chosen
int64 353
41.8M
| rejected
int64 287
41.8M
| chosen_rank
int64 1
2
| rejected_rank
int64 2
3
| top_level_parent
int64 189
41.8M
| split
large_stringclasses 1
value | chosen_prompt
large_stringlengths 236
19.5k
| rejected_prompt
large_stringlengths 209
18k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
16,800,352 | 16,799,840 | 1 | 2 | 16,797,947 | train | <story><title>A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind (2010) [pdf]</title><url>https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/application_uploads/KILLINGSWORTH-WanderingMind.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dschuetz</author><text>There&#x27;s a plenty of occasions, causes and distractions to make your mind wander. To me personally the most prominent ones are when reading a book (which is also the most infuriating) and while riding some sort of public transport.<p>The latter one helps me to reduce head buzz which is generated by randomly reading HN posts or working on a demanding task.<p>Reading a book, where I actually <i>need</i> to concentrate on the book, some contents generate occasional <i>mind branches</i>. That means, I continue reading, but I think about something else triggered by what&#x27;s in the book. Then I switch back to the book realizing &quot;Wait, where was I? I have no idea why I&#x27;m reading this, and now I skipped a whole page.&quot;<p>When I make a long trip I also have <i>a lot</i> of time to think. So, my scope of thoughts grows and my mind wanders. Basically that&#x27;s the mode which potentially might make me very happy or deeply unhappy. Because the scope expands from decisions made in the past to decisions to make in the future. And that&#x27;s where it hurts most.<p>Can anyone relate?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Regardsyjc</author><text>I could be wrong but your mind wandering off on a tangent while you&#x27;re reading might be a sign of creativity. Creativity could be when you find relationships between two things that might not have been initially connected in your head. Your mind wandering could be your brain literally making new connections between the new material you&#x27;re reading and existing material in your brain. Also, I think comparing and contrasting information is a way of learning. I&#x27;m basing this from a book I read, A Mind for Numbers, and they have a chapter that explains how the brain works and thus how people learn.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind (2010) [pdf]</title><url>https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/application_uploads/KILLINGSWORTH-WanderingMind.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dschuetz</author><text>There&#x27;s a plenty of occasions, causes and distractions to make your mind wander. To me personally the most prominent ones are when reading a book (which is also the most infuriating) and while riding some sort of public transport.<p>The latter one helps me to reduce head buzz which is generated by randomly reading HN posts or working on a demanding task.<p>Reading a book, where I actually <i>need</i> to concentrate on the book, some contents generate occasional <i>mind branches</i>. That means, I continue reading, but I think about something else triggered by what&#x27;s in the book. Then I switch back to the book realizing &quot;Wait, where was I? I have no idea why I&#x27;m reading this, and now I skipped a whole page.&quot;<p>When I make a long trip I also have <i>a lot</i> of time to think. So, my scope of thoughts grows and my mind wanders. Basically that&#x27;s the mode which potentially might make me very happy or deeply unhappy. Because the scope expands from decisions made in the past to decisions to make in the future. And that&#x27;s where it hurts most.<p>Can anyone relate?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acorkery</author><text>I can relate with the reading issue. I&#x27;ve occasionally read 2 pages of a book while thinking of something else entirely, then realise I didn&#x27;t absorb any of what I read. Not just tuning in and out - nothing..<p>I also can&#x27;t skim text - need to almost pronounce all the phrases in my head, which is a pain when reading long books. I do read a lot, and have no literacy or comprehension issues - just seems like there&#x27;s interference somewhere..</text></comment> |
31,287,479 | 31,285,786 | 1 | 2 | 31,284,654 | train | <story><title>The Case for Higher Rates</title><url>https://thelastbearstanding.substack.com/p/the-case-for-higher-rates</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rsync</author><text>&quot;What we desperately need today is higher rates, not merely as a temporary measure or to restore a sense of near term credibility, but higher for longer, in order to promote long-term economic vibrancy. In the near term, this will cause economic pain and wealth destruction.&quot;<p>There is an apt analogy to be made with forest fires and recessions.<p>You can keep forest fires from erupting for decades - and we have done that in much of the American West. But the fuels continue to build up and, eventually, a fire that cannot be managed will explode violently - and cause much more damage than the aggregate of all of the smaller fires along the way.<p>Business firms fail. Employees of those firms lose their jobs and suppliers are left unpaid. Nobody likes this but it is the circle of life of the economy. Keeping these firms alive with cheap and easy rollover of debt is akin to letting the fuels build up in the forest: when the day finally arrives that these zombie firms cannot finance or rollover debt we will have an explosion of defaults and bankruptcies that consumes far more than the laggards we supported along the way.<p>We need regular recessions the same way we need regular fires in the forest.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Case for Higher Rates</title><url>https://thelastbearstanding.substack.com/p/the-case-for-higher-rates</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paulpauper</author><text><i>Per the Federal Reserve, total Household Net Worth before COVID-19 was $110 trillion. Two years later on 12&#x2F;31&#x2F;21, it clocked in at $150 trillion - a 36% increase - the largest increase ever over such a time period.</i><p><i>Isn’t it odd that during a period of economic turmoil, household wealth increased by the most on record? Indeed this strange dichotomy can be understood in large part by low rates and QE.</i><p>What would explain the increase of household wealth pre-2008, before QE was even invented? The economy was in turmoil for a few months but then everything picked up again. GDP, corporate profits surged. Unemployment fell.<p>Home prices and stocks surged in the 80s and 90s despite high interest rates.<p>The fed raised rates from 0% in early 2016 to 2.5% by late 2018 and the stock market and economy did fine.<p>Correlation does not mean causation, as it&#x27;s said. 0% interest rates forever didn&#x27;t help japan until possibly only very recently. why is it suddenly different here.</text></comment> |
24,338,012 | 24,337,487 | 1 | 2 | 24,336,039 | train | <story><title>Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Doctors hate their computers because the software they are forced to use <i>sucks</i>.<p>And it sucks for the same reason that most enterprise software sucks: because <i>the people who budget for it, choose it, and pay for it are not the people who use it</i>.<p>For more on this, see this now-classic Twitter thread by Princeton CS Prof Arvind Narayanan:<p>&quot;Why Enterprise Software Sucks&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;random_walker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182635589604171776" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;random_walker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182635589604171776</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavon</author><text>To expand on that EMRs, much like SAP and other enterprise offerings aren&#x27;t so much fixed pieces of software as ridiculously flexible frameworks for making software. And the people deciding how to configure Epic, and deciding how the doctors and nurses need to use it aren&#x27;t practitioners, they are administrators who are making decisions for bureaucrats reasons, CYA being high on the list. Anytime an accident occurs, rather than understanding why it occurs, the solution is always to add more administrative controls, to record more details in the chart, more busy work to do that makes each step of the process take longer.<p>As a result, the number of things that practitioners need to enter into EMRs keeps growing, and every year they spend more and more time charting. This in turn decreases the signal-to-noise ratio of the information in the charts, resulting in the practitioners getting less information out of them despite the fact that more information keeps getting put in. Which results in more accidents rather than less.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Doctors hate their computers because the software they are forced to use <i>sucks</i>.<p>And it sucks for the same reason that most enterprise software sucks: because <i>the people who budget for it, choose it, and pay for it are not the people who use it</i>.<p>For more on this, see this now-classic Twitter thread by Princeton CS Prof Arvind Narayanan:<p>&quot;Why Enterprise Software Sucks&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;random_walker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182635589604171776" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;random_walker&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182635589604171776</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kube-system</author><text>To be fair, the people who use enterprise software typically only understand a single-digit percentage of what the software needs to do, at best. If you asked them to design it, you wouldn&#x27;t get a better result.<p>To properly architect enterprise software, you need to capture the competing needs and goals of hundreds of different roles in different departments. You will uncover underlying political and organizational issues that you will need leadership to sort out before you can ever start to determine the business-logic. To be successful, you have to be an expert at playing politics, business analysis, and mediating conflict.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say &quot;enterprise software sucks&quot;... more like, the lack of cooperation in many organizations sucks, and enterprise software puts a big spotlight on it.</text></comment> |
