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30,413,971 | 30,413,330 | 1 | 2 | 30,410,856 | train | <story><title>Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?</title><url>https://vaghetti.dev/posts/times-are-great/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edanm</author><text>Again, I&#x27;m not defending every single workplace here. Obviously some developers <i>aren&#x27;t</i> treated well, and in those cases, they should find another job. I was commenting on the fairly blanket statement made.<p>But the way the conversation should go isn&#x27;t the developer deciding when refactoring should happen. It&#x27;s the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save Y work in the future). And the manager factoring that into all the other circumstances, and deciding whether it&#x27;s worth the current cost.</text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>I think we&#x27;re definitely better at non-developers at software development. Yet we literally have outside people dictating to us when they think it&#x27;s appropriate for refactoring to happen. Or when it&#x27;s time to update a dependency.<p>This is a lot different from than &quot;no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren&#x27;t important.&quot;. I definitely value the input of other professionals when it comes to their field of expertise. All I want is the same in return.</text></item><item><author>edanm</author><text>&gt; We&#x27;re still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor.<p>I highly disagree with this.<p>For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow <i>better</i> than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren&#x27;t important.<p>News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a <i>part</i> of building things in most cases. There&#x27;s nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.<p><i>Every</i> skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.</text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>I feel like we have so much leverage and don&#x27;t use it at all.<p>We&#x27;re still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It&#x27;s nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.<p>If anyone has read <i>Developer Hegemony</i>, I&#x27;m fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdimitar</author><text>&gt; <i>It&#x27;s the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save Y work in the future). And the manager factoring that into all the other circumstances, and deciding whether it&#x27;s worth the current cost.</i><p>This has been the ideal theory for decades and I really wish people finally stopped to think for two minutes, look around, read some history and finally understand that <i>it&#x27;s not working</i>.<p>Is it really so hard to accept this reality? I am periodically mind-boggled by the amazingly resilient illusion that you can plan things as tidily. It never happened, not once, in my 20 years of career.<p>Estimating these costs upfront is more or less impossible. It&#x27;s usually a can of worms that opens other brand new and exciting sub-tasks, the same kind that gives managers nightmares.<p>IMO you might have projected a little bit and arguing against some imaginary &quot;us the programmers are better than everyone else&quot;. Meh. Only kiddos think and say things like that. By and large, almost all experienced programmers I&#x27;ve ever met are quite moderate and humble.<p>Problem is, they are <i>too</i> moderate and humble which leads to predatory businessmen micro-managing them to oblivion. I&#x27;ve personally witnessed high-profile programmers firmly saying &quot;No!&quot;, putting their foot down and making a thing their way with more time budget. Their project and code was used, almost untouched, for 10+ years afterwards -- it was that good.<p>Many of us are expert artisans. You don&#x27;t go to a professional blacksmith giving him wisdom how can he accelerate a certain process.</text></comment> | <story><title>Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?</title><url>https://vaghetti.dev/posts/times-are-great/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edanm</author><text>Again, I&#x27;m not defending every single workplace here. Obviously some developers <i>aren&#x27;t</i> treated well, and in those cases, they should find another job. I was commenting on the fairly blanket statement made.<p>But the way the conversation should go isn&#x27;t the developer deciding when refactoring should happen. It&#x27;s the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save Y work in the future). And the manager factoring that into all the other circumstances, and deciding whether it&#x27;s worth the current cost.</text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>I think we&#x27;re definitely better at non-developers at software development. Yet we literally have outside people dictating to us when they think it&#x27;s appropriate for refactoring to happen. Or when it&#x27;s time to update a dependency.<p>This is a lot different from than &quot;no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren&#x27;t important.&quot;. I definitely value the input of other professionals when it comes to their field of expertise. All I want is the same in return.</text></item><item><author>edanm</author><text>&gt; We&#x27;re still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor.<p>I highly disagree with this.<p>For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow <i>better</i> than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren&#x27;t important.<p>News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a <i>part</i> of building things in most cases. There&#x27;s nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.<p><i>Every</i> skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.</text></item><item><author>LAC-Tech</author><text>I feel like we have so much leverage and don&#x27;t use it at all.<p>We&#x27;re still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It&#x27;s nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this.<p>If anyone has read <i>Developer Hegemony</i>, I&#x27;m fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mibollma</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s the developer giving an analysis of the cost and benefit of a refactoring (it will take X time, but will save Y work in the future). And the manager factoring that into all the other circumstances, and deciding whether it&#x27;s worth the current cost.<p>I don&#x27;t think either devlopers or managers can estimate future savings in most cases, but I still think it&#x27;s necessary to refactor just to not drown in complexity and slow down overall development speed.
My approach is to reserve about 20% for refactoring and technical improvements and let the team decide internally what to use it on.</text></comment> |
19,548,398 | 19,548,115 | 1 | 2 | 19,545,668 | train | <story><title>San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance</title><url>https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2019/03/san-diego-has-been-turned-into-massive.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mark212</author><text>This blog post is highly misleading and inaccurate. Access to the video is very limited and subject to strict protocols for use in investigations. And the audio recording capacity isn’t live because the City has no use for it.<p>The SD Reader isn’t a very trustworthy source. Here’s the U-T’s extensive piece on the topic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sandiegouniontribune.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;the-conversation&#x2F;sd-san-diego-street-light-sensors-camera-for-law-enforcement-use-20190319-htmlstory.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sandiegouniontribune.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;the-conversatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelnos</author><text>I frankly do not care how limited access is, or if parts of the hardware are disabled. I do not trust governments to act transparently.<p>There are a few telling things in the article you link to that make it clear that the government values expediency over protecting citizens&#x27; rights.<p>The first notable one is the process: a police officer has to submit a request to view video records... but to whom? It looks like just to their superiors? If they <i>actually</i> cared about protecting people&#x27;s rights, the request should have to be made to a court, in the same way a warrant needs to be requested.<p>The city points out that the audio recorders aren&#x27;t active because they don&#x27;t have a use case for the audio. They claim that they would engage the public before activating them, but... is that really true? And regardless, I would not want that activated, ever. Any use case audio recordings of public spaces could possibly have... I do not want that. Having the hardware there and ready is just too tantalizing to public officials.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about moving to SD at some point, but this kind of thing really gives me pause.</text></comment> | <story><title>San Diego Implemented City-Wide Streetlight Surveillance</title><url>https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2019/03/san-diego-has-been-turned-into-massive.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mark212</author><text>This blog post is highly misleading and inaccurate. Access to the video is very limited and subject to strict protocols for use in investigations. And the audio recording capacity isn’t live because the City has no use for it.<p>The SD Reader isn’t a very trustworthy source. Here’s the U-T’s extensive piece on the topic:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sandiegouniontribune.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;the-conversation&#x2F;sd-san-diego-street-light-sensors-camera-for-law-enforcement-use-20190319-htmlstory.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sandiegouniontribune.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;the-conversatio...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terr_</author><text>&gt; strict protocols<p>Much like discussions about corporate policies, I find it helps to ask what happens when the handbook <i>isn&#x27;t</i> followed...<p>How many years in prison does someone get for unauthorized access or (if an authorized user) abusing their access for improper use?</text></comment> |
36,074,198 | 36,072,572 | 1 | 3 | 36,071,397 | train | <story><title>Cases where full scans are better than indexes</title><url>https://www.jefftk.com/p/you-dont-always-need-indexes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameshart</author><text>“We’ll add an index when it gets slow” is saying “screw the guy who’s on call the night this system starts timing out”.<p>Invisible cliffs in your code that it will fall off at some unknown point in the future are the antithesis of engineering.<p>If you deliberately aren’t implementing indexing, know at what point indexing would begin to matter. Put in place guard rails so the system doesn’t just blow up unexpectedly.<p>There are 100% cases where <i>you shouldn’t use indexes</i>. That’s not the same thing as <i>being able to get away without an index</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bob1029</author><text>&gt; Invisible cliffs in your code that it will fall off at some unknown point in the future are the antithesis of engineering.<p>I think this describes the general shape of problem seen in any engineering domain. After a certain point of time (i.e. unknown), we can no longer guarantee certain properties of the system. This is why we add all kinds of qualifiers and constraints in our discussions with the customer.<p>Certainly, you can make some predictions about how tables will grow over time, but there are also some potential headaches that can be incurred if you arbitrarily add indexing. &quot;We <i>might</i> need to expire records to manage growth&quot; so you go ahead and index that CreatedUtc column. Turns out, the usage patterns of your app changed such that that table is now experiencing 20x more insert volume than you could have ever anticipated and your prediction is now a gigantic liability. With 20x insert volume you would have _never_ indexed that column. You would have used some alternative path involving temporary tables, etc. Now, you are stuck with essentially same problem - a judgement call at 2am regarding whether or not you should drop an index while the rest of your team is in bed.<p>Since I am unable to predict the future I feel like waiting until the <i>actual</i> problem arises and then dealing with it at that moment is the best option. Strategically, <i>not</i> having an index will likely fail more gracefully than if an index is bottlenecking requests during peak load (i.e. instantaneous vs cumulative data volume).</text></comment> | <story><title>Cases where full scans are better than indexes</title><url>https://www.jefftk.com/p/you-dont-always-need-indexes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameshart</author><text>“We’ll add an index when it gets slow” is saying “screw the guy who’s on call the night this system starts timing out”.<p>Invisible cliffs in your code that it will fall off at some unknown point in the future are the antithesis of engineering.<p>If you deliberately aren’t implementing indexing, know at what point indexing would begin to matter. Put in place guard rails so the system doesn’t just blow up unexpectedly.<p>There are 100% cases where <i>you shouldn’t use indexes</i>. That’s not the same thing as <i>being able to get away without an index</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>plugin-baby</author><text>&gt; Invisible cliffs in your code that it will fall off at some unknown point in the future are the antithesis of engineering.<p>On the other hand, they are the essence of _software_ engineering.</text></comment> |
26,661,634 | 26,662,055 | 1 | 3 | 26,659,150 | train | <story><title>Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard</title><url>https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I still consider my old Nokia E70[0] my favorite phone of all time, so I am definitely in the target demographic for this, as I&#x27;m 100% sold on the usefulness of a physical keyboard on a phone... However the CPU just doesn&#x27;t match the &quot;pro&quot; branding, or the price range. I&#x27;d personally rather throw an extra $200-300 on top to get a flagship CPU and then it would be close to a perfect phone for me! As it currently is, the Snapdragon 662 shipped in the pro-1x gets blown away by my current Pixel 5&#x27;s Snapdragon 765G - and Pixel phones recently have been generally characterized as having &quot;above-average hardware specs but not enough to justify flagship prices&quot;.<p>Separately, I am also curious for a phone like this that could run Android, LineageOS, and Ubuntu Touch - are there &quot;dual boot&quot; options in the mobile space? With 256GB storage it seems like it should be possible. I&#x27;d like to have old reliable Android as a daily driver, but maybe periodically drop into a less stable but more flexible environment like ubuntu.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>k_</author><text>Seems like we&#x27;re looking for similar things. I am currently waiting for delivery of my Astro Slide [0]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;astro-slide-5g-transformer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;astro-slide-5g-transforme...</a> which has android &#x2F; linux dual boot. Not sure if performance are what you are looking for.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pro1 X: A Linux smartphone with slideout keyboard</title><url>https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sodman</author><text>I still consider my old Nokia E70[0] my favorite phone of all time, so I am definitely in the target demographic for this, as I&#x27;m 100% sold on the usefulness of a physical keyboard on a phone... However the CPU just doesn&#x27;t match the &quot;pro&quot; branding, or the price range. I&#x27;d personally rather throw an extra $200-300 on top to get a flagship CPU and then it would be close to a perfect phone for me! As it currently is, the Snapdragon 662 shipped in the pro-1x gets blown away by my current Pixel 5&#x27;s Snapdragon 765G - and Pixel phones recently have been generally characterized as having &quot;above-average hardware specs but not enough to justify flagship prices&quot;.<p>Separately, I am also curious for a phone like this that could run Android, LineageOS, and Ubuntu Touch - are there &quot;dual boot&quot; options in the mobile space? With 256GB storage it seems like it should be possible. I&#x27;d like to have old reliable Android as a daily driver, but maybe periodically drop into a less stable but more flexible environment like ubuntu.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nokia_E70</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevecat</author><text>The Nokia E72 was my favourite phone form-factor. I really wanted to try Android but was so resistive to keyboardless-phones that I bought a HTC ChaCha, regretted it immediately, and finally relented. I still miss a keyboard.</text></comment> |
11,825,675 | 11,823,146 | 1 | 3 | 11,821,117 | train | <story><title>Owncloud has been forked into Nextcloud</title><url>https://nextcloud.com/about/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mseebach</author><text>I don&#x27;t mean to belittle the severity of the bug you encountered -- but the root-cause of your problem was a lack of a backup. A large number of issues, some of them software bugs, many of them not, could lead to data loss.<p>It that vein, too, your RAID-5 system is&#x2F;was a disaster waiting to happen, especially when you don&#x27;t have a backup: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-small-arrays&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-sma...</a></text></item><item><author>alexggordon</author><text>Let me tell you an anecdote about Owncloud. Once upon a time, I hosted an Owncloud instance for my family. I had a raid 5 system setup on an old Xserve with around 10 TB of usable space. I was really into learning about encryption at the time, so I figured it would be cool to encrypt all my families files on the server. I made sure that all my family members were properly educated about not forgetting their password, and then enabled the Encryption App[0] by following a tutorial. Everything went smoothly for about 6 months until I was updating Owncloud with a minor version upgrade, and then BAM; nobody (myself included) could decrypt any data on the server.<p>I posted around about it, trying to figure it, ripped apart the source code to the point where I found that manually decrypting the data was resulting in gibberish. All my backups were the encrypted data, so those didn&#x27;t really help either.<p>I still don&#x27;t know what happened to this day, but I&#x27;ve been eternally wary of personal fileservers ever since.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;owncloud.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to-protect-your-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;owncloud.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to-pr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pxtl</author><text>No. The user <i>should</i> have a backup, but you can never blame a software problem on a lack of backup. That&#x27;s like blaming a car-accident malfunctioning airbags.<p>The software screwed up <i>and</i> his backup strategy failed. The software didn&#x27;t screw up <i>because</i> his backup strategy failed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Owncloud has been forked into Nextcloud</title><url>https://nextcloud.com/about/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mseebach</author><text>I don&#x27;t mean to belittle the severity of the bug you encountered -- but the root-cause of your problem was a lack of a backup. A large number of issues, some of them software bugs, many of them not, could lead to data loss.<p>It that vein, too, your RAID-5 system is&#x2F;was a disaster waiting to happen, especially when you don&#x27;t have a backup: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-small-arrays&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-sma...</a></text></item><item><author>alexggordon</author><text>Let me tell you an anecdote about Owncloud. Once upon a time, I hosted an Owncloud instance for my family. I had a raid 5 system setup on an old Xserve with around 10 TB of usable space. I was really into learning about encryption at the time, so I figured it would be cool to encrypt all my families files on the server. I made sure that all my family members were properly educated about not forgetting their password, and then enabled the Encryption App[0] by following a tutorial. Everything went smoothly for about 6 months until I was updating Owncloud with a minor version upgrade, and then BAM; nobody (myself included) could decrypt any data on the server.<p>I posted around about it, trying to figure it, ripped apart the source code to the point where I found that manually decrypting the data was resulting in gibberish. All my backups were the encrypted data, so those didn&#x27;t really help either.<p>I still don&#x27;t know what happened to this day, but I&#x27;ve been eternally wary of personal fileservers ever since.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;owncloud.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to-protect-your-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;owncloud.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to-pr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Karunamon</author><text>The problem was that encryption totally broke after an update. A symptom of that problem was that files became inaccessible.<p>Restoring from backup would have corrected the symptom, not the root problem: a bug.</text></comment> |
39,226,391 | 39,226,368 | 1 | 3 | 39,224,865 | train | <story><title>The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nly</author><text>So your weekday evening social life is non existent?</text></item><item><author>buserror</author><text>I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It&#x27;s 6:50 now and I&#x27;ve done a lot of work! It&#x27;s nice, quiet, I just really crack on.<p>I&#x27;m waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I&#x27;ll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it&#x27;ll still be early when I wake up again.
Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I&#x27;ve done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!<p>... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.<p>I used to be a &#x27;night owl&#x27; really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.<p>Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peebeebee</author><text>Not OP, but I&#x27;m almost the same.<p>If you have (young) kids, it&#x27;s non existent either way.<p>Now I go to sleep at the same time my kids do, around 9PM.
My social life is during noon. My lunch-time is 2.5 hours instead of the usual 40min. During that time I go to the gym, have lunch with my wife, do some shopping, go to the barber,...<p>I can recommend it. More sunlight, more movement, no evening binging, no hanging in the couch, no useless late-night phone scrolling, no tired mornings, better quality time with the family...</text></comment> | <story><title>The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nly</author><text>So your weekday evening social life is non existent?</text></item><item><author>buserror</author><text>I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It&#x27;s 6:50 now and I&#x27;ve done a lot of work! It&#x27;s nice, quiet, I just really crack on.<p>I&#x27;m waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I&#x27;ll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it&#x27;ll still be early when I wake up again.
Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I&#x27;ve done most of the stuff I wanted to do already!<p>... So that gives me a lot of time for a good walk, or tinkering etc in the afternoon.<p>I used to be a &#x27;night owl&#x27; really, going to bed at 2am; but I realized I was never really terribly efficient until about lunchtime the following day, while I was also wasting my time in the evening for no real reason. AND wasting the short winter day at my desk.<p>Nowadays, well, I got the whole day to myself!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>romanovcode</author><text>I would imagine everyone who is 35+ with family has no evening social life. Or am I missing something?<p>Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?</text></comment> |
27,691,114 | 27,691,030 | 1 | 2 | 27,690,587 | train | <story><title>Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WisNorCan</author><text>Intuit is consistently one of the least ethical actors in tech. They have a monopoly position in many of their products and take advantage of some of the poorest people through misinformation and lobbying.<p>Facebook &amp; Uber have received most of the heat over the past few years. Intuit has strangely avoided the same level of scrutiny.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cmckn</author><text>For sure. The IRS needs to offer a tax preparation platform, the grift in this industry is astounding. I&#x27;ve always had decent experiences with TurboTax, but they&#x27;ve gotten extremely good at making your taxes hell if you want to avoid giving them $89.99.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WisNorCan</author><text>Intuit is consistently one of the least ethical actors in tech. They have a monopoly position in many of their products and take advantage of some of the poorest people through misinformation and lobbying.<p>Facebook &amp; Uber have received most of the heat over the past few years. Intuit has strangely avoided the same level of scrutiny.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhosek</author><text>Around 2009 my taxes grew complicated enough that I could no longer do them by hand and had to start using tax software for them. I&#x27;ve consistently refused to use TurboTax because the company is so evil. H&amp;R Block is not necessarily a more ethical company, but at the very least, there&#x27;s not more unethical. (And I&#x27;m vaguely aware of there being some open-source tax software of some sort out there, but when I looked it was kind of janky and didn&#x27;t seem to give me much of an improvement over filling out the forms myself. I&#x27;d love to learn that things have changed.)</text></comment> |
33,311,138 | 33,310,772 | 1 | 2 | 33,309,754 | train | <story><title>The Social Recession: By the Numbers</title><url>https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seydor</author><text>The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can&#x27;t trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.<p>Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today&#x27;s technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as &#x27;problems&#x27; and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peanut_merchant</author><text>This argument feels like an oversimplification to me.<p>These are only two examples of &quot;collectivist&quot; societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China&#x2F;Russia seems like a false dichotomy.<p>Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).<p>My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.<p>The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Social Recession: By the Numbers</title><url>https://novum.substack.com/p/social-recession-by-the-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seydor</author><text>The US must not be a low-trust society. You should try to live in an actual low trust society (where people can&#x27;t trust institutions and instead revert to their family or clan). The US is not like that, people seem to trust other people they have never seen before because they trust things like justice or the US army or google or apple.<p>Other than that, it seems that things are progressing as normal. Since the times of the Enlightenment, there was this oxymoron of idealizing individual empowerment, while advocating that humans are social animals that must act collectively. Which is it? Well with today&#x27;s technology and abundance people are drifting deliberately and decisively towards more individualism. Perhaps it is about ime to stop describing these things as &#x27;problems&#x27; and realize that they are the new reality. Our politics worldwide is quite ancient , and not prepared for the next phase of individual empowerment. The places of the world that are stuck in collectivist mindsets are awfully deluded like Russia, or rigidly antiprogressive, like China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Every single highly individualistic society seems to be in population decline (more so if you factor out immigrants from “anti-progressive” Muslim or Catholic countries). Individualism seems to be a self-limiting feature of society: it’s unpleasant to raise children in highly individualistic societies, which makes such societies inherently transitory.[1]<p>Is societal self-obsolescence how you define “progress?” How successful can your society really be if your people don’t seem to want to raise kids in it and perpetuate it? If you have to import people from collectivist societies just to take care of your elderly?<p>[1] The inverse is not true—many collectivist societies are also facing population walls—but for quite different reasons.</text></comment> |
15,332,453 | 15,332,534 | 1 | 2 | 15,332,138 | train | <story><title>Man convicted after preventing counter-terrorism police search</title><url>http://news.met.police.uk/news/man-convicted-after-preventing-counter-terrorism-police-search-262829</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>confounded</author><text>The Guardian have more context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;campaign-group-director-in-court-for-refusing-to-divulge-passwords" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;uk-news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;sep&#x2F;25&#x2F;campaign-gro...</a><p>This was very clearly politically motivated to hamper the efforts of CAGE; a UK based group which lobbies of behalf of young Muslim men who have been detained without charge it gitmo, harassed by the security services etc.<p>Regardless of whether readers like CAGE&#x27;s politics (which are considered inflammatory by the government), this raises a worrying precedent.<p>It&#x27;s also worth noting that given the UK&#x27;s recent authoritarian laws, he got off lightly --- this could easily have been spun to possessing encrypted data (while being unwilling or unable to decrypt upon command), which carries a two year sentence, IIRC five if the magic word &quot;terrorism&quot; is conjured.</text></comment> | <story><title>Man convicted after preventing counter-terrorism police search</title><url>http://news.met.police.uk/news/man-convicted-after-preventing-counter-terrorism-police-search-262829</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jaclaz</author><text>To me it makes little sense.<p>For Police work, time is &quot;relative&quot;, as an example the cop that is held in the US for contempt of the Court for not revealing the password to his drives is suspected of possessing child pornography, whether he is kept in jail because he won&#x27;t reveal them or because as the sheer moment he reveals them he will be proved guilty doesn&#x27;t change things much (there is anyway other evidence against him).<p>Here it is not a &quot;Police&quot; case, but rather a &quot;counter-intelligence&quot; one, in these cases time is everything, a delay of hours, or at the most days in gathering the information is vital.<p>AFAIK Mr.Rabani NEVER revealed the password(s), he refused revealing it&#x2F;them on 20&#x2F;Nov&#x2F;2016, now, almost one year later, he is found guilty of obstructing the search, still there is no evidence that he is or was - even tangentially - connected with terrorism.<p>So, £620+12 months&#x27; conditional discharge seem to me a lot of time&#x2F;a very severe punishment if he was in good faith attempting to protect some sensitive data for his non-governement organization, and <i>nothing</i> if he was in bad faith or however protecting terrorism related info.<p>In any case, whatever the Police expected to find on the device(s) they didn&#x27;t access it&#x2F;them, and much worse than that they didn&#x27;t access it&#x2F;them in a timely fashion (and no charges of terrorism or connections to it were made against Mr.Rabani in almost one year) so - besides seeming more a petty vengeance than anything else - it is not like it helped in ANY way the counter-terrorism.</text></comment> |
41,046,604 | 41,044,482 | 1 | 3 | 41,042,877 | train | <story><title>Cure for male pattern baldness given boost by sugar discovery</title><url>https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/cure-male-pattern-baldness-given-boost-sugar-discovery</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bob1029</author><text>Minoxidil is the only thing that ever &quot;worked&quot; for me, but I got tired of the routine very quickly and it wasn&#x27;t nearly as effective as desired. The real cure is to stop worrying about it and to buzz off whatever remaining hair. You will look and feel 10x better than if you try to patchwork your way through it.<p>Think about the end game - hair loss is probably only going to escalate over time. This is an uphill battle. Focus on other parts of your body. Things you can fundamentally improve without drugs and other fake crap. I am sure everyone on this board can quickly identify certain popular figures who have gone all-in on the &quot;save my hair at all costs&quot; angle and should look to this as a cautionary tale, not an inspirational one.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cure for male pattern baldness given boost by sugar discovery</title><url>https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/cure-male-pattern-baldness-given-boost-sugar-discovery</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>animal531</author><text>I already have the cure growing in my head.<p>My hairline started receding somewhere in my 30&#x27;s, but on the one side of my forehead there is this one single remaining hair that refuses to give up, no matter what.<p>The poor guy looks kind of sad out there by himself, but I&#x27;m sure if we science him we can discover how to apply his chutzpah to all hair everywhere.</text></comment> |
6,214,580 | 6,214,286 | 1 | 2 | 6,213,885 | train | <story><title>Is There A Giant Life Form Lurking In Our Solar System? Possibly, Say Scientists</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/08/14/211945779/is-there-a-giant-life-form-lurking-in-our-solar-system-possibly-say-scientists</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dm2</author><text>I&#x27;m still having a hard time contemplating the fact that WE exist.<p>Sitting in front of our flat monitors with access to nearly all information which is stored all around planet Earth.<p>Phones that connect us to billions of people.<p>Brains large enough to hypothesize the creation of the universe.<p>We can create rockets that send probes to other planets and even the edge of our solar system.<p>We regularly travel around in amazing personal vehicles that allow us to travel at over 100 mph in about 10 seconds.<p>The fact that each one of us had about one quadrillionth percent chance of even being born, yet here we are.<p>The fact that we can even talk and communicate effectively is amazing.<p>We can imagine future technologies and have goals to work towards such as immortality, brain-computer interfaces, teleportation, and mining asteroids.<p>We have so much to be thankful for. Everything is amazing.<p>WTF. [0]<p>I have a dog that can&#x27;t do anything but eat, pee, poop, and play fetch. What kind of activities do other organisms do that humans can&#x27;t do? Other than telepathy, and flight, and breathing without oxygen, and energy creation through sunlight.<p>Yet we still make fellow humans and animals suffer daily. We eat shit food and get depressed and some people even try to kill themselves. We have concepts like good and evil and actually hate other humans just because they are not exactly like our culture or have more stuff than we do. We have enough nuclear missiles in the ocean to eradicate life on earth.<p>Terraforming mars will be fun. I hope that I live to see the start of that adventure. The next 100 years in general will be very fun. I&#x27;m extremely glad that I get to be a part of this awesome world at this extraordinary time in human history. Please, nobody fuck it up too bad.<p>My point is, regarding the article, ANYTHING is possible. God is possible, ghosts are possible, flying spaghetti monsters are possible but until I see a video with convincing explanation or accredited scientists agree that something is very likely, is there really any point of just making up stuff?<p>Mars having a thriving self-sustaining human-like civilization underground is possible. Aliens living among us for several years is possible. No scientist will say that either of those hypothesis are absolutely impossible, but there is no point in proposing it unless you&#x27;re writing a science fiction novel&#x2F;movie&#x2F;comic book.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is There A Giant Life Form Lurking In Our Solar System? Possibly, Say Scientists</title><url>http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/08/14/211945779/is-there-a-giant-life-form-lurking-in-our-solar-system-possibly-say-scientists</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rgbrenner</author><text>The entire article is based on this sentence<p>&quot;Thus, life on Titan could involve huge (by Earth standards) and very slowly metabolizing cells, in which case biomass densities would be higher than calculated above.&quot;<p>which the author interprets as<p>&quot;a life form in our solar system that&#x27;s not a puny, dumb little thing, but a huge dumb thing. Like dog-sized. Or maybe Volkswagen-sized.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m sorry.. but a &quot;huge by (earth standards) cell&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean dog sized. It means a few times an earth sized cell. Otherwise, why compare it to a cell at all?</text></comment> |
34,997,874 | 34,996,414 | 1 | 3 | 34,992,615 | train | <story><title>FreeBSD Home Audio Studio</title><url>https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/freebsd-home-audio-studio/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kamranjon</author><text>For those that might have struggled with Ardour or were looking for something just a bit more professional on Linux, I recommend Reaper - it&#x27;s a one time purchase and in my opinion about as good as it gets on Linux: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wyager</author><text>Reaper is awesome! I did a bunch of research before buying a DAW and Reaper struck me as the most principled and generally well-designed option among those I found.<p>It&#x27;s <i>very</i> powerful, which means there is a bit of a learning curve, but it can do everything you want it to, and it has nice stuff like really solid scripting support (lua, python, and some DSL).<p>I record like 20-30 audio tracks at a time from my rackmount setup and reaper handles it no problem.<p>Very much worth the $60.</text></comment> | <story><title>FreeBSD Home Audio Studio</title><url>https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/freebsd-home-audio-studio/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kamranjon</author><text>For those that might have struggled with Ardour or were looking for something just a bit more professional on Linux, I recommend Reaper - it&#x27;s a one time purchase and in my opinion about as good as it gets on Linux: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome31</author><text>Also check Bitwig, Renoise, Tracktion , U-He, AudioThing... Plenty of commercial audio software running on Linux nowadays.</text></comment> |
34,125,035 | 34,124,911 | 1 | 2 | 34,124,215 | train | <story><title>Introduction to Homotopy Type Theory</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spekcular</author><text>I realize it&#x27;s Christmas Eve, but this post tempts my inner curmudgeon.<p>I do not understand why homotopy type theory posts are so popular on this website. My view is that all the &quot;philosophical&quot; arguments in favor of it (vs. the standard set theory foundations) misunderstand the issues at play. Further, the &quot;practical&quot; arguments in terms of facilitating formalization are not so compelling given the HoTT people haven&#x27;t actually (as far as I know) formalized much mathematics - whereas (seemingly) less ideological communities like users of Lean have made great progress.<p>To expand on the comment about the philosophical arguments: take for example the abstract of this article. It states:<p>&gt; It is common in mathematical practice to consider equivalent objects to be the same, for example, to identify isomorphic groups. In set theory it is not possible to make this common practice formal. For example, there are as many distinct trivial groups in set theory as there are distinct singleton sets. Type theory, on the other hand, takes a more structural approach to the foundations of mathematics that accommodates the univalence axiom. This, however, requires us to rethink what it means for two objects to be equal.<p>It is sometimes quite useful in practice to recognize that two isomorphic objects are not literally the same. So I am skeptical of any approach that wants to blur those distinctions.<p>Also, more to the point: ZFC does everything we need a foundation to do extremely well, except serve as a basis for practical formalization of proofs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ebingdom</author><text>&gt; I do not understand why homotopy type theory posts are so popular on this website.<p>Martin-Löf type theory (and, therefore, homotopy type theory) is like an idealized programming language that is capable of expressing both programs and proofs, such that you can prove your code correct in the same language. Hacker News is a mostly technical community that often likes to geek out on programming languages.<p>Homotopy type theory is an especially cool flavor of type theory that finally gives a satisfying answer to the question of when two types should be considered propositionally equal.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introduction to Homotopy Type Theory</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spekcular</author><text>I realize it&#x27;s Christmas Eve, but this post tempts my inner curmudgeon.<p>I do not understand why homotopy type theory posts are so popular on this website. My view is that all the &quot;philosophical&quot; arguments in favor of it (vs. the standard set theory foundations) misunderstand the issues at play. Further, the &quot;practical&quot; arguments in terms of facilitating formalization are not so compelling given the HoTT people haven&#x27;t actually (as far as I know) formalized much mathematics - whereas (seemingly) less ideological communities like users of Lean have made great progress.<p>To expand on the comment about the philosophical arguments: take for example the abstract of this article. It states:<p>&gt; It is common in mathematical practice to consider equivalent objects to be the same, for example, to identify isomorphic groups. In set theory it is not possible to make this common practice formal. For example, there are as many distinct trivial groups in set theory as there are distinct singleton sets. Type theory, on the other hand, takes a more structural approach to the foundations of mathematics that accommodates the univalence axiom. This, however, requires us to rethink what it means for two objects to be equal.<p>It is sometimes quite useful in practice to recognize that two isomorphic objects are not literally the same. So I am skeptical of any approach that wants to blur those distinctions.<p>Also, more to the point: ZFC does everything we need a foundation to do extremely well, except serve as a basis for practical formalization of proofs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmgsabst</author><text>&gt; So I am skeptical of any approach that wants to blur those distinctions.<p>HoTT doesn’t blur those distinctions — it formalizes the distinction.<p>The key idea of univalence is an axiom that says equivalence is equivalent to equality; and that if we only want equivalence as our standard, that we can substitute proofs of equivalence for proofs of equality.<p>The main insight is that topology of diagrams determines the semantics of your logic; which helps us explore concepts like abstraction and proof simplification. (This relates to topos theory — which creeps up in CS fairly often.)<p>&gt; ZFC does everything we need a foundation to do extremely well, except serve as a basis for practical formalization of proofs.<p>Counterpoint: no it doesn’t, because almost every working mathematician uses a higher level type theory in their work that “compiles” to ZFC and will run away screaming if you try to make them compile their work down to formal ZFC statements because set theory is a garbage foundation — the worst of the three options.<p>“My axioms do everything but formalize proofs!” is the equivalent of “my car does everything but drive!”</text></comment> |
