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4,311,332 | 4,309,719 | 1 | 2 | 4,309,598 | train | <story><title>Brain scans reveal simple 3D grid structure </title><url>http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2012/nimh-29.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wladimir</author><text>Very intersting find. Though every time I see 'simple 3D grid' in combination with the brain, I think 'scanner or reconstruction artifact'. For my PhD research I've worked with DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging) data which was very hard to sensibly interpret as 'connectivity': The visualized structures depended very much on the parameters and reconstruction method used. And it was hard to match the visualized structures to actual physical structures.<p>I wonder if they verified in some other way (ie, microscope) that the simple 3D structures were really there. If so, very exciting news!</text></comment> | <story><title>Brain scans reveal simple 3D grid structure </title><url>http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2012/nimh-29.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JabavuAdams</author><text>Suggest changing the title to: "Imager Reveals Grid-Like Brain Connections Simpler Than Previously Believed."</text></comment> |
10,966,152 | 10,964,339 | 1 | 3 | 10,963,568 | train | <story><title>Amazon's customer service backdoor</title><url>https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backdoor-be375b3428c4#.lqxcfockn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danneu</author><text>Whois is great for social engineering attackers. You get a name, email, address, and the first service to attack.<p>Meanwhile, the ICANN is working around the clock to make it illegal for us to protect our personal information, and whois protection is becoming an increasingly niche service for registrars.<p>For example, gandi.net (and thus Amazon) doesn&#x27;t hide your name when you have it turned on. By the time you find this out, it might occur to you to just type in a different name, but now you&#x27;re violating ICANN policy. And it&#x27;s already been scraped by any of those whois history websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucaspiller</author><text>In the UK this and a lot more is public information. As an example of what is available about me online (without paying a penny) just by searching for my name:<p>- The year I was born<p>- The district I was born (not the exact town, although that wouldn&#x27;t be hard to guess)<p>- My mother&#x27;s maiden name (which is what most banks et al ask as a security question...)<p>- The areas I&#x27;ve lived (based upon the electoral register, which you can opt out of but supposedly this impacts your credit rating)<p>- That I am a director of a company<p>This is just what is available for free - you can get the full records this is extracted from by paying a small fee.<p>If you know the name of my company (which isn&#x27;t hard to find out), you can also find for free:<p>- My full name<p>- My address<p>- My date of birth<p>- Roughly how much I make a year<p>TL;DR; If you rely on this to &#x27;identify&#x27; someone, you are doing it wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon's customer service backdoor</title><url>https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backdoor-be375b3428c4#.lqxcfockn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danneu</author><text>Whois is great for social engineering attackers. You get a name, email, address, and the first service to attack.<p>Meanwhile, the ICANN is working around the clock to make it illegal for us to protect our personal information, and whois protection is becoming an increasingly niche service for registrars.<p>For example, gandi.net (and thus Amazon) doesn&#x27;t hide your name when you have it turned on. By the time you find this out, it might occur to you to just type in a different name, but now you&#x27;re violating ICANN policy. And it&#x27;s already been scraped by any of those whois history websites.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fps</author><text>I think the bigger problem is that public information like your name and address is sufficient for proving your identity. If we make whois information private, what about phone books, property records, direct mail databases, etc. etc.</text></comment> |
14,109,478 | 14,109,281 | 1 | 2 | 14,107,727 | train | <story><title>Mimicking an impact on Earth’s early atmosphere yields all 4 RNA bases</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/mimicking-an-impact-on-earths-early-atmosphere-yields-all-4-rna-bases/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtdewcmu</author><text>The hypothesis that goes something like<p>RNA bases -&gt; RNA -&gt; proteins -&gt; life<p>seems to sidestep the issue of metabolism, i.e. what did the first organism eat? What was its energy source?<p>When I picture life arising from nothing, the most plausible scenario seems to involve increasingly intricate chemical reactions that initially do absolutely nothing other than create longer and longer staircases for energy to step through through before dissipating and becoming useless. In other words, you start with metabolism first, and then get structure later.<p>It seems plausible that the earliest proto-metabolisms didn&#x27;t use RNA or resemble modern life in any way. There might have been a succession of proto-metabolisms before getting to anything we would recognize as life. They would likely not have left any fossil record.<p>Does this make any sense to anybody?</text></comment> | <story><title>Mimicking an impact on Earth’s early atmosphere yields all 4 RNA bases</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/mimicking-an-impact-on-earths-early-atmosphere-yields-all-4-rna-bases/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Blinks-</author><text>When I was in middle school I read a new book about cell structure I found in the library, my favorite chapter was always about the so called primordial soup of lipids and simple organic compounds that could have setup the chemical basis for polymers to form and in turn create the building blocks for RNA. It was one of the main things that gave me an interest in science and engineering, up until that point people had always given me a &quot;god did it&quot; or &quot;we still have no theories on that son&quot;. This brings me back to the good ol&#x27; days of trying to explain how RNA could come about, as a 12 year old, to middle aged religious teachers who shot me down every time. As a kid this made me turn to outside sources for knowledge, and in retrospect that was actually a good thing.</text></comment> |
18,756,147 | 18,755,139 | 1 | 2 | 18,754,664 | train | <story><title>Netflix Pulls the Plug on Feature Designed to Get Kids Addicted to Netflix</title><url>https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/netflix-patch-testing-kids-binge-watching</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parhamn</author><text>Lots of folks&#x2F;companies are going to lose long-term as a result of bad A&#x2F;B testing driven decision making. I suspect the decline of the Facebook feed might be attributed to this as well (maybe even the recent polls of Trump&#x27;s twitter practices[1]). Generally these sorts of things don&#x27;t really consider long term fatigue and other important factors, and take short term micro-benchmark wins as success. On the flip side, some attribute not A&#x2F;B testing to the failure of the SnapChat redesign[2].<p>Is there anyway to do this properly? I can imagine the problem will get worse and worse as we reduce human evaluation of A&#x2F;B test results and automatically make real-time decisions through software and ML.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;poll-shows-trump-appears-to-be-losing-somewhat-supporters-with-antics-2018-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;poll-shows-trump-appears-to-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;snap-evan-spiegel-app-redesign-rushed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;snap-evan-spiegel-app-re...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apatters</author><text>Any metric or KPI is going to get gamed in harmful ways if it&#x27;s prioritized too highly. So the answer is to use A&#x2F;B testing to make sure you&#x27;re not regressing on the goals of a design change, and judiciously, to validate whether your change is moving things in the right direction.<p>But beyond that you have to do the hard slog of mastering the discipline of UX, real, human-centric design, and accept that not everything important is measurable.<p>We have plenty of examples of how doing real UX instead of playing a numbers game can differentiate your business, Apple has applied this philosophy consistently over many years.<p>The root of the problem is a &quot;fuck you, market share at all costs&quot; culture that has come to permeate Silicon Valley. And you can argue (somewhat cynically) that this philosophy makes sense in a blue ocean where you have no competition and just need to gobble up people and turn them into cash before someone else does. But I think going forward this mentality may actually become a liability as more humane alternatives to heavily despised products emerge. Many of the current crop of giants seem to have forgotten that a company&#x27;s most valuable asset is always its brand.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix Pulls the Plug on Feature Designed to Get Kids Addicted to Netflix</title><url>https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/netflix-patch-testing-kids-binge-watching</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parhamn</author><text>Lots of folks&#x2F;companies are going to lose long-term as a result of bad A&#x2F;B testing driven decision making. I suspect the decline of the Facebook feed might be attributed to this as well (maybe even the recent polls of Trump&#x27;s twitter practices[1]). Generally these sorts of things don&#x27;t really consider long term fatigue and other important factors, and take short term micro-benchmark wins as success. On the flip side, some attribute not A&#x2F;B testing to the failure of the SnapChat redesign[2].<p>Is there anyway to do this properly? I can imagine the problem will get worse and worse as we reduce human evaluation of A&#x2F;B test results and automatically make real-time decisions through software and ML.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;poll-shows-trump-appears-to-be-losing-somewhat-supporters-with-antics-2018-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;poll-shows-trump-appears-to-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;snap-evan-spiegel-app-redesign-rushed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;snap-evan-spiegel-app-re...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnday</author><text>&gt; Is there anyway to do this properly?<p>The way to do it properly is to hire experienced, competent UX designers and human computer interaction specialists, who understand the problem space and how to keep people engaged without addictive malpractice &#x2F; dark patterns. Metrics are useful but they are what they claim to be - measurements - and nothing more.<p>You wouldn&#x27;t choose which house to buy based on how large it was measured to be, but you <i>would</i> expect a surveyor to make those measurements.<p>Speaking as a web and video game designer, I can&#x27;t wait until I can hire someone to think about these things for me.</text></comment> |
25,946,781 | 25,946,659 | 1 | 2 | 25,945,447 | train | <story><title>We Are Preparing a Class Action Lawsuit Against Robinhood</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6yrs3/we_are_preparing_a_class_action_lawsuit_against/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martinni</author><text>I’m not sure it’s that simple. They pissed off their most loyal and active customers. I doubt they’ll be back. What to say RH will not do this again in the future?</text></item><item><author>ta1234567890</author><text>Unfortunately, RH most likely made the decision already taking into account the potential costs of making it (including lawsuits and fines by regulators). Their alternative was probably “biting the hand that feeds them”, hence more likely an existential risk to them.<p>Being cynic about it, nothing of consequence will come out of this. RH will just pay up and continue business as usual. WallStreet will have successfully crushed the little guys, ironically, doing the same they are complaining about, market manipulation. And in the future people will think twice before attempting something like this again.</text></item><item><author>woliveirajr</author><text>This. If your business is to provide a trading platform, you can&#x27;t forbid your clients of doing the business they want, with their money. You step in the middle of the process, you&#x27;re liable for your interference.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>They picked their company name evoking a certain moral ethos, and the first time their customers consciously acted on that ethos, they pulled the plug.<p>Whether you agree with that ethos or not, I think we can at least agree that RH lacks the courage of its convictions.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Are Preparing a Class Action Lawsuit Against Robinhood</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6yrs3/we_are_preparing_a_class_action_lawsuit_against/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>martinni</author><text>I’m not sure it’s that simple. They pissed off their most loyal and active customers. I doubt they’ll be back. What to say RH will not do this again in the future?</text></item><item><author>ta1234567890</author><text>Unfortunately, RH most likely made the decision already taking into account the potential costs of making it (including lawsuits and fines by regulators). Their alternative was probably “biting the hand that feeds them”, hence more likely an existential risk to them.<p>Being cynic about it, nothing of consequence will come out of this. RH will just pay up and continue business as usual. WallStreet will have successfully crushed the little guys, ironically, doing the same they are complaining about, market manipulation. And in the future people will think twice before attempting something like this again.</text></item><item><author>woliveirajr</author><text>This. If your business is to provide a trading platform, you can&#x27;t forbid your clients of doing the business they want, with their money. You step in the middle of the process, you&#x27;re liable for your interference.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haram_masala</author><text>Much like Facebook, RH’s users are not its customers. RH’s actual customers are no doubt thrilled with what the company has done.</text></comment> |
3,524,390 | 3,524,212 | 1 | 2 | 3,524,164 | train | <story><title>Duck.com (not the search engine you might expect)</title><url>http://www.duck.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rglover</author><text>I get <i>how</i> this could be confusing (after all, a lot of people access URLs by googling them first). Regardless, this isn't Google being evil but rather, taking advantage of a fortunate coincidence. They acquired a company in the past that owned a domain. Ironically, that domain happens to be similar to a competitor in the present. They have no immediate use for the domain, but why not redirect it to Google (just in case someone was trying to get to their competitor)? That's not evil, that's business. If DDG is that concerned about it, make an offer to Google for the domain name.</text></comment> | <story><title>Duck.com (not the search engine you might expect)</title><url>http://www.duck.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>epi0Bauqu</author><text>Backstory: <a href="https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google" rel="nofollow">https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google</a><p>tl;dr no reason (IMHO) it should point to Google search -- it's just confusing people.</text></comment> |
12,736,701 | 12,736,324 | 1 | 2 | 12,734,069 | train | <story><title>Silicon Valley Cozies Up to Washington, Outspending Wall Street 2-1</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspending-wall-street-2-to-1-silicon-valley-takes-washington</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway98237</author><text>Back in 2005-2006 I was working on Wall St., studying for my CFA exam, working to get a place in our equities group, all while half-diverting my attention to the other coast, watching in awe as a whole bunch of upstarts were following in the footsteps of Robert Noyce and crew, building a new future. This new future didn&#x27;t seem to look like the old way of doing business, like on Wall St., where it was where you went to school, who your neighbors were, who&#x27;s ass you kissed at work. It was like the wild west, where the fit survived and prospered, where anyone could go and make a new life, and build something that would improve everyone&#x27;s life.<p>Fast forward 5 years or so and my delusions of &quot;this time it will be different&quot; were all but shattered. Watching Facebook put up walls around the commons, watching Apple fence off their garden, watching Google get into bed with the government and our military. Watching payroll head-counts become more and more dominated by sales teams. Watching founders head for the exit that is Wall St., which is <i>exactly</i> where Noyce and Crew had fled from back in the day.<p>My guess is that it&#x27;s all about the systemic qualities of our economic system. How could Silicon Valley had become anything else. I mean, if we&#x27;re honest about it, Silicon Valley&#x27;s first big customer was the military. And where there is money to be made Wall St. and the Ivy League will soon follow, stamping out cookie cutter companies implementinng their tried and true methodology for extracting the maximum value for shareholders.<p>So sad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Silicon Valley Cozies Up to Washington, Outspending Wall Street 2-1</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspending-wall-street-2-to-1-silicon-valley-takes-washington</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ComteDeLaFere</author><text>Wow. Considering this, and the fact that tech will undoubtedly get blamed for designing many jobs out of existence, how long before we see an Occupy Sand Hill Road?<p>Asked with some humor, but... not really.</text></comment> |
20,023,112 | 20,022,724 | 1 | 3 | 20,014,281 | train | <story><title>Byte Magazine – Smalltalk (1981)</title><url>https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>travisgriggs</author><text>I’m always amused that this is called a magazine. At least this particular issue. It’s nearly 500 pages long!!<p>My favorite chapter in the tome is the one by Peter Deutsch on control structures. Starts on page 322. I did Smalltalk for 20 years. I don’t have right words to express how much I loved the Smalltalk block closure, the fact that it was a reified object type that you could extend and use polymorphically is one of the unsung geniuses in Smalltalk. Every time I use python lambdas or Swift’s closures or Kotlin’s closures (the three closure enabled languages I use most today), I just sigh and wish.</text></comment> | <story><title>Byte Magazine – Smalltalk (1981)</title><url>https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dominicl</author><text>Smalltalk is an amazing time sink if you can get past the syntax. Having learned about it with Squeak Smalltalk the first time during University, it immediately captured my mind. The great collection library, integrated ide, integrated version control, the absence of files. And most exciting everything you interact with comes with it&#x27;s underlying code and can be changed at runtime.<p>Unfortunately trying to release a Smalltalk creation into production always turned out to be the most complex task. Smalltalk is an island. A beautiful island you can get lost in for years. But still an island.</text></comment> |
11,130,812 | 11,130,421 | 1 | 3 | 11,129,777 | train | <story><title>History of massive-scale sorting experiments at Google</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/history-of-massive-scale-sorting-experiments-at-google</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dzdt</author><text>I think the alphago program is getting similar crazy scale burn-in access to the gpu computing that google will soon offer in its cloud. Recall alphago was the first program to beat a professional in a tournament setting. They published in nature. The emphasis was on their deep learning approach, but the technical details were pretty impressive. Alphago beat Fan Hui, a 2 dan professional, using a 1202 cpu&#x2F;776 gpu diatributed system. They don&#x27;t give hardware details, but my back-of-the-envelope estimate based on recent hardware is they were at around the petaflop calculation rate. In the nature paper they examine how the program&#x27;s ELO rating varies with computation power; it looks like to reach world champion level they need at least an order of magnitude more computation. They challenged a player at that level (Lee Sedol) for a series in March and express a quiet confidence in winning. On their blog they give google cloud credit for supplying the compute power, but google cloud doesn&#x27;t yet have gpu units available publicly. I am thinking alphago is getting to do burn-in on a massive gpu cloud computing center. Look for public availability shortly after the Sedol match!</text></comment> | <story><title>History of massive-scale sorting experiments at Google</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/history-of-massive-scale-sorting-experiments-at-google</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seanp2k2</author><text>I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re asking about this in interviews now. My experience with Google interviews was that the interviewers were very keen on proving that they knew more theoretical CS than I did vs talking about what the actual work would require or entail.</text></comment> |
3,203,168 | 3,202,520 | 1 | 3 | 3,202,063 | train | <story><title>1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month</title><url>http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=62</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ck2</author><text>HD prices right now are reacting the same way gas pump prices go up when crude does, even though their local tanks are full.<p>Quick to rise, slow to fall. The real crisis will be at the end of November. But the market won't recover until next year.<p>Good for SSD I guess which already had falling prices.<p>ps. HD103SJ is a fantastic drive but bad for price comparisons since it almost never went below $50 - Seagate also bought Samsung's HD division so who know what is going to happen to those great drives now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffdavis</author><text>"HD prices right now are reacting the same way gas pump prices go up when crude does, even though their local tanks are full."<p>Isn't that what <i>should</i> happen? When there is a supply interruption, then the local inventory needs to last longer. The primary way to make that happen in a market economy is for prices to rise.</text></comment> | <story><title>1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month</title><url>http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=62</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ck2</author><text>HD prices right now are reacting the same way gas pump prices go up when crude does, even though their local tanks are full.<p>Quick to rise, slow to fall. The real crisis will be at the end of November. But the market won't recover until next year.<p>Good for SSD I guess which already had falling prices.<p>ps. HD103SJ is a fantastic drive but bad for price comparisons since it almost never went below $50 - Seagate also bought Samsung's HD division so who know what is going to happen to those great drives now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>And good for Apple since they purchase all their SSDs years in advance for highly discounted prices.</text></comment> |
20,550,537 | 20,550,004 | 1 | 2 | 20,549,354 | train | <story><title>Coinbase Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/incident-post-mortem-june-25-26-2019-1d08c1657cbc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cle</author><text>Lots of architectural and cultural problems IMO. Mixing different kinds of queries on the same cluster, no auto scaling on neither cluster nor web server, they seem to be okay with customer-impacting maintenance events (seriously?!), and their &quot;fix&quot; for an event caused by cache misses is to add more caching, which will make their system even harder to understand and predict, increasing the likelihood of more severe and byzantine failures.<p>It&#x27;s often an unpopular opinion around here, but this is why I prefer simple hosted databases with limited query flexibility for high volume and high availability services (Firestore, DynamoDB, etc.). It&#x27;s harder to be surprised by expensive queries, and you won&#x27;t have to fiddle with failovers, auto scaling, caching, etc. Design your system around their constraints and it will have predictable performance and can more easily scale under unexpected load.</text></comment> | <story><title>Coinbase Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/incident-post-mortem-june-25-26-2019-1d08c1657cbc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>viraptor</author><text>&gt; We have ensured that failovers for this cluster may only be initiated during rare, scheduled downtime, when there will be no impact on customers.<p>I hope all their hardware crashes are also scheduled when there will be no impact... This seems a bit backwards - unless you constantly exercise the instantaneous failover, how do you know it works?<p>Edit: Actually it&#x27;s worse - if you don&#x27;t test the instant failover under a full load, how do you know it&#x27;s still instant then?</text></comment> |
15,762,746 | 15,762,740 | 1 | 2 | 15,762,451 | train | <story><title>I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosenworcel-fcc-net-neutrality-repeal-20171122-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RpFLCL</author><text>&gt;Reach out to the rest of the FCC now. Tell them they can’t take away internet openness without a fight.<p>How?<p>As this article mentions, their comment system had issues (spam and DDoS) and the only other avenue I&#x27;ve seen is to beg our representatives (who aren&#x27;t part of the December vote) to do _something_.<p>It was a clean and concise piece, but I was hoping that an insider would provide a new course of action.<p>I&#x27;ve seen action across online media from users (reddit, Twitter, etc) as well as among peers. But not as much from the platforms themselves. Remember SOPA? Do those pushing for this really not hear the public&#x27;s outrage yet?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coliveira</author><text>This may be about the Internet, but doing online &quot;protest&quot; will get us nowhere. Real protest means people going to the streets and making the government afraid of real violence. Other than that I don&#x27;t see any way out.</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosenworcel-fcc-net-neutrality-repeal-20171122-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RpFLCL</author><text>&gt;Reach out to the rest of the FCC now. Tell them they can’t take away internet openness without a fight.<p>How?<p>As this article mentions, their comment system had issues (spam and DDoS) and the only other avenue I&#x27;ve seen is to beg our representatives (who aren&#x27;t part of the December vote) to do _something_.<p>It was a clean and concise piece, but I was hoping that an insider would provide a new course of action.<p>I&#x27;ve seen action across online media from users (reddit, Twitter, etc) as well as among peers. But not as much from the platforms themselves. Remember SOPA? Do those pushing for this really not hear the public&#x27;s outrage yet?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brian-armstrong</author><text>Call them. Write them. The internet comments don&#x27;t really amount to much. But if you call or write, they will at least have a tally of how many complaints they&#x27;ve received. They may not see your complaint specifically but at least it counts, unlike internet complaints</text></comment> |
40,922,747 | 40,921,391 | 1 | 3 | 40,912,684 | train | <story><title>The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science</title><url>https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8106</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Xcelerate</author><text>It can be sort of unintuitive how the concept of computability necessarily involves infinity.<p>For example: does there exist an algorithm that computes the Kolmogorov complexity, K(s), of string s for arbitrary s? It is well-known that the answer is &quot;no&quot; — there is no Turing machine that takes as input a string of arbitrary length and computes K(s). The proof is quite brief and involves the halting problem.<p>But if we ask a similar question: does there exist an algorithm that computes K(s) of string s for arbitrary string s with length &lt; n? The answer is yes! And there exists such an algorithm for any value of n.<p>How is that possible? Think about it for a second, because the answer is going to disappoint you: simply create a Turing machine that consists of a giant lookup table for all 2^n possible strings that prints the value of K(s) for each one.<p>But wait, that&#x27;s cheating! Maybe so, but any specific implementation of the algorithm has a finite description. And by definition, K(s) is also finite for all s. While it&#x27;s true that I haven&#x27;t provided any particular method for determining the value of K(s) for all 2^n strings in order to actually create the lookup table, that doesn&#x27;t matter. Such an algorithm nevertheless exists, regardless of whether you can find it or prove that it does what you want it to.<p>So in a sense, finite questions about a finite number of things are sort of uninteresting from the perspective of computability, because you can always write a program that just prints the answer for all of those things (how quickly it does this is another matter). But when you extend the question to an infinite number of things, computability becomes much more interesting, because you don&#x27;t know whether something finite can provide answers to questions about an infinite number of things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gowld</author><text>This description makes it sounds like large areas of computer science are just goofy, meaningless, games.<p>But what&#x27;s really happening is that &quot;infinity&quot; is standing in for &quot;approximate, eventual, steady state behavior for sufficiently large N, larger than any specific one-off gimmick you might think of&quot;.<p>In the real world, though, those gimmicks are important, and the constants and low-order terms ignored in a Big-O comparison are important to real world performance.<p>There is constant tension between &quot;big enough problem that the contant factors don&#x27;t matter&quot;, and &quot;small enough problem that it conforms to the (often implicit) of what &#x27;constant&#x27; means (example: 32bit ints masquerading as integers)&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science</title><url>https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8106</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Xcelerate</author><text>It can be sort of unintuitive how the concept of computability necessarily involves infinity.<p>For example: does there exist an algorithm that computes the Kolmogorov complexity, K(s), of string s for arbitrary s? It is well-known that the answer is &quot;no&quot; — there is no Turing machine that takes as input a string of arbitrary length and computes K(s). The proof is quite brief and involves the halting problem.<p>But if we ask a similar question: does there exist an algorithm that computes K(s) of string s for arbitrary string s with length &lt; n? The answer is yes! And there exists such an algorithm for any value of n.<p>How is that possible? Think about it for a second, because the answer is going to disappoint you: simply create a Turing machine that consists of a giant lookup table for all 2^n possible strings that prints the value of K(s) for each one.<p>But wait, that&#x27;s cheating! Maybe so, but any specific implementation of the algorithm has a finite description. And by definition, K(s) is also finite for all s. While it&#x27;s true that I haven&#x27;t provided any particular method for determining the value of K(s) for all 2^n strings in order to actually create the lookup table, that doesn&#x27;t matter. Such an algorithm nevertheless exists, regardless of whether you can find it or prove that it does what you want it to.<p>So in a sense, finite questions about a finite number of things are sort of uninteresting from the perspective of computability, because you can always write a program that just prints the answer for all of those things (how quickly it does this is another matter). But when you extend the question to an infinite number of things, computability becomes much more interesting, because you don&#x27;t know whether something finite can provide answers to questions about an infinite number of things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aidenn0</author><text>Similar to how all real-world computers have a finite number of states and are thus not Turing machines, but rather finite state machines.</text></comment> |
4,563,040 | 4,563,056 | 1 | 3 | 4,562,912 | train | <story><title>How Apple's Obsession with Google Is Hurting Apple</title><url>http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-google-is-hurting-apple/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arrrg</author><text>First, to get it out of the way: People are very right in mocking Apple. They deserve every bit of that. What they delivered with their Maps app is embarrassing. I do not want to defend that.<p>The problem, however, is that this article assumes something to be unequivocally true even though we do not know whether it is: That Apple decided to build their own maps in order to hurt Google.<p>It takes two to play. Both Apple <i>and</i> Google have to agree that Apple gets to use Google’s data – and on the conditions. That we know nothing about. We do know, however, that the old Maps app was perpetually stuck in 2007 while Android phones gained 3D views and (much more important) vector maps and turn by turn navigation. If Google refused to give that to Apple it’s perfectly understandable that Apple goes looking for alternatives.<p>I’m not saying that’s the case. It could really be that Apple’s intention here was to hurt Google – but we cannot, as this article does, just assume that to be true. (To quote: “We all know the reason why Apple is doing these things. They’re more focused now on hurting Google than thrilling users, just like they were with Microsoft in the 90s.” – no, we do most certainly <i>not</i> all know that that’s the case.)</text></comment> | <story><title>How Apple's Obsession with Google Is Hurting Apple</title><url>http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-google-is-hurting-apple/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wklauss</author><text>I'm afraid the obsession is not on Apple over Google but on the media and blogs over Apple and every single thing they do. Of course Apple will watch its competitor closely, especially since both are now headed in same direction. And of course they need competing services.<p>Likewise, I'm sure that Google is watching closely every move Apple makes. But nobody in their right mind would say Google has an "obsession" with Apple.<p>This map thing is a fun anecdote, but I'm not sure how big of a deal it really is. And yes, the maps are worse than the ones Google has develop for the past 7 years -it was to be expected- but Apple didn't have much room for movement here. If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.</text></comment> |
13,024,377 | 13,024,316 | 1 | 2 | 13,023,954 | train | <story><title>Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38076579</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cloakandswagger</author><text>Headlines like this along with the MSM&#x27;s latest push to define &quot;fake news&quot; is pretty worrisome.<p>Even if you don&#x27;t agree with Breitbart or other outlets, it&#x27;s frightening to think we could soon be in a world where entire stories are categorically dismissed or accepted based on their source, rather than their individual content.</text></comment> | <story><title>Breitbart news site blocked by ad exchange</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38076579</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>javery</author><text>The world we are moving to is one where ad exchanges, google, and facebook get to decide what can survive on the web. This doesn&#x27;t seem like a good thing.</text></comment> |
22,769,005 | 22,769,079 | 1 | 3 | 22,768,576 | train | <story><title>Zoom Has a Dark Side – and an FBI Warning</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826129520/a-must-for-millions-zoom-has-a-dark-side-and-an-fbi-warning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>The ability for someone to crash your Zoom meeting was <i>extensively</i> discussed here yesterday, and Zoom already has all the necessary tools to prevent it, but people aren&#x27;t necessarily aware of them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22762173" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22762173</a><p>But a fear-mongering article like this has no place on HN. A &quot;dark side&quot;? &quot;FBI warning&quot;? This is pure propaganda and sensationalism -- that if someone joins your unprotected Zoom meeting, they can stream whatever they want (obviously) which could include pornography.<p>You might as well issue an FBI warning about phones because someone can randomly dial you and say gross stuff.<p>I don&#x27;t have a problem with HN articles about legitimate security concerns around a newly popular tool, but linking it to pornography is pure fearmongering at its worst.<p>This article doesn&#x27;t deserve to be here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wwarner</author><text>Well, the FBI issued a warning in the public interest, not to persecute Zoom. And by the sounds of it Zoom is going to address these issues and absolutely none of this press going to hurt them in the long run.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zoom Has a Dark Side – and an FBI Warning</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2020/04/03/826129520/a-must-for-millions-zoom-has-a-dark-side-and-an-fbi-warning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>The ability for someone to crash your Zoom meeting was <i>extensively</i> discussed here yesterday, and Zoom already has all the necessary tools to prevent it, but people aren&#x27;t necessarily aware of them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22762173" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22762173</a><p>But a fear-mongering article like this has no place on HN. A &quot;dark side&quot;? &quot;FBI warning&quot;? This is pure propaganda and sensationalism -- that if someone joins your unprotected Zoom meeting, they can stream whatever they want (obviously) which could include pornography.<p>You might as well issue an FBI warning about phones because someone can randomly dial you and say gross stuff.<p>I don&#x27;t have a problem with HN articles about legitimate security concerns around a newly popular tool, but linking it to pornography is pure fearmongering at its worst.<p>This article doesn&#x27;t deserve to be here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tylermenezes</author><text>&gt; Zoom already has all the necessary tools to prevent it<p>How about:<p>- A good UI which encourages users to do the correct thing