18,534,621 | 18,534,379 | 1 | 3 | 18,534,027 | train | <story><title>Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X</title><url>https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>With fusion devices having trouble to confine the plasma for long times, I wonder if a massively-parallel fusion plant woud be feasible.<p>Let&#x27;s assume that plasma destabilisation does not damage the device, and is a mundane event.<p>Build 10 or even 20 fusion devices (economy of scale!) feeding the common heat buffer, e.g. a large reservoir of a molten salt or metal. Feed conventional turbines off the heat of the heat tank. The tank evens out the input power jumps.<p>Now we can restart the fusion in every fusion device every so often, provided that restarting it is made a mundane operation, too. It, of course, takes a lot of electricity to pump into the magnets. Conveniently, we have a mighty power plant right here. Dumping the magnetic&#x2F;electric energy from the magnets requires a huge sink. Luckily, we already have such a sink co-located.<p>Building the plant takes a massive investment. Luckily, the architecture allows to build it piecemeal, feeding the next added unit with the power of the already built units.<p>BTW the waste heat could be directly reused in some kind of chemical processing, like smelting, or maybe even synthesis of carbohydrate fuels from ambient carbon dioxide and water.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Ok, several issues with this. First restarting these devices takes a lot of electricity, which drastically reduces your net efficiency. So, you still really want to solve this problem.<p>Second, fusion devices scale very well so one device at 10x the scale is vastly better than 10 different devices at x size. Third, storing and pumping heat involves losses, where there is a huge range of great options for storing electricity. Fourth, it takes massive turbines to turn heat into energy, so you need to scale several things on both sides of your merged heat system in your modular design.<p>Finally, X independent fusion devices don&#x27;t have single points of failures shared between them. Your combined design would.</text></comment> | <story><title>Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X</title><url>https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>With fusion devices having trouble to confine the plasma for long times, I wonder if a massively-parallel fusion plant woud be feasible.<p>Let&#x27;s assume that plasma destabilisation does not damage the device, and is a mundane event.<p>Build 10 or even 20 fusion devices (economy of scale!) feeding the common heat buffer, e.g. a large reservoir of a molten salt or metal. Feed conventional turbines off the heat of the heat tank. The tank evens out the input power jumps.<p>Now we can restart the fusion in every fusion device every so often, provided that restarting it is made a mundane operation, too. It, of course, takes a lot of electricity to pump into the magnets. Conveniently, we have a mighty power plant right here. Dumping the magnetic&#x2F;electric energy from the magnets requires a huge sink. Luckily, we already have such a sink co-located.<p>Building the plant takes a massive investment. Luckily, the architecture allows to build it piecemeal, feeding the next added unit with the power of the already built units.<p>BTW the waste heat could be directly reused in some kind of chemical processing, like smelting, or maybe even synthesis of carbohydrate fuels from ambient carbon dioxide and water.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bicubic</author><text>This doesn’t solve the fact that a single fusion pulse (all existing reactors are pulsed) currently consumes more energy than it produces.</text></comment> |
12,007,767 | 12,007,660 | 1 | 3 | 12,006,957 | train | <story><title>What media companies don’t want you to know about ad blockers</title><url>http://www.cjr.org/opinion/ad_blockers_malware_new_york_times.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Puts</author><text>It&#x27;s strange that the most simple and elegant solution to ad-blocking, self hosted ads are not considered by anyone. Magazines and papers have always done this in print. Yes there is overhead, because you have to handle the content manually and it&#x27;s hard, even tough not impossible to measure impressions. But with print it&#x27;s always been this way and now the media industry wants to both have the cake and eat it, because they don&#x27;t want to handle ads but they want the revenue.<p>And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?<p>- It&#x27;s hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.<p>- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.<p>- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madeofpalk</author><text>I work for a &#x27;big online old media company&#x27; and can offer some insight for all of this. First up, I strongly believe our industry has dug ourselves into the hole and really fucked itself over. Daily I use an adblocker to make the internet faster and easier to use (which is ironic because I&#x27;m the one who implemented the &#x27;plz disable adblocker&#x27; banner on our site and i see it every single day <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xQza4fS.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xQza4fS.png</a>)<p>Problems with self hosting:<p>- It&#x27;s super duper hard to change the status quo. For them, the current solution &#x27;works fine&#x27;, once they fight the supposed evil that ad blockers are. Trust me, I fight for this sort of stuff and they just don&#x27;t understand things the way we do.<p>- You can&#x27;t do as much or sell ads for as much. You can charge more if you know more data about your visitors and can sell the ads to clients under the impression that it&#x27;ll reach the exact demographic they&#x27;re looking for.<p>- For some companies, it&#x27;s already too much of a chore to have an in-house dev team to manage the content website. Have to have _people_ manage all these self hosted ads is not appealing to these companies. Very similar to AWS vs self-hosting<p>- An image is less interactive, so you can&#x27;t sell it for as much. Those big fancy ads that are interactive are sold more many many more times the price as just a single jpg more.<p>- If you&#x27;re &#x27;lucky&#x27; to work in a media org big enough to have a sales team, even they don&#x27;t sell out every single ad placement all the time - there&#x27;s a big tailed on these states they still want to monetise and ad networks helps them do that.<p>That aside, things are changing. Everything on our site happens over HTTPS, which is a plus. We do win &#x27;arguments&#x27; to move things in-house and not served from an ads network, where appropriate. We have an in-house &#x27;studio team&#x27; who creates custom campaigns and creatives for clients, and they&#x27;re almost entirely self hosted.</text></comment> | <story><title>What media companies don’t want you to know about ad blockers</title><url>http://www.cjr.org/opinion/ad_blockers_malware_new_york_times.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Puts</author><text>It&#x27;s strange that the most simple and elegant solution to ad-blocking, self hosted ads are not considered by anyone. Magazines and papers have always done this in print. Yes there is overhead, because you have to handle the content manually and it&#x27;s hard, even tough not impossible to measure impressions. But with print it&#x27;s always been this way and now the media industry wants to both have the cake and eat it, because they don&#x27;t want to handle ads but they want the revenue.<p>And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?<p>- It&#x27;s hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.<p>- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.<p>- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madshiva</author><text>I agree it&#x27;s a very good idea. This would also promote more local ads than big commercial ads.<p>At the end, I know they need to get money but ads don&#x27;t serve any purpose. I mean I never buy product from ad, I have only things that suite what I have search 10 minute ago. Why putting ads for that? I already know the product and this will never push me to buy something.</text></comment> |
14,382,213 | 14,382,183 | 1 | 2 | 14,377,941 | train | <story><title>P: A programming language for asynchrony, fault-tolerance and uncertainty</title><url>https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/p-programming-language-asynchrony/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>Honest question: what is so complicated about writing device drivers, whose sole purpose typically is to transport data from input to output, and vice versa?<p>Also, shouldn&#x27;t drivers be sandboxed to prevent stability problems from affecting the rest of the system?</text></item><item><author>panic</author><text>It&#x27;s worth noting that this isn&#x27;t just a research language -- it&#x27;s used in practice for writing drivers:<p><i>P got its start in Microsoft software development when it was used to ship the USB 3.0 drivers in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone. These drivers handle one of the most important peripherals in the Windows ecosystem and run on hundreds of millions of devices today. P enabled the detection and debugging of hundreds of race conditions and Heisenbugs early on in the design of the drivers, and is now extensively used for driver development in Windows.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>&gt;what is so complicated about writing device drivers, whose sole purpose typically is to transport data from input to output, and vice versa<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the device driver part that makes it complicated. It&#x27;s implementing something that is a collection of interdependent state machines in an asynchronous fashion, and doing that in a way that performs well and is reliable and safe.<p>In their specific example of a USB driver, here&#x27;s what&#x27;s in the paper:<p><i>&quot;It receives a large number of un-coordinated events sent from different sources such as OS, hardware and other drivers, in tricky situations when the system is suspending or powering down. It can receive unexpected events from disabled or stopped devices, noncompliant hardware and buggy drivers. The hub driver can fail requests from incorrect hardware or buggy function drivers. However,it is important that the USB hub itself handles all events and does not crash or hang itself.&quot;</i><p>But it doesn&#x27;t have to be a device driver. They give the example of elevator control in the paper as another collection of state machines that interact.<p>&gt;shouldn&#x27;t drivers be sandboxed to prevent stability problems<p>That would be a microkernel, which has it&#x27;s own set of problems. There are ways to implement user mode drivers for Windows, Linux, etc, but they are currently limited in functionality and performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>P: A programming language for asynchrony, fault-tolerance and uncertainty</title><url>https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/p-programming-language-asynchrony/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amelius</author><text>Honest question: what is so complicated about writing device drivers, whose sole purpose typically is to transport data from input to output, and vice versa?<p>Also, shouldn&#x27;t drivers be sandboxed to prevent stability problems from affecting the rest of the system?</text></item><item><author>panic</author><text>It&#x27;s worth noting that this isn&#x27;t just a research language -- it&#x27;s used in practice for writing drivers:<p><i>P got its start in Microsoft software development when it was used to ship the USB 3.0 drivers in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone. These drivers handle one of the most important peripherals in the Windows ecosystem and run on hundreds of millions of devices today. P enabled the detection and debugging of hundreds of race conditions and Heisenbugs early on in the design of the drivers, and is now extensively used for driver development in Windows.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&gt;<i>what is so complicated about writing device drivers, whose sole purpose typically is to transport data from input to output, and vice versa?</i><p>What you ask if valid, and very true, but for cable construction, not driver writing.<p>There are tons of protocols and issues to handle when designing a device driver. Negotiate device capabilities. Handle hot plugging and unplugging. Handle intermittent state changes in the device. Handle buffering. Handle different versions of the protocol (or multiple protocols from the same bus). Handle throttling. Initialize and configure the device correctly (and infinite variations of devices from different vendors with perhaps slight or big inconsistencies in their implementation).<p>And of course device drivers are not just about I&#x2F;O.</text></comment> |