17,008,377 | 17,008,439 | 2 | 3 | 17,007,630 | train | <story><title>California to become first U.S. state mandating solar on new homes</title><url>https://www.ocregister.com/2018/05/04/california-to-become-first-u-s-state-mandating-solar-on-new-homes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>secabeen</author><text>&gt; It also makes you more immune to losing power in a natural disaster, of which California has plenty.<p>Unfortunately, this is generally not the case. Most grid-tie solar inverters do not support disconnected operation. They all have anti-islanding features that disconnect the solar panels when the grid goes down (to prevent back-flow into the grid that could injure linemen working to repair outages). There are a few inverters that include an emergency-outlet on the inverter that works when the power is out, but you have to run an extension cord from the inverter to the devices you want to power.<p>It is possible to buy a hybird off-grid inverter, but they are much more expensive than either plain grid-tie or off-grid, and the power company is going to scrutinize their installation a lot more closely.</text></item><item><author>programbreeding</author><text>&gt;If the state would focus on higher density living...<p>&gt;...where they&#x27;ll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses<p>The type of people that live in huge inefficient homes are generally also the same type of people that don&#x27;t want to live in high density areas. California could turn open fields in to solar farms like you mentioned, but that requires that someone foot the bill and also build the infrastructure for it. &quot;Forcing&quot; people to put solar panels on their own home solves both of those problems. It also makes you more immune to losing power in a natural disaster, of which California has plenty.<p>I&#x27;m not saying I&#x27;m even for this issue, I don&#x27;t live in California. But your view is extremely negative and ignores the negatives of your way while also ignoring the positives of the way mentioned in the article.</text></item><item><author>baron816</author><text>I&#x27;m certainly a big fan of solar power, but rooftop solar is a little silly. Rooftop solar would make sense if we had some shortage of land and couldn&#x27;t just fill up empty fields with panels, but that&#x27;s not the case. It&#x27;s much cheaper for utility companies to buy up big plots of land than it is to try to figure out how to outfit odd shaped surfaces with panels.<p>California is really missing the forrest for the trees here. There&#x27;s so much low hanging fruit (things that could kill two birds with one stone) that they&#x27;re ignoring. If the state would focus on higher density living and public transportation over imposing regulations that will drive more people away and lower the standard of living for those who remain, then we would see a much bigger global impact on reducing climate change. Because of this, more people will decide to live in Texas instead of California, where they&#x27;ll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses which draw power from coal plants.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mehrdadn</author><text>&gt; to prevent back-flow into the grid that could injure linemen working to repair outages<p>Surely they can&#x27;t entirely rely on this for safety?</text></comment> | <story><title>California to become first U.S. state mandating solar on new homes</title><url>https://www.ocregister.com/2018/05/04/california-to-become-first-u-s-state-mandating-solar-on-new-homes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>secabeen</author><text>&gt; It also makes you more immune to losing power in a natural disaster, of which California has plenty.<p>Unfortunately, this is generally not the case. Most grid-tie solar inverters do not support disconnected operation. They all have anti-islanding features that disconnect the solar panels when the grid goes down (to prevent back-flow into the grid that could injure linemen working to repair outages). There are a few inverters that include an emergency-outlet on the inverter that works when the power is out, but you have to run an extension cord from the inverter to the devices you want to power.<p>It is possible to buy a hybird off-grid inverter, but they are much more expensive than either plain grid-tie or off-grid, and the power company is going to scrutinize their installation a lot more closely.</text></item><item><author>programbreeding</author><text>&gt;If the state would focus on higher density living...<p>&gt;...where they&#x27;ll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses<p>The type of people that live in huge inefficient homes are generally also the same type of people that don&#x27;t want to live in high density areas. California could turn open fields in to solar farms like you mentioned, but that requires that someone foot the bill and also build the infrastructure for it. &quot;Forcing&quot; people to put solar panels on their own home solves both of those problems. It also makes you more immune to losing power in a natural disaster, of which California has plenty.<p>I&#x27;m not saying I&#x27;m even for this issue, I don&#x27;t live in California. But your view is extremely negative and ignores the negatives of your way while also ignoring the positives of the way mentioned in the article.</text></item><item><author>baron816</author><text>I&#x27;m certainly a big fan of solar power, but rooftop solar is a little silly. Rooftop solar would make sense if we had some shortage of land and couldn&#x27;t just fill up empty fields with panels, but that&#x27;s not the case. It&#x27;s much cheaper for utility companies to buy up big plots of land than it is to try to figure out how to outfit odd shaped surfaces with panels.<p>California is really missing the forrest for the trees here. There&#x27;s so much low hanging fruit (things that could kill two birds with one stone) that they&#x27;re ignoring. If the state would focus on higher density living and public transportation over imposing regulations that will drive more people away and lower the standard of living for those who remain, then we would see a much bigger global impact on reducing climate change. Because of this, more people will decide to live in Texas instead of California, where they&#x27;ll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses which draw power from coal plants.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>This seems like a simple problem to solve, by putting the inverter at the periphery of the domestic system.</text></comment> |
32,780,807 | 32,780,614 | 1 | 3 | 32,778,932 | train | <story><title>Winamp 5.9</title><url>http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=458120</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Thaxll</author><text>Foobar is the &quot;new&quot; Winamp, it has been for 15years+<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Foobar didn&#x27;t really scratch the same itch for me as Winamp. Foobar felt more like it wanted to ingest&#x2F;organize my entire library, which never appealed to me because my library was 1TB+ and it would take a lifetime to fix every album with some bad tags.<p>Winamp much better fit my workflow, which is: I wanna right-click a folder on my desktop that houses the specific album I want to play, click &quot;Play in Winamp&quot;, and have the music player launch quietly in the system tray and throw up the occasional notification when the track changes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Winamp 5.9</title><url>http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=458120</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Thaxll</author><text>Foobar is the &quot;new&quot; Winamp, it has been for 15years+<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bt1a</author><text>I&#x27;ve used both Foobar and MusicBee (on Windows) and personally I prefer MusicBee&#x27;s interface. It works well with my library of 21k files - not sure how it performs with libraries much larger.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getmusicbee.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getmusicbee.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
6,257,569 | 6,255,734 | 1 | 2 | 6,254,721 | train | <story><title>Yahoo tops Google in US traffic</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57599600-93/wait-what-yahoo-tops-google-in-us-traffic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thisisnotatest</author><text>Google engineer here.<p>We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google &quot;ignoring the word you asked for,&quot; there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn&#x27;t have the exact words you asked for, and you didn&#x27;t even notice. We&#x27;re not perfect but we&#x27;re always working on improvements.<p>We also added &quot;Verbatim Mode&quot; to save you the trouble of putting &quot;each&quot; &quot;query&quot; &quot;term&quot; in &quot;quotes&quot; when you want to exactly match all your query words.</text></item><item><author>pasbesoin</author><text>I &quot;Google&quot; less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for &quot;big name&quot; items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.<p>These days, I&#x27;m fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.<p>Whatever you are and aren&#x27;t doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that&#x27;s not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results.<p>Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam results just go on and one. If there&#x27;s quality somewhere in the search results, it&#x27;s beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.<p>Not that I&#x27;m using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right explanation, but...<p>--<p>P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I <i>definitely</i> don&#x27;t want to see results that don&#x27;t include term x frequently proved quite useful. Now... the damned thing shows me &quot;whatever it feels like&quot;, whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimrandomh</author><text>No. Your metrics are deceiving you, because your test suite under-weights or fails to include sophisticated searchers and programmers, and fails to include highly-specific queries with only a few results. For technical people, Google search has gotten so much worse it&#x27;s hard to ignore.<p>Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.<p>This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.<p>Google Search fails whenever I&#x27;m doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can&#x27;t just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn&#x27;t help, because the problem isn&#x27;t the rankings, it&#x27;s that you don&#x27;t know when you&#x27;re done.<p>Then there&#x27;s personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it&#x27;s often because the first query had something in it that I <i>didn&#x27;t</i> want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can&#x27;t trust that the reason is part of the query I made.<p>Basically, you&#x27;ve improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics&#x27; blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what&#x27;s wrong, but <i>they are right</i>. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Yahoo tops Google in US traffic</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57599600-93/wait-what-yahoo-tops-google-in-us-traffic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thisisnotatest</author><text>Google engineer here.<p>We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google &quot;ignoring the word you asked for,&quot; there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn&#x27;t have the exact words you asked for, and you didn&#x27;t even notice. We&#x27;re not perfect but we&#x27;re always working on improvements.<p>We also added &quot;Verbatim Mode&quot; to save you the trouble of putting &quot;each&quot; &quot;query&quot; &quot;term&quot; in &quot;quotes&quot; when you want to exactly match all your query words.</text></item><item><author>pasbesoin</author><text>I &quot;Google&quot; less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap. They are mostly best for &quot;big name&quot; items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.<p>These days, I&#x27;m fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.<p>Whatever you are and aren&#x27;t doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that&#x27;s not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again. Pages and pages full of very spammy results.<p>Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information. These days... the spam results just go on and one. If there&#x27;s quality somewhere in the search results, it&#x27;s beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.<p>Not that I&#x27;m using Yahoo, in preference. That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads. Probably not the right explanation, but...<p>--<p>P.S. Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me. Being able to tell the query engine that I <i>definitely</i> don&#x27;t want to see results that don&#x27;t include term x frequently proved quite useful. Now... the damned thing shows me &quot;whatever it feels like&quot;, whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cynwoody</author><text>The old mode was, you put a + before a required term, and you quoted exact (multi-word) phrases. That worked reasonably well and was easy to understand. A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase, as could a -.<p>Verbatim was a regression, given it requires you to use the UI instead of typing inline, and it seems to interact with other search options in hard to predict ways.</text></comment> |
38,053,803 | 38,053,672 | 1 | 2 | 38,052,864 | train | <story><title>Elixir and Phoenix can do it all</title><url>https://fly.io/phoenix-files/elixir-and-phoenix-can-do-it-all/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shijie</author><text>We’re experiencing this at my place of work. Our backend stack is Python, and coming from an Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix background, adding a durable queue to our infrastructure <i>should</i> be trivial but because of the nature of Python, it is all but impossible to run the queue in the same codebase and application server.<p>Elixir and the BEAM make it so easy and pleasant to run extremely complicated infrastructure in the same codebase and in the same application context. Hard problems made easy.<p>I miss it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thibaut_barrere</author><text>Something I often &quot;draw&quot; to other developers when showing Elixir is the difference in terms of &quot;boundaries&quot;.<p>It is common to have:<p>frontend &lt;-JSON-&gt; backend &lt;-db&#x2F;queue-&gt; background jobs<p>Each boundary introduces complexity (marshalling &#x2F; impedance mismatch &#x2F; but also different HR&#x2F;recruiting needs).<p>In Elixir you can more or less do:<p>front&#x2F;back&#x2F;background<p>with no boundaries or reduced boundaries (e.g. using LiveView &amp; OBAN in the same process, even if going through Postgres as a queue).<p>Someone coined the term &quot;deepstack engineer&quot; as well recently I think, which I could draw as:<p>frontend &lt;-&gt; backend &lt;-&gt; background &lt;-&gt; machine learning<p>Now with Elixir you can do everything in the same process (but with isolation as required):<p>front&#x2F;back&#x2F;background&#x2F;ml<p>And this is something I find really interesting about this stack.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elixir and Phoenix can do it all</title><url>https://fly.io/phoenix-files/elixir-and-phoenix-can-do-it-all/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shijie</author><text>We’re experiencing this at my place of work. Our backend stack is Python, and coming from an Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix background, adding a durable queue to our infrastructure <i>should</i> be trivial but because of the nature of Python, it is all but impossible to run the queue in the same codebase and application server.<p>Elixir and the BEAM make it so easy and pleasant to run extremely complicated infrastructure in the same codebase and in the same application context. Hard problems made easy.<p>I miss it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Yoric</author><text>Every time I see microservices, or Kafka, or Redis, ... I can&#x27;t help being disappointed because we seem to be stuck reinventing BEAM&#x2F;Erlang (and Elixir) 30 years after the fact, except with technologies that are slower, more fragile, more complicated to use and harder to deploy.<p>:sigh:</text></comment> |
37,353,433 | 37,352,671 | 1 | 2 | 37,352,486 | train | <story><title>Police Seized Innocent Peoples Property, Kept It for Years. What Will SCOTUS Do?</title><url>https://reason.com/2023/07/11/police-seized-innocent-peoples-property-and-kept-it-for-years-what-will-the-supreme-court-do/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sambeau</author><text>This graph from the 2015 article &quot;Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year&quot; really rammed this home for me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;cops-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Police Seized Innocent Peoples Property, Kept It for Years. What Will SCOTUS Do?</title><url>https://reason.com/2023/07/11/police-seized-innocent-peoples-property-and-kept-it-for-years-what-will-the-supreme-court-do/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jkubicek</author><text>Severely limiting the scope of civil forfeiture seems like one of those political issues that <i>everyone</i> across the political spectrum can agree on.<p>I&#x27;m constantly hearing horror stories like the ones in this article and I&#x27;ve never heard any reasonable defense of our current system. In fact, I&#x27;ve never even heard an unreasonable defense.</text></comment> |
28,490,454 | 28,488,995 | 1 | 3 | 28,486,623 | train | <story><title>Index bloat reduced in PostgreSQL v14</title><url>https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/index-bloat-reduced-in-postgresql-v14/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smt88</author><text>I don&#x27;t remember specifics, but that Uber article made it clear that they didn&#x27;t understand how Postgres worked and made some very basic mistakes. The whole thing made them seem surprisingly incompetent, although the general crappiness of Uber apps maybe should have tipped me off sooner.</text></item><item><author>edoceo</author><text>I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll get a bunch of (well deserved) praise for PG here but, does anyone have a case where PG really shit the bed? (Besides the Uber one) (which is its own long thread)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>da_chicken</author><text>That&#x27;s what I remember, too.<p>That said, Postgres have had a somewhat common problem with poorly selected defaults.<p>I remember that the performance tests back over 10 years ago between Postgres (v7-v9) and MySQL (~v5.0) always showed MySQL way ahead. For a long time people assumed the reason was because MyISAM (the then-default) isn&#x27;t transactional. Except InnoDB was still faster. Okay, but by default MySQL didn&#x27;t `fsync()` after writes. But it was still faster when you enabled that, too.<p>Turns out that Postgres&#x27;s default memory configurations were either largely unchanged from v6 initial releases a decade earlier, or perhaps more accurately they&#x27;re simply set to make the DB not a resource hog out of the box. Well, outside of the development environment, most people set up a dedicated server, and they <i>want</i> the server to be a resource hog! Most RDBMSs do that automatically. It&#x27;s an odd choice.<p>It&#x27;s been 6-7 years since I used the platform daily, but I would not be surprised if it was still that way. And given the complexity of the memory configuration [0] it&#x27;s hard to NOT make &quot;basic&quot; mistakes.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;current&#x2F;runtime-config-resource.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.postgresql.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;current&#x2F;runtime-config-resou...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Index bloat reduced in PostgreSQL v14</title><url>https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/index-bloat-reduced-in-postgresql-v14/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smt88</author><text>I don&#x27;t remember specifics, but that Uber article made it clear that they didn&#x27;t understand how Postgres worked and made some very basic mistakes. The whole thing made them seem surprisingly incompetent, although the general crappiness of Uber apps maybe should have tipped me off sooner.</text></item><item><author>edoceo</author><text>I&#x27;m sure we&#x27;ll get a bunch of (well deserved) praise for PG here but, does anyone have a case where PG really shit the bed? (Besides the Uber one) (which is its own long thread)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eloff</author><text>In what way did they make basic mistakes?</text></comment> |
35,003,955 | 35,002,902 | 1 | 2 | 35,000,263 | train | <story><title>BetterHelp Barred by FTC from Sharing Data with Facebook</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-02/teladoc-s-tdoc-betterhelp-online-therapy-unit-barred-from-data-sharing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dymk</author><text>I used BetterHelp mid-pandemic. It&#x27;s one of the few times I&#x27;ve issued a credit card chargeback.<p>Their business model is one big scam. You don&#x27;t pay per-session, you pay per-month. Thus, they oversubscribe their &quot;therapists&quot; (who are almost all independent contractors doing BH as their side gig), and so the incentive is encourage you to book as infrequently as possible.<p>Once you take that into account, it ends up being as expensive or more than a traditional therapist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonathankoren</author><text>A &quot;scam&quot;? That&#x27;s a pretty strong word. I&#x27;d go with an &quot;ineffective ripoff&quot;.<p>I tried two competitors. Both were horrible. Thirty minute sessions, where the &quot;therapist&quot; did all the talking, and then occasionally gave a PDF worksheet. Apparently this is &quot;cognitive behavioral therapy&quot;.<p>I tried TalkSpace twice. My favorite experience was when I texted the &quot;therapist&quot; and got back -- and let me quote <i>in full</i> -- &quot;That&#x27;s a lot. Can you fill out this worksheet, and do this self-assessment?&quot; (This would be the same assessment I had done four times prior. And the worksheet looked like it came from the chummiest chumsite on the web. There was even a URL on the bottom, where she had just clicked &quot;Print | Save to PDF&quot;.<p>I tried Cerebral, and its &quot;therapists&quot; were equally worthless. However, the &quot;prescriber&quot; gave me an SSRI (shockingly fast), which actually helped.<p>Cerebral felt like a pill mill, and apparently the DOJ also thinks so.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;5&#x2F;9&#x2F;23063356&#x2F;cerebral-telehealth-prescriptions-investigation-adhd-adderall-doj-dea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;5&#x2F;9&#x2F;23063356&#x2F;cerebral-teleheal...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>BetterHelp Barred by FTC from Sharing Data with Facebook</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-02/teladoc-s-tdoc-betterhelp-online-therapy-unit-barred-from-data-sharing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dymk</author><text>I used BetterHelp mid-pandemic. It&#x27;s one of the few times I&#x27;ve issued a credit card chargeback.<p>Their business model is one big scam. You don&#x27;t pay per-session, you pay per-month. Thus, they oversubscribe their &quot;therapists&quot; (who are almost all independent contractors doing BH as their side gig), and so the incentive is encourage you to book as infrequently as possible.<p>Once you take that into account, it ends up being as expensive or more than a traditional therapist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modoc</author><text>Counter-point, they make it easy to try different therapists until you find one you feel comfortable with and you feel is helpful to you (not an easy task) with no additional costs, all from the comfort of your home. I think I was paying ~$60&#x2F;45 minute session with a great provider, who was always able to get me in schedule-wise, provided great benefit, and saved me from an hour+ drive each way.<p>I know several people, myself included, who have found their service very valuable.</text></comment> |
26,387,824 | 26,384,759 | 1 | 3 | 26,380,822 | train | <story><title>Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch</title><url>https://text.npr.org/974534021</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pietrovismara</author><text>It&#x27;s almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of &quot;importance&quot;).<p>The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our society, we have to &quot;earn our living&quot; or be left behind.<p>Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in place?</text></item><item><author>irjustin</author><text>Nothing remotely close. I&#x27;m simply asking, that given the situation, would I have made the same decision? That I could be such a hero.<p>But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career, who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a huge black mark in many&#x27;s eyes. I have 2 children, a wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to make ends meet if I can&#x27;t get a job?<p>I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I&#x27;m honest, probably not.</text></item><item><author>dstick</author><text>&gt; I wish I could say the same for myself.<p>Care to elaborate a little? Seems like your experience could help others in a similar situation.</text></item><item><author>irjustin</author><text>That&#x27;s post fact. He blew the whistle before and very publicly.<p>This event almost doesn&#x27;t matter because he didn&#x27;t care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.<p>I believe there&#x27;s a moment before he doesn&#x27;t sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...<p>If you&#x27;ve ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.<p>I wish I could say the same for myself.</text></item><item><author>hyperbovine</author><text>It didn&#x27;t hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;99th-congress&#x2F;house-joint-resolution&#x2F;634&#x2F;text?r=85&amp;s=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;99th-congress&#x2F;house-joint-reso...</a></text></item><item><author>cushychicken</author><text>I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for lunch afterwards.<p>He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission&#x27;s face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, &quot;It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.<p>He also didn&#x27;t give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I&#x27;d joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wing-_-nuts</author><text>&gt;It&#x27;s almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of &quot;importance&quot;).<p>This right here is one of the main reasons why I&#x27;ve worked so hard to achieve financial independence.<p>Every time someone in my life has told me that I have to do something I&#x27;m uncomfortable with, &#x27;or else&#x27;, they&#x27;ve simply been trying to cover the fact that I&#x27;m being exploited. <i>Every</i>. <i>Time</i>.<p>I&#x27;m quite happy to have reached a place in my life where I can tell someone &#x27;No&#x27; with whatever level of politeness they deserve.</text></comment> | <story><title>Remembering Allan McDonald, who refused to approve the Challenger launch</title><url>https://text.npr.org/974534021</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pietrovismara</author><text>It&#x27;s almost like we are blackmailed into doing the wrong things all the time (on different levels of &quot;importance&quot;).<p>The fact is that this is a distinct feature of our society, we have to &quot;earn our living&quot; or be left behind.<p>Do we really want to keep such a negative incentive in place?</text></item><item><author>irjustin</author><text>Nothing remotely close. I&#x27;m simply asking, that given the situation, would I have made the same decision? That I could be such a hero.<p>But am I willing to stick my neck out? Risk my career, who will hire me? Maybe someone will, but I just put a huge black mark in many&#x27;s eyes. I have 2 children, a wife, and myself who rely on my income stream. Am I willing to let that go? Do I have to sell my house to make ends meet if I can&#x27;t get a job?<p>I want to be able to say I could do what McDonald or Snowden did, but if I&#x27;m honest, probably not.</text></item><item><author>dstick</author><text>&gt; I wish I could say the same for myself.<p>Care to elaborate a little? Seems like your experience could help others in a similar situation.</text></item><item><author>irjustin</author><text>That&#x27;s post fact. He blew the whistle before and very publicly.<p>This event almost doesn&#x27;t matter because he didn&#x27;t care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.<p>I believe there&#x27;s a moment before he doesn&#x27;t sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...<p>If you&#x27;ve ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.<p>I wish I could say the same for myself.</text></item><item><author>hyperbovine</author><text>It didn&#x27;t hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;99th-congress&#x2F;house-joint-resolution&#x2F;634&#x2F;text?r=85&amp;s=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;99th-congress&#x2F;house-joint-reso...</a></text></item><item><author>cushychicken</author><text>I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for lunch afterwards.<p>He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission&#x27;s face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, &quot;It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.<p>He also didn&#x27;t give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I&#x27;d joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cduzz</author><text>This is the basic nature of a modern American corporation where the culture of the leadership implicitly believes there is a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to generate a profit.<p>There is a self-selecting process where people promote other people who make those small decisions in a particular way.<p>If you climb well or are unlucky enough to look under the wrong rocks you get to an inflection point where your option is to become a whistle blower, leave, ask for a promotion, or become the patsy.<p>Often you can avoid this (if that&#x27;s your desire) by frequently and vocally asking about the audit requirements of a particular business process...</text></comment> |
12,276,554 | 12,276,521 | 1 | 2 | 12,274,749 | train | <story><title>Lake Nyos suffocated over 1,700 people in one night</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lake-nyos-the-deadliest-lake-in-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bnjmn</author><text>A few years ago I wrote a poem loosely based this event.<p>I know unsolicited poetry from strangers on the internet is almost always awful, but this poem still holds up for me, which is pretty unusual for anything I&#x27;ve ever written.<p>So I hope you enjoy it, too:<p><pre><code> NYOS
You took me in on dusky breath,
tasted me, tasted nothing,
gathered by my easy take
that I was oxygen enough
for idle inspiration.
How swiftly my lack became your
lack; my misgiving, your mistake.
Your eyes flashed a baffled
petition as you fell limp in a
thousand different doorways,
cribs, embraces, fits and fields,
yet I pressed after whatever it was
I thought to find in the lowest
parts of Cameroon, as foolish in
love as a gas trapped in a lake.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeroer</author><text>If it means anything to you, I enjoy being hyper-critical, and shitting on strangers on the internet has a special place in my heart, but that poem is pretty good. I&#x27;d read more if you published it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lake Nyos suffocated over 1,700 people in one night</title><url>http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lake-nyos-the-deadliest-lake-in-the-world</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bnjmn</author><text>A few years ago I wrote a poem loosely based this event.<p>I know unsolicited poetry from strangers on the internet is almost always awful, but this poem still holds up for me, which is pretty unusual for anything I&#x27;ve ever written.<p>So I hope you enjoy it, too:<p><pre><code> NYOS
You took me in on dusky breath,
tasted me, tasted nothing,
gathered by my easy take
that I was oxygen enough
for idle inspiration.
How swiftly my lack became your
lack; my misgiving, your mistake.
Your eyes flashed a baffled
petition as you fell limp in a
thousand different doorways,
cribs, embraces, fits and fields,
yet I pressed after whatever it was
I thought to find in the lowest
parts of Cameroon, as foolish in
love as a gas trapped in a lake.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x2398dh1</author><text>I have wondered if the 1986 Ladysmith Black Mambazo &#x2F; Paul Simon song, &quot;Homeless,&quot; is about this tragedy, but I have not been able to find anything online confirming it. The only things I have supporting this are the fact that it came out in 1986 and has the lyrics, &quot;Moonlight sleeping on the midnight lake,&quot; and &quot;Strong wind, many dead tonight it could be you.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fy3YVyh3mYE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fy3YVyh3mYE</a></text></comment> |
41,229,927 | 41,229,914 | 1 | 3 | 41,228,935 | train | <story><title>History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024</title><url>https://trieve.ai/history-of-hnsearch/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>On the topic of Hacker News search… a useful trick that not enough people know is that you can take the ID of a story and use search to return all comments ordered by most recent first - great for keeping up with what’s new in a specific conversation.<p>Eg for this thread the most recent comments can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=story%3A41228935&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a><p>I built an Observable notebook to save me from having to manually construct those searches here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;observablehq.com&#x2F;@simonw&#x2F;hacker-news-homepage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;observablehq.com&#x2F;@simonw&#x2F;hacker-news-homepage</a></text></comment> | <story><title>History of Hacker News Search from 2007 to 2024</title><url>https://trieve.ai/history-of-hnsearch/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>There are a few capabiliti es lacking from Algolia which I&#x27;d really like to see in a replacement:<p>- Negative search &#x2F; exclusion: the ability to <i>exclude</i> terms from a search, as in &quot;procfs -linux&quot;, which would look for any references to &quot;procfs&quot; which did not <i>also</i> reference &quot;linux&quot;.<p><i>Edit:</i> This exists, see dang&#x27;s reply below.<p>- Replies to a specific user, e.g., &quot;by:dredmorbius inreplyto:skeptrune &lt;search terms&gt;&quot;. I&#x27;m often looking for a specific context of my own previous comments.<p>- An improved date-bounding interface. If there&#x27;s one thing that frustrates me about Algolia&#x27;s interface, it&#x27;s the GUI (and syntax) for defining dates. It&#x27;s cumbersome, and at least on my browser, the dates are generally hard to read or invisible. Going back years is especially cumbersome.<p>I&#x27;ll add: Algolia <i>has</i> been massively useful, and the fact that I <i>can</i> search HN, especially for my own content, has been a huge part of the value of the site, and is worlds ahead of other online platforms. (Mastodon &#x2F; the Fediverse <i>is</i> catching up here, Diaspora*&#x27;s lack of search was among my main frustrations with the site and explains my absence there after more than a decade of participation.)</text></comment> |
7,324,257 | 7,324,274 | 1 | 3 | 7,323,986 | train | <story><title>The rise of OpenStreetMap: A quest to conquer Google’s mapping empire</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/02/28/openstreetmap/1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>FYI on android&#x27;s Google Maps I&#x27;ve been able to do that for at least a year and a half, and it works great for me (I used it extensively in SEA too, coincidentally). Not sure if it&#x27;s available on iOS&#x27;s version.</text></item><item><author>huskyr</author><text>One thing where OSM really shines is the ability to downloaded maps for offline use. When i was travelling in South East Asia for two months i had an iPhone with an app that allowed me to download a part of any OSM map. Because every hotel had Wi-Fi access i just downloaded the parts where i was travelling and used that instead of finding a local SIM card. Even in pretty remote parts the maps were usually good, and in some cases they were even better than the Google Maps equivalent (e.g. Laos).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>4ad</author><text>It&#x27;s incomparable. Google Maps only caches around 10km x 10km, and in offline mode search and routing doesn&#x27;t work. Also, in Google Maps it&#x27;s impossible to tell if&#x2F;what is cached and what not.<p>OSM maps can be for any area, and applications do provide search, including POI search and routing.</text></comment> | <story><title>The rise of OpenStreetMap: A quest to conquer Google’s mapping empire</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/02/28/openstreetmap/1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>FYI on android&#x27;s Google Maps I&#x27;ve been able to do that for at least a year and a half, and it works great for me (I used it extensively in SEA too, coincidentally). Not sure if it&#x27;s available on iOS&#x27;s version.</text></item><item><author>huskyr</author><text>One thing where OSM really shines is the ability to downloaded maps for offline use. When i was travelling in South East Asia for two months i had an iPhone with an app that allowed me to download a part of any OSM map. Because every hotel had Wi-Fi access i just downloaded the parts where i was travelling and used that instead of finding a local SIM card. Even in pretty remote parts the maps were usually good, and in some cases they were even better than the Google Maps equivalent (e.g. Laos).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>est</author><text>Try cache satellite or terrain maps.<p>That&#x27;s why I love open source or hackable products. You don&#x27;t need to whining to a shitty support forum to grind a kpi driven product manager to make empty promises.</text></comment> |
6,566,422 | 6,566,350 | 1 | 3 | 6,564,610 | train | <story><title>Windows 8.1 now available</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-now-available.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkolb</author><text>I&#x27;m using 8 on my primary desktop right now, haven&#x27;t upgraded to 8.1 yet. Typing this comment on my Macbook Pro.<p>After using 8 for a while, I honestly don&#x27;t see why people hate it so much. I don&#x27;t use the Metro stuff, and the traditional Windows desktop experience is much faster. As a development environment I quite like it, and prefer it mightily over OSX as Apple tries to shoehorn that OS into an iOS-like frankenstein&#x27;s monster.<p>I&#x27;ll be upgrading to 8.1 as soon as I feel like it, but I just came here to chime in that I really don&#x27;t get why people abhor 8 so much in the first place. It kind of feels like piling-on to me with no real substance behind. As a developer anyway--I can&#x27;t speak to a non-technical user&#x27;s experience with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstrauser</author><text>We bought my junior high-aged son a laptop for Christmas last year, and it came with Windows 8. He hates it. I promise you I didn&#x27;t say anything bad about it (because who wants to convince someone not to like the gift you just gave them?), but he came to me a few days later asking if I could &quot;upgrade it to Mac OS&quot;. His words, not mine.<p>I think the reason he doesn&#x27;t like it is that it&#x27;s different from any computer he&#x27;d ever used at home or school before, and without any real benefit. He loves the Windows 7 gaming desktop we have in the living room but sees 8 as &quot;weird&quot; without a good reason for being so.<p>I personally didn&#x27;t have an opinion on it until I tried to install a network printer and ended up bouncing between the Win 7-style control panel and the Win 8-style wizard thingy because neither one held all of the settings required to make it work. After a few minutes of that, I was about ready to pitch it out the living room window.<p>TL;DR it radically changed the UI without offering any noticeable advantages for having done so. That&#x27;s why we came to not like it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 8.1 now available</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-now-available.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkolb</author><text>I&#x27;m using 8 on my primary desktop right now, haven&#x27;t upgraded to 8.1 yet. Typing this comment on my Macbook Pro.<p>After using 8 for a while, I honestly don&#x27;t see why people hate it so much. I don&#x27;t use the Metro stuff, and the traditional Windows desktop experience is much faster. As a development environment I quite like it, and prefer it mightily over OSX as Apple tries to shoehorn that OS into an iOS-like frankenstein&#x27;s monster.<p>I&#x27;ll be upgrading to 8.1 as soon as I feel like it, but I just came here to chime in that I really don&#x27;t get why people abhor 8 so much in the first place. It kind of feels like piling-on to me with no real substance behind. As a developer anyway--I can&#x27;t speak to a non-technical user&#x27;s experience with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zobzu</author><text>Probably because it&#x27;s the cool thing to do.
