chosen
int64 353
41.8M
| rejected
int64 287
41.8M
| chosen_rank
int64 1
2
| rejected_rank
int64 2
3
| top_level_parent
int64 189
41.8M
| split
large_stringclasses 1
value | chosen_prompt
large_stringlengths 236
19.5k
| rejected_prompt
large_stringlengths 209
18k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
28,249,783 | 28,249,401 | 1 | 3 | 28,248,354 | train | <story><title>Home Prices Are Now Higher Than the Peak of the 2000s Housing Bubble</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/08/17/1028083046/home-prices-are-now-higher-than-the-peak-of-the-2000s-housing-bubble-what-gives</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meterplech</author><text>100% true.<p>And a good reminder of how much exposure housing prices have to interest rates. To frame the same math another way:<p>If you bought a house for, say, $580k with a $500k mortgage... You paid $80k down payment + $20k closing costs and your monthly would be ~$2,073&#x2F;month.<p>If interest rates go up to 6%, and the person buying your house also wants to pay the same ~2,073&#x2F;month, they would only be able to afford a $344,649 mortgage. Assume the same $80k down payment and $20k closing costs... and they should be willing to pay $444,649 for your house ($135,351 less than you paid!).<p>Obviously with inflation the person may be willing to spend more than you spent! But there&#x27;s a lot of risk for homeowners who need&#x2F;want to sell if&#x2F;when interest rates go up. That&#x27;s why the 30 year fixed is such a fantastic bet if you are willing + able to hold and lock that fixed price... but housing is a pretty lousy investment if you need to sell.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>They cite the numbers in &quot;real terms&quot;, which would mean inflation adjusted:<p>&gt; The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it&#x27;s ever been<p>Of course, you really need to be looking at mortgage rates to understand housing affordability: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freddiemac.com&#x2F;pmms&#x2F;pmms30.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freddiemac.com&#x2F;pmms&#x2F;pmms30.html</a><p>July 2021 average 30-year mortgage rate: 2.87% (with 0.7 points)<p>2008 12-month average 30-year mortgage rate: 6.03% (with 0.6 points)<p>To put that in perspective, a $500,000 mortgage (excluding down payment) would require a $2,073 monthly payment today, but a $3,007 monthly payment at 2008&#x27;s 6% mortgage rates.<p>In other words: Houses are still way cheaper, in actual out-of-pocket terms for average people, than they were in 2008. Today&#x27;s interest rates are way too low.<p>EDIT: Updated with 2008 numbers, thanks to comment below</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rrrrrrrrrrrryan</author><text>This logic doesn&#x27;t hold in all housing markets.<p>In California, people generally buy the absolute most house they can possibly afford. Houses are extremely expensive and people don&#x27;t want to live in shacks, so they stretch their budget as far as they can. Home prices in these markets are extremely sensitive to changes in interest rates, as you&#x27;ve described.<p>However in other markets, interest rates can wiggle up and down without having as dramatic an effect on prices, because livable homes aren&#x27;t as expensive and people have more slack in their budgets.<p>In markets with lots of cash buyers, home prices may also be somewhat isolated from interest rate swings.</text></comment> | <story><title>Home Prices Are Now Higher Than the Peak of the 2000s Housing Bubble</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/08/17/1028083046/home-prices-are-now-higher-than-the-peak-of-the-2000s-housing-bubble-what-gives</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meterplech</author><text>100% true.<p>And a good reminder of how much exposure housing prices have to interest rates. To frame the same math another way:<p>If you bought a house for, say, $580k with a $500k mortgage... You paid $80k down payment + $20k closing costs and your monthly would be ~$2,073&#x2F;month.<p>If interest rates go up to 6%, and the person buying your house also wants to pay the same ~2,073&#x2F;month, they would only be able to afford a $344,649 mortgage. Assume the same $80k down payment and $20k closing costs... and they should be willing to pay $444,649 for your house ($135,351 less than you paid!).<p>Obviously with inflation the person may be willing to spend more than you spent! But there&#x27;s a lot of risk for homeowners who need&#x2F;want to sell if&#x2F;when interest rates go up. That&#x27;s why the 30 year fixed is such a fantastic bet if you are willing + able to hold and lock that fixed price... but housing is a pretty lousy investment if you need to sell.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>They cite the numbers in &quot;real terms&quot;, which would mean inflation adjusted:<p>&gt; The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it&#x27;s ever been<p>Of course, you really need to be looking at mortgage rates to understand housing affordability: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freddiemac.com&#x2F;pmms&#x2F;pmms30.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freddiemac.com&#x2F;pmms&#x2F;pmms30.html</a><p>July 2021 average 30-year mortgage rate: 2.87% (with 0.7 points)<p>2008 12-month average 30-year mortgage rate: 6.03% (with 0.6 points)<p>To put that in perspective, a $500,000 mortgage (excluding down payment) would require a $2,073 monthly payment today, but a $3,007 monthly payment at 2008&#x27;s 6% mortgage rates.<p>In other words: Houses are still way cheaper, in actual out-of-pocket terms for average people, than they were in 2008. Today&#x27;s interest rates are way too low.<p>EDIT: Updated with 2008 numbers, thanks to comment below</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kodah</author><text>It&#x27;s going to be quite interesting how the bay area fairs if more companies leave over time. I&#x27;ve refused to buy a house thus far and have been looking into more economical (and practical ways) to live on the move given that I&#x27;ve had to move so much in this industry.</text></comment> |
11,253,592 | 11,253,566 | 1 | 2 | 11,252,999 | train | <story><title>Amazon’s Echo Brims with Groundbreaking Promise</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/technology/the-echo-from-amazon-brims-with-groundbreaking-promise.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>I haven&#x27;t used an iPhone in a while, does Siri have a wake word? Does it work when the phone is in standby? Android has &quot;Ok Google&quot; but it doesn&#x27;t work when in standby and doesn&#x27;t work from the distance that Echo does.<p>I think that&#x27;s really its killer feature. You are in the pantry and notice you&#x27;re out of basil, you say &quot;Alexa, add basil to my shopping list&quot; and it&#x27;s done. No pulling out your phone, no unlock screens, you just say what you want to happen and it works.</text></item><item><author>peteretep</author><text><p><pre><code> &gt; Shopping lists, weather, home automation
</code></pre>
Funny, I felt the article gave unusually short shrift to Siri, which I use for all of those things, in addition to &quot;What time is it in X?&quot;, alarms, and so on.<p>Siri is not working so well when music plays, and I wish I could easily add skills to it, so if they&#x27;ve cracked that then it&#x27;s something.</text></item><item><author>sisk</author><text>Writing a bit about the Echo has been on my todo list but this article touches on a lot of points I was thinking about. I got it thinking it would be a bit of a gimmick—and to an extent, it still is at times. But, as the author found, it has snuck into facets of my life. Shopping lists, weather, home automation, etc.<p>The thing is, it&#x27;s a natural interface with a decent interaction model. Keyboards, mice, etc, have all become second nature to most of us but they&#x27;re still not truly natural. The Echo feels like one of the first voice-based interfaces that isn&#x27;t a complete gimmick. And the hardware does an amazing job of perking up when I say the wake word and picking me out of a room full of noise.<p>What really convinced me of it&#x27;s value was when I started digging in to writing a skill for it. My grandfather passed recently and my grandmother has horrible eyesight. I wrote a skill that enables my grandmother to ask to start a phone call. She is then asked who she would like to call. Once she says a name, she receives a call on her landline, is greeted, and the call is forwarded to the intended recipient. There was a small learning curve (&quot;you can&#x27;t just say, &#x27;call John,&#x27; you have to ask her to &#x27;start a phone call&#x27;&quot;) but it has worked and has provided an often confused elderly woman with poor eyesight a straightforward way of connecting with her loved ones.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yoda_sl</author><text>As of the latest iPhone 6, you don&#x27;t even need to have the iPhone plugged. You trained Siri a few times by saying a few sentences and later you can say &quot;hey Siri&quot; and it will start listening.
Apple added some new chip which will be listening for that key sentence and will only react to your voice, not someone else.
So no more funny joke from co-worker nor Podcast and in addition low battery impact.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon’s Echo Brims with Groundbreaking Promise</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/technology/the-echo-from-amazon-brims-with-groundbreaking-promise.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>I haven&#x27;t used an iPhone in a while, does Siri have a wake word? Does it work when the phone is in standby? Android has &quot;Ok Google&quot; but it doesn&#x27;t work when in standby and doesn&#x27;t work from the distance that Echo does.<p>I think that&#x27;s really its killer feature. You are in the pantry and notice you&#x27;re out of basil, you say &quot;Alexa, add basil to my shopping list&quot; and it&#x27;s done. No pulling out your phone, no unlock screens, you just say what you want to happen and it works.</text></item><item><author>peteretep</author><text><p><pre><code> &gt; Shopping lists, weather, home automation
</code></pre>
Funny, I felt the article gave unusually short shrift to Siri, which I use for all of those things, in addition to &quot;What time is it in X?&quot;, alarms, and so on.<p>Siri is not working so well when music plays, and I wish I could easily add skills to it, so if they&#x27;ve cracked that then it&#x27;s something.</text></item><item><author>sisk</author><text>Writing a bit about the Echo has been on my todo list but this article touches on a lot of points I was thinking about. I got it thinking it would be a bit of a gimmick—and to an extent, it still is at times. But, as the author found, it has snuck into facets of my life. Shopping lists, weather, home automation, etc.<p>The thing is, it&#x27;s a natural interface with a decent interaction model. Keyboards, mice, etc, have all become second nature to most of us but they&#x27;re still not truly natural. The Echo feels like one of the first voice-based interfaces that isn&#x27;t a complete gimmick. And the hardware does an amazing job of perking up when I say the wake word and picking me out of a room full of noise.<p>What really convinced me of it&#x27;s value was when I started digging in to writing a skill for it. My grandfather passed recently and my grandmother has horrible eyesight. I wrote a skill that enables my grandmother to ask to start a phone call. She is then asked who she would like to call. Once she says a name, she receives a call on her landline, is greeted, and the call is forwarded to the intended recipient. There was a small learning curve (&quot;you can&#x27;t just say, &#x27;call John,&#x27; you have to ask her to &#x27;start a phone call&#x27;&quot;) but it has worked and has provided an often confused elderly woman with poor eyesight a straightforward way of connecting with her loved ones.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>If it&#x27;s plugged in, you can enable an iPhone to respond to &quot;Hey Siri&quot; as a wake phrase.<p>[EDIT: I have an iPhone 6. Apparently the latest models don&#x27;t need to be plugged in.]</text></comment> |
8,477,447 | 8,477,428 | 1 | 3 | 8,477,150 | train | <story><title>Disney rendered its new animated film on a 55,000-core supercomputer</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dpiers</author><text>Two figures that stood out to me were the 1.1 million render hour &#x2F; day capacity of the farm and the quoted total of 190 million render hours for the film.<p>That means almost half a year (~172 days) was spent rendering the film on this supercomputer. The listed running time of 108 minutes * 60 seconds * 24 frames per second = 155,520 frames in the film, giving us an average render time of 1,221 compute hours per frame, or a rendering speed of 2.27e^-10 FPS. Which means that, if Moore&#x27;s Law continues to hold, in 26.7 years or so we&#x27;ll have a super computer that could render this film in realtime at 24FPS, and that&#x27;s just neat.<p>Congrats to everyone who worked on this; really impressive technical achievement.</text></comment> | <story><title>Disney rendered its new animated film on a 55,000-core supercomputer</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Really 55,000 cores isn&#x27;t all that &quot;big&quot;, its 2300 Dual CPU Ivybridge class servers from Supermicro, which will set you back about $10M if you load them up with RAM (which I would do with this workload). Why not go a bit higher and get 25,000 machines and stick a couple of GPUs in each of them. Figure the movie is rendered at 8K resolution, 60 frames per second (for 30 frames per second 3D stereo), if you render left and right view frames on a machine in say 5 minutes, that renders an entire 2 hour movie overnight. Sure setting the lights and setting the motion takes most of the time but we&#x27;ve reached a point where a &quot;big budget&quot; animated movie can afford the hardware. Even more so if it is done on a rental type deal.<p>Take the infrastructure of an Amazon or a Google and its not really a material chunk of their resources. In fact, Amazon could no doubt offer an &#x27;Elastic Render&#x27; service ala EC2 and really help a lot of CGI companies become profitable. The thing that kills those companies is keeping all the hardware after they don&#x27;t need it any more. If you don&#x27;t store it properly it becomes worthless, if you store it too long it becomes worthless, if you leave powered up and running it sucks money out of your account long after the checks from the projects come in.</text></comment> |
34,652,004 | 34,651,144 | 1 | 3 | 34,650,368 | train | <story><title>Servo 2023 Roadmap</title><url>https://servo.org/blog/2023/02/03/servo-2023-roadmap/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>p-e-w</author><text>Of all the baffling decisions Mozilla made over the past few years, abandoning Servo is the most incomprehensible one. Servo was a critical open source project, and had the potential to decide whether the &quot;open web&quot; will still be a thing 10 years from now. Unless continuing to work on Servo was literally threatening Mozilla&#x27;s existence, cancelling it doesn&#x27;t make any sense from a long-term perspective.<p>Seeing this announcement, I&#x27;m cautiously optimistic about Servo&#x27;s future, but it&#x27;s hard to imagine it ever again picking up the momentum it once had. And considering that the web platform is becoming ever more complex, any hope of disrupting the browser engine oligopoly is probably lost by now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Servo 2023 Roadmap</title><url>https://servo.org/blog/2023/02/03/servo-2023-roadmap/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>defrost</author><text><i>The Servo Parallel Browser Engine Project</i><p><pre><code> Servo is a prototype web browser engine written in the Rust language. It is currently developed on 64-bit macOS, 64-bit Linux, 64-bit Windows, and Android.
Servo welcomes contribution from everyone.
</code></pre>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;servo&#x2F;servo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;servo&#x2F;servo</a></text></comment> |
2,900,105 | 2,899,995 | 1 | 2 | 2,899,782 | train | <story><title>Spin.js, a pure JS spinner</title><url>http://fgnass.github.com/spin.js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seanalltogether</author><text>I hate to be <i>that guy</i> but this takes up 45% cpu under firefox for a simple spin animation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robert-boehnke</author><text>My gut feeling is that if you rendered the different stages of the animation into multiple images using canvas and just toggled their visibility, you could get better performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Spin.js, a pure JS spinner</title><url>http://fgnass.github.com/spin.js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seanalltogether</author><text>I hate to be <i>that guy</i> but this takes up 45% cpu under firefox for a simple spin animation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tobbez</author><text>I see the same problem in Opera too, except it's even worse (the animation lags, and it hogs a whole CPU core).<p>Explorer is better than Firefox and Opera, but still pretty high CPU usage.<p>The only browser of the ones I tested that it seems to be relatively fine in is Chrome.</text></comment> |
10,761,190 | 10,760,325 | 1 | 2 | 10,751,827 | train | <story><title>Ketamine’s effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/a-vaccine-for-depression</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>astazangasta</author><text>I have been depressed a significant fraction of my adult life. I am also a biologist who abhors the medical description of this problem. I don&#x27;t even like the word &#x27;mental illness&#x27;. This shit is not an illness, its a normal response to a fucked up life! Can I get at least some acknowledgment of this fact?<p>The sine qua non for me was an issue of Nature a few years back that focused on depression, talked about how prevalent it is, how it is a &#x27;drain on productivity&#x27;, etc. Included therein was a graph of the worst affected populations, topping the list was Afghanistan. This passed without comment. How about: &#x27;hey, the cause of depression seems to be human misery, like war, unemployment, alienation, etc.&#x27;<p>But you can&#x27;t sell a fucking pill to cure war and alienation, so ...</text></comment> | <story><title>Ketamine’s effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/a-vaccine-for-depression</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>Ketamine is an exciting experimental approach for depression (especially with suicidal thinking) and anhedonia.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;lanpsy&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2215-0366(15)00392-2&#x2F;fulltext" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelancet.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;lanpsy&#x2F;article&#x2F;PIIS2215-03...</a><p>Researchers seem to be using an infusion of 5 mg per kg of body weight. That means you don&#x27;t give a bunch of pills to a patient, which in itself helps a bit to reduce risk.<p>There&#x27;s a bit of a web-based discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5b6zrpd1trk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5b6zrpd1trk</a></text></comment> |
6,725,557 | 6,725,143 | 1 | 3 | 6,725,012 | train | <story><title>Aaron Swartz documentary under development</title><url>http://www.aaronswartzthedocumentary.com</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kevando</author><text>Do documentaries like this bother anyone else? I&#x27;m only surmising from the trailer, but it seems to take this very serious event and over dramatize it into something like the bogus Gasland documentary. I already know about this tragedy, so maybe this movie&#x27;s not for me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Aaron Swartz documentary under development</title><url>http://www.aaronswartzthedocumentary.com</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mattl</author><text>Kickstarter ended month&#x27;s ago, the movie is now in production. I haven&#x27;t heard much in the way of updates though.</text></comment> |
19,210,513 | 19,210,741 | 1 | 2 | 19,209,957 | train | <story><title>U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/politics/civil-asset-forfeiture-supreme-court.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colmmacc</author><text>As a permanent resident who lives in the US, the idea that basic protections of law should only apply to citizens is terrifying. It&#x27;s not the same outcome at all. Due process is afforded to &quot;persons&quot;.</text></item><item><author>ls612</author><text>That’s not quite right. The Bill of Rights originally only applied to the federal government, until after the civil war when the 14th amendment was passed. Since then the clause in that amendment saying no one can be deprived of life or liberty without due process has been interpreted to mean most of the bill of rights also applies to the states. This ruling said as much for the 8th amendment prohibitions on excessive fines.<p>Thomas just wanted to use a different clause of the 14th amendment to achieve the same outcome.</text></item><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>&gt;<i>Justice Thomas agreed with the result in the case, Timbs v. Indiana, No. 17-1091, but said he would have gotten to the same place by a different route. While the majority relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas said he would have ruled “the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the 14th Amendment.”</i><p>I was going to comment that the real biggest legal problem with civil forfeiture is how it circumvents due process, but it sounds like that was the actual ruling given by the supreme court. I think the title of the article disagrees with the last paragraph. It was actually Justice Thomas who wanted to rule that it constituted excessive punishment, while the rest of the court ruled that it constituted a breach of due process.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GeekyBear</author><text>Quite recently, we have had two Presidents claim that non-citizens had no right to challenge their imprisonment by the United States (Bush in Gitmo and Obama on Bagram AFB in the Middle East) who ran smack into a Supreme Court that found their actions unconstitutional.<p>The notion that Constitutional protections cannot apply to non-citizens is simply not true, even when applied to non-citizens being held by the US off of US soil.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/politics/civil-asset-forfeiture-supreme-court.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colmmacc</author><text>As a permanent resident who lives in the US, the idea that basic protections of law should only apply to citizens is terrifying. It&#x27;s not the same outcome at all. Due process is afforded to &quot;persons&quot;.</text></item><item><author>ls612</author><text>That’s not quite right. The Bill of Rights originally only applied to the federal government, until after the civil war when the 14th amendment was passed. Since then the clause in that amendment saying no one can be deprived of life or liberty without due process has been interpreted to mean most of the bill of rights also applies to the states. This ruling said as much for the 8th amendment prohibitions on excessive fines.<p>Thomas just wanted to use a different clause of the 14th amendment to achieve the same outcome.</text></item><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>&gt;<i>Justice Thomas agreed with the result in the case, Timbs v. Indiana, No. 17-1091, but said he would have gotten to the same place by a different route. While the majority relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas said he would have ruled “the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the 14th Amendment.”</i><p>I was going to comment that the real biggest legal problem with civil forfeiture is how it circumvents due process, but it sounds like that was the actual ruling given by the supreme court. I think the title of the article disagrees with the last paragraph. It was actually Justice Thomas who wanted to rule that it constituted excessive punishment, while the rest of the court ruled that it constituted a breach of due process.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eco</author><text>The 14th Amendment&#x27;s Equal Protection Clause (&quot;nor shall any State [...] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws&quot;) means aliens are afforded the same protections as citizens.</text></comment> |
39,410,476 | 39,410,340 | 1 | 2 | 39,409,445 | train | <story><title>The game theory of seduction and marriage with Jane Austen</title><url>https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-game-theory-of-seduction-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rendaw</author><text>Just a few weird things while reading this<p>&gt; Unlike in the modern dating process, they cannot get to know a potential partner intimately before deciding whether or not to commit to a relationship.<p>Does intimacy somehow lend knowledge of whether someone&#x27;s looking for a long term relationship?<p>&gt; Tinder data shows that men like 10 times more profiles than women do and that 1 in 50 of their likes leads to a match versus 2 out of 5 for women. Faced with many men happy to date them, women have to identify the ones who may be willing to invest in a long-term relationship.<p>This seems to be saying that men send out lots of likes because they want to play around... but I thought men sent out lots of likes because if they didn&#x27;t they wouldn&#x27;t even get a single match, which doesn&#x27;t say anything about interest in long term relationships.</text></comment> | <story><title>The game theory of seduction and marriage with Jane Austen</title><url>https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-game-theory-of-seduction-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hinglenkle</author><text>I was screamed down by an entire classroom in university for my interpretation of “pride and prejudice”; though I was one of only 5 of the 25 students who read it.<p>Jane Austen herself lived her life unwed, and the character whom shared her name in P&amp;P also finishes the novel unwed.<p>It is my opinion that P&amp;P is Austen’s way of saying “if these are the players and this is the game then I am uninterested in taking part”.<p>From this reading, instead of Mr Darcy being the perfect man he’s the perfect example of why Jane chose to forgo participation in the marriage practice of the day.<p>TFA’s focus on finances, I feel, is just another example of one such reason provided by Austen to highlight the insincere process.</text></comment> |
20,467,105 | 20,466,397 | 1 | 3 | 20,466,196 | train | <story><title>H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (2018)</title><url>https://eng.uber.com/h3/#hco</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>I did some indexing using elasticsearch and some home grown stuff based on geohashes about seven years ago. At the time Elasticsearch was just adding support for geoshape indexing as well. Initially this was also based on geohashes. Later they added proper quad tree support (instead of indexing the geohash as a term), and recently they revamped the implementation using BKD trees. The current implementation is way faster and scalable than what they had a few years back and allegedly quite nice for handling complex GIS data.<p>What&#x27;s the advantage of Uber&#x27;s approach over any of this. Even my primitive geohash solution worked pretty nicely and you can implement it on just about any type of DB. I had a simple algorithm to cover any shape with geohashes of a certain size as well as a quick way to generate a polygon for a circle. The two combined allowed me to do radius searches for any shape overlapping or contained by the circle with simple terms queries on the geohash prefixes. My main headache was keeping the number of terms in a query (i.e. number of geohashes) to a reasonable size (below 1024, which if I recall was a the default limit).</text></comment> | <story><title>H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index (2018)</title><url>https://eng.uber.com/h3/#hco</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Cactus2018</author><text>Previously <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16135302" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16135302</a></text></comment> |
15,692,555 | 15,691,730 | 1 | 3 | 15,689,700 | train | <story><title>The science of Destiny 2's 'uniquely complicated' netcode</title><url>http://www.pcgamer.com/the-strange-science-of-destiny-2s-uniquely-complicated-netcode/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgmmo</author><text>The game limits multiplayer interaction big time. It&#x27;s no more than 3 parties allowed in an instance at any one time, and that&#x27;s where a single person can count as a party. So really how tough does the netcode be when you really just have instance based coop.<p>PVP is basically csgo in space. Not too many people on each team. Only 2 teams. Etc.<p>As an aside, as a gamer - terribly displeased with destiny 2. Huge dissappointment. Mostly because of it&#x27;s multiplayer and communicated drawbacks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jakebasile</author><text>Not having public zone chat, and even worse not having clan chat in this ostensibly social game is absolute madness. Yes, I&#x27;m in Discord voice&#x2F;text chatting with people I know but what am I supposed to do to talk to the random pubby next to me? It&#x27;s intensely frustrating when I&#x27;m standing next to someone in a public area and want to show them a chest or something, and the only way I can do it is to shoot them until they look at me, then shoot towards the thing I want to show. Communicating how to trigger heroic events is literally impossible.<p>They claim to be protecting sensitive people from mean people, but to do so they&#x27;re essentially nuking the ability for the vast majority of people who aren&#x27;t one of those two groups to communicate and organize for play. It&#x27;s even set to ignore whispers from people you don&#x27;t have on your friends list &#x2F; clan by default, so almost no one knows to change that and cannot be contacted in any way. They should enable zone&#x2F;clan chat by default with the option to turn it off.<p>I cannot think of any other similar game on PC that is so constraining to player communication. The Division has zone chat. Warframe does too. The brand new Call of Duty WWII, which isn&#x27;t even the same type of &quot;shared world shooter&quot; has more social interaction available in their social space (&quot;headquarters&quot;).</text></comment> | <story><title>The science of Destiny 2's 'uniquely complicated' netcode</title><url>http://www.pcgamer.com/the-strange-science-of-destiny-2s-uniquely-complicated-netcode/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgmmo</author><text>The game limits multiplayer interaction big time. It&#x27;s no more than 3 parties allowed in an instance at any one time, and that&#x27;s where a single person can count as a party. So really how tough does the netcode be when you really just have instance based coop.<p>PVP is basically csgo in space. Not too many people on each team. Only 2 teams. Etc.<p>As an aside, as a gamer - terribly displeased with destiny 2. Huge dissappointment. Mostly because of it&#x27;s multiplayer and communicated drawbacks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saluki</author><text>I bought Destiny 2 (PS4) around the same time I got Player Unknown&#x27;s Battlegrounds (PC).<p>I have about an hour on D2 and 300+ hrs on PUBG.<p>PUBG is so entertaining I never even made it back to Destiny.<p>100 online players in each match, dropped on an island, pick up loot(guns, helmets, ammo, attachments), be the last player standing.<p>It would be interesting to see a write up on PUBG net code.<p>The dev team sounds new&#x2F;semi-amateur but I think they have done a great job with the game and the single map that is available (8km x8km).<p>It&#x27;s not the best I&#x27;m sure, there are optimization issues, lots of cheaters currently, you&#x27;ll get wiped by hackers 1 out of 10 matches.<p>But solo is so much fun and Squad and Duo are even more fun. There are discord channels to meet up with fun to play with players.<p>If you have a decent gaming PC I&#x27;d recommend giving it a try.</text></comment> |
7,766,065 | 7,765,904 | 1 | 3 | 7,765,758 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one</title><url>https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Adblock-Plus-memory-consumption</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zorbo</author><text>HTTPSB just isn&#x27;t userfriendly enough for me. I run Adblock (not plus though) + Ghostery, and perhaps they use more memory and CPU, but if they do I&#x27;ve never noticed nor cared about it. Their userfriendliness is amazing though. HTTPSB randomly cripples sites, much like NoScript, and I really can&#x27;t be bothered to deal with that anymore.<p>With Adblock + Ghostery I feel completely in control. If I want to enable the Disqus script on a single page for a single session, Ghostery easily lets me do that. HTTPSB makes that hard, or perhaps I&#x27;m missing something.<p>Case in point: When I tried to post this comment, I got a &quot;Dead link: users don&#x27;t match&quot; error which went away when I disabled HTTPSB.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one</title><url>https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/Adblock-Plus-memory-consumption</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Walkman</author><text>MY GOSH! I never realized how <i></i><i></i><i></i> slow my page loadings were. Removed ABP (and a couple of extensions) after reading this and the memory consumption just went to 1&#x2F;2 of what it used to be, the page loading times are just incredible... I always wondered why Chrome is soooo much slower compared to Firefox (ABP not installed on Firefox) but never investigated further.