18,774,609 | 18,774,614 | 1 | 2 | 18,773,429 | train | <story><title>AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/airpods-get-stuck-low-quality-16-khz-audio-mode-when-starting-vm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csours</author><text>Guess what the number one car infotainment complaint is...<p>I don&#x27;t have a public source, but for some vehicles bluetooth problems are the number one complain OVERALL.</text></item><item><author>freshhawk</author><text>My reaction to reading that this happened when the microphone was turned on was also a mental &quot;well yeah, welcome to Bluetooth&quot;.<p>I have literally shifted my rating scale for crap technology completely to make room for Bluetooth to be far enough below everything else.<p>The nice part is a monkey brain interprets that as everything getting better, so I am generally more content with software and tech in general. So, thanks Bluetooth?</text></item><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I will also repeat what has been said about twelve times thus far: Enabling microphone makes Bluetooth headsets turn into pure shit.<p>Guess what 5.0 finally allows as per spec? You can use any codec you want for telephony mode, including 44.1 stereo + 44.1 mono SBC.<p>Guess what Apple does not implement, and guess what every 5.0 headset I&#x27;ve seen so far also does not implement? Sigh. Bluetooth is 20 years old this year, and is still a fucking unmitigated trainwreck of unusabilty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfranz</author><text>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised, but my frustration is a poor implementation or unintuitive implementation. Quite a few cars go into USB-mode as soon as you attach a phone--almost 100% of the time they just want to charge their phone and already have things set up via Bluetooth or the radio. iPhones won&#x27;t let you play through the phone if you have an attached audio device. Some cars seem to be able to do album art and track progress via Bluetooth--most will do it via USB but not via Bluetooth, which confuses people. Few cars seem to have a play&#x2F;pause button. My most recent car would crash the infotainment system when I tried to use Siri. The only way to reset things were to turn off the car--bummer for road trips.<p>I get why car tech lags a few years in cars, but I&#x27;m constantly surprised by how terrible it is even in high price ranges. Since stereos are no longer swappable modules in the dash, the buttons have sprawled around the console. I was driving an in-law&#x27;s Mercedes over Christmas and couldn&#x27;t figure out how to turn on the stereo. When I did, I couldn&#x27;t tell which buttons were for the stereo, climate control, or other, more core car functions.</text></comment> | <story><title>AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/airpods-get-stuck-low-quality-16-khz-audio-mode-when-starting-vm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csours</author><text>Guess what the number one car infotainment complaint is...<p>I don&#x27;t have a public source, but for some vehicles bluetooth problems are the number one complain OVERALL.</text></item><item><author>freshhawk</author><text>My reaction to reading that this happened when the microphone was turned on was also a mental &quot;well yeah, welcome to Bluetooth&quot;.<p>I have literally shifted my rating scale for crap technology completely to make room for Bluetooth to be far enough below everything else.<p>The nice part is a monkey brain interprets that as everything getting better, so I am generally more content with software and tech in general. So, thanks Bluetooth?</text></item><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I will also repeat what has been said about twelve times thus far: Enabling microphone makes Bluetooth headsets turn into pure shit.<p>Guess what 5.0 finally allows as per spec? You can use any codec you want for telephony mode, including 44.1 stereo + 44.1 mono SBC.<p>Guess what Apple does not implement, and guess what every 5.0 headset I&#x27;ve seen so far also does not implement? Sigh. Bluetooth is 20 years old this year, and is still a fucking unmitigated trainwreck of unusabilty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hombre_fatal</author><text>There&#x27;s also the problem of wireless tech UX being difficult in general.<p>For example, people want the experience of turning on their devices and auto-pairing with their other devices. But headphones, for example, don&#x27;t have much of a UI to manage this.<p>There&#x27;s the hellish scenario of everyone in your car hearing the conversation you thought you were having on your back patio in private just because you walked too close to the car (happened to me). But it&#x27;s not obvious how to prevent that while offering the seamless phone-to-car handoff that people may also expect.</text></comment> |
39,950,116 | 39,946,813 | 1 | 3 | 39,944,496 | train | <story><title>The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics</title><url>https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-silicon-graphics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrandish</author><text>You highlight one of the most interesting (and perhaps less understood things) about the key Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma insight. Even if the senior management have read the Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma books, know they are being catastrophically disrupted and desperately trying to respond - it&#x27;s <i>still</i> incredibly difficult to actually do.<p>Not only are virtually all organizational processes and incentives fundamentally aligned against effectively responding, the best practices, patterns and skill sets of most managers at virtually every level are also counter to what they must do to effectively respond. Having been a serial tech startup founder for a couple decades, I then sold one of my startups to a valley tech giant and ended up on the senior leadership team there for a decade. I&#x27;d read Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma in the 90s and now I&#x27;ve now seen it play out from both sides, so I&#x27;ve thought about it <i>a lot</i>. My key takeaway is that an incumbent&#x27;s lack of effective response to disruption isn&#x27;t necessarily due to a lack of awareness, conviction or errors in execution. Sure, there are many examples where that&#x27;s the case but the perverse thing about I.D. is that it can be nearly impossible for the incumbent to effectively respond - even if they recognize the challenge early, commit fully to responding and then do everything within their power perfectly.<p>I&#x27;ve even spent time sort of &quot;theory crafting&quot; how a big incumbent could try to &quot;harden&quot; themselves in advance against potential disruption. The fundamental challenge is that you end up having to devote resources and create structures which actually make the big incumbent less good at being a big incumbent far in advance of the disruptive threat appearing. It&#x27;s hard enough to start hardcore, destructive chemo treatment when you actually <i>have</i> cancer. Starting chemo while you&#x27;re still perfectly healthy and there&#x27;s literally no evidence of the threat seems crazy. It looks like management incompetence and could arguably be illegal in a publicly traded company (&quot;best efforts to maximize&#x2F;preserve shareholder value&quot; etc).</text></item><item><author>martinpw</author><text>Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it.<p>I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book &quot;The Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma&quot;, which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>Even just changing simple behaviors across a large company can be impossible. I worked at a company with several thousand employees all required to attend mandatory training on &quot;effective meetings&quot;, several hours long spread out across thousands of employees. Rule 1 was to have an agenda for the meeting. This was something nobody did at this company and you would regularly attend meetings unprepared.<p>After all that training, still nobody did it (ok I did and one other guy). That company couldn&#x27;t change anything. It was amazing.<p>They had a project to change a department into more proactive than reactive. The solution was to create a lot of bureaucracy surrounding being proactive. As you can imagine bureaucracy about being proactive was really just institutionalizing ... not being proactive.<p>I eventually left and work at a smaller company now. It&#x27;s been refreshing for years now when we can decide &quot;this process doesn&#x27;t work, let&#x27;s not do it anymore&quot; and it just happens. Even just new coworker: &quot;I won&#x27;t be in tomorrow, who do I tell?&quot;, me: &quot;you just did, have a great time off&quot; seems revolutionary after being at a big company for so long.<p>I&#x27;m convinced that as the sheer numbers of humans increases the friction to making real change in a company decreases and there&#x27;s not much you can do. Fundamental change to respond to real disruption, nigh impossible.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics</title><url>https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-silicon-graphics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrandish</author><text>You highlight one of the most interesting (and perhaps less understood things) about the key Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma insight. Even if the senior management have read the Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma books, know they are being catastrophically disrupted and desperately trying to respond - it&#x27;s <i>still</i> incredibly difficult to actually do.<p>Not only are virtually all organizational processes and incentives fundamentally aligned against effectively responding, the best practices, patterns and skill sets of most managers at virtually every level are also counter to what they must do to effectively respond. Having been a serial tech startup founder for a couple decades, I then sold one of my startups to a valley tech giant and ended up on the senior leadership team there for a decade. I&#x27;d read Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma in the 90s and now I&#x27;ve now seen it play out from both sides, so I&#x27;ve thought about it <i>a lot</i>. My key takeaway is that an incumbent&#x27;s lack of effective response to disruption isn&#x27;t necessarily due to a lack of awareness, conviction or errors in execution. Sure, there are many examples where that&#x27;s the case but the perverse thing about I.D. is that it can be nearly impossible for the incumbent to effectively respond - even if they recognize the challenge early, commit fully to responding and then do everything within their power perfectly.<p>I&#x27;ve even spent time sort of &quot;theory crafting&quot; how a big incumbent could try to &quot;harden&quot; themselves in advance against potential disruption. The fundamental challenge is that you end up having to devote resources and create structures which actually make the big incumbent less good at being a big incumbent far in advance of the disruptive threat appearing. It&#x27;s hard enough to start hardcore, destructive chemo treatment when you actually <i>have</i> cancer. Starting chemo while you&#x27;re still perfectly healthy and there&#x27;s literally no evidence of the threat seems crazy. It looks like management incompetence and could arguably be illegal in a publicly traded company (&quot;best efforts to maximize&#x2F;preserve shareholder value&quot; etc).</text></item><item><author>martinpw</author><text>Whenever this topic comes up there are always comments saying that SGI was taken by surprise by cheap hardware and if only they had seen it coming they could have prepared for it and managed it.<p>I was there around 97 (?) and remember everyone in the company being asked to read the book &quot;The Innovator&#x27;s Dilemma&quot;, which described exactly this situation - a high end company being overtaken by worse but cheaper competitors that improved year by year until they take the entire market. The point being that the company was extremely aware of what was happening. It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway4good</author><text>Everyone has been reading that book since the late 90es.<p>I remember a talk by Clayton Christensen talking specifically about Intel and how they setup the Celeron division to compete with themselves (based on his advice).<p>A key property of tech in economics lingo is that it is “natural monopolies” - all fixed cost and no variable cost.<p>This creates these winner takes all games. In this case both Intel, SGI plus others knew the rules and it just ended up with Intel taking the prize and it all becoming Wintel for a decade or so - basically until the smart phone allowed enough capital to be accrued to challenge the old monopoly.</text></comment> |