I know quite a few people, even some Linux devs that use Windows as their workstation (and a VM for linux).<p>Why? Because it works. its fast. and the UI ain&#x27;t bad, in fact (of the classic desktop that is).<p>Basically, the polar opposite of what the &quot;cool comment against windows&quot; says.</text></comment> |
18,128,610 | 18,128,551 | 1 | 2 | 18,128,384 | train | <story><title>10 years of gog.com</title><url>https://www.gog.com/10years</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>manfredo</author><text>Wow, GoG is a decade old - it&#x27;s hard to believe. GoG has always had the image in my mind of a scrappy new startup competing against the big likes of Steam, Microsoft Store, Origin, etc. I was probably a bit too young for the crowd that it&#x27;s games were initially aimed at. My earliest gaming memories stretch back to the N64 era, but really only start in earnest with the Xbox and I only really got into PC gaming in the mid-2000s. A of classics like the old Infinity Engine games (Baldur&#x27;s gate, Planescape Torment), Stronghold Crusaders, Heroes of Might and Magic, and others were largely unknown to me until I bought them through GoG. Despite their age I thoroughly enjoyed many of these games, and experiencing playing these games gave me a better appreciation and enjoyment of more modern games that draw on these older titles.<p>I think the tendency for the availability of games to quickly decay is one barrier that prevents video games from having the same prestige as a lot of other works of art, like film, books, or visual art. In movies or books it&#x27;s not uncommon for works to become recognized for excellence and remain widely explored decades after their release. With video games, it&#x27;s often becomes increasingly difficult to legally acquire old games and as time goes on eventually getting them to run in a modern machine becomes a challenge. It&#x27;s great to see that GoG has created a market for old games and created an incentive to maintain the ability to easily play them on modern machines - CD Projekt&#x27;s efforts go a long way of reducing the &quot;media decay&quot; of video games.</text></comment> | <story><title>10 years of gog.com</title><url>https://www.gog.com/10years</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>georgespencer</author><text>Congratulations for ten great years!<p>If you&#x27;ve never used it, Gog is a really nicely thought out experience from an ecom perspective. I&#x27;m not wild about the app store they&#x27;ve built, but it&#x27;s worth creating an account and tooling around a little on the website. It&#x27;s terrific.<p>Tonnes of the games from my childhood are on their platform. The only annoyance is having to boot into Windows for many of them. I know it&#x27;s easier said than done, but it&#x27;d be great if they could crack a way of wrapping a WINE-like emulator around each game so I can play on macOS.</text></comment> |
34,234,593 | 34,234,310 | 1 | 3 | 34,231,152 | train | <story><title>Start a fucking blog</title><url>https://startafuckingblog.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linhns</author><text>I get what the author of this website is trying to say, but is there a need to swear that much? What is the purpose of that?<p>Ps: You actually lost me at the &quot;Fuck Twitter&quot; part. It actually has been better for me since Elon took over and Mastodon has never convinced me with its hallmarks of the old Twitter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kibwen</author><text>It&#x27;s a riff on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherfuckingwebsite.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherfuckingwebsite.com&#x2F;</a> , whose memetic descendants have made the rounds on HN often over the past decade.</text></comment> | <story><title>Start a fucking blog</title><url>https://startafuckingblog.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linhns</author><text>I get what the author of this website is trying to say, but is there a need to swear that much? What is the purpose of that?<p>Ps: You actually lost me at the &quot;Fuck Twitter&quot; part. It actually has been better for me since Elon took over and Mastodon has never convinced me with its hallmarks of the old Twitter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waihtis</author><text>there&#x27;s plenty of people out there who think saying &quot;fuck&quot; is demonstrating a personality</text></comment> |
23,975,757 | 23,975,771 | 1 | 2 | 23,975,001 | train | <story><title>Google’s top search result is Google</title><url>https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Slartie</author><text>Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate IMHO. The only downside is that they don&#x27;t appear to offer some kind of transparent website translate feature (&quot;put a URL in and it translates the entire site, with layout kept intact&quot;), at least not for free. But if I happen to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to some language I can understand, DeepL has become my first stop due to its consistently higher result quality.</text></item><item><author>chimen</author><text>Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it&#x27;s not the case. Build better alternatives and I&#x27;m on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well.
One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google.<p>I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that&#x27;s what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch &quot;the numbers&quot; carefully.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinay427</author><text>I would be prepared to switch over completely for the languages they support if DeepL didn&#x27;t insert their advertisement at the bottom of some results (I&#x27;ve had this accidentally included in an email before), and if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to highlight text and see a popup with the translation. As it is, I use it most of the time but still rely on Google Translate being more accessible. Obviously DeepL is newer, so these limitations are understandable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google’s top search result is Google</title><url>https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Slartie</author><text>Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate IMHO. The only downside is that they don&#x27;t appear to offer some kind of transparent website translate feature (&quot;put a URL in and it translates the entire site, with layout kept intact&quot;), at least not for free. But if I happen to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to some language I can understand, DeepL has become my first stop due to its consistently higher result quality.</text></item><item><author>chimen</author><text>Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it&#x27;s not the case. Build better alternatives and I&#x27;m on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well.
One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google.<p>I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that&#x27;s what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch &quot;the numbers&quot; carefully.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bobsoap</author><text>Same here, I&#x27;ve been consistently surprised at how much better (and more natural&#x2F;accurate) deepl is than google at translating, especially for sentences and paragraphs.</text></comment> |
9,560,906 | 9,560,788 | 1 | 2 | 9,560,270 | train | <story><title>Yum is dead, long live DNF</title><url>http://dnf.baseurl.org/2015/05/11/yum-is-dead-long-live-dnf/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SwellJoe</author><text>I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I&#x27;ve interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite been the same without him, but I occasionally think of him when using yum.<p>I wish they&#x27;d keep the yum name, since dnf is still based on yum, even if a lot of the innards have been replaced. Also, &quot;dnf&quot; is not at all awesome to say out loud, while &quot;yum&quot; is among the most awesome commands to say out loud.</text></comment> | <story><title>Yum is dead, long live DNF</title><url>http://dnf.baseurl.org/2015/05/11/yum-is-dead-long-live-dnf/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>istvan__</author><text>Out of curiosity, why not fix something if broken? Why is there is always a half baked alternative that has a different set of problems. Instead of replacing what is perceived broken you can just fix it also keeping the good parts. I have several systems deeply vested in in the yum&#x2F;rpm ecosystem and I see very little chance that a new package manager is going to offer that much new features that I need while keeping the features I already like from yum.<p>From the article:<p>&quot;undocumented API, broken dependency solving algorithm and inability to refactor internal functions. The last mentioned issue is connected with the lack of documentation. &quot;<p>Well some of them I don&#x27;t care about as a user of yum some of them I can verify not true (documentation) and some of them I care about and it works for my use-cases (dependency solving algorithm).</text></comment> |
3,307,657 | 3,307,544 | 1 | 3 | 3,307,428 | train | <story><title>Steve Jobs and America's decline</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/10/death-steve-jobs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stephen_g</author><text>"As bad as their politics has got, Americans could always comfort themselves with the knowledge that their business leaders, entrepreneurs and workers were the most dynamic and innovative in the world."<p>Do any people from the USA find these sentiments nauseating or is it just the rest of the world? I don't know exactly what they mean by 'dynamic', but the idea that all the most innovative people only exist in the United States (or even that people in the US are on average more innovative than others) is ridiculous, and stating it is just blind nationalism...</text></comment> | <story><title>Steve Jobs and America's decline</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/10/death-steve-jobs</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Newgy</author><text>America's "decline" is mostly a function of bad government policy the past 15 years or so that lead to massively wasteful over-investment of people and capital into finance and real estate.<p>Break up the banks, let the market (not the Fed) set interest rates, deregulate health care markets, and balance the budget.</text></comment> |
41,303,672 | 41,303,657 | 1 | 3 | 41,302,944 | train | <story><title>Why are Texas interchanges so tall?</title><url>https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/8/19/why-are-texas-interchanges-texas-so-tall</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>From a quick skim of Wikipedia, it looks like the main benefit to the stack style over a conventional 2-level cloverleaf is capacity (the left-turn leaves are generally at most one lane) and speed (left turns are direct rather than 270deg, so you don&#x27;t have to slow down as much when taking them).<p>Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain.</text></item><item><author>missingcolours</author><text>There are frontage roads at most freeway interchanges in Texas.<p>Typical stack interchange elsewhere has 4 levels: freeway 1, freeway 2, freeway 1 left turns, freeway 2 left turns. Frontage roads add 5th and occasionally 6th levels.<p>The other thing not mentioned is the proliferation of separate express lanes, which often have dedicated flyover ramps as well.</text></item><item><author>Groxx</author><text>So...<p><pre><code> &gt; Q: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
&gt;
&gt; Frontage roads need grade separation, adding a layer.
&gt; Texas has lots of frontage roads.
</code></pre>
OK, I buy that Texas has <i>more</i> grade-separated interchanges on average... but I&#x27;m not seeing how that turns into &quot;Texas has more higher interchanges&quot; which is what it feels like that question is asking. Frontage roads don&#x27;t generally exist where 3+ highways intersect, so that shouldn&#x27;t be relevant for high ones, it just raises many 1-high to 2-high.<p>Or do they, in Texas? Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges, until it looks like a scene from The Fifth Element?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>Cloverleaf intersections have really poor overload behavior. They&#x27;re fine in low traffic areas, but in places with high traffic, the crossing streams of traffic cause cascading backups.<p>Stack interchanges increase acheivable throughput because you can often build enough road to allow backups for one direction to not impinge on the other flows.<p>It&#x27;s also easier to build effective signage so there&#x27;s fewer surprise lane changes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are Texas interchanges so tall?</title><url>https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/8/19/why-are-texas-interchanges-texas-so-tall</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikepurvis</author><text>From a quick skim of Wikipedia, it looks like the main benefit to the stack style over a conventional 2-level cloverleaf is capacity (the left-turn leaves are generally at most one lane) and speed (left turns are direct rather than 270deg, so you don&#x27;t have to slow down as much when taking them).<p>Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain.</text></item><item><author>missingcolours</author><text>There are frontage roads at most freeway interchanges in Texas.<p>Typical stack interchange elsewhere has 4 levels: freeway 1, freeway 2, freeway 1 left turns, freeway 2 left turns. Frontage roads add 5th and occasionally 6th levels.<p>The other thing not mentioned is the proliferation of separate express lanes, which often have dedicated flyover ramps as well.</text></item><item><author>Groxx</author><text>So...<p><pre><code> &gt; Q: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
&gt;
&gt; Frontage roads need grade separation, adding a layer.
&gt; Texas has lots of frontage roads.
</code></pre>
OK, I buy that Texas has <i>more</i> grade-separated interchanges on average... but I&#x27;m not seeing how that turns into &quot;Texas has more higher interchanges&quot; which is what it feels like that question is asking. Frontage roads don&#x27;t generally exist where 3+ highways intersect, so that shouldn&#x27;t be relevant for high ones, it just raises many 1-high to 2-high.<p>Or do they, in Texas? Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges, until it looks like a scene from The Fifth Element?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seijiotsu</author><text>Don’t forget ease and safety. With a stack interchange (and many other types), you often have plenty of time beforehand to position yourself into the correct lane. But if you are going to go through a cloverleaf you will often need to make a stressful weave into the leaf, and then back again into the highway.</text></comment> |
21,449,131 | 21,449,005 | 1 | 2 | 21,447,459 | train | <story><title>Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-separating-gifted-children-hasnt-led-to-better-acheivement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.</text></item><item><author>borski</author><text>Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a <i>world</i> of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was <i>very</i> difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, <i>just didn&#x27;t give a fuck</i>. It really sucked.<p>Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing &quot;too well&quot; meant a beatdown after school.<p>2&#x2F;3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally.<p>[edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble <i>constantly</i> for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn&#x27;t bored; I was challenged.<p>[edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn&#x27;t want to get in trouble. It was dumb.</text></item><item><author>hackerrenews</author><text>I was fourth picked for g&amp;t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy.<p>Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even.<p>Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. (With a few exceptions, the smart kids tended to be kind). The mixture with the “gen pop” led to bullying, repeated physical abuse and harassment by other kids from ages 10-12. This was decades ago when physical abuse amongst minors was often ignored, even by police.<p>By freshman year of high school, I was worn down and switched back to some non-honors classes mid-term. This unfortunately led to dysfunctional friendships with the “cool” kids (same bully crowd), introduction to drugs and a low achievement life. There was some form of Florence nightingale syndrome involved here, due to unresolved physical abuse leading to friendships with the abusers in high school.<p>Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I know, I was there. Still here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>This is 95% of why we send our kids to private school. In the rare case a disrupter makes it in, they&#x27;re &quot;counseled out.&quot; It&#x27;s a travesty that schools permit a handful of bad apples to ruin the learning experience of everyone else.</text></comment> | <story><title>Separating gifted children hasn't led to better achievement</title><url>https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-separating-gifted-children-hasnt-led-to-better-acheivement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>The solution is not to pull out a handful of high performers, it’s to kick out the even smaller number of disrupters.</text></item><item><author>borski</author><text>Amen to this. I was separated (went to Stuyvesant HS in NYC) and it made a <i>world</i> of difference for me, as compared to JHS or elementary school. Prior to Stuy, I was bullied like crazy, beaten, and it was <i>very</i> difficult to try and fit in with many of the others around me who, frankly, <i>just didn&#x27;t give a fuck</i>. It really sucked.<p>Stuy was a different world, and the first time in my life I felt the opportunity to actually just learn, and not have to hide my report card or test scores as soon as I got them, because doing &quot;too well&quot; meant a beatdown after school.<p>2&#x2F;3 of my MIT admission essays were about this experience, incidentally.<p>[edit 1] Aside: one additional anecdote is that I was constantly getting in trouble before Stuy; I was always bored, because the work was easy, and nobody ever gave me additional work to do, so I would talk to the other kids. I was always an extrovert, and very bad at being bored; I could not sit in one place and just stare at the wall, or pretend to listen to a teacher drone on about some geometry thing I already knew. So I got in trouble <i>constantly</i> for distracting the other kids. That stopped in Stuy, because I wasn&#x27;t bored; I was challenged.<p>[edit 2] The other corollary to this, of course, is that on the last day of JHS, after having held my reactions entirely for nearly a decade, and just taking the beatings...I finally lost it. It was really bad, and on the last day of JHS I went absolutely apeshit on this kid for pushing me around and punching me, after I gave him three warnings. Easily one of the top 3 least proud moments of my life. That could have been avoided, too, though you could make an argument a large part of that was also due to it being taboo to actually talk to someone about your feelings in the 90s. I never wanted to fight back because I was afraid of hurting them (I had been training in martial arts for like 7-8 years) and because I didn&#x27;t want to get in trouble. It was dumb.</text></item><item><author>hackerrenews</author><text>I was fourth picked for g&amp;t. First and second pick ended up being quite successful, as did the third picked. One has a high up, prestigious position at Amazon and the other retired from Microsoft wealthy.<p>Me, I smoke weed and that’s about the only thing I’ve really done consistently since high school.. more consistently than music, and programming, even.<p>Frankly, I wish I had been better separated from the other kids. I would have been far happier in middle school just hanging around other nice, smart people. (With a few exceptions, the smart kids tended to be kind). The mixture with the “gen pop” led to bullying, repeated physical abuse and harassment by other kids from ages 10-12. This was decades ago when physical abuse amongst minors was often ignored, even by police.<p>By freshman year of high school, I was worn down and switched back to some non-honors classes mid-term. This unfortunately led to dysfunctional friendships with the “cool” kids (same bully crowd), introduction to drugs and a low achievement life. There was some form of Florence nightingale syndrome involved here, due to unresolved physical abuse leading to friendships with the abusers in high school.<p>Separating gifted children for accelerated learning is great. Ignoring social development by blindly sticking all kids together in unstructured environments where bullying and physical abuse is allowed to persist will override any hope for some kids. I know, I was there. Still here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solveit</author><text>Yes, but how would that work in practice? Special schools for high performers is much more palatable than special schools for quarantining children who aren&#x27;t going to amount to anything (no matter what you call it and how you design it, this is how it will be perceived).</text></comment> |
37,997,812 | 37,996,401 | 1 | 3 | 37,995,155 | train | <story><title>Unified versus Split Diff</title><url>https://matklad.github.io/2023/10/23/unified-vs-split-diff.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crdrost</author><text>I go back and forth on this.<p>On the one hand, I really like constant deep feedback. I really like the consistency benefits of having another person say “that’s too much, I find that unreadable.”<p>On the other, I have now been at a lot of places where it was very hard to get my code reviewed, latencies of days and sometimes weeks if folks are in a particularly heinous crunchtime... And then when it does get reviewed, the stuff that I worked really hard on to get the right speed or to properly centralize cache invalidation... Suddenly someone is like “I would have done it from this other approach” and you have no idea whether it&#x27;s tractable or not.<p>While I have never been at a place that did this, I have in my head the idea that the code should be an unfolding collective conversation, kind of like when folks are all collaborating on a shared Google Doc, I see that you are editing this section and I throw in a quick comment “don&#x27;t forget to add XYZ” and then jump to a different part that I won&#x27;t be stepping on their toes with. So the basic idea would be to get everybody to merge to `main` like 2 or 3 times a day if possible. In that case code review really is just “make sure this doesn&#x27;t break the build or break prod, everything is behind a feature toggle, if I don&#x27;t like the design I will comment on the code near the design or sketch a proof of concept showing that my approach is superior in clarity or speed or whatever”... Nobody ever takes me up on this culture shift it seems.</text></item><item><author>dylukes</author><text>&gt; In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently.<p>This is an impoverished view of code review. Code review is a principal mechanism for reducing individual code ownership, for propagating conventions, and for skill transfer.<p>A good code review starts with a good PR: one that outlines what its goals were and how it achieved them.<p>First item on a good review then: does the code achieve what it set out to do per the outline?<p>Second: does it contain tests that validate the claimed functionality?<p>Third: does it respect the architectural conventions of the system so far?<p>Fourth: is the style in line with expectations?<p>Fifth, and finally: do you have any suggestions as to better API usage?<p>A code review that is nothing more than a sanity check is useless and could have been done by CI infrastructure. Code review is a human process and should maximally take advantage of the things only humans could do. Leave the rest to machines.<p>An implicit question in several of the above is &quot;will this set a good example for future contributions?&quot;</text></item><item><author>friendzis</author><text>&gt; For a large change, I don’t want to do a “diff review”, I want to do a proper code review of a codebase at a particular instant in time, paying specific attention to the recently changed areas,<p>obviously every team and ticket is different, but IMO unless the person doing the review is some sort of principal engineer mostly responsible for the code at large, this does not align with I would personally consider a code review. In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently. If commits in the PR are properly ordered&#x2F;squashed it is relatively easy to review incremental changes in isolation anyway.<p>I guess the complaint author has is really about review <i>types</i>. I do not have terminology ready at hand, but there is run of the mill sanity check review and then there is deep, architectural feature premerge review. The author complains about the latter when most of the code reviews in web tools are of the former variety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaggederest</author><text>In this kind of context, I ask people what log level they&#x27;d like their review at. If you just want to get the code out the door, by all means, &quot;error&quot; or &quot;warn&quot; might be the right review depth, when you&#x27;re confident in your code and don&#x27;t want to be derailed with philosophy.<p>If you&#x27;re exploring a new concept and want all the ideas and brainstorming you can get in your feedback, &quot;debug&quot; log level is appropriate.<p>Once that idea has moved down the pipe, you may be down to &quot;info&quot; or &quot;warn&quot; depending on how much conversation has happened around the PR.</text></comment> | <story><title>Unified versus Split Diff</title><url>https://matklad.github.io/2023/10/23/unified-vs-split-diff.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crdrost</author><text>I go back and forth on this.<p>On the one hand, I really like constant deep feedback. I really like the consistency benefits of having another person say “that’s too much, I find that unreadable.”<p>On the other, I have now been at a lot of places where it was very hard to get my code reviewed, latencies of days and sometimes weeks if folks are in a particularly heinous crunchtime... And then when it does get reviewed, the stuff that I worked really hard on to get the right speed or to properly centralize cache invalidation... Suddenly someone is like “I would have done it from this other approach” and you have no idea whether it&#x27;s tractable or not.<p>While I have never been at a place that did this, I have in my head the idea that the code should be an unfolding collective conversation, kind of like when folks are all collaborating on a shared Google Doc, I see that you are editing this section and I throw in a quick comment “don&#x27;t forget to add XYZ” and then jump to a different part that I won&#x27;t be stepping on their toes with. So the basic idea would be to get everybody to merge to `main` like 2 or 3 times a day if possible. In that case code review really is just “make sure this doesn&#x27;t break the build or break prod, everything is behind a feature toggle, if I don&#x27;t like the design I will comment on the code near the design or sketch a proof of concept showing that my approach is superior in clarity or speed or whatever”... Nobody ever takes me up on this culture shift it seems.</text></item><item><author>dylukes</author><text>&gt; In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently.<p>This is an impoverished view of code review. Code review is a principal mechanism for reducing individual code ownership, for propagating conventions, and for skill transfer.<p>A good code review starts with a good PR: one that outlines what its goals were and how it achieved them.<p>First item on a good review then: does the code achieve what it set out to do per the outline?<p>Second: does it contain tests that validate the claimed functionality?<p>Third: does it respect the architectural conventions of the system so far?<p>Fourth: is the style in line with expectations?<p>Fifth, and finally: do you have any suggestions as to better API usage?<p>A code review that is nothing more than a sanity check is useless and could have been done by CI infrastructure. Code review is a human process and should maximally take advantage of the things only humans could do. Leave the rest to machines.<p>An implicit question in several of the above is &quot;will this set a good example for future contributions?&quot;</text></item><item><author>friendzis</author><text>&gt; For a large change, I don’t want to do a “diff review”, I want to do a proper code review of a codebase at a particular instant in time, paying specific attention to the recently changed areas,<p>obviously every team and ticket is different, but IMO unless the person doing the review is some sort of principal engineer mostly responsible for the code at large, this does not align with I would personally consider a code review. In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently. If commits in the PR are properly ordered&#x2F;squashed it is relatively easy to review incremental changes in isolation anyway.<p>I guess the complaint author has is really about review <i>types</i>. I do not have terminology ready at hand, but there is run of the mill sanity check review and then there is deep, architectural feature premerge review. The author complains about the latter when most of the code reviews in web tools are of the former variety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bernds74</author><text>&quot;I would have done it from this other approach&quot;. I&#x27;ve seen that, and it&#x27;s not good when you get the feeling of &quot;code review is when someone who hasn&#x27;t thought about your problem tells you how you should have solved it&quot;. People sometimes feel they have to add value as a reviewer, and casually discarding other people&#x27;s work is the way to do it. Fortunately it&#x27;s not something I have to deal with at my current job.</text></comment> |
31,217,261 | 31,217,355 | 1 | 2 | 31,215,891 | train | <story><title>Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/did-w-boson-just-break-standard-model.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>&gt; LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources<p>As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around <i>a lot</i> before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You&#x27;ve got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.<p>We&#x27;re doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists <i>to do those sorts of measurements that they&#x27;d need</i>.</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it&#x27;s fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it&#x27;s the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.</text></item><item><author>katmannthree</author><text>&gt; It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way.<p>It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.<p>She&#x27;s a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she&#x27;s smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she&#x27;s doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.</text></item><item><author>d0mine</author><text>This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it is true &quot;paper production&quot; has disproportionate influence on funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I&#x27;m excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telescope (new instruments are often good for scientific progress), and quantum computing is gobbledygook (theoretically there were some exciting algorithms, in practice I expect at best modest but nonetheless important [cryptography] applications--that we could duplicate in less elegant way in a classical way)<p>but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like &quot;defund LHC&quot; (that would be unfortunate)</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR:<p>&gt; &quot;I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of people still work on it, most of them don’t like me. But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on, which is why that’s what I mostly talk about these days.&quot;<p>The popular science literature is also full of string theory this and god particle that, and it&#x27;s really not very satisfying or illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject, I&#x27;d recommend instead Stephen Hawking&#x27;s compendium of classic papers on quantum physics, with commentary, &quot;The Dreams That Stuff is Made Of.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JackFr</author><text>Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.</text></comment> | <story><title>Did the W-boson just “break the standard model”?</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/did-w-boson-just-break-standard-model.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>&gt; LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources<p>As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around <i>a lot</i> before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You&#x27;ve got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.<p>We&#x27;re doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists <i>to do those sorts of measurements that they&#x27;d need</i>.</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>There is a limited pool of resources available to do basic fundamental science and it&#x27;s fair to argue that things like LHC have absorbed a disproportionate share of these scare resources, without a whole lot to show for it. Since it&#x27;s the general public that ultimately funds these projects (unless the LHC can attract its own Jeff Bezos), I think it is OK to have a public discussion about it.</text></item><item><author>katmannthree</author><text>&gt; It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way.<p>It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.<p>She&#x27;s a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she&#x27;s smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she&#x27;s doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.</text></item><item><author>d0mine</author><text>This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it is true &quot;paper production&quot; has disproportionate influence on funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I&#x27;m excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telescope (new instruments are often good for scientific progress), and quantum computing is gobbledygook (theoretically there were some exciting algorithms, in practice I expect at best modest but nonetheless important [cryptography] applications--that we could duplicate in less elegant way in a classical way)<p>but for people unfamiliar with science it may sound like &quot;defund LHC&quot; (that would be unfortunate)</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR:<p>&gt; &quot;I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so a lot of people still work on it, most of them don’t like me. But the disciplines where the foundations of physics currently make progress are cosmology and astrophysics, and everything quantum, quantum information, quantum computing, quantum metrology, and so on, which is why that’s what I mostly talk about these days.&quot;<p>The popular science literature is also full of string theory this and god particle that, and it&#x27;s really not very satisfying or illuminating. If people want to get into this general subject, I&#x27;d recommend instead Stephen Hawking&#x27;s compendium of classic papers on quantum physics, with commentary, &quot;The Dreams That Stuff is Made Of.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>As opposed to open season on new theory - or even new kinds of theory.<p>The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented.<p>It&#x27;s hard to believe that physics can&#x27;t do better. But easy to believe that physics won&#x27;t do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.</text></comment> |
31,718,015 | 31,717,381 | 1 | 3 | 31,715,067 | train | <story><title>Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNl0DDUnp0E</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Deritio</author><text>Whenever I hear air taxi, I think about water bottles and airport security.<p>I don&#x27;t want some rich dude flying over my house just because he&#x2F;she can afford to take a airtaxi from the airport to city center while everyone else uses car or train.<p>For other use cases they can do what they want. Australian outback perhaps.<p>But airspace pollution and a potential small airplane crashing down in a city? No way.</text></item><item><author>marcosdumay</author><text>The low energy density of batteries favors <i>large</i> planes and short distances.<p>The only reason you are seeing them in small planes is that electric propulsion makes VTOL viable, and VTOL favors small planes. There is just this niche in aviation that can&#x27;t be filled at all by fossil fuel engines, so it&#x27;s the first to adopt electric ones.<p>And yes, regulations will be the most important factor for those. I imagine it all depends on how silent those planes can be. But I doubt safety will be the limiting factor.</text></item><item><author>robonerd</author><text>This is kind of cool, but I&#x27;m skeptical that these sort of planes will ever be practical as much more than rich people toys. The power density of even speculative near-future batteries favors small airplanes and short flights. This doesn&#x27;t really mesh into the existing aviation industry, so proponents of these small electric planes usually propose creating new markets entirely; e.g. <i>Uber for Helicopters</i>. But I&#x27;m pretty skeptical that laws will allow regular operation of these in residential neighborhoods for long, if at all.<p>Also, where is the vertical stabilizer and rudder? I assume they&#x27;re using differential thrust in powered flight, but what if they lose power? Can this plane be controlled in a glide?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstummbillig</author><text>&gt; No way.<p>Wait until you see the motor carriages they claim are going to replace horses one day.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNl0DDUnp0E</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Deritio</author><text>Whenever I hear air taxi, I think about water bottles and airport security.<p>I don&#x27;t want some rich dude flying over my house just because he&#x2F;she can afford to take a airtaxi from the airport to city center while everyone else uses car or train.<p>For other use cases they can do what they want. Australian outback perhaps.<p>But airspace pollution and a potential small airplane crashing down in a city? No way.</text></item><item><author>marcosdumay</author><text>The low energy density of batteries favors <i>large</i> planes and short distances.<p>The only reason you are seeing them in small planes is that electric propulsion makes VTOL viable, and VTOL favors small planes. There is just this niche in aviation that can&#x27;t be filled at all by fossil fuel engines, so it&#x27;s the first to adopt electric ones.<p>And yes, regulations will be the most important factor for those. I imagine it all depends on how silent those planes can be. But I doubt safety will be the limiting factor.</text></item><item><author>robonerd</author><text>This is kind of cool, but I&#x27;m skeptical that these sort of planes will ever be practical as much more than rich people toys. The power density of even speculative near-future batteries favors small airplanes and short flights. This doesn&#x27;t really mesh into the existing aviation industry, so proponents of these small electric planes usually propose creating new markets entirely; e.g. <i>Uber for Helicopters</i>. But I&#x27;m pretty skeptical that laws will allow regular operation of these in residential neighborhoods for long, if at all.<p>Also, where is the vertical stabilizer and rudder? I assume they&#x27;re using differential thrust in powered flight, but what if they lose power? Can this plane be controlled in a glide?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inglor_cz</author><text>Air taxis are really useful in places divided by natural obstacles.<p>Hop over a fjord, hop over a mountain range. Much cheaper and eco-friendly than building bridges and tunnels everywhere, especially if the population density isn&#x27;t high.</text></comment> |
20,387,939 | 20,387,585 | 1 | 3 | 20,378,852 | train | <story><title>Why Three Prongs? (1996)</title><url>http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text><i>Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world.</i><p>100V, 240V, if 15 amps runs through you, you’re having a really bad day either way. That’s another way of saying, “it ain’t the volts, it’s the amperage.”</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>- Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world. At least when it comes to electrocution. I suppose that it is also the reason why in Europe, where the standard voltage goes up to 240V, electrical safety is much more strict.<p>- As it is already mentioned, Japan is backwards in several domains and that may just be one of these. That&#x27;s despite their technological advance in others.<p>- I have a feeling that there are more &quot;perfect electricians&quot; in Japan than anywhere else, because of their culture.<p>- Some 2-prong devices are perfectly safe because they are double insulated. This is also called Class II and the symbol for it is a square inside another square.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>The obvious follow up question, then, is: why does Japan use 2-prong outlets even today? Are Japanese people dying from electrical shock at a much higher rate than the rest of the world? Is Japan full of only Perfect Electricians? Or is this not actually the significant problem that this myth (in the etiological sense, not the fictional sense) would lead us to believe?<p>The only 2-prong device I own is a (Japanese-made, of course) rice cooker. You&#x27;d think that if any device warranted 3-prong safety, it&#x27;d be a metal container which combines water and mains electricity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwallin</author><text>I = V&#x2F;R<p>So given relatively constant resistance, voltage is linearly proportional to amperage. Double the volts, double the amps.<p>The resistance of the human body can vary, for instance, if you&#x27;re sweating, your resistance drops, therefore the amperage increases. Dry skin has high resistance, so if you stab electrodes through your skin and into your flesh, the low resistance of your mostly salt water body will carry a high amperage. But with all environmental factors being equal, if one person gets zapped by 100V and another person gets zapped by 240V, the person zapped by 240V will have 2.4x the amps running through them, and their day will be roughly 2.4x worse.<p>In other words, sure, guns don&#x27;t kill people, bullets kill people. But you&#x27;ll find that whenever a bullet kills sometime, there was probably a gun involved.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Three Prongs? (1996)</title><url>http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text><i>Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world.</i><p>100V, 240V, if 15 amps runs through you, you’re having a really bad day either way. That’s another way of saying, “it ain’t the volts, it’s the amperage.”</text></item><item><author>GuB-42</author><text>- Japan runs at 100V, the lowest and therefore safest voltage in the world. At least when it comes to electrocution. I suppose that it is also the reason why in Europe, where the standard voltage goes up to 240V, electrical safety is much more strict.<p>- As it is already mentioned, Japan is backwards in several domains and that may just be one of these. That&#x27;s despite their technological advance in others.<p>- I have a feeling that there are more &quot;perfect electricians&quot; in Japan than anywhere else, because of their culture.<p>- Some 2-prong devices are perfectly safe because they are double insulated. This is also called Class II and the symbol for it is a square inside another square.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>The obvious follow up question, then, is: why does Japan use 2-prong outlets even today? Are Japanese people dying from electrical shock at a much higher rate than the rest of the world? Is Japan full of only Perfect Electricians? Or is this not actually the significant problem that this myth (in the etiological sense, not the fictional sense) would lead us to believe?<p>The only 2-prong device I own is a (Japanese-made, of course) rice cooker. You&#x27;d think that if any device warranted 3-prong safety, it&#x27;d be a metal container which combines water and mains electricity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>Path (through the body) and frequency also matter. See generally:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypertextbook.com&#x2F;facts&#x2F;2000&#x2F;JackHsu.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hypertextbook.com&#x2F;facts&#x2F;2000&#x2F;JackHsu.shtml</a><p>I recall a story, late 1990&#x27;s to early oughts, of a solo researcher found dead in his lab of apparent heart failure whilst working with very low voltage- and amperage currents, but at critical frequencies. I cannot find an online reference presently.</text></comment> |
34,138,325 | 34,137,857 | 1 | 3 | 34,137,703 | train | <story><title>Digital Gardening in Obsidian</title><url>https://bytes.zone/posts/digital-gardening-in-obsidian/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cube2222</author><text>If you like that, I also recommend taking a look at Logseq[0].<p>I&#x27;ve previously been using Obsidian, and Bear before that, but always structured my notes as increasingly nested lists of bullet points.<p>Logseq is basically built around that abstraction, to make it very ergonomic (with each bullet point being a &quot;block&quot; - the smallest unit of text on which Logseq operates).<p>It also has querying built-in and the core is fully open source. So far very happy with it, and the new sync is great.<p>Besides, it&#x27;s also written in ClojureScript, which makes my inner lisp nerd happy.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logseq.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Digital Gardening in Obsidian</title><url>https://bytes.zone/posts/digital-gardening-in-obsidian/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>number6</author><text>My problem with obsidian is that I need a license to use it if I add something work related. I can not realy disentangle both. If Ilearn something new here on HN Iwm will propably use it later at work.</text></comment> |
