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7,492,003 | 7,491,803 | 1 | 2 | 7,491,423 | train | <story><title>A simple, kernel-space, on-disk filesystem from scratch</title><url>https://github.com/psankar/simplefs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deepakprakash</author><text>&quot;If you are planning to learn filesystems, start from the scratch. You can look from the first commit in this repository and move the way up.&quot;<p>Slightly off topic - I&#x27;ve always thought this is a very interesting use case for Github and open source in general - especially for understanding such low level concepts and their implementations. Provided the commit history is clear and comprehensive, this might be the best way to learn, other than do the whole thing yourself from scratch. Has somebody actually taken this path? What&#x27;s your experience?</text></comment> | <story><title>A simple, kernel-space, on-disk filesystem from scratch</title><url>https://github.com/psankar/simplefs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tjaerv</author><text>And best of all, the implementation is in the public domain (CC0):<p><a href="https://github.com/psankar/simplefs/blob/master/LICENSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;psankar&#x2F;simplefs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;LICENSE</a></text></comment> |
34,279,981 | 34,279,782 | 1 | 3 | 34,275,149 | train | <story><title>Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies</title><url>http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=181050.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HDThoreaun</author><text>30% goes to the publisher? What service are they providing?</text></item><item><author>berkle4455</author><text>$15M * 70% = $10.5M and some percentage goes to the publisher they&#x27;re working with (let&#x27;s say another 30%) = $7.4M &#x2F; 2 = ~$3.7M each</text></item><item><author>wonderwonder</author><text>And it&#x27;s 15k divided by 2 before tax isn&#x27;t it? Pretty amazing story of just doing what you love and eventually getting rewarded.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Revenue numbers on that page don&#x27;t include the Steam numbers since the launch in December ~ $15M is revenue in one month!!<p>To go from $15k to $15M, x1000, in a matter of weeks must feel incredible. Particularly after 15 years of hard work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pflats</author><text>20% is going to the publisher. They paid for the Steam version, including hiring the graphics and sound people. They&#x27;re also handling customer support for the paid version.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dwarffortress&#x2F;comments&#x2F;b0mzog&#x2F;official_announcement_dwarf_fortress_is_coming_to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dwarffortress&#x2F;comments&#x2F;b0mzog&#x2F;offic...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Dwarf Fortress has sold half a million copies</title><url>http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=181050.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>HDThoreaun</author><text>30% goes to the publisher? What service are they providing?</text></item><item><author>berkle4455</author><text>$15M * 70% = $10.5M and some percentage goes to the publisher they&#x27;re working with (let&#x27;s say another 30%) = $7.4M &#x2F; 2 = ~$3.7M each</text></item><item><author>wonderwonder</author><text>And it&#x27;s 15k divided by 2 before tax isn&#x27;t it? Pretty amazing story of just doing what you love and eventually getting rewarded.</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>Revenue numbers on that page don&#x27;t include the Steam numbers since the launch in December ~ $15M is revenue in one month!!<p>To go from $15k to $15M, x1000, in a matter of weeks must feel incredible. Particularly after 15 years of hard work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnarbarian</author><text>being on steam is pretty valuable. people are more likely to buy a game on steam than off of a random website. steam will show your game to people who like similar games. there are cloud saving features, mod integration, updates etc.</text></comment> |
12,756,959 | 12,757,009 | 1 | 2 | 12,756,462 | train | <story><title>Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw</title><url>https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>niftich</author><text>This is absolutely fascinating.<p>It&#x27;s mesmerizing to see this NSFW detection applied in reverse, and it&#x27;s even more interesting to observe your mind react to the generated images. You can see the sort-of-<i>mons pubis</i> patterns, the maybe-pubic hair, the perhaps-breasts and the suspiciously phallic appendages, complete with realistic colors.<p>Interestingly, all exposed skin suggests that the training dataset for the NSFW detection was skewed towards caucasians, given how the synthesized images are near-completely devoid of skin tones other than light pink. Perhaps this is a good visual indication of unintentional &#x27;bias&#x27; in datasets?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aab0</author><text>It could also reflect what is most distinguishable. Which is easier for a NN to confidently distinguish: black pubic hair on black skin, or black pubic hair on white skin? Darker nipples on black skin, or darker nipples on white skin? etc You&#x27;re doing gradient ascent on confidence of classification, not simply trying to find a plausible input, but the <i>maximal</i> input. There&#x27;s no reason to expect this to be racially unbiased as there are simple objective reasons that higher contrast would be useful. (Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black.)<p>And since Yahoo needs to detect porn of all races and there&#x27;s plenty of black porn out there, it would be odd if their porn detector had such a huge gaping hole in it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw</title><url>https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>niftich</author><text>This is absolutely fascinating.<p>It&#x27;s mesmerizing to see this NSFW detection applied in reverse, and it&#x27;s even more interesting to observe your mind react to the generated images. You can see the sort-of-<i>mons pubis</i> patterns, the maybe-pubic hair, the perhaps-breasts and the suspiciously phallic appendages, complete with realistic colors.<p>Interestingly, all exposed skin suggests that the training dataset for the NSFW detection was skewed towards caucasians, given how the synthesized images are near-completely devoid of skin tones other than light pink. Perhaps this is a good visual indication of unintentional &#x27;bias&#x27; in datasets?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbhjpbhj</author><text>Re your last point:<p>Strong pink is probably the most common colour across all people for the most intimate parts of the genitals as AFAIK the inner folds and spread appearance of all types of vulva are pink. All tongues and palms are pink too [AFAIK], they probably feature highly in porn compared to in other images. If you were then looking at pictures of black women, say, and wanted to find the porn images then looking for certain pinks in those images would be a good first pass I feel [you&#x27;d probably get lots of false-positives for mouth pictures]. Even those with brown and black skin can flush pink when aroused too, that&#x27;s got to feed in to the results. [Do men have pigmented <i>glans penis</i>? Not something I&#x27;ve ever really needed to know. [2]]<p>FWIW <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open_nsfw.gitlab.io&#x2F;nsfw&#x2F;prob_0001_1000_10.0_0.04__144.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open_nsfw.gitlab.io&#x2F;nsfw&#x2F;prob_0001_1000_10.0_0.04__1...</a> doesn&#x27;t look especially &quot;caucasian&quot; (ie white European) to me. There seems to be a good mix of pretty coffee-y colours to me that I&#x27;d associate with Asia.<p>&gt;Perhaps this is a good visual indication of unintentional &#x27;bias&#x27; in datasets? &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>So, maybe it&#x27;s a colour-of-genitals bias rather than a dataset bias?<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iflscience.com&#x2F;health-and-medicine&#x2F;why-are-your-nipples-and-genitals-different-color-rest-your-skin-0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iflscience.com&#x2F;health-and-medicine&#x2F;why-are-your-n...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interestingarticles.com&#x2F;mens-health-issues&#x2F;penis-skin-of-a-different-color-whats-normal-and-whats-not-5948.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interestingarticles.com&#x2F;mens-health-issues&#x2F;penis-...</a></text></comment> |
27,761,393 | 27,761,278 | 1 | 2 | 27,758,872 | train | <story><title>Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/blog/letter-ban-surveillance-based-advertising/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pasabagi</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a simpler way to achieve this. Force companies who leak personal data to pay reasonable damages to all the individuals involved, on the scale of 10-100 dollars, depending on how much personal info has been leaked.<p>That would make businesses very quickly reassess how much data they need to keep, and how careful they need to be with it, without requiring any really radical legislation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cartoonworld</author><text>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s gonna cut it, but definitely on the right track. Its going to require some kind of legislation, or an insurance requirement that renders the insurers as de-facto regulators. This is still crazy hard due to the possibility of regulatory arbitrage, just open shop in Anguilla or wherever.<p>Without the auditing, compliance, and domain experts to verify and implement this, its going to be extremely hard to create and levy these penalties in any meaningful way. Using (legally) vague terms like &quot;leak&quot; &quot;personal&quot; &quot;data&quot; and &quot;involved&quot;, a quick trip to the local courtroom will obviate a lot of the fines for well connected C-execs and legal teams.<p>Data integrity needs to be baked into the equation from the start. Until it is a business requirement to ensure proper system architecture practices, data integrity, and auditing, I don&#x27;t see a snowball&#x27;s chance of reaching sanity. Really, we&#x27;ve only barely defined the problem. Businesses have compliance departments that are totally subservient to business needs and would much rather resort to gaslighting stakeholders with silver-bullet checkbox security technology processes shaded in at the board room.<p>On the other side, we are now ushering in a fascinating golden age of the security rodeo. There is astonishing growth in this industry, enjoy unending contracts for Red and Blue alike. It could soon really begin to look like a Gibson novel.</text></comment> | <story><title>Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/blog/letter-ban-surveillance-based-advertising/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pasabagi</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a simpler way to achieve this. Force companies who leak personal data to pay reasonable damages to all the individuals involved, on the scale of 10-100 dollars, depending on how much personal info has been leaked.<p>That would make businesses very quickly reassess how much data they need to keep, and how careful they need to be with it, without requiring any really radical legislation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>handrous</author><text>Yeah, rather than targeting advertising I&#x27;d prefer to get to the actual point, and target mass surveillance and collection of huge troves of personal data <i>no matter the purpose</i>.<p>Ban monetizing data (no selling, no pay-for-access, no derived products) and make leaks guaranteed to be expensive, so companies only keep what they have to to operate, with some large multiplier attached to the leak fine if it was related to banned activities.<p>Done.<p>The advertising is a symptom, it&#x27;s not the disease.</text></comment> |
38,931,347 | 38,929,565 | 1 | 3 | 38,928,334 | train | <story><title>Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)</title><url>https://lproven.livejournal.com/189791.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>How about the opposite: PC-compatible non-x86 computers?<p>Like how the Transmeta Crusoe was an x86-compatible CPU... but moreso.<p>The Crusoe was a thing marketed as a &quot;CPU&quot;, that was actually internally an SoC (with the CPU inside it being non-x86.) This SoC had its own internal RAM and storage, and booted itself into internal software that then emulated an x86 CPU. All of the &quot;CPU&quot; data pins on the Crusoe SoC, routed to the virtual CPU inputs and outputs of this software. So, as far as other devices in the system were concerned, they were speaking to an x86 CPU.<p>Did anyone ever try taking this concept further? Maybe in the context of an industrial embedded computer?<p>I could imagine someone taking e.g. a modern ARM SoC with onboard RAM + eMMC; setting it up to boot into e.g. Bochs to emulate a virtual x86 (CPU + BIOS + other memory-mapped ROMs + platform controller hub + IO controllers + timer chips + TPM + etc — all the stuff on an x86 motherboard) — and then just setting up the SoC&#x27;s GPIO pins to directly expose all the virtual buses of that virtual motherboard. You could then take such a chip, and design a physical &quot;motherboard&quot; for it to sit in, that&#x27;s just a bunch of ports (e.g. PS2) and slots (e.g. ISA or <i>maybe</i> very slow PCI) routing directly to the SoC&#x27;s GPIO pins.<p>This would be a very effective strategy, I think, for producing low-cost host platforms for the many industrial-automation ISA cards that still exist. So I have a feeling some OEM has at least <i>tried</i> to do this.<p>Probably there wouldn&#x27;t be enough GPIO pins for most busses — x86 CPUs have <i>tons</i> of pins compared to almost any other architecture. So I wouldn&#x27;t consider it cheating to feed parallel busses out serially at higher clock rates than those busses natively run at, and then to require the use of an external ser&#x2F;des chip or two to flatten the signals back out. As long as it&#x27;s the SoC itself speaking the protocol and the chip is &quot;dumb&quot;, I think that&#x27;d still count.<p>Also keep in mind that unlike with the Crusoe, an &quot;x86-on-ARM SoC&quot; <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> need to have GPIO fast and wide enough to talk to external DRAM — as any memory could be internal to the SoC without breaking the contract. So the main constraint bottlenecking the Crusoe&#x27;s CPU performance, wouldn&#x27;t apply here. This thing <i>could</i> actually perform decently well — possibly well enough to run hard-realtime industrial control software coded in the 1990s, and to speak to ISA cards built in the 1990s. Which is all it would need to be able to do, for the obvious use-case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnklos</author><text>There were lots of computers in the &#x27;80s which claimed official MS-DOS compatibility through emulation or added hardware. There were the Solution and Conqueror emulators for the Sinclair QL, there was Amiga Transformer from Commodore for the Amiga, there were ST Outlook and pc-ditto for the Atari ST.<p>Not long afterwards, hardware made MS-DOS compatibility much better because the speed of MS-DOS could easily be as fast as or faster than real IBM hardware. There were many options including the Sidecar, BridgeBoards, KCS PowerPC, and more on Amigas. Later, there were DOS compatibility cards for Macs.<p>Often these options had advantages over having a separate DOS compatible computer, like the ability to still run the native system at the same time, and often to share files &#x2F; drives and other resources. It was an interesting time, for sure.</text></comment> | <story><title>Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)</title><url>https://lproven.livejournal.com/189791.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>How about the opposite: PC-compatible non-x86 computers?<p>Like how the Transmeta Crusoe was an x86-compatible CPU... but moreso.<p>The Crusoe was a thing marketed as a &quot;CPU&quot;, that was actually internally an SoC (with the CPU inside it being non-x86.) This SoC had its own internal RAM and storage, and booted itself into internal software that then emulated an x86 CPU. All of the &quot;CPU&quot; data pins on the Crusoe SoC, routed to the virtual CPU inputs and outputs of this software. So, as far as other devices in the system were concerned, they were speaking to an x86 CPU.<p>Did anyone ever try taking this concept further? Maybe in the context of an industrial embedded computer?<p>I could imagine someone taking e.g. a modern ARM SoC with onboard RAM + eMMC; setting it up to boot into e.g. Bochs to emulate a virtual x86 (CPU + BIOS + other memory-mapped ROMs + platform controller hub + IO controllers + timer chips + TPM + etc — all the stuff on an x86 motherboard) — and then just setting up the SoC&#x27;s GPIO pins to directly expose all the virtual buses of that virtual motherboard. You could then take such a chip, and design a physical &quot;motherboard&quot; for it to sit in, that&#x27;s just a bunch of ports (e.g. PS2) and slots (e.g. ISA or <i>maybe</i> very slow PCI) routing directly to the SoC&#x27;s GPIO pins.<p>This would be a very effective strategy, I think, for producing low-cost host platforms for the many industrial-automation ISA cards that still exist. So I have a feeling some OEM has at least <i>tried</i> to do this.<p>Probably there wouldn&#x27;t be enough GPIO pins for most busses — x86 CPUs have <i>tons</i> of pins compared to almost any other architecture. So I wouldn&#x27;t consider it cheating to feed parallel busses out serially at higher clock rates than those busses natively run at, and then to require the use of an external ser&#x2F;des chip or two to flatten the signals back out. As long as it&#x27;s the SoC itself speaking the protocol and the chip is &quot;dumb&quot;, I think that&#x27;d still count.<p>Also keep in mind that unlike with the Crusoe, an &quot;x86-on-ARM SoC&quot; <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> need to have GPIO fast and wide enough to talk to external DRAM — as any memory could be internal to the SoC without breaking the contract. So the main constraint bottlenecking the Crusoe&#x27;s CPU performance, wouldn&#x27;t apply here. This thing <i>could</i> actually perform decently well — possibly well enough to run hard-realtime industrial control software coded in the 1990s, and to speak to ISA cards built in the 1990s. Which is all it would need to be able to do, for the obvious use-case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>I&#x27;ve also been interested in a different kind of &quot;PC-compatible non-x86&quot;, as in building a standardized architecture with all the normal pieces and just swapping out the CPU. It is 100% possible to make a machine with an arch64 CPU that boots using UEFI, handles device enumeration like a PC, has the usual buses and everything, lives in an ATX case, and in every way it looks and acts like a regular PC that just happens to have a different CPU.</text></comment> |
14,745,169 | 14,744,702 | 1 | 3 | 14,744,279 | train | <story><title>Fedora 26 released</title><url>https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-26-is-here/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lima</author><text>Fedora has been great lately. QA is so much better than other distros. Things &quot;just work&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>champagnepapi</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using Fedora since 23. I started using it because of work, but it quickly became my main OS.
I&#x27;ve installed it on a MBP, and now an Alienware. Only have had a couple problems, on the MBP webcam didn&#x27;t work. On the Alienware, I have to run a script to get the 3.5mm jack to work. Other than that, no problems. I enjoy using it, and its also really easy to upgrade. Prior, I was a life long Mac OS user (since the 6th grade lol).</text></comment> | <story><title>Fedora 26 released</title><url>https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-26-is-here/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lima</author><text>Fedora has been great lately. QA is so much better than other distros. Things &quot;just work&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meddlepal</author><text>Agreed. I readopted Fedora as my distro of choice around 19 and haven&#x27;t looked back.</text></comment> |
4,341,510 | 4,341,237 | 1 | 2 | 4,340,047 | train | <story><title>What I Hate About Git</title><url>https://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>encoderer</author><text>&#62; The OP already pointed out that the official Git documentation is bad, bad bad. So, already it's not just "RTFM" but "Google around for a decent Git tutorial and hope you pick the right one." Great.<p>I have a hard time believing that there are scores of software developers out there who have learned their craft enough to want source control but are somehow overwhelmed by the basic task of finding a good Git tutorial.<p>The real impediment that I've observed is developers that certainly <i>could</i> learn Git but don't because they don't see it as a good investment. That's where they're so, so wrong. Git is like power tools for your code. If you embrace and learn it, you'll be much better off for it. Yes, SVN is easier. It's also a lot less powerful.<p>And there's always Mercurial, which is very similar to Git and addresses some of the confusing-API criticism.</text></item><item><author>ender7</author><text>Like others, I think telling people to RTFM is unhelpful.<p>The OP already pointed out that the official Git documentation is bad, bad <i>bad.</i> So, already it's not just "RTFM" but "Google around for a decent Git tutorial and hope you pick the right one." Great.<p>Add to this the fact that the Git commands are simply <i>poorly designed.</i> Yes, it is possible to understand what they do after expending a significant amount of time simply learning to think like Linus, but <i>why should we have to do that?</i> I refer you to the gitref.org entry for 'git reset':<p><i>git reset is probably the most confusing command written by humans. I've been using Git for years, even wrote a book on it and I still get confused by what it is going to do at times.</i> [0]<p>This is not a problem of people not wanting to learn DVCS concepts. This is simply people who don't want to jump through a set of arbitrary, confusing, and completely unnecessary mental hoops in order to get to the DVCS concepts they wanted to use.<p>[0] <a href="http://gitref.org/basic/#reset" rel="nofollow">http://gitref.org/basic/#reset</a> (gitref.org is maintained by GitHub)</text></item><item><author>klodolph</author><text>Number 1-5 are mostly "I don't want to learn new things", so I'll ignore them. Do you remember when you learned source control for the first time? I don't, it was too long ago. Just like you have to learn SVN if you've never used source control before, you have to learn Git if you've never used distributed source control before.<p>* "Unsafe version control", and then gives examples using -f or +&#60;refspec&#62;, both of which advertise their destructive nature. Yes, you can also go in with SVN and obliterate history too, using svnadmin dump and svnadmin load. Git's reflog will have your back when you make mistakes, as long as the mistakes don't get too old.<p>* "Power for the maintainer, at the expense of the contributor" Yes, most people write code on one branch for a long period of time. Git does this just fine.<p>* "Burden of VCS maintainance pushed to contributors" First of all, nobody says that contributors have to merge. That is a decision that each project makes. Plenty of projects have the lead developers merging in everyone else's work. Second, the reason this is even an issue is because merging is such a pain in SVN that most people don't want to do it.<p>* "Git history is a bunch of lies" Again, this is up to the individual project. Some developers like to work on six different things at the same time, and then they go back and rewrite history so that their six changes end up as six commits. The difference with SVN, is that these same developers would simply avoid committing until they're done with all six changes. Some projects expect rebased patches, some prefer proper merges. Worse, the author says that "filtering" should solve this problem, but doesn't propose how such a filter would work.<p>* Complexity of simple tasks: Let's try not to artificially inflate the complexity of the Git tasks. For example, the Git examples assume no commit access, whereas the SVN examples assume direct commit access. If you don't have commit access to an SVN project, how do you do it? You either use git-svn and mail them a patch, or you use svn and mail them a patch.<p>A recurring complaint seems to be that "git add" is not the same as "svn add". I don't see why it would be. It's not the same as "ssh-add" or "useradd" either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>The problem with git isn't following a tutorial, the problems I have had are nasty corner cases. I have to keep looking up strange a-symmetries, like why does 'git push' push just the current branch, and 'git pull' pull all branches? Then I have to look up how to make 'git pull' pull just the current branch.<p>Also, due to inconsistencies in how commands take branches, I sometimes realise I have a branch called 'origin/stuff', when I meant to do something with stuff on origin. It's also hard to find which branches are tracking what. Of course, you can find the options to do all these things. But there are just so many little things to learnt.<p>The fundamental question is, does the complexity of git come from the power it offers over svn, or does it come from the most terrible UI I think I have ever seen on a command line tool? I think it is the second.<p>I still use git every day, but I think it is putting usability by less computer-savvy users back years.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Hate About Git</title><url>https://steveko.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>encoderer</author><text>&#62; The OP already pointed out that the official Git documentation is bad, bad bad. So, already it's not just "RTFM" but "Google around for a decent Git tutorial and hope you pick the right one." Great.<p>I have a hard time believing that there are scores of software developers out there who have learned their craft enough to want source control but are somehow overwhelmed by the basic task of finding a good Git tutorial.<p>The real impediment that I've observed is developers that certainly <i>could</i> learn Git but don't because they don't see it as a good investment. That's where they're so, so wrong. Git is like power tools for your code. If you embrace and learn it, you'll be much better off for it. Yes, SVN is easier. It's also a lot less powerful.<p>And there's always Mercurial, which is very similar to Git and addresses some of the confusing-API criticism.</text></item><item><author>ender7</author><text>Like others, I think telling people to RTFM is unhelpful.<p>The OP already pointed out that the official Git documentation is bad, bad <i>bad.</i> So, already it's not just "RTFM" but "Google around for a decent Git tutorial and hope you pick the right one." Great.<p>Add to this the fact that the Git commands are simply <i>poorly designed.</i> Yes, it is possible to understand what they do after expending a significant amount of time simply learning to think like Linus, but <i>why should we have to do that?</i> I refer you to the gitref.org entry for 'git reset':<p><i>git reset is probably the most confusing command written by humans. I've been using Git for years, even wrote a book on it and I still get confused by what it is going to do at times.</i> [0]<p>This is not a problem of people not wanting to learn DVCS concepts. This is simply people who don't want to jump through a set of arbitrary, confusing, and completely unnecessary mental hoops in order to get to the DVCS concepts they wanted to use.<p>[0] <a href="http://gitref.org/basic/#reset" rel="nofollow">http://gitref.org/basic/#reset</a> (gitref.org is maintained by GitHub)</text></item><item><author>klodolph</author><text>Number 1-5 are mostly "I don't want to learn new things", so I'll ignore them. Do you remember when you learned source control for the first time? I don't, it was too long ago. Just like you have to learn SVN if you've never used source control before, you have to learn Git if you've never used distributed source control before.<p>* "Unsafe version control", and then gives examples using -f or +&#60;refspec&#62;, both of which advertise their destructive nature. Yes, you can also go in with SVN and obliterate history too, using svnadmin dump and svnadmin load. Git's reflog will have your back when you make mistakes, as long as the mistakes don't get too old.<p>* "Power for the maintainer, at the expense of the contributor" Yes, most people write code on one branch for a long period of time. Git does this just fine.<p>* "Burden of VCS maintainance pushed to contributors" First of all, nobody says that contributors have to merge. That is a decision that each project makes. Plenty of projects have the lead developers merging in everyone else's work. Second, the reason this is even an issue is because merging is such a pain in SVN that most people don't want to do it.<p>* "Git history is a bunch of lies" Again, this is up to the individual project. Some developers like to work on six different things at the same time, and then they go back and rewrite history so that their six changes end up as six commits. The difference with SVN, is that these same developers would simply avoid committing until they're done with all six changes. Some projects expect rebased patches, some prefer proper merges. Worse, the author says that "filtering" should solve this problem, but doesn't propose how such a filter would work.<p>* Complexity of simple tasks: Let's try not to artificially inflate the complexity of the Git tasks. For example, the Git examples assume no commit access, whereas the SVN examples assume direct commit access. If you don't have commit access to an SVN project, how do you do it? You either use git-svn and mail them a patch, or you use svn and mail them a patch.<p>A recurring complaint seems to be that "git add" is not the same as "svn add". I don't see why it would be. It's not the same as "ssh-add" or "useradd" either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgkimsal</author><text>"...but are somehow overwhelmed by the basic task of finding a good Git tutorial."<p>Ummm.... when you <i>don't know</i> the tool, you're not in a good place to judge what a 'good' tutorial is. This is the same reason we've got generations of bad PHP developers out there - they can't tell what's good or not.<p>"scores of software developers out there who have learned their craft enough to want source control"<p>How many people 'want' to learn source control, and how many people are told 'this is what we use here, go learn it'? I suspect far more of the latter, especially with git. People would <i>not</i> flock to git purely based on the documentation quality. Further, I suspect that had git just been written by some random dude off the street with no major project behind it, it would have never taken off. Using it for Linux kernel work has ensured a sizeable number of people are going to have to use it, whether they like it or not.</text></comment> |
41,229,922 | 41,225,719 | 1 | 3 | 41,223,902 | train | <story><title>Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail</title><url>https://www.maragu.dev/blog/go-is-my-hammer-and-everything-is-a-nail</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>conor-</author><text>Go is the only language I&#x27;ve ever felt highly productive working in. Oftentimes in other stacks I find myself in analysis paralysis on meta things that don&#x27;t matter:<p>- what design patterns&#x2F;language features make sense to use<p>- what is the best lib to accomplish X<p>- how do you keep things up to date<p>With Go, the language is so simple that it&#x27;s pretty difficult to over engineer or write terse code. Everything you need is in stdlib. The tooling makes dependency management and upgrades trivial because of strong backwards compatibility.</text></item><item><author>daghamm</author><text>The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost <i>everything</i>.<p>I have extremely good productivity when using Go. Once your project exceeds 100 lines it is usually even better than python. And yes, I am aware that Rustians did a survey where Rust was crowned as the most efficient language but in my reality (which may differ from yours) Go is simply the best tool for most tasks.<p>Why is that? Well, for me there are 3 reasosns:<p>1. The language is extremely simple. If you know 20% of C you are already a Go expert.<p>2. The core libraries are extremly well thought.<p>3. Batteries are included. The toolchain and the core libraries alone can do 90% of what most people will ever need.<p>When people argue about the validity of these claims, I simply point them to this talk <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;talks&#x2F;2012&#x2F;concurrency.slide#42" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;talks&#x2F;2012&#x2F;concurrency.slide#42</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>Sure, if everything one does is either CLI stuff, or UNIX daemons, containers, ....<p>Because in the reign of graphics , GUI, GPGPU, HPC, HFT, ML, game engines,numeric analysis, ... there is hardly any library that really stands out.</text></comment> | <story><title>Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail</title><url>https://www.maragu.dev/blog/go-is-my-hammer-and-everything-is-a-nail</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>conor-</author><text>Go is the only language I&#x27;ve ever felt highly productive working in. Oftentimes in other stacks I find myself in analysis paralysis on meta things that don&#x27;t matter:<p>- what design patterns&#x2F;language features make sense to use<p>- what is the best lib to accomplish X<p>- how do you keep things up to date<p>With Go, the language is so simple that it&#x27;s pretty difficult to over engineer or write terse code. Everything you need is in stdlib. The tooling makes dependency management and upgrades trivial because of strong backwards compatibility.</text></item><item><author>daghamm</author><text>The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost <i>everything</i>.<p>I have extremely good productivity when using Go. Once your project exceeds 100 lines it is usually even better than python. And yes, I am aware that Rustians did a survey where Rust was crowned as the most efficient language but in my reality (which may differ from yours) Go is simply the best tool for most tasks.<p>Why is that? Well, for me there are 3 reasosns:<p>1. The language is extremely simple. If you know 20% of C you are already a Go expert.<p>2. The core libraries are extremly well thought.<p>3. Batteries are included. The toolchain and the core libraries alone can do 90% of what most people will ever need.<p>When people argue about the validity of these claims, I simply point them to this talk <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;talks&#x2F;2012&#x2F;concurrency.slide#42" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;talks&#x2F;2012&#x2F;concurrency.slide#42</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mapcars</author><text>I do programming interviews and I found candidates struggling a lot in doing http request and parsing response json in Go while in Python its a breeze, what makes it particularly hard, is it lack of generics or dict data type?</text></comment> |
26,806,985 | 26,806,909 | 1 | 3 | 26,806,250 | train | <story><title>EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService_2_MOLT/idUSKBN2C10MU</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jleyank</author><text>Probably every drug has risks, many higher than the 1:1,000,000 reported for AZ&#x2F;J&amp;J. It&#x27;s always a balance between the risk untreated vs. treated - many cancer drugs will kill you, but slower than they kill the cancer. Contraceptives have various issues, but their &quot;social good&quot; is deemed worthwhile.<p>I&#x27;ve read that they are doing gene analysis to try and determine why these cases appear - is it gender, age, cross-reactions with other meds, ...? And recall that some of these conditions appear without obvious causes. If they&#x27;re due to an overly aggressive immune response, recall that the cytokine storm caused by covid in such cases is what attacks the lungs (why immunosuppressants are used as treatments).<p>And nobody understands Long Covid.</text></comment> | <story><title>EU Commission to end AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine contracts at expiry</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService_2_MOLT/idUSKBN2C10MU</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>parhamn</author><text>Does anyone know how reusable the mRNA infrastructure is in the future for other mRNA based solutions or is this stuff more one-off for COVID?</text></comment> |
30,626,850 | 30,626,477 | 1 | 3 | 30,625,586 | train | <story><title>A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)</title><url>https://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>random_upvoter</author><text>For decades of my adult life I skipped breakfast, going against all conventional dietary wisdom. Having 3 meals a day just felt like turning my body into a conveyor belt that produces faeces. Now I feel kinda vindicated.<p>A few times I traveled with a friends who did the breakfast - lunch - dinner thing and after two or three days I had to opt out of either breakfast or dinner. I remember asking &quot;how do you even manage to process that much?&quot; and I just got blank stares.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m 51 now and my body weight is the same as when I was 20. It just doesn&#x27;t LOOK quite the same anymore ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JKCalhoun</author><text>My sense is that <i>conventional dietary wisdom</i> comes from an agricultural heritage — where we spent all damn day working the fields. Without that intensive labor, three meals seems to make less sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)</title><url>https://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>random_upvoter</author><text>For decades of my adult life I skipped breakfast, going against all conventional dietary wisdom. Having 3 meals a day just felt like turning my body into a conveyor belt that produces faeces. Now I feel kinda vindicated.<p>A few times I traveled with a friends who did the breakfast - lunch - dinner thing and after two or three days I had to opt out of either breakfast or dinner. I remember asking &quot;how do you even manage to process that much?&quot; and I just got blank stares.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, I&#x27;m 51 now and my body weight is the same as when I was 20. It just doesn&#x27;t LOOK quite the same anymore ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fouc</author><text>People that maintain a low weight throughout life and eat 3 meals a day probably eat smaller meals than your 2 meals.</text></comment> |
1,466,811 | 1,466,507 | 1 | 3 | 1,466,288 | train | <story><title>Clojure's n00b attraction problem</title><url>http://gregslepak.posterous.com/clojures-n00b-attraction-problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>Now this is exactly the sort of thing we should be taking issue with (from the comments):<p>&#62; A true noob should probably install java, download clojure and clojure-contrib, run the repl, and stay there for couple 2-3 weeks. No IDE, no web app dev, just functional and concurrent programming with clojure in a REPL. They'll be much better off in the long run because they'll either give up (and save time) or learn something truly outside their comfort zone (and understand the benefit of getting setup for real development).<p>When teaching someone a programming language, your first goal should always be to get them to the point where they've made something real in a domain they understand. Then, they can bootstrap that domain knowledge, and its application within the new language, and use it to "grow into" the rest of the language.<p>The <i>best</i> thing for Clojure would be something that lets you write web-apps (or games, or visualizations like Processing...) in it two minutes after clicking "Download"—because those users would be able to say they've <i>done</i> something in Clojure, be able to say they're <i>sure</i> of their knowledge (because if they weren't, the program wouldn't have worked, would it?) and be able to proceed to learn more with confidence. The <i>worst</i> thing would be to download Clojure and be stuck at a REPL invoking (defproto) to overload String methods with no goal in sight—because that kind of knowledge doesn't <i>stick</i>, and won't get you anywhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>Clojure's n00b attraction problem</title><url>http://gregslepak.posterous.com/clojures-n00b-attraction-problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ihodes</author><text>I certainly had very similar issues when starting out with Clojure (and am still running into them now), and I'd had previous development experience with Java and used Emacs before Clojure.<p>That being said, I do believe the "noob experience" is improving, and the community Clojure fosters is inviting and welcoming to newbies, as far as I've seen.<p>I've begun work on a tutorial to get people up and running with Clojure, but I will be recommending Emacs in it. As someone in the comments on the blog noted, if someone's goal with Clojure is to crank out a web app in 24 hours, they've come to the wrong place. Emacs enriches the experience, and I truly don't think it is as daunting as it is often made out to be. Gaining basic productivity in Emacs, even if not excellent productivity, takes little time, and the benefits of using Emacs seem large to me.<p>Regardless, the sentiment expressed here is important to consider. There should be a sanctioned IDE for Clojure, and it shouldn't just be Emacs and clojure-mode.el + Lein, at least not to start. Along with clojure.jar, I'd like to see Leibke's clj script packaged and promoted. That way, like with python, irb and newlisp, you can download and immediately get started with a functional REPL to see if you like the language before investing the time in setting up the ultimate IDE.<p>And yes, documentation. Please, documentation. It's in the style of LISP to have little to none documentation in code, as the code should explain itself. And it certainly should, but a little exlanation here and there can only help to enlighten those not as familiar with the language and save the time of those in a hurry.<p>But now is an exciting tine for getting into Clojure. Don't let the initial challenge of getting into it deter you!</text></comment> |
14,848,107 | 14,848,007 | 1 | 2 | 14,847,654 | train | <story><title>The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market</title><url>http://hackaday.com/2017/07/25/the-end-of-arduino-101-intel-leaves-maker-market/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wiremine</author><text>I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino, only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production.<p>IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware&#x2F;software platform that bridges the ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are really bad on the hardware side.</text></comment> | <story><title>The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market</title><url>http://hackaday.com/2017/07/25/the-end-of-arduino-101-intel-leaves-maker-market/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elijahparker</author><text>As someone who spent a bit of time trying to start a project based on the Edison, the most frustrating thing was the amount of bugs and the lack of documentation to be able to do anything about it myself, leaving me hopelessly waiting for them to release fixes.<p>For example, after several months of terribly slow and buggy SPI and no fix over multiple releases, I finally switched to ARM and am very glad I did. Intel did finally fix the SPI issue about 9 months after it was first reported.<p>With ARM, I had plenty of issues and challenges, but had the documentation and resources I needed to be able to fix things, as well as a better support community.<p>One of the key issues in the Intel support communities was a growing lack of trust, now confirmed by Intel dropping out. It takes a big commitment to really understand a system, and the nice thing about ARM is that the community goes beyond a single company, so a company dropping out is not as significant as in this case with Intel.</text></comment> |
18,967,791 | 18,964,578 | 1 | 2 | 18,963,811 | train | <story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I love the Feynman Algo. I hold over 60 patents (not bragging) often times colleagues will ask me if I can teach them to be innovative. After being asked this question a number of times and giving it a lot of thought, the answer I give now is the following:<p>&quot;No, no one can teach you to be innovative or creative, you already are. Humans are the most innovative creatures in the history of this planet, innately, look at all we have created. All you need to do is to un-learn to not be creative. We are all constantly taught, either in school, the military, by our family or by our peers, our company we work for, whatever... to NOT be creative; to in effect comport. First un-learn that. It will unleash your creative&#x2F;innovative abilities.&quot;<p>Jeff Bezos may not be a physicist but somewhere along his path he learned to stop NOT being innovative.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>Also known as: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm</a><p>In this case, Bezos saw firsthand how a brain teaser could be answered by &quot;seen something similar once before&quot; much more easily than &quot;worked on it on a team for several hours&quot;. Isn&#x27;t this exactly the sort of brain teaser that we hate seeing in tech interviews?<p>This one was bad enough that Bezos <i>left the field</i>, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tim333</author><text>The Feynman Algo relied on him putting a lot of work in. His wife&#x27;s divorce complaint:<p>&gt;He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.</text></comment> | <story><title>When Jeff Bezos decided not to become a physicist [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnV6EM-wzY</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I love the Feynman Algo. I hold over 60 patents (not bragging) often times colleagues will ask me if I can teach them to be innovative. After being asked this question a number of times and giving it a lot of thought, the answer I give now is the following:<p>&quot;No, no one can teach you to be innovative or creative, you already are. Humans are the most innovative creatures in the history of this planet, innately, look at all we have created. All you need to do is to un-learn to not be creative. We are all constantly taught, either in school, the military, by our family or by our peers, our company we work for, whatever... to NOT be creative; to in effect comport. First un-learn that. It will unleash your creative&#x2F;innovative abilities.&quot;<p>Jeff Bezos may not be a physicist but somewhere along his path he learned to stop NOT being innovative.</text></item><item><author>ken</author><text>Also known as: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?FeynmanAlgorithm</a><p>In this case, Bezos saw firsthand how a brain teaser could be answered by &quot;seen something similar once before&quot; much more easily than &quot;worked on it on a team for several hours&quot;. Isn&#x27;t this exactly the sort of brain teaser that we hate seeing in tech interviews?<p>This one was bad enough that Bezos <i>left the field</i>, yet Amazon (like every other software company) still asks these style of questions of its engineering candidates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>candiodari</author><text>I think what Bezos says in the interview is funny, but also very directly clarifies further what you&#x27;re saying. The smartest guy at Princeton solved this problem ...<p>Not because he was actually smart (ok, perhaps a good memory). Not because he was able to do math really fast, or really accurate, or in his head. None of that. NOT EVEN because he figured out this problem on the spot. That was quite simply not it.<p>But because he had solved a metric fuckton of problems before, and then got lucky.<p>I agree with your statement (just got one patent to my name though), but a very important caveat is that you have to learn something (and preferably more than 1 thing) thoroughly before unlearning it. And learning first and then unlearning is vastly different from not learning it at all.</text></comment> |
