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianmsmith</author><text>&gt; He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. ... Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won&#x27;t know about it in advance, but if you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.<p>This would all be improved by legalization and regulation. Nobody dies because a Bud Light is suddenly a lot stronger in one region than another.</text></comment> | <story><title>A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health</title><url>https://www.thecompanion.app/philip-k-dick-psychosis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blippage</author><text>I was talking to a guy who was into drug counselling. He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there <i>legitimate</i> medical uses.<p>He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.<p>Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it&#x27;s the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.<p>Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won&#x27;t know about it in advance, but if
you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.<p>And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.</text></item><item><author>TeaBrain</author><text>Philip K Dick&#x27;s A Scanner Darkly contains an Author&#x27;s Note at the end of the book on this topic. This is the note from the copy I have:<p>&quot;AUTHOR&#x27;S NOTE:<p>This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.<p>Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is &quot;Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,&quot; but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. &quot;Take the cash and let the credit go,&quot; as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.<p>There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.<p>If there was any &quot;sin,&quot; it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:<p>To Gaylene deceased<p>To Ray deceased<p>To Francy permanent psychosis<p>To Kathy permanent brain damage<p>To Jim deceased<p>To Val massive permanent brain damage<p>To Nancy permanent psychosis<p>To Joanne permanent brain damage<p>To Maren deceased<p>To Nick deceased<p>To Terry deceased<p>To Dennis deceased<p>To Phil permanent pancreatic damage<p>To Sue permanent vascular damage<p>To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage<p>. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The &quot;enemy&quot; was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.&quot;</text></item><item><author>roody15</author><text>Interesting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :&#x2F;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajuc</author><text>Legalizing drugs can actually reduce number of kids taking drugs. Because you can require shops to ask for ID. Back street dealers won&#x27;t.<p>I think people often imagine legalizing drugs means there will be heroin ads in TV. But you can legalize them and still regulate them heavily (no ads, only sell to adults, require warnings on the packaging, finance anti-drug campaigns from the sales taxes, etc.).<p>Portugal legalized drugs long ago and their drug problems seemed to get a lot better since.</text></comment> |
19,064,826 | 19,064,804 | 1 | 3 | 19,064,069 | train | <story><title>A Python Interpreter Written in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hathawsh</author><text>This is wonderful. This could become the best way to move Python projects to Rust: initially just run on the RustPython interpreter, but then optimize low level routines in Rust. In 15 years I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this or something like it surpasses CPython in popularity.<p>Still, no discussion about Python implementations is complete without some mention of the infamous GIL (global interpreter lock). :-) CPython has it, Pypy doesn&#x27;t (I think) (EDIT: yes it does), Jython doesn&#x27;t, etc. What is the GIL plan for RustPython?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>std_throwawayay</author><text>The GIL comes with great convenience as you don&#x27;t have to worry about a whole host of data races. It&#x27;s no silver bullet but it&#x27;s mighty convenient if you only do some multi-threading like in a web-server.<p>Many libraries are not prepared for the disappearance of the GIL and while it&#x27;s not a general problem for python per se it will be a great amount of work to make every library compatible with GILless python.<p>Therefore I think that you must always provide an option for the GIL that is enabled by default in order to provide backward compatibility.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Python Interpreter Written in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hathawsh</author><text>This is wonderful. This could become the best way to move Python projects to Rust: initially just run on the RustPython interpreter, but then optimize low level routines in Rust. In 15 years I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this or something like it surpasses CPython in popularity.<p>Still, no discussion about Python implementations is complete without some mention of the infamous GIL (global interpreter lock). :-) CPython has it, Pypy doesn&#x27;t (I think) (EDIT: yes it does), Jython doesn&#x27;t, etc. What is the GIL plan for RustPython?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>Writing a concurrent runtime system including garbage collector is a serious effort, and that&#x27;s why all those other versions of Python don&#x27;t support it and are stuck with a GIL. Hence, I highly doubt that this Rust version of Python has gotten rid of the GIL.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a better separation of language and VMs. I think it&#x27;s a bit sad that a language designer has to either implement their runtime system from scratch, or has to run it on top of a VM that was designed for another language (Java in the case of Jython).<p>Therefore, the thing I&#x27;m looking forward to most is a concurrent, generic and portable VM written in Rust.</text></comment> |
3,772,384 | 3,772,232 | 1 | 2 | 3,771,573 | train | <story><title>A Better Strategy for Hangman</title><url>http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lorax</author><text>An even better strategy would be to weight your guesses towards the most information gain. If a letter appears often, but is in the same position most of the time, getting it won't help you as much as getting a letter that appears in fewer words but in more varied positions. Doing a quick check of 5 letter words in my /usr/share/dict/words file I find:
S: 659,62,267,260,2282
E: 122,829,448,1254,679
A: 252,1201,678,410,307<p>That is, S, when it appears, is heavily skewed towards the last letter in the word, finding it won't help you figure out the word nearly as well as finding the more evenly distributed E or A.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Better Strategy for Hangman</title><url>http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r00k</author><text>I loved this blog post (and the other one I read, about Battelship), so I wondered who was behind these great posts.<p>Their homepage says this "DataGenetics is a technology consultancy specializing in unlocking the value stored in large databases. Using a variety of techniques we can mine the trends in your data to help you maximize your marketing and advertising campaigns."<p>Damn.<p>Yet another group of smart folks focused on more-effective advertising.</text></comment> |
14,405,793 | 14,405,904 | 1 | 2 | 14,402,738 | train | <story><title>Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers</title><url>https://quiz.triplebyte.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graphememes</author><text>This is very python specific. While I got a 15&#x2F;15 and can easily answer these, the reason for that lies with the fact that I am very fluent in Python, had I not been I would have not gotten at least 6-8 of these wrong.<p>This isn&#x27;t a generalist quiz, nor is it a good baseline for interviewing candidates for the hiring process, this wouldn&#x27;t tell me anything about the application of their skillset.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>squeaky-clean</author><text>I took a quiz at the Facebook booth at PyCon this past weekend. It was Python specific, but had a few annoying gotchas. There was one question in there twice, but with 2 different values for the input (which is what tipped me off that it was a trick).<p>It basically relied on this fact...<p><pre><code> x = 256
x is 256 # True
y = 257
y is 257 # False
</code></pre>
Which for one, you shouldn&#x27;t use `is` to compare integers in Python. I wish I could have just written that as my answer.<p>Secondly, you need to be aware the CPython uses an integer cache which causes the answers to be different. You&#x27;ll actually get different answers based on whether you run it as a file, enter it line-by-line into the interpreter, or use a different implementation such as PyPy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;15171695&#x2F;whats-with-the-integer-cache-inside-python" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;15171695&#x2F;whats-with-the-...</a><p>There wasn&#x27;t any point to the quiz, so it&#x27;s okay that they put in silly questions like that. But it&#x27;s clearly there just to try and trick you, and not quiz you on anything relevant. Most of the other questions were tricks of the sort, or or Python 3 specific gotcha&#x27;s.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: 15-question programming quiz with answers</title><url>https://quiz.triplebyte.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graphememes</author><text>This is very python specific. While I got a 15&#x2F;15 and can easily answer these, the reason for that lies with the fact that I am very fluent in Python, had I not been I would have not gotten at least 6-8 of these wrong.<p>This isn&#x27;t a generalist quiz, nor is it a good baseline for interviewing candidates for the hiring process, this wouldn&#x27;t tell me anything about the application of their skillset.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaulingMonkey</author><text>I consider myself barely Python literate (I&#x27;ve modified maybe 5 python scripts in my life) but also managed 15&#x2F;15. Most of the relevant core semantics are extremely common to dynamically typed scripting languages:<p>- Reference semantics for pretty much everything, except perhaps basic types such as integers - but those are generally &quot;immutable&quot; (e.g. no 5.add(6) mutating the &quot;original object&quot; in-place) making by-reference vs by-value moot.<p>- Arguments <i>copy</i> the reference, they do not alias the original reference.<p>- Mutating functions, if the return value isn&#x27;t being used, are either being misused (e.g. the code has a bug) or mutate the original object in-place.<p>- Closures alias the same variables<p>This could be JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Powershell, Squirrel, PHP, ... hell, even a lot of the compiled statically typed languages share similar semantics. I&#x27;d expect someone coming from, say, a pure C&#x2F;C++ background to have some trouble though, which is perhaps the point you&#x27;re getting at.</text></comment> |
30,788,146 | 30,787,609 | 1 | 2 | 30,787,076 | train | <story><title>Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/developers-of-small-modular-reactors-hope-their-time-has-come/21808321</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodelshady</author><text>The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this.<p>Last calendar, it produced &gt; 1 GW for 784 hours.<p>In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with &gt; 100 GWh shortfall.<p>The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.<p>Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.<p>edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they&#x27;ve been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just <i>feel</i> like the right amount. We&#x27;re all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn&#x27;t get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It&#x27;s more rare offshore. It&#x27;s very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps.<p>There&#x27;s a need for &quot;base load&quot;. I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it&#x27;s probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We&#x27;re talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual.<p>The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They&#x27;re putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they&#x27;ll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe.<p>A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I&#x27;m not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Developers of small modular reactors hope their time has come</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/developers-of-small-modular-reactors-hope-their-time-has-come/21808321</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodelshady</author><text>The ~25 GW nameplate capacity of wind power in the UK is producing 0.76 GW as a type this.<p>Last calendar, it produced &gt; 1 GW for 784 hours.<p>In the last four months, assuming a 40% capacity factor and therefore an expected capacity of 10 GW, there have been at least three periods with &gt; 100 GWh shortfall.<p>The UK does not yet, but plans to, shift heating loads onto the electrical grid, meaning that is likely to become a 100 GWh shortfall in heating.<p>Please, show me an estimate for an alternative fossil-fuel system that can guarantee that shortfall.<p>edit: more specific to SMRs, and I have ranted on this before: they&#x27;ve been given ~ £ 500 M, which does... just <i>feel</i> like the right amount. We&#x27;re all aware how 100 times that can be disappear into consultants, and much less simply wouldn&#x27;t get you a complete product. £500 M I can see engineers spending.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raphaelj</author><text>Where do you get that data from? I checked on electicityMap [1] and the British wind farms are producing more than 6 GW at the moment [2].<p>--<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.electricitymap.org&#x2F;zone&#x2F;GB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.electricitymap.org&#x2F;zone&#x2F;GB</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;URVfMDT.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;URVfMDT.png</a></text></comment> |
35,988,010 | 35,988,111 | 1 | 3 | 35,987,579 | train | <story><title>Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop (2019)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>trollied</author><text>2019 article.<p>Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19913362" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19913362</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop (2019)</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>There&#x27;s no point in posting a 2019 article just to get riled up against Adobe without any updates or more recent developments.<p>If we&#x27;re going to turn on the outrage machine, let&#x27;s at least stick to current news. Not something that happened 4 years ago.</text></comment> |
7,528,429 | 7,528,036 | 1 | 2 | 7,527,685 | train | <story><title>The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires</title><url>http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/the-guilt-of-the-video-game-millionaires.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcampbell1</author><text>Consider the following statements:<p>A) We live in a meritocracy<p>B) Meritocracies are fair<p>Most people accept that A is false. We all know a fucktard that managed to get rich by being manipulative and destroying value. The problem is that people then fail to realize that B is also false.<p>Meritocracies are not fair. Allocating wealth to the people that provide a large amount of entertainment, seems fair, but it is not fair in a broad sense of the word. Meritocracies reward those with good health, good luck, good parents who are encouraging, and the lucky gamete club who have high intelligence or exceptional physical skills.<p>Meritocracies are like democracy: &quot;the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.&quot;<p>Working hard on a startup doesn&#x27;t really earn you anything. The best you can hope for is that hard work increases your luck surface area. Keep in mind, that there are people that came from better sperm and eggs who will work just as hard but have a much higher chance of success.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires</title><url>http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/the-guilt-of-the-video-game-millionaires.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>refurb</author><text>Interesting and well written article.<p>I think the issue that causes a lot of this emotion around money is the fact that we as a society like to think that the harder you work, the more money you make.<p>It&#x27;s obviously not a true statement at all.<p>When you come into a lot of money for relatively little effort (the comparison of the kid vs. the mother), you start to feel like you don&#x27;t deserve it at all.<p>&quot;Why do I get $1M for a few months work when my mom gets $20K&#x2F;yr for busting her ass?&quot;</text></comment> |
18,963,997 | 18,963,992 | 1 | 2 | 18,963,811 | train | <story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ken</author><text>Also known as: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm</a><p>In this case, Bezos saw firsthand how a brain teaser could be answered by &quot;seen something similar once before&quot; much more easily than &quot;worked on it on a team for several hours&quot;. Isn&#x27;t this exactly the sort of brain teaser that we hate seeing in tech interviews?<p>This one was bad enough that Bezos <i>left the field</i>, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates.</text></comment> | <story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ZhuanXia</author><text>Everyone is jealous of someone. It is amusing to compare Bezos&#x27;s awe at Yasantha to that of many of his engineers towards him - or for that matter, my awe of anyone who can pass Amazon&#x27;s recruitment process.<p>See this except from a biography of Bezos:<p>&gt;... To the amazement and irritation of employees, Bezos’s criticisms are almost always on target. Bruce Jones, a former Amazon supply chain vice president, describes leading a five-engineer team figuring out ways to make the movement of workers in fulfillment centers more efficient. The group spent nine months on the task, then presented their work to Bezos. “We had beautiful documents, and everyone was really prepared,” Jones says. Bezos read the paper, said, “You’re all wrong,” stood up, and started writing on the whiteboard.<p>&gt;“He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems,” Jones says. “He only had minimum experience in the distribution centers and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard, and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong, but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff. He had this unbelievable ability to be incredibly intelligent about things he had nothing to do with, and he was totally ruthless about communicating it.”<p>Yasantha is an interesting fellow, with contributions in wireless networking, AI, chip design and various other fields.<p>In this article Yasantha describes Bezos&#x27;s legendary work ethic[1].<p>&gt;Yasantha described how students once dared each other to complete a computer science assignment in a single line of coding. “Finally, I gave up and did this in 10 or so lines of code,” he added, “But I remember Jeff working through all night, in pursuit of the most compact solution, and turned in a two-line solution that was probably the shortest anyone could do…”<p>&gt;“It goes to prove that Jeff is tenacious, and will not give up like most of us would when presented with a challenge,” he said.<p>&gt;“He sets his goals and sticks to them. I think that’s a quality that has made him who he is,” Yasantha added.<p>Think what it meant for someone such as him to give up on his dream to be a theoretical physicist.<p>Despite his tenaciousness he was forced to conclude there were levels of abstraction he could not reach through hard work.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailynews.lk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;22&#x2F;local&#x2F;163321&#x2F;lankan-solved-math-problem-amazon-founder" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailynews.lk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;22&#x2F;local&#x2F;163321&#x2F;lankan-solve...</a></text></comment> |
31,671,137 | 31,634,979 | 1 | 2 | 31,631,260 | train | <story><title>Notkia: Linux phone in the shape of Nokia, with LoRa + WiFI + BT connectivity</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/reimunotmoe/notkia-f6e772</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilv</author><text>What I most want is new open source hardware guts with Linux for shells like the E61 and Blackberry.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E61" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E61</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stuntkite</author><text>There are several blackberry keyboard projects out there. I&#x27;ve been on a similar journey to OP for a while. Currently I&#x27;ve got a phone I&#x27;m fiddling with putting a jetson xavier inside a rotary phone and another based off the featherwing with a blackberry keyboard and touch display and a feather compatible linux SOC (GiantBoard).<p>I recently got a ClockworkPi DevTerm and have been so pleased with it that I&#x27;m seriously considering their GameShell as a phone platform. It&#x27;s modularity is great.<p>I&#x27;m so excited that other people are working on DIY &quot;phones&quot;. I personally think we are going to see this scene keep growing and phones will finally be more like the custom computer market very soon. The fact that people are finally putting linux on apple devices is also very very encouraging. There are so many bricked iphones and ipads floating around with great displays and sensors that are totally useless because we can&#x27;t run a reasonable OS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;4818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adafruit.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;4818</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;groboards&#x2F;giant-board" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;groboards&#x2F;giant-board</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clockworkpi.com&#x2F;product-page&#x2F;devterm-kit-a06-series" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clockworkpi.com&#x2F;product-page&#x2F;devterm-kit-a06-ser...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Notkia: Linux phone in the shape of Nokia, with LoRa + WiFI + BT connectivity</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/reimunotmoe/notkia-f6e772</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilv</author><text>What I most want is new open source hardware guts with Linux for shells like the E61 and Blackberry.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E61" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E61</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>durnygbur</author><text>This device with both large screen and physical keyboard is still smaller than every Android device available currently on the market.</text></comment> |
5,939,982 | 5,939,083 | 1 | 2 | 5,938,824 | train | <story><title>Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star</title><url>http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1328/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EsoTopNews+%28ESO+Top+News%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cryptoz</author><text>This is an amazing discovery! The star is only 22 lightyears away, and it&#x27;s got three potentially habitable planets. That&#x27;s astounding. This is probably going to be one of our first destinations, when humanity starts building interstellar craft. Of course, the discoveries are still very early right now and we&#x27;ll probably find all sorts of Earth-like planets quite close. But three Super Earths in the habitable zone of a close-by star? That&#x27;s almost as good as it gets.<p>Edit: And surely this will be a focus of searching for life as well. A high concentration of life-capable planets in the same radio direction? Yes please. Also, I&#x27;ve often wondered if having a high density of habitable planets in the same system as your species would increase the chances and speed to becoming a spacefaring species. If you have a lot of places to go that are quite inviting and not that difficult to get to, you&#x27;ll probably go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vbtemp</author><text>Just remember being in a &quot;habitable zone&quot; is but one, small necessary (and by itself absolutely insufficient) condition for actually being &quot;habitable&quot; or sustaining life.<p>Recall that the earth is gifted with an active planetary core inducing a strong magnetic shield around the planet, has a single moon of sufficient mass and distance to throttle earth&#x27;s rotation back to just the right speed to have a stable atmosphere, as well as the proper chemical composition...</text></comment> | <story><title>Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star</title><url>http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1328/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EsoTopNews+%28ESO+Top+News%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cryptoz</author><text>This is an amazing discovery! The star is only 22 lightyears away, and it&#x27;s got three potentially habitable planets. That&#x27;s astounding. This is probably going to be one of our first destinations, when humanity starts building interstellar craft. Of course, the discoveries are still very early right now and we&#x27;ll probably find all sorts of Earth-like planets quite close. But three Super Earths in the habitable zone of a close-by star? That&#x27;s almost as good as it gets.<p>Edit: And surely this will be a focus of searching for life as well. A high concentration of life-capable planets in the same radio direction? Yes please. Also, I&#x27;ve often wondered if having a high density of habitable planets in the same system as your species would increase the chances and speed to becoming a spacefaring species. If you have a lot of places to go that are quite inviting and not that difficult to get to, you&#x27;ll probably go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>exratione</author><text>Seems unlikely to be the first choice of destination on that basis. By the time the technology exists to reliably transport people (or equivalent amounts of mass) to other planetary systems in a usefully short amount of time, then the technology will also exist to cost-effectively (a) make everything habitable for baseline humans via habitats and other forms of engineering, and (b) engineer sentient entities that can live comfortably in native conditions near anywhere in a star system.<p>So whether or not the system has habitable zone planets will be irrelevant. Our descendants will go to the closest one first.</text></comment> |
