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8,320,778 | 8,320,786 | 1 | 3 | 8,320,487 | train | <story><title>“Giganews is an FBI Operation”</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrbill</author><text>Having worked at Texas.Net before it became DataFoundry, and being one of the people who built up the original Sun E450s that were used as the Usenet servers when the separate Giganews product was developed, I find this hilarious.<p>I know a good number of the GN&#x2F;DF employees mentioned in the article, and think this sounds more like a disgruntled ex-employee trying to badmouth his former employer.<p>As for the &quot;gigauth&quot; file - how else are you going to run a subscription Usenet service without logging authenticated users?<p>Disclaimer: I worked for Texas.Net from 1996 to late 1998 and was one of the people involved in moving their HQ from their San Antonio location to 823 Congress in Austin.<p>Edit: BTW, here&#x27;s pics of my tubby self at work in the GREEN TSHIRT THEY MADE ME WEAR! (hey, free clothing is free clothing, I loved not having to worry about what I was going to wear to work every day..)<p><a href="http://www.mrbill.net/texasnet/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mrbill.net&#x2F;texasnet&#x2F;</a><p>I have nothing but respect for Ron Y. and his family - he and his wife invited me to spend Thanksgiving dinner in &#x27;96 with them since I&#x27;d just moved to Austin and had nowhere else to go. I will never forget that kindness.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Giganews is an FBI Operation”</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bendoernberg</author><text>Giganews has responded by claiming the ex-employee is delusional. They posted links to a pastebin allegedly written by him, which includes the following:<p>&quot;Besides spamming, the only other conduct that is unacceptable is uploading or contacting our employees with information about Vehuiah the holy angel, her
invocation Psalm 3:3, Archangels, or the angels of Jehovah&#x27;s 72 syllable name called the Shemhamforash. These are all unstoppable solutions to the 72 demon intelligences central to mankind, and will drive the dark of all evil away with
an annoyingly bright Holy Light.&quot;<p><a href="https://twitter.com/Giganews/status/511587414683291648" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Giganews&#x2F;status&#x2F;511587414683291648</a><p><a href="http://pastebin.com/gM9mN7gS" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;gM9mN7gS</a></text></comment> |
25,283,186 | 25,281,170 | 1 | 3 | 25,279,567 | train | <story><title>How the CCP Does Job Promotions</title><url>https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/how-the-ccp-does-job-promotions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anonymousiam</author><text>This story makes me want to tell one of my own. I have visited the PRC a few times. On one of those times, my wife and I visited a cousin of hers in Beijing. This cousin had a factory and was well connected. He wanted us to do something for him, so he invited us to drinks and dinner at a fine restaurant (in a private banquet room). Turns out that one of his buddies was the Chief of Police and he was there too. We had fun trying to drink each other under the table, and as the evening came to a close I slipped downstairs so that I could pay for everything. (I didn&#x27;t want to be obligated to any of these people.) When I approached the restaurant staff and expressed my intention to pay, they were horror stricken. Apparently the Police Chief was sponsoring the meal, which means the restaurant was giving it to him and everyone else for &quot;free&quot;. I had not truly realized the extent of corruption in China until that moment.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the CCP Does Job Promotions</title><url>https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/how-the-ccp-does-job-promotions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yorwba</author><text>The introduction frames the following translation as focusing on<p>&gt; various “failures of democracy” that, if left unchecked, could lead to the weakening of the Chinese political system. Not only does his analysis argue the importance of having more senior officials rather than the rank-and-file party cadres select competent officials, but also serves as an implicit suggestion of the superiority of the Chinese system in contrast to western democratic systems.<p>I believe that is a misinterpretation caused by misunderstanding &quot;failures of democracy&quot; as referring to &quot;failures of <i>Western</i> democracy&quot;. However, as an academic affiliated with the Central Party School, Wang Dongjing can safely be assumed to be using official terminology, in which China is <i>defined</i> as a democratic country. So all references to &quot;democracy&quot; in the article should be understood to refer to the system of leadership selection implemented in China. In particular, the &quot;failures of democracy&quot; he talks about are specifically &quot;failures of leadership selection in China&quot;.<p>That is also very noticeable when he talks about the difference between &quot;majority of the minority and the majority of the majority&quot;. In his example of minority selection, <i>all 20 superior officials are corrupt</i>, blocking the young official&#x27;s promotion for not doing them a favor. Then later he says that &quot;in our society, the good guys are in the majority and the bad guys are in the minority&quot; and &quot;if under the guidance of democratic centralism, we elect those who have the support of the majority of the people and entrust them with important tasks, then the bureaucratic culture will change greatly. In this way, there will be no market for those who are political ‘social climbers’, who only seek to curry favors with others but don’t seek to accomplish anything.&quot;<p>I.e. he is arguing explicitly against having senior officials decide on promotions and wants rank-and-file cadres to get a vote instead.<p>Just because he is affiliated with the Central Party School, it should not be assumed that he wants to paint a rosy picture of the government. On the contrary, it is kind of their <i>raison d&#x27;être</i> to be aware of the government&#x27;s shortcomings, so that they can educate future cadres to improve the system. (Though I don&#x27;t think posting such criticism publicly was part of the job description.)</text></comment> |
22,630,667 | 22,630,550 | 1 | 3 | 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>notefuel</author><text>I think this is very common.<p>Genuine question: what, if anything, could a note-taking app do to assuage this fear?<p>e.g., is there something extreme that would help like giving you example notes to run through the export process during onboarding, or maybe even an automated export to an email every number of days so that if the app shuts down, even if you do nothing, you&#x27;ll still have your data.<p>I&#x27;m asking because I recently launched an app in precisely this space (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notefuel.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notefuel.com</a> - it&#x27;s a note-taking app dedicated specifically to learning, kind of like Readwise.io meets Evernote), and I totally understand this worry, have it myself, and would invest in mitigating it.</text></comment> |
34,021,274 | 34,020,781 | 1 | 3 | 34,019,900 | train | <story><title>Legacy Update: Fix Windows Update on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003, 2000</title><url>https://legacyupdate.net</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>I could see staying with Windows 7. That was the best version Microsoft ever made. Microsoft finally figured out how to make it stable, and it didn&#x27;t have all the ad and cloud crap nailed in. You can run current Firefox, current Thunderbird, and current LibreOffice, which covers the basics. Most Windows software still works.</text></comment> | <story><title>Legacy Update: Fix Windows Update on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003, 2000</title><url>https://legacyupdate.net</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slt2021</author><text>For the love of god just get off of thece ancient systems pls, or run the only in airgapped and isolated network segments with application whitelisting and manual data ingress&#x2F;egress controls, and everything will be fine without these silly updates.<p>Just bury the body already, let winxp rest in peace, please</text></comment> |
6,707,797 | 6,707,895 | 1 | 2 | 6,707,021 | train | <story><title>Nonplussed</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/10/nonplussed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>itafroma</author><text>I am mostly for the ostensible cleaning up of YouTube comments, but what got me was that any time you share a YouTube video on Google+ proper or comment in a thread where someone shared a YouTube video, it automatically cross-posts what you said back to the comments underneath the video on YouTube. And that&#x27;s not just for shares&#x2F;comments going forward: it&#x27;s everything you&#x27;ve ever shared publicly, ever. I&#x27;m now getting inane YouTube-level comments on stuff I shared months ago because I happened to share a popular YouTube video on Google+.<p>As part of the rare breed of people actually using Google+ proper, it&#x27;s really turned me off from the whole thing. Even though I shared YouTube videos publicly and commented on publicly-viewable Google+ posts with YouTube videos, I intended to only post my comments and shares <i>on</i> Google+, not syndicated everywhere at a later date without additional consent[1] and especially not the cesspool that is the YouTube comment section. I don&#x27;t really understand why anyone thought that&#x27;d be okay. And anecdote isn&#x27;t data, but talking to other Google+ users I know, nobody seemed to be aware that this was going to happen: they all just thought the identities would be merged, but if you post on Google+, it&#x27;d stay on Google+.<p>[1]: I&#x27;m aware that there&#x27;s probably some clause in their privacy policy that gave them the legal ability to do this, but Google is usually pretty decent when it comes to informing of changes to privacy&#x2F;visibility options.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephp</author><text>Ugh. This was my problem with Google+ too. Everything you do ripples out into the rest of the internet in a creepy way.<p>When I was freelancing, I emailed back and forth with potential clients through the Gmail interface. One day I saw this party pic of a 20-something girl with beer in hand, identified by the full name of a receptionist I had emailed with professionally but never actually met. It was a suggestion from Google to connect with her on Google+, which I&#x27;m sure she&#x27;d have been mortified by. I deleted my account that day.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nonplussed</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/10/nonplussed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>itafroma</author><text>I am mostly for the ostensible cleaning up of YouTube comments, but what got me was that any time you share a YouTube video on Google+ proper or comment in a thread where someone shared a YouTube video, it automatically cross-posts what you said back to the comments underneath the video on YouTube. And that&#x27;s not just for shares&#x2F;comments going forward: it&#x27;s everything you&#x27;ve ever shared publicly, ever. I&#x27;m now getting inane YouTube-level comments on stuff I shared months ago because I happened to share a popular YouTube video on Google+.<p>As part of the rare breed of people actually using Google+ proper, it&#x27;s really turned me off from the whole thing. Even though I shared YouTube videos publicly and commented on publicly-viewable Google+ posts with YouTube videos, I intended to only post my comments and shares <i>on</i> Google+, not syndicated everywhere at a later date without additional consent[1] and especially not the cesspool that is the YouTube comment section. I don&#x27;t really understand why anyone thought that&#x27;d be okay. And anecdote isn&#x27;t data, but talking to other Google+ users I know, nobody seemed to be aware that this was going to happen: they all just thought the identities would be merged, but if you post on Google+, it&#x27;d stay on Google+.<p>[1]: I&#x27;m aware that there&#x27;s probably some clause in their privacy policy that gave them the legal ability to do this, but Google is usually pretty decent when it comes to informing of changes to privacy&#x2F;visibility options.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spyder</author><text>And cross-posting G+ comments makes YouTube comments worse not better because many times when people share video on G+ the text is just the video title or something like: Must watch <i>video title</i> or &quot;Checkout this video on YouTube&quot;. Showing these in the YouTube comments is useless spam. Also there is lot of &quot;empty&quot; comments with only a &quot;shared this via Google+&quot; thing which is even more useless. It&#x27;s turning into something like the end of Tumblr posts with page long list of likes without any comment.</text></comment> |
33,513,534 | 33,513,411 | 1 | 2 | 33,506,132 | train | <story><title>Blessed.rs – An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem</title><url>https://blessed.rs/crates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>This is my project (although I didn&#x27;t submit this to HN), AMA<p>I consider quite incomplete at this point (but hopefully already useful). There are several categories of crate that just aren&#x27;t covered yet (suggestions very welcome, either here or on the github repo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicoburns&#x2F;blessed-rs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicoburns&#x2F;blessed-rs</a>).<p>I&#x27;d also like to add more hand curated content such as:<p>- Installation and developer environment setup
- Link to learning resources (books, projects, etc)
- Explanations of the community (reddit, TWIR, discourse, github, zulip, etc)
- Themed guides (backend web development, CLI tools, game development, etc)<p>I want to put together more guidance on how to contribute, and gradually transition this into more of a community maintained model over time, but I haven&#x27;t had a chance to do this yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rob74</author><text>Thanks for compiling this! One small nitpick: &quot;De facto random number generation library&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean what you probably want to say, it should be &quot;De facto <i>standard</i> [...] library&quot;. Otherwise the &quot;de facto&quot; applies to &quot;library&quot;, and that doesn&#x27;t really make sense (at least not in Rust, where it&#x27;s very well defined what can be called a library and what not)...</text></comment> | <story><title>Blessed.rs – An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem</title><url>https://blessed.rs/crates</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>This is my project (although I didn&#x27;t submit this to HN), AMA<p>I consider quite incomplete at this point (but hopefully already useful). There are several categories of crate that just aren&#x27;t covered yet (suggestions very welcome, either here or on the github repo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicoburns&#x2F;blessed-rs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicoburns&#x2F;blessed-rs</a>).<p>I&#x27;d also like to add more hand curated content such as:<p>- Installation and developer environment setup
- Link to learning resources (books, projects, etc)
- Explanations of the community (reddit, TWIR, discourse, github, zulip, etc)
- Themed guides (backend web development, CLI tools, game development, etc)<p>I want to put together more guidance on how to contribute, and gradually transition this into more of a community maintained model over time, but I haven&#x27;t had a chance to do this yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>c0balt</author><text>Just a small suggestion might be the category templating engines (incomplete list, based on my experience):<p>- askama<p>- tera<p>- liquid<p>And more importantly logging, due to this being a common usecase:<p>- log<p>- ... and companions<p>- (maybe even advanced things, like opentelemetry)</text></comment> |
38,009,633 | 38,009,776 | 1 | 3 | 38,006,512 | train | <story><title>Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ImprovedSilence</author><text>Everyone knew about LOTR and read the books before the movies came out. It was in no way some obscure out of print lit, it was both pop and a cult classic, and it was very much front and center of any must read fantasy bookshelf. Hence the wildly profitable movies.</text></item><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>&gt;Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.<p>I find it unlikely I would have heard about them, my local library was full of books from the 50&#x27;s I had never heard of and was reluctant to read. Seeing the Hobbit cartoon gave me an interest in it that I followed up on in middle school.<p>On that note, the only way most children will hear of Calvin and Hobbes is if their parents were big fans or through the many unlicensed products available. Maybe that&#x27;s fine, but people seem strangely proud that&#x27;s the case.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>The most magnificent thing about Calvin and Hobbes is ..... Calvin and Hobbes.<p>The second most magnificent thing is Calvin and Hobbes was never licensed.<p>The third most magnificent thing is it stopped whilst it was awesome instead of being wrung out for every penny.<p>There&#x27;s no films, no sequels. You can&#x27;t buy a licensed tshirt with Calvin and Hobbes on it. There&#x27;s no licensed merchandise. No one has made it into a live action movie. Calvin and Hobbes are not available this month on MacDonalds cups if you buy a second whopper burger. You can&#x27;t buy plush toys of Hobbes. There isn&#x27;t a Christmas special TV show. Giant balloon figures of Calvin and Hobbes do not appear in city parades.<p>Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>&quot;Everyone&quot; very much didn&#x27;t. Most of the people in my life have seen the movies. Relatively few have read the book even now. Most of those close to me who have read the books did so <i>after</i> the movies came out as a direct result of hearing about or seeing the movies.<p>It wasn&#x27;t obscure <i>to fantasy fans</i>, but <i>very few</i> fantasy books break through and sell well. Most genre fiction outside of romance, thrillers&#x2F;crime sell ridiculously low numbers.<p>In a 2003 interview, the project manager for Tolkien at Houghton Mifflin, who held the US rights, stated that they had at the time only had two million-copy bestsellers in the company&#x27;s history: The Silmarillion in 1977, and LOTR in 2001 in the runup to the first movie.<p>By 2003 they&#x27;d sold 2 million copies of the one-volume trade paperback in the US.<p>Worldwide, combined sales went from 50 million copies in 2003, already massively boosted by the movies, to 150 million by 2007. In other words: Nearly half a century to get to 50 million, with a significant proportion of those 50 million in the last few years of that period, and then 100 million in the following 4 once the movies were well known.<p>The readers of &quot;any must read fantasy bookshelf&quot; are a small enough demographic that if they were the only ones who&#x27;d watch the movies, they&#x27;d have bombed spectacularly.</text></comment> | <story><title>Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ImprovedSilence</author><text>Everyone knew about LOTR and read the books before the movies came out. It was in no way some obscure out of print lit, it was both pop and a cult classic, and it was very much front and center of any must read fantasy bookshelf. Hence the wildly profitable movies.</text></item><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>&gt;Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.<p>I find it unlikely I would have heard about them, my local library was full of books from the 50&#x27;s I had never heard of and was reluctant to read. Seeing the Hobbit cartoon gave me an interest in it that I followed up on in middle school.<p>On that note, the only way most children will hear of Calvin and Hobbes is if their parents were big fans or through the many unlicensed products available. Maybe that&#x27;s fine, but people seem strangely proud that&#x27;s the case.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>The most magnificent thing about Calvin and Hobbes is ..... Calvin and Hobbes.<p>The second most magnificent thing is Calvin and Hobbes was never licensed.<p>The third most magnificent thing is it stopped whilst it was awesome instead of being wrung out for every penny.<p>There&#x27;s no films, no sequels. You can&#x27;t buy a licensed tshirt with Calvin and Hobbes on it. There&#x27;s no licensed merchandise. No one has made it into a live action movie. Calvin and Hobbes are not available this month on MacDonalds cups if you buy a second whopper burger. You can&#x27;t buy plush toys of Hobbes. There isn&#x27;t a Christmas special TV show. Giant balloon figures of Calvin and Hobbes do not appear in city parades.<p>Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devjab</author><text>Everyone in a certain generation did, yes. But it didn’t carry over to their children as such, unless you were a member of fantasy communities I think it’s largely positive that you haven’t heard about them. This is obviously anecdotal, but I grew up in the 80&#x2F;90ies, played dnd and was a general fantasy nerd and nobody in our community had read them before the movies. Even after the movies a lot of us never made it through all the running around in the second book, which was a staring point for a lot of us after having watched the first movie. Our younger siblings never got into it, they got into Harry Potter instead. For todays youngsters LOTR is basically non-existent.<p>While anecdotal like I said, none of the “fantasy” stores around my city sell anything LOTR related while some of them have entire floors dedicated to Harry Potter merc.<p>But you’re absolutely right about what we call the 57’ generation. They all ate it right up. Everyone in my parents generation read it during their early university years, and I do mean everyone.</text></comment> |
20,715,612 | 20,715,515 | 1 | 3 | 20,714,571 | train | <story><title>Suicide Prevention Hotline Number Should Be 3 Digits, 988, Agency Says</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/suicide-prevention-hotline-988.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jaclaz</author><text>As a side note, in Italy (and in some other countries) the &quot;emergency&quot; numbers have historically been 112 and 113 for two reasons:<p>1) you could dial them also on old rotary phones with a lock on the dial disc (the lock was put on the &quot;three finger hole&quot;) but of course now it makes no sense anymore<p>2) they were easier to &quot;dial&quot; without dialing but tapping on the &quot;hang&quot; buttons<p>Nowadays 112 is the &quot;unique&quot; emergency number across all EU and many nearby countries:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_emergency_telephone_numbers#Europe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_emergency_telephone_nu...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Suicide Prevention Hotline Number Should Be 3 Digits, 988, Agency Says</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/suicide-prevention-hotline-988.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LinuxBender</author><text>Great idea. B-number routing changes are straight forward. Some questions they would need to figure out is:<p>- Where are we routing this<p>- When the target is full, which hotlines do we route to and in what order (load balancing)<p>- Will this use e911 coordinate forwarding? i.e. what privacy controls will be in place<p>- Will this get priority override on cell networks? i.e. bump non 988 calls when cell site is full, but not bump 911 or first responders. (GSM capability)<p>There are probably a few other details that would need to be sorted, but it should be easy from a technical stand-point.</text></comment> |
22,236,846 | 22,236,332 | 1 | 2 | 22,235,279 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?</title><text>What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone should consider acquiring in 2020?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>Some suggestions:<p>- Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it.<p>- Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn about ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed and the interplay of those three variables. There&#x27;s a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don&#x27;t have the link handy but you can Google for it.<p>- Set a goal of cooking for yourself at least two nights a week and eating leftovers two nights a week. Buy a binder and some clear inserts and start to put together your own book of favorite recipes.<p>- Take a nightly walk.<p>- Listen to classical music. This one didn&#x27;t come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there&#x27;s a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart&#x27;s &quot;The Marriage of Figaro&quot;. Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tnel77</author><text>What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?</title><text>What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone should consider acquiring in 2020?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>Some suggestions:<p>- Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it.<p>- Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn about ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed and the interplay of those three variables. There&#x27;s a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don&#x27;t have the link handy but you can Google for it.<p>- Set a goal of cooking for yourself at least two nights a week and eating leftovers two nights a week. Buy a binder and some clear inserts and start to put together your own book of favorite recipes.<p>- Take a nightly walk.<p>- Listen to classical music. This one didn&#x27;t come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there&#x27;s a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart&#x27;s &quot;The Marriage of Figaro&quot;. Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>billfruit</author><text>Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning.<p>Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently &#x27;The French Lieutenant&#x27;s Woman&#x27;, I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.</text></comment> |
28,644,788 | 28,644,256 | 1 | 3 | 28,642,326 | train | <story><title>A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow</title><url>https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+%5Bsql%5D+is%3Aanswer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deltree7</author><text>If you look at many people&#x27;s reddit&#x2F;usenet&#x2F;facebook comment history, 23 entries per day isn&#x27;t much</text></item><item><author>jchw</author><text>Absolutely astonishing. Answering questions on a Q&amp;A site may not on its own be heroic, but at this scale it’s hard to see it as any less.</text></item><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>This user Gordon Linoff hit one million reputation points on Stack Overflow in August 2020 (now one year later he&#x27;s at 1.17M): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;400506&#x2F;congratulations-for-reaching-a-million-gordon-linoff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;400506&#x2F;congratulati...</a><p>&gt; This comes after an astonishing amount of 71,839 answers (and 0 questions!). He only joined in 2012, so that&#x27;s an average of ~22.8 answers per day, every day, for the last 3144 days.To put perspective on the numbers, the second answerer on the site is Jon Skeet (our first millionaire) with 35K answers and then several others with 20k+</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wubin</author><text>Stack Exchange sites are not mere social media but more like an encyclopedia for specific topics. Answering as well as asking good questions requires extensive research and being mindful of future readers.<p>Sad to see SE contributors are compared with FB users.</text></comment> | <story><title>A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow</title><url>https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+%5Bsql%5D+is%3Aanswer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deltree7</author><text>If you look at many people&#x27;s reddit&#x2F;usenet&#x2F;facebook comment history, 23 entries per day isn&#x27;t much</text></item><item><author>jchw</author><text>Absolutely astonishing. Answering questions on a Q&amp;A site may not on its own be heroic, but at this scale it’s hard to see it as any less.</text></item><item><author>EForEndeavour</author><text>This user Gordon Linoff hit one million reputation points on Stack Overflow in August 2020 (now one year later he&#x27;s at 1.17M): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;400506&#x2F;congratulations-for-reaching-a-million-gordon-linoff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;400506&#x2F;congratulati...</a><p>&gt; This comes after an astonishing amount of 71,839 answers (and 0 questions!). He only joined in 2012, so that&#x27;s an average of ~22.8 answers per day, every day, for the last 3144 days.To put perspective on the numbers, the second answerer on the site is Jon Skeet (our first millionaire) with 35K answers and then several others with 20k+</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone1234</author><text>I don&#x27;t think we can equate the effort between answering technical questions and a comment on Reddit&#x2F;Facebook.<p>While the occasional comment feels like work (e.g. citations), that isn&#x27;t the norm so 23&#x2F;day is meaningless.<p>Plus SO answers actually contribute positively to the world, whereas arguably social media comments do not.</text></comment> |
24,110,431 | 24,109,980 | 1 | 2 | 24,107,497 | train | <story><title>CEO of Uber: Gig Workers Deserve Better</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opinion/uber-ceo-dara-khosrowshahi-gig-workers-deserve-better.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>griffinkelly</author><text>From a startup perspective, I&#x27;ve always thought it interesting that more people in Europe&#x2F;rest of the world don&#x27;t take chances to create companies because of the great safety net there--at least its not as highly publicized. For whatever reason, the US is still the place to be and everyone wants to come to the US to start a company--my current company included (We have Canadian founders).<p>I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago, I was able to stay on my parents health insurance for a meaningful amount of time. It allowed me to take the chance of starting my own company. Unsure if I would have done the same, had circumstances been different.</text></item><item><author>bo1024</author><text>This reply comes from completely internalizing the perspective the above post describes. It only makes sense if you accept that the employer is supposed to completely care for their employees. But if you view it as society’s job, then everything changes. For one thing, small mom n pop stores can compete with Walmart a lot easier if healthcare is provided by the state. Also employees can quit if they’re not treated well, etc.</text></item><item><author>jschwartzi</author><text>I don’t want to subsidize Walmart with my taxes. That’s exactly what you’re proposing, and in fact what happens. Companies underpay their workers, who end up needing government assistance. In the end my taxes go to supporting a company that I would never shop at.</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>It seems odd that our public discourse has settled on the following set themes:<p>- Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits<p>- The person&#x27;s employer is tasked with the above responsibility<p>- If a corporation pays their workers less than the above baseline, they are bad. We should shame them, and pass laws to ensure that they pay their workers better<p>- If a corporation decides not to hire someone at all, and operates with a smaller workforce by tweaking their business model, that is perfectly acceptable and even laudable<p>Combine all of the above, and you end up with a world where corporations go above-and-beyond to reduce their headcount, and entrepreneurs specifically avoid labor-intensive business models. Firms like DE Shaw are publicly lauded for making lots of money with a tiny elite workforce, while spinoffs like Amazon are publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. All this only worsens the situation for those in the lower-middle-class in the long-term, because now they have fewer work opportunities, and less demand for their labor.<p>Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits. But instead of heaping this responsibility on the subset of corporations that hire low-skill workers, this responsibility really should lie with <i>everyone</i>. Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, and use the money to strengthen the social safety net for low-skill workers. That would eliminate this entire mess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fractionalhare</author><text>Others are responding in a way that explains your premise, but I actually reject the premise. Specifically, I do not think this is true:<p><i>&gt; From a startup perspective, I&#x27;ve always thought it interesting that more people in Europe&#x2F;rest of the world don&#x27;t take chances to create companies because of the great safety net there -- at least its not as highly publicized.</i><p>There are <i>a lot</i> of startups in Europe; particularly France, UK, Germany, Switzerland and Scandanavia, and they are well publicized locally. I hypothesize they don&#x27;t get surfaced to the attention of Americans for a few reasons:<p>1. Essentially no country in Europe provides businesses with as many freedoms as America does. American businesses have more autonomy, and a lot of basic facts about American life primarily exist within the framework of a business (e.g. healthcare). This makes it a less attractive environment for investors, so these startups don&#x27;t get international attention as easily.<p>2. Partly as a result of #1, and also because of a reduced cost of living (and thereby labor) in much of Europe, startups in Europe typically don&#x27;t pay as well as those in America.<p>This is to say that Europe has lots of entrepreneurialism, it just exists in a less recognizable way compred to America due to cultural, political and economic differences.</text></comment> | <story><title>CEO of Uber: Gig Workers Deserve Better</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opinion/uber-ceo-dara-khosrowshahi-gig-workers-deserve-better.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>griffinkelly</author><text>From a startup perspective, I&#x27;ve always thought it interesting that more people in Europe&#x2F;rest of the world don&#x27;t take chances to create companies because of the great safety net there--at least its not as highly publicized. For whatever reason, the US is still the place to be and everyone wants to come to the US to start a company--my current company included (We have Canadian founders).<p>I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago, I was able to stay on my parents health insurance for a meaningful amount of time. It allowed me to take the chance of starting my own company. Unsure if I would have done the same, had circumstances been different.</text></item><item><author>bo1024</author><text>This reply comes from completely internalizing the perspective the above post describes. It only makes sense if you accept that the employer is supposed to completely care for their employees. But if you view it as society’s job, then everything changes. For one thing, small mom n pop stores can compete with Walmart a lot easier if healthcare is provided by the state. Also employees can quit if they’re not treated well, etc.</text></item><item><author>jschwartzi</author><text>I don’t want to subsidize Walmart with my taxes. That’s exactly what you’re proposing, and in fact what happens. Companies underpay their workers, who end up needing government assistance. In the end my taxes go to supporting a company that I would never shop at.</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>It seems odd that our public discourse has settled on the following set themes:<p>- Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits<p>- The person&#x27;s employer is tasked with the above responsibility<p>- If a corporation pays their workers less than the above baseline, they are bad. We should shame them, and pass laws to ensure that they pay their workers better<p>- If a corporation decides not to hire someone at all, and operates with a smaller workforce by tweaking their business model, that is perfectly acceptable and even laudable<p>Combine all of the above, and you end up with a world where corporations go above-and-beyond to reduce their headcount, and entrepreneurs specifically avoid labor-intensive business models. Firms like DE Shaw are publicly lauded for making lots of money with a tiny elite workforce, while spinoffs like Amazon are publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. All this only worsens the situation for those in the lower-middle-class in the long-term, because now they have fewer work opportunities, and less demand for their labor.<p>Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits. But instead of heaping this responsibility on the subset of corporations that hire low-skill workers, this responsibility really should lie with <i>everyone</i>. Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, and use the money to strengthen the social safety net for low-skill workers. That would eliminate this entire mess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whywhywhywhy</author><text>It’s only a safety net to you. If you have free healthcare your entire life you don’t think of it as a safety net it’s just something you expect.<p>And the sort of worries Americans have about healthcare stopping you from starting a business we just move those worries elsewhere to rent or whatever.</text></comment> |
25,323,777 | 25,323,568 | 1 | 2 | 25,323,186 | train | <story><title>Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise (2009) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/21/8665.full.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seesawtron</author><text>A controversial topic .. there is an effect called mito-hormesis .. when you do excercise there are small amount of free radicals leaked that activates kinases and inhibits phosphatades and overall increase phosphorylation in the cell. Through this and other pathways, some genes are expressed which are supposed to increase survival, so overall there is a window of free raficals concentration. If you get below it (total blockade) you will prevent the hormesis (beneficial) effect, but if you get above it, you can get all the free radical related diseases e.g neurodegenerative diseases.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;nm.3624" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;nm.3624</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise (2009) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/21/8665.full.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ketamine__</author><text>&gt; Taken together, these previously published findings tentatively suggest that fruits and vegetables may exert health-promoting effects
despite their antioxidant content and possibly due to other bio-active compounds. However, it should be noted that the current study applied comparably high doses of oral antioxidants, which have been tested in healthy young men only.</text></comment> |
35,154,084 | 35,152,766 | 1 | 2 | 35,151,298 | train | <story><title>Scrcpy 2.0 mirrors Android devices with audio forwarding</title><url>https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/releases/tag/v2.0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>almog</author><text>Scrpy has been such a great tool!<p>There is another project inspired by scrcpy (I think) called sndcpy but it&#x27;s no longer maintained it seems, so I&#x27;m very glad to see these capabilities added to scrcpy.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying in the past and failed to setup an A2DP + Bluez to allow me to use my desktop machine as a handset for my android phone. I know that such tools exist for Windows but couldn&#x27;t to work well on Mac or Linux.