15,929,651 | 15,929,293 | 1 | 3 | 15,927,641 | train | <story><title>Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework</title><url>http://truffleframework.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>malux85</author><text>I’m a pretty experienced solidly &#x2F; ethereum developer, and a developer with 13 years experience in vast array of systems and languages (from embedded C on ppc to high performance c++ and now deep learning and scientific computing in python). I completely agree with you, that there’s some very odd language choices in solidity, seemingly rookie mistakes, and the tooling is very poor. But! It’s the 1.0 of crypto. Early C stuff was poor, early html development was poor, early OpenGL development was poor, it’s just new.<p>I see it as a lot of room for opportunity, but I could also see how it could be frustrating to some more senior people - but I have found part of growing old and seeing things constantly get re-invented but slightly different are windows of opportunity - so I get excited</text></item><item><author>increment_i</author><text>I recently got pretty pumped about exploring developing for the Ethereum network and spent an entire weekend reading everything I could about the protocol, the development ecosystem, language and anything else I could find - blog posts, tutorials, experiences from other developers.<p>I came away with my initial enthusiasm completely dashed. I can&#x27;t for the life of me imagine why any sane developer would ever want to work within the constraints of Ethereum. It just doesn&#x27;t seem to me anywhere near ready for any kind of serious development, or even trivial development for that matter.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear rebuttals to this. Is anyone out there doing anything interesting with this platform?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quickthrower2</author><text>There was a semi-joke post on HN a while back where someone created a &#x27;pyramid&#x27; lispy language using Racket, which complied to solidity.<p>But in seriousness, a Haskell -&gt; solidity compiler, might make it bearable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Truffle: Ethereum Dapp Development Framework</title><url>http://truffleframework.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>malux85</author><text>I’m a pretty experienced solidly &#x2F; ethereum developer, and a developer with 13 years experience in vast array of systems and languages (from embedded C on ppc to high performance c++ and now deep learning and scientific computing in python). I completely agree with you, that there’s some very odd language choices in solidity, seemingly rookie mistakes, and the tooling is very poor. But! It’s the 1.0 of crypto. Early C stuff was poor, early html development was poor, early OpenGL development was poor, it’s just new.<p>I see it as a lot of room for opportunity, but I could also see how it could be frustrating to some more senior people - but I have found part of growing old and seeing things constantly get re-invented but slightly different are windows of opportunity - so I get excited</text></item><item><author>increment_i</author><text>I recently got pretty pumped about exploring developing for the Ethereum network and spent an entire weekend reading everything I could about the protocol, the development ecosystem, language and anything else I could find - blog posts, tutorials, experiences from other developers.<p>I came away with my initial enthusiasm completely dashed. I can&#x27;t for the life of me imagine why any sane developer would ever want to work within the constraints of Ethereum. It just doesn&#x27;t seem to me anywhere near ready for any kind of serious development, or even trivial development for that matter.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear rebuttals to this. Is anyone out there doing anything interesting with this platform?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikkwong</author><text>Could you touch on what you find are the short comings of solidity?</text></comment> |
34,115,111 | 34,114,603 | 1 | 2 | 34,107,061 | train | <story><title>How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work</title><url>https://nuxx.net/blog/2022/12/23/how-asus-and-a-microsoft-bug-almost-broke-remote-work/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ytygg775</author><text>Clickbaity title. It makes it sound like remote work for everybody everywhere almost broke because of this-or-that thing involving Microsoft and Asus. Not the case. The article is about some obscure issue for a particular company who trusted their IT to be handled by Active Directory in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment, involving Asus home routers. Hardly a general insight.<p>The root cause for this is the inability of our industry to properly define standards and then enforcing&#x2F;sticking to them. Everybody just hacks something that kinda-sorta works and whoever has the larger market share is right and everybody else has to suffer, even if they themselves want to do the right thing and do it properly.<p>Let&#x27;s face it, we all suck at this and have to pay for it with this kind of meaningless waste of time &quot;troubleshooting&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work</title><url>https://nuxx.net/blog/2022/12/23/how-asus-and-a-microsoft-bug-almost-broke-remote-work/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PreInternet01</author><text>Ah, yes, my old nemesis, WinHttpAutoProxySvc... For years, on both Windows 10 and 11, this has had the habit of randomly spiking the CPU core the service is running on to 100%, in some kind of busy-loop that&#x27;s effectively preventing anything that uses the Win32 HTTP API from working.<p>So, if symptoms include <i>laptop fan thinks it&#x27;s a jet engine</i>, Start menu refusing to fully populate, Search not responding, and a lot of apps just not launching at all (or taking several minutes to do so), a quick look at the Services tab in Task Manager for WinHttpAutoProxySvc, followed by <i>go to details</i> and <i>End task</i> on the corresponding svchost.exe might just do the trick. You can ignore the big scary warning about this restarting the system: that&#x27;s a lie.<p>For a slightly more permanent fix, paste the following into a .reg file and merge it into your Registry:<p><pre><code> Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinHttpAutoProxySvc]
&quot;Start&quot;=dword:00000004
</code></pre>
This will disable the service (which Microsoft has made impossible to do via regular GUI or CLI tooling), and after a reboot, you should be able to, like, use your PC for a while. Keep an eye open for rogue Windows Updates, though, as Microsoft really, really wants to re-enable this service using those. (Apparently, WinHttpAutoProxySvc does <i>all kinds of important stuff</i>, including address assignment for non-native IPv6 setups, none of which I care about, but before blindly following &#x27;just disable this thing&#x27; advice from the Internet, just <i>think</i> for a while before rolling it out to your entire fleet).<p>Playing whack-a-mole with WinHttpAutoProxySvc has been oddly satisfying so far: one of these days I might actually grab a debugger to see what&#x27;s going on here (because, yes, also after updating to Windows 11 22H2, which re-enabled the service, I had the same-old symptoms within days -- I admire the writer of this article for getting a fix for their problem that <i>worked</i>!)</text></comment> |
28,831,013 | 28,830,980 | 1 | 2 | 28,829,843 | train | <story><title>And you will know us by the company we keep</title><url>https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/9/29/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-company-we-keep</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mooreds</author><text>Like always, Eugene blows my mind.<p>I don&#x27;t have a lot to add in commentary, but almost every time I read one of his essays, I learn something.<p>Here are some particularly insightful snippets from the article.<p>&gt; A higher fidelity social product would automatically nip and tuck our social graphs over time as they observed our interaction patterns.<p>YES! I remember reading about someone advocating for an app to make unfollowing easy (daily, present someone on a social network and if you swiped right, unfollow them). But it&#x27;d be even better if the network did it; they have the data, after all.<p>&gt; Twitter favors pure play Twitter accounts that focus on one niche.<p>This so much. And it&#x27;s one of the reasons I struggle with Twitter.<p>&gt; First, [TikTok] runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users.<p>LOL.<p>&gt; TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.<p>Note that the entire article is built around the concept that western social media companies have used the social graph as a proxy for the content graph, to their detriment.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s no surprise that many tech companies install Slack and then suddenly find themselves, shortly thereafter, dealing with employee uprisings. When you rewire the communications topology of any group, you alter the dynamic among the members.<p>Shout it from the rooftops!<p>&gt; [On linkedin:] It turns out if you map out the professional graph, not just today but also across long temporal and organizational dimensions, recruiters will pay a lot of money to traverse it.<p>A friend calls LinkedIn &quot;a rolodex that someone else keeps up to date&quot;. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve seen the peak of LI&#x27;s value. Such a smart acquisition by MS.</text></comment> | <story><title>And you will know us by the company we keep</title><url>https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/9/29/and-you-will-know-us-by-the-company-we-keep</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strogonoff</author><text>&gt; Western social apps also rely much more heavily on advertising revenue.<p>I’m surprised this is only mentioned in passing, as it most certainly relates to the problem of “over-attributing how people behave on a social app to their innate nature”.<p>To paraphrase, perhaps the single most important influence on users’ behavior in social media is platforms’ existential requirement to generate ad revenue from it?<p>The author mostly misses this factor in favor of overthinking what technically is its consequences. Seems blindingly obvious that such a business model would shape everything from high-level design to implementation to strategy—all that causes social media dynamics to be what they are.</text></comment> |
31,564,608 | 31,563,583 | 1 | 2 | 31,560,692 | train | <story><title>Profiles of people living in homeless encampments, rarely what you’d expect</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-29/venice-library-homeless-encampment-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alsetmusic</author><text>The tone of this really is disappointing because it sounds more like a complaint about the unhoused rather than compassion for their situation.<p>Anyway, housing first is a proven method for resolving the cycle of homelessness[0]. Rather than placing restrictions on people (get sober, get a job, etc) to access shelter, putting people in a stable home environment right off the bat has greater success at keeping people housed long-term.<p>I learned about a study on housing first and one of the primary champions of the initiative in a fantastic podcast series called According to Need, by the 99% Invisible crew. It&#x27;s an eye-opening look at the beuracracy that keeps people unhoused when they seek help[1]. Bonus points that it&#x27;s reported on in the Bay Area, where the problem is completely out of control. Episode three deals with housing first, but I&#x27;d really recommend listening to the entire series if you have the time.<p>&quot;However, for the chronically homeless population, which represents about 10 percent of the homeless population, research has shown, and our experience has been, that when these individuals have a place of their own where they can be safe, the drinking and drug use decreases. Also, with effective case management support, we have found a positive supportive community is created in the single site locations.&quot;[2]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlihc.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Housing-First-Research.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlihc.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Housing-First-Research...</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;need&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;need&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kitsapsun.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;editorials&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;14&#x2F;further-questions-about-housing-first&#x2F;94326784&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kitsapsun.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;editorials&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;1...</a></text></item><item><author>causality0</author><text>Exactly. I want the support system to be good enough that there are few to no &quot;unluckies&quot; in these encampments. If we make it possible for virtually everyone who wants to get back on their feet to do so, then we can bring on the regulations to keep the streets clear. I&#x27;d gladly pay more in taxes if it meant I could eat lunch in my car in peace or go shopping in the bad part of town without getting accosted by some asshole who &quot;just needs gas money to get home&quot; like it&#x27;s not the third time this week.</text></item><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>exactly. empathy is a wonderful thing to cultivate when designing solutions for obvious problems like homelessness and the community impact it has. But, the fact that homeless people are very real people does not change the fact that their encampments need to be dealt with and the communities around these encampments are suffering very real impacts.</text></item><item><author>drc500free</author><text>These are touching portraits of people&#x27;s backgrounds. However, they are exactly the archetypes I expect in the Venice homeless encampments.<p>The first person is an addict who chops up stolen bikes. The second person has untreated mental health issues. The third person came to LA with no money or employment because the weather was nicer.<p>They&#x27;ve all had struggles and we need better support for all of them, but nothing surprising here. It is nice to get a more individualized and personal background on each, it&#x27;s easy to dehumanize when you&#x27;re walking by and afraid of who is the 1-in-100 that&#x27;s dangerous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swearwolf</author><text>My experience has been that as you dig deeper into the success of housing first programs, you start to find a lot of caveats. For example, for a while Utah was being praised for “solving” homelessness by applying the housing first method, but their program failed after a few years.<p>It’s still probably the best idea we have going, but it’s not without significant downsides. Where I live, many small time landlords who have agreed to participate in programs like this with the city have had to evict the tenants placed with them because they made the entire property unlivable for other people through actions like smoking meth in their apartments, letting their dealers move in with them, or in one case, piling all their belongings into the bathtub and lighting them on fire in a state of meth induced psychosis.<p>In Portland, there is a large housing complex called Bud Clark Commons that provides low barrier housing to the homeless. Since it was constructed, the area around it has become far more dangerous than it was before. There are hundreds of tents surrounding it, meth dealers operating openly from RVs, and trash strewn all around the area. But what’s really interesting about Bud Clark Commons is that the staff actually struggles to keep people there. People cycle in and out, often leaving to return to the streets voluntarily.<p>It’s really depressing to consider, but it seems clear that some of the people living on our streets have been fundamentally changed in such a way that will make it extremely difficult for them to find their way back into society again. Especially for addicts, the call of euphoric oblivion right outside the door seems very hard to resist in the long term.</text></comment> | <story><title>Profiles of people living in homeless encampments, rarely what you’d expect</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-29/venice-library-homeless-encampment-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alsetmusic</author><text>The tone of this really is disappointing because it sounds more like a complaint about the unhoused rather than compassion for their situation.<p>Anyway, housing first is a proven method for resolving the cycle of homelessness[0]. Rather than placing restrictions on people (get sober, get a job, etc) to access shelter, putting people in a stable home environment right off the bat has greater success at keeping people housed long-term.<p>I learned about a study on housing first and one of the primary champions of the initiative in a fantastic podcast series called According to Need, by the 99% Invisible crew. It&#x27;s an eye-opening look at the beuracracy that keeps people unhoused when they seek help[1]. Bonus points that it&#x27;s reported on in the Bay Area, where the problem is completely out of control. Episode three deals with housing first, but I&#x27;d really recommend listening to the entire series if you have the time.<p>&quot;However, for the chronically homeless population, which represents about 10 percent of the homeless population, research has shown, and our experience has been, that when these individuals have a place of their own where they can be safe, the drinking and drug use decreases. Also, with effective case management support, we have found a positive supportive community is created in the single site locations.&quot;[2]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlihc.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Housing-First-Research.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nlihc.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;Housing-First-Research...</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;need&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;need&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kitsapsun.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;editorials&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;14&#x2F;further-questions-about-housing-first&#x2F;94326784&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kitsapsun.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;editorials&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;1...</a></text></item><item><author>causality0</author><text>Exactly. I want the support system to be good enough that there are few to no &quot;unluckies&quot; in these encampments. If we make it possible for virtually everyone who wants to get back on their feet to do so, then we can bring on the regulations to keep the streets clear. I&#x27;d gladly pay more in taxes if it meant I could eat lunch in my car in peace or go shopping in the bad part of town without getting accosted by some asshole who &quot;just needs gas money to get home&quot; like it&#x27;s not the third time this week.</text></item><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>exactly. empathy is a wonderful thing to cultivate when designing solutions for obvious problems like homelessness and the community impact it has. But, the fact that homeless people are very real people does not change the fact that their encampments need to be dealt with and the communities around these encampments are suffering very real impacts.</text></item><item><author>drc500free</author><text>These are touching portraits of people&#x27;s backgrounds. However, they are exactly the archetypes I expect in the Venice homeless encampments.<p>The first person is an addict who chops up stolen bikes. The second person has untreated mental health issues. The third person came to LA with no money or employment because the weather was nicer.<p>They&#x27;ve all had struggles and we need better support for all of them, but nothing surprising here. It is nice to get a more individualized and personal background on each, it&#x27;s easy to dehumanize when you&#x27;re walking by and afraid of who is the 1-in-100 that&#x27;s dangerous.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alienbeast</author><text>Pardon my ignorance, but does &quot;housing-first&quot; come with an expiration date, or is it indefinite? Obviously, if you pay for someone&#x27;s home, you cure their homelessness, but the goal is to have them pay for their own home eventually, right?<p>I&#x27;d expect something like: You get 1 year of &quot;housing-first&quot;-style free housing with no requirements, then you get 1 year of &quot;tough love&quot; free housing with sobriety and job-search requirements, then you get kicked out.</text></comment> |
36,894,093 | 36,893,402 | 1 | 2 | 36,859,614 | train | <story><title>Paris to bring back swimming in Seine after 100 years</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66238618</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zx2c4</author><text>I love the initiative, of course. How could I not? The idea of folks casually taking a dip in this city is really nice. I spend a lot of time beside the Seine - writing code on my laptop, even! - and being able to dangle my legs in sounds nice.<p>But... No matter what they say about bacteria measurements and other high quality quantitative indicators, there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there, even the occasional Vélib&#x27; bicycle. The thought of going for a nice swim only to whack my foot on a rusted underwater bicycle gear and then leave the water with a sandwich wrapper clinging to my back isn&#x27;t very appealing. So I wonder how this will be managed, and how separated the three proposed swimming spots will be.<p>With that said, I went swimming in the Ohio River as a child, and I guess I&#x27;m still alive, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ &#x2F; ¯</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>insanitybit</author><text>Hopefully this introduces pressure to actually get littering taken more seriously. If there are communities who want to swim, but feel uncomfortable about it, those communities can begin to pressure the government to deal with those problems.<p>Given that the article mentions that there will be officially held races&#x2F; marathons, I suspect that there will be a lot of money being put into keeping the water clean and safe. It seems like the city has been very invested in improving the water quality of the Seine and I expect that to continue with the additional pressure of human swimmers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Paris to bring back swimming in Seine after 100 years</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66238618</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zx2c4</author><text>I love the initiative, of course. How could I not? The idea of folks casually taking a dip in this city is really nice. I spend a lot of time beside the Seine - writing code on my laptop, even! - and being able to dangle my legs in sounds nice.<p>But... No matter what they say about bacteria measurements and other high quality quantitative indicators, there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there, even the occasional Vélib&#x27; bicycle. The thought of going for a nice swim only to whack my foot on a rusted underwater bicycle gear and then leave the water with a sandwich wrapper clinging to my back isn&#x27;t very appealing. So I wonder how this will be managed, and how separated the three proposed swimming spots will be.<p>With that said, I went swimming in the Ohio River as a child, and I guess I&#x27;m still alive, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ &#x2F; ¯</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrollaway</author><text>&gt; <i>there will still be swimming bags of potato chips and cigarette cartons and beer cans and receipts, and all the other junk Parisians tend to toss in there</i><p>Time to enforce littering fines.<p>Seriously, as a French person living in Belgium, I am disgusted with how little of a shit people give about keeping <i>their own city</i> clean.<p>If we start enforcing littering fines a bit more in western europe, this shit will stop within a couple of years. It&#x27;s 100% cultural and this is something we absolutely have to change in our culture.</text></comment> |
34,166,165 | 34,162,439 | 1 | 3 | 34,161,410 | train | <story><title>26 Programming Languages in 25 Days</title><url>https://matt.might.net/articles/26-languages-part1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>The sleep trick is something I do with my hobby projects all the time, without really deliberately coming up with it as a strategy.<p>By the time I get the kids in bed at night, I&#x27;m often out of steam. Sometimes I try to make some progress on a project, but I usually don&#x27;t have the willpower to push through a stumbling block. After many many nights of staying up late and losing sleep trying to power through but not actually getting anything working, I finally realized it&#x27;s better to just go to bed.<p>But I also feel sad if I go to bed early without making progress on something I&#x27;m excited about. So I started tricking myself by telling myself, &quot;Well, you can just think about the project as you fall asleep.&quot; That&#x27;s usually enough to get me in bed early.<p>And, lo and behold, quite often, I figure something out as I&#x27;m drifting off. Then when I wake up the next morning, I can get it implemented while I have my morning coffee. It&#x27;s a really pleasant routine.</text></comment> | <story><title>26 Programming Languages in 25 Days</title><url>https://matt.might.net/articles/26-languages-part1/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maxiepoo</author><text>For context, Matt Might is formerly a professor whose research was in programming languages&#x2F;program analysis. Professors like to code too!</text></comment> |
40,392,446 | 40,391,220 | 1 | 2 | 40,387,318 | train | <story><title>ADSL works over wet string (2017)</title><url>https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbreese</author><text>This is funny. About 10 years ago, I had bonded ADSL for my internet (yay sonic.net). The idea being that two lines bonded together would have twice as much bandwidth as a single line. Each line had a max rate of 20Mbps, so I had a max of 40Mbps combined. It worked pretty well initially, but over time it degraded horribly. Because you could see stats for each line independently, I could tell that one line was operating at ~18Mbps and the other was around 2 and there was a lot of error recovery going on. After much complaining, I found out that one line was degraded and somehow reacted to rain (water got in the trunk somehow). And no, AT&amp;T wasn’t going to fix the broken line.<p>I chose to just use the single (good) line.<p>So, yes, I can confirm this does work in the field… but with about as much practically as you’d expect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfox</author><text>Another issue with DSL bonding is crosstalk, which is pretty bad in many cases of telco wiring.<p>10 years ago there was a huge amount of surplus Cisco 1700s with SHDSL line cards (apparently coming from Czech government&#x27;s project to connect every school to internet in early 00&#x27;s) and we had huge spool of flat phone cable that was left over from earlier project. So we had the bright idea to wrap ethernet trafic in AAL5, pass that over SHDSL and use that as an LAN for anime convention. Interesting observation from that it matters whether the cable is coiled or un-coiled. We built and tested the whole network in a lab (with coiled cables), it worked well, the G.991bis bonded links synced up at 6Mbps with two pairs and everything was good. We labeled everything and we built the exact same thing (including same cables) at the venue and the links will not go above 1.5Mbps and were frequently losing sync. Disabling the second bonded pair caused it to work reliably at 2Mbps. (Back then, we did not need that much of bandwidth, it was essentially for few SCCP phones, some IP tunelled serial ports and ssh)<p>Well, next year we bought two boxes of Cat5 cable and switched to native ethernet (and today the backbone spans are 10G fiber, as it also carries video streams).</text></comment> | <story><title>ADSL works over wet string (2017)</title><url>https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbreese</author><text>This is funny. About 10 years ago, I had bonded ADSL for my internet (yay sonic.net). The idea being that two lines bonded together would have twice as much bandwidth as a single line. Each line had a max rate of 20Mbps, so I had a max of 40Mbps combined. It worked pretty well initially, but over time it degraded horribly. Because you could see stats for each line independently, I could tell that one line was operating at ~18Mbps and the other was around 2 and there was a lot of error recovery going on. After much complaining, I found out that one line was degraded and somehow reacted to rain (water got in the trunk somehow). And no, AT&amp;T wasn’t going to fix the broken line.<p>I chose to just use the single (good) line.<p>So, yes, I can confirm this does work in the field… but with about as much practically as you’d expect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scoundreller</author><text>I’m always a bit amazed when <i>every</i> home has 2 lines running to it, and probably 99% of those second lines never get used, but telcos figured it was worth it for those occasional 2nd lines&#x2F;fax lines or redundancy instead of ever needing to run a 2nd pull.<p>Is this just a North America thing or an everywhere thing?</text></comment> |
20,065,253 | 20,064,222 | 1 | 2 | 20,063,979 | train | <story><title>Scaling to 1M active GraphQL subscriptions on Postgres</title><url>https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/architecture/live-queries.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aidos</author><text>Just another little shout out for Hasura here. It’s a really lovely system to use and the team behind it are awesome to deal with. Super friendly and helpful.<p>We evaluated a lot of stuff recently before settling on Hasura. Prisma, aws appsync, postgraphile, roll our own socketio backend etc. I had a few hesitations about Hasura. In particular I was hoping to lean on Postgres RLS for the authorisation, and to be able to customise the graphql endpoints a bit more. After hearing the rational from the guys about how their system is better than RLS and seeing the patterns they have for implementing the logic I’m really happy we made the leap.<p>We’re still in early days, but it’s been really solid and a real pleasure to use.<p>(No affiliation, but happily paying for their support licence)</text></comment> | <story><title>Scaling to 1M active GraphQL subscriptions on Postgres</title><url>https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/architecture/live-queries.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Thaxll</author><text>I was curious about the code so I went to check it, it&#x27;s written in Haskell, never seen Haskell before, it&#x27;s really hard to follow for someone not used to it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hasura&#x2F;graphql-engine&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;server&#x2F;src-lib&#x2F;Hasura&#x2F;Server&#x2F;App.hs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hasura&#x2F;graphql-engine&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;server&#x2F;...</a><p>Not sure how people enjoy FP.</text></comment> |
21,257,899 | 21,257,891 | 1 | 2 | 21,257,182 | train | <story><title>Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benjaminjosephw</author><text>&gt; Automating Poverty will run all week. If you have a story to tell about being on the receiving end of the new digital dystopia, email [email protected]<p>This is dangourous journalism. The reporter has clearly taken a stance and is not attempting to open up a nuanced and careful discussion of the factors at play here but is instead insighting fear and mistrust of technical progress in the public sphere.<p>I can understand the fear and concern around the changing digital landscapes and the potential impact on different parts of society. What&#x27;s needed is a public discourse about these things that doesn&#x27;t conflate the issues into one single problem of a &quot;digital dystopia&quot;. Are we really talking about a &quot;flawed algorithm&quot;, for example, or simply the encoding of a badly designed government process?<p>Technology _is_ changing how poor people interact with the state and this is an important topic to discuss openly and broadly. We&#x27;ll never have the quality of discussion that&#x27;s needed while there are fear mongering reporters like this subverting that conversation to the level of luddism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sileni</author><text>I go back and forth on the value of a &quot;devil&#x27;s advocate&quot;. I hope someone else will chime in to help me out if I don&#x27;t explain this eloquently.<p>This is a case where I believe the topic won&#x27;t be properly discussed unless someone is willing to take a hard stance on the negative side. Someone has to point out all the potential failings of the system that so many people are pouring their lives into building. Even if that person ends up taking a much harder stance than they actually believe in, and becoming a little too disconnected from reality.<p>The situations being described in the article are horrifying, and sound an awful lot like what you might expect from software bugs in their early stages. That wouldn&#x27;t be a problem if there was an appropriate human force behind the systems going online, but we&#x27;ve all seen stakeholders push systems into production before they&#x27;re ready without adequate support.<p>You&#x27;re probably on the right track to call it a &quot;badly designed government process&quot;, but I&#x27;d wager the human element is what softened the blow from that bureaucracy. It shifts the burden of proof from the case worker to the support seeker. It changes the conversation from &quot;You think you deserve benefits? Let&#x27;s look over your evidence&quot; to &quot;You&#x27;ve already been rejected, why should we support you?&quot;. When you&#x27;re talking about people surviving, that&#x27;s a significant difference.</text></comment> | <story><title>Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benjaminjosephw</author><text>&gt; Automating Poverty will run all week. If you have a story to tell about being on the receiving end of the new digital dystopia, email [email protected]<p>This is dangourous journalism. The reporter has clearly taken a stance and is not attempting to open up a nuanced and careful discussion of the factors at play here but is instead insighting fear and mistrust of technical progress in the public sphere.<p>I can understand the fear and concern around the changing digital landscapes and the potential impact on different parts of society. What&#x27;s needed is a public discourse about these things that doesn&#x27;t conflate the issues into one single problem of a &quot;digital dystopia&quot;. Are we really talking about a &quot;flawed algorithm&quot;, for example, or simply the encoding of a badly designed government process?<p>Technology _is_ changing how poor people interact with the state and this is an important topic to discuss openly and broadly. We&#x27;ll never have the quality of discussion that&#x27;s needed while there are fear mongering reporters like this subverting that conversation to the level of luddism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0-_-0</author><text>In addition, there is nothing in the article to support the point it&#x27;s trying to make. Not a single number to compare against. It says &quot;new thing X is bad&quot;, while it should be saying &quot;New thing X is worse than old thing Y and here is how that was measured&quot;. Otherwise how should I know if a similar article could have been written about how &quot;old thing Y is bad&quot;. Surely, humans making decisions about welfare is also error prone and much more resource intensive, and the job of a journalist would be to make the comparison.<p>I&#x27;m interested in facts, not opinions completely lacking in (and separated from) facts.</text></comment> |
19,469,377 | 19,467,857 | 1 | 2 | 19,465,606 | train | <story><title>Bitcoin ETF research finds that 95% of Bitcoin volume is fake</title><url>https://twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1109114656944209921</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>&quot;Reported&quot; by CoinMarketCap (and it&#x27;s dropped to #11 now):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coinmarketcap.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;exchanges&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coinmarketcap.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;exchanges&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s pretty well known within the crypto community that CoinMarketCap exchange volumes are bullshit - other than Binance, the top 45 basically consist of exchanges I&#x27;ve never heard of. They&#x27;re bullshit because there <i>is</i> a ranking, one that many newbies would refer to, and it&#x27;s trivially easy to fake volumes through wash trading or just lying if you own an exchange. It&#x27;s been like that for at least a couple years too - when I first found CoinMarketCap, the top exchange was BitMEX by a large margin, which everybody said to stay away with and doesn&#x27;t even appear today.</text></item><item><author>gruez</author><text>&gt;CoinBene is reported to be the largest bitcoin exchange in the world<p>I literally never heard of this exchange before today. If some random exchange popped up and overtakes all of long time &quot;legitimate&quot; incumbents (eg. coinbase, bitstamp, kraken) <i>combined</i>, I&#x27;d be suspicious of that too. The same applies for most of the other exchanges near the top of the list on slide 22. In reality, I don&#x27;t think seasoned traders are affected by this, only newcomers and the occasional journalist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>verroq</author><text>BitMEX isn&#x27;t a spot exchange. It offers derivatives and futures products. It does has its share of issues (namely system overload) but it is probably the only legitimate platform (i.e. no fake volume) on Coinmarketcap that doesn&#x27;t get volume counted because it is not spot volume.<p>The elephant in the room is that the liquidity and trading on BitMEX is legit and many times higher than spot, yet BitMEX is unregulated. Big players can and has used BitMEX to manipulate spot prices (arbitrage&#x2F;market maker bots will move the price on regulated spot exchanges accordingly). It used to be that most of the manipulation happens on Okcoin futures products. Since the China fiasco in 2016-2017 they lost almost of all of their traders to BitMEX.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bitcoin ETF research finds that 95% of Bitcoin volume is fake</title><url>https://twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1109114656944209921</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>&quot;Reported&quot; by CoinMarketCap (and it&#x27;s dropped to #11 now):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coinmarketcap.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;exchanges&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coinmarketcap.com&#x2F;rankings&#x2F;exchanges&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s pretty well known within the crypto community that CoinMarketCap exchange volumes are bullshit - other than Binance, the top 45 basically consist of exchanges I&#x27;ve never heard of. They&#x27;re bullshit because there <i>is</i> a ranking, one that many newbies would refer to, and it&#x27;s trivially easy to fake volumes through wash trading or just lying if you own an exchange. It&#x27;s been like that for at least a couple years too - when I first found CoinMarketCap, the top exchange was BitMEX by a large margin, which everybody said to stay away with and doesn&#x27;t even appear today.</text></item><item><author>gruez</author><text>&gt;CoinBene is reported to be the largest bitcoin exchange in the world<p>I literally never heard of this exchange before today. If some random exchange popped up and overtakes all of long time &quot;legitimate&quot; incumbents (eg. coinbase, bitstamp, kraken) <i>combined</i>, I&#x27;d be suspicious of that too. The same applies for most of the other exchanges near the top of the list on slide 22. In reality, I don&#x27;t think seasoned traders are affected by this, only newcomers and the occasional journalist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bufferoverflow</author><text>CoinMarketCap simply reports what exchanges report. There&#x27;s no way for them to get real data.</text></comment> |
24,125,537 | 24,125,241 | 1 | 2 | 24,123,878 | train | <story><title>Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming</title><url>https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/avoid-dependencies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdmichal</author><text>My rule is, don&#x27;t use a dependency to implement your core business. Is JSON parsing our core business? No, so why would we ever write -- and thereby commit to supporting for its entire lifetime -- JSON parsing code? All the code you write and support should be directly tied to what you as a business decide are your fundamental value propositions. Everything else you write is just fat waiting to be cut by someone who knows how to write a business case.<p>To be clear, this is about the <i>lifetime support</i> of code. It&#x27;s very, very rare that code can be written once and never touched. But that long tail of support eats up time and money, and is almost always discounted in these conversations. I don&#x27;t even care that Jackson JSON parsing has years of work behind it, when I can hack together a JSON parser in a day. I care that Jackson will <i>continue</i> to improve their offering without any further input, while that&#x27;s not true of my version.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nayuki</author><text>&gt; don&#x27;t use a dependency to implement your core business<p>In logic language, you&#x27;re saying &quot;If X is your core business, don&#x27;t outsource X&quot;.<p>&gt; Is JSON parsing our core business? No, so why would we ever write -- and thereby commit to supporting for its entire lifetime -- JSON parsing code? All the code you write and support should be directly tied to what you as a business decide are your fundamental value propositions. Everything else you write is just fat waiting to be cut by someone who knows how to write a business case.<p>The rest of your argument is interpreted as &quot;If X is not your core business, don&#x27;t in-house X&quot;.<p>These two logical implication statements are not equivalents of each other, but are converses. Casual language often conflates If, Only-If, and If-And-Only-If.</text></comment> | <story><title>Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming</title><url>https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2020/avoid-dependencies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdmichal</author><text>My rule is, don&#x27;t use a dependency to implement your core business. Is JSON parsing our core business? No, so why would we ever write -- and thereby commit to supporting for its entire lifetime -- JSON parsing code? All the code you write and support should be directly tied to what you as a business decide are your fundamental value propositions. Everything else you write is just fat waiting to be cut by someone who knows how to write a business case.<p>To be clear, this is about the <i>lifetime support</i> of code. It&#x27;s very, very rare that code can be written once and never touched. But that long tail of support eats up time and money, and is almost always discounted in these conversations. I don&#x27;t even care that Jackson JSON parsing has years of work behind it, when I can hack together a JSON parser in a day. I care that Jackson will <i>continue</i> to improve their offering without any further input, while that&#x27;s not true of my version.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xamuel</author><text>Well, one special edge-case would be where you only need to parse some extremely tiny subset of JSON (for example: you only need to parse dictionaries whose keys and values are positive integers, like {1:2,3:4}). Then, depending how expensive the full json parser is, it might be worth your while just writing the limited parser yourself.<p>Of course, you might say, inevitably feature-creep will expand the list of things your parser needs to parse, but that&#x27;s not a law of physics. Sometimes in certain limited, well-defined projects, it really is true that YAGNI.</text></comment> |
32,980,738 | 32,979,831 | 1 | 2 | 32,978,355 | train | <story><title>Adversarial Collaboration</title><url>https://www.edge.org/adversarial-collaboration-daniel-kahneman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eloff</author><text>Maybe I&#x27;m uncommon in this aspect, but I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m a member of many groups. I&#x27;m not religious, but don&#x27;t really consider myself an atheist. I&#x27;m not for any particular party. I don&#x27;t care about sports. I&#x27;m Canadian, but don&#x27;t live there and don&#x27;t feel like I belong there either. I suppose you could say I&#x27;m part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade, but I don&#x27;t think those are &quot;real&quot; groups with many ideas in common. Maybe I just am not aware of which ideas I get from those groups.</text></item><item><author>lapcat</author><text>&gt; If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group.<p>Who isn&#x27;t a member of a group? We&#x27;re all members of a number of groups.<p>It&#x27;s refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn&#x27;t change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He&#x27;s not putting himself above the rest of humanity. He could easily say, &quot;Well I&#x27;m a famous and distinguished scientist, so obviously <i>my</i> beliefs are rational, unlike everyone else&quot;, but he doesn&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>bigmatto</author><text>One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific disciplines as much as anywhere else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcosdumay</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m not religious, but don&#x27;t really consider myself an atheist.<p>Oh, an agnostic.<p>There is something to be said about groups of people that hold similar ideas because their similar way of thinking lead them to similar conclusions. It&#x27;s a very important exception to the OP&#x27;s description, where the group came first, and may even be the most common kind.<p>(Of course, the question to answer is why do those people think in similar ways.)<p>&gt; part of the group of software engineers by trade<p>I&#x27;d bet that one lead you into adopting some values.</text></comment> | <story><title>Adversarial Collaboration</title><url>https://www.edge.org/adversarial-collaboration-daniel-kahneman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eloff</author><text>Maybe I&#x27;m uncommon in this aspect, but I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;m a member of many groups. I&#x27;m not religious, but don&#x27;t really consider myself an atheist. I&#x27;m not for any particular party. I don&#x27;t care about sports. I&#x27;m Canadian, but don&#x27;t live there and don&#x27;t feel like I belong there either. I suppose you could say I&#x27;m part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade, but I don&#x27;t think those are &quot;real&quot; groups with many ideas in common. Maybe I just am not aware of which ideas I get from those groups.</text></item><item><author>lapcat</author><text>&gt; If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group.<p>Who isn&#x27;t a member of a group? We&#x27;re all members of a number of groups.<p>It&#x27;s refreshing that Kahneman honestly admits that he doesn&#x27;t change his mind either, and his tastes were formed when he was relatively young. He&#x27;s not putting himself above the rest of humanity. He could easily say, &quot;Well I&#x27;m a famous and distinguished scientist, so obviously <i>my</i> beliefs are rational, unlike everyone else&quot;, but he doesn&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>bigmatto</author><text>One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific disciplines as much as anywhere else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggawatts</author><text>Same here. Something I always find hilarious is conversations with people who&#x27;s opinions are <i>very polarised</i> due to their membership in groups. For example, I have a friends that are variously: a Christian priest, libertarian, anti-vaxxers, and Trump supporters.<p>Invariably, in every discussion, they&#x27;ll trot out this sentence: &quot;You <i>&lt;opponent group name&gt;</i> people always think <i>&lt;notion&gt;</i>&quot;.<p>For example: &quot;You Liberal party voters always support lowering taxes&quot; or somesuch sentence.<p>I point out that I didn&#x27;t vote for the Liberal party.<p>&quot;The Labour party voters are the same!&quot;<p>I point out I didn&#x27;t vote for Labour either in the most recent election either.<p>&quot;Err...&quot;<p>-- at this point their brain locks up, because they&#x27;re expecting a tribe-vs-tribe fight and they have <i>no idea what to do</i> when they discover I don&#x27;t actually belong to their &quot;enemy tribe&quot;.</text></comment> |