23,110,960 | 23,111,010 | 1 | 2 | 23,107,945 | train | <story><title>Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal</title><url>https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/07/serv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>&gt; single-threaded nonvectorized C wastes on the order of 97% of your computer&#x27;s computational power<p>Can you elaborate on what this means exactly? For example, is there some reasonable C code that runs 33 times slower than some other ideal code? In what sense are we wasting 97% of our computer&#x27;s computational power?</text></item><item><author>kragen</author><text>Rachel presumably wrote her server in a reasonable language like C++ (though I don&#x27;t see a link to her source), but when I wrote httpdito⁰ ¹ ² I wrote it in assembly, and it can handle 2048 concurrent connections on similarly outdated hardware despite spawning an OS <i>process</i> per connection, more than one concurrent connection per byte of executable†. (It could handle more, but I had to set a limit somewhere.) It just serves files from the filesystem. It of course doesn&#x27;t use epoll, but maybe it should — instead of Rachel&#x27;s 50k requests per second, it can only handle about 20k or 30k on my old laptop. IIRC I wrote it in one night.<p>It might sound like I&#x27;m trying to steal her thunder, but mostly what I&#x27;m trying to say is <i>she is right. Listen to her. Here is further evidence that she is right.</i><p>As I wrote in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;derctuo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;vector-vm.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;derctuo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;vector-vm.md</a>, single-threaded nonvectorized C wastes on the order of 97% of your computer&#x27;s computational power, and typical interpreted languages like Python waste about 99.9% of it. There&#x27;s a huge amount of potential that&#x27;s going untapped.<p>I feel like with modern technologies like LuaJIT, LevelDB, ØMQ, FlatBuffers, ISPC, seL4, and of course modern Linux, we ought to be able to do a lot of things that we couldn&#x27;t even imagine doing in 2005, because they would have been far too inefficient. But our imaginations are still too limited, and industry is not doing a very good job of imagining things.<p>—<p>⁰ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;server.s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;server.s</a><p>¹ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;httpdito-readme" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;httpdito-readme</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6908064" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6908064</a><p>† It&#x27;s actually bloated up to 2060 bytes now because I added PDF and CSS content-types to it, but you can git clone the .git subdirectory and check out the older versions that were under 2000 bytes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>augustt</author><text>A good example of getting a ~3000x speedup from naive matrix multiplication in C here (slides 20 onward): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;electrical-engineering-and-computer-science&#x2F;6-172-performance-engineering-of-software-systems-fall-2018&#x2F;lecture-slides&#x2F;MIT6_172F18_lec1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ocw.mit.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;electrical-engineering-and-compu...</a><p>Includes a 9-level nested for loop, which is always great to see.</text></comment> | <story><title>Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal</title><url>https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/07/serv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>highfrequency</author><text>&gt; single-threaded nonvectorized C wastes on the order of 97% of your computer&#x27;s computational power<p>Can you elaborate on what this means exactly? For example, is there some reasonable C code that runs 33 times slower than some other ideal code? In what sense are we wasting 97% of our computer&#x27;s computational power?</text></item><item><author>kragen</author><text>Rachel presumably wrote her server in a reasonable language like C++ (though I don&#x27;t see a link to her source), but when I wrote httpdito⁰ ¹ ² I wrote it in assembly, and it can handle 2048 concurrent connections on similarly outdated hardware despite spawning an OS <i>process</i> per connection, more than one concurrent connection per byte of executable†. (It could handle more, but I had to set a limit somewhere.) It just serves files from the filesystem. It of course doesn&#x27;t use epoll, but maybe it should — instead of Rachel&#x27;s 50k requests per second, it can only handle about 20k or 30k on my old laptop. IIRC I wrote it in one night.<p>It might sound like I&#x27;m trying to steal her thunder, but mostly what I&#x27;m trying to say is <i>she is right. Listen to her. Here is further evidence that she is right.</i><p>As I wrote in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;derctuo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;vector-vm.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;kragen&#x2F;derctuo&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;vector-vm.md</a>, single-threaded nonvectorized C wastes on the order of 97% of your computer&#x27;s computational power, and typical interpreted languages like Python waste about 99.9% of it. There&#x27;s a huge amount of potential that&#x27;s going untapped.<p>I feel like with modern technologies like LuaJIT, LevelDB, ØMQ, FlatBuffers, ISPC, seL4, and of course modern Linux, we ought to be able to do a lot of things that we couldn&#x27;t even imagine doing in 2005, because they would have been far too inefficient. But our imaginations are still too limited, and industry is not doing a very good job of imagining things.<p>—<p>⁰ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;server.s" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;server.s</a><p>¹ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;httpdito-readme" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;canonical.org&#x2F;~kragen&#x2F;sw&#x2F;dev3&#x2F;httpdito-readme</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6908064" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6908064</a><p>† It&#x27;s actually bloated up to 2060 bytes now because I added PDF and CSS content-types to it, but you can git clone the .git subdirectory and check out the older versions that were under 2000 bytes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>umvi</author><text>I think it&#x27;s referring to simd instructions [0].<p>I&#x27;m still kind of a newb myself but from what I understand these are special CPU instructions that allow you execute the same instruction in parallel against multiple data points. This allows you to eke out a lot more performance. It&#x27;s how simdjson[1] is able to outperform all other C++ json parsers.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SIMD" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SIMD</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;simdjson&#x2F;simdjson" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;simdjson&#x2F;simdjson</a></text></comment> |
22,706,244 | 22,705,867 | 1 | 3 | 22,704,051 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class</title><text>Hello HN! My name is Sankalp. I’m taking a class called Fixing Social Media at MIT (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixingsocialmedia.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixingsocialmedia.mit.edu</a>). We are examining problems with existing modes of social media and exploring affirmative visions for social media that are good for individuals and society.<p>At this point, the class is working on case studies of successful and healthy online communities, where we are seeking insights from online communities we are part of, inspired by, or find interesting. The goal of the assignment is to figure out whether an online community exemplifies or doesn’t exemplify ‘healthy’ behaviors, from the points of view of their own members, on their own terms. I’m here to understand HN from your perspectives and I’m interested in hearing from all of you.<p>What criteria do you use to determine &#x27;health&#x27; in online communities? How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in? How does HN exemplify or not exemplify &#x27;healthy&#x27; behaviors? What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?<p>How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay?<p>I began using HN as a source for news, projects, ideas, etc. a couple years ago when a mentor referred me here, but I hadn’t made an account until this week for this Ask HN. I check HN once or twice daily and I actually stay for the discussion as much as the links shared by HN members.<p>In case this is helpful for our discussion, something that our class recently discussed is that communities with controversy aren&#x27;t necessarily &#x27;unhealthy&#x27; — as in, the ability of some communities to work through a controversy and maintain coherence, and to exist as multiple voices coming out of a controversy can be an indicator of being &#x27;healthy&#x27;.<p>I aim to share my findings as well. I hope these questions are interesting to you and that we can hear a variety of perspectives in the comments!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>Yes and no.<p>I think it&#x27;s better in terms of overall &quot;health&quot; (content, toxicity, moderation, privacy, spam) than other, more popular forums (e.g. Reddit), but that could just be directly because of its small size and relatively niche appeal.<p>My biggest problem is that it stopped being a community for tech entrepreneurs a long time ago. Everyone is now bearish on everything by default. Every idea is pointless. Every new product is useless. Every company is evil. There&#x27;s no point building or launching anything. It&#x27;s just people complaining about everything rather than improving things and building the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NathanKP</author><text>I&#x27;ve been on HN for 11 years now, and each year its been more negative. At some point the best way to get upvotes turned into &quot;say something pedantic that contradicts the parent post or criticizes it.&quot;<p>This is a big part of the reason why I dialed my contributions way back, and I&#x27;ve heard the same from many other great people in the IRL tech community that I respect. Unfortunately each time a positive person stops contributing on HN it just leads to the site becoming more negative. It is a vicious cycle.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class</title><text>Hello HN! My name is Sankalp. I’m taking a class called Fixing Social Media at MIT (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixingsocialmedia.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fixingsocialmedia.mit.edu</a>). We are examining problems with existing modes of social media and exploring affirmative visions for social media that are good for individuals and society.<p>At this point, the class is working on case studies of successful and healthy online communities, where we are seeking insights from online communities we are part of, inspired by, or find interesting. The goal of the assignment is to figure out whether an online community exemplifies or doesn’t exemplify ‘healthy’ behaviors, from the points of view of their own members, on their own terms. I’m here to understand HN from your perspectives and I’m interested in hearing from all of you.<p>What criteria do you use to determine &#x27;health&#x27; in online communities? How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in? How does HN exemplify or not exemplify &#x27;healthy&#x27; behaviors? What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?<p>How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay?<p>I began using HN as a source for news, projects, ideas, etc. a couple years ago when a mentor referred me here, but I hadn’t made an account until this week for this Ask HN. I check HN once or twice daily and I actually stay for the discussion as much as the links shared by HN members.<p>In case this is helpful for our discussion, something that our class recently discussed is that communities with controversy aren&#x27;t necessarily &#x27;unhealthy&#x27; — as in, the ability of some communities to work through a controversy and maintain coherence, and to exist as multiple voices coming out of a controversy can be an indicator of being &#x27;healthy&#x27;.<p>I aim to share my findings as well. I hope these questions are interesting to you and that we can hear a variety of perspectives in the comments!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>Yes and no.<p>I think it&#x27;s better in terms of overall &quot;health&quot; (content, toxicity, moderation, privacy, spam) than other, more popular forums (e.g. Reddit), but that could just be directly because of its small size and relatively niche appeal.<p>My biggest problem is that it stopped being a community for tech entrepreneurs a long time ago. Everyone is now bearish on everything by default. Every idea is pointless. Every new product is useless. Every company is evil. There&#x27;s no point building or launching anything. It&#x27;s just people complaining about everything rather than improving things and building the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smoyer</author><text>Interesting perspective - I never really thought about the tone of my comments. I&#x27;ve always played &quot;the devil&#x27;s advocate&quot; because it&#x27;s the way that the smaller start-ups I was involved with stay alive. I&#x27;m going to make sure that I praise good ideas first ... and then perhaps warn of potential pitfalls. Sorry if I participated in turning HN into a downer.<p>As an aside, I don&#x27;t read HN that way. Even when there&#x27;s a pessimistic tone, I often read right through it and think to myself &quot;that&#x27;s some good advice&quot;. It will be interesting to see whether we become more bearish simply due to the COVID-19 environment we&#x27;re all working in now.</text></comment> |
7,859,407 | 7,858,903 | 1 | 2 | 7,858,276 | train | <story><title>Python to OCaml: Retrospective</title><url>http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-retrospective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gnuvince</author><text>As a language, OCaml gets most things right: being functional by default appeals to me very much, as does the easy path into imperative programming when you need it. Its type system is awesome not only at catching bugs at compile-time, but also at guiding you in your design. There are a couple of nice-to-have that would be cool though: Haskell-like type classes come to mind, and some minor syntax warts could be improved. Its implementation is also extremely solid: I always expect the code generated by OCaml to perform well. With tools like OPAM, getting the latest compiler and libraries is very easy. Definitely one of my favorite language toolset.</text></comment> | <story><title>Python to OCaml: Retrospective</title><url>http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-retrospective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pnathan</author><text>This is possibly the best language writeup I have seen in years, if ever. Congratulations, sir!</text></comment> |
37,947,586 | 37,947,563 | 1 | 2 | 37,946,017 | train | <story><title>Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-19/bezos-backed-startup-convoy-closes-operations-with-no-buyer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpflan</author><text>Given that you were in the company and presumably have an idea of how the company functions: where did the funding go? $260M gone in 1 year?<p>&quot;Convoy, which raised $260 million in a funding round last year that valued the business at $3.8 billion, on Wednesday told employees in an email that it would stop accepting shipments until further notice and that it was rescheduling or canceling existing loads.&quot; (wsj)</text></item><item><author>wooly_bully</author><text>(Ex-)Convoy engineer here. No mystery as to why this happened, sudden tight market and low available capital demolished us. External reasons given in the article were the same we knew and couldn&#x27;t do anything about considering that none of the M&amp;A options materialized.<p>Detailed the shutdown on a call at 8:30am Pacific this morning. CEO said there&#x27;ll be no severance or healthcare.<p>Lot of talented folks in Seattle and beyond who&#x27;ll be looking for new gigs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WisNorCan</author><text>They got caught in the same thing that happened to Flexport and others in the freight industry.<p>Price per shipment cratered -&gt; Revenue cratered. (They make a % of each shipment) -&gt; Losses spiked up. (Because they had fixed cost)<p>Flexport had a burn run rate of $600M a year<i>. Convoy had less burn but also less in the bank.<p></i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;briefings&#x2F;flexport-revenue-drop-showed-extent-of-freight-slowdown" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theinformation.com&#x2F;briefings&#x2F;flexport-revenue-dr...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-19/bezos-backed-startup-convoy-closes-operations-with-no-buyer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpflan</author><text>Given that you were in the company and presumably have an idea of how the company functions: where did the funding go? $260M gone in 1 year?<p>&quot;Convoy, which raised $260 million in a funding round last year that valued the business at $3.8 billion, on Wednesday told employees in an email that it would stop accepting shipments until further notice and that it was rescheduling or canceling existing loads.&quot; (wsj)</text></item><item><author>wooly_bully</author><text>(Ex-)Convoy engineer here. No mystery as to why this happened, sudden tight market and low available capital demolished us. External reasons given in the article were the same we knew and couldn&#x27;t do anything about considering that none of the M&amp;A options materialized.<p>Detailed the shutdown on a call at 8:30am Pacific this morning. CEO said there&#x27;ll be no severance or healthcare.<p>Lot of talented folks in Seattle and beyond who&#x27;ll be looking for new gigs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iterminate</author><text>&gt;1,000 employees means a burn rate in the hundreds of millions per year just on the costs of having employees, $260m burned in a year sounds about right for a company of that size.</text></comment> |
8,687,806 | 8,687,560 | 1 | 2 | 8,687,092 | train | <story><title>You Can See the Milky Way</title><url>http://www.youcanseethemilkyway.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisGranger</author><text>Living in the city, light pollution drives me a little bit crazy. I don&#x27;t understand why so many people seem to be OK with <i>losing our ability to see the stars</i>... It also implies squandered electricity (and money).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HCIdivision17</author><text>When I stayed with my mom for a week in NYC, I was shocked by how bright the sky at night was. Literally it glowed orange. I felt like I was in the D&#x27;ni caverns from Myst, and it really wore on me. My best guess is that one just stops looking up after a while. Or, as a sibling comment notes, you look down at the city as your new sky.<p>Cities can take on a sort of self-importance, an introspective ego, anyhow, since there&#x27;s so much available that you can be permanently distracted from looking outward or upward. Can&#x27;t say it wasn&#x27;t a fun place, but it&#x27;s not my cuppa joe. But I could easily imagine a [native?] city dweller feeling like they&#x27;re not missing anything.<p>[EDIT: I guess I just figure some people live in the city because it gives them everything they need. But it certainly made me feel like I lost my sky. I&#x27;d be curious to know if you grew up in the city; so far, it seems like that feeling of loss or wrongness is just for people who grew up outside them.]</text></comment> | <story><title>You Can See the Milky Way</title><url>http://www.youcanseethemilkyway.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChrisGranger</author><text>Living in the city, light pollution drives me a little bit crazy. I don&#x27;t understand why so many people seem to be OK with <i>losing our ability to see the stars</i>... It also implies squandered electricity (and money).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tluyben2</author><text>I grew up in a very small town and I used to sit very long periods under the stars doing nothing. It was kind of meditation. I moved to the city when I went to uni and started missing it more and more; you hardly could see anything there and it didn&#x27;t give me the same rest sitting outside. A while ago I looked for a new place to live after the city and I picked that place specifically based on viewing stars as one of the highest priorities on my list. I live in a village deep in the mountains; there is no light in the village at night, there are no cities nearby and the rest is shielded by the mountains. If you have never seen something like this you definitely are missing something worthwhile and yes, I can see the milky way, almost every night.</text></comment> |
30,336,023 | 30,336,093 | 1 | 3 | 30,334,683 | train | <story><title>Developing a new app is unreasonable condition that Apple imposes on dating apps</title><url>https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-developing-new-app-unnecessary-and-unreasonable-condition-apple-imposes-dating-app-providers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RIMR</author><text>This is a little bit overdramatic, given that they only exert that kind of control over the frameworks that they wholly own and control.<p>Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of &quot;getting to decide what games were allowed to be made&quot; because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.<p>The real problem is that consumers have accepted an Apple&#x2F;Google duopoly over mobile computing, which isn&#x27;t defeated by destroying the free choice of corporations, but by creating a viable competing alternative. This currently exists in the form of jailbreaking, the use of third-party app stores and sideloading. Ultimately it should take the form of a competing smartphone OS.<p>Quite frankly, Linux is beginning to look more and more capable of breaking into this scene, and this will fundamentally turn the current broken system on its head when it happens. Android being open source and Unix-based only makes it easier since a ton of the foundations already exist.</text></item><item><author>anaisbetts</author><text>I look forward to Apple incurring more anti-competitive regulation and bringing the entire industry with it so that two companies do not get to decide by fiat what software is and is not allowed to be written, and what businesses do and do not get to exist</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anaisbetts</author><text>People make the game console comparison, but there are crucial differences that don&#x27;t make these scenarios comparable - first, there is still a completely open, viable platform to write games for (PC), and much more importantly, I do not run my entire life through my game console, and a game console is not effectively a requirement for modern life like a phone is.<p>Phones are ubiquitous, and the vast majority of businesses have a <i>Compelling Reason</i> to have a presence on these devices. Allowing two companies to make any decision they want regarding what nearly every non-trivial business Can and Can Not Do, is the very definition of anti-competitiveness.<p>When you are a monopoly and you can influence other businesses in such an overarching way, it is Extremely Appropriate that you have to follow a Different Set of Rules than other people, rules that are more closely regulated to ensure that you are not abusing your position</text></comment> | <story><title>Developing a new app is unreasonable condition that Apple imposes on dating apps</title><url>https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/acm-developing-new-app-unnecessary-and-unreasonable-condition-apple-imposes-dating-app-providers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RIMR</author><text>This is a little bit overdramatic, given that they only exert that kind of control over the frameworks that they wholly own and control.<p>Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of &quot;getting to decide what games were allowed to be made&quot; because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.<p>The real problem is that consumers have accepted an Apple&#x2F;Google duopoly over mobile computing, which isn&#x27;t defeated by destroying the free choice of corporations, but by creating a viable competing alternative. This currently exists in the form of jailbreaking, the use of third-party app stores and sideloading. Ultimately it should take the form of a competing smartphone OS.<p>Quite frankly, Linux is beginning to look more and more capable of breaking into this scene, and this will fundamentally turn the current broken system on its head when it happens. Android being open source and Unix-based only makes it easier since a ton of the foundations already exist.</text></item><item><author>anaisbetts</author><text>I look forward to Apple incurring more anti-competitive regulation and bringing the entire industry with it so that two companies do not get to decide by fiat what software is and is not allowed to be written, and what businesses do and do not get to exist</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shoue</author><text>&gt; This is a little bit overdramatic, given that they only exert that kind of control over the frameworks that they wholly own and control.<p>Would you be fine with being taxed for breathing if two or three companies hypothetically bought all the forests in your town or even state? After all, they own the things producing the oxygen you breathe, it only seems reasonable that you&#x27;d pay them.<p>Sometimes, maybe it&#x27;s not reasonable for companies to justify their bad behaviour simply because they &quot;own&quot; something.<p>&gt; Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of &quot;getting to decide what games were allowed to be made&quot; because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.<p>I often just see the &quot;consoles aren&#x27;t general purpose&quot; cop-out here but I&#x27;d go further and say: we should -- we should accuse them of being anticompetitive too.</text></comment> |
23,324,733 | 23,324,309 | 1 | 2 | 23,322,658 | train | <story><title>France, Italy, Belgium stop hydroxychloroquine use for Covid-19 on safety fears</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine/france-bans-hydroxychloroquine-to-treat-covid-19-amid-safety-concerns-idUSKBN233197</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lbeltrame</author><text>A shame, since the Lancet paper has problems[1][2] in particular related to the baseline of the HCQ-treated vs non-HCQ treated patients. And by admission of the authors themselves, it is not a substitute of a RCT.<p>And this before the results of the Minnesota trial are out. At this point I hope those are negative, so that it does not show that countries are overreacting.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;hydroxychloroquine-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;hydroxychl...</a> and related posts<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevePhillipsMD&#x2F;status&#x2F;1263899569252896771" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevePhillipsMD&#x2F;status&#x2F;12638995692528967...</a><p>PS: The title is misleading. The ban is on the use on severe diseases, not all of them, according to the text in the news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acallaghan</author><text>If it had any effect on covid-19, it&#x27;d be very obvious by now. There isn&#x27;t some massive conspiracy here, it just doesn&#x27;t work. The reason trials have stopped is because France, Italy, Belgium &amp; the UK have seen worse outcomes generally, directly because of it.<p>I don&#x27;t get the &#x27;it needs to be taken <i>before</i> symptoms!&#x27; argument - like we can possibly give a immunosuppressant with non-negligible side-effects (e.g. arrythmia) to billions of people with no scientific evidence of it working on covid <i>at all</i>.</text></comment> | <story><title>France, Italy, Belgium stop hydroxychloroquine use for Covid-19 on safety fears</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine/france-bans-hydroxychloroquine-to-treat-covid-19-amid-safety-concerns-idUSKBN233197</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lbeltrame</author><text>A shame, since the Lancet paper has problems[1][2] in particular related to the baseline of the HCQ-treated vs non-HCQ treated patients. And by admission of the authors themselves, it is not a substitute of a RCT.<p>And this before the results of the Minnesota trial are out. At this point I hope those are negative, so that it does not show that countries are overreacting.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;hydroxychloroquine-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;25&#x2F;hydroxychl...</a> and related posts<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevePhillipsMD&#x2F;status&#x2F;1263899569252896771" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;StevePhillipsMD&#x2F;status&#x2F;12638995692528967...</a><p>PS: The title is misleading. The ban is on the use on severe diseases, not all of them, according to the text in the news.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pen2l</author><text>Lancet isn&#x27;t the only paper that has raised issues with HCQ treatment.<p>Sciencemag [1] has this to say:<p>However, both HCQ and AZ have potential cardiac toxicity (QT prolongation,
