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12,639,368 | 12,636,958 | 1 | 3 | 12,634,590 | train | <story><title>I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.</title><url>https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>escot</author><text>There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a stable path towards more robust research practices.</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe&#x2F;hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc.<p>I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.<p>Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.<p>Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>existencebox</author><text>I&#x27;d echo sister posts re: how to get involved. My wife is currently in biotech doing mixed research&#x2F;slightly CS-ey work and it constantly boggles my mind how antique many of their methods are, but they barely have money to keep running let alone pay for the expertise and&#x2F;or infrastructure to leverage modern computing. Companies that have more freedom tend to be more restrictive I&#x27;ve found, and without a PHD it can be hard to get a foot in the door. Been doing data engineer&#x2F;distributed systems&#x2F;full stack engineer for almost a decade now and the recurring feeling of &quot;I should be doing more to contribute to humanity&quot; is often followed by contemplation of pursuing bio, but frankly I&#x27;ve been in such a different part of industry I don&#x27;t even know where to start without heavily hamstringing my current career (e.g. going back for a PHD, potentially in another field)</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.</title><url>https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>escot</author><text>There is an immense amount of software work to be done in biotech. Molecular biology research is in need of better automation, analysis, visualization techniques, and on and on. We need folks at all levels. I entered biotech as a web developer and have been able to pick more challenging problems to approach on a monthly basis. We know next to nothing about the human body. Im optimistic that tech will help out us on a stable path towards more robust research practices.</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe&#x2F;hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc.<p>I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.<p>Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.<p>Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rubicon33</author><text>How would one get started in Biotech?</text></comment> |
16,087,408 | 16,087,511 | 1 | 2 | 16,087,154 | train | <story><title>Astronaut John Young Has Died</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/01/06/517138761/astronaut-john-young-who-flew-in-space-6-times-dies-at-87</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ColinWright</author><text>During the launch of the Apollo 16 mission, Charles Duke had a heartbeat of 144. It’s an absolutely natural response to the sensation of 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifting 95 tons into orbit. John Young was commander of the mission. His heart rate was 70. When asked about this he simply replied in an even voice:<p><pre><code> “Yeah, well mine was too
old to go any faster.”
</code></pre>
The above is a quotation from
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@room_n&#x2F;john-young-the-astronaut-fe2c1076a986" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@room_n&#x2F;john-young-the-astronaut-fe2c1076...</a> which was submitted to HN some 9 months ago and got no attention. There have been a couple of other submissions[0] about Capt Young&#x27;s passing, but I remember the way T.K.Mattingly, Tom Stafford, and Charlie Duke all spoke of him. They all considered him one of the best they&#x27;d ever worked or flown with.<p>As Scott Kelly said: Fair winds and following seas, Captain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Astronaut John Young Has Died</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2018/01/06/517138761/astronaut-john-young-who-flew-in-space-6-times-dies-at-87</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sizzzzlerz</author><text>And then there were five.<p>Moon walkers still living are Harrison Schmitt, Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, David Scott, and Charlie Duke.<p>Is there any chance we&#x27;ll have another person on the moon before these guys are gone. They&#x27;re all in their 80&#x27;s now.</text></comment> |
11,019,962 | 11,018,719 | 1 | 3 | 11,018,516 | train | <story><title>Cheerp 1.2 – C++ to JavaScript: faster than Emscripten with dynamic memory</title><url>http://blog.leaningtech.com/2016/02/cheerp-12-c-to-javascript-with-faster.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vvanders</author><text>Looked into Cheerp briefly but the commercial licenses made it pretty much a non-starter. If you&#x27;re going to charge then you should be upfront with your licenses costs rather than hide them until you see who contacts you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cheerp 1.2 – C++ to JavaScript: faster than Emscripten with dynamic memory</title><url>http://blog.leaningtech.com/2016/02/cheerp-12-c-to-javascript-with-faster.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emn13</author><text>The &quot;with dynamic memory&quot; part being critical, since that means no asm.js. With asm.js, emscripten is faster.<p>I get the feeling this is one the one hand pretty cool, but on the other hand poorly timed. Unless WebAssembly never arrives or arrives really late, there&#x27;s going to be a way to run almost-native code <i>with</i> dynamic memory allocation fairly soon. So it&#x27;s likely this will soon be relegated to &quot;old-android support&quot;.</text></comment> |
3,407,657 | 3,407,642 | 1 | 3 | 3,407,436 | train | <story><title>Ron Paul speaks against SOPA</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/presidential-candidate-ron-paul-slams-sopa-111229/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makmanalp</author><text>I used to be interested in what he had to say until I saw this: <a href="http://murphysbride.tumblr.com/post/14876601176/bacon-beer-and-boobs-afternoonsnoozebutton" rel="nofollow">http://murphysbride.tumblr.com/post/14876601176/bacon-beer-a...</a><p>I don't know how credible this is but it leaves me doubtful.</text></item><item><author>dkhenry</author><text>What is great about Ron Paul's stance is that I am confident based on his continual display of principled politics that if elected he would stand by this. Who cares what the other candidates are tickling our ears with. Paul is the only one who I feel would actually stand up to the Movie Industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CWuestefeld</author><text><i>I don't know how credible this is but it leaves me doubtful.</i><p>Without checking out each quote, I believe the answer is that it's generally accurate, but you need to understand what these represent.<p>First, there's the normal crap about taking things out of context...<p>But more specifically, these are decidedly <i>not</i> things that Paul ever said or wrote. These are things that somebody else wrote in a newsletter that was using Paul's name. That doesn't mean that you should let Paul off the hook. It means that what you should be concerned about is not that he's a racist ass, but that he may have a lapses in judgment, as here where he allowed someone else to use his name without monitoring closely how they used it.<p>It's worth noting, though, that there are some very strong parallels here between Paul's misstep and President Obama. Consider Obama's association with the explicitly anti-American, anti-Semite minister Jeremiah Wright, and with the communist and terrorist Bill Ayers. Indeed, in my opinion, Obama comes out much dirtier in this comparison, because he refused to disavow those other people, and particularly Wright, who is acknowledged to have served (still?) as a mentor to Obama, shaping his thinking. In contrast, Paul condemns those statements, and there's no reason to believe that he ever took their writers' ideas as guidance.<p>More discussion of this here: <a href="http://volokh.com/2011/12/22/libertarians-and-ron-pauls-racist-newsletters/comment-page-3/" rel="nofollow">http://volokh.com/2011/12/22/libertarians-and-ron-pauls-raci...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ron Paul speaks against SOPA</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/presidential-candidate-ron-paul-slams-sopa-111229/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makmanalp</author><text>I used to be interested in what he had to say until I saw this: <a href="http://murphysbride.tumblr.com/post/14876601176/bacon-beer-and-boobs-afternoonsnoozebutton" rel="nofollow">http://murphysbride.tumblr.com/post/14876601176/bacon-beer-a...</a><p>I don't know how credible this is but it leaves me doubtful.</text></item><item><author>dkhenry</author><text>What is great about Ron Paul's stance is that I am confident based on his continual display of principled politics that if elected he would stand by this. Who cares what the other candidates are tickling our ears with. Paul is the only one who I feel would actually stand up to the Movie Industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kissickas</author><text>Ron Paul has claimed he didn't write those comments (taken from newsletters a few decades ago) and has renounced them, at least.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul#Inter-congressional_years" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul#Inter-congressional_y...</a></text></comment> |
26,451,725 | 26,449,419 | 1 | 2 | 26,447,540 | train | <story><title>Federal investigators blast Tesla, call for stricter safety standards</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/03/federal-investigators-blast-tesla-call-for-stricter-safety-standads/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipsocannibal</author><text>Having driven a Model Y and a Model 3 I can say that until Tesla removes that huge ass distraction magnet touchscreen from their vehicles I won&#x27;t buy one. In order to determine anything about the status of the vehicle or change a setting you have to train all of your attention off of the road and onto an overly complicated cellphone interface. Autopliot is an optional feature, that damn tablet is not. Adding a simple HUD that comes standard on most Mazda&#x27;s would be a huge improvement in safety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moduspol</author><text>Does this need to be in literally every thread about Tesla?<p>Is there any evidence at all that this is the impairment of safety opponents claim? Model 3s have been sold in large numbers since 2018. Are drivers crashing into other cars at higher rates? Or are we just going to keep beating this dead horse?</text></comment> | <story><title>Federal investigators blast Tesla, call for stricter safety standards</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/03/federal-investigators-blast-tesla-call-for-stricter-safety-standads/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ipsocannibal</author><text>Having driven a Model Y and a Model 3 I can say that until Tesla removes that huge ass distraction magnet touchscreen from their vehicles I won&#x27;t buy one. In order to determine anything about the status of the vehicle or change a setting you have to train all of your attention off of the road and onto an overly complicated cellphone interface. Autopliot is an optional feature, that damn tablet is not. Adding a simple HUD that comes standard on most Mazda&#x27;s would be a huge improvement in safety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>airhead969</author><text>There&#x27;s something to be said for manual switches and gauges.<p>Another case in point: F-35.<p><i>Please swipe up and to the left to apply the brakes or draw a peace symbol if you&#x27;d like to eject instead of dying.</i> - megacorp UX of the future</text></comment> |
842,838 | 842,818 | 1 | 3 | 842,685 | train | <story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wanderingmarker</author><text>I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards.<p>The "high level language" which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is inelegant and inexpressive. Perhaps people who hacked larger computers of the era did not interact with microcomputer hobbyists. Perhaps it was too difficult to get Lisp fast enough to be usable on the old hardware, although if it was possible on big iron in the late 1950s, it should have also been possible on microprocessors in the 1970s.<p>An entire generation of programmers grew up using GOTO <i>&#60;line number&#62;</i> to call subroutines and execute loops. That same generation could have grown up using lambdas. How sad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp</title><url>http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Keyframe</author><text>I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, whatnot).<p>However, I don't think that is the main story here. It sure is a big part, but not main for sure. I mean, there were LISP systems in usage at the big boys houses where money/hardware was no object. Later on, Moore law brought us supercomputers of the past to our desktops and we got C++, Java and Python; Even Ada was formed and deployed.<p>So, what's the deal? My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 and my early serious computer endeavor is inherently tied to the Amiga platform (SAS C and alike), so I didn't have exposure to other language paradigms at all until later.<p>Later on, through a marvelous turns of event I was exposed to Scheme and at first I didn't "get it" - but there was this epiphany moment or two where I could see almost everything I needed in computer language for my needs, yet it was so simple.<p>Not to bore you more with details - I always wanted to get into game development. Career of TV and Commercials direction happened in the mean time, and now I am back into making my game development ideal a reality. My weapon of choice is D/Tango, since it really best suites my mindset. However, after seeing a PPT/PDF from naughty dog earlier this year about how they have utilized an embedded PLT Scheme, I came to wonder once again about maybe using Scheme as a scripting language after all.<p>tl;dr; Can anyone, preferably a pro Lisp or Scheme developer give a rationale why it isn't used more often? Everything I've read makes absolutely no sense why it isn't. Oh, and about the python argument that gets thrown around - I like the python as the next guy, but let's not fool ourselves.<p>&#60;/rant&#62;</text></comment> |
13,276,256 | 13,275,648 | 1 | 3 | 13,272,610 | train | <story><title>UDP vs TCP</title><url>http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjevans</author><text>The main difference between TCP and UDP, as this programmer discovered, relates to quality of realtime service.<p>Times to use UDP over TCP<p><pre><code> * When you need the lowest latency
* When LATE data is worse than GAPS (loss of) in data.
* When you want to implement your own form of error correction to handle late&#x2F;missing&#x2F;mangled data.
</code></pre>
TCP is best when<p><pre><code> * You need all of the data to arrive, period.
* You want to automatically make a rough best estimate use of the available connection for &#x2F;rate&#x2F; of transfer.
</code></pre>
For a videogame, having a general control channel to the co-ordination server in TCP is fine. Having interactive asset downloads (level setup) over TCP is fine. Interactive player movements &#x2F;probably&#x2F; should be UDP. Very likely with a mix of forward error correction and major snapshot syncs for critical data (moving entity absolute location, etc).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Negitivefrags</author><text>People talk like most games use UDP, but they don&#x27;t.<p>Pretty much the only genre that does is First Person Shooters.<p>MMOs (like world or warcraft)
MOBAs (like Dota)
RTSs (like Starcraft)
Action RPGs (like Diablo)<p>All of these are action games and use TCP.<p>In most genres people would rather have the simulation pause when there is packet loss, and then run fast to catch up rather than have unreliable data about player locations.<p>Due to the large number of geographical locations you can have your servers in these days, it&#x27;s common for most of your players to have pings &lt;30ms. With that kind of latency and a few tweaks, it&#x27;s possible for a single packet lost to be recovered very quickly with TCP.</text></comment> | <story><title>UDP vs TCP</title><url>http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjevans</author><text>The main difference between TCP and UDP, as this programmer discovered, relates to quality of realtime service.<p>Times to use UDP over TCP<p><pre><code> * When you need the lowest latency
* When LATE data is worse than GAPS (loss of) in data.
* When you want to implement your own form of error correction to handle late&#x2F;missing&#x2F;mangled data.
</code></pre>
TCP is best when<p><pre><code> * You need all of the data to arrive, period.
* You want to automatically make a rough best estimate use of the available connection for &#x2F;rate&#x2F; of transfer.
</code></pre>
For a videogame, having a general control channel to the co-ordination server in TCP is fine. Having interactive asset downloads (level setup) over TCP is fine. Interactive player movements &#x2F;probably&#x2F; should be UDP. Very likely with a mix of forward error correction and major snapshot syncs for critical data (moving entity absolute location, etc).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nrjdhsbsid</author><text>This isn&#x27;t really true, or at least not the main reasons to choose UDP or TCP .<p>In modern days UDP is really only used in situations where you can afford packet loss and CPU is expensive, or when you need to bypass the built-in behavior of TCP on your OS. It&#x27;s not as much about latency or data loss, usually UDP is used in places where processing power is expensive or load is too extreme to justify TCP.<p>Sometimes, like with DNS, it&#x27;s better to just resend to request than burden a massively parallel server with maintaining TCP state and checksums.<p>The main issue I have with the above comment is that UDP absolutely does not guarantee better latency or have higher priority than TCP packets. The packets usually queue in the NIC buffers and downstream identically regardless of which protocol you use. The main draw of TCP besides data and ordering guarantee (which are CPU costly) is that (depending on your operating system) it follows some kind of automatic rate limiting algorithm be it TCP Vegas(Linux, delay based) or Reno (windows, loss based). These algorithms attempt to limit your connection &quot;stream&quot; to the line rate automatically and play somewhat nicely with each other on large scale.<p>In contrast, the main problem with using UDP is figuring out a smart way to rate the limit to avoid excessive packet loss. In some protocols like DNS anycast type things where only raw throughout matters, who cares if responses drop. Other times, like with LEDBAT or Microsoft&#x27;s BITS, your main reason for using UDP is to roll your own rate limiting protocol, since otherwise you&#x27;re stuck with what the OS gives you on TCP.</text></comment> |
6,567,142 | 6,567,156 | 1 | 3 | 6,564,668 | train | <story><title>Visual Studio 2013 released to web</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/10/17/visual-studio-2013-released-to-web.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>727374</author><text>This rant has been brewing for many years...<p>Everything&#x27;s been downhill since VS6. I&#x27;m only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application &#x27;snappiness&#x27; has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers.<p>I&#x27;ve used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and cool features that goes into it. The new VS2013 feature that shows how often a function is referenced is useful. I don&#x27;t get that in ST2 and probably never will. But I&#x27;ve used VS enough that I&#x27;ve become philosophically opposed to it and other similar IDEs. The core of the problem for me was that all the fancy wizards and project templates are not maintainable for MS. There were a number of times I was using some new project type introduced in a version of VS only to find the template was incompatible in the <i>next</i> version (e.g. reporting in 2005). This inevitably lead to a lot of unexpected work when my team would upgrade. Many of the productivity wizards impose hidden debt on their users.<p>Another major gripe was that VS would get really sludgy for solutions with a great number of projects&#x2F;files. Take note that whenever you see MS demo a hot new feature, it&#x27;s always with a very simple solution. Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins. I&#x27;d find that an application freeze of even 2 seconds would distract me. Not an issue I face now with a text editor + repl.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>overgryphon</author><text>I think you may have selective memory with regards to VS6 (understandable over 15 years). Having recently worked at a company that for silly reasons did not upgrade beyond VS6, it was not lightning fast, took several minutes to open, and crashed frequently even with smaller projects.<p>Modern VS really needs to work on managing large projects- but this isn&#x27;t something it ever had to begin with, and has certainly improved since VS6 despite added functionality. The responsiveness issues you list seem a little more problematic than normal from my experiences- I would definitely try uninstalling a few plugins and seeing if that helps.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visual Studio 2013 released to web</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/10/17/visual-studio-2013-released-to-web.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>727374</author><text>This rant has been brewing for many years...<p>Everything&#x27;s been downhill since VS6. I&#x27;m only joking, but seriously, does anyone remember how lightning fast VS6 was? That was over 15 years ago with much slower computers. I guess application &#x27;snappiness&#x27; has not been a priority for the Visual Studio decision makers.<p>I&#x27;ve used VS since the late 90s (writing node.js in ST2 now) and honestly appreciate the hard work and cool features that goes into it. The new VS2013 feature that shows how often a function is referenced is useful. I don&#x27;t get that in ST2 and probably never will. But I&#x27;ve used VS enough that I&#x27;ve become philosophically opposed to it and other similar IDEs. The core of the problem for me was that all the fancy wizards and project templates are not maintainable for MS. There were a number of times I was using some new project type introduced in a version of VS only to find the template was incompatible in the <i>next</i> version (e.g. reporting in 2005). This inevitably lead to a lot of unexpected work when my team would upgrade. Many of the productivity wizards impose hidden debt on their users.<p>Another major gripe was that VS would get really sludgy for solutions with a great number of projects&#x2F;files. Take note that whenever you see MS demo a hot new feature, it&#x27;s always with a very simple solution. Also, VS would block for me a lot, but that was probably due using too many plugins. I&#x27;d find that an application freeze of even 2 seconds would distract me. Not an issue I face now with a text editor + repl.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nightski</author><text>I disagree heavily. Stock VS is very fast. However it does slow down significantly when using a plugin like ReSharper.<p>But for me in the end it is worth it. Show me any text editor or IDE that provides the same number and quality of productivity enhancing features as ReSharper that isn&#x27;t as slow or slower.</text></comment> |
34,317,591 | 34,317,356 | 1 | 3 | 34,316,618 | train | <story><title>The first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers</title><url>https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1612565777407938560</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I just hope this emphasizes that individuals should <i>never</i> feel guilty or shameful if they need to back out of a job agreement that they made.<p>I&#x27;ve heard stories of folks that accepted job offers, only to have circumstances unexpectedly change shortly thereafter, or to have a better offer come along. And I&#x27;ve seen these people have a lot of stress and guilt about wanting to rescind their acceptance.<p>Just remember, it&#x27;s just business. I guarantee Meta (and all other companies) are just treating it as business, and you should do the same. I&#x27;m not at all saying be rude, and it&#x27;s important not to burn bridges, but remember that when push comes to shove a company will <i>never</i> show you loyalty beyond what makes economic sense and what is legally necessary, and you should do the same.</text></comment> | <story><title>The first time I'm aware that Meta is taking back signed, FTE offers</title><url>https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1612565777407938560</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AviationAtom</author><text>The first dominos are falling. The others will soon follow. When Big Tech makes up a sizable marketcap of the markets, and most folks are passively invested these days, it will hit everyone.</text></comment> |
25,352,486 | 25,351,527 | 1 | 2 | 25,348,506 | train | <story><title>GitHub Releases Dark Mode</title><url>https://github.com/settings/appearance</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The fact that it used to work perfectly fine without JS is proof enough that it don&#x27;t need it. But I guess the average web deviloper is more concerned with stuffing one&#x27;s resume with the latest fads than <i>real</i> accessibility and efficiency.</text></item><item><author>j-james</author><text>I would suppose the above user is referring, rather snidely, to GitHub not loading commit information without JavaScript. GitHub&#x27;s JavaScript use is really quite minimal, and certainly nothing like GitLab.</text></item><item><author>viraptor</author><text>What are the actual issues? JS does not necessarily mean lack of accessibility on its own.</text></item><item><author>bluefox</author><text>GitHub have the gall talking about accessibility while flinging their octotentacles, dragging users screaming down to the firey pits of JavaScript hell.</text></item><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>I believe the CEO stated an intention to add more themes for, say, colorblind people, so there might be additional options coming.<p>Edit: Found the link. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1330924323952091137" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1330924323952091137</a></text></item><item><author>deadmik3</author><text>Nice to see but it&#x27;s too contrast-y for me compared to the stylus theme I&#x27;ve already been using which honestly looks better <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pkage</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers. &quot;Real accessibility&quot; doesn&#x27;t really have much to do with Javascript or not, it has everything to do with ensuring the site is screen reader accessible, ensuring the site is available for low-vision users, and ensuring that the site is available at slow bandwidths. Given that the site caters to those already (good kb navigation, stated future support for color-blindness, and the site is ~300kb&#x2F;page) I think that they&#x27;re in pretty good shape.<p>Ultimately, choosing not to run JS is your decision—but a vanishingly small percentage of users choose to do that, and as a company your focus is on providing features for the product, and not supporting every single user and their unique configurations. Should Github explicitly support terminal-based browsers like Lynx as well?<p>Plus, you can avoid 99% of the github website just by using git from the command line (or your favorite client) and using their CLI tool for repo creation&#x2F;etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub Releases Dark Mode</title><url>https://github.com/settings/appearance</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The fact that it used to work perfectly fine without JS is proof enough that it don&#x27;t need it. But I guess the average web deviloper is more concerned with stuffing one&#x27;s resume with the latest fads than <i>real</i> accessibility and efficiency.</text></item><item><author>j-james</author><text>I would suppose the above user is referring, rather snidely, to GitHub not loading commit information without JavaScript. GitHub&#x27;s JavaScript use is really quite minimal, and certainly nothing like GitLab.</text></item><item><author>viraptor</author><text>What are the actual issues? JS does not necessarily mean lack of accessibility on its own.</text></item><item><author>bluefox</author><text>GitHub have the gall talking about accessibility while flinging their octotentacles, dragging users screaming down to the firey pits of JavaScript hell.</text></item><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>I believe the CEO stated an intention to add more themes for, say, colorblind people, so there might be additional options coming.<p>Edit: Found the link. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1330924323952091137" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;natfriedman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1330924323952091137</a></text></item><item><author>deadmik3</author><text>Nice to see but it&#x27;s too contrast-y for me compared to the stylus theme I&#x27;ve already been using which honestly looks better <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;StylishThemes&#x2F;GitHub-Dark</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viraptor</author><text>Please take a step back for a moment and imagine that you&#x27;re one of the blind users of HN running into this comment. Reading that GitHub devs who took the time to actually support some assistive technology on their website (not sure how well, but see the existing aria attributes in the source) and track their support (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;government.github.com&#x2F;accessibility&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;government.github.com&#x2F;accessibility&#x2F;</a>) don&#x27;t care about &quot;real accessibility&quot; by not catering to what technology choices you prefer.</text></comment> |
40,929,438 | 40,929,076 | 1 | 2 | 40,927,438 | train | <story><title>Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)</title><url>https://www.timdbg.com/posts/useless-x86-trivia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aengelke</author><text>Bonus quirk: there&#x27;s BSF&#x2F;BSR, for which the Intel SDM states that on zero input, the destination has an undefined value. (AMD documents that the destination is not modified in that case.) And then there&#x27;s glibc, which happily uses the undocumented fact that the destination is also unmodified on Intel [1]. It took me quite some time to track down the issue in my binary translator. (There&#x27;s also TZCNT&#x2F;LZCNT, which is BSF&#x2F;BSR encoded with F3-prefix -- which is silently ignored on older processors not supporting the extension. So the same code will behave differently on different CPUs. At least, that&#x27;s documented.)<p>Encoding: People often complain about prefixes, but IMHO, that&#x27;s by far not the worst thing. It is well known and somewhat well documented. There are worse quirks: For example, REX&#x2F;VEX&#x2F;EVEX.RXB extension bits are ignored when they do not apply (e.g., MMX registers); except for mask registers (k0-k7), where they trigger #UD -- also fine -- except if the register is encoded in ModRM.rm, in which case the extension bit is ignored again.<p>APX takes the number of quirks to a different level: the REX2 prefix can encode general-purpose registers r16-r31, but not xmm16-xmm31; the EVEX prefix has several opcode-dependent layouts; and the extension bits for a register used depend on the register type (XMM registers use X3:B3:rm and V4:X3:idx; GP registers use B4:B3:rm, X4:X3:idx). I can&#x27;t give a complete list yet, I still haven&#x27;t finished my APX decoder after a year...<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceware.org&#x2F;bugzilla&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=31748" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceware.org&#x2F;bugzilla&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=31748</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2023)</title><url>https://www.timdbg.com/posts/useless-x86-trivia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sdsd</author><text>What a cool person. I really enjoy writing assembly, it feels so simple and I really enjoy the vertical aesthetic quality.<p>The closest I&#x27;ve ever come to something like OP (which is to say, not close at all) was when I was trying to help my JS friend understand the stack, and we ended up writing a mini vm with its own little ISA: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;darighost&#x2F;2d880fe27510e0c90f75680bfee86b29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;darighost&#x2F;2d880fe27510e0c90f75680bfe...</a><p>This could have gone much deeper - i&#x27;d have enjoyed that, but doing so would have detracted from the original educational goal lol. I should contact that friend and see if he still wants to study with me. it&#x27;s hard since he&#x27;s making so much money doing fancy web dev, he has no time to go deep into stuff. whereas my unemployed ass is basically an infinite ocean of time and energy.</text></comment> |
22,014,473 | 22,014,017 | 1 | 3 | 22,012,080 | train | <story><title>I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left</title><url>https://write.as/dsf4khx3r1m1208f.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elldoubleyew</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand this philosophy of &quot;if only they could change their minds&quot;<p>The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people?<p>Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can&#x2F;would mesh well in Chinese society.<p>I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.</text></item><item><author>Seenso</author><text>&gt; Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn&#x27;t leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China&#x27;s government policy as evil.<p>It takes <i>years</i> in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don&#x27;t come up often that they may not even realize.<p>For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?123188-1&#x2F;youth-violence-embassy-bombing-apology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?123188-1&#x2F;youth-violence-embass...</a>. The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn&#x27;t fit the narrative so it wasn&#x27;t reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?</text></item><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn&#x27;t leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China&#x27;s government policy as evil.</text></item><item><author>virtuous_signal</author><text>I don&#x27;t have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief &quot;We shouldn&#x27;t censor for China, even if that makes us lose money&quot;. But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don&#x27;t give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press.<p>People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first <i>two</i> controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alisonatwork</author><text>I live and work in mainland China, and the government here pisses me off. Yeah, i am a foreigner, but this is my home. I pay taxes here. I deserve to have my voice heard. The Chinese government is trash.<p>Because i am a foreigner the worst that could happen from me voicing such an opinion is the government doesn&#x27;t renew my work visa. For Han, it could affect their social credit rating. For ethnic minorities it could land them or their families in &quot;reeducation camps&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s the trick of authoritarian regimes. If you just shut up and do whatever the government says, they won&#x27;t bother you (unless you are rich enough to bother extorting). But if you make a noise, you are screwed. That&#x27;s the reason why everyone you talk to is allegedly happy with the regime. It&#x27;s not in their interests to be anything else.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left</title><url>https://write.as/dsf4khx3r1m1208f.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elldoubleyew</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand this philosophy of &quot;if only they could change their minds&quot;<p>The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people?<p>Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can&#x2F;would mesh well in Chinese society.<p>I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.</text></item><item><author>Seenso</author><text>&gt; Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn&#x27;t leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China&#x27;s government policy as evil.<p>It takes <i>years</i> in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don&#x27;t come up often that they may not even realize.<p>For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?123188-1&#x2F;youth-violence-embassy-bombing-apology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?123188-1&#x2F;youth-violence-embass...</a>. The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn&#x27;t fit the narrative so it wasn&#x27;t reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?</text></item><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn&#x27;t leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China&#x27;s government policy as evil.</text></item><item><author>virtuous_signal</author><text>I don&#x27;t have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief &quot;We shouldn&#x27;t censor for China, even if that makes us lose money&quot;. But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don&#x27;t give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press.<p>People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first <i>two</i> controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Seenso</author><text>&gt; ...I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well.<p>The topic of this subthread is not the attitudes of mainland Chinese, it&#x27;s the attitudes of mainland Chinese who have immigrated to work at Google for economic reasons. I have friends who came from mainland China, and have talked to them about how their attitudes have changed over time. They don&#x27;t all stay fixed in the officially-sanctioned mainland mindset.<p>&gt; Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.<p>So you&#x27;re saying if someone is happy with something at least in part because they&#x27;ve been lied to, it&#x27;s wrong for someone to interfere with their attitudes by trying to tell them the truth?</text></comment> |
30,347,659 | 30,347,593 | 1 | 3 | 30,346,251 | train | <story><title>Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/bitcoin-widow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scotty79</author><text>On the other hand ... What&#x27;s wrong, if your wealth distilled to the limits of abstraction dies with you?<p>If you haven&#x27;t shared it with anyone, why would anyone get it?<p>If you didn&#x27;t trust anyone with the keys to it while you were alive, why should anyone have it?</text></item><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>&gt; Cotten possessed the only key to the online vaults where his customers’ investments were supposedly stored.<p>This is very important. Due to strong cryptography it&#x27;s safe to assume the cryptocurrencies can&#x27;t be moved without the secret key. What happens if the owner of the key dies? My father asked me about this once and I had no answer. Something to really think about.<p>We currently think of secret keys as expendable. Compromised or lost? Just make a new one. Nobody shares or inherits keys, everyone has their own set. The dead won&#x27;t be encrypting or signing any messages and there is generally no reason for anyone to retain the ability to impersonate them.<p>Traditional key discipline relies on the assumption keys are worth nothing. All this goes out the window when these are the keys to assets worth thousands, millions. A new key discipline needs to be developed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>helen___keller</author><text>&gt; If you didn&#x27;t trust anyone with the keys to it while you were alive, why should anyone have it?<p>Wills and inheritance have been a part of human society since the beginning of civilization, I think it’s more likely we will need to find a way to make new technology adapt to society and not the other way around</text></comment> | <story><title>Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/bitcoin-widow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scotty79</author><text>On the other hand ... What&#x27;s wrong, if your wealth distilled to the limits of abstraction dies with you?<p>If you haven&#x27;t shared it with anyone, why would anyone get it?<p>If you didn&#x27;t trust anyone with the keys to it while you were alive, why should anyone have it?</text></item><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>&gt; Cotten possessed the only key to the online vaults where his customers’ investments were supposedly stored.<p>This is very important. Due to strong cryptography it&#x27;s safe to assume the cryptocurrencies can&#x27;t be moved without the secret key. What happens if the owner of the key dies? My father asked me about this once and I had no answer. Something to really think about.<p>We currently think of secret keys as expendable. Compromised or lost? Just make a new one. Nobody shares or inherits keys, everyone has their own set. The dead won&#x27;t be encrypting or signing any messages and there is generally no reason for anyone to retain the ability to impersonate them.<p>Traditional key discipline relies on the assumption keys are worth nothing. All this goes out the window when these are the keys to assets worth thousands, millions. A new key discipline needs to be developed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwirbl</author><text>Most people don&#x27;t trust their adult children with access to their wealth, and yet they leave it as an inheritance to them when they die. Often even accompanied by a will</text></comment> |