Thank you so much!</text></comment> |
11,364,247 | 11,364,105 | 1 | 3 | 11,358,936 | train | <story><title>The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate</title><url>https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-consequences-of-solitary-with-a-cellmate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superuser2</author><text>This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration.<p>Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other&#x27;s throats.<p>Until the prison population <i>actually</i> declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity.<p>Google your state - you&#x27;ll be amazed. Prisons aren&#x27;t designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.</text></item><item><author>rdtsc</author><text>People talk about institutional evil. This is an example of it. You can almost trace their thinking &quot;Oh, so solitary is bad now. We&#x27;ll fix it. Put two people in a 10x4 cell. See, not solitary anymore, and we doubled the capacity too. Bonuses for everyone&quot;.<p>Ideally you&#x27;d think those who made those decision would be disciplined, pensions would be cut, etc. But nothing like that is gonna happen. Even if the family wins the lawsuit, it will be taxpayers paying for it.<p>One a deeper level, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if many of those involved in running the prison would be thinking things like &quot;well good, less people less worries. So what if he kills another one&quot;. Even more perverse, in some countries, prisoners who are known to kill and attack their cellmates are used as a coercion tool. That is effective against political prisoners and other undesirables who need to &quot;confess&quot; or be punished -- &quot;behave or you&#x27;ll end up in Sesson&#x27;s cell &lt;wink-wink&gt;&quot;. On paper it looks completely by the rules and clean.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chishaku</author><text>&gt; Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one...<p>Is there any evidence that people &quot;against the prison industrial complex&quot; are directly responsible for the rate at which new prisons are being constructed? I&#x27;m not sure but I&#x27;m inclined to think that this would have more to do with strained budgets than any successful activism.<p>Edit: I looked into this a bit with California as an example.<p>In 2011, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that required California to dramatically reduce its prison population.<p>&quot;Justice Kennedy, citing the lower court decision, said there was &#x27;no realistic possibility that California would be able to build itself out of this crisis,&#x27; in light of the state’s financial problems.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;24&#x2F;us&#x2F;24scotus.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;24&#x2F;us&#x2F;24scotus.html</a><p>The opinion of the lower court:<p>&quot;Relying on expert testimony, the court ruled that the California prison system, the nation’s largest with more than 150,000 inmates, could reduce its population by shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole, which they said would have no adverse impact on public safety.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;02&#x2F;10&#x2F;us&#x2F;10prison.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;02&#x2F;10&#x2F;us&#x2F;10prison.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate</title><url>https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-consequences-of-solitary-with-a-cellmate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superuser2</author><text>This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration.<p>Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other&#x27;s throats.<p>Until the prison population <i>actually</i> declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity.<p>Google your state - you&#x27;ll be amazed. Prisons aren&#x27;t designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.</text></item><item><author>rdtsc</author><text>People talk about institutional evil. This is an example of it. You can almost trace their thinking &quot;Oh, so solitary is bad now. We&#x27;ll fix it. Put two people in a 10x4 cell. See, not solitary anymore, and we doubled the capacity too. Bonuses for everyone&quot;.<p>Ideally you&#x27;d think those who made those decision would be disciplined, pensions would be cut, etc. But nothing like that is gonna happen. Even if the family wins the lawsuit, it will be taxpayers paying for it.<p>One a deeper level, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if many of those involved in running the prison would be thinking things like &quot;well good, less people less worries. So what if he kills another one&quot;. Even more perverse, in some countries, prisoners who are known to kill and attack their cellmates are used as a coercion tool. That is effective against political prisoners and other undesirables who need to &quot;confess&quot; or be punished -- &quot;behave or you&#x27;ll end up in Sesson&#x27;s cell &lt;wink-wink&gt;&quot;. On paper it looks completely by the rules and clean.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnaritas</author><text>There&#x27;s a simple solution to that, set people free. We don&#x27;t need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal with them than prison. Prison should be for violent criminals only. Release all drug users, release all drug pushers, none of those people belong in jail.</text></comment> |
39,843,427 | 39,841,739 | 1 | 3 | 39,841,390 | train | <story><title>Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/the-king-is-dead-claude-3-surpasses-gpt-4-on-chatbot-arena-for-the-first-time/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neonate</author><text><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240327190610&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-king-is-dead-claude-3-surpasses-gpt-4-on-chatbot-arena-for-the-first-time&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20240327190610&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnic...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Claude 3 surpasses GPT-4 on Chatbot Arena for the first time</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/the-king-is-dead-claude-3-surpasses-gpt-4-on-chatbot-arena-for-the-first-time/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>suby</author><text>For coding I&#x27;ve found ChatGPT4 a bit better than Claude 3 Opus because it tends to understand my intentions more and I trust it to make better suggestions for code changes.<p>I think Claude has better writing style, and it&#x27;s refreshing not having to fight with the thing to get it to give me full code snippets. I also hate how difficult it is to get the arrow keys to scroll up or down on chatgpt.</text></comment> |
15,748,357 | 15,747,894 | 1 | 2 | 15,747,313 | train | <story><title>Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?</title><url>https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vadimberman</author><text>As an old fart who grew up with 1970s and 1980s music, I didn&#x27;t even have to read the Stackexchange article to know the answer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>interfixus</author><text>Completely off on a tangent: A good friend of mine, getting on in years, just this weekend told me a story about the time he met one half of the composer-team behind that song, Benny Andersson of ABBA, at the absolute height of his fame somewhere in the mid to late seventies. Pleasant and low-key, almost self-effacing, superstardom or not. Someone tried to pull a fast one on him, and my friend, in a professional capacity, had to intercede. &quot;Nah, let it be&quot;, said Benny in a very quiet Swedish way, &quot;I can probably afford it&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?</title><url>https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vadimberman</author><text>As an old fart who grew up with 1970s and 1980s music, I didn&#x27;t even have to read the Stackexchange article to know the answer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgrahamc</author><text>Me neither. I immediately thought &quot;gimme, gimme, gimme&quot; and &quot;00:30 is after midnight&quot; so clearly the answer is somehow Abba.</text></comment> |
12,778,385 | 12,778,304 | 1 | 3 | 12,775,400 | train | <story><title>Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent</title><url>http://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DocTomoe</author><text>Being German I want to pPoint out that the article leaves out one cruicial detail: Building your own home puts you into debt for quite literally the rest of your life. We do not like debt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mto</author><text>Same for Austria. Then considering that you might change jobs every few years... and the jobs are mostly in the cities, where you can&#x27;t afford building a house.<p>We live in a small to medium size flat for 380€&#x2F;month, including some running costs. Buying it would cost roughly 250k. That just doesn&#x27;t pay off. Most medium sized houses are about 700k€ in the region, with typical software developer wages at 2-4k€&#x2F;month before taxes. So 1.5-2.5k€ after taxes. Now go figure how long you will be in debt...<p>And of course, people are older nowadays when they start to earn.
For example, my parents started working with 16.
I visited a technical school up to age 19, had to do a year of civil&#x2F;military service, then worked 2 years to save some money, then did a CS bachelor. A bachelor alone is &quot;no real degree&quot; here, so also doing an MSc. Working while studying to afford the studying prolonged the studies a bit.. and in the end I started with my first real OKish earnings at age 28 when I started with my PhD. So... yeah. At the bank they laughed at my income when asking for a loan for a flat.</text></comment> | <story><title>Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent</title><url>http://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DocTomoe</author><text>Being German I want to pPoint out that the article leaves out one cruicial detail: Building your own home puts you into debt for quite literally the rest of your life. We do not like debt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>Yup.<p>Germany has one of the lowest adoption rates of credit products such as the humble credit card out of nearly all Western nations.<p>Debt is not liked.<p>Edit: From the same site, the linked article at the bottom has the answer: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;262595&#x2F;why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everything&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;262595&#x2F;why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everyth...</a><p>A better link: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;you-have-to-understand-germanys-long-standing-fear-of-debt-2012-7?IR=T" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;you-have-to-understand-german...</a></text></comment> |
9,543,612 | 9,543,680 | 1 | 3 | 9,543,440 | train | <story><title>Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees</title><url>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Housing-com-CEO-Rahul-Yadav-gives-away-his-entire-stake-worth-Rs-200-crore-to-employees/articleshow/47272859.cms?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOI</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arihant</author><text>&gt; <i>Yadav had reportedly written a resignation letter on April 30 to the board and investors and questioning their &quot;intellectual capability&quot; and giving them a one-week deadline to &quot;help in the transition&quot;. However, on May 5, he withdrew the resignation and apologised for his outbursts.</i><p>I call unstable. This CEO isn&#x27;t maverick, world-changing bastard. He is simply unstable.<p>Moreover, there are huge questions about quality of hiring at Housing. Their website, app have had same bugs for 6 months, and they still remain. Over 2000 people can&#x27;t make a decent bug-free website to see property listings?<p>The whole point of Housing was Airbnb style property listings - real verification, owners -only, professional photos and VR. And somehow their UX is one of their weakest points.</text></comment> | <story><title>Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees</title><url>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Housing-com-CEO-Rahul-Yadav-gives-away-his-entire-stake-worth-Rs-200-crore-to-employees/articleshow/47272859.cms?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOI</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shubhamjain</author><text>Housing.com is dot-com-bubble era extravagant startup with no good forseeable business model. In their initial rounds, they spend $1M ( 40% of funding ) to get the fancy domain and phone number. Its almost as if they are doing exactly opposite of Sam Altman&#x27;s every advice - low burn rate, focus on product, hire slowly, build and iterate. One of my friend who works there told me that they are working simultaneously on 16 projects.<p>I don&#x27;t believe a company like this would find itself existing in the next few years unless, they get a new CEO who knows how to get shit on track which would mean firing of lots of people and cutting down on their stupid campaigns. I don&#x27;t know weather this move was because of his sheer goodwill or to save his face or to get back on news again but considering his moves in past few months, he is an arrogant cocky teenager-like mentality person who doesn&#x27;t think twice before making a move</text></comment> |
16,732,797 | 16,731,664 | 1 | 2 | 16,729,555 | train | <story><title>Life is Short (2016)</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>euske</author><text>As a side note, not only one&#x27;s life is short, but the entire human history is short. I&#x27;m over 40 and it struck me that if I repeated my life 50 times it would already go back B.C.! We&#x27;ve invented and developed ALL the things in between. I don&#x27;t think I could live 50 times and do that myself. That was some amazing achievement, humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattbierner</author><text>In 2016 I did a small project that visualizes time as a series of hypothetical cross generation conversations (such as a 5 year old listening to an 80 year old&#x27;s stories) [0]. Really fascinating to see how recent seemingly ancient events such as the American civil war or the invention of the printing press are when examined in these terms.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattbierner.github.io&#x2F;forward-propagation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattbierner.github.io&#x2F;forward-propagation&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Life is Short (2016)</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>euske</author><text>As a side note, not only one&#x27;s life is short, but the entire human history is short. I&#x27;m over 40 and it struck me that if I repeated my life 50 times it would already go back B.C.! We&#x27;ve invented and developed ALL the things in between. I don&#x27;t think I could live 50 times and do that myself. That was some amazing achievement, humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>subcosmos</author><text>Just imagine the increase in human lifespan that can occur in the next 100 years, given how much it has changed in just 50 ...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Life_expectancy#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_by_Region_1950-2050.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Life_expectancy#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Li...</a></text></comment> |
29,085,296 | 29,085,305 | 1 | 2 | 29,083,367 | train | <story><title>Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)</title><url>https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrooched_moose</author><text>Something like &quot;Checklist Script&quot;, as that&#x27;s what they really provide?</text></item><item><author>sovietmudkipz</author><text>I did this after seeing this before on HN. There were a few processes that were manual that benefitted from the technique in the article.<p>Learn from my folly: I even called them “do nothing scripts,” referencing this article. However; I was judged by peers for not writing the full automation versions as they didn’t appreciate the idea of gradual automation (programmer hubris?). Saying “do nothing scripts” in meetings did catch the awkward attention of leadership.<p>As a description, “do nothing” communicates a lot. As a brand, “do nothing” can use some improvements.<p>My short prescription of turning “do nothings” into “do some things” into “do all the things” didn’t help. We had some new people join the team and they had fun turning the do nothing scripts into a document. * Sigh *<p>I still build these type of process description scripts still. I usually don’t advertise them to peers until they do some of the things nowadays.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BariumBlue</author><text>&quot;Process Automation&quot; would be a good, encompassing term I think.<p>Even if there&#x27;s no code being run, having all the steps down and easy to follow is a way to make the process &quot;automatic&quot;. The term is extendible to completely automated computer code, while including non-computer-code (human) automation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)</title><url>https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrooched_moose</author><text>Something like &quot;Checklist Script&quot;, as that&#x27;s what they really provide?</text></item><item><author>sovietmudkipz</author><text>I did this after seeing this before on HN. There were a few processes that were manual that benefitted from the technique in the article.<p>Learn from my folly: I even called them “do nothing scripts,” referencing this article. However; I was judged by peers for not writing the full automation versions as they didn’t appreciate the idea of gradual automation (programmer hubris?). Saying “do nothing scripts” in meetings did catch the awkward attention of leadership.<p>As a description, “do nothing” communicates a lot. As a brand, “do nothing” can use some improvements.<p>My short prescription of turning “do nothings” into “do some things” into “do all the things” didn’t help. We had some new people join the team and they had fun turning the do nothing scripts into a document. * Sigh *<p>I still build these type of process description scripts still. I usually don’t advertise them to peers until they do some of the things nowadays.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>How about &quot;scripted playbook&quot;?</text></comment> |
18,052,829 | 18,052,567 | 1 | 3 | 18,051,264 | train | <story><title>From VNC to reverse shell</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/qemu-monitor-socket-rce-vnc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sverhagen</author><text>&gt;Once again, the world of security is complex and surprise features can often be fatal<p>This. And for me, as an application developer, who is now (willingly) ushered into being a DevOps engineer on the side, it is scary that the tools in the DevOps world are so easily exposing me to security risks, whereas a seemingly much smaller set of best practices on the application side seemed to have been <i>fine</i> when that was all there was to my world.</text></comment> | <story><title>From VNC to reverse shell</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/qemu-monitor-socket-rce-vnc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>If author is reading here, there&#x27;s a typo: &quot;While looked for the code repository so I could fix it,&quot; is missing a word between &quot;While looked&quot;</text></comment> |
6,941,689 | 6,941,512 | 1 | 2 | 6,941,171 | train | <story><title>Letter From A Psychopath</title><url>http://www.twitlonger.com/show/dh5l3q?share</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kristofferR</author><text>Everybody should turn on showdead in the settings and check out losethos&#x27; comments here. Psychopathy is really interesting and fascinating, but so is schizophrenia.<p>It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vectorpush</author><text>Let&#x27;s all prattle on about the guy as if he isn&#x27;t an active member of this forum. The man can read you know, most developers can. I&#x27;m not trying to censor discussion but it just seems a little odd to publicly deconstruct this guy in every mental health thread like he&#x27;s some type of lab specimen. It is indeed possible to read comments while hellbanned.</text></comment> | <story><title>Letter From A Psychopath</title><url>http://www.twitlonger.com/show/dh5l3q?share</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kristofferR</author><text>Everybody should turn on showdead in the settings and check out losethos&#x27; comments here. Psychopathy is really interesting and fascinating, but so is schizophrenia.<p>It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PavlovsCat</author><text>I find it sad rather than fascinating, wish I could hug the guy. I know this isn&#x27;t the time or the place, and that I could probably not help anyway. But still, every time I see a post of him with that greyed out font saying &quot;move along, nothing to see here&quot; gets me right in the feels. When some sports star or programmer with family dies from stupid or natural causes or commits suicide, we are upset. When someone is obviously unhappy and unable to successfully interact with others, we are annoyed, instead of being happy they&#x27;re at least still alive.<p>I&#x27;m sorry, I didn&#x27;t mean to ramble. I have no criticism or suggestions to offer, just vague frustration and helplessness. But it does frustrate me, it&#x27;s something that&#x27;s been on my mind a lot of times, so thanks for the opportunity to say it, FWIW.</text></comment> |
40,989,854 | 40,989,251 | 1 | 2 | 40,986,894 | train | <story><title>Panic at the Job Market</title><url>https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you&#x27;re in. Often the first group doesn&#x27;t think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want, but they&#x27;re definitely <i>wrong</i>, and I wouldn&#x27;t want to work with those people; when there are actual problems to solve I&#x27;m going to go looking for people in the second group to figure them out. A terrible situation is to end up with a team of entirely people who can code but can&#x27;t theorize about code, because they&#x27;ll build a mountain of crap that other people have to rebuild later.<p>(Now it&#x27;s true that some people can&#x27;t theorize quickly, or in front of someone else, or especially in a stressful interview where there&#x27;s a lot on the line. Those are real issues with the format that need solving. Not to mention the &quot;esoteric trivia&quot; sorts of questions which are pointless.<p>But the basic objection that &quot;coding tests aren&#x27;t testing the skills you need in your day job&quot; is absurd to me. They&#x27;re not the skills you use everyday, they&#x27;re the skills you need to be able to pull out when you need them, which backstop the work you do every day. Like your mechanic doesn&#x27;t use their &quot;theory of how engines work&quot; every day to fix a car, but you wouldn&#x27;t want a mechanic who doesn&#x27;t know how an engine works working on your car for very long either...)</text></item><item><author>caesil</author><text>&gt;According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.<p>As a (now) senior&#x2F;staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I&#x27;m begrudgingly coming to accept that coding interviews might not actually be all that bad. Mostly because I find myself passing them due to having picked up skills in the past few years rather than spending a ton of time studying, which suggests they might actually be picking up some signal. I once thought they were purely hazing with zero relevance to day to day work, but as I get more senior I drift further away from that opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dakiol</author><text>I think there’s another group: people who can come up with solid code by using search tools.<p>I code, sure, but I will never come up with a custom solution for any non trivial problem. I know where to find appropriate solutions (the best ones) because I’m aware of what I don’t know (I read a lot of tech books). You cannot test this in the classic tech interview (because I would googling 75% of the time).<p>The final result is: you want good code or not? How I come up with it should be secondary.</text></comment> | <story><title>Panic at the Job Market</title><url>https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you&#x27;re in. Often the first group doesn&#x27;t think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want, but they&#x27;re definitely <i>wrong</i>, and I wouldn&#x27;t want to work with those people; when there are actual problems to solve I&#x27;m going to go looking for people in the second group to figure them out. A terrible situation is to end up with a team of entirely people who can code but can&#x27;t theorize about code, because they&#x27;ll build a mountain of crap that other people have to rebuild later.<p>(Now it&#x27;s true that some people can&#x27;t theorize quickly, or in front of someone else, or especially in a stressful interview where there&#x27;s a lot on the line. Those are real issues with the format that need solving. Not to mention the &quot;esoteric trivia&quot; sorts of questions which are pointless.<p>But the basic objection that &quot;coding tests aren&#x27;t testing the skills you need in your day job&quot; is absurd to me. They&#x27;re not the skills you use everyday, they&#x27;re the skills you need to be able to pull out when you need them, which backstop the work you do every day. Like your mechanic doesn&#x27;t use their &quot;theory of how engines work&quot; every day to fix a car, but you wouldn&#x27;t want a mechanic who doesn&#x27;t know how an engine works working on your car for very long either...)</text></item><item><author>caesil</author><text>&gt;According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.<p>As a (now) senior&#x2F;staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I&#x27;m begrudgingly coming to accept that coding interviews might not actually be all that bad. Mostly because I find myself passing them due to having picked up skills in the past few years rather than spending a ton of time studying, which suggests they might actually be picking up some signal. I once thought they were purely hazing with zero relevance to day to day work, but as I get more senior I drift further away from that opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joha4270</author><text>Could you expand on what<p>&gt; conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code<p>means?<p>It might be my insufficient command of the English language, or I might be outing myself as being outside said group, but I&#x27;m unsure what that <i>means</i>. Is this just referring to a vocabulary for discussing the structure and creation of software, or is there a deeper mystery I have not yet grasped?</text></comment> |
16,485,460 | 16,485,550 | 1 | 2 | 16,484,461 | train | <story><title>Google Hangouts Chat</title><url>https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/move-projects-forward-one-placehangouts-chat-now-available/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JorgeGT</author><text>But now you can have <i>five</i> Google IM apps in your phone! Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Hangouts meet, Hangouts chat... am I missing any? Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google&#x27;s messaging PM.</text></item><item><author>FreakyT</author><text>I already find Google&#x27;s handling of their chat software utterly nonsensical, but this one arguably takes the cake for ridiculousness, considering they <i>already have</i> a chat product called &quot;Hangouts&quot;.<p>There is definitely no chance of branding confusion there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>miah_</author><text>It feels like they are doing A&#x2F;B testing by releasing entirely different products rather than small changes within existing products. I wish they&#x27;d pick a name and iterate on features on one product that I can invest into using for a long time (like Gmail).</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Hangouts Chat</title><url>https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/move-projects-forward-one-placehangouts-chat-now-available/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JorgeGT</author><text>But now you can have <i>five</i> Google IM apps in your phone! Allo, Duo, Hangouts, Hangouts meet, Hangouts chat... am I missing any? Definitely Franz Kafka is alive and well as Google&#x27;s messaging PM.</text></item><item><author>FreakyT</author><text>I already find Google&#x27;s handling of their chat software utterly nonsensical, but this one arguably takes the cake for ridiculousness, considering they <i>already have</i> a chat product called &quot;Hangouts&quot;.<p>There is definitely no chance of branding confusion there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adamrezich</author><text>I had Google Voice before I had an Android phone. A big selling point of Android to me early on, especially stock Android phones like the Nexus One, was how, being a Google product, it would integrate with my SMS and phone apps, and provide a unified experience. Since then, they&#x27;ve released so many chat apps, most with SMS integration, that it&#x27;s just frustratingly confusing and it makes me think less of the entire platform.<p>So I get they wanted to make a Slack competitor... why not make this new app FINALLY also double as the One True Google Chat App? Surely that would be good for adoption and stuff, plus it would finally solve their &quot;too many chat apps&quot; problem once and for all...</text></comment> |
28,161,532 | 28,161,517 | 1 | 2 | 28,160,673 | train | <story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fossuser</author><text>They have a podcast together called Dithering which is pretty good (but not free) - they&#x27;re friends.<p>I think John&#x27;s article is better than Ben&#x27;s, but they&#x27;re both worth reading.<p>Ben takes the view that unencrypted cloud is the better tradeoff - I&#x27;m not sure I agree. I&#x27;d rather have my stuff e2ee in the cloud. If the legal requirements around CSAM are the blocker then Apple&#x27;s approach may be a way to thread the needle to get the best of both worlds.</text></item><item><author>samename</author><text>John Gruber is biased because his brand is closely tied to Apple’s brand. Ben Thompson wrote a better review on the topic:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;apples-mistake&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;apples-mistake&#x2F;</a><p>There’s also the Op-Ed by Matthew Green and Alex Stamos, cyber security researchers:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;11&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;apple-iphones-privacy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;11&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;apple-iphones-pri...</a></text></item><item><author>fossuser</author><text>It&#x27;s worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I&#x27;ve seen on this topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initiatives_slippery_slope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initia...</a><p>There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.</text></item><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sa1</author><text>For me it&#x27;s the worst of both worlds - e2ee has no meaning if the ends are permanently compromised - and there&#x27;s no local vs cloud separation anymore which you can use to delineate what is under your own control - nothing&#x27;s under your control.</text></comment> | <story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fossuser</author><text>They have a podcast together called Dithering which is pretty good (but not free) - they&#x27;re friends.<p>I think John&#x27;s article is better than Ben&#x27;s, but they&#x27;re both worth reading.<p>Ben takes the view that unencrypted cloud is the better tradeoff - I&#x27;m not sure I agree. I&#x27;d rather have my stuff e2ee in the cloud. If the legal requirements around CSAM are the blocker then Apple&#x27;s approach may be a way to thread the needle to get the best of both worlds.</text></item><item><author>samename</author><text>John Gruber is biased because his brand is closely tied to Apple’s brand. Ben Thompson wrote a better review on the topic:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;apples-mistake&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;apples-mistake&#x2F;</a><p>There’s also the Op-Ed by Matthew Green and Alex Stamos, cyber security researchers:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;11&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;apple-iphones-privacy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;11&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;apple-iphones-pri...</a></text></item><item><author>fossuser</author><text>It&#x27;s worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I&#x27;ve seen on this topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initiatives_slippery_slope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initia...</a><p>There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.</text></item><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexandrB</author><text>One logical conclusion of systems like this is that modifying your device in any &quot;unauthorized&quot; way becomes suspicious because you might be trying to evade CSAM detection. So much for jail-breaking and right to repair!<p>I think I&#x27;d rather have the non-e2ee cloud.</text></comment> |
13,752,852 | 13,752,384 | 1 | 3 | 13,751,803 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Wtrace – A command line tracing tool for Windows, based on ETW</title><url>https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>etatoby</author><text>To all the commenters lamenting the lack of filtering capabilities, I would like to remind that this is a console program, which in the spirit of Unix should &quot;do one thing and do it well.&quot;<p>If you need filtering, sorting, correlating, and so on, you should add pipes after this program. I believe Powershell pipes are even more powerful than plain text ones, although I haven&#x27;t used them myself.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Wtrace – A command line tracing tool for Windows, based on ETW</title><url>https://github.com/lowleveldesign/wtrace</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Cylons</author><text>Google also has a similar tool for recording and managing ETW traces: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;UIforETW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;UIforETW</a></text></comment> |
23,967,965 | 23,967,950 | 1 | 2 | 23,960,631 | train | <story><title>Spies can eavesdrop by watching a light bulb's vibrations</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/lamphone-light-bulb-vibration-spying/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ravenstine</author><text>One way you can do this without another light source is to bounce a laser beam off a window or other things that are reflective.<p>In fact, the same principle can be achieved with radio. The Russians once planted a device in a wooden seal they gave to a US ambassador as a gift which, when a focused radio beam was aimed at it, would reflect and oscillate that beam due to vibrations in the air.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Thing_%28listening_device%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Thing_%28listening_device%...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>balls187</author><text>Most of my office windows at Boeing had little ultrasonic buzzers on them to prevent such an attack.<p>On my offices was actually in a large farad cage to reduce&#x2F;eliminate EMF leaks from workstations.</text></comment> | <story><title>Spies can eavesdrop by watching a light bulb's vibrations</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/lamphone-light-bulb-vibration-spying/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ravenstine</author><text>One way you can do this without another light source is to bounce a laser beam off a window or other things that are reflective.<p>In fact, the same principle can be achieved with radio. The Russians once planted a device in a wooden seal they gave to a US ambassador as a gift which, when a focused radio beam was aimed at it, would reflect and oscillate that beam due to vibrations in the air.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Thing_%28listening_device%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Thing_%28listening_device%...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acidburnNSA</author><text>Back in the 90&#x27;s I found an old cardboard box full of radioshack electronics components and a paper schematic of how to put it together. I asked my dad what it was. He had been into an electronics hobby in the 1980s and told me that it was a amplifier to receiving laser light bounced off of a window for spy stuff. I couldn&#x27;t believe it. The kit became my first significant soldering project. I got it all together and put my beloved laser pointer on a tripod and tried bouncing it in. I never did get it to the point that I could hear voices but boy could I ever hear cool vibration noises when I tapped the window.<p>It was extremely fun and I&#x27;ve been soldering things here and there ever since.</text></comment> |
39,116,930 | 39,115,466 | 1 | 3 | 39,111,539 | train | <story><title>Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/01/23/appeals-court-fbis-safe-deposit-box-seizures-violated-fourth-amendment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EasyMark</author><text>I read the article. The article ruled they broke the terms of the warrant. How in the world do you think that the FBI wouldn&#x27;t bag and tag stuff if they planned on using it in court at a later date? Any fresh out of school lawyer could get that tossed in a heart beat. The people will get back their stuff after the appeals. How could they do that without the fbi tracking what was in the SDBs?</text></item><item><author>bagels</author><text>Is this a joke? Did you read about this case? Because that is basically what happened. Some people got parts of their things back.</text></item><item><author>EasyMark</author><text>I highly doubt the fba didn&#x27;t tag and bag the contents by box #. they didn&#x27;t just throw them into a big pile in the middle of the floor</text></item><item><author>theogravity</author><text>What are the chances the seized items are returned in its entirety to the owner?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justanorherhack</author><text>No they won’t this is a highly public case because of their mishandling of all of it.