which can lead to fatal arrhythmia), and
HCQ additionally has the potential for
negative effects on the eye. Understanding
risk-benefit ratios is paramount if these
drugs are to become a standard of care for
COVID-19. Several post hoc analyses carried out in the United States and Europe
suggest modest benefit, at best, from HCQ
monotherapy for COVID-19 patients; one
large post hoc analysis among U.S. veterans
suggests that there is harm to patients from
HCQ. Given the mechanistic rationale but
lack of well-designed clinical studies and
potential for drug-induced toxicity, there is
a key need for controlled, randomized trials
to test the efficacy and safety of these drugs
for COVID-19 patients.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;sci&#x2F;368&#x2F;6493&#x2F;829.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;sci&#x2F;368&#x2F;6493&#x2F;829.full...</a><p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a &quot;shame&quot; that some have decided to stop wtih HCQ when other viable treatments seem to have less concerning side-effects. Either way, we will know very soon with greater certainty as ongoing randomized trials finish up.</text></comment> |
15,478,124 | 15,478,230 | 1 | 2 | 15,477,286 | train | <story><title>US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data</title><url>https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open-this-link-on-your-phone-with-wifi-turned-off-9e0adb00d024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>artificial</author><text>Which country are you from where privacy is a right?</text></item><item><author>cmurf</author><text>That&#x27;s because privacy is not a right in GOP land. It is a product. And therefore you should have to pay to get it.</text></item><item><author>pde3</author><text>EFF and other privacy groups fought against this for a long time, and eventually succeeded in having the FCC intervene to stop these practices: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;victory-verizon-will-stop-tagging-customers-tracking-without-consent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;victory-verizon-will-s...</a><p>Then one of the first things Trump and the Republicans in Congress did after the election was repeal the FCC&#x27;s privacy rules :(
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;five-ways-cybersecurity-will-suffer-if-congress-repeals-fcc-privacy-rules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;five-ways-cybersecurit...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brianjoseff</author><text>California Constitution. Article 1, Section 1:
&quot;All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.&quot;
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CONS&amp;sectionNum=SECTION%201.&amp;article=I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leginfo.legislature.ca.gov&#x2F;faces&#x2F;codes_displaySectio...</a><p>(not a country of course, but somewhere privacy is a constitutional right. question then is how a state can protect this right)</text></comment> | <story><title>US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data</title><url>https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open-this-link-on-your-phone-with-wifi-turned-off-9e0adb00d024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>artificial</author><text>Which country are you from where privacy is a right?</text></item><item><author>cmurf</author><text>That&#x27;s because privacy is not a right in GOP land. It is a product. And therefore you should have to pay to get it.</text></item><item><author>pde3</author><text>EFF and other privacy groups fought against this for a long time, and eventually succeeded in having the FCC intervene to stop these practices: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;victory-verizon-will-stop-tagging-customers-tracking-without-consent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;victory-verizon-will-s...</a><p>Then one of the first things Trump and the Republicans in Congress did after the election was repeal the FCC&#x27;s privacy rules :(
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;five-ways-cybersecurity-will-suffer-if-congress-repeals-fcc-privacy-rules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;03&#x2F;five-ways-cybersecurit...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackweirdy</author><text>Privacy is a fundamental right of EU residents (it’s in the fundamental charter)</text></comment> |
36,311,325 | 36,311,037 | 1 | 2 | 36,301,276 | train | <story><title>What is Social Status?</title><url>https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>How do you explain that some people are not sensitive to social status?</text></item><item><author>HPsquared</author><text>In the brain, serotonin seems to be deeply related to social status. This is Jordan Peterson&#x27;s bit about lobsters - it&#x27;s so ubiquitous that even lobsters share the same mechanism.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41386-022-01378-2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41386-022-01378-2</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.94.11.5939" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.94.11.5939</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koonsolo</author><text>This reminds me of a buddhist story that goes something like this: (tried to look it up but couldn&#x27;t find it, chatgpt also didn&#x27;t know)<p>There is this man and his brother is a monk. So he tells this monk &quot;if you please the king, you don&#x27;t have to live on rice and water anymore&quot;, where the monk replies: &quot;if you learn to live on rice and water, you don&#x27;t need to please the king&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>What is Social Status?</title><url>https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/what-is-social-status</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>How do you explain that some people are not sensitive to social status?</text></item><item><author>HPsquared</author><text>In the brain, serotonin seems to be deeply related to social status. This is Jordan Peterson&#x27;s bit about lobsters - it&#x27;s so ubiquitous that even lobsters share the same mechanism.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41386-022-01378-2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41386-022-01378-2</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.94.11.5939" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1073&#x2F;pnas.94.11.5939</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>graeme</author><text>That it&#x27;s a false belief. One of two things happens in those cases:<p>1. That person is in some way sad regardless of what they profess, or<p>2. They have their own subgroup where they rate status according to the status rankings of the subgroup. This can include rejecting the status hierarchy of the mainstream, but this itself is a status play<p>With the internet this sub group can now be entirely online. But there does not exist such a thing as someone entirely insensitive to social status.<p>If you posit there is, can you name an example of such a person?</text></comment> |
33,019,254 | 33,019,231 | 1 | 2 | 33,018,135 | train | <story><title>JWT vs. Opaque Tokens</title><url>https://zitadel.com/blog/jwt-vs-opaque-tokens</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franky47</author><text>Another drawback for JWTs (when used fully statelessly) is the inability to list active sessions on other devices (which may lead to revocation).<p>That being said, always going to the database for connecting an opaque session token to an identity can quickly become slow, and if those features listed above are not desirable, having a blocklist of revoked JWT IDs in an in-memory cache (like Redis) can bring back some performance benefits.</text></item><item><author>pmontra</author><text>I investigated this issue with a customer recently with a focus on revocation. We concluded that if we have to hit the database to check if a JWT token is still valid we can use a session cookie (or equivalent) and hit the database to get the user, the associated capabilities, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mooreds</author><text>&gt; having a blocklist of revoked JWT IDs in an in-memory cache (like Redis) can bring back some performance benefits.<p>Doing this obviates some of the benefits of JWT&#x27;s statelessness, but for situations where revocation is really important and you can&#x27;t have that few seconds of JWT validity after a user logs out, this totally works.<p>My employer has an article about this topic here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fusionauth.io&#x2F;learn&#x2F;expert-advice&#x2F;tokens&#x2F;revoking-jwts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fusionauth.io&#x2F;learn&#x2F;expert-advice&#x2F;tokens&#x2F;revoking-jw...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>JWT vs. Opaque Tokens</title><url>https://zitadel.com/blog/jwt-vs-opaque-tokens</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franky47</author><text>Another drawback for JWTs (when used fully statelessly) is the inability to list active sessions on other devices (which may lead to revocation).<p>That being said, always going to the database for connecting an opaque session token to an identity can quickly become slow, and if those features listed above are not desirable, having a blocklist of revoked JWT IDs in an in-memory cache (like Redis) can bring back some performance benefits.</text></item><item><author>pmontra</author><text>I investigated this issue with a customer recently with a focus on revocation. We concluded that if we have to hit the database to check if a JWT token is still valid we can use a session cookie (or equivalent) and hit the database to get the user, the associated capabilities, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aeolun</author><text>&gt; always going to the database for connecting an opaque session token to an identity can quickly become slow<p>PHP does this every single request. I’ve never had enough users that this became a significant issue (and you probably don’t either)</text></comment> |
18,245,825 | 18,245,941 | 1 | 2 | 18,244,663 | train | <story><title>Solving Sol</title><url>http://solvingsol.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fescue</author><text>Hey wow! Site author here, tons more solutions on Github than I&#x27;ve posted on the site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wholepixel&#x2F;solving-sol" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wholepixel&#x2F;solving-sol</a><p>Sol LeWitt, and his cohort of generative conceptual artists, are really interesting to evaluate from a software engineering perspective, and I hope you&#x27;ll take a look at what they&#x27;re all about!</text></comment> | <story><title>Solving Sol</title><url>http://solvingsol.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tniemi</author><text>This reminds me of the description texts in heraldry.<p>For example, the coat of arms of Finland:
&quot;Gules, semy of roses argent, a lion rampant crowned Or trampling a sabre in base proper, his dexter foreleg in the form of a man&#x27;s arm vambraced and embowed argent garnished Or bearing aloft a sword proper.&quot;<p>And somehow from this emerges a special lion with a sword through it&#x27;s head: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satwcomic.com&#x2F;coat-of-arms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satwcomic.com&#x2F;coat-of-arms</a></text></comment> |
6,002,298 | 6,002,348 | 1 | 3 | 6,001,843 | train | <story><title>“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”</title><url>http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexvr</author><text>In order to stay safe from the government,<p>1. Don&#x27;t buy sparkling water if you&#x27;re a college student<p>2. Don&#x27;t bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution<p>3. Don&#x27;t tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you&#x27;ll be charged with espionage<p>4. It&#x27;s probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying &quot;Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car&quot; might give him reason to shoot you in self defense<p>5. You don&#x27;t actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JulianMorrison</author><text>Also don&#x27;t be black, poor, trans, or a sex worker (and if you&#x27;re black, poor and trans, you&#x27;d better dress like a nun, or the police <i>will</i> read you as a sex worker). People in those categories usually don&#x27;t even make it as far as an outraged Salon article.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”</title><url>http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexvr</author><text>In order to stay safe from the government,<p>1. Don&#x27;t buy sparkling water if you&#x27;re a college student<p>2. Don&#x27;t bet with friends because an arbitrary threshold of about $2k warrants your execution<p>3. Don&#x27;t tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you&#x27;ll be charged with espionage<p>4. It&#x27;s probably a bad idea to bear arms these days, because saying &quot;Officer, I have a weapon in the trunk of my car&quot; might give him reason to shoot you in self defense<p>5. You don&#x27;t actually have free speech anymore, so be careful about that. If you threaten to shoot up a school, even jokingly and totally within your rights, you will be incarcerated for half a year before your trial. And who knows if the judge will let you off? You just have to pray for one who knows and abides by the constitution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lawnchair_larry</author><text>6. Don&#x27;t have $20 buy-in poker games<p>and Steven Seagal driving a tank into that guys living room for fighting chickens...wow.</text></comment> |
28,950,260 | 28,945,568 | 1 | 3 | 28,942,189 | train | <story><title>Willingness to look stupid</title><url>https://danluu.com/look-stupid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ensorceled</author><text>&gt; The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.<p>This is actually an example of where the author IS stupid. You will often be found &quot;at fault&quot; in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases (at least in Ontario) where you are legislatively at fault even if you did nothing out of the ordinary (making a left turn while overtaking traffic attempts to pass rather than yield). That the broker was trying to protect them from this isn&#x27;t even a conflict of interest for the broker.<p>I wonder how many insurance brokers encounter the &quot;I&#x27;m such an amazing driver, I don&#x27;t really need insurance.&quot; macho man ... I&#x27;m presuming the broker, at least initially, assumed the author was one of &quot;those drivers&quot; and not &quot;stupid&quot;.</text></item><item><author>alexandrerond</author><text>Totally.<p>There&#x27;s distance between:<p>&quot;people think I&#x27;m stupid because I&#x27;m not scared to show that I don&#x27;t know about something&quot;<p>and some of the examples which are more along the lines of<p>&quot;people think I&#x27;m stupid because I act as a self-entitled genius who provides little context or reasoning behind choices and expect everyone to line up behind with no question&quot;<p>What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box? What are the chances they&#x27;re not a clueless customer in need of help and have solid reasons behind?<p>The boss raises an eyebrow when someome proposes to skip half of the test suite? Means a lack of trust.<p>The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.<p>There&#x27;s quite a bit of narcissism here: &quot;They though I&#x27;m stupid but I&#x27;m not&quot;, &quot; I was right in the end&quot;. It&#x27;s actually arguing how everyone else is dumber in the end.<p>A more sincere approach would have been to explain how he realized how stupid he actually was and how not being defensive about it helped. But perhaps the author knows better after all.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>One way to prove that he truly doesn&#x27;t mind looking stupid would be to list times when he risked looking stupid... and it turns out he actually was.<p>It&#x27;s happened to all of us though we dont like to admit it.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s happened to him too and I looked but I didn&#x27;t see any of those examples listed.<p>Giving only examples of when people thought he was dumb and it turned out he wasn&#x27;t... that&#x27;s <i>kind</i> of just a roundabout way of humblebragging that you&#x27;re an unrecognized genius.<p>Sadly I think this undermines the point of the article which otherwise makes a good point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zarel</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s about who&#x27;s at fault, it&#x27;s about what risks you&#x27;re willing to tolerate.<p>Insurance is always a trade-off of EV for tail risk. In exchange for losing money on average (the insurance company has to earn money somehow, after all), you&#x27;re protected from the worst case scenario. You can think of it like, yourself from parallel universe where you don&#x27;t get into a crash, pays yourself in the parallel universe where you do get into a crash. And the insurance company skims a little off the top as payment for the service of sending money across parallel universes.<p>But if you can afford to just eat the cost of a crash, you don&#x27;t need to pay the insurance company for that service. And maybe you can eat the costs of some crashes but not others: If you crash into a rich guy&#x27;s car, maybe you can&#x27;t afford those costs, but damage to your own car is capped at the price of your own car. So that&#x27;s all Dan&#x27;s doing: insuring the costs he can&#x27;t pay (damage to others) but not the ones he can (damage to his own car).<p>The math isn&#x27;t affected by his chances of being found at fault, or how good of a driver he is, at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Willingness to look stupid</title><url>https://danluu.com/look-stupid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ensorceled</author><text>&gt; The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.<p>This is actually an example of where the author IS stupid. You will often be found &quot;at fault&quot; in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases (at least in Ontario) where you are legislatively at fault even if you did nothing out of the ordinary (making a left turn while overtaking traffic attempts to pass rather than yield). That the broker was trying to protect them from this isn&#x27;t even a conflict of interest for the broker.<p>I wonder how many insurance brokers encounter the &quot;I&#x27;m such an amazing driver, I don&#x27;t really need insurance.&quot; macho man ... I&#x27;m presuming the broker, at least initially, assumed the author was one of &quot;those drivers&quot; and not &quot;stupid&quot;.</text></item><item><author>alexandrerond</author><text>Totally.<p>There&#x27;s distance between:<p>&quot;people think I&#x27;m stupid because I&#x27;m not scared to show that I don&#x27;t know about something&quot;<p>and some of the examples which are more along the lines of<p>&quot;people think I&#x27;m stupid because I act as a self-entitled genius who provides little context or reasoning behind choices and expect everyone to line up behind with no question&quot;<p>What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box? What are the chances they&#x27;re not a clueless customer in need of help and have solid reasons behind?<p>The boss raises an eyebrow when someome proposes to skip half of the test suite? Means a lack of trust.<p>The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.<p>There&#x27;s quite a bit of narcissism here: &quot;They though I&#x27;m stupid but I&#x27;m not&quot;, &quot; I was right in the end&quot;. It&#x27;s actually arguing how everyone else is dumber in the end.<p>A more sincere approach would have been to explain how he realized how stupid he actually was and how not being defensive about it helped. But perhaps the author knows better after all.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>One way to prove that he truly doesn&#x27;t mind looking stupid would be to list times when he risked looking stupid... and it turns out he actually was.<p>It&#x27;s happened to all of us though we dont like to admit it.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s happened to him too and I looked but I didn&#x27;t see any of those examples listed.<p>Giving only examples of when people thought he was dumb and it turned out he wasn&#x27;t... that&#x27;s <i>kind</i> of just a roundabout way of humblebragging that you&#x27;re an unrecognized genius.<p>Sadly I think this undermines the point of the article which otherwise makes a good point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pja</author><text>I think you’ve got that backwards - he wanted to only buy coverage for damage he did to other vehicles &#x2F; people &amp; not to cover his own vehicle.<p>However, sometimes, for some drivers, fully comprehensive insurance can be cheaper than 3rd party only for arcane internal insurance risk-accounting reasons. So by not letting his agent even look at the whole market he was cutting himself off from the possibility of cheaper insurance.</text></comment> |
15,766,334 | 15,766,305 | 1 | 2 | 15,765,990 | train | <story><title>Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tw04</author><text>That&#x27;s not at all what it says. The cost of moving to Windows and office is ~€5 million:<p>&gt;€ 4.8 million and licenses (for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, software distribution,<p>The €50 is for hardware replacements that were going to happen anyway.<p>Nothing in the article addresses the harder to track costs of user efficiency and expert support staff. I&#x27;m not claiming it&#x27;s cheaper in either direction, but staffing costs are a very, very real cost.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 10 switchover will cost Linux champion Munich €50m</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-switchover-will-cost-linux-champion-munich-50m/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A%20Trending%20Content&utm_content=5a14ac6f00bd470007dd3c20&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>Meanwhile:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.itworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2716115&#x2F;operating-systems&#x2F;switching-to-linux-saves-munich-over--11-million.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.itworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2716115&#x2F;operating-systems&#x2F;sw...</a><p>I&#x27;m sure Munich council&#x27;s decision to switch back to Windows, despite all the costs and long-term lock-in, had nothing to do with this totally random HQ-building in Munich:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mspoweruser.com&#x2F;microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mspoweruser.com&#x2F;microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...</a></text></comment> |
5,866,810 | 5,866,772 | 1 | 2 | 5,866,573 | train | <story><title>Booz Allen fires leaker Snowden</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/11/news/companies/snowden-booz-allen/index.html?hpt=hp_t2</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mililani</author><text>I was thinking before, how in the hell is a sys admin contractor making $200k&#x2F;year??? Especially in Hawaii. $122k seems about right. Regardless, this does seem to cast some doubt about Snowden&#x27;s character. Why lie? It seems like such a trivial point.<p>At any rate, I really hope the ad hominen attacks don&#x27;t sway public opinion about the gravity of the overall message: even though the messenger may be disingenuous, the government has already admitted to mass spying. 4th amendment rights are being disregarded.<p>edit:<p>Ok, I&#x27;m seeing all kinds of conjecturing. I know a lot of people who work as civilian IT contractors in Hawaii. I grew up there; I used to work there at Square USA; my uncle is a retired military officer who is now working for Northrop Grumman as a civilian IT contractor in Hawaii. There is NO way any civilian IT contractor is making that kind of dough in Hawaii even working tons of overtime. When my uncle was working as a civilian IT contractor in Korea back during the dot com boom, he was telling me that most of his employees were making $125k. However, most of that was tax free. So, they were making money hand over fist. Since then, he&#x27;s said that salaries have stagnated and even gone down. He&#x27;s a programmer and an Oracle DBA; and nowadays, he&#x27;s not making more than 100k. I personally don&#x27;t know anyone who is making $200k in IT. Even my friend at Goldman Sachs who has a masters degree in comp sci from Cornell is only making $125k without bonuses. And he said the bonuses are only 10%. So, really guys, the $200k is most likely baloney. I&#x27;m not buying that. But, regardless, it&#x27;s a moot point. The government is screwing us over; they&#x27;ve already admitted to it in so much words.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>&gt; how in the hell is a sys admin contractor making $200k&#x2F;year???<p>Bonuses for special projects. Stock options. Relocation reimbursements.<p>Also given that BAH is also the bad guy they will try to discredit him as much as possible (he lied is a first strike) to divert the attention from their own incompetence.</text></comment> | <story><title>Booz Allen fires leaker Snowden</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/11/news/companies/snowden-booz-allen/index.html?hpt=hp_t2</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>mililani</author><text>I was thinking before, how in the hell is a sys admin contractor making $200k&#x2F;year??? Especially in Hawaii. $122k seems about right. Regardless, this does seem to cast some doubt about Snowden&#x27;s character. Why lie? It seems like such a trivial point.<p>At any rate, I really hope the ad hominen attacks don&#x27;t sway public opinion about the gravity of the overall message: even though the messenger may be disingenuous, the government has already admitted to mass spying. 4th amendment rights are being disregarded.<p>edit:<p>Ok, I&#x27;m seeing all kinds of conjecturing. I know a lot of people who work as civilian IT contractors in Hawaii. I grew up there; I used to work there at Square USA; my uncle is a retired military officer who is now working for Northrop Grumman as a civilian IT contractor in Hawaii. There is NO way any civilian IT contractor is making that kind of dough in Hawaii even working tons of overtime. When my uncle was working as a civilian IT contractor in Korea back during the dot com boom, he was telling me that most of his employees were making $125k. However, most of that was tax free. So, they were making money hand over fist. Since then, he&#x27;s said that salaries have stagnated and even gone down. He&#x27;s a programmer and an Oracle DBA; and nowadays, he&#x27;s not making more than 100k. I personally don&#x27;t know anyone who is making $200k in IT. Even my friend at Goldman Sachs who has a masters degree in comp sci from Cornell is only making $125k without bonuses. And he said the bonuses are only 10%. So, really guys, the $200k is most likely baloney. I&#x27;m not buying that. But, regardless, it&#x27;s a moot point. The government is screwing us over; they&#x27;ve already admitted to it in so much words.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yen223</author><text>&gt; &quot;I was thinking before, how in the hell is a sys admin contractor making $200k&#x2F;year???&quot;<p>Government contracts, especially defense contracts which require clearance, tend to result in inflated salaries.</text></comment> |
