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17,645,197 | 17,645,049 | 1 | 3 | 17,644,792 | train | <story><title>Goodreads offloads DynamoDB tables to S3 and queries them with Athena</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-goodreads-offloads-amazon-dynamodb-tables-to-amazon-s3-and-queries-them-using-amazon-athena/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kaycebasques</author><text>I use Goodreads as my main book tracker and reviewer. My impression is that Amazon bought it for whatever reason, and then ignored it. It seems like there&#x27;s so much more potential to a social community around books than what Goodreads offers. The UI also never fails to disappoint. One of the core user features, searching for books, has all sorts of weird quirks. I&#x27;ll use a very specific query that should guarantee a hit, and nothing comes up. Or, the book that I want will come up for a second, and right as I&#x27;m going to select it, the results completely change and the book I want has vanished.</text></comment> | <story><title>Goodreads offloads DynamoDB tables to S3 and queries them with Athena</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-goodreads-offloads-amazon-dynamodb-tables-to-amazon-s3-and-queries-them-using-amazon-athena/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>polskibus</author><text>Weren&#x27;t Goodreads bought by Amazon a couple of years ago? If so, they might&#x27;ve been pushed to do the move (to microservices, s3, etc) to comply with corporate guidelines&#x2F;policy not because there wasn&#x27;t a better&#x2F;more efficient way to scale.</text></comment> |
22,710,664 | 22,710,669 | 1 | 2 | 22,709,183 | train | <story><title>Show HN: RxResume – A free and open-source resume builder</title><url>https://rx-resume.web.app</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ducaale</author><text>There is also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;resumake.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;resumake.io&#x2F;</a> which generates resume as a latex document. Github repo <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saadq&#x2F;resumake.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saadq&#x2F;resumake.io</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: RxResume – A free and open-source resume builder</title><url>https://rx-resume.web.app</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edent</author><text>This is a great app! But it is so weird seeing photos on a CV. In the UK it is almost totally unheard of. And most large organisations will have an HR department which would blank them out.<p>Your CV is for judging your work history and experience. What can I learn from a photo that I would legally be able to take a decision about?</text></comment> |
30,789,002 | 30,783,836 | 1 | 3 | 30,782,994 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?</title><text>I&#x27;m approaching my 30s, and I thought I could draw on the wisdom and experience of the HN community, particularly those of you who are 40+ years old.<p>Thanks.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>scionthefly</author><text>In your 30s, if you are waiting to have kids for various reasons, you really need to stop delaying. Your probability of successfully having kids goes down every year, and by your early 40s your options for medical help if you have infertility stop being available because even those interventions lose effectiveness.<p>If you want kids, just have the kids. You&#x27;re not going to care that you were being responsible and waiting when you find out waiting means you never get to have them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agent008t</author><text>&quot;If you want kids, just have the kids&quot; sounds very irresponsible - a good way to create a lot of suffering. It is not a decision you can reverse. You should give it a lot more thought than to choosing your career, where&#x2F;how you live, or to getting a pet. It is shocking that so often it is the opposite, and people &#x27;yolo&#x27; into this decision. If anything, you should err on the side of not having children, unless you are very, very sure:<p>1. You will still want to be spending overwhelming majority of your time on children in 1, 2, 5, 10 years at least and will be enjoying it.<p>2. You are in a position to be consistently spending enough time and effort and other resources on them.<p>3. You are very confident you will be able to be a good parent, and that you are bringing new life into a good environment that both you and them will enjoy.<p>You need to be in a very good, stable place both physically and mentally for sure before you even consider it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What do you wish you had done/known in your 30s?</title><text>I&#x27;m approaching my 30s, and I thought I could draw on the wisdom and experience of the HN community, particularly those of you who are 40+ years old.<p>Thanks.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>scionthefly</author><text>In your 30s, if you are waiting to have kids for various reasons, you really need to stop delaying. Your probability of successfully having kids goes down every year, and by your early 40s your options for medical help if you have infertility stop being available because even those interventions lose effectiveness.<p>If you want kids, just have the kids. You&#x27;re not going to care that you were being responsible and waiting when you find out waiting means you never get to have them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dartdartdart</author><text>Waiting is not bad, most child abuse cases come from people who shouldn&#x27;t have had kids in the first place. The worst case if you wait is that you&#x27;ll have to adopt kids, which is arguably way more humane than introducing another hungry soul into the world.</text></comment> |
28,133,565 | 28,133,490 | 1 | 3 | 28,132,873 | train | <story><title>U.S. Kids Are Getting Nearly 70% of Their Calories from 'Ultra-Processed' Foods</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/u-s-kids-are-now-getting-nearly-70-of-their-calories-1847457103</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>I&#x27;m not aware of any food that would be considered &quot;ultra-processed&quot; yet known to be good for people</i><p>What does &quot;ultra processed&quot; mean? Cheese, bread, olive oil and most vegetables require processing to be made or nutritionally useful. Freeze-dried vegetables are quite processed and quite good for you.</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>&gt; Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn&#x27;t make the thing bad for you.<p>I have to admit though, I&#x27;m not aware of any <i>food</i> that would be considered &quot;ultra-processed&quot; yet known to be good for people.</text></item><item><author>dolni</author><text>The complete lack of rigor and the use of shock-headlines around &quot;ultra-processed&quot; foods drives me nuts. It conveys very little useful information.<p>Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn&#x27;t make the thing bad for you.<p>It shouldn&#x27;t come as a surprise to anybody that constantly horking down Mountain Dew, Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos isn&#x27;t good for you. We all know this, we don&#x27;t need a headline for it.<p>Give me some useful information. What are reasonable thresholds for these junk foods? How about for specific ingredients?<p>Ranting and raving out of the way, do yourself a favor and skip to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization classification document [1] linked in the article. It actually answers some of the questions I posed.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>artimaeis</author><text>Ultra processed is defined by the FAO (The UN Food and Agriculture Organization) thusly:<p>&gt; Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials.<p>Source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf</a><p>I believe this is the widest standard used to define &quot;ultra-processed&quot;, though there are more sentences and paragraphs in that doc explaining the definition more thoroughly.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Kids Are Getting Nearly 70% of Their Calories from 'Ultra-Processed' Foods</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/u-s-kids-are-now-getting-nearly-70-of-their-calories-1847457103</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>I&#x27;m not aware of any food that would be considered &quot;ultra-processed&quot; yet known to be good for people</i><p>What does &quot;ultra processed&quot; mean? Cheese, bread, olive oil and most vegetables require processing to be made or nutritionally useful. Freeze-dried vegetables are quite processed and quite good for you.</text></item><item><author>dataflow</author><text>&gt; Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn&#x27;t make the thing bad for you.<p>I have to admit though, I&#x27;m not aware of any <i>food</i> that would be considered &quot;ultra-processed&quot; yet known to be good for people.</text></item><item><author>dolni</author><text>The complete lack of rigor and the use of shock-headlines around &quot;ultra-processed&quot; foods drives me nuts. It conveys very little useful information.<p>Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn&#x27;t make the thing bad for you.<p>It shouldn&#x27;t come as a surprise to anybody that constantly horking down Mountain Dew, Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos isn&#x27;t good for you. We all know this, we don&#x27;t need a headline for it.<p>Give me some useful information. What are reasonable thresholds for these junk foods? How about for specific ingredients?<p>Ranting and raving out of the way, do yourself a favor and skip to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization classification document [1] linked in the article. It actually answers some of the questions I posed.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fao.org&#x2F;3&#x2F;ca5644en&#x2F;ca5644en.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endisneigh</author><text>One definition of processed would be the amount of &quot;steps&quot; required to take from the base ingredient.<p>So if you make falafel for example, it&#x27;s only two steps removed from chickpeas, as it&#x27;s just mildly grinded and fried. That being said it&#x27;s an exercise to the reader in determining if each &quot;step&quot; is equally bad. In general steps involving the destruction or heating of the food are worse than the &quot;separation&quot; (e.g. peeling or cutting vs frying or blending).</text></comment> |
9,967,420 | 9,967,404 | 1 | 3 | 9,966,030 | train | <story><title>Facebook Ordered by Hamburg Regulator to Allow Pseudonyms</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-28/facebook-ordered-by-hamburg-regulator-to-allow-pseudonyms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abluecloud</author><text>How is that possible for them to know your real age, logically? (I don&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re lying, but only you can work out the link with other services and facebook that might be leaking this information).</text></item><item><author>nxb</author><text>Facebook does the same with birthdays. I input my age as 90 when creating my account. They changed it to my real birthday somehow.<p>AND then they expose it publicly to anyone who looks up my profile, even when they aren&#x27;t my friends.<p>AND this is all after me having disabled the &quot;show birthday on timeline&quot; and enabling every other privacy setting there was.<p>If there&#x27;s one company using AI and data collection for evil, it&#x27;s Facebook. Not to mention the years of silently disabling previously set privacy settings without getting the user&#x27;s permission - e.g. the &quot;show profile in search&quot;.<p>Insane. Facebook should be slammed hard by the courts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m12k</author><text>Most likely, a number of nxb&#x27;s friends have Facebook integrated with the contacts list on their smartphone, and have nxb&#x27;s birthday associated with their contact details there. Another option is if nxb&#x27;s Facebook account has been connected to their Skype account (though from their FB-skeptic stance I find it unlikely they would make such a connection in the first place).</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook Ordered by Hamburg Regulator to Allow Pseudonyms</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-28/facebook-ordered-by-hamburg-regulator-to-allow-pseudonyms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abluecloud</author><text>How is that possible for them to know your real age, logically? (I don&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re lying, but only you can work out the link with other services and facebook that might be leaking this information).</text></item><item><author>nxb</author><text>Facebook does the same with birthdays. I input my age as 90 when creating my account. They changed it to my real birthday somehow.<p>AND then they expose it publicly to anyone who looks up my profile, even when they aren&#x27;t my friends.<p>AND this is all after me having disabled the &quot;show birthday on timeline&quot; and enabling every other privacy setting there was.<p>If there&#x27;s one company using AI and data collection for evil, it&#x27;s Facebook. Not to mention the years of silently disabling previously set privacy settings without getting the user&#x27;s permission - e.g. the &quot;show profile in search&quot;.<p>Insane. Facebook should be slammed hard by the courts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smoe</author><text>The easiest way to do it would be if one or more of your friends have your actual birthday stored in their contact list which the facebook app has access to (I think, haven&#x27;t been using fb in quite a while).</text></comment> |
34,371,216 | 34,371,226 | 1 | 3 | 34,367,905 | train | <story><title>Endemic pathogens are causing psychiatric illnesses and shortening lives</title><url>https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2devnull</author><text>“the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence”<p>Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I’m not trying to troll by asking that question. I legitimately feel, as a patient of a large HMO, that the doctors I interact with aren’t very bright, making frequent mistakes about stuff they could google as quickly as they give out wrong information, but instead confidently insist upon something they’re misremembering or have never learned correctly in the first place. It feels like the profession has been optimizing for the wrong things: quick recall of a breadth of information rather than a scientific orientation towards the work. Perhaps I’m just seeing downstream effects of the reform of health economics in the last decade. Perhaps it’s elite overproduction. In any case reading the featured article, I’m just not at all optimistic about current medical practices experiencing any sort of kuhnian paradigm shift. They can’t even get the basics right, and seem prone to extreme group think bordering on religiosity.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>Covid has been found in the brains and organs of Long Covid sufferers at autopsy while not being found in their blood in PCR testing. Bhupesh Prusty recently found in an autopsy of 4 ME&#x2F;CFS sufferers they had HHV-6 in their brain and spine and 3 of the 4 also had EBV too where 28 controls did not. The DOD just last year also linked Multiple Sclerosis to EBV. There is growing evidence that many viruses stick with us in cells, are not found in the blood and can lead to severe chronic illnesses later in life.<p>A lot of microbiome research is leading to particular bacteria in or missing from the gut being correlated with various diseases like diabetes and obesity and almost all chronic diseases have a corresponding microbiome adjustment. We don&#x27;t know yet know if there is a cause here or its just correlated but its a potential diagnostic that shows long before more serious symptoms and could potentially be used diagnostically one day. Or it might be these shifts are causal and we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably.<p>The fundamental idea is becoming mainstream in research with significant labs working on this for Long Covid, ME&#x2F;CFS as well as EDS across the globe. Its not a fringe idea in research looking at long neglected diseases and the more they look the more they find evidence for it. Its not something the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence for the fundamental idea of ongoing infections causing increasing problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>I don’t think they’re getting stupider. They’re what they’ve always been…a source of conventional wisdom. When conventional wisdom said bloodletting was good for health, they bled their patients. When mercury was considered a medicine, they administered it. When hacking off limbs was considered the best way to fight infections, their toolkit included bone saws. When electroshock therapy was considered a treatment for mental illness, they shocked the hell out of their patients. I’m sure that one day we’ll look at chemotherapy and radiation as barbaric practices representative of our ignorance of how easy it is to deal with cancer.<p>Scientists&#x2F;researchers advance the state of our medical knowledge and doctors, over subsequent generations, absorb what they find and practices slowly change. But there’s always a lag. What we need to get past is the notion that doctors are some font of truth when it comes to medical information. They are, largely, a snapshot of what was conventionally believed at the time they graduated med school. We don’t have a system that effectively updates their knowledge or keeps them in the loop for cutting-edge research. They do learn a set of first principles that can help them reason about novel situations better than a lay person, but only if the right answer is one that follows from those principles as opposed to being counterintuitive.<p>It’s the nature of being a practitioner rather than a researcher.</text></comment> | <story><title>Endemic pathogens are causing psychiatric illnesses and shortening lives</title><url>https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>2devnull</author><text>“the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence”<p>Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I’m not trying to troll by asking that question. I legitimately feel, as a patient of a large HMO, that the doctors I interact with aren’t very bright, making frequent mistakes about stuff they could google as quickly as they give out wrong information, but instead confidently insist upon something they’re misremembering or have never learned correctly in the first place. It feels like the profession has been optimizing for the wrong things: quick recall of a breadth of information rather than a scientific orientation towards the work. Perhaps I’m just seeing downstream effects of the reform of health economics in the last decade. Perhaps it’s elite overproduction. In any case reading the featured article, I’m just not at all optimistic about current medical practices experiencing any sort of kuhnian paradigm shift. They can’t even get the basics right, and seem prone to extreme group think bordering on religiosity.</text></item><item><author>PaulKeeble</author><text>Covid has been found in the brains and organs of Long Covid sufferers at autopsy while not being found in their blood in PCR testing. Bhupesh Prusty recently found in an autopsy of 4 ME&#x2F;CFS sufferers they had HHV-6 in their brain and spine and 3 of the 4 also had EBV too where 28 controls did not. The DOD just last year also linked Multiple Sclerosis to EBV. There is growing evidence that many viruses stick with us in cells, are not found in the blood and can lead to severe chronic illnesses later in life.<p>A lot of microbiome research is leading to particular bacteria in or missing from the gut being correlated with various diseases like diabetes and obesity and almost all chronic diseases have a corresponding microbiome adjustment. We don&#x27;t know yet know if there is a cause here or its just correlated but its a potential diagnostic that shows long before more serious symptoms and could potentially be used diagnostically one day. Or it might be these shifts are causal and we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably.<p>The fundamental idea is becoming mainstream in research with significant labs working on this for Long Covid, ME&#x2F;CFS as well as EDS across the globe. Its not a fringe idea in research looking at long neglected diseases and the more they look the more they find evidence for it. Its not something the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence for the fundamental idea of ongoing infections causing increasing problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dec0dedab0de</author><text><i>Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider?</i><p>I think patients are getting smarter, and conditions for doctors are worse causing some intelligent people to choose different fields. That said, I recently went through a major illness and interacted with many medical professionals. My first hand experience&#x2F;anecdata is that doctors are just like every other professional. Some are good, some are mediocre. Some are so consumed by hubris they believe the public is always wrong, and
Some are willing to talk things through and keep an open mind about everything, even if it is ridiculous.<p>The best thing we could do for healthcare is to remove the idea that &quot;doctor knows best.&quot; While it is important for doctors to feel confident, and to teach the public to avoid snakeoil, it just places unreal expectations on these people. If patients took more accountability for their own health, then we could loosen some of the malpractice laws, and doctors insurance premiums would go down, and that would in turn cause rates to go down. But that was a bit of a tangent from my point that doctors are just people, maybe with an average intelligence that is slightly above the population at large, but still just people.</text></comment> |
15,568,983 | 15,567,136 | 1 | 3 | 15,566,873 | train | <story><title>Elixir web development 101: collaborative todolist with realtime updates</title><url>https://blog.openbloc.fr/elixir-phoenix-web-development-101-todo-app/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whalesalad</author><text>I&#x27;m so excited about Elixir these days. I would love to see more cookbook examples of using Elixir but NOT as a Ruby&#x2F;Rails replacement.<p>While the concept is not new to me, I have recently become totally infatuated with the concept of green threads, actor models, etc... for dealing with concurrent processing. This is literally what Erlang was designed to do, and Elixir makes it user friendly.<p>The real beauty of Elixir&#x2F;Erlang is being able to run hundreds of thousands of concurrent &quot;threads&quot; (co-operative in userspace, not OS-level).<p>Anyway I do not mean to detract from the post here -- just feel like a todo list is not a shining-star example of Elixir and would love to see some more hackers post their concurrency work here.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elixir web development 101: collaborative todolist with realtime updates</title><url>https://blog.openbloc.fr/elixir-phoenix-web-development-101-todo-app/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bsaul</author><text>Non-representative anecdote : i&#x27;ve recently heard of two teams that started using elixir, they both came from a ruby background, and in both case they weren&#x27;t using OTP.<p>They both justified using elixir because it was &quot;closer to ruby&quot; (???), and they both seemed to live a pretty difficult time with that language. Which makes me wonder : why would you ever want to use such a special language (purely functional isn&#x27;t for everyone) if you don&#x27;t have any scalability issue, and don&#x27;t even use OTP ?</text></comment> |
7,332,913 | 7,332,729 | 1 | 2 | 7,332,282 | train | <story><title>Mt. Gox Has Been Hacked by People Trying to Find Out What Happened?</title><url>http://dzoba.com/apparently-mt-gox-has-been-hacked-againby-people-trying-to-find-out-what-happened/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jychang</author><text>They have passport scans?<p>I&#x27;m impressed by how hard MtGox is fucking up.</text></item><item><author>zoba</author><text>In case my server goes, here is the text:<p>Right now in ##mtgox-chat someone named nanashi____ claims to be speaking for a group of hackers who have gotten into Mt Gox in an attempt to figure out what happened. Nanashi says they have a DB dump and are looking at what to do with it. Nanashi gave these links:<p>A conversation in Japanese with Karpeles and a Banker (<a href="http://picosong.com/Y7di/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picosong.com&#x2F;Y7di&#x2F;</a>)
Some Mt Gox Code (<a href="http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;W8B3CGiN</a>)<p>Nanashi also posted personal information on those employed by Mt Gox including phone numbers and addresses. Nanashi says the group plans on releasing more info. Nanashi also said they group plans on not releasing the huge store of passport scans they found… Hopefully this group has the public’s best interests at heart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sentenza</author><text>Also, we now see that the Wild West metaphor for Bitcoin banking carries quite far. If you fuck up in the wilderness, you&#x27;ll not only be sorry, but you&#x27;ll also be ripped apart by the wolves!<p>Maybe this can serve as a warning that the tedious processes used by banks and other institutions handling &quot;serious&quot; money can&#x27;t just be disrupted away.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mt. Gox Has Been Hacked by People Trying to Find Out What Happened?</title><url>http://dzoba.com/apparently-mt-gox-has-been-hacked-againby-people-trying-to-find-out-what-happened/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jychang</author><text>They have passport scans?<p>I&#x27;m impressed by how hard MtGox is fucking up.</text></item><item><author>zoba</author><text>In case my server goes, here is the text:<p>Right now in ##mtgox-chat someone named nanashi____ claims to be speaking for a group of hackers who have gotten into Mt Gox in an attempt to figure out what happened. Nanashi says they have a DB dump and are looking at what to do with it. Nanashi gave these links:<p>A conversation in Japanese with Karpeles and a Banker (<a href="http://picosong.com/Y7di/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;picosong.com&#x2F;Y7di&#x2F;</a>)
Some Mt Gox Code (<a href="http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;W8B3CGiN</a>)<p>Nanashi also posted personal information on those employed by Mt Gox including phone numbers and addresses. Nanashi says the group plans on releasing more info. Nanashi also said they group plans on not releasing the huge store of passport scans they found… Hopefully this group has the public’s best interests at heart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmomo</author><text>This is why I have had to stop using a number of services which requested a photocopy of official government documentation. I am specifically thinking of how I had to dump my Dwolla account.</text></comment> |
14,448,822 | 14,446,879 | 1 | 2 | 14,445,239 | train | <story><title>Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects</title><url>http://upstart.me/?ups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TekMol</author><text>This is not a Show HN.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;showhn.html</a><p>&quot;Show HN is for something you&#x27;ve made that other people can play with&quot;<p>&quot;Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can&#x27;t be tried out, so they can&#x27;t be Show HNs.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects</title><url>http://upstart.me/?ups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>theprop</author><text>I wish you&#x27;d just write out (at least some of) the newsletters, reach&#x2F;audience, and pricing. I&#x27;m hesitant to give you my email address without knowing any of that.</text></comment> |
41,585,652 | 41,585,015 | 1 | 2 | 41,583,605 | train | <story><title>OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ban-strawberry-reasoning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brink</author><text>&quot;For your safety&quot; is _always_ the preferred facade of tyranny.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hollerith</author><text>The CEO of that company that sold rides on an unsafe submersible to view the wreck of the Titanic (namely Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate, which killed 5 people when the submersible imploded) responded to concerns about the safety of his operation by claiming that the critics were motivated by a desire to protect the established players in the underwater-tourism industry from competition.<p>The point is that some companies are actually reckless (and also that some <i>users</i> of powerful technology are reckless).</text></comment> | <story><title>OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ban-strawberry-reasoning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brink</author><text>&quot;For your safety&quot; is _always_ the preferred facade of tyranny.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warkdarrior</author><text>&quot;For your safety&quot; (censorship), &quot;for your freedom&quot; (GPL), &quot;for the children&quot; (anti-encryption).</text></comment> |
28,630,134 | 28,630,457 | 1 | 2 | 28,604,882 | train | <story><title>Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire</title><url>https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/09/ludwig-wittgenstein-a-mind-on-fire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>klik99</author><text>My rule of thumb summary of Wittgenstein: If you can spend an entire book on the meaning of a concept (IE Truth-with-a-capital-T, The meaning of life) then you may be confusing an artifact of grammar and language with something that exists in actual reality.<p>In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn&#x27;t mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to &quot;end philosophy&quot; by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.<p>I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire</title><url>https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/09/ludwig-wittgenstein-a-mind-on-fire</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yamrzou</author><text>One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn&#x27;t get the attention it deserves is his book &quot;<i>On Certainty</i>&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.<p>It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.<p>Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: <i>Wittgenstein&#x27;s Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on &quot;On Certainty&quot;</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160304215023&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.philosophyforums.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;wittgenstein-a-summary-41631.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20160304215023&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.phi...</a></text></comment> |
6,850,994 | 6,851,190 | 1 | 3 | 6,849,057 | train | <story><title>Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach</title><url>http://www.haveibeenpwned.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gmisra</author><text>I am surprised by how few people are aware of this: <a href="https://www.pwdhash.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pwdhash.com&#x2F;</a><p>Convenience provided via Chrome&#x2F;Firefox extensions, portability provided by the website.</text></item><item><author>da_n</author><text>This should be a lesson not to manage your own passwords, use a password manager there are many to choose from. I was also caught up in the Adobe breach but my password was randomly generated by my password manager.</text></item><item><author>pvnick</author><text>Shit. Looks like I got caught up in the adobe breach. Let this be a lesson to all engineers in charge of such situations to implement strong security. You are partially responsible for these disasters.<p>I got a call from PayPal a week or two ago. It turns out somebody in Indonesia accessed my Paypal account, presumably with credentials scraped from adobe. I know, I know, shame on me for reusing passwords. Luckily no damage was done and I did a change to the strongest password I&#x27;ve assigned anything yet.<p>Great job, op (if you&#x27;re the one who wrote this service) for such an amazing tool. Everyone, if you haven&#x27;t already, you really should check if you&#x27;ve been compromised. I will be sending this to all my friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Periodic</author><text>I second this. I&#x27;ve been using it for a few years now. It gives me great peace of mind knowing that my password on a site like HN is something like &quot;e5wLoMB1kZ&quot;. I only have to remember a few passwords and yet each site has a unique password.<p>Even in the event a leak of plain-text passwords I&#x27;m still secure in knowing that my other accounts won&#x27;t be compromised unless there is a very determined attacker.<p>However, you do have to put some trust in the extension and the website. Fortunately, the website has some good credentials and the extensions have appeared clean... for now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach</title><url>http://www.haveibeenpwned.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gmisra</author><text>I am surprised by how few people are aware of this: <a href="https://www.pwdhash.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pwdhash.com&#x2F;</a><p>Convenience provided via Chrome&#x2F;Firefox extensions, portability provided by the website.</text></item><item><author>da_n</author><text>This should be a lesson not to manage your own passwords, use a password manager there are many to choose from. I was also caught up in the Adobe breach but my password was randomly generated by my password manager.</text></item><item><author>pvnick</author><text>Shit. Looks like I got caught up in the adobe breach. Let this be a lesson to all engineers in charge of such situations to implement strong security. You are partially responsible for these disasters.<p>I got a call from PayPal a week or two ago. It turns out somebody in Indonesia accessed my Paypal account, presumably with credentials scraped from adobe. I know, I know, shame on me for reusing passwords. Luckily no damage was done and I did a change to the strongest password I&#x27;ve assigned anything yet.<p>Great job, op (if you&#x27;re the one who wrote this service) for such an amazing tool. Everyone, if you haven&#x27;t already, you really should check if you&#x27;ve been compromised. I will be sending this to all my friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oijaf888</author><text>I like <a href="https://oneshallpass.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oneshallpass.com&#x2F;</a> better since it lets you change some attributes about the passwords generated. So if a site is compromised you can just increment the generation field and get a totally new hash.</text></comment> |
22,971,882 | 22,971,821 | 1 | 2 | 22,969,533 | train | <story><title>Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die</title><url>https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/lean-agile-methodology-software-engineering</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plughs</author><text>My first team, some 14 years ago, had the best experience with Agile. What made this work<p>&gt; During planning, everyone understood that the estimates were _estimates_. Tasks could take longer or shorter, that was OK and even expected. The goal was to improve velocity, not to accomplish every story, every time.<p>&gt; Engineers felt comfortable taking stories in areas they knew nothing about. A stated goal was that every engineer understand every piece of the project.<p>&gt; Standups were team only. Engineers felt comfortable saying they got stuck or needed help or got lost in a rathole and didn&#x27;t make the progress they hoped.<p>&gt; Demos were important so that the team and the clients could understand what had changed and what new features were available.<p>But it quickly got lost - managers and PMs and Directors got involved and Jira boards became published for all to see. (In the beginning it was whiteboards and sticky note). Standups and Demos were all about self-promotion. No one ever wanted to take on a task they weren&#x27;t 100% certain they could do. If a task was 3 point it needed to be done in 3 days or there would be questions.<p>When I left the last company it had gotten outrageous. Every task should be completed in three days and in production in five days - and if not that team was Doing Something Wrong.<p>( We were told that this was standard FAANG practice, I have no idea how true that was )<p>What happened was what you&#x27;d expect - shortcuts, tech debt, unit tests cynically design to pass and meet code coverage expectations instead of actually usefully testing.<p>The reality is that any process is going to fail one senior leadership decides it&#x27;s a way to evaluate engineers, not create a good product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marktangotango</author><text>A looong time ago I went through Army basic training. As a BS degree holder I was given the job of &quot;book man&quot;. This meant I carried around the platoon training book and carried placards to put in signs at various training locations that told what battalion, company, and platoon we were so if anyone driving by a gun range, motor pool, or classroom could look and see oh that&#x27;s 1st platoon, C company, 1st training battalion.<p>I&#x27;ve come to believe that that main driver for Agile adoption has come to be something similar. Making visible to outsiders what software development teams are doing, and making progress (or it&#x27;s lack) visible to management. I thinks that&#x27;s a completely reasonable expectation. Businesses are paying exorbitant salaries and providing ping pong tables, why shouldn&#x27;t they have visibility into what&#x27;s being done?<p>Where it becomes toxic is in areas this posts parent indicates; posturing, one upsmanship, pressure to perform. Effective teams need &quot;safe spaces&quot; to learn, discover, try and fail. Agile isn&#x27;t that anymore. Hasn&#x27;t been for a long time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Agile's early evangelists wouldn't mind watching Agile die</title><url>https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/lean-agile-methodology-software-engineering</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>plughs</author><text>My first team, some 14 years ago, had the best experience with Agile. What made this work<p>&gt; During planning, everyone understood that the estimates were _estimates_. Tasks could take longer or shorter, that was OK and even expected. The goal was to improve velocity, not to accomplish every story, every time.<p>&gt; Engineers felt comfortable taking stories in areas they knew nothing about. A stated goal was that every engineer understand every piece of the project.<p>&gt; Standups were team only. Engineers felt comfortable saying they got stuck or needed help or got lost in a rathole and didn&#x27;t make the progress they hoped.<p>&gt; Demos were important so that the team and the clients could understand what had changed and what new features were available.<p>But it quickly got lost - managers and PMs and Directors got involved and Jira boards became published for all to see. (In the beginning it was whiteboards and sticky note). Standups and Demos were all about self-promotion. No one ever wanted to take on a task they weren&#x27;t 100% certain they could do. If a task was 3 point it needed to be done in 3 days or there would be questions.<p>When I left the last company it had gotten outrageous. Every task should be completed in three days and in production in five days - and if not that team was Doing Something Wrong.<p>( We were told that this was standard FAANG practice, I have no idea how true that was )<p>What happened was what you&#x27;d expect - shortcuts, tech debt, unit tests cynically design to pass and meet code coverage expectations instead of actually usefully testing.<p>The reality is that any process is going to fail one senior leadership decides it&#x27;s a way to evaluate engineers, not create a good product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Totally. &quot;When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart%27s_law</a><p>And as you say, managerial involvement is the problem. Managers and execs mostly get paid to appear to be in control, so having the appearance of control is vital to them, even if that makes the results wildly worse.</text></comment> |
15,803,039 | 15,803,032 | 1 | 2 | 15,801,574 | train | <story><title>Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-28/vanguard-founder-jack-bogle-says-avoid-bitcoin-like-the-plague</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nerdponx</author><text><i>There is nothing to support bitcoin</i><p>That&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve been realizing latey: there <i>is</i> something to support Bitcoin, and that something is the blockchain. The reason banks and big financial companies are interested in it is <i>not</i> for its speculative value. They are interested in the fact that it is both decentralized and immutable. As long as financial corporations are willing to exchange Bitcoin for USD, then Bitcoin is a reasonable store of value.<p>There&#x27;s also value in Bitcoin because it&#x27;s a good entry point into other cryptocurrencies that could turn out to be better general-purpose exchange media, like Litecoin.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like US Treasury Bonds. Nobody buys them for the tiny rate of return they offer, but they have genuine, valid use as a financial instrument. Normal people, however don&#x27;t typically buy them, and normal people probably shouldn&#x27;t be buying Bitcoin either unless they have some spare cash to gamble on it.</text></item><item><author>non_sequitur</author><text>“Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return,” said Bogle, 88, who started the first index fund in 1976. “You know bonds have an interest coupon, stocks have earnings and dividends, gold has nothing. There is nothing to support bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.”<p>Didnt quite understand this quote - is he down on gold too?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chiaro</author><text>Nah. Banks and big financial companies interested in the blockchain will spin up their own version without tying it to the unstable mess of bitcoin. e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ripple.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ripple.com&#x2F;</a><p>And people do by treasury bonds for their rate of return, when the investment must be as riskless as possible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-28/vanguard-founder-jack-bogle-says-avoid-bitcoin-like-the-plague</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nerdponx</author><text><i>There is nothing to support bitcoin</i><p>That&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve been realizing latey: there <i>is</i> something to support Bitcoin, and that something is the blockchain. The reason banks and big financial companies are interested in it is <i>not</i> for its speculative value. They are interested in the fact that it is both decentralized and immutable. As long as financial corporations are willing to exchange Bitcoin for USD, then Bitcoin is a reasonable store of value.<p>There&#x27;s also value in Bitcoin because it&#x27;s a good entry point into other cryptocurrencies that could turn out to be better general-purpose exchange media, like Litecoin.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like US Treasury Bonds. Nobody buys them for the tiny rate of return they offer, but they have genuine, valid use as a financial instrument. Normal people, however don&#x27;t typically buy them, and normal people probably shouldn&#x27;t be buying Bitcoin either unless they have some spare cash to gamble on it.</text></item><item><author>non_sequitur</author><text>“Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return,” said Bogle, 88, who started the first index fund in 1976. “You know bonds have an interest coupon, stocks have earnings and dividends, gold has nothing. There is nothing to support bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.”<p>Didnt quite understand this quote - is he down on gold too?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsacco</author><text><i>&gt; The reason banks and big financial companies are interested in it is not for its speculative value. They are interested in the fact that it is both decentralized and immutable.</i><p>None of the blockchain projects or proposals being worked on by enterprise financial institutions are decentralized. A decentralized ledger is conceptually antithetical to a small group of organizations which trust each other and want to retain control over the shared ledger.<p>It can be immutable, but for that matter I don&#x27;t really think it&#x27;s immutable in the same sense as a decentralized, permissionless ledger is. The organizations in charge of the blockchain can create a hard fork, which everyone participating with the organizations will have to abide by, because the blockchain is not decentralized.<p>In fact, what we actually have is a consortium of companies deploying distributed database structures and calling them blockchains. I&#x27;m sure there is a legitimately new innovation that can emerge from this sort of blockchain, but it won&#x27;t be decentralization or immutability.</text></comment> |