If Scrcpy had a bi-directional audio copy (i.e. mount a mic), it would probably be able to do just that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Scrcpy 2.0 mirrors Android devices with audio forwarding</title><url>https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/releases/tag/v2.0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eddieroger</author><text>This app and its sister app, Gnirehtet, were essential to me as an Android dev in a corporate environment. It&#x27;s very cool to see them continuing to ship features in the face of Android Studio releasing mirroring and remote control. I am excited to check out this update!</text></comment> |
15,306,247 | 15,306,031 | 1 | 2 | 15,304,210 | train | <story><title>Experian Site Can Give Anyone Your Credit Freeze PIN</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/experian-site-can-give-anyone-your-credit-freeze-pin/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vec</author><text>This isn&#x27;t going to stop until we stop treating SSNs like they&#x27;re secret. Mine&#x27;s not; it&#x27;s been leaked at least once that I know of and I&#x27;ve given it freely to dozens of clerks and HR staffers over the years, any of whom had ample opportunity to jot it down for personal use.<p>I know this will never actually happen, but I sincerely wish the Social Security Administration would publish a complete official database of real name to SSN mappings. It wouldn&#x27;t impede their use as <i>Social Security Numbers</i>, but it would make it extremely obvious how inappropriate they are as a proof of identity. Maybe then we&#x27;d finally be forced to come up with something a bit less insane.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>My university used to use SSN as student identifiers. So you&#x27;d walk down the hallways and trash bins would be full of discarded test papers and homework assignments with a nicely printed SSN and full names on all of them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Experian Site Can Give Anyone Your Credit Freeze PIN</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/experian-site-can-give-anyone-your-credit-freeze-pin/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vec</author><text>This isn&#x27;t going to stop until we stop treating SSNs like they&#x27;re secret. Mine&#x27;s not; it&#x27;s been leaked at least once that I know of and I&#x27;ve given it freely to dozens of clerks and HR staffers over the years, any of whom had ample opportunity to jot it down for personal use.<p>I know this will never actually happen, but I sincerely wish the Social Security Administration would publish a complete official database of real name to SSN mappings. It wouldn&#x27;t impede their use as <i>Social Security Numbers</i>, but it would make it extremely obvious how inappropriate they are as a proof of identity. Maybe then we&#x27;d finally be forced to come up with something a bit less insane.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>&gt; I sincerely wish the Social Security Administration would publish a complete official database of real name to SSN mappings<p>Given the prevalence of fraudulent tax returns and people working under fake SSNs to avoid taxes, I imagine the IRS would be very displeased with them if they were to do this. It&#x27;s not just credit reporting agencies that need to reform their identification procedures, it&#x27;s also government.</text></comment> |
38,035,983 | 38,034,575 | 1 | 2 | 38,032,242 | train | <story><title>Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco</title><url>https://theeyewall.com/trying-to-make-sense-of-why-otis-exploded-en-route-to-acapulco-this-week/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zootboy</author><text>This headline could really use the word &quot;hurricane&quot; in it. I had no idea what Otis or Acapulco were, and my initial guess was wildly off: some sort of space probe experienced a catastrophic failure on the way to an asteroid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rob74</author><text>I know what Acapulco is, but when reading &quot;Otis&quot; I first think of elevators, which very rarely explode...</text></comment> | <story><title>Trying to make sense of why Otis exploded en route to Acapulco</title><url>https://theeyewall.com/trying-to-make-sense-of-why-otis-exploded-en-route-to-acapulco-this-week/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zootboy</author><text>This headline could really use the word &quot;hurricane&quot; in it. I had no idea what Otis or Acapulco were, and my initial guess was wildly off: some sort of space probe experienced a catastrophic failure on the way to an asteroid.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crdrost</author><text>Otis is the name of one of the Fat Bear Week audience favorites so that was where my first thoughts went but I was very surprised to imagine an “Acapulco, Alaska” near where he lives.</text></comment> |
7,977,779 | 7,977,744 | 1 | 2 | 7,977,332 | train | <story><title>Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado</title><url>http://mic.com/articles/92449/six-months-after-legalizing-marijuana-two-big-things-have-happened-in-colorado</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielweber</author><text>The linked data shows 19 murders in the first five months of 2013, 11 murders in the same period in 2014.<p>First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it&#x27;s a good thing to have so few murders that it&#x27;s hard to make generalizations.) March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.<p>Second, this isn&#x27;t a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9. It&#x27;s a 47.1% drop.<p>This is a very low quality article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DatBear</author><text>They just worded it wrong, really... It should say it&#x27;s 52.9% of what it was in 2013, meaning it is a 47.1% drop.<p>But linking to data for 5 months and then only using the 4 you want to use to skew numbers seems pretty ridiculous to me.<p>And then in the same page there&#x27;s data for drug&#x2F;narcotics violations which isn&#x27;t even mentioned because it is going up (21% more) even though there are supposedly plummeting marijuana convictions. Also they stated that the crime rate in Denver is going down, yet the data shows the exact opposite.<p>Whole article seems like cherrypicking at its finest.</text></comment> | <story><title>Six Months After Legalizing Marijuana, Two Big Things Have Happened in Colorado</title><url>http://mic.com/articles/92449/six-months-after-legalizing-marijuana-two-big-things-have-happened-in-colorado</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielweber</author><text>The linked data shows 19 murders in the first five months of 2013, 11 murders in the same period in 2014.<p>First, this is very noisy data to make any predictions from. (I guess it&#x27;s a good thing to have so few murders that it&#x27;s hard to make generalizations.) March 2014 alone had 5 murders compared to three last year.<p>Second, this isn&#x27;t a 52.9% drop, even if you exclude May, which makes the drop from 17 to 9. It&#x27;s a 47.1% drop.<p>This is a very low quality article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xyzzy123</author><text>Agreed. I&#x27;m pro decriminalization and&#x2F;or legalization, but a 52% drop in the murder rate due to the legalization of marijuana doesn&#x27;t even pass the laugh test let alone the kind of analysis people are proposing here.</text></comment> |
41,466,797 | 41,465,246 | 1 | 2 | 41,464,334 | train | <story><title>Intent to unship: HTTP/2 Push</title><url>https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/vU9hJg343U8/m/4cZsHz7TAQAJ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>It is extremely annoying that all of this sudden discovery that http2 push didn&#x27;t work hasn&#x27;t come with some kind of apology to everyone out here who had tried to explain before why this wouldn&#x27;t work and why it would be a dangerous waste of time just to be shouted down for years by the people insisting it was going to be epic as the much-smarter people at Google knew what they were doing and really needed this so we should just let them ram it into the spec. We should be extremely conservative about what we put in the spec and stop just throwing in speculative stretch goals because some people at Google thought it&#x27;s a good idea.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intent to unship: HTTP/2 Push</title><url>https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/vU9hJg343U8/m/4cZsHz7TAQAJ</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_heimdall</author><text>I never found the explanations given for why HTTP&#x2F;2 Push failed compelling. Google usually just refers to a blog post from Jake Archibald [1], but that post seems to call out all the ways browsers poorly implemented it rather than reasons the protocol itself wouldn&#x27;t work.<p>Browsers already support preload links, which should function effectively the same as a Push header. Why couldn&#x27;t that same code have been used for Push, including all the existing handling for things like caching and authorization headers that Jake called out as challenges with the 2017 implementations?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakearchibald.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;h2-push-tougher-than-i-thought&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jakearchibald.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;h2-push-tougher-than-i-though...</a></text></comment> |
13,466,058 | 13,465,234 | 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>maxfurman</author><text>This isn&#x27;t right. I know &quot;drivers can choose,&quot; and nobody is forcing these people to live and work like this. It still feels wrong. One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments. Seems like indentured servitude to me. Uber owes its drivers more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strken</author><text>The &quot;drivers can choose&quot; argument is important because it shows that for at least one driver it is genuinely preferable to sleep in his car and work 70 hours a week than do anything else. Clearly, drivers are facing unemployment, poverty, or working conditions that are even worse.<p>It would be very easy to regulate the hell out of Uber and turn the unicorn into a donkey. However, that wouldn&#x27;t improve the conditions that those in the economic class of drivers are subject to, it would just make them less visible. Fixing the Uber problem without providing any alternative employment options is a superficial placebo to make the wealthy feel more comfortable, because it doesn&#x27;t correct any of the underlying economic problems. Those drivers will still exist, they&#x27;ll just be pushed into agriculture, sweatshops, and dingy housing projects; hidden places, where nobody else has to look at them again.<p>There&#x27;s a very good article called The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[0] which states that &quot;when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it&quot;, and &quot;if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.&quot; This seems to be the case with Uber, where they make money from a social and economic problem where there&#x27;s an oversupply of unskilled labour, and thus get blamed for the working conditions that were already a reality for so many hidden and unnoticed people, even if they incrementally improve those conditions.<p>This is not a call to give Uber free rein, but rather to consider drivers as more or less rational human beings capable of making their own choices, and to consider driver wellbeing in that light.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160806191858&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jaibot.com&#x2F;the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160806191858&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jaibo...</a></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>maxfurman</author><text>This isn&#x27;t right. I know &quot;drivers can choose,&quot; and nobody is forcing these people to live and work like this. It still feels wrong. One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments. Seems like indentured servitude to me. Uber owes its drivers more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djrogers</author><text>&gt; One driver mentioned in the article leased his car from Uber and sleeps in it because it&#x27;s the only way he can make enough to afford the payments.<p>You obviously didn&#x27;t read the whole article (although the author clearly tried to bury this at the end) - quote from the same driver:<p>“I signed up for this because I am my boss. I kind of own the business. I have the freedom and that’s a beautiful thing,”<p>and<p>“These labor advocates, they don’t know what it’s like to be a driver. They think we’re not being treated right, but I’m happy. If I didn’t like it, I would do something else.”</text></comment> |
40,513,888 | 40,510,974 | 1 | 3 | 40,505,167 | train | <story><title>Writing an NVMe Driver in Rust [pdf]</title><url>https://db.in.tum.de/~ellmann/theses/finished/24/pirhonen_writing_an_nvme_driver_in_rust.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>For those curious: this is a userspace driver, written to open&#x2F;mmap the PCI BAR via sysfs. It doesn&#x27;t attempt to hook interrupts from the device and has to resort to polling for completion[1]. Also AFAICT there&#x27;s really no attempt being made at parallel design: all the hardware interaction is handled by a single manager thread responding to queued commands from workers. That&#x27;s a fine choice for simplicity and reliability but a very poor one for scalability in a storage backend that needs to be handling requests from filesystem drivers serving dozens or hundreds of CPUs.<p>Basically: this is good work (great work for an undergraduate thesis). But it&#x27;s very much &quot;solving the easy part&quot; and not really showing off Rust in any particularly impressive way. You can write very similar userspace &quot;drivers&quot; (and I have!) in Python.<p>[1] Though on modern hardware designed to manage arbitrary scatter&#x2F;gather command queues on its own, that&#x27;s not really such a big deal. In performance situations the hardware will always have something to do anyway, and idle hardware can be sent a command synchronously. Fixing this amounts to a power optimization only.</text></comment> | <story><title>Writing an NVMe Driver in Rust [pdf]</title><url>https://db.in.tum.de/~ellmann/theses/finished/24/pirhonen_writing_an_nvme_driver_in_rust.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kydlaw</author><text>Really cool and impressive work! I&#x27;m more on the software (high level) side than on the hardware, but I always wondered how USBs and other ports were truly working. It is an area of knowledge that I&#x27;m shamefully lacking...<p>Does anyone have nice resources to share like this one that focuses on a specific port&#x2F;connection and implement a driver&#x2F;reader&#x2F;parser? I&#x27;d very like to learn more of this.</text></comment> |
39,879,203 | 39,876,219 | 1 | 2 | 39,875,822 | train | <story><title>About the Tailscale.com outage on March 7, 2024</title><url>https://tailscale.com/blog/tls-outage-20240307</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smackeyacky</author><text>I&#x27;ve said it before and I&#x27;ll say it again: expiring certs are the new DNS for outages.<p>I still marvel at just how good Tailscale is. I&#x27;m a minor user really but I have two sites that I use tailscale to access: a couple of on-prem servers and my AWS production setup.<p>I can literally work from anywhere - had an issue over the weekend where I was trying to deploy an ECS container but the local wifi was so slow that the deploy kept timing out.<p>I simply SSH&#x27;d over to my on-prem development machine, did a git pull of the latest code and did the deploy from there. All while remaining secure with no open ports at all on my on-prem system and none in AWS. Can even do testing against the production Aurora database without any open ports on it, simply run a tailscale agent in AWS on a nano sized EC2.<p>Got another developer you need to give access to your network to? Tailscale makes that trivial (as it does revoking them).<p>Yeah, for that deployment I could just make a GitHub action or something and avoid the perils of terrible internet, but for this I like to do it manually and Tailscale lets me do just that.</text></comment> | <story><title>About the Tailscale.com outage on March 7, 2024</title><url>https://tailscale.com/blog/tls-outage-20240307</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lmeyerov</author><text>Expiring certs strikes again!<p>I&#x27;d recommend as part of the post mortem to move their install script off their marketing site or putting in some other fallback so marketing site activity is unrelated to customer operations critical path. They&#x27;re almost there for maintaining that typical isolation, which helps bc this kind of thing is common.<p>We track uptime of our various providers, and seeing bits like the GitHub or Zendesk sites go down is more common than we expected... and they&#x27;re the good cases.</text></comment> |
3,089,650 | 3,089,573 | 1 | 3 | 3,089,352 | train | <story><title>Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>astrofinch</author><text>&#62;“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”<p>How about the fact that we're doing it, period?<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_i...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Coming Soon: the Drone Arms Race</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunday-review/coming-soon-the-drone-arms-race.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mathattack</author><text>Everything we do that duhumanizes war comes with good ethical concerns (less loss of human life) but this doesn't make war any better.<p>Drones - save our lives. Cruise missiles - save our lives. An A-bomb saved our lives.<p>Not getting into as many wars would save the most lives. (Note: Some wars - like WW II are I admit unavoidable, but very few fall under this heading)</text></comment> |
4,653,048 | 4,653,052 | 1 | 3 | 4,652,940 | train | <story><title>Game Over</title><url>http://antirez.com/post/game-over.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blackhole</author><text>Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness.<p>The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong <i>doesn't matter</i>. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative <i>perspective</i> to mainstream conciousness.<p>Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem.<p>By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem.<p>If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.<p><i>"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ahelwer</author><text>I see this from a different perspective. We are finally getting to the point where a critical mass of people are not going to tolerate sexist misinformed crap as they encounter it, and will instead speak out en masse.<p>The blog post on sexism wasn't a "controversial opinion." The author wasn't bravely standing up to the mainstream. It was just his crappy opinion that tech needs to continue to try <i>very hard</i> to move past.<p>Most importantly, his opinion was NOT silenced. Why do people in this arena of conversation seem to consistently misinterpret the meaning of free speech? He espoused his opinion, and then a whole bunch of other people espoused theirs. Nobody was silenced. Quite the opposite, actually.</text></comment> | <story><title>Game Over</title><url>http://antirez.com/post/game-over.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blackhole</author><text>Some people are going to say that he was in the right, and some will argue this is a consequence of being wrong, but this doesn't matter. What this illustrates is the dangerous precipice that the world of blogging is hanging on to, where the violent hatred that spews forth when anyone writes a remotely controversial opinion threatens to silence any opinion that sways too far from mainstream consciousness.<p>The fact that the first comment that was posted here was just more critique about the original blog post and how supposedly "wrong" it was illustrates how much of a problem this has become. Whether or not his opinion is wrong <i>doesn't matter</i>. What matters is that he expresses it as an alternative <i>perspective</i> to mainstream conciousness.<p>Problems are solved and society is moved forward by a multitude of various opinions, all right and wrong in their own ways, interacting with each other. Each perspective provides a unique method of solving a problem which may not yet exist. The more perspectives we have, the more ideas we have to work from when we try to solve a problem.<p>By violently critiquing such controversial stances, we are indirectly silencing those voices, and ultimately destroying our own ability to find progressively better solutions to problems, because we get stuck inside a single point of view and refuse to move outside of it. It is not simply a matter of ignoring trolls either, because many of the most hurtful comments, at least in my experience, are otherwise highly intelligent people who completely missed the point of what you were trying to say, and have spent 10 minutes writing a scathing critique against a nonexistent problem.<p>If we continue to censor ourselves, it will destroy us.<p><i>"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_delirium</author><text>&#62; "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire<p>Wouldn't you then likewise defend the right of people to criticize the post, including to criticize it harshly, even if you disagree with he criticisms or the way they're phrased?<p>edit: That said, I can see a case for communities maintaining discourse norms, in order to promote discussion/etc. But to me that's precisely the <i>opposite</i> of a free-speech absolutist view, because discourse norms are limits on what/how/when to say things.</text></comment> |
2,824,042 | 2,822,508 | 1 | 3 | 2,822,255 | train | <story><title>Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production</title><url>http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-25-pc-goes-into-alpha-production-20110728/?hy=2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>"The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output."<p>Is it just me, or does that sound like it might make a decent gaming machine, if you don't get too greedy about graphics?<p>If that's the case, the consoles are in trouble!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wtracy</author><text>Alternative option: With a few gigs of read-only memory, you could burn a game image onto it, and market a device dedicated to that single game.<p>You could just about eliminate any and all compatibility and piracy issues, you wouldn't require customers to have an existing console, and conceivably you could still profitably sell the game at $50.<p>It wouldn't be very environmentally friendly (you're forcing players to buy a new console for every game) but it could make economic sense.<p>The devices are certainly small enough to stack behind your TV; you just need a decent KVM switch designed to work with these devices.</text></comment> | <story><title>Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production</title><url>http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/raspberry-pi-25-pc-goes-into-alpha-production-20110728/?hy=2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>"The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output."<p>Is it just me, or does that sound like it might make a decent gaming machine, if you don't get too greedy about graphics?<p>If that's the case, the consoles are in trouble!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>politician</author><text>Graphics or simulation complexity -- I don't think it'd run Dwarf Fortress very well, for example.</text></comment> |
30,446,098 | 30,446,053 | 1 | 2 | 30,444,644 | train | <story><title>No minimum parking requirements? No problem for Fayetteville, Arkansas</title><url>https://www.sightline.org/2022/02/22/no-minimum-parking-requirements-no-problem-for-fayetteville-arkansas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falsenapkin</author><text>I didn&#x27;t even know that minimum parking was an issue, where else can I read about this? How prevalent is it in other cities? It sounds like some 50s&#x2F;60s era white flight policy permanently enshrining cars into city life.<p>I&#x27;ve been to Bentonville (~2016) quite a bit for work, always said I&#x27;d go to Fayetteville <i>next time</i>. Bentonville wasn&#x27;t anything worth writing about for how I want to live but I can see it being an attractive place for quite a lot of people, I was kind of surprised by how underpopulated it seemed. I guess not a lot of jobs outside of the obvious few. Crystal Bridges was a great museum, the Ozarks are lovely. In general I felt a lot more positive visiting that area than I was expecting to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drivers99</author><text>A couple YouTube channels I&#x27;d suggest:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;notjustbikes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;notjustbikes</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;OhTheUrbanity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;OhTheUrbanity</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;CityBeautiful" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;CityBeautiful</a><p>If you want to go deep on parking policy, here&#x27;s a talk by Donald Shoup: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r0gokb4rPik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r0gokb4rPik</a></text></comment> | <story><title>No minimum parking requirements? No problem for Fayetteville, Arkansas</title><url>https://www.sightline.org/2022/02/22/no-minimum-parking-requirements-no-problem-for-fayetteville-arkansas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falsenapkin</author><text>I didn&#x27;t even know that minimum parking was an issue, where else can I read about this? How prevalent is it in other cities? It sounds like some 50s&#x2F;60s era white flight policy permanently enshrining cars into city life.<p>I&#x27;ve been to Bentonville (~2016) quite a bit for work, always said I&#x27;d go to Fayetteville <i>next time</i>. Bentonville wasn&#x27;t anything worth writing about for how I want to live but I can see it being an attractive place for quite a lot of people, I was kind of surprised by how underpopulated it seemed. I guess not a lot of jobs outside of the obvious few. Crystal Bridges was a great museum, the Ozarks are lovely. In general I felt a lot more positive visiting that area than I was expecting to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mperham</author><text>So much of American zoning code makes our suburbs into ugly, inhumane places. StrongTowns.org is a good place to start. Their blog is great and will quickly radicalize you.</text></comment> |
18,712,578 | 18,712,341 | 1 | 2 | 18,712,022 | train | <story><title>An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/12/18/675253856/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnu8</author><text>It&#x27;s clear that no one should be working in a mine without at minimum an N95 mask and probably a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator). I wonder if there is any reason at all, other than preserving corporate profit margins, that the coal industry has failed to adopt simple and well understood industrial hygiene practices.<p>Clean coal indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whyenot</author><text>That&#x27;s a good point -- why aren&#x27;t mining companies buying PAPRs for their workers? PAPRs are designed for difficult conditions like hot and damp, and at least in my experience, the constant flow of air over your face cools you down and is a lot more comfortable than a traditional respirator. Mining is a relatively well paid profession. Yes, PAPRs are expensive ($1,500), and depending on how often they need to be changed, the cost of filters can quickly add up, but even for a heartless corporation, wouldn&#x27;t it make monetary sense to invest a few $1,000 a year per worker to keep your most experienced employees, avoid lawsuits, etc.?</text></comment> | <story><title>An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/12/18/675253856/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnu8</author><text>It&#x27;s clear that no one should be working in a mine without at minimum an N95 mask and probably a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator). I wonder if there is any reason at all, other than preserving corporate profit margins, that the coal industry has failed to adopt simple and well understood industrial hygiene practices.<p>Clean coal indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adanto6840</author><text>Surely it&#x27;s cheaper to provide this kind of protection (I assumed it would be OSHA-mandated honestly) than it is to pay for the healthcare and&#x2F;or lawsuits that follow?<p>I admittedly haven&#x27;t read the article yet, but it&#x27;s surprising to me that black lung &#x2F; industrial air quality isn&#x27;t something that OSHA (or similar) is tasked with ensuring ample worker protections for.</text></comment> |
5,161,733 | 5,161,495 | 1 | 3 | 5,161,214 | train | <story><title>Postel’s Principle is a Bad Idea</title><url>http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42215715657/postels-principle-is-a-bad-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruseom</author><text><i>when instead they've accidentally built dependencies on other people's implementation details</i><p>I think it would be very interesting if you could give an example or two of this.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Postel's Principle was very important for bootstrapping adoption of TCP/IP, but it's mostly a curse in mature systems. It doesn't even help new implementors; instead, it deceives them into thinking that they've achieved interoperability when instead they've accidentally built dependencies on other people's implementation details.<p>That said, I wouldn't suggest that our Insertion, Evasion paper presented an argument regarding the Principle in either direction. Even if we forbad leniency, there'd still be ambiguous standards.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MichaelGG</author><text>Here's the general outline.<p>Vendor A writes a parser that is helpful and is liberal and infers missing quotes and stuff. Vendor B writes something that's mostly to spec, but accidentally doesn't properly quote things. It works fine, because A is liberal and infers these quotes.<p>Vendor C comes along and builds exactly to spec. But despite being perfectly to spec, it doesn't interop because B sends invalid data! But B is a big vendor, and their stuff works with A.<p>So now C must add a hack to their parser to deal with the fact that, because A was liberal, B got their implementation wrong.<p>One example is the loose routing parameter, "lr". It has no value, you just add the name of the parameter "uri;lr" in contrast to other parameters like "tag=bla". Some implementations send "lr=on", and that should be mostly harmless. Except other implementations take that to mean "lr" has a value, and no longer accept just "lr" as turning the feature on.<p>SIP is full of these things, many of them in the <i>parsing</i> layer alone, let alone actual semantics of what things mean. Browsers are another example: vendor A decides to allow closing tags out of order - how do you do handle such unspecified stuff cross browser?</text></comment> | <story><title>Postel’s Principle is a Bad Idea</title><url>http://programmingisterrible.com/post/42215715657/postels-principle-is-a-bad-idea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruseom</author><text><i>when instead they've accidentally built dependencies on other people's implementation details</i><p>I think it would be very interesting if you could give an example or two of this.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Postel's Principle was very important for bootstrapping adoption of TCP/IP, but it's mostly a curse in mature systems. It doesn't even help new implementors; instead, it deceives them into thinking that they've achieved interoperability when instead they've accidentally built dependencies on other people's implementation details.<p>That said, I wouldn't suggest that our Insertion, Evasion paper presented an argument regarding the Principle in either direction. Even if we forbad leniency, there'd still be ambiguous standards.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kens</author><text>Windows software is a similar case - a program works on one version of Windows due to accidental dependencies on Windows implementation details (e.g. memory management), and then fails on the next version of Windows when the underlying implementation changes. Raymond Chen has written about the huge difficulty for Windows to maintain backwards compatibility with "broken" programs. New versions of Windows provide special-case handling for old applications so they will still run. See <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html</a> and scroll way down to "The Two Forces at Microsoft" for a long discussion of this, and how Apple is much stricter.</text></comment> |
38,897,164 | 38,869,415 | 1 | 2 | 38,895,373 | train | <story><title>First tunnel to a magma chamber could supercharge geothermal power</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aimonster2</author><text>Really. Just use that energy to absorb CO2 via CaO to CaCO3 and convert it into long chain hydrocarbons using water . Iceland is surrounded by water, after all. Just don&#x27;t take too much CO2 out of the environment with that limitless energy :)</text></comment> | <story><title>First tunnel to a magma chamber could supercharge geothermal power</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>justsomeoldguy</author><text>for anyone interested in reading the article behind the paywall:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?sca_esv=595707050&amp;gbv=1&amp;sxsrf=AM9HkKkzNpGXLFltvjpvEDCqe1KknjTF4w%3A1704387801061&amp;q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg26134722-100-worlds-first-tunnel-to-a-magma-chamber-could-unleash-unlimited-energy%2F&amp;oq=&amp;aqs=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?sca_esv=595707...</a></text></comment> |
28,446,420 | 28,446,459 | 1 | 2 | 28,446,102 | train | <story><title>Netflix is not a tech company (2019)</title><url>https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/31/Netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>While you can make that argument today, Netflix as a company is 24 years old. It got to its current position not by spending $15B&#x2F;yr on original content (which it can afford to do now) but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.<p>Of course eventually all discussions of this nature devolve into the intricate definition of &quot;tech company&quot;, and in the absence of one that is agreed upon, bringing this whole thing up is pointless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saalweachter</author><text>Eh, as a user Netflix original content is a large part of why I still have a subscription.<p>I used Netflix back when it was mailing me DVDs, and loved the online streaming back in the halcyon days when it seemed like they had <i>everything</i>.<p>Then came the dark days when content owners began pulling their IP from Netflix and scattering it all over the internet behind a dozen different options that offered them more money or control, and Netflix was a barren wasteland without anything that caught my eye; my queue was a variety of B-tier series that I tried a few episodes of and gave up on.<p>So I canceled my subscription, for several years. It didn&#x27;t matter what their UX or uptime was or how smooth their video codecs, they didn&#x27;t have enough content I wanted to watch.<p>Then I came back for the original content -- I forget which series first made me sign back up; House of Cards? -- and while I watch licensed content on Netflix from time to time, at least half of what I watch is produced by Netflix.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix is not a tech company (2019)</title><url>https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/7/31/Netflix</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>While you can make that argument today, Netflix as a company is 24 years old. It got to its current position not by spending $15B&#x2F;yr on original content (which it can afford to do now) but purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.<p>Of course eventually all discussions of this nature devolve into the intricate definition of &quot;tech company&quot;, and in the absence of one that is agreed upon, bringing this whole thing up is pointless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>&gt; <i>purely based on a superior and novel tech experience for its users.</i><p>I don&#x27;t think this is accurate - the main value proposition of Netflix seems to have always been &quot;streaming site with lots of mainstream content, <i>that is also legal</i>&quot;. I.e. it&#x27;s the streaming deals they&#x27;ve made that mattered, not delivery tech or their web player.</text></comment> |
17,956,780 | 17,956,456 | 1 | 2 | 17,956,180 | train | <story><title>Google Photos API</title><url>https://developers.google.com/photos</url><text>Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product.<p>Developer site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;photos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;photos</a><p>With the API you can help users transfer, share and bring their content into your app more easily (including features like auto-organized categories and creating link-shareable albums).<p>API is now launched to General Availability, with official client libraries and sample apps for Java &amp; PHP (and more in the works!).<p>Large app integrations are also encouraged to join the Google Photos Partner Program. Check the developer site for more info.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewstuart</author><text>There&#x27;s alot of comments here about Google shutting down its services.<p>Here&#x27;s what Amazon does with products it no longer wants:<p>Consider SimpleDB, one of the first of the Amazon web services and effectively dead. But still has a live page, and still works and is online <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;simpledb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;simpledb&#x2F;</a><p>But is not listed in the Amazon Web Services product lineup:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;</a><p>Presumably if you had built something on it many years ago (which I did), it would still be working today. Maybe the lesson for Google is that instead of killing things, leave them working but without future development. And instead of radical pricing change, make pricing change for new customers and leave the old ones on the existing pricing. Sure people might be unhappy about the changes but they are less likely to be enraged and lose trust in Google.<p>This post from Amazon Web Services CTO <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;10-lessons-from-10-years-of-aws.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allthingsdistributed.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;10-lessons-from...</a> says:<p>5. APIs are forever<p>This was a lesson we had already learned from our experiences with Amazon retail, but it became even more important for AWS’s API-centric business. Once customers started building their applications and systems using our APIs, changing those APIs becomes impossible, as we would be impacting our customer’s business operations if we would do so. We knew that designing APIs was a very important task as we’d only have one chance to get it right.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Photos API</title><url>https://developers.google.com/photos</url><text>Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product.<p>Developer site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;photos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;photos</a><p>With the API you can help users transfer, share and bring their content into your app more easily (including features like auto-organized categories and creating link-shareable albums).<p>API is now launched to General Availability, with official client libraries and sample apps for Java &amp; PHP (and more in the works!).<p>Large app integrations are also encouraged to join the Google Photos Partner Program. Check the developer site for more info.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>highace</author><text><i>Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product</i>... until we deprecate the API in a couple years time and leave you up shit creek.</text></comment> |
