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40,557,215 | 40,557,071 | 1 | 2 | 40,543,535 | train | <story><title>Re-Evaluating GPT-4's Bar Exam Performance</title><url>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-024-09396-9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Scoring 96 percentile among humans taking the exam without moving goal posts would have been science fiction two years ago. Now it’s suddenly not good enough and the fact a computer program can score decent among passing lawyers and first time test takers is something to sneer at.<p>The fact I can talk to the computer and it responds to me idiomatically and understands my semantic intent well enough to be nearly indistinguishable from a human being is breath taking. Anyone who views it as anything less in 2024 and asserts with a straight face they wouldn’t have said the same thing in 2020 is lying.<p>I do however find the paper really useful in contextualizing the scoring with a much finer grain. Personally I didn’t take the 96 percentile score to be anything other than “among the mass who take the test,” and have enough experience with professional licensing exams to know a huge percentage of test takers fail and are repeat test takers. Placing the goal posts quantitatively for the next levels of achievement is a useful exercise. But the profusion of jaded nerds makes me sad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Re-Evaluating GPT-4's Bar Exam Performance</title><url>https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-024-09396-9</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thehoneybadger</author><text>It is difficult to comment without sounding obnoxious, but having taken the bar exam, I found the exam simple. Surprisingly simple. I think it was the single most over hyped experience of my life. I was fed all this insecurity and walked into the convention center expecting to participate in the biggest intellectual challenge in my life. Instead, it was endless multiple choice questions and a couple contrived scenarios for essays.<p>It may also be surprising to some to understand that legal writing is prized for its degree of formalism. It aims to remove all connotation from a message so as to minimize misunderstanding, much like clean code.<p>It may also be surprising, but the goal when writing a legal brief or judicial opinion is not to try to sound smart. The goal is to be clear, objective, and thereby, persuasive. Using big words for the sake of using big words, using rare words, using weasel words like &quot;kind of&quot; or &quot;most of the time&quot; or &quot;many people are saying&quot;, writing poetically, being overly obtuse and abstract, these are things that get your law school application rejected, your brief ridiculed, and your bar exam failed.<p>The simpler your communication, the more formulaic, the better. The more your argument is structured, akin to a computer program, the better.<p>As compared to some other domain, such as fiction, good legal writing much easier for an attention model to simulate. The best exam answers are the ones that are the most formulaic and that use the smallest lexicon and that use words correctly.<p>I only want to add this comment because I want to inform how non-lawyers perceive the bar exam. Getting an attention model to pass the bar exam is a low bar. It is not some great technical feat. A programmer can practically write a semantic disambiguation algorithm for legal writing from scratch with moderate effort.<p>It will be a good accomplishment, but it will only be a stepping stone. I am still waiting for AI to tackle messages that have greater nuance and that are truly free form. LLMs are still not there yet.</text></comment> |
14,376,482 | 14,376,521 | 1 | 2 | 14,375,459 | train | <story><title>U.S. Startups Fail to Attract Expected Crowd of Small Investors</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-19/u-s-startups-fail-to-attract-expected-crowd-of-small-investors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>This is anecdotal, but I chatted with a VC for a while at an event and he said their firm will not invest in anyone who did equity crowd funding, on the theory that it signals a weaker company. If they were stronger, they would have raised proper VC.<p>I think the existing VC investment structures hate the idea of crowdfunded VC as it threatens their model, which is personal connections and an old boys (and girls) network which allows more favorable terms for investors, especially for first-time founders.<p>I hope that crowdfunding becomes more normal. Not every idea has to have billion dollar potential, which is what most VC&#x27;s are looking for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FailMore</author><text>I was a VC. I think it is mainly that it is a very weak signal. A good VC or a select group of high quality angels does help a company get itself in order, so raising money from a large collection of distant angels tends to be a signal that the quality of the company must be low - as they <i>should</i> have tried to raise from high quality individuals first.<p>A company with crowdfunding will have to display stronger metrics than a company with strong angels &#x2F; VCs.<p>Imagine two companies come to pitch, both are identical in every way. One has crowdfunded a $1M seed, the other got a check from Andreessen Horowitz and the CTO of LinkedIn. Which one do you put your money in? Even the potential deal flow from those individuals helps hedge your bet.<p>As a side note I think that this relationship of quality and crowdfunding is true (though not always by any means). I have seen fraudulent behaviour by companies misrepresenting their data to a group who are, by a VC&#x27;s standard, very unsavvy investors. This company was certainly not able to raise money from a VC, but raised two $M+ rounds on a crowd funding site. However, I have also seen good companies who don&#x27;t have an &#x27;in&#x27; to the VC world raise money in this way.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Startups Fail to Attract Expected Crowd of Small Investors</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-19/u-s-startups-fail-to-attract-expected-crowd-of-small-investors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>seibelj</author><text>This is anecdotal, but I chatted with a VC for a while at an event and he said their firm will not invest in anyone who did equity crowd funding, on the theory that it signals a weaker company. If they were stronger, they would have raised proper VC.<p>I think the existing VC investment structures hate the idea of crowdfunded VC as it threatens their model, which is personal connections and an old boys (and girls) network which allows more favorable terms for investors, especially for first-time founders.<p>I hope that crowdfunding becomes more normal. Not every idea has to have billion dollar potential, which is what most VC&#x27;s are looking for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riazrizvi</author><text>Even as a founder I can understand why VCs might be reluctant. Investors accumulate control of a company over each round of funding. This enables them to rest easier that their money isn&#x27;t going to be mismanaged. The investor-bloc&#x27;s influence is predicated on the reasonableness of the other investor partners, if they don&#x27;t see eye to eye then their votes don&#x27;t have influence. An equity crowd is not a strong partner for the investors. Just the opposite it leaves more control in the hands of the executives because they have the direct communication channel to them.</text></comment> |
24,237,132 | 24,237,303 | 1 | 2 | 24,236,734 | train | <story><title>RustConf 2020 Links</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/rustconf-2020</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>I skimmed through the talks and the content seems to be more focused at PMs evaluating using Rust than at Rust programmers themselves.<p>I don&#x27;t think I learned anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcpst</author><text>I actually felt like I learned a lot. Not so much technical stuff, but more about how intentional the community is designed.<p>It made me feel proud to be part of a group that is all about empowering the people that need it most. People that are typically marginalized.<p>How values aren’t an option; how deciding not to have values is itself a value choice.<p>The whole event made me even more excited about Rust, and building in an ecosystem that is very explicitly inclusive.</text></comment> | <story><title>RustConf 2020 Links</title><url>https://github.com/poteto/rustconf-2020</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>I skimmed through the talks and the content seems to be more focused at PMs evaluating using Rust than at Rust programmers themselves.<p>I don&#x27;t think I learned anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>steveklabnik</author><text>Creating a program is always difficult. Historically, there&#x27;s been a big tension with Rustconf, and that&#x27;s that many people are still new to Rust, so serving them best involves accepting talks that are more broad, both in scope and difficulty. It&#x27;s <i>really</i> hard to pick talks for something as big as a language ecosystem for a one-day, one track conference.<p>Last year, RustConf did one day, but two parallel tracks. Fourteen talks instead of seven helps a lot, and lets you accept things in a much broader range of topics and difficulties.<p>2020 is... not a usual year for events. There are also more conferences these days, and with different focuses. Oxidize is very different than RustFest is different than RustConf is different than all the other various confs.</text></comment> |
33,461,717 | 33,461,597 | 1 | 2 | 33,460,970 | train | <story><title>ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service</title><url>http://3lib.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>night-rider</author><text>&gt; I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!<p>Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don&#x27;t want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how &#x27;fast&#x27; you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.</text></item><item><author>idontwantthis</author><text>Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe&#x27;s shitty app, you can&#x27;t share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow.<p>I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lxgr</author><text>&gt; Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites.<p>DRM doesn&#x27;t seem to be very good at preventing this either, though. The only thing it&#x27;s really good at is making it harder for legitimate users to access their legally purchased media.<p>There is an inherent asymmetry to it: It only takes one sophisticated bad actor to break DRM and make a cracked book widely available, yet legitimate users not willing to break the law are suffering the inconveniences of error-prone, user-hostile systems.<p>I can even somewhat empathize with the idea of DRM for subscriptions or loans (otherwise there is really no incentive for users to continue paying, and durable access is not a concern either), but for outright purchased media, it really rubs me the wrong way to know that I can lose access to my stuff at any time.<p>It worked like this for music (Spotify and Apple Music have DRM, but iTunes and Amazon MP3&#x2F;AAC purchases haven&#x27;t, for example), and it&#x27;s even working for eBooks in some countries: German language ePubs have been DRM free for some years now (although watermarked).</text></comment> | <story><title>ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service</title><url>http://3lib.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>night-rider</author><text>&gt; I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!<p>Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don&#x27;t want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how &#x27;fast&#x27; you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.</text></item><item><author>idontwantthis</author><text>Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe&#x27;s shitty app, you can&#x27;t share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow.<p>I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sixtyfourbits</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-kindle-5317703" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...</a></text></comment> |
27,871,460 | 27,868,958 | 1 | 2 | 27,867,941 | train | <story><title>HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)</title><url>https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-progress-on-real-risc-v-hardware/10963/31</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hankman86</author><text>Other than BeOS nostalgia: is there any good reason to prefer Haiku over [name any modern Linux distribution]? I can see that it’s fun to hack on an OS and make it your own. But is Haiku actually known to do anything particularly well that other operating systems struggle with?</text></comment> | <story><title>HaikuOS running on RISC-V hardware (HiFive Unmatched)</title><url>https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/my-progress-on-real-risc-v-hardware/10963/31</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qwerty456127</author><text>This is awesome but this is a rather strategic move. Hopefully RISC-V boards will emerge and this will become practical. Today, however, a RaspberryPI port could make more sense.</text></comment> |
12,896,852 | 12,896,943 | 1 | 2 | 12,894,721 | train | <story><title>Apple's Great GPL Purge (2014)</title><url>http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greyman</author><text>&gt; GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it&#x27;s about maximizing freedom of your work and anything based upon it.<p>Yes, but you should add that you are talking about the RMS definition of freedom, not about the word freedom as it is generally understood.</text></item><item><author>candiodari</author><text>GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it&#x27;s about maximizing freedom of your work and anything based upon it. It&#x27;s about not having your work just stolen, embraced and extended, monopolized, and disappeared.</text></item><item><author>payne92</author><text>I think GPL has served its purpose, leaving a healthy ecosystem of open source software along with professional acceptance of the model.<p>Now, paradoxically, GPL is less free than many open source licenses. The GPL restrictions will limit adoptions, as we&#x27;re seeing here.<p>Stated differently, GPL was an important starting &quot;assist&quot; that&#x27;s now slowing us down. It&#x27;s time to turn it off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kzrdude</author><text>The assertion that there is one general and correct notion of freedom is dubious when we hear <i>freedom</i> being shouted misguidedly all the time (politics stuff).</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's Great GPL Purge (2014)</title><url>http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>greyman</author><text>&gt; GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it&#x27;s about maximizing freedom of your work and anything based upon it.<p>Yes, but you should add that you are talking about the RMS definition of freedom, not about the word freedom as it is generally understood.</text></item><item><author>candiodari</author><text>GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it&#x27;s about maximizing freedom of your work and anything based upon it. It&#x27;s about not having your work just stolen, embraced and extended, monopolized, and disappeared.</text></item><item><author>payne92</author><text>I think GPL has served its purpose, leaving a healthy ecosystem of open source software along with professional acceptance of the model.<p>Now, paradoxically, GPL is less free than many open source licenses. The GPL restrictions will limit adoptions, as we&#x27;re seeing here.<p>Stated differently, GPL was an important starting &quot;assist&quot; that&#x27;s now slowing us down. It&#x27;s time to turn it off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guelo</author><text>GPL preserves the hacker&#x27;s freedom to modify the code in the hardware they own. It doesn&#x27;t preserve a corporation&#x27;s freedom to take the code, package it up and sell it in some other hardware. Which licenses are more free? Depends who you are and what you&#x27;re trying to do.</text></comment> |
38,871,691 | 38,732,621 | 1 | 3 | 38,731,355 | train | <story><title>What We Need Instead of "Web Components"</title><url>https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/web-component-alternative-futures/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fevangelou</author><text>That&#x27;s a great writeup.<p>As someone who&#x27;s worked primarily on news&#x2F;media sites for the last 15 years, I can totally relate and agree on all your points.<p>I would also argue that there are non-code issues that could easily be resolved. Bundling fonts for example. Decide on the top 100 with support for all or almost all characters, based on usage etc., and bundle them in the browser. That would shave possibly hundreds of KBs of each page&#x27;s size.<p>On the flip side, stuff like lazy loading could become standard and use the attribute only to force-load content. Or stuff that is used on every freaking site (eg togglers as native html tags).<p>I&#x27;m hopeful though.</text></comment> | <story><title>What We Need Instead of "Web Components"</title><url>https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/web-component-alternative-futures/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>morrvs</author><text>Thanks for this, gives my intuition some words to back it up!<p>I find especially compelling how the author separates concrete problems like reconciliation (hard to argue against) from the abstract principle of &quot;everything should be a component&quot; (can be argued more easily IMO).<p>Shamelessly plugging <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;morris&#x2F;vanilla-todo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;morris&#x2F;vanilla-todo</a> here; in this try-hard-to-stay-vanilla case study there are similar conclusions: Reconciliation is hard, CSS global namespace is problematic, etc. - I also did not use web components, but could not explain&#x2F;justify that decision well (until now!).</text></comment> |
17,856,867 | 17,856,588 | 1 | 3 | 17,855,104 | train | <story><title>Pandoc</title><url>https://pandoc.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smohare</author><text>I’ve never understood the impetus for not using full LaTeX in an academic contex, given that the boiler plate is so minimal and presumably one has a built up a personal template over time.<p>For blog posts and notes I see the appeal, since the boilerplate can be a hindrance to spontaneous writing.</text></item><item><author>Schiphol</author><text>I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher &#x27;needs&#x27; a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It&#x27;s just great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>Latex can&#x27;t produce web output, which is increasingly a target I want.<p>Also, Latex can&#x27;t produce any output which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX). The PDFs latex produces are probably the least accessible format available (much worse than a word proeuced pdf, or some html). This matters to me, and should matter more to other people (in my opinion).</text></comment> | <story><title>Pandoc</title><url>https://pandoc.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smohare</author><text>I’ve never understood the impetus for not using full LaTeX in an academic contex, given that the boiler plate is so minimal and presumably one has a built up a personal template over time.<p>For blog posts and notes I see the appeal, since the boilerplate can be a hindrance to spontaneous writing.</text></item><item><author>Schiphol</author><text>I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher &#x27;needs&#x27; a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It&#x27;s just great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>susam</author><text>I agree. If one is going to use LaTeX directly or indirectly via Pandoc, eventually one would have to build up a personal template to fine-tune the look and feel of the documents.<p>If one is going to write LaTeX code anyway, it seems easier and cleaner to use LaTeX all the way, move all the boilerplate along with the personal template to say, a file named preamble.tex, and \input{preamble.tex} in the documents.<p>However, there are situations where Pandoc can be convenient. For example, I wanted a document[1] to be written primarily as README.md (CommonMark format), so that GitHub could render it as the project README. At the same time I wanted to render a PDF output from a customized form of the content. Pandoc is convenient for cases like this although it takes a bit of work to fine-tune the formatting and customize the content for each output format.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;susam&#x2F;gitpr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;susam&#x2F;gitpr</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;susam&#x2F;gitpr&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Makefile" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;susam&#x2F;gitpr&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;Makefile</a></text></comment> |
14,945,033 | 14,945,061 | 1 | 2 | 14,944,574 | train | <story><title>Many Smart Contract Use Cases Are Impossible (2016)</title><url>https://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>This article outlines the basic problem. If you want smart contracts that do anything off chain, there have to be connections to trusted services that provide information and take actions. If you have trusted services available, you may not need a blockchain.<p>The article points out that you can&#x27;t construct an ordinary loan on chain, because you have no way to enforce paying it back short of tying up the loaned funds tor the duration of the loan. Useful credit fundamentally requires some way of making debtors pay up later. It&#x27;s possible to construct various speculative financial products entirely on chain, and that&#x27;s been done, but it&#x27;s mostly useful for gambling, broadly defined.</text></comment> | <story><title>Many Smart Contract Use Cases Are Impossible (2016)</title><url>https://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>libertymcateer</author><text>I have been saying this for quite sometime on this forum - contracts have to deal with ambiguous circumstances and expressly contemplate being resolved in courts. Ambiguity of contracts is a <i>feature</i>, not a bug, as it is in the interest of <i>both</i> parties to be able to argue about certain unanticipated events when they occur.<p>Quoting my own comments from a while back:<p>&gt; The vast majority of contracts do not have syntactically testable conditions. They just don&#x27;t. Whether the conditions in a contract have been met is very often a matter of huge debate - this is what &quot;law suits&quot; are about. Unless you can create a condition that is testable by code, you cannot have a contract that self-enforces with the block chain. The conditions set forth in contracts are extremely complex and reasonable people can differ. I cannot imagine how you would have a contract be triggered on the insolvency of a privately held corporation - good luck defining insolvency and good luck getting access to the underlying books. Copyright infringement is also a preposterous idea - the amount of semantic judgment that must be made to determine if a work is infringing is enormous. Only the very simplest of conditions - comparing numbers, checking the time, can be reliably automated, and if you are getting a lawyer to write your contracts, odds are there is substantially more complexity in the agreements than this, which is why you hired the lawyer in the first place. In addition, a fair portion of contracts that can actually be set up to work this already are - and the blockchain is not necessary. They are things like credit cards and they work pretty good without the blockchain.</text></comment> |
33,734,443 | 33,733,311 | 1 | 3 | 33,729,345 | train | <story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>This makes perfect sense product wise, if I&#x27;m searching &quot;bakery&quot; on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.<p>As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.</text></item><item><author>dpryden</author><text>I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the &quot;New Maps&quot; release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn&#x27;t involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com&#x2F;maps around that time, but I don&#x27;t know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.<p>In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it&#x27;s possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It&#x27;s also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn&#x27;t seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philsnow</author><text>&gt; if I&#x27;m searching &quot;bakery&quot; on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me<p>And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that&#x27;s ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I&#x27;ve searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.</text></comment> | <story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>This makes perfect sense product wise, if I&#x27;m searching &quot;bakery&quot; on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.<p>As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.</text></item><item><author>dpryden</author><text>I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the &quot;New Maps&quot; release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn&#x27;t involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com&#x2F;maps around that time, but I don&#x27;t know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.<p>In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it&#x27;s possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It&#x27;s also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn&#x27;t seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>startupsfail</author><text>What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue.<p>It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.</text></comment> |
12,457,651 | 12,457,640 | 1 | 2 | 12,456,136 | train | <story><title>Visual Studio Code 1.5</title><url>https://code.visualstudio.com/updates?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>On this day and age many don&#x27;t want to pay for tools.<p>Sometimes I wonder if Emacs and Vi would be so appreciated if they were commercial as well, without any FOSS version available.</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>Try WebStorm. I&#x27;m surprised at how few people use it, given the quality of the autocomplete and code assistance (and the fact that it works just as well with ES6 as it does with TypeScript!)</text></item><item><author>msoad</author><text>VSCode + TypeScript is an amazing experience for us poor JavaScript developers that never enjoyed proper autocomplete and refactoring in our editors. Writing JavaScript feels like writing random bash scripts with no help now. TypeScript is freaking awesome and you should start using it! :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>markcerqueira</author><text>&gt; On this day and age many don&#x27;t want to pay for tools.<p>Strange logic: if everyone followed that train of thought, we&#x27;d all settle for whatever quality tools are available so long as the price is $0. I&#x27;d much rather pay for a valuable tool than use a subpar free tool.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visual Studio Code 1.5</title><url>https://code.visualstudio.com/updates?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjmlp</author><text>On this day and age many don&#x27;t want to pay for tools.<p>Sometimes I wonder if Emacs and Vi would be so appreciated if they were commercial as well, without any FOSS version available.</text></item><item><author>aviraldg</author><text>Try WebStorm. I&#x27;m surprised at how few people use it, given the quality of the autocomplete and code assistance (and the fact that it works just as well with ES6 as it does with TypeScript!)</text></item><item><author>msoad</author><text>VSCode + TypeScript is an amazing experience for us poor JavaScript developers that never enjoyed proper autocomplete and refactoring in our editors. Writing JavaScript feels like writing random bash scripts with no help now. TypeScript is freaking awesome and you should start using it! :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kozikow</author><text>&gt; On this day and age many don&#x27;t want to pay for tools.<p>Main part of pycharm is free and open source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jetbrains.com&#x2F;pycharm&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;pycharm-3-0-community-edition-source-code-now-available&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jetbrains.com&#x2F;pycharm&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;pycharm-3-0-commu...</a> .<p>&gt; Sometimes I wonder if Emacs and Vi would be so appreciated if they were commercial as well, without any FOSS version available.<p>One reason for multitude of emacs extensions is the open source nature. Average IntelliJ user is less likely to write extension than emacs user.</text></comment> |
13,489,293 | 13,488,719 | 1 | 2 | 13,487,886 | train | <story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>problems</author><text>Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like &quot;avoid ingredients you can&#x27;t pronounce&quot; and a lot of &quot;avoid processed anything&quot;.<p>While I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s some arguable benefits to these things, I think it&#x27;s paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being &quot;processed&quot;. What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss.<p>Maybe I just have no sense for quality, but I&#x27;ve tried paying double for &quot;organic&quot; products and similar - only to be repeatedly disappointed with products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker - I&#x27;ll never buy them again, it just doesn&#x27;t make sense to pay more for it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (2007)</title><url>http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ericdykstra</author><text>This is a great article, and should be widely read beyond that piece of succinct eating advice. For example, this is a great paragraph:<p>&gt; In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses — with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.<p>In fact, I recently read a book, <i>The Dorito Effect</i> which goes into this in much, much more detail, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. I bought it thinking it would be a light read, based on the title and cover, but it was more engaging, better researched, and more informative than I expected.</text></comment> |
25,034,242 | 25,034,305 | 1 | 3 | 25,032,956 | train | <story><title>Pijul: Towards 1.0</title><url>https://pijul.org/posts/2020-11-07-towards-1.0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chriswarbo</author><text>I&#x27;ve been keeping an eye on Pijul for a while, but assumed that (when it eventually stabilised) it personally wouldn&#x27;t be worth the effort to switch from git.<p>I&#x27;ve changed my mind now that they&#x27;re tracking byte ranges instead of lines, with ranges decided in a customisable way at commit time. Semantic&#x2F;format-aware versioning would be really nice. The easiest plugins to write would be s-expressions and JSON, and I could definitely see myself choosing Pijul for such repos in the future. If the patch-based approach is truly as nice as it appears, that might push me to use it more generally.<p>In fact, making an s-expression plugin which is robust across various Lisp dialects might be a good way to bootstrap the user community.<p>It would be nice to have for other languages too (C, Python, etc.), but they&#x27;d (a) be more complicated and (b) more subject to churn.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pijul: Towards 1.0</title><url>https://pijul.org/posts/2020-11-07-towards-1.0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kevincox</author><text>I&#x27;m really excited to see what Pijul ends up doing. I do love git, and I think its simple mental model of content addressed commits and trees is fantastic. However I do often find myself annoyed by the lack of a &quot;change&quot; concept other than the immutable commit. It seems that this results in review tools bending backwards to add that on top and it makes backports and other cherry-picks harder to follow.<p>One of the show-stopper complaints that I had about Pijul was the lack of a version identifier. However according to this post that has now been resolved which is fantastic news.</text></comment> |
6,171,271 | 6,170,939 | 1 | 2 | 6,170,582 | train | <story><title>A Tmux Crash Course (2011)</title><url>http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2641409235/a-tmux-crash-course/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>oostevo</author><text>If you&#x27;re willing to spend $14 for a more detailed tutorial, I&#x27;d strongly recommend _ tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development_ from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.<p>It goes through common use cases, common customizations, and pair programming.<p><a href="http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pragprog.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;bhtmux&#x2F;tmux</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raldu</author><text>I do not get the idea of buying a &quot;book&quot; to learn a *nix utility that explains itself in a single man page when all you need to learn is just a few keyboard shortcuts.<p>Obsessively focusing on the tool does not magically improve productivity.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Tmux Crash Course (2011)</title><url>http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2641409235/a-tmux-crash-course/#</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>oostevo</author><text>If you&#x27;re willing to spend $14 for a more detailed tutorial, I&#x27;d strongly recommend _ tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development_ from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.<p>It goes through common use cases, common customizations, and pair programming.<p><a href="http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pragprog.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;bhtmux&#x2F;tmux</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsissitka</author><text>The Kindle version is only $7.20:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/tmux-Productive-Mouse-Free-Development-ebook/dp/B00A4I3ZVY" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;tmux-Productive-Mouse-Free-Development...</a></text></comment> |
26,180,162 | 26,179,949 | 1 | 2 | 26,178,518 | train | <story><title>There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”</title><url>https://hunterwalk.medium.com/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-startup-within-a-big-company-c3003615f3bc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nojvek</author><text>When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like.<p>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. What we did moved very little of the top revenue metric. It made little difference if I worked like a dog, or slacked. The promos were very much “buddy buddy” system.<p>In the end I realized you can’t have startups in big companies (esp as an engineer you don’t have the huge upside if the startup is successful, your upside is capped)<p>Startups work because you have skin in the game, when you build something people want, you get to reap rewards proportional to it. That correlation and feedback loop is very important.<p>At big companies you don’t have the the same correlation. Some big shot exec they hired reaps far far more on the work you did.<p>Equity is what builds wealth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DebtDeflation</author><text>&gt;The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock.<p>I joined a startup in 1999. There were 3 founders and I was employee #2 after that. I received a ton of options (this was before RSUs became popular). We had a great product and a great team, but 18 months later ran out of money and unfortunately it was right after the dotcom implosion of early 2001 when funding had completely dried up.<p>My takeaway was that base salary is actually the most important component of TC. Cash bonus based on some metric that you control comes second. Equity comes third. If you work for a FAANG, maybe equity can move higher up (though it remains to be seen how long this will be true).<p>Outside of FAANG (and top executives at F500 sized public companies) very few people are getting rich off of the &quot;equity&quot; component of their TC. The vast majority of startups go bust before IPO or acquisition.<p>Time is the most valuable commodity you have, don&#x27;t squander it for lottery tickets and empty promises.</text></comment> | <story><title>There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”</title><url>https://hunterwalk.medium.com/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-startup-within-a-big-company-c3003615f3bc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nojvek</author><text>When I was at PowerBI in Microsoft, all the execs hailed it as Startup within Microsoft. Come work here instead of Uber. I worked like a dog, sometimes till 2am in morning. My manager would routinely ask us to come on weekends. I was naive, I thought we are growing customer base, this is what a startup looks like.<p>The ultimate realization was in a startup you have equity, a decent amount in a good startup. At Microsoft it was a base salary and set amount of stock. What we did moved very little of the top revenue metric. It made little difference if I worked like a dog, or slacked. The promos were very much “buddy buddy” system.<p>In the end I realized you can’t have startups in big companies (esp as an engineer you don’t have the huge upside if the startup is successful, your upside is capped)<p>Startups work because you have skin in the game, when you build something people want, you get to reap rewards proportional to it. That correlation and feedback loop is very important.<p>At big companies you don’t have the the same correlation. Some big shot exec they hired reaps far far more on the work you did.<p>Equity is what builds wealth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>onion2k</author><text><i>Equity is what builds wealth.</i><p>In exceptional circumstances, yes. In <i>most</i> circumstances equity in a startup ends up being worthless, even in the event of exit. Starting your own startup, or joining a startup as a very early employee can make you rich; anything else and you might as well be buying lottery tickets.<p>That&#x27;s not to denigrate startups <i>in any way</i>. Working in a startup is amazing. It&#x27;s just not how you get rich as an employee unless you are <i>staggeringly</i> lucky.</text></comment> |
41,553,289 | 41,553,275 | 1 | 2 | 41,551,564 | train | <story><title>LinkedIn blocked due Meshtastic video in private chat</title><url>https://github.com/resiliencetheatre/rpi4edgemapdisplay/discussions/4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rnts08</author><text>We absolutely need a better platform for professional networking. A platform that&#x27;s not filled with people who dislocate their shoulders trying to pat themselves on the back for some &quot;inspirational&quot; social media babble about the last time they managed to send an email.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lvncelot</author><text>I won&#x27;t disagree about the state of LinkedIn, but doesn&#x27;t the content just come with the territory? In my experience, people who &quot;network&quot; for networking&#x27;s sake the most are exactly the type of people who self-congratulate and humble brag, so you&#x27;re bound to get exactly this type of content on a platform that&#x27;s entirely networking-focused.</text></comment> | <story><title>LinkedIn blocked due Meshtastic video in private chat</title><url>https://github.com/resiliencetheatre/rpi4edgemapdisplay/discussions/4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rnts08</author><text>We absolutely need a better platform for professional networking. A platform that&#x27;s not filled with people who dislocate their shoulders trying to pat themselves on the back for some &quot;inspirational&quot; social media babble about the last time they managed to send an email.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mandmandam</author><text>God it really is heinous.<p>However, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a consequence of the platform, but of work culture. People are like that because <i>it works</i>, and it works because we&#x27;re deep, deep into a headlong rush toward annihilation in the name of profit.<p>The people profiting from destroying every public good - peace, pollution-free air and water and soil, housing, healthcare, etc etc - own basically everything. Our politicians, our media, our military. It&#x27;s been this way for a long time.<p>Speaking up against this isn&#x27;t what most people <i>want</i> to hear. It&#x27;s uncomfortable - and a distraction from short-term survival. There are no easy answers. It&#x27;s not a message you&#x27;ll ever hear amplified on corporate media, and it doesn&#x27;t fit well into a soundbite or tweet.<p>There&#x27;s an ocean of subtle and not-so-subtle messaging across every type of media telling you not to look behind the curtain. There are very real consequences for doing so in a way that gets peoples attention.<p>LinkedIn rewards superficiality over substance because our society does, workplace culture especially so. Professional posturing is a byproduct of a system that commodifies <i>everything</i>: even authenticity, even revolution.<p>Essentially, our &#x27;hearts and minds&#x27; have been hacked, in every possible way.<p>That said, if you have any good ideas on how a different platform could change that I&#x27;d love to hear them.</text></comment> |
8,027,416 | 8,027,461 | 1 | 3 | 8,027,326 | train | <story><title>EA is File Snooping with the Origin Client</title><url>http://wccftech.com/ea-spying-file-snooping-origin-client-investigation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bellerocky</author><text>Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&#x27;s just one of the things I remember.<p>In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin. I&#x27;m sure they can pay Valve enough to get top billing on steam and it would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat and origin engineering. They&#x27;d also have to cut steam in on sales, but it might still be worth it. It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.</text></item><item><author>FatalLogic</author><text>It&#x27;s quite likely to be cheat-detection scanning filenames, maybe even file contents. Valve had an issue like this recently. (edit: the Valve issue was actually DNS cache scanning)<p>edit: Gabe Newell explained Valve&#x27;s reasons for scanning DNS cache - <a href="http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1y70ej&#x2F;valve_vac_and_tru...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cameron_D</author><text>&gt; Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&#x27;s just one of the things I remember.<p>And this is perfectly okay, but looking through a list of start menu entries isn&#x27;t? In fact I&#x27;d consider shipping off lists of URLs and domains I&#x27;ve been to worse than looking through installed programs.<p>&gt; In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin.<p>I disagree, competition is a good thing. By this same argument we should all ditch every other operating system because most users run Windows, so using others isn&#x27;t necessary. Sure Origin has had its&#x27; share of bumps, but so did Steam in its early days, now look at it - Steam is adored by gamers and anything else is immediately shunned.<p>&gt; would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat<p>I&#x27;m not sure about this, but from my understanding Steam doesn&#x27;t really offer much anti-cheat, mostly just DRM. Valve games all have VAC, but I&#x27;m not sure how widely used VAC is for non-Valve games.<p>&gt; It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.<p>I partly disagree with this. The Origin interface really isn&#x27;t that bad, I actually find it a lot faster&#x2F;more responsive than Steam&#x27;s. Steam&#x27;s interface is also far from great - although they do have great cross-platform consistency, it is at the expense of being inconsistent with the users operating system.</text></comment> | <story><title>EA is File Snooping with the Origin Client</title><url>http://wccftech.com/ea-spying-file-snooping-origin-client-investigation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bellerocky</author><text>Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&#x27;s just one of the things I remember.<p>In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin. I&#x27;m sure they can pay Valve enough to get top billing on steam and it would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat and origin engineering. They&#x27;d also have to cut steam in on sales, but it might still be worth it. It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.</text></item><item><author>FatalLogic</author><text>It&#x27;s quite likely to be cheat-detection scanning filenames, maybe even file contents. Valve had an issue like this recently. (edit: the Valve issue was actually DNS cache scanning)<p>edit: Gabe Newell explained Valve&#x27;s reasons for scanning DNS cache - <a href="http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1y70ej&#x2F;valve_vac_and_tru...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mfisher87</author><text>Why is &quot;everything on steam&quot; a perfect world scenario? Give all the power to one system that already has significant problems with DRM and offline play?<p>We learned monopolies are bad this decade, again. Or is that again again? Or again again again? Or maybe it was again again again again again. I can&#x27;t keep track. But we have a large portion of our population clamoring for every game to be on Steam or every house to be on Google fiber.</text></comment> |
29,651,056 | 29,651,068 | 1 | 2 | 29,650,255 | train | <story><title>The Dreamcast Legacy</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2021/12/22/the-dreamcast-legacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>b15h0p</author><text>The article states that the Dreamcast &quot;fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released&quot;. Am I missing something here? As far as I know the N64 was released more than two years before the Dreamcast&#x27;s release. The Dreamcast always felt like it belonged to the PS2&#x2F;Xbox&#x2F;Gamecube console generation more than the PS1&#x2F;N64 generation, although it was released in between generations.<p>Release dates:<p><pre><code> * PlayStation 1: &#x27;94&#x2F;&#x27;95
* N64: &#x27;96
* Dreamcast: &#x27;98&#x2F;&#x27;99
* PlayStation 2: 2000
* XBox: 2001
* GameCube: 2001</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Comevius</author><text>They confused it with Sega Saturn, that&#x27;s the one that was pushed under the bus by Nintendo 64 in 1996. Nintendo however was late to the game, the PS1 was already entrenched.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Dreamcast Legacy</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2021/12/22/the-dreamcast-legacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>b15h0p</author><text>The article states that the Dreamcast &quot;fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released&quot;. Am I missing something here? As far as I know the N64 was released more than two years before the Dreamcast&#x27;s release. The Dreamcast always felt like it belonged to the PS2&#x2F;Xbox&#x2F;Gamecube console generation more than the PS1&#x2F;N64 generation, although it was released in between generations.<p>Release dates:<p><pre><code> * PlayStation 1: &#x27;94&#x2F;&#x27;95
* N64: &#x27;96
* Dreamcast: &#x27;98&#x2F;&#x27;99
* PlayStation 2: 2000
* XBox: 2001
* GameCube: 2001</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>titusjohnson</author><text>According to my memory of the time, the Dreamcast launched a bit too early compared to the PS2. The Dreamcast was trying to sell games and systems right when the PS2 marketing engine went into full swing. The marketing hype for PS2 was <i>huge</i>, everyone I knew was talking about how many millions of pixels it would push, how the multi-core architecture would make everything else obsolete, and of course, how it was backwards compatible with existing libraries.<p>I knew one guy that had a Dreamcast, everyone else saved their pennies for a PS2 and made do with their existing PS1.</text></comment> |
29,548,209 | 29,548,112 | 1 | 2 | 29,544,979 | train | <story><title>What a progressive utopia does to outdoor dining</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/california-san-francisco-outdoor-dining-progressive-utopia/620974/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stormbrew</author><text>I love San Francisco more than most places I don&#x27;t live, but I really have a hard time even beginning to agree on any description of it or really any part of California as a &quot;progressive utopia&quot;.<p>Certainly it has a lot of open minded people in it, but it has awful housing policy, mediocre transit for a city its size, historically some of the most brutal police behaviour and crackdowns, and an incredibly stark wealth divide. Many of these things get reflected in policies about land use too, to which the things this article is talking about are likely second order effects.<p>I mean, realistically table stakes for progressive utopia have to include universal health care, which I guess makes Hawaii the only state that&#x27;s even at the table.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epistasis</author><text>San Francisco is where reactionary conservatism is couched in the right sort of language and gets passed off as Progressive (the capital P is for the political faction). Any true progressivism that may affect the wealthy homeowner class is rejected with flowery but nonsensical arguments:<p>&gt; “Zoning is racist and made by people like me who live here to increase my profit on my property. That’s [pro-housing activists’] line…tell that to the folks in Bayview-Hunters Point, the largest single family home owning area in the city.”