17,673,531 | 17,672,938 | 1 | 3 | 17,671,449 | train | <story><title>Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/tesla-is-building-its-own-ai-chips-for-self-driving-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>27182818284</author><text>Has a flight ever been brought down through a cyberattack? I&#x27;ve heard a lot of concern over that over the years, but (thank goodness) I don&#x27;t recall any news of an actual flight being brought down.</text></item><item><author>mhneu</author><text>YES. Security compromise is the huge achilles heel of self-driving cars - and anything that is algorithmically controlled.<p>When you have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road, and someone figures out how to hack them, and drive them simultaneously into crowds, that will be a BIG BIG problem.<p>And this problem isn&#x27;t just about self-driving cars. It is a fundamental issue with all algorithms. It&#x27;s a lot harder to hack humans to do bad things (although it can be done with sustained messaging and propaganda). But algorithms can be compromised and exploited.</text></item><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>I worry less about software &#x2F; hardware crashes leading to death and more about cyberattack. I&#x27;ve written about it before[0]: We need regulations <i>before</i> a mass breach of autonomous systems happens. Not after. This whole bullshit where corporations claim all sorts of things about their security then get owned trivially has happened for every OS and device out there. The supposedly secure QNX was installed into countless tanks, nuclear power plants, and autonomous devices before getting owned in 2017[1]. I don&#x27;t buy this &quot;just trust us&quot; attitude from automotive and other autonomous manufacturers. One of them is going to fuck up at some point.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zachaysan.com&#x2F;cars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zachaysan.com&#x2F;cars</a> and apologies for the length; it was a very stressful time in my life.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.blackberry.com&#x2F;kb&#x2F;articleDetail?articleNumber=000046674" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.blackberry.com&#x2F;kb&#x2F;articleDetail?articleNumber...</a></text></item><item><author>titzer</author><text>This is pretty bad from a hardware&#x2F;software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It&#x27;s amazing that we&#x27;re gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go &gt;100mph, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a <i>weapon</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>There are multiple safeguards for planes that don&#x27;t work for self-driving cars.<p>First, they&#x27;re not physically inspectable by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. This means it&#x27;s easier to obscure interfaces and other potential areas of attack. Not state-actor proof, but probably ISIS-proof. Second, they only get software updates while parked at an airport, so it makes MITM attacks harder (though not impossible). Third, they&#x27;re in the air where death isn&#x27;t a sudden movement away. Pilots can override the system and fly it manually. Fourth, they&#x27;re heavily monitored with errant flightpaths reported to militaries around the world (to stop another 9&#x2F;11).<p>We have none of these safeguards for self-driving cars and there are going to be hundreds of millions of them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/tesla-is-building-its-own-ai-chips-for-self-driving-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>27182818284</author><text>Has a flight ever been brought down through a cyberattack? I&#x27;ve heard a lot of concern over that over the years, but (thank goodness) I don&#x27;t recall any news of an actual flight being brought down.</text></item><item><author>mhneu</author><text>YES. Security compromise is the huge achilles heel of self-driving cars - and anything that is algorithmically controlled.<p>When you have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road, and someone figures out how to hack them, and drive them simultaneously into crowds, that will be a BIG BIG problem.<p>And this problem isn&#x27;t just about self-driving cars. It is a fundamental issue with all algorithms. It&#x27;s a lot harder to hack humans to do bad things (although it can be done with sustained messaging and propaganda). But algorithms can be compromised and exploited.</text></item><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>I worry less about software &#x2F; hardware crashes leading to death and more about cyberattack. I&#x27;ve written about it before[0]: We need regulations <i>before</i> a mass breach of autonomous systems happens. Not after. This whole bullshit where corporations claim all sorts of things about their security then get owned trivially has happened for every OS and device out there. The supposedly secure QNX was installed into countless tanks, nuclear power plants, and autonomous devices before getting owned in 2017[1]. I don&#x27;t buy this &quot;just trust us&quot; attitude from automotive and other autonomous manufacturers. One of them is going to fuck up at some point.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zachaysan.com&#x2F;cars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zachaysan.com&#x2F;cars</a> and apologies for the length; it was a very stressful time in my life.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.blackberry.com&#x2F;kb&#x2F;articleDetail?articleNumber=000046674" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.blackberry.com&#x2F;kb&#x2F;articleDetail?articleNumber...</a></text></item><item><author>titzer</author><text>This is pretty bad from a hardware&#x2F;software verification perspective. People who care about correctness can just go home, I guess. It&#x27;s amazing that we&#x27;re gonna let these things on the streets. When you weigh almost 2 tons and can go &gt;100mph, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you have a gun mounted on you or not, you are a <i>weapon</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tjoff</author><text>It has already been demonstrated non-self-driving cars.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-33650491" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-33650491</a></text></comment> |
31,089,818 | 31,090,087 | 1 | 2 | 31,086,310 | train | <story><title>Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words”</title><url>https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1516463416885399554</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uoaei</author><text></text></item><item><author>colpabar</author><text>&gt;I don&#x27;t want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.<p>This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people &quot;below them&quot; how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&amp;I is a grift.</text></item><item><author>codesternews</author><text>This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.<p>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).<p>Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don&#x27;t want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.<p>There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,<p>This is how it starts.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thecitywanderer&#x2F;status&#x2F;1516176983549530122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thecitywanderer&#x2F;status&#x2F;15161769835495301...</a></text></item><item><author>2bitencryption</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a valid concern with this; a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to &quot;big brother&quot; or &quot;corporate overlords&quot;.<p>Google is so large that any stance they take, no matter how minuscule, has immense influence.<p>Case in point, from this article:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-maps-neighborhood-names.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-maps-ne...</a><p>&gt; For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.<p>&gt; The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.<p>My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don&#x27;t feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexb_</author><text>DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases, and people actually want it to happen.<p>So you know, it doesn&#x27;t fucking work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words”</title><url>https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1516463416885399554</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>uoaei</author><text></text></item><item><author>colpabar</author><text>&gt;I don&#x27;t want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.<p>This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people &quot;below them&quot; how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&amp;I is a grift.</text></item><item><author>codesternews</author><text>This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.<p>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).<p>Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don&#x27;t want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.<p>There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,<p>This is how it starts.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thecitywanderer&#x2F;status&#x2F;1516176983549530122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thecitywanderer&#x2F;status&#x2F;15161769835495301...</a></text></item><item><author>2bitencryption</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a valid concern with this; a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to &quot;big brother&quot; or &quot;corporate overlords&quot;.<p>Google is so large that any stance they take, no matter how minuscule, has immense influence.<p>Case in point, from this article:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-maps-neighborhood-names.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-maps-ne...</a><p>&gt; For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.<p>&gt; The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.<p>My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don&#x27;t feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jollybean</author><text>It&#x27;s a big assumption to suppose that the &#x27;failing up&#x27; guy was only able to do so &#x27;because he was white&#x27;.<p>&#x27;Buddies with the execs&#x27; - that&#x27;s easy to believe. But &#x27;because white&#x27; ... much harder to convince me there.<p>The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there&#x27;s evidence otherwise.<p>Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow &#x27;racially oriented&#x27;.<p>This is pernicious, because it&#x27;s a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly.<p>Everyone has a beef, everyone has a &#x27;reason&#x27; for why they aren&#x27;t at some stage higher than they are, it&#x27;s the perennial social issue of middle management.<p>So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard &#x27;beefs&#x27; that lie just below surface level in every office environment.<p>At about the Director level and above, it&#x27;s very political and &#x27;talent&#x27; is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level.<p>DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990&#x27;s progressives, with a focus on &#x27;treating people equally&#x27; or &#x27;equal opportunity&#x27; (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule.<p>A dude &#x27;failing up&#x27; if that&#x27;s the case, is just unfair all around and that&#x27;s it.<p>It&#x27;s 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US.<p>To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from &#x27;genocide&#x27; etc.</text></comment> |
33,530,268 | 33,527,914 | 1 | 3 | 33,525,673 | train | <story><title>Why are glasses so expensive? The industry prefers to keep that blurry (2019)</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-why-are-eyeglasses-so-expensive-20190122-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasil</author><text>Glasses aren&#x27;t that expensive.<p>I buy them from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zennioptical.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zennioptical.com</a><p>I don&#x27;t think that I&#x27;d ever pay more than $100 for a frame again.<p>The sunglasses that we buy in a drugstore can be had for paltry sums, why not prescription eyewear?</text></item><item><author>imroot</author><text>I worked on the retail IT side of things at Luxottica.<p>I don&#x27;t even think that you&#x27;ve scratched the surface of just how prevalent Luxottica is: you&#x27;ve touched the retail side of things, but, you also haven&#x27;t touched the manufacturing side of things (Lux has patents on the hinges used in glasses), the wholesaling side of things (Lux supplies generic and branded frames to your local optician on less-than-preferred terms), and then just the genetic beast that is their optimization efforts.<p>I discovered some ineffective linux and db management that was adding 15-30 minutes of closing time every night -- time where we&#x27;d have employees on the clock waiting to close the store -- and figured out why it was behaving the way that it was and fixed it so the &#x27;point of sales&#x27; part of closing wouldn&#x27;t be the hold up. Saved the company almost 13 million dollars a year in labor costs and 45 million in licensing costs when I came up with a way to replace the POS systems OS without needing a cross-ship of new hardware...and still got screwed around when it came to my hourly rate increased or getting my contract renewed...<p>When my girlfriend&#x27;s son passed away from complications with cancer, I had flowers and cards sent from some former coworkers, but, not a single person even reached out to me until a few months later, where they asked me if I was &#x27;ready to go back to work&#x27; after cutting my contract.<p>It was well known that if someone robbed a Sunglass hut, the most expensive item in the store to replace was the iPad...</text></item><item><author>petilon</author><text>Glasses are expensive because there is no competition. One company - Luxottica - owns pretty much everything.<p>You go to LensCrafters and prices seem super expensive, so you go to Pearle Vision and that&#x27;s expensive too, so you go to Target Optical and prices are still high and then you think maybe glasses <i>are</i> expensive, since you went to multiple stores and they all have similar prices. What you don&#x27;t realize is that all those retail brands are owned by the same company - Luxottica [1]. They operate under several names, so there is an appearance of competition but there isn&#x27;t.<p>But wait, it isn&#x27;t just stores, they also own eyewear brands such as Ray-Ban, Chanel, Coach, Oakley, Prada, Tiffany, and so on. Yes, all of those brands are owned by Luxottica [2].<p>Wait, not done yet. They also own insurance. Luxottica owns the vision insurance company EyeMed. [3]<p>Still not done. Luxottica has merged with Essilor and now own multiple lens brands [4].<p>See 60 Minutes story on Luxottica if you&#x27;re not outraged yet [5].<p>Where are the anti-trust enforcers in this country and other countries, and why are they not doing anything?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;retail-brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;retail-brands</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;eyewear-brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;eyewear-brands</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eyemed.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;about-us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eyemed.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;about-us</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.essilorluxottica.com&#x2F;brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.essilorluxottica.com&#x2F;brands</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonwatkinspdx</author><text>I&#x27;ve had very good luck ordering from Zenni and Coastal. It is perhaps a bit harder to find a frame style you like, but once you have a frame of reference for say width measurements it&#x27;s not so bad.<p>They&#x27;re especially good for cheap prescription sun glasses. I bought a whole stack of them years ago I&#x27;m still working through. If I go to the river or where ever and something happens to them I&#x27;m out $25 instead of $250.<p>It also helped that the last time I went to a local shop it proved to be a ridiculous experience. I ordered a pair of clear acrylic frames, and for whatever reason when they came in the sales clerk got bored and thought it&#x27;d be interesting to use highlighter on the insides of the frame to see what it looked like. But then it wouldn&#x27;t come off so she just kinda tried to play it off like nothing happened when I picked them up. It was completely absurd. I had to wait another month for them to reorder.<p>So yeah, eyeglasses are now one of those categories of local businesses where I&#x27;ve learned they&#x27;re basically all scams.<p>Related: it&#x27;s getting hard to find a cleaner that does alterations in house vs mailing them off to a service. Last couple times I&#x27;ve had to do that it turns into a 4 to 6 week long game of &quot;where did your clothing disappear to and will the store find it this time or tell you to come back in a week yet again.&quot;<p>Why is it so many of these simple services increasingly feel like total scams in the US?</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are glasses so expensive? The industry prefers to keep that blurry (2019)</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-why-are-eyeglasses-so-expensive-20190122-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chasil</author><text>Glasses aren&#x27;t that expensive.<p>I buy them from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zennioptical.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zennioptical.com</a><p>I don&#x27;t think that I&#x27;d ever pay more than $100 for a frame again.<p>The sunglasses that we buy in a drugstore can be had for paltry sums, why not prescription eyewear?</text></item><item><author>imroot</author><text>I worked on the retail IT side of things at Luxottica.<p>I don&#x27;t even think that you&#x27;ve scratched the surface of just how prevalent Luxottica is: you&#x27;ve touched the retail side of things, but, you also haven&#x27;t touched the manufacturing side of things (Lux has patents on the hinges used in glasses), the wholesaling side of things (Lux supplies generic and branded frames to your local optician on less-than-preferred terms), and then just the genetic beast that is their optimization efforts.<p>I discovered some ineffective linux and db management that was adding 15-30 minutes of closing time every night -- time where we&#x27;d have employees on the clock waiting to close the store -- and figured out why it was behaving the way that it was and fixed it so the &#x27;point of sales&#x27; part of closing wouldn&#x27;t be the hold up. Saved the company almost 13 million dollars a year in labor costs and 45 million in licensing costs when I came up with a way to replace the POS systems OS without needing a cross-ship of new hardware...and still got screwed around when it came to my hourly rate increased or getting my contract renewed...<p>When my girlfriend&#x27;s son passed away from complications with cancer, I had flowers and cards sent from some former coworkers, but, not a single person even reached out to me until a few months later, where they asked me if I was &#x27;ready to go back to work&#x27; after cutting my contract.<p>It was well known that if someone robbed a Sunglass hut, the most expensive item in the store to replace was the iPad...</text></item><item><author>petilon</author><text>Glasses are expensive because there is no competition. One company - Luxottica - owns pretty much everything.<p>You go to LensCrafters and prices seem super expensive, so you go to Pearle Vision and that&#x27;s expensive too, so you go to Target Optical and prices are still high and then you think maybe glasses <i>are</i> expensive, since you went to multiple stores and they all have similar prices. What you don&#x27;t realize is that all those retail brands are owned by the same company - Luxottica [1]. They operate under several names, so there is an appearance of competition but there isn&#x27;t.<p>But wait, it isn&#x27;t just stores, they also own eyewear brands such as Ray-Ban, Chanel, Coach, Oakley, Prada, Tiffany, and so on. Yes, all of those brands are owned by Luxottica [2].<p>Wait, not done yet. They also own insurance. Luxottica owns the vision insurance company EyeMed. [3]<p>Still not done. Luxottica has merged with Essilor and now own multiple lens brands [4].<p>See 60 Minutes story on Luxottica if you&#x27;re not outraged yet [5].<p>Where are the anti-trust enforcers in this country and other countries, and why are they not doing anything?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;retail-brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;retail-brands</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;eyewear-brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.luxottica.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;eyewear-brands</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eyemed.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;about-us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eyemed.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;about-us</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.essilorluxottica.com&#x2F;brands" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.essilorluxottica.com&#x2F;brands</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RajT88</author><text>Indeed. I buy 5 pairs of glasses at a time (cheapest ones I can manage which look OK). 5 at a time is still cheaper than 1&#x2F;3rd the price of low cost normal glasses.<p>And each of those 5 pairs is half as durable.<p>It is a similarly wild situation where eye exams at Walmart can be cheaper than at a regular eye doctor covered by my insurance.</text></comment> |
12,507,006 | 12,507,121 | 1 | 2 | 12,505,466 | train | <story><title>What goes wrong in the brain chemistry of a gambling addict?</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/addicted-to-anticipation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ajankovic</author><text>I hate gambling but observing some recent changes in my behaviour this sentence strike a chord:<p>&gt; The high is in expecting an outcome, desiring it, imagining it, not in its fulfillment.<p>I am staring at unfinished side projects of mine and they are staring back at me.</text></comment> | <story><title>What goes wrong in the brain chemistry of a gambling addict?</title><url>http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/addicted-to-anticipation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>js8</author><text>&quot;But since addiction is defined as compulsive behavior that continues in the face of punishment, punishment is clearly not the best way to deal with it. Dozens of studies show that shame, confrontation, and humiliation are ineffective and can backfire when used in addiction treatment.&quot;<p>I suspect this is case with many things, that punishment is ineffective. Punishment ultimately assumes people are acting rationally, and they often do not.</text></comment> |
15,030,585 | 15,028,007 | 1 | 2 | 15,026,887 | train | <story><title>Migrating 1200 databases from MySQL to Postgres</title><url>http://psyenix.blogspot.com/2017/08/migrating-1200-db-from-mysql-to-postgres.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seanharr11</author><text>I wrote an open source tool that migrates between any 2 relational databases.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seanharr11&#x2F;etlalchemy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seanharr11&#x2F;etlalchemy</a><p>This includes automatic migration of the schema, constraints, indexes and obviously data. It leverages fast bulk loading tools like mysqlimport, and PostgreSQL&#x27;s COPY FROM. It doesn&#x27;t need any config. Just plug and play.<p>The tool uses SQLAlchemy to abstract column types, and handles various column type conversions between any flavor of SQL.<p>The one thing it needs are tests, and scalability support for tables bigger than a few GB!</text></comment> | <story><title>Migrating 1200 databases from MySQL to Postgres</title><url>http://psyenix.blogspot.com/2017/08/migrating-1200-db-from-mysql-to-postgres.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>willcodeforfoo</author><text>I&#x27;m working on migrating an app right now (just one MySQL database) but can highly recommend [pgloader](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pgloader.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pgloader.io&#x2F;</a>). It has a bunch of built-in and configurable rules to cast different column types to PostgreSQL and the developer has been very responsive in helping me make weird column types work, too.</text></comment> |
34,449,064 | 34,449,263 | 1 | 2 | 34,448,211 | train | <story><title>The Grapes of Wrath’s Foreshadowing of the Cold War (2018)</title><url>https://sites.psu.edu/comm150honors/2016/02/04/the-grapes-of-wraths-foreshadowing-of-the-cold-war/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>I tried to find the source for this claim, and all the internet posts point to one article written in 2008 that tells the story. That article sources it to two books, a New York Times article, and some email.<p>The first book, &quot;The Origins of Totalitarianism&quot; by Hannah Arendt is from 1958 and is on the Internet Archive, and searching it brought no mention of &quot;grape&quot; or &quot;Steinbeck.&quot; &quot;Wrath&quot; came up a few times in different context.<p>The second, &quot;Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States&quot; by Kenneth T. Jackson is from 1989 available on Google Books. It does tell the story, adding that every character having shoes was also part of the ban. It doesn&#x27;t provide a source for the claim, but the footnote given says the film wasn&#x27;t a hit in the US either. The film won several Oscars and is on numerous &quot;best film ever&quot; lists.<p>I can&#x27;t check a personal email.<p>I don&#x27;t subscribe to the NYT, so can&#x27;t check the article. Maybe someone else can. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1955&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;archives&#x2F;foreign-affairs-america-seen-through-a-glass-darkly.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1955&#x2F;04&#x2F;13&#x2F;archives&#x2F;foreign-affairs-...</a><p>So at best it looks like the source was some article in the NYT from the height of the Cold War about a somewhat related topic. Possibly happened, possibly made up.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Grapes of Wrath’s Foreshadowing of the Cold War (2018)</title><url>https://sites.psu.edu/comm150honors/2016/02/04/the-grapes-of-wraths-foreshadowing-of-the-cold-war/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yaakov34</author><text>I don&#x27;t know the details about the showing of that movie, but America&#x27;s mass car ownership certainly came up in the comparisons of life in the USSR and in America. In one discussion with my classmates (in Moscow, USSR, ca. mid-1980s) I mentioned that in the suburb of New York in which my relatives lived, most of the high school students in the upper grades drove their cars to school and parked near it. &quot;Come on&quot;, someone said, &quot;I am with you when you tell us not to believe our propaganda, but you shouldn&#x27;t believe theirs, either. Who is going to give a car to some kid, unless he is the son of a senator or something?&quot;<p>Oh, and some years later, a friend of mine in America was asked by a family in the USSR (which would not be the USSR much longer) to bring some package or item to their relatives, who lived in some other suburb of NYC. My friend asked for the address. &quot;Don&#x27;t remember right now, but you&#x27;ll be able to find them: they have two cars!&quot;</text></comment> |
6,181,136 | 6,181,048 | 1 | 2 | 6,180,846 | train | <story><title>Mail provider allegedly used by Snowden suspending operations</title><url>http://72.249.41.52</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>plainOldText</author><text>I believe donating to their Legal Defense Fund is a sensible thing to do if you care about your rights. Link: <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_button_id=7BCR4A5W9PNN4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paypal.com&#x2F;cgi-bin&#x2F;webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_b...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Mail provider allegedly used by Snowden suspending operations</title><url>http://72.249.41.52</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>junto</author><text>That is crazy. I&#x27;ve recently signed up for an account. How annoying. I hope he wins his fight.<p>Talk about slapping down on the little guy.<p>His choice was a noble one. How many others would walk away from their business rather than be complicit in crimes of the state against it&#x27;s own people? Few I imagine.</text></comment> |
16,884,974 | 16,884,877 | 1 | 2 | 16,882,539 | train | <story><title>Google changes its messaging strategy again: Goodbye to Allo, double down on RCS</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/19/google-changes-its-messaging-strategy-again-goodbye-to-allo-double-down-on-rcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>The carriers are idiots. It&#x27;s where innovation goes to die.<p>We had to pull them kicking and screaming into the smart phone and data era. (Remember When AT&amp;T sent a paper copy of every image you downloaded on your iPhone in a bill?)<p>Quite frankly the core problem with Google&#x27;s strategy is involving then at all. Instead, go the manufacturers and campaign against supporting sms <i>at all</i>. It&#x27;s insecure, slow, unreliable, monitored, among many other things. Push the manufacturers to an open Android messaging api that runs over TLS (or double ratchet) and bypasses the carriers completely, but the manufacturers can still rebrand.<p>The other issue is Apple. For as much as they claim &quot;privacy is a human right&quot;, they have been jerks about making sure iMessage drags it&#x27;s feet using secure technologies to communicate outside of their ecosystem. Apple wants to ride a white horse on encryption, but in reality they&#x27;re having an opposite, negative, effect on the vast majority of the world&#x27;s population.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrooched_moose</author><text>&gt; unreliable<p>Really? It&#x27;s the only messaging format that works without a data connection and is an absolute godsend when I&#x27;m out camping, rural biking, or at large sporting events and the towers are absolutely swamped.<p>I&#x27;m in a situation at least once a month where the only reliable communication method is SMS.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google changes its messaging strategy again: Goodbye to Allo, double down on RCS</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/19/google-changes-its-messaging-strategy-again-goodbye-to-allo-double-down-on-rcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>The carriers are idiots. It&#x27;s where innovation goes to die.<p>We had to pull them kicking and screaming into the smart phone and data era. (Remember When AT&amp;T sent a paper copy of every image you downloaded on your iPhone in a bill?)<p>Quite frankly the core problem with Google&#x27;s strategy is involving then at all. Instead, go the manufacturers and campaign against supporting sms <i>at all</i>. It&#x27;s insecure, slow, unreliable, monitored, among many other things. Push the manufacturers to an open Android messaging api that runs over TLS (or double ratchet) and bypasses the carriers completely, but the manufacturers can still rebrand.<p>The other issue is Apple. For as much as they claim &quot;privacy is a human right&quot;, they have been jerks about making sure iMessage drags it&#x27;s feet using secure technologies to communicate outside of their ecosystem. Apple wants to ride a white horse on encryption, but in reality they&#x27;re having an opposite, negative, effect on the vast majority of the world&#x27;s population.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimktrains2</author><text>&gt; Quite frankly the core problem with Google&#x27;s strategy is involving then at all. Instead, go the manufacturers and campaign against supporting sms at all. It&#x27;s insecure, slow, unreliable, monitored, among many other things. Push the manufacturers to an open Android messaging api that runs over TLS (or double ratchet) and bypasses the carriers completely, but the manufacturers can still rebrand.<p>But it&#x27;s universal. I would never buy a phone that doesn&#x27;t support sms. How do I contact people with flip phones? People with iPhones?<p>Also, Gchat is &quot;monitored&quot; as much as sms. Imessage claims it&#x27;s not, but has that&#x2F;can that be verified?</text></comment> |
22,640,895 | 22,640,818 | 1 | 2 | 22,638,558 | train | <story><title>New York Governor announces 100% workforce reduction for non-essential services</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/20/new-york-governor-announces-100-workforce-reduction-for-non-essential-services/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>There is no doubt Cuomo should be the national point person for the response to the crisis based on his performance so far. He is independently working with regional manufacturing to retool to make critical medical PPE and ventilators, and has organized a regional coalition including CT, NJ, and PA. I have not agreed with him all the time, but his crisis management has been exemplary and he will have saved many lives in NY by the time this is done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vincentmarle</author><text>I think that Gov Newsom of CA has been doing a way better job than Cuomo:<p>- implements stricter measures faster and more decisively, while having a lower case count<p>- doesn&#x27;t fight with his mayors or the President<p>- no false promises or statements that need to be taken back days later</text></comment> | <story><title>New York Governor announces 100% workforce reduction for non-essential services</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/20/new-york-governor-announces-100-workforce-reduction-for-non-essential-services/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>There is no doubt Cuomo should be the national point person for the response to the crisis based on his performance so far. He is independently working with regional manufacturing to retool to make critical medical PPE and ventilators, and has organized a regional coalition including CT, NJ, and PA. I have not agreed with him all the time, but his crisis management has been exemplary and he will have saved many lives in NY by the time this is done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zone411</author><text>This should&#x27;ve been done much sooner, certainly before St. Patrick&#x27;s Day. He rejected an earlier proposal by De Blasio. It was obvious that this was coming and also clear that NYC would&#x27;ve been hit very hard. No state government has done well.</text></comment> |
20,860,062 | 20,859,902 | 1 | 3 | 20,858,458 | train | <story><title>Dual AMD EPYC 7742 Crushes Quad Intel Xeon 8180M's in Geekbench 4</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dual-amd-epyc-7742-vs-quad-intel-xeon-platinum-8180m,40288.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>localhost</author><text>&quot;You&#x27;re getting 24.83% more performance while costing 73.29% less.&quot;<p>This is a terrible performance summary. Let&#x27;s try to normalize it in terms of Geekbench points &#x2F; $:<p><pre><code> Intel = 155050 &#x2F; $52044 = 2.97 &#x2F; $
AMD = 193554 &#x2F; $13011 = 14.88 &#x2F; $
</code></pre>
AMD has a 5x advantage on the price of the CPU alone, not factoring in the price of the motherboard and other components (this is a 4 socket Intel motherboard vs. a dual socket AMD).<p>5X. That&#x27;s incredible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamadatix</author><text>I think it&#x27;s best to say it the way they did. It&#x27;s one thing to be faster per dollar but it&#x27;s another thing for to win on performance as well.<p>From single core to same number of cores to having more cores the 7742 wins in each case and still comes out on top. That&#x27;s far more amazing than being 5x cheaper. Everyone has known Intel has charged an outrageous premium for a long time but it was also the best so people dealt with it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dual AMD EPYC 7742 Crushes Quad Intel Xeon 8180M's in Geekbench 4</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dual-amd-epyc-7742-vs-quad-intel-xeon-platinum-8180m,40288.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>localhost</author><text>&quot;You&#x27;re getting 24.83% more performance while costing 73.29% less.&quot;<p>This is a terrible performance summary. Let&#x27;s try to normalize it in terms of Geekbench points &#x2F; $:<p><pre><code> Intel = 155050 &#x2F; $52044 = 2.97 &#x2F; $
AMD = 193554 &#x2F; $13011 = 14.88 &#x2F; $
</code></pre>
AMD has a 5x advantage on the price of the CPU alone, not factoring in the price of the motherboard and other components (this is a 4 socket Intel motherboard vs. a dual socket AMD).<p>5X. That&#x27;s incredible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joemag</author><text>Interesting pricing decision by AMD. Given their performance, and no other competition in x86 market besides Intel, surprised they chose to sell at such a steep discount.<p>Sometimes, such pricing decisions can perpetuate “you are a weaker substitute” perception.</text></comment> |
40,522,209 | 40,522,238 | 1 | 3 | 40,521,229 | train | <story><title>Cybercriminals pose as "helpful" Stack Overflow users to push malware</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cybercriminals-pose-as-helpful-stack-overflow-users-to-push-malware/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>braiamp</author><text>I along with others, years ago, have said that answers that don&#x27;t address the question asked should be removed. In this case, malicious actors are using packages that are not related to the problem presented in the question. This will become more prevalent than package squatting.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cybercriminals pose as "helpful" Stack Overflow users to push malware</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cybercriminals-pose-as-helpful-stack-overflow-users-to-push-malware/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>entuno</author><text>You could probably create a more convincing version of this with a bit of collusion between multiple accounts on StackOverflow.<p>If you have one person asking a deliberate question, someone else answering with a backdoored package that does actually does solve the problem, then a few accounts upvoting and adding comments it would lot a more more convincing than just a random answer with zero upvotes that doesn&#x27;t actually solve the problem.</text></comment> |
37,358,805 | 37,358,298 | 1 | 3 | 37,356,925 | train | <story><title>Explaining the Postgres iceberg</title><url>https://avestura.dev/blog/explaining-the-postgres-meme</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phamilton</author><text>We got hit with a good bit of the postgres iceberg this week.<p>VACUUM by default runs with the TRUNCATE option. This will, if possible and valuable, truncate the heap and return those pages to the operating system. This operation takes an AccessExclusive lock, which blocks reads and writes. It is written to be very deferential and only runs if nothing else is trying to take a competing lock.<p>AccessExclusive is a unique lock in that it is replicated to standbys. When the writer holds the lock, reads on the standbys will be blocked. However, the writer doesn&#x27;t know about them, so its conservative approach of only acquiring the lock if there&#x27;s no contention is completely thwarted.<p>Finally, if vacuum truncate is interrupted by lock contention it must repeat a scan of the heap to ensure the blocks are still empty before proceeding with the truncation.<p>All of these details combined meant our writer got stuck in a &quot;grab lock, scan, be interrupted, release lock, grab lock, restart scan, be interrupted, release lock... etc&quot; loop. The replication of this lock to the reader seemed to have batched together, so the readers never got to run in between the loop iterations. The vacuum never actually succeeded because it kept re-scanning. We had to intervene manually to disable autovacuum and cancel the in-progress jobs.<p>We&#x27;ve hit plenty of weird postgres issues, but this was a new one for us.<p>Edit: of note is the somewhat rare lack of clarity in the postgres docs. &quot;VACUUM (without FULL)&quot; is documented as only requiring ShareUpdateExclusive, which is why autovacuum is considered safe to run. Turns out that&#x27;s not true.</text></comment> | <story><title>Explaining the Postgres iceberg</title><url>https://avestura.dev/blog/explaining-the-postgres-meme</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slotrans</author><text>Heh, this is pretty great. Is it good or bad that I know almost all of these?<p>Not sure &quot;SERIAL is non-transactional&quot; belongs at the bottom, I thought that was common knowledge... but that might be from years doing Oracle where sequences are more explicit.</text></comment> |
26,478,851 | 26,477,285 | 1 | 3 | 26,473,442 | train | <story><title>One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBX5qh09OIE</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burlesona</author><text>Just FWIW in much of the rural US you are largely exempt from building codes if you are building your own primary residence. The logic being that if you built it and you live in it and it kills you, well, you only have yourself to blame. This doesn’t apply for many town and city locations, though, as there are often local zoning controls that make you build cookie cutter garbage. But the smaller and and less regulated the area, the more likely you’re allowed to build what you want so long as you do it yourself and don’t sell it to anyone else.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>One thing that always seems to be missing from these videos (in general, because there are many of them) is step 0: how do you go about acquiring the land and the permission to build a log cabin on this land? I can&#x27;t imagine that there&#x27;s many countries in the world where there is no build code or other legislation regarding how or where buildings can be built. The last thing I&#x27;d want to do is spend an entire year building something that I would then be legally obliged to tear down.<p>If you&#x27;re felling a large amount of trees in a forest, at the bare minimum you need the blessing of the land owner (if that isn&#x27;t you). Most likely, you&#x27;ll also need in addition to this a permit to fell trees to begin with, because land owners in most countries aren&#x27;t free to simply fell any amount of trees they wish just because they own the land.<p>It&#x27;s obviously an impressive feat to build a log cabin from scratch, but since this step is so often completely omitted, I have to ask myself whether this is because it&#x27;s considered too boring, or because there are people out there who think that as long as you go far enough into the woods, you can do whatever you want because no one will notice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwiel</author><text>I&#x27;ve found that places exempt from building codes are much more common than places exempt from health code. Be sure to read up on local plumbing, waste water, septic, etc. code. They will often dictate things like how big the septic system needs to be, how big pipes need to be etc. Generally good rules to follow if you want such a system. If you want a legal outhouse or composting toilet and&#x2F;or grey water setup, there are very few places in the US which allow it so be sure to read up first.</text></comment> | <story><title>One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBX5qh09OIE</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burlesona</author><text>Just FWIW in much of the rural US you are largely exempt from building codes if you are building your own primary residence. The logic being that if you built it and you live in it and it kills you, well, you only have yourself to blame. This doesn’t apply for many town and city locations, though, as there are often local zoning controls that make you build cookie cutter garbage. But the smaller and and less regulated the area, the more likely you’re allowed to build what you want so long as you do it yourself and don’t sell it to anyone else.</text></item><item><author>hnarn</author><text>One thing that always seems to be missing from these videos (in general, because there are many of them) is step 0: how do you go about acquiring the land and the permission to build a log cabin on this land? I can&#x27;t imagine that there&#x27;s many countries in the world where there is no build code or other legislation regarding how or where buildings can be built. The last thing I&#x27;d want to do is spend an entire year building something that I would then be legally obliged to tear down.<p>If you&#x27;re felling a large amount of trees in a forest, at the bare minimum you need the blessing of the land owner (if that isn&#x27;t you). Most likely, you&#x27;ll also need in addition to this a permit to fell trees to begin with, because land owners in most countries aren&#x27;t free to simply fell any amount of trees they wish just because they own the land.<p>It&#x27;s obviously an impressive feat to build a log cabin from scratch, but since this step is so often completely omitted, I have to ask myself whether this is because it&#x27;s considered too boring, or because there are people out there who think that as long as you go far enough into the woods, you can do whatever you want because no one will notice.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnarn</author><text>Ok, but does being exempt from building codes mean you have the freedom to fell trees in the forest and build a house with them? What if you sell the lumber? Presumably the land is owned by someone, regardless of how remote it is. If you own the land and you&#x27;re exempt from building codes, are you allowed to fell any amount of tress without regulation? How do you know that the area you&#x27;re in is not protected?</text></comment> |