They are claiming they can’t give people back their things and much of it was “lost”. Another addition to the long list of civil forfeiture cases in which us law enforcement legally steals people’s assets without consequences. They are incentivized to do so as local and federal agencies get kickbacks from what they seize. They’ve taken tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayers with little to no cause. Look up civil forfeiture.</text></comment> | <story><title>Appeals Court: FBI's Safe-Deposit Box Seizures Violated Fourth Amendment</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/01/23/appeals-court-fbis-safe-deposit-box-seizures-violated-fourth-amendment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EasyMark</author><text>I read the article. The article ruled they broke the terms of the warrant. How in the world do you think that the FBI wouldn&#x27;t bag and tag stuff if they planned on using it in court at a later date? Any fresh out of school lawyer could get that tossed in a heart beat. The people will get back their stuff after the appeals. How could they do that without the fbi tracking what was in the SDBs?</text></item><item><author>bagels</author><text>Is this a joke? Did you read about this case? Because that is basically what happened. Some people got parts of their things back.</text></item><item><author>EasyMark</author><text>I highly doubt the fba didn&#x27;t tag and bag the contents by box #. they didn&#x27;t just throw them into a big pile in the middle of the floor</text></item><item><author>theogravity</author><text>What are the chances the seized items are returned in its entirety to the owner?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagels</author><text>Apologies for being flippant, I thought you were trolling. The FBI has lost (or stolen) some of these people&#x27;s items.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ij.org&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;innocent-security-deposit-box-renters-demand-fbi-return-missing-property&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ij.org&#x2F;press-release&#x2F;innocent-security-deposit-box-r...</a></text></comment> |
24,807,489 | 24,807,506 | 1 | 2 | 24,805,569 | train | <story><title>How to Hide from a Drone</title><url>https://theconversation.com/how-to-hide-from-a-drone-the-subtle-art-of-ghosting-in-the-age-of-surveillance-143078</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>01100011</author><text>I don&#x27;t know if it would be effective at hiding you beyond the next few years when more comprehensive systems are in place, but I think a simple circuit that randomly blinks an IR LED would be handy. Something like an an LED throwie, but with random cycling. Put a bunch of them around and you&#x27;ll probably screw up most cheap CCDs by forcing them to constantly adjust their exposure. Sure, a cheap filter can defeat them... But eventually we&#x27;ll be in a world where there is no escape from integrated surveillance and jamming&#x2F;hiding just raises flags.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Hide from a Drone</title><url>https://theconversation.com/how-to-hide-from-a-drone-the-subtle-art-of-ghosting-in-the-age-of-surveillance-143078</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobwilliamroy</author><text>For reference here is footage from an apache gun killing a civilian reporter in Baghdad in 2007:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=File%3ACollateralMurder.ogv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.wikimedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=File%3AColla...</a><p>So I&#x27;m fairly certain this is what most drone operators will see on the screen. This video is over 13 years old though, so current optics are probably much more advanced than what was deployed in iraq. Near-future drones can also probably use 5G networks to transmit higher resolution videos. I don&#x27;t think anyone can hide from this, even if they don&#x27;t have anything to hide. False positives seem extremely likely and if the domestic drones won&#x27;t shoot, they still will very likely be reporting a lot of crimes and violations that didn&#x27;t actually happen. The guy in the video who the operators claimed was carrying an AK-47 that was also an RPG, was actually a reporter carrying a camera and laptop.</text></comment> |
13,543,781 | 13,543,824 | 1 | 3 | 13,543,369 | train | <story><title>Reuters' position on covering Trump</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/rpb-adlertrump-idUSKBN15F276</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a_humean</author><text>So Reuter&#x27;s position is that the media environment in the US is rapidly becoming like illiberal democracies in Egypt, Russia and Iran, and so its time to use skills applicable when operating within typically third world authoritarian regimes. What heart warming times we live in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bredren</author><text>Another way to look at it is their reporters on US press have been caught flat-footed on daily news gathering. They don&#x27;t have the same skills as their non-US counterparts and are rattled.<p>This is a call to arms. We are facing darkness now, and I believe this will have a lasting impact in what reporters are capable of and willing to do to offer free press.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reuters' position on covering Trump</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/rpb-adlertrump-idUSKBN15F276</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a_humean</author><text>So Reuter&#x27;s position is that the media environment in the US is rapidly becoming like illiberal democracies in Egypt, Russia and Iran, and so its time to use skills applicable when operating within typically third world authoritarian regimes. What heart warming times we live in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ErikVandeWater</author><text>That&#x27;s a very sensationalist way of putting it, especially when they say &quot;Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment...&quot;</text></comment> |
27,625,369 | 27,624,756 | 1 | 2 | 27,623,605 | train | <story><title>Twilio, Asana to List on Long Term Stock Exchange</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/twilio-asana-to-list-on-long-term-stock-exchange-as-esg-push-continues-11624565701</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neonate</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;KzTDN" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;KzTDN</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Twilio, Asana to List on Long Term Stock Exchange</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/twilio-asana-to-list-on-long-term-stock-exchange-as-esg-push-continues-11624565701</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>endisneigh</author><text>I can’t read the full article but:<p>&gt; To list on LTSE in August, Twilio and Asana are agreeing to a slate of commitments such as aligning executive and board compensation with long-term performance; taking customers and employees into account; and explaining how the company’s board oversees its long-term strategy. These commitments must be concrete policies that can be monitored by LTSE.<p>If such agreements are broken what’s the punishment, other than presumably being dislisted? If there are none it seems like an empty platitude given that you can already buy both on the “regular” stock exchange.<p>Is daytrading prohibited? If not seems like it’s still bound by the same short term nonsense. I’d be impressed if you can only buy and sell on the LTSE once a year. Money being put where the mouth is and all that.</text></comment> |
26,108,488 | 26,106,050 | 1 | 2 | 26,101,608 | train | <story><title>Podman: A Daemonless Container Engine</title><url>https://podman.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yobert</author><text>I&#x27;ve been trying to use podman in production and it is not working very well. I&#x27;m excited for this technology but it is not ready.<p>- podman layer caching during builds do not work. When we switched back to docker-ce, builds went from 45 minutes to 3 minutes with no changes to our Dockerfile<p>- fuse-overlayfs sits at 100% CPU all day, every day on our production servers<p>- podman loses track of containers. Sometimes they are running but don&#x27;t show in podman ps<p>- sometimes podman just gets stuck and can&#x27;t prune or stop a container<p>(edit: formatting)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>windexh8er</author><text>I could very well be wrong but Podman seems to have missed the time-frame of opportunity. It was always a knife fight between Red Hat and Docker with regard to tooling. Red Hat wanting to own the toolchain for containers so they didn&#x27;t have to deal with, and so they could box out, competitors like (now basically defunct) Docker Enterprise.<p>I&#x27;ve taken a look at podman from time to time over the years but it seems like it&#x27;s just never formalized, never been polished and almost always has been sub-par in execution. On this list the builds and container control are things that I&#x27;ve run across. I guess - what&#x27;s the point? The rootless argument leaned on so heavily is pretty much gone, the quality of Podman hasn&#x27;t (seemingly) improved and now IBM owns Red Hat (subjective, but a viable concern&#x2F;consideration given what&#x27;s recently happened with CentOS).<p>You&#x27;re more than safe leveraging Docker and buildkit (when and where needed). Quite honestly, given the relatively poor execution of Red Hat with these tools over the years, I don&#x27;t see the point. I&#x27;m sure there are some niche use cases for Podman&#x2F;Buildah, but overall it just seems to come up as an agenda more than an exponentially better product at this point. Red Hat could have made things better, instead they just created a distraction and worked against the broader effort in the container ecosystem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Podman: A Daemonless Container Engine</title><url>https://podman.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yobert</author><text>I&#x27;ve been trying to use podman in production and it is not working very well. I&#x27;m excited for this technology but it is not ready.<p>- podman layer caching during builds do not work. When we switched back to docker-ce, builds went from 45 minutes to 3 minutes with no changes to our Dockerfile<p>- fuse-overlayfs sits at 100% CPU all day, every day on our production servers<p>- podman loses track of containers. Sometimes they are running but don&#x27;t show in podman ps<p>- sometimes podman just gets stuck and can&#x27;t prune or stop a container<p>(edit: formatting)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dastx</author><text>I&#x27;ve been running multiple services through podman on a pi without any issues. Certainly not the same as production though.<p>Layer caching seems to work for me. Note that rootless stores images (and everything else), in different place from rootfull. It may be that you&#x27;re caching the wrong directory.</text></comment> |
5,929,331 | 5,929,340 | 1 | 3 | 5,929,007 | train | <story><title>Google handed over years of e-mails belonging to WikiLeaks chatroom admin</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/google-handed-over-years-of-e-mails-belonging-to-wikileaks-chatroom-admin/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jabbles</author><text>What could Google have done better?<p>(Specifically in regards to this case. And assuming they pushed back on orders like this, like they claim to do.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>betterunix</author><text>The way I see it, Google set up a system that is <i>easy</i> to conduct surveillance on. Gigabytes of storage, no way to actually delete messages over IMAP or POP3, and in various subtle ways GMail discourages the use of encryption.<p>This is all probably inadvertent, but it indicates that protecting users from this sort of surveillance is <i>not</i> a priority.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google handed over years of e-mails belonging to WikiLeaks chatroom admin</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/google-handed-over-years-of-e-mails-belonging-to-wikileaks-chatroom-admin/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jabbles</author><text>What could Google have done better?<p>(Specifically in regards to this case. And assuming they pushed back on orders like this, like they claim to do.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>senjmccarthy</author><text>They could have done what they thought was right in the interests of the Internet as a free, unregulated medium and by extension their business which depends on the Internet, even if that course of action (or inaction) was not clearly legal. Then they could have used some of their billions in cash on hand and their team of lawyers to defend themselves against prosecution. They, instead of some random sysadmin, could be the ones bringing this issue of Internet spying to the fore.<p>Now, before you say &quot;What, do you expect them to break the law?&quot;, consider that they routinely push the boundaries of US law (securities law, copyright law, tax law, etc.) and lo and behold they are usually successful.<p>Now, I expect you might say &quot;What you&#x27;re suggesting is still nonsensical because resisting orders related to national security is, among other things, far too controversial and not in the interests of shareholders.&quot; And I would not disgaree with you.<p>My point is simply that Google, with its vast resources, is in a much better position than Ed Snowden to take on this fight for the future of the Internet and privacy of communications.<p>You could even argue Google has more skin in the game than Mr. Snowden, or any of us individually (aside from those who exploit others&#x27; private information for profit, of course)... because if this controversy brings about knee-jerk changes in privacy law, it could materially affect their bottom line.</text></comment> |
28,857,132 | 28,857,343 | 1 | 2 | 28,856,203 | train | <story><title>Apple silently fixes iOS zero-day, asks bug reporter to keep quiet</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/apple/apple-silently-fixes-ios-zero-day-asks-bug-reporter-to-keep-quiet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>post_break</author><text>What a slap in the face. This guy is owed a boatload of cash, and typical Apple just kicks the can down the road. Next time I hope he sells his next vuln to the highest bidder.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>Who&#x27;s the next highest bidder after Apple for a bug in `gamed` that allows you to access GameCenter and download contacts? It&#x27;s a significant vulnerability, but there&#x27;s e.g. no price list entry on Zerodium (you can take Zerodium more or less seriously, this is just a data point) for anything but code execution, which this vulnerability isn&#x27;t.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple silently fixes iOS zero-day, asks bug reporter to keep quiet</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/apple/apple-silently-fixes-ios-zero-day-asks-bug-reporter-to-keep-quiet/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>post_break</author><text>What a slap in the face. This guy is owed a boatload of cash, and typical Apple just kicks the can down the road. Next time I hope he sells his next vuln to the highest bidder.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bawolff</author><text>Can&#x27;t we hope they go for full-disclosure instead of selling to the highest bidder? Selling to the highest bidder just hurts apple users not apple.</text></comment> |
25,892,651 | 25,891,677 | 1 | 2 | 25,888,249 | train | <story><title>Pip has dropped support for Python 2</title><url>https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/news/#id1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orf</author><text>&gt; The minor improvements of Python 3 did not warrant breaking backwards compatibility and most could have been handled in a way that would not break it opt-in directives.<p>There where large changes to fundamental parts of the type system, as well as core types. Pretending this isn’t the case belays ignorance or at the very least cherry picking.<p>How would you have handled the string&#x2F;bytes split in a way that’s backwards compatible? Or the removal of old-style classes?</text></item><item><author>Blikkentrekker</author><text>Hindsight might very well be easy in this case, but I cannot think otherwise than finding the <i>Python</i> developers to have been ridiculously naïve in how they handled this, and foolish to even begin it from the start.<p>The minor improvements of <i>Python</i> 3 did not warrant breaking backwards compatibility and most could have been handled in a way that would not break it opt-in directives.<p>The very swarms of users that chanted “just upgrade” as if that not incur a significant cost also seemed ridiculously naïve to me, not understanding the real cost that large projects have by having to rewrite very extensive codebases and dealing the potential regressions that that might involve.<p>Everything about the switch, from it&#x27;s very conception, to it&#x27;s execution, was handled in a veritably disastrous way by the team, that really did not seem to appreciate even a fraction of what obviously is involved with projects that have millions of lines of code and of course would rather not have to rewrite that all.<p>This is why many projects such as <i>Linux</i>, <i>Windows</i>, <i>Rust</i>, <i>Cobol</i>, <i>Fortran</i>, <i>C</i>, and <i>C++</i> take backwards compatibility quite serious. Serious enterprises do not like to invest in something if it mean that 10 years later they would have to rewrite their entire codebase again.<p>Even on my home computer, I simply do not have the time to rewrite the many <i>Python</i> 2 scripts that have written over the years that run my computer. — it is cumbersome enough that once in a while part of my desktop stops functioning because my distribution removed a <i>Python</i> 2 library which I had relied upon as a system library that I now have to install as a user library but that was hitherto quite easily fixed.<p>Do these men think that time is free?</text></item><item><author>oconnor663</author><text>I think a lot of important lessons got learned in both cases. Clearly perl6 should have had a different name. But I think python2-&gt;python3 could&#x27;ve been much less painful if they&#x27;d known to prioritize single-codebase compatibility from the very beginning. I think you can see that lesson applied with e.g. Rust editions, which as far as I can tell have been a complete success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is awesome in terms of avoiding all of the weird things when a person typed pip rather than pip3 and module didn&#x27;t seem to get installed anywhere. That said, watching perl trying to kill perl5 with perl6 (unsuccessful) and python trying to kill python 2 with python 3 (more successful) it struck me how ridiculous it is that open source languages have to put up with this. Clearly &quot;major&quot; numbers are insufficient, the only real answer is to rename the entire freaking language when you make incompatible changes to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>naniwaduni</author><text>Let&#x27;s not pretend that py3&#x27;s string changes weren&#x27;t <i>fundamentally wrong</i> and didn&#x27;t create years of issues trying to decode things that could properly be arbitrary byte sacks as utf-8.<p>So my answer is that it was a deeply misconceived change that shouldn&#x27;t have been made at all, let alone been taken as the cornerstone of a &quot;necessary&quot; break in backward compatibility.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pip has dropped support for Python 2</title><url>https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/news/#id1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orf</author><text>&gt; The minor improvements of Python 3 did not warrant breaking backwards compatibility and most could have been handled in a way that would not break it opt-in directives.<p>There where large changes to fundamental parts of the type system, as well as core types. Pretending this isn’t the case belays ignorance or at the very least cherry picking.<p>How would you have handled the string&#x2F;bytes split in a way that’s backwards compatible? Or the removal of old-style classes?</text></item><item><author>Blikkentrekker</author><text>Hindsight might very well be easy in this case, but I cannot think otherwise than finding the <i>Python</i> developers to have been ridiculously naïve in how they handled this, and foolish to even begin it from the start.<p>The minor improvements of <i>Python</i> 3 did not warrant breaking backwards compatibility and most could have been handled in a way that would not break it opt-in directives.<p>The very swarms of users that chanted “just upgrade” as if that not incur a significant cost also seemed ridiculously naïve to me, not understanding the real cost that large projects have by having to rewrite very extensive codebases and dealing the potential regressions that that might involve.<p>Everything about the switch, from it&#x27;s very conception, to it&#x27;s execution, was handled in a veritably disastrous way by the team, that really did not seem to appreciate even a fraction of what obviously is involved with projects that have millions of lines of code and of course would rather not have to rewrite that all.<p>This is why many projects such as <i>Linux</i>, <i>Windows</i>, <i>Rust</i>, <i>Cobol</i>, <i>Fortran</i>, <i>C</i>, and <i>C++</i> take backwards compatibility quite serious. Serious enterprises do not like to invest in something if it mean that 10 years later they would have to rewrite their entire codebase again.<p>Even on my home computer, I simply do not have the time to rewrite the many <i>Python</i> 2 scripts that have written over the years that run my computer. — it is cumbersome enough that once in a while part of my desktop stops functioning because my distribution removed a <i>Python</i> 2 library which I had relied upon as a system library that I now have to install as a user library but that was hitherto quite easily fixed.<p>Do these men think that time is free?</text></item><item><author>oconnor663</author><text>I think a lot of important lessons got learned in both cases. Clearly perl6 should have had a different name. But I think python2-&gt;python3 could&#x27;ve been much less painful if they&#x27;d known to prioritize single-codebase compatibility from the very beginning. I think you can see that lesson applied with e.g. Rust editions, which as far as I can tell have been a complete success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is awesome in terms of avoiding all of the weird things when a person typed pip rather than pip3 and module didn&#x27;t seem to get installed anywhere. That said, watching perl trying to kill perl5 with perl6 (unsuccessful) and python trying to kill python 2 with python 3 (more successful) it struck me how ridiculous it is that open source languages have to put up with this. Clearly &quot;major&quot; numbers are insufficient, the only real answer is to rename the entire freaking language when you make incompatible changes to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Blikkentrekker</author><text>&gt; <i>How would you have handled the string&#x2F;bytes split in a way that’s backwards compatible?</i><p>A language pragma.<p>All functions that return `bytes` continue to do so unless specifically opted in on a per file basis, then they return `unicode`.<p>`str` thus returns `bytes` as it does in 2, unless the pragma ask otherwise.<p>&gt; <i>Or the removal of old-style classes?</i><p>They would obviously not be removed and still be available but depræcated.</text></comment> |
10,484,118 | 10,483,974 | 1 | 2 | 10,483,747 | train | <story><title>Linux TCP will have lockless listener processing 3.5M SYNs per sec</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/659199/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raphaelj</author><text>This lock starts to be a bottleneck when you want to scale the Linux TCP stack over a large number of cores (8+). This patch could be an huge improvement.<p>Because of the issues that this lock leads to, I had to implement an user-space, lock-less, TCP&#x2F;IP stack for my Master&#x27;s thesis, last year:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raphaelj&#x2F;rusty" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raphaelj&#x2F;rusty</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RaphaelJ&#x2F;master-thesis&#x2F;raw&#x2F;master&#x2F;thesis.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;RaphaelJ&#x2F;master-thesis&#x2F;raw&#x2F;master&#x2F;thesis....</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Linux TCP will have lockless listener processing 3.5M SYNs per sec</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/659199/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zokier</author><text>&gt; 20 files changed, 307 insertions(+), 746 deletions(-)<p>Two orders of magnitude faster and half the code size? That&#x27;s nice.</text></comment> |
34,706,497 | 34,706,148 | 1 | 3 | 34,704,948 | train | <story><title>Browsers are essential and how operating systems are holding them back (2022) [pdf] (2022)</title><url>https://research.mozilla.org/files/2022/10/Mozilla-Five-Walled-Gardens.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lovich</author><text>&gt;...(or better yet, Firefox Nightly) ...<p>I think this is some of the disconnect between users on this site who don&#x27;t understand why people would possibly actively choose iOS even with the lockin. Most people do not want to use a product that is constantly updating and adding features in that are going to be taken out shortly, for something as basic nowadays as web browsing. If you&#x27;re on the cool new technology people the average person likes rapid innovations. Once your tech is considered a commodity, then the average person wants a the equivalent of a toaster. Most people do not want to fiddle with their toasters or find out each day what new changes their toaster has. They want to put in bread, and get out toast. For browser, most people want to just be able to navigate to a handful of websites.<p>The restrictions are a feature and not a bug.</text></item><item><author>midoridensha</author><text>Just reading the beginning, it looks like they&#x27;re mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users&#x27; choice in browsers through various shenanigans.<p>Linux users (for desktop systems) don&#x27;t have this problem, and for mobile, Android users can easily install Firefox (or better yet, Firefox Nightly) through the Google Play store and set it to be the default browser.<p>Basically, if you want to have choice in a browser, don&#x27;t use Apple products or a Microsoft OS. And even the Microsoft OS isn&#x27;t <i>that</i> bad these days. Apple is now the worst offender in forcing you to use your computing the device only the way <i>they</i> want you to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lutger</author><text>You are making one mistake here: people actually do want a different toast if its significantly better than the current one that burns their edges too many times.<p>Chrome was able to outcompete everything else on Windows, despite Microsoft trying to prevent it. People actively installed it, just because it was better, also the so-called stupid users were able to install it.<p>If this was possible on apple devices, who knows? Maybe it would have been the end of safari.<p>Users just want toast, but they do prefer great toast above mediocre toast and will spend some effort on getting it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Browsers are essential and how operating systems are holding them back (2022) [pdf] (2022)</title><url>https://research.mozilla.org/files/2022/10/Mozilla-Five-Walled-Gardens.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lovich</author><text>&gt;...(or better yet, Firefox Nightly) ...<p>I think this is some of the disconnect between users on this site who don&#x27;t understand why people would possibly actively choose iOS even with the lockin. Most people do not want to use a product that is constantly updating and adding features in that are going to be taken out shortly, for something as basic nowadays as web browsing. If you&#x27;re on the cool new technology people the average person likes rapid innovations. Once your tech is considered a commodity, then the average person wants a the equivalent of a toaster. Most people do not want to fiddle with their toasters or find out each day what new changes their toaster has. They want to put in bread, and get out toast. For browser, most people want to just be able to navigate to a handful of websites.<p>The restrictions are a feature and not a bug.</text></item><item><author>midoridensha</author><text>Just reading the beginning, it looks like they&#x27;re mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users&#x27; choice in browsers through various shenanigans.<p>Linux users (for desktop systems) don&#x27;t have this problem, and for mobile, Android users can easily install Firefox (or better yet, Firefox Nightly) through the Google Play store and set it to be the default browser.<p>Basically, if you want to have choice in a browser, don&#x27;t use Apple products or a Microsoft OS. And even the Microsoft OS isn&#x27;t <i>that</i> bad these days. Apple is now the worst offender in forcing you to use your computing the device only the way <i>they</i> want you to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wrldos</author><text>It’s not that here. I use iOS because I don’t want anyone embedding several bloated half baked ancient hole ridden security nightmare browser engines in their apps which do everything possible to bypass system wide network restrictions so they can carry out whatever bad behaviour their business model thinks is acceptable. I want one system wide browser that respects the security configuration at OS level.<p>I want this for myself and the surface area of our 500 or so staff.</text></comment> |
4,060,154 | 4,059,889 | 1 | 3 | 4,059,821 | train | <story><title>I was the worst coder in the room...</title><url>http://designcodelearn.com/2012/06/01/i-was-the-worst-coder-in-the-room/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fleitz</author><text>It's possible to build successful businesses by being able to put cheese, tomato sauce and pepperoni on dough and put it in an oven.<p>I'm not sure why people think they have to be the smartest person in the room to build a business.</text></comment> | <story><title>I was the worst coder in the room...</title><url>http://designcodelearn.com/2012/06/01/i-was-the-worst-coder-in-the-room/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tokenizer</author><text>Great article. I really enjoyed how they solved a problem that came up during brainstorming. I think that the easiest way to find a problem to solve is to be picky with reality. Question everything you or someone you're with is going through, that either takes a little more time, or a little more effort than you think. And you might not think it would unless you question reality more.<p>Congrats to the team for going into this competition with the edge case mentality. I didn't see any details of their work in the posting, but it be interesting if we could all discuss physical locks with virtual keys some more.<p>Cheers</text></comment> |
11,423,423 | 11,422,901 | 1 | 2 | 11,421,894 | train | <story><title>Alaska Airlines to Buy Virgin America for $2.6B</title><url>https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/virgin-america</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btgeekboy</author><text>I still think JetBlue was a better fit. Alaska&#x27;s a west coast, all 737 fleet. Now they own another west coast airline (i.e. they overlap) with a ton of Airbus. Alaska&#x27;s probably getting something good for their $2.6b, but I haven&#x27;t figured out what exactly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JamilD</author><text>According to the investor slide deck [0], it&#x27;s to get into the California market, which they&#x27;re not dominant in. This acquisition will mean that Alaska will be #2 at SFO, and a major player at LAX.<p>Virgin America&#x27;s aircraft are almost all leased, so they&#x27;ll be easy to get rid of and consolidate into Boeing aircraft.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phx.corporate-ir.net&#x2F;External.File?t=1&amp;item=VHlwZT0yfFBhcmVudElEPTUyMjI1MjV8Q2hpbGRJRD02MjgzODc=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phx.corporate-ir.net&#x2F;External.File?t=1&amp;item=VHlwZT0yf...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Alaska Airlines to Buy Virgin America for $2.6B</title><url>https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/virgin-america</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btgeekboy</author><text>I still think JetBlue was a better fit. Alaska&#x27;s a west coast, all 737 fleet. Now they own another west coast airline (i.e. they overlap) with a ton of Airbus. Alaska&#x27;s probably getting something good for their $2.6b, but I haven&#x27;t figured out what exactly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djcapelis</author><text>Apparently Virgin only owns 8 of those planes and the rest are leased, so the speculation I read is Alaska is just likely to change them all over to 737s eventually. And if they have the capital to operate that same system using purchased planes and not leased planes, then they&#x27;ll be running the same routes with more favorable finances than Virgin was able to.</text></comment> |
12,507,686 | 12,506,214 | 1 | 2 | 12,502,947 | train | <story><title>Angular 2 Final Released</title><url>https://angular.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nemcue</author><text>Cons:<p>1. Typescript. If your team isn&#x27;t familiar with it it&#x27;s not trivial to get everyone on board. The up-front cost can absolutely be worth it in the long run, but there&#x27;s some friction in the day-to-day work with managing type definition files and looking up esoteric lint-errors from the Typescript compiler.<p>2. RXJS. Canonical NG2 should use Observables, and rxjs is not a trivial library to learn the ins and outs of. Add to that that there&#x27;s no clean way of doing testing with Observables at the moment (integrating with the rxjs testing schedulers is very finicky). This is doubly true if you&#x27;re using ngrx (which you probably should).<p>3. Template language. I&#x27;m one of those who don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a very good idea to bring a new DSL into html. I&#x27;d much rather do it the React-way of bringing HTML into JS instead of relying on a very complex compiler to do magic behind the scenes.
This becomes a bit better with the template pre-compilation, but it&#x27;s still new syntax that you need to learn and keep in mind. Some of which is not intuitive nor well documented (i.e. how pipes and parentheses work together).<p>4. It feels unfinished. This is to be expected since it&#x27;s just on it&#x27;s initial release, but the sharp edges do show up quite a lot. For example we very often have to do manual subscription and unsubscription of Observables in Components.
This feeling also goes for quite a few of the community addons, such as the browser-extension. While I absolutely applaud their efforts, it&#x27;s far from reaching the quality of e.g. the Ember-Inspector.<p>5. Sub-par debugging experience. When you get any errors there&#x27;s a mile long stack trace filled with rxjs and zone.js garble, making it very hard to actually figure out what&#x27;s going on.
When there actually are custom error-messages they are not very informative, with you having to fundamentally grok how parts of NG2 works to even come close to understanding why it&#x27;s not working (getting this a lot with the change detection).<p>6. Lack of documentation. I tried to stay very far away from Angular 1 since I found its documentation to be very low quality (probably a symptom of Angular 1 being poorly engineered as well). The NG2 docs are definitely better, but I feel like my mental model for reasoning about how things work was still very weak when I had finished going through the docs. There&#x27;s some really huge gaps in there (testing) and a lot of the really complicated stuff that you will stumble over is only really documented in semi-old blog posts.</text></item><item><author>NhanH</author><text>Any chance you can do a quick cons review too? Specifically comparing to the weakness of Angular 1 like bloated complexities, issue with custom directives or scope life-cycle.</text></item><item><author>EugeneOZ</author><text>I use Angular 2 in production since November 19, 2015 (alpha.46). Currently I&#x27;ve built 3 web apps (40, 60 and 20 components each), 3 mobile apps (with Ionic 2) and my employer have plans for more apps.<p>Breaking changes during alpha stage were expected, so I didn&#x27;t have issues with it.<p>Most positive things I want to highlight:<p>1. Components are encapsulated and truly reusable (and without dependencies hell).<p>2. You don&#x27;t need any &quot;bridges&quot; anymore to use 3-rd party JS libraries inside your Angular app. Nothing need to be &quot;angularized&quot; - twbs, D3, all just works out of the box. Maybe it&#x27;s even most important part for me.<p>3. Idea of `(events)` and `[attributes]` is awesome, works really effective and makes code much more easy to read.<p>4. Performance is great.<p>5. Community is friendly and have a lot of fun and patience, even to newbies.<p>6. TypeScript gives a lot of bonuses with zero price - you don&#x27;t need to learn anything (you can just rename js to ts and it will work) and additions to JS are simple and powerful.<p>7. Cool abilities like AOT-compilation, server-side rendering and tree-shaking.<p>Congrats to the all devs who are using Angular, congrats to the Angular team! :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emodendroket</author><text>&gt; 5. Sub-par debugging experience. When you get any errors there&#x27;s a mile long stack trace filled with rxjs and zone.js garble, making it very hard to actually figure out what&#x27;s going on. When there actually are custom error-messages they are not very informative,<p>And they said your angular 1 experience wouldn&#x27;t carry over.</text></comment> | <story><title>Angular 2 Final Released</title><url>https://angular.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nemcue</author><text>Cons:<p>1. Typescript. If your team isn&#x27;t familiar with it it&#x27;s not trivial to get everyone on board. The up-front cost can absolutely be worth it in the long run, but there&#x27;s some friction in the day-to-day work with managing type definition files and looking up esoteric lint-errors from the Typescript compiler.<p>2. RXJS. Canonical NG2 should use Observables, and rxjs is not a trivial library to learn the ins and outs of. Add to that that there&#x27;s no clean way of doing testing with Observables at the moment (integrating with the rxjs testing schedulers is very finicky). This is doubly true if you&#x27;re using ngrx (which you probably should).<p>3. Template language. I&#x27;m one of those who don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a very good idea to bring a new DSL into html. I&#x27;d much rather do it the React-way of bringing HTML into JS instead of relying on a very complex compiler to do magic behind the scenes.
This becomes a bit better with the template pre-compilation, but it&#x27;s still new syntax that you need to learn and keep in mind. Some of which is not intuitive nor well documented (i.e. how pipes and parentheses work together).<p>4. It feels unfinished. This is to be expected since it&#x27;s just on it&#x27;s initial release, but the sharp edges do show up quite a lot. For example we very often have to do manual subscription and unsubscription of Observables in Components.
This feeling also goes for quite a few of the community addons, such as the browser-extension. While I absolutely applaud their efforts, it&#x27;s far from reaching the quality of e.g. the Ember-Inspector.<p>5. Sub-par debugging experience. When you get any errors there&#x27;s a mile long stack trace filled with rxjs and zone.js garble, making it very hard to actually figure out what&#x27;s going on.