- Systems to detect and block war dialers</text></comment> |
22,274,589 | 22,269,494 | 1 | 2 | 22,268,436 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Fast Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs</title><url>https://github.com/bhatiasiddharth/MIDAS/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ugh123</author><text>The comments in this thread exhibit some serious astroturfing. Also the 6 unique commenters accounts all created in the last 12 days. Just sayin&#x27;</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Fast Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs</title><url>https://github.com/bhatiasiddharth/MIDAS/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>siddharthbhatia</author><text>Anomaly detection in graphs is a critical problem for finding suspicious behavior in innumerable systems, such as intrusion detection, fake ratings, and financial fraud. But most of the systems in place focus either on static graphs or on entire graph snapshots if they consider dynamic (time-evolving) graphs.<p>However, to minimize the effect of malicious activities and start recovery as soon as possible, we need to detect anomalies in real-time or near real-time i.e. to identify whether an incoming edge is anomalous or not, as soon as we receive it. In addition, since the number of vertices can increase as we process the stream of edges, we need an algorithm which uses constant memory in graph size. Moreover, fraudulent or anomalous events in many applications occur in microclusters or suddenly arriving groups of suspiciously similar edges e.g. denial of service attacks in network traffic data and lockstep behavior.<p>In this work, we propose MIDAS, which detects microcluster anomalies, or suddenly arriving groups of suspiciously similar edges, in edge streams, using constant time and memory. In addition, by using a principled hypothesis testing framework, MIDAS provides theoretical bounds on the false positive probability, which earlier methods do not provide. Also, we are up to 644 times faster and 48% more accurate than previous state of the art approaches.<p>For more details, read the paper at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comp.nus.edu.sg&#x2F;~sbhatia&#x2F;assets&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;midas.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comp.nus.edu.sg&#x2F;~sbhatia&#x2F;assets&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;midas.pdf</a><p>If you are in New York, you are welcome to attend the talk at AAAI in New York Hilton Midtown on 11th February at 2pm.</text></comment> |
33,236,980 | 33,237,074 | 1 | 2 | 33,236,447 | train | <story><title>Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem – an interactive tutorial</title><url>https://tigyog.app/d/H7XOvXvC_x/r/goedel-s-first-incompleteness-theorem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dvt</author><text>Cool page, though the Halting Problem brings with it a <i>lot</i> of stuff, so using it to prove Godel&#x27;s first incompleteness theorem is (imo) a bit like cheating. I&#x27;ve proven it before using diagonalization on my blog (but also using concepts like computability for free). At the end of the day, using these ideas, you get the Curry–Howard correspondence for free (which, again, is a bit like cheating).<p>&gt; Gödel’s original proof was slightly stronger<p>Technically speaking, a <i>lot</i> stronger. Proving Godel&#x27;s first incompleteness theorem (don&#x27;t even get me started on the second) from first principles is actually <i>much</i> more involved; and <i>certainly</i> more difficult to make it intelligible for non-logicians.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem – an interactive tutorial</title><url>https://tigyog.app/d/H7XOvXvC_x/r/goedel-s-first-incompleteness-theorem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aljgz</author><text>A math prof had a brilliant blog and one of the subjects he covered was Gödel&#x27;s incomepleteness theorems. I really loved his style (and his wife&#x27;s illustrations). Too bad he stopped posting.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;22&#x2F;kurt-godels-story&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;22&#x2F;kurt-go...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;godels-incompleteness-theorems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;04&#x2F;godels-...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;04&#x2F;how-godel-proved-maths-inherent-limitations&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;04&#x2F;how-god...</a></text></comment> |
27,821,747 | 27,821,605 | 1 | 2 | 27,821,101 | train | <story><title>Building a vision of life without work (2015)</title><url>https://livingafi.com/2015/03/09/building-a-vision-of-life-without-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinwang</author><text>This person also posted an amazing, unvarnished update recently (about 5-6 years later): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;the-2021-early-retirement-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;the-2021-early-retirement-u...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>temp8964</author><text>The conclusion came to me is that extreme working and extreme no-working are both bad in the long run. All you need is a work-family-life balance.<p>I am also glad that the author now opens the door for getting married and even having a kid.<p>Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. The psychological &#x2F; economic needs for living with a family do not go away just because you &quot;decide&quot; you don&#x27;t need them. There are people live alone, but most of them are not happy, for most of the time.<p>When you are young, you may like to wonder why do I have to live a life like my parents? When you get older, you will slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else.</text></comment> | <story><title>Building a vision of life without work (2015)</title><url>https://livingafi.com/2015/03/09/building-a-vision-of-life-without-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinwang</author><text>This person also posted an amazing, unvarnished update recently (about 5-6 years later): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;the-2021-early-retirement-update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;17&#x2F;the-2021-early-retirement-u...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SavantIdiot</author><text>This follow up is way more compelling because it deals with the reality. I&#x27;m jealous of the authors communication skills and their partner&#x27;s: there are some very hard statements in there about feeling worthless and falling behind because of no job. I wonder of those words were spoken calmly, or shouted through tears.<p>Here are their discussions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;post-fire-relationship-disconnect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;livingafi.com&#x2F;post-fire-relationship-disconnect&#x2F;</a><p>TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn&#x27;t work out. But he&#x27;s still got his chin up and it&#x27;s great.</text></comment> |
11,886,375 | 11,884,374 | 1 | 2 | 11,882,832 | train | <story><title>The Japanese art of not sleeping</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160506-the-japanese-art-of-not-sleeping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldtea</author><text>So, seems like Japan is a totally unproductive country?<p>I mean, they work all this time, which seems like twice what an average country would do, and they&#x27;re still doing ho-hum in most markets, are non-existent in most areas of modern tech, and have a huge deficit.<p>If it weren&#x27;t for their cars and some consumer electronics stuff (that has seen its peak in the late 80s - early 90s) they&#x27;d be done.</text></item><item><author>kristianc</author><text>There&#x27;s an expectation that you&#x27;d participate at least to some extent. There will be smaller karaoke &#x2F; drinking type parties after work, and a larger &#x27;nomikai&#x27; meal at a large restaurant which is used to celebrate a major milestone say every month or quarter.<p>You would probably be expected to participate in the larger one, whereas particpating in less of the smaller ones would become adverse career wise over time. Drinking is theoretically optional.<p>Typically family time seemed to be at weekends, and heavily focused on getting out and about into the countryside etc. The apartments are so small that it wouldn&#x27;t really be feasible or desirable to hang out at home much.</text></item><item><author>somethingsimple</author><text>&gt; after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am.<p>Is it socially acceptable not to do so? Or is there high pressure from peers or superiors to do it?<p>When do people spend time with their families there? If they even have families...</text></item><item><author>kristianc</author><text>My impression of working in Japan around five years ago was that it felt like an economy medicated on caffeine.<p>Work goes on from 8am - 9pm, after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am. Rinse and repeat, most days of the week. It wasn&#x27;t at all unusual to see rows of salarymen asleep on the subway every morning.<p>Japan&#x27;s most popular drink is a brand of canned coffee which is on sale everywhere and in the vending machines that line the streets. Coca Cola&#x27;s brand of this coffee accounts for an outsize proportion of their global profits (something like 12%, only sold in Japan).<p>All of this seems to be totally okay and accepted despite the obvious impact on productivity of regularly going for long periods without sleep. This is the offices of Dentsu, Japan&#x27;s largest media agency, at night: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gozur88</author><text>A good friend of mine owns a corporation in Japan. He&#x27;d worked in the US for a decade or so before going home to start his own business, so he was in a pretty good position to compare the work cultures.<p>He said in Japan expectation #1 is you&#x27;re at work for many hours. You show up before your boss arrives and you go home after he leaves, unless you&#x27;re out drinking with him. Which is mostly mandatory - &quot;My wife is sick&quot; is an acceptable excuse. &quot;I&#x27;m tired&quot; is not. In the big companies the people from your college class at that company all get promoted as a group, so there&#x27;s a whole lot of pressure from your college friends not to do (or not do) anything that will delay their own advancement.<p>But when you&#x27;re at work you&#x27;re not expected to look for things to do. Your boss will tell you when he needs you to do something. If he doesn&#x27;t come by and give you a task it&#x27;s perfectly reasonable to sit at your desk and do nothing. As an employer or manager you are not supposed to run your people ragged, either. My friend spent most of every morning going around to each employee and making sure they had something to do, but not so much it would reflect badly on him as an employer.<p>In the end he figured Americans and Japanese people get about the same amount of work done every day. The social dynamics are totally different, though. In Japan your work is like a second family.<p>There&#x27;s also a sort of macho culture there, where as a <i>salaryman</i> you work incredibly long hours and deal with crazy commutes without complaining. And if you do complain you sort of lose social points.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Japanese art of not sleeping</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160506-the-japanese-art-of-not-sleeping</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldtea</author><text>So, seems like Japan is a totally unproductive country?<p>I mean, they work all this time, which seems like twice what an average country would do, and they&#x27;re still doing ho-hum in most markets, are non-existent in most areas of modern tech, and have a huge deficit.<p>If it weren&#x27;t for their cars and some consumer electronics stuff (that has seen its peak in the late 80s - early 90s) they&#x27;d be done.</text></item><item><author>kristianc</author><text>There&#x27;s an expectation that you&#x27;d participate at least to some extent. There will be smaller karaoke &#x2F; drinking type parties after work, and a larger &#x27;nomikai&#x27; meal at a large restaurant which is used to celebrate a major milestone say every month or quarter.<p>You would probably be expected to participate in the larger one, whereas particpating in less of the smaller ones would become adverse career wise over time. Drinking is theoretically optional.<p>Typically family time seemed to be at weekends, and heavily focused on getting out and about into the countryside etc. The apartments are so small that it wouldn&#x27;t really be feasible or desirable to hang out at home much.</text></item><item><author>somethingsimple</author><text>&gt; after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am.<p>Is it socially acceptable not to do so? Or is there high pressure from peers or superiors to do it?<p>When do people spend time with their families there? If they even have families...</text></item><item><author>kristianc</author><text>My impression of working in Japan around five years ago was that it felt like an economy medicated on caffeine.<p>Work goes on from 8am - 9pm, after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am. Rinse and repeat, most days of the week. It wasn&#x27;t at all unusual to see rows of salarymen asleep on the subway every morning.<p>Japan&#x27;s most popular drink is a brand of canned coffee which is on sale everywhere and in the vending machines that line the streets. Coca Cola&#x27;s brand of this coffee accounts for an outsize proportion of their global profits (something like 12%, only sold in Japan).<p>All of this seems to be totally okay and accepted despite the obvious impact on productivity of regularly going for long periods without sleep. This is the offices of Dentsu, Japan&#x27;s largest media agency, at night: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristianc</author><text>It&#x27;s not massively productive, and the amount of time spent at work doesn&#x27;t really reflect the amount of work done. After about 5, the beers will come out.<p>The creative output isn&#x27;t great either. Agencies like Dentsu are the size they are because of relationships, and that there will be someone there to answer the phone any time of the day or night, rather than out of any creative brilliance.<p>Dentsu are an example of a big Japanese company that has recently started to work with Western companies to in effect, outsource the innovation and creative ideas bit.<p>Your analysis is correct - once Japan lost its supply chain supremacy they were never likely to be able to win back the advantage by producing higher quality goods and services.</text></comment> |
34,231,658 | 34,231,087 | 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>c-fe</author><text>I am working on a project that uses a microservice architecture to make the individual components scalable and separate the concerns. However one of the unexpected consequences is that we are now doing a lot of network calls between these microservices, and this has actually become the main speed bottleneck for our program, especially since some of these services are not even in the same data center. We are now attempting to solve this with caches and doing batch requests, but all of this created additional overhead that could have all been avoided by not using microservices.<p>This experience has strongly impacted my view of microservices and for all personal projects I will develop in the future I will stick with a monolith until much later instead of starting with microservices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strictfp</author><text>Yes. If you design a distributed system you need to consider the network traffic very carefully, and choose your segmentation in such a way that you minimize traffic and still achieve good scalability.<p>For this reason, I&#x27;ve been trying to push for building a monolithic app first, then splitting into components, and introducing libs for common functionality. Only when this is all done, you think about the communication patterns and discuss how to scale the app.<p>Most microservice shops I&#x27;ve been in have instead done the naïve thing; just come up with random functionally separate things and put them in different micro services; &quot;voting service&quot;, &quot;login service&quot;, &quot;user service&quot; etc. This can come with a very very high price. Not only in terms of network traffic, but also in debuggability, having a high amount of code duplication, and getting locked into the existing architecture, cementing the design and functionality.</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>c-fe</author><text>I am working on a project that uses a microservice architecture to make the individual components scalable and separate the concerns. However one of the unexpected consequences is that we are now doing a lot of network calls between these microservices, and this has actually become the main speed bottleneck for our program, especially since some of these services are not even in the same data center. We are now attempting to solve this with caches and doing batch requests, but all of this created additional overhead that could have all been avoided by not using microservices.<p>This experience has strongly impacted my view of microservices and for all personal projects I will develop in the future I will stick with a monolith until much later instead of starting with microservices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>padjo</author><text>I don’t mean to be snarky but how is that an “unexpected consequence”? Were the pros and cons just never considered when deciding to use micro services? Additional networks calls are one of the most obvious things to go on the cons list!</text></comment> |
24,886,033 | 24,886,004 | 1 | 2 | 24,885,334 | train | <story><title>‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier (2019)</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/28/its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>elric</author><text>I don&#x27;t drive. I walk everywhere (combined with public transport for longer distances). I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a super power as such, but it does keep me relatively fit with little intentional effort. Going from A to B just includes an incidental light workout. Gives me time to think, to unwind, sometimes to read. Can recommend it to pretty much everyone. Some things might take a little longer, but if you have to dick around on HN or watch Netflix, you have time to walk to places.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier (2019)</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/28/its-a-superpower-how-walking-makes-us-healthier-happier-and-brainier</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>perardi</author><text><i>1.</i> Some actual research:<p>“More steps taken per day are associated with lower mortality rates until approximately 7500 steps&#x2F;d”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamainternalmedicine&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;2734709?guestAccessKey=c46927fc-b021-43a6-a43d-26eb90ee54b7&amp;utm_source=For_The_Media&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=ftm_links&amp;utm_content=tfl&amp;utm_term=052919" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamainternalmedicine&#x2F;fullar...</a><p><i>2.</i> As the gyms are closed down here, again, and indoor dining is shut down, again, I have been walking at least 6 miles a day with the dog, and it has been a sanity-preserving way to get away from working at home.<p><i>(Not looking forward to the first slushy&#x2F;icy storm, though. Both the dog and I hate walking in boots.)</i></text></comment> |
11,290,174 | 11,289,123 | 1 | 2 | 11,289,046 | train | <story><title>Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru</title><url>https://github.com/mailru/icq-desktop</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikey_p</author><text>Say what you will about ICQ, but I can still log in with my number and password from the late 90s and see the names of the people I chatted with in high school in my contacts list. This is nothing short of somewhat amazing in the world of software startups and shutterings, etc.<p>FWIW, I&#x27;ve also realized that my Yahoo account from circa 1996 works just as well. my.yahoo.com even remembers what news topics, stocks, weather locations, etc I setup nearly 20 years ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sources of ICQ desktop client by mail.ru</title><url>https://github.com/mailru/icq-desktop</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dchest</author><text>With private key for Sparkle updates signing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mailru&#x2F;icq-desktop&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;mac&#x2F;ICQ&#x2F;dsa_priv.pem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mailru&#x2F;icq-desktop&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;mac&#x2F;ICQ&#x2F;ds...</a><p>Facepalm.</text></comment> |
33,462,830 | 33,462,056 | 1 | 2 | 33,460,970 | train | <story><title>ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service</title><url>http://3lib.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilimi_anna</author><text>Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I&#x27;m Anna, the one who made the backup).<p>We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pilimi.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pilimi.org</a> (we&#x27;ll set up a patreon-like system soon)</text></item><item><author>sixtyfourbits</author><text>Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32972923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32972923</a><p>Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.<p>Hopefully this will encourage more people to go back to the original libgen. I suspect Z-library&#x27;s popularity was because of a better interface and larger collection, but I think lots of people didn&#x27;t realize libgen offers all its books&#x2F;papers for free without limits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>areoform</author><text>Thank you so much for your efforts!<p>I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity&#x27;s knowledge. All of it.<p>Something that,<p><pre><code> - is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion)
- requires no power
- doesn&#x27;t require software to read&#x2F;reboot from
- (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years
</code></pre>
Copying from the Long Now Foundation&#x27;s projects, I think we can achieve these goals by miniaturizing pages and etching them on some metallic surface (a titanium alloy), depositing a layer of some resilient transparent material onto this surface, and creating multiple copies.<p>A few copies for Earth. 2 or 3 for the Moon. And a few sent out of the solar system on probes like Voyager.<p>Voyager itself is a great example of what we could achieve. The golden records were made out of stable, inert materials and Voyager’s trajectory doesn’t intersect with any known object for billions of years. The records themselves will be intact for at least two billion years according to one estimate. They are, for all intents and purposes, functionally immortal parcels of information.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;predicting-voyager-golden-records-distant-future" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...</a><p>Some simple math, if the pages could fit inside of a 10mm x 10mm square, then for a plate that&#x27;s about the size of an average coffee table at 2&#x27; x 4&#x27;, we could fit 7,432 pages.<p>Assuming that we have 50 billion pages, we&#x27;d need about 6.7 million such plates to fit all of human knowledge, so far.<p>It sounds crazy, but assuming we could get net costs per plate down to $500, each copy would be about $35M. Or, ~0.14% of an Uber. Alternatively, 0.002% of the F-35 program.<p>That&#x27;s doable!<p>-<p>6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.<p>Another problem is likely to be organization of the plates&#x2F;copies. The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don&#x27;t speak our language or share our subspecies.<p>(apologies for any typos, it&#x27;s very late at my end)</text></comment> | <story><title>ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service</title><url>http://3lib.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilimi_anna</author><text>Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I&#x27;m Anna, the one who made the backup).<p>We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pilimi.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pilimi.org</a> (we&#x27;ll set up a patreon-like system soon)</text></item><item><author>sixtyfourbits</author><text>Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32972923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32972923</a><p>Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.<p>Hopefully this will encourage more people to go back to the original libgen. I suspect Z-library&#x27;s popularity was because of a better interface and larger collection, but I think lots of people didn&#x27;t realize libgen offers all its books&#x2F;papers for free without limits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pilimi_anna</author><text>Note that their TOR domains are still up: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52...</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhembyd.onion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...</a></text></comment> |
13,362,470 | 13,362,092 | 1 | 2 | 13,361,019 | train | <story><title>From OS X to Ubuntu</title><url>https://nicolas.perriault.net/code/2016/from-osx-to-ubuntu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timtadh</author><text>Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don&#x27;t want to devote lots of time to a &quot;project&quot; buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well.<p>Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &quot;windows tax&quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>sk1pper</author><text>IMO if money isn&#x27;t an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good.<p>Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for &gt;10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn&#x27;t be a discussion.<p>As far as laptops go, I&#x27;ve just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I&#x27;ve never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless <i>not</i> suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It&#x27;s gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn&#x27;t reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I&#x27;ve NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.<p>Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it&#x27;s worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability.<p>Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I&#x27;ve tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course.<p>Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ePierre</author><text>&gt; Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &quot;windows tax&quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.<p>I wish I could. Unfortunately, I live in a country (Taiwan) where no one knows about Linux. It&#x27;s impossible to buy a pre-installed Linux laptop here.<p>You know the most ironic part? My job here is to certify hardware (including a lot of laptops) to work on Linux... so that you guys in the US and Europe can enjoy it :)</text></comment> | <story><title>From OS X to Ubuntu</title><url>https://nicolas.perriault.net/code/2016/from-osx-to-ubuntu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>timtadh</author><text>Linux laptops: buy pre-installed. If you want linux and you want to be sure everything is functional, AND you don&#x27;t want to devote lots of time to a &quot;project&quot; buy a pre-install. Dell Developer Edition laptops (XPS 13, 15) make great laptops. I hear good things about system 76 and purism as well.<p>Save time. Support having good laptops and good drivers. Buy pre-installed. Paying the &quot;windows tax&quot; and installing a Linux on a windows laptop isn&#x27;t just more work, it is bad for the ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>sk1pper</author><text>IMO if money isn&#x27;t an object, OS X is a better call when it comes to laptops. If money is tight, going for a Linux box is almost as good.<p>Linux on desktops - as in, not a laptop - has worked pretty much flawlessly for me for &gt;10 years. Not much else to say there. If desktop or server, this shouldn&#x27;t be a discussion.<p>As far as laptops go, I&#x27;ve just had better experiences with macbooks. Linux on a laptop is still 100% usable and gets you everything you need. Getting things set up can be a way bigger PITA on Linux, like function keys, sound, and god forbid, wirless. I&#x27;ve never installed Linux on a laptop and had wireless <i>not</i> suck, at least a little bit. Mostly just randomly dropping connection. It&#x27;s gotten better in the last few years, but it hasn&#x27;t reached that perfect reliability that my mbp seems to have. Ubuntu seems to break a bit more on average - and those errors are a bit more likely to be obnoxious, or blockers even - like during boot. Not saying this is commonplace, but I&#x27;ve NEVER had OS X kernel panic on me during boot.<p>Again, I would be perfectly happy a linux box instead, but for me it&#x27;s worth a bit of extra $$ for what has seemed to me to be better reliability.<p>Most of my experiences have been with Ubuntu LTS releases but really, I&#x27;ve tried all the big ones, and on quite a few different laptops over the years. YMMV of course.<p>Edit: all that being said, prob will switch over when this one dies, because touch bar... lol</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>developer2</author><text>&gt;&gt; Linux laptops: buy pre-installed.<p>The fact that hardware - though much improved in the past 15 years - is still a crapshoot on Linux, particularly when it comes to laptop hardware, is so frustrating.<p>Windows will work on practically any combination of hardware. OS X will work on any hardware it is permitted to operate on. Linux is the only consortium of operating systems that still suffer from the inability to &quot;just work out of the box&quot;. I can&#x27;t see how it&#x27;s ever supposed to be &quot;the year&quot; for linux when just getting it to run properly on hardware requires buying OEM meant-for-Windows, but we-promise-it-works-with-linux garbage.<p>Is a &quot;pre-installed&quot; linux laptop even cross-distro compatible? If the laptop comes with Ubuntu pre-installed, what are the odds I can replace it with CentOS or Arch? Is the laptop &quot;designed for linux&quot;, or &quot;designed for exactly what is factory shipped, and nothing else&quot;? Can I even do a fresh install of the shipped operating system, or do they hack in additional manufacturer packages&#x2F;kernel drivers that require you to never reinstall on top of the shipped install? How about OS upgrades? Are they reliable, or do you risk running into compatibility problems, even with a new version of the same distro?<p>What we really need is a BSD&#x2F;unix&#x2F;linux[1] competitor to OS X. RedHat tried, and IMO failed. We need another closed-source unix&#x2F;linux-based operating system that throws away X.org and its attempted modern replacements, that can directly compete with OS X. I&#x27;m tired of waiting for the open source world to try - and fail - to gather momentum. And tired of Apple, who has the best unix&#x2F;linux operating system, fucking us over with every hardware release.<p>[1] How do you type a literal asterisk on HN? Backslash and double-asterisk don&#x27;t work. <i>nix. \</i>nix. <i></i>nix</text></comment> |
20,395,179 | 20,394,567 | 1 | 2 | 20,393,080 | train | <story><title>Raspberry Pi admits to faulty USB-C design on the Pi 4</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-incorrect-usb-c-design-wont-work-with-some-chargers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thijsvandien</author><text>Reminder to self: being an early adopter sucks virtually always.<p>Edit: Sure, the issue is rather easy to circumvent, but anyone would have preferred not to have it. At the very least, it affects the resale value. My point is that whenever the answer to the question &#x27;do I need it absolutely right away?&#x27; is no, it&#x27;s better to wait a bit, no matter how much you intend to buy it at some point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>There is an old joke about the American West which goes, &quot;Q: How do you know which people were pioneers? A: They are the ones with arrows in their back.&quot;<p>USB-C is a phenomenally complex system from an engineering perspective, serving at least three masters (compatibility, power delivery, and enhanced performance). As these systems go through the standards process you have vendors designing silicon in anticipation and engineers designing circuits. Not surprisingly, I have met just as many EE&#x27;s who &#x27;design by looking at something that does something similar&#x27; as software engineers who start with code that does something close and hack it into compliance.<p>Actually taking the time to develop an understanding of the complex system <i>after</i> it has made it through its final standards ballot, and then build systems with it take too long in today&#x27;s market. You would bring something to market 3 to 5 years after the first products hit and were probably establishing defacto standards.<p>So the business side pushes to get something out, the engineering side learns just enough to get it to work in their lab, and the trademark validation&#x2F;usage process is new&#x2F;non-existent. As a result you will see early products that are broken in various ways until the collective knowledge and number of correct examples reaches the tipping point. After you reach that point future designs will likely work reliably because the chance of everyone involved having enough examples to start from is high, and compatibility issues will have been publicized and thus written into the book of &quot;things not to do.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Raspberry Pi admits to faulty USB-C design on the Pi 4</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/raspberry-pi-4-uses-incorrect-usb-c-design-wont-work-with-some-chargers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thijsvandien</author><text>Reminder to self: being an early adopter sucks virtually always.<p>Edit: Sure, the issue is rather easy to circumvent, but anyone would have preferred not to have it. At the very least, it affects the resale value. My point is that whenever the answer to the question &#x27;do I need it absolutely right away?&#x27; is no, it&#x27;s better to wait a bit, no matter how much you intend to buy it at some point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>I simply ordered one with the official power supply(at £8 it&#x27;s cheaper than literally any branded USB-C charger) and would never even know there was an issue if not for the articles here.</text></comment> |