35,769,726 | 35,769,857 | 1 | 2 | 35,769,203 | train | <story><title>Indian government bans 14 messenger apps including Element, Briar and Threema</title><url>https://news.abplive.com/technology/india-ban-messaging-messenger-apps-mobile-pakistan-terrorism-connection-crypviser-enigma-safeswiss-bchat-1599074</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rogers18445</author><text>These things are typically bureaucratic security theater. Terrorists can sideload. The decision makers just care to be seen doing something, whether it&#x27;s useful or not is not their problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p-e-w</author><text>You severely underestimate the people in power, and the people who stand behind them.<p>Such bans are deliberate attacks targeting (parts of) the general population. Terrorists have nothing to do with this.<p>&quot;Hahaha those stupid bureaucrats, they have no idea what they are doing&quot; is a popular meme, but it couldn&#x27;t be further from the truth. They <i>do</i> know what they are doing, and it&#x27;s working. If you believe it isn&#x27;t, that&#x27;s only because you misunderstand what the real goal is.</text></comment> | <story><title>Indian government bans 14 messenger apps including Element, Briar and Threema</title><url>https://news.abplive.com/technology/india-ban-messaging-messenger-apps-mobile-pakistan-terrorism-connection-crypviser-enigma-safeswiss-bchat-1599074</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rogers18445</author><text>These things are typically bureaucratic security theater. Terrorists can sideload. The decision makers just care to be seen doing something, whether it&#x27;s useful or not is not their problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>&gt;Terrorists can sideload<p>many don&#x27;t because terrorists in reality don&#x27;t tend to be very smart. And if they do, its not that difficult to trick them and compromise that channel aswell (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;fbi-app-arrests-australia-crime&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2021&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;fbi-app-arre...</a>)<p>The amount of people who get caught on insecure communication, including some famous tech CEOs, is staggering. Most people, criminal or not, are completely security&#x2F;tech illiterate. Changing the default has a huge impact. Webs in these investigations tend to be wide so it&#x27;s not just about literal criminals, if one suspect leaks info to anyone that may be enough for authorities to catch on, it&#x27;s a statistical game basically and the harder you make it to not mess up the higher your chance to catch someone.<p>Gentle reminder that the US intelligence leaker was caught because he distributed the material on a gaming discord on an account with user info that was one Google search away from his father&#x27;s instagram and steam profile. And that guy was US National Guard tech support staff.</text></comment> |
33,586,698 | 33,585,864 | 1 | 2 | 33,582,795 | train | <story><title>Human behavior on social media is similar to collective behavior in nature</title><url>https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seydor</author><text>one of the mysteries of biology in this century is why&#x2F;how collective behavior appears to be a fractal from cell cultures to societies and their digital facsimiles<p>(also, social media are part of nature)</text></comment> | <story><title>Human behavior on social media is similar to collective behavior in nature</title><url>https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ispo</author><text>So what? Any complex system behaves like that, which makes the analogy banal.</text></comment> |
34,402,380 | 34,402,036 | 1 | 2 | 34,401,418 | train | <story><title>Apple Silicon Mac’s have 2-3 times longer battery than PC laptops</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0h8q6D0s74</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m_st</author><text>I can confirm that various Dell XPS 15 models and Microsoft Surface Book 2 and 3 models are just not usable without the power plug for my software development (and very rare gaming) needs. I also need the power plug for a simple thing like a Microsoft Teams meeting that last longer than one hour.<p>Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.<p>With Dell I learned it&#x27;s better to always shut down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubermonkey</author><text>It <i>staggers</i> me that this is still a problem, because *more than 20 years ago* I switched from Win98 on a ThinkPad to a G3 Powerbook partly because of sleep.<p>I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.<p>Then I noticed a colleague who&#x27;d come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.<p>And you&#x27;re telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn&#x27;t work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That&#x27;s bananas.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Silicon Mac’s have 2-3 times longer battery than PC laptops</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0h8q6D0s74</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m_st</author><text>I can confirm that various Dell XPS 15 models and Microsoft Surface Book 2 and 3 models are just not usable without the power plug for my software development (and very rare gaming) needs. I also need the power plug for a simple thing like a Microsoft Teams meeting that last longer than one hour.<p>Compare that to my MacBook Air M1 which runs for a full day easily. Also, standby works.<p>With Dell I learned it&#x27;s better to always shut down.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>Sleep mode is really bad. I had a Surface Pro 3 which was the first iteration of &quot;connected standby&quot; and it would run the battery down while sleeping in less than a day.<p>I was borrowing a newer Surface Pro from work more recently and hoped with the additional years of development they would have managed to fix it. Sadly not.</text></comment> |
6,862,611 | 6,862,706 | 1 | 3 | 6,861,481 | train | <story><title>The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA</title><url>http://www.newsweek.com/day-mandela-was-arrested-little-help-cia-223935</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moolriaz</author><text>Shocked by how misinformed people are about Mandela&#x2F;Apartheid, or by the amount of trolling going on here.<p>Thousands of white people have not died in SA thanks to Mandela. Mandela was not a &#x27;terrorist&#x27;. Apartheid was BAD, and still affects the country significantly today. Here&#x27;s some context for you. This all applied pre 1994&#x2F;2:<p>I am a non white South African. The only reason I got a good education was because with the release of Nelson Mandela, my parents were one of few to study at a previously white only university, and qualify for positions previously reserved for whites only. They went on to run companies that they COULD NOT have run during Apartheid, have offices in places they could not have had before, have clients they could not have before etc. I live in a neighbourhood my parents could not have lived in prior to 1994, and study at a university my parents were not allowed to. These were white only areas only, because they are good.<p>My father was a lawyer during Apartheid. Black people were only allowed to represent black people. Almost all of the people he defended in court were put to death, in many cases before their trials were even heard by courts! Post apartheid, the death penalty was dropped.<p>My family had family friends that were white. They were never allowed to mix. My aunt wanted to marry a white (American) man but was forbidden to. They got married illegally. She was not entitled to live in the property he owned, as black people could not legally own property. She came close to being arrested many times.<p>Post apartheid my aunt and her white husband were married. She was allowed to legally own the property after he died.<p>My birth certificate does not have my parents names on it, due to Apartheid. Families were not formally recognised. I need to get an amended birth certificate to prove who my parents are, and I can now do this post apartheid.<p>My parents were also forcefully removed from their legally owned properties that were taken from them during Apartheid. Their property was seized by the government and never returned. My parents could barely even travel out of South Africa as flying over&#x2F;travelling other African countries were restricted. They were even not allowed to enter many countries abroad.<p>And I&#x27;m not even &#x27;Black&#x27;. My ethnicity is Indian. I am an Indian South Africa (of which there are millions). Everyone who wasn&#x27;t white was counted as &#x27;Black&#x27;. This accounts for over 85% of South Africa&#x27;s population.<p>It is well known in SA that the US government actively supported Apartheid, and many people have a poor opinion of the US because of this.<p>If it wasn&#x27;t for Nelson Mandela, I probably wouldn&#x27;t even be able to post this. My family, and millions others, now live lives they simply could not have lived before.<p>Please explain to me how this is the work of a terrorist, or how in any way the work of the armed wing of the ANC was not justified by the Apartheid regimes massacre of innocent children and women , and torture of prisoners (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soweto_uprising" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Soweto_uprising</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sharpeville_massacre</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Biko" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Steve_Biko</a>) and their numerous policies and their effects as explained above.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA</title><url>http://www.newsweek.com/day-mandela-was-arrested-little-help-cia-223935</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CraigJPerry</author><text>I only found out today how Nelson Mandella place in Glasgow city centre got its name.<p>To piss off SA, the street their embassy was on was renamed while he was still being held.<p>There&#x27;s more the story: <a href="http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22976781" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-scotland-22976781</a></text></comment> |
16,294,043 | 16,294,165 | 1 | 3 | 16,291,272 | train | <story><title>Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baron816</author><text>I wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.</text></item><item><author>wjnc</author><text>A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!</text></item><item><author>52-6F-62</author><text>This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn&#x27;t we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth&#x27;s surface as possible?<p>Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don&#x27;t race to do more?<p>I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians.<p>There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical claims that might be put to rest (or less likely, cause a revolution in human self-knowledge). Eg: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bosnian_pyramid_claims" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bosnian_pyramid_claims</a><p>I would also love to see plots like Cahokia (and others like it) scanned: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cahokia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cahokia</a></text></item><item><author>brett40324</author><text>This highly corroborates Charles C Mann&#x27;s book 1491: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1491:_New_Revelations_of_the...</a><p>From wikipedia: The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobolus</author><text>It’s both bigger and smaller than we often think.<p>In a straight line, it’s smaller than we might expect: People can (and do) walk across continents, sail across oceans in one-person boats, fly all the way around in 2 days, visit every country at least once during their life, etc.<p>But of course the surface is two-dimensional, we can’t see very far at a time. The land surface is about 150 million square kilometers. (For reference, New York’s Central Park is about 3.4 square kilometers.)<p>It’s also “fractal”, in the sense that as we look at smaller and smaller pieces, we keep noticing more and more details. Every little patch of soil is teeming with tiny animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria.<p>Or if you like, there are probably at least 10 million restaurants in the world (maybe an order of magnitude more, it’s hard to guess). If you eat at 3 different restaurants every day for your whole life, it will take more than 100 lifetimes to eat at all of them. Then there are the 150 million books to read. Etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sprawling Mayan network discovered under Guatemala jungle</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baron816</author><text>I wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.</text></item><item><author>wjnc</author><text>A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!</text></item><item><author>52-6F-62</author><text>This is not my field of expertise, but why wouldn&#x27;t we just run LIDAR scans of as much of the earth&#x27;s surface as possible?<p>Is it prohibitively expensive at this point? Is the computation [relatively] expensive? Is there a sound reason we don&#x27;t race to do more?<p>I get the feeling this kind of data could inspire generations of new archaeologists and historians.<p>There are also some pseudo-archeological and pseudo-historical claims that might be put to rest (or less likely, cause a revolution in human self-knowledge). Eg: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bosnian_pyramid_claims" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bosnian_pyramid_claims</a><p>I would also love to see plots like Cahokia (and others like it) scanned: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cahokia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cahokia</a></text></item><item><author>brett40324</author><text>This highly corroborates Charles C Mann&#x27;s book 1491: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;1491:_New_Revelations_of_the...</a><p>From wikipedia: The book presents recent research findings in different fields that suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackhack</author><text>I would say quite a lot.<p>A private small-aircraft flight over any populated area (other than the biggest cities) reveals just how sparse most towns are. Travel almost any direction away from a main highway and in a minute or two you&#x27;ll be looking at trees, trees, trees (or desert&#x2F;mountains&#x2F;fields).<p>It helps give one an entirely new perspective when we&#x27;re used to traveling along roads and seeing unyielding flows of civilization, when the reality is those are mere ribbons of development criss-crossing what is still mostly empty, disinterested nature.</text></comment> |
18,804,784 | 18,804,566 | 1 | 2 | 18,803,533 | train | <story><title>IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle</title><url>https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dqpb</author><text>I&#x27;ll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don&#x27;t think this is inherent in those people. I think it&#x27;s mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress&#x2F;anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.<p>OTOH there&#x27;s definitely a difference between people, people who aren&#x27;t mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who&#x27;s worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people&#x27;s capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.<p>It&#x27;s hard to separate out Taleb&#x27;s own axe-grinding from anything concrete he&#x27;s trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I&#x27;ve seen a difference between people in this degree, it&#x27;s more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn&#x27;t seem to be improved easily with learning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toasterlovin</author><text>You should ask yourself what it would it take to falsify your working hypothesis and then see if there are research results which falsify it.</text></comment> | <story><title>IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle</title><url>https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dqpb</author><text>I&#x27;ll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don&#x27;t think this is inherent in those people. I think it&#x27;s mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress&#x2F;anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.<p>OTOH there&#x27;s definitely a difference between people, people who aren&#x27;t mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who&#x27;s worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people&#x27;s capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.<p>It&#x27;s hard to separate out Taleb&#x27;s own axe-grinding from anything concrete he&#x27;s trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I&#x27;ve seen a difference between people in this degree, it&#x27;s more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn&#x27;t seem to be improved easily with learning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yourapostasy</author><text>&gt; I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.<p>If the real world distribution of IQ closely approximates the Gaussian distribution IQ tests are meant to model, then in the US alone there are about 44 million people in the range from about 70-85. World wide, about 1 billion people in that cohort of 1-2 standard deviations. Even if actual real world results are half of what the models predict, we&#x27;re still talking really large numbers of people.<p>Finding ways to bring them up to &quot;just&quot; average intelligence would be astounding for the species, and I&#x27;d aim for that first instead of setting ourselves up for failure by defining a goal of &quot;great intelligence&quot;.<p>Right now, the best we can prescribe with even a semblance of consistent results is intensive educational intervention and family assistance from early childhood onward. Actually doing that in our current economic model would be on the order of ditching the MIC and somehow transferring the spending to those activities. That&#x27;s a pipe dream with current established stakeholders.</text></comment> |
22,153,274 | 22,151,959 | 1 | 2 | 22,151,420 | train | <story><title>In 2019, Americans went more to the library than to the movies on average</title><url>https://news.gallup.com/poll/284009/library-visits-outpaced-trips-movies-2019.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawaylolx</author><text>Just post the actual results: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284009&#x2F;library-visits-outpaced-trips-movies-2019.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284009&#x2F;library-visits-outpaced-...</a><p>Also, the results don&#x27;t show at all that &quot;more Americans went to the library than to the movies&quot; but rather that Americans went more to the library than to the movies (on average), which is not very surprising given that only one of them is free.<p>In other words, if 100 Americans went to the movies once, and 1 American went to the library 101 times, the results would still rank libraries higher than movies despite it being obviously not true that &quot;more Americans went to the library than to the movies.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hedora</author><text>That link still isn’t to the actual results. Here they are: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284015&#x2F;200123LeisureActivities.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284015&#x2F;200123LeisureActivi...</a><p>Your page points to this — good luck finding the hyperlink though!<p>Anyway, defined as “% of population that did the thing at least once”, movies are first, parks second, and libraries third.<p>Parks have seen a huge uptick in popularity. The other two dropped off (libraries dropped off more than movies).<p>In terms of median visits per person (probably the better measurement), almost nothing changed.<p>Concerts went from 1 to 2 visits, libraries went from 3 to 2. I’d guess those are explainable as statistical noise.</text></comment> | <story><title>In 2019, Americans went more to the library than to the movies on average</title><url>https://news.gallup.com/poll/284009/library-visits-outpaced-trips-movies-2019.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawaylolx</author><text>Just post the actual results: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284009&#x2F;library-visits-outpaced-trips-movies-2019.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;284009&#x2F;library-visits-outpaced-...</a><p>Also, the results don&#x27;t show at all that &quot;more Americans went to the library than to the movies&quot; but rather that Americans went more to the library than to the movies (on average), which is not very surprising given that only one of them is free.<p>In other words, if 100 Americans went to the movies once, and 1 American went to the library 101 times, the results would still rank libraries higher than movies despite it being obviously not true that &quot;more Americans went to the library than to the movies.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avip</author><text>There&#x27;s a whole class of people who practically live in libraries, which makes your example very realistic.</text></comment> |
17,844,997 | 17,843,328 | 1 | 2 | 17,842,553 | train | <story><title>Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/world/great-barrier-reef/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jarmitage</author><text>I met a coral researcher last year who said we just have to get over the fact that it’s all over for coral as it exists now, and try to learn as much as possible from it so we can re-design it later ourselves. They were very calm about this suggesting they were way past the grieving period. It was quite shocking to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/world/great-barrier-reef/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DavidPiper</author><text>We&#x27;re going on holiday to the Great Barrier Reef in a few months. I think it&#x27;s quite likely to be the first and last time I see it in any state worth visiting for many years.<p>Irrespective of how successful or unsuccessful the far-rights are in maintaining Australia&#x27;s CO2 emission levels, I believe it&#x27;s already too late - we&#x27;ve crossed from &#x27;recovery is possible&#x27; to &#x27;rebuilding is the only way&#x27; and that will take decades if not centuries.<p>&#x2F;opinion</text></comment> |
31,944,412 | 31,943,076 | 1 | 2 | 31,941,777 | train | <story><title>Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-meta-girds-fierce-headwinds-slower-growth-second-half-memo-2022-06-30/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Maybe I&#x27;m being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don&#x27;t even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between.<p>Engagement with a real human purpose seems like a better goal than just beating tiktok, but yes I&#x27;m just being an old man nostalgic for the old innocent days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yieldcrv</author><text>Impersonal blasts are done, and ephemeral stories are still common but becoming less broadly viewable as well and maybe on the way out. Its all groupchats, that you’re not in.<p>0 post instagram accounts are common in my circles, its still a fair assumption to assume they archived all their old photos as opposed to deleting them or never having any, but 0 post and story exclusive accounts (only create “stories” that are visible for 24 hours) are a fine way to interact. Just to be able to view your stories and send DMs. And many don&#x27;t really engage with the stories, but maybe do more “close friends” stories that only a whitelisted group can see, even if the profile was already private.<p>Its really more like hybrid of Snapchat and Tiktok now, and you need to make closer friends yourself. The network part about finding “people you met once” or “15 years ago” is done, people want more genuine connections right now, its going to leave lonely people in the dust if it hasn&#x27;t already, but there are ways to take initiative yourself by adding a few people to your close friends list.<p>This is how people are getting their engagement with real human beings, far better than status updates on a wall ever did. The latter would actually be a weird thing to me right now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-meta-girds-fierce-headwinds-slower-growth-second-half-memo-2022-06-30/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Maybe I&#x27;m being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don&#x27;t even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between.<p>Engagement with a real human purpose seems like a better goal than just beating tiktok, but yes I&#x27;m just being an old man nostalgic for the old innocent days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>boredtofears</author><text>&gt; I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago<p>Really, you _want_ to go back to that? They don&#x27;t have to regain your trust in any way?<p>I don&#x27;t think the &quot;innocent&quot; days were all that innocent, many were just naïve.</text></comment> |
32,140,731 | 32,140,607 | 1 | 2 | 32,139,026 | train | <story><title>Crimes against transhumanity</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stereolambda</author><text>&gt; Here&#x27;s the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading&#x2F;replication or super-human intelligence.<p>Don&#x27;t agree with this specific point. One of the most common anti-democratic arguments (?) is that people are inherently unequal, because of differences in physical and cognitive capacity. But this of course misses that declaration of all people being equal is <i>performative</i>. I don&#x27;t think we actually care if it&#x27;s &quot;naturally&quot; true, we - citizens - don&#x27;t want to be dominated, so we will <i>make</i> everyone equal by law and politics. Democratic politics is just arguing the specifics, in what areas, to what extent etc.<p>So this is a rational pact. Trying to break it just means there will be someone stronger than you out to dominate you, and you&#x27;ll be in a suboptimal position to resist, because you alienated and weakened your potential allies. Look up Republicanism for a related line of thinking.<p>In my opinion an artificial person automatically gets all the rights (they are bound to personhood and reciprocity and not biology). But I have no doubt there will be much lawlessness about this and perhaps an American Civil War-like event down the line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>benlivengood</author><text>There will at least have to be a law restricting the duplication or creation of persons; otherwise the dictator only needs to copy themselves &gt;N times where world population is N and vote themselves into the top leadership position(s). It would be a race to the bottom cloning people, consuming all available compute resources, just to maintain status quo of political power. And it will be the wealthy&#x2F;powerful who can afford the resources for mass self-duplication.<p>And then the question of personhood itself; someone is going to try uplifting animals (or raw creation of new beings) and we&#x27;ll need a rigorous threshold for the properties an intelligence must have for personhood, and this is also vulnerable to the mass-cloning takeover of democracy because the simplest artificial person is likely much less resource intensive than a human, so they will quickly outnumber everyone else and who knows what their values would be in a democracy?</text></comment> | <story><title>Crimes against transhumanity</title><url>http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stereolambda</author><text>&gt; Here&#x27;s the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading&#x2F;replication or super-human intelligence.<p>Don&#x27;t agree with this specific point. One of the most common anti-democratic arguments (?) is that people are inherently unequal, because of differences in physical and cognitive capacity. But this of course misses that declaration of all people being equal is <i>performative</i>. I don&#x27;t think we actually care if it&#x27;s &quot;naturally&quot; true, we - citizens - don&#x27;t want to be dominated, so we will <i>make</i> everyone equal by law and politics. Democratic politics is just arguing the specifics, in what areas, to what extent etc.<p>So this is a rational pact. Trying to break it just means there will be someone stronger than you out to dominate you, and you&#x27;ll be in a suboptimal position to resist, because you alienated and weakened your potential allies. Look up Republicanism for a related line of thinking.<p>In my opinion an artificial person automatically gets all the rights (they are bound to personhood and reciprocity and not biology). But I have no doubt there will be much lawlessness about this and perhaps an American Civil War-like event down the line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JasonFruit</author><text>&gt; so we will make everyone equal by law and politics<p>I hope you mean that we will <i>treat</i> everyone as though they were equal, not attempt to make them equal by government-enforced handicapping.</text></comment> |
34,700,267 | 34,698,479 | 1 | 2 | 34,696,635 | train | <story><title>Why do we create modern desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? (2022)</title><url>https://gerrysweeney.com/why-do-write-desktop-gui-desktop-apps-in-html-css-javascript-making-them-just-glorified-web-pages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alerighi</author><text>I think the difference is about frameworks. Typically desktop application frameworks (Windows Forms, GTK, QT, etc) follow an imperative approach, where you design your UI (maybe with a graphical designer) and attach callbacks to events, than then update the UI elements directly.<p>Web frameworks (and modern desktop frameworks are starting to do so) use a functional approach, the view is a pure function of the state of the application, when you need to change something you change the application state and the view updates automatically. This solves a lot of problems that you otherwise have.</text></item><item><author>JCWasmx86</author><text>&gt; the desktop&#x2F;UI sucks, its awful in almost every way, you are essentially targeting X11 which was developed in the 70’s and it shows. It works and it brings a couple of quirky features to the table which are quite nice, but, in essence, if you love Linux, just forget targeting GUI desktop stuff, you need a graphics screen, a browser (for a real UI) and a terminal window – that’s it… there is the Wayland stuff but its far too early, it’s also disjointed, barley supported and is grappling with compatibility with legacy stuff…<p>When would you even want to target X11&#x2F;Wayland directly? Just use a toolkit and ignore the underlying stuff. For 90% of the application it does not matter.<p>&gt; I find it difficult to see why this is going to change any time soon, the performance of a well written UI in a modern browser out-performs a native desktop application in every category of sped, usability and presentation for most usual use cases.<p>I always encounter the exact opposite. I&#x27;ve never found any web application with a good UI or any web application that outperformed a native one.<p>&gt; Could you imagine a future where desktop applications were built like this, and in every sense of the word, “portable between operating systems” with the experience being identical on all platforms…<p>This sounds more like a really crappy future, if anything looks everywhere the same. Applications must integrate with the &quot;host&quot;-OS.<p>The only reason the web stack is used for desktop applications is because it is a bit cheaper and less effort than writing a good - native application.<p>The lock-in argument is just a very weak one. At some point you depend on something. Oh, your HTML only renders fine in Chromium or you use Chromium only JS APIs - you are locked-in to Chromium now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xg15</author><text>Web <i>frameworks</i> do, but the web platform, i.e. browsers don&#x27;t. The basic abstraction of browsers is still the DOM, which follows the same basic idea of desktop UI toolkits: A tree of elements which you can modify imperatively, combined with event handlers. Only, it&#x27;s far less sophisticated than the data models of UI toolkits and still optimized for the web&#x27;s original use case, which were text documents.<p>A lot of the bloat and complexity of web frameworks comes from the issue that they basically have to implement a modern, functional UI toolkit on top of an ancient, imperative one.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why do we create modern desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript? (2022)</title><url>https://gerrysweeney.com/why-do-write-desktop-gui-desktop-apps-in-html-css-javascript-making-them-just-glorified-web-pages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alerighi</author><text>I think the difference is about frameworks. Typically desktop application frameworks (Windows Forms, GTK, QT, etc) follow an imperative approach, where you design your UI (maybe with a graphical designer) and attach callbacks to events, than then update the UI elements directly.<p>Web frameworks (and modern desktop frameworks are starting to do so) use a functional approach, the view is a pure function of the state of the application, when you need to change something you change the application state and the view updates automatically. This solves a lot of problems that you otherwise have.</text></item><item><author>JCWasmx86</author><text>&gt; the desktop&#x2F;UI sucks, its awful in almost every way, you are essentially targeting X11 which was developed in the 70’s and it shows. It works and it brings a couple of quirky features to the table which are quite nice, but, in essence, if you love Linux, just forget targeting GUI desktop stuff, you need a graphics screen, a browser (for a real UI) and a terminal window – that’s it… there is the Wayland stuff but its far too early, it’s also disjointed, barley supported and is grappling with compatibility with legacy stuff…<p>When would you even want to target X11&#x2F;Wayland directly? Just use a toolkit and ignore the underlying stuff. For 90% of the application it does not matter.<p>&gt; I find it difficult to see why this is going to change any time soon, the performance of a well written UI in a modern browser out-performs a native desktop application in every category of sped, usability and presentation for most usual use cases.<p>I always encounter the exact opposite. I&#x27;ve never found any web application with a good UI or any web application that outperformed a native one.<p>&gt; Could you imagine a future where desktop applications were built like this, and in every sense of the word, “portable between operating systems” with the experience being identical on all platforms…<p>This sounds more like a really crappy future, if anything looks everywhere the same. Applications must integrate with the &quot;host&quot;-OS.<p>The only reason the web stack is used for desktop applications is because it is a bit cheaper and less effort than writing a good - native application.<p>The lock-in argument is just a very weak one. At some point you depend on something. Oh, your HTML only renders fine in Chromium or you use Chromium only JS APIs - you are locked-in to Chromium now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ognarb</author><text>With Qt you can use QML and use a declarative language and this was way ahead of it&#x27;s time when it was first released in 2009.</text></comment> |
9,037,753 | 9,037,332 | 1 | 2 | 9,034,570 | train | <story><title>Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University</title><url>https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/enoughs-enough-6c56afe36d00</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lazare</author><text>Universities don&#x27;t offer any more than they have to. Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that&#x27;s what they do. I&#x27;m sure this guy is awesome, but the reason he&#x27;s being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it. If nobody would teach classes for less than $50k, then that&#x27;s what they&#x27;d get paid.<p>It&#x27;s the flip side of the big companies complaining about a skills shortage and advocating for increased immigration. Yeah, it&#x27;s hard to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley for peanuts. But there&#x27;s no god given right to be able to hire cheap labour, and if you really want to hire someone, pay the market rate, or stop whining about it.<p>I&#x27;m also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying &quot;I&#x27;m not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for&quot;. That wouldn&#x27;t fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn&#x27;t being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.<p>Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He&#x27;s doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he&#x27;s the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.<p>Ultimately, there&#x27;s only so many teaching slots available, and there&#x27;s a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms. Doubling the salary won&#x27;t increase the number of teaching slots available (more likely decrease it), and it won&#x27;t decrease the number of Phd grads looking to teach (it would absolutely increase it). Academia is already a lottery where the many chase the tiny number of tenure slots; does making the competition even fiercer and more Darwinian help improve the fairness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrgriscom</author><text>This is literally the least interesting response one can make to this issue. Both parties are offering&#x2F;accepting what the market will bear? Obviously! That&#x27;s what makes it the market. You&#x27;re stating a tautology.<p>The interesting issues at hand are the cultural factors of academia that cause so many highly qualified people to work for such astoundingly little money. Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of &#x27;higher learning&#x27;, not unlike a cult? Are those self-issued &#x27;high qualifications&#x27; not actually as valuable as they are pretended to be? Those are the interesting questions rather than just going &quot;hurr durr supply and demand&quot;.<p>Not like the supply-and-demand argument excuses anything, either. The entire history of labor protections is that previous practices that the market would bear were deemed socially unjust and no longer permitted, even if you could still find people desperate enough to agree to them. Saying &quot;you took the job; don&#x27;t complain&quot; simply isn&#x27;t valid.</text></comment> | <story><title>Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University</title><url>https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/enoughs-enough-6c56afe36d00</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lazare</author><text>Universities don&#x27;t offer any more than they have to. Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that&#x27;s what they do. I&#x27;m sure this guy is awesome, but the reason he&#x27;s being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it. If nobody would teach classes for less than $50k, then that&#x27;s what they&#x27;d get paid.<p>It&#x27;s the flip side of the big companies complaining about a skills shortage and advocating for increased immigration. Yeah, it&#x27;s hard to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley for peanuts. But there&#x27;s no god given right to be able to hire cheap labour, and if you really want to hire someone, pay the market rate, or stop whining about it.<p>I&#x27;m also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying &quot;I&#x27;m not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for&quot;. That wouldn&#x27;t fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn&#x27;t being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.<p>Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He&#x27;s doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he&#x27;s the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.<p>Ultimately, there&#x27;s only so many teaching slots available, and there&#x27;s a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms. Doubling the salary won&#x27;t increase the number of teaching slots available (more likely decrease it), and it won&#x27;t decrease the number of Phd grads looking to teach (it would absolutely increase it). Academia is already a lottery where the many chase the tiny number of tenure slots; does making the competition even fiercer and more Darwinian help improve the fairness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joesmo</author><text>He&#x27;s getting paid hourly and has already put in 55 free hours to teach the course properly. How many more free hours do you expect from him? I think the email he sent the students is spot on. Perhaps if they&#x27;re distressed enough, they will put pressure on the university to pay their teachers what they&#x27;re worth.<p>Yes, he might be &quot;part of the problem&quot; but it&#x27;s not like he can choose not to be without starving. Nor can other professors. Perhaps with union help, but they don&#x27;t seem to help. I don&#x27;t see how blame slinging helps here at all.</text></comment> |