6,847,118 | 6,847,091 | 1 | 2 | 6,846,639 | train | <story><title>I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview</title><url>http://hownottohireadeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/no-i-will-not-hack-on-your-codebase-for-free.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyanZAG</author><text>Surely the disagreement should be obvious? If they interview 50 candidates and get each candidate to do a free day of work, they&#x27;re exploiting the candidates and the market.<p>As others have said, there is no reason not to let the candidate work on related OSS projects or on already solved tasks. Adding new features to a code base for free is not on. This is like hiring labor for your bridge building company, getting 50 people and having them drag rocks around all day and then not paying them. Feels close to illegal.</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>Too aggressive in tone for what the gripe is here. I wouldn&#x27;t hire this guy. Several of you long-time participants on Hacker News have noticed various iterations of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,[1] and if you haven&#x27;t read that, I invite you to follow the link and read it. Genuine work-sample tests are a GOOD idea in hiring, as most of the comments already here have said. Perhaps a full-day work sample feels too long to most job applicants, compared to a one-hour work sample (but how much would paying each applicant help with that?). There are also intellectual property issues here (but doesn&#x27;t freedom of contract in most countries allow a way to resolve that issue?). But he doth protest too much, methinks.<p>In any job application situation, the company&#x27;s concern is &quot;can this applicant really do the job and do it well?&quot; The applicant&#x27;s concern is &quot;will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?&quot; In general, a work-sample test is a very good idea for answering both kinds of questions, and anyway research shows that a work-sample test is a far more valid hiring procedure than most other hiring procedures that have been tried. Check my FAQ link for research citations on that topic.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5227923</a><p>P.S. Yes, I intend to touch up my FAQ draft some more and then post it to my personal website. I just bookmarked the blog post kindly submitted here as another resource to refer to as I update my FAQ.<p>AFTER EDIT: I&#x27;d be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. That helps me learn to make the FAQ better for its next posting on my website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>columbo</author><text>&gt; Surely the disagreement should be obvious? If they interview 50 candidates and get each candidate to do a free day of work, they&#x27;re exploiting the candidates and the market.<p>If the application is so simple that you can get actual productivity in someone in the first couple hours then stop trying to hire candidates and outsource the entire thing to India for a fraction of the cost.<p>Otherwise it&#x27;s a pair-programming test with massive hand-holding from another developer which is ridiculously more expensive for the company.<p>I&#x27;d choose to spend a few hours on the employer&#x27;s actual application over any other form interview.<p>Obviously there are extreme cases (hey we&#x27;d like you to spend a few weeks working on this API, you know, for the interview), but I don&#x27;t get that vibe from this article.</text></comment> | <story><title>I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview</title><url>http://hownottohireadeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/no-i-will-not-hack-on-your-codebase-for-free.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RyanZAG</author><text>Surely the disagreement should be obvious? If they interview 50 candidates and get each candidate to do a free day of work, they&#x27;re exploiting the candidates and the market.<p>As others have said, there is no reason not to let the candidate work on related OSS projects or on already solved tasks. Adding new features to a code base for free is not on. This is like hiring labor for your bridge building company, getting 50 people and having them drag rocks around all day and then not paying them. Feels close to illegal.</text></item><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>Too aggressive in tone for what the gripe is here. I wouldn&#x27;t hire this guy. Several of you long-time participants on Hacker News have noticed various iterations of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,[1] and if you haven&#x27;t read that, I invite you to follow the link and read it. Genuine work-sample tests are a GOOD idea in hiring, as most of the comments already here have said. Perhaps a full-day work sample feels too long to most job applicants, compared to a one-hour work sample (but how much would paying each applicant help with that?). There are also intellectual property issues here (but doesn&#x27;t freedom of contract in most countries allow a way to resolve that issue?). But he doth protest too much, methinks.<p>In any job application situation, the company&#x27;s concern is &quot;can this applicant really do the job and do it well?&quot; The applicant&#x27;s concern is &quot;will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?&quot; In general, a work-sample test is a very good idea for answering both kinds of questions, and anyway research shows that a work-sample test is a far more valid hiring procedure than most other hiring procedures that have been tried. Check my FAQ link for research citations on that topic.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5227923</a><p>P.S. Yes, I intend to touch up my FAQ draft some more and then post it to my personal website. I just bookmarked the blog post kindly submitted here as another resource to refer to as I update my FAQ.<p>AFTER EDIT: I&#x27;d be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. That helps me learn to make the FAQ better for its next posting on my website.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fennecfoxen</author><text>Heyo. From time to time I do interviews at my employer which involve having someone hack on our code base, pair-programming style, for around an hour-ish.<p>But the work isn&#x27;t <i>free</i>. Sure, the company isn&#x27;t paying you, but the company is paying me, and you can bet that we&#x27;re not getting as much done as we would get done on an interview-free day. I don&#x27;t think anyone&#x27;s ever been under the delusion that we&#x27;re just trying to get cheap labor to build our codebase for us.</text></comment> |
33,398,453 | 33,396,373 | 1 | 3 | 33,352,668 | train | <story><title>The Essential Philip K. Dick</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/books/best-philip-k-dick-novels.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>There&#x27;s a bit in Ubik that stays in my mind. Joe Chip gets into an
argument with his apartment door that refuses to open for him because
he owes it money. I kinda got that the door was an autonomous
money-making agent that held him hostage - a conversation reminiscent
of that between Doolittle and the Bomb in Dark Star. It made me see
the ridiculous side and ultimate absurdity of micropayments leading to
world where a dollar value is put on everything so that every silly
little thing becomes a coin operated nuisance whose actual function is
replaced by squeezing a few more micro-credits out of you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>They call that &quot;web3&quot; nowadays, but you&#x27;re supposed to enjoy it because you can buy shares in the specific door that won&#x27;t open for you and they might triple in value while you&#x27;re locked in.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Essential Philip K. Dick</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/books/best-philip-k-dick-novels.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonrandomstring</author><text>There&#x27;s a bit in Ubik that stays in my mind. Joe Chip gets into an
argument with his apartment door that refuses to open for him because
he owes it money. I kinda got that the door was an autonomous
money-making agent that held him hostage - a conversation reminiscent
of that between Doolittle and the Bomb in Dark Star. It made me see
the ridiculous side and ultimate absurdity of micropayments leading to
world where a dollar value is put on everything so that every silly
little thing becomes a coin operated nuisance whose actual function is
replaced by squeezing a few more micro-credits out of you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2Gkashmiri</author><text>Years ago I read about cloud computing as getting a free vacation but being charged for each sand particle you touch, small on its own but it gets too ridiculous after some time</text></comment> |
14,338,645 | 14,338,355 | 1 | 3 | 14,337,569 | train | <story><title>Lessons from last week’s cyberattack</title><url>https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>&gt; Instead what will happen is more tightening of the walled garden<p>You know what? I&#x27;m starting to get excited for the walled garden to get more walls.<p>Native desktop applications get far too many permissions by default - its crazy that any desktop application, once running can register itself at startup, see all my files (created by any application), register system-wide keyloggers, take screenshots of other applications and download my contacts list, all without my permission. We don&#x27;t let web apps do that, because web app developers aren&#x27;t trusted by default. We don&#x27;t let mobile apps do that, because mobile app developers aren&#x27;t trusted by default. Why on earth do we implicitly trust any executable file run on the desktop so much?<p>Telling users not to double click on executables is obviously not working. Even for experienced users I have no idea whether some random app on the internet is trustworthy. Its a reverse lottery. I also suspect ransomware like this one would have been slowed down if it needed explicit user permission to read &amp; modify files on disk.<p>We even know what the sandbox should look like, because we have two working examples in the form of the web and mobile. And we have sandboxing support &amp; APIs in most operating systems. We&#x27;re just missing the UI part.<p>I&#x27;m imagining something like:<p>- All apps get signed by the developer (Lean on SSL? Not sure the chain here.)<p>- The app needs to request capabilities from the user, like on iOS. &quot;App X by Y developer wants permission to read the files in your home directory&quot;. (&#x2F; Read your contacts &#x2F; Register at startup &#x2F; Take screenshots &#x2F; Modify these files).<p>- Capabilities can be viewed and revoked at a system-wide level in the control panel &#x2F; system preferences.</text></item><item><author>Kholo</author><text>Complete BS. This is what happens when you have top class PR at your disposal to define the narrative.<p>Microsoft is responsible for their shit software getting exploited first and foremost. Seriously fine Microsoft and by day after tomorrow that 3500 security engineer number will jump to something realistic.<p>Instead what will happen is more tightening of the walled garden, overcharging of support&#x2F;security contracts and propping up of another billionaire or two. I can hear the whisky glasses clinking.<p>Corporations do not get to set the agenda and the narrative. When they are allowed to, the results are very predictable - in this case Microsoft will make more than they loose. Who here disagrees that is going to happen? And who here believes that is right?<p>The answer is simple whether its Microsoft today or Facebook and Google tomorrow win-win should not be an option when such things happen.</text></item><item><author>loteck</author><text>The quote bombshell here, and what hasnt yet gotten much attention since sysadmins the world over are busy dealing with fallout, is that the NSA and therefore the US government is directly responsible for the current global cyber-carnage. We developed the capability, we chose to keep it unpatched, we tried to keep it secret, we lost control of it.<p>This has similarities in type, if not in horror, to the development and subsequent spread of nuclear weapons. When we lost control of those secrets, it was a BFD [0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atomic_spies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atomic_spies</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beagle3</author><text>That&#x27;s fine and dandy - I&#x27;m all for it, in fact, I configure my systems thus with 3rd party tools as much as I can. Android is mostly like this (with a less than perfect implementation)<p>But when people talk of &quot;walled gardens&quot;, they mostly refer to the guardian at the entrance. Only Apple decides what runs on iOS, only Microsoft decides whats in the App Shop. That&#x27;s NOT good for anyone (except Apple and Microsoft).<p>Sure, make users jump through hoops to install alternate stores, and warn them up the wazoo when they do that. But do let them, or general purpose computing as we know it is gone.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons from last week’s cyberattack</title><url>https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/05/14/need-urgent-collective-action-keep-people-safe-online-lessons-last-weeks-cyberattack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>&gt; Instead what will happen is more tightening of the walled garden<p>You know what? I&#x27;m starting to get excited for the walled garden to get more walls.<p>Native desktop applications get far too many permissions by default - its crazy that any desktop application, once running can register itself at startup, see all my files (created by any application), register system-wide keyloggers, take screenshots of other applications and download my contacts list, all without my permission. We don&#x27;t let web apps do that, because web app developers aren&#x27;t trusted by default. We don&#x27;t let mobile apps do that, because mobile app developers aren&#x27;t trusted by default. Why on earth do we implicitly trust any executable file run on the desktop so much?<p>Telling users not to double click on executables is obviously not working. Even for experienced users I have no idea whether some random app on the internet is trustworthy. Its a reverse lottery. I also suspect ransomware like this one would have been slowed down if it needed explicit user permission to read &amp; modify files on disk.<p>We even know what the sandbox should look like, because we have two working examples in the form of the web and mobile. And we have sandboxing support &amp; APIs in most operating systems. We&#x27;re just missing the UI part.<p>I&#x27;m imagining something like:<p>- All apps get signed by the developer (Lean on SSL? Not sure the chain here.)<p>- The app needs to request capabilities from the user, like on iOS. &quot;App X by Y developer wants permission to read the files in your home directory&quot;. (&#x2F; Read your contacts &#x2F; Register at startup &#x2F; Take screenshots &#x2F; Modify these files).<p>- Capabilities can be viewed and revoked at a system-wide level in the control panel &#x2F; system preferences.</text></item><item><author>Kholo</author><text>Complete BS. This is what happens when you have top class PR at your disposal to define the narrative.<p>Microsoft is responsible for their shit software getting exploited first and foremost. Seriously fine Microsoft and by day after tomorrow that 3500 security engineer number will jump to something realistic.<p>Instead what will happen is more tightening of the walled garden, overcharging of support&#x2F;security contracts and propping up of another billionaire or two. I can hear the whisky glasses clinking.<p>Corporations do not get to set the agenda and the narrative. When they are allowed to, the results are very predictable - in this case Microsoft will make more than they loose. Who here disagrees that is going to happen? And who here believes that is right?<p>The answer is simple whether its Microsoft today or Facebook and Google tomorrow win-win should not be an option when such things happen.</text></item><item><author>loteck</author><text>The quote bombshell here, and what hasnt yet gotten much attention since sysadmins the world over are busy dealing with fallout, is that the NSA and therefore the US government is directly responsible for the current global cyber-carnage. We developed the capability, we chose to keep it unpatched, we tried to keep it secret, we lost control of it.<p>This has similarities in type, if not in horror, to the development and subsequent spread of nuclear weapons. When we lost control of those secrets, it was a BFD [0].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atomic_spies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atomic_spies</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pharrlax</author><text>&gt;You know what? I&#x27;m starting to get excited for the walled garden to get more walls.<p>Yep. What developer types don&#x27;t like to admit is that for the average user, who doesn&#x27;t use the features excluded by the walled garden anyway, the tradeoff is well worth the security gains.</text></comment> |
22,044,575 | 22,044,642 | 1 | 2 | 22,044,465 | train | <story><title>Equinix is acquiring Packet</title><url>https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drej</author><text>A fun story! Packet support contacted me one day last fall to ask about my business. I said I had none, I used Packet years before then for personal projects and only for a few days. Then they asked what my plans were for the 13 VMs I had running. I knew of no such VMs.<p>I guess my account got pwned.<p>They asked how I&#x27;d pay for these - $900 worth I think - since I didn&#x27;t have a valid card in their system (the previous one expired since I last used Packet). I told them to stop the VMs and allow me to reset my credentials. I also asked them to investigate their logs and geolocate all the users that logged into my account. I was also curious they actually let someone log into the account from a new IP (without notifying me) and also allowed them to run instances without a valid card.<p>They blocked my account, which also blocked this support thread. So I started a new thread from an alternative e-mail address to resolve the issues.<p>I never heard from them again.</text></comment> | <story><title>Equinix is acquiring Packet</title><url>https://www.packet.com/blog/ping-power-processors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>q3k</author><text>Likely bad news and writing on the wall for the open-but-competitive culture at Packet. Equinix has been historically turning every single acquisition into a closed-off enterprise-only product&#x2F;service, especially in the IXP space.</text></comment> |
12,857,190 | 12,857,051 | 1 | 2 | 12,854,895 | train | <story><title>Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux</title><url>https://www.darlinghq.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.)<p>The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web.<p>I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have <i>ever</i> seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You&#x27;d think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something.<p>The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit &#x2F;r&#x2F;linux. Most comments there amounted to &quot;web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project).&quot; Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias.<p>I ended up taking the post down for two reasons:<p>(1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn&#x27;t worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do.<p>(2) This convinced me that the &quot;desktop Linux&quot; community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it&#x27;s a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.</text></item><item><author>peatmoss</author><text>I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer.<p>But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs.<p>Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.</text></item><item><author>hapless</author><text>If you&#x27;re interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;gnustep&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;gnustep&#x2F;</a><p>Most of &quot;cocoa&quot; came from the OPENSTEP specification, and GNUstep offers quite a complete implementation.</text></item><item><author>jernfrost</author><text>I am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I&#x27;d love to make stuff available on Linux.<p>I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac.<p>The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peatmoss</author><text>I am truly sorry you caught the brunt of the toxic parts of the Linux community. It&#x27;s a part of the community that has existed since I first started using Linux in the mid 90s. It sounds like you offered some thoughts about what you felt was the right thing to do, and people reacted violently to it.<p>I personally <i>wish</i> we had a first class, broadly adopted Free *nix desktop option with native GUI and the like. I am not necessarily a fan of extending the web to all parts of my computing experience. However, what you described is very much what is happening with Chromebooks--so maybe your normative statements about the Linux desktop just required the implementation and backing by a Google.<p>That all said, I wouldn&#x27;t write off desktop Linux along with the caustic communities you&#x27;ve found. I did a career switch to urban planning some years ago now, and what I&#x27;ve discovered is that every community has a majority group of mostly reasonable, mostly disengaged people along with a smaller group of really loud, difficult people. In that sense, Linux user communities feel normal to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux</title><url>https://www.darlinghq.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>api</author><text>I wrote a blog post once about how the web is the new presentation layer for the desktop, that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that a desktop OS (e.g. a Linux distro) should just fully embrace it by implementing a desktop that runs 100% via web technologies. Local and remote web apps could coexist as first class citizens, etc. I basically argued that HTML+JS+CSS renderers are the new X and that HTTP(S) is the new X11 protocol-- or at least that these parts occupy an analogous position in the stack to what X originally was. (They are technically quite different of course.)<p>The web is the OSS GUI stack with the largest, most diverse, and most active developer community, and with it you get to ride on the coattails of multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google that have significant investments in the web.<p>I got DDOSed and threatened. I got some of the most insane all-caps slobbering and frothing at the mouth feedback I have <i>ever</i> seen in all my years of interacting with any developer community. You&#x27;d think I went into a conservative church and gave a talk about evidence for abortion in the Bible or something.<p>The vast majority of this came after the article got posted to Reddit &#x2F;r&#x2F;linux. Most comments there amounted to &quot;web sucks and JS coders are weenies and next year will be the year of the Linux desktop as soon as we finish the next rewrite of (insert favorite project).&quot; Intelligent criticism is good but the vast majority of the comments I read responded to none of the core points of my post and amounted to not much more than developer community religious bias.<p>I ended up taking the post down for two reasons:<p>(1) I got sick of getting DDOSed and it wasn&#x27;t worth it to me to fight just to get an off the cuff opinion out there. I am not deeply invested in this and have better things to do.<p>(2) This convinced me that the &quot;desktop Linux&quot; community is toxic in the extreme and should be avoided. This includes avoiding providing any input whatsoever to that community. Also caused me to become a lot less loyal to Linux in general, since it&#x27;s a community full of people who respond to any opinion differing from their own with absurd amounts of hate and vitriol.</text></item><item><author>peatmoss</author><text>I go back and forth on whether this would truly be useful. 10-15 years ago, having a fully baked, first class, slavishly source compatible implementation of GNUstep with broad adoption throughout Linux land would have likely been a game changer.<p>But now, it seems webified apps are king. The handful of native apps that people use are already satisfactorily implementable on Linux. In fact, a great number of native apps are being implemented on Linux in spite of the GUI bits not being source compatible with OS X or Windows. The major holdouts (MS Office, Adobe CS) likely have more to do with business reasons that factor much more than porting costs.<p>Now, if GNUstep were to become a compelling alternative to XCode for developing iOS apps, I could absolutely see that tide lifting the Linux fleet.</text></item><item><author>hapless</author><text>If you&#x27;re interested in porting code, many of the OSX core libraries are available as part of the GNUstep project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;gnustep&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;gnustep&#x2F;</a><p>Most of &quot;cocoa&quot; came from the OPENSTEP specification, and GNUstep offers quite a complete implementation.</text></item><item><author>jernfrost</author><text>I am hoping that with cross platform Swift we can start seeing more libraries to help us port Mac apps to Linux. I am a Mac developer but I&#x27;d love to make stuff available on Linux.<p>I really like Linux as a backup plan, in case Apple totally drops the ball on professionals on the Mac.<p>The Linux desktop is getting pretty good, but it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woodrowbarlow</author><text>While I agree with your view of HTML+CSS+JS in relation to X and would even go as far as to say the shift towards &quot;webified&quot; apps is (mostly) a good thing, it still saddens me as a developer to see it happening. It&#x27;s an ecosystem that doesn&#x27;t discourage lazy practices and it makes me feel unimportant because modern computers can more or less keep up with even the most poorly-written webified apps. I think it&#x27;s that sentiment that caused the lash-out you describe.<p>But hey, that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m in embedded development. That field is still safe for now.</text></comment> |
35,386,266 | 35,385,167 | 1 | 3 | 35,369,773 | train | <story><title>Brains speed up perception by guessing what's next (2019)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-speed-up-perception-by-guessing-whats-next-20190502/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Agingcoder</author><text>This might be tangentially related - I&#x27;m not sure. I&#x27;ve recently started playing jazz piano, after years of classical piano.<p>Now, I&#x27;m supposed to be a reasonably good sight reader, or at least that&#x27;s what I thought. The improv part of jazz I&#x27;m not good at but I get, but I&#x27;ve also tried playing from transcriptions (Bill Evans in particular), and have found I&#x27;m extremely slow at reading the music.<p>After thinking about it, I suspect it&#x27;s because the music makes no sense to me so I can&#x27;t guess what&#x27;s coming ( which is what I do with classical music). So while I anticipate with classical music and just confirm after the fact&#x2F;right when the note actually shows up, with Bill Evans I have to think hard and actually confirm everything.<p>My ears help but not much, since &#x27;confirming&#x27; the sound is much harder with jazz than with classical music (it&#x27;s unexpected , so again, there&#x27;s some kind of delay between &#x27;I hear the note&#x27; and &#x27;ok that&#x27;s right&#x27; while there&#x27;s essentially no delay with classical music where my brain is kind of &#x27;primed for acceptance&#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chaps</author><text>I&#x27;m a drummer with loads of improv, including a fair amount of jazz. What&#x27;s interesting is that over time what&#x27;s sounded like (mostly) random noise with no pattern has progressively turned into sensicle flows from moment to moment -- it&#x27;s definitely a predictive process (both brain-wize and nervous system!). It&#x27;s manifested in surprising ways, like having a forward predictive understanding of which hand should be where depending what I want to play.<p>Shifting between large shifts during improv can be mentally taxing, very much the same feeling of trying to remember the name of something or someone. But just like with names, once you get that first mental hint (like a vowel), predicting what comes next just falls into place.</text></comment> | <story><title>Brains speed up perception by guessing what's next (2019)</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-speed-up-perception-by-guessing-whats-next-20190502/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Agingcoder</author><text>This might be tangentially related - I&#x27;m not sure. I&#x27;ve recently started playing jazz piano, after years of classical piano.<p>Now, I&#x27;m supposed to be a reasonably good sight reader, or at least that&#x27;s what I thought. The improv part of jazz I&#x27;m not good at but I get, but I&#x27;ve also tried playing from transcriptions (Bill Evans in particular), and have found I&#x27;m extremely slow at reading the music.<p>After thinking about it, I suspect it&#x27;s because the music makes no sense to me so I can&#x27;t guess what&#x27;s coming ( which is what I do with classical music). So while I anticipate with classical music and just confirm after the fact&#x2F;right when the note actually shows up, with Bill Evans I have to think hard and actually confirm everything.<p>My ears help but not much, since &#x27;confirming&#x27; the sound is much harder with jazz than with classical music (it&#x27;s unexpected , so again, there&#x27;s some kind of delay between &#x27;I hear the note&#x27; and &#x27;ok that&#x27;s right&#x27; while there&#x27;s essentially no delay with classical music where my brain is kind of &#x27;primed for acceptance&#x27;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Kaijo</author><text>I get this. With anything from the core classical repertoire, the obvious major composers, to a good listener, you almost already know the piece before you learn it. With jazz standards too, but there is much more flexibility required in actually rendering them.<p>Part of the article seems to be confirming a neurobiological basis for something quite common-sensical to me.<p>From how you describe your issue I suspect there are things from the more recent classical repertoire that would stump you beyond the level of Bill Evans transcriptions. Bill Evans is still at least in a relatively &quot;accessible&#x2F;listenable&quot; harmonic idiom.<p>Have you tried reading through any atonal&#x2F;serial works of the Second Viennese School? Or 20th century classical composers like Ligeti, Elliott Carter, or contemporary pieces like Unsuk Chin&#x27;s piano etudes, or Birtwistle&#x27;s &quot;Clocks&quot;? I&#x27;m a good sight reader too but that&#x27;s where I really hit a wall. This is music that provokes a strong negative reaction in many people. In the language of the article, their sensory expectations are defied. I think to really love this music (as I really do), you will have had to grapple with and deeply internalize things about compositional structure, so that what is a theme, a countersubject, a commentary, a development, an ornamentation, a point of rhythmic or textural elaboration, etc. are all still readily evident to the ear, and thus satisfy the ear, even if it&#x27;s all occuring in an alien harmonic context.</text></comment> |
8,103,445 | 8,103,485 | 1 | 3 | 8,102,816 | train | <story><title>The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream</title><url>http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ufmace</author><text>My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households.<p>Build a suburban &quot;gated community&quot; for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they&#x27;re obligated to constantly maintain, don&#x27;t allow any commercial buildings in because they&#x27;re considered ugly, and you get an environment where it&#x27;s pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>modoc</author><text>Your vision of a suburb has very little to do with the reality of my suburban existence. It&#x27;s like someone from the country talking about the horribly dangerous ugly city with its filthy air, roving gangs shooting strangers, and huge rats running in the streets.<p>I&#x27;m not saying suburbs are perfect, but you&#x27;ve basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream</title><url>http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ufmace</author><text>My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households.<p>Build a suburban &quot;gated community&quot; for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they&#x27;re obligated to constantly maintain, don&#x27;t allow any commercial buildings in because they&#x27;re considered ugly, and you get an environment where it&#x27;s pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>altcognito</author><text>&gt; and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors<p>This is completely unfair. I can tell you that from living in my suburban home over the past 10 years that over time I have come to know every single person who lives on my street. You have children that play together, that goto school together (and you may serve on the PTO together with those same neighbors), you have trees that you plant, fences that are built together. You see each other at garage sales. If you have an HOA, you likely maintain a common area together (maybe a pool)<p>On the other hand, there are those who complain how &quot;up in everybody&#x27;s business&quot; the neighbors are.<p>All I can say is that everywhere is different, perspective is everything. I&#x27;ve live in major cities and talked to people who in major cities and &quot;knowing your neighbors&quot; is more reflective of who your neighbors are than it is of the geographical layout. (I also have neighbors who I have little interaction with, and that&#x27;s just fine)</text></comment> |
32,887,114 | 32,886,708 | 1 | 2 | 32,885,774 | train | <story><title>GTA VI Leak [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az2wt7sRuHM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eduard</author><text>&gt; The problem with GTA is that it&#x27;s a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience.<p>What?</text></item><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what kind of innovations Rockstar is able to come up with for the next GTA, nothing stands out to me from these development leaks.<p>The problem with GTA is that it&#x27;s a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience. Imagine if it included more realistic elements like economics and persistent characters. You could decide you have a vendetta against Bob and steal his cheese every time he goes out shopping for groceries. Heck, you could become the cheese kingpin and monopolize access to cheese. Although a more thematic approach would probably have to do with drugs, which doesn&#x27;t seem like too far of a bridge to jump considering the game genre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fudgefactorfive</author><text>This is famously an issue with Rockstar style missions, they are so adherent to a script that even minor Playstyle variations lead to logical deadlocks. Red Dead 2 had the same issue, players finding paths to the door they know stuff is happening behind only for them to literally not function until an NPC points them out to you.<p>I want a world where I can figure out what to do next and that still functions, not one where Character X has to tell me to move to the next room for the doors to work as doors.</text></comment> | <story><title>GTA VI Leak [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az2wt7sRuHM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Eduard</author><text>&gt; The problem with GTA is that it&#x27;s a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience.<p>What?</text></item><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what kind of innovations Rockstar is able to come up with for the next GTA, nothing stands out to me from these development leaks.<p>The problem with GTA is that it&#x27;s a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience. Imagine if it included more realistic elements like economics and persistent characters. You could decide you have a vendetta against Bob and steal his cheese every time he goes out shopping for groceries. Heck, you could become the cheese kingpin and monopolize access to cheese. Although a more thematic approach would probably have to do with drugs, which doesn&#x27;t seem like too far of a bridge to jump considering the game genre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>syndacks</author><text>Most missions:
- get to some location (after a cut scene dialogue)
- do the task (with some unique element ie kill the character who was fucking someone’s wife)
- return to the original location</text></comment> |
19,861,768 | 19,861,809 | 1 | 3 | 19,859,395 | train | <story><title>Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop</title><url>https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apocalyptic0n3</author><text>Linus Tech Tips put out a video this week on Floatplane about the Pinebook (not the Pro edition) and it was woefully underpowered. CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates&#x2F;new software to get it running) and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops. The hardware in it and their tablet and phone prototype are several generations out of date (easiest example is WiFi only being 802.11n and single band). They were also unable to get Windows running on it when they tried using a Raspberry Pi image, if that is something you care about. Pine64 themselves claim that the machine is not a daily driver.<p>The Pinebook Pro looks more respectable hardware-wise, but I would avoid looking at it as a daily driver until you can find reviews of it saying otherwise. I had been looking at the phone a few days before and was astonished at how outdated the hardware was, even for an open source device that is possibly upgradeable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>X-Istence</author><text>I own one of the original Pinebooks, and for $99 it is a great little machine.<p>Comparing it to my MacBook Pro... it&#x27;s terrible.<p>It has some flaws, and it may be underpowered for things like YouTube, it works flawlessly as a small note taker that has an extremely long battery life and a decent screen&#x2F;keyboard. It&#x27;s also really nice for having a Linux machine around that most dongles&#x2F;serial consoles just work with when you head into the datacenter to deal with a Cisco device that isn&#x27;t playing nice.<p>For the price point, you get a lot. As an owner of a Pinebook, I am looking forward to the Pinebook Pro.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pinebook – Powerful, Metal and Open Source ARM 64-Bit Laptop</title><url>https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apocalyptic0n3</author><text>Linus Tech Tips put out a video this week on Floatplane about the Pinebook (not the Pro edition) and it was woefully underpowered. CPU was compared to the PS3 and GPU was compared to the original Xbox, for reference. It barely ran with the stock software (they had to install updates&#x2F;new software to get it running) and was unable to play a 480p YouTube video fullscreen without noticeable frame drops. The hardware in it and their tablet and phone prototype are several generations out of date (easiest example is WiFi only being 802.11n and single band). They were also unable to get Windows running on it when they tried using a Raspberry Pi image, if that is something you care about. Pine64 themselves claim that the machine is not a daily driver.<p>The Pinebook Pro looks more respectable hardware-wise, but I would avoid looking at it as a daily driver until you can find reviews of it saying otherwise. I had been looking at the phone a few days before and was astonished at how outdated the hardware was, even for an open source device that is possibly upgradeable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blu42</author><text>I have a RK3399-based (same chip as in the PBP) chromebook -- ASUS Chromebook Flip CA101P -- as one of my daily rides. It has no issue playing 1080@60fps &amp; 4K@30 youtubes (I cannot physically output more than 4K@30 to my TV). Its Chrome browser is among the fastest browser experiences I get in my daily routine (which includes linux and windows desktops). On top of it, that chromebook lasts 6-10h of productive usage on a single charge.<p>Of course, Google&#x27;s ChromeOS level of polish is a far cry from most &#x27;freely assembled&#x27; distros out there, but last time I checked, the ubuntu&#x2F;debian images for the PBP were getting there in terms of working features and performance.</text></comment> |
28,259,257 | 28,259,039 | 1 | 3 | 28,258,189 | train | <story><title>An Opinionated Guide to Xargs</title><url>https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/08/xargs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>I frequently find myself reaching for this pattern instead of xargs:<p><pre><code> do_something | ( while read -r v; do
. . .
done )
</code></pre>
I’ve found that it has fewer edge cases (except it creates a subshell, which can be avoided in some shells by using braces instead of parens)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aaaaaaaaaaab</author><text>Some additional tips:<p>1. You don&#x27;t need the parentheses.<p>2. If you use process substitution [1] instead of a pipe, you will stay in the same process and can modify variables of the enclosing scope:<p><pre><code> i=0
while read -r v; do
...