19,158,448 | 19,155,571 | 1 | 2 | 19,155,239 | train | <story><title>Lessons from Google's Geographical GDPR Goof</title><url>https://www.dmnews.com/data/data-management/data-privacy/article/21047138/dont-be-stupid-3-lessons-from-googles-geographical-gdpr-goof</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ggm</author><text>We (staffers) wanted to consider google g suite for integrated mail&#x2F;calendar. We couldn&#x27;t because as an Asia-Pacific entity, we felt we wanted a guarantee our data was in Asia-Pacific (preferably Australian) DC and under local law.<p>What we found, is that only the US State and federal governments can demand US located data from Google. All other economies and agencies can <i>ask</i> for local, but cannot have it a checkbox requirement: Google retain the right to host you wherever they decide, subject to laws they decide.<p>Somebody else has noted that Microsoft, for all their faults, actually looked at customers in Europe and said &quot;you know what: we can declare hosting in ireland is subject to EU laws and we will (at the right price) guarantee your data is in the EU, subject to EU law&quot; and for that, I salute them.<p>I think Google got this wrong. I think microsoft got this right.<p>We didn&#x27;t go with G Suite. We went another direction with mail and calendar.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons from Google's Geographical GDPR Goof</title><url>https://www.dmnews.com/data/data-management/data-privacy/article/21047138/dont-be-stupid-3-lessons-from-googles-geographical-gdpr-goof</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>josteink</author><text>Things like this is why Microsoft is still retaining a lot of business-customers which Google will never touch.<p>They care about addressing the customers need first and foremost, while Google’s #1 priority will always be tracking and ads.<p>When the EU said processing needed to be done in the EU, Microsoft was fine with that, while Google has been playing nice only on paper.<p>With rulings like this, guess which one will seem more reliable and dependable (from a business POV) for the EU market?<p>Not Google. That’s for sure.</text></comment> |
37,422,035 | 37,420,110 | 1 | 3 | 37,415,478 | train | <story><title>Gaussian splatting is pretty cool</title><url>https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pretty-cool/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Macuyiko</author><text>Very cool work.<p>As a bit of tangent (but wondering whether someone can answer) - the article also makes mention of point based rendering and indeed the fact is has been a staple of particle systems for a long time. However, especially with recent games, I have noticed (purely subjectively) a very subtle shift to a new style of particle systems which are on the one hand fully point oriented (compared to (textured) fragments) but on the other behave more like a physics systems.<p>Examples:<p>- Hogwarts (heavily): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamespot.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;original&#x2F;1816&#x2F;18167535&#x2F;4097726-hogwartslegacybestspellsallspellsguideunforgivablecurses-1.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamespot.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;original&#x2F;1816&#x2F;18167535&#x2F;40...</a>
- Forspoken (heavily): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oyster.ignimgs.com&#x2F;mediawiki&#x2F;apis.ign.com&#x2F;project-athia&#x2F;0&#x2F;04&#x2F;FdlsymrXwAgCXE4.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oyster.ignimgs.com&#x2F;mediawiki&#x2F;apis.ign.com&#x2F;project-at...</a>
- Starfield (though more rarely): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotesports.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;temple-location-Starfield.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotesports.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;temple-loc...</a>
- AC6
- FF16 (heavily)<p>It&#x27;s more obvious when you see it &#x27;in motion&#x27;. The common denominator seems to be particles as colored transparent points with physics. Especially on console systems it seems that developers are using this for very cheap (CPU-wise, all on GPU) effects.<p>Anyone in gamedev who has some insight in this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>I&#x27;m not in gamedev anymore (and didn&#x27;t do graphics when I was), but my vague impression is that real-time fluid simulation has become more common over the past decade, and I think that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re describing as &quot;physics&quot; here and is what makes point-based VFX actually look cool.<p>Without a fluid sim, point-based particle systems just look like fireworks. It was a cool effect in, like, the early 90s, but is is passe today.<p>The next step up from that is having each particle move independently with its own physics (some momentum, maybe a little wandering around from &quot;wind&quot;, etc.) but then rendering them using little texture billboards. That&#x27;s what games did up until relatively recently and looks pretty good for explosions, smoke, etc.<p>But now machines are powerful enough and physics algorithms clever enough to actually do fluid simulation in real-time where the particles all interact with each other. I think that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re seeing now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gaussian splatting is pretty cool</title><url>https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pretty-cool/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Macuyiko</author><text>Very cool work.<p>As a bit of tangent (but wondering whether someone can answer) - the article also makes mention of point based rendering and indeed the fact is has been a staple of particle systems for a long time. However, especially with recent games, I have noticed (purely subjectively) a very subtle shift to a new style of particle systems which are on the one hand fully point oriented (compared to (textured) fragments) but on the other behave more like a physics systems.<p>Examples:<p>- Hogwarts (heavily): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamespot.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;original&#x2F;1816&#x2F;18167535&#x2F;4097726-hogwartslegacybestspellsallspellsguideunforgivablecurses-1.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamespot.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;original&#x2F;1816&#x2F;18167535&#x2F;40...</a>
- Forspoken (heavily): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oyster.ignimgs.com&#x2F;mediawiki&#x2F;apis.ign.com&#x2F;project-athia&#x2F;0&#x2F;04&#x2F;FdlsymrXwAgCXE4.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oyster.ignimgs.com&#x2F;mediawiki&#x2F;apis.ign.com&#x2F;project-at...</a>
- Starfield (though more rarely): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotesports.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;temple-location-Starfield.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotesports.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2023&#x2F;08&#x2F;temple-loc...</a>
- AC6
- FF16 (heavily)<p>It&#x27;s more obvious when you see it &#x27;in motion&#x27;. The common denominator seems to be particles as colored transparent points with physics. Especially on console systems it seems that developers are using this for very cheap (CPU-wise, all on GPU) effects.<p>Anyone in gamedev who has some insight in this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tbalsam</author><text>I&#x27;ve certainly seen game engines trying to advertise much more-involved particle systems over the last few years, that is for sure. ;PPPP<p>Which in some ways I guess makes sense, as the shift towards AI has heavily pushed GPUs almost towards a &quot;sizeable-reduced-instruction-set-GPU-in-GPU&quot; approach with RT cores&#x2F;tensor cores, etc.... ;P<p>Side note as well, in&#x2F;from my experience at least, I think these systems may not be as hard to render as it is for the author. A few years ago, someone (at NVIDIA I think?) wrote kernels to move the SE(3) kernels to tensor cores, so I wouldn&#x27;t be shocked if some of that could be ported to the spherical harmonics portion of the Gaussian splatting during both compression and runtime: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;accelerating-se3-transformers-training-using-an-nvidia-open-source-model-implementation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;accelerating-se3-transform...</a><p>Also, side side note, gaussian splatting should be quite efficient...I think? Due to technically always having support in 3D space (and hopefully not too much of a problem with having good support in 3D space). This should mean that even &#x27;sloppy&#x27;, quick-conversion calculations should work pretty decently in the end.<p>I say all of this knowing very little about most optimizations like billboarding, how things like nanite work, etc, etc. I do like it tho! ;PPPP</text></comment> |
27,937,991 | 27,933,209 | 1 | 2 | 27,929,150 | train | <story><title>BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound</title><url>https://birdnet.cornell.edu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>argc</author><text>You should PictureThis for plant indentification. It works really quite well for me in the Pacific Northwest (though not perfect).</text></item><item><author>silicon2401</author><text>This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN year after year. 99% may be a quick, mildly entertaining read, but that 1% tends to be empowering or life changing for me. I&#x27;ve had a continuously growing interest in plant and bird identification as a hobby (animals are a bit easier). I&#x27;ve gone so far as to research apps, put Audobon society books on my wishlist, and try to look up some specimens I see in my area. Unfortunately it&#x27;s, frankly, a steep learning curve and not a habit yet for me to take pictures, remember to look at them later, search their characteristics, etc. This will be the perfect tool to help me jumpstart my newfound interest and get more familiar with the flora and fauna around my home.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krick</author><text>I know it&#x27;s weird to mention when you are talking about all these fancy tools, but I was surprised how often I get decent results when simply taking a photo and using Yandex image-search. First time I did it I didn&#x27;t even expect anything but random pictures of grass, but it&#x27;s actually good and it is even sort of helpful that I can see similar, but different plants in the same search (which is how I found out that apparently I was mistaking for its close relative a plant that I&#x27;m used to putting into my tea from the very childhood: I just called it what my grand-dad thought it was). For well-known decorative plants it often straight up shows the exact plant variety I&#x27;m looking for.</text></comment> | <story><title>BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound</title><url>https://birdnet.cornell.edu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>argc</author><text>You should PictureThis for plant indentification. It works really quite well for me in the Pacific Northwest (though not perfect).</text></item><item><author>silicon2401</author><text>This is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to HN year after year. 99% may be a quick, mildly entertaining read, but that 1% tends to be empowering or life changing for me. I&#x27;ve had a continuously growing interest in plant and bird identification as a hobby (animals are a bit easier). I&#x27;ve gone so far as to research apps, put Audobon society books on my wishlist, and try to look up some specimens I see in my area. Unfortunately it&#x27;s, frankly, a steep learning curve and not a habit yet for me to take pictures, remember to look at them later, search their characteristics, etc. This will be the perfect tool to help me jumpstart my newfound interest and get more familiar with the flora and fauna around my home.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrgoff</author><text>iNaturalist is another good option for plant identification (and other forms of life as well). It has decent machine learning for suggesting IDs and is also backed by its community providing IDs. I&#x27;ve been using it a lot this year and have found it pretty helpful for IDs (though some regions and life forms are more likely to have good identifications than others), as well as for showing me what people are seeing in the area, and feeling like I&#x27;m contributing useful data.</text></comment> |
38,775,139 | 38,775,294 | 1 | 2 | 38,772,980 | train | <story><title>How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/26/thermal_management_is_changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vpribish</author><text>20,000 Amps has to be a mis-statement. or there&#x27;s some qualifier they are not mentioning. it doesn&#x27;t look like an industrial arc-furnace</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>That video and the cooling system is insane. Insanely cool even. Thanks for posting.<p>I wonder, how do all the contacts in the 20,000A power distribution plate that is bolted on top of the wafer-scale die line up? The engineering involved in just making that part work must be crazy.</text></item><item><author>brucethemoose2</author><text>If y&#x27;all missed it, the Cerebras CS-2 teardown is amazing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig</a><p>The engineering to handle that power density is insane. <i>Technically</i> its less power per mm^2, but the chip is the size of a dinner plate.<p>EDIT: The video was taken down, but looks like the web archive got it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230812020202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230812020202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtu...</a><p>As well as Vimeo (thanks morcheeba): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;853557623" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;853557623</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kirby64</author><text>It&#x27;s not. The CS-2 they claim can do 23kW peak. The voltage is very low. If 23kW and 20kA is right, it&#x27;s a 1.15V core voltage, which is pretty normal these days.<p>For comparison, one of the workstation AMD EPYC processors uses ~400W under peak load, and would use approximately ~320A peak current. It&#x27;s only ~30x more current... modern CPUs use an enormous amount of current these days.</text></comment> | <story><title>How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/26/thermal_management_is_changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vpribish</author><text>20,000 Amps has to be a mis-statement. or there&#x27;s some qualifier they are not mentioning. it doesn&#x27;t look like an industrial arc-furnace</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>That video and the cooling system is insane. Insanely cool even. Thanks for posting.<p>I wonder, how do all the contacts in the 20,000A power distribution plate that is bolted on top of the wafer-scale die line up? The engineering involved in just making that part work must be crazy.</text></item><item><author>brucethemoose2</author><text>If y&#x27;all missed it, the Cerebras CS-2 teardown is amazing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig</a><p>The engineering to handle that power density is insane. <i>Technically</i> its less power per mm^2, but the chip is the size of a dinner plate.<p>EDIT: The video was taken down, but looks like the web archive got it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230812020202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pzyZpauU3Ig" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20230812020202&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtu...</a><p>As well as Vimeo (thanks morcheeba): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;853557623" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;853557623</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LASR</author><text>850k cores apparently.<p>We have EPYC chips with ~100 cores at ~200w TDP. So each core is around 2W in the AMD chips. Core voltages are ~1v with modern CPUs. So that&#x27;s 2A per core.<p>850k cores at 20kA is very much lower than the AMD chips. Must be massively parallel, lower-performing cores. But it&#x27;s quite feasible that it needs 20kA.<p>The CS-2 system on their website specs out at 23kW peak. So all this lines up with each other.<p>As far as benchmarks and utility of such systems, I am not sure if they&#x27;ve proven it out.</text></comment> |
5,423,014 | 5,422,715 | 1 | 2 | 5,422,456 | train | <story><title>Hacker News For Africa</title><url>http://afritech.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skc</author><text>This is awesome. Thank you so much.<p>We in Africa are just as geeky as anywhere else in the world, but we tend to face problems unique to living on the continent. An HN-like site should yield some great "uncanny valley"-esque discussions :-)</text></comment> | <story><title>Hacker News For Africa</title><url>http://afritech.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>greg_mazurek</author><text>Mobile phone usage is very high in Africa compared to the big screen experience. Wouldn't it be nice if your design was a better mobile experience?</text></comment> |
28,644,017 | 28,643,764 | 1 | 2 | 28,642,020 | train | <story><title>Tether is under undisclosed SEC investigation, FOIA blocked</title><url>https://twitter.com/silvermanjacob/status/1441391317578289153</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruez</author><text>&quot;tether is a fraud&#x2F;ponzi&quot; claims aside, does SEC even have jurisdiction here? The SEC isn&#x27;t out to protect all investors, only to protect them from <i>securities</i> fraud. I&#x27;m skeptical whether a stablecoin could even count as a security. From bloomberg:<p>&gt;The rule in the U.S. is that an “investment contract,” meaning “the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others,” is a security<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-09-08&#x2F;lending-bitcoins-is-tricky" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-09-08&#x2F;lendin...</a><p>Under that definition, are stablecoins even securities? You buy it at $1 and the best you can hope for it is that the value remains at $1. There&#x27;s no expectation of profits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blitzar</author><text>Reminder: #Tether is registered and regulated under FinCEN as all the centralised competitors. Strict KYC&#x2F;AML is applied to all Tether direct users, as the other main issuers are doing. Less regulated is just FUD. Ask yourself who benefits from spreading such misinformation?<p>— Paolo Ardoino (@paoloardoino) December 30, 2020<p>Paolo Ardoino, Tether&#x27;s chief technology officer.<p>It doesnt matter who is&#x2F;isnt regulating you, once you are claiming to be a regulated instrument publicly to people in the US then the SEC have all the jursidiction they need.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tether is under undisclosed SEC investigation, FOIA blocked</title><url>https://twitter.com/silvermanjacob/status/1441391317578289153</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gruez</author><text>&quot;tether is a fraud&#x2F;ponzi&quot; claims aside, does SEC even have jurisdiction here? The SEC isn&#x27;t out to protect all investors, only to protect them from <i>securities</i> fraud. I&#x27;m skeptical whether a stablecoin could even count as a security. From bloomberg:<p>&gt;The rule in the U.S. is that an “investment contract,” meaning “the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others,” is a security<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-09-08&#x2F;lending-bitcoins-is-tricky" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2021-09-08&#x2F;lendin...</a><p>Under that definition, are stablecoins even securities? You buy it at $1 and the best you can hope for it is that the value remains at $1. There&#x27;s no expectation of profits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ARandumGuy</author><text>My understanding is that, in the US at least, &quot;securities&quot; is a broad category that applies to any financial asset or product that isn&#x27;t regulated under other rules. However, this is pretty uncharted territory, and until there&#x27;s some judicial precedent, it&#x27;s impossible to be completely sure.</text></comment> |
41,179,275 | 41,172,738 | 1 | 3 | 41,168,904 | train | <story><title>OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-says-he-will-join-rival-anthropic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwertox</author><text>I&#x27;m confused with GPT4o. While it&#x27;s faster than GPT4, the quality is noticeably worse.<p>It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified.<p>I cancelled Plus for one month, but got back this week, and for some reason I feel that it really isn&#x27;t worth it anymore. And the teasing with the free tier, which is downgraded really fast, is more of an annoyance than a solution.<p>There are these promises of &quot;memory&quot; and &quot;talking with it&quot;, but they are just ads of something that isn&#x27;t on the market, at least I don&#x27;t have access to both of these features.<p>Gemini used to be pretty bad, but for some reason it feels like it has improved a lot, focusing more on the task than on trying to be humanly friendly.<p>Claude and Mistral are not able to execute code, which is a dealbreaker for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ravagedbanana</author><text>I anecdotally agree that GPT-4o often feels really bad, but I can&#x27;t tell how much of this is due to becoming more accustomed to the quality and hallucinations of using ChatGPT.<p>I tend to see Huggingface&#x27;s LLM (anonymized, elo-based) Leaderboard as the SoT regarding LLM quality, and according to it GPT-4o is markedly better than GPT-4, and contrary to popular sentiment, is on-par with or better than Claude in most ways (except being slightly worse at coding).<p>Not sure what to believe, or if there is some other dimension that Hugginface is not capturing here.</text></comment> | <story><title>OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-says-he-will-join-rival-anthropic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwertox</author><text>I&#x27;m confused with GPT4o. While it&#x27;s faster than GPT4, the quality is noticeably worse.<p>It often enters into a state where it just repeats what it already said, when all I want is a clarification or another opinion on what we were chatting about. A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified.<p>I cancelled Plus for one month, but got back this week, and for some reason I feel that it really isn&#x27;t worth it anymore. And the teasing with the free tier, which is downgraded really fast, is more of an annoyance than a solution.<p>There are these promises of &quot;memory&quot; and &quot;talking with it&quot;, but they are just ads of something that isn&#x27;t on the market, at least I don&#x27;t have access to both of these features.<p>Gemini used to be pretty bad, but for some reason it feels like it has improved a lot, focusing more on the task than on trying to be humanly friendly.<p>Claude and Mistral are not able to execute code, which is a dealbreaker for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Marsymars</author><text>&gt; A clarification could be a short sentence, a snipped of code, but no, I get the entire answer again, slightly modified.<p>This tracks, in the sense that this is what you&#x27;ll get from many real people when you actually want a clarification.</text></comment> |
18,663,115 | 18,662,987 | 1 | 3 | 18,662,201 | train | <story><title>Writing a book in public</title><url>https://200wordsaday.com/words/i-am-writing-a-book-in-public-5585c109c5735a98</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>franze</author><text>I wrote a book[1] - well - i wrote the same book 4 times again and again, writing, learning, throwing away, writing, iterrating, editing, rearranging, throwing away, starting new, iterrating, ... . Some learnings:<p>I) just write<p>first attemp i made a super fancy setup - google chrome book with custom linux installed that automatically transformed markdown via pandoc into a custom styled PDF everytime i saved. was fun to create this setup, but i wasted time not writting the actual book.<p>II) don&#x27;t wittgenstein<p>i wanted to be absolutely correct, so i started with defining word, what do i mean with website, domain, webproperty, webpage, page, link, external duplicate content, internal duplicate content, ... or any other technical term. wittgensteining is yak shaving for authors. don&#x27;t do it. just write.<p>III) a manuscript is not a book<p>after you are finished, the real work start. a manuscript does not have the same feeling, read-feeling, read flow as a real book. get a professional editor, work with him&#x2F;her. fire him&#x2F;her if not the right match, find the right match, start again. the right editor is as much a factor for the success of the book as the author.<p>IV) live with the law of strawberry jam<p>the further you spread knowledge&#x2F;jam the thinner it gets. yes, in a 1:1 talk, in a 1:12 people workshop you can communicate more knowledge than you can with a book. talk, interaction, any form of communication with exchange, has direct feedback - something unbelievable important for information communication. a book is a one way street with - if at all - delayed feedback. you can always continue writting, pack in more knowledge, more details, more clarificaiton, more scenarios, but then the book will never finish. at one point you have to stop.<p>V) cut away<p>go through your book again, and question every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter. if the word, the sentence doesn&#x27;t ad substential value, get rid of it. your book will be better. it&#x27;s not about quantitiy of words, it&#x27;s about what you want to say.<p>VI) let go<p>&amp; publish, just do it.<p>[1] &quot;Understanding SEO - A Systematic Approach to Search Engine Optimization&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstackoptimization.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;understanding-seo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstackoptimization.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;understanding-seo</a> ISBN: 978-3-200-05426-4</text></comment> | <story><title>Writing a book in public</title><url>https://200wordsaday.com/words/i-am-writing-a-book-in-public-5585c109c5735a98</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>distant_hat</author><text>You&#x27;d have to take editing into account. By any reasonable account, I saw a page that discussed it once, to have 100 readable words, you&#x27;d need to write 500-1000 words. Which means the time required goes to 5-10x. On the other hand, 200 words per day is pretty low, you could easily get up to 500-1000 words per day once you really get going.</text></comment> |
40,281,106 | 40,281,080 | 1 | 3 | 40,280,490 | train | <story><title>Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content</title><url>https://www.caniemail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dylan604</author><text>[flagged]</text></item><item><author>shortformblog</author><text>As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.”<p>I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ago, and we need to figure out how to keep what we have working for people who don’t even know how to set plaintext email.<p>That’s what this particular tool is for.</text></item><item><author>dylan604</author><text>I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam.<p>It&#x27;s 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to &quot;share&quot; large files. Attachment to email was such a kludgy hack in the first place just shows it was only the best worst idea waiting for better solutions. We have them now.</text></item><item><author>shortformblog</author><text>Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of &quot;emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shortformblog</author><text>First: I run a popular newsletter that uses custom HTML theming and CMS customization. I don’t work in marketing. I just genuinely think HTML in email is actually a value add. Not everyone you disagree with works in marketing.<p>Secondly: The problem you’re pointing at is bad implementation of standards, which is entirely on Microsoft and Google. (Mostly Microsoft.) The reason HTML doesn’t work well in email is because of bad prioritization, which has led to kludge upon kludge.</text></comment> | <story><title>Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content</title><url>https://www.caniemail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dylan604</author><text>[flagged]</text></item><item><author>shortformblog</author><text>As someone who works very regularly in email, it really bugs me that every time I see a thread about this topic in Hacker News there seems to be this confirmation bias that this is how the average person uses email in the wild, and I’m just trying to make the point that “Hey, this is a strong minority viewpoint.”<p>I get that y’all don’t like HTML email, but the fact of the matter is, that was a battle lost 25 years ago, and we need to figure out how to keep what we have working for people who don’t even know how to set plaintext email.<p>That’s what this particular tool is for.</text></item><item><author>dylan604</author><text>I disagree. I wish I had more people that fit that filter. Email is broken and just a platform for spam. Even if it might be from someone that I purchased something from once or even regularly, if I did not select a check box to opt-in to receiving your email, it is spam.<p>It&#x27;s 2024. Emailing large file attachments is about as old and busted as FTP. There are so many other services to &quot;share&quot; large files. Attachment to email was such a kludgy hack in the first place just shows it was only the best worst idea waiting for better solutions. We have them now.</text></item><item><author>shortformblog</author><text>Expand your group of people, because you clearly don’t know enough people.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The lower the score, the better. I know many who have a policy of &quot;emails must be in plaintext only, with no attachments unless agreed to in advance; everything else gets deleted automatically.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ceejayoz</author><text>There&#x27;s a vast spectrum of HTML email.<p>Most people use it in the &quot;bold a few things and make a few words into a link&quot; side of things; more like the old .RTF format. The caniemail.com stuff is for the more complex stuff that might be better left to websites.</text></comment> |
19,577,248 | 19,576,763 | 1 | 2 | 19,576,379 | train | <story><title>Oregon students returned thousands of fake iPhones, costing Apple $900k</title><url>https://www.businesstelegraph.co.uk/2-oregon-students-returned-thousands-of-fake-iphones-costing-apple-900000-feds-say-the-olympian/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_cerv</author><text>Apple warranty fraud is a great way to make money. I know of a guy who between 2008 and 2010 would purchase used iPod lots from Costco Electronic Hardware Services, refurbish the water damage indicator in the headphone jack and dock, and then try to return the iPod to one of the few Apple stores in the Seattle area. The refurbishing method would consist of cutting tiny strips of white wax paper, applying a little adhesive, and then sliding the paper flush down the hole. When Apple caught onto this guys method, he would later take the whole headphone assembly apart by using a pen knife to lift the plastic around the headphones, pulling the jack out, and using whiteout to cover the other end.<p>I went to the Apple store with this guy and felt ashamed just being around him as he dropped off a dozen water damaged iPod Nanos, each with an appointment, telling the guy that they were from guys in Iraq, as if that were to add some emotional weight to getting new ones.<p>Nearly a decade later I found out the guy was running the same scam with the iPhone SE by using reassembled water damaged phones or dummy phones from China. I am guessing he didn&#x27;t get caught because the scale of his operation were a few at a time, maybe a couple hundred in a year, but not thousands over a year.<p>Now that I think about it, I had let him use my Apple account for appointments and claims, and ever since then, I have always had a bad time working with the genius bar over things that I bring in.</text></comment> | <story><title>Oregon students returned thousands of fake iPhones, costing Apple $900k</title><url>https://www.businesstelegraph.co.uk/2-oregon-students-returned-thousands-of-fake-iphones-costing-apple-900000-feds-say-the-olympian/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>smogcutter</author><text>Many moons ago I worked at an apple store genius bar, and this was constant. There wasn&#x27;t a whole lot we could do about it unless the phones were obvious fakes. Those we would reject, as well as ones where the serial number came up as having been replaced a number of times.<p>Guys would bring in a bunch of phones at a time. They knew the apple store drill and would make a separate appointment for each phone. It sucked, and took time and resources away from real customers. But we couldn&#x27;t broom them without a concrete reason so they usually got at least a couple phones replaced.<p>We mostly assumed the phones were stolen and were being washed for new serial numbers, but it makes perfect sense that there are big counterfeiting operations behind this.</text></comment> |
9,013,797 | 9,013,738 | 1 | 3 | 9,013,261 | train | <story><title>Confessions of a Congressman</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2015/2/5/7978823/congress-secrets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IkmoIkmo</author><text>Agreed, the US doesn&#x27;t rank first in virtually any metric that citizens would consider to be desirable (like healthcare, education, safety, freedom of the press etc). And it&#x27;s no more democratic than say most European states.<p>Taking into context its size is a whole different matter, though. It&#x27;s relatively easier to build an awesome small country (say the Netherlands where I&#x27;m writing from) than a massive union of states spanning multiple time zones and climates. Perhaps if the US is compared to the entirety of the EU, then Congress and the American system of governing can be said to be one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive, experiment in government in history <i>at that scale</i> (although I&#x27;d much prefer Europe to the US even on average). But that&#x27;s more a function of it being the only 300m+ country in the world that is also rich than it being the best among many of them.</text></item><item><author>KwanEsq</author><text>&gt;We are still, despite our shortcomings, the most successful experiment in self-government in history.<p>I&#x27;d like to know what metric they are judging that by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bostik</author><text>&gt; <i>no more democratic than say most European states</i><p>I may get flamed or burned for saying this, but I believe we (in Europe and US) are currently pretty close to the ancient form of Greek democracy.<p>In the ancient Greece, the vote was a privilege of the free men. The definition of &quot;free man&quot; on the other hand was not quite what we think of in a modern society. To start with, only a few percent of the population actually was eligible to participate. [0] To qualify as a free man, you needed to have position and&#x2F;or wealth. Usually the two came together.<p>After all, what good would it do to allow plebs to vote? They could vote against your agenda! Better to control the access to the vote by simply ensuring that at least majority of the voting people already share a certain appreciation for the status quo.<p>&quot;But, but but... We can vote however we want&quot; you say. Sorry, no you can&#x27;t. Thanks to the nature of the system, you get to vote between two or three nearly identical alternatives. Outliers will not be even put on the ballot. (I think California is an exception, which introduces its own downsides.)<p>The choices on the vote are in practice dictated by those with the most power or money. Lawrence Lessig outlined this situation with his only slightly satirical TED talk - a country of Lesters. [1, 2]<p>But back to terminology. If the power is held by those with wealth, and decisions are made purely among the people who have the most to financially gain from them, what do you call such a system? Is there even a descriptive term for a mix of oligarchy and plutocracy?<p><i>The True Greek Democracy</i>?<p>0: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Participation_and_exclusion" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Athenian_democracy#Participatio...</a><p>1: <a href="http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/03/how-we-can-make-elections-about-the-people-not-just-funders-an-excerpt-of-lawrence-lessigs-new-ted-book-lesterland/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ted.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;how-we-can-make-elections-abo...</a><p>2: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim?language=en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Confessions of a Congressman</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2015/2/5/7978823/congress-secrets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IkmoIkmo</author><text>Agreed, the US doesn&#x27;t rank first in virtually any metric that citizens would consider to be desirable (like healthcare, education, safety, freedom of the press etc). And it&#x27;s no more democratic than say most European states.<p>Taking into context its size is a whole different matter, though. It&#x27;s relatively easier to build an awesome small country (say the Netherlands where I&#x27;m writing from) than a massive union of states spanning multiple time zones and climates. Perhaps if the US is compared to the entirety of the EU, then Congress and the American system of governing can be said to be one of the most impressive, if not the most impressive, experiment in government in history <i>at that scale</i> (although I&#x27;d much prefer Europe to the US even on average). But that&#x27;s more a function of it being the only 300m+ country in the world that is also rich than it being the best among many of them.</text></item><item><author>KwanEsq</author><text>&gt;We are still, despite our shortcomings, the most successful experiment in self-government in history.<p>I&#x27;d like to know what metric they are judging that by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theiostream</author><text>I wouldn&#x27;t say the US being rich is a question of government organization, rather of not having been a colony whose sole purpose was to export raw materials.<p>Higher dimensions also means more tax collection, which could be perfectly invested into making the standard of living of Americans better (it seems absurd to me that you don&#x27;t have any public universal healthcare). The government prefers to invest 50% of it in Defense though. Consequence (also) of arms industry lobbyists and geopolitical strategy etc. but certainly not of size.</text></comment> |
8,313,357 | 8,313,245 | 1 | 3 | 8,312,959 | train | <story><title>Dutch Girl Fakes a Trip to South East Asia</title><url>http://www.gapyear.com/news/230749/dutch-girl-fakes-a-trip-to-se-asia</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qopp</author><text>Another interesting take on this in my opinion is that no one recognized the places that she went to. Perhaps people don&#x27;t realize that interesting destinations exist in their home towns.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dutch Girl Fakes a Trip to South East Asia</title><url>http://www.gapyear.com/news/230749/dutch-girl-fakes-a-trip-to-se-asia</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>clay_to_n</author><text>Love this. Very cool project, even if, as pointed out already in this thread, it was emulated from the Leeds 13&#x27;s own fake trip.<p>Also fascinating how hostile some of the commenters are here. The project explores the illusion social media sites create. I think it&#x27;s pretty cool.</text></comment> |
6,042,815 | 6,042,812 | 1 | 3 | 6,042,331 | train | <story><title>What I Learned In College</title><url>http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-i-learned-in-college.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmduke</author><text>I graduated two months ago, and I learned a lot of things, too.<p>I learned that the fastest way I&#x27;ll ever learn a subject (whether or not it&#x27;s a programming language, a financial derivative, or an era of Hinduism) is on my own, poring over search engines and worn-down books. Professors will never teach me <i>faster</i> than I can teach myself.<p>I learned that, yes, you&#x27;re more or less paying for the piece of paper (but that doesn&#x27;t mean there isn&#x27;t a lot of other awesome things you get along the way.)<p>I learned that, yes, that piece of paper is quite worth it, no matter how many hip tech companies say they don&#x27;t care about pieces of paper.<p>I learned that there can be infinitely more value in talking to a stranger for fifteen minutes than spending that time browsing Reddit (or playing a video game.)<p>I learned that, despite my protestations otherwise, I honestly do perform best when my outcome is quantified, curved, and compared to other people&#x27;s outcomes.<p>I learned that everyone&#x27;s college experience is wildly unique, too, as I benefitted from professors in both business and computer science classes who always rewarded creativity instead of stifling it.<p>(I don&#x27;t mean to say that I disliked college. It was the best four years of my life. But the idea that the undergraduate experience is marvelous and the idea that the undergraduate experience needs a lot of fixing are not necessarily in contention with one another.)</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Learned In College</title><url>http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-i-learned-in-college.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>10098</author><text>What you learn in college&#x2F;university depends only on yourself. Tests are just the most convenient, unified way to measure students&#x27; progress. There are two ways you can beat tests: one is to train specifically for the test, the other is to actually know the subject.<p>The first way is easier, but leaves you with little residual knowledge, and you don&#x27;t even know how to apply that knowledge. The second way is much harder, and it requires work on your part. However, it pays off. Not only you get to pass the test, you&#x27;re also now armed with useful knowledge.<p>At my time in university, I&#x27;ve taken both approaches towards various subjects. For the algorithms class, I made a lot of effort to study and understand the subject. Today, I still have it in my head, and can apply it when needed. For differential equations, I just studied for the test. I don&#x27;t remember anything now, and it&#x27;s my fault for being lazy. I got an &quot;A&quot; in both subjects, by the way.<p>What I&#x27;m trying to say is, the system is just fine as long as qualified professors are teaching. The problem is lazy students.</text></comment> |
27,097,548 | 27,096,935 | 1 | 3 | 27,095,345 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk, master promoter</title><url>https://keith404.medium.com/elon-musk-the-master-promoter-a-case-study-3b8eae65b8f7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tailspin2019</author><text>My cognitive dissonance is strong when it comes to Elon. I have trouble sometimes reconciling the obvious flaws in his character on the one hand (though none of us are without flaws) and his extraordinary achievements on the other.<p>He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.<p>He&#x27;s also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.<p>I don&#x27;t see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he <i>has</i> delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.<p>But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot&#x27;s of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.<p>I guess it depends what you choose to focus on.</text></item><item><author>nnamtr</author><text>Is his stuff really that good? I can&#x27;t shake the feeling that he has a strong tendency to exaggerate.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;22424592&#x2F;tesla-elon-musk-autopilot-dmv-fsd-exaggeration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;22424592&#x2F;tesla-elon-musk-a...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;johnbbrandon&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;elon-musks-the-boring-company-is-starting-to-look-like-a-dumb-idea&#x2F;?sh=2e65b2d17562" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;johnbbrandon&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;elon-mu...</a></text></item><item><author>totololo</author><text>I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story.