When there actually are custom error-messages they are not very informative, with you having to fundamentally grok how parts of NG2 works to even come close to understanding why it&#x27;s not working (getting this a lot with the change detection).<p>6. Lack of documentation. I tried to stay very far away from Angular 1 since I found its documentation to be very low quality (probably a symptom of Angular 1 being poorly engineered as well). The NG2 docs are definitely better, but I feel like my mental model for reasoning about how things work was still very weak when I had finished going through the docs. There&#x27;s some really huge gaps in there (testing) and a lot of the really complicated stuff that you will stumble over is only really documented in semi-old blog posts.</text></item><item><author>NhanH</author><text>Any chance you can do a quick cons review too? Specifically comparing to the weakness of Angular 1 like bloated complexities, issue with custom directives or scope life-cycle.</text></item><item><author>EugeneOZ</author><text>I use Angular 2 in production since November 19, 2015 (alpha.46). Currently I&#x27;ve built 3 web apps (40, 60 and 20 components each), 3 mobile apps (with Ionic 2) and my employer have plans for more apps.<p>Breaking changes during alpha stage were expected, so I didn&#x27;t have issues with it.<p>Most positive things I want to highlight:<p>1. Components are encapsulated and truly reusable (and without dependencies hell).<p>2. You don&#x27;t need any &quot;bridges&quot; anymore to use 3-rd party JS libraries inside your Angular app. Nothing need to be &quot;angularized&quot; - twbs, D3, all just works out of the box. Maybe it&#x27;s even most important part for me.<p>3. Idea of `(events)` and `[attributes]` is awesome, works really effective and makes code much more easy to read.<p>4. Performance is great.<p>5. Community is friendly and have a lot of fun and patience, even to newbies.<p>6. TypeScript gives a lot of bonuses with zero price - you don&#x27;t need to learn anything (you can just rename js to ts and it will work) and additions to JS are simple and powerful.<p>7. Cool abilities like AOT-compilation, server-side rendering and tree-shaking.<p>Congrats to the all devs who are using Angular, congrats to the Angular team! :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkassis</author><text>On 3. I&#x27;ve found Aurelia templates to be much better in that regard. Their templates are valid HTML and compile well. I&#x27;m not a huge fan of embedding html within the JS (even with JSX) been easier to work with separate template files and keep as much JS out of them as possible. This has helped reduce harder to debug errors that crop up when the JS inside templates fails.</text></comment> |
13,490,003 | 13,489,852 | 1 | 2 | 13,487,886 | train | <story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xaviers</author><text>I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can&#x27;t generalise.</text></item><item><author>ENTP</author><text>When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don&#x27;t, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can&#x27;t generalise &#x27;diets&#x27; or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people&#x27;s bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ivanhoe</author><text>&gt; if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight<p>This is the key point and it makes all the difference. You need to be able to stay on the diet for a sufficiently long time, and that&#x27;s why different approaches are needed fro different people. If you eat carbs you need to measure carefully every meal and calculate the calories, which to many people very quickly gets extremely annoying. On low carb diets you don&#x27;t have to. Also there are mood changes depending on the taste of the food that you eat. If you like eating meat and veggies, low-carb diets taste great, you enjoy every meal. It makes it much easier to abide the rules. Also general mental state is important, high stress and depression will sabotage your efforts.<p>Diets are not just about nutrition, that&#x27;s one of the biggest misconceptions. Psychology and physical activities play equally, if not more important role in dieting.</text></comment> | <story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xaviers</author><text>I can generalise diets pretty easy. Eat less calories than you burn and loose weight. Eat whatever you want if you can abide by this rule you will loose the weight. But to be healthy. Well you have to eat healthy to be healthy. And that means getting all the fat, carbs and protein your body needs. And what your body needs I agree you can&#x27;t generalise.</text></item><item><author>ENTP</author><text>When I eat carbs, I put on weight. When I don&#x27;t, I lose weight. However, other people I know are the opposite. Quite honestly, I think you can&#x27;t generalise &#x27;diets&#x27; or eating advice as, frankly, it would appear that different people&#x27;s bodies work in slightly different ways. This could explain the vast array of different advice that, often times, seems contradictory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>legulere</author><text>This is true, but it ignores a lot of other things that are going on:<p>Absorption and digestion can greatly vary between humans. (A Common example are algae).<p>What kind of micro and macronutrients you eat will directly and indirectly affect your metabolism.<p>What you eat will affect your hunger.<p>Those and other complex interplays lead to things that are counterintuitive. For instance there recently was some study that drinking soda with artificial sweetener also leads to obesity, if I remember correctly.</text></comment> |
25,645,803 | 25,645,301 | 1 | 3 | 25,644,605 | train | <story><title>Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors</title><url>https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1346183432876019712</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prof-dr-ir</author><text>I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure.<p>Their websites might not look the part, but they excel (again, in my experience) in their practicality, accessibility and ease of use. And that is exactly what you would expect from a government website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>&gt;Their websites might not look the part, but they excel.... accessibility....<p>I remember they had a design document ( Something similar to [1] [2], but not the exact one I was looking for ) where they list accessibility as their number one priority and a <i>very</i> <i>long</i> list of accessibility requirement. Simply because Government Web Site <i>needs</i> to be accessible by everyone. That means there are certain fancy things and colour scheme they cant do.<p>I wonder if the stack for Gov.UK are the same as their Petition Site [3] or was it based on something else? They have an Open Source Github account [4] for Government Digital Service which list everything they have open sourced.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;government-design-principles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;government-design-principles</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;design-system.service.gov.uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;design-system.service.gov.uk</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petition.parliament.uk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petition.parliament.uk</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alphagov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alphagov</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Busiest hour ever in the history of Gov.uk 17M page requests just 21 5xx errors</title><url>https://twitter.com/TheRealNooshu/status/1346183432876019712</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prof-dr-ir</author><text>I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure.<p>Their websites might not look the part, but they excel (again, in my experience) in their practicality, accessibility and ease of use. And that is exactly what you would expect from a government website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>helij</author><text>I on the other hand find the design of gov.uk websites one of the best out there.</text></comment> |
16,138,977 | 16,137,760 | 1 | 2 | 16,129,786 | train | <story><title>Why is the ocean salty?</title><url>https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whysalty.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sundarurfriend</author><text>I like that the article begins with a tl;dr summary of<p>&gt; Ocean salt primarily comes from rocks on land<p>Not many articles do that, but it only made reading the rest of the article more appealing to me, not less.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why is the ocean salty?</title><url>https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whysalty.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ccleve</author><text>I wonder why lakes aren&#x27;t salty?<p>It&#x27;s clear why rivers and lakes that eventually empty into the ocean are fresh. Rainwater washes the salt downstream to its ultimate destination.<p>But many lakes do not have an outlet that leads to the sea. Water flows in and evaporates. Where does the salt go in that case?<p>Or is it possible that the article doesn&#x27;t tell the full story, and that salty rocks are confined to a limited number of areas?</text></comment> |
17,772,267 | 17,772,314 | 1 | 2 | 17,771,096 | train | <story><title>Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents</title><url>https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>solatic</author><text>&gt;But the CIA’s interim system contained a technical error: It connected back architecturally to the CIA’s main covert communications platform. When the compromise was suspected, the FBI and NSA both ran “penetration tests” to determine the security of the interim system. They found that cyber experts with access to the interim system could also access the broader covert communications system the agency was using to interact with its vetted sources, according to the former officials.<p>&gt;In the words of one of the former officials, the CIA had “fucked up the firewall” between the two systems.<p>If you read between the lines, this raises the suspicion that there&#x27;s a common underlying infrastructure which handles the communications, with management front-ends for different users which are firewalled off from each other, and the security of the system relied upon the firewall between the different front-ends to prevent users from finding out about each other. However, an attacker who compromised the &quot;less secure&quot; front end, could use that as a launching pad to attack the underlying communication infrastructure, and if the attacker pwned the infrastructure, then he&#x27;d have a back entrance to the &quot;more secure&quot; front end.<p>If that&#x27;s the case, then somebody was grossly incompetent, depending on the age of the system: if the system is old enough, then somebody running ops in the CIA is incompetent, for continuing to operate a system whose security model (&quot;all you need is a strong enough firewall!&quot;) was obsolete; if the system is young enough, then either the original architects, or the security engineers who certified the architecture (if there were any), for proposing an architecture with an obsolete security model.<p>Arguably, that incompetence amounts to criminal negligence, since it resulted in the deaths of US agents, and somebody should be tried for it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents</title><url>https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yborg</author><text>It took 8 years for the CIA to figure out what happened?? This certainly explains why China and Russia continue to conduct cyber operations basically at the same level of intensity they have been for years - US intelligence, despite its enormous, unaccountable budget is unable to stop them or even know where they are compromised. If there is an actual hot conflict between the US and either of these nations, I shudder to think what will happen.<p>I don&#x27;t believe the US lacks in technical skill at the operational level. These failures are management and organizational failures.</text></comment> |
17,075,818 | 17,075,872 | 1 | 3 | 17,074,148 | train | <story><title>A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/google-employees-resign-in-protest-of-googlepentagon-drone-program/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manfredo</author><text>&gt; &quot;If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed,&quot; the letter reads, &quot;we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,”<p>My understanding from the reading I&#x27;ve done is that this project is to analyze drone video after it&#x27;s collected, to automate tasks like picking out when people enter and exit buildings and to read the license plates off cars. If that understanding is correct then this quote seems disingenuous. Google&#x27;s project is no more designed to &quot;Target and kill at a distance&quot; than the designers of the drone&#x27;s camera, or it&#x27;s engine. Arguably even less than those, since those components are in use when drone actually launches strikes. Google&#x27;s project only comes into play after drones have returned and they have time to crunch the data.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davesque</author><text>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s an argument. The truth is, even if the particular applications of AI to tasks like this are innocuous in this case, they&#x27;re less than a stone&#x27;s throw away from things that aren&#x27;t. Uses like this for technology are a perfect example of things we (we, the tech community, who have always prided ourselves on being more fair and ethical than the rest of the world) all promised we would <i>never do</i>. There is no more of a perfect mis-application of AI tech than to military uses. It doesn&#x27;t matter if the military is currently only &quot;counting people&quot; in video footage. We all know exactly where it will eventually lead. Counting people will turn into finding people. Finding people will turn into killing people. We can&#x27;t mince words in our condemnation of this activity.</text></comment> | <story><title>A dozen Google employees quit over military drone project</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/google-employees-resign-in-protest-of-googlepentagon-drone-program/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manfredo</author><text>&gt; &quot;If ethical action on the part of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a technology and who might be harmed,&quot; the letter reads, &quot;we can say with certainty that no topic deserves more sober reflection—no technology has higher stakes—than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and without public accountability,”<p>My understanding from the reading I&#x27;ve done is that this project is to analyze drone video after it&#x27;s collected, to automate tasks like picking out when people enter and exit buildings and to read the license plates off cars. If that understanding is correct then this quote seems disingenuous. Google&#x27;s project is no more designed to &quot;Target and kill at a distance&quot; than the designers of the drone&#x27;s camera, or it&#x27;s engine. Arguably even less than those, since those components are in use when drone actually launches strikes. Google&#x27;s project only comes into play after drones have returned and they have time to crunch the data.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jadell</author><text>The response to that is in the article:<p>&gt; While a Google spokesperson says the program is &quot;scoped for non-offensive purposes,&quot; a letter signed by almost 4,000 Google employees took issue with this assurance, saying, &quot;The technology is being built for the military, and once it&#x27;s delivered, it could easily be used to assist in [lethal] tasks.&quot;<p>If the object and intent recognition is made fast enough, and is able to be sent to and from a drone in flight, then the technology can be re-purposed offensively, regardless of its initial purpose.</text></comment> |
16,904,295 | 16,904,276 | 1 | 2 | 16,903,821 | train | <story><title>New AI Imaging Technique Reconstructs Photos with Realistic Results</title><url>https://news.developer.nvidia.com/new-ai-imaging-technique-reconstructs-photos-with-realistic-results/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exhilaration</author><text>In case you only read the HN comments, don&#x27;t miss the amazing video from the article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gg0F5JjKmhA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gg0F5JjKmhA</a></text></comment> | <story><title>New AI Imaging Technique Reconstructs Photos with Realistic Results</title><url>https://news.developer.nvidia.com/new-ai-imaging-technique-reconstructs-photos-with-realistic-results/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SlowRobotAhead</author><text>The example with the eyes being removed works nicely on the attractive girl, it adds sexy eyes back in.<p>Works less nicely on the old man, where it adds the same sexy eyes.</text></comment> |
19,957,758 | 19,957,254 | 1 | 3 | 19,956,636 | train | <story><title>Sony's Deal with Microsoft Blindsided Its Own PlayStation Team</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-19/sony-s-deal-with-microsoft-blindsided-its-own-playstation-team</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rocky1138</author><text>&gt; This shows &quot;a new Sony&quot; and should be applauded by investors, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. analyst Ryosuke Katsura wrote in a report. “Management is adapting rapidly to change.&quot;<p>Uh, no. This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work. Things like this happen in companies (or divisions within a company) right before their best people jump ship because they are so poorly respected they are literally not given the time of day by management.<p>I&#x27;m reminded of Ray Kassar&#x27;s comment about programmers being at the same level of someone who puts the game boxes together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caymanjim</author><text>I&#x27;m a developer and low-level manager, and wouldn&#x27;t expect to have much input in this kind of decision. Especially in a behemoth like Sony. This is C-level-executive decision making territory.<p>I might have something to say about the idea from a technical perspective, if asked, and if that aspect of the platform were my purview, and I suspect they discussed it with plenty of knowledgeable people at some level.<p>I&#x27;m sure some people who were developing their in-house cloud solution feel like they&#x27;ve been blindsided, but if they&#x27;d succeeded, they wouldn&#x27;t be in this position. The article says they&#x27;ve been struggling with it. They likely had a chance and missed benchmarks one time too many.<p>They&#x27;re likely better off using a major cloud provider anyway. They&#x27;ve already solved the big problems.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sony's Deal with Microsoft Blindsided Its Own PlayStation Team</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-19/sony-s-deal-with-microsoft-blindsided-its-own-playstation-team</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rocky1138</author><text>&gt; This shows &quot;a new Sony&quot; and should be applauded by investors, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. analyst Ryosuke Katsura wrote in a report. “Management is adapting rapidly to change.&quot;<p>Uh, no. This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work. Things like this happen in companies (or divisions within a company) right before their best people jump ship because they are so poorly respected they are literally not given the time of day by management.<p>I&#x27;m reminded of Ray Kassar&#x27;s comment about programmers being at the same level of someone who puts the game boxes together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ARandomerDude</author><text>&gt; This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work.<p>Developer here. What role would you see developers playing? This is more strategic than technical, so I wouldn&#x27;t expect much developer input at this stage.<p>If management asked and the developers didn&#x27;t like it, people would say &quot;why the opinion charade?&quot;. So the only options are don&#x27;t partner or get a strong (whatever that means) majority vote from the developers before doing anything. Both seem like bad options to me.</text></comment> |
39,379,017 | 39,378,221 | 1 | 2 | 39,366,542 | train | <story><title>Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/business/bob-moore-dead.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>In the defense of YC by modern neoliberalist definition bob was a terrible businessman. The company&#x27;s only worth 50 million, he ran up debts so large it required a partner to bail him out, the company never went public or sold to large agricultural interests to maximize shareholder value, and he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding. he focused on an unprofitable cadre of niche markets.<p>Bob was a great guy though and a sterling example of a leader who really cared about his product and his customers.</text></item><item><author>billiam</author><text>For all you founders and YC aspirants who build companies to get rich as quickly as possible: think of what this man achieved and the lives that have been changed by creating something built to last. By not extracting maximum labor from employees and maximum cash for yourselves but by recognizing you matter less than you think to your company&#x27;s success and your employees matter more. I buy Bob&#x27;s Red Mills flour a few times a year and probably will for the rest of my life. TextPayMe, Loopt, Infogami, Memamp, Simmery- do we even remember what those first YC companies tried to do? Think about making things people will remember in a decade, or even 4.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotBen</author><text><i>&quot;to maximize shareholder value&quot;</i><p>You know, philosophically speaking, not every company has to do that. And before someone steps in and quotes &#x27;fiduciary responsibility for shareholder returns&#x27;, I&#x27;m a VC and I run a VC fund so I&#x27;m acutely aware.<p>Now, if you take venture funding then that&#x27;s a different story. But there are countless businesses - from small mom+pop to larger ones like Bob&#x27;s Red Mills - which are operating for higher purposes than just shareholder returns. See B Corps generally. And the world is better place for it. I tuck into a bowl of Bob&#x27;s oatmeal every morning and I&#x27;ll be fucked if I&#x27;m buying Great Mills or PepsiCo (Quaker Oats) big company shit.<p><i>&quot;he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding&quot;</i><p>Many would say this was anything but a cardinal sin. Try reading fewer Ayn Rand books.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/business/bob-moore-dead.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimbius</author><text>In the defense of YC by modern neoliberalist definition bob was a terrible businessman. The company&#x27;s only worth 50 million, he ran up debts so large it required a partner to bail him out, the company never went public or sold to large agricultural interests to maximize shareholder value, and he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding. he focused on an unprofitable cadre of niche markets.<p>Bob was a great guy though and a sterling example of a leader who really cared about his product and his customers.</text></item><item><author>billiam</author><text>For all you founders and YC aspirants who build companies to get rich as quickly as possible: think of what this man achieved and the lives that have been changed by creating something built to last. By not extracting maximum labor from employees and maximum cash for yourselves but by recognizing you matter less than you think to your company&#x27;s success and your employees matter more. I buy Bob&#x27;s Red Mills flour a few times a year and probably will for the rest of my life. TextPayMe, Loopt, Infogami, Memamp, Simmery- do we even remember what those first YC companies tried to do? Think about making things people will remember in a decade, or even 4.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>Other than running up too much debt and getting bailed out (is that functionally different from getting outside funding?), I don&#x27;t see any reason why these things are bad business.<p>Even if you&#x27;re a steely-eyed capitalist, you have to admit that these were wildly successful long-term investments in developing loyal lifelong customer base.<p>The only difference is that the time horizon on those investments are much longer than your typical VC or PE firm cares for.</text></comment> |
8,476,567 | 8,476,162 | 1 | 2 | 8,475,753 | train | <story><title>Towards Reliable Storage of 56-bit Secrets in Human Memory [pdf]</title><url>http://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-paper-bonneau.pdf</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>harshreality</author><text>1 and 2 are easy. Sort the words and use levenshtein distance to correct unrecognized words to the nearest valid word, prior to doing the password hashing. 3 is slightly more difficult; for 7-of-8 you&#x27;d have to store 9 hashes, one for the full list, and 8 more hashes resulting from removing one of the 8 words. What you gain in user friendliness costs you since you have to store several times the hashes, and you have to run multiple hash computations for each attempted login.<p>It should be noted that 1 and 3 both reduce entropy significantly.<p>A system that lets users omit one of the words in their passphrase will end up with users omitting one of the words all the time (why would you type more than you have to, particularly for passphrases of 20-40 characters?); the effective security of an 8 word passphrase with that system is worse than if it was a 7 word passphrase with no leeway for forgetting words. With a strict comparison but a passphrase of one less word, attacker then has to guess the right 7 words. By allowing a word to be forgotten, the attacker can guess any of 8 different 7-word passphrases and get in.<p>Any system that reminds you of the full passphrase has to store the passphrase unhashed (or equivalent, like, with each sub-hash, storing a hint for the missing word), which is unacceptable.</text></item><item><author>twotwotwo</author><text>Humans being the error-prone creatures we are, I wonder how it could work better to a longer word-based code, but allow for certain kinds of errors: for example, 1) word order doesn&#x27;t matter, 2) it tries to correct a word not in the built-in word list to the &quot;closest&quot; word in it, 3) maybe you only need, say, seven of the eight words to be right to get in (then it might remind you of the real code). You can do a little calculation to see how many words you need to get to the desired number of bits then.<p>Pretty different from passwords as we know them (#3 means you can&#x27;t simply store a bcrypt&#x2F;scrypt&#x27;d code--you could build something complicated tricks to square &quot;allow one word wrong&quot; with not storing plain PWs: each word is 10 bits and what you tell the user is really their secret code + a parity&#x2F;ECC word, and correction happens before a convnetional password check--that rabbit hole goes deep, though.) But if all this gets average folks remembering more entropy than before, that makes it kind of interesting.<p>On the study (which I admit just skimming), survey in 2010 suggested about half of Mechanical Turk users were located in the US (<a href="http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html)--folks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;new-demographi...</a> who learned English at school would probably do better at memorizing a password in their native language. (I studied French many years in school, but I doubt I&#x27;d memorize a set of random French words as easily as English words.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twotwotwo</author><text>Yeah, I did some rough calcs (after my anti-procrastination timer expired and I couldn&#x27;t waste more time here, haha). If you have ~1000 words, ~10 bits&#x2F;word, seven words is 70 bits, and you lose about 12 of those by allowing reordering, and obviously 10 if you let them flub a word (via a parity word or storing 8 hashes). Seven words could be 48 bits with both kinds of variation allowed, or 58 or 60 with only one kind allowed. It might also help users remember to give them limited choice of code (pick one of 4 or 8 codes, say), which could cost you up to 2-3 more bits (on the paranoid assumption that users will pick according to predictable patterns).<p>How much entropy you target depends on the system. If it needs to work as a crypto key, then you really need entropy, and good luck to you. (Maybe you have folks remember a piece and write a piece down, and use an expensive key scheduley thing to stretch the concatenated result out.) If it&#x27;s for a login system where you can rate-limit, then, hey, even 32 bits is a lot if the attacker has to wait one second between tries.<p>Just realized, if you use a parity word to recover from the user flubbing one word in a login system, you don&#x27;t need to store the cleartext in order to correct the word they missed--you just redo the parity calculation on the remaining words to recover it. Yay. Also, to recover after a parity error in a seven-word phrase, you have to check seven different potential passphrases (assume word 1 was erased, apply parity to recover it, check, repeat), so I guess it takes another three bits off your security on top of the 10 of losing a word.<p>On users just omitting a word all the time if the system lets them, I think 1) you require them to enter the full number of words every time, 2) if you see an error recoverable using parity, first you tell them which word was wrong and ask them to re-enter it, 3) if they still can&#x27;t get it, you tell them what the word was (shoulder-surfer issues obv) and they have to type it. Then you minimize how much you show, you (try to) keep the user from slowly forgetting the passphrase one word at a time, and you make sure that entering your whole passphrase is the fastest way to log in.<p>Though it&#x27;s nice what weird stuff you can do while keeping a hashed cred DB, if it were a login code (not crypto key) and there were big wins to other aspects of the system to keeping the clear version around (for example, it let you do some significantly better error-tolerance strategy), I&#x27;m not sure you have quite the same level of obligation around a random token that you give out specifically for your app as you do around a password the user entrusts you with that they also use elsewhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>Towards Reliable Storage of 56-bit Secrets in Human Memory [pdf]</title><url>http://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-paper-bonneau.pdf</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>harshreality</author><text>1 and 2 are easy. Sort the words and use levenshtein distance to correct unrecognized words to the nearest valid word, prior to doing the password hashing. 3 is slightly more difficult; for 7-of-8 you&#x27;d have to store 9 hashes, one for the full list, and 8 more hashes resulting from removing one of the 8 words. What you gain in user friendliness costs you since you have to store several times the hashes, and you have to run multiple hash computations for each attempted login.<p>It should be noted that 1 and 3 both reduce entropy significantly.<p>A system that lets users omit one of the words in their passphrase will end up with users omitting one of the words all the time (why would you type more than you have to, particularly for passphrases of 20-40 characters?); the effective security of an 8 word passphrase with that system is worse than if it was a 7 word passphrase with no leeway for forgetting words. With a strict comparison but a passphrase of one less word, attacker then has to guess the right 7 words. By allowing a word to be forgotten, the attacker can guess any of 8 different 7-word passphrases and get in.<p>Any system that reminds you of the full passphrase has to store the passphrase unhashed (or equivalent, like, with each sub-hash, storing a hint for the missing word), which is unacceptable.</text></item><item><author>twotwotwo</author><text>Humans being the error-prone creatures we are, I wonder how it could work better to a longer word-based code, but allow for certain kinds of errors: for example, 1) word order doesn&#x27;t matter, 2) it tries to correct a word not in the built-in word list to the &quot;closest&quot; word in it, 3) maybe you only need, say, seven of the eight words to be right to get in (then it might remind you of the real code). You can do a little calculation to see how many words you need to get to the desired number of bits then.<p>Pretty different from passwords as we know them (#3 means you can&#x27;t simply store a bcrypt&#x2F;scrypt&#x27;d code--you could build something complicated tricks to square &quot;allow one word wrong&quot; with not storing plain PWs: each word is 10 bits and what you tell the user is really their secret code + a parity&#x2F;ECC word, and correction happens before a convnetional password check--that rabbit hole goes deep, though.) But if all this gets average folks remembering more entropy than before, that makes it kind of interesting.<p>On the study (which I admit just skimming), survey in 2010 suggested about half of Mechanical Turk users were located in the US (<a href="http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html)--folks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;new-demographi...</a> who learned English at school would probably do better at memorizing a password in their native language. (I studied French many years in school, but I doubt I&#x27;d memorize a set of random French words as easily as English words.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jannic</author><text>The system may only store a hash of the correct password, and then try to brute force it with the entered (slightly wrong) password as a starting point.<p>This has several advantages:
- Nearly as secure as only accepting the correct password (as an attacker could do the brute forcing as well, without help from the system)
- Incentive for the user to remember and type the correct password, as logging in with an incorrect password takes longer
- After successfully brute forcing the password, the system can remind the user of the correct one - without having to store it!<p>Of course, this is not without disadvantages:
- Much more load on the server, which probably can&#x27;t be offloaded to the client without leaking the hash. (But perhaps it can, by offloading parts of the calculation to the client, and only doing the final comparison on the server.)
- Depends on efficiently generating a list of likely passwords given an imperfect starting point - one needs to develop a model of likely user errors.<p>Assuming 56 bit passwords, and 2^20 hashes per second, one could try all 4-bit-errors in 9s and all 5-bit-errors in 8min. But &#x27;all possible n-bit errors&#x27; is not a realistic measure, as errors wouldn&#x27;t be random.<p>56 bit would be about 10 random letters, and e.g. assuming that the only possible errors are omissions of letters, one could forget 3 letters and would still be able to login in about 1 minute. On the other hand, an attacker without any knowledge of the password would need ~2000 CPU years to brute force the password.
(Of course the values should be tuned according to the intended security level.)</text></comment> |
34,239,351 | 34,238,655 | 1 | 3 | 34,232,037 | train | <story><title>Men Without Work (2016)</title><url>https://time.com/4504004/men-without-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epups</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry, but I think your narrative is misguided. When you were 20,which was 30 years ago, it might have been less likely that you would get a stranger to change your tire. But it was much more likely you, rather than a woman, would find employment and especially reach a position of power. Which one do you think is more important for a satisfying life?<p>The fact that we are working towards a more equal society is not only a win for feminism, it is a win for humanity. Civilization has historically been built by men, as you say, because we used to believe that women were incapable of contributing equally. A big mistake, and a huge waste of potential talent.</text></item><item><author>lordfrito</author><text>My 2c.<p>Society doesn&#x27;t care about young men. They&#x27;re pretty much left to fend for themselves. Hopefully they have a good family structure, and a few good male friends. Without that they&#x27;re toally adrift.<p>I learned this lesson when I got a flat tire driving across two states when I was 20. No one is willing to help. I guarantee a 20 yo woman would have no problem flagging down help, heck people would stop to help without being asked.<p>I&#x27;m 51 now, and I understand why more and more men are checking out. The grind isn&#x27;t worth it. There&#x27;s a reward system in play here, you grind at life and are rewarded. Grind in school and you graduate. Grind more and you get a degree. Grind more and you get a family and career and some big toys.<p>It seems that the amount of grinding men have to do is increasing, and the net rewards society bestows seem to be decreasing. I won&#x27;t get into a shouting match on what the problems men experience are, you can fill in the blanks with your own experiences and biases, but all the men I know seem to agree that there seems to be less of an upside to sacrificing for the greater good than there used to be. As a middle aged man strangers I meet expect the worst from me, why should I try?<p>As an alternative you can spend your hours grinding away at video games and leveling up. And the games are getting better every year.<p>It seems to me that many young men are finding leveling up in games is simply more rewarding than leveling up in real life. I wish it weren&#x27;t so, but here we are.<p>Historically speaking, civilization is built and defended largely on the backs of young men. When they check out, it can&#x27;t be a net good for the trajectory of society.<p>Or maybe this is a win for feminism? Women finally have work equality and so men don&#x27;t have to work as hard anymore.<p>I don&#x27;t have answers. But the trend has been clear for a long while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinyl7</author><text>The problem is with basic male-female relationship dynamics within the concept of marriage&#x2F;family. Women are attracted to wealth and status, men are attracted to appearances. Now that women can build a career equal to men, not only do they find those men unattractive...they really have no need for a man, aside from procreation. With how expensive everything is getting, and requiring both couples to work full time careers just to be able afford a home, its just not manageable to bring children into the picture for most people. Forget about day care which costs $1500 a month.<p>What we&#x27;re seeing and will see more of is demographic changes similar to china where there are more elderly people and not enough young people to take over and care for the elderly.<p>Beyond demographic changes, there is something behind men needing a family to take care of that makes him have worth and gives him something to keep working for. Being a career slave for nothing is probably a big part of the suicide rate among men</text></comment> | <story><title>Men Without Work (2016)</title><url>https://time.com/4504004/men-without-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epups</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry, but I think your narrative is misguided. When you were 20,which was 30 years ago, it might have been less likely that you would get a stranger to change your tire. But it was much more likely you, rather than a woman, would find employment and especially reach a position of power. Which one do you think is more important for a satisfying life?<p>The fact that we are working towards a more equal society is not only a win for feminism, it is a win for humanity. Civilization has historically been built by men, as you say, because we used to believe that women were incapable of contributing equally. A big mistake, and a huge waste of potential talent.</text></item><item><author>lordfrito</author><text>My 2c.<p>Society doesn&#x27;t care about young men. They&#x27;re pretty much left to fend for themselves. Hopefully they have a good family structure, and a few good male friends. Without that they&#x27;re toally adrift.<p>I learned this lesson when I got a flat tire driving across two states when I was 20. No one is willing to help. I guarantee a 20 yo woman would have no problem flagging down help, heck people would stop to help without being asked.<p>I&#x27;m 51 now, and I understand why more and more men are checking out. The grind isn&#x27;t worth it. There&#x27;s a reward system in play here, you grind at life and are rewarded. Grind in school and you graduate. Grind more and you get a degree. Grind more and you get a family and career and some big toys.<p>It seems that the amount of grinding men have to do is increasing, and the net rewards society bestows seem to be decreasing. I won&#x27;t get into a shouting match on what the problems men experience are, you can fill in the blanks with your own experiences and biases, but all the men I know seem to agree that there seems to be less of an upside to sacrificing for the greater good than there used to be. As a middle aged man strangers I meet expect the worst from me, why should I try?<p>As an alternative you can spend your hours grinding away at video games and leveling up. And the games are getting better every year.<p>It seems to me that many young men are finding leveling up in games is simply more rewarding than leveling up in real life. I wish it weren&#x27;t so, but here we are.<p>Historically speaking, civilization is built and defended largely on the backs of young men. When they check out, it can&#x27;t be a net good for the trajectory of society.<p>Or maybe this is a win for feminism? Women finally have work equality and so men don&#x27;t have to work as hard anymore.<p>I don&#x27;t have answers. But the trend has been clear for a long while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ithkuil</author><text>I agree that shouldn&#x27;t be a zero sum game.<p>Yet, there are undoubtedly forces at play it that cause a significant fraction of men to feel disfranchised. We can blame that to reactionary forces, to the last blows of patriarchy, but ultimately it&#x27;s a real issue and unless we find a way to communicate across the ever deeper chasm the situation can only get more serious.</text></comment> |