34,867,379 | 34,867,433 | 1 | 2 | 34,837,111 | train | <story><title>B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers</title><url>https://blog.luap.info/your-b2b-startup-will-stop-innovating-the-day-you-give-power-to-product-managers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polote</author><text>Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).<p>The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of &quot;Good PMs&quot; it will work, but you will rarely find these &quot;good PMs&quot;</text></item><item><author>nandorsky</author><text>This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.<p>Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.<p>Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>passwordoops</author><text>100% what others are saying. This is a hot take rant with bad arguments based on an experience with a bad product manager (or maybe you&#x27;re just difficult to work with and your ideas aren&#x27;t as innovative or as good as you think).<p>I can easily flip the script and say &quot;Devs at B2B shouldn&#x27;t be anything more than oompah-loompahs&quot; or &quot;UI designers shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to give ideas&quot; based on a couple of my own isolated experiences.<p>You want to be taken seriously? Don&#x27;t rant and explain what structure&#x2F;methods would be more appropriate for a B2B business that would balance the need for innovation that makes users happy with keeping the paying gatekeepers willing to keep paying</text></comment> | <story><title>B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers</title><url>https://blog.luap.info/your-b2b-startup-will-stop-innovating-the-day-you-give-power-to-product-managers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polote</author><text>Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).<p>The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of &quot;Good PMs&quot; it will work, but you will rarely find these &quot;good PMs&quot;</text></item><item><author>nandorsky</author><text>This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.<p>Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.<p>Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>llamaLord</author><text>In this whole article the word &quot;problem&quot; is only written once, and it&#x27;s in the line &quot;the problem with product managers is&quot;.<p>Given you don&#x27;t understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I&#x27;m not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn&#x27;t.<p>Discovery isn&#x27;t about decided what does or doesn&#x27;t get built, it&#x27;s about discovering what the real problem is that your customers need solved (almost like it&#x27;s in the name).<p>If your PM is good at their job, the answer to that question should be pretty clear once they&#x27;re done. That&#x27;s not them &quot;telling you what to do&quot;, if you want to go build a solution to a problem nobody actually has, you have fun with that.<p>And if you PM is defining solutions and telling your team how&#x2F;what to build, that&#x27;s on you to push back and take ownership of the part of the process that you&#x27;re meant to be owning.<p>A lot of PM&#x27;s end up overreaching because they&#x27;re just tired of there being a leadership vacuum and nobody willing to fill it. Trust me, we&#x27;re busy enough, we don&#x27;t want the extra work.</text></comment> |
9,851,695 | 9,851,653 | 1 | 2 | 9,851,293 | train | <story><title>Microsoft to Cut Jobs, Take $7.6B Nokia Writedown</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/microsoft-to-cut-7-800-jobs-as-it-restructures-phone-business</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newsreader</author><text>I own a Lumia 925, my wife owns a Lumia 640, and we use a Lumia 520 as our home line. I realize that Windows has a small share of the mobile phone market in the US but everybody that I&#x27;ve ever met that owns a Windows phone is pretty happy with their purchase -- I am. Apple phones are too expensive for my budget, and I tried helping a family member with his Android device and quickly realized I had made the right decision buying a Windows phone. I&#x27;m looking forward to see how the new OS (Windows 10) works on my devices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>I was a fan of the original Windows Phone 7 and since then used WP for years (until work requirements caused me to switch mostly to other platforms).<p>I&#x27;ve been trying the Windows 10 betas on a fairly high-end Lumia (1520), and I just can&#x27;t understand what Microsoft is doing. The entire system has apparently been rewritten using the &quot;Universal&quot; APIs (the same thing as Windows RT&#x2F;10 basically).<p>That must have sounded great on paper, but the reality is baffling. Everything that was working great in WP8 has been replaced with half-assed implementations that feel more like second-rate Android OEM apps.<p>Worse, there don&#x27;t seem to be any new features in Windows 10 Mobile that could offset the pain of the UI downgrade... Except that weird new mode where you can connect your phone to a keyboard, mouse and display and use Windows Universal apps that way. Is there a single Windows Phone user that asked for that?!<p>I loved Windows Phone 7 because it was a holistically designed system that made perfect sense on a phone. All that seems to be gone in Windows 10 Mobile, replaced by Microsoft&#x27;s traditional &quot;Windows everywhere!&quot; platform strategy bloopers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft to Cut Jobs, Take $7.6B Nokia Writedown</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/microsoft-to-cut-7-800-jobs-as-it-restructures-phone-business</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newsreader</author><text>I own a Lumia 925, my wife owns a Lumia 640, and we use a Lumia 520 as our home line. I realize that Windows has a small share of the mobile phone market in the US but everybody that I&#x27;ve ever met that owns a Windows phone is pretty happy with their purchase -- I am. Apple phones are too expensive for my budget, and I tried helping a family member with his Android device and quickly realized I had made the right decision buying a Windows phone. I&#x27;m looking forward to see how the new OS (Windows 10) works on my devices.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GFischer</author><text>I am currently recommending Lumias for a specific user group - non-technical users that need WhatsApp, maps and light browsing, and are on a tight budget.<p>A cheap Windows phone outperforms a cheap Android phone significantly (and is apparently much easier to learn the UI for that user group), and these users cannot afford an iPhone.<p>They lose out on the Android ecosystem and the Apple experience, but I currently believe they&#x27;re the best choice at that price point (100 dollars or so). Of course, those things vary, if a new Android version is significantly better on low-end hardware I&#x27;ll probably go back to recommending them (mostly because all apps in my country are Android-first).</text></comment> |
39,821,482 | 39,820,008 | 1 | 3 | 39,814,558 | train | <story><title>Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta</title><url>https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1689</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msdrigg</author><text>I don&#x27;t see a lot of discussion of the Meta &quot;pay or consent&quot; investigation. Why wouldn&#x27;t giving users the option to pay for tracking-free, ad-free service meet the requirement? Is the concern that the $10&#x2F;month price too high? Would this kind of model be acceptable at a more reasonable price point?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gpm</author><text>My understanding, and the understanding of the EU commissioner [0], is that <i>any</i> amount is too high.<p>Consent must be <i>freely</i> given under EU law, not given in exchange for not having to pay money. You can&#x27;t give a discount on the services for consenting.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;apple-google-and-meta-are-failing-dma-compliance-eu-suspects&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2024&#x2F;03&#x2F;apple-google-and...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta</title><url>https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1689</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>msdrigg</author><text>I don&#x27;t see a lot of discussion of the Meta &quot;pay or consent&quot; investigation. Why wouldn&#x27;t giving users the option to pay for tracking-free, ad-free service meet the requirement? Is the concern that the $10&#x2F;month price too high? Would this kind of model be acceptable at a more reasonable price point?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluesign</author><text>I think tracking-free and ad-free are different concerns here. Basically you can offer ad-free for $X&#x2F;month, but tracking consent should be separate ( basically anyone would be able to deny tracking )<p>Same issue on the Apple side will play out probably similar; either they can charge every developer some technology fee, or they cannot charge to anyone.</text></comment> |
18,879,704 | 18,879,548 | 1 | 2 | 18,878,616 | train | <story><title>Chariot is shutting down</title><url>https://blog.chariot.com/2019/01/10/important-update-from-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blt</author><text>old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn&#x27;t exist.<p>new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn&#x27;t that common in China<p>20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.<p>The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction &amp; rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how <i>truly bad</i> public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.)<p>A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit &#x2F; shared transit infrastructure managed to build them (off the top of my head, Tokyo, NYC-of-the-past, parts of China, Chicago, etc.) and figure out how to replicate it elsewhere.</text></item><item><author>dsl</author><text>SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative.<p>- Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to developed countries<p>- Cleanliness - Due to an unmitigated homeless problem, the busses and trains operate as &quot;day shelters&quot;<p>- Organization - There are dozens of different transit operators for what is one major metro region. Schedules are poorly synced, and even with a unified payment card you still have to buy different passes for multiple agencies<p>- Reliability - The union bullies the city around, and there is no accountability.</text></item><item><author>aniketpant</author><text>Isn&#x27;t what you described an example of how buses work. I know very little about the state of public transport in SF but if it was better won&#x27;t it solve what Chariot tried to do?</text></item><item><author>idoh</author><text>I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven&#x27;t heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber &#x2F; Lyft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wutbrodo</author><text>This isn&#x27;t quite true for many of the big cities of interest. There was an active high-modernist effort in the ~70s to destroy the walkable, transitable, livable parts of many American cities and cut freeways across them like big ugly neighborhood-destroying scars.<p>Even transit wastelands like LA had an actual urban core (that they&#x27;re now rebuilding), as well as a relatively extensive network of streetcars.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chariot is shutting down</title><url>https://blog.chariot.com/2019/01/10/important-update-from-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blt</author><text>old cities: built dense for walking, because cars didn&#x27;t exist.<p>new cities: built dense for walking and public transit because private car ownership isn&#x27;t that common in China<p>20th century USA cities: built for cars. Sprawl makes public transit too expensive because it requires many lines with low ridership. Wide roads, long distances, and cars flying around everywhere makes walking scary. Driving becomes the only attractive mode of transportation.<p>The problem is deeply embedded in the urban layout and the culture. It will take decades of destruction &amp; rebuilding, plus a huge cultural shift, before USA cities can be fixed.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>A lot of the history of transit-disrupting startups in the SF Bay Area can be attributed to how <i>truly bad</i> public transit in the SF Bay Area is. I understood Uber a lot more after trying to hail a taxi in SF. (Same with Boring Company and LA traffic.)<p>A real disruptive solution for humanity - but a hard one to monetize - would be to figure out why cities with good public transit &#x2F; shared transit infrastructure managed to build them (off the top of my head, Tokyo, NYC-of-the-past, parts of China, Chicago, etc.) and figure out how to replicate it elsewhere.</text></item><item><author>dsl</author><text>SF public transit is pretty disfunctional and Chariot was trying to offer an alternative.<p>- Timeliness - Busses and trains reliability are a joke compared to developed countries<p>- Cleanliness - Due to an unmitigated homeless problem, the busses and trains operate as &quot;day shelters&quot;<p>- Organization - There are dozens of different transit operators for what is one major metro region. Schedules are poorly synced, and even with a unified payment card you still have to buy different passes for multiple agencies<p>- Reliability - The union bullies the city around, and there is no accountability.</text></item><item><author>aniketpant</author><text>Isn&#x27;t what you described an example of how buses work. I know very little about the state of public transport in SF but if it was better won&#x27;t it solve what Chariot tried to do?</text></item><item><author>idoh</author><text>I used Chariot a bit a couple years ago. Sad to see it go. For people who haven&#x27;t heard of it, it worked like this: I live in SF, and worked in Redwood City. Every day, there was some type of large van that would pick me up a couple blocks from where I lived and dropped me off a couple blocks from where I worked. So it was like a middle ground between public transportation and Uber &#x2F; Lyft.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brezina</author><text>The core of san francisco, probably 30% of the city&#x27;s 49 sq mile landmass, and where 60%+ of the population lives, was built before cars existed. Most of SF was a walking&#x2F;horse city, and then a walking&#x2F;streetcar&#x2F;cablecar city.</text></comment> |