18,530,341 | 18,529,421 | 1 | 2 | 18,527,917 | train | <story><title>AI Mistakes Bus-Side Ad for Famous CEO, Charges Her With Jaywalking</title><url>https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-11-22/ai-mistakes-bus-side-ad-for-famous-ceo-charges-her-with-jaywalkingdo-101350772.html?cxg=web&Sfrom=twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nitrogen</author><text>Scaling fines <i>up</i> to higher incomes for things that don&#x27;t really matter (jaywalking, minor traffic violations) seems antithetical to the individualistic core of American culture. We typically try to equalize society by raising the floor for the many, rather than lowering the ceiling for the few.</text></item><item><author>nabla9</author><text>Fines should be some percentage of income.<p>Here in Finland the record speeding ticked is over 100,000 euros.<p>One guy in Switzerland received $1 million speeding ticket for driving his Mercedes SLS AMG over 280 km&#x2F;h. That&#x27;s how hit should be.</text></item><item><author>burfog</author><text><i>NOTE: not specifically about jaywalking, but about fines&#x2F;fees being disproportionate punishment in general</i><p>Jail disproportionately punishes those who are working. (they lose their income source, then they can&#x27;t pay bills, then their house gets foreclosed, etc.)<p>Ditching punishment entirely means free-for-all anarchy until somebody takes that opportunity to impose a government with punishments.<p>What options are left? Torture? Execution? Ignoring the masochists and the suicidal, those don&#x27;t disproportionately punish people.</text></item><item><author>goatsi</author><text>&gt;I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.<p>Absolutely, court fees and fines disproportionately punish those with low incomes. Increasing enforcement of low level violations by surveillance tech and&#x2F;or AI is going to crush a lot of people if we don&#x27;t change that fact.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;312158516&#x2F;increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;312158516&#x2F;increasing-court-fe...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;municipal-courts-war-on-poor-people-explained&#x2F;541395&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;municipal-courts-war-...</a></text></item><item><author>raleigh_user</author><text>Heres further proof the justice system is screwed. Yesterday I was stopped while driving for not having current tags. Registration was renewed but I didn&#x27;t have the sticker yet. Cop looked at my paperwork said all good be back in 5.<p>Come to find out, I haven&#x27;t had a valid license in 5 years.<p>There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled&#x2F;money received but court says they never got money.<p>So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.<p>I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.<p>But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven&#x27;t had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>retsibsi</author><text>&gt; things that don&#x27;t really matter<p>If they really don&#x27;t matter, why forbid them at all?<p>For things that are worth forbidding, scaling is surely necessary to create a meaningful disincentive for the rich, without destroying the poor by setting very high flat fines.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI Mistakes Bus-Side Ad for Famous CEO, Charges Her With Jaywalking</title><url>https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-11-22/ai-mistakes-bus-side-ad-for-famous-ceo-charges-her-with-jaywalkingdo-101350772.html?cxg=web&Sfrom=twitter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nitrogen</author><text>Scaling fines <i>up</i> to higher incomes for things that don&#x27;t really matter (jaywalking, minor traffic violations) seems antithetical to the individualistic core of American culture. We typically try to equalize society by raising the floor for the many, rather than lowering the ceiling for the few.</text></item><item><author>nabla9</author><text>Fines should be some percentage of income.<p>Here in Finland the record speeding ticked is over 100,000 euros.<p>One guy in Switzerland received $1 million speeding ticket for driving his Mercedes SLS AMG over 280 km&#x2F;h. That&#x27;s how hit should be.</text></item><item><author>burfog</author><text><i>NOTE: not specifically about jaywalking, but about fines&#x2F;fees being disproportionate punishment in general</i><p>Jail disproportionately punishes those who are working. (they lose their income source, then they can&#x27;t pay bills, then their house gets foreclosed, etc.)<p>Ditching punishment entirely means free-for-all anarchy until somebody takes that opportunity to impose a government with punishments.<p>What options are left? Torture? Execution? Ignoring the masochists and the suicidal, those don&#x27;t disproportionately punish people.</text></item><item><author>goatsi</author><text>&gt;I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.<p>Absolutely, court fees and fines disproportionately punish those with low incomes. Increasing enforcement of low level violations by surveillance tech and&#x2F;or AI is going to crush a lot of people if we don&#x27;t change that fact.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;312158516&#x2F;increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;312158516&#x2F;increasing-court-fe...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;municipal-courts-war-on-poor-people-explained&#x2F;541395&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;equity&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;municipal-courts-war-...</a></text></item><item><author>raleigh_user</author><text>Heres further proof the justice system is screwed. Yesterday I was stopped while driving for not having current tags. Registration was renewed but I didn&#x27;t have the sticker yet. Cop looked at my paperwork said all good be back in 5.<p>Come to find out, I haven&#x27;t had a valid license in 5 years.<p>There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled&#x2F;money received but court says they never got money.<p>So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.<p>I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.<p>But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven&#x27;t had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>Depends what you think the fines are for. If they are to discourage behaviour, it makes sense to me to try to make them equally discouraging to everyone, which requires scaling.</text></comment> |
33,535,514 | 33,535,687 | 1 | 2 | 33,534,505 | train | <story><title>Russia to Withdraw Troops from Kherson</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63573387</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maltalex</author><text>To those of you that are interested in following the war in greater detail, check out the daily updates [1] from the Institute For The Study Of War [2]. There&#x27;s even a map that updates daily [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.understandingwar.org&#x2F;backgrounder&#x2F;ukraine-conflict-updates" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.understandingwar.org&#x2F;backgrounder&#x2F;ukraine-confli...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Institute_for_the_Study_of_War" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Institute_for_the_Study_of_War</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storymaps.arcgis.com&#x2F;stories&#x2F;36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storymaps.arcgis.com&#x2F;stories&#x2F;36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Russia to Withdraw Troops from Kherson</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63573387</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Max-Ganz-II</author><text>Careful.<p>The Russian Government has made an announcement they are evacuating.<p>The Ukrainian military have stated they&#x27;re not seeing it actually happen on the ground.<p>They have been saying for some days they suspect it&#x27;s a trap, and Kherson has not really been evacuated.<p>This announcement could well be just more encouragement to dive in, from the Russians.</text></comment> |
9,606,872 | 9,606,906 | 1 | 2 | 9,605,505 | train | <story><title>Vibrant.js: Extract prominent colors from an image</title><url>https://jariz.github.io/vibrant.js/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exogen</author><text>Are you changing the code, or is it nondeterministic? I just reloaded and the last three pictures (cat, car, peacock) all had their vibrant color change.<p>Edit: Interestingly, it looks like it may sample the image at its visible size and not the full source image. If I resize my browser, triggering various media queries and thus image sizes, the dominant colors change after reloading.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vibrant.js: Extract prominent colors from an image</title><url>https://jariz.github.io/vibrant.js/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jgrowl</author><text>Neat! This reminds me of my fiancée&#x27;s project:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamy-screenshots.herokuapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamy-screenshots.herokuapp.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moneypenny&#x2F;steamy-screenshots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moneypenny&#x2F;steamy-screenshots</a><p>You can specify a steam username or game title and it will pull in screenshots and use the extracted colors to style the page.<p>I think she used a port of Panic&#x27;s iTunes album art color algorithm. I am not sure if she had heard of Vibrant.js or not.</text></comment> |
14,267,740 | 14,267,678 | 1 | 2 | 14,265,751 | train | <story><title>NASA: High Performance Fast Computing Challenge</title><url>https://herox.com/HPFCC</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gravypod</author><text>&gt; Compared to C or C++ it has the advantages of better complex floating point number support and better control of reproducible math results<p>No it does not have better complex types. C++11 added std::complex which is a standardized implementation of complex types for all data sizes.<p>&gt; And there is better possibility for compiler optimisation because the langauge semantics let the compiler know one array will not alias another.<p>These optimizations will only ever be made if Fortran has wide adoption.<p>These optimizations are probably already done in GCC&#x2F;Clang. Fortran also misses out on a HUGE optimization that can be provided by the existence of explicit inlining from C&#x2F;C++ and implicit optimizations from things like C++&#x2F;Rust. There&#x27;s also constexpr from C++ which, in C++17, will offer huge benefits to non-trivial code.<p>Most formulas can be expressed as an inline function or constexpr and as a result can, in some cases, see huge performance improvements from compiler optimizations.<p>&gt; Compared to Java, C#, or Python, or any other JVM language, it has the advantage of compiling to machine code for every relevant supercomputer and cluster architecture.<p>You can do this with Python. Or you could juse use Julia which is built for clustered environments, performance, IPC &amp; machine-to-machine communication.<p>&gt; And all of the well-tested high performance computing libraties are written in or support Fortran. The ecosystem is there.<p>So is with most of these languages. C++ is just as developed in this aspect, Julia is getting there but it&#x27;s already ready for most applications.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t assume things are done purely by inertia -- for big projects there are real reasons for the choices made!<p>I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m assuming these decisions are made because people in physics&#x2F;ME&#x2F;chemistry are not programmers and don&#x27;t know about the latest and greatest our field has to offer. It&#x27;s our fault for not advertising our successes to these people.</text></item><item><author>dzdt</author><text>Fortran often IS the best language for the job, when the job is scientific number crunching.<p>Compared to C or C++ it has the advantages of better complex floating point number support and better control of reproducible math results. And there is better possibility for compiler optimisation because the langauge semantics let the compiler know one array will not alias another.<p>Compared to Java, C#, or Python, or any other JVM language, it has the advantage of compiling to machine code for every relevant supercomputer and cluster architecture.<p>And all of the well-tested high performance computing libraries are written in or support Fortran. The ecosystem is there.<p>Don&#x27;t assume things are done purely by inertia -- for big projects there are real reasons for the choices made!</text></item><item><author>gravypod</author><text>There is sadly a huge amount of Fortran code bases in science. Not old. Not left over libraries. Not software written for a bygone age.<p>No... New software. Huge, mission critical, core project, software.<p>The best part: No documentation, no maintainer, and no migration plan.<p>Scientists think in terms of how Units of Science per Units of Work. Translating code, learning new languages, testing, checking correctness, software validation, bug testing, or even just using external (non-science) libraries yield a very low science&#x2F;work ratio.<p>Just opening a text editor, writing a language you already know, and calling it &quot;good enough&quot; is high science&#x2F;work.<p>Their method of software validation usually boils down to &quot;spit out your data, graph it, and see if it looks like what you expect&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s also this notion that &quot;Fortran is fast&quot; that MANY people hold for some reason. They don&#x27;t know about what kinds of modern compiler optimizations they&#x27;re missing out on and what new IPC frameworks are available. They know Fortran is fast, MPI is parallel, and that&#x27;s what they use.<p>Right now I&#x27;m looking at a codebase that is actively being developed and is written in Fortran. It&#x27;s about 48,466 lines in total. The source is about 2.3M in size. No one seems to have formula listings for it. I want to rewrite it but pulling apart fortran is very difficult.<p>It&#x27;s very scary that if I were to write the software in C that it would be seen as modern! This software is tax-payer funded and included in real time systems and production software.<p>(On that note if anyone is good at Fortran and can document the formulas in this software so I can rewrite them I&#x27;d be happy! Please email me)</text></item><item><author>mynegation</author><text>Putting up two TL;DR filters right away:
US citizens only, Fortran codebase :-&#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>semi-extrinsic</author><text>&gt; These optimizations will only ever be made if Fortran has wide adoption.<p>I think you completely fail to realize that Fortran does have wide adoption, and that there is a big market for commercial and open-source Fortran compilers, and that these optimizations have already been made.<p>I also don&#x27;t think you realize how much more productive a scientist is with a language that explicitly lacks all the bells and whistles of e.g. C++. Just like how many fiction authors prefer to use old and simple text editing software, hell even mechanical typewriters, while you would argue an iPad with keyboard cover has so much more functionality.<p>If you want some examples, go have a dig through the OpenFOAM C++ source code [1], and compare it to e.g. the Pencil Fortran code [2]. They&#x27;re both CFD codes, though the specializations are different. The former can best be characterized as &quot;templates all the way down&quot;, throwing you 800-line error messages when you miss a semicolon, while the latter is downright pleasant to install, use, understand and debug in comparison.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenFOAM&#x2F;OpenFOAM-dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpenFOAM&#x2F;OpenFOAM-dev</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pencil-code&#x2F;pencil-code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pencil-code&#x2F;pencil-code</a></text></comment> | <story><title>NASA: High Performance Fast Computing Challenge</title><url>https://herox.com/HPFCC</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gravypod</author><text>&gt; Compared to C or C++ it has the advantages of better complex floating point number support and better control of reproducible math results<p>No it does not have better complex types. C++11 added std::complex which is a standardized implementation of complex types for all data sizes.<p>&gt; And there is better possibility for compiler optimisation because the langauge semantics let the compiler know one array will not alias another.<p>These optimizations will only ever be made if Fortran has wide adoption.<p>These optimizations are probably already done in GCC&#x2F;Clang. Fortran also misses out on a HUGE optimization that can be provided by the existence of explicit inlining from C&#x2F;C++ and implicit optimizations from things like C++&#x2F;Rust. There&#x27;s also constexpr from C++ which, in C++17, will offer huge benefits to non-trivial code.<p>Most formulas can be expressed as an inline function or constexpr and as a result can, in some cases, see huge performance improvements from compiler optimizations.<p>&gt; Compared to Java, C#, or Python, or any other JVM language, it has the advantage of compiling to machine code for every relevant supercomputer and cluster architecture.<p>You can do this with Python. Or you could juse use Julia which is built for clustered environments, performance, IPC &amp; machine-to-machine communication.<p>&gt; And all of the well-tested high performance computing libraties are written in or support Fortran. The ecosystem is there.<p>So is with most of these languages. C++ is just as developed in this aspect, Julia is getting there but it&#x27;s already ready for most applications.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t assume things are done purely by inertia -- for big projects there are real reasons for the choices made!<p>I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m assuming these decisions are made because people in physics&#x2F;ME&#x2F;chemistry are not programmers and don&#x27;t know about the latest and greatest our field has to offer. It&#x27;s our fault for not advertising our successes to these people.</text></item><item><author>dzdt</author><text>Fortran often IS the best language for the job, when the job is scientific number crunching.<p>Compared to C or C++ it has the advantages of better complex floating point number support and better control of reproducible math results. And there is better possibility for compiler optimisation because the langauge semantics let the compiler know one array will not alias another.<p>Compared to Java, C#, or Python, or any other JVM language, it has the advantage of compiling to machine code for every relevant supercomputer and cluster architecture.<p>And all of the well-tested high performance computing libraries are written in or support Fortran. The ecosystem is there.<p>Don&#x27;t assume things are done purely by inertia -- for big projects there are real reasons for the choices made!</text></item><item><author>gravypod</author><text>There is sadly a huge amount of Fortran code bases in science. Not old. Not left over libraries. Not software written for a bygone age.<p>No... New software. Huge, mission critical, core project, software.<p>The best part: No documentation, no maintainer, and no migration plan.<p>Scientists think in terms of how Units of Science per Units of Work. Translating code, learning new languages, testing, checking correctness, software validation, bug testing, or even just using external (non-science) libraries yield a very low science&#x2F;work ratio.<p>Just opening a text editor, writing a language you already know, and calling it &quot;good enough&quot; is high science&#x2F;work.<p>Their method of software validation usually boils down to &quot;spit out your data, graph it, and see if it looks like what you expect&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s also this notion that &quot;Fortran is fast&quot; that MANY people hold for some reason. They don&#x27;t know about what kinds of modern compiler optimizations they&#x27;re missing out on and what new IPC frameworks are available. They know Fortran is fast, MPI is parallel, and that&#x27;s what they use.<p>Right now I&#x27;m looking at a codebase that is actively being developed and is written in Fortran. It&#x27;s about 48,466 lines in total. The source is about 2.3M in size. No one seems to have formula listings for it. I want to rewrite it but pulling apart fortran is very difficult.<p>It&#x27;s very scary that if I were to write the software in C that it would be seen as modern! This software is tax-payer funded and included in real time systems and production software.<p>(On that note if anyone is good at Fortran and can document the formulas in this software so I can rewrite them I&#x27;d be happy! Please email me)</text></item><item><author>mynegation</author><text>Putting up two TL;DR filters right away:
US citizens only, Fortran codebase :-&#x2F;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stonogo</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m assuming these decisions are made because<p>You&#x27;re assuming wrong. Feel free to join us in scientific computing and make your case. Many have, and yet we still use fortran alongside the newer stuff.<p>Perhaps people who disagree with you do so out of something other than ignorance. Just a thought.</text></comment> |
31,698,313 | 31,697,790 | 1 | 2 | 31,694,849 | train | <story><title>Write HTML Right</title><url>http://lofi.limo/blog/write-html-right</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shakna</author><text>Whilst the spec certainly allows you to ignore closing of a whole range of elements, it&#x27;s not necessarily the wisest of choices to make. The parser does actually get slower when you fail to close your tags in my experience.<p>Unscientific stats from a recent project where I noticed it:<p>+ Document is about 50,000 words in size. About 150 words to a paragraph element, on average.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 120ms in Firefox on Linux, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 480ms in Chrome on Linux, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 400ms in Firefox on Android, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 560ms in Chrome on Android, before initial render.<p>+ The time differences appeared to be linearly increasing, as the document grew from 20,000 to 50,000 words.<p>+ Curiously, Quirks Mode also increased the load times by about 250ms on Firefox and 150ms on Chrome. (Tried it just because I was surprised at the massive overhead of removing&#x2F;adding the tag endings.)<p>The most common place this was going to be opened was Chrome on Android, and a whopping half-second slower to first render is going to be noticeable to the end user. For some prettier mark up.<p>Whilst you can debate whether that increased latency actually affects the user, a decreased latency will always make people smile more. So including the end tags is a no-brainer. Feel free to write it without them - but you _might_ consider whether your target is appropriate for you to generate them before you serve up the content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niconii</author><text>I can&#x27;t verify your numbers. As far as I can tell, loading a ~900,000 word document with no other differences than including or excluding &lt;&#x2F;p&gt; has about the same load time, though there&#x27;s too much variance from load to load for me to really give definitive numbers.<p>Are you sure you converted it properly? I&#x27;d expect those kinds of numbers if your elements were very deeply nested by mistake (e.g. omitting tags where it&#x27;s <i>not</i> valid to do so), but I don&#x27;t see why leaving out &lt;&#x2F;p&gt; should be so slow.<p>Try these two pages:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niconii.github.io&#x2F;lorem-unclosed.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niconii.github.io&#x2F;lorem-unclosed.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niconii.github.io&#x2F;lorem-closed.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niconii.github.io&#x2F;lorem-closed.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Write HTML Right</title><url>http://lofi.limo/blog/write-html-right</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shakna</author><text>Whilst the spec certainly allows you to ignore closing of a whole range of elements, it&#x27;s not necessarily the wisest of choices to make. The parser does actually get slower when you fail to close your tags in my experience.<p>Unscientific stats from a recent project where I noticed it:<p>+ Document is about 50,000 words in size. About 150 words to a paragraph element, on average.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 120ms in Firefox on Linux, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 480ms in Chrome on Linux, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 400ms in Firefox on Android, before initial render.<p>+ Converting the entire thing to self-closing p elements added an overhead of about 560ms in Chrome on Android, before initial render.<p>+ The time differences appeared to be linearly increasing, as the document grew from 20,000 to 50,000 words.<p>+ Curiously, Quirks Mode also increased the load times by about 250ms on Firefox and 150ms on Chrome. (Tried it just because I was surprised at the massive overhead of removing&#x2F;adding the tag endings.)<p>The most common place this was going to be opened was Chrome on Android, and a whopping half-second slower to first render is going to be noticeable to the end user. For some prettier mark up.<p>Whilst you can debate whether that increased latency actually affects the user, a decreased latency will always make people smile more. So including the end tags is a no-brainer. Feel free to write it without them - but you _might_ consider whether your target is appropriate for you to generate them before you serve up the content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>myfonj</author><text>Well this sounds like really interesting observation. May I ask where exactly were the original closing tags located and how the stripped source looked like? I can imagine there _might_ be some differences among differently formatted code: e.g. I&#x27;d expect<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;Content&lt;p&gt;Content[EOF fig1]
</code></pre>
to be (slightly) slower, than<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;Content&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Content&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;[EOF fig2]
</code></pre>
(most likely because of some &quot;backtracking&quot; when hitting `&lt;p[&gt;]`), or<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;Content&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Content&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;[EOF fig3]
</code></pre>
(with that that small insignificant `\n` text node between paragraph nodes), what should be possibly faster than &quot;the worst scenarios&quot;:<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;Content
&lt;p&gt;Content[EOF fig4a]
</code></pre>
or even<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;
Content
&lt;p&gt;
Content
[EOF fig4b]
</code></pre>
with paragraph text nodes `[&quot;Content\n&quot;,&quot;Content]&quot;` &#x2F; `[&quot;\nContent\n&quot;,&quot;\nContent\n]&quot;`, where the &quot;\n&quot; must be also preserved in the DOM but due white-space collapsing rules not present in the render tree (if not overridden by some non-default CSS) but still with backtracking, that<p><pre><code> &lt;p&gt;Content
&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Content
&lt;&#x2F;p&gt;[EOF fig5]
</code></pre>
should eliminate (again, similarly to fig2 vs fig1).<p>(Sorry for wildly biased guesswork, worthless without measurements.)</text></comment> |
26,577,099 | 26,576,504 | 1 | 3 | 26,560,544 | train | <story><title>The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter</title><url>https://dannybate.com/2021/03/15/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-latin-neuter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgwil2</author><text>Surprised the article didn&#x27;t mention the Spanish definite article <i>lo</i>, which can be paired with a masculine adjective to form a nominal phrase meaning the abstract notion of the adjective: <i>lo mismo</i> - the same [thing], <i>lo bueno</i> - the good, that which is good. My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well.<p>Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or controversial?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sniffnoy</author><text>I didn&#x27;t downvote, but if it&#x27;s being downvoted, it&#x27;s probably because the article <i>does</i> mention &quot;lo&quot;, although only in the context of Asturian, not standard Spanish.<p>&gt; Distinct but unofficial Romance languages like [...] Asturian (spoken in Asturias, a part of Spain) seem to have definite articles (equivalent to English the) for three genders, not two. Asturian has el for masculine nouns, la for feminine and lo for those nouns termed ‘neuter’. [...] The key question is whether these supposed neuter definite articles demonstrate the existence of a neuter gender. Again, sadly, the answer is no. These definite articles and the nouns they are used with (no matter what their origins) seem not to constitute a neuter gender, but rather to signify that the noun is something abstract or a physical mass – that is, an indivisible substance, like water or gold. [...] Why does this contradict the existence of a neuter gender? Because we find this “mass gender” (Harmon 2007) used with nouns that were not neuter in Latin, and because nouns in these languages can appear both with and without the feature, according to whether they have a mass meaning or not. This is therefore not a grammatical feature on the same level as the masculine and feminine genders; instead, the mass gender is a feature of nouns determined by semantics – to what sort of thing the noun refers.<p>If you wanted to talk about &quot;lo&quot; in standard Spanish, it would make more sense to start from the starting point of what&#x27;s discussed in the article -- e.g., &quot;The &#x27;lo&#x27; construction actually exists in standard Spanish as well, although it&#x27;s more restricted than in Asturian; rather than being used with any mass noun, it&#x27;s used to mean...&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter</title><url>https://dannybate.com/2021/03/15/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-latin-neuter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgwil2</author><text>Surprised the article didn&#x27;t mention the Spanish definite article <i>lo</i>, which can be paired with a masculine adjective to form a nominal phrase meaning the abstract notion of the adjective: <i>lo mismo</i> - the same [thing], <i>lo bueno</i> - the good, that which is good. My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well.<p>Edit: why on earth is this being downvoted? Seriously confused - is something here wrong or controversial?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumasiotes</author><text>&gt; My understanding is this derives from the Latin neuter as well.<p>Does it? Spanish articles derive from Latin <i>ille &#x2F; illa &#x2F; illud</i> [&quot;that&quot;, as contrasted with &quot;this&quot;]. The neuter (nominative) form is <i>illud</i>. It is not obvious how this would have resulted in the form <i>lo</i>. Wiktionary suggests ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;lo#Spanish" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;lo#Spanish</a> ) that it derives from the masculine form <i>illum</i>, which makes much more phonological sense. (-m was already so weak in Latin that a syllable ending in -m completely disappeared when followed by a vowel.)</text></comment> |
33,095,144 | 33,094,600 | 1 | 3 | 33,093,941 | train | <story><title>I don’t believe in sprints</title><url>https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-don’t-believe-in-sprints/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Sprints and planning are useful for organizations that attach a lot of value to planning and deadlines. It creates a lot of additional work and pressure, as you say, but I can also imagine that for certain types of organizations that may be worth it (eg when doing client work on a fixed budget with strict deadlines).<p>Other than that, I fully agree that Kanban is a great middle ground, as it’s low overhead and focuses on prioritization and flexibility rather than planning and burndown charts and whatnot.</text></item><item><author>gbro3n</author><text>Kanban is the best middle ground IMO. I agree sprints are a distraction. The planning and ceremonies alone sap time. Sprints are really just a form of pressure. In my experience the stories estimating is not accurate enough to set up a predictable sprint, and the inevitable deviation from the plan just creates additional work to audit and adjust, along with a sense of failure around what has often been a productive 2 weeks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elboru</author><text>&gt; Sprints are really just a form of pressure<p>I’ve felt the opposite. My team switched from “Scrum” to “Kamban”. Then after a few months the sensation of having an endless pile of cards, without a time frame, felt overwhelming.<p>In the other hand, having a short lived cycle used to help me manage my time. If for any reason one day I was not able to accomplish much, I knew I still had a few more days to compensate. The same was true for the opposite, I could be really productive a few days and then I could relax for the rest of the sprint.<p>That workflow really worked for me. With Kanaban I feel the pressure to always be “productive”, because I don’t have a clear reference on how “relaxed” I’m (or not), during the week or month.<p>Maybe I just need to find a different reference. I guess my point is that sprints don’t necessarily mean pressure for everyone.</text></comment> | <story><title>I don’t believe in sprints</title><url>https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-don’t-believe-in-sprints/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Sprints and planning are useful for organizations that attach a lot of value to planning and deadlines. It creates a lot of additional work and pressure, as you say, but I can also imagine that for certain types of organizations that may be worth it (eg when doing client work on a fixed budget with strict deadlines).<p>Other than that, I fully agree that Kanban is a great middle ground, as it’s low overhead and focuses on prioritization and flexibility rather than planning and burndown charts and whatnot.</text></item><item><author>gbro3n</author><text>Kanban is the best middle ground IMO. I agree sprints are a distraction. The planning and ceremonies alone sap time. Sprints are really just a form of pressure. In my experience the stories estimating is not accurate enough to set up a predictable sprint, and the inevitable deviation from the plan just creates additional work to audit and adjust, along with a sense of failure around what has often been a productive 2 weeks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway4aday</author><text>You can value planning and deadlines and still not do sprints. The key is that whoever is managing the project, whether it&#x27;s a dedicated PM or just the lead dev, needs to be fully engaged with the team and understand the work that is being done. Cards (beyond a basic todo list and record of who&#x27;s doing what), points, sprints, standups, backlogs all of these are symptoms of bad communication and a lack of an overall understanding of the project. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you can put it in to practice, this means that the person leading&#x2F;managing the team needs to understand software development as well as the current tech and tools being used. There is a place for non-technical managers but it is outside of the software development team where they act as an interface between dev and the other departments or interests in the company.</text></comment> |
32,046,331 | 32,045,869 | 1 | 3 | 32,036,474 | train | <story><title>Is the smart grid all hot air?</title><url>https://austinvernon.site/blog/smartgrid.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iancarroll</author><text>&gt; Most utilities are switching customers to smart meters that allow remote disconnection of electricity.<p>I learned about this 3-6 months ago when PG&amp;E erroneously remotely disconnected a large number of people in the Bay Area, including my apartment. I walked outside my unit and the entire building had power except for me -- the maintenance team was mystified and said the meter specific to my apartment reported it had been remotely killed.<p>It was impossible to figure out what had happened, and after many hours of vague outage status messages, I was finally able to reach the billing department who said they had been fixing this issue all day, and they remotely reactivated my meter as I was still on the phone with them (they had a whole disclaimer about turning it on remotely too).<p>I got a vague letter and $100 statement credit a month later that admitted an issue accidentally cut off a lot of meters, but no further details on how or why. Very strange experience and made me question the whole smart meter thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is the smart grid all hot air?</title><url>https://austinvernon.site/blog/smartgrid.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danans</author><text>&gt; Small Wind Turbines<p>&gt; Car companies have been relentlessly making electric motors (which generate electricity if spun backward) smaller and cheaper. A small wind turbine only has to be cheaper than retail electricity rates.<p>It likely won&#x27;t be cheaper. Small wind turbines have very high levelized cost of energy because:<p>- The wind at the lower heights they are built at is multiple times weaker and also less consistent than the wind that large turbines can access.<p>- The power output of a wind turbine is a function of swept area, which is the square of blade length and therefore very limited with small turbines.<p>No matter the efficiency of the generator it can&#x27;t make power that the blades can&#x27;t capture.<p>Small wind turbines only make sense in off-grid setups in areas with poor solar resources.</text></comment> |
12,154,682 | 12,154,398 | 1 | 2 | 12,153,527 | train | <story><title>Super-hard metal 'four times tougher than titanium'</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36855705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Aelinsaar</author><text>Your own body basically goes through a skeleton every 7 years, although it&#x27;s a gradual procedure of course. Your bones are constantly being eaten away, and replaced as part of their maintenance. It&#x27;s truly amazing, but the secret is definitely, &quot;We can rebuild it&quot; not &quot;Unbreakable&quot;.</text></item><item><author>andyidsinga</author><text>&quot;Conventional knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and tear.&quot;<p>this is really amazing to me! you put metallic, designed-to-last object inside an organic blend of tissue and bone and human activity and in 10 years its worn out. So much opportunity in the area!<p>Along the same lines, interesting how delicate our bodies are in the short term but rather durable in the long term.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aluhut</author><text>We should adjust our justice systems to this cycle. You can sit in jail for max 7years. After that you are considered a different person. The justice apparatus needs to use that 7 years to form this new person in a way that it can behave according to the outside system.</text></comment> | <story><title>Super-hard metal 'four times tougher than titanium'</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36855705</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Aelinsaar</author><text>Your own body basically goes through a skeleton every 7 years, although it&#x27;s a gradual procedure of course. Your bones are constantly being eaten away, and replaced as part of their maintenance. It&#x27;s truly amazing, but the secret is definitely, &quot;We can rebuild it&quot; not &quot;Unbreakable&quot;.</text></item><item><author>andyidsinga</author><text>&quot;Conventional knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and tear.&quot;<p>this is really amazing to me! you put metallic, designed-to-last object inside an organic blend of tissue and bone and human activity and in 10 years its worn out. So much opportunity in the area!<p>Along the same lines, interesting how delicate our bodies are in the short term but rather durable in the long term.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dghughes</author><text> I thought that&#x27;s why coral was used for bone implants it&#x27;s first shaped like the part needed then once implanted your own bone cells gradually take over.<p>Maybe it was just a trial I saw to see if it worked or maybe it can only be used for small patches not entire sections of bone like a femur or hip joint.</text></comment> |
20,150,284 | 20,150,088 | 1 | 3 | 20,145,630 | train | <story><title>Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.<p>If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com</a>) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.<p>If you guys have any feedback... I&#x27;d really appreciate it. We&#x27;re just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!</text></item><item><author>anonu</author><text>One thing I&#x27;ve had to remind myself of - coming from a CS&#x2F;Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I&#x27;m guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don&#x27;t.<p>To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.<p>To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that &quot;just work&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarejunba</author><text>When I looked into this a few months ago, your pricing didn’t make sense to me. You’re saving developer time, but charging on user time. So I’ve got 800 people in this org and I could either pay a shit ton to use retool or just build it from scratch. The difference between both of these is my time so it makes sense I’d pay you for that.<p>That made it not viable for me. Building from scratch was way cheaper with Upwork. Anyway, Product was cool.</text></comment> | <story><title>Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/salesforce-is-buying-data-visualization-company-tableau-for-15-7b-in-all-stock-deal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>As an engineer, this has really fascinated me. Tableau, Salesforce, Excel, etc. were things that never made a significant amount of sense to me. I thought mostly of Salesforce as a CRUD app (which it is!), Tableau as d3 with nicer ergonomics, and Excel as... well... something I never understood.<p>If this is something you guys are interested in, I started a company called Retool (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com</a>) that is essentially Excel for developers. Imagine if every Excel cell — instead of being a cell — were instead a React component. So you drag and drop these components around, and you can connect them to any back-end datasource (postgres, APIs, etc.). So you could drag on a table and have it pull data from `select * from users` from postgres, and then drag on a button and have it `POST` the selected row back to your API, in order to ban a particular user. The goal is to let end users build CRUD apps (like Salesforce) around their existing datasources quickly.<p>If you guys have any feedback... I&#x27;d really appreciate it. We&#x27;re just starting out, and really curious to get any feedback from developers. Thanks!</text></item><item><author>anonu</author><text>One thing I&#x27;ve had to remind myself of - coming from a CS&#x2F;Engineering background similar to most folks on HN (I&#x27;m guessing) - is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don&#x27;t.<p>To me, Salesforce looks like a big shared Excel file with a bunch of sheets. Tableau... well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.<p>To others, this tech is just magical. Pay the money, do the integration and it just works... And clearly people will pay a lot of money for things that &quot;just work&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enlyth</author><text>I would have to delve deeper to give actually useful feedback, but I wanted to say from a presentational point of view, it looks great, well done for putting something like this together</text></comment> |
38,222,198 | 38,221,806 | 1 | 2 | 38,221,121 | train | <story><title>Missing windows discovered on U.S.-bound plane after departing London</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/11/10/1212144515/plane-missing-window-london-us</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danielvf</author><text>Just to add some color on this from a lighting point of view. The film lights used look like Maxibrutes[1], which are 12,000 watts of old school, non-LED power per fixture. Looks like they used six lights, so 72,000 watts.<p>Now in a past life, I&#x27;ve stood a similar distance in front of a giant, super diffuse 72,000 watt light, while wearing full body welding protective gear&#x2F;goggles, and it was cooking hot right through all the leather gear.<p>However, this looks even worse - it looks like they are using very tight beams on those fixtures. From the photos on the ground with the lights, it looks like only three and half windows are getting lit up. That&#x27;s an insane amount of power being concentrated into a small space, and yeah, I&#x27;d believe it could wreck some damage.<p>(Hah, just read the AAIB report[2], yes, they are indeed Maxibrutes)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filmgear.net&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product&amp;product_id=841" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filmgear.net&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product&amp;pro...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;6544b3089e05fd0014be7c9b&#x2F;S2-2023__Airbus_A321-253NX_G-OATW.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;6544b3089e05f...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Missing windows discovered on U.S.-bound plane after departing London</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/11/10/1212144515/plane-missing-window-london-us</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>OJFord</author><text>The linked AAIB report is pretty interesting, and surprisingly easy reading.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;6544b3089e05fd0014be7c9b&#x2F;S2-2023__Airbus_A321-253NX_G-OATW.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;media&#x2F;6544b3089e05f...</a><p>Also interesting from the article:<p>&gt; An engineer and co-pilot went back to take a look at the window<p>Is that the same person? Or would they ordinarily be flying with 2&#x2F;3 pilots and also an engineer? Or did they just happen to have an engineer among the nine passengers on board to call upon like they might a doctor?<p>Although, with 11 crew and 9 passengers, maybe they do just routinely fly with a doctor, engineer, dentist, therapist, ...?! (It&#x27;s not actually stated, but seems like maybe it is the film studio or whatever&#x27;s plane, not that it just happened to be loaned out for filming beforehand. So maybe a funny crew list is more likely than otherwise.)</text></comment> |
15,230,229 | 15,230,418 | 1 | 2 | 15,226,110 | train | <story><title>Mal – Make a Lisp, in 68 languages</title><url>https://github.com/kanaka/mal#mal---make-a-lisp</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chc4</author><text>I got decently far in my implementation, but probably wouldn&#x27;t suggest you use this. The actual guide is pretty sloppily written and doesn&#x27;t outline all that much, along with not explicitly saying what you have to define at each step. It doesn&#x27;t define what the different cases of the mal Lisp value type should be, for example, or when to implement pretty much all of the &quot;optional&quot; extensions it mentions in the first or second chapter. Most of the forms in each chapter get a sentence explanation of what they do, at most, and I hit several snags where I read an explanation and thought I implemented it correctly, only to find out there was something subtly wrong with the obvious implementation.<p>Also, writing a Lisp in a purely functional language isn&#x27;t the best :X Things like by-reference function environments and atoms are hard to implement if you&#x27;re not Haskell, at least if you try in the method that the guide outlines...</text></comment> | <story><title>Mal – Make a Lisp, in 68 languages</title><url>https://github.com/kanaka/mal#mal---make-a-lisp</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sassy_samurai</author><text>There is a similar project called &quot;Build Your Own Lisp&quot;[0] (BYOL), which is a book that walks one through making a Lisp in C. Has anybody here done BYOL? How does it compare to MAL? If you had to choose one to learn how to create a Lisp, which would you choose?<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buildyourownlisp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buildyourownlisp.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
25,509,100 | 25,509,435 | 1 | 3 | 25,494,583 | train | <story><title>Underwater Roundabout in the Faroe Islands</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55195390</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>booi</author><text>That still doesn’t change the fact that this is a huge investment for 50,000 people. Those tunnels will likely never pay for themselves</text></item><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>From what I&#x27;ve gathered from reading other articles before this one, the weather can get pretty choppy at times and when that happens those islands become cut off. So it might not be a case of tunnels being less expensive but rather tunnels being more reliable.</text></item><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Is there a geological property that makes tunnel less expansive to build in Faroe Islands ? More than 50km of tunnels for 50000 inhabitants seems huge (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tunnels_of_the_Faroe_Islands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tunnels_of_the_Faroe_I...</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lqet</author><text>To put that into perspective: the tunnel cost roughly 175M euros, that&#x27;s 3.5k EUR per inhabitant. I don&#x27;t find this excessive. From the maps, it looks like basically <i>every</i> inhabitant benefits from those tunnels. Even if it just saves 100 EUR in gas per year and inhabitant, the tunnel is a societal net gain after about 35 years.<p>Also consider this:<p>&gt; On the Eysturoy side of the tunnel house prices increased by 31% between 2019 and 2020 and have doubled between 2015-2020 [0]<p>Additionally, the tunnels are tolled [0]:<p>&gt; Construction costs for the tunnel are being recouped through toll fees. Tolls start at 75 DKK for small cars (up to 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb)) between Tórshavn and Eysturoy, and 25 DKK for local traffic between Saltnes (near Runavík) and Strendur. This price is for people who have a subscription (hald). Without subscription the price is 175 DKK between Eysturoy to Streymoy and 125 DKK between the two arms of Skálafjørður.<p>75 DKK are around 10 EUR. With an estimated 6,000 cars per day, thats 60,000 EUR per day. At this rate, the tunnel will have paid for itself (if maintenance cost is excluded) after 8 years.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eysturoyartunnilin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eysturoyartunnilin</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Underwater Roundabout in the Faroe Islands</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55195390</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>booi</author><text>That still doesn’t change the fact that this is a huge investment for 50,000 people. Those tunnels will likely never pay for themselves</text></item><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>From what I&#x27;ve gathered from reading other articles before this one, the weather can get pretty choppy at times and when that happens those islands become cut off. So it might not be a case of tunnels being less expensive but rather tunnels being more reliable.</text></item><item><author>Rexxar</author><text>Is there a geological property that makes tunnel less expansive to build in Faroe Islands ? More than 50km of tunnels for 50000 inhabitants seems huge (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tunnels_of_the_Faroe_Islands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tunnels_of_the_Faroe_I...</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xvedejas</author><text>The Norwegian city of Tromsø has just 70k people, and a whole network of underground tunnels with two roundabouts. It&#x27;s very useful given the weather, and less destructive to the island than new overland thoroughfares would have been. If that had been a failure, I&#x27;m not sure why it would be repeated.</text></comment> |