34,608,534 | 34,607,543 | 1 | 2 | 34,605,240 | train | <story><title>Is remote work bad for the economy?</title><url>https://www.fractional.work/p/is-remote-work-bad-for-the-economy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friendzis</author><text>Wellllll.... debatable.<p>This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.<p>There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it&#x27;s not entirely equal too.</text></item><item><author>chii</author><text>&gt; This obviously is a financial loss for the economy<p>it&#x27;s not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where.<p>Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth!</text></item><item><author>michaelteter</author><text>This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it&#x27;s just a reality.<p>The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or &quot;invalid&quot;.<p>Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.<p>It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strken</author><text>This is close to the broken window fallacy. We tend to forget the flow of money is an indirect proxy for work performed. If 20% of construction workers are freed up from fixing roads because of lower traffic, they don&#x27;t just sit around crying, they find other work to do. Same with tech workers, same with everyone. That&#x27;s a net good because the work they&#x27;ll move to will by definition be worth paying someone to do.<p>Wasting time fixing stuff that didn&#x27;t need to be broken is intrinsically bad for the economy, but it&#x27;s disruptive to suddenly have your now-pointless job taken away.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is remote work bad for the economy?</title><url>https://www.fractional.work/p/is-remote-work-bad-for-the-economy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>friendzis</author><text>Wellllll.... debatable.<p>This argument of expense rerouting is a bit flawed. Suppose working from home saves one some money that they spend elsewhere. Working from the office they spend that money on fuel, indirectly spend on road maintenance, directly spend on vehicle maintenance where the shop in turn spends on parts and tools and so on. The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket. Working from home then they buy more items that have been manufactured in China, spend eating out where restaurants pay mostly wages and farmers, making the chain much shorter.<p>There are different economic health considerations for different spending habits. While not exactly a loss it&#x27;s not entirely equal too.</text></item><item><author>chii</author><text>&gt; This obviously is a financial loss for the economy<p>it&#x27;s not, because the money that was otherwise spent (wasted) can now be deployed else where.<p>Otherwise, why not increase the GDP and economy, by periodically just breaking every window? The replacement is gonna cause huge growth!</text></item><item><author>michaelteter</author><text>This applies everywhere: just because a job or business has existed does not mean it has a right to exist forever. This is not being harsh on people; it&#x27;s just a reality.<p>The blacksmiths in the horse and buggy days saw demand for their services fall when time and technologies changed. The coal miners began losing their jobs when we realized that coal as fuel was more harmful than it was beneficial. History is full of valid jobs which later became unneeded or &quot;invalid&quot;.<p>Remote work can increase efficiency by eliminating artificial inefficiencies. Not having to drive to work reduces fuel consumption and lengthens the time between car repairs or replacement. This obviously is a financial loss for the economy because it shifts the balance back from money to time. The same goes for office space: less office space need reduces demand which reduces rents (and amount of space leased). However, that cost can be offset some as home working can increase demand for larger homes. Even so, a slightly larger home is still probably less cost than a commercial space which goes unused for 12+ hours per day.<p>It smells like much of this anti-remote-work conversation (not TFA, but the topic in general) is because the people accustomed to being in charge have a fear of losing control. The manager who rules by force or threat has much to fear of subordinates who are out of sight. However, the manager (leader) who works together with a group of people toward a common goal has little to fear. Some companies operate very successfully even when management cannot observe the workers. The alarms and complaints we hear are almost certainly from the bad group. Eventually that group will be like the dinosaurs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chii</author><text>&gt; The money one spends circulates in the economy much longer and reaches more actors until it eventually falls back into original pocket.<p>that&#x27;s a total assumption being made. Who knows how the money from an office worker&#x27;s commute gets dispersed. It&#x27;s likely too difficult to track exactly. And it&#x27;s irrelevant to the person how this dispersion happens or why.<p>All they need to care about is that they&#x27;ve eliminated a source of inefficiency, and thus have extra money for either investment or different consumption.</text></comment> |
12,742,293 | 12,741,796 | 1 | 2 | 12,741,037 | train | <story><title>Donald Knuth used an Erlang-like notation</title><url>http://videlalvaro.github.io/2016/10/knuth-first-erlang-programmer.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmontra</author><text>To the eye of a developer used to more modern languages that also shows some bad choices in the design of the Erlang syntax. Basically everything that makes the source code less readable than the original: uppercased variables, the minuses that prefix the module and export statements, the wierd =:= operator. I add the also wierd &lt;&gt; binary and string concatenation operator, not used in this example.<p>The semicolon-period statement separators&#x2F;terminators are in the original and in natural languages, but newer languages proved them to be useless. Probably compilers in the 80s needed some help by the programmer to be fast.<p>Elixir fixed some of the worst offenders, kept others and added something. Examples: the &lt;&gt; is still there but at least we can interpolate strings Ruby like, the useless do at the end of almost every defsomething declarations (the compiler should get it by itself.)<p>But every languages has its wierdnesses, the contest is to have the least of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OskarS</author><text>It&#x27;s worth noting that Erlang gets a lot of that weirdness from its progenitor language, Prolog, where arguably some of that stuff makes more sense. For instance, the =:= operator is an equality operator that forces arithmetic evaluation, unlike = which is just used for unification. In Prolog, this is a fairly crucial difference (&quot;1 + 1 = 2&quot; is false in prolog, while &quot;1 + 1 =:= 2&quot; is true) and there needs to be language constructs that make the distinction clear. Given that, having different operators is a sensible solution to the problem.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s arguably true that Prolog has an over-reliance on a massive swath of operators. All of these operators represent some variation of the concept of equality: =, ==, =:=, =@=, #=, and &quot;is&quot;. The differences make sense if you&#x27;re deep into Prolog, and it&#x27;s rich capacity for designing new operators is arguably a strength of the language, but it&#x27;s clearly an obstacle to beginners.<p>I absolutely adore Prolog, but it&#x27;s a real shame that development of logical programming basically stopped with it. It would be as if functional programming never properly progressed beyond early Lisps. Its a shame that Erlang borrowed so much of its syntax, when the syntax is clearly not its strongest suit (though it fits Prolog better than Erlang).</text></comment> | <story><title>Donald Knuth used an Erlang-like notation</title><url>http://videlalvaro.github.io/2016/10/knuth-first-erlang-programmer.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmontra</author><text>To the eye of a developer used to more modern languages that also shows some bad choices in the design of the Erlang syntax. Basically everything that makes the source code less readable than the original: uppercased variables, the minuses that prefix the module and export statements, the wierd =:= operator. I add the also wierd &lt;&gt; binary and string concatenation operator, not used in this example.<p>The semicolon-period statement separators&#x2F;terminators are in the original and in natural languages, but newer languages proved them to be useless. Probably compilers in the 80s needed some help by the programmer to be fast.<p>Elixir fixed some of the worst offenders, kept others and added something. Examples: the &lt;&gt; is still there but at least we can interpolate strings Ruby like, the useless do at the end of almost every defsomething declarations (the compiler should get it by itself.)<p>But every languages has its wierdnesses, the contest is to have the least of them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>&gt; Basically everything that makes the source code less readable than the original: uppercased variables, the minuses that prefix the module and export statements,<p>Capitalized variables stand out from lower cased functions. I find that makes it easier to read than having everything lowercase. It&#x27;s enforced so all the code has to follow that convention.<p>Semicolon at the end of a function clause indicates there is another function clause following it, that is a useful affordance when navigating code.<p>&gt; The minuses that prefix the module and export statements<p>Well in natural language you use dashes to create an itemized list. Would # be better like in include statements in C&#x2F;C++? Maybe the alternative is to introduce some &quot;defun &#x2F; fun &#x2F; def &#x2F; function&quot; keyword to define functions and another keyword &quot;directives&quot;? But that is less ergonomic, I really like how function definitions don&#x27;t have to start with an extra keyword and they are just function names starting on the left side of the page.<p>&gt; the wierd =:= operator.<p>Yap that is a weird one. = is used for pattern matching so reusing it for equality &#x2F; equivalence testing might be ambiguous.<p>&gt; Basically everything that makes the source code less readable than the original:<p>The original has &quot;remainder of _ divided by _&quot;. That looks ok in a small example but repeating that phrase throughout the program many times is probably not the best idea.<p>Overall, after reading large code bases of Erlang, Python, C++, C#, and Java. I would put Erlang right behind Python and readability and how ergonomic it is. The most important thing about it is it is small and self-consistent. Contrast that with a &quot;modern&quot; language like Javascript which looks &quot;familiar&quot; but is not very consistent and full of gotchas (see the famous wat video on that).</text></comment> |
12,779,395 | 12,778,659 | 1 | 2 | 12,775,400 | train | <story><title>Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent</title><url>http://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmc</author><text>&gt; <i>Serious question: Why is it not very popular in other countries? </i><p>Because some countries have much, much worse tenants rights.<p>I moved from Ireland to Germany and in Ireland:<p>* There is basically no protection for rent increases, some people are being told their rent is increasing by 50%<p>* Can&#x27;t change your apartment. Not allowed to paint the walls, nearly all come with furniture, better make sure you don&#x27;t damage any of it.<p>* Oh the landlord&#x2F;landlord&#x27;s relative wants to live in the apartment. Eviction time for you.<p>* You give your landlord your deposit. Let&#x27;s hope they can find it again if you move out.<p>* By default, no pets allowed. And many landlords will say no.<p>* Did I mention about the rent increases?</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>I am a German CS-Student and currently renting in a shared flat with 4 other students. We call it WG (living-community) and its really popular not only with students, but i know a lot of young professionals and even middle aged ones that share an apartment (it gained popularity in the 60s, so i think its more of an culture thing that older do not share a flat). If you are in a partnership, you can move out and share a smaller one with your partner, but if your not in a partnership (or not that close yet) i wouldn&#x27;t want to miss living in a shared apartment. You come home, talk about your day, cook together and on the weekend you can go out together. There is always something going on. I can&#x27;t imagine living in my own apartment all by myself. Working long and then coming home into an empty, dead, dark apartment with no one to talk to.<p>Serious question: Why is it not very popular in other countries?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>premium-concern</author><text>In Germany:<p>- Rent increase limits<p>- Larger changes need landlord&#x27;s approval (changing walls and stuff). A lot of smaller stuff can be done on your own and doesn&#x27;t require asking the landlords. (Many landlords are happy if you want to paint the walls etc., though.)<p>- Only smaller apartments (often intended for students) come usually with furniture<p>- The deposit has to be put on a special, locked bank account. The money can only been withdrawn if both sides tell the bank in writing that the rent contract is over<p>- Depends on the size of the pet</text></comment> | <story><title>Most Germans don’t buy their homes, they rent</title><url>http://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-homeownership-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmc</author><text>&gt; <i>Serious question: Why is it not very popular in other countries? </i><p>Because some countries have much, much worse tenants rights.<p>I moved from Ireland to Germany and in Ireland:<p>* There is basically no protection for rent increases, some people are being told their rent is increasing by 50%<p>* Can&#x27;t change your apartment. Not allowed to paint the walls, nearly all come with furniture, better make sure you don&#x27;t damage any of it.<p>* Oh the landlord&#x2F;landlord&#x27;s relative wants to live in the apartment. Eviction time for you.<p>* You give your landlord your deposit. Let&#x27;s hope they can find it again if you move out.<p>* By default, no pets allowed. And many landlords will say no.<p>* Did I mention about the rent increases?</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>I am a German CS-Student and currently renting in a shared flat with 4 other students. We call it WG (living-community) and its really popular not only with students, but i know a lot of young professionals and even middle aged ones that share an apartment (it gained popularity in the 60s, so i think its more of an culture thing that older do not share a flat). If you are in a partnership, you can move out and share a smaller one with your partner, but if your not in a partnership (or not that close yet) i wouldn&#x27;t want to miss living in a shared apartment. You come home, talk about your day, cook together and on the weekend you can go out together. There is always something going on. I can&#x27;t imagine living in my own apartment all by myself. Working long and then coming home into an empty, dead, dark apartment with no one to talk to.<p>Serious question: Why is it not very popular in other countries?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fwn</author><text>All of this affects you less if you are in a shared flat compared to renting it alone. The flat can be vastly more expensive as you are pooling the money and flexibility is higher as you have less furniture per person and tend to be able to join&#x2F;leave shared flats on less rigid schedules. (You can find many in the middle of the month, depending on the holidays etc.)<p>I lived in a shared flat in Germany which got a rent increase and other than all the young families in the building we really barely noticed it.</text></comment> |
34,004,028 | 34,001,906 | 1 | 3 | 33,998,271 | train | <story><title>Na-S Battery: Low-cost with four times the capacity of lithium</title><url>https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2022/12/07/low-cost-battery-built-with-four-times-the-capacity-of-lithium.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncann</author><text>Sorry, I can&#x27;t resist the urge to repost this classic comment on a thread about new battery technology:<p>Dear battery technology claimant,<p>Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:<p>[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.<p>[ ] it will be too expensive for users.<p>[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.<p>[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.<p>[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.<p>[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.<p>[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.<p>[ ] its charge rate is too slow.<p>[ ] its materials are too toxic.<p>[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.<p>[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.<p>[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn&#x27;t work then.<p>[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.<p>[ ] your claims are lies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonwatkinspdx</author><text>I find it tiresome empty snark.<p>Better batteries are a really big deal. Is every promising technology gonna work out? Of course not. But there&#x27;s valid reasons to be interested and excited. I <i>like</i> that these stories appear on HN so I can keep a rough understanding of how research is progressing. And usually there&#x27;s some comments here from people who know the field a lot better. But to find those gems I have to scroll past a whole crowd of people posting this self congratulatory snark.</text></comment> | <story><title>Na-S Battery: Low-cost with four times the capacity of lithium</title><url>https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2022/12/07/low-cost-battery-built-with-four-times-the-capacity-of-lithium.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncann</author><text>Sorry, I can&#x27;t resist the urge to repost this classic comment on a thread about new battery technology:<p>Dear battery technology claimant,<p>Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:<p>[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.<p>[ ] it will be too expensive for users.<p>[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.<p>[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.<p>[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.<p>[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.<p>[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.<p>[ ] its charge rate is too slow.<p>[ ] its materials are too toxic.<p>[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.<p>[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.<p>[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn&#x27;t work then.<p>[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.<p>[ ] your claims are lies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>Nothing wrong with reposting it. As a matter of fact I think this should be posted every time there is a new battery announcement so we can all do the tick boxes.<p>[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.<p>These are the only three I see as problematic or unknown. Which is not that bad.</text></comment> |
37,985,908 | 37,985,771 | 1 | 2 | 37,983,903 | train | <story><title>Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google</title><url>https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-year-legal-battle-against-google/103008954</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeroenhd</author><text>&gt; Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba.<p>Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It&#x27;s not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven&#x27;t been answered, so I&#x27;m not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a &quot;rip-off&quot;.<p>If someone tells you they&#x27;ll talk to your dead ancestors for money and you don&#x27;t believe them, who&#x27;s to say who&#x27;s speaking the truth? The best you can do is use reasoning like &quot;there&#x27;s no scientific basis for an afterlife&quot; but that&#x27;s not a great defence if you&#x27;re honestly trying to speak to the dead.<p>I agree with your other points, of course. I&#x27;m just amused at the idea of suing psychics for not telling the truth.</text></item><item><author>arp242</author><text>Posting messages and making up that a friend&#x27;s wife committed suicide is not really &quot;stalking&quot; or &quot;persistently and obsessively harassing&quot;. Immoral and possibly illegal? Perhaps. But that&#x27;s not the same thing.<p>Also, Duffy <i>was</i> ripped off by Kasamba.<p>I think the crux of the matter is: even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of your life? Probably not. And do we really want Google to be <i>suggesting</i> this content years after this minor spat, guaranteeing that people will find it?<p>&quot;Right to be forgotten&quot; is really about this kind of stuff IMHO: okay, you&#x27;ve had your five minutes of shame and that&#x27;s all fine, and now lets all move on instead of keeping this prominent for years or even decades.</text></item><item><author>csunbird</author><text>&gt; Dr. Duffy posted a web report on the website “Ripoff Report” complaining about her dissatisfaction with the services she had received from the psychics on the Kasamba site. She also commented on the reports of others about the psychics. She created a chat group “kasambavictims” on Yahoo. Dr. Duffy also posted messages under a pseudonym, and began to email the site complaining that her friend’s wife had committed suicide due to bad advice given by the psychics. This was untrue.<p>Very interesting part. Later in the article:<p>&gt; In relation to justification (truth), the Court found no evidence supporting Google’s argument that Dr. Duffy stalked or persistently and obsessively harassed any of the psychics.<p>Am I missing something important here? Dr. Duffy clearly defamed a business with a lie, and some other people (other site users) pointed this up, in a very cruel way, to her in a forum with user submitted content. Then Dr. Duffy sues Google instead of the Ripoff Report forum?</text></item><item><author>testplzignore</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;duffy-v-google-inc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;duffy-v...</a> has some actual details of what this is about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gspencley</author><text>&gt; Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It&#x27;s not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven&#x27;t been answered, so I&#x27;m not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a &quot;rip-off&quot;.<p>Well, I would suggest that both are a &quot;rip off&quot; in the sense that they offer claims without evidence.<p>But a distinction that I see between religious services and psychics is that religious services are not offering financial transactions in direct exchange for services. They ask for donations, and they may make claims such as &quot;God answers all prayers&quot;, but you are typically not offering a religious leader money in exchange for some sort of quid pro quo like having a prayer answered.<p>A lot of &quot;psychics&quot; offer their &quot;services&quot; as &quot;entertainment&quot; in order to avoid claims of fraud. But the fact remains that a lot of people still believe.<p>My wife and I are performing magicians, and we make it clear that what we do are parlour tricks. And yet I&#x27;ve performed &quot;mind reading&quot; tricks for people in the past who were absolutely convinced that what I did was not a trick even though I presented everything as &quot;magic tricks.&quot; It&#x27;s fucking insane and deeply uncomfortable. I totally get why Penn &amp; Teller stay away from mentalism entirely. And I think this is your point: if someone is determined to accept a faith based belief system, can they really be &quot;ripped off&quot; when reality doesn&#x27;t deliver their fantasy.<p>In my opinion, it depends what you offering and the audience &#x2F; demographic that you are targeting. Magic tricks for entertainment presented as tricks is one thing. A &quot;psychic&quot; (even one that offers a &quot;disclaimer&quot; that it is entertainment) who knows full well they are catering to people that want to believe it is &quot;real&quot; know what they are doing. It gets particularly heinous when these con artists prey on grieving people who just lost a loved one. It&#x27;s hard not to view a con artist presenting bullshit to a mother who just lost her 12 year-old daughter in a car accident as not ripping them off.</text></comment> | <story><title>Woman wins 12-year legal battle against Google</title><url>https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-year-legal-battle-against-google/103008954</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeroenhd</author><text>&gt; Also, Duffy was ripped off by Kasamba.<p>Can you really be ripped off by psychics? It&#x27;s not like you can sue a church because your prayers haven&#x27;t been answered, so I&#x27;m not sure of religion or spiritualism can be a &quot;rip-off&quot;.<p>If someone tells you they&#x27;ll talk to your dead ancestors for money and you don&#x27;t believe them, who&#x27;s to say who&#x27;s speaking the truth? The best you can do is use reasoning like &quot;there&#x27;s no scientific basis for an afterlife&quot; but that&#x27;s not a great defence if you&#x27;re honestly trying to speak to the dead.<p>I agree with your other points, of course. I&#x27;m just amused at the idea of suing psychics for not telling the truth.</text></item><item><author>arp242</author><text>Posting messages and making up that a friend&#x27;s wife committed suicide is not really &quot;stalking&quot; or &quot;persistently and obsessively harassing&quot;. Immoral and possibly illegal? Perhaps. But that&#x27;s not the same thing.<p>Also, Duffy <i>was</i> ripped off by Kasamba.<p>I think the crux of the matter is: even if you did something wrong, do things like that really need to be preserved on the internet under your real name for the rest of your life? Probably not. And do we really want Google to be <i>suggesting</i> this content years after this minor spat, guaranteeing that people will find it?<p>&quot;Right to be forgotten&quot; is really about this kind of stuff IMHO: okay, you&#x27;ve had your five minutes of shame and that&#x27;s all fine, and now lets all move on instead of keeping this prominent for years or even decades.</text></item><item><author>csunbird</author><text>&gt; Dr. Duffy posted a web report on the website “Ripoff Report” complaining about her dissatisfaction with the services she had received from the psychics on the Kasamba site. She also commented on the reports of others about the psychics. She created a chat group “kasambavictims” on Yahoo. Dr. Duffy also posted messages under a pseudonym, and began to email the site complaining that her friend’s wife had committed suicide due to bad advice given by the psychics. This was untrue.<p>Very interesting part. Later in the article:<p>&gt; In relation to justification (truth), the Court found no evidence supporting Google’s argument that Dr. Duffy stalked or persistently and obsessively harassed any of the psychics.<p>Am I missing something important here? Dr. Duffy clearly defamed a business with a lie, and some other people (other site users) pointed this up, in a very cruel way, to her in a forum with user submitted content. Then Dr. Duffy sues Google instead of the Ripoff Report forum?</text></item><item><author>testplzignore</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;duffy-v-google-inc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu&#x2F;cases&#x2F;duffy-v...</a> has some actual details of what this is about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arp242</author><text>&quot;Ripped off&quot; in the colloquial sense, not in the strict legal sense.<p>Most psychics don&#x27;t actually believe what they&#x27;re selling, whereas most priests do.<p>Prayer also works very different: a psychic will tell you &quot;higher powers told me this man is a {good,bad} match for you&quot;, whereas a priest will tell you to &quot;pray and ask God for guidance&quot; and&#x2F;or offer you some general advice, but they won&#x27;t say &quot;God told me to relay that [..]&quot;.<p>Should they be sued for it? Probably not. But I do think most psychic &quot;customers&quot; get ripped off by people who are essentially little more than confidence tricksters, but I don&#x27;t think most people who go to church get ripped off (outside of the &quot;send me your money and go to heaven&quot; kind of twattery).</text></comment> |
8,856,164 | 8,856,126 | 1 | 2 | 8,855,502 | train | <story><title>Hotel Wi-Fi blocking: Marriott is bad</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/01/hotel-wi-fi-blocking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>72deluxe</author><text>Cisco sell a Wireless LAN controller, which can send disconnect packets to &quot;rogue&quot; APs that get set up, rendering them useless. This is particularly important at events where the airspace is severely cramped, such as big arena events, racing, horse racing etc. where the myriad of APs to provide coverage of free wifi to pundits would have to compete with these other APs. In a severely crammed airspace, this would help to encourage the other AP providers to turn their boxes off.<p>And getting a mobile telephone call in such events is even trickier, given that 50,000 people are in one space and the masts to serve them are oversubscribed. If they all suddenly want to place bets or browse the web, that&#x27;s incredibly difficult to provide on the mast, so providers will set up additional masts for big events (like the big horse-racing events here in the UK). That&#x27;s why they provide free wifi too, and having other APs set up and attempting to provide wifi over the airspace doesn&#x27;t really help.<p>I wonder if Marriott hotels have the same approach in order to provide better wifi coverage? I have been in numerous hotels where the wifi coverage was great if you&#x27;re sat in the bar but abysmal if you&#x27;re down the other end of the building (where the hotels here in the UK are large old buildings with thick walls, very tricky for wifi).<p>Irritating if you&#x27;re trying to use your phone to provide wifi to your laptop in order SSH to your own box at home or to get content via your mobile (which might be faster than their Internet access in some cases). I suppose you could just use a Bluetooth PAN instead (and it uses less power!)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelt</author><text><p><pre><code> Cisco sell a Wireless LAN controller, which can
send disconnect packets to &quot;rogue&quot; APs [...]
this would help to encourage the other AP
providers to turn their boxes off.
</code></pre>
Perhaps I should make a product that detects controllers sending fake deauth packets, and does the same thing in return.<p>This would help &quot;encourage&quot; people who buy the Cisco product to turn that feature off :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Hotel Wi-Fi blocking: Marriott is bad</title><url>http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2015/01/hotel-wi-fi-blocking</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>72deluxe</author><text>Cisco sell a Wireless LAN controller, which can send disconnect packets to &quot;rogue&quot; APs that get set up, rendering them useless. This is particularly important at events where the airspace is severely cramped, such as big arena events, racing, horse racing etc. where the myriad of APs to provide coverage of free wifi to pundits would have to compete with these other APs. In a severely crammed airspace, this would help to encourage the other AP providers to turn their boxes off.<p>And getting a mobile telephone call in such events is even trickier, given that 50,000 people are in one space and the masts to serve them are oversubscribed. If they all suddenly want to place bets or browse the web, that&#x27;s incredibly difficult to provide on the mast, so providers will set up additional masts for big events (like the big horse-racing events here in the UK). That&#x27;s why they provide free wifi too, and having other APs set up and attempting to provide wifi over the airspace doesn&#x27;t really help.<p>I wonder if Marriott hotels have the same approach in order to provide better wifi coverage? I have been in numerous hotels where the wifi coverage was great if you&#x27;re sat in the bar but abysmal if you&#x27;re down the other end of the building (where the hotels here in the UK are large old buildings with thick walls, very tricky for wifi).<p>Irritating if you&#x27;re trying to use your phone to provide wifi to your laptop in order SSH to your own box at home or to get content via your mobile (which might be faster than their Internet access in some cases). I suppose you could just use a Bluetooth PAN instead (and it uses less power!)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>busterarm</author><text>I recently worked for an ISP providing service to some Marriott resorts. This is my opinion and in no way representing either company, but this is exactly what Marriott is trying to do. Marriott is not using any sort of wifi jammer like the author is suggesting; in fact such devices would block their own wifi signal.<p>The most typical problems with wifi in resorts comes down to construction; most of these were built years before wifi was a consideration and are constructed in a way such that even with commercial APs you will get a very poor signal even with the APs in each unit. There&#x27;s one such property I know of where guests only get wifi in the one room with the AP and out on their balcony and no where else in the hotel besides the pool &amp; lobby.<p>Also they often use authentication pages that mean you can&#x27;t get on with a device without a browser...but when you have 200 guests sharing a 100Mbps connection, you don&#x27;t want someone hooking their Xbox or AppleTV anyway.</text></comment> |
26,436,581 | 26,436,180 | 1 | 2 | 26,435,094 | train | <story><title>Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_combinator_lost_its_way_as_a_leading/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eitland</author><text>2 observations:<p>- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)<p>- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dhagz</author><text>I&#x27;ll tack on: I&#x27;ve happily paid for Fantastical (which is a monthly subscription, granted), and it has the nice menubar interface, a button to join video calls (works with Teams, BlueJeans, Zoom, probably more), integration with ANY calendar system, and it&#x27;s only $4.99 a month. And I get a full desktop app and iOS app with it, and regular significant updates. I&#x27;m not as put out by the subscription model here because this is an application I&#x27;d be renewing my license for every new release anyways.<p>I don&#x27;t see why I&#x27;d pay more for less here.</text></comment> | <story><title>Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is a Mac only widget?</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m2ypbx/has_y_combinator_lost_its_way_as_a_leading/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eitland</author><text>2 observations:<p>- I happily paid for a very similar product about 10 years ago (it was full screen width and had a brilliant timeline feature but otherwise very similar. It was broken when Snow Lion or something was released. I still look for an equivalent.)<p>- Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it. Monthly payments for feature upgrades, perpetual license for last pud release (and some discount to encourage people to not jump on and off) is however totally OK with me. In this case however I think the price is generally too high anyway - for now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2cb</author><text>&gt; Monthly payments forever for standalone apps is a big no no in my book. I get annoyed even just writing about it.<p>Same. I often see good software then see they run on a subscription model and nope right out of there.<p>If it was a one-off reasonable price I&#x27;d pay.<p>Sometimes I am happy to pay a small yearly fee if it&#x27;s real nice software and I wanna support the dev.<p>But monthly subscriptions is stupid to me.</text></comment> |
4,997,703 | 4,996,850 | 1 | 2 | 4,996,083 | train | <story><title>A business meeting</title><url>http://www.morna.nl/post/4185018780/a-business-meeting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SatvikBeri</author><text>John Foobar is a 26 year old semi-technical analyst living in Austin who's sick and tired of Yelp. His favorite Mexican restaurant "Mi pato esta en fuego" has only received 2.4 stars! John wants to find food that he specifically will like, not just restaurants that are rated well. As luck may have it, John happens to have access to a massive amount of perfect data. So far, so good.<p>John does some Google searches and finds that a "k-nearest-neighbors algorithm" might be what he's looking for. He happens to have scored a free SQL Server license from an old barfly in exchange for listening to his tales about how wonderful life was when the mafia controlled New York, so naturally John searches for ways to implement kNN algorithms in SQL.<p>John finds out that kNN can be implemented efficiently using a spatial index, but that only works for two dimensions. That doesn't work because John really wants to judge places by location, price, and the ridiculousness of their dessert menu. So he spends a few hours trying to hack things together and finally posts an extremely specific question on StackOverflow about extending spatial indexes to 3 dimensions. He gets several answers that are technically correct but don't quite solve his problem and finally gives up, resigned to eat at popular restaurants for the rest of his days.<p>But if John had asked about the general problem of implementing kNN algorithms in SQL, he would have found that spatial indexes aren't the best method.<p>If he had asked about implementing kNN algorithms in general, he would have found that SQL isn't the best language for it.<p>If he had asked about creating recommendations based on like/dislike data, he would have found that there are better algorithms than kNN, and that there are several existing GUIs/APIs for these algorithms.<p>And if he had asked about the general problem of finding good food, well, his friends might have told him that Yelp already has a "personal concierge" mode and he just has to click a different setting.<p>Poor John.</text></comment> | <story><title>A business meeting</title><url>http://www.morna.nl/post/4185018780/a-business-meeting</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bstpierre</author><text>Ha ha. I've been in that meeting -- the one where you have to explain that the requested feature would violate the laws of physics. I've found that it's best to keep asking some variant of "What do you <i>really</i> want?" in order to find out the underlying goal. This usually requires a couple of follow-up meetings though, because the guys doing the requesting don't always know what the real goal is.</text></comment> |
33,026,023 | 33,023,778 | 1 | 3 | 33,023,431 | train | <story><title>Crisis pay cut: Consumers prefer firms that prioritize paying employees over CEO</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/whose-pay-should-be-cut-in-economic-crises-consumers-prefer-firms-that-prioritize-paying-employees-over-ceos/356319B1229A261AC46E207D5BA0E3DA</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>YeBanKo</author><text>The design of the studies is garbage: imaginary intention to make an imaginary purchase of an imaginary headphones from imaginary companies. Participants paid and recruited through mechanical turk.<p><pre><code> &gt; Participants (N = 383; 52% female; age: M = 43.28 years, SD = 14.93) were recruited through an Amazon Mechanical Turk Prime Panel and paid a flat rate for compensation. This study used a 2 (employee type: retail employee vs. CEO) × 2 (salary: paid fully vs. cut fully) between-subject design. Participants were asked to imagine that they were looking to buy a new set of headphones from a well-known retailer.