17,749,705 | 17,749,436 | 1 | 2 | 17,743,747 | train | <story><title>History of editors for Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/master/editors.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phoe-krk</author><text>There is no mention of the most recent editor that is being developed - Second Climacs, by Robert Strandh. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robert-strandh&#x2F;Second-Climacs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robert-strandh&#x2F;Second-Climacs</a><p>It has multiple novel ideas, such as generating a syntax tree of typed Lisp code as it is being typed in on the keyboard, which allows it to automatically check and validate symbol spelling and indent code based not on regexes, but on the actual Lisp code that is being edited.</text></comment> | <story><title>History of editors for Lisp</title><url>https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/master/editors.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Y_Y</author><text>I&#x27;d love to see a couple of screencasts of people effectively using these. I use spacemacs in evil mode, but I find smartparens infuriating. I don&#x27;t know if this is because it doesn&#x27;t suit me, or it&#x27;s just no good, or if (most likely) I don&#x27;t know how it&#x27;s supposed to be used and haven&#x27;t learnt the keys.<p>Any advice on getting off the ground for sexp editing (racket mostly) in a modern semantic way would be greatly appreciated.</text></comment> |
29,874,057 | 29,874,267 | 1 | 2 | 29,873,253 | train | <story><title>Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are</title><url>https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newswasboring</author><text>&gt; In June 2016, attackers exploited a vulnerability to steal 3.6 million ETH (then about $50 million) of the project’s 11.5 million ETH (about $160 million).<p>People love to tout this example, I did too, until that realized that one a one off event. There are regularly significantly more larger thefts of crypto currencies these days[1] and nobody is even willing to discuss a hard fork. I now chalk this up as growing mistakes which every project makes in early stages. I&#x27;m still not into this whole idea of crypto currencies, but don&#x27;t think we can use this point fairly any more.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rekt.news&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rekt.news&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FabHK</author><text>Yes. Similarly, you can totally rely on your gold or fiat money being yours. Ok, there was this small incidence in 1933 where the US government took most of your gold, but that was a one off event [1]. And then during the hyperinflation in Germany your money actually became worthless, but that was a growing mistake. Of course, that was multiple generations ago, not a few years.<p>Conclusion: On the dimension of reliability and censor resistance, crypto might be as good as gold or fiat (while on all other axes it remains much worse).<p>[1] Executive Order 6102 required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20.67 (equivalent to $413 in 2020)[5] per troy ounce. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Executive_Order_6102" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Executive_Order_6102</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are</title><url>https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchains-are-not-what-they-say/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newswasboring</author><text>&gt; In June 2016, attackers exploited a vulnerability to steal 3.6 million ETH (then about $50 million) of the project’s 11.5 million ETH (about $160 million).<p>People love to tout this example, I did too, until that realized that one a one off event. There are regularly significantly more larger thefts of crypto currencies these days[1] and nobody is even willing to discuss a hard fork. I now chalk this up as growing mistakes which every project makes in early stages. I&#x27;m still not into this whole idea of crypto currencies, but don&#x27;t think we can use this point fairly any more.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rekt.news&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rekt.news&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>&gt; I now chalk this up as growing mistakes which every project makes in early stages.<p>Except it&#x27;s not new at all; regular banks and the fiat money they have been handling have been dealing with these things for literally centuries.<p>But the cryptobros decided they could do better, converting their PHP Magic the Gathering trading platform to a Bitcoin trading platform and thinking yeah, that&#x27;s good enough for handling billions. To name but one example.</text></comment> |
13,737,484 | 13,736,959 | 1 | 3 | 13,736,009 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?</title><text>From what I understand so far, it&#x27;s just a portal that gives the news. What I don&#x27;t get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard? I am not sure how is the network connected, is it a VPN. The cost of the product is ridiculous. I do not understand why are people paying for it. Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware? I know Bloomberg is a politician, has he managed to pass some ridiculous law that forces everyone to pay for his product?<p>P.S.: I do not understand Finance or the wall street world. But I am curious to know about the tech they use and why they are paying a huge amount for it.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hazard</author><text>It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades.<p>Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don&#x27;t mean relatively basic info like &quot;What&#x27;s the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?&quot; or &quot;What&#x27;s the current CDS spread for Citibank?&quot; that you can easily google for but also stuff like &quot;Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?&quot; and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.<p>Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).<p>Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zimablue</author><text>This is hyperbole, I&#x27;ve worked on dev side in finance a while now and bloomberg data is often unreliable, everywhere I&#x27;ve worked people have built layers on top of it, checking vs other sources and fat fingers. Also I&#x27;m actually currently working for some oil guys and they use bloomberg for some things but use specialist providers for oil macro, shipping and refinery events. I&#x27;d say their main advantages are familiarity and some information oligopolies</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?</title><text>From what I understand so far, it&#x27;s just a portal that gives the news. What I don&#x27;t get is why have a custom monitor, keyboard? I am not sure how is the network connected, is it a VPN. The cost of the product is ridiculous. I do not understand why are people paying for it. Is there a cheaper alternative that does not require specialised hardware? I know Bloomberg is a politician, has he managed to pass some ridiculous law that forces everyone to pay for his product?<p>P.S.: I do not understand Finance or the wall street world. But I am curious to know about the tech they use and why they are paying a huge amount for it.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hazard</author><text>It brings together a vast variety of otherwise extremely hard to find information. The keyboard is specialized because it literally reduces the number of keystrokes required to quickly access financial information. This is a business where seconds matter - even when you have humans talking to other humans to negotiate trades.<p>Literally almost every piece of useful financial information is available via bloomberg. And I don&#x27;t mean relatively basic info like &quot;What&#x27;s the current yield the Apple 3.85% of 2043?&quot; or &quot;What&#x27;s the current CDS spread for Citibank?&quot; that you can easily google for but also stuff like &quot;Which oil tankers are in for repair right now, and what are their capacities?&quot; and similar info on power plants, international agriculture, equities, interest rates, etc.<p>Experienced bloomberg users have their most-used keystrokes in their muscle memory. Less experienced users can hit F1 twice and immediately be connected to a live bloomberg rep who will research your question for you (although it may take 20 minutes for them to figure it out).<p>Bloomberg Chat is also extremely important, as others have mentioned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawayish</author><text>Oh. I&#x27;m European and I always wondered why in practically every American criminal-spy-scifi-investigative-themed TV show or movie there are people sitting at magical, proprietary computers able to find strange pieces of (personal) information in no time (but obviously always complex to use, because other characters don&#x27;t know how).<p>I didn&#x27;t know about the &quot;Bloomberg Terminal&quot; before, but now that makes <i>a lot</i> more sense where that idea comes from.</text></comment> |
23,962,955 | 23,962,611 | 1 | 3 | 23,955,197 | train | <story><title>Named arguments are coming in PHP 8</title><url>https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arcosdev</author><text>Why not use a dictionary or parameter object when you get past 2 arguments? Or is that not a thing in PHP?</text></item><item><author>Aeolun</author><text>&gt; break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile<p>Speak for yourself. If each line indicates what it is the parameter for I couldn’t care less.<p>Nobody will use this for functions that have just two parameters. It’s the ones that have 10 possibilities that are crazy.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>I&#x27;m ambivalent.<p>There&#x27;s a tension in PHP-land between PHP&#x27;s roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of mud.<p>Named arguments don&#x27;t do a lot for the first group. It looks like the big point in favor is not having to look up a reference for which-arguments-go-where in functions anymore, but a good IDE already does that for you.<p>But there is a common anti-pattern where you have some polymorphic function or interface, and you want to accrete your arguments somewhere and then bundle them up and call the function, so then you see things like [1]:<p><pre><code> call_user_func($function, [&#x27;length&#x27; =&gt; $n, &#x27;foo&#x27; =&gt; $bar, ...]);
</code></pre>
...and <i>that</i> is bad because it totally bypasses all of PHP&#x27;s type-checking and leaves it up to the called function to sanity-check the input types instead of letting the compiler do it, and basically nobody does that anyway.<p>So named parameters would fix that at least, which would be nice. I&#x27;m just not looking forward to the impact this is going to have on code readability, because everyone (including this article) is going to go, &quot;oh, now my parameter list is too long!&quot;, and break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile.<p>[1]: I&#x27;m guilty of this too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raziel2p</author><text>With a dictionary (array in PHP) you lose strict typing and it&#x27;s possible for the person constructing it to make a typo and it won&#x27;t cause an error, the called function will just think an optional argument was left out.<p>Writing and maintaining parameter classes is just tedious.</text></comment> | <story><title>Named arguments are coming in PHP 8</title><url>https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arcosdev</author><text>Why not use a dictionary or parameter object when you get past 2 arguments? Or is that not a thing in PHP?</text></item><item><author>Aeolun</author><text>&gt; break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile<p>Speak for yourself. If each line indicates what it is the parameter for I couldn’t care less.<p>Nobody will use this for functions that have just two parameters. It’s the ones that have 10 possibilities that are crazy.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>I&#x27;m ambivalent.<p>There&#x27;s a tension in PHP-land between PHP&#x27;s roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of mud.<p>Named arguments don&#x27;t do a lot for the first group. It looks like the big point in favor is not having to look up a reference for which-arguments-go-where in functions anymore, but a good IDE already does that for you.<p>But there is a common anti-pattern where you have some polymorphic function or interface, and you want to accrete your arguments somewhere and then bundle them up and call the function, so then you see things like [1]:<p><pre><code> call_user_func($function, [&#x27;length&#x27; =&gt; $n, &#x27;foo&#x27; =&gt; $bar, ...]);
</code></pre>
...and <i>that</i> is bad because it totally bypasses all of PHP&#x27;s type-checking and leaves it up to the called function to sanity-check the input types instead of letting the compiler do it, and basically nobody does that anyway.<p>So named parameters would fix that at least, which would be nice. I&#x27;m just not looking forward to the impact this is going to have on code readability, because everyone (including this article) is going to go, &quot;oh, now my parameter list is too long!&quot;, and break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile.<p>[1]: I&#x27;m guilty of this too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flemhans</author><text>That&#x27;s what the above comment was referring to when saying people to things like:<p><pre><code> call_user_func_array($function, [&#x27;length&#x27; =&gt; $n, &#x27;foo&#x27; =&gt; $bar, ...]);</code></pre></text></comment> |
26,480,023 | 26,480,067 | 1 | 2 | 26,477,029 | train | <story><title>Cricut Wants Users to Pay for Unlimited Use of Cutting Machines They Already Own</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/cricut-now-wants-users-to-pay-extra-for-unlimited-use-o-1846477745</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benrbray</author><text>Do you have any recommendations for machines that someone could reasonably fit in their home to replace a cricut?</text></item><item><author>ddingus</author><text>Mental note: Never, ever buy anything that team is involved with.<p>I go way back with various machines. Cutting, bending, printing, whatever.<p>If it won&#x27;t take gcode, or some other open data to operate with, whatever it is, no matter how good it is, the answer is no.<p>Always no.<p>It has to take, gcode, svg, dxf, real postscript, hpgl, png, something. And it has to do that offline, period.<p>There are great machines made in the 80&#x27;s still making money, and I saw one just yesterday. Wonderful to see.<p>Yes, I realize these are consumer grade machines, but what will also happen is these things will get abandoned.<p>Maybe someone will reverse engineer them and they become useful over the longer term.<p>I hope someone does.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scoates</author><text>The reasonably-priced response to this is the CAMEO from Silhouette.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cricut Wants Users to Pay for Unlimited Use of Cutting Machines They Already Own</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/cricut-now-wants-users-to-pay-extra-for-unlimited-use-o-1846477745</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benrbray</author><text>Do you have any recommendations for machines that someone could reasonably fit in their home to replace a cricut?</text></item><item><author>ddingus</author><text>Mental note: Never, ever buy anything that team is involved with.<p>I go way back with various machines. Cutting, bending, printing, whatever.<p>If it won&#x27;t take gcode, or some other open data to operate with, whatever it is, no matter how good it is, the answer is no.<p>Always no.<p>It has to take, gcode, svg, dxf, real postscript, hpgl, png, something. And it has to do that offline, period.<p>There are great machines made in the 80&#x27;s still making money, and I saw one just yesterday. Wonderful to see.<p>Yes, I realize these are consumer grade machines, but what will also happen is these things will get abandoned.<p>Maybe someone will reverse engineer them and they become useful over the longer term.<p>I hope someone does.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monknomo</author><text>US Cutter MH series cutter would probably fit the bill. they range from small to quite large</text></comment> |
35,542,287 | 35,542,519 | 1 | 2 | 35,541,772 | train | <story><title>Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco</title><url>https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-its-ok-to-be-mad-about-crime</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacooper</author><text>&gt; Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away…<p>This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hartator</author><text>&gt; This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?<p>Would you have acted differently? Specially if you risk going to jail yourself if you have to use violence?</text></comment> | <story><title>Yes, it's OK to be mad about crime in San Francisco</title><url>https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-its-ok-to-be-mad-about-crime</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacooper</author><text>&gt; Tragic video shows dying Cash App founder Bob Lee was ignored by bystanders as he begged for help after being stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday…Footage showed Lee lifted his shirt to show [a] driver his two stab wounds — but collapsed to the ground as the car drove off…Lee raised one arm in an attempt to flag down [another] car and jumped back onto his feet, but the driver sped away…<p>This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tlogan</author><text>&gt; This is sickening, the fuck is wrong with these people?<p>I do not know. I’m ashamed to say but I might do the same.<p>You might be hit by a metal rod [1]
Calling 911 will not work since police will just ignore it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;sf-fire-commissioner-attack-don-carmignani-san-francisco-crime-metal-pipe&#x2F;13100484&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc7news.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;sf-fire-commissioner-attack-don-car...</a></text></comment> |
17,795,296 | 17,795,291 | 1 | 3 | 17,794,292 | train | <story><title>A Haskell Compiler – Slides on GHC Implementation (2013)</title><url>http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/notes/ghc-slides.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zallarak</author><text>How do you go to the next slide on mobile?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ekr</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scs.stanford.edu&#x2F;11au-cs240h&#x2F;notes&#x2F;ghc.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scs.stanford.edu&#x2F;11au-cs240h&#x2F;notes&#x2F;ghc.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A Haskell Compiler – Slides on GHC Implementation (2013)</title><url>http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/notes/ghc-slides.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zallarak</author><text>How do you go to the next slide on mobile?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beyonddream</author><text>Click directly on the bottom right corner pagination index to move to next slide. It worked for me.</text></comment> |
10,791,410 | 10,791,453 | 1 | 3 | 10,791,295 | train | <story><title>Devstash.io – Hacker News alternative focused on computer science</title><url>https://devstash.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ColinWright</author><text>Firstly, anyone who creates something and puts it up for people to see deserves congratulations. Nicely done. I look forward to reading this and have bookmarked it to return to regularly.<p>And now this is going to seem really harsh, but I&#x27;ve learned, as I produce specialist sites and facilities for other people, that immediate and instant reactions are incredibly important. So here are mine.<p>True design has usability at its heart, appearance being secondary to that. Things can look gorgeous, but without usability it&#x27;s art and nothing else.<p>It&#x27;s a nightmare to read - please, please, increase the contrast. It&#x27;s wishy-washy and bland.<p>The text is small, and there&#x27;s just <i>so</i> much wasted space. Increasing the text size to something sensible means there&#x27;s also nothing on the screen, leading to endless scrolling.<p>Beautiful to look at, provided you don&#x27;t actually want to use it. Additionally, the &quot;1&quot; and &quot;2&quot; links at the bottom are <i>really</i> hard to hit.<p>Other questions, then:<p>How are you going to enforce the focus on CS?<p>Do usability issues fall in the remit?<p>Looking at one entry:<p><pre><code> AllTheFreeStock (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;allthefreestock.com&#x2F;)
Get all the Free Stock Images
By SaijoGeorge | 0 comment(s)
</code></pre>
How is this &quot;Computer Science&quot;?<p>========<p>Edit: Typo:<p><pre><code> You have been sent an email,
please confirm you account.
</code></pre>
That should be &quot;your account&quot;.<p>========<p>Edit:<p>When posting extra information to accompany a post, it&#x27;s not clear that there is a 140 char limit until you fail. More, if it <i>does</i> fail there&#x27;s no indication of how much it&#x27;s missed by.</text></comment> | <story><title>Devstash.io – Hacker News alternative focused on computer science</title><url>https://devstash.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SolarNet</author><text>Yea this site appears to be about software development not CS. YCombinator is a CS term. Dev and Stash are both development terms (I hesitate to even call it software engineering actually).<p>Even the name doesn&#x27;t make sense.</text></comment> |
30,765,972 | 30,766,148 | 1 | 2 | 30,765,546 | train | <story><title>Google Maps Hacks (2020)</title><url>http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eckmLJE</author><text>Around the time this fake traffic jam project was first performed, a friend of mine was working on a condo development that was just about ready to list for sale. They planned an open house. The property itself was very nice and successfully delivered. However, there was a problem.<p>The property was very convenient to a local highway without being so close that it experienced noise&#x2F;traffic&#x2F;primary exposure to exhaust, etc. Google Maps would reliably take people on this highway and to the same exit. From that exit, locals would go one way that was a nice, quiet drive through some residential parts of town. But Maps would take you a different way, a detour down a side street with a public housing project that often presented an open air drug market, and was the site of not infrequent shooting deaths.<p>Presumably Maps sent you that way because the other direct way was the way most people took, and so this detour had less traffic and was marginally faster. This street was some distance from the condo project, but it would still give people a certain impression of the neighborhood that the developer felt was unfair.<p>I sent them the linked writeup hoping they would try it, but they never did as far as I know. Also, I&#x27;m not sure how well-received someone walking down this street with a bunch of phones in a wagon would be.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Maps Hacks (2020)</title><url>http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Steltek</author><text>How does Google Maps handle a bus or other transit? You could have 50 people, all starting and stopping every 100m, like it&#x27;s bumper-to-bumper traffic. I suppose they don&#x27;t all have Google Maps open but it could be reporting anyway. People don&#x27;t need Navigation for the daily commute to work yet highways show up red just the same.</text></comment> |
21,132,076 | 21,131,343 | 1 | 2 | 21,130,343 | train | <story><title>Global Illumination in WebGL</title><url>https://playcanv.as/p/ZV4PW6wr/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>westoncb</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised I never see playcanvas on HN. It&#x27;s great technology that should be better known IMO.<p>I first came across it working on a project where I needed to load and animate a number of complex .fbx character models. Spent loads of time trying to do this with three.js (in 2017) + all manner of converters to different formats. I tried every supported loader and they were all broken in various ways.<p>Then somehow I found playcanvas and had the models loaded and working flawlessly in a very short period of time. That experience extended to basically everything else I tried with the system—it&#x27;s well polished.<p>The editor UI is very nice, and yet remains lightweight in a way where I still feel more like I&#x27;m working with something like three.js than e.g. Unity. I personally still prefer three.js for <i>most</i> projects I work on, but it would be a very good option for certain projects and I always keep it in mind. It&#x27;s also open source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;playcanvas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;playcanvas</a><p>The downside is for the free tier you get their logo on your app, and you can&#x27;t hide the source (and anyone can fork your project). On the up-side, the pricing was something like $15&#x2F;month last time I checked.<p>For a very simple example, here&#x27;s an asteroids game I spent a few days making with it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playcanvas.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;479850&#x2F;overview&#x2F;rocks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;playcanvas.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;479850&#x2F;overview&#x2F;rocks</a> (you can play or jump into the editor and modify from that link.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Global Illumination in WebGL</title><url>https://playcanv.as/p/ZV4PW6wr/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gavanwoolery</author><text>Neat, dont have time to dive in the source right now but whats the trick? Light probes?
Edit: Ah, nevermind its one click away:<p>&quot;Illumination technique used here is:<p>Realtime direct shadowmapping with time blended lighmaps for global illumination on: walls, ceiling and floor.<p>For furniture we use spherical harmonics L2 with spatial and time blending for ambient light.<p>Reflections made with time blended box projected cubemaps for image based lighting on physically based materials.<p>Post processing done with color grading by LUT (lookup tables) and vignette.&quot;</text></comment> |
31,497,156 | 31,496,451 | 1 | 2 | 31,494,343 | train | <story><title>Hetzner subsea fibre cut outage</title><url>https://status.hetzner.com/incident/de97a4ef-deb6-416e-92a7-9264d160519a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foepys</author><text>Why only 8? Why don&#x27;t they put like 100 in there?</text></item><item><author>Denvercoder9</author><text>Neither, it&#x27;s shared ownership. It&#x27;s similar to if you buy a house with your partner: neither of you owns specific rooms, but you own the whole thing together. There&#x27;s likely agreements about which fibers (there&#x27;s 8 fiber pairs in the cable) and&#x2F;or how much bandwidth everyone can use, though.</text></item><item><author>R0b0t1</author><text>So do they own a solid chunk of it somewhere, or like a really long pie-slice sliver down the whole thing?</text></item><item><author>ArchOversight</author><text>As Hetzner is a co-investor in the cable, it is partially their cable.</text></item><item><author>daneel_w</author><text>This isn&#x27;t Hetzner&#x27;s own cable, and it&#x27;s not just &quot;any&quot; cable - it&#x27;s an Alcatel-Lucent + Cinia + EU project, with 150 terabits worth of bandwidth. It&#x27;s a high profile target, but it&#x27;s just as likely that it&#x27;s just an anchor accident.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bogomipz</author><text>Well, cost for one. If that fiber isn&#x27;t being used it&#x27;s a terrible investment. But more generally it&#x27;s probably not needed. The bandwidth of optical fibre is theoretically unlimited. A single fibre carries many wavelengths, a wave length is like a channel. This is known as DWDM(dense wave division multiplexing.) A single wavelength commonly caries 100 Gbs. Although recently advances have shown 700 Gbs for a single wavelength[1]. The number of wavelengths and hence bandwidth depends on the transmission gear used on both ends of the cable. You can upgrade the bandwidth by upgrading the transmission gear. The state of the art for years has been 8 pair systems but more recently developments have produced 24 and 36 pair systems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lightwaveonline.com&#x2F;network-design&#x2F;high-speed-networks&#x2F;article&#x2F;14195486&#x2F;infinera-facebook-achieve-700gbps-per-wavelength-transmission-on-marea-submarine-cable" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lightwaveonline.com&#x2F;network-design&#x2F;high-speed-ne...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Hetzner subsea fibre cut outage</title><url>https://status.hetzner.com/incident/de97a4ef-deb6-416e-92a7-9264d160519a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foepys</author><text>Why only 8? Why don&#x27;t they put like 100 in there?</text></item><item><author>Denvercoder9</author><text>Neither, it&#x27;s shared ownership. It&#x27;s similar to if you buy a house with your partner: neither of you owns specific rooms, but you own the whole thing together. There&#x27;s likely agreements about which fibers (there&#x27;s 8 fiber pairs in the cable) and&#x2F;or how much bandwidth everyone can use, though.</text></item><item><author>R0b0t1</author><text>So do they own a solid chunk of it somewhere, or like a really long pie-slice sliver down the whole thing?</text></item><item><author>ArchOversight</author><text>As Hetzner is a co-investor in the cable, it is partially their cable.</text></item><item><author>daneel_w</author><text>This isn&#x27;t Hetzner&#x27;s own cable, and it&#x27;s not just &quot;any&quot; cable - it&#x27;s an Alcatel-Lucent + Cinia + EU project, with 150 terabits worth of bandwidth. It&#x27;s a high profile target, but it&#x27;s just as likely that it&#x27;s just an anchor accident.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tiernano</author><text>IIRC, it&#x27;s mostly to do with power... every Xkm (100?) they need to put a power amp and have to splice 100 pairs at each point...</text></comment> |
33,454,526 | 33,454,508 | 1 | 2 | 33,450,753 | train | <story><title>Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce</title><url>https://stripe.com/en-au/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TorKlingberg</author><text>&gt; Sucks because my manager was only told this morning<p>As a manager I find their really curious. I guess they were trying to avoid leaks. I wonder how they chose who to lay off. Most recent performance rating? Next level managers impression?</text></item><item><author>thunkle</author><text>I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn&#x27;t have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We&#x27;ll at least I&#x27;ll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mik3y</author><text>Yes, it&#x27;s normal for layoffs to be planned and executed by a very small group, typically to avoid leaks or creating hysteria ahead of decisions being finalized. This in turn means less-than-perfect information is available, and so less-than-scientific cuts are made.<p>&quot;Ideally&quot;, your layoff strategy dictates some cuts regardless of performance: Say we&#x27;re shutting down the self-driving car division, folding up recruiting, or choosing to accept the risk that comes with getting rid of the whole security team; sadly, the performance of the individuals involved isn&#x27;t really considered.<p>Tenure, seniority, and comp are also factors that can come into play &amp; are straightforward to establish without lower-level involvement.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce</title><url>https://stripe.com/en-au/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TorKlingberg</author><text>&gt; Sucks because my manager was only told this morning<p>As a manager I find their really curious. I guess they were trying to avoid leaks. I wonder how they chose who to lay off. Most recent performance rating? Next level managers impression?</text></item><item><author>thunkle</author><text>I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn&#x27;t have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We&#x27;ll at least I&#x27;ll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmurdoch</author><text>I work at a company that did layoffs recently as well, about double this size.<p>Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into &quot;busy&quot;, so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn&#x27;t. It was a brutal day.<p>In our case I don&#x27;t think they were picking people based on performance whatsoever. It seemed to just be about who was paid the best and who in the org structure could have their job removed and someone else take over. Really weird.</text></comment> |
11,865,131 | 11,865,170 | 1 | 2 | 11,863,729 | train | <story><title>Coming changes to Apple's App Store</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/8/11880730/apple-app-store-subscription-update-phil-schiller-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bad_user</author><text>There aren&#x27;t many apps that can save you 1000&#x2F;year. I keep hearing this, but that&#x27;s nonsense. If a &quot;service&quot; is not producing money and isn&#x27;t saving you time allowing you to produce money, then it&#x27;s not worth paying for.<p>Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here&#x27;s the thing: $5&#x2F;month here, $10&#x2F;month there and pretty soon we&#x27;re talking about serious money. Not only that, but as soon as you stop paying for whatever reason (eg temporary financial problems) you&#x27;re out.<p>Of course, with our oversized salaries, we stop noticing that $5&#x2F;month for a passwords app is actually expensive. And that&#x27;s actually a good example because a passwords app at least has some utility.<p>More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.</text></item><item><author>chasing</author><text>I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this:<p>Apps are a service.<p>I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000&#x2F;yr in headache, I&#x27;d prefer to spend $30&#x2F;yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can&#x27;t keep the lights on.</text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added.<p>I suspect I&#x27;ll be buying far fewer apps if there&#x27;s a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I&#x27;m perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for an app (even a simple app) if it provides value and I&#x27;m happy to pay for major upgrades or additional content&#x2F;features, but I won&#x27;t pay $20-30 a year just to maintain the ability to launch an app on an ongoing basis.<p>In addition, after years of terrible search in the app store, coupling search improvements with search-based ads is just a kick in the shins.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chasing</author><text>I want to address two things, here:<p>1) You&#x27;re absolutely right: Pricing matters. If I charge you $10&#x2F;mo for my app that sends you a text message every time there&#x27;s a full moon, that would be way too expensive and you&#x27;d be well within your rights as a consumer to spend your money on something else. As far as I&#x27;m aware, Apple will not force you to subscribe to any apps.<p>2) &quot;... subscriptions are immoral...&quot; Bullshit. And you don&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; software you buy and pay for once. Operating systems change. Companies and developers come and go. If you value a piece of software, then you value the developer and should desire that they maintain and improve the app.<p>What <i>is</i> moral is creating a system by which software developers can support themselves by creating products that are useful to the community. I&#x27;d say the App Store is currently broken in that regard (with a few high-profile exceptions). If popularizing subscription-based pricing will help fix that, I&#x27;m all in favor.</text></comment> | <story><title>Coming changes to Apple's App Store</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/8/11880730/apple-app-store-subscription-update-phil-schiller-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bad_user</author><text>There aren&#x27;t many apps that can save you 1000&#x2F;year. I keep hearing this, but that&#x27;s nonsense. If a &quot;service&quot; is not producing money and isn&#x27;t saving you time allowing you to produce money, then it&#x27;s not worth paying for.<p>Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here&#x27;s the thing: $5&#x2F;month here, $10&#x2F;month there and pretty soon we&#x27;re talking about serious money. Not only that, but as soon as you stop paying for whatever reason (eg temporary financial problems) you&#x27;re out.<p>Of course, with our oversized salaries, we stop noticing that $5&#x2F;month for a passwords app is actually expensive. And that&#x27;s actually a good example because a passwords app at least has some utility.<p>More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.</text></item><item><author>chasing</author><text>I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this:<p>Apps are a service.<p>I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000&#x2F;yr in headache, I&#x27;d prefer to spend $30&#x2F;yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can&#x27;t keep the lights on.</text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added.<p>I suspect I&#x27;ll be buying far fewer apps if there&#x27;s a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I&#x27;m perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for an app (even a simple app) if it provides value and I&#x27;m happy to pay for major upgrades or additional content&#x2F;features, but I won&#x27;t pay $20-30 a year just to maintain the ability to launch an app on an ongoing basis.<p>In addition, after years of terrible search in the app store, coupling search improvements with search-based ads is just a kick in the shins.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theli0nheart</author><text>&gt; I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.<p>I applaud your idealism, but with this attitude, you might as well not buy any apps at all. When you buy an app, or TV show, or pretty much anything digital in 2016, you&#x27;re purchasing a license, not the thing itself. You don&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; anything.<p>Even if you can download the app you buy in 2016 in 5 years from now, what are the odds that it still works on whatever operating system is still available, on your 2016 hardware? What good is ownership when you can&#x27;t even use what you own?</text></comment> |
19,909,143 | 19,908,523 | 1 | 2 | 19,906,796 | train | <story><title>The Law of Leaky Abstractions</title><url>https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-law-of-leaky-abstractions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>I see this fact used pretty often to dismiss the idea that we should use abstractions at all, and I think that&#x27;s pretty wrongheaded. As an example, it&#x27;s pretty common to hear that people should prefer writing raw SQL to using an ORM or query builder because those are both &quot;leaky abstractions&quot;<p>Abstractions aren&#x27;t necessarily only there so that you don&#x27;t need to understand anything about what&#x27;s being abstracted. They are there so that your code can get away from nitty-gritty implementation details, and be more focused on the problem domain.<p>What would you rather see when you&#x27;re coming into a new codebase:<p><pre><code> const formData = new FormData();
formData.append(&#x27;name&#x27;, &#x27;Widget&#x27;);
fetch(`&#x2F;api&#x2F;widgets&#x2F;${id}`, {
method: &#x27;POST&#x27;,
body: formData
})
</code></pre>
or:<p><pre><code> Widget.save({ name: &#x27;Widget&#x27; });</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icxa</author><text>The argument against ORMs aren&#x27;t that they are a leaky abstraction (although they most definitely are).<p>The argument is although they appear to offer you value up front, they cost you much more down the road. The moment you have a hot path query that needs optimizing, you are dropping down to your ORM&#x27;s &quot;raw sql&quot; mode. Then you do it again. Then again. Then you are ripping out the ORM and spending cycles refactoring it out of your code and replacing it with simpler abstractions.<p>I always find the people who don&#x27;t believe writing raw SQL is preferable to using an ORM is usually down to a lack of experience or because they have been coerced to use ORMs by their &quot;enterprise grade&quot; language (usually your C# developers of the world, no offense to you all but if every time you look up examples of data operations it&#x27;s dealing with EntityFramework you are probably going to wind up with a lot of devs using EntityFramework). The ORMers, as I call them, don&#x27;t have confidence in their own SQL ability, and they haven&#x27;t experienced the aforementioned situation enough times to realize you are better off starting with SQL to begin with.<p>The realization is, if I could summarize it: yes all abstractions are at least somewhat leaky, so you are better to use simpler ones than complex ones (and if you need something more complex, compose it from simpler ones)</text></comment> | <story><title>The Law of Leaky Abstractions</title><url>https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-law-of-leaky-abstractions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanbrunner</author><text>I see this fact used pretty often to dismiss the idea that we should use abstractions at all, and I think that&#x27;s pretty wrongheaded. As an example, it&#x27;s pretty common to hear that people should prefer writing raw SQL to using an ORM or query builder because those are both &quot;leaky abstractions&quot;<p>Abstractions aren&#x27;t necessarily only there so that you don&#x27;t need to understand anything about what&#x27;s being abstracted. They are there so that your code can get away from nitty-gritty implementation details, and be more focused on the problem domain.<p>What would you rather see when you&#x27;re coming into a new codebase:<p><pre><code> const formData = new FormData();