10,996,884 | 10,997,113 | 1 | 2 | 10,996,147 | train | <story><title>San Francisco Bubble</title><url>http://blog.larrold.com/2016/01/29/san-francisco-bubble/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbooth</author><text>Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven&#x27;t, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn&#x27;t need to bother.<p>So he&#x27;s doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it&#x27;s actually a sustainable business, to boot.<p>Lastly, there&#x27;s absolutely no need to get so personal -- if his article offended you, discuss the article.</text></item><item><author>YuriNiyazov</author><text>Yea no kidding.<p>&quot;AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising.&quot;<p>Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.</text></item><item><author>thelarry</author><text>I&#x27;m very hypocritical.</text></item><item><author>philfrasty</author><text>&quot;Engineers are particularly spoiled. They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work...&quot; &lt;---&gt; (on the about page) &quot;...Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical...&quot; ???</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>YuriNiyazov</author><text>See, whether a startup is silly or not is an opinion. I happen to have an opinion that adtech is evil. Whether it has a side benefit like allowing &quot;content&quot; to exist is tangential.<p>I <i>usually</i> keep that opinion to myself because it&#x27;s not a popular one, but in this particular subthread we are not discussing the article, we are discussing the author who volunteered his &quot;I am very hypocritical&quot; comment.<p>Elsewhere in this comment thread I discuss the article.</text></comment> | <story><title>San Francisco Bubble</title><url>http://blog.larrold.com/2016/01/29/san-francisco-bubble/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbooth</author><text>Unless microtransactions for content take off, and they haven&#x27;t, ad tech is necessary to incentivize content on the web. 90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in. Hacker News, being one big ad for ycombinator, doesn&#x27;t need to bother.<p>So he&#x27;s doing a real thing that provides real value to the web. And it&#x27;s actually a sustainable business, to boot.<p>Lastly, there&#x27;s absolutely no need to get so personal -- if his article offended you, discuss the article.</text></item><item><author>YuriNiyazov</author><text>Yea no kidding.<p>&quot;AppNexus helps brands connect with consumers, empowering agencies and advertisers with a uniquely powerful approach to programmatic online advertising.&quot;<p>Thanks for working on Ad Tech, the very thing that powers this bubble by trading attention as a commodity. Other people work on silly startups, but this shit is akin to HFT.</text></item><item><author>thelarry</author><text>I&#x27;m very hypocritical.</text></item><item><author>philfrasty</author><text>&quot;Engineers are particularly spoiled. They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work...&quot; &lt;---&gt; (on the about page) &quot;...Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical...&quot; ???</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ktRolster</author><text>&quot;90% of the websites you read could not exist without the ecosystem that appnexus is a big player in.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s ok. The internet would be better off without most junk websites, and the ones I like, I&#x27;m willing to pay for.</text></comment> |
6,859,933 | 6,859,712 | 1 | 2 | 6,859,232 | train | <story><title>Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bgp-hijacking-belarus-iceland/?cid=co15315354</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PhantomGremlin</author><text>Bah. Real simple cure for this nonsense. Too bad it&#x27;s unlikely to happen.<p>Back when Usenet mattered, there used to be something called a &quot;Usenet Death Penalty&quot;. What we need here is an &quot;Autonomous System Death Penalty&quot;.<p>BGP works between &quot;Autonomous Systems&quot; (aka AS). ISPs almost invariably are. Bigger companies usually are. Anyone who wants to be independent of their upstream IP connection gets an AS number. The only way some ISP in Belarus can interfere with your IP packets is to announce over BGP that packets should be sent to their AS.<p>So anyone who was affected by some rogue ISP in Belarus should simply tell their BGP routers to totally ignore anything from that AS. Forever. And if they&#x27;re a govt agency they simply tell Comcast, Verizon, AT&amp;T, etc to drop any and all packets from that AS. To anywhere! And if it&#x27;s a govt agency making this &quot;request&quot;, there&#x27;s a good chance that the Tier 1 IP providers will comply.<p>Done. That podunk ISP in Belarus has now been disconnected from a large part of the Internet. And good luck with them trying to get Verizon etc to undo that.<p>So, what the death penalty means is &quot;you get to intentionally mess around with routing just once, then you go away forever&quot;. Now that podunk ISP can either go out of business or it can go begging IANA for a new AS number. And since ICANN (which operates IANA) answers (at least for now) to the US Dept of Commerce, it might not be too easy to get a new AS.<p>Yes I know the propeller-head nerds who operate the &quot;technical&quot; Internet would immediately think my proposal is much too harsh. But, ultimately, nerds need to understand that sometimes things are done for &quot;political&quot; rather than &quot;technical&quot; reasons. And the managers who sign the nerds&#x27; paychecks are political creatures; they almost invariably aren&#x27;t nerds.</text></comment> | <story><title>Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bgp-hijacking-belarus-iceland/?cid=co15315354</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r0h1n</author><text>Here&#x27;s the post at Renesys upon which this article is based: <a href="http://www.renesys.com/2013/11/mitm-internet-hijacking/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renesys.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;mitm-internet-hijacking&#x2F;</a><p>FWIW, I found the renesys post more informative than the Wired article (though on a standalone basis it is pretty good too).</text></comment> |
21,010,620 | 21,008,455 | 1 | 2 | 21,007,243 | train | <story><title>Repo companies have passively scanned & uploaded locations of 9B license plates</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>The fundamental problem is that technology has made collecting this information too cheap. Instead of manual entry and uploads, it&#x27;s automated with essentially zero marginal cost over and above putting the cameras on cars or buildings.<p>The solution is to make license plate collection expensive again - allow people to install license plate covers that people can manually lift to read the plate and automatically retract when the car is started.</text></item><item><author>tomatotomato37</author><text>I think the scariest part of is in the first part of this; the collection of data was <i>voluntarily</i> crowdsourced by repo men all acting as independent actors. While right now there is still a centralized corporation that can be targeted to stop the practice, I can see a future where this stuff becomes decentralized in the same lieu as software piracy sites and their infrastructure is done today, maintained by &quot;helpful&quot; repomen&#x2F;investigators that each have a pervasive interest in maintaining such a resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rlucas</author><text>I&#x27;m a huge proponent of this core idea -- that networked technologies have changed the cost structure that underpins our 20th century implicit understandings about privacy, and that one stopgap approach is to rework the economics of surveillance in a way that re-approximates the cost structure under which our legal and moral consensus was developed.<p>For example, it was never possible to read, secretly and automatically, in bulk, everyone&#x27;s correspondence in the 20th century. With email, it&#x27;s a commonplace that governments do it routinely. Encryption doesn&#x27;t make it impossible to figure out what someone&#x27;s corresponding about, it just makes it more expensive (as the investigator may need to devote resources to shoulder-surfing or other means instead of auto-collection). It used to be fairly expensive to have to go to the post office and steam open an envelope, copy it, and seal it back up without detection.<p>Likewise for various other surveillance technologies, such as the ALPR&#x2F;ANPRs. The people who (still) write our laws were raised watching TV cops listen for a radio APB on a license plate. For their intuitions about this matter to be valid, it should be roughly as costly in manpower, time, and attention to do a &quot;live alert&quot; on a license plate today as it was for those TV cops.<p>A pen register used to be an actual box you put at the central office on a specific bad guy of interest, not an excuse to sweep up and cross-correlate every dialed number ever. Again, several orders of magnitude cost difference here, in a way where the difference of degree (cost) becomes a difference of kind.<p>The big danger IMO is when you have well-meaning legislators and jurists opining about network-enabled privacy intrusions using intuitions and examples formed with 20th century cost expectations.<p>Eventually those expectations will need to reflect current technology, but in the meantime, anything that can be done to raise the cost of pervasive surveillance is IMO a good thing as it buys time for legal and moral intuitions (much slower rate of change) to adapt.</text></comment> | <story><title>Repo companies have passively scanned & uploaded locations of 9B license plates</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne879z/i-tracked-someone-with-license-plate-readers-drn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>The fundamental problem is that technology has made collecting this information too cheap. Instead of manual entry and uploads, it&#x27;s automated with essentially zero marginal cost over and above putting the cameras on cars or buildings.<p>The solution is to make license plate collection expensive again - allow people to install license plate covers that people can manually lift to read the plate and automatically retract when the car is started.</text></item><item><author>tomatotomato37</author><text>I think the scariest part of is in the first part of this; the collection of data was <i>voluntarily</i> crowdsourced by repo men all acting as independent actors. While right now there is still a centralized corporation that can be targeted to stop the practice, I can see a future where this stuff becomes decentralized in the same lieu as software piracy sites and their infrastructure is done today, maintained by &quot;helpful&quot; repomen&#x2F;investigators that each have a pervasive interest in maintaining such a resource.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dole</author><text>Already beat you: local laws that require a <i>valid</i> plate to be visible at all times when parked on public streets. (Private drives&#x2F;businesses subject to jurisdiction.)<p>There aren&#x27;t just repo men scanning in my local area; police cruisers are equipped with automatic scanners, there&#x27;s numerous scanners posted on traffic poles (with silly blue and red flashing lights as a CYA) throughout the metro area, etc.</text></comment> |
34,148,387 | 34,148,430 | 1 | 2 | 34,148,150 | train | <story><title>Iranian women compete at chess tournament without hijab: media reports</title><url>https://www.newarab.com/news/iranian-women-compete-chess-tournament-without-hijab</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>obituary_latte</author><text>I feel proud as a human to see these brave women standing up for their rights and wish them and their fellow countrypeople all of the success with no bloodshed. It&#x27;s time we move out of the age of religious compulsion on all fronts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Iranian women compete at chess tournament without hijab: media reports</title><url>https://www.newarab.com/news/iranian-women-compete-chess-tournament-without-hijab</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>T-A</author><text>I hope they have good home insurance.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-middle-east-63847173" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;world-middle-east-63847173</a></text></comment> |
15,060,126 | 15,060,192 | 1 | 2 | 15,059,795 | train | <story><title>Latency matters</title><url>https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emerongi</author><text>Latency is the reason I just can not use some editors, most notably Atom. You get used to it after a while, but it&#x27;s not fun.<p>I remember when I used IntelliJ&#x27;s product line for a good while and then opened up Vim. I was dumbfounded that I somehow had not noticed that IntelliJ was slow. It&#x27;s fast enough - not Atom - but Vim was amazing next to it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Latency matters</title><url>https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/latency-matters.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Alan Kay once said something like &quot;There should no more be a delay between pressing a key and something happening on a computer than on a piano.&quot;</text></comment> |
8,507,471 | 8,507,413 | 1 | 2 | 8,506,771 | train | <story><title>Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor</title><url>https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/wikipedia-needs-an-ide-not-a-wysiwyg-editor-7acd85b582c8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tottenhm</author><text>&quot;Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago.&quot;<p>To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn&#x27;t have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make it less rewarding to participate (e.g. <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;featuredstory&#x2F;520446&#x2F;the-dec...</a> ).<p>(Edit: Not trying to be negative -- the suggestions in the article sound cool anyway.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alialkhatib</author><text>I was also somewhat skeptical of the author&#x27;s claim that the barrier to entry for Wikipedia editors was the editor itself. I&#x27;ve read a few papers concluding that Wikipedia contributions are declining because of the community pushing out people who don&#x27;t understand the <i>many</i> rules that have been developed[1], or in other cases because editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over[2]. Meanwhile, I haven&#x27;t read anything concluding that the editing environment was a strong deterrent (although I haven&#x27;t been looking, so I could be willfully blind).<p>Edit: <i>more</i> articles identifying interpersonal friction as the leading factor deterring would-be editors [3,4]. At this point I&#x27;m suspicious of the author&#x27;s due diligence in studying the problem, making the proposed solution more dubious.<p>[1] Suh, Bongwon, et al. &quot;The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia.&quot; Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM, 2009.<p>[2] Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, Dan R. Cosley, and Geri Gay. &quot;What&#x27;s mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring.&quot; Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.<p>[3] Kittur, Aniket, and Robert E. Kraut. &quot;Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination.&quot; Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2008.<p>[4] Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. &quot;Don&#x27;t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work.&quot; Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. ACM, 2011.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor</title><url>https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/wikipedia-needs-an-ide-not-a-wysiwyg-editor-7acd85b582c8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tottenhm</author><text>&quot;Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago.&quot;<p>To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn&#x27;t have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make it less rewarding to participate (e.g. <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&#x2F;featuredstory&#x2F;520446&#x2F;the-dec...</a> ).<p>(Edit: Not trying to be negative -- the suggestions in the article sound cool anyway.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bjelkeman-again</author><text>As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn&#x27;t. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.</text></comment> |
15,837,388 | 15,837,356 | 1 | 3 | 15,836,755 | train | <story><title>Termination of StartCom business</title><url>https://www.startcomca.com/index/News/newDetail?date=20171116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pferde</author><text>Apparently, they also sent out an e-mail with the same text to their customers, with an addendum that they are going to try to get a certificate for each customer with other CAs, and that to opt-out, one has to send them an e-mail.<p>I found that addendum quite strange. Such thing should be opt-in, in my opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nvr219</author><text>I got the email. Here is the full text:<p>This is an automatically generated email, please do not reply.<p>Dear customer,<p>As you are surely aware, the browser makers distrusted StartCom around a year ago and therefore all the end entity certificates newly issued by StartCom are not trusted by default in browsers.<p>The browsers imposed some conditions in order for the certificates to be re-accepted. While StartCom believes that these conditions have been met, it appears there are still certain difficulties forthcoming. Considering this situation, the owners of StartCom have decided to terminate the company as a Certification Authority as mentioned in Startcom´s website.<p>StartCom will stop issuing new certificates starting from January 1st, 2018 and will provide only CRL and OCSP services for two more years.<p>StartCom would like to thank you for your support during this difficult time.<p>StartCom is contacting some other CAs to provide you with the certificates needed. In case you don´t want us to provide you an alternative, please, contact us at [email protected]<p>Please let us know if you need any further assistance with the transition process. We deeply apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause.<p>Best regards,<p>StartCom Certification Authority</text></comment> | <story><title>Termination of StartCom business</title><url>https://www.startcomca.com/index/News/newDetail?date=20171116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pferde</author><text>Apparently, they also sent out an e-mail with the same text to their customers, with an addendum that they are going to try to get a certificate for each customer with other CAs, and that to opt-out, one has to send them an e-mail.<p>I found that addendum quite strange. Such thing should be opt-in, in my opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Matt3o12_</author><text>Thank you very much for pointing out about the opt-out crap. I also got the email but I didn’t bother to read past the first paragraph because I stopped using them as soon as I switched to cloudlfare for my certificates.<p>I always hated their interface but as a broke high school student I couldn’t afford to have a paid certificate. Thankfully we have Let’s Encrypt now</text></comment> |
29,923,640 | 29,923,147 | 1 | 3 | 29,920,920 | train | <story><title>The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3693773/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>I find this to be the most telling stat:<p>&quot;In a few cases (N &lt; 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained.&quot;<p>So roughly 5% (&lt;5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest&#x2F;abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers&#x2F;brothers. His opinion was that our society is not ready to deal with this, that such abuse is far more common than anyone is willing to admit. He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. The OP study seems in line with his numbers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fullstop</author><text>My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being impartial because of the nature of the case. If you were uncomfortable discussing the matter, you could ask to be taken aside to discuss without the others in the room hearing it.<p>Out of a few dozen people, seven women left the room to explain why they could not be impartial, some of them returning in tears. They weren&#x27;t gone for a short while, either, many of them took 20 or 30 minutes before returning to the court room. One of them was called back out of the room at the very end, and my wife suspects that she was actively being abused and this was an opportunity to seek help without the abuser being present.<p>This isn&#x27;t something that I have to personally worry about if I&#x27;m by myself, but it&#x27;s something that so many women <i>do</i> have to worry about all the time. I can&#x27;t even imagine the burden that women must carry.</text></comment> | <story><title>The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3693773/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>I find this to be the most telling stat:<p>&quot;In a few cases (N &lt; 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained.&quot;<p>So roughly 5% (&lt;5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest&#x2F;abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers&#x2F;brothers. His opinion was that our society is not ready to deal with this, that such abuse is far more common than anyone is willing to admit. He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. The OP study seems in line with his numbers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hkt</author><text>Similar story here except with journalism: I did a course in media law where it was explained that victims of sex crimes always get lifelong anonymity. Journalists must avoid &quot;jigsaw identification&quot;, eg giving away details that might identify the victim.<p>This means in cases of incest it is impossible to report the incest element because it is too easy to identify the victim if you say &quot;x raped his daughter&quot;. So it appears in the press as though attacks are random, when actually a shocking number (10% seems conservative) are in the family.<p>As a sibling comment says, it is chilling.</text></comment> |
23,359,853 | 23,359,695 | 1 | 3 | 23,359,289 | train | <story><title>Google postpones Android 11 beta</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-google-android/google-postpones-android-11-unveiling-amid-u-s-protests-idUSKBN2360AS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catmanjan</author><text>As an outsider the George Floyd seems like every other police murder that the US has, I swear it happens every other year with similar outrage... BAU</text></item><item><author>djaque</author><text>George Floyd&#x27;s murder is only the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back. This is now about decades of injustice and police officers that stand by silently and enable their peers to abuse and kill and get away with it. Protests have broken out in most major cities.</text></item><item><author>spuz</author><text>How widespread are the protests? It seems very bizarre to think they could be affecting tech news and announcements. Is there more going on here?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curiousgal</author><text>The Tunisian Revolution (the first and only successful one in the Arab Spring) started when a fruit seller self-immolated.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google postpones Android 11 beta</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-google-android/google-postpones-android-11-unveiling-amid-u-s-protests-idUSKBN2360AS</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>catmanjan</author><text>As an outsider the George Floyd seems like every other police murder that the US has, I swear it happens every other year with similar outrage... BAU</text></item><item><author>djaque</author><text>George Floyd&#x27;s murder is only the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back. This is now about decades of injustice and police officers that stand by silently and enable their peers to abuse and kill and get away with it. Protests have broken out in most major cities.</text></item><item><author>spuz</author><text>How widespread are the protests? It seems very bizarre to think they could be affecting tech news and announcements. Is there more going on here?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MattGaiser</author><text>Yeah, I expect this to last a week or three and then it will happen again in another year or two.</text></comment> |
2,477,783 | 2,477,653 | 1 | 2 | 2,477,586 | train | <story><title>Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter</title><url>http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-an-open-letter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Years back, I used to be an FSF member. Not that I liked the GPL much (in fact, I mostly use the Apache License), but they raised important issues, and had a track record of investing into fine software (GNU) that I benefitted from a lot.<p>However, their campaigns were getting so off-target, that much of my sympathy dwindled, and I ended my membership. Childish 'anti' advertising, such as 'BadVista' and DDoSing Apple's genius bars (gee, that's will convince anyone who was visiting an Apple Store) only made the whole free software movement look bad, childish, and unsocial. To this day, they seem to put their energy into almost hilarious campaigns (Windows 7 sins? Seriously?).<p>This open letter is on the mark, their current course only marginalizes the FSF and part of the FLOSS community. Whatever happened to relying on your own strengths, rather than caricaturizing the competition?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vog</author><text>I'm a happy fellow of the FSFE (<a href="http://fsfe.org/" rel="nofollow">http://fsfe.org/</a>), the European pendant to the FSF. Sometimes we also discuss FSF campaigns, and usually agree that those would almost certainly be counter-productive here in Europe, especially things like the "Windows 7 sins".<p>However, we always thought: Well, the USA have a different culture, so maybe this kind of campaign is needed there, and probably our style of campaign would not work there.<p>(With "our style" I especially mean: not to exaggerate, and to prefer positive campaigns over negative campaigns.)<p>It is interesting to see that our objections seem to be also valid within the USA, too. Maybe it's time for some people to join the FSF and to encourage them to learn from their European branch.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter</title><url>http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-an-open-letter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Years back, I used to be an FSF member. Not that I liked the GPL much (in fact, I mostly use the Apache License), but they raised important issues, and had a track record of investing into fine software (GNU) that I benefitted from a lot.<p>However, their campaigns were getting so off-target, that much of my sympathy dwindled, and I ended my membership. Childish 'anti' advertising, such as 'BadVista' and DDoSing Apple's genius bars (gee, that's will convince anyone who was visiting an Apple Store) only made the whole free software movement look bad, childish, and unsocial. To this day, they seem to put their energy into almost hilarious campaigns (Windows 7 sins? Seriously?).<p>This open letter is on the mark, their current course only marginalizes the FSF and part of the FLOSS community. Whatever happened to relying on your own strengths, rather than caricaturizing the competition?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fluidcruft</author><text>I am also a lapsed member exactly for the same reasons. The camp makes it impossible to spread the word (for example by linking to their site) because I feel like the cheesiness of the presentation would reflect poorly on me. Frankly they look like a bunch of clowns. Which is unfortunate. I do think they are entitled to their own flair and personality. Thankfully the GPL website is less polarizing. The free software manifesto is great and it isn't packaged in a cloak of easily-dismissed looniness.</text></comment> |
6,383,289 | 6,383,202 | 1 | 2 | 6,382,478 | train | <story><title>Sea Change – The Pacific's Perilous Turn</title><url>http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>revscat</author><text>Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however, that the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that exists today. It dwarfs all other problems -- Syria, terrorism, the NSA, class and economic disparity, all of them.<p>Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I am growing increasingly pessimistic that such a solution will arise. The powers that be in our world are dedicated to economics, not science, and certainly not to the environment. Their altars are derivatives and overnight lending rates, of war and spying, of realpolitik and power.<p>Humanity, I do not think, is likely to survive this coming apocalypse without widespread civil uprisings against the current power establishment, and with it a sea change in what is viewed as unethical or sinful: unnecessary CO2 production being viewed as the great evil that is is, an existential threat to every extant political, religious, and economic group.<p>Instead we have the Koch brothers, Apple vs. Google flame wars, and the expenditure of almost unbelievable energies on wars and political positioning.<p>It&#x27;s insane. I don&#x27;t think humanity will survive into the 22nd century, and it will be our own damn fault for not rising up and removing those power structures that lead us to this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hooande</author><text>It&#x27;s very easy to underestimate the power of human ingenuity. The things we do routinely today would seem to be beyond magic to someone who lived 100 years ago. How do you even convey the concept of &quot;automated car&quot; to someone who doesn&#x27;t know what a car is? How would you explain the job of a &quot;director of social media strategy&quot; to someone who lives in 1913?<p>My point is that the people of the 22nd century will probably be more alien to us than we are to people of the early 20th century. One innovation is all it takes to change paradigms, and those innovations are very difficult to see coming. Then something builds on top of that and something else on top of that, and next thing we know someone is getting filthy rich by removing carbon from the atmosphere using science fiction technology.<p>I believe that your pessimism is unfounded. Human beings have a long history of rising to a challenge. Even more so when there are fantastic sums of money to be made from a global economy. The safe bet is on technology and innovation, on unexpected ideas and discoveries that change the way we understand our problems. I&#x27;ll admit that the environmental situation looks grim, but take heart in the fact that help is on the way.<p>And:
HN has gotten so conspiracy crazy. For whatever Snowden did, he certainly changed the way that we view things in our corner of the internet. Privacy and liberty are genuinely important values and they should be fought for. But really, every thread? &quot;the powers that be&quot;? This too shall pass, I suppose.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sea Change – The Pacific's Perilous Turn</title><url>http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>revscat</author><text>Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however, that the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that exists today. It dwarfs all other problems -- Syria, terrorism, the NSA, class and economic disparity, all of them.<p>Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I am growing increasingly pessimistic that such a solution will arise. The powers that be in our world are dedicated to economics, not science, and certainly not to the environment. Their altars are derivatives and overnight lending rates, of war and spying, of realpolitik and power.<p>Humanity, I do not think, is likely to survive this coming apocalypse without widespread civil uprisings against the current power establishment, and with it a sea change in what is viewed as unethical or sinful: unnecessary CO2 production being viewed as the great evil that is is, an existential threat to every extant political, religious, and economic group.<p>Instead we have the Koch brothers, Apple vs. Google flame wars, and the expenditure of almost unbelievable energies on wars and political positioning.<p>It&#x27;s insane. I don&#x27;t think humanity will survive into the 22nd century, and it will be our own damn fault for not rising up and removing those power structures that lead us to this point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lutusp</author><text>&gt; Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late.<p>I have some bad news:<p>* The problem isn&#x27;t pollution and CO2 release, at last not directly. The problem is the number of people doing the polluting and CO2 releasing.<p>* A solution would be to have a smaller worldwide birthrate. Easy to say.<p>* But any solution to the above point is very likely to collide with equality and fair play, as well as crashing into the &quot;Population Paradox&quot;.<p>* The Population Paradox goes like this -- someone delivers a reasoned appeal to have fewer children, in the name of human survival and that of the earth. It&#x27;s perfectly worded, and delivered to a huge audience.<p>* Sensitive, intelligent, compassionate listeners resolve to have fewer children.<p>* Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don&#x27;t -- they will have the usual number of children.<p>* That&#x27;s the Population Paradox in a nutshell: because of evolution, <i>over time people become less sensitive to the damage they cause</i>. And history proves that political &quot;solutions&quot; aren&#x27;t solutions at all, but disasters.<p>I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection.<p>EDIT: People, do try to avoid downvoting posts that are truthful but upsetting, solely on the ground that they&#x27;re upsetting.</text></comment> |
29,702,884 | 29,701,993 | 1 | 3 | 29,699,403 | train | <story><title>Pytudes: Python programs for perfecting particular programming skills</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mark_l_watson</author><text>What I find interesting is how Peter builds bottom up solutions using low level utilities. This is how I have always coded in Lisp languages, but when I use Python I tend to write little monoliths. Since I now have to use Python for most of my work (deep learning), I should change the way I use Python. Reading his code is educational.<p>Peter and I each wrote a Common Lisp book about 25 years ago and a few years after that we had lunch and I was into Lisp and he had transitioned to the practicality of Python. I have a serious bias in favor of Lisp languages that probably has not served me very well. I once had a short talk with Alexis Ohanian about how he and his partner Steve had to convert Reddit from Common Lisp to Python, I think that he described the situation as something like “the Lisp version kept falling down.”</text></comment> | <story><title>Pytudes: Python programs for perfecting particular programming skills</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wirthjason</author><text>I find Norvig’s style of Python a bit odd as it diverges from PEP-8ish style I’m accustomed to. Nothing wrong with it but he’ll redefine things, put functions on one line, etc. The good thing is that I challenges my understanding of what you can do with the language and how simple and expressive it can be.<p>For example I found this line of code cute. So much going on — no function definition, just a string literal method being assigned to a name (which any Linux programmer would get but a windows one may not).<p><pre><code> cat = &#x27;&#x27;.join</code></pre></text></comment> |
18,465,357 | 18,465,549 | 1 | 2 | 18,463,553 | train | <story><title>Tulsa Remote</title><url>https://tulsaremote.com/#hero</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Twirrim</author><text>Admittedly this is aggregate for the whole state:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;best-states&#x2F;oklahoma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;best-states&#x2F;oklahoma</a><p><pre><code> Overall Rank Out of 50: #43
Health Care #48
Education #39
Economy #36
Opportunity #38
Infrastructure #31
Crime &amp; Corrections #34
Fiscal Stability #22
Quality of Life #17
</code></pre>
Those aren&#x27;t great incentives for people with families to want to move. Might be more tolerable for younger folks?<p>Of course, getting fresh tax revenue etc may be important towards getting those various things improved, and Tulsa might be significantly better than the rest of the state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidw</author><text>Statewide aggregates are not always super useful. Portland, Oregon is really different from Burns, Oregon, for instance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tulsa Remote</title><url>https://tulsaremote.com/#hero</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Twirrim</author><text>Admittedly this is aggregate for the whole state:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;best-states&#x2F;oklahoma" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;best-states&#x2F;oklahoma</a><p><pre><code> Overall Rank Out of 50: #43
Health Care #48
Education #39
Economy #36
Opportunity #38
Infrastructure #31
Crime &amp; Corrections #34
Fiscal Stability #22
Quality of Life #17
</code></pre>
Those aren&#x27;t great incentives for people with families to want to move. Might be more tolerable for younger folks?<p>Of course, getting fresh tax revenue etc may be important towards getting those various things improved, and Tulsa might be significantly better than the rest of the state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>damon_c</author><text>You&#x27;d think &quot;Quality of Life&quot; would have a little more weight... I mean... what else is there?!</text></comment> |
4,994,235 | 4,993,321 | 1 | 3 | 4,992,401 | train | <story><title>How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic</title><url>http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-i-fell-in-love-with-schizophrenic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guylhem</author><text>I'll cast a dissenting opinion.<p>Do you really, honestly think the author will be happy - and for long (say more than 2 years, after the initial thrill of doing something odd and new)?<p>It does not looks like a sane relation to me, but more like a relation based on needs - such as the need to "save" someone (frequent with young upperclass women) or such as a profound emotional need to display love.<p><i>"I'll throw myself in front of a bus for her if she wants it"</i> - this doesn't looks like a good thing to say about a relationship - especially about a relationship with someone hearing voices who might recommend such things.<p>Are normal persons (or life) so boring that one needs to import another person problems - especially unfixable problems given the state of our technology regarding schizophrenia?<p>(my cousin has a severe form and spends most of his time in various institutions)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gaustin</author><text>I was diagnosed with schizo-affective and bipolar disorders when I was 19. I was on disability until I was 26 (I am now almost 31), even though I worked part time as a software developer through that entire period.<p>I've managed to live a pretty "normal" life so far, even with my health issues. I have both Bachelor's and Master's degrees. I've been with my wife for 5 years so far. I've held down jobs pretty well, with ever-increasing levels of responsibility. I have healthy hobbies that take quite a bit of attention but do not become overriding obsessions.<p>My wife and I have different struggles than most other couples. She is most definitely not with me because it's novel, nor to "save" me or any other sort of co-dependent nonsense.<p>Schizophrenia may not be fixable, but it is controllable to a degree and with care it doesn't have to mean a life in institutions or a life without a satisfying career.</text></comment> | <story><title>How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic</title><url>http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-i-fell-in-love-with-schizophrenic.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guylhem</author><text>I'll cast a dissenting opinion.<p>Do you really, honestly think the author will be happy - and for long (say more than 2 years, after the initial thrill of doing something odd and new)?<p>It does not looks like a sane relation to me, but more like a relation based on needs - such as the need to "save" someone (frequent with young upperclass women) or such as a profound emotional need to display love.<p><i>"I'll throw myself in front of a bus for her if she wants it"</i> - this doesn't looks like a good thing to say about a relationship - especially about a relationship with someone hearing voices who might recommend such things.<p>Are normal persons (or life) so boring that one needs to import another person problems - especially unfixable problems given the state of our technology regarding schizophrenia?<p>(my cousin has a severe form and spends most of his time in various institutions)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>&#62; "I'll throw myself in front of a bus for her if she wants it" - this doesn't looks like a good thing to say about a relationship<p>I tend to agree. But it's something that common to many relationships, not just those involving people in unhealthy relationships.<p>&#62; - especially about a relationship with someone hearing voices who might recommend such things.<p>I'm not sure people with a psychotic illness recommend directly that another person should throw themselves in front of a literal bus.<p>And I hope that OP has enough insight to recognise when the (metaphorical) bus is real or a product of illness.<p>&#62; Are normal persons (or life) so boring that one needs to import another person problems - especially unfixable problems given the state of our technology regarding schizophrenia?<p>I am not talking about the OP here. With that disclaimer out of the way: sometimes life with someone who has a severe mental illness is just more fun; it's more exciting; there's more stuff to do. This can be useful - you go to different places and experience life in a different way. Or it can be unhealthy, with dependence and enabling and people wanting to "fix" others and getting locked into a cycle of recovery and relapse. The pre-mania phase of bi-polar can be incredibly productive for some people.</text></comment> |
29,594,342 | 29,592,454 | 1 | 2 | 29,588,174 | train | <story><title>Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation</title><url>https://www.axios.com/wages-inflation-economic-data-c912afdb-b950-4183-8283-50afff593576.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawaycities</author><text>Glad this was the top comment.<p>Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US.<p>We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.</text></item><item><author>Gareth321</author><text>Real wages have been flat since the 1970s (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;for-most-us...</a>). &quot;Okay, so people&#x27;s living standards are about the same since 1970?&quot; Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in real terms (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.seekingalpha.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;29&#x2F;saupload_inflation10-16.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.seekingalpha.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;29&#x2F;saupload_i...</a>). Okay, so TVs and cellphones are cheaper, but necessities like college, childcare, and healthcare are up significantly.<p>And when you drill in more, there are other issues. For example, the housing metric appears relatively flat in real terms, right? Except, that doesn&#x27;t tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low. This allow them to keep the fed rate low, which keeps stock valuations high. This LOOKS great and generates great headlines, but the reality is that most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s.<p>And then we come to the other elephant in the room: why are real wages flat? Given the incredible performance of the American economy since 1970, shouldn&#x27;t real wages be significantly UP? This is yet another reminder that wealth is being squeezed from the bottom and funnelled straight up. As a non-American, it&#x27;s heartbreaking to see efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war. Poor people in America have FAR more in common with each other than the rich, no matter race. I really hope you all manage to set aside the obvious red herring of race and unite in tackling your staggering wealth inequality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vmception</author><text>The other side of this to remember is that highly compensated employees are still subjects to this reality.<p>The numbers themselves dont actually matter. It doesnt matter if highly compensated to you means $88k or $150k annual compensation, $450k or $750k.<p>If a single earner cant buy a home outright in 5 years in that area, then the compensation isn&#x27;t high enough compared to when wages were keeping up. There was a housing shortage in the 1970s too, so the supply side isnt a worthwhile deflection.<p>The oppression contest and olympics from the masses earning way less isn&#x27;t really useful because that just conveniently perpetuates the reality.</text></comment> | <story><title>Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation</title><url>https://www.axios.com/wages-inflation-economic-data-c912afdb-b950-4183-8283-50afff593576.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwawaycities</author><text>Glad this was the top comment.<p>Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US.<p>We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.</text></item><item><author>Gareth321</author><text>Real wages have been flat since the 1970s (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;for-most-us...</a>). &quot;Okay, so people&#x27;s living standards are about the same since 1970?&quot; Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in real terms (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.seekingalpha.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;29&#x2F;saupload_inflation10-16.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.seekingalpha.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;29&#x2F;saupload_i...</a>). Okay, so TVs and cellphones are cheaper, but necessities like college, childcare, and healthcare are up significantly.<p>And when you drill in more, there are other issues. For example, the housing metric appears relatively flat in real terms, right? Except, that doesn&#x27;t tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low. This allow them to keep the fed rate low, which keeps stock valuations high. This LOOKS great and generates great headlines, but the reality is that most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s.<p>And then we come to the other elephant in the room: why are real wages flat? Given the incredible performance of the American economy since 1970, shouldn&#x27;t real wages be significantly UP? This is yet another reminder that wealth is being squeezed from the bottom and funnelled straight up. As a non-American, it&#x27;s heartbreaking to see efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war. Poor people in America have FAR more in common with each other than the rich, no matter race. I really hope you all manage to set aside the obvious red herring of race and unite in tackling your staggering wealth inequality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlexandrB</author><text>I don&#x27;t get why minimum wage isn&#x27;t tied to the CPI by default. I supposed there&#x27;s a risk of it creating a positive feedback loop, but only a small portion of the workforce is paid at minimum wage. It seems capricious for minimum wage to only be increased when the legislative branch decides it&#x27;s popular enough to fight for.</text></comment> |
15,264,025 | 15,263,767 | 1 | 3 | 15,263,575 | train | <story><title>Don't use Git rebase</title><url>https://medium.com/@fredrikmorken/why-you-should-stop-using-git-rebase-5552bee4fed1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fulafel</author><text>What&#x27;s even the point of using rebase? Merging the development branch into your feature branch periodically is the obvious history preserving thing.<p>Git already has merge commits, that can be used to label and describe bigger sets of changes in retrospect. There is no need to rewrite the commit history with the benefit of hindsight, it only erases the record of how changes were arrived at, thus losing the opportunity to revisit conclusions from debugging or experiments.<p>You can also use merge commits to describe sub-units of work in your feature branch. Just rename your branch to some subtask and merge that into your feature branch.<p>edit: towards the middle of the article, the author also opines
&quot;What motivates people to rebase branches? ...