&gt;
&gt;It seemed to be lost on the group, which consisted of eleven white people over the age of forty, that minority homeowners might be clustered in that area in part because of redlining and racist zoning laws that restricted access to other neighborhoods.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebaycitybeacon.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;the-sierra-club-fights-to-save-a-parking-garage&#x2F;article_93ff9084-3be7-11e7-a3a8-17f11f24db6e.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thebaycitybeacon.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;the-sierra-club-fi...</a><p>The politics are truly cursed in SF and nothing makes sense, and all rhetoric is hidden behind several layers of misdirection and retribution for long-held grudges.</text></comment> | <story><title>What a progressive utopia does to outdoor dining</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/california-san-francisco-outdoor-dining-progressive-utopia/620974/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stormbrew</author><text>I love San Francisco more than most places I don&#x27;t live, but I really have a hard time even beginning to agree on any description of it or really any part of California as a &quot;progressive utopia&quot;.<p>Certainly it has a lot of open minded people in it, but it has awful housing policy, mediocre transit for a city its size, historically some of the most brutal police behaviour and crackdowns, and an incredibly stark wealth divide. Many of these things get reflected in policies about land use too, to which the things this article is talking about are likely second order effects.<p>I mean, realistically table stakes for progressive utopia have to include universal health care, which I guess makes Hawaii the only state that&#x27;s even at the table.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>b9a2cab5</author><text>It&#x27;s honestly not surprising in my view. Wealthy &quot;progressives&quot; have always had a &quot;rules for thee but not for me&quot; attitude, whether it comes to homeless shelters, new housing starts, police funding, or affirmative action.</text></comment> |
21,718,722 | 21,718,727 | 1 | 3 | 21,699,871 | train | <story><title>Kill Sticky Headers (2013)</title><url>https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vortico</author><text>Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don&#x27;t know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30&quot; monitor), it feels like something is &quot;stuck&quot; to my browser that wasn&#x27;t before and makes me feel anxious.<p>Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I&#x27;m moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it&#x27;s not of the &quot;webpage&quot; medium that I&#x27;ve been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement <i>much</i> more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you&#x27;re scrolling at 1cm&#x2F;second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm&#x2F;second while you&#x27;re trying to read an article. It&#x27;s hard <i>not</i> to pay attention to it. But navbars don&#x27;t contain content, so they shouldn&#x27;t steal attention from the page content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pgcj_poster</author><text>Exactly. When I&#x27;m using an application called a browser to view a document on the web, I don&#x27;t want the document to try to become part of the chrome: that breaks the &quot;web page&quot; metaphor. There is a <i>very small</i> subset of websites, such as Figma, that feel more like independent applications than web pages, and for those I get more annoyed by the presence of the browser chrome, for basically the same reason.<p>What&#x27;s worse, almost no sticky header has any useful items in it. Take StackOverflow as an example. It has a link to the homepage and a searchbar, in spite of the fact that many frequent StackOverflow users have never visited the homepage and never used the built-in search. The top of the screen is the most valuable part, because my head is usually above the screen, so it&#x27;s more comfortable for my eyes to rest around the top of the viewport. So if you put something there, it had better be important.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kill Sticky Headers (2013)</title><url>https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vortico</author><text>Sticky headers make me feel claustrophobic, I don&#x27;t know why. Regardless of my screen height (it could be a 30&quot; monitor), it feels like something is &quot;stuck&quot; to my browser that wasn&#x27;t before and makes me feel anxious.<p>Even without that feeling, sticky headers kill the feeling that I&#x27;m moving through a viewport of a webpage. It makes your website look like it&#x27;s not of the &quot;webpage&quot; medium that I&#x27;ve been familiar with for 20 years. Humans have a very good eye for relative movement. The visual processing part of your brain considers movement <i>much</i> more contrasting than color. So a fixed header when you&#x27;re scrolling at 1cm&#x2F;second is visually equivalent to a big bar moving upward at 1cm&#x2F;second while you&#x27;re trying to read an article. It&#x27;s hard <i>not</i> to pay attention to it. But navbars don&#x27;t contain content, so they shouldn&#x27;t steal attention from the page content.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baroffoos</author><text>I think the only time sticky headers are ever acceptable is when you need to regularly refer back to them. Long tables without sticky headers are the worst</text></comment> |
22,414,375 | 22,414,527 | 1 | 2 | 22,411,338 | train | <story><title>China bans consumption and trade of wild animals</title><url>https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sci-tech/china-bans-human-consumption-and-trade-of-wild-animals-1.4824540</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nitramp</author><text>&gt; However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing.<p>aka as &quot;the rule of law&quot;.<p>From a continental European perspective, the US stance in rule of law seems a bit dubious as well, with the president pardoning his friends, or the enormous sentences afflicted to people once, but only once, they end up in bad public standing, or elected states attorneys incentivize to look hard on crime to their constituents.</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>This very important. Both the PRC and USSR constitutions, on paper, arguably provide better freer basic law than that of the US but in practice it’s just words on paper.<p>However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing. So mr Xi and mr Stalin (née Jughashvili) get to purge all want-to-be usurpers.</text></item><item><author>someperson</author><text>I can&#x27;t see how this can be successfully enforced without a massive education campaign and actual enforcement by authorities, including moving the so-called &quot;wet markets&quot; (which are outdoor butchers that are very important to the food supply chain in many areas of China) into modern indoor facilities for improved food safety.<p>Older people in China (the so-called lost generation) are set in their ways: remember that in traditional Chinese medicine, the medicinal value of an animal is directly proportional to its rarity. This of course creates perverse incentives to kill the last living members of endangered animals already under threat from poachers.<p>China has plenty of laws including a constitution that defends practicing free speech and religion, but in reality laws mean nothing if there&#x27;s no enforcement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jack_h</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure how your examples illustrate your point.<p>For instance the power to pardon is defined within the constitution with a singular exception added to it. It doesn&#x27;t say a president can&#x27;t pardon their friends. That might be socially unacceptable but it is a power delegated to the president nonetheless. If the constitution made no such mention of that power and the president was pardoning their friends - or indeed anyone at all - then that would be a good example of capricious use of power outside the rule of law.</text></comment> | <story><title>China bans consumption and trade of wild animals</title><url>https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sci-tech/china-bans-human-consumption-and-trade-of-wild-animals-1.4824540</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Nitramp</author><text>&gt; However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing.<p>aka as &quot;the rule of law&quot;.<p>From a continental European perspective, the US stance in rule of law seems a bit dubious as well, with the president pardoning his friends, or the enormous sentences afflicted to people once, but only once, they end up in bad public standing, or elected states attorneys incentivize to look hard on crime to their constituents.</text></item><item><author>mc32</author><text>This very important. Both the PRC and USSR constitutions, on paper, arguably provide better freer basic law than that of the US but in practice it’s just words on paper.<p>However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing. So mr Xi and mr Stalin (née Jughashvili) get to purge all want-to-be usurpers.</text></item><item><author>someperson</author><text>I can&#x27;t see how this can be successfully enforced without a massive education campaign and actual enforcement by authorities, including moving the so-called &quot;wet markets&quot; (which are outdoor butchers that are very important to the food supply chain in many areas of China) into modern indoor facilities for improved food safety.<p>Older people in China (the so-called lost generation) are set in their ways: remember that in traditional Chinese medicine, the medicinal value of an animal is directly proportional to its rarity. This of course creates perverse incentives to kill the last living members of endangered animals already under threat from poachers.<p>China has plenty of laws including a constitution that defends practicing free speech and religion, but in reality laws mean nothing if there&#x27;s no enforcement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>the_watcher</author><text>While pardoning friends is certainly distasteful, that power is explicitly defined in the Constitution and is plenary. The only potential exception is a self-pardon.<p>There are plenty of examples of embarrassing pardons, but it&#x27;s not a rule of law failing.</text></comment> |
19,355,230 | 19,355,233 | 1 | 2 | 19,351,934 | train | <story><title>How a small group of activists got gas-powered leaf blowers banned in D.C.</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/james-fallows-leaf-blower-ban/583210/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>The real issue IMO is that the battery powered yard tools are infected by the same planned obsolescence as existing power tools. Most gas-powered yard tools last damn near forever even if you don&#x27;t do maintenance on them. The battery powered ones are good for three years and then you&#x27;re buying a new one. If you&#x27;re lucky they still make the battery, but it costs as much a whole new tool.<p>Wish we could standardize modern rechargeable batteries the same way we did with old lead acid models.</text></item><item><author>adamswann</author><text>The ban is on <i>gas</i>-powered leaf blowers. I’ve switched to all electric yard tools at home. No regrets; the tools are durable, can easily handle the whole job on a single charge, quiet enough that I feel comfortable letting my children assist (they can hear my instructions and generally what’s going on around them), and no gas engines to maintain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>Am I missing something? Most Bosch tools for instance use their universal battery packs, they fit nearly all old tools and it&#x27;s a pretty safe bet that they will fit all the new ones too. There&#x27;s plenty of 3rd party replacements on the market, but there&#x27;s almost zero chance that you won&#x27;t be able to buy a replacement battery for your bosch leaf blower in few years.<p>That&#x27;s their standardised battery pack - it fits dozens of different tools:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bosch-do-it.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;diy&#x2F;tools&#x2F;battery-pack-pba-18v-6-0ah-w-c-3165140843010-category-pmdb-id.jsp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bosch-do-it.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;diy&#x2F;tools&#x2F;battery-pack-pba...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How a small group of activists got gas-powered leaf blowers banned in D.C.</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/james-fallows-leaf-blower-ban/583210/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>The real issue IMO is that the battery powered yard tools are infected by the same planned obsolescence as existing power tools. Most gas-powered yard tools last damn near forever even if you don&#x27;t do maintenance on them. The battery powered ones are good for three years and then you&#x27;re buying a new one. If you&#x27;re lucky they still make the battery, but it costs as much a whole new tool.<p>Wish we could standardize modern rechargeable batteries the same way we did with old lead acid models.</text></item><item><author>adamswann</author><text>The ban is on <i>gas</i>-powered leaf blowers. I’ve switched to all electric yard tools at home. No regrets; the tools are durable, can easily handle the whole job on a single charge, quiet enough that I feel comfortable letting my children assist (they can hear my instructions and generally what’s going on around them), and no gas engines to maintain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pfhreak</author><text>&gt; If you&#x27;re lucky they still make the battery, but it costs as much a whole new tool.<p>Aren&#x27;t most companies working on a standardized battery (at least within their brand) so you can swap batteries between your drill, blower, trimmer, etc? It would seem that if that&#x27;s the case, changing battery form factors would be a real bad idea.</text></comment> |
35,335,699 | 35,335,061 | 1 | 3 | 35,334,299 | train | <story><title>The perils of polishing old Fortran libraries</title><url>https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/the-perils-of-polishing-long/5444</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zippyman55</author><text>My favorite personal Fortran story: I was passing by a WAY SMARTER THAN I COULD EVER HOPE FOR guy who was pouring over a two inch Print-out of some scientific code. He had been trying to troubleshoot a problem. I guess a comma was in the 80th column, which I recall presents an error. In my passing by, I pointed out the error (one second) and I always had his respect after that.</text></comment> | <story><title>The perils of polishing old Fortran libraries</title><url>https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/the-perils-of-polishing-long/5444</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Koshkin</author><text>Fortran 66 was the pinnacle as a no-nonsense practical programming language. No semicolon cancer, no fancy brackets, just code that looks like code. Beautiful (in a nerdy kind of way, by today’s standards).</text></comment> |
5,993,377 | 5,993,286 | 1 | 2 | 5,992,875 | train | <story><title>The last Incan suspension bridge is made entirely of grass and woven by hand</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/06/10/the_last_incan_suspension_bridge_is_made_entirely_of_grass_and_woven_by.html?wpsrc=theweek</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdevalence</author><text>&gt; The Incas never invented the wheel...<p>In fact, the Incans did know about wheels, it&#x27;s just that wheels are considerably less useful when you don&#x27;t have any large pack animals to pull things. It&#x27;s an accident of geography, and the article would be better off without the vaguely racist opening about how the &quot;primitive&quot; Incans were able to do amazing things with fibres even though they never &quot;figured out&quot; this other stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aloisius</author><text><i>In fact, the Incans did know about wheels, it&#x27;s just that wheels are considerably less useful when you don&#x27;t have any large pack animals to pull things.</i><p>The Incans did not have the wheel (when we refer to people having the wheel, we mean with an axle). They used wood beams to roll things around, but that&#x27;s not a wheel. As far as I know, the only group that had the wheel in the Americas were the ancient Mexicans.<p>Further, devices like wheel barrows and carts are incredibly useful with or without pack animals. Doubly so if you had the incredible manpower that the Incans had where you can easily just use humans to pull them instead of pack animals. Wheels aren&#x27;t just for hauling things around either, it is hard to express how <i>incredibly</i> useful potter&#x27;s wheels has been for the last five thousand years.</text></comment> | <story><title>The last Incan suspension bridge is made entirely of grass and woven by hand</title><url>http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/06/10/the_last_incan_suspension_bridge_is_made_entirely_of_grass_and_woven_by.html?wpsrc=theweek</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hdevalence</author><text>&gt; The Incas never invented the wheel...<p>In fact, the Incans did know about wheels, it&#x27;s just that wheels are considerably less useful when you don&#x27;t have any large pack animals to pull things. It&#x27;s an accident of geography, and the article would be better off without the vaguely racist opening about how the &quot;primitive&quot; Incans were able to do amazing things with fibres even though they never &quot;figured out&quot; this other stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adventured</author><text>Wasn&#x27;t racist in the least.<p>Arguing over technological superiority or lack thereof has absolutely nothing to do with race.<p>Would it be racist to say that cavemen were primitive because they lacked the steam engine? No, it&#x27;s merely acknowledging the fact of their state of technology. And it should be noted, primitive in this sense exists on constantly shifting sand: Americans from 1776 were primitive as well. Saying so is not racist.<p>By our standards today, George Washington was killed by medical malpractice, having been bled to death. It all sounds so barbaric by comparison to what we take for granted now. I&#x27;m sure our chemotherapy of today will sound like primitive barbarism tomorrow.</text></comment> |
37,433,200 | 37,433,034 | 1 | 2 | 37,431,962 | train | <story><title>NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/08/new-york-police-tracking-voyager-labs-meta-contract</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>Scraping social media platforms may be against their terms of service, but its not illegal or unethical.<p>People seem to think social media is akin to private communications where it&#x27;s more akin to the public square. Making your IG&#x2F;FB&#x2F;whatever profile private doesn&#x27;t change that.<p>In NYC for example, there&#x27;s been a large uptick in teen shootings, many adjacent to schools, and a lot of it involves the idiots posting on social media before &amp; after. One tool could be simply scraping social media for these postings. Another alternate, pre-internet tool was stop&amp;frisk.<p>While you have a constitutional right to not be searched without consent&#x2F;probably cause, you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence. What you say publicly can &amp; will be used against you in the court of law.<p>Putting out an IG post of yourself with illegal guns or inciting a shooting is no more private than printing out posters of the same and putting them up around the neighborhood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylan604</author><text>&gt;Making your IG&#x2F;FB&#x2F;whatever profile private doesn&#x27;t change that.<p>If someone tells you something in private in a public square in a way that nobody else in the public square can hear it, like lowering the volume of their voice so nobody else can hear, then it is possible to discuss in private in a public setting. There is no obligation to immediately share that private information with the entire public square just because the public square was used. This isn&#x27;t some FOSS with a licensing agreement that says it must be made public.<p>You can use the features of a social platform to share with a chosen group of people while not allowing the entirety of the platform access. That&#x27;s what private means. Not respecting that for sake of &quot;it&#x27;s a public platform&quot; is just that person being a dick. Whether that&#x27;s you holding this opinion or a scrapper justifying their manner if not respecting the poster&#x27;s intent, it&#x27;s all people with utter lack of respect. It&#x27;s an AB conversation, and you&#x27;re trying to be C. We&#x27;ve already indicated you&#x27;re not the intended audience by setting to private. You doing everything you can to get around that is, again, you being a dick</text></comment> | <story><title>NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/08/new-york-police-tracking-voyager-labs-meta-contract</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>Scraping social media platforms may be against their terms of service, but its not illegal or unethical.<p>People seem to think social media is akin to private communications where it&#x27;s more akin to the public square. Making your IG&#x2F;FB&#x2F;whatever profile private doesn&#x27;t change that.<p>In NYC for example, there&#x27;s been a large uptick in teen shootings, many adjacent to schools, and a lot of it involves the idiots posting on social media before &amp; after. One tool could be simply scraping social media for these postings. Another alternate, pre-internet tool was stop&amp;frisk.<p>While you have a constitutional right to not be searched without consent&#x2F;probably cause, you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence. What you say publicly can &amp; will be used against you in the court of law.<p>Putting out an IG post of yourself with illegal guns or inciting a shooting is no more private than printing out posters of the same and putting them up around the neighborhood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawayapples</author><text>&gt; you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence<p>Actually, in the U.S., you <i>literally</i> have that specific constitutional right.<p>The First Amendment protects &quot;spouting off in the public square without consequence&quot; via the Freedoms of Assembly (the right to gather), Speech (say what you like without consequence), Religion (believe what you like), and the right to petition the government.<p>Loud complaining or even vague and non-specific threats (such as &quot;I&#x27;ll make you pay for this!&quot;) are actually protected by the First Amendment.<p>There are <i>very</i> rare and limited exceptions, such as &quot;directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action <i>and</i> is likely to incite or produce such action&quot;.</text></comment> |
33,256,334 | 33,256,467 | 1 | 2 | 33,255,920 | train | <story><title>Just for Fun. No, really.</title><url>https://justforfunnoreally.dev</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boberoni</author><text>I moved to San Francisco a few months ago. In my second week in the city, I went to a party and someone I had never met before opened a conversation with &quot;What do you care most about in life?&quot;<p>After a second of thinking, I answered &quot;Having fun.&quot;<p>I asked him the same question back and he said &quot;Having an impact on the world.&quot;<p>Although I don&#x27;t think about it that much, I realized that I personally didn&#x27;t care that much about my impact on the world. Any impact that I create would simply be a byproduct of me pursuing whatever activities I find fun.<p>Moreover, a positive impact in my eyes might end up being a negative impact to others. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MikeTheRocker</author><text>Cynically I believe that person to be judgmental and self-absorbed in their motives for asking the question at the party. They didn&#x27;t care about your answer, they wanted you to ask them the same in return so they could feel good about themself. It&#x27;s all too typical in SF in my experience. That said, I love living in a city where people are genuinely passionate about making things better (at least in their estimation).</text></comment> | <story><title>Just for Fun. No, really.</title><url>https://justforfunnoreally.dev</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boberoni</author><text>I moved to San Francisco a few months ago. In my second week in the city, I went to a party and someone I had never met before opened a conversation with &quot;What do you care most about in life?&quot;<p>After a second of thinking, I answered &quot;Having fun.&quot;<p>I asked him the same question back and he said &quot;Having an impact on the world.&quot;<p>Although I don&#x27;t think about it that much, I realized that I personally didn&#x27;t care that much about my impact on the world. Any impact that I create would simply be a byproduct of me pursuing whatever activities I find fun.<p>Moreover, a positive impact in my eyes might end up being a negative impact to others. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justinlloyd</author><text>We may have run in to the same person in SF.<p>When I used to attend in-person network events, I was sometimes asked &quot;what do you care about?&quot;<p>Which, to me, tagged them as people who weren&#x27;t all that interested in you, but really wanted you to ask the same question back so they could feel good about their answer, e.g. &quot;having an impact&quot; or &quot;making the world a better place.&quot;<p>My answer to that question was always &quot;fucking around and finding out.&quot;<p>But more often than not, people would ask, &quot;what is it you do?&quot;<p>And my answer to that was always &quot;whatever the fuck I want to, it makes money and everyone goes home happy.&quot;</text></comment> |
1,335,496 | 1,334,748 | 1 | 2 | 1,334,720 | train | <story><title>Let me Duck Duck Go that for you</title><url>http://lmddgtfy.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>Using DDG as a replacement for Google in the latest two months. I'm impressed. If it's better or not than google for certain types of usage, I'll let other users to decide (but it <i>is</i> better, for my usage). But what is truly impressive is how this guy build a search engine that works in a way that is comparable to Google for the end user, with limited resources.</text></comment> | <story><title>Let me Duck Duck Go that for you</title><url>http://lmddgtfy.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>epi0Bauqu</author><text>Stuff like this keeps me super-motivated. Thx Mike for making it!</text></comment> |
22,934,077 | 22,932,327 | 1 | 2 | 22,931,339 | train | <story><title>Anger mounts after corporations tap small-business relief funds</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/finance/493759-anger-mounts-after-corporations-tap-small-business-relief-funds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>w0utert</author><text>We have the same discussion here in the Netherlands now, one of the poster childs of the (entirely rightful) public anger being Booking.com.<p>Companies like this have been raking in billions of revenue and profit until very, very recently, but instead of using even a tiny proportion of it for contingency planning they decided to take on more debt and buy back their own shares to boost their stock price instead, to &#x27;reward&#x27; their shareholders. And at the same time they used every loophole imaginable to evade taxes, effectively contributing next to nothing to tax revenue to be used for the public cause.<p>Now things went sour and within 1 month they are already out of money and cannot continue paying their employees, so they are begging to be bailed out with money that was intended to save small businesses that were forced to close by the government. They made $15 billion of profit last year alone, which would be enough to pay their ~17.5K employees for years to come, but decided to throw it at all their shareholders. The hotels and BnB&#x27;s that use their platform will go down because the government aid is limited, but Booking.com needs to be saved...<p>Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, always the same thing. It&#x27;s frankly quite disgusting and I have no sympathy for these companies at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Anger mounts after corporations tap small-business relief funds</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/finance/493759-anger-mounts-after-corporations-tap-small-business-relief-funds</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nimbius</author><text>So ive got a few questions about this legislation now that its in effect...<p>&gt;Businesses rushed to apply for the loans, which the government said would be forgiven...<p><i>Forgiven?</i> Then its not a loan anymore is it? Its a bailout. Was the intention to give a handout of cash to small businesses free of charge?<p>&gt;Democrats have since called for rules that would ensure smaller, community banks, particularly those that service minority and underbanked populations, have a leg up in the lending process.<p>I mean, the program ran out of money a week ago. What exactly are we legislating? these are businesses that are likely already shuttered after waiting five weeks to be told they either dont qualify or the money sacks empty.<p>This isnt something you get a do-over on. Rubio doesnt seem to care that Hilton is a nine billion dollar multinational corporation that could afford to keep the lights on in every hotel they franchise for the next year, easily, without federal aid. They could give away old hotels as makeshift hospitals. Hilton is the thirty-sixth largest company in the USA and the fact that they qualified for something called a small business relief fund can only be attributed to a completely detached legislature if you&#x27;re being amicable and giving the current legislation a fair chance to be anything but corrupt but frankly thats hard to do when the presidents friends are getting kickbacks from this program.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;20&#x2F;839455480&#x2F;company-with-ties-to-trump-receives-millions-from-small-business-loan-program" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;20&#x2F;839455480&#x2F;company-with-ties-t...</a><p>What Rubio has basically managed to do is wipe out coffee houses, machine shops, shoe repair businesses, daycares and nail salons in every north american city. Its pretty transparent that this funding was never intended to make it to taco trucks and barbers.</text></comment> |
30,310,821 | 30,309,376 | 1 | 3 | 30,301,271 | train | <story><title>I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/technology/airtags-gps-surveillance.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>technothrasher</author><text>&gt; Checking in constantly. Wondering and&#x2F;or quizzing their child<p>This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends&#x2F;neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children&#x27;s location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she&#x27;s driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I&#x27;m in the minority of parents.</text></item><item><author>kbos87</author><text>My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products.<p>Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just in case something happens to you! This is the innocent end of the spectrum; subtle or outright coercion in a controlling relationship is the darker end of the spectrum.<p>How it starts really doesn’t matter, because the truth is that even among otherwise well meaning and well intentioned people, tracking tech can turn them obsessive. Checking in constantly. Wondering and&#x2F;or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X.<p>The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this, and the negative outcomes can range from feeling like your everyday movements are under a microscope, to outright abusive behavior more easily taken to the extreme.<p>I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franga2000</author><text>Holy shit what happened to &quot;have fun, just be back by dinner time&quot;? I&#x27;m not that far from my teenage years so the fact that this is already happening to today&#x27;s teens is a bit terrifying to me. We had cellphones back then and I had an early smartphone (Nokia N95 - anyone remember those?) when at least half my school didn&#x27;t even have a brickphone, so the capability was there. Bot neither my parents nor the parents of any of my peers ever used it, even later when all of us had proper smartphones with parental control options only a few clicks away.<p>So what happened? Crime rates are down, kinds these days do drugs and drink at lower rates than back then, I can&#x27;t remember the last time I heard of a kid go missing... We now have many privacy-preserving options for emergency tracking so there&#x27;s less of a reason for total control than ever. Even monitoring Internet usage - there are fewer &quot;predators&quot; out there and kids are better at recognising and avoiding them than ever. I don&#x27;t get it.</text></comment> | <story><title>I used Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker to watch my husband’s every move</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/technology/airtags-gps-surveillance.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>technothrasher</author><text>&gt; Checking in constantly. Wondering and&#x2F;or quizzing their child<p>This behavior is rampant in my peer group. Most of my friends&#x2F;neighbors are constantly monitoring their teen age children&#x27;s location, reading their recent calls, texts, and emails, looking at internet usage logs, etc. One of my neighbors even calls her daughter every time she sees she&#x27;s driving over the speed limit and yells at her. It all seems so creepy to me, and I give my kid way more privacy than that, but it looks like I&#x27;m in the minority of parents.</text></item><item><author>kbos87</author><text>My comment isn’t specific to AirTags, but there’s a much larger conversation that needs to be had about this gray area of stalking capabilities that are now built into many mainstream products.<p>Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than once among friends and family - they share their location willingly and for seemingly benign reasons. It’s helpful to know when you’ll be getting home so I can start dinner! Just in case something happens to you! This is the innocent end of the spectrum; subtle or outright coercion in a controlling relationship is the darker end of the spectrum.<p>How it starts really doesn’t matter, because the truth is that even among otherwise well meaning and well intentioned people, tracking tech can turn them obsessive. Checking in constantly. Wondering and&#x2F;or quizzing their child, partner or friend about what they were doing at location X.<p>The truth is that most people aren’t immune to being on either end of a situation like this, and the negative outcomes can range from feeling like your everyday movements are under a microscope, to outright abusive behavior more easily taken to the extreme.<p>I don’t claim that there are simple solutions here, but a starting point would be tech companies making it easier to see an audit of how this “innocent” tracking tech is being used on the trackee. For example, I bet my grandpa would think twice about checking in on my cousins location as often as he probably does if he knew that my cousin got a notification every time he checked in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rootusrootus</author><text>Neurotic people are neurotic, they just use whatever tools are available to them. I can locate my daughter, my son, my wife, and even my own mother if I want to. I don&#x27;t stalk them, ask questions about where they are going or where they have been, etc. But if I need a little peace of mind, I know where my loved ones are. We use the location &amp; communication tools with respect, just like anything else.</text></comment> |