21,097,557 | 21,097,173 | 1 | 2 | 21,096,864 | train | <story><title>California's ‘Surprise’ Billing Law Is Protecting Patients and Angering Doctors</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/upshot/california-surprise-medical-billing-law-effects.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>riahi</author><text>Physician here.<p>The problem with this law is it takes the medical reimbursement contract system and then shoots the physicians in the back.<p>When insurance companies are trying to get people to join their network, they offer competitive rates. Once they are large enough, they start to exert downward pressure on physician reimbursement to both existing and new medical service providers (hospitals and physicians). The only way to counteract their pricing power is to be willing to walk. Physicians do not like going out of network; the insurance companies make it incredibly painful, refuse to pay you, and instead send the check to the patient who is expected to deposit it and forward it to the patient (if they pay at all).<p>However, what has happened post-ACA is massive consolidation across the medical services sector so that large staffing companies would deliberately go out of network to force better rates strategically. It was no longer the individual physicians choice whether or not to out of network; rather their employers&#x27;.<p>However, these laws are a huge gift to the insurance companies. They remove the physician&#x2F;hospital&#x27;s ability to negotiate, and already, we are seeing insurance carriers refuse to negotiate or offer rates greater than 125% of Medicare. It also completely eliminates the incentive for insurance carriers to even bother creating a provider network. This is not the intent of the law and fundamentally is acting as a wage-cap.<p>Medicare rates are intentionally set by fiat and often below the cost of goods sold. 125% of Medicare is an arbitrary &quot;sounds good&quot; number that is not helping anyone but the insurance companies.<p>Instead, a better version of the law would be to have payments indexed to the FAIR health claims database [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fairhealth.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fairhealth.org</a>].<p>Yes, I agree the medical reimbursement system in the US is not ideal; however, this is tantamount to price fixing which in EVERY thread on compensation for software engineers, people think what Google&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;et Al did to prevent wage increases and poaching was unethical and unfair to workers. I don&#x27;t think this is any different.</text></comment> | <story><title>California's ‘Surprise’ Billing Law Is Protecting Patients and Angering Doctors</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/upshot/california-surprise-medical-billing-law-effects.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coolspot</author><text>I once got a surprise bill from in-network ER because they invited a specialist for consultation, That specialist sent me a separate bill later.<p>No one told me upfront it will cost additional $450 to hear from the specialist that &quot;sometimes kids are having stomach pain for no any reason&quot;.<p>Edit: Additional information - Blue Shield CA HMO, Cedars-Sinai ER , circa 2012. $150 ER co-pay, later $10,000 bill fully paid by insurance + $450 specialist bill not covered by insurance.</text></comment> |
21,957,654 | 21,954,790 | 1 | 2 | 21,953,418 | train | <story><title>Wanggongchang Explosion</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazygringo</author><text>While the Wikipedia article says &quot;no academic consensus has been reached&quot; it seems pretty clear from the &quot;possible causes&quot; section that a bolide (meteor exploding in the air above) is the only explanation listed which seems to fit the facts.<p>I&#x27;m curious, therefore, why the lack of consensus? Is there any evidence <i>inconsistent</i> with the bolide hypothesis? Or is there just no positive proof whatsoever (e.g. some type of meteor residue or other) so it can never be conclusively demonstrated?</text></comment> | <story><title>Wanggongchang Explosion</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MeteorMarc</author><text>The following resources provide some context about the frequency of high energy atmospheric meteorite impacts:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cneos.jpl.nasa.gov&#x2F;fireballs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cneos.jpl.nasa.gov&#x2F;fireballs&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_meteor_air_bursts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_meteor_air_bursts</a><p>Edited 14:32 MET</text></comment> |
33,061,680 | 33,061,460 | 1 | 2 | 33,061,058 | train | <story><title>Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites</title><url>https://github.com/soxoj/maigret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I&#x27;m not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smeagull</author><text>You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive.<p>I&#x27;ve worked on search engines, and depending on who is using them, that balance gets struck differently on the ROC curve. For legal matters, for example, they want every record that might match. For ad-hoc (google style) queries, nobody reads the second page so you care more about Precision @ 20 (or really, at 3)</text></comment> | <story><title>Maigret: Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites</title><url>https://github.com/soxoj/maigret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I&#x27;m not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lol768</author><text>Yup; for common&#x2F;short usernames it&#x27;s all too common for other folks to register using the same identifier.<p>The end result seems to be that this tool decides you&#x27;re interested in &quot;dating&quot;, &quot;porn&quot;, &quot;stocks&quot; and tags you with a &quot;ru&quot; country code - despite not owning any of the accounts that the determination has been based off of.<p>The README should come with a disclaimer really.</text></comment> |
16,440,903 | 16,440,708 | 1 | 3 | 16,438,913 | train | <story><title>Introducing Airbnb Plus</title><url>https://www.airbnb.com/plus</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annexrichmond</author><text>This is strange marketing as it almost sounds like the non-Plus listings aren&#x27;t what people already expect to some degree from an airbnb.<p>&gt; With Airbnb Plus, you can always check in effortlessly. Every home is equipped with a lockbox, keypad, or a host who is on-call to greet you.<p>This is so weird. How would you otherwise check in to a home if it doesn&#x27;t have self check in or a host?<p>&gt; When you book an Airbnb Plus home, you get the focused attention of our Airbnb Plus customer support team–a highly-trained team committed to great service and faster responses<p>Okay, so if there is no self check in and no host to greet me at a non Plus home, I&#x27;m stuck with a poorly trained unresponsive agent.<p>I realize that they want to differentiate the hotel-like quality airbnbs from the others, so they can give it a badge and therefore justify a higher price for it, but the delivery is odd, as other commenters have pointed out.<p>An alternative approach could be to describe such listings as &quot;Guaranteed X, Y, Z&quot;. I think with that language it wouldn&#x27;t undermine the quality of the non Plus listings as much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>calbear81</author><text>Airbnb employee here: Re: the check-in and on-demand requirement, this means that there is 24 hour check-in available vs. a pre-set check-in time that you would have to coordinate closely with a host. This would mean that there&#x27;s a keypad, lockbox with a key and&#x2F;or a doorman or local key person who will bring the key on demand when requested.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introducing Airbnb Plus</title><url>https://www.airbnb.com/plus</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annexrichmond</author><text>This is strange marketing as it almost sounds like the non-Plus listings aren&#x27;t what people already expect to some degree from an airbnb.<p>&gt; With Airbnb Plus, you can always check in effortlessly. Every home is equipped with a lockbox, keypad, or a host who is on-call to greet you.<p>This is so weird. How would you otherwise check in to a home if it doesn&#x27;t have self check in or a host?<p>&gt; When you book an Airbnb Plus home, you get the focused attention of our Airbnb Plus customer support team–a highly-trained team committed to great service and faster responses<p>Okay, so if there is no self check in and no host to greet me at a non Plus home, I&#x27;m stuck with a poorly trained unresponsive agent.<p>I realize that they want to differentiate the hotel-like quality airbnbs from the others, so they can give it a badge and therefore justify a higher price for it, but the delivery is odd, as other commenters have pointed out.<p>An alternative approach could be to describe such listings as &quot;Guaranteed X, Y, Z&quot;. I think with that language it wouldn&#x27;t undermine the quality of the non Plus listings as much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbreit</author><text>I don&#x27;t usually care about naming at all because it&#x27;s typically irrelevant to the actual product. But &quot;Plus&quot; seems like surprisingly bad naming, especially for a company that has excelled at branding (I don&#x27;t love the new logo). Uber&#x27;s &quot;Select&quot; and, to a lesser extent, Lyft&#x27;s &quot;Premier&quot; seem better.</text></comment> |
20,301,684 | 20,299,908 | 1 | 3 | 20,298,653 | train | <story><title>Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/jony-ive-to-form-independent-design-company-with-apple-as-client/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bud</author><text>This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.</text></item><item><author>PunksATawnyFill</author><text>How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company&#x27;s most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple?<p>For Apple&#x27;s and consumers&#x27; sake, I hope NOT.</text></item><item><author>valine</author><text>With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&amp;D into a display that folds back on itself for the sole reason that a phone is more ascetically pleasing when the boarders are symmetrical. Even after a year and a half every phone except the iPhone has an asymmetrical chin. Will Apple still be able to make decisions like that without Ive in a leadership position? For Apple&#x27;s sake I really hope so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kllrnohj</author><text>The largest non-Apple player in the industry, Samsung, continues to ship flagship phones with a 3.5mm jack and with waterproofing that has been consistently ahead of the iPhone. Samsung Galaxy has been IP68 since the S7 in 2016. Something the iPhone didn&#x27;t achieve until the XS &amp; XS Max.<p>The idea that this was about waterproofing is a fabrication.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/jony-ive-to-form-independent-design-company-with-apple-as-client/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bud</author><text>This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.</text></item><item><author>PunksATawnyFill</author><text>How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company&#x27;s most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple?<p>For Apple&#x27;s and consumers&#x27; sake, I hope NOT.</text></item><item><author>valine</author><text>With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&amp;D into a display that folds back on itself for the sole reason that a phone is more ascetically pleasing when the boarders are symmetrical. Even after a year and a half every phone except the iPhone has an asymmetrical chin. Will Apple still be able to make decisions like that without Ive in a leadership position? For Apple&#x27;s sake I really hope so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>steve19</author><text>Its not obselete when 100s of millions of people use it everyday and the replacement is expensive, needs replacing because the batteries die and has poorer sound quality.<p>No phone is more waterproof with it than without (they all have complex data ports with many connection vs three or four in a jack). No phone has a bigger battery. No phone is tougher.<p>It allows Apple and others to sell expensice Bluetooth ear buds.<p>And yes, I do own a pair of airpods.</text></comment> |
9,870,150 | 9,869,970 | 1 | 2 | 9,869,755 | train | <story><title>If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear</title><url>http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelpinto</author><text>Something that people in silicon valley just don&#x27;t get is that that the above argument also applies to tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living and then say &quot;trust us, we&#x27;ll do no evil&quot;. The industry is upset about Snowden because it cost them sales in China, but for the most part while it talks the talk it doesn&#x27;t walk the walk.<p>* If we&#x27;re going to talk about WWII a good example would be IBM and their role in the holocaust:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chestnut-tree</author><text><i>&quot;...tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living&quot;</i><p>I agree. The largest and potentially most-revealing information about you is captured by technology companies like Google and Facebook.<p>The Amsterdam registry recorded <i>&quot;Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death&quot;</i><p>Create a Google account and you are asked to provide: Name, Gender, Date of birth, Location, Mobile phone number.<p>This is some of your most private and personal information and it&#x27;s tied to your actual behaviour on the web. Google&#x27;s ability to track you across the web and across devices is simply unprecedented.<p>Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you. Things like: how long they keep your data (presumably forever), whether the data is anonymised, whether your searches or activity are disassociated from your identity, and who sees your data inside the company.<p>Does Google use your mobile number solely for two-factor authentication and absolutely nothing else? Google doesn&#x27;t tell you. Do they really need your date-of-birth? And is it only used for age verification? Could they simply ask if you&#x27;re 16 or over? Sure they could, but date of birth tied to your online activity is so much more valuable when it comes to crunching all that big data on user behaviour.<p>The amount of information that Google captures about you is gargantuan. They know more about your online (and possibly offline) behaviour than you know about yourself. Just to be clear, I don&#x27;t believe Google does anything nefarious with your data. But even if you trust them, why is it considered perfectly acceptable for them to track you to such a relentless degree?</text></comment> | <story><title>If you've nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear</title><url>http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelpinto</author><text>Something that people in silicon valley just don&#x27;t get is that that the above argument also applies to tech corporations like Google who collect personal data for living and then say &quot;trust us, we&#x27;ll do no evil&quot;. The industry is upset about Snowden because it cost them sales in China, but for the most part while it talks the talk it doesn&#x27;t walk the walk.<p>* If we&#x27;re going to talk about WWII a good example would be IBM and their role in the holocaust:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_and_the_Holocaust</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>higherpurpose</author><text>I agree, and I think Cisco, for example, is almost as bad as IBM was then, by being the architects of the &quot;lawful intercept&quot; [1] (backdoor [2]) protocol for their routers in China and elsewhere, which then facilitates the government&#x27;s catching, torturing or killing of the dissidents. At the very least Cisco is as bad as the Hacking Team.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc3924" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc3924</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blackhat.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;bh-dc-10&#x2F;Cross_Tom&#x2F;BlackHat-DC-2010-Cross-Attacking-LawfulI-Intercept-wp.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blackhat.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;bh-dc-10&#x2F;Cross_Tom&#x2F;Bl...</a><p>There are other, much more loved, tech companies that do similar things, too. They know who they are. I just hope history won&#x27;t be kind to them.</text></comment> |
39,420,816 | 39,421,041 | 1 | 2 | 39,417,638 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I create a free website for download YouTube transcript, subtitle</title><url>https://www.downloadyoutubesubtitle.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rspoerri</author><text>I use this script, because automatically generated subtitles are badly formatted as transcript (only good as subtitles). It works pretty well to archive the videos including the transcript and subtitles.<p>```<p>#!&#x2F;bin&#x2F;zsh<p># download as mp4, get normal subtitles<p>yt-dlp -f mp4 &quot;$@&quot; --write-auto-sub --sub-format best --write-sub<p># download subtitles and convert them to transcript<p>yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs --sub-lang en -k --sub-format ttml --convert-subs srt --exec before_dl:&quot;sed -e &#x27;&#x2F;^[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9][0-9] --&gt; [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9][0-9]$&#x2F;d&#x27; -e &#x27;&#x2F;^[[:digit:]]\{1,3\}$&#x2F;d&#x27; -e &#x27;s&#x2F;&lt;[^&gt;]<i>&gt;&#x2F;&#x2F;g&#x27; -e &#x27;&#x2F;^[[:space:]]</i>$&#x2F;d&#x27; -i &#x27;&#x27; %(requested_subtitles.:.filepath)#q&quot; &quot;$@&quot;<p>```</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I create a free website for download YouTube transcript, subtitle</title><url>https://www.downloadyoutubesubtitle.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>araes</author><text>Checking online, this [1] appears to be one of the most heavily referenced on StackOverflow for downloading both user entered and automatically generated transcripts. (Python based)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jdepoix&#x2F;youtube-transcript-api">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jdepoix&#x2F;youtube-transcript-api</a><p>Notably, Google really needs to have an obvious API endpoint for this kind of call. If 1000&#x27;s of programmers are all rolling their own implementation, there&#x27;s probably a huge number that constantly download the full video and transcribe in data harvesting.<p>Kind of surprised honestly it&#x27;s taken this long for Youtube to fall prey to massive data harvesting campaigns. From this article [2] and this paper on Youtube data statistics [3] there are ~14,000,000,000 videos on Youtube with a mean length of 615 seconds (~10 minutes).<p>You&#x27;d think people would be interested in:<p><pre><code> 8,610,000,000,000 seconds
143,500,000,000 minutes
2,391,666,666 hours
3,274,083 months
272,840 years
27,284 decades
2,728 centuries
273 millennia
</code></pre>
Of live action video on nearly every single subject in human existence.<p>Also, the paper&#x27;s really cool and extremely sobering about being a &quot;content creator&quot; based on the 1% get all views.<p>[2] &quot;What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’&quot;, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;how-many-videos-youtube-research&#x2F;677250&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2024&#x2F;01&#x2F;how-m...</a><p>[3] &quot;Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube&quot;, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journalqd.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;4066&#x2F;3766" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journalqd.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;4066&#x2F;3766</a></text></comment> |
10,917,801 | 10,916,662 | 1 | 3 | 10,916,342 | train | <story><title>Phishing attack against Lastpass</title><url>https://www.seancassidy.me/lostpass.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pwman</author><text>LastPass has pushed Google for years to give us a way to avoid using the browser viewport: infobars was a solution to this issue -- you can see one of my pleas for it back in January 2012: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=39511" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=39511</a><p>We do a lot to try to protect our usage of viewports using iframes, but it&#x27;s not good enough and we&#x27;ll figure out a way to do better. LastPass has generally told people to use the extension directly to login as it&#x27;s more secure, we&#x27;ll need to go further here as well.<p>Sean was clever using <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome-extension.pw" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome-extension.pw</a> which looks close -- but LastPass also detects you enter your master password on an incorrect domain and notifies you immediately of your mistake, mitigating this a great deal. This has existed for a long time before Sean&#x27;s report and we did not implement as a response to Sean&#x27;s bug report -- we implemented it as a general way for people to know about password resuse and to be notified of being phished.<p>Making this practical is a lot tougher than email phishing -- you really need an XSS on a page that people use to login, and unlike email phishing it is immediately caught.</text></comment> | <story><title>Phishing attack against Lastpass</title><url>https://www.seancassidy.me/lostpass.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jnevill</author><text>This is of the devil. It needs to be burned with fire and the ashes should be sunk in the Mariana trench and the trench should be filled with dirt that has been cursed by a witch that was formerly dead but was reanimated by Cthulhu and then rekilled, burned with fire, and buried on the opposite side of the earth.<p>Everything here is usual phishing stuff, but that Chrome-Extension.pw url is disturbing combined with the lastpass API stuff.</text></comment> |
29,813,089 | 29,813,048 | 1 | 3 | 29,810,334 | train | <story><title>How to design a house to last 1000 years</title><url>https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/how-to-design-a-house-to-last-for</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Fiahil</author><text>I expected something much simpler : bricks, stones, and wood. It&#x27;s not like we are running low on examples of 1000+ years buildings (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;11th_century_in_architecture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;11th_century_in_architecture</a>). These castles, cathedrals, farms, were built to last, so it&#x27;s appropriate to use them as examples.<p>We can, however, apply modern technics and materials when they make sense : insulation, windows, waterways... Prefer wood, wool and steel over plastics or composite materials and you&#x27;re good to go.<p>On a side note, I&#x27;m currently buying a house (old farm) with over 200 years old plain oak carpentry. The thing is absolutely massive and would be unimaginably expensive to build today. With the proper care, it might last another 200 years without issue. Remember, Notre-Dame de Paris used 300 years old trees cut in ~1150 for its roof -before the 2019 fire-. With the proper care it would have still be standing today. I find that to be deeply humbling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkeuomorphicBee</author><text>&gt; We can, however, apply modern technics and materials when they make sense : insulation, windows, waterways...<p>The article raises an important point that could be a problem when trying to mix old and new build techniques. When talking about brick walls it says:<p>&gt; One tricky thing with this type of assembly is that while it has performed well historically, it doesn’t necessarily play nice with more modern, energy efficient construction. A solid brick wall was traditionally designed to be exposed on the inside, exposing it to interior heat and allowing it to dry. Adding interior insulation makes the house much more comfortable, but also changes the thermal dynamics, potentially causing freeze&#x2F;thaw damage in the brick, and allowing moisture to accumulate between the brick and the insulation. This is one of the many details that would need to be worked out for the complete design of the home.<p>You can&#x27;t simply build something following the examples of a castle or a cathedral, but then add modern insulation, because the insulation won&#x27;t allow the masonry to breath and dry to both sides, leading to water damage, mold, rot, ...<p>At the end of the day, a badly insulated building can be made to last for ages passively by just making it breath, so the temperature and humidity vary with the weather but are kept in check by passive external factors (e.g. the sun shining on a external wall dries it from the outside). While a well insulated building absolutely needs constant mechanical HVAC with fine tuned control. You can have a well insulated building or a passive building, you can&#x27;t have both (by the way, the &quot;Passive House TM&quot; insulation standard is a complete misnomer, being that mechanical ventilation is its second biggest tenet).</text></comment> | <story><title>How to design a house to last 1000 years</title><url>https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/how-to-design-a-house-to-last-for</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Fiahil</author><text>I expected something much simpler : bricks, stones, and wood. It&#x27;s not like we are running low on examples of 1000+ years buildings (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;11th_century_in_architecture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;11th_century_in_architecture</a>). These castles, cathedrals, farms, were built to last, so it&#x27;s appropriate to use them as examples.<p>We can, however, apply modern technics and materials when they make sense : insulation, windows, waterways... Prefer wood, wool and steel over plastics or composite materials and you&#x27;re good to go.<p>On a side note, I&#x27;m currently buying a house (old farm) with over 200 years old plain oak carpentry. The thing is absolutely massive and would be unimaginably expensive to build today. With the proper care, it might last another 200 years without issue. Remember, Notre-Dame de Paris used 300 years old trees cut in ~1150 for its roof -before the 2019 fire-. With the proper care it would have still be standing today. I find that to be deeply humbling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tinco</author><text>The fact that there&#x27;s still a lot of buildings still standing doesn&#x27;t mean they were built perfect, it just means their construction has the possibility of lasting a 1000 years. For each of those buildings I bet there were 10 more with the exact same building techniques that are no longer standing.<p>A 1000 years is a lot of time to go without a fire. I think just because of the fire risk wood is simply out of the question. Well unless you can protect the wood against fire like the OP is doing with the steel.<p>Considering modern times, I think you would have to go one step further and also consider gas explosions and possibly being bombed as well. Just imagine how many 1000+ yr old buildings must have been in Germany before WW2.</text></comment> |
33,897,650 | 33,895,744 | 1 | 2 | 33,895,187 | train | <story><title>Dora: A open-source Rust DHCP Server</title><url>https://github.com/bluecatengineering/dora</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>latchkey</author><text>I have a datacenter with so many machines (blade computers) in it that dnsmasq couldn&#x27;t keep up and we ended up having really bad UDP storms. That wasn&#x27;t fun to debug at all since we had no idea that dnsmasq would have scaling issues like that. Even worse is that the logging output is abysmal and made things even harder to diagnose.<p>Switched to another DHCP server and the storms went away, but I am not entirely happy with it because of the way it handles leases, it doesn&#x27;t guarantee that each MAC keeps the same IP over time.<p>Now, I&#x27;m always on the lookout for a good DHCP server... tried another one that was golang, but it wasn&#x27;t working on my network for some weird spec reason, I didn&#x27;t have time to debug it and the authors didn&#x27;t seem that interested in helping out.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dora: A open-source Rust DHCP Server</title><url>https://github.com/bluecatengineering/dora</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ckdarby</author><text>Hey, I&#x27;m from BlueCat (though my opinions are my own). Will lurk the comments if there are any questions around the project or general DHCP.</text></comment> |
26,247,108 | 26,246,660 | 1 | 2 | 26,246,435 | train | <story><title>Fry's Electronics is closing all stores</title><url>https://twitter.com/bill0004/status/1364407906192424964</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>Central Computer is still kicking around -for now.<p>This is all changing. It&#x27;s not the same. You used to have a bunch of grey market PC parts distributors all over the east bay (uProcessor, add on Cards, RAM, HDD, etc) that used to sell to beige box PC makers (and individuals) but they went the way of the dodo too (ASI is legit distributor now). Also, remember WeirdStuff? Gone too.<p>It&#x27;s a mature industry and the biz has gone largely to Amazon and NewEgg with some at BestBuy (regular people) and to large distributors like Ingram for larger players that can&#x27;t buy direct from MFG or huge players who build their own.<p>SARS-CoV2 might have hastened their demise, but it was coming none the less.<p>PS. The sandwiches + a bag of chips&#x2F;crisps &amp; drink were not bad at all. Maybe it&#x27;s nostalgia.</text></item><item><author>BuyMyBitcoins</author><text>I’m not surprised, but this makes me feel incredibly sad. I built my first PC using parts from there. I’m going to miss it.<p>But once Fry’s pivoted to be a consignment store that was mostly empty and selling pallets of bottled water and perfume, it was obvious the business was about to die.<p>Curiously, Microcenter has managed to live on and seems fairly robust. I can’t help but think Fry’s tried to sell too many different products and had a massive amount of floorspace to keep up. Whereas my local Microcenter just sticks to electronics and the store is much smaller and feels cramped in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redisman</author><text>As someone who got back to PC building in the last few years, I’m jealous of people with a micro center in their city. Amazon and Newegg are not up to par</text></comment> | <story><title>Fry's Electronics is closing all stores</title><url>https://twitter.com/bill0004/status/1364407906192424964</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mc32</author><text>Central Computer is still kicking around -for now.<p>This is all changing. It&#x27;s not the same. You used to have a bunch of grey market PC parts distributors all over the east bay (uProcessor, add on Cards, RAM, HDD, etc) that used to sell to beige box PC makers (and individuals) but they went the way of the dodo too (ASI is legit distributor now). Also, remember WeirdStuff? Gone too.<p>It&#x27;s a mature industry and the biz has gone largely to Amazon and NewEgg with some at BestBuy (regular people) and to large distributors like Ingram for larger players that can&#x27;t buy direct from MFG or huge players who build their own.<p>SARS-CoV2 might have hastened their demise, but it was coming none the less.<p>PS. The sandwiches + a bag of chips&#x2F;crisps &amp; drink were not bad at all. Maybe it&#x27;s nostalgia.</text></item><item><author>BuyMyBitcoins</author><text>I’m not surprised, but this makes me feel incredibly sad. I built my first PC using parts from there. I’m going to miss it.<p>But once Fry’s pivoted to be a consignment store that was mostly empty and selling pallets of bottled water and perfume, it was obvious the business was about to die.<p>Curiously, Microcenter has managed to live on and seems fairly robust. I can’t help but think Fry’s tried to sell too many different products and had a massive amount of floorspace to keep up. Whereas my local Microcenter just sticks to electronics and the store is much smaller and feels cramped in comparison.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taurath</author><text>Ah weirdstuff is gone? I suppose the only businesses left along those lines are the startup graveyard furniture stores</text></comment> |
14,319,794 | 14,318,814 | 1 | 2 | 14,318,345 | train | <story><title>Microsoft now lets iOS developers deploy, run and test their apps on Windows</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/microsoft-now-lets-ios-developers-deploy-run-and-test-their-apps-directly-from-windows</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pgoggijr</author><text>Are there any examples of solid, stable, cross-platform apps developed with Xamarin? I tried looking at their website, but it doesn&#x27;t seem possible to tell the difference between apps being tested using Xamarin Test Cloud, and apps developed using the Xamarin Platform.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dreeri</author><text>We have done several high profile cross-platform applications with Xamarin. As a user you can&#x27;t really see the difference while using it. The most noticeable difference is that the app startup time is couple of seconds slower and the application bundle steals at least 10MB of app size. As a programmer the Developer Experience™ is a little rough around the edges with casual bugs. But hey you get to write your core business logic only once and in C#.<p>Here are some of the more visually appealing apps we&#x27;ve made with Xamarin:<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;valopilkkutaksi.fi&#x2F;briefly-in-english&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;valopilkkutaksi.fi&#x2F;briefly-in-english&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upmmetsani.fi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upmmetsani.fi&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.online&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft now lets iOS developers deploy, run and test their apps on Windows</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/microsoft-now-lets-ios-developers-deploy-run-and-test-their-apps-directly-from-windows</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pgoggijr</author><text>Are there any examples of solid, stable, cross-platform apps developed with Xamarin? I tried looking at their website, but it doesn&#x27;t seem possible to tell the difference between apps being tested using Xamarin Test Cloud, and apps developed using the Xamarin Platform.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hart_russell</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked on a number of Xamarin apps. You can definitely make stable cross platform apps, it&#x27;s just very tedious; sometimes it requires more effort than developing 2 separate native apps.</text></comment> |
40,412,732 | 40,412,687 | 1 | 3 | 40,405,309 | train | <story><title>Steve Wozniak: When I die these are the moments I want to remember</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/18/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-happiness-matters-more-than-accomplishment.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>self_awareness</author><text>&gt; At the end of his life, Steve Wozniak won&#x27;t measure his happiness by the size of Apple&#x27;s market cap or his personal net worth.<p>This is a very popular stance to take for every millionare out there.<p>Also, the absence of daily worries, the lack of problems induced by money, and the presence of an everlasting feeling of security can lead to a detachment from the concept of wealth. What I mean is, if you don’t experience the problems that money can easily solve—and there are many of them—and you possess a great deal of money, then you might not feel that money solves anything, simply because you haven’t encountered such problems in a long time. This could create the impression that money has no value, but it actually indicates that we’re detached from reality, not that we’ve achieved any form of moral enlightenment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hi_hi</author><text>Relevant quote from the comic genius of Spike Milligan.<p>“Money can&#x27;t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.”<p>If you&#x27;ve never heard of him, it&#x27;s well worth reading some of his books (see Memoirs), especially of his time serving during the Second World War.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spike_Milligan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spike_Milligan</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Steve Wozniak: When I die these are the moments I want to remember</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/18/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-happiness-matters-more-than-accomplishment.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>self_awareness</author><text>&gt; At the end of his life, Steve Wozniak won&#x27;t measure his happiness by the size of Apple&#x27;s market cap or his personal net worth.<p>This is a very popular stance to take for every millionare out there.<p>Also, the absence of daily worries, the lack of problems induced by money, and the presence of an everlasting feeling of security can lead to a detachment from the concept of wealth. What I mean is, if you don’t experience the problems that money can easily solve—and there are many of them—and you possess a great deal of money, then you might not feel that money solves anything, simply because you haven’t encountered such problems in a long time. This could create the impression that money has no value, but it actually indicates that we’re detached from reality, not that we’ve achieved any form of moral enlightenment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>The_Colonel</author><text>It&#x27;s a good point, Maslow&#x27;s hierarchy of needs is an important concept to keep in mind. However, most software engineers live well enough that their basic needs are well covered by their above-average income.</text></comment> |
10,982,160 | 10,982,237 | 1 | 3 | 10,979,418 | train | <story><title>Why Understanding Space Is So Hard</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/this-is-why-understanding-space-is-so-hard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kazinator</author><text>The question &quot;would space still exist if matter disappeared&quot; is posed with an ontological bias which influences the answer.<p>A better question is: does a universe in which there is nothing (and never has been) still contain space? (Though a better question, I wrecked it by introducing &quot;never&quot;, which presupposes that the universe has time---even though it contains nothing, and therefore no events take place.)<p>The question creates a bias because when we imagine matter being removed from the universe, we firstly imagine the removal as an event unfolding in time. Secondly, we continue to imagine the locations where pieces of matter <i>used</i> to be, and those locations continue to be separated by the abstract space which we continue to imagine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdonis</author><text><i>&gt; does a universe in which there is nothing (and never has been) still contain space?</i><p>Within the framework of our best current theories, the answer is yes, in the sense that flat Minkowski spacetime, containing no matter or energy anywhere, is a valid solution of the Einstein Field Equation of general relativity.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Understanding Space Is So Hard</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/this-is-why-understanding-space-is-so-hard</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kazinator</author><text>The question &quot;would space still exist if matter disappeared&quot; is posed with an ontological bias which influences the answer.<p>A better question is: does a universe in which there is nothing (and never has been) still contain space? (Though a better question, I wrecked it by introducing &quot;never&quot;, which presupposes that the universe has time---even though it contains nothing, and therefore no events take place.)<p>The question creates a bias because when we imagine matter being removed from the universe, we firstly imagine the removal as an event unfolding in time. Secondly, we continue to imagine the locations where pieces of matter <i>used</i> to be, and those locations continue to be separated by the abstract space which we continue to imagine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ratsmack</author><text>Time is simply a measure of change, so if there is nothing to change how can there be time?</text></comment> |
19,955,946 | 19,955,221 | 1 | 3 | 19,953,854 | train | <story><title>A Decade of Remote Work</title><url>https://blog.viktorpetersson.com/2019/05/18/a-decade-of-remote.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knappe</author><text>So one thing that isn&#x27;t mentioned in this article that I think is incredibly important is making sure you maintain a social life outside of work.<p>When working at an office you tend to spend time with your coworkers outside of work and that is something you don&#x27;t really get an opportunity to take advantage of when you&#x27;re remote. Be sure to make some effort to get out of the house and be social in some form. Otherwise it becomes too easy to become isolated and you can suffer because of it. It also helps with counteracting the problem of overworking, since you have other obligations in you day that push you towards wrapping up work for the day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notacoward</author><text>Totally agree, and thank you. As much as I enjoy being alone, if I go too long without any significant social contact my &quot;social muscles&quot; start to atrophy. I start misinterpreting others&#x27; social cues, I forget how to do the usual give-and-take of a normal conversation, I start coming across as aloof or pushy (which is enough of a problem for me already). It&#x27;s particularly helpful to have social contact, even if it&#x27;s just VC, with the members of my team, so I can &quot;stay in practice&quot; interacting with those particular personalities in that particular environment, but social contact with <i>anyone</i> is almost as good.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Decade of Remote Work</title><url>https://blog.viktorpetersson.com/2019/05/18/a-decade-of-remote.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knappe</author><text>So one thing that isn&#x27;t mentioned in this article that I think is incredibly important is making sure you maintain a social life outside of work.<p>When working at an office you tend to spend time with your coworkers outside of work and that is something you don&#x27;t really get an opportunity to take advantage of when you&#x27;re remote. Be sure to make some effort to get out of the house and be social in some form. Otherwise it becomes too easy to become isolated and you can suffer because of it. It also helps with counteracting the problem of overworking, since you have other obligations in you day that push you towards wrapping up work for the day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kiro</author><text>&gt; When working at an office you tend to spend time with your coworkers outside of work<p>Never experienced this. Is it really that common? I love my coworkers but they are colleagues, not friends.</text></comment> |