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s about vanity. Rebasing is a purely aesthetic operation. The apparently clean history appeals to us as developers, but it can’t be justified, from a technical nor functional standpoint.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vinnl</author><text>There&#x27;s no such thing as &quot;real&quot; history - you don&#x27;t commit every line of code you add or remove, or even every character. Rather, you choose some points in time to commit.<p>For me, those are often arbitrary - I can&#x27;t get something to work at a certain point, so I make a WIP commit with the buggy work at that point, and will come back to it the next day.<p>Before I merge my branch back into master, though, I want my commit history to be useful. &quot;This is the point where I went home or was disturbed that day&quot; is not useful to future developers. &quot;This is the work I did on this individual feature and everything that&#x27;s needed to run it and to have the tests succeed is in this commit, and this was the reasoning behind what I did&quot;, however, is.<p>In other words, I rebase to divide my codebase into non-arbitrary units of code, not based on chronology, but on what is useful together.</text></comment> | <story><title>Don't use Git rebase</title><url>https://medium.com/@fredrikmorken/why-you-should-stop-using-git-rebase-5552bee4fed1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fulafel</author><text>What&#x27;s even the point of using rebase? Merging the development branch into your feature branch periodically is the obvious history preserving thing.<p>Git already has merge commits, that can be used to label and describe bigger sets of changes in retrospect. There is no need to rewrite the commit history with the benefit of hindsight, it only erases the record of how changes were arrived at, thus losing the opportunity to revisit conclusions from debugging or experiments.<p>You can also use merge commits to describe sub-units of work in your feature branch. Just rename your branch to some subtask and merge that into your feature branch.<p>edit: towards the middle of the article, the author also opines
&quot;What motivates people to rebase branches? ...
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s about vanity. Rebasing is a purely aesthetic operation. The apparently clean history appeals to us as developers, but it can’t be justified, from a technical nor functional standpoint.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pandemi</author><text>The main use case for rebase for me is to add automatic rebases on pull to the git config.<p>Normally if you pull from the remote and have local commits not in the remote, you&#x27;ll have an &quot;extra&quot; merge. Automatic rebase on pull takes care of this, to avoid those useless merges.</text></comment> |
11,032,085 | 11,031,363 | 1 | 2 | 11,029,263 | train | <story><title>On Google's self-driving car acident rates</title><url>http://ideas.4brad.com/google-releases-detailed-intervention-rates-and-real-unsolved-problem-robocars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aetherson</author><text>I&#x27;ve been involved in several reported accidents that were judged to be fully the fault of the other driver, and my rates have never increased.</text></item><item><author>snowwrestler</author><text>Insurance companies raise premiums after accidents because there is an excuse to do so. It has nothing do with your likelihood to have another accident, and everything to do with charging you more so that they can attract new customers with a lower price. Premiums go up even if the driver is found to be not at fault.</text></item><item><author>tyre</author><text>Look at insurance premiums. Premiums go up after an accident because it is more likely that you are a poor driver and likely to have another accident.</text></item><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>What evidence? Certainly individual humans (anecdotally: like myself) do.</text></item><item><author>thrownaway2424</author><text>The idea that humans learn well from accidents stands contrary to all available evidence.</text></item><item><author>underbluewaters</author><text>I think it&#x27;s pretty clear that the bar for safety must be much higher (10x) than human-level for these to be accepted by consumers. Auto accidents are very common, and the first time someone has an accident with a car like this everyone they know will hear about it. It will be terrifying. If these are only as safe on average as a human driver then nearly everyone is going to have at the very least a 2nd-hand negative experience.<p>The emotional response to these accidents is not going to be entirely irrational either. If I have a minor accident with my traditional truck, I&#x27;m going to probably have a good understanding of what went wrong and how I can prevent future collisions. With an autonomous vehicle... software upgrade? I&#x27;d rather take responsibility for my own safety if that&#x27;s the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>Yes, this is my point: rate increases after accidents are done <i>by choice</i> of the insurance company, not because their risk management requires them to do so, as the grandparent post implied:<p>&gt; Premiums go up after an accident because it is more likely that you are a poor driver and likely to have another accident.<p>No, premiums go up in that situation when the insurance company thinks they can do so and not lose too many customers. As you point out, not every insurance company operates this way.<p>An insurance company only cares about managing risk and revenue across the entire pool. They plan to pay out a certain number of claims, so any given accident might simply be fulfilling the actuarial expectations and not altering their risk calculations at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>On Google's self-driving car acident rates</title><url>http://ideas.4brad.com/google-releases-detailed-intervention-rates-and-real-unsolved-problem-robocars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aetherson</author><text>I&#x27;ve been involved in several reported accidents that were judged to be fully the fault of the other driver, and my rates have never increased.</text></item><item><author>snowwrestler</author><text>Insurance companies raise premiums after accidents because there is an excuse to do so. It has nothing do with your likelihood to have another accident, and everything to do with charging you more so that they can attract new customers with a lower price. Premiums go up even if the driver is found to be not at fault.</text></item><item><author>tyre</author><text>Look at insurance premiums. Premiums go up after an accident because it is more likely that you are a poor driver and likely to have another accident.</text></item><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>What evidence? Certainly individual humans (anecdotally: like myself) do.</text></item><item><author>thrownaway2424</author><text>The idea that humans learn well from accidents stands contrary to all available evidence.</text></item><item><author>underbluewaters</author><text>I think it&#x27;s pretty clear that the bar for safety must be much higher (10x) than human-level for these to be accepted by consumers. Auto accidents are very common, and the first time someone has an accident with a car like this everyone they know will hear about it. It will be terrifying. If these are only as safe on average as a human driver then nearly everyone is going to have at the very least a 2nd-hand negative experience.<p>The emotional response to these accidents is not going to be entirely irrational either. If I have a minor accident with my traditional truck, I&#x27;m going to probably have a good understanding of what went wrong and how I can prevent future collisions. With an autonomous vehicle... software upgrade? I&#x27;d rather take responsibility for my own safety if that&#x27;s the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ams6110</author><text>Same. I&#x27;ve also had one at-fault accident and my premium went up in the sense that my &quot;accident free discount&quot; was removed for about 24 months. But I eventually got that back too.</text></comment> |
16,658,991 | 16,658,325 | 1 | 2 | 16,655,494 | train | <story><title>With SESTA/FOSTA, lawmakers failed to separate good intentions from bad law</title><url>https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moomin</author><text>This is the real story:<p>&quot;While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking.&quot;<p>Too many laws in America are stalking horses for restricting, not just commercial sexual activity, but all unapproved sexual activity. And the people who&#x27;d be doing the approving don&#x27;t look like people I want in charge of my or my kid&#x27;s sex life.<p>Child pornography and sex trafficking are both real, serious, problems. We should deal with them, not work to make it harder for sex workers and horny teenagers. But for a lot of the pressure groups in this area, the second thing is _their actual goal_.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djsumdog</author><text>In more sane high income countries, New Zealand, parts of Australia, the UK, et. al, prostitution is legal and regulated. If sex workers get into trouble, there are places and people they can go to get help. It at least attempts to be a legitimate industry.<p>In America, we have parts of Nevada and that&#x27;s it. Filming a sex act and paying for it is legal (if you do your due diligence and make sure you have all the right paperwork, a good lawyer, and for good measure you should probably only film in California and Florida -- it&#x27;s why there are so few industries who can afford the lawyers to do porn, but that&#x27;s another issue entirely...)<p>The right way to deal with sex trafficking is to make it legal for people to do what they want with sex&#x2F;their bodies, create as safe a sex-work industry as you can, and make it more difficult for illegitimate people in the sex industry to work.<p>This just takes me back to the Child Safety Protection Act of 1994. Over a decade later we&#x27;re fighting the same bullshit.</text></comment> | <story><title>With SESTA/FOSTA, lawmakers failed to separate good intentions from bad law</title><url>https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moomin</author><text>This is the real story:<p>&quot;While we can’t speculate on the agendas of the groups behind SESTA, we can study those same groups’ past advocacy work. Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet or blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking.&quot;<p>Too many laws in America are stalking horses for restricting, not just commercial sexual activity, but all unapproved sexual activity. And the people who&#x27;d be doing the approving don&#x27;t look like people I want in charge of my or my kid&#x27;s sex life.<p>Child pornography and sex trafficking are both real, serious, problems. We should deal with them, not work to make it harder for sex workers and horny teenagers. But for a lot of the pressure groups in this area, the second thing is _their actual goal_.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PurpleBoxDragon</author><text>One should look at the history behind why certain currently banned obscenity is banned, and what the goals of the groups were who originally pushed the ban.<p>&gt;Given that history, one could be forgiven for thinking that some of these groups see SESTA as a mere stepping stone to banning pornography from the Internet<p>This is one of their main goals.<p>&gt;blurring the legal distinctions between sex work and trafficking<p>I think this has largely been achieved.</text></comment> |
38,696,402 | 38,696,377 | 1 | 2 | 38,695,583 | train | <story><title>An In-depth Look at Gemini's Language Abilities</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11444</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkmk</author><text>Mixtral is a mystery to me. How in the world is that team on par with&#x2F;beating GOOGLE, who presumably have all the resources in the world to throw at this?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Has anyone (outside of Google) gotten to play with Gemini Ultra yet? Been hearing a lot about Pro, but I&#x27;d be interested in seeing whether Ultra is really close to as capable as they claim.<p>Also very interesting that Mixtral 8x7B ranks in the same neighborhood as Gemini Pro&#x2F;GPT 3.5 Turbo&#x2F;Claude 2.1 while being fully open source and Apache 2.0 licensed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>n2d4</author><text>Mixtral is on-par with Gemini Pro, not Gemini Ultra (and even there it is further behind Gemini Pro than Gemini Pro is behind GPT 3.5). But to directly answer your question, they are quite well-funded, having raised over $700mil to date. I definitely wouldn&#x27;t count them out.</text></comment> | <story><title>An In-depth Look at Gemini's Language Abilities</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11444</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkmk</author><text>Mixtral is a mystery to me. How in the world is that team on par with&#x2F;beating GOOGLE, who presumably have all the resources in the world to throw at this?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>Has anyone (outside of Google) gotten to play with Gemini Ultra yet? Been hearing a lot about Pro, but I&#x27;d be interested in seeing whether Ultra is really close to as capable as they claim.<p>Also very interesting that Mixtral 8x7B ranks in the same neighborhood as Gemini Pro&#x2F;GPT 3.5 Turbo&#x2F;Claude 2.1 while being fully open source and Apache 2.0 licensed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carterschonwald</author><text>My understanding, however fuzzy, is that all the safety&#x2F;politeness tuning results in models that are at times less likely to give accurate responses. That said, I suspect that either way both types of models largely give similar answers for soft questions aside from those politeness and safety things</text></comment> |
15,583,279 | 15,582,074 | 1 | 2 | 15,581,087 | train | <story><title>How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>goatherders</author><text>My last CEO was a great leader, except he showed up at 10am most days. Employees saw him get to work 90 minutes after they did. They didn&#x27;t see that he stayed until 9p most nights since most of them were gone by 530. He lost the respect of the employees because he never understood that the example he set was visual. And he got fired despite the executives who worked closely with him all thinking he did a great job.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Be a C.E.O., From a Decade’s Worth of Them</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/business/how-to-be-a-ceo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zappo2938</author><text>One CEO says when hiring he asks if the applicant thinks she is smart or hard working. The only correct answer is hard working. Later in the article another CEO at a college job fair looks at a plain resume and asks what the kid has been doing with his time. The kid says he drives home and works Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at his family&#x27;s diner all weekend returning to school on Monday morning.<p>I used to work on a massive private yacht. I&#x27;m cleaning and polishing the outside making it look pretty for all the passerby&#x27;s to admire after we arrived at the marina at Atlantis in the Bahamas. A tourist perhaps in his early 40s with a family stops me to ask &quot;How do I achieve getting my own yacht?&quot; I said what everyone says, hard work. He scoffed at me and replied that he works very hard in technology in Vegas. He works 50+ hours a week and that he will never realize a yacht like this.<p>It&#x27;s not hard work. That&#x27;s not the answer. It&#x27;s something else. After working 6 years on private yachts my best guess is that the people who own the yachts hire people who know what they are doing, they provide those people with the resources they need, and they stay out of their way. They do not micromanage.<p>The writer mentions Ray Dalio and his hundreds of principles for working at his firm, Bridgewater Associates. Maybe, but the big thing to take away from Dalio&#x27;s principles is not to micromanage. He has built an algorithm to make decisions based on merit of each employee&#x27;s history of making the correct decision. [0] &quot;In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right.&quot; He has established a way to quantify merit, which I think is similar the democratization of the stock market itself.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_w...</a></text></comment> |
33,455,497 | 33,455,138 | 1 | 3 | 33,431,669 | train | <story><title>Comparing TCP and QUIC</title><url>https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2022-11/quicvtcp.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drewg123</author><text>What nobody talks about is the lack of server-side offloads for QUIC. Things like TSO, LRO, and even hardware offloaded kTLS. Without those offloads, I estimate I&#x27;d be lucky to get 200Gb&#x2F;s out of the same Netflix CDN server hardware that can serve TLS-encrypted TCP at over 700Gb&#x2F;s.<p>Do the benefits of QUIC really justify the economic and environmental impacts of that kind of loss of inefficiency on the server side?<p>And yes, I know that some of these offloads are being worked on, but they are not here today.</text></comment> | <story><title>Comparing TCP and QUIC</title><url>https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2022-11/quicvtcp.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iamcalledrob</author><text>I often see QUIC described as &quot;faster than TCP&quot;, but in my experience this has only been the case when it comes to handshake latency.<p>Throughput-wise, I&#x27;ve found in real-world testing that QUIC is often slower than TCP:
(1) QUIC uses more CPU, due to the processing in user-space. 1Gbps required 3 CPU cores. On my 1x-CPU VPS, QUIC maxed out at 400Mbps due to the CPU. With TCP+TLS, I could comfortably achieve 5Gbps.
(2) QUIC was less resilient to packet loss (surprisingly). This was particularly noticeable on mobile devices.<p>If your use-case is to move bytes between powerful servers over a reliable, wired connection, QUIC may beat TCP in most ways that matter. But for use in real-world mobile apps, TCP may still offer better throughput.<p>Caveat: This is all data from using the quic-go package. The C libraries may well be more efficient :)</text></comment> |
16,594,185 | 16,594,156 | 1 | 2 | 16,593,220 | train | <story><title>Google and LG creates VR AMOLED 120 Hz at 5500 x 3000</title><url>https://www.blurbusters.com/google-and-lg-creates-vr-amoled-120-hz-at-5500x3000/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naoru</author><text>Everyone says that a powerful GPU is needed to drive this thing, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a must. Careful art direction based on current hardware limitations can produce nice-looking virtual worlds — not photorealistic, but still immersive and fun. Nintendo pulls this thing consistently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalkut</author><text>I absolutely agree ! I do see the appeal of photorealism but lots of excellent 3D experiences are far from photorealism. A sensible art direction can go very far, and I&#x27;d even argue that a less than ideal graphical experience can be forgiven if the content is meaningful and engaging enough. I think we all have examples of this in mind</text></comment> | <story><title>Google and LG creates VR AMOLED 120 Hz at 5500 x 3000</title><url>https://www.blurbusters.com/google-and-lg-creates-vr-amoled-120-hz-at-5500x3000/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naoru</author><text>Everyone says that a powerful GPU is needed to drive this thing, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a must. Careful art direction based on current hardware limitations can produce nice-looking virtual worlds — not photorealistic, but still immersive and fun. Nintendo pulls this thing consistently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>I would love to walk around in a VR world that looked like the old vector displays. Slightly glowing wire frames but with occlusion. This technically doesn&#x27;t even need polygon rendering, though doing so with mostly black textures except the edges might be cool. At todays resolutions I think small cylinders along the edges of flat black surfaces might look better. And that&#x27;s just one stylized world that doesn&#x27;t require a mammoth GPU to handle.</text></comment> |
20,866,198 | 20,865,999 | 1 | 3 | 20,863,370 | train | <story><title>Traffic apps turned L.A.’s neighborhoods into ”shortcuts”</title><url>https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/waze-los-angeles-neighborhoods/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krn</author><text>&gt; Google Maps has real time traffic data and the accuracy is staggering.<p>But does Google Maps use real time traffic data to calculate the most optimal route in the same way as Waze does? As I understand, that&#x27;s the main difference between the two.</text></item><item><author>Steve44</author><text>&gt; The main difference between Waze and Google Maps is that Waze uses real time traffic data.<p>Google Maps has real time traffic data and the accuracy is staggering. I occasionally use Google Maps for navigation in the car and it even highlights traffic stationary at traffic lights and temporary road works as I’m approaching.<p>This level or real time detail really amazed me. I’ve not spent any time looking onto how they do it but assume they are continually tracking everyone with a phone, or at least running Google Maps Navigation, and using their real time location and speed.</text></item><item><author>simplesleeper</author><text>Transport for London Tech Lead here.<p>In London, we have been collaborating with google waze - we provide them with information at the local level. Streets that waze should not use for route finding (e.g. roads with schools) can be blocked for use by Waze. Both local councils and TfL can provide this data.<p>The main difference between Waze and Google Maps is that Waze uses real time traffic data. There are multiple map providers that do this in London. There is a plan to provide different data to different TfL data consumers in the future to try and get map providers to seperate traffic across roads (at the cost of surrendering absolute truth).<p>London is also host to discussions of taxing roads - this is unsurprising when the roads are mostly paid for by the cost of the London Underground (LU makes the majority of public transport money, but 80% of revenue goes into road, traffic and bus management). The London Assembly (who supposedly keep the London mayor accountable) have written a paper &quot;London Stalling&quot; to suggest road taxing related to mileage across London. This, they no doubt expect, will cut down the traffic. However, from my understanding of embellished models of Braess&#x27; paradox, this will only result in similar traffic (on maybe slightly different roads) with an optimum equilibrium between how good a route is and what the cost of it is - meaning people may just take longer to commute and pay more tax.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eli</author><text>Yes, they definitely both take traffic into account when calculating a route. My suspicion is that they&#x27;re actually using the same raw data, but Waze is tuned to be more aggressive. Waze routinely guides me off a main road onto a side street to avoid two blocks of congestion for a net gain of maybe 1 minute, Google Maps doesn&#x27;t.</text></comment> | <story><title>Traffic apps turned L.A.’s neighborhoods into ”shortcuts”</title><url>https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/waze-los-angeles-neighborhoods/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krn</author><text>&gt; Google Maps has real time traffic data and the accuracy is staggering.<p>But does Google Maps use real time traffic data to calculate the most optimal route in the same way as Waze does? As I understand, that&#x27;s the main difference between the two.</text></item><item><author>Steve44</author><text>&gt; The main difference between Waze and Google Maps is that Waze uses real time traffic data.<p>Google Maps has real time traffic data and the accuracy is staggering. I occasionally use Google Maps for navigation in the car and it even highlights traffic stationary at traffic lights and temporary road works as I’m approaching.<p>This level or real time detail really amazed me. I’ve not spent any time looking onto how they do it but assume they are continually tracking everyone with a phone, or at least running Google Maps Navigation, and using their real time location and speed.</text></item><item><author>simplesleeper</author><text>Transport for London Tech Lead here.<p>In London, we have been collaborating with google waze - we provide them with information at the local level. Streets that waze should not use for route finding (e.g. roads with schools) can be blocked for use by Waze. Both local councils and TfL can provide this data.<p>The main difference between Waze and Google Maps is that Waze uses real time traffic data. There are multiple map providers that do this in London. There is a plan to provide different data to different TfL data consumers in the future to try and get map providers to seperate traffic across roads (at the cost of surrendering absolute truth).<p>London is also host to discussions of taxing roads - this is unsurprising when the roads are mostly paid for by the cost of the London Underground (LU makes the majority of public transport money, but 80% of revenue goes into road, traffic and bus management). The London Assembly (who supposedly keep the London mayor accountable) have written a paper &quot;London Stalling&quot; to suggest road taxing related to mileage across London. This, they no doubt expect, will cut down the traffic. However, from my understanding of embellished models of Braess&#x27; paradox, this will only result in similar traffic (on maybe slightly different roads) with an optimum equilibrium between how good a route is and what the cost of it is - meaning people may just take longer to commute and pay more tax.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>garblegarble</author><text>&gt;But does Google Maps use real time traffic data to calculate the most optimal route in the same way as Waze does?<p>Anecdotally in the UK I see Google Maps routing based on live traffic data. I also often get a reassurance notification &quot;you are on the fastest route despite traffic&quot; (and it distinguishes between &quot;traffic&quot; and &quot;usual traffic&quot;). Occasionally I&#x27;ll also get a recommendation pushed to switch to another route which is faster</text></comment> |
12,185,541 | 12,185,333 | 1 | 2 | 12,182,156 | train | <story><title>Writing kernels that boot with Qemu and Grub – a tutorial</title><url>http://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/misc/writingkernels.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exDM69</author><text>Nice but very incomplete article. Some observations below...<p>You <i>will</i> need to build a cross compiler toolchain (binutils and GCC). I.e. i686-pc-elf-gcc for 32 bit or x86_64-pc-elf-gcc for 64 bit. The compiler that comes with your OS is built for a different target and may have downstream patches, esp. if you&#x27;re on Ubuntu. Things may seem to work initially but you <i>will</i> encounter strange bugs sooner or later.<p>Build a bootable and debuggable ELF file, not a flat binary. All it takes is a slightly different linker script. You won&#x27;t get very far without a debugger on bare metal projects.<p>You need to zero fill .bss section in the boot code before jumping to C code.<p>I recommend using gas instead of nasm. You might like Intel syntax but you&#x27;ll need inline (at&amp;t) assembly in C code anyway. Nicer to have just one syntax. It&#x27;s just an assembler syntax, you will get used to it in a matter of hours<p>Use a makefile. Fancy build systems (e.g. cmake) aren&#x27;t nice with kernel images.<p>See below for examples. The first one isn&#x27;t my project but I contributed the linker script, Makefile and README for making bootable ELFs. The latter is my x86_64 toy kernel project from years ago.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Overv&#x2F;MineAssemble" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Overv&#x2F;MineAssemble</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rikusalminen&#x2F;danjeros" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rikusalminen&#x2F;danjeros</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Writing kernels that boot with Qemu and Grub – a tutorial</title><url>http://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/misc/writingkernels.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deathanatos</author><text>I&#x27;m impressed they got grub onto a hard disk image without needing root; I didn&#x27;t think you could do that. I struggled with that for a while, before I found grub2-mkrescue, which I think is much easier if you&#x27;re just starting out. The entire sequence to create a CD ISO is,<p><pre><code> # Stage the data we want in our image:
mkdir -p isofiles&#x2F;boot&#x2F;grub
cp grub.cfg isofiles&#x2F;boot&#x2F;grub&#x2F;.
cp kernel.bin isofiles&#x2F;boot&#x2F;.