32,481,359 | 32,481,275 | 1 | 3 | 32,480,009 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: In 2022, what is the proper way to get into machine/deep learning?</title><text>By getting into machine or deep learning I mean building upto a stage to do ML&#x2F;DL research. Applied research or core theory of ML&#x2F;DL research. Ofcourse, the path to both will quite different.<p>Standing in 2022, what are the best resources for a CS student&#x2F;decent programmer to get into the field of ML and DL on their own. Resources can be both books or public courses.<p>The target ability:<p>1. To understand the theory behind the algorithms<p>2. To implement an algorithm on a dataset of choice. (Data cleaning and management should also be learned)<p>3. Read research publications and try to implement them.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wokwokwok</author><text>Someone who can engineer infrastructure, pipelines and fire fight production issues <i>is</i> hard to find, but that’s not the point I was making.<p>My apologies; It is real work; the point I was making is it’s not <i>ML work</i>, any more than writing a yaml file is ML work.<p>If you want to write yaml files, any number of possibilities exist.<p>If you want to work with machine learning, then don’t become a data engineer. The skills are, mostly, not related ML, and more closely aligned with SRE &#x2F; devops.<p>It’s not infrastructure and helping build models as you mature and advance: it’s almost literally just infrastructure and fire fighting… in my, limited, 3 years of experience as such.</text></item><item><author>robertlagrant</author><text>&gt; It’s IT support for the people doing real work.<p>This is an appalling perspective. Good MLE skills seem a lot harder to find that good ML ones.</text></item><item><author>wokwokwok</author><text>&gt; I think it can yield the highest success rate.<p>At what?<p>If you want to be an SRE for a data platform, sure, but this pretty thankless work:<p>- cleaning up dodgy data<p>- cleaning up behind low code data pipelines and other painful integration work with systems that suck and sometimes just don’t work (like PowerBI).<p>- cleaning up behind data scientists that create models in arcane and imaginative ways and expect you to “productionise” them.<p>- cleaning up behind brain dead scheduling systems that fail unexpectedly.<p>- constant churn with partners and cloud products for whatever the latest hotness is.<p>If you want to be solving actual problems with ML, this is a dead end.<p>It’s IT support for the people doing real work.<p>…so, it depends on your goals. Getting a job? Sure! Everyone wants a workhorse who they can dump all the annoying problematic on-call tasks to.<p>Learning ML, contributing to research, building models?<p>This isn’t a path that leads there.</text></item><item><author>santiagobasulto</author><text>Can I suggest a longer, but (I think) better route?<p>Try the Data&#x2F;ML Engineer route. Instead of going directly into ML, try to work as a “supporter” of those doing ML. There’s a HUGE gap there, specially if you’re a good programmer.<p>There are a lot of people in the “pure” ML space, people with science background, with phDs, etc.<p>But there’s not enough people to support them: taking their models to producing, building their pipelines, etc.<p>If you get into Data&#x2F;ML engineer, you’ll be working with these people and learning from them.<p>It’s a longer route for sure, but I think it can yield the highest success rate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmeyerov</author><text>What?<p>A lot of the hard part isn&#x27;t the model, and especially in a world where bert, xgboost, optuna, pytorch, etc have solved much of the classic problem and forced &#x27;real&#x27; DS to specialize on either the business consulting side (not math&#x2F;engineering) or theory side (barely implemented). The rebrand of &#x27;data analyst&#x27; (SQL, powerbi, . ..) to &#x27;data scientist&#x27; by even top tech companies underscores this. It&#x27;s not yet to where web dev has gotten in terms of global $20&#x2F;hr fiverrr contractors, but already at say $40&#x2F;hr for someone who can build real production models for more boring scenarios.<p>The result is the vast bulk of data scientists (phd, self-trained, consulting, ...) we interview are weak engineers, so going from a make-believe notebook to a trickier production scenario requires the data engineer &#x2F; MLOps &#x2F; etc to solve a lot that a typical DS doesn&#x27;t really understand in practice. Scale, latency, distributed systems, testing, etc. Likewise, the part the DS solves has little to do with the latest neuroips paper, and more just about lifecycle tasks like getting better data, which the other folks on the team will often be involved with as well.<p>So 2 natural high-paying paths here:<p>data engineer &#x2F; MLOps -&gt; MLEngineer -&gt; DS<p>data engineer -&gt; all-in-one data analyst&#x2F;scientist -&gt; ML&#x2F;AI data scientist</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: In 2022, what is the proper way to get into machine/deep learning?</title><text>By getting into machine or deep learning I mean building upto a stage to do ML&#x2F;DL research. Applied research or core theory of ML&#x2F;DL research. Ofcourse, the path to both will quite different.<p>Standing in 2022, what are the best resources for a CS student&#x2F;decent programmer to get into the field of ML and DL on their own. Resources can be both books or public courses.<p>The target ability:<p>1. To understand the theory behind the algorithms<p>2. To implement an algorithm on a dataset of choice. (Data cleaning and management should also be learned)<p>3. Read research publications and try to implement them.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wokwokwok</author><text>Someone who can engineer infrastructure, pipelines and fire fight production issues <i>is</i> hard to find, but that’s not the point I was making.<p>My apologies; It is real work; the point I was making is it’s not <i>ML work</i>, any more than writing a yaml file is ML work.<p>If you want to write yaml files, any number of possibilities exist.<p>If you want to work with machine learning, then don’t become a data engineer. The skills are, mostly, not related ML, and more closely aligned with SRE &#x2F; devops.<p>It’s not infrastructure and helping build models as you mature and advance: it’s almost literally just infrastructure and fire fighting… in my, limited, 3 years of experience as such.</text></item><item><author>robertlagrant</author><text>&gt; It’s IT support for the people doing real work.<p>This is an appalling perspective. Good MLE skills seem a lot harder to find that good ML ones.</text></item><item><author>wokwokwok</author><text>&gt; I think it can yield the highest success rate.<p>At what?<p>If you want to be an SRE for a data platform, sure, but this pretty thankless work:<p>- cleaning up dodgy data<p>- cleaning up behind low code data pipelines and other painful integration work with systems that suck and sometimes just don’t work (like PowerBI).<p>- cleaning up behind data scientists that create models in arcane and imaginative ways and expect you to “productionise” them.<p>- cleaning up behind brain dead scheduling systems that fail unexpectedly.<p>- constant churn with partners and cloud products for whatever the latest hotness is.<p>If you want to be solving actual problems with ML, this is a dead end.<p>It’s IT support for the people doing real work.<p>…so, it depends on your goals. Getting a job? Sure! Everyone wants a workhorse who they can dump all the annoying problematic on-call tasks to.<p>Learning ML, contributing to research, building models?<p>This isn’t a path that leads there.</text></item><item><author>santiagobasulto</author><text>Can I suggest a longer, but (I think) better route?<p>Try the Data&#x2F;ML Engineer route. Instead of going directly into ML, try to work as a “supporter” of those doing ML. There’s a HUGE gap there, specially if you’re a good programmer.<p>There are a lot of people in the “pure” ML space, people with science background, with phDs, etc.<p>But there’s not enough people to support them: taking their models to producing, building their pipelines, etc.<p>If you get into Data&#x2F;ML engineer, you’ll be working with these people and learning from them.<p>It’s a longer route for sure, but I think it can yield the highest success rate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>achileas</author><text>I first had the DE title 7 years ago (going into it having never heard of DE), and have been doing MLE&#x2F;platform work for the past 5. You’re projecting your limited experience onto a poorly defined role that varies wildly from company to company. My experience is much different from yours: little firefighting, lots of actual building. Yes there is infrastructure, but any good programmer these days should be able to stand up some basic infrastructure.<p>Yes, don’t get into it if you want to do ML research or apply ML, but if you are interested a bit in it and find building models the least creative, most boring shit ever like I do, and prefer traditional coding, it’s a nice spot to be in.</text></comment> |
21,905,261 | 21,905,096 | 1 | 2 | 21,904,041 | train | <story><title>The Ecosystem Is Moving [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thekyle</author><text>So in the beginning of the presentation Moxie brings up some valid cases where it&#x27;s good that centralized services can rapidly iterate and improve such as WhatsApp being able to roll out end-to-end encryption with a single update, while email is still not encrypted despite the tools existing to do so for years. Basically centralized services can roll out changes quickly and decentralized ones are more or less set in stone.<p>However, I feel that maybe he isn&#x27;t considering the downsides of being able to change quickly. Sure WhatsApp was able to add end-to-end encryption with a single update, but they can just as easily remove encryption with another update. Additionally, while I will admit that it sucks that email is not encrypted, knowing how many people and businesses rely on email every day, it should be incredibly difficult to make changes to it. I don&#x27;t want a single person or company to be able too suddenly decide to change how email works.<p>One area where I am sympathetic towards Moxie and Signal is requiring phone numbers (mentioned at the end in the Q&amp;A). Personally, I don&#x27;t see it as being all that big of a deal and it does bring several advantages with it:<p>* Users get to store&#x2F;control their own social network in their phones address book<p>* Users can switch easily between WhatsApp&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;etc.<p>Although I agree that requiring phone numbers does reduce the privacy of Signal users, I think it is a worthwhile trade off for making the app usable by the public.<p>Also, it seems like usernames might be supported in the future: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;secure-value-recovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;secure-value-recovery&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fauigerzigerk</author><text>This idea of phone numbers being easy to use is baffling to me. Phone numbers come with so much red tape it&#x27;s unbelievable.<p>I&#x27;m still paying for a phone service in a country where I previously lived (5 years after leaving) because I can&#x27;t move all the stuff that&#x27;s linked to that phone number. I even had to send them a government issued photo ID recently so I could keep the number.<p>And to use the number without switching SIM cards I have a separate phone that I&#x27;m booting up just for that purpose. I actually bought a third phone to manage all my SIM cards. This time I was smart. I bought an Android phone with dual SIM slots in spite of being an iPhone user.<p>After listening to Moxie&#x27;s talk, I realise that many of his arguments sound entirely plausible from a US centric point of view but make far less sense if you live elsewhere.<p>Building on top of phone numbers also assumes that end-to-end encrypted messaging will always be permitted in the mobile app stores. It&#x27;s a reasonable assumption as far as the US app stores are concerned. I wouldn&#x27;t bet on it here in the UK though, and even less so in many other countries.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Ecosystem Is Moving [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11086-the_ecosystem_is_moving</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thekyle</author><text>So in the beginning of the presentation Moxie brings up some valid cases where it&#x27;s good that centralized services can rapidly iterate and improve such as WhatsApp being able to roll out end-to-end encryption with a single update, while email is still not encrypted despite the tools existing to do so for years. Basically centralized services can roll out changes quickly and decentralized ones are more or less set in stone.<p>However, I feel that maybe he isn&#x27;t considering the downsides of being able to change quickly. Sure WhatsApp was able to add end-to-end encryption with a single update, but they can just as easily remove encryption with another update. Additionally, while I will admit that it sucks that email is not encrypted, knowing how many people and businesses rely on email every day, it should be incredibly difficult to make changes to it. I don&#x27;t want a single person or company to be able too suddenly decide to change how email works.<p>One area where I am sympathetic towards Moxie and Signal is requiring phone numbers (mentioned at the end in the Q&amp;A). Personally, I don&#x27;t see it as being all that big of a deal and it does bring several advantages with it:<p>* Users get to store&#x2F;control their own social network in their phones address book<p>* Users can switch easily between WhatsApp&#x2F;Signal&#x2F;etc.<p>Although I agree that requiring phone numbers does reduce the privacy of Signal users, I think it is a worthwhile trade off for making the app usable by the public.<p>Also, it seems like usernames might be supported in the future: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;secure-value-recovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;secure-value-recovery&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dijit</author><text>Why not use something like an email address instead of a phone number though. A phone number can be used to track you in the real world, it’s worse than having someone’s IP in some cases.<p>In fact some countries (Russia, at least) require you to give over Government issued ID when you get a new phone number. So it’s directly tied to your real persona, this is not just one country doing that either. I believe it is also a requirement in the UK now too. (They’re combating “burner” phones)</text></comment> |
35,922,942 | 35,922,900 | 1 | 3 | 35,917,912 | train | <story><title>Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tootie</author><text>Advertising and product are not separate concerns. Advertising _is_ the business. If he doesn&#x27;t take orders from her, the business will just get worse. His vision of &quot;free speech&quot; is in direct antagonism to the kind of brand-safe content that advertisers want.</text></item><item><author>DoesntMatter22</author><text>I think he&#x27;s primarily hiring her for advertiser relations. She knows all the advertisers and can placate them.<p>Meanwhile hell drive the company and she can be the face</text></item><item><author>tootie</author><text>He&#x27;s only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he&#x27;ll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.</text></item><item><author>atestu</author><text>WSJ yesterday for what it&#x27;s worth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-twitter-ceo-elon-musk-7a006bb5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-tw...</a> Good writeup<p>And to add to your comment:<p>&gt; Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.</text></item><item><author>belter</author><text>The FT got the scoop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4830" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4...</a><p>&quot;@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design &amp; new technology.&quot;<p>Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DoesntMatter22</author><text>He&#x27;s not going to take orders from her. That&#x27;s not her role. And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company. They are grinding out features faster than ever, the got rid of a ton of staff but are moving faster than at any time in the past.<p>You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that&#x27;s fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.<p>First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.<p>All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter</title><url>https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tootie</author><text>Advertising and product are not separate concerns. Advertising _is_ the business. If he doesn&#x27;t take orders from her, the business will just get worse. His vision of &quot;free speech&quot; is in direct antagonism to the kind of brand-safe content that advertisers want.</text></item><item><author>DoesntMatter22</author><text>I think he&#x27;s primarily hiring her for advertiser relations. She knows all the advertisers and can placate them.<p>Meanwhile hell drive the company and she can be the face</text></item><item><author>tootie</author><text>He&#x27;s only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he&#x27;ll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.</text></item><item><author>atestu</author><text>WSJ yesterday for what it&#x27;s worth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-twitter-ceo-elon-musk-7a006bb5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;linda-yaccarino-in-talks-new-tw...</a> Good writeup<p>And to add to your comment:<p>&gt; Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.</text></item><item><author>belter</author><text>The FT got the scoop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4830" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;edfead7f-27b5-441b-8971-8a161bad4...</a><p>&quot;@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design &amp; new technology.&quot;<p>Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>UncleOxidant</author><text>What are the chances that he actually will listen to her and take her advice? I kind of think he&#x27;s not accustomed to doing that.</text></comment> |
2,326,208 | 2,325,999 | 1 | 3 | 2,325,691 | train | <story><title>Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer</title><url>http://blog.dantup.com/2011/03/why-im-close-to-giving-up-on-windows-phone-7-as-a-user-and-a-developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Microsoft's an interesting beast. Things that "should" matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista). Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect. Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7). This current mess could mean anything from "WP7 is doomed, sell your stock" to "the Eye of Sauron just hasn't shone on that product group yet". We'll see. Personally, I'm thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn't standing still either.<p>When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software. They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk. When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that? Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>This pretty much jibes with the conventional wisdom that Microsoft is a company with deep political entanglements. If something is important, it stands to reason there would be a lot of paralyzing infighting, whereas teams on the periphery could actually do some good work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I'm Close to Giving Up on Windows Phone 7, as a User and a Developer</title><url>http://blog.dantup.com/2011/03/why-im-close-to-giving-up-on-windows-phone-7-as-a-user-and-a-developer</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Microsoft's an interesting beast. Things that "should" matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista). Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect. Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7). This current mess could mean anything from "WP7 is doomed, sell your stock" to "the Eye of Sauron just hasn't shone on that product group yet". We'll see. Personally, I'm thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn't standing still either.<p>When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software. They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk. When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that? Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kenjackson</author><text>Windows ME was a result of MS moving their top talent to the NT group. ME should have never been released, but Win2K wasn't ready to be the consumer OS.<p>When you don't have the company riding on you, you can take bigger risks. It will be interesting to see what Windows 8 ends up becoming. Vista was largely a failure because they were overly ambitious, despite common belief. I fear that this failure will prevent Windows from being ambitious again. I hope they learned that they failed for very specific reasons -- not just ambition in of itself.</text></comment> |
19,781,444 | 19,781,485 | 1 | 3 | 19,780,762 | train | <story><title>Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522637/burger-king-impossible-whopper-nationwide-rollout-meatless-vegetarian</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>In America only one or two percent are vegetarians. In England it&#x27;s over twenty percent! That&#x27;s the reason it pays to cater to them.<p>My sister is a vegan and on my urging she tried an impossible burger when it first came to San Francisco and she loved it.<p>But Burger King is cooking the impossible burger on the same grill upon which they&#x27;re grilling the meat. I haven&#x27;t asked her but I&#x27;m guessing most vegans won&#x27;t be buying their impossible burgers at Burger King for that reason.</text></item><item><author>hhs</author><text>I lived in England for a bit and remember fast food places commonly having veggie burgers. This was both in Burger King and McDonald&#x27;s. It was super convenient for that occasional quick bite.<p>In the US, Burger King has been supplying veggie patties for some time, but I wonder why it took American fast food places so long to expand. For instance, why is there still an absence of veggie burgers in a typical US McDonald&#x27;s? Is this a business decision or something else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattmanser</author><text>No, it&#x27;s not. I wouldn&#x27;t even say it&#x27;s 5%, let alone 20%.<p>You only have to walk into a supermarket to see this is nonsense, meat vs veggie options are like 10 to 1.<p>You&#x27;re referencing one widely debunked survey (this is about the vegan part of it, but it applied to the whole study and the vegetarian percentage claim (of 14%, not 20%), is discussed and debunked later in the article):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fullfact.org&#x2F;health&#x2F;vegans-uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fullfact.org&#x2F;health&#x2F;vegans-uk&#x2F;</a><p>I know 1 vegan and 1 vegetarian, but I know at least 6 ex-vegetarians.</text></comment> | <story><title>Burger King is rolling out meatless Impossible Whoppers nationwide</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/29/18522637/burger-king-impossible-whopper-nationwide-rollout-meatless-vegetarian</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmason</author><text>In America only one or two percent are vegetarians. In England it&#x27;s over twenty percent! That&#x27;s the reason it pays to cater to them.<p>My sister is a vegan and on my urging she tried an impossible burger when it first came to San Francisco and she loved it.<p>But Burger King is cooking the impossible burger on the same grill upon which they&#x27;re grilling the meat. I haven&#x27;t asked her but I&#x27;m guessing most vegans won&#x27;t be buying their impossible burgers at Burger King for that reason.</text></item><item><author>hhs</author><text>I lived in England for a bit and remember fast food places commonly having veggie burgers. This was both in Burger King and McDonald&#x27;s. It was super convenient for that occasional quick bite.<p>In the US, Burger King has been supplying veggie patties for some time, but I wonder why it took American fast food places so long to expand. For instance, why is there still an absence of veggie burgers in a typical US McDonald&#x27;s? Is this a business decision or something else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DominikPeters</author><text>The UK&#x27;s vegetarian rate is more like 10% as far as I recall. Since cooking veggie burgers on the same grill as meat burgers doesn&#x27;t lead to additional harm to animals, I hope and expect most vegans to be happy to go for it -- veganism is not an allergy.</text></comment> |
36,456,983 | 36,455,566 | 1 | 2 | 36,450,822 | train | <story><title>China solar module prices keep diving</title><url>https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/06/23/china-solar-module-prices-keep-diving/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ianburrell</author><text>The problem is that there is no standard for house-scale DC power. It has to be higher voltage than 12V or 48V that are used off-grid. There are no standard plugs or sockets, and it has to be different than AC.<p>The big problem is that everyone has AC sockets, and it isn&#x27;t worth the trouble to switch. It is going to be huge expense to buy new appliances for potential small efficiency gain. The in-wall voltage is going to mean that need adapters for other DC uses.<p>A better approach is to have a standard for DC power between AC side, batteries, and solar panels. Then have a single big inverter between AC and DC. It also makes possible to have DC-only in places like cabins that aren&#x27;t connected to the grid.<p>Finally, many houses and apartments can&#x27;t add batteries or solar panel. Not everyone has space like a basement. Like there is efficiency advantage like with utility solar, it might make sense to put batteries in substations where can use containers.</text></item><item><author>yazaddaruvala</author><text>&gt; In practice, inverters probably also need partial redesign<p>I&#x27;d also love for appliances to entirely adopt DC.<p>- Homes should run on batteries.<p>- Batteries should be trickle charged from the grid with a cheap rectifier.</text></item><item><author>philipkglass</author><text>The ratio of DC panel wattage to AC inverter wattage is called the inverter loading ratio, and it has been creeping up over time in utility scale solar farms. The reasoning is indeed to give more of a plateau shape to AC output (which is limited by transmission line capacity) and to perform more steadily under hazy or partly cloudy conditions. In theory, this ratio could go up a lot if panel prices continue to decline faster than inverter prices.<p>In practice, inverters probably also need partial redesign for a high loading ratio. Higher ILRs in large solar farms has appeared to contribute to faster inverter failures in recent years.</text></item><item><author>aitchnyu</author><text>I have almost 5kw of panels and a 5kw inverter. If solar panels get cheaper than dirt, will future 5kw inverters allow 10 kw of panels, so that the power vs time graph is a wide &quot;plateau&quot; instead of a thin &quot;hill&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>Low-power 12V or 24V DC is very doable around the house, for small-scale LED lighting, etc. But if you limit yourself to small connectors and thus reasonably low currents (like 10A, as I did), it&#x27;s 120W or 240W per connector at the very top.<p>Serious power, in the kilowatt range, would require much higher voltage, and still much bulkier connectors and thicker conductors. OTOH 400V DC should be comparable in this regard with 220V AC, which has a 380V amplitude. The 400V DC standard is relatively widespread and well-supported by existing industrial equipment. Connectors are comparable in size to the (grounded) Euro plugs.</text></comment> | <story><title>China solar module prices keep diving</title><url>https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/06/23/china-solar-module-prices-keep-diving/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ianburrell</author><text>The problem is that there is no standard for house-scale DC power. It has to be higher voltage than 12V or 48V that are used off-grid. There are no standard plugs or sockets, and it has to be different than AC.<p>The big problem is that everyone has AC sockets, and it isn&#x27;t worth the trouble to switch. It is going to be huge expense to buy new appliances for potential small efficiency gain. The in-wall voltage is going to mean that need adapters for other DC uses.<p>A better approach is to have a standard for DC power between AC side, batteries, and solar panels. Then have a single big inverter between AC and DC. It also makes possible to have DC-only in places like cabins that aren&#x27;t connected to the grid.<p>Finally, many houses and apartments can&#x27;t add batteries or solar panel. Not everyone has space like a basement. Like there is efficiency advantage like with utility solar, it might make sense to put batteries in substations where can use containers.</text></item><item><author>yazaddaruvala</author><text>&gt; In practice, inverters probably also need partial redesign<p>I&#x27;d also love for appliances to entirely adopt DC.<p>- Homes should run on batteries.<p>- Batteries should be trickle charged from the grid with a cheap rectifier.</text></item><item><author>philipkglass</author><text>The ratio of DC panel wattage to AC inverter wattage is called the inverter loading ratio, and it has been creeping up over time in utility scale solar farms. The reasoning is indeed to give more of a plateau shape to AC output (which is limited by transmission line capacity) and to perform more steadily under hazy or partly cloudy conditions. In theory, this ratio could go up a lot if panel prices continue to decline faster than inverter prices.<p>In practice, inverters probably also need partial redesign for a high loading ratio. Higher ILRs in large solar farms has appeared to contribute to faster inverter failures in recent years.</text></item><item><author>aitchnyu</author><text>I have almost 5kw of panels and a 5kw inverter. If solar panels get cheaper than dirt, will future 5kw inverters allow 10 kw of panels, so that the power vs time graph is a wide &quot;plateau&quot; instead of a thin &quot;hill&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanmcdirmid</author><text>Didn’t utilities in NYC offer DC service for a long time? See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;11&#x2F;14&#x2F;off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.nytimes.com&#x2F;cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;...</a><p>Old buildings had elevators, lights, and so on, that operated on DC.</text></comment> |
23,035,087 | 23,035,368 | 1 | 2 | 23,031,388 | train | <story><title>Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-pushes-colleges-to-the-breaking-point-forcing-hard-choices-about-education-11588256157</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwd</author><text>It will force &quot;the system&quot; to come up with some other way to pay for tuition.<p>What do you think about Income Share Agreements?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesimpledollar.com&#x2F;loans&#x2F;student&#x2F;income-share-agreements-a-new-way-to-pay-for-college&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesimpledollar.com&#x2F;loans&#x2F;student&#x2F;income-share-a...</a></text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>To be clear, I don&#x27;t think college should be paid for with loans. I agree with you that we shouldn&#x27;t be enslaving people.<p>But I also don&#x27;t think allowing these loans to be discharged in bankruptcy will solve anything (and will arguably make things worse) without systemic changes in the way college is paid for.</text></item><item><author>gwd</author><text>&gt; The reason they aren&#x27;t dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral?<p>If it&#x27;s a bad bet for the <i>bank</i>, it must be <i>far</i> worse of a bet for young adults. That&#x27;s the point -- right now we&#x27;re essentially suckering millions of naive young adults into a life of wage slavery by giving them a &quot;bet&quot; which they are completely unequipped to evaluate; and many of them are making a bet when they shouldn&#x27;t.<p>What you&#x27;re essentially arguing is, &quot;We have to enslave these people or society wouldn&#x27;t function&quot;. On the contrary: we must not enslave these people; if stop doing it, society will figure out some other way to get things done.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.<p>The reason they aren&#x27;t dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can&#x27;t be discharged.<p>Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.<p>That being said, I actually think that&#x27;s a good thing, because it would force colleges to charge reasonable tuition rates and also offer scholarships if they want to get the best students.<p>But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don&#x27;t see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won&#x27;t reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.</text></item><item><author>gwd</author><text>&gt; He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.<p>This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to &quot;the good life&quot;. Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren&#x27;t great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.<p>There&#x27;s a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it&#x27;s the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it&#x27;s a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they&#x27;re buying a ticket to a better life is far <i>more</i> vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan.<p>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.</text></item><item><author>nimbius</author><text>Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school.<p>Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we&#x27;d hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.<p>That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you &quot;invent flowers.&quot; I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>I think that they help universities raise tuition as long as the projected lifetime income increase from going to college exceeds the cost of tuition. Which will just allow our unsustainable &quot;tuition rises faster than inflation&quot; trend to last a few more years before it falls apart.<p>Note that &quot;projected lifetime income increase&quot; is generally overestimated. What we do is compare average income of a college graduate with a high school graduate and attribute the difference to college. However people who could get through college likely would have made more than people who couldn&#x27;t, even if they hadn&#x27;t gone to college!</text></comment> | <story><title>Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-pushes-colleges-to-the-breaking-point-forcing-hard-choices-about-education-11588256157</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwd</author><text>It will force &quot;the system&quot; to come up with some other way to pay for tuition.<p>What do you think about Income Share Agreements?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesimpledollar.com&#x2F;loans&#x2F;student&#x2F;income-share-agreements-a-new-way-to-pay-for-college&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesimpledollar.com&#x2F;loans&#x2F;student&#x2F;income-share-a...</a></text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>To be clear, I don&#x27;t think college should be paid for with loans. I agree with you that we shouldn&#x27;t be enslaving people.<p>But I also don&#x27;t think allowing these loans to be discharged in bankruptcy will solve anything (and will arguably make things worse) without systemic changes in the way college is paid for.</text></item><item><author>gwd</author><text>&gt; The reason they aren&#x27;t dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral?<p>If it&#x27;s a bad bet for the <i>bank</i>, it must be <i>far</i> worse of a bet for young adults. That&#x27;s the point -- right now we&#x27;re essentially suckering millions of naive young adults into a life of wage slavery by giving them a &quot;bet&quot; which they are completely unequipped to evaluate; and many of them are making a bet when they shouldn&#x27;t.<p>What you&#x27;re essentially arguing is, &quot;We have to enslave these people or society wouldn&#x27;t function&quot;. On the contrary: we must not enslave these people; if stop doing it, society will figure out some other way to get things done.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>&gt; All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.<p>The reason they aren&#x27;t dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can&#x27;t be discharged.<p>Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.<p>That being said, I actually think that&#x27;s a good thing, because it would force colleges to charge reasonable tuition rates and also offer scholarships if they want to get the best students.<p>But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don&#x27;t see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won&#x27;t reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.</text></item><item><author>gwd</author><text>&gt; He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.<p>This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to &quot;the good life&quot;. Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren&#x27;t great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.<p>There&#x27;s a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it&#x27;s the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it&#x27;s a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they&#x27;re buying a ticket to a better life is far <i>more</i> vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan.<p>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.</text></item><item><author>nimbius</author><text>Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school.<p>Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we&#x27;d hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.<p>That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you &quot;invent flowers.&quot; I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dnautics</author><text>Ironically, income share agreements are increasingly being challenged on the grounds that they violate the 14th amendment (being rather close to the indentured servitude model).<p>I think the (optics) problem is that it&#x27;s a &quot;more obvious voluntary fractional slavery program&quot;. So it&#x27;s easy to criticize. Of course, because it&#x27;s a less obvious voluntary fractional slavery program, non-dischargeable loans are simultaneously harder to criticize and harder for people to see the trap they&#x27;re walking in to.</text></comment> |