Elon doesn&#x27;t pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time.
In the unofficial biography there&#x27;s the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the &quot;save the earth&quot; narrative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6gvONxR4sf7o</author><text>He might be a very effective marketer and manager, but he gets credit for so so much more than that. Like he singlehandedly made electric cars a thing. It&#x27;s the Great Man theory of history.<p>Even then, effective marketing are often lies, so why value effective marketing? Effective management is so often toxic, so why value effective management? As far as I can tell, he&#x27;s full of BS and his employees are treated poorly, so I really don&#x27;t care so much that he&#x27;s first to market.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Great_man_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Great_man_theory</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk, master promoter</title><url>https://keith404.medium.com/elon-musk-the-master-promoter-a-case-study-3b8eae65b8f7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tailspin2019</author><text>My cognitive dissonance is strong when it comes to Elon. I have trouble sometimes reconciling the obvious flaws in his character on the one hand (though none of us are without flaws) and his extraordinary achievements on the other.<p>He can be a bit of a dick, yes. He exaggerates, yes.<p>He&#x27;s also in my view one of the most talented and inspirational entrepreneurs of our generation.<p>I don&#x27;t see how people can call him an outright fraud with a straight face when you look at what he <i>has</i> delivered through Tesla and SpaceX.<p>But he seems to elicit strong polarised opinions. And I get it. Lot&#x27;s of noise about FSD, his constantly slipping timelines etc.<p>I guess it depends what you choose to focus on.</text></item><item><author>nnamtr</author><text>Is his stuff really that good? I can&#x27;t shake the feeling that he has a strong tendency to exaggerate.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;22424592&#x2F;tesla-elon-musk-autopilot-dmv-fsd-exaggeration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;5&#x2F;7&#x2F;22424592&#x2F;tesla-elon-musk-a...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;johnbbrandon&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;elon-musks-the-boring-company-is-starting-to-look-like-a-dumb-idea&#x2F;?sh=2e65b2d17562" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;johnbbrandon&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;elon-mu...</a></text></item><item><author>totololo</author><text>I believe this article completely ignores the product side of the story.
Elon doesn&#x27;t pitch, he builds. His products are significantly better than market alternatives, with a steady momentum of improvement over time.
In the unofficial biography there&#x27;s the story of how Tesla pulled an unlikely funding from Daimler. The Daimler executives visiting Tesla were unimpressed, skeptical and bored to death by the PowerPoints. Then the Tesla team took them for a ride in the electrified Smart they had built in a hurry. All the executives stepped out of it with a smile. The check arrived later. It was about the product, not the &quot;save the earth&quot; narrative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fossuser</author><text>I think it’s political tribalism more than anything else? It’s become more clear after this SNL thing.<p>On Twitter people on the left claim vaguely that Elon is bad and why is SNL doing this etc.<p>People on the right say Elon is great and SNL is normally unfunny.<p>In the former case I think it’s just because people associate Elon with the right for some reason.<p>The latter is easier to understand since a lot of SNL’s humor is explicitly political (not in a bad way imo).<p>Part of me wonders if the irreverent tweets were an intentional way to broaden his appeal. He needed EVs to go from “liberal” Prius symbols about the environment to cool.<p>That’s a Herculean task when you think about it. Even now there are still coal rolling truck drivers yelling at EVs, but the sentiment <i>has</i> definitely changed in a positive way.<p>He did this without having to embrace trump (unlike Thiel for instance).<p>I think his biggest miss was on covid, but he seems to agree that he was wrong.<p>I suspect a part of the left dislike is also around the progressive anti-billionaire&#x2F;anti-capitalist sentiment, it makes Elon an easy “enemy”.<p>Putting all this aside and looking at what he’s building - it’s an exciting time to be alive. Most companies are fairly dull doing fairly dull things. Elon takes huge risks to try to pull the future down earlier. For the most part, he succeeds.</text></comment> |
33,467,031 | 33,466,681 | 1 | 2 | 33,463,908 | train | <story><title>Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beanjuiceII</author><text></text></item><item><author>maxbond</author><text>Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it&#x27;s &quot;just the flu&quot;, and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.</text></item><item><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I&#x27;m not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it&#x27;s pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work.<p>I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that&#x27;s true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.</text></item><item><author>losvedir</author><text>And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there&#x27;s a decent severance package.<p>Now we&#x27;ll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won&#x27;t bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the &quot;how do you need X people to do Y?&quot; commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we&#x27;ll see more downtime and issues now.<p>I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he&#x27;s overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we&#x27;ve all formed impressions of it. Let&#x27;s see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.<p>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>InsomniacL</author><text>That&#x27;s not the problem. I can&#x27;t speak for the USA however this perspective is from the UK.<p>At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...<p>Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient&#x27;s. At this stage all elective&#x2F;emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn&#x27;t matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.<p>Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beanjuiceII</author><text></text></item><item><author>maxbond</author><text>Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it&#x27;s &quot;just the flu&quot;, and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.</text></item><item><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I&#x27;m not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it&#x27;s pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work.<p>I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that&#x27;s true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.</text></item><item><author>losvedir</author><text>And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there&#x27;s a decent severance package.<p>Now we&#x27;ll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won&#x27;t bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the &quot;how do you need X people to do Y?&quot; commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we&#x27;ll see more downtime and issues now.<p>I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he&#x27;s overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we&#x27;ve all formed impressions of it. Let&#x27;s see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.<p>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxbond</author><text>I&#x27;m not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it&#x27;s not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn&#x27;t be an acceptable thing to do.</text></comment> |
24,376,133 | 24,375,951 | 1 | 2 | 24,374,979 | train | <story><title>List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills</title><url>https://devandgear.com/posts/the-ultimate-list-of-youtube-channels-to-boost-your-web-development-and-programming-skills/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mg</author><text>I clicked on a few and they all turned out to be tutorials for beginners.<p>I would use it if it had a filter for &quot;How long have you been programming:&quot;<p>[ ] Never
[ ] 1 Year
[ ] 3 Years
[ ] Over 10 years<p>Then I would tick the &quot;Over 10 years&quot; option and hope to find channels that update me on the latest developments. While somebody else would select the &quot;Never&quot; option and will find beginner tutorials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone1234</author><text>This is also a problem with paid educational content e.g. Pluralsight.<p>You want 101 tier material? They have it in droves, for every language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;concept.<p>You want high level system design&#x2F;architecture? Team management training? Project scheduling&#x2F;estimation? Or other software engineering topics: Good luck with that.<p>I mean, I get it, you&#x27;re selling shovels to gold miners. But at some scale, it must make sense to target smaller niches.</text></comment> | <story><title>List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills</title><url>https://devandgear.com/posts/the-ultimate-list-of-youtube-channels-to-boost-your-web-development-and-programming-skills/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mg</author><text>I clicked on a few and they all turned out to be tutorials for beginners.<p>I would use it if it had a filter for &quot;How long have you been programming:&quot;<p>[ ] Never
[ ] 1 Year
[ ] 3 Years
[ ] Over 10 years<p>Then I would tick the &quot;Over 10 years&quot; option and hope to find channels that update me on the latest developments. While somebody else would select the &quot;Never&quot; option and will find beginner tutorials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Swizec</author><text>As an online educator, this is the nut I’m trying to crack. Beginner stuff doesn’t interest me and advanced stuff is often so specialized you can’t really teach it. And selling to intermediate engineers is crazy hard it turns out.<p>Everyone thinks they can figure it out on their own and doesn’t want to be taught. Or works in areas so specialized only their teammates can help.<p>And you’re always fighting against a sea of $10 Udemy courses and free resources.<p>That said, I think it’s a crackable nut. It’s just a longer slog than beginner stuff.</text></comment> |
14,501,207 | 14,500,686 | 1 | 2 | 14,500,116 | train | <story><title>Pinterest Raises $150M at 2015 Share Price</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/pinterest-raises-150-million-at-2015-share-price</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skewart</author><text>I&#x27;ve been a fan of Pinterest for a long time, though I rarely use it these days.<p>I&#x27;ve been fascinated, and slightly horrified, by their pivot away from social functionality and towards a vision of a neutral bookmarking site.<p>It&#x27;s not that I&#x27;d want Pinterest to be more social in and as an end itself, but rather because I think it better incentivizes people to create good quality content, and it makes it easier to discover things I want to find.<p>There&#x27;s very little ROI for cultivating a public image on Pinterest, so few people put much effort into doing it. At the same time, people who have taste similar to mine are a much better way to find things than any algorithm Pinterest has ever released. And yet, they keep emphasizing algorithmic recommendations while disincentivizing people from publicly expressing their taste and making it harder for me to follow people I like.<p>And then there are the ads, which, as a bunch of other commenters have pointed out, tend to be really far out of line from anything I&#x27;ve ever expressed interest in. It&#x27;s just off-putting to see a bunch of low-quality ads for tacky crap in the middle of my feed of minimalist interiors.<p>Maybe they have something up their sleeves, or maybe I&#x27;m very different from their target user. Otherwise I just don&#x27;t agree with their product direction.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pinterest Raises $150M at 2015 Share Price</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/pinterest-raises-150-million-at-2015-share-price</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fensterblick</author><text>I just started looking at Pinterest as a company to work for. From the outside, the way they treat their employees looks amazing. Things like KnitCon (an internal conference for employees led by employees) reflect well on the company.
On the other hand, some of the reviews on Glassdoor are not so kind.<p>I hope Pinterest can succeed and overcome its current challenges. Even if I do not ever get a job there, what is good for one company lifts everyone else in our industry (unless you are a direct competitor!)</text></comment> |
32,828,459 | 32,828,734 | 1 | 2 | 32,826,437 | train | <story><title>FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/tvqddc/fb_feed_is_98_suggested_pages_and_barely_any/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ok123456</author><text>The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn&#x27;t be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.</text></item><item><author>elcomet</author><text>That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...</text></item><item><author>ok123456</author><text>Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars.<p>If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta&#x27;s kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that&#x27;s where most of the overhead on that section is going to come from.</text></item><item><author>ineptech</author><text>Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it&#x27;s the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew&#x27;s school photos, etc would be a pretty good little business. And they already have all of that functionality built, so they could run significantly leaner, and hence not have to drive their remaining users away with excessive ads.<p>This seems like a good idea to me. But I also think it&#x27;s about as likely to happen as President Stallman.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>max51</author><text>&gt;No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.<p>Until their HOA or their sports club start using Facebook as their official platform for announcements and communication.<p>I know there are other free platform that could fill the same role, but you will never find one where literally more than half the adult population already has an account and is familiar with the interface&#x2F;features. Lots of groups use it because it&#x27;s the path of least resistance.</text></comment> | <story><title>FB feed is 98% suggested pages and barely any friends' posts</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/tvqddc/fb_feed_is_98_suggested_pages_and_barely_any/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ok123456</author><text>The people using Marketplace are the people who wouldn&#x27;t be using the site otherwise, and who are there for the express purpose of doing commerce. No one over 40 would be caught dead of facebook otherwise.</text></item><item><author>elcomet</author><text>That might be the reason for you, but there are many other reasons why people still use the site. For example, coordinating events with friends, discover local events, discussing on messenger, sharing photos, discussing in groups...</text></item><item><author>ok123456</author><text>Marketplace is the only reason a lot of people still use the site. This is since especially true for people looking for beater cars since Craigslist started charging $5 to post ads for cars.<p>If Apple or someone else with an ax to grind with Facebook really wanted to bust Meta&#x27;s kneecaps, they could off to subsidize this charge. Maybe also help them out with fraud and spam detection, since that&#x27;s where most of the overhead on that section is going to come from.</text></item><item><author>ineptech</author><text>Crazy idea: FB should stop trying to lure people back from Tiktok with weird features and just lean in to its one remaining strength, which is that among social media sites, it&#x27;s the most generic and boring and ubiquitous. Being the default place for non-influencers to do quotidian stuff like hearing about school closings, joining the PTA or HOA, coordinating family gatherings, see your nephew&#x27;s school photos, etc would be a pretty good little business. And they already have all of that functionality built, so they could run significantly leaner, and hence not have to drive their remaining users away with excessive ads.<p>This seems like a good idea to me. But I also think it&#x27;s about as likely to happen as President Stallman.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BbzzbB</author><text>It&#x27;s funny how much projection people do when speaking of FB, as if their personal experience offers some deep insight into a platform of 3.5 billion users whose usage varies by user, demography and geography.</text></comment> |
15,809,178 | 15,809,143 | 1 | 3 | 15,807,505 | train | <story><title>G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/gm-driverless-cars.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CruiseAway</author><text>WIRED talks a lot more about the drive itself, and isn&#x27;t as positive about it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;ride-general-motors-self-driving-car&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;ride-general-motors-self-driving...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quirkot</author><text>This gets at something I was taught in driving school. Slow =&#x2F;= safe. Sudden stopping can be just as dangerous as any other tactic.</text></comment> | <story><title>G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/gm-driverless-cars.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CruiseAway</author><text>WIRED talks a lot more about the drive itself, and isn&#x27;t as positive about it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;ride-general-motors-self-driving-car&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;ride-general-motors-self-driving...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Fricken</author><text>I&#x27;ve read half a dozen articles on Cruise&#x27;s press event, they all tell similar stories. I guess whether you view them as positive depends on your expectations. Downtown SF is a very challenging driving environment, Cruise is doing some pretty awesome stuff realtive to the other established and well capitalized efforts.</text></comment> |
30,974,879 | 30,974,737 | 1 | 2 | 30,971,282 | train | <story><title>Starting Your Computer Music Journey with Clojure and Overtone in Emacs</title><url>https://savo.rocks/posts/starting-your-computer-music-journey-with-clojure-and-overtone-in-emacs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chaosprint</author><text>I have been studying different music programming languages for years and eventually landed on the design of Glicol:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glicol.org</a><p>I think the combo of Overtone and Emacs is really cool. Essentially, Overtone, Tidalcycles, Sonic Pi or FoxDot are note&#x2F;OSC msg generators for SuperCollider. Perhaps the post should mention that. The reason is that when users start to care about audio synthesis and &quot;sound-based music&quot;, then they will find a missing picture&#x2F;concept between the pattern-based language abstraction to the audio float numbers. My experience is that if a user does not understand this process, it is very hard to master the language, tend to forget the syntax and is prone to errors.<p>One example is that before I made Glicol, I made QuaverSeries (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quaverseries.web.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quaverseries.web.app&#x2F;</a>), which shares a very similar syntax to Glicol. I would call it a functional wrapper for Tone.js. But as a functional programming language, even I myself forget the input&#x2F;output type for each function after not using it for a while. Yet in Glicol, this problem is solved from the first day as Glicol&#x27;s node IO are all audio streams. One reason I call Glicol &quot;the next generation computer music&quot; is partly because we are now in an era when browsers can also handle real-time GC-free audio, and audio-first makes a modern design.<p>In designing Glicol, my experience is that when one begins from the audio level, it does affect the language design a lot. How to make the trade-off among readability, simplicity and ergonomics for speedy writing in live coding performance, error handing, abstraction from audio to language, lowering the learning curve is really an art.</text></comment> | <story><title>Starting Your Computer Music Journey with Clojure and Overtone in Emacs</title><url>https://savo.rocks/posts/starting-your-computer-music-journey-with-clojure-and-overtone-in-emacs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>clx75</author><text>I&#x27;m really fond of the idea of writing music like this.<p>From all available implementations of the idea, I probably like Extempore (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;digego&#x2F;extempore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;digego&#x2F;extempore</a>) the most. Extempore provides a low-level C-like language (xtlang) which compiles into LLVM and can be meta-programmed from a variant of Scheme (TinyScheme I believe). This arrangement makes it possible to generate the code for the audio graph from Scheme, compile&#x2F;optimize it via LLVM, then drive it in a live-coding fashion from Emacs. Best of both worlds (high and low).<p>My personal, much simpler attempt in this space is Cowbells (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;omkamra&#x2F;cowbells" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;omkamra&#x2F;cowbells</a>) - with this one you can live-code FluidSynth (MIDI soundfonts) from Clojure + CIDER + Emacs, representing musical phrases either via Clojure data structures or an alternative text-based syntax (which is translated into the former by a compiler).</text></comment> |
7,085,439 | 7,085,547 | 1 | 2 | 7,084,845 | train | <story><title>FreeBSD 10.0 is here</title><url>http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_wmd</author><text>For the love of goodness, <i>please link to the release notes!</i> Cannot fathom why people do this (and its not just OP - it happens all the time).<p><a href="http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/10-STABLE/relnotes/article.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;relnotes&#x2F;10-STABLE&#x2F;relnotes&#x2F;article.h...</a><p>Most interesting to me, this is the first stable release supporting netmap(4).. <a href="http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&amp;sektion=4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freebsd.org&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;man.cgi?query=netmap&amp;sektion=4</a></text></comment> | <story><title>FreeBSD 10.0 is here</title><url>http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>evilgjb</author><text>The release is <i>never</i> officially &quot;here&quot; until the PGP-signed email is sent to the freebsd-announce@ mailing list.</text></comment> |
24,212,486 | 24,211,779 | 1 | 3 | 24,208,390 | train | <story><title>Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/08/most-mandatory-requirements-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rvense</author><text>About five years ago, a place I was working at was selecting a new laptop for all employees. Mine was up for replacement, so I was interested in what they were picking.
They&#x27;d arrived at some god-awful Lenovo gamer model. It fit the performance and price point they&#x27;d decided they needed.<p>I said I&#x27;d prefer to have something smaller with less Christmas lights.<p>&quot;Policy is everyone has to have the same laptop, and some people need more graphics power than the one you&#x27;re asking for.&quot;<p>Turns out there&#x27;d been some big thing back and forth already about size and performance and this was the compromise that nobody liked.<p>&quot;But why does everyone have to have the same laptop?&quot; I asked.<p>&quot;Well, it&#x27;s just policy. Every desk has a docking station, and we don&#x27;t want to have to buy different ones.&quot;<p>So I flipped the selected monstrosity over to reveal the extremely lacking docking connector at the bottom. There were some awkward laughs and I got my Thinkpad.</text></item><item><author>sfifs</author><text>In BigCorps, if there&#x27;s a stupid requirement, there&#x27;s usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. A more productive use of time would be to understand the reason for the policy, document out why it doesn&#x27;t apply to your case and then attempt to get approval.<p>For instance, there&#x27;s a restriction at my workplace (not a software company, a regular old industry fortune 500) which prevents git installs from pushing to any non corporate GitHub repo from our work machines.<p>The obvious reason it exists is to prevent people (a lot of who are analysts or data scientists - not professional programmers) from shooting themselves in the foot by pushing code to their personal repos in error.<p>It&#x27;s annoying to work around if you need to say push a contribution to an open source project and you could rage at the infosec for enforcing it - but it obviously exists because stupid errors would have happened.<p>This principle is also called Chesterton&#x27;s fence<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grogenaut</author><text>This is literally my job. Amazon calls it Dive Deep&#x2F;Earn Trust. I get called in constantly to &quot;Remove Blockers&quot;. Part of it is just understanding why the policy exists and then getting a policy modification. While it&#x27;s definitely an art, it&#x27;s not as hard as a lot of people think, but you can&#x27;t be afraid to escalate.</text></comment> | <story><title>Most “mandatory requirements” in corporations are imaginary</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/08/most-mandatory-requirements-in.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rvense</author><text>About five years ago, a place I was working at was selecting a new laptop for all employees. Mine was up for replacement, so I was interested in what they were picking.