i=$(( i + 1))
done &lt; &lt;(do_something)
</code></pre>
The drawback is that this way `do_something` has to come after `done`, but that&#x27;s bash for you ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;bash&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Process-Substitution.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;bash&#x2F;manual&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;Process-S...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Opinionated Guide to Xargs</title><url>https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/08/xargs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fiddlerwoaroof</author><text>I frequently find myself reaching for this pattern instead of xargs:<p><pre><code> do_something | ( while read -r v; do
. . .
done )
</code></pre>
I’ve found that it has fewer edge cases (except it creates a subshell, which can be avoided in some shells by using braces instead of parens)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ptspts</author><text>For thousands of arguments this sloution is much slower (high CPU usage) than xargs, because either it implements the logic as a shell script (slow) or it runs an external program for each argument (slow).</text></comment> |
4,823,612 | 4,822,318 | 1 | 2 | 4,821,488 | train | <story><title>Introducing GNU Guix</title><url>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-11/msg00000.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dhruvbird</author><text>Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?</text></item><item><author>josteink</author><text><i>Why utilize scheme?</i><p>If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening.<p>Why <i>not</i> scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power.<p>It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full architect should you need to. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.</text></item><item><author>nwmcsween</author><text>It seems everyone reinvents package management poorly again and again. Some things that obviously stand out to me:<p>* Why utilize scheme? It's declaritive utilize a markup like yaml, don't go off the deep end because you can.<p>* Utilize OS specific features such as jails, bind mounts, namespaces, you can have the same NIX style separation without destroying FHS.<p>* Parse the config files for options, it's easy cmake, autocrap, etc all have parsable formatting this way you don't need to mess with adding build time options.<p>* Parse the source for dependencies, there are lots of white papers of people doing this and beating human made spec files.<p>* Utilize machine learning for classification of options, dependency resolution (utilizing previous data).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sparkie</author><text>Packages are mostly just declarations of how you want a package to be built/installed, but sometimes they require additional logic or computation. Using python would require a separate file format to put definitions into (e.g, YAML), and those definitions would need a rigid schema and versioning system. Some existing package managers take this approach, but what happens when you need a feature that doesn't exist in the declarative schema? You would need to extend the YAML format and bump the version numbers to allow your new features.<p>On the other hand, a LISP does not need a distinction between a declarative format and the computation language itself - it does both in a consistent syntax. (Homoiconicity is the term). It makes it much simpler to mix your declarations and computations, alleviating much of the need for a rigid specification on package definitions.<p>If you look at places where the former system is used, you'll find they usually age pretty quickly - or have many version increments because the original design omitted features people wanted in their package definitions. In effect, this leads to standards proliferation, because people invent new systems when the existing ones don't do what they need. Rather than trying to second guess the features people might need, it can be easier to just give them the ability to add them when they want.<p>A recent example of the former system is this project from GNOME: <a href="https://live.gnome.org/BuilDj" rel="nofollow">https://live.gnome.org/BuilDj</a>. If you look at what it's trying to do, it really just wants to reinvent makefiles in YAML. A clear example of NIH, which will fail because as soon as someone needs to do something which their YAML schema doesn't support, it's a useless tool.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introducing GNU Guix</title><url>http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/2012-11/msg00000.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dhruvbird</author><text>Might as well use python because of greater?? adoption and ease of use?</text></item><item><author>josteink</author><text><i>Why utilize scheme?</i><p>If emacs has thaught us anything, it is that when you give people a fully featured language to fool around with, things you could never imagine can start happening.<p>Why <i>not</i> scheme? It's liberally licensed and already has mind-share. It's a simple, no fuzz language with little obfuscating magic and great expressive power.<p>It allows you to build your solutions as bare-bones as you like or go on full architect should you need to. Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.</text></item><item><author>nwmcsween</author><text>It seems everyone reinvents package management poorly again and again. Some things that obviously stand out to me:<p>* Why utilize scheme? It's declaritive utilize a markup like yaml, don't go off the deep end because you can.<p>* Utilize OS specific features such as jails, bind mounts, namespaces, you can have the same NIX style separation without destroying FHS.<p>* Parse the config files for options, it's easy cmake, autocrap, etc all have parsable formatting this way you don't need to mess with adding build time options.<p>* Parse the source for dependencies, there are lots of white papers of people doing this and beating human made spec files.<p>* Utilize machine learning for classification of options, dependency resolution (utilizing previous data).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josteink</author><text>Not to start a flame-war, but I would argue that Python is not as fully featured as a LISP language-wise.<p>And as far as LISPs go, Scheme is extremely simplistic and friendly.</text></comment> |
25,486,952 | 25,486,303 | 1 | 2 | 25,485,841 | train | <story><title>Building a simple neural net in Java</title><url>https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/05/03/building-a-simple-neural-net-in-java</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>&gt; A neural net is a software representation of how the brain works<p>A NN shares as much with the brain, as a decision tree does with a forest: nothing at all.<p>It would be preferable to completely dispense with any talk of the brain, and introduce it simply as a modified form of (high school) linear regression.<p>Any biological talk at this point is unhelpful mystification.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timkam</author><text>One can perhaps say: &quot;A neural net is a collection of machine learning approaches that are somewhat inspired by the human brain. However, neural nets have little to do with how the brain actually works.&quot; I think this statement (or a similar, more accurate version) is actually useful, because the name &quot;neural net&quot; is somewhat deceiving.</text></comment> | <story><title>Building a simple neural net in Java</title><url>https://smalldata.tech/blog/2016/05/03/building-a-simple-neural-net-in-java</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>&gt; A neural net is a software representation of how the brain works<p>A NN shares as much with the brain, as a decision tree does with a forest: nothing at all.<p>It would be preferable to completely dispense with any talk of the brain, and introduce it simply as a modified form of (high school) linear regression.<p>Any biological talk at this point is unhelpful mystification.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curioushacking</author><text>I agree with you that the biological inspiration for a neural network is tenuous at best. Especially the basic two-layer network outlined here.<p>However at least for visual perception, there is some scientific basis for convolutional neural networks having some properties to biological visual perception. The work of Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated visual cortex activations that look very similar to the first layers of CNN kernels.<p>ref: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowingneurons.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;hubel-and-wiesel-the-neural-basis-of-visual-perception&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowingneurons.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;29&#x2F;hubel-and-wiesel-the-n...</a></text></comment> |
24,939,505 | 24,939,437 | 1 | 2 | 24,933,054 | train | <story><title>My Resignation from the Intercept</title><url>https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.<p>It&#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which <i>actually</i> made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.</text></item><item><author>jerry1979</author><text>NYT also helped sell America into Iraq.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>&gt; Mind you I&#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now<p>WaPo and NYT aren&#x27;t trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.<p>I&#x27;m still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.<p>WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it&#x27;s not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They&#x27;re expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.<p>All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I&#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.<p>Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it&#x27;s also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we&#x27;re going to get are &quot;tabloids for politics&quot; - and that is what we see. It&#x27;s just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.<p>Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the &quot;opposite side&quot; media as tabloid-like, it&#x27;s been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it&#x27;s still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam&#x27;s Razor to their own.<p>This does mean that there&#x27;s a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it&#x27;s critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jkhdigital</author><text>The Bush administration offered the choice, and a bipartisan majority of congress took it. No need to invoke tribalism and blame an impersonal mass of people--we know the names of the specific individuals involved.</text></comment> | <story><title>My Resignation from the Intercept</title><url>https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>That one factoid, namely that two of their writers were of the wrong persuasion almost 20 years ago, seems to be the extend of criticism people can actually come up with when put on the spot. Even though they had plenty of opposition against the war on staff and on paper, and very few of their readers were likely to change their opinion on that topic. And, not being having the presidency and Congress at that point not being neccessary for a declaration of war, their mostly Democratic audience had little to no influence on events.<p>It&#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party, which <i>actually</i> made the decision to invade Iraq. And also to lie to the world, its citizens, and, yes, those people at the Times that were naive enough to believe them.</text></item><item><author>jerry1979</author><text>NYT also helped sell America into Iraq.</text></item><item><author>dmix</author><text>&gt; Mind you I&#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now<p>WaPo and NYT aren&#x27;t trash but they have fallen mightly. Which sucks because NYT easily has one of the best web design teams on the internet IMO and I used to look forward to reading it daily for over a decade.<p>I&#x27;m still angry that they chose to go all Buzzfeed and hammer it everywhere politicially on their website.<p>WSJ has been a fine replacement, but it&#x27;s not as extensive or big as NYT. I just hope things return to a bit more normal after the US election.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>This is why the Economist, FT and the WSJ still have a somewhat positive reputation. They&#x27;re expensive and tend to write about things that are important, not sensational.<p>All other publications are slowly falling victim to the parametdynamicser of the entertainment game, including ones that were also in that bracket not long ago. Mind you I&#x27;m not saying WaPo and NYT are trash now, they did start with a high rep and try to square the circle by staying there and getting people to pay for it.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The media has fallen into the well-known trap of optimizing the wrong KPI. You want to maximize trust with the public, not engagement, if you want your media company to survive if its value proposition is providing journalism and the usual benefits that come with a free press.<p>Unfortunately, not only is engagement the wrong metric, but it&#x27;s also one which incentivizes the undermining of the actual metric you need to be optimizing. This results in a negative feedback loop, and the logical outcome is that all media companies who focus on the engagement KPI will, in the limit, become tabloids - pure entertainment, no trust. Since most outlets were already on their way to becoming politics-focused, what we&#x27;re going to get are &quot;tabloids for politics&quot; - and that is what we see. It&#x27;s just a matter of when the public accepts this transition has occurred, not if it is happening.<p>Getting the public to accept this has proven challenging - despite the fact that many clearly see the &quot;opposite side&quot; media as tabloid-like, it&#x27;s been hard for the same people to accept that their own chosen media sources, who tell them things they agree with, are no different in this regard. The resistance of course is due to all the usual human biases, but it&#x27;s still strange when people can see it so obviously in the media they disagree with and not apply Occam&#x27;s Razor to their own.<p>This does mean that there&#x27;s a huge opportunity if you assume trust is something people will pay for. Substack seems to provide early evidence that this is the case. Fortunately, I think the market will correct this error - and it&#x27;s critical it does, because a free press is essential to ensuring our society continues without increasing oppression or war.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brigandish</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s noticeable that nobody ever faults the Republican Party<p>2008 brought a Democrat president along with an increased Democrat majority in both houses, so if they weren&#x27;t faulted at the time (and they were) then they were certainly faulted just a few years later.</text></comment> |
33,989,665 | 33,989,639 | 1 | 2 | 33,988,345 | train | <story><title>Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 50 basis points</title><url>https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20221214a.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>Has the Federal Reserve always been this powerful and active? Over the past few years, it seems that they have been molding the economy to their will. Are there any detailed retrospectives on this in terms of it being good or not? From my naive perspective, it seems like a lot of meddling, and it isn&#x27;t clear if such frequent changes are required. If they are required, I suppose that bothers me just as much since it implies a fragile economic system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>evdubs</author><text>This is just the Fed setting interest rates to be in line with the Taylor Rule [1]. As some of your replies have noted, they&#x27;re aggressive both because of a delayed response to recent inflation as well as a sharp rise in inflation since the COVID lockdowns ended.<p>Note that the Fed has two mandates: maximum employment and price stability. They raise rates in an attempt to reduce inflation and try to reach price stability. Their tools for maximizing employment tend to be much more indirect.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlantafed.org&#x2F;cqer&#x2F;research&#x2F;taylor-rule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlantafed.org&#x2F;cqer&#x2F;research&#x2F;taylor-rule</a> &#x2F; Create Your Calculation &#x2F; Chart &#x2F; Compare &quot;Alternative 3&quot; and &quot;Actual Fed Funds Rate&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 50 basis points</title><url>https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20221214a.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>Has the Federal Reserve always been this powerful and active? Over the past few years, it seems that they have been molding the economy to their will. Are there any detailed retrospectives on this in terms of it being good or not? From my naive perspective, it seems like a lot of meddling, and it isn&#x27;t clear if such frequent changes are required. If they are required, I suppose that bothers me just as much since it implies a fragile economic system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cheald</author><text>The Fed&#x27;s dual mandate is to &quot;maintain price stability&quot; and to &quot;ensure maximum stable employment&quot;, both of which are only accomplished through explicit manipulation of the economy. They&#x27;re an enormously powerful entity, and if they&#x27;re actually accomplishing their goals, do help keep the economy running smoothly (most specifically, IMO, by improving the confidence of people to make long-forecast economic decisions), but when they get it wrong, they have the potential to cause damage at a scale nearly unrivaled by anyone else.</text></comment> |
17,724,612 | 17,724,858 | 1 | 2 | 17,723,973 | train | <story><title>I don't trust Signal</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>g_sch</author><text>Some version of this post seems to circulate every few months or so. This one is more direct in its accusations of Moxie acting in bad faith. I think this is disingenuous. Moxie has been very clear[0] about the tradeoffs that Signal has made and the reasons for them. It&#x27;s fine to be dissatisfied with those choices. It&#x27;s another thing entirely to accuse Moxie of dissimulating.<p>Personally, I&#x27;d like to see Signal replace WhatsApp. That&#x27;s why I support the path Signal took, and why I also have a distaste for the author&#x27;s snarky dismissals of features like GIF search.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hutzlibu</author><text>But in the linked post he does not explain, why he does not maintain a F-Droid repository for people who do not trust google, nor why the original Signal Client does not connect to Signal Forks, even if they use everything the same.
Security reasons? Ordinary smartphones are full of rootkits anyways, so someone using a forked Signal version probably is better of anyway, as he knows a bit more what he is doing.<p>So the base argument holds in my opinion: Moxies main focus is Moxie in control. And not making Signal the best and securely possible.<p>So I also use Signal, but as soon as Matrix gets stable, I am gone</text></comment> | <story><title>I don't trust Signal</title><url>https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>g_sch</author><text>Some version of this post seems to circulate every few months or so. This one is more direct in its accusations of Moxie acting in bad faith. I think this is disingenuous. Moxie has been very clear[0] about the tradeoffs that Signal has made and the reasons for them. It&#x27;s fine to be dissatisfied with those choices. It&#x27;s another thing entirely to accuse Moxie of dissimulating.<p>Personally, I&#x27;d like to see Signal replace WhatsApp. That&#x27;s why I support the path Signal took, and why I also have a distaste for the author&#x27;s snarky dismissals of features like GIF search.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-ecosystem-is-moving&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m-p-3</author><text>I am not willing to support Signal if they are unwilling to federate the system.<p>Sure, it doesn&#x27;t allow them the flexibility they&#x27;d like to have to move forward but in a way it won&#x27;t be their fault if federated servers aren&#x27;t keeping themselves up to date when there&#x27;s a major protocol change and they get temporarily splitted from the pool.</text></comment> |
15,950,963 | 15,950,055 | 1 | 2 | 15,949,144 | train | <story><title>What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)</title><url>http://woz.posthaven.com/what-orms-have-taught-me-just-learn-sql</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>zzzeek - can I take this chance to praise your work on SqlAlchemy. People say there&#x27;s not enough thanks given to open source developers... here&#x27;s thanks to you. It&#x27;s the work of a craftsman.</text></item><item><author>zzzeek</author><text>&gt; If you&#x27;re using an RDBMS, bite the bullet and learn SQL.<p>If this person spent all that time using Hibernate and then SQLAlchemy, and all that time did <i>not</i> know SQL, then their suffering and bad experiences make complete sense. You absolutely need to know SQL if you&#x27;re going to use an ORM effectively. Good ORMs are there to automate the repetitive tasks of composing largely boilerplate DML statements, facilitating query composition, providing abstraction for database-specific and driver-specific quirks, providing patterns to map object graphs to relational graphs, and marshaling rows between your object model and database rows - that last one is something your application needs to do whether or not you write raw SQL, so you&#x27;ll end up inventing that part yourself without an ORM (I recommend doing so, on a less critical project, to learn the kinds of issues that present themselves). None of those things should be about &quot;hiding SQL&quot;, and you need to learn SQL first before you work with an ORM.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jgraham</author><text>I&#x27;m pretty sure that SqlAlchemy has caused more grief and frustration than any other single library. After all if I didn&#x27;t know about the excellence of SqlAlchemy, maybe I wouldn&#x27;t get so cross when I have to do anything non-trivial with the Django ORM ;)<p>Joking aside, SwlAlchemy is very impressive software, and zzzeek deserves all this praise and more. Every time that there&#x27;s one of these anti-ORM articles I feel like SqlAlchemy pre-emtively addressed all the substantive criticisms in its flexible, well layered, design.<p>(And in the interests of fairness, Django&#x27;s ORM is also very good at making simple things simple).</text></comment> | <story><title>What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)</title><url>http://woz.posthaven.com/what-orms-have-taught-me-just-learn-sql</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrewstuart</author><text>zzzeek - can I take this chance to praise your work on SqlAlchemy. People say there&#x27;s not enough thanks given to open source developers... here&#x27;s thanks to you. It&#x27;s the work of a craftsman.</text></item><item><author>zzzeek</author><text>&gt; If you&#x27;re using an RDBMS, bite the bullet and learn SQL.<p>If this person spent all that time using Hibernate and then SQLAlchemy, and all that time did <i>not</i> know SQL, then their suffering and bad experiences make complete sense. You absolutely need to know SQL if you&#x27;re going to use an ORM effectively. Good ORMs are there to automate the repetitive tasks of composing largely boilerplate DML statements, facilitating query composition, providing abstraction for database-specific and driver-specific quirks, providing patterns to map object graphs to relational graphs, and marshaling rows between your object model and database rows - that last one is something your application needs to do whether or not you write raw SQL, so you&#x27;ll end up inventing that part yourself without an ORM (I recommend doing so, on a less critical project, to learn the kinds of issues that present themselves). None of those things should be about &quot;hiding SQL&quot;, and you need to learn SQL first before you work with an ORM.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>href</author><text>+1 SQLAlchemy has had a solution for every problem I threw at it in 5 years of heavy use!</text></comment> |
27,084,378 | 27,083,899 | 1 | 3 | 27,081,754 | train | <story><title>California population declines for first time in more than a century</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-population-declines-for-first-time-in-more-than-a-century-11620416887</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linguae</author><text>I&#x27;m a lifelong Californian whose lived in Santa Cruz County for nearly nine out of the past 11 years, and as someone who wants to become a CS professor at a teaching university one day, I feel the exact same way. I love California and I don&#x27;t want to leave the state. However, the housing prices signal to me that if I want to buy a house, I need to have a very high income and maintain it during the length of a 30-year mortgage. Professors are paid well compared to the average Californian, but professors&#x27; salaries are generally not enough to afford to purchase a place in the Bay Area or much of Southern California without involving mega-commutes from exurbia (and, thanks to the WFH boom, these exurbs have gone up in price dramatically). There&#x27;s still some parts of the Central Valley that are affordable for professors and that are too far for Bay Area&#x2F;Los Angeles mega-commuters, but the nature of academic hiring means that there&#x27;s no guarantee a position at a place like UC Merced or Fresno State would open when it&#x27;s time for me to apply for assistant professor jobs.<p>If I can&#x27;t find a place in the next few years that is affordable on an $80,000&#x2F;year salary in California, then I have to move. I&#x27;d like to move to a place where a 3-bedroom house in a safe neighborhood costs no more than $400,000, and where there is a diverse population. Ideally I&#x27;d like to live in a place that doesn&#x27;t get too cold in the winter; I&#x27;d rather deal with very hot summers (I grew up in Sacramento where it regularly gets above 100 in the summer) than to deal with cold winters.</text></item><item><author>gautamcgoel</author><text>I&#x27;m a PhD student at Caltech. I&#x27;d love to stay in CA and become a prof at one of the world-renown universities in the state. The cost for a nice house is &gt; $800K in all of the cities hosting these universities; on top of that, the state income tax on a prof&#x27;s salary is 9-10%. CA is basically telling me (and millions of other millennials) that we are not wanted here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>8bitsrule</author><text>Cause of problem: Missing Middle Housing. Not everyone needs the concrete beehives or the single-family-home. But there&#x27;s been very little built in-between in recent decades. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Missing_middle_housing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Missing_middle_housing</a><p>I could live in very little space. Not into owning a lotta stuff, entertaining crowds. 15x25 is more than enough. Noone&#x27;s building cottages these days. Let alone on nice streets with trees, away from traffic, walkable. A couple of US cities have opened that up. Neither is in CA. My family of 4 was once quite comfortable in one apt. in a quadplex. We did this to ourselves, and invested in a <i>lot</i> of infrastructure to be locked into.</text></comment> | <story><title>California population declines for first time in more than a century</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-population-declines-for-first-time-in-more-than-a-century-11620416887</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>linguae</author><text>I&#x27;m a lifelong Californian whose lived in Santa Cruz County for nearly nine out of the past 11 years, and as someone who wants to become a CS professor at a teaching university one day, I feel the exact same way. I love California and I don&#x27;t want to leave the state. However, the housing prices signal to me that if I want to buy a house, I need to have a very high income and maintain it during the length of a 30-year mortgage. Professors are paid well compared to the average Californian, but professors&#x27; salaries are generally not enough to afford to purchase a place in the Bay Area or much of Southern California without involving mega-commutes from exurbia (and, thanks to the WFH boom, these exurbs have gone up in price dramatically). There&#x27;s still some parts of the Central Valley that are affordable for professors and that are too far for Bay Area&#x2F;Los Angeles mega-commuters, but the nature of academic hiring means that there&#x27;s no guarantee a position at a place like UC Merced or Fresno State would open when it&#x27;s time for me to apply for assistant professor jobs.<p>If I can&#x27;t find a place in the next few years that is affordable on an $80,000&#x2F;year salary in California, then I have to move. I&#x27;d like to move to a place where a 3-bedroom house in a safe neighborhood costs no more than $400,000, and where there is a diverse population. Ideally I&#x27;d like to live in a place that doesn&#x27;t get too cold in the winter; I&#x27;d rather deal with very hot summers (I grew up in Sacramento where it regularly gets above 100 in the summer) than to deal with cold winters.</text></item><item><author>gautamcgoel</author><text>I&#x27;m a PhD student at Caltech. I&#x27;d love to stay in CA and become a prof at one of the world-renown universities in the state. The cost for a nice house is &gt; $800K in all of the cities hosting these universities; on top of that, the state income tax on a prof&#x27;s salary is 9-10%. CA is basically telling me (and millions of other millennials) that we are not wanted here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nradov</author><text>I wish you luck but even in CS there aren&#x27;t many tenure track positions open. You might have to move to another state to pursue your career, regardless of housing costs.</text></comment> |
11,970,996 | 11,970,940 | 1 | 3 | 11,970,344 | train | <story><title>The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/24/the-british-are-frantically-googling-what-the-eu-is-hours-after-voting-to-leave-it/?campaign_id=A100&campaign_type=Email</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Inthenameofmine</author><text>&gt; We haven&#x27;t figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?<p>As a Swiss citizen, I think the swiss system is very close to perfect in this regard.<p>Sure, emotional and stupid arguments sometimes prevail, but most of the time the people make the perfect decision. Public discourse is most often also very rational, more so than most world parliaments.<p>Irrational arguments have been a staple of especially the British political system. I am amazed at the low level of discussion in the UK even by their representatives.<p>Direct democracy is something that has to be done regularly, otherwise you end up with situations like the UK or California.</text></item><item><author>netcan</author><text>I&#x27;m strangely moved by this whole thing. It&#x27;s a pretty decent status check on where we are with democracy ATM. I&#x27;m not against democracy, but I do think we need to pay attention to what it can &amp; can&#x27;t do.<p>On one hand, this has been a model of democracy. A primary election agenda and referendum. The phrasing of the question was simple, clear and unbiased. The &quot;will of the people&quot; won over the will of the ruling structure. Most politicians and the main parties (especially before the opportunists jumped in) were against leaving. So was the financial sector and most big businesses.<p>OTOH, some of the problems inherent in democracy were also on display. A &quot;right to my opinion&quot; emotional public moved by very emotional arguments. Lies, untruths and misleading truths were the most prominent arguments on either side. A majority of the discussion was stupid.<p>We haven&#x27;t figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mstade</author><text>&gt; Direct democracy is something that has to be done regularly [...]<p>I think there&#x27;s a lot of truth to this. When referendums are seldom, I believe there&#x27;s a real risk of them turning into spectacle. (And at worst, a weapon for use by nationalists and fascists, like what happened in Germany in the 30s.)<p>When they are regular, and limited, and like in Switzerland not something pulled on a whim but actually requires some work to call, they might just work. But that also kind of assumes an informed electorate, which is perhaps the main point here – the electorate hasn&#x27;t been very well informed, either way.</text></comment> | <story><title>The British are Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/24/the-british-are-frantically-googling-what-the-eu-is-hours-after-voting-to-leave-it/?campaign_id=A100&campaign_type=Email</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Inthenameofmine</author><text>&gt; We haven&#x27;t figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?<p>As a Swiss citizen, I think the swiss system is very close to perfect in this regard.<p>Sure, emotional and stupid arguments sometimes prevail, but most of the time the people make the perfect decision. Public discourse is most often also very rational, more so than most world parliaments.<p>Irrational arguments have been a staple of especially the British political system. I am amazed at the low level of discussion in the UK even by their representatives.<p>Direct democracy is something that has to be done regularly, otherwise you end up with situations like the UK or California.</text></item><item><author>netcan</author><text>I&#x27;m strangely moved by this whole thing. It&#x27;s a pretty decent status check on where we are with democracy ATM. I&#x27;m not against democracy, but I do think we need to pay attention to what it can &amp; can&#x27;t do.<p>On one hand, this has been a model of democracy. A primary election agenda and referendum. The phrasing of the question was simple, clear and unbiased. The &quot;will of the people&quot; won over the will of the ruling structure. Most politicians and the main parties (especially before the opportunists jumped in) were against leaving. So was the financial sector and most big businesses.<p>OTOH, some of the problems inherent in democracy were also on display. A &quot;right to my opinion&quot; emotional public moved by very emotional arguments. Lies, untruths and misleading truths were the most prominent arguments on either side. A majority of the discussion was stupid.<p>We haven&#x27;t figured this shit out yet. Kings anyone? How about the best wrestler gets to be in charge? ideas?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>semi-extrinsic</author><text>In the British Parliament, there are lines which separate the MPs on the two sides. These lines are a bit more than two swordlengths apart, to prevent them from stabbing each other.</text></comment> |
3,785,555 | 3,784,792 | 1 | 2 | 3,782,827 | train | <story><title>MIT scientist captures 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, graphs it</title><url>http://www.fastcompany.com/1733627/mit-scientist-captures-his-sons-first-90000-hours-on-video</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nhebb</author><text>"<i>applies these same high-powered analytics to relate [...] events broadcast on TV to conversations taking place in social media</i>"<p>So, if you use Twitter, you're someone's lab rat. I know that when I tweet, it's open for all the world to see, but I can't shake the feeling that this is really creepy.<p>Beyond that, I'm trying to envision how this data could be used. I imagine three scenarios:<p>1. Leverage it to sell more TV advertising. If a show is getting buzz on twitter, maybe this could be a viable alternative to Nielsen ratings. (Which leads to the question of whether Blue Fin can discern positive buzz from negative buzz).<p>2. If step 1 is analysis, could step 2 be manipulation? Can buzz be jump started or boosted at key inflection points by sock puppet marketing?<p>3. C-level eye candy - interesting visualizations that TV exec's buy for their egos, but ultimately can't do anything actionable with the information.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaredmck</author><text>Unless they're sandbagging the spam filtering right now, there's no way twitter is close to tapping into the potentially huge value of their data. I'd love to see them turn the data into huge value and insight, but they'll need to show a lot more before this outcome is likely.</text></comment> | <story><title>MIT scientist captures 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, graphs it</title><url>http://www.fastcompany.com/1733627/mit-scientist-captures-his-sons-first-90000-hours-on-video</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nhebb</author><text>"<i>applies these same high-powered analytics to relate [...] events broadcast on TV to conversations taking place in social media</i>"<p>So, if you use Twitter, you're someone's lab rat. I know that when I tweet, it's open for all the world to see, but I can't shake the feeling that this is really creepy.<p>Beyond that, I'm trying to envision how this data could be used. I imagine three scenarios:<p>1. Leverage it to sell more TV advertising. If a show is getting buzz on twitter, maybe this could be a viable alternative to Nielsen ratings. (Which leads to the question of whether Blue Fin can discern positive buzz from negative buzz).<p>2. If step 1 is analysis, could step 2 be manipulation? Can buzz be jump started or boosted at key inflection points by sock puppet marketing?<p>3. C-level eye candy - interesting visualizations that TV exec's buy for their egos, but ultimately can't do anything actionable with the information.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joejohnson</author><text>I feel like either the data Twitter has isn't actually that valuable, or Twitter is just sitting on a goldmine and they are refusing to show their hand too soon. I say this because they're still not profitable, but I predict that if they do become a large financial success, it won't be through existing ad-revenue models (or maybe even ads). Twitter could monetize in countless ways with their powerful information base.</text></comment> |
40,459,254 | 40,459,290 | 1 | 3 | 40,458,686 | train | <story><title>US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)</title><url>https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/13170</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>A_D_E_P_T</author><text>Of course it was reckless and unethical, but it also seems like kind of an <i>unnecessary</i> study. There have been lots of population exposures to radiation before then, and many more since, and there were ample ways to gather data from those. And, if absolutely necessary, rhesus monkeys are close enough for government work. With that, and with perhaps some extrapolation and translation of data, I&#x27;m sure that there was nothing to be gained by experimenting on unwitting civilians.<p>By the way, speaking of population exposures to radiation: In Japan, people still pay good money to bathe in radioactive radon-rich hot springs. [1] It appears that it might even be healthy. [2]<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;misasaonsen.jp&#x2F;en&#x2F;radon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;misasaonsen.jp&#x2F;en&#x2F;radon&#x2F;</a><p>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;37635139&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;37635139&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>US Army researched the health effects of radioactivity in St Louis 1945-1970 (2011)</title><url>https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/13170</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomwheeler</author><text>St. Louisan here, we sure had plenty of it for them to study. It remains a problem to this day.<p>Watch the documentary Atomic Homefront to see for yourself. Just a few miles from the STL airport, radioactive waste from the Manhattan project remains buried in a landfill where an underground fire has been burning for years. People living near a creek in that area have had wildly high rates of diseases associated with exposure, yet the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers claim it&#x27;s no big deal.</text></comment> |
17,451,739 | 17,451,494 | 1 | 2 | 17,450,974 | train | <story><title>Show HN: GraphCMS – A GraphQL-based Headless CMS</title><url>https://graphcms.com/blog/new-graphcms-ready-for-launch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ericfrederich</author><text>&gt;&gt; Can I host GraphCMS on my own servers?
&gt;&gt; Please talk to sales to discuss deployment options.<p>This is not an answer. Talk to sales?<p>I don&#x27;t mind paying for support. I&#x27;m not a fan of paying for enterprise features. I would never want a dependency to something which is not free.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: GraphCMS – A GraphQL-based Headless CMS</title><url>https://graphcms.com/blog/new-graphcms-ready-for-launch</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>les</author><text>The scary thing to me is if a service like this stops, I have an angry client and a lot of work.