14,167,130 | 14,167,269 | 1 | 2 | 14,165,785 | train | <story><title>Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/20/intel-shuts-lustre-file-system-business/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>This entire space is littered with hard to use and&#x2F;or flawed products. It&#x27;s extremely difficult to get right. And even things like HDFS, which redefine the problem into something much much more manageable and with better semantics for distributed computing, have had their own issues.<p>Take, for example, my favorite storage system Ceph. As I understand it was originally going to be CephFS, with multiple metadata servers and lots of distributed POSIX goodness. However, in the 10+ years its been in development, the parts that have gotten tons of traction and have widespread use are seemingly one-off side projects from the underlying storage system: object storage and the RBD block device interfaces. Only in the past 12 months is CephFS becoming production ready. But only with a single metadata server, and the multiple metadata servers are still being debugged.<p>With Ceph, some of these timing issues are that the market for object store and network-based block devices are dwarf the market for distributed POSIX. But I bring it up to point out that distributed POSIX is also just a really really hard problem, with limited use cases. It&#x27;s super convenient for getting an existing Unix executable to run on lots of machines at once. But that convenience may not be worth the challenges it imposes on the infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>X-Istence</author><text>Object Storage and layered on top of that RBD are much easier to get right.<p>CephFS simply didn&#x27;t gain as much traction because it made sense to just store objects in many cases, and let something else worry about what is stored and where. A massive distributed file system is not nearly as necessary as people make it out to be for a lot of different workloads.<p>RBD works so well because it can replace iSCSI&#x2F;FC storage and provide failover and redundancy, and as you scale servers it gets faster. We had 20 Gbit&#x2F;sec bandwidth for our storage network (to each hypervisor), with 20 Gbit&#x2F;sec for the front-end Ceph access network, and Ceph RBD easily saturated it on the hypervisor side. Spinning up VM&#x27;s in OpenStack was a pleasure and soooooo quick (RBD backed images too).<p>We looked at increasing the hypervisor to 40 Gbit&#x2F;sec, but decided against it for cost reasons, and in reality we had very little workloads that actually needed that much storage IO.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/20/intel-shuts-lustre-file-system-business/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>epistasis</author><text>This entire space is littered with hard to use and&#x2F;or flawed products. It&#x27;s extremely difficult to get right. And even things like HDFS, which redefine the problem into something much much more manageable and with better semantics for distributed computing, have had their own issues.<p>Take, for example, my favorite storage system Ceph. As I understand it was originally going to be CephFS, with multiple metadata servers and lots of distributed POSIX goodness. However, in the 10+ years its been in development, the parts that have gotten tons of traction and have widespread use are seemingly one-off side projects from the underlying storage system: object storage and the RBD block device interfaces. Only in the past 12 months is CephFS becoming production ready. But only with a single metadata server, and the multiple metadata servers are still being debugged.<p>With Ceph, some of these timing issues are that the market for object store and network-based block devices are dwarf the market for distributed POSIX. But I bring it up to point out that distributed POSIX is also just a really really hard problem, with limited use cases. It&#x27;s super convenient for getting an existing Unix executable to run on lots of machines at once. But that convenience may not be worth the challenges it imposes on the infrastructure.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zzzcpan</author><text>&quot;This entire space is littered with hard to use and&#x2F;or flawed products.&quot;<p>None of the internet facing services actually need a strongly consistent POSIX filesystem that scales across multiple datacenters and a huge chunk of them won&#x27;t put up with corresponding latencies of something like that for mere convinience. So the products are not really flawed, they just don&#x27;t need to do those things.</text></comment> |
13,771,833 | 13,771,893 | 1 | 2 | 13,771,421 | train | <story><title>Lyft Is Said to Seek New Funding as Its Rival Uber Stumbles</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/technology/lyft-funding-uber.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>Counterpoint: one of the reasons I prefer Uber is that it <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> allow or encourage in-app tipping. Tipping sucks, is economically dysfunctional, and socially awkward. If the drivers aren&#x27;t making enough from base fares then the fares need to go up - it&#x27;s not my job to be a charity.</text></item><item><author>jbw976</author><text>the in app tipping that lyft provides is what seals the deal for me. the drivers are performing a service for me and having an integrated way to enhance their compensation is really nice. a lot of the drivers have a hard time making a good living especially considering vehicle related costs are all on their shoulders. I&#x27;m happy to have a 1-click way to give them a bit extra.<p>I&#x27;ve never understood why uber doesn&#x27;t let you tip from within the app. it further solidifies the perception that uber doesn&#x27;t care about its drivers. they can&#x27;t wait to replace all their human drivers with a self driving fleet. can the same be said about lyft? maybe. but at least the humans are being compensated better by lyft right now.</text></item><item><author>smileysteve</author><text>The key points are<p>- CEO never blackmailed journalists<p>- No major revelations of sexual harassment<p>- ~~No major revelations of political support~~<p>Related to core business<p>- Surge Limit has prevented complaints about emergency pricing vs Uber.<p>- Lyft takes a lower commission capped at 20%&#x2F;25%<p>- Lyft has in app digital tipping (drivers keep 100% of tips). Uber&#x27;s tip policy encourages cash, which is an often cited complaint of taxis.<p>- Major investment &#x2F; partnership with GM (mentioned in an Uber thread that Car Makers will need a cheap &#x2F; reasonably priced app)</text></item><item><author>techsupporter</author><text>Forgive me if this is me being dense, but from an outsider&#x27;s perspective I don&#x27;t understand what makes Lyft any better than Uber. Neither company properly categorizes their drivers (as employees), both have a rather sizeable cut from fares, both depended on being basically illegal cabs--except for Uber Black, which uses licensed black car services--to get started, and neither has a financially viable business model.<p>Why is either business the cat&#x27;s meow?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kemayo</author><text>I completely agree, and was halfway through writing a similar comment when I saw your post.<p>I <i>actively</i> make choices for things like transit and food which reduce how much I have to think about tipping. I don&#x27;t <i>like</i> having to judge someone&#x27;s service, and decide how much it&#x27;s appropriate to tip them based on some unwritten societal rule.<p>The signal that hiding tips away sends is &quot;the service provider is being compensated already&quot;, and if you want to make an extra effort to pay them more you can, but it&#x27;s not required of you.<p>I&#x27;m absolutely in favor of Uber&#x2F;Lift charging whatever is necessary to pay their drivers properly. Similarly, I love no-tip restaurants which pay their servers and kitchen staff living wages.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lyft Is Said to Seek New Funding as Its Rival Uber Stumbles</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/technology/lyft-funding-uber.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>Counterpoint: one of the reasons I prefer Uber is that it <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> allow or encourage in-app tipping. Tipping sucks, is economically dysfunctional, and socially awkward. If the drivers aren&#x27;t making enough from base fares then the fares need to go up - it&#x27;s not my job to be a charity.</text></item><item><author>jbw976</author><text>the in app tipping that lyft provides is what seals the deal for me. the drivers are performing a service for me and having an integrated way to enhance their compensation is really nice. a lot of the drivers have a hard time making a good living especially considering vehicle related costs are all on their shoulders. I&#x27;m happy to have a 1-click way to give them a bit extra.<p>I&#x27;ve never understood why uber doesn&#x27;t let you tip from within the app. it further solidifies the perception that uber doesn&#x27;t care about its drivers. they can&#x27;t wait to replace all their human drivers with a self driving fleet. can the same be said about lyft? maybe. but at least the humans are being compensated better by lyft right now.</text></item><item><author>smileysteve</author><text>The key points are<p>- CEO never blackmailed journalists<p>- No major revelations of sexual harassment<p>- ~~No major revelations of political support~~<p>Related to core business<p>- Surge Limit has prevented complaints about emergency pricing vs Uber.<p>- Lyft takes a lower commission capped at 20%&#x2F;25%<p>- Lyft has in app digital tipping (drivers keep 100% of tips). Uber&#x27;s tip policy encourages cash, which is an often cited complaint of taxis.<p>- Major investment &#x2F; partnership with GM (mentioned in an Uber thread that Car Makers will need a cheap &#x2F; reasonably priced app)</text></item><item><author>techsupporter</author><text>Forgive me if this is me being dense, but from an outsider&#x27;s perspective I don&#x27;t understand what makes Lyft any better than Uber. Neither company properly categorizes their drivers (as employees), both have a rather sizeable cut from fares, both depended on being basically illegal cabs--except for Uber Black, which uses licensed black car services--to get started, and neither has a financially viable business model.<p>Why is either business the cat&#x27;s meow?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nojvek</author><text>But when a driver goes above and beyond, it feels good to tip. One driver offered me water and a towel when it was too hot. He genuinely gave a shit about me and lyft made tipping easy. I found lyft&#x27;s customer service better.<p>Honesty lyft&#x27;s pink branding and mustache logo gives off a fun and underdog vibe. Not many companies go for pink. Their 50% female executive represention probably plays a role.<p>Uber on the other hand with black&#x2F;silver gives off a very strong corporate &quot;we&#x27;re gonna fuck you over if you don&#x27;t play by our rules&quot; vibe.<p>This are emotional arguments but that&#x27;s what branding is all about.</text></comment> |
30,255,346 | 30,251,471 | 1 | 2 | 30,249,618 | train | <story><title>Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of Covid-19</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMM_386</author><text>I have been noticeably short of breath since getting a pretty bad case of Covid (hospitalized), and that was months ago.<p>Even things like climbing stairs has become a chore. One top of that, I was experiencing syncope on standing which they sent me to a cardiologist for. I couldn&#x27;t complete the treadmill test to anyone&#x27;s satisfaction so now we have to explore this further.<p>None of this existed prior to getting Covid, and it&#x27;s far past the point of &quot;it&#x27;s all in my head&quot;. With the fainting on standing, I would literally drop to my knees as the world faded to black. I&#x27;ve never experienced anything like that in my life.<p>The shortness of breath is just another one to add to a list of problems now.<p>Note I was double-vaxxed when I caught Covid. I&#x27;ll have to assume Omnicron although I have no actual data on that. It was a breakthrough case and I had a 104 fever, cough, and shortness of breath (that&#x27;s why they admitted me). It&#x27;s been downhill since then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevenicr</author><text>Something that helped me alot...<p>I wrote the date and times of activities that drained me - and the recovery time of rest before I felt average.<p>This included phone conversations, which I found had about a 14 minute limit.<p>It was helpful in communicating with other health professionals a little, but immensely helpful in seeing a couple weeks go by and my activities got longer &#x2F; further, and the recovery time got shorter.<p>This also helped with the feelings of dread and worry when in the middle of something, I felt complete exhaustion - knowing I could look at a clock and count on 2 minutes to go by and I would be mostly normal again..
Things like that had a huge impact for me.<p>After some months, looking back on where things were, I feel that I am doing okay, and better than I was, even if I am not where I&#x27;d like to be.</text></comment> | <story><title>Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of Covid-19</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01689-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMM_386</author><text>I have been noticeably short of breath since getting a pretty bad case of Covid (hospitalized), and that was months ago.<p>Even things like climbing stairs has become a chore. One top of that, I was experiencing syncope on standing which they sent me to a cardiologist for. I couldn&#x27;t complete the treadmill test to anyone&#x27;s satisfaction so now we have to explore this further.<p>None of this existed prior to getting Covid, and it&#x27;s far past the point of &quot;it&#x27;s all in my head&quot;. With the fainting on standing, I would literally drop to my knees as the world faded to black. I&#x27;ve never experienced anything like that in my life.<p>The shortness of breath is just another one to add to a list of problems now.<p>Note I was double-vaxxed when I caught Covid. I&#x27;ll have to assume Omnicron although I have no actual data on that. It was a breakthrough case and I had a 104 fever, cough, and shortness of breath (that&#x27;s why they admitted me). It&#x27;s been downhill since then.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TylerE</author><text>Lungs are no joke.<p>I had a bad case of pneumonia that put me in the hospital for a couple days a few years back (early 30s at the time) - and it was year plus before my lungs were back to &quot;normal&quot;... I&#x27;m asthmatic so even my normal isn&#x27;t that great. Was having to do nebulizer treatments basically every day for months.</text></comment> |
30,473,608 | 30,472,617 | 1 | 2 | 30,470,457 | train | <story><title>Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?</title><url>https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-can-you-do-about-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boppo1</author><text>&gt; wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine working in a place like this. I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar constructions that are a result of being well read. Running what I&#x27;ve written, the codification of my thoughts, through a statistical homogenization machine is dystopian in a way I had never imagined. What kind of business was it?<p>Imagine running famous writers through this thing, even if they&#x27;re just journalists. Gross. I&#x27;m gonna run Moby Dick through Grammarly later and see what it has to say.</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>Years ago I worked at a company where many people were using Grammarly. One of the top devs took a look at it, and saw that the text was sent to Grammarly&#x27;s server unencrypted and warned everyone not to use it. Some still did.<p>At my previous engagement, a large number of staff spoke English as a second or third language, and Grammarly was prevalent. Even as a native English speaker, they wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader. I&#x27;ll admit that it caught some of my dumber mistakes, but I never felt comfortable using it. I could have proof-read my work better is all. Perhaps if I wasn&#x27;t given mind-numbing work, the quality would have been better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chipotle_coyote</author><text>While I don&#x27;t use Grammarly, this doesn&#x27;t strike me as a very fair description of what grammar checkers are meant to do. Just like spellcheckers, they only make the changes you let them make. If you blindly accept every suggestion they make, then yes, I suppose you&#x27;re running your text &quot;through a statistical homogenization machine,&quot; but that&#x27;s even more foolish than blindly accepting every suggestion a spellchecker makes.<p>I <i>do</i> use a &quot;grammar and style check&quot; built into Ulysses fairly frequently, even on fiction. This is a server-side service like Grammarly, but without the keylogging-ish aspects. (It only works in Ulysses, and you have to explicitly go into &quot;revision mode&quot; and click the &quot;Check Text&quot; button.) And, sure, it&#x27;s optimized for business writing and is going to make a lot of dumb suggestions. But not <i>all</i> the suggestions are dumb; it really does catch genuine mistakes and even make style suggestions worth considering (e.g., &quot;the phrase here is so overused it&#x27;s in our database as an overused phrase, so are you sure you want to use it&quot;). And, of course, sometimes I really <i>am</i> writing something for business, and some of the suggestions that are superfluous in creative writing might actually be useful.<p>I don&#x27;t like Grammarly&#x27;s approach explicitly because of the &quot;send everything to Grammarly in the background&quot;, but I think people write off style checkers as pointless a little too quickly. Even the stupidest grammar checker, like the one built into macOS (sorry, Apple), will catch things like inadvertently doubled words, which is something I&#x27;m prone to do when I pause in the middle of writing a sentence to collect my thoughts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?</title><url>https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-can-you-do-about-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boppo1</author><text>&gt; wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine working in a place like this. I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar constructions that are a result of being well read. Running what I&#x27;ve written, the codification of my thoughts, through a statistical homogenization machine is dystopian in a way I had never imagined. What kind of business was it?<p>Imagine running famous writers through this thing, even if they&#x27;re just journalists. Gross. I&#x27;m gonna run Moby Dick through Grammarly later and see what it has to say.</text></item><item><author>geocrasher</author><text>Years ago I worked at a company where many people were using Grammarly. One of the top devs took a look at it, and saw that the text was sent to Grammarly&#x27;s server unencrypted and warned everyone not to use it. Some still did.<p>At my previous engagement, a large number of staff spoke English as a second or third language, and Grammarly was prevalent. Even as a native English speaker, they wanted me to use it as a sort of proof reader. I&#x27;ll admit that it caught some of my dumber mistakes, but I never felt comfortable using it. I could have proof-read my work better is all. Perhaps if I wasn&#x27;t given mind-numbing work, the quality would have been better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iak8god</author><text>&gt; I often write with some unusual but perfectly valid grammar constructions that are a result of being well read.<p>That&#x27;s lovely for you. It sounds like you&#x27;re very clever. However, most writing in the workplace is intended to communicate concrete ideas, and benefits more from clarity than cleverness.</text></comment> |
28,112,146 | 28,111,933 | 1 | 2 | 28,111,718 | train | <story><title>About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years</title><url>https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2021-08-06/animator-dorm-project-about-90-percent-of-animators-quit-their-jobs-within-3-years/.175908</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chadcmulligan</author><text>It&#x27;s like all those jobs - game developer, film jobs, graphic artist, artist, musician - too many young people want to do it and there&#x27;s a lot of money if you&#x27;re successful so it attracts sharks up the top who keep all the money. Just don&#x27;t is my advice, unless you have a trust fund, which a large number of those successful have, you can weather out the early years then until you make a name for yourself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mumblemumble</author><text>I&#x27;m rather fond of the story of the Pulitzer prizewinning poet Wallace Stevens, who worked as an insurance attorney by day, and did his writing during his free time. He considered his unexciting day job to be something that enabled him to do his writing, by giving his life a stable foundation that left plenty of mental resources remaining for doing what he loved.<p>Some choice quotes on the subject:<p>&quot;It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.&quot;<p>&quot;It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I&#x27;ve lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>About 90% of Animators Quit Their Jobs Within 3 Years</title><url>https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2021-08-06/animator-dorm-project-about-90-percent-of-animators-quit-their-jobs-within-3-years/.175908</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chadcmulligan</author><text>It&#x27;s like all those jobs - game developer, film jobs, graphic artist, artist, musician - too many young people want to do it and there&#x27;s a lot of money if you&#x27;re successful so it attracts sharks up the top who keep all the money. Just don&#x27;t is my advice, unless you have a trust fund, which a large number of those successful have, you can weather out the early years then until you make a name for yourself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilverRed</author><text>Yep, all the fun jobs have horrible work environments because people stick to it even if the job sucks. I&#x27;m a big fan of the boring jobs. If its not working out, you just leave and go somewhere else so employers have to compete by making the job more attractive in other ways.<p>There is even a wiki page for this concept <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compensating_differential" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compensating_differential</a></text></comment> |
37,837,581 | 37,837,369 | 1 | 2 | 37,836,237 | train | <story><title>Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification</title><url>https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil-sector-is-lobbying-for-inefficient-hydrogen-cars-because-it-wants-to-delay-electrification-/2-1-1033226?zephr_sso_ott=XwKh7x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gmane</author><text>Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn&#x27;t make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid&#x2F;gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_fizz_buzz_</author><text>Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.</text></comment> | <story><title>Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification</title><url>https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/liebreich-oil-sector-is-lobbying-for-inefficient-hydrogen-cars-because-it-wants-to-delay-electrification-/2-1-1033226?zephr_sso_ott=XwKh7x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gmane</author><text>Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn&#x27;t make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid&#x2F;gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tw04</author><text>I don&#x27;t blame you for being skeptical, but it isn&#x27;t just the oil and gas industry. The Japanese government went all-in on hydrogen.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thediplomat.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;a-look-at-japans-latest-hydrogen-strategy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thediplomat.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;a-look-at-japans-latest-hydr...</a></text></comment> |
18,499,124 | 18,498,902 | 1 | 2 | 18,493,047 | train | <story><title>NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-city-subway-bus-death-spiral-mta-fares</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>It&#x27;s also interesting how people <i>don&#x27;t</i> see public roads in the same way—people don&#x27;t expect roads to cover their own expenses directly, expect free parking as a human right and bridle at toll roads or gasoline taxes.<p>People need to see public transport as &quot;roads that don&#x27;t need cars&quot;.</text></item><item><author>DoubleGlazing</author><text>The problem with urban transport systems is that no one sees them for what they really are... an expensive thing that drives the economy. There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself, but the reality is that a few billion invested in better public transport results in a lot more billions being made elsewhere.<p>We need to get away from this idea that public transport systems need to break even or turn a profit. They are there to help make money in other ways. An efficient reliable transport system should cost the taxpayer money, but they will get that back in profit elsewhere through a thriving local economy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ProfessorLayton</author><text>Except that most of the wear and tear on our roads isn&#x27;t caused by people&#x27;s cars. People pay <i>much more</i> than their fair share of road maintenance via gas taxes etc than the industries that cause the most damage to the roads.<p>Semis cause 1,400x more wear than cars [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrrb.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;201432.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrrb.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;201432.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/20/new-york-city-subway-bus-death-spiral-mta-fares</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tikhonj</author><text>It&#x27;s also interesting how people <i>don&#x27;t</i> see public roads in the same way—people don&#x27;t expect roads to cover their own expenses directly, expect free parking as a human right and bridle at toll roads or gasoline taxes.<p>People need to see public transport as &quot;roads that don&#x27;t need cars&quot;.</text></item><item><author>DoubleGlazing</author><text>The problem with urban transport systems is that no one sees them for what they really are... an expensive thing that drives the economy. There seems to be an obsession in the west with making public transport pay for itself, but the reality is that a few billion invested in better public transport results in a lot more billions being made elsewhere.<p>We need to get away from this idea that public transport systems need to break even or turn a profit. They are there to help make money in other ways. An efficient reliable transport system should cost the taxpayer money, but they will get that back in profit elsewhere through a thriving local economy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elhudy</author><text>People might see roads different from public transportation because they are directly affected by poor Management on the part of public transportation companies. If your bus is always late, you can&#x27;t sit on the subway because the seat is soaked in piss, and there is no customer support for the $100 card you just purchased which isn&#x27;t working, you might become disinclined to defend the exorbitant costs of public transportation. As paradoxical as that might seem.</text></comment> |
7,354,815 | 7,178,134 | 1 | 3 | 7,178,004 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Should I sue drchrono (YC W11) for violating their contract w/ me?</title><text>[1 of 2]: My name is Dr. Dal Bedi. I&#x27;m owner of a medical practice in Va. I took a chance on a start-up drchrono as my EHR &amp; billing service provider; both services being a vital part of my business. It&#x27;s a decision I wish I never made. In the past 5 mo, I&#x27;ve had massive issues w&#x2F; the drchrono service. The setup of their billing &amp; collections services has taken 4 months due to repeated, inept errors by outsourced-to-India drchrono billing staff. Other drchrono users have been complaining about similar issues &amp; have asked for refunds: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1doMER9 &amp; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1fL8dzH. I&#x27;ve forwarded pages of errors to the drchrono staff http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;200i2D2y1s2R , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;1z0g230x0N1I , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;3H072F0f3k43 , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0k3G1t2h3h3w , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0V1x2h3E2m43 , escalated w&#x2F; their support team for months, and finally escalated to the CEO, Michael Nusimow. When that proved ineffective, I asked for a refund for the months when the service wasn&#x27;t functional, all while being a committed customer w&#x2F;o a single outstanding balance. This past Xmas Eve, drchrono sent me an email raising my monthly fee 3x from $1.5k&#x2F;mo to $4.5k&#x2F;mo starting Jan 1st, 2014 w&#x2F;o any reason given -- even tho. we have a signed contract which sets the price for their services and can&#x27;t be changed.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Skeletor</author><text>drchrono cofounder here.<p>I spoke with Dr. Dal on the phone and we worked out his issues. We try to make all of our users happy, but from time to time things don&#x27;t work out. The drchrono team and I are working to change healthcare doctor by doctor and healthcare is a hard space to fix.<p>Dr. Dal was using our RCM (Revenue Cycle Management) service where we do all of the staff work for billing for the Doctor in exchange for a percentage of all of the insurance collections done in a month. There is a monthly minimum fee for the first few months the service ramps up, but for all of these contracts the percentage of billing fees is designed to exceed the monthly minimum in a steady state. In all the months Dr. Dal was using our RCM service he was paid on all of his medical claims in our system, but his account still never exceeded the minimum fee.<p>We raised rates for all of our RCM customers whose contracts weren&#x27;t exceeding the minimums across the board. We gave customers several months notice about these rate changes and helped any customer that wanted to do their own billing or port to another service do so.<p>All of our users have access to download all of their data at any time. Users can also synch all of their data on an ongoing basis to Box&#x27;s Enterprise HIPAA compliant storage. We put up a blog post to highlight these features and give instructions for users with links to our knowledge base: <a href="https://drchrono.com/blog/backup-records-outside-drchrono/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drchrono.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;backup-records-outside-drchrono&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s important that users always have access to their own data to use with other services at their convenience and to have for their own safety and peace of mind.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Should I sue drchrono (YC W11) for violating their contract w/ me?</title><text>[1 of 2]: My name is Dr. Dal Bedi. I&#x27;m owner of a medical practice in Va. I took a chance on a start-up drchrono as my EHR &amp; billing service provider; both services being a vital part of my business. It&#x27;s a decision I wish I never made. In the past 5 mo, I&#x27;ve had massive issues w&#x2F; the drchrono service. The setup of their billing &amp; collections services has taken 4 months due to repeated, inept errors by outsourced-to-India drchrono billing staff. Other drchrono users have been complaining about similar issues &amp; have asked for refunds: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1doMER9 &amp; http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1fL8dzH. I&#x27;ve forwarded pages of errors to the drchrono staff http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;200i2D2y1s2R , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;1z0g230x0N1I , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;3H072F0f3k43 , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0k3G1t2h3h3w , http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;0V1x2h3E2m43 , escalated w&#x2F; their support team for months, and finally escalated to the CEO, Michael Nusimow. When that proved ineffective, I asked for a refund for the months when the service wasn&#x27;t functional, all while being a committed customer w&#x2F;o a single outstanding balance. This past Xmas Eve, drchrono sent me an email raising my monthly fee 3x from $1.5k&#x2F;mo to $4.5k&#x2F;mo starting Jan 1st, 2014 w&#x2F;o any reason given -- even tho. we have a signed contract which sets the price for their services and can&#x27;t be changed.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phren0logy</author><text>Speaking as a physician, and with the caveat that I assume Dr. Bedi wouldn&#x27;t waste his time if this story wasn&#x27;t mostly accurate, I want to express my frustration - this is why we can&#x27;t have nice things!<p>Medical bureaucracies are very reticent to chose software from companies that don&#x27;t have a long track record. Examples like this are why we have to suffer through 1980s era software to get our work done.</text></comment> |
7,039,651 | 7,038,939 | 1 | 2 | 7,038,033 | train | <story><title>FFmpeg and a thousand fixes</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-thousand-fixes.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>The wonders of C:<p>- NULL pointer dereferences,<p>- Invalid pointer arithmetic leading to SIGSEGV due to unmapped memory access,<p>- Out-of-bounds reads and writes to stack, heap and static-based arrays,<p>- Invalid free() calls,<p>- Double free() calls over the same pointer,<p>- Division errors,<p>- Assertion failures,<p>- Use of uninitialized memory.<p>But hey, any good programmer always writes perfect C code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haberman</author><text>Yeah, and you know, the Rust guys are actually doing some great work on making a language that solves some of these problems without giving up the advantages that make C programmers choose C.<p>Meanwhile, you are just being snarky on a message board while using a whole stack of software that was built by the programmers whose work you are criticizing.</text></comment> | <story><title>FFmpeg and a thousand fixes</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-thousand-fixes.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>The wonders of C:<p>- NULL pointer dereferences,<p>- Invalid pointer arithmetic leading to SIGSEGV due to unmapped memory access,<p>- Out-of-bounds reads and writes to stack, heap and static-based arrays,<p>- Invalid free() calls,<p>- Double free() calls over the same pointer,<p>- Division errors,<p>- Assertion failures,<p>- Use of uninitialized memory.<p>But hey, any good programmer always writes perfect C code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinkelhake</author><text>Really breaking new ground here. What should FFmpeg have been written in? I can think of a few candidates, but I think they share a number of those &quot;wonders&quot;.</text></comment> |
6,407,506 | 6,407,469 | 1 | 2 | 6,406,877 | train | <story><title>Simpson's Paradox</title><url>http://vudlab.com/simpsons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tlb</author><text>The Omitted Variable Problem is part of my mental framework that causes me to not believe most epidemiological studies, especially ones that confirm a popular belief.<p>The almost universally omitted variable is health-consciousness. Some people are health-conscious and some aren&#x27;t. People who are health-conscious do a whole bunch of things, some of which help (like exercise, sleep well, eat moderately). They also do things that are widely believed to be good for you, like eating broccoli.<p>So if you do a study, you&#x27;ll find that people who eat lots of broccoli are healthier. You&#x27;ll be able to confirm pretty much any widely believed health folk wisdom, unless it&#x27;s something quite harmful, as long as you omit health-consciousness as a variable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simpson's Paradox</title><url>http://vudlab.com/simpsons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>Simpson&#x27;s Paradox is scary if you&#x27;ve not seen it before, but you should not stop here and instead proceed <i>immediately</i> on to omitted variable bias and the conversation here (<a href="http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/simpsons-paradox-explained/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;normaldeviate.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;simpsons-parad...</a>).<p>In short, Simpson&#x27;s paradox occurs because probability distributions and causal claims <i>are distinct things</i> which behave differently. It&#x27;s nothing more than a particular, insidious example of correlation not implying causation. It&#x27;s perfectly possible for a probability distribution to have a &quot;contradictory&quot; shape, but perfectly impossible for logical statements about the world to be contradictory.<p>The resolution is that you shouldn&#x27;t let your probability distributions turn into logical statements without analyzing your causal assumptions. This will lead you to whether or not excluding a variable is omitted variable bias (and whether including an improper one will lead to included variable bias, which is rarely recognized).</text></comment> |
17,523,390 | 17,523,266 | 1 | 2 | 17,522,961 | train | <story><title>Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, Winds Up Using More Plastic</title><url>https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/12/starbucks-straw-ban-will-see-the-company</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgbmtl</author><text>This article is rather cranky and make two assumptions: 1) that plastic is often trashed, not recycled, and it assumes that we will never fix that. 2) exemptions will not be made for people with disabilities.<p>Also, would compostable straws be an option? (assuming they do not end up in the landfill, and only distributed on demand to reduce waste).<p>Fast food better fix itself, or we will end up demonizing the entire industry, for its abundance of litter all over the place and subsidizing the cleanup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justinator</author><text>&gt; 1) that plastic is often trashed, not recycled, and it assumes that we will never fix that.<p>I&#x27;m sorry to say, but recycling plastic doesn&#x27;t work all that well. I believe one problem is that straws couldn&#x27;t be recycled (and I think these lids can?), but then the next problem is, who is going to recycle all this plastic [0] and what is the recycled product going to be? You can&#x27;t make a new lid out of an old on, unfortunately.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17368168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17368168</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws, Winds Up Using More Plastic</title><url>https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/12/starbucks-straw-ban-will-see-the-company</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mgbmtl</author><text>This article is rather cranky and make two assumptions: 1) that plastic is often trashed, not recycled, and it assumes that we will never fix that. 2) exemptions will not be made for people with disabilities.<p>Also, would compostable straws be an option? (assuming they do not end up in the landfill, and only distributed on demand to reduce waste).<p>Fast food better fix itself, or we will end up demonizing the entire industry, for its abundance of litter all over the place and subsidizing the cleanup.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ravenstine</author><text>Even if they are trashed, does it even matter unless they make it into the ocean? It&#x27;s not like any continent has a shortage on wasteland to build more landfills in.</text></comment> |
26,979,401 | 26,979,511 | 1 | 2 | 26,977,901 | train | <story><title>Union's evidence in Amazon vote 'could be grounds for overturning election'</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-labor-board-says-evidence-presented-by-union-amazon-vote-could-be-grounds-2021-04-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannyw</author><text>Amazon is offering competitive wages (especially for Albama&#x27;s cost of living), and benefits from day one.<p>Maybe a majority of the workers there prefer the status quo?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sammorrowdrums</author><text>I would be willing to listen to that line of argument, but having seen the Amazon manager training videos, the doitwithoutdues.com site, the countless other articles, evidence and anecdotes about Amazon&#x27;s particularly aggressive forms of trying to prevent unionisation, the twitter ambassadors tweeting the official talking points etc.<p>I don&#x27;t think we can rule out the possibility we don&#x27;t actually know what the employees truly think because they&#x27;re in the middle of an all out propaganda war.<p>And I certainly don&#x27;t think Amazon would put so much effort into fighting this if their employee treatment, benefits and compensation and general employer track record made employees genuinely not even consider the Union option.<p>As an outsider, it just feels like watching media reporting a war. I don&#x27;t trust it due to propaganda and clearly opposing biases at play between the interested parties.</text></comment> | <story><title>Union's evidence in Amazon vote 'could be grounds for overturning election'</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-labor-board-says-evidence-presented-by-union-amazon-vote-could-be-grounds-2021-04-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannyw</author><text>Amazon is offering competitive wages (especially for Albama&#x27;s cost of living), and benefits from day one.<p>Maybe a majority of the workers there prefer the status quo?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MomoXenosaga</author><text>One analysis in a local newspaper was something that blew my mind: in the US your health insurance is tied to your employer?!. Just think about how absolutely insane that is. Your boss has life or death power over you and your loved ones.