# Make the image:
grub2-mkrescue -o os.iso isofiles
# Clean up:
rm -rf isofiles
</code></pre>
Which I got from the tutorial here[1], which is also excellent.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;os.phil-opp.com&#x2F;multiboot-kernel.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;os.phil-opp.com&#x2F;multiboot-kernel.html</a></text></comment> |
19,761,034 | 19,761,060 | 1 | 2 | 19,759,485 | train | <story><title>Can Uber ever make money?</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/27/can-uber-ever-make-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rchaud</author><text>Looking at Uber, WeWork, JustEat etc., I get the feeling there&#x27;s a growing gap between what we were brought up to believe about entrepreneurship and innovation vs. what the reality is.<p>We&#x27;re all familiar with the &#x27;&gt;50% of small businesses fail&#x27; stat (not the real number) and that we should be toiling and not taking a salary for years until we break even, i.e. reach a point where we&#x27;re no longer losing money on every project&#x2F;sale. If you aren&#x27;t able to achieve this, your pricing, product-market fit, etc. have failed, because the all-knowing, all-equilibrium-izing market has spoken.<p>Every politician out there shows reverence for the &#x27;small businessperson&#x27; taking risks and bringing jobs and tax revenue into their communities. But once in office, the people they meet with are Travis Kalachian and others, people who cannot make a profit, but are excellent at convincing rich investors that they should make Travis a millionaire.<p>The reality is that a VC-backed company can simply outprice any competitor, and if it&#x27;s not enough, can lobby city hall to change the laws to favour them. And this cash spigot can stay on for years, as long as you can show you&#x27;re gaining customers every quarter. If you&#x27;re a big enough play, you can move your whole HQ to a low-tax friendly country and administer local operations from there.<p>The jobs that are created by this are right around minimum-wage level, so how is this supposed to create wealth for anybody except the shareholders who got in early with cheap valuations?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JimboOmega</author><text>The question (with Uber in particular) is that if this business model really covers up a huge ponzi scheme.<p>Before the last decade (or even 5 years?) the amount of money some of these companies have been raising would have been unheard of and required an IPO.<p>But if you can keep finding ever bigger investors to give you ever more money...<p>It&#x27;s a really weird reality, because typically the worst kind of place to start a company is one with huge barriers to entry that requires a ton of money to get started. Yet that seems to have done quite well recently.<p>Squashing minimum wage service providers seems to be merely a side effect... these companies can&#x27;t really make money EVEN WHEN they ignore regulations and exploit their not-technically-employees.</text></comment> | <story><title>Can Uber ever make money?</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/27/can-uber-ever-make-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rchaud</author><text>Looking at Uber, WeWork, JustEat etc., I get the feeling there&#x27;s a growing gap between what we were brought up to believe about entrepreneurship and innovation vs. what the reality is.<p>We&#x27;re all familiar with the &#x27;&gt;50% of small businesses fail&#x27; stat (not the real number) and that we should be toiling and not taking a salary for years until we break even, i.e. reach a point where we&#x27;re no longer losing money on every project&#x2F;sale. If you aren&#x27;t able to achieve this, your pricing, product-market fit, etc. have failed, because the all-knowing, all-equilibrium-izing market has spoken.<p>Every politician out there shows reverence for the &#x27;small businessperson&#x27; taking risks and bringing jobs and tax revenue into their communities. But once in office, the people they meet with are Travis Kalachian and others, people who cannot make a profit, but are excellent at convincing rich investors that they should make Travis a millionaire.<p>The reality is that a VC-backed company can simply outprice any competitor, and if it&#x27;s not enough, can lobby city hall to change the laws to favour them. And this cash spigot can stay on for years, as long as you can show you&#x27;re gaining customers every quarter. If you&#x27;re a big enough play, you can move your whole HQ to a low-tax friendly country and administer local operations from there.<p>The jobs that are created by this are right around minimum-wage level, so how is this supposed to create wealth for anybody except the shareholders who got in early with cheap valuations?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text><i>&gt; how is this supposed to create wealth for anybody except the shareholders who got in early with cheap valuations?</i><p>Spoiler alert: It&#x27;s not.<p>The primary goal of a VC-backup startup is a positive return to its VC backers. Everything else is a necessary evil to attain that primary goal.</text></comment> |
34,590,809 | 34,591,075 | 1 | 2 | 34,590,087 | train | <story><title>Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service</title><url>https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/192977/need-help-with-students-whove-turned-my-class-into-a-dating-service</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elil17</author><text>It’s disrespectful because it ignores the fact that the women are not there to date, but to learn. The men are getting in their way by showing off and offering disingenuous tutoring.</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>I don&#x27;t think that taking a class to get to know single women of your own age is disrespectful.<p>Do we know they are objectifying? The post said this was about finding a future wife.</text></item><item><author>I-love-india</author><text>No, you just to treat women with respect. The issue here is intention. The intention here is not about teaching or learning in the class. But its using that pretence in fact distrupting the intention of the class and people there. How do you like your intention distrupted? How about by unattractive slobs who are objectifying you and trying to be &quot;helpful&quot; and trying tricks they found on internet If someone is trying to come to terms with complex mathematics it just not appropriate to distract or give them the feeling of having to deal with a situation of someone coming onto them.<p>How do people not get this? It&#x27;s about basic respect. Isn&#x27;t it totally distracting to you if someone you&#x27;re not attracted in is looking at you and commenting on you and trying to &quot;help&quot; you?<p>Maybe you&#x27;d like unattractive specimens distrupting your coding process by hanging around and offering to be &quot;helpful&quot;?</text></item><item><author>nhchris</author><text>&gt; This might be hard, as no unwanted advances are taking place. We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd. I should&#x27;ve been more clear with my &quot;leching&quot; comment. Still, it seems harassing in nature.<p>It seems increasingly that society demands a world where dating only happens during designated and approved dating times and venues, and outside those strictly delimited places, men are to behave as eunuchs, and all prospects of romance are to be extinguished.<p>Then wonder why marriage and fertility rates are tanking.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bruce511</author><text>I feel like (as an old person) trying to tell youngsters how to behave at college, seems, well likely to fall in deaf ears.<p>But I&#x27;m not sure your point holds water. If women want to date, they can. If they don&#x27;t want to then they don&#x27;t have to. These other students hold no power, assign no grades, and so on.<p>Perhaps the root issue is the demoralization of some not being offered dates or extra tutoring? But it&#x27;s hard to see how that might be corrected.<p>I confess I don&#x27;t see the actual harm here - those that want to learn can learn, those that want to date can date. I suppose those that want to date, but aren&#x27;t getting any offers....?<p>Still, as an old man, I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;m qualified to weigh in - but to me it sounds like kids being kids.</text></comment> | <story><title>Need help with students who've turned my class into a dating service</title><url>https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/192977/need-help-with-students-whove-turned-my-class-into-a-dating-service</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elil17</author><text>It’s disrespectful because it ignores the fact that the women are not there to date, but to learn. The men are getting in their way by showing off and offering disingenuous tutoring.</text></item><item><author>xupybd</author><text>I don&#x27;t think that taking a class to get to know single women of your own age is disrespectful.<p>Do we know they are objectifying? The post said this was about finding a future wife.</text></item><item><author>I-love-india</author><text>No, you just to treat women with respect. The issue here is intention. The intention here is not about teaching or learning in the class. But its using that pretence in fact distrupting the intention of the class and people there. How do you like your intention distrupted? How about by unattractive slobs who are objectifying you and trying to be &quot;helpful&quot; and trying tricks they found on internet If someone is trying to come to terms with complex mathematics it just not appropriate to distract or give them the feeling of having to deal with a situation of someone coming onto them.<p>How do people not get this? It&#x27;s about basic respect. Isn&#x27;t it totally distracting to you if someone you&#x27;re not attracted in is looking at you and commenting on you and trying to &quot;help&quot; you?<p>Maybe you&#x27;d like unattractive specimens distrupting your coding process by hanging around and offering to be &quot;helpful&quot;?</text></item><item><author>nhchris</author><text>&gt; This might be hard, as no unwanted advances are taking place. We simply have students excelling at the course, and drawing-in a crowd. I should&#x27;ve been more clear with my &quot;leching&quot; comment. Still, it seems harassing in nature.<p>It seems increasingly that society demands a world where dating only happens during designated and approved dating times and venues, and outside those strictly delimited places, men are to behave as eunuchs, and all prospects of romance are to be extinguished.<p>Then wonder why marriage and fertility rates are tanking.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackinthebochs</author><text>The subtext here is that women should be able to exist in the world without &quot;unwanted&quot; sexual attention being given towards them. The question is whether this is reasonable.<p>Should men not seek dates? Should men not go where single women are to seek dates? Should men limit their efforts at getting dates only to &quot;appropriate venues&quot;, where women&#x27;s interest is explicit? How does the man&#x27;s attractiveness factor into these constraints?<p>None of this seems reasonable at first blush. Obviously women don&#x27;t want men they&#x27;re not attracted to to engage them with romantic interests. Conversely, women generally do want men they are attracted to demonstrate romantic interests, regardless of venue (to a certain extent). But how can this constraint possibly be enforced in a reasonable way?</text></comment> |
10,380,891 | 10,380,594 | 1 | 2 | 10,380,416 | train | <story><title>Nobody’s Talking About Nanotech Anymore</title><url>http://time.com/4068125/nanotech-sector/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kanzure</author><text>One of the startups that fizzled out was Nanorex, which is where Nanoengineer was made. Thankfully they were open to releasing the source code and version control repository when they decided to shutdown. The results of that are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kanzure&#x2F;nanoengineer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kanzure&#x2F;nanoengineer</a><p>I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips paper: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diyhpl.us&#x2F;~bryan&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;nanotech&#x2F;Optimal%20tooltip%20trajectories%20in%20a%20hydrogen%20abstraction%20tool%20recharge%20reaction%20sequence%20for%20positionally%20controlled%20diamond%20mechanosynthesis.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diyhpl.us&#x2F;~bryan&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;nanotech&#x2F;Optimal%20tooltip%2...</a><p>All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this eye candy video: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg</a><p>Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn&#x27;t exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.<p>Long-term we might be able to coerce enzymes into creating molecular machines anyway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;enzymaticsynthesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;enzymaticsynthesis</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skosuri</author><text>Our lab is working on ways to screen large libraries of designed proteins for engineered orthogonally interacting libraries. The thought would this would be a start of a modular resuasable library for molecular self-assembly. If you are interested, we&#x27;re definitely hiring!</text></comment> | <story><title>Nobody’s Talking About Nanotech Anymore</title><url>http://time.com/4068125/nanotech-sector/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kanzure</author><text>One of the startups that fizzled out was Nanorex, which is where Nanoengineer was made. Thankfully they were open to releasing the source code and version control repository when they decided to shutdown. The results of that are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kanzure&#x2F;nanoengineer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kanzure&#x2F;nanoengineer</a><p>I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips paper: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diyhpl.us&#x2F;~bryan&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;nanotech&#x2F;Optimal%20tooltip%20trajectories%20in%20a%20hydrogen%20abstraction%20tool%20recharge%20reaction%20sequence%20for%20positionally%20controlled%20diamond%20mechanosynthesis.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diyhpl.us&#x2F;~bryan&#x2F;papers2&#x2F;nanotech&#x2F;Optimal%20tooltip%2...</a><p>All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this eye candy video: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg</a><p>Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn&#x27;t exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.<p>Long-term we might be able to coerce enzymes into creating molecular machines anyway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;enzymaticsynthesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;group&#x2F;enzymaticsynthesis</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianN</author><text>As I see it, proteins are our best bet of making custom nanomachines. They&#x27;re proven to work. The hard part is understanding protein folding and predicting protein function from the amino acid sequence.</text></comment> |
28,070,475 | 28,070,179 | 1 | 2 | 28,067,731 | train | <story><title>How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-58062630</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yesbut</author><text>I wonder how it stacks up to the fake network pushing anti-China propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>est</author><text>Funny if you think about how Chinese government crackdown anti-China content in China&#x27;s intranet. They used similar technics and analysis, plus raiding people&#x27;s home to in order to take them down.</text></comment> | <story><title>How a fake network pushes pro-China propaganda</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-58062630</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yesbut</author><text>I wonder how it stacks up to the fake network pushing anti-China propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shapefrog</author><text>I want to find the facebook pages where the pro-China propaganda bots are fighting the anti-China propaganda bots to know which is the one true propaganda I am meant to believe in.</text></comment> |
41,377,680 | 41,377,709 | 1 | 3 | 41,376,044 | train | <story><title>Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?</title><url>https://areweanticheatyet.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Starz0r</author><text>What an interesting day when you see a site you&#x27;ve worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don&#x27;t blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It&#x27;s come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with someone else to do a redesign, which I think has done great for the project at large.<p>I originally created the site as a way to track which games would be supported on Linux, since at the time the Steam Deck was releasing, and some games were turning to support it. And it has since blossomed into a larger project, which some other tools even pull from! I would have never even imagined that when I first started making this.<p>I do want to address something I see being talked about in the comments, which is the fact people say that anti-cheats are snake oil, or useless. This is a big misunderstanding, and I feel like those more technically inclined should understand that anti-cheat is a &quot;defense-in-depth&quot; type of approach. Where it is just one of many lines of defense. Some anti-cheats are pretty useless, and don&#x27;t do much, but some actually do try and protect the game you&#x27;re playing. But, just like DRM, it can be cracked, and that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s more of a constant arms race, rather than a one and done thing.<p>I&#x27;m writing out a longer post about this for the future, but just know that without anti-cheat clientside, it would be far too easy for an attacker to cheat in these games. We&#x27;re still ways out from letting AI (see VACnet [1] and and Anybrain [2]) determine if someone is cheating server-side, so for now we have to rely on heavier client-side techniques and server-side decision making.<p>Also if anyone has questions about the site (or for me), I&#x27;ll try to answer them here when I see them. If not, have a nice day!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kTiP0zKF9bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kTiP0zKF9bc</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anybrain.gg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anybrain.gg&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lousken</author><text>I disagree with the onclient kernel stuff. Just like with any website, any checking MUST be server side. Kernel stuff not only makes clients inherently less secure and stable, but also for cheat coders it&#x27;s only a matter of finding vulnerable driver they can use to avoid being caught.</text></comment> | <story><title>Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?</title><url>https://areweanticheatyet.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Starz0r</author><text>What an interesting day when you see a site you&#x27;ve worked on for the past 2 (3?) years get posted to HN! Except I tried submitting this site years ago when I had just finished it, but it did not seem like HN was that interested at the time, and I don&#x27;t blame them. It was very niche and video game related, and the site also looked a lot worse. It&#x27;s come a long way to the point where there where I collaborated with someone else to do a redesign, which I think has done great for the project at large.<p>I originally created the site as a way to track which games would be supported on Linux, since at the time the Steam Deck was releasing, and some games were turning to support it. And it has since blossomed into a larger project, which some other tools even pull from! I would have never even imagined that when I first started making this.<p>I do want to address something I see being talked about in the comments, which is the fact people say that anti-cheats are snake oil, or useless. This is a big misunderstanding, and I feel like those more technically inclined should understand that anti-cheat is a &quot;defense-in-depth&quot; type of approach. Where it is just one of many lines of defense. Some anti-cheats are pretty useless, and don&#x27;t do much, but some actually do try and protect the game you&#x27;re playing. But, just like DRM, it can be cracked, and that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s more of a constant arms race, rather than a one and done thing.<p>I&#x27;m writing out a longer post about this for the future, but just know that without anti-cheat clientside, it would be far too easy for an attacker to cheat in these games. We&#x27;re still ways out from letting AI (see VACnet [1] and and Anybrain [2]) determine if someone is cheating server-side, so for now we have to rely on heavier client-side techniques and server-side decision making.<p>Also if anyone has questions about the site (or for me), I&#x27;ll try to answer them here when I see them. If not, have a nice day!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kTiP0zKF9bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kTiP0zKF9bc</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anybrain.gg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anybrain.gg&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aerroon</author><text>&gt;<i>This is a big misunderstanding, and I feel like those more technically inclined should understand that anti-cheat is a &quot;defense-in-depth&quot; type of approach. Where it is just one of many lines of defense. Some anti-cheats are pretty useless, and don&#x27;t do much, but some actually do try and protect the game you&#x27;re playing.</i><p>As a serious player of many multiplayer games I disagree. All it takes is one cheat to circumvent the protections and soon enough every cheater will use that circumvention.<p>Meanwhile, I, the legitimate player suffer from degraded performance, disconnections (looking at you Amazon Games - you&#x27;ve not been able to fix your (most likely) Easy Anticheat disconnection issue in 2 years!), or outright inability to play.<p>Perhaps the cheating situation would be worse without anticheats, but considering how rampant it seems to be in fast-paced or grindy games I play, I kind of doubt it.</text></comment> |
4,440,344 | 4,439,672 | 1 | 3 | 4,439,127 | train | <story><title>Public Lab DIY Spectrometry Kit</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jywarren/public-lab-diy-spectrometry-kit</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomkinstinch</author><text>I attempted this before, even on Kickstarter:<p><a href="http://www.openspectrometer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openspectrometer.com/</a><p><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makerhaus/open-spectrometer?ref=live" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makerhaus/open-spectrome...</a><p>Unfortunately we did not hit our fundraising target, and it's now a dead project. I'd love to see this new Kickstart project succeed, especially the online spectral database. Commercial databases of spectral signatures are expensive (thousands of dollars), and they shouldn't be.<p>Part of our problem, I think, was that we were attempting the project while taking classes full time, and working.<p>We were planning to release two different designs at different price points. One would have used inexpensive ruled transmission grating, while a more expensive unit would have used a concave holographic aberration-corrected reflective grating. The latter would have had better system efficiency, less "smear" across pixels, and better linearity. Each would have made use of a linear CCD array with good sensitivity (the same chip used in the Ocean Optics units). Concave gratings add a couple hundred bucks to the price, but are well worth it if you need to do UV.<p>A challenge we didn't get to solve was how to make something DIY that could be used to detect UV. It's difficult to sputter a uniform phosphor coating or remove a sensor window without specialized equipment.</text></comment> | <story><title>Public Lab DIY Spectrometry Kit</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jywarren/public-lab-diy-spectrometry-kit</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>daniel_reetz</author><text>I applaud the approach, but it seems like a challenge to achieve useful accuracy across many devices. I am a little skeptical about the 3nm claims.<p>First, the (bandpass) Bayer color filter arrays on cameras limit their color resolution pretty sharply. It might be a better (if less elegant) approach to use the ambient light sensor and scan it across the spectrum generated by the diffraction grating.<p>Also, the resolution of a spectrometer is in part determined by entry slit width. Old timers and DIY'ers use abutted razorblades to make a clean, straight slit. Problem here is that there is a trade-off. You need a wide slit to get light in for these insensitive webcam sensors. But then you lose spectral resolution because your slit is wide. Alternately, you narrow the slit to get more spectral resolution, but then your image is dominated by noise. I'm sure these guys have found the sweet spot.<p>Second, the spectral response of the color filter arrays varies both from camera to camera and even within same-model sensors (I personally own over 40 of one model of Canon Powershot, and the differences in color response are fairly extreme). This could in principle be at least partly calibrated out, if you had each device take a picture of a calibration standard.<p>Third, the image signal processors are closer and closer to the sensor these days. It may be impossible to get data which hasn't at least been somewhat mucked with, meaning some people will have a useful spectrometer and some won't.<p>This goes doubly for phones with bad imaging pipelines, where the image processing is out of your control. Lots of spatial and spectral processing going on. It will be interesting to see, for example, how the auto white balance and sharpening algos deal with having zero natural image content in the captured data.<p>Aside from the within-sensor variation/image processing problems it would definitely be usable for relative data - I see that they used a relative approach on their UV detection of a bluing dye in detergent. Nice.<p>All that said, I run a somewhat-similar project using cheap cameras to do work previously only reserved for hard-core SLRs and scanning line sensors, and I've found that over and over again, something is vastly better than nothing and often "good enough" is better than expensive, complicated, and pain in the ass. I've also dealt with a lot of people laying out a bunch of complicated technical "Here's why it won't work" talk and have learned to counter with my own "But look, it does work" answer.<p>Blah blah: I think it's important for the capture software captured as much metadata about the image sensor as possible. Their software looks great and a database of spectra would also be great. It would be AWESOME if the Shazam-style auto identification worked at all. Good luck, I'll probably be supporting the project.</text></comment> |
31,854,098 | 31,854,185 | 1 | 2 | 31,849,553 | train | <story><title>As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/well/mind/teens-thc-canabis.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>worker_person</author><text>Watching your child being content to work at Taco Bell for the next 50 years is not something to be proud of. Regardless of contentment.</text></item><item><author>nshung</author><text>To me, a life that is in content and has meaning trumps all those whatever higher trajectory means. I mean.. isn’t achieving those higher trajectories the goal of being content and having achieve the meaning if it exits at all?</text></item><item><author>SoftTalker</author><text>Can confirm.<p>Two of my kids use THC pretty regularly and they seem content with a life that is paying the bills but not really leading anywhere.<p>The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher trajectory.<p>All had pretty much the same upbringing, rules, experiences, and discipline.<p>I&#x27;ve never used it, so don&#x27;t have personal experience.</text></item><item><author>mesofile</author><text>I thought the way that South Park put it (in the voice of Randy Marsh) many years ago was just about perfect:<p>“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn&#x27;t gonna make you kill people, and ...it most likely isn&#x27;t gonna fund terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and... It&#x27;s when you&#x27;re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or... being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren&#x27;t good at anything.” [0]<p>To be clear, I don’t wholly agree, I know too many talented and hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of cannabis rather nicely I think.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;southpark.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Future_Self_n%27_Me&#x2F;Script" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;southpark.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Future_Self_n%27_Me&#x2F;Scr...</a></text></item><item><author>lacker</author><text>The real danger with cannabis is not that it&#x27;ll make you sick or have some nasty side effect like this article describes.<p>The danger is simply that you will like it, you&#x27;ll end up using it every day, all different times of the day, and it won&#x27;t really hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on it won&#x27;t feel &quot;fun&quot; it&#x27;ll just feel &quot;normal&quot;. And you just won&#x27;t get as much out of your life as you could get, won&#x27;t achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Taywee</author><text>I&#x27;d be proud of it, if they were a good person, took care of themselves, took care of the people around them, and were truly happy in their lives. Some people are perfectly happy working low-level positions in restaurants, sanitation, retail, and the like for their lives, and maybe maintaining a few hobbies and relationships that give them personal meaning off their work hours.<p>It&#x27;s only a problem if they aren&#x27;t actually content. I&#x27;ve known tons of people working minimum wage who sneer at &quot;elites&quot;, don&#x27;t seek higher things, and get high all the time, but really resent the fact that they never did anything with their lives. They don&#x27;t build their hobbies, they don&#x27;t seek higher levels of employment or skill, and they constantly talk about how they want to do great things that they never do.<p>There will always be an infinite amount of achievement that you never accomplished. There will always be an infinite number of things you never did. The best thing you can do is prioritize, accomplish the things that you really want to accomplish, and try to do your best to be happy with what you are able to do. Live your life happily, and make the people around you happy.</text></comment> | <story><title>As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/well/mind/teens-thc-canabis.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>worker_person</author><text>Watching your child being content to work at Taco Bell for the next 50 years is not something to be proud of. Regardless of contentment.</text></item><item><author>nshung</author><text>To me, a life that is in content and has meaning trumps all those whatever higher trajectory means. I mean.. isn’t achieving those higher trajectories the goal of being content and having achieve the meaning if it exits at all?</text></item><item><author>SoftTalker</author><text>Can confirm.<p>Two of my kids use THC pretty regularly and they seem content with a life that is paying the bills but not really leading anywhere.<p>The third does not (AFAIK) and is on a much higher trajectory.<p>All had pretty much the same upbringing, rules, experiences, and discipline.<p>I&#x27;ve never used it, so don&#x27;t have personal experience.</text></item><item><author>mesofile</author><text>I thought the way that South Park put it (in the voice of Randy Marsh) many years ago was just about perfect:<p>“Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn&#x27;t gonna make you kill people, and ...it most likely isn&#x27;t gonna fund terrorists, but... Well son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored and... It&#x27;s when you&#x27;re bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or... being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren&#x27;t good at anything.” [0]<p>To be clear, I don’t wholly agree, I know too many talented and hard-working stoners, but it does sum up the passive danger of cannabis rather nicely I think.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;southpark.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Future_Self_n%27_Me&#x2F;Script" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;southpark.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;My_Future_Self_n%27_Me&#x2F;Scr...</a></text></item><item><author>lacker</author><text>The real danger with cannabis is not that it&#x27;ll make you sick or have some nasty side effect like this article describes.<p>The danger is simply that you will like it, you&#x27;ll end up using it every day, all different times of the day, and it won&#x27;t really hurt your health as much as it will make you live your life in a somewhat dopey, detached, less-intelligent way. As time goes on it won&#x27;t feel &quot;fun&quot; it&#x27;ll just feel &quot;normal&quot;. And you just won&#x27;t get as much out of your life as you could get, won&#x27;t achieve as much relationship success, professional success, or personal fulfillment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monktastic1</author><text>Everyone is focusing on whether being content with working at Taco Bell is sufficient in life, but I think the more interesting question is whether they truly <i>are</i> content. That&#x27;s not for me to answer, but if the South Park quote has any truth (and I think it has more than a little), in 50 years&#x27; time, they themselves might not be happy with how things went in retrospect. In that case, it&#x27;s possible they weren&#x27;t really content all that time, but were using weed to avoid deeply feeling that discontent.<p>I say this as someone with at least a little experience, not to be judgmental.</text></comment> |
18,024,374 | 18,024,304 | 1 | 3 | 18,012,732 | train | <story><title>Mysterious great white shark lair discovered in Pacific Ocean</title><url>https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mysterious-great-white-shark-lair-discovered-in-13234068.php?t=5c043f9ce3&f?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CalChris</author><text>It&#x27;s a good article but existence of the <i>White Shark Café</i> has been known for quite some time. I first read about it in <i>The Devil&#x27;s Teeth</i>, a book (the only one?) about the Farallon Islands (20 miles west of San Francisco) where they actively study Great Whites.<p>They&#x27;ve known it was there since satellite tracker data indicated that in the 2000s. I guess what the article is talking about discovering is the <i>Café</i> part. They didn&#x27;t know that there was food there or rather they didn&#x27;t understand the food there.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;White_Shark_Caf%C3%A9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;White_Shark_Caf%C3%A9</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Mysterious great white shark lair discovered in Pacific Ocean</title><url>https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mysterious-great-white-shark-lair-discovered-in-13234068.php?t=5c043f9ce3&f?</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>Everything about these fish is &quot;mysterious&quot;. All we really know about them comes from behavior at the surface. Immature whites are rarely every seen. We don&#x27;t know where the real tiny ones grow up. Mating behavior is a totally open book atm. Only recently have we learned that they move in loose packs.<p>I got a real kick out of a study that gave credence to the old surfer&#x27;s adage &quot;big waves, big shark&quot;. It turns out they like to recharge in the more oxygenated waters near breaking waves. Bigger and more territoriality dominant sharks hang out near the bigger waves.</text></comment> |
16,729,054 | 16,728,863 | 1 | 3 | 16,727,319 | train | <story><title>My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app</title><url>https://twitter.com/buro9/status/980349887006076928</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buro9</author><text>HN replying to myself with some context outside of the tweets.<p>I actually trust stock Android over Samsung, Sony, etc Android. Hence my &quot;if we&#x27;re going to have Android TV perhaps Google could supply it without the forced add-ons&quot;. I see this similar to installing Windows yourself rather than having &quot;Windows with added vendor crap&quot;... like if you know you want Windows, a stock one is better and same with Android.<p>I&#x27;m now looking at purchasing the Nvidia Shield and disabling all network connectivity on my Sony TV.<p>The Sony TV is a recent one, about a year old. A Bravia something or other. I have disabled the Samba app using the Android Apps system.<p>One thing I didn&#x27;t include in the tweets was Samba&#x27;s patent list, because it&#x27;s too deep a topic for Twitter. The patent numbers are on their site though... go take a look: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;patents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;patents&#x2F;</a> Some of those are downright scary and have no positive application for privacy conscious users.<p>Feel free to ask anything.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>I&#x27;m the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.<p>For future HN context, as the author I&#x27;m reproducing them here in full:<p>My @Sony &quot;smart&quot; TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv</a> and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.<p>From their own privacy policy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;</a> … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.<p>This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a &quot;hot list&quot;... but it is also used to &quot;Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others&quot;<p>If you have a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any brand and it&#x27;s doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.<p>Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it&#x27;s a feature for corporations only.<p>To disable Samba the soft way... don&#x27;t agree to their T&amp;Cs post OS upgrade.<p>To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.<p>This is a good time to say that if you own a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any company you should run it on a different network than your NAS and other computers. And that all other devices best require passwords to connect to them.<p>Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.<p>And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only &quot;smart&quot; functionality was external to the display itself. But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.<p>I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays.<p>Perhaps @Google could even call it Pixel TV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tannhaeuser</author><text>I&#x27;ve bought a Sony Bravia TV set around this time a year ago, too, but mine doesn&#x27;t seem to have Android TV. Or does it? The firmware only has basic TV, EPG, and recording capabilities, plus Netflix but no &quot;apps&quot;. It&#x27;s an absolute joke compared to PlayTV on PS3 of ten years ago. I was about to reset&#x2F;update it because the recording software is stuck in a state where it can&#x27;t delete a scheduled recording in the past and won&#x27;t take programming for new recordings.<p>So I&#x27;m selfishly asking if you could look up the version number of yours, so that I can identify mine and avoid updating it?</text></comment> | <story><title>My Sony "smart" TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app</title><url>https://twitter.com/buro9/status/980349887006076928</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buro9</author><text>HN replying to myself with some context outside of the tweets.<p>I actually trust stock Android over Samsung, Sony, etc Android. Hence my &quot;if we&#x27;re going to have Android TV perhaps Google could supply it without the forced add-ons&quot;. I see this similar to installing Windows yourself rather than having &quot;Windows with added vendor crap&quot;... like if you know you want Windows, a stock one is better and same with Android.<p>I&#x27;m now looking at purchasing the Nvidia Shield and disabling all network connectivity on my Sony TV.<p>The Sony TV is a recent one, about a year old. A Bravia something or other. I have disabled the Samba app using the Android Apps system.<p>One thing I didn&#x27;t include in the tweets was Samba&#x27;s patent list, because it&#x27;s too deep a topic for Twitter. The patent numbers are on their site though... go take a look: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;patents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;patents&#x2F;</a> Some of those are downright scary and have no positive application for privacy conscious users.<p>Feel free to ask anything.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>I&#x27;m the author and linking to my tweets is a bad idea because they auto-delete after 14 days.<p>For future HN context, as the author I&#x27;m reproducing them here in full:<p>My @Sony &quot;smart&quot; TV has updated itself and tried to force me to use a new app from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv</a> and boy oh boy... this is worse than recent @facebook stuff.<p>From their own privacy policy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samba.tv&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy-policy&#x2F;</a> … they track what you watch, when you watch it, your location, your interactions with other apps. And they share this with... well, everyone basically.<p>This information is then used to market to you within the TV and offer you a &quot;hot list&quot;... but it is also used to &quot;Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights, safety and property of Samba and others&quot;<p>If you have a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any brand and it&#x27;s doing an update you will 100% want to disable Samba.<p>Samba is not a feature for you, it is a snitch in your living room, snitching on everything you watch on your TV, it&#x27;s a feature for corporations only.<p>To disable Samba the soft way... don&#x27;t agree to their T&amp;Cs post OS upgrade.<p>To disable Samba the hard way... use Android system settings to disable the app.<p>This is a good time to say that if you own a &quot;Smart TV&quot; from any company you should run it on a different network than your NAS and other computers. And that all other devices best require passwords to connect to them.<p>Ideally you run a TV on a different VLAN.<p>And this is where I wish that dumb panels were all the rage, and that the only &quot;smart&quot; functionality was external to the display itself. But when @netflix and other content providers decline the use of their apps outside of integrated devices this is the hell we live in.<p>I really wish that @Google provided a TV box that was the full Android TV, but that was vanilla Google with the ability to install @netflix, @BBCiPlayer, @mubi as apps. That I could just plug this into any display panel, including dumb displays.<p>Perhaps @Google could even call it Pixel TV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gregmac</author><text>I&#x27;ve had the Nvidia Shield for a couple years now, and highly recommend it. It&#x27;s a bit expensive if you&#x27;re not using it for gaming or Plex server (I&#x27;m not) but I find it worth it because it&#x27;s reliable, still gets updated, and generally &quot;just works&quot;. It&#x27;s literally the only content used for my TV now: Netflix, Plex, YouTube, weather, Tinycam (baby monitor), Google Music, and I can also cast from a phone&#x2F;computer&#x2F;etc without changing inputs.</text></comment> |
21,421,848 | 21,420,697 | 1 | 3 | 21,418,232 | train | <story><title>Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/google-to-acquire-fitbit-valuing-the-smartwatch-maker-at-about-2point1-billion.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you&#x27;re a pawn in internal politics.<p>You may think you have a product but you don&#x27;t. If your product survives (as in, Google didn&#x27;t buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA&#x2F;team in Google.<p>- You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion.<p>- Even if you survive Android, Fuchsia probably thinks you belong on their paltform.<p>- Oh and while we&#x27;re at it, let&#x27;s integrate with OAuth2.0 so your device now needs a Google account to even work (and stops working when refresh tokens can&#x27;t be used as happened to many Google wireless routers).<p>- Your software development is now set in stone as various teams work out how to migrate it to Google infrastructure and rewrite it in [language&#x2F;framework du jour].<p>I actually agree with other commenters: Google just doesn&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s about anymore. It has no overriding vision. Larry just isn&#x27;t the leader Google needs to be, which would be fine, except that he clearly wants to be.<p>Disclaimer: Xoogler.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clairity</author><text>&gt; “I actually agree with other commenters: Google just doesn&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s about anymore. It has no overriding vision.”<p>it’s pretty apparent to me that after google finally got over wanting to be facebook, google now wants to be apple. and they’re desperately trying not to be microsoft, even though that’s what they mostly are.<p>in the beginning, google had a unique identity (quirky &amp; clever) and vision (organize the world’s information). now they look to others to figure out who to be. it’s like the small town high school football star who never moved on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/google-to-acquire-fitbit-valuing-the-smartwatch-maker-at-about-2point1-billion.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Oof. Goodbye Fitbit. Or, rather, welcome to the world where you&#x27;re a pawn in internal politics.<p>You may think you have a product but you don&#x27;t. If your product survives (as in, Google didn&#x27;t buy you just for the team), your product schedule will have to survive the interests of every other PA&#x2F;team in Google.<p>- You think you have software to run your products? Ha. The Android team will have a different opinion.<p>- Even if you survive Android, Fuchsia probably thinks you belong on their paltform.<p>- Oh and while we&#x27;re at it, let&#x27;s integrate with OAuth2.0 so your device now needs a Google account to even work (and stops working when refresh tokens can&#x27;t be used as happened to many Google wireless routers).<p>- Your software development is now set in stone as various teams work out how to migrate it to Google infrastructure and rewrite it in [language&#x2F;framework du jour].<p>I actually agree with other commenters: Google just doesn&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s about anymore. It has no overriding vision. Larry just isn&#x27;t the leader Google needs to be, which would be fine, except that he clearly wants to be.<p>Disclaimer: Xoogler.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>habitue</author><text>&gt; as in, Google didn&#x27;t buy you just for the team<p>2.1B isn&#x27;t an acquihire. They want the customers, the team, and the manufacturing chain at the very least.</text></comment> |
8,754,063 | 8,753,905 | 1 | 2 | 8,753,448 | train | <story><title>Americans are 40% poorer than before the recession</title><url>http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-are-40-poorer-than-before-the-recession-2014-12-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hawkice</author><text>Calculating how poor people are based on comparing against a time known to have unrealistically high and unsustainable housing prices, which made up a very large portion of net worth, seems like clickbait. We haven&#x27;t re-entered a housing bubble massive enough to make every a paper millionaire. We shouldn&#x27;t sulk about that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Americans are 40% poorer than before the recession</title><url>http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-are-40-poorer-than-before-the-recession-2014-12-12</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pvnick</author><text>&quot;The recession is over&quot; has always struck me a political double-speak. We never left the recession; mainstream America just collectively forgot how it felt to have enough money. We have become accustomed to the 60 hour work weeks for folks fortunate enough to have jobs, chronic unemployment for those unfortunate enough to work outside of tech, the cheaper processed food, the increasing debt, and the lower standard of living. Being poor is the new norm, and &quot;the recession is over&quot; translates to &quot;get used to it buddy, it&#x27;s not getting any better.&quot;<p>Given that&#x27;s the case, I wonder what the phrase &quot;double dip recession&quot; we hear thrown around referring to impending repeat economic troubles actually translates into?</text></comment> |
17,170,777 | 17,170,576 | 1 | 2 | 17,168,713 | train | <story><title>Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)</title><url>https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/03/en-plural.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>I was amazed to discover that oranges used to be called &quot;noranges&quot; but &quot;a norange&quot; was corrupted into &quot;an orange&quot;.</text></item><item><author>justinpombrio</author><text>The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. &quot;en&quot; for plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn&#x27;t technically appropriate. Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. &quot;discover&quot; used to mean &quot;to remove the cover of&quot;, but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases together until they&#x27;re effectively one word. A lot of conjugations&#x2F;declentions are a result of this. I recommend this book if you&#x27;re interested in how languages change over time; it&#x27;s very well written.<p>EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, &quot;wicked&quot; used to mean &quot;evil&quot;, but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it&#x27;s started to mean &quot;sweet&quot;.<p>And there&#x27;s always the great consonant shift:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grimm%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grimm%27s_law</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Mankinds-Invention&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0805080120" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Manki...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yosito</author><text>Oh! That suddenly makes the Spanish &quot;naranja&quot; seem way more connected!</text></comment> | <story><title>Why “children,” not “childs”? (2016)</title><url>https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/03/en-plural.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>I was amazed to discover that oranges used to be called &quot;noranges&quot; but &quot;a norange&quot; was corrupted into &quot;an orange&quot;.</text></item><item><author>justinpombrio</author><text>The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. &quot;en&quot; for plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn&#x27;t technically appropriate. Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. &quot;discover&quot; used to mean &quot;to remove the cover of&quot;, but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases together until they&#x27;re effectively one word. A lot of conjugations&#x2F;declentions are a result of this. I recommend this book if you&#x27;re interested in how languages change over time; it&#x27;s very well written.<p>EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, &quot;wicked&quot; used to mean &quot;evil&quot;, but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it&#x27;s started to mean &quot;sweet&quot;.<p>And there&#x27;s always the great consonant shift:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grimm%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grimm%27s_law</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Mankinds-Invention&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0805080120" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Manki...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cven714</author><text>Same with &quot;a napron&quot; -&gt; &quot;an apron&quot;</text></comment> |
4,787,587 | 4,785,340 | 1 | 2 | 4,784,772 | train | <story><title>Why aren't we all using Japanese toilets?</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/toilets/#japanese</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aptimpropriety</author><text>Every one of these articles gets the pitch of these toilets completely wrong - for every person, and in every scenario, these are not universally better.<p>Consider the following experiment:<p>Smear some mud on your arm. Now, using a jet stream the power of a squirt gun and very low precision, wash it all off in 10 seconds. Not so easy.