29,776,547 | 29,776,104 | 1 | 2 | 29,775,023 | train | <story><title>An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)</title><url>https://malisper.me/an-algorithm-for-passing-programming-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arduinomancer</author><text>Interviews are really a dumb game these days so if you want to really game it you can go with a statistical approach:<p>* Practice questions by company on LeetCode, sort by frequency of last 6 months and work down the list, do maybe 75-100, the list updates once a week<p>* Search for the company on the LeetCode forums and sort by most recent. If a question is not on LC yet it will likely get posted there, so you can get really fresh intel.<p>I&#x27;ve read of people doing this and getting like 6&#x2F;6 questions they&#x27;ve seen before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>o10449366</author><text>No, if you really want to game it you sign up for membership on Chinese forums where people post the questions word for word minutes after completing the interview. That or work exclusively with private recruiters that tell you the questions verbatim because they have a vested interest in you passing.<p>Interview questions don&#x27;t rotate that frequently, especially for smaller companies or more specialized roles, and a $60 membership for a month will buy you internal referrals and potentially land you hundreds of thousands of dollars of value in a new position.</text></comment> | <story><title>An Algorithm for Passing Programming Interviews (2020)</title><url>https://malisper.me/an-algorithm-for-passing-programming-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arduinomancer</author><text>Interviews are really a dumb game these days so if you want to really game it you can go with a statistical approach:<p>* Practice questions by company on LeetCode, sort by frequency of last 6 months and work down the list, do maybe 75-100, the list updates once a week<p>* Search for the company on the LeetCode forums and sort by most recent. If a question is not on LC yet it will likely get posted there, so you can get really fresh intel.<p>I&#x27;ve read of people doing this and getting like 6&#x2F;6 questions they&#x27;ve seen before.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diehunde</author><text>Many people say this. But the reality is that solving 100 LC questions and actually understand the solution enough to solve a variation of the problem is a lot of work. Especially if you are working full-time. I wouldn&#x27;t call that &quot;game it&quot;, just usual study and hard work.</text></comment> |
11,280,473 | 11,279,579 | 1 | 3 | 11,279,382 | train | <story><title>Small Memory Software: Patterns for systems with limited memory</title><url>http://www.smallmemory.com/book.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>The one thing that I was strongly expecting but didn&#x27;t seem to find any mention of when I was quickly paging through is the idea of using simpler, constant-space algorithms (e.g. streaming style, keeping only what&#x27;s needed in memory) and in general <i>reducing the amount of code and data</i>.<p>Likewise, the use of C++ and Java in a book about &quot;limited memory&quot; is a bit unusual.<p>Then again, I&#x27;m <i>really</i> not keen on the whole &quot;patterns&quot; thing, because from experience I&#x27;ve found it tends to replace careful thought with dogmatic application of rules that might not be relevant at all to the situation at hand.</text></comment> | <story><title>Small Memory Software: Patterns for systems with limited memory</title><url>http://www.smallmemory.com/book.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fiatjaf</author><text>At least this serves to remind people they must think about memory, at least sometimes. The rule today seems to be to use as much memory as possible, load gigantic frameworks or use super-heavy languages for the most simple of tasks. I only notice because my computer do not have all the memory a normal modern computer has.</text></comment> |
29,725,685 | 29,725,169 | 1 | 3 | 29,724,414 | train | <story><title>Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)</title><url>https://soccermatics.medium.com/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alkonaut</author><text>The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you <i>think</i> of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative <i>especially</i> if the categories don’t even offer any behavioral insight.<p>But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research.<p>A bit like every single diet works (compared to no diet) because the fundamental thing is dieting in the sense that you think actively about diet.<p>As for this book: It’s a pretty useless book, but I can see how it’s appealing. I can’t see how it being unscientific makes it worse than 90% of similar books in the bookstore. This is a pop book you read on a plane. It’s not a scientific publication. If he claims it’s solid science that’s obviously bad, but I’m sure all the mindfulness and yoga books do too - and all of those are certainly not very scientific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NikolaNovak</author><text>I have a friend who&#x27;s tremendously into astrology. After years of arguments etc I had a moment of enlightment when I realized she practically uses it more as descriptive model rather than predictive source of truth. I. E. She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people. From that perspective, there&#x27;s a sense where a summarizing framework is beneficial.<p>Almost every high level executive I met that&#x27;s actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it&#x27;s the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever. The fact it has no scientific backing has no bearing in them &quot;knowing its true&quot; , but it also doesn&#x27;t limit it being a useful if self fulfilling framework. And though we can accurately argue that system is stacked in what it rewards, these are leaders who genuinely do care and do well by their team. More than anything, it makes me introspect what does it mean for a model to &quot;work&quot;, because I deeply believe that these models are pseudo scientific garbage, overly simplifying and random bs&#x27;s confirmation of existing bias... But I&#x27;ve also had tons of personal anecdotal evidence they &quot;work&quot; or &quot;help&quot; - again, not just in self fulfilling or pegging into square hole way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)</title><url>https://soccermatics.medium.com/how-swedes-were-fooled-by-one-of-the-biggest-scientific-bluffs-of-our-time-de47c82601ad</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alkonaut</author><text>The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you <i>think</i> of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative <i>especially</i> if the categories don’t even offer any behavioral insight.<p>But something tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research.<p>A bit like every single diet works (compared to no diet) because the fundamental thing is dieting in the sense that you think actively about diet.<p>As for this book: It’s a pretty useless book, but I can see how it’s appealing. I can’t see how it being unscientific makes it worse than 90% of similar books in the bookstore. This is a pop book you read on a plane. It’s not a scientific publication. If he claims it’s solid science that’s obviously bad, but I’m sure all the mindfulness and yoga books do too - and all of those are certainly not very scientific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HPsquared</author><text>Arbitrarily dividing people into groups with defined roles is the basis of the &quot;Noble Lie&quot; in Plato&#x27;s Republic. In that, people are defined as having souls made of gold, silver or iron&#x2F;bronze.<p>The idea of giving people a role that they can focus on, from an early age, has some advantages. Of course pigeonholing people has a wide range of disadvantages; everything is a trade-off.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plato%27s_five_regimes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plato%27s_five_regimes</a></text></comment> |
13,951,215 | 13,951,258 | 1 | 3 | 13,950,002 | train | <story><title>Google Talk Is Being Discontinued</title><url>https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g-suite-to-streamline-hangouts-and-gmail.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>Here&#x27;s what I don&#x27;t get about Google.<p>A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they&#x27;re all dead.<p>Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and lightweight chat app, right in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the time!<p>Google has <i>failed</i> to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it&#x27;s proprietary. This time, it&#x27;s much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones?<p>So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and they used their Android market share to do that. People didn&#x27;t like it, still used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because everybody&#x27;s gotta reinvent the wheel.<p>You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn&#x27;t up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it&#x27;s a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything. Who&#x27;s making these decisions exactly?<p>Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it&#x27;s honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discordapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discordapp.com&#x2F;</a>) for essentially all my communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms tech, even as an open protocol). It&#x27;s proprietary, but at least it gives me text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn&#x27;t suck - and there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmerl</author><text>Not just failed. Google betrayed XMPP. You can blame Eric Schmidt for it. He gave some lame speech about how other instant messaging services aren&#x27;t playing fair, so Google should also become a walled garden. And that was it. They made Hangouts and stopped caring about federated IM idea.<p>It&#x27;s a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We&#x27;d be stuck with incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever.<p>And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it&#x27;s not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn&#x27;t they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; is off the table I suppose.<p>People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I&#x27;m really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Talk Is Being Discontinued</title><url>https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/03/updates-in-g-suite-to-streamline-hangouts-and-gmail.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>Here&#x27;s what I don&#x27;t get about Google.<p>A few years ago, they were one of the only players in the IM game, alongside MSN, AOL IM, ICQ... have you heard about any of these lately? Of course not, they&#x27;re all dead.<p>Talk was built on top of XMPP, an open protocol, which helped its popularity as third party clients could connect to it. Talk was also built in to gmail, and at the time that was revolutionary: A fast and lightweight chat app, right in your browser. In (one of?) the most popular mail service providers at the time!<p>Google has <i>failed</i> to capitalize on any of that. They completely ignored Talk. But then when Facebook did the same thing, oh suddenly they had to compete. So they rebuilt Talk on top of a new protocol. This time, it&#x27;s proprietary. This time, it&#x27;s much slower in the browser. Oh and you lose half your contacts if you upgrade to it. But at least now it works on phones?<p>So they tried building this new closed chat ecosystem for no good reason, and they used their Android market share to do that. People didn&#x27;t like it, still used Whatsapp, still used FB Messenger, still used Viber, and the now hundreds of alternatives there are, all incompatible with one another because everybody&#x27;s gotta reinvent the wheel.<p>You know, I can get behind that XMPP wasn&#x27;t up to the task - I tried dealing with XMPP myself and it&#x27;s a frustrating piece of work. But the way Google has treated IM is appalling. Really backwards. They built a good product, then completely ignored it, then built another in an attempt to reinvent it and become more locked down, butchered the old one and are now losing everything. Who&#x27;s making these decisions exactly?<p>Matrix is probably our best bet when it comes to open chat protocols, but it&#x27;s honestly not mainstream ready. In the mean time, I use Discord (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discordapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discordapp.com&#x2F;</a>) for essentially all my communications. I have completely moved off Talk, Hangouts, Skype and even most of IRC (which has frankly fallen way too far behind more recent comms tech, even as an open protocol). It&#x27;s proprietary, but at least it gives me text+voice (+ soon video) and doesn&#x27;t suck - and there is no open choice I can make at this point that is approachable enough that I can convert people to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munin</author><text>Don&#x27;t forget Allo in the mix, from Google, that could replace Hangouts! Take a product people use, and replace it with something people don&#x27;t, then replace that with something that people also don&#x27;t use.</text></comment> |
35,816,847 | 35,816,759 | 1 | 2 | 35,815,538 | train | <story><title>Europeans drain billions from banks, fed up with shrinking savings</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/fed-up-with-shrinking-savings-europeans-drain-billions-banks-2023-05-04/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huhtenberg</author><text>Stocks dividends are now in 5-10% range, e.g. Verizon is at 7%.<p>Obviously, markets are volatile and are in &quot;search of direction&quot;, but quite a few dividend-paying stocks are trading at near 5-10 year low, so picking them up is not that much of a gamble if your investment horizon is long.</text></item><item><author>ab_testing</author><text>So, where are they putting in the money. Reading the article, it is not very clear, but it looks like there a slight shift from Savings Accounts to Money Market Accounts. In the end, I think it is just shuffling money between banks. Nobody is stuffing their money in the mattress anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unmole</author><text>3 Month US T-bills are above 5% and much closer to money in the bank than picking random stocks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Europeans drain billions from banks, fed up with shrinking savings</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/fed-up-with-shrinking-savings-europeans-drain-billions-banks-2023-05-04/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huhtenberg</author><text>Stocks dividends are now in 5-10% range, e.g. Verizon is at 7%.<p>Obviously, markets are volatile and are in &quot;search of direction&quot;, but quite a few dividend-paying stocks are trading at near 5-10 year low, so picking them up is not that much of a gamble if your investment horizon is long.</text></item><item><author>ab_testing</author><text>So, where are they putting in the money. Reading the article, it is not very clear, but it looks like there a slight shift from Savings Accounts to Money Market Accounts. In the end, I think it is just shuffling money between banks. Nobody is stuffing their money in the mattress anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>loeg</author><text>Stocks, even blue chip ones, have a very different risk profile from money in the bank.</text></comment> |
16,708,251 | 16,707,019 | 1 | 3 | 16,703,821 | train | <story><title>How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry</title><url>https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/27/17168088/cheap-storage-warehouse-self-storage-real-estate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasingthewind</author><text>I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units &quot;junk&quot; is a moral judgement that&#x27;s repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis.<p>In the end, there&#x27;s no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good money after bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spooky23</author><text>It&#x27;s junk if you don&#x27;t know what it is. My sister&#x27;s mother-in-law spends about $1000&#x2F;mo on storage units in 6 cities. They were a military family and moved frequently.<p>The problem is that they don&#x27;t remember what is in the storage units, and the cost of traveling across the country to go through a closet is steep and of questionable value. So she is stuck in a cycle of paying for things that she may or may not need. My understanding is that many people are in similar circumstances.</text></comment> | <story><title>How warehouses for personal junk became a $38B industry</title><url>https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/27/17168088/cheap-storage-warehouse-self-storage-real-estate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasingthewind</author><text>I try to be pretty slow to criticize people for taking advantage of a service that they find valuable. Calling things in these storage units &quot;junk&quot; is a moral judgement that&#x27;s repeated a bit early on and then cast off to make room for the more mundane rundown of the market analysis.<p>In the end, there&#x27;s no way to know the ratio of people getting good value out of this storage to the number of people throwing good money after bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patentatt</author><text>Sure, what if the rent&#x2F;mortgage you pay per square foot in your home is greater than the rent for a storage locker down the road? And there are reasonable use cases for medium-long term storage, such as seasonal items. I don&#x27;t know how many people use them this way, but I can see reasonable uses too.</text></comment> |
40,437,391 | 40,437,432 | 1 | 3 | 40,436,651 | train | <story><title>Scandal at America's top science fair</title><url>https://www.karlstack.com/p/exclusive-scandal-at-americas-top</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snickerbockers</author><text>&gt;Everyone makes mistakes — Lord knows I did plenty of stupid, immoral things when I was 17 — and there is always the opportunity for growth and redemption.<p>when did the definition of &#x27;mistake&#x27; change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.<p>i don&#x27;t mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn&#x27;t be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he&#x27;s a teenager, but let&#x27;s not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>physicles</author><text>Those stupid, immoral things that the author did at 17 were also done on purpose. The mistake is in the reasoning that led to the decision to do the action.<p>Pai&#x27;s mistake was _deciding_ to commit research fraud, and then doing it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Scandal at America's top science fair</title><url>https://www.karlstack.com/p/exclusive-scandal-at-americas-top</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snickerbockers</author><text>&gt;Everyone makes mistakes — Lord knows I did plenty of stupid, immoral things when I was 17 — and there is always the opportunity for growth and redemption.<p>when did the definition of &#x27;mistake&#x27; change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.<p>i don&#x27;t mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn&#x27;t be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he&#x27;s a teenager, but let&#x27;s not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smogcutter</author><text>Most mistakes aren’t accidents, plenty of accidents aren’t mistakes.</text></comment> |
19,026,634 | 19,026,475 | 1 | 2 | 19,025,871 | train | <story><title>I abused 2FA to maintain persistence after a password change</title><url>https://medium.com/@lukeberner/7e3f455b71a1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elcomet</author><text>I think this attack is slightly overrated by the other commenters (and those that say it defeats 2FA are wrong).<p>Here is the scenario he posted:<p><pre><code> &gt; An Attacker enables 2FA in Victim’s account.
&gt; In another browser, Attacker waits indefinitely in the 2FA input page (Image 1).
&gt; Attacker disables 2FA.
&gt; The Victim regains access to the account (changing password &amp; resetting sessions)
&gt; Then the Attacker could input a valid 2FA code and have access again to the account, without knowing the current password.
</code></pre>
So to summarize:<p>- The attacker needs the password of an account that is <i>not protected by 2FA</i>.<p>- It allows the attacker to stay connected after a password change (usually, when a password change occurs, it logs out the user of all platforms).<p>In fact, 2FA protects you from this vulnerability : just activate it for your account and you are not vulnerable to this attack (the attacker cannot connect to your account in the first place, since he doesn&#x27;t control 2FA tokens).<p>Moreover, if your account doesn&#x27;t have 2FA and someone finds out your password, well I think you are already deep in trouble (the attacker could do many more things, since he&#x27;s already connected).<p>So this attack is still a big deal (the user can&#x27;t disconnect you) but it doesn&#x27;t break 2FA security at all. It just adds a vulnerability to accounts that don&#x27;t have 2FA enabled.</text></comment> | <story><title>I abused 2FA to maintain persistence after a password change</title><url>https://medium.com/@lukeberner/7e3f455b71a1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>donalhunt</author><text>Instagram: &quot;[the attack] seems unlikely to happen commonly, making this more of a theoretical attack. The protection in this case is to not allow someone to steal your password&quot;<p>LOL<p>Isn&#x27;t the whole point of MFA to protect the theft of the one of the authentication tokens? and the password is the most likely to be stolen &#x2F; compromised imho.</text></comment> |
39,677,969 | 39,677,049 | 1 | 3 | 39,676,030 | train | <story><title>No installation required: how WebAssembly is changing scientific computing</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00725-1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>firtoz</author><text>&gt; For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says.<p>I am surprised by the memory and 32 bit limitations... Are there plans to overcome them?<p>Edit: found it, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikewarot</author><text>&gt;Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections.<p>Those are its two strongest features, not bugs. If you&#x27;re not going to respect those, just use native code, and the broken ambient authority model of computing, which never works out in the long run.<p>Edit: The article doesn&#x27;t focus much on these limitations, but I think that putting up with the current limitations of WASM in terms of memory size or lack of threading might suck, but it&#x27;s worth the ability to just try things out and run them without risking your whole computer.<p>Younger folks who never had a PC with only write protectable floppy drives missed out on a wonderful care-free period when you could just TRY OUT any new software, and your other data was safe, no matter what.</text></comment> | <story><title>No installation required: how WebAssembly is changing scientific computing</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00725-1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>firtoz</author><text>&gt; For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says.<p>I am surprised by the memory and 32 bit limitations... Are there plans to overcome them?<p>Edit: found it, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Extigy</author><text>Similarly for threads: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;webassembly&#x2F;threads">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;webassembly&#x2F;threads</a></text></comment> |
26,218,648 | 26,218,446 | 1 | 2 | 26,217,564 | train | <story><title>Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39309/the-apparent-hackers-behind-kias-ransomware-attack-are-demanding-millions-in-bitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it&#x27;s the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.<p>Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well.<p>In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there&#x27;s no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that&#x27;s what is in it. There&#x27;s no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn&#x27;t pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>prostoalex</author><text>&gt; allowed full usage of their battery.<p>I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.<p>If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren&#x27;t they endangering the drivers of the budget version?</text></item><item><author>grawprog</author><text>The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly &#x27;phones home&#x27; without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why after this people weren&#x27;t in an uproar.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;business&#x2F;tesla-battery-irma-upgrade.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;business&#x2F;tesla-battery-ir...</a><p>When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.<p>People&#x27;s lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.<p>The fact that it&#x27;s come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn&#x27;t they&#x27;d suffer bad publicity is disgusting.<p>And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.<p>People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text><i>As we noted previously, it means that many Kia owners may be unable to remotely unlock their vehicles or warm them up during an especially nasty winter storm hitting much of the country this week.</i><p>Cars had remote unlock and start <i>decades</i> ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with <i>zero</i> dependence on what appears to be the company&#x27;s servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios (&quot;your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it&quot;). Have we gone backwards...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jay_kyburz</author><text>It feels wrong because it is wrong. When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. When you buy something, you should own the hardware and should be free to do what you want with it.<p>I would like governments to make this clear in law, but I understand why some people feel might feel this is an overreach.<p>We can try and avoid buying hardware that has software restrictions, but without laws ensuring we can run whatever software we want on our hardware, manufacturers will take these rights away from us.<p>We are living in an age of environmental catastrophe, and I think we need to appreciate our physical things more, build them to last, and have laws that help us get the most out of the things we build.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin</title><url>https://www.thedrive.com/tech/39309/the-apparent-hackers-behind-kias-ransomware-attack-are-demanding-millions-in-bitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it&#x27;s the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.<p>Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well.<p>In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there&#x27;s no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that&#x27;s what is in it. There&#x27;s no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn&#x27;t pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.</text></item><item><author>prostoalex</author><text>&gt; allowed full usage of their battery.<p>I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.<p>If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren&#x27;t they endangering the drivers of the budget version?</text></item><item><author>grawprog</author><text>The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly &#x27;phones home&#x27; without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why after this people weren&#x27;t in an uproar.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;business&#x2F;tesla-battery-irma-upgrade.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;business&#x2F;tesla-battery-ir...</a><p>When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.<p>People&#x27;s lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.<p>The fact that it&#x27;s come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn&#x27;t they&#x27;d suffer bad publicity is disgusting.<p>And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.<p>People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text><i>As we noted previously, it means that many Kia owners may be unable to remotely unlock their vehicles or warm them up during an especially nasty winter storm hitting much of the country this week.</i><p>Cars had remote unlock and start <i>decades</i> ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with <i>zero</i> dependence on what appears to be the company&#x27;s servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios (&quot;your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it&quot;). Have we gone backwards...?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>On the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right? So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.</text></comment> |
35,967,959 | 35,967,969 | 1 | 3 | 35,967,549 | train | <story><title>Steam Now Offers 90-Minute Game Trials</title><url>https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-now-offers-90-minute-game-trials-starting-with-dead-space/1100-6514177/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OkayPhysicist</author><text>I&#x27;m curious to see if publishers will be willing to opt into this. On one hand, letting someone sit through the install time and see if they enjoy the game before paying for it probably significantly reduces the hurdle of &quot;hmm, do I really want this game&quot; for many consumers. On the other hand, if your PC port is a shameless, unoptimized moneygrab then players realizing that fact might balk rather than committing to actually buying the game.<p>It could also end up encouraging longer &quot;tutorial&quot; sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>progbits</author><text>Valve will refund any Steam purchase if made within 2 weeks and with less than 2 hours play time (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;steam_refunds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;steam_refunds&#x2F;</a>).<p>Therefore this doesn&#x27;t really change much when it comes to realization that the game sucks very early on.<p>I suppose there is some small risk difference between &quot;play 90 minutes for free, then decide to pay&quot; vs &quot;play 120 minutes for full game price, then get it back&quot;. But in my experience and from what I&#x27;ve heard over the years the refund policy is reliably honored.</text></comment> | <story><title>Steam Now Offers 90-Minute Game Trials</title><url>https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-now-offers-90-minute-game-trials-starting-with-dead-space/1100-6514177/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>OkayPhysicist</author><text>I&#x27;m curious to see if publishers will be willing to opt into this. On one hand, letting someone sit through the install time and see if they enjoy the game before paying for it probably significantly reduces the hurdle of &quot;hmm, do I really want this game&quot; for many consumers. On the other hand, if your PC port is a shameless, unoptimized moneygrab then players realizing that fact might balk rather than committing to actually buying the game.<p>It could also end up encouraging longer &quot;tutorial&quot; sections at the beginning of games, which you can aggressively optimize to give players a misplaced confidence that their computers can run the game effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metalang</author><text>Steam already offers no questions asked refunds if a game is played for under 2 hours (and based on my experience will give refunds outside of that policy if the game won&#x27;t run).</text></comment> |
1,891,978 | 1,891,150 | 1 | 3 | 1,890,876 | train | <story><title>Flash Mob gone wrong</title><url>http://ashitvora.info/flash-mob-gone-wrong</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danw</author><text>Original source: <a href="http://www.tomscott.com/mob/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomscott.com/mob/</a>. From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source". That's not quite the same as embedding something in your own blog and then submitting your own blog.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flash Mob gone wrong</title><url>http://ashitvora.info/flash-mob-gone-wrong</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tvon</author><text>I don't care for this, it reminds me of slapping an "e-" prefix on something just to indicate that it's now somehow "internet ready".<p>More to the point, people acting like idiots is nothing new, but I think we'd all still be shocked if this actually happened, just like we'd be shocked if any kind of gathering resulted in a riot and 23 people dead.</text></comment> |
29,223,346 | 29,222,727 | 1 | 2 | 29,219,042 | train | <story><title>California plans to turn the screws on NIMBY cities</title><url>https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-california-plans-to-turn-the-screws-on-nimby-cities/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rank0</author><text>The youngsters are free to live elsewhere no? I just purchased my first home earlier this year. Obviously I had no choice but to purchase a home in a city&#x2F;neighborhood I could afford. Why can’t others do the same?</text></item><item><author>azinman2</author><text>That’s been the mentality in SF for years — “we don’t want to become nyc”. And so what happens? Prices skyrocket, the people who made the city interesting and serve its needs are pushed out, and only the rich enjoy it. The young generation as a whole has little hope of home ownership, while the top who work in well paid jobs reap all the rewards. Those well paid jobs are where it’s expensive to live, so it’s a catch 22. It doesn’t create a balanced society, and in fact just further stresses the differences between the haves versus the have nots. At it’s worst the wealth inequality turns into tinder for moving beyond culture wars into actual war or revolution.</text></item><item><author>rank0</author><text>One thing I don’t understand about the housing debate is why any specific area needs to be “affordable”<p>If I can’t afford to live in an area, it seems to me the solution is to live somewhere else.<p>Maybe I’m missing something. I’m open to new ideas here but I really don’t get it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tcmart14</author><text>A number of different factors that vary for people depending on circumstances. My wife is in nursing school. Sure, we could move to some rural town in Montana when she finishes, but its not reasonable if the closest hospital is 4 hours away. Some of the more affordable places just don&#x27;t have good access to jobs people want or are qualified for.<p>I myself work full time and am going to school for Software Engineering. Right now job prospects in where I would like move don&#x27;t look great since the last job fair I attended, I got the feeling most companies are planning to axe remote work ASAP. Which then limits my ability to move in the market place for jobs.</text></comment> | <story><title>California plans to turn the screws on NIMBY cities</title><url>https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-california-plans-to-turn-the-screws-on-nimby-cities/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rank0</author><text>The youngsters are free to live elsewhere no? I just purchased my first home earlier this year. Obviously I had no choice but to purchase a home in a city&#x2F;neighborhood I could afford. Why can’t others do the same?</text></item><item><author>azinman2</author><text>That’s been the mentality in SF for years — “we don’t want to become nyc”. And so what happens? Prices skyrocket, the people who made the city interesting and serve its needs are pushed out, and only the rich enjoy it. The young generation as a whole has little hope of home ownership, while the top who work in well paid jobs reap all the rewards. Those well paid jobs are where it’s expensive to live, so it’s a catch 22. It doesn’t create a balanced society, and in fact just further stresses the differences between the haves versus the have nots. At it’s worst the wealth inequality turns into tinder for moving beyond culture wars into actual war or revolution.</text></item><item><author>rank0</author><text>One thing I don’t understand about the housing debate is why any specific area needs to be “affordable”<p>If I can’t afford to live in an area, it seems to me the solution is to live somewhere else.<p>Maybe I’m missing something. I’m open to new ideas here but I really don’t get it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idreyn</author><text>Others are free to do the same, except that they have to continue to commute to where the jobs are. If they&#x27;re lucky they might live on the fringes of BART but increasingly people are just condemned to hours-long gridlocked freeway commutes to get to their $17&#x2F;hr job in SF. To recover any kind of decent quality of life you&#x27;re talking about moving to a different region&#x2F;state.</text></comment> |
20,390,735 | 20,389,930 | 1 | 2 | 20,389,077 | train | <story><title>Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar</title><url>https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GTn8p4GxT9gJ:https://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/3078458/the-worst-move-from-microsoft-in-30-years-mpn-changes-spark-uproar</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wayoutthere</author><text>This is all intentional. They’re basically killing off their reseller model in favor of self-service for small clients.<p>When selling SKUs, a reseller model is great. They do the hard work of finding and converting long-tail leads, and all you have to give up is a little margin. When selling cloud subscriptions it becomes a burden — you have to continually pay overhead for your partners to manage your customers. Customer support expectations are low in the cloud (AWS provides minimal support, so MS can too).<p>Microsoft has been investing in customer-facing solution architects for this reason. They are investing dedicated resources in their big accounts, and are driving their partner strategy through the big consultancies rather than small MSPs. Their strategy seems to be one of landing a lot of “big fish;” which isn’t hard to do with a lot of big customers backtracking G-Suite to Office 365. From what I’ve seen, it’s working: Google simply doesn’t have the kind of relationships in the enterprise IT world that Microsoft does.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft Partner Network changes spark uproar</title><url>https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GTn8p4GxT9gJ:https://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/3078458/the-worst-move-from-microsoft-in-30-years-mpn-changes-spark-uproar</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>Quoting Wikipedia:<p>&gt; <i>Microsoft Partner Network or MPN [...] is designed to make resources available to a wide variety of technology companies so they can build a business around Microsoft technologies.</i><p>I suspect the matter of the &quot;worst move in 30 years&quot; article will get straightened out, and won&#x27;t seem nearly as bad as the title suggests.<p>A backstab would be SOP for much of the last 30 years of MS, but I&#x27;d be surprised if they&#x27;re going to throw away a lot of the developer goodwill they&#x27;ve been acquiring recently.<p>Right now, I get the impression that a sizable chunk of HN think of MS as good-natured fellow developers who run GitHub and share an IDE, and that chunk has little awareness of earlier history (and how relieved a lot of people were by the escape route that the Web and Linux provided).<p>Why would MS spoil that goodwill, by alerting all those developers to the proven business pattern of waiting until your partner&#x2F;customer has built their business around you, before you do whatever you want to them?<p>Whether MS will someday lose their current goodwill, I don&#x27;t know, but the timing doesn&#x27;t seem right (unless someone is really desperate for short-term numbers).</text></comment> |