Apparently that&#x27;s how Amazon was able to threaten it&#x27;s workers.</text></comment> |
2,056,085 | 2,056,004 | 1 | 2 | 2,055,410 | train | <story><title>Steve Jobs Understands Team Building</title><url>http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2010/12/steve-jobs-understands-team-building.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matwood</author><text>It's amazing how many successful business types like SJ or PG recognize that people are the most important thing, and still the majority of high level managers view people as completely interchangeable cogs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ntoshev</author><text>It depends on what are you trying to do: if you want to change the world you need the best people, a sweatshop doesn't. If you hire great people and the job you have is not at their level, they'll run away anyway.</text></comment> | <story><title>Steve Jobs Understands Team Building</title><url>http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2010/12/steve-jobs-understands-team-building.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matwood</author><text>It's amazing how many successful business types like SJ or PG recognize that people are the most important thing, and still the majority of high level managers view people as completely interchangeable cogs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome</author><text><i>still the majority of high level managers view people as completely interchangeable cogs.</i><p>I'd say it's more common to make people <i>feel</i> like cogs.</text></comment> |
36,498,176 | 36,496,031 | 1 | 2 | 36,491,338 | train | <story><title>Tinc, a GPLv2 mesh routing VPN</title><url>https://www.tinc-vpn.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buserror</author><text>Been using tinc for god knows how long... Perhaps 20 years? It&#x27;s been fantastic. I really don&#x27;t know why people are wax-lyrical about wireguard. tinc was doing it 20 years ago. UDP? yeah. encryption, mesh, proxy ARP you name it. I&#x27;ve had countless install and it&#x27;s been the best VPN.<p>You even get a &#x27;dot&#x27; graph of your current network status if you want to. When &#x27;git&#x27; was invented, I put my &#x2F;etc&#x2F;tinc&#x2F;*&#x2F; into git with the public keys, and installing a new host to the mesh is one &#x27;git clone&#x27; away.<p>Most underrated open source software ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JeremyNT</author><text>I used and still really adore tinc, it&#x27;s been a joy to use.<p>I will say however that development appears to have fizzled out. I was really looking forward to some of the changes in 1.1, but it&#x27;s been in pre-release for years now and doesn&#x27;t seem like it&#x27;s closer to being officially released.<p>I&#x27;ve largely replaced tinc with Nebula [0], but I still think fondly of it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slackhq&#x2F;nebula">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;slackhq&#x2F;nebula</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tinc, a GPLv2 mesh routing VPN</title><url>https://www.tinc-vpn.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buserror</author><text>Been using tinc for god knows how long... Perhaps 20 years? It&#x27;s been fantastic. I really don&#x27;t know why people are wax-lyrical about wireguard. tinc was doing it 20 years ago. UDP? yeah. encryption, mesh, proxy ARP you name it. I&#x27;ve had countless install and it&#x27;s been the best VPN.<p>You even get a &#x27;dot&#x27; graph of your current network status if you want to. When &#x27;git&#x27; was invented, I put my &#x2F;etc&#x2F;tinc&#x2F;*&#x2F; into git with the public keys, and installing a new host to the mesh is one &#x27;git clone&#x27; away.<p>Most underrated open source software ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>generalizations</author><text>The draw of wireguard, at least for me, is the performance. Otherwise I’d be all in on tinc or zerotier.</text></comment> |
17,635,514 | 17,634,960 | 1 | 3 | 17,634,579 | train | <story><title>The Failure Mode of Clever (2010)</title><url>https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever/amp/?__twitter_impression=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shawn</author><text>Most of the comments seem to divide into two categories: those who have experienced this failure mode, and those attacking the author.<p>As someone who has learned not to do this, here is what the author is saying. You subconsciously care about yourself more than the person you&#x27;re talking to. When you want something from them, that&#x27;s a bad idea.<p>Those two sentences, if internalized, will cure you of trying to be clever. There&#x27;s no room for clever when you have to be effective. At least, not manufactured clever.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Failure Mode of Clever (2010)</title><url>https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever/amp/?__twitter_impression=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Havoc</author><text>Personally I&#x27;ve noticed I tend towards passive aggressive as &quot;failure mode&quot;. Which plays out as &quot;being difficult&quot;.<p>e.g. Authority figure tells me something is X and I think they&#x27;re wrong. Say as much, but it doesn&#x27;t stick. End result is I go with X but with lots of resistance. (Not helpful for career)<p>I&#x27;d also venture that what the author describes - online interactions are a rather unique ballgame. IRL I know when I&#x27;m the smartest person in the room. Online there is always a real chance that you&#x27;re arguing against a triple PhD that can school you till the end of time without breaking a sweat, but was just being modest &amp; polite.</text></comment> |
16,896,330 | 16,896,355 | 1 | 2 | 16,896,150 | train | <story><title>Java is Pass-by-Value</title><url>http://javadude.com/articles/passbyvalue.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>This article is overly pedantic. Java&#x27;s semantics are pass-by-value only of you consider that the &quot;values&quot; that are being passed are pointers. But Java doesn&#x27;t have first-class pointers, it has implicit pointers. The only thing you can do with a Java pointer &quot;value&quot; is to tacitly dereference it.<p>In fact, you can write a swap(x,y) function in Java. It goes something like this:<p><pre><code> class foo { int value }
void swap(foo x, foo y} {
int temp = x.value;
x.value = y.value;
y.value = temp;
}
</code></pre>
(Yes, I know this isn&#x27;t valid Java. Cut me a little slack here, OK?)<p>&quot;But that&#x27;s cheating&quot; you protest. &quot;That&#x27;s not swapping the value of X and Y, that&#x27;s swapping the value of a slot in the values of X and Y, which happen to be objects.&quot; Well, yeah. So? Compare that to this C code:<p><pre><code> struct foo { int value }
void swap(struct foo x, struct foo y) {
[same code as above]
}
</code></pre>
The effect of this function will be DIFFERENT. Specifically, the C function will have no effect while the Java function will swap the value slots of X and Y because C lets you pass a structure as a value while Java does not. All Java &quot;values&quot; are (tacit) pointers to objects [1]. Pounding your fist on the table and insisting that Java is pass-by-value because you can&#x27;t write a swap(x,y) function obscures this crucial difference.<p>[1] OK, it also has ints and floats of various sizes. But that&#x27;s really it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colanderman</author><text>But Java <i>isn&#x27;t</i> pass-by-reference. Saying so is simply <i>wrong</i>, for exactly the reasons you write off as &quot;pedantry&quot;. I see this play out all the time with co-workers who are new to Python (which has the same semantics) being very confused about why &quot;numbers are passed by value but objects are passed by reference&quot;.<p>Pedantry matters in our profession. Details have consequences.</text></comment> | <story><title>Java is Pass-by-Value</title><url>http://javadude.com/articles/passbyvalue.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>This article is overly pedantic. Java&#x27;s semantics are pass-by-value only of you consider that the &quot;values&quot; that are being passed are pointers. But Java doesn&#x27;t have first-class pointers, it has implicit pointers. The only thing you can do with a Java pointer &quot;value&quot; is to tacitly dereference it.<p>In fact, you can write a swap(x,y) function in Java. It goes something like this:<p><pre><code> class foo { int value }
void swap(foo x, foo y} {
int temp = x.value;
x.value = y.value;
y.value = temp;
}
</code></pre>
(Yes, I know this isn&#x27;t valid Java. Cut me a little slack here, OK?)<p>&quot;But that&#x27;s cheating&quot; you protest. &quot;That&#x27;s not swapping the value of X and Y, that&#x27;s swapping the value of a slot in the values of X and Y, which happen to be objects.&quot; Well, yeah. So? Compare that to this C code:<p><pre><code> struct foo { int value }
void swap(struct foo x, struct foo y) {
[same code as above]
}
</code></pre>
The effect of this function will be DIFFERENT. Specifically, the C function will have no effect while the Java function will swap the value slots of X and Y because C lets you pass a structure as a value while Java does not. All Java &quot;values&quot; are (tacit) pointers to objects [1]. Pounding your fist on the table and insisting that Java is pass-by-value because you can&#x27;t write a swap(x,y) function obscures this crucial difference.<p>[1] OK, it also has ints and floats of various sizes. But that&#x27;s really it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>masklinn</author><text>&gt; This article is overly pedantic. Java&#x27;s semantics are pass-by-value only of you consider that the &quot;values&quot; that are being passed are pointers.<p>Which is exactly what they are.<p>&gt; But Java doesn&#x27;t have first-class pointers, it has implicit pointers. The only thing you can do with a Java pointer &quot;value&quot; is to tacitly dereference it.<p>So? Just because you&#x27;re not given direct access to the value itself doesn&#x27;t change the semantics of the language. If you assume &quot;pass-by&quot; is strictly dichotomous and the choices are either value or reference, then Java can only be pass-by-value, its semantics simply don&#x27;t allow the possibility of it being pass-by-ref.<p>IIRC the Python community calls it &quot;pass reference by value&quot;, sadly they seem to be more or less the only ones doing so. CLU called it &quot;pass by sharing&quot;.<p>&gt; All Java &quot;values&quot; are (tacit) pointers to objects [1]. Pounding your fist on the table and insisting that Java is pass-by-value because you can&#x27;t write a swap(x,y) function obscures this crucial difference.<p>Then again that Java&#x27;s boxed types are boxed seems pretty obvious...</text></comment> |
35,145,898 | 35,144,913 | 1 | 2 | 35,142,991 | train | <story><title>LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A1_60163_Tornado</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hilbert42</author><text>I&#x27;m a high-tech electronics person but I still love steam engines (and that&#x27;s partly historical as my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on building power station boilers and I&#x27;m old enough to have traveled on steam trains as a kid when they weren&#x27;t a novelty).<p>That said, I&#x27;m concerned that the reawakening of interest in steam engines&#x2F;trains especially in the UK may be the result of a hankering for the old days when Britain had an empire and its mechanical engineering output was the envy of the world. Of course, I hope I&#x27;m wrong and that interest actually runs deeper than just that.<p>What ought to be important about this reawakening is that we have the opportunity to awaken an interest in kids about mechanics, engineering and science and do so from a very young age, and in my opinion, there&#x27;s nothing much better than having them stand on a platform watching a hissing, noisy steam engine.<p>Steam engines are visually exciting and interesting but they are also the combined embodiment of mechanics and thermodynamics and understanding both of them is the keyway to understanding science.<p>Despite my electronics background I consider that a thorough understanding of thermodynamics is crucial to understanding the high-tech world irrespective of one&#x27;s field. And I reckon there&#x27;s likely no better way of starting kids&#x27; education in thermodynamics other than to have them engulfed in steam from a Puffing Billy.</text></comment> | <story><title>LNER Peppercorn Class A1 60163 Tornado</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A1_60163_Tornado</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FearNotDaniel</author><text>I particularly love this linked story from 2009 [0], buried in the Wikipedia article:<p>&quot;Passengers were rescued by a steam locomotive after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England.&quot;<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;england&#x2F;8428097.stm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;england&#x2F;8428097.stm</a></text></comment> |
32,998,671 | 32,998,309 | 1 | 2 | 32,996,953 | train | <story><title>Someone is pretending to be me</title><url>https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending-to-be-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer&#x27;s position. You&#x27;ve been doing interviews every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation. You&#x27;re about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you&#x27;re 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you&#x27;re in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that&#x27;s ever happened.<p>Is it a good legal&#x2F;corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate? Holy fuck, no. Is it going to be WAY more thrilling? Oh my god yes; how could you not?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&gt; Is it a good legal&#x2F;corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate?<p>Consider the situation from the perspective of the interviewer: They don&#x27;t have all of the background we did while reading this blog. They haven&#x27;t even had time to process what Connor #1 said by the time that Connor #2 arrives.<p>The decision to hear them both out for a few minutes is reasonable, IMO. At that point in time, Connor #1 could have been lying as far as the interviewer knew. Letting them both exist in the meeting immediately cleared up any confusion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Someone is pretending to be me</title><url>https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending-to-be-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer&#x27;s position. You&#x27;ve been doing interviews every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation. You&#x27;re about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you&#x27;re 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you&#x27;re in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that&#x27;s ever happened.<p>Is it a good legal&#x2F;corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate? Holy fuck, no. Is it going to be WAY more thrilling? Oh my god yes; how could you not?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>filmgirlcw</author><text>Oh, I&#x27;d be so in to take part in this drama. It would probably be one of the most memorable job interviews of all time.<p>And I doubt there would be too many legal or corporate ramifications from allowing someone else to be on the call with their camera off. These are contractor positions, not full-time. Frankly, it&#x27;s a risk I would take to be able to witness this sort of thing in real-time.</text></comment> |
29,414,919 | 29,414,927 | 1 | 3 | 29,409,894 | train | <story><title>Instagram Is Facebook Now</title><url>https://embedded.substack.com/p/instagram-is-facebook-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>theshrike79</author><text>The rest of the world seems to use Twitter for this. Despite all its faults it seems to be better for this kind of stuff.<p>Facebook&#x27;s algorithms limit the way posts can be found way too much.</text></item><item><author>k_bx</author><text>Ukraine is of course no major market for Facebook, but it&#x27;s a good example that doesn&#x27;t match what you describe at all. In Ukraine, Facebook is the place where you follow top journalists, anti-corruption people, activists, and other public figures. It&#x27;s basically an extremely valuable addition to the media, where anyone can be lifted in popularity in a matter of hours if their content is truly important. Facebook has been an invaluable tool during the Maidan revolution in 2014 combining its social and video-streaming capabilities. It works in times where media is breaking down, being bought by oligarchs, and isn&#x27;t to be relied upon.<p>I don&#x27;t see any alternative that would replace it, in terms of being social, everyone being present on it, and allowing long text+image+video content to be posted and spread easily.</text></item><item><author>randomsearch</author><text>I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp.<p>Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all.<p>Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention.<p>Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company.<p>In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users.<p>If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part.<p>It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it.<p>Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmel</author><text>Twitter literally limits the length of your tweets. What can you say in a couple of phrases in the context of activism and politics? Just link another platform? Don&#x27;t get me started on twitter threads, this is abomination. My patience usually runs out after the third tweet in a thread.<p>Another day Twitter CEO resigned and he posted a screenshot of his mail. Why couldn&#x27;t he post it in a proper text format so people can reflow text and read it on different screens? Because Twitter sucks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Instagram Is Facebook Now</title><url>https://embedded.substack.com/p/instagram-is-facebook-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>theshrike79</author><text>The rest of the world seems to use Twitter for this. Despite all its faults it seems to be better for this kind of stuff.<p>Facebook&#x27;s algorithms limit the way posts can be found way too much.</text></item><item><author>k_bx</author><text>Ukraine is of course no major market for Facebook, but it&#x27;s a good example that doesn&#x27;t match what you describe at all. In Ukraine, Facebook is the place where you follow top journalists, anti-corruption people, activists, and other public figures. It&#x27;s basically an extremely valuable addition to the media, where anyone can be lifted in popularity in a matter of hours if their content is truly important. Facebook has been an invaluable tool during the Maidan revolution in 2014 combining its social and video-streaming capabilities. It works in times where media is breaking down, being bought by oligarchs, and isn&#x27;t to be relied upon.<p>I don&#x27;t see any alternative that would replace it, in terms of being social, everyone being present on it, and allowing long text+image+video content to be posted and spread easily.</text></item><item><author>randomsearch</author><text>I think Facebook (meta)‘s key asset is now WhatsApp.<p>Facebook is practically dead. It’s just a stream of awful content that isn’t from your friends. It’s hyper advertising and desperate attempts to clone other platforms as it slowly dies. It’ll continue for a long time, eventually becoming yahoo like, but young people do not care about it at all.<p>Instagram has similarly been over monetised but in an earlier stage. It has been roundly defeated by TikTok, utterly destroyed by TikTok, in the battle for teens’ attention.<p>Oculus was a great buy but the gap (in terms of years) between instagram’s peak and oculus really coming online is just too wide to “save” the company.<p>In contrast, WhatsApp is still used across the generations. It’s the one platform where grandparents and grandkids are both active users.<p>If I were Zuck then I’d focus on turning WhatsApp into an Asian-style chat platform with integrated services. That I can’t wire money on WhatsApp in the U.K. is I think a very very big strategic error on his part.<p>It seems clear Facebook (meta) can’t build anything truly new, but they can certainly extend platforms - they should focus on WhatsApp. It has longevity, strong network effects, and huge potential. Just don’t use ads and destroy it.<p>Otoh Facebook deserves to die so I hope he continues to think oculus will save them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jakub_g</author><text>I prefer Twitter personally, but in Poland it&#x27;s also FB where everyone is, + Messenger and FB groups.<p>Twitter is only really used by journalists and politicians in Poland.</text></comment> |
6,176,993 | 6,176,652 | 1 | 3 | 6,176,222 | train | <story><title>I cannot afford to go back to engineering school</title><url>https://medium.com/p/4ee09a99696e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I agree with the ultimate sentiment, which is that it&#x27;s generally inadvisable to try and pay your way through school these days. The federal government will let you and your parents borrow as much as you need to pay for school, and you&#x27;ll make more money after you finish your degree, so your efforts are better spent trying to finish in as few semesters as possible to minimize the amount of money you need to borrow instead of trying to pay for things as you go.<p>This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren&#x27;t willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that it&#x27;s the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000&#x27;s at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that&#x27;s increasingly something that&#x27;s not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fixxer</author><text>It gets stranger with graduate school.<p>I&#x27;m currently a PhD student. I quit a fairly lucrative trading career in 2010 and went back to school without any intention of doing a GRA (I was fine with self-funding; to be honest, I wanted to not have a boss for a while)... that lasted one semester.<p>My adviser realized she liked the idea of paying 1&#x2F;10 my old salary and getting an actual software engineer on her staff. I&#x27;m not one to complain or turn down money, so I took the gig and I&#x27;m near finished with the degree.<p><i>Moral of the story #1: Go back to school for a PhD with a boat load of cash in your pocket, legitimate skills and solid work experience. You won&#x27;t have to pay tuition.</i><p>My wife and also decided to start a family during this time. We paid for her insurance out of pocket. Once the little guy came into the world, we started getting pamphlets in the mail from the state (aka the broke state of Illinois) regarding free programs (health insurance, food and formula vouchers) that we qualified for due to my lowly GRA salary (my wife is a stay-at-home mom). They don&#x27;t care about or penalize high savings; these program managers just want to get as many qualified participants on the dole as possible to justify their existence. &quot;Need&quot; is not important; quotas are.<p><i>Moral of the story #2: Quit producing taxable income, go back to school, breed like a rabbit. The state will provide.</i><p>I realize this may sound harsh to those students currently getting by thanks to federal grants, but if you want to fix the problem, we need to get rid of these fucking programs. Prices will drop. All these loans accomplish is artificially inflating demand and putting graduates deep in debt. It&#x27;ll be messy, sure, but the system is not sustainable in current form.</text></comment> | <story><title>I cannot afford to go back to engineering school</title><url>https://medium.com/p/4ee09a99696e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>I agree with the ultimate sentiment, which is that it&#x27;s generally inadvisable to try and pay your way through school these days. The federal government will let you and your parents borrow as much as you need to pay for school, and you&#x27;ll make more money after you finish your degree, so your efforts are better spent trying to finish in as few semesters as possible to minimize the amount of money you need to borrow instead of trying to pay for things as you go.<p>This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren&#x27;t willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that it&#x27;s the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000&#x27;s at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that&#x27;s increasingly something that&#x27;s not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text><i>as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.</i><p>True, the debt seems a lot smaller in that context. I&#x27;m (very slightly) optimistic that the new rules which cap student loan payments as a % of income and also subsidize public service work will make this burden a little lighter and less intimidating.<p>But at bottom, it&#x27;s still a terrible problem. Not everyone is a financial wizard, and after an unpleasant brush with debt as a youth I&#x27;ve been largely allergic to it since. It&#x27;s disappointing that people who want to take a fiscally conservative approach and pay up front or as they go are finding that becoming ever more impractical, thereby limiting their economic opportunity and productivity. Although many schools offer scholarships and suchlike, they&#x27;re far from transparent.</text></comment> |
9,600,940 | 9,600,650 | 1 | 2 | 9,600,364 | train | <story><title>JavaScript GameBoy Advance Emulator</title><url>http://jsemu.github.io/gba/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arcatek</author><text>If I may, I&#x27;d like to also link my site (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;start9.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;start9.io</a>) which does this and also work with GB&#x2F;GBC, and persist your saves online (on top of quite a few other features). The only drawback is that we actually require users to upload their games, for legal reasons.<p>We&#x27;re still in beta, and it will probably improve quite a lot in the upcoming months, but I use it myself on a daily basis.<p>For the record, the emulators are currently based on Emscripten versions of the libretro cores (rather than being a full-JS emulator implementation, like IodineGBA). I&#x27;m looking to add more consoles, and the SNES will probably be come soon.<p>Should you try it, I&#x27;d love to hear your feedbacks (my contact is on my HN profile) :)</text></comment> | <story><title>JavaScript GameBoy Advance Emulator</title><url>http://jsemu.github.io/gba/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dma3</author><text>I think it&#x27;s important to credit the actual emulator this runs on: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;taisel&#x2F;IodineGBA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;taisel&#x2F;IodineGBA</a></text></comment> |
10,887,701 | 10,887,879 | 1 | 2 | 10,885,727 | train | <story><title>A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/1/11/a-beginners-guide-to-scaling-to-11-million-users-on-amazons.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>napkindrawing</author><text>I work in the entertainment &#x2F; ticketing industry and we&#x27;ve been burned badly before by relying on AWS&#x27; Elastic Load Balancer due to sudden &amp; unexpected traffic spikes.<p>From the article: &quot;Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): [...] It scales without your doing anything. If it sees additional traffic it scales behind the scenes both horizontally and vertically. You don’t have to manage it. As your applications scales so is the ELB.&quot;<p>From Amazon&#x27;s ELB documentation: &quot;Pre-Warming the Load Balancer: [...] In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected [...] we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer &quot;pre-warmed&quot;. We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request&#x2F;response that you will be testing.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M+ Users on Amazon's AWS</title><url>http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/1/11/a-beginners-guide-to-scaling-to-11-million-users-on-amazons.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>falcolas</author><text>Hoo boy. Here we go. The problem with AWS reps is that they only see everything as working perfectly, with no possibility for downtime of their services.<p>RDS is great, but only to a certain level. You&#x27;ll still need to pull it off RDS once you reach that service&#x27;s capacity (much sooner than their 10m user mark). They also keep pushing Aurora, but without telling us what the tradeoffs are for the high availability. Based on the responses so far (MySQL backed by InnoDB), it appears to be based on a technology similar to Galara, which has a lot of caveats for its use, especially with multiple writers.<p>Don&#x27;t depend on Elastic Scaling for high availability - when an AZ is having issues, the AWS API will either be down or swamped, so you want to have at least 50% extra capacity at all times, if you want high availability.<p>Using their scaling numbers, your costs start spiking at 10 users. Realistically, with intelligent caching (even something as simple as Nginx caching), you can easily support several thousand users just fine with a t2 style instance, either a small or micro. Splitting services onto different hosts not only increases your hosting costs, it increases the workload on your developers&#x2F;admins and likeliness of failure.<p>DR: Don&#x27;t wait until you have over a thousand users to have multiple instances in different AZs. The cost of duplicating a t2.small across an AZ is small compared to lost users or sales.<p>Automation: Be prepared for vendor lockin if you use Amazon&#x27;s solutions. Also be prepared for their APIs being unavailable during times of high load or during AZ failures.<p>&gt; Lambda [...] We’ve done away with EC2. It scales out for you and there’s no OS to manage.<p>The biggest problem with Lambda right now are the huge latency costs with cold lambda instances. You&#x27;ll get a pretty good 95% percentile response times, but that other 5% will be off-the-chart bad.<p>In summary, AWS has a lot of great toys, and can absolutely be used for scaling up to silly levels. However, most who have done this degree of scaling do not do so using AWS tools.</text></comment> |
27,258,912 | 27,257,401 | 1 | 2 | 27,256,867 | train | <story><title>Why I prefer making useless stuff</title><url>https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/makinguselessstuff.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justin_oaks</author><text>The biggest reason to make useless stuff instead of useful stuff is to avoid harassment. If you have something useful on GitHub then entitled users will come out of the woodwork to request features, report &quot;bugs&quot; (read: the user is doing something wrong), or otherwise expect free work out of you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>salmo</author><text>My biggest reason is that I don’t have to finish. When I get bored with it, I move on.<p>I used to put pressure on myself to “finish” and would often miss and feel guilty. Not just computer projects, but electronics, learning musical instruments, etc.<p>Then I realized I was making my hobbies work and doing it badly. Real work (where I have to finish) got in the way of my hobbies. Hobbies are supposed to be fun, relaxing, and rewarding. What was I doing?<p>I gave up the pressure and it was liberating. I pick up the guitar for a couple months, then get lost in trying to make analog circuits. I tinker in the garden then teach myself enough CAD to do a small woodworking project. I started sewing masks and tote bags then set it aside. I fish a bunch in the spring and fall. Then, I’ll revisit them later when the muse hits and don’t feel like I wasted money.<p>Now my only goals are to have some fun, relax, and learn something new.<p>I really only program for fun in languages I don’t know or platforms I haven’t played with. I learn by picking up a project that scratches an itch.<p>Sometimes those feed back into my work (eg Go, Kotlin), but most don’t (various LISPs, low level C).<p>My issues are exacerbated by my ADHD, but I would recommend the approach to anyone with a steady job they enjoy. That and not using TV&#x2F;movies as a hobby. There’s just so much cool stuff to explore.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I prefer making useless stuff</title><url>https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/makinguselessstuff.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justin_oaks</author><text>The biggest reason to make useless stuff instead of useful stuff is to avoid harassment. If you have something useful on GitHub then entitled users will come out of the woodwork to request features, report &quot;bugs&quot; (read: the user is doing something wrong), or otherwise expect free work out of you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>I haven&#x27;t gotten any feedback on my github stuff (which isn&#x27;t quite useless, just not useful to many), but it&#x27;s pretty easy to ignore feedback in general, and it&#x27;s not too hard to turn off issues; not sure if you can turn off pull requests though.</text></comment> |
13,246,262 | 13,245,474 | 1 | 2 | 13,240,409 | train | <story><title>How Social Isolation Is Killing Us</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/upshot/how-social-isolation-is-killing-us.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>navait</author><text>From my perspective, I think most people want to be socially isolated, or at the very least, never change their social bubble. After completing school, I didn&#x27;t want to be lonely when living in the working world. So I bought a few books on socializing, picked up swing dance, went to meetups, took adult education classes and volunteered in the US election.<p>After 16 months of continuous practice, I have made 0 friends. Conversations with strangers, yes. I got contact information, was religious about following up, but people who agreed to do something with me in the future suddenly didn&#x27;t respond to my messages. Attempted to have a few gatherings at my apartment and despite the people I invited saying they would come, nobody showed up.<p>Why even bother if people won&#x27;t meet you a tenth of the way?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SeanDav</author><text>This is going to sound terribly judgemental, but have you considered that the problem might lie with you? It sounds like you are doing exactly the right thing in terms of meeting new people but the fact that your results are very poor, seems to suggest you are not doing something correctly, or are putting people off in some way.<p>Just show an interest in people, without being creepy. Respect boundaries but show you are a good listener and ask questions that show that you have listened and do care. Rather than shotgun everyone, just be friendly and interested and concentrate on developing relationships with people that appear interested in you.<p>It is also important to not rush things. If you perceive a connection with someone - don&#x27;t ask them around to your house for drinks immediately, but develop the relationship for a few more meetings before taking it to the next level (I mean this from a platonic point of view).<p>Also consider your appearance and personal hygiene. Are you dressed about the same as everyone else? Try to be better dressed than average without being extreme. Have you too much deodorant? Are you freshly showered? Do you have bad breath?<p>Try to ask a family member or honest friend the tough questions about yourself.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Social Isolation Is Killing Us</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/upshot/how-social-isolation-is-killing-us.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>navait</author><text>From my perspective, I think most people want to be socially isolated, or at the very least, never change their social bubble. After completing school, I didn&#x27;t want to be lonely when living in the working world. So I bought a few books on socializing, picked up swing dance, went to meetups, took adult education classes and volunteered in the US election.<p>After 16 months of continuous practice, I have made 0 friends. Conversations with strangers, yes. I got contact information, was religious about following up, but people who agreed to do something with me in the future suddenly didn&#x27;t respond to my messages. Attempted to have a few gatherings at my apartment and despite the people I invited saying they would come, nobody showed up.<p>Why even bother if people won&#x27;t meet you a tenth of the way?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cableshaft</author><text>I did something similar (continuously went to meetups for two years), but had the exact opposite experience. Now I have more friends than I can realistically keep up with.<p>Just repeatedly showing up to these things and making an effort to talk to these people a bit each time and eventually I stopped being a stranger to people and started getting invited to private events they hosted. It might have helped that the meetups I focused on were often board game related (or movies or dinners or theater) and I&#x27;m a board game nut, though. I&#x27;m also getting more and move involved with my local writer&#x27;s group (hosted two writer&#x27;s workshops last year).<p>I&#x27;ve gone to several software development meetups and had really poor experiences befriending people there. People seem to be more shy or standoff-ish, or the focus is too much on the lecture or &#x27;hacking in a corner&#x27; and not on a group activity, so that might be part of it. Oh, also I think too many of those people go to those for &#x27;professional networking&#x27; purposes and not to have some fun talking about technology and making some genuine connections, so it feels a little artificial, too.</text></comment> |
16,702,673 | 16,702,784 | 1 | 3 | 16,701,913 | train | <story><title>Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations</title><url>https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/03/26/facebook-platform-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miracle2k</author><text>The so-called &quot;data breach&quot; was always in reality a by-product of an open platform that hundreds of thousands of developers could easily build apps on top. You may err on the side of &quot;more reviews&quot; or &quot;less powerful API&quot;, but in the end, those ideals are in tension. The more open the platform, the more open to this kind of &quot;breach&quot;.<p>People who believe in the idea in this kind of platform having an API should have long ago spoken up in Facebooks defense. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen, and I expect worse to come from this &quot;platform review&quot;. Given the kind of media coverage here, Facebook seems to have more to lose than to gain from letting random Hacker News kids build on their platform. And if so, they won&#x27;t in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IBM</author><text>Apple got this right from the beginning despite years of criticism about the &quot;walled garden&quot;. They took arrows for years: all the &quot;open always wins&quot; from the FOSS types, all the press coverage of some app developer crying about App Store rejections or onerous rules.<p>They didn&#x27;t get it wrong because they know who butters their bread: customers. Developers are rightly prioritized last.<p>Fun to give this Paul Graham essay a read again [1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;apple.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;apple.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook pauses app reviews, disables new user authorizations</title><url>https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/03/26/facebook-platform-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miracle2k</author><text>The so-called &quot;data breach&quot; was always in reality a by-product of an open platform that hundreds of thousands of developers could easily build apps on top. You may err on the side of &quot;more reviews&quot; or &quot;less powerful API&quot;, but in the end, those ideals are in tension. The more open the platform, the more open to this kind of &quot;breach&quot;.<p>People who believe in the idea in this kind of platform having an API should have long ago spoken up in Facebooks defense. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen, and I expect worse to come from this &quot;platform review&quot;. Given the kind of media coverage here, Facebook seems to have more to lose than to gain from letting random Hacker News kids build on their platform. And if so, they won&#x27;t in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ktta</author><text>Ben Thompson talks about this towards the end<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;the-facebook-brand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;the-facebook-brand&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
16,695,002 | 16,693,314 | 1 | 2 | 16,692,216 | train | <story><title>The Oforth Programming Language</title><url>http://www.oforth.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>luckydude</author><text>I&#x27;m a forth programmer, I&#x27;ve implemented an editor in forth, a more(1) clone in forth, a grep(1) in forth and I did a bunch of stuff I&#x27;ve forgotten in forth for the geophysics department at UW Madison.<p>I HATE forth. It&#x27;s a miserable language, I just hate it.<p>And then I went to Sun and the boot prom language was forth, still hated it.<p>Then I got to PCs. The BIOS had no language and then Intel did whatever garbage they did and I was like please, just give me Forth. It&#x27;s not what I&#x27;d do for debugging a panic but I could make it work. The Intel stuff was way worse.<p>I suspect that Mitch priced himself out, otherwise we&#x27;d all be using Forth as the boot language, I dunno what happened. But if you had asked me 20 years ago would I be saying anything positive about forth I would have kicked you in the XXXs. Yet here I am wishing that forth was how we dealt with a panic. We&#x27;d all be happier.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Oforth Programming Language</title><url>http://www.oforth.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lolc</author><text>The last time I looked at Forth it was to get a more powerful replacement for the bc calculator. But the minimalistic approach of forth enthusiasts means there is no powerful REPL.<p>Unfortunately Oforth doesn&#x27;t seem very mature to me. To compile it, I had to install libc6-dev-i386 and g++-multilib so it could do its 32-bit compile. Now it fails on me with a segmentation fault. If I try the precompiled version, it just exits with a nonzero exit-code.<p>So, back to bc, I guess :-)<p>Edit: Ah I see, it needs --i for interactive mode.</text></comment> |
7,670,074 | 7,669,924 | 1 | 2 | 7,669,436 | train | <story><title>What's New in Mercurial 3.0</title><url>http://hglabhq.com/blog/2014/4/29/what-s-new-in-mercurial-3-0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wirrbel</author><text>While a lot of tutorials mention how complicated git is in contrast to mercurial I - being a git native - feel the other way around. Git is intuitive with a small number of concepts necessarry to grasp my whole workflow.<p>Using this workflow with mercurial is really frustrating when I do it - the occasional pull request for a python-based project. A git branch as a concept is really simple, the mercurial ways I just cant wrap my head around (granted I only use it occasionally).<p>As a platform I like how all the porcellain in mercurial is implemented in a high level python. I can only wonder how productive writing custom porcellain commands in mercurial is given that interface.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gecko</author><text>There are two things people mean when they say Git is complicated.<p>Some people mean that Git&#x27;s <i>model</i> is complicated, which what you&#x27;re talking about. I actually find its model very simple, some people find it complicated, but at any rate, I certainly think Git and Mercurial have comparable complexity in the model.<p>What most people mean, though, is that Git&#x27;s <i>UI</i> is complicated. To be blunt, I think this is simply objectively correct. For example, &quot;git checkout foo&quot; might mean go to the foo branch, or might mean revert a file called &quot;foo&quot;. There is no way to know. If you want to be sure to revert a file called foo, you can do &quot;git checkout -- foo&quot;, I believe, but I don&#x27;t know a branch equivalent (and it at any rate won&#x27;t be symmetrical). Want to create a new branch? That&#x27;s &quot;git checkout -b newbranch&quot;. Want to delete it? That&#x27;s &quot;git branch -d newbranch&quot;. There are <i>tons</i> of things like this in the Git UI, where commands have basically arbitrary parameters in different contexts.<p>Way back when Git was first created, the plan was for what is now called Git to be the underlying <i>implementation</i> of a higher-level UI. I really, profoundly wish that had actually panned out. Instead, Git&#x27;s low-level commands gradually grew more user-friendly until it hit the &quot;good enough&quot; zone. <i>That&#x27;s</i> what people usually mean when they say Git&#x27;s complicated.</text></comment> | <story><title>What's New in Mercurial 3.0</title><url>http://hglabhq.com/blog/2014/4/29/what-s-new-in-mercurial-3-0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wirrbel</author><text>While a lot of tutorials mention how complicated git is in contrast to mercurial I - being a git native - feel the other way around. Git is intuitive with a small number of concepts necessarry to grasp my whole workflow.<p>Using this workflow with mercurial is really frustrating when I do it - the occasional pull request for a python-based project. A git branch as a concept is really simple, the mercurial ways I just cant wrap my head around (granted I only use it occasionally).<p>As a platform I like how all the porcellain in mercurial is implemented in a high level python. I can only wonder how productive writing custom porcellain commands in mercurial is given that interface.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jordigh</author><text>&gt; I can only wonder how productive writing custom porcellain commands in mercurial is given that interface.<p>You don&#x27;t have to use Python to add more commands on top of Mercurial. Its CLI is also its API, just like git, and you don&#x27;t typically have to use Python to write tools on top of hg, just like you don&#x27;t typically need to write C to hack on top of git.<p>The stdout of hg is guaranteed to remain stable, so you can script it by just parsing stdout. The options are guaranteed to remain stable, so your old tools won&#x27;t need to be updated in case hg&#x27;s CLI some day changes, because its CLI never changes.<p>There are also a bunch of hg CLI commands that start with debug (e.g. hg debugparents or hg debugdag) that you can use to directly manipulate hg&#x27;s internal revlog data structure and do fun things like create a corrupt repo, if that&#x27;s what you want to do. :-)</text></comment> |