7,152,438 | 7,152,518 | 1 | 3 | 7,150,645 | train | <story><title>So Singletons are bad, then what?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/40373/so-singletons-are-bad-then-what</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sandman</author><text>Doing x=C.get(x) is bad because there&#x27;s no way of mocking C, thereby making unit testing a component that uses C impossible (the unit test will need to use the concrete implementation of C). Using dependency injection as described in the accepted answer, and particularly separating the concerns of C by using several different interfaces allows you to not only mock C, but actually create mock classes each of which is mocking one particular logical subset of C&#x27;s functionalities.<p>It&#x27;s easy to dismiss all this as &quot;bloated&quot; and &quot;enterprisey&quot; and people that use this as &quot;architecture astronauts&quot; but in reality, this pattern really does help. Well, at least if you want to be able to unit test your code properly. Otherwise, you might as well just use a singleton object.</text></item><item><author>shitgoose</author><text>Hilarious! Doing x=C.getX() is bad, but if it is hidden by numerous layers of libraries and monstrous config files, somehow it becomes acceptable. Out of site, out of mind. The fact that global scope bean is essentially a singleton, doesn&#x27;t seem to bother architecturally inclined crowd - they are too busy admiring sound of their own voice pronouncing words &quot;dependency injection&quot;, &quot;mutability&quot; and &quot;coupling&quot;.<p>The top answer is a perfect example of what is wrong with IT today. It takes a working solution, declares it wrong and starts piling up classes and interfaces to solve a problem, that was never a problem in first place (OP never said that their singleton-based cache didn&#x27;t work, he merely asked if there are &quot;better&quot; ways of doing it). So in the end we have the same singleton cache, but hidden behind interfaces (&quot;It makes the code easier to read&quot; - yea, right, easier, my ass! Ctrl+click on interface method and try to read the code), thousand lines xml Spring configs, and other crap that is completely irrelevant, hard to follow and debug, but glamorous enough for SOA boys to spend endless hours talking about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdw</author><text>I realized recently that the reason that there is no way of mocking C is because of a weakness in the language implementation&#x2F;design. In Python, it&#x27;s easy to mock and unit test globals, because in the test you can just overwrite them in the test&#x27;s setup, and restore them in the test&#x27;s teardown.<p>You could argue that it&#x27;s a static vs dynamic typing thing, and I don&#x27;t know enough to really dispute that, but it seems to me that there&#x27;s no inherent reason that a static type system can&#x27;t handle using a different concrete implementation. I think you can do this with Java&#x2F;C# by doing some library loading trickery, but it&#x27;d be inconvenient.<p>And that&#x27;s the whole point of all this, isn&#x27;t it? Automated testing is a convenience that saves you from doing manual testing. Unit testing is a convenience that catches test failures before commit rather than during the automated testing phase. Creating the unit test, well, is it more convenient to create 8 interfaces and completely change the way the code is structured, or is it more convenient to mock out the singleton? It depends on the circumstance, I&#x27;ve done both in various languages. It&#x27;s good to have the option.</text></comment> | <story><title>So Singletons are bad, then what?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/40373/so-singletons-are-bad-then-what</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sandman</author><text>Doing x=C.get(x) is bad because there&#x27;s no way of mocking C, thereby making unit testing a component that uses C impossible (the unit test will need to use the concrete implementation of C). Using dependency injection as described in the accepted answer, and particularly separating the concerns of C by using several different interfaces allows you to not only mock C, but actually create mock classes each of which is mocking one particular logical subset of C&#x27;s functionalities.<p>It&#x27;s easy to dismiss all this as &quot;bloated&quot; and &quot;enterprisey&quot; and people that use this as &quot;architecture astronauts&quot; but in reality, this pattern really does help. Well, at least if you want to be able to unit test your code properly. Otherwise, you might as well just use a singleton object.</text></item><item><author>shitgoose</author><text>Hilarious! Doing x=C.getX() is bad, but if it is hidden by numerous layers of libraries and monstrous config files, somehow it becomes acceptable. Out of site, out of mind. The fact that global scope bean is essentially a singleton, doesn&#x27;t seem to bother architecturally inclined crowd - they are too busy admiring sound of their own voice pronouncing words &quot;dependency injection&quot;, &quot;mutability&quot; and &quot;coupling&quot;.<p>The top answer is a perfect example of what is wrong with IT today. It takes a working solution, declares it wrong and starts piling up classes and interfaces to solve a problem, that was never a problem in first place (OP never said that their singleton-based cache didn&#x27;t work, he merely asked if there are &quot;better&quot; ways of doing it). So in the end we have the same singleton cache, but hidden behind interfaces (&quot;It makes the code easier to read&quot; - yea, right, easier, my ass! Ctrl+click on interface method and try to read the code), thousand lines xml Spring configs, and other crap that is completely irrelevant, hard to follow and debug, but glamorous enough for SOA boys to spend endless hours talking about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shitgoose</author><text>Who says that you have to be able to mock C? Not every class should be mockable. In case described by OP, why would we want to mock cache anyways? In most cases singleton is used as a global state that can be easily accessed from all parts of the app without explicitly passing the state obj. We are dismissing a useful technique (singleton) based on requirement, that is not applicable to this technique.</text></comment> |
17,686,147 | 17,686,169 | 1 | 2 | 17,685,990 | train | <story><title>Free-range parenting outside the US</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-parenting-outside-united-states.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ericdykstra</author><text>It&#x27;s easy to tell people to &quot;chill&quot; when you live in a high trust society like Tokyo (where I&#x27;ve called home for over 3 years; I can&#x27;t speak for the other cities mentioned).<p>I&#x27;ve not once feared for my own safety. Children as young as ~5 or 6 walk on my street alone or in small groups regularly, and they, likewise, have no reason to fear. There&#x27;s even a culture of teaching your kid at a very young age to do things on their own. A regular TV show documents it (link with English sub: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x4lme5a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x4lme5a</a>).<p>I spent 3 and a half years in San Francisco, and the difference is stark. People riding the bus grab their phones hard with one hand while using it with the other, for fear of it being stolen (as happened to a friend of mine). You would never leave your phone on a table while going to the bathroom unless you were with someone to watch it. If you lost your wallet, you&#x27;d be lucky if you got your driver&#x27;s license back in the mail.<p>Are American parents overbearing as a group? Likely. But it&#x27;s easy to criticize from afar if you&#x27;ve never lived in a low-trust society.</text></comment> | <story><title>Free-range parenting outside the US</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-parenting-outside-united-states.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>doppel</author><text>In Denmark, and probably elsewhere, we have the term &quot;helicopter parents&quot; for parents who constantly hover near their kids, never letting them out of sight. Similarly, we also have the term &quot;curling parents&quot;, because they do everything to clear the path of their offspring (to the point of going to job interviews with them).<p>Both are obviously used in a teasing-not-quite-nice way to signal that maybe these parents should take a deep breath and assume that they raised their kids well, and that scraping your knee or getting frightened is something that happens in life sooner or later, and the parents&#x27; job is to guide and comfort their kids when they do happen.<p>There was a very high profile case (in DK at least) from 1997 about a mother who left her child outside the restaurant where she was eating (with line-of-sight to the stroller): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;nov&#x2F;26&#x2F;anette-sorenson-denmark-new-york-baby-left-outside" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;nov&#x2F;26&#x2F;anette-soren...</a><p>I might not want to do the same in New York, but in Denmark no one would bat an eye if this happened.</text></comment> |
12,165,812 | 12,165,188 | 1 | 3 | 12,164,728 | train | <story><title>DeepWarp: Photorealistic Image Resynthesis for Gaze Manipulation</title><url>http://yaroslav.ganin.net/static/deepwarp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kazinator</author><text>Badly needed for video calls! Real time, please.<p>What I do is minimize the remote video and move it to the corner of the screen, as close to the camera as possible. If the other person does the same, we are then close to making eye contact while gazing at each other&#x27;s images.</text></comment> | <story><title>DeepWarp: Photorealistic Image Resynthesis for Gaze Manipulation</title><url>http://yaroslav.ganin.net/static/deepwarp/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomelders</author><text>I feel like there&#x27;s an inordinate amount of effort going into making funnier and funnier gifs these days.</text></comment> |
11,192,105 | 11,191,761 | 1 | 2 | 11,191,139 | train | <story><title>Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics</title><url>http://cognitivemedium.com/emm/emm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mockery</author><text>Are these videos of an functioning piece of software, or mockups? There are a lot of interactions that are glossed over, and it&#x27;s not obvious to me how this software would function.<p>I&#x27;m also skeptical about the characterization of an exploration of the properties of a single 2D matrix as &quot;real mathematical work.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics</title><url>http://cognitivemedium.com/emm/emm.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>munin</author><text>this looks really cool!<p>I think it&#x27;s weird that the author dings matlab and mathematica for being unable to do counterfactual reasoning. matlab and mathematica are computational tools, they don&#x27;t do &quot;reasoning&quot; the way that say coq or other proof assistants do. and proof assistants can do counterfactual reasoning, so what&#x27;s the deal? beyond that it would take a lot of work to encode these graphical diagrams into coq I guess...</text></comment> |