They&#x27;d arrived at some god-awful Lenovo gamer model. It fit the performance and price point they&#x27;d decided they needed.<p>I said I&#x27;d prefer to have something smaller with less Christmas lights.<p>&quot;Policy is everyone has to have the same laptop, and some people need more graphics power than the one you&#x27;re asking for.&quot;<p>Turns out there&#x27;d been some big thing back and forth already about size and performance and this was the compromise that nobody liked.<p>&quot;But why does everyone have to have the same laptop?&quot; I asked.<p>&quot;Well, it&#x27;s just policy. Every desk has a docking station, and we don&#x27;t want to have to buy different ones.&quot;<p>So I flipped the selected monstrosity over to reveal the extremely lacking docking connector at the bottom. There were some awkward laughs and I got my Thinkpad.</text></item><item><author>sfifs</author><text>In BigCorps, if there&#x27;s a stupid requirement, there&#x27;s usually a reason for the stupid requirement to be there in the first place but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. A more productive use of time would be to understand the reason for the policy, document out why it doesn&#x27;t apply to your case and then attempt to get approval.<p>For instance, there&#x27;s a restriction at my workplace (not a software company, a regular old industry fortune 500) which prevents git installs from pushing to any non corporate GitHub repo from our work machines.<p>The obvious reason it exists is to prevent people (a lot of who are analysts or data scientists - not professional programmers) from shooting themselves in the foot by pushing code to their personal repos in error.<p>It&#x27;s annoying to work around if you need to say push a contribution to an open source project and you could rage at the infosec for enforcing it - but it obviously exists because stupid errors would have happened.<p>This principle is also called Chesterton&#x27;s fence<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robbyking</author><text>I had the opposite experience once: at my previous company we were all issued mid-tier ThinkPads. Completely out of the blue we all received an email saying we&#x27;d be given a set budget and would be able to choose any machine we wanted. We went from 100% Windows to about 80% OS X within a week. They ended up giving the old ThinkPads away. (I put Ubuntu on one and gave it to my mom.)<p>This was in 2012 or so, and because of that I was able to learn Objective-C and go on to work on the first version of our native app. It made me a stronger engineer, and allowed the company to have developers who were already familiar with the product and backend services work on native. It was win-win.</text></comment> |
18,806,437 | 18,804,380 | 1 | 2 | 18,801,531 | train | <story><title>Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>riskable</author><text>This article is making a big legal mistake I think... You <i>should</i> be free to make a Mickey Mouse doll with modern colors and white gloves after Steamboat Willie enters the public domain because those would be <i>derivative works</i> (of the original). The colors of the character&#x27;s clothes can certainly be <i>trademarked</i> but after the initial copyright expires any and all color combinations should be fair game (legally speaking).<p>If this were <i>not</i> the case the entire body of case law on derivative works would be turned on its head. The entire <i>point</i> of derivative works law is that there&#x27;s an original that everything else is based on. If the original is public domain <i>any variation thereof</i> is also public domain from that point forward except for <i>exact replicas</i>.<p>Meaning: You can produce all the Mickey Mouse stuff you want as long as you&#x27;re not literally copying something that&#x27;s still under copyright. Mickey Mouse dolls are fine as long as your artwork wasn&#x27;t literally copied &amp; pasted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Buge</author><text>There&#x27;s copyright law and trademark law. Copyright law might be ok with something but trademark law might ban it. The ban takes precedence.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mickey Mouse and Batman will soon be public domain</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-just-fell-into-the-public-domain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>riskable</author><text>This article is making a big legal mistake I think... You <i>should</i> be free to make a Mickey Mouse doll with modern colors and white gloves after Steamboat Willie enters the public domain because those would be <i>derivative works</i> (of the original). The colors of the character&#x27;s clothes can certainly be <i>trademarked</i> but after the initial copyright expires any and all color combinations should be fair game (legally speaking).<p>If this were <i>not</i> the case the entire body of case law on derivative works would be turned on its head. The entire <i>point</i> of derivative works law is that there&#x27;s an original that everything else is based on. If the original is public domain <i>any variation thereof</i> is also public domain from that point forward except for <i>exact replicas</i>.<p>Meaning: You can produce all the Mickey Mouse stuff you want as long as you&#x27;re not literally copying something that&#x27;s still under copyright. Mickey Mouse dolls are fine as long as your artwork wasn&#x27;t literally copied &amp; pasted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fattire</author><text>I was thinking the same thing re: derivative works. Ordinarily a claim could be made if you took a copyrighted work and created derivative material from it (someone sampling your hook in a new song), but what if you start from a public domain work, and add your own changes? It seems your changes only would be copyrighted. But can you copyright obvious colors? If you took B&amp;W, public domain Mickey and had some preschoolers or an AI or something color it in... would this be yours?<p>What Disney should worry about if they plan to defend their colored Mickey is a team of hacktivists creating derivative colored works from the original pd B&amp;W image and claiming copyright on THAT for another 100 years :)</text></comment> |
40,295,210 | 40,295,189 | 1 | 2 | 40,294,650 | train | <story><title>xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04517</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>albertzeyer</author><text>It seems Sepp Hochreiter has talked already about this model since Oct 2023: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huggingface&#x2F;transformers&#x2F;issues&#x2F;27011">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;huggingface&#x2F;transformers&#x2F;issues&#x2F;27011</a><p>In the scaling law comparison, I wonder if it is reasonable to compare number of parameters between Llama, Mamba, RWKV, xLSTM? Isn&#x27;t compute time more relevant? E.g. in the figure about scaling laws, replace num of params by compute time.<p>Specifically, the sLSTM has still recurrence (memory mixing) in it, i.e. you cannot fully parallelize the computation. So scaling up Transformer could still look better when you look at compute time.<p>It seems neither the code nor the model params are released. I wonder if that will follow.</text></comment> | <story><title>xLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04517</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>KhoomeiK</author><text>For those who don&#x27;t know, the senior author on this paper (Sepp Hochreiter) was the first author on the original paper with Schmidhuber introducing LSTMs in 1997.</text></comment> |
26,402,638 | 26,402,972 | 1 | 2 | 26,401,782 | train | <story><title>Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimish</author><text>Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.<p>Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it&#x27;ll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.<p>RIP, only France did nuclear right :(</text></item><item><author>rgbrenner</author><text>People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it&#x27;s complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn&#x27;t make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.<p>So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it&#x27;s just not going to happen. For the same reason you don&#x27;t shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sir_bearington</author><text>&gt; Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.<p>Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal batteries, something else.<p>But who knows if any of those will actually pan out. California has already hit saturation with solar power. Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions. As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more valuable than raw generation figures present because this power is generated 24&#x2F;7.<p>&gt; RIP, only France did nuclear right :(<p>And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimish</author><text>Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to Wind&#x2F;Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add batteries.<p>Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it&#x27;ll have to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous economies of scale.<p>RIP, only France did nuclear right :(</text></item><item><author>rgbrenner</author><text>People who decide to build new plants make their decision not from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse because by the time it&#x27;s complete the economics will be even poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn&#x27;t make economic sense on any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost, regulatory difficulty, etc.<p>So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it&#x27;s just not going to happen. For the same reason you don&#x27;t shop around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the type of plant it came from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gameman144</author><text>One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar, and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy production without reverting to the equally land-efficient methods of coal and gas.<p>That said, improvements in the transmission grid <i>might</i> be able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.</text></comment> |
4,397,050 | 4,397,056 | 1 | 3 | 4,396,349 | train | <story><title>Restaurant offers a 5% discount if you eat without your phone on the table</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/technology/restaurant-cell-phone-discount/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>geebee</author><text>Shoot. I often eat with my phone on the table, but I never field a call or text - I just put it there along with my keys because it's uncomfortable to sit with it in my pocket and I usually don't wear a jacket.<p>I can see how just putting it there could send the wrong message, though, that I'm open to distractions. Argh. Just one more reason to get a "european carry all", I guess. Or maybe I'll just wear a jacket.</text></item><item><author>nagrom</author><text>I get really annoyed when I eat with someone and they have their phone on the table. There's something about that behaviour that seems to say "I'll pay attention to you for now, but I'm really hoping for a distraction.".<p>I'd much rather go to a restaurant where phone use is discouraged as it seems to have become socially acceptable to fuck around with phones even during face-to-face conversation with someone.<p>Regarding ROI: if I were to run the restaurant, I'd have opaquely added the same charge to all the menu items and remove it for good behaviour. I guess that rewards for not being a dick are more popular than explicit punishments for being a dick?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>debacle</author><text>I do similar. We need to develop a new etiquette. Perhaps placing the phone beyond your reach (in the center of the table) signifies that it's not a distraction, but just a bauble.</text></comment> | <story><title>Restaurant offers a 5% discount if you eat without your phone on the table</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/16/technology/restaurant-cell-phone-discount/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>geebee</author><text>Shoot. I often eat with my phone on the table, but I never field a call or text - I just put it there along with my keys because it's uncomfortable to sit with it in my pocket and I usually don't wear a jacket.<p>I can see how just putting it there could send the wrong message, though, that I'm open to distractions. Argh. Just one more reason to get a "european carry all", I guess. Or maybe I'll just wear a jacket.</text></item><item><author>nagrom</author><text>I get really annoyed when I eat with someone and they have their phone on the table. There's something about that behaviour that seems to say "I'll pay attention to you for now, but I'm really hoping for a distraction.".<p>I'd much rather go to a restaurant where phone use is discouraged as it seems to have become socially acceptable to fuck around with phones even during face-to-face conversation with someone.<p>Regarding ROI: if I were to run the restaurant, I'd have opaquely added the same charge to all the menu items and remove it for good behaviour. I guess that rewards for not being a dick are more popular than explicit punishments for being a dick?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylanz</author><text>Comfort is the reason I have my phone on the table as well. My glasses and keys end up in the same place... usually in a precarious stack.</text></comment> |
14,151,368 | 14,150,821 | 1 | 3 | 14,150,770 | train | <story><title>Kip (YC W16) is using data to make therapy better for patients and therapists</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/kip-therapy-app/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>I&#x27;m a bit troubled by this phrase in the article: <i>As someone who is seeking to overcome a certain amount of anxiety and depression — and really, what human isn’t dealing with some amount of anxiety or depression?</i><p>This makes it sound more like life coaching or therapy for episodic mental health problems than for people who deal with chronic mental illness. It&#x27;s hard to tell how much of this is the article author&#x27;s voice and how much of it stems from the way the service is structured and marketed.<p>This isn&#x27;t necessarily bad - people suffering minor or acute depression need help too and if this improves their outcomes at lower cost then that&#x27;s a wonderful thing. But since it is profit-driven, there&#x27;s a natural economic incentive to orient it around the needs of the easiest customers to deal with, rather than the ones with the most severe problems, for whom outcomes are much harder to optimize: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC4219058&#x2F;#__sec2title" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC4219058&#x2F;#__sec2...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Kip (YC W16) is using data to make therapy better for patients and therapists</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/19/kip-therapy-app/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anandkulkarni</author><text>I&#x27;ve referred a few folks to Kip who were looking for a therapist after struggling to find one elsewhere (in one case, I downloaded the app on their phone and just sent the person to the first meeting). So far, they&#x27;re reporting positive things about the app and the experience.<p>One of the interesting things that Kip solves is discovery: it seems like they have a roster of prequalified therapists who follow evidence-based strategies. That&#x27;s pretty interesting – the basic process of finding a qualified therapist who&#x27;s a good fit via the usual methods (Google, asking people) isn&#x27;t easy.</text></comment> |
21,078,561 | 21,075,608 | 1 | 2 | 21,073,853 | train | <story><title>Goodbye, Motherboard. Hello, Silicon-Interconnect Fabric</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/goodbye-motherboard-hello-siliconinterconnect-fabric</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jabl</author><text>I agree this looks promising, though I&#x27;m not an expert in this field.<p>But the title is a bit, well, overpromising or broad. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll replace traditional motherboards anytime soon (except maybe in smartphones?). Rather, it will be an incremental progress.<p>- first, SoC&#x27;s will be replaced with chiplets<p>- then we&#x27;ll start seeing more and more stuff being integrated on this wafer.<p>- say, instead of a server motherboard with multiple sockets, have all the CPU chiplets on the same wafer and enjoy much better bandwidth than you get with a PCB<p>- integrate DRAM on the wafer. This will be painful as we&#x27;re used to being able to simply add DIMM&#x27;s, but the upside is massively higher bandwidth.<p>The motherboard pcb per se will live for a long time still, if nothing else then as the place to mount all the external connectors (network, display, pcie, usb, power, whatnot).</text></item><item><author>craigjb</author><text>It&#x27;s been fun to see Dr. Subu present this concept and prototypes at several conferences, and the level of integration possible is absolutely insane. I think the industry is definitely moving toward chiplets, such as the latest AMD release.<p>I definitely think we will see more chiplets and more standardization on interfaces between chiplets. The focus will be on how to minimize energy per bit transferred (a big topic in Subu&#x27;s talks) and how to minimize the die area used for inter-chiplet communication. In monolithic silicon, you don&#x27;t have to think about die area, since your parallel wires between sections might just need a register or two along the way. With chiplets, you typically can&#x27;t run wires at that density yet, so you still have some serialization&#x2F;deserialization hardware. But, since it&#x27;s not crossing multiple high inductance solder balls and PCB traces, you can get away with less. Hopefully also you can get away without area-intensive resynchronization, PLLS, etc.<p>I think it will definitely be awhile before this kind of integration is used outside of niche cases though. The costs are just insane. You have to pre-test all manufactured chiplets before integration, and that test engineering is nothing to sneeze at. If you don&#x27;t then you have all kinds of commercials issues about who is liable for the $500k prototype one bad chip broke.<p>On the bright side, I see the chiplet approach benefitting other integration technologies. For example, wafer level and panel level embedded packaging technologies can be used for 1-2um interconnects now. You won&#x27;t get a wafer sized system out of it with any kind of yield, but it&#x27;s probably the direction mobile chips and wearables will go.<p>Anyway, disorganized info-dump over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elihu</author><text>&gt; integrate DRAM on the wafer. This will be painful as we&#x27;re used to being able to simply add DIMM&#x27;s, but the upside is massively higher bandwidth.<p>One way I imagine this working out is that, instead of just replacing the plastic motherboard with a silicon motherboard, you eventually do away with a single monolithic motherboard entirely. Instead, you have &quot;compute blocks&quot; (comprised of chiplets bonded to a silicon chip, or conventional chips on a conventional circuitboard) that connect with each other via copper or fiber optic point-to-point communication cables, and you can just wire them together arbitrarily to build a complete computer. Like, you might have a couple blocks that house CPUs, one or two that have memory controllers and DRAM, and maybe one with a PCI bus so you can connect peripherals, and you can connect them all in a ring bus. You could house these blocks in a case and call it a server, or connect a lot more blocks and call it a cluster.<p>The main advantage of such a setup is that you don&#x27;t have a single component (the motherboard) that determines how much memory, how many processors, or what sort of peripherals you can have.</text></comment> | <story><title>Goodbye, Motherboard. Hello, Silicon-Interconnect Fabric</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/goodbye-motherboard-hello-siliconinterconnect-fabric</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jabl</author><text>I agree this looks promising, though I&#x27;m not an expert in this field.<p>But the title is a bit, well, overpromising or broad. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ll replace traditional motherboards anytime soon (except maybe in smartphones?). Rather, it will be an incremental progress.<p>- first, SoC&#x27;s will be replaced with chiplets<p>- then we&#x27;ll start seeing more and more stuff being integrated on this wafer.<p>- say, instead of a server motherboard with multiple sockets, have all the CPU chiplets on the same wafer and enjoy much better bandwidth than you get with a PCB<p>- integrate DRAM on the wafer. This will be painful as we&#x27;re used to being able to simply add DIMM&#x27;s, but the upside is massively higher bandwidth.<p>The motherboard pcb per se will live for a long time still, if nothing else then as the place to mount all the external connectors (network, display, pcie, usb, power, whatnot).</text></item><item><author>craigjb</author><text>It&#x27;s been fun to see Dr. Subu present this concept and prototypes at several conferences, and the level of integration possible is absolutely insane. I think the industry is definitely moving toward chiplets, such as the latest AMD release.<p>I definitely think we will see more chiplets and more standardization on interfaces between chiplets. The focus will be on how to minimize energy per bit transferred (a big topic in Subu&#x27;s talks) and how to minimize the die area used for inter-chiplet communication. In monolithic silicon, you don&#x27;t have to think about die area, since your parallel wires between sections might just need a register or two along the way. With chiplets, you typically can&#x27;t run wires at that density yet, so you still have some serialization&#x2F;deserialization hardware. But, since it&#x27;s not crossing multiple high inductance solder balls and PCB traces, you can get away with less. Hopefully also you can get away without area-intensive resynchronization, PLLS, etc.<p>I think it will definitely be awhile before this kind of integration is used outside of niche cases though. The costs are just insane. You have to pre-test all manufactured chiplets before integration, and that test engineering is nothing to sneeze at. If you don&#x27;t then you have all kinds of commercials issues about who is liable for the $500k prototype one bad chip broke.<p>On the bright side, I see the chiplet approach benefitting other integration technologies. For example, wafer level and panel level embedded packaging technologies can be used for 1-2um interconnects now. You won&#x27;t get a wafer sized system out of it with any kind of yield, but it&#x27;s probably the direction mobile chips and wearables will go.<p>Anyway, disorganized info-dump over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>craigjb</author><text>I think the embedded wafer level or &quot;panel&quot; level packaging technologies are the mid-ground. These technologies don&#x27;t use expensive silicon, and instead surround the die with cheaper epoxy. Then the interconnects are built on top of that, and can connect multiple die together. Yield and interconnect pitch are the big issues here though, and that&#x27;s why I think you&#x27;re right, that we will see SoCs or mobile systems first, not whole motherboards.<p>With that said, some of these technologies can have a layer of surface mount pads on top. So you have a substrate of epoxy with all your chips and interconnects embedded in it, and then surface mount parts on top. For example, passives, connectors, etc. It would look almost like a motherboard, but with all the chips inside. Of course, for cost and yield reasons, this will be for mobile devices only at first.</text></comment> |
24,601,335 | 24,598,322 | 1 | 3 | 24,597,413 | train | <story><title>The first appearance of a real computer in a comic book</title><url>http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/computerComics/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jim_lawless</author><text>Some comics used to try to pass off source code ... often BASIC ... as programs on the screens of the computers in the story&#x27;s. I had seen a couple of these instances in Jim Starlin&#x27;s &quot;Dreadstar&quot; comic. One of them was a printer dump routine from 80 Micro magazine for a TRS-80 that included the original author&#x27;s contact info on the screen:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jiml.us&#x2F;i&#x2F;dreadstar-basic.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jiml.us&#x2F;i&#x2F;dreadstar-basic.jpg</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The first appearance of a real computer in a comic book</title><url>http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/computerComics/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robviren</author><text>A machine that we can ask any question and get an answer, aghast! Fun to realize what was top level science fiction at the time is now our mundane daily life</text></comment> |
26,339,315 | 26,338,939 | 1 | 2 | 26,338,186 | train | <story><title>Norwegian Won’t Fly the Boeing 737 Max Again</title><url>https://simpleflying.com/norwegian-drops-737-max/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geocrasher</author><text>Am I the only one who feels like this headline borders on Click Bait? More than once I&#x27;ve found articles on this website to be heavy in inferred meaning and light on actual content. Such is the case here. Take a controversial aircraft, form a headline around how an airline &quot;won&#x27;t fly&quot; it again, and then gloss over the actual reason:<p>They&#x27;re out of money.<p>Take this article for example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpleflying.com&#x2F;spirit-airlines-a321xlr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simpleflying.com&#x2F;spirit-airlines-a321xlr&#x2F;</a><p>It does not read like an analysis, it reads like a gossip column about the latest airliner fashions, and at the end even asks &quot;Do you think Spirit should order the Airbus A321XLR? Let us know in the comments!&quot; which only supports my take on it: This site is an airline gossip site, not a aviation industry news site.</text></comment> | <story><title>Norwegian Won’t Fly the Boeing 737 Max Again</title><url>https://simpleflying.com/norwegian-drops-737-max/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kenneth</author><text>Norwegian is dropping the 737 MAX because they&#x27;re practically bankrupt and are significantly downsizing. I wouldn&#x27;t read too much into this — it&#x27;s a business and marketing decision, not a safety decision.</text></comment> |
3,571,960 | 3,570,852 | 1 | 3 | 3,570,603 | train | <story><title>Backbone patterns</title><url>http://ricostacruz.com/backbone-patterns</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>conesus</author><text>One of the patterns looks like it requires more processing power than necessary. The rendering of a template should be fast, since you will likely be doing it many times on a page.<p><pre><code> ContactView = Backbone.View.extend({
template: function() {
var template = _.template($("#template-contact").html());
return template.apply(this, arguments);
},
render: function() {
// This is a dictionary object of the attributes of the models.
// =&#62; { name: "Jason", email: "[email protected]" }
var dict = this.model.toJSON();
// Pass this object onto the template function.
// This returns an HTML string.
var html = this.template(dict);
// Append the result to the view's element.
$(this.el).append(html);
// ...
}
})
</code></pre>
Note that the template is already on the page and has to be serialized by jQuery with the `_.template($("#template-contact").html());` line. It would be faster to already have the template in a JavaScript string, ready to be interpolated with your values.<p>Otherwise, for every view you will be fetching the template from the DOM. The difference in implementation would be from this:<p><pre><code> &#60;div id="template-contact"&#62;Mail me at &#60;%= email %&#62;&#60;/div&#62;
</code></pre>
to this:<p><pre><code> &#60;script&#62;var templateContact = "Mail me at &#60;%= email %&#62;"&#60;/script&#62;
</code></pre>
It's a bit more work, but it reduces the amount of work that has to happen just to render one of many templates.</text></comment> | <story><title>Backbone patterns</title><url>http://ricostacruz.com/backbone-patterns</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jugglinmike</author><text>It's great to see knowledge like this compiled into one place. Unfortunately, it looks like the resource is only superficially open source.<p>I was about to make a pull request to fix a typo, when I found someone had already done so:
<a href="https://github.com/rstacruz/backbone-patterns/pull/3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rstacruz/backbone-patterns/pull/3</a><p>If a objective correction like this takes 6 weeks (and counting!) to be merged, does the open nature of this page really matter?<p>Not that this detracts from the message, but take the claim "This is a massive work-in-progress." with a grain of salt.</text></comment> |
16,446,756 | 16,445,597 | 1 | 2 | 16,439,642 | train | <story><title>Worst Roommate Ever</title><url>https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/jamison-bachman-worst-roommate-ever.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maaaats</author><text>&gt; <i>I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it whatsoever</i><p>That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.<p>And giving people housing is important, that&#x27;s why the laws often favor the person renting, not the owner. The laws is a risk you have to take if you want to rent out your place. Price it into your rent. Or just don&#x27;t live in &quot;mortal fear&quot; by not being a master tenant..</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren&#x27;t on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven&#x27;t paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.<p>As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whack</author><text>Realistically, there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it because the eviction process is so long and time consuming, that by the time I finally evict the person, my lease would be over and I&#x27;d be moving out anyway. After having given my roommate free housing for many months of course.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Giving people housing is important&quot;</i><p>I agree! So let&#x27;s make the government financially liable for any missed rent payments, while the eviction process is pending. After all, if providing its citizens with housing is so important, it should be the state&#x27;s financial responsibility, not that of a random landlord whose contract was violated. I&#x27;m all for universal basic income, but not income-appropriated-from-a-few-random-landlords.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Price it into your rent&quot;</i><p>Ah, now we get to the real rub. Everyone already does this. If you&#x27;re a rich, successful individual, you have the luxury of living anywhere you want, at market prices. If you&#x27;re down on your luck, but want to turn things around, you&#x27;ll find that many places will refuse to accept you anyway, because the risk is too great. Or they will offer you housing at significantly higher rents, because of the additional risks involved. Either way, you&#x27;re getting screwed, just because some other deadbeat thinks he&#x27;s entitled to free housing at the landlord&#x27;s expense.</text></comment> | <story><title>Worst Roommate Ever</title><url>https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/jamison-bachman-worst-roommate-ever.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maaaats</author><text>&gt; <i>I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it whatsoever</i><p>That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.<p>And giving people housing is important, that&#x27;s why the laws often favor the person renting, not the owner. The laws is a risk you have to take if you want to rent out your place. Price it into your rent. Or just don&#x27;t live in &quot;mortal fear&quot; by not being a master tenant..</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren&#x27;t on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven&#x27;t paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.<p>As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BrandoElFollito</author><text>&gt; That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.<p>It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out.<p>And this is just if he is not paying. If someone pays, it is simply impossible. Every three years you may take back the house for your or your close family use only. You cannot sell it empty. You cannot end the contract.
You are awfully stuck.</text></comment> |
37,172,444 | 37,171,704 | 1 | 2 | 37,170,911 | train | <story><title>Microplastics detected in the marine air from Norway to the high Arctic</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/18/microplastics-detected-in-the-marine-air-from-norway-to-the-high-arctic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>flangola7</author><text>&gt; Except you could find an alternative for asbestos. I don’t think anyone could come up with a replacement for plastic that is… not plastic like.<p>Modern humans have walked the Earth for 300,000 years. We use plastics for 0.03% of our history and suddenly think we can&#x27;t survive without them.<p>ಠ_ಠ</text></item><item><author>soligern</author><text>Except you could find an alternative for asbestos. I don’t think anyone could come up with a replacement for plastic that is… not plastic like.<p>Ideally someone would make “plastic” that biodegrades over 10 years into completely harmless substances.</text></item><item><author>SteveNuts</author><text>This is going to turn out to be this generation&#x27;s lead paint + asbestos all in one, isn&#x27;t it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DoingIsLearning</author><text>People are shutting down the discussion in a somewhat dishonest way. &quot;Can&#x27;t get rid of all plastics so let&#x27;s do nothing!&quot;<p>The societal need we have is to get rid of single use-plastic and frail plastic based textiles which are the two main contributors for this microplastic degradation into our water cycle and food (and all wildlife ecosystems).<p>Even purely from an engineering standpoint it is absolutely ridiculous to design a part that will last 450 years to then use it to carry soda around for 45 min.<p>Apart from single-use plastic usage in laboratory work and medical applications all other uses only have a purely economic benefit and should be banned (and the companies that transition should fork the costs). They have externalized the environmental cost of packaging for decades, a market correction is overdue.<p>The issue is not about getting ready of plastic. The ABS plastic part inside a mechanical assembly will likely do it&#x27;s job for decades undisturbed. The issue really is banning single-use plastic.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microplastics detected in the marine air from Norway to the high Arctic</title><url>https://scienceswitch.com/2023/08/18/microplastics-detected-in-the-marine-air-from-norway-to-the-high-arctic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>flangola7</author><text>&gt; Except you could find an alternative for asbestos. I don’t think anyone could come up with a replacement for plastic that is… not plastic like.<p>Modern humans have walked the Earth for 300,000 years. We use plastics for 0.03% of our history and suddenly think we can&#x27;t survive without them.<p>ಠ_ಠ</text></item><item><author>soligern</author><text>Except you could find an alternative for asbestos. I don’t think anyone could come up with a replacement for plastic that is… not plastic like.<p>Ideally someone would make “plastic” that biodegrades over 10 years into completely harmless substances.</text></item><item><author>SteveNuts</author><text>This is going to turn out to be this generation&#x27;s lead paint + asbestos all in one, isn&#x27;t it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RF_Savage</author><text>Most humans to ever have lived have lived or currently live during the age of plastics.
The population growth and demand for plastics has been massive.<p>Last 15 years saw as much plastics being manufactured as all the years before it.<p>And we are not yet even at peak plastic use, it is still increasing.</text></comment> |
26,386,496 | 26,386,463 | 1 | 2 | 26,385,317 | train | <story><title>Google suffers from a digital petro curse</title><url>https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-suffers-from-a-digital-petro-curse-908e919a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whitepaint</author><text>Do people forget the powerhouses that Youtube, Android, GCP, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Chromebooks are (plus gazillion smaller companies like Waymo that have insane potential)?<p>People have been predicting the downfall of Google for a very long time now and yet they have never been bigger growing every year at astounding rates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jasper_</author><text>Google bought YouTube in ~2006. If Ruth Porat saw the amount that it bled in its first two years, they would have canceled it then too. GCP is questionable, they&#x27;re falling behind.<p>I think the issue is that Google, at the high level, is incapable of thinking long term. It wants to see runaway success in a quarter or two.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google suffers from a digital petro curse</title><url>https://world.hey.com/dhh/google-suffers-from-a-digital-petro-curse-908e919a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whitepaint</author><text>Do people forget the powerhouses that Youtube, Android, GCP, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Chromebooks are (plus gazillion smaller companies like Waymo that have insane potential)?<p>People have been predicting the downfall of Google for a very long time now and yet they have never been bigger growing every year at astounding rates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcfrei</author><text>Not predicting a downfall but just to give you some perspective: 80% of Google&#x27;s revenue is from advertising. They only disclose net income for three very wide segments: Services, cloud and other bets. Only three services - that is search, youtube and google play - are profitable. GCP, maps, Chromebooks, Waymo, G Suite (that includes Gmail, Drive, etc) are a net loss.</text></comment> |
4,627,984 | 4,627,891 | 1 | 2 | 4,627,527 | train | <story><title>One of the SpaceX engines came apart during launch</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/that-smooth-spacex-launch-turns-out-one-of-the-engines-exploded/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text><i>&#62; We know the engine did not explode, because we continued to receive data from it.</i><p>Uh, they say the engine did not explode. The failed engine shut down and vented gasses ruptured the engine fairing. How about someone change the inaccurate headline? <i>"That smooth SpaceX launch? Turns out one of the engines exploded"</i></text></comment> | <story><title>One of the SpaceX engines came apart during launch</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/that-smooth-spacex-launch-turns-out-one-of-the-engines-exploded/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Looking forward to the SpaceX update.<p>One of the things that struck me is that trying to watch the control room at the same time as this anomaly I have yet to pick out anyone who 'flinched' or made any sort of noted move. That has left me wondering if they knew when this happened that it happened. I have to believe they did.<p>I remember watching the faces of the people in the control room when they did TV shots of the control room of NASA and noting that there was always someone who knew that things weren't going to plan, their face betrayed that knowledge.<p>That said, it looks like their primary cargo was fine, but they ended up putting their secondary cargo into a 'backup' orbit.</text></comment> |
4,539,250 | 4,539,234 | 1 | 2 | 4,538,187 | train | <story><title>Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing</title><url>http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/hey-yahoo-youre-optimizing-the-wrong-thing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattj</author><text>I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: <a href="http://www.hilarymason.com/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hilarymason.com/about/</a></text></item><item><author>cbsmith</author><text>It's unfortunate that the person who wrote this article didn't consult with someone more informed about the online advertising world.<p>As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, I'm going to try to summarize the various ways that this article is getting it wrong.<p>* Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks.<p>* Where clicks <i>do</i> matter, major ad platforms including Yahoo throw away a LOT of clicks as fraud, and accidental clicks tend to disproportionately get thrown out along with them.<p>* In general, random clicks are considered a real PITA for major ad networks, as they confuse the heck out of ad optimization. While small players do tend to soak up that revenue, the big players really, really hate the phenomenon because it makes them far less efficient.<p>* It turns out what <i>most</i> impacts ad effectiveness online is whether people actually <i>see</i> the ad. An incredibly number of ads are just never seen by the audience. As a consequence, a good publisher will try to find locations for their ads that are highly visible. Highly visible and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, highly correlated.<p>* Most advertisers who are paying per click are very performance driven. They look at ROI, which means they look at conversion rates. When you charge an accidental click, it's almost certainly not going to convert, so in the end you look worse and they pay less for your clicks.<p>* One unfortunate bit of truth: advertisers <i>do</i> pay too much attention to clicks and CTR (click through rate). Even advertisers doing brand awareness campaigns, which are not looking for immediate response from their audience, tend to look at CTR.<p>* Yahoo has actually tried hard to establish other metrics that they should look at, like "Bounce Rate", which attempts to factor in whether visitors immediately exit after clicking. They use those metrics internally for optimizing ad performance, so accidental clicks are likely to discourage showing an ad more than encourage it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ColinWright</author><text>To be fair, it's not clear that Hilary Mason is specifically knowledgeable about on-line advertising. She is undoubtedly very knowledgeable about computer science, big data, and a number of fields in general, but it's possible her major interaction with the specifics of on-line advertising are as an advertisee, either directly or by proxy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing</title><url>http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/hey-yahoo-youre-optimizing-the-wrong-thing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattj</author><text>I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: <a href="http://www.hilarymason.com/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hilarymason.com/about/</a></text></item><item><author>cbsmith</author><text>It's unfortunate that the person who wrote this article didn't consult with someone more informed about the online advertising world.<p>As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, I'm going to try to summarize the various ways that this article is getting it wrong.<p>* Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks.<p>* Where clicks <i>do</i> matter, major ad platforms including Yahoo throw away a LOT of clicks as fraud, and accidental clicks tend to disproportionately get thrown out along with them.<p>* In general, random clicks are considered a real PITA for major ad networks, as they confuse the heck out of ad optimization. While small players do tend to soak up that revenue, the big players really, really hate the phenomenon because it makes them far less efficient.<p>* It turns out what <i>most</i> impacts ad effectiveness online is whether people actually <i>see</i> the ad. An incredibly number of ads are just never seen by the audience. As a consequence, a good publisher will try to find locations for their ads that are highly visible. Highly visible and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, highly correlated.<p>* Most advertisers who are paying per click are very performance driven. They look at ROI, which means they look at conversion rates. When you charge an accidental click, it's almost certainly not going to convert, so in the end you look worse and they pay less for your clicks.<p>* One unfortunate bit of truth: advertisers <i>do</i> pay too much attention to clicks and CTR (click through rate). Even advertisers doing brand awareness campaigns, which are not looking for immediate response from their audience, tend to look at CTR.<p>* Yahoo has actually tried hard to establish other metrics that they should look at, like "Bounce Rate", which attempts to factor in whether visitors immediately exit after clicking. They use those metrics internally for optimizing ad performance, so accidental clicks are likely to discourage showing an ad more than encourage it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>levesque</author><text>She's a data geek. How does that make her an expert about advertising?</text></comment> |
20,571,598 | 20,570,303 | 1 | 2 | 20,564,467 | train | <story><title>Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30</title><url>https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/google-unlocks-33-of-publisher-paywalls-on-july-30-this-is-what-happens-next/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hyperbovine</author><text>No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.</text></item><item><author>liability</author><text>So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide.<p>Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geofft</author><text>&gt; <i>No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.</i><p>The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I&#x27;m interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.<p>When, say, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a <i>Journal</i> subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that&#x27;s it.<p>It&#x27;s rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you&#x27;re only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I&#x27;m entirely unsurprised your business model isn&#x27;t working out.<p>Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don&#x27;t have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30</title><url>https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/google-unlocks-33-of-publisher-paywalls-on-july-30-this-is-what-happens-next/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hyperbovine</author><text>No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.</text></item><item><author>liability</author><text>So real news continues to make their content harder to read, while fake news does everything they can to spread far and wide.<p>Journalism for profit is fundamentally broken.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beatgammit</author><text>I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.<p>An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X&#x2F;month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.<p>I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.</text></comment> |