Headless CMS&#x27;s are a delight to work with though.</text></comment> |
18,262,860 | 18,262,777 | 1 | 2 | 18,255,945 | train | <story><title>Brand New ODroid Single Board Computer</title><url>https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=32536</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fake-name</author><text>Nope, both NICs are Realtek. It&#x27;ll make a great flaming pile of shit.<p>I&#x27;ve never had realtek network hardware that wasn&#x27;t unstable under load on linux.</text></item><item><author>mrpippy</author><text>With 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, this would make a great pfSense&#x2F;OpenBSD router.<p>Too bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>osivertsson</author><text>Which Realtek Ethernet NICs are we talking about?<p>For me they have been rock-solid using Debian for many years across different generations of Realtek NICs.<p>On the other hand I have experienced no end of issues with Intel 82574L, e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.krisk.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;packets-of-death.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.krisk.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;packets-of-death.html</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;linux&#x2F;+bug&#x2F;1730550" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;linux&#x2F;+bug&#x2F;1730550</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Brand New ODroid Single Board Computer</title><url>https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=32536</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fake-name</author><text>Nope, both NICs are Realtek. It&#x27;ll make a great flaming pile of shit.<p>I&#x27;ve never had realtek network hardware that wasn&#x27;t unstable under load on linux.</text></item><item><author>mrpippy</author><text>With 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, this would make a great pfSense&#x2F;OpenBSD router.<p>Too bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arghwhat</author><text>Never had problems with Realtek on Linux in recent years. Had a lot of problems with it under *BSD a decade ago, though.<p>I still prefer Intel NICs, but IIRC, Realtek works just fine now. The new network antichrist is &quot;Killer&quot; WiFi NICs</text></comment> |
24,861,851 | 24,861,932 | 1 | 3 | 24,859,787 | train | <story><title>Activists turn facial recognition tools against the police</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? This whole doxxing your opponents movement scares me.<p>I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels.<p>But if protesters use this technology to target policemen&#x27;s families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&gt; How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman?<p>Ideally, you aren&#x27;t; you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as &quot;police departments&quot;, redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments have broadly and systematically done over an extended period of time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Activists turn facial recognition tools against the police</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? This whole doxxing your opponents movement scares me.<p>I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels.<p>But if protesters use this technology to target policemen&#x27;s families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>In a perfect world, that’s something which only <i>bad</i> cops have anything to worry about.<p>We’re not in a perfect world, and — as all humans are imperfect — evidence of badness will accumulate in even the best of us. I wish I knew how to fix that, because it also applies to literally all online activity, and isn’t just a cops thing.</text></comment> |
17,653,153 | 17,653,299 | 1 | 2 | 17,652,566 | train | <story><title>Ex-SolarCity employees: We were fired after reporting millions in fake sales</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/3-ex-solarcity-employees-claim-company-oversaw-bogus-sales-to-inflate-valuation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>foxyv</author><text>My partner worked for various solar companies (But not Solar City) as a canvasser hoping to get some sales experience. As a result we got to see first hand how corrupt and underhanded their sales departments could be.<p>Canvassers were exploited mercilessly and commissions never appeared as new requirements were added to the payouts. Paychecks bounced periodically. Canvassers would be told to go door to door in areas where solicitation was illegal even though the company knew it was illegal and risked getting their employees arrested. Managers would hire friends and use fake leads to make them look good.<p>I kind of hoped that Solar City would be an exception but I&#x27;m not surprised. It seems like the entire solar industry is focused more on extracting government subsidies than on creating long term revenue streams. I don&#x27;t think management is very confident of the long term prospects of residential solar. Especially considering pushback from utility companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ex-SolarCity employees: We were fired after reporting millions in fake sales</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/3-ex-solarcity-employees-claim-company-oversaw-bogus-sales-to-inflate-valuation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikro2nd</author><text>A trend that&#x27;s been growing for quite a (long!) while now is exemplified by this article: &quot;<i>Tesla did not respond to Ars’ request for comment on Sunday.</i>&quot;<p>Who in their right minds realistically expects <i>any</i> organisation to respond to some random journalistic enquiry <i>on a Sunday</i>?<p>The other major variant of this shyster tactic is along the lines of, &quot;Company X failed to respond <i>immediately</i> when asked for comment.&quot; No company is able to respond <i>immediately</i>, particularly not on an issue that&#x27;s likely contentious. Any response would need to be run by their PR and legal people at the very least.<p>It&#x27;s a cheap and nasty way to make companies look&#x2F;feel uncaring about the issue being reported, but imho it does nothing but reflect poorly on the reporter and publication using these smelly tactics, and leaves me wondering what other agendas they may have running.</text></comment> |
3,878,785 | 3,878,732 | 1 | 2 | 3,878,522 | train | <story><title>Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-22/software-engineers-will-work-one-day-for-english-majors.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radzell</author><text>It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.</text></item><item><author>tgflynn</author><text>Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters.<p>I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version.<p>The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science, its been done before and there are plenty of examples of reasonably well designed frameworks out there, Swing and Qt to name a couple.<p>Software is complex so it takes a while (years at least, probably decades) for a human brain to gain real perspective on what's important and what isn't in software development. A culture like the one we're living in that throws away those brains dooms itself to decline.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hoff</author><text>The parent was commenting on a broken framework, something that should be an anathema in any shipping product, and around spending (wasting) time determining that the API itself was faulty. Replacing the faulty API call took two hours.<p>But to follow onto to your point, it's also the case that the younger programmers can need a decade or more to make enough mistakes; to variously learn what the older programmers already know about various fundamentals of the programming and product-creation business.<p>And to extend your point, it's been my experience that having a team of younger programmers is just as big a headache and as big a mistake as having a team comprised entirely of older programmers. A mix works better, as the younger folks teach the older folks and they bring knowledge of new technologies and volumes of enthusiasm, and the older folks can teach the younger programmers about temperance, testing, productization and business in general.</text></comment> | <story><title>Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-22/software-engineers-will-work-one-day-for-english-majors.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radzell</author><text>It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.</text></item><item><author>tgflynn</author><text>Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters.<p>I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version.<p>The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science, its been done before and there are plenty of examples of reasonably well designed frameworks out there, Swing and Qt to name a couple.<p>Software is complex so it takes a while (years at least, probably decades) for a human brain to gain real perspective on what's important and what isn't in software development. A culture like the one we're living in that throws away those brains dooms itself to decline.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sausagefeet</author><text>I think newer programmer's just work for less. There really isn't that much new under the sun in software engineering.</text></comment> |
7,887,784 | 7,887,026 | 1 | 3 | 7,885,641 | train | <story><title>Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core</title><url>http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mz</author><text>Excerpt:<p><i>By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could figure out which types of rocks the waves were passing through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down, as it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry rock.<p>Jacobsen worked out in advance what would happen to the waves if water-containing ringwoodite was present. He grew ringwoodite in his lab, and exposed samples of it to massive pressures and temperatures matching those at 700 kilometres down.</i><p>To me, as someone who knows not that much about all this, that sounds like it could well be hooey. It could be voodoo. It could be a Tall Tale.<p>Can anyone explain to me (like I am 5 years old) how such things get vetted or taken seriously or whatever?<p>No, I am not trolling.<p>Thanks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>Suppose you have an earthquake at a known location, or you set off a large underground explosion at a known location. This causes several different kinds of waves to radiate out from that location.<p>Seismometers can detect those waves. How fast the waves of a given type move depends on the kind of rock or soil they are moving through. When we measure how long the wave took to go from the point of origin to a given seismometer, that tells us a little bit about the kind of rock or soil on that wave&#x27;s path. The wave might have passed through many different kinds of rock or soil, so just looking at one wave doesn&#x27;t tell much--just that the path had some mix of rock and soil overall that gave that speed.<p>We aren&#x27;t limited to one wave, fortunately. Every time something generates detectable waves, we get a little more data on the composition of the rock and soil on the paths between that source and every seismometer that measures those waves.<p>The more data we get, the more constraints that puts on what kind of rock and soil can be where and still be consistent with all of the observations.<p>For things reasonably near the surface the deductions from seismic wave analysis can be checked against observation from tunnels and wells to verify that the methods work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core</title><url>http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mz</author><text>Excerpt:<p><i>By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could figure out which types of rocks the waves were passing through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down, as it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry rock.<p>Jacobsen worked out in advance what would happen to the waves if water-containing ringwoodite was present. He grew ringwoodite in his lab, and exposed samples of it to massive pressures and temperatures matching those at 700 kilometres down.</i><p>To me, as someone who knows not that much about all this, that sounds like it could well be hooey. It could be voodoo. It could be a Tall Tale.<p>Can anyone explain to me (like I am 5 years old) how such things get vetted or taken seriously or whatever?<p>No, I am not trolling.<p>Thanks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rosser</author><text>What are you asking to have explained, the science? Like, how seismic waves propagate at different speeds through materials of different densities? Or how the observed propagation of seismic waves through the planet after multiple earthquakes had anomalies that matched those predicted in the presence of &quot;wet&quot; (hydrous) ringwoodite? Or how they created ringwoodite in the lab and subjected it to temperatures and pressures like those that might be found in the mantle?</text></comment> |
32,480,286 | 32,480,059 | 1 | 2 | 32,447,995 | train | <story><title>Krunvm – Create MicroVMs from OCI Images</title><url>https://github.com/containers/krunvm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sidkshatriya</author><text>Krunvm is extremely easy to use and is packed with some interesting ideas.<p>One of the biggest advantages of this VMM is that programs have access to the network inside the VMM without the admin having to setup complex virtual bridges and so forth in the host in advance or use something like slirp. This is accomplished via TSI (Transparent Socket Impersonation).<p>Basically sockets in the guest are bridged to AF_VSOCK via the use of a patched linux kernel (when you build libkrunfw.so) when communicating outside the VM. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EGV03THGrrw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EGV03THGrrw</a> for more info on TSI.<p>My only concern is that TSI is currently not a feature available in Linux. When do the authors plan to upstream this into Linux proper? My understanding is that this was planned in 2021 but it is now 2022...</text></comment> | <story><title>Krunvm – Create MicroVMs from OCI Images</title><url>https://github.com/containers/krunvm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gabereiser</author><text>Mmmmmm, rust and golang, working together. Shout out to buildah team and the krunvm folks. This is very cool. The icing on the cake was the aarm64 support for apple. Kudos to you all. I can now run experimental linux images as VM&#x27;s and see if they&#x27;ll blow up.</text></comment> |
9,142,231 | 9,141,947 | 1 | 2 | 9,141,892 | train | <story><title>‘Unsubstantiated’ child neglect finding for free-range parents</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/decision-in-free-range-case-does-not-end-debate-about-parenting-and-safety/2015/03/02/5a919454-c04d-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chromaton</author><text>Notice here that there has been no arrest, no charges, and no trial. Yet the family in question still had to go through a very stressful period of time AND has an open file with the county CPS, who threatened to take the kids away.<p>I was in a very similar situation for almost the exact same thing. I&#x27;m happy Georgia DFACS did not get involved, though being arrested still sucks.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘Unsubstantiated’ child neglect finding for free-range parents</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/decision-in-free-range-case-does-not-end-debate-about-parenting-and-safety/2015/03/02/5a919454-c04d-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tokenadult</author><text>The legal background of this case from Maryland must have something to do with the weird result so far: &quot;[Maryland Child Protective Services] officials have said they are guided in part by a state law that says children younger than 8 must be left with a reliable person who is at least 13. The law addresses children locked or confined in a building, dwelling, motor vehicle or other enclosed space, but does not mention children outdoors on a walk.&quot; My state, Minnesota, doesn&#x27;t appear to have such a law, and it doesn&#x27;t appear to have CPS officers who would give such a crazy interpretation to a comparable law. I have certainly had my children walking all over my neighborhood (a full mile from my house in either of two directions, for shopping or for trips to the library) when the oldest in the party was ten years old, for most of the last decade. It is very routine for my children to be out walking in our neighborhood, even during school hours, as we are a homeschooling family. This story is news in part because it is very unusual.<p>AFTER EDIT: Other reporting on this same story, with varying emphasis on other details:<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/02/parents-investigated-letting-children-walk-alone/24265981/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;parents...</a><p><a href="http://www.wusa9.com/story/news/local/maryland/2015/03/02/free-range-parents-fight-child-neglect-ruling/24287953/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wusa9.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;maryland&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;fr...</a><p><a href="https://ca.shine.yahoo.com/-free-range--parents-under-investigation-for-child-neglect-will-appeal-cps-decision-143030305.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ca.shine.yahoo.com&#x2F;-free-range--parents-under-invest...</a><p>A letter to the editor of the local paper reporting the story points out that children can be required to walk that far to school in the same state:<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/children-were-caught-walking-at-the-wrong-time/2015/03/03/9c2d2962-c1b7-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;children-were-caught-...</a></text></comment> |
39,621,339 | 39,620,178 | 1 | 3 | 39,618,822 | train | <story><title>FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor</title><url>https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-clears-first-over-counter-continuous-glucose-monitor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philsnow</author><text>I dove into CGMs a little bit about a year ago, mostly just for fun. Yes, I paid money to some online prescription mill for CGMs (Abbott Freestyle Libre 3, IIRC), and then put one in my arm (the applicator is a short syringe section that has the monitor tube threaded into it, so the tube stays in your arm and your skin under the monitor remains broken) for a couple weeks. Just to see how various foods would affect my blood glucose, to see whether the “facts” I’m telling my kids about the glycemic index of various foods actually has the expected impact on a measurable result. You know, as you do. For fun.<p>(It actually <i>was</i> fun, and I’ll do it again when the data ecosystem improves.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>Before I got cancer, I had one through Levels, and it was informative. Dessert is <i>much</i> worse than I&#x27;d thought. Rice, too, including brown rice. I remember eating some biryani and a small bit of naan at an Indian restaurant and thinking that I&#x27;d been pretty healthy, only to see a spike of like 80.</text></comment> | <story><title>FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor</title><url>https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-clears-first-over-counter-continuous-glucose-monitor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philsnow</author><text>I dove into CGMs a little bit about a year ago, mostly just for fun. Yes, I paid money to some online prescription mill for CGMs (Abbott Freestyle Libre 3, IIRC), and then put one in my arm (the applicator is a short syringe section that has the monitor tube threaded into it, so the tube stays in your arm and your skin under the monitor remains broken) for a couple weeks. Just to see how various foods would affect my blood glucose, to see whether the “facts” I’m telling my kids about the glycemic index of various foods actually has the expected impact on a measurable result. You know, as you do. For fun.<p>(It actually <i>was</i> fun, and I’ll do it again when the data ecosystem improves.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>Aside from the fun, how did it go? Find anything surprising or insightful in the process?<p>It sounds like an experiment I’d like to do for the purpose of optimizing my daily habits and establishing a better mental model for how my eating habits impact me throughout the day. But I really dislike needles.</text></comment> |
29,254,341 | 29,254,174 | 1 | 2 | 29,253,928 | train | <story><title>I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/i-built-5000-raspberry-pi-server-yes-its-ridiculous</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rym_</author><text>I get so frustrated with the idiotic thumbnails on youtube video these days. I am sure it&#x27;s all optimized for the maximum number of clicks&#x2F;views but if I see a still that looks the way it does at the bottom of this page I generally just don&#x27;t watch it on principle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geerlingguy</author><text>Believe me, I had a nice discussion yesterday with my sister (who helped me take pictures for the thumbnail), and we both agreed it&#x27;s one of the dumbest things about current YouTube...<p>The thing is, from all my own A&#x2F;B testing, a face vs. no face will automatically get 20-30% more views (all else equal). And an exaggerated face, a bit more than that.</text></comment> | <story><title>I built a $5k Raspberry Pi server (yes, it's ridiculous)</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/i-built-5000-raspberry-pi-server-yes-its-ridiculous</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rym_</author><text>I get so frustrated with the idiotic thumbnails on youtube video these days. I am sure it&#x27;s all optimized for the maximum number of clicks&#x2F;views but if I see a still that looks the way it does at the bottom of this page I generally just don&#x27;t watch it on principle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>athorax</author><text>The youtube channel veritasium did a pretty interesting video on the phenomenon<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng</a></text></comment> |
13,965,153 | 13,965,096 | 1 | 2 | 13,964,551 | train | <story><title>Logic Production Systems: A new mixed logic/imperative programming language</title><url>http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5419</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>notthemessiah</author><text>I recall trying a few mods that made Kerbal Space Program programmable so you can automate your rocket (Some have used it to make SpaceX-style reusable boosters: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sqqQy8cIVFY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sqqQy8cIVFY</a>), and mods that provided a domain-specific language were more convenient than mods that used an existing conventional programming language. However the kOS language was still ultimately an imperative script, and too inflexible to be a complete programming language. It got me thinking about what kind of language would best be suited for the purpose of controllers (I was also writing PID controllers at the time), and I noticed there wasn&#x27;t a language for it.<p>I also recall a Minecraft mod called ComputerCraft where you program a &quot;Turtle&quot; (a la Logo) to perform automated digging actions, but the task of programming it in the easily-embedded Lua proved somewhat inconvenient for simple actions, if only for the ALGOL-style syntax. Another mod tried Forth, but get the sense that while one could be productive in Forth, it&#x27;s a lot to learn.<p>The developers have already incorporated it in a proof of concept game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bobthesimplebot.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bobthesimplebot.github.io&#x2F;</a>, but I could imagine RTS style games or mods where you not only have to scavenge for resources, you also program your bots to do your bidding, like Dwarf Fortress with programmable drones instead of independently-minded Dwarves.</text></comment> | <story><title>Logic Production Systems: A new mixed logic/imperative programming language</title><url>http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5419</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nickpsecurity</author><text>Justification from author:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ruleml.org&#x2F;post&#x2F;32629706-the-sad-state-concerning-the-relationships-between-logic-rules-and-logic-programming" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ruleml.org&#x2F;post&#x2F;32629706-the-sad-state-concernin...</a></text></comment> |
10,182,611 | 10,181,937 | 1 | 2 | 10,181,556 | train | <story><title>The Internet of Way Too Many Things</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/allison-arieff-the-internet-of-way-too-many-things.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antr</author><text>I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I&#x27;m putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting &quot;smart&quot; devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the &quot;advantages&quot; these promise.<p>After considerable research, it&#x27;s not worth the hussle or money. Let&#x27;s put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won&#x27;t breakeven in years (some devices smart devices simply don&#x27;t breakeven).<p>The main reason I decided not to have any of these installed was due to how cumbersome they are to operate. Each appliance&#x2F;brand has their own app&#x2F;portal, which does not connect to other brands, making it impossible to have an overview of your &quot;smart home&quot;. Even more scary, some of these devices are operated by startups, god knows, if they will be alive next year. Good luck getting that app to work with iOS 10! It&#x27;s a true headache, it&#x27;s even a headache for contractors, who have no clue how these work. It&#x27;s going to take some time (and education) to have an OS that makes a smart home smart...<p>and don&#x27;t get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80&#x27;s without being in a &quot;smart onesie&quot;, I&#x27;m sure we can do just as fine today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshstrange</author><text>I agree with nearly everything you have said except for:<p>&gt; and don&#x27;t get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80&#x27;s without being in a &quot;smart onesie&quot;, I&#x27;m sure we can do just as fine today.<p>I even agree that the baby monitor mentioned is a little over the top (I don&#x27;t care for the lights&#x2F;music&#x2F;coffee aspect) but it&#x27;s important not to write things off just because &quot;I was raised just fine without X&quot;. That logic doesn&#x27;t hold for most things. And for high-risk babies that onesie is probably multitudes of times cheaper than expensive medical equipment to do the same level of monitoring.<p>(Sad Personal Anecdote Below)<p>My youngest sister died when she was very young (&lt;2 mo old) due to a medical condition (birth defect). Now this isn&#x27;t to say that this product would have saved her life. In fact I&#x27;m nearly 100% positive it wouldn&#x27;t have. My parents were already awake due to me waking up from a bad dream and so my mom caught her stopping breathing probably almost immediately and we lived next door to a doctor who was over within minutes before she was rushed off to the hospital. She still died but I can&#x27;t help but think that while she couldn&#x27;t be saved there are other babies and young children out there that could be saved from such a device. Also there is nothing to say that constant monitoring wouldn&#x27;t have caught signs of this a little earlier allowing my parents enough time to get her to professionals. All I&#x27;m saying is don&#x27;t write off this just because you &quot;got by fine without it&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Internet of Way Too Many Things</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/allison-arieff-the-internet-of-way-too-many-things.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>antr</author><text>I just bought a home, and just started a considerable renovation. I&#x27;m putting in new water pipes, new electrical wiring, etc. I thought of putting &quot;smart&quot; devices (i.e. switches, alarms, thermostats, etc.) given the &quot;advantages&quot; these promise.<p>After considerable research, it&#x27;s not worth the hussle or money. Let&#x27;s put aside the fact that these are considerable more expensive, and won&#x27;t breakeven in years (some devices smart devices simply don&#x27;t breakeven).<p>The main reason I decided not to have any of these installed was due to how cumbersome they are to operate. Each appliance&#x2F;brand has their own app&#x2F;portal, which does not connect to other brands, making it impossible to have an overview of your &quot;smart home&quot;. Even more scary, some of these devices are operated by startups, god knows, if they will be alive next year. Good luck getting that app to work with iOS 10! It&#x27;s a true headache, it&#x27;s even a headache for contractors, who have no clue how these work. It&#x27;s going to take some time (and education) to have an OS that makes a smart home smart...<p>and don&#x27;t get me started on the smart baby monitors, etc... if my siblings an I were brought up just fine in the 80&#x27;s without being in a &quot;smart onesie&quot;, I&#x27;m sure we can do just as fine today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guybrushT</author><text>One of the companies that is solving this very problem is Xiaomi. Their method is quite crude - that is, they make everything themselves. But the end result is that everything they make - from an air purifier to a TV - is connected and operated via a similar &#x2F; familiar OS called MIUI.<p>They give away their phones for very cheap, because the phone is the Trojan horse - it is the remote control for all the other devices it makes.<p>Xiaomi is the largest and fastest growing IoT company on the planet, and worth keeping an eye out for.</text></comment> |
1,891,978 | 1,891,429 | 1 | 2 | 1,890,876 | train | <story><title>Flash Mob gone wrong</title><url>http://ashitvora.info/flash-mob-gone-wrong</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danw</author><text>Original source: <a href="http://www.tomscott.com/mob/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomscott.com/mob/</a>. From the guidelines: "Please submit the original source". That's not quite the same as embedding something in your own blog and then submitting your own blog.</text></comment> | <story><title>Flash Mob gone wrong</title><url>http://ashitvora.info/flash-mob-gone-wrong</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>petercooper</author><text>Get Tom Scott a slot at TED! He's a legend, and the same guy who ran as a pirate in the Westminster constituency at the last UK election.</text></comment> |
34,578,877 | 34,578,952 | 1 | 3 | 34,577,617 | train | <story><title>Aicracy – Governed by Algorithms</title><url>https://www.aicracy.net</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ly3xqhl8g9</author><text>Algocracy [1] sounds somewhat better, but as any barbarism, Medieval Latin <i>algorismus</i>, a mangled transliteration of the Arabic <i>al-Khwarizmi</i> + <i>kratos</i>, Ancient Greek word for power, is just as wrong.<p>The issue however is that society does not have a technology problem, it has a metaphysics problem: under, over, and for what should there be a <i>we</i>. Hence why all the futures we imagine through technology can barely go beyond a boring distopia.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_by_algorithm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_by_algorithm</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hemmert</author><text>I think we&#x27;re losing that &#x27;we&#x27; in many instances, even if it feels like being &#x27;more connected&#x27;, it&#x27;s less &#x27;together&#x27; often.</text></comment> | <story><title>Aicracy – Governed by Algorithms</title><url>https://www.aicracy.net</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ly3xqhl8g9</author><text>Algocracy [1] sounds somewhat better, but as any barbarism, Medieval Latin <i>algorismus</i>, a mangled transliteration of the Arabic <i>al-Khwarizmi</i> + <i>kratos</i>, Ancient Greek word for power, is just as wrong.<p>The issue however is that society does not have a technology problem, it has a metaphysics problem: under, over, and for what should there be a <i>we</i>. Hence why all the futures we imagine through technology can barely go beyond a boring distopia.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_by_algorithm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Government_by_algorithm</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ETH_start</author><text>A utopia for some is going to be a dystopia for others. That&#x27;s why I prefer a heterotopia:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1EW41177v6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1EW41177v6</a></text></comment> |
21,079,302 | 21,078,790 | 1 | 3 | 21,071,791 | train | <story><title>The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-wind-farm/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the need for nuclear is much of a fact. It&#x27;s more wishful thinking. Norway gets by without it and uses wind and hydro (mostly) for most of their electricity needs. They have no need for nuclear whatsoever and they export energy. Iceland is famous for using geothermal. Scotland exports wind power and generates more power than they need that way. Also, places like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden are relying on lots of wind (on and offshore).<p>The energy markets in Europe are connected and the fastest growing source of energy is basically wind. Coal is shrinking at this point and the enthusiasm for building new gas plants is likewise melting away rapidly as their cost seems to be on the high side compared to clean energy solutions. It will take decades to get rid of both of course.<p>Sweden and Finland actually both have nuclear plants. Finland even built a new one recently. But in general, nuclear is on the way out in Europe as there is no political will to commit to building new plants across the continent. Older plants are shutting down one by one. France has a lot of aging nuclear plants and they don&#x27;t seem to be building new ones and are actively considering shutting a few down (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.france24.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;20170710-france-hulot-could-close-nuclear-plants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.france24.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...</a>). Apparently keeping their existing capacity online would take tens&#x2F;hundreds of billions and the political appetite for those investments is pretty low.<p>Many EU countries are on a path to completely clean energy and it does not seem to involve building new nuclear plants.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>I&#x27;m super pro-renewables. The fact is that northern Europe is going to need nuclear to completely decarbonize (which is what is required to meet our goals).<p>Because of the long winters, to do the same with wind&#x2F;solar will require about 3-5 times as much cost as you might think at first. You need to provide extra capacity to artificially increase effective capacity factor, and then you need about 48 hours of storage. Also possible, but about the same price, is hydrogen for seasonal storage for winter.<p>...and generally speaking, effectively any carbonfree project being built now needs to be supported. We need everything. Including a lot more off-shore wind.</text></item><item><author>pytester</author><text>My local constituency was going to achieve this honour but unfortunately the local MP Robert Syms (known to be somewhat corrupt) killed the project on utterly bullshit grounds (it would barely have affected the view): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Navitus_Bay_wind_farm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Navitus_Bay_wind_farm</a><p>As a contrast, it was also reported today that Hinkley point will be £2.9 billion over budget: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-49823305" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-49823305</a> luckily for them, they get to charge £92.50 per megawatt hour upon completion - locked in for 10 years. While wind power is costing us £40 per megawatt hour, not guaranteed, and likely to decrease.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gchadwick</author><text>It&#x27;s important not just to look at current electricity usage but total energy needs. To truly decarbonise you need to stop burning gas for heating, stop burning fuel for transportation (or convert to Hydrogen) and so on. So the existence of countries that can supply their current electricity needs via renewables doesn&#x27;t immediately imply that for a zero carbon future renewables is all that is needed.<p>David MacKay covers this in his excellent book: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.withouthotair.com&#x2F;c18&#x2F;page_103.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.withouthotair.com&#x2F;c18&#x2F;page_103.shtml</a><p>As for political will I feel we should first start with the numbers and works out what adds up. If people don&#x27;t want nuclear but nuclear is the only path to zero carbon then we&#x27;ll need to choose one or the other.<p>Right now we can make great progress by ignoring nuclear because there&#x27;s lots of things to be done. So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice. Does great things for the stats and many people don&#x27;t like nuclear. Will it take us all the way though?</text></comment> | <story><title>The largest offshore wind farm is nearly complete, can power 1M homes</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/25/business/worlds-largest-wind-farm/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>I don&#x27;t think the need for nuclear is much of a fact. It&#x27;s more wishful thinking. Norway gets by without it and uses wind and hydro (mostly) for most of their electricity needs. They have no need for nuclear whatsoever and they export energy. Iceland is famous for using geothermal. Scotland exports wind power and generates more power than they need that way. Also, places like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden are relying on lots of wind (on and offshore).<p>The energy markets in Europe are connected and the fastest growing source of energy is basically wind. Coal is shrinking at this point and the enthusiasm for building new gas plants is likewise melting away rapidly as their cost seems to be on the high side compared to clean energy solutions. It will take decades to get rid of both of course.<p>Sweden and Finland actually both have nuclear plants. Finland even built a new one recently. But in general, nuclear is on the way out in Europe as there is no political will to commit to building new plants across the continent. Older plants are shutting down one by one. France has a lot of aging nuclear plants and they don&#x27;t seem to be building new ones and are actively considering shutting a few down (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.france24.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;20170710-france-hulot-could-close-nuclear-plants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.france24.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...</a>). Apparently keeping their existing capacity online would take tens&#x2F;hundreds of billions and the political appetite for those investments is pretty low.<p>Many EU countries are on a path to completely clean energy and it does not seem to involve building new nuclear plants.</text></item><item><author>Robotbeat</author><text>I&#x27;m super pro-renewables. The fact is that northern Europe is going to need nuclear to completely decarbonize (which is what is required to meet our goals).<p>Because of the long winters, to do the same with wind&#x2F;solar will require about 3-5 times as much cost as you might think at first. You need to provide extra capacity to artificially increase effective capacity factor, and then you need about 48 hours of storage. Also possible, but about the same price, is hydrogen for seasonal storage for winter.<p>...and generally speaking, effectively any carbonfree project being built now needs to be supported. We need everything. Including a lot more off-shore wind.</text></item><item><author>pytester</author><text>My local constituency was going to achieve this honour but unfortunately the local MP Robert Syms (known to be somewhat corrupt) killed the project on utterly bullshit grounds (it would barely have affected the view): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Navitus_Bay_wind_farm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Navitus_Bay_wind_farm</a><p>As a contrast, it was also reported today that Hinkley point will be £2.9 billion over budget: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-49823305" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-49823305</a> luckily for them, they get to charge £92.50 per megawatt hour upon completion - locked in for 10 years. While wind power is costing us £40 per megawatt hour, not guaranteed, and likely to decrease.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Maakuth</author><text>I think increased interconnects are the way to go, but don&#x27;t mind adding nuclear capacity. It&#x27;s worth noting though, that Norway is quite an exception in their hydro capacity, as there is so much height differences in their terrain. Increasing hydro capacity is also pretty hard these days due to enormous environmental cost and the fact that most of the viable sites are already built.</text></comment> |
21,930,817 | 21,928,296 | 1 | 3 | 21,927,009 | train | <story><title>Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (2015)</title><url>https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>froindt</author><text>I started reading this book this week in an effort to open up my job prospects down the line. I&#x27;m a &quot;technical&quot; Industrial Engineer often serving as a liason between IT and the business. I can program in VBA and do anything you can name in Excel, but I want to move to a more programming oriented role down the line.<p>I want to be able to do statistical analysis, queries, and just &quot;be better&quot; at breaking down a problem into easily solvable steps.<p>I&#x27;m using this book as a &quot;learn the basics&quot; stepping stone, and Project Euler as a list of solvable problems which will let me practice solving problems. After that I&#x27;ll move into some personal projects I have in mind.<p>Does anyone have additional book or resource recommendations beyond that? I know packages like NumPy and&#x2F;or SciPy will be useful down the line.<p>* Codecademy feels overpriced at $40&#x2F;month or $250&#x2F;year (no refunds for using a partial year).<p>* Google Python class was free but about 10 years old. With the Python 2-&gt;3 debacle, I was unsure if fundamentals had changed and hesitant to sink my time into it.<p>* Lynda runs $25 or $40&#x2F;month but would offer python as well as many other resources.<p>* Udemy - has a number of courses including one by Al, the author of this book. Looked like it&#x27;d be a good value, but I&#x27;m not sure how much more value the videos add than the book.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikofeyn</author><text>&gt; &quot;be better&quot; at breaking down a problem into easily solvable steps<p>i highly recommend the courses <i>how to code: simple data</i> and <i>how to code: complex data</i> to supplement your learning to address the quoted goal. don’t be put off by the teaching language or the simplicity at the start. it gets more complicated as you go. the courses teach systematic program design and are based upon the book <i>how to design programs</i>.<p>everybody and their dog knows python. you will not separate yourself by just knowing python. so in the long term, you need other skills beyond “just programming”. and much of the industry is moving to functional-first multiparadigm langauges and more and more concurrent&#x2F;asynchronous programming. python is a terrible choice for both of those and there is no clear evolution for python in those directions. it is a very outdated language in my opinion, its usage and amount of libraries available for it aside.<p>by all means, learn python, since there are a lot of resources and jobs that need it, but i highly recommend also learning a functional language. my recommendations would be f# (a .net language) and elixir. f# is a very ripe language for automation, probably even more so than python.<p>there are also python courses by MIT on edX you should check out. (actually, they are more computer science courses that use python, but there is an advanced one for using python for scientific applications.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (2015)</title><url>https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>froindt</author><text>I started reading this book this week in an effort to open up my job prospects down the line. I&#x27;m a &quot;technical&quot; Industrial Engineer often serving as a liason between IT and the business. I can program in VBA and do anything you can name in Excel, but I want to move to a more programming oriented role down the line.<p>I want to be able to do statistical analysis, queries, and just &quot;be better&quot; at breaking down a problem into easily solvable steps.<p>I&#x27;m using this book as a &quot;learn the basics&quot; stepping stone, and Project Euler as a list of solvable problems which will let me practice solving problems. After that I&#x27;ll move into some personal projects I have in mind.<p>Does anyone have additional book or resource recommendations beyond that? I know packages like NumPy and&#x2F;or SciPy will be useful down the line.<p>* Codecademy feels overpriced at $40&#x2F;month or $250&#x2F;year (no refunds for using a partial year).<p>* Google Python class was free but about 10 years old. With the Python 2-&gt;3 debacle, I was unsure if fundamentals had changed and hesitant to sink my time into it.<p>* Lynda runs $25 or $40&#x2F;month but would offer python as well as many other resources.<p>* Udemy - has a number of courses including one by Al, the author of this book. Looked like it&#x27;d be a good value, but I&#x27;m not sure how much more value the videos add than the book.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rainbowzootsuit</author><text>You might check with your public library. Ours offers free access to Lynda.com from your home by redirecting through the public library&#x27;s websitt.</text></comment> |