21,415,887 | 21,414,619 | 1 | 2 | 21,411,893 | train | <story><title>We need new data books, so we started one: Cloud Data Management</title><url>https://chartio.com/blog/cloud-data-management-book-launch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameslk</author><text>One of the experiences that stuck with me most going from doing software engineering stuff to data engineering stuff is the very difficult and sometimes complete lack of tooling around testing and debugging issues in SQL and pipelines. As software engineers, we have debuggers, unit testing, mocking frameworks, e2e tools, BDD languages like Cucumber, code quality tools, etc. But when you&#x27;re working on a pipeline and you&#x27;re wondering what will happen if you run it, sometimes your best bet is actually to just run it and wait 20 min for it to complete. Or run some portion of it ad hoc. Or if you want to know what a SQL query is going to do in the black box of your query engine, you might try to parse the esoteric language of a query explainer. The best tools seem to be available after deployment such as data quality tests, dashboards and alerts. I think there&#x27;s a lot of opportunity to improve the ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisweekly</author><text>Agreed. Outside the world of ML (but working with reasonably large data, ie a few billion rows of server log entries in varying formats) I had some success grabbing a narrow slice (single-digit millions) and experimenting w&#x2F; ways to query it using combination of regex and SQL, thanks to an amazing little powertool called lnav (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lnav.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lnav.org</a>). It&#x27;s like an intuitive, scriptable, mini-ETL on the commandline you can learn in no time. I once used it to track down the root cause of a p0 in prod, in parallel to the ops gurus and most senior devs using dedicated tools and processes; we arrived at the same conclusion around the same time, and the stuff I&#x27;d extracted helped speed the patch. Felt pretty good, and I&#x27;ve been singing lnav&#x27;s praises ever since.<p>Shoot I must be getting old, rambling on a tangent. Get off my lawn! ;)</text></comment> | <story><title>We need new data books, so we started one: Cloud Data Management</title><url>https://chartio.com/blog/cloud-data-management-book-launch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameslk</author><text>One of the experiences that stuck with me most going from doing software engineering stuff to data engineering stuff is the very difficult and sometimes complete lack of tooling around testing and debugging issues in SQL and pipelines. As software engineers, we have debuggers, unit testing, mocking frameworks, e2e tools, BDD languages like Cucumber, code quality tools, etc. But when you&#x27;re working on a pipeline and you&#x27;re wondering what will happen if you run it, sometimes your best bet is actually to just run it and wait 20 min for it to complete. Or run some portion of it ad hoc. Or if you want to know what a SQL query is going to do in the black box of your query engine, you might try to parse the esoteric language of a query explainer. The best tools seem to be available after deployment such as data quality tests, dashboards and alerts. I think there&#x27;s a lot of opportunity to improve the ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heroHACK17</author><text>Writing this comment as I &#x27;actually run it and wait 20 min for it to complete.&#x27;</text></comment> |
14,757,303 | 14,756,333 | 1 | 2 | 14,754,829 | train | <story><title>ZFS Is the Best Filesystem For Now</title><url>http://blog.fosketts.net/2017/07/10/zfs-best-filesystem-now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>floatboth</author><text>&gt; ZFS never really adapted to today’s world of widely-available flash storage: Although flash can be used to support the ZIL and L2ARC caches, these are of dubious value in a system with sufficient RAM, and ZFS has no true hybrid storage capability.<p>How is L2ARC not &quot;true hybrid&quot;?<p>&gt; And no one is talking about NVMe even though it’s everywhere in performance PC’s.<p>Why should a filesystem care about NVMe? It&#x27;s a different layer. ZFS generally doesn&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s IDE, SATA, NVMe or a microSD card.<p>&gt; can be a pain to use (except in FreeBSD, Solaris, and purpose-built appliances)<p>I think it&#x27;s just a package install away on many Linux distros? Also installable on macOS — I had a ZFS USB disk I shared between Mac and FreeBSD.<p>Also it&#x27;s interesting that these two sentences appear in the same article:<p>&gt; best level of data protection in a small office&#x2F;home office (SOHO) environment.<p>&gt; It’s laughable that the ZFS documentation obsesses over a few GB of SLC flash when multi-TB 3D NAND drives are on the market<p>Who has enough money to get a mutli-TB SSD for SOHO?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raattgift</author><text>&gt; How is L2ARC not &quot;true hybrid&quot;?<p>It doesn&#x27;t persist across import&#x2F;export or reboot.<p>It is demand-filled.<p>Not all data in the main vdevs are eligible for l2arc.<p>There is memory overhead for l2arc buffers.<p>There is CPU overhead in processing l2arc headers.<p>Once a buffer is in l2arc it stays in l2arc until the underlying data is overwritten or destroyed, or until the l2arc has filled up and the buffer is replaced with fresher data.<p>A true hybrid in the zfs context would let one pin a dataset or zvol onto a particular vdev, or pin only the (zfs) metadata (or a subset thereof) of a dataset, zvol or pool to a particular vdev.<p>Openzfs will eventually get both persistence and this form of true hybrid.<p>Unfortunately automatic migration by zfs of hot data to low-latency vdevs and cool data from low-latency vdevs is not really possible without solving the infamous block-pointer-rewrite problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>ZFS Is the Best Filesystem For Now</title><url>http://blog.fosketts.net/2017/07/10/zfs-best-filesystem-now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>floatboth</author><text>&gt; ZFS never really adapted to today’s world of widely-available flash storage: Although flash can be used to support the ZIL and L2ARC caches, these are of dubious value in a system with sufficient RAM, and ZFS has no true hybrid storage capability.<p>How is L2ARC not &quot;true hybrid&quot;?<p>&gt; And no one is talking about NVMe even though it’s everywhere in performance PC’s.<p>Why should a filesystem care about NVMe? It&#x27;s a different layer. ZFS generally doesn&#x27;t care if it&#x27;s IDE, SATA, NVMe or a microSD card.<p>&gt; can be a pain to use (except in FreeBSD, Solaris, and purpose-built appliances)<p>I think it&#x27;s just a package install away on many Linux distros? Also installable on macOS — I had a ZFS USB disk I shared between Mac and FreeBSD.<p>Also it&#x27;s interesting that these two sentences appear in the same article:<p>&gt; best level of data protection in a small office&#x2F;home office (SOHO) environment.<p>&gt; It’s laughable that the ZFS documentation obsesses over a few GB of SLC flash when multi-TB 3D NAND drives are on the market<p>Who has enough money to get a mutli-TB SSD for SOHO?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chongli</author><text><i>Why should a filesystem care about NVMe?</i><p>Because at some point the filesystem becomes a bottleneck. ZFS was designed with the assumption that CPUs would be way faster than storage. When you get speeds over 10GB&#x2F;sec, [0] you are going to spend a lot of time checksumming all that data.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seagate.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-seagate&#x2F;news&#x2F;seagate-demonstrates-fastest-ever-ssd-flash-drive-pr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seagate.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-seagate&#x2F;news&#x2F;seagate-demo...</a></text></comment> |
31,388,324 | 31,387,672 | 1 | 3 | 31,387,019 | train | <story><title>About iCloud Private Relay</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT212614</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plg</author><text>It may not work perfectly for all people in all use cases, yet ... but I have to say I appreciate and admire Apple&#x27;s initiative and the values that this approach reflects. They didn&#x27;t have to do this. It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line. It does seem like the right thing to do for individual privacy. I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradgessler</author><text>I too laud Apple for their efforts, but I view them as a benevolent dictator.<p>To me it’s obvious how this helps their bottom line: people are very interested in privacy and willing to pay top dollar for it. Every time I turn on an additional privacy service from Apple, I feel their grip tightening on my digital identity as they push themselves even more between me and the direct relationships I have with other websites.<p>iCloud private relay, email aliases, and “Sign in with Apple” is their final act to completely dominate the relationship between their users and other web applications.<p>I’m not bitter about it, but I do think it’s helpful and healthier to view Apple in this way and not mistake their efforts as altruistic. They’re simply a company trying to develop a profitable, high retention service… and they’re doing a damn good job at it.</text></comment> | <story><title>About iCloud Private Relay</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT212614</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plg</author><text>It may not work perfectly for all people in all use cases, yet ... but I have to say I appreciate and admire Apple&#x27;s initiative and the values that this approach reflects. They didn&#x27;t have to do this. It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line. It does seem like the right thing to do for individual privacy. I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>latexr</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line.<p>Your comment ends with:<p>&gt; I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.<p>Seems like a straightforward connection: Apple provides the feature → your trust in them increases[1] → you continue to buy from them and recommend them to other people.<p>[1]: Especially relevant at a time where distrust of big tech companies is rising.</text></comment> |
31,994,259 | 31,988,243 | 1 | 3 | 31,986,205 | train | <story><title>FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fedex-to-close-data-centers-retire-all-mainframes-by-2024-saving-400m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries.<p>The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages.<p>Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway).<p>So where is this flexible cost exactly?</text></item><item><author>sofixa</author><text>It&#x27;s not only about size, there&#x27;s also workloads to take into consideration.<p>Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays.<p>In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, and then some margin on top. And that capacity is wasted what, 90% of the year?<p>Meanwhile if you subcontract that part on AWS, it&#x27;s their problem, and they can afford to handle it, and you only pay for what you actually use when you use it.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money.<p>If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point where this is no longer true, and even huge corporations can save money in moving away from their own premises?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magicalhippo</author><text>Not just routing. When a plane or truck arrives and is unloaded, thousands of packages have to be scanned, which triggers a cascade of messages to different systems. In addition to the routing and whatnot, customs declarations might have to be sent, track and trace gets updates (both from arrival scan and customs), there&#x27;s billing etc. All this flurry of activity happens within an hour or so after the plane lands, and then it quiets down until the next plane or truck.<p>I could easily see FedEx can save money by dynamically scaling capacity to track the arrival of their planes or trucks.</text></comment> | <story><title>FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fedex-to-close-data-centers-retire-all-mainframes-by-2024-saving-400m/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>The cost does not scale linearly with the #of packages. A table with 1 entry is not cheaper than a table with 1 million entries.<p>The same routing algorithms have to run either they have one package or 1 million packages.<p>Plus you need to keep the history of the operations for months if not years (meaning that you will store both holiday and random Tuesday data anyway).<p>So where is this flexible cost exactly?</text></item><item><author>sofixa</author><text>It&#x27;s not only about size, there&#x27;s also workloads to take into consideration.<p>Take FedEx, their operations are highly dynamic - per day but also per period. The number of packages sent, and being transported, vary greatly between a random Tuesday 15:00 and the weeks before holidays.<p>In such a scenario, with your own infrastructure, you need to overprovision, by a lot, to be able to handle the heaviest load possible, and then some margin on top. And that capacity is wasted what, 90% of the year?<p>Meanwhile if you subcontract that part on AWS, it&#x27;s their problem, and they can afford to handle it, and you only pay for what you actually use when you use it.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>Making accurate calculations of data center cost is of course complicated and rarely manages to take everything into account, but the common knowledge I’ve heard is that there comes a point when a company is so large that going on-prem is what actually saves them a lot of money.<p>If FedEx is not large enough to be one of those companies, how large do you actually have to be? Or has cloud pricing changed to the point where this is no longer true, and even huge corporations can save money in moving away from their own premises?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrep</author><text>Ever heard of the traveling salesman problem because that is worse than linear, it is factorial. Granted, that is probably overkill for most people and my team (Not FedEx) just does NxN so it is only quadratic but it is definitely not constant nor even linear.</text></comment> |
8,439,034 | 8,438,977 | 1 | 2 | 8,438,904 | train | <story><title>Ride Sharing by the Numbers</title><url>http://blog.whatsthefare.com/2014/10/it-pays-to-compare.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kyro</author><text>Sort of off topic, but I have to say that WhatsTheFare is the only web app I&#x27;ve got saved to my home screen. A very, very simple but valuable tool. It&#x27;s now a permanent part of my &quot;workflow&quot;. It&#x27;s like inter-app information arbitrage.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ride Sharing by the Numbers</title><url>http://blog.whatsthefare.com/2014/10/it-pays-to-compare.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>minimaxir</author><text>The date range is 9&#x2F;22 to 10&#x2F;8. That&#x27;s two weeks, which means it&#x27;s only 2 data points for each given day-of-week + time combo, so analysis might not be accurate for DOY charts.<p>Otherwise, since the sample size is large (2000+ pts in the worst case), this is a good analysis.<p>How are you making the charts? It&#x27;s not any JS library I&#x27;ve seen, and looking at the source, the code appears to be custom.</text></comment> |
32,426,556 | 32,425,007 | 1 | 2 | 32,423,080 | train | <story><title>Hetzner Price Adjustment</title><url>https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rr888</author><text>Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn&#x27;t thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iforgotpassword</author><text>Don&#x27;t use a &quot;server&quot; server, unless you <i>really</i> need that. Use a desktop from a few years ago, from some oem who advertises power efficiency. Stuff it full of hdds and ram.<p>I&#x27;ve made very good experiences with Fujitsu. The power consumption figures they publish in their energy consumption white papers has been matching my measurements very well, so you can check ebay for used machines that match your performance&#x2F;price expectations and then google eg &quot;p920 energy white paper&quot; and check the pdf. (Note, some models are available with different PSUs, ie 90+ and 85+.)<p>My &quot;home server&quot; mostly idles at 14W with one hdd running, one in standby and one ssd.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hetzner Price Adjustment</title><url>https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/price-adjustment/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rr888</author><text>Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn&#x27;t thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Loic</author><text>In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€&#x2F;year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€&#x2F;year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right!<p><pre><code> 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh
My current price: 0.33€&#x2F;kWh (100% renewable)
8.76kWh x 0.33€&#x2F;kWh = 2.89€</code></pre></text></comment> |
11,413,974 | 11,413,448 | 1 | 3 | 11,411,890 | train | <story><title>Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/article/head-of-oracle-linux-moves-to-microsoft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diebir</author><text>I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it&#x27;s fun to watch.<p>Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer&#x27;s mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono&#x2F;open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).<p>MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It&#x27;s fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago.<p>I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don&#x27;t know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Eridrus</author><text>&gt; Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer&#x27;s mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono&#x2F;open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).<p>The JVM has certainly had a lot of time to mature, and certainly has a fairly entrenched position, but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure, it&#x27;s pretty clear that support from powerful entities can go a long way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/article/head-of-oracle-linux-moves-to-microsoft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diebir</author><text>I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it&#x27;s fun to watch.<p>Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer&#x27;s mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono&#x2F;open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).<p>MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It&#x27;s fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago.<p>I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don&#x27;t know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dantiberian</author><text>I think this is one of the destructive legacies of Internet Explorer. Many web developers (including myself) got fed up with IE, and that rage transferred onto Microsoft.</text></comment> |
5,986,147 | 5,985,992 | 1 | 3 | 5,985,793 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I made an HN job board</title><url>https://hnjobs.org/</url><text>I noticed the who&#x27;s hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user&#x27;s profiles and more.<p>Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>nilsjuenemann</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty bad that I have to enter my HN password.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgrahamc</author><text>When I was running usethesource.com (a job board that allowed only people with a certain HN karma to post) I worked around this authentication issue by having people place a magic string in their HN profile.<p>So, you&#x27;d register as say jgrahamc on my site and then place &#x27;magic string&#x27; in your HN profile and usethesource.com would know that it was really you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I made an HN job board</title><url>https://hnjobs.org/</url><text>I noticed the who&#x27;s hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user&#x27;s profiles and more.<p>Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>nilsjuenemann</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty bad that I have to enter my HN password.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eterm</author><text>WTF that&#x27;s horrifying, this should be taken down it&#x27;s a honey trap!</text></comment> |
8,936,037 | 8,934,493 | 1 | 3 | 8,934,320 | train | <story><title>Diagnostic page for Google.com</title><url>http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>q2</author><text>Few honest questions:<p>1. If Google detects something as malware, i.e. google software knows that it can be dangerous to users, then why it cannot prevent itself from acting as intermediary? Also, why it does not stop hosting malware?<p>2. &gt;&gt;&gt; Malicious software is hosted on 279 domain(s), including 24corp-shop.com&#x2F;, abu-farhan.com&#x2F;, soaksoak.ru&#x2F;.<p>These web domains do not belong to Google. It seems google is downloading several pages onto its server for various purposes. Is it legal in all countries?<p>From the architecture point of view, is it difficult to sandbox&#x2F;protect user facing google.com search engine from the above websites all the time so that if malware is there, do not let it effect search engine or other major parts. Users are not security-literate.<p>3. What should I do as user? Just ignore this assuming that this is for webmasters and not for ordinary users?<p>Honestly, for me personally, malware on google is unimaginable, since we consider it as gold standard on the web.</text></comment> | <story><title>Diagnostic page for Google.com</title><url>http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diakritikal</author><text>Would some kind soul please describe to me what this does, my corporate eager beaver network admins seem to consider this some kind of problem site and it&#x27;s URL is blocked by our gateway proxy.</text></comment> |
11,597,910 | 11,597,816 | 1 | 2 | 11,596,496 | train | <story><title>Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494/weasel-shuts-down-world-s-most-powerful-particle-collider</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>Great, I skip reading the daily run meeting slides once, and then find <i>this</i> in the news (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC [1]).<p>There are a couple of nasty images in the (internal) presentation. That poor weasel tried to eat a cable or something and got completely fried :-(. For those wondering how this can happen, it looks to me like a normal outdoor transformer station, like there are many all around the world. I actually wonder why you don&#x27;t hear about power outages like this (not at CERN, but in regular cities) more frequently. Maybe public power supplies are more redundant?<p>([1] Note I&#x27;m only posting as a private person and not in any official function. Disclaim disclaim yadda yadda.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walrus</author><text>Squirrels accounted for 28% of fiber cuts in 2010 for Level 3 Communications.[1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.level3.com&#x2F;level-3-network&#x2F;the-10-most-bizarre-and-annoying-causes-of-fiber-cuts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.level3.com&#x2F;level-3-network&#x2F;the-10-most-bizarre-a...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476154494/weasel-shuts-down-world-s-most-powerful-particle-collider</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>captainmuon</author><text>Great, I skip reading the daily run meeting slides once, and then find <i>this</i> in the news (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC [1]).<p>There are a couple of nasty images in the (internal) presentation. That poor weasel tried to eat a cable or something and got completely fried :-(. For those wondering how this can happen, it looks to me like a normal outdoor transformer station, like there are many all around the world. I actually wonder why you don&#x27;t hear about power outages like this (not at CERN, but in regular cities) more frequently. Maybe public power supplies are more redundant?<p>([1] Note I&#x27;m only posting as a private person and not in any official function. Disclaim disclaim yadda yadda.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>&gt; I actually wonder why you don&#x27;t hear about power outages like this (not at CERN, but in regular cities) more frequently. Maybe public power supplies are more redundant?<p>Happens pretty frequently, they just don&#x27;t get reported beyond local news unless it affects something noteworthy. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cybersquirrel1.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cybersquirrel1.com&#x2F;</a> maps a lot of these &quot;Cyber Squirrel Operations&quot;.<p>Mainly squirrels, birds, raccoons, snakes, and rats.</text></comment> |
40,209,825 | 40,208,707 | 1 | 2 | 40,207,142 | train | <story><title>Only9Fans</title><url>https://only9fans.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcl</author><text>Wow, that reeks of arrogance.</text></item><item><author>rhinoceraptor</author><text>That&#x27;s not an accident, Rob Pike famously hates syntax highlighting, he&#x27;s derided it as &quot;childish&quot; on multiple occasions.</text></item><item><author>tazu</author><text>Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux&#x2F;Mac without a VM [1]. I&#x27;m pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn&#x27;t even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me. I hated that it required a 3-button mouse though, made trackpads basically unusable.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9fans.github.io&#x2F;plan9port&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9fans.github.io&#x2F;plan9port&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usesthis.com&#x2F;interviews&#x2F;russ.cox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usesthis.com&#x2F;interviews&#x2F;russ.cox&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>noobermin</author><text>The 9front people have always been a funny bunch. I&#x27;ve always wanted to use plan9 tools seriously partially because of their websites and docs are so amusing but I never could get past just running it in a vm.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pyrale</author><text>The guy built a programming language in the 2010&#x27;s by ignoring everything that happened in the computer science community since his heyday, and tried to spin it as an improvement.<p>The ways people found to circumvent his hubris are pretty entertaining [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;rust&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5penft&#x2F;parallelizing_enjarify_in_go_and_rust&#x2F;dcsgk7n&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;rust&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5penft&#x2F;parallelizing_...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Only9Fans</title><url>https://only9fans.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcl</author><text>Wow, that reeks of arrogance.</text></item><item><author>rhinoceraptor</author><text>That&#x27;s not an accident, Rob Pike famously hates syntax highlighting, he&#x27;s derided it as &quot;childish&quot; on multiple occasions.</text></item><item><author>tazu</author><text>Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux&#x2F;Mac without a VM [1]. I&#x27;m pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn&#x27;t even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me. I hated that it required a 3-button mouse though, made trackpads basically unusable.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9fans.github.io&#x2F;plan9port&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9fans.github.io&#x2F;plan9port&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usesthis.com&#x2F;interviews&#x2F;russ.cox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usesthis.com&#x2F;interviews&#x2F;russ.cox&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>noobermin</author><text>The 9front people have always been a funny bunch. I&#x27;ve always wanted to use plan9 tools seriously partially because of their websites and docs are so amusing but I never could get past just running it in a vm.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjk2</author><text>I&#x27;m not that far behind him but on the basis that syntax highlighting is sometimes completely wrong. That leads to a lot of head scratching when it turns out the highlighting engine is wrong and the code is not. Of course this is because a lot of the engines use naive regex to do the highlighting rather than a parser.<p>Calling it childish is a little wrong though for sure.</text></comment> |
38,685,238 | 38,685,029 | 1 | 2 | 38,684,102 | train | <story><title>Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/954787/41470c731eda02a4/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>The claims in the article feel kinda weak as to the motivation.<p>&gt; Cohen&#x27;s EuroRust talk highlighted that one of the major reasons gccrs is being developed is to be able to take advantage of GCC&#x27;s security plugins. There is a wide range of existing GCC plugins that can aid in debugging, static analysis, or hardening; these work on the GCC intermediate representation<p>&gt; One more reason for gccrs to exist is Rust for Linux, the initiative to add Rust support to the Linux kernel. Cohen said the Linux kernel is a key motivator for the project because there are a lot of kernel people who would prefer the kernel to be compiled only by the GNU toolchain.<p>That explains why you’d want GCC as the backend but not why you need a duplicate front end. I think it’s a bad idea to have multiple front ends and Rust should learn from the mistakes of C++ which even with a standards body has to deal with a mess of switches, differing levels of language support for each compiler making cross-platform development harder, platform-specific language bugs etc etc.<p>&gt; A lot of care is being put into gccrs not becoming a &quot;superset&quot; of Rust, as Cohen put it. The project wants to make sure that it does not create a special &quot;GNU Rust&quot; language, but is trying instead to replicate the output of rustc — bugs, quirks, and all. Both the Rust and GCC test suites are being used to accomplish this.<p>In other words, I’d love gccrs folks to explain why their approach is a better one than rustc_codegen_gcc considering the latter is able to achieve this with far less effort and risk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ndiddy</author><text>Having another Rust implementation allows for an &quot;audit&quot; to help validate the Rust spec and get rid of any unspecified behavior. It would also give users options. If I hit a compiler bug in MSVC, I can file a report, switch to GCC and keep working on my project until the bug is fixed. With Rust, that&#x27;s not currently possible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/954787/41470c731eda02a4/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>The claims in the article feel kinda weak as to the motivation.<p>&gt; Cohen&#x27;s EuroRust talk highlighted that one of the major reasons gccrs is being developed is to be able to take advantage of GCC&#x27;s security plugins. There is a wide range of existing GCC plugins that can aid in debugging, static analysis, or hardening; these work on the GCC intermediate representation<p>&gt; One more reason for gccrs to exist is Rust for Linux, the initiative to add Rust support to the Linux kernel. Cohen said the Linux kernel is a key motivator for the project because there are a lot of kernel people who would prefer the kernel to be compiled only by the GNU toolchain.<p>That explains why you’d want GCC as the backend but not why you need a duplicate front end. I think it’s a bad idea to have multiple front ends and Rust should learn from the mistakes of C++ which even with a standards body has to deal with a mess of switches, differing levels of language support for each compiler making cross-platform development harder, platform-specific language bugs etc etc.<p>&gt; A lot of care is being put into gccrs not becoming a &quot;superset&quot; of Rust, as Cohen put it. The project wants to make sure that it does not create a special &quot;GNU Rust&quot; language, but is trying instead to replicate the output of rustc — bugs, quirks, and all. Both the Rust and GCC test suites are being used to accomplish this.<p>In other words, I’d love gccrs folks to explain why their approach is a better one than rustc_codegen_gcc considering the latter is able to achieve this with far less effort and risk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>&gt; Rust should learn from the mistakes of C++<p>They are. You quoted them doing it, the care taken not to become a superset. The problem with C&#x2F;C++ stemmed from compiler vendors competing with each other to be &quot;better&quot; than their peers.<p>Multiple front ends of an implementation of a language usually shakes out a bunch of bugs and misimplementations. That&#x27;s the primary benefit of having multiple front ends IMO.</text></comment> |
10,383,544 | 10,383,348 | 1 | 2 | 10,379,904 | train | <story><title>Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nickpsecurity</author><text>Many programmers talk about Ada Lovelace, who was certainly awesome, but should be talking about Margaret Hamilton. Before anyone heard of Dijkstra&#x27;s work, Hamilton was straight up inventing everything from real, software engineering to properly handling fault-tolerance and human interfaces. Here&#x27;s what she was doing (see Apollo Beginnings rather than USL):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;htius.com&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;r12ham.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;htius.com&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;r12ham.pdf</a><p>Her Wikipedia page gives her due credit and shows just how much she and her team pulled off:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist...</a><p>Also note the size of that printout of her program. Try to think about how many people make one like that which doesn&#x27;t fail in the field even when parts of its environment and hardware are failing. Also while using low-level code with little to no tool support on 60&#x27;s era, embedded hardware rather than a JVM, etc. Margaret Hamilton was the first in the field of high-assurance programming that I&#x27;ve seen. A lot of firsts.<p>So, I give her credit where possible. The industry should even more as she wasn&#x27;t a theoretical programmer like Ada Lovelace: she engineered actual software, co-invented many of the best practices for it, deployed them successfully in production, and then made a tool that automated much of that from requirement specs to correct code.<p>While programmers and industry ignore her, at least NASA gave her positive mention as the founder of software engineering and ultra-reliable software along with the biggest check they ever cut to an innovator:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;home&#x2F;hqnews&#x2F;2003&#x2F;sep&#x2F;HQ_03281_Hamilton_Honor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasa.gov&#x2F;home&#x2F;hqnews&#x2F;2003&#x2F;sep&#x2F;HQ_03281_Hamilton_...</a><p>Where would our systems and tools be if more attention was put into her methods, even just principles, than informal use of C? ;)</text></comment> | <story><title>Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lumberjack</author><text>Only tangentially related but it seems to me that if you want to work on cool software that does something novel and exciting it seems like it&#x27;s better to graduate with a degree in math or physics.<p>Also interesting if you visit her company&#x27;s website: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.htius.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.htius.com&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a view into a software industry that is virtually never reported on in the news, at least not on HN. The client list is impressive. It&#x27;s not really clear what they actually do? Seems to me like they maintain a developing environment and sell support contracts for it?</text></comment> |
11,715,164 | 11,715,017 | 1 | 2 | 11,714,340 | train | <story><title>You're Gonna Need a License for That</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-17/you-re-going-to-need-a-license-for-that-job</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>imgabe</author><text>I&#x27;m a PE (electrical) and I think what most people don&#x27;t realize is that the licensing was largely driven by the insurance industry.<p>Let&#x27;s say you pay some people to design a building for you. You get insurance of course. A year later, the building falls down. You call your insurance company to collect. The first thing they ask is whether you took every reasonable precaution you could to prevent that from happening. Part of that would include having a licensed structural engineer design the building. If you let Joe Shmoe off the street design your building and it falls down, the insurance company is going to say you&#x27;re basically SOL, because you didn&#x27;t find a person you could verify was qualified.<p>It&#x27;s really about transferring the liability from the building owner to the engineer. If there&#x27;s a mistake in the design, the engineer gets sued. Guess what happens then? The engineer has professional liability insurance to pay that! How does the professional liability insurance company decide who to insure? Well, they insure people with licenses, of course. It&#x27;s an elaborate scheme to transfer money from one insurance company to another.<p>Is it necessary for a florist? Probably not. I can&#x27;t think of a situation where you&#x27;d need to sue a florist. Interior decorator might be more problematic than people realize. First, it depends on whether it&#x27;s a <i>decorator</i> or a <i>designer</i>. A <i>designer</i> may move walls around, affecting egress paths, and can possibly have some life safety implications, so they should be able to take responsibility for that.</text></comment> | <story><title>You're Gonna Need a License for That</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-17/you-re-going-to-need-a-license-for-that-job</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adekok</author><text>The attitude of &quot;license all the things&quot; comes from two places.<p>Existing groups use licensing to shut out newcomers. They are largely anti-competitive, and anti-capitalistic.<p>The other is where unlicensed activities results in people dying. The outrage from such events often ends up with &quot;license the people&quot;, so that Bad Things can&#x27;t happen.<p>That&#x27;s arguably a better approach, for mechanics, nuclear power technicians, etc. Perhaps even hairdressers, who work with toxic chemicals and need to know basic safety.<p>For me, the &quot;health and safety&quot; requirements make sense. Anything outside of that is typically anti-competitive, and likely rent-seeking.</text></comment> |
25,364,353 | 25,364,095 | 1 | 2 | 25,359,144 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk moves to Texas</title><url>https://www.ktvu.com/news/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-critical-of-california-leaves-the-state-and-moves-to-texas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manigandham</author><text>The state has gone downhill on every metric possible. People can&#x27;t name even 5 things that have improved over the past decade. Taxes, infrastructure, homeless, rent&#x2F;housing, cost of living, gas, traffic, smog and pollution, crime, illegal immigration, gangs, fires, droughts, private property issues, local govt gridlock and deficiency, and now the weather isn&#x27;t great either.<p>Unfortunately many of those leaving don&#x27;t realize the policies they voted for are the main cause of this mess and might repeat the same thing in the new areas.</text></item><item><author>S_A_P</author><text>Pretty interesting to see this move makes people so salty. There does seem to be a trend of people fleeing California, I dont know enough about the situation out there to comment on whether or not its valid. I suspect <i>something</i> must be going on for several high profile folks moving out. And before you bash Texas, its not perfect. But its pretty diverse, and it seems that folks with opposing viewpoints can still coexist here. I like that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddoolin</author><text>Crime in almost every category has gone down over the last decade. You have to be crazy to think gang activity has gotten worse over the same time period. Immigration is not the domain of the state. I&#x27;d argue that given the number of people here, the traffic could be a lot worse. I&#x27;ve personally seen worse gridlock on worse infrastructure in other states with less people. Even if you account for the days that fires affect a significant amount of people&#x27;s weather experience, we still have great weather for the vast majority of the year.<p>It&#x27;s not perfect by any means but you could easily draw up a similar list for any state. A state is a big area and it&#x27;s probably more useful to talk about most of these kinds of things at a local level.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk moves to Texas</title><url>https://www.ktvu.com/news/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-critical-of-california-leaves-the-state-and-moves-to-texas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manigandham</author><text>The state has gone downhill on every metric possible. People can&#x27;t name even 5 things that have improved over the past decade. Taxes, infrastructure, homeless, rent&#x2F;housing, cost of living, gas, traffic, smog and pollution, crime, illegal immigration, gangs, fires, droughts, private property issues, local govt gridlock and deficiency, and now the weather isn&#x27;t great either.<p>Unfortunately many of those leaving don&#x27;t realize the policies they voted for are the main cause of this mess and might repeat the same thing in the new areas.</text></item><item><author>S_A_P</author><text>Pretty interesting to see this move makes people so salty. There does seem to be a trend of people fleeing California, I dont know enough about the situation out there to comment on whether or not its valid. I suspect <i>something</i> must be going on for several high profile folks moving out. And before you bash Texas, its not perfect. But its pretty diverse, and it seems that folks with opposing viewpoints can still coexist here. I like that...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tabtab</author><text>&gt; The state has gone downhill on every metric possible.<p>Mostly because it got more crowded. As a CA resident, if you don&#x27;t like CA, please DO move out. It will help traffic, for one.<p>If ALL you care about is a big house and taxes, then CA is probably not for you. As soon as you walk outside your TX McMansion, you may realize why CA is so crowded.</text></comment> |