39,390,581 | 39,389,449 | 1 | 2 | 39,388,218 | train | <story><title>Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/apple-confirms-its-breaking-iphone-web-apps-in-the-eu-on-purpose/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious... camera, microphone or location ... Browsers ...<p>30 some million lines of code in chromium browsers.<p>Thats bigger than the linux kernel.<p>The HN crowed might not LIKE apples response but they have a very defensible position.<p>Edit: Its not like we haven&#x27;t seen this play out on the desktop recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;24054329&#x2F;microsoft-edge-automatic-chrome-import-data-feature" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;24054329&#x2F;microsoft-edge-automatic-c...</a></text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>Since the article doesn&#x27;t actually repeat what Apple has said, here&#x27;s what Apple says:<p>== Begin quote ==<p>The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.<p>Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.<p>EU users will be able to continue accessing websites directly from their Home Screen through a bookmark with minimal impact to their functionality. We expect this change to affect a small number of users. Still, we regret any impact this change — that was made as part of the work to comply with the DMA — may have on developers of Home Screen web apps and our users.<p>== End quote ==<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;dma-and-apps-in-the-eu&#x2F;#dev-qa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;dma-and-apps-in-the-eu&#x2F;#...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arghwhat</author><text>It really doesn&#x27;t make sense. By that logic, I shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to load web pages because it&#x27;s impossible to secure a browser. PWA&#x27;s only need a few extra integration privileges like badge- and window control, rest is just a web as usual.<p>What you link is a case of one app (edge) reading the data of another app (chrome), which is entirely unrelated to PWAs.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/apple-confirms-its-breaking-iphone-web-apps-in-the-eu-on-purpose/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zer00eyz</author><text>Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious... camera, microphone or location ... Browsers ...<p>30 some million lines of code in chromium browsers.<p>Thats bigger than the linux kernel.<p>The HN crowed might not LIKE apples response but they have a very defensible position.<p>Edit: Its not like we haven&#x27;t seen this play out on the desktop recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;24054329&#x2F;microsoft-edge-automatic-chrome-import-data-feature" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;24054329&#x2F;microsoft-edge-automatic-c...</a></text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>Since the article doesn&#x27;t actually repeat what Apple has said, here&#x27;s what Apple says:<p>== Begin quote ==<p>The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.<p>Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.<p>EU users will be able to continue accessing websites directly from their Home Screen through a bookmark with minimal impact to their functionality. We expect this change to affect a small number of users. Still, we regret any impact this change — that was made as part of the work to comply with the DMA — may have on developers of Home Screen web apps and our users.<p>== End quote ==<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;dma-and-apps-in-the-eu&#x2F;#dev-qa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;dma-and-apps-in-the-eu&#x2F;#...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>summerlight</author><text>Why should we trust Apple for security in that context? Apple also provides all those functionalities via their proprietary API, which is not even audit-able. If Apple really believes in that argument, they should disable their own API as well.</text></comment> |
16,220,859 | 16,219,137 | 1 | 3 | 16,218,439 | train | <story><title>Ursula Le Guin has died</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>macrael</author><text><i>I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn&#x27;t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can&#x27;t earn, and can&#x27;t keep, and often don&#x27;t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.</i><p>—The Left Hand Of Darkness</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>labster</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot in <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i>, but the thing I got out of it is there are some things that can&#x27;t be learned by being told the answer. I could tell you what the left hand of darkness is right now, but if you didn&#x27;t read the book, you&#x27;d be none the wiser. Some things can only be taught through experiencing it yourself, or through the proxy of storytelling.<p>Storytelling is the greatest tool we have for passing down wisdom to the next generation. Ursula LeGuin, we celebrate what you have taught us and will continue to teach us, and we mourn your passing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ursula Le Guin has died</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>macrael</author><text><i>I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn&#x27;t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can&#x27;t earn, and can&#x27;t keep, and often don&#x27;t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.</i><p>—The Left Hand Of Darkness</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Maultasche</author><text>I loved that book. I read it once and never forgot it. I immediately remembered what part of the book that quote was from even though it&#x27;s been 20 years since I read it.</text></comment> |
24,030,330 | 24,030,352 | 1 | 2 | 24,023,543 | train | <story><title>“Zombie cicadas” infected with mind-controlling fungus return to West Virginia</title><url>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zombie-cicadas-infected-mind-controlling-fungus-west-virginia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomasreimers</author><text>The mind-controlling--probably a better phrase for them is &quot;behavior altering&quot;--class of parasites are fascinating from an academic sense... and nightmare fuel from a day-to-day sense. Two additional cases which I remember studying in school are:<p>(1) A parasitic worm which causes snails to climb to clearly visible positions so that birds can eat them. These snails are usually avoidant of those positions, and so this is clear behavior alteration. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fkiL-v4X8w8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fkiL-v4X8w8</a>)<p>(2) A parasitic fungus which takes over ants, causing them to climb up high and then bite (!!! this means it can affect specific muscle movements) into a plant, before bursting from the body and spreading spores (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vijGdWn5-h8</a>, apologies for the mildly dramatic nat-geo video)<p>And for a good piece of sci-fi on the first-person experience of seeing others rapidly&#x2F;inexplicably change behavior, check out [The Screwfly Solution](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Screwfly_Solution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Screwfly_Solution</a>). (It&#x27;s a good read intended as commentary on patriarchy, and it also uses a behavior altering piece of biology as a key plot device.)<p>There is a part of me that wonders if there are things (viruses&#x2F;bacteria&#x2F;funguses) which effect human behavior. And if in 100&#x2F;1000s of years into the future we&#x27;ll look back and realize that some subset of maladaptive personality traits and&#x2F;or mood disorders aren&#x27;t something that simply &quot;happen&quot; to someone, but are instead explained by biology&#x2F;chemistry we didn&#x27;t have a good understanding of. The same way we now look at ancient Rome and say &quot;yeah, their use of lead pipes definitely had some effect on their psychology&quot;.<p>Then again, there is something deeply human to say &quot;nah, we are fully in control of our psychology. These things only happen in simpler animals, and our more-complicated biology means this could NEVER happen to us&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Zombie cicadas” infected with mind-controlling fungus return to West Virginia</title><url>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zombie-cicadas-infected-mind-controlling-fungus-west-virginia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hirundo</author><text>Humans certainly get infected with mind-controlling memes. How sure are we that there aren&#x27;t fungal&#x2F;bacterial&#x2F;viral sources of change to human behavior? Maybe an infection could make us more peaceful or warlike, authoritarian or laissez-faire, pious or agnostic, obedient or obstinate. Political and religious movements sure seem to spread like biological infections. I wonder if there are epidemiological measures that could tell the difference. Velocity of spread could be discriminator, but you&#x27;d have to test that on populations that are culturally but not physically isolated and visa versa, which is a tall order.</text></comment> |
1,306,457 | 1,306,319 | 1 | 3 | 1,306,187 | train | <story><title>Microsoft's Guide to Humor</title><url>http://www.microsoft.com/education/competencies/humor.mspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nagrom</author><text>This reminds me of E. B. White's quote:<p>"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White</a><p>It's also reminiscent of Louis Armstrong's<p>"Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know"<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong</a><p>Is it really possible to develop a sense of humour by reading a list of bullet points, action plans and self-help advice? I'm not really convinced that this isn't a really brilliant, very subtle joke on a completely higher level.<p>I can't decide whether this is funnier if posted by someone in earnest, or if posted in total seriousness. I think that's the joke.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thinkbohemian</author><text>This may be a little bit convoluted of an idea but when i was much younger I made a concerted effort to be "funnier". I watched stand up commedians on tv and analyzed why some jokes worked and some didn't. I paid attention to my friends jokes and took mental notes. All in all it worked out, i'm no robbin williams, but I make people around me laugh (in a good way) fairly frequently.<p>So structured learning of "un-learnable" fields can pay off, though your intent, desire, and actions all have to be aligned. Microsofts attempts to introduce humor to the workplace could legitimately be successful if they really really followed through, sponsoring weekly sitcom watching parties, making jokes in email signatures the internal norm, etc.<p>What makes this document so sad, is the perception that feelings and enjoyment can be delegated to a memo.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft's Guide to Humor</title><url>http://www.microsoft.com/education/competencies/humor.mspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nagrom</author><text>This reminds me of E. B. White's quote:<p>"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/E._B._White</a><p>It's also reminiscent of Louis Armstrong's<p>"Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know"<p><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Armstrong</a><p>Is it really possible to develop a sense of humour by reading a list of bullet points, action plans and self-help advice? I'm not really convinced that this isn't a really brilliant, very subtle joke on a completely higher level.<p>I can't decide whether this is funnier if posted by someone in earnest, or if posted in total seriousness. I think that's the joke.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gcheong</author><text>"I'm not really convinced that this isn't a really brilliant, very subtle joke on a completely higher level."<p>It probably started out that way.</text></comment> |
3,087,907 | 3,087,873 | 1 | 3 | 3,087,322 | train | <story><title>Redditor burnt by Paypal's "Rolling Reserve" feature</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/l4q2y/please_help_me_expose_this_newest_paypal_fraud/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ck2</author><text>The way PayPal risk management works is to dump the whole problem on the customer, never on themselves. This is why the "guarantees" on ebay are useless and actually a hassle for all parties, except paypal/ebay.<p>Try getting a false charge on your paypal card - the moment you notify them, they instantly cancel the card - but to get the money back you have to file a written snail mail report - and then they do not send you a replacement card automatically, they allow it to remain canceled and never support you otherwise unless you specifically ask for another card which will take at least two weeks to receive.<p>They have no problem with people leaving them as there is an endless supply of newbies and near zero competition with easy entry, because they aren't competing as a bank and don't have to obey banking laws.</text></comment> | <story><title>Redditor burnt by Paypal's "Rolling Reserve" feature</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/l4q2y/please_help_me_expose_this_newest_paypal_fraud/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bcl</author><text>PayPal did something similar to me earlier this year. They instituted a 21 day hold on incoming payments because they suddenly decided my business was prone to chargebacks. This is after 8 years of service with <i>zero</i> problems. Never a complaint or chargeback and 10's of thousands of dollars through my account.<p>I no longer have anything for sale (I open sourced my AIS Parser SDK late last year) so it didn't have a dramatic impact on my income. I decided to drop my PayPal and eBay accounts without argument -- if that's the way they want to play the game then I'll just take my business elsewhere.</text></comment> |
13,465,775 | 13,466,039 | 1 | 2 | 13,461,981 | train | <story><title>When Their Shifts End, Uber Drivers Set Up Camp in Parking Lots Across the U.S.</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-23/when-their-shifts-end-uber-drivers-set-up-camp-in-parking-lots-across-the-u-s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otoburb</author><text>I heard anecdotally that drivers with ratings below 4.6 have their Uber driver accounts shutdown.<p>In this instance, how would the rating work for drivers in an UberPool? Does each person&#x27;s vote count for only 1&#x2F;n, or is each one a full vote? If it&#x27;s full votes for all riders in a single UberPool ride, all it probably takes are a couple of mediocre UberPool experiences and the driver is selected out of the driving pool.</text></item><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>I live in small-town Kansas but commute to San Francisco occasionally for my job, which is based there. I just got back from a trip last week and noticed something startling about the Uber drivers that ferried me around: never before have I seen drivers this bad. Twice in one week, my drivers nearly ran over a pedestrian. On one of those incidents, a guy was walking across a crosswalk in North Beach in broad daylight. Everybody in this Uber Pool was screaming &quot;stop!&quot; as the driver ran right up on this poor guy but the driver seemed oblivious, like the guy was invisible. The only explanation, I think, is that our driver was extremely fatigued.<p>I predict that rideshare-pedestrian deaths are going to skyrocket in 2017 as more drivers take desperate measures to try to get by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>civilian</author><text>I thought it was anything below 4, but who knows.<p>When I have unsafe drivers I aggressively rate them 1 or 2s depending on what it was. I know that it&#x27;s &quot;mean&quot; to the driver, but I&#x27;m being kind to future passengers, pedestrians, and everyone who shares the road.</text></comment> | <story><title>When Their Shifts End, Uber Drivers Set Up Camp in Parking Lots Across the U.S.</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-23/when-their-shifts-end-uber-drivers-set-up-camp-in-parking-lots-across-the-u-s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otoburb</author><text>I heard anecdotally that drivers with ratings below 4.6 have their Uber driver accounts shutdown.<p>In this instance, how would the rating work for drivers in an UberPool? Does each person&#x27;s vote count for only 1&#x2F;n, or is each one a full vote? If it&#x27;s full votes for all riders in a single UberPool ride, all it probably takes are a couple of mediocre UberPool experiences and the driver is selected out of the driving pool.</text></item><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>I live in small-town Kansas but commute to San Francisco occasionally for my job, which is based there. I just got back from a trip last week and noticed something startling about the Uber drivers that ferried me around: never before have I seen drivers this bad. Twice in one week, my drivers nearly ran over a pedestrian. On one of those incidents, a guy was walking across a crosswalk in North Beach in broad daylight. Everybody in this Uber Pool was screaming &quot;stop!&quot; as the driver ran right up on this poor guy but the driver seemed oblivious, like the guy was invisible. The only explanation, I think, is that our driver was extremely fatigued.<p>I predict that rideshare-pedestrian deaths are going to skyrocket in 2017 as more drivers take desperate measures to try to get by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryen</author><text>I wouldn&#x27;t believe any assumptions around how Uber ratings affect drivers. In many cities Uber&#x27;s demand outweighs their pool of available drivers. Its not in their best interest to remove drivers from their platform other than the most egregious cases.</text></comment> |
37,112,225 | 37,111,561 | 1 | 3 | 37,111,317 | train | <story><title>Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/15pd5si/today_i_realized_i_now_trust_microsoft_more_than/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw__away7391</author><text>I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you&#x27;ll ever see on any mainstream platform. One particular strength is that creators don&#x27;t seem too bound to producing videos for specific length of time. There are literally informative mini-documentaries 90 seconds long while others might go on for 4 hours and they cover every imaginable topic. This is definitely the last subscription I&#x27;d give up if I had to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotnet00</author><text>The hate for youtube is understandable when you consider how much of it Google changes without listening to anyone. They know they have an effectively monopoly position on video hosting and thus just do whatever they want.<p>They&#x27;ll let their system ban whoever it wants, only letting a human review things if the person is sufficiently large&#x2F;well-connected. They change their policies on a whim regardless of impact on people making a living off Youtube, same with demonetization, they also continue to allow content-ID and DMCA to be abused and have made search completely useless.<p>People are still using YouTube not because they like it, but simply because of the existing network effect and wanting to support their preferred creators. Thus it makes total sense why people would be willing to pay creators but not Google.</text></comment> | <story><title>Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/15pd5si/today_i_realized_i_now_trust_microsoft_more_than/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw__away7391</author><text>I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you&#x27;ll ever see on any mainstream platform. One particular strength is that creators don&#x27;t seem too bound to producing videos for specific length of time. There are literally informative mini-documentaries 90 seconds long while others might go on for 4 hours and they cover every imaginable topic. This is definitely the last subscription I&#x27;d give up if I had to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goalieca</author><text>&gt; I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads.<p>Much of the “fantastic” content I do watch on YouTube has sponsored content in the video. Mostly I avoid YouTube.</text></comment> |
15,648,475 | 15,648,016 | 1 | 3 | 15,644,680 | train | <story><title>Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/waymo-now-testing-its-self-driving-cars-on-public-roads-with-no-one-at-the-wheel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aidenn0</author><text>I still think that proper self-driving cars are such a paradigm shift that predictions of how it will work are still up in the air.<p>For example, right now I live on the west coast and my parents live on the east coast. 4 kids, Minimum of 40 hour drive or $3500 flight.<p>Here&#x27;s one tiny example:<p>I can work remotely for a few weeks and my boss doesn&#x27;t mind. The kids sleep for 8+ hours at night. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights driving for 12 hours (mostly sleeping) means I am at my parent&#x27;s house on Tuesday and I either take Monday as vacation or work remotely from a friend&#x27;s house in Ohio. We see friends in flyover country that we rarely visit or see national parks on Saturday and Sunday.<p>I can now take the whole family to my parents taking just 2 days of vacation&#x2F;remote for the trip, for only the depreciation cost on my car. Car trip isn&#x27;t too bad because the kids are awake for a total of the running time of 6 movies.<p>Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn&#x27;t the dollars, but the time.</text></item><item><author>LrnByTeach</author><text>Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee.<p>If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below.<p>2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles&#x2F;month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault&#x2F;Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400&#x2F;month<p>2024 :same 1000 miles&#x2F;month SUBSCRIPTION $200&#x2F;month<p>At $200&#x2F;month Subscription price for 1000 miles&#x2F;month (which is average US driver car mileage&#x2F;month), savings are so big as average car ownership is around $400&#x2F;month ( AAA Estimate ) , all inclusive of<p>- Car depreciation<p>- Insurance cost<p>- gasoline cost<p>- Repairs &amp; maintenance costs<p>- extra 1 hours&#x2F;day you get in NOT-Driving<p>(EDIT: This Model I mentioned is Summon only, there is NO OWNERSHIP of the Car, is it monthly pay instead of per RIDE Pay .
In this Model, All the Major CAR Manufactures of today offer these FLEETS with monthly pay of 1000&#x2F;miles month SUBSCRIPTIONS.<p>Being a) no-driver Cost b) ELECTRIC c) RIDE Sharing d) mass adoption -- is the key for Lower price tag of $200&#x2F;month
)<p>The above is Phase 1, in Phase 2 starting 2025 Google will be supplying only &quot;end-to-end Autonomous vehicle Software system&quot; for a fee of $5000&#x2F;year per car for ALL the CAR FLEET companies .<p>Google will run small FLEET of Autonomous CARs for the purpose of &quot;Reference implementation of Software&quot; much like &quot;Pixel Android Phones&quot; to showcase the Reference implementation of Android ( for all other Android Vendors )</text></item><item><author>a9a</author><text>It will be interesting to see how Lyft&#x27;s partnership with Waymo evolves given this tech announcement and Waymo&#x27;s acknowledgment that they plan to offer their own ridesharing service.<p>Lyft&#x27;s approach to self-driving partnerships in general seems to rest on the assumption that self-driving providers will catch up to each other before any of them can fully handle everything a human driver can do. If this assumption is correct, Lyft ends up in the great position of being compatible with all major self-driving providers before any of them can feasibly launch a standalone service without Lyft&#x27;s driver network (who wants to take a car service that doesn&#x27;t take you downtown? Or doesn&#x27;t work in the rain?). Ideally, this means Lyft can negotiate favorable terms with all the providers and maintain their position as marketplace brokering between riders and ride providers (either human or robot).<p>But, if this announcement means Waymo is truly way ahead of the competition, is Lyft aiding and abetting its own demise by covering Waymo&#x27;s short-term holes (weather, urban areas, etc) up until the day that Waymo can cut Lyft out and run their own service? If Waymo is the only self-driving game in town, and they solve the urban case, why do they need Lyft? I wonder if we&#x27;ll see any tension develop between the two if leadership at Lyft starts to get concerned about this scenario being a likely outcome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>landryraccoon</author><text>&gt; Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn&#x27;t the dollars, but the time.<p>This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides, the more people will drive (self driving or otherwise). If road infrastructure is the same, that necessarily means a much higher density of cars on the road. It&#x27;s possible that self driving cars will be more space efficient on the road, but ten times more efficient? I think it&#x27;s more likely that there will just be way more cars on the road and traffic will worsen considerably.</text></comment> | <story><title>Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/waymo-now-testing-its-self-driving-cars-on-public-roads-with-no-one-at-the-wheel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aidenn0</author><text>I still think that proper self-driving cars are such a paradigm shift that predictions of how it will work are still up in the air.<p>For example, right now I live on the west coast and my parents live on the east coast. 4 kids, Minimum of 40 hour drive or $3500 flight.<p>Here&#x27;s one tiny example:<p>I can work remotely for a few weeks and my boss doesn&#x27;t mind. The kids sleep for 8+ hours at night. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights driving for 12 hours (mostly sleeping) means I am at my parent&#x27;s house on Tuesday and I either take Monday as vacation or work remotely from a friend&#x27;s house in Ohio. We see friends in flyover country that we rarely visit or see national parks on Saturday and Sunday.<p>I can now take the whole family to my parents taking just 2 days of vacation&#x2F;remote for the trip, for only the depreciation cost on my car. Car trip isn&#x27;t too bad because the kids are awake for a total of the running time of 6 movies.<p>Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn&#x27;t the dollars, but the time.</text></item><item><author>LrnByTeach</author><text>Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee.<p>If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below.<p>2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles&#x2F;month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault&#x2F;Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400&#x2F;month<p>2024 :same 1000 miles&#x2F;month SUBSCRIPTION $200&#x2F;month<p>At $200&#x2F;month Subscription price for 1000 miles&#x2F;month (which is average US driver car mileage&#x2F;month), savings are so big as average car ownership is around $400&#x2F;month ( AAA Estimate ) , all inclusive of<p>- Car depreciation<p>- Insurance cost<p>- gasoline cost<p>- Repairs &amp; maintenance costs<p>- extra 1 hours&#x2F;day you get in NOT-Driving<p>(EDIT: This Model I mentioned is Summon only, there is NO OWNERSHIP of the Car, is it monthly pay instead of per RIDE Pay .