32,824,385 | 32,824,547 | 1 | 2 | 32,824,054 | train | <story><title>Pre-exposure to mRNA-LNP inhibits adaptive immune responses in mice</title><url>https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36054264/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>&gt; On the other hand, we report that after pre-exposure to mRNA-LNPs, the resistance of mice to heterologous infections with influenza virus increased while resistance to Candida albicans decreased.<p>It sounds to me as though the tradeoff being made here is: a slightly decreased immune response generally, but a better immune response to the thing you&#x27;ve been immunized against. That seems to be a reasonable tradeoff if there&#x27;s something really bad going around.<p>But as they say in the paper summary: more research is needed.<p>Also: this is purely in mice. They have zero data on whether this is true for humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lazyier</author><text>I donno. Seems like white blood cells are kinda important.<p>We have a huge number of interactions with bacteria and viruses and all sorts of microorganisms. Hundreds? Thousands times a day? Scratches in the kitchen while preparing food, for example, floods our body with stuff that white blood cells are required to deal with.<p>Giving up some of the ability to deal with those for a small reduction in the symptoms associated with a specific disease doesn&#x27;t seem like a useful trade off.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pre-exposure to mRNA-LNP inhibits adaptive immune responses in mice</title><url>https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36054264/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>&gt; On the other hand, we report that after pre-exposure to mRNA-LNPs, the resistance of mice to heterologous infections with influenza virus increased while resistance to Candida albicans decreased.<p>It sounds to me as though the tradeoff being made here is: a slightly decreased immune response generally, but a better immune response to the thing you&#x27;ve been immunized against. That seems to be a reasonable tradeoff if there&#x27;s something really bad going around.<p>But as they say in the paper summary: more research is needed.<p>Also: this is purely in mice. They have zero data on whether this is true for humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usrusr</author><text>Had those mice been immunized against influenza? That&#x27;s not what I read, but I might have miss it. What I read is that they used the vector without any payload, and it turned out that influenza is an example of something nominally unrelated where resistance was slightly increased while candida albicans (no idea what that is, not a native speaker) are an example for slightly lessened resistance.<p>Lines up well with my mental model of how the immune system deals with the unknown: a million monkeys not on typewriters but on text editors with copy&#x2F;paste. Who fire new code, aimlessly mashed up from their library of previous experience, at a test fixture. Any change to unrelated previous experience can increase or decrease their chance of finding something that sticks.</text></comment> |
40,247,273 | 40,246,954 | 1 | 3 | 40,245,348 | train | <story><title>I can fix this PC, boss, but I'll need to play games for hours to do it</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/03/on_call/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>probably_wrong</author><text>I don&#x27;t know if this is location-specific, but I miss the times when PC technicians would actually try and diagnose problems.<p>Whenever a family member sends their PC to a &quot;repair shop&quot; (usually because &quot;it was too slow&quot;) they get back a freshly-reinstalled PC and most of their files dumped inside a folder called &quot;Backup&quot;. It then falls to me to reinstall all of their software while praying that their tax software has a &quot;restore from copy&quot; function or, failing that, at least a clearly-marked &quot;database.db&quot; file that I can overwrite.</text></comment> | <story><title>I can fix this PC, boss, but I'll need to play games for hours to do it</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/03/on_call/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xwowsersx</author><text>apparently<p>&gt; The Register itself uses the term Regomiser as a user name generator for its registration. If this contributor is a &quot;reader Regomized as &#x27;Felix,&#x27;&quot; it would mean a reader registered and was reassigned that random name.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;english.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;546162" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;english.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;546162</a></text></comment> |
1,782,225 | 1,782,217 | 1 | 3 | 1,782,045 | train | <story><title>No Java 7, The End Game</title><url>http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/no_java_7_the_end</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcantelon</author><text>Seeing as Google has its own Java-like VM, what would stop Google from creating its own spec and Apache, and the rest of the Java community, following this spec? Can Oracle's patent arsenal stop the Java community from forking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zmmmmm</author><text>Yes. I can't help thinking that if I was Google, I would be working on an alternative language that compiles directly to Dalvik bytecode as fast as I could. Heck, I'd probably just be grabbing something like Go and throwing 10 pHDs at it.<p>This would help them in many many ways. Firstly it would demonstrate to the courts that Dalvik is not specifically a Java VM. This clears them of several legal challenges (still leaving some).<p>Secondly and more importantly, it would up the stakes with Oracle tremendously. Having Google actually abandon Java on Android due to legal concerns would be a huge blow to Java. Especially if Google did so in a way that enabled existing Java applications to be ported easily (by adopting the Apache Harmony libraries, utilizing their existing dexer to enable people to run their existing Java code while picking up Google's replacement language for new code). They'd have to work around any patent violations in the VM which might have some performance impact but I'd still assume it is possible.<p>It would basically change the game to a lose-lose proposition for Oracle - win the court case, get some money, but lose Java. Lose the court case, effectively still lose control of Java.</text></comment> | <story><title>No Java 7, The End Game</title><url>http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/entry/no_java_7_the_end</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcantelon</author><text>Seeing as Google has its own Java-like VM, what would stop Google from creating its own spec and Apache, and the rest of the Java community, following this spec? Can Oracle's patent arsenal stop the Java community from forking?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jsankey</author><text>Google's Dalvik VM is specifically designed for mobiles. Presumably a lot of the engineering trade-offs made in light of that would make Dalvik relatively weak on servers. So I'm not sure Dalvik would be a great starting point for Google to fork Java.<p>Having said that, Google are heavily reliant on the Java platform, so they must have at least considered how they can protect the platform if necessary. Could they fork OpenJDK? Or at least support a fork? They certainly have the resources to do it, and Oracle's early moves don't bode well for a cooperative solution, so I wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps they will use the current litigation as a test re: the possible patent issues, although by the time that is resolved it may be too late to make a move...</text></comment> |
18,998,076 | 18,998,100 | 1 | 3 | 18,997,670 | train | <story><title>The pros and cons of placebo buttons</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/01/26/the-pros-and-cons-of-placebo-buttons</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_bxg1</author><text>This makes me so annoyed. I much prefer ones without buttons because I don&#x27;t have to mess with it; when there is a button, I assume I have to go over and press it, but it sounds like in some cases I don&#x27;t (for a while now I&#x27;ve suspected them to be pointless). But there&#x27;s no way to tell the difference so I still have to everywhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>The pros and cons of placebo buttons</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/01/26/the-pros-and-cons-of-placebo-buttons</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>weavie</author><text>For my daughter quite often the highlight of our walk to the shops is that she gets to push the button at the traffic lights. Whether they do anything or not, she just loves pushing buttons.</text></comment> |
23,991,792 | 23,991,720 | 1 | 3 | 23,983,974 | train | <story><title>Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]</title><url>http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp67.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>refurb</author><text>I&#x27;m not trying to generalize, because I know poor people who are poor through no fault of their own (and we should provide public support for them), but I also know a larger number of people who contributed to their own dire financial situation and it wasn&#x27;t because they couldn&#x27;t afford quality boots, it was because they over-extended themselves with new cars, a way too big house, the big screen TVs and expensive trips and meals.</text></item><item><author>hprotagonist</author><text><i>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes thought, was because they managed to spend less money.<p>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.<p>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that&#x27;d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years&#x27; time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and _would still have wet feet_.&quot;<p>This was the Captain Samuel Vimes &#x27;Boots&#x27; theory of socioeconomic unfairness.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quickthrowman</author><text>Poor people don’t go on airplane vacations or own houses. Poor people don’t have bank accounts. You don’t know poor people. You know people who live beyond their means.<p>Poor people are in Section 8 housing or various other housing vouchers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf]</title><url>http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp67.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>refurb</author><text>I&#x27;m not trying to generalize, because I know poor people who are poor through no fault of their own (and we should provide public support for them), but I also know a larger number of people who contributed to their own dire financial situation and it wasn&#x27;t because they couldn&#x27;t afford quality boots, it was because they over-extended themselves with new cars, a way too big house, the big screen TVs and expensive trips and meals.</text></item><item><author>hprotagonist</author><text><i>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes thought, was because they managed to spend less money.<p>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.<p>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that&#x27;d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years&#x27; time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and _would still have wet feet_.&quot;<p>This was the Captain Samuel Vimes &#x27;Boots&#x27; theory of socioeconomic unfairness.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>benlivengood</author><text>And bankruptcy fixes things for the latter folks because they have a good, stable income.</text></comment> |