34,132,828 | 34,130,961 | 1 | 3 | 34,128,944 | train | <story><title>The return of lazy imports for Python</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/917280/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kortex</author><text>I really hope a solution can be found and python can get true lazy imports (without doing the manual thing). I work in the ML&#x2F;AI space and manual lazy imports are basically mandatory unless you want several seconds to see usage text from `footool --help`. Why &quot;pay&quot; for executing code you don&#x27;t use?<p>Manual lazy import meaning:<p><pre><code> def uses_foo(x):
import foo
return foo.bar(x)
</code></pre>
Manual lazy import sucks because:<p>- it&#x27;s just ugly, I like imports all at the top so I can see all the deps<p>- bad for static analysis<p>- performance hit every time the function is called<p>Eschewing lazy imports has several problems:<p>- you always pay the execution cost, even if you don&#x27;t use it<p>- also bad for static analysis and testing, since you have to eat the import time even if the code block you want to test doesn&#x27;t execute the expensive path<p>- sometimes you <i>need</i> lazy import to avoid circular import errors<p>It&#x27;s too bad that the main impediment to this is existing code which relies on side effects. Import-time side effects are an absolute pain in the ass. Avoid it at all costs.</text></comment> | <story><title>The return of lazy imports for Python</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/917280/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>m000</author><text>Not a word though about the elephant in the room: circular imports.<p>It is absurdly easy in Python to end up with a circular import situtation, where no real circular dependency exists. E.g. you can&#x27;t have A.a1 -&gt; B.b1 and B.b2 -&gt; A.a2. So, you are forced to layout your code in some quite awkward ways.</text></comment> |
22,080,258 | 22,080,406 | 1 | 3 | 22,079,174 | train | <story><title>PopSockets CEO calls out Amazon's tactics before House committee</title><url>https://mashable.com/article/amazon-bullying-tactics-popsockets-hearing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Marsymars</author><text>I was recently searching for 1TB flash drives. Currently, when I search for &quot;1tb flash drive&quot; on amazon.com, after ads and an Amazon&#x27;s Choice banner, the top result is a listing for a $20 product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Computer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07NY9WR28&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...</a></text></item><item><author>metalliqaz</author><text>Amazon is extremely shady and it doesn&#x27;t just hurt companies like PopSockets. Amazon has a counterfeits problem and it&#x27;s bad for customers. It is totally obvious now that Amazon embraces cheap Chinese knockoffs, and I&#x27;m sick of having to send them back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>This was my prime reason to cancel my Amazon Prime. For 20$ of revenue, people are willing to destroy other people&#x27;s work and memories.<p>In my case, it was a fake Kingston SD Card and luckily used it only for a Rasberry pi. It cost me only a day of figuring out what I am doing wrong but easily it could have cost me my photos from a trip to a remote place.<p>Of course, Amazon would deal with that as if it was 20$(or whatever) issue and everything is supposed to be O.K. when you get a refund.</text></comment> | <story><title>PopSockets CEO calls out Amazon's tactics before House committee</title><url>https://mashable.com/article/amazon-bullying-tactics-popsockets-hearing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Marsymars</author><text>I was recently searching for 1TB flash drives. Currently, when I search for &quot;1tb flash drive&quot; on amazon.com, after ads and an Amazon&#x27;s Choice banner, the top result is a listing for a $20 product: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Computer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07NY9WR28&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Flash-Memory-Rotatable-Laptop-Compute...</a></text></item><item><author>metalliqaz</author><text>Amazon is extremely shady and it doesn&#x27;t just hurt companies like PopSockets. Amazon has a counterfeits problem and it&#x27;s bad for customers. It is totally obvious now that Amazon embraces cheap Chinese knockoffs, and I&#x27;m sick of having to send them back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>&gt; an Amazon&#x27;s Choice banner<p>For those who don&#x27;t know: despite having a name that implies curation, Amazon does not choose &quot;Amazon&#x27;s Choice&quot; at all. It simply indicates which product is most popular, based on reviews that are widely known to be faked. Yet another utterly deceptive dark pattern.</text></comment> |
7,466,273 | 7,465,021 | 1 | 3 | 7,465,015 | train | <story><title>Mylar: A platform for building secure web applications</title><url>http://css.csail.mit.edu/mylar/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyMarshal</author><text>Also of note:<p>* <a href="https://crypton.io/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crypton.io&#x2F;</a> a zero-knowledge web framework from SpiderOak<p>* <a href="http://hails.scs.stanford.edu/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hails.scs.stanford.edu&#x2F;</a> a secure web platform framework for untrusted 3rd party plugins</text></comment> | <story><title>Mylar: A platform for building secure web applications</title><url>http://css.csail.mit.edu/mylar/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gphilip</author><text>From the blurb:<p>Mylar protects data confidentiality even when an attacker gets full access to servers. Mylar stores only encrypted data on the server, and decrypts data only in users&#x27; browsers. Simply encrypting each user&#x27;s data with a user key does not suffice, and Mylar addresses three challenges in making this approach work.<p>First, Mylar allows the server to perform keyword search over encrypted documents, even if the documents are encrypted with different keys. Second, Mylar allows users to share keys and data securely in the presence of an active adversary. Finally, Mylar ensures that client-side application code is authentic, even if the server is malicious.</text></comment> |
28,534,415 | 28,534,479 | 1 | 2 | 28,532,464 | train | <story><title>Anonymous Hacks Epik</title><url>https://4chan.partyvan.epikfail.win:55899/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kadoban</author><text>How many just regular folks would actually pick Epik? Why?</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>Eventually the cloud is going to burst and everyone’s data will be public. The motive will be similar to this one, where a huge blast radius of collateral damage is accepted in the name of harming bad people. Seeing people eagerly download this data that surely includes countless amounts of personal info of non-Nazis shows this clearly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Syonyk</author><text>I intend to for future domain registration.<p>- Register.com is an annoying cesspool of value-add upsells and is extremely expensive in the process, with added cost to not have your personal info attached directly to your domain whois.<p>- GoDaddy, other than the creepy ads, has shown plenty of willingness to remove domains hosting content that they don&#x27;t like, even if it&#x27;s legal.<p>- I think Google is a registrar, but I&#x27;m not at all comfortable with how easy it might be to move my domain out of their grasp if I care to host my content somewhere else. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s possible, I&#x27;m sure it has weird issues, and I&#x27;m certain there&#x27;s zero support to talk to.<p>- Epik has, at least as far as I can tell, a reputation for simply hosting domain registrations, not asking questions, and ignoring just about every request for information.<p>Of those options, I&#x27;m fine with the last. I tend pretty hard towards the &quot;free speech&quot; side of the spectrum, and a registrar that will ignore anything short of a legitimate legal request from the authorities of the nation(s) they operate in is perfectly fine with me. Even if they host domains I consider distasteful, I&#x27;d rather support that than someone who will bow to public outrage and go snooping around domains looking for reasons to remove their registration (GoDaddy and Arfcom come to mind here).<p>There are probably other options, but those are the ones I know of, and why I&#x27;m intending to register future domains with Epik. I don&#x27;t particularly care if a founder of a service is a scumbag in their personal life, as long as they reliably do what they promise to do.</text></comment> | <story><title>Anonymous Hacks Epik</title><url>https://4chan.partyvan.epikfail.win:55899/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kadoban</author><text>How many just regular folks would actually pick Epik? Why?</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>Eventually the cloud is going to burst and everyone’s data will be public. The motive will be similar to this one, where a huge blast radius of collateral damage is accepted in the name of harming bad people. Seeing people eagerly download this data that surely includes countless amounts of personal info of non-Nazis shows this clearly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MileyCyrax</author><text>I bought a domain name from a domain squatter who used Epik and there&#x27;s a 60 day waiting period before I&#x27;m allowed to transfer the domain away.<p>Their site is one of the buggiest I&#x27;ve ever used (no, really), so this hack doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all. Now I&#x27;m trying to remember how much personal information I would have given them.</text></comment> |
25,401,209 | 25,401,056 | 1 | 2 | 25,383,511 | train | <story><title>The Piet-GPU Vision</title><url>https://github.com/linebender/piet-gpu/blob/master/doc/vision.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>littlestymaar</author><text>I have one question in case Raph passes by:<p>Isn&#x27;t that a bit risky to go this deep? If I understand things correctly, you are currently trying to build a font editor in Rust(runebender). Because there is no good UI library in Rust, and there&#x27;s good reason to think Rust is a good fit for this, you want to build your own (Druid). So far so good. But, now you are also trying to build your own 2D renderer and not a basic one: you want to advance the state of the art in that field too.<p>Not that I&#x27;m not exited, because if all this lands, it will be super great for the Rust ecosystem, but sometimes because you&#x27;re so deep in the rabbit hole, I&#x27;m afraid you get burned-out (or bored) and that everything would be lost because nothing would be polished enough to be usable at that point.<p>Is that a risk you&#x27;re taking on purpose? Or is it just that you have a plan to avoid it?<p>Thanks in advance.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Piet-GPU Vision</title><url>https://github.com/linebender/piet-gpu/blob/master/doc/vision.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anchpop</author><text>I think Rust and Haskell, due to their irrelevance in industry and general &quot;nerdiness&quot;, attract a certain type of hacker. Specifically I&#x27;ve noticed that there are some libraries for both languages that are just <i>so</i> good that they make you never want to use anything else. One example in Haskell is Megaparsec [0], by far the best point in the parser framework design-space I&#x27;m aware of. An example in Rust is wgpu-rs, which maybe isn&#x27;t &quot;all the way there&quot; yet but is already turning into a very ergonomic low-level rendering API. Although I haven&#x27;t used them, I think piet-gpu and pathfinder may be in this category also. I don&#x27;t have a link handy but I remember seeing a tweet from the developer of Pathfinder where he was reverse-engineering MacOS&#x27;s idiosyncratic font rendering so he could generate identical-looking output as the native renderer. That&#x27;s going above-and-beyond what any reasonable library developer would do and I love it.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there aren&#x27;t any great libraries for other languages (there certainly are, like Halide for C++) but that I&#x27;m more often pleasantly surprised by the library quality in Haskell and Rust than I am in other languages (when there are libraries available, anyway).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;megaparsec" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;megaparsec</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gfx-rs&#x2F;wgpu-rs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gfx-rs&#x2F;wgpu-rs</a></text></comment> |
14,460,059 | 14,458,347 | 1 | 3 | 14,456,690 | train | <story><title>Uber Posts $708M Loss as Finance Head Leaves</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-posts-708-million-loss-as-finance-head-leaves-1496272500</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jpatokal</author><text>You&#x27;re ignoring that businessmen who travel all the time are very heavy users of Uber and similar services.<p>I&#x27;m not even a frequent flyer, but I&#x27;d estimate that a good 80-90% of my Uber usage is travel-related. At home, I have tons of other options to get around, but on a tight schedule in an unfamiliar city, I basically default to Uber all the time, because I rarely have the time or risk tolerance explore alternatives.<p>One of the things I love about Uber is that I can use it in SF, Singapore, Manila, Helsinki, wherever. It also works sufficiently well that I have near-zero incentive to try out Lyft&#x2F;Grab&#x2F;Ola&#x2F;whatever, particularly since this usually involves yet another tedious sign-up process of entering credit cards and PIN confirmations and yadda yadda.</text></item><item><author>beager</author><text>I believe that Lyft doesn&#x27;t have to compete globally with Uber to be a successful business in its own right. I also believe that Uber isn&#x27;t immune from being crippled by competitors that operate in a very small but key subset of Uber&#x27;s markets.<p>There is very little network effect with Uber. Sure, you can hop off a plane anywhere in the world and open Uber to get a car, but that is a very small number of people overall. I would contend that most people use whichever ride-sharing service is available and most economical in their own city, and if that same service is available on the rare occasion that they travel, then bonus.<p>Of course, if Uber beats everyone else to the punch with proprietary self-driving cars and undercuts prices profitably, they win. There seem to be some very large issues with that, however.</text></item><item><author>encoderer</author><text>&lt;&#x2F;conjecture&gt;<p>Lyft just isn&#x27;t a real competitor outside of major American cities right now. Go to a city without an international airport and see how many lyft drivers there are.</text></item><item><author>objclxt</author><text>&gt; And what most people miss, is that the 3.4 billion is the 30% cut Uber takes from a ride. Prices don&#x27;t have to rise 20% to break even, prices have to rise 6%<p>No, they have to rise by more than that. Your math is technically correct (a 6% rise gives you an extra $700 million), but you are assuming that the price increase goes entirely to Uber. There is no way Uber can increase prices by 6% and give none of that upside to their drivers - they would flee to platforms offering better terms (like Lyft).<p>If Uber was to be profitable this past quarter they wouldn&#x27;t have needed an extra $700 million in fares, but an extra <i></i>2.3 billion<i></i> - which is a 20% rise.</text></item><item><author>bpodgursky</author><text>$708 million loss, narrowed from $991 million last quarter<p>18% growth from last quarter (note: that&#x27;s not Y&#x2F;Y. this is ridiculously fast, given the huge base.)<p>708mm loss &#x2F; 3.4 billion in revenue is only about 20% under even. And what most people miss, is that the 3.4 billion is the 30% cut Uber takes from a ride. Prices don&#x27;t have to rise 20% to break even, prices have to rise 6% (assuming no efficiency improvements via pool etc, which is frankly ridiculous)<p>Yeah... Uber is doing fine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CPLX</author><text>Yeah but frequent flying businessmen are also the kind of people who will do research and pick better options quickly if they are available, it&#x27;s not plausible for Uber to have a permanent monopoly.<p>One of Uber&#x27;s <i>massive</i> problems is lack of predictability. When going to&#x2F;from the airport I can&#x27;t fuck around with surge pricing, I need to be able to have a travel budget that doesn&#x27;t change sharply for situations out of my control. I don&#x27;t want to miss planes. A service like Blacklane (which by the way is now in the US and is growing very quickly yet seems to rarely make the articles that talk about Uber&#x27;s competition) neatly solves that problem for you, and generally has better service and more professional drivers.<p>I am a frequent flier and your idea that there&#x27;s zero-incentive to have a backup or alternate option to Uber ready to go doesn&#x27;t resonate with me. Uber isn&#x27;t reliable enough to forget about other options, and as long as those exist and are viable Uber&#x27;s supposed &quot;monopoly&quot; strategy will likely be regarded in retrospect as expensive and stupid waste of capital.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber Posts $708M Loss as Finance Head Leaves</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-posts-708-million-loss-as-finance-head-leaves-1496272500</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jpatokal</author><text>You&#x27;re ignoring that businessmen who travel all the time are very heavy users of Uber and similar services.<p>I&#x27;m not even a frequent flyer, but I&#x27;d estimate that a good 80-90% of my Uber usage is travel-related. At home, I have tons of other options to get around, but on a tight schedule in an unfamiliar city, I basically default to Uber all the time, because I rarely have the time or risk tolerance explore alternatives.<p>One of the things I love about Uber is that I can use it in SF, Singapore, Manila, Helsinki, wherever. It also works sufficiently well that I have near-zero incentive to try out Lyft&#x2F;Grab&#x2F;Ola&#x2F;whatever, particularly since this usually involves yet another tedious sign-up process of entering credit cards and PIN confirmations and yadda yadda.</text></item><item><author>beager</author><text>I believe that Lyft doesn&#x27;t have to compete globally with Uber to be a successful business in its own right. I also believe that Uber isn&#x27;t immune from being crippled by competitors that operate in a very small but key subset of Uber&#x27;s markets.<p>There is very little network effect with Uber. Sure, you can hop off a plane anywhere in the world and open Uber to get a car, but that is a very small number of people overall. I would contend that most people use whichever ride-sharing service is available and most economical in their own city, and if that same service is available on the rare occasion that they travel, then bonus.<p>Of course, if Uber beats everyone else to the punch with proprietary self-driving cars and undercuts prices profitably, they win. There seem to be some very large issues with that, however.</text></item><item><author>encoderer</author><text>&lt;&#x2F;conjecture&gt;<p>Lyft just isn&#x27;t a real competitor outside of major American cities right now. Go to a city without an international airport and see how many lyft drivers there are.</text></item><item><author>objclxt</author><text>&gt; And what most people miss, is that the 3.4 billion is the 30% cut Uber takes from a ride. Prices don&#x27;t have to rise 20% to break even, prices have to rise 6%<p>No, they have to rise by more than that. Your math is technically correct (a 6% rise gives you an extra $700 million), but you are assuming that the price increase goes entirely to Uber. There is no way Uber can increase prices by 6% and give none of that upside to their drivers - they would flee to platforms offering better terms (like Lyft).<p>If Uber was to be profitable this past quarter they wouldn&#x27;t have needed an extra $700 million in fares, but an extra <i></i>2.3 billion<i></i> - which is a 20% rise.</text></item><item><author>bpodgursky</author><text>$708 million loss, narrowed from $991 million last quarter<p>18% growth from last quarter (note: that&#x27;s not Y&#x2F;Y. this is ridiculously fast, given the huge base.)<p>708mm loss &#x2F; 3.4 billion in revenue is only about 20% under even. And what most people miss, is that the 3.4 billion is the 30% cut Uber takes from a ride. Prices don&#x27;t have to rise 20% to break even, prices have to rise 6% (assuming no efficiency improvements via pool etc, which is frankly ridiculous)<p>Yeah... Uber is doing fine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bakary</author><text>I think their point was that well-off people who travel all the time are still a tiny portion of the population.</text></comment> |
26,267,185 | 26,266,862 | 1 | 2 | 26,263,508 | train | <story><title>The Framework Laptop</title><url>https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway894345</author><text>I&#x27;ve still never seen a PC with a sane touchpad. That&#x27;s the first issue in a long tail of grievances with the PC laptop ecosystem.<p>EDIT: This isn&#x27;t a generic &quot;pro-Mac&quot; dig, I <i>want</i> a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).</text></item><item><author>IQunder130</author><text>I hope this business of yours works out because a laptop that isn&#x27;t a piece of junk with too much stuff I don&#x27;t need inflating the price is something I&#x27;ve been wanting for a long time.</text></item><item><author>nrp</author><text>&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; was not actually a direct quote from us, but it&#x27;s nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!</text></item><item><author>samizdis</author><text>Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic&#x2F;hopeful take on it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-designed-a-thin-modular-repairable-13-inch-laptop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-de...</a><p>Edit to add quote from Ars article:<p><i>Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it&#x27;s going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we&#x27;re completely convinced.<p>Although we&#x27;re skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR&#x27;s head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company&#x27;s team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkrisc</author><text>For whatever reason, I&#x27;ve never used a laptop that wasn&#x27;t a MacBook that has had a trackpad anywhere as amazing as what Apple has done. I don&#x27;t know if the problem is hardware, software, or both, but as a consumer I don&#x27;t care. I&#x27;ll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better. That&#x27;s my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Framework Laptop</title><url>https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway894345</author><text>I&#x27;ve still never seen a PC with a sane touchpad. That&#x27;s the first issue in a long tail of grievances with the PC laptop ecosystem.<p>EDIT: This isn&#x27;t a generic &quot;pro-Mac&quot; dig, I <i>want</i> a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).</text></item><item><author>IQunder130</author><text>I hope this business of yours works out because a laptop that isn&#x27;t a piece of junk with too much stuff I don&#x27;t need inflating the price is something I&#x27;ve been wanting for a long time.</text></item><item><author>nrp</author><text>&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; was not actually a direct quote from us, but it&#x27;s nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!</text></item><item><author>samizdis</author><text>Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic&#x2F;hopeful take on it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-designed-a-thin-modular-repairable-13-inch-laptop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-de...</a><p>Edit to add quote from Ars article:<p><i>Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it&#x27;s going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we&#x27;re completely convinced.<p>Although we&#x27;re skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR&#x27;s head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company&#x27;s team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Brakenshire</author><text>Looks like there’s some good progress for touchpad support on Linux:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bill.harding.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;linux-touchpad-like-a-mac-update-firefox-gesture-support-goes-live&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bill.harding.blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;linux-touchpad-like-a-m...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26102894" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26102894</a><p>Many millions of people will benefit, but the project only has 129 supporters, if anyone wants to chip in!</text></comment> |
20,852,017 | 20,851,511 | 1 | 2 | 20,850,970 | train | <story><title>PySceneDetect – A tool for detecting scenes in movies</title><url>https://pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/command-line-params/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spapas82</author><text>My PhD (before 10+ years) was in video search and one of the proposed methods for video comparison was using the shot durations of the video. Notice that with <i>shots</i> I refer to cuts in the camera flow, IIRC hollywood movies have a such a shot cut every 4 seconds as an average (for example when two people talk the camera will move from one person to the other).<p>I remember that I used two techniques for extracting scene cuts:<p>* Difference in the brightness (Y) histogram of the YUV video between frames; when that difference is more than a threshold there&#x27;s a scene cut<p>* Counting the number of Intra macroblocks per frame on an H.264 encoded video; if that number was more than a threshold then there&#x27;s a scene cut</text></comment> | <story><title>PySceneDetect – A tool for detecting scenes in movies</title><url>https://pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/command-line-params/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>speps</author><text>Can the link be changed to the home page of the docs instead of the CLI params one? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;latest&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
28,804,853 | 28,804,674 | 1 | 2 | 28,797,182 | train | <story><title>GPU.js</title><url>https://gpu.rocks/#/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Lerc</author><text>I have been using GPU.js in the last few weeks and I feel like there are two parts to the magic that makes it work.<p>The headline feature is the translation of JavaScript into Shader code, but the underlying architecture that interfaces between arrays and textures is I think where the utility really comes in for me.<p>I think I&#x27;d actually be better off working with just that second part. Writing the kernels in a more native shader language but being able to pass in arrays and get arrays out the other end.<p>While the aspect of writing the shader itself in JavaScript is cool when you consider what it has to do to make it work, when it doesn&#x27;t work it can be a real struggle to find out why.<p>Also there seems to be a bit of bit-rot in the documentation the link for the API reference is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doxdox.org&#x2F;gpujs&#x2F;gpu.js&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doxdox.org&#x2F;gpujs&#x2F;gpu.js&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>GPU.js</title><url>https://gpu.rocks/#/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SavantIdiot</author><text>This was posted multiple times on HN over the past 5 years.<p>And every time I see it, I cry that JavaScript doesn&#x27;t have something like numpy.<p>numpy is just so damn logical and fast (and comprehensive!) that i don&#x27;t consider myself a python programmer, i&#x27;m a numpy user.<p>EDIT: (removed complaint). That said: this looks like a good foundation for someone to use for implementing a fully featured numpy in JS.</text></comment> |
34,995,100 | 34,995,186 | 1 | 2 | 34,992,891 | train | <story><title>Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024</title><url>https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/royal-astronomical-society-announces-all-journals-publish-open-access-2024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sega_sai</author><text>This is bad news masquerading as good news.<p>Now they force you to pay 2.3k GBP to publish an article. Previously it was free, unless you wanted it to make it immediately accessible on the website.
People in astrophysics always did put articles on arxiv.org anyway, so papers were already accessible to everyone (in a non-typeset&#x2F;not-proofread form), but now it will be the same, but everyone will have to pay 2.3 kGBP per paper.
Also a useful comparison. The subscription to MNRAS for the institution was 6.5 kGBP. So any institution that publishes more than 2 papers a year will pay way more then before.
Also none of the referees are payed.
Also, some funding agencies (like UK&#x27;s UKRI) prohibit to put page charges in overheads for grants, so I wonder how people are supposed to get the money...<p>To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS. There is simply not enough value added in the publication process to justify 2.3k GBP, given that the referees are not payed, the journal is published online only, and the arxiv already provide hosting.<p>Also, this is the case of Royal Astronomical Society (which does a lot of good things: provides grants, fellowships, organizes meetings, gives prizes) of trying to preserve the income stream to fund that. This is wrong, and we should not accept that in my opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>planede</author><text>Even if it eventually gets covered by funding, this is still kind of bad. Who gets to publish is basically decided at funding time, not on merits of a paper.</text></comment> | <story><title>Royal Astronomical Society: all journals to publish as open access from 2024</title><url>https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/royal-astronomical-society-announces-all-journals-publish-open-access-2024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sega_sai</author><text>This is bad news masquerading as good news.<p>Now they force you to pay 2.3k GBP to publish an article. Previously it was free, unless you wanted it to make it immediately accessible on the website.
People in astrophysics always did put articles on arxiv.org anyway, so papers were already accessible to everyone (in a non-typeset&#x2F;not-proofread form), but now it will be the same, but everyone will have to pay 2.3 kGBP per paper.
Also a useful comparison. The subscription to MNRAS for the institution was 6.5 kGBP. So any institution that publishes more than 2 papers a year will pay way more then before.
Also none of the referees are payed.
Also, some funding agencies (like UK&#x27;s UKRI) prohibit to put page charges in overheads for grants, so I wonder how people are supposed to get the money...<p>To be honest, the natural consequence of this will be that people will stop publishing in MNRAS. There is simply not enough value added in the publication process to justify 2.3k GBP, given that the referees are not payed, the journal is published online only, and the arxiv already provide hosting.<p>Also, this is the case of Royal Astronomical Society (which does a lot of good things: provides grants, fellowships, organizes meetings, gives prizes) of trying to preserve the income stream to fund that. This is wrong, and we should not accept that in my opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yaxu</author><text>I disagree, it&#x27;s ridiculous for publicly-funded research to be published behind paywalls, and open access fees are supported by research councils who mandate open access publication anyway. The point of publishing something in a journal is to have people _more_ able to read it, not less!!<p>It&#x27;s simply not true that UKRI don&#x27;t allow you to charge APCs to grants. I&#x27;ve costed it in to my current grant with no problems. They also provide funds to institutions to support open access publication, that academics without grant funding can access.<p>Generally people without funding support e.g. from &#x27;developing countries&#x27; are able to publish for free via a fee waiver, as the article suggests. This new policy also means they&#x27;re actually able to afford to read the research in the publication they&#x27;re submitting to.<p>If you&#x27;re arguing that the academic commercial publication model makes no sense and is in desperate need of wide-ranging reform, I agree with that. But I think this is a step in the right direction because at least it makes research accessible.</text></comment> |
19,118,355 | 19,117,311 | 1 | 3 | 19,113,661 | train | <story><title>New pill can deliver insulin</title><url>http://news.mit.edu/2019/pill-deliver-insulin-orally-0207</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpatru</author><text>I just watched a lecture on diabetes by Dr John McDougall last night. He described type 2 diabetes as the body&#x27;s natural way to limit weight gain. He points out that morbidly obese people are often not diabetic: lack of insulin resistance is what enabled them to keep growing. Viewed this way, diabetes is a sign that a person has reached maximum weight. Giving a person additional insulin at this point is like trying to override the body&#x27;s defense mechanism and forcing it to gain even more weight.<p>McDougall has lots of other interesting insights in the lecture and discusses how he treats diabetics. He goes into some detail about how he decides how to adjust medications and why he recommends his diet.<p>I&#x27;m posting this here because it may be of use to people who may not have heard this information from their own doctors.<p>The lecture is found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103</a><p>The link starts the video at the point where McDougall starts discussing type 2 diabetes specifically. Before this he talks about insulin and type 1 diabetes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geoelectric</author><text><i>and why he recommends his diet.</i><p>...which is the key. McDougall&#x27;s claim to fame is fad diets and prepackaged food for the same since the 80s, and anything where his bottom line is involved is suspect. He&#x27;s the vegan equivalent of Robert Atkins, basically.<p>McDougall is not who I look to for nutritional (or really any) advice. I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;s right sometimes, but his credibility is so compromised by his business that I&#x27;d need to hear it from someone else first with their data proving it before I&#x27;d ever believe it. If he told me the sky is blue, I&#x27;d get a second opinion.</text></comment> | <story><title>New pill can deliver insulin</title><url>http://news.mit.edu/2019/pill-deliver-insulin-orally-0207</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpatru</author><text>I just watched a lecture on diabetes by Dr John McDougall last night. He described type 2 diabetes as the body&#x27;s natural way to limit weight gain. He points out that morbidly obese people are often not diabetic: lack of insulin resistance is what enabled them to keep growing. Viewed this way, diabetes is a sign that a person has reached maximum weight. Giving a person additional insulin at this point is like trying to override the body&#x27;s defense mechanism and forcing it to gain even more weight.<p>McDougall has lots of other interesting insights in the lecture and discusses how he treats diabetics. He goes into some detail about how he decides how to adjust medications and why he recommends his diet.<p>I&#x27;m posting this here because it may be of use to people who may not have heard this information from their own doctors.<p>The lecture is found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UgE2IdL6tMw?t=1103</a><p>The link starts the video at the point where McDougall starts discussing type 2 diabetes specifically. Before this he talks about insulin and type 1 diabetes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotuser</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a lot of confusion&#x2F;ignorance with Type 1 and Type 2 and most people just lump them both under the same diabetes umbrella. Diet and exercise will never be enough for Type 1&#x27;s since the disease is an autoimmune disorder where the pancreas is attacked to the point where it makes little or no insulin (thus the need for external insulin). Type 2, as I understand it, is a progressive disease where the cell&#x27;s insulin receptors become nonreceptive. I think, in some cases, though, Type 2&#x27;s can become Type 1&#x27;s due to their pancreas being overworked to the point where they need insulin. And on the flip side, Type 1&#x27;s can become Type 2&#x27;s as a result of eating poorly and overusing insulin. But I wish each disease had it&#x27;s own name to avoid confusion over how each one should be treated.</text></comment> |
37,851,253 | 37,851,216 | 1 | 3 | 37,850,930 | train | <story><title>US citizens with permanent disabilities get free lifetime pass to National Parks</title><url>https://www.nps.gov/subjects/accessibility/interagency-access-pass.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wyldfire</author><text>The National Parks are truly a treasure. We are fortunate to have them and helping disabled people take advantage of the parks is an excellent idea.<p>I think it&#x27;d be great to encourage kids to visit the parks through passes like these. Sponsor a lottery&#x2F;giveaway or a contest featuring children&#x27;s park-themed art or creative writing as chances to win lifetime park passes for them and their family.<p>Also - fans of US national parks specifically can enjoy a game with some spectacular art called simply &quot;Parks&quot; [1]. and there&#x27;s a simpler spinoff called &quot;Trails&quot;[2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;266524&#x2F;parks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;266524&#x2F;parks</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keymastergames.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;trails" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keymastergames.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;trails</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swatcoder</author><text>&gt; I think it&#x27;d be great to encourage kids to visit the parks through passes like these. Sponsor a lottery&#x2F;giveaway or a contest featuring children&#x27;s park-themed art or creative writing as chances to win lifetime park passes for them and their family.<p>It’s a great idea, and if you’re one of the people here making SV tech salaries, you could make that happen tomorrow. You’re talking about $5000-10000 of direct philanthropy to run&#x2F;promote the contest and buy those passes for the winner. Media coverage would come easy and you could get it to snowball through other contributors after driving it through the first time.<p>(Not being flippant. Sometimes people just need help seeing what they can actually make happen without too much trouble.)</text></comment> | <story><title>US citizens with permanent disabilities get free lifetime pass to National Parks</title><url>https://www.nps.gov/subjects/accessibility/interagency-access-pass.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wyldfire</author><text>The National Parks are truly a treasure. We are fortunate to have them and helping disabled people take advantage of the parks is an excellent idea.<p>I think it&#x27;d be great to encourage kids to visit the parks through passes like these. Sponsor a lottery&#x2F;giveaway or a contest featuring children&#x27;s park-themed art or creative writing as chances to win lifetime park passes for them and their family.<p>Also - fans of US national parks specifically can enjoy a game with some spectacular art called simply &quot;Parks&quot; [1]. and there&#x27;s a simpler spinoff called &quot;Trails&quot;[2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;266524&#x2F;parks" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;266524&#x2F;parks</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keymastergames.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;trails" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keymastergames.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;trails</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solardev</author><text>And for those wanting a bit more complexity is the 2023 worker placement game &quot;Trailblazer - John Muir Trail&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;307044&#x2F;trailblazer-john-muir-trail" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boardgamegeek.com&#x2F;boardgame&#x2F;307044&#x2F;trailblazer-john-...</a><p>I personally really enjoyed that game, and some reviewers have described it as &quot;What Parks should&#x27;ve been&quot;</text></comment> |