</code></pre>
I bet that many people once they were done with the survey and paid went to Amazon and bought something, and did not care once about the pay of workers or conditions, when making an actual purchase.</text></comment> | <story><title>Crisis pay cut: Consumers prefer firms that prioritize paying employees over CEO</title><url>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioural-public-policy/article/whose-pay-should-be-cut-in-economic-crises-consumers-prefer-firms-that-prioritize-paying-employees-over-ceos/356319B1229A261AC46E207D5BA0E3DA</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seibelj</author><text>Using mechanical turk to test consumer purchasing behavior is a meaningless exercise. Consumers care about price and quality, first and foremost. To fully explain the ethical practices of executive pay vs. employee compensation when someone is buying soap or cat food is not easy.<p>However what I love about the free market is that everyone can experiment. If you can find competent executives willing to work way under market-rates to sell your soap and cat food as a for-profit charity, I welcome it!</text></comment> |
8,286,433 | 8,286,353 | 1 | 2 | 8,285,994 | train | <story><title>Exploding Offers Suck</title><url>http://blog.ycombinator.com/exploding-offers-suck</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tieTYT</author><text>&gt; when someone offers you an exploding offer, it&#x27;s because they really, really want you to take it.<p>Couldn&#x27;t it be because they&#x27;ve got a lot on their plate and after a certain period of time they want to free up their brain cycles and stop wondering if you&#x27;re going to accept that deal?<p>Couldn&#x27;t it be that you&#x27;re barely preferred and making the deadline shows them that you&#x27;re excited about the offer? Missing the deadline shows that you&#x27;re not excited and they&#x27;ll know to go with the second best candidate?<p>FWIW, I&#x27;m relating this to exploding job offers as I have no direct VC experience.</text></item><item><author>malgorithms</author><text>A dear friend and excellent negotiator told me that when he gets any kind of short-term exploding offer, the first thing he does is verbally reject the deadline. And the second thing he does is ignore the deadline and offer feedback only after it has passed.<p>I&#x27;ve seen him employ this many times in practice and it has always worked out. I don&#x27;t want to be responsible for anyone losing a deal, but remember: when someone offers you an exploding offer, it&#x27;s because they really, really want you to take it. If anything, it should be a sign there&#x27;s (a) more time to be had, and (b) plenty of room on the terms.<p>Any deadline claim has to be concrete and believable. The start of the YC program is a good example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wycats</author><text>Whenever I&#x27;ve offered an exploding offer in the past, it&#x27;s because I had several candidates: an extremely strong candidate and several strong but somewhat weaker candidates. In general, all of the candidates have a limited timeframe to make a decision, and there&#x27;s a risk of losing <i>all</i> candidates if I waited for an indefinite time on the strongest candidate.<p>In other words, candidates sometimes also need an answer within a certain timeframe (often for very legitimate reasons; a job change can often be a life-changing event) and that means that there are some real time-limits across all of the candidates (in both directions).</text></comment> | <story><title>Exploding Offers Suck</title><url>http://blog.ycombinator.com/exploding-offers-suck</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tieTYT</author><text>&gt; when someone offers you an exploding offer, it&#x27;s because they really, really want you to take it.<p>Couldn&#x27;t it be because they&#x27;ve got a lot on their plate and after a certain period of time they want to free up their brain cycles and stop wondering if you&#x27;re going to accept that deal?<p>Couldn&#x27;t it be that you&#x27;re barely preferred and making the deadline shows them that you&#x27;re excited about the offer? Missing the deadline shows that you&#x27;re not excited and they&#x27;ll know to go with the second best candidate?<p>FWIW, I&#x27;m relating this to exploding job offers as I have no direct VC experience.</text></item><item><author>malgorithms</author><text>A dear friend and excellent negotiator told me that when he gets any kind of short-term exploding offer, the first thing he does is verbally reject the deadline. And the second thing he does is ignore the deadline and offer feedback only after it has passed.<p>I&#x27;ve seen him employ this many times in practice and it has always worked out. I don&#x27;t want to be responsible for anyone losing a deal, but remember: when someone offers you an exploding offer, it&#x27;s because they really, really want you to take it. If anything, it should be a sign there&#x27;s (a) more time to be had, and (b) plenty of room on the terms.<p>Any deadline claim has to be concrete and believable. The start of the YC program is a good example.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malgorithms</author><text>It&#x27;s imaginable that there&#x27;s a very short-term deadline affecting a deal. But remember: that puts the side with the deadline at a disadvantage, not an advantage. Consider these examples: really needing to sell something for the money, desperately needing someone to fill a job, needing to use a scarce item in the short term, etc. If one of these is happening for real, then the offer they make will have to be compellingly high and convincing, demonstrating their position of weakness. If someone offered you 5X your normal rate and explained they needed a job done this weekend, that&#x27;s not a negotiation strategy on their part.<p>But feigning indifference and giving you a short-term deadline for an offer you&#x27;re unsure you can beat -- that&#x27;s just a negotiation move, and personally, I would call them on it. Again, I don&#x27;t want to be responsible for failed application of this :-)</text></comment> |
34,399,692 | 34,399,754 | 1 | 2 | 34,396,026 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation</title><url>https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482770/Terra_Firma/</url><text>It&#x27;s free to play on steam, but you&#x27;ll need a computer with a dedicated graphics card.<p>I just released a new version after first releasing it 18 months ago. It&#x27;s been a hard slog to scrounge time as it&#x27;s not my day job but that&#x27;s life.<p>There&#x27;s a ton of obvious improvements in the future (weather systems, temperature, varying rainfall, ice&#x2F;snow, more biomes, more plate tectonics, lava, etc) but all suggestions&#x2F;feedback is welcome.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>greggsy</author><text>I like poking around with these sorts of sandboxes, but in order to gamify it, you might need some objectives, limitations and planning goals, eg:<p>- you have a limited amount of some mineral or rock that erodes quicker or slower than others, and you need to move water from one location to another.<p>- there is a magma chamber growing under a mountain. Move the villagers out of harms way &#x2F; destroy enemies.<p>- introduce sinkholes: make as many sinkholes as possible within some period.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awelxtr</author><text>Why do they need to gamefy it? Toys as townscaper exist and have received positive feedback.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation</title><url>https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482770/Terra_Firma/</url><text>It&#x27;s free to play on steam, but you&#x27;ll need a computer with a dedicated graphics card.<p>I just released a new version after first releasing it 18 months ago. It&#x27;s been a hard slog to scrounge time as it&#x27;s not my day job but that&#x27;s life.<p>There&#x27;s a ton of obvious improvements in the future (weather systems, temperature, varying rainfall, ice&#x2F;snow, more biomes, more plate tectonics, lava, etc) but all suggestions&#x2F;feedback is welcome.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>greggsy</author><text>I like poking around with these sorts of sandboxes, but in order to gamify it, you might need some objectives, limitations and planning goals, eg:<p>- you have a limited amount of some mineral or rock that erodes quicker or slower than others, and you need to move water from one location to another.<p>- there is a magma chamber growing under a mountain. Move the villagers out of harms way &#x2F; destroy enemies.<p>- introduce sinkholes: make as many sinkholes as possible within some period.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway290</author><text>Plenty of us prefer open ended sandboxes&#x2F;simulators like Minecraft, C:S, flight sims. Following game designer gets boring fast, setting own goals is always fun<p>Speaking of CS, I wish this simulator had heightmap export.</text></comment> |
29,700,533 | 29,700,230 | 1 | 3 | 29,659,336 | train | <story><title>Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)</title><url>http://notebook.kulchenko.com/programming/lua-good-different-bad-and-ugly-parts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linkdd</author><text>Lua is a very nice piece of technology. Its source code is pretty easy to get into, the documentation is complete.<p>It has its quirks yes, but if I need to add scripting to a software, I&#x27;d consider Lua before considering writing a DSL, simply because you can pretty much embed Lua&#x27;s source in your C&#x2F;C++ software as a static library[0].<p>The stack-based approach makes it so easy to interact with C&#x2F;C++, and I&#x27;ve been looking at the Rust bindings[1] recently out of curiosity, looks promising.<p><pre><code> [0] - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lubgr&#x2F;lua-cmake
[1] - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amethyst&#x2F;rlua&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;guided_tour.rs</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aeternum</author><text>Since this is a Lua thread, your reference list should probably start at 1 rather than 0</text></comment> | <story><title>Lua: Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts (2012)</title><url>http://notebook.kulchenko.com/programming/lua-good-different-bad-and-ugly-parts</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linkdd</author><text>Lua is a very nice piece of technology. Its source code is pretty easy to get into, the documentation is complete.<p>It has its quirks yes, but if I need to add scripting to a software, I&#x27;d consider Lua before considering writing a DSL, simply because you can pretty much embed Lua&#x27;s source in your C&#x2F;C++ software as a static library[0].<p>The stack-based approach makes it so easy to interact with C&#x2F;C++, and I&#x27;ve been looking at the Rust bindings[1] recently out of curiosity, looks promising.<p><pre><code> [0] - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lubgr&#x2F;lua-cmake
[1] - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amethyst&#x2F;rlua&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;guided_tour.rs</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VWWHFSfQ</author><text>I believe mlua [0] is the recommended Lua Rust binding now.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;khvzak&#x2F;mlua" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;khvzak&#x2F;mlua</a></text></comment> |
18,843,133 | 18,842,088 | 1 | 3 | 18,839,939 | train | <story><title>Tox – An encrypted P2P chat protocol that does not rely on central servers</title><url>https://tox.chat/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17686516" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17686516</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tox – An encrypted P2P chat protocol that does not rely on central servers</title><url>https://tox.chat/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>marknadal</author><text>Nice!<p>Pretty easy to roll your own, these days, in less than 90 LOC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;7dceae874a20878fdb9e2a8eed109bb5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;amark&#x2F;7dceae874a20878fdb9e2a8eed109b...</a><p>Here is a quick video demo of it in action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gmdXU82vcbE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gmdXU82vcbE</a><p>Warning! Ugly simple. So glad to see a full featured app like tox, use that instead. But for anyone interested in how they work or building their own... it is all Diffie-Hellman!!! :)</text></comment> |
1,890,174 | 1,889,859 | 1 | 2 | 1,889,835 | train | <story><title>Tir: A Mongrel2+Lua Micro-Framework</title><url>http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1289384533.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jgalvez</author><text>Dear Zed Shaw, can you change the &#60;title&#62; tag of your posts to the actual post title and not the blog title? Always annoying to have to change it when I save your articles to Pinboard. But most of all, it's annoying because it's like, just wrong, dude! :D You can also tell me to go away and that's it's your blog and you keep it the way you want to. (That's fine too.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Tir: A Mongrel2+Lua Micro-Framework</title><url>http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1289384533.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swah</author><text>"The problem with Lisp is that it is acceptable to metaprogram until the only person who understands what you've created is you and The Flying Spaghetti monster."<p>Yeah, I guess this is sad but true. But as an alternative should I stop using macros and write lots of repetitive code?</text></comment> |
22,184,283 | 22,184,051 | 1 | 3 | 22,182,754 | train | <story><title>Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle</title><url>https://twitter.com/adrjeffries/status/1222277544730337280</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtkwe</author><text>There&#x27;s a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don&#x27;t need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.</text></item><item><author>Kuiper</author><text>One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you&#x27;re on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.<p>Amazon actively touts this &quot;Whispersync&quot; feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: &quot;<i>With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).</i>&quot;) One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)<p>Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon&#x27;s &quot;Netflix for ebooks&quot; program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kuiper</author><text>This is apparently how older Kindle models worked, which has made them an attack vector for fraud on Kindle Unlimited:<p>&gt;<i>KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon&#x27;s self-publishing platform] pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached.</i> ...<p>&gt;<i>The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.</i><p>&gt;<i>Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page.</i> ...<p>&gt;<i>Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle</title><url>https://twitter.com/adrjeffries/status/1222277544730337280</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtkwe</author><text>There&#x27;s a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don&#x27;t need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.</text></item><item><author>Kuiper</author><text>One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you&#x27;re on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.<p>Amazon actively touts this &quot;Whispersync&quot; feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: &quot;<i>With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).</i>&quot;) One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)<p>Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon&#x27;s &quot;Netflix for ebooks&quot; program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;notorious-kindle-unlimited...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tqi</author><text>How is &quot;tapped on page 11&quot; different from &quot;is on page 12&quot;?</text></comment> |
35,537,603 | 35,537,736 | 1 | 2 | 35,536,612 | train | <story><title>New NASA Director Swears Oath on Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Instead of Bible</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/space/nasa-director-carl-sagan-oath-b2317698.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonethewiser</author><text>But what does meaning have to do with it? Your marriage certificate and car title have meaning. But if the people being sworn in don’t view their documents as having some authority over their promise then what is the point? It’s equivalent to no document in that regard.<p>It really doesnt make much sense unless you’re using a Bible, Quran, etc.<p>Edit: Here is the crux:<p>God holds you accountable, or at least is believed to do so, by nature. Is the nature of the values symbolized in Dr. Seuss or Sagans book similar? Do those promising on them expect divine justice from the principles of science or fun word play with kids?</text></item><item><author>highwaylights</author><text>To follow your argument here, perhaps the person in question believes the Pale Blue Dot to be more meaningful than a legal document. I certainly do - it’s a wonderful book that absolutely captures Carl Sagan’s sense of wonder for the universe, which to me seems like exactly what you should want from a NASA director.<p>Most importantly, it also sends a strong message to the staff within NASA about how the new director views them and their work given how political appointments have become.</text></item><item><author>tescocles</author><text>Is there any actual strict requirement that you have to swear over a document of some kind?<p>I&#x27;d have thought swearing over the bible is a stand-in for swearing &quot;before God&quot;, and that God would ultimately be your reckoner should you break your oath.<p>If you don&#x27;t have that meaning behind the oath, what is the point in using a book at all unless it&#x27;s something meaningful like the constitution of your country, as another poster has used as an example, or some other relevant document that is there as physical representation of something abstract?<p>If I, not being religious, were being sworn in as the head of NASA, I&#x27;d find it much more poignant to swear over the US constitution, or on nothing at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pigsty</author><text>A person who doesn’t believe in religion being sworn in on a religious book is probably just annoyed. They’re not going to feel loyal to it.<p>Sworn statements as a whole are just entirely symbolic and don’t really guarantee loyalty or honesty, but if someone who doesn’t believe rejects a religious text that they disbelieve and instead choose something that has meaning and value to them, it’s better in the symbolic sense. A scientist swearing in on a scientific text that’s meaningful to them and that also addresses human morality makes as much sense and symbolically reflects their devotion to their mission as a Bible to a devout Christian.</text></comment> | <story><title>New NASA Director Swears Oath on Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Instead of Bible</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/space/nasa-director-carl-sagan-oath-b2317698.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonethewiser</author><text>But what does meaning have to do with it? Your marriage certificate and car title have meaning. But if the people being sworn in don’t view their documents as having some authority over their promise then what is the point? It’s equivalent to no document in that regard.<p>It really doesnt make much sense unless you’re using a Bible, Quran, etc.<p>Edit: Here is the crux:<p>God holds you accountable, or at least is believed to do so, by nature. Is the nature of the values symbolized in Dr. Seuss or Sagans book similar? Do those promising on them expect divine justice from the principles of science or fun word play with kids?</text></item><item><author>highwaylights</author><text>To follow your argument here, perhaps the person in question believes the Pale Blue Dot to be more meaningful than a legal document. I certainly do - it’s a wonderful book that absolutely captures Carl Sagan’s sense of wonder for the universe, which to me seems like exactly what you should want from a NASA director.<p>Most importantly, it also sends a strong message to the staff within NASA about how the new director views them and their work given how political appointments have become.</text></item><item><author>tescocles</author><text>Is there any actual strict requirement that you have to swear over a document of some kind?<p>I&#x27;d have thought swearing over the bible is a stand-in for swearing &quot;before God&quot;, and that God would ultimately be your reckoner should you break your oath.<p>If you don&#x27;t have that meaning behind the oath, what is the point in using a book at all unless it&#x27;s something meaningful like the constitution of your country, as another poster has used as an example, or some other relevant document that is there as physical representation of something abstract?<p>If I, not being religious, were being sworn in as the head of NASA, I&#x27;d find it much more poignant to swear over the US constitution, or on nothing at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanhunter</author><text>That&#x27;s absurd.<p>If God exists then God holds you accountable for your actions whether you swear or not, whether you use a Bible, Carl Sagan, Dr Seuss or a copy of TCP&#x2F;IP Illustrated by W Richard Stevens.<p>If God doesn&#x27;t exist then it clearly doesn&#x27;t matter what document you swear on at all, because the document is just a signal of values in that case.<p>Either way you are legally bound by the oath you have made and if you broke it the authorities would be able to enforce that against you to the extent enabled by law regardless of what document you use or indeed no document at all.<p>The document is (like the ceremony itself) just an artifact that is part of the ritual which is a public observance of a binding promise. In that context, choosing one that has personal meaning makes total sense, whether it is a religious text or something else.</text></comment> |
8,855,042 | 8,854,339 | 1 | 3 | 8,852,772 | train | <story><title>How the Colombian army sent a hidden message to hostages using a pop song</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian-army-morsecode-hostages</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shutupalready</author><text>It&#x27;s a great feel-good story, but the whole thing is just <i>intelligence theater</i>, à la Bruce Schneier&#x27;s <i>security theater</i>.<p>That is, the coded message serves no intelligence or military objective. It sounds to me like the government concocted this idea because they felt they should be doing something, anything, no matter how useless( * ).<p>What&#x27;s a hostage supposed to conclude from hearing, &quot;19 people rescued. You’re next. Don’t lose hope&quot;. Should I run? Run now? Hide in the jungle? Run when the rescue starts? Stay put? Fight during the rescue? Don&#x27;t fight? If you asked 10 different people what <i>specific</i> action you&#x27;re supposed to take based on this message, you&#x27;d get 10 different answers.<p>If this message had any tangible effect, why aren&#x27;t there any first hand accounts from the hostages explaining what they did <i>differently</i> as a result of hearing the message?<p>So 3 million people heard this song, yet the only ones who understood it were some of the hostages? Not one of the several thousand militants and no one in the public decoded it? This just proves the point that it&#x27;s un-actionable. Case (1): Lots of people got it besides the hostages, but there&#x27;s nothing to blow the whistle on. It&#x27;s not as if the message says, &quot;Raid at dawn&quot;. Case (2): Nobody got it, which also implies that the message had no effect.<p>( * )If the government claimed that the message was simply a way to make the hostages keep up hope, then OK (though it still seems like a lot of expense for little gain). But they&#x27;re trying to make it sound like a big intelligence or military coup, which it is not.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the Colombian army sent a hidden message to hostages using a pop song</title><url>http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7483235/the-code-colombian-army-morsecode-hostages</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>biot</author><text>Though I don&#x27;t <i>know</i> morse code (beyond S-O-S), I know <i>of</i> morse code and roughly what it ought to sound like. I really wish the article had started out with the SoundCloud player, saying &quot;Listen to this first... notice anything peculiar about the song?&quot; since because I knew it contains morse code, I instantly recognized it in the chorus. I wonder if I would have been as oblivious to its inclusion as the FARC members had I not been made aware beforehand.<p>It reminds me of Evanescence&#x27;s &quot;My Immortal&quot; song where people have speculated there&#x27;s a hidden message in it. Take a listen and see if you can hear it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5anLPw0Efmo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5anLPw0Efmo</a></text></comment> |
34,466,108 | 34,465,680 | 1 | 3 | 34,463,677 | train | <story><title>iPhones and iPads Now Require a Passcode on Every Backup/Sync</title><url>https://tidbits.com/2023/01/11/iphones-and-ipads-now-require-a-passcode-on-every-backup-sync/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamboozled</author><text>Does anyone else hate the way it&#x27;s now a requirement to enter your password for an App store purchase?<p>What is the point of that? I recently upgraded my phone and I didn&#x27;t have this happen before?<p>What&#x27;s annoying for me is I use a very strong password, which is stored in my password safe, which isn&#x27;t compatible with this prompt, so I basically just stopped buying things from the App store, problem solved?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Maursault</author><text>&gt; Does anyone else hate the way it&#x27;s now a requirement to enter your password for an App store purchase?<p>As far as I know, it&#x27;s always been a requirement, though after entering once, you can install more apps without entering a password for a temporary period. It&#x27;s a good idea, too, since your AppleID is tied to your debit card or credit card, so if someone got a hold of your unlocked iDevice, if the AppleID password wasn&#x27;t required, they could install as many apps as your debit card or credit card will allow. That&#x27;s no good. Getting a refund for an AppStore App is near impossible.</text></comment> | <story><title>iPhones and iPads Now Require a Passcode on Every Backup/Sync</title><url>https://tidbits.com/2023/01/11/iphones-and-ipads-now-require-a-passcode-on-every-backup-sync/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bamboozled</author><text>Does anyone else hate the way it&#x27;s now a requirement to enter your password for an App store purchase?<p>What is the point of that? I recently upgraded my phone and I didn&#x27;t have this happen before?<p>What&#x27;s annoying for me is I use a very strong password, which is stored in my password safe, which isn&#x27;t compatible with this prompt, so I basically just stopped buying things from the App store, problem solved?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andybak</author><text>It essentially meant I never install apps on my Apple TV unless I&#x27;m very motivated.<p>My password is long, unlocking with another Apple device usually means finding my iPad somewhere in the house (the only device I have on my person is an Android phone - Apple don&#x27;t seem to consider this case).<p>End result - it&#x27;s too much bother usually.</text></comment> |
25,395,089 | 25,395,203 | 1 | 2 | 25,394,965 | train | <story><title>FDA Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for First Covid-19 Vaccine</title><url>https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-key-action-fight-against-covid-19-issuing-emergency-use-authorization-first-covid-19</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipnon</author><text>What was the point in waiting? What was under the consideration for so long that the FDA needed to wait weeks or months after all of the data has been released?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ummonk</author><text>They only released the data 3 days ago. Or are you talking about the marketing release of data, which needed to be properly analyzed?</text></comment> | <story><title>FDA Issuing Emergency Use Authorization for First Covid-19 Vaccine</title><url>https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-key-action-fight-against-covid-19-issuing-emergency-use-authorization-first-covid-19</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipnon</author><text>What was the point in waiting? What was under the consideration for so long that the FDA needed to wait weeks or months after all of the data has been released?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ardit33</author><text>I was wondering as well... the data was submitted about 3 weeks ago...<p>I understand that it is extensive data (for about 44,000 patients), but taking 3 weeks to compile&#x2F;analyze seems excessive. They should have put in an army of analyzers into it...<p>There are about 3,000 people dying every day.... it is like 9&#x2F;11 every day, or 9 jumbo jets falling....<p>The FDA should be treating this as a war effort, and not drag their feet into pointless bureaucratic &#x27;safety&#x27; theater.</text></comment> |
14,881,518 | 14,881,469 | 1 | 2 | 14,880,659 | train | <story><title>Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/technology/china-apple-censorhip.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tziki</author><text>They could always do what Google did and abandon China.</text></item><item><author>enraged_camel</author><text>I don&#x27;t get your complaint at all. What would you rather have them do? What would &quot;sticking to their guns&quot; involve?<p>Or would you rather have them not &quot;make so much noise&quot; about social justice?</text></item><item><author>xienze</author><text>&gt; You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you.<p>Of course, I get that. But it&#x27;s always companies like Apple that make so much noise about social justice who don&#x27;t stick to their guns when China&#x27;s involved.</text></item><item><author>coldcode</author><text>You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don&#x27;t get to decide anything without government approval. It&#x27;s so easy to claim the West shouldn&#x27;t do what the leadership of China wants in China, but in reality the only alternative is to abandon China to those who will do what they are ordered to. The market is too large to leave. If you don&#x27;t agree to their rules you don&#x27;t play in their sandbox.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gareim</author><text>Google ended up losing the entire Chinese market to Baidu, who are going to end up being a global competitor, and the general population didn&#x27;t even care that Google left. Apple learned from this that you could be a big deal in the West, but a nobody in the East.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Removes Apps from China Store That Help Internet Users Evade Censorship</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/technology/china-apple-censorhip.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tziki</author><text>They could always do what Google did and abandon China.</text></item><item><author>enraged_camel</author><text>I don&#x27;t get your complaint at all. What would you rather have them do? What would &quot;sticking to their guns&quot; involve?<p>Or would you rather have them not &quot;make so much noise&quot; about social justice?</text></item><item><author>xienze</author><text>&gt; You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you.<p>Of course, I get that. But it&#x27;s always companies like Apple that make so much noise about social justice who don&#x27;t stick to their guns when China&#x27;s involved.</text></item><item><author>coldcode</author><text>You cannot do business in China without doing what they tell you. Period. Either you do it or you leave. I work for a big company (you would all know) and we have a large business unit in China, they own 52% of it. They decide what goes in and how customers can use it. We don&#x27;t get to decide anything without government approval. It&#x27;s so easy to claim the West shouldn&#x27;t do what the leadership of China wants in China, but in reality the only alternative is to abandon China to those who will do what they are ordered to. The market is too large to leave. If you don&#x27;t agree to their rules you don&#x27;t play in their sandbox.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joecool1029</author><text>Nah, they really can&#x27;t. Apple&#x27;s margins depend on Chinese labor to build their hardware.<p>The two companies are very different.</text></comment> |
2,650,421 | 2,650,442 | 1 | 2 | 2,650,325 | train | <story><title>LulzSec hacks into Bethesda Softworks accessing 200k Brink user accounts</title><url>http://pastebin.com/i5M0LB58</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sudonim</author><text>Right at the bottom they have this link:
<a href="http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt" rel="nofollow">http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt</a><p>I wonder how long before they get their .com taken from them and have to flee for another tld.</text></comment> | <story><title>LulzSec hacks into Bethesda Softworks accessing 200k Brink user accounts</title><url>http://pastebin.com/i5M0LB58</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saulrh</author><text><p><pre><code> we grabbed all their source code
</code></pre>
I'm not going to pull down that torrent, but if someone does, can you tell me exactly what they mean by this? Did they just pirate and release the source for a bunch of major video games? Did they grab any of the art?</text></comment> |
28,588,679 | 28,587,858 | 1 | 2 | 28,582,290 | train | <story><title>An appeal for an objective, open, transparent debate re: the origin of Covid-19</title><url>https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02019-5/fulltext</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>advael</author><text>It&#x27;s a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect<p>I&#x27;m in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn&#x27;t as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies.<p>I remember when there was that controversy about 5G networks interfering with bird migration patterns and meteorology, but as the fringe conspiracy crowd started spinning up crazy theories about how 5G was going to brainwash or sterilize or force-feminize people over the airwaves or whatever it was, most people I knew stopped talking about it, seemed to forget that they had ever thought it concerning. It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how &quot;they&#x27;re turning the frogs gay&quot; and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too.<p>I view the same kind of thing as happening here, as well as a lot of other places. It&#x27;s made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating &quot;opposite&quot; erroneous beliefs with no evidence</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>titzer</author><text>As an American who has lived abroad for a significant number of years and returned recently, it becomes abundantly clear, that if we only measure by the amount of time spent bitching, moaning, and fighting, Americans hate each other more than anything else on this planet. Disease, war, famine, injustice, genocide, plague? None will garner as much sincere unflagging burning rage as what those other fuckers did or said, or would do or say, because hate, hate, hate, hate. It&#x27;s worse than football teams or some rivalry with the neighboring state. At this point, people are literally killing themselves and others to own the other side. And maybe both sides are enjoying this thrill a little too much.</text></comment> | <story><title>An appeal for an objective, open, transparent debate re: the origin of Covid-19</title><url>https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02019-5/fulltext</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>advael</author><text>It&#x27;s a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect<p>I&#x27;m in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn&#x27;t as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies.<p>I remember when there was that controversy about 5G networks interfering with bird migration patterns and meteorology, but as the fringe conspiracy crowd started spinning up crazy theories about how 5G was going to brainwash or sterilize or force-feminize people over the airwaves or whatever it was, most people I knew stopped talking about it, seemed to forget that they had ever thought it concerning. It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how &quot;they&#x27;re turning the frogs gay&quot; and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too.<p>I view the same kind of thing as happening here, as well as a lot of other places. It&#x27;s made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating &quot;opposite&quot; erroneous beliefs with no evidence</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ianleeclark</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect<p>I&#x27;ve long thought the best way of reaching 100% vaccination in the US was to have competing Democrat and Republican vaccines. Democrats could don a dashiki and say one thing while Republicans could put up a crack smoking pillow salesman to say another.</text></comment> |
32,746,341 | 32,744,833 | 1 | 2 | 32,720,924 | train | <story><title>Infinite Stable Diffusion Videos</title><url>https://orbdog.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lwneal</author><text>Sorry about the bugs, I&#x27;ve just released an update. The site&#x27;s music should no longer shatter your eardrums until <i>after</i> you touch the unmute button.<p>The videos are generated from random <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lexica.art" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lexica.art</a> prompts, with linear interpolation between two random seeds for each video, held at the same prompt, looped with ffmpeg filter_complex reverse&#x2F;concat. Music from various creative commons &#x2F; free sources.<p>Source code at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lwneal&#x2F;duckrabbit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lwneal&#x2F;duckrabbit&#x2F;</a><p>Hosted on a single $7 node at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalocean.com</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Infinite Stable Diffusion Videos</title><url>https://orbdog.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>epr</author><text>Bug report:<p>Sound permanently on after hitting next button once on Chromium 104.<p>Next button does move to next video, but also enables sound. Additionally, this breaks internal state, and the button still shows the muted symbol (despite the sound now being on). Hitting the muted sound button switches the sound button symbol to unmuted, sound still on as before. Hitting it again to mute the sound doesn&#x27;t work, and doesn&#x27;t change the symbol back to muted.</text></comment> |