10,491,061 | 10,490,886 | 1 | 3 | 10,490,198 | train | <story><title>The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)</title><url>http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emiliobumachar</author><text>&quot;Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.&quot;<p>Prescient to the point of being creepy.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)</title><url>http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>knattt</author><text>An audiobook version is available for free here:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librivox.org&#x2F;the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librivox.org&#x2F;the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster&#x2F;</a><p>(librivox is a volunteer&#x2F;non-professional project, so don&#x27;t expect shakespearean acting, but it&#x27;s good enough)</text></comment> |
15,283,185 | 15,282,825 | 1 | 3 | 15,281,506 | train | <story><title>U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines</title><url>https://pilotonline.com/news/military/local/the-u-s-navy-s-most-advanced-submarines-will-soon/article_5c24eefc-8e70-5c4a-9d82-00d29e052b76.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedc</author><text>Former submariner here. My thoughts echo those of a ex-submariner group I&#x27;m a part of -- it makes sense across the board. It&#x27;s 1) a cost saving measure, 2) WAY easier to get replacements, and 3) WAAAYY easier to train new people to use it safely and efficiently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cstross</author><text>I&#x27;d have two big reservations about this.<p>1. The Virginia class was first commissioned in 2004, with a 33 year design life. The XBox 360 was first shown in public in 2005, with a design life of ...? Yup, it&#x27;s consumer electronics, with a design life of <i>much</i> less than 33 years. Even though there are on the order of 80-100M of them in the wild, by and by XBox 360s and replacement parts will be getting scarce.<p>(If you think this is an exaggeration, consider the availability of spare parts today for a computer system commissioned 33 years ago, in 1984 — an original IBM PC XT, perhaps, or an original Macintosh, both of which were manufactured in — for the time — high volume. Things like 5.25&quot; floppy disks, or a replacement M-series IBM keyboard with the original DIN plug, were once ubiquitous, but today they&#x27;re rarities.)<p>2. A second concern is that these days <i>everything</i> comes with an embedded processor and an enterprising hostile entity might try to sneak malware on board a fast attack submarine via the periscope controller handset. (I&#x27;ve no idea what form such malware might take, or what it might accomplish, but that&#x27;s not the point: it&#x27;s that using cheap commercial handsets widens the threat surface of the submarine&#x27;s sensor suite arbitrarily.)</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines</title><url>https://pilotonline.com/news/military/local/the-u-s-navy-s-most-advanced-submarines-will-soon/article_5c24eefc-8e70-5c4a-9d82-00d29e052b76.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedc</author><text>Former submariner here. My thoughts echo those of a ex-submariner group I&#x27;m a part of -- it makes sense across the board. It&#x27;s 1) a cost saving measure, 2) WAY easier to get replacements, and 3) WAAAYY easier to train new people to use it safely and efficiently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kobeya</author><text>Former defense contractor here. I trust Microsoft to have put more time and money into making that controller maximally usable and useful than whatever subcontractor would have made the thing otherwise.</text></comment> |
13,965,297 | 13,964,384 | 1 | 2 | 13,963,858 | train | <story><title>How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)</title><url>http://time.com/3722418/become-someone-people-love-talk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rrherr</author><text>Yes! My favorite tactic to get people talking about themselves comes from Paul Ford:<p><i>Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.”<p>Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c</a></text></item><item><author>tyingq</author><text>The best bit of advice in the article:<p><i>The right question is “How do I get them talking about themselves?“</i><p>I&#x27;ve noticed that even if the only thing you do is ask someone their opinion, and listen attentively, there is some sort of distortion field effect.<p>They will often later recall you as knowledgeable, insightful, etc...even though you never did anything but ask questions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bnjms</author><text>What a lovely little piece with some delightful quotes. Thank you for sharing.<p><i>I’ve found that people will fear your enthusiasm and warmth, and wait to hear the price. Which is fair. We’ve all been drawn into someone’s love only to find out that we couldn’t afford it.</i></text></comment> | <story><title>How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015)</title><url>http://time.com/3722418/become-someone-people-love-talk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rrherr</author><text>Yes! My favorite tactic to get people talking about themselves comes from Paul Ford:<p><i>Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.”<p>Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;message&#x2F;how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c</a></text></item><item><author>tyingq</author><text>The best bit of advice in the article:<p><i>The right question is “How do I get them talking about themselves?“</i><p>I&#x27;ve noticed that even if the only thing you do is ask someone their opinion, and listen attentively, there is some sort of distortion field effect.<p>They will often later recall you as knowledgeable, insightful, etc...even though you never did anything but ask questions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hoodoof</author><text>Well I wasn&#x27;t there of course, but all things being equal, if a woman at a party touches you whilst talking, is animated in her discussion, and goes to the trouble of saying out loud that she likes you, well usually that&#x27;s a good sign that a person is &quot;interested&quot;.<p>Maybe you&#x27;re in a relationship, maybe you weren&#x27;t interested anyway but she might have wanted to get your phone number.</text></comment> |
20,044,723 | 20,042,308 | 1 | 2 | 20,041,321 | train | <story><title>Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/uber-will-start-deactivating-riders-with-low-ratings/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatchnyc</author><text>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much you can do, or if there is it is none of these things. Mine was ~4.5 for forever. I was always on time, careful entering&#x2F;exiting the vehicle, very polite, etc. and even regularly gave cash tips before the app offered the option.<p>A few years ago I started dating a girl who had nearly a 5 star rating. She eventually moved in with me and since then nearly all my trips are together. We are often late arriving to the meeting point, she has no hesitation to ask the driver to change the air temperature, adjust the music station or volume, open or close windows, always takes water when available, and asks to be dropped off at a given point regardless of traffic lights or inconvenient turns for the driver. Since this started, my rating has steadily climbed and is now around 4.8.</text></item><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>My Uber passenger rating is 4.57. I have no idea whether that&#x27;s good or bad. I&#x27;m typically at pick-up points before the drivers are, I sometimes chat with drivers, I always wear my seatbelt, I sit in the back, and I don&#x27;t make a mess or cause any problems. It&#x27;s hard to know what I could be doing to get a better rating beyond just bribing drivers with cash tips at the end of the ride. I tend to rate every driver a 5 unless they clearly did something wrong, like insane driving (which happens rarely).<p>I&#x27;d be curious to know what the passenger cut-off ratings are, and what thus what kind of behavior is actually kicking people off the app.<p>Also, if there&#x27;s some inherent racial or other protected class bias in the kinds of ratings that people get, then Uber could be in a world of trouble here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much you can do</i><p>Have you tried asking? I asked a few drivers, at the end of a ride and after I’d rated them, what I could do better. Two complained about my taking work calls in the car. I started requesting permission, at the beginning of the ride, to take a phone call. (It’s their car, after all.) Never been refused. Rating jumped from ~4.4 to ~4.9.<p>I’ll also note that some of the sweetest people I know have terrible ratings for constantly being late, at the wrong pick-up spot or other little reasons. It’s mostly a rating around if you’re observant and treat the driver like a human being more than if you’re a good person.<p>(Note: I’m a guy. I don’t think gender is as powerful as other comments assume.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/uber-will-start-deactivating-riders-with-low-ratings/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hatchnyc</author><text>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much you can do, or if there is it is none of these things. Mine was ~4.5 for forever. I was always on time, careful entering&#x2F;exiting the vehicle, very polite, etc. and even regularly gave cash tips before the app offered the option.<p>A few years ago I started dating a girl who had nearly a 5 star rating. She eventually moved in with me and since then nearly all my trips are together. We are often late arriving to the meeting point, she has no hesitation to ask the driver to change the air temperature, adjust the music station or volume, open or close windows, always takes water when available, and asks to be dropped off at a given point regardless of traffic lights or inconvenient turns for the driver. Since this started, my rating has steadily climbed and is now around 4.8.</text></item><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>My Uber passenger rating is 4.57. I have no idea whether that&#x27;s good or bad. I&#x27;m typically at pick-up points before the drivers are, I sometimes chat with drivers, I always wear my seatbelt, I sit in the back, and I don&#x27;t make a mess or cause any problems. It&#x27;s hard to know what I could be doing to get a better rating beyond just bribing drivers with cash tips at the end of the ride. I tend to rate every driver a 5 unless they clearly did something wrong, like insane driving (which happens rarely).<p>I&#x27;d be curious to know what the passenger cut-off ratings are, and what thus what kind of behavior is actually kicking people off the app.<p>Also, if there&#x27;s some inherent racial or other protected class bias in the kinds of ratings that people get, then Uber could be in a world of trouble here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Balgair</author><text>Based off your comment, I&#x27;ll assume that you are a male. Based on this assumption, there is a possbility that gender is at play.</text></comment> |
7,481,295 | 7,481,235 | 1 | 2 | 7,480,857 | train | <story><title>Spatial Data Structures for Better Map Interactions</title><url>http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/spatial-data-structures-for-better-map-interactions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryandrake</author><text>Spatial data structures are great, and heavily used in all kinds of mapping applications. Most of the systems I&#x27;ve worked with used the more constrained quadtree structure, where the map is divided into uniformly-sized tiles, and a level-of-detail hierarchy is built. This is good for raster data, where each tile is a picture and the whole world is covered by tiles. The R-tree has great advantages when the complexity is not uniformly distributed across the map, for example, vector road data, where vast areas on earth have no data, and most of the data is concentrated in small urban areas.<p>I believe PostGIS, which adds spatial operations to Postgres, uses an R-tree as its spatial index.<p>An improvement on the R-tree, the R(star)-tree, uses a different node splitting algorithm and includes re-insertions (similar to balancing a B-tree), reducing both coverage and overlap. The insertion complexity is greater, but in general, R(star)-tree query performance tends to be a bit better for mapping applications. Generally, maps don&#x27;t change that often, so building the tree tends to happen far less often than querying it.<p>There are many more specialized spatial data structures available, for example, Kd-trees, which can be perfectly balanced and are useful for storing point data.<p>If you&#x27;re really interested in this stuff, the holy bibles for spacial data structures (which I keep in a special place on my bookshelf) are a pair of books written by H. Samet: The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures, and Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS.<p>EDIT: Formatting, and apparently you can&#x27;t write the asterisk character on HN<p>R-Tree paper (1984): <a href="http://postgis.org/support/rtree.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;postgis.org&#x2F;support&#x2F;rtree.pdf</a><p>R(star)-Tree (1990): <a href="http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4256/1/31.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de&#x2F;4256&#x2F;1&#x2F;31.pdf</a><p>PostGIS: <a href="http://postgis.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;postgis.net</a><p>H.Samet textbooks: <a href="http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/design.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.umd.edu&#x2F;~hjs&#x2F;design.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Spatial Data Structures for Better Map Interactions</title><url>http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/spatial-data-structures-for-better-map-interactions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adam-a</author><text>The other way to do this, which is common in (older?) 3d video games, is to render your scene twice, once normally and once with each object shaded in a unique flat colour. Then sample your second bitmap at the mouse position and map the pixel value back to your list of objects. This is very fast and only falls over when you start to have transparent objects, in which case ray-casting and r-trees become appropriate.</text></comment> |
20,539,585 | 20,538,156 | 1 | 2 | 20,535,698 | train | <story><title>Senescent cells stop producing nucleotides: new research</title><url>https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190725151018.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>To the computer hackers who read these things: biology is a complex system. So complex that the most complicated system you have ever worked on seems very simple compared to it. WHen you read articles like this, be aware the scientists have extensive training in working with complex systems, and publish exciting sounding coherent narratives that are, at best, incorrect but useful working models (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Not_even_wrong" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Not_even_wrong</a>).<p>It&#x27;s fun to speculate but to prove your case and make a real dent in human health problems is a lot harder than coming in late and saying &quot;But wait, why don&#x27;t you just...&quot;<p>I heartily recommend going back to the great textbooks of these fields and reading them, rather than trying to understand things by dropping into the state of the art research (which is usually wrong, and hard to understand in detail).<p>Some books I recommend:
The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg). After you read this book you&#x27;ll have a better understanding of why doctors and scientists cringe when people say &quot;cure cancer&quot;.<p>Molecular Biology the Cell (Alberts, etc). After you read this book you&#x27;ll have a much better understanding of the full complexity that scientists have to deal with in complex cellular systems.<p>Molecular Biology of the Gene (watson, etc). Can&#x27;t say much about this book except that&#x27;s it&#x27;s a classic reference.<p>What makes these three books exception is that they support all their factual claims with direct links to the papers that established the facts. And they provide you with the skills to evaluate modern research. But nothing compares to actually going to grad school and participating in the research- once you see how the grants are made, the experiments are, and the papers are written, you&#x27;ll understand why trying to understand biology by press release is like trying to understand assembly language by watching a Steve Jobs product announcement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>breck</author><text>&gt; To the computer hackers who read these things: biology is a complex system. So complex that the most complicated system you have ever worked on seems very simple compared to it.<p>I had this exact experience, when I transitioned from working in big tech to working at a cancer research center. The scales are wildly different. In the time it’s taken me to write this comment, my body has generated nearly a billion new cells at 20GB of data per cell, or about 100 google web indexes worth of data. Very humbling. But also very fun!</text></comment> | <story><title>Senescent cells stop producing nucleotides: new research</title><url>https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190725151018.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dekhn</author><text>To the computer hackers who read these things: biology is a complex system. So complex that the most complicated system you have ever worked on seems very simple compared to it. WHen you read articles like this, be aware the scientists have extensive training in working with complex systems, and publish exciting sounding coherent narratives that are, at best, incorrect but useful working models (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Not_even_wrong" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Not_even_wrong</a>).<p>It&#x27;s fun to speculate but to prove your case and make a real dent in human health problems is a lot harder than coming in late and saying &quot;But wait, why don&#x27;t you just...&quot;<p>I heartily recommend going back to the great textbooks of these fields and reading them, rather than trying to understand things by dropping into the state of the art research (which is usually wrong, and hard to understand in detail).<p>Some books I recommend:
The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg). After you read this book you&#x27;ll have a better understanding of why doctors and scientists cringe when people say &quot;cure cancer&quot;.<p>Molecular Biology the Cell (Alberts, etc). After you read this book you&#x27;ll have a much better understanding of the full complexity that scientists have to deal with in complex cellular systems.<p>Molecular Biology of the Gene (watson, etc). Can&#x27;t say much about this book except that&#x27;s it&#x27;s a classic reference.<p>What makes these three books exception is that they support all their factual claims with direct links to the papers that established the facts. And they provide you with the skills to evaluate modern research. But nothing compares to actually going to grad school and participating in the research- once you see how the grants are made, the experiments are, and the papers are written, you&#x27;ll understand why trying to understand biology by press release is like trying to understand assembly language by watching a Steve Jobs product announcement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cgiles</author><text>This is not bad advice, especially for people lacking the fundamentals, but these books are often way out of date and only cover topics that have been solidly established 20 years ago.<p>I would suggest, especially for people interested in a relatively niche field like aging, that a good compromise is to read review articles. You can go to PubMed and filter by review articles to find them.<p>But I wholeheartedly concur that for non-experts to read primary research articles will cause much more confusion than clarity. And doubly so for press releases on those articles.</text></comment> |
8,746,029 | 8,744,625 | 1 | 3 | 8,743,635 | train | <story><title>Marking HTTP as Non-Secure</title><url>https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; There&#x27;s no more good reason not to have HTTPS<p>Cost. Today I host my website for 6 cents a month as a static page on Amazon S3.<p>To go https, I&#x27;d have to first acquire a certificate (lucky that <i>can</i> be free and with Let&#x27;s Encrypt will be). Then I have to find someone to host that certificate. I can pay someone hundreds to thousands of dollars in setup and monthly fees.<p>Or, the cheapest option I&#x27;ve found is to get a $6&#x2F;mo VPS as a frontend, put nginx on it, and put my cert there. The problem is that costs <i>100 times</i> as much as what I pay now, <i>and</i> I have to maintain a server <i>and</i> it&#x27;s not served from multiple redundant servers like my site is now.<p>Or I can use Amazon&#x27;s free SNI support, making it so that older browsers can&#x27;t see my site and I have no way of blocking people from using http or redirecting them.<p>There is currently no good, cheap option to do SSL only that is viewable by everyone.<p>That&#x27;s why I haven&#x27;t switched yet.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart2</author><text>I think the best time to do this would be soon after the Let&#x27;s Encrpyt free CA [1] starts handing out certificates. There&#x27;s no more good reason not to have HTTPS, so that&#x27;s a good time to start applying a little pressure and adding the incentive for website authors.<p>Does google already reward secure sites with higher search rankings? I can&#x27;t decide if I think that&#x27;s a good idea or not, but if they want to push for a more secure and free web, that&#x27;s definitely another avenue.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/press/releases/new-free-certificate-authority-dramatically-increase-encrypted-internet-traffic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;releases&#x2F;new-free-certificate-auth...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unethical_ban</author><text>I understand the principle, but let&#x27;s not get to philosophical about this: You ran reddit&#x27;s servers and worked at netflix in their availability department. Cut out a morning coffee and you have enough money to run SSL.<p>SNI works with anyone on Windows &gt; XP, and any mobile &#x2F; Apple &#x2F; Linux OS you&#x27;ll find visiting your site. How many IE6&#x2F;XP hits does your site get per month?</text></comment> | <story><title>Marking HTTP as Non-Secure</title><url>https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; There&#x27;s no more good reason not to have HTTPS<p>Cost. Today I host my website for 6 cents a month as a static page on Amazon S3.<p>To go https, I&#x27;d have to first acquire a certificate (lucky that <i>can</i> be free and with Let&#x27;s Encrypt will be). Then I have to find someone to host that certificate. I can pay someone hundreds to thousands of dollars in setup and monthly fees.<p>Or, the cheapest option I&#x27;ve found is to get a $6&#x2F;mo VPS as a frontend, put nginx on it, and put my cert there. The problem is that costs <i>100 times</i> as much as what I pay now, <i>and</i> I have to maintain a server <i>and</i> it&#x27;s not served from multiple redundant servers like my site is now.<p>Or I can use Amazon&#x27;s free SNI support, making it so that older browsers can&#x27;t see my site and I have no way of blocking people from using http or redirecting them.<p>There is currently no good, cheap option to do SSL only that is viewable by everyone.<p>That&#x27;s why I haven&#x27;t switched yet.</text></item><item><author>andrewstuart2</author><text>I think the best time to do this would be soon after the Let&#x27;s Encrpyt free CA [1] starts handing out certificates. There&#x27;s no more good reason not to have HTTPS, so that&#x27;s a good time to start applying a little pressure and adding the incentive for website authors.<p>Does google already reward secure sites with higher search rankings? I can&#x27;t decide if I think that&#x27;s a good idea or not, but if they want to push for a more secure and free web, that&#x27;s definitely another avenue.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/press/releases/new-free-certificate-authority-dramatically-increase-encrypted-internet-traffic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;press&#x2F;releases&#x2F;new-free-certificate-auth...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonny_eh</author><text>Cloudflare provides a free ssl service.</text></comment> |
20,629,766 | 20,628,047 | 1 | 2 | 20,626,807 | train | <story><title>Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>privateSFacct</author><text>Google sees folks falling for google-secure-payments.google.via.net type URLS. They see all the gaming people do with URLs in search results (including abusing the names of other brands like Amazon).<p>There are lots of developers who like distinguishing these subtle topics. I can tell you in a larger enterprise deployment most of these changes will be welcomed (yes, people do still click on bogus URLs believe it or not - FAR more often than I would expect). Or think that the url amazon.lowprice.com is an amazon website in a search result.<p>Folks claiming google is hiding the owner of the website forget that the actual owner of the website is reflected by the END of the domain name, not the earlier parts. In some shared hosting situations this is confusing, but in the end whoever controls the end actually is in control.</text></item><item><author>Rebelgecko</author><text>Google must really hate URLs. My search results recently stopped showing the full path of the URL, just the domain name. It was a huge pain because I was looking for an item at Ikea and couldn&#x27;t tell if a result went to their American site or to their UK, Saudi Arabian, Qatari, etc. site (apparently the same item can have small differences in different countries— I almost bought the wrong lightbulbs because the UK version of my lamp uses a different size bulb).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwild</author><text>Can you tell me what&#x27;s more secure and why?<p><pre><code> Before the change: www.google.com
After the change: google.com
Before the change: google-secure-payments.google.via.net
After the change: google-secure-payments.google.via.net
</code></pre>
Seems to me like the same trick is available.<p>Now do it like Firefox:<p><pre><code> Grey: www
Black google.com
Grey: google-secure-payments.google
Black: via.net
</code></pre>
Warning: Check the black portion of the URL and make sure it&#x27;s the right one!</text></comment> | <story><title>Chrome hides www and https:// in the address bar again</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-hides-www-and-https-in-the-address-bar-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>privateSFacct</author><text>Google sees folks falling for google-secure-payments.google.via.net type URLS. They see all the gaming people do with URLs in search results (including abusing the names of other brands like Amazon).<p>There are lots of developers who like distinguishing these subtle topics. I can tell you in a larger enterprise deployment most of these changes will be welcomed (yes, people do still click on bogus URLs believe it or not - FAR more often than I would expect). Or think that the url amazon.lowprice.com is an amazon website in a search result.<p>Folks claiming google is hiding the owner of the website forget that the actual owner of the website is reflected by the END of the domain name, not the earlier parts. In some shared hosting situations this is confusing, but in the end whoever controls the end actually is in control.</text></item><item><author>Rebelgecko</author><text>Google must really hate URLs. My search results recently stopped showing the full path of the URL, just the domain name. It was a huge pain because I was looking for an item at Ikea and couldn&#x27;t tell if a result went to their American site or to their UK, Saudi Arabian, Qatari, etc. site (apparently the same item can have small differences in different countries— I almost bought the wrong lightbulbs because the UK version of my lamp uses a different size bulb).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ljoshua</author><text>I&#x27;m wondering how the particular <i>address bar</i> change helps alleviate this though. As I&#x27;ve seen it implemented, the only subdomain they&#x27;ll &quot;elide&quot; is www, so if it is google-secure-payments.google.via.net it will still show as such in the address bar, not as via.net. So I don&#x27;t understand their reasoning in how this will help from a security standpoint.</text></comment> |
33,488,066 | 33,488,153 | 1 | 3 | 33,486,497 | train | <story><title>Mastodon Explained</title><url>https://mastodon.ie/@Ciaraioch/109287818715515862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stormbrew</author><text>&gt; Instance owners can read DMs.<p>&quot;Admins of &lt;website&gt; can read data on &lt;website&gt;&quot; is just a tautology. It&#x27;s true of everything you use on the internet where you don&#x27;t own the server, and even then it&#x27;s dubious.<p>If people don&#x27;t get that about mastodon they probably don&#x27;t get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD...<p>[note: Edited &lt;service&gt; to &lt;website&gt; above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we&#x27;re talking about websites here - a website can&#x27;t have &quot;e2e&quot; encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y&#x27;all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]</text></item><item><author>artificial</author><text>Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;18079" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;18079</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klabb3</author><text>&gt; Admins of &lt;service&gt; can read data on &lt;service&gt;&quot; is just a tautology.<p>Huh? This is certainly not true for Signal and Matrix, heck even whatsapp and telegram sounds better than some random instance operator.<p>That said, truly private messages aren&#x27;t always necessary, as long as the platform is <i>crystal clear</i> about this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mastodon Explained</title><url>https://mastodon.ie/@Ciaraioch/109287818715515862</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stormbrew</author><text>&gt; Instance owners can read DMs.<p>&quot;Admins of &lt;website&gt; can read data on &lt;website&gt;&quot; is just a tautology. It&#x27;s true of everything you use on the internet where you don&#x27;t own the server, and even then it&#x27;s dubious.<p>If people don&#x27;t get that about mastodon they probably don&#x27;t get it about everything else they use either, so this recurring argument just seems like FUD...<p>[note: Edited &lt;service&gt; to &lt;website&gt; above because people keep coming at this from the angle of chat clients that run on your phone, and we&#x27;re talking about websites here - a website can&#x27;t have &quot;e2e&quot; encryption because it is both ends. That said, some of y&#x27;all believe way too hard in the perfectness of e2e in general and I addressed that in some of my replies]</text></item><item><author>artificial</author><text>Glad to see more people dip toes into federated networks. Instance owners can read DMs. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;18079" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;mastodon&#x2F;issues&#x2F;18079</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>palata</author><text>That&#x27;s wrong. If it is end-to-end encrypted, then the server admins still cannot read it.<p>Use e2ee messengers (like Signal) for DMs, use Mastodon (or whatever you want) for public posts.</text></comment> |
31,386,909 | 31,386,750 | 1 | 2 | 31,375,145 | train | <story><title>Computer powered by colony of blue-green algae has run for six months</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/2319584-computer-powered-by-colony-of-blue-green-algae-has-run-for-six-months/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LoveMortuus</author><text>&gt; The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes of calculating sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts. The computer itself measured the current output from the device and this data was stored in the cloud for researchers to analyse.<p>&gt; Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues built a small enclosure about the size of an AA battery out of aluminium and clear plastic.<p>That&#x27;s REALLY not a lot of power, which of course is reasonable, but I do wonder how far can it scale, can it reach any generally usable.<p>Let&#x27;s take a very conservative estimate of watt-hours of an AA battery of 2 Wh.
The computer used in the paper could run for 2,000,000 µWh &#x2F; 0.3 µW = ~6,666,666h.<p>Let&#x27;s convert to a more human friendly numbers:
6,666,666h &#x2F; 24h = ~277,777 days.
277,777 days &#x2F; 365 days = ~761 years.<p>I probably calculated all of this incorrectly, but I still have a feeling that blue-green algae might not be very scalable... :&#x2F;</text></comment> | <story><title>Computer powered by colony of blue-green algae has run for six months</title><url>https://www.newscientist.com/article/2319584-computer-powered-by-colony-of-blue-green-algae-has-run-for-six-months/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phtrivier</author><text>Stupid question : do the bacteria manage the create their organic mass entirely from air + sunlight, or does the &quot;container&quot; need a special substrate &#x2F; soil &#x2F; etc... ? How fast would that &quot;deplete&quot; relative to the metals in the anode &#x2F; cathode ?<p>Also, how much does it &quot;capture&quot; carbon as part of the photosynthesis ?</text></comment> |
13,746,295 | 13,745,955 | 1 | 3 | 13,742,917 | train | <story><title>Same-sex marriage linked to decline in teen suicides</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/same-sex-marriage-linked-to-decline-in-teen-suicides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>judah</author><text>&gt;&gt; &quot;I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.&quot;<p>Small government conservative here. It&#x27;s actually pretty simple:<p>Small government: the government should stop meddling in marriage altogether. It&#x27;s a social and often religious institution.<p>Freedom: We take seriously the founders&#x27; belief that government should not infringe on religious liberty.</text></item><item><author>mikeash</author><text>This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it really bizarre that a site which says it&#x27;s &quot;championing freedom, smaller government&quot; is so stridently against same-sex marriage.<p>I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.<p>Bringing it back to the original topic a bit, it&#x27;s sad that people&#x27;s reactions are so predictable. People in favor of same-sex marriage think this study is great. People who oppose it think it sucks. How boring! Show me someone in favor of same-sex marriage who thinks this study is terrible, or someone against who thinks the study is really good.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>When I read studies like this, one of the first things I like to do is look around for critiques.<p>On conservative commentary website Stream.org, statistician William M. Briggs (who, take it for what it&#x27;s worth, opposes same-sex marriage) offers a critique of the study&#x27;s methodology and conclusion, as well as the conclusion that the study expressly does not make, but that the headlines have made:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-marriage-laws-reduce-teen-suicide-rates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-mar...</a><p>A few interesting snippets from his critique:<p>&gt; A weighted 8.6% to a weighted 8%, they say. This is a 7% reduction, all right, but a minor tweak in the actual weighted number. The numbers are weighted averages across several states and the result of a statistical model called a linear regression. The 0.6 drop is not observed, but is the output from a model.<p>&gt; The numbers within states is anything but straightforward (the authors provide graphs). For instance, some states show reported suicide attempts increasing after gmarriage (New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, for example). The graphs also indicate a general decline in rates before gmarriage and continuing afterwards (see their Fig. 3).<p>&gt; putting Ebola in the model works equally well with gmarriage to explain the data. So do the disasters of those crashing Malaysian airliners, or the fighting in Ukraine and Crimea. So does the 2014 Winter Olympics!<p>One other point that Briggs makes only indirectly, but bears mentioning, is that measuring the number of self-reported unsuccessful suicide attempts only provides us with part of the picture; we can&#x27;t make any firm conclusions about what its rise or fall says about suicide prevention unless we also know the number of _successful_ suicide attempts. For instance, it might be the case that some suicide prevention factor reduces the likelihood that any given suicide attempt is successful. Maybe hospitals have gotten better at reducing the mortality rate of intentional overdoses. In such a case, the rate of suicide attempts might remain relatively flat, but the rate of unsuccessful suicide attempts would rise, and the rate of successful suicide attempts would fall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pc86</author><text>Small government conservative here, too! And it&#x27;s not nearly that simple.<p>&quot;Religious liberty,&quot; especially in the context of the American founders, is the freedom to practice your faith privately in whatever manner you wish, and to speak about that faith publicly without fear or persecution. It is <i>not</i> the freedom to impose your religious mores on other people who do not share your religion, or even those who do. To imply otherwise is to bastardize what this country was founded on and does a disservice to the founders.<p>If you want government to stop meddling in marriage, I hope you&#x27;re fighting against tax breaks and other marriage incentives just as hard as you are against allowing two people you&#x27;ll never meet to enjoy the same recognition straight people do.</text></comment> | <story><title>Same-sex marriage linked to decline in teen suicides</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/same-sex-marriage-linked-to-decline-in-teen-suicides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>judah</author><text>&gt;&gt; &quot;I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.&quot;<p>Small government conservative here. It&#x27;s actually pretty simple:<p>Small government: the government should stop meddling in marriage altogether. It&#x27;s a social and often religious institution.<p>Freedom: We take seriously the founders&#x27; belief that government should not infringe on religious liberty.</text></item><item><author>mikeash</author><text>This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it really bizarre that a site which says it&#x27;s &quot;championing freedom, smaller government&quot; is so stridently against same-sex marriage.<p>I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.<p>Bringing it back to the original topic a bit, it&#x27;s sad that people&#x27;s reactions are so predictable. People in favor of same-sex marriage think this study is great. People who oppose it think it sucks. How boring! Show me someone in favor of same-sex marriage who thinks this study is terrible, or someone against who thinks the study is really good.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>When I read studies like this, one of the first things I like to do is look around for critiques.<p>On conservative commentary website Stream.org, statistician William M. Briggs (who, take it for what it&#x27;s worth, opposes same-sex marriage) offers a critique of the study&#x27;s methodology and conclusion, as well as the conclusion that the study expressly does not make, but that the headlines have made:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-marriage-laws-reduce-teen-suicide-rates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-mar...</a><p>A few interesting snippets from his critique:<p>&gt; A weighted 8.6% to a weighted 8%, they say. This is a 7% reduction, all right, but a minor tweak in the actual weighted number. The numbers are weighted averages across several states and the result of a statistical model called a linear regression. The 0.6 drop is not observed, but is the output from a model.<p>&gt; The numbers within states is anything but straightforward (the authors provide graphs). For instance, some states show reported suicide attempts increasing after gmarriage (New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, for example). The graphs also indicate a general decline in rates before gmarriage and continuing afterwards (see their Fig. 3).<p>&gt; putting Ebola in the model works equally well with gmarriage to explain the data. So do the disasters of those crashing Malaysian airliners, or the fighting in Ukraine and Crimea. So does the 2014 Winter Olympics!<p>One other point that Briggs makes only indirectly, but bears mentioning, is that measuring the number of self-reported unsuccessful suicide attempts only provides us with part of the picture; we can&#x27;t make any firm conclusions about what its rise or fall says about suicide prevention unless we also know the number of _successful_ suicide attempts. For instance, it might be the case that some suicide prevention factor reduces the likelihood that any given suicide attempt is successful. Maybe hospitals have gotten better at reducing the mortality rate of intentional overdoses. In such a case, the rate of suicide attempts might remain relatively flat, but the rate of unsuccessful suicide attempts would rise, and the rate of successful suicide attempts would fall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>They&#x27;re not arguing that government should get out of the marriage business. I&#x27;ve seen that sentiment before and it&#x27;s totally consistent. I might even agree with it. But these people here are arguing stridently for government-endorsed traditional marriage, and against same-sex marriage, all while having that tagline at the bottom of every page.</text></comment> |
36,205,207 | 36,203,044 | 1 | 2 | 36,202,088 | train | <story><title>macOS 14 will support JPEG XL</title><url>https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1665792517613256705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulHoule</author><text>As a mirrorless photographer who wants to publish photos on the web that look like they came out of a mirrorless camera I want JPEG XL. In trials I&#x27;ve done, AVIF works well for a throwaway splash image for a blog but compression results are not so impressive compared to JPEG or WEBP if you want the image to hold up under close inspection.<p>On the other hand there is something that seems almost infantile about image support in the &quot;operating system&quot; being pivotal. If you read a review of a new MacOS in ArsTechnica you might get the idea that 99% of an OS is about what the buttons look like but in terms of the computer science definition, image codecs are definitely a userspace thing and as a Windows or Linux user I never wait for my OS to support an image format, I just install the codec and code away.</text></item><item><author>amoerie</author><text>As a radiology software developer: please please let JPEG XL become a thing.