17,427,690 | 17,426,571 | 1 | 2 | 17,426,194 | train | <story><title>An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python</title><url>https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3a8f27f3-d724-4e0b-bc72-0dcddd0b2eab/announcing-an-easier-way-to-build-alexa-skills-using-python</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oulipo</author><text>If you care about your privacy, you can also build your own 100% on-device Voice AI for free using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snips.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;snips.ai</a> (disclaimer: I&#x27;m a co-founder)<p>We are building an open-source and 100% private-by-design Voice AI platform, and you can code your first private assistant in less than 1h: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;snips-ai&#x2F;building-a-voice-controlled-home-sound-system-using-snips-and-sonos-2aaf16523ce9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;snips-ai&#x2F;building-a-voice-controlled-home...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python</title><url>https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/3a8f27f3-d724-4e0b-bc72-0dcddd0b2eab/announcing-an-easier-way-to-build-alexa-skills-using-python</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gnufied</author><text>I own several Echo devices and programmability of Alexa devices just baffles me.<p>There is still no way for a skill to read notifications. For example - I want to write a calendar notification app which unifies all calendar events across several sources and there is just no way to do it. It is of course disabled in the name of privacy which I can understand - but I don&#x27;t understand how I can&#x27;t enable this for a device that I own from an app I write.<p>Similarly - I was considering getting an Echo Show for keeping a persistent view of my todo list and upcoming things on Echo show. I looked at writing skills for Echo show. Something that should be a webapp that just renders a particular source or something similar. But nope - It just looks hard or impossible.</text></comment> |
31,718,093 | 31,717,003 | 1 | 2 | 31,714,524 | train | <story><title>Parental alienation and the unregulated experts shattering children’s lives</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/12/parental-alienation-and-the-unregulated-experts-shattering-childrens-lives</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrsmee89</author><text>As someone who has gone through something similar to this, it was heartbreaking to discover that parental alienation is quite common.<p>Child raising is too delicate and nuanced to be relegated to process level decisions. It’s too late for my situation but family court with children involved is something I hope gets revamped sooner rather than later.<p>Many of the family court laws are a relic from a time when the roles of men and women were very different from the standard of today and unfortunately many women use this to their advantage (which I suppose is the rational thing to do).<p>Now, whenever I see a woman claiming to be a victim in a family matter I look way more closely than I would have in the past and I hope society as a whole starts to do this too.<p>Of course, I’m not saying only women use victimhood to their advantage but I am saying that there is a very clear incentive to claim to be a victim in todays society and in family court especially. As long as a woman is ok with lying, it’s almost foolish for her to NOT claim to be the victim. The incentive needs to be removed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Parental alienation and the unregulated experts shattering children’s lives</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/12/parental-alienation-and-the-unregulated-experts-shattering-childrens-lives</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bergenty</author><text>It sounds like you’re supposed to sympathize with the mother in this article but you need to be careful, especially when a court system—- that is generally incredibly biased against the father— makes a ruling in his favor.<p>I can think of plenty of scenarios in what’s described where the mother is incredibly manipulative and plays the victim card as soon as there are consequences.</text></comment> |
6,580,040 | 6,579,914 | 1 | 3 | 6,579,294 | train | <story><title>Have young people in Japan stopped having sex?</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>westicle</author><text>This certainly isn&#x27;t a phenomenon exclusive to Japan either.<p>I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in their work. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in Pokemon.<p>More power to them, I say.</text></item><item><author>veidr</author><text>This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.<p>What westerners might call &#x27;casual sex&#x27; -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses&#x2F;committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.<p>Sometimes I&#x27;ll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). &quot;I don&#x27;t have anybody... I can&#x27;t remember the last time I slept with somebody,&quot; she might say. What she means is that she doesn&#x27;t have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she&#x27;s fucking.<p>Or I will see a guy asked about it. &quot;Well, romance is too complicated with all I&#x27;ve got going on... I&#x27;ve learned to live without it,&quot; he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn&#x27;t come with implied commitments and hassle.<p>These two people might very well end up leaving together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>001sky</author><text>Anecdotally, this is directly correlated to the price of real-estate, and other parts of the world are only now catching up to Japan in this regards.</text></comment> | <story><title>Have young people in Japan stopped having sex?</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>westicle</author><text>This certainly isn&#x27;t a phenomenon exclusive to Japan either.<p>I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in their work. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they&#x27;re more interested in Pokemon.<p>More power to them, I say.</text></item><item><author>veidr</author><text>This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.<p>What westerners might call &#x27;casual sex&#x27; -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses&#x2F;committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.<p>Sometimes I&#x27;ll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). &quot;I don&#x27;t have anybody... I can&#x27;t remember the last time I slept with somebody,&quot; she might say. What she means is that she doesn&#x27;t have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she&#x27;s fucking.<p>Or I will see a guy asked about it. &quot;Well, romance is too complicated with all I&#x27;ve got going on... I&#x27;ve learned to live without it,&quot; he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn&#x27;t come with implied commitments and hassle.<p>These two people might very well end up leaving together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrs99</author><text>I think it&#x27;s a bigger more existential problem that young people these days have.</text></comment> |
39,595,918 | 39,595,077 | 1 | 2 | 39,593,256 | train | <story><title>Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade</title><url>https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yalok</author><text>The main limitation for such codecs is CPU&#x2F;battery life - and I like how they sparsely applied ML in it here and there, combining it with classic approach (non-ML algos) to achieve better tradeoff of CPU vs quality. E.g. for better low bitrate support&#x2F;LACE - &quot;we went for a different approach: start with the tried-and-true postfilter idea and sprinkle just enough DNN magic on top of it.&quot; The key was not to feed raw audio samples to the NN - &quot;The audio itself never goes through the DNN. The result is a small and very-low-complexity model (by DNN standards) that can run even on older phones.&quot;<p>Looks like the right direction for embedded algos and it seems to be a pretty unexplored one, as compared to the current fashion to do ML E2E.</text></comment> | <story><title>Opus 1.5 released: Opus gets a machine learning upgrade</title><url>https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spacechild1</author><text>I&#x27;m using Opus as one of the main codecs in my peer-to-peer audio streaming library (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.iem.at&#x2F;cm&#x2F;aoo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.iem.at&#x2F;cm&#x2F;aoo&#x2F;</a> - still alpha), so this is very exciting news!<p>I&#x27;ll definitely play around with these new ML features!</text></comment> |
35,566,249 | 35,563,414 | 1 | 2 | 35,562,430 | train | <story><title>SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new</title><url>http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>burakemir</author><text>In the end, SQL is what people are familiar with (for better or worse) and what is entrenched in some form in most database, and new versions of the standard are unlikely to change anything fundamental.<p>I don&#x27;t believe that adding property graph support to SQL makes much of a difference for SQL and relational databases...<p>However, the PG query additions (I believe they are close to the Cypher language neo4j) being part of the SQL standard will give a boost to marketing and adoption of PG databases. Vendors can now say &quot;our language follows the SQL standard&quot; instead of referencing cypher and indirectly neo4j. Even if neo4j may have the best intentions, marketing is very important in databases and it is unlikely that vendors could have supported Cypher and thus admit that they are following neo4j rather than leading.<p>Standards can thus be valuable regardless of whether they are adopted or not and a lot of discussion and collaboration was likely necessary to get to this point re: the PG additions.<p>In this context, it is also worth mentioning the GQL standard here, which neo4j folks are part of
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Graph_Query_Language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Graph_Query_Language</a></text></comment> | <story><title>SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new</title><url>http://peter.eisentraut.org/blog/2023/04/04/sql-2023-is-finished-here-is-whats-new</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mastax</author><text>Lots of nice stuff in here.<p><pre><code> SELECT t.j.foo.bar[2], ... FROM tbl t ...
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m going to miss having this for years, probably.</text></comment> |
22,478,400 | 22,478,366 | 1 | 2 | 22,473,263 | train | <story><title>What's so hard about PDF text extraction?</title><url>https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tolmasky</author><text>What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.</text></item><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&gt; I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a &quot;block&quot; (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be.<p>The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and&#x2F;or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as much profit to any company that can solve it. But there are hundreds of billions of dollars going into self-driving cars, and like zero dollars going into this problem.</text></item><item><author>tolmasky</author><text>This is why iPhone didn&#x27;t initially ship with double-tap to zoom for PDF paragraphs (like it had for blocks on web pages). I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a &quot;block&quot; (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. I relayed this to my manager and the bug was punted.<p>Edit: To add a little more color, given that none of us was (or at least certainly I wasn&#x27;t) an expert on the PDF format, we had so far treated the bug like a bug of probably at-most moderate complexity (just have to read up on PDF and figure out what the base unit is or whatever). After discovering what this article talks about, it became evident that any solution we cobbled together in the time we had left would really just be signing up for an endless stream of it-doesn&#x27;t-work-quite-right bugs. So, a feature that would become a bug emitter. I remember in particular considering one of the main use cases: scientific articles that are usually in two columns, AND also used justified text. A lot of times the spaces between words could be as large as the spaces between columns, so the statistical &quot;grouping&quot; of characters to try to identify the &quot;macro rectangle&quot; shape could get tricky without severely special-casing for this. All this being said, as the story should make clear, I put about one day of thought into this before the decision was made to avoid it for 1.0, so far all I know there are actually really good solutions to this. Even writing this now I am starting to think of fun ways to deal with this, but at the time, it was one of a huge list of things that needed to get done and had been underestimated in complexity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>greycol</author><text>Almost any business that has physical suppliers or business customers.<p>PDF is de-facto standard for any invoicing, POs, quotes, etc.<p>If you solve the problem you can effectively programmatically deal with invoicing&#x2F;payments&#x2F; large parts of ordering&#x2F;dispensing. It&#x27;s a no brainer to add it on to almost any financial&#x2F;procurement software that deals with inter business stuff.<p>Any small-medium physical business can probably half their financial department if you can dependably solve this issue.</text></comment> | <story><title>What's so hard about PDF text extraction?</title><url>https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tolmasky</author><text>What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.</text></item><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&gt; I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a &quot;block&quot; (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be.<p>The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and&#x2F;or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as much profit to any company that can solve it. But there are hundreds of billions of dollars going into self-driving cars, and like zero dollars going into this problem.</text></item><item><author>tolmasky</author><text>This is why iPhone didn&#x27;t initially ship with double-tap to zoom for PDF paragraphs (like it had for blocks on web pages). I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a &quot;block&quot; (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. I relayed this to my manager and the bug was punted.<p>Edit: To add a little more color, given that none of us was (or at least certainly I wasn&#x27;t) an expert on the PDF format, we had so far treated the bug like a bug of probably at-most moderate complexity (just have to read up on PDF and figure out what the base unit is or whatever). After discovering what this article talks about, it became evident that any solution we cobbled together in the time we had left would really just be signing up for an endless stream of it-doesn&#x27;t-work-quite-right bugs. So, a feature that would become a bug emitter. I remember in particular considering one of the main use cases: scientific articles that are usually in two columns, AND also used justified text. A lot of times the spaces between words could be as large as the spaces between columns, so the statistical &quot;grouping&quot; of characters to try to identify the &quot;macro rectangle&quot; shape could get tricky without severely special-casing for this. All this being said, as the story should make clear, I put about one day of thought into this before the decision was made to avoid it for 1.0, so far all I know there are actually really good solutions to this. Even writing this now I am starting to think of fun ways to deal with this, but at the time, it was one of a huge list of things that needed to get done and had been underestimated in complexity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex3917</author><text>So I have a lot of experience with basically the same problem just from working on this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prettyfwd.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prettyfwd.com</a>. As an example of the opportunity size just in the email domain, the amount of personal non-spam email sent every day is like 100x the total size of Wikipedia, but nothing is really done with any of this information because of this challenge. Basically applications are things like:<p>- Better search engine results<p>- Identifying experts within a company<p>- Better machine translation<p>- Finding accounting fraud<p>- Automating legal processes<p>For context, the reason why Facebook is the most successful social network is that they&#x27;re able to turn behavioral residue into content. If you can get better at taking garbage data and repackaging it into something useful, it stands to reason that there are lots of other companies the size of Facebook that can be created.</text></comment> |
9,655,568 | 9,655,049 | 1 | 3 | 9,653,978 | train | <story><title>GitUp makes Git painless</title><url>http://gitup.co/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cheald</author><text>It&#x27;s kind of amusing to me how the pendulum has swung, and we&#x27;re now producing OS X-only developer software.<p>But then, I&#x27;m an oddball who works on Windows as my shell with the real work happening on a headless Linux box via SSH and Samba for 99% of my development.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iconjack</author><text>Can we please change the title to GitUp makes Git painless for OS X Users?</text></comment> | <story><title>GitUp makes Git painless</title><url>http://gitup.co/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cheald</author><text>It&#x27;s kind of amusing to me how the pendulum has swung, and we&#x27;re now producing OS X-only developer software.<p>But then, I&#x27;m an oddball who works on Windows as my shell with the real work happening on a headless Linux box via SSH and Samba for 99% of my development.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SomeCallMeTim</author><text>You&#x27;re not the only oddball. Some of us work on Windows software and NEED the Windows box -- I also use too many Windows-only tools to make the jump to Mac.<p>And what they do with Cmd-vs-Alt drives my fingers crazy, so I can&#x27;t configure a Mac to be sane no matter what I try. And I use keyboard navigation to peruse menus, which OS X still hasn&#x27;t implemented...the list goes on, and I stick with Windows.</text></comment> |
32,612,522 | 32,612,369 | 1 | 2 | 32,611,247 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?</title><text>In the 2020s most old generation people are retiring and not only the replacement generations smaller but there is gap in generational knowledge transfer. What do you think is important tech out there in which are we are losing our collective knowledge and hard won wisdom?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>commoddity</author><text>I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?<p>It basically took that game&#x27;s massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples &amp; pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.<p>It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game&#x27;s map and repurposed it to create something educational.<p>Would love to see more of that type of thing.</text></item><item><author>iammjm</author><text>Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tareqak</author><text>It was released as a free update to the base game, but it is also available as a standalone title at a price lower than the base game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;775430&#x2F;Discovery_Tour_by_Assassins_Creed_Ancient_Egypt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;775430&#x2F;Discovery_Tour_by_...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?</title><text>In the 2020s most old generation people are retiring and not only the replacement generations smaller but there is gap in generational knowledge transfer. What do you think is important tech out there in which are we are losing our collective knowledge and hard won wisdom?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>commoddity</author><text>I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?<p>It basically took that game&#x27;s massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples &amp; pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.<p>It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game&#x27;s map and repurposed it to create something educational.<p>Would love to see more of that type of thing.</text></item><item><author>iammjm</author><text>Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisweekly</author><text>Related tangent - I&#x27;d love to see more games (whether or not explicitly &quot;educational&quot;) that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you&#x27;d play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.</text></comment> |
11,025,086 | 11,024,739 | 1 | 3 | 11,024,505 | train | <story><title>Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI firmware under Linux</title><url>http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2016/02/02/dell-firmware-updating-under-linux</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stonogo</author><text>This announcement confuses me, since I&#x27;ve been flashing UEFI firmware on linux-based Dell, HP, and IBM servers for many years. IBM&#x27;s tools are particularly pleasant, since they&#x27;re easy to integrate into configuration management tools.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dell Edge Gateway 5000 to support natively flashing UEFI firmware under Linux</title><url>http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2016/02/02/dell-firmware-updating-under-linux</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdboyd</author><text>I&#x27;m happy to see the news, but now I&#x27;m also very curious what the Dell Edge Gateway 5000 is.</text></comment> |
18,506,640 | 18,505,539 | 1 | 2 | 18,504,099 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Easy-to-use curl command to send email notifications</title><url>https://curlmail.co/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mrmattyboy</author><text>Thanks all for all of the suggestions!<p>For the improvements, I will try get all of them done by tomorrow; they&#x27;ve all been really good!<p>For those of you suggesting alternatives:<p>* If you&#x27;re suggesting them as a sort of &#x27;BTW you can do this as well&#x27;, then awesome<p>* If you&#x27;re questioning &#x27;why did I re-invent the wheel&#x27;, as I&#x27;ve said in other comments:<p>a) Sending mail directly from a machine can be troublesome (lack of ports open, lack of SPF record for sending domain (since it maybe a workstation) etc.)<p>b) I&#x27;ve struggled to find an alternative method (since my original use for this was few and fare between) that I could actually remember.. often looking up how to send mail through curl for example meant reading multiple websites each time and time spent to get it working wasn&#x27;t worth it, whereas I&#x27;ve never had problems remembering &#x27;curl curlmail.co&#x2F;email&#x27; :)<p>Thanks for all the feedback so far and, as with any quick side-project hack, if a single person in a real situation ends up using it and finds it useful, then its served it&#x27;s purpose in my opinion!<p>Thanks</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Easy-to-use curl command to send email notifications</title><url>https://curlmail.co/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>guessmyname</author><text>It seems that I can unsubscribe everyone like this:<p><pre><code> curl &quot;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.curlmail.co&#x2F;unsubscribe&#x2F;EMAIL&quot;
</code></pre>
This may or may not be considered as an attack vector. If I know that someone is using the service, I can “troll” them by unsubscribing their email and they will stop receiving the alerts. A solution to this would be to include a verification code in the “unsubscribe” link that you are sending with the alert. Unsubscribe only if the verification code exists and matches the one associated with the email.</text></comment> |
12,192,555 | 12,191,619 | 1 | 3 | 12,191,089 | train | <story><title>Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here</title><url>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>I&#x27;ve never been as afraid of fresh water shortage as a lot of other people seem to be precisely because it is exactly the kind of shortage that is solved by market forces. Freshwater getting scarce? OK, so the price goes up. Now there&#x27;s more incentive to conserve water by replacing fixtures for low-flow variants, letting your lawn die (why do you really need one in a desert anyway), and using more efficient irrigation methods in agriculture. The price of water still keeps going up? Then the price of meat goes up because growing crops to feed animals become more expensive, and people eat less meat. Meanwhile, increased price makes desalination more profitable, and more plants come online.<p>I don&#x27;t see it as anything rising close to a civilization-ending threat. Seawater is abundant. Freshwater can be made cheaply enough. We are extravagantly wasteful with water as it is, and that can be fixed easily enough as it becomes more expensive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pipio21</author><text>Remember Arab Spring?<p>People in the West believe that it was about &quot;freedom&quot;, but it was about food and life getting so expensive normal people needed to spend most of their salary just on it. Poor people not being able to eat well or not eat at all as there were no jobs.<p>People will revolt if they can&#x27;t buy food because it is very expensive. That is the civilization ending treat: war.<p>War is really the worst experience you could experience. I will remember things I have seen in Congo all my life.<p>For example WWII was created because Germans lived a miserable life paying for WW1 and Great depression. Just interest in the WW1 debt grew faster than their productivity meaning they were slaves forever, just like Greece is today.<p>Americans were very careful not making the compensation for war for Germany excessive in order not to repeat History.<p>People will choose whoever person that promises an easy exit for their problems, and the easiest thing is to steal from others. You don&#x27;t have water, you take the places that have water, like the Golan heights.<p>And that is war.<p>For market forces to work you need a long time. Inventors will only discover innovative methods after working for decades in a problem.<p>Letting your lawn die? This is a really stupid idea. I have worked in Sahara desert precisely helping people stop the desert just putting vegetation in place(that holds sand and makes soil so wind does not move it).</text></comment> | <story><title>Israel Proves the Desalination Era Is Here</title><url>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>I&#x27;ve never been as afraid of fresh water shortage as a lot of other people seem to be precisely because it is exactly the kind of shortage that is solved by market forces. Freshwater getting scarce? OK, so the price goes up. Now there&#x27;s more incentive to conserve water by replacing fixtures for low-flow variants, letting your lawn die (why do you really need one in a desert anyway), and using more efficient irrigation methods in agriculture. The price of water still keeps going up? Then the price of meat goes up because growing crops to feed animals become more expensive, and people eat less meat. Meanwhile, increased price makes desalination more profitable, and more plants come online.<p>I don&#x27;t see it as anything rising close to a civilization-ending threat. Seawater is abundant. Freshwater can be made cheaply enough. We are extravagantly wasteful with water as it is, and that can be fixed easily enough as it becomes more expensive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JDDunn9</author><text>It might not be a civilization-ending threat, but it affects several outliers.<p>- If you live on less than $1 a day, rising food&#x2F;water costs is a big deal.<p>- If you are in a land-locked country, desalination isn&#x27;t an option.<p>- Desalination plants aren&#x27;t built over night. In the meantime droughts would have consequences.<p>- If water became a major percentage of the cost of food, it would shift what crops are grown. Towards monoculture and away from diversity. The poor would especially be constrained.<p>- If we let our lawns die, we&#x27;ll see more property damage due to soil erosion.</text></comment> |
26,400,502 | 26,400,586 | 1 | 3 | 26,387,100 | train | <story><title>Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/hertz-the-original-meme-stock-is-turning-out-to-be-worthless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Judgmentality</author><text>At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz).<p>I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I&#x27;m up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won&#x27;t last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.</text></item><item><author>tacheiordache</author><text>GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don&#x27;t belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lot of gains to come. Eventually without a definite date what goes up comes down but it&#x27;d be silly to not take a piece of the pie yourself and keep your savings in cash...</text></item><item><author>VHRanger</author><text>Obviously?<p>The company was bankrupt.<p>People who bought HRTZ after bankruptcy had to have known it was a game of financial musical chairs, much like GME, TSLA or BTC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>camjohnson26</author><text>All this retail interest in meme stocks is gambling, plain and simple. More people entering the market creates a Ponzi effect where new entrants pay for the gains of holders, but by definition this is unsustainable. You can see this basically everywhere in the economy but the meme stocks are the most obvious.<p>Not financial advice, I thought Tesla was laughably over valued at $40 a share, never bet more than you’re willing to lose.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/hertz-the-original-meme-stock-is-turning-out-to-be-worthless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Judgmentality</author><text>At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz).<p>I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I&#x27;m up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won&#x27;t last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.</text></item><item><author>tacheiordache</author><text>GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don&#x27;t belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lot of gains to come. Eventually without a definite date what goes up comes down but it&#x27;d be silly to not take a piece of the pie yourself and keep your savings in cash...</text></item><item><author>VHRanger</author><text>Obviously?<p>The company was bankrupt.<p>People who bought HRTZ after bankruptcy had to have known it was a game of financial musical chairs, much like GME, TSLA or BTC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elif</author><text>TSLA is crashing because TSLA is not worth more than the rest of the top 10 manufacturers combined, as their market cap would suggest.<p>Other notable differences include actively building the largest and most advanced factories on every major continent, disrupting the entire automobile industry such that even jaguar is going full electric by 2025, mainstreaming self-driving, and cutting the costs of residential solar in half.<p>Meanwhile, gamestop is trying to make a profit out of a portfolio of dusty commercial real estate.</text></comment> |
16,988,027 | 16,988,013 | 1 | 3 | 16,984,815 | train | <story><title>100 prisoners problem</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_prisoners_problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dbatten</author><text>I&#x27;m confused...<p>&quot;Before the first prisoner enters the room, the prisoners may discuss strategy—but may not communicate once the first prisoner enters to look in the drawers.&quot;<p>And, in the example given, &quot;That prisoners 5 to 8 will also find their numbers can also be derived from the information gained by the first three prisoners.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s never any explanation of what happens when a prisoner opens a drawer and finds it empty. In the first example given, what happens when prisoner 5 goes in and there&#x27;s nothing in drawer 5? The algorithm doesn&#x27;t seem to account for this.<p>It seems like there&#x27;s some sort of assumption that the later prisoners are gathering information from the earlier prisoners, but the problem set-up seems to preclude this? They&#x27;re going into a room so they can&#x27;t watch each other, the drawers are closed afterwards so they can&#x27;t derive information from which drawers are open&#x2F;closed, and they&#x27;re not allowed to communicate.<p>Am I not following something?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dbatten</author><text>Two things:<p>1) You don&#x27;t take your number when you find it. I guess my brain assumed &quot;find&quot; meant &quot;find and take with you to prove you found it.&quot; Perhaps a better term might be &quot;encounter.&quot;<p>2) Here&#x27;s a much better explanation (thanks micaeked): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;datagenetics.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;december42014&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;datagenetics.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;december42014&#x2F;index.html</a>. Essentially, the algorithm works because following numbers to drawers will eventually create a loop (e.g., drawer 2 points to 4 points to 6 points to 2). By starting with the drawer with your number, you&#x27;re guaranteed to be in a loop with your number. The only question is whether your loop is less than 50 drawers long...<p>Furthermore, this confirms that there IS no transfer of information from previous prisoners in any way.</text></comment> | <story><title>100 prisoners problem</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_prisoners_problem</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dbatten</author><text>I&#x27;m confused...<p>&quot;Before the first prisoner enters the room, the prisoners may discuss strategy—but may not communicate once the first prisoner enters to look in the drawers.&quot;<p>And, in the example given, &quot;That prisoners 5 to 8 will also find their numbers can also be derived from the information gained by the first three prisoners.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s never any explanation of what happens when a prisoner opens a drawer and finds it empty. In the first example given, what happens when prisoner 5 goes in and there&#x27;s nothing in drawer 5? The algorithm doesn&#x27;t seem to account for this.<p>It seems like there&#x27;s some sort of assumption that the later prisoners are gathering information from the earlier prisoners, but the problem set-up seems to preclude this? They&#x27;re going into a room so they can&#x27;t watch each other, the drawers are closed afterwards so they can&#x27;t derive information from which drawers are open&#x2F;closed, and they&#x27;re not allowed to communicate.<p>Am I not following something?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajanuary</author><text>The numbers are left in the drawers once someone finds their number.</text></comment> |