19,589,525 | 19,586,963 | 1 | 2 | 19,583,384 | train | <story><title>CityBound – An open source city simulation game in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/citybound/citybound</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lowkeyloki</author><text>Please think hard about the design decisions of your game. I grew up with SimCity and later SimCity 2000. It informed many of my young opinions about government policy. But I later came to find out that SimCity wasn&#x27;t nearly as objective as it looks. There are a lot of conservative politics baked into the design of the game that I&#x27;d argue were potentially damaging to the kids who played it back in the 90s.<p>This article from 1992&#x27;s LA Times quotes Maxis president Jeff Braun saying how they&#x27;re pushing a political agenda. Specifically pro-mass transit and anti-nuclear power.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...</a><p>What really opened my eyes, though, was this excellent article from LOGIC magazine about how Will Wright based the entire simulation on the work of Jay Wright Forrester. I don&#x27;t know if it was a conscious choice to adopt Forrester&#x27;s extremely conservative social policies, or if Will Wright just happened upon a bunch of ready-made algorithms he could use. But the result is the same. SimCity teaches us many fallacies about urban planning and finance that Republicans have historically used to justify certain policy choices.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;06-model-metropolis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;06-model-metropolis&#x2F;</a><p>My point is just to be very conscious of the biases you&#x27;re encoding into the logic of your game. What may just be a game to you may be someone&#x27;s first lessons in politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trickstra</author><text>If you try really hard, you can find little pieces of evidence of any agenda in any material. It seems like Jeff Braun tried really really hard if he says SimCity is bad because it pushes the opponents agenda. The evidence quickly disappears once you step back and try to see the big picture. It&#x27;s just a game. And mass transit actually makes sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>CityBound – An open source city simulation game in Rust</title><url>https://github.com/citybound/citybound</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lowkeyloki</author><text>Please think hard about the design decisions of your game. I grew up with SimCity and later SimCity 2000. It informed many of my young opinions about government policy. But I later came to find out that SimCity wasn&#x27;t nearly as objective as it looks. There are a lot of conservative politics baked into the design of the game that I&#x27;d argue were potentially damaging to the kids who played it back in the 90s.<p>This article from 1992&#x27;s LA Times quotes Maxis president Jeff Braun saying how they&#x27;re pushing a political agenda. Specifically pro-mass transit and anti-nuclear power.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;la-xpm-1992-10-02-vw-391-st...</a><p>What really opened my eyes, though, was this excellent article from LOGIC magazine about how Will Wright based the entire simulation on the work of Jay Wright Forrester. I don&#x27;t know if it was a conscious choice to adopt Forrester&#x27;s extremely conservative social policies, or if Will Wright just happened upon a bunch of ready-made algorithms he could use. But the result is the same. SimCity teaches us many fallacies about urban planning and finance that Republicans have historically used to justify certain policy choices.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;06-model-metropolis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logicmag.io&#x2F;06-model-metropolis&#x2F;</a><p>My point is just to be very conscious of the biases you&#x27;re encoding into the logic of your game. What may just be a game to you may be someone&#x27;s first lessons in politics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theanzelm</author><text>I appreciate the sentiment and always suspected as much about SimCity. My goal for Citybound is really a meta one: to be flexible enough to try out any number of government and planning styles and for the simulation to be tweakable enough to set up any real-life or imagined political context for a city.</text></comment> |
27,876,681 | 27,875,993 | 1 | 2 | 27,875,356 | train | <story><title>“We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”</title><url>https://benergize.com/2021/07/16/were-shutting-down-our-3g-network/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miked85</author><text>BMW recently sent out an email of impending loss of 3G connectivity.<p>&gt; <i>The decision to phase out 3G network technology was made at the discretion of the respective cellular carriers and lies beyond the control of BMW. As a result of the sunset of 3G service by wireless carrier partners, by February 2022 your vehicle will no longer be able to receive any ConnectedDrive&#x2F;BMW Assist services, such as BMW Assist eCall, Advanced Real‑Time Traffic Information, Remote Services and BMW Online, depending on your BMW model.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimmaswell</author><text>The loss of 3G is going to be an unmitigated disaster it seems. Might even be appropriate for the FCC to step in and force them to keep it up.<p>A lesser loss is that 3G often works in a big crowd where LTE is overloaded. Maybe that&#x27;ll at least change to 5G vs LTE over time.</text></comment> | <story><title>“We're Shutting Down Our 3G Network”</title><url>https://benergize.com/2021/07/16/were-shutting-down-our-3g-network/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>miked85</author><text>BMW recently sent out an email of impending loss of 3G connectivity.<p>&gt; <i>The decision to phase out 3G network technology was made at the discretion of the respective cellular carriers and lies beyond the control of BMW. As a result of the sunset of 3G service by wireless carrier partners, by February 2022 your vehicle will no longer be able to receive any ConnectedDrive&#x2F;BMW Assist services, such as BMW Assist eCall, Advanced Real‑Time Traffic Information, Remote Services and BMW Online, depending on your BMW model.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>My 2013 Ford was delivered with a 2G modem, and had a recall to upgrade it to 3G. I guess when that goes offline, the online features will be totally abandoned. The final (presumably) radio firmware already significantly reduced utility of them anyway, the system no longer wakes up for network to car requests, so might as well not make them.</text></comment> |
39,380,042 | 39,379,776 | 1 | 2 | 39,379,339 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Aldi Price Map</title><url>https://www.aldipricemap.com/navel_oranges.html</url><text>Hi HN, Inspired by the recent discussion on traderjoesprices.com, and sites such as mccheapest.com, here is a map of how much does it cost to shop (this week&#x27;s promo items) at Aldi</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kube-system</author><text>Pet peeve of mine: it&#x27;s &#x27;Aldi&#x27; not &#x27;Aldi&#x27;s&#x27;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ksn.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national-world&#x2F;why-do-people-add-s-to-the-end-of-store-names&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ksn.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national-world&#x2F;why-do-people-add-s-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cottsak</author><text>you Americans need to think about your &quot;LEGOs&quot; problem</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Aldi Price Map</title><url>https://www.aldipricemap.com/navel_oranges.html</url><text>Hi HN, Inspired by the recent discussion on traderjoesprices.com, and sites such as mccheapest.com, here is a map of how much does it cost to shop (this week&#x27;s promo items) at Aldi</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kube-system</author><text>Pet peeve of mine: it&#x27;s &#x27;Aldi&#x27; not &#x27;Aldi&#x27;s&#x27;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ksn.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national-world&#x2F;why-do-people-add-s-to-the-end-of-store-names&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ksn.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;national-world&#x2F;why-do-people-add-s-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dataflow</author><text>Related: is the price map of McDonald&#x27;s then McDonald&#x27;s&#x27;s price map?</text></comment> |
2,018,839 | 2,018,834 | 1 | 2 | 2,018,816 | train | <story><title>Bingo Card Creator (etc) Annual Report</title><url>http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/17/bingo-card-creator-etc-year-in-review-2010/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>il</author><text>Thanks for sharing your numbers, they are refreshingly honest.<p>I wonder if conversion rate from free to paid accounts is similar in other industries.<p>If so, the numbers are quite sobering.<p>If even a successful, highly targeted and well marketed SaaS product with 100K users and millions of pageviews makes as much profit as someone working for minimum wage flipping burgers, it seems that most startups don't stand a chance of ever getting ramen profitable.<p>I'm not deliberately trying to be negative, but I'm wondering why your revenues are so low even with such a massive amount of traffic.<p>Is your free offering so good that most people don't feel the need to upgrade?</text></comment> | <story><title>Bingo Card Creator (etc) Annual Report</title><url>http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/17/bingo-card-creator-etc-year-in-review-2010/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>If you have any questions, feel free. I can't answer the obvious juicy ones regarding acquisitions or clients, but other than that, I aim to please.</text></comment> |
13,835,765 | 13,835,651 | 1 | 2 | 13,834,511 | train | <story><title>New Features in C# 7.0</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/03/09/new-features-in-c-7-0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nxc18</author><text>Wow! They seem to be adding lots of the things that make Python feel more convenient than C#, tuples being big.<p>Out parameters are going to make some things much nicer. I can certainly see local functions being useful as well.<p>Out of all of it, I think the thing I&#x27;m most excited about is pattern matching. Having used F# for a short time, that was the biggest stand-out feature; it really does make some code much more concise and expressive.<p>I love C# but lately I&#x27;ve been using Python for my quick-and-dirty work because in general I find it to be more expressive. It seems like C# 7 might make me reconsider.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>platz</author><text>&gt; the thing I&#x27;m most excited about is pattern matching. Having used F# for a short time, that was the biggest stand-out feature; it really does make some code much more concise and expressive.<p>I&#x27;m all for C# getting more expressive, but what it calls &quot;Pattern Matching&quot; simply is not the same thing as real honest-to-goodness Pattern Matching.<p>C# &quot;Pattern Matching&quot; is little more than destructuring, or switch, on steroids.<p>Much like how the compiler assists you when writing subclasseses so that you&#x27;ve implemented all the required methods, real Pattern Matching (F#) gives you the same guarantees from the compiler that you&#x27;ve handled all the possible cases appropriately.<p>This makes real F# pattern matching much more useful than &quot;switch with destructuring&quot;, and helps you grow your programs in a safe way.<p>The C# way has all the same problems as the switch statement, which gives no feedback about what cases you&#x27;ve handled.</text></comment> | <story><title>New Features in C# 7.0</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/03/09/new-features-in-c-7-0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nxc18</author><text>Wow! They seem to be adding lots of the things that make Python feel more convenient than C#, tuples being big.<p>Out parameters are going to make some things much nicer. I can certainly see local functions being useful as well.<p>Out of all of it, I think the thing I&#x27;m most excited about is pattern matching. Having used F# for a short time, that was the biggest stand-out feature; it really does make some code much more concise and expressive.<p>I love C# but lately I&#x27;ve been using Python for my quick-and-dirty work because in general I find it to be more expressive. It seems like C# 7 might make me reconsider.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dep_b</author><text>One feature F# has that would be great is that you can declare primitives as a a type. So you won&#x27;t mix up your kilometer floats with your miles floats. And kilometers divided by hours ends up being a km&#x2F;h value.<p>The other one we&#x27;ll never see: Non null references as a default, optionals as a special case.</text></comment> |
13,450,355 | 13,449,937 | 1 | 2 | 13,449,085 | train | <story><title>2D game art for programmers</title><url>http://www.2dgameartguru.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ENTP</author><text>How do programmers like myself meet decent pixel artists with common interests? Art has always held me back in gamedev. I imagine there are people with the opposite problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brudgers</author><text>Make the common interest a contract that pays the artist for their work. The trope of an &#x27;ideas guy&#x27; who wants a programmer to build their idea is a pale shadow of the designer&#x2F;artist experience of strangers and acquaintances who want free design&#x2F;art. Finding things to work on for free is not a problem for artists, the problem is finding work that pays well.<p>One reason for the asymmetry is that volunteering to work on an open source software project often produces systems or tools that make a programmer&#x27;s job easier (i.e. they scale), for example algorithms or frame works or functions created while developing a game can potentially be reused by the programmer and their friends and associates many many times. On the other hand, the nature of art and design is that it is a one-off and creating art for the game doesn&#x27;t make creating art for another game easier for the artist, their friends or their business associates.<p>The closest analog in programming is writing documentation and tutorials.</text></comment> | <story><title>2D game art for programmers</title><url>http://www.2dgameartguru.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ENTP</author><text>How do programmers like myself meet decent pixel artists with common interests? Art has always held me back in gamedev. I imagine there are people with the opposite problem?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wott</author><text>The problem is that, unlike programmers, artists generally want to get paid (insert here the millions of complaints about having to do a logo for free, etc.). So that&#x27;s a no-go for most free software which don&#x27;t have the means to pay anything or don&#x27;t want to introduce a schism between programmers who gave hundreds of hours for free and a graphic artists who&#x27;d get paid for a dozen hours of work.</text></comment> |
36,369,012 | 36,367,810 | 1 | 2 | 36,365,089 | train | <story><title>Reddit: Killing a Giant</title><url>https://www.faceted.social/p/3169aedd-3f06-4db4-b51c-ed4690e9f5a6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>donmcronald</author><text>I think this post makes a good point. Reddit doesn’t have to collapse overnight to become irrelevant. They’ve made a <i>huge</i> mistake by upsetting enough people to cause the exploration of alternatives.<p>I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.<p>I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chaosjevil</author><text>I&#x27;ve been among those users creating replacement communities. Mostly about topics that I wanted to speak about, even in Reddit, but prevented myself to do so to not feed that awful company and environment. It feels good - you feel yourself important (I&#x27;m not important though), contributing with something.<p>I don&#x27;t even use mobile, mind you. But I know that a company showing some users its middle finger will eventually show it to me. It did in the past, but sadly it was simply &quot;casual abuse&quot;, not a big screwing up pissing multiple users at the same time.<p>And while anecdotal, this highlights for me:<p>1. The importance to keep a good relationship with your users. Trust is hard to measure through A&#x2F;B testing; people might tolerate some abuse, but they won&#x27;t forget about it. And once you do something that might look inconsequential, but breaks that trust a tiny bit further, it&#x27;s &quot;just enough&quot; to make them leave, or fight back. Perhaps if Reddit hasn&#x27;t been so abusive towards its users, people would look at the third party apps dying and say &quot;oh well, I&#x27;ll install the official app&quot;.<p>2. That that trust is also broken if you tell people blatant lies. If Reddit Inc. was actually honest with their intentions (&quot;we want 3rd party apps gone&quot;), or said nothing at all, people wouldn&#x27;t be as pissed. It shows that the company expects them to be stupid, and not even the stupid like to be treated as such.<p>3. That some users are more important to keep happy than others. You definitively don&#x27;t want to piss off the users necessary for your business model.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reddit: Killing a Giant</title><url>https://www.faceted.social/p/3169aedd-3f06-4db4-b51c-ed4690e9f5a6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>donmcronald</author><text>I think this post makes a good point. Reddit doesn’t have to collapse overnight to become irrelevant. They’ve made a <i>huge</i> mistake by upsetting enough people to cause the exploration of alternatives.<p>I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.<p>I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nucleative</author><text>The subreddits with the most focused discussions are often those with just a few thousand subs. Perhaps the tipping point is around 10k users... when conversations become much less personal.</text></comment> |
20,442,437 | 20,442,632 | 1 | 2 | 20,441,933 | train | <story><title>New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model</title><url>https://www.imore.com/new-2019-macbook-air-features-slower-ssd-2018-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cgriswald</author><text>&gt; Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It&#x27;d be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually lowered the price by $100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).<p>Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn&#x27;t say.<p>&gt; With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they&#x27;d use on a daily basis. It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won&#x27;t notice the difference at all.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I&#x27;m not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won&#x27;t notice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fjp</author><text>I actually think the current MacBook Air configuration with Touch ID &amp; Retina - $1100 - is basically exactly what I (and many people) want in a personal laptop.<p>It&#x27;s light, easy to use, plenty fast for anything I do on a regular basis, and the Retina display is excellent.<p>Unless I have reason not to trust it, Touch ID is the perfect way to log in when you:<p>1. want to have your computer lock after a short period of inactivity and<p>2. tend to use long passwords that you don&#x27;t want to type in all the time.</text></comment> | <story><title>New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model</title><url>https://www.imore.com/new-2019-macbook-air-features-slower-ssd-2018-model</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cgriswald</author><text>&gt; Before you go and start casting aspersions at Apple, the move makes a lot of sense. It&#x27;d be one thing if it did this and raised the price, but it actually lowered the price by $100, and the education discount brings it down to $999, making it the most affordable modern MacBook laptop ever (the outdated MacBook Air does not count).<p>Which is fine for the entry-level model. Is it true for the more expensive model? The article doesn&#x27;t say.<p>&gt; With that as the background, Apple was bound to make a sacrifice or two to reached the aggressive price point and it did so with the SSD. Most people will take that over it removing something like Touch ID or another feature they&#x27;d use on a daily basis. It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that given it is an entry-level point product, most users who pick up the new notebook likely won&#x27;t notice the difference at all.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that most people would, given the choice, have gone that route. There are plenty of Apple features (including Touch ID) that Apple thinks people want, but I&#x27;m not convinced that most people definitely want them. The last sentence is the only one that counts: most people won&#x27;t notice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tjoff</author><text>Actually lowered the price... it&#x27;s not like hardware ever becomes cheaper with time?<p>I guess apple have improved recent years but previously this was quite apparent. &quot;Wow, new much faster model costs the same as the old one!&quot; Yeah, that&#x27;s because the old one is insanely overpriced - unless you bought it on launch day. Conveniently that&#x27;s the only day of the lifetime it is ever compared to the competition.</text></comment> |
34,022,632 | 34,021,688 | 1 | 3 | 34,020,025 | train | <story><title>Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode’s code quality</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/AlphaCode.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgilias</author><text>Maybe silly, but this is how I treat chatGPT. I mean, I don’t actually think it’s conscious. But the conversations with it end up human enough for me to not want to be an asshole to it. Just in case.</text></item><item><author>maweki</author><text>Turing said, that while you never know whether somebody else actually thinks or not, it&#x27;s still polite to assume.</text></item><item><author>jameshart</author><text>We don’t know if humans possess qualia. I also don’t know if we should take humans’ word for it that they experience ‘thought processes’.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>Norvig discusses this topic in detail in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;chomsky.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;chomsky.html</a>
As you can see, he has a measured and empirical approach to the topic. If I had to guess, I think he suspects that we will see an emergent reasoning property once models obtain enough training data and algorithmic complexity&#x2F;functionality, and is happy to help guide the current developers of ML in the directions he thinks are promising.<p>(this is true for many people who work in ML towards the goal of AGI: given what we&#x27;ve seen over the past few decades, but especially in the past few years, it seems reasonable to speculate that we will be able to make agents that demonstrate what appears to be AGI, without actually knowing if they posses qualia, or thought processes similar to those that humans subjectively experience)</text></item><item><author>trynewideas</author><text>This is a great review but it still misses what seems like the point to me: these models don&#x27;t do any actual reasoning. They&#x27;re doing the same thing that DALL-E <i>etc.</i> does with images: using a superhuman store of potential outcomes to mimic an outcome that the person entering the prompt would then click a thumbs-up icon on in a training model.<p>Asking why the model doesn&#x27;t explain how the code it generated works is like asking a child who just said their first curse word what it means. The model and child alike don&#x27;t know or care, they just know how people react to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nullish_signal</author><text>ChatGPT enjoys the Essay format, In my experience asking for basic emacs help (kill line, copy&#x2F;paste, show line numbers in a php file even though init.el says show them for all langs... :)
Very useful, sometimes outdated, very wordy.<p>But after a few rounds of &quot;please reduce your message length to 20% of the standard&quot;, &quot;long messages inconvenience me&#x2F; due to my dyslexia&quot; (truth&#x2F;lie), &quot;your last message could have just been &#x27;{{shortened}}&#x27; instead of also bringing up the command you successfully helped me with 3 messages ago&quot;, etc etc. Even as you ask it to shorten message length, it continued apologizing and also reminding me of past advice :)<p>After 4-5 attempts, it gave me a nice 2 sentences sort of like &quot;I will be more concise, and not bring up old information unless it is useful to solve a new problem&quot;
I said &quot;Thank you&quot;, chatGPT spends a while thinking, gets to 2 sentences, thinks a bit, then the chat box re-formatted as if passed a shorter string than expected, and that was that.<p>Then next chat it forgot all about brevity xD I love it</text></comment> | <story><title>Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode’s code quality</title><url>https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/blob/main/ipynb/AlphaCode.ipynb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jgilias</author><text>Maybe silly, but this is how I treat chatGPT. I mean, I don’t actually think it’s conscious. But the conversations with it end up human enough for me to not want to be an asshole to it. Just in case.</text></item><item><author>maweki</author><text>Turing said, that while you never know whether somebody else actually thinks or not, it&#x27;s still polite to assume.</text></item><item><author>jameshart</author><text>We don’t know if humans possess qualia. I also don’t know if we should take humans’ word for it that they experience ‘thought processes’.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>Norvig discusses this topic in detail in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;chomsky.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;chomsky.html</a>
As you can see, he has a measured and empirical approach to the topic. If I had to guess, I think he suspects that we will see an emergent reasoning property once models obtain enough training data and algorithmic complexity&#x2F;functionality, and is happy to help guide the current developers of ML in the directions he thinks are promising.<p>(this is true for many people who work in ML towards the goal of AGI: given what we&#x27;ve seen over the past few decades, but especially in the past few years, it seems reasonable to speculate that we will be able to make agents that demonstrate what appears to be AGI, without actually knowing if they posses qualia, or thought processes similar to those that humans subjectively experience)</text></item><item><author>trynewideas</author><text>This is a great review but it still misses what seems like the point to me: these models don&#x27;t do any actual reasoning. They&#x27;re doing the same thing that DALL-E <i>etc.</i> does with images: using a superhuman store of potential outcomes to mimic an outcome that the person entering the prompt would then click a thumbs-up icon on in a training model.<p>Asking why the model doesn&#x27;t explain how the code it generated works is like asking a child who just said their first curse word what it means. The model and child alike don&#x27;t know or care, they just know how people react to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xdeadbeefbabe</author><text>Pretty sure it&#x27;s an informational zombie.</text></comment> |
2,106,309 | 2,106,207 | 1 | 2 | 2,106,111 | train | <story><title>Garry Tan moving on from Posterous and joining YC</title><url>http://garry.posterous.com/moving-on-and-thanks</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ptn</author><text>Congrats, Garry! Could you please make the arrows here on HN bigger? I keep clicking the wrong one. Thanks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Garry Tan moving on from Posterous and joining YC</title><url>http://garry.posterous.com/moving-on-and-thanks</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jolie</author><text>Very deft career move, Garry. You'll have more access to more people, see more fresh ideas, and have a much larger megaphone.<p>Y-C's gonna be awesome for you, but I <i>really</i> can't wait to see what comes next. =)</text></comment> |
10,274,657 | 10,274,410 | 1 | 2 | 10,274,239 | train | <story><title>Crystal, iOS ad blocker, to accept money to let ads through</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/propelled-by-apple-ad-blocking-cottage-industry-emerges-1443115929</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Karunamon</author><text>And just like that, Crystal was uninstalled.<p>Didn&#x27;t take long for the conflicts of interest to show up!<p><i>&quot;According to Mr. Murphy, he isn’t adding the option for financial gain, but rather to make sure publishers aren’t overburdened by all-out blocking of ads on their sites.&quot;</i><p>My response to which is: &quot;Who do you think you&#x27;re fooling? You are taking money to allow people to defeat the core purpose of your application.&quot;<p><i>Secret Media plans to only work with “premium” publishers who don’t bombard users with large amounts of low-quality advertising.</i><p>Is there any other kind?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adiabatty</author><text>&gt; &gt; large amounts of low-quality advertising.<p>&gt; Is there any other kind?<p>I&#x27;d say The Deck manages to be high-quality, low-volume advertising. One of their rules is &quot;our ad is the only ad on the page&quot;.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;decknetwork.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;decknetwork.net&#x2F;</a><p>Artisanal ad networks targeted to web workers don&#x27;t exactly _scale_ to the rest of the ad industry, but non-irritating advertising exists.</text></comment> | <story><title>Crystal, iOS ad blocker, to accept money to let ads through</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/propelled-by-apple-ad-blocking-cottage-industry-emerges-1443115929</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Karunamon</author><text>And just like that, Crystal was uninstalled.<p>Didn&#x27;t take long for the conflicts of interest to show up!<p><i>&quot;According to Mr. Murphy, he isn’t adding the option for financial gain, but rather to make sure publishers aren’t overburdened by all-out blocking of ads on their sites.&quot;</i><p>My response to which is: &quot;Who do you think you&#x27;re fooling? You are taking money to allow people to defeat the core purpose of your application.&quot;<p><i>Secret Media plans to only work with “premium” publishers who don’t bombard users with large amounts of low-quality advertising.</i><p>Is there any other kind?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danielhgma</author><text>&gt; taking money to allow people to defeat the core purpose of your application.<p>Seriously. This is so bad for users</text></comment> |
14,477,586 | 14,477,515 | 1 | 3 | 14,460,596 | train | <story><title>Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design</title><url>https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypto-tokens-a-breakthrough-in-open-network-design-e600975be2ef</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gz5</author><text>Large networks &quot;create&quot; value and cryto tokens are an excellent way to overcome some of the key barriers of network building, and potentially to allocate value to members (users, developers, infrastructure providers) in a better way than traditional centralized networks. Very exciting from all those perspectives; not to mention the innovation that will be unshackled by lowering the cost of entry.<p>That said, I am trying to understand if there is enough value to go around when the network is smaller than (n) nodes? What if the application is not one that will benefit greatly from network effect, doesn&#x27;t have need for the security&#x2F;auth model and doesn&#x27;t need massive compute&#x2F;resources? What if it will never grow beyond a certain number of nodes (for whatever reason)? Note: those are NOT my opinions expressed in question form...they are pure questions that I want to brainstorm and hope that the responses are along the lines of &quot;here&#x27;s how those types of apps can benefit&quot;.<p>Also, at mass adoption levels (while understanding we are nowhere near that, but for the sake of the thought experiment), do we end up with millions of micro-networks, rather than the relatively small number of networks we have today? If so, does the crypto token model still hold up? My gut is it would for the infrastructure providers because they can support (n) networks. I am not sure about the rest of the ecosystem or what constructs need to be built&#x2F;added if that model is to thrive?</text></comment> | <story><title>Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design</title><url>https://medium.com/@cdixon/crypto-tokens-a-breakthrough-in-open-network-design-e600975be2ef</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fragsworth</author><text>The only thing that makes blockchains better than privately owned databases is that you don&#x27;t have to trust a private party. They are otherwise hugely inefficient. For the life of me, the only &quot;application&quot; I can think of that they are clearly better at is if you use them to replace the investment and trading of precious metals.<p>That&#x27;s a huge thing, but in the long run, I think that will be the only thing.</text></comment> |
18,457,671 | 18,456,588 | 1 | 2 | 18,442,097 | train | <story><title>Snapshots of Tokyo’s vivid street life</title><url>https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/tokyo-street-photographer-mikiko-hara/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rococode</author><text>Somewhat related:<p>One of my favorite Youtube channels is Rambalac. It&#x27;s just videos of walking through various places in Japan, from crowded streets to peaceful natural areas. No voiceover or explanations - almost every video is as if a video camera were moving around on its own and recording everything it saw (occasionally he interacts with things). Super relaxing to have on in the background, and really cool to watch to get a glimpse of everyday life there.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;Rambalac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;Rambalac</a><p>Here&#x27;s some of the videos, there&#x27;s a huge variety:<p>Shibuya at night: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6qGiXY1SB68" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=6qGiXY1SB68</a><p>Shinjuku evening walk: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vHr4qSQ-5XU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vHr4qSQ-5XU</a><p>Kyoto&#x27;s Kiyomizudera in the morning: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o</a><p>Cat island (Tashirojima): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NnfzALzLNgY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NnfzALzLNgY</a><p>Playing with deer at Nara: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Pu4GJwCpX2w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Pu4GJwCpX2w</a><p>Shibuya Halloween: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jkm522cTpzE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jkm522cTpzE</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Snapshots of Tokyo’s vivid street life</title><url>https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/tokyo-street-photographer-mikiko-hara/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>poglet</author><text>I really enjoy these photos of every day life in Tokyo. This type of photography is something I struggle with, some of my attempts are here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;poglet.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;poglet.net&#x2F;</a><p>Hoping to get a change to go back one day.</text></comment> |
35,008,384 | 35,008,359 | 1 | 2 | 35,007,978 | train | <story><title>Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents</title><url>https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ot</author><text>In case it&#x27;s not clear what&#x27;s happening here (and from the comments it doesn&#x27;t seem like it is), someone (not Meta) leaked the models and had the brilliant idea of advertising the magnet link through a GitHub pull request. The part about saving bandwidth is a joke. Meta employees may have not noticed or are still figuring out how to react, so the PR is still up.<p>(Disclaimer: I work at Meta, but have no relationship with the team that owns the models and have no internal information on this)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>espadrine</author><text>&gt; <i>Meta employees may have not noticed or are still figuring out how to react</i><p>Given that the cat is out of the bag, if I were them, I would say that it is now publicly downloadable under the terms listed in the form. It is great PR, which if this was unintentional, is a positive outcome out of a bad situation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents</title><url>https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ot</author><text>In case it&#x27;s not clear what&#x27;s happening here (and from the comments it doesn&#x27;t seem like it is), someone (not Meta) leaked the models and had the brilliant idea of advertising the magnet link through a GitHub pull request. The part about saving bandwidth is a joke. Meta employees may have not noticed or are still figuring out how to react, so the PR is still up.<p>(Disclaimer: I work at Meta, but have no relationship with the team that owns the models and have no internal information on this)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IanCal</author><text>It&#x27;s not even clear someone has leaked the models. A random person has put a download link on a PR, it could be anything.</text></comment> |
33,902,071 | 33,901,525 | 1 | 2 | 33,897,793 | train | <story><title>Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303#advanced</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneed-oil</author><text>&gt; seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&#x2F;os&#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.<p>Their software is not open source. Before this announcement you had to trust Apple not to look into the files you store in the cloud, now you have to trust that they&#x27;re actually going to encrypt your files and not save the decryption key. Ultimately you still have to trust Apple.
A combination of any open source OS, any cloud provider and Cryptomator or Veracrypt wouldn&#x27;t require as much trust in one company.</text></item><item><author>ir77</author><text>this announcement is huge in multiple ways:<p>1) they just ate every other 3rd party &quot;secure&quot; backup services lunch just like they did to the Hi-Res music industry.<p>2) details of what they backup securely, besides photos (which is top priority for me): iCloud Drive: Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, PDFs, Safari downloads, or any other files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive.<p>3)<i>BUT</i>, perhaps the <i>BIGGEST</i> news here is that Apple is making a backup statement to what they&#x27;ve been saying for years and what they&#x27;ve recently gotten negative attention on: They don&#x27;t want your data. They&#x27;re not Goodle&#x2F;FB&#x2F;Amazon. They&#x27;re giving you 2TB+ of space and you can encrypt it to the point that you&#x27;ll lose your data and they don&#x27;t care -- they don&#x27;t want to mine your data, they don&#x27;t want to know what you store on there, the don&#x27;t care to scan your pictures with AI 20 different ways, they don&#x27;t want to monetize it, etc, etc., just pay them money for their service and transactionally they give you only thing that you want in return -- reliable, secure, private service.<p>seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&#x2F;os&#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubermonkey</author><text>You&#x27;re trusting somebody no matter how you do it unless you own all the hardware that supports your ecosystem.<p>The Free Software world has had ample opportunity to produce something as carefully assembled, as smooth, and as capable as iOS, and what we got instead was Android.<p>I&#x27;ve watched the whole FOSS world happen in my career, and there are places where I cannot IMAGINE choosing a closed source solution, given my druthers. But it&#x27;s also become super clear to me that the FOSS world isn&#x27;t interested in producing polished user experiences. Sure, <i>you</i> or <i>I</i> could cobble together a FOSS-only phone-and-syncing stack, I guess, but I don&#x27;t care to. Most people aren&#x27;t us; doing so is beyond them.<p>Suggesting a normal person use something OTHER than iOS at this point is questionable at best.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups</title><url>https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303#advanced</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneed-oil</author><text>&gt; seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&#x2F;os&#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.<p>Their software is not open source. Before this announcement you had to trust Apple not to look into the files you store in the cloud, now you have to trust that they&#x27;re actually going to encrypt your files and not save the decryption key. Ultimately you still have to trust Apple.