31,059,409 | 31,058,970 | 1 | 2 | 31,058,283 | train | <story><title>Miniclip to Discontinue Desktop Site and Transition Exclusively to Mobile Games</title><url>https://www.miniclip.com/games/en/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jterrys</author><text>It&#x27;s really a shame that Adobe&#x27;s absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens&#x27; and teens&#x27; disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it&#x27;s getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there&#x27;s never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia</text></comment> | <story><title>Miniclip to Discontinue Desktop Site and Transition Exclusively to Mobile Games</title><url>https://www.miniclip.com/games/en/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aniforprez</author><text>Man, I&#x27;m so sad to hear this. Miniclip was the absolute best and I&#x27;ve had so much fun on the site going all the way back more than 14 years where I loved playing all those flash games. I remember having a ton of fun with some of the sidescrolling shoot-&#x27;em-ups that had a surprising degree of polish<p>My favorite developers to come from that era was Nitrome[0]. They made so many classics like Skywire, Final Ninja and Cheese Dreams. They&#x27;re still making games and have ported a large number of their Flash games to HTML5 to play on the browser. They&#x27;re now making a Shovel Knight spinoff which was a pleasant surprise<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nitrome.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nitrome.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
1,934,316 | 1,934,178 | 1 | 2 | 1,933,614 | train | <story><title>How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless</title><url>http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/11/how-i-filled-two-dumpsters-and-went-paperless-with-the-fujitsu-scansnap-s1500/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatrocks</author><text>My apartment got robbed the day after I got a brand new external to back up my MacBook. Guess where it was at time of robbery? Plugged into the laptop. Luckily, I had a second, much crappier-looking external with most of my stuff that the thief didn't take. But I still lost tons of pictures and music. I've been Dropboxing ever since. But would love recommendations on secondary online storage providers in case Dropbox ever whiffs..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inovica</author><text>I use BackBlaze. I have 3 accounts with them, one of which is linked to a Mac Mini that I use as a general storage machine. My set up at home is:<p>3 x Laptops
1 x media centre (Mac mini)
1 x family machine (Mac mini) attached to 2 x 1Tb software-raid drives.<p>Everyone backs up to the Mac Mini, and this is backed up to the 2 drives. This machine also backs up to Backblaze.<p>I too had an experience where I thought I'd lost all my photos of my kids (5 years worth) when a HD died. Luckily I had an earlier backup and I lost around 3 months worth in the end</text></comment> | <story><title>How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless</title><url>http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/11/how-i-filled-two-dumpsters-and-went-paperless-with-the-fujitsu-scansnap-s1500/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatrocks</author><text>My apartment got robbed the day after I got a brand new external to back up my MacBook. Guess where it was at time of robbery? Plugged into the laptop. Luckily, I had a second, much crappier-looking external with most of my stuff that the thief didn't take. But I still lost tons of pictures and music. I've been Dropboxing ever since. But would love recommendations on secondary online storage providers in case Dropbox ever whiffs..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chime</author><text>I've been using Mozy for over a year now. It works fine with my 700GB of storage.</text></comment> |
32,882,825 | 32,882,776 | 1 | 3 | 32,879,734 | train | <story><title>Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell</title><url>https://gist.github.com/ttesmer/948df432cf46ec6db8c1e83ab59b1b21</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sordina</author><text>One of my favourite Haskell &quot;one-liners&quot; is combining the AD package with Number.Symbolic:<p><pre><code> {-# LANGUAGE ImportQualifiedPost #-}
module Module_1663406024_9206 where
import Numeric.AD qualified as Ad
import Data.Number.Symbolic qualified as Sym
-- &gt;&gt;&gt; f x = x^2 + 3 * x
-- &gt;&gt;&gt; Ad.diff f 1
-- &gt;&gt;&gt; Ad.diff f (Sym.var &quot;a&quot;)
-- 5
-- 3+a+a
-- &gt;&gt;&gt; Ad.diff sin pi
-- &gt;&gt;&gt; Ad.diff sin (Sym.var &quot;a&quot;)
-- -1.0
-- cos a
</code></pre>
The package authors did not need to coordinate to make this possible which is pretty wild.<p>Saw it first here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GabriellaG439&#x2F;status&#x2F;647601518871359489" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;GabriellaG439&#x2F;status&#x2F;647601518871359489</a>
and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;haskell&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3r75hq&#x2F;comment&#x2F;cwmqphe&#x2F;?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;context=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;haskell&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3r75hq&#x2F;comment&#x2F;cwm...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell</title><url>https://gist.github.com/ttesmer/948df432cf46ec6db8c1e83ab59b1b21</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrsig</author><text>one of the references is a talk by simon peyton jones on AD[0]<p>I&#x27;m neither a math expert nor a haskell expert, but I happen to enjoy both. It&#x27;s been a while since I&#x27;ve watched a SPJ lecture, and I&#x27;d forgotten how much I want him to explain everything.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EPGqzkEZWyw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EPGqzkEZWyw</a></text></comment> |
32,725,010 | 32,724,823 | 1 | 3 | 32,723,909 | train | <story><title>Toyota patents plans for EV with manual transmission and clutch</title><url>https://insideevs.com/news/566896/toyota-electric-vehicle-manual-transmission/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foepys</author><text>I wish EVs were actually silent. In reality they are just as loud as a normal ICE vehicle above 20mph&#x2F;30kph.<p>The reason for this are the tires which have gotten so wide over the past decades that they are now the sole noise you hear from a normal car.</text></item><item><author>superchroma</author><text>I can&#x27;t decide whether this is dumber than Dodge making a huge deal about how their new EV Dodge Charger (car not car-charger, oh my god, what a branding screw up) makes authentic loud V8 noises, but they&#x27;re definitely both stupid. Can we just fast forward to the future where EVs glide around silently and people look both ways before crossing the road?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>garyfirestorm</author><text>There’s a regulatory requirement that specifies how much minimum noise should be emitted in each frequency band. All BEVs need this pedestrian alert system. It takes into account that partially deaf people may not be able to hear certain frequencies say tire noise band.</text></comment> | <story><title>Toyota patents plans for EV with manual transmission and clutch</title><url>https://insideevs.com/news/566896/toyota-electric-vehicle-manual-transmission/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foepys</author><text>I wish EVs were actually silent. In reality they are just as loud as a normal ICE vehicle above 20mph&#x2F;30kph.<p>The reason for this are the tires which have gotten so wide over the past decades that they are now the sole noise you hear from a normal car.</text></item><item><author>superchroma</author><text>I can&#x27;t decide whether this is dumber than Dodge making a huge deal about how their new EV Dodge Charger (car not car-charger, oh my god, what a branding screw up) makes authentic loud V8 noises, but they&#x27;re definitely both stupid. Can we just fast forward to the future where EVs glide around silently and people look both ways before crossing the road?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dekhn</author><text>Uh, no. I have a hybrid and the difference in noise between a gas engine and electric is highly noticeable at all speeds, in cabin or outside.</text></comment> |
30,690,574 | 30,690,557 | 1 | 2 | 30,688,013 | train | <story><title>Popular Tibetan singer Tsewang Norbu dies of self-immolation protest</title><url>https://tchrd.org/popular-tibetan-singer-tsewang-norbu-dies-of-self-immolation-protest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberpunk</author><text>As a zen Buddhist, I&#x27;ve always kinda felt our Tibetan &#x27;dharma brothers&#x27; style of buddhism (admittedly, I don&#x27;t know a lot about) feels much more like a proper religion than the kind of thing I&#x27;ve been into.. Which put me off quite a lot of it, I still hope to someday visit the place.<p>It’s pretty sad that such an essentially peaceful and introspective group of people are abused thus, even if they believe in some pretty mad shit.<p>I’ve never worked out what china wants in Tibet tbh though, does anyone have a clue? Chan is bigger in .cn than Tibetan Buddhism (and chan (which became zen) also rejects any kind of eternal self &#x2F; reincarnation &#x2F; non-impermanence) and so thus there are no such thing as a lama.<p>So I guess the restrictions &#x2F; bad business china got unto in tibet are related to some kind of territorial dispute? But what’s there? What do they gain?<p>I can’t see how it’s making them a profit..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>technobabbler</author><text>IMHO only, not an expert&#x2F;informed analysis: Buddhism can be a risk to Chinese harmony if left to a separate authority (the real Dalai Lama). The Chinese grand social experiment of a strong state can only really work if they are relatively culturally homogenous, whether in Tibet or Hong Kong or Xinjiang or Taiwan. Dissent plants the seeds of change, and the CCP&#x27;s system doesn&#x27;t work when there is too much diversity of values. It&#x27;s uber-collectivism in the name of the nation.<p>China very rarely does anything in the name of short-term profit. Their government doesn&#x27;t work on 4-year competitive cycles like ours does, they plan and orchestrate in decades, and to them it&#x27;s safer to conquer and assimilate other territories while they are still underdeveloped than when they become too powerful, either economically (like Taiwan) or culturally (like Tibet) or both (like Hong Kong). Having a puppet religious master under their control, along with all of Tibet&#x27;s future economic output, is reason enough to seize it, even the real gains won&#x27;t be realized for another few decades. The artificial legitimacy of Chinese-controlled Buddhism would greatly expand their cultural sphere of influence both inside and outside their immediate borders.</text></comment> | <story><title>Popular Tibetan singer Tsewang Norbu dies of self-immolation protest</title><url>https://tchrd.org/popular-tibetan-singer-tsewang-norbu-dies-of-self-immolation-protest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberpunk</author><text>As a zen Buddhist, I&#x27;ve always kinda felt our Tibetan &#x27;dharma brothers&#x27; style of buddhism (admittedly, I don&#x27;t know a lot about) feels much more like a proper religion than the kind of thing I&#x27;ve been into.. Which put me off quite a lot of it, I still hope to someday visit the place.<p>It’s pretty sad that such an essentially peaceful and introspective group of people are abused thus, even if they believe in some pretty mad shit.<p>I’ve never worked out what china wants in Tibet tbh though, does anyone have a clue? Chan is bigger in .cn than Tibetan Buddhism (and chan (which became zen) also rejects any kind of eternal self &#x2F; reincarnation &#x2F; non-impermanence) and so thus there are no such thing as a lama.<p>So I guess the restrictions &#x2F; bad business china got unto in tibet are related to some kind of territorial dispute? But what’s there? What do they gain?<p>I can’t see how it’s making them a profit..</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whimsicalism</author><text>They were not so peaceful and introspective when they were actually in power. This is basically a CCP talking point at this point, but it is pretty true that the system they governed was essentially a serfdom-powered society.<p>See the sort of punishments that were common for people who tried to organize the serfs in any way: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lungshar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lungshar</a></text></comment> |
13,905,901 | 13,905,482 | 1 | 2 | 13,905,139 | train | <story><title>Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Years</title><url>http://acsh.org/news/2017/03/16/suicides-rural-america-increased-more-40-16-years-11010</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>Yes so you want to have every move to the city where the opportunities are. Which may be fine, but imagine for a second someone telling you that &#x27;you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn&#x27;t good enough&#x27;. Not very considerate. Also, they would be thrown into an environment that is wildly different than there own with far less money than everyone else and lack of skillets and knowledge to thrive.<p>They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don&#x27;t disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?<p>Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. &#x27;Why can&#x27;t black people just start learning how to code to catch up?&#x27; &#x27;Why can&#x27;t gays just get over not being able to be officially married?&#x27;<p>Basically what you&#x27;re saying is &#x27;why cant people that aren&#x27;t me adapt to how I operate?&#x27;</text></item><item><author>w1ntermute</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn&#x27;t opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon.<p>In generations past, Americans picked up and moved to where the opportunity was, rather than staying put. Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now?<p>The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.</text></item><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>Giving money is not the issue in rural America. It&#x27;s not social welfare such as health insurance or anything of the sort. If anything I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.<p>It&#x27;s lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn&#x27;t opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn&#x27;t as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there. Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won&#x27;t solve the problem at all.<p>Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. Ignore if that is true. Ignore if he is an idiot. Ignore if that works in the long term. He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them.</text></item><item><author>loeg</author><text>&quot;People in the cities&quot; (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally <i>want</i> to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support them. It&#x27;s the right-leaning candidates who are opposed to wealth redistribution.<p>Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.</text></item><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>The lack of opportunity in rural America is disheartening to say the least. I feel the election of Trump is a direct reflection of the lack of empathy people have from cities have for rural America.<p>I grew up in New Hampshire in a very rural town with a population of 4,000. Rural life sat well with some of my peers, but I loved tech and quickly left through college enabled by my parents ability to point me in the right direction, which many of my peers didn&#x27;t have. The difference in opportunity I saw in the cities versus New Hampshire was staggering, not even comparable. I&#x27;ve enjoyed my life as I&#x27;ve explored more of America and ended up in the Bay, but every time I go back to New Hampshire there is always a tally of people I knew who died to Heroin. That or one of my friends succumbing to their addictions again. I know these people extremely well and I can confidently say the only difference between me and them was opportunities to enable my mind and parenting. It&#x27;s disgusting honestly.<p>Now I would love to solve this problem, but the lack of empathy I&#x27;ve seen in the cities for these people is the worst piece of this puzzle. People in cities have the privilege of wealth and the ability to direct America in a way rural America doesn&#x27;t. The issues they face in rural America are completely ignored. While they cite that the popular vote strongly favored Hilary, they forget why the electoral college was created. To help rural America from being completely ignored while the cities with denser populations sway the votes towards their issues.<p>I encourage everyone to go talk to a person in a rural county that is provided cheap heroin through foreign drug smuggling groups that don&#x27;t have any opportunities. Empathize with their problems. Do I think transgender deserve equal rights? Absolutely. But go to a town ravaged by heroin and lack of financial growth and bring up transgender bathrooms to them. They will be baffled by your lack of knowledge of how their lives operate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>closeparen</author><text>&gt;but imagine for a second someone telling you that &#x27;you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn&#x27;t good enough&#x27;<p>I don&#x27;t have to imagine it. There are 8 cities between my great-grandfather and me.<p>- Russia (we don&#x27;t know what city), where my great-grandfather was born.<p>- St. Louis, where my great-grandfather settled as a refugee from the pogroms (he was Jewish).<p>- Chicago, where my great-grandfather relocated for work and my grandfather did undergrad-&gt;PhD.<p>- Seattle, where my grandfather moved after graduation and met my grandmother from Ottawa.<p>- Lawrence, KS., where my grandfather got his faculty job and where my parents met.<p>- Rochester, NY. where my parents moved after college.<p>- Milwaukee, WI. because the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle was written during the evenings and delivered in the afternoon, while the Milwaukee Journal was written during the business day and delivered the following morning. My dad was a journalist and my mom was a teacher (they have both changed careers now) and they wanted to have dinner together.<p>- Chicago again, where I went to college.<p>- Berkeley, CA. where I now live for my software engineering job in San Francisco.<p>My family is privileged in many ways (white skin, tradition of going to college, supportive households, etc). But no one in my family&#x27;s history has had the incredible privilege of being born in a place that remains suitable for an entire lifetime, much less multiple generations of lifetimes. I cannot even comprehend what it would be like to be born in a place I could stay in forever while having a decent career. That must be nice if you can get it.<p>In terms of public policy, I&#x27;d consider that kind of luxury to be on par with owning a vacation home. Yeah, it&#x27;d be nice if everyone could have that, but there are much more pressing problems to solve.</text></comment> | <story><title>Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Years</title><url>http://acsh.org/news/2017/03/16/suicides-rural-america-increased-more-40-16-years-11010</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>Yes so you want to have every move to the city where the opportunities are. Which may be fine, but imagine for a second someone telling you that &#x27;you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn&#x27;t good enough&#x27;. Not very considerate. Also, they would be thrown into an environment that is wildly different than there own with far less money than everyone else and lack of skillets and knowledge to thrive.<p>They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don&#x27;t disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?<p>Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. &#x27;Why can&#x27;t black people just start learning how to code to catch up?&#x27; &#x27;Why can&#x27;t gays just get over not being able to be officially married?&#x27;<p>Basically what you&#x27;re saying is &#x27;why cant people that aren&#x27;t me adapt to how I operate?&#x27;</text></item><item><author>w1ntermute</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn&#x27;t opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon.<p>In generations past, Americans picked up and moved to where the opportunity was, rather than staying put. Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now?<p>The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.</text></item><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>Giving money is not the issue in rural America. It&#x27;s not social welfare such as health insurance or anything of the sort. If anything I&#x27;d say there&#x27;s a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.<p>It&#x27;s lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn&#x27;t opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn&#x27;t as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there. Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won&#x27;t solve the problem at all.<p>Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. Ignore if that is true. Ignore if he is an idiot. Ignore if that works in the long term. He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them.</text></item><item><author>loeg</author><text>&quot;People in the cities&quot; (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally <i>want</i> to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support them. It&#x27;s the right-leaning candidates who are opposed to wealth redistribution.<p>Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.</text></item><item><author>jbhatab</author><text>The lack of opportunity in rural America is disheartening to say the least. I feel the election of Trump is a direct reflection of the lack of empathy people have from cities have for rural America.<p>I grew up in New Hampshire in a very rural town with a population of 4,000. Rural life sat well with some of my peers, but I loved tech and quickly left through college enabled by my parents ability to point me in the right direction, which many of my peers didn&#x27;t have. The difference in opportunity I saw in the cities versus New Hampshire was staggering, not even comparable. I&#x27;ve enjoyed my life as I&#x27;ve explored more of America and ended up in the Bay, but every time I go back to New Hampshire there is always a tally of people I knew who died to Heroin. That or one of my friends succumbing to their addictions again. I know these people extremely well and I can confidently say the only difference between me and them was opportunities to enable my mind and parenting. It&#x27;s disgusting honestly.<p>Now I would love to solve this problem, but the lack of empathy I&#x27;ve seen in the cities for these people is the worst piece of this puzzle. People in cities have the privilege of wealth and the ability to direct America in a way rural America doesn&#x27;t. The issues they face in rural America are completely ignored. While they cite that the popular vote strongly favored Hilary, they forget why the electoral college was created. To help rural America from being completely ignored while the cities with denser populations sway the votes towards their issues.<p>I encourage everyone to go talk to a person in a rural county that is provided cheap heroin through foreign drug smuggling groups that don&#x27;t have any opportunities. Empathize with their problems. Do I think transgender deserve equal rights? Absolutely. But go to a town ravaged by heroin and lack of financial growth and bring up transgender bathrooms to them. They will be baffled by your lack of knowledge of how their lives operate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TuringNYC</author><text>&gt; imagine for a second someone telling you that &#x27;you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn&#x27;t good enough&#x27;<p>Now imagine telling a corporation that &#x27;you must build your factory only in City X&#x27; -- why should they? They will build where they find space at good rents and an industrial ecosystem and workers.<p>What if the factory owner lives in California. So he has to move his life across the country and build in New Hampshire because a rural worker in New Hampshire didn&#x27;t want to move themselves? How does this make sense?</text></comment> |
2,761,820 | 2,761,599 | 1 | 3 | 2,761,337 | train | <story><title>Why I Sold My Startup to Google</title><url>http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/why-i-sold-my-startup-sparkbuy-to-google/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>staunch</author><text>Some people might take away from this the idea that you can just build a cool little prototype and Google will come along and snatch you up.<p>I'd bet this acquisition happened almost entirely due to relationships and salesmanship. Most hackers who don't already know the right people (e.g. former Googlers) would have no chance of pulling this kind of thing off.<p>Do not try this at home folks. The only real chance of an exit for most startups is one based on actual success in the marketplace.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I Sold My Startup to Google</title><url>http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/why-i-sold-my-startup-sparkbuy-to-google/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dennisgorelik</author><text>Google essentially killed <a href="http://www.sparkby.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.sparkby.com</a>
(Like it killed Gizmo5 in the past: <a href="http://www.google.com/gizmo5/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/gizmo5/</a> - initially it was "temporary", but then became permanent).<p>Why does Google do that?
Why not allow it to grow and gradually integrate refined pieces of technology into larger project [Google Product Search]?</text></comment> |
37,328,341 | 37,328,253 | 1 | 3 | 37,324,518 | train | <story><title>When should you use the IN instead of the OR operator in Postgres?</title><url>https://ottertune.com/blog/query-best-practices-when-should-you-use-the-in-instead-of-the-or-operator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thargor90</author><text>Yes, this explains the how, but not the why.<p>Why is there no optimization in place for this? Converting a=x or a=y or a=z to a in(x,y,z) should be trivial and the db should have heuristics to calculate the expected query cost to decide when to apply this transformation.</text></item><item><author>ZeroClickOk</author><text>from the article:<p>&quot;For the OR clause query, the DBMS sequentially compares each condition&#x27;s value one by one. In the given example, it performs three comparisons for each row to determine if (price = 1), (price = 2), and then (price = 3). This evaluation approach means that for N predicates, the complexity of the filtering operation per row is O(N).<p>On the other hand, with the IN clause, PostgreSQL builds a temporary hash table populated with the elements in the query’s IN clause (ExecEvalHashedScalarArrayOp). Then as the DBMS scans each tuple, it probes this hash table to see whether the tuple&#x27;s attribute matches with any entry. This hash-based evaluation has a more efficient complexity of O(1) since the DBMS only needs to perform one lookup in the hash table per tuple.<p>Hence, as the number of predicates increases in a query, the OR clause incurs significant overhead because the DBMS evaluates predicates for each row individually, in contrast to the more efficient IN clause.&quot;</text></item><item><author>thargor90</author><text>That&#x27;s weird. I thought this would be optimized based on database statistics and not depend on the query syntax. At least for those simple queries.<p>Can anyone elaborate why this is the case?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mike_hock</author><text>Yes, and Postgres remains staunchly opposed to planner hints because the planner knows better! It always computes the optimal query plan!<p>The &quot;optimal query plan&quot; changes at the drop of a hat, as you can see in this case. Absolutely trivial syntax changes result in a completely different query, sometimes turning a sequential scan into an index-only scan or vice versa. So, 100x difference in query time, it doesn&#x27;t just do that for small tables.</text></comment> | <story><title>When should you use the IN instead of the OR operator in Postgres?</title><url>https://ottertune.com/blog/query-best-practices-when-should-you-use-the-in-instead-of-the-or-operator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thargor90</author><text>Yes, this explains the how, but not the why.<p>Why is there no optimization in place for this? Converting a=x or a=y or a=z to a in(x,y,z) should be trivial and the db should have heuristics to calculate the expected query cost to decide when to apply this transformation.</text></item><item><author>ZeroClickOk</author><text>from the article:<p>&quot;For the OR clause query, the DBMS sequentially compares each condition&#x27;s value one by one. In the given example, it performs three comparisons for each row to determine if (price = 1), (price = 2), and then (price = 3). This evaluation approach means that for N predicates, the complexity of the filtering operation per row is O(N).<p>On the other hand, with the IN clause, PostgreSQL builds a temporary hash table populated with the elements in the query’s IN clause (ExecEvalHashedScalarArrayOp). Then as the DBMS scans each tuple, it probes this hash table to see whether the tuple&#x27;s attribute matches with any entry. This hash-based evaluation has a more efficient complexity of O(1) since the DBMS only needs to perform one lookup in the hash table per tuple.<p>Hence, as the number of predicates increases in a query, the OR clause incurs significant overhead because the DBMS evaluates predicates for each row individually, in contrast to the more efficient IN clause.&quot;</text></item><item><author>thargor90</author><text>That&#x27;s weird. I thought this would be optimized based on database statistics and not depend on the query syntax. At least for those simple queries.<p>Can anyone elaborate why this is the case?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dumbfounder</author><text>My gut says it&#x27;s a resource issue. Oracle has the time and money to optimize a gajillion scenarios that increase performance without making developers think things through. Which makes the product easier to use and seem faster. It&#x27;s very simple to code this one, but then there are 10,000 other cases you need to code too to make it cover a large percentage of potential optimizations.</text></comment> |
7,676,512 | 7,676,455 | 1 | 2 | 7,675,533 | train | <story><title>Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future</title><url>https://medium.com/editors-picks/892b57499e77</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swombat</author><text>&gt; <i>Dukes believes, though he has no evidence, that the bacteria in his gut became drug-resistant because he ate meat from animals raised with routine antibiotic use. That would not be difficult: most meat in the United States is grown that way. To varying degrees depending on their size and age, cattle, pigs, and chickens — and, in other countries, fish and shrimp — receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase their weight, and protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in the United States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture, primarily to fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised.</i><p>I really don&#x27;t like to generalise in this way, but this sort of stuff makes me, as a European, pretty angry at the general laissez-faire attitude of the United States towards such things.<p>You may say &quot;The US is allowed to govern itself as it wishes, no one&#x27;s forcing you to live there&quot; - but with its heavy use of antibiotics in cattle-raising (banned in the EU - even though the US has tried to use its muscle to get the EU to un-ban it), the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics <i>for everyone</i>. So yes, I&#x27;m angry at the United States and its corrupt political system that means that there&#x27;s almost zero chance that any of this will be fixed until it&#x27;s far too late.</text></comment> | <story><title>Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future</title><url>https://medium.com/editors-picks/892b57499e77</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grlhgr420</author><text>when this was posted on metafilter last year someone posted a truly excellent comment: <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/134210/Imagining-the-Post-Antibiotics-Future#5305117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.metafilter.com&#x2F;134210&#x2F;Imagining-the-Post-Antibio...</a></text></comment> |
2,542,902 | 2,542,291 | 1 | 3 | 2,541,853 | train | <story><title>Google penalizes original content site because of scrapers</title><url>http://www.seobook.com/no-adwords-soup</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>clintavo</author><text>Google's latest algorithmic changes seem to be either horribly wrong or not fully baked.<p>Our site went from ranking #8 for our target search "artist websites" to PAGE 440 of the results. Our listing for "how to sell art" just went away. There's been nothing but original content on our site for 10 years, and, among artists, we're considered one of the best sources of art marketing information, given that I owned an art gallery for 20 years and all of our other writers are professional artists. (and yet Google still has <i>ehow</i> ranked for "how to sell art".....yeah, I'm sure ehow knows a <i>whole</i> lot more than we do).<p>I'm saying this not to vent, but to concur with Aaron and others that there is something wrong. It may not hurt Google's business....the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business. Fortunately I've read HN long enough to know not to build my entire company on top of someone else's platform and, as much as it upsets me, we don't need Google. Bing (and Yahoo) have us at #3 for that same search ("artist websites"). We don't depend on search engines as our only source of marketing leads....nor even our main source.<p>The most frustrating thing is not even that it happens, but that they do not communicate. There's no way to find out WHAT happened. Nothing in Webmaster Tools. No way to pay for search support. I read the Google blog post with guidelines on how to structure content after Panda and, none of that applied to us, at least not that I could tell.<p>They say "just focus on users" and that's what we do, but I guess, that's BS.<p>I, frankly, think Google's gotten to big for their britches and as unlikely as it is to happen, I hope Bing, Blekko and yes, DuckDuckGo take some market share away. Windows is better for having OSX and Linux to compete with. Maybe Google would be a bit less "evil" with more competition too.<p>Sorry for the bit of the rant, I'm usually only a lurker here, but this article of Aaron's really hit close to home this week. At least there are a couple of relevant points buried in my little rant....I hope ;-)</text></comment> | <story><title>Google penalizes original content site because of scrapers</title><url>http://www.seobook.com/no-adwords-soup</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moultano</author><text>The headline is factually inaccurate. It looks like a mistake that he was denied access to Adwords due to original content, but that has no connection to his ranking in search. It looks like the adwords representative may not have access to fine-grained enough tools to assess the site accurately, which is an organizational failing, but there's no bad intent there. In some sense it reflects how disconnected search and ads are from each other that they're using crude tools to assess original content.<p>Google cares a great deal about putting the original source of a piece of content first. If we're doing that incorrectly, it's because we screwed up, not because that's how things are designed. It's a hard problem and an area we are still working on intensely. It would be great if someone involved could post the queries on which we are screwing up so we can debug what's causing it.</text></comment> |
25,299,982 | 25,299,455 | 1 | 3 | 25,298,574 | train | <story><title>“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”</title><url>https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/3004947/coding-interviews-hackerrank-nightmare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrew_</author><text>Tech hiring is severely broken. 22 years in and it&#x27;s only gotten worse. We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs, endless series of array shuffling and sorting, canned problems intended to &quot;measure your problem solving ability,&quot; ridiculous hypotheticals (e.g. whiteboard how you would build Slack), and a litany of other tactics that recruiters or old school management thinks are reasonable hoops to jump through.<p>Yes, I&#x27;m a bit salty.<p>The best advice I received recently came from someone 10 years my junior in the industry: politely refuse hackerrank, algorithmic code challenges, array shuffling, or anything unrelated to the work you&#x27;ve done or the work the interviewers are doing on a daily basis. Instead, offer to pair&#x2F;group program or troubleshoot on a problem they&#x27;re currently trying to solve, offer to walk through an open source project you&#x27;ve worked on or authored and speak to the problems you encountered. Let the gatekeeper&#x2F;recruiter know you decline the kinds of interviews I mentioned above, and let them know you&#x27;re looking for an org that thinks outside of that box, that values a person beyond their ability to regurgitate for-sale interview prep.<p>That approach has an effect of weeding out companies mired in corporate lockstep. I had told a recruiter at a national, Austin based real estate firm that I decline those types of questions and interviews. Was assured that they would not happen, and in the first round of the process was asked to sort an array of phone numbers. The interviewers had no idea I would decline the challenge, and I politely ended the call.<p>I recently adopted this approach with great success, speaking with a number of high quality orgs and all around great people who were truly interested in what I could bring to their effort. Granted, not everyone is in a position to take a bold stance, but I found that it made me more interesting to companies who were doing more than going through the motions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meekrohprocess</author><text>Yeah, it does seem like the best jobs are the ones that you don&#x27;t have to jump through arbitrary hoops for. Ideally, your employer or client will respect you as a human being who has something valuable to bring to the table.<p>When I find &quot;good jobs&quot;, they almost always crop up from serendipity in areas that I am genuinely interested in at the time. Looking back it feels like dumb luck, but the sort of dumb luck that is helped along by trying to make your own opportunities.<p>If you ever have a chance to talk candidly with an executive or entrepreneur about a subject that you are passionate about...well, at least take the meeting. Those sorts of discussions aren&#x27;t interviews per se, but sometimes your vision will click with someone else&#x27;s, and that&#x27;s where the magic happens.</text></comment> | <story><title>“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”</title><url>https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/3004947/coding-interviews-hackerrank-nightmare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>andrew_</author><text>Tech hiring is severely broken. 22 years in and it&#x27;s only gotten worse. We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs, endless series of array shuffling and sorting, canned problems intended to &quot;measure your problem solving ability,&quot; ridiculous hypotheticals (e.g. whiteboard how you would build Slack), and a litany of other tactics that recruiters or old school management thinks are reasonable hoops to jump through.<p>Yes, I&#x27;m a bit salty.<p>The best advice I received recently came from someone 10 years my junior in the industry: politely refuse hackerrank, algorithmic code challenges, array shuffling, or anything unrelated to the work you&#x27;ve done or the work the interviewers are doing on a daily basis. Instead, offer to pair&#x2F;group program or troubleshoot on a problem they&#x27;re currently trying to solve, offer to walk through an open source project you&#x27;ve worked on or authored and speak to the problems you encountered. Let the gatekeeper&#x2F;recruiter know you decline the kinds of interviews I mentioned above, and let them know you&#x27;re looking for an org that thinks outside of that box, that values a person beyond their ability to regurgitate for-sale interview prep.<p>That approach has an effect of weeding out companies mired in corporate lockstep. I had told a recruiter at a national, Austin based real estate firm that I decline those types of questions and interviews. Was assured that they would not happen, and in the first round of the process was asked to sort an array of phone numbers. The interviewers had no idea I would decline the challenge, and I politely ended the call.<p>I recently adopted this approach with great success, speaking with a number of high quality orgs and all around great people who were truly interested in what I could bring to their effort. Granted, not everyone is in a position to take a bold stance, but I found that it made me more interesting to companies who were doing more than going through the motions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bit_logic</author><text>This is a good strategy for senior engineers to avoid the leetcode interviews. And to any recruiters and hiring managers reading this, there’s the other side of this. If you want responses from high quality senior engineers, then start your LinkedIn email with “NO Leetcode”. Response rates will likely increase by a lot.</text></comment> |