31,814,248 | 31,812,478 | 1 | 2 | 31,810,832 | train | <story><title>SSO should be table stakes</title><url>https://tuple.app/blog/sso-should-be-table-stakes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nsxwolf</author><text>Man, I hate hate hate seeing the SSO portal 30 times a day, reaching for my phone to answer the popup every time. Which sometimes gets eaten by &quot;Focus Mode&quot; on my iPhone, or randomly goes to my watch and I have to look at both.<p>Wasn&#x27;t the dream to log in once in the morning, and have your SSO token be valid for all systems all day? Is anyone out there successfully putting the &quot;Single&quot; in &quot;Single Sign On&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mooreds</author><text>It&#x27;s a configuration option, so it is in control of your IT staff. I&#x27;m not sure if there are security risks&#x2F;compliance requirements specifying such a short SSO session duration (20 min?), but may be worth asking.<p>&gt; Wasn&#x27;t the dream to log in once in the morning, and have your SSO token be valid for all systems all day? Is anyone out there successfully putting the &quot;Single&quot; in &quot;Single Sign On&quot;?<p>I work for an identity provider that many of our clients use for SSO between applications, and it is absolutely possible to configure our solution to require 1 sign-in per day.</text></comment> | <story><title>SSO should be table stakes</title><url>https://tuple.app/blog/sso-should-be-table-stakes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nsxwolf</author><text>Man, I hate hate hate seeing the SSO portal 30 times a day, reaching for my phone to answer the popup every time. Which sometimes gets eaten by &quot;Focus Mode&quot; on my iPhone, or randomly goes to my watch and I have to look at both.<p>Wasn&#x27;t the dream to log in once in the morning, and have your SSO token be valid for all systems all day? Is anyone out there successfully putting the &quot;Single&quot; in &quot;Single Sign On&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dexwiz</author><text>I have used a few SSO providers and never had this. I usually log into the portal once and then everything else resolve via redirects without interaction the rest of the day. Maybe I have to click confirm. This sounds like bad configuration on your ITs side of things.</text></comment> |
35,459,478 | 35,458,629 | 1 | 3 | 35,456,192 | train | <story><title>Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later</title><url>https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-preterite</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>I wrote a paper on Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itronitron</author><text>They probably did not read it.<p>I&#x27;ve read the first third of the book, at some point I&#x27;ll make another attempt. Pynchon&#x27;s writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get &#x27;sucked into&#x27; the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.<p>Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.</text></comment> | <story><title>Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later</title><url>https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-preterite</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karaterobot</author><text>I wrote a paper on Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity&#x27;s Rainbow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paddw</author><text>I think you can get an A- on a paper these days for writing anything remotely representing a cogent or lucid train of thought.</text></comment> |
38,165,418 | 38,163,409 | 1 | 2 | 38,160,382 | train | <story><title>Debian discusses vendoring again (2021)</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/842319/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nerdponx</author><text>This is one of the places that the often-maligned Homebrew package manager does a good job.<p>App dependencies in languages like Python and Lua are fetched manually, with exact filenames and hashes, and installed into an isolated location just for that app. If they turn out to be used by several apps, then they get packaged normally.<p>I wish other package managers did it this way. It would make packaging complicated applications much easier and result in many fewer dependency conflicts, and allows devs to produce more stable software.<p>It&#x27;s basically static linking but for Python packages. Sometimes you want shared libraries, but for one-off dependencies it&#x27;s possibly more trouble than it&#x27;s worth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikemcquaid</author><text>As the person who has probably influenced Homebrew&#x27;s policy on this the most: I&#x27;m very pleased to read this, thanks for saying it!<p>I was also reading this link today to think more about how Homebrew can handle this stuff better.<p>To me the main differentiation is &quot;is the package for an application or a library?&quot;. If it&#x27;s a library: it&#x27;s a trickier balance. If it&#x27;s an application: vendoring the e.g. NPM&#x2F;RubyGems modules is most likely to create the best, most useful experience for the user, upstream creator and Homebrew maintainers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Debian discusses vendoring again (2021)</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/842319/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nerdponx</author><text>This is one of the places that the often-maligned Homebrew package manager does a good job.<p>App dependencies in languages like Python and Lua are fetched manually, with exact filenames and hashes, and installed into an isolated location just for that app. If they turn out to be used by several apps, then they get packaged normally.<p>I wish other package managers did it this way. It would make packaging complicated applications much easier and result in many fewer dependency conflicts, and allows devs to produce more stable software.<p>It&#x27;s basically static linking but for Python packages. Sometimes you want shared libraries, but for one-off dependencies it&#x27;s possibly more trouble than it&#x27;s worth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hedora</author><text>The article suggests using debian’s contrib package category in this way. (Packages with such dependencies live in contrib, since they don’t live up to Debian’s quality standards, which is fine.)</text></comment> |
28,223,025 | 28,222,601 | 1 | 2 | 28,221,821 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful</title><text>I&#x27;ve worked for startups for 10 years and recently joined a FAANG company. Compensation and stability were part of my motivation, but the biggest reason was the assumption that I would be able to work with A+ players solving hard problems.<p>Instead, I&#x27;m on a team that has and horrendous turnover and is staffed with below-average IQ people.<p>This company builds EVERYTHING in house, and the toolset is like going backwards in my career 10 years.<p>If I do want to stick this out and turn this team around, I&#x27;m going to be working nights and weekends for at least a year - there&#x27;s just too much to fix.<p>I&#x27;ve told this to lots of people who work in other division (that I can trust) and they&#x27;ve said the easiest thing is to just accept it as it is and coast. I&#x27;ve never done that in my career and don&#x27;t think I could do that.<p>Has anyone been in the same boat? I&#x27;m told that it becomes easier to switch teams after a year.<p>I feel like I&#x27;ve made a terrible decision and don&#x27;t know what to do next.<p>Any advice is appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>laurieg</author><text>&quot;staffed with below-average IQ people&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure why your co-workers&#x27; IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them.<p>Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren&#x27;t bouncing.<p>My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the company face. Make incremental improvements.<p>If you really want to you can work late every day and at weekends. It&#x27;s your choice. Bear in mind your job won&#x27;t love you back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tZqGafFdSbj5w34</author><text>I seem to be getting a lot of heat for this comment - fair enough, but I will expand on that.<p>Before joining this company, I hired and managed teams across various startups. I don&#x27;t think I would be speaking out of turn to say in every company we looked for aptitude and intelligence. I don&#x27;t know what my previous or current colleagues literal IQs are, but you know a highly intelligent person when you meet and work with one.<p>Through my entire FOUR MONTH interview process, I met a dozen people, all of whom would be considered highly intelligent. Maybe I am naive to assume that&#x27;s what that interview process was designed for.<p>And to be clear, those folks I interviewed with and many other people around me are highly intelligent. But the people I work with on daily basis, whom I did not meet in my interview, are categorically less intelligent and honestly at the root of most of the problems I&#x27;ve dealt with since starting.<p>Sorry if it is rude, but I think it&#x27;s an honest depiction of the situation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful</title><text>I&#x27;ve worked for startups for 10 years and recently joined a FAANG company. Compensation and stability were part of my motivation, but the biggest reason was the assumption that I would be able to work with A+ players solving hard problems.<p>Instead, I&#x27;m on a team that has and horrendous turnover and is staffed with below-average IQ people.<p>This company builds EVERYTHING in house, and the toolset is like going backwards in my career 10 years.<p>If I do want to stick this out and turn this team around, I&#x27;m going to be working nights and weekends for at least a year - there&#x27;s just too much to fix.<p>I&#x27;ve told this to lots of people who work in other division (that I can trust) and they&#x27;ve said the easiest thing is to just accept it as it is and coast. I&#x27;ve never done that in my career and don&#x27;t think I could do that.<p>Has anyone been in the same boat? I&#x27;m told that it becomes easier to switch teams after a year.<p>I feel like I&#x27;ve made a terrible decision and don&#x27;t know what to do next.<p>Any advice is appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>laurieg</author><text>&quot;staffed with below-average IQ people&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure why your co-workers&#x27; IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them.<p>Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren&#x27;t bouncing.<p>My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the company face. Make incremental improvements.<p>If you really want to you can work late every day and at weekends. It&#x27;s your choice. Bear in mind your job won&#x27;t love you back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisMarshallNY</author><text>I had the same visceral reaction to that comment.<p>I was fortunate enough to work in an environment, where I was the &quot;below-average IQ person,&quot; and I am <i>not</i> below-average, but I worked with some fairly smart cookies.<p>I know that some of my co-workers looked at me with disdain; but I was honored that most did not.<p>Working with frustrating people has been a very useful part of my career. As a manager, I had to make life-changing decisions for employees, and it was important for me to be empirical in my decision-making.<p>It appears that working for FAANGs is a &quot;mark of distinction,&quot; these days. I know they pay ridiculous salaries. I&#x27;m pretty much aware of the working environment, and don&#x27;t find the prospect enticing.<p>In NY, I know many, many folks that worked in the finance industry as brokers and traders. They got their licenses, and made a whole boatload of money in a few short years, while absolutely <i>destroying</i> their mental and physical health.<p>They then left, when they couldn&#x27;t stand it anymore, and used the money they made to start companies, doing the things they liked doing.<p>Maybe that could be the approach the OP may want to take.</text></comment> |
36,680,125 | 36,680,024 | 1 | 2 | 36,673,793 | train | <story><title>Shortening the Let's Encrypt chain of trust</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&#x27;m disappointed that we can&#x27;t come up with a way for encryption to work forever.<p>Like, if I find a knife from 150 years ago, it still cuts cheese. Sure - it isn&#x27;t the most modern tech, but it still does the job it was made for. Even though cheese recipes have changed, they are still compatible with an old knife.<p>Yet a phone in 150 years will be 100% useless. Not only useless because other things have moved on, or because the hardware has degraded, but <i>useless by design</i> because root certificates expire.<p>We shouldn&#x27;t be putting anything into consumer electronics with an expiry date.</text></item><item><author>profmonocle</author><text>Let&#x27;s Encrypt is switching to a different root certificate (their own root certificate), which means that <i>extremely outdated</i> devices will no longer be able to access servers using Let&#x27;s Encrypt certificates.<p>The biggest concern is old Android devives. By &quot;old&quot;, I mean devices using a version of Android from the Obama administration. Android 7.1 is the oldest version that will work, and it was released on October 4th, 2016.<p>At this point, roughly 6.1% of Android devices are running a version of Android that will be impacted by this change. It&#x27;s likely that most of these devices are in relatively low-income countries, so depending on your audience this may be much lower or much higher. (If your primary audience isn&#x27;t in a developing country, it&#x27;s likely much higher.)<p>This change will affect you at some point after February 8th, 2024. (Specifically, you&#x27;ll be affected the first time your LE cert renews after that point. If you&#x27;re using one of the common clients, it will be up to 60 days after that point.) If you want, you can configure your client to support legacy devices longer, but only up to June 6th, 2024. After then, if you truly need to support very, very old Android devices, you would need to switch from Let&#x27;s Encrypt to a different (possibly paid) CA.<p>Only you know for sure if you need to support these very old devices. Most web sites don&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>hospitalJail</author><text>Can you explain?<p>I use it and forget Let&#x27;s Encrypt is so critical to my website.</text></item><item><author>profmonocle</author><text>I remember when Let&#x27;s Encrypt announced they were going to do this in summer of 2019. They listened to community feedback and postponed.<p>I really want to shout out the LE team for how they handled this. Back in 2019 I was one of the loud people urging to you to reconsider. You <i>massively</i> overshot my wildest hopes on this issue - I never expected you to delay this switch for 4 1&#x2F;2 years. That&#x27;s incredible. Thank you for showing this level of care for the TLS ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tialaramex</author><text>A knife is an extremely simple tool and you&#x27;re making a very modest requirement of it (that it should cut cheese). There&#x27;s no way that a 2023 smartphone is equivalently simple, nor that &quot;Just access arbitrary remote stuff over the Internet&quot; is a similarly modest requirement.<p>Lets try something appreciably more complex and do an equivalently tricky task. Lets use an 1873 steam train to travel from London to Derby.<p>We run into more or less the same problem. Functionally, this can work, you&#x27;ll have to buy the coal from somewhere and hire tankers to move the water where it&#x27;s needed since there is no longer provision for that- but much harder you&#x27;ll need to secure an extraordinary amount of special case paperwork to make this happen, because obviously your 1873 steam train isn&#x27;t authorized to use this route, you will need to retro-fit safety equipment that an 1873 steam train was never designed to work with, and you will need to re-train people to operate it.<p>Don&#x27;t worry though, you have preserved the important part - your 150 year old train <i>is</i> still ludicrously unsafe compared to its modern equivalent like the phone. Relatively minor impacts will turn the passenger compartments into kindling, with passengers still inside, because they&#x27;re basically just a wooden box resting on a simple metal platform, not a monocoque design and even after fitting mandatory safety equipment the train can&#x27;t effectively stop anywhere close to fast as modern trains if things go wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>Shortening the Let's Encrypt chain of trust</title><url>https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>londons_explore</author><text>I&#x27;m disappointed that we can&#x27;t come up with a way for encryption to work forever.<p>Like, if I find a knife from 150 years ago, it still cuts cheese. Sure - it isn&#x27;t the most modern tech, but it still does the job it was made for. Even though cheese recipes have changed, they are still compatible with an old knife.<p>Yet a phone in 150 years will be 100% useless. Not only useless because other things have moved on, or because the hardware has degraded, but <i>useless by design</i> because root certificates expire.<p>We shouldn&#x27;t be putting anything into consumer electronics with an expiry date.</text></item><item><author>profmonocle</author><text>Let&#x27;s Encrypt is switching to a different root certificate (their own root certificate), which means that <i>extremely outdated</i> devices will no longer be able to access servers using Let&#x27;s Encrypt certificates.<p>The biggest concern is old Android devives. By &quot;old&quot;, I mean devices using a version of Android from the Obama administration. Android 7.1 is the oldest version that will work, and it was released on October 4th, 2016.<p>At this point, roughly 6.1% of Android devices are running a version of Android that will be impacted by this change. It&#x27;s likely that most of these devices are in relatively low-income countries, so depending on your audience this may be much lower or much higher. (If your primary audience isn&#x27;t in a developing country, it&#x27;s likely much higher.)<p>This change will affect you at some point after February 8th, 2024. (Specifically, you&#x27;ll be affected the first time your LE cert renews after that point. If you&#x27;re using one of the common clients, it will be up to 60 days after that point.) If you want, you can configure your client to support legacy devices longer, but only up to June 6th, 2024. After then, if you truly need to support very, very old Android devices, you would need to switch from Let&#x27;s Encrypt to a different (possibly paid) CA.<p>Only you know for sure if you need to support these very old devices. Most web sites don&#x27;t.</text></item><item><author>hospitalJail</author><text>Can you explain?<p>I use it and forget Let&#x27;s Encrypt is so critical to my website.</text></item><item><author>profmonocle</author><text>I remember when Let&#x27;s Encrypt announced they were going to do this in summer of 2019. They listened to community feedback and postponed.<p>I really want to shout out the LE team for how they handled this. Back in 2019 I was one of the loud people urging to you to reconsider. You <i>massively</i> overshot my wildest hopes on this issue - I never expected you to delay this switch for 4 1&#x2F;2 years. That&#x27;s incredible. Thank you for showing this level of care for the TLS ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>i_am_proteus</author><text>The encryption itself will work &quot;forever.&quot; (Realistically, very powerful computers could some day obviate contemporary encryption).<p>The tricky part about PKI and signed TLS certificates has little to do with the encryption and a lot to do with networks of trusted parties. People die and are born, relationships evolve, and so these networks are inherently dynamic.<p>Certificate expiration is a feature by design, and it&#x27;s included for a reason.</text></comment> |
36,951,911 | 36,950,898 | 1 | 3 | 36,949,785 | train | <story><title>Show HN: This Girl Next Door Does Not Exist (NSFW)</title><url>https://thisgirlnextdoordoesnotexist.net/mindy/</url><text>Warning: NSFW.<p>I&#x27;m posting this from a throwaway. Note that on HN favorites are public, but upvotes are private.<p>Porn seems like it&#x27;ll be one of the big areas of ai in the short term. There&#x27;ve been multiple threads and comments about AI + Onlyfans and AI + porn and AI girlfriends on HN recently (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36888038">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36888038</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36920987">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36920987</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36849066">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36849066</a>).<p>I&#x27;ve heard that porn is the industry that pushes new technology forward - VHS, bluray, highly scalable video serving.<p>I made a site compiling together some of the AI porn that I made with the help of some people on Discord over the past few months.<p>I don&#x27;t think AI will get rid of onlyfans. People spend on onlyfans for more than just the images.<p>I do think people will have access to unlimited image and video porn at some point in the coming decade, which will definitely change the porn industry.<p>The site shows what&#x27;s possible with AI porn today - images both sfw and nsfw, audio, text, and some moving images. There&#x27;s even more possible than just what&#x27;s on the page, with lots of people are playing around with making animated gifs that are nsfw, there&#x27;ll be animated 3d nsfw avatars, and so on. So the site isn&#x27;t comprehensive at all. But it&#x27;s still quite interesting.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hnaiobsession</author><text>This is one more inevitable step in machine generated images.<p>My main objection to this site is that the prime example, “Mindy”, definitely does not look like “a girl next door” but rather looks like a model or like someone with near-perfect body measurements. The latter is not what people understand by “girl next door”. It’s more like “my dream girl next door” for some boys and men.<p>I’m sure there’s a “market” for machine generated images of “girl next door” and “boy next door”, but this one is not it (as of yet). The other image sets on this site are too small to judge anything.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: This Girl Next Door Does Not Exist (NSFW)</title><url>https://thisgirlnextdoordoesnotexist.net/mindy/</url><text>Warning: NSFW.<p>I&#x27;m posting this from a throwaway. Note that on HN favorites are public, but upvotes are private.<p>Porn seems like it&#x27;ll be one of the big areas of ai in the short term. There&#x27;ve been multiple threads and comments about AI + Onlyfans and AI + porn and AI girlfriends on HN recently (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36888038">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36888038</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36920987">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36920987</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36849066">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36849066</a>).<p>I&#x27;ve heard that porn is the industry that pushes new technology forward - VHS, bluray, highly scalable video serving.<p>I made a site compiling together some of the AI porn that I made with the help of some people on Discord over the past few months.<p>I don&#x27;t think AI will get rid of onlyfans. People spend on onlyfans for more than just the images.<p>I do think people will have access to unlimited image and video porn at some point in the coming decade, which will definitely change the porn industry.<p>The site shows what&#x27;s possible with AI porn today - images both sfw and nsfw, audio, text, and some moving images. There&#x27;s even more possible than just what&#x27;s on the page, with lots of people are playing around with making animated gifs that are nsfw, there&#x27;ll be animated 3d nsfw avatars, and so on. So the site isn&#x27;t comprehensive at all. But it&#x27;s still quite interesting.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrm4</author><text>Interesting.<p>I kind of feel like we haven&#x27;t even fully gotten around to figuring out what it meant when we hit &quot;all the porn (made by humans) is available all the time to anyone who wants it,&quot; which is universes away from when I was a lad coming of age at the time.<p>Like, can I attribute at least some of my interest in tech in figuring out how to program the VCR to record HBO at 2am (then sneak down to get the tape out before everyone wakes up?)<p>Sure!</text></comment> |
1,370,767 | 1,370,757 | 1 | 3 | 1,370,705 | train | <story><title>John Gruber's Post-I/O Thoughts</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/post_io_thoughts</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ssp</author><text>Ballmer was not wrong about the iPhone. He said they would get 2-3% of the <i>total phone market</i>, not the smartphone market. He even makes that clear in the part that Gruber quoted: "... 1.3 billion phones ...". That's phones, not smartphones.<p>According to <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-iphone-smartphone-market-share-surges-rim-slips/34181" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-iphone-smartphone-market...</a> in the first quarter of 2010 Apple had 16.1% of smartphones and smartphones were 18.8% of mobile phones. That comes out to almost exactly 3%.<p>Ballmer also wasn't wrong about Windows Mobile. The "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent" was not a prediction, it was just what he would prefer.</text></comment> | <story><title>John Gruber's Post-I/O Thoughts</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/post_io_thoughts</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raptrex</author><text>Although syncing with a computer may feel retrograde, I'm sure theres a lot of people, including myself, that would rather keep their data due to privacy issues instead of relying on Google or Apple to store it. However, I think most people would prefer cloud syncing since it is so easy for the user.</text></comment> |
30,978,815 | 30,977,034 | 1 | 2 | 30,975,613 | train | <story><title>What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?</title><url>https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkurz</author><text>Here&#x27;s a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion:<p><i>The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th&#x2F;early 20th century and start back up.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.navalgazing.net&#x2F;Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.navalgazing.net&#x2F;Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness</a><p>The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>poof131</author><text>My biggest concern with that article is some of the assumptions, such as most the warheads will go after random army bases in unpopulated areas. I feel like that is a very “conventional” war attitude from an armchair tactician. My guess would be a strategy of annihilating all key US &amp; EU population centers. Utterly destroy DC, NY, SF, LA, etc.<p>After spending a decade in the military, I saw a consistent theme of underestimating opponents and making plans on how we want them to act. War isn’t rational and never plays out how you want it to. The people trying to make nuclear war seem like a reasonable outcome terrify me, especially when they make assumptions about how the opponent would act that best aligns with what they want to happen.</text></comment> | <story><title>What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?</title><url>https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/03/what-the-science-says-could-humans-survive-a-nuclear-war-between-nato-and-russia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkurz</author><text>Here&#x27;s a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion:<p><i>The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources. This could easily kill more people than the war itself, particularly in densely-populated areas, but I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th&#x2F;early 20th century and start back up.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.navalgazing.net&#x2F;Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.navalgazing.net&#x2F;Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness</a><p>The main difference is that he concludes that nuclear winter is mostly a myth. His main evidence is that the effect on weather of the soot produced by the oil wells burning in Kuwait in 1991 did not match the nuclear winter theory predictions. It would be interesting to reconcile these two disparate conclusions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justin66</author><text>&gt; I would expect things to stabilize at a technology level of maybe the late 19th&#x2F;early 20th century and start back up.<p>Except it would need to restart without all the easily accessible fossil fuels and lumber of that time…</text></comment> |
27,815,741 | 27,815,732 | 1 | 2 | 27,815,396 | train | <story><title>; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";-- LTD</title><url>https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10542519</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robocat</author><text>Here is the explanation from the company founder:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pizzey.me&#x2F;posts&#x2F;no-i-didnt-try-to-break-companies-house&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pizzey.me&#x2F;posts&#x2F;no-i-didnt-try-to-break-companies-ho...</a><p>(Disclaimer: Link copied from desas but needed to be top level comment.)</text></comment> | <story><title>; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES";-- LTD</title><url>https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10542519</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text><i>Drop Table “Companies”;-- LTD</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21534156" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21534156</a> - Nov 2019 (7 comments)<p><i>Drop Table “Companies”;– LTD</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20583540" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20583540</a> - Aug 2019 (2 comments)<p><i>Drop Table Companies Ltd</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17003588" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17003588</a> - May 2018 (27 comments)<p><i>Drop Table Companies Ltd</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13280494" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13280494</a> - Dec 2016 (23 comments)</text></comment> |
37,473,716 | 37,472,655 | 1 | 3 | 37,461,695 | train | <story><title>UK air traffic control meltdown</title><url>https://jameshaydon.github.io/nats-fail/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sam0x17</author><text>Why on earth do they not have GUIDs for these navigation points if the names are not globally unique and inter-region routes are commonplace?</text></item><item><author>reactordev</author><text>So they forgot to &quot;geographically disparate&quot; fence their queries. Having built a flight navigation system before, I know this bug. I&#x27;ve seen this bug. I&#x27;ve followed the spec to include a geofence to avoid this bug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwallin</author><text>1. Pilots occasionally have to fat finger them into ruggedized I&#x2F;O devices and read them off to ATC over radios.<p>2. These are defined by the various regional aviation authorities. The US FAA will define one list, (and they&#x27;ll be unique in the US) the EU will have one, (EASA?) etc.<p>The AA965 crash (1995-12-20) was due to an aliased waypoint name. Colombia had two waypoints with the same name within 150 nautical miles of each other. (the name was &#x27;R&#x27;) This was in violation of ICAO regulations from like the &#x27;70s.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;American_Airlines_Flight_965" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;American_Airlines_Flight_965</a></text></comment> | <story><title>UK air traffic control meltdown</title><url>https://jameshaydon.github.io/nats-fail/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sam0x17</author><text>Why on earth do they not have GUIDs for these navigation points if the names are not globally unique and inter-region routes are commonplace?</text></item><item><author>reactordev</author><text>So they forgot to &quot;geographically disparate&quot; fence their queries. Having built a flight navigation system before, I know this bug. I&#x27;ve seen this bug. I&#x27;ve followed the spec to include a geofence to avoid this bug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amoerie</author><text>Long story: because changing identifiers is a considerable refactoring, and it takes coordination with multiple worldwide distributed partners to transition safely from the old to the new system, all to avoid a hypothetical issue some software engineer came up with<p>Short story: money. It costs money to do things well.</text></comment> |
17,091,554 | 17,091,592 | 1 | 3 | 17,091,278 | train | <story><title>Reports from Nest Secure customers who are unable to arm/disarm or lock/unlock</title><url>https://twitter.com/nestsupport/status/996955985343270913</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dsnuh</author><text>This is what the future will bring more of - not some all powerful AI - just a bunch of crap that didn&#x27;t need to be tethered to the cloud that suddenly stops working without much explanation, as the Deal With It dog laughs and dons his sunglasses.<p>Edit: typo</text></comment> | <story><title>Reports from Nest Secure customers who are unable to arm/disarm or lock/unlock</title><url>https://twitter.com/nestsupport/status/996955985343270913</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>Why would they depend on the internet to allow you to control a device at your home? NFC? Bluetooth? Wifi? Ignoring the obvious security problems of these devices being internet-connected, it&#x27;s just a crap design from a usability standpoint. (where &quot;usability&quot; includes &quot;can use it when the internet goes out&quot;)</text></comment> |
41,031,715 | 41,030,385 | 1 | 2 | 41,026,663 | train | <story><title>Stremio OS Is Now Available for Raspberry Pi 5 and 4</title><url>https://blog.stremio.com/stremio-os-is-now-available-for-raspberry-pi-5-4/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nilsherzig</author><text>Stremio is a Mediacenter thingy. You can provide different video sources using Plugins.<p>People mainly use it for torrenting. It&#x27;s nice in theory since it allows you to watch basically anything without having to download it first. It will find and download Torrents on demand and start playing them after a small buffer has been built.<p>But stremio users are only active on a given Torrent while watching its content. Meaning that they contribute nothing back to the network. If everyone (or a large enough percentage of users) would act like this the whole (public) BitTorrent Network would no longer work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stremio OS Is Now Available for Raspberry Pi 5 and 4</title><url>https://blog.stremio.com/stremio-os-is-now-available-for-raspberry-pi-5-4/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>Never heard of Streamio before, but from the FAQ:<p>&gt; We run non-intrusive ads occassionally<p>(Their typo, not mine.)<p>So it&#x27;s like Plex, but, with ads in it.</text></comment> |
33,692,624 | 33,690,260 | 1 | 3 | 33,686,168 | train | <story><title>AWS and Blockchain</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smt88</author><text>I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).<p>I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.<p>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn&#x27;t hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.<p>We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.<p>That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasmer</author><text>&quot; it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.&quot;<p>Wow, that&#x27;s next level PM cringe.<p>I&#x27;m glad you were able to jujitsu your way around it.</text></comment> | <story><title>AWS and Blockchain</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Blockchain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smt88</author><text>I had a real experience that perfectly reflects the research presented here (safer ledgers useful, blockchains are not).<p>I accidentally got wrapped up in a project to automate some HR functions, and the product manager demanded that it must be blockchain because blockchains are the future.<p>It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records, and (especially when dealing with things like background checks, immigration papers, etc.) it doesn&#x27;t hurt to have a history with cryptographically-verifiable date stamps.<p>We used an existing database that did all of the above, told everyone it was blockchain, and released the product.<p>That was a great strategy for a few years until everyone realized blockchain was a boondoggle, and now you never need to work with anyone who still believes in it. You can just understand their mention of blockchain to be a sign that you need to avoid doing business with them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>v-erne</author><text>&gt;&gt;It turns out that append-only databases are well-suited for HR records<p>It may seem so, bu then You find out what are Your governments limit&#x27;s for storing workers data, and Your company lawyers forces You to make it possible to delete everything that past that limit to limit legal risk and be gdpr compliant.