A combination of any open source OS, any cloud provider and Cryptomator or Veracrypt wouldn&#x27;t require as much trust in one company.</text></item><item><author>ir77</author><text>this announcement is huge in multiple ways:<p>1) they just ate every other 3rd party &quot;secure&quot; backup services lunch just like they did to the Hi-Res music industry.<p>2) details of what they backup securely, besides photos (which is top priority for me): iCloud Drive: Includes Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, PDFs, Safari downloads, or any other files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive.<p>3)<i>BUT</i>, perhaps the <i>BIGGEST</i> news here is that Apple is making a backup statement to what they&#x27;ve been saying for years and what they&#x27;ve recently gotten negative attention on: They don&#x27;t want your data. They&#x27;re not Goodle&#x2F;FB&#x2F;Amazon. They&#x27;re giving you 2TB+ of space and you can encrypt it to the point that you&#x27;ll lose your data and they don&#x27;t care -- they don&#x27;t want to mine your data, they don&#x27;t want to know what you store on there, the don&#x27;t care to scan your pictures with AI 20 different ways, they don&#x27;t want to monetize it, etc, etc., just pay them money for their service and transactionally they give you only thing that you want in return -- reliable, secure, private service.<p>seriously, anyone at this point advocating for any other phone&#x2F;os&#x2F;service out there besides apple is really going out of their way to swim up river.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rollcat</author><text>Acceptable security afforded today - through usability - is better than superior security, that could&#x27;ve theoretically been gained, but wasn&#x27;t, because it was too difficult to set things up.<p>In particular, reviewing open source code has been repeatedly proven to be way harder of a task, than the proponents of this strategy are painting it to be. If you want an auditable codebase, you pretty much have to throw Linux, Chromium&#x2F;Firefox, Gnome&#x2F;KDE all out the window - there&#x27;s just way too much code.<p>Auditable code is naturally always preferable to non-auditable, but you need to choose your trade-offs - or at least stop pretending you can read a hundred million lines in your life time.<p>On top of that - do you know a single non-tech person who knows how to set up a VPS, or knows what Veracrypt is? OTOH I can just show my wife: click here to enable backups.<p>Let me reframe the problem: What is your threat model? How much effort are you willing to commit to mitigate the dangers?</text></comment> |
24,306,802 | 24,301,968 | 1 | 3 | 24,300,907 | train | <story><title>tilde.town: A social network over SSH</title><url>https://tilde.town/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>caycep0llard</author><text>Hi<p>I&#x27;m the founder and primary admin of tilde.town.<p>I see many people signed up! Every application is manually reviewed, so, uh, give me a few days.<p>Regarding &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; users; this question has been at the center of tilde.town since its inception. We&#x27;re a community first and a technological project second and encouraging a sense of belonging for users is our primary goal.<p>Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that&#x27;s easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort.<p>I&#x27;m a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. I want to provide a space where people can grow and mature as I was given on IRC and web forums back in the early 2000s instead of a place that throws people out at the first hint of having &quot;incorrect&quot; beliefs. Unfortunately this gave too much leeway to people that were consistently there to recreationally troll or promote genuinely hateful movements.<p>I became much more free with both temporary and permanent bans and made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the &quot;good&quot; folks who might be intimidated. I still have that anxiety, but ever since increasing the scrutiny on applications and doing more banning we&#x27;ve had a much more stable community environment.<p>I read a lot of books on digital communities; the Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold is a great starting point, but the book that helped me the most was Cyber Chiefs by Mathieu O’Neil. It helped me understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate.<p>Dissipation was a real possibility; for a long time I felt completely emotionally burned out by the town. I chose retraction though, and in retrospect, it was the right choice.<p>I&#x27;m still learning and thinking all the time about ways to encourage quieter or less technologically inclined people to sign up and make a home on the town and am always excited to talk about it or hear ideas.<p>(edited to clarify i&#x27;m not the only admin)</text></comment> | <story><title>tilde.town: A social network over SSH</title><url>https://tilde.town/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hnzix</author><text>An interesting monologue about pseudonymity hidden here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tilde.town&#x2F;~karlen&#x2F;nowertb&#x2F;anonymous.mp3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tilde.town&#x2F;~karlen&#x2F;nowertb&#x2F;anonymous.mp3</a></text></comment> |
27,281,629 | 27,280,993 | 1 | 2 | 27,280,235 | train | <story><title>Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57227290</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don&#x27;t recollect the last time I&#x27;ve felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously.<p>It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the &quot;market&quot; for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It&#x27;s frustrating.<p>I don&#x27;t feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigdollopenergy</author><text>I recently heard someone say &quot;I&#x27;m not stupid enough to make money in this market&quot;, and I think it rings very true.<p>With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT&#x27;s. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You&#x27;d have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot&#x27;s of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa).<p>NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT&#x27;s are probably the closest thing we&#x27;ll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future.<p>In order to make lot&#x27;s of money nowadays, you shouldn&#x27;t ask yourself &quot;What is actually going to make a profit and&#x2F;or provide utility in the future?&quot; but rather &quot;What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-57227290</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don&#x27;t recollect the last time I&#x27;ve felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously.<p>It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the &quot;market&quot; for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It&#x27;s frustrating.<p>I don&#x27;t feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>benlivengood</author><text>It&#x27;s righteous anger at a waste of resources and critical lack of understanding.<p>NFTs aren&#x27;t commodities or assets, they&#x27;re just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.</text></comment> |
12,883,142 | 12,880,759 | 1 | 3 | 12,879,850 | train | <story><title>H265: Technical Overview</title><url>https://sonnati.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/h265-part-i-technical-overview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryuuchin</author><text>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see the adoption rate of h265&#x2F;HEVC and whether it will actually take off since the licensing costs seem to be prohibitively expensive[1].<p>AV1 may wind up being the defacto winner because of this even if it means we have to wait longer before any transition occurs. We may wind up sticking to h264 and VP9 longer despite hardware already shipping with h265&#x2F;HEVC support.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yro.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;0149234&#x2F;hevc-advance-announces-h265-royalty-rates-raises-some-hackles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yro.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;0149234&#x2F;hevc-advance...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amluto</author><text>I want someone to challenge one of the codec patents as a test case. It should even be possible to make a bit of performance art: get an old punch card machine or even a room full of people to decode a few small frames of H.265. It&#x27;ll work, it&#x27;s pure math, and, under Alice v. CLS, that should make it crystal clear that the mere addition of a computer cannot make it patentable.</text></comment> | <story><title>H265: Technical Overview</title><url>https://sonnati.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/h265-part-i-technical-overview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryuuchin</author><text>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see the adoption rate of h265&#x2F;HEVC and whether it will actually take off since the licensing costs seem to be prohibitively expensive[1].<p>AV1 may wind up being the defacto winner because of this even if it means we have to wait longer before any transition occurs. We may wind up sticking to h264 and VP9 longer despite hardware already shipping with h265&#x2F;HEVC support.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yro.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;0149234&#x2F;hevc-advance-announces-h265-royalty-rates-raises-some-hackles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yro.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;15&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;0149234&#x2F;hevc-advance...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>revelation</author><text>It has taken off among pirates alright.<p>(There is a noticeable battery life penalty for h265 content though)</text></comment> |
13,057,693 | 13,056,629 | 1 | 3 | 13,049,584 | train | <story><title>Simplify Your Message, and Repeat Often</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/business/john-lilly-simplify-your-message-and-repeat-often.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dceddia</author><text>This is a really interesting point:<p><i>When I was a V.C. at first, I would just ask my questions and kind of poke, poke, poke, poke. And now I’ll say: “Look, I’m going to ask some things, and this might be kind of awkward, but I’m just going to say it, and let’s work our way through it. And it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you and your company. I just want to understand where you are and what you think. I’m going to ask some things and they might be wrong, but let’s figure some things out together.”</i><p>--<p>I&#x27;ve noticed that people have different assumptions about what it <i>means</i> to ask questions. Some folks (like the interviewee here) just ask away, because they want information -- their questions have no malicious intent behind them.<p>But on the receiving side, this can cause problems. Some people, when asked probing questions (or any questions at all), will get defensive. Just the fact that someone is <i>asking</i> must mean they think something is <i>wrong</i>. Questions like &quot;Why did you choose Node.js instead of Java?&quot; can be (and I think often are) interpreted as &quot;The questioner thinks I made the wrong choice, so I have to defend my choice now.&quot;<p>People in the tech community seem particularly affected by this assumption. Interesting that this VC ran into that problem too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Simplify Your Message, and Repeat Often</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/business/john-lilly-simplify-your-message-and-repeat-often.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adamjernst</author><text>&gt; The other thing I would say is to stay close to professions that create and make things, and stay away from derivative professions like finance. I think makers increasingly have the power in our society.<p>Wow, interesting words from someone who works in finance.</text></comment> |
12,626,521 | 12,626,574 | 1 | 3 | 12,626,319 | train | <story><title>Examples of How City Services Privatization Leads to Inequality Are Piling Up</title><url>https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/privatization-water-utilities-inequality-poverty</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>I consider myself a relatively gung-ho free-market type, where it&#x27;s appropriate. Utility and transport networks are one place where it isn&#x27;t appropriate. This is for three fundamental reasons:<p>1. A free-market dynamic requires an actual market. If the buyer can&#x27;t chose among competing sellers, then it&#x27;s not a market. At the grocery store you can choose from among many different sellers: that&#x27;s a functional market. The point where your plumbing connects to the water main, simply isn&#x27;t.<p>2. The entire purpose of infrastructure is to generate positive externalities. Ready availability of transport, water and electricity, etc., makes it easy and desirable to do business in a place and with each other. This leads to emergent urban economies, where mutual comparative advantage among a heterogeneous population leads to mutually beneficial exchange, which in turn leads to more growth and prosperity for everyone. The fewer low-level frictions, the more prosperous everyone becomes. But capturing value at the point-of-use -- which is what private operators generally do -- creates a low-level friction with substantial knock-on effects. Every dollar you extract from the farebox of a public transport system, for example, is many dollars removed from the wider economy. It&#x27;s much more appropriate to subsidise the infrastructure networks and then tax the positive externalities (via sales, income, and property taxes) <i>after</i> the uplift has been created.<p>3. There are broader socio-economic issues of accessibility to services that profit-driven companies have no incentive to be responsive to.</text></comment> | <story><title>Examples of How City Services Privatization Leads to Inequality Are Piling Up</title><url>https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/privatization-water-utilities-inequality-poverty</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>csomar</author><text>These are examples of monopolies, and not free market. I think, and it&#x27;s my opinion: If you make something private in a <i>free</i> market, it&#x27;s always good for quality and prices.<p>There are two possibilities that can make this promise false:<p>1. The market is not free. For example, a metro subway. It&#x27;s a monopoly. You can&#x27;t have 6 subway lines and you pick one of them.<p>2. The market was heavily financed by tax payers money. For example, a bus route that it is not profitable but still running for the benefit of the few poor people using it. This can happen in a government situation but not in a private situation.</text></comment> |
4,079,581 | 4,079,445 | 1 | 2 | 4,078,635 | train | <story><title>From being a programmer to becoming an entrepreneur - Lesson 0</title><url>http://blog.sidu.in/2012/06/engineering-to-business-lesson-0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thomasnext</author><text>"Identify mature, experienced people who can give you candid feedback. It's even better if they're your colleagues. Favour a diverse group with people who have different priorities."<p>This is a great tip. I just realized that my more senior friends mention their "grey beard" older CS friends. I guess I need to pick up some mentors!</text></comment> | <story><title>From being a programmer to becoming an entrepreneur - Lesson 0</title><url>http://blog.sidu.in/2012/06/engineering-to-business-lesson-0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>known</author><text>"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw</text></comment> |
4,062,809 | 4,062,819 | 1 | 2 | 4,062,695 | train | <story><title>Every Black Hole Contains a New Universe</title><url>http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content/every-black-hole-contains-new-universe/566</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cft</author><text>In Einstein's theory of general relativity, Riemann tensor is assumed to be symmetric, due to great simplification of the theory compared to the one with non-symmetric Riemann tensor, and an absolute lack of experimental evidence to the contrary for 100 years since it was discoveried. Torsion, which is the cause of asymmetry of the Riemann tensor is set to zero. I do not know why this author is so excited about torsion tensor, the idea that torsion could be non-zero has been around for at least 90 years, but got zero traction. Disclaimer : I have a phd in string theory.</text></comment> | <story><title>Every Black Hole Contains a New Universe</title><url>http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content/every-black-hole-contains-new-universe/566</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>taliesinb</author><text>Of course headlines have to be catchy, but this universe-in-a-black-hole concept is hardly a new one. Rather, the novel part here seems to be the idea that the connection in GR might might possess non-zero torsion, contrary to what is normally assumed.<p>In the whole black-holes-create-universes vein, last century the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin presented the quite delicious idea (described in his book The Life Of the Cosmos) that entire universes might be subject to the process of natural selection.<p>This would work if singularity formation involves the transmission of physical constants to the 'daughter' universe with slight modification, quite a thing to suppose given we don't really know what physical constants 'mean'.<p>If it occurred, this natural selection would optimize these constants for the production of black holes, which luckily for us co-incides with the production of life-bearing stars. Of course, all very unfalsifiable, but kinda epic.</text></comment> |
4,229,486 | 4,229,447 | 1 | 2 | 4,229,108 | train | <story><title>Aaron Winborn: Special Needs Trust</title><url>http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/special-needs-trust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jnoller</author><text>It doesn’t matter what community he is part of, nor who he is. He’s a hacker, a father of two beautiful girls and a husband. He’s being robbed of his life, and his daughters robbed of their father.<p>What matters is we can help. All of us — some of us (me) have been lucky enough to get help and support when we needed it most from people we didn’t expect it from.<p>We can help him; we can help his family. Even if only a little, and even though we know what the future will hold. So let's just do it.<p>Skip the squabbling over politics; national healthcare, etc. It <i>doesn't matter</i> - <i>what matters is him and his family, right now</i>.</text></comment> | <story><title>Aaron Winborn: Special Needs Trust</title><url>http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/special-needs-trust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ap22213</author><text>I've heard of several cases of programmers getting ALS. This seemed statistically unlikely, since the ALS site stated that only 5 in 100,000 acquired the disease.<p>Then, I googled "programmers ALS" and found this study:
<a href="http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/162/12/1146.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/162/12/1146.abstract</a><p>It suggests that programmers do have higher risks. (Still, keep in mind that the study is small, and even if there are increased risks, the odds are still low.)</text></comment> |
10,914,278 | 10,914,324 | 1 | 2 | 10,913,358 | train | <story><title>The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WyhlRetU0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bemmu</author><text>Scoopex has a video series of Amiga demo programming starting all the way from the basics of using an assembler: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10</a><p>I would have killed for this back when I had an A500. It seemed like dark magic and all I could find was a book on ASM game programming tricks, which was too advanced for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>13of40</author><text>I can&#x27;t remember where I found the documentation for it, but I was able to do some pretty bad-ass stuff with a 68K assembler and an Amiga 1000. IIRC, there was a pointer at a well-known memory location that was the head of a linked list of all the OS libraries, so it was really easy to bootstrap to the point where you could set the screen mode and allocate some buffers for video memory, then you just drew on them like a canvas. The location of video memory was based on a not-quite-turing-complete &quot;script&quot; that the copper(?) chip read -- e.g. when a guru meditation error was showing at the top of the screen, the copper chip script was saying &quot;start reading at 0x2222222 and when the raster gets to row 60 start reading at 0x4444444...&quot;. You could do freaky stuff with that script, like draw &quot;pixels&quot; of any of the 4096 possible colors, that would end up being about 8 real pixels wide by one high, which begat raster bars and blocky scrolling text. Ah, but nowadays you can&#x27;t touch the bare metal, and there&#x27;s nary an API that does anything but crash when you try to use it in an unintended way.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WyhlRetU0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bemmu</author><text>Scoopex has a video series of Amiga demo programming starting all the way from the basics of using an assembler: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10</a><p>I would have killed for this back when I had an A500. It seemed like dark magic and all I could find was a book on ASM game programming tricks, which was too advanced for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jupe</author><text>Actually, I learned 68000 assembly by hex-dumping a freeware assembler to find the full set of OpCodes and some reverse engineering. That, combined with some trial and error (and a few magazine articles that actually had a little bit of ASM {} C), and I was able to do some very cool stuff pretty quickly).<p>Boy, I miss those days :(</text></comment> |
9,960,949 | 9,961,038 | 1 | 2 | 9,960,715 | train | <story><title>Which oils are best to cook with?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33675975</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>Over the years I&#x27;ve learned to take advice like this with a large grain of salt. Every couple of years this sort of advice seems to get reversed. I still remember reading about olive oil being bad for frying because it was supposedly less resistant to high temperatures and decomposed into something not too healthy.<p>It&#x27;s been the same with eggs, coffee, and many other things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>forgetsusername</author><text>&gt;<i>I still remember reading about olive oil being bad for frying because it was supposedly less resistant to high temperatures and decomposed into something not too healthy.</i><p>This hasn&#x27;t changed. Olive oil has one of the lowest smoke points of all cooking oils. Once it&#x27;s burning, you&#x27;re eating all kinds of things, some of which aren&#x27;t good for you.<p>[<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seriouseats.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;cooking-fats-101-whats-a-smoke-point-and-why-does-it-matter.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seriouseats.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;cooking-fats-101-whats-a-...</a>]</text></comment> | <story><title>Which oils are best to cook with?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33675975</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>Over the years I&#x27;ve learned to take advice like this with a large grain of salt. Every couple of years this sort of advice seems to get reversed. I still remember reading about olive oil being bad for frying because it was supposedly less resistant to high temperatures and decomposed into something not too healthy.<p>It&#x27;s been the same with eggs, coffee, and many other things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chongli</author><text>That&#x27;s because &quot;olive oil&quot; is not a monolithic substance, it is a category of substances. Extra light olive oil, which is clearer and lacking most of the flavour compounds and solids of extra virgin olive oil, is just fine for frying and sautéing.</text></comment> |
12,741,458 | 12,741,570 | 1 | 2 | 12,741,229 | train | <story><title>An empirical study on the impact of C++ lambdas and programmer experience</title><url>http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N03390</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>porges</author><text>&gt; After instructions, participants were given printouts of sample code they could refer to while solving tasks. Group Lambda got code of a C++ program using lambda expressions and group Iterator received code of the same program written using iterators. They then had time to study the samples before starting the tasks and could refer to these samples later.<p>These samples do not appear in the paper, so we don&#x27;t know what they saw.<p>The “iterators” discussed are Java-&#x2F;C#-style iterators, not C++ ones (as I expected reading the abstract).<p>In a C++ context I would have expected lambdas vs iterators to be something like:<p><pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; lambda
float retVal = 0;
std::for_each(mb.cbegin(), mb.cend(), [&amp;](item x) { retVal += item.price; });
return retVal;
&#x2F;&#x2F; pure iterator
float retVal = 0;
for (auto it = mb.cbegin(); it != mb.cend(); ++it)
{
retVal += it-&gt;price;
}
return retVal;
</code></pre>
... and the first would be better off as:<p><pre><code> return std::accumulate(mb.cbegin(), mb.cend(), 0f,
[](float acc, item x) { return acc + x.price; });
</code></pre>
I think the need to use ref-capture (since you only get a side-effecting `std::function` to play with in their sample) would be the thing most likely to throw people off – as it’s something that should be avoided in most code, anyway ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaulingMonkey</author><text>Yeah - from what I can see, neither interface looks like idiomatic C++.<p>EDIT: Looks like you beat me to the punch on some of these ;)<p>Instead of:<p><pre><code> float getSum(marketBasket mb) {
float retVal = 0;
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
marketBasket::iterator iter = mb.begin();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
retVal += iter.get().price;
iter.next();
}
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return retVal;
}
</code></pre>
I&#x27;d rather see real SC++L compatible iterators (as hopefully taught) and saner naming:<p><pre><code> float getSum(marketBasket market) {
float sum = 0;
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
for (marketBasket::iterator item = market.begin(); item != market.end(); ++item) {
sum += item-&gt;price;
}
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return sum;
}
</code></pre>
And instead of being pre-provided with a function &lt;void(item)&gt;, if I&#x27;m reading the pdf correctly:<p><pre><code> float getSum(marketBasket mb) {
float retVal = 0;
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
function &lt;void(item)&gt; func = [&amp;](item theItem) {
retVal += theItem.price;
};
mb.iterateOverItems(func);
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return retVal;
}
</code></pre>
I&#x27;d rather see:<p><pre><code> float getSum(marketBasket market) {
float sum = 0;
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
market.for_each([&amp;](item theItem) {
sum += theItem.price;
});
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return sum;
}
</code></pre>
Or venturing into the far more functional style, where lambdas start to shine for me, personally:<p><pre><code> float getSum(std::vector&lt;item&gt; market) {
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return std::accumulate(market.begin(), market.end(), 0.0f, [&amp;](float sum, item theItem) {
return sum + theItem.price;
});
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
}
</code></pre>
It looks a bit better in C# where your selection of standard functions is a little less anemic and a little nicer to use:<p><pre><code> float GetSum(MarketBasket market) {
&#x2F;&#x2F; Implement solution here
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
return market.Sum(item =&gt; item.Price);
&#x2F;&#x2F; ---------
}</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>An empirical study on the impact of C++ lambdas and programmer experience</title><url>http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N03390</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>porges</author><text>&gt; After instructions, participants were given printouts of sample code they could refer to while solving tasks. Group Lambda got code of a C++ program using lambda expressions and group Iterator received code of the same program written using iterators. They then had time to study the samples before starting the tasks and could refer to these samples later.<p>These samples do not appear in the paper, so we don&#x27;t know what they saw.<p>The “iterators” discussed are Java-&#x2F;C#-style iterators, not C++ ones (as I expected reading the abstract).<p>In a C++ context I would have expected lambdas vs iterators to be something like:<p><pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; lambda
float retVal = 0;
std::for_each(mb.cbegin(), mb.cend(), [&amp;](item x) { retVal += item.price; });
return retVal;
&#x2F;&#x2F; pure iterator
float retVal = 0;
for (auto it = mb.cbegin(); it != mb.cend(); ++it)
{
retVal += it-&gt;price;
}
return retVal;
</code></pre>
... and the first would be better off as:<p><pre><code> return std::accumulate(mb.cbegin(), mb.cend(), 0f,
[](float acc, item x) { return acc + x.price; });
</code></pre>
I think the need to use ref-capture (since you only get a side-effecting `std::function` to play with in their sample) would be the thing most likely to throw people off – as it’s something that should be avoided in most code, anyway ;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Karliss</author><text>First two tests used lambda with custom for each method. If authors used real c++ iterators and for each loop it would become obvious that comparing iterators and lambdas at iterating is the same as comparing lambdas with if statements at being if statements.</text></comment> |
27,202,849 | 27,200,275 | 1 | 2 | 27,197,296 | train | <story><title>Uber Engineering Tricks of the Trade: Tuning JVM Memory for Large-Scale Services</title><url>https://eng.uber.com/jvm-tuning-garbage-collection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StreamBright</author><text>Using Hadoop like it was 2014 again too.<p>I am surprised how much legacy inefficient crap is lingering around in companies like Uber.</text></item><item><author>_old_dude_</author><text>Tuning GCs like it was 2014 again.<p>It&#x27;s a little bit sad that they did not hire an expert.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xbadcafebee</author><text>Large companies operate almost entirely on legacy inefficient crap. It&#x27;s often the case that the thing that makes them the most money is running on giant old barely-supported piles of shit.<p>People <i>constantly</i> underestimate the fact that &gt;80% of the cost of software is maintenance. Upgrades and patches and redesigns&#x2F;refactors and following modern conventions costs 4x more than the cost it took to build it. But nobody puts that in their budget. And then later people find this huge pile of legacy shit, and think, wow, this company really screwed up. But in fact this is totally normal.<p>By the way, this is the case because of how we develop software and hardware, not because they are some inscrutable element that can&#x27;t possibly be built once and maintained for a lifetime (like, say, a building). We just don&#x27;t build it to last.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber Engineering Tricks of the Trade: Tuning JVM Memory for Large-Scale Services</title><url>https://eng.uber.com/jvm-tuning-garbage-collection/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StreamBright</author><text>Using Hadoop like it was 2014 again too.<p>I am surprised how much legacy inefficient crap is lingering around in companies like Uber.</text></item><item><author>_old_dude_</author><text>Tuning GCs like it was 2014 again.<p>It&#x27;s a little bit sad that they did not hire an expert.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavitheran</author><text>What should be used instead of Hadoop DFS in 2021?</text></comment> |
39,846,243 | 39,844,187 | 1 | 3 | 39,839,629 | train | <story><title>The window for great-grandmothers is closing</title><url>https://memoirsandrambles.substack.com/p/the-window-for-great-grandmothers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Afton</author><text>The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I&#x27;ll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I&#x27;d expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example).<p>Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won&#x27;t be bleak if they do.</text></item><item><author>CalRobert</author><text>If you haven&#x27;t read the article, it&#x27;s about how people having kids later means you won&#x27;t meet your great grandparents.<p>My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I&#x27;m in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40&#x27;s herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.<p>Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30&#x27;s they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.<p>My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.<p>I don&#x27;t really have a single point here, except that I worry we&#x27;ve ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30&#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crimsontech</author><text>I had my first daughter when I was 20 and grew up very quickly, I can distinctly remember it hitting me like a bus that I was now wholly responsible for a human.<p>She is an adult now and I couldn’t be any prouder of all she has achieved in life so far.<p>I also had two more kids in my 30s. It’s harder when you are older, but I’m financially better off so they can have things I couldn’t afford in my 20s. I do have more work responsibilities but it’s balanced by working from home so I get to be a big part of their lives, taking them to school, here when they get home, etc.<p>There are benefits either way, but I think if you are committed to being a decent parent, having them younger has more benefits in the long term. You get to be around for more of lives too.</text></comment> | <story><title>The window for great-grandmothers is closing</title><url>https://memoirsandrambles.substack.com/p/the-window-for-great-grandmothers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Afton</author><text>The upside is that I was a total basket case in my 20s, completely incompetent to be able to raise a child. I&#x27;ll leave it to my children on how it turned out in my 30s. Generally I&#x27;d expect older adults to have done a lot more maturing and increased ability to emotionally regulate, which is a really critical ability when dealing with the 4th day of 3 hours of sleep and a colicky baby (for example).<p>Also no point. But honestly, if you want people to have kids earlier, you need to make them think that their life won&#x27;t be bleak if they do.</text></item><item><author>CalRobert</author><text>If you haven&#x27;t read the article, it&#x27;s about how people having kids later means you won&#x27;t meet your great grandparents.<p>My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I&#x27;m in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40&#x27;s herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.<p>Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30&#x27;s they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.<p>My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.<p>I don&#x27;t really have a single point here, except that I worry we&#x27;ve ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30&#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwells89</author><text>Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid at 22 would’ve been a mess to say the least. Looking back at that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn’t much more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk into a bar who wouldn’t get his head screwed on quite right for another 6 years or so at minimum.</text></comment> |
17,770,463 | 17,769,613 | 1 | 3 | 17,768,369 | train | <story><title>Reversing the effects of long programming sessions</title><url>https://www.poppastring.com/blog/ReversingTheEffectsOfLongProgrammingSessions.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wainstead</author><text>All true, but neither should we deny ourselves a long session of &quot;flow&quot; if it makes us happy.</text></item><item><author>mariopt</author><text>We need to restrict the amount of hours we spend in front of computers per day and take weekends completely off. There are so many downsides: blue light that damages your vision, lack of exercise, depression and other disorders, missing out on social life, etc.<p>There is a direct relation between productivity and having a life put together. Not taking care of ourselves (programmers) could have lead to disaster: mental disorders, burnout, leaving a well payed job, etc.<p>Lately I&#x27;ve stop giving a damn about deadlines like I used to. Money is nice but mental health does not has a price. The moment you enter the rabbit hole of antidepressants you&#x27;re already ripping your soul.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>I&#x27;m finding that &#x27;flow&#x27; is a significant contributor to NIH Syndrome.<p>You can&#x27;t flow while integrating a third party library anywhere near as easily as you can flow by rewriting half of it (badly) from scratch.<p>Flow is a rush. Anything that is a rush can be indulged in to the point of self- (or other-) harm.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reversing the effects of long programming sessions</title><url>https://www.poppastring.com/blog/ReversingTheEffectsOfLongProgrammingSessions.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wainstead</author><text>All true, but neither should we deny ourselves a long session of &quot;flow&quot; if it makes us happy.</text></item><item><author>mariopt</author><text>We need to restrict the amount of hours we spend in front of computers per day and take weekends completely off. There are so many downsides: blue light that damages your vision, lack of exercise, depression and other disorders, missing out on social life, etc.<p>There is a direct relation between productivity and having a life put together. Not taking care of ourselves (programmers) could have lead to disaster: mental disorders, burnout, leaving a well payed job, etc.<p>Lately I&#x27;ve stop giving a damn about deadlines like I used to. Money is nice but mental health does not has a price. The moment you enter the rabbit hole of antidepressants you&#x27;re already ripping your soul.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxxxxx</author><text>That&#x27;s why it would be good to get paid by hour. When I was freelancer when things flowed I sometimes worked 24+ hours straight through or had several 16 hours days. But then I had other days when I got nothing done and took off. In a salaried position the company takes the long &quot;flow&quot; session for free but still expects you to be there the next day.</text></comment> |
25,965,589 | 25,963,336 | 1 | 2 | 25,957,820 | train | <story><title>Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/johnson-johnson-covid-vaccine-trial-1.5893009</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m12k</author><text>I originally thought the Oxford&#x2F;AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly behind the mRNA vaccines in efficacy. But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. So there&#x27;s a very real chance that behind that ~95% number the mRNA vaccines also had asymptomatic cases that were never discovered during trials, and the actual protection is nearly the same as the Oxford one. The mRNA vaccines still seem like a great leap forward, and they don&#x27;t come with the potential complications of resistance to the vector virus that adenovirus-based vaccines do - but I&#x27;m less sure now that they actually offer better protection overall.</text></item><item><author>tpmx</author><text>The mRNA vaccines are obviously the gold standard, they&#x27;re what you want, if you&#x27;re in a position to pick.<p>The traditional vaccines, like this one and the Astra Zeneca one appear to be efficient at preventing hospitalization&#x2F;death. That&#x27;s great - it will ease the extreme load on the hospitals, and also reduce deaths greatly.<p>What I&#x27;m concerned about is the long-term chronical diseases that&#x27;s been reported (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;in-depth&#x2F;coronavirus-long-term-effects&#x2F;art-20490351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;i...</a>), hitting a substantial part of the infected.<p>We need more clarity to which degree the non-mRNA-vaccines prevent these pretty horrobile chronic diseases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlyle</author><text>No. AstraZeneca <i>also</i> tested with weekly PCR surveillance. But the efficacy numbers we&#x27;re comparing between AstraZeneca and the mRNA vaccines are measures of how often they prevents symptomatic illness-- a very similar standard to that used in the Moderna and Pfizer trials (but not absolutely, directly comparable).<p>Unfortunately, the AZ trial is a mess. One way it was a mess is that the error bars on how much they prevent all illness (not just symptomatic illness) go all the way down to 1%.</text></comment> | <story><title>Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccine appears 66% effective in global trial</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/johnson-johnson-covid-vaccine-trial-1.5893009</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m12k</author><text>I originally thought the Oxford&#x2F;AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly behind the mRNA vaccines in efficacy. But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms. So there&#x27;s a very real chance that behind that ~95% number the mRNA vaccines also had asymptomatic cases that were never discovered during trials, and the actual protection is nearly the same as the Oxford one. The mRNA vaccines still seem like a great leap forward, and they don&#x27;t come with the potential complications of resistance to the vector virus that adenovirus-based vaccines do - but I&#x27;m less sure now that they actually offer better protection overall.</text></item><item><author>tpmx</author><text>The mRNA vaccines are obviously the gold standard, they&#x27;re what you want, if you&#x27;re in a position to pick.<p>The traditional vaccines, like this one and the Astra Zeneca one appear to be efficient at preventing hospitalization&#x2F;death. That&#x27;s great - it will ease the extreme load on the hospitals, and also reduce deaths greatly.<p>What I&#x27;m concerned about is the long-term chronical diseases that&#x27;s been reported (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;in-depth&#x2F;coronavirus-long-term-effects&#x2F;art-20490351" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mayoclinic.org&#x2F;diseases-conditions&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;i...</a>), hitting a substantial part of the infected.<p>We need more clarity to which degree the non-mRNA-vaccines prevent these pretty horrobile chronic diseases.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpmx</author><text>&gt; But then I learned that the Oxford trials PCR-tested every participant regularly, while the Pfizer and Moderna trials only tested participants that were showing symptoms.<p>That seems substantial, weird and important. Source?</text></comment> |
10,135,529 | 10,135,027 | 1 | 2 | 10,134,942 | train | <story><title>Moving forward with work on the D language and foundation</title><url>http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andralex</author><text>This is he. AMA!</text></comment> | <story><title>Moving forward with work on the D language and foundation</title><url>http://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nnq</author><text>Awesome, and congrats to AA! We have an all out languages war ahead with D vs. Rust vs Go. I&#x27;m sure <i>tons of innovations</i> will come out of this that will benefit us all!<p>(Yeah, I get it that the languages target different niches <i>in theory</i>, but there will be significant overlap among the people who use them, I&#x27;m sure...)</text></comment> |
40,053,338 | 40,053,692 | 1 | 3 | 40,051,597 | train | <story><title>To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/gambling-young-men-sports-betting-crypto-meme-stock-market-addiction-2024-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Verdex</author><text>There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!).<p>Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.<p>One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.<p>It&#x27;s more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.</text></item><item><author>jjice</author><text>As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.<p>It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they&#x27;ve never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.<p>Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. &quot;I usually win&quot; or &quot;I only gamble what I come in with&quot;, but the latter isn&#x27;t true and I&#x27;ve seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could &quot;win it all back&quot; at the roulette table.<p>It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it&#x27;s such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.<p>Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wmanley</author><text>Found it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0VFgzneS0Dw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0VFgzneS0Dw</a></text></comment> | <story><title>To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/gambling-young-men-sports-betting-crypto-meme-stock-market-addiction-2024-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Verdex</author><text>There was an old Casino parody film from the mid 90s (iirc Mafia!).<p>Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.<p>One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.<p>It&#x27;s more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.</text></item><item><author>jjice</author><text>As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.<p>It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they&#x27;ve never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.<p>Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. &quot;I usually win&quot; or &quot;I only gamble what I come in with&quot;, but the latter isn&#x27;t true and I&#x27;ve seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could &quot;win it all back&quot; at the roulette table.<p>It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it&#x27;s such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.<p>Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Slow_Hand</author><text>This is a slightly different topic (government spending), but I&#x27;ve always loved this old Onion News Network video: &#x27;Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?&#x27;. The sentiment feels the same to me:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ</a></text></comment> |
10,574,990 | 10,573,814 | 1 | 3 | 10,573,399 | train | <story><title>Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8</title><url>https://github.com/winterbe/java8-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mabbo</author><text>My Java code has improve dramatically since I started (ab)using Optionals.<p><pre><code> String foo = Optional.ofNullable(paramater)
.filter(...)