formData.append(&#x27;name&#x27;, &#x27;Widget&#x27;);
fetch(`&#x2F;api&#x2F;widgets&#x2F;${id}`, {
method: &#x27;POST&#x27;,
body: formData
})
</code></pre>
or:<p><pre><code> Widget.save({ name: &#x27;Widget&#x27; });</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>XCabbage</author><text>Some abstractions are basically perfect and don&#x27;t require you to understand the layer beneath them at all. Some have that as their ideal, but are imperfect, and sometimes require you to understand a few details of the layer below. But others - the best example that I know of is SCSS - <i>aren&#x27;t even trying</i> to eliminate the need to understand the layer below. Everything you need to know to write CSS, you still need to know to write SCSS, and then SCSS adds more on top. It&#x27;s a convenient tool for power users and I wouldn&#x27;t want to be without it, but for a beginner, using SCSS instead of CSS means you have strictly more to learn; I&#x27;d suggest that a newbie on my team not touch SCSS until they&#x27;ve done a few days&#x27; work with raw CSS.<p>While less clear-cut than SCSS&#x2F;CSS, it seems to me that ORMs&#x2F;SQL have a similar relationship. Frankly, without knowing SQL, you can&#x27;t hope to competently use an ORM; you won&#x27;t know what sort of queries and updates it&#x27;s capable of or what its performance characteristics will be, let alone more subtle stuff like what indexes to create or how the database&#x27;s transaction model works. But even once you DO understand the SQL layer, getting to grips with how ORMs work is a major additional hurdle.<p>For that reason, while I am comfortable using an ORM for projects I work on, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend that a beginner do the same. If I did, I&#x27;d be doubling the amount they have to learn, and creating a risk that they&#x27;ll give up in despair trying to figure out how something poorly-documented works at the ORM layer because they don&#x27;t have the knowledge of the underlying SQL layer to intuitively guess what their ORM code must be doing under the hood.<p>It&#x27;s perhaps more radical than anything I believe, but I think you can reasonably go further and make the case that the extra learning curve imposed by ORMs is not worth the minor convenience benefit they offer to the proficient, and that for that reason, it&#x27;s generally better not to use them. The fact that they leak the entire layer underneath them is <i>part</i> of that argument, but not all of it; the other part is that the layer they build on <i>top</i> of that is difficult-to-learn and only adds a small bit of convenience in exchange.</text></comment> |
39,120,321 | 39,119,125 | 1 | 3 | 39,104,504 | train | <story><title>scrapscript.py</title><url>https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/scrapscript/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>surprisetalk</author><text>I should probably write a longer post about this, but scrapscript is an attempt to fix a lot of the &quot;in-between&quot; problems in software engineering.<p>Instead of working on &quot;real&quot; problems, I find myself battling untyped&#x2F;undocumented YAML&#x2F;JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders&#x2F;decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies, writing unholy SQL, etc.<p>I obviously don&#x27;t have all the answers, but a system with the following properties seems like a worthwhile pursuit: (1) small enough to be used like JSON yet powerful enough to used like Javascript, (2) cryptographic guarantees that code is compatible over time, (3) a compiler that checks live servers for compatibility before deploying, (4) simple but expressive type system, (5) a package manager that facilitates all of this at a granular level... and so on.<p>On top of all that, I think these properties lend themselves to some grand ambitions like &quot;a new internet&quot; and a &quot;google-docs live coding editor experience&quot;. Maybe I&#x27;m just full of myself though haha<p>scrapscript.py is the first real attempt at making scrapscript a reality, so some folks who feel these pains are getting excited to see some movement on the project.<p>EDIT: Here’s my recent scrapyard demo, if you want to see it in action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SngOLU5G1Eg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SngOLU5G1Eg</a></text></item><item><author>account-5</author><text>Can someone explain what this is? Why it&#x27;s a good thing? What&#x27;s it&#x27;s for? I have to admit based on reading the post I have absolutely no idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manifoldgeo</author><text>&gt; I find myself battling untyped&#x2F;undocumented YAML&#x2F;JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders&#x2F;decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies<p>I feel your pain on having to manage so many dependencies. I write primarily in Python, and the various pip &#x2F; Pipenv &#x2F; pipx &#x2F; PDM &#x2F; Poetry dependency managers drive me pretty crazy. That&#x27;s not even accounting for the multiple Python versions I need!<p>That said, I&#x27;m surprised that you&#x27;re trying to _alleviate_ this by implementing your FP language in Python. The Python ecosystem is full of half-documented config files, incompatible dependency trees, etc.<p>Have you considered implementing it in any other languages after the Python one proves its worth? For example, if the language becomes strong enough, would you consider writing a scrapscript compiler in scrapscript, itself?</text></comment> | <story><title>scrapscript.py</title><url>https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/scrapscript/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>surprisetalk</author><text>I should probably write a longer post about this, but scrapscript is an attempt to fix a lot of the &quot;in-between&quot; problems in software engineering.<p>Instead of working on &quot;real&quot; problems, I find myself battling untyped&#x2F;undocumented YAML&#x2F;JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders&#x2F;decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies, writing unholy SQL, etc.<p>I obviously don&#x27;t have all the answers, but a system with the following properties seems like a worthwhile pursuit: (1) small enough to be used like JSON yet powerful enough to used like Javascript, (2) cryptographic guarantees that code is compatible over time, (3) a compiler that checks live servers for compatibility before deploying, (4) simple but expressive type system, (5) a package manager that facilitates all of this at a granular level... and so on.<p>On top of all that, I think these properties lend themselves to some grand ambitions like &quot;a new internet&quot; and a &quot;google-docs live coding editor experience&quot;. Maybe I&#x27;m just full of myself though haha<p>scrapscript.py is the first real attempt at making scrapscript a reality, so some folks who feel these pains are getting excited to see some movement on the project.<p>EDIT: Here’s my recent scrapyard demo, if you want to see it in action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SngOLU5G1Eg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SngOLU5G1Eg</a></text></item><item><author>account-5</author><text>Can someone explain what this is? Why it&#x27;s a good thing? What&#x27;s it&#x27;s for? I have to admit based on reading the post I have absolutely no idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mst</author><text>I&#x27;d been kind of interested by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yglu.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yglu.io&#x2F;</a> and now ingy&#x27;s new piece of insanity <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yamlscript.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yamlscript.org&#x2F;</a> - helm appears to let you inject your own script to template charts and I was wondering about trying a wrapper around one of those (because text templating an indentation sensitive language like YAML makes me itch).<p>I think scrapscript is a really interesting idea, mind, this isn&#x27;t a &quot;here&#x27;s an alternative&quot; type comment, it&#x27;s a &quot;here&#x27;s things that I think are neat in a similar way to how I think scrapscript is neat&quot; :)<p>Edit: I forgot something! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trout.me.uk&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;termite-r7rs.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trout.me.uk&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;termite-r7rs.pdf</a> is a paper on adding library support to the cross-network (kinda erlangish) termite scheme extensions - and leans heavily on content addressable-ness. Termite itself has gone the way of small lisp projects but I kept this around specifically for the content addressable stuff having been solidly worked out in a language I understood; maybe that&#x27;ll come in handy for ideas for you as well.</text></comment> |
41,330,707 | 41,323,257 | 1 | 3 | 41,311,135 | train | <story><title>We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PJu2HhKsyTEJMxS9a/you-don-t-know-how-bad-most-things-are-nor-precisely-how</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keiferski</author><text>I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.</text></item><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it&#x27;s a great fishing spot but doesn&#x27;t have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;Api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;Multimedia&#x2F;4404375b-5eed-431b-adb2-a465ba433c57&#x2F;Rendition&#x2F;low-res&#x2F;Content&#x2F;Public" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;Api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;Multimedia...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thecupisblue</author><text>Because we are more socially interconnected, so the strings of society that keep us connected are also the ones constraining us. The &quot;risk&quot; of non-uniformity outweighs the gain for most people.<p>Back then, doing something that society deemes risky&#x2F;provocative&#x2F;condemns, as an artist, a musician, a politician would be seen or heard only by the people present, everyone else would have second or third hand accounts of it, and that would be maybe tomorrow, maybe the week after, maybe the month after.<p>You could get drunk in a tavern, get in a brawl and paint the owner&#x27;s wife posing as a nude boar. The people who would know about it first hand would be only the people who directly saw it. Your boss wouldn&#x27;t hear about it unless he is in direct contact with the people there, which would be rare.<p>Nowadays, getting in a brawl would end up with someone calling the cops immediately, someone posting it on instagram, someone calling your job to get you fired with probably a dozen articles next day &quot;drunken fool fights local bar owner after insulting his wife&quot;.<p>These social constraints, the speed of information and the interconnectedness of it all is constraining us into uniformity, as behaviour against the graph is more and more ostracised - unless you have enough social capital to afford it, at which point it is rewarded.<p>So of course we are less interesting - we are being forced into uniformity.</text></comment> | <story><title>We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PJu2HhKsyTEJMxS9a/you-don-t-know-how-bad-most-things-are-nor-precisely-how</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keiferski</author><text>I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to be…more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting places like Paris in the 20s. Today the “artistic” hubs in the world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa 1890-1930, but you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t read the older books.</text></item><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think it&#x27;s a great fishing spot but doesn&#x27;t have a frame of reference for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and smaller:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;Api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;Multimedia&#x2F;4404375b-5eed-431b-adb2-a465ba433c57&#x2F;Rendition&#x2F;low-res&#x2F;Content&#x2F;Public" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;Api&#x2F;v1&#x2F;Multimedia...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barryrandall</author><text>The role of alcohol, drugs, and other mind-altering substances in history can&#x27;t be ignored. A lot of these fascinating people were intentionally and unintentionally drugging themselves.</text></comment> |
19,124,687 | 19,124,222 | 1 | 3 | 19,116,664 | train | <story><title>The Peculiar Power of Plane Mechanic Simulator</title><url>https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/08/the-flare-path-plane-mechanic-simulator-review/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>Reminds me in a way of my favorite sim game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Summer_Car" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Summer_Car</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Peculiar Power of Plane Mechanic Simulator</title><url>https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/08/the-flare-path-plane-mechanic-simulator-review/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>knolan</author><text>What I find interesting is that a lot of today’s games have become photography simulators. Many include either a photo mode where you can edit the paused game state or a live in game camera (in GTA V your character has a smartphone with various apps and an instagram clone).<p>I’ve frequently had more fun with these features than with the actual game.</text></comment> |
33,287,584 | 33,282,588 | 1 | 2 | 33,279,274 | train | <story><title>It was all downhill after the Cuecat</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggdm</author><text>&gt;Cuecats were cool. The people who made them were assholes.<p>Thanks @doctorow<p>Look, we created it because barcodes had URLs below them on packaged goods that were generic. Google had a fresh “links in” algorithm that they were figuring out. We had the first concept of location or demographic based results for media and products.<p>Your :CC ID was used to see who the best distribution channels were. The software ID held your profile and zip code so someone swiping a Coke can in Dallas would see a Six Flags promotion, someone in Atlanta would get SeaWorld + Coke offers.<p>The light DMCA approved ROT 64 output scrambling was to prevent OS or browsers from natively decoding the scans, as we wanted to run the ONS (object naming service) and provide truly valuable links. How many QR codes go to 404 links today? Our magic from 1997 was dynamic in multiple ways.<p>Alas, the USB and portable devices shipped as the dot-bomb era encroached and our open plug-in framework gets forgotten by the researchers.<p>I’m proud of what the 300+ team built over those handful of formative commercial Internet years, and happy to see our creation in the Computer History Museum. Under oddity input devices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LocalH</author><text>Perception is a hell of a drug. You were a &quot;trailblazer&quot; in one of the nastiest, evilest segments of modern tech. I was glad to see the Cuecat crumble as a product, I remember being a tiny, tiny mirror of the information to hack the product, and I also remember (as a 17-year old) getting a nasty email from your legal team that taught me an early lesson in &quot;might makes right, and corporations own the world&quot;. Your team was one of the ones that set the stage for the dismal state of online rights. Thanks for that &#x2F;s<p>Even though I never used it for anything, I was proud to disable the serial number of my old Cuecat on principle<p>I wish we could see the votes on this thread just to see the ratio your post is likely getting.</text></comment> | <story><title>It was all downhill after the Cuecat</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggdm</author><text>&gt;Cuecats were cool. The people who made them were assholes.<p>Thanks @doctorow<p>Look, we created it because barcodes had URLs below them on packaged goods that were generic. Google had a fresh “links in” algorithm that they were figuring out. We had the first concept of location or demographic based results for media and products.<p>Your :CC ID was used to see who the best distribution channels were. The software ID held your profile and zip code so someone swiping a Coke can in Dallas would see a Six Flags promotion, someone in Atlanta would get SeaWorld + Coke offers.<p>The light DMCA approved ROT 64 output scrambling was to prevent OS or browsers from natively decoding the scans, as we wanted to run the ONS (object naming service) and provide truly valuable links. How many QR codes go to 404 links today? Our magic from 1997 was dynamic in multiple ways.<p>Alas, the USB and portable devices shipped as the dot-bomb era encroached and our open plug-in framework gets forgotten by the researchers.<p>I’m proud of what the 300+ team built over those handful of formative commercial Internet years, and happy to see our creation in the Computer History Museum. Under oddity input devices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nullc</author><text>You&#x27;re proud about harassing uses of the cuecat hardware with legal threats? You&#x27;re proud of the security vulnerabilities on your site that leaked the PII of users that were foolish enough to use your software? -- because these are also thing the team at Digital Convergence did.<p>You spied on people.
You leaked their private data.
When people tried to not get spied on, you threatened to sue them and forced them to take their drivers down.<p>These are the things that got you called an asshole.<p>If you&#x27;re going to post here today saying that you were proud and not even &quot;some mistakes were made&quot; -- then I think the asshole label was well justified.</text></comment> |
23,648,828 | 23,648,698 | 1 | 3 | 23,648,165 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What are the technical justifications for keeping .DS_Store?</title><text>I was hoping that with macos 11 we would see the deprecation of .DS_Store. I&#x27;m not running the beta so perhaps it is, but what has surprised me is its sustained longevity. What are the technical reasons for keeping .DS_Store? It is essentially a application-specific (i.e. Mac Finder) solution that pollutes the data store.<p>Off the top of my head I can think of a number of other solutions to store directory metadata: a Finder-specific database mapping values to directory paths, resource forks (ala OS 9), etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I&#x27;m going to be honest: it should be deleted when seen, and OSX should have never begun this.<p>99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do <i>not</i> have images in them, and have that file.<p>You know what I&#x27;ve seen? People do `git add <i>` and then I find that directory in the repo. Why does git not automatically ignore that?! It&#x27;s never the right option.<p></i>Anything* that pollutes directories should be absolutely verboten, its never what the user wants.<p>Edit: The worst part is, it makes them on network shares, and on filesystems that aren&#x27;t HFS. The hell, Apple?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>&gt; 99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do not have images in them, and have that file.<p>QuickLook thumbnails actually go in a different cache as they are dynamically generated. .DS_Store files contain things like folder layout information.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What are the technical justifications for keeping .DS_Store?</title><text>I was hoping that with macos 11 we would see the deprecation of .DS_Store. I&#x27;m not running the beta so perhaps it is, but what has surprised me is its sustained longevity. What are the technical reasons for keeping .DS_Store? It is essentially a application-specific (i.e. Mac Finder) solution that pollutes the data store.<p>Off the top of my head I can think of a number of other solutions to store directory metadata: a Finder-specific database mapping values to directory paths, resource forks (ala OS 9), etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I&#x27;m going to be honest: it should be deleted when seen, and OSX should have never begun this.<p>99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do <i>not</i> have images in them, and have that file.<p>You know what I&#x27;ve seen? People do `git add <i>` and then I find that directory in the repo. Why does git not automatically ignore that?! It&#x27;s never the right option.<p></i>Anything* that pollutes directories should be absolutely verboten, its never what the user wants.<p>Edit: The worst part is, it makes them on network shares, and on filesystems that aren&#x27;t HFS. The hell, Apple?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bacon_waffle</author><text>git can be configured to ignore .DS_Store by default - in your home directory, make a .gitignore file using the usual format, then do &quot;git config --global core.excludesfile ~&#x2F;.gitignore&quot;.</text></comment> |
2,576,459 | 2,576,513 | 1 | 2 | 2,575,899 | train | <story><title>Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?</title><url>http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/05/23/vacation.in.america/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k3dz</author><text>you can do that only if you are a senior dev.. what do junior devs, recent college grads do?</text></item><item><author>joss82</author><text>Here it is, and it's awesome:<p><a href="http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vacation-is-only.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...</a></text></item><item><author>leftnode</author><text>There is a good article from another software developer around here who told his boss he was taking a 3 month vacation. He made the point the business needed him more than he needed it; he was a competent developer and could easily get work, didn't have any living/large financial dependencies. At first I thought it was absurd, but the more I thought about it, he was absolutely correct.<p>Take a long vacation some time. Even if you do have a family, save up enough money and go travel for a while. Take some decent time off work (4+ weeks). Let them fire you if they want. That's (one of my) my goal(s) over the next 2 years: take an extended vacation (I haven't taken more than a week off since I graduated college).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmm</author><text>Live on less than half of your net(take-home) pay and save the rest. Now for every month that you work, you are also saving a month's worth of living expenses. After two years of this you have two years of fuck you money. Two years is enough time to learn python or something else significant.<p>Your savings can last even longer if you get a $10/hr job such as waiting tables part-time.<p>Work daily on developing marketable skills. Work daily on communicating how your work impacts the business you're in. Imagine your boss asks you tomorrow, "Why shouldn't I fire you right now?". What would you say?<p>Always have a resume prepared.<p>Once you have done this you can go up to your boss and tell her you are taking two months off and you won't care what she says in reply.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?</title><url>http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/05/23/vacation.in.america/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k3dz</author><text>you can do that only if you are a senior dev.. what do junior devs, recent college grads do?</text></item><item><author>joss82</author><text>Here it is, and it's awesome:<p><a href="http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vacation-is-only.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/02/two-weeks-vaca...</a></text></item><item><author>leftnode</author><text>There is a good article from another software developer around here who told his boss he was taking a 3 month vacation. He made the point the business needed him more than he needed it; he was a competent developer and could easily get work, didn't have any living/large financial dependencies. At first I thought it was absurd, but the more I thought about it, he was absolutely correct.<p>Take a long vacation some time. Even if you do have a family, save up enough money and go travel for a while. Take some decent time off work (4+ weeks). Let them fire you if they want. That's (one of my) my goal(s) over the next 2 years: take an extended vacation (I haven't taken more than a week off since I graduated college).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enjo</author><text>There is no point in your life that you can more easily take 3 months off to do whatever you want than when you are a "recent college grad".<p>My <i>biggest</i> life regret was not realizing this at the time. I jumped into the workforce and pursued my career at 95 mph.<p>I should have spent a year travelling.</text></comment> |
20,330,705 | 20,327,051 | 1 | 3 | 20,326,407 | train | <story><title>Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>october_sky</author><text>I love how amateur the physical machine looks, with all of that aluminum foil stuck to it and the wires falling about. This immediately reminded me of how my codebase looks whenever I am doing a proof-of-concept just to show someone that something is possible. &quot;Let&#x27;s get it working before we make it look pretty&quot; -- what I imagined they said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kurthr</author><text>I worked with Dr. Lutz about 20yr ago, helping to make some of the early magnetically tipped cantilevers for the effort at single atom NMR. It&#x27;s interesting to me that the NYT shifted the nomenclature to MRI... although with microscopic scanning that is what they can achieve. It&#x27;s not that weird because (at the time) the tip magnetic field caused a torus to interact with the cantilever when the atom(s) resonate, so they do have to deconvolve the effect to localize the atom and I assume that they use force feedback control to maintain position much like STM (Tunneling Microscopy). I probably would have called it something like NMM (Nuclear Magnetic-Resonance Microscopy), but hey I didn&#x27;t make it work!<p>I&#x27;d note that the same group headed by Lutz achieved single electron ESR with a similar scanning methodology at least 15 years back so this was follow on work. It&#x27;s still amazing and incredibly difficult... just imagine how you would produce something (a test sample) that you know will have only 1 magnetically resonant atom in the affected scan area!<p>At the time the hope was to use single atom NMR to image DNA, but I think that has largely been accomplished by other methods.<p>edit: The paper in Nature for those with access.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41567-019-0573-x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41567-019-0573-x</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope-atom-magnetic-mri.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>october_sky</author><text>I love how amateur the physical machine looks, with all of that aluminum foil stuck to it and the wires falling about. This immediately reminded me of how my codebase looks whenever I am doing a proof-of-concept just to show someone that something is possible. &quot;Let&#x27;s get it working before we make it look pretty&quot; -- what I imagined they said.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frereubu</author><text>A bit like the first full-size MRI machine in fact: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:MRI_Scanner_Mark_One.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_magnetic_resonance_...</a></text></comment> |
3,621,892 | 3,621,975 | 1 | 3 | 3,620,537 | train | <story><title>Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome</title><url>http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>radarsat1</author><text>You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision):<p>Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web. This helps them sell their IDE, and more importantly, gets their brand out there.<p>Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been <i>accomplished</i>. Adobe is well-entrenched in web history, and everyone knows what Flash is. However, the relevance of Flash is clearly declining, due to HTML5, and stigma and disgruntlement is increasing. This means they will get less and less sales of their IDE and their name will fizzle out.<p>Imagine for a second that they open sourced the Flash player. Just the player. Suddenly it would no longer carry such a stigma with Linux, it would be easy to include in distros, developers would contribute fixes and make it more efficient on hard-to-support systems. It would literally stretch out its life-time as a product, and <i>keep</i> Adobe's name on the web.<p>I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it <i>now</i> it could only benefit them. I did not think this was true in the past, and I think it will not be true in 5 to 10 years when HTML5 has surpassed Flash adoption in the most important venues. However, right <i>now</i> I think it would benefit them immensely.<p>There also seems to be a sentiment from some of the comments here that they are losing interest in maintaining Flash, so opening it to the community would seem to make some sense. If the "standard" ends up evolving in any way, they'd always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>windsurfer</author><text>There are over 70 patents and licensed libraries in Flash. It would basically be impossible to get those companies to agree to open source and give away all their IP. For a while, Adobe was paying over a dollar per Android Flash install because some of their licenses only applied to desktop.<p>So one might say they should open source the core of Flash, the JIT compiler and virtual machine, and not the parts that are licensed. And you're right, that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29</a><p>They also open sourced the Flex SDK: <a href="http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK" rel="nofollow">http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK</a><p>What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers for free, has it's source code public and free from patents. This way, Adobe tools can still be sold and used to develop, while the player is ubiquitous and as widely spread as possible. And that's what they're trying to do with HTML5: <a href="http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html</a><p>Adobe's communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this. Technology isn't their problem, marketing is.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome</title><url>http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>radarsat1</author><text>You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision):<p>Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web. This helps them sell their IDE, and more importantly, gets their brand out there.<p>Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been <i>accomplished</i>. Adobe is well-entrenched in web history, and everyone knows what Flash is. However, the relevance of Flash is clearly declining, due to HTML5, and stigma and disgruntlement is increasing. This means they will get less and less sales of their IDE and their name will fizzle out.<p>Imagine for a second that they open sourced the Flash player. Just the player. Suddenly it would no longer carry such a stigma with Linux, it would be easy to include in distros, developers would contribute fixes and make it more efficient on hard-to-support systems. It would literally stretch out its life-time as a product, and <i>keep</i> Adobe's name on the web.<p>I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it <i>now</i> it could only benefit them. I did not think this was true in the past, and I think it will not be true in 5 to 10 years when HTML5 has surpassed Flash adoption in the most important venues. However, right <i>now</i> I think it would benefit them immensely.<p>There also seems to be a sentiment from some of the comments here that they are losing interest in maintaining Flash, so opening it to the community would seem to make some sense. If the "standard" ends up evolving in any way, they'd always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain ahead of the curve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>9999</author><text>I've been wondering why they haven't done this for a very, very long time. The player itself has not been a source of revenue for Adobe for quite some time (they used to license Flash Lite to handset manufacturers and made money off of that), instead they make all their money by selling tools to make content for that runtime. I'm hoping someone from Adobe is reading this, because I've never really heard a rational business reason for why the Player is not open source.<p>So here are my questions for Adobe:<p>Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests?<p>Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that's stopping you from making it open source?<p>Do you not have the resources to communicate with the community that would develop around an open sourced player (knowing that you would have spend some time to justify many things that exist in the codebase to maintain backwards compatibility)?<p>Are you concerned that a rival would clone some of the technology you developed and implement it in their proprietary player (e.g. MS, but they already gave up on Silverlight)?<p>Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player?<p>Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them?<p>What are your other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player?</text></comment> |
15,390,774 | 15,389,225 | 1 | 3 | 15,387,036 | train | <story><title>San Francisco, now with more dystopia</title><url>https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-with-more-dystopia</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>theyregreat</author><text>The root of the US problem: it’s turning into a poor country because the vast majority of the greedy rich people hoarding trillions, that used to go to middle class as wages and to general government funds, and their corrupt politicians enabling this vicious cycle.<p>Social welfare and mental healthcare exist so people aren’t crawling on the street. Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity... if the can’t provide for themselves, falling through the cracks is not a solution but a source of many more, more expensive and worse, problems. So socialism for the rich and nothing for the poor isn’t sustainable and people will eventually go “French Revolution.” A stable democratic country has to balance competing tyrannies: rich vs. middle vs. poor, country vs. city and community vs. individual.</text></comment> | <story><title>San Francisco, now with more dystopia</title><url>https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-with-more-dystopia</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>5706906c06c</author><text>San Francisco has become polarizing over the past decade(+,) though SOMA used to be pretty much a shanty town in the 80s: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ww2.hdnux.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;42&#x2F;55&#x2F;37&#x2F;9099221&#x2F;3&#x2F;rawImage.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ww2.hdnux.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;42&#x2F;55&#x2F;37&#x2F;9099221&#x2F;3&#x2F;rawImage.jpg</a><p>&quot;Mayor Dianne Feinstein leads a group on a tour of Shantytown at Seventh and Berry streets in 1986. The group includes her press secretary Tom Eastham (left), Public Health Director David Werdegar and Thomas Dalton, “mayor of Shantytown.”<p>One more: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;janet-delaney-south-of-market&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;janet-delaney-south-of-market&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
20,572,995 | 20,572,843 | 1 | 3 | 20,572,589 | train | <story><title>Electron 6.0</title><url>https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-6-0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rvz</author><text>It&#x27;s kind of interesting to see this release and previous ones mention &#x27;performance fixes&#x27; (V8 and Blink does all the work) that it brings, yet the job postings for desktop software engineer requiring Electron experience also put data structure and algorithms and what I see here is a runtime that is very expensive in both space + time complexity. It makes no difference in using a different language with a faster runtime to combat this.<p>Imagine if I were to write a &#x27;next-gen&#x27; CAD program or an alternative 3D modeling program in Electron. I&#x27;m not so sure if the manufacturing or the games industry would take a second look at that. But in our industry, it is seen as normal for our text editors, ide&#x27;s, git clients and video editing software and our messaging clients to be expensive in memory and cpu time.<p>Can&#x27;t we do better than this? Or do we have to accept and depend on Google to create our desktop software?</text></comment> | <story><title>Electron 6.0</title><url>https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-6-0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rado</author><text>Appreciating the contrast with the 512-byte OS posted today.</text></comment> |
10,418,776 | 10,417,674 | 1 | 2 | 10,417,206 | train | <story><title>Let's Encrypt is Trusted</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/19/lets-encrypt-is-trusted.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lorddoig</author><text>Being told that you now trust someone with your secrets via a news website is a pleasingly succinct display of everything that&#x27;s wrong with the CA model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geofft</author><text>Well. The CA model is <i>community</i> trust. I am told all the time, often by news websites, that my government now trusts or distrusts some other government, that my employer now trusts or distrusts or is even part of some other company, etc. I don&#x27;t know if I personally think that the embargoes on Cuba should be lifted, or my company&#x27;s new vice president is qualified for the role, or (if I worked for VMware) Dell is a good employer, or my savings should now be held by Bank of America, or whatever. But that&#x27;s how living and working in a community works.<p>If you have secrets that are too sensitive for community trust, there are other mechanisms, but they typically have trouble scaling very much beyond continuing a previous face-to-face relationship. For the question of whether, say, news.ycombinator.com is who they say they are, I don&#x27;t care enough to take Caltrain down to YC&#x27;s offices and check a fingerprint posted on the wall, if they had one. What I care is that, <i>at scale</i>, the certificate authorities I trust will do a good job of verifying identities and running secure systems.<p>And <i>I</i> am not an auditor or pen-tester of large companies, and even if I were, I wouldn&#x27;t want to spend my spare time auditing and pen-testing all CAs just before I can use the internet. (Importantly, I am not an auditor of web browsers or SSL implementations either, and since I outsource my trust to my browser &#x2F; SSL stack, it&#x27;s not useful for me to be skeptical of the CAs unless I&#x27;m also skeptical of the code.)<p>Remember that the CA model is bare-minimum security. (Some of the CAs find money in telling you otherwise, but they&#x27;re stretching the truth.) All it&#x27;s providing is the security that, in a perfect world, you would have gotten all along from DNS and IP. If you need anything more than bare-minimum security, there are tons of options, ranging from the SSL-based (EV, HPKP) to the completely unrelated (PGP, Pond, etc.). But the world needs a good mechanism for the simplest security that could possibly work, and the CA system seems to have settled into that role.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let's Encrypt is Trusted</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/19/lets-encrypt-is-trusted.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lorddoig</author><text>Being told that you now trust someone with your secrets via a news website is a pleasingly succinct display of everything that&#x27;s wrong with the CA model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vonklaus</author><text><i>We’re pleased to announce that we’ve received cross-signatures from IdenTrust</i><p>This is what is wrong with the CA, model, not their method of announcing it to a community anxiously awaiting the arrival of their product. What is absurd is that identrust has a shitty non-responsive 90&#x27;s looking website and wants $299 for an SSL certificate, which is something that should be free. I will say though, they really did sell me on their trust worthiness with the alternating images of a fingerprint and a lock. So now I know they&#x27;re legit. It is worth the $99 for SSL on a single site annually because there is binary data superimposed on some of the pictures.</text></comment> |