23,514,749 | 23,513,735 | 1 | 2 | 23,508,979 | train | <story><title>Flow browser passes the Acid tests</title><url>https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fouric</author><text>&gt; The reason for Chrome&#x27;s massive memory requirements is that they make memory vs. CPU&#x2F;performance&#x2F;security tradeoffs on a regular basis, and usually make them against memory.<p>This is generally a good trade. Memory is not very useful (modulo filesystem caches) when you&#x27;re not using it, and has a very low cost when you are (extremely tiny power consumption). CPU cycles cost power (leading to heat dissipation and battery life loss) when you use any amount, and latency when you use too much. Latency directly affects user experience and efficiency, which is a much higher cost than &quot;my RAM is at 75% usage&quot;.<p>Additionally, Chrome&#x27;s tradeoff is such that it works out better on cheaper devices. Memory is far cheaper than more powerful processors - which also reduce battery life, which is even <i>more</i> expensive. On more expensive devices, you have all the memory you need for Chrome anyway, so you&#x27;re just getting better latency.<p>Finally, there are very few cases where you should have a large number of Chrome tabs open anyway. Multi-tasking is impossible (the human brain simply doesn&#x27;t support it) and rapid context-switches are inefficient. As much fun as it might be to have 5 tabs open on each of 10 different topics, you&#x27;re simply decreasing your productivity and capacity for focus. Even when doing multi-disciplinary research, there are a <i>ton</i> of ways to get around the problem of running out of memory due to Chrome tabs: printing pages to PDF, turning off JavaScript, downloading research papers and reading them in a native PDF viewer, extracting content from webpages and inserting into local documents, and the classic using <i>darn bookmarks instead of tabs like they were intended to be used</i>.<p>(of course, in an ideal world, all web browsers would use absolutely no memory or processing power whatsoever - I&#x27;m just defending this particular engineering tradeoff)</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>There was a meme when I was at Google (~2012) that went:<p>&quot;What would you do if you had 16GB of RAM?&quot;<p>&quot;I&#x27;ll tell you what I&#x27;d do with that. 2 Chrome tabs at the same time.&quot;<p>(Superimposed over the scene from Office Space.)<p>(On a more charitable note, I worked with the Chrome performance team on a few occasions. The reason for Chrome&#x27;s massive memory requirements is that they make memory vs. CPU&#x2F;performance&#x2F;security tradeoffs on a regular basis, and usually make them against memory. For example, the reason you can have smooth animations in Chrome is because there are multiple in-memory representations of the layout and changing a CSS property relies on cached parsing&#x2F;cascading&#x2F;layout decisions and only needs a repaint on the GPU, using blocks of the page that have been pre-rendered into a texture. For another example, the multi-process architecture that gives each webpage isolation from another is a lot more RAM intensive than a shared-state architecture that could share common components, like say the object code from compiling shared JS libraries.)</text></item><item><author>htk</author><text>Yesterday I stumbled upon a post here about a guy trying to use a Pi as his main machine for a couple of days, and one of his conclusions was that he needed 8GB of ram to run Chromium acceptably, and I thought, hardware evolved to these amazingly small and powerful machines but software is bloating faster. All this is to say that software such as Flow might be the way to go back to more performant ways of doing “essential” computing.</text></item><item><author>rattray</author><text>This actually looks pretty interesting.<p>They started out as an SVG engine for set-top boxes (embedded devices running on TV&#x27;s) since browsers at the time weren&#x27;t fast&#x2F;light enough for the underpowered chips in set-top boxes. Then when the devices got better chips, they realized perf still wasn&#x27;t good enough for big 4k screens – and that multicore rendering could help.<p>So they&#x27;ve implemented a full HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS browser from scratch, all to take advantage of a multicore architecture (today&#x27;s browsers all render on a single thread) which has enabled (they claim) greater than 4x better framerate during web animations than the stable channels of Chrome&#x2F;Blink and Safari&#x2F;Webkit. Oh, and 60% faster layout on a quad-core machine.<p>They also claim &quot;extremely low memory consumption&quot;, which would be quite appealing to many HN&#x27;ers I think, though that may only be true of their HTML engine and not of the full browser (eg; when using multiple tabs and hungry JS apps).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MereInterest</author><text>&gt; Finally, there are very few cases where you should have a large number of Chrome tabs open anyway. Multi-tasking is impossible (the human brain simply doesn&#x27;t support it) and rapid context-switches are inefficient.<p>I agree that the human brain doesn&#x27;t task switch effectively, but that is exactly why I want to have many tabs open. In the case of reading Hacker News, I will go through the main page once, opening each article and comment page in a new tab, then will use that as a to-read list. If I am researching how to do a task, I will open have several pages open for documentation, stack overflow posts, bug reports, etc. These are open not for the sake of multitasking, but in order to reduce the amount of working memory I need. For example, if a post mentions that a particular workaround may be required, then I want to keep that tab open until I have verified that that workaround is not needed in my case.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flow browser passes the Acid tests</title><url>https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fouric</author><text>&gt; The reason for Chrome&#x27;s massive memory requirements is that they make memory vs. CPU&#x2F;performance&#x2F;security tradeoffs on a regular basis, and usually make them against memory.<p>This is generally a good trade. Memory is not very useful (modulo filesystem caches) when you&#x27;re not using it, and has a very low cost when you are (extremely tiny power consumption). CPU cycles cost power (leading to heat dissipation and battery life loss) when you use any amount, and latency when you use too much. Latency directly affects user experience and efficiency, which is a much higher cost than &quot;my RAM is at 75% usage&quot;.<p>Additionally, Chrome&#x27;s tradeoff is such that it works out better on cheaper devices. Memory is far cheaper than more powerful processors - which also reduce battery life, which is even <i>more</i> expensive. On more expensive devices, you have all the memory you need for Chrome anyway, so you&#x27;re just getting better latency.<p>Finally, there are very few cases where you should have a large number of Chrome tabs open anyway. Multi-tasking is impossible (the human brain simply doesn&#x27;t support it) and rapid context-switches are inefficient. As much fun as it might be to have 5 tabs open on each of 10 different topics, you&#x27;re simply decreasing your productivity and capacity for focus. Even when doing multi-disciplinary research, there are a <i>ton</i> of ways to get around the problem of running out of memory due to Chrome tabs: printing pages to PDF, turning off JavaScript, downloading research papers and reading them in a native PDF viewer, extracting content from webpages and inserting into local documents, and the classic using <i>darn bookmarks instead of tabs like they were intended to be used</i>.<p>(of course, in an ideal world, all web browsers would use absolutely no memory or processing power whatsoever - I&#x27;m just defending this particular engineering tradeoff)</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>There was a meme when I was at Google (~2012) that went:<p>&quot;What would you do if you had 16GB of RAM?&quot;<p>&quot;I&#x27;ll tell you what I&#x27;d do with that. 2 Chrome tabs at the same time.&quot;<p>(Superimposed over the scene from Office Space.)<p>(On a more charitable note, I worked with the Chrome performance team on a few occasions. The reason for Chrome&#x27;s massive memory requirements is that they make memory vs. CPU&#x2F;performance&#x2F;security tradeoffs on a regular basis, and usually make them against memory. For example, the reason you can have smooth animations in Chrome is because there are multiple in-memory representations of the layout and changing a CSS property relies on cached parsing&#x2F;cascading&#x2F;layout decisions and only needs a repaint on the GPU, using blocks of the page that have been pre-rendered into a texture. For another example, the multi-process architecture that gives each webpage isolation from another is a lot more RAM intensive than a shared-state architecture that could share common components, like say the object code from compiling shared JS libraries.)</text></item><item><author>htk</author><text>Yesterday I stumbled upon a post here about a guy trying to use a Pi as his main machine for a couple of days, and one of his conclusions was that he needed 8GB of ram to run Chromium acceptably, and I thought, hardware evolved to these amazingly small and powerful machines but software is bloating faster. All this is to say that software such as Flow might be the way to go back to more performant ways of doing “essential” computing.</text></item><item><author>rattray</author><text>This actually looks pretty interesting.<p>They started out as an SVG engine for set-top boxes (embedded devices running on TV&#x27;s) since browsers at the time weren&#x27;t fast&#x2F;light enough for the underpowered chips in set-top boxes. Then when the devices got better chips, they realized perf still wasn&#x27;t good enough for big 4k screens – and that multicore rendering could help.<p>So they&#x27;ve implemented a full HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS browser from scratch, all to take advantage of a multicore architecture (today&#x27;s browsers all render on a single thread) which has enabled (they claim) greater than 4x better framerate during web animations than the stable channels of Chrome&#x2F;Blink and Safari&#x2F;Webkit. Oh, and 60% faster layout on a quad-core machine.<p>They also claim &quot;extremely low memory consumption&quot;, which would be quite appealing to many HN&#x27;ers I think, though that may only be true of their HTML engine and not of the full browser (eg; when using multiple tabs and hungry JS apps).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrekandre</author><text>&gt; Finally, there are very few cases where you should have a large number of Chrome tabs open anyway.<p>from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose context of the previous ones...<p>from my own personal experience, i like to reuse them as much as i can, but it gets harder as more and more get added, its easier to start from scratch and get a new tab open and go where i want to go...<p>i think browsers could be doing much more than just tabs and bookmarks to help people organize, because right now it seems like the equivalent of a desk with lots of papers strewn around where someone grabs yet another blank peice to start writing on...</text></comment> |
29,187,784 | 29,187,738 | 1 | 2 | 29,184,064 | train | <story><title>Reflections on E-Bikes</title><url>https://ebikes.neighbor-ryan.org/reflections</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unicornporn</author><text>&gt; Today I got cursed out by a spandexed “real biker” as I passed by with my electric whirrrr.<p>So, a motorbike a passes a human powered vehicle? That should come as no surprise to neither of you. :)<p>To be honest, I don&#x27;t get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you&#x27;re riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike. An 8 km ride takes 20 minutes at 15 MPH. At 20 MPH it&#x27;s 15 minutes. You&#x27;d add 5 minutes off your ride and get some proper exercise.<p>As a reference, my grandmother rode her bike 12 miles to school and then back at the age of 10.<p>E-bikes make a lot of sense for longer rides with cargo bikes packed kids, trash, food and whatnot.</text></item><item><author>icameron</author><text>I am an amateur e-biker. Luckily I live in a city with bikeshare so I don’t have to own one, I just rent it for my commute. 5 miles each way. It takes half the time as public transit used to. Before the bike share I would waste at least 90 minutes a day waiting for and commuting on public transit. Now it’s no more than 24 minutes door to door each way. I get mild exercise, and it’s fun! I still own a non e-bike (fat tire mountain bike) and I am in the 10-15 MPH range with that, plus it makes me sweat and be out of breath. The small difference of e-assist puts me in the 15-20 MPH range, and as described in the article it’s a night-and-day difference. I feel safe and assured, confident, like on a motorcycle. Almost can keep up with traffic. I don&#x27;t identify as a cyclist like many of the true bike commuters in the area, but I often pass them on the bike routes. I try to be friendly, but I’m smoking them with my rental bike in my street clothes for 20 cents per minute. Today I got cursed out by a spandexed “real biker” as I passed by with my electric whirrrr. It really feels great to ride these bikes. What a time to be alive!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>masklinn</author><text>&gt; To be honest, I don&#x27;t get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you&#x27;re riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike. An 8 km ride takes 20 minutes at 15 MPH. At 20 MPH it&#x27;s 15 minutes. You&#x27;d add 5 minutes off your ride and get some proper exercise.<p>Morning commute is not a moment where I have any interest in exercise, arriving sweaty at work, needing to always carry multiple sets of clothes, ...<p>I&#x27;d rather see it like the dutch, the bike is a tool for moving from A to B. If you want to do this while exercising more power to you, that&#x27;s not my jam.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reflections on E-Bikes</title><url>https://ebikes.neighbor-ryan.org/reflections</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unicornporn</author><text>&gt; Today I got cursed out by a spandexed “real biker” as I passed by with my electric whirrrr.<p>So, a motorbike a passes a human powered vehicle? That should come as no surprise to neither of you. :)<p>To be honest, I don&#x27;t get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you&#x27;re riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike. An 8 km ride takes 20 minutes at 15 MPH. At 20 MPH it&#x27;s 15 minutes. You&#x27;d add 5 minutes off your ride and get some proper exercise.<p>As a reference, my grandmother rode her bike 12 miles to school and then back at the age of 10.<p>E-bikes make a lot of sense for longer rides with cargo bikes packed kids, trash, food and whatnot.</text></item><item><author>icameron</author><text>I am an amateur e-biker. Luckily I live in a city with bikeshare so I don’t have to own one, I just rent it for my commute. 5 miles each way. It takes half the time as public transit used to. Before the bike share I would waste at least 90 minutes a day waiting for and commuting on public transit. Now it’s no more than 24 minutes door to door each way. I get mild exercise, and it’s fun! I still own a non e-bike (fat tire mountain bike) and I am in the 10-15 MPH range with that, plus it makes me sweat and be out of breath. The small difference of e-assist puts me in the 15-20 MPH range, and as described in the article it’s a night-and-day difference. I feel safe and assured, confident, like on a motorcycle. Almost can keep up with traffic. I don&#x27;t identify as a cyclist like many of the true bike commuters in the area, but I often pass them on the bike routes. I try to be friendly, but I’m smoking them with my rental bike in my street clothes for 20 cents per minute. Today I got cursed out by a spandexed “real biker” as I passed by with my electric whirrrr. It really feels great to ride these bikes. What a time to be alive!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dlisboa</author><text>&gt; To be honest, I don&#x27;t get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you&#x27;re riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike.<p>I think most people in the North America and Europe live in cities that are so flat biking is just like walking faster. Maybe that&#x27;s where your frame of mind comes from.<p>Where I live the hills are so steep that it&#x27;s impossible to bike them solely human-powered unless you&#x27;re an actual athlete. And even the more modest inclines will make a regular person give up on the thought of biking since it&#x27;d be a workout.<p>E-bikes are awesome for this, as they make tough inclines much easier.</text></comment> |
38,625,746 | 38,624,080 | 1 | 3 | 38,616,888 | train | <story><title>AI’s big rift is like a religious schism</title><url>https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-singularity-is-nigh-republished</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>The thing I never understood is: why would it go vertical? It would at best be an exponential curve, and I have doubts about that.<p>I admit looking at the 100 years before 1993, it looks like innovation is constantly speeding up, but even then there&#x27;s not going to be a moment that we suddenly have infinite knowledge. There&#x27;s no such thing as infinite knowledge; it&#x27;s still bound by physical limits. It still takes time and resources to actually do something with it.<p>And if you look at the past 30 years, it doesn&#x27;t really look like innovation is speeding up at all. There is plenty of innovation, but is it happening at an ever faster pace? I don&#x27;t see it. Not to mention that much of it is hype and fashion, and not really fundamentally new. Even AI progress is driven mostly by faster hardware and more data, and not really fundamentally new technologies.<p>And that&#x27;s not even getting into the science crisis: lots of science is not really reproducible. And while LLMs are certainly an exciting new technology, it&#x27;s not at all clear that they&#x27;re really more than a glorified autocorrect.<p>So I&#x27;m extremely skeptical about those singularity ideas. It&#x27;s an exciting SciFi idea, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s true. And certainly not within the next 30 years.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>The reference to the origin of the concept of a singularity was better than most, but still misunderstood it:<p>&gt; In 1993 Vernor Vinge drew on computer science and his fellow science-fiction writers to argue that ordinary human history was drawing to a close. We would surely create superhuman intelligence sometime within the next three decades, leading to a “Singularity”, in which AI would start feeding on itself.<p>Yes it was Vernor, but he said something much more interesting: that as the speed of innovation itself sped up (the derivative of acceleration) the curve could bend up until it became essentially vertical, literally a singularity in the curve. And then things on the other side of that singularity would be incomprehensible to those of us on our side of it. This is reflected in Peace and Fire upon the deep and other of his novels going back before the essay.<p>You can see in this idea is itself rooted in ideas from Alvin Toffler in the 70s (Future Shock) and Ray Lafferty in the 60s (e.g. Slow Tuesday Night).<p>So AI machines were just part of the enabling phenomena -- the most important, and yes the center of his &#x27;93 essay. But the core of the metaphor was broader than that.<p>I&#x27;m a little disappointed that The Economist, of all publications, didn&#x27;t get ths quite right, but in their defense, it was a bit tangental to the point of the essay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AngaraliTurk</author><text>&gt; And while LLMs are certainly an exciting new technology, it&#x27;s not at all clear that they&#x27;re really more than a glorified autocorrect.<p>Are we sure things like biology, or heck, even the universe as a whole and its parts, aren&#x27;t &quot;glorified x thing&quot;? Can&#x27;t we apply this argument to just about anything?</text></comment> | <story><title>AI’s big rift is like a religious schism</title><url>https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-singularity-is-nigh-republished</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>The thing I never understood is: why would it go vertical? It would at best be an exponential curve, and I have doubts about that.<p>I admit looking at the 100 years before 1993, it looks like innovation is constantly speeding up, but even then there&#x27;s not going to be a moment that we suddenly have infinite knowledge. There&#x27;s no such thing as infinite knowledge; it&#x27;s still bound by physical limits. It still takes time and resources to actually do something with it.<p>And if you look at the past 30 years, it doesn&#x27;t really look like innovation is speeding up at all. There is plenty of innovation, but is it happening at an ever faster pace? I don&#x27;t see it. Not to mention that much of it is hype and fashion, and not really fundamentally new. Even AI progress is driven mostly by faster hardware and more data, and not really fundamentally new technologies.<p>And that&#x27;s not even getting into the science crisis: lots of science is not really reproducible. And while LLMs are certainly an exciting new technology, it&#x27;s not at all clear that they&#x27;re really more than a glorified autocorrect.<p>So I&#x27;m extremely skeptical about those singularity ideas. It&#x27;s an exciting SciFi idea, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s true. And certainly not within the next 30 years.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>The reference to the origin of the concept of a singularity was better than most, but still misunderstood it:<p>&gt; In 1993 Vernor Vinge drew on computer science and his fellow science-fiction writers to argue that ordinary human history was drawing to a close. We would surely create superhuman intelligence sometime within the next three decades, leading to a “Singularity”, in which AI would start feeding on itself.<p>Yes it was Vernor, but he said something much more interesting: that as the speed of innovation itself sped up (the derivative of acceleration) the curve could bend up until it became essentially vertical, literally a singularity in the curve. And then things on the other side of that singularity would be incomprehensible to those of us on our side of it. This is reflected in Peace and Fire upon the deep and other of his novels going back before the essay.<p>You can see in this idea is itself rooted in ideas from Alvin Toffler in the 70s (Future Shock) and Ray Lafferty in the 60s (e.g. Slow Tuesday Night).<p>So AI machines were just part of the enabling phenomena -- the most important, and yes the center of his &#x27;93 essay. But the core of the metaphor was broader than that.<p>I&#x27;m a little disappointed that The Economist, of all publications, didn&#x27;t get ths quite right, but in their defense, it was a bit tangental to the point of the essay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bratbag</author><text>Its infinite from the perspective of our side of the curve.<p>It&#x27;s another application of advanced technology appearing to be magic, but imagine transitioning into it in a matter of hours, then with that advanced tech transitioning further into damn-near godhood within minutes.<p>Then imagine what happens in the second after that.<p>It may be operating within the boundaries of physics, but they would be physical rules well beyond our understanding and may even be infinite by our own limited definition of physics.<p>That&#x27;s the curve.</text></comment> |
17,632,982 | 17,632,551 | 1 | 3 | 17,631,545 | train | <story><title>‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/ai-artificial-intelligence-social-media-bots-wrong</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it&#x27;s hard to separate from journalism itself. It&#x27;s part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium.<p>We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At every step, a journalist loses most of her readers. The winning strategy is to increase &quot;story,&quot; play to existing opinions, be sensational, use bait... There are flavours and degrees, but by and large writing like this is n inevitability of the medium, of journalism.<p>If you are reporting on programs that &quot;developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves..&quot; you are reporting on whether or not the skynet singularity is coming, almost certainly.<p>If we want something different, I think we&#x27;ll need a medium change.<p>Personally, I was hoping e-readers would catalyze a new medium subtype: 30-100 page mini books. A lot of &quot;news cycle..&quot; the drip, drip, sensation of the day journalism just isn&#x27;t a good way of understanding anything.<p>What happened between North Korea and the US this year? What&#x27;s been happening with the Syrian war? Brexit as of July 2018...? I would be very happy to exchange the daily&#x2F;weekly news bulletins for monthly&#x2F;quarterly mini books.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/ai-artificial-intelligence-social-media-bots-wrong</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jokoon</author><text>Success in developing working AI is not so much of a big step in progress for AI in general.<p>It would be more interesting if we could understand what happens in those black boxes, and synthesize it. All we see is showcase projects and services, but never something you can run on a client computer.<p>It really looks like machine learning is just brute forcing problems until you have a partial solution key to a problem, without understanding how it works internally. Granted, it&#x27;s progress, but why isn&#x27;t it possible to use the data of a trained ML network for further analysis? I see many models of learning, but not a lot of analysis or simplification of the resulting data.<p>I would have thought AI would help science understand what intelligence is, but obviously it&#x27;s always money first, science later. You often see a lot of tools and models, but not a lot of good insights.</text></comment> |
38,200,480 | 38,200,553 | 1 | 2 | 38,200,117 | train | <story><title>After a $1.8B verdict, the clock is ticking on the 6% realtor commission</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/homes/nar-verdict-real-estate-commission-fee/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisArchitect</author><text>Some more discussion a few days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38156557">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38156557</a></text></comment> | <story><title>After a $1.8B verdict, the clock is ticking on the 6% realtor commission</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/05/homes/nar-verdict-real-estate-commission-fee/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>intrasight</author><text>I see this changing really fast. Real estate firms and individual real estate agents are not gonna want to get sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. They are going to be SUPER careful to avoid that. I foresee the quick dilution of the power of the realtor trademark. I foresee new real estate agents entering the market and not using the realtor trademark. I see those real estate agents using very different business models than what are use now. Lower percentages or fixed-price - but they&#x27;ll find other ways to make money by being intermediaries with the other players in a transaction.<p>Whatever is our cost for this cartel, the cost of the MD cartel is at least 10x higher. So perspective is needed.</text></comment> |
9,354,064 | 9,350,340 | 1 | 2 | 9,346,313 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?</title><text>I&#x27;m finishing the Art of War by Sun Tzu and I&#x27;m looking for some book suggestions, so I&#x27;m curious to know which books are being read by the members of the HN community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>GregBuchholz</author><text>&quot;Metallurgy of Steel for Bladesmiths &amp; Others
who Heat Treat and Forge Steel&quot; by John Verhoeven
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feine-klingen.de&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;verhoeven.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feine-klingen.de&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;verhoeven.pdf</a>
An interesting technical introduction to metallurgy, without being overly tedious. Congratulations to the author, for what sounds like it could be a dry subject. I am pleasantly surprised by how ignorant I was about such a common everyday material, and about the fascinating changes that take place in the crystal structure of steel with mere temperature changes. I&#x27;ve got no plans to forge steel, or make blades, but found this book very good so far (although I have been interested in metalworking in general lately).<p>&quot;Basic Lathework&quot; by Stan Bray. This is the best of the beginning lathe books that I&#x27;ve been reading recently, covering the parts of the machine and accessories, techniques, and cutting tools. Very minimal pre-requisites.<p>&quot;Metals in the Service of Man&quot; by Arthur Street and William Alexander. A very light read about industrially useful metals, a little history about them, and their uses.<p>&quot;Measurement&quot; by Paul Lockhart. I finally got this book after reading his &quot;A Mathematicians Lament&quot; from a while back. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;external_archive&#x2F;devlin&#x2F;LockhartsLament.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;external_archive&#x2F;devlin&#x2F;LockhartsLament....</a><p>&quot;How Round is Your Circle&quot; by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. Just started this, but it sounds interesting, the pictures are intriguing, and it pushes a lot of my &quot;interesting&quot; buttons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joekrill</author><text>The Metallurgy book sounds very interesting, definitely going to check it out. Along those lines, but I think <i>much</i> more simplistic, is a book I just read called &quot;Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World&quot; -- one chapter each devoted to a common everyday material. You may like that one based on why you liked the Metallurgy book.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?</title><text>I&#x27;m finishing the Art of War by Sun Tzu and I&#x27;m looking for some book suggestions, so I&#x27;m curious to know which books are being read by the members of the HN community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>GregBuchholz</author><text>&quot;Metallurgy of Steel for Bladesmiths &amp; Others
who Heat Treat and Forge Steel&quot; by John Verhoeven
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feine-klingen.de&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;verhoeven.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feine-klingen.de&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;verhoeven.pdf</a>
An interesting technical introduction to metallurgy, without being overly tedious. Congratulations to the author, for what sounds like it could be a dry subject. I am pleasantly surprised by how ignorant I was about such a common everyday material, and about the fascinating changes that take place in the crystal structure of steel with mere temperature changes. I&#x27;ve got no plans to forge steel, or make blades, but found this book very good so far (although I have been interested in metalworking in general lately).<p>&quot;Basic Lathework&quot; by Stan Bray. This is the best of the beginning lathe books that I&#x27;ve been reading recently, covering the parts of the machine and accessories, techniques, and cutting tools. Very minimal pre-requisites.<p>&quot;Metals in the Service of Man&quot; by Arthur Street and William Alexander. A very light read about industrially useful metals, a little history about them, and their uses.<p>&quot;Measurement&quot; by Paul Lockhart. I finally got this book after reading his &quot;A Mathematicians Lament&quot; from a while back. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;external_archive&#x2F;devlin&#x2F;LockhartsLament.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maa.org&#x2F;external_archive&#x2F;devlin&#x2F;LockhartsLament....</a><p>&quot;How Round is Your Circle&quot; by John Bryant and Chris Sangwin. Just started this, but it sounds interesting, the pictures are intriguing, and it pushes a lot of my &quot;interesting&quot; buttons.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grkvlt</author><text>&quot;How Round is Your Circle&quot; is awesome. I finished that and immediately lost a huge amount of time investigating all the papers referenced by them, and reading on planimeters and measurement theory. I still have to get a copy of &quot;Measurement&quot; by Lockhart though.</text></comment> |
36,875,237 | 36,874,121 | 1 | 3 | 36,850,113 | train | <story><title>When did people stop being drunk all the time?</title><url>https://lefineder.substack.com/p/when-did-people-stop-being-drunk</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Modern people drunk a lot, event recently. In France, 80 years ago, kids would drink wine at school.<p>Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.<p>But I think other factors came at play:<p>- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;expat-in-france.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;wine-drinking-ban-french-school.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;expat-in-france.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;wine-...</a><p>- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.<p>- Moving to a service based society. If you don&#x27;t have to work in a mine, you drink less.<p>- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toshk</author><text>A big shift was also coffee. Works much better for focus work, and also gives a slight high (big in the beginning).<p>The coffee &amp; alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West<p>High paced work environment &amp; coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).</text></comment> | <story><title>When did people stop being drunk all the time?</title><url>https://lefineder.substack.com/p/when-did-people-stop-being-drunk</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Modern people drunk a lot, event recently. In France, 80 years ago, kids would drink wine at school.<p>Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.<p>But I think other factors came at play:<p>- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;expat-in-france.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;wine-drinking-ban-french-school.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;expat-in-france.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;02&#x2F;wine-...</a><p>- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.<p>- Moving to a service based society. If you don&#x27;t have to work in a mine, you drink less.<p>- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HappMacDonald</author><text>Depends on your definition of &quot;innocent&quot;. Sugar is Satan-incarnate (and I am its slave )</text></comment> |
32,908,138 | 32,908,287 | 1 | 2 | 32,907,726 | train | <story><title>Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead</title><url>https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/09/15/deadlines.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It’s always fascinating to read these anti-deadline articles that assume deadlines are arbitrary things that exist for no reason.<p>That might be moderately true for, say, someone developing a new app feature that gets shipped to users who aren’t expecting it. However, it’s not true at all when the software development output is a gating feature for real-world contractual obligations and other such business drivers. In that case, target dates must be carefully forecasted and estimates must be performed with great care and detain. This doesn’t guarantee that a target date will be hit, of course, but it’s not impossible to produce estimates that are reasonable accurate a large percentage of the time.<p>Estimation, planning, and progress tracking are difficult skills that must be learned, but they’re not impossible. I suspect many of the developers who believe that target dates are always arbitrary, pointless, and impossible to estimate have mostly worked in big cash-rich environments where it didn’t really matter when a feature shipped. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and talk to engineers who work in industries where target dates are critical you’ll discover a lot of people who are very good at breaking down projects and accurately estimating dates without relying on crunch time to get things done. It may sound impossible if you’ve never worked in an industry that requires such precision, but it makes sense after you’ve worked in such an environment for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arnvald</author><text>Most deadlines in my career so far were arbitrary. Sure, some deadlines were driven by fixed events, for example Christmas promotion has to be launched before Christmas.<p>But in most cases when I asked managers about the reason behind the deadline, the answer was something like &quot;oh,I promised this team&#x2F;director we&#x27;ll do it by then&quot;. When I dug deeper to see what happens if we miss the deadline, it appeared the said team would be just fine, there were no real life consequences, just that they wanted to finish their part of work by certain time, and they depended on us.<p>I&#x27;m not saying deadlines are useless, but they&#x27;re very often driven by some arbitrary promises made by managers before even consulting developers about the complexity of work to be done.</text></comment> | <story><title>Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead</title><url>https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/09/15/deadlines.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It’s always fascinating to read these anti-deadline articles that assume deadlines are arbitrary things that exist for no reason.<p>That might be moderately true for, say, someone developing a new app feature that gets shipped to users who aren’t expecting it. However, it’s not true at all when the software development output is a gating feature for real-world contractual obligations and other such business drivers. In that case, target dates must be carefully forecasted and estimates must be performed with great care and detain. This doesn’t guarantee that a target date will be hit, of course, but it’s not impossible to produce estimates that are reasonable accurate a large percentage of the time.<p>Estimation, planning, and progress tracking are difficult skills that must be learned, but they’re not impossible. I suspect many of the developers who believe that target dates are always arbitrary, pointless, and impossible to estimate have mostly worked in big cash-rich environments where it didn’t really matter when a feature shipped. If you go to the other end of the spectrum and talk to engineers who work in industries where target dates are critical you’ll discover a lot of people who are very good at breaking down projects and accurately estimating dates without relying on crunch time to get things done. It may sound impossible if you’ve never worked in an industry that requires such precision, but it makes sense after you’ve worked in such an environment for a while.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0x20cowboy</author><text>It’s not that deadlines don’t exist (for some business reason), it’s just that trying to have both a deadline and a set of completed features is contradictory (if you want something that works well).<p>You can set out to have a set of features, and you can have a deadline, but thinking all the features will be completed (and completed well), on that day has never worked (in my experience). You just wind up with rush hacked garbage towards the end.<p>This is what I’ve done successfully for years now (when I am not forced by a PM to do agile): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;concentric.works&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;concentric.works&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
3,160,053 | 3,160,044 | 1 | 2 | 3,159,660 | train | <story><title>Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS</title><url>http://www.ecsspert.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bcrescimanno</author><text>I hate to be "that dick" so let me first say that this is damn impressive stuff; kudos to the authors for some serious CSS wizardry!<p>It's also completely and totally useless. The person / people who did this are obviously talented and have a lot of expertise. I'd really rather see people with this level of ability contributing meaningful, useful tools / techniques to the community rather than seeing this type of post over and over again.<p>I can hear the arguments now, "but it shows off the power of CSS!"<p>No, it doesn't. It shows off what a clever person can achieve by tinkering with a system; but there's no practical value to most of the techniques demonstrated. CSS has a lot of power; but its best demonstrated by projects like the CSS Zen Garden that show off real-world CSS use.</text></comment> | <story><title>Famous Logos Designed Entirely in CSS</title><url>http://www.ecsspert.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kreek</author><text>This is cool but isn't this what SVG (ignoring browser incompatibilities) is for? CSS is for affecting the layout of the content. In most uses a logo is content, that content could still be affected by style, but I don't think it should be entirely defined by CSS.</text></comment> |
30,665,064 | 30,665,015 | 1 | 2 | 30,663,248 | train | <story><title>Container loaded with discarded lithium batteries catches fire enroute to port</title><url>https://gcaptain.com/container-lithium-battery-fire/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noodlesUK</author><text>The real crime here was lying on the bill of lading to get around shipping restrictions. Lithium batteries do sometimes cause fires, and sometimes big ones, but we have some safety mechanisms to help with that kind of thing. You can’t put any of them in place if you lie about what you’re shipping</text></comment> | <story><title>Container loaded with discarded lithium batteries catches fire enroute to port</title><url>https://gcaptain.com/container-lithium-battery-fire/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devwastaken</author><text>Lithiums are nothing to treat carelessly. Friend of mine had a good quality drone battery catch their room on fire. Could not put out the battery, had to scoop it and put it outside until it stopped. The only reason it didn&#x27;t burn the house down was due to flame retardant materials things are made out of nowadays and they caught it fast enough.<p>Manufacturing by it&#x27;s nature has defects, get metal containers for your lithium charging and don&#x27;t cheap out on batteries. If you have old lithium batteries from laptops, drones, etc, dispose of them at a local transfer station properly. Or at a minimum locate them in something metal that has a lid in an area where open flame would not readily catch something on fire.</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.