I sincerely hope this might make Chrome change its mind.
JPEG XL is a game changer for 16 bit lossless images. The technical landscape for these kinds of images today is barren.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucideer</author><text>You&#x27;re using the term &quot;OS&quot; but you&#x27;re not talking about OSes you&#x27;re talking about kernels.<p>The OS is what comes with the computer or gets installed in the default setup if you&#x27;re installing yourself. Most of it is userspace.<p>Distros like Arch &amp; Gentoo allow you to build a custom OS which in doing so blurs the definition quite a lot, but ultimately when people say &quot;macOS&quot; that term includes quite a lot of userspace things. Bundled software is absolutely a core part of every popularly used definition of the word &quot;OS&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>macOS 14 will support JPEG XL</title><url>https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1665792517613256705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulHoule</author><text>As a mirrorless photographer who wants to publish photos on the web that look like they came out of a mirrorless camera I want JPEG XL. In trials I&#x27;ve done, AVIF works well for a throwaway splash image for a blog but compression results are not so impressive compared to JPEG or WEBP if you want the image to hold up under close inspection.<p>On the other hand there is something that seems almost infantile about image support in the &quot;operating system&quot; being pivotal. If you read a review of a new MacOS in ArsTechnica you might get the idea that 99% of an OS is about what the buttons look like but in terms of the computer science definition, image codecs are definitely a userspace thing and as a Windows or Linux user I never wait for my OS to support an image format, I just install the codec and code away.</text></item><item><author>amoerie</author><text>As a radiology software developer: please please let JPEG XL become a thing.
I sincerely hope this might make Chrome change its mind.
JPEG XL is a game changer for 16 bit lossless images. The technical landscape for these kinds of images today is barren.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kps</author><text>As an ‘operating system’ OS X includes user space tools like the Finder and Quick Look in particular where vendor support is helpful.</text></comment> |
26,654,166 | 26,651,760 | 1 | 3 | 26,639,901 | train | <story><title>Benzene detected in hand sanitizers</title><url>https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects-benzene-in-hand-sanitizers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Abishek_Muthian</author><text>Almost every chemical factory which had license to Ethanol where I live started making hand sanitizers to meet&#x2F;exploit the demand last year. Most of them where just white-labeled and so I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there was other harmful substances in it.<p>Doctors here advise to use soap over hand sanitizers if there&#x27;s water available. But now there&#x27;s another problem, all these obsessive hand wash with soap is making the skin dry[1] and causing other skin problems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;needgap.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;198-hand-wash-liquid-which-doesnt-make-the-skin-dry-skincare-hygiene" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;needgap.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;198-hand-wash-liquid-which-does...</a> (Disclaimer: It&#x27;s a problem validation platform I built).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbotz</author><text>Your skin &quot;dries out&quot; because soap removes the natural oils of your skin. The solution is to replace the oils. Coconut oil or olive oil are good choices. A few drops on your still-wet hands, then spread it around by rubbing your hands together; your skin being slightly wet helps spread the oil evenly. The oil will be completely absorbed within a few minutes, so don&#x27;t worry about having oily hands.</text></comment> | <story><title>Benzene detected in hand sanitizers</title><url>https://www.valisure.com/blog/valisure-news/valisure-detects-benzene-in-hand-sanitizers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Abishek_Muthian</author><text>Almost every chemical factory which had license to Ethanol where I live started making hand sanitizers to meet&#x2F;exploit the demand last year. Most of them where just white-labeled and so I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there was other harmful substances in it.<p>Doctors here advise to use soap over hand sanitizers if there&#x27;s water available. But now there&#x27;s another problem, all these obsessive hand wash with soap is making the skin dry[1] and causing other skin problems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;needgap.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;198-hand-wash-liquid-which-doesnt-make-the-skin-dry-skincare-hygiene" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;needgap.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;198-hand-wash-liquid-which-does...</a> (Disclaimer: It&#x27;s a problem validation platform I built).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cultofmetatron</author><text>use doctor bronners. works extremely well and they don&#x27;t remove the glycerin so it won&#x27;t dry out your hands.</text></comment> |
3,523,727 | 3,522,874 | 1 | 2 | 3,522,839 | train | <story><title>IcedCoffeeScript</title><url>http://maxtaco.github.com/coffee-script/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swannodette</author><text>This fork brings some up deep issues, perhaps intractable, around
about the development of syntax-y languages. Useful source
transformations require marginalized forks of the compiler and all the
development burden and risks that entails. In some sense CoffeeScript
inherits the <i>actual problem</i> with JavaScript - a select few determine
the introduction of language features. Perhaps these language
features are best shipped as libraries?<p>Maybe it doesn't matter. Perhaps most users don't need it. Or perhaps
as we continue to develop software we'll find that we'd rather defer work to the
compiler / macros and the high cost of syntax is simply not worth it.<p>I'm looking forward to see how 3 languages I immensely enjoy (JavaScript, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript) co-evolve :)</text></comment> | <story><title>IcedCoffeeScript</title><url>http://maxtaco.github.com/coffee-script/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mayoff</author><text>I was going to complain that I could find no mention of TameJS (from which the await and defer keywords/features clearly originated). Then I noticed that the IcedCoffeeScript author is also the author of TameJS.</text></comment> |
32,746,491 | 32,746,338 | 1 | 2 | 32,744,795 | train | <story><title>Building future cities out of timber could save 100B tons of CO2 emissions</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/05/building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>credit_guy</author><text>For context, humanity produces about 50 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. This estimate of 100 billion tons is between now and 2100, so about 1.2 billion tons per year savings. That&#x27;s not nothing, but it&#x27;s not that impressive either. And if it turns out the assumptions in the estimate are a bit optimistic, then it becomes more or less a rounding error.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nextaccountic</author><text>&gt; That&#x27;s not nothing, but it&#x27;s not that impressive either.<p>Almost all initiatives fighting carbon emissions are on the low % percentages. That&#x27;s just the nature of the problem.<p>If humanity wants to stand a chance, we need to catch ALL the low hanging fruits</text></comment> | <story><title>Building future cities out of timber could save 100B tons of CO2 emissions</title><url>https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/05/building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>credit_guy</author><text>For context, humanity produces about 50 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. This estimate of 100 billion tons is between now and 2100, so about 1.2 billion tons per year savings. That&#x27;s not nothing, but it&#x27;s not that impressive either. And if it turns out the assumptions in the estimate are a bit optimistic, then it becomes more or less a rounding error.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ido</author><text>2.4% savings in emissions is massive. It obviously not on its own the only measure we need to take.</text></comment> |
8,392,172 | 8,391,869 | 1 | 2 | 8,391,127 | train | <story><title>CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US</title><url>http://www.cnbc.com/id/102037055</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arrrg</author><text>The likelihood of any kind of pandemic is extremely low, sure. However, your dismissal of this epidemic and its impact is arrogant and disgusting.<p>It’s still a disaster in the affected countries, with many knock-on effects. Also, it would have been better to spend more money earlier to prevent unnecessary deaths.<p>This Ebola epidemic is actually something people hardly care about. Hardly anyone is donating, for example.<p>Help is needed. Actually. For real. And with better support and a better reaction this could have turned out better.</text></item><item><author>lee</author><text>Am I one of the minorities who believe that this hype about Ebola is more sensationalism and news than an actual pandemic we should be fearful for?<p>Let&#x27;s take a lot at what we can agree on:<p>* The number of cases of infected patients is fairly small.<p>* The vector of transmission is fluid exchange, so that reduces its ability to spread.<p>* The virus doesn&#x27;t appear to lie dormant, and is only contagious when the patient becomes symptomatic.<p>The chances of contracting the disease in a western country so far is near 0. The chances of contracting the disease in AFRICA is fairly improbable too.<p>It really sounds like sensationalism at its finest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SpaceManNabs</author><text>I am having a hard time understanding why people keep saying that donations are the way to go to solve this issue. From what I have seen, many rural communities are rejecting and acting against foreign assistance. I am not sure of the circumstances in urban settings, but I read that they are just as superstitious. How can we help those that do not want our help, especially when it is deadly to help either because of the disease or fear of attack?</text></comment> | <story><title>CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US</title><url>http://www.cnbc.com/id/102037055</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arrrg</author><text>The likelihood of any kind of pandemic is extremely low, sure. However, your dismissal of this epidemic and its impact is arrogant and disgusting.<p>It’s still a disaster in the affected countries, with many knock-on effects. Also, it would have been better to spend more money earlier to prevent unnecessary deaths.<p>This Ebola epidemic is actually something people hardly care about. Hardly anyone is donating, for example.<p>Help is needed. Actually. For real. And with better support and a better reaction this could have turned out better.</text></item><item><author>lee</author><text>Am I one of the minorities who believe that this hype about Ebola is more sensationalism and news than an actual pandemic we should be fearful for?<p>Let&#x27;s take a lot at what we can agree on:<p>* The number of cases of infected patients is fairly small.<p>* The vector of transmission is fluid exchange, so that reduces its ability to spread.<p>* The virus doesn&#x27;t appear to lie dormant, and is only contagious when the patient becomes symptomatic.<p>The chances of contracting the disease in a western country so far is near 0. The chances of contracting the disease in AFRICA is fairly improbable too.<p>It really sounds like sensationalism at its finest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shivetya</author><text>as far as donations are going, Time had a good breakout. There are many who have gone there, given money, and risked their lives. hint they aren&#x27;t the type that frequent tech boards but posters here are quick to dismiss some of them for their religious convictions</text></comment> |
37,773,180 | 37,773,198 | 1 | 2 | 37,772,394 | train | <story><title>Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists</title><url>https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mental-health/how-insurance-companies-fill-their-networks-with-ghost-therapists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cogman10</author><text>Up and down the board this is the game insurance companies are playing.<p>For example, I had need for a medical device. My doctors office submitted the claim for that device with documentation of it&#x27;s necessity 5 times over 6 months before it was finally approved. The prior 4 times it was &quot;You didn&#x27;t include all the required information&quot; even though each submission was identical.<p>There&#x27;s simply far too little oversight on insurance agencies. They are perversely incentivized to give the worst outcomes for everyone which being to command high premiums because of the relatively low amount of competition or threat of &quot;switching&quot; (After all, you are using your employer&#x27;s insurance. You didn&#x27;t get to pick it, HR did. And they picked it based on who&#x27;s cheapest. How did they become the cheapest? A race to the bottom in terms of service).<p>All of this burdens the whole system with cost and delay.<p>I&#x27;m all for universal healthcare, but if we can&#x27;t get that can we at least get stronger regulations and punitive measure against insurance companies for playing these games? It&#x27;s crazy that everyone has stories, regardless of agency, of illegitimate claim denials.<p>And to be clear, they do this because it saves them money and costs them nothing. By denying by default, a certain percentage of the population and doctors offices will ultimately just go away because of the headache it takes to convince the agency to provide the product you pay for.</text></item><item><author>didgeoridoo</author><text>My wife is a clinical psychologist who used to take insurance. She got tired of not being paid for months for patients she saw. Legally they have 90 days to pay you, but in practice it’s closer to 4-5 months. Every January they claim to have “computer problems related to the new year” and simply lose huge numbers of claims, requiring you to resubmit — oh that claim is more than 90 days old even though it was their system that “lost” it? Sorry, can’t submit! Guess you just worked for free!<p>She takes cash now. It was an abusive system and I’m not surprised it’s falling apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Loughla</author><text>It&#x27;s astounding that the care plan created by myself and my team of doctors is regularly denied by a statistician at Blue Cross Blue Shield.<p>This means my care is ultimately in the hands of someone with zero medical training.<p>Astounding.</text></comment> | <story><title>Insurance companies fill their networks with ‘ghost’ therapists</title><url>https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mental-health/how-insurance-companies-fill-their-networks-with-ghost-therapists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cogman10</author><text>Up and down the board this is the game insurance companies are playing.<p>For example, I had need for a medical device. My doctors office submitted the claim for that device with documentation of it&#x27;s necessity 5 times over 6 months before it was finally approved. The prior 4 times it was &quot;You didn&#x27;t include all the required information&quot; even though each submission was identical.<p>There&#x27;s simply far too little oversight on insurance agencies. They are perversely incentivized to give the worst outcomes for everyone which being to command high premiums because of the relatively low amount of competition or threat of &quot;switching&quot; (After all, you are using your employer&#x27;s insurance. You didn&#x27;t get to pick it, HR did. And they picked it based on who&#x27;s cheapest. How did they become the cheapest? A race to the bottom in terms of service).<p>All of this burdens the whole system with cost and delay.<p>I&#x27;m all for universal healthcare, but if we can&#x27;t get that can we at least get stronger regulations and punitive measure against insurance companies for playing these games? It&#x27;s crazy that everyone has stories, regardless of agency, of illegitimate claim denials.<p>And to be clear, they do this because it saves them money and costs them nothing. By denying by default, a certain percentage of the population and doctors offices will ultimately just go away because of the headache it takes to convince the agency to provide the product you pay for.</text></item><item><author>didgeoridoo</author><text>My wife is a clinical psychologist who used to take insurance. She got tired of not being paid for months for patients she saw. Legally they have 90 days to pay you, but in practice it’s closer to 4-5 months. Every January they claim to have “computer problems related to the new year” and simply lose huge numbers of claims, requiring you to resubmit — oh that claim is more than 90 days old even though it was their system that “lost” it? Sorry, can’t submit! Guess you just worked for free!<p>She takes cash now. It was an abusive system and I’m not surprised it’s falling apart.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>briffle</author><text>I would love, love for it to become a thing for Employers to put your money in a special type of account (similar to a Roth 401k) where the only thing you can do with it is buy insurance on the open market.<p>Heck, even have a list of 2-3 &#x27;preferred&#x27; plans that employees can choose from, if they don&#x27;t want to do all the research. But seeing all that money go into their pay-stub, and then right back out for insurance is going to be very, very eye opening to people who currently just have their employer pay it, and they ever see it in their check.</text></comment> |
10,339,660 | 10,339,871 | 1 | 2 | 10,338,904 | train | <story><title>The End of Safe Harbor and a Scary Path Forward</title><url>http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2015/10/6/end-of-safe-harbor/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gozo</author><text>We are dealing with the consequences of not taking this very seriously for the last decade. It&#x27;s not good enough to just hope that the Internet will remain free in the face of legitimate concerns.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s a concern that the Internet won&#x27;t be global anymore, but it never really was. Up until thing like Firesheep and Snowden, and still to some extent, a lot of Internet traffic was only safe based on not passing any bad actors.</text></comment> | <story><title>The End of Safe Harbor and a Scary Path Forward</title><url>http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2015/10/6/end-of-safe-harbor/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coldcode</author><text>The end result may become a Balkanized internet - you can&#x27;t share anything outside your country&#x27;s borders or access them from outside. Each country winds up as a China, a government&#x27;s dream situation. In the end though we all lose.</text></comment> |
35,412,808 | 35,412,825 | 1 | 2 | 35,410,778 | train | <story><title>‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/6218aa73-ae25-46fc-9503-f2f45b8db47f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Spooky23</author><text>That’s how the critics of these programs spiked the programs. “Welfare Queens” were supposedly driving around with Cadillacs, so controls had to be in place.<p>I spent several years working on social services IT. The biggest welfare beneficiaries are companies like IBM, CSC, Accenture, Unisys, Northrup Grumman, etc and their employees.<p>That’s why some politicians were so terrified of the COVID relief programs. The government efficiently provided direct cash aid to millions of people with minimal fraud while the complex controlled systems like unemployment insurance were just raided by fraudsters. We made people’s lives measurably better, saved the economy from
collapse, etc, and then took it all away.</text></item><item><author>Nifty3929</author><text>The main problem with government poverty programs is that they usually focus on <i>spending</i> money instead of <i>giving</i> money to people who need it. That is, the government spends money on things, but this is a very inefficient or even counterproductive way to help. And a lot of the time it just means that the money is going to whoever is politically connected.<p>A much more efficient way to help people is just to give them money directly, and then people can spend it on whatever they think they need.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinyl7</author><text>Less than 35% of the $800 billion in PPP loans actually went to workers, say economists<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90713747&#x2F;workers-800-billion-ppp-loans-economists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;90713747&#x2F;workers-800-billion-ppp...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/6218aa73-ae25-46fc-9503-f2f45b8db47f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Spooky23</author><text>That’s how the critics of these programs spiked the programs. “Welfare Queens” were supposedly driving around with Cadillacs, so controls had to be in place.<p>I spent several years working on social services IT. The biggest welfare beneficiaries are companies like IBM, CSC, Accenture, Unisys, Northrup Grumman, etc and their employees.<p>That’s why some politicians were so terrified of the COVID relief programs. The government efficiently provided direct cash aid to millions of people with minimal fraud while the complex controlled systems like unemployment insurance were just raided by fraudsters. We made people’s lives measurably better, saved the economy from
collapse, etc, and then took it all away.</text></item><item><author>Nifty3929</author><text>The main problem with government poverty programs is that they usually focus on <i>spending</i> money instead of <i>giving</i> money to people who need it. That is, the government spends money on things, but this is a very inefficient or even counterproductive way to help. And a lot of the time it just means that the money is going to whoever is politically connected.<p>A much more efficient way to help people is just to give them money directly, and then people can spend it on whatever they think they need.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orzig</author><text>&gt; Minimal fraud<p>You’re going to have to be more specific or offer some evidence, because a cursory search suggests there was <i>massive</i> fraud.<p>To take the least sensationalized source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;justice-department-takes-action-against-covid-19-fraud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;opa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;justice-department-takes-acti...</a><p>They’re estimating more than half a billion dollars and are just getting started.</text></comment> |
31,609,356 | 31,608,658 | 1 | 2 | 31,607,248 | train | <story><title>Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/feeling-super-bad-about-economy-musk-wants-to-cut-10percent-of-tesla-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you&#x27;re ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you&#x27;re large enough) that you&#x27;re in a hiring freeze and&#x2F;or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.<p>The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a &quot;soft freeze&quot; mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren&#x27;t happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees <i>will</i> notice this and you&#x27;ll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.</text></item><item><author>cmrdporcupine</author><text>Uh,ok...<p>Two days ago the &quot;Who is hiring&quot; thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31585021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31585021</a><p>More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krisoft</author><text>&gt; you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring<p>This reminds me what I once read about the challenges of zookeeping big cats. They tend to appear very often perfectly healthy until one day they just die. And when you do an autopsy on them you realise that they were sick since weeks or even month, but it often does not “show” in a way you would expect.<p>The speculation is that since they are not incentivised evolutionary to show that they are hurt. In the wild they are often solitary creatures so no one would or could help them, on the other hand if they appear hurt that would invite other predators to challenge them. Sounds like the incentive structure is very similar for companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla to Cut 10% of Jobs</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/feeling-super-bad-about-economy-musk-wants-to-cut-10percent-of-tesla-jobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjr00</author><text>Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you&#x27;re ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you&#x27;re large enough) that you&#x27;re in a hiring freeze and&#x2F;or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.<p>The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a &quot;soft freeze&quot; mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren&#x27;t happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees <i>will</i> notice this and you&#x27;ll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.</text></item><item><author>cmrdporcupine</author><text>Uh,ok...<p>Two days ago the &quot;Who is hiring&quot; thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31585021" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31585021</a><p>More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrwyoilarticle</author><text>I&#x27;ve experienced similar at a large tech employer. During a brief, now-forgotten market downturn, we froze hiring but kept open all of our position advertisements, in order to keep the pipeline &#x27;warm&#x27;.<p>I thought it was short-sighted. There were a small number of qualified people for the positions and we constantly complained that it was hard to find them. If one of those qualified candidates applies to a position and gets ghosted, they may never apply again, either because they lose their confidence or out of spite.</text></comment> |
20,470,815 | 20,470,887 | 1 | 3 | 20,468,696 | train | <story><title>FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/07/17/viral-app-faceapp-now-owns-access-to-more-than-150-million-peoples-faces-and-names/#25ca052b62f1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imgabe</author><text>Is &quot;what your face looks like&quot; private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It&#x27;s not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information?<p>So Faceapp knows &quot;There&#x27;s a person with this name who looks like this&quot;. Was that supposed to be a secret?<p>I&#x27;m concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some people just want to hide under a rock for their entire lives. I don&#x27;t know how anyone manages to leave the house if having people see your face and know your name is a serious concern.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagacrap</author><text>Faceapp knows what 150M faces look like. That concentration of information is valuable. Google built a fortune by taking freely available information and organizing it for easy access. In the case of faceapp there are many nefarious actors who could serve as clients.</text></comment> | <story><title>FaceApp Now Owns Access to More Than 150M People's Faces and Names</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/07/17/viral-app-faceapp-now-owns-access-to-more-than-150-million-peoples-faces-and-names/#25ca052b62f1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imgabe</author><text>Is &quot;what your face looks like&quot; private information? You publicly display your face everywhere you go all the time. It&#x27;s not really practical to hide it. Likewise your name you pretty much freely give out to anyone who asks. Is that private information?<p>So Faceapp knows &quot;There&#x27;s a person with this name who looks like this&quot;. Was that supposed to be a secret?<p>I&#x27;m concerned about privacy too, but it seems like some people just want to hide under a rock for their entire lives. I don&#x27;t know how anyone manages to leave the house if having people see your face and know your name is a serious concern.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thunderbong</author><text>I think you&#x27;ve put that very well.<p>All I&#x27;m wondering is how this would play out in a dystopian future where I&#x27;m recognised by everyone wherever I go.<p>And in some cases they might even have additional information maybe in a probabilistic fashion. Like what kind of clothes I prefer or the kinds of food I like. And that would be the good version.<p>The worse scenario would be that some malicious actor puts all this together to play on others&#x27; fears.<p>The worst case, of course, being big brother!</text></comment> |
41,245,973 | 41,246,144 | 1 | 3 | 41,245,702 | train | <story><title>Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?</title><url>https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/02/13/is-rich-dad-poor-dad-a-fraud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spamizbad</author><text>You can distill all the advice this book has to offer into one sentence: Rather than succumb to lifestyle creep, direct your cashflow from your 9-to-5 towards other endeavors that can make you money. That&#x27;s it. That&#x27;s the book. There is no step-by-step guide on how to do this, just a narrative, anecdotes and a few examples mostly around real estate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>01HNNWZ0MV43FF</author><text>I&#x27;ll add some unnecessary fluff:<p>Don&#x27;t invest in real estate. If it was a free lunch, someone else would eat it first. VTSAX is way less work.<p>All that matters is the savings ratio. Everything else cancels out. I promise. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mrmoneymustache.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;13&#x2F;the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mrmoneymustache.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;13&#x2F;the-shockingly-si...</a><p>So a penny saved is actually worth more than a penny earned, because it means you need less invested to retire.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?</title><url>https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2024/02/13/is-rich-dad-poor-dad-a-fraud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spamizbad</author><text>You can distill all the advice this book has to offer into one sentence: Rather than succumb to lifestyle creep, direct your cashflow from your 9-to-5 towards other endeavors that can make you money. That&#x27;s it. That&#x27;s the book. There is no step-by-step guide on how to do this, just a narrative, anecdotes and a few examples mostly around real estate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hylaride</author><text>Pretty much this. In Canada, we have a book called the Wealthy Barber ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Wealthy_Barber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Wealthy_Barber</a> ) that came out in the late 1980s that was a fictional story of a &quot;rich barber giving financial advice to young people&quot;. It essentially lays the groundwork for compound interest working in your favour and gives sensible advice on life insurance, estate planning, etc.<p>The TL;DR is the &quot;pay yourself first and make it so that 10% of your income goes into a mutual fund before you even see the money&quot;(1) and reasonably stay out of debt and you&#x27;ll likely be financially successful. The other point is that money is just a tool and tools can be useful (buying food, shelter, pleasure), but can also hurt you (debt, bankruptcy, etc).<p>In the book he even advises AGAINST real estate because of the PITA (pain in the ass) factor of having to deal with tenants and upkeep.<p>1. This is the 1980s and index funds weren&#x27;t yet in the zeitgeist, but subsequent revisions address this.</text></comment> |
30,361,535 | 30,359,802 | 1 | 3 | 30,345,806 | train | <story><title>Delayed Job vs. Sidekiq</title><url>https://blog.appsignal.com/2022/02/15/delayed-job-vs-sidekiq-which-is-better.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>berkes</author><text>I agree with most of the findings in that article, but I miss one very important one: consistency.<p>Jobs in your queue in the database can be committed in the same transaction that makes the mutation. With redis you have no such thing. Leading to (been there, it hurt) potentially missing jobs or queuing jobs that have no associated mutation in the db.<p>Furthermore, a big downside of redis is that it&#x27;s promise of consistency is low. Mostly by design: redis is not meant to be the primary, one and only store of truth. Commonly, people store stuff in redis that can be re-built from database or some eventlog or so.
But not sidekiq. If your redis starts failing (been there, it hurts), e.g. though OOM errors, you are loosing data. Jobs, with their parameters, are dropped, often irrecoverably. And with Rails&#x27; common set-up, this means you are irrecoverably loosing data: there simply is no way to find what emails you did not send, nor any way to re-queue them. There is no way to re-enqueue those &quot;generateReport&quot; jobs using the data at that point in time and so on.<p>Basically: Redis is quite certainly not the best tool to store your job-queues with associated data, in. Sidekiq is the less sturdy approach of both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scosman</author><text>Transactional consistency is nice. Maybe worth it for some low-volume jobs.<p>The downside that comes with it is using your primary DB as your queue is that the queues in an app tend to absorb all the exceptional conditions (queue grows to millions during worker outage, backfill which needs to process millions of items). Using your primary DB means all that disk usage, memory usage, and IO hit your primary DB in exceptional ways and impacts your app in more ways than just queue delays. It also scales much less linearly than other queue options.<p>A nice middle ground is to store all your data and state in your DB transactionally, and only queue tiny lightweight jobs with database primary keys (database: sentWelcomeMailDate=nil, queue: sentWelcomeMailForUser:1234).<p>This is another case for neither DJ or Sidekiq. A fully hosted option like SQS addresses the durability concerns of Sidekiq, and the scaling concerns of both. I’ve queued 1B+ jobs in SQS and watched the workers slowly burn through them over the course of a month.<p>DJ and Sidekiq can go quite far. I’ve used both and patched some perf issues on DJ. The lesson learned was queues at scale are hard distributed systems problems - you probably don’t want to have to know how they work, or host the distributed system yourself.</text></comment> | <story><title>Delayed Job vs. Sidekiq</title><url>https://blog.appsignal.com/2022/02/15/delayed-job-vs-sidekiq-which-is-better.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>berkes</author><text>I agree with most of the findings in that article, but I miss one very important one: consistency.<p>Jobs in your queue in the database can be committed in the same transaction that makes the mutation. With redis you have no such thing. Leading to (been there, it hurt) potentially missing jobs or queuing jobs that have no associated mutation in the db.<p>Furthermore, a big downside of redis is that it&#x27;s promise of consistency is low. Mostly by design: redis is not meant to be the primary, one and only store of truth. Commonly, people store stuff in redis that can be re-built from database or some eventlog or so.
But not sidekiq. If your redis starts failing (been there, it hurts), e.g. though OOM errors, you are loosing data. Jobs, with their parameters, are dropped, often irrecoverably. And with Rails&#x27; common set-up, this means you are irrecoverably loosing data: there simply is no way to find what emails you did not send, nor any way to re-queue them. There is no way to re-enqueue those &quot;generateReport&quot; jobs using the data at that point in time and so on.<p>Basically: Redis is quite certainly not the best tool to store your job-queues with associated data, in. Sidekiq is the less sturdy approach of both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cardy31</author><text>You can run Redis in a persistent setup. So each Redis instance has a replica and both master and replica write out to disk. You still don’t get transactions, but depending on your scale a transaction for every job you enqueue may be impossible.<p>If you’re small enough that you don’t knock over your DB by putting jobs in it then the transactions are nice!</text></comment> |
23,572,361 | 23,572,408 | 1 | 2 | 23,562,164 | train | <story><title>Breakthrough in inverse Laplace transform procedures</title><url>http://inverselaplace.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rollulus</author><text>A little ELI5 for those who haven&#x27;t had Laplace transforms at school, from someone who only had a Laplace 101 course, so for what&#x27;s it worth: Laplace transforms allow you to convert differential equations into easier equations, and back: the differentials and integrals become multiplications and divisions. So you can take a differential equation, transform it into the Laplace domain, manipulate it, and convert it back. And that&#x27;s cool because differential equations tend to appear everywhere, for instance to model springs, electrical circuits with caps and coils, the surface of a soap bubble in a metal rod, etc. A sibling is the z-transform, which is like the digital version. This one is used for instance to design digital audio filters. I&#x27;m sure some math wizards here can elaborate and correct me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GolDDranks</author><text>I don&#x27;t have any real understanding over the Laplace transform, but I understand Fourier transform well enough that it makes sense to me. Back then, I saw an claim that Laplace transform is a generalization of Fourer transform in the sense that it transforms a function not only to a space of frequencies and phases of sine waves, but to a larger space of parameters of exponentials. Note that the parameter space of the sine waves is subset of the (complex) parameter space of exponentials.<p>Is this claim correct?</text></comment> | <story><title>Breakthrough in inverse Laplace transform procedures</title><url>http://inverselaplace.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rollulus</author><text>A little ELI5 for those who haven&#x27;t had Laplace transforms at school, from someone who only had a Laplace 101 course, so for what&#x27;s it worth: Laplace transforms allow you to convert differential equations into easier equations, and back: the differentials and integrals become multiplications and divisions. So you can take a differential equation, transform it into the Laplace domain, manipulate it, and convert it back. And that&#x27;s cool because differential equations tend to appear everywhere, for instance to model springs, electrical circuits with caps and coils, the surface of a soap bubble in a metal rod, etc. A sibling is the z-transform, which is like the digital version. This one is used for instance to design digital audio filters. I&#x27;m sure some math wizards here can elaborate and correct me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taneq</author><text>Sounds right to my (very very rusty) recollection. Laplace transforms are a magic trick that let you easily solve some kinds of differential equations.</text></comment> |
31,272,682 | 31,272,666 | 1 | 2 | 31,271,451 | train | <story><title>I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production</title><url>https://blog.thevinter.com/posts/vimeo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tauwauwau</author><text>Once we get used to doing same thing multiple times a day, it doesn&#x27;t matter if the log shows that we&#x27;re about to take a destructive action, we&#x27;ll still do it.