In this Model, All the Major CAR Manufactures of today offer these FLEETS with monthly pay of 1000&#x2F;miles month SUBSCRIPTIONS.<p>Being a) no-driver Cost b) ELECTRIC c) RIDE Sharing d) mass adoption -- is the key for Lower price tag of $200&#x2F;month
)<p>The above is Phase 1, in Phase 2 starting 2025 Google will be supplying only &quot;end-to-end Autonomous vehicle Software system&quot; for a fee of $5000&#x2F;year per car for ALL the CAR FLEET companies .<p>Google will run small FLEET of Autonomous CARs for the purpose of &quot;Reference implementation of Software&quot; much like &quot;Pixel Android Phones&quot; to showcase the Reference implementation of Android ( for all other Android Vendors )</text></item><item><author>a9a</author><text>It will be interesting to see how Lyft&#x27;s partnership with Waymo evolves given this tech announcement and Waymo&#x27;s acknowledgment that they plan to offer their own ridesharing service.<p>Lyft&#x27;s approach to self-driving partnerships in general seems to rest on the assumption that self-driving providers will catch up to each other before any of them can fully handle everything a human driver can do. If this assumption is correct, Lyft ends up in the great position of being compatible with all major self-driving providers before any of them can feasibly launch a standalone service without Lyft&#x27;s driver network (who wants to take a car service that doesn&#x27;t take you downtown? Or doesn&#x27;t work in the rain?). Ideally, this means Lyft can negotiate favorable terms with all the providers and maintain their position as marketplace brokering between riders and ride providers (either human or robot).<p>But, if this announcement means Waymo is truly way ahead of the competition, is Lyft aiding and abetting its own demise by covering Waymo&#x27;s short-term holes (weather, urban areas, etc) up until the day that Waymo can cut Lyft out and run their own service? If Waymo is the only self-driving game in town, and they solve the urban case, why do they need Lyft? I wonder if we&#x27;ll see any tension develop between the two if leadership at Lyft starts to get concerned about this scenario being a likely outcome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>titzer</author><text>&gt; Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights driving for 12 hours (mostly sleeping)<p>It&#x27;s really sad that the United States has let passenger rail deteriorate to the point that people are forced into this situation. Really, really poor foresight.</text></comment> |
23,883,220 | 23,882,973 | 1 | 2 | 23,882,026 | train | <story><title>Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/institutions-the-social-capital-structure-and-multilevel-marketing-companies/D9F67620E7B64D6B473A348C0C2273FA#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bcatanzaro</author><text>Stay-at-home moms are another big reason for this besides the missionary experience. It is very common for Utah Mormon women to stay at home raising children.<p>The traditional full-time workplace totally disrespects that choice. SAHMs are not compensated for the hard work they do. It makes sense they would look for something part time to do to make a little money and think about something besides kids. But how can they do that in the traditional American workplace that expects 40+ hours a week and a resume with no gaps?<p>Many MLMs are built for SAHMs. They build on SAHM social networks and many of them are explicitly about making domestic life more bearable (kitchen gadgets, home goods, clothes, beauty and health products).<p>I think there’s a story here about SAHMs as a neglected overlooked and disrespected population, and how MLMs fill a need for them.<p>BTW, I hate MLMs generally, I’m just pointing out that Mormon missionary service isn’t the only thing attracting MLMs to Utah.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ineedasername</author><text>To say they&#x27;re not compensated is a fundamental misunderstanding of such a relationship, when it&#x27;s really very simple: there is a pool of tasks that need to get done, and between the two partners there is a division of labor on who performs which tasks, often with at least a little overlap. If the person who works for pay happens to mop the floor at home, is that &quot;uncompensated&quot;?<p>Take a relationship where both people work, mine: My spouse does laundry. I go food shopping and cook. To say that either of us is uncompensated for those tasks is a complete misapplication of the term, and a gross oversimplification that attempts to reduce the rewards of effort to solely lie in the monetary realm.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/institutions-the-social-capital-structure-and-multilevel-marketing-companies/D9F67620E7B64D6B473A348C0C2273FA#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bcatanzaro</author><text>Stay-at-home moms are another big reason for this besides the missionary experience. It is very common for Utah Mormon women to stay at home raising children.<p>The traditional full-time workplace totally disrespects that choice. SAHMs are not compensated for the hard work they do. It makes sense they would look for something part time to do to make a little money and think about something besides kids. But how can they do that in the traditional American workplace that expects 40+ hours a week and a resume with no gaps?<p>Many MLMs are built for SAHMs. They build on SAHM social networks and many of them are explicitly about making domestic life more bearable (kitchen gadgets, home goods, clothes, beauty and health products).<p>I think there’s a story here about SAHMs as a neglected overlooked and disrespected population, and how MLMs fill a need for them.<p>BTW, I hate MLMs generally, I’m just pointing out that Mormon missionary service isn’t the only thing attracting MLMs to Utah.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dgut</author><text>Is there any region of the world that respects SAHM besides Scandinavian countries? I feel like this is one of the most important issues we&#x27;re facing today. Separating kids from their parents for most of the day after three months can&#x27;t possibly be good.</text></comment> |
35,038,701 | 35,038,495 | 1 | 2 | 35,037,297 | train | <story><title>There Were Half As Many Affordable Homes For Sale In 2022 As There Were In 2021</title><url>https://www.redfin.com/news/share-of-homes-affordable-2022/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrkeen</author><text>&gt; All else being equal, we would expect 50% of homes to be unaffordable to a median buyer.<p>Sounded reasonable on first and second reading. But now I question why. Would 50% of avocados be unaffordable to the median buyer? Would 50% of private jets?</text></item><item><author>throwaway09223</author><text>There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics - Twain<p>Key observations:<p>* All else being equal, we would expect 50% of homes to be unaffordable to a median buyer. This is the reasonable base figure (not zero). We would expect 2 in 5 if everyone were buying homes they could properly afford.<p>* But they&#x27;re comparing median <i>county</i> incomes to homes in a <i>metro area</i>. For example they call out Boise, ID but use income from Ada county (already 20% lower!). This issue alone could account for the difference.<p>* There is also an issue of counting homes for sale, vs homes in general. If more expensive homes are sold more often (or, are listed for sale longer - say years - because they&#x27;re unique) then we will see a skew towards more expensive homes being listed more frequently. It won&#x27;t accurately represent the actual underlying home inventory.<p>I recommend not reading too much into these numbers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notahacker</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that more than 50% should be affordable to a median <i>buyer</i>, on the basis that not everyone lives in the most expensive house they can possibly afford, and in the middle of the house pricing range there are multiple homes available at any given price.<p>Of course, there&#x27;s also a large set of people who cannot afford to be buyers [in areas suitable for them to live] for various reasons and this median income dataset includes them. Not entirely sure they&#x27;ve used median household income and not median individual income either</text></comment> | <story><title>There Were Half As Many Affordable Homes For Sale In 2022 As There Were In 2021</title><url>https://www.redfin.com/news/share-of-homes-affordable-2022/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrkeen</author><text>&gt; All else being equal, we would expect 50% of homes to be unaffordable to a median buyer.<p>Sounded reasonable on first and second reading. But now I question why. Would 50% of avocados be unaffordable to the median buyer? Would 50% of private jets?</text></item><item><author>throwaway09223</author><text>There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics - Twain<p>Key observations:<p>* All else being equal, we would expect 50% of homes to be unaffordable to a median buyer. This is the reasonable base figure (not zero). We would expect 2 in 5 if everyone were buying homes they could properly afford.<p>* But they&#x27;re comparing median <i>county</i> incomes to homes in a <i>metro area</i>. For example they call out Boise, ID but use income from Ada county (already 20% lower!). This issue alone could account for the difference.<p>* There is also an issue of counting homes for sale, vs homes in general. If more expensive homes are sold more often (or, are listed for sale longer - say years - because they&#x27;re unique) then we will see a skew towards more expensive homes being listed more frequently. It won&#x27;t accurately represent the actual underlying home inventory.<p>I recommend not reading too much into these numbers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>Good point. I think the answer is that the definition of market is ... flexible. Avocados are a commodity and cheap enough that yeah everyone in US can afford one. Not true for global population living on a dollar a day....<p>Houses are probably more like a car market - it&#x27;s designed to cover <i>everyone</i>, and so there is a percentage that is unaffordable - and that I think is the real point - the orignal article kind of assumes all houses should be affordable - but that&#x27;s not true. The OP argues that only 50 % are affordable - that&#x27;s kind of a guesstimate and think the percentage is more likely similar for cars - not sure what it is but let&#x27;s guess 80%.<p>Add in fact that affordability is defined so ways - percentage of incame and will someone give you mortgage and most of the disagreements go away</text></comment> |
23,767,262 | 23,767,261 | 1 | 3 | 23,766,503 | train | <story><title>Yoloface-500k: ultra-light real-time face detection model, 500kb</title><url>https://github.com/dog-qiuqiu/MobileNetv2-YOLOV3#500kb%E7%9A%84yolo-face-detection</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>haditab</author><text>I believe this is exactly why pjreddie quit computer vision research. It must kill him to see such projects based off of his work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tda</author><text>Maybe someone else is also interested in some backgrounds on this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22390093" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22390093</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Yoloface-500k: ultra-light real-time face detection model, 500kb</title><url>https://github.com/dog-qiuqiu/MobileNetv2-YOLOV3#500kb%E7%9A%84yolo-face-detection</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>haditab</author><text>I believe this is exactly why pjreddie quit computer vision research. It must kill him to see such projects based off of his work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonex</author><text>Could you elaborate? What is the problem with the linked project? Training a slightly faster, smaller and less accurate version of an existing model?</text></comment> |
39,417,990 | 39,417,374 | 1 | 2 | 39,416,602 | train | <story><title>Apple Watch Ultra 2 Hacked</title><url>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255453237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty obviously fake. A bunch of &quot;level 1&quot; (new) users, all with the <i>same</i> story? They literally mention the exact time &amp; date in the same style, and mention the 1-minute lockout in the same way as well. Two of them use the <i>same</i> timestamp even, down to the minute.<p>Also, something I noticed working for large orgs with over 100K staff and 1M users: An appreciable fraction of the human population is simply mentally ill. Hallucinations, drug use, psychosis, etc... all have a non-zero rate. Given enough users, you&#x27;ll get the same type that imagines being abducted by aliens and even makes police reports that sound <i>suspiciously</i> like the sci-fi movie that&#x27;s popular at the time.</text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>This is so hard to believe that I simply don&#x27;t.<p>Either the user had a bad digitizer, and misread and&#x2F;or hallucinated the &quot;We are in control&quot; message, or the entire story is made up. Perhaps a group of people working together to post &quot;Hey me too!&quot; stories? I&#x27;m not sure what the motive would be, though.<p>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is beyond believability.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clawoo</author><text>Not necessarily disagreeing with you regarding the people that are imagining things, but with a device so relatively popular as the Apple Watch, this could be very well explained by a software update that messed up the touch screen &quot;driver&quot; and is generating ghost touches. As the update rolled out, it started affecting more and more users who turn to the forums to look for help.<p>One consequence of these ghost touches would be inputting the wrong PIN which will initially lock the device for one minute, so I don&#x27;t see what&#x27;s strange about that.<p>Which messages, specifically, are you referring to with &quot;exact time &amp; date&quot; and &quot;same timestamp&quot;? I skimmed through them but nothing of sort stood out.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Watch Ultra 2 Hacked</title><url>https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255453237</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jiggawatts</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty obviously fake. A bunch of &quot;level 1&quot; (new) users, all with the <i>same</i> story? They literally mention the exact time &amp; date in the same style, and mention the 1-minute lockout in the same way as well. Two of them use the <i>same</i> timestamp even, down to the minute.<p>Also, something I noticed working for large orgs with over 100K staff and 1M users: An appreciable fraction of the human population is simply mentally ill. Hallucinations, drug use, psychosis, etc... all have a non-zero rate. Given enough users, you&#x27;ll get the same type that imagines being abducted by aliens and even makes police reports that sound <i>suspiciously</i> like the sci-fi movie that&#x27;s popular at the time.</text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>This is so hard to believe that I simply don&#x27;t.<p>Either the user had a bad digitizer, and misread and&#x2F;or hallucinated the &quot;We are in control&quot; message, or the entire story is made up. Perhaps a group of people working together to post &quot;Hey me too!&quot; stories? I&#x27;m not sure what the motive would be, though.<p>Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is beyond believability.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rahkiin</author><text>Not only that, but all those new users actually bothered to look for a pre-existing topic on their issue instead of making their own new topic. Unlikely.</text></comment> |
27,178,551 | 27,178,619 | 1 | 2 | 27,177,503 | train | <story><title>There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic</title><url>https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/15/there-have-been-7m-13m-excess-deaths-worldwide-during-the-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greenwich26</author><text>The average age in many African countries is in the mid teens, and we know that age is one of the strongest risk gradients. So Africa is not at all comparable with the aging West. Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders. Everything and everyone comes through a few ports and airports, which already had the infrastructure established to tightly control and monitor everything. Meanwhile most European or North American countries can&#x27;t close their sprawling land borders without starving their populations. (And the U.S. couldn&#x27;t close its land borders even if it wanted to.)</text></item><item><author>candu</author><text>IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don&#x27;t look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had <i>vastly</i> better outcomes.<p>Of course, I&#x27;m not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I&#x27;m not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there&#x27;s no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I&#x27;d start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...</text></item><item><author>khazhoux</author><text>This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren&#x27;t necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this?<p>Legitimate question, please no political commentary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sellyme</author><text>&gt; Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders.<p>Australia had a major outbreak in Victoria in July last year. Victoria has a 2,550km land border with other states, including with South Australia, which peaked at 10 active cases over the same time period.<p>The evidence shows that strict quarantining and early lockdowns prevent spread even when there&#x27;s an outbreak on the other side of a land border, and it also shows that being an island doesn&#x27;t help at all if you <i>don&#x27;t</i> do this (see also: the United Kingdom). I don&#x27;t know why people constantly act like Australia and New Zealand only succeeded because they&#x27;re islands when they were locking cities down at single digit case counts while the United States and India were packing stadiums full of people when they were getting tens of thousands of new infections a day.</text></comment> | <story><title>There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic</title><url>https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/05/15/there-have-been-7m-13m-excess-deaths-worldwide-during-the-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greenwich26</author><text>The average age in many African countries is in the mid teens, and we know that age is one of the strongest risk gradients. So Africa is not at all comparable with the aging West. Australia and NZ have the huge advantage of no land borders. Everything and everyone comes through a few ports and airports, which already had the infrastructure established to tightly control and monitor everything. Meanwhile most European or North American countries can&#x27;t close their sprawling land borders without starving their populations. (And the U.S. couldn&#x27;t close its land borders even if it wanted to.)</text></item><item><author>candu</author><text>IMHO if you want to understand what an effective response looks like - don&#x27;t look at North America or Europe. Think Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Africa, all of which had <i>vastly</i> better outcomes.<p>Of course, I&#x27;m not an epidemiologist or public health expert, so while I have some guesses I&#x27;m not sure what exactly they did that was more effective - but there&#x27;s no question that it was more effective. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what to do next time, I&#x27;d start there. If I was going to look for case studies to understand what not to do next time, well...</text></item><item><author>khazhoux</author><text>This has me a bit confused: I look at the stats on cases and deaths per capita across various U.S. states, including California (which was very locked down, at least in theory) and Florida (which was flippant towards risks of contagion), and many states in between. The per capita cases+deaths are nearly identical across many states with very different approaches. This left me really wondering which measures were and weren&#x27;t necessary. Anyone seen good studies or analysis on this?<p>Legitimate question, please no political commentary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stubish</author><text>Being an island might make it easier to close borders, but the point is that closing them was likely hugely significant. I&#x27;d argue that borders remained open in many countries areas largely due to a lack of will. You could certainly close borders to most tourists and business travelers in any country that does immigration control, like Australia did. You can also close interstate land borders, like Australia did. You can even close borders to major cities, like Australia did. You don&#x27;t need to close borders to food deliveries, just budget for the logistical headaches. You do have to pay the political and economic cost though. Australia was watching with both envy and horror when we started seeing stories of British people able to go on holidays to Europe again.</text></comment> |
32,633,217 | 32,633,204 | 1 | 2 | 32,631,355 | train | <story><title>TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy</title><url>https://scribe.rip/i-was-on-tiktok-for-30-days-it-is-manipulative-addictive-and-harmful-to-privacy-9e25445a9122</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>8f2ab37a-ed6c</author><text>I&#x27;m with the rest of the commenters here in being puzzled about why TikTok is being singled out here with respect to the other social media apps. It&#x27;s like comparing whiskey, vodka, and tequila in terms of health risks. You can&#x27;t single out one as particularly pernicious when they do about the same thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justapassenger</author><text>Facebook, IG, Snapchat and other old social apps already had their fair share of dirt thrown at them. TikTok didn’t, and lots of people think that they are just a cool app for teenagers to record their dancing.<p>So it’s more about telling people who already know that alcohol is bad, that White Claw is also bad.</text></comment> | <story><title>TikTok is manipulative, addictive, and harmful to privacy</title><url>https://scribe.rip/i-was-on-tiktok-for-30-days-it-is-manipulative-addictive-and-harmful-to-privacy-9e25445a9122</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>8f2ab37a-ed6c</author><text>I&#x27;m with the rest of the commenters here in being puzzled about why TikTok is being singled out here with respect to the other social media apps. It&#x27;s like comparing whiskey, vodka, and tequila in terms of health risks. You can&#x27;t single out one as particularly pernicious when they do about the same thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>echelon</author><text>1. TikTok appears to be the optimum in social media platform evolution for the foreseeable future. The other platforms don&#x27;t even come close. TikTok presents a perfect stream of user interests - no &quot;friends&quot; that bare little interest graph similarity. It&#x27;s all delivered in a video funnel (great for ads) and A&#x2F;B tests are so natural they&#x27;re part of the platform itself. Highly optimized dopamine-triggering doom scrolling perfectly tailored to the viewer.<p>2. Some people are worried about the CCP exerting control to learn about sensitive leaders and their families [1] or to persuade populations at scale [2]. The app has been shown to capture all keyboard input [3], clipboard contents [4], and record much more than it needs to function. Furthermore, all US-based social media is blocked in China, and there&#x27;s an argument for reciprocity. The topic of Facebook being used to gather international intelligence for the US is not typically mentioned in the same conversations.<p>[1] opinion; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;on-tiktok-its-all-fun-and-games-until-beijing-wants-your-info-china-ccp-national-security-app-store-apple-google-information-data-11658347613" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;on-tiktok-its-all-fun-and-games...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-all-conquering-quaver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;2022&#x2F;07&#x2F;09&#x2F;th...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;TikTok-is-monitoring-all-keyboard-inputs-and-taps-on-iOS.641707.0.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notebookcheck.net&#x2F;TikTok-is-monitoring-all-keybo...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threatpost.com&#x2F;tiktok-to-stop-clipboard-snooping-after-apple-privacy-feature-exposes-behavior&#x2F;156945&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;threatpost.com&#x2F;tiktok-to-stop-clipboard-snooping-aft...</a></text></comment> |