Then - imagine if you put mud on a place with hair! Not only will it not be clean without some actual washing, we haven't even gotten to the drying part yet.<p>Fact of the matter is, these do not replace toilet paper. I thought they were OK (Google) until I decided to use toilet paper after - and I was shocked and disappointed. My routine simply got longer and more complex, with a small value add of washing with water instead of dry paper.<p>Sorry about the grim detail - I think the 'squeamish about bathroom routine' point of the article is right - just in the wrong way!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>veidr</author><text>I read a version of this argument in some US newspaper a while back. It completely misses the point.<p>These ass-jet toilets are not intended to replace toilet paper. They are for getting your asshole (and ladyparts, but I can't testify on that topic) much cleaner in much less time than with conventional American toilets and dry paper alone.<p>You use the ass-jet, then paper. That's how they work. (For a heinous bowel-movement situation, you might do paper, ass-jet, paper again.) You aren't supposed to skip the paper!<p>Using your mud example, if you got mud all over your head, would you rather just keep scraping your head with dry paper towels, and use up a couple rolls worth and still have some mud left over, or use some water too? Same principle.<p>If you take a perfect shit (love when that happens), then sure, it just slides out and leaves behind minimal debris. Great. But let's say you ate a plate of Uncle Jim's nachos the night before, along with a twelve pack of PBR, and you definitely didn't achieve shitting perfection this time. <i>That</i> is when these toilets really shine.<p>The number of times you have to wipe your ass to achieve that comforting pure-white-no-residue final wipe, that tells you your asshole is clean, is <i>astronomically</i> higher with paper only than it is with an ass-jet plus paper. I mean, have you ever had one of those wipe-it-ten-time-and-dammit-it-still-isn't-clean kind of shits? You just never have that happen with the ass-jet. The water helps wash your doody-hole AND that moistens the toilet paper (for the first post-jet wipe). That makes it work better, just like a wet dishrag is more effective at cleaning a dish than a dry one.<p>I personally would be surprised if populations that lack ass-jet toilets didn't have a higher incidence of hemmhorrhoids from all that wiping, over a lifetime. I don't think we have that long-term data yet.<p>But from personal experience, they have saved me thousdands and thousands of asshole-wipes over the years, and I could never go back to a the barbaric American toilets of my youth.<p>(When I moved back to America several years ago, I brought a Toto washlet toilet seat with me. And the new apartment that I just bought in Tokyo had many options to specify, but the toilet wasn't one of them--just as patio11 suggests above, the place came with a brand new whiz-bang model featuring the latest in shitter technology from Toto, complete with not only heated seat, ass-jet, and wall-mounted control panel, but also sensors that allow it to raise the seat automatically as I approach, and flush for me when I am done.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Why aren't we all using Japanese toilets?</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/toilets/#japanese</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aptimpropriety</author><text>Every one of these articles gets the pitch of these toilets completely wrong - for every person, and in every scenario, these are not universally better.<p>Consider the following experiment:<p>Smear some mud on your arm. Now, using a jet stream the power of a squirt gun and very low precision, wash it all off in 10 seconds. Not so easy.
Then - imagine if you put mud on a place with hair! Not only will it not be clean without some actual washing, we haven't even gotten to the drying part yet.<p>Fact of the matter is, these do not replace toilet paper. I thought they were OK (Google) until I decided to use toilet paper after - and I was shocked and disappointed. My routine simply got longer and more complex, with a small value add of washing with water instead of dry paper.<p>Sorry about the grim detail - I think the 'squeamish about bathroom routine' point of the article is right - just in the wrong way!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is pretty insightful. I used them at Google as well and discovered similar variabilities. Doing some A/B testing (trust me testing on the toilet is encouraged there :-) I did find that I used less paper, but not 'no' paper. And it wasn't just for 'drying purposes' it was to insure everything had been taken care of.<p>Another observation was that you got better with the wash over time. Once familiarized with the placement controls of the unit and the 'feel' (sorry) of the action you could achieve better results. There was some interesting speculation on what a 'complete' fix might entail, and one of the hardware engineers put a 'watts up' meters in line with the seat to get a read on its actual usage (about .037 kwH per month),<p>My take away was that it was an improvement but not a $1,500 improvement (or $4,500 if I wanted to do it to all three toilets in my house). It also <i>increases</i> water usage, albeit modestly, which is sort of anti-california but that was before I talked with the toilet guys who said the water saving toilets only save water on urine flushes since it it typical for solid matter to require more than one flush cycle. (it still saves water but still).</text></comment> |
22,264,221 | 22,263,622 | 1 | 3 | 22,258,113 | train | <story><title>No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback</title><url>http://blog.interviewing.io/no-engineer-has-ever-sued-a-company-because-of-constructive-post-interview-feedback-so-why-dont-employers-do-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iagooar</author><text>In Germany every single lawyer or HR responsible would tell you not to send any reason at all, just a generic response.<p>This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it).<p>So this is it, companies do not do this because they&#x27;re evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.</text></item><item><author>vector_spaces</author><text>I&#x27;m so disappointed to read comments on this thread to the effect of &quot;There&#x27;s nothing in it for the company but risk&quot;.<p>I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with &quot;sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience&quot;.<p>I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response<p>The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now.<p>On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn&#x27;t get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again.<p>Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there&#x27;s more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>virgilp</author><text>While working at Adobe, an executive launched the &quot;Red Box&quot; innovation program (that eventually became <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kickbox.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kickbox.org&#x2F;</a>). The program itself is interesting, but what was MORE interesting is that he was able to pull it off - the whole thing is a legal minefield of epic proportions (1). Normally, if you go to the legal department and ask &quot;can I do this&quot;, nobody in their right mind will answer &quot;yes, but&quot;... you&#x27;ll get an immediate &quot;no way, get out of here, you&#x27;re crazy&quot;.<p>The trick is to ask legal &quot;I&#x27;m doing this, how can I minimize our legal exposure&quot;. Not to ask &quot;can we do this&quot;. The second question will invariably get you a &quot;no&quot; (if you thought to ask, there must be _some_ risk). The first question will get a lot of grumbling, but if you&#x27;re in a high-enough position, will eventually lead to useful advice.<p>(1) The basic idea is that in the early stages, you need to prove traction&#x2F;market interest for your idea. As such, it needs to show no signs that it&#x27;s backed by Adobe - it&#x27;s trivially easy to get a BizzFeudNews article about &quot;Adobe launches ShitDraw Pro&quot; or whatnot; it&#x27;s very easy to get thousands of people curious &amp; signing up. All this is much harder when you&#x27;re a John Doe, and don&#x27;t lean on the brand recognition, but on the intrinsic value of your idea&#x2F;product.
However, this all means is that by design in the early stages you will have company employees, paying with company money, to &quot;launch&quot; services &amp; get people to subscribe while hiding the true entity behind those services. No nefarious motivation behind it, but surely you can see the potential legal challenges.</text></comment> | <story><title>No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback</title><url>http://blog.interviewing.io/no-engineer-has-ever-sued-a-company-because-of-constructive-post-interview-feedback-so-why-dont-employers-do-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iagooar</author><text>In Germany every single lawyer or HR responsible would tell you not to send any reason at all, just a generic response.<p>This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it).<p>So this is it, companies do not do this because they&#x27;re evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.</text></item><item><author>vector_spaces</author><text>I&#x27;m so disappointed to read comments on this thread to the effect of &quot;There&#x27;s nothing in it for the company but risk&quot;.<p>I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with &quot;sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience&quot;.<p>I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response<p>The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now.<p>On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn&#x27;t get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again.<p>Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there&#x27;s more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hvidgaard</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand this. If I select a candidate of three to offer a job, then as long as I&#x27;m not discriminating the others for things such as sexuality, gender, age, ect. then the person we feel is the best fit is just that. What we believe is the best candidate - no amount of arguing in a court is going to change that.</text></comment> |
22,500,043 | 22,499,839 | 1 | 3 | 22,495,420 | train | <story><title>Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)</title><url>https://www.ibj.com/articles/73599-companies-fret-as-costs-soar-for-software-subscriptions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SonicScrub</author><text>That number doesn&#x27;t surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical&#x2F;aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here&#x27;s the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search:<p>1) $35,000<p>2) $15,000<p>3) $10,000<p>4) $4,500<p>So I&#x27;m costing the company ~$65,000 per year in software licenses alone.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Look, either it&#x27;s worth it or it&#x27;s not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn&#x27;t be buying them if they weren&#x27;t providing more value than they cost. But:<p>&gt; <i>enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software</i><p>Sorry but I can&#x27;t wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR&#x2F;payroll and a few other tools I can imagine <i>$1,000</i>&#x2F;year. And certain employees need SalesForce or Adobe CC or whatever which adds another, say, $500-2,000.<p>But I just cannot possibly imagine how an <i>average</i> employee is using $10K worth of subscription services?! Does anyone else think this is accurate?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>analog31</author><text>Even for a typical office worker, based on my experience at a large company, there might be 10 to 20 enterprise apps that include:<p><pre><code> * Tracking work hours
* Communicating within teams
* Entering and managing yearly performance reviews
* Managing IT tickets
* Catching spyware, phishing, etc.
* Key and click logging
* Personality and other screenings for job candidates
* Health insurance management
* Jira being used outside of software development
* Database for archiving HR announcements
* Password management for the above
</code></pre>
In general, the prosperity of a business is a balance of assets and liabilities, and a software purchase is both, since it involves a cost. Managers promote purchases based on a variety of factors relative to the business and their own personal ambitions. There&#x27;s no magic that makes managers so brilliant in the face of a salesman that they only make beneficial decisions, or that purchases are inherently beneficial, just because the product is software.</text></comment> | <story><title>Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)</title><url>https://www.ibj.com/articles/73599-companies-fret-as-costs-soar-for-software-subscriptions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SonicScrub</author><text>That number doesn&#x27;t surprise me. Your quick $1000-$2000 estimate is probably accurate for a typical office worker, but the more specialized positions skew the average. I work in mechanical&#x2F;aerospace engineering for a large company. A lot of the software we use is very specialized and very costly. Here&#x27;s the yearly costs from the top 4 softwares I use based on a quick google search:<p>1) $35,000<p>2) $15,000<p>3) $10,000<p>4) $4,500<p>So I&#x27;m costing the company ~$65,000 per year in software licenses alone.</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>Look, either it&#x27;s worth it or it&#x27;s not. Costs may be soaring, but companies wouldn&#x27;t be buying them if they weren&#x27;t providing more value than they cost. But:<p>&gt; <i>enterprise companies are spending an average of more than $10,000 per employee per year on software</i><p>Sorry but I can&#x27;t wrap my head around this. Is that really accurate? Between Office and cloud and HR&#x2F;payroll and a few other tools I can imagine <i>$1,000</i>&#x2F;year. And certain employees need SalesForce or Adobe CC or whatever which adds another, say, $500-2,000.<p>But I just cannot possibly imagine how an <i>average</i> employee is using $10K worth of subscription services?! Does anyone else think this is accurate?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aeolun</author><text>But there would have to be 5 other workers for every you. I think it’s more likely that the number is around 1 in 200 for most enterprises. And maybe closer to 1 in 1000 for all enterprises combined.<p>Note: those numbers are pulled out of my ass.</text></comment> |
17,142,099 | 17,142,121 | 1 | 2 | 17,140,638 | train | <story><title>Instapaper is temporarily shutting off access for European users due to GDPR</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17387146/instapaper-gdpr-europe-access-shut-down-privacy-changes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Fradow</author><text>Obviously, IANAL, but my company talked to a few over the past week.<p>This move is, in my opinion, a bad read on the odds and European culture.<p>First, culture. The goal (at least in France, but that&#x27;s probably the same in other countries) is to get you in compliance, NOT to fine you. What this means is that before you get lawsuit and fines, someone will talk to you and work with you to see how you can get compliant.<p>Second, the odds. Unless you are a big company that thrives on GDPR violations (doesn&#x27;t seem to me Instapaper is one, but I could be mistaken as I never used the service), you aren&#x27;t likely to be targeted before a while, at least until a big case is done and over (let&#x27;s take the odds Facebook is first).<p>Third, the delay. While the GDPR takes effect tomorrow, you have a grace period of a year for part of it (for example, getting consent for newsletter). I would really be surprised if enforcement start tomorrow.<p>Well, at least that&#x27;s my read on the situation. And that&#x27;s how I intend to do it: pro-actively work into getting in compliance without rushing it too much, and handle things properly as they come.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sebazzz</author><text>As far as I understand the grace period was the last two years. Tomorrow is the big day.<p>But whether or not that it is true, I believe that if Europeans have used Instapaper and they now temporarily shut off access they still are not compliant and in violation of the law. Because they did serve Europeans, so they have their data.</text></comment> | <story><title>Instapaper is temporarily shutting off access for European users due to GDPR</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17387146/instapaper-gdpr-europe-access-shut-down-privacy-changes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Fradow</author><text>Obviously, IANAL, but my company talked to a few over the past week.<p>This move is, in my opinion, a bad read on the odds and European culture.<p>First, culture. The goal (at least in France, but that&#x27;s probably the same in other countries) is to get you in compliance, NOT to fine you. What this means is that before you get lawsuit and fines, someone will talk to you and work with you to see how you can get compliant.<p>Second, the odds. Unless you are a big company that thrives on GDPR violations (doesn&#x27;t seem to me Instapaper is one, but I could be mistaken as I never used the service), you aren&#x27;t likely to be targeted before a while, at least until a big case is done and over (let&#x27;s take the odds Facebook is first).<p>Third, the delay. While the GDPR takes effect tomorrow, you have a grace period of a year for part of it (for example, getting consent for newsletter). I would really be surprised if enforcement start tomorrow.<p>Well, at least that&#x27;s my read on the situation. And that&#x27;s how I intend to do it: pro-actively work into getting in compliance without rushing it too much, and handle things properly as they come.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zhdc1</author><text>&#x27;European&#x27; - e.g., EU - culture is still quite new in this regard, and plenty of companies have gotten very large fines for gross non compliance of other regulations&#x2F;directives.<p>Since GDPR compliance is enforced by EU members, many small companies are exposed to (have customers in) most or all EU jurisdictions, and the EU is very heterogeneous when it comes to regulatory enforcement by member states, I think that they&#x27;re correct to be worried about the ambiguity around the GDPR.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing against the GDPR - I&#x27;m in favor of data protection - but the if&#x2F;ands&#x2F;and buts (e.g., speculation) about who is going to get fined, and for how much, is uncomfortable.</text></comment> |
5,078,822 | 5,078,567 | 1 | 2 | 5,078,254 | train | <story><title>Google Declares War on the Password</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-password/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meaty</author><text>Used one of these before (YubiKey) - they are an utter pain in the arse.<p>The contacts get dirty, they dont fit some USB ports properly, they die regularly, are absolutely no good if you don't have a USB port handy (my desktop for example doesn't have a USB hole in the front or on the keyboard or monitor, resulting in crawling around under my desk to authenticate) and to be honest quite fragile.<p>All it does is act as a USB HID keyboard and pump some text down when you press the button on it. It's basically about as secure as an RSA key but requires physical electrical contact with the machine.<p>No thank you.<p>(For reference <a href="http://bigv.io/" rel="nofollow">http://bigv.io/</a> uses these).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>archangel_one</author><text>FWIW, I've had one at work for a year now and I've had nearly none of the problems you've mentioned. It's fit into all USB ports I've tried, the contacts are still fine, it hasn't died, it doesn't seem fragile (or at least hasn't broken yet) and I haven't had to crawl anywhere to plug it in. The most annoying thing (apart from the general annoyance of a second authentication step) is that I can't use it via my phone; a screen on it would be handy for that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Declares War on the Password</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-password/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meaty</author><text>Used one of these before (YubiKey) - they are an utter pain in the arse.<p>The contacts get dirty, they dont fit some USB ports properly, they die regularly, are absolutely no good if you don't have a USB port handy (my desktop for example doesn't have a USB hole in the front or on the keyboard or monitor, resulting in crawling around under my desk to authenticate) and to be honest quite fragile.<p>All it does is act as a USB HID keyboard and pump some text down when you press the button on it. It's basically about as secure as an RSA key but requires physical electrical contact with the machine.<p>No thank you.<p>(For reference <a href="http://bigv.io/" rel="nofollow">http://bigv.io/</a> uses these).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>obituary_latte</author><text>&#62;All it does is act as a USB HID keyboard and pump some text down when you press the button on it.<p>Not necessarily. They can be configured for challenge-response auth: <a href="http://www.yubico.com/products/services-software/personalization-tools/challenge-response/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yubico.com/products/services-software/personaliza...</a></text></comment> |
31,142,407 | 31,142,160 | 1 | 3 | 31,142,025 | train | <story><title>Software Mise En Place</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/software-mise-en-place/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisdbanks</author><text>For me, &quot;Mise en place&quot;, has nothing to do with chopping everything beforehand and in fact that is completely different from how I cook and develop software. Chopping everything at the start seems like it takes longer.<p>I think Mise en place can mean different things to different people. The way I was taught it was to have everything &quot;in place&quot; before you start. Literally you gather all the ingredients in one place (on a metal tray) before you start cooking. This has three main benefits:
1) you make sure you have everything you need;
2) you don&#x27;t forget to add anything as you go because at the end your tray should be empty;
3) you don&#x27;t mess up timings by searching for something while you&#x27;re cooking that you can&#x27;t find;
Thus I use Mise en place, but I don&#x27;t chop everything at the start. I chop the onion and then start cooking it, and then chop the other ingredients. Chopping everything else upfront would make the process slower.<p>Similarly in software development I often save simple tasks for when I need mental relief from a hard task. Working on a simple task can often give you the space you need for your brain to solve the hard task it&#x27;s working on in the background.<p>Doing all the simple tasks up front does not seem to me like a good approach to cooking or software development, but making sure you know what all the ingredients are and have them all ready, does.</text></comment> | <story><title>Software Mise En Place</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/software-mise-en-place/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elcapitan</author><text>&gt; You don’t start prepping one vegetable while another is already cooking.<p>I actually do that all the time - different ingredients have different densities and different cooking times, so it makes total sense to start cooking the harder ones while cutting the softer ones (e.g. when making a Minestrone soup). Or you want an onion&#x2F;garlic&#x2F;tomato base to break down before inserting other ingredients that should only cook shortly and retain their texture.</text></comment> |
19,135,021 | 19,134,611 | 1 | 2 | 19,132,510 | train | <story><title>Apple's iPhone Shipments Plunge in China as Huawei Tightens Grip</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-11/apple-s-iphone-shipments-plunge-in-china-as-huawei-tightens-grip</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>free652</author><text>For some reason I doubt that you have the right perspective. Chinese are very nationalistic and every non immigrant Chinese I met is pro Chinese government. Netcitizens are even worse.<p>American are persecuting a company that disobeyed American laws on American soil. No a single Chinese would blink an eye about persecuting American companies in China.<p>China is having economic issues, that&#x27;s the major reason in sales&#x27; dip.</text></item><item><author>yonkshi</author><text>Currently visiting China for Chinese New Year, and can&#x27;t help but to notice the anti-US anti-Apple sentiment that arose recently. Although anecdotal, I think the nationalistic sentiment has a lot to do with the dip in sales.<p>To put in perspective, most Chinese netizens are generally pretty critical of the Chinese gov. Chinese with higher educations usually look up to western culture and products. However after the Huawei arrest incident, the Chinese netizens were <i>pissed</i> at the American government, I&#x27;ve never seen such anger towards the US gov, and huge waves of boycotts began. They think that American gov is bullying a Chinese company into obeying US law even outside US, and their response is to boycott American products.<p>During my two weeks here I&#x27;ve talked to a dozen random people at bars, friends gatherings and on the plane. Normally US-China politics never come up, but it has come up in almost every single conversation this trip. Most of these people mention that they recent switched to a Chinese phone or their next phone will be a domestic phone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ardy42</author><text>&gt; American are persecuting a company that disobeyed American laws on American soil. No a single Chinese would blink an eye about persecuting American companies in China.<p>Hypocrites exist. The Chinese government was shamelessly hypocritical over the Meng arrest, complaining that it violated her &quot;human rights,&quot; [1] while their utter indifference to them has yet again been made clear by the camps in Xinjiang. I doubt everyday nationalistic citizens would be any more thoughtful.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-46465768" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-46465768</a>: &quot;A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told reporters: &#x27;The detention without giving any reason violates a person&#x27;s human rights.&#x27; ... Beijing has itself frequently been accused by rights groups of rights abuses including unexplained detentions&quot;<p>&gt; China is having economic issues, that&#x27;s the major reason in sales&#x27; dip.<p>Nationalistic ferver drummed up by the Huawei arrest could compound the sales drop.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's iPhone Shipments Plunge in China as Huawei Tightens Grip</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-11/apple-s-iphone-shipments-plunge-in-china-as-huawei-tightens-grip</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>free652</author><text>For some reason I doubt that you have the right perspective. Chinese are very nationalistic and every non immigrant Chinese I met is pro Chinese government. Netcitizens are even worse.<p>American are persecuting a company that disobeyed American laws on American soil. No a single Chinese would blink an eye about persecuting American companies in China.<p>China is having economic issues, that&#x27;s the major reason in sales&#x27; dip.</text></item><item><author>yonkshi</author><text>Currently visiting China for Chinese New Year, and can&#x27;t help but to notice the anti-US anti-Apple sentiment that arose recently. Although anecdotal, I think the nationalistic sentiment has a lot to do with the dip in sales.<p>To put in perspective, most Chinese netizens are generally pretty critical of the Chinese gov. Chinese with higher educations usually look up to western culture and products. However after the Huawei arrest incident, the Chinese netizens were <i>pissed</i> at the American government, I&#x27;ve never seen such anger towards the US gov, and huge waves of boycotts began. They think that American gov is bullying a Chinese company into obeying US law even outside US, and their response is to boycott American products.<p>During my two weeks here I&#x27;ve talked to a dozen random people at bars, friends gatherings and on the plane. Normally US-China politics never come up, but it has come up in almost every single conversation this trip. Most of these people mention that they recent switched to a Chinese phone or their next phone will be a domestic phone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>The boycott of American products is very real. What we do not know is how large the impact really are. For example Hermes posted a record quarter in China again, doesn&#x27;t seems to be hurt by whatever downturn there is in China.</text></comment> |
23,289,946 | 23,287,675 | 1 | 2 | 23,287,278 | train | <story><title>DuckDB: SQLite for Analytics</title><url>https://github.com/cwida/duckdb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scoresmoke</author><text>When I was developing my pet project for Web analytics (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dustalov&#x2F;ballcone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dustalov&#x2F;ballcone</a>), I aimed at using an embedded columnar database for fast analytic queries with zero maintenance, so literally, I wanted ‘OLAP SQLite’. There are essentially two options, DuckDB and MonetDBLite, developed by the same research group. I tried both of them.<p>DuckDB is a relatively new project and I generally enjoyed its design and code quality. However, I found that its current implementation of storage works better for dense data, which is not my case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cwida&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;issues&#x2F;632" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cwida&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;issues&#x2F;632</a>. I think it would be pretty cool to have data compression and more careful NULL handling needed for storing HTTP access logs.<p>MonetDBLite seems to be more mature in terms of functionality, but it seems to be lagging significantly behind the non-embedded client-server version, MonetDB: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;monetdb&#x2F;monetdb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;monetdb&#x2F;monetdb</a>. I experienced unexpected segfaults when using the DATE type on any platform and window functions on aarch64. Nevertheless, I am still using MonetDBLite primarily due to the more efficient disk usage. I will be happy to switch to a more lightweight and actively maintained solution.</text></comment> | <story><title>DuckDB: SQLite for Analytics</title><url>https://github.com/cwida/duckdb</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>banana_giraffe</author><text>As someone that uses SQLite a bit for analytics, I feel like the elevator pitch on the github and the website ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.duckdb.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.duckdb.org&#x2F;</a> ) is missing something.<p>I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s some great reason, but I don&#x27;t see it: Why would I want to use this over SQLite? Is it considerably faster? Does it handle large scale better? I suppose I could try and throw it some use cases I could come up with, but I&#x27;d worry I&#x27;m missing the best use case for this tool.</text></comment> |
17,257,071 | 17,256,208 | 1 | 2 | 17,255,418 | train | <story><title>Show HN: µFSM – A state chart library for embedded applications</title><url>https://github.com/jonpe960/ufsm/tree/ufsm-0.1.0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aylons</author><text>Very nice! Anything that allows something more sophisticated than switch:case in embedded systems are welcome! Also, state machines are way too often overlooked as a proper model for embedded systems architecture. My guess is that proper implementation may become hard (specially if you want to nest them), and there are lots of hardware engineers doing firmware.<p>In my case, when I want to use a state machine for a project, I usually go with Quantum Leaps [1] tools.
