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21,208,169 | 21,206,369 | 1 | 3 | 21,205,942 | train | <story><title>China Says ‘Stay Tuned’ for Retaliation over U.S. Tech Blacklist</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/china-says-stay-tuned-for-retaliation-over-u-s-tech-blacklist</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>On HN, when there&#x27;s a major story unfolding over time, we apply the &quot;significant new information&quot; test: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=%22significant%20new%20information%22&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a><p>The idea is to have a new thread for each development that adds significant new information, and to downweight follow-ups and copycat stories that don&#x27;t. In this way we prevent the front page from being flooded with repetitive stories and discussions (often low-quality ragey discussions, the internet being what it is), while making space for substantive new content when it arises. We came up with this after the Snowden deluge of 2013, when HN&#x27;s front page was inundated with a lot of articles that didn&#x27;t make this distinction, and many users—even ones who found the underlying story interesting—complained.<p>If we apply this test here, it&#x27;s clear that &quot;China says ‘stay tuned’&quot; does not count as significant new information. On HN there&#x27;s no harm in waiting until the next important thing happens, and in the meantime we can turn our attention to other interesting things.</text></comment> | <story><title>China Says ‘Stay Tuned’ for Retaliation over U.S. Tech Blacklist</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/china-says-stay-tuned-for-retaliation-over-u-s-tech-blacklist</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sunstone</author><text>There&#x27;s little doubt that the future paths of the democracies and China will resemble the cold war of the 60&#x27;s and 70&#x27;s. Can&#x27;t we just spare the drama, cut to the chase, swap corporate prisoners and get on with stockpiling weapons already?</text></comment> |
17,228,654 | 17,228,870 | 1 | 3 | 17,226,243 | train | <story><title>Bayer to retire Monsanto name</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-m-a-bayer-closing/bayer-to-close-monsanto-takeover-to-retire-targets-name-idUSKCN1J00IZ?il=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>doublescoop</author><text>Check the Monsanto Wikipedia page for more details, but the short version is that Monsanto patented its genetically engineered seeds and then sued farmers for patent infringement if they were found to be growing crops from that seed without a license.<p>The problem with this is that seeds tended to blow between fields, so if your neighbor licensed Monsanto seed and then the next year a bunch of that seed manages to take hold in your field, you&#x27;re liable for a patent infringement.<p>Additionally, they argued, successfully before the Supreme Court in 2013, that additional generations of seed from the initially licensed seed required new licenses from the patent holder.<p>As might be expected, this rubs A LOT of people the wrong way.</text></item><item><author>criley2</author><text>I&#x27;m not going to defend Monsanto&#x27;s bad business practices, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever met someone who accurately articulated real problems with Monsanto as opposed to hysteria and conspiracy theory, so this is probably the best move over all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Eridrus</author><text>&gt; The problem with this is that seeds tended to blow between fields, so if your neighbor licensed Monsanto seed and then the next year a bunch of that seed manages to take hold in your field, you&#x27;re liable for a patent infringement.<p>Do you know of a court case where this actually happened?<p>I&#x27;ve seen this defense thrown around in the few cases I&#x27;ve seen, but investigators have usually had evidence that it wasn&#x27;t accidental contamination, but rather just being used as an opportunistic defense.<p>&gt; Additionally, they argued, successfully before the Supreme Court in 2013, that additional generations of seed from the initially licensed seed required new licenses from the patent holder.<p>I found this court case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co</a>.<p>&quot;sold the seed from which these soybeans were grown to farmers under a limited use license that prohibited the farmer-buyer from using the seeds for more than a single season or from saving any seed produced from the crop for replanting&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not totally sure what&#x27;s objectionable about this ruling. The original buyers explicitly agreed to the license.<p>I think there is an argument to be made against intellectual property in general, but this doesn&#x27;t seem any more egregious than, e.g. music or software copyright, and most people are quite happy with those.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bayer to retire Monsanto name</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-m-a-bayer-closing/bayer-to-close-monsanto-takeover-to-retire-targets-name-idUSKCN1J00IZ?il=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>doublescoop</author><text>Check the Monsanto Wikipedia page for more details, but the short version is that Monsanto patented its genetically engineered seeds and then sued farmers for patent infringement if they were found to be growing crops from that seed without a license.<p>The problem with this is that seeds tended to blow between fields, so if your neighbor licensed Monsanto seed and then the next year a bunch of that seed manages to take hold in your field, you&#x27;re liable for a patent infringement.<p>Additionally, they argued, successfully before the Supreme Court in 2013, that additional generations of seed from the initially licensed seed required new licenses from the patent holder.<p>As might be expected, this rubs A LOT of people the wrong way.</text></item><item><author>criley2</author><text>I&#x27;m not going to defend Monsanto&#x27;s bad business practices, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever met someone who accurately articulated real problems with Monsanto as opposed to hysteria and conspiracy theory, so this is probably the best move over all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bret791</author><text>I think the bigger issue is the &quot;Round-Up Ready&quot; crops and the fact that they produce sterile seeds.<p>Using Round-Up ready seeds allows the use of Round-Up for weed control on your fields, but this can have negative affects on neighboring farms. For example on Field A, populated with Round-Up ready seeds, Round Up is used to control the weeds. However this same spray can affect neighboring field B, which is not populated by Round-Up Ready seeds, causing weeds and crop die or reduced yields... So basically if your neighbor is using Round-Up, you need to also, and your neighbor...etc. So now everyone is locked into Round-Up ready seeds they have to buy every year.</text></comment> |
10,228,746 | 10,228,621 | 1 | 2 | 10,227,872 | train | <story><title>Germany's Wi-Fi Shortage Set to Ease as Merkel Backs New Bill</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-16/germany-s-wi-fi-shortage-set-to-ease-as-merkel-backs-new-bill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codebeaker</author><text>I&#x27;m currently suffering two copyright infringement cases, which I can only assume are the result of the storm that reset my FritzRepeater back to factory settings, leaving an open bridge into my network.<p>Two copyright claims, from two law firms, for albums I&#x27;ve never heard of, at times that I wasn&#x27;t in the house.<p>Because of an arcane, but largely logical German law named &quot;Störerhaftung&quot; I am by default responsible, and have to pay both claims (in the order of €5,000 each). I have no recourse.<p>Tech-savvy as I am, powerless to defend against a case such as this, where do I stand, I could theoretically bring a case against AVM Deutschland (manufacturer of the Fritzrepeater) but then the burden is on me to prove their buggy software failed, and reset to factory settings.<p>An impossible situation, and I hope that laws such as these move in the direction of transparency, the Störerhaftung is designed to make sure that someone who loses out always has someone to claim against (common other uses, are for example if drunks throw stones from the top of a building, and then run away, the building owner is responsible, in lieu of finding and proving that the drunkards were responsible) - it&#x27;s arcane, and whilst well intended, and the &quot;terrorism&quot; argument holds strong, this is about copyright, and always maintaining the Störerhaftung right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nisa</author><text>Most cases aren&#x27;t taken to court. Courts have decided against these firms in the past and the general climate is turning against them. I&#x27;ve got similar claims (but only 500€) and the lawyer firm stopped bothering me after I&#x27;ve said I&#x27;m running a freifunk.net router (which I&#x27;m doing) - freifunk.net are having a &quot;war&quot; cash depot and want to go to the BVerG to end finally end this madness. You can follow the drama here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freifunkstattangst.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freifunkstattangst.de&#x2F;</a><p>The new law is btw. not helping at all. It&#x27;s lobbying by said lawfirms that bother you and me and in practice things likely will turn out worse. See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freifunkstattangst.de&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;16&#x2F;die-bundesregierung-hat-beschlossen-die-ausweitung-von-oeffentlichen-wlan-hotspots-zu-verhindern&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freifunkstattangst.de&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;16&#x2F;die-bundesregierung-...</a> for details.<p>If it&#x27;s Waldorf and Frommer tell them you are cooperating the freifunkstattangst.de and mail them. They dropped at least my case out of fear (or rather tactics on their behalf).<p>It&#x27;s a scare game these lawyers are playing. It&#x27;s ridiciolous that this is still a thing. However most lawyers are profiting of it and the majority of Bundestag members are lawyers. For a (kind of unfair) comparison see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rechtsberatungsgesetz#Geschichte" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rechtsberatungsgesetz#Geschich...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Germany's Wi-Fi Shortage Set to Ease as Merkel Backs New Bill</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-16/germany-s-wi-fi-shortage-set-to-ease-as-merkel-backs-new-bill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codebeaker</author><text>I&#x27;m currently suffering two copyright infringement cases, which I can only assume are the result of the storm that reset my FritzRepeater back to factory settings, leaving an open bridge into my network.<p>Two copyright claims, from two law firms, for albums I&#x27;ve never heard of, at times that I wasn&#x27;t in the house.<p>Because of an arcane, but largely logical German law named &quot;Störerhaftung&quot; I am by default responsible, and have to pay both claims (in the order of €5,000 each). I have no recourse.<p>Tech-savvy as I am, powerless to defend against a case such as this, where do I stand, I could theoretically bring a case against AVM Deutschland (manufacturer of the Fritzrepeater) but then the burden is on me to prove their buggy software failed, and reset to factory settings.<p>An impossible situation, and I hope that laws such as these move in the direction of transparency, the Störerhaftung is designed to make sure that someone who loses out always has someone to claim against (common other uses, are for example if drunks throw stones from the top of a building, and then run away, the building owner is responsible, in lieu of finding and proving that the drunkards were responsible) - it&#x27;s arcane, and whilst well intended, and the &quot;terrorism&quot; argument holds strong, this is about copyright, and always maintaining the Störerhaftung right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ju-st</author><text>You (most propably) don&#x27;t have to pay anything.<p>Source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arag.de&#x2F;auf-ins-leben&#x2F;udo-vetter&#x2F;filesharing-oft-reicht-ein-dickes-fell&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arag.de&#x2F;auf-ins-leben&#x2F;udo-vetter&#x2F;filesharing-oft-...</a></text></comment> |
28,162,126 | 28,161,254 | 1 | 3 | 28,160,673 | train | <story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fortenforge</author><text>Lots of people responding to this seem to not understand how perceptual hashing &#x2F; PhotoDNA works. It&#x27;s true that they&#x27;re not cryptographic hashes, but the false positive rate is vanishingly small. Apple claims it&#x27;s 1 in a trillion [1], but suppose that you don&#x27;t believe them. Google and Facebook and Microsoft are all using PhotoDNA (or equivalent perceptual hashing schemes) right now. Have you heard of some massive issue with false positives?<p>The fact of the matter is that unless you possess a photo that exists in the NCMEC database, your photos simply will not be flagged to Apple. Photos of your own kids won&#x27;t trigger it, nude photos of adults won&#x27;t trigger it; only photos of already known CSAM content will trigger (and that too, Apple requires a specific threshold of matches before a report is triggered).<p>[1] &quot;The threshold is selected to provide an extremely low (1 in 1 trillion) probability of incorrectly flagging a given account.&quot; Page 4 of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;child-safety&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;child-safety&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;CSAM_Detection_Techni...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fossuser</author><text>It&#x27;s worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I&#x27;ve seen on this topic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initiatives_slippery_slope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;apple_child_safety_initia...</a><p>There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.</text></comment> |
17,288,329 | 17,288,512 | 1 | 2 | 17,286,770 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Plot modern addresses on Earth 240M years ago</title><url>http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>typpo</author><text>Hi HN, I built this by adapting GPlates (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gplates.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gplates.org</a>), an academic project providing desktop software for geologists to investigate plate tectonic data. I&#x27;m amazed that geologists collected enough data to actually plot my home 750M years ago, so I thought you all would enjoy it too.<p>Even though plate tectonic models return precise results, you should consider the plots approximate (obviously we will never be able to prove correctness). In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this particular model because it is widely cited and covers the greatest length of time.<p>The visualization itself is open source, though I have not yet cleaned up and pushed the plate tectonics integration (working on that right now): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typpo&#x2F;ancient-earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typpo&#x2F;ancient-earth</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhorie</author><text>I&#x27;m curious about the accuracy of the visualization. Specifically, at around 20M yrs, one can clearly see the mediterranean sea. The wikipedia page for the Zanclean Deluge[1] says it&#x27;s theorized to have happened around 5M yrs ago.<p>Does this mean that the data from gplates doesn&#x27;t support that theory? Or is that just an artifact of how things were put together for this project?<p>Nonetheless, cool project!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Zanclean_flood" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Zanclean_flood</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Plot modern addresses on Earth 240M years ago</title><url>http://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>typpo</author><text>Hi HN, I built this by adapting GPlates (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gplates.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gplates.org</a>), an academic project providing desktop software for geologists to investigate plate tectonic data. I&#x27;m amazed that geologists collected enough data to actually plot my home 750M years ago, so I thought you all would enjoy it too.<p>Even though plate tectonic models return precise results, you should consider the plots approximate (obviously we will never be able to prove correctness). In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly. I chose this particular model because it is widely cited and covers the greatest length of time.<p>The visualization itself is open source, though I have not yet cleaned up and pushed the plate tectonics integration (working on that right now): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typpo&#x2F;ancient-earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;typpo&#x2F;ancient-earth</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mncharity</author><text>Nifty work.<p>&gt; Even though precise results are returned by the plate tectonic models, the locations are still approximate [...]. In my tests I found that model results can vary significantly.<p>One challenge with science education content is to avoid nurturing rich ecologies of misconceptions... to the degree possible given resource constraints and conflicting objectives. So here are some random brainstormy ideas.<p>Add small inserts with different plate models? To reduce the implied certainty. Uncertainty is usually handled poorly in science education, with unfortunate results for education and society. Perhaps pixelate the globe?<p>The false colors represent elevation (EDIT: no, Scotese&#x27;s hand-drawn sort-of-elevation maps), not biome. So &quot;green map&quot; may represent a long-term tan desert. Perhaps choose a less pretty but &#x27;less likely to be misinterpreted as biomes&#x27; colorization? Maybe as an option? A biome map would be great to have... but at least as of some years ago, it didn&#x27;t seem anyone was attempting unified paleobiome map models. It seemed more lack of incentive than lack of data, at least for some periods.<p>Sea level and coastline position varies at high frequency. 12k years ago, the shortest walk from Boston to the sea, was due south past Long Island. A color scheme that deemphasized the coast would allow coastline variation to be averaged&#x2F;blurred.<p>Cloud coverage and patters vary greatly across time. Pretty clouds over Pangean desert made me smile. Perhaps explicitly call them &quot;Bogus Clouds&quot;? :) Science education content frequently shows bogus things. Rather than difficult reform, simply becoming more transparent&#x2F;honest and comfortable with calling them bogus might be a relatively easy but significant cultural improvement.<p>The star field is missing long-term features, like a visible galactic disk. Having a higher-density star map might also usefully obscure that the set of bright stars is changing. Or perhaps just another &quot;Bogus&quot; label? They&#x27;re really quite handy. :)<p>If anyone has time on their hands, it might be neat to attempt a more principled representation. Perhaps realistic appearance, averaged over a few My? Average cloud cover maps are less pretty than weather, but plausible long-term ones might be derived from relatively simple paleoclimate models. Similarly for biomes.<p>Paleoglobes are traditionally <i>very</i> misleading. As we move forward, it could be nice to improve on that.</text></comment> |
36,670,073 | 36,669,770 | 1 | 3 | 36,669,253 | train | <story><title>Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983</title><url>https://statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/student-loan-debt-forgiveness</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GartzenDeHaes</author><text>&gt; lenders that are taking on too much risk<p>The lenders are taking no risks since these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. There are also very large late fees and penalties that can triple (or more) the amount owed.</text></item><item><author>taeric</author><text>Worse than just &quot;backed by the federal government,&quot; the loans are basically protected by the government. Being one of the small list of things you can&#x27;t bankrupt out of, the risk in giving out the loans has been fully pulled from the lenders.<p>It is frustrating to hear the discourse over the inappropriate students that are taking on too much debt, all the while ignoring the lenders that are taking on too much risk. At least, they would be taking on too much risk, if they hadn&#x27;t captured the market so effectively.</text></item><item><author>eschulz</author><text>Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees with the confidence that their admitted students will be able to pay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>Now I read that Wall Street is creating CDO&#x27;s based on these loans, like they (continue to) do on mortgages. Some people die &quot;early&quot; without paying back these loans, and sometimes, they will owe more than they took out. Given the mounting problems with the numbers here, it seems a whole generation of people in the middle of this bubble are going to go to the grave while still owing on these loans. What happens to these CDO&#x27;s? Are we headed for a smaller &quot;meltdown?&quot;<p>I went to school from 87-91. I could already see the problem starting. I was hoping this bubble would burst before my own children went to school. Two of three have gone to public schools so far, and we&#x27;ve paid through the nose for it. We are pushing our third towards some sort of trade school.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983</title><url>https://statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/student-loan-debt-forgiveness</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>GartzenDeHaes</author><text>&gt; lenders that are taking on too much risk<p>The lenders are taking no risks since these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. There are also very large late fees and penalties that can triple (or more) the amount owed.</text></item><item><author>taeric</author><text>Worse than just &quot;backed by the federal government,&quot; the loans are basically protected by the government. Being one of the small list of things you can&#x27;t bankrupt out of, the risk in giving out the loans has been fully pulled from the lenders.<p>It is frustrating to hear the discourse over the inappropriate students that are taking on too much debt, all the while ignoring the lenders that are taking on too much risk. At least, they would be taking on too much risk, if they hadn&#x27;t captured the market so effectively.</text></item><item><author>eschulz</author><text>Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees with the confidence that their admitted students will be able to pay.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chiefalchemist</author><text>In other words, the government gave the leaders license to do &quot;predatory&quot;.</text></comment> |
8,092,718 | 8,092,211 | 1 | 3 | 8,090,190 | train | <story><title>A Traditional City Primer</title><url>http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php#.U9PdSPmSz6A</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twelvechairs</author><text>This is my field. I trained as an architect and work as an urban designer (somewhere between an architect, landscape architect and planner). This article hits on some good points but misses a lot of others. Some dot points to keep it short:<p>* People (especially those with children) often prefer to live in houses with space which are more private rather than in narrow apartments (required if you want low building heights and for everyone to walk everyhwere) on top of their neighbours. Do you really want to hear 3 screaming babies next door every night. Because that&#x27;s how it works.<p>* Modern business don&#x27;t work in low desnity environments like this. You simply need to be as accessible as you can to as wide a market (of workers and other businesses you work with) as possible. Maybe once we are all working on the internet it will shift this way - but it hasn&#x27;t gone far yet.<p>* Even the &#x27;traditional cities&#x27; shown will have outskirts with houses which are a pain to walk to rather than just apartments in a centre.<p>* There is no single &#x27;traditional city&#x27;. There are differences even across Europe. England has its widened-road market squares. Italy has its hill towns. Places like Japan usually built out of timber (which doesn&#x27;t last) rather than stone. Etc.<p>* There are plenty of examples of tower cities with bustling urban environments and low car ownership. Like Hong Kong. Dehumanising? Perhaps. It depends on your definition.<p>* Most &#x27;traditional cities&#x27; couldn&#x27;t be built for anywhere near the same cost as a modern development.<p>Overall though, this is pushing in the right direction, just not quite thought through as thoroughly as it might be.<p>[edit] Perhaps the most successful attempt at building in this vein in the west recently has been Poundbury, England. It was Prince Charles&#x27; pet project. It has done some things well (like managing to break the highways codes) but in the end perhaps still isn&#x27;t as nice as a traditional town or as attractive a location for modern living as other places being built. You can see it in streetview here: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@50.712904,-2.463939,3a,75y,145.8h,79.11t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sP_ymofrDtmlmk2aW3jaL5w!2e0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@50.712904,-2.463939,3a,75y,145....</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeri</author><text>As someone who deliberately left behind suburbia and its mandatory car ownership to find a better quality of life in a traditional city i find it saddening to hear you argue against human-friendly urban planning. I find your arguments unconvincing.<p>* Just because apartments are small doesn&#x27;t mean you hear your neighbors, or live uncomfortably. I&#x27;ve lived in three different apartments the past decade and the only time i had noise issues was with a neighbor who played techno at full volume at 3 am, which would be an issue in any city design, dense or sparse. The notion that hearing three crying babies every night is just how it works is only true in hollywood movies which fictionalize poverty in the inner city. In real world apartment life you have a mixed habitation pattern, and soundproofing.<p>* suburbia is even less dense than any sort of city. It&#x27;s not the density that&#x27;s the issue, it&#x27;s the ability to commute. In a city where commuting can be done on foot or through public transit, like many european cities, it&#x27;s simply not an issue. I walk 5 minutes and then take the tram to work, reading HN while commuting.<p>* There&#x27;s no such thing as a traditional city, yet you&#x27;re arguing against it. The article was quite clear on what is meant by the traditional city.<p>* Having low density at the edges is a feature, not a downside, because some people prefer the isolation. Anyway, if we built all cities in this pattern, there would be a better density distribution. City edges would blend. In high density urban construction everybody struggles to reach the center and get back out again, every day during rush hour. Having ten smaller less dense cities without suburbs instead of one big dense one with a lot of suburbs seems like it would have fewer traffic problems and a better quality of life. Maybe it&#x27;s just my personal preferences talking though.<p>* I&#x27;ve been to NY, as a tower city with low car ownership it is impressive, and i was glad to visit, but also glad to leave. The best living in NY is in traditional city areas like greenwich village. High rise is not the answer to quality of life in urban planning.<p>* The cost argument is a red herring. We don&#x27;t know how to build traditional cities cheaply because we haven&#x27;t done it enough recently. It would solve itself. Business finds a way when forced to.<p>Anyway, whatever design is used, there is a sort of universal understanding what a city that is nice to live in is like, and it&#x27;s one without cars. Cars simply don&#x27;t belong inside a city where people actually live. I hope urban planners everywhere eventually realize this and force cars to remain at the edge, where they belong. Usually the people who want to drive their car inside the city don&#x27;t even live there.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Traditional City Primer</title><url>http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php#.U9PdSPmSz6A</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>twelvechairs</author><text>This is my field. I trained as an architect and work as an urban designer (somewhere between an architect, landscape architect and planner). This article hits on some good points but misses a lot of others. Some dot points to keep it short:<p>* People (especially those with children) often prefer to live in houses with space which are more private rather than in narrow apartments (required if you want low building heights and for everyone to walk everyhwere) on top of their neighbours. Do you really want to hear 3 screaming babies next door every night. Because that&#x27;s how it works.<p>* Modern business don&#x27;t work in low desnity environments like this. You simply need to be as accessible as you can to as wide a market (of workers and other businesses you work with) as possible. Maybe once we are all working on the internet it will shift this way - but it hasn&#x27;t gone far yet.<p>* Even the &#x27;traditional cities&#x27; shown will have outskirts with houses which are a pain to walk to rather than just apartments in a centre.<p>* There is no single &#x27;traditional city&#x27;. There are differences even across Europe. England has its widened-road market squares. Italy has its hill towns. Places like Japan usually built out of timber (which doesn&#x27;t last) rather than stone. Etc.<p>* There are plenty of examples of tower cities with bustling urban environments and low car ownership. Like Hong Kong. Dehumanising? Perhaps. It depends on your definition.<p>* Most &#x27;traditional cities&#x27; couldn&#x27;t be built for anywhere near the same cost as a modern development.<p>Overall though, this is pushing in the right direction, just not quite thought through as thoroughly as it might be.<p>[edit] Perhaps the most successful attempt at building in this vein in the west recently has been Poundbury, England. It was Prince Charles&#x27; pet project. It has done some things well (like managing to break the highways codes) but in the end perhaps still isn&#x27;t as nice as a traditional town or as attractive a location for modern living as other places being built. You can see it in streetview here: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@50.712904,-2.463939,3a,75y,145.8h,79.11t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sP_ymofrDtmlmk2aW3jaL5w!2e0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@50.712904,-2.463939,3a,75y,145....</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lliwta</author><text>&gt; * Most &#x27;traditional cities&#x27; couldn&#x27;t be built for anywhere near the same cost as a modern development.<p>Why is this? E.g. The author points out that narrow streets should be cheaper to build and maintain.<p>I grew up in suburbia, lived in a typical American city, and now live in a traditional city abroad. My best guesses as to why building a traditional city is more expensive are 1) construction might be more expensive because of the constrained space; 2) lots of roads are cobble stone rather than pavement; 3) maybe infrastructure (e.g. fire hydrants etc)<p>Are there other more important reasons? I really can&#x27;t figure it out.</text></comment> |
32,596,557 | 32,595,661 | 1 | 2 | 32,593,190 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: I want to dive into how to make search engines</title><text>But I don&#x27;t know where to start or what to study. If I were going for masters in this subject, what would my courses be?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text><i>&gt;search engines</i><p>You can decompose a &quot;search engine&quot; into multiple big components and figure out what you want to look at first:<p>(1) web crawler&#x2F;spiders<p>(2) database cache of web content -- aka building the &quot;search index&quot;<p>(3) algorithm of scoring&#x2F;weighing&#x2F;ranking of pages -- e.g. &quot;PageRank&quot;<p>(4) query engine -- translating user inputs into returning the most &quot;relevant&quot; pages<p>Each technical topic is a sub-specialty and can be staffed by dedicated engineers. There are also more topics such as lexical analysis, distributed computing (for all 4 areas), etc.<p>If you&#x27;re mainly focused on experimenting with programming another ranking algorithm, you can skip part (1) by leveraging the dataset from Common Crawl:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;index.commoncrawl.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;index.commoncrawl.org&#x2F;</a><p>Here are some videos about PageRank:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JGQe4kiPnrU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JGQe4kiPnrU</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qxEkY8OScYY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qxEkY8OScYY</a><p>... but keep in mind that the scope of those videos omits all of (1), (2), and (4).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swyx</author><text>I would also require reading on the major OSS search engines, e.g. Lucene, Solr and then Elasticsearch.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apache_Lucene" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apache_Lucene</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apache_Solr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apache_Solr</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elasticsearch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elasticsearch</a><p>those who dont know history will repeat it, etc<p>then maybe the newer stuff like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typesense.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typesense.org&#x2F;</a><p>to be clear i dont know these things but thats what I would do and I&#x27;d happily read fly.io style blogposts drip feeding out knowledge over time</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: I want to dive into how to make search engines</title><text>But I don&#x27;t know where to start or what to study. If I were going for masters in this subject, what would my courses be?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text><i>&gt;search engines</i><p>You can decompose a &quot;search engine&quot; into multiple big components and figure out what you want to look at first:<p>(1) web crawler&#x2F;spiders<p>(2) database cache of web content -- aka building the &quot;search index&quot;<p>(3) algorithm of scoring&#x2F;weighing&#x2F;ranking of pages -- e.g. &quot;PageRank&quot;<p>(4) query engine -- translating user inputs into returning the most &quot;relevant&quot; pages<p>Each technical topic is a sub-specialty and can be staffed by dedicated engineers. There are also more topics such as lexical analysis, distributed computing (for all 4 areas), etc.<p>If you&#x27;re mainly focused on experimenting with programming another ranking algorithm, you can skip part (1) by leveraging the dataset from Common Crawl:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;index.commoncrawl.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;index.commoncrawl.org&#x2F;</a><p>Here are some videos about PageRank:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JGQe4kiPnrU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JGQe4kiPnrU</a> , <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qxEkY8OScYY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qxEkY8OScYY</a><p>... but keep in mind that the scope of those videos omits all of (1), (2), and (4).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abadger9</author><text>As someone who works in this space, ^ this. I would say don&#x27;t overthink any component, use common crawl (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commoncrawl.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commoncrawl.org&#x2F;</a>) to build your initial index, use a pagerank implementation that&#x27;s been thoroughly researched and published, and use off the shelf components from the apache foundation when you can.</text></comment> |
6,285,773 | 6,285,439 | 1 | 2 | 6,283,665 | train | <story><title>Memories of positive associations get written onto DNA</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/memories-of-positive-associations-get-written-onto-dna/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>By this argument, culture can be imprinted into DNA too, no?<p>This also implies that it would be much tougher to do a Jurassic Park recreation, because the environment is different. You can&#x27;t just start from scratch with the DNA.<p>Or am I misinterpreting?</text></item><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>This is fascinating but unsurprising given all the things that have come out lately with regard to epigenetics. If your mental model of DNA involves some image of a pristine blueprint that is followed with clockwork-like precision in the exact same way by every cell in your body, your model needed updating quite some time ago.<p>I feel that many researchers, even geneticists who should know better, still have not internalized the idea that epigenetics is pretty good evidence that somatic DNA is a read&#x2F;write medium. This leads to sloppy thinking about genetic causes of disease as well as continued persistence of the idea that if we can just collect enough sequences, all genetic causes of disease might be found.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3am</author><text>You are misinterpreting. As others have noted, this is DNA in the nuclei of nerve cells, not gametes. It is not heritable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Memories of positive associations get written onto DNA</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/memories-of-positive-associations-get-written-onto-dna/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>By this argument, culture can be imprinted into DNA too, no?<p>This also implies that it would be much tougher to do a Jurassic Park recreation, because the environment is different. You can&#x27;t just start from scratch with the DNA.<p>Or am I misinterpreting?</text></item><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>This is fascinating but unsurprising given all the things that have come out lately with regard to epigenetics. If your mental model of DNA involves some image of a pristine blueprint that is followed with clockwork-like precision in the exact same way by every cell in your body, your model needed updating quite some time ago.<p>I feel that many researchers, even geneticists who should know better, still have not internalized the idea that epigenetics is pretty good evidence that somatic DNA is a read&#x2F;write medium. This leads to sloppy thinking about genetic causes of disease as well as continued persistence of the idea that if we can just collect enough sequences, all genetic causes of disease might be found.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>It&#x27;s a mistake to think there is only one correct path when talking about DNA. Often, there is quite a bit of redundancy involved so Jurasic Park dinosaurs may be slightly different than there historic counterparts but that would not prevent them from being sufficiently viable to pass on there DNA. Because, biology is PASS &#x2F; FAIL not some pursuit of perfection.</text></comment> |
23,965,932 | 23,964,756 | 1 | 2 | 23,963,998 | train | <story><title>Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53450688</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hosh</author><text>I like solar and all, but I will say that just looking at the farming practices of these growers, this transformation will likely be shortlived (I am thinking in terms of generations, not in terms of seasons). Yes, the solar allows people to rapidly deploy solar to use as pumps, but those pumps are also depleting the aquifer. They are probably not putting anything back into the aquifer with practices such as rainwater harvesting (earthworks and improving infiltration, rather than rain barrels).<p>In metro Phoenix, AZ (here in the States) we have been seeing something similar as the deep water have been drying up. Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights (from the Colorado river), and people’s solutions have been to install an electric pump to get at the water. With so many people draining off of the aquifer, people who have been depending on the water have been having difficulty with getting consistent water. Many of them are finding that they have to try to sell the property. What they have <i>not</i> been doing are things like, capturing the rain that does come to the region to irrigate crops or landscape; use of greywater; use of a composting toilet (which cleans waste with the carbon cycle rather than the hydrologic cycle), and otherwise conserve <i>drinking</i> and <i>cooking</i> water. Tuscon, AZ and Flagstaff, AZ have residents and public policies in place that does a much better job with this than Phoenix.<p>With cheap solar added to the mix, what will happen is that it hastens the aquifer depletion.<p>So those poppy farmers are not thinking with whole systems or thinking in the long term. On the other hand, if they were thinking in the long term, they probably would not be growing poppy as a cash crop in the first place. Perhaps small batches to make high quality anesthesia for local use, as part of of a more diverse crop. You don’t kill off your aquifer, and you don’t make something that will kill off your customers. You’d have nothing left.<p>My conclusion is that that the market forces, while transformative, is also very limited and short-sighted, and there are better ways for humans to interact with each other.</text></comment> | <story><title>Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53450688</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>EricE</author><text>&quot;...water is effectively free...&quot; yeah, until they deplete the groundwater. But until then it&#x27;s good times! They should talk to farmers or more importantly, residents in central CA about how much fun it is to run out of groundwater. Good luck.</text></comment> |