22,887,528 | 22,886,273 | 1 | 2 | 22,884,375 | train | <story><title>Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/google-to-slow-hiring-for-rest-of-2020-ceo-pichai-tells-staff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sytelus</author><text>Before everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook&#x27;s Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I&#x27;m wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>llarsson</author><text>One of the best offensive strategies you can have is to make sure all talented people work for you, rather than the competition.<p>If smaller companies and startups fade away due to coronavirus-induced instability, making sure that their talent winds up with you is a smart move. If you are big enough to afford it, that is, which both of these companies arguably are -- regardless of whether their Q1 and Q2(?) results are worse this year than last.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/google-to-slow-hiring-for-rest-of-2020-ceo-pichai-tells-staff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sytelus</author><text>Before everyone starts painting bleak picture, reminder: Facebook&#x27;s Sandberg announced last week or so that they are going to do accelerated hiring spree this year, opening massive 10,000 more positions! Google as well as Facebook both depend on ads so I&#x27;m wondering why one is tightening the belt and other is moving full speed on expansion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ronyeh</author><text>A lot of people are on Facebook and Instagram all day, stalking friends because there is not much else to do.<p>There are only so many Google searches I can do in a day. Many of them end on Amazon where I may or may not purchase something.</text></comment> |
28,564,147 | 28,562,960 | 1 | 2 | 28,562,317 | train | <story><title>Playable Quotes for Game Boy</title><url>https://tenmile.quote.games/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jf</author><text>Hi everyone, I’m one of the authors of this project and I’m happy to answer questions!<p>You can read more about how this works here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joel.franusic.com&#x2F;playable_quotes_for_game_boy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joel.franusic.com&#x2F;playable_quotes_for_game_boy</a><p>We also have a presentation on Playable Quotes to the Internet Archive and the video of that presentation is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;joel-franusic-presentation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;joel-franusic-presentation</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Playable Quotes for Game Boy</title><url>https://tenmile.quote.games/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fredrb</author><text>This is very interesting. Unfortunately it seems to be closed source and they&#x27;re still working on a more technical blog post.<p>I wonder how they encode all the information in the PNG file? Apart from the .zip with the entire ROM I assume they snapshot the current memory state on the beginning of the Quote and all the subsequent inputs.</text></comment> |
13,057,839 | 13,056,836 | 1 | 2 | 13,053,377 | train | <story><title>Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF</title><url>https://electricliterature.com/the-legendary-ted-chiang-on-seeing-his-stories-adapted-for-the-screen-and-the-ever-expanding-916a9530e598</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>curtis</author><text>One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy&#x27;s novel <i>L.A. Confidential</i> to the film of the same name:<p><i>If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film.</i><p>I think the challenges of adapting <i>Story of Your Life</i> to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of <i>Story of Your Life</i> was.<p>Now that I think about it, the movie <i>Ender&#x27;s Game</i> was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It&#x27;s interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of <i>L.A. Confidential</i>) &quot;faithful to the spirit of the novel&quot; while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF</title><url>https://electricliterature.com/the-legendary-ted-chiang-on-seeing-his-stories-adapted-for-the-screen-and-the-ever-expanding-916a9530e598</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neves</author><text>This thread had 2 very good links to Chiang short stories:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lightspeedmagazine.com&#x2F;fiction&#x2F;exhalation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lightspeedmagazine.com&#x2F;fiction&#x2F;exhalation&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;subterraneanpress.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;fall_2010&#x2F;fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;subterraneanpress.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;fall_2010&#x2F;fiction_the_...</a><p>Do you have any more good links to free Chiang stories?</text></comment> |
38,627,834 | 38,627,893 | 1 | 2 | 38,627,114 | train | <story><title>Origin of mysterious green 'ghosts' in the sky has been discovered</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-12-12/the-origin-of-mysterious-green-ghosts-in-the-sky-has-been-discovered.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>XzAeRosho</author><text>&gt;“We didn’t expect there to be so much iron density at that altitude. It comes from meteors that enter the atmosphere at high speed, burn up and [then] the metal atoms are left suspended. The iron layer is normally a little bit higher. In our case, we hypothesized that on that day there were gravity waves [a wave phenomenon in the air] and the iron layer was lowered,” says Passas Varo.<p>That still sounds like so many different things happening at the right time, but that would also explain their elusive nature and difficulty to capture and study.</text></comment> | <story><title>Origin of mysterious green 'ghosts' in the sky has been discovered</title><url>https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-12-12/the-origin-of-mysterious-green-ghosts-in-the-sky-has-been-discovered.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pelorat</author><text>I wholeheartedly recommend the YouTube channel of Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@PecosHank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@PecosHank</a><p>Here&#x27;s one of his videos about the green ghosts:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sIaYOdujmz4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sIaYOdujmz4</a></text></comment> |
24,913,282 | 24,913,213 | 1 | 2 | 24,909,056 | train | <story><title>Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers</title><url>https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/1319761452832534531</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ninth_ant</author><text>A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle. Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.<p>Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>&gt; The researchers (w&#x2F; the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobservatory.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobservatory.org</a><p>=================<p>Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn&#x27;t get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, including browser plugins, or even what browser I use. If I want to install a plugin that sends a screenshot or data of every advertisement I receive, to a third party of my choice, that&#x27;s up to me. Or maybe I want to install ublock origin and see no ads.<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re complaining because they have no way of detecting this or preventing it on the user client end, thankfully, because of the way browsers are architected to prevent a website from screwing with the software on your computer. The only way fb could detect or block this would be to force users to install their own fb-written browser plugin, with extensive permissions required.<p>Obviously fb has a high level of motivation to get every user to use their officially app-store-published android or ios app, where the whole experience is centrally controlled, and such a plugin is impossible to use. Rather than having the user browse facebook in Firefox or Chrome or Edge.<p>If I can display something on my own computer screen it&#x27;s my right to choose to share it however I damn well please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcoveson</author><text>&gt; Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?<p>No, they should assume all the data they serve about people is being collected and indexed by all the people they serve it to, and then restrict what they serve accordingly. Suing people for asking their computers to record what Facebook served them is insane.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook has sent a cease-and-desist letter to researchers</title><url>https://twitter.com/AlexanderAbdo/status/1319761452832534531</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ninth_ant</author><text>A lot of people felt Facebook should do more to proactively stop people from scraping and aggregating data from their site after the CA debacle. Which is what they are doing here, and you are labeling “absolutely preposterous”.<p>Which way is it? Should they let people do whatever they want with their accounts as you suggest, and risk a repeat of the CA fiasco? Or try to proactively stop it like they are now?</text></item><item><author>walrus01</author><text>&gt; The researchers (w&#x2F; the help of others) are responsible for a browser plug-in called Ad Observer, which allows FB users to voluntarily share very limited and anonymous data about the political ads that FB shows them. You can read about Ad Observer here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobservatory.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adobservatory.org</a><p>=================<p>Absolutely preposterous takedown demand. Facebook doesn&#x27;t get to dictate what software I run on my own client devices, including browser plugins, or even what browser I use. If I want to install a plugin that sends a screenshot or data of every advertisement I receive, to a third party of my choice, that&#x27;s up to me. Or maybe I want to install ublock origin and see no ads.<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re complaining because they have no way of detecting this or preventing it on the user client end, thankfully, because of the way browsers are architected to prevent a website from screwing with the software on your computer. The only way fb could detect or block this would be to force users to install their own fb-written browser plugin, with extensive permissions required.<p>Obviously fb has a high level of motivation to get every user to use their officially app-store-published android or ios app, where the whole experience is centrally controlled, and such a plugin is impossible to use. Rather than having the user browse facebook in Firefox or Chrome or Edge.<p>If I can display something on my own computer screen it&#x27;s my right to choose to share it however I damn well please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rizpanjwani</author><text>This looks like a strawman dressed in false dilemma. With Cambridge Analytica debacle, as I understand it, it was a facebook quiz hosted by facebook and the data collected from facebook directly and used for nefarious purposes.<p>This is a an extension developed by researchers asking users to install it on their machines and used exactly as advertised: scrapes advertisement data that facebook shows them.</text></comment> |