19,797,120 | 19,796,628 | 1 | 3 | 19,795,802 | train | <story><title>Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/nasa-says-aluminum-fraud-caused-700-million-satellite-failures</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pseudolus</author><text>The deferred prosecution agreement essentially means that as long as the SEI adheres to the financial terms of the plea agreement the government will eventually drop the charges [0]. That&#x27;s an amazing deal in its generosity and I&#x27;m sure that the financial penalties levied are outweighed by the financial gain realized over the years of their fraudulent activity. The rationale for not pursuing the company for the full $700 million dollars lost escapes me. The damages were entirely foreseeable.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mololamken.com&#x2F;news-knowledge-18.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mololamken.com&#x2F;news-knowledge-18.html</a></text></item><item><author>wlkr</author><text>The linked DOJ report has far more detail [0]. On the penalties themselves:<p><i>According to court documents, SPI has agreed to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud, and SEI has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) in connection with a criminal information filed today charging the company with mail fraud. As part of the plea agreement, SPI has agreed to pay $34.1 million in combined restitution to NASA, the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and commercial customers. SPI has also agreed to forfeit $1.8 million in ill-gotten gains. The plea agreement remains subject to acceptance by the court at a plea hearing currently scheduled for May 13, 2019, before U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady. The DPA with SEI is conditioned on the court’s acceptance and SPI’s satisfaction of the plea agreement’s terms.<p>SPI also agreed to pay $34.6 million as part of a related civil settlement to resolve its liability under the False Claims Act for causing a government contractor to invoice MDA and NASA for aluminum extrusions that did not comply with contract specifications. Government contractors purchased aluminum extrusions for use on rockets for NASA and missiles provided to the MDA. Under the terms of the civil settlement agreement, SPI will satisfy the $34.6 million settlement through credits totaling $23.6 million for its restitution payments as part of the criminal plea agreement, plus additional payments of $6 million to NASA and $5 million to the MDA.</i><p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;aluminum-extrusion-manufacturer-agrees-pay-over-46-million-defrauding-customers-including" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>rationale for not pursuing the company for the full $700 million dollars lost escapes me</i><p>Satellites are usually insured. (Not sure about NASA protocol, though.) If that’s the case, the insurer will sue. Shareholder lawsuits will also, naturally, follow, as will suits from all the other customers.<p>Agree, though, that it’s shocking nobody is going to jail in relation to a fraud guilty plea.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nasa Says Metals Fraud Caused $700M Satellite Failure</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/nasa-says-aluminum-fraud-caused-700-million-satellite-failures</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pseudolus</author><text>The deferred prosecution agreement essentially means that as long as the SEI adheres to the financial terms of the plea agreement the government will eventually drop the charges [0]. That&#x27;s an amazing deal in its generosity and I&#x27;m sure that the financial penalties levied are outweighed by the financial gain realized over the years of their fraudulent activity. The rationale for not pursuing the company for the full $700 million dollars lost escapes me. The damages were entirely foreseeable.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mololamken.com&#x2F;news-knowledge-18.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mololamken.com&#x2F;news-knowledge-18.html</a></text></item><item><author>wlkr</author><text>The linked DOJ report has far more detail [0]. On the penalties themselves:<p><i>According to court documents, SPI has agreed to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud, and SEI has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) in connection with a criminal information filed today charging the company with mail fraud. As part of the plea agreement, SPI has agreed to pay $34.1 million in combined restitution to NASA, the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and commercial customers. SPI has also agreed to forfeit $1.8 million in ill-gotten gains. The plea agreement remains subject to acceptance by the court at a plea hearing currently scheduled for May 13, 2019, before U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady. The DPA with SEI is conditioned on the court’s acceptance and SPI’s satisfaction of the plea agreement’s terms.<p>SPI also agreed to pay $34.6 million as part of a related civil settlement to resolve its liability under the False Claims Act for causing a government contractor to invoice MDA and NASA for aluminum extrusions that did not comply with contract specifications. Government contractors purchased aluminum extrusions for use on rockets for NASA and missiles provided to the MDA. Under the terms of the civil settlement agreement, SPI will satisfy the $34.6 million settlement through credits totaling $23.6 million for its restitution payments as part of the criminal plea agreement, plus additional payments of $6 million to NASA and $5 million to the MDA.</i><p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;aluminum-extrusion-manufacturer-agrees-pay-over-46-million-defrauding-customers-including" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;aluminum-extrusion-manufactur...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brianpgordon</author><text>This is a worthwhile book that might help clear up some of your bewilderment at why corporate crime cases so often turn out so unsatisfactorily.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute-Executives&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1501121367" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Chickenshit-Club-Department-Prosecute...</a><p>My personal TL;DR from a couple of years ago if you don&#x27;t have the time to read the book:<p>- It&#x27;s very hard for prosecutors to secure a criminal conviction even in the most blatant cases of wrongdoing.<p>- Prosecutors care too much about their win rate to risk trials.<p>- Prosecutors have fallen into a trap where they&#x27;re so dependent on the policy of offering generous non-prosecution or deferred-prosecution agreements if the company comes forward and volunteers evidence, they&#x27;ve become incapable of actually executing on a complex criminal investigation anymore.<p>- There&#x27;s intense political pressure to not punish shareholders for management&#x27;s misdeeds.</text></comment> |
20,146,933 | 20,146,806 | 1 | 2 | 20,145,704 | train | <story><title>Always Own Your Platform</title><url>http://alwaysownyourplatform.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xwdv</author><text>No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform.<p>The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coding123</author><text>Why give the platform all that seo. In the long past era we used to have a bunch of random webshops. Now sellers can barely survive unless they are on Etsy eBay or Amazon. We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn&#x27;t.</text></comment> | <story><title>Always Own Your Platform</title><url>http://alwaysownyourplatform.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xwdv</author><text>No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform.<p>The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimktrains2</author><text>&gt; The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario.<p>Especially if you&#x27;ve built a business around a SaaS this is fairly impossible&#x2F;difficult to do unless you don&#x27;t embrace the features that set the SaaS apart, in which case, why bother with the SaaS at all.<p>I&#x27;m always an advocate for in-house control of any system that can&#x27;t be abandoned in a week.</text></comment> |
8,091,448 | 8,091,488 | 1 | 2 | 8,090,996 | train | <story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acomjean</author><text>Legalize it,<p>But there are some real issues to be worked out, as someone who had a friend sent to hospital after being hit by a stoned driver who blew through a stop sign. Whats the legal limit?<p>I&#x27;m not sure how easy it is to detect if someone is &quot;under the influence&quot; as the drug is detectable for weeks in the blood (in this case the join was in the car).</text></item><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&#x27;t understand it&#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lostcolony</author><text>We already have this situation with prescription drugs. I agree it should be worked out, but failure to do so is not in itself a problem; same with prescription drugs, while there&#x27;s a lot of ambiguity around when a person is under the influence, as it were, it just makes it so arrests have to be for actual occurrences. Reckless driving, or an accident caused by it. As you mention yourself, the driver ran a stop sign; all the marijuana does is add an additional offense, it&#x27;s not like the driver walks scot free because the system is unable to respond to his drug usage.</text></comment> | <story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acomjean</author><text>Legalize it,<p>But there are some real issues to be worked out, as someone who had a friend sent to hospital after being hit by a stoned driver who blew through a stop sign. Whats the legal limit?<p>I&#x27;m not sure how easy it is to detect if someone is &quot;under the influence&quot; as the drug is detectable for weeks in the blood (in this case the join was in the car).</text></item><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&#x27;t understand it&#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djur</author><text>Legal limits for alcohol are pretty arbitrary. Someone who&#x27;s driving way over the limit isn&#x27;t going to get caught unless they&#x27;re driving dangerously anyway.</text></comment> |
33,646,412 | 33,643,002 | 1 | 3 | 33,639,860 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?</title><text>It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists&#x2F;fans&#x2F;venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?<p>The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;the-ticket-fairy</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y &lt; X) to the venue.<p>It&#x27;s essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of &quot;being the asshole&quot; to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the &quot;processing fees&quot;.<p>If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You&#x27;ll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you&#x27;ll get actual physical tickets.<p>Sure this doesn&#x27;t work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Justsignedup</author><text>So much this. And just to add, any startup that even attempts this, EVEN WITH 100% ARTIST SUPPORT, cannot work out because venues have the exclusivity contracts.<p>And worse, you can&#x27;t split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don&#x27;t have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.<p>Basically the only way for this to work is:<p>a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating<p>b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don&#x27;t care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.<p>c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets<p>This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It&#x27;ll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you&#x27;d be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.<p>And don&#x27;t forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you&#x27;ll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.<p>Its a perfect monopoly field.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?</title><text>It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists&#x2F;fans&#x2F;venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?<p>The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;the-ticket-fairy</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y &lt; X) to the venue.<p>It&#x27;s essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of &quot;being the asshole&quot; to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the &quot;processing fees&quot;.<p>If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You&#x27;ll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you&#x27;ll get actual physical tickets.<p>Sure this doesn&#x27;t work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idunno246</author><text>You still get hit with fees at the door in my experience. Considering most venues bigger than a bar are owned by livenation which is the same company as Ticketmaster…</text></comment> |
12,508,197 | 12,508,062 | 1 | 2 | 12,507,534 | train | <story><title>Making ASP.NET apps first-class citizens on Google Cloud Platform</title><url>https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/making-ASP.NET-apps-first-class-citizens-on-Google-Cloud-Platform.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blackoil</author><text>If MS plays its cards well, .NET can take a decent marketshare from of Java. C# as a language seems more polished and friendly then Java&#x2F;Scala. MS has some of the best compiler&#x2F;language folks in industry. Next couple of years should be interesting, with .net core, VSC, typescript and all OSS, lets see if MS is able to capture any developer mindshare.</text></comment> | <story><title>Making ASP.NET apps first-class citizens on Google Cloud Platform</title><url>https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/08/making-ASP.NET-apps-first-class-citizens-on-Google-Cloud-Platform.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slap_shot</author><text>I just finished a project on Azure and am now doing a project on Google Cloud. I&#x27;ve been blown away by the documentation and user experience. It&#x27;s by far my favorite between AWS, Azure, and GCP.<p>Glad to see Windows VMs are now supported. Any intention to add C# drivers for the services, namely Pub&#x2F;Sub?</text></comment> |
15,298,266 | 15,298,447 | 1 | 2 | 15,294,171 | train | <story><title>A new kind of map: it’s about time</title><url>https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-kind-of-map-its-about-time-7bd9f7916f7f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chippy</author><text>As a geographer I cringed. The article was written in a way that made it sound a bit more important than it actually is, and I think that quote was one of it. A designer finding geography and cartography for the first time. It IS good stuff though. Maybe the writing is stylised and maybe not as humble as usual techy writing?<p>People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. &quot;Pizza in San Francisco&quot; has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.<p>Now - this doesn&#x27;t discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn&#x27;t good, so any research and attempt to think about what&#x27;s good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.</text></item><item><author>nerdponx</author><text><i>By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.”</i><p>Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bllguo</author><text>I don&#x27;t see the article arguing that all maps should be replaced with this visualization. It&#x27;s a much better map for certain tasks. Of course you lose information by throwing out geography.</text></comment> | <story><title>A new kind of map: it’s about time</title><url>https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-kind-of-map-its-about-time-7bd9f7916f7f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chippy</author><text>As a geographer I cringed. The article was written in a way that made it sound a bit more important than it actually is, and I think that quote was one of it. A designer finding geography and cartography for the first time. It IS good stuff though. Maybe the writing is stylised and maybe not as humble as usual techy writing?<p>People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. &quot;Pizza in San Francisco&quot; has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.<p>Now - this doesn&#x27;t discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn&#x27;t good, so any research and attempt to think about what&#x27;s good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.</text></item><item><author>nerdponx</author><text><i>By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.”</i><p>Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Boothroid</author><text>I agree. I&#x27;m becoming slightly irritated by blog posts that claim something as new that appears to be either nil improvement or minor increment from what has gone before. This isn&#x27;t the first or the second time I&#x27;ve seen it from MapBox, and I&#x27;m now sceptical of what they seem to claiming as real breakthroughs. There are thousands of researchers involved in geo worldwide - every time I dip into a journal I am humbled by the progress that is being made and the depth of the research that is being performed. Are we really to believe that MapBox are finding things that the global research community have missed? I suspect HN is a ready audience as most users do not have a formal education in geo.</text></comment> |
29,510,205 | 29,509,559 | 1 | 3 | 29,508,208 | train | <story><title>The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headmelted</author><text>Just played through this on PS5 on a decent OLED. It does not look like this video.<p>It&#x27;s impressive, but I&#x27;m skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere.<p>It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it&#x27;s PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall.<p>Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video.<p>EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It&#x27;s clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it&#x27;s not <i>that</i> far away from where it would need to be. And when it&#x27;s not struggling with jaggies&#x2F;framerate it&#x27;s pretty jaw-dropping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darkteflon</author><text>I also just played this through on a PS5 and an OLED and was blown away. Don’t think I’ve ever been so impressed with a virtual world before.<p>The moment that drove it home for me was flying up into the sky, striking out in a random direction, flying to the roof of a building and zooming right up to a cluster of pipes and seeing individual rivets accurately modelled. All of this, for a 10 minute demo.<p>This is a staggering achievement, by all accounts made possible by some pretty amazing new tooling. Genuinely baffled that anyone could fail to be impressed by this.<p>Edit: don’t forget to open up the menu and play around with the lighting, crowd, AI settings, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headmelted</author><text>Just played through this on PS5 on a decent OLED. It does not look like this video.<p>It&#x27;s impressive, but I&#x27;m skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere.<p>It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it&#x27;s PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall.<p>Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video.<p>EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It&#x27;s clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it&#x27;s not <i>that</i> far away from where it would need to be. And when it&#x27;s not struggling with jaggies&#x2F;framerate it&#x27;s pretty jaw-dropping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>somebee</author><text>I played through it myself and tbh I think the video doesn&#x27;t do it justice. I haven&#x27;t been this blown away in years. Until I got to take over the controls I was utterly convinced there had to be pre-rendered video thrown into the mix.<p>If you have a compatible console I&#x27;d really recommend checking it out!</text></comment> |
32,358,545 | 32,358,736 | 1 | 2 | 32,357,470 | train | <story><title>DreamWorks Animation to release MoonRay as open source</title><url>https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miohtama</author><text>Would be interesting to know what business considerations lead to the decision to open source MoonRay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thebeardisred</author><text>DreamWorks Animation (aka DWA) is a huge advocate of open source.<p>Over the years they&#x27;ve bankrolled a lot of development around Linux on the desktop and have one of the most astonishing NFS infrastructures I&#x27;ve ever directly layed hands on.<p>They&#x27;ve talked about their love of open source over the years, especially at Red Hat summit.<p>(I spent quite a bit of time working with them and their former CTO is currently a teammate of mine).</text></comment> | <story><title>DreamWorks Animation to release MoonRay as open source</title><url>https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miohtama</author><text>Would be interesting to know what business considerations lead to the decision to open source MoonRay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>There is a lot of staffing churn in the film world and many films are built by farming out work to dozens of separate VFX studios.<p>I speculate that having this open source increases its popularity, which makes more likely that any given potential hire or VFX company will have experience with it, which makes it easier for DreamWorks to ramp up new hires or contract out to third party companies.<p>When I was at EA, we switched from a proprietary UI tool (which was quite well suited for consoles) to Flash (which wasn&#x27;t) entirely because it eased staffing problems even though the technology itself was a worse fit. The best tool is often the one that people you can hire already know.</text></comment> |
5,164,025 | 5,163,933 | 1 | 2 | 5,162,341 | train | <story><title>"Most of you steal your software"</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jscheel</author><text>It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how many people try to justify theft. Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.<p>Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard work.<p>It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what you have done.</text></comment> | <story><title>"Most of you steal your software"</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moccajoghurt</author><text>Don't review the letter from today's perspective.<p>Bill Gates didn't know that his work will spread over the world and he will become one of the richest persons alive.<p>He didn't know that there will be a huge open source community in the future, where it is normal to develop software for free.<p>All he knew is that he was working fulltime on something for three years and wasn't payed for it.<p>For me this letter is just a snapshot of the past with an understandable point of view.</text></comment> |
10,545,466 | 10,545,416 | 1 | 2 | 10,545,143 | train | <story><title>Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X</title><url>http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2015-11-10-osx-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stinos</author><text><i>Xcode isn’t too bad.</i><p>I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I&#x27;ve always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn&#x27;t deal with it even though I tried. I don&#x27;t remember all details but in general it just felt inferior to VS on like all fronts, with no advantages of any kind (for C++). Again, IIRC, but it did annoying things like opening the same document in multiple windows, one for editing and one for debugging or so? Anyway, what&#x27;s the state today?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lordnacho</author><text>I&#x27;m using both every day at the moment.<p>- I don&#x27;t spend a lot of time setting up the IDE, so it&#x27;s important the defaults are sensible. For instance, it might be possible to change this, but XCode&#x27;s code completion seems to be less useful than VC2015. I really need it to be near immediate, and I also need it to check string that may appear in the middle of a function name instead of just the start. Especially since NS libraries have strange and long names for things. As I&#x27;m writing this, I just found out you can have tabs in XCode. Why isn&#x27;t that a default?<p>- XCode crashes maybe once or twice a week for me. VC doesn&#x27;t.<p>- Unspecific weird things happen in XCode way more than VC. For instance I was unable to see variable values in XCode for a while. Eats up my time looking it up. Hasn&#x27;t happened to me on VC yet.<p>- XCode is highly integrated with the Apple environment. You can build stuff for the app store and send it right there.<p>- XCode has a less than complete Git integration. You need a bit more detail than what it gives you. I use SourceTree anyway, but it might matter for some people.<p>- Compile times are hard to compare, as I&#x27;m doing different things on the two environments. VC2015 is definitely a lot faster than a few years ago though.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows game developer about porting to and using OS X</title><url>http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2015-11-10-osx-progress/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stinos</author><text><i>Xcode isn’t too bad.</i><p>I wish the author told me more about it than just this. Can somebody comment on how it compares to recent VS editions these days? About 5 years ago I also looked into using OSX as main OS. As I&#x27;ve always been using non-commandline graphic text editors and IDEs for most coding that made XCode the go-to environment but I just couldn&#x27;t deal with it even though I tried. I don&#x27;t remember all details but in general it just felt inferior to VS on like all fronts, with no advantages of any kind (for C++). Again, IIRC, but it did annoying things like opening the same document in multiple windows, one for editing and one for debugging or so? Anyway, what&#x27;s the state today?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flohofwoe</author><text>I use both VS and Xcode daily. Once you get over the initial &quot;gee this thing looks like iTunes&quot; shock and get used to a few small annoyances, Xcode is quite ok to work with. Keyboard shortcuts and source file navigation are completely different to anything else though, once you get used to it, it works well though.<p>Where Xcode is better than Visual Studio for C&#x2F;C++ dev (IMHO of course):<p>- C++ compiling and linking is easily 5x..10x faster out of the box than Visual Studio thanks to clang<p>- the static analyzer has a really nice &#x27;arrow&#x27;-visualization of the steps that lead to the warning<p>- clang provides more useful error messages<p>- compiler warnings and errors are directly overlaid into the text editor view<p>- built-in support for clang address sanitizer (just a checkbox to tick)<p>- support for iOS development is really slick<p>- better out-of-the-box support for command line builds either through xcodebuild or the gcc-compatible toolchain<p>- Xcode comes with a lot of profiling and analysis tools where Visual Studio has only slowly caught up (but VS2015 seems to be mostly on par).<p>Where Xcode falls behind compared to VS:<p>- Xcode has that strange &#x27;Scheme&#x27; feature for build configuration<p>- the debugger&#x27;s variable inspection has usability issues<p>- working on source files with a couple thousand lines of code feels laggy<p>- before El Capitan, the whole UI felt slow on a Retina MBP, but I guess that&#x27;s because of general optimizations in the OS<p>- it crashes or freezes about once or twice a week on me<p>- probably a number of smaller ignorances which I have learned to ignore<p>I usually don&#x27;t touch any of the UI builder tools in both IDEs, only straight C and C++ stuff so I can&#x27;t comment on the more platform-specific features.<p>[edit: formatting]</text></comment> |
16,008,533 | 16,008,626 | 1 | 3 | 16,000,895 | train | <story><title>Reviving the Apple 410 Color Plotter</title><url>https://www.nycresistor.com/2017/12/13/reviving-the-apple-410-color-plotter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matthewwiese</author><text>Great and simple write-up. Vaguely remembered nycresistor from other articles I&#x27;ve read, so I&#x27;m glad this was posted here.<p>I think HN would be well served to have more front page retro hardware hacking articles. They may not be useful in the same way as other posts, but they sure as heck are delicious brain food and a relaxing diversion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reviving the Apple 410 Color Plotter</title><url>https://www.nycresistor.com/2017/12/13/reviving-the-apple-410-color-plotter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>imglorp</author><text>Since OP mentioned the nice big HP x,y plotters, that reminds me I once wrote an emacs lisp HPGL driver to hit the serial port and run one in grad school. I&#x27;ll have to dig it up sometime.<p>Edit, just remembered: it was probably to output one of the VLSI CAD layer formats, like GDS or EDIF.</text></comment> |
7,980,013 | 7,980,122 | 1 | 2 | 7,979,847 | train | <story><title>Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forgotten-woman-whitney-wolfe-sexism-and-startup-creation-myths</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>The &quot;Tinderslut&quot;[1] comment says a lot about how Rad and Mateen view the women who use their app. It&#x27;s consistent with Wolfe&#x27;s claim in her complaint that Mateen told her it would be &quot;slutty&quot; to be a female Tinder co-founder, because it was an app people used to hook up.<p>As an aside, Mateen exhibits the textbook Madonna-whore dichotomy. To him, women are either someone he can see being a wife (Wolfe pre-breakup), or a whore&#x2F;bimbo&#x2F;slut (the women on his Instagram feed). When she rejected him, in classic fashion she went from the former bucket to the latter. This is a case study for a gender-studies paper.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tinderslut" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.urbandictionary.com&#x2F;define.php?term=Tinderslut</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forgotten-woman-whitney-wolfe-sexism-and-startup-creation-myths</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dbloom</author><text>It&#x27;s ironic that Mr. Rad went to such great lengths to keep his friend Mr. Mateen from facing the consequences of his behavior for so long. Because by putting his friend above his company, he ended up hurting both even more.<p>If Rad had just forced his friend Mateen to resign earlier on for &quot;creative differences&quot; before his behavior got out of hand, everyone -- including Mateen! -- would have been strictly better off.<p>And this definitely isn&#x27;t the first time that this has happened (Rap Genius, and I&#x27;m sure there are others too...)<p>TL;DR: Do your sexist, racist friends a favor by getting them out of your workplace.<p>(By the way, to be clear, I don&#x27;t feel bad for any of these guys. They deserved what happened. But this sort of thing really shouldn&#x27;t be happening again, and again, and again...)</text></comment> |