36,662,618 | 36,659,192 | 1 | 2 | 36,657,952 | train | <story><title>The great Polish Sea or We forgot Poland (2006)</title><url>https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061027-00/?p=29213</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nl</author><text>Not great, but <i>nothing</i> is worse than date calculations with the Swedish calendar between 1699 and 1753. They have a leap year with no Feb 29, a year with 30 days in February and 367 days in the year, 10 years where they used a globally unique calendar and a year where 1 March was the day after 17 February.<p>Quoting the entire thing:<p>&gt; In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars and the differences would change every four years.<p>&gt; In accordance with the plan, 29 February was omitted in 1700, but the Great Northern War stopped any further omissions from being made in the following years.<p>&gt; In January 1711, King Charles XII declared that Sweden would abandon the calendar, which was not in use by any other nation, in favour of a return to the older Julian calendar. An extra day was added to February in the leap year of 1712, thus giving the month a unique 30-day (30 February) and the year a 367-day length.<p>&gt; In 1753, one year later than England and its colonies, Sweden introduced the Gregorian calendar. The leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with 17 February being followed by 1 March<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Swedish_calendar#Solar_calendar" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Swedish_calendar#Solar_calenda...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The great Polish Sea or We forgot Poland (2006)</title><url>https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061027-00/?p=29213</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>i_am_proteus</author><text>A reference to G. W. Bush&#x27;s remark to J. Kerry in a 2004 presidential debate:<p>&quot;Well, actually, he forgot Poland.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debates.org&#x2F;voter-education&#x2F;debate-transcripts&#x2F;september-30-2004-debate-transcript&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debates.org&#x2F;voter-education&#x2F;debate-transcripts&#x2F;septe...</a></text></comment> |
13,372,258 | 13,370,752 | 1 | 2 | 13,369,510 | train | <story><title>Welcome Chris Lattner</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abalone</author><text>What&#x27;s really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical <i>software correctness and reliability</i> is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you look closely, Lattner has been leading this charge at the language and compiler level.<p>His work has been distinguished by the melding of language <i>safety</i>, <i>reliability</i> and <i>clarity</i>, that is, not merely having sophisticated constructs that help the guarantee correctness, but also making code simple, beautiful and easy to read. Ultimately writing safe code depends on the ability of the programmer to comprehend it, so creating a programming environment that&#x27;s successful on all fronts is a foundational achievement.<p>A notable example: LLVM enabled ARC, a beautifully simple approach to memory management that removed much (not all) of the need for the developer to implement details in code, while providing high efficiency and, perhaps even more importantly, predictable performance (no garbage collection pauses). These are all essential for safety-critical realtime software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>&gt; LLVM enabled ARC, a beautifully simple approach to memory management that removed much (not all) of the need for the developer to implement details in code, while providing high efficiency and, perhaps even more importantly, predictable performance (no garbage collection pauses). These are all essential for safety-critical realtime software.<p>A GC algorithm known since the early days of Lisp GC research and used in languages like Mesa&#x2F;Cedar in the late 70&#x27;s.<p>I can think of lots of other examples, like how VB, Delphi and C++ Builder interfaced with COM in the mid-90&#x27;s.<p>Yes, ARC PR made automatic memory management to those without background in compiler research more easy to accept, specially if they weren&#x27;t aware of the stability issues that trying to implement a tracing GC in Objective-C semantics meant.<p>However it goes without saying, that Lattner is really brilliant and his work on LLVM as a compiler building tool, as well as, clang in regards to improving the status quo of C static analysis tooling and compiler error messages, is really notable.<p>In regards to ARC, maybe also in terms of PR, as now there is a whole generation of developers that thinks reference counting isn&#x27;t garbage collection.</text></comment> | <story><title>Welcome Chris Lattner</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/blog/welcome-chris-lattner</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abalone</author><text>What&#x27;s really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical <i>software correctness and reliability</i> is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you look closely, Lattner has been leading this charge at the language and compiler level.<p>His work has been distinguished by the melding of language <i>safety</i>, <i>reliability</i> and <i>clarity</i>, that is, not merely having sophisticated constructs that help the guarantee correctness, but also making code simple, beautiful and easy to read. Ultimately writing safe code depends on the ability of the programmer to comprehend it, so creating a programming environment that&#x27;s successful on all fronts is a foundational achievement.<p>A notable example: LLVM enabled ARC, a beautifully simple approach to memory management that removed much (not all) of the need for the developer to implement details in code, while providing high efficiency and, perhaps even more importantly, predictable performance (no garbage collection pauses). These are all essential for safety-critical realtime software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devsquid</author><text>ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I&#x27;ve used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy&#x2F;unaware coding can do to it.<p>Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrible and does not back up the sentiment; &quot;But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you look closely, Lattner has been leading this charge at the language and compiler level&quot;.</text></comment> |
4,492,223 | 4,491,854 | 1 | 3 | 4,491,554 | train | <story><title>Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2367378</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rarrrrrr</author><text>At SpiderOak, every storage cluster writes new customer data to three RAID6 volumes on 3 different machines, which wait for fdatasync, before we consider it written.<p>... and before that begins, the data is added to a giant ring buffer that records the last 30 TB of new writes, on machines with UPS. If a rack power failure happens, the ring buffer is kept until storage audits complete.<p>I think every company that deals with large data they can't lose develops appropriate paranoia.<p>The behavior of hard drives is like decaying atoms. You can't make accurate predictions about what any one of them will do. Only in aggregate can you say something like "the half life of this pile of hardware is 12 years" or "if we write this data N times we can reasonably expect to read it it again."</text></comment> | <story><title>Disks lie. And the controllers that run them are partners in crime.</title><url>http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2367378</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>During my tenure at NetApp I got to see all sorts of really really interesting disk problems and the lengths software had to go to reliably store data on them. Two scars burned into me from that were 1) disks suck, and 2) disks are not 'storage'.<p>The first part is pretty easy to understand, storage manufacturers have competed for years in a commodity market where consumers often choose price per gigabyte over URER (the unrecoverable read error rate), further at the scale of the market small savings of cents adds up to better margins. And while the 'enterprise' fibre channel and SCSI drives could (and did) command a hefty premium, the shift to SATA drives really put a crimp in the over all margin picture. So the disk manufacturers are stuck between the reliability of the drive and the cost of the drive. They surf the curve where it is just reliable enough to keep people buying drives.<p>This trend bites back, making the likely hood of an error while reading more and more probable. Not picking on Seagate here, they are all similar, but lets look at their Barracuda drive's spec sheet [1]. You will notice a parameter 'Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits read', and you'll see that its 1x10e14 across the sheet, from 3TB down to 250GB. It is a statistical thing, the whole magnetic field domain to digital bit pipeline is one giant analog loop of a error extraction. 1x10E14 <i>bits</i>. So what does that mean? Lets say each byte is encoded in 10 bits on the disk. Three trillion bytes is 30 trillion bits in that case, or 3x10E13 bits. Best case, if you read that disk from one end to the other (like you were re-silvering a mirror from a RAID 10 setup) you have a 1 in 3 chance that one of those sectors won't be readable <i>for a perfectly working disk.</i> Amazing isn't it? Trying to reconstruct a RAID5 group with 4 disks remaining out of 5, look out.<p>So physics is not on your side, but we've got RAID 6 Chuck! Of course you do, and that is a good thing. But what about when you write to the disk, the disk replies "Yeah sure boss! Got that on the platters now" but it didn't actually right it? Now you've got a parity failure waiting to bite you sitting on the drive, or worse, it <i>does</i> write the sector but writes it somewhere else (saw this a number of times at NetApp as well). There are <i>three million lines of code</i> in the disk firmware. One of the manufacturers (my memory says Maxtor) showed a demo where they booted Linux on the controller of the drive.<p>Bottom line is that the system works mostly, which is a huge win, and a lot of people blame the OS when the drive is at fault, another bonus for manufacturers, but unless your data is in a RAID 6 group or on at least 3 drives, its not really 'safe' in the "I am absolutely positive I could read this back" sense of the word.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-ds1737-1-1111us.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/...</a></text></comment> |
27,214,235 | 27,214,443 | 1 | 2 | 27,212,423 | train | <story><title>Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus</title><url>https://sfciti.org/sf-tech-exodus/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>godot</author><text>It&#x27;s somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow&#x2F;outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.).<p>I know that outside of California, the world views &quot;SF&quot; and &quot;the bay area&quot; mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn&#x27;t tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does).<p>Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay &#x2F; surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn&#x27;t get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it&#x27;s not supposed to be the &quot;next sexy tech town&quot;, but in reality is a <i>lot</i> of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there&#x27;s already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year.<p>All I&#x27;m saying is there&#x27;s a lot of nuances in this general exodus!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dotBen</author><text>Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate&#x2F;lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally.<p>But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city&#x2F;county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there.<p>That&#x27;s why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers.<p><i>(BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don&#x27;t want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don&#x27;t then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)</i></text></comment> | <story><title>Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus</title><url>https://sfciti.org/sf-tech-exodus/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>godot</author><text>It&#x27;s somewhat interesting that some numbers are based on the bay area (drop in bay area tech workers inflow&#x2F;outflow, what percentage of bay area workforce will remain remote), while other numbers based on San Francisco alone (drop in SF residents, SF GDP, business tax revenue, etc.).<p>I know that outside of California, the world views &quot;SF&quot; and &quot;the bay area&quot; mostly as one and the same. Based on anecdotes I feel like this doesn&#x27;t tell the full story, though maybe it does give you a high level overview (like this site does).<p>Among both personal friends and coworkers, ex-coworkers (from a decade+ of working in the bay area) -- surely there are people who move out of state (to Denver, Austin, Miami, etc.); but the more common trend is -- people who used to live in SF are moving out to the east bay &#x2F; surrounding areas; and people who were already in the east bay before move even further away (Sacramento area, etc.). Another interesting bit -- Sacramento doesn&#x27;t get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it&#x27;s not supposed to be the &quot;next sexy tech town&quot;, but in reality is a <i>lot</i> of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not. I moved here before the pandemic, and witnessed the housing market rise more than the east bay (where there&#x27;s already an influx of SF people moving to) this past year.<p>All I&#x27;m saying is there&#x27;s a lot of nuances in this general exodus!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gopalv</author><text>&gt; Sacramento doesn&#x27;t get talked about in tech circles and sites like this and related articles, because it&#x27;s not supposed to be the &quot;next sexy tech town&quot;, but in reality is a lot of people have moved here since the pandemic, both tech and not.<p>Sacramento also has a train line that takes you to Santa Clara, which is better than driving - this has made it a better choice for a few of the folks to consider that over Dublin or Pleasanton in the most recent migration (Amtrak is close to a lot of hardware-lab specific jobs like Nvidia, Lockheed, Marvell, GlobalFoundries and Arista), though that connectivity might shift if BART finally loops around to SJC.<p>Also Sacramento has good schools, decent federal funding pull (over say Tracy) and an airport with a few direct flights from Seattle or NYC.<p>The only downside pretty much is the weather in comparison and that too not by much.</text></comment> |
6,597,725 | 6,597,473 | 1 | 2 | 6,593,780 | train | <story><title>iPad Air</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/apple-unveils-redesigned-9-7-ipad-air/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NicoJuicy</author><text>The iPad to enrich people&#x27;s live...<p>Sorry, but the iPad&#x2F;tablets are mostly used for browsing, creating photos and using apps and games.<p>That&#x27;s not really &quot;enriching&quot; life as i see it, it&#x27;s a consumer device, not a production device... If you really want to make it enriching, make it non-obtrusive.<p>And i would feel sorry for those whose life really is enriched with a electronic device.</text></item><item><author>ek</author><text>I really, really dislike how much hate there is in this thread. I feel like someone always ends up making similar comments every time there&#x27;s a new launch from Apple&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Google&#x2F;whomever, and there is never any change. Do you guys get psyched about <i>anything</i>?<p>On the one end we have &quot;Oh man, iPad air only has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash, how stupid&quot; and on the other end we have &quot;iPad hasn&#x27;t cured cancer yet; would have expected more from Apple under Steve Jobs.&quot;<p>Has it occurred to people to like, take a step back for a moment and think about how amazing it is that we as a society have advanced to the point where we can even have something like iPad? The iPad, and devices like it, have done so much to enrich so many people&#x27;s lives, and isn&#x27;t that what we&#x27;re about in this community? We&#x27;re all trying to make people&#x27;s lives better with computers, and Apple is as much a part of this mission as any of the people on this site.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s easy to get karma by ranting and raving, especially on a site like this where controversy drives more upvotes than downvotes simply because more people have upvote-only privileges. But I want us to be better than this; I don&#x27;t want this to be the norm for discussion in this community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mark_integerdsv</author><text>My dad is 79 years of age. He could never adjust to the digital world.<p>Something as simple as checking a hotmail account was out of his reach.<p>With his iPad he is able to:<p>- keep on touch with my expat brother<p>- see pictures of his grand kids on FB and emails<p>- catch up woth long lost fire do on FB<p>- read magazines without his glasses<p>...in general: just take part in the modern world as opposed to being an outsider.<p>If you pity him then your pity is misplaced because he is massively grateful to have a tool that enables him to commune with his kids and grand kids and to commune with us online.</text></comment> | <story><title>iPad Air</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/apple-unveils-redesigned-9-7-ipad-air/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NicoJuicy</author><text>The iPad to enrich people&#x27;s live...<p>Sorry, but the iPad&#x2F;tablets are mostly used for browsing, creating photos and using apps and games.<p>That&#x27;s not really &quot;enriching&quot; life as i see it, it&#x27;s a consumer device, not a production device... If you really want to make it enriching, make it non-obtrusive.<p>And i would feel sorry for those whose life really is enriched with a electronic device.</text></item><item><author>ek</author><text>I really, really dislike how much hate there is in this thread. I feel like someone always ends up making similar comments every time there&#x27;s a new launch from Apple&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Google&#x2F;whomever, and there is never any change. Do you guys get psyched about <i>anything</i>?<p>On the one end we have &quot;Oh man, iPad air only has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash, how stupid&quot; and on the other end we have &quot;iPad hasn&#x27;t cured cancer yet; would have expected more from Apple under Steve Jobs.&quot;<p>Has it occurred to people to like, take a step back for a moment and think about how amazing it is that we as a society have advanced to the point where we can even have something like iPad? The iPad, and devices like it, have done so much to enrich so many people&#x27;s lives, and isn&#x27;t that what we&#x27;re about in this community? We&#x27;re all trying to make people&#x27;s lives better with computers, and Apple is as much a part of this mission as any of the people on this site.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s easy to get karma by ranting and raving, especially on a site like this where controversy drives more upvotes than downvotes simply because more people have upvote-only privileges. But I want us to be better than this; I don&#x27;t want this to be the norm for discussion in this community.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hippee-lee</author><text>My daughter can create music with Easy Beats 3, she likes the auto drumming thing in garage band because she can record her own songs. She also likes to paint pictures with Paper, she has hot own books so we can keep our drawing separate and so we can print them out or share them. Finally, she makes little animations with Hopscotch. While these are all creativity generators she and I both refer to them as games.<p>I do use the iPad for Flipboard and netflix and games but just as often when I reach for my ipad I reach for my stylus to draw or headphones to create a song. I know I&#x27;m n of one but one of the things I&#x27;m teaching the next generation is that this one thing is a tool that can adapt itself to almost all of her tasks in school and beyond, when she wants to play, when she wants to create or when she wants to learn in a non school context. I don&#x27;t know if most people look at it that way, but those who do will have more opportunity than those who see devices purely for consumption.</text></comment> |
37,060,704 | 37,060,324 | 1 | 2 | 37,059,533 | train | <story><title>Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fourfour3</author><text>Entirely unsurprising - we know Amazon uses their own ARM CPUs internally for large swathes of AWS infra and services.<p>None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here.<p>My employer is moving workloads to ARM on AWS as it’s much better for price&#x2F;perf, and our shiny new M1&#x2F;M2 Macs run the same binaries. We’ve had very little issue doing the shift - Amazon Linux and Debian both support ARM well.<p>Must be really putting a dent in Intel’s data centre sales though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ignoramous</author><text>&gt; <i>None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here.</i><p>James Hamilton was adamant AWS build ARM expertise in-house [0] (one which they accelerated by acquiring <i>Annapurna Labs</i>), and he&#x27;s been proven right [1] despite the obstacles he himself foresaw [2].<p>[0] <i>On the Origins of AWS Custom Silicon</i>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;4k5ul" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;4k5ul</a><p>[1] <i>Low cost, low power servers for Internet-scale services</i>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mvdirona.com&#x2F;jrh&#x2F;talksandpapers&#x2F;JamesHamilton_CEMS.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mvdirona.com&#x2F;jrh&#x2F;talksandpapers&#x2F;JamesHamilton_CEMS.p...</a><p>[2] <i>AWS Designed Processor: Graviton</i>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;WLFBW" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;WLFBW</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/amazon_arm_servers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fourfour3</author><text>Entirely unsurprising - we know Amazon uses their own ARM CPUs internally for large swathes of AWS infra and services.<p>None of the other cloud providers are using ARM at this scale yet. They’re using Ampere chips, whereas Amazon invested in building their own - it tells you the level of commitment Amazon have here.<p>My employer is moving workloads to ARM on AWS as it’s much better for price&#x2F;perf, and our shiny new M1&#x2F;M2 Macs run the same binaries. We’ve had very little issue doing the shift - Amazon Linux and Debian both support ARM well.<p>Must be really putting a dent in Intel’s data centre sales though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheDong</author><text>&gt; and our shiny new M1&#x2F;M2 Macs run the same binaries<p>Does that mean you&#x27;re all running asahi linux, or are you somehow running linux elf binaries on macOS?<p>Or are you using VMs, just like the x86 + docker desktop folks are doing to run the same binaries on their laptops and servers?</text></comment> |
39,195,939 | 39,195,942 | 1 | 2 | 39,195,796 | train | <story><title>Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tra3</author><text>This caught my eye, total employees<p>- 2022: 190,234<p>- 2023: 182,502<p>Total increase in revenue of 10 billion.<p>Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]</title><url>https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>resolutebat</author><text>Google Cloud made $864M in profit in a single quarter, more than ever before.<p>Google Bets lost $86<i>3</i>M in the same period, much less than ever before.</text></comment> |
3,651,890 | 3,651,812 | 1 | 3 | 3,651,329 | train | <story><title>Kim Dotcom’s first TV interview: ‘I’m no piracy king’</title><url>http://www.3news.co.nz/Kim-Dotcoms-first-TV-interview-Im-no-piracy-king/tabid/817/articleID/244830/Default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rasur</author><text>I think some of the points Kim makes are interesting:<p>- He complies with the DMCA.
- He provides direct 'delete' access to his servers for the content companies.
- The content companies that claim to be losing billions, with direct access to his servers so far have failed to file any legal complaint with his lawyers.<p>I'm sure as much as we want to dislike him for his previous flamboyant behaviour, he has some legitimate points and a legitimate company providing a legitimate service (and one that is similarly provided by other companies, some of which are household names).<p>Call me cynical, but this smells of being such a monumental set-up that it makes the farm full of cows just down the road from me seem like a breath of fresh air.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kim Dotcom’s first TV interview: ‘I’m no piracy king’</title><url>http://www.3news.co.nz/Kim-Dotcoms-first-TV-interview-Im-no-piracy-king/tabid/817/articleID/244830/Default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tweak2live</author><text>In my unprofessional legal view, it seems that what the copyright clique is really hoping to gain from this case is a precedent for making website owners responsible for ensuring that content uploaded to their site is copyright kosher.<p>Currently, the copyright holder has to crawl the internet to make sure their copyright isn't being violated somewhere and if so - file a takedown order. This is very whack-a-mole and when it comes to cyberlockers - intractable, since many external links can resolve to the same file. Locker admins have to only remove the offending link to comply with a takedown request, as it is impossible (without knowing the internal code structure) to prove whether two links resolve to the same file or different copies thereof. The linkers can simply check periodically to make sure their links are current and update as necessary, which can be easily automated.<p>The copyright holders cannot automate the discovery process (not without huge resources, anyway), while the copyright infringing parties can easily automate their side. This inherent unbalance creates a difficult policing problem that copyright holders (naturally) don't want to be responsible for.<p>It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If UGC site admins become legally compelled to monitor what they are hosting, the overhead will kill most ad-only revenue models. If not, copyright holders will have to hire some sort of copyright police (does it already exist? if not --&#62; startup_idea_masterlist.add() ).<p>Opinion question: what is the "ok/not ok" line for encouraging your users to use your (online) service for illegal activities (esp. copyright infringement)? Paying them to do it seems to be clearly "over the line", as far as US gov. is concerned. What about publicly announcing that you are not going to police their data?</text></comment> |
28,273,411 | 28,273,280 | 1 | 2 | 28,272,026 | train | <story><title>Afghans Delete Social Media as Taliban Seizes US Surveillance Equipment</title><url>https://www.theepochtimes.com/stranded-afghans-delete-social-media-as-taliban-seizes-us-surveillance-equipment_3958444.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomc1985</author><text>Why oh why didn&#x27;t the military destroy equipment left behind in the wind-down? At least at the bases... where they keep heaps of explosives for the purpose of destroying things?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rgbrenner</author><text>These devices, like most of the equipment the Taliban captured, was in the hands of ANA troops and was abandoned during their surrender&#x2F;retreat[0].<p>This equipment was purchased by Afghanistan from the US (using US funds, obviously). So technically, it wasn&#x27;t US property.. and they had no right to destroy it.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pri.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2021-08-19&#x2F;us-biometric-devices-are-hands-taliban-they-could-be-used-target-afghans-who" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pri.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2021-08-19&#x2F;us-biometric-devices-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Afghans Delete Social Media as Taliban Seizes US Surveillance Equipment</title><url>https://www.theepochtimes.com/stranded-afghans-delete-social-media-as-taliban-seizes-us-surveillance-equipment_3958444.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomc1985</author><text>Why oh why didn&#x27;t the military destroy equipment left behind in the wind-down? At least at the bases... where they keep heaps of explosives for the purpose of destroying things?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>XorNot</author><text>This has been the ongoing incredible thing about all of this: the US just up and leaving fully functional equipment all over the place. I would&#x27;ve thought &quot;slap some C4 to the engine block&quot; would be standard procedure if you&#x27;re abandoning a base?</text></comment> |
16,157,092 | 16,156,528 | 1 | 2 | 16,153,840 | train | <story><title>Google Memory Loss</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colordrops</author><text>This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it&#x27;s been determined to be more likely what you want. It&#x27;s infuriating.</text></item><item><author>Declanomous</author><text>&gt; has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference...)<p>I think the biggest irony is that the web allows for more adoption of long-tail movements than ever before, and Google has gotten significantly worse at turning these up. I <i>assume</i> this has something to do with the fact that information from the long tail is substantially less searched for than stuff within the normal bounds.<p>This is a nightmare if you have any hobbies that share a common phrase with a vastly more popular hobby, and is especially common when it comes to tech-related activities. I use Linux at home, and I program VBA at work. At home Linux is crossed out of most of the first few pages, and I just get a ton of results about Windows, and at work VBA is crossed off and I get results about VB6 and .NET.<p>Completely. Useless.<p>I can only imagine this has something to do with their increasing reliance on AI, and the fact that the AI is probably incentivized to give a correct response to as many people&#x27;above the fold&#x27; as is possible. If 95% of people are served by dropping the specifically-chosen search term, then the AI probably thinks it&#x27;s doing a great job.<p>It seems like the web is being optimized for casual users, and using the internet is no longer as skill you can improve to create a path towards a more meaningful web experience.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I&#x27;ve noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it &quot;Google Alzheimer&#x27;s&quot; --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I&#x27;ve tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including <i>the very word that makes all the difference</i> --- I didn&#x27;t put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.<p>To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something <i>you know exists</i>, very often it will think you&#x27;re a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.<p>Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I&#x27;m often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply &quot;falling off the radar&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkoren</author><text>It actually does this with such consistency that I think it&#x27;s a very specific mistake. For example, I frequently swipe &quot;See you soon.&quot; It always, <i>always</i> renders as &quot;See you son&quot;, which I then have to manually retype. Sometimes twice. I don&#x27;t have a son, and I&#x27;m not a blind old cowboy who jocularly refers to any random person as &quot;son&quot;. I honestly just want to type &quot;soon&quot;, for the love of... anyhow, this is an ongoing, totally inane battle of wills with my phone.<p>I think what&#x27;s happening here is that there&#x27;s a very impressive and sophisticated heuristic for predicting the probability of what you <i>want</i> to type by looking at the frequency of what you <i>have</i> typed in similar contexts. It uses its state-of-the-art AI to evaluate the context and build an array of candidate words, along with their respective probabilities. I suspect it is <i>very</i> accurate as it does this. Then it sorts the array by probability and pops the top element into the predictive text input.<p>Alas -- per my pet theory anyways -- it sorts like this:<p><pre><code> candidateWords.sort((a,b) =&gt; a.probability - b.probability);
</code></pre>
Rather than:<p><pre><code> candidateWords.sort((a,b) =&gt; b.probability - a.probability);
</code></pre>
...which is how a two-character diff can turn a brilliantly helpful AI into an ultimately annoying damnit-I-need-to-smash-something antagonist.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Memory Loss</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/01/15/Google-is-losing-its-memory</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colordrops</author><text>This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it&#x27;s been determined to be more likely what you want. It&#x27;s infuriating.</text></item><item><author>Declanomous</author><text>&gt; has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including the very word that makes all the difference...)<p>I think the biggest irony is that the web allows for more adoption of long-tail movements than ever before, and Google has gotten significantly worse at turning these up. I <i>assume</i> this has something to do with the fact that information from the long tail is substantially less searched for than stuff within the normal bounds.<p>This is a nightmare if you have any hobbies that share a common phrase with a vastly more popular hobby, and is especially common when it comes to tech-related activities. I use Linux at home, and I program VBA at work. At home Linux is crossed out of most of the first few pages, and I just get a ton of results about Windows, and at work VBA is crossed off and I get results about VB6 and .NET.<p>Completely. Useless.<p>I can only imagine this has something to do with their increasing reliance on AI, and the fact that the AI is probably incentivized to give a correct response to as many people&#x27;above the fold&#x27; as is possible. If 95% of people are served by dropping the specifically-chosen search term, then the AI probably thinks it&#x27;s doing a great job.<p>It seems like the web is being optimized for casual users, and using the internet is no longer as skill you can improve to create a path towards a more meaningful web experience.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I&#x27;ve noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it &quot;Google Alzheimer&#x27;s&quot; --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I&#x27;ve tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including <i>the very word that makes all the difference</i> --- I didn&#x27;t put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.<p>To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something <i>you know exists</i>, very often it will think you&#x27;re a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.<p>Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I&#x27;m often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply &quot;falling off the radar&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gonvaled</author><text>Try switching between languages. I work in English, my wife is Italian, my colleagues are french speaking, I am Spanish and have Catalan friends, and I live in Germany. I gave up on predictive keyboards long ago.</text></comment> |
41,552,404 | 41,551,143 | 1 | 3 | 41,550,017 | train | <story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dakiol</author><text>It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive.<p>It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care about is to keep receiving the big pay checks until the ship sinks. Obviously you cannot just mandate “normal mode”, otherwise it wouldn’t look as if everyone is doing their best to keep the company afloat.<p>I hope in 10 years or so, we’ll see “wartime software engineering” with the same eyes we see today Agile and Scrum masters: snake oil.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screye</author><text>It&#x27;s easy to validate the veracity of &#x27;War mode&#x27;. If survival hinges on a critical deliverable, then the promised reward must be in line with the stakes.<p>You can&#x27;t have an employer offering a 20% bonus for keeping them alive. It&#x27;s an insultingly low payoff or the crisis was a lie.<p>There is definitely such a thing as wartime software engineering. But such moments offer a clear path to millions of dollars or generational glory. Otherwise, you&#x27;re being fed koolaid.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire</title><url>https://peterszasz.com/how-to-lead-your-team-when-the-house-is-on-fire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dakiol</author><text>It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive.<p>It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care about is to keep receiving the big pay checks until the ship sinks. Obviously you cannot just mandate “normal mode”, otherwise it wouldn’t look as if everyone is doing their best to keep the company afloat.<p>I hope in 10 years or so, we’ll see “wartime software engineering” with the same eyes we see today Agile and Scrum masters: snake oil.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imetatroll</author><text>Where do you work that you get to avoid agile, scrum, and war mode? I&#x27;m jealous. Then again I&#x27;ve always just been stuck working for startups my entire career. I have a family and desperately need something more stable.</text></comment> |