Only thing that is foolproof is to not take the destructive action because people make mistake, it&#x27;s human nature. I don&#x27;t know how this can be implemented, may be encrypt the files, take a backup in some other location (which may not be allowed).<p>Multiple reviewers here didn&#x27;t catch the mistake<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloombergquint.com&#x2F;markets&#x2F;citi-s-900-million-misfire-happened-in-midst-of-software-switch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloombergquint.com&#x2F;markets&#x2F;citi-s-900-million-mi...</a></text></item><item><author>dkersten</author><text>I was involved with archiving of data that was legally required to be retained for PSD2 compliance. So it was pretty important that the data was correctly archived, but it was just as important that it was properly removed from other places due to data protection.<p>This is basically the approach that was taken: log before and after every action exactly what data or files is being acted on and how. Don&#x27;t actually do it. Then have multiple people inspect the logs. Once ok&#x27;d, run again, with manual prompts after each log item asking to continue, for the first few files&#x2F;bits of data. Only after that was ok&#x27;d too did it run the remainder.<p>In other things I&#x27;ve worked on, I&#x27;ve taken the terraform-style plan first, then apply the plan approach, with manual inspection of the plan in between.</text></item><item><author>dsego</author><text>&gt; but at the time the code seemed completely correct to me<p>It always does.<p>&gt; Well, it teaches me to do more diverse tests when doing destructive operations.<p>Or add some logging and do a dry run and check the results, literally simple prints statements:<p><pre><code> print(&quot;-----&quot;)
print(&quot;Downloading videos ids from url: {url}&quot;)
print(list of ids)
...
...
...
# delete() dangerous action commented out until I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s right
print(&quot;I&#x27;m about to delete video {id}&quot;)
print(&quot;Deleted {count} videos&quot;) # maybe even assert
...
</code></pre>
Then dump out to a file and spot check it five times before running for real.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HowardStark</author><text>While this is a huge issue, a solution (well, a partial mitigation) I&#x27;ve seen and used is the &quot;Pointing and Calling&quot; technique. The basic idea is that you incorporate more actions beyond reading and typing or pressing a button—generally by having people point at something and say aloud what it is they&#x27;re doing and what they expect to happen.<p>It&#x27;s used rather extensively in safety-critical public transportation in Japan [1] and to a lesser extent in New York (along with many other countries) [2]. This can easily extend to software without overcomplicating by just setting the expectation that engineers, Q&amp;A, etc. do this even when alone.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pointing-and-calling-japan-trains" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pointing-and-calling-j...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pointing_and_calling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pointing_and_calling</a></text></comment> | <story><title>I Accidentally Deleted 7TB of Videos Before Going to Production</title><url>https://blog.thevinter.com/posts/vimeo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tauwauwau</author><text>Once we get used to doing same thing multiple times a day, it doesn&#x27;t matter if the log shows that we&#x27;re about to take a destructive action, we&#x27;ll still do it.
Only thing that is foolproof is to not take the destructive action because people make mistake, it&#x27;s human nature. I don&#x27;t know how this can be implemented, may be encrypt the files, take a backup in some other location (which may not be allowed).<p>Multiple reviewers here didn&#x27;t catch the mistake<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloombergquint.com&#x2F;markets&#x2F;citi-s-900-million-misfire-happened-in-midst-of-software-switch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloombergquint.com&#x2F;markets&#x2F;citi-s-900-million-mi...</a></text></item><item><author>dkersten</author><text>I was involved with archiving of data that was legally required to be retained for PSD2 compliance. So it was pretty important that the data was correctly archived, but it was just as important that it was properly removed from other places due to data protection.<p>This is basically the approach that was taken: log before and after every action exactly what data or files is being acted on and how. Don&#x27;t actually do it. Then have multiple people inspect the logs. Once ok&#x27;d, run again, with manual prompts after each log item asking to continue, for the first few files&#x2F;bits of data. Only after that was ok&#x27;d too did it run the remainder.<p>In other things I&#x27;ve worked on, I&#x27;ve taken the terraform-style plan first, then apply the plan approach, with manual inspection of the plan in between.</text></item><item><author>dsego</author><text>&gt; but at the time the code seemed completely correct to me<p>It always does.<p>&gt; Well, it teaches me to do more diverse tests when doing destructive operations.<p>Or add some logging and do a dry run and check the results, literally simple prints statements:<p><pre><code> print(&quot;-----&quot;)
print(&quot;Downloading videos ids from url: {url}&quot;)
print(list of ids)
...
...
...
# delete() dangerous action commented out until I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s right
print(&quot;I&#x27;m about to delete video {id}&quot;)
print(&quot;Deleted {count} videos&quot;) # maybe even assert
...
</code></pre>
Then dump out to a file and spot check it five times before running for real.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>irrational</author><text>Because everyone assumes that everyone else is looking at it more closely than they are. “I’ll just do a cursory look since I’m sure everyone else is doing a in-depth look.” Narrator: nobody did an in-depth search.</text></comment> |
37,776,792 | 37,775,270 | 1 | 2 | 37,773,918 | train | <story><title>LLMs confabulate not hallucinate</title><url>https://www.beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-confabulate-not-hallucinate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>galaxyLogic</author><text>I had the same thought that &quot;hallucinate&quot; is too strong a term for what LLMs are doing.<p>Instead I would say they DREAM. Dreams follow some logic but basically they are disjoint from reality. They involve same characters as our real-life experiences but what those characters do in a dream is not based on reality.<p>So one could think that ALL LLMs ever do is dream but much of the time their dreams are dreams which feel very real.<p>Our dreams are basically an LLM based on our real experiences but recombined in arbitrary ways, still retaining some logical structure but now detached from reality because when you recombine different experiences including our thoughts from real life, the result cannot really reflect reality very well. LLMs are better in this respect than our dreams, but sometimes their &quot;dreams&quot; get really obviously detached from reality.<p>Or if you want to use the term &quot;hallucinate&quot; with LLMs then fine but its more like they hallucinate all the time, it&#x27;s just that sometimes, even often, their hallucinations seem to agree with the reality so well that we cannot tell the difference.<p>LLMs do not describe reality because they cannot experience reality, all they can give us is an &quot;average description&quot; created from many existing descriptions.<p>One way of looking at it is to say that all LLMs tell us is hearsay.</text></item><item><author>lachlan_gray</author><text>This reminds me of something from “The language instinct” by Steven pinker. One thing that stuck with me was a story of a girl named Denys who is or was severely mentally handicapped, but speaks perfectly.<p>She can’t read, write, handle money, but confabulates engaging and convincing stories about receiving mail, haggling with her bank, her boyfriend. She speaks with proper grammar, intonation, etc, but doesn’t demonstrate any understanding of what she talks about beyond the words. She doesn’t have a bank account or a boyfriend.<p>Trying to find more and I can’t find anything about her on the internet, I would have to look at the references. Maybe it’s questionable.<p>Anyway, I like to think about what the hell we even mean when we say we “know something”, and where we should actually put the bar for AI. Where is the line between confabulation and knowledge? Is knowledge just confabulation that happens to be correct?<p>I feel like it’s possible that Denys could feel that she “knows” what she is saying, but is simply trapped in, with a working knowledge of the world and is just unable to translate it into actions, and words are just her only degree of freedom.<p>I don’t remember where I was going with this, but I agree that “confabulation” is a much better term to use, but we also shouldn’t discount what it means to be able to confabulate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KaiserPro</author><text>Dreams involve the concept of self, consciousness and an understanding of reality. all of it is far too anthropomorphic.<p>Hallucinations are much better described as noise. Its noise that lowers the quality of the signal. its just unlike white noise, this is in the form of coherent sentences&#x2F;imagery.</text></comment> | <story><title>LLMs confabulate not hallucinate</title><url>https://www.beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-confabulate-not-hallucinate/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>galaxyLogic</author><text>I had the same thought that &quot;hallucinate&quot; is too strong a term for what LLMs are doing.<p>Instead I would say they DREAM. Dreams follow some logic but basically they are disjoint from reality. They involve same characters as our real-life experiences but what those characters do in a dream is not based on reality.<p>So one could think that ALL LLMs ever do is dream but much of the time their dreams are dreams which feel very real.<p>Our dreams are basically an LLM based on our real experiences but recombined in arbitrary ways, still retaining some logical structure but now detached from reality because when you recombine different experiences including our thoughts from real life, the result cannot really reflect reality very well. LLMs are better in this respect than our dreams, but sometimes their &quot;dreams&quot; get really obviously detached from reality.<p>Or if you want to use the term &quot;hallucinate&quot; with LLMs then fine but its more like they hallucinate all the time, it&#x27;s just that sometimes, even often, their hallucinations seem to agree with the reality so well that we cannot tell the difference.<p>LLMs do not describe reality because they cannot experience reality, all they can give us is an &quot;average description&quot; created from many existing descriptions.<p>One way of looking at it is to say that all LLMs tell us is hearsay.</text></item><item><author>lachlan_gray</author><text>This reminds me of something from “The language instinct” by Steven pinker. One thing that stuck with me was a story of a girl named Denys who is or was severely mentally handicapped, but speaks perfectly.<p>She can’t read, write, handle money, but confabulates engaging and convincing stories about receiving mail, haggling with her bank, her boyfriend. She speaks with proper grammar, intonation, etc, but doesn’t demonstrate any understanding of what she talks about beyond the words. She doesn’t have a bank account or a boyfriend.<p>Trying to find more and I can’t find anything about her on the internet, I would have to look at the references. Maybe it’s questionable.<p>Anyway, I like to think about what the hell we even mean when we say we “know something”, and where we should actually put the bar for AI. Where is the line between confabulation and knowledge? Is knowledge just confabulation that happens to be correct?<p>I feel like it’s possible that Denys could feel that she “knows” what she is saying, but is simply trapped in, with a working knowledge of the world and is just unable to translate it into actions, and words are just her only degree of freedom.<p>I don’t remember where I was going with this, but I agree that “confabulation” is a much better term to use, but we also shouldn’t discount what it means to be able to confabulate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orobinson</author><text>But do LLMs dream of electric sheep?</text></comment> |
16,489,557 | 16,488,904 | 1 | 2 | 16,485,975 | train | <story><title>Spotify Form F-1</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312518063434/d494294df1.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mancerayder</author><text><i>also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.</i><p>Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn&#x27;t seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy).<p>It might be because I live in Brooklyn.<p>And there&#x27;s no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora.<p>edit: Don&#x27;t think anyone compromised my account.</text></item><item><author>dopeboy</author><text>Spotify is the reason why I don&#x27;t pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It&#x27;s much faster and convenient to use Spotify.<p>I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.<p>My only wish is they&#x27;d get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dheelus</author><text>Agreed. Spotify Discovery is hardly as good as many people tout it to be. Usually Indie music junk that isn&#x27;t really my genre.
Also agree that Pandora is far superior when it comes to curating tracks. A trick I&#x27;ve learned from a friend is to never like a song Pandora; only dislike what you don&#x27;t want to hear.
Spotify Radio is terrible as well. There&#x27;s no good way to reseed a radio station. For example, when I first started using Spotify radio, I was listening to The National a lot. For whatever reason, 3-4 years since, whenever I start my &#x27;Liked From Radio&#x27; station, it plays The National every fifth song or so. Ugghhh!!!
Finally, Spotify on Android has been kinda buggy for me. Once you have a lot of offline music on your device, the app takes forever to load on startup. It complains if there is no active internet connection, etc. When I wrote to Support, they suggested that I clear the cache and re-install the app (which caused me to lose all my prior downloaded music).</text></comment> | <story><title>Spotify Form F-1</title><url>https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312518063434/d494294df1.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mancerayder</author><text><i>also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.</i><p>Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn&#x27;t seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy).<p>It might be because I live in Brooklyn.<p>And there&#x27;s no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora.<p>edit: Don&#x27;t think anyone compromised my account.</text></item><item><author>dopeboy</author><text>Spotify is the reason why I don&#x27;t pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It&#x27;s much faster and convenient to use Spotify.<p>I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.<p>My only wish is they&#x27;d get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nitemice</author><text>I&#x27;m so happy to hear it&#x27;s not just me.<p>When I first started listening to Spotify (about a year and a half ago), I found the dicovery really high-quality, but it just seems to have gotten worse and worse. Discover Weekly is particularly bad. I find that the first 5 or so songs are okay, but from there is rapidly decends into madness.<p>I have the weird habit (though I&#x27;m weening off) of keeping all the music I listen to out of curiosity on a big playlist together, whether I liked it or not, as a way of keeping track. I thought that might be throwing Spotify&#x27;s algorithm off (and it probably still is), but it seems it&#x27;s definitely not the only reason.<p>I&#x27;ve decided to just trust that Last.fm is doing it&#x27;s juob and not add any more to that playlist.</text></comment> |
4,944,598 | 4,944,537 | 1 | 2 | 4,944,322 | train | <story><title>EFF Patent Project Gets Half-Million-Dollar Boost from Mark Cuban and 'Notch'</title><url>https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-patent-project-gets-half-million-dollar-boost-mark-cuban-and-notch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lolcraft</author><text>Hmmm, that's a bold move from Notch. I wonder how political activism in the US by a Swedish citizen is going to sit. Personally, I would just have thanked my luck for working in a country with sane patent laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krasin</author><text>Notch was sued by US-based patent troll back in July, 2012: <a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/07/21/patent-troll-targets-minecraft.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2012/07/21/patent-troll-targets-minecr...</a><p>Notch just fights back.</text></comment> | <story><title>EFF Patent Project Gets Half-Million-Dollar Boost from Mark Cuban and 'Notch'</title><url>https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-patent-project-gets-half-million-dollar-boost-mark-cuban-and-notch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lolcraft</author><text>Hmmm, that's a bold move from Notch. I wonder how political activism in the US by a Swedish citizen is going to sit. Personally, I would just have thanked my luck for working in a country with sane patent laws.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gilrain</author><text>The patent laws of the US always seem to reach across borders, so it's not surprising to see pressure from non-Americans.</text></comment> |
41,350,306 | 41,349,951 | 1 | 3 | 41,347,909 | train | <story><title>Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn</title><url>https://decripto.org/en/arrest-of-pavel-durov-charges-of-terrorism-fraud-and-child-pornography-he-did-not-cooperate-with-the-authorities-he-risks-20-years-in-prison/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nomdep</author><text>I&#x27;m appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime.<p>Why aren&#x27;t all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.</text></item><item><author>ajross</author><text>If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y&#x27;know, illegal.</text></item><item><author>kyleee</author><text>Is it illegal to offer legal services to undesirables and&#x2F;or criminals?</text></item><item><author>Aurornis</author><text>This distinction gets lost in these discussions all of the time. A company that makes an effort to comply with laws is in a completely different category than a company that makes the fact that they’ll look the other way one of their core selling points.<p>Years ago there was a case where someone built a business out of making hidden compartments in cars. He did an amazing job of making James Bond style hidden compartments that perfectly blended into the interior. He was later arrested because drug dealers used his hidden compartment business to help their drug trade.<p>There was an uproar about the fact that he wasn’t doing the drug crimes himself. He was only making hidden compartments which could be used for anything. How was he supposed to know that the hidden compartments were being used for illegal activities rather than keeping people’s valuables safe during a break-in?<p>Yet when the details of the case came out, IIRC, it was clear that he was leaning into the illegal trades and marketing his services to those people. He lost his plausible deniability after even a cursory look at how he was operating.<p>I don’t know what, if any, parts of that case apply to Pavel Durov. I do like to share it as an example of how intent matters and how one can become complicit in other crimes by operating in a manner where one of your selling points is that you’ll help anyone out even when their intent is to break the law. It’s also why smart <i>corporate</i> criminals will shut down and walk away when it becomes too obvious that they’re losing plausible deniability in a criminal enterprise.</text></item><item><author>marcinzm</author><text>Because those providers cooperate with authorities and moderate their content to a fairly large degree?</text></item><item><author>mazambazz</author><text>This seems like the Kim Dotcom situation again.<p>Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, <i>these</i> service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don&#x27;t see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything.<p>Hell, then there&#x27;s the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery slope with no defined boundaries where the government can just arbitrary use to pin the blame on the people they don&#x27;t like. Because ultimately, almost every platform with user-provided content will have some quantity of illegal material.<p>But maybe I&#x27;m just being naive?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cbsmith</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime.<p>The usual metaphor is child pornography, but let&#x27;s pick something less outrageous: espionage. If a spy uses your messaging platform to share their secrets without being detected &amp; prevented, that&#x27;s using the service to commit a crime. Now, if you&#x27;re making a profit from said service, that doesn&#x27;t necessarily make you a criminal, but if you start saying &quot;if spies used this platform, they&#x27;d never be stopped or even detected&quot;, that could get you in to some serious trouble. If you send a sales team to the KGB to encourage them to use the platform, even more so.</text></comment> | <story><title>Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn</title><url>https://decripto.org/en/arrest-of-pavel-durov-charges-of-terrorism-fraud-and-child-pornography-he-did-not-cooperate-with-the-authorities-he-risks-20-years-in-prison/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nomdep</author><text>I&#x27;m appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime.<p>Why aren&#x27;t all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.</text></item><item><author>ajross</author><text>If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y&#x27;know, illegal.</text></item><item><author>kyleee</author><text>Is it illegal to offer legal services to undesirables and&#x2F;or criminals?</text></item><item><author>Aurornis</author><text>This distinction gets lost in these discussions all of the time. A company that makes an effort to comply with laws is in a completely different category than a company that makes the fact that they’ll look the other way one of their core selling points.<p>Years ago there was a case where someone built a business out of making hidden compartments in cars. He did an amazing job of making James Bond style hidden compartments that perfectly blended into the interior. He was later arrested because drug dealers used his hidden compartment business to help their drug trade.<p>There was an uproar about the fact that he wasn’t doing the drug crimes himself. He was only making hidden compartments which could be used for anything. How was he supposed to know that the hidden compartments were being used for illegal activities rather than keeping people’s valuables safe during a break-in?<p>Yet when the details of the case came out, IIRC, it was clear that he was leaning into the illegal trades and marketing his services to those people. He lost his plausible deniability after even a cursory look at how he was operating.<p>I don’t know what, if any, parts of that case apply to Pavel Durov. I do like to share it as an example of how intent matters and how one can become complicit in other crimes by operating in a manner where one of your selling points is that you’ll help anyone out even when their intent is to break the law. It’s also why smart <i>corporate</i> criminals will shut down and walk away when it becomes too obvious that they’re losing plausible deniability in a criminal enterprise.</text></item><item><author>marcinzm</author><text>Because those providers cooperate with authorities and moderate their content to a fairly large degree?</text></item><item><author>mazambazz</author><text>This seems like the Kim Dotcom situation again.<p>Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, <i>these</i> service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don&#x27;t see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything.<p>Hell, then there&#x27;s the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery slope with no defined boundaries where the government can just arbitrary use to pin the blame on the people they don&#x27;t like. Because ultimately, almost every platform with user-provided content will have some quantity of illegal material.<p>But maybe I&#x27;m just being naive?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amanaplanacanal</author><text>The difference is knowing some percentage will be used to commit crimes, and knowing a specific individual is going to use it to commit a crime.</text></comment> |
36,382,955 | 36,382,936 | 1 | 3 | 36,372,176 | train | <story><title>Can you just move into an abandoned house?</title><url>https://www.quora.com/Is-it-okay-to-go-into-abandoned-houses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samstave</author><text>Years ago, when detroit was in desparate throws, I thought that it was ripe for a new &#x27;silicon valley&#x27; and they should have pushed a huge start-up market. They didnt, but they should have.<p>I still think detroit is a solid market - but you have to get some serious incentives...<p>Look at fn twitter - they got SF to give them millions in tax breaks, only to find that all the other services (and tremote work) were untennable on market street (the Emporium now the westfield mall) has turned back into the failed district it was in the 90s (hint; public transport and parking greed fucked that up)<p>Now look - the city of SF depends on Salesforce and twitter to bring thousands of people into the city - but it has no affordable place to house or park them.<p>I think twitter owes the city a giant amount of money - and benioff can go fuck himself (speaking as someone who built out many of his offices)<p>The point being that places such as Detroit need to up there game and build a tech scene - but I am afraid its too late.<p>-<p>EDIT: @DANG - im tired of this fn &quot;posting too fast&quot; -- it stiffles intereaction.<p>I dont participate in Reddit any longer, but seriously - ive talked to you about this many times....<p>I want to <i>engage</i> with HNers, and your speed-brake thwarts that... knock it off. :-)</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Varies enormously with the jurisdiction.<p>There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>I was at a fairly sizable tech event in Detroit last fall. The convention center and area down by the river were nice enough but people didn&#x27;t feel very safe in general and there were apparently some incidents--and we&#x27;re not even talking particularly bad parts of town. A tech company would probably have a lot more luck with something like an Ann Arbor location. I think Detroit proper would be a really tough sell to get most people to move there.</text></comment> | <story><title>Can you just move into an abandoned house?</title><url>https://www.quora.com/Is-it-okay-to-go-into-abandoned-houses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samstave</author><text>Years ago, when detroit was in desparate throws, I thought that it was ripe for a new &#x27;silicon valley&#x27; and they should have pushed a huge start-up market. They didnt, but they should have.<p>I still think detroit is a solid market - but you have to get some serious incentives...<p>Look at fn twitter - they got SF to give them millions in tax breaks, only to find that all the other services (and tremote work) were untennable on market street (the Emporium now the westfield mall) has turned back into the failed district it was in the 90s (hint; public transport and parking greed fucked that up)<p>Now look - the city of SF depends on Salesforce and twitter to bring thousands of people into the city - but it has no affordable place to house or park them.<p>I think twitter owes the city a giant amount of money - and benioff can go fuck himself (speaking as someone who built out many of his offices)<p>The point being that places such as Detroit need to up there game and build a tech scene - but I am afraid its too late.<p>-<p>EDIT: @DANG - im tired of this fn &quot;posting too fast&quot; -- it stiffles intereaction.<p>I dont participate in Reddit any longer, but seriously - ive talked to you about this many times....<p>I want to <i>engage</i> with HNers, and your speed-brake thwarts that... knock it off. :-)</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Varies enormously with the jurisdiction.<p>There are places in the US so desperate for new residents they will offer you an abandoned house if you fix it up and pay property taxes. Buffalo, NY and Detroit have done this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prepend</author><text>The problem is that Detroit sucks and it’s really cold. I don’t think startups would want to locate there.<p>Also, they are poorly managed and that’s part of their decline. They aren’t trying any good ideas like encouraging startup incubators and whatnot.</text></comment> |
40,873,155 | 40,872,059 | 1 | 3 | 40,870,357 | train | <story><title>The Origins of DS_store (2006)</title><url>https://www.arno.org/on-the-origins-of-ds-store</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>worstspotgain</author><text>A lot of Classic Mac apps just used the resource fork to store all their data. It was basically used as a Berkeley DB, except the keys were limited to a 32-bit OSType plus a 16-bit integer, and performance was horrible. But it got the job done when the files were small, had low on-disk overhead, and was ridiculously easy to deploy.<p>Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt, thrashing the disk like crazy on any save. Apple&#x27;s algorithm would shift huge chunks of the file multiple times per set of updates, when usually it would be better to just rewrite the entire file once. IIRC, part of the problem was an implicit commitment to never strictly requiring more than a few KBs of available disk space.<p>In a sense, the resource fork was just too easy and accessible. In the long run, Mac users ended up suffering from it more than they benefited. When Apple finally got rid of it, the rejoice was pretty much universal. There was none of the nostalgia that usually accompanies disappearing Apple techs, especially the ones that get removed outright instead of upgraded (though one could argue that&#x27;s what plists, XML and bundles did.)</text></item><item><author>kzrdude</author><text>Resource fork used to contain all the stuff you could edit with ResEdit (good old times!) right? Icons, various gui resources, could be text and translation assets too. For example Escape Velocity plugins used custom resource types and a ResEdit plugin made them easy to edit there.</text></item><item><author>ggm</author><text>Aside from this file, the &quot;fork&quot; concept of Mac file systems caused some wtf moments. Fork not being fork() but being the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. In Unix, the metadata was in the directory block inode, and wasn&#x27;t bound to the file in a formalism uniquely, it had to be represented by structure in tar, or cpio or zip distinctly. Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it.<p>You couldn&#x27;t map all the properties of the resource fork into an inode block of the time in UFS. It has stuff like the icon. More modern fs may have larger directory block structure and can handle the data better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickm12</author><text>The rejoicing was definitely not universal. It really felt like the NeXT folks wanted to throw out pretty much the entire Mac (except keeps its customer base and apps) and any compatibility had to be fought for through customer complaints.<p>Personally, MacOS X bundles (directories that were opaque in the Finder) seemed like a decent enough replacement for resource forks. The problem was that lots of NeXT-derived utilities munged old Mac files by being ignorant of resource forks and that was not ok.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Origins of DS_store (2006)</title><url>https://www.arno.org/on-the-origins-of-ds-store</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>worstspotgain</author><text>A lot of Classic Mac apps just used the resource fork to store all their data. It was basically used as a Berkeley DB, except the keys were limited to a 32-bit OSType plus a 16-bit integer, and performance was horrible. But it got the job done when the files were small, had low on-disk overhead, and was ridiculously easy to deploy.<p>Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt, thrashing the disk like crazy on any save. Apple&#x27;s algorithm would shift huge chunks of the file multiple times per set of updates, when usually it would be better to just rewrite the entire file once. IIRC, part of the problem was an implicit commitment to never strictly requiring more than a few KBs of available disk space.<p>In a sense, the resource fork was just too easy and accessible. In the long run, Mac users ended up suffering from it more than they benefited. When Apple finally got rid of it, the rejoice was pretty much universal. There was none of the nostalgia that usually accompanies disappearing Apple techs, especially the ones that get removed outright instead of upgraded (though one could argue that&#x27;s what plists, XML and bundles did.)</text></item><item><author>kzrdude</author><text>Resource fork used to contain all the stuff you could edit with ResEdit (good old times!) right? Icons, various gui resources, could be text and translation assets too. For example Escape Velocity plugins used custom resource types and a ResEdit plugin made them easy to edit there.</text></item><item><author>ggm</author><text>Aside from this file, the &quot;fork&quot; concept of Mac file systems caused some wtf moments. Fork not being fork() but being the two-pronged idea in that file system, both a resource and a data component existed as pair. One metadata and one the file contents. In Unix, the metadata was in the directory block inode, and wasn&#x27;t bound to the file in a formalism uniquely, it had to be represented by structure in tar, or cpio or zip distinctly. Implementing Mac compatible file support in Unix meant treating the resource fork first class and the obvious way you do it is for each file have .file beside it.<p>You couldn&#x27;t map all the properties of the resource fork into an inode block of the time in UFS. It has stuff like the icon. More modern fs may have larger directory block structure and can handle the data better.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inferiorhuman</author><text><p><pre><code> Once you pushed an app beyond the level of usage the developer
had performed in their initial tests, it would crawl to a near-halt
</code></pre>
With HFS (unsure about HFS+) the first three extents are stored in the extent data record. After that extents get stored in a separate &quot;overflow&quot; file stored at the end of the filesystem. How much data goes in those three extents depends on a lot of things, but it does mean that it&#x27;s actually pretty easy for things to get fragmented.<p>A bit more detail: the first three extents the resource and data forks are stored as part of the entry in the catalog (for a total of up to six extents). On HFS each extent can be 2^16 blocks long (I think HFS+ moved to 32-bit lengths). Anything beyond that (due to size or fragmentation) will have its info stored in an overflow catalog. The overflow catalogs are a.) normal files and b.) keyed by the id (CNID) of the parent directory. If memory serves this means that the catalog file itself can become fragmented but also the lookups themselves are a bit slow. There are little shortcuts (threads) that are keyed by the CNID of the file&#x2F;directory itself, but as far as I can tell they&#x27;re only commonly written for directories not files.<p>tl;dr For either of the forks (data or resource) once you got beyond the capacity of three extents or you start modifying things on a fragmented filesystem performance will go to shit.</text></comment> |
13,195,632 | 13,193,714 | 1 | 2 | 13,192,597 | train | <story><title>The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone (2013)</title><url>http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Matt3o12_</author><text>Is there any working being done to modernize those protocols? I&#x27;m sure Apple can demand that by a given timeframe, a new standard has to be supported or else new iphone won&#x27;t work on the carrier&#x27;s network (and which carrier would not want iphones to work on their network?). It&#x27;s not like Apple is afraid of such things. I&#x27;m sure if apple implemented them, google&#x2F;samsung would follow within 1 or 2 years.<p>In the meantime, is there a refactor&#x2F;rewrite of that &#x27;90 code bash that is full of bugs and unused functions? And if so, do any phone manufactures use that improve &quot;firmware&quot;?</text></comment> | <story><title>The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone (2013)</title><url>http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in_every_mobile_phone</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>helb</author><text>The author posted it to HN after publication (in 2013), it got 262 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6722292" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6722292</a></text></comment> |
12,865,910 | 12,865,816 | 1 | 2 | 12,864,727 | train | <story><title>The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death</title><url>http://qz.com/196005/the-steve-jobs-email-that-outlined-apples-strategy-a-year-before-his-death/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CPLX</author><text>I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc.<p>But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that&#x27;s probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mercer</author><text>That the Macs are not given as much attention doesn&#x27;t surprise me. It seems &#x27;fitting&#x27; that they would gravitate toward the current MacBook end of the spectrum considering that a huge amount of users don&#x27;t really need much more than that. Cutting out the middle-ground (MacBook Air) makes a certain amount of sense.<p>But I expected that they&#x27;d keep a high-performance developer-focused MacBook (the Pro) for all those guys who are actually making the iOS&#x2F;MacOS apps. And part of me hoped they&#x27;d show some love for that target audience.<p>On the other hand, who am I kidding. As I&#x27;m getting more and more into &#x27;native&#x27; development and as my laptop is showing its age when I use Xcode, I&#x27;ll probably eventually cave and get a MacBook Pro because I can&#x27;t do my work without it.<p>It&#x27;s just not nice, I guess. But then Apple isn&#x27;t particularly known for being nice, so it makes business-sense. iOS&#x2F;MacOS devs will still get their new machines, even if they end up feeling fleeced.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death</title><url>http://qz.com/196005/the-steve-jobs-email-that-outlined-apples-strategy-a-year-before-his-death/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CPLX</author><text>I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc.<p>But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that&#x27;s probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dictum</author><text>This is foreshadowed in section 1:<p><pre><code> – Post PC products now 66% of our revenues
– iPad outsold Mac within 6 months
– Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter) + communications + apps + cloud services
– PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
</code></pre>
Emphasis on <i>&quot;just another client&quot;</i>.</text></comment> |
41,663,526 | 41,663,385 | 1 | 3 | 41,646,420 | train | <story><title>Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence</title><url>https://innocenceproject.org/who-is-marcellus-williams-man-facing-execution-in-missouri-despite-dna-evidence-supporting-innocence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrapLord_Rhodo</author><text>Am i the only one in favor of capital punishment in this thread?<p>My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).<p>Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a &quot;State Hospital&quot; for rehabilitation. It&#x27;s not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51&#x2F;51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.<p>The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.<p>Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren&#x27;t rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you&#x27;ve taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).<p>Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>calderarrow</author><text>I used to be, for most of the same reasons as you. What ultimately convinced me was realizing that our judicial system can never be 100% perfect, so we would always have a non-zero number of innocent people executed as long as capital punishment is on the table. To me, I think the cost of keeping people incarcerated is worth the cost of accidentally executing innocent citizens.<p>Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.</text></comment> | <story><title>Who is Marcellus Williams: Execution in Missouri despite evidence of innocence</title><url>https://innocenceproject.org/who-is-marcellus-williams-man-facing-execution-in-missouri-despite-dna-evidence-supporting-innocence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrapLord_Rhodo</author><text>Am i the only one in favor of capital punishment in this thread?<p>My mom used to work at state hospital for the criminally insane. The stories she would tell me about how these people got in there were absolutely brutal. (Canabalism, satanic sacrafices of loved ones, all manor of wierd shit.).<p>Instead of executing these lunatics, they send them to a &quot;State Hospital&quot; for rehabilitation. It&#x27;s not a Prison, but a hospital so the conditions are great for the guy who ate his mom. So much so that some of the gang members claim 51&#x2F;51 and say craay shit to the jury to get sent to a state hospital instead of prison.<p>The U.S. spends approximately $75 billion per year on incarcerating prisoners... You could build a city, every year for that amount.<p>Someone who commits capital murder, admits to it, does 30 years in prison. You have robbed them off all life. They aren&#x27;t rehabilitated, they are just a hardened prison inmate with no chance to make it back in the real world so their only option alot of the time is to do what you&#x27;ve taught them in prison on release. Steal, lie, cheat and do anything you can to try and stay alive. So, it would cost approximately $2.43 million to imprison one person in California for 30 years. (California costs around ~81k per year per prisoner).<p>Death seems to be so feared nowadays to the point where they can justify taking away any sense of freedom, rights and soverignty and put you in a small cage for 30 years, but yet the death penalty is to far? If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JellyBeanThief</author><text>&gt; If i ever get falsely accused of a crime that would send me to jail for life i would beg for the death penalty.<p>That&#x27;s your life and your choice, which I think should be respected.</text></comment> |
9,375,563 | 9,375,650 | 1 | 2 | 9,374,146 | train | <story><title>Popular JavaScript Package Manager Npm Raises $8M, Launches Private Modules</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/popular-javascript-package-manager-npm-raises-8m-launches-private-modules</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattmanser</author><text>Do I just not get the scale? For this investment to make sense, they would have to get to $100s of million dollars, but by charging a few thousand companies $7?<p>And I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s a 50&#x2F;50 chance node will completely collapse within 10 years or so. And that&#x27;s being generous, javascript is a controversial language and the standards committee moves very slowly. I honestly can&#x27;t see it staying king once browsers can support other languages. You only have to see how fast Ruby was a darling and even now might be regarded on its swan song, less than 10 years later. Tech changes, the next big language will hit soon.<p>Congratulations to them and all that, and great product, I&#x27;m just wondering if someone can explain the sense in investing so much money into something like this? As this seems an incredibly risky venture?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moe</author><text><i>You only have to see how fast Ruby was a darling and even now might be regarded on its swan song</i><p>By what metric, your personal preference?<p>Because the common statistics[1][2][3] don&#x27;t quite support your remark.<p><i>And I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s a 50&#x2F;50 chance node will completely collapse within 10 years or so.</i><p>Again, just making random stuff up?<p>As much as I&#x27;d love for javascript to disappear, the idea of that happening within a decade is nothing short of ridiculous.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;langpop.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;langpop.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;githut.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;githut.info&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore#q=ruby%2C%20rails%2C%20javascript%2C%20node%2C%20java&amp;cmpt=q&amp;tz=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore#q=ruby%2C%20rails%2C%2...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Popular JavaScript Package Manager Npm Raises $8M, Launches Private Modules</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/popular-javascript-package-manager-npm-raises-8m-launches-private-modules</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattmanser</author><text>Do I just not get the scale? For this investment to make sense, they would have to get to $100s of million dollars, but by charging a few thousand companies $7?<p>And I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s a 50&#x2F;50 chance node will completely collapse within 10 years or so. And that&#x27;s being generous, javascript is a controversial language and the standards committee moves very slowly. I honestly can&#x27;t see it staying king once browsers can support other languages. You only have to see how fast Ruby was a darling and even now might be regarded on its swan song, less than 10 years later. Tech changes, the next big language will hit soon.<p>Congratulations to them and all that, and great product, I&#x27;m just wondering if someone can explain the sense in investing so much money into something like this? As this seems an incredibly risky venture?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text>&gt;<i>I honestly can&#x27;t see it staying king once browsers can support other languages.</i><p>But your profile says:<p>&gt;<i>&quot;, begrudgingly beginning to accept the browsers are never going to give us the freedom to choose.&quot;</i><p>It looks like you&#x27;ve got some cognitive dissonance happening there. :-)<p>In any case, I can&#x27;t think of any example in computing history where a language that&#x27;s adopted by <i>multiple companies</i> is then abandoned for another language. In Javascript&#x27;s case, it would require that Microsoft IE AND Apple Safari AND Google Chrome AND Mozilla FF AND countless other web browsers (Opera, embedded, etc) switch to something else in lockstep. In the decades of computing history, I&#x27;ve never seen that type coordination ever happen.<p>Similar language entrenchment on the scale of Javascript would be something like SQL and C++.<p>SQL (1974) is implemented by Oracle&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;MySql&#x2F;PostgreSQL&#x2F;HiveHadoop&#x2F;etc. A better query language could be designed (e.g. syntax of tables first then columns). However, it&#x27;s just theoretical because you can&#x27;t get all database vendors to adopt it lockstep. We are stuck with SQL for the next 50 years.<p>C++ (1983) entrenchment also can&#x27;t be dislodged. It is implemented by the well-known big-3 of GCC, Clang, and Microsoft but you also have independent compiler implementations from Intel, HP, Sun, IBM, embedded chips, etc. The newer systems languages such as D and Rust are interesting but they will not get adopted and implemented by all those vendors. It&#x27;s just not going to happen.<p>Look to the multi-decade history of SQL and C++&#x2F;C and that&#x27;s the depth of entrenchment you&#x27;re looking at for Javascript. Better designed languages have not overcome the inertia in the industry and we have no evidence so far that it ever will. Therefore, Javascript will be with us for the next 50+ years.<p>Probably the best chance for making Javascript irrelevant was the brief plugins movement of Java applets, Adobe Flash, and MS Silverlight. Well, the marketplace of ideas (mobile phones) killed all of those off. What&#x27;s left standing is Javascript.</text></comment> |
33,059,908 | 33,059,906 | 1 | 3 | 33,053,149 | train | <story><title>Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society</title><url>https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-drives-jonathan-haidt-to-quit-academic-society/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why.<p>But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is violence. It’s abject insanity that such a notion is being advanced in society.<p>The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. The cure for violence is forgiveness. The cure for hatred is forgiveness.<p>The only way anything stops is for people to have the humility and wisdom to say “this will stop with me.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>&gt; But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is violence. It’s abject insanity that such a notion is being advanced in society.<p>Kendi is just advocating for a system of racial preferences administered by &quot;good white people.&quot; That&#x27;s been a hobby horse of a segment of the political left since the Nixon administration. Decades later, it still remains unpopular even among the minorities it is supposed to help: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewsocialtrends.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewsocialtrends.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;americans-see-adv...</a>. But center left think tanks and advocacy organizations won&#x27;t let it go. Even the most liberal state in the country defeating it resoundingly won&#x27;t dissuade them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;california-not-bellwether-affirmative-action" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.americanprogress.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;california-not-bell...</a>. So keep expecting it to pop up in different guises until they manage to get their way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society</title><url>https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-drives-jonathan-haidt-to-quit-academic-society/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brightball</author><text>He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why.<p>But further, I’d never seen the statement from antiracist before…wow. The idea that the only cure for discrimination is discrimination is akin to saying the only cure for violence is violence. It’s abject insanity that such a notion is being advanced in society.<p>The cure for discrimination is forgiveness. The cure for violence is forgiveness. The cure for hatred is forgiveness.<p>The only way anything stops is for people to have the humility and wisdom to say “this will stop with me.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>that_guy_iain</author><text>&gt; He’s right to do so. Statements that your research must be presented with a filter based on how it will advance political goals calls into question the integrity of all research. When people don’t “trust the science” this will be why.<p>When I started to read it, I thought it would be about making a statement about how we should be diverse. Not that he would have to present only science that is about diversity.<p>The second I read there would be a litmus test for studies I was right onboard with him quitting.</text></comment> |
32,181,927 | 32,178,861 | 1 | 2 | 32,178,105 | train | <story><title>Zendesk to be acquired</title><url>https://investor.zendesk.com/ir-home/press-releases/press-releases-details/2022/Zendesk-to-Be-Acquired-by-Investor-Group-Led-by-Hellman--Friedman-and-Permira-for-10.2-Billion/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickjj</author><text>Up until yesterday I didn&#x27;t know Zendesk was written in Rails. They had a talk at RailsConf 2022[0] where they went over how they handle a billion requests a day with mostly a Rails monolith.<p>I wonder why they&#x27;re not brought up more when talking about large Rails apps. Is there an interesting (read: bad) history with them and Ruby?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJw3al4Ms2o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJw3al4Ms2o</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cplanas</author><text>Author of the talk here. Thank you, you made my day by sharing my presentation. :)<p>One thing I would like to add after reading some of the comments here. The &quot;1 billion requests&#x2F;day&quot; is actually an understatement so the title has a nicer ring. Last time I checked we were around 2B -and that&#x27;s according the most conservative approximation-. Those are requests that hit the application, excluding the CDN caching layer.<p>BTW, happy to answer any questions!</text></comment> | <story><title>Zendesk to be acquired</title><url>https://investor.zendesk.com/ir-home/press-releases/press-releases-details/2022/Zendesk-to-Be-Acquired-by-Investor-Group-Led-by-Hellman--Friedman-and-Permira-for-10.2-Billion/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickjj</author><text>Up until yesterday I didn&#x27;t know Zendesk was written in Rails. They had a talk at RailsConf 2022[0] where they went over how they handle a billion requests a day with mostly a Rails monolith.<p>I wonder why they&#x27;re not brought up more when talking about large Rails apps. Is there an interesting (read: bad) history with them and Ruby?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJw3al4Ms2o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJw3al4Ms2o</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pen2l</author><text>There’s also that when you’re kind of big, there’s a brand to be maintained and that rarely involves presenting the dissected view of your stack. In fact at some it’s readily avoided by some.