18,105,753 | 18,105,661 | 1 | 2 | 18,103,949 | train | <story><title>Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-29/why-marriage-costs-in-china-are-out-of-control</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>williamdclt</author><text>Genuine question: how is it possible to invite 1200 people? I can&#x27;t imagine that you and your partner know 600 people each, I&#x27;d have a hard time finding 100 people to invite if I needed too</text></item><item><author>puranjay</author><text>I would like to see an equivalent study on Indian weddings. All the people I know who got married recently spent between $50-$100k on their wedding. My own wedding was about $50k. Food alone was nearly $20k (over 1200 guests were invited - which was on the low end)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>It’s not so important about who the groom and bride knows, it’s more about everyone the groom and bride’s parents and grandparents know also.<p>It’s more of a “bring the whole tribe together” affair, but only makes sense in villages when food and labor was cheap. But that was within the grandparents’ and parents’ lifetimes so it still lingers around, only now it’s a status symbol to show how well you’ve made it, and of course, some (most?) people choose to over extend themselves and choose to show off to the tribe rather than invest in their own future. Especially since the “tribe” is further and further away from the original rural villages which were geographically next to each other.<p>The new tribes are split along educational and wealth boundaries, so anyone who thinks wasting money entertaining the tribe will help keep them in it is sorely mistaken.</text></comment> | <story><title>Marriage Costs in China Are Out of Control</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-29/why-marriage-costs-in-china-are-out-of-control</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>williamdclt</author><text>Genuine question: how is it possible to invite 1200 people? I can&#x27;t imagine that you and your partner know 600 people each, I&#x27;d have a hard time finding 100 people to invite if I needed too</text></item><item><author>puranjay</author><text>I would like to see an equivalent study on Indian weddings. All the people I know who got married recently spent between $50-$100k on their wedding. My own wedding was about $50k. Food alone was nearly $20k (over 1200 guests were invited - which was on the low end)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throw930336</author><text>In Chinese weddings, when you invite your friends, you also invite their relatives and families as well. It can definitely add up.<p>And it&#x27;s not just you inviting people, but your parents and their parents.<p>It&#x27;s not uncommon to actually not know 2&#x2F;3s of the people at your wedding.<p>The best part however is that each guest will give you a &quot;red envelope&quot; of money. It&#x27;s basically the wedding gift. The more people you invite, the more money you can possibly make (even after the expenses of the wedding).<p>This money is then used for the new coupe to start their family.</text></comment> |
19,089,671 | 19,089,330 | 1 | 3 | 19,087,096 | train | <story><title>Real-time Continuous Transcription with Live Transcribe</title><url>https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/real-time-continuous-transcription-with.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>This app is cool and useful, but a major piece of the puzzle is missing.<p>Communication between a Deaf person and a hearing person is a two-way street, and this tool really only addresses one of those streets.<p>The tool transcribes the audible speech of the hearing person, allowing the Deaf person to read the transcription.<p>But if the Deaf person wants to sign a response, they&#x27;re out of luck. Instead, they need to type their response on the device.<p>That&#x27;s OK, but in a &quot;this&#x27;ll make do in a pinch&quot; kind of way. The ideal is that both the Deaf person and the Hearing person are able to communicate without typing.<p>There is some pretty cool research around signing-to-text translation -- Matt Huenerfauth <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huenerfauth.ist.rit.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huenerfauth.ist.rit.edu</a> is doing some really interesting stuff, for example -- but as far as I know it&#x27;s not ready for prime time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thro_away_n</author><text>As a deaf person, I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ava.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ava.me&#x2F;</a> most of the time. It allows me to host a group conversation and have speakers labeled if everyone else uses the app but that&#x27;s a chore to set up sometimes. It&#x27;s also quite pricey at $30 per month and some months I use it for less than a hour. It can voice what you type if you want, but I normally voice for myself. I also used to use Keep Notes &amp; the &#x27;mic&#x27; icon in a pinch, but that would turn itself off if it didn&#x27;t pick up any speech in some time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Real-time Continuous Transcription with Live Transcribe</title><url>https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/02/real-time-continuous-transcription-with.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>This app is cool and useful, but a major piece of the puzzle is missing.<p>Communication between a Deaf person and a hearing person is a two-way street, and this tool really only addresses one of those streets.<p>The tool transcribes the audible speech of the hearing person, allowing the Deaf person to read the transcription.<p>But if the Deaf person wants to sign a response, they&#x27;re out of luck. Instead, they need to type their response on the device.<p>That&#x27;s OK, but in a &quot;this&#x27;ll make do in a pinch&quot; kind of way. The ideal is that both the Deaf person and the Hearing person are able to communicate without typing.<p>There is some pretty cool research around signing-to-text translation -- Matt Huenerfauth <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huenerfauth.ist.rit.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huenerfauth.ist.rit.edu</a> is doing some really interesting stuff, for example -- but as far as I know it&#x27;s not ready for prime time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fipple</author><text>Repairing one lane of a two way street is still useful. :)</text></comment> |
6,357,616 | 6,357,562 | 1 | 3 | 6,357,317 | train | <story><title>To my daughter's high school programming teacher</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gemma</author><text>&gt; Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.<p>Yeah? So this high school programming class isn&#x27;t so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?<p>Please. It&#x27;s the educator&#x27;s job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority. It&#x27;s their job to track their students&#x27; education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It&#x27;s not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of &#x27;real world training&#x27;. It&#x27;s not their job to decide that since it&#x27;s hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn&#x27;t about maintaining the world we already live in, it&#x27;s about shaping the world our kids will live in.<p>You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that&#x27;s fine with comments like &quot;get in the kitchen and make me sandwich&quot;. Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?</text></item><item><author>cookiecaper</author><text>So, was this article about the student&#x27;s experience or the mother&#x27;s? Because it reads like it&#x27;s about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That&#x27;s the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don&#x27;t endorse such teasing, it&#x27;s certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it&#x27;s not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.<p>Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.<p>It&#x27;s hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you&#x27;ll see that it doesn&#x27;t appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the &quot;harassment&quot; was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cookiecaper</author><text>&gt;Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?<p>The real world where HR thought police aren&#x27;t sitting in every room of every company. The real world where even HR people try to &quot;make jokes&quot; and be funny. The real world where HR people generally judge the severity of a harassment complaint by favoritism, which reality a blunt HR person (not employed at my current employer) just relayed to me recently. The real world where real humans, not perfectly politically correct robo-trons, must work, play, and engage.<p>I don&#x27;t endorse teasing that harms a person&#x27;s feelings. But I also think we shouldn&#x27;t be so thin-skinned that we shrivel up and quit the first time a trite, cliched joke is thrown our way, because that happens all the time to everybody (your peers _will_ find a difference to comment upon no matter how mainstream you think you are), and if you can&#x27;t handle it, you&#x27;ll have a lot of difficulty handling more serious emotional situations, like getting passed up for a promotion.<p>It&#x27;d be great if the programming teacher first, was made aware of this problem, and the article never claims he was, and second, was able to stop the problem, but there&#x27;s no guarantee he could&#x27;ve effectively done so even if he tried (and he may have), just as corporate HR departments can&#x27;t stop all incidents of &quot;harassment&quot; even though they &quot;try&quot;.<p>I believe the author probably wrote the piece primarily as a hypothetical, but I also believe it was bad taste to do so since this supposedly is traceable back to a real person who may not deserve that type of criticism, and I don&#x27;t believe her fundamental complaint (&quot;someone said something that made my daughter sad, so you all should feel bad :( &quot;) is very worthy of the community&#x27;s attention.</text></comment> | <story><title>To my daughter's high school programming teacher</title><url>https://www.usenix.org/blog/my-daughters-high-school-programming-teacher</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gemma</author><text>&gt; Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well.<p>Yeah? So this high school programming class isn&#x27;t so much a programming class as a crash course in coping mechanisms for gender-based harassment?<p>Please. It&#x27;s the educator&#x27;s job to create a safe space for, you know, education--for every student in the class, not just the privileged majority. It&#x27;s their job to track their students&#x27; education and interest level, and make adjustments if either starts dropping. It&#x27;s not their job to facilitate a hostile environment and let minority students flounder in the interests of &#x27;real world training&#x27;. It&#x27;s not their job to decide that since it&#x27;s hard for women in tech in real life, it should be hard in their class. Education isn&#x27;t about maintaining the world we already live in, it&#x27;s about shaping the world our kids will live in.<p>You want real world training? Show me an HR department in a software company that&#x27;s fine with comments like &quot;get in the kitchen and make me sandwich&quot;. Which real world are you advocating this high school programming class introduce to a 16-year-old girl?</text></item><item><author>cookiecaper</author><text>So, was this article about the student&#x27;s experience or the mother&#x27;s? Because it reads like it&#x27;s about the mother. The guys in class suggested that their peer go make a sandwich. That&#x27;s the only accusation actually made against the class and the teacher. While I don&#x27;t endorse such teasing, it&#x27;s certainly in no way specific to computer programming, and it&#x27;s not anything like the intensity one would expect when trolls find an article.<p>Minority entities will be teased practically any time they exist, regardless of sector or age, and they need to be taught to handle it well. We can continue to attempt to stop the teasing altogether, but in the meantime we have to live in the Real World, and if this child quit programming because a few guys made a kitchen joke, the mother is really misdirecting her efforts by writing a letter to the teacher.<p>It&#x27;s hard to imagine that any rape joke would be allowed to fly in our classrooms where students can hardly wield pencils anymore, and if you read carefully, you&#x27;ll see that it doesn&#x27;t appear to have occurred. It appears to me that the author is attempting to use some clever wording to create an impression that the &quot;harassment&quot; was much more intense than it actually was by subtly crossing over into her personal experience with online trolls.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peter-fogg</author><text>Thank you. If we accept discrimination of minorities as inevitable, then it will be.</text></comment> |
14,951,576 | 14,951,225 | 1 | 2 | 14,949,694 | train | <story><title>Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/jamesob/tinychain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulBGD_</author><text>I&#x27;m working on my own blockchain (not specifically bitcoin) implementation just to wrap my head around everything. One thing I&#x27;m not getting that also wasn&#x27;t answered by the source code is how you check timestamps.<p>I understand the whole network time = median offset + local time thing, however I&#x27;m a bit fuzzy on how you check timestamps on previous blocks when you&#x27;re initially downloading the chain. How do you know that you need to check the timestamp if you can&#x27;t know if you&#x27;re on the latest block?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Taek</author><text>You need to check two things. First you need to check that this block had a timestamp higher than the median of the past 11 blocks (it&#x27;s a consensus rule). Second you need to check that the timestamp is not unacceptably far in the future. For historic blocks, it definitely won&#x27;t be because the timestamp will be far in the past (as the block was created far in the past).<p>Latest block or not, it just needs to follow those rules. That <i>does</i> mean it&#x27;s possible for a block with an invalid timestamp to become valid after some time has passed. But if it is invalid, nobody will be mining on it, so it&#x27;s unlikely to remain part of the longest chain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tinychain: a pocket-sized implementation of Bitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/jamesob/tinychain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulBGD_</author><text>I&#x27;m working on my own blockchain (not specifically bitcoin) implementation just to wrap my head around everything. One thing I&#x27;m not getting that also wasn&#x27;t answered by the source code is how you check timestamps.<p>I understand the whole network time = median offset + local time thing, however I&#x27;m a bit fuzzy on how you check timestamps on previous blocks when you&#x27;re initially downloading the chain. How do you know that you need to check the timestamp if you can&#x27;t know if you&#x27;re on the latest block?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>uobytx</author><text>Wouldn&#x27;t you only need to verify proof-of-work on the largest chain? Largest meaning the highest cumulative difficulty rather than number of blocks.<p>If you include a timestamp in each block, just have each node simply reject times that are out of order or too far from the current time, which will prevent people from mining on an invalid chain. &quot;Current time&quot; meaning nothing more than a few minutes in the future of now. Yes, even when dealing with an old chain.<p>Here is how it works:<p>If an invalid or malicious person spends hashrate to mine a block with a bad date, all the nodes in the network will see it and reject the block.<p>Because the block is rejected, everyone else keeps attempting to mine the same block, but with the correct timestamp. The window is: greater than the last block, less than a couple minutes from now.<p>Because most miners are on non-malicious nodes, they eventually produce a longer chain than the chain with the bad timestamp.<p>Because this good chain is longer, new nodes that sync the blockchain from scratch would simply pick the longest of the available chains (which is the good one).<p>This could still go wrong if the attacker has a large amount of hashrate (or luck) for an extended period of time, but this gets very expensive very fast. This is why it is sometimes good to wait a few blocks before assuming consensus.</text></comment> |
24,139,688 | 24,138,987 | 1 | 3 | 24,135,619 | train | <story><title>Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)</title><url>https://www.whatlisacooks.com/blog/2015/5/8/dishwashing-detergent-hack-two-ingredients</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twic</author><text>I once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked.<p>Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i&#x27;d expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won&#x27;t work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean <i>chemically</i>, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually <i>break food down</i> over the course of tens of minutes or hours.<p>Dish soap does NOT do that. (It&#x27;s also why you shouldn&#x27;t wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.)<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that this &quot;hack&quot; does <i>some</i> cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it&#x27;s just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn&#x27;t break these things down. It&#x27;s not meant to.<p>(Washing by hand with dish soap works because you&#x27;re applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.)<p>I just don&#x27;t find it credible that &quot;the results are identical&quot;. Either the author isn&#x27;t paying enough attention, or else they&#x27;re doing extensive &quot;pre-washing&quot; of their dishes before loading them, or they&#x27;re washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry&#x2F;harden in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>uberduber</author><text>We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.<p>Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren&#x27;t getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren&#x27;t really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.<p>My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)</title><url>https://www.whatlisacooks.com/blog/2015/5/8/dishwashing-detergent-hack-two-ingredients</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twic</author><text>I once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked.<p>Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i&#x27;d expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won&#x27;t work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean <i>chemically</i>, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually <i>break food down</i> over the course of tens of minutes or hours.<p>Dish soap does NOT do that. (It&#x27;s also why you shouldn&#x27;t wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.)<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that this &quot;hack&quot; does <i>some</i> cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it&#x27;s just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn&#x27;t break these things down. It&#x27;s not meant to.<p>(Washing by hand with dish soap works because you&#x27;re applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.)<p>I just don&#x27;t find it credible that &quot;the results are identical&quot;. Either the author isn&#x27;t paying enough attention, or else they&#x27;re doing extensive &quot;pre-washing&quot; of their dishes before loading them, or they&#x27;re washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry&#x2F;harden in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wu_tang_chris</author><text>I lived in a co-op in PA during college, we had a &quot;dish sanitizer&quot; instead of a dish washer. It was basically just blasting the shit out of the dishes with crazy hot water. We were supposed to wash them before we put them in there but nobody ever did.</text></comment> |
3,750,608 | 3,749,923 | 1 | 2 | 3,749,678 | train | <story><title>Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-censors-pirate-bay-links-in-windows-live-messenger-120324/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>javert</author><text>I'm disappointed to see the destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise) being lauded on HN.<p>The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>We'll be seeing a lot more of this in the next couple of years. The RIAA and the MPAA will get more and more desperate and will call in more favors with industry buddies as they get closer to the recognition that they are losing the war in spite of winning a couple of battles.<p>In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.<p>This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.<p>edit:<p>This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: <a href="http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry" rel="nofollow">http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>muuh-gnu</author><text>&#62; destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise)<p>These are not the same. Most people do not support the concept of "intellectual property". But for a property to exist in practice, you need majority support, otherwise your property is either just imaginary or you need a totalitarian police state to enforce it.<p>&#62; the basis of society<p>The concept of imaginary property is neither supported by a majority of population not in any other way democratically backed. Nobody on this planet has ever voted on it. From its early beginnings, it has been enforced from the top down, decided in shady deals behind closed doors between corrupt officials and industry stake holders and then enforced against the majority.<p>&#62; steal it<p>To steal it, you must first reckognize that it is somebody else's property first. But what if you dont consider it property in the first place?</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-censors-pirate-bay-links-in-windows-live-messenger-120324/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>javert</author><text>I'm disappointed to see the destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise) being lauded on HN.<p>The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>We'll be seeing a lot more of this in the next couple of years. The RIAA and the MPAA will get more and more desperate and will call in more favors with industry buddies as they get closer to the recognition that they are losing the war in spite of winning a couple of battles.<p>In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.<p>This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.<p>edit:<p>This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: <a href="http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry" rel="nofollow">http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>natesm</author><text>Unlimited copyright terms are eroding the basis of society (the Constitution). 5 to 10 years would be reasonable.</text></comment> |
29,786,291 | 29,786,268 | 1 | 3 | 29,785,046 | train | <story><title>Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeybutton</author><text>Netflix is facing the rise of competing streaming platforms. They&#x27;re forced into creating their own content because other producers would rather release content on their own platforms and keep all the streaming revenue, rather than license it to Netflix. Streaming video on demand isn&#x27;t a technical moat that is stopping anyone.</text></item><item><author>jarjoura</author><text>All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.<p>However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.<p>* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.<p>* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.<p>* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.<p>* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they&#x27;ve built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They&#x27;ve also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cogman10</author><text>Agreed. What made netflix successful initially was their access to IP. That&#x27;s going away fast as every IP producer is pushing for their own paid streaming service (which sucks, btw).<p>With big heavyweights like Disney that own a huge percentage of content having their own services, netflix is really going to struggle being anything more than niche media providers (anime) and their own inhouse media.<p>If they are lucky, they&#x27;ll be an HBO style platform. However, the quality of their in-house content has left a lot to be desired. Some is good, but a lot is garbage.<p>That netflix has technical chops isn&#x27;t going to be a saving grace. Rather, it will mean engineers from netflix will likely be able to secure jobs at other streaming providers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Poll: Which FAANG is the most likely to decline in the years ahead?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeybutton</author><text>Netflix is facing the rise of competing streaming platforms. They&#x27;re forced into creating their own content because other producers would rather release content on their own platforms and keep all the streaming revenue, rather than license it to Netflix. Streaming video on demand isn&#x27;t a technical moat that is stopping anyone.</text></item><item><author>jarjoura</author><text>All of these companies are too big to fail at this point. They all have at least a decade of reserves to power through anything that gets thrown their way.<p>However, I do predict that they will change in significant ways in the next decade.<p>* Apple is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending their App Store monopoly that could disrupt the entire world, since it would also affect all other digital marketplaces.<p>* Amazon is about to enter a decade of unionization all over the world.<p>* Google and Facebook both lost a key ability to micro-target on their ad platforms so they are both reinventing themselves to drive revenue from other sources, hardware being the biggest moats they can invest in.<p>* Netflix has some of the worlds brightest minds in data science and they&#x27;ve built up a war-chest of understanding viewing habits. They&#x27;ve also gobbled up a lot of key Hollywood players in the last few years, so I expect some huge cultural changes ahead as these creatives start to take more leadership roles in the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2muchcoffeeman</author><text>There’s too many now though. The producers are getting greedy. I don’t think people will put up with having multiple subscriptions and eventually it’ll all come back down to a few key players.<p>My money is on Netflix, Prime (because we want the free shipping) and Disney.</text></comment> |
33,160,134 | 33,159,625 | 1 | 2 | 33,158,877 | train | <story><title>Human Motion Diffusion Model</title><url>https://github.com/GuyTevet/motion-diffusion-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cdev_gl</author><text>If you scroll down a bit there&#x27;s a wireframe of the skeleton which is what&#x27;s actually being animated, and you&#x27;ll notice it&#x27;s lacking in bones to define the fingers or even possibly hands. Hence why the hands maintain that weird pose throughout all examples.<p>My gut says that the quality could be rapidly improved without changing the underlying design at all.<p>The real issue with this, I think, is that motion capture for humans is already widely available and provides much higher fidelity and control than text. Unless I&#x27;m misreading the paper badly, this model was trained on exactly such data. Blending between multiple animations through motion capture is also well-understood.<p>So while the results are impressive, the practical gains seem very marginal. I think perhaps that the equivalent to &quot;inpainting&quot; (as mentioned in the text) and &quot;style transfer&quot; would be the big gain here? If we could use this to retarget animations to different body plans (child, adult, space monster) quickly, or for smarter interpolation between human-authored keyframes, I could see that being a much-desired tool.</text></item><item><author>soperj</author><text>I understand it&#x27;s probably gonna get better and better, but the actual result made me laugh out loud. The skipping rope one was hilarious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nineteen999</author><text>I dunno, as an amateur animator and game developer this would be a huge help to me. I have a first gen Perception Neuron suit, I even wrote an addon for Blender that retargets the Neuron output for the Rigify rig.<p>But it&#x27;s cumbersome to put on and take off, and to operate, especially when working alone. While I&#x27;m in pretty good shape, there&#x27;s heaps of movements (eg. martial arts, swordplay, firing&#x2F;reloading a gun etc) that would probably look silly if I performed them. I can see this being very handy at least for prototyping animations at the very least.<p>Replacing finger bone positions is pretty trival in Blender as well using the Pose Library feature so the lack of finger data isn&#x27;t that much of a big deal.</text></comment> | <story><title>Human Motion Diffusion Model</title><url>https://github.com/GuyTevet/motion-diffusion-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cdev_gl</author><text>If you scroll down a bit there&#x27;s a wireframe of the skeleton which is what&#x27;s actually being animated, and you&#x27;ll notice it&#x27;s lacking in bones to define the fingers or even possibly hands. Hence why the hands maintain that weird pose throughout all examples.<p>My gut says that the quality could be rapidly improved without changing the underlying design at all.<p>The real issue with this, I think, is that motion capture for humans is already widely available and provides much higher fidelity and control than text. Unless I&#x27;m misreading the paper badly, this model was trained on exactly such data. Blending between multiple animations through motion capture is also well-understood.<p>So while the results are impressive, the practical gains seem very marginal. I think perhaps that the equivalent to &quot;inpainting&quot; (as mentioned in the text) and &quot;style transfer&quot; would be the big gain here? If we could use this to retarget animations to different body plans (child, adult, space monster) quickly, or for smarter interpolation between human-authored keyframes, I could see that being a much-desired tool.</text></item><item><author>soperj</author><text>I understand it&#x27;s probably gonna get better and better, but the actual result made me laugh out loud. The skipping rope one was hilarious.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dagmx</author><text>The reason there’s likely no finger joints is because a lot of motion capture data doesn’t include fidelity beyond the wrist.<p>So if they’re training on the standard corpuses of motion capture data available and even mixing in their own, they likely won’t have fingers to base data on.</text></comment> |
10,507,978 | 10,508,080 | 1 | 2 | 10,506,280 | train | <story><title>New Emacs maintainer</title><url>https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00118.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrock</author><text>Nice to hear this from Mr. Wiegley:<p>&gt; Actually, there were no compromises made. I found Richard to be an absolute delight to talk with. We discussed the architectural history of Pompeii, admired his reading library, his tea collection... :)<p>&gt; I think many people misunderstand his devotion to freedom as being unreasoning in his views -- as I had, not just a few month ago! On the contrary: I proposed several Emacs-related ideas that I expected him to balk at, only to find he happily considered everything, even suggesting further improvements. At no point did I ever get the feeling that I was speaking to a closed mind.<p>&gt; I only wish I lived nearby so I could spend more time with him. He is truly an amiable fellow. I have no worries about our ability to find a common path in future, if issues that threaten his goals for software freedom arise.</text></comment> | <story><title>New Emacs maintainer</title><url>https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-11/msg00118.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dkns</author><text>John Wiegley is the author of (completely awesome in my opinion) use-package for emacs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwiegley&#x2F;use-package" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jwiegley&#x2F;use-package</a></text></comment> |
12,051,678 | 12,050,800 | 1 | 2 | 12,050,730 | train | <story><title>Announcing Rust 1.10</title><url>http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/07/07/Rust-1.10.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>parley</author><text>I&#x27;m really looking forward to when rustup.rs is stable (atleast for Linux)! I&#x27;m trying to push Rust at work, and it&#x27;s one of those polishy things that would help.<p>Unfortunately, last time I checked development (on issues blocking the initial stable release) seemed to have slowed as of late, but I should be helping out instead of whining - the Rust community is doing great work!</text></comment> | <story><title>Announcing Rust 1.10</title><url>http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/07/07/Rust-1.10.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dikaiosune</author><text>Exciting!<p>Tongue-in-cheek, it&#x27;s very exciting that distros will now have an easier time patching Rust and producing bugs like this one:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;gcc-4.2&#x2F;+bug&#x2F;256797" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;gcc-4.2&#x2F;+bug&#x2F;25679...</a></text></comment> |
24,603,534 | 24,603,266 | 1 | 3 | 24,603,053 | train | <story><title>Social-media platforms are destroying evidence of war crimes</title><url>https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/09/26/social-media-platforms-are-destroying-evidence-of-war-crimes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>schoen</author><text>I was trying to reply to a post that got flagged, so I&#x27;ll repost at the top level instead:<p>I strongly disagree with [the other poster&#x27;s lack of concern about war crimes], but I want to try to paraphrase the part of your intuition that makes sense to me.<p>Facebook gets criticized by its users and governments both for taking down &quot;too much&quot; and &quot;too little&quot;, sometimes with regard to the same post or subject area.<p>Suppose user X posts something related to an armed conflict, violence, suffering, or death. This post might be part of a crime by X against Y, or evidence of a crime by Y against Z, or evidence of a crime by Y against Z, or not really a crime at all but just really disturbing and upsetting. Also, in various circumstances people might want records about violent crimes against them to be destroyed, or publicized, or not destroyed but not publicized (only used by some judicial process, or truth-and-reconciliation process, or historians, or something). Also, user X might have an intention that&#x27;s different from the primary value or valence of the content, like prurient enthusiasm for violence, or making one of the parties depicted look bad, or trying to intimidate one of the parties depicted.<p>In order to figure out which category (or categories) a post falls into, Facebook has to (1) learn the language(s) involved in all posts, (2) learn the political context of violent conflicts, (3) perform some level of adjudication and fact-finding about political conflicts and disputes, and maybe even (4) try to understand the motives of the person who posted something <i>on each particular occasion</i>.<p>Is it reasonable to expect Facebook to do all those things, compared to other choices that are consistent, neutral, and inevitably result in various type I and type II errors with respect to the nature and purposes of posts related to violence?</text></comment> | <story><title>Social-media platforms are destroying evidence of war crimes</title><url>https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/09/26/social-media-platforms-are-destroying-evidence-of-war-crimes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skissane</author><text>Removed from public access != deleted<p>For all we know, the content still exists on the social media platforms&#x27; servers, and access is just blocked to the public, but the platforms will happily provide it to the proper authorities in response to an appropriate request.<p>(Of course, I can&#x27;t rule out the possibility they may have physically deleted some of it, or may do so eventually – I don&#x27;t know what their data retention policies are – but I imagine they would be hesitant to permanently delete content that may plausibly be of future interest to regulators – this article contains zero information on whether they have actually physically deleted any of it or not)<p>Human Rights Watch is of course a purely private body, so unless they reach some special arrangement with the platforms (and platforms are sometimes willing to enter into those sorts of special arrangements), they are not going to have any more access to removed content than the general public has. But that doesn&#x27;t mean that government authorities don&#x27;t have more access than the general public has.</text></comment> |
37,421,464 | 37,421,703 | 1 | 3 | 37,421,241 | train | <story><title>Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-07/grindr-loses-nearly-half-its-staff-to-strict-return-to-office-rule</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mjhay</author><text>Not sure that it&#x27;s such a great business decision to lose almost half your staff, and probably moreso the higher-performing ones with other options. I&#x27;m guessing that this was intended to reduce the headcount without paying severance, which sounds attractive to the average MBA brain with zero ability to think through long-term consequences.</text></comment> | <story><title>Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-07/grindr-loses-nearly-half-its-staff-to-strict-return-to-office-rule</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Grindr went public via a SPAC acquisition last November and has lost 90% of its value since. I&#x27;m gonna go ahead and say it&#x27;s a bad move to make RTO demands from your staff when they already see no future at the company and have one foot out the door.<p>The company&#x27;s problems will be solved by better leadership, decision making, product vision, adaptability and faster execution...not more butts in seats at the office.</text></comment> |