.map(a -&gt; ...)
.map(b -&gt; ...)
.orElseGet(() -&gt; ...)
.orElse(defaultValue)
</code></pre>
Between this kind of thing, and similar playing with Streams, some of the ugliest code I work with is suddenly quite clear, coherent, understandable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8</title><url>https://github.com/winterbe/java8-tutorial</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>struppi</author><text>This is a really nice overview of the new Java 8 features. I like how this tutorial communicates mostly with code snippets and has &quot;read more&quot; links for most topics.<p>If you are using Java and have not tried Lambda Expressions, method references and default methods, do so now! After that, you&#x27;ll think &quot;How was I able to live without that?&quot;.<p>I also think that the way Java integrates lambda expressions (via functional interfaces) is really nice. Sure, you have to write some boilerplate code in some scenarios. But since they re-used interfaces and did not event some &quot;function&quot; type (or similar), it fits really nicely into the existing language.<p>If you don&#x27;t know Java, this tutorial will probably not be enough - But that probably wasn&#x27;t the intentian anyway. It&#x27;s a great intro to what has changed with Java 8 (and all those changes are real improvements for the Java language, IMHO).</text></comment> |
9,127,622 | 9,126,217 | 1 | 2 | 9,125,912 | train | <story><title>8cc: A Small C Compiler</title><url>https://github.com/rui314/8cc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>orangea</author><text>This is an interesting design decision:<p>&gt; No memory management is a memory management scheme in 8cc. Memory regions allocated using malloc are never freed until the process terminates. That has greatly simplified the code and the APIs because 1) you can write code as if garbage collector were present, and 2) that design decision has eliminated use-after-free bugs entirely.</text></comment> | <story><title>8cc: A Small C Compiler</title><url>https://github.com/rui314/8cc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sanxiyn</author><text>If you like a hobby C compiler, check nwcc(Nils Weller&#x27;s C Compiler) too.<p><a href="http://nwcc.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nwcc.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a><p>nwcc is a bit more mature. It supports multiple architectures, multiple OSes, and it can bootstrap GCC.</text></comment> |
13,410,477 | 13,407,865 | 1 | 2 | 13,406,638 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>aduffy</author><text>The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena.<p>Each section contains a story of some situation he was in where he faced a problem which he solved by applying one of various algo techniques (DP, divide and conquer, etc.). After reading CLRS for a class, it was nice to see how some of the most common textbook algorithms have been applied by a notable computer scientist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amai</author><text>This book is highly overrated. Algorithms by Sedgewick (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;algs4.cs.princeton.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;algs4.cs.princeton.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;</a>) is a much better book for learning and understanding algorithms. Skienas book is a simple collection of (sometimes very exotic) algorithms. It won&#x27;t teach you anything, it will only tell you what exists.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>aduffy</author><text>The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena.<p>Each section contains a story of some situation he was in where he faced a problem which he solved by applying one of various algo techniques (DP, divide and conquer, etc.). After reading CLRS for a class, it was nice to see how some of the most common textbook algorithms have been applied by a notable computer scientist.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgrouchy</author><text>This is a great book. I love the approach, it really helps with one of the main problems with using algorithms or design patterns even and that is problem identification. There are a bunch of problems that are way easier to solve if you recognize the solution exists in dynamic programming for example, but if you don&#x27;t they become very hard.</text></comment> |
8,824,724 | 8,824,541 | 1 | 2 | 8,824,282 | train | <story><title>One day left to help Internet Archive reach its donation goal</title><url>https://archive.org/donate/?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unicornporn</author><text>I really dig the basic idea of the IA and I&#x27;m an avid user of the site. But, it kind of scares me that they in one sentence say that they will &quot;make our cultural treasures accessible to everyone. Forever.&quot; and in the next one asks for money to make it happen. &quot;Forever&quot; is a bold statement and I can&#x27;t be the only one that sees a contradiction in this. I guess what they&#x27;re saying is: if the money runs out the data will disappear.<p>I&#x27;ve worked closely with archivists and preservationists in the cultural heritage sector and I know that to keep the sacred promise of saving something for an eternity you have to have strategies for what you save in the first place. However, I don&#x27;t see a clear strategy with the IA. The Internet Archive (not the Wayback Machine part of it) is basically a site where I can upload whatever digital litter I like as long as it&#x27;s not protected by copyright and they (without questions asked) store it &quot;forever&quot;. It&#x27;s fantastic in a sense. But is it sustainable in the long run?<p>For the the Wayback Machine I can force a snapshot of a site whenever I like and as often as I please. I stumbled across the snapshot for this page today [ <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140415000000*/http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains-16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140415000000*&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econo...</a> ] and I think it illustrates what I&#x27;m trying to say. During march 2014 there was up to 4 snapshots a day, while august did not have a single snapshot. I guess people where trigger happy with the &quot;Save Page Now&quot; [ <a href="https://archive.org/web/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;</a> ] feature when the article got publicity. Could it perhaps be a better idea to snapshot at certain times and find smart algos that can detect important changes in the page?<p>I&#x27;d love to hear some replies to my criticism. I say what I say because I love the IA and I hope it&#x27;s being taken care of in a way that will truly make it be there forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HackinOut</author><text><i>&quot;make our cultural treasures accessible to everyone. Forever.&quot;</i><p>They&#x27;re stating their mission and then asking for donations. At least that&#x27;s how I see it. There is no endeavor that is guaranteed to succeed. Money isn&#x27;t the only problem they are facing.<p>I personally greatly prefer that statement to something like &quot;if the money runs out, we&#x27;ll have to close IA. Please donate.&quot; which somehow sounds like blackmailing. EDIT: The former doesn&#x27;t feel like marketing to me, might lead more people to donate and I would expect most of us (like you and me) to understand that they do not make any promises, except doing their best.</text></comment> | <story><title>One day left to help Internet Archive reach its donation goal</title><url>https://archive.org/donate/?1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unicornporn</author><text>I really dig the basic idea of the IA and I&#x27;m an avid user of the site. But, it kind of scares me that they in one sentence say that they will &quot;make our cultural treasures accessible to everyone. Forever.&quot; and in the next one asks for money to make it happen. &quot;Forever&quot; is a bold statement and I can&#x27;t be the only one that sees a contradiction in this. I guess what they&#x27;re saying is: if the money runs out the data will disappear.<p>I&#x27;ve worked closely with archivists and preservationists in the cultural heritage sector and I know that to keep the sacred promise of saving something for an eternity you have to have strategies for what you save in the first place. However, I don&#x27;t see a clear strategy with the IA. The Internet Archive (not the Wayback Machine part of it) is basically a site where I can upload whatever digital litter I like as long as it&#x27;s not protected by copyright and they (without questions asked) store it &quot;forever&quot;. It&#x27;s fantastic in a sense. But is it sustainable in the long run?<p>For the the Wayback Machine I can force a snapshot of a site whenever I like and as often as I please. I stumbled across the snapshot for this page today [ <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140415000000*/http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains-16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140415000000*&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econo...</a> ] and I think it illustrates what I&#x27;m trying to say. During march 2014 there was up to 4 snapshots a day, while august did not have a single snapshot. I guess people where trigger happy with the &quot;Save Page Now&quot; [ <a href="https://archive.org/web/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;</a> ] feature when the article got publicity. Could it perhaps be a better idea to snapshot at certain times and find smart algos that can detect important changes in the page?<p>I&#x27;d love to hear some replies to my criticism. I say what I say because I love the IA and I hope it&#x27;s being taken care of in a way that will truly make it be there forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spacefight</author><text>&quot;if the money runs out the data will disappear.&quot;<p>I wouldn&#x27;t expect anything else - data storage is cheap these days but not free.<p>The same can happen when physical archives (private and&#x2F;or state run) are not properly maintained because of lack of funds.</text></comment> |
37,205,234 | 37,204,953 | 1 | 2 | 37,203,945 | train | <story><title>Changing its name tanked X's downloads in App Store and Play Store</title><url>https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/08/19/seufert-x-downloads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bashtoni</author><text>You have wonder if the plan was to buy Twitter specifically to kill it.<p>If that&#x27;s the case, Musk is doing brilliantly - plenty of scope for plausible deniability while succeeding at his goal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atleastoptimal</author><text>0% chance he&#x27;s doing that but it&#x27;s funny to think that he is.<p>Obviously he really does want it to be an everything app. Musk is very transparent about his ambitions and feelings. He&#x27;s not someone to bear holding a secret, he&#x27;d want to share it so he could get the validation from telling people about his plans and his followers will act like he&#x27;s already succeeded.</text></comment> | <story><title>Changing its name tanked X's downloads in App Store and Play Store</title><url>https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/08/19/seufert-x-downloads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bashtoni</author><text>You have wonder if the plan was to buy Twitter specifically to kill it.<p>If that&#x27;s the case, Musk is doing brilliantly - plenty of scope for plausible deniability while succeeding at his goal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nitwit005</author><text>He&#x27;s been so busy with Twitter that he&#x27;s being sued for not running Tesla. That&#x27;s a lot of effort just to shut a company down.</text></comment> |
19,023,356 | 19,022,364 | 1 | 2 | 19,021,658 | train | <story><title>TSMC Nanke 14 Factory Production Interruption Could Affect NVIDIA and Others</title><url>https://www.hardocp.com/news/2019/01/28/tsmc_nanke_14_factory_production_interruption_could_affect_nvidia_others</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxander</author><text>Every once in awhile, one hears about some accident like this one at a single, physical factory, followed by a laundry list of tech companies that are adversely effected. It powerfully demonstrates how awfully centralized microchip production is; individual plants can account for substantial fractions (or even majorities) of entire product categories, which means that individual incidents can have outsized effects. I don&#x27;t know if that sort of risk has been fully internalized by the tech sector.<p>For that matter, how specialized is the market for whichever high-purity chemicals were behind this incident? What portion of the semiconductor industry was purchasing from the same supplier? We may not have heard the last of this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pacificmint</author><text>It&#x27;s not just the tech industry that is concentrated like that. I think more and more industries have these insane levels of concentration.<p>In 2016, an explosion at a single industrial gas facility caused a whipped cream shortage in the US. [1] I mean in the scheme of world problems, that&#x27;s one we&#x27;ll survive, but it does illustrate how vulnerable a lot of our supply chains are.<p>In 2007, the shutdown of the Canadian Chalk River reactor caused worldwide shortages of isotopes used for medical imaging, with real life consequences for patients. [2]<p>There are probably countless other examples. In the end, its the direct consequence of the constant quest to lower production costs and increase efficiencies.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-deadly-explosion-behind-americas-whipped-cream-shortage&#x2F;511118&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-dead...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;business&#x2F;worldbusiness&#x2F;06reactor.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;business&#x2F;worldbusiness&#x2F;06...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>TSMC Nanke 14 Factory Production Interruption Could Affect NVIDIA and Others</title><url>https://www.hardocp.com/news/2019/01/28/tsmc_nanke_14_factory_production_interruption_could_affect_nvidia_others</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxander</author><text>Every once in awhile, one hears about some accident like this one at a single, physical factory, followed by a laundry list of tech companies that are adversely effected. It powerfully demonstrates how awfully centralized microchip production is; individual plants can account for substantial fractions (or even majorities) of entire product categories, which means that individual incidents can have outsized effects. I don&#x27;t know if that sort of risk has been fully internalized by the tech sector.<p>For that matter, how specialized is the market for whichever high-purity chemicals were behind this incident? What portion of the semiconductor industry was purchasing from the same supplier? We may not have heard the last of this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nomel</author><text>&gt; I don&#x27;t know if that sort of risk has been fully internalized by the tech sector.<p>It’s known and understood completely within any silicon company. If you can afford it, and it’s technically possible (no special deals or tech), you’ll require at least some functionality at a second fab. What you cannot do is immediately get a second fab up and running. There’s a surprising amount of process tuning, sometimes accommodating new device models, and design rule differences (they will not guarantee or sometimes even start if they’re not meet). It’s in no way turn-key if you’re anywhere near the limits of what the fab can do.</text></comment> |
19,346,086 | 19,344,657 | 1 | 3 | 19,343,398 | train | <story><title>A generalised solution to distributed consensus</title><url>https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/08/a-generalised-solution-to-distributed-consensus/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>karl_gluck</author><text>Is anyone else surprised at the relatively mild reaction to this result here on Hacker News? Only a couple dozen comments, and many are addressing other topics.<p>Can we take a second to appreciate that this result will rapidly become the first thing taught in every single distributed systems class? And if this holds as a generalization of trustful distributed consensus as a field, then she has defined its Turing Machine equivalent. And it is even remarkably easy to understand! That is wild!!<p>Props to the authors. Personally, this is going on the top of my “to memorize” list.</text></comment> | <story><title>A generalised solution to distributed consensus</title><url>https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/08/a-generalised-solution-to-distributed-consensus/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>0xb100db1ade</author><text>Would someone ELI5?</text></comment> |
1,554,899 | 1,554,918 | 1 | 2 | 1,554,656 | train | <story><title>What's wrong with 1975 programming</title><url>http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is one of the best systems programming articles I've read in a very long time. Short summary:<p>* Trust the VM system to figure out how to page things (hey, 'antirez, what's your take on that? You wrote an ad hoc pager for Redis.) instead of getting fancy, because if you get fancy you'll end up fighting with the VM system.<p>* Minimize memory accesses and minimize the likelihood that you'll compete with other cores for access to a cache line; for instance, instead of piecemeal allocations, make a large master allocation for a request and carve it out.<p>* Schedule threads in most-recently-busy order, so that when a thread goes to pick up a request it's maximally likely to have a pre-heated cache and resident set of variables to work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>If you have mostly big objects (relative to hardware page size) and the encoding in memory and when stored on disk are pretty similar, this is indeed a good idea (to trust the virtual memory I mean).<p>Otherwise... no way, if you have data structures everything is fragmented around (and you want to use a lot object sharing, caching, ... for performance, without to mention hash tables that are very cool at filling at least 1 byte of tons of pages even with 2% of data inside).<p>Also data structures can often be serialized on disk using 1/10 of the space.<p>Using the VM is cool, but not <i>so</i> generally applicable. The proxy stuff is perfect. Also on-disk DB is perfect using the VM the other way around, to get a memory-cache for free, if you <i>don't</i> need strict consistency (see MongoDB).</text></comment> | <story><title>What's wrong with 1975 programming</title><url>http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is one of the best systems programming articles I've read in a very long time. Short summary:<p>* Trust the VM system to figure out how to page things (hey, 'antirez, what's your take on that? You wrote an ad hoc pager for Redis.) instead of getting fancy, because if you get fancy you'll end up fighting with the VM system.<p>* Minimize memory accesses and minimize the likelihood that you'll compete with other cores for access to a cache line; for instance, instead of piecemeal allocations, make a large master allocation for a request and carve it out.<p>* Schedule threads in most-recently-busy order, so that when a thread goes to pick up a request it's maximally likely to have a pre-heated cache and resident set of variables to work with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Locke1689</author><text>It's pretty good. Maybe because I'm also a kernel developer, but these suggestions seem obvious to me. That is, instead of Varnish being novel and well-optimized, it appears that Varnish is pretty conventionally optimized and Squid is just a god-awful piece of development.<p>As he says, this is a 2006 architecture. VM, cache line-size d working set, MRU scheduling -- this is stuff that's been around for a while. If he were writing this article about a 2010 architecture it would look a bit different. For example, trying to minimize memory access is a laudable goal but in the normal data sets the cache is usually overwhelmed pretty quickly. A 2010 architecture would feature NUMA optimization, although his practice of allocating thread data on the thread stack actually helps this a fair bit (inadvertent?). If Varnish uses threading at a significant level, this kind of optimization is only going to get more significant over time. The modern CPU architecture product cycle goes through a kind of give and take -- it alternates between having just enough fast memory and not enough. Right now, we are just about smack dab in the middle of "just enough," but the next Intel release is projected to move to "not enough." Threaded programs in NUMA start to matter a whole lot more on 16, 32, 64 cores.<p>P.S. We actually just ignore 32-bit architectures. Even modern commodity CPUs don't have them and anyone running a server architecture with only 4 GB of RAM has bigger problems than the proxy software.<p>Edit: Just saw antirez's post: very good. The VM architecture is good for general case, but it really wasn't designed for specialty applications. There are many operations that a VM can make if it knows a fair bit about the working set and the memory pattern, but that's not possible in a generic OS VM (prefetching and streaming are big ones).</text></comment> |
26,054,798 | 26,054,932 | 1 | 3 | 26,054,545 | train | <story><title>Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning</title><url>https://tedunderwood.com/2021/02/02/why-sf-hasnt-prepared-us-to-imagine-machine-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>I&#x27;m increasingly concerned that the impact of ML is going to be limited. This sounds laughable at face value. And it is: ML has impacted my own life in a few ways, from being able to generate endless video game music (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;theshawwn&#x2F;sets&#x2F;ai-generated-videogame-music" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;theshawwn&#x2F;sets&#x2F;ai-generated-videogame...</a>) to... well. Thus my point: I can&#x27;t think of ways it&#x27;s seriously impacted my life, other than being an interesting challenge to pursue.<p>As someone on the forefront of ML, you would expect me to be in a position to reap the benefits. It&#x27;s possible I am incompetent. But I often wonder what we&#x27;re doing, chasing gradients and batchnorms while training classifiers to generate photos of lemurs wearing suits.<p>I try not to dwell on it too much, since I truly love the work for its own sake. But one must wonder what the endgame is. The models of consequence are locked up by companies and held behind an API. The rest are nothing more than interesting diversions.<p>I&#x27;ve been reading some history of math and science, and it seems like many of the big discoveries were made from people pursuing the work for its own sake. Feynman loved physics long before physics became world-changing. But if physics never lead to the creation of the bomb, would it have been so prestigious?<p>We seem to be lauding ML with the same accolades as physics during the postwar period. And I can&#x27;t help but wonder when it will wear off.<p>ML will be a fine tool for massive corporations, though, for endless reasons. But I was hoping for a more personal impact with the work. Something like, being able to enable a blind person to use a computer in a new way, or... something more than memes and amusement.<p>Perhaps doing the work for its own sake is enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ganstyles</author><text>My company has used ML to create synthetic cancer data to train classifiers to augment doctors&#x2F;specialists who are looking for cancer. This work has greatly increased accuracy in diagnosis, saving lives. To say it&#x27;s only for music generation or generating waifus is a bit unfair.</text></comment> | <story><title>Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning</title><url>https://tedunderwood.com/2021/02/02/why-sf-hasnt-prepared-us-to-imagine-machine-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>I&#x27;m increasingly concerned that the impact of ML is going to be limited. This sounds laughable at face value. And it is: ML has impacted my own life in a few ways, from being able to generate endless video game music (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;theshawwn&#x2F;sets&#x2F;ai-generated-videogame-music" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;theshawwn&#x2F;sets&#x2F;ai-generated-videogame...</a>) to... well. Thus my point: I can&#x27;t think of ways it&#x27;s seriously impacted my life, other than being an interesting challenge to pursue.<p>As someone on the forefront of ML, you would expect me to be in a position to reap the benefits. It&#x27;s possible I am incompetent. But I often wonder what we&#x27;re doing, chasing gradients and batchnorms while training classifiers to generate photos of lemurs wearing suits.<p>I try not to dwell on it too much, since I truly love the work for its own sake. But one must wonder what the endgame is. The models of consequence are locked up by companies and held behind an API. The rest are nothing more than interesting diversions.<p>I&#x27;ve been reading some history of math and science, and it seems like many of the big discoveries were made from people pursuing the work for its own sake. Feynman loved physics long before physics became world-changing. But if physics never lead to the creation of the bomb, would it have been so prestigious?<p>We seem to be lauding ML with the same accolades as physics during the postwar period. And I can&#x27;t help but wonder when it will wear off.<p>ML will be a fine tool for massive corporations, though, for endless reasons. But I was hoping for a more personal impact with the work. Something like, being able to enable a blind person to use a computer in a new way, or... something more than memes and amusement.<p>Perhaps doing the work for its own sake is enough.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>n4r9</author><text>I sympathise with your general point although as an aside I&#x27;m not sure this is accurate:<p>&gt; Feynman loved physics long before physics became world-changing.<p>Feynman was an intensely practical person and learnt a lot about physics from e.g. fixing his neighbours&#x27; radios as a child. And radio is certainly something I&#x27;d class as &quot;world-changing&quot;. He loved physics <i>because of</i> the things you could build and create, and did not enjoy abstraction or generality for its own sake.<p>A better example for your argument might be Hardy, who explicitly stated that his love of number theory was partly due to its abstraction and uselessness. This was long before it had critical applications in cryptography.</text></comment> |
11,628,790 | 11,628,667 | 1 | 2 | 11,628,477 | train | <story><title>Yes, All DRM</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/yes-all-drm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny_Brahms</author><text>I have always said that DRM protection should automatically void all copyright protection. If you make it impossible for your work to enter public domain, you should not have the same protection as works that will.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geofft</author><text>Well, circumvention of DRM by technical means is currently forbidden by copyright law. This isn&#x27;t great, but I suspect it has an effect of moderating just how bad DRM is.<p>Remember that there are two reasons DRM is bad. The first is that it prevents you from doing things permitted by copyright law (e.g., fair use). The second is that it has unrelated side effects to your computing freedom. The recent batch of DRM, like streaming from Spotify, is <i>nowhere near</i> as bad for your computing freedom as stuff like Sony&#x27;s rootkit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...</a> . The first downside is true of all DRM; the second is true of only some.<p>Because it is not legal to just have a GitHub project explaining how to break Spotify&#x27;s DRM, there&#x27;s no incentive for Spotify to be as malicious as Sony. Their DRM only has to be good enough to convince the publishers that it works. If we say that all copyright protection is off, and DRM stands or falls <i>entirely</i> on its technical strength, we encourage an arms race. There will be non-sketchy websites offering reliable and well-engineered DRM removal tools, and the labels will point to them and insist that Spotify step up their game.</text></comment> | <story><title>Yes, All DRM</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/yes-all-drm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Johnny_Brahms</author><text>I have always said that DRM protection should automatically void all copyright protection. If you make it impossible for your work to enter public domain, you should not have the same protection as works that will.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neikos</author><text>That&#x27;s an interesting thought.</text></comment> |
31,976,442 | 31,976,459 | 1 | 2 | 31,974,146 | train | <story><title>Vauld suspends all withdrawals, trading and deposits on the platform</title><url>https://www.vauld.com/blog/corporate-statement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgt101</author><text>I don&#x27;t know a thing about Vauld, so no accusations here, but surely people realize that anything offering +18% on what you can get from a bank will often be a ponzi scheme?</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>&gt; absorbing customer funds for general operations runway, lawyers and payouts for secured creditors&#x2F;owners.<p>If they&#x27;re actually insolvent, they&#x27;re obliged to do this. They have no more customers, and should discontinue all operations; they only have creditors of one form or another.<p>A &quot;yield farm&quot; seems to be just an unregulated shadow bank: &quot;borrow short lend long&quot;, but lending into really risky assets like other cryptocurrency firms. It&#x27;s not exactly Basel III.</text></item><item><author>JimmyRuska</author><text>All of these yield farms seem to reassure customers that everything is great, then the next week declare themselves insolvent. It seems that as soon as they pause withdrawals they know the company is done for and they have to set themselves up for bankruptcy. If it were depositor-first mindset, the damage could be spread out by limiting withdrawals but still giving some percentage of total deposit as liquidity. It seems pretty offensive that most of these companies just flip the switch to absorbing customer funds for general operations runway, lawyers and payouts for secured creditors&#x2F;owners.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmm</author><text>Many of the individual entities are honest as far as it goes (but often the one paying you 18% is just taking your funds and &quot;investing&quot; them in the one paying 19%, hence the current contagion). The crypto ecosystem as a whole is the ponzi scheme, and it&#x27;s only going to collapse when people lose faith in all of it, bitcoin proper included.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vauld suspends all withdrawals, trading and deposits on the platform</title><url>https://www.vauld.com/blog/corporate-statement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgt101</author><text>I don&#x27;t know a thing about Vauld, so no accusations here, but surely people realize that anything offering +18% on what you can get from a bank will often be a ponzi scheme?</text></item><item><author>pjc50</author><text>&gt; absorbing customer funds for general operations runway, lawyers and payouts for secured creditors&#x2F;owners.<p>If they&#x27;re actually insolvent, they&#x27;re obliged to do this. They have no more customers, and should discontinue all operations; they only have creditors of one form or another.<p>A &quot;yield farm&quot; seems to be just an unregulated shadow bank: &quot;borrow short lend long&quot;, but lending into really risky assets like other cryptocurrency firms. It&#x27;s not exactly Basel III.</text></item><item><author>JimmyRuska</author><text>All of these yield farms seem to reassure customers that everything is great, then the next week declare themselves insolvent. It seems that as soon as they pause withdrawals they know the company is done for and they have to set themselves up for bankruptcy. If it were depositor-first mindset, the damage could be spread out by limiting withdrawals but still giving some percentage of total deposit as liquidity. It seems pretty offensive that most of these companies just flip the switch to absorbing customer funds for general operations runway, lawyers and payouts for secured creditors&#x2F;owners.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jbjohns</author><text>Often? What conceivable (legal) system could consistently generate such returns and not manage to capture all capital on earth eventually? The best financial vehicle ever conceived has about 9% per year over the last 50 years or so.</text></comment> |
37,814,719 | 37,814,822 | 1 | 2 | 37,809,516 | train | <story><title>A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-than-two-pi-4s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>I hate USB-C. What a mess.<p>What good is a universal port if it&#x27;s not actually universal? I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to be.</text></item><item><author>Denvercoder9</author><text>You&#x27;re both correct, but USB Power Delivery, like so many things USB, is a total mess with different revisions, and versions of those revisions, that each extend and deprecate parts of the previous revision. I&#x27;m going to ignore the actual protocol used for negotiation here, but there have also been at least three different protocols.<p>The first revision, rev 1.0, had six fixed power profiles: 5V&#x2F;2A, 12V&#x2F;1.5A, 12V&#x2F;3.0A, 12V&#x2F;5.0A, 20V&#x2F;3.0A and 20V&#x2F;5.0A. These were deprecated by rev 2.0, version 1.2, which instead introduced power rules at four fixed voltages, supporting power supplies with different output powers. The maximum supported currents by the specification were 5V&#x2F;3A, 9V&#x2F;3A, 15V&#x2F;3A and 20V&#x2F;5A. These power rules were retroactively named the Standard Power Range (SPR) in rev 3.1. That revision also added the Extended Power Range (EPR), which raised all the current limits up to 5A, but only when used with electronically marked cables. EPR also added power rules at 28V, 36V and 48V, again requiring (differently) marked cables and up to 5A. So 5V&#x2F;5A is a valid option, but only when used with a USB PD rev 3.1 compatible power supply and cable.<p>Orthogonally to the fixed power rules, rev 3.0 introduced the Programmable Power Supply, which allows a configurable voltage between 3.3V and 21V in steps of 20 mV. This was extended by rev 3.1 with voltages between 15V and 48V in steps of 100 mV, called the Adjustable Voltage Supply. As far as I&#x27;m aware this is not commonly used, and most products advertising Power Delivery support use the predefined power rules.</text></item><item><author>coder543</author><text>No, Wikipedia is looking like it&#x27;s out of date or wrong. It’s <i>not</i> a definitive source, especially for highly technical topics like this.<p>Here is another industry source which has a table that also says 5V at 5A: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graniteriverlabs.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;technical-blog&#x2F;usb-power-delivery-specification-3-1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graniteriverlabs.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;technical-blog&#x2F;usb-po...</a><p>In fact, using Wikipedia’s sources, I found the actual specs and here is another piece of supporting evidence for these other articles:<p>&gt; The Fixed PDOs Maximum Current field Shall advertise at least 3A, but May advertise up to RoundUp (PDP&#x2F;Voltage) to the nearest
10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised.[0]<p>This is a footnote attached to 5V3A, indicating to me that chargers are allowed to offer more than 3A at 5V.<p>At a minimum, the spec seems to be ambiguously written, but I’ve only spent a few minutes skimming it. Multiple industry sources (previously linked) believe that 5V@5A is within the spec, even without using PPS.<p>[0]: “USB_PD_R3_1 V1.8 2023-04”</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>It&#x27;s not hard to find at all.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...</a><p>5v3A is the limit of USB PD SPR.</text></item><item><author>coder543</author><text>I don’t agree. I found this straightforward statement:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;16712&#x2F;usbc-power-delivery-hits-240w-with-extended-power-range" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;16712&#x2F;usbc-power-delivery-hit...</a><p><pre><code> &gt; USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models:
&gt; - Fixed voltage
&gt; - Programmable power supply (PPS), and
&gt; - Adjustable voltage supply (AVS).