I recently discovered, for example, that Django-REST is quite often used for big sites. Like Robinhood and Eventbrite.</text></comment> |
718,629 | 718,391 | 1 | 2 | 718,132 | train | <story><title>China and "our standard of living"</title><url>http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-really-thinking-maybe-i-shouldnt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mistermann</author><text>Wow, spot on! Likely not news to anyone here, but I really wonder how many people out there are smart enough to realize how amazingly cheap the stuff we buy is, and really think of where it comes from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>domodomo</author><text>I used to work in IT for a Taiwanese manufacturing company that sold to Walmart &#38; Sams Club, with factories primarily in southern China (near Guangzhou).<p>Spent a fair amount of time in these factories. First thing is, no factory makes everything themselves, it's a huge network of factories and a buddy network of factory managers who supply varying levels of material to one another. That's part of the reason it's difficult to ascertain the true quality of life of workers associated with making a product, because down the line many factories go into making one finished product.<p>I can say from my own anecdotal experience labor conditions are mixed bag. The light industry factories seemed to have safer conditions, and my companies factories were pretty decent. One iron processing factory I saw down right scary, imagine vats of molten iron at ground level, and operators in bare feet.<p>One counter-intuitive thing I saw is that workers will often protest not when worked too hard, but when worked too lightly. Many factory workers WANT long hours so they can send more money back to relatives, or increase their personal savings. At least when I was there five years ago, it could be dangerous for a factory to be light on hours, as employees will quit and move to a factory where there are more hours to be paid. With the economic slowdown, this might have changed.<p>What I'm getting at is it's hard to generalize about labor conditions in China, so saying things like they are all "slave labor" isn't really useful. You have to look at the specific circumstances of that companies manufacturing chain, if you are able.</text></comment> | <story><title>China and "our standard of living"</title><url>http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-really-thinking-maybe-i-shouldnt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mistermann</author><text>Wow, spot on! Likely not news to anyone here, but I really wonder how many people out there are smart enough to realize how amazingly cheap the stuff we buy is, and really think of where it comes from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>biohacker42</author><text>Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point:<p>People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative is harder. This is how you work your way up from a very low starting point.<p>England wasn't always a workers' paradise either. Wages in China will rise.</text></comment> |
13,936,600 | 13,935,481 | 1 | 3 | 13,932,226 | train | <story><title>Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)</title><url>https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onedrivefb-mso_o365brs/onedrive-for-business-open-is-very-slow-on-linux/3d33dc1b-3cc3-4c24-9998-9ab96bad31fc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsweeney21</author><text>&quot;Don&#x27;t assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.&quot; - Hanlon&#x27;s razor<p>I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn&#x27;t officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented &lt;1% of our user base. It just didn&#x27;t make business sense. We tested it on occasion anyway because we are decent people and, being part of the tech community, we were fans of Linux.<p>We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we&#x27;d never hear about them. The support team did their job.<p>This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rossy</author><text>Having a list of supported browsers is fine. All modern browsers are supposed to implement the same web standards, but they all have a different set of supported features and subtle rendering and layout bugs. Sniffing the User-Agent string to detect the browser is a small evil, but it&#x27;s sometimes necessary.<p>Having a list of supported operating-systems is totally different. For a web app, this is almost never okay. The popular cross-platform browsers (Chrom{e,ium} and Firefox) are excellent examples of well designed cross-platform software. They both abstract the underlying platform and implement the layout engine in platform-independent code. It&#x27;s very rare to find a rendering bug in these browsers that only affects a single platform. So, what I don&#x27;t understand is why OneDrive is sending different code to Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, and why are the support team being instructed to dismiss bug reports from Linux users when they are using a browser that would be supported on Windows? It&#x27;s hard not to attribute this to malice. Even perpetuating the idea that it&#x27;s not possible to write truly cross-platform software or that web apps have compatibility with specific operating systems works in Microsoft&#x27;s favour, since they sell the most popular desktop operating system.</text></comment> | <story><title>Onedrive is slow on Linux but fast with a “Windows” user-agent (2016)</title><url>https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_onedrivefb-mso_o365brs/onedrive-for-business-open-is-very-slow-on-linux/3d33dc1b-3cc3-4c24-9998-9ab96bad31fc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsweeney21</author><text>&quot;Don&#x27;t assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding.&quot; - Hanlon&#x27;s razor<p>I worked as a Microsoft employee on the xbox.com website from 2007-2010. We didn&#x27;t officially support any browsers on Linux because it represented &lt;1% of our user base. It just didn&#x27;t make business sense. We tested it on occasion anyway because we are decent people and, being part of the tech community, we were fans of Linux.<p>We supplied a list of officially supported browsers to the customer support team. Any bugs on non-supported browsers would never get reported back to our team, so we&#x27;d never hear about them. The support team did their job.<p>This is how pretty much every company in the history of ever works.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angry_octet</author><text>I hear this phrase &quot;It didn&#x27;t make business sense&quot; all the time. It&#x27;s a persistent misunderstanding of business and customer relationships.<p>You support Linux users (or Mac or WinXP or those behind a firewall or MSI installer needing etc etc) because you want to dominate your competitors, you want your product to be the one <i>everyone</i> wants, and the one with the least bugs.<p>If you&#x27;re going to say &#x27;screw you&#x27; to some customers, that needs to be based on an actual assessment of costs, impact on users, how it can be mitigated, and what else that money would be spent on. A CTO level decision, not the support desk. And not supporting people running a standard web browser is just inept.</text></comment> |
9,139,071 | 9,138,977 | 1 | 2 | 9,138,134 | train | <story><title>Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity</title><url>http://bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-sanity#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Xylakant</author><text>&gt; Anyone else remember the days when having your SVN server go down meant that you more or less had to wait until the server came back up before you could get back to doing things? (if you wanted a nice atomic commit).<p>That&#x27;s now known as &quot;I can&#x27;t deploy because github is down&quot;. Note that the author proposes &quot;local commits plus a centralized storage&quot;.<p>&gt; The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap.<p>Not in portable computers. I can get a TB, but that&#x27;s it. I have build artifacts that clock in at about 300 - 500 MB and I&#x27;d version control them if possible. I can&#x27;t, because that would fill my disk within a couple of month, so I have to push them to a server and somehow link them.<p>&gt; Anyone else ever needed their own fork of something due to differing goals from the parent project, but needed to fold in upstream changes relatively often? That&#x27;s by nature the sort of problem that a DVCS solves easily.<p>That&#x27;s a strawman. The article does not argue that there&#x27;s no use-case that&#x27;s solved by git or and DVCS. It&#x27;s just that not every use-case is solved by git. I&#x27;d even go out and argue that most use-cases are solved just as good by a solid centralized system with less complexity involved.<p>&gt; Just because we haven&#x27;t had tools in this space with wide adoption that are user friendly doesn&#x27;t mean that we won&#x27;t eventually.<p>I see a developer wedge his git repo with a pull + rebase about once a month. And then somebody needs to walk over and explain. DVCS fundamentally introduce complexity that is not always needed. And I doubt that the fundamental complexity can be abstracted away.</text></item><item><author>iand675</author><text>Anyone else remember the days when having your SVN server go down meant that you more or less had to wait until the server came back up before you could get back to doing things? (if you wanted a nice atomic commit). Let&#x27;s not forget people that have to travel a lot for work– SVN + airplanes is a match made in hell.<p>Anyone else ever had someone delete or close an open source project that you cared about? Finding a copy with the history that mattered to you could be tricky.<p>Anyone else ever needed their own fork of something due to differing goals from the parent project, but needed to fold in upstream changes relatively often? That&#x27;s by nature the sort of problem that a DVCS solves easily.<p>Other objections to this article:<p>* Nothing precludes you from using the patch model with DVCS (I mean, Linux kernel development uses Git just fine with this)<p>* The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap. Another point worth mentioning is that you can make shallow clones with Git. I don&#x27;t know what the status is for committing to them these days, but there&#x27;s nothing fundamental that should prevent a DVCS from letting you work on shallow clones if space is such a big deal.<p>I could go on, but the article seems to be griping about UX issues. Just because we haven&#x27;t had tools in this space with wide adoption that are user friendly doesn&#x27;t mean that we won&#x27;t eventually.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimktrains2</author><text>&gt; That&#x27;s now known as &quot;I can&#x27;t deploy because github is down&quot;. Note that the author proposes &quot;local commits plus a centralized storage&quot;.<p>And in that cause you can scp your repo somewhere and change your origin and move on.<p>Also, do people really rely on 3rd party services for their deployed code? I&#x27;ve used github as a repo and colab tool at companies, but we still deployed from repos owned by the company.<p>&gt; I&#x27;d even go out and argue that most use-cases are solved just as good by a solid centralized system with less complexity involved.<p>I&#x27;d go out an argue that because the added complexity of git is far outweighed by the benefits of a local repo.</text></comment> | <story><title>Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity</title><url>http://bitquabit.com/post/unorthodocs-abandon-your-dvcs-and-return-to-sanity#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Xylakant</author><text>&gt; Anyone else remember the days when having your SVN server go down meant that you more or less had to wait until the server came back up before you could get back to doing things? (if you wanted a nice atomic commit).<p>That&#x27;s now known as &quot;I can&#x27;t deploy because github is down&quot;. Note that the author proposes &quot;local commits plus a centralized storage&quot;.<p>&gt; The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap.<p>Not in portable computers. I can get a TB, but that&#x27;s it. I have build artifacts that clock in at about 300 - 500 MB and I&#x27;d version control them if possible. I can&#x27;t, because that would fill my disk within a couple of month, so I have to push them to a server and somehow link them.<p>&gt; Anyone else ever needed their own fork of something due to differing goals from the parent project, but needed to fold in upstream changes relatively often? That&#x27;s by nature the sort of problem that a DVCS solves easily.<p>That&#x27;s a strawman. The article does not argue that there&#x27;s no use-case that&#x27;s solved by git or and DVCS. It&#x27;s just that not every use-case is solved by git. I&#x27;d even go out and argue that most use-cases are solved just as good by a solid centralized system with less complexity involved.<p>&gt; Just because we haven&#x27;t had tools in this space with wide adoption that are user friendly doesn&#x27;t mean that we won&#x27;t eventually.<p>I see a developer wedge his git repo with a pull + rebase about once a month. And then somebody needs to walk over and explain. DVCS fundamentally introduce complexity that is not always needed. And I doubt that the fundamental complexity can be abstracted away.</text></item><item><author>iand675</author><text>Anyone else remember the days when having your SVN server go down meant that you more or less had to wait until the server came back up before you could get back to doing things? (if you wanted a nice atomic commit). Let&#x27;s not forget people that have to travel a lot for work– SVN + airplanes is a match made in hell.<p>Anyone else ever had someone delete or close an open source project that you cared about? Finding a copy with the history that mattered to you could be tricky.<p>Anyone else ever needed their own fork of something due to differing goals from the parent project, but needed to fold in upstream changes relatively often? That&#x27;s by nature the sort of problem that a DVCS solves easily.<p>Other objections to this article:<p>* Nothing precludes you from using the patch model with DVCS (I mean, Linux kernel development uses Git just fine with this)<p>* The author mentions that you have to retain the whole history of a project. For one thing, storage is cheap. Another point worth mentioning is that you can make shallow clones with Git. I don&#x27;t know what the status is for committing to them these days, but there&#x27;s nothing fundamental that should prevent a DVCS from letting you work on shallow clones if space is such a big deal.<p>I could go on, but the article seems to be griping about UX issues. Just because we haven&#x27;t had tools in this space with wide adoption that are user friendly doesn&#x27;t mean that we won&#x27;t eventually.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iand675</author><text>&gt; Not in portable computers. I can get a TB, but that&#x27;s it. I have build artifacts that clock in at about 300 - 500 MB and I&#x27;d version control them if possible. I can&#x27;t, because that would fill my disk within a couple of month, so I have to push them to a server and somehow link them.<p>git-annex is a pretty good solution for this: <a href="https://git-annex.branchable.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git-annex.branchable.com&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; That&#x27;s a strawman. The article does not argue that there&#x27;s no use-case that&#x27;s solved by git or and DVCS. It&#x27;s just that not every use-case is solved by git. I&#x27;d even go out and argue that most use-cases are solved just as good by a solid centralized system with less complexity involved.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced that it is a strawman– I&#x27;m not an uber-developer, but I&#x27;ve had to do it reasonably often. A common case is that the originator loses interest, and you still need to do maintenance on it. I&#x27;d rather my go-to choice of a version control system support that notion rather than learn a different tool to deal with this case.<p>&gt; I see a developer wedge his git repo with a pull + rebase about once a month. And then somebody needs to walk over and explain. DVCS fundamentally introduce complexity that is not always needed. And I doubt that the fundamental complexity can be abstracted away.<p>Sure, there is an additional level of abstraction, but to argue that it&#x27;s insurmountable seems rather pessimistic. Most technologies that we take for granted now required multiple decades to get to a consumer-friendly state. This is perhaps a philosophical difference that only time will answer.</text></comment> |
34,468,249 | 34,467,320 | 1 | 2 | 34,464,512 | train | <story><title>GNU Octave</title><url>https://octave.org/index</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wwfn</author><text>Open science depends on open tools! Octave is such a good resource for otherwise walled off code (that doesn&#x27;t use newer matlab features). But I&#x27;m curious where octave is popular. Does anyone pick it over julia or python when starting a new project&#x2F;research?<p>I also wish the state of science&#x2F;engineering software shook out differently. There&#x27;s plenty of money to pay Mathworks. Is there some kind of license like pay us if you&#x27;re doing commercial work or publishing research on grants worth over $XXX, otherwise consider it open source?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the__alchemist</author><text>Another take: There&#x27;s value in using a compiled language here. I&#x27;m an amateur dabbling in computational chemistry, and my weapon of choice is Rust. (After starting using Python). Why:<p><pre><code> - Fast, in an area where speed is important
- Can be made faster for repetitive tasks by communicating with a GPU using Vulkan, CUDA etc
- Can incorporate a GUI, and 3D graphics, which helps for exploring things visually, tweaking parameters, doing time simulations etc.
- Can share. Ie, I showed my brother yesterday by sharing a 10Mb executable. Matlab has license complications and you need it installed. Sharing Python programs is a disaster. (Docker? Pip? Pyenv? Poetry? Virtualenv? System Python? System dependencies for the C and Fortran dependencies?)</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>GNU Octave</title><url>https://octave.org/index</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wwfn</author><text>Open science depends on open tools! Octave is such a good resource for otherwise walled off code (that doesn&#x27;t use newer matlab features). But I&#x27;m curious where octave is popular. Does anyone pick it over julia or python when starting a new project&#x2F;research?<p>I also wish the state of science&#x2F;engineering software shook out differently. There&#x27;s plenty of money to pay Mathworks. Is there some kind of license like pay us if you&#x27;re doing commercial work or publishing research on grants worth over $XXX, otherwise consider it open source?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fluidcruft</author><text>I used to use it a lot, but the python libraries are much further ahead at this point. For my uses (essentially image processing and statistics) Octave is always playing catchup with Matlab but python is mostly at par or ahead of Matlab. With the exception of the parallel stuff... but that wasn&#x27;t anything Octave had either. Eventually when I need performance again I&#x27;ll see about figuring out how to migrate parts to Julia. One thing I like about the python things is there are some hints of IDL in there (I&#x27;m a masochist and liked IDL... Matlab frustrates me at times). Matlab was great for slapping quick UIs together and making little tools, but Jupyter works well enough for that.<p>The 0 indexing in python does really and truly suck sometimes though.</text></comment> |
12,478,996 | 12,478,129 | 1 | 2 | 12,476,901 | train | <story><title>A little SF personal injury case threatens 'most important law' on the Internet</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-online-publishers-20160909-snap-story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>OliverJones</author><text>Working for a nonprofit, I once was ripped off by a service provider. I posted a Yelp review describing the facts of the case and saying &quot;would-be customers, be careful.&quot; This service provider retaliated by posting false and malicious statements about my character. Lucky we had a pro-bono lawyer, or this would have cost me thousands. As it is, it did cost the nonprofit thousands (in the ripoff). We wasted time too.<p>(Hint: it&#x27;s really hard to collect after you get a favorable judgement in small claims court. Small claims court is a waste of time unless you&#x27;re making a claim against a deep-pocketed multinational corporation.)<p>This experience taught me that Yelp is useless for anything except five-star reviews. The personal risk of using Yelp to tell the truth about bad service is simply too high.</text></comment> | <story><title>A little SF personal injury case threatens 'most important law' on the Internet</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-online-publishers-20160909-snap-story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomohawk</author><text>Since sites like facebook seem to be taking more of an active role in censoring&#x2F;curating comments and content, it seems like this exemption would no longer apply to them at some point.</text></comment> |
39,227,444 | 39,227,466 | 1 | 2 | 39,223,982 | train | <story><title>FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines</title><url>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-cpap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>I have a strong aversion to comments like this, because they come across as extremely generic. Are you really very knowledgeable about the Dutch justice system, that being where Philips is headquartered? Philips are gonna lose at least $400m from this: what makes you so certain that the justice system is &quot;completely broken&quot;, or that manslaughter charges are what they deserve? Have you compared the justice system with, let&#x27;s say, Russian justice or Zimbabwean justice? I think the latter are a great deal more broken.<p>Casual cynicism is as foolish as casual naivety, and more toxic and dangerous.</text></item><item><author>dns_snek</author><text>Because after decades of inbreeding between the legislators, law enforcement, and corporations, the justice system is completely broken.</text></item><item><author>lijok</author><text>You just know the people that brought this up internally at Philips were told “it’s not that simple, we can’t just…”.<p>Why is every CEO that held the reins during this debacle at Philips not in jail right now for manslaughter?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dns_snek</author><text>They killed <i>at least</i> 561 people, <i>knew about it, covered it up for years</i>, and you want to debate whether manslaughter charges might be appropriate? Any justice system which allows that to happen without imprisoning the people responsible for the rest of their lives is completely broken, says me.<p>It&#x27;s not casual cynicism either, at this point it&#x27;s professional cynicism because we&#x27;ve all seen this film 1000 times before and we know how it typically ends. Personally I&#x27;d reserve the use of words such as &quot;toxic&quot; and &quot;dangerous&quot; for Philips&#x27; CPAP machines and their leadership.<p>They&#x27;re going to pay less than $1 million per victim while their annual profits are in the billions. Would you feel good about that amount if they killed your dad, mom, brother, sister, son or daughter?</text></comment> | <story><title>FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines</title><url>https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-cpap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>I have a strong aversion to comments like this, because they come across as extremely generic. Are you really very knowledgeable about the Dutch justice system, that being where Philips is headquartered? Philips are gonna lose at least $400m from this: what makes you so certain that the justice system is &quot;completely broken&quot;, or that manslaughter charges are what they deserve? Have you compared the justice system with, let&#x27;s say, Russian justice or Zimbabwean justice? I think the latter are a great deal more broken.<p>Casual cynicism is as foolish as casual naivety, and more toxic and dangerous.</text></item><item><author>dns_snek</author><text>Because after decades of inbreeding between the legislators, law enforcement, and corporations, the justice system is completely broken.</text></item><item><author>lijok</author><text>You just know the people that brought this up internally at Philips were told “it’s not that simple, we can’t just…”.<p>Why is every CEO that held the reins during this debacle at Philips not in jail right now for manslaughter?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usea</author><text>They killed people for money. They will get away with it because the managerial class is generally not held responsible for their actions. One legal system is not immune from criticism just because worse ones exist.</text></comment> |
14,202,445 | 14,202,063 | 1 | 2 | 14,200,486 | train | <story><title>Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress</title><url>http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Suicide-of-an-Uber-engineer-widow-blames-job-11095807.php?t=7e40d1f554&cmpid=fb-premium&cmpid=twitter-premium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway8800</author><text>&gt; I had a Pavlovian response to the sound of email arriving on my phone, to the point where it would be in my nightmares.<p>I went through a rough period last summer where a project I was involved in was a complete disaster. I basically spent 24x7 terrified that a new &quot;emergency&quot; was going to roll in on my phone via email with a stakeholder telling me how this new issue was ruining their life and how disappointed they were; an issue which I was expected to deal with immediately. After that summer and to this day I keep my phone in &quot;Do Not Disturb&quot; mode 24x7 and treat it as a passive communications device that I only check when I want to, because I have literally run out of notification tones on my phone that don&#x27;t send a burst of adrenaline through my body upon hearing them.<p>This is even after that project is over. I feel like it permanently damaged my brain and my ability to deal with stress.<p>I have used smartwatches that notify you when an email comes in by vibrating on your wrist. I view these as modern-day human &quot;shock collars&quot; where the shock collar beneficiary is actually not you, but your employer. I actually warn others against falling into that trap of wearing a &quot;shock collar for work&quot;. Having your arm vibrate the moment an email comes in is not healthy.</text></item><item><author>jjjensen90</author><text>This was so difficult for me to read.<p>I have struggled with extreme anxiety and chronic depression and brushed up against the thought of there being no way forward or out but suicide. During the closest calls, I was making the most I ever had, living in a nice house, etc. It didn&#x27;t really matter though. I felt a tightness in my chest and a boiling kettle of acid in my stomach from the second I woke up until the second I fell into fitful sleep. I had a Pavlovian response to the sound of email arriving on my phone, to the point where it would be in my nightmares. But it was more than just work; irrational panic and anxiety filled everything facet of my life. I would nearly pass out from panic attacks when flying, or worry that the police I saw were going to arrest or harass me for an unknown crime, or think that any time my family was calling it would be tragic news.<p>About three months after I most seriously considered suicide, I got a new job, saw a psychiatrist, saw a counselor, and a few years later I was pretty much stable. I did have to detox off benzos, but that wasn&#x27;t too bad.<p>It has to be understood that highly motivated, highly intelligent people can be driven to irrational levels of stress from their work. Unfortunately it isn&#x27;t as easy as just reminding the person that they aren&#x27;t their job or their career, just like you can&#x27;t treat depression by telling a depressed person to turn their frown upside-down. This man may still have struggled with stress, anxiety, and depression even if he left Uber for somewhere healthier; what&#x27;s important now is that people reading this story or these comments realise that there are always so many ways out, and that no matter what there are resources to keep you afloat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldpie</author><text>I just don&#x27;t put work email on my personal devices. If I&#x27;m not at the office, I&#x27;m not working. Done. Otherwise you can pay me to be on-call, and that&#x27;s a whole other discussion.</text></comment> | <story><title>Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress</title><url>http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Suicide-of-an-Uber-engineer-widow-blames-job-11095807.php?t=7e40d1f554&cmpid=fb-premium&cmpid=twitter-premium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway8800</author><text>&gt; I had a Pavlovian response to the sound of email arriving on my phone, to the point where it would be in my nightmares.<p>I went through a rough period last summer where a project I was involved in was a complete disaster. I basically spent 24x7 terrified that a new &quot;emergency&quot; was going to roll in on my phone via email with a stakeholder telling me how this new issue was ruining their life and how disappointed they were; an issue which I was expected to deal with immediately. After that summer and to this day I keep my phone in &quot;Do Not Disturb&quot; mode 24x7 and treat it as a passive communications device that I only check when I want to, because I have literally run out of notification tones on my phone that don&#x27;t send a burst of adrenaline through my body upon hearing them.<p>This is even after that project is over. I feel like it permanently damaged my brain and my ability to deal with stress.<p>I have used smartwatches that notify you when an email comes in by vibrating on your wrist. I view these as modern-day human &quot;shock collars&quot; where the shock collar beneficiary is actually not you, but your employer. I actually warn others against falling into that trap of wearing a &quot;shock collar for work&quot;. Having your arm vibrate the moment an email comes in is not healthy.</text></item><item><author>jjjensen90</author><text>This was so difficult for me to read.<p>I have struggled with extreme anxiety and chronic depression and brushed up against the thought of there being no way forward or out but suicide. During the closest calls, I was making the most I ever had, living in a nice house, etc. It didn&#x27;t really matter though. I felt a tightness in my chest and a boiling kettle of acid in my stomach from the second I woke up until the second I fell into fitful sleep. I had a Pavlovian response to the sound of email arriving on my phone, to the point where it would be in my nightmares. But it was more than just work; irrational panic and anxiety filled everything facet of my life. I would nearly pass out from panic attacks when flying, or worry that the police I saw were going to arrest or harass me for an unknown crime, or think that any time my family was calling it would be tragic news.<p>About three months after I most seriously considered suicide, I got a new job, saw a psychiatrist, saw a counselor, and a few years later I was pretty much stable. I did have to detox off benzos, but that wasn&#x27;t too bad.<p>It has to be understood that highly motivated, highly intelligent people can be driven to irrational levels of stress from their work. Unfortunately it isn&#x27;t as easy as just reminding the person that they aren&#x27;t their job or their career, just like you can&#x27;t treat depression by telling a depressed person to turn their frown upside-down. This man may still have struggled with stress, anxiety, and depression even if he left Uber for somewhere healthier; what&#x27;s important now is that people reading this story or these comments realise that there are always so many ways out, and that no matter what there are resources to keep you afloat.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icebraining</author><text>Notifications has always been one of the dissonant topics in our industry. We constantly complain about interruptions in our jobs, how it kills our productivity, yet we keep inventing new ways of interrupting us.</text></comment> |
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