4,068,751 | 4,067,428 | 1 | 2 | 4,067,297 | train | <story><title>Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies</title><text>Jessica and I had dinner recently with a prominent investor. He seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. But no one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle.<p>What does this mean for you? If it means new startups raise their first money on worse terms than they would have a few months ago, that's not the end of the world, because by historical standards valuations had been high. Airbnb and Dropbox prove you can raise money at a fraction of recent valuations and do just fine. What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face "down rounds," which can be damaging.<p>What to do?<p>If you haven't raised money yet, lower your expectations for fundraising. How much should you lower them? We don't know yet how hard it will be to raise money or what will happen to valuations for those who do. Which means it's more important than ever to be flexible about the valuation you expect and the amount you want to raise (which, odd as it may seem, are connected). First talk to investors about whether they want to invest at all, then negotiate price.<p>If you raised money on a convertible note with a high cap, you may be about to get an illustration of the difference between a valuation cap on a note and an actual valuation. I.e. when you do raise an equity round, the valuation may be below the cap. I don't think this is a problem, except for the possibility that your previous high cap will cause the round to seem to potential investors like a down one. If that's a problem, the solution is not to emphasize that number in conversations with potential investors in an equity round.<p>If you raised money in an equity round at a high valuation, you may find that if you need money you can only get it at a lower one. Which is bad, because "down rounds" not only dilute you horribly, but make you seem and perhaps even feel like damaged goods.<p>The best solution is not to need money. The less you need investor money, (a) the more investors like you, in all markets, and (b) the less you're harmed by bad markets.<p>I often tell startups after raising money that they should act as if it's the last they're ever going to get. In the past that has been a useful heuristic, because doing that is the best way to ensure it's easy to raise more. But if the funding market tanks, it's going to be more than a heuristic.<p>The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on easy terms, and are then led thereby to spend a lot, and to pay little attention to profitability. That kind of startup gets destroyed when markets tighten up. So don't be that startup. If you've raised a lot, don't spend it; not merely for the obvious reason that you'll run out faster, but because it will turn you into the wrong sort of company to thrive in bad times.<p>--pg</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Note incidentally that I'm talking about the performance of the IPO, not the performance of Facebook itself. I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. The problem is simply that Mr. Market (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor</a>) doesn't think so at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rst</author><text>Or perhaps Mr. Market thinks it's a solid, say, $25 or $35 billion company that was just way overvalued at the IPO valuation of $100 billion plus. There's certainly a whole lot of commentary along those lines in the financial press, like this example from a few days before the IPO: <a href="http://marketday.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/15/11702548-is-facebook-worth-the-price-analysts-split?lite" rel="nofollow">http://marketday.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/15/11702548-is-...</a><p>That's certainly a defensible position: the company is stable and profitable as is, but the current valuation has a <i>lot</i> of growth priced in, which could only be realized by growing revenue per user substantially, and they haven't yet demonstrated how they're going to do that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies</title><text>Jessica and I had dinner recently with a prominent investor. He seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. But no one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle.<p>What does this mean for you? If it means new startups raise their first money on worse terms than they would have a few months ago, that's not the end of the world, because by historical standards valuations had been high. Airbnb and Dropbox prove you can raise money at a fraction of recent valuations and do just fine. What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face "down rounds," which can be damaging.<p>What to do?<p>If you haven't raised money yet, lower your expectations for fundraising. How much should you lower them? We don't know yet how hard it will be to raise money or what will happen to valuations for those who do. Which means it's more important than ever to be flexible about the valuation you expect and the amount you want to raise (which, odd as it may seem, are connected). First talk to investors about whether they want to invest at all, then negotiate price.<p>If you raised money on a convertible note with a high cap, you may be about to get an illustration of the difference between a valuation cap on a note and an actual valuation. I.e. when you do raise an equity round, the valuation may be below the cap. I don't think this is a problem, except for the possibility that your previous high cap will cause the round to seem to potential investors like a down one. If that's a problem, the solution is not to emphasize that number in conversations with potential investors in an equity round.<p>If you raised money in an equity round at a high valuation, you may find that if you need money you can only get it at a lower one. Which is bad, because "down rounds" not only dilute you horribly, but make you seem and perhaps even feel like damaged goods.<p>The best solution is not to need money. The less you need investor money, (a) the more investors like you, in all markets, and (b) the less you're harmed by bad markets.<p>I often tell startups after raising money that they should act as if it's the last they're ever going to get. In the past that has been a useful heuristic, because doing that is the best way to ensure it's easy to raise more. But if the funding market tanks, it's going to be more than a heuristic.<p>The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on easy terms, and are then led thereby to spend a lot, and to pay little attention to profitability. That kind of startup gets destroyed when markets tighten up. So don't be that startup. If you've raised a lot, don't spend it; not merely for the obvious reason that you'll run out faster, but because it will turn you into the wrong sort of company to thrive in bad times.<p>--pg</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Note incidentally that I'm talking about the performance of the IPO, not the performance of Facebook itself. I think Facebook as a company is in a strong position. The problem is simply that Mr. Market (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor</a>) doesn't think so at the moment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>Out of curiosity, why is it that Facebook's IPO would hurt early stage valuations, when all of Facebook's early investors made hundreds of millions or billions of dollars? I could see it getting harder to IPO at a good valuation for a few years, but that shouldn't drive down early stage valuations all that much. Also, to me the most interesting thing to watch (beyond Spain) is these new crowdsourcing laws going into effect January 1st. That has the potential to drive hundreds of millions of dollars into the angel space overnight, sending valuations through the roof or at least keeping them propped up for a while.</text></comment> |
8,020,981 | 8,020,807 | 1 | 3 | 8,020,621 | train | <story><title>Bill Gates's Favorite Business Book</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/articles/bill-gatess-favorite-business-book-1405088228</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>caster_cp</author><text>It&#x27;s available since July 8th 2014 in Amazon... I see what you did there with your marketing ingeniousness, Mr. WSJ || Bill Gates.<p>The problem is that I&#x27;m easy, all too easy, and I fall for these ploys. And now I&#x27;m biting myself to buy the book :) Well done.<p>edit: what&#x27;s available is a Kindle edition, that I suppose is from the same book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Street-ebook/dp/B00L1TPCKW/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Bill Gates's Favorite Business Book</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/articles/bill-gatess-favorite-business-book-1405088228</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AJ007</author><text>Not available on Amazon currently, but available on Abebooks:
<a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=john+brooks&amp;sts=t&amp;tn=business+adventures" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abebooks.com&#x2F;servlet&#x2F;SearchResults?an=john+brooks...</a><p>Also on Google Books for $9.99: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=ZMPTAwAAQBAJ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=ZMPTAwAAQBAJ</a></text></comment> |
33,652,927 | 33,652,328 | 1 | 3 | 33,637,192 | train | <story><title>Migrating 1 terabyte of files from OneDrive to Nextcloud</title><url>https://herrherrmann.net/migrating-1-terabyte-of-files-from-onedrive-to-nextcloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neamar</author><text>My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders.<p>I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I&#x27;m not looking back!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomaskafka</author><text>+1 here. Nextcloud is a pile of PHP scripts, while Seafile splits and diffs individual file blocks, and absolutely flies at &#x27;whatever the lower of of your network and drive speed is&#x27;, handling any file sizes you can throw at it.<p>On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I&#x27;d build in all the backdoors I can, which I guess already happened.</text></comment> | <story><title>Migrating 1 terabyte of files from OneDrive to Nextcloud</title><url>https://herrherrmann.net/migrating-1-terabyte-of-files-from-onedrive-to-nextcloud/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neamar</author><text>My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders.<p>I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I&#x27;m not looking back!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bayindirh</author><text>As a sysadmin managing Nextcloud on an on premise VPS, we have none of the problems you mentioned. We have 20+ accounts, tons of shared files, and whatnot.<p>Just upgraded to Nextcloud 25 (literally 20 minutes ago), and no problems whatsoever.<p>I deployed it on a virtualized server which is not extremely powerful, and everybody seems to enjoy the productivity boost it brought into the team.</text></comment> |
31,748,961 | 31,742,070 | 1 | 2 | 31,740,902 | train | <story><title>Grafana releases OnCall open source project</title><url>https://grafana.com/blog/2022/06/14/introducing-grafana-oncall-oss-open-source/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>juliennakache</author><text>Looking forward to trying this out. I&#x27;ve always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering. It costs something at least $250 per user for organization larger than 5 person - even if you&#x27;re not an engineer who is ever directly on call. At my previous company, IT had to regularly send surveys to employees to assess if they <i>really</i> needed to have a PagerDuty account. Alerts are a key information in an organization that runs software in production and you shouldn&#x27;t have to pay $250 &#x2F; month just to be able to have some visibility into it. I&#x27;m hoping Grafana OnCall is able to fully replace PagerDuty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>echelon</author><text>Time and time again.<p>&quot;Business should focus on its core competency&quot;<p>* Outsource in-house infra to cloud. This begets lock-in as every engineer is doing heaven knows what with Lambda. Still need that huge infra team to manage AWS.<p>* Outsource in-house metrics and visibility to SignalFx, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, etc. Still need a team to manage it. Costs get raised by more than double because we&#x27;re beholden, so now we need to fund 20+ engineer quarters to migrate everything ASAP.<p>* Feature flagging system built in house works like a charm and needs one engineer for maintenance. Let&#x27;s fund a team to migrate it all to LaunchDarkly. Year+ later and we still don&#x27;t have proper support or rollout and their stuff doesn&#x27;t work as expected.<p>Madness.<p>Expensive madness.<p>SaaS won&#x27;t magically reduce your staffing needs. Open source solutions won&#x27;t reduce your staffing needs either, but they&#x27;ll make costs predictable. As these tools become more prevalent and standard, you can even hire experts for them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Grafana releases OnCall open source project</title><url>https://grafana.com/blog/2022/06/14/introducing-grafana-oncall-oss-open-source/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>juliennakache</author><text>Looking forward to trying this out. I&#x27;ve always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering. It costs something at least $250 per user for organization larger than 5 person - even if you&#x27;re not an engineer who is ever directly on call. At my previous company, IT had to regularly send surveys to employees to assess if they <i>really</i> needed to have a PagerDuty account. Alerts are a key information in an organization that runs software in production and you shouldn&#x27;t have to pay $250 &#x2F; month just to be able to have some visibility into it. I&#x27;m hoping Grafana OnCall is able to fully replace PagerDuty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CSMastermind</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;ve always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering<p>For anyone out there in the same spot, I&#x27;ll say that I switched my last company to Atlassian&#x27;s OpsGenie and it was a 10x cost savings for the same feature set.</text></comment> |
29,089,272 | 29,088,896 | 1 | 2 | 29,084,122 | train | <story><title>The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021</title><url>https://raymii.org/s/blog/The_Common_Desktop_Environment_CDE_is_still_developed_in_2021.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rnd0</author><text>&gt;CDE is still developed and modern in 2021<p>I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I&#x27;m left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is &quot;modern&quot;.<p>Anyone else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>badsectoracula</author><text>Judging from the repository it has a lot of commits so i guess it is being developed.<p>Also the releases seem to have changed convention since CDE 2.3.0 which was made a few years ago[0] and there have been a couple of releases per year since then. My guess is that there is a new maintainer&#x2F;team behind it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cdesktopenv&#x2F;files&#x2F;src&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cdesktopenv&#x2F;files&#x2F;src&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021</title><url>https://raymii.org/s/blog/The_Common_Desktop_Environment_CDE_is_still_developed_in_2021.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rnd0</author><text>&gt;CDE is still developed and modern in 2021<p>I read the article and while I see a pretty good installation guide, I&#x27;m left unconvinced that CDE is either currently being developed or that it is &quot;modern&quot;.<p>Anyone else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>Maybe they meant &quot;modernist&quot;, or the &quot;modern era&quot; in Civilization V, which was roughly the 1900-1950 period.</text></comment> |
37,885,026 | 37,884,824 | 1 | 2 | 37,879,715 | train | <story><title>Kalman filter from the ground up</title><url>https://www.kalmanfilter.net/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubs</author><text>I&#x27;ve been asked by a friend recently to implement a Kalman filter for a side project. Among many others, I&#x27;ve read this website and still have no idea how to implement it. They all seem to be in the style of &#x27;draw the rest of the owl&#x27;.<p>Can anyone point to anything that explains it in a manner a programmer would explain (eg array iteration instead of sigma notation) ?<p>As far as i understand, Kalman Filters seem to be a moving average of position, velocity, and (perhaps) acceleration, and use those 3 values to estimate the &#x27;real value&#x27; as opposed to what the sensor is telling you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tnecniv</author><text>As far as resources, I’m not sure. It really only takes a few lines of code if you have a linear algebra library like NumPy or similar. However you need to write down the math describing your dynamics first.<p>The Kalman filter is really just Bayes Theorem applied to a particular set of system dynamics. Really it’s two applications of Bayes rule: given my current state estimate, how do I update my estimate when I receive a measurement? Then, after receiving that measurement, how will the system dynamics impact my uncertainty before the next measurement? You iterate applying these two every time you receive a measurement.<p>Do you have a dynamics model? I.e., a set of equations that tell you how what ever you are trying to track will update in time? That’s the first thing you need and if you don’t have that, I could see you being quite confused about the implementation.<p>It might help you to either read about particle filters or just Bayes filters generally. The Kalman filter is a Bayes filter for a specific set of assumptions that leads to a lot of linear algebra. If you understand the Bayes filter, the Kalman filter will make more sense, and you can learn about the Bayes filter without all the matrices. The particle filter is another algorithm worth reading about. Like the Kalman filter, it is a Bayes filter but it doesn’t require the linear algebra.<p>Aside: I always get frustrated when I see people saying that you don’t need to know math to be a software developer. Maybe that’s true if you want to make web pages, but the more math you know, the better your ability to model problems and either solve them yourself or find solutions others have created. The scope of problems you can solve via programming becomes so much bigger the more math you know.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kalman filter from the ground up</title><url>https://www.kalmanfilter.net/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubs</author><text>I&#x27;ve been asked by a friend recently to implement a Kalman filter for a side project. Among many others, I&#x27;ve read this website and still have no idea how to implement it. They all seem to be in the style of &#x27;draw the rest of the owl&#x27;.<p>Can anyone point to anything that explains it in a manner a programmer would explain (eg array iteration instead of sigma notation) ?<p>As far as i understand, Kalman Filters seem to be a moving average of position, velocity, and (perhaps) acceleration, and use those 3 values to estimate the &#x27;real value&#x27; as opposed to what the sensor is telling you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dilyevsky</author><text>&gt; As far as i understand, Kalman Filters seem to be a moving average of position, velocity, and (perhaps) acceleration, and use those 3 values to estimate the &#x27;real value&#x27; as opposed to what the sensor is telling you.<p>Sort of. The actual variables (v, r, a in your case) vary depending on your use case. What matters is you make an <i>estimate</i> based on that state, then you take a <i>measurement</i> and there’s an iterative way of adjusting your next state based on those two. It’s actually pretty easy to code once you understand formulas.<p>Maybe this could help <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bilgin.esme.org&#x2F;BitsAndBytes&#x2F;KalmanFilterforDummies" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bilgin.esme.org&#x2F;BitsAndBytes&#x2F;KalmanFilterforDummies</a></text></comment> |
20,833,863 | 20,833,856 | 1 | 2 | 20,832,798 | train | <story><title>Microsoft Is Killing ePub Support in Edge Classic</title><url>https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/213350/microsoft-is-killing-epub-support-in-edge-classic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saagarjha</author><text>&gt; “Download an .epub app to keep reading,” a notification in Edge classic reads when you load an EPUB document. “Microsoft Edge will no longer be supporting [sic] e-books that use the .epub file extension. Visit the Microsoft Store to see our recommended .epub apps.”<p>What’s wrong with this? It looks grammatically correct to me…</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwinnski</author><text>It seems fine to me, too, if not the most direct wording. &quot;Microsoft Edge will no longer support e-books...&quot; is shorter, but the existing wording isn&#x27;t wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft Is Killing ePub Support in Edge Classic</title><url>https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/213350/microsoft-is-killing-epub-support-in-edge-classic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>saagarjha</author><text>&gt; “Download an .epub app to keep reading,” a notification in Edge classic reads when you load an EPUB document. “Microsoft Edge will no longer be supporting [sic] e-books that use the .epub file extension. Visit the Microsoft Store to see our recommended .epub apps.”<p>What’s wrong with this? It looks grammatically correct to me…</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&gt; What’s wrong with this?<p>This is answered in the next sentence of the article: <i>it’s “support” not “be supporting,” Microsoft</i>.<p>The is using the future continuous when the simple future is more appropriate to the message.</text></comment> |
20,888,445 | 20,888,724 | 1 | 3 | 20,887,641 | train | <story><title>A critique of the claim that passive investing is a bubble</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/09/debunking-the-silly-passive-is-a-bubble-myth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perspective1</author><text>Exactly. The article, starting with the title, is pompous and overconfident. Burry made the unanswered point that in a sell-off large index funds will have to dump their smaller holdings at large discounts. We have never had a market crash with passive holdings this large (and consolidated in a small handful of funds)-- we&#x27;re in unprecedented times. Burry&#x27;s point is entirely plausible. And although that it wouldn&#x27;t immediately cause a problem for investors who don&#x27;t sell (price is not value), the newly discount-price firms may struggle immensely in terms of raising new capital and financing.</text></item><item><author>talolard</author><text>I think this article really misses the point that Burry was making, which is that if the indexs see a sell off they won&#x27;t find the liquidity in the market to cash out their positions and will drive the market down.<p>This article seems to focus on all of the upsides of indexing, which are all true. However, those upsides don&#x27;t negate the risk that is being pointed to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thanatropism</author><text>The title is terrible.<p>The fundamental problem he seems to be pointing at is that notional replicating portfolios can work like an engineering marvel in good times and become inoperable in bad (liquidity) times.<p>There were many elements to the CDO crisis -- including bad faith by the rating agencies and a prolonged asset-price mania much beyond this stock-market rally. The simpler metaphor is the emission of vanilla stock options. In principle, a bank is only able to offer options because he has the ability to replicate it and neutralize his risk. But if market conditions diverge from the asset replication model, then <i>boom</i> you get LTCM.</text></comment> | <story><title>A critique of the claim that passive investing is a bubble</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2019/09/debunking-the-silly-passive-is-a-bubble-myth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>perspective1</author><text>Exactly. The article, starting with the title, is pompous and overconfident. Burry made the unanswered point that in a sell-off large index funds will have to dump their smaller holdings at large discounts. We have never had a market crash with passive holdings this large (and consolidated in a small handful of funds)-- we&#x27;re in unprecedented times. Burry&#x27;s point is entirely plausible. And although that it wouldn&#x27;t immediately cause a problem for investors who don&#x27;t sell (price is not value), the newly discount-price firms may struggle immensely in terms of raising new capital and financing.</text></item><item><author>talolard</author><text>I think this article really misses the point that Burry was making, which is that if the indexs see a sell off they won&#x27;t find the liquidity in the market to cash out their positions and will drive the market down.<p>This article seems to focus on all of the upsides of indexing, which are all true. However, those upsides don&#x27;t negate the risk that is being pointed to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doubleunplussed</author><text>By symmetry, shouldn&#x27;t the rapid growth of index funds imply the funds have paid inflated premiums to buy illiquid stocks? I suppose the &#x27;bubble&#x27; claim is that they have, but that this is invisible because it has inflated the price of the underlying stocks as well so we still see the index funds priced the same as the underlying stocks.<p>At least for exchange-traded funds, it would seem that you don&#x27;t have to actually destroy units of the ETF in the case of a sell-off. The ETF units would just sell at lower prices, just like when there is a &#x27;sell off&#x27; of any stock - there are always equal numbers of buyers and sellers, you don&#x27;t destroy units, you just move the price lower.<p>With index funds where you have an account directly with vanguard or whoever instead of buying units on an exchange, I&#x27;m not sure how it works in a sell-off. Perhaps they sell shares in the individual stocks, or perhaps they just try to sell off your shares bundled together by issuing more ETF units. I don&#x27;t know what they do, but it seems like there are a bunch of options that should mean they don&#x27;t have to sell off illiquid stocks on command.<p>I&#x27;m not sure. Happy to be enlightened. As much as I think about it, my intuition seems to consistently say that it&#x27;s impossible for index funds to be broken in any meaningful way that&#x27;s any different from the market itself or some sector thereof being in a bubble.</text></comment> |
22,075,421 | 22,075,568 | 1 | 2 | 22,050,418 | train | <story><title>Professors create free research-backed games to train your brain</title><url>http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/january/train-your-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArtWomb</author><text>Simply put, I don&#x27;t think the engagement is there with the entire genre of &quot;brain training&quot; games. They don&#x27;t feel like &quot;play&quot; in the same way that one could easily slip into Stardew Valley and lose hours at a sitting. Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible. Even if the benefits were are as palpable as actual exercise.<p>Contrast with the &quot;Math AR&quot; tool GeoGebra. The interface is not perfect yet. But it does give a glimpse at what a truly interactive geometry lesson would look like. As well as a medium that invites life-long learning ;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grawprog</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure about learning games, but video games in general have definitely improved my skills in life. Especially when it comes to problem solving and persistence. I tend to work at difficult problems the same way I work on tough levels in games.<p>I do think many games today don&#x27;t teach this though. You need to be able to lose. Old games made you lose constantly, you had to learn the patterns and build up your reflexes and coordination. Much of life is actually like this. It&#x27;s a valuable skill to be able to keep going at something until you get it. I&#x27;ve seen a lot of people just give up on things at the first hint of difficulty, video games taught me not to do that and because of this, i&#x27;ll push and keep learning skills even when it gets frustrating and not so fun. There&#x27;s a lot of things I would&#x27;ve given up on if I hadn&#x27;t learned that the rewards for pushing through are usually worth it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Professors create free research-backed games to train your brain</title><url>http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/january/train-your-brain.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ArtWomb</author><text>Simply put, I don&#x27;t think the engagement is there with the entire genre of &quot;brain training&quot; games. They don&#x27;t feel like &quot;play&quot; in the same way that one could easily slip into Stardew Valley and lose hours at a sitting. Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible. Even if the benefits were are as palpable as actual exercise.<p>Contrast with the &quot;Math AR&quot; tool GeoGebra. The interface is not perfect yet. But it does give a glimpse at what a truly interactive geometry lesson would look like. As well as a medium that invites life-long learning ;)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geogebra.org&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwsm</author><text>&gt;Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible. Even if the benefits were are as palpable as actual exercise.<p>This makes no sense. People exercise for 30 minutes a day, or read, or clean, or play video games, or watch TV, or tend to a garden, or do yoga.<p>Why are all these feasible but exercising your brain is not?</text></comment> |
5,053,488 | 5,053,510 | 1 | 3 | 5,053,359 | train | <story><title>Anonymous R.I.P Note for Aaron Swartz</title><url>http://rledev.mit.edu/aaron.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hkmurakami</author><text><i>&#62;Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace. </i><p>"read in peace" where we'd expect "rest in peace. I'm guessing that this expression was intentional, given that Aaron was a voracious reader, and considering the eloquence of the postscript[0].<p>This is the first time I've read any message from Anonymous (and my understanding is that there is no "one" Anonymous organization, but rather a loose collection of fragmented groups), but I am quite impressed by the author's command of the English language.<p><i>[0] Postscript: We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites. We understand that it is a time of soul-searching for all those within this great institution as much — perhaps for some involved even more so — than it is for the greater internet community. We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud, and honour the ideals and dedication that burnt so brightly within him by embodying them in thought and word and action.</i><p>---<p>edit: it also seems that the closing line, <i>"You were the best of us; may you yet bring out the best in us."</i> is an original phrase by the author? (a quick google search didn't yield any prominent matches) It is a beautiful line.</text></comment> | <story><title>Anonymous R.I.P Note for Aaron Swartz</title><url>http://rledev.mit.edu/aaron.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thornjm</author><text>I thought it was interesting how the images used are not hosted anywhere. Instead the source contains a base64 encoded copy of the image.</text></comment> |
22,414,182 | 22,413,899 | 1 | 2 | 22,413,676 | train | <story><title>Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference</title><url>https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/02/25/early-riser-or-night-owl-new-study-may-help-to-explain-the-difference/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZanyProgrammer</author><text>Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.</text></item><item><author>bilekas</author><text>I am very much a night owl and I have a really hard time getting into a routine of getting up early in the morning, even if I do manage to get my hours of sleep.<p>It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week.<p>People say its a lazy thing, but its really not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>poulsbohemian</author><text>Nearly everywhere in US society where productivity comes up, the “early bird” is held up as the standard of efficiency. Thus, those people who instead prefer a schedule that doesn’t begin pre-dawn have been chastised in books, talks, and in media despite there not being any proof that that they are “lazy” but rather are simply naturally attuned to a different schedule.</text></comment> | <story><title>Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference</title><url>https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/02/25/early-riser-or-night-owl-new-study-may-help-to-explain-the-difference/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZanyProgrammer</author><text>Maybe it’s just the small subset of software engineers who frequent HN, but I swear 99.9% of the people on here are night owls, and they very much let their opinions be known on every thread about sleep.</text></item><item><author>bilekas</author><text>I am very much a night owl and I have a really hard time getting into a routine of getting up early in the morning, even if I do manage to get my hours of sleep.<p>It took a long time to find a balance of forcing to sleep and forcing to get up. But now I have to be very concious, if I have a late weekend I am out of sync for the rest of the week.<p>People say its a lazy thing, but its really not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>npongratz</author><text>Perhaps because this is one place where kindred spirits feel comfortable sharing without fear of the denigration we&#x27;ve experienced our entire lives -- the overt and the subtle, conscious and inadvertent, the malicious and the good-intentioned.</text></comment> |
38,932,864 | 38,932,661 | 1 | 3 | 38,932,228 | train | <story><title>SEC has not approved Bitcoin ETFs [fixed]</title><url>https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744837121406349714</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>The price of BTC initially jumped 3% on the hacked tweet. That&#x27;s $25bn+ of market cap. The irony is the SEC itself is probably now responsible for the largest crypto pump and dump in history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>addicted</author><text>This is quite literally not a pump and dump by the SEC.<p>A pump and dump would require the same entity to be doing the buying, pumping up, and then dumping the asset.<p>The SEC didn’t buy, nor did it sell, nor did it pump up the price (someone pretending to be the SEC pumped up the price).<p>Even assuming that the “largest pump and dump” claim is correct, at most, the SEC was used for that purpose and isn’t “responsible” for it.</text></comment> | <story><title>SEC has not approved Bitcoin ETFs [fixed]</title><url>https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744837121406349714</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcolkitt</author><text>The price of BTC initially jumped 3% on the hacked tweet. That&#x27;s $25bn+ of market cap. The irony is the SEC itself is probably now responsible for the largest crypto pump and dump in history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Twitter&#x2F;X is not an authoritative source of news, regardless of whether it is an &quot;official&quot; account doing the Tweeting or not. Anyone can get a blue check by paying $8&#x2F;mo.</text></comment> |
25,083,598 | 25,083,071 | 1 | 3 | 25,081,707 | train | <story><title>SLS vs. Starship</title><url>https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>The reasoning behind SLS sort of made sense 10 years ago. We didn&#x27;t know that Starship, New Glenn and Falcon Heavy were coming down the pipe. We decided that the US &amp; NASA needed super-heavy lift capability. Previous attempts to design a heavy lift vehicle were lost to political regime change and congress in-fighting. Previous attempts to design a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle were cancelled due to its virtual impossibility.<p>So NASA &amp; Congress designed a program that was unkillable. It greased too many wheels and lined too many pockets to make it easy to kill. It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.<p>So now when we complain that it&#x27;s a pork-filled boondoggle that&#x27;s impossible to kill, that was the plan, and there was a certain logic behind it. It makes no sense in a world with Falcon Heavy, Starship &amp; New Glenn, but who would have predicted that with confidence in 2010?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OnlyOneCannolo</author><text>It made sense as an institutional flywheel.<p>The Constellation Program [1] that preceded SLS had two vehicles - Ares I for ISS crew and supplies after Shuttle was retired, and Ares V for occupying the moon. The missions gave some justification for needing vehicles. Their design was primarily a means to preserve existing contracts and jobs. Additional wheel greasing made it happen.<p>That stuff about re-using parts to reduce risk is just what people say because it sounds good, but isn&#x27;t inherently true. Kind of like how &quot;drug delivery&quot; and &quot;machine learning application&quot; are go-to pseudo-justifications for many research proposals.<p>Constellation was eventually canceled when ISS resupply went to the Commercial Crew Program [2]. Ares V was stripped down and reimagined as the mission-less SLS. SLS is not really intended to do much more than exist for the time being.<p>There are a lot of factors that will go into canceling SLS - infighting between NASA centers, preserving jobs and contracts with Old Space companies, even more wheel greasing. I&#x27;m interested to see how it plays out.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Constellation_program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Constellation_program</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commercial_Crew_Program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Commercial_Crew_Program</a></text></comment> | <story><title>SLS vs. Starship</title><url>https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>The reasoning behind SLS sort of made sense 10 years ago. We didn&#x27;t know that Starship, New Glenn and Falcon Heavy were coming down the pipe. We decided that the US &amp; NASA needed super-heavy lift capability. Previous attempts to design a heavy lift vehicle were lost to political regime change and congress in-fighting. Previous attempts to design a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle were cancelled due to its virtual impossibility.<p>So NASA &amp; Congress designed a program that was unkillable. It greased too many wheels and lined too many pockets to make it easy to kill. It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.<p>So now when we complain that it&#x27;s a pork-filled boondoggle that&#x27;s impossible to kill, that was the plan, and there was a certain logic behind it. It makes no sense in a world with Falcon Heavy, Starship &amp; New Glenn, but who would have predicted that with confidence in 2010?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mlindner</author><text>I think you&#x27;re misrepresenting the past.<p>&gt; It was also designed ultra-conservatively using mostly existing designs so there was no technical risk.<p>Politicians can&#x27;t design a rocket and cannot get what is &quot;ultra-conservative&quot;. Rockets are not Lego blocks that you can just mix and match. They&#x27;re explicitly designed a certain way to support a certain load profile. Even if the parts of the SLS _look_ like they have low risk, they do not and that&#x27;s why the vehicle has taken so long to develop.<p>One example, if the shuttle boosters were could actually have been used directly they wouldn&#x27;t have needed to extend the number of segments from 4 to 5, redesign the liner between the segments, and completely redesign the nozzle. It&#x27;s a new booster.<p>Second example, even though the shuttle external tank looks like it&#x27;s being used, in previous iterations the shuttle external tank did not support any axial loads, it was simply held on to the bottom of the Orbiter. Now the external tank has to withstand the entire axial load of the rocket so it&#x27;s basically redesigned from scratch.</text></comment> |
11,156,223 | 11,156,317 | 1 | 2 | 11,155,948 | train | <story><title>Rewrite Everything in Rust</title><url>http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/rewrite-everything-in-rust.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>&gt; A rewrite would clean up the code, sure, but then you&#x27;re left in the same situation, only with brand new bugs that nobody has time to fix.<p>The entire point is that you&#x27;re <i>not</i> in the same situation regarding memory safety problems&#x2F;vulnerabilities.</text></item><item><author>panic</author><text>I think this misses the real problem. So many pieces of foundational software like glibc and OpenSSL are understaffed, underfunded, and plagued by terrible code. Go read glibc getaddrinfo: it&#x27;s a mess!<p>Rewriting the software in Rust would not solve these problems any more than rewriting it in C++ would. A rewrite would clean up the code, sure, but then you&#x27;re left in the same situation, only with brand new bugs that nobody has time to fix.<p>We need to have incentives for maintaining this foundational software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubiquity</author><text>I think what GP is saying that you&#x27;ll have problems in logic or other typical programming problems and that it isn&#x27;t a lack of language features&#x2F;safety but rather time&#x2F;money being thrown at these libraries<p>I imagine the top two reasons unsafe memory access happen is:<p>1) other complicated logic seeped into the memory sensitive area or causes programmer fatigue<p>2) memory management is hard<p>Rust helps with #2 but let&#x27;s not kid ourselves, what percentage of a library like glibc would be spent in unsafe blocks? Drawing attention to an unsafe area can help though.<p>As you can see, I&#x27;m running around in circles. Just like every discussion about this does. Until an avid Rust user puts their money where their mouth is, we&#x27;re all just playing Armchair Programmer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rewrite Everything in Rust</title><url>http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/02/rewrite-everything-in-rust.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcwalton</author><text>&gt; A rewrite would clean up the code, sure, but then you&#x27;re left in the same situation, only with brand new bugs that nobody has time to fix.<p>The entire point is that you&#x27;re <i>not</i> in the same situation regarding memory safety problems&#x2F;vulnerabilities.</text></item><item><author>panic</author><text>I think this misses the real problem. So many pieces of foundational software like glibc and OpenSSL are understaffed, underfunded, and plagued by terrible code. Go read glibc getaddrinfo: it&#x27;s a mess!<p>Rewriting the software in Rust would not solve these problems any more than rewriting it in C++ would. A rewrite would clean up the code, sure, but then you&#x27;re left in the same situation, only with brand new bugs that nobody has time to fix.<p>We need to have incentives for maintaining this foundational software.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>panic</author><text>Yeah, I&#x27;m not saying that a rewrite is necessarily a bad idea or that it wouldn&#x27;t improve things (though writing a drop-in replacement for something like glibc in Rust sounds pretty challenging to me). The situation I&#x27;m talking about is the one where no one has an incentive to improve the software day-to-day. If we really want to fix the problem, we should also look at how it got that way.</text></comment> |