2,549,615 | 2,549,479 | 1 | 2 | 2,549,240 | train | <story><title>Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough</title><url>http://blog.tstmedia.com/news_article/show/86942?referrer_id=308069</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fauigerzigerk</author><text>I think the real problem with Rails and similar frameworks is the culture of not giving a shit about performance. I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view.<p>But there are people who have convinced themselves that as long as it scales out, it doesn't matter how many servers you have to run. And if the reason is that something that's known statically is checked billions of times at runtime they don't care.<p>For a framework, the concept of premature optimization makes no sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rails 3 Performance - Not Good Enough</title><url>http://blog.tstmedia.com/news_article/show/86942?referrer_id=308069</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stiff</author><text>There clearly still are performance problems in Rails 3.0.x that aren't fixed. I am just now in the process of switching an application to Rails 3 and I have recently spent 5 days of hard work trying to investigate a big performance drop after the migration (under a different environment: Ruby 1.9.2 and PostgreSQL). I ended up finding two big performance issues in Rails PostgreSQLAdapter:<p><a href="https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/398" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/398</a>
<a href="https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/485" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/485</a><p>What they and everyone else experiencing performance problems should do, is to find one action that has the biggest performance difference between running under Rails 2 and Rails 3 and then profile it - easiest way is by wrapping the action in an around filter and using RubyProf. If there is a obvious performance problem somewhere, you will most often see a method that has a really huge number of calls and %self% time in comparison to all the others. Then you have to figure out what in detail happens - I ended up doing this by putting "begin; raise StandardException.new; rescue =&#62; e; puts e.backtrace; end;" into the "hot" methods to get call stacks and then went on to read the code involved.</text></comment> |
14,275,301 | 14,274,737 | 1 | 3 | 14,271,597 | train | <story><title>My son died in 1994 but his heart only stopped beating this year</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39422660</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nom</author><text>I want to raise awareness that you don&#x27;t have donate an organ to save lives. Blood cancer patients all over the world are frantically looking for bone marrow and blood cell donors. The chances for a match are very low, but if they find one the chances of success are high. So you can understand the desperation.<p>The thing is, an actual bone marrow extraction is only required in 10% of all cases, most of the time you only have to donate blood cells. It&#x27;s painless and pretty much non-intrusive.<p>Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dkms.de&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dkms.de&#x2F;en</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bethematch.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bethematch.org&#x2F;</a> for more information about the subject. Costs for the match test are unfortunately not covered by health insurance here in Germany, but it&#x27;s only 30€ or something in that order.<p>If you ever wanted to save a life, get tested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Viper007Bond</author><text>I&#x27;m literally getting a bone marrow transplant today to treat leukemia. I&#x27;m in the US and my donor is somewhere in Europe. I can&#x27;t thank these donation networks enough -- they are saving my life.</text></comment> | <story><title>My son died in 1994 but his heart only stopped beating this year</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39422660</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nom</author><text>I want to raise awareness that you don&#x27;t have donate an organ to save lives. Blood cancer patients all over the world are frantically looking for bone marrow and blood cell donors. The chances for a match are very low, but if they find one the chances of success are high. So you can understand the desperation.<p>The thing is, an actual bone marrow extraction is only required in 10% of all cases, most of the time you only have to donate blood cells. It&#x27;s painless and pretty much non-intrusive.<p>Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dkms.de&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dkms.de&#x2F;en</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bethematch.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bethematch.org&#x2F;</a> for more information about the subject. Costs for the match test are unfortunately not covered by health insurance here in Germany, but it&#x27;s only 30€ or something in that order.<p>If you ever wanted to save a life, get tested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>callumprentice</author><text>I live in the US now but was born in the UK and lived there until I was almost 30. Each time I tried to give blood here in CA, I was told I was ineligible because of the possibility I was a carrier for &quot;Mad Cow Disease&quot;.<p>Anyone know if that&#x27;s still the case or if there is a way to get tests and cleared for donations?</text></comment> |
41,181,489 | 41,180,867 | 1 | 3 | 41,173,261 | train | <story><title>Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYOF-YggWAg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulnpace</author><text>Within her discussion is the unscientific &quot;humans have no free will&quot; statement. Free will is experienced as a part of the consciousness, which we cannot point to, physiologically. (For those who point to the head region as &quot;containing consciousness&quot;, this is also unscientific.) The most annoying part of the video is that her statement comes off as this being simple observable fact that &quot;everybody knows&quot; and is a good example of why articles on topics are best when <i>kept on topic.</i><p>My own observation is that time is better described as human narrative description of events in the observable universe.<p>I have not read the paper referenced in the video and I have to really spend time on these things to recall the concepts such papers are typically breezing through, but when I have attempted in previous years to understand how scientists explain time, they seem to usually have little agreement and lots of guesses. I have not found scientists claiming they have discovered fundamental units of time. I have not found scientists claiming they can sample time. I have not found scientists claiming they can isolate time. I have not found scientists claiming to have derived time as some sort of force in the universe. I am not clear on how something that has no fundamental units, cannot be sampled, cannot be isolated, and is not a force can also be something in the physically existent universe. Yet, scientists seem to place time in their explanations and equations as something that <i>de facto</i> exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bubblyworld</author><text>I think your observation can be generalised - <i>all</i> of physics is human narrative description of events in the universe, coupled with some principles for choosing one narrative over another.<p>I think when a scientist says &quot;free will does not exist&quot;, they mean that in a very particular sense - a theory of physics (or narrative) that includes free will has as much predictive power as one that doesn&#x27;t. So from a scientific point of view it&#x27;s parsimonious to exclude it.<p>As you rightly point out this has nothing to do with the subjective <i>experience</i> of free will, which is an aspect of consciousness that I expect most people are familiar with (scientists or no).<p>By the way, this is not directly related, but who are these scientists you speak of who claim to be unable to measure time? Time, as it is used in theories like classical mechanics or relativity, has been measurable with clocks for millenia. The measurements fulfil the role of time in those theories; the predictions they make have been tested to an extreme degree. This is the strongest evidence for time as an ontological primitive that science can produce!<p>(which is not inconsistent with the fact that it may behave differently outside those regimes)</text></comment> | <story><title>Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYOF-YggWAg</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulnpace</author><text>Within her discussion is the unscientific &quot;humans have no free will&quot; statement. Free will is experienced as a part of the consciousness, which we cannot point to, physiologically. (For those who point to the head region as &quot;containing consciousness&quot;, this is also unscientific.) The most annoying part of the video is that her statement comes off as this being simple observable fact that &quot;everybody knows&quot; and is a good example of why articles on topics are best when <i>kept on topic.</i><p>My own observation is that time is better described as human narrative description of events in the observable universe.<p>I have not read the paper referenced in the video and I have to really spend time on these things to recall the concepts such papers are typically breezing through, but when I have attempted in previous years to understand how scientists explain time, they seem to usually have little agreement and lots of guesses. I have not found scientists claiming they have discovered fundamental units of time. I have not found scientists claiming they can sample time. I have not found scientists claiming they can isolate time. I have not found scientists claiming to have derived time as some sort of force in the universe. I am not clear on how something that has no fundamental units, cannot be sampled, cannot be isolated, and is not a force can also be something in the physically existent universe. Yet, scientists seem to place time in their explanations and equations as something that <i>de facto</i> exists.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spacebacon</author><text>I like to assume both sides of the free will argument will be wrong in the future. The future answers will be wrong as well. This is consistent with history.</text></comment> |
14,555,486 | 14,554,865 | 1 | 3 | 14,553,261 | train | <story><title>Nutella 'Hired' an Algorithm to Design New Jars. And It Was a Sell-Out Success</title><url>https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/can-robots-do-the-job-of-designers-nutella-gives-it-a-whirl.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moftz</author><text>I was hoping the algorithm was to design a new shape of a jar rather than the label of the jar. There are tons of variables and constraints to consider for the jar shape. You want something easy for people to scoop out the product and to get all of it without wasting anything (or maybe an acceptable amount of waste so they go buy a new jar sooner but don&#x27;t feel like they waste money). Also lid shape and size, easy to open and close but as minimal as possible. How efficient can you pack the jars in a box while keeping the box weight under whatever the standard person should carry without needing help. And also how easy it is to actually make the injection molded jar, too complex a design would cause too many jar rejects. And also just overall look, does the jar look like a jar? Human designers usually have a general idea of what a container should look like before adjusting the design to be cost efficient but if you give a computer program just a list of constraints and tell it to go wild, I&#x27;m sure you would get some innovative designs that most people wouldn&#x27;t think of.<p>Think back to when condiments started coming in the upside down squeeze bottles. No company immediately went from the glass ketchup bottle to the upside down squeeze bottle overnight so it was a long process of interim designs until someone realized what the ideal shape and features the current ketchup bottle should have. Sometimes the most common design practice isn&#x27;t necessarily the best or cheapest. Bottled water used to be made of very thick plastic with large caps that were sometimes not able to be recycled. The designs have changed to more thinner, ergonomic shapes with better usage of materials both as a cost cutting effort and a green effort. It would be interesting to see genetic algorithms used for things like packaging design in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malandrew</author><text>Me too. The nutella jar is such an awkward and messy shape to get nutella out off, especially as it gets emptier and emptier. I would prefer it in a regular wide-mouth jar if that were available.<p>Even better, give me nutella in caulk gun form. No wastage, accuracy in application to your toast and you just need to wipe the nozzle to keep it clean. No knife or spoon to clean either. There are tons of condiments I would prefer in caulk gun form. For jams and jellies, there would be no excess air that result in spoilage from when bacteria and fungi get in the jar. Thicker jams with fruit chunks can just use a larger nozzle.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nutella 'Hired' an Algorithm to Design New Jars. And It Was a Sell-Out Success</title><url>https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/can-robots-do-the-job-of-designers-nutella-gives-it-a-whirl.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moftz</author><text>I was hoping the algorithm was to design a new shape of a jar rather than the label of the jar. There are tons of variables and constraints to consider for the jar shape. You want something easy for people to scoop out the product and to get all of it without wasting anything (or maybe an acceptable amount of waste so they go buy a new jar sooner but don&#x27;t feel like they waste money). Also lid shape and size, easy to open and close but as minimal as possible. How efficient can you pack the jars in a box while keeping the box weight under whatever the standard person should carry without needing help. And also how easy it is to actually make the injection molded jar, too complex a design would cause too many jar rejects. And also just overall look, does the jar look like a jar? Human designers usually have a general idea of what a container should look like before adjusting the design to be cost efficient but if you give a computer program just a list of constraints and tell it to go wild, I&#x27;m sure you would get some innovative designs that most people wouldn&#x27;t think of.<p>Think back to when condiments started coming in the upside down squeeze bottles. No company immediately went from the glass ketchup bottle to the upside down squeeze bottle overnight so it was a long process of interim designs until someone realized what the ideal shape and features the current ketchup bottle should have. Sometimes the most common design practice isn&#x27;t necessarily the best or cheapest. Bottled water used to be made of very thick plastic with large caps that were sometimes not able to be recycled. The designs have changed to more thinner, ergonomic shapes with better usage of materials both as a cost cutting effort and a green effort. It would be interesting to see genetic algorithms used for things like packaging design in the future.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>princeb</author><text>the nutella jar is rather iconic. it&#x27;s like the contour bottle or the happy meal box. there are probably efficiency reasons to change it, but i don&#x27;t know if they will.</text></comment> |
19,787,418 | 19,785,882 | 1 | 2 | 19,783,650 | train | <story><title>I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)</title><url>https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtms</author><text>I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.</text></item><item><author>dnprock</author><text>This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn&#x27;t study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%!<p>My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some statistics training, you&#x27;ll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You&#x27;re more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.<p>I congratulated my daughter on her score. We went out for dinner and got tasty pastries for dessert. Life is too short to waste our time on these dumb tests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TallGuyShort</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a right and a wrong way to run these programs. Some schools just pick a couple of outliers and make it obvious they&#x27;re outliers. If you&#x27;re going to group some kids by ability for some classes, do it to everyone. Yes, a few kids are really advanced. A few others are almost there. Don&#x27;t make the first group so uniquely isolated at the expenses of making the second group miss out on similar opportunities entirely. I see the benefit of keeping everyone together some of the time, but I&#x27;m screaming inside when I see my daughter reading at a 3rd grade level next to kids who still don&#x27;t know the alphabet, and her teacher has to keep them all in one big reading group. She has an alternative but it&#x27;s strictly an addition to all her other work: which is how it was for me, so I got A&#x27;s in the gifted program, and D&#x27;s in my regular school work because it seemed pointless and stupid. My high school was only told about the D&#x27;s so it took me 2 years to get back into Honors classes. Whoever designed that program was not <i>gifted</i>.<p>Let everyone spend some time grouped by ability. Don&#x27;t just burden them with more busy work. And please make sure the teachers running special programs have a clue what they&#x27;re doing to kids...<p>edit: Furthermore, I always thought it pathetic that I went from being a very average student in 2 other countries, moved to America and was suddenly seen as a gifted genius who was years ahead of my peers in math and science. I&#x27;ve obviously never seen it that way - I think kids are capable of for more than the American school system expects of them, but their intellectual growth is being stunted at a very young age.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Can’t Answer Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems (2017)</title><url>https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtms</author><text>I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.</text></item><item><author>dnprock</author><text>This article is fun to read. Incidentally, my daughter just took a test for a gifted program. She didn&#x27;t study for it as recommended by our school district. She scored 95% in one subject. But the qualified cut-off rate is 98%!<p>My eyes just rolled looking at that number. That means they only pick 98 and 99 percentiles. For a first grader to score that high, she needs to answer the exam perfectly. If you have some statistics training, you&#x27;ll see this score is like shooting yourself in the foot. You&#x27;re more likely selecting prepared test takers than gifted students.<p>I congratulated my daughter on her score. We went out for dinner and got tasty pastries for dessert. Life is too short to waste our time on these dumb tests.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>I was fortunate enough to get into a GATE extracurricular program when I was in elementary school in the East Bay, a long time ago. In my case, I got to socialize more with some peer groups, visit a planetarium, make oddball things, get a good grasp of the sciences way ahead of the regular school curriculum, and participate in a problem-solving program that influenced my thinking for the rest of my life.<p>BUT: in retrospect, those programs are mostly for kids who just happened to be fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances at the right time. East Bay public schools were pretty good at the time, I was born just in time to learn about computers just ahead of the rest of the world, I had a somewhat stable home life, and my family supported learning and nerdy hobbies.<p>I was a social outcast for most of my youth too, but that had less to do with GATE and more to do with my family&#x27;s obsession with being smarter than everyone else, which made me an insufferable, lazy little jerkwad. It took getting out into the world in my late teens to begin realizing just how much of an idiot I really was.<p>So, YMMV, but if I were a parent I&#x27;d at least give a local GATE program a try. (But also sports.)</text></comment> |
6,496,430 | 6,496,505 | 1 | 2 | 6,495,358 | train | <story><title>Melatonin</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>My youngest daughter is borderline ADHD, and rather than trying Ritalin we&#x27;ve been using Melatonin in the evenings to help ease the bedtime process. (In the hopes that more sleep will help her cope with problems focusing.)<p>The change has been dramatic. Previously it was a 3-4 hour battle each night for her to get ready for bed and stay in bed. Now with 3mg of Melatonin she spontaneously decides to get ready for bed herself and goes to sleep in minutes.<p>The most interesting thing about Melatonin isn&#x27;t that it makes you drowsy or helps you sleep, it&#x27;s that it increases the _desire_ for sleep. While I don&#x27;t usually have trouble sleeping, it&#x27;s often hard to break myself free from a computer or a device at night, and Melatonin changes this. As the author says, &quot;It works.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>allsystemsgo</author><text>I too have ADHD. I was diagnosed with it nearly 10 years ago now. I&#x27;m not hyperactive or anything like that. I do tend to bounce from one thing to the next sometimes, and this can be problematic around bedtime.<p>Not only that but I take medication to treat my ADHD. This medication is a pretty low dose, but sometimes it&#x27;s still going strong at 8 or 9pm, which is not good for sleep.<p>Melatonin has helped A LOT. I take between 1 - 3mg. It&#x27;s not a drowsy feeling. I just want to sleep after taking it. Glad to see there seems to be no side effects.</text></comment> | <story><title>Melatonin</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/Melatonin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jobu</author><text>My youngest daughter is borderline ADHD, and rather than trying Ritalin we&#x27;ve been using Melatonin in the evenings to help ease the bedtime process. (In the hopes that more sleep will help her cope with problems focusing.)<p>The change has been dramatic. Previously it was a 3-4 hour battle each night for her to get ready for bed and stay in bed. Now with 3mg of Melatonin she spontaneously decides to get ready for bed herself and goes to sleep in minutes.<p>The most interesting thing about Melatonin isn&#x27;t that it makes you drowsy or helps you sleep, it&#x27;s that it increases the _desire_ for sleep. While I don&#x27;t usually have trouble sleeping, it&#x27;s often hard to break myself free from a computer or a device at night, and Melatonin changes this. As the author says, &quot;It works.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pstuart</author><text>3mg might be too much. I am not a doctor, but my sleep doctor is, and she recommended half that amount -- right around sunset.</text></comment> |
6,638,704 | 6,637,450 | 1 | 2 | 6,636,763 | train | <story><title>The End of Hypocrisy</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/10/end-hypocrisy-with-leaks.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>&gt; That’s because most of the world today lives within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by U.S. power and legitimated by liberal ideas. American commitments to the rule of law, democracy, and free trade are embedded in the multilateral institutions that the country helped establish after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and later the World Trade Organization.<p>Gee, all of this sounds pretty good! But as the author acknowledges, this is all &quot;underwritten by U.S. power.&quot; I couldn&#x27;t have put it better myself. If the cost of maintaining that power is some hypocrisy, then I say: there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy.<p>The article reaches the core issue but has trouble grappling with it. Would any other approach be better than the one the U.S. is currently taking? Would it be beneficial to the developing nations of the world for the U.S. to abdicate its hegemony, leaving a power vacuum for Russia or China? Or would it instead be better for the U.S. to stop with the hipocrisy, and be clear about its naked intentions to maintain its power? Would the existing multilateral order survive that revelation? Or is the current, if hypocritical, state of affairs the best: for the U.S. to foster the current international order while acting behind the scenes to maintain the power that &quot;underwrites&quot; that order?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>betterunix</author><text>&quot;Would it be beneficial to the developing nations of the world for the U.S. to abdicate its hegemony, leaving a power vacuum for Russia or China?&quot;<p>The US is not limiting itself to keeping Russia and China in check, and that is the problem. Hardly anyone would claim that the US should abandon Taiwan to its fate. Yet at the same time, why is the US military being used to expand the reach of US businesses? Why are we in the business of support cruel dictators, and even overthrowing democratic governments in favor of dictatorships? Why continue the embargo on Cuba? Why do we ignore the UN when it suits us, then use the fact that a country ignores the UN as a pretense to attack it?</text></comment> | <story><title>The End of Hypocrisy</title><url>http://cryptome.org/2013/10/end-hypocrisy-with-leaks.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>&gt; That’s because most of the world today lives within an order that the United States built, one that is both underwritten by U.S. power and legitimated by liberal ideas. American commitments to the rule of law, democracy, and free trade are embedded in the multilateral institutions that the country helped establish after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and later the World Trade Organization.<p>Gee, all of this sounds pretty good! But as the author acknowledges, this is all &quot;underwritten by U.S. power.&quot; I couldn&#x27;t have put it better myself. If the cost of maintaining that power is some hypocrisy, then I say: there is nothing wrong with hypocrisy.<p>The article reaches the core issue but has trouble grappling with it. Would any other approach be better than the one the U.S. is currently taking? Would it be beneficial to the developing nations of the world for the U.S. to abdicate its hegemony, leaving a power vacuum for Russia or China? Or would it instead be better for the U.S. to stop with the hipocrisy, and be clear about its naked intentions to maintain its power? Would the existing multilateral order survive that revelation? Or is the current, if hypocritical, state of affairs the best: for the U.S. to foster the current international order while acting behind the scenes to maintain the power that &quot;underwrites&quot; that order?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eevilspock</author><text>So you believe might makes right? Or that right doesn&#x27;t matter, so long as you are on the side of and can benefit from might?</text></comment> |
9,036,085 | 9,035,778 | 1 | 3 | 9,035,586 | train | <story><title>How Chris McCandless Died: An Update</title><url>http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chris-mccandless-died-update</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>woodchuck64</author><text>What&#x27;s fascinating is inferring the other motives and agendas swirling around the issue that are then cut through by hard science (in Krakauer&#x27;s favor):<p>From <a href="http://www.alaskacommons.com/2013/09/22/what-everyone-is-getting-wrong-about-chris-mccandless/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alaskacommons.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;22&#x2F;what-everyone-is-get...</a>:<p>&quot;The forensic question “Were the seeds poisonous?” is of interest only because it sheds light on broader, more contentious question, expressed bluntly as “How stupid was Chris McCandless?” If, like Alaska Dispatch reporters Dermot Cole and Craig Medred (and again), you think McCandless was a clueless, crazy knucklehead, arrogant in his disdain for wild nature and its perils, then you want to think the seeds weren’t poisonous; the kid just died of starvation because he was too stupid&#x2F;crazy&#x2F;arrogant to make it to safety.&quot;<p>&quot;But if, like Jon Krakauer (and, in the interest of full disclosure, like me), you have some level of empathy with or sympathy for McCandless, you want to think the seeds were poisonous—he was doing his best to survive a difficult enterprise and was done in because he consumed something that was not known to be poisonous until two decades after his death.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>How Chris McCandless Died: An Update</title><url>http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chris-mccandless-died-update</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>notacoward</author><text>This is pretty awesome. Clausen seemed a bit snotty about the original theory not being in a peer-reviewed journal. Now the followup is, and the underlying science also blows a hole in one of Clausen&#x27;s own papers. He messed with the wrong guy. Citizen science FTW.</text></comment> |
24,195,505 | 24,195,047 | 1 | 2 | 24,194,747 | train | <story><title>2.5M Medical Records Leaked by AI Company</title><url>https://securethoughts.com/medical-data-of-auto-accident-victims-exposed-online/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maybelsyrup</author><text>I&#x27;m a medical researcher, and I&#x27;ve worked with exactly this sort of data. The number of hoops I had to jump through to even be allowed on the project was insane. Background checks, legal forms of all kinds, trainings on how to keep the data secure. Fingerprint locked rooms. Access control. And most importantly: the data themselves were air-gapped.<p>If I fucked up on this scale, jail would be the least of my worries. I&#x27;d never work again. I&#x27;d be professionally shunned forever, with no hope of redemption once my name is attached to the incident in some Google search. No more grants, no more collaborations, no nothing. I&#x27;d be ruined. Frankly I&#x27;d be begging to be let into prison; where else am I gonna be able to eat?<p>Nothing will happen to these people.</text></comment> | <story><title>2.5M Medical Records Leaked by AI Company</title><url>https://securethoughts.com/medical-data-of-auto-accident-victims-exposed-online/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eggsmediumrare</author><text>This happens because execs are cheap, farm out everything to dev shops, and the beleaguered, underqualified devs power out nonsense code to keep up with the arbitrary point quota for the sprint. No one knows how the whole system works, reqs change constantly so poorly-planned updates degrade the whole thing, and all the while actual patient data gets mixed into the big soupy pot of bullshit. Anyone who raises concerns about the situation gets to be the &quot;compliance officer,&quot; thus passing responsibility from the people benefitting from the situation to the people who just want to keep their job.<p>I wonder what would happen if devs could say to their boss &quot;no, this won&#x27;t be released until we&#x27;re confident in it&quot; with legally enforced immunity to consequences.</text></comment> |
28,586,149 | 28,586,163 | 1 | 2 | 28,583,656 | train | <story><title>Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?</title><url>https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>&gt; Why do you think population density matters? What might&#x2F;probably matter(s) is the degree of urbanisation.<p>Population density is a measure of urbanization. I don&#x27;t understand the distinction you&#x27;re trying to make?</text></item><item><author>UrsaMedius</author><text>Why do you think population density matters? Does it matter that Swedish forests are large than Israeli deserts?<p>What might&#x2F;probably matter(s) is the degree of urbanisation.</text></item><item><author>xivzgrev</author><text>Agreed, there are a number of counterpoints never considered.<p>Another one: Israel population is 20x more dense than Sweden, which naturally would lead to more spread
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;versus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;israel-vs-sweden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;versus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;israel-vs-sweden</a></text></item><item><author>ayberkt</author><text>I was living in Sweden at the beginning of the pandemic. I suspected that I had COVID multiple times and tried to get a test. The response I got from the Swedish healthcare system was: “it doesn&#x27;t matter what you are infected with, just stay home”.<p>Even though the author does have a point, they overlook the fact that it&#x27;s been much harder to get COVID tests in Sweden than the countries it is compared to in the blog post. Are these numbers normalised with respect to the number of tests performed? What about the number of tests on symptomatic vs. asymptomatic people?<p>Sweden&#x27;s lack of action against the pandemic was not limited to just the lack of closure and mask mandates and so on. As far as I know, they never set up a proper test and trace system (please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, I&#x27;m not sure about this) as they did in Israel or the UK. Of course their case numbers will be smaller.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alkonaut</author><text>&gt; Population density is a measure of urbanization<p>Population density is <i>not</i> a measure of urbanization.<p>A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 1M sq km has a population density of around 1 person per square kilometer.<p>A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 10M sq&#x2F;km has a density of around 0.1 person per square km.<p>A 1sq km city state with 1M people have 1M people per sq km!<p>All 3 these countries are 100% urbanized (no one lives in the countryside) and have the same population yet population density varies by four orders of magnitude.<p>Sweden has a <i>high</i> level of urbanization and a <i>low</i> population density. Or put another way: most people live in few places BUT the areas where people don’t live are large.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?</title><url>https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>&gt; Why do you think population density matters? What might&#x2F;probably matter(s) is the degree of urbanisation.<p>Population density is a measure of urbanization. I don&#x27;t understand the distinction you&#x27;re trying to make?</text></item><item><author>UrsaMedius</author><text>Why do you think population density matters? Does it matter that Swedish forests are large than Israeli deserts?<p>What might&#x2F;probably matter(s) is the degree of urbanisation.</text></item><item><author>xivzgrev</author><text>Agreed, there are a number of counterpoints never considered.<p>Another one: Israel population is 20x more dense than Sweden, which naturally would lead to more spread
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;versus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;israel-vs-sweden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;versus.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;israel-vs-sweden</a></text></item><item><author>ayberkt</author><text>I was living in Sweden at the beginning of the pandemic. I suspected that I had COVID multiple times and tried to get a test. The response I got from the Swedish healthcare system was: “it doesn&#x27;t matter what you are infected with, just stay home”.<p>Even though the author does have a point, they overlook the fact that it&#x27;s been much harder to get COVID tests in Sweden than the countries it is compared to in the blog post. Are these numbers normalised with respect to the number of tests performed? What about the number of tests on symptomatic vs. asymptomatic people?<p>Sweden&#x27;s lack of action against the pandemic was not limited to just the lack of closure and mask mandates and so on. As far as I know, they never set up a proper test and trace system (please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, I&#x27;m not sure about this) as they did in Israel or the UK. Of course their case numbers will be smaller.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawayay02</author><text>He&#x27;s saying that Sweden is larger but that you can expect the same population density in places where people live, i.e. cities, so just raw national population density is not a good metric.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s true, mind you.</text></comment> |
22,503,823 | 22,503,743 | 1 | 2 | 22,500,649 | train | <story><title>FreeNAS and TrueNAS Are Unifying</title><url>https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/freenas-truenas-unification/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Deeplybrassic</author><text>&gt;it is far better to have one really good piece of software than 20 half baked ones all doing roughly 80% of the whole.<p>I have to disagree on this one. Multiple diverging projects create _Stability_, whereas a single project creates _fragility_. One bad step on the only project, and it will be all who suffer</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Excellent news. This is something far more open source projects should do. All this fragmentation is good for nothing, it is <i>far</i> better to have one really good piece of software than 20 half baked ones all doing roughly 80% of the whole.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>Try to provide a package of a GUI app &quot;for linux&quot;. After you support centos, fedora, debian, ubuntu, gentoo and arch, you&#x27;ll maintain a mess of brittle packaging scripts for years, breaking at each release and some updates. Just making the first release for each is a challenge. Even app images, the least well integrated system will fail at some point.<p>You&#x27;ll see how stable is diversity.<p>Then package for windows xp. It probably works on windows vista, 7, 8 and 10.<p>Now I do see a lot of value in diversity. Resiliance, ethics, competition, collaboration...<p>Stability isn&#x27;t one.</text></comment> | <story><title>FreeNAS and TrueNAS Are Unifying</title><url>https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/freenas-truenas-unification/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Deeplybrassic</author><text>&gt;it is far better to have one really good piece of software than 20 half baked ones all doing roughly 80% of the whole.<p>I have to disagree on this one. Multiple diverging projects create _Stability_, whereas a single project creates _fragility_. One bad step on the only project, and it will be all who suffer</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Excellent news. This is something far more open source projects should do. All this fragmentation is good for nothing, it is <i>far</i> better to have one really good piece of software than 20 half baked ones all doing roughly 80% of the whole.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbreese</author><text>I might agree with you in theory, but in the specific instance, there were never really two distinct projects. They were artificially maintained as two distinct projects to have an arbitrary “enterprise” project and the community-supported project.<p>The relationship between FreeNAS and TrueNAS is more like the difference between Fedora and RHEL. Both sponsored by the same company, but the later is the more mature, “enterprise” version.<p>So instead of having FreeNAS and TrueNAS we’re going to have “TrueNAS Core” and “TrueNAS Enterprise”.<p>It’s honestly not that big of a shift from a practical perspective.</text></comment> |
16,694,298 | 16,691,665 | 1 | 2 | 16,690,805 | train | <story><title>NVIDIA Develops NVLink Switch: NVSwitch, 18 Ports For DGX-2</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/12581/nvidia-develops-nvlink-switch-nvswitch-18-ports-for-dgx2-more</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>everyone</author><text>Does anyone know when graphics cards will be available at sane prices for people who actually want to use them one (or two max) at a time to render graphics?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sabalaba</author><text>The bad news is that a lot of system builders like us (we build pre-built systems pre-installed with Deep Learning software <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdalabs.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdalabs.com</a>) are now used to paying more than MSRP for our GPUs. MSRP for a 1080Ti is supposed to be $699. They haven&#x27;t been available even in large bulk purchases at that price for a while now. I don&#x27;t see it going back down any time soon.</text></comment> | <story><title>NVIDIA Develops NVLink Switch: NVSwitch, 18 Ports For DGX-2</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/12581/nvidia-develops-nvlink-switch-nvswitch-18-ports-for-dgx2-more</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>everyone</author><text>Does anyone know when graphics cards will be available at sane prices for people who actually want to use them one (or two max) at a time to render graphics?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Obi_Juan_Kenobi</author><text>It&#x27;s really hard to come up with a timeline, but I&#x27;d say the worst has passed. It will take time to recover inventory, but the alt-coin market (basically, not-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies) has died down a lot and the rush to acquire mining capital has likely diminished.<p>6 months to a year, maybe?</text></comment> |
29,476,750 | 29,476,127 | 1 | 3 | 29,474,274 | train | <story><title>Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews</title><url>https://tanayagrawal.substack.com/p/how-to-schedule-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elevanation</author><text>While this is an interesting optimization strategy, getting and applying professional feedback for one&#x27;s interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion.<p>If you&#x27;re amazing at interviews, the interviewer will remember you and want to hire you. They will even rave about you to their colleagues... &quot;Hey, this person was awesome, we need to hire them.&quot;<p>Accomplish that special human ability, and you don&#x27;t have to worry about such micro-optimisations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>UncleOxidant</author><text>&gt; If you&#x27;re amazing at interviews... Accomplish that special human ability<p>&quot;It&#x27;s easy, you just...&quot;<p>Most of us are not amazing at interviews so telling people to be amazing at interviews isn&#x27;t too helpful. Interview feedback tends to be pretty sparse. Often you don&#x27;t hear anything back unless you got the job. Even if you do get a &quot;no&quot; response it will be light on details (and it&#x27;s usually this way due to legal concerns). It&#x27;s difficult to improve a skill when there&#x27;s little or no feedback and what feedback you do get is vague.</text></comment> | <story><title>Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews</title><url>https://tanayagrawal.substack.com/p/how-to-schedule-interviews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elevanation</author><text>While this is an interesting optimization strategy, getting and applying professional feedback for one&#x27;s interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion.<p>If you&#x27;re amazing at interviews, the interviewer will remember you and want to hire you. They will even rave about you to their colleagues... &quot;Hey, this person was awesome, we need to hire them.&quot;<p>Accomplish that special human ability, and you don&#x27;t have to worry about such micro-optimisations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lijogdfljk</author><text>Can you recommend how to go about this? It&#x27;s the first i&#x27;ve heard of this strategy, and interviews are a big fear of mine. I would have assumed most of these &quot;pay for feedback&quot; things to be scams in one way or another. Thoughts?</text></comment> |