And at this moment You find out that world is not constant and far from Your ideal model of spherical cow.</text></comment> |
35,005,536 | 35,004,823 | 1 | 2 | 34,999,464 | train | <story><title>A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview</title><url>https://interviewing.io/guides/system-design-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stale2002</author><text>If the entirety of your web development knowledge is NDA&#x27;ed, then what good are you as a potential employee anyway?<p>You wouldn&#x27;t be able to build anything, as all your knowledge is NDAed!</text></item><item><author>rco8786</author><text>&gt; 98% of what you&#x27;d be inclined to diagram out and explain for a system design interview isn&#x27;t remotely proprietary<p>Maybe we&#x27;re just on different wavelengths, but literally every single thing I work on that would be a good candidate for this sort of interview is extremely proprietary...and I&#x27;m just working on regular ol&#x27; backend services at [generic big tech].</text></item><item><author>eschneider</author><text>98% of what you&#x27;d be inclined to diagram out and explain for a system design interview isn&#x27;t remotely proprietary. People are generally looking for a high-level overview of a system you&#x27;ve worked on to see a) that you&#x27;ve really worked on it and b) you can explain it such that it makes sense.<p>Sure, folks will ask you to drill down here and there for more detailed info, but if someone pokes on something where the details really _ARE_ proprietary, it&#x27;s fine to just say that and offer to drill down somewhere else.</text></item><item><author>azornathogron</author><text>I like this... in theory. But I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m allowed to give you a system diagram and detailed explanation of systems I&#x27;ve worked on, because obviously they&#x27;re proprietary. That seems like a problem.<p>How do your candidates normally work around this? Does everyone just talk about hobby or open-source systems they&#x27;ve worked on?</text></item><item><author>rednerrus</author><text>We&#x27;ve gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It&#x27;s a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something technical that they claim to understand. Our philosophy is how well you understand something you claim to know well is indicative of the depth and breadth of your technical knowledge in general. There are plenty of opportunities in this to ask about design and get to know how people think when it comes to design. I think it helps to eliminate false negatives and false positives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everydayentropy</author><text>This comment is a prime example of how the non-technical founder understands the world.<p>Proprietary systems are company IP. Talking about the design of the system is protected by the NDA, which the exercise described above is asking the candidate to do.<p>You hire for the skills to develop your own proprietary system. The employer doesn&#x27;t own the skill. The employer owns anything those skills produced for the employer.<p>You wouldn&#x27;t want your employees giving the recipe to your secret sauce away to your competitor, right? That&#x27;s what everyone is talking about.</text></comment> | <story><title>A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview</title><url>https://interviewing.io/guides/system-design-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stale2002</author><text>If the entirety of your web development knowledge is NDA&#x27;ed, then what good are you as a potential employee anyway?<p>You wouldn&#x27;t be able to build anything, as all your knowledge is NDAed!</text></item><item><author>rco8786</author><text>&gt; 98% of what you&#x27;d be inclined to diagram out and explain for a system design interview isn&#x27;t remotely proprietary<p>Maybe we&#x27;re just on different wavelengths, but literally every single thing I work on that would be a good candidate for this sort of interview is extremely proprietary...and I&#x27;m just working on regular ol&#x27; backend services at [generic big tech].</text></item><item><author>eschneider</author><text>98% of what you&#x27;d be inclined to diagram out and explain for a system design interview isn&#x27;t remotely proprietary. People are generally looking for a high-level overview of a system you&#x27;ve worked on to see a) that you&#x27;ve really worked on it and b) you can explain it such that it makes sense.<p>Sure, folks will ask you to drill down here and there for more detailed info, but if someone pokes on something where the details really _ARE_ proprietary, it&#x27;s fine to just say that and offer to drill down somewhere else.</text></item><item><author>azornathogron</author><text>I like this... in theory. But I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m allowed to give you a system diagram and detailed explanation of systems I&#x27;ve worked on, because obviously they&#x27;re proprietary. That seems like a problem.<p>How do your candidates normally work around this? Does everyone just talk about hobby or open-source systems they&#x27;ve worked on?</text></item><item><author>rednerrus</author><text>We&#x27;ve gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It&#x27;s a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something technical that they claim to understand. Our philosophy is how well you understand something you claim to know well is indicative of the depth and breadth of your technical knowledge in general. There are plenty of opportunities in this to ask about design and get to know how people think when it comes to design. I think it helps to eliminate false negatives and false positives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djs070</author><text>The flaw in this argument is assuming that you could do a good job of diagramming a system without describing the use cases of the system. My web dev skills are not proprietary, but the processes and systems I have worked on are.</text></comment> |
38,060,236 | 38,059,075 | 1 | 3 | 38,056,854 | train | <story><title>Ken Burns chronicles the sad fate of the American buffalo</title><url>https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/10/25/ken-burns-chronicles-the-sad-fate-of-the-american-buffalo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aodin</author><text>Denver, Colorado maintains two bison herds descended from the last wild North American bison. There were as few as 18 bison left in Colorado at the beginning of the 1900s. Thankfully, the conservation project has been a success and Denver has been transferring bison to Native American tribes to start additional herds. The herds are just about 30 minutes from downtown if you ever visit.<p>More info, pictures, and video here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.denvergov.org&#x2F;Government&#x2F;Agencies-Departments-Offices&#x2F;Agencies-Departments-Offices-Directory&#x2F;Parks-Recreation&#x2F;Urban-Parks&#x2F;Mountain-Parks&#x2F;Bison-Conservation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.denvergov.org&#x2F;Government&#x2F;Agencies-Departments-Of...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ken Burns chronicles the sad fate of the American buffalo</title><url>https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/10/25/ken-burns-chronicles-the-sad-fate-of-the-american-buffalo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ethbr1</author><text>If you&#x27;re interested in streaming, here&#x27;s PBS&#x27; &quot;How to Watch PBS Without Cable&quot; page:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.pbs.org&#x2F;support&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;articles&#x2F;12000090583-how-to-watch-pbs-without-cable" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.pbs.org&#x2F;support&#x2F;solutions&#x2F;articles&#x2F;12000090583-...</a><p>And a direct link to <i>American Buffalo</i>:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;show&#x2F;the-american-buffalo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;show&#x2F;the-american-buffalo&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
24,164,749 | 24,164,763 | 1 | 3 | 24,164,470 | train | <story><title>GPT-3 generated blog post reach #1 on Hacker News</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/14/1006780/ai-gpt-3-fake-blog-reached-top-of-hacker-news/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>minimaxir</author><text>HN submission from the blog post author, where the comments from dang reveal the author engaged in voting manipulation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24062702" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24062702</a></text></comment> | <story><title>GPT-3 generated blog post reach #1 on Hacker News</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/14/1006780/ai-gpt-3-fake-blog-reached-top-of-hacker-news/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dorkwood</author><text>I remember skimming this article. My initial feeling was that it was written by someone who wasn&#x27;t a native English speaker. It seems like I&#x27;ll have to pay more close attention to that feeling in the future.</text></comment> |
13,780,828 | 13,780,746 | 1 | 3 | 13,780,597 | train | <story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books.<p>It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they&#x27;re obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple&#x27;s decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they&#x27;ve gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn&#x27;t happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don&#x27;t want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved.<p>As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they&#x27;re just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there&#x27;s not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Merad</author><text>It blows my mind that Apple has basically put no effort at all into supporting the multi user business&#x2F;education market. Our company rolled out our first LOB mobile app last year. Only six devices are involved, but they&#x27;re basically in use 24&#x2F;7 and are handed off at shift changes. The amount of hoops we had to jump through were absurd both in terms of device management setup and adding some features to the app to make it feel more &quot;multi user&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s supposed to be an intrinsically safe iPad Mini case available later this year (IIRC), and our manufacturing areas are salivating over the possibilities... But we might have to disappoint them, because the overhead of trying to manage hundreds of iPads would be truly insane.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books.<p>It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they&#x27;re obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple&#x27;s decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they&#x27;ve gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn&#x27;t happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don&#x27;t want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved.<p>As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they&#x27;re just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there&#x27;s not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulddraper</author><text>As a middle-school student in the early 2000s, I helped part-time with IT at a Mac-only school. Macintoshes, iMacs, eMacs.<p>People were less familiar with Macs than PCs, but from an IT perspective, it was heaven. There were only a few models, they were reliable, and everything &quot;just worked&quot; together. The most common snag was attempting to get floppies to work with people&#x27;s PCs from home.<p>Sad to see the Apple desktops gone.</text></comment> |
34,200,287 | 34,199,658 | 1 | 3 | 34,195,353 | train | <story><title>JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/jp-morgan-to-acquire-1-billion-of-single-family-rentals-2022-11</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IG_Semmelweiss</author><text>Prop 13 was a direct result of a California court decision.<p>I forget the 1960s case, but the gist of it was it instituted equalization in school budgets out from property taxes in the name of equity.<p>In other words, high property taxes in 1 town were forced to be transfered to the neighboring town with a lower budget, so much so that the transfer had to be make payments by pupil within a $100 band.<p>That was instituted blind to school performance of course.<p>This actually took hold in many states not just California, however CA was the o ly one that forced transfer payments within a $100 band. There are different flavors of this all accross the country<p>Of course, homeowners are not idiots. They dont want their tax dollars wasted. So soon after this case forced these transfer payments, there was a swell of home owners pushing for prop 13.<p>Makes sense. Local taxes to local benefit. If my taxes are going elsewhere, why should i pay more?<p>And so here we are. Almost 50 years later.
Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending.</text></item><item><author>geocon</author><text>Behold the rise of neofeudalism: you can already see it in California, thanks to Prop 13.<p>Land value tax would fix this.</text></item><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>The megalandords are potentially a serious threat to democracy.<p>Property rights are, to many theorists, the foundation of liberty. The widespread ownership of property is arguably the foundation of democracy. Owning your home gives you rights and independence; your home is your castle. The landlord&#x27;s home is their castle.<p>Now we are concentrating wealth and property back into the hands of a few, a corporate aristocracy. You can use property at their pleasure. What happens if you want to do something politically unpopular? Put a sign in your yard? Work someplace or say something on social media? What if you have a dispute with this landlord - can you compete in court with their lawyers? where else will you live? Will other megalandlords accept you?<p>They also will have enormous influence in local communities. Property owners, not renters, are the influential people in any community. These new megalandlords will concentrate that power in a large corporation which has enormous resources. Local government will not be able to compete.<p>How does this arrangement differ from feudalism, with the wealthy controlling the land and the rest reduced to renting it. Well past feudalism, the concentration of property ownership has been a serious obstacle to democracy in many countries trying to make that transition. Now we are going backward.<p>Do you think these wealthy, powerful people, who pride themselves on their naked aggression and disregard of others&#x27; welfare, who have a long history of buying government, will not use this power?<p>A crucial question is, is this part of the deliberate attack on democracy by the (unnamed) coalition of wealthy and corporations, or truly just an investment? Regardless, the power will be there for that coalition to utilize.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanp2k2</author><text>Prop 13 also has the great benefit of keeping anyone new out of the neighborhood, as they’ll be paying potentially an order of magnitude higher tax on the same property. Meanwhile, folks living on the edge of poverty already can stay in their 7-figure homes, unable to afford anything locally as everything else has moved on price-wise, so we get underfunded schools surrounded by de-facto millionaires. Businesses benefit even more, just look up what Disney’s Prop13 benefits are like. This is a great idea too, as it ensures that land owners who have owned in a place for decades are untouchable in terms of investment performance due to the massive tax benefit, so they can charge market-rate rent while paying a small fraction of the tax that anyone else trying to do the same today would. &#x2F;s</text></comment> | <story><title>JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/jp-morgan-to-acquire-1-billion-of-single-family-rentals-2022-11</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IG_Semmelweiss</author><text>Prop 13 was a direct result of a California court decision.<p>I forget the 1960s case, but the gist of it was it instituted equalization in school budgets out from property taxes in the name of equity.<p>In other words, high property taxes in 1 town were forced to be transfered to the neighboring town with a lower budget, so much so that the transfer had to be make payments by pupil within a $100 band.<p>That was instituted blind to school performance of course.<p>This actually took hold in many states not just California, however CA was the o ly one that forced transfer payments within a $100 band. There are different flavors of this all accross the country<p>Of course, homeowners are not idiots. They dont want their tax dollars wasted. So soon after this case forced these transfer payments, there was a swell of home owners pushing for prop 13.<p>Makes sense. Local taxes to local benefit. If my taxes are going elsewhere, why should i pay more?<p>And so here we are. Almost 50 years later.
Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending.</text></item><item><author>geocon</author><text>Behold the rise of neofeudalism: you can already see it in California, thanks to Prop 13.<p>Land value tax would fix this.</text></item><item><author>wolverine876</author><text>The megalandords are potentially a serious threat to democracy.<p>Property rights are, to many theorists, the foundation of liberty. The widespread ownership of property is arguably the foundation of democracy. Owning your home gives you rights and independence; your home is your castle. The landlord&#x27;s home is their castle.<p>Now we are concentrating wealth and property back into the hands of a few, a corporate aristocracy. You can use property at their pleasure. What happens if you want to do something politically unpopular? Put a sign in your yard? Work someplace or say something on social media? What if you have a dispute with this landlord - can you compete in court with their lawyers? where else will you live? Will other megalandlords accept you?<p>They also will have enormous influence in local communities. Property owners, not renters, are the influential people in any community. These new megalandlords will concentrate that power in a large corporation which has enormous resources. Local government will not be able to compete.<p>How does this arrangement differ from feudalism, with the wealthy controlling the land and the rest reduced to renting it. Well past feudalism, the concentration of property ownership has been a serious obstacle to democracy in many countries trying to make that transition. Now we are going backward.<p>Do you think these wealthy, powerful people, who pride themselves on their naked aggression and disregard of others&#x27; welfare, who have a long history of buying government, will not use this power?<p>A crucial question is, is this part of the deliberate attack on democracy by the (unnamed) coalition of wealthy and corporations, or truly just an investment? Regardless, the power will be there for that coalition to utilize.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>istjohn</author><text>It&#x27;s truly incredible the mountains that are moved in politics to ensure poor families attend inferior public schools since Brown v. Board.</text></comment> |
6,479,354 | 6,479,449 | 1 | 2 | 6,478,740 | train | <story><title>Competing with a Mac</title><url>http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/01/competing-with-a-mac/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kronopath</author><text>Finally, someone else who agrees that the iPhone was a disruptive product. It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product <i>except</i> for the low price. It appealed to a different set of values (i.e. usability and interface), ignored features that were seen as critical in the existing market of smartphone users (No third-party apps at launch? No copy&#x2F;paste? No editing of <i>Word documents</i>?!), and it blindsided the incumbents (who focused on business users rather than the new market of everyday consumers). Nowadays you&#x27;d have trouble convincing people that existing smartphone users mocked the iPhone when it first came out.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that even Christensen didn&#x27;t think the iPhone would be a success.[0]<p>[0] <a href="http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;clayton-christensen-got-wrong&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Competing with a Mac</title><url>http://www.asymco.com/2013/10/01/competing-with-a-mac/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blinkingled</author><text>Blackberry&#x27;s was the case of being too much in love with their own beliefs and processes. Also known as inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Microsoft also has those tendencies but they tend to get their act somewhat together even if that&#x27;s too late.<p>Lazaridis saw the iPhone and the Engineer in him went - the battery won&#x27;t last and it will bring down the AT&amp;T network with its full fledged browser. Ballmer saw the iPhone and laughed at the $500 price. Both did not see the potential from a changing market&#x27;s standpoint. Battery tech gets better, hardware, networks and OSes get better every year, and the prices can and do fall.<p>But some of it was inevitable for Blackberry. There really wasn&#x27;t any differentiation potential left behind for them. iPhone got the smooth, attractive, computer replacement part. Android got the customizable, ubiquitous, many options, open and the &quot;not iPhone&quot; part. There just wasn&#x27;t any way for BB to differentiate and win. They could&#x27;ve had a perfectly smooth touch optimized OS with great BB hardware, security suite and BBM etc. and even then their target market would still be limited.<p>The only way they could&#x27;ve saved themselves was if they had innovated ahead of time. After the iPhone and Android it was game over for them.</text></comment> |
6,878,819 | 6,878,751 | 1 | 2 | 6,877,153 | train | <story><title>The main trick in machine learning</title><url>http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/12/the-main-trick-in-machine-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joe_the_user</author><text><i>In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach that point entirely.</i><p>It seems like you can &quot;mis-power&quot; your model also.<p>For example, the Ptolemaic system could approximate the movement of the planets to any degree if you added enough &quot;wheels within wheels&quot; but since these were &quot;the wrong wheels&quot;, the necessary wheels grew without bounds to achieve reasonable approximation over time.</text></item><item><author>tel</author><text>A professor of mine stated it very well. If you can imagine that there is a <i>true</i> model somewhere out in infinitely large model space then ML is just the search for that model.<p>In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach that point entirely.<p>Almost all error in ML can be seen nicely in this model. In particular here, those who do not remember to optimize validation accuracy are often making their model space so large (overfitting) at the cost of having too little data to power the search within it.<p>Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-Modelling-Probability/dp/0387946187" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-M...</a>) have a really great picture of this in their book.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>Also, to add, when DGL bring this kind of mental model up they do so to motivate a kind of semi-parametric modeling where the design space changes progressively to move closer to the true model without growing so quickly as to make inference unstable. The problem being, of course, that this causes your algorithm run time to blow out to something cubic, I think, and so you have a beautiful model that loses out on search error.</text></comment> | <story><title>The main trick in machine learning</title><url>http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/12/the-main-trick-in-machine-learning/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joe_the_user</author><text><i>In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach that point entirely.</i><p>It seems like you can &quot;mis-power&quot; your model also.<p>For example, the Ptolemaic system could approximate the movement of the planets to any degree if you added enough &quot;wheels within wheels&quot; but since these were &quot;the wrong wheels&quot;, the necessary wheels grew without bounds to achieve reasonable approximation over time.</text></item><item><author>tel</author><text>A professor of mine stated it very well. If you can imagine that there is a <i>true</i> model somewhere out in infinitely large model space then ML is just the search for that model.<p>In order to make it tractable, you pick a finite model space, train it on finite data, and use a finite algorithm to find the best choice inside of that space. That means you can fail in three ways---you can over-constrain your model space so that the true model cannot be found, you can underpower your search so that you have less an ability to discern the best model in your chosen model space, and you can terminate your search early and fail to reach that point entirely.<p>Almost all error in ML can be seen nicely in this model. In particular here, those who do not remember to optimize validation accuracy are often making their model space so large (overfitting) at the cost of having too little data to power the search within it.<p>Devroye, Gyorfi, and Lugosi (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-Modelling-Probability/dp/0387946187" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Probabilistic-Recognition-Stochastic-M...</a>) have a really great picture of this in their book.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>Totally agree, though I&#x27;d call that maybe &quot;picking the wrong shape&quot; for your model space. You can pay a whole lot but if you cannot admit a shape that gets close to the truth then you&#x27;re spending your data in vain.</text></comment> |
7,362,056 | 7,361,987 | 1 | 3 | 7,361,051 | train | <story><title>PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/03/powerpoint_in_higher_education_is_ruining_teaching.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmar</author><text>I&#x27;ve taught a few college classes. I&#x27;ve experimented with no slides, minimalist slides, and text-heavy slides.<p>Young whippersnappers don&#x27;t seem to know how to take notes--so going with no slides is tough. Students cannot go back and review the lecture to make sure they understood key points. I&#x27;ll use this method for teaching skills--e.g. calculating NPV in Excel--but not for introducing terms &amp; definitions.<p>When I&#x27;ve used minimalist slides, I get a bunch of students complaining that there isn&#x27;t enough detail. I think the lectures are more entertaining and engaging, personally, but for students who want to be able to review the material in preparation for an exam, minimalist slides aren&#x27;t the best. Think about your average Discovery channel show. The shows are interesting and engaging, but if you had to explain everything to a friend later on, or had to take an exam on the material presented, how would you do? Without watching the whole thing over again, it would be hard to absorb all of the material.<p>I hate delivering the text-heavy slides to classes--I often want to skip over some points based on the flow of the lesson, but the doing so might cause confusion later on. Students will ask if they have to know that stuff for the exam.<p>Anyway, they key takeaway for me is to listen to the students and adjust to what they prefer, but not to ignore well-studied pedagogical best practices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>&gt; Young whippersnappers don&#x27;t seem to know how to take notes--so going with no slides is tough. Students cannot go back and review the lecture to make sure they understood key points.<p>If you&#x27;re going to go to the effort of planning a verbal (i.e. text) lecture, and <i>then</i> re-encoding it as slideshow, all for the purpose of getting students something to review... why not just write down your plan for the lecture--a transcript of what you&#x27;re going to say--and then email it to the students?<p>In fact, ideally, do this <i>before</i> the lecture. That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.</text></comment> | <story><title>PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/03/powerpoint_in_higher_education_is_ruining_teaching.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmar</author><text>I&#x27;ve taught a few college classes. I&#x27;ve experimented with no slides, minimalist slides, and text-heavy slides.<p>Young whippersnappers don&#x27;t seem to know how to take notes--so going with no slides is tough. Students cannot go back and review the lecture to make sure they understood key points. I&#x27;ll use this method for teaching skills--e.g. calculating NPV in Excel--but not for introducing terms &amp; definitions.<p>When I&#x27;ve used minimalist slides, I get a bunch of students complaining that there isn&#x27;t enough detail. I think the lectures are more entertaining and engaging, personally, but for students who want to be able to review the material in preparation for an exam, minimalist slides aren&#x27;t the best. Think about your average Discovery channel show. The shows are interesting and engaging, but if you had to explain everything to a friend later on, or had to take an exam on the material presented, how would you do? Without watching the whole thing over again, it would be hard to absorb all of the material.<p>I hate delivering the text-heavy slides to classes--I often want to skip over some points based on the flow of the lesson, but the doing so might cause confusion later on. Students will ask if they have to know that stuff for the exam.<p>Anyway, they key takeaway for me is to listen to the students and adjust to what they prefer, but not to ignore well-studied pedagogical best practices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanSrich</author><text>&gt; review the material in preparation for an exam<p>Have you thought about getting rid of exams? Honest question.<p>I had a few progressive professors in college that completely ditched exams and went with either in person exams (think office hours with PG) or all participation and projects. I learned more from those classes than any class I took in all 4 years.<p>I know this style doesn&#x27;t lend itself useful to all subjects but I feel that the academic community needs a massive overhaul in how it tests knowledge retention.</text></comment> |
24,271,496 | 24,271,716 | 1 | 2 | 24,271,314 | train | <story><title>‘Better Yield on 5nm Than 7nm’: TSMC Update on Defect Rates for N5</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-than-7nm-tsmc-update-on-defect-rates-for-n5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samfisher83</author><text>It seems to be that than TSMC needs to increase their prices. They should be extracting more margin when compared to AMD, NVDA etc. They are just killing it. One of the main reasons with intc had better chips was they had the best Fabs.<p>Its kind of sad we used have guys like shockley, moore, kilby etc. The reason why silicon valley is called silicon valley. Now we are just falling behind Taiwan, south korea, and maybe china.</text></comment> | <story><title>‘Better Yield on 5nm Than 7nm’: TSMC Update on Defect Rates for N5</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028/better-yield-on-5nm-than-7nm-tsmc-update-on-defect-rates-for-n5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exar0815</author><text>This is a problem for Intel on four fronts at the same time:<p>- x86-CPUs from AMD with better efficiency in Desktop and Datacenter<p>- Apple-ARM Macbooks showing that it doesnt have to be x86 at all<p>- x86-APUs from AMD with Navi-GPUs versus Intel Xe<p>- Intel Xe as Compute vs. NVidia Cards.<p>All of these pivot around Intel at least matching the process of their competitiors.
Also, Intel has optimized 14nm that much, that their initial yields and performance gains on 10nm and 7nm will probably piss-poor initially.</text></comment> |
29,192,097 | 29,189,420 | 1 | 3 | 29,184,198 | train | <story><title>Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died</title><url>https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3984488</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanackley</author><text>Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it&#x27;s depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy&#x27;s accomplishments without being like &quot;oh but it <i>has to be</i> mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person&quot;.<p>Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only &quot;good&quot; people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you&#x27;ve lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.</text></item><item><author>extortionist</author><text>He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It&#x27;s important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can&#x27;t be set aside.<p>At the same time, SA&#x27;s influence on the modern internet can&#x27;t be understated. The &#x27;image macro&#x27; of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today&#x27;s common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.<p>Many of today&#x27;s well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it&#x27;s hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let&#x27;s Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).<p>The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zwaps</author><text>Much of today&#x27;s internet culture is directly on indirectly influenced by SA to some degree. Beyond this, however, SA remains a unique community, perhaps even more so today. It is quite large compared to specialist boards, but it is insular, exclusive and high trust: It is not monetized and overrun by fakes compared the reddits, chans or imgurs of today.<p>So sure, Lowtax has had significant positive influence on many people.<p>This is why people on SA are so outspoken and disappointed. Lowtax is an &quot;eminent figure&quot; of the internet. He has had a personal impact on many people throughout their formative years, inasmuch as he impacted internet culture as such.<p>Lowtax had a place of high status and influence that betrayed how deeply flawed he was as a person. People literally grew up with him as a central player in internet culture. When he (and SA) went and mocked some &quot;crazy person&quot; or fought against a perceived evil, then this was part of valiant, stupid, maybe wrong but nonetheless memorable childhoods and teenage years for many people.<p>When Richard posted that he was seriously ill, the outpouring of support was far and wide.