37,826,498 | 37,826,141 | 1 | 3 | 37,825,653 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Brother printers sending ink data to Amazon?</title><text>A most unusual thing. Every once in a while I get an email from Amazon that it&#x27;s time to re-order Brother ink. I always delete these because I rarely print, but also figure it&#x27;s just Amazon reminding me to buy something.<p>Today I decided to opt out&#x2F;unsubscribe once and for all. Instead I see this at the bottom of the email:<p>&quot;Click here to view or manage settings, including the option to opt out if you are already using another replenishment service.<p>This took me to https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drs-web.amazon.com&#x2F;settings<p>&quot;The data shown is based on estimated consumption reported by smart devices and orders you place through Amazon.&quot;<p>Here it had a link to &quot;Consumption history&quot; which upon clicking showed me the ink levels of my Brother printer for the past <i>two weeks</i>. Date and time.<p>WTF?! It is not apparent that I can disable this function. Can anyone else duplicate?<p><i>Update</i> : This is part of Alexa it seems, and folded in to the Dash replenishment protocol; note I have never had a Dash button.<p>Amazon&#x27;s instructions for this were not very helpful.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;help&#x2F;customer&#x2F;display.html?nodeId=201357520<p>Some digging revealed a Brother help document:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.brother-usa.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;answers&#x2F;detail&#x2F;a_id&#x2F;172810&#x2F;~&#x2F;cancel-enrollment-%28amazon-smart-reorders%29<p>This bothers me quite a lot. I never authorized, opted in, or gave either device permission to connect, let alone Amazon to monitor and nag me about it!<p>Model: Brother MFC-J485DW<p>Purchased from: Best Buy, an American retailer, after July of 2019.<p>Firmware: N1901041316</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>orev</author><text>If you have the printer on your network, and any Amazon device on your network, the Amazon device could easily query the printer for ink levels. My Home Assistant does this and I never connected HA to the printer. It’s just part of the status information the printer seems to make available on the network.<p>It’s not surprising to me that Amazon would do this using one of their devices, as everyone seems to be grabbing as much data as they can. It’s probably described in the T&amp;Cs somewhere (that they can scan your network and use data from it).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kxrm</author><text>This is why IoT devices on my network get their own subnet and they are blocked from communicating with anything but what I allow them to communicate with, including the Internet.<p>Also I want to make it clear, it shouldn&#x27;t have to be this way. Devices should be transparent about how they function, but sadly they are not.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Brother printers sending ink data to Amazon?</title><text>A most unusual thing. Every once in a while I get an email from Amazon that it&#x27;s time to re-order Brother ink. I always delete these because I rarely print, but also figure it&#x27;s just Amazon reminding me to buy something.<p>Today I decided to opt out&#x2F;unsubscribe once and for all. Instead I see this at the bottom of the email:<p>&quot;Click here to view or manage settings, including the option to opt out if you are already using another replenishment service.<p>This took me to https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drs-web.amazon.com&#x2F;settings<p>&quot;The data shown is based on estimated consumption reported by smart devices and orders you place through Amazon.&quot;<p>Here it had a link to &quot;Consumption history&quot; which upon clicking showed me the ink levels of my Brother printer for the past <i>two weeks</i>. Date and time.<p>WTF?! It is not apparent that I can disable this function. Can anyone else duplicate?<p><i>Update</i> : This is part of Alexa it seems, and folded in to the Dash replenishment protocol; note I have never had a Dash button.<p>Amazon&#x27;s instructions for this were not very helpful.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;help&#x2F;customer&#x2F;display.html?nodeId=201357520<p>Some digging revealed a Brother help document:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.brother-usa.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;answers&#x2F;detail&#x2F;a_id&#x2F;172810&#x2F;~&#x2F;cancel-enrollment-%28amazon-smart-reorders%29<p>This bothers me quite a lot. I never authorized, opted in, or gave either device permission to connect, let alone Amazon to monitor and nag me about it!<p>Model: Brother MFC-J485DW<p>Purchased from: Best Buy, an American retailer, after July of 2019.<p>Firmware: N1901041316</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>orev</author><text>If you have the printer on your network, and any Amazon device on your network, the Amazon device could easily query the printer for ink levels. My Home Assistant does this and I never connected HA to the printer. It’s just part of the status information the printer seems to make available on the network.<p>It’s not surprising to me that Amazon would do this using one of their devices, as everyone seems to be grabbing as much data as they can. It’s probably described in the T&amp;Cs somewhere (that they can scan your network and use data from it).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ajay-p</author><text><i>It’s probably described in the T&amp;Cs somewhere</i><p>Which.. I never read but I concur with your theory.</text></comment> |
13,429,355 | 13,428,363 | 1 | 3 | 13,428,098 | train | <story><title>PyTorch – Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python</title><url>http://pytorch.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Smerity</author><text>Only a few months ago people saying that the deep learning library ecosystem was starting to stabilize. I never saw that as the case. The latest frontier for deep learning libraries is ensuring efficient support for dynamic computation graphs.<p>Dynamic computation graphs arise whenever the amount of work that needs to be done is variable. This may be when we&#x27;re processing text, one example being a few words while another being paragraphs of text, or when we are performing operations against a tree structure of variable size. This problem is particularly prominent in particular subfields, such as natural language processing, where I spend most of my time.<p>PyTorch tackles this very well, as do Chainer[1] and DyNet[2]. Indeed, PyTorch construction was directly informed from Chainer[3], though re-architected and designed to be even faster still. I have seen all of these receive renewed interest in recent months, particularly amongst many researchers performing cutting edge research in the domain. When you&#x27;re working with new architectures, you want the most flexibility possible, and these frameworks allow for that.<p>As a counterpoint, TensorFlow does not handle these dynamic graph cases well at all. There are some primitive dynamic constructs but they&#x27;re not flexible and usually quite limiting. In the near future there are plans to allow TensorFlow to become more dynamic, but adding it in after the fact is going to be a challenge, especially to do efficiently.<p>Disclosure: My team at Salesforce Research use Chainer extensively and my colleague James Bradbury was a contributor to PyTorch whilst it was in stealth mode. We&#x27;re planning to transition from Chainer to PyTorch for future work.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chainer.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chainer.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clab&#x2F;dynet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clab&#x2F;dynet</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jekbradbury&#x2F;status&#x2F;821786330459836416" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jekbradbury&#x2F;status&#x2F;821786330459836416</a></text></comment> | <story><title>PyTorch – Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python</title><url>http://pytorch.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spyspy</author><text>This project aside, I&#x27;m in love with that setup UI on the homepage telling you exactly how to get started given your current setup.</text></comment> |
26,582,323 | 26,582,269 | 1 | 3 | 26,581,434 | train | <story><title>RIP Google Reader</title><url>https://www.ripgooglereader.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>conesus</author><text>It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader.<p>Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I&#x27;d heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.<p>It&#x27;s strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there&#x27;s plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.newsblur.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;45632737156&#x2F;three-months-to-scale-newsblur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.newsblur.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;45632737156&#x2F;three-months-to-s...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baumy</author><text>At some point a year or two ago I googled around for &quot;best rss reader app&quot; or &quot;best rss news app&quot; looking for android specifically, and I don&#x27;t remember seeing newsblur talked about anywhere. All of the ones I did try (aggregator, feedly, inoreader, etc) were unsatisfactory in various ways.<p>I just downloaded and tried newsblur and it&#x27;s pretty much perfect for my taste and needs. Going to try it for a few days then will likely become a paid user. This comment is coming from a place of relative ignorance, but have you considered investing in a bit of marketing, or a bit more if you have? For how good this app is among rss readers, it doesn&#x27;t seem as discoverable as it deserves to be.</text></comment> | <story><title>RIP Google Reader</title><url>https://www.ripgooglereader.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>conesus</author><text>It was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader.<p>Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I&#x27;d heard the news. That was a difficult month as I scaled (and wrote about scaling[0]), since by then Google Reader had 10 million active users. After Reader was sunset, about 5 million found their homes on the news readers that remained.<p>It&#x27;s strange to think that naively competing with one of the big platforms paid off, but there&#x27;s plenty of companies that did well in the wake of a giant choosing to ignore the ecosystem near their feet.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.newsblur.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;45632737156&#x2F;three-months-to-scale-newsblur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.newsblur.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;45632737156&#x2F;three-months-to-s...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JustARandomGuy</author><text>Thanks for NewsBlur! I’ve been a paying customer since Reader got cancelled.<p>I recommend NewsBlur to everybody: super uptime, great API, integrated with IFTTT, and supported by a lot of good mobile reader apps</text></comment> |
29,427,761 | 29,427,626 | 1 | 2 | 29,426,656 | train | <story><title>Open 3D Foundation announces first major release of Open 3D Engine</title><url>https://o3de.org/blog/posts/o3de-2111-announcement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spijdar</author><text>I&#x27;m no game developer, but I think if nothing else, Cryengine&#x2F;lumberyard&#x2F;open 3D would be far superior in terms of visuals than the alternatives. I&#x27;d assume the code as a whole is clunkier and more bloated, but also more &quot;battle hardened&quot; than most FOSS projects too.<p>Godot&#x27;s 3D support seems promising, but at a very different level than the &quot;big&quot; engines. Not sure I&#x27;d want to pick it up for a serious project just yet. The other options like Ogre seem ... kind of bad, if their industry track record is to go by. Ogre in particular seems to have had a brief golden era, where a few commercial games used it, but in every case I know of, sequels to those games abandoned Ogre for unity or unreal. Even the open source games&#x2F;frameworks I know of that used it like OpenMW abandoned it.<p>If I was really trying to make a commercial indie game with a FOSS engine, this seems like a good candidate, even considering the questionable Amazon ties... to me, it strikes me as more &quot;open source Cryengine&quot; in the first place anyway, in the same way OpenSolaris indirectly open sourced a lot of older UNIX utilities in addition to Sun&#x27;s novel code.<p>(Of course if I was only making a hobby project I&#x27;d probably stick to Godot, but I&#x27;m imagining the perspective of a small team seriously trying to make a commercial game)</text></item><item><author>slimsag</author><text>I would encourage anyone looking for an open source game engine to first consider Godot, Ogre3D, Panda3D, etc.<p>Rebranded as &quot;Open 3D&quot; and backed by the linux foundation, O3DE appears to be little more than an open sourced version of Amazon&#x27;s Lumberyard (which was itself just a purchased copy of CryEngine.)<p>Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon:<p>&gt; &quot;I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.&quot;<p>From the same Amazon Game Studios that has failed to release several titles with YEARS of development in them including: Breakaway, Crucible, Lord of the Rings MMO, Intensity, Nova, etc.<p>The same Amazon Game Studios whose &quot;New World&quot; MMO had health and gold client-side, allowed inserting arbitrary HTML+JS code into the game chat that would run on other&#x27;s computers, could kick players from the game, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that this is open source by definition. I don&#x27;t doubt that the Linux Foundation has allowed this project to live under its umbrella. But the way this came about is a far cry from being in the spirit of open source in my opinion, and rebranding it as &quot;Open 3D&quot; seems just a brilliant marketing trick.<p>In the best case scenario, Amazon&#x27;s intentions are to convince the FOSS community to develop their engine to subsidize costs long-term while maintaining ownership of the project broadly, and having full control&#x2F;ownership of the new &quot;Open3D Foundation&quot; that they can use readily for marketing[0] similar how they do to the Rust foundation[1] to hire talent.<p>It might not be the worst thing in the world, but seriously, just use any of the other open source engines out there. Godot is great.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;gametech&#x2F;open-3d-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;gametech&#x2F;open-3d-engine&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28513130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28513130</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mikeb85</author><text>&gt; Godot&#x27;s 3D support seems promising, but at a very different level than the &quot;big&quot; engines<p>While this is true, &quot;big&quot; games require a small legion of 3D artists. Very few indies will ever come close to maxing out Godot&#x27;s 3D abilities.<p>If you &quot;need&quot; a big engine you also need a multi-million dollar budget.</text></comment> | <story><title>Open 3D Foundation announces first major release of Open 3D Engine</title><url>https://o3de.org/blog/posts/o3de-2111-announcement/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spijdar</author><text>I&#x27;m no game developer, but I think if nothing else, Cryengine&#x2F;lumberyard&#x2F;open 3D would be far superior in terms of visuals than the alternatives. I&#x27;d assume the code as a whole is clunkier and more bloated, but also more &quot;battle hardened&quot; than most FOSS projects too.<p>Godot&#x27;s 3D support seems promising, but at a very different level than the &quot;big&quot; engines. Not sure I&#x27;d want to pick it up for a serious project just yet. The other options like Ogre seem ... kind of bad, if their industry track record is to go by. Ogre in particular seems to have had a brief golden era, where a few commercial games used it, but in every case I know of, sequels to those games abandoned Ogre for unity or unreal. Even the open source games&#x2F;frameworks I know of that used it like OpenMW abandoned it.<p>If I was really trying to make a commercial indie game with a FOSS engine, this seems like a good candidate, even considering the questionable Amazon ties... to me, it strikes me as more &quot;open source Cryengine&quot; in the first place anyway, in the same way OpenSolaris indirectly open sourced a lot of older UNIX utilities in addition to Sun&#x27;s novel code.<p>(Of course if I was only making a hobby project I&#x27;d probably stick to Godot, but I&#x27;m imagining the perspective of a small team seriously trying to make a commercial game)</text></item><item><author>slimsag</author><text>I would encourage anyone looking for an open source game engine to first consider Godot, Ogre3D, Panda3D, etc.<p>Rebranded as &quot;Open 3D&quot; and backed by the linux foundation, O3DE appears to be little more than an open sourced version of Amazon&#x27;s Lumberyard (which was itself just a purchased copy of CryEngine.)<p>Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon:<p>&gt; &quot;I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.&quot;<p>From the same Amazon Game Studios that has failed to release several titles with YEARS of development in them including: Breakaway, Crucible, Lord of the Rings MMO, Intensity, Nova, etc.<p>The same Amazon Game Studios whose &quot;New World&quot; MMO had health and gold client-side, allowed inserting arbitrary HTML+JS code into the game chat that would run on other&#x27;s computers, could kick players from the game, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that this is open source by definition. I don&#x27;t doubt that the Linux Foundation has allowed this project to live under its umbrella. But the way this came about is a far cry from being in the spirit of open source in my opinion, and rebranding it as &quot;Open 3D&quot; seems just a brilliant marketing trick.<p>In the best case scenario, Amazon&#x27;s intentions are to convince the FOSS community to develop their engine to subsidize costs long-term while maintaining ownership of the project broadly, and having full control&#x2F;ownership of the new &quot;Open3D Foundation&quot; that they can use readily for marketing[0] similar how they do to the Rust foundation[1] to hire talent.<p>It might not be the worst thing in the world, but seriously, just use any of the other open source engines out there. Godot is great.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;gametech&#x2F;open-3d-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;gametech&#x2F;open-3d-engine&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28513130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28513130</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slimsag</author><text>I don&#x27;t disagree visuals may be better (where better is likely &quot;more configurable&quot; or &quot;more performant&quot; in specific cases), but in many ways your art team and shader team matters FAR more than the underlying engine these days.<p>If you are a small indie team, you&#x27;d do well to pick and engine that has a strong community, momentum, and perhaps most importantly - one that you&#x27;re willing and able to dive into the internals of to fix&#x2F;debug things when they go wrong.</text></comment> |
6,895,044 | 6,895,118 | 1 | 2 | 6,894,244 | train | <story><title>News is bad for you</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oskarth</author><text>While I agree with the sentiment, Rolf Dobelli himself is a plagiarist. This whole reasoning is basically stolen from Nassim Taleb.<p><a href="http://fooledbyrandomness.com/dobelli.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fooledbyrandomness.com&#x2F;dobelli.htm</a><p><a href="http://blog.chabris.com/2013/09/similarities-between-rolf-dobellis-book.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chabris.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;similarities-between-rolf-do...</a><p>EDIT: For another take on not reading the news, see <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sazpaz</author><text>His account on the plagiarism story. <a href="http://www.dobelli.com/book-corrections/taleb" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dobelli.com&#x2F;book-corrections&#x2F;taleb</a><p>It&#x27;s definitely easy to see his book as heavily influenced by Taleb, but I supposed everything would be correctly referenced to Taleb — I never actually went to check references. Despite that, the book is a great summary of thinking biases and is clearly explained.</text></comment> | <story><title>News is bad for you</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oskarth</author><text>While I agree with the sentiment, Rolf Dobelli himself is a plagiarist. This whole reasoning is basically stolen from Nassim Taleb.<p><a href="http://fooledbyrandomness.com/dobelli.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fooledbyrandomness.com&#x2F;dobelli.htm</a><p><a href="http://blog.chabris.com/2013/09/similarities-between-rolf-dobellis-book.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chabris.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;similarities-between-rolf-do...</a><p>EDIT: For another take on not reading the news, see <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;hatethenews</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joecurry</author><text>The rebuttal from Dobelli &gt;&gt; <a href="http://www.dobelli.com/book-corrections/taleb" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dobelli.com&#x2F;book-corrections&#x2F;taleb</a></text></comment> |
39,037,778 | 39,037,609 | 1 | 3 | 39,036,774 | train | <story><title>Portable Web Documents – An Alternative to PDF Based on HTML5 (2019)</title><url>https://getpolarized.io/2019/05/11/portable-web-documents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>ePub can do most of these things I believe; there are just not many “PDF-like” viewers for it, given that most existing ePubs are books.<p>Features I need are being able to quickly open multiple documents side-by-side; a feature I actively don’t want is maintaining some sort of “library” for me.</text></item><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>EPUB is already XHTML and supporting files zipped (iirc the packaging) into one file. It&#x27;s very widely supported. I wonder why they don&#x27;t start with it or even mention it?<p>EPUB lacks annotation, which is not at all trivial; I don&#x27;t know how well it handles precise layout and pagination, and long-term preservation (will I be able to read it in 20 or 50 or 100 years?). But, again, I wonder why they don&#x27;t improve on EPUB or at least use it as a starting point, and not seem to reinvent the wheel? (Sometimes, there&#x27;s a good reason.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iscream26</author><text>That&#x27;s just the UX of most ebook reader application, it&#x27;s not a limitation of the format itself. The conceptual model of the most popular epub readers are built upon the concept of a personal library, but that&#x27;s just because, as you said: &quot;most existing epubs are books&quot;. There&#x27;s nothing stopping anyone from creating an epub file that&#x27;s not a transcription of a book.<p>Calibre&#x27;s e-book viewer should cover your use-case just fine, and in KDE is quite easy to set that viewer as the default application for epub files.</text></comment> | <story><title>Portable Web Documents – An Alternative to PDF Based on HTML5 (2019)</title><url>https://getpolarized.io/2019/05/11/portable-web-documents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>ePub can do most of these things I believe; there are just not many “PDF-like” viewers for it, given that most existing ePubs are books.<p>Features I need are being able to quickly open multiple documents side-by-side; a feature I actively don’t want is maintaining some sort of “library” for me.</text></item><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>EPUB is already XHTML and supporting files zipped (iirc the packaging) into one file. It&#x27;s very widely supported. I wonder why they don&#x27;t start with it or even mention it?<p>EPUB lacks annotation, which is not at all trivial; I don&#x27;t know how well it handles precise layout and pagination, and long-term preservation (will I be able to read it in 20 or 50 or 100 years?). But, again, I wonder why they don&#x27;t improve on EPUB or at least use it as a starting point, and not seem to reinvent the wheel? (Sometimes, there&#x27;s a good reason.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrec</author><text>SumatraPDF opens ePub, supports multiple document tabs and doesn&#x27;t maintain any kind of library.</text></comment> |
16,935,744 | 16,935,052 | 1 | 3 | 16,934,500 | train | <story><title>Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)</title><url>https://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway000021</author><text>The real problem is that as an &quot;older&quot; programmer (50) I am probably the best I have been, but I no longer believe in the missions of pretty much any company, I&#x27;m not interested in the silly ways the companies try to build their culture with toys and trinkets and blankets and rituals and sparkles and phony constructs designed to create workplace as a funpark. I am diplomatic, so I would of course keep all this a secret - I know how to be a good employee.<p>I&#x27;m very happy to do a great job, and easy to get along with and productive and a team player, but I&#x27;d be happy to program in a grey box on a plain chair and table.<p>The employment deal for me is this:<p>I program, do a great and professional job<p>You give me money and&#x2F;or equity<p>I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for example to pick up the kids<p>I get you a great result<p>I set in a chair and table at an office or ideally I work from home (travel is dead time)<p>But that&#x27;s not the deal on offer.<p>For me, the primary satisfaction comes from working hard and getting a result that advances the goals of the business.<p>And BTW I am <i>very</i> much on the cutting edge technically, but I probably wouldn&#x27;t get through any recruiting process for god know what reason why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notacoward</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure why you say that&#x27;s not the deal on offer. I&#x27;m 53 (today!) and a lot of how you describe yourself applies to me too. And yet, a year ago, I had no problem getting through one of those classic Silicon Valley hiring processes - code interviews, design interviews, the whole bit. There are two key points I&#x27;ll share that might help you.<p>(1) That process isn&#x27;t always what you think it is. Sure, some companies will copy the <i>superficial</i> aspects of that process, asking puzzle questions or looking down their nose at you because you don&#x27;t know some trivia about a language that has existed less time than you&#x27;ve been programming. They&#x27;re idiots. However, there are also more people than you might think who have actually been trained in such interview techniques, who almost couldn&#x27;t care less about your solution because they&#x27;re looking at <i>how</i> you solved it, how you communicated about solving it, how you reacted when surprised or confronted, and so on. That&#x27;s really important stuff, and I for one don&#x27;t mind being measured on it.<p>(2) If you&#x27;re clear about expectations, you might be surprised what kind of deal you can get. For example, this company is <i>notoriously</i> averse to letting people work from home full time. I&#x27;m one of only a few dozen (out of thousands) apparently. Why? Because I told them right at the start that it was an immutable requirement and if they weren&#x27;t willing to make that deal then we might as well not waste our time. Mentioning that kind of thing post-offer wouldn&#x27;t have worked. Not a chance.<p>So yes, I think people like you and me can get through that kind of recruiting process and get the kinds of jobs we want. I hope that helps.</text></comment> | <story><title>Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)</title><url>https://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway000021</author><text>The real problem is that as an &quot;older&quot; programmer (50) I am probably the best I have been, but I no longer believe in the missions of pretty much any company, I&#x27;m not interested in the silly ways the companies try to build their culture with toys and trinkets and blankets and rituals and sparkles and phony constructs designed to create workplace as a funpark. I am diplomatic, so I would of course keep all this a secret - I know how to be a good employee.<p>I&#x27;m very happy to do a great job, and easy to get along with and productive and a team player, but I&#x27;d be happy to program in a grey box on a plain chair and table.<p>The employment deal for me is this:<p>I program, do a great and professional job<p>You give me money and&#x2F;or equity<p>I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for example to pick up the kids<p>I get you a great result<p>I set in a chair and table at an office or ideally I work from home (travel is dead time)<p>But that&#x27;s not the deal on offer.<p>For me, the primary satisfaction comes from working hard and getting a result that advances the goals of the business.<p>And BTW I am <i>very</i> much on the cutting edge technically, but I probably wouldn&#x27;t get through any recruiting process for god know what reason why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vorpalhex</author><text>I&#x27;m not an older programmer, I&#x27;m in fact a pretty young programmer, but I want the same things:<p>+ A company that gives me a good work&#x2F;life balance
+ Regular WFH or preferably be fully remote
+ Interesting tasks, in a relatively stable environment<p>Most of my peers seem to want the same thing as well. While I&#x27;ve done the crazy workweek startup thing before, it burns you out and it&#x27;s simply not sustainable. I don&#x27;t have a single peer who still works in startup land.</text></comment> |
22,526,680 | 22,526,439 | 1 | 2 | 22,525,762 | train | <story><title>Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00660-x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhanhfo</author><text>I upvoted this just because of the nature.com link - but after I actually read it, I am disapointed. Summary:<p>Q: Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?<p>A: We don&#x27;t know yet<p>The results presented not verified by experiments yet.<p>&quot;But some researchers are cautious about overstating the role of the activation site in helping the coronavirus to spread more easily. “We don’t know if this is going to be a big deal or not,” says Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>giarc</author><text>&gt;A: We don&#x27;t know yet<p>That&#x27;s a gross oversimplification of the article. They have identified proteins and associated host-cell enzymes and can postulate why this combination would result in greater spread (and additionally why other organs are affected).</text></comment> | <story><title>Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00660-x</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhanhfo</author><text>I upvoted this just because of the nature.com link - but after I actually read it, I am disapointed. Summary:<p>Q: Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?<p>A: We don&#x27;t know yet<p>The results presented not verified by experiments yet.<p>&quot;But some researchers are cautious about overstating the role of the activation site in helping the coronavirus to spread more easily. “We don’t know if this is going to be a big deal or not,” says Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mistersquid</author><text>This article made me get off my digital duff and Google &quot;how do asymptomatic diseases enter the body COVID 19&quot;.<p>This Harvard health blog provides a few explanations. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.health.harvard.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;as-coronavirus-spreads-many-questions-and-some-answers-2020022719004" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.health.harvard.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;as-coronavirus-spreads-m...</a></text></comment> |
2,712,296 | 2,711,714 | 1 | 3 | 2,711,646 | train | <story><title>CA Amazon Tax Signed Into Law</title><url>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2011/06/jerry-brown-signs-laws-redevelopment-agencies-taxes-online-retailers.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanLivesHere</author><text>Amazon's doing the right thing here.<p>California has no way of charging them sales tax, nor should they, without a nexus. Imagine if you, living in CA, ordered something from a brick-and-mortar store in New York. If that store had to charge you sales tax and remit it to California, they'd simply say "no thanks" to your business. It's just not worth it for them to have to do all that work so you can get a $10 item (and so California can get their 82.5 cents).<p>Amazon shouldn't be treated any differently simply because they do a lot of business in the state. California knows this, so they come up with (well, Illinois came up with it) the idea that if some third party runs ads on their website for products on Amazon, that third party (an "affiliate") is actually an agent of Amazon. That's preposterous.<p>Amazon doesn't really have a choice, though. If they sue and lose, the entire affiliate program goes away. So they instead just drop the affiliates. They have to -- they're paying affiliates 6% of all qualified sales <i>and</i> paying the state 8.25%. And they are then open to audits and other nonsense from the state. It's just not worth the leads any more.</text></comment> | <story><title>CA Amazon Tax Signed Into Law</title><url>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2011/06/jerry-brown-signs-laws-redevelopment-agencies-taxes-online-retailers.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phirephly</author><text>Damn. There goes my $300-$400 a month passive income... And I already report my use-tax to begin with. Guess it's time to start calling up friends out-of-state for their mailing address.</text></comment> |
41,339,353 | 41,338,417 | 1 | 2 | 41,323,042 | train | <story><title>LM Studio 0.3 – Discover, download, and run local LLMs</title><url>https://lmstudio.ai/blog/lmstudio-v0.3.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcf</author><text>In some brief testing, I discovered that the same models (Llama 3 7B and one more I can&#x27;t remember) are running MUCH slower in LM Studio than in Ollama on my MacBook Air M1 2020.<p>Has anyone found the same thing, or was that a fluke and I should try LM Studio again?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viccis</author><text>Just chiming in with others to help out:<p>By default LM Studio doesn&#x27;t fully use your GPU. I have no idea why. Under the settings pane on the right, turn the slider under &quot;GPU Offload&quot; all the way to 100%.</text></comment> | <story><title>LM Studio 0.3 – Discover, download, and run local LLMs</title><url>https://lmstudio.ai/blog/lmstudio-v0.3.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pcf</author><text>In some brief testing, I discovered that the same models (Llama 3 7B and one more I can&#x27;t remember) are running MUCH slower in LM Studio than in Ollama on my MacBook Air M1 2020.<p>Has anyone found the same thing, or was that a fluke and I should try LM Studio again?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terretta</author><text>Two replies to parent immediately suggest tuning. Ironically, this release claims to feature auto-config for best performance:<p><i>“Some of us are well versed in the nitty gritty of LLM load and inference parameters. But many of us, understandably, can&#x27;t be bothered. LM Studio 0.3.0 auto-configures everything based on the hardware you are running it on.”</i><p>So parent should expect it to work.<p>I find the same issue: using a MBP with 96GB (M2 Max with 38‑core GPU), it seems to tune by default for a base machine.</text></comment> |
40,266,248 | 40,266,470 | 1 | 2 | 40,265,552 | train | <story><title>Small Things</title><url>https://rishad.substack.com/p/small-things</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lukevp</author><text>This is something Apple does amazingly well. The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish. When you go to open the box, the interface between the bottom and top halves is so perfectly fitted that there’s a weightiness to removing the lid, like it has a seal. It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that, but every time I buy an Apple product I notice it, and I feel like they care about the small things.<p>I used to be anti-Apple. I used Android or Windows Phone and used Windows or Linux on PC. I thought the extra cost of Apple was a scam. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a company that doesn’t BS me and waste my time.<p>Windows has ads and malware built into the OS. They charge you for OS upgrades. macOS is just free and ad-free.<p>The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.<p>This extends to all their other products and services. I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy. I’ll make that deal all day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wrs</author><text>“It’s the small things” has driven Apple design for decades. And it’s a cultural thing, not just the “design department”. I remember back in the mid-90s when I left Apple to work at Microsoft and realized how rare it is to have software developers who view everything through the lens of the end user experience, even if they’re working on the file system or the boot sequence.<p>Random example: One of the first things I asked when I got there was “why, when you turn on a Windows PC, does it start your user experience by filling the screen with scary gibberish?” That got fixed, but it took <i>many</i> years, partially because of all the coordination needed in the PC ecosystem to do anything, but mostly because nobody really cared all that much.</text></comment> | <story><title>Small Things</title><url>https://rishad.substack.com/p/small-things</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lukevp</author><text>This is something Apple does amazingly well. The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish. When you go to open the box, the interface between the bottom and top halves is so perfectly fitted that there’s a weightiness to removing the lid, like it has a seal. It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that, but every time I buy an Apple product I notice it, and I feel like they care about the small things.<p>I used to be anti-Apple. I used Android or Windows Phone and used Windows or Linux on PC. I thought the extra cost of Apple was a scam. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a company that doesn’t BS me and waste my time.<p>Windows has ads and malware built into the OS. They charge you for OS upgrades. macOS is just free and ad-free.<p>The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.<p>This extends to all their other products and services. I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy. I’ll make that deal all day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmd</author><text>&gt; It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that<p>On the contrary, it costs <i>a LOT</i> to make the box that good.<p>I can&#x27;t find it now, but I recall some article posted here about how lots of startups spent insane amounts of money trying to make their packaging as good as Apple&#x27;s (UHD foam, aluminum milling) when they should be working on their actual product instead.</text></comment> |
15,485,745 | 15,482,534 | 1 | 3 | 15,473,199 | train | <story><title>It's Time for a New Old Language – Guy Steele [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cryptonector</author><text>Wow, this is a very nice talk. I particularly liked the Q&amp;A, where Guy Steele went back and explained the type checker shown earlier. And I also loved the LISP macro backtick-comma inspiration for using underline to &quot;escape&quot; overline. Brilliant!</text></comment> | <story><title>It's Time for a New Old Language – Guy Steele [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCuZkaaou0Q</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>I&#x27;ve finished watching the talk, and I&#x27;m not sure if this is serious, or is Guy Steele just trolling people in a sophisticated way. The TL;DR as I understand is:<p>- Computer science papers have this ad-hoc, ever evolving notation that started out in mathematics, that is not well defined (every paper ends up using a different flavour, sometimes even a bunch of mutually contradicting flavours at the same time), and that is subject to weird evolutionary pressures (like page limit of CS papers leading to extreme conciseness).<p>- Particularly interesting is the evolution of overline notation, and the ubiquitous but never defined use of ellipsis.<p>- Guy thinks this is a mess and should be cleaned up. His first contribution is solving overline notation abuse by introducing <i>underlines</i>, which cancel out overlines, thus implementing quasiquoting in mathematical notation. His second contribution is formalizing the meaning of ellipsis by defining a transformation from ellipsis form into over&#x2F;underline form.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s because of the way he presented it, or maybe because of my unfamiliarity with the space, but overall this talk really felt like a one-hour long practical joke aimed at CS academics.</text></comment> |
29,754,253 | 29,754,382 | 1 | 3 | 29,752,413 | train | <story><title>Predict 3D position of flying bugs and pest to shoot down them with a laser</title><url>https://www.naro.go.jp/english/laboratory/nipp/press/3d/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>consp</author><text>Ah yes, the &quot;star wars laser defense mosquito system&quot;. It&#x27; as impractical then (early 00&#x27;s origin) as it is now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TGkPMZxWPpA&amp;t=2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TGkPMZxWPpA&amp;t=2s</a> (it&#x27;s Dutch but you get it).<p>Unless you can get mm accuracy and perfect non-foe detection it&#x27;s useless with the multi-watt lasers generally required.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>I&#x27;ve been dreaming about that to kill mosquitoes since I was a teenager. Then I wondered: &quot;how to prevent firing the laser into someone&#x27;s eye?&quot; and my idea was to only shoot laser from 2 meters high and to only ever shoot towards the ceiling, never downwards, while having the ceiling having some kind of paint&#x2F;material that wouldn&#x27;t be reflecting the laser too much. Make the paint&#x2F;material all white to makes mosquito detection easier.<p>And it&#x27;d be probabilistic: considering that, at some point, the mosquito is bound to fly at a height higher than 2 meters in your room. And then boom, the laser.<p>A pipe dream but I <i>hate</i> these little fuckers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Predict 3D position of flying bugs and pest to shoot down them with a laser</title><url>https://www.naro.go.jp/english/laboratory/nipp/press/3d/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>consp</author><text>Ah yes, the &quot;star wars laser defense mosquito system&quot;. It&#x27; as impractical then (early 00&#x27;s origin) as it is now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TGkPMZxWPpA&amp;t=2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TGkPMZxWPpA&amp;t=2s</a> (it&#x27;s Dutch but you get it).<p>Unless you can get mm accuracy and perfect non-foe detection it&#x27;s useless with the multi-watt lasers generally required.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endymi0n</author><text>It is. And if you want to go Khaby Lame all the way on this issue: Just use a fan instead.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;14596273&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;14596273&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