38,881,934 | 38,879,688 | 1 | 3 | 38,863,817 | train | <story><title>Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript</title><url>https://andykong.org/blog/icloudconfusion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&gt;So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem,<p>Yes.<p>I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than a Franklin a year, and most people won&#x27;t even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a Jackson a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying a Washington per month to Apple for 50GB of iCloud.<p>The amount of money I would save from managing photos myself locally isn&#x27;t worth the time spent nor the money spent on the hardware.<p>EDIT:<p>For the downvoters, consider this: If I were to manage all this myself, I would need at least three storage mediums with one being a different form factor to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup scheme. I would also need to procure arrangements for that third backup copy in the 3-2-1 scheme. And I would need to spend time managing it all.<p>That is going to cost me more than a Franklin per year. Life is short, my time is precious, and my money is ultimately expendable.</text></item><item><author>frostix</author><text>Differential backups or any sort of versioning seemed like one of the most obvious culprits (that and or total redundant storage to preserve the file) but the issue with all of this is it’s entirely opaque.<p>Ultimately you’re increasingly tethered to some service for your storage that you pay for periodically based on total storage yet you have little-to-no information how to best optimize that storage if you want to operate in a fixed cost bracket or lower storage&#x2F;cost ratio. So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem, especially now that devices are increasingly pushing everything, including storage, as a subscription service to meet my actual functional needs (that realistically could be met by local storage options if manufacturers didn’t have a vested interest in pushing me towards service based storage solutions)?<p>The modern business strategy in technology is simply hiding behind complexity. The cost is too complex for you to understand, it gives too much information away about our internals to competitors, and so on. Yet somehow these metrics are derived to assure the business is operating above cost because when the rubber meets the road it must be done, yet when the consumer wants to understand it’s suddenly too complex. The problem is that tech in many cases is growing to scales that really is too complex and business managers know this, so it’s often a valid excuse to hide behind. Conveniently that’s where they focus on investment and padding margins though.</text></item><item><author>mft_</author><text>Okay, so it could be a bug, but it is possible that iCloud is secretly storing more than one version of the file in some cases? (After all, Apple does similar things with other media files.)<p>The example given at the end is interesting:<p>&gt; So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I download it and the video is actually 48MB, and my free storage increases by ~170MB when I deleted it. Interesting!<p>This suggests that iCloud isn&#x27;t simply misrepresenting the size of the example file, as then you&#x27;d expect that deleting the 128MB file would clear ~128MB of iCloud space. Instead, the deletion clears <i>roughly</i> the space it reports (128MB) <i>plus</i> the space of the downloaded version (48MB): 128MB + 48MB = 176 MB - which might be close enough, allowing for rounding errors, as iCloud reports the free space (from the article&#x27;s example) to the nearest 10 MB.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terretta</author><text>Presidents on US currency:<p><pre><code> - $100,000: Wilson
- $1,000: Cleveland
- $500: McKinley
- $100: Franklin*
- $50: Grant
- $20: Jackson
- $10: Hamilton*
- $5: Lincoln
- $2: Jefferson
- $1: Washington
* not a president
</code></pre>
&gt; <i>I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than $100 a year, and most people won&#x27;t even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a $20 a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying $1 per month to Apple for 50GB of iCloud.</i><p>While we&#x27;re at it, iCloud+ offers these monthly storage plans now:<p><pre><code> United States:
50GB: $1
200GB: $3
2TB: $10
6TB: $30
12TB: $60
</code></pre>
See everywhere in the world here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201238" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201238</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript</title><url>https://andykong.org/blog/icloudconfusion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&gt;So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem,<p>Yes.<p>I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than a Franklin a year, and most people won&#x27;t even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a Jackson a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying a Washington per month to Apple for 50GB of iCloud.<p>The amount of money I would save from managing photos myself locally isn&#x27;t worth the time spent nor the money spent on the hardware.<p>EDIT:<p>For the downvoters, consider this: If I were to manage all this myself, I would need at least three storage mediums with one being a different form factor to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup scheme. I would also need to procure arrangements for that third backup copy in the 3-2-1 scheme. And I would need to spend time managing it all.<p>That is going to cost me more than a Franklin per year. Life is short, my time is precious, and my money is ultimately expendable.</text></item><item><author>frostix</author><text>Differential backups or any sort of versioning seemed like one of the most obvious culprits (that and or total redundant storage to preserve the file) but the issue with all of this is it’s entirely opaque.<p>Ultimately you’re increasingly tethered to some service for your storage that you pay for periodically based on total storage yet you have little-to-no information how to best optimize that storage if you want to operate in a fixed cost bracket or lower storage&#x2F;cost ratio. So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem, especially now that devices are increasingly pushing everything, including storage, as a subscription service to meet my actual functional needs (that realistically could be met by local storage options if manufacturers didn’t have a vested interest in pushing me towards service based storage solutions)?<p>The modern business strategy in technology is simply hiding behind complexity. The cost is too complex for you to understand, it gives too much information away about our internals to competitors, and so on. Yet somehow these metrics are derived to assure the business is operating above cost because when the rubber meets the road it must be done, yet when the consumer wants to understand it’s suddenly too complex. The problem is that tech in many cases is growing to scales that really is too complex and business managers know this, so it’s often a valid excuse to hide behind. Conveniently that’s where they focus on investment and padding margins though.</text></item><item><author>mft_</author><text>Okay, so it could be a bug, but it is possible that iCloud is secretly storing more than one version of the file in some cases? (After all, Apple does similar things with other media files.)<p>The example given at the end is interesting:<p>&gt; So iCloud says the video is 128MB, I download it and the video is actually 48MB, and my free storage increases by ~170MB when I deleted it. Interesting!<p>This suggests that iCloud isn&#x27;t simply misrepresenting the size of the example file, as then you&#x27;d expect that deleting the 128MB file would clear ~128MB of iCloud space. Instead, the deletion clears <i>roughly</i> the space it reports (128MB) <i>plus</i> the space of the downloaded version (48MB): 128MB + 48MB = 176 MB - which might be close enough, allowing for rounding errors, as iCloud reports the free space (from the article&#x27;s example) to the nearest 10 MB.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ebiester</author><text>Now, consider a world where you are making $42,000 a year. That&#x27;s 20 dollars an hour and a very common wage. How do they handle the same when there are so many competing Franklins for them?</text></comment> |
11,266,728 | 11,266,725 | 1 | 3 | 11,265,948 | train | <story><title>A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG</title><url>https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=50706.msg1188742</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nyandaber</author><text>Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first person view and playing like a FPS game.<p>So yeah, seeing this feels like Dungeon Keeper meets Minecraft. Which could be very interesting if executed properly, but it&#x27;s not going to be easy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agumonkey</author><text>Not abandonware it seems <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gog.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;dungeon_keeper" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gog.com&#x2F;game&#x2F;dungeon_keeper</a> (5$)</text></comment> | <story><title>A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG</title><url>https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=50706.msg1188742</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nyandaber</author><text>Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first person view and playing like a FPS game.<p>So yeah, seeing this feels like Dungeon Keeper meets Minecraft. Which could be very interesting if executed properly, but it&#x27;s not going to be easy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>Check out War for the Overworld, the unofficial successor to Dungeon Keeper. They even brought in the original narrator!</text></comment> |
1,392,850 | 1,392,891 | 1 | 2 | 1,392,775 | train | <story><title>Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit</title><url>http://thestartuptoolkit.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robfitz</author><text>Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize &#38; update your business hypotheses.<p>Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team &#38; investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them).<p>I thought Steve Blank's customer development worksheets were a good start, but it's hard to update quickly and doesn't provide an overview. The canvas you see on the app is a modification of the Business Model Generation canvas, which I re-vamped to better suit startups.<p>Hope it's handy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit</title><url>http://thestartuptoolkit.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edw519</author><text>My first thought was that this would be silly. Until I went inside and saw for myself. Very thought provoking, an exercise definitely worth my while.<p>Until I read this:<p><i>We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees. Your canvas is secured by obscurity, which is to say it's not very secure at all. Anyone with your canvas' URL may view and edit it. If and when we add a paywall, we'll make sure you can export any existing data.</i><p>Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?<p>I think you're really on the right track to something good. But until you fix this, I'll just use my own text editor to save my thoughts on my own hard drive.</text></comment> |
8,269,009 | 8,267,722 | 1 | 2 | 8,267,295 | train | <story><title>BankAPI</title><url>https://github.com/trustly/bankapi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lorddoig</author><text>What&#x27;s the motivation for this? Is it coming from inside the industry&#x2F;is it a suggestion&#x2F;fun project?<p>I&#x27;m don&#x27;t understand the purpose - it&#x27;s all about transmission, not data. Banks could sure do sure do with a standardised API, but is interbank message encryption a problem needing solved? I&#x27;ve haven&#x27;t heard anything like that.<p>The author is very sure of it&#x27;s production-readiness. If this transpires to be true, then I could easily see this spec as a good way to encrypt message-based data of all kinds. But where does this bank angle come from?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoelJacobson</author><text>Author here. That&#x27;s a good question. Please see: <a href="https://github.com/trustly/bankapi/blob/master/doc/rationale.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;trustly&#x2F;bankapi&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;doc&#x2F;rationale...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>BankAPI</title><url>https://github.com/trustly/bankapi/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lorddoig</author><text>What&#x27;s the motivation for this? Is it coming from inside the industry&#x2F;is it a suggestion&#x2F;fun project?<p>I&#x27;m don&#x27;t understand the purpose - it&#x27;s all about transmission, not data. Banks could sure do sure do with a standardised API, but is interbank message encryption a problem needing solved? I&#x27;ve haven&#x27;t heard anything like that.<p>The author is very sure of it&#x27;s production-readiness. If this transpires to be true, then I could easily see this spec as a good way to encrypt message-based data of all kinds. But where does this bank angle come from?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mnem</author><text>It appears to be from <a href="https://trustly.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trustly.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a> so perhaps they use it internally and are open sourcing it.</text></comment> |
10,678,051 | 10,676,939 | 1 | 2 | 10,676,685 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Acme-tiny, a tiny 200-line Let's Encrypt client</title><url>https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>macns</author><text>I&#x27;d love to see this paired with your <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gethttpsforfree.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gethttpsforfree.com&#x2F;</a> which was very easy and pleasant to use (loved the: <i>This website is static, so it can be saved and loaded locally. Just right-click and &quot;Save Page As..&quot;!</i> at the bottom of the page).<p>I guess this tool is what&#x27;s needed next to get the auto-renewal crontab</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Acme-tiny, a tiny 200-line Let's Encrypt client</title><url>https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diafygi</author><text>Fun fact. There&#x27;s really nothing stopping you from using a PGP&#x2F;smartcard&#x2F;HSM keypairs for the ACME account key. Would love to see someone adapt this or another client to use a yubikey or other hardware key.</text></comment> |
30,303,317 | 30,299,386 | 1 | 2 | 30,299,060 | train | <story><title>SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started</title><url>https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/snes-dev-1-getting-started</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jsd1982</author><text>I&#x27;ve developed quite a few SNES-related things for fun, mostly using Go and C++, with some 65816 ASM sprinkled in.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;alttpo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;alttpo</a> - A Link To The Past Online. Lets multiple players see and interact with one another in the same game world and synchronize their progress through the game. Exclusive to a customized fork of the bsnes emulator which provides a scripting language and PPU-integrated drawing routines to render remote player sprites. In retrospect, I consider this a dead-end architecture; redesigned in o2 project (see below).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;o2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;o2</a> - Second version of alttpo (see above) but this time targeted at SNES hardware console support (via SD2SNES flash cart USB feature) and does not require a customized emulator nor a scripting language. Trade-off here is a loss of the visual aspect (cannot see remote player sprites) due to tight hardware limitations in the amount of VRAM and limited SNES CPU cycles available. Work is in progress to gain back the remote sprite rendering as an optional add-on via the bsnes-plus WASM module support (see below). This project includes a 65816 machine code emitter library (pure Go) with support for named labels of branch targets. There is also a bare-bones headless SNES emulator library (pure Go) included for unit tests to verify the generated 65816 ASM and ROM patching mechanism.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;bsnes-plus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alttpo&#x2F;bsnes-plus</a> - A fork of bsnes-plus in development that invokes WebAssembly modules when certain general SNES events occur, e.g. `on_nmi`, `on_power`, `on_reset`, `on_frame_present`. WASM code has access to a draw-list API for drawing into the various PPU layers, e.g. extra sprites, text (with PCF font support), basic shapes. WASM code can also receive arbitrary binary messages from external applications, e.g. to update remote player positions or exchange custom sprite graphics.</text></comment> | <story><title>SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started</title><url>https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/snes-dev-1-getting-started</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>muterad_murilax</author><text>Also:<p>Part 2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-2-background-graphics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-2-background-graphi...</a><p>Part 3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-3-input" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-3-input</a><p>Part 4: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-4-nmi-and-vblank" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-4-nmi-and-vblank</a><p>Part 5: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-5-dma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-5-dma</a><p>Part 6: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-6-sprites" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.wesleyac.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;snes-dev-6-sprites</a></text></comment> |
31,931,766 | 31,931,600 | 1 | 2 | 31,929,957 | train | <story><title>Amazon bows to UAE pressure to restrict LGBT search results</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/30/amazon-bows-to-uae-pressure-to-restrict-lgbt-search-results</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyEgswuCsn</author><text>Do people agree that corporations should respect the customs and values of the local people when operating their business there?<p>If yes, then Amazon is not &quot;bowing&quot;, and it is The Guardian who is playing word games here. If not, then it would seem to imply that we are OK with western powers using their capital (instead of gunboats) to impose their ideology on other cultures in the world.<p>Now, one may argue that the customs and values of some countries are incompatible with those of the West and may even be considered &quot;backward&quot; to the point that western companies should completely withdraw from those markets because providing services to such markets equates to empowering those backward social values. That can be a fair assessment, but just remember not to blame them for &quot;banning western companies&quot; in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djohnston</author><text>My feeling is that if you&#x27;re going out of your way to promote an ideology&#x2F;cultural value domestically (Happy Pride Month!, flags everywhere, etc), then yes you need to stick to your guns and not bow to the opposite influence.<p>If you&#x27;re strictly in the business of making money, then by all means conduct your business but stfu about it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon bows to UAE pressure to restrict LGBT search results</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/30/amazon-bows-to-uae-pressure-to-restrict-lgbt-search-results</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyEgswuCsn</author><text>Do people agree that corporations should respect the customs and values of the local people when operating their business there?<p>If yes, then Amazon is not &quot;bowing&quot;, and it is The Guardian who is playing word games here. If not, then it would seem to imply that we are OK with western powers using their capital (instead of gunboats) to impose their ideology on other cultures in the world.<p>Now, one may argue that the customs and values of some countries are incompatible with those of the West and may even be considered &quot;backward&quot; to the point that western companies should completely withdraw from those markets because providing services to such markets equates to empowering those backward social values. That can be a fair assessment, but just remember not to blame them for &quot;banning western companies&quot; in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>remember not to blame them for &quot;banning western companies&quot; in the future</i><p>American companies are banned from paying foreign bribes. They’re not given a free pass with suporting genocide or terrorism, regardless of where it happens, even if that’s the law or custom somewhere else.<p>If we place domestic profits over sex trafficking or death penalties for gay people, so long as it’s there not here, then fine, let’s live with that sociopathy. It’s an abysmal moral space to occupy, but I also can’t argue with putting food on one’s table.</text></comment> |
5,617,871 | 5,617,652 | 1 | 2 | 5,617,423 | train | <story><title>Elixir, a functional metaprogramming-aware language built on the Erlang VM</title><url>http://elixir-lang.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colanderman</author><text>1) Where is the language documentation? The "Docs" section only seems to address the libraries. Libraries are uninteresting if you're designing a new language.<p>2) How does Elixir address the problems that Javascript-style metaprogramming (i.e. first-class definitions) cause for automatic program analysis? Erlang has some great analysis tools (e.g. Dialyzer) precisely because it's simple.<p>3) How is Elixir's first-class definition approach more useful than multi-stage programming (such as MetaOCaml: <a href="http://www.metaocaml.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.metaocaml.org/</a>), principled syntax extension (such as CamlP4: <a href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/camlp4/" rel="nofollow">http://pauillac.inria.fr/camlp4/</a>), or second-class higher-order modules (such as OCaml's functors), each of which are inherently more amenable to automatic analysis?<p>4) Almost every "old" computer language has slowly moved <i>away</i> from unprincipled metaprogramming precisely because it's difficult to reason about, for both humans and computers. (C, JavaScript, and Python, to name a few, all have unprincipled metaprogramming facilities, which have been, over time, relegated to specific use patterns to maintain coder sanity.) What do we hope to gain from a new language whose <i>raison d'être</i> is based on this feature?<p>(P.S. All these points seem to apply equally well to Joe Armstrong's "erl2".)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>&#62; 4) Almost every "old" computer language has slowly moved away from unprincipled metaprogramming precisely because it's difficult to reason about, for both humans and computers. (C, JavaScript, and Python, to name a few, all have unprincipled metaprogramming facilities, which have been, over time, relegated to specific use patterns to maintain coder sanity.) What do we hope to gain from a new language whose raison d'être is based on this feature?<p>This complaint makes little sense, because macros are expanded entirely at compile-time. Reasoning about a macro is no harder than reasoning about a higher-order function: you reason about the macro function (which is a simple transformation on some tree data structure), and the generated function. Because a macro is always expanded at compile-time, you can always expand it and inspect the generated function.<p>I wouldn't use Javascript and Python as examples here--those languages, suffering from their lack of meta-programming, instead encourage heinous things like monkey-patching and runtime introspection, which are insanely difficult to reason about.<p>Compare: what I might do in Common Lisp by writing a set of macros (and checking the expansions--just a hotkey away in my IDE) I'd do in Python by adding fields and methods to objects at runtime.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elixir, a functional metaprogramming-aware language built on the Erlang VM</title><url>http://elixir-lang.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colanderman</author><text>1) Where is the language documentation? The "Docs" section only seems to address the libraries. Libraries are uninteresting if you're designing a new language.<p>2) How does Elixir address the problems that Javascript-style metaprogramming (i.e. first-class definitions) cause for automatic program analysis? Erlang has some great analysis tools (e.g. Dialyzer) precisely because it's simple.<p>3) How is Elixir's first-class definition approach more useful than multi-stage programming (such as MetaOCaml: <a href="http://www.metaocaml.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.metaocaml.org/</a>), principled syntax extension (such as CamlP4: <a href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/camlp4/" rel="nofollow">http://pauillac.inria.fr/camlp4/</a>), or second-class higher-order modules (such as OCaml's functors), each of which are inherently more amenable to automatic analysis?<p>4) Almost every "old" computer language has slowly moved <i>away</i> from unprincipled metaprogramming precisely because it's difficult to reason about, for both humans and computers. (C, JavaScript, and Python, to name a few, all have unprincipled metaprogramming facilities, which have been, over time, relegated to specific use patterns to maintain coder sanity.) What do we hope to gain from a new language whose <i>raison d'être</i> is based on this feature?<p>(P.S. All these points seem to apply equally well to Joe Armstrong's "erl2".)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeremyjh</author><text>1) The language introduction is found under the Getting Started link: <a href="http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html" rel="nofollow">http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html</a><p>2) Dialyzer works fine on Elixir beam files. You can specify type &#38; spec attributes just like in Erlang.<p>If macros worry you unduly, then Elixir is not for you. I personally prefer to use macros than type lots of boilerplate code, but yes there are some downsides.<p>edit: Actually I should have said reading and typing - reading boilerplate is much worse than writing it. Judicious use of macros can clarify intent for someone reading the code.</text></comment> |
25,342,519 | 25,342,433 | 1 | 2 | 25,330,223 | train | <story><title>If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail</title><url>https://pathelland.substack.com/p/if-all-you-have-is-a-database-everything</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Glyptodon</author><text>I think<p>&gt; &quot;Isolate applications. Keep different applications away from other applications’ tables.&quot;<p>is only good advice if the tables are application specific data and you don&#x27;t do microservices in that stupid braindead way that makes it so that everything from the admin panel to data visualization are their own &quot;applications&quot; with their own databases and doing things that would be even the simplest of queries becomes a project in writing what are effectively bad performance joins via random http APIs. IE have a data model and understand where the most painless boundaries are, don&#x27;t throw up dozens of DBs for the hell of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JMTQp8lwXL</author><text>&gt; doing things that would be even the simplest of queries becomes a project in writing what are effectively bad performance joins via random http APIs<p>In some ways, is GraphQL trying to slap a fresh coat of paint on what is otherwise is a bad problem under the hood? At my employer, we&#x27;re trying to adopt it, but we&#x27;ve never addressed the underlying performance issues of the microservices, and now the slowness is quite apparent with the GraphQL wrapper tier.<p>This isn&#x27;t a diss to GraphQL. The queries are awesome to write. The developer experience of writing &#x2F; being the client of a GraphQL server is extremely excellent. But I feel I might not be alone in a journey that is playing out to be a mediocre implementation because we are avoiding the core problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail</title><url>https://pathelland.substack.com/p/if-all-you-have-is-a-database-everything</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Glyptodon</author><text>I think<p>&gt; &quot;Isolate applications. Keep different applications away from other applications’ tables.&quot;<p>is only good advice if the tables are application specific data and you don&#x27;t do microservices in that stupid braindead way that makes it so that everything from the admin panel to data visualization are their own &quot;applications&quot; with their own databases and doing things that would be even the simplest of queries becomes a project in writing what are effectively bad performance joins via random http APIs. IE have a data model and understand where the most painless boundaries are, don&#x27;t throw up dozens of DBs for the hell of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bpodgursky</author><text>&gt; even the simplest of queries becomes a project in writing what are effectively bad performance joins via random http APIs<p>Don&#x27;t forget the part where the queries are impossible to test, because you can&#x27;t spin up real instances of all 15 APIs in a test environment, so all the HTTP calls are mocked and the responses are meaningless!</text></comment> |
29,042,486 | 29,042,561 | 1 | 2 | 29,038,022 | train | <story><title>Meta</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2021/meta/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>As much as I am <i>not</i> a FB fan, I give Zucc credit for dedicating an entire keynote to his vision of the future. What are all the other tech companies&#x27; visions for the future? Who knows! They never talk about the future. Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it&#x27;s probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. What&#x27;s Amazon&#x27;s vision of the future? Continue N% YoY growth for online shopping and cloud...forever. Google&#x27;s? Ads on moar surfaces...forever?<p>Zucc said this is our future vision for end users, here&#x27;s what and why. Whether or not you like the idea or company, at least he stuck his neck out and articulated it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dangoor</author><text>&gt; Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it&#x27;s probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever.<p>This is just because Apple never <i>talks</i> about future things, but they certainly have a picture internally. Plenty of reporting supports the existence of AI&#x2F;VR glasses of some sort and a car of some sort being designed within Apple.</text></comment> | <story><title>Meta</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2021/meta/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>As much as I am <i>not</i> a FB fan, I give Zucc credit for dedicating an entire keynote to his vision of the future. What are all the other tech companies&#x27; visions for the future? Who knows! They never talk about the future. Apple almost never talks about anything more than a month away. Their vision of the future? Looks like it&#x27;s probably: a brand new phone, similar to and released precisely one year after the previous one... forever and ever. What&#x27;s Amazon&#x27;s vision of the future? Continue N% YoY growth for online shopping and cloud...forever. Google&#x27;s? Ads on moar surfaces...forever?<p>Zucc said this is our future vision for end users, here&#x27;s what and why. Whether or not you like the idea or company, at least he stuck his neck out and articulated it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>&gt; <i>What are all the other tech companies&#x27; visions for the future?</i><p>I can&#x27;t say that I care at all about what trillion dollar companies&#x27; visions of the future are.</text></comment> |
3,566,964 | 3,566,960 | 1 | 2 | 3,566,528 | train | <story><title>Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?</title><url>http://finchblogs.com/2012/02/07/rich-dad-poor-dad-review/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zavulon</author><text>I disagree.. the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success, NOT being an employee and staying in the rat race. While it may be common sense to someone who's been in business for a while, or read a lot of similar literature, it's far from obvious to most people.<p>I'm not ashamed to say Rich Dad Poor Dad has been one of the most influential books I've read in my life. At 20, I had very little idea about business - I thought my path was clear: graduate with a degree, get a job, work up corporate ladder, etc. Reading this book was completely mind-blowing and eye-opening.<p>Yes, most of the advice is trivial, as I look at it now.. But there's certainly great value in the book - business vs "rat race", building assets vs liabilities, learning to sell, active vs passive income, what you can't afford your business can, value of financial literacy, and much more. But most importantly this: you can very rarely get rich working for someone else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huxley</author><text>"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success"<p>No, it may be one of the best paths to wealth and independence --unless you're born into wealth already -- but it's not necessarily a path to success.<p>My parents worked themselves to the bone in business, were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks. It didn't give them one bit of gratification.<p>My mother went back to university and got into not-for-profit microcredit and was reborn as a happy person.<p>My dad spent time with his kids and neighbours, when he passed away he had three times as many people come to the funeral as we had space for.<p>Entrepreneurship has a lot going for it, but it is very hard and given the barriers that can be thrown in your face, it can be just another rat-race for lots of people.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?</title><url>http://finchblogs.com/2012/02/07/rich-dad-poor-dad-review/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zavulon</author><text>I disagree.. the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success, NOT being an employee and staying in the rat race. While it may be common sense to someone who's been in business for a while, or read a lot of similar literature, it's far from obvious to most people.<p>I'm not ashamed to say Rich Dad Poor Dad has been one of the most influential books I've read in my life. At 20, I had very little idea about business - I thought my path was clear: graduate with a degree, get a job, work up corporate ladder, etc. Reading this book was completely mind-blowing and eye-opening.<p>Yes, most of the advice is trivial, as I look at it now.. But there's certainly great value in the book - business vs "rat race", building assets vs liabilities, learning to sell, active vs passive income, what you can't afford your business can, value of financial literacy, and much more. But most importantly this: you can very rarely get rich working for someone else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>Sounds more like inspiration and self-help than personal finance. You could point to any number of career paths and say, "This is a well-established route to wealth, and if you work very very hard and manage your money well, you can become wealthy this way." For example, there are high-paying specialties in law and medicine where the rat race really does lead to wealth. You have to outcompete 95% of the people in your field to become wealthy, but the same thing is true of entrepreneurship.</text></comment> |
7,627,578 | 7,627,400 | 1 | 2 | 7,627,283 | train | <story><title>The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>According to the graphs, the US middle class is actually still doing pretty good. I was expecting it to do a lot worse than that of many European countries, but there&#x27;s only a few countries that have overtaken the US middle class, and then just barely.<p>Puts all those articles about the weak US middle class in perspective.<p>The real travesty is at the bottom. The worst 10% are actually doing worse now than 30 years ago. The few groups above that didn&#x27;t benefit at all from the enormous economic growth of the past decades. The extreme growth of the wealthiest 10% is simply outrageous by comparison. But the middle class isn&#x27;t doing quite as badly as I expected.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viggity</author><text>&gt; The extreme growth of the wealthiest 10% is simply outrageous by comparison<p>Is the bottom decile worse off <i>because</i> the top decile is better off? I don&#x27;t think so, I think everyone is better off with Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin making tons of money. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I want to see a world where everyone can support themselves and provide for their families. I just don&#x27;t think having super rich people prevents that from happening, I think it is just the opposite. The Gates Foundation is a million times more effective than any gang of UN Bureaucrats.</text></comment> | <story><title>The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>According to the graphs, the US middle class is actually still doing pretty good. I was expecting it to do a lot worse than that of many European countries, but there&#x27;s only a few countries that have overtaken the US middle class, and then just barely.<p>Puts all those articles about the weak US middle class in perspective.<p>The real travesty is at the bottom. The worst 10% are actually doing worse now than 30 years ago. The few groups above that didn&#x27;t benefit at all from the enormous economic growth of the past decades. The extreme growth of the wealthiest 10% is simply outrageous by comparison. But the middle class isn&#x27;t doing quite as badly as I expected.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Simply tying some European countries isn&#x27;t really that great a performance when the U.S. is so much more productive overall. For example, our PPP GDP per capita is 20-25% higher than Canada&#x27;s. So if Canada edges us out in terms of median income, even just barely, that&#x27;s not a great showing.</text></comment> |
37,472,386 | 37,472,277 | 1 | 2 | 37,470,318 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?</title><text>I&#x27;ve been a software developer for almost 30 years.
I remember using VB back in the 90&#x27;s and I was thinking about it the other day and it dawned on me; despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we&#x27;ve gone backwards in a big way.<p>Now, I&#x27;m no fan of Microsoft products but, I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic. Yet I can&#x27;t help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it? Moreover, why hasn&#x27;t someone come out with a solid replacement?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwheeler</author><text>Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes:<p>* &quot;Visual .NET&quot; (aka &quot;Visual Fred&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;V&#x2F;Visual-Fred.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;V&#x2F;Visual-Fred.html</a> ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly <i>also</i> called Visual Basic. I don&#x27;t think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (USD) to rewrite code just to keep the same functionality. Before that time, many thought that Visual Basic&#x27;s wide use gave it a kind of &quot;herd immunity&quot;. I don&#x27;t have numbers with me, but I remember that years later that a study found that some were sticking to the original Visual Basic (even though it was no longer supported), a few had moved to Visual .NET, and many other had abandoned Visual Basic entirely (some to C#, others beyond). In short, the Visual Basic community was split into multiple communities, and anyone using Visual Basic would have to worry about either lack of support or yet another harmful change.<p>* The rise of the web and of platforms other than Windows (including Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux). Visual Basic is fine when you send files via sneakernet to another Windows user. Now people want to access through their web browser, smartphone, etc. If you have a website, anything can access it (as long as they have the permissions), and you don&#x27;t have to worry about synchronizing data changes the way you do if people make changes on their local device. Most of the simple &quot;fill in a form&quot; kinds of applications that Visual Basic was used for are more sensibly web applications (server side or client side).<p>Visual Basic is still used. And yes, I think there could be better tools for developing software. But as best as I recall, that&#x27;s how we ended up here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madrox</author><text>As someone who was writing Visual Basic.NET back when it came out, there was no upside to it over writing in C#. VB&#x27;s original sweet spot was for writing small scripts and apps in Windows, and it was the only language available. When the .NET line came out, you could do the same things in whichever language you wanted. When new tasks came in, I started defaulting to C# for that reason. I don&#x27;t think anyone actually prefers VB syntax. C# has a pretty robust community around it now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?</title><text>I&#x27;ve been a software developer for almost 30 years.
I remember using VB back in the 90&#x27;s and I was thinking about it the other day and it dawned on me; despite all the advances in technology since then, nothing I have found compares to that development experience today. I would go so far as to say we&#x27;ve gone backwards in a big way.<p>Now, I&#x27;m no fan of Microsoft products but, I have yet to find a tool that can allow me to be as productive in so short a time as Visual Basic. Yet I can&#x27;t help wondering what problems it had that caused them to abandon it? Moreover, why hasn&#x27;t someone come out with a solid replacement?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dwheeler</author><text>Visual Basic (both of them) still exist, but their use has dropped dramatically through some big changes:<p>* &quot;Visual .NET&quot; (aka &quot;Visual Fred&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;V&#x2F;Visual-Fred.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catb.org&#x2F;jargon&#x2F;html&#x2F;V&#x2F;Visual-Fred.html</a> ) was released by Microsoft. This was an incompatible language confusingly <i>also</i> called Visual Basic. I don&#x27;t think Microsoft realized how angry this made developers and businesses, who were being asked to spend hundreds of billions of dollars (USD) to rewrite code just to keep the same functionality. Before that time, many thought that Visual Basic&#x27;s wide use gave it a kind of &quot;herd immunity&quot;. I don&#x27;t have numbers with me, but I remember that years later that a study found that some were sticking to the original Visual Basic (even though it was no longer supported), a few had moved to Visual .NET, and many other had abandoned Visual Basic entirely (some to C#, others beyond). In short, the Visual Basic community was split into multiple communities, and anyone using Visual Basic would have to worry about either lack of support or yet another harmful change.<p>* The rise of the web and of platforms other than Windows (including Android, iOS, MacOS, Linux). Visual Basic is fine when you send files via sneakernet to another Windows user. Now people want to access through their web browser, smartphone, etc. If you have a website, anything can access it (as long as they have the permissions), and you don&#x27;t have to worry about synchronizing data changes the way you do if people make changes on their local device. Most of the simple &quot;fill in a form&quot; kinds of applications that Visual Basic was used for are more sensibly web applications (server side or client side).<p>Visual Basic is still used. And yes, I think there could be better tools for developing software. But as best as I recall, that&#x27;s how we ended up here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jzb</author><text>Visual Basic is one of the best arguments for open source and community ownership in the history of computing, IMO. Microsoft&#x27;s decision to tank it was hugely painful for companies that had made major investments in it -- no company should make that kind of investment in a proprietary platform that can be killed off by a single company and not forked and maintained by others.</text></comment> |
25,516,770 | 25,515,349 | 1 | 3 | 25,513,713 | train | <story><title>Things You're Allowed to Do</title><url>https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k__</author><text>My findings:<p>Sleep until noon every day.<p>Work only as much as you need.<p>Work from home, or anywhere else for that matter.<p>Have multiple romantic partners in parallel.<p>Have platonic friends of the opposite sex.<p>Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)<p>Study 10 years.<p>Make your own iced tea in the fridge.<p>Buy food in bulk.<p>Drink tap water.<p>Create your own dishes by mixing ingredients.<p>Cook&#x2F;fry&#x2F;bake food you would usually eat raw.<p>Eat food raw that you would usually cook&#x2F;fry&#x2F;bake.<p>Sleep everywhere in your home.<p>Learn languages, instruments, or sports after you turned 30.<p>Drink no alcohol at a party and still have fun.<p>Start&#x2F;stop smoking and drinking after 30.<p>Found a company like you would buy a game console.<p>Take no VC money.<p>Take muliple years and tries to create a good product.<p>Write music&#x2F;give concerts for yourself or your friends only.<p>Don&#x27;t wear shoes outside.<p>Don&#x27;t have an opinion on a topic.<p>Overall:<p>Don&#x27;t play pre-defined games in your life, but ask if they make you happy. You only have one life, make the most out of it.<p>Sometimes you have to play by some rules made up by other people to get into a better place, but look at them closely, it could very well be that they are more open to interpretation than they first seem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paganel</author><text>&gt; Have multiple romantic partners in parallel.<p>Do those &quot;multiple romantic partners&quot; know about each other? If the answer is &quot;no&quot; then yours is a very jerky suggestion (I know &quot;jerky&quot; is a harsh word for this forum, but I can&#x27;t come up with anything else to describe this).</text></comment> | <story><title>Things You're Allowed to Do</title><url>https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k__</author><text>My findings:<p>Sleep until noon every day.<p>Work only as much as you need.<p>Work from home, or anywhere else for that matter.<p>Have multiple romantic partners in parallel.<p>Have platonic friends of the opposite sex.<p>Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)<p>Study 10 years.<p>Make your own iced tea in the fridge.<p>Buy food in bulk.<p>Drink tap water.<p>Create your own dishes by mixing ingredients.<p>Cook&#x2F;fry&#x2F;bake food you would usually eat raw.<p>Eat food raw that you would usually cook&#x2F;fry&#x2F;bake.<p>Sleep everywhere in your home.<p>Learn languages, instruments, or sports after you turned 30.<p>Drink no alcohol at a party and still have fun.<p>Start&#x2F;stop smoking and drinking after 30.<p>Found a company like you would buy a game console.<p>Take no VC money.<p>Take muliple years and tries to create a good product.<p>Write music&#x2F;give concerts for yourself or your friends only.<p>Don&#x27;t wear shoes outside.<p>Don&#x27;t have an opinion on a topic.<p>Overall:<p>Don&#x27;t play pre-defined games in your life, but ask if they make you happy. You only have one life, make the most out of it.<p>Sometimes you have to play by some rules made up by other people to get into a better place, but look at them closely, it could very well be that they are more open to interpretation than they first seem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jtolmar</author><text>Having done a large chunk of this myself, I feel like I have to ask about this one:<p>&gt; Share multiple flats with multiple people (i.e. live in multiple places, but cheap)<p>I&#x27;ve never even heard of people doing this. How does it work? What&#x27;s it like? It sounds fascinating, and like something I should&#x27;ve tried in my 20s.</text></comment> |
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