31,798,140 | 31,798,118 | 1 | 3 | 31,796,256 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?</title><text>I work for a DeFi protocol that has a token. I joined in 2021.<p>I would describe myself as having neutral stance towards the crypto industry, DeFi&#x2F;Ethereum more specifically. I am not a fan of most other alternative chains or Bitcoin. I understand that the majority of tokens and services are scams and markets caps are a bubble driven by speculation, but I also see true potential in the technology and ideology. Both of these opinions kind of cancel each other out leading to me being neither fully pro- nor fully anti-crypto.<p>However, the constant backlash from the public is nagging me. All the hate for crypto, even though much of it is uninformed, makes me question my decisions. I am also worried about future employability. If crypto fails, which is a real possibility in my mind, will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?<p>Just feeling a bit lost. Anyone else in a similar position?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeroenhd</author><text>I&#x27;m one of the &quot;haters&quot;. I see no value in crypto in 99.99% of crypto and in the cases that do make sense the actual use for it is borderline money laundering or tax evasion. All the &quot;enthusiasts&quot; seem to want to get rich by getting as many people as they can in their greater fool scheme of choice in the hopes of becoming a Bitcoin billionaire. The obnoxious fan base and practical scams coming out of the marketing department are what I despise most about the whole thing.<p>However, I don&#x27;t foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job&#x27;s a job, and crypto isn&#x27;t exactly as easy as your run of the mill CRUD application development.<p>By working in the ethereum space you&#x27;ve proven you can work with&#x2F;around obscure tools, learn strange jargon, probably have some knowledge of cryptographic algorithms, and a willingness to do a deep dive in what you believe in. I&#x27;m no hiring manager, but to me that all seems like a bunch of skills that will transfer to many businesses outside crypto.<p>There&#x27;s more to a person than what areas of business they have experience in. You can work for Big Oil, Facebook&#x2F;Google&#x2F;UmbrellaCorp, or Nestlé and be a perfectly good person just doing their job. Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.<p>Even if you are a crucial part in the next big rug-pull-sold-as-ending-world-hunger, I honestly doubt you&#x27;ll run into too many ethical qualms unless you screw up enough to actually break the law and get caught. It&#x27;s not like Meta or Wells Fargo suddenly care about ethics if you can talk things straight enough, most big companies are morally bankrupt anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>popcorncowboy</author><text>&gt; I don&#x27;t foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job&#x27;s a job<p>Nah. This line of reasoning excuses <i>any</i> activity one might be involved with because &quot;it&#x27;s just my job&quot;. Doesn&#x27;t work like that. The idea that you carry zero moral (or ethical or even legal) culpability because you&#x27;re drawing a paycheck and being &quot;told&quot; what to do is what every person working for the companies that are deeply damaging our society tells themselves. Because the alternative (the reality) is really hard to deal with.<p>GP is right to be concerned.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Feel bad about working in crypto, what to do?</title><text>I work for a DeFi protocol that has a token. I joined in 2021.<p>I would describe myself as having neutral stance towards the crypto industry, DeFi&#x2F;Ethereum more specifically. I am not a fan of most other alternative chains or Bitcoin. I understand that the majority of tokens and services are scams and markets caps are a bubble driven by speculation, but I also see true potential in the technology and ideology. Both of these opinions kind of cancel each other out leading to me being neither fully pro- nor fully anti-crypto.<p>However, the constant backlash from the public is nagging me. All the hate for crypto, even though much of it is uninformed, makes me question my decisions. I am also worried about future employability. If crypto fails, which is a real possibility in my mind, will I be unemployable because I spend several years in the scammy crypto industry?<p>Just feeling a bit lost. Anyone else in a similar position?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeroenhd</author><text>I&#x27;m one of the &quot;haters&quot;. I see no value in crypto in 99.99% of crypto and in the cases that do make sense the actual use for it is borderline money laundering or tax evasion. All the &quot;enthusiasts&quot; seem to want to get rich by getting as many people as they can in their greater fool scheme of choice in the hopes of becoming a Bitcoin billionaire. The obnoxious fan base and practical scams coming out of the marketing department are what I despise most about the whole thing.<p>However, I don&#x27;t foster any negative feelings towards developers per se. A job&#x27;s a job, and crypto isn&#x27;t exactly as easy as your run of the mill CRUD application development.<p>By working in the ethereum space you&#x27;ve proven you can work with&#x2F;around obscure tools, learn strange jargon, probably have some knowledge of cryptographic algorithms, and a willingness to do a deep dive in what you believe in. I&#x27;m no hiring manager, but to me that all seems like a bunch of skills that will transfer to many businesses outside crypto.<p>There&#x27;s more to a person than what areas of business they have experience in. You can work for Big Oil, Facebook&#x2F;Google&#x2F;UmbrellaCorp, or Nestlé and be a perfectly good person just doing their job. Anyone refusing you simply because you worked in crypto at some point is short-sighted.<p>Even if you are a crucial part in the next big rug-pull-sold-as-ending-world-hunger, I honestly doubt you&#x27;ll run into too many ethical qualms unless you screw up enough to actually break the law and get caught. It&#x27;s not like Meta or Wells Fargo suddenly care about ethics if you can talk things straight enough, most big companies are morally bankrupt anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itsoktocry</author><text>&gt;<i>A job&#x27;s a job</i><p>But most people involved in the scam claim to be &quot;just doing their job&quot;.<p>If you&#x27;re working for an employer or in an industry that <i>you yourself</i> consider a bit shady, you are morally obligated to leave. Society can&#x27;t function otherwise.</text></comment> |
22,829,033 | 22,829,221 | 1 | 2 | 22,828,691 | train | <story><title>Worst economic crisis since 1930s depression, IMF says</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52236936</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>The increase in the last two weeks is because it&#x27;s becoming obvious that:<p>1) The US&#x27;s response to this was competent.<p>2) The measures put in place are working.<p>3) The projections are improving <i>substantially</i>.<p>4) The time horizon is shrinking.<p>5) We are starting to understand how to treat this.<p>(+ &quot;in the us&quot;).<p>Two weeks ago we were looking at places like Italy, and extrapolating that the US could see deaths in the <i>millions</i>. A week ago that projection went down to 100-200k, and yesterday it went down to 60k. <i>Obviously</i> that is still a massive catastrophe, but it&#x27;s nowhere near the catastrophe we were fearing two weeks ago.<p>Additionally, the writing is on the wall that manufacturing is going to be moving away from China as much as possible in the near future. Much of that, for American companies at least, is going to come back to the US, probably at the hands of massive tariffs.<p>That&#x27;s all good news for the US economy.<p>&gt;US realizes the coronavirus is hitting them the hardest.<p>Where did you hear this? It is absolutely not true.</text></item><item><author>baby</author><text>The increase we’ve seen in the last two weeks make zero sense to me. It’s almost making me lose trust in the market as I feel like it’s rigged. We’re in a complete state of unknown, nobody knows when this will be over, unemployment raises like crazy, the US now realizes that coronavirus is hitting them the hardest...</text></item><item><author>mLuby</author><text>And yet the stock market is already recovering. I guess &quot;worst crisis since Great Depression&quot; has been priced in?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andbberger</author><text>The US&#x27;s response could not be described as anything even approaching competent. This is still just getting started.<p>Let&#x27;s check back in a few months and see how this comment has aged...</text></comment> | <story><title>Worst economic crisis since 1930s depression, IMF says</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52236936</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>The increase in the last two weeks is because it&#x27;s becoming obvious that:<p>1) The US&#x27;s response to this was competent.<p>2) The measures put in place are working.<p>3) The projections are improving <i>substantially</i>.<p>4) The time horizon is shrinking.<p>5) We are starting to understand how to treat this.<p>(+ &quot;in the us&quot;).<p>Two weeks ago we were looking at places like Italy, and extrapolating that the US could see deaths in the <i>millions</i>. A week ago that projection went down to 100-200k, and yesterday it went down to 60k. <i>Obviously</i> that is still a massive catastrophe, but it&#x27;s nowhere near the catastrophe we were fearing two weeks ago.<p>Additionally, the writing is on the wall that manufacturing is going to be moving away from China as much as possible in the near future. Much of that, for American companies at least, is going to come back to the US, probably at the hands of massive tariffs.<p>That&#x27;s all good news for the US economy.<p>&gt;US realizes the coronavirus is hitting them the hardest.<p>Where did you hear this? It is absolutely not true.</text></item><item><author>baby</author><text>The increase we’ve seen in the last two weeks make zero sense to me. It’s almost making me lose trust in the market as I feel like it’s rigged. We’re in a complete state of unknown, nobody knows when this will be over, unemployment raises like crazy, the US now realizes that coronavirus is hitting them the hardest...</text></item><item><author>mLuby</author><text>And yet the stock market is already recovering. I guess &quot;worst crisis since Great Depression&quot; has been priced in?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jameslevy</author><text>Back in February, there were a handful of cases popping up here and there. And then growing in each hotspot from 5 to 10 to 20, etc. It didn&#x27;t take long for things to get out of control.<p>Without some major game-changer in the next two months, its hard to see a reason why the same thing won&#x27;t just happen again. Hopefully over the summer it&#x27;s not as contagious due to hot weather.</text></comment> |
24,214,174 | 24,213,981 | 1 | 3 | 24,212,628 | train | <story><title>Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-begins-universal-basic-income-trial-three-years-2020-8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OneGuy123</author><text>Based on how most jobs will get automated some form of an UBI will be required sooner or later.<p>Now the only question is: how to you phase in UBI while still rewarding extra productive people to keep creating&#x2F;innovating?<p>Some will say &quot;those people will innovate out of love&quot;. This is not always the case, many people are good at what they do and create many awesome things but given the chance they would rather do something less productive because on some level they don&#x27;t like what they do that much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thisisbrians</author><text>Isn&#x27;t this like saying that the invention of agriculture will mean society has to start feeding hunter gatherers for free? That&#x27;s not how it went. People find new ways to create value all the time, and yet every time we invent anything new people keep saying &quot;all the jobs are going away.&quot; It has yet to happen in spite of the agricultural, industrial, and now tech revolutions.</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-begins-universal-basic-income-trial-three-years-2020-8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OneGuy123</author><text>Based on how most jobs will get automated some form of an UBI will be required sooner or later.<p>Now the only question is: how to you phase in UBI while still rewarding extra productive people to keep creating&#x2F;innovating?<p>Some will say &quot;those people will innovate out of love&quot;. This is not always the case, many people are good at what they do and create many awesome things but given the chance they would rather do something less productive because on some level they don&#x27;t like what they do that much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pizza234</author><text><p><pre><code> &gt; Based on how most jobs will get automated some form of an UBI will be required sooner or later.
&gt; Now the only question is: ...
</code></pre>
&quot;Most jobs will get automated&quot; is actually very questionable. It&#x27;s called &quot;Lump of labour fallacy&quot;, although (I suppose) either not everybody subscribes to it, or it&#x27;s something that tends to go unnoticed.</text></comment> |
8,431,471 | 8,430,955 | 1 | 2 | 8,429,123 | train | <story><title>Firestone Stopped Ebola in Its Tracks</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/06/354054915/firestone-did-what-governments-have-not-stopped-ebola-in-its-tracks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>&gt;This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world.<p>Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:<p>1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.<p>2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>Honestly what it really boils down to is resources and money (&quot;resource&quot; can also be described as &quot;money&quot; therefore really money and money).<p>Up until very recently there were simply not enough hazmat suits, not enough burn-able bedding, not enough people (who wants to work with Ebola?), not enough disinfectant, and heck even clean water in SOME areas.<p>Then you have to consider how damn hot it is there, so a $5 hazmat suit may not cut it (this article covers that). Now you&#x27;re dealing with suits costing tens of times more than that for basic AC, just to allow the people in them to work longer shifts.<p>You also have a lot of local population pushback. The hazmat suits scare people, and all locals see is Ebola patients go into treatment and die. There is a lot of suspicion that Westerners are getting people sick to kill them, so they hide away family members until they get infectious.<p>What can be done? Money, and resources. It isn&#x27;t a magic bullet but if you train a metric ton of local people and give them everything they could possibly need it would at least slow the spread if not reverse it entirely...<p>PS - This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. We are simply too rich, we have or can acquire the resources, and even your average Joe Smith on the street can Google how to protect themselves from Ebola exposure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shivetya</author><text>the real threat is that this disease is going to come to more Westernize countries and fester amongst poor populations who already do not trust their local officials. combine this with a sense of entitlement far too many people have when it comes to travel and restrictions of such, already in the US there is push back from those being monitored who had contact with the Dallas patient. We even have protesters rallying because a dog was put down.<p>How do you contain irrational actions, the mutation of the disease may occur or not occur, but damn if a bunch of people aren&#x27;t exercising self destructive behavior.<p>People love to ridicule the Africans suffering through this as backward and superstitious all the while ignoring that entitlement, arrogance, and such, will cause similar containment issues in supposedly better countries.<p>The fact that traffic hasn&#x27;t been stopped already is criminal, its starting to read like World War Z. Europe will have it worse as they cannot easily control people getting in, the US has an ocean but air travel tends to mitigate that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Firestone Stopped Ebola in Its Tracks</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/06/354054915/firestone-did-what-governments-have-not-stopped-ebola-in-its-tracks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>&gt;This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world.<p>Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:<p>1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.<p>2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.</text></item><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>Honestly what it really boils down to is resources and money (&quot;resource&quot; can also be described as &quot;money&quot; therefore really money and money).<p>Up until very recently there were simply not enough hazmat suits, not enough burn-able bedding, not enough people (who wants to work with Ebola?), not enough disinfectant, and heck even clean water in SOME areas.<p>Then you have to consider how damn hot it is there, so a $5 hazmat suit may not cut it (this article covers that). Now you&#x27;re dealing with suits costing tens of times more than that for basic AC, just to allow the people in them to work longer shifts.<p>You also have a lot of local population pushback. The hazmat suits scare people, and all locals see is Ebola patients go into treatment and die. There is a lot of suspicion that Westerners are getting people sick to kill them, so they hide away family members until they get infectious.<p>What can be done? Money, and resources. It isn&#x27;t a magic bullet but if you train a metric ton of local people and give them everything they could possibly need it would at least slow the spread if not reverse it entirely...<p>PS - This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world. We are simply too rich, we have or can acquire the resources, and even your average Joe Smith on the street can Google how to protect themselves from Ebola exposure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wobbleblob</author><text>&gt;Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks.<p>The virus doesn&#x27;t gave a goal, to kill the patient. The death of the host is just an unfortunate side effect that really harms the spread of the virus. The really successful viruses have mutated to a form where they don&#x27;t kill the host, don&#x27;t make you sick enough to stay in bed, and just make you go to work and cough and sneeze all over everyone at the office.</text></comment> |
16,555,290 | 16,555,176 | 1 | 3 | 16,553,606 | train | <story><title>An Italian Region Where Co-Ops Produce a Third of GDP (2016)</title><url>http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-italian-place-where-co-ops-drive-the-economy-and-most-people-are-members-20160705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fbn79</author><text>Im from that region. Coop are anti-meritocracy. Many times the coops is a way to bypass tax and rules and do unfair concurrency. Coops give low pay to workers and they can because workers are considered company members. Coops are very politically connected and many time implied in corruption cases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coliveira</author><text>&gt; Coops are very politically connected and many time implied in corruption cases.<p>I don&#x27;t see how this is any different from non-cooperative companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>An Italian Region Where Co-Ops Produce a Third of GDP (2016)</title><url>http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-italian-place-where-co-ops-drive-the-economy-and-most-people-are-members-20160705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fbn79</author><text>Im from that region. Coop are anti-meritocracy. Many times the coops is a way to bypass tax and rules and do unfair concurrency. Coops give low pay to workers and they can because workers are considered company members. Coops are very politically connected and many time implied in corruption cases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frgtpsswrdlame</author><text>&gt;Coops give low pay to workers and they can because workers are considered company members.<p>How is this the case? I was under the impression that since workers were company members they would exert <i>more</i> pressure to increase wages.</text></comment> |
6,232,066 | 6,231,948 | 1 | 2 | 6,230,403 | train | <story><title>Do I Really Want All This Stuff?</title><url>https://medium.com/editors-picks/4728ca0774be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>westicle</author><text>For anyone interested in what happens to all this &quot;stuff&quot; at the other end...<p>I administer several deceased estates (the process for which is to locate and prove the will (if applicable), gather in and dispose of the assets, distribute the balance).<p>As most deceased people tend to be in the 70+ age bracket, it is very unlikely that you can even comprehend the volume of &quot;stuff&quot; involved in that undertaking.<p>Typically, 1% - 5% of the stuff has any commercial value. There might be jewellery, an antique or two. I can usually get $100 for a working fridge. Unfortunately we live in a disposable culture - we are geared to buy new rather than re-use old.<p>Some small proportion of the rest of the stuff can be donated (ie. charities will accept it). The rest fills up 2-5 rubbish skips (6 cubic metres each) and subsequently landfill.<p>Look around your house. Experience indicates that on your death I&#x27;ll recover approximately $900 from selling your stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sushimako</author><text>I&#x27;ve heard of &quot;apartment-looting&quot; parties in Vienna, don&#x27;t know if this is common elsewhere?<p>In order to empty a deceased apartment, they publicly sell a limited number of tickets (~20-30EUR iirc) for a cleaning&#x2F;looting event.
At the event, they let in a certain number of people at the same time, so it doesn&#x27;t feel too crowded.<p>Once inside, everyone is free to take whatever they want and can. This is fairly popular with students who just moved into their new flat and need stuff like kitchen supplies, lamps, frames etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Do I Really Want All This Stuff?</title><url>https://medium.com/editors-picks/4728ca0774be</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>westicle</author><text>For anyone interested in what happens to all this &quot;stuff&quot; at the other end...<p>I administer several deceased estates (the process for which is to locate and prove the will (if applicable), gather in and dispose of the assets, distribute the balance).<p>As most deceased people tend to be in the 70+ age bracket, it is very unlikely that you can even comprehend the volume of &quot;stuff&quot; involved in that undertaking.<p>Typically, 1% - 5% of the stuff has any commercial value. There might be jewellery, an antique or two. I can usually get $100 for a working fridge. Unfortunately we live in a disposable culture - we are geared to buy new rather than re-use old.<p>Some small proportion of the rest of the stuff can be donated (ie. charities will accept it). The rest fills up 2-5 rubbish skips (6 cubic metres each) and subsequently landfill.<p>Look around your house. Experience indicates that on your death I&#x27;ll recover approximately $900 from selling your stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sliverstorm</author><text><i>Unfortunately we live in a disposable culture - we are geared to buy new rather than re-use old.</i><p>I think a lot of that has to do with the markets for new &amp; used goods. There are many things I would be perfectly fine buying used, but have no hope of locating for sale in any reasonable span of time.</text></comment> |
18,207,988 | 18,207,096 | 1 | 3 | 18,206,752 | train | <story><title>Why Did China’s Biggest Movie Star, and the Interpol Chief, Vanish?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-did-chinas-biggest-movie-star-and-the-interpol-chief-vanish</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkurz</author><text><i>After expressing “deep shame and sorrow,” she admitted to years of underreporting her earnings, through the practice of “yin and yang” contracts, in which a smaller contract is disclosed but a larger one is paid to the star. She was ordered to pay a hundred and thirty million dollars in back taxes and penalties. Her actions amounted not only to a personal misstep, she wrote, but to a betrayal of China.</i><p>I find myself agreeing with the confession: if you illegally evade $100 million of taxes by lying about the amount you are paid, you are betraying your country. While the Chinese approach to prosecution seems open to abuse, the outcome here seems actually seems reasonable: the actress pays substantial penalties but goes on being an actress, tax evasion is not condoned, and rule of law is upheld.<p>By contrast, the outcomes of the US system often seem perverse: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;d...</a>. This is an in-depth NYT article showing how the current president seems to have used similar illegal maneuvers to avoid paying many millions of inheritance taxes. The outcome seems to be that if you have enough money, you win, and the ordinary taxpayer loses.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Did China’s Biggest Movie Star, and the Interpol Chief, Vanish?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-did-chinas-biggest-movie-star-and-the-interpol-chief-vanish</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_cs2017_</author><text>I&#x27;m puzzled by comments that describe this as a well written article. There are no new facts here; nor are there even any guesses as to what actually caused these detentions. There is no amazing investigative work, no deep unexpected insights.<p>What exactly does this article say to stand above the news media noise? I guess it does provide some simple analysis of the general situation in China, but even here it doesn&#x27;t deviate from the well known story about how Xi Jinping is moving China back towards heavy handed government control.</text></comment> |
31,549,924 | 31,549,379 | 1 | 3 | 31,548,989 | train | <story><title>Graviton 3: First Impressions</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/29/graviton-3-first-impressions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Dunedan</author><text>&gt; The final result is a chip that lets AWS sell each Graviton 3 core at a lower price, while still delivering a significant performance boost over their previous Graviton 2 chip.<p>That&#x27;s not correct. AWS sells Graviton 3 based EC2 instances at a higher price than Graviton 2 based instances!<p>For example a c6g.large instance (powered by Graviton 2) costs $0.068&#x2F;hour in us-east-1, while a c7g.large instance (powered by Graviton 3) costs $0.0725&#x2F;hour [1]. Both instances have the same core count and memory, although c7g instances have slightly better network throughput.<p>I believe that is pretty unusual as, if my memory serves me right, newer instances family generations are usually cheaper than the previous generation.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;ec2&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;on-demand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;ec2&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;on-demand&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Graviton 3: First Impressions</title><url>https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/29/graviton-3-first-impressions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Hizonner</author><text>It feels like we&#x27;ve gone badly wrong somewhere when processors have to spend so many of their resources guessing about the program. I am not saying I have a solution, just that feeling.</text></comment> |
17,668,774 | 17,668,701 | 1 | 2 | 17,661,391 | train | <story><title>How we spent $30k in Firebase in less than 72 hours</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-less-than-72-hours-307490bd24d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sciurus</author><text>When you have an unexplained performance problem, your response shouldn&#x27;t be to &quot;upgrade every single framework and plugin&quot; that you use. The 36 hours that they spent doing this cost them $21,600 dollars on GCP and didn&#x27;t solve their users&#x27; problem.<p>Understand the services you depend on. Track the number of requests you&#x27;re making to them, how long they&#x27;re taking, and how many are failing. Reason through your system and look at the data when you have issues, rather than grasping at straws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>That jumped out at me too.<p>Obviously they were under a lot of pressure and it&#x27;s easy to stand here and criticise, but...<p>...if my site is slowing down with load or usage, I&#x27;m not sure how you make the jump to &quot;I should update my UI libraries!&quot;. Angular 4 isn&#x27;t getting any slower, so best case is you&#x27;ve got some unknown performance bottleneck in your UI that is somehow causing 30s page load times, and which just <i>happens</i> to be fixed in Angular 6, and you don&#x27;t accidentally add any new issues when you upgrade.<p>Conversely, it feels like if you&#x27;re struggling with &quot;slow load times&quot; on a SPA, the <i>first</i> thing you&#x27;d do is open the network tab and see what requests are being made, to what, how often, and how long they&#x27;re taking.<p>Grasping at straws does seem to be the right metaphor. (Or maybe the old chestnut about the drunk dropping his car keys in a dark parking lot, then looking for them under a streetlight, since it&#x27;s too dark to find them in the parking lot?)<p>I&#x27;m happy for the team and it sounds like things are going great for them, but wow, that was an almost fatal bit of blindness. On the plus side, I bet everyone involved will check for inefficient database calls <i>first</i> next time. :)</text></comment> | <story><title>How we spent $30k in Firebase in less than 72 hours</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-less-than-72-hours-307490bd24d</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sciurus</author><text>When you have an unexplained performance problem, your response shouldn&#x27;t be to &quot;upgrade every single framework and plugin&quot; that you use. The 36 hours that they spent doing this cost them $21,600 dollars on GCP and didn&#x27;t solve their users&#x27; problem.<p>Understand the services you depend on. Track the number of requests you&#x27;re making to them, how long they&#x27;re taking, and how many are failing. Reason through your system and look at the data when you have issues, rather than grasping at straws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sitkack</author><text>&gt; Reason through your system<p>modern stacks have a huge opacity problem, everyone wants to be magic, and everyone fails. abstractions make reasoning harder, what tools and techniques would you suggest for doing this?<p>I&#x27;d probably run the application in some sort of sandbox and measure the outbound request load vs inbound request load, something a containerized deployment <i>should</i> be giving the end user (developer) as an affordance for application maintenance and visibility. Differential analysis and graphing built directly into the execution substrate.<p>Judge away!</text></comment> |
23,475,054 | 23,474,666 | 1 | 2 | 23,463,779 | train | <story><title>Logic.ly – Digital logic simulator for teaching logic gates and digital circuits</title><url>https://logic.ly/demo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scotteh</author><text>In a similar vein, NandGame (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nandgame.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nandgame.com&#x2F;</a>) is an online game where the challenge is to progressively build a microprocessor, starting from simple logic gates.<p>Show HN thread from a couple of years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17508151" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17508151</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Logic.ly – Digital logic simulator for teaching logic gates and digital circuits</title><url>https://logic.ly/demo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>compumike</author><text>(Disclosure: I wrote the simulation engine that powers CircuitLab, a mixed-mode [i.e. analog+digital combined] circuit simulator, so this builds on the digital-only logic simulation concept.)<p>If you find it fun to play with digital logic, you should first look at combinational logic, and then add some registers and get clocked logic with memory &#x2F; registers. Once you&#x27;ve got that down, I&#x27;d recommend two next steps:<p>1. Look at some simple circuits that combine analog and digital. For example, [1] a digital 4-bit counter made up of four half-adders. (It&#x27;s called a half adder because it only adds two bits A+B, producing a value 0, 1, or 2. In contrast, a full adder adds three bits A+B+C, producing a value 0, 1, 2, or 3.) The four output bits of the 4-bit counter are connected to a simple op-amp and resistor based digital-to-analog converter (DAC). This helps you understand that we have lots of ways of representing signals, and in engineering practice we combine these modalities to useful effect.<p>2. Instead of merely using software to model circuits, understand that circuits are a great way to model all sorts of real-world problems. You may have heard of &quot;analog computers&quot; [2] which predate digital ones, and were used for modeling all sorts of engineering problems. You may now use a circuit simulator to model mechanical systems, thermal systems, or even the spread of COVID-19. I&#x27;ve done the latter here [3], using a few capacitors and current sources to implement the differential equations of an epidemic. Because you can define current sources algebraically (i.e. the current can be proportional to other currents and voltages in the circuit), you can easily take advantage of the simulator&#x27;s underlying ability to simulate arbitrary systems of differential equations. I&#x27;ve explained the COVID-19 model here [4] as previously discussed on HN.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;editor&#x2F;53xa3r&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;editor&#x2F;53xa3r&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Analog_computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Analog_computer</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;editor&#x2F;zubfhu8p3q3v&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;editor&#x2F;zubfhu8p3q3v&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;surprising-covid-19-strategy-how-to-reduce-economic-damage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.circuitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;surprising-covid-...</a></text></comment> |
25,705,736 | 25,705,596 | 1 | 2 | 25,703,614 | train | <story><title>Clearview AI being used to identify Capitol rioters</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/09/us/trump-biden#facial-recognition-clearview-capitol</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>Comparing cancel culture to China&#x27;s social credit system is ... not a great choice, in my opinion.<p>Regardless, I&#x27;ve had this theory about cancel culture. I don&#x27;t necessarily agree with cancel culture, for the aforementioned problem of it being mob social justice. But it seems to me like it has arisen out of a failure by the real justice system. Issues like sexism in particular, which affect half of the population, have been ignored and marginalized. It took how long for Bill Cosby&#x27;s heinous crimes to finally be prosecuted? More over, how likely would it have been for his crimes to yet again have been swept under the rug had cancel culture not fostered an environment where the victims felt comfortable coming forward?<p>The very topic we&#x27;re discussing, the terrorist attack on our Capitol, is another example of racist failures of our police force.<p>So is it really any surprise that society has collectively taken matters into their owns hands?<p>Again, I don&#x27;t _agree_ with the idea that society at large should pass their own judgements. I&#x27;d rather the courts do that. But they haven&#x27;t been. And aren&#x27;t. And we just suffered through one of the worst years on record of blatant police abuse and court inaction.<p>If we want to get rid of cancel culture I think we need to fix our policing and justice system to the extent that society feels they don&#x27;t need to take up the mantel of justice themselves.<p>In other words, I don&#x27;t see value in deriding cancel culture. If one feels that cancel culture is wrong, my belief is that one should be calling for action to repair the _cause_ of cancel culture, not the symptoms. And that cause is a prejudiced justice system.</text></item><item><author>mmmBacon</author><text>I think we already have a system in the West where people are afraid to speak openly; it’s referred to as cancel culture but exists elsewhere. The difference is that it’s not a formal government system but more of a mob social justice system.</text></item><item><author>ondrek</author><text>It seems that face recognition could be as dangerous as country laws are. China&#x27;s social credit system is a strong mirror to its government. The Black Mirror scenario with all those people scared to even talk publicly could (if once real) be strongly country specific, if we get to the point, where life drastically depend on ethics of technology laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inglor_cz</author><text>&quot;So is it really any surprise that society has collectively taken matters into their owns hands?&quot;<p>It is not the society. The virtual mobs that hunt people online, even though looking massive (1:N is scary even for N==100), are absolutely tiny when compared to the society as a whole.<p>And as for the reasons, every mob in history, including the ones that did absolutely horrible things (such as pogroms), had some reasoning as to why their activity is virtuous and noble. And putative inefficiency or corruption of the legal system was one of them. Check up on history of lynching - that was done because the legal system was perceived to be &quot;soft&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Clearview AI being used to identify Capitol rioters</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/09/us/trump-biden#facial-recognition-clearview-capitol</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>Comparing cancel culture to China&#x27;s social credit system is ... not a great choice, in my opinion.<p>Regardless, I&#x27;ve had this theory about cancel culture. I don&#x27;t necessarily agree with cancel culture, for the aforementioned problem of it being mob social justice. But it seems to me like it has arisen out of a failure by the real justice system. Issues like sexism in particular, which affect half of the population, have been ignored and marginalized. It took how long for Bill Cosby&#x27;s heinous crimes to finally be prosecuted? More over, how likely would it have been for his crimes to yet again have been swept under the rug had cancel culture not fostered an environment where the victims felt comfortable coming forward?<p>The very topic we&#x27;re discussing, the terrorist attack on our Capitol, is another example of racist failures of our police force.<p>So is it really any surprise that society has collectively taken matters into their owns hands?<p>Again, I don&#x27;t _agree_ with the idea that society at large should pass their own judgements. I&#x27;d rather the courts do that. But they haven&#x27;t been. And aren&#x27;t. And we just suffered through one of the worst years on record of blatant police abuse and court inaction.<p>If we want to get rid of cancel culture I think we need to fix our policing and justice system to the extent that society feels they don&#x27;t need to take up the mantel of justice themselves.<p>In other words, I don&#x27;t see value in deriding cancel culture. If one feels that cancel culture is wrong, my belief is that one should be calling for action to repair the _cause_ of cancel culture, not the symptoms. And that cause is a prejudiced justice system.</text></item><item><author>mmmBacon</author><text>I think we already have a system in the West where people are afraid to speak openly; it’s referred to as cancel culture but exists elsewhere. The difference is that it’s not a formal government system but more of a mob social justice system.</text></item><item><author>ondrek</author><text>It seems that face recognition could be as dangerous as country laws are. China&#x27;s social credit system is a strong mirror to its government. The Black Mirror scenario with all those people scared to even talk publicly could (if once real) be strongly country specific, if we get to the point, where life drastically depend on ethics of technology laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nuzzerino</author><text>&gt; Regardless, I&#x27;ve had this theory about cancel culture. I don&#x27;t necessarily agree with cancel culture, for the aforementioned problem of it being mob social justice. But it seems to me like it has arisen out of a failure by the real justice system.<p>&gt; In other words, I don&#x27;t see value in deriding cancel culture.<p>This is apologism, and starting such an argument with &quot;I don&#x27;t agree with this but...&quot; is just a way to trick a few more people into taking your ideas seriously enough to read to the end of the paragraph.<p>And terrorists, really? You could use your same EXACT logic, in fact even more justifiably, as a defense for what happened at the U.S. Capital.</text></comment> |
35,343,314 | 35,343,318 | 1 | 3 | 35,341,680 | train | <story><title>Starbucks illegally withheld raises and tips from union workers, NLRB says</title><url>https://perfectunion.us/starbucks-nlrb-credit-card-tip-complaint/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hiddencost</author><text>First, for the record, any claims that unions make this process harder is a lie designed by a union busting consulting firm.<p>Second:<p>(1) any change to the contract has to be approved by the union. That includes raises and the like, yes.