27,191,865 | 27,191,090 | 1 | 3 | 27,186,675 | train | <story><title>Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/57102499</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>betterunix2</author><text>I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for conspiracy theories, so...let&#x27;s see the evidence that there is some conspiracy between Google and Israel to hide what is happening there. For that matter, I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding -- Netanyahu is not at all shy about settlements, the IDF calls people up to tell them when a bomb is going to be dropped on their building, and there are reporters and international observers all over the Israel and the Palestinian territories.</text></item><item><author>jussij</author><text>Israel can get all the detailed imagery it needs by just launching a reconnaissance aircraft or drone.<p>So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians from getting imagery of the area.<p>Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.<p>Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.</text></item><item><author>plaidfuji</author><text>This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel &#x2F; Gaza &#x2F; West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on <i>both sides</i> from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another. But please continue the breathless hot takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hellbannedguy</author><text>We don&#x27;t have any evidence.<p>We do know that Israel has launched 1000 to 1500 missiles up until 10 pm pacific time.<p>Netanyahu has been blatant over taking back &quot;theiir&quot; land lately.<p>Netanyahu is in a very close political race.<p>I won&#x27;t say what I thinking though out of respect for the rules.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/57102499</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>betterunix2</author><text>I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for conspiracy theories, so...let&#x27;s see the evidence that there is some conspiracy between Google and Israel to hide what is happening there. For that matter, I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding -- Netanyahu is not at all shy about settlements, the IDF calls people up to tell them when a bomb is going to be dropped on their building, and there are reporters and international observers all over the Israel and the Palestinian territories.</text></item><item><author>jussij</author><text>Israel can get all the detailed imagery it needs by just launching a reconnaissance aircraft or drone.<p>So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians from getting imagery of the area.<p>Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.<p>Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.</text></item><item><author>plaidfuji</author><text>This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel &#x2F; Gaza &#x2F; West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on <i>both sides</i> from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another. But please continue the breathless hot takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacksconfidence</author><text>The article makes this very clear. There is no google-israel conspiracy. The limits on satelite resolution were dictated by the US government.</text></comment> |
34,999,200 | 34,998,848 | 1 | 3 | 34,998,043 | train | <story><title>Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-paying-matthew-mcconaughey-10-million-to-sit-around</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eunoia</author><text>&gt; Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working.<p>&gt; The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant<p>Kinda odd how you attribute them &quot;beating the street&quot; more to Mathew McConaughey&#x27;s presence than the work output of 8 thousand employees. Can you elaborate on why this is so clear to you?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>&quot;Company&quot; = Salesforce, which is a name I&#x27;m sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.<p>There&#x27;s also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.<p>First of all, it is objectively incorrect:<p>&gt; Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce<p>The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.<p>Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to &quot;sit around&quot; but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don&#x27;t like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.<p>The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>The old joke is the marketing manager saying: &quot;Half of all our marketing expenditures are wasted. The problem is we don&#x27;t know which half.&quot;<p>In my years in business, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to draw an accurate cause and effect line between marketing and sales. Too many other factors at work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-paying-matthew-mcconaughey-10-million-to-sit-around</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eunoia</author><text>&gt; Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working.<p>&gt; The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant<p>Kinda odd how you attribute them &quot;beating the street&quot; more to Mathew McConaughey&#x27;s presence than the work output of 8 thousand employees. Can you elaborate on why this is so clear to you?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>&quot;Company&quot; = Salesforce, which is a name I&#x27;m sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.<p>There&#x27;s also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.<p>First of all, it is objectively incorrect:<p>&gt; Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce<p>The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.<p>Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to &quot;sit around&quot; but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don&#x27;t like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.<p>The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Is it very hard to believe that (1) some single digit % of employees (and even entire divisions) at a massive corporation – one that nearly doubled in size during the pandemic – aren&#x27;t adding a lot of value and (2) a flashy marketing campaign can bring a company new customers?</text></comment> |
36,209,785 | 36,209,665 | 1 | 2 | 36,208,735 | train | <story><title>visionOS</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/visionos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>What are the health implications of watching a screen this close for many hours every day? Is there scientific consensus on this or are we exploring uncharted waters?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astrange</author><text>AR&#x2F;VR doesn&#x27;t work the same way as a 2D screen because of the lenses. Your eyes are essentially focusing at infinity.<p>It can lead to completely different problems, mostly in children. Adults instead get terrible motion sickness if you&#x27;re not very careful.</text></comment> | <story><title>visionOS</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/visionos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>What are the health implications of watching a screen this close for many hours every day? Is there scientific consensus on this or are we exploring uncharted waters?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viraptor</author><text>No idea about the eyesight, but a personal anecdote about the eyetracking for the cursor&#x2F;selection: It&#x27;s an existing assistive technology and a few years ago I tried it for fun for a day. It can get tiring and you really exercise the muscles moving your eyeballs. I suspect it&#x27;s something that you train &#x2F; get used to in the end, but it&#x27;s definitely an unexpected strain on the body. I suspect that&#x27;s going to become a new thing people experience like the texting thumb RSI.</text></comment> |
31,040,046 | 31,037,419 | 1 | 3 | 31,002,174 | train | <story><title>Sorry, Wrong Number: Debugging a Crash Under Wine</title><url>https://blog.jchw.io/wrong-number/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>k1t</author><text>This (2013) article[1], when talking about &quot;High Entropy Bottom-up Randomization&quot; says that:<p><i>&quot;For compatibility reasons, this feature is disabled by default and must be enabled on a per-application basis. This is because some 64-bit applications have latent pointer truncation issues that can surface when dealing with pointers above 4 GB (significant bits set beyond bit 31).&quot;</i><p>Although OP had an issue with an offset rather than an absolute position, I imagine it would also handle that case.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msrc-blog.microsoft.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;software-defense-mitigating-common-exploitation-techniques&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;msrc-blog.microsoft.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;software-defense-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Sorry, Wrong Number: Debugging a Crash Under Wine</title><url>https://blog.jchw.io/wrong-number/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Scramblejams</author><text>Semi-related: Is anyone aware of a Proton neophyte&#x27;s guide to fixing a Windows game? I&#x27;ve got a few old games that get stuck various places and I imagine that there may be a simple Windows call that needs implementing, but I don&#x27;t know the first thing about how to diagnose that.</text></comment> |
32,060,416 | 32,060,516 | 1 | 3 | 32,059,666 | train | <story><title>Tell HN: I have the perfect job, why is it not enough?</title><text>I am in my mid-thirties, working four days a week, and making over 100k. I have a house, a good relationship with my wife, and young and healthy kids.<p>I work from home. My job is technically interesting, and I still learn&#x2F;improve. I do not have meetings. One or sometimes two 30 min calls a week with my boss. Most days, I do not have to interact with anyone from work, not even customer contact.<p>If I knew I could have a job like this ten years ago, I would have thought that&#x27;s it, the dream.<p>But somehow, it isn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s never enough.<p>I dream about doing my own thing or retiring early to do other projects. It is probably human to always want more.<p>So HN, how did you settle and slow down and become happy with the way it is without always wanting more?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>willhslade</author><text>You are describing the hedonic treadmill. Essentially, you become used to your surroundings, and while they are objectively great, from the perspective of inside your own head, this is now normal and you &#x2F; your monkey mind wants more.<p>There have been a lot of post floating around the internet with various solutions, the most popular being Stoicism &gt; Positive Psychology &#x2F; Happiness research &gt; Buddhism &#x2F; Meditation. I&#x27;ve dabbled a little in all of them and they all have something to offer.<p>Essentially, you are experiencing a disconnect between how it feels to be you and how you expected to feel. As someone only a little older than yourself, I would say this: your job will never love you back, and especially in the software realm, it may not be as fulfilling as something like woodworking or therapy. It does pay the bills, though.<p>The above mentioned happiness research &#x2F; positive psychology suggests that having multiple, meaningful social roles that you can fulfill outside of work will allow you to shoulder more responsibility and find meaning in your life.<p>What I&#x27;m trying say is that in the second half of life, it is our job to give back. So start there.<p>Also, this is in my morning bookmarks to revisit:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskEngineers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;so6e8h&#x2F;engineers_who_got_their_mba_whats_your_jobcareer&#x2F;hw8ui28&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskEngineers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;so6e8h&#x2F;engine...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2OEH8eoCRo0</author><text>Correct. It works in reverse too.<p>Anecdote: As I deployed to Afghanistan from my duty station on Okinawa things got progressively shitty. Okinawa -&gt; Manas: Living conditions suck but they have a decent chow hall. Manas -&gt; Camp Leatherneck: Crappy living, crappy chow. Camp Leatherneck -&gt; FOB: wow this sucks. FOB -&gt; combat outpost: holy shit this sucks! How am I gonna do 7 months of this?!<p>I did. Got used to it. Was actually kind of fun after awhile. Then after deployment you do it in reverse and feels like being upgraded to better and better luxury.<p>Soon enough you&#x27;re used to it and living in the barracks on Okinawa sucks again.<p>Point being that you adjust to living conditions- good or bad. Don&#x27;t derive purpose from chasing more because you&#x27;ll always adjust to whatever you attain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tell HN: I have the perfect job, why is it not enough?</title><text>I am in my mid-thirties, working four days a week, and making over 100k. I have a house, a good relationship with my wife, and young and healthy kids.<p>I work from home. My job is technically interesting, and I still learn&#x2F;improve. I do not have meetings. One or sometimes two 30 min calls a week with my boss. Most days, I do not have to interact with anyone from work, not even customer contact.<p>If I knew I could have a job like this ten years ago, I would have thought that&#x27;s it, the dream.<p>But somehow, it isn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s never enough.<p>I dream about doing my own thing or retiring early to do other projects. It is probably human to always want more.<p>So HN, how did you settle and slow down and become happy with the way it is without always wanting more?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>willhslade</author><text>You are describing the hedonic treadmill. Essentially, you become used to your surroundings, and while they are objectively great, from the perspective of inside your own head, this is now normal and you &#x2F; your monkey mind wants more.<p>There have been a lot of post floating around the internet with various solutions, the most popular being Stoicism &gt; Positive Psychology &#x2F; Happiness research &gt; Buddhism &#x2F; Meditation. I&#x27;ve dabbled a little in all of them and they all have something to offer.<p>Essentially, you are experiencing a disconnect between how it feels to be you and how you expected to feel. As someone only a little older than yourself, I would say this: your job will never love you back, and especially in the software realm, it may not be as fulfilling as something like woodworking or therapy. It does pay the bills, though.<p>The above mentioned happiness research &#x2F; positive psychology suggests that having multiple, meaningful social roles that you can fulfill outside of work will allow you to shoulder more responsibility and find meaning in your life.<p>What I&#x27;m trying say is that in the second half of life, it is our job to give back. So start there.<p>Also, this is in my morning bookmarks to revisit:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskEngineers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;so6e8h&#x2F;engineers_who_got_their_mba_whats_your_jobcareer&#x2F;hw8ui28&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskEngineers&#x2F;comments&#x2F;so6e8h&#x2F;engine...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hesdeadjim</author><text>I think you drastically over-estimate how &quot;fulfilling&quot; something like therapy is. Day in and day out you will see people you desperately wish to help, who if they
listened to 20% of what you offered would see their lives change immensely, only to watch them repeat the same behavior without change day in and day out. Worse, if you deal with depressed or addicted people it&#x27;s just a matter of time before a client kills themselves.<p>Grass is always greener, but we have it <i>easy</i> in software and it&#x27;s good to remember that.<p>All that said, I&#x27;ve been through the types of discontent that OP mentions. I&#x27;ve worked many interesting software jobs, started multiple businesses, failed many times, succeeded, made lots of money, shipped an indie game that was an expression of myself -- a dream come true, and at the end of it all... emptiness and a feeling of not-enough-ness (not depression!).<p>If one does not find a philosophy that accepts this as reality at its core, you&#x27;ll be chasing your tail until the day you die. I personally prefer Buddhism without the ceremonial pomp, and in that vein I&#x27;d recommend Noah Levine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.againstthestream.com&#x2F;dharma-talk-and-meditation-podcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.againstthestream.com&#x2F;dharma-talk-and-meditation-...</a><p>Edit: 100% agree though that giving back to people is wonderful. Some of my best experiences have been the happiness in helping someone else succeed.</text></comment> |
10,297,766 | 10,296,099 | 1 | 3 | 10,295,658 | train | <story><title>Amazon Flex</title><url>https://flex.amazon.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>suvelx</author><text>I&#x27;ve got a suspicion that Amazon has been trialling&#x2F;building this in the UK since their purchase of Yodel, perhaps earlier. A number of times some bloke in a car has turned up and delivered me a package. No uniform, no branding. Just a phone running Amazon software.<p>I can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s the greatest experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thieving_magpie</author><text>Man I couldn&#x27;t care less who hands me my package if it arrives intact and on time.<p>I&#x27;m not looking for a &quot;delivery experience&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Flex</title><url>https://flex.amazon.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>suvelx</author><text>I&#x27;ve got a suspicion that Amazon has been trialling&#x2F;building this in the UK since their purchase of Yodel, perhaps earlier. A number of times some bloke in a car has turned up and delivered me a package. No uniform, no branding. Just a phone running Amazon software.<p>I can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s the greatest experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephenc_c_</author><text>The blank vans, oftentimes actually rental vans, are actually Amazon Logistics. This is Amazon&#x27;s own delivery operation in the UK, and all Prime deliveries in my area use this service. It&#x27;s been years since I have seen any third party delivery providers for Amazon orders.</text></comment> |
16,026,599 | 16,026,054 | 1 | 2 | 16,025,112 | train | <story><title>A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance</title><url>https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>Agreed. It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs. To go further, it is wasteful to design hardware to be disposable rather than repairable and reusable.<p>People with jobs I wouldn’t want to do work very hard to bring us these devices, and the earth gives up resources to mine, transport, and shape the materials. Throwing things away when they could last 5-10x as long consumes our precious resources and wastes our collective capital.<p>Finally I’ll say that a lack of open software support contributes to this. If I could flash alpine linux on an old iPhone, Nexus, or Samsung, I could find great uses for the old hardware. Such a project is now underway (Alpine linux for Mobile), but mobile devices are still a morass of unpatchable secret binaries with glaring security holes.<p>I know we can better use our resources than to throw a two or three year old flagship phone in the trash or let it waste away in an old drawer, but it will take us demanding more of manufacturers and calling them out for their waste before they take action on it.</text></item><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>This isn&#x27;t the first time this has happened to Apple. They use to not sell replacement batteries for the original iPods, and when people called in to complain, they were often told to buy an entire new iPod. This was settled in a lawsuit:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilounge.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;articles&#x2F;comments&#x2F;apples-ipod-battery-settlement-explained" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilounge.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;articles&#x2F;comments&#x2F;apples-ip...</a><p>Another important note is this battery replacement cost only cover the iPhone6 and up. That&#x27;s only the 2015 release. That&#x27;s still lubricious. If we had devices as powerful as today&#x27;s cellphones that cost $500+ in the early-90s, losing support after 2~3 years would be lubricious.<p>In 2012 I remember seeing someone with the first generation iPhone EDGE (pre-3G). That&#x27;s right; the thing was like 6? 7 years old? He really only used it on Wi-Fi. EDGE data was painful, but it was still his primary&#x2F;only phone for another year.<p>The throwaway economy saddens me, and this move doesn&#x27;t really do enough to prevent the continuing pileup of e-waste being shipped on boats to China and Africa.</text></item><item><author>jmull</author><text>&gt; Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29...<p>&gt; Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.<p>There we go.<p>It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.<p>Actually, the cost of battery replacement is now excellent. If they hadn&#x27;t screwed this up by not communicating what was going on, I think they could have easily justified $49 - $59.<p>So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I&#x27;ve already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that&#x27;s not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raquo</author><text>It&#x27;s because everything is so cheap nowadays, because all the externalities that we worry about (pollution, resources running out, etc.) are left for the public and future generations to bear, with those who actually cause those externalities not paying their dues.<p>Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t see this changing within our culture of mindless consumerism and a governance system based on what is essentially legalized bribery (&quot;lobbying&quot;).</text></comment> | <story><title>A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance</title><url>https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TaylorAlexander</author><text>Agreed. It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs. To go further, it is wasteful to design hardware to be disposable rather than repairable and reusable.<p>People with jobs I wouldn’t want to do work very hard to bring us these devices, and the earth gives up resources to mine, transport, and shape the materials. Throwing things away when they could last 5-10x as long consumes our precious resources and wastes our collective capital.<p>Finally I’ll say that a lack of open software support contributes to this. If I could flash alpine linux on an old iPhone, Nexus, or Samsung, I could find great uses for the old hardware. Such a project is now underway (Alpine linux for Mobile), but mobile devices are still a morass of unpatchable secret binaries with glaring security holes.<p>I know we can better use our resources than to throw a two or three year old flagship phone in the trash or let it waste away in an old drawer, but it will take us demanding more of manufacturers and calling them out for their waste before they take action on it.</text></item><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>This isn&#x27;t the first time this has happened to Apple. They use to not sell replacement batteries for the original iPods, and when people called in to complain, they were often told to buy an entire new iPod. This was settled in a lawsuit:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilounge.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;articles&#x2F;comments&#x2F;apples-ipod-battery-settlement-explained" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilounge.com&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;articles&#x2F;comments&#x2F;apples-ip...</a><p>Another important note is this battery replacement cost only cover the iPhone6 and up. That&#x27;s only the 2015 release. That&#x27;s still lubricious. If we had devices as powerful as today&#x27;s cellphones that cost $500+ in the early-90s, losing support after 2~3 years would be lubricious.<p>In 2012 I remember seeing someone with the first generation iPhone EDGE (pre-3G). That&#x27;s right; the thing was like 6? 7 years old? He really only used it on Wi-Fi. EDGE data was painful, but it was still his primary&#x2F;only phone for another year.<p>The throwaway economy saddens me, and this move doesn&#x27;t really do enough to prevent the continuing pileup of e-waste being shipped on boats to China and Africa.</text></item><item><author>jmull</author><text>&gt; Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29...<p>&gt; Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.<p>There we go.<p>It took too much trouble and too long for it to happen, but Apple is stepping up and doing the right thing.<p>Actually, the cost of battery replacement is now excellent. If they hadn&#x27;t screwed this up by not communicating what was going on, I think they could have easily justified $49 - $59.<p>So I take the drop to $29 as a tangible apology, which I appreciate. (Well, personally, I&#x27;ve already replaced my battery using a $25 kit from Amazon, but obviously that&#x27;s not viable for the great majority of iPhone owners.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djsumdog</author><text>&gt; Such a project is now underway (Alpine linux for Mobile)<p>Check out PostmarketOS. It&#x27;s made a lot headway into attempting to create a single, semi-universal image that can be used on multiple devices.</text></comment> |
26,901,048 | 26,900,718 | 1 | 3 | 26,897,550 | train | <story><title>SolarBatteryBitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/ARKInvest/SolarBatteryBitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lottin</author><text>Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn&#x27;t designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don&#x27;t be surprised if people takes issue with that.</text></item><item><author>erentz</author><text>&gt; that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn&#x27;t used somewhere else.<p>This applies to so many things. Snapchat data center? YouTube using gigawatts to process and stream cat videos? On and on. It’s really hard to control what people do with energy. Much better to focus on ensuring its priced correctly and all it’s externalities are properly included in that price. Then we don’t have to involve ourselves in moral debates about what’s a valid or invalid use.</text></item><item><author>barathr</author><text>I&#x27;d like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don&#x27;t get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn&#x27;t used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it&#x27;s negative-priced during such periods. If bitcoin soaks up that power, it won&#x27;t be negative-priced, and other loads won&#x27;t be moved to use it, and they&#x27;ll use power from non-renewable sources during some other time of day.<p>There&#x27;s all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that&#x27;s one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there&#x27;s no need to run it in the early evening), etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csomar</author><text>This is purely subjective. Bitcoin&#x27;s spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one&#x27;s care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.</text></comment> | <story><title>SolarBatteryBitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/ARKInvest/SolarBatteryBitcoin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lottin</author><text>Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn&#x27;t designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don&#x27;t be surprised if people takes issue with that.</text></item><item><author>erentz</author><text>&gt; that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn&#x27;t used somewhere else.<p>This applies to so many things. Snapchat data center? YouTube using gigawatts to process and stream cat videos? On and on. It’s really hard to control what people do with energy. Much better to focus on ensuring its priced correctly and all it’s externalities are properly included in that price. Then we don’t have to involve ourselves in moral debates about what’s a valid or invalid use.</text></item><item><author>barathr</author><text>I&#x27;d like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don&#x27;t get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn&#x27;t used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it&#x27;s negative-priced during such periods. If bitcoin soaks up that power, it won&#x27;t be negative-priced, and other loads won&#x27;t be moved to use it, and they&#x27;ll use power from non-renewable sources during some other time of day.<p>There&#x27;s all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that&#x27;s one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there&#x27;s no need to run it in the early evening), etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hparadiz</author><text>Bitcoin isn&#x27;t designed to waste energy. It&#x27;s designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate from energy. It&#x27;s humans that are essentially throwing electricity at it due to the high reward for doing so. Once equilibrium is reached there is no reason to throw more energy at it.</text></comment> |
1,424,689 | 1,424,762 | 1 | 2 | 1,424,299 | train | <story><title>SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon</title><url>http://www.sparkleshare.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>This isn't a threat to dropbox becaue (as I read it) you have to set up your own server, or maybe hook up on a friends server. While this is certainly a great feature that a lot of people will value, the beauty of dropbox is that it just works. Without you having to install a server.<p>I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare:<p>1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people don't have one.<p>2) You need to monitor your server. If the architecture is anything like dropbox it doesn't need to have 100% uptime since synchronizing will just be delayed a bit, but you still need to check in every now and then to make sure everything is OK.<p>3) Installing a server has never been easy. There is always some sort of problem with port forwarding, IP adresses, proxies, etc. unless you have a server somewhere in the cloud which most people don't. Normal people are barely aware of what a server <i>is</i>. See point 1.<p>4) Your backups are still your worry. What makes dropbox great is that I know that if they lose my data they have a serious business problem - they'll be held accountable. I'll write rants on my blog and everyone on HN will read it. They'll go through great lengths to prevent this. Besides their knowledge of backup procedures, RAID disks, redundancy and what have you is far far greater than mine. (At least I hope so :-)) If I host my files on my own server I'm the one that's accountable.<p>I see this as a great service for companies that have some IT staff and aren't comfortable having all their company files hosted by another company, and hackers that prefer their own server. But it's not a threat to dropbox, which is getting popular among non-techies. My mom even has dropbox installed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neilc</author><text>If Sparkleshare develops some momentum, you could easily see third-parties compete to offer Sparkleshare storage as a service, in a similar manner to how Dropbox works today.</text></comment> | <story><title>SparkleShare: Open Source Dropbox clone coming soon</title><url>http://www.sparkleshare.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mixmax</author><text>This isn't a threat to dropbox becaue (as I read it) you have to set up your own server, or maybe hook up on a friends server. While this is certainly a great feature that a lot of people will value, the beauty of dropbox is that it just works. Without you having to install a server.<p>I see the following obstacles with installing a server for sparkleshare:<p>1) You need a server. This might be obvious, but normal people don't have one.<p>2) You need to monitor your server. If the architecture is anything like dropbox it doesn't need to have 100% uptime since synchronizing will just be delayed a bit, but you still need to check in every now and then to make sure everything is OK.<p>3) Installing a server has never been easy. There is always some sort of problem with port forwarding, IP adresses, proxies, etc. unless you have a server somewhere in the cloud which most people don't. Normal people are barely aware of what a server <i>is</i>. See point 1.<p>4) Your backups are still your worry. What makes dropbox great is that I know that if they lose my data they have a serious business problem - they'll be held accountable. I'll write rants on my blog and everyone on HN will read it. They'll go through great lengths to prevent this. Besides their knowledge of backup procedures, RAID disks, redundancy and what have you is far far greater than mine. (At least I hope so :-)) If I host my files on my own server I'm the one that's accountable.<p>I see this as a great service for companies that have some IT staff and aren't comfortable having all their company files hosted by another company, and hackers that prefer their own server. But it's not a threat to dropbox, which is getting popular among non-techies. My mom even has dropbox installed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattmaroon</author><text>It depends what they define as a "server". If you have to set up a Linux box somewhere with decent upstream, then yeah, I'm not spending any time on that. And I'm the sort of person who could do it.<p>However for what I use Dropbox for, I'd be perfectly fine if the "server" was just an old Windows box running out of my basement. If there's nothing more onerous than a port-forward it might be useful.<p>But either way I doubt the guys at Dropbox have anything to worry about. To hurt them this doesn't have to appeal to the average Dropbox customer. It only has to appeal to the average paying Dropbox customer. There's a big difference there, but probably not big enough to matter.</text></comment> |
35,709,726 | 35,709,327 | 1 | 2 | 35,708,869 | train | <story><title>Google Authenticator cloud sync: Google can see the secrets, even while stored</title><url>https://defcon.social/@mysk/110262313275622023</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patmcc</author><text>It&#x27;s a tradeoff. They could let (or require) a password be entered to encrypt&#x2F;decrypt it on each device, but then people would be ticked off when they forget their password and can&#x27;t recover their 2FA stuff.<p>They should have handled it the same way they do Sync in chrome, and I expect they will eventually. But, as always, unless a service advertises that it&#x27;s full E2EE <i>and</i> you can verify that, assume it&#x27;s not.<p>One part of this that&#x27;s funny to me:<p>&gt;&gt;&gt;Also, 2FA QR codes typically contain other information such as account name and the name of the service (e.g. Twitter, Amazon, etc). Since Google can see all this data, it knows which online services you use, and could potentially use this information for personalized ads.<p>I guarantee you, Google knows which online services you use in about 800 other ways, it doesn&#x27;t need to scrape it from your 2FA accounts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Authenticator cloud sync: Google can see the secrets, even while stored</title><url>https://defcon.social/@mysk/110262313275622023</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nomilk</author><text>&gt; if someone obtains access to your Google Account, all of your 2FA secrets would be compromised.<p>This overlooks that fact Google itself also has access to your 2FA secrets, which could be even worse considering Google could be requested to peer not just into the user&#x27;s <i>google</i> account, but into accounts they have with other companies&#x2F;organisations too.</text></comment> |
39,380,042 | 39,380,149 | 1 | 3 | 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>zyx321</author><text>If anything it should be Al&#x27;sdi (Albrecht&#x27;s Discount)</text></comment> |
7,894,258 | 7,893,032 | 1 | 3 | 7,892,745 | train | <story><title>Spreadsheet-like programming in Haskell</title><url>http://www.haskellforall.com/2014/06/spreadsheet-like-programming-in-haskell.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thinkpad20</author><text>The article claims to be about the power of Applicative (and&#x2F;or spreadsheets?), but I&#x27;ve been writing Haskell for about a year and am comfortable with all of the canonical Haskell abstractions including `Applicative`, and this made basically zero sense to me. Beyond familiarity with Applicative, the author also assumes the reader has facility with Controller, Fold, Managed, View, the Pipes library, Lens, and a host of functions I had never seen, such as last (not the Prelude version), stdinLines, tick, and runMVC. Assuming this, he throws out the definition of Updatable on top of that like it makes perfect sense (&quot;just a Fold sitting in front of a Managed Controller&quot;. Oh, well then.). Basically, two or three paragraphs in and I am already completely lost. I don&#x27;t even know what problem it is we&#x27;re trying to solve, and I have no idea what it has to do at all with spreadsheets.<p>This is one of the downsides of Haskell; with so much emphasis on abstraction, code often ends up being just that: so damn abstract that it&#x27;s practically inscrutable except to the very few who are familiar with what&#x27;s going on. I guess this article was written for an audience with very broad and detailed knowledge of some complicated Haskell libraries -- meaning it&#x27;s not so important that anyone else be able to make head or tails out of what he&#x27;s talking about. Which is ok, but it does add to the impression that Haskell is an exclusive club.<p>Also, this part sticks out as confusing: The type signature of `example` does not include IO (unless Updatable has IO on under the hood), and yet the language above suggests that it will change, i.e. that it is mutable:<p>&gt; example will update every time lastLine or seconds updates, caching and reusing portions that do not update. For example, if lastLine updates then only the first field of Example will change. Similarly, if seconds updates then only the second field of Example will change.<p>Can someone clear this up for me?</text></comment> | <story><title>Spreadsheet-like programming in Haskell</title><url>http://www.haskellforall.com/2014/06/spreadsheet-like-programming-in-haskell.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gcv</author><text>I wrote something similar for Clojure: <a href="https://github.com/gcv/dgraph" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gcv&#x2F;dgraph</a></text></comment> |
28,738,167 | 28,735,896 | 1 | 2 | 28,726,125 | train | <story><title>PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack</title><url>https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2021/10/01/pipewire-and-fixing-the-linux-video-capture-stack/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>One clarification to TFA:<p>&gt;And also we can have patchbay applications that supports video pipelines and not just audio, like Carla provides for Jack applications. To be clear this feature will not come for ‘free’ from Jack patchbays since Jack only does audio, but hopefully new PipeWire patchbays like Helvum can add video support.<p>There actually have been patches for JACK to enable it transport video just like it already handles audio &amp; MIDI. We never accepted them into the mainstream.<p>The specific problem with video compared with audio is this: for audio, settling on 32 bit floating point as the canonical format for audio (and note, JACK did not prevent you from using other formats, even internally; people just didn&#x27;t bother) was not even remotely controversial. Nothing is lost and much is gained via this choice.<p>For video, however, there are a plethora of possible format choices, each with their own distinct reasons for being, and often significant computational costs associated with conversion. This means that for video it&#x27;s fairly problematic to define a single format for an entire workflow, which in turn means that figuring out when&#x2F;where conversion between formats occurs is a significant task. For JACK, we decided not to try to do this, and left the system handling only audio &amp; MIDI.</text></comment> | <story><title>PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack</title><url>https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2021/10/01/pipewire-and-fixing-the-linux-video-capture-stack/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>schmorptron</author><text>When F34 initially came out, PipeWire broke Bluetooth audio on my laptop. But a couple of days later, a patch came in and just fixed it without me having to do anything. Every couple of days, a new update for it drops and it just keeps getting better and more stable.