When we then learned that not only was all this fake, but Richard was privately a person hardly deserving of the immense respect he had, people got unreasonably angry.<p>Today, I think people are mourning. On the one hand, the real person who died, on the other hand, many people are mourning the loss of a childhood hero - a hero who metaphorically (and now literally) died, because he was never a hero to begin with.</text></comment> | <story><title>Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died</title><url>https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3984488</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanackley</author><text>Never heard of this guy or SA until this post but I think it&#x27;s depressing that we feel guilty celebrating this guy&#x27;s accomplishments without being like &quot;oh but it <i>has to be</i> mentioned he treated people in his life terribly and might have been an objectively awful person&quot;.<p>Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only &quot;good&quot; people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you&#x27;ve lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.</text></item><item><author>extortionist</author><text>He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It&#x27;s important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can&#x27;t be set aside.<p>At the same time, SA&#x27;s influence on the modern internet can&#x27;t be understated. The &#x27;image macro&#x27; of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today&#x27;s common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.<p>Many of today&#x27;s well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it&#x27;s hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let&#x27;s Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).<p>The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brodouevencode</author><text>Interesting points. It&#x27;s too common now to lump a person&#x27;s strengths and weaknesses into one big package. Right or wrong, that is the common way of judging people it seems.<p>I enjoyed SA at first, until it became quite clear the moderation was heavily skewed to Lowtax and his friends, Photoshop Fridays were largely rigged, accounts would be locked for no apparent reason and good luck getting a response from that cancer guy that never checked email. And fine - that&#x27;s his site, his rules, and opted (since phpBB was free and had &quot;access&quot; to university servers) to set up something just for me and my friends. Apparently I wasn&#x27;t the only one because the user base slowly declined with some hardcore hangers-on sticking around to form the shell of a community it is now. Lowtax was always an asshole, but he did build something that greatly influenced internet culture (again, for better or worse is left up to the reader).</text></comment> |
18,472,623 | 18,470,926 | 1 | 3 | 18,468,732 | train | <story><title>AI Playbook</title><url>http://aiplaybook.a16z.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stanfordkid</author><text>It&#x27;s really quite interesting how A16z is playing this. I&#x27;ve been following the types of content that they release -- and I think their vision is that the a16z brand can almost function as a consultancy with (not only) direct channels to the enterprise, but also deep technical knowledge of their problems. In the old world consultancies most of the money went to the partners -- but top engineers didn&#x27;t get to rake in the profits.<p>In the modern world, top engineers can band together, raise VC funding, build some stupid app and get acqui-hired for 5-10x the salary. Huge discrepancies in comp.<p>The natural progression is that VC funds build channels and in-house expertise on technical problems in enterprise. Top engineers raise funding and are guided by partners towards solving these problems.<p>The new model is not that enterprises pay consultancies to solve problems, but instead, they form long standing trust based relationships with VC&#x27;s who then fund companies that solve their problems (and profit when the companies profit). A big part of making this differentiation happen is releasing content that educates leaders and implementers within such enterprises.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roymurdock</author><text>A16z also needs to compete with the increasing growth of in-house VC firms such as GE Ventures, Verizon Ventures, Microsoft M12, The Alexa Fund (Amazon) etc. that are trying to incubate startups these companies have already identified as adjacent to their business&#x2F;needed. Apparently today 75 of the fortune 100 have a dedicated corporate VC team [1].<p>The Alexa Fund is a good example - Amazon wants to create an ecosystem of innovation and development around Alexa voice technology, perhaps one of the clearer examples of AI today, and is shoveling cash into the space.<p>Big enterprises have brought the VC model in-house, closer to R&amp;D and the problems they need to solve because most of these companies are flush with cash and facing a declining number of good ROI bets coming out of their actual R&amp;D departments.<p>To stay relevant A16z needs to pick the SMB fruit that doesn&#x27;t have access to its own in-house VC biz.<p>Notice how the document is aimed at people who own their own biz - &quot;What can you do with AI?&quot; &quot;Applying AI to your business&quot; etc.<p>They&#x27;re hoping to stumble on SMB teams&#x2F;problems that can solve a SMB problem quicker than a solution a huge enterprise can incubate in-house, then either scale it up to a late-round&#x2F;pre IPO private company or sell it off to a large enterprise for the exit.<p>Agreed that part of that is just asking the question - have you thought about what this new technology could do for your SMB? As well as being a thought-leader in the space and putting out some educational docs so that people know A16z has a good handle on the latest AI craze and a framework for monetizing it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;valleyvoices&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;corporate-vc-on-the-rise&#x2F;#6fec09fdbbf2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;valleyvoices&#x2F;2017&#x2F;02&#x2F;14&#x2F;corpora...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>AI Playbook</title><url>http://aiplaybook.a16z.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stanfordkid</author><text>It&#x27;s really quite interesting how A16z is playing this. I&#x27;ve been following the types of content that they release -- and I think their vision is that the a16z brand can almost function as a consultancy with (not only) direct channels to the enterprise, but also deep technical knowledge of their problems. In the old world consultancies most of the money went to the partners -- but top engineers didn&#x27;t get to rake in the profits.<p>In the modern world, top engineers can band together, raise VC funding, build some stupid app and get acqui-hired for 5-10x the salary. Huge discrepancies in comp.<p>The natural progression is that VC funds build channels and in-house expertise on technical problems in enterprise. Top engineers raise funding and are guided by partners towards solving these problems.<p>The new model is not that enterprises pay consultancies to solve problems, but instead, they form long standing trust based relationships with VC&#x27;s who then fund companies that solve their problems (and profit when the companies profit). A big part of making this differentiation happen is releasing content that educates leaders and implementers within such enterprises.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaoued</author><text>Another proof that strategy consultancies producing recommendation reports and advices and not getting involved in the implementation add no value versus the new model as you described above.</text></comment> |
11,021,158 | 11,019,574 | 1 | 2 | 11,004,559 | train | <story><title>Death of a Troll</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/death-of-a-troll</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lucidrains</author><text>Haha I&#x27;m the owner of the site. Surprised it made it to hacker news. There&#x27;s a whole world out there with countless stories unravelling that the naked eye can&#x27;t see. I&#x27;m very happy to have had a special glimpse into one of these worlds.</text></comment> | <story><title>Death of a Troll</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/death-of-a-troll</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>On the forums that I have run, I have seen 2 deaths faked.<p>The most recent was in December 2014 where a person claiming to be the partner of the guy who had allegedly died was then asking for contributions to help cover a funeral.<p>At the time it sowed a fair degree of mistrust, and the only way the community was able to move on was to pull together in secret to prove conclusively whether or not the person had died. What this meant is that about 50 people spent a chunk of time checking morgues, hospitals, location hints, police reports and other details until not only did we have an overwhelming amount of evidence it was faked, but could actually prove he was alive and well.<p>But then what? What do you do with someone who has done that?<p>The only answer that was palatable to us is that the person should be permanently excluded from the community.<p>It&#x27;s taken the real death of another person to remind us that not everyone is like that and to restore a lot of the trust and faith in each other.<p>The damage a fake death does to a community is significantly more than the damage the person who faked it does to themselves. And you can be sure that the person who does it will lose a lot of friends forever and find it hard to find a place in which someone doesn&#x27;t know someone that knows.<p>The world isn&#x27;t a big enough place for someone to get away with this now, it&#x27;s all interconnected.</text></comment> |
6,899,069 | 6,896,260 | 1 | 3 | 6,895,502 | train | <story><title>Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tensafefrogs</author><text>No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.<p>That way you aren&#x27;t evaluated so much on when&#x2F;how you work, but on what you accomplish.<p>(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW, Google tried to avoid this scenario with &#x27;snippets&#x27; which everyone was supposed to do every day. Basically you posted a snippet of what you were thinking about &#x2F; working on that day which gave folks evaluating you some idea of what was going on in your head at any given time. (note that snippets were world readable)<p>Unfortunately, when I was there, there wasn&#x27;t a lot of protection from the conflict created by your snippets, so if you wrote &quot;tried again to convince team X to let me fix their code, they brought up objection a, b, c. Still no clarity from them on what they really want.&quot; In your snippet it would make Team X look bad, and at some point it could come back to them that you were bitching about them in your snippets (even if you were doing what you were told to do) and then they would counter-attack in their snippets, and a little sub-surface adhominem would go on for a while. Moderating your snippets made you look non-productive. It was an epic failure in leadership.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Gaming &quot;Objectives and Key Results&quot; type evaluations is far older than Google. It&#x27;s not remotely an objective measure unless you have an organization that has <i>extensive</i> knowledge of how to accurately assess effort based on set objectives.<p>From what I&#x27;ve seen, many organizations that try to formalize evaluations this way are easier to game, because the very idea that there are somewhat reliable metrics makes it easier to justify not following up as closely.<p>(I&#x27;m not saying it <i>will</i> happen, but I&#x27;ve seen it far more often than I care to; including once having a manager that didn&#x27;t even inquire about what my team had done lately for <i>three years</i> - I didn&#x27;t mind, I delivered what I should to other parts of the business, but he should have: he had no effective oversight over a team officially reporting to him that handled tens of millions in revenue; if I <i>had</i> messed up, his head would&#x27;ve been on the chopping block next to mine)</text></comment> | <story><title>Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy?</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tensafefrogs</author><text>No, Google uses the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system to track performance. You set goals with measurable results, and you grade them every quarter.<p>That way you aren&#x27;t evaluated so much on when&#x2F;how you work, but on what you accomplish.<p>(I should also include a note here about how you are evaluated by your peers at Google, which has its own set of benefits and downsides, but OKRs are meant to be a somewhat objective measure of output)</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW, Google tried to avoid this scenario with &#x27;snippets&#x27; which everyone was supposed to do every day. Basically you posted a snippet of what you were thinking about &#x2F; working on that day which gave folks evaluating you some idea of what was going on in your head at any given time. (note that snippets were world readable)<p>Unfortunately, when I was there, there wasn&#x27;t a lot of protection from the conflict created by your snippets, so if you wrote &quot;tried again to convince team X to let me fix their code, they brought up objection a, b, c. Still no clarity from them on what they really want.&quot; In your snippet it would make Team X look bad, and at some point it could come back to them that you were bitching about them in your snippets (even if you were doing what you were told to do) and then they would counter-attack in their snippets, and a little sub-surface adhominem would go on for a while. Moderating your snippets made you look non-productive. It was an epic failure in leadership.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>Everything about your post is correct except the &quot;No,&quot;. Googlers have both OKRs and snippets.</text></comment> |
14,283,049 | 14,282,567 | 1 | 2 | 14,281,833 | train | <story><title>Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-facebook-make-you-miserable.html?ref=opinion&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feocco</author><text>This comment thread hits the nail on the head for why I deactivated my social media.<p>But I haven&#x27;t found a good alternative &quot;productive&quot; time waster for when my mind needs a short break.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>That&#x27;s actually why I deleted my account. The constant anger about everything was just unnecessary in my life.</text></item><item><author>trevyn</author><text>This. It used to be closer to the former, but today it seems like all my &quot;friends&quot; are just raging about the latest ragefest. I am not envious of being overtaken by these emotions. :-)</text></item><item><author>tsm</author><text>Facebook doesn&#x27;t make me miserable because I feel like I&#x27;m having less fun and being less glamorous than the friends on my news feed—it makes me miserable because it&#x27;s an addicting timewaster with minimal utility and I&#x27;d much rather be [reading a book, playing music, writing software, hanging out with friends IRL, working on a project, sleeping, watching TV…]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>5thaccount</author><text>&gt; But I haven&#x27;t found a good alternative &quot;productive&quot; time waster for when my mind needs a short break.<p>Hacker News? I mean, you posted this right here!</text></comment> | <story><title>Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/dont-let-facebook-make-you-miserable.html?ref=opinion&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>feocco</author><text>This comment thread hits the nail on the head for why I deactivated my social media.<p>But I haven&#x27;t found a good alternative &quot;productive&quot; time waster for when my mind needs a short break.</text></item><item><author>brightball</author><text>That&#x27;s actually why I deleted my account. The constant anger about everything was just unnecessary in my life.</text></item><item><author>trevyn</author><text>This. It used to be closer to the former, but today it seems like all my &quot;friends&quot; are just raging about the latest ragefest. I am not envious of being overtaken by these emotions. :-)</text></item><item><author>tsm</author><text>Facebook doesn&#x27;t make me miserable because I feel like I&#x27;m having less fun and being less glamorous than the friends on my news feed—it makes me miserable because it&#x27;s an addicting timewaster with minimal utility and I&#x27;d much rather be [reading a book, playing music, writing software, hanging out with friends IRL, working on a project, sleeping, watching TV…]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rublev</author><text>I force myself to bounce between reading a book and working, the computer is mostly a tool to get work done &#x2F; research things quickly now for me. It&#x27;s super boring in the immediate but rewarding once you put the work in which is a stark contrast to constantly coding -&gt; compiling and filling up that instant gratification meter.</text></comment> |
19,414,297 | 19,414,383 | 1 | 3 | 19,414,019 | train | <story><title>Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dstroot</author><text>One of the main points of the article was that although Herodotus described what he saw know one could turn his words into a mental picture. In other words until we actually found a wreck and could observe how it was built did we come to understand that Herodotus’ description was accurate.<p>BUT THEY DONT PUT A PICTURE OR DIAGRAM IN THE ARTICLE.<p>They pulled a “Herodotus” on us and I am pissed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/17/nile-shipwreck-herodotus-archaeologists-thonis-heraclion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>herodotus</author><text>Reading Herodotus&#x27; &quot;The Histories&quot; was life altering for me - I highly recomend it - but you MUST read a quality translation. I read the translation by Robin Waterfield. There are other good translations. What you should not do is download any old version you find online. Bad translations ruin the book.</text></comment> |
13,335,665 | 13,334,918 | 1 | 3 | 13,332,480 | train | <story><title>Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it&#x27;s coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they&#x27;re a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago.<p>I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. However, it&#x27;s probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven&#x27;t used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high?<p>Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you&#x27;re currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior 15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and all other browsers today have bad defaults.<p>I&#x27;m a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just don&#x27;t WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I&#x27;m sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. I&#x27;m sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror.<p>You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company&#x27;s ownership changes? Great! But please don&#x27;t be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don&#x27;t make an offering well-suited for 2017.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tomis02</author><text>Man, I really miss the skins in Opera 12, there were some gorgeous ones. I agree that the email client is not necessarily a priority, however<p>&gt; Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you&#x27;re currently on.<p>Oh wow, that&#x27;s pretty bad for every other major browser. We have two use cases:
1) I want to open the link in a new tab and switch focus (presumably to read right now).
2) I want to open the link in a new tab and not switch focus (presumably to read later).
In Vivaldi you can achieve (1) by &quot;open link in new tab&quot;, and (2) by &quot;open link in background tab&quot;.
In Chrome you can achieve (2) but no way of achieving (1) without touching the keyboard. And even when using the keyboard the shortcuts are clunkier (ctrl+shit+click vs shift+click in Vivaldi), which is probably not even relevant since I regularly observe Chrome users (programmers nonetheless) using &quot;open link in new tab&quot; and then clicking the new tab.
We should keep in mind that most browser users are not power users. Which leads me to<p>&gt; but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors<p>It&#x27;s the wrong default behaviors, and ~8 years ago I could have listed you a dozen epic failures of Chrome&#x2F;Firefox usability. I sincerely doubt there&#x27;s some elaborate reasoning for why they behaved badly, most likely it was just inertia and &quot;works good enough&quot;. One of my pet peeves is that Chrome&#x2F;Firefox don&#x27;t restore your last tab session by default, which I find extremely annoying: a regular user who doesn&#x27;t even know how to open the browser options will always have to reopen the previous tabs when restarting the PC.<p>Nowadays I rarely use Chrome&#x2F;Firefox so I can&#x27;t make a detailed browser comparison anymore, but from what I&#x27;ve been seeing there&#x27;s no reason to think they&#x27;re anywhere near as good as Opera 12 used to be. I agree that the usability changes could be a shock for new Vivaldi users but it shouldn&#x27;t be too hard to adapt to a better way of doing things.</text></comment> | <story><title>Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it&#x27;s coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they&#x27;re a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago.<p>I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. However, it&#x27;s probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven&#x27;t used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high?<p>Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you&#x27;re currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior 15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and all other browsers today have bad defaults.<p>I&#x27;m a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just don&#x27;t WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I&#x27;m sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. I&#x27;m sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror.<p>You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company&#x27;s ownership changes? Great! But please don&#x27;t be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don&#x27;t make an offering well-suited for 2017.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>suprfnk</author><text>&gt; the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day.<p>Really? That&#x27;s dumb. Why would I want my browser to check my email? That should be another program, or just a webpage. The browser browses the internet.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m not the audience, as I&#x27;ve always liked the Unix &quot;do one thing and do it well&quot; approach.</text></comment> |
16,030,639 | 16,030,725 | 1 | 2 | 16,018,962 | train | <story><title>Publishers Bought Millions of Website Visits They Found Out Were Fraudulent</title><url>https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/these-publishers-bought-millions-of-website-visits-they</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reustle</author><text>&gt; An estimated $16 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year, and a significant portion of that will go to criminals who use bots and other nefarious means to siphon money out of the digital ad ecosystem.<p>That&#x27;s a mind bogglingly big number, if true. I don&#x27;t really find myself feeling sorry for advertisers, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghostbrainalpha</author><text>You shouldn&#x27;t feel bad for the advertisers, but you should be worried about the content producers you love who provide you free content based on advertisements.<p>If true fraud levels were exposed it could shift the digital economy in a massive way.<p>Say you have an unpopular dishwasher and it breaks. It&#x27;s great to go to Youtube and find someone showing you how to fix the problem even for a relatively niche dishwasher. But if the ad money dries up for that content producer, that video won&#x27;t be there the next time you look for it.<p>Or you will be forced to pay $1.00 to watch it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Publishers Bought Millions of Website Visits They Found Out Were Fraudulent</title><url>https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/these-publishers-bought-millions-of-website-visits-they</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reustle</author><text>&gt; An estimated $16 billion will be lost to ad fraud this year, and a significant portion of that will go to criminals who use bots and other nefarious means to siphon money out of the digital ad ecosystem.<p>That&#x27;s a mind bogglingly big number, if true. I don&#x27;t really find myself feeling sorry for advertisers, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LeifCarrotson</author><text>It&#x27;s not that large a number. All of advertising is a $500-$800 billion business depending on where you get the numbers, so that represents 2.5% lost to fraud.<p>That is believable to me. Larger than fraud in a lot of markets, but not particularly large, and everyone knows the market is full of bots, bad stats, and scams.</text></comment> |
39,978,249 | 39,977,963 | 1 | 2 | 39,976,387 | train | <story><title>How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?</title><text>I was pondering how internet latency seems to be just barely sufficient for a decent fast-paced online multiplayer gaming experience. If human cognition were say, 20x faster relative to the speed of light, we&#x27;d be limited to playing many games only with players from the same city.
More significantly, single-threaded compute performance relative to human cognition would effectively be limited to the equivalent of 300 MHz (6 GHz &#x2F; 20), which I suspect makes it a challenge to run even barebones versions of many modern games.<p>This led me to wondering how software development would have progressed if CPU clock speeds were effectively 20x slower.<p>Might the overall greater pressure for performance have kept us writing lower-level code with more bugs while shipping less features? Or could it actually be that having all the free compute to throw around has comparatively gotten us into trouble, because we&#x27;ve been able to just rapidly prototype and eschew more formal methods and professionalization?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted.<p>It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. Even in more modern languages.<p>Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.</text></item><item><author>red_admiral</author><text>I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example.<p>Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that returns a HWND and all that - but with the number of levels of indirection and abstraction these days, we&#x27;ve made some things easier at the cost of making other things more obfuscated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>laserbeam</author><text>Keep in mind, the thing that matters most for tigerbeetle’s speed is they are domain specific. They know exactly upfront how data looks like. They don’t have to be general purpose.<p>The style of programming does work for general purpose computing, but their requirements enable a significant % of “orders of magnitude faster than postgress”.</text></comment> | <story><title>How might software development have unfolded if CPU speeds were 20x slower?</title><text>I was pondering how internet latency seems to be just barely sufficient for a decent fast-paced online multiplayer gaming experience. If human cognition were say, 20x faster relative to the speed of light, we&#x27;d be limited to playing many games only with players from the same city.
More significantly, single-threaded compute performance relative to human cognition would effectively be limited to the equivalent of 300 MHz (6 GHz &#x2F; 20), which I suspect makes it a challenge to run even barebones versions of many modern games.<p>This led me to wondering how software development would have progressed if CPU clock speeds were effectively 20x slower.<p>Might the overall greater pressure for performance have kept us writing lower-level code with more bugs while shipping less features? Or could it actually be that having all the free compute to throw around has comparatively gotten us into trouble, because we&#x27;ve been able to just rapidly prototype and eschew more formal methods and professionalization?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>josephg</author><text>I saw a talk about tigerbeetle the other day - which is a small, fast database for handling financial transactions that apparenty runs orders of magnitude faster than Postgres. The database binary has no dependencies and compiles to 500kb. Its authors were joking they could distribute it on floppy disks if they wanted.<p>It’s written in Zig, not C. But that style of programming is still available to us if we want it. Even in more modern languages.<p>Honestly I’m really tempted to try to throw together a 90s style fantasy desktop environment and widget library and make some apps for it. There’s something about that era of computing that feels great.</text></item><item><author>red_admiral</author><text>I feel like every time CPU speeds double, someone comes up with a Web UI framework that has twice as much indirection. With 20x slower compute, we might not have UIs that fire off an event and maybe trigger an asynchronous network request every time you type a character in a box, for example.<p>Windows 95 could do a decently responsive desktop UI on an 80386. Coding was a lot less elegant in one way - C code that returns a HWND and all that - but with the number of levels of indirection and abstraction these days, we&#x27;ve made some things easier at the cost of making other things more obfuscated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>red_admiral</author><text>Back when Java had just introduced Swing to supplement&#x2F;complement AWT, I remember you had a set of components (that you could even style in different ways with themes), a fairly object-oriented approach, and with the open-source MiG layout manager (that still exists today) a powerful way of laying out forms with constraints to adapt to changing screen&#x2F;window&#x2F;font sizes. I feel like UI framework progress from Windows 3.1 to Swing+MiG was much greater than anything I&#x27;ve seen since.</text></comment> |
11,585,139 | 11,583,524 | 1 | 2 | 11,583,268 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-supports-his-business-empire-with-unusual-financial-moves-1461781962</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dmode</author><text>WSJ has a target on Elon Musk&#x27;s back. Every week they post something negative about him or his companies. I have a couple of conservative friends who have an irrational hatred for Elon. They rail how everything Elon Musk does is a &quot;scam&quot;. The WSJ comments are a reflection of that mindset. More broadly, I wonder why WSJ and some conservatives set a target on Elon. There are literally a gazillion subsidies, tax credits, offshore accounting going around. For example, Hollywood shoots their movies wherever they get tax credits. Texas has attracted large back office operations using tax credits. Data center locations are chosen based upon which state government throws in the most benefits. It seems odd that they would spent so much energy on Musk, whose subsidies are probably a rounding error. It makes me wonder if there are bigger things at stake. Are the WSJ overlords really scared that he is making material changes to energy and transportation that could hurt them ?</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk Supports His Business Empire with Unusual Financial Moves</title><url>http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-supports-his-business-empire-with-unusual-financial-moves-1461781962</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vvanders</author><text>Man, comments on that article are certainly ugly. I wonder why subsidies for Solar&#x2F;EVs are viewed so negatively while ones for farming&#x2F;oil&#x2F;etc are almost ignored.</text></comment> |
14,674,536 | 14,674,150 | 1 | 2 | 14,673,777 | train | <story><title>Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>This is a watershed moment in the VC industry. The dam has finally burst, and we&#x27;re now seeing the establishment of a new norm in which women who are being harassed go public rather than feeling compelled to hide it. Expect to see many men who were operating under the old norms getting ousted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>19eightyfour</author><text>Hopefully man on man abuse comes out as well. Sex abuse between all pairings &#x2F; genders happens but there are not so many women VCs so it&#x27;s unlikely that&#x27;s going to come down here. But there are quite a few gay VCs.<p>My advice to everybody is keep meticulous notes and records of your interactions with others, regardless of gender. This is important to expose abuse and to expose lies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html?_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CydeWeys</author><text>This is a watershed moment in the VC industry. The dam has finally burst, and we&#x27;re now seeing the establishment of a new norm in which women who are being harassed go public rather than feeling compelled to hide it. Expect to see many men who were operating under the old norms getting ousted.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>5thaccount</author><text>I expect less VCs to take meetings with women, sadly. Not because they are likely to be problems, quite the opposite I&#x27;d wager.<p>That&#x27;s going to be the rather depressing and sad reality of the shakeout of this.</text></comment> |
32,509,566 | 32,509,832 | 1 | 2 | 32,488,802 | train | <story><title>What Beirut was like before the war (2019)</title><url>https://www.the961.com/this-is-what-beirut-was-like-before-the-war/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Lots of places in the Middle East were more European like this before the colonial influences weakened and the Muslim majority populations got back more power over their own countries. Egypt and Iran are similar. The nostalgia is somewhat uncomfortable because in some respects things were better because they were better, but in others it’s the perception of things being better because they’re more relatable to Europeans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>james-redwood</author><text>Lebanon became independent in 1945. Civil war began in 1975, largely as a result of radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon.
Lebanon beforehand, it is important to note, was not Muslim majority at all. It was Christian and Druze, and that was the very foundation of the country itself. It was never the country of Muslims in the first place.<p>Iran was also never colonised by European countries. Its decline began with both theocratic rule as well as sanctions, but even despite this it’s still remarkably functional and developed in comparison to a ton of countries that weren’t put in such a position.</text></comment> | <story><title>What Beirut was like before the war (2019)</title><url>https://www.the961.com/this-is-what-beirut-was-like-before-the-war/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Lots of places in the Middle East were more European like this before the colonial influences weakened and the Muslim majority populations got back more power over their own countries. Egypt and Iran are similar. The nostalgia is somewhat uncomfortable because in some respects things were better because they were better, but in others it’s the perception of things being better because they’re more relatable to Europeans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bnralt</author><text>France didn&#x27;t control Lebanon for long, less than three decades and never as a colony. These pictures here were taken a couple of decades after Lebanese independence. I imagine the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the resulting turmoil has more to do with the upheaval we see in the region than the Europeans leaving after their relatively brief period of control.<p>And Iran was never colonized (Egypt&#x27;s a bit more complex, though it wasn&#x27;t simplistically colonized).</text></comment> |
34,486,780 | 34,486,158 | 1 | 3 | 34,482,684 | train | <story><title>The first new build of Circle, a new C++20 compiler, since April 2022 is online</title><url>https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fidgewidge</author><text>Yes yes yes. Everything about this document screams good sense and logic.<p>It&#x27;s clear why Carbon looks the way it does - they want to do what Kotlin did for Java and using the same strategy. But, it won&#x27;t work. They understood Kotlin&#x27;s strategy as binary compatibility at the per source file level but that&#x27;s only half the story. The quiet monster of Kotlin&#x27;s success is j2k which is a source translation tool built into the IDE. It rewrites a Java file to Kotlin and then applies all the intelligence in the ide plug-in to clean up the results, meaning even idioms get translated properly.<p>Jetbrains could do that because they were developing the IDE plug-in alongside the compiler from day one, and because Java is quite easy to parse, and because Kotlin deliberately constrained itself to Java semantics even when sub optimal.<p>I had high hopes for Carbon when I first heard about it but that number of proposals without even having a compiler is crazy. How do you port existing code? You can only use it for newly added code, presumably, and only if your new code doesn&#x27;t interact with any c++ using the bits the carbon team don&#x27;t like? That&#x27;s light years from the type of interop that made Kotlin a success.<p>Sounds like this guy actually understands the problem in depth. I hope he&#x27;s able to attract customers, though it&#x27;s a tough sell to make your company codebase depends on a language maintained by only one guy.</text></comment> | <story><title>The first new build of Circle, a new C++20 compiler, since April 2022 is online</title><url>https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>From all possible wannabe be replacements for C++ that poped up in 2022, Circle is definitely the one that has the most going for it.<p>Everything else requires rewriting everything, and they can only support a limited subset of C++ features, so if the goal is full compatibility with existing code they aren&#x27;t going to achieve it anyway.<p>For full rewrites, we already have enough alternatives with more maturity years behind them.</text></comment> |
8,436,503 | 8,434,812 | 1 | 3 | 8,434,128 | train | <story><title>Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion</title><url>http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel-underestimates-error-bounds-by-1-3-quintillion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Is it even valid for a compiler to transform sin(constant) into a hardcoded constant embedded into the executable?<p>I guess since sin(x) is computed by an FPU in hardware, then it&#x27;s inherently &quot;dynamically linked.&quot; But in that case, why is it valid for a compiler to transform sin(constant) into a hardcoded result? Is there some standard somewhere which says that the implementation of sin&#x2F;cos&#x2F;etc can&#x27;t ever change, and therefore it&#x27;s valid for the compiler to do that? Or do compilers just make an assumption that the implementation of sin(x) won&#x27;t ever change?</text></item><item><author>Guvante</author><text>&gt; One scenario I can imagine an app breaking is if someone executed fsin(x), pasted the result into their code, and then tested some other float against it using the == operator.<p>While this sounds grandious, thanks to aggressive inlining this could be the case even if you wrote in your logic:<p><pre><code> sin(x) == sin(constant)
</code></pre>
Or even the following depending on your choice of delta.<p><pre><code> abs(sin(x) - sin(constant) &lt; delta</code></pre></text></item><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>It&#x27;s not possible to implement a more precise fsin() without breaking apps?<p>One scenario I can imagine an app breaking is if someone executed fsin(x), pasted the result into their code, and then tested some other float against it using the == operator.<p>I suppose a more common breakage scenario would be if someone did something like floor(x + fsin(x)), since that&#x27;d very slightly change where the floor &quot;triggers&quot; with respect to the input. But how could that cause an app to break? Every scenario I can think of comes back to someone using == to test floats, which everyone knows is a no-no for dynamic results, such as the output of a function like fsin().<p>I guess a programmer wouldn&#x27;t really expect the result of &quot;x + fsin(x)&quot; to ever change for a certain value of x, so maybe they executed it with that certain value, stored the result, and did an equality comparison later, which would always work unless the implementation of fsin() changed, and the thought process went something like, &quot;This should be reliable because realistically the implementation of fsin() won&#x27;t change.&quot;<p>Can anyone think of some obvious way that making fsin() more accurate could cause serious breakage in an app that isn&#x27;t testing floats with the equality operator?</text></item><item><author>CurtHagenlocher</author><text>Of possible interest, I researched a related issue once and here&#x27;s what I found:<p>The particular approximation used by the FPU instructions fsin and fcos is valid in the domain [-π &#x2F;4, π &#x2F;4]. Inputs outside this domain are reduced by taking the remainder when dividing by π &#x2F;4 and then using trigonometric identities to fix up values in the other three quadrants (ie sin(x) = sin(π &#x2F;2 – x) for x in [π &#x2F;4, π &#x2F;2].<p>The Intel FPU is “off” because it uses an approximation for π &#x2F;4 when performing the reduction. In the mid 90s, some engineers at AMD figured out how to do a more precise reduction and implemented this reduction in the K5 FPU. AMD went back to being bit-for-bit compatible with the x87 behavior in the very next generation of their CPUs, presumably because it either broke or appeared to break too many applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC</author><text>Your mistake is in assuming that the language C and its standard library are somehow defined in terms of some hardware, and that there somehow is a mapping between C functions and operators and CPU instructions - there isn&#x27;t. The standard specifies for what input values an operation is defined and which conditions have to be met by the result, nowhere does it say how an implementation is supposed to compute the result, that&#x27;s for the compiler to decide - as far as the standard is concerned, the compiler may compile all arithmetic to only ANDs and NOTs, though most practical compilers tend to try and choose instructions that give the best performance for a given computation, or just compute the result at compile time where possible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel Underestimates Error Bounds by 1.3 Quintillion</title><url>http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel-underestimates-error-bounds-by-1-3-quintillion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Is it even valid for a compiler to transform sin(constant) into a hardcoded constant embedded into the executable?<p>I guess since sin(x) is computed by an FPU in hardware, then it&#x27;s inherently &quot;dynamically linked.&quot; But in that case, why is it valid for a compiler to transform sin(constant) into a hardcoded result? Is there some standard somewhere which says that the implementation of sin&#x2F;cos&#x2F;etc can&#x27;t ever change, and therefore it&#x27;s valid for the compiler to do that? Or do compilers just make an assumption that the implementation of sin(x) won&#x27;t ever change?</text></item><item><author>Guvante</author><text>&gt; One scenario I can imagine an app breaking is if someone executed fsin(x), pasted the result into their code, and then tested some other float against it using the == operator.<p>While this sounds grandious, thanks to aggressive inlining this could be the case even if you wrote in your logic:<p><pre><code> sin(x) == sin(constant)
</code></pre>