(2) that can literally be an email from Starbucks to the union&#x27;s lawyer saying &quot;we&#x27;re making these changes&quot; and an email back from the union lawyer saying &quot;cool, sounds good&quot;.
(3) union lawyers work for the union members. They almost never have a reason to reject a purely positive change, and turn-around for simple positive changes can be 24 hours easily
(4) if the union wants more, they&#x27;ll still accept the positive change and then separately negotiate an even larger change.<p>If there&#x27;s an active strike negotiation going on, the company may not want to give an intermediate positive change because it weakens their bargaining power.<p>If the change is a mix of positive and negative, things may go differently.</text></item><item><author>sokoloff</author><text>I&#x27;m clearly no expert in labor law, but isn&#x27;t the entire point of unionization that the company has to negotiate significant changes in contract and benefits terms with the union? As a lay person, that seems like the first principles of what unionization means. The company can act directly with the workers in non-union locations and must work with the union in union locations; that seems to be what Starbucks is doing. (Now, are they being strategic and jerks about it? Yeah, probably, but they couldn&#x27;t unilaterally impose these changes, even if seemingly beneficial to workers, without negotiations with the union.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HardlyCurious</author><text>That union lawyer isn&#x27;t going to unilaterally say ok. It has to get socialized and a consensus opinion needs to be found. That takes time. And like you pointed out, the union might not want to accept a modest increase because it can weaken their bargaining position. So, despite your claim the union doesn&#x27;t make this more difficult, it absolutely objectively does make it more difficult than he company being able to make a decision without these restrictions. That doesn&#x27;t mean unions are bad or that this process isn&#x27;t worth it, but don&#x27;t poison the well with unneeded dishonesty.</text></comment> | <story><title>Starbucks illegally withheld raises and tips from union workers, NLRB says</title><url>https://perfectunion.us/starbucks-nlrb-credit-card-tip-complaint/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hiddencost</author><text>First, for the record, any claims that unions make this process harder is a lie designed by a union busting consulting firm.<p>Second:<p>(1) any change to the contract has to be approved by the union. That includes raises and the like, yes.
(2) that can literally be an email from Starbucks to the union&#x27;s lawyer saying &quot;we&#x27;re making these changes&quot; and an email back from the union lawyer saying &quot;cool, sounds good&quot;.
(3) union lawyers work for the union members. They almost never have a reason to reject a purely positive change, and turn-around for simple positive changes can be 24 hours easily
(4) if the union wants more, they&#x27;ll still accept the positive change and then separately negotiate an even larger change.<p>If there&#x27;s an active strike negotiation going on, the company may not want to give an intermediate positive change because it weakens their bargaining power.<p>If the change is a mix of positive and negative, things may go differently.</text></item><item><author>sokoloff</author><text>I&#x27;m clearly no expert in labor law, but isn&#x27;t the entire point of unionization that the company has to negotiate significant changes in contract and benefits terms with the union? As a lay person, that seems like the first principles of what unionization means. The company can act directly with the workers in non-union locations and must work with the union in union locations; that seems to be what Starbucks is doing. (Now, are they being strategic and jerks about it? Yeah, probably, but they couldn&#x27;t unilaterally impose these changes, even if seemingly beneficial to workers, without negotiations with the union.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>n8cpdx</author><text>The Union sets the employees and the business up as adversaries and guarantees that there will be a contract negotiation. If you know that you will be in a knock-down drag-out fight every time the contact is renegotiated, why would you ever give a single solitary inch that you’re not forced to? The business is always n days away from another strike negotiation because that is the entire reason the union exists (to threaten strikes).<p>I don’t understand why people expect labor to be able to play hardball while also trying to benefit from a cooperative relationship with the adversarial partner.</text></comment> |
15,623,726 | 15,619,942 | 1 | 2 | 15,619,634 | train | <story><title>Pyro: PyTorch-Based Deep Universal Probabilistic Programming</title><url>http://pyro.ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ineedasername</author><text>&quot;Deep&quot; probabilistic? A quick search &amp; it seems the term &quot;Deep Probabilistic&quot; was coined by the package author. Which, hey, nice work and all, but &quot;deep&quot; in this context looks like pure marketing fluff.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s not, I&#x27;m no longer cutting edge on this stuff-- my grad school days were a decade ago and the day job ::sigh:: doesn&#x27;t require the more interesting stuff.<p>But I&#x27;m gonna get a bit &quot;get off my lawn&quot; on this one and say that, in my day (woohoo!), neural nets could be deep; they had hidden depths (&amp; layers). Belief networks could be deep, and they were adding depth to learning too; Much of the &quot;deep&quot; stuff today seems to use that word the same way Tide &amp; OxyClean have &quot;deep&quot; cleaning technology in their laundry detergent.<p>All of which is to say, this is a question from someone in the early stages of cruftiness, meant in good humor, to ask &quot;What makes them there probablistics &#x27;deep&#x27; ?&quot; :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Pyro: PyTorch-Based Deep Universal Probabilistic Programming</title><url>http://pyro.ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>juxtaposicion</author><text>How does this compare to Edward, PyMC, Stan, et al? Is the primary distinction due to PyTorch’s imperative, dynamic programming?</text></comment> |
11,507,342 | 11,507,304 | 1 | 3 | 11,506,431 | train | <story><title>8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]</title><url>http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>corysama</author><text>Actually leveraging the power of palletized graphics has been a lost art for well over a decade. Mark Ferrari is the only person I know of that I can call a master of that art.<p>When I was working on PlayStation 2 games, it was frustrating that all of the artists I worked with were creating textures that would ultimately end up palletized, but none of them had any concept of the techniques presented here even then. These days GPUs are getting powerful enough that I occasionally see kids reinventing these techniques using tricky shaders from first principles without knowing that they used to be the only way to get things done.<p>In the HN circles you have a chance to be familiar with Ferrari&#x27;s work through [1][2]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.effectgames.com&#x2F;effect&#x2F;article.psp.html&#x2F;joe&#x2F;Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.effectgames.com&#x2F;effect&#x2F;article.psp.html&#x2F;joe&#x2F;Old_S...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3890267" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3890267</a><p>But, in gaming circles, you might be more familiar with his work in Loom, Secret of Monkey Isle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.</text></comment> | <story><title>8-Bit and '8 Bitish' Graphics [video]</title><url>http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023586/8-Bit-8-Bitish-Graphics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mattl</author><text>It seems with graphics and especially with games, there are two uses of &quot;8-bit graphics&quot;<p>- One, like this, refers to 256 color (or less) graphics<p>- The other, refers to graphics made using the constraints of real world common 8-bit computers (in the US, the Apple ][ or C64, in Europe, the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, etc) or 8-bit consoles, such as the NES and Sega Master System.<p>There are a lot of games which try to emulate these styles, and there are very few true accurate 8-bit (or 16-bit in the case of SNES, Genesis&#x2F;Mega Drive, Amiga, ST) games. I always appreciated the constraints of having small amounts of memory and so few colors to play with when I was messing around with my Amstrad CPC as a kid.</text></comment> |
27,949,675 | 27,948,258 | 1 | 3 | 27,947,004 | train | <story><title>PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects</title><url>https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>that_guy_iain</author><text>&gt; That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives.<p>I love Linux. I&#x27;m a Linux desktop user but I can 100% say my experience is degraded compared to mac and windows users. Not just in apps that are there but in small things like sometimes it changes which mic is being used without telling me.<p>Driver support is also a thing.<p>I have my GUI crash on me on a semi regular basis.<p>And that is on Ubuntu which is a commerical product. And probably the best funded desktop linux there is.<p>Simply put, it is not stable.</text></item><item><author>matkoniecz</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones.<p>That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives.<p>&gt; How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford?<p>In many cases they win by default. If &quot;no leaking of personal data&quot; is on mandatory feature list then Pinephones are already better than Android!<p>And there are many projects where there is simply no commercial product at all and is unlikely to ever appear.</text></item><item><author>that_guy_iain</author><text>&gt; Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it&#x27;ll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.<p>I&#x27;m coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? The reality is, we can&#x27;t. And we&#x27;ll always compare PinePhone and other things to iOS and Android and they&#x27;ll always come up short.<p>Also, a large part of using a smart phone is the apps. Without apps the phone is just really a phone.<p>For me, to want to use PinePhone they would need to make it super easy to have Android on there.</text></item><item><author>katmannthree</author><text>The pinephone is great, in fact I&#x27;m typing this comment from mine.<p>That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it&#x27;s slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive &#x2F; answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work).<p>Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it&#x27;ll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warble</author><text>As a user of Linux on my daily driver I recently received a machine with windows 10 for a work project. I&#x27;ve been using it about 50% of the time for the past 2 months and I&#x27;m missing Linux big time. It&#x27;s slower on better hardware, it does seemingly unpredictable things, software crashes more often and the driver situation is still a problem contrary to what everyone has told me. There&#x27;s countless design choices that make my workflows harder as well.<p>I also have a Mac mini, and my wife has a MacBook pro. They are better but stability has never been an issue with my Linux desktop experience. I&#x27;ve been using it since 2005 or so. It used to offer far less software and a worse user experience but was always very stable.<p>Arch BTW.</text></comment> | <story><title>PinePhone – Open Source Smart Phone Supported by Major Linux Phone Projects</title><url>https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>that_guy_iain</author><text>&gt; That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives.<p>I love Linux. I&#x27;m a Linux desktop user but I can 100% say my experience is degraded compared to mac and windows users. Not just in apps that are there but in small things like sometimes it changes which mic is being used without telling me.<p>Driver support is also a thing.<p>I have my GUI crash on me on a semi regular basis.<p>And that is on Ubuntu which is a commerical product. And probably the best funded desktop linux there is.<p>Simply put, it is not stable.</text></item><item><author>matkoniecz</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones.<p>That is not true. As far as I am concerned Linux is clearly superior OS for my laptop over commercial alternatives.<p>&gt; How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford?<p>In many cases they win by default. If &quot;no leaking of personal data&quot; is on mandatory feature list then Pinephones are already better than Android!<p>And there are many projects where there is simply no commercial product at all and is unlikely to ever appear.</text></item><item><author>that_guy_iain</author><text>&gt; Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it&#x27;ll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.<p>I&#x27;m coming to the realisation that open source projects will always provide a lower quality than comerical ones. How can we honestly expect a small team of developers to compete with the larger teams a commerical project can afford? The reality is, we can&#x27;t. And we&#x27;ll always compare PinePhone and other things to iOS and Android and they&#x27;ll always come up short.<p>Also, a large part of using a smart phone is the apps. Without apps the phone is just really a phone.<p>For me, to want to use PinePhone they would need to make it super easy to have Android on there.</text></item><item><author>katmannthree</author><text>The pinephone is great, in fact I&#x27;m typing this comment from mine.<p>That said, fair warning to anyone thinking about getting one: it&#x27;s slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive &#x2F; answer calls and texts for anything important (e.g. work).<p>Once they get the software worked out over the next few years though, it&#x27;ll be the best thing out there. No ads, no bullshit, just a phone with a mainline linux distribution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>okamiueru</author><text>I get that argument, but depending on what is being discussed, it might miss the point. If it is &quot;end user experience&quot;, then I agree that lack of driver support or software matters. However, if we are comparing operating systems, what they do, and how they do it, I find Linux to be so far ahead of both Windows and MacOS (and I&#x27;ve used all three) that it shouldn&#x27;t even be much of a question. The limiting factor is, in my experience, only software and driver availability.<p>&quot;Well, that&#x27;s kinda a big and important thing to ignore&quot; I hear you say. And, I agree. But, it&#x27;s also not an inadequacy of Linux itself.<p>I&#x27;ve had this discussion quite a few times, so to distill it down, &quot;OS A is better than OS B&quot; tend to touch on the following:<p>- Software availability is better (not a limitation of the OS, but I hear you)<p>- Privacy is better (while, for example MacOS, not being aware that every single executed executable is being logged and transmitted unencrypted)<p>- User experience is better (while not having given latest gnome a try, which aside from subjective preference is really well done, and in my subjective experience, much more intuitive than apple&#x27;s approach, as well as windows&#x27; &quot;here&#x27;s two ways to do the same thing&quot;)<p>- ̶A̶r̶t̶i̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶w̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶m̶i̶t̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶ hardware is better. For Apple hardware, this was sort of true up until around 2010. Since then, you get so much less value I&#x27;m amazed they can still pull it off.<p>I see MacOS and Windows going more and more in the direction of a &quot;mobile OS&quot; which less freedom and more telemetry. I see the growing collection of open source hardware as humanity&#x27;s effort to build something for everyone. Imagine how sad the world would be if Linux or OSS didn&#x27;t exist.</text></comment> |
22,446,269 | 22,446,239 | 1 | 2 | 22,445,510 | train | <story><title>Google employee diagnosed with coronavirus</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/google-employee-diagnosed-with-coronavirus.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notlukesky</author><text>Not condoning Google but the mortality rate increases with every age bracket and is much lower under 50 years of age. I would assume that the Google office is quite young.</text></item><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>They aren&#x27;t even telling employees which group or floor the employee was in, so employees cannot even gauge their risk level.<p>Imagine going home to your family without knowing if you&#x27;ve been exposed to a disease that has a ~2% mortality rate.<p>...and then the company asks everyone to come back into work the next day.<p>Google&#x27;s response here is shocking.</text></item><item><author>Johnny555</author><text><i>We have taken — and will continue to take — all necessary precautionary measures... as we prioritize everyone’s health and safety</i><p>...<p><i>Google’s Zurich office will remain open</i><p>So they&#x27;ve taken all necessary precautions except the one that would actually prioritize health and safety by asking all employees in that office (or at least those on the same floor&#x2F;seating area as the infected employee) to work from home and self-isolate.<p>I thought the germ theory of disease was already well accepted and we had a pretty good idea of how pandemics spread.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>odorousrex</author><text>It&#x27;s a good thing none of those young google employees have parents, siblings, or friends over the age of 50!<p>&#x2F;s (in case it isn&#x27;t obvious)</text></comment> | <story><title>Google employee diagnosed with coronavirus</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/google-employee-diagnosed-with-coronavirus.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notlukesky</author><text>Not condoning Google but the mortality rate increases with every age bracket and is much lower under 50 years of age. I would assume that the Google office is quite young.</text></item><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>They aren&#x27;t even telling employees which group or floor the employee was in, so employees cannot even gauge their risk level.<p>Imagine going home to your family without knowing if you&#x27;ve been exposed to a disease that has a ~2% mortality rate.<p>...and then the company asks everyone to come back into work the next day.<p>Google&#x27;s response here is shocking.</text></item><item><author>Johnny555</author><text><i>We have taken — and will continue to take — all necessary precautionary measures... as we prioritize everyone’s health and safety</i><p>...<p><i>Google’s Zurich office will remain open</i><p>So they&#x27;ve taken all necessary precautions except the one that would actually prioritize health and safety by asking all employees in that office (or at least those on the same floor&#x2F;seating area as the infected employee) to work from home and self-isolate.<p>I thought the germ theory of disease was already well accepted and we had a pretty good idea of how pandemics spread.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>capableweb</author><text>Sure, but as its morality rate is bad in some age brackets, we should protect those people in the age brackets, meaning self-isolating is a good idea to avoid spreading it further.</text></comment> |
11,225,889 | 11,225,726 | 1 | 3 | 11,223,316 | train | <story><title>We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else</title><url>http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>&quot;You can teach everyone to be a great programmer&quot;<p>Flat out dead wrong. If you hire &quot;anyone&quot; and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them.<p>This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: &quot;Our programmers are people hitting keys. We&#x27;ll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.&quot;, cause, you know, anyone can do it.<p>Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do that.<p>If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those ingredients are far from &quot;anyone&quot;.</text></item><item><author>struppi</author><text>Also: Give the &quot;not-the-best&quot; people a chance to develop.<p>The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: &quot;You can teach everyone to be a great programmer&quot;. And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for <i>several months</i>. Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help them and guid them.<p>He had to fire some of those people later, mostly because they were not a good fit for the company. But some of them became great programmers and software consultants.<p>&quot;Hire only the best&quot; is really only half of the battle. Give people an environment where learning is encouraged and failure is expected. And help them wherever you can. Most will learn and enjoy it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fsloth</author><text>&quot;Everyone&quot; here I think means the same as &quot;anyone can be a great cook&quot; in Ratatuille - it does not mean that anyone <i>can</i> learn to cook - but that a good programmer can arise from any background.<p>My experience would support this. You need a mindset keen towards rigor, and motivation. Given those, and guidance, anyone can learn to program - at least in limited contexts.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else</title><url>http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>&quot;You can teach everyone to be a great programmer&quot;<p>Flat out dead wrong. If you hire &quot;anyone&quot; and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them.<p>This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: &quot;Our programmers are people hitting keys. We&#x27;ll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.&quot;, cause, you know, anyone can do it.<p>Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do that.<p>If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those ingredients are far from &quot;anyone&quot;.</text></item><item><author>struppi</author><text>Also: Give the &quot;not-the-best&quot; people a chance to develop.<p>The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: &quot;You can teach everyone to be a great programmer&quot;. And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for <i>several months</i>. Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help them and guid them.<p>He had to fire some of those people later, mostly because they were not a good fit for the company. But some of them became great programmers and software consultants.<p>&quot;Hire only the best&quot; is really only half of the battle. Give people an environment where learning is encouraged and failure is expected. And help them wherever you can. Most will learn and enjoy it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bad_user</author><text>You know what the irony is? Us programmers thinking that &quot;everyone can be a great programmer&quot; is our preponderant liberal and very idealistic views showing.<p>And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant.<p>I look at physicians, surgeons, accountants, lawyers and others with envy, because in those professions, the older you get, the more esteemed and valuable you are. We peak at 30.</text></comment> |
37,873,400 | 37,872,157 | 1 | 2 | 37,868,388 | train | <story><title>Populating the page: how browsers work (2020)</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/How_browsers_work</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielvaughn</author><text>My understanding is that single-thread concurrency is essentially what Javascript does. It basically flickers between tasks very rapidly to simulate concurrency. Does that match your understanding or am I incorrect?</text></item><item><author>Lukeisun</author><text>Concurrency can be done on a singular thread</text></item><item><author>bloopernova</author><text>That was really informative, but it raised a question for me:<p>It described the browser as single threaded, but then talked about multiple concurrent tasks. Aren&#x27;t those threads?<p>One more question: are there any browsers that use multiple threads to lay out the various object models and render the page? If it&#x27;s been found to be too difficult, what were the issues?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>euiq</author><text>I don&#x27;t think that &quot;flickers between tasks very rapidly to simulate concurrency&quot; is a good mental model for event loops. It&#x27;s more like &quot;runs one task at a time until it hits a suspension point,&quot; where a suspension point is something like an I&#x2F;O operation. If you had an event loop that switched tasks between suspension points, then you&#x27;d still need locks for shared data.</text></comment> | <story><title>Populating the page: how browsers work (2020)</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/How_browsers_work</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danielvaughn</author><text>My understanding is that single-thread concurrency is essentially what Javascript does. It basically flickers between tasks very rapidly to simulate concurrency. Does that match your understanding or am I incorrect?</text></item><item><author>Lukeisun</author><text>Concurrency can be done on a singular thread</text></item><item><author>bloopernova</author><text>That was really informative, but it raised a question for me:<p>It described the browser as single threaded, but then talked about multiple concurrent tasks. Aren&#x27;t those threads?<p>One more question: are there any browsers that use multiple threads to lay out the various object models and render the page? If it&#x27;s been found to be too difficult, what were the issues?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eyelidlessness</author><text>It doesn’t simulate, and the “flicker” is named “event loop”, but otherwise you’ve got it right. The concurrency model is essentially cooperative, ie pending tasks wait for the current task on the event loop to unblock, and then they are each executed in turn (with several different scheduling priorities based on how they became pending, eg synchronous event callbacks, Promises, various timers).</text></comment> |
25,533,203 | 25,531,606 | 1 | 2 | 25,530,307 | train | <story><title>Fictional Videogame Stills</title><url>https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>OmarShehata</author><text>This reminds me of a few game jams that were basically about one phase where artists create screenshots of games that don&#x27;t exist, and then developers pick one of those screenshots and make it a reality.<p>It was as amazing as it sounds, and you had a lot of leeway as a developer to interpret so much about the game from the one screenshot. So multiple people could choose the same one and make completely different games.<p>One from Newgrounds in 2013 [1]. A more recent one on itch [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newgrounds.com&#x2F;bbs&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1342155#bbspost24671968_post_text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newgrounds.com&#x2F;bbs&#x2F;topic&#x2F;1342155#bbspost24671968...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itch.io&#x2F;jam&#x2F;cartridge-jam-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itch.io&#x2F;jam&#x2F;cartridge-jam-3</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Fictional Videogame Stills</title><url>https://www.suzannetreister.net/Ampages/Amenu.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stared</author><text>Suzanne Treister&#x27;s works are wonderful, I recommend her Hexen 2.0 project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.suzannetreister.net&#x2F;HEXEN2&#x2F;HEXEN_2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.suzannetreister.net&#x2F;HEXEN2&#x2F;HEXEN_2.html</a>), which I call &quot;mysticism of the 20th century&quot;. Counterculture, infomation revolution, CIA, LSD, quantum - presented as Tarot cards and Sefirot.</text></comment> |
33,228,050 | 33,227,609 | 1 | 2 | 33,226,352 | train | <story><title>Wikiversity</title><url>https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>c7b</author><text>It sounds like a cool idea if I get it right (organize links to wikipedia articles in a way that could correspond to a curriculum), but the quality of the curation at least for mathematics looks abysmal. Here are some of the top-level categories:<p>* Charles Sanders Peirce (the only (!) mathematician with a top-level category to himself, who&#x27;s arguably more of a philosopher actually) - 46 pages.<p>* Set theory - 3 pages<p>* Theory of summation of natural numbers - empty<p>This fails to be useful for students at so many levels. The entries are at completely inconsistent levels of granularity or concepts, it fails to make any meaningful selection or ranking by importance (another example, it has a top-level category for Chaos Theory but none for Dynamical Systems). And, most importantly, it doesn&#x27;t correspond to how university curriculums are structured and doesn&#x27;t work as a useful guide for self-study.<p>But yeah, it&#x27;s a wiki, so I guess I shouldn&#x27;t complain but instead just contribute to improving it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wikiversity</title><url>https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thealistra</author><text>How is one suppose to use this? I tried finding something on comp-sci - no mention on main page or courses list. I went into medicine and there are no courses and list of random resources where one is about mammals.<p>Doesn’t seem like a structured set of data that you could actually learn from as you would do on a university</text></comment> |
22,948,186 | 22,946,516 | 1 | 2 | 22,946,092 | train | <story><title>Small business rescue earned banks $10B in fees</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840678984/small-business-rescue-earned-banks-10-billion-in-fees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Gotta ask whether the banking system makes sense in its current form.<p>- Part of it is actually a utility. Payments, sending money from one place to another, making sure there&#x27;s an account at the other end of that number. Everyone needs this, yet being a huge international network there isn&#x27;t a whole lot that one bank offers that another cannot.<p>- Part of it is deciding who to lend money to. Makes sense for the bank to decide this with its own money.<p>- Part of it is regulatory. We don&#x27;t want money laundering. Have to ask whether this really ought to be up to law enforcement to do, or as it is now a massive burden on the banks, which also have bad incentives.<p>What if we had the central bank give everyone an account that was interoperable with the rest of the banking system? Then if you want to hand out money, you just do it. If you want to borrow money, find a lender.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JSavageOne</author><text>You outline the problem very well. The banking sector has an ENORMOUS amount of power over the economy&#x2F;society in a way that no other industry does because it literally has the ability to create money out of thin air (by loaning it into existence). The banking industry is the arbiter and credit in our society and decides where money get allocated.<p>This would be fine if it were their own money, but it&#x27;s not - it&#x27;s our bank accounts (ie. fractional reserve banking). Unfortunately individuals can&#x27;t opt out of this because unlike private banks, individuals aren&#x27;t allowed to open a bank account directly with the government (though these replies show that this is possible in countries like France).<p>The finance industry does not generate real wealth, it is a wealth extracting industry that profits off the spread between the interest rate decided by the central bank and the interest rates and fees it charges consumers. Banks do not create goods or services, they just decide who gets the money to do so, with money that&#x27;s not theirs. 80% of bank credit goes to mortgage loans (driving up housing prices and saddling homeowners in debt). Banks have gone from 2% of the U.S. economy in the 1950s to 8% by 2008, and 1.5% of the British economy in 1978 to 15% by 2008.<p>The first step to fixing this is to give citizens the ability to opt out of private banks and bank directly with the central bank. Private banks should not be the only ones with this privilege.</text></comment> | <story><title>Small business rescue earned banks $10B in fees</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840678984/small-business-rescue-earned-banks-10-billion-in-fees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Gotta ask whether the banking system makes sense in its current form.<p>- Part of it is actually a utility. Payments, sending money from one place to another, making sure there&#x27;s an account at the other end of that number. Everyone needs this, yet being a huge international network there isn&#x27;t a whole lot that one bank offers that another cannot.<p>- Part of it is deciding who to lend money to. Makes sense for the bank to decide this with its own money.<p>- Part of it is regulatory. We don&#x27;t want money laundering. Have to ask whether this really ought to be up to law enforcement to do, or as it is now a massive burden on the banks, which also have bad incentives.<p>What if we had the central bank give everyone an account that was interoperable with the rest of the banking system? Then if you want to hand out money, you just do it. If you want to borrow money, find a lender.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theplague42</author><text>There have been suggestions over the years for the post office to offer banking services. They have branches literally everywhere, they&#x27;re independent yet still a government agency, and have no profit motive.</text></comment> |
3,969,194 | 3,968,650 | 1 | 3 | 3,968,562 | train | <story><title>What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money</title><url>http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-developers-did-with-your-kickstarter-money</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>Software development on a budget of $30k getting described as lavish. Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, but cute. "You're doing your shoestring budget wrong! You should listen to me! I've never shipped anything longer than a blog comment but my years of experience as a pir^H^H^H consumer mean I really know this job well!"<p>P.S. A business where the successful outcome is the principals end up in personal debt is neither a business nor successful.</text></comment> | <story><title>What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money</title><url>http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-developers-did-with-your-kickstarter-money</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>benologist</author><text>Direct link instead of Gawker's shallow little summary wrapped around a giant quote from the direct link:<p><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command-sci-fi-meets-gamedev-story-for-ios-an/posts/208395" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command...</a></text></comment> |
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