This really seems like a good one-for-all solution for low-latency audio.</text></comment> |
7,760,216 | 7,760,292 | 1 | 2 | 7,759,674 | train | <story><title>'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27441156</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>HillOBeans</author><text>Does anyone else here ever wonder if some of these &quot;new&quot; dinosaurs are really just re-discoveries of known dinosaurs? The article even mentions that the skeletal remains are incomplete. What if a number of these sauropods are really all the same species, albeit at different stages of their life? Is size alone enough to create a new classification? Perhaps growth continued throughout the life of a sauropod, and the largest ones were just the oldest?</text></comment> | <story><title>'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27441156</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spindritf</author><text>So what&#x27;s their secret? How did they manage to feed themselves? Were they living sparsely? Was bioshpere denser then? Were they capable of eating just about anything?<p>And how was such massive size selected for? Is it just a matter of warmer climate and a feedback loop with larger and larger predators?</text></comment> |
20,275,952 | 20,273,846 | 1 | 3 | 20,273,228 | train | <story><title>The insulin racket: why a drug made free 100 years ago is recently expensive</title><url>https://prospect.org/article/insulin-racket</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>&gt; [monthly] $43,354.73<p>That&#x27;s half a million per year. At that price, unless syprine&#x27;s manufacturing process requires digging diamonds, one could probably save money by hiring a dedicated chemist (100k p&#x2F;y or thereabout) and giving them the necessary money to make the drug just for one.<p>If I were an insurance company, I&#x27;d consider buying a small pharma outfit and target it at these orphan drugs just <i>to save money</i>.</text></item><item><author>maire</author><text>This is an issue beyond insulin. I hope they don&#x27;t just focus on insulin.<p>Generics do not work to lower prices on drugs because there is price fixing between companies. Price fixing is illegal in the US but does not seem to be enforced.<p>I discovered this because my sister in law has a rare disease and she depends on a rare drug called syprine. Her drug costs went from 177.00 a month to $8000.00 a month where it hovered there for a year, then it went up to $43,354.73 a month.<p>The US funds the manufacture and research on drugs for rare diseases but only while the drug is under patent. Once the drug is out of patent then there is no regulation. These are called &quot;orphan drugs.&quot;<p>It turns out that Valeant (the maker of syprine) was guilty of price fixing and was under investigation by the federal trade commission. The case went all the way to the supreme court which came down against Valeant. The end result seems to be nothing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text><i>If I were an insurance company, I&#x27;d consider buying a small pharma outfit and target it at these orphan drugs just to save money.</i><p>Here is why you&#x27;d rethink that position.<p>By law, insurance companies have to spend 80-85% of their revenue on patient care. Which means that their potential profits are limited by medical expenses paid out. As long as they have properly projected and accounted for the medical expenses in their business model, they therefore have a financial incentive to let expenses be high.</text></comment> | <story><title>The insulin racket: why a drug made free 100 years ago is recently expensive</title><url>https://prospect.org/article/insulin-racket</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>&gt; [monthly] $43,354.73<p>That&#x27;s half a million per year. At that price, unless syprine&#x27;s manufacturing process requires digging diamonds, one could probably save money by hiring a dedicated chemist (100k p&#x2F;y or thereabout) and giving them the necessary money to make the drug just for one.<p>If I were an insurance company, I&#x27;d consider buying a small pharma outfit and target it at these orphan drugs just <i>to save money</i>.</text></item><item><author>maire</author><text>This is an issue beyond insulin. I hope they don&#x27;t just focus on insulin.<p>Generics do not work to lower prices on drugs because there is price fixing between companies. Price fixing is illegal in the US but does not seem to be enforced.<p>I discovered this because my sister in law has a rare disease and she depends on a rare drug called syprine. Her drug costs went from 177.00 a month to $8000.00 a month where it hovered there for a year, then it went up to $43,354.73 a month.<p>The US funds the manufacture and research on drugs for rare diseases but only while the drug is under patent. Once the drug is out of patent then there is no regulation. These are called &quot;orphan drugs.&quot;<p>It turns out that Valeant (the maker of syprine) was guilty of price fixing and was under investigation by the federal trade commission. The case went all the way to the supreme court which came down against Valeant. The end result seems to be nothing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Xelbair</author><text>Sadly it is not about how much manufacturing and research costs.<p>But about how much they can profit from it.</text></comment> |
6,154,942 | 6,154,758 | 1 | 2 | 6,154,493 | train | <story><title>Founder of Tor Freedom Hosting arrested in Ireland, awaiting extradition to USA</title><url>http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/fbi-bids-to-extradite-largest-childporn-dealer-on-planet-29469402.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redthrowaway</author><text>Interesting. Freedom Hosting had been a target of Anonymous&#x27; Operation Darknet from the beginning--they&#x27;re well-known for refusing to take down exploitative sites. Operation Darknet is, itself, a pretty interesting phenomenon: Anonymous hacks onion sites, then hands over user information to the FBI for investigation. Anonymous does what the FBI legally can&#x27;t, and in exchange they&#x27;re not prosecuted for it. I can&#x27;t find the article now, but I recall reading an interview with an FBI agent in Wired or Ars or some such where he described the anons as &quot;Internet Superheroes&quot;. (sic)<p>That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]<p>The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(hacktivist)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sabu_(hacktivist)</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/anonymous-attacks-child-pornography-webs/231901499" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.informationweek.com&#x2F;security&#x2F;attacks&#x2F;anonymous-at...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikcub</author><text>I&#x27;m interested in knowing how evidence obtained via Anonymous can be submitted in a court of law. When I did evidence collecting work as part of infosec work there are very strict criteria if the evidence is going to be used in a police case[1].<p>We have to sign off on everything and record how we obtained the information and have been told by a number of lawyers that in no way are we allowed to break the law when collecting evidence that could be forwarded to police or prosecutors.<p>Private detectives go through the same thing as well. If they are carrying out a private investigation for a corporate client they can&#x27;t submit evidence that has been obtained illegally to be used at trial. For eg. you can submit evidence from public surveillance, but you can&#x27;t submit anything that you obtain by hacking email accounts or placing a recording device on private property.<p>From what I understand, there are very very strict rules about both gathering evidence and then chain of custody. The person who collects the evidence has to sign off on it and then be prepared to testify in a court to back up what they found. I know for certain that this applies in the USA, UK and Australia.<p>I wonder how the FBI are able to use evidence collected by Anonymous, or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch. I can&#x27;t imagine a judge would be impressed when told that key evidence was obtained via an illegal breakin perpetrated by a group of hackers.<p>Re: Sabu. I&#x27;ve read everything there is on that case and don&#x27;t recall a reference to his handlers prompting him on Operation Darknet. The timing also doesn&#x27;t seem to work - Sabu was taken offline last March while this arrest is the culmination of a 12-month investigation, which would suggest it started around 5 months after Sabu&#x27;s work with the FBI was completed.<p>[1] Just a note - I was usually against prosecuting the defacement style hackers or guys who were just poking around for fun. In all my work i&#x27;ve only ever been involved in two cases where evidence I collected (IP addresses, email addresses etc.) ended up being used in an investigation and in both cases it was phishing attacks from Russia.</text></comment> | <story><title>Founder of Tor Freedom Hosting arrested in Ireland, awaiting extradition to USA</title><url>http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/fbi-bids-to-extradite-largest-childporn-dealer-on-planet-29469402.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>redthrowaway</author><text>Interesting. Freedom Hosting had been a target of Anonymous&#x27; Operation Darknet from the beginning--they&#x27;re well-known for refusing to take down exploitative sites. Operation Darknet is, itself, a pretty interesting phenomenon: Anonymous hacks onion sites, then hands over user information to the FBI for investigation. Anonymous does what the FBI legally can&#x27;t, and in exchange they&#x27;re not prosecuted for it. I can&#x27;t find the article now, but I recall reading an interview with an FBI agent in Wired or Ars or some such where he described the anons as &quot;Internet Superheroes&quot;. (sic)<p>That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]<p>The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(hacktivist)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sabu_(hacktivist)</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/anonymous-attacks-child-pornography-webs/231901499" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.informationweek.com&#x2F;security&#x2F;attacks&#x2F;anonymous-at...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlgreco</author><text>Consider the following: there is a masked hero who breaks into crackhouses and drug dens, obtains evidence that the authorities were unable to legally acquire, and then promptly hands this evidence over to authorities. The identity of the masked hero is unauditable.<p>Can we spot the potential for abuse?</text></comment> |
35,810,986 | 35,810,457 | 1 | 2 | 35,809,807 | train | <story><title>Google employees complain about CEO's pay raise as cost cuts hit company</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-about-ceo-sundar-pichais-pay-raise.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>a) what would you have them work on?<p>b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>If every one of the 13,000 employees made $300k in compensation then that’s $3.9B&#x2F;year in expenses saved.<p>Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years.<p>Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numbsafari</author><text>As a GCP customer? How about fixing a whole bunch of long-standing bugs and missing features? How about not having an entire region go down due to a flood in a single DC?<p>As a Google Workspace user? How about making the search in Drive not be an embarrassment? How about creating an actual backup and restore function (DLP is not that).<p>How about making ChromeOS not suck? How about making it possible to do zero touch deployments without involving some shitty third party reseller that wants to take over your Admin Console with their insecure and crappy “plug-in”? How about not forcing people to work with shitty resellers at all?<p>There are so many things Google could be working on, that it is not. Having them eliminate staff, raise prices, defer and delay new features that have been missing for years, or leaving bugs on the table, while doing a stock buyback and lavishing money on the leadership that let OpenAI eat their lunch, or that is letting Microsoft embrace and extend his supposed wheelhouse, Chrome, or who shutdown Stadia and literally returned everyone’s money, …<p>The list goes on. I get that it’s popular to dump on Google employees as overpaid and underperforming, but the fact of the matter is that that is only true because Google ‘s CEO is a crappy as fuck leader. I’ve never worked at Google, have no desire to, but I fail to see how he doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the litany of strategic and operational blunders that this company can continue to pave over with massive cash from their supposedly failing ads business.<p>Honestly, why does he even still have a job there?</text></comment> | <story><title>Google employees complain about CEO's pay raise as cost cuts hit company</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/google-employees-complain-about-ceo-sundar-pichais-pay-raise.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andsoitis</author><text>a) what would you have them work on?<p>b) total cost to company per employee is more than their cash compensation.</text></item><item><author>prepend</author><text>If every one of the 13,000 employees made $300k in compensation then that’s $3.9B&#x2F;year in expenses saved.<p>Instead of the $70B stock buyback they could have employed those 13,000 people for 17.9 years.<p>Google is basically comcast or Nike in terms of caring about their employees and customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>htag</author><text>&gt; a) what would you have them work on?<p>This exactly. A stock buyback combined with layoffs are a signal that Google doesn&#x27;t have enough good ideas to work on. Google thinks the money is just better spent being given back to investors. This is very different than the Google 10 years ago, which was arguably throwing minds&#x2F;money at bad ideas.</text></comment> |
30,936,021 | 30,936,302 | 1 | 2 | 30,932,596 | train | <story><title>Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on</title><url>https://www.sofuckingagile.com/blog/your-competitor-wrote-the-rfp-you-are-bidding-on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edko</author><text>Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody&#x27;s time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>umvi</author><text>This has happened twice to my dad.<p>The first time was in 1994 when he applied for an Air Force position in Italy. The role required a max 3 out of 3 score on the DoD Italian proficiency test and some other niche requirements, all of which my dad fulfilled. The Air Force selected my dad for the position since the only other candidate that applied was the person currently holding the position. Then there was a big debacle because the commander over that position actually wanted the extend the guy currently holding the position a few years and decided crafting a niche job spec that seemingly only he could fill was the best way. There was a bunch of back-pedaling and politics and the job position was redacted in order for the commander to keep his guy from being replaced by my dad.<p>The second time was similar, but at a public university. A super niche job opening for their history department was published on their site that required experience with american military history, and a few other things my dad was uniquely qualified for. He applied, and the job posting was shortly taken down and my dad got a response like &quot;actually we&#x27;ve decided to move a different direction from when we originally posted that job listing. That listing has been removed and we are no longer accepting applications for it&quot;. Seemed like another instance where the candidate to-be-hired was pre-determined, but my dad threw a wrench into their plans by applying to a job posting that was only supposed to have 1 candidate (the predetermined hire).</text></comment> | <story><title>Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on</title><url>https://www.sofuckingagile.com/blog/your-competitor-wrote-the-rfp-you-are-bidding-on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edko</author><text>Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody&#x27;s time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brightball</author><text>I applied for a job that a friend of mine was up for simply because they couldn&#x27;t complete the job search until they had enough candidates. I went through the interview process to speed things up for him. Got interviewed by 9 people when we all knew what the outcome was supposed to be.<p>I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his job just to move it along faster.</text></comment> |
1,267,481 | 1,267,471 | 1 | 2 | 1,267,417 | train | <story><title>Case dropped against Simon Singh </title><url>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8621880.stm</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shrikant</author><text>From the BCA's official statement [<a href="http://www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk/gfx/uploads/textbox/Singh/BCA%20Statement%2015th%20April%202010.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.chiropractic-uk.co.uk/gfx/uploads/textbox/Singh/B...</a>]:<p><i>[...] the BCA has taken the view that it should withdraw to avoid further legal costs being incurred by either side.</i><p>A realisation that did not strike them until the prospect of an embarassing loss.</text></comment> | <story><title>Case dropped against Simon Singh </title><url>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8621880.stm</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ErrantX</author><text>I hope the BCA is forced to bear the costs to Singh. I've been following this story closely and it was setting up to be a real triumph for free reporting and science etc.<p>Damn the BCA for chickening out of their drubbing early :(</text></comment> |
35,197,637 | 35,197,679 | 1 | 2 | 35,196,442 | train | <story><title>Still Have a Use for Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working to Safely Emulate It in Rust</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ruffle-Adobe-Flash-Rust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adrian17</author><text>Some extra notes:<p>&gt; project issued their first progress report with getting dozens of ActionScript 2 based games working<p>Dozens of _previously-broken_ games working. We had a majority of (single-player) AS2 games working for years now, with only several major missing features plaguing the remaining games. The biggest one of them (a very unintuitive way variables magically bind to &quot;DOM&quot; objects) was implemented very recently, hence the announcement.<p>As for AS3, you could say the interpreter support has finally reached the turning point. It took 2 years from the first AS3-related commit to the first simplest game to &quot;kinda-sorta work&quot;, and within the next couple of months up to now, so many games started to work that we stopped being able to count them. So yeah, we&#x27;re very optimistic here :)<p>EDIT: oh, also major shoutout to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jindrapetrik&#x2F;jpexs-decompiler">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jindrapetrik&#x2F;jpexs-decompiler</a> which is effectively a full-blown low-level IDE for decompiling, debugging, analysing and manipulating (or even hand-crafting from scratch) SWFs. Without actually seeing all the ways the games abused Flash interpreter, it&#x27;d be borderline impossible to figure out Flash Player&#x27;s various quirks. Further, it lets contributors create test SWFs without having to own old versions of Flash IDE.</text></comment> | <story><title>Still Have a Use for Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working to Safely Emulate It in Rust</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ruffle-Adobe-Flash-Rust</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moolcool</author><text>I will defend Flash all day long, and I think it&#x27;s death is a regression in technology that to this day has not been rectified. Of course it had it&#x27;s problems (particularly around accessibility and security), but in 1998, it was possible for a teenager to write a decent quality Mario clone that could run on a Pentium II, from a web browser, at 60fps.</text></comment> |
5,919,352 | 5,919,236 | 1 | 3 | 5,918,508 | train | <story><title>We were wrong</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/we-were-wrong</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cushman</author><text>This &quot;defense&quot; misses the point.<p><i>The gist of the controversial advice is &quot;Don&#x27;t wait for signs before you make your move. Let her be the one who rejects your advances. If she says no, stop immediately and tell her you don&#x27;t want to do anything that would make her uncomfortable. Try again at a later time if appropriate or cease entirely if she is absolutely not interested.&quot;</i><p>This is not a defense. This advice leads to sexual assault. You are <i>assuming</i> your partner&#x27;s consent, and placing the burden on them to reject it. <i>That is the problem.</i><p>Without a clear verbal confirmation of consent, or an explicit proactive action, you <i>cannot know</i> if your partner is participating willingly. Failure to reject is not the same thing as consent, and no adult should have difficulty understanding the distinction.<p>If you follow this advice, you <i>will</i> rape people while believing that they are just shy.<p>And for what? To avoid the embarrassment of saying, &quot;So do you wanna fuck?&quot; How old are you?<p>Or are you worried that if you ask a woman &quot;So do you wanna fuck?&quot;, she might say no? Do I even need to explain what&#x27;s wrong with that?</text></item><item><author>angersock</author><text>Have some context:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;zwHYzCZe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;zwHYzCZe</a><p>Sincerely,<p>A HNer who is ashamed of the lack of reading comprehension of this community right now.</text></item><item><author>ebbv</author><text>Dear fellow HN dwellers,<p>If you read the writings of the Guide&#x27;s author and do not recognize that it is misogynistic and advocating sexual assault, you have a problem. That problem is that you are mistaking sexual assault for &quot;taking the first step.&quot;<p>You do not need to resort to pulling out your dick and forcibly placing the woman&#x27;s hand on it in order to &quot;make a move.&quot; There&#x27;s literally hundreds of other things that aren&#x27;t sexual assault that you could do before resorting to that.<p>If you believe that&#x27;s a reasonable &quot;move&quot; to make, then you not only have no imagination, but your judgment of what&#x27;s acceptable behavior is way, way off. It doesn&#x27;t matter if this is a woman who you&#x27;re behind closed doors with for the first time, that&#x27;s not a normal, acceptable &quot;move&quot;. That kind of thing is for people already in an established, ongoing relationship with a solid foundation of consent.<p>Without that consent, it is assault.<p>I strongly urge all of you who &quot;do not see the problem&quot; with the author&#x27;s writings to do more research into exactly what consent is, and what women (as a whole, obviously it varies from individual to individual) see as acceptable, expected behavior.<p>If women are loudly saying &quot;This is assault.&quot;, you need to take them at their word, because it is their judgment, it is their <i>consent</i> that matters. Not yours.<p>Sincerely,<p>A married, 34 year old HNer who is ashamed of this community right now.<p>EDIT:<p>I thought this was obvious but <i>I have already read all the comments in this thread and all the &quot;context&quot; the excusers are providing.</i> If you think pointing me to that again is refuting my points, then you didn&#x27;t understand what I wrote.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>300bps</author><text>&gt;And for what? To avoid the embarrassment of saying, &quot;So do you wanna fuck?&quot; How old are you?<p>I&#x27;m not the person you wrote this to, but I can answer that I am 41 years old, have been married for 11 years and have three children (including a daughter).<p>When I think of the little scene you&#x27;ve played out there occurring, I see the biggest nerd in the world getting his first chance at making out with a girl when he awkwardly stops and says, &quot;Do you consent to fornication at this time?&quot;<p>Frankly, your advice makes you sound unbelievably young and inexperienced with women. I have yet to meet a woman that wants you ask permission for every stage of a sexual relationship. In fact, every woman I&#x27;ve talked to about the subject has told me that it&#x27;s specifically unwanted.</text></comment> | <story><title>We were wrong</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/we-were-wrong</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cushman</author><text>This &quot;defense&quot; misses the point.<p><i>The gist of the controversial advice is &quot;Don&#x27;t wait for signs before you make your move. Let her be the one who rejects your advances. If she says no, stop immediately and tell her you don&#x27;t want to do anything that would make her uncomfortable. Try again at a later time if appropriate or cease entirely if she is absolutely not interested.&quot;</i><p>This is not a defense. This advice leads to sexual assault. You are <i>assuming</i> your partner&#x27;s consent, and placing the burden on them to reject it. <i>That is the problem.</i><p>Without a clear verbal confirmation of consent, or an explicit proactive action, you <i>cannot know</i> if your partner is participating willingly. Failure to reject is not the same thing as consent, and no adult should have difficulty understanding the distinction.<p>If you follow this advice, you <i>will</i> rape people while believing that they are just shy.<p>And for what? To avoid the embarrassment of saying, &quot;So do you wanna fuck?&quot; How old are you?<p>Or are you worried that if you ask a woman &quot;So do you wanna fuck?&quot;, she might say no? Do I even need to explain what&#x27;s wrong with that?</text></item><item><author>angersock</author><text>Have some context:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;zwHYzCZe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;zwHYzCZe</a><p>Sincerely,<p>A HNer who is ashamed of the lack of reading comprehension of this community right now.</text></item><item><author>ebbv</author><text>Dear fellow HN dwellers,<p>If you read the writings of the Guide&#x27;s author and do not recognize that it is misogynistic and advocating sexual assault, you have a problem. That problem is that you are mistaking sexual assault for &quot;taking the first step.&quot;<p>You do not need to resort to pulling out your dick and forcibly placing the woman&#x27;s hand on it in order to &quot;make a move.&quot; There&#x27;s literally hundreds of other things that aren&#x27;t sexual assault that you could do before resorting to that.<p>If you believe that&#x27;s a reasonable &quot;move&quot; to make, then you not only have no imagination, but your judgment of what&#x27;s acceptable behavior is way, way off. It doesn&#x27;t matter if this is a woman who you&#x27;re behind closed doors with for the first time, that&#x27;s not a normal, acceptable &quot;move&quot;. That kind of thing is for people already in an established, ongoing relationship with a solid foundation of consent.<p>Without that consent, it is assault.<p>I strongly urge all of you who &quot;do not see the problem&quot; with the author&#x27;s writings to do more research into exactly what consent is, and what women (as a whole, obviously it varies from individual to individual) see as acceptable, expected behavior.<p>If women are loudly saying &quot;This is assault.&quot;, you need to take them at their word, because it is their judgment, it is their <i>consent</i> that matters. Not yours.<p>Sincerely,<p>A married, 34 year old HNer who is ashamed of this community right now.<p>EDIT:<p>I thought this was obvious but <i>I have already read all the comments in this thread and all the &quot;context&quot; the excusers are providing.</i> If you think pointing me to that again is refuting my points, then you didn&#x27;t understand what I wrote.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Samuel_Michon</author><text>When you’ve gone out on several dates, you’ve kissed, she’s invited you to her home, and you’re now sitting on the couch with her, more often than not, the girl will expect the guy to take the initiative. By that time, asking her if you can touch her is a major downer for her. You’re expected to try something. If she didn’t want to fool around, you wouldn’t be there.<p>That’s the context of the quotes, and in the book, it is prefaced by an instruction to stop immediately if she indicates you to do so.</text></comment> |
27,006,895 | 27,006,192 | 1 | 3 | 26,991,300 | train | <story><title>Internal Combustion Engine</title><url>https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knolan</author><text>I’m a lowly mechanical engineering lecturer. I use Jupyter notebooks to teach fluid mechanics[0]. I make videos of fluid flows with Blender and embed them with the notes along with some basic Python code examples so that students are aware of how basic code can make an Engineer’s life easier (even if Matlab is the standard platform).<p>I also embed simple 3D models with pyGEL3D[1]. It’s fine but very limited. I’m always blown away by this gentleman’s work when it comes up here on HN and would like to use JavaScript instead, but I’ve no idea where to start. Can anyone recommend a good book or online course that would put me on the right path?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nbviewer.jupyter.org&#x2F;github&#x2F;nolankucd&#x2F;MEEN20010&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nbviewer.jupyter.org&#x2F;github&#x2F;nolankucd&#x2F;MEEN20010&#x2F;tree...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.imm.dtu.dk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;GEL&#x2F;PyGEL&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.imm.dtu.dk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;GEL&#x2F;PyGEL&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>helixc</author><text>Why do you have to learn JS? If you just want to make a web app and add some interactive 3D models on it, there&#x27;re some Python libraries can help with that, like:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;streamlit&#x2F;streamlit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;streamlit&#x2F;streamlit</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wang0618&#x2F;PyWebIO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wang0618&#x2F;PyWebIO</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plotly&#x2F;dash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plotly&#x2F;dash</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Internal Combustion Engine</title><url>https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>knolan</author><text>I’m a lowly mechanical engineering lecturer. I use Jupyter notebooks to teach fluid mechanics[0]. I make videos of fluid flows with Blender and embed them with the notes along with some basic Python code examples so that students are aware of how basic code can make an Engineer’s life easier (even if Matlab is the standard platform).<p>I also embed simple 3D models with pyGEL3D[1]. It’s fine but very limited. I’m always blown away by this gentleman’s work when it comes up here on HN and would like to use JavaScript instead, but I’ve no idea where to start. Can anyone recommend a good book or online course that would put me on the right path?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nbviewer.jupyter.org&#x2F;github&#x2F;nolankucd&#x2F;MEEN20010&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nbviewer.jupyter.org&#x2F;github&#x2F;nolankucd&#x2F;MEEN20010&#x2F;tree...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.imm.dtu.dk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;GEL&#x2F;PyGEL&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.imm.dtu.dk&#x2F;projects&#x2F;GEL&#x2F;PyGEL&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lasagna_coder</author><text>Also I would trade you mech eng tutoring for JS tutoring, if you&#x27;ve got the time.</text></comment> |
33,163,449 | 33,162,988 | 1 | 3 | 33,162,235 | train | <story><title>Joe Rogan Interviews Steve Jobs</title><url>https://podcast.ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graderjs</author><text>This is mindblowing. Like this could be real, and I&#x27;m learning stuff from it: <i>There&#x27;s an Indian epic that&#x27;s 10 times as long as ...</i><p>There&#x27;s some audio distortion (sounds like clips cut together, little &quot;notches&quot; in the soundscape) but apart from that, and some weirdness in sensing &quot;the spatial location&quot; where this audio was recorded...the concepts and the dialog are amazing.<p>Some parts are weird...but people can be weird. It you tidied this up, and added the right sounds affects and audio processing to this, without the cue that this is AI generated...holy fuck, I think people would believe it. Particularly if you cut it together as a &quot;highlights reel&quot;. Jobs does sound a bit off tho, a bit thin...there should be enough data on him to do a sparse reconstruction of his voice to a level of accuracy beyond human discernment tho.<p>The thing this got wrong about Job&#x27;s voice cadence, tho is: Jobs speaks a lot more slowly and deliberately, and with a lot more pauses, than here. I suspect the cadence &#x2F; timing is not so emphatically modelled by this AI.<p>I think also they&#x27;re missing some emotional trajectory coherence in both their voices. Like the emotional register of the voice does not sound or transition as naturally, and is less diverse.<p>Incredible PoC. AI folks are the new dark wizards. WTF can they not do? That list is shorter</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petercooper</author><text>I agree it&#x27;s a fantastic PoC. Jobs&#x27; voice sounds <i>very</i> heavily derived from keynote speeches. People speak with different intonation and cadence in different situations and the uncanny valley effect here is due to having him speak casually on a podcast but in keynote voice. It&#x27;d be like training a Paul McCartney AI voice solely on Beatles songs - it wouldn&#x27;t sound anything like McCartney&#x27;s real life speech.</text></comment> | <story><title>Joe Rogan Interviews Steve Jobs</title><url>https://podcast.ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graderjs</author><text>This is mindblowing. Like this could be real, and I&#x27;m learning stuff from it: <i>There&#x27;s an Indian epic that&#x27;s 10 times as long as ...</i><p>There&#x27;s some audio distortion (sounds like clips cut together, little &quot;notches&quot; in the soundscape) but apart from that, and some weirdness in sensing &quot;the spatial location&quot; where this audio was recorded...the concepts and the dialog are amazing.<p>Some parts are weird...but people can be weird. It you tidied this up, and added the right sounds affects and audio processing to this, without the cue that this is AI generated...holy fuck, I think people would believe it. Particularly if you cut it together as a &quot;highlights reel&quot;. Jobs does sound a bit off tho, a bit thin...there should be enough data on him to do a sparse reconstruction of his voice to a level of accuracy beyond human discernment tho.<p>The thing this got wrong about Job&#x27;s voice cadence, tho is: Jobs speaks a lot more slowly and deliberately, and with a lot more pauses, than here. I suspect the cadence &#x2F; timing is not so emphatically modelled by this AI.<p>I think also they&#x27;re missing some emotional trajectory coherence in both their voices. Like the emotional register of the voice does not sound or transition as naturally, and is less diverse.<p>Incredible PoC. AI folks are the new dark wizards. WTF can they not do? That list is shorter</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>h0l0cube</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m learning stuff from it: There&#x27;s an Indian epic that&#x27;s 10 times as long as ...<p>From a cursory websearch:<p>&gt; At about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is roughly ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mahabharata" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mahabharata</a></text></comment> |
13,663,033 | 13,663,271 | 1 | 3 | 13,654,055 | train | <story><title>R for Excel Users</title><url>http://blog.yhat.com/posts/R-for-excel-users.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>roel_v</author><text>The thing is though - R is just not Excel. For many tasks (blasphemy!), Excel is simply better.<p>Take quick scenario evaluation. In Excel, I change one or two cells and see everything update immediately; in R, you need to re-run your analysis and find the outputs you&#x27;re after again. There is built-in support for scenarios in Excel. In R you have to code your analysis around it, and do the formatting for comparing, too.<p>Or take the libraries. Anything that is not statistics is just a pain in R. Everything is possible, sure - but high friction. PMT()&#x2F;IPMT() functions in R? Good luck. Sure it&#x27;s easy to code yourself (which is the advice you get when asking R users %| ) but I&#x27;m using something high level to not have to bother with that sort of thing!<p>Graphs? Yeah, there&#x27;s plot() which is straight out of 1960, or ggplot - which is easy for the simple things and then devolves into afternoons chasing obscure manual pages for this or that setting. Here&#x27;s one: plot 360 degrees of a sine wave, and it&#x27;s first and second derivatives. Then explain an Excel user how that works. (this is both because anything non-stats is bolted onto R, and because ggplot is designed around stats graphing.)<p>Keeping a matrix of data, like a simple database? Sure R can read dozens of file formats from CSV to HDF, but actually editing&#x2F;maintaining that data is a pain in the ass. Excel, just add a sheet and use vlookup - it will let you sort and filter and copy and validate, all without leaving one software package.<p>Yes, there are many things wrong with Excel. FFS, there is a conference on how to not screw things up in real life with Excel. But saying &#x27;just use R&#x27; is silly. For most applications where starry-eyed grad students advocate R over Excel (because hey, nail&#x2F;hammer, right?), Excel is just the better choice, even if that means workflows that make programming-literate folk die a little inside every time we have to work with them.</text></comment> | <story><title>R for Excel Users</title><url>http://blog.yhat.com/posts/R-for-excel-users.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ktamura</author><text>So glad to see this. As someone who learned both Excel and SQL on the first job (it&#x27;s called being an analyst at a trading firm), I always felt that SQL was a &quot;more powerful but clunkier cousin&quot; of Excel and wished there was a tutorial for SQL aimed at Excel ninjas.<p>Well, fast forward half a decade and nobody wrote it, so I did so awhile back. Of all the things I wrote for work, it continues to be the most popular:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.treasuredata.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;learn-sql-by-calculating-customer-lifetime-value-part-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.treasuredata.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;learn-sql-by-c...</a></text></comment> |
12,007,887 | 12,003,695 | 1 | 3 | 12,003,142 | train | <story><title>Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes</title><url>http://www.coindesk.com/urbit-developers-bitcoin-node/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>What did they sell? Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space.<p>Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it&#x27;s sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it&#x27;s hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective.<p>So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It&#x27;s not clear if this will work out, but it&#x27;s something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you&#x27;re not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.)<p>It&#x27;s not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it&#x27;s useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it&#x27;s good to see people trying original ideas.<p>If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it&#x27;s a developer toolkit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidgerard</author><text>Urbit: neoreaction via Diaspora in INTERCAL on the blockchain.<p>(Urbit is explicitly intended to instantiate Yarvin&#x27;s political views, per the 2013 version of the security chapter: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;UK8So" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;UK8So</a> )</text></comment> | <story><title>Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes</title><url>http://www.coindesk.com/urbit-developers-bitcoin-node/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>What did they sell? Apparently, some (all?) of their potential user ID space.<p>Urbit, under all their jargon, is a base for a federated social network. Sort of like Diaspora. (Right now, they say they have chat, so it&#x27;s sort of like IRC.) They recognize that a big problem with social networks is spam. If you can freely create user IDs, it&#x27;s hard to stop spammers. But if user IDs cost money, then spam blocking costs spammers money (their purchased online identities lose value) and spamming is no longer cost-effective.<p>So their solution is to create a market in user ID space. It&#x27;s not clear if this will work out, but it&#x27;s something. If you buy an ID, you own it, in the Bitcoin sense. That is, you&#x27;re not at the mercy of some service provider, and can freely move from one service provider to another without their permission. (I think this is right. Not entirely sure.)<p>It&#x27;s not clear if this will work in the social space. They have the underlying machinery, but nobody has built the Facebook or WhatsApp or Dropbox killer on top of it yet, so it&#x27;s useless to end users at this stage. The concepts are interesting; it&#x27;s good to see people trying original ideas.<p>If someone builds an easy to use social application on this and gets some services to host it (like Wordpress hosting), this could get actual users. Right now, it&#x27;s a developer toolkit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hault</author><text>urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have <i>useful</i> apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you&#x27;re ready to go. See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;using&#x2F;web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;using&#x2F;web&#x2F;</a><p>Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:<p>&quot;If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.<p>To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn&#x27;t want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn&#x27;t built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you&#x27;ve ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It&#x27;s, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it&#x27;s out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;augur.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;augur.net</a>] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across&#x2F;between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].<p>If we&#x27;re going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems.
Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: &quot;They have verve, and that&#x27;s generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven&#x27;t looked at it more deeply (and probably should).&quot; [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11810177" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11810177</a>] - very cool!&quot;<p>And finally, another idea: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;objections&#x2F;#killer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;objections&#x2F;#killer</a><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11817721" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11817721</a></text></comment> |
14,417,306 | 14,417,104 | 1 | 3 | 14,414,712 | train | <story><title>MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud</title><url>https://mediagoblin.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>I just had a brief look at Mastodon, and it appears to have the same humongous flaw that Diaspora has. No events management.<p>What the hell? That is <i>the</i> main feature required in a social network, after the ability to see each others comments. People want to organise their lives using the graph that their social network provides.<p>Is anyone aware of a distributed or federated open source social network which provides event management functionality? I would love to hear about it if you have... Gallery functionality would come in handy too.</text></item><item><author>rglullis</author><text>Curious to see this here, given that I&#x27;ve been trying to set up some of these &quot;decentralized services&quot; at my home servers and figuring out if it is really possible to replace the common mainstream services.<p>So far, I installed my own Matrix server (synapse), my own XMPP (ejabberd), yesterday I got semi-happy with my mastodon setup, and now I was just finishing some tests with ownCloud to see if I could replace Dropbox.<p>MediaGoblin is on my list of services to setup. I ran a basic deployment and checked some other instances of it before, but I didn&#x27;t put it higher on my priority list because to me it looks like it focus too much on being a &quot;community-driven website&quot; instead of providing a solid service as a media-hosting&#x2F;publishing&#x2F;catalog system.<p>To me it looks like they are shooting for the wrong level of &quot;decentralization granularity&quot;. Each instance of these services are aiming for a &quot;community&quot;, and think that the people use the mainstream tools because they don&#x27;t want to&#x2F;won&#x27;t manage the server.<p>The point they seem to miss is that this only creates another type of top-down organization. It would be MUCH easier for them to focus on a &quot;single-user&quot; system, and start from the point that the communication will work when the applications talk with each other.<p>To me this is why Diaspora failed, and Wordpress is still such a big part of the internet.<p>Another thing I noticed: the projects that really focused on separating client from server produced much better results in terms of UI&#x2F;UX. With Matrix, I just had to setup the server, and then I could have the riot app just point to my instance. If by any chance a better client comes around, my instance would be untouched.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeena</author><text>I have events on my website <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeena.net&#x2F;events&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jeena.net&#x2F;events&#x2F;</a> plain HTML marked up with h-event <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;microformats.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;h-event" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;microformats.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;h-event</a> and I can receive RSVPs with help of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;webmention&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;webmention&#x2F;</a><p>It was fairly easy to implement, the only problem is that not many of the people I know have software which lets them RSVP too, therefor I also connected it to Facebook.</text></comment> | <story><title>MediaGoblin – Self Hosted, Decentralized Alt to YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud</title><url>https://mediagoblin.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mike-cardwell</author><text>I just had a brief look at Mastodon, and it appears to have the same humongous flaw that Diaspora has. No events management.<p>What the hell? That is <i>the</i> main feature required in a social network, after the ability to see each others comments. People want to organise their lives using the graph that their social network provides.<p>Is anyone aware of a distributed or federated open source social network which provides event management functionality? I would love to hear about it if you have... Gallery functionality would come in handy too.</text></item><item><author>rglullis</author><text>Curious to see this here, given that I&#x27;ve been trying to set up some of these &quot;decentralized services&quot; at my home servers and figuring out if it is really possible to replace the common mainstream services.<p>So far, I installed my own Matrix server (synapse), my own XMPP (ejabberd), yesterday I got semi-happy with my mastodon setup, and now I was just finishing some tests with ownCloud to see if I could replace Dropbox.<p>MediaGoblin is on my list of services to setup. I ran a basic deployment and checked some other instances of it before, but I didn&#x27;t put it higher on my priority list because to me it looks like it focus too much on being a &quot;community-driven website&quot; instead of providing a solid service as a media-hosting&#x2F;publishing&#x2F;catalog system.<p>To me it looks like they are shooting for the wrong level of &quot;decentralization granularity&quot;. Each instance of these services are aiming for a &quot;community&quot;, and think that the people use the mainstream tools because they don&#x27;t want to&#x2F;won&#x27;t manage the server.<p>The point they seem to miss is that this only creates another type of top-down organization. It would be MUCH easier for them to focus on a &quot;single-user&quot; system, and start from the point that the communication will work when the applications talk with each other.<p>To me this is why Diaspora failed, and Wordpress is still such a big part of the internet.<p>Another thing I noticed: the projects that really focused on separating client from server produced much better results in terms of UI&#x2F;UX. With Matrix, I just had to setup the server, and then I could have the riot app just point to my instance. If by any chance a better client comes around, my instance would be untouched.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mallaidh</author><text>I haven&#x27;t heard of `events management&#x27; as a core feature of social media and Mastodon gets alone just fine without it. I&#x27;m assuming that you&#x27;re referring to facebook-style timelines for life events, etc.?</text></comment> |
26,441,318 | 26,439,720 | 1 | 3 | 26,439,131 | train | <story><title>Diode Drive – Privacy-focused distributed alternative to GoogleDrive and Dropbox</title><url>https://diode.io/resources/download/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>huhtenberg</author><text>I&#x27;m getting a strong early 00s vibe - the time when P2P was getting traction and people were trying to use it this way and that way. Good ideas, interesting tech, but ultimately just a collection of solutions, frameworks and platforms in search of a problem.<p>When the excitement subsided, it turned out that nobody really cared about things to be p2p <i>per se</i>. Nobody cared how it was done, only that it did what they needed. In some cases p2p was the answer, i.e. BitTorrent and the original Skype, in very many others it wasn&#x27;t and a centralized solution was simpler, cheaper, more reliable or more user-friendly.<p>Diode Drive appears to be in the same spirit. As a technical person I appreciate the solution, but it doesn&#x27;t appear to be solving any tangible problem in some dramatically better way that also maps onto a better user experience. This is based on the 8 minute &quot;How Diode Drive works&quot; video behind two &quot;Learn More&quot; links.<p>If I got it right, then the idea is that N people can come together as a &quot;trusted group&quot; and use each other as nodes in a storage cluster. They can also share out files from the storage with outsiders and these files will be delivered from one of the nodes in the group.<p>If that&#x27;s correct, then I&#x27;d argue that this <i>is</i> in fact a solution in search of a problem, competing directly with a good old dedicated storage box, e.g. an on-premises NAS that is accessible from the Internet in some way. I can see Diode Drive being used as a stop-gap solution while a proper one is put in place, but that&#x27;s about it.<p>But I may be missing something. I hope do. But on the surface this is eerie similar to the projects of the p2p glory days from 20 years ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Diode Drive – Privacy-focused distributed alternative to GoogleDrive and Dropbox</title><url>https://diode.io/resources/download/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>theon144</author><text>Why should I use this instead of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncthing.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncthing.net&#x2F;</a>?<p>I looked around the website for a while, but the model seems fairly similar, and I wasn&#x27;t able to find any unique advantages.</text></comment> |
31,352,401 | 31,352,170 | 1 | 2 | 31,350,550 | train | <story><title>Modernizing AWK, a 45-year old language, by adding CSV support</title><url>https://benhoyt.com/writings/goawk-csv/?m</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mro_name</author><text>I recently learned via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31257248" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31257248</a> that ASCII has the idea of records and fields ever since. It&#x27;s just not used, but workaround CSV.<p>No improvement of CSV handling will ever improved on that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belter</author><text>Discussed here before, not everybody was seeing only positives.<p>&quot;ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text&quot;:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7474600" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7474600</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Modernizing AWK, a 45-year old language, by adding CSV support</title><url>https://benhoyt.com/writings/goawk-csv/?m</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mro_name</author><text>I recently learned via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31257248" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31257248</a> that ASCII has the idea of records and fields ever since. It&#x27;s just not used, but workaround CSV.<p>No improvement of CSV handling will ever improved on that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cb321</author><text>See the &quot;Conventions for lossless conversion to TSV&quot; on the current version of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tab-separated_values" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tab-separated_values</a> . There are really only 3 chars to escape - the escape char, and 2 delimiters - to make everything easy to deal with (even binary data in fields - what &quot;lossless&quot; means here).</text></comment> |
19,563,490 | 19,561,780 | 1 | 3 | 19,559,617 | train | <story><title>Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demanding-some-new-users-email-passwords</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there&#x27;s no reason facebook <i>needs</i> to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.</text></item><item><author>leCapitalist</author><text>Easy.<p>The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.<p>The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.<p>The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation.<p>Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they&#x27;re trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it&#x27;s all said and done, over $1M is wasted.<p>Welcome to life at a big tech company.</text></item><item><author>kyle-rb</author><text>I just don&#x27;t understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying &quot;hey, wait, isn&#x27;t this an insane thing to do?&quot;.<p>I would guess it&#x27;s some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking &quot;well we&#x27;re doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn&#x27;t they trust us, we&#x27;re Facebook!&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baron_harkonnen</author><text>I think you misunderstand the real purpose of these major companies fighting to hire as much talent as possible. Anyone in the Bay Area that cannot afford FAANG total comp knows how hard it is to hire top engineering talent. This is the end goal of these companies hiring policies: to remove talent from the market.<p>Before these companies where FAANG most of them were small, crazy startups that were able to easily acquire talent because tech was pretty boring at the time. You could pay market rates, but give someone an exciting project and they&#x27;d join you. That allowed all of these companies to completely disrupt the market. Having disrupted the market they are no longer interested in this happening again.<p>The current hiring practices are to basically drain talent from the startup pool. Paying an engineer 500k is much cheaper than acquiring the new darling startup they ended up creating (DeepMind), which is much cheaper than acquiring the now large company that is threatening you (instagram), which is still much cheaper than allowing existential threats to you to eventually IPO.<p>There&#x27;s the added benefit that you now have a bunch of great engineers on your team, but this isn&#x27;t the real purpose. The tech giants of the past, IBM, Oracle etc all failed to realize how important it was not only to have good engineers, but to also remove great engineers from the market.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook Asking for Some New Users' Email Passwords</title><url>https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyond-sketchy-facebook-demanding-some-new-users-email-passwords</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Traster</author><text>I find it fascinating how big tech companies are intent on spending enormous sums of money seeking out the top tech talent in the world. Then rather than listen to them when they voice concerns they try to beat them down into submission. I get that if you worked at a company whose core mission is evil that you just have to accept that when you sign up, but there&#x27;s no reason facebook <i>needs</i> to be make these active moral choices to pursue things in the worst possible way and yet they consistently do.</text></item><item><author>leCapitalist</author><text>Easy.<p>The engineers who built it care mostly about their total compensation and getting promoted. They therefore gleefully implement the product requirements.<p>The PMs behind the idea also care about the above, except they are held to account by business objectives. By narrowly optimizing for a particular objective (reducing account fraud) in an unprincipled manner, they come up with an insane feature idea like this.<p>The lowly L3 engineer fresh out of college understands how crazy this is and speaks up, but is hammered down by the culture. The decision is quite literally above their pay grade. They begrudgingly fall in line as they have the most to lose in this situation.<p>Finally a story like this breaks and upper management realizes the contradiction with the narrative that they&#x27;re trying to create - that Facebook really does care about your privacy. The whole project gets scrapped, and by the time it&#x27;s all said and done, over $1M is wasted.<p>Welcome to life at a big tech company.</text></item><item><author>kyle-rb</author><text>I just don&#x27;t understand how this gets implemented without someone speaking up and saying &quot;hey, wait, isn&#x27;t this an insane thing to do?&quot;.<p>I would guess it&#x27;s some combination of the complainers being ignored, and people at a higher level thinking &quot;well we&#x27;re doing this in a secure way, as long as the user trusts us, and why wouldn&#x27;t they trust us, we&#x27;re Facebook!&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nstart</author><text>That&#x27;s exactly why they spend that much money. They know you can be submitted. They want tech talent. Not revolutionists. It&#x27;s a rough world out there and it&#x27;s better to get in line than lose your pot of gold.<p>Doesn&#x27;t make it right at all. But if you were that engineer, it&#x27;s easier to say to yourself that you&#x27;ll work your way up and change things the day you are in charge.</text></comment> |
5,748,539 | 5,748,129 | 1 | 3 | 5,747,961 | train | <story><title>Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is</title><url>http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-think-it-is.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mratzloff</author><text>Who is the audience for Dart? Clearly it is first and foremost Google, whose programmers spend their days writing Java and C++ in an IDE like Eclipse. But web developers, who are the primary producers of JavaScript, will happily stick with Node.js, CoffeeScript, or plain JavaScript.<p>For that audience, they are given a language with optional static typing (most don't want it) and an Eclipse-based editor (most don't want it).<p>By way of contrast, consider Go. Go is (in my opinion) an extremely successful successor to C, in terms of its design. It fixes a handful of problems with C (strings, and I would argue pointer arithmetic), and modernizes and streamlines it. The interface system is fantastic. In terms of its design, I have nothing but good things to say about Go.<p>Dart does not seem to improve on JavaScript in a compelling way. It adds optional static typing, and as far as I can tell, nothing else.<p>Is it any surprise that Dart has failed to take off?</text></comment> | <story><title>Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is</title><url>http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-think-it-is.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>willlll</author><text>Untyped languages are okay. Typed languages are also okay. Typed languages with inference are okay.<p>Optionally typed is extremely strange.</text></comment> |
25,019,027 | 25,019,252 | 1 | 3 | 25,006,970 | train | <story><title>The Influence of Breathing on the Central Nervous System</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070065/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Noumenon72</author><text>The domain and big words had me expecting a scientific paper; the fact that they jump from topic to topic without driving toward anything or saying how it&#x27;s connected had me thinking GPT-3; the fact that the conclusion is &quot;we can conclude with this reflection: Breath has patterns. Schemes create behavior. Breath is a behavior. Behavior represents the person. Breath reveals the person.&quot; has me thinking it might be some kind of planted article for fake yoga marketers to cite. Maybe I just skimmed too fast and didn&#x27;t give it a chance.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Influence of Breathing on the Central Nervous System</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070065/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>If you have a strong (personal) need to understand how breathing impacts the body, a good source of info that can be found in layman&#x27;s terms is stuff about altitude sickness and about what happens to the body at altitude even before it turns into altitude sickness. (This is probably especially valuable info if you have gut issues or blood health issues.)</text></comment> |
14,821,733 | 14,821,515 | 1 | 2 | 14,821,022 | train | <story><title>Hedge Fund Uses Algae to Reap 21% Return</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/hedge-fund-quant-posting-21-return-says-biology-is-secret-sauce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>habosa</author><text>In the chart, this is how the fund has compared to an S&amp;P index over the past 5 years:<p><pre><code> * 2013 - 5% over
* 2014 - 15% under (and negative overall)
* 2015 - 30% over
* 2016 - 10% over
* 2017 - About even
</code></pre>
One exceptionally strong year, and pretty uneven otherwise. Hardly proof that these biology-derived algorithms are the secret to market-beating returns.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huac</author><text>We have no idea what the beta of the fund is; it&#x27;s difficult to talk about performance without knowledge of the fund&#x27;s underlying risk<p>The other problem is scale - this is pretty evidently an advertising attempt in order to raise more cash. It&#x27;s a lot easier to return 20% on, say, $100M AUM than it is on $1B AUM.<p>To be fair -- these caveats are true for almost <i>every</i> fund you hear about. I do think that&#x27;s kind of my big issue with the article though, that this fund is just like every other fund; it&#x27;s intrinsically an actively managed portfolio with the same shortcomings as any other. It&#x27;s just got a good publicist!</text></comment> | <story><title>Hedge Fund Uses Algae to Reap 21% Return</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/hedge-fund-quant-posting-21-return-says-biology-is-secret-sauce</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>habosa</author><text>In the chart, this is how the fund has compared to an S&amp;P index over the past 5 years:<p><pre><code> * 2013 - 5% over
* 2014 - 15% under (and negative overall)
* 2015 - 30% over
* 2016 - 10% over
* 2017 - About even
</code></pre>
One exceptionally strong year, and pretty uneven otherwise. Hardly proof that these biology-derived algorithms are the secret to market-beating returns.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexandercrohde</author><text>I agree, I don&#x27;t believe this would pass a test for statistical significance (of outperforming the market indices).<p>Unless there is a way to break this data down much more finely (by 6-day window, by individual asset) in which case it&#x27;s possible there&#x27;s a high p-value but low-power effect. Even so, if there are more than 100 experimental firms, a single one with p-value .01 isn&#x27;t evidence enough to jumping to big conclusions.</text></comment> |
26,410,753 | 26,409,271 | 1 | 2 | 26,409,174 | train | <story><title>Delft café premieres with EEMCS blockchain euro</title><url>https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/delft-cafe-premieres-eemcs-blockchain-euro</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>synctext</author><text>Responsible Professor here from Delft University, AMA.<p>Note this is not a normal blockchain: its an offline-first blockchain [1]. Open source [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-pouwelse-trustchain-01.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-pouwelse-trustchain-01.html</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tribler&#x2F;trustchain-superapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tribler&#x2F;trustchain-superapp</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sigio</author><text>Please... don&#x27;t name your protocol IPv[0-9] when it&#x27;s not a RFC-based IP protocol.</text></comment> | <story><title>Delft café premieres with EEMCS blockchain euro</title><url>https://www.delta.tudelft.nl/article/delft-cafe-premieres-eemcs-blockchain-euro</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>synctext</author><text>Responsible Professor here from Delft University, AMA.<p>Note this is not a normal blockchain: its an offline-first blockchain [1]. Open source [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-pouwelse-trustchain-01.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-pouwelse-trustchain-01.html</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tribler&#x2F;trustchain-superapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Tribler&#x2F;trustchain-superapp</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elcomet</author><text>Could you give a high-level explanation of what&#x27;s an offline-first blockchain here, and what&#x27;s the difference between TrustChain and Bitcoin ? The draft seems very low-level and complex to read, and the article contains very few technical information.</text></comment> |
15,942,744 | 15,942,856 | 1 | 2 | 15,940,674 | train | <story><title>The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>volgo</author><text>IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program:<p>&quot;The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.&quot;<p>So... Harry Reid&#x27;s friend is absolutely convinced there are aliens, gets Reid to convince congress to fund the program, and all the money goes back to his own company? Not fishy at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frankquist</author><text>Say that you are interested in investigating puzzling phenomena, and you have the money. What more logical step is there than to approach your senate majority leader friend?<p>Such oddball connections are probably the only the way such a program would ever get funded.<p>Edit: well, obviously he didn&#x27;t have the money. Misspoke. I meant the means (a company with the required infrastructure).</text></comment> | <story><title>The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>volgo</author><text>IMO, the fishy part of the article is the cronyism involved in this program:<p>&quot;The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.&quot;<p>So... Harry Reid&#x27;s friend is absolutely convinced there are aliens, gets Reid to convince congress to fund the program, and all the money goes back to his own company? Not fishy at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Teever</author><text>Robert Bigelow has been interested in aliens and UFOs for most of his life and has essentially dedicated his life to amassing the resources to start an aeronautical company.<p>Hiring him to do this is like hiring Robert Ballard to find the Titanic.</text></comment> |
22,947,173 | 22,946,079 | 1 | 3 | 22,944,490 | train | <story><title>Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-facebook-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-agreed-to-censor-posts-after-vietnam-slowed-traffic-sources-idUSKCN2232JX</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JCharante</author><text>Facebook is truly huge. Several expats I know that had previously quit Facebook have had to unquit because it&#x27;s so ingrained in society. Checking menus and hours (Facebook pages will be more up to date than google maps entries), messaging to order delivery, live streams for online shopping, finding an apartment, buying motorbikes...<p>Relating to your small businesses, a lot of them will have their own shippers to save on having to pay the cut from a food delivery app. When I needed a reusable mask after the ones I had were running out at the end of my quarantine, I just messaged a guy who had his online business and an hour later my shipment had arrived (he used an inter-city courier, but you get the point). Somehow being in a city of 8 million makes you feel in more of a community than being in a city of 150k.<p>I&#x27;ve had a bakery message me to ask if I was in the mood for ordering cupcakes when they still had extra at the end of the day (and I was). A few weeks after a new japanese ramen restaurant told me they only offered take out, they messaged me to tell me that they now offered delivery. It&#x27;s an amazing channel for businesses to reach their customers.<p>It&#x27;s also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there&#x27;s no fake news to worry about. (and by fake news I mean sensationalist stuff, not anything serious relating to politics. I obviously understand the shortcomings with such a system when it relates to criticism of the government)<p>It&#x27;s also really nice because you don&#x27;t have pseudo-science crap on your feed (since sharing that stuff is a fineable offense). Although you still have to watch out for the moms in their Zalo groupchats.</text></item><item><author>blago</author><text>Vietnam has a fairly large population and FB is the platform of choice for communication and to a large degree shopping. Small businesses love it.<p>For anecdotal evidence, I have been ordering food on FB every day for the last month. My wife is watching a life-streaming apparel sale as we speak.</text></item><item><author>piokoch</author><text>Kind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a &quot;superpower&quot; country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue.<p>FB might have just opened Pandora&#x27;s box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meowface</author><text>I&#x27;m very skeptical of any state that outlaws what they label as pseudoscience or fake news. Odds are that means they&#x27;re banning some of what I would consider pseudoscience and fake news but sometimes permitting or mandating what I would consider to be other kinds.<p>For example, imagine the US government as it exists today banning everything they call pseudoscience or fake news. Even if you say it&#x27;s just &quot;sensationalist stuff&quot; and not political things, I wouldn&#x27;t trust them to make either distinction.<p>Hopefully you see that &quot;because since all news sources are government approved then there&#x27;s no fake news to worry about&quot; is essentially a verbatim line out of any dystopian novel. And with the added context of this article saying the state is refusing to allow Facebook to operate unless they censor posts that criticize the state, the allusion isn&#x27;t even necessary, since the dystopian aspect is already so incredibly blatant.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vietnam-facebook-exclusive/exclusive-facebook-agreed-to-censor-posts-after-vietnam-slowed-traffic-sources-idUSKCN2232JX</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JCharante</author><text>Facebook is truly huge. Several expats I know that had previously quit Facebook have had to unquit because it&#x27;s so ingrained in society. Checking menus and hours (Facebook pages will be more up to date than google maps entries), messaging to order delivery, live streams for online shopping, finding an apartment, buying motorbikes...<p>Relating to your small businesses, a lot of them will have their own shippers to save on having to pay the cut from a food delivery app. When I needed a reusable mask after the ones I had were running out at the end of my quarantine, I just messaged a guy who had his online business and an hour later my shipment had arrived (he used an inter-city courier, but you get the point). Somehow being in a city of 8 million makes you feel in more of a community than being in a city of 150k.<p>I&#x27;ve had a bakery message me to ask if I was in the mood for ordering cupcakes when they still had extra at the end of the day (and I was). A few weeks after a new japanese ramen restaurant told me they only offered take out, they messaged me to tell me that they now offered delivery. It&#x27;s an amazing channel for businesses to reach their customers.<p>It&#x27;s also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there&#x27;s no fake news to worry about. (and by fake news I mean sensationalist stuff, not anything serious relating to politics. I obviously understand the shortcomings with such a system when it relates to criticism of the government)<p>It&#x27;s also really nice because you don&#x27;t have pseudo-science crap on your feed (since sharing that stuff is a fineable offense). Although you still have to watch out for the moms in their Zalo groupchats.</text></item><item><author>blago</author><text>Vietnam has a fairly large population and FB is the platform of choice for communication and to a large degree shopping. Small businesses love it.<p>For anecdotal evidence, I have been ordering food on FB every day for the last month. My wife is watching a life-streaming apparel sale as we speak.</text></item><item><author>piokoch</author><text>Kind of surprising. I can somehow understand that FB bends under pressure from Chinese government - huge population of a &quot;superpower&quot; country. But Vietnam? It looks as if FB was forced to squeeze every cent of their revenue.<p>FB might have just opened Pandora&#x27;s box with all kind of restriction requests coming from all over the World.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zentiggr</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there&#x27;s no fake news to worry about. (and by fake news I mean sensationalist stuff, not anything serious relating to politics. I obviously understand the shortcomings with such a system when it relates to criticism of the government)<p>It&#x27;s also really nice because you don&#x27;t have pseudo-science crap on your feed (since sharing that stuff is a fineable offense).<p>Every single word of that reads like exactly the reasons any media company that wants to maintain their own reputation should pull out of Vietnam and anywhere else that they have to compromise their content.<p>And post a list of countries that have made requests to remove any content specific to that country.</text></comment> |
34,208,598 | 34,191,548 | 1 | 3 | 34,191,286 | train | <story><title>Claude Shannon’s research laid foundations for modern communications (2020)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bee_rider</author><text>Shannon’s work has already produced a whole lot of course, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near seeing the full outcome of his contributions yet.<p>Currently our computers operate by filling the transistors with charge and&#x2F;or dumping it to ground. Who even cares about in information-theoretic efficiency in that case? The cost of the actual work done is dwarfed by the ancillary cost of running the machine.<p>If we ever move on to something less brute-force, like reversible quantum cellular automata, I think we’ll see him as an invaluable part in the chain of formalizing what information and computation mean physically.<p>Kelvin&#x2F;Maxwell -&gt; Shannon -&gt; Landauer -&gt; maybe Bennett</text></comment> | <story><title>Claude Shannon’s research laid foundations for modern communications (2020)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rogerkirkness</author><text>Certainly it seems like Shannon is turning out to be the lindy Nicola Tesla equivalently impactful person but in the realm of bits.</text></comment> |
31,796,357 | 31,793,813 | 1 | 2 | 31,791,124 | train | <story><title>Japan's NTT to begin remote work as norm for 30k employees</title><url>https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/3baf3aae9f2f-japans-ntt-to-begin-remote-work-as-norm-for-30000-employees-in-july.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oblio</author><text>I don&#x27;t know about NTT, but salaries for software devs are really low in general. Think €30-40k per year. How FAANG are not leveraging such a poorly paid workforce in countries with a great climate, developed, safe, etc, I will never know.</text></item><item><author>DeathArrow</author><text>How bad is pretty bad?</text></item><item><author>permalac</author><text>But if you work for them in Barcelona the salary is still pretty bad.</text></item><item><author>drnonsense42</author><text>If you’re doing a lot of extra hours, not having to commute and getting some peace makes a huge difference in making it sustainable.</text></item><item><author>mkl95</author><text>In Southern Europe NTT is mostly a bodyshop. Their target demographic is junior engineers willing to do unpaid overtime for abysmal pay. Pretty sure remote work doesn&#x27;t make a big difference.</text></item><item><author>samfisher83</author><text>Ntt has 320k employees. I wonder what the other 290 will think?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DeathArrow</author><text>That&#x27;s low.<p>In Romania FAANGs aren&#x27;t paying better salaries than market average, so the only incentive to work for a FAANG is to have it on your CV, stay 2 years and find better employment.<p>FAANGs get it really cheap here as they pay 10x lower wages than in the US.</text></comment> | <story><title>Japan's NTT to begin remote work as norm for 30k employees</title><url>https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/3baf3aae9f2f-japans-ntt-to-begin-remote-work-as-norm-for-30000-employees-in-july.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oblio</author><text>I don&#x27;t know about NTT, but salaries for software devs are really low in general. Think €30-40k per year. How FAANG are not leveraging such a poorly paid workforce in countries with a great climate, developed, safe, etc, I will never know.</text></item><item><author>DeathArrow</author><text>How bad is pretty bad?</text></item><item><author>permalac</author><text>But if you work for them in Barcelona the salary is still pretty bad.</text></item><item><author>drnonsense42</author><text>If you’re doing a lot of extra hours, not having to commute and getting some peace makes a huge difference in making it sustainable.</text></item><item><author>mkl95</author><text>In Southern Europe NTT is mostly a bodyshop. Their target demographic is junior engineers willing to do unpaid overtime for abysmal pay. Pretty sure remote work doesn&#x27;t make a big difference.</text></item><item><author>samfisher83</author><text>Ntt has 320k employees. I wonder what the other 290 will think?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>I think the sort of person FAANG wants to hire, knows how much they can get from moving and has either already relocated or found remote work.</text></comment> |
3,813,370 | 3,812,364 | 1 | 3 | 3,811,332 | train | <story><title>Notch live coding 0x10c</title><url>http://www.twitch.tv/notch?0x10c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>degenerate</author><text>If you want non-stop energetic, yet "smooth" techno with some soothing vocals, I recommend you check into trance. Specifically, "A State of Trance". There was a 6-city, 6 week tour that just ended last weekend. All of the music is playable here:
<a href="http://soundcloud.com/edmtunestv" rel="nofollow">http://soundcloud.com/edmtunestv</a>
And downloadable here:
<a href="http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=316887" rel="nofollow">http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=316...</a><p>(I code to this music EVERY day)</text></item><item><author>MiguelHudnandez</author><text>The music reminds me of a small group of coders I was inspired by at my first startup. Back then I was only doing tech support and light front-end work, but every day it was three programmers and I getting stuff done to music like this. Ever since then, this kind of music is a great booster for me, even though I get embarrassed if someone comes into my office while it's playing...<p>The only thing I try for nowadays is to find an energetic, repetitive mix with no vocals.</text></item><item><author>rauljara</author><text>I'm actually being really productive having the stream on in the background. I'm not looking at him code, but hearing his techno going is reminding me that someone somewhere is getting a ton of shit done, and it's shaming me into working hard.<p>And I don't even like techno.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bprater</author><text>I also recommend the podcast, "Trance Around the World" -- two hours of awesome trance. I program with it on, I go to sleep with it playing, we just had a party with it playing in the background.<p>(Also, if you are a Spotify user, try the Radio/Trance mix.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Notch live coding 0x10c</title><url>http://www.twitch.tv/notch?0x10c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>degenerate</author><text>If you want non-stop energetic, yet "smooth" techno with some soothing vocals, I recommend you check into trance. Specifically, "A State of Trance". There was a 6-city, 6 week tour that just ended last weekend. All of the music is playable here:
<a href="http://soundcloud.com/edmtunestv" rel="nofollow">http://soundcloud.com/edmtunestv</a>
And downloadable here:
<a href="http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=316887" rel="nofollow">http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=316...</a><p>(I code to this music EVERY day)</text></item><item><author>MiguelHudnandez</author><text>The music reminds me of a small group of coders I was inspired by at my first startup. Back then I was only doing tech support and light front-end work, but every day it was three programmers and I getting stuff done to music like this. Ever since then, this kind of music is a great booster for me, even though I get embarrassed if someone comes into my office while it's playing...<p>The only thing I try for nowadays is to find an energetic, repetitive mix with no vocals.</text></item><item><author>rauljara</author><text>I'm actually being really productive having the stream on in the background. I'm not looking at him code, but hearing his techno going is reminding me that someone somewhere is getting a ton of shit done, and it's shaming me into working hard.<p>And I don't even like techno.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danneu</author><text>Another smooth genre is "deep house", also found in genres like slowmo, nu disco. An example: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tD74t6K7mI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tD74t6K7mI</a></text></comment> |
34,033,750 | 34,033,744 | 1 | 2 | 34,033,389 | train | <story><title>The human cost of neurotechnology failure</title><url>https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drodgers</author><text>I really like the proposal from John Scalzi&#x27;s &#x27;Lock In&#x27; series where companies that produce neural implants have to establish a trust or insurance contract with enough assets to pay for the maintenance of any implants for the lifetime of the recipients, regardless of what happens to the company.<p>Governments could provide generous subsidies, tax breaks etc. to such funds to reduce the barrier for entry for companies.<p>Without some solution like this, it&#x27;s hard to imagine any non-essential neural implants really taking off: who would ever buy a neural lace from a startup — or even an established company like Google who might just lose interest — if there was no guarentee of patches and maintenance?</text></comment> | <story><title>The human cost of neurotechnology failure</title><url>https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_fat_santa</author><text>There should be something similar to the FDIC for medical device manufacturers. If you&#x27;re a customer of a bank and the bank goes under, the FDIC will step in to ensure continuity of operations and youre eventually taken up by another bank that buys the assets.<p>For a company that makes medical devices, part of the bankrupcy process should be a 3rd party company coming in and taking over support and maintenance of the devices. Although this would be very challenging, one of the things that makes it possible with banks is at a high level,the business is the same. With medical devices it would be much much more difficult to find a suitable company to come in and take over operations.<p>At the very least this story is why we need Right to Repair laws. If not having another company step in to takeover support, at least make the device such that it can be repaired by an independent party</text></comment> |
12,083,028 | 12,082,809 | 1 | 2 | 12,080,871 | train | <story><title>C++14 for the Commodore 64 [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLv_INgaLq8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>white-flame</author><text>Static optimization to inlined code that ONLY handles immediate numbers and addresses is fine, and interesting to see the full pipeline working. But that possibility is there really for any language and any asm platform. I remember seeing Forth compile down to 6502 or other asm code, where it compiled down to the asm instructions a human would write for the same task, with basically zero language overhead.<p>HOWEVER, that was because the code written only did things similar to assembly instructions, similar to this example.<p>The biggest problem with compiling C family languages to 6502 is the stack. They generally assume something like a local stack frame for variables and parameters, and there&#x27;s no way to directly express that style of programming at the 6502 instruction level. Note that there were no local variables in these examples, much less any actual function calls. Certainly the ABI used by C would not be machine-code-translatable from x86 to 6502; there would be an ABI written for 6502 and higher level targeting could work.<p>Instead of generating &amp; trying to translate x86 assembly code, compiling C++14 down to plain C and using a 6502 compiler like cc65 could work significantly better for more idiomatic C++.<p>While it&#x27;s an interesting novelty, why write 50+ lines of C++ code when writing 7 lines of commented, well-understood assembly instructions suffice? Add some variables and macros to take care of naming the various bits &amp; locations, or target some codegen directly to 6502 if we&#x27;re talking about programming &quot;in the large&quot; relatively speaking. Sure, you don&#x27;t want to touch x64 code for human writing in the general case, but 6502 was designed with hand coding in mind.</text></comment> | <story><title>C++14 for the Commodore 64 [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLv_INgaLq8</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>richard_todd</author><text>My eyes couldn&#x27;t look away from the extra &quot;= 0x01&quot; at the top; it was driving me nuts. Glad he noticed it before the end of the video.<p>The middle part got me thinking: how helpful is it really, to write 50+ lines of high-level code, just to get 8 assembly instructions? I get that it&#x27;s more readable and whatever, but seriously, I might rather write the 8 assembly lines and be done with it. Maybe I&#x27;ve spent too much time on comp.lang.forth lately :)</text></comment> |