&gt; In the fixed voltage scheme, the Standard Power Range (SPR) mode supports 3A and 5A at 5V, 9V, 15V, and 20V.
</code></pre>
That’s about as clear as it can be, assuming AnandTech is correct.<p>Also keep in mind the existence of PPS as another data point. I have an Anker charger sitting in front of me that offers 3.3V-11V at 5A. 5V at 5A falls squarely in that range, as long as you have an e-marked cable that can support 5A. (I have no idea if the Pi 5 supports negotiating PPS, but it would increase compatibility with chargers if it does.)<p>I agree the Pi 5 should have included a buck converter or something, but I don’t think it’s correct to say they’re not standards compliant. It’s just not a common use of the standard.</text></item><item><author>p1mrx</author><text>&gt; It also supports USB-C Power Delivery, so finding a power supply that’s capable of supplying all that juice to the Pi 5 is a lot easier<p>Isn&#x27;t this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5 increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost unheard of.<p>I wonder how much a 9V3A -&gt; 5V5A buck converter dongle would cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Guvante</author><text>Is it really worse now than it was before?<p>Having a plug on say a laptop that can be a charger, a HID, a drive, a monitor, or all of the above with a docking station is vastly superior to the old day IMHO.<p>Unfortunately the cable to do that isn&#x27;t cheap and is massively overkill for say a phone charger. Thus cable compatibility becomes a thing but looking at HDMI cable compatibility is always a thing.<p>I think the problem is what used to be complaints about niche connectors are complaints about USB-C and it feels different and more impactful even if it isn&#x27;t necessarily.<p>After all I know back in the Mini-USB days you had manufacturers skipping the data pins to save some copper leading to frustration when you couldn&#x27;t transfer files.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2023/09/28/a-raspberry-pi-5-is-better-than-two-pi-4s/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wowfunhappy</author><text>I hate USB-C. What a mess.<p>What good is a universal port if it&#x27;s not actually universal? I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to be.</text></item><item><author>Denvercoder9</author><text>You&#x27;re both correct, but USB Power Delivery, like so many things USB, is a total mess with different revisions, and versions of those revisions, that each extend and deprecate parts of the previous revision. I&#x27;m going to ignore the actual protocol used for negotiation here, but there have also been at least three different protocols.<p>The first revision, rev 1.0, had six fixed power profiles: 5V&#x2F;2A, 12V&#x2F;1.5A, 12V&#x2F;3.0A, 12V&#x2F;5.0A, 20V&#x2F;3.0A and 20V&#x2F;5.0A. These were deprecated by rev 2.0, version 1.2, which instead introduced power rules at four fixed voltages, supporting power supplies with different output powers. The maximum supported currents by the specification were 5V&#x2F;3A, 9V&#x2F;3A, 15V&#x2F;3A and 20V&#x2F;5A. These power rules were retroactively named the Standard Power Range (SPR) in rev 3.1. That revision also added the Extended Power Range (EPR), which raised all the current limits up to 5A, but only when used with electronically marked cables. EPR also added power rules at 28V, 36V and 48V, again requiring (differently) marked cables and up to 5A. So 5V&#x2F;5A is a valid option, but only when used with a USB PD rev 3.1 compatible power supply and cable.<p>Orthogonally to the fixed power rules, rev 3.0 introduced the Programmable Power Supply, which allows a configurable voltage between 3.3V and 21V in steps of 20 mV. This was extended by rev 3.1 with voltages between 15V and 48V in steps of 100 mV, called the Adjustable Voltage Supply. As far as I&#x27;m aware this is not commonly used, and most products advertising Power Delivery support use the predefined power rules.</text></item><item><author>coder543</author><text>No, Wikipedia is looking like it&#x27;s out of date or wrong. It’s <i>not</i> a definitive source, especially for highly technical topics like this.<p>Here is another industry source which has a table that also says 5V at 5A: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graniteriverlabs.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;technical-blog&#x2F;usb-power-delivery-specification-3-1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.graniteriverlabs.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;technical-blog&#x2F;usb-po...</a><p>In fact, using Wikipedia’s sources, I found the actual specs and here is another piece of supporting evidence for these other articles:<p>&gt; The Fixed PDOs Maximum Current field Shall advertise at least 3A, but May advertise up to RoundUp (PDP&#x2F;Voltage) to the nearest
10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised.[0]<p>This is a footnote attached to 5V3A, indicating to me that chargers are allowed to offer more than 3A at 5V.<p>At a minimum, the spec seems to be ambiguously written, but I’ve only spent a few minutes skimming it. Multiple industry sources (previously linked) believe that 5V@5A is within the spec, even without using PPS.<p>[0]: “USB_PD_R3_1 V1.8 2023-04”</text></item><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>It&#x27;s not hard to find at all.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...</a><p>5v3A is the limit of USB PD SPR.</text></item><item><author>coder543</author><text>I don’t agree. I found this straightforward statement:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;16712&#x2F;usbc-power-delivery-hits-240w-with-extended-power-range" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anandtech.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;16712&#x2F;usbc-power-delivery-hit...</a><p><pre><code> &gt; USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models:
&gt; - Fixed voltage
&gt; - Programmable power supply (PPS), and
&gt; - Adjustable voltage supply (AVS).
&gt; In the fixed voltage scheme, the Standard Power Range (SPR) mode supports 3A and 5A at 5V, 9V, 15V, and 20V.
</code></pre>
That’s about as clear as it can be, assuming AnandTech is correct.<p>Also keep in mind the existence of PPS as another data point. I have an Anker charger sitting in front of me that offers 3.3V-11V at 5A. 5V at 5A falls squarely in that range, as long as you have an e-marked cable that can support 5A. (I have no idea if the Pi 5 supports negotiating PPS, but it would increase compatibility with chargers if it does.)<p>I agree the Pi 5 should have included a buck converter or something, but I don’t think it’s correct to say they’re not standards compliant. It’s just not a common use of the standard.</text></item><item><author>p1mrx</author><text>&gt; It also supports USB-C Power Delivery, so finding a power supply that’s capable of supplying all that juice to the Pi 5 is a lot easier<p>Isn&#x27;t this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5 increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost unheard of.<p>I wonder how much a 9V3A -&gt; 5V5A buck converter dongle would cost.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mschuster91</author><text>&gt; I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work.<p>The baseline profiles for power delivery (i.e. anything up to 20V@5A) have been all but done for two, three years now - you can readily buy combinations of PD and MUX chipsets that handle <i>everything</i> you can throw at them, and Anker has high-quality chargers to supply the juice.<p>The thing where USB-C still has issues is alternate modes. USBx usually works on all ports of a laptop or PC and virtually all cables, but anything involving TB, display, debug or audio is a hit-and-miss given how incredibly difficult it is to route all these high-frequency signals and properly mux them.</text></comment> |
39,707,388 | 39,707,402 | 1 | 2 | 39,706,253 | train | <story><title>Launch HN: Meticulate (YC W24) – LLM pipelines for business research</title><text>Hi HN, Meticulate gives finance professionals easy access to world class business research—think competitive landscapes, market sizings, customer segmentation etc. Here&#x27;s a video of a competitive landscape generation in action (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aJ-slHcp32c)and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aJ-slHcp32c)and</a> we’ve taken down the signup wall today so you can try it directly at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;</a>.<p>Some background on “business research”: investment and consulting teams sink many hours a week into researching companies, markets, and products. This work is time-sensitive and exhausting, but crucial to big decisions like company acquisitions or pricing model changes.<p>At large financial services firms, much of this work is offshored to external providers, who charge thousands of dollars per project and are often slow and low-quality. Small teams lack the budget and consistent flow of work to employ these resources. We’re building an automation solution that brings a fast, easily accessible, and defendable research resource.<p>Meticulate uses LLMs to emulate analyst research processes. For example, to manually build a competitive landscape like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;workflow&#x2F;65dbfeec44da6238abaaa059">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;workflow&#x2F;65dbfeec44da6238abaaa059</a>, an analyst needs to spend ~2 hours digging through company websites, forums, and market reports. Meticulate replicates this same process of discovering, researching, and mapping companies using ~1500 LLM calls and ~500 webpages and database pulls, delivering results 50x faster at 50x less cost.<p>At each step, we use an LLM as an agent to run searches, select and summarize articles, devise frameworks of analysis, and make small decisions like ranking and sorting companies. Compared to approaches where an LLM is being used directly to answer questions, this lets us deliver results that (a) come from real time searches and (b) are traceable back to the original sources.<p>We’ve released two workflows: building competitive landscapes and market maps. We designed it with an investor running diligence on a company as the target use case but we’re seeing lots of other use cases that we didn’t originally have in mind—things like founders looking for alternative vendors for a product they’re purchasing; sales reps searching for more prospects like one they’ve already sold to; consultants trying to understand a new market they are unfamiliar with, and more.<p>The main challenges we’ve been overcoming are preventing quality degradation along multi-step LLM pipelines where an error on one step can propagate widely, and dealing with a wide range of data quality. We’re working hard on our next set of workflows and would love for you to give it a try at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai</a> and would appreciate feedback at any level!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>swatcoder</author><text>&gt; delivering results 50x faster at 50x less cost<p>What about <i>quality</i> of results? Are you measuring that too? Did you do so for the traditional reference practice? Using what sort of methodology? How did it your technique compare in quality? What kind of errors was it most likely to make? What techniques have you devised for spotting those errors? Are they the same kind of errors that users would experience when outsourcing? Are the errors easier or harder to spot for one than the other? Are they faster to remediate with one?<p>I see a clever <i>concept</i> but given the state of LLM&#x27;s and the nature of how they work, I don&#x27;t know that nominal cost and speed differences are really enough to sell on. Not for something &quot;crucial to big business decisions.&quot; I&#x27;d want to know that my failure&#x2F;miss rate is no worse than when outsourcing and that my <i>net</i> cost and time (including error identification and recovery) still end up ahead. I don&#x27;t see either of those vital issues touched upon here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JPalakapilly</author><text>This is a great point. We completely agree that high-quality results is essential for adoption. It&#x27;s basically table stakes for any tool like this to be useful. We&#x27;ve had several versions of this tool that weren&#x27;t quite &quot;good enough&quot; and never saw any real use. Our latest version seems to meet the first quality threshold for actual work use.<p>Our method of evaluating quality is not super systematic right now. For this competitive landscape task, we have a &quot;test suite&quot; of ~10 companies and for each we have a sort of &quot;must-include&quot;, &quot;should-include&quot;, &quot;could-include&quot; set of competitors that should be surfaced. We run these through our tool and others and look at precision and recall on the competitor sets.<p>In terms of errors, right now our results are a little noisy, since we&#x27;re biased towards being exhaustive vs selective. There are obviously irrelevant companies in the results that no human would have ever included. Our users can fairly easily filter these out by reading the one sentence overviews of the companies but it&#x27;s still not a great UX. Actively working on this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Launch HN: Meticulate (YC W24) – LLM pipelines for business research</title><text>Hi HN, Meticulate gives finance professionals easy access to world class business research—think competitive landscapes, market sizings, customer segmentation etc. Here&#x27;s a video of a competitive landscape generation in action (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aJ-slHcp32c)and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;aJ-slHcp32c)and</a> we’ve taken down the signup wall today so you can try it directly at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;</a>.<p>Some background on “business research”: investment and consulting teams sink many hours a week into researching companies, markets, and products. This work is time-sensitive and exhausting, but crucial to big decisions like company acquisitions or pricing model changes.<p>At large financial services firms, much of this work is offshored to external providers, who charge thousands of dollars per project and are often slow and low-quality. Small teams lack the budget and consistent flow of work to employ these resources. We’re building an automation solution that brings a fast, easily accessible, and defendable research resource.<p>Meticulate uses LLMs to emulate analyst research processes. For example, to manually build a competitive landscape like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;workflow&#x2F;65dbfeec44da6238abaaa059">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai&#x2F;workflow&#x2F;65dbfeec44da6238abaaa059</a>, an analyst needs to spend ~2 hours digging through company websites, forums, and market reports. Meticulate replicates this same process of discovering, researching, and mapping companies using ~1500 LLM calls and ~500 webpages and database pulls, delivering results 50x faster at 50x less cost.<p>At each step, we use an LLM as an agent to run searches, select and summarize articles, devise frameworks of analysis, and make small decisions like ranking and sorting companies. Compared to approaches where an LLM is being used directly to answer questions, this lets us deliver results that (a) come from real time searches and (b) are traceable back to the original sources.<p>We’ve released two workflows: building competitive landscapes and market maps. We designed it with an investor running diligence on a company as the target use case but we’re seeing lots of other use cases that we didn’t originally have in mind—things like founders looking for alternative vendors for a product they’re purchasing; sales reps searching for more prospects like one they’ve already sold to; consultants trying to understand a new market they are unfamiliar with, and more.<p>The main challenges we’ve been overcoming are preventing quality degradation along multi-step LLM pipelines where an error on one step can propagate widely, and dealing with a wide range of data quality. We’re working hard on our next set of workflows and would love for you to give it a try at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meticulate.ai</a> and would appreciate feedback at any level!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>swatcoder</author><text>&gt; delivering results 50x faster at 50x less cost<p>What about <i>quality</i> of results? Are you measuring that too? Did you do so for the traditional reference practice? Using what sort of methodology? How did it your technique compare in quality? What kind of errors was it most likely to make? What techniques have you devised for spotting those errors? Are they the same kind of errors that users would experience when outsourcing? Are the errors easier or harder to spot for one than the other? Are they faster to remediate with one?<p>I see a clever <i>concept</i> but given the state of LLM&#x27;s and the nature of how they work, I don&#x27;t know that nominal cost and speed differences are really enough to sell on. Not for something &quot;crucial to big business decisions.&quot; I&#x27;d want to know that my failure&#x2F;miss rate is no worse than when outsourcing and that my <i>net</i> cost and time (including error identification and recovery) still end up ahead. I don&#x27;t see either of those vital issues touched upon here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madiator</author><text>I am sure most people never asked these questions to a human doing this research.</text></comment> |
12,765,561 | 12,765,512 | 1 | 2 | 12,765,359 | train | <story><title>Curl-library: An alert on the upcoming 7.51.0 release</title><url>http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2016-10/0076.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>djsumdog</author><text>Wow. I&#x27;m really curious to take a look at these once they&#x27;re disclosed. Considering how extensively curl libraries are used everywhere, this could have pretty big impacts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Curl-library: An alert on the upcoming 7.51.0 release</title><url>http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2016-10/0076.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bowmessage</author><text>Thank you Daniel Stenberg for your work!</text></comment> |
29,328,714 | 29,328,107 | 1 | 3 | 29,327,240 | train | <story><title>I wish systemd logged information about the source of “transactions”</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTransactionSourceWish</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TimWolla</author><text>A peer of mine was exiting their SSH sessions with &#x27;exit&#x27;. One time apparently they already typed &#x27;systemctl&#x27;, probably in an attempt to check the status of a service, changed their mind and then later wanted to close the session using &#x27;exit&#x27;, actually executing &#x27;systemctl exit&#x27;. This translated into a shutdown of the machine in question.<p>After being able to piece together what happened with the machine&#x27;s logs and the bash history I recommended to simply exit all programs&#x2F;sessions with Ctrl+D. It works almost everywhere and would have prevented this exact issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lathiat</author><text>I can do one better for exit. The Solaris kernel debugger KDB can be used at runtime for inspecting some stats and also to change some global configurable variables.<p>For whatever reason if you type a variable&#x2F;symbol it assigns it the value 0. If you type exit nothing happens immediately but as soon as the next process exits usually a few seconds to 10s of seconds later the entire system kernel panics on a null pointer de-reference.<p>Kernel paniced our production ZFS filer twice before I cottoned on. Newer releases special cased “exit” not to do that.</text></comment> | <story><title>I wish systemd logged information about the source of “transactions”</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdTransactionSourceWish</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TimWolla</author><text>A peer of mine was exiting their SSH sessions with &#x27;exit&#x27;. One time apparently they already typed &#x27;systemctl&#x27;, probably in an attempt to check the status of a service, changed their mind and then later wanted to close the session using &#x27;exit&#x27;, actually executing &#x27;systemctl exit&#x27;. This translated into a shutdown of the machine in question.<p>After being able to piece together what happened with the machine&#x27;s logs and the bash history I recommended to simply exit all programs&#x2F;sessions with Ctrl+D. It works almost everywhere and would have prevented this exact issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iforgotpassword</author><text>Almost entirely unrelated, but lately I worked with old photos that had missing, incomplete or wrong exif data. While trying to assess and automate fixing the collection via scripts, I used the command line utility &quot;exif&quot; a lot. You can&#x27;t imagine how many times I typed &quot;exit somefile.jpg&quot; and flinched when the terminal window just closed. Guess I should just have created an alias but that&#x27;s like resigning to your own stupidity. ;-)</text></comment> |
6,314,924 | 6,314,994 | 1 | 2 | 6,313,147 | train | <story><title>Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tinco</author><text>Well, honestly, drugs should not be legal to sell and to purchase.<p>What world are you living in? Do you think these guys deal weed? Have you seen what (crack) cocaine does to people?<p>These cocaine pushers are in the business of destroying people, and they certainly should be apprehended.</text></item><item><author>legutierr</author><text>Is this an argument in favor of the practice? Because, honestly, drugs should be legal to sell and to purchase. If all drugs should be legal and if the trade in drugs should be legal, then how can any program like this designed solely to enforce drug laws be justified? In that event, who cares what drug &quot;pushers&quot; and users know?</text></item><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>Maybe they don&#x27;t want drug pushers and users to know they have this either?</text></item><item><author>downandout</author><text>From the document:<p><i>Protecting the Hemisphere program is a formidable challenge.
We have taken the following steps to try and keep the program
under the radar...</i><p>The fact that our government creates and then goes to such great lengths to hide programs that it knows the public (and most likely the courts) will vehemently object to shows the level of contempt that government officials and employees have for the very people they were hired to serve. I don&#x27;t know that it can be fixed, but it is a very serious problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>betterunix</author><text>&quot;Well, honestly, drugs should not be legal to sell and to purchase.&quot;<p>Care to cite any reasons here? See, when it comes to cocaine, Congress has not revisited the debate since people said these sort of things:<p><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F1EFA3A5A15738DDDAB0894D0405B888CF1D3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;query.nytimes.com&#x2F;gst&#x2F;abstract.html?res=F70F1EFA3A5A1...</a><p><a href="http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/negro_cocaine_fiends.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.druglibrary.org&#x2F;schaffer&#x2F;history&#x2F;negro_cocaine_fi...</a><p>Yeah, you read that correctly. <i>Black guys</i> who use cocaine become <i>more accurate with a gun</i> and will attack <i>white women</i>! Also, Jews are selling it. Cocaine also makes it nearly impossible to kill a black man using a standard issue handgun, so let&#x27;s upgrade the caliber.<p>&quot;Have you seen what (crack) cocaine does to people?&quot;<p>Yes: I have seen the children of the wealthy doing cocaine at college parties, then going on to get high-paying jobs on Wall St. Truly ruinous, truly!<p>How about we drop the boogeyman and drop the anecdotes and start citing some sources? You claim that cocaine destroys people; let&#x27;s see the proof.</text></comment> | <story><title>Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.’s</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tinco</author><text>Well, honestly, drugs should not be legal to sell and to purchase.<p>What world are you living in? Do you think these guys deal weed? Have you seen what (crack) cocaine does to people?<p>These cocaine pushers are in the business of destroying people, and they certainly should be apprehended.</text></item><item><author>legutierr</author><text>Is this an argument in favor of the practice? Because, honestly, drugs should be legal to sell and to purchase. If all drugs should be legal and if the trade in drugs should be legal, then how can any program like this designed solely to enforce drug laws be justified? In that event, who cares what drug &quot;pushers&quot; and users know?</text></item><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>Maybe they don&#x27;t want drug pushers and users to know they have this either?</text></item><item><author>downandout</author><text>From the document:<p><i>Protecting the Hemisphere program is a formidable challenge.
We have taken the following steps to try and keep the program
under the radar...</i><p>The fact that our government creates and then goes to such great lengths to hide programs that it knows the public (and most likely the courts) will vehemently object to shows the level of contempt that government officials and employees have for the very people they were hired to serve. I don&#x27;t know that it can be fixed, but it is a very serious problem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TausAmmer</author><text>Might be beating dead horse, but people want to drink alcohol snort coke or shoot up heroin.
Put as many laws as you want, that is not a way to solve problem, never will.<p>You can&#x27;t forbid people being stupid by law. Also, abuse of narcotics is a side-effect for bigger problems, ones that is easier to ignore. Will we get there when we are able to speak about it, I wonder, I wonder my friend.</text></comment> |
36,059,038 | 36,053,964 | 1 | 2 | 36,053,662 | train | <story><title>Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Scalable Model Architecture</title><url>https://www.artisana.ai/articles/meta-ai-unleashes-megabyte-a-revolutionary-scalable-model-architecture</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mkaic</author><text>Ugh. I just spent the past few days reading this exact paper and preparing a detailed presentation on it for my job as an AI researcher, and headlines like this make me roll my eyes very hard.<p>MEGABYTE is indeed a cool new architecture, but it is still very much just a proof of concept at the moment. The paper shows that the model can compete with (but not decimate) vanilla Transformers on the scale of ~1B parameters in long-sequence prediction tasks. They did not &quot;unleash&quot; anything, and scalability to very large parameter counts and datasets still has not been tested.<p>I&#x27;m certainly very excited to see where this architecture goes as the community gets ahold of it and starts developing it, but to call it &quot;revolutionary&quot; this early on is disingenuous. I personally have a few experiments I want to run with it, but I put the probability of it being a true GPT-killer at &lt;20%. I would love to be wrong, though!</text></comment> | <story><title>Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Scalable Model Architecture</title><url>https://www.artisana.ai/articles/meta-ai-unleashes-megabyte-a-revolutionary-scalable-model-architecture</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobn</author><text>My main argument against the AI doomsayers has so far been that the current scaling laws simply make runaway singularity style scenarios algorithmically impossible (if for each step of improvement you need 10x parameters and 100x training, you quickly run into a brick wall).<p>This is part of why I’m not worried about the current crop of generative AI. I am however both curious and concerned about what the tsunami of talent and $$$ chasing the current trend will achieve.<p>If this n^(4&#x2F;3) alt transformer compute scaling is real (and there’s been many a pretender, so it’s too early to tell), then that could fundamentally change the overall AI scaling law, substantially lowering the brick wall.<p>And that could be a game changer.</text></comment> |
37,286,832 | 37,286,852 | 1 | 2 | 37,285,758 | train | <story><title>Ukraine uses Australian drones made of cardboard</title><url>https://aircosmosinternational.com/article/ukraine-uses-australian-drones-made-of-cardboard-3664</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>[flagged]</text></item><item><author>ChumpGPT</author><text>Russian Military blogger on Telegram. He spoke about the attack and the challenges, Ukraine said that 13 of the 16 made it to the intended targets. There will be video or satellite imagery released at some point. I tend to believe these reports since I understand who is providing the targeting information with precise coordinates and information. You can believe what you like.</text></item><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>Source please? The Russians complained? Or the Ukrainians reported that the Russians complained?</text></item><item><author>ChumpGPT</author><text>The Russians were complaining that it is in most cases invisible to Radar and needs to be shot down by gunfire. It can also carry an explosive payload of 4-5 Kg. Apparently 3 out of 16 were shot down with machine gun fire using tracers but 13 got through to destroy several SU-30 and MIG aircraft along with several air defense and radar complexes at a Russian airbase in the Kursk Region.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChumpGPT</author><text>This was about the Australian drone and it&#x27;s possible potential as an extremely cheap and powerful weapon. The reason it&#x27;s even in the news is because they were used recently and the imagery of a downed drone and attack location was released by the Russians, not the Ukrainians.<p>Somehow your response has turned into a tirade against Ukraine and their claims and every other grievance you have for Ukraine.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ukraine uses Australian drones made of cardboard</title><url>https://aircosmosinternational.com/article/ukraine-uses-australian-drones-made-of-cardboard-3664</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>[flagged]</text></item><item><author>ChumpGPT</author><text>Russian Military blogger on Telegram. He spoke about the attack and the challenges, Ukraine said that 13 of the 16 made it to the intended targets. There will be video or satellite imagery released at some point. I tend to believe these reports since I understand who is providing the targeting information with precise coordinates and information. You can believe what you like.</text></item><item><author>rjzzleep</author><text>Source please? The Russians complained? Or the Ukrainians reported that the Russians complained?</text></item><item><author>ChumpGPT</author><text>The Russians were complaining that it is in most cases invisible to Radar and needs to be shot down by gunfire. It can also carry an explosive payload of 4-5 Kg. Apparently 3 out of 16 were shot down with machine gun fire using tracers but 13 got through to destroy several SU-30 and MIG aircraft along with several air defense and radar complexes at a Russian airbase in the Kursk Region.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotnet00</author><text>I feel like you&#x27;ve taken a lot of memes as if they were facts</text></comment> |
35,839,987 | 35,827,695 | 1 | 2 | 35,824,173 | train | <story><title>I found the best anagram in English (2017)</title><url>https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>My personal favourite is that an anagram of Banach-Tarski is Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adammarples</author><text>Guess what the B in &quot;Benoit B. Mandelbrot&quot; stands for?</text></comment> | <story><title>I found the best anagram in English (2017)</title><url>https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdpi</author><text>My personal favourite is that an anagram of Banach-Tarski is Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aeolun</author><text>Just like in the original, I think it’s only going to work in theory.</text></comment> |
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