11,157,783 | 11,157,509 | 1 | 3 | 11,150,314 | train | <story><title>Caterpillar's new smartphone with built-in thermal imaging</title><url>http://gizmodo.com/caterpillars-new-s60-is-the-first-smartphone-with-flir-1759685817?sf44639276=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>verytrivial</author><text>This is perhaps the first actually interesting sensor&#x2F;add-on I&#x27;ve seen for a phone. I&#x27;m picturing myself running around the outside of my house looking for hot-spots to re-insulate and hence justify to my partner the purchase price of the device. Or hot electronic components. Or playing a TSA creep and looking for ill people on public transport. What fun! (I hope other manufacturer&#x27;s race in to this market.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Caterpillar's new smartphone with built-in thermal imaging</title><url>http://gizmodo.com/caterpillars-new-s60-is-the-first-smartphone-with-flir-1759685817?sf44639276=1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JorgeGT</author><text>For any makers out there, remember that FLIR sells a dev kit with their Lepton sensor (the one used in this phone). So if you are interested in IR applications you can create them yourself: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparkfun.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;13233" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparkfun.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;13233</a></text></comment> |
2,846,602 | 2,846,339 | 1 | 2 | 2,845,946 | train | <story><title>$1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet</title><url>http://www.fastcompany.com/1770850/the-10-cent-plastic-chip-that-quickly-detect-hiv-syphilis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikarous</author><text>I really doubt the "no human interpretation" part of the Engadget article. I've been involved in HIV education as part of the gay community, and this sort of kit worries me greatly. If the test is an antibody based test, then it could do far more harm than good by giving uneducated users a false sense of security: a negative result does <i>not</i> mean that you don't have HIV.<p>While I'm sure that everyone on HN understands the seroconversion window period, this is simply not the case in the larger community. Ignorance about HIV is widespread. I cannot even begin to count the number of people who believe that pulling out before ejaculating affords some sort of magical protection from the virus. These are the same people who upon seeing a negative result would assume that they're safe without condoms.<p>The CDC states that the window period for detectable HIV antibody formation is three months; however, this figure is based on first generation HIV tests and is considered somewhat conservative. Public health experts like H. Hunter Handsfield state that detectable antibodies usually form in four to six weeks.<p>Whatever figure you choose to believe, it's a pretty significant time period. And it's a <i>deadly</i> one. It's during the window period that an HIV infected person is most infectious. Their viral loads are off the chart and they can unknowingly infect multiple people in a short period of time.<p>The "cure" for HIV is the same as it has always been: education and safer sex practices. HIV is largely a preventable disease. I would be okay with personal test kits if they were bundled with extremely clear educational packets printed in multiple languages. But this particular kit is advertised too much like a silver bullet to assure me that the manufacturers are anywhere near that responsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>"HIV is largely a preventable disease."<p>Except when the government is responsible for spreading the disease. 50% of all new infections come from intravenous drug use, and an even larger percentage are secondary to drug users. If you're gay then it's not illegal to use condoms, but if you're a heroin user then you can literally get put in jail for trying to use clean needles.<p>What's more, many black communities in the US have higher HIV rates than sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Because so many black males are in prison that it completely changes the sexual dynamics for everyone left on the outside. And further, many of those in prison contract the virus and then end up spreading it throughout the larger community once they get released.</text></comment> | <story><title>$1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet</title><url>http://www.fastcompany.com/1770850/the-10-cent-plastic-chip-that-quickly-detect-hiv-syphilis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikarous</author><text>I really doubt the "no human interpretation" part of the Engadget article. I've been involved in HIV education as part of the gay community, and this sort of kit worries me greatly. If the test is an antibody based test, then it could do far more harm than good by giving uneducated users a false sense of security: a negative result does <i>not</i> mean that you don't have HIV.<p>While I'm sure that everyone on HN understands the seroconversion window period, this is simply not the case in the larger community. Ignorance about HIV is widespread. I cannot even begin to count the number of people who believe that pulling out before ejaculating affords some sort of magical protection from the virus. These are the same people who upon seeing a negative result would assume that they're safe without condoms.<p>The CDC states that the window period for detectable HIV antibody formation is three months; however, this figure is based on first generation HIV tests and is considered somewhat conservative. Public health experts like H. Hunter Handsfield state that detectable antibodies usually form in four to six weeks.<p>Whatever figure you choose to believe, it's a pretty significant time period. And it's a <i>deadly</i> one. It's during the window period that an HIV infected person is most infectious. Their viral loads are off the chart and they can unknowingly infect multiple people in a short period of time.<p>The "cure" for HIV is the same as it has always been: education and safer sex practices. HIV is largely a preventable disease. I would be okay with personal test kits if they were bundled with extremely clear educational packets printed in multiple languages. But this particular kit is advertised too much like a silver bullet to assure me that the manufacturers are anywhere near that responsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carbocation</author><text>It's not good public health to deny information to everyone because some people will misuse said information.<p>While the linked rag's piece is sensationalized, the Nature Medicine article on this device is more useful. <a href="http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2408.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.2408....</a></text></comment> |
12,900,588 | 12,900,042 | 1 | 3 | 12,898,257 | train | <story><title>America has never had so much TV, and even Hollywood is overwhelmed</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/11/07/america-has-never-had-so-much-tv-and-even-hollywood-is-overwhelmed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matwood</author><text>It would be interesting to know how many people subscribe and unsubscribe to Netflix for a single show. I tend to think it is a small minority, but without numbers it is hard to know.<p>Also, the up front production costs do not need to be recaptured on first watching. The 90M to produce Marco Polo creates and asset that can be sold, traded, etc... Eventually Netflix will have so much good, custom content that a new person joining will take years to go through it all if possible. What we are watching now is them bootstrap that process, but it will not always be that way.</text></item><item><author>thenomad</author><text>It&#x27;s probably not quite as rosy as you state here, I&#x27;m afraid.<p>Let&#x27;s look at a 380,000 viewer show. It&#x27;s very unlikely that ever single one of those viewers paid for Netflix for a solid year just to get access to that show (which will have all its episodes released at once).<p>So let&#x27;s assume it has significant cult appeal, meaning a full 25% of its viewers are primarily subscribed for that show and things like it. (I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s likely to be very high, based on my experience in the narrative video world, but let&#x27;s be optimistic.) And let&#x27;s say, based on subscribing for that show and forgetting to cancel for a couple of months (or subsequently being retained by another 380k viewer show), that Netflix gets 3 months&#x27; worth of revenue from them.<p>So that&#x27;s 380k&#x2F;4 = 95,000 * $7.99 * 3 = $2.28m revenue attributable to that show.<p>Of the shows you mention:<p>Marco Polo cost $90m to produce for the entire season.<p>Black Mirror doesn&#x27;t have figures online, but it&#x27;ll be around $3m per episode if it&#x27;s similar to other BBC shows. So that&#x27;s $18m.<p>Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn&#x27;t have figures available, but based on Tina Fey&#x27;s fees for other shows and general knowledge of how much TV costs, I&#x27;ll guess at about $3m an episode. (Might be cheaper if they&#x27;re being clever about it, so could be as low as $2m) So that&#x27;s $39m.<p>So, assuming that Netflix are just getting revenue from retained subscribers, and they get the figures above, we&#x27;re looking at losses of:<p>$88m for Marco Polo.<p>$16m for Black Mirror.<p>$37m for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.<p>Obviously the situation is far more complex than that - they&#x27;ll be financing with coproduction deals, they&#x27;re looking for growth rather than revenue, they also acquire a lot of content cheaply (very, very cheaply in some cases) through licensing - but it&#x27;s certainly not rosy enough that they&#x27;ll be happy with 380k viewers for shows they&#x27;re making.</text></item><item><author>Throwaway23412</author><text>&gt;The networks are gambling big in a risky industry where only the most prominent shows survive. While top-rated hits can garner millions of viewers, FX research found that the bottom 20 percent of shows averaged around 380,000 viewers, a daunting prospect for networks that depend on big audiences for ad revenue.<p>Only the prominent shows survive in the ads business model that currently governs these networks. If an Amazon or Netflix show gets 380,000 viewers and this show convinces the majority of those viewers to keep their subscription, then the respective streaming giant has already accomplished their goal. That&#x27;s another $3.8M (or whatever the average subscription amount is) in monthly subscription revenue. They&#x27;re not beholden to advertisers. A typical &quot;Black Mirror&quot; viewer might not overlap with a typical &quot;Marco Polo&quot; viewer or a typical &quot;Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt&quot; viewer, but, as long as each viewer has a reason to stay subscribed, Netflix doesn&#x27;t care if said shows were to have a low average number of viewers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thenomad</author><text>Yes, usually you&#x27;d have to consider syndication rights, DVD sales, merch, etc when looking at a show&#x27;s overall profitability.<p>OTOH, it would appear in many cases those rights aren&#x27;t going to Netflix directly. See<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;comcast-bites-netflix-snagging-big-show&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;comcast-bites-netflix-snagging...</a><p>, for example.<p>(Of course, this is how Netflix is getting so many shows made - they&#x27;re trading those rights to the production company in exchange for not footing the entire production cost.)<p>It&#x27;s worth noting, though, that those will scale strongly with the initial success of the show. Breaking Bad DVD sales were huge. The sales of DVDs of, say, &quot;Alphas&quot; on Sci-Fi will not be nearly as impressive.<p>As for subscribe numbers - I don&#x27;t have hard figures, but based on years of persuading people to watch video-based narrative content I&#x27;d guess 5% of total viewers for a weak show, 10% for a strong show or one that&#x27;s capturing a new audience, 18% for one that&#x27;s both very strong and targeted at a radically new audience. Occasional outliers like Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones will probably provide higher capture for the subscription services showing them, but they&#x27;re 1-3 times a decade phenomena.</text></comment> | <story><title>America has never had so much TV, and even Hollywood is overwhelmed</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/11/07/america-has-never-had-so-much-tv-and-even-hollywood-is-overwhelmed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matwood</author><text>It would be interesting to know how many people subscribe and unsubscribe to Netflix for a single show. I tend to think it is a small minority, but without numbers it is hard to know.<p>Also, the up front production costs do not need to be recaptured on first watching. The 90M to produce Marco Polo creates and asset that can be sold, traded, etc... Eventually Netflix will have so much good, custom content that a new person joining will take years to go through it all if possible. What we are watching now is them bootstrap that process, but it will not always be that way.</text></item><item><author>thenomad</author><text>It&#x27;s probably not quite as rosy as you state here, I&#x27;m afraid.<p>Let&#x27;s look at a 380,000 viewer show. It&#x27;s very unlikely that ever single one of those viewers paid for Netflix for a solid year just to get access to that show (which will have all its episodes released at once).<p>So let&#x27;s assume it has significant cult appeal, meaning a full 25% of its viewers are primarily subscribed for that show and things like it. (I&#x27;d say that&#x27;s likely to be very high, based on my experience in the narrative video world, but let&#x27;s be optimistic.) And let&#x27;s say, based on subscribing for that show and forgetting to cancel for a couple of months (or subsequently being retained by another 380k viewer show), that Netflix gets 3 months&#x27; worth of revenue from them.<p>So that&#x27;s 380k&#x2F;4 = 95,000 * $7.99 * 3 = $2.28m revenue attributable to that show.<p>Of the shows you mention:<p>Marco Polo cost $90m to produce for the entire season.<p>Black Mirror doesn&#x27;t have figures online, but it&#x27;ll be around $3m per episode if it&#x27;s similar to other BBC shows. So that&#x27;s $18m.<p>Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn&#x27;t have figures available, but based on Tina Fey&#x27;s fees for other shows and general knowledge of how much TV costs, I&#x27;ll guess at about $3m an episode. (Might be cheaper if they&#x27;re being clever about it, so could be as low as $2m) So that&#x27;s $39m.<p>So, assuming that Netflix are just getting revenue from retained subscribers, and they get the figures above, we&#x27;re looking at losses of:<p>$88m for Marco Polo.<p>$16m for Black Mirror.<p>$37m for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.<p>Obviously the situation is far more complex than that - they&#x27;ll be financing with coproduction deals, they&#x27;re looking for growth rather than revenue, they also acquire a lot of content cheaply (very, very cheaply in some cases) through licensing - but it&#x27;s certainly not rosy enough that they&#x27;ll be happy with 380k viewers for shows they&#x27;re making.</text></item><item><author>Throwaway23412</author><text>&gt;The networks are gambling big in a risky industry where only the most prominent shows survive. While top-rated hits can garner millions of viewers, FX research found that the bottom 20 percent of shows averaged around 380,000 viewers, a daunting prospect for networks that depend on big audiences for ad revenue.<p>Only the prominent shows survive in the ads business model that currently governs these networks. If an Amazon or Netflix show gets 380,000 viewers and this show convinces the majority of those viewers to keep their subscription, then the respective streaming giant has already accomplished their goal. That&#x27;s another $3.8M (or whatever the average subscription amount is) in monthly subscription revenue. They&#x27;re not beholden to advertisers. A typical &quot;Black Mirror&quot; viewer might not overlap with a typical &quot;Marco Polo&quot; viewer or a typical &quot;Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt&quot; viewer, but, as long as each viewer has a reason to stay subscribed, Netflix doesn&#x27;t care if said shows were to have a low average number of viewers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ntrails</author><text>my &quot;to do list&quot; on netflix probably has 500 hours of television on it. That&#x27;s ignoring the random stuff I&#x27;ll see as new and just watch (eg gone girl) or the re-watching of a classic (hello breaking bad).<p>Netflix still has shitty recommendations, and annoying pushing of content I&#x27;m not interested in. But by the time I get through all the things I actually want to watch as of today I&#x27;d be amazed if there wasn&#x27;t almost as much new content. In other words I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever run out.</text></comment> |
3,001,701 | 3,001,429 | 1 | 2 | 3,001,371 | train | <story><title>Facebook and Heroku</title><url>http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/9/15/facebook/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davcro</author><text>Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products.<p>Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment.<p>Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS.<p>In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook and Heroku</title><url>http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/9/15/facebook/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>briandoll</author><text>This is pure win. The screencast on this post shows that with one click you get a deployed app (in the language you choose) that ships with an app template that uses the Facebook APIs to get you started.<p>We're witnessing a Facebook app that creates real living Facebook apps. Heroku continues to impress with insanely easy onboarding of folks new to deploying web apps, and building features the way things should work.<p>It must be amazing to start programming in the age of Heroku.</text></comment> |
20,156,107 | 20,155,950 | 1 | 2 | 20,155,098 | train | <story><title>Pylon – Declarative layout primitives for CSS and HTML</title><url>https://almonk.github.io/pylon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziroshima</author><text>I work on an older project with some folks that never got the memo about tables being evil for layout. In my experience, they&#x27;ve actually been quite easy to work with. Granted, we develop for a fixed screen width. Why were tables declared evil?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I like this, but my 20 years in web dev can&#x27;t help but chuckle. Remember when tables were declared evil for layout, so we had the shit show of trying to use CSS floats for everything, so then we added flexbox, and then grid, and here is a nice set of elements that is basically, well, somewhat less useful than tables for layout.<p>Don&#x27;t mean to bash the poster, I just think it&#x27;s interesting in the &quot;everything old is new again&quot; vain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pault</author><text>Aside from the semantic HTML movement, they&#x27;re clunky and verbose, more difficult to break up into reusable components, and table rendering is more expensive than the equivalent layouts with non-table elements and CSS (at least that was my experience last time I tried profiling a table with hundreds of rows).<p>Edit: they also have a lot of intrinsic layout behavior that can be difficult to predict once you start getting into more complex layouts than header, sidebar, and footer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pylon – Declarative layout primitives for CSS and HTML</title><url>https://almonk.github.io/pylon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ziroshima</author><text>I work on an older project with some folks that never got the memo about tables being evil for layout. In my experience, they&#x27;ve actually been quite easy to work with. Granted, we develop for a fixed screen width. Why were tables declared evil?</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I like this, but my 20 years in web dev can&#x27;t help but chuckle. Remember when tables were declared evil for layout, so we had the shit show of trying to use CSS floats for everything, so then we added flexbox, and then grid, and here is a nice set of elements that is basically, well, somewhat less useful than tables for layout.<p>Don&#x27;t mean to bash the poster, I just think it&#x27;s interesting in the &quot;everything old is new again&quot; vain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wishinghand</author><text>They didn’t flex like flexbox. When smaller laptop screens and eventually mobile devices appeared on the scene, tables would often extend past the screen’s boundaries.</text></comment> |
18,527,674 | 18,527,751 | 1 | 3 | 18,526,090 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Online banks where I can open account worldwide?</title><text>I travel to exotic countries to live and work remotely. If suddenly my credit card is blocked or stolen, are there any online banks where I can open an account and order a card by post to anywhere in the world, confirming my identity online?<p>For example, there are several banks which allows me to open a bank account without German registration and no non-residence, being in Germany. Unfortunately, they send cards only to a limited number of European countries. Even if they are ok with my passport I have to ask somebody to receive my card and send it directly to me.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Wow, I can’t even comprehend that much hassle to report a card stolen. American Express will deactivate my card and overnight me a new one in 5 minutes on the phone with customer service.</text></item><item><author>joshuatalb</author><text>Whilst I recommend Revolut, be wary of the support. My card was stolen and I noticed that there had been several transactions on it, meaning somebody had been using it. Fortunately I have the push notifications turned on so I was alerted almost instantly.<p>When I got in touch with Revolut support, they needed a paper copy of the police report, along with several other documents from places such as ActionFraud (an organisation set up here in the UK to exclusively tackle fraud).<p>The police report took 2 hours to file, followed by a 2 week delay by Revolut to actually verify the claim and process the refund. Now, any other “bank” I’ve been with here will always refund you the money first and then resolve later.<p>This isn’t necessarily a criticism of Revolut, as I still use them very frequently but just a word of advice in case you’re used to the process, as I was.</text></item><item><author>orf</author><text>Revolut[1] seems perfect, I cannot recommend them enough. With their premium plan you get 1% cashback on all card purchases outside the EU as well. The support is great, if your card gets cloned or something.<p>You also can fluidly and transparently transfer between all different currencies at the interbank rate, which I find is great for travelling back home (Most of my cash is in Euros).<p>They are really, really good.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tudorconstantin</author><text>You can deactivate any Revolut card from your mobile app instantly (don&#x27;t even have to call them).<p>What parent commenter was complaining about were the cumbersome procedures for refunds of fraudulent transactions. Given the worldwide distribution of their customers and the online only interactions with them, seem justified IMO.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Online banks where I can open account worldwide?</title><text>I travel to exotic countries to live and work remotely. If suddenly my credit card is blocked or stolen, are there any online banks where I can open an account and order a card by post to anywhere in the world, confirming my identity online?<p>For example, there are several banks which allows me to open a bank account without German registration and no non-residence, being in Germany. Unfortunately, they send cards only to a limited number of European countries. Even if they are ok with my passport I have to ask somebody to receive my card and send it directly to me.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Wow, I can’t even comprehend that much hassle to report a card stolen. American Express will deactivate my card and overnight me a new one in 5 minutes on the phone with customer service.</text></item><item><author>joshuatalb</author><text>Whilst I recommend Revolut, be wary of the support. My card was stolen and I noticed that there had been several transactions on it, meaning somebody had been using it. Fortunately I have the push notifications turned on so I was alerted almost instantly.<p>When I got in touch with Revolut support, they needed a paper copy of the police report, along with several other documents from places such as ActionFraud (an organisation set up here in the UK to exclusively tackle fraud).<p>The police report took 2 hours to file, followed by a 2 week delay by Revolut to actually verify the claim and process the refund. Now, any other “bank” I’ve been with here will always refund you the money first and then resolve later.<p>This isn’t necessarily a criticism of Revolut, as I still use them very frequently but just a word of advice in case you’re used to the process, as I was.</text></item><item><author>orf</author><text>Revolut[1] seems perfect, I cannot recommend them enough. With their premium plan you get 1% cashback on all card purchases outside the EU as well. The support is great, if your card gets cloned or something.<p>You also can fluidly and transparently transfer between all different currencies at the interbank rate, which I find is great for travelling back home (Most of my cash is in Euros).<p>They are really, really good.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.revolut.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshuatalb</author><text>Reporting the card stolen is hassle-free and can be done from the app instantly. It&#x27;s just the process to get the money refunded and back in my account.</text></comment> |
18,327,178 | 18,326,338 | 1 | 2 | 18,323,938 | train | <story><title>The Linux Kernel Is Now VLA (Variable-Length Array) Free</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kills-The-VLA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enriquto</author><text>Yeah, VLA is one of my favorite features in C. I would love if it was viable to use them for arbitrarily large temporary arrays. They lead to much cleaner code. Instead of<p><pre><code> {
float *x = malloc(n * sizeof*x);
...
free(x);
}
</code></pre>
you do simply<p><pre><code> {
float x[n];
...
}
</code></pre>
In image processing, you often need large temporary images, but it is dangerous to distribute code such as the above unless you play with the stack limits from outside your program.</text></item><item><author>int_19h</author><text>I&#x27;m actually kinda sad that VLAs didn&#x27;t work out in general (they have been downgraded to an optional feature in the latest C standards). For all the downsides, they make working with matrices in C much easier.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rwmj</author><text>It&#x27;s non-standard (although we have tried to get it added to the next Cxx standard) but you can use __attribute__((cleanup)) here. In systemd code it is common to write this as:<p><pre><code> _cleanup_free_ float *x = malloc (...);
</code></pre>
Since cleanups are supported by both GCC and Clang it&#x27;s not a real problem to use them on Linux, BSD and MacOS. We recently added them to libvirt, have used them in libguestfs for a long time, and as I mention above they are used in systemd for years. They are also applicable to many other cases such as automatically closing files at the end of the current scope.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Linux Kernel Is Now VLA (Variable-Length Array) Free</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kills-The-VLA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>enriquto</author><text>Yeah, VLA is one of my favorite features in C. I would love if it was viable to use them for arbitrarily large temporary arrays. They lead to much cleaner code. Instead of<p><pre><code> {
float *x = malloc(n * sizeof*x);
...
free(x);
}
</code></pre>
you do simply<p><pre><code> {
float x[n];
...