3,084,143 | 3,082,811 | 1 | 2 | 3,082,322 | train | <story><title>With Time Running Short, Jobs Managed His Farewells</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/with-time-running-short-steve-jobs-managed-his-farewells.html?pagewanted=all</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eob</author><text>This is a sweet story, but I just wanted to point out that this is pretty common for someone with terminal cancer. Jobs was a private, controlling man, for sure, but I feel like this reporter is unfairly stretching the narrative to fit this caricature.<p>The endless stream of visitors to the house can be absolutely exhausting for a person who already only has enough energy to stay awake and active a few hours each day. A big part of the family's responsibility, and burden, is prioritizing and intercepting visitors.<p>I'm sure many of you here on this board have had the misfortune to experience this yourself, so you know what I'm talking about.<p>It's not a big deal; it was a good article. But for once, Jobs' behavior didn't stem from being some larger than life cartoon figure of a business-genius-prophet-dictator.. he was just really sick.</text></comment> | <story><title>With Time Running Short, Jobs Managed His Farewells</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/with-time-running-short-steve-jobs-managed-his-farewells.html?pagewanted=all</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jballanc</author><text>Every summer Steve had a talk with the Apple interns. In 2008, I was there (at what, as far as I know, would end up being his last intern talk). One question came from the audience: "What is your dream?"<p>After a beat, his dead-pan response: "To not be asked questions like that."</text></comment> |
30,238,602 | 30,238,683 | 1 | 2 | 30,238,036 | train | <story><title>“How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp” by Gulbahar Haitiwaji</title><url>https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-i-survived-a-chinese-reeducation-camp-by-gulbahar-haitiwaji-review-the-true-story-of-the-uighur-tragedy-xbzhq9b2w</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WaitWaitWha</author><text>&gt; &#x27;Born in 1966 in Ghulja in the Xinjiang region, Gulbahar Haitiwaji was an executive in the Chinese oil industry before leaving for France in 2006 with her husband and children, who obtained the status of political refugees. In <i>2017</i> she was summoned in China for an administrative issue. Once there, she was arrested and spent more than two years in a re-education camp. Thanks to the efforts of her family and the French foreign ministry she was freed and was able to return to France where she currently resides.&#x27;<p>This is not &#x27;long long time ago&#x27;, this is &#x27;yesterday&#x27;.</text></comment> | <story><title>“How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp” by Gulbahar Haitiwaji</title><url>https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-i-survived-a-chinese-reeducation-camp-by-gulbahar-haitiwaji-review-the-true-story-of-the-uighur-tragedy-xbzhq9b2w</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cyb_</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;1la1W" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;1la1W</a></text></comment> |
40,488,984 | 40,488,874 | 1 | 2 | 40,480,011 | train | <story><title>Low-latency scripting for game engines</title><url>https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/an-introduction-to-low-latency-scripting-with-libriscv-ad0619edab40</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dazzawazza</author><text>This is seriously cool but I really think we are losing our way in game development.<p>We used to create DSLs to make scripting of games simpler and less error prone... so that coders&#x2F;designers could write Scripts&#x2F;AI in a language better suited to the problems they face. It was sort of a side issue that is was a sandbox although that was really useful for lots of reasons.<p>Now we seem to be creating more and more complex toolchains while complaining that game development is getting more and more expensive. We&#x27;re not solving the correct problems at all.<p>Oh well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Low-latency scripting for game engines</title><url>https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/an-introduction-to-low-latency-scripting-with-libriscv-ad0619edab40</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gudzpoz</author><text>&gt; ... but Lua still creates issues now and then. Like if you forget return, the return value is that of the last expression.<p>Is this true? Or was it true for some Lua 2.X versions? Because it does not seem to be the case for Lua 3.0 and on: [1]<p>&gt; If control reaches the end of a function without a return instruction, then the function returns with no results.<p>As to the idea of using an emulator for scripting, it seems a bit similar to approaches using WebAssembly. But looking into the benchmarks [2] provided by libriscv, it is quite interesting to see it outperforms luajit and wasm3 (in its &quot;hand-picked&quot; tests, at the very least).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lua.org&#x2F;manual&#x2F;3.0&#x2F;manual.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lua.org&#x2F;manual&#x2F;3.0&#x2F;manual.html</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fwsGonzo&#x2F;libriscv?tab=readme-ov-file#benchmarks">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fwsGonzo&#x2F;libriscv?tab=readme-ov-file#benc...</a></text></comment> |
40,637,421 | 40,637,116 | 1 | 3 | 40,635,834 | train | <story><title>Google has been blocking Invidious with error "This helps protect our community"</title><url>https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>verdverm</author><text>Paying for YT premium is even better. No ads and you support the content creators</text></item><item><author>dsalfdslfdsa</author><text>&gt;Maybe they should focus on improving their frontend<p>They have. Do you know how many ads they can stuff into people&#x27;s faces now?<p>Youtube is unbearable without ablock. If there are people who are able to watch it like that, then it shows just how long you can boil the proverbial frog.</text></item><item><author>robotnikman</author><text>I use individious because the current youtube frontend is bloated and slow on firefox. Maybe they should focus on improving their frontend instead of blocking frontends that other people prefer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Marsymars</author><text>YT premium unfortunately scales very poorly for low usage. I probably average about one youtube video watched per month, so while I&#x27;m not opposed to paying <i>something</i>, I am opposed to watching any ads, and I&#x27;m not going to pay $13&#x2F;video.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google has been blocking Invidious with error "This helps protect our community"</title><url>https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>verdverm</author><text>Paying for YT premium is even better. No ads and you support the content creators</text></item><item><author>dsalfdslfdsa</author><text>&gt;Maybe they should focus on improving their frontend<p>They have. Do you know how many ads they can stuff into people&#x27;s faces now?<p>Youtube is unbearable without ablock. If there are people who are able to watch it like that, then it shows just how long you can boil the proverbial frog.</text></item><item><author>robotnikman</author><text>I use individious because the current youtube frontend is bloated and slow on firefox. Maybe they should focus on improving their frontend instead of blocking frontends that other people prefer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shepherdjerred</author><text>I used YT premium until I realized I was still getting ads from the videos themselves.</text></comment> |
20,100,365 | 20,100,354 | 1 | 3 | 20,096,445 | train | <story><title>FBI alleges that DC Solar Scammed Berkshire Hathaway for Millions</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/the-couple-who-feds-say-scammed-buffett-s-berkshire-hathaway</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brookside</author><text>Nascar, to me, is a celebration of pointless CO2 emissions.<p>It is literally people driving around in a circle in last-century technology, mainly as an advertising platform for selling inefficient non-race vehicles.<p>We can do better in 2019, and I&#x27;d personally be ok if the whole sport shuttered, not just one team.</text></item><item><author>themodelplumber</author><text>Sad. Can the HN community sponsor a car. Crazy idea maybe but we are not known for messing around.</text></item><item><author>joncrane</author><text>&quot;Funny&quot; story: DC Solar was a big sponsor of NASCAR in multiple series.<p>Ross Chastain, an amazing driver who was a watermelon farmer, was finally getting his big break and going to a very good car with full season sponsorship from DC Solar. (Most drivers in order to succeed need some kind of sponsorship connection and this was one of those amazing talents with few connections guys so fans were super excited).<p>Literally within a few weeks of the announcement of sponsorship came the news that DC Solar had been raided by the FBI and the sponsorship was off.<p>Ross Chastain is back running subpar equipment sponsored by his family&#x27;s watermelon farm business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clouddrover</author><text>&gt; <i>driving around in a circle in last-century technology</i><p>As a criticism I think this lacks perspective. Presumably you want them to be driving electric cars in a circle. Electric cars are 19th century technology:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;now&#x2F;shows&#x2F;223&#x2F;electric-car-timeline.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;now&#x2F;shows&#x2F;223&#x2F;electric-car-timeline.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_the_electric_vehicle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_the_electric_vehicl...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019-05-02&#x2F;the-history-birth-death-resurrection-of-the-electric-car&#x2F;11053928" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2019-05-02&#x2F;the-history-birth-dea...</a><p>Formula E is good. It&#x27;s improving year by year and the Gen2 car is a clear improvement over the Gen1 car. You can watch past races on their YouTube channel:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;FIAFormulaE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;FIAFormulaE</a><p>But let&#x27;s not kid ourselves. Formula E is not yet at the level of Formula 1.</text></comment> | <story><title>FBI alleges that DC Solar Scammed Berkshire Hathaway for Millions</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/the-couple-who-feds-say-scammed-buffett-s-berkshire-hathaway</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brookside</author><text>Nascar, to me, is a celebration of pointless CO2 emissions.<p>It is literally people driving around in a circle in last-century technology, mainly as an advertising platform for selling inefficient non-race vehicles.<p>We can do better in 2019, and I&#x27;d personally be ok if the whole sport shuttered, not just one team.</text></item><item><author>themodelplumber</author><text>Sad. Can the HN community sponsor a car. Crazy idea maybe but we are not known for messing around.</text></item><item><author>joncrane</author><text>&quot;Funny&quot; story: DC Solar was a big sponsor of NASCAR in multiple series.<p>Ross Chastain, an amazing driver who was a watermelon farmer, was finally getting his big break and going to a very good car with full season sponsorship from DC Solar. (Most drivers in order to succeed need some kind of sponsorship connection and this was one of those amazing talents with few connections guys so fans were super excited).<p>Literally within a few weeks of the announcement of sponsorship came the news that DC Solar had been raided by the FBI and the sponsorship was off.<p>Ross Chastain is back running subpar equipment sponsored by his family&#x27;s watermelon farm business.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucasmullens</author><text>The entertainment provided per amount of CO2 is probably better than lots of other forms of entertainment, since there&#x27;s thousands watching only dozens of cars. Like I&#x27;m sure skydiving or going on a cruise is worse for the environment per person.</text></comment> |
28,346,780 | 28,346,500 | 1 | 2 | 28,345,430 | train | <story><title>How the pandemic has affected people’s perspective on travelling to work</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/28/seven-uk-workers-talk-about-travelling-work-commute-covid-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nextlevelwizard</author><text>&gt; I also *have* to cycle through often horrible weather(...)<p>Except you do not, do you? If the weather is horrible more often than not and you still choose to bicycle then that is on you. Same goes for people who complain that their commute takes upto 2 hours. That is&#x2F;was a choice you made when you chose your living arrangement and employer.<p>I know I get downvoted for this opinion since it goes against majority of HN, but commute and office work are both really nice and I miss them. I hope come next month our office opens up and I can start going to work again. But my situation is way different. I&#x27;ve purposely chosen both my employer and my living situation to suite me. I have 15-25 minute drive to office. My gym is on the way and there is several choices of grocery stores, so I can get additional benefit for my commute. On top of that the 20 minutes of driving back home is very nice book end to day of working and I can leave the office completely behind me and just have a nice drive and listen some music. In same toon in the morning I can hit the gym and then have a nice drive to office and start focusing on the work immediately.<p>It is fine if you don&#x27;t like your commute or your office, but don&#x27;t take it personally when someone says that they like it.</text></item><item><author>BoxOfRain</author><text>I&#x27;m completely different, I despise my commute because it&#x27;s time that doesn&#x27;t truly belong to me and I&#x27;m not being paid for. It&#x27;s getting up earlier and arriving home later for the exclusive purpose of mindless presenteeism, time that belongs to my boss rather than to me because I certainly wouldn&#x27;t be doing it out of choice. I also have to cycle through often horrible weather around drivers who I can only presume have WW2 fighter style marks for how may cyclists they&#x27;ve managed to run off the road.<p>My next job will be exclusively remote, and I&#x27;ll be much better off for it. I don&#x27;t mind what other people choose to do, as long as I&#x27;m not forced to participate in the return to the office.</text></item><item><author>brtkdotse</author><text>&gt; Christina Cage, a 38-year-old chartered accountant in Edinburgh, did not appreciate how important her commute was until she stopped doing it. “I came to realise that my commute was a time where I could transition from being a mum to becoming a colleague with a bit of space in between to myself,” says Cage, who has two young children. “Overnight it became a threshold of a door that didn’t close.”<p>While I can’t say I’d like to pay the price of 2x50 minutes each day, I too miss that piece of time that was truly mine and mine alone. I used it to read, do a mediation or just space out and let my mind wander.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BoxOfRain</author><text>For the record, I don&#x27;t really choose to cycle. Public transport is absolutely dreadful in much of the UK outside of London (I&#x27;m not exaggerating when I say it&#x27;s an hour and a half to go six miles on a bus that often is 30-40 minutes late or doesn&#x27;t turn up at all) and I don&#x27;t have a driver&#x27;s licence for medical reasons. These medical issues are now controlled, but the post-lockdown backlog for driving tests is insane so that&#x27;s not an immediate option for me. At any rate it&#x27;s wrong from a disability rights point of view to assume that driving is an option for everyone.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the pandemic has affected people’s perspective on travelling to work</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/28/seven-uk-workers-talk-about-travelling-work-commute-covid-pandemic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nextlevelwizard</author><text>&gt; I also *have* to cycle through often horrible weather(...)<p>Except you do not, do you? If the weather is horrible more often than not and you still choose to bicycle then that is on you. Same goes for people who complain that their commute takes upto 2 hours. That is&#x2F;was a choice you made when you chose your living arrangement and employer.<p>I know I get downvoted for this opinion since it goes against majority of HN, but commute and office work are both really nice and I miss them. I hope come next month our office opens up and I can start going to work again. But my situation is way different. I&#x27;ve purposely chosen both my employer and my living situation to suite me. I have 15-25 minute drive to office. My gym is on the way and there is several choices of grocery stores, so I can get additional benefit for my commute. On top of that the 20 minutes of driving back home is very nice book end to day of working and I can leave the office completely behind me and just have a nice drive and listen some music. In same toon in the morning I can hit the gym and then have a nice drive to office and start focusing on the work immediately.<p>It is fine if you don&#x27;t like your commute or your office, but don&#x27;t take it personally when someone says that they like it.</text></item><item><author>BoxOfRain</author><text>I&#x27;m completely different, I despise my commute because it&#x27;s time that doesn&#x27;t truly belong to me and I&#x27;m not being paid for. It&#x27;s getting up earlier and arriving home later for the exclusive purpose of mindless presenteeism, time that belongs to my boss rather than to me because I certainly wouldn&#x27;t be doing it out of choice. I also have to cycle through often horrible weather around drivers who I can only presume have WW2 fighter style marks for how may cyclists they&#x27;ve managed to run off the road.<p>My next job will be exclusively remote, and I&#x27;ll be much better off for it. I don&#x27;t mind what other people choose to do, as long as I&#x27;m not forced to participate in the return to the office.</text></item><item><author>brtkdotse</author><text>&gt; Christina Cage, a 38-year-old chartered accountant in Edinburgh, did not appreciate how important her commute was until she stopped doing it. “I came to realise that my commute was a time where I could transition from being a mum to becoming a colleague with a bit of space in between to myself,” says Cage, who has two young children. “Overnight it became a threshold of a door that didn’t close.”<p>While I can’t say I’d like to pay the price of 2x50 minutes each day, I too miss that piece of time that was truly mine and mine alone. I used it to read, do a mediation or just space out and let my mind wander.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;ve purposely chosen both my employer and my living situation to suite me.<p>You&#x27;re very fortunate to have had both the opportunity and ability to do this. Many people are not.<p>HN users with their top-of-market salaries and offices in downtown centers tend to forget this.</text></comment> |
13,895,917 | 13,894,887 | 1 | 2 | 13,891,756 | train | <story><title>Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflows</title><url>https://www.netlifycms.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bradgessler</author><text>This will sound crazy, but I recently deployed a content management workflow for a rails app that mounts a WebDAV drive inside of a staging rails application that&#x27;s running <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitepress.cc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitepress.cc&#x2F;</a> (think Middleman in Rails, without all the dependencies)<p>If the marketing team wants to edit something, they mount the content drive, make changes using their text editor of choice, and are able to preview when they hit Save.<p>After they make a bunch of changes and add whatever media an engineer copies the changes off of the drive into a commit and deploys to production.<p>So far it&#x27;s been working pretty well. The marketing and CS team are all able to edit markdown copy and run it easier through their content editing processes since it&#x27;s just files. They don&#x27;t need to learn or care about git. Designers can throw images in the volume without thinking too much about it.<p>Engineering is happy because they control their git history and commits. When it&#x27;s time to optimize PNGs, compress assets, etc. the engineer can deal with and deploy to product with confidence.<p>We also run rspecs against every single page of content to enforce SEO, branding, etc.<p>Happy to answer questions or write something more detailed about it if others are interested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chocolatebunny</author><text>I setup winscp to automatically sync a directory from a coworkers laptop to a webserver so he can edit his html documents in Microsoft Frontpage locally and have it sync with the remote server.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflows</title><url>https://www.netlifycms.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bradgessler</author><text>This will sound crazy, but I recently deployed a content management workflow for a rails app that mounts a WebDAV drive inside of a staging rails application that&#x27;s running <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitepress.cc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sitepress.cc&#x2F;</a> (think Middleman in Rails, without all the dependencies)<p>If the marketing team wants to edit something, they mount the content drive, make changes using their text editor of choice, and are able to preview when they hit Save.<p>After they make a bunch of changes and add whatever media an engineer copies the changes off of the drive into a commit and deploys to production.<p>So far it&#x27;s been working pretty well. The marketing and CS team are all able to edit markdown copy and run it easier through their content editing processes since it&#x27;s just files. They don&#x27;t need to learn or care about git. Designers can throw images in the volume without thinking too much about it.<p>Engineering is happy because they control their git history and commits. When it&#x27;s time to optimize PNGs, compress assets, etc. the engineer can deal with and deploy to product with confidence.<p>We also run rspecs against every single page of content to enforce SEO, branding, etc.<p>Happy to answer questions or write something more detailed about it if others are interested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cobookman</author><text>I&#x27;ve done something similar by grabbing a google doc by url, scraping its html markup, and generating a site from it.<p>Some people have even done a google doc markup like language.</text></comment> |
22,603,471 | 22,600,885 | 1 | 3 | 22,597,446 | train | <story><title>Global oil use heads for steepest annual contraction</title><url>https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/3/15/global-oil-use-heads-for-steepest-annual-contraction-in-history</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannyw</author><text>The aviation sector currently accounts for about 2% of global emissions.<p>Is the ability to travel, including all the business, leisure, and cultural exchange benefits worth less than 2% of our carbon footprint?</text></item><item><author>miketery</author><text>Being a part of society implies a social contract and some social control, it’s not black and white. Right now environmental impacts are not priced into many of our products (e.g. meat) and services (e.g. travel).</text></item><item><author>creato</author><text>In the minds of people opposed to controlling CO2 emissions, your comment here justifies all of their worst fears of CO2 emission regulation as a means of social control.</text></item><item><author>hamburga</author><text>The general Western game plan right now seems to be: (1) shut down the whole nonessential part of the economy, (2) buy time to not overwhelm medical systems, (3) gradually turn the economy back on where safe.<p>For part (3) the general idea of &quot;safe&quot; has meant, allow people who are medically low-risk to return to the workplace and retail establishments. But we could see that could be expanded to also factor in carbon impact. In other words, we prioritize turning back on the low-carbon parts of the economy first, and maybe leave some high-carbon parts (international vacations) turned off or reduced for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrpopo</author><text>Air transportation is a major contributor to CO2, if you limit the scope to the people who use it. It is estimated that about 80% of the world&#x27;s adults have never taken a flight, and 94% of the world&#x27;s adults have not taken a flight in over a year.<p>So, the real picture is that this 2.5% of global CO2 emissions are caused by as few as 6% of the population, who also are incidentally the richest and bear a high personal carbon footprint in other domains than transportation.<p>Also please remember that the aviation sector is growing, and therefore its global contribution to GHG emissions will grow as well in the future. Discounting the carbon footprint of the aviation sector based on today&#x27;s numbers is a mistake.<p>If you do not want to impede on your ability to travel, you shouldn&#x27;t object to it for the 94% of the population that want the same thing as you, and when it becomes available to them the aviation sector&#x27;s emissions will increase 15-fold.</text></comment> | <story><title>Global oil use heads for steepest annual contraction</title><url>https://www.worldoil.com/news/2020/3/15/global-oil-use-heads-for-steepest-annual-contraction-in-history</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannyw</author><text>The aviation sector currently accounts for about 2% of global emissions.<p>Is the ability to travel, including all the business, leisure, and cultural exchange benefits worth less than 2% of our carbon footprint?</text></item><item><author>miketery</author><text>Being a part of society implies a social contract and some social control, it’s not black and white. Right now environmental impacts are not priced into many of our products (e.g. meat) and services (e.g. travel).</text></item><item><author>creato</author><text>In the minds of people opposed to controlling CO2 emissions, your comment here justifies all of their worst fears of CO2 emission regulation as a means of social control.</text></item><item><author>hamburga</author><text>The general Western game plan right now seems to be: (1) shut down the whole nonessential part of the economy, (2) buy time to not overwhelm medical systems, (3) gradually turn the economy back on where safe.<p>For part (3) the general idea of &quot;safe&quot; has meant, allow people who are medically low-risk to return to the workplace and retail establishments. But we could see that could be expanded to also factor in carbon impact. In other words, we prioritize turning back on the low-carbon parts of the economy first, and maybe leave some high-carbon parts (international vacations) turned off or reduced for good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sixo</author><text>Is 20% of that worth 80% of the benefit?<p>When costs are not priced in the benefits are weighed against nothing.</text></comment> |
4,257,063 | 4,256,055 | 1 | 2 | 4,255,649 | train | <story><title>The Latest On Intelligence</title><url>http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/05/the-latest-on-intelligence.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>justin_vanw</author><text>"A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed."<p>There is a strong cultural bias among much of the research community to go out of their way to deny any genetic factors in intelligence. Perhaps this is well intentioned, but it is absurd.<p>I have come across very few squirrels that have mastered fire, or could be taught calculus, or even addition. I doubt that this is cultural or due to the squirrels upbringing, diet, social status, or how many books the squirrel has available to it, or the quality of it's teachers, or pathogens. Clearly then, it is possible for genetics to completely dominate other factors in determining intelligence. In the animal kingdom at large heredity/genetics account for basically all of the variation in intelligence.<p>The unanswered question is whether there is enough genetic diversity across the human species to cause intelligence to be significantly hereditable. The fear among scientists that try to keep the lid on this question is that the answer might be yes, and worse that such variations will correlate with geographic or national groupings. This would put a very nasty <i>perceived</i> scientific stamp of approval on racism (even though this would be unjustified), and could over time lead to discrimination and 'scientific racism'.<p>Anyway, in the end science will uncover the truth here, and in the meantime it is probably very prudent to not make any potentially inflammatory statements and to be very cautious about any studies that could fuel hate. I just find it absurd that whenever this kind of question comes up people start denying that there is any hereditary component of intelligence, and that IQ is completely meaningless, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Latest On Intelligence</title><url>http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/05/the-latest-on-intelligence.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kenjackson</author><text>This is an interesting result noted from the paper:
"Even when improvements in IQ produced by the most
effective early childhood interventions fail to persist, there can be very marked effects on academic achievement and life outcomes."<p>As noted by the author, this suggests that IQ only captures a portion of early childhood intervention benefits. And goes counter to those who suggest that early intervention programs serve no purpose if IQ doesn't remain high (IOW, IQ is only a portion of what constitutes success in life).</text></comment> |
11,065,489 | 11,064,798 | 1 | 2 | 11,060,232 | train | <story><title>How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking</title><url>http://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ljoshua</author><text>As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this&#x2F;Forbes approach&#x2F;elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets.<p>I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a <i>physical object</i> (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4&#x2F;mo for digital only feels cheap.<p>I don&#x27;t mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don&#x27;t want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.<p><i>Suggested Solution:</i><p>Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general &quot;content publishers&quot; account with the equivalent of that $3.99&#x2F;mo? When I get to a paywalled&#x2F;ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.<p>Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they&#x27;re already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oneeyedpigeon</author><text>This is exactly what Readability [1] was doing, really well - from a user&#x27;s perspective - but they couldn&#x27;t make the business model work. They got lots of paying readers on-board, but couldn&#x27;t get publishers involved.<p>Maybe they were just s few years too early. As you say, now that publishers are slowly awakening from their slumber, they&#x27;ll be more willing to give it a go.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readability.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.readability.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking</title><url>http://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ljoshua</author><text>As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this&#x2F;Forbes approach&#x2F;elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets.<p>I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a <i>physical object</i> (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4&#x2F;mo for digital only feels cheap.<p>I don&#x27;t mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don&#x27;t want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.<p><i>Suggested Solution:</i><p>Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general &quot;content publishers&quot; account with the equivalent of that $3.99&#x2F;mo? When I get to a paywalled&#x2F;ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.<p>Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they&#x27;re already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dexterdog</author><text>Why wouldn&#x27;t you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription. When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and providers get credited. It&#x27;s really pretty simple and invisible. People get to fund what they actually use. Content creators get paid. Content providers can decide whether to paywall for out-of-network requests if they like. There is a paper trail to deal with copyright violations. I just need a huge pile of money to get people to sell it to some key players.</text></comment> |
31,935,490 | 31,935,744 | 1 | 2 | 31,932,202 | train | <story><title>Why I’m Cryptophobic</title><url>https://www.bvp.com/atlas/why-i-m-cryptophobic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benreesman</author><text>Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long.<p>I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it.<p>You want the other side?</text></item><item><author>dmoy</author><text>You completely ignored what GP said.<p>The <i>floor</i> is different from what people will sell it to you for right now.<p>AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS &#x2F; #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn&#x27;t mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.</text></item><item><author>benreesman</author><text>I’ll sell you that contract up to what I can finance it at.</text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>You&#x27;re right that BTC has a floor because there&#x27;s some economy behind it. I&#x27;d say in the 100USD-1000USD&#x2F;coin range.</text></item><item><author>ntoskrnl</author><text>Who says BTC isn&#x27;t used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they&#x27;re keeping the lights on somehow. It&#x27;s being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It&#x27;s being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There&#x27;s far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold.<p>It all depends where you look. In some niches, BTC is used a lot. In some niches it isn&#x27;t used by anyone (hi HN!) But it&#x27;s a big world out there, and if you look outside your bubble it&#x27;s not hard to find people using it.<p>Re: the last paragraph, BTC did indeed crumple under load for a long time around ~2016, and transaction fees were very high as a result. But lightning network has appeared since then and fees are back down to reasonable levels, well under $1. Those were serious growing pains, but we made it through just fine.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31914284" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31914284</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-russia-currency-donations-transfer-infrastructure-11648065166" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-r...</a></text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>There needs to be some basic economics here..<p>Money has value because of the value of the <i>economic transactions</i> in which its conducted.<p>Government-backed currencies are <i>forced</i> to have value in the sense they <i>force</i> people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades.<p><i>Value</i> is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a &quot;liquifying&quot; of that value, to make it easier to spread around. So that 1hr of my time&#x2F;output can be more easily traded for 1hr of another persons. We are still <i>just trading output</i>.<p>For BTC (or any coin) to have any value, it needs actual economic transactions to be conducted in it. If there arent any, its value is smoke-and-mirrors; its not real. If you can&#x27;t trade the market cap of bitcoin for <i>actual economic output</i>, it isnt actual economic value.<p>Imagine doing that right now. Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>px43</author><text>Shh.. you&#x27;re scaring all the people who think their computer science degree gives them exceptional insight into how money works.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I’m Cryptophobic</title><url>https://www.bvp.com/atlas/why-i-m-cryptophobic</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benreesman</author><text>Anyone can invent quasi-financial terms to make grandiose claims. The beauty of the market is that loudmouths don’t participate in the market for long.<p>I’ll sell an American-style options contract to someone who thinks BTC is going anywhere near there at Black-Scholes -75. And I’ll have no trouble financing it.<p>You want the other side?</text></item><item><author>dmoy</author><text>You completely ignored what GP said.<p>The <i>floor</i> is different from what people will sell it to you for right now.<p>AMZN may have a floor of $ASSETS &#x2F; #SHARES (or something, I just made that up), but that doesn&#x27;t mean anyone will sell it to you for that right now.</text></item><item><author>benreesman</author><text>I’ll sell you that contract up to what I can finance it at.</text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>You&#x27;re right that BTC has a floor because there&#x27;s some economy behind it. I&#x27;d say in the 100USD-1000USD&#x2F;coin range.</text></item><item><author>ntoskrnl</author><text>Who says BTC isn&#x27;t used for payments? Many porn sites ONLY allow you to pay with crypto, including PornHub[1], and they&#x27;re keeping the lights on somehow. It&#x27;s being used by the Ukrainian military to pay their suppliers while the banking system is offline[2]. It&#x27;s being used for remittances. I had to pay my rent with it once. Also VPNs, etc. There&#x27;s far more global economic activity conducted in BTC than in gold.<p>It all depends where you look. In some niches, BTC is used a lot. In some niches it isn&#x27;t used by anyone (hi HN!) But it&#x27;s a big world out there, and if you look outside your bubble it&#x27;s not hard to find people using it.<p>Re: the last paragraph, BTC did indeed crumple under load for a long time around ~2016, and transaction fees were very high as a result. But lightning network has appeared since then and fees are back down to reasonable levels, well under $1. Those were serious growing pains, but we made it through just fine.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31914284" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31914284</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-russia-currency-donations-transfer-infrastructure-11648065166" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-crypto-is-helping-ukraine-r...</a></text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>There needs to be some basic economics here..<p>Money has value because of the value of the <i>economic transactions</i> in which its conducted.<p>Government-backed currencies are <i>forced</i> to have value in the sense they <i>force</i> people to use it for their taxes. The US, additionally, forces the world to use it for oil trades.<p><i>Value</i> is in those economic transactions. A currency is just a &quot;liquifying&quot; of that value, to make it easier to spread around. So that 1hr of my time&#x2F;output can be more easily traded for 1hr of another persons. We are still <i>just trading output</i>.<p>For BTC (or any coin) to have any value, it needs actual economic transactions to be conducted in it. If there arent any, its value is smoke-and-mirrors; its not real. If you can&#x27;t trade the market cap of bitcoin for <i>actual economic output</i>, it isnt actual economic value.<p>Imagine doing that right now. Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattnewton</author><text>Not the person you are responding to, but is there somewhere reputable offering these kinds of contracts to no-name retail investors like myself? I would absolutely load up on something like 12,000 - 15,000 USD bitcoin puts depending on the time decay people are offering and how certain I could be that they would actually let me exercise them, and not freeze trading or even go belly up during the crash. I am somewhat.. skeptical I will be able to exercise them on an primarily crypto exchange like Binance that has blocked trading during freefalls before that is structurally dependent on the price of crypto to some extent.</text></comment> |
22,816,210 | 22,816,041 | 1 | 2 | 22,815,453 | train | <story><title>New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems</title><url>https://landing.google.com/sre/books/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sethvargo</author><text>Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Thank you for all the positive comments about the book. I&#x27;ll be around to answer any questions you might have. As noted, the book can be downloaded for free in digital formats.<p>PDF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SRS.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SRS.pdf</a><p>EPUB: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-epub.epub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-epub.epub</a><p>MOBI: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-mobi.mobi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-mobi.mobi</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ignoramous</author><text>I really liked that there were HTML versions of the previous two books. Any chance that&#x27;ll be up for this one?<p>A bit far-fetched but: Have you (or anyone else at Google) looked at Amazon Builder&#x27;s Library [0] and&#x2F;or various re:Invent &#x2F; re:Inforce talks from 2018&#x2F;19 [1][2] that focus on similar topics as in this book and other SRE books? If so, what are some ideas (infrastructure, blast radius, incident management, resilience, recovery, deployment strategies, crisis management, disaster planning, aftermath etc) you folks think that contrast &#x2F; complement Google&#x27;s approach to building hyperscale systems?<p>Thanks.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21714209" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21714209</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22347694" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22347694</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19291163" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19291163</a></text></comment> | <story><title>New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems</title><url>https://landing.google.com/sre/books/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sethvargo</author><text>Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Thank you for all the positive comments about the book. I&#x27;ll be around to answer any questions you might have. As noted, the book can be downloaded for free in digital formats.<p>PDF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SRS.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;SRS.pdf</a><p>EPUB: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-epub.epub" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-epub.epub</a><p>MOBI: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-mobi.mobi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;landing.google.com&#x2F;sre&#x2F;static&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;srs-mobi.mobi</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>athenot</author><text>No questions, just THANK YOU for this effort and for making it public.<p>We use it here to help expand people&#x27;s minds, shifting their thinking from just writing applications to designing for large-scale HA systems, with all the fun pitfalls that lurk in a cloud.</text></comment> |
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