Or even the following depending on your choice of delta.<p><pre><code> abs(sin(x) - sin(constant) &lt; delta</code></pre></text></item><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>It&#x27;s not possible to implement a more precise fsin() without breaking apps?<p>One scenario I can imagine an app breaking is if someone executed fsin(x), pasted the result into their code, and then tested some other float against it using the == operator.<p>I suppose a more common breakage scenario would be if someone did something like floor(x + fsin(x)), since that&#x27;d very slightly change where the floor &quot;triggers&quot; with respect to the input. But how could that cause an app to break? Every scenario I can think of comes back to someone using == to test floats, which everyone knows is a no-no for dynamic results, such as the output of a function like fsin().<p>I guess a programmer wouldn&#x27;t really expect the result of &quot;x + fsin(x)&quot; to ever change for a certain value of x, so maybe they executed it with that certain value, stored the result, and did an equality comparison later, which would always work unless the implementation of fsin() changed, and the thought process went something like, &quot;This should be reliable because realistically the implementation of fsin() won&#x27;t change.&quot;<p>Can anyone think of some obvious way that making fsin() more accurate could cause serious breakage in an app that isn&#x27;t testing floats with the equality operator?</text></item><item><author>CurtHagenlocher</author><text>Of possible interest, I researched a related issue once and here&#x27;s what I found:<p>The particular approximation used by the FPU instructions fsin and fcos is valid in the domain [-π &#x2F;4, π &#x2F;4]. Inputs outside this domain are reduced by taking the remainder when dividing by π &#x2F;4 and then using trigonometric identities to fix up values in the other three quadrants (ie sin(x) = sin(π &#x2F;2 – x) for x in [π &#x2F;4, π &#x2F;2].<p>The Intel FPU is “off” because it uses an approximation for π &#x2F;4 when performing the reduction. In the mid 90s, some engineers at AMD figured out how to do a more precise reduction and implemented this reduction in the K5 FPU. AMD went back to being bit-for-bit compatible with the x87 behavior in the very next generation of their CPUs, presumably because it either broke or appeared to break too many applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>&quot;but if it&#x27;s dynamic, is it even valid for a compiler to transform sin(constant) into a hardcoded constant embedded into the executable?&quot;<p>Yes.<p>I honestly don&#x27;t remember all the rules here, but it does in fact do so, legally.</text></comment> |
19,340,320 | 19,340,535 | 1 | 2 | 19,339,039 | train | <story><title>Chelsea Manning jailed for contempt of court</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/433213-chelsea-manning-jailed-for-contempt-of-court</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pera</author><text>Anecdotally by the same judge who ordered a $5,000-a-day fine to Ladar Levison from Lavabit, back in 2013, until he provided the SSL private keys in electronic form (originally he printed them in 11 pages of 4pt text).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qrbLPHiKpiux</author><text>I remember the day I tried to get my mail, it didn’t work, I went to the website and saw that cryptic message. Then a few days later... The news broke about Snowden.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chelsea Manning jailed for contempt of court</title><url>https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/433213-chelsea-manning-jailed-for-contempt-of-court</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pera</author><text>Anecdotally by the same judge who ordered a $5,000-a-day fine to Ladar Levison from Lavabit, back in 2013, until he provided the SSL private keys in electronic form (originally he printed them in 11 pages of 4pt text).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tuxxy</author><text>I wonder how far you can take the &quot;electronic form&quot;...<p>Could you compress it, base64 it, hex encode it, then base64 encode it again (this time URL-safe), then hex encode it, etc? I wonder what kind of response that would elicit heh.</text></comment> |
14,496,928 | 14,496,830 | 1 | 3 | 14,495,174 | train | <story><title>Chrome 59 stable released</title><url>https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2017/06/stable-channel-update-for-desktop.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madjam002</author><text>Has there been any research on whether Material Design has superior UX for desktop use?<p>I&#x27;ve just tried the new settings screen on Chrome 59, and personally I find it far, far worse than what it was previously. I hate this trend of hiding essential top-level navigation behind a hamburger menu, especially on desktop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>I struggle with what things are buttons in material design. Everything looks flat, so clickable things look like labels to me. Especially buttons that aren&#x27;t rectangles.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chrome 59 stable released</title><url>https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2017/06/stable-channel-update-for-desktop.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madjam002</author><text>Has there been any research on whether Material Design has superior UX for desktop use?<p>I&#x27;ve just tried the new settings screen on Chrome 59, and personally I find it far, far worse than what it was previously. I hate this trend of hiding essential top-level navigation behind a hamburger menu, especially on desktop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>diminish</author><text>Actually on material design, I liked the look though it smells a bit classic as of now.<p>But what I dislike the most is that I have to navigate and click more than necessary for simple tasks.</text></comment> |
18,388,982 | 18,388,930 | 1 | 3 | 18,388,040 | train | <story><title>Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You)</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-voting-record.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erwan</author><text>I don&#x27;t have a horse in that race, I&#x27;m not even a US citizen - and I must say that whole debate on voter id laws is puzzling to me.<p>After reading a bit on <i>disparate impact</i> and what constitute the &quot;crux&quot; of the issue, I get why the ID requirement can be problematic if it makes people jump through a ton of hoops. However, the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me.<p>I would think a path to resolution would rather include making it easier to obtain an ID.</text></item><item><author>tiles</author><text>The preset party supports stronger Democratic norms like same-day registration, the other supports Voter ID laws and reducing the number of polling locations. Of course an app encouraging voter maximalism can work in favor of the party that aligns with their goal.</text></item><item><author>keiferski</author><text><i>Anyone can use the apps, but executives say they hope to improve voter turnout particularly among young Democrats. The VoteWithMe app, for instance, is preset to show likely Democrats among a user’s contacts. Users must change the app’s settings to see the voting histories of all of their contacts.</i><p>This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.<p>As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.<p>Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>There is not a voter fraud problem in the US. Estimates of the rate of voter fraud in the US put the rate at about 0.0003% or lower, far less than what would ever swing an election. Regardless of whether national IDs make sense for other reasons, there is no issue with voter fraud that needs addressing.<p>And yet, in the last decade, at least 11 states have passed laws adding new voter ID requirements. Because of the lack of a voter fraud problem, the disparate impact is clearly the main objective of the laws, which proponents of the laws are frequently quite clear about. The idea that they might be used to theoretically avoid fraud is basically a convenient justification that just might pass constitutional muster.<p>It&#x27;s not that Democrats hate national ID cards because freedom and Republicans like them because safety. It&#x27;s that Republicans like requiring voter ID cards because adding barriers to voting benefits Republicans, and Democrats dislike them because adding barriers to voting hurts Democrats. If it weren&#x27;t voter ID cards, it&#x27;d be something else. Previous obvious attempts included poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests. When those fail, you just make sure the lines to vote in the wrong party&#x27;s districts are going to be much longer than the lines to vote in the right party&#x27;s districts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Did You Vote? Now Your Friends May Know (and Nag You)</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-voting-record.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erwan</author><text>I don&#x27;t have a horse in that race, I&#x27;m not even a US citizen - and I must say that whole debate on voter id laws is puzzling to me.<p>After reading a bit on <i>disparate impact</i> and what constitute the &quot;crux&quot; of the issue, I get why the ID requirement can be problematic if it makes people jump through a ton of hoops. However, the common suggestion that IDing people be stripped altogether just sounds bizarre to me.<p>I would think a path to resolution would rather include making it easier to obtain an ID.</text></item><item><author>tiles</author><text>The preset party supports stronger Democratic norms like same-day registration, the other supports Voter ID laws and reducing the number of polling locations. Of course an app encouraging voter maximalism can work in favor of the party that aligns with their goal.</text></item><item><author>keiferski</author><text><i>Anyone can use the apps, but executives say they hope to improve voter turnout particularly among young Democrats. The VoteWithMe app, for instance, is preset to show likely Democrats among a user’s contacts. Users must change the app’s settings to see the voting histories of all of their contacts.</i><p>This, combined with the “Our Trusted Partners” section, clearly shows that this isn’t about getting people out to vote in order to strengthen the democratic process - it’s about supporting a particular political party.<p>As an independent, this is really troubling. It will only result in more tribalism and more shaming for having “undesirable” party registration. Yeah, your actual vote is still private. But considering that mere membership of a party has been an issue in the past, this isn’t very reassuring.<p>Then again, maybe it will lead to an implosion of the party system and a shift to independent voters.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gmueckl</author><text>Mandatory state issues IDs are a cultural red flag for many Americans. This leads to practical absurdities like having the driver&#x27;s license double as a de facto ID card. As a European, this seems byzantine and unnecessarily inconvenient to me, but such are cultural differences.</text></comment> |
26,049,883 | 26,049,046 | 1 | 2 | 26,047,444 | train | <story><title>Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/06/daughters-provoke-parental-strife</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>Marriages aren&#x27;t supposed to end except in death. It&#x27;s right there in the vows. They are a serious commitment, and I think many take them lightly without realizing that they are intended to be lifelong.</text></item><item><author>andys627</author><text>What are some characteristics of a healthy end to a marriage?</text></item><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>Better than abuse and resentment, yes; healthy, no.</text></item><item><author>mattcwilson</author><text>It strikes me that GP is observing that legal divorce is happier than abuse, detachment, resentment, cold war, etc.<p>I think they have a point.</text></item><item><author>zionic</author><text>&gt; but isn&#x27;t divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?<p>How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?<p>No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.</text></item><item><author>ThePadawan</author><text>Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn&#x27;t divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure.<p>My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly.<p>As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of &quot;not legally, but emotionally divorced&quot; makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samsa</author><text>Marriage is one of a very few things in life humans undertake where they are asked to commit to do something “for life” that they have never done before. And their closest vantage point is likely their parents’ marriage.<p>I think it’s not so much people take it lightly, as that they have no idea of what they are getting into and what kind of work a modern marriage involves.</text></comment> | <story><title>Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/06/daughters-provoke-parental-strife</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>Marriages aren&#x27;t supposed to end except in death. It&#x27;s right there in the vows. They are a serious commitment, and I think many take them lightly without realizing that they are intended to be lifelong.</text></item><item><author>andys627</author><text>What are some characteristics of a healthy end to a marriage?</text></item><item><author>da_big_ghey</author><text>Better than abuse and resentment, yes; healthy, no.</text></item><item><author>mattcwilson</author><text>It strikes me that GP is observing that legal divorce is happier than abuse, detachment, resentment, cold war, etc.<p>I think they have a point.</text></item><item><author>zionic</author><text>&gt; but isn&#x27;t divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?<p>How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?<p>No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.</text></item><item><author>ThePadawan</author><text>Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn&#x27;t divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure.<p>My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly.<p>As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of &quot;not legally, but emotionally divorced&quot; makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xref</author><text>As nwienert said better elsewhere in the thread: “You’re emotionally tying yourself to Christian theology and claiming it as universal.”</text></comment> |
37,935,683 | 37,935,460 | 1 | 2 | 37,933,633 | train | <story><title>You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed</title><url>https://newsletter.thejorgemedina.com/p/youre-not-lacking-creativity-youre</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FigurativeVoid</author><text>I think that we are being overwhelmed and it hurts us in more ways than our creativity. We are moving through the world in constant distraction.<p>Until recently, when I was doing something around the house, no matter what, I was listening to music, podcasts, or books.<p>I found that it seemed like it was taking for ever for me to do the simplest tasks. After a while... I figured that I must be going slower because I was always doing two things at once. After a few weeks of doing the dishes without ear buds in, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever go back. I am not able to focus better and get things done.<p>If you are like I was, and you are always inundated with some distraction, try moving through the world without it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>The obvious other side of that coin: of the two things we&#x27;re doing at once, one of them is neither fun nor engaging. Making it the thing to 100% focus on will also mean it it&#x27;s now a stronger candidate to procrastination, and just won&#x27;t be done at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed</title><url>https://newsletter.thejorgemedina.com/p/youre-not-lacking-creativity-youre</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FigurativeVoid</author><text>I think that we are being overwhelmed and it hurts us in more ways than our creativity. We are moving through the world in constant distraction.<p>Until recently, when I was doing something around the house, no matter what, I was listening to music, podcasts, or books.<p>I found that it seemed like it was taking for ever for me to do the simplest tasks. After a while... I figured that I must be going slower because I was always doing two things at once. After a few weeks of doing the dishes without ear buds in, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever go back. I am not able to focus better and get things done.<p>If you are like I was, and you are always inundated with some distraction, try moving through the world without it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>121789</author><text>I can’t agree with this any more. If you find yourself always thinking “I’ll do the laundry, let me just find a good podcast first” you are in trouble. It’s so easy just to have constant input these days</text></comment> |
18,353,881 | 18,352,139 | 1 | 2 | 18,351,654 | train | <story><title>Protect the last of the wild</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07183-6</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>japhyr</author><text>I live in southeast Alaska, where we have a relatively healthy population of coastal brown bears. When we go into the woods, there is always a chance a bear could be nearby.<p>Your first encounter with a brown bear in the wild can be unnerving. It&#x27;s a really different feeling to see an animal that could easily kill you in the woods, without a wall or a fence between you and that animal. It&#x27;s really humbling, and makes the woods feel entirely different than most other woods I&#x27;ve ever been in.<p>It&#x27;s not that hard to be safe. You make noise when you&#x27;re in brushy areas, and you stay aware of your surroundings as long as you&#x27;re in bear country. If you&#x27;re camping, there are well-established routines that keep bears from messing with your camping area. You keep in mind where bears are in their annual cycles; are they relatively well-fed, or are they hungry and looking anywhere they can for food?<p>I like the balance of doing technical work with the experience of walking in the woods with bears. The projects I work on are important, but they&#x27;re not life-safety-critical. If one of my servers goes down, no one&#x27;s going to die. Having interacted with brown bears at close range, a server going down is a relatively low-stress event.<p>I wish there were more wild areas left. The woods in the lower 48 feel empty after living in forests that still have the top predators alive and healthy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Protect the last of the wild</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07183-6</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fractallyte</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that humanity certainly <i>requires</i> huge tracts of wilderness for its long term survival. So far, we&#x27;ve successfully transformed diverse ecosystems into vast, but basic, mono-cultural &#x27;deserts&#x27;.<p>But - is it sustainable? In the century since the Haber process was introduced, the world has started to buckle at the seams from the results: huge population growth, with accompanying pollution (nitrates, pesticides, algal blooms, etc.) and degradation of biomes. What are the effects on our biochemistry? Plastic pollution is only now being noticed. Pthalates and numerous other estrogen mimickers are silently at work. Antibiotic resistance is increasing.<p>I think it&#x27;s too early to conclude that we can indeed survive this. The outlook for the rest of this century is not positive...<p>A &#x27;wilderness&#x27; is a vast library of alternative biotech. Until humanity understands the effects of its impact on Earth&#x27;s ecosystems and itself, it would be wise to remember this.</text></comment> |
30,662,572 | 30,662,680 | 1 | 3 | 30,660,953 | train | <story><title>EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items</title><url>https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/not-dodgy-at-all-and-long-overdue-user-replaceable-batteries/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.<p>Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That&#x27;s the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.<p>None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It&#x27;s an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.</text></item><item><author>swores</author><text>While I&#x27;m not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices,<p>&gt; <i>Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?</i><p>You&#x27;re forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.</text></item><item><author>adhesive_wombat</author><text>I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost.<p>It&#x27;s infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it&#x27;s around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?<p>And don&#x27;t get me started on cars!<p>If we as species cared about sustainability (we don&#x27;t), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it&#x27;s highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>newaccount74</author><text>The heating element of my Miele washing machine broke after about 4 years, and a genuine spare part would have cost 100€. I got a 3rd party replacement part that looks completely identical for 20€. I&#x27;m pretty sure there&#x27;s still a healthy profit margin on that, since they cost half of that on Ali Express. And if the original part breaks after 4 years, the aftermarket part can&#x27;t be much worse.<p>The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking expensive is because they make a lot of money with service. They don&#x27;t want people fixing their own machines for 20€, they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the part for 250€.<p>EDIT: And don&#x27;t tell me that logistics for a heating element are hard. All Miele washers have been using the same heating element for 15 years or so, it&#x27;s a drop in replacement for the previous version of the part, and it&#x27;s probably also the single part that breaks most often. That part should be easy to stock and the cost to do so should be trivial.</text></comment> | <story><title>EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items</title><url>https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/not-dodgy-at-all-and-long-overdue-user-replaceable-batteries/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.<p>Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That&#x27;s the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.<p>None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It&#x27;s an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.</text></item><item><author>swores</author><text>While I&#x27;m not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices,<p>&gt; <i>Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?</i><p>You&#x27;re forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.</text></item><item><author>adhesive_wombat</author><text>I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost.<p>It&#x27;s infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it&#x27;s around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?<p>And don&#x27;t get me started on cars!<p>If we as species cared about sustainability (we don&#x27;t), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it&#x27;s highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics works. Even distribution alone, within a single country ( ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.</text></comment> |
24,253,905 | 24,252,837 | 1 | 2 | 24,252,048 | train | <story><title>Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power</title><url>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aenm.202001189</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dghughes</author><text>My mother ayed tomatoes in the spring when it was still cool. She covered them with clear plastic bags as she always has. But she needed one more bag so she used a blue recycling bag on one of the plants. Blue tinged really it&#x27;s almost clear.<p>I pointed out to her one of the plants had yellow leaves. It was the plant with the blue bag.<p>Later in the summer the blue bag plant produced fruit just like the other plants. But the bottom of each tomato was disfigured and looked rotten but it was dry to the touch. It&#x27;s blossom rot due to low calcium. I have to wonder if it was the blue bag or lack of&#x2F;too much water. All the plants got the same nutrients only this one had the blue bag. It got red light and green light which plants don&#x27;t need but no blue light.<p>Plants are seemingly very sensitive to sunlight quality. I&#x27;m sure the solar panels are clear but even a slight colour blockage may be harmful.<p>It was an interesting result.</text></comment> | <story><title>Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power</title><url>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/aenm.202001189</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>khawkins</author><text>Only people who spend most of their life in densely crowded cities could think that the planet has so little space that you&#x27;d need to grow crops underneath solar panels for efficiency&#x27;s sake.</text></comment> |
15,054,477 | 15,054,385 | 1 | 2 | 15,052,192 | train | <story><title>Functions as a Service: Serverless Framework for Docker and Kubernetes</title><url>https://github.com/alexellis/faas</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexellisuk</author><text>Hi, OpenFaaS author here - it feels like I&#x27;m late to the party here. I can see lots of folks chiming-in with their projects which you are welcome to do. I agree with you that this is a confusing landscape with lots of options. Here&#x27;s my introduction to OpenFaaS (and Serverless), the top 3 new features and what&#x27;s coming next: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.alexellis.io&#x2F;introducing-functions-as-a-service&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.alexellis.io&#x2F;introducing-functions-as-a-service...</a><p>If you have 10-15 minutes you can just jump in with your own serverless function in Python with this guide - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.alexellis.io&#x2F;first-faas-python-function&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.alexellis.io&#x2F;first-faas-python-function&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Functions as a Service: Serverless Framework for Docker and Kubernetes</title><url>https://github.com/alexellis/faas</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_Marak_</author><text>If anyone is interested in doing this without the additional requirements of Docker and Kubernetes check out Microcule.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stackvana&#x2F;microcule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stackvana&#x2F;microcule</a></text></comment> |
8,597,808 | 8,597,401 | 1 | 2 | 8,596,956 | train | <story><title>AWS CodeDeploy</title><url>http://aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>STRML</author><text>While this looks nice, part of me can&#x27;t help but be annoyed by yet <i>another</i> deployment option on AWS. We now have CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk (which can take many forms, including Docker), CodeDeploy, and Opsworks.<p>I can imagine how, for a new user, it&#x27;s utterly baffling which of these options is the best for the longterm, with the least friction. I use OpsWorks quite a bit but have found it very challenging, and the feedback cycle when attempting to develop new cookbooks is excruciatingly slow.<p>All I want, personally, is a system that uses a set of interchangeable scripts that represent dependencies, so my server configs can live in version control. It doesn&#x27;t even need to run on multiple OSs (which seems to be a central tenet of Chef). It just needs to deploy&#x2F;rollback with zero downtime, and ideally autoscale as quickly as possible. Is this it? Is there any way to know without spending weeks fleshing out how it works?</text></comment> | <story><title>AWS CodeDeploy</title><url>http://aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanfitz</author><text>I&#x27;ve only briefly read over the documentation, but this service seems to not follow deployment best practices that aws and others such as netflix have been talking about for years. Specifically the pattern of pre-baking an ami with your current version of the app you are deploying and any other needed software completely installed on the ami and then having an autoscale group be able to boot that ami up in a few seconds and start working. This greatly helps with scaling up, doing rolling upgrades and also very easy rollbacks.<p>The CodeDeploy service seems to operate by you manually launching base ec2 instance with a code deploy agent and then this agent will checkout your git code on the live instance, run any provisioning steps and then if things break somehow rollback all that work, still on the live instance.<p>I&#x27;m sure this is still a big improvement to companies who are manually sshing into servers and running deployments by hand, but as someone who pre-bakes ami&#x27;s and does rolling upgrades with autoscaling groups this service seems like a step backwards.</text></comment> |
35,400,955 | 35,400,923 | 1 | 3 | 35,397,071 | train | <story><title>Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-drive-does-a-surprise-rollout-of-file-limits-locking-out-some-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djha-skin</author><text>Google could have (and many expected them to) eat Amazon&#x27;s lunch for cloud compute back when it was new. However, Amazon actually had infrastructure around customer support while Google famously really doesn&#x27;t. From what I gather Google cloud is technologically better, but no one wants to use a cloud from someone who doesn&#x27;t do customer support as well.</text></item><item><author>mcherm</author><text>Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Failing to document that such a limit exists and refusing to publicly confirm it (which apparently is STILL the case) is extraordinarily poor customer service&#x2F;communication.<p>Google KEEPS setting new records for poor customer communication, to the point where I (and much of the HN crowd) now expect it. Android developer banned from the app store? There is no meaningful way to appeal but you&#x27;ll probably never be able to find out why. Your best hope is to post on HN and hope someone with power at Google notices.<p>Leadership at Google ought to recognize this; they ought to make an effort to improve the channels by which &quot;customers&quot; can communicate with Google. But I see no signs that they are even aware of the issue; I see no effort to change anything.<p>I would try to tell them but... there&#x27;s no communication channel. Maybe I should post about it on HN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tedivm</author><text>I&#x27;ve got a tale of two clouds. I complained about an issue with AWS on Twitter and two hours later was on a call with the EKS product manager who connected me with someone on their team who documented the issue, gave me a workaround, and then pushed out a fix to everyone a few days later. It was super impressive!<p>I complained about a separate issue with GCP. The product manager found my tweet and told me it was my fault for using a service marked as &quot;preview&quot;. He then told me I should have used a different service, which was also marked as &quot;preview&quot;. They were rude and defensive and made no attempt to resolve my issue. We decided to just not use GCP for the project as a result.<p>Neither of these are isolated stories. I have multiple examples of GCP staff just being super rude for no real reason, while AWS regularly goes above and beyond with customer service.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-drive-does-a-surprise-rollout-of-file-limits-locking-out-some-users/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>djha-skin</author><text>Google could have (and many expected them to) eat Amazon&#x27;s lunch for cloud compute back when it was new. However, Amazon actually had infrastructure around customer support while Google famously really doesn&#x27;t. From what I gather Google cloud is technologically better, but no one wants to use a cloud from someone who doesn&#x27;t do customer support as well.</text></item><item><author>mcherm</author><text>Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Failing to document that such a limit exists and refusing to publicly confirm it (which apparently is STILL the case) is extraordinarily poor customer service&#x2F;communication.<p>Google KEEPS setting new records for poor customer communication, to the point where I (and much of the HN crowd) now expect it. Android developer banned from the app store? There is no meaningful way to appeal but you&#x27;ll probably never be able to find out why. Your best hope is to post on HN and hope someone with power at Google notices.<p>Leadership at Google ought to recognize this; they ought to make an effort to improve the channels by which &quot;customers&quot; can communicate with Google. But I see no signs that they are even aware of the issue; I see no effort to change anything.<p>I would try to tell them but... there&#x27;s no communication channel. Maybe I should post about it on HN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antiterra</author><text>I interviewed with Google Cloud a few years back and they straight up told me they were behind both AWS &amp; Azure as a product and were lacking in user support. They said they were trying to build out an org to address it.</text></comment> |
18,600,004 | 18,599,130 | 1 | 3 | 18,598,544 | train | <story><title>Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)</title><url>http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-guide-to-emacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wildgoose</author><text>I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs.<p>For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses.<p>It&#x27;s not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can be fashioned to exactly suit whatever purpose you require.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leemailll</author><text>Org mode is really awesome. A chemist basically does his work with org (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu</a>) and recently another guy showing his colleague’s poster done with org and Beamer ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;irreal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=7651" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;irreal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=7651</a>). I find org and mu4e really make mundane stuff easily done. On a mac and iOS system to get email, calendar, to do list, and notes done, it is usually 4 different programs, with emacs it is just org and mu4e and beorg on mobile.</text></comment> | <story><title>Absolute Beginner's Guide to Emacs (2012)</title><url>http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-guide-to-emacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wildgoose</author><text>I have yet to encounter anything that can match the sheer flexibility of Emacs.<p>For example I am currently using Org mode to write some documentation complete with hyper-links, tables, foot notes and the option to export the results as LaTeX, HTML, Open-Office, and so on with just a few keypresses.<p>It&#x27;s not just an editor, or an IDE, or even a windowing system - it is a cross-platform computing environment that can be fashioned to exactly suit whatever purpose you require.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tiborsaas</author><text>How much time have you invested?</text></comment> |
25,437,023 | 25,436,935 | 1 | 2 | 25,435,652 | train | <story><title>CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)</title><url>https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/call-transcript_en.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotdi</author><text>I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now.<p>It&#x27;s running very well for me. I&#x27;ve had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn&#x27;t cause any gameplay problems†.<p>The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I&#x27;m not much of a gamer, but I feel that I&#x27;ll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can&#x27;t stop thinking about the game when I&#x27;m away from it.<p>† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still &quot;dead&quot; but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>You&#x27;re not seeing the issues because you&#x27;re not playing the affected versions. Notice how all of the positive anecdotes are coming from PC players?<p>IGN went so far as to split their Cyberpunk 2077 review into two separate reviews: One for consoles, and one for PC. Quote from the console review:<p>&gt; The Xbox One&#x2F;PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.<p>The PC version scored 9&#x2F;10 and the console version scored 4&#x2F;10.<p>They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible. I suspect console gamers are requesting refunds in droves due to the issues, which is surely going to impact their long-term sales projections.</text></comment> | <story><title>CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)</title><url>https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/call-transcript_en.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dotdi</author><text>I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now.<p>It&#x27;s running very well for me. I&#x27;ve had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn&#x27;t cause any gameplay problems†.<p>The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I&#x27;m not much of a gamer, but I feel that I&#x27;ll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can&#x27;t stop thinking about the game when I&#x27;m away from it.<p>† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still &quot;dead&quot; but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sirn</author><text>It has been working well for me as well (on a PC). I love the story and the visual. However the combat system is simply broken. Police spawns out of nowhere when a crime is reported[1]. Really bad reticle drifting behavior[2]. Enemy sniper can 1-hit kill you even when they are far away enough for the game to not render them. Enemy spamming Overheat from behind a wall (even with all cameras disabled, which is game-breaking on Very Hard), and much, much more.<p>I wasn&#x27;t even looking for them, but they managed to find me. I still enjoy the game a lot, but combat has been nothing but frustration.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.polygon.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;22167436&#x2F;cyberpunk-2077-wanted-cops-police-system-spawn-cd-projekt-red" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.polygon.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;22167436&#x2F;cyberpunk-2077-w...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cyberpunkgame&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kbwpps&#x2F;reticle_drift_feels_a_bit_extreme&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;cyberpunkgame&#x2F;comments&#x2F;kbwpps&#x2F;retic...</a></text></comment> |
6,218,458 | 6,218,244 | 1 | 2 | 6,217,968 | train | <story><title>Why does this Java program terminate despite appearing that it shouldn't?</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-java-program-terminate-despite-that-appears-that-it-shouldt-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>One of my biggest WTF moments as a programmer was dealing with a high performance spectrum analyzer. It was a cost no object bit of experimental military hardware, and was very impressive from that perspective. But the software was buggy. We would see lockups, as well as discontinuities in the readouts, which were screwing up our post-hoc data analysis. When I dug into the code, I realized that the program used several different threads, but there was not a lock or other synchronization mechanism in sight. You had a thread pulling data off a socket from the device and storing it in a (single) memory buffer, a thread writing commands through a socket to the device, a thread pulling data out of the buffer to draw it to a waterfall plot, and a thread writing data to disk. The lockups happened because the device didn&#x27;t like to change the scan state while reading data, and there was no synchronization between the command thread and the readout thread. The discontinuities happened because there was a single buffer shared by the readout thread and the write out threads, with no synchronization. So as one thread was writing out a sample, the readout thread was replacing part of that data with the next sample.<p>I remember grepping the source for pthread_mutex or pthread_cond and slowly realizing that whoever wrote the code didn&#x27;t even see the need for locks. To be fair, I later heard it was some poor hardware guy who knew some C who got roped into writing the software as an afterthought to show off the awesome hardware, a common problem with hardware companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why does this Java program terminate despite appearing that it shouldn't?</title><url>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-java-program-terminate-despite-that-appears-that-it-shouldt-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boothead</author><text>How can anyone program sanely in the presence of this:<p>currentPos = new Point(currentPos.x+1, currentPos.y+1); does a few things, including writing default values to x and y (0) and then writing their initial values in the constructor. Since your object is not safely published those 4 write operations can be freely reordered by the compiler &#x2F; JVM.<p>So from the perspective of the reading thread, it is a legal execution to read x with its new value but y with its default value of 0 for example. By the time you reach the println statement (which by the way is synchronized and therefore does influence the read operations), the variables have their initial values and the program prints the expected values.<p>I&#x27;m not anywhere near smart or careful enough for that... I think I&#x27;ll stick with Haskell.</text></comment> |
3,331,391 | 3,330,575 | 1 | 2 | 3,329,676 | train | <story><title>A single line to 3 cashiers is ~3x faster than a separate line for each cashier</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082933921432686.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dxbydt</author><text>scala&#62; import org.apache.commons.math.distribution.{ExponentialDistributionImpl=&#62;expo}<p>//pc = process customer, with a mean time mu per customer<p>scala&#62; def pc(mu:Int):Double= new expo(mu).sample<p>// q = queue of n customers with mean process time mu<p>scala&#62; def q(n:Int,mu:Int):Double=(1 to n).map(_=&#62;pc(mu)).sum<p>scala&#62; // put 3000 people in 1 queue with mean process time 50<p>scala&#62; (1 to 1000).map(_=&#62;q(3000,50)).sum/1000<p>res43: Double = 83107.37275937156<p>scala&#62; //now put 1000 people each in 3 separate queues with the same mean process time as before<p>scala&#62; (1 to 1000).map(_=&#62;(1 to 3).par.map(_=&#62;q(1000,50)).sum).sum/1000<p>res45: Double = 200010.29627921886<p>200010 = ~3x83107, so yeah, single line to 3 cashiers is ~3x faster than a separate line for each cashier.<p>// Now make 1 queue that feeds into shortest of the 3 queues<p>scala&#62; def qq(n:Int,mu:Int)=(1 to 3).par.map(_=&#62;{(1 to n/3).map(_=&#62;pc(mu)).sum}).sum<p>scala&#62; (1 to 10000).map(_=&#62;qq(3000,50)).sum/10000<p>res70: Double = 141824.974765643<p>So our single queue feeding into 3 separate queues still beats 3 separate independent queues.<p>edited to address MaysonL's question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewla</author><text>Okay, someone with some Scala expertise needs to jump in here. The code as written is _clearly_ incorrect. q(n,mu) sums a distribution with mean mu n times. The expected value of this is mu * n. Then we run this 1000 times and average the results. If this is not extremely close to mu*n then I will eat my hat. In R, sum(replicate(1000,sum(rexp(3000,1/50)))) / 1000
returns ~150000 (using sum for clarity instead of mean). Maybe scala is caching the seed or something?<p>I don't know what the "par" function does, but assuming it doesn't do anything crazy, the answer for all three of those expressions should be exactly 150,000, because they just reorder the order of summation.</text></comment> | <story><title>A single line to 3 cashiers is ~3x faster than a separate line for each cashier</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082933921432686.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dxbydt</author><text>scala&#62; import org.apache.commons.math.distribution.{ExponentialDistributionImpl=&#62;expo}<p>//pc = process customer, with a mean time mu per customer<p>scala&#62; def pc(mu:Int):Double= new expo(mu).sample<p>// q = queue of n customers with mean process time mu<p>scala&#62; def q(n:Int,mu:Int):Double=(1 to n).map(_=&#62;pc(mu)).sum<p>scala&#62; // put 3000 people in 1 queue with mean process time 50<p>scala&#62; (1 to 1000).map(_=&#62;q(3000,50)).sum/1000<p>res43: Double = 83107.37275937156<p>scala&#62; //now put 1000 people each in 3 separate queues with the same mean process time as before<p>scala&#62; (1 to 1000).map(_=&#62;(1 to 3).par.map(_=&#62;q(1000,50)).sum).sum/1000<p>res45: Double = 200010.29627921886<p>200010 = ~3x83107, so yeah, single line to 3 cashiers is ~3x faster than a separate line for each cashier.<p>// Now make 1 queue that feeds into shortest of the 3 queues<p>scala&#62; def qq(n:Int,mu:Int)=(1 to 3).par.map(_=&#62;{(1 to n/3).map(_=&#62;pc(mu)).sum}).sum<p>scala&#62; (1 to 10000).map(_=&#62;qq(3000,50)).sum/10000<p>res70: Double = 141824.974765643<p>So our single queue feeding into 3 separate queues still beats 3 separate independent queues.<p>edited to address MaysonL's question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaysonL</author><text>But of course this is BS, because the three queues are not independent. Try it with 1 queue which feeds into whichever of the three queues is currently shortest. And of course, in grocery stores, where one can unload one's cart while the person ahead is being processed, there's an advantage to multiple lines.</text></comment> |
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