Nowadays their website seems cluttered and management-focused, but the tech is solid and the tools are very robust.<p>They also distribute a book [2] on how to use the model using their framework as an example, and I even implemented my version of it as an exercise years ago.<p>It does not have (or did not, I haven&#x27;t checked in the last few years) a tool to translate from XMI to their framework, but they have a freeware to draw the chart. Frankly, I have not even used it: I draw the state machine using some editor and it is easy enough to translate to code and maintain. Maybe not the best, but up until now, very nice to deal with the limited complexity of most embedded systems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.state-machine.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;concepts#HSM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.state-machine.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;concepts#HSM</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.state-machine.com&#x2F;psicc2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.state-machine.com&#x2F;psicc2&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: µFSM – A state chart library for embedded applications</title><url>https://github.com/jonpe960/ufsm/tree/ufsm-0.1.0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slig</author><text>A must read for anyone interested <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statecharts.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;statecharts.github.io&#x2F;</a> Also I highly recommend to check out `xstate` TypeScript library. It&#x27;s a breeze to work with it.</text></comment> |
9,373,075 | 9,372,792 | 1 | 3 | 9,372,494 | train | <story><title>Etsy Vendors to get option to buy $2,500 of shares before public float</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/etsy-vendors-to-get-a-piece-of-ipo-1428971989</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>netcan</author><text>Interesting tactic.<p>I suppose if you boiled it down, they are selling &quot;5% of planned public offering.&quot; So.. costs of selling those shares would be slightly higher. But, they have some presence from people who see the company the roughly same way they do, not as a piece of a portfolio or investment strategy. They get some buzz around the IPO (this article demonstrates that), if vendors are discussing it. It&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re giving away the shares.<p>A part of what&#x27;s interesting is what&#x27;s underlying it: an environment where so much capital is in the hands of rich people that there&#x27;s not much point thinking of &#x27;the public&#x27; as a source of capital.<p>I think income distribution is a lot easier to measure, comprehend and comment on. But wealth disparities are much larger, and I think the societal effect is different. If someone owns $2m in capital but $1.2m is a house and $1.8 is actively invested to yield an income of $75k per annum, is that person rich or are a middle class investor?<p>There&#x27;s definitely markets for the middle classes. Apple, Walmart, etc are the biggest companies in the world and their business is selling stuff to us. But if your business is selling financial services or you want to raise capital, the middle class is irrelevant. It&#x27;s not about risk or sophistication of the investor, it&#x27;s about them not really having capital. I reckon that&#x27;s significant. WHo has the capital matters.<p>Money gets even more theoretical when talking about capital. When you earn an income and use it to buy goods as service, the metaphor-made-real of money is relatively straightforward. I work for a company that makes medicines. They may me a salary which I can exchange for stuff other companies make. With capital, the link to physical things is broken. It becomes more of an abstract right^ to things. The right to establish a company. The right to future revenues from some venture. Rent…<p>^&quot;right&quot; isn&#x27;t exactly it. It&#x27;s somewhere in the ability&#x2F;resource&#x2F;right realm.</text></comment> | <story><title>Etsy Vendors to get option to buy $2,500 of shares before public float</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/etsy-vendors-to-get-a-piece-of-ipo-1428971989</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fabulist</author><text>Non-paywall link:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;kLrVp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;kLrVp</a><p>For reference, I find archive.today to be the most reliable way to bypass WSJ&#x27;s paywall. I&#x27;ve never had occasion to bypass any other paywalls.</text></comment> |
34,443,890 | 34,442,125 | 1 | 3 | 34,439,588 | train | <story><title>Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil</title><url>https://blest.co.jp/eng/service/be-h/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generalizations</author><text>I remember nearly two decades ago a PopSci article about some guy who figured out how to use microwaves to convert plastic (any hydrocarbon) into oil and natural gas. More than enough to break even. He was converting tires and waste plastic.<p>Nothing ever came of it - IIRC, ownership disputes with the partner, and eventually the patent got purchased by some random company and blackholed.<p>Edit: found a source. Better than popsci. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn12141-giant-microwave-turns-plastic-back-to-oil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn12141-giant-microwave...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numlocked</author><text>If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investorshub.advfn.com&#x2F;boards&#x2F;read_msg.aspx?message_id=93867748" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investorshub.advfn.com&#x2F;boards&#x2F;read_msg.aspx?message_...</a><p>Edit: more context: the “inventor” is Frank Pringle who <i>appears</i> to have invented a number of too-good-to-be-true gizmos, including one for weight loss.<p>Edit 2: also he claimed to cure cancer with microwaves (the same year as the oil producing microwaves): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biospace.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;releases&#x2F;-b-global-resource-corp-b-files-patents-to-treat-cancerous-tumors-with-its-microwave-technology-expanding-the-scope-of-its-revolutionary-microwave&#x2F;?s=61" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biospace.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;releases&#x2F;-b-global-resource...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil</title><url>https://blest.co.jp/eng/service/be-h/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>generalizations</author><text>I remember nearly two decades ago a PopSci article about some guy who figured out how to use microwaves to convert plastic (any hydrocarbon) into oil and natural gas. More than enough to break even. He was converting tires and waste plastic.<p>Nothing ever came of it - IIRC, ownership disputes with the partner, and eventually the patent got purchased by some random company and blackholed.<p>Edit: found a source. Better than popsci. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn12141-giant-microwave-turns-plastic-back-to-oil&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newscientist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;dn12141-giant-microwave...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jp57</author><text>Shouldn&#x27;t it be almost out of patent by now?</text></comment> |
31,569,160 | 31,568,962 | 1 | 2 | 31,565,514 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around</title><text>I&#x27;ve been programming on and off since the age of 16. Unfortunately, I have never been a rockstar programmer. I&#x27;ve always pieced code together from multiple sources to create programs but I&#x27;ve always failed to come up with a solution from scratch of my own and provide any value. I&#x27;ve always wondered how other smart people are able to come up with libraries, services and various solutions from scratch. I&#x27;ve devised countless ideas only to never execute them for various reasons or get started with them only to never fully complete them and see it all the way through.<p>I&#x27;ve already wasted my entire teens and 20s, current 28 years old, working as a software engineer (Full-Stack) at a startup for ~4 years. I&#x27;ve been feeling like a loser and not good enough for this career even though I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team. I&#x27;ve put in countless hours of work every day (70-90 hrs), being on-call almost 24&#x2F;7, sometimes for straight 7 days for months despite only getting paid on a salary basis on 40 hr work weeks; being a loner helps with working long hours. My salary also hasn&#x27;t increased much, and feel like I&#x27;m severely underpaid based on the # of years of experience but I struggle with evaluating my value in the market to determine my worth. I assumed working hard would pay off but that hasn&#x27;t been the case at all; I truly believe I&#x27;ve been doing the opposite of &quot;Work Smart, Not Hard&quot;. I&#x27;ve been trying to get back to learning DS and Algos so I can apply to places but I struggle with LeetCode, which is making me feel like even a bigger loser for not being able to solve problems.<p>I&#x27;m stuck in a rut, wanting to better my skills and earn a good amount of money but unable to concentrate, riddled with brain fog, and unsure of my future. My self-confidence and self-esteem are taking a hit. I am terrible at networking, so I don&#x27;t have others to reach out to for tips and advice, hence I&#x27;m turning to HN. I apologize if this isn&#x27;t the place for a post like this. How can I turn my directionless life around and find satisfaction with my career?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It depends entirely on the company and how many other candidates they have.<p>If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect - Sorry, I can’t interview or even screen everyone. The resume with unexplained gaps isn’t getting sorted into the top of the pile simply because I have to be aggressive with filtering.<p>On the other hand, if I’m hiring for a difficult position at a less popular company and I’m only getting 1 or 2 okay resumes per week, I’ll take the time to screen resumes with gaps as long as everything else looks fine.<p>You have to understand that a lot of hiring managers simply couldn’t screen&#x2F;interview everyone even if they wanted to. For those jobs, having unexplained gaps in an otherwise average resume could be the negative signal that moves you slightly down bellow the threshold.<p>But for a lot of average jobs: No, it doesn’t actually matter that much.</text></item><item><author>feanaro</author><text>&gt; No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.<p>On a related note, this &quot;gap in resume&quot; thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don&#x27;t know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving.<p>Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?</text></item><item><author>colanderman</author><text>1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.<p>2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. &quot;I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team&quot; --&gt; is a desirable skill in and of itself.<p>3. Stop working 80 hour weeks, stop working weekends. When the only thing you do has little&#x2F;no reward, that is what causes burnout.<p>4. Fill your time with something else that you prioritize above work. Make it hard to find time to work. This both prevents slipping back to 80 hr weeks, and forces your brain to prioritize important things within your work life (like executing and finishing projects).<p>5. Networking is key. I don&#x27;t have good advice here as this is a challenge for me also. But -- switch jobs often (every couple years), and be friendly and helpful (within reason) to your co-workers. They&#x27;re now your network.<p>My background -- coding since I was 6, now 36 -- but I&#x27;ve shared many of the same feelings.<p>[1] I am assuming you have the basic financial stability to support this. My apologies if not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lttlrck</author><text>A company that doesn&#x27;t respect the need for privacy and&#x2F;or the need to take time off should be avoided.<p>Nobody should have to explain a gap between jobs upfront - they could be gardening, on pilgrimage or attending family - Or simply take advantage of between jobs to take a well earned break. There are a million none of your business reasons.<p>There should be no expectation for this information, until you engage with them. And even then...</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around</title><text>I&#x27;ve been programming on and off since the age of 16. Unfortunately, I have never been a rockstar programmer. I&#x27;ve always pieced code together from multiple sources to create programs but I&#x27;ve always failed to come up with a solution from scratch of my own and provide any value. I&#x27;ve always wondered how other smart people are able to come up with libraries, services and various solutions from scratch. I&#x27;ve devised countless ideas only to never execute them for various reasons or get started with them only to never fully complete them and see it all the way through.<p>I&#x27;ve already wasted my entire teens and 20s, current 28 years old, working as a software engineer (Full-Stack) at a startup for ~4 years. I&#x27;ve been feeling like a loser and not good enough for this career even though I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team. I&#x27;ve put in countless hours of work every day (70-90 hrs), being on-call almost 24&#x2F;7, sometimes for straight 7 days for months despite only getting paid on a salary basis on 40 hr work weeks; being a loner helps with working long hours. My salary also hasn&#x27;t increased much, and feel like I&#x27;m severely underpaid based on the # of years of experience but I struggle with evaluating my value in the market to determine my worth. I assumed working hard would pay off but that hasn&#x27;t been the case at all; I truly believe I&#x27;ve been doing the opposite of &quot;Work Smart, Not Hard&quot;. I&#x27;ve been trying to get back to learning DS and Algos so I can apply to places but I struggle with LeetCode, which is making me feel like even a bigger loser for not being able to solve problems.<p>I&#x27;m stuck in a rut, wanting to better my skills and earn a good amount of money but unable to concentrate, riddled with brain fog, and unsure of my future. My self-confidence and self-esteem are taking a hit. I am terrible at networking, so I don&#x27;t have others to reach out to for tips and advice, hence I&#x27;m turning to HN. I apologize if this isn&#x27;t the place for a post like this. How can I turn my directionless life around and find satisfaction with my career?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>It depends entirely on the company and how many other candidates they have.<p>If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect - Sorry, I can’t interview or even screen everyone. The resume with unexplained gaps isn’t getting sorted into the top of the pile simply because I have to be aggressive with filtering.<p>On the other hand, if I’m hiring for a difficult position at a less popular company and I’m only getting 1 or 2 okay resumes per week, I’ll take the time to screen resumes with gaps as long as everything else looks fine.<p>You have to understand that a lot of hiring managers simply couldn’t screen&#x2F;interview everyone even if they wanted to. For those jobs, having unexplained gaps in an otherwise average resume could be the negative signal that moves you slightly down bellow the threshold.<p>But for a lot of average jobs: No, it doesn’t actually matter that much.</text></item><item><author>feanaro</author><text>&gt; No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.<p>On a related note, this &quot;gap in resume&quot; thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don&#x27;t know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving.<p>Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?</text></item><item><author>colanderman</author><text>1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume.<p>2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. &quot;I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team&quot; --&gt; is a desirable skill in and of itself.<p>3. Stop working 80 hour weeks, stop working weekends. When the only thing you do has little&#x2F;no reward, that is what causes burnout.<p>4. Fill your time with something else that you prioritize above work. Make it hard to find time to work. This both prevents slipping back to 80 hr weeks, and forces your brain to prioritize important things within your work life (like executing and finishing projects).<p>5. Networking is key. I don&#x27;t have good advice here as this is a challenge for me also. But -- switch jobs often (every couple years), and be friendly and helpful (within reason) to your co-workers. They&#x27;re now your network.<p>My background -- coding since I was 6, now 36 -- but I&#x27;ve shared many of the same feelings.<p>[1] I am assuming you have the basic financial stability to support this. My apologies if not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skeeter2020</author><text>&gt; If I receive 200 resumes and 30% of them are picture perfect<p>First, what software company hiring developers is in this position?<p>Second, isn&#x27;t the definition of &quot;picture perfect resume&quot; the exact thing the GP is arguing to change?<p>Third, a month is not a unexplained gap; resumes (even LinkedIn) typically aren&#x27;t fined-grained below the month level with dates, so there&#x27;s nothing to hide or explain.</text></comment> |
10,165,497 | 10,164,844 | 1 | 3 | 10,164,513 | train | <story><title>HTML5 Deck of Cards</title><url>http://pakastin.github.io/deck-of-cards/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>riebschlager</author><text>Maybe it&#x27;s a weird takeaway, but this line is really clever:<p>var suit = i &#x2F; 13 | 0;<p>That&#x27;s such a clean way to get a 0, 1, 2 or 3 from each card&#x27;s `i` and I <i>never</i> would have thought of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>takeda</author><text>If you&#x27;re referring to |0 then I would disagree. It shows how horrible JavaScript is. This is very confusing if you&#x27;re not familiar with this trick or strange behavior of the language.<p><pre><code> suit = int(i &#x2F; 13)
suit = (int)(i &#x2F; 13)
suit = math.floor(i &#x2F; 13)
</code></pre>
Are much easier to understand for someone not familiar with the code.</text></comment> | <story><title>HTML5 Deck of Cards</title><url>http://pakastin.github.io/deck-of-cards/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>riebschlager</author><text>Maybe it&#x27;s a weird takeaway, but this line is really clever:<p>var suit = i &#x2F; 13 | 0;<p>That&#x27;s such a clean way to get a 0, 1, 2 or 3 from each card&#x27;s `i` and I <i>never</i> would have thought of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pakastin</author><text>I think &quot;value | 0&quot; is basically same as &quot;Math.floor(value)&quot;</text></comment> |
15,402,341 | 15,402,012 | 1 | 2 | 15,401,405 | train | <story><title>Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kuharich</author><text>Prior discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14681561" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14681561</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>verri</author><text>It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can&#x27;t find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?</text></comment> |
33,017,196 | 33,016,148 | 1 | 2 | 33,015,002 | train | <story><title>The Endless Doomscroller</title><url>https://endlessdoomscroller.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kirse</author><text>I picked up on this last year and what frustrates me is I feel like I can&#x27;t override the population-level unconscious anxiety and despair that many continue to spread through their behaviors (often being fed by these doomscrolling news narratives).<p>Words can be consciously dismantled in the mind, but actions are subtler and speak something subconsciously... It&#x27;s like if you walked up to a pool and everyone was tiptoeing around it and not jumping in. No matter how fearless you are there&#x27;s still something deep that triggers your own apprehension.<p>With COVID people are still behaving fearfully and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it other than suffer the harvest of ongoing social distancing stupidity, the idiotic glass walls still up in every grocery store, the &quot;contact-less whatever the fuck&quot;, the lack of hotel room service... all the 100s of stupid anxiety-driven behaviors and changes that got implemented the past few years that were once never a thing.<p>Ahh whatever, back to doomscrolling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>411111111111111</author><text>Why did you expect the grocers to take the glass walls back down again? The item has already been purchased and even if corona is just a cold at this point... Why remove it now? You still increase the chance of infection for any airborne illness which would have the cashier go on sick leave. Literally no incentive to remove it now that the money for the purchase and assembly has been spent.<p>They likely won&#x27;t put them into new stores but i don&#x27;t expect them to go down until they&#x27;re so worn down that you can&#x27;t look through them anymore.<p>I don&#x27;t buy your issues with the distancing either. There are a lot of people that always disliked others getting close to them. This group might&#x27;ve increased now, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s anxiousness because of corona.<p>You&#x27;re just noticing things for the first time and blame a sickness that was overly zealously warned against for a short time.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Endless Doomscroller</title><url>https://endlessdoomscroller.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kirse</author><text>I picked up on this last year and what frustrates me is I feel like I can&#x27;t override the population-level unconscious anxiety and despair that many continue to spread through their behaviors (often being fed by these doomscrolling news narratives).<p>Words can be consciously dismantled in the mind, but actions are subtler and speak something subconsciously... It&#x27;s like if you walked up to a pool and everyone was tiptoeing around it and not jumping in. No matter how fearless you are there&#x27;s still something deep that triggers your own apprehension.<p>With COVID people are still behaving fearfully and there&#x27;s nothing I can do about it other than suffer the harvest of ongoing social distancing stupidity, the idiotic glass walls still up in every grocery store, the &quot;contact-less whatever the fuck&quot;, the lack of hotel room service... all the 100s of stupid anxiety-driven behaviors and changes that got implemented the past few years that were once never a thing.<p>Ahh whatever, back to doomscrolling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tenpies</author><text>I find that reminding yourself to be charitable really helps.<p>We just had most of the West undergo 2 years of non-stop government psy-op. Propaganda was constant. Dissent was suppressed at every step.<p>It&#x27;s only natural that this has obliterated some people&#x27;s critical thinking skills and their ability to operate in reality without being told by Authorities what reality is.<p>As for the hotels, I&#x27;ve just chosen not to participate. If you want to charge me 2X to deliver .5X that&#x27;s fine, I just chose not to accept that deal. We can go through a recession and when the conditions bring us back to the previous 1X for 1X, then I&#x27;ll gladly book a room.</text></comment> |
36,329,811 | 36,330,105 | 1 | 3 | 36,328,148 | train | <story><title>Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achieve It</title><url>https://www.yugabyte.com/postgresql/postgresql-high-availability/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>It’s amazing that this isn’t a solved problem, but we have all of this crazy language model stuff.<p>Unfortunately Spanner isn’t open source. Yugabyte and Citus are close but have annoying issues. Cockroach isn’t 100% compatible (and has its own issues) and things like FoundationDB which are truly HA and comparable to Spanner in terms of consistency and fault tolerance are not easily plugged into Postgres as the underlying storage engine since sadly it’s only a key value store.<p>edit: when I say close, I&#x27;m talking strictly about HA, not general functionality.<p>lately I&#x27;ve been thinking of using FoundationDB, which is closest to Spanner in terms of ACID and serializability and mvsqlite.<p>Then, I was thinking, since SQLite doesn&#x27;t have online schema changes (nor does mvsqlite) to have a schema such as:<p><pre><code> [UUID, Data, Version, CreatedAt, UpdatedAt]
</code></pre>
Where Data is a JSON or Proto and Version is an integer. You then could mimic an online schema change by in your application code supporting two adjacent &quot;versions&quot;, and then in an eventually consistent manner run [<i>small</i>] transactions to update the Data to the new Version as necessary. You would index Version, and UpdatedAt as necessary to find the rows in the table that are not &quot;migrated.&quot;<p>In SQLite you can also create indexes on expressions so technically all of your JSON or Proto could also have indexes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franckpachot</author><text>Citus is not close to Spanner. No global secondary indexes, no cross-shard ACID (the commit status is eventually consistent). No auto-resharding.
Yugabyte and Cockroach have a spanner-like architecture, but different open-source model and postgres-compatibility. What are those annoying issues?</text></comment> | <story><title>Why PostgreSQL High Availability Matters and How to Achieve It</title><url>https://www.yugabyte.com/postgresql/postgresql-high-availability/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>It’s amazing that this isn’t a solved problem, but we have all of this crazy language model stuff.<p>Unfortunately Spanner isn’t open source. Yugabyte and Citus are close but have annoying issues. Cockroach isn’t 100% compatible (and has its own issues) and things like FoundationDB which are truly HA and comparable to Spanner in terms of consistency and fault tolerance are not easily plugged into Postgres as the underlying storage engine since sadly it’s only a key value store.<p>edit: when I say close, I&#x27;m talking strictly about HA, not general functionality.<p>lately I&#x27;ve been thinking of using FoundationDB, which is closest to Spanner in terms of ACID and serializability and mvsqlite.<p>Then, I was thinking, since SQLite doesn&#x27;t have online schema changes (nor does mvsqlite) to have a schema such as:<p><pre><code> [UUID, Data, Version, CreatedAt, UpdatedAt]
</code></pre>
Where Data is a JSON or Proto and Version is an integer. You then could mimic an online schema change by in your application code supporting two adjacent &quot;versions&quot;, and then in an eventually consistent manner run [<i>small</i>] transactions to update the Data to the new Version as necessary. You would index Version, and UpdatedAt as necessary to find the rows in the table that are not &quot;migrated.&quot;<p>In SQLite you can also create indexes on expressions so technically all of your JSON or Proto could also have indexes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gen220</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t Spanner depend on access to globally-synchronized custom atomic clock hardware? i.e. even if it were open source, it wouldn&#x27;t really be valuable unless you&#x27;re a data center operator.<p>As I understand it, it&#x27;s not a solved problem because there is no silver bullet, but rather trade-offs in every direction, and which solution works for you (including Spanner) is heavily dependent on your use case.</text></comment> |
6,807,676 | 6,807,736 | 1 | 2 | 6,807,380 | train | <story><title>On Asm.js</title><url>http://acko.net/blog/on-asmjs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>safetydank</author><text>I feel like PNaCl is the technically superior approach - define a stable set of LLVM bytecode and build an interface to run it in the browser. But the uptake is a problem, no other browser maker wants to adopt a big chunk of code controlled by Google, tailored to run optimally in Chrome.<p>So asm.js took a beeline - leveraging existing Javascript machinery for security&#x2F;JIT and shoehorning a way to run executable LLVM on top of it. The fact that it&#x27;s Javascript is just a detail, a legacy of the days when one vendor (Netscape) was able to push through a standard for running code in the browser.<p>In today&#x27;s fragmented browser landscape I find it hard to believe a consensus could be reached again. Most of the major browser makers (Google, Microsoft, Apple) have their own platform agenda to push - in that context asm.js&#x27;s compatibility with existing Javascript engines gives it the best chance of adoption.<p>But I agree, the hoops that had to be jumped through are a damned shame.</text></comment> | <story><title>On Asm.js</title><url>http://acko.net/blog/on-asmjs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>flohofwoe</author><text>What I miss in all those discussions regarding JS, asm.js and PNaCl is that the web is the best software distribution platform we have by a huge margin, this is really its overwhelming killer-feature. All the user needs is an URL. No &quot;downloading&quot;, no installation, no special user permissions, no app shops, no gate keepers, no walled gardens, and everything is automatically multi-OS and multi-CPU-architecture. The web as a runtime platform may not be ideal, but the web as a &quot;software distribution platform&quot; rocks. For this I&#x27;m even happy to give up a few CPU cycles. And no platform should be tied to a specific language. The more choices there are, the better.</text></comment> |
8,037,664 | 8,035,755 | 1 | 2 | 8,035,022 | train | <story><title>ITerm2 2.0</title><url>http://iterm2.com/news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>ITerm is great. It really is. But I wish more time was spent on optimizations. People these days seem to forget that terminals are often used for displaying huge amounts of rapidly scrolling text and that speed is of paramount importance.<p>To put this in perspective, my computer has two CPUs with 4 cores each, 24GB RAM, a graphics card with 1600 Stream Processing Units (engine running at 850MHz) and 1GB of RAM, and yet it scrolls text in a terminal slower than my 386 machine 20 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnachman</author><text>I did a lot of work on performance which you can see in the nightly builds; it was too risky for the 2.0 schedule. We now parse the input stream in a separate thread from where it is rendered. That being said, while the refresh rate is probably lower than it was on your &#x27;386, the throughput is undoubtedly higher. If you&#x27;d like a higher refresh rate, it&#x27;s a trivial tweak to a single constant, but in general throughput is more useful.</text></comment> | <story><title>ITerm2 2.0</title><url>http://iterm2.com/news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>ITerm is great. It really is. But I wish more time was spent on optimizations. People these days seem to forget that terminals are often used for displaying huge amounts of rapidly scrolling text and that speed is of paramount importance.<p>To put this in perspective, my computer has two CPUs with 4 cores each, 24GB RAM, a graphics card with 1600 Stream Processing Units (engine running at 850MHz) and 1GB of RAM, and yet it scrolls text in a terminal slower than my 386 machine 20 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tinco</author><text>Not just fast scrolling text. For some reason there is a noticeable delay when just typing text into a shell in iTerm. I didn&#x27;t notice it until one day I started Terminal.app for no reason at all, and typing in it gave me that feeling that it was predicting my keystrokes, meaning of course that my brain expected a lag that wasn&#x27;t there.</text></comment> |
20,517,667 | 20,517,963 | 1 | 2 | 20,515,806 | train | <story><title>Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-keynote-address-international-conference-cyber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daveslash</author><text>Modern encryption is really just math. Cryptography in consumer and off-the-shelf products (which Barr is targeting with his discussion) theoretically _could_ be modified in such a way that the government could decrypt it. The two ways of which I can think are (1) Encryption &quot;backdoors&quot; -- fancy math known only to the government; this would require new encryption ciphers or (b) key escrow. Both approaches have their shortcomings and I&#x27;m against both, but it&#x27;s plausible that the government might try it anyway. All that said, because encryption is just math, any individual or group could employ their own encryption by implementing one of any known existing ciphers -- one without a known &quot;fancy math back door&quot; and refuse to follow the &quot;key escrow&quot; guidelines. In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that&#x27;s really what&#x27;s being proposed, I&#x27;d urge people to consider &quot;Illegal Numbers&quot; and how effective that&#x27;s been. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrLeap</author><text>Breaking encryption for the government is so furiously stupid it blows my mind every time it is suggested. Especially here, where people actually give the idea merit. It makes me miss oldschool &#x2F;. where 100% of everyone was on the same page. Your point illustrates a huge reason as to why.<p>Backdooring stupid.crypt and forcing law abiding people to use it just insures that big badguys will use any other kind of encryption. All you&#x27;ve really accomplished is adding an extra charge of illegal encryption use at the expense of security for every human.<p>This potentially creates all sorts of pathologies. Is it illegal now for me not to update an old computer? If your backdoors are implemented in hardware, is it illegal to use old computers?<p>When people are against gun control, a common thread is &quot;make guns illegal and only criminals will have guns.&quot; This argument has merit, but if we DID amend out #2 and make guns illegal, over time firearm proliferation would decrease.<p>Not so with encryption. Other, more free countries will constantly be developing better security methodologies, and reproducing those methods is effectively free. &quot;Fuck up encryption, then only bad guys will have encryption&quot; is a much stronger argument, because it&#x27;s emphatically true.<p>The ignorant hubris of this is massively disheartening.</text></comment> | <story><title>Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Address Conference on Cyber Security</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-keynote-address-international-conference-cyber</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daveslash</author><text>Modern encryption is really just math. Cryptography in consumer and off-the-shelf products (which Barr is targeting with his discussion) theoretically _could_ be modified in such a way that the government could decrypt it. The two ways of which I can think are (1) Encryption &quot;backdoors&quot; -- fancy math known only to the government; this would require new encryption ciphers or (b) key escrow. Both approaches have their shortcomings and I&#x27;m against both, but it&#x27;s plausible that the government might try it anyway. All that said, because encryption is just math, any individual or group could employ their own encryption by implementing one of any known existing ciphers -- one without a known &quot;fancy math back door&quot; and refuse to follow the &quot;key escrow&quot; guidelines. In these discussions about the government being able to decrypt stuff, are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that&#x27;s really what&#x27;s being proposed, I&#x27;d urge people to consider &quot;Illegal Numbers&quot; and how effective that&#x27;s been. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Illegal_number</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>txcwpalpha</author><text>&gt;are we, in effect, suggesting that certain math be made illegal? If that&#x27;s really what&#x27;s being proposed, I&#x27;d urge people to consider &quot;Illegal Numbers&quot; and how effective that&#x27;s been.<p>I keep seeing this &quot;implausibility&quot; of enforcing illegal encryption brought up, and I really think it&#x27;s wishful thinking. <i>If</i> such encryption algorithms ever are made illegal in some manner, it will be trivial for the government to get the result they want.<p>It won&#x27;t be about completely stopping people from using AES, nor will it be about imprisoning every person who continues to use it. What it will be about is turning &quot;this target of our investigation is using illegal encryption&quot; into an immediate cause for search&#x2F;arrest warrant. And that will be more than enough for 95%+ of the purposes they&#x27;re looking for.</text></comment> |
40,492,754 | 40,492,059 | 1 | 2 | 40,491,480 | train | <story><title>Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”</title><url>https://ntietz.com/blog/lets-say-instead-of-auth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>verdverm</author><text>&quot;Identity&quot; and &quot;Access&quot; Management (IAM) is pretty standard terminology.<p>I personally like saying authnz (authentication and authorization mashed together)<p>&quot;Login&quot; doesn&#x27;t really cover token or key based authentication, i.e. service accounts don&#x27;t &quot;log in&quot; but do require authentication and authorization</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcosdumay</author><text>&quot;Identity&quot; and &quot;Access&quot; are really good names.<p>I could easily adopt those if I find myself naming middleware again.</text></comment> | <story><title>Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”</title><url>https://ntietz.com/blog/lets-say-instead-of-auth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>verdverm</author><text>&quot;Identity&quot; and &quot;Access&quot; Management (IAM) is pretty standard terminology.<p>I personally like saying authnz (authentication and authorization mashed together)<p>&quot;Login&quot; doesn&#x27;t really cover token or key based authentication, i.e. service accounts don&#x27;t &quot;log in&quot; but do require authentication and authorization</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandworm101</author><text>The modern parlance doesn&#x27;t accommodate but the original &quot;log in&quot; and &quot;log out&quot; describes any time a use enters or leaves and is noted in the <i>log</i>. This goes back to shipping whereby persons entry or exit would be noted in a log. Imho that older definition would cover nearly every type of authentication that results in someone connecting to a service.</text></comment> |
23,403,047 | 23,399,702 | 1 | 2 | 23,398,261 | train | <story><title>Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC</title><url>https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tjohns</author><text>Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :)<p>Turns out there&#x27;s very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.</text></item><item><author>40four</author><text>I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet.<p>That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only sharing file between folks on the same network. I applaud the effort, I will certainly like to try this out soon!</text></item><item><author>smcleod</author><text>I use Firefox Send (works on all browsers), it&#x27;s end to end encrypted and has automatic expiry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.firefox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.firefox.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thebiss</author><text>This exact use case - sharing many GB of raw movies and pictures - is solved really well by Resilio Sync.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.resilio.com&#x2F;individuals&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.resilio.com&#x2F;individuals&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Sharedrop – Easy P2P file transfer powered by WebRTC</title><url>https://github.com/cowbell/sharedrop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tjohns</author><text>Meanwhile, I found the 2.5 GB limit on Firefox Send really frustrating this weekend when I was trying to send 80 GB of raw video files to a friend. :)<p>Turns out there&#x27;s very few options available for really large P2P file transfers, short of hosting an FTP server.</text></item><item><author>40four</author><text>I started using Firefox Send recently, I have been really impressed with the simplicity and easy of use. I haven’t tried it, but it is open source and possible to self-host if you so chose. But for the time being it remains free, and you can share up to a generous 2.5 GB if you log in with a Firefox account so I see no reason to put in the effort yet.<p>That being said, Sharedrop seems to be a different use case, only sharing file between folks on the same network. I applaud the effort, I will certainly like to try this out soon!</text></item><item><author>smcleod</author><text>I use Firefox Send (works on all browsers), it&#x27;s end to end encrypted and has automatic expiry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.firefox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;send.firefox.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wrsh07</author><text>Disclosure, I work at Dropbox: but did you consider paying for a tool? Or were you mostly interested in free options?</text></comment> |
6,868,044 | 6,868,106 | 1 | 3 | 6,867,717 | train | <story><title>Epic Fail: The Rise and Fall of Demand Media</title><url>http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jotm</author><text>&quot;Under Google’s new algorithm, code-named Panda, companies that produced lots of content got penalized&quot;<p>Hahaha! Yeah, let me fix that for you: &quot;companies that produced lots of <i>useless, worthless, trash</i> content got penalized&quot;.<p>Good for Google, good for everyone, screw Demand media for ad-filled &quot;content farms&quot; on crappy domains like 3d-blueray-players.com&quot;.<p>Even eHow and Livestrong are borderline spammy, although they do have enough <i>good</i> content to make them popular (and they are).<p>Should&#x27;ve focused on quality content while they were a $2 billion company instead of whining about it now.</text></comment> | <story><title>Epic Fail: The Rise and Fall of Demand Media</title><url>http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomasien</author><text>&quot;The freefall of Demand serves as a cautionary tale for hype in the Internet age: No company burns so hot that it can’t cool off.&quot;<p>What a crock - what cautionary tale? A company that grew really fast, is still producing lots of cash, and is already public? Companies rise and fall and are dependent on lots of other forces. Airbnb could crash any time if cities decided they don&#x27;t want it (I doubt it will), same with Uber, and TONS of companies are in some way dependent on Google not shutting them out.<p>Seems like this was a pretty crappy business with extremely low value added to the world, but it&#x27;s so obnoxious to hear every single company that starts to decline or doesn&#x27;t grow the way we thought it would as a &quot;cautionary tale&quot;. Companies grow, companies die.</text></comment> |
26,691,706 | 26,690,237 | 1 | 2 | 26,687,858 | train | <story><title>A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture</title><url>https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/d0ee02585b#!divAbstract</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thechao</author><text>I don&#x27;t know why the Democrats, in particular, don&#x27;t turn this into political hay: it&#x27;s literally the perfect counter to the coal issue.<p>1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines;<p>2. All of the mining &amp; transportation infrastructure is already in mining country;<p>3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and,<p>4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining.<p>Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that &quot;their livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something else to do&quot;, the Fed could roll in and say: &quot;now it&#x27;s your turn to ~save the world~; go dig!&quot;</text></item><item><author>tim333</author><text>For comparison I was looking back at the &quot;Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches&quot; thing.<p>There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20415138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20415138</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petra</author><text>It&#x27;s not enough to change people&#x27;s beliefs about climate change and political choices.<p>&gt;&gt; Olivine is plentiful, everywhere,<p>That means olivine will be mined everywhere. not necessarily in coal country.</text></comment> | <story><title>A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture</title><url>https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ee/d0ee02585b#!divAbstract</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thechao</author><text>I don&#x27;t know why the Democrats, in particular, don&#x27;t turn this into political hay: it&#x27;s literally the perfect counter to the coal issue.<p>1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines;<p>2. All of the mining &amp; transportation infrastructure is already in mining country;<p>3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and,<p>4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining.<p>Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that &quot;their livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something else to do&quot;, the Fed could roll in and say: &quot;now it&#x27;s your turn to ~save the world~; go dig!&quot;</text></item><item><author>tim333</author><text>For comparison I was looking back at the &quot;Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches&quot; thing.<p>There were estimates of $10-$25 a ton for olivine rock
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20415138" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20415138</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aardvarkr</author><text>Just a side note, as I don’t know a thing about olivine, but wouldn’t they be able to pull the material from the waste piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up</text></comment> |