27,021,786 | 27,021,098 | 1 | 2 | 27,020,313 | train | <story><title>Why are there so many Canadians in India?</title><url>https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/26/data-science-is-interesting-why-are-there-so-many-canadians-in-india/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qart</author><text>I use en-CA because it makes the most sense for me.<p>- I want spellcheckers to default to American (analyze vs analyse, etc.) because that&#x27;s the default in computer science. This, despite en-IN using British conventions.<p>- Metric units<p>- A4, etc. paper sizes are the default in India<p>- Acceptable date format (anything but MM&#x2F;DD&#x2F;YY will do)<p>- I definitely don&#x27;t want my file explorer showing sizes in lakhs and crores (the commas in Indian numbers) so en-IN is out.<p>I speak Kannada, but I don&#x27;t think anyone who can speak English here will confuse Canada for Kannada, whether they are Kannadigas or not.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are there so many Canadians in India?</title><url>https://chuttenblog.wordpress.com/2021/04/26/data-science-is-interesting-why-are-there-so-many-canadians-in-india/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scottrogowski</author><text>This is almost certainly wrong but is worth a mention given that the author can&#x27;t figure it out. In Southern India, there is a language known as Kannada. It has 43 million speakers, which, fun trivia, is more than the population of Canada (38 million). While &quot;Kannada&quot; and &quot;Canada&quot; are pronounced differently, I wonder whether there could be some clicks from Kannada speakers who think they are selecting the local English dialect. The English &#x27;k&#x27; and &#x27;c&#x27; sounds are so close together that perhaps Kannada speakers with weak English are trying to sound it out? Would be curious to hear someone from India chime in.</text></comment> |
35,303,251 | 35,303,360 | 1 | 2 | 35,302,735 | train | <story><title>Freedom Clock</title><url>https://domsson.github.io/freedom-clock/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacknews</author><text>I get it, it&#x27;s really annoying that there are different formats.<p>In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format.<p>But honestly both formats (M&#x2F;D&#x2F;Y and D&#x2F;M&#x2F;Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y&#x2F;M&#x2F;D.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstanley</author><text>While I agree that big-endian dates are the best solution (if nothing else, because lexical sort puts it in the right order), I think little-endian at least makes sense. The middle-endian format is just absurd.</text></comment> | <story><title>Freedom Clock</title><url>https://domsson.github.io/freedom-clock/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacknews</author><text>I get it, it&#x27;s really annoying that there are different formats.<p>In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format.<p>But honestly both formats (M&#x2F;D&#x2F;Y and D&#x2F;M&#x2F;Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y&#x2F;M&#x2F;D.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mianm</author><text>They are both &quot;wrong&quot; compared to big-endian, but M&#x2F;D&#x2F;Y is by far the least logical of the three formats.<p>M&#x2F;D&#x2F;Y should never be a default for any software without the user explicitly selecting it or specifying their country.</text></comment> |
21,016,628 | 21,016,936 | 1 | 3 | 21,015,964 | train | <story><title>Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makomk</author><text>That big headline $5.2 trillion figure isn&#x27;t money that was spent on anything. They&#x27;re counting the difference between the actual market price of fossil fuels and what they think should be charged for them due to air pollution etc as a subsidy.</text></item><item><author>tito</author><text>USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Glo...</a><p>&quot;hey fossil fuels, let&#x27;s 1v1&quot;
sincerely, solar<p>(From Forbes: United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SamBam</author><text>At least some of that was, in fact, hard cash subsidies.<p>The US spends around $35 billion&#x2F;year in actual subsidies on fossil fuels.[1] (About $20 billion to producers, and about $15 billion to consumers.<p>Further more, the cost of not charging the fossil fuel industry for carbon emissions should absolutely be counted as a real subsidy, although its value is harder to calculate. But we force industries to clean up other pollutants, or we otherwise regulate their environmental impact, which costs them. If we gave one industry a pass on those regulations, that would be uncontroversially a subsidy.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;climate-consensus-97-per-cent&#x2F;2018&#x2F;jul&#x2F;30&#x2F;america-spends-over-20bn-per-year-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-abolish-them" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;environment&#x2F;climate-consensus-97...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makomk</author><text>That big headline $5.2 trillion figure isn&#x27;t money that was spent on anything. They&#x27;re counting the difference between the actual market price of fossil fuels and what they think should be charged for them due to air pollution etc as a subsidy.</text></item><item><author>tito</author><text>USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Glo...</a><p>&quot;hey fossil fuels, let&#x27;s 1v1&quot;
sincerely, solar<p>(From Forbes: United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darksaints</author><text>Accounting isn&#x27;t just lying with numbers. Those are real costs whether they&#x27;re paid for in cash or otherwise. They may be hard to estimate, but they&#x27;re real costs.<p>For example, if you build roads and don&#x27;t charge users to use them, they are going to use those roads more than if you charged users the costs that they incur for construction and maintenance. Building roads but not charging for their use is a subsidy to vehicle use, which is also a subsidy to <i>all of the inputs of vehicle use</i>, including mining, manufacturing, and yes, fossil fuel consumption.<p>The same goes for environmental costs. You either pay for them with cash or you pay for them with a destroyed environment. And even with a destroyed environment, you&#x27;re probably still paying in cash, just indirectly, deferred substantially, and with significant interest.</text></comment> |
38,271,838 | 38,271,821 | 1 | 2 | 38,271,702 | train | <story><title>ARRL hails FCC action to remove symbol rate restrictions</title><url>https://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-hails-fcc-action-to-remove-symbol-rate-restrictions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chmaynard</author><text>Another open issue is the threat to limit amateur radio access to the 60-meter band (shared with commercial interests).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arrl.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;deadline-extended-to-november-28-2023-for-60-meter-comments" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arrl.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;deadline-extended-to-november-28-2...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>ARRL hails FCC action to remove symbol rate restrictions</title><url>https://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-hails-fcc-action-to-remove-symbol-rate-restrictions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lxe</author><text>I can finally CW at my full speed!</text></comment> |
37,608,230 | 37,601,771 | 1 | 2 | 37,600,618 | train | <story><title>USPS In-Person Identity Proofing</title><url>https://faq.usps.com/s/article/USPS-In-Person-Identity-Proofing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>This used to be what everybody in Germany had to do to open a bank account or request a new credit card, until the alternative of KYC by video call became popular.<p>It&#x27;s not efficient by any means, but in my view it beats the US practice treating an SSN as a password, together with bizarre &quot;security questions&quot; sourced from public records that some banks use as a &quot;verification method&quot;. And no, &quot;phone number verification&quot; (that really only works for phone numbers with the big three mobile carriers) should also never have been a thing.<p>I really, really hope to see a usable-by-everyone identification method one day, as opposed to &quot;usable by enough&quot;, with a sizable fraction of the population just being denied access to credit, banking, and more, just because they don&#x27;t exist in the expected form in some creepy data miner&#x27;s database.<p>Ironically, German ID cards support exactly such a method: You can just tap it on your iOS or Android phone for a &quot;qualified electronic signature&quot; as defined by EU law. And as a non-citizen, you can now finally get an &quot;e-ID only&quot; card, so nobody is excluded from that scheme! Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t know a single person that remembers their six-digit PIN that&#x27;s required for that feature...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicbou</author><text>These systems are remarkably hostile to recent immigrants.<p>PostIdent (go to post office, get verified, send confirmation by mail) does not support Indian passports, among many others. The video replacement has the same flaw. You are legally entitled to a bank account, but a large portion of immigrants are left out.<p>Many banks now require a plastic residence permit. In Berlin it takes a few months to arrive. How do you pay your rent while you wait?<p>The residence permit is an eID, but I don&#x27;t know anyone who activated it. You get an activation code weeks before the permit arrives, but it doesn&#x27;t explain why it&#x27;s useful and the activation requires an in-person visit somewhere. So I&#x27;m told; I have not activated mine.<p>Soon they want to use the eID for the address registration. This would save everyone an in-person appointment... except immigrants who must register long before they get a residence permit.<p>Fortunately, there are old Germans who must also be accounted for, so old-fashioned bureaucratic services exist in parallel.<p>France allegedly has a good method: the postal worker knocks at your door and verifies your identity.</text></comment> | <story><title>USPS In-Person Identity Proofing</title><url>https://faq.usps.com/s/article/USPS-In-Person-Identity-Proofing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lxgr</author><text>This used to be what everybody in Germany had to do to open a bank account or request a new credit card, until the alternative of KYC by video call became popular.<p>It&#x27;s not efficient by any means, but in my view it beats the US practice treating an SSN as a password, together with bizarre &quot;security questions&quot; sourced from public records that some banks use as a &quot;verification method&quot;. And no, &quot;phone number verification&quot; (that really only works for phone numbers with the big three mobile carriers) should also never have been a thing.<p>I really, really hope to see a usable-by-everyone identification method one day, as opposed to &quot;usable by enough&quot;, with a sizable fraction of the population just being denied access to credit, banking, and more, just because they don&#x27;t exist in the expected form in some creepy data miner&#x27;s database.<p>Ironically, German ID cards support exactly such a method: You can just tap it on your iOS or Android phone for a &quot;qualified electronic signature&quot; as defined by EU law. And as a non-citizen, you can now finally get an &quot;e-ID only&quot; card, so nobody is excluded from that scheme! Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t know a single person that remembers their six-digit PIN that&#x27;s required for that feature...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>overlordalex</author><text>That&#x27;s if you even got a pin in the first place!<p>I discovered this recently when I wanted to use the gloriously named AusweisApp2 (ID app 2, superseding a PC app which was at least forward thinking enough to be called ID app 1).<p>In theory it&#x27;s simple to request a new pin - you can even do it within the app! However I&#x27;ve moved since I acquired the card, and so instead of the reset mails going to my registered address, I can only assume they went to the address stored on the card. And in a catch-22 of course you can only update that with a pin...<p>But no worries, you can simply book an appointment at your nearest buergeramt to have a pin reset in person; except there are no free slots in the next 3 months.. anywhere!<p>I needed documents for a new visa, which should give me a new card (and hopefully a new pin!), which ultimately turned out to be faster to do than trying to sort out the damn pin</text></comment> |
8,619,110 | 8,618,980 | 1 | 2 | 8,618,743 | train | <story><title>OSIRIS spots Philae drifting across the comet</title><url>http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/17/osiris-spots-Philae-drifting-across-the-comet/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grey-area</author><text>The original blog post is here:<p><a href="http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/17/osiris-spots-philae-drifting-across-the-comet" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.esa.int&#x2F;rosetta&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;osiris-spots-philae-...</a><p>There&#x27;s a nice image[2] which shows this in context linked to in the comments [3]. ESA seem to think the lander ended up somewhere over in the dark cliffs of the large crater filling the right hand side of this image.<p>[2] <a href="http://i.imgur.com/4m4WqAN.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;4m4WqAN.png</a><p>[3] <a href="http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/17/osiris-spots-philae-drifting-across-the-comet/#comment-201918" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.esa.int&#x2F;rosetta&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;osiris-spots-philae-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>OSIRIS spots Philae drifting across the comet</title><url>http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/17/osiris-spots-Philae-drifting-across-the-comet/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>madaxe_again</author><text>If there&#x27;s one plus in all of this (notwithstanding the data already returned!) it&#x27;s that if there wasn&#x27;t a thick enough coating of dust to absorb the shock of a light impact in the absence of the harpoons or retro-thrusters, and the surface was hard enough to break the thermometer... there may also not be enough dust to cover the panels as 67P nears the sun, which means we may not have heard the last from Philae.</text></comment> |
30,119,868 | 30,120,098 | 1 | 2 | 30,118,758 | train | <story><title>Twitter doesn't care about spam?</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanSrich</author><text>Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam&#x2F;scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.<p>The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam&#x2F;scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can&#x27;t actually judge how good a job is being done.<p>First, we don&#x27;t see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block&#x2F;allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.<p>(But also, I can&#x27;t remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevage</author><text>I follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole thread is pretty confusing to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter doesn't care about spam?</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanSrich</author><text>Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam&#x2F;scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.<p>The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam&#x2F;scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can&#x27;t actually judge how good a job is being done.<p>First, we don&#x27;t see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block&#x2F;allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.<p>(But also, I can&#x27;t remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyMarshal</author><text>I follow around 5000, zero spam.<p>Everyone I follow is computer science or software engineering focused though, so maybe Twitter&#x27;s algorithm can easily recognize my preference and fill my timeline with related tweets.<p>Maybe someone who follows a more diverse set of interests will get more diverse tweets in their timeline, more likely to include spam.<p>Just a guess, dunno for sure.</text></comment> |
24,739,704 | 24,739,660 | 1 | 3 | 24,738,206 | train | <story><title>Nine in ten adults think buying latest smartphone is waste of money</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-mobile-waste-of-money-report-b837371.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>potatofarmer45</author><text>This survey almost certainly wrong. 9 out of 10 people when given a leading question will probably say they think buying the latest smartphone is a waste of money, but the whole point of marketing shows that&#x27;s not the case.<p>Average upgrade cycle is 24-36 months now. 75-85% of that is a &quot;current&quot; model. The caveat here is that &quot;latest&quot; device and flagship devices are not the same thing. For example, the latest oneplus can be either the flagship 8T or the new mid-range Nord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daveFNbuck</author><text>A 24-36 month upgrade cycle means people aren&#x27;t buying the latest smartphone every year. I don&#x27;t think that the latest smartphone is a good value, and that&#x27;s why I try to hold on to mine for a few years before buying a new one.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nine in ten adults think buying latest smartphone is waste of money</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-mobile-waste-of-money-report-b837371.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>potatofarmer45</author><text>This survey almost certainly wrong. 9 out of 10 people when given a leading question will probably say they think buying the latest smartphone is a waste of money, but the whole point of marketing shows that&#x27;s not the case.<p>Average upgrade cycle is 24-36 months now. 75-85% of that is a &quot;current&quot; model. The caveat here is that &quot;latest&quot; device and flagship devices are not the same thing. For example, the latest oneplus can be either the flagship 8T or the new mid-range Nord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antiterra</author><text>Just because someone thinks it’s a waste of money or poor value doesn’t mean they won’t buy it anyway.<p>I have an iPhone XR and, while there’s nothing about it lacking in daily use, I still have persistent thoughts of it as an older low resolution phone that I should upgrade.</text></comment> |
21,720,835 | 21,719,971 | 1 | 3 | 21,719,710 | train | <story><title>The Siege of Carrie Lam</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2019/12/the_siege_of_carrie_lam.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kenneth</author><text>(For context — am an expat living in HK.)<p>Living in HK the last few months has been frustrating for me, primarily because of growing spread of misinformation and the untrustworthy reporting on the situation. It&#x27;s getting hard to know what information to believe, and that&#x27;s even for myself living here, who has seen all of it from my own eyes. How could you expect anyone reading the news or social media from a foreign country to be reacting to valid information?<p>The western media is making it sound like Hong Kong is Syria. Protester private channels makes wild unfounded claims about mass-scale executions and rapes. Chinese media makes it sound like HK is under siege by terrorists. SCMP&#x27;s reporting is increasingly suspiciously lacking and pro-establishment. The government is entirely untrustworthy and straight up lying about everything and anything.<p>There are a few people doing good work (e.g. OSINT HK), but it&#x27;s not enough to rise about the noise drowning it all out.<p>Of course the real situation is more nuanced. It&#x27;s also all entirely pointless, with no hope for de-escalation or positive resolution.<p>That said, it&#x27;s also not nearly as dramatic and disrupting to daily life as you&#x27;d expect. Living in HK is still far safer than in downtown San Francisco (or anywhere in the US for that matter). For those wishing to stay out of it, avoiding protests is fairly easy (I mean — unless you live in Mong Kong or Prince Edward). The handful of times I ended up right in the middle of it, nobody really cared to bother any bystanders.<p>The government seems to be on a mission to do anything in its power to make things worse, from repeatedly escalating the situation through violence, inflammatory policy, and generally being a party-pooper and cancelling all ordinary celebrations (e.g. Halloween).<p>Today, walking down the street in Sai Ying Pun, I observed workers replacing the wooden paneling they&#x27;ve been installing in front of the mainland Chinese banks to protect them from the thrashings with welded metal paneling. It was somewhat of a sign that they&#x27;re getting ready for this to continue in the long term.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Siege of Carrie Lam</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2019/12/the_siege_of_carrie_lam.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sumgame</author><text>‘ No one on either side of the conflict , then or now, has a satisfactory theory of why Carrie Lam won’t form an independent inquiry into police violence, the demand that is the emotional core of the protests.’<p>Does China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?<p>The Hong Kong situation is still quite baffling. I initially thought that the emotional motivation was independence. But it seems like that’s not the crux of the issue</text></comment> |
24,100,938 | 24,100,197 | 1 | 3 | 24,099,968 | train | <story><title>SMT Solving on an iPhone (2018)</title><url>https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bornholt/post/z3-iphone.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zero_k</author><text>Hah, funny to see my blog referenced. Yeah, cache misses are a huge part of SAT solving (modern solvers have prefetch code specifically for this loop, some seemingly following the code I wrote). And SAT solving is about 95+% of SMT solving. So, yeah, cache is where it&#x27;s at.<p>I once had an old, but &quot;enthusiast&quot; i7 that had a 3-lane mem setup, and &quot;upgraded&quot; to a consumer dual-lane i7 that was 2-3 gens ahead. It had the same performance(!) for SAT solving. Was pretty eye-opening.</text></comment> | <story><title>SMT Solving on an iPhone (2018)</title><url>https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bornholt/post/z3-iphone.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>panpanna</author><text>Note that this sort of software can be extremely sensitive to cache arrangement.<p>Not only actual performance but also small details such as data arrangement, line size, replacement model and coherency model.<p>Source: I worked on performance improvement for a related piece of software.</text></comment> |
31,535,492 | 31,532,370 | 1 | 2 | 31,531,298 | train | <story><title>Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA</title><url>https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-survey/academics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JauntTrooper</author><text>When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per department.<p>It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it&#x27;s had a negative impact on my life. My public high school didn&#x27;t have a great math and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had covered the material before in AP classes.<p>By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-wrenching decision that I couldn&#x27;t go to medical school or pursue a PhD in biology because my grades weren&#x27;t high enough. I decided I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out, basically business school was the only graduate school that would take me. I switched my major to economics.<p>It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have loved to pursue research as a profession.<p>My main problem is I didn&#x27;t know how to effectively study in college. I cruised through high school without ever really needing to learn from a book. I didn&#x27;t really learn how to study correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA exams.<p>Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later.<p>I&#x27;ve had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of different levels of preparation and there&#x27;s a big risk that some will flounder.<p>I don&#x27;t like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn&#x27;t matter whether 30% or 80% of the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>willio58</author><text>It&#x27;s insane to me that there are people like you who went to a school like _princeton_ and ended up being cut out of your dream to pursue medical school or a PhD in bio, where if you had maybe just gone to a mid-tier 4-year university you could have easily scored top of your class and probably been accepted to those same programs.<p>To me, grades in general seem to have little bearing on how driven or knowledgeable someone is on a topic. To limit someone&#x27;s future based on a somewhat subjective measurement is just.. wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA</title><url>https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-survey/academics/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JauntTrooper</author><text>When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per department.<p>It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it&#x27;s had a negative impact on my life. My public high school didn&#x27;t have a great math and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had covered the material before in AP classes.<p>By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-wrenching decision that I couldn&#x27;t go to medical school or pursue a PhD in biology because my grades weren&#x27;t high enough. I decided I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out, basically business school was the only graduate school that would take me. I switched my major to economics.<p>It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have loved to pursue research as a profession.<p>My main problem is I didn&#x27;t know how to effectively study in college. I cruised through high school without ever really needing to learn from a book. I didn&#x27;t really learn how to study correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA exams.<p>Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later.<p>I&#x27;ve had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of different levels of preparation and there&#x27;s a big risk that some will flounder.<p>I don&#x27;t like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn&#x27;t matter whether 30% or 80% of the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eatbitseveryday</author><text>If you are lucky enough to be in a financially sound situation, why not consider a career change and try to pursue that which you&#x27;ve wanted?<p>My wife retook foundational courses for med school -- physics, biology, chemistry, etc. to pass the prerequisites, and then the MCAT. You can take classes at (any?) university, telling them they are &quot;non-degree credits&quot; which makes it easier for you to enroll.<p>For a PhD you&#x27;re never too old. For medical school, likely as a &quot;non-traditional&quot; student, you&#x27;d have better luck at gaining admissions to a DO school than an MD school, despite the latter claiming they adore that class of student.</text></comment> |
14,010,472 | 14,008,862 | 1 | 3 | 14,008,569 | train | <story><title>Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI</title><url>http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/openai-general-support</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hawkice</author><text>There&#x27;s lots of concern about the bizarre relationship disclosure. But perhaps even more bizarre is that this deal has a structure closer to a strategic move than actual philanthropy. Am I massively misreading this?<p>This page details how their main goal with the $30M isn&#x27;t to increase OpenAI&#x27;s pledged funds by 3%, thereby reducing the marginal &quot;AI Risk&quot; by less than 3%. The goal is to have a seat on the board (basically -- they use a lot more words to say this in the announcement). What on earth is going on where a charitable organization with Open in its name feels it needs to buy its way onto the board of a prominent non-profit in order to:<p>&quot;Improve our understanding of the field of AI research&quot;<p>&quot;[get] opportunities to become closely involved with any of the small number of existing organizations in “industry”&quot;<p>and &quot;Better position us to generally promote the ideas and goals that we prioritize&quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t the whole point of &quot;open philanthropy&quot; that you can direct funds to organizations more open about what&#x27;s going on?!</text></comment> | <story><title>Open Philanthropy Project awards a grant of $30M to OpenAI</title><url>http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/openai-general-support</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vpontis</author><text>That&#x27;s awesome! Open Philanthropy reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;</a>.<p>In their relationship disclosure:<p>&gt; OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Paul Christiano are both technical advisors to Open Philanthropy and live in the same house as Holden. In addition, Holden is engaged to Dario’s sister Daniela.<p>This is so tangled. I don&#x27;t mean it as a criticism as I&#x27;m sure a lot of SV investments would have a much longer Relationship Disclosure sections. So props to them for including this.</text></comment> |
6,119,839 | 6,119,833 | 1 | 2 | 6,119,673 | train | <story><title>Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-28/heart-surgery-in-india-for-1-583-costs-106-385-in-u-s-.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seanmcdirmid</author><text>&gt; A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US.<p>In general?<p><a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/shocking-facts-about-primary-health-care-in-india-and-their-implications" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.worldbank.org&#x2F;developmenttalk&#x2F;shocking-facts-ab...</a><p>&gt; It’s also pretty staggering that hiring qualified staff doesn’t appear to increase this probability. Das and colleagues suggest that part of the issue might be the variation in the quality of instruction in Indian medical training institutions. So there may be some institutions from which a qualification does make a difference. But given the paper’s results, the effect of such institutions must be rather small. The fact that providers working in better equipped facilities don’t have a higher probability of prescribing the right treatment is also alarming.<p>Obviously, heart surgery isn&#x27;t rocket science, and our medical training is a bit overpriced, but is it so easy to compare two disjoint systems?</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>The first supposed fact thrown around in the medical costs argument like this is, &quot;Well in India their cost of living is lower, so they charge considerably less, yadda yadda...&quot; but it&#x27;s obvious the price difference goes way beyond any cost of living gap. That&#x27;s over $100,000 in price difference, while it is true the cost of living (salary, prices of every day items) in India is considerably less than that of the US, the gap certainly isn&#x27;t 100k+<p>It&#x27;s comparisons like these that really make you sick to your stomach. You don&#x27;t see this kind of innovation in the American health system because it has been engineered with greed in mind right from the start. The lobbyist super groups, hospitals being paid kickbacks for using an exclusive medical equipment provider, the money hungry mentality of US medical corporations is more than obvious.<p>I think when your medical system becomes so expensive it&#x27;s cheaper for people to fly out of the country, pay for accommodation and even some spending money to get the same level of care, if not higher than that of your own country, regardless of cost of living differences and other nation specific costs that&#x27;s absolutely ridiculous. By the sounds of it, India is going to be the new global superpower if more and more people fly there to pay for medical treatment it benefits their economy in the end (given how a substantial chunk of the population is below the poverty line, this might not be such a bad thing).<p>A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US. So expertise or training is no excuse either. In-fact I&#x27;ve found Indian trained specialists to be more thorough, careful, understanding and compassionate in comparison to that of Australian trained medical professionals (I&#x27;m from Australia). When was the last time you saw or heard of a poor American medical specialist or surgeon?<p>The question is: Will America ever change their ways? Or will quality medical care only be reserved for those who can afford decent medical insurance or have jobs that provide fair medical benefits?<p>One thing is for certain, this is submission is going to garner a lot of responses from both sides of the fence if past submissions along these lines are anything to go by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crntaylor</author><text>That article doesn&#x27;t actually compare India to the US. In fact, it says that &quot;It’s also likely the results aren’t India-specific.&quot; It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study carried out in the US or UK, for example.<p>In any case, there is a difference between the general level of competency of doctors in a given country, and the level of competency available to wealthy foreigners travelling to the country for medical tourism.</text></comment> | <story><title>Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-28/heart-surgery-in-india-for-1-583-costs-106-385-in-u-s-.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seanmcdirmid</author><text>&gt; A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US.<p>In general?<p><a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/shocking-facts-about-primary-health-care-in-india-and-their-implications" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.worldbank.org&#x2F;developmenttalk&#x2F;shocking-facts-ab...</a><p>&gt; It’s also pretty staggering that hiring qualified staff doesn’t appear to increase this probability. Das and colleagues suggest that part of the issue might be the variation in the quality of instruction in Indian medical training institutions. So there may be some institutions from which a qualification does make a difference. But given the paper’s results, the effect of such institutions must be rather small. The fact that providers working in better equipped facilities don’t have a higher probability of prescribing the right treatment is also alarming.<p>Obviously, heart surgery isn&#x27;t rocket science, and our medical training is a bit overpriced, but is it so easy to compare two disjoint systems?</text></item><item><author>DigitalSea</author><text>The first supposed fact thrown around in the medical costs argument like this is, &quot;Well in India their cost of living is lower, so they charge considerably less, yadda yadda...&quot; but it&#x27;s obvious the price difference goes way beyond any cost of living gap. That&#x27;s over $100,000 in price difference, while it is true the cost of living (salary, prices of every day items) in India is considerably less than that of the US, the gap certainly isn&#x27;t 100k+<p>It&#x27;s comparisons like these that really make you sick to your stomach. You don&#x27;t see this kind of innovation in the American health system because it has been engineered with greed in mind right from the start. The lobbyist super groups, hospitals being paid kickbacks for using an exclusive medical equipment provider, the money hungry mentality of US medical corporations is more than obvious.<p>I think when your medical system becomes so expensive it&#x27;s cheaper for people to fly out of the country, pay for accommodation and even some spending money to get the same level of care, if not higher than that of your own country, regardless of cost of living differences and other nation specific costs that&#x27;s absolutely ridiculous. By the sounds of it, India is going to be the new global superpower if more and more people fly there to pay for medical treatment it benefits their economy in the end (given how a substantial chunk of the population is below the poverty line, this might not be such a bad thing).<p>A doctor trained in India is no less qualified than a doctor trained in the US. So expertise or training is no excuse either. In-fact I&#x27;ve found Indian trained specialists to be more thorough, careful, understanding and compassionate in comparison to that of Australian trained medical professionals (I&#x27;m from Australia). When was the last time you saw or heard of a poor American medical specialist or surgeon?<p>The question is: Will America ever change their ways? Or will quality medical care only be reserved for those who can afford decent medical insurance or have jobs that provide fair medical benefits?<p>One thing is for certain, this is submission is going to garner a lot of responses from both sides of the fence if past submissions along these lines are anything to go by.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arjie</author><text>For what it&#x27;s worth, there&#x27;s a huge range of private care in India. From expensive hospitals that cater primarily to the upper class to charlatans without a degree holed away in a slum.<p>The difference between these two ends is incredible. While I can imagine these results at the latter, I find them hard to believe at the former. I&#x27;m paywalled away from this for the next two weeks, so if you want the facts, that&#x27;s where I&#x27;d look: what sort of private healthcare.<p>Edit: To illustrate, another commenter has a link to an news story that says mortality is lower after the Indian procedure - <a href="http://m.theaustralian.com.au/archive/business-old/the-henry-ford-of-heart-surgery-devi-shettys-business-model-delivers-cheap-medical-care/story-e6frg90x-1225801548287" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.theaustralian.com.au&#x2F;archive&#x2F;business-old&#x2F;the-henry...</a></text></comment> |
2,722,896 | 2,722,538 | 1 | 2 | 2,722,383 | train | <story><title>TinyVM: A lightweight, fast virtual machine in < 500 lines of ANSI C</title><url>https://github.com/GenTiradentes/tinyvm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon_comenter9</author><text>Unless this is relying on the compiler optimizing this, the dispatch looks to be not good<p>if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MOV) <i>arg0 = </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == PUSH) stack_push(vm-&#62;pStack, arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == POP) stack_pop(vm-&#62;pStack, arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == INC) ++(<i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == DEC) --(</i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == ADD) <i>arg0 += </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SUB) <i>arg0 -= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MUL) <i>arg0 </i>= <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == DIV) </i>arg0 /= <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MOD) vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;remainder = </i>arg0 % <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == REM) </i>arg0 = vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;remainder;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == NOT) <i>arg0 = ~(</i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == XOR) <i>arg0 ^= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == OR) <i>arg0 |= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == AND) <i>arg0 &#38;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SHL) <i>arg0 &#60;&#60;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SHR) <i>arg0 &#62;&#62;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == CMP) vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS = ((<i>arg0 == </i>arg1) | (<i>arg0 &#62; </i>arg1) &#60;&#60; 1);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JMP) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JE
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x1)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JNE
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x1)) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JG
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x2)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JGE
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x3)) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JL
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x3)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JLE
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x2)) instr_idx = *arg0 - 1;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jws</author><text>Update: I changed it to a switch statement. The euler1 program went from 0.081s to 0.091s with gcc on a core i3.<p>The cascading <i>if</i> statements are indeed faster than a switch.<p>EOU - original comment follows…<p>Without the benefit of profiling, I can suggest it may not be as bad as it looks.<p>The relative frequency of the opcodes could make this faster than the switch. See MOV, PUSH, POP in the front? Theses likely have tiny, inline implementations and are also probably a large percentage of the opcodes implemented. They may all fit in the same cache line and give the pipelines on deep pipeline, branch predicting machines lots of good stuff to work on.<p>Likewise, the infrequently occurring opcode comparisons in the back part of the statement, by definition, are almost always false, which should tell the branch predictors which way to go to again keep the pipelines full.<p>A switch on the other hand is pretty much a guaranteed pipeline flush.<p>But… if you asked me to code this control structure without being able to profile and to get it fast the first time… I'd use a <i>switch</i>. (well, maybe with a couple <i>if</i> statements out front if I knew I had a heavily lopsided distribution.)<p>Then if I'd go reread that article that came by HN a couple weeks ago and turn the control structure inside out and see how much better it was.</text></comment> | <story><title>TinyVM: A lightweight, fast virtual machine in < 500 lines of ANSI C</title><url>https://github.com/GenTiradentes/tinyvm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon_comenter9</author><text>Unless this is relying on the compiler optimizing this, the dispatch looks to be not good<p>if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MOV) <i>arg0 = </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == PUSH) stack_push(vm-&#62;pStack, arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == POP) stack_pop(vm-&#62;pStack, arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == INC) ++(<i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == DEC) --(</i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == ADD) <i>arg0 += </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SUB) <i>arg0 -= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MUL) <i>arg0 </i>= <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == DIV) </i>arg0 /= <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == MOD) vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;remainder = </i>arg0 % <i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == REM) </i>arg0 = vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;remainder;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == NOT) <i>arg0 = ~(</i>arg0);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == XOR) <i>arg0 ^= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == OR) <i>arg0 |= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == AND) <i>arg0 &#38;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SHL) <i>arg0 &#60;&#60;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == SHR) <i>arg0 &#62;&#62;= </i>arg1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == CMP) vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS = ((<i>arg0 == </i>arg1) | (<i>arg0 &#62; </i>arg1) &#60;&#60; 1);
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JMP) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JE
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x1)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JNE
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x1)) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JG
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x2)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JGE
&#38;&#38; (vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x3)) instr_idx = <i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JL
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x3)) instr_idx = </i>arg0 - 1;
else if(vm-&#62;pProgram-&#62;instr[instr_idx] == JLE
&#38;&#38; !(vm-&#62;pMemory-&#62;FLAGS &#38; 0x2)) instr_idx = *arg0 - 1;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>teyc</author><text>For the benefit of those who don't understand this, have a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code</a> where it explains the different ways one can process byte codes.<p>The key issue here is that the efficiency of dispatch loop determines the performance of a VM.</text></comment> |
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