}
</code></pre>
In image processing, you often need large temporary images, but it is dangerous to distribute code such as the above unless you play with the stack limits from outside your program.</text></item><item><author>int_19h</author><text>I&#x27;m actually kinda sad that VLAs didn&#x27;t work out in general (they have been downgraded to an optional feature in the latest C standards). For all the downsides, they make working with matrices in C much easier.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dzdt</author><text>Its unfortunate that C and C++ kept the mindset that automatically memory managed variables are stored on a SMALL stack, with the consequence of exceeding that small and unknown size being that your program crashes.<p>For variable sized arrays, there is already a bit of overhead in sizing the allocation. Would it really have been impossible to move large allocations to the heap with automatic free at exit of the scope?</text></comment> |
32,342,313 | 32,342,612 | 1 | 3 | 32,340,305 | train | <story><title>mCaptcha – Proof of work based, privacy respecting CAPTCHA system</title><url>https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>realaravinth</author><text>Thank you for your detailed response, you raise some very interesting and valid points!<p>&gt; JS engines (or even WASM) aren&#x27;t going to be as fast at this kind of work as native machine code would be<p>You are right. mCaptcha has a WASM and a JS polyfill implementations. Native code will definitely be faster than WASM but in an experiment I ran for fun[0], I discovered that the WASM was roughly 2s slower than native implementation.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s also based on the assumption that proof-of-work is going to increase the cost of doing business<p>mCaptcha is basically a rate-limiter. If an expensive endpoint(say registration: hashing + other validation is expensive) can handle 4k requests&#x2F;seconds and has mCaptcha installed, then the webmaster can force the attacker to slow down to 1 request&#x2F;second, significantly reducing the load on their server. That isn&#x27;t to say that the webmaster will be able to protect themselves against sufficiently motivated attacker who has botnets. :)<p>&gt; There&#x27;s also the risk that any challenge that&#x27;s sufficiently difficult may also make the user&#x27;s browser angry that a script is either going unresponsive or eating tons of CPU, which isn&#x27;t much different from cryptocurrency miner behavior.<p>Also correct. The trick is in finding optimum difficulty which will work for the majority of the devices. A survey to benchmark PoW performance of devices in the wild is WIP[1], which will help webmasters configure their CAPTCHA better.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mcaptcha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pow-performance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mcaptcha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pow-performance</a> Benchmarking platforms weren&#x27;t optimised for running benchmarks, kindly take it with a grain of salt. It was a bored Sunday afternoon experiment.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcaptcha&#x2F;survey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcaptcha&#x2F;survey</a><p>Full disclosure: I&#x27;m the author of mCaptcha</text></item><item><author>AbacusAvenger</author><text>I looked into doing something like this once and decided it wasn&#x27;t going to be very effective, for a few different reasons.<p>JS engines (or even WASM) aren&#x27;t going to be as fast at this kind of work as native machine code would be. Especially when you consider that libraries like OpenSSL have heavily tuned implementations of the SHA algorithms. Any bot solving a SHA-based challenge would be able to extract the challenge from the page and execute it using native machine code faster than any legitimate user&#x27;s browser could. And if you increase the difficulty of the challenge, it&#x27;s just going to punish real users running the challenge in their browser more than it would the bots.<p>It&#x27;s also based on the assumption that proof-of-work is going to increase the cost of doing business for the bots in some way and discourage their behavior. Many of the bots I was dealing with in my case were either using cloud compute services fraudulently or were running on compromised machines of unknowing people. And they tended not to care about how long it took or how high-effort the challenge was, they were very dedicated at getting past it and continuing their malicious behavior.<p>There&#x27;s also the risk that any challenge that&#x27;s sufficiently difficult may also make the user&#x27;s browser angry that a script is either going unresponsive or eating tons of CPU, which isn&#x27;t much different from cryptocurrency miner behavior.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tusharsoni</author><text>&gt; mCaptcha is basically a rate-limiter<p>This is a much better explanation of what it does than captcha where I expect &quot;proof-of-human&quot;. A PoW based rate-limiter is a really interesting idea! Usually, the challenge with unauthenticated endpoints (ex. signups) is that the server has to do more work (db queries) than the client (make an http request) so it is really easy for the client to bring the server down. With PoW, we&#x27;re essentially flipping that model where the client has to do more work than the server. Good work!</text></comment> | <story><title>mCaptcha – Proof of work based, privacy respecting CAPTCHA system</title><url>https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>realaravinth</author><text>Thank you for your detailed response, you raise some very interesting and valid points!<p>&gt; JS engines (or even WASM) aren&#x27;t going to be as fast at this kind of work as native machine code would be<p>You are right. mCaptcha has a WASM and a JS polyfill implementations. Native code will definitely be faster than WASM but in an experiment I ran for fun[0], I discovered that the WASM was roughly 2s slower than native implementation.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s also based on the assumption that proof-of-work is going to increase the cost of doing business<p>mCaptcha is basically a rate-limiter. If an expensive endpoint(say registration: hashing + other validation is expensive) can handle 4k requests&#x2F;seconds and has mCaptcha installed, then the webmaster can force the attacker to slow down to 1 request&#x2F;second, significantly reducing the load on their server. That isn&#x27;t to say that the webmaster will be able to protect themselves against sufficiently motivated attacker who has botnets. :)<p>&gt; There&#x27;s also the risk that any challenge that&#x27;s sufficiently difficult may also make the user&#x27;s browser angry that a script is either going unresponsive or eating tons of CPU, which isn&#x27;t much different from cryptocurrency miner behavior.<p>Also correct. The trick is in finding optimum difficulty which will work for the majority of the devices. A survey to benchmark PoW performance of devices in the wild is WIP[1], which will help webmasters configure their CAPTCHA better.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mcaptcha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pow-performance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mcaptcha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pow-performance</a> Benchmarking platforms weren&#x27;t optimised for running benchmarks, kindly take it with a grain of salt. It was a bored Sunday afternoon experiment.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcaptcha&#x2F;survey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcaptcha&#x2F;survey</a><p>Full disclosure: I&#x27;m the author of mCaptcha</text></item><item><author>AbacusAvenger</author><text>I looked into doing something like this once and decided it wasn&#x27;t going to be very effective, for a few different reasons.<p>JS engines (or even WASM) aren&#x27;t going to be as fast at this kind of work as native machine code would be. Especially when you consider that libraries like OpenSSL have heavily tuned implementations of the SHA algorithms. Any bot solving a SHA-based challenge would be able to extract the challenge from the page and execute it using native machine code faster than any legitimate user&#x27;s browser could. And if you increase the difficulty of the challenge, it&#x27;s just going to punish real users running the challenge in their browser more than it would the bots.<p>It&#x27;s also based on the assumption that proof-of-work is going to increase the cost of doing business for the bots in some way and discourage their behavior. Many of the bots I was dealing with in my case were either using cloud compute services fraudulently or were running on compromised machines of unknowing people. And they tended not to care about how long it took or how high-effort the challenge was, they were very dedicated at getting past it and continuing their malicious behavior.<p>There&#x27;s also the risk that any challenge that&#x27;s sufficiently difficult may also make the user&#x27;s browser angry that a script is either going unresponsive or eating tons of CPU, which isn&#x27;t much different from cryptocurrency miner behavior.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mort96</author><text>&gt; mCaptcha is basically a rate-limiter.<p>Hmm, is it a better rate limiter than others? I know that nginx, for example, makes it pretty easy to rate limit based on IP address with the `limit_req` and `limit_req_zone` directives.<p>In essence, ngix&#x27;s rate limiter also works by making each request consume a resource, but it makes the resource consumed an IP address (or range) rather than compute resources. It seems intuitive that a malicious actor would have an easier time scaling compute than IP addresses, while a legitimate user will _always_ have an IP address but might be on a machine with 1&#x2F;100000th the compute resources of the malicious actor.</text></comment> |
28,496,717 | 28,496,527 | 1 | 2 | 28,478,046 | train | <story><title>The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games (2015)</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-alternate-universe-of-soviet-arcade-games</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eukgoekoko</author><text>I remember how Konyok-Gorbunok <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DpWkJuXGQic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DpWkJuXGQic</a> was just driving me nuts, I was just 6 y. o. and couldn&#x27;t handle the frustration from losing on the 3rd screen. This game was just inhumane, I&#x27;ve only seen 20-year olds being good at it.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games (2015)</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-alternate-universe-of-soviet-arcade-games</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>atemerev</author><text>Yes, I was growing up with these, and spent a lot of 15-kopeck coins in these devices. The graphics was awful, but the games were... playable. The shooting games worked flawlessly. The &quot;sea battle&quot; torpedo launcher simulator was awesome, with realistic ship silhouettes. The games were not unlike Tetris: simple, but ingenious and addictive.</text></comment> |
19,803,004 | 19,803,115 | 1 | 3 | 19,802,558 | train | <story><title>L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/college-admissions-scandal.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ForrestN</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised that this scandal doesn&#x27;t seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of &quot;elite&quot; colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We&#x27;re devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards.<p>I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we&#x27;re finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people&#x27;s children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.<p>As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.</text></comment> | <story><title>L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/college-admissions-scandal.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cletus</author><text>Honestly, I really don&#x27;t understand the motivations for some of these parents. Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly isn&#x27;t that interested, isn&#x27;t particularly academic and isn&#x27;t particularly athletic? Like... why?<p>I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law School. There&#x27;s a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It just makes no sense to me.<p>Felicity Huffman may end up being sentenced to 10 months in jail (and, let&#x27;s face it, might serve only 5) but, still, that&#x27;s a big deal for someone who probably never expected to go to jail. It&#x27;s also on the lighter end because of her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution. What are these parents who have plead not guilty going to get when they&#x27;re found guilty?<p>Add to this the children have to live with the stigma of these actions. I don&#x27;t have a huge amount of sympathy here because at least some of them were complicit. Posing for photos faking crew, that sort of thing. But still... why would you want to risk your children having to live with that... to go to USC?</text></comment> |
14,820,234 | 14,819,523 | 1 | 3 | 14,818,633 | train | <story><title>How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?</title><url>http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/article/20854121/how-did-anyone-do-math-in-roman-numerals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting how the notation used can encourage or retard progress. For example, Leibniz&#x27;s calculus notation was vastly superior to Newton&#x27;s, and calculus theory advanced much more quickly where Leibniz&#x27;s notation was used.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leibniz%27s_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leibniz%27s_notation</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nnq</author><text>About this particular case: why hasn&#x27;t Euler&#x27;s notation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Notation_for_differentiation#Euler.27s_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Notation_for_differentiation#E...</a>) become <i>the clear winner?</i><p>I mean, its the only one that is both <i>not confusing for beginners</i> (because it doesn&#x27;t trick them into the &quot;cool, let&#x27;s `simplify` the dx at the denominator with the next one&quot; mindset) and it also translates easily to code (or other 1D encoding), like you can write &quot;second derivative of f with respect to x&quot; as D[f, x, 2] and &quot;integral of a with respect to t&quot; as &quot;D[a, t, -1]&quot;.<p>My point is mainly that <i>there is nothing rational at all in how humans choose notations...</i> without some obscure historic events, we&#x27;d probably still be using some derivative of roman numerals or maybe even sexagesimals! (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sexagesimal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sexagesimal</a>)<p>(I imagine the reason is because &quot;highly performing&quot; individuals have their own &quot;internal&quot; language to think in, so general language is just a for communication, so a political decision... unfortunately for <i>education :(</i>)</text></comment> | <story><title>How Did Anyone Do Math in Roman Numerals?</title><url>http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/article/20854121/how-did-anyone-do-math-in-roman-numerals</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting how the notation used can encourage or retard progress. For example, Leibniz&#x27;s calculus notation was vastly superior to Newton&#x27;s, and calculus theory advanced much more quickly where Leibniz&#x27;s notation was used.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leibniz%27s_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Leibniz%27s_notation</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaymzcampbell</author><text>Another excellent example of the power of good notation to aid understanding and increase efficiency is Dirac, or Bra-Ket notation[1] used in Quantum Mechanics.<p>This allows you to do all sort of calculations with wave functions without constantly grinding to a halt bogged down by integrals and conjugates all over the place.<p>The ladder operators (aka raising &amp; lowering), really put this notation to good use[2]. It would be tremendously tedious to manipulate such expressions repeatedly without the simplifying properties of Bra-Kets. Once you are done manipulating them you then use the rules of the bra-kets to transform it back into a plain old integral, evaluate, and you&#x27;re done.<p>I used to think they were very mysterious until I realised they were (essentially) notational convenience.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;~bds10&#x2F;aqp&#x2F;lec3_compressed.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;~bds10&#x2F;aqp&#x2F;lec3_compressed.pdf</a></text></comment> |
11,043,393 | 11,042,401 | 1 | 2 | 11,041,245 | train | <story><title>France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels</title><url>http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/trends/france-pa7ve-1000km-ro7ad-so7lar-panel7s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CyberDildonics</author><text>Paving roads with solar panels is a classic example of a &#x27;simple, easy, wrong&#x27; solution. It seems that some people have gross misconceptions about the barrier to solar panels. People living in crowded cities think there is some sort of shortage of space. In a broad sense this is of course very far from the truth. The barrier to solar is cost per kw&#x2F;hr. As that goes down, solar installations go up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wang_li</author><text>&gt; Paving roads with solar panels is a classic example of a &#x27;simple, easy, wrong&#x27; solution.<p>You are likely not seeing the same &quot;problem&quot; that the powers that be in France are seeing. When looked at through the lens of graft, corruption and cronyism, it&#x27;s &#x27;simple, easy, and profitable&#x27;. Whether it ever delivers worthwhile amounts of power at efficient costs is entirely secondary.</text></comment> | <story><title>France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels</title><url>http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/trends/france-pa7ve-1000km-ro7ad-so7lar-panel7s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CyberDildonics</author><text>Paving roads with solar panels is a classic example of a &#x27;simple, easy, wrong&#x27; solution. It seems that some people have gross misconceptions about the barrier to solar panels. People living in crowded cities think there is some sort of shortage of space. In a broad sense this is of course very far from the truth. The barrier to solar is cost per kw&#x2F;hr. As that goes down, solar installations go up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stickfigure</author><text>Plus, the first light rain will turn this into a shiny death trap for motorcycles.</text></comment> |
13,225,101 | 13,225,181 | 1 | 3 | 13,224,520 | train | <story><title>Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/twitters-chief-technology-officer-to-leave-company.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johns</author><text>I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company&#x27;s inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;crazyfoo&#x2F;status&#x2F;811331557608652800" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;crazyfoo&#x2F;status&#x2F;811331557608652800</a><p>AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split &#x2F; shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OoTheNigerian</author><text>FWIW, he used our product <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com</a> to do his Tweetstorm.<p>I feel great!!</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/twitters-chief-technology-officer-to-leave-company.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johns</author><text>I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the company&#x27;s inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.</text></item><item><author>aresant</author><text>Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30 minutes ago too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;crazyfoo&#x2F;status&#x2F;811331557608652800" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;crazyfoo&#x2F;status&#x2F;811331557608652800</a><p>AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split &#x2F; shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clamprecht</author><text>What&#x27;s wrong with reinventing TCP&#x2F;IP over twitter? Sometimes they even appear out of order.</text></comment> |
17,793,510 | 17,793,317 | 1 | 3 | 17,793,024 | train | <story><title>Show HN: FreshJobs – An aggregator of junior and entry-level jobs</title><url>https://freshjobs.io</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lukehero</author><text>Some background to this:<p>The project:
Ever been in that catch-22 situation where you need experience to get a job, but you can’t get a job without experience? Or maybe you want to go into a new field, or you just graduated from College or University?<p>FreshJobs sources all the entry level and junior positions from across the web and puts them in one place. When you click the ‘apply’ button you are taken to the source site to apply. I’m still adding more sources so over time it will grow larger with more jobs across more locations.<p>Me:
I’m on a mission to learn to code by making 6 projects in 6 months (this is 2&#x2F;6), with my final project being at the end of the year in December. The dream is to live from these projects by that time and help people across the world<p>The idea:
The idea for FreshJobs came when a friend told me a few weeks back after I finished project #1, “hey man, you could probably apply for some junior dev jobs now&quot;, so I decided to check the internet out of curiosity to see what there was. I noticed that there was no specific place which had a lot of these types of jobs, so project #2 was decided right there and then.<p>I truly hope this website can help you find a new job that you love. For those struggling to get a job because they don’t have experience, it will be a true pleasure if you can find a job.
If you do find and get a job via FreshJobs, please let me know!<p>All feedback and bug reports are much appreciated. Go easy on me, I am still a total newbie dev!</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: FreshJobs – An aggregator of junior and entry-level jobs</title><url>https://freshjobs.io</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CommanderData</author><text>Not working for me atm. Maybe use Cloudflare to cache, quick and easy fix while the post is still hot.<p>edit: Working now, great job (pi). Would be nice to see some type of filters.</text></comment> |
25,961,358 | 25,961,274 | 1 | 2 | 25,960,905 | train | <story><title>It’s time for police to stop lying to suspects</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions-police-interrogation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wonder_er</author><text>Asking police to stop lying to suspects belies an expectation for police to act contrary to human nature for _many well known reasons_.<p>It&#x27;s less of a problem that police lie if everyone adopts the very clear advice given by every legal professional:<p>&gt; Never, ever, talk to police.*<p>* You can give them your name, and if they ask &quot;what are you doing&quot;, a tolerable answer, but any further questions are to be met with &quot;I have been advised to never speak with police, and I can answer no further questions.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s an entertaining lecture on the topic, for anyone not convinced: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&amp;t=11s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&amp;t=11s</a><p>And he wrote a very short (single-sitting) book titled: &quot;You Have The Right To Remain Innocent&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;You-Have-Right-Remain-Innocent-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01DAD218W&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;You-Have-Right-Remain-Innocent-ebook&#x2F;...</a><p>Do. Not. Talk. To. Police. They are not your friend.<p>If you&#x27;re reading this and about to hit the &quot;reply&quot; button explaining why I am wrong, will you please, please say in that comment if you watched _any_ of the lecture by Regent Law Professor James Duane?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>syops</author><text>The problem with <i>never talk to the police</i> is that they can mess with you more or less with impunity. They can beat you and not worry about retribution from the judicial system. They can arrest you in which the only charge is resisting arrest.<p>Even if you are treated humanely when you refuse to talk to the police there is the very real possibility they will investigate your life. Given that there are civil liberties lawyers who claim that everyone commits felonies on a regular basis does one really want a big investigation into their life [1]?<p>The power of the state to mess up your life is such that this advice might not be applicable if the cop you are dealing with is a jerk.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ulrichboser.com&#x2F;how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-today-an-interview-with-harvey-silverglate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ulrichboser.com&#x2F;how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-toda...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>It’s time for police to stop lying to suspects</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions-police-interrogation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wonder_er</author><text>Asking police to stop lying to suspects belies an expectation for police to act contrary to human nature for _many well known reasons_.<p>It&#x27;s less of a problem that police lie if everyone adopts the very clear advice given by every legal professional:<p>&gt; Never, ever, talk to police.*<p>* You can give them your name, and if they ask &quot;what are you doing&quot;, a tolerable answer, but any further questions are to be met with &quot;I have been advised to never speak with police, and I can answer no further questions.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s an entertaining lecture on the topic, for anyone not convinced: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&amp;t=11s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&amp;t=11s</a><p>And he wrote a very short (single-sitting) book titled: &quot;You Have The Right To Remain Innocent&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;You-Have-Right-Remain-Innocent-ebook&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01DAD218W&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;You-Have-Right-Remain-Innocent-ebook&#x2F;...</a><p>Do. Not. Talk. To. Police. They are not your friend.<p>If you&#x27;re reading this and about to hit the &quot;reply&quot; button explaining why I am wrong, will you please, please say in that comment if you watched _any_ of the lecture by Regent Law Professor James Duane?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>&gt; belies an expectation for police to act contrary to human nature<p>But it&#x27;s illegal in multiple situations for me to lie to them. Is that an expectation for me to act contrary to human behavior? I think that what people are asking is just that the standards be applied in both directions.<p>&gt; Do. Not. Talk. To. Police.<p>Agreed on that point, and yes, I have watched some (but not all) of James Duane&#x27;s stuff.</text></comment> |
33,693,924 | 33,691,703 | 1 | 2 | 33,674,904 | train | <story><title>Quest for my perfect watch</title><url>https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/watch.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mhalle</author><text>On a related topic, I find programming or typing while wearing a watch leads relatively quickly to wrist pain due to the pressure constraints it puts on the muscles and tendons.<p>I have tried several different watches and experienced this problem. I know many tech industry people wear watches while they work, but I have never heard a discussion of this condition. I wonder if I am somehow unusual in this situation. I am otherwise not especially prone to repetitive stress injuries.<p>It has been bad enough I have thought of converting a wristwatch into a modern pocket watch, though I would lose any feature that depended on skin proximity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Taylor_OD</author><text>How large of a watch are you using? How tight do you wear it? How much do you weight?<p>I&#x27;ve worn larger watches in the past. Now I wear a pretty small watch or an apple watch, that is also smallish, and I dont have any issues. I tend to wear my watches quite loose so they rest beyond the rim of the laptop I type on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Quest for my perfect watch</title><url>https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/watch.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mhalle</author><text>On a related topic, I find programming or typing while wearing a watch leads relatively quickly to wrist pain due to the pressure constraints it puts on the muscles and tendons.<p>I have tried several different watches and experienced this problem. I know many tech industry people wear watches while they work, but I have never heard a discussion of this condition. I wonder if I am somehow unusual in this situation. I am otherwise not especially prone to repetitive stress injuries.<p>It has been bad enough I have thought of converting a wristwatch into a modern pocket watch, though I would lose any feature that depended on skin proximity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinoki</author><text>Where do you wear a watch? Over your wrist joint or higher up your forearm?<p>I like to wear my watch a few cm higher up my arm, so that the metal band doesn’t scratch my laptop.<p>If you want features that need skin contact, you could keep a nice watch as a pocket watch, and then wear a cheap fitness band on your ankle.</text></comment> |
26,347,624 | 26,347,822 | 1 | 2 | 26,346,879 | train | <story><title>Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56281726</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dmix</author><text>You have to love the s&#x2F;weird&#x2F;unusual [1] names of places in the UK (and it looks like a beautiful area from the small picture):<p>&gt; Tintern, in the Wye Valley, Monmouthshire<p>There&#x27;s also plenty of &quot;upon the&quot;s and &quot;x-in-y&quot; (ie: Henly-in-Arden). Not just the England but seems just as common in Scotland, or even more common.<p>I can imagine the early computer systems of the postal organization having to deal with these quirks.<p>[1] apparently &quot;weird&quot; is being taken as bad or something. I like weird.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56281726</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BerislavLopac</author><text>I love Tintern Abbey [0]... When you&#x27;re peacefully driving down the Wye Valley (say, after visiting Puzzlewood [1]), enjoying the green scenery and cosy little villages along the river, the last thing you expect are the colossal ruins of a medieval church... &lt;3<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tintern_Abbey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tintern_Abbey</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Puzzlewood" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Puzzlewood</a></text></comment> |
18,139,687 | 18,139,516 | 1 | 2 | 18,138,990 | train | <story><title>The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, Chinese Government</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simias</author><text>That&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of unsubstantiated assumptions. It&#x27;s also explicitly denied by both Amazon:<p>&gt;It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise<p>and Apple:<p>&gt;we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them.<p>There&#x27;s no in &quot;between the lines&quot; or ambiguous wording there, they flat out deny it. Unless this small set of &quot;TS&#x2F;SCI cleared employees&quot; worked completely on their own without reporting to anybody else in the company this means that they are lying in these statements.<p>It&#x27;s possible that they do just that but it&#x27;s a bit strange to me that they wouldn&#x27;t find an easier way to deflect the issue without using such a strong and explicit language. Something vague like &quot;we&#x27;ve been working with the authorities and have no reason to believe that any sensitive information has been leaked etc...&quot; would be easier to spin if it turns out that somebody can prove that these attacks took place.<p>Surely if the scale of the attack was as large as reported by Bloomberg in their article it should be possible to find one of these backdoored boards in the wild? Or at least have testimonies by employees in these company that could testify that batches of motherboards were suddenly replaced for no obvious reasons?<p>And if trade war is the reason why deny it now? What do they have to gain from that, they&#x27;re the victims in this story as far as I can tell.</text></item><item><author>hendzen</author><text>Apple and Amazon probably have a small set of TS&#x2F;SCI cleared employees who dealt with this mess. It’s likely 99.99% of the employees at those firms had no idea what was going on. The switching out of thousands of compromised servers was probably made to look like routine maintenance or upgrades and the whole affair was kept secret. That is, until some high level government employees intentionally leaked it to the media, probably under direction of the White House to garner support for a more aggressive stance on China - the trade war in particular. Read between the lines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text><i>&gt; this means that they are lying in these statements.</i><p>Cyberwar with China is the current equivalent of the old Cold War scuffles with the USSR in third countries. How many lies were told back then, to cover up the worst mishaps? And then they were &quot;uncovered&quot; when it was safer or more convenient to do so.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, Chinese Government</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simias</author><text>That&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> of unsubstantiated assumptions. It&#x27;s also explicitly denied by both Amazon:<p>&gt;It’s untrue that AWS knew about a supply chain compromise<p>and Apple:<p>&gt;we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them.<p>There&#x27;s no in &quot;between the lines&quot; or ambiguous wording there, they flat out deny it. Unless this small set of &quot;TS&#x2F;SCI cleared employees&quot; worked completely on their own without reporting to anybody else in the company this means that they are lying in these statements.<p>It&#x27;s possible that they do just that but it&#x27;s a bit strange to me that they wouldn&#x27;t find an easier way to deflect the issue without using such a strong and explicit language. Something vague like &quot;we&#x27;ve been working with the authorities and have no reason to believe that any sensitive information has been leaked etc...&quot; would be easier to spin if it turns out that somebody can prove that these attacks took place.<p>Surely if the scale of the attack was as large as reported by Bloomberg in their article it should be possible to find one of these backdoored boards in the wild? Or at least have testimonies by employees in these company that could testify that batches of motherboards were suddenly replaced for no obvious reasons?<p>And if trade war is the reason why deny it now? What do they have to gain from that, they&#x27;re the victims in this story as far as I can tell.</text></item><item><author>hendzen</author><text>Apple and Amazon probably have a small set of TS&#x2F;SCI cleared employees who dealt with this mess. It’s likely 99.99% of the employees at those firms had no idea what was going on. The switching out of thousands of compromised servers was probably made to look like routine maintenance or upgrades and the whole affair was kept secret. That is, until some high level government employees intentionally leaked it to the media, probably under direction of the White House to garner support for a more aggressive stance on China - the trade war in particular. Read between the lines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hendzen</author><text>Those employees wouldn&#x27;t be authorized to talk about the information to anyone not cleared. Which includes the PR department or anyone tasked with crafting a statement.</text></comment> |
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