34,236,899 | 34,236,336 | 1 | 2 | 34,230,641 | train | <story><title>Modules, not microservices</title><url>http://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2023/you-want-modules-not-microservices.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cogman10</author><text>You know, I don&#x27;t really think microservices are fundamentally more scalable. Rather, they expose scaling issues more readily.<p>When you have a giant monolith with the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoint, it can be tricky to pinpoint the the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoint (or, as is often the case, endpoint*s*) is what&#x27;s causing issues. Instead, everyone just tends to think of it as &quot;the x app having problems.&quot;<p>When you bust the monolith into the x&#x2F;y&#x2F;z, and x and z got the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoints, that starts the fires of &quot;x is constantly killing things and it&#x27;s only doing this one thing. How do we do that better?&quot;<p>That allows you to better prioritize fixing those scaling problems.</text></item><item><author>dahfizz</author><text>Microservices are less <i>efficient</i>, but are still more <i>scalable</i>.<p>Servers can only get so big. If your monolith needs more resources than a single server can provide, then you can chop it up into microservices and each microservice can get its own beefy server. Then you can put a load balancer in front of a microservice and run it on N beefy servers.<p>But this only matters at Facebook scale. I think most devs would be shocked at how much a single beefy server running efficient code can do.</text></item><item><author>eklitzke</author><text>I just want to point out that for the second problem (scalability of CPU&#x2F;memory&#x2F;io), microservices almost always make things worse. Making an RPC necessarily implies serialization and deserialization of data, and nearly always also means sending data over a socket. Plus the fact that most services have some constant overhead of the footprint to run the RPC code and other things (healthchecking, stats collection, etc.) that is typically bundled into each service. And even if the extra CPU&#x2F;memory isn&#x27;t a big deal for you, doing RPCs is going to add latency, and if you get too many microservices the latency numbers can start really adding up and be very difficult to fix later.<p>Running code in a single process is MUCH lower overhead because you don&#x27;t need to transit a network layer and you&#x27;re generally just passing pointers to data around rather than serializing&#x2F;deserializing it.<p>There are definitely some cases where using microservices does make things more CPU&#x2F;memory efficient, but it&#x27;s much rarer than people think. An example where you&#x27;d actually get efficiency would be something like a geofence service (imagine Uber, Doordash, etc.) where the geofence definitions are probably large and have to be stored in memory. Depending on how often geofence queries happen, it might be more efficient to have a small number of geofence service instances with the geofence definitions loaded in memory rather than having this logic as a module that many workers need to have loaded. But again, cases like this are much less common than the cases where services just lead to massive bloat.<p>I was working at Uber when they started transitioning from monolith to microservices, and pretty much universally splitting logic into microservices required provisioning many more servers and were disastrous for end-to-end latency times.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization.<p>There&#x27;s two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that need it).<p>The first problem, modules, can be solved at the language level. Modules can do that job, and that&#x27;s the point of this blog post.<p>The second problem, scalability, is harder to solve at the language level in most languages outside those designed to be run in a distributed environment. But most people need it a lot less than they think. Normally the database is your bottleneck and if you keep your application server stateless, you can just run lots of them; the database can eventually be a bottleneck, but you can scale up databases <i>a lot</i>.<p>The real reason that microservices may make sense is because they keep people honest around module boundaries. They make it much harder to retain access to persistent in-memory state, harder to navigate object graphs to take dependencies on things they shouldn&#x27;t, harder to create PRs with complex changes on either side of a module boundary without a conversation about designing for change and future proofing. Code ownership by teams is something you need as an organization scales, if only to reduce the amount of context switching that developers need to do if treated as fully fungible; owning a service is more defensible than owning a module, since the team will own release schedules and quality gating.<p>I&#x27;m not so positive on every microservice maintaining its own copy of state, potentially with its own separate data store. I think that usually adds more ongoing complexity in synchronization than it saves by isolating schemas. A better rule is for one service to own writes for a table, and other services can only read that table, and maybe even then not all columns or all non-owned tables. Problems with state synchronization are one of the most common failure modes in distributed applications, where queues get backed up, retries of &quot;bad&quot; events cause blockages and so on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirekrusin</author><text>It sounds like creating problem, then spending time=money on fixing it and calling it a win?<p>There is a point when it all starts to make sense. But that point is when you go into billions worth business, hundreds of devs etc. And going there has large cost, especially for small&#x2F;medium systems. And that cost is not one off - it&#x27;s a day-to-day cost of introducing changes. It&#x27;s orders of magnitude chaper and faster (head cound wise) to do changes in ie. single versioned monorepo where everything is deployed at once, as single working, tested, migrated version than doing progressive releases for each piece keeping it all backward compatible at micro level. Again - it does make sense at scale (hundreds of devs kind of scale), but saying your 5 devs team moves faster because they can work on 120 micoservices independently is complete nonsense.<p>In other words micoservices make sense when you don&#x27;t really have other options, you have to do it, it&#x27;s not good start-with default at all; and frankly Sam Newman says it in &quot;Building Microservices&quot; and so do people who know what they&#x27;re talking about. For some reason juniors want to start there and look at anything non-microservice as legacy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modules, not microservices</title><url>http://blogs.newardassociates.com/blog/2023/you-want-modules-not-microservices.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cogman10</author><text>You know, I don&#x27;t really think microservices are fundamentally more scalable. Rather, they expose scaling issues more readily.<p>When you have a giant monolith with the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoint, it can be tricky to pinpoint the the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoint (or, as is often the case, endpoint*s*) is what&#x27;s causing issues. Instead, everyone just tends to think of it as &quot;the x app having problems.&quot;<p>When you bust the monolith into the x&#x2F;y&#x2F;z, and x and z got the &quot;load the world&quot; endpoints, that starts the fires of &quot;x is constantly killing things and it&#x27;s only doing this one thing. How do we do that better?&quot;<p>That allows you to better prioritize fixing those scaling problems.</text></item><item><author>dahfizz</author><text>Microservices are less <i>efficient</i>, but are still more <i>scalable</i>.<p>Servers can only get so big. If your monolith needs more resources than a single server can provide, then you can chop it up into microservices and each microservice can get its own beefy server. Then you can put a load balancer in front of a microservice and run it on N beefy servers.<p>But this only matters at Facebook scale. I think most devs would be shocked at how much a single beefy server running efficient code can do.</text></item><item><author>eklitzke</author><text>I just want to point out that for the second problem (scalability of CPU&#x2F;memory&#x2F;io), microservices almost always make things worse. Making an RPC necessarily implies serialization and deserialization of data, and nearly always also means sending data over a socket. Plus the fact that most services have some constant overhead of the footprint to run the RPC code and other things (healthchecking, stats collection, etc.) that is typically bundled into each service. And even if the extra CPU&#x2F;memory isn&#x27;t a big deal for you, doing RPCs is going to add latency, and if you get too many microservices the latency numbers can start really adding up and be very difficult to fix later.<p>Running code in a single process is MUCH lower overhead because you don&#x27;t need to transit a network layer and you&#x27;re generally just passing pointers to data around rather than serializing&#x2F;deserializing it.<p>There are definitely some cases where using microservices does make things more CPU&#x2F;memory efficient, but it&#x27;s much rarer than people think. An example where you&#x27;d actually get efficiency would be something like a geofence service (imagine Uber, Doordash, etc.) where the geofence definitions are probably large and have to be stored in memory. Depending on how often geofence queries happen, it might be more efficient to have a small number of geofence service instances with the geofence definitions loaded in memory rather than having this logic as a module that many workers need to have loaded. But again, cases like this are much less common than the cases where services just lead to massive bloat.<p>I was working at Uber when they started transitioning from monolith to microservices, and pretty much universally splitting logic into microservices required provisioning many more servers and were disastrous for end-to-end latency times.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>Microservices, while often sold as solving a technical problem, usually actually solve for a human problem in scaling up an organization.<p>There&#x27;s two technical problems that microservices purport to solve: modularization (separation of concerns, hiding implementation, document interface and all that good stuff) and scalability (being able to increase the amount of compute, memory and IO to the specific modules that need it).<p>The first problem, modules, can be solved at the language level. Modules can do that job, and that&#x27;s the point of this blog post.<p>The second problem, scalability, is harder to solve at the language level in most languages outside those designed to be run in a distributed environment. But most people need it a lot less than they think. Normally the database is your bottleneck and if you keep your application server stateless, you can just run lots of them; the database can eventually be a bottleneck, but you can scale up databases <i>a lot</i>.<p>The real reason that microservices may make sense is because they keep people honest around module boundaries. They make it much harder to retain access to persistent in-memory state, harder to navigate object graphs to take dependencies on things they shouldn&#x27;t, harder to create PRs with complex changes on either side of a module boundary without a conversation about designing for change and future proofing. Code ownership by teams is something you need as an organization scales, if only to reduce the amount of context switching that developers need to do if treated as fully fungible; owning a service is more defensible than owning a module, since the team will own release schedules and quality gating.<p>I&#x27;m not so positive on every microservice maintaining its own copy of state, potentially with its own separate data store. I think that usually adds more ongoing complexity in synchronization than it saves by isolating schemas. A better rule is for one service to own writes for a table, and other services can only read that table, and maybe even then not all columns or all non-owned tables. Problems with state synchronization are one of the most common failure modes in distributed applications, where queues get backed up, retries of &quot;bad&quot; events cause blockages and so on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jayd16</author><text>Another way to look at this is microservices reduce the blast radius of problems.</text></comment> |
10,291,427 | 10,291,488 | 1 | 3 | 10,291,070 | train | <story><title>Why Airbnb is dead to me</title><url>http://drupaler.drupalgardens.com/content/why-airbnb-dead-me</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deveac</author><text><i>&gt;Airbnb do not care about guests and their safety at all.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know. It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn&#x27;t even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting &quot;no, it&#x27;s cool, I know them&quot;), and furthermore didn&#x27;t even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred.<p>It&#x27;s nice that they were &quot;all cool&quot; with the host and decided to play musical buildings instead of contacting Airbnb right there, but when they did that, they went off the books and <i>severely limited Airbnb&#x27;s ability to quickly and effectively</i> sort through the issue. A customer that didn&#x27;t even book a room though the service had an issue and went with a &quot;handshake&quot; from the host to resolve it instead.<p>Let&#x27;s walk through the alternate scenario.<p>Customer desiring a room actually books a room through AirBnB.<p>Customer arrives and hosts tells them the apartment is no longer available. Customer contacts AirBnB and the issue is dealt with right then and there, and the host is sanctioned properly.<p>No driving around in a strange city to a place you&#x27;ve never set eyes on, and if you want to book another apartment with the host, you do it on the books.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Elessar</author><text>Have you ever travelled to a foreign country where you don&#x27;t speak the language?<p>You really need to put yourself in the tourist&#x27;s shoes. If I booked a tour and the host drove me to a different place to stay, that&#x27;s all I can do. You rely on their ability to communicate, and if they&#x27;re being kind and doing their best to make your stay comfortable, then that&#x27;s fantastic.<p>What you&#x27;re suggesting is that you&#x27;re going to start making international calls with some website&#x27;s support staff while you have luggage on the street, no place to stay, in a foreign city and completely on your own. You&#x27;re also going to blow off the only person (the host) who cares at all about your situation. Are you kidding me?</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Airbnb is dead to me</title><url>http://drupaler.drupalgardens.com/content/why-airbnb-dead-me</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deveac</author><text><i>&gt;Airbnb do not care about guests and their safety at all.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know. It seems like it would be a nightmare to sort through a he-said she-said after the fact when the offended party didn&#x27;t even book a stay (instead the room was booked by some other person that is insisting &quot;no, it&#x27;s cool, I know them&quot;), and furthermore didn&#x27;t even report the apartment not being available when the issue occurred.<p>It&#x27;s nice that they were &quot;all cool&quot; with the host and decided to play musical buildings instead of contacting Airbnb right there, but when they did that, they went off the books and <i>severely limited Airbnb&#x27;s ability to quickly and effectively</i> sort through the issue. A customer that didn&#x27;t even book a room though the service had an issue and went with a &quot;handshake&quot; from the host to resolve it instead.<p>Let&#x27;s walk through the alternate scenario.<p>Customer desiring a room actually books a room through AirBnB.<p>Customer arrives and hosts tells them the apartment is no longer available. Customer contacts AirBnB and the issue is dealt with right then and there, and the host is sanctioned properly.<p>No driving around in a strange city to a place you&#x27;ve never set eyes on, and if you want to book another apartment with the host, you do it on the books.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>I don&#x27;t really blame the renters here although, in retrospect, they&#x27;d obviously have been better doing things differently.<p>At the same time, in the grand scheme of bad customer service from big Internet companies, Airbnb doesn&#x27;t look like a huge offender here. Photos from balconies notwithstanding, there is apparently a lot of he-said, she-said to sort through here and it&#x27;s really hard for an Airbnb (or an eBay etc.) to sort through that. What usually evolves over time (to the dissatisfaction of one side of transactions or another) is policies that strongly default to favor the buyer or the seller.</text></comment> |
4,145,083 | 4,144,960 | 1 | 2 | 4,144,724 | train | <story><title>Symbolset - symbol font using clever opentype ligature hack</title><url>http://symbolset.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dkulchenko</author><text>Having trouble figuring out the license (<a href="http://symbolset.com/license/" rel="nofollow">http://symbolset.com/license/</a>), specifically: "You may not under any circumstances embed the licensed fonts into software or hardware products in which the fonts will be used by the purchasers of such products."<p>By that are they only restricting adding the font as a selectable font for writing (i.e. WYSIWYG editors) or can you not use the font in your own software in any case?</text></comment> | <story><title>Symbolset - symbol font using clever opentype ligature hack</title><url>http://symbolset.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duopixel</author><text>Perhaps it should also include a non-ligature way of displaying icons. In current accessibility practices, when you place a description after its image you are supposed to include an empty alt attribute.<p>So say you have social icons...<p><pre><code> ◈ Facebook
◈ Twitter
</code></pre>
You are supposed to write<p><pre><code> &#60;img alt="" /&#62; Facebook
&#60;img alt="" /&#62; Twitter
</code></pre>
As to cue screen readers to not read out loud filename or the alt attribute.<p>In this case Symbolset works as the alt property of images, so you would do something like...<p><pre><code> &#60;span class="icon"&#62;Facebook&#60;/span&#62; Facebook
&#60;span class="icon"&#62;Twitter&#60;/span&#62; Twitter
</code></pre>
Which wouldn't be right.</text></comment> |
9,520,775 | 9,520,682 | 1 | 3 | 9,520,145 | train | <story><title>Git in six hundred words</title><url>http://maryrosecook.com/blog/post/git-in-six-hundred-words</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>&quot;You go to commit some code to a public repo. The maintainer scolds you for using merges instead of fast forwards.&quot;<p>&quot;You decide to bring in some more code from the public repo. Here is a 6000 word essay on what rebase means.&quot;<p>&quot;You try to look at an old version of the code. Suddenly you are in ‘detached HEAD’ state. The End.&quot;<p>I love git, but simple intros like this hide all the confusing complexity and awkward UI that quickly comes to the forefront when using git for everyday work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reuven</author><text>I teach courses on Git, and I couldn&#x27;t agree more. <i>Many</i> of my students have been told that Git is simple, and they just need to know 10 commands. Or they can think about it like SVN. Or that they should push, pull, and that&#x27;s about it.<p>Which has the effect of (a) making them fear Git, (b) making them feel like they&#x27;ll never figure it out, (c) and convincing them that they&#x27;re always on the verge of losing data. I&#x27;ve literally had students at the start of my course refer to Git as &quot;that system that makes me lose files.&quot;<p>Once I teach people about Git&#x27;s objects and data structures, things suddenly become much more obvious to these people. Git becomes less of a mystery.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that Git is easy for people to understand or use, because it isn&#x27;t. It has a steep learning curve -- one which I think is worth the effort. But I think that it does a disservice to Git newbies to try to summarize all of Git&#x27;s functionality in a short essay, and then proclaim, &quot;See? There&#x27;s not that much to learn here!&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Git in six hundred words</title><url>http://maryrosecook.com/blog/post/git-in-six-hundred-words</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NelsonMinar</author><text>&quot;You go to commit some code to a public repo. The maintainer scolds you for using merges instead of fast forwards.&quot;<p>&quot;You decide to bring in some more code from the public repo. Here is a 6000 word essay on what rebase means.&quot;<p>&quot;You try to look at an old version of the code. Suddenly you are in ‘detached HEAD’ state. The End.&quot;<p>I love git, but simple intros like this hide all the confusing complexity and awkward UI that quickly comes to the forefront when using git for everyday work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidgerard</author><text>+1. I want an intro to git that covers <i>all the weird confusing shit newbies meet</i>. I think I&#x27;ve read enough of the travel brochure version.</text></comment> |
7,023,925 | 7,023,688 | 1 | 2 | 7,023,393 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Codebox - Open-source cloud and desktop IDE</title><url>https://github.com/FriendCode/codebox</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjungwir</author><text>I&#x27;d love to see someone build an IDE that lives locally but syncs up to a cloud service so I can pull everything back down to a different machine and work there. I think you could actually do this with Docker, where your &quot;IDE&quot; would not be an editor, but a virtual system with the code, the database, a web server, the right version of Python&#x2F;Ruby&#x2F;foo, dependencies, etc., and you could use whatever editor you wanted. As you worked, the app would use Docker to save the state of the world and push it up to the server. It seems like this would get the benefits of cloud IDEs but still provide the low latency and flexibility of working locally. I don&#x27;t have the time or expertise to build it, but I hope someone will!</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Codebox - Open-source cloud and desktop IDE</title><url>https://github.com/FriendCode/codebox</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jalan</author><text>I sometimes wonder, can cloud IDE&#x27;s will really be able to replace traditional code editors like Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs.<p>I really like the idea of cloud IDE&#x27;s, but practically it&#x27;s difficult to bring the entire development environment on cloud&#x2F;browser, and even more difficult when switching from Vim.<p>Anyways, I really appreciate the efforts you are putting in this project. Congrats guys&#x2F;gals, job well done.</text></comment> |
22,706,403 | 22,703,865 | 1 | 3 | 22,699,439 | train | <story><title>The Polygons of Doom: PSX</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/doom_psx/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>contravariant</author><text>Can I just call attention to the fact that this webpage is amazingly well designed. It uses only a minimal amount of CSS and clean HTML but renders perfectly on both my mobile phone and desktop without additional logic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gorpomon</author><text>Full time Front-End dev here-- this site is pure delight. Reading the markup and seeing the styles is a real pleasure. It&#x27;s the web as it was always intended to be, simple, effective, effortless.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Polygons of Doom: PSX</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/doom_psx/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>contravariant</author><text>Can I just call attention to the fact that this webpage is amazingly well designed. It uses only a minimal amount of CSS and clean HTML but renders perfectly on both my mobile phone and desktop without additional logic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobolus</author><text>It uses monospaced type, and then does full justification by adding arbitrary extra space between words. Overall the legibility is awful, and typographers are puking.<p>I used my web browser’s “reader” mode on it.</text></comment> |
22,373,231 | 22,372,353 | 1 | 2 | 22,366,875 | train | <story><title>Let's Encrypt has turned on stricter validation requirements</title><url>https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v1-v2-validating-challenges-from-multiple-network-vantage-points/112253</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>Does anyone know of a “set it and forget it” alternative to Let’s Encrypt?<p>I’m all for making things more secure, but they’ve broken all of my certs in the last 12 months (in different ways, at different times), and I’m sick of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevekemp</author><text>Regardless of what you end up using you need to have your own monitoring if you care about availability.<p>My own monitoring always alerts if certificate chains don&#x27;t validate, HTTP-&gt;HTTPS redirection is dead, or if the certificate is due to expire in less than 10 days.<p>The various tools for interacting with Lets Encrypt might fail sometimes, but if you have monitoring you can fix them up as required - and without monitoring you&#x27;ll in trouble regardless of who you use.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let's Encrypt has turned on stricter validation requirements</title><url>https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v1-v2-validating-challenges-from-multiple-network-vantage-points/112253</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hedora</author><text>Does anyone know of a “set it and forget it” alternative to Let’s Encrypt?<p>I’m all for making things more secure, but they’ve broken all of my certs in the last 12 months (in different ways, at different times), and I’m sick of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wiremaus</author><text>Same here. I had them running for a small informational website, and they took the site down for several days via surprise cert problems. I may switch to a paid provider.</text></comment> |
38,703,779 | 38,703,891 | 1 | 3 | 38,702,783 | train | <story><title>Tell HN: Microsoft.com added 192.168.1.1 to their DNS record</title><text>Is this bad?<p>$ nslookup microsoft.com<p>Non-authoritative answer:<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 192.168.1.0<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.112.250.133<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.231.239.246<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.76.201.171<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.70.246.20<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.236.44.162<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 192.168.1.1</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kotaKat</author><text>Through a series of connections I know a guy that knows a guy that works at Microsoft that was made aware and the changes have been reverted. Give &#x27;er 30 minutes TTL ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubyfan</author><text>This is my favorite HN comment of 2023.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tell HN: Microsoft.com added 192.168.1.1 to their DNS record</title><text>Is this bad?<p>$ nslookup microsoft.com<p>Non-authoritative answer:<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 192.168.1.0<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.112.250.133<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.231.239.246<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.76.201.171<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.70.246.20<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 20.236.44.162<p>Name: microsoft.com
Address: 192.168.1.1</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kotaKat</author><text>Through a series of connections I know a guy that knows a guy that works at Microsoft that was made aware and the changes have been reverted. Give &#x27;er 30 minutes TTL ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaza</author><text>30 minutes minutes or 30 Windows minutes? :P</text></comment> |
15,138,994 | 15,138,409 | 1 | 3 | 15,137,986 | train | <story><title>Astronomers have found the stars responsible for an explosion recorded in 1437</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/a-cosmic-whodunit/538482/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmontra</author><text>My first reaction was &quot;it shone for 14 days and only Korean astronomers noticed it?&quot;
Then I googled for that nova and eventually found this interesting article <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;astrogeo&#x2F;article&#x2F;47&#x2F;1&#x2F;1.29&#x2F;258488&#x2F;Where-have-all-the-novae-gone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;astrogeo&#x2F;article&#x2F;47&#x2F;1&#x2F;1.29&#x2F;258488&#x2F;W...</a><p>It seems that Koreans were particularly keen at looking for novae. Cloudy skys, lack of fast global communications, the small number of people looking for faint new stars could explain why nobody else noticed it. For example, about the supernova of 1604 which was visible during the day:<p>&gt; &quot;On the 30th [of September], the sudden breaking of the clouds afforded one of Kepler&#x27;s friends an opportunity of having a very short view of it… On the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th of October, it was seen by several persons in different places. On account of cloudy weather at Prague, where Kepler resided, he did not see it until the 8th of that month.&quot;<p>If that&#x27;s happened to a supernova, I can imagine a nova could slip away unnoticed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Astronomers have found the stars responsible for an explosion recorded in 1437</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/a-cosmic-whodunit/538482/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yeukhon</author><text>I got to say I am always astonished at astronomical discoveries. Finding a wrecked ship in ocean is really really difficult, but correlate and finding what is out there in the open space, hundreds or even more light years away is like finding a dust particle in the open sea. Let&#x27;s pause for a moment and appreicate these discoveries....</text></comment> |
2,760,586 | 2,759,933 | 1 | 3 | 2,759,642 | train | <story><title>IBM patent trolling patent application</title><url>http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070244837%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070244837&RS=DN/20070244837</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>law</author><text>Step 1: Go to <a href="http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair" rel="nofollow">http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair</a><p>Step 2: Enter the captcha<p>Step 3: Type 11/696,104 as the "Application Number"<p>Step 4: Click the "Transaction History" tab<p>To summarize, the PTO issued a non-final rejection of the patent on 02/07/2009. IBM responded to that on 05/11/2009, which yielded a final rejection on 08/31/2009. IBM then requested to withdraw their response to the non-final rejection (the 05/11/2009 response). On 07/01/2010, IBM filed a new response to the 02/10/2009 non-final rejection, and the PTO issued its second final rejection on 09/13/2010.<p>IBM then made an amendment to their application, and requested a continued examination (read more about that at <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/aipa/rcefaq.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/aipa/rcefaq.jsp</a>). Then, they filed their appeal to the 09/13/2010 final rejection with the Board of Patent Appeals and Interference. The continued examination yielded the most recent non-final rejection, on 06/24/2011. IBM will likely respond in a few months, and there'll likely be another final rejection (the third) issued.<p>Now, it's still in the hands of the BPAI, which will likely affirm the rejection. After that, IBM can appeal the Board's ruling to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which will most likely side with the PTO.<p>It seems highly unlikely that IBM will be issued this patent, but if the final rejection is miraculously overturned, prosecution history estoppel will likely preclude IBM from doing anything meaningful with the patent, because as many of you have noted, there's plenty of prior art dated before April 2006.</text></comment> | <story><title>IBM patent trolling patent application</title><url>http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070244837%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070244837&RS=DN/20070244837</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>monochromatic</author><text>It's worth mentioning that the USPTO, which everyone here thinks will allow anything, recently issued its <i>fifth</i> rejection of this application.</text></comment> |
28,163,393 | 28,163,256 | 1 | 3 | 28,162,412 | train | <story><title>Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-apples-child-protection-features-spark-concern-within-its-own-ranks-2021-08-12/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>The practical difference is that with on-device scanning, the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning <i>every</i> photo on your device, instead of just the ones that are about to be uploaded. With server-side scanning, the separation is clear—what&#x27;s on Apple&#x27;s server can be scanned, and what&#x27;s only on your phone cannot.<p>This all plays so perfectly into my long-time fears about the locked down nature of the iPhone. Sure, it&#x27;s more secure <i>if</i> Apple is a good steward, but no one outside of Apple can inspect or audit what it&#x27;s doing!</text></item><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>In their attempt to make this extra private by scanning &#x27;on device&#x27;, I think they&#x27;ve managed to make it feel worse.<p>If they scan my iCloud photos in iCloud, well lots of companies scan stuff when you upload it. It&#x27;s on their servers, they&#x27;re responsible for it. They don&#x27;t want to be hosting CSAM.<p>It feels much worse them turning your own, trusty iPhone against you.<p>I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feels.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nitrogen</author><text><i>With server-side scanning, the separation is clear</i><p>In all these threads everyone is coming close to the crux of the issue, but I want to restate it in clearer terms:<p>There is a sacrosanct line between &quot;public&quot; and &quot;private,&quot; &quot;mine&quot; and &quot;yours.&quot; That line cannot be crossed by Western governments without a warrant. Cloud computing has deliberately blurred this line over time. This on-device scanning implementation blows right past that line.<p>Our tools before the computing revolution, and our devices after, become a part of us. Our proprioception extends to include them as part of &quot;self.&quot; A personal device -- a tool that should be wholly owned and wholly dependable, like pen and paper -- that betrays its user, is a self that betrays itself.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-apples-child-protection-features-spark-concern-within-its-own-ranks-2021-08-12/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>The practical difference is that with on-device scanning, the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning <i>every</i> photo on your device, instead of just the ones that are about to be uploaded. With server-side scanning, the separation is clear—what&#x27;s on Apple&#x27;s server can be scanned, and what&#x27;s only on your phone cannot.<p>This all plays so perfectly into my long-time fears about the locked down nature of the iPhone. Sure, it&#x27;s more secure <i>if</i> Apple is a good steward, but no one outside of Apple can inspect or audit what it&#x27;s doing!</text></item><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>In their attempt to make this extra private by scanning &#x27;on device&#x27;, I think they&#x27;ve managed to make it feel worse.<p>If they scan my iCloud photos in iCloud, well lots of companies scan stuff when you upload it. It&#x27;s on their servers, they&#x27;re responsible for it. They don&#x27;t want to be hosting CSAM.<p>It feels much worse them turning your own, trusty iPhone against you.<p>I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feels.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throaway46546</author><text>I agree. Our phones tend to hold all of our most intimate data. Violating them is akin to violating our homes. It would be nice if the laws saw it this way.</text></comment> |
9,313,243 | 9,313,224 | 1 | 2 | 9,313,004 | train | <story><title>So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission</title><url>http://www.myrmecos.net/2015/03/28/faq-so-your-company-has-been-found-using-alexs-photographs-without-permission-what-next/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jakejake</author><text>I can feel in this post the years of dealing with people nicely, only to have them treat you as if you are the bad guy.<p>I&#x27;ve had people send nasty emails after I moved or got rid of an image that they were hotlinking. People have called me all sorts of ugly names because a free app that I wrote didn&#x27;t have a feature they need. People have posted nasty stuff because I didn&#x27;t provide them phone support at 3am for a GPL open source utility that I released. All this because I can&#x27;t always manage to reply to people needing support for my free-time projects. I&#x27;m sure a lot of you here have known the same type of treatment.</text></comment> | <story><title>So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission</title><url>http://www.myrmecos.net/2015/03/28/faq-so-your-company-has-been-found-using-alexs-photographs-without-permission-what-next/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>Alex Wild&#x27;s copyright infringement story on Ars Technica a few months ago provides some helpful context to the linked page.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;one-mans-endless-hopeless-struggle-to-protect-his-copyrighted-images&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;one-mans-endless-...</a></text></comment> |
36,725,341 | 36,725,176 | 1 | 3 | 36,724,736 | train | <story><title>Dropped iPad implicated in fatal Rotak Chinook helicopter crash</title><url>https://verticalmag.com/news/dropped-ipad-implicated-in-fatal-chinook-helicopter-crash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>the__alchemist</author><text>Some loose thoughts:<p>Military aircraft cockpits sometimes don&#x27;t have a great concept of &quot;inside&quot; and &quot;outside&quot;, the way a cell, waterproof device, the aircraft&#x27;s pressure seal etc do. If you drop something (FOD), there may not be a clearly defined boundary to where it can end up, or it may not be possible to see or get to it while strapped in etc. Rudder pedals, or the various mechanical and electrical connections around them, as indicated in the article, are a great example of this. If you can&#x27;t find it, the AC may have to be grounded and thoroughly searched&#x2F;panels removed etc.<p>Military avionics may be missing basic things that an EFB can help with, including maps, nav point and airport databases, weather info, ADSB info etc. EFBs are (IMO) a poor substitute due to the FOD concern here, the clunky touch screen interface (which you probably have to take gloves off for), the risk of getting locked out of important things like checklist and plates by BlackBerry, Foreflight licenses, passcode timers or other security layer etc.<p>You might have a jet that&#x27;s 30 years old, just got retrofitted with a really nice radar etc, but the funding didn&#x27;t make it through for a database, better displays&#x2F;UI etc that would be better integrated with a jet, so you lean on the EFBs.<p>There are sometimes EFB mounts that can attach to a canopy via suction cup, clip onto various surfaces etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dropped iPad implicated in fatal Rotak Chinook helicopter crash</title><url>https://verticalmag.com/news/dropped-ipad-implicated-in-fatal-chinook-helicopter-crash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>For anybody that liked the style of this sort of analysis, let me strongly recommend Dekker&#x27;s &quot;Field Guide to Understanding &#x27;Human Error&#x27;&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1472439058" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...</a><p>It focuses on air crash investigations. But it&#x27;s very useful to tech people in understanding the right way to approach incident investigations. It can be very easy to blame individuals (&quot;stupid pilot shouldn&#x27;t have dropped his iPad&quot;, etc), but that focus prevents improving safety over the long term. Dekker&#x27;s book is a great argument for, as here, thinking about what actually happened and why as a systemic thing. Which provides much more fertile ground for making sure it doesn&#x27;t happen again.</text></comment> |
34,905,676 | 34,905,395 | 1 | 2 | 34,901,703 | train | <story><title>Poste.io – Complete Mail Server</title><url>https://poste.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user3939382</author><text>&gt; The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients&#x27; inboxes<p>It&#x27;s amazing that having someone in your address book isn&#x27;t enough in many cases. Like, why?</text></item><item><author>c0l0</author><text>Having been a part-time postmaster for more than a decade by now, I fully agree, and would even go further: Ingress spam is pretty much a solved problem if you play your cards right. ChatGPT et al. might change that again - but the mechanisms you can deploy today are very effective against the current UBE landscape.<p>The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients&#x27; inboxes.</text></item><item><author>that_courtney</author><text>I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem.<p>The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn&#x27;t software setup and admin. On the receiving side, it&#x27;s all the work dealing with abuse and attacks. On the sending side -- and this is the tough one -- it&#x27;s getting sites to accept your email. When I finally gave up managing my own mail server (about two years ago), I found that about every six months I was involved in some panic where some large mail provider (Microsoft and Google most frequently) decided they didn&#x27;t want to accept email from my server. Solving these issues is neither easy nor quick.<p>These days I&#x27;m very happy to pay somebody else to run email services using my provided domains.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelteter</author><text>I moved a Gsuite client to Zoho because once or twice a week, an email from one person at the custom domain to another person in the same custom domain (company) would have their direct email get put into spam in Gmail.<p>You would really think that Google would whitelist emails within the same custom domain which is paying for Gsuite service. Maybe that has changed, but it was definitely a problem 5 years ago.<p>And we&#x27;re not talking about an email which had some copy&#x2F;paste of spam, we&#x27;re talking about a one or two line sentence giving an instruction or asking a question to a colleague.</text></comment> | <story><title>Poste.io – Complete Mail Server</title><url>https://poste.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>user3939382</author><text>&gt; The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients&#x27; inboxes<p>It&#x27;s amazing that having someone in your address book isn&#x27;t enough in many cases. Like, why?</text></item><item><author>c0l0</author><text>Having been a part-time postmaster for more than a decade by now, I fully agree, and would even go further: Ingress spam is pretty much a solved problem if you play your cards right. ChatGPT et al. might change that again - but the mechanisms you can deploy today are very effective against the current UBE landscape.<p>The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients&#x27; inboxes.</text></item><item><author>that_courtney</author><text>I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem.<p>The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn&#x27;t software setup and admin. On the receiving side, it&#x27;s all the work dealing with abuse and attacks. On the sending side -- and this is the tough one -- it&#x27;s getting sites to accept your email. When I finally gave up managing my own mail server (about two years ago), I found that about every six months I was involved in some panic where some large mail provider (Microsoft and Google most frequently) decided they didn&#x27;t want to accept email from my server. Solving these issues is neither easy nor quick.<p>These days I&#x27;m very happy to pay somebody else to run email services using my provided domains.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>I’d guess the main issue is, the big guys don’t care about you. Like, at all.<p>If they pass their log through a scanner, come up with a few dozen small servers that look fishy (e.g your IP is contiguous to some other spammer’s IP), and yours is rope in as false positive, you’re banned.<p>And from there you’ll have to convince Google that you’ve done nothing wrong.</text></comment> |
15,352,233 | 15,350,873 | 1 | 2 | 15,349,880 | train | <story><title>Stressful lives of older tech workers</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/stressful-lives-of-older-tech-workers-2015-11?_lrsc=e525de47-81f1-48b4-bc62-2a1e336af828</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>Silicon Valley likes young people because they tend to accept worse employment contracts and accept the idea of longer hours. Folks with family responsibility immediately put counter-pressure on this.<p>I&#x27;m 38. And I feel <i>enormous</i> pressure to be smarter than everyone around me to be relevant. People <i>expect</i> you to be incredible both at management and engineering as you get older. I&#x27;m very lucky my career path has given me opportunity here, because but for a few chance encounters I&#x27;d be much, much worse at both and that&#x27;d be awful. I&#x27;m quite worried about what people will expect of me when I&#x27;m 45. I&#x27;m working hard to add data science to my resume because I think that &quot;mathy&quot; roles have less discrimination against them than pure engineering roles, and I want to stay ahead of it.<p>I do a lot of stuff that is tactical as well. For example, today I&#x27;m wearing a uniqlo-nintendo collaboration t-shirt with Pikachu on it. I&#x27;m doing so on the day I&#x27;m giving an interview. Because I know, tactically, this shirt is silly and irreverent and paints a picture of someone younger at heart.<p>And maybe that is naturally me (pika pika, ban lylat!) but I&#x27;d be lying if I didn&#x27;t continue to do it tactically to appear more relevant and &quot;with it&quot;.<p>What&#x27;s interesting to me is that outside of the SV startup world, every computer scientist and great engineer I respect is a person over 40. Especially in academia, where women and men of <i>astounding</i> intelligence are doing work that in 10 years will probably reshape the industry (put forth, naturally, by breathlessly enthusiastic 21 year old &quot;devrel&quot; folks mis-attributing the work of 2 generations of academia to the brilliance of the senior technical staff at that company).<p>So yeah, it sucks. It&#x27;s real. And there is a reason in the older white male-ish segment you find more awareness of other types (gender, racial) discrimination in the industry: people over 40 directly experience age discrimination and it&#x27;s not at all theoretical even to white men in that cohort. If it can happen to older white dudes, it surely can happen to anyone else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>groby_b</author><text>Counterpoint: I&#x27;m 48. I work in the Valley. I do wear suits and dresses because that&#x27;s what I like. (Some days, you can catch me in jeans and t-shirts. It&#x27;s rare). I don&#x27;t pick up hobbies I don&#x27;t care about just because &quot;everybody does it&quot;. (Looking at you, bicycling!). I&#x27;m not even male.<p>I still (just verified :) ace my interviews. I&#x27;m well respected at my job. I&#x27;ve got a decent income and a decent set of responsibilities.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m an exception. But, alternative thought, maybe the &quot;youth obsession&quot; is also partially created because everybody thinks it exists.<p>Yes, I&#x27;m wondering what happens when I get post 50 as well. But mostly I&#x27;m thinking that because everybody <i>tells</i> me it will be bad, not because I&#x27;ve seen actual evidence. I&#x27;ve got wonderful colleagues who are 50+, and nobody would dream of firing them. I&#x27;ve got industry contacts who are 50+. So, I guess I&#x27;ll find out in about two years.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stressful lives of older tech workers</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/stressful-lives-of-older-tech-workers-2015-11?_lrsc=e525de47-81f1-48b4-bc62-2a1e336af828</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>Silicon Valley likes young people because they tend to accept worse employment contracts and accept the idea of longer hours. Folks with family responsibility immediately put counter-pressure on this.<p>I&#x27;m 38. And I feel <i>enormous</i> pressure to be smarter than everyone around me to be relevant. People <i>expect</i> you to be incredible both at management and engineering as you get older. I&#x27;m very lucky my career path has given me opportunity here, because but for a few chance encounters I&#x27;d be much, much worse at both and that&#x27;d be awful. I&#x27;m quite worried about what people will expect of me when I&#x27;m 45. I&#x27;m working hard to add data science to my resume because I think that &quot;mathy&quot; roles have less discrimination against them than pure engineering roles, and I want to stay ahead of it.<p>I do a lot of stuff that is tactical as well. For example, today I&#x27;m wearing a uniqlo-nintendo collaboration t-shirt with Pikachu on it. I&#x27;m doing so on the day I&#x27;m giving an interview. Because I know, tactically, this shirt is silly and irreverent and paints a picture of someone younger at heart.<p>And maybe that is naturally me (pika pika, ban lylat!) but I&#x27;d be lying if I didn&#x27;t continue to do it tactically to appear more relevant and &quot;with it&quot;.<p>What&#x27;s interesting to me is that outside of the SV startup world, every computer scientist and great engineer I respect is a person over 40. Especially in academia, where women and men of <i>astounding</i> intelligence are doing work that in 10 years will probably reshape the industry (put forth, naturally, by breathlessly enthusiastic 21 year old &quot;devrel&quot; folks mis-attributing the work of 2 generations of academia to the brilliance of the senior technical staff at that company).<p>So yeah, it sucks. It&#x27;s real. And there is a reason in the older white male-ish segment you find more awareness of other types (gender, racial) discrimination in the industry: people over 40 directly experience age discrimination and it&#x27;s not at all theoretical even to white men in that cohort. If it can happen to older white dudes, it surely can happen to anyone else.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text><i>&gt;Silicon Valley likes young people</i><p>People get the wrong impression that it&#x27;s a SV thing.
It&#x27;s not just SV. Lots of employers (who are themselves age 40+) like to hire 20-somethings.<p>As one example, there was a reddit thread with a woman in Tennessee trying to start a hot sauce business. In one of her replies, she wrote: <i>&quot;I wanted my company to be young and hip, so I hired young and hip -- okay, ‘hip’ might be subjective, but we’re definitely young.&quot;</i>[1]<p>It was fascinating to watch an honest moment of communication because she later deleted that reply. However, others had already quickly replied to it which left her original comment for prosperity.[1]<p>In another example, the aides that sit directly adjacent to the President&#x27;s oval office are traditionally staffed by 20-somethings.[2] There&#x27;s nothing in the job description that says the gatekeeping work can&#x27;t be done by senior-citizens but every WH Chief of Staff always wants the high energy of a recent college grad stationed there.<p>It&#x27;s not just programming. Whether it&#x27;s packaging up food sauce in Tennessee or filtering visitors into the President&#x27;s office in Washington DC, employers want the vibe of a young crew.<p>[1] original text still in a reply:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;pics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4hiipf&#x2F;update_hi_reddit_my_name_is_sue_sullivan_and_six&#x2F;d2q4ddr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;pics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4hiipf&#x2F;update_hi_redd...</a><p>[2] Bush aides: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;lNhpsPvMYAE?t=5m37s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;lNhpsPvMYAE?t=5m37s</a><p>Obama aides: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;p-U0-0anzV0?t=28s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;p-U0-0anzV0?t=28s</a><p>Clinton aides: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uzZ-gfvXN-c?t=25m17s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;uzZ-gfvXN-c?t=25m17s</a></text></comment> |
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