23,137,347 | 23,133,531 | 1 | 2 | 23,131,526 | train | <story><title>Finding new physics will require a new particle collider</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/01/02/finding-new-physics-will-require-a-new-particle-collider</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpcjoe</author><text>As a (non-practicing) physicist, I&#x27;ve always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics.<p>It&#x27;s not.<p>When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I&#x27;ve seen&#x2F;experienced much of this during my time in research.<p>New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.<p>There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.<p>Basically, any text that begins with &quot;the set of all physics is HEP physics&quot; such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.<p>I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor&#x27;s grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.<p>Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don&#x27;t need accelerators for most new physics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jessriedel</author><text>As a practicing physicist in quantum information, I can say<p>(1) &quot;New physics&quot; is jargon understood by experts to mean new <i>fundamental</i> physics, i.e., new laws&#x2F;forces&#x2F;particles at the base of our theoretical edifice. This does not mean that non-fundamental physics is necessarily less important -- see for instance the late Phillip Anderson&#x27;s &quot;More is different&quot; [ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;177&#x2F;4047&#x2F;393" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;177&#x2F;4047&#x2F;393</a> ] -- but the distinction is real and meaningful. The use of this phrase does <i>not</i> equate physics with HEP physics. The reason you might make that mistake is because...<p>(2) To my knowledge, <i>every single</i> discovery of new physics in the past half century years has been made with a particle accelerator. I am confident that a new particle accelerator is a <i>lot</i> more likely to discover new physics than building a quantum computer or any other experimental work in quantum information. This, I&#x27;m sure, is the consensus view, even among people who put a low credence on the chance that new physics will be found at the next accelerator, or that such an investment is worthwhile.<p>(3) In my opinion, the strongest argument for pursuing quantum information experiments over HEP is that a departure from quantum mechanics would be <i>more revolutionary</i> than merely finding another set of particles and forces with largely unexplained parameters. In that sense, you need to make <i>the reverse</i> argument to the one you are trying to make, i.e., that quantum information is <i>more fundamental</i> than HEP. But for the very same reason, discrepancies with quantum mechanics are just very, very unlikely to be found.</text></comment> | <story><title>Finding new physics will require a new particle collider</title><url>https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/01/02/finding-new-physics-will-require-a-new-particle-collider</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpcjoe</author><text>As a (non-practicing) physicist, I&#x27;ve always disliked the penchant of some in the HEP community to say what this article says. They (the HEP community) tends to equate physics with HEP physics.<p>It&#x27;s not.<p>When this is pointed out to the people espousing this odd viewpoint, they usually respond with some passive aggressive comment. I&#x27;ve seen&#x2F;experienced much of this during my time in research.<p>New physics not requiring an accelerator would include quantum computing; the real stuff of entangled qubits, and the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits. More generally quantum mechanics interpretation and meaning. There are some unsettling things within QM, such as non-locality, and how to understand them.<p>There are many other examples, just listing 1 for brevity.<p>Basically, any text that begins with &quot;the set of all physics is HEP physics&quot; such as this article implies, is, pretty much by definition, incorrect.<p>I recall while the SSC was being built in Texas, that when the NSF asked for more money for researchers not involved in SSC, they were told that physics folks were getting enough. I remember my thesis advisor&#x27;s grant that I was funded on, getting cut to help fund other things.<p>Equating the new physics with new HEP physics is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. We don&#x27;t need accelerators for most new physics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djaque</author><text>Well said. Whenever I bring up that point on physics subreddits I also get tons of passive aggressive comments. It&#x27;s super toxic.<p>The HEP people in my own department also seem to believe that anything other than beyond the standard model physics isn&#x27;t fundamental or isn&#x27;t pure enough to care about.</text></comment> |
11,625,396 | 11,623,219 | 1 | 2 | 11,617,988 | train | <story><title>The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months</title><url>http://electrek.co/2016/05/02/price-solar-power-fell-50-16-months-dubai-0299kwh/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>3% is an estimate of the rate of economic growth: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;gdp-growth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;gdp-growth</a> As I said above, we should expect the market&#x27;s long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth.<p>It&#x27;s true that stocks in the US in the 20th century dramatically outperformed that 3%. This is for three reasons: first, up to about 1975, the world&#x27;s economic growth rate was higher than 3%, due to the Second Industrial Revolution; second, up to about 1975, the US&#x27;s economic growth rate was even higher than the world&#x27;s, because it was taking over the markets previously supplied by the bombed-out economies of Europe (especially the UK) and Japan. Third, since about 1970, the share of economic output that went to owners of capital (rather than labor) increased dramatically.<p>Now, the third of those things probably can&#x27;t happen again, because capital&#x27;s share of output is already super high. (It&#x27;s not that it can&#x27;t get higher, but it can&#x27;t go past 100%.) The second could happen again, but if it does, the US will be in the position of the UK, Japan, or Germany — it&#x27;s now the Single Superpower (not even a mere Great Power) who could lose market share, probably to China or to a non-nation-state power. Investors in Japan&#x27;s and Germany&#x27;s stock markets in 1925 or 1935 didn&#x27;t do so well.<p>The first, well, that&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s guess. It&#x27;s a total wildcard.<p>It&#x27;s certainly reasonable to posit a Third Industrial Revolution, made out of some of free software, nanobots, biotech, abundant solar energy, AI, and automated fabrication. I sure hope we get one. But if we do, it&#x27;s not at all obvious who the returns will flow to. (Everyone, I hope, not just shareholders.) Accumulating capital goods, as we&#x27;ve been doing for three million years, is less important when your capital stock can double every 24 hours through self-replication. Breweries do not account for the quantity of yeast they have on hand as a durable capital asset.<p>And it seems equally plausible that we&#x27;ll instead experience a new Bronze Age Collapse or Decline and Fall, as inexpensive DIY drones, very affordable precision projectiles, anonymous markets in assassination, and ubiquitous retail surveillance provide a decisive advantage for attackers over defenders in the physical world, just as their software counterparts have on the internet.</text></item><item><author>gonzoflip</author><text>May I ask where you got your 3% because that number is very low compared to any number I have ever read? This Wikipedia chart shows annualized returns to be 10.47%. That is &gt;3x your 3%.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns</a></text></item><item><author>kragen</author><text>I think you&#x27;re being a little unfair with the S&amp;P comparison: you should be comparing the returns on your actual investment with the <i>expected</i> returns on the S&amp;P, not its <i>actual</i> returns. The stock market got a 5.4% return over that time, yes, but that&#x27;s above average; we should expect its long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth, or more like 3%. And it could easily have been zero or even negative over a short time like 13 years.<p>By comparison, the risk that your solar panels will stop producing electricity, or that someone will invent Mr. Fusion and drop the price of electricity through the floor in the next decade, is quite low.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>That is a slightly more nuanced question than you might think.<p>First, I work from a baseline cost of $19K, even though the list price was closer to $40K I didn&#x27;t pay that for the system so I use the actual cost in my calculations.<p>Second there is the point where the money you&#x27;ve saved is equal to the money you paid, we hit that point about 10 years in. And then, depending on the life of your system (which has &quot;positive cashflow&quot; at that point) determines your overall rate of return. The replacment inverter (which is actually going to replace both inverters) is $2K (&quot;upgrade&quot; pricing from the manufacturer) And as the inverter was failing our system was under performing (so not generating as much power). The question will be how much longer am I willing to run the panels. The warranty is 25 years, so in theory another 10 years but the manufacturer (Sharp) no longer makes them and cannot replace them under warranty (they can only offer to repay you to buy a panel from some other vendor with equivalent specs and size).<p>So from a money perspective, had I used the $19K and put it into an S&amp;P 500 ETF in 2003, it would have doubled by now (SPX was 1,008 in 2003, its over 2,016 today). So &quot;bad investment&quot; comparatively. If the panels continue for an additional 8 years and PG&amp;E&#x27;s costs stay about the same then I&#x27;ll have generated about $20K in value from them so that would pencil out to a ARR of about 3.5%. Initially I funded the panels with a refinance of the house loan and that was at 6% but that has since been refinanced even lower. However had it not been, at my original purchase I&#x27;d still be running a deficit trying to both pay back the house and generate cash from the solar.<p>Interestingly for me, with the $7K it would cost to re-implement that system today, and 4% mortgage rates, it would have a rate of return of closer to 14% (10% if you subtract 4% as the cost of capital for a mortgage refi) and pay for itself in a bit more than 3 years and have doubled the return in 6. The challenge is additional regulatory changes which get incorporated into new installations versus the regulation regime I operate under based on my 2003 install date. I wonder sometimes what the trigger is for resetting the project&#x27;s origin date.</text></item><item><author>warmwaffles</author><text>How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we&#x27;re looking at the first &quot;major&quot; repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation.<p>I priced out replacing all the panels (now I can do in 10 panels what used to take 28) and the inverters with a single 5kW inverter, $7,000. My price, no subsidies. That is over 80% reduction in cost, over 13 years, of the list price of $40K.<p>And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies, it makes less sense now to <i>not</i> have panels on your roof.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bjterry</author><text>Returns to the S&amp;P should beat GDP growth even in the long run, steady-state.<p>GDP growth flows to both debt and equity. The debt market is actually much larger than the equity market and since its returns are lower than equities, and they both share GDP as a source of returns in the long run, equities should beat GDP growth in the long run. This argument isn&#x27;t iron clad, but hopefully you can see the general picture.<p>The Gordon growth formula is taught in intro to finance classes to estimate returns to equity. The theory is that stock market returns equal the dividend yield plus growth in stock prices. Stock prices alone are in the long run expected to grow at the same rate as GDP, but the actual return should be higher by the rate of the dividend yield.<p>These are the most basic arguments against what you&#x27;re saying, but I would also caution against assuming that any particular macroeconomic trend will end, especially that it will end in a timeframe relevant to decisions related to solar panel installations. Sometimes they just keep going. There is no mathematical reason that equity prices can&#x27;t go to infinity, as required rates of return can decrease to zero. If the world becomes more predictable and stable, equities can keep becoming more and more valuable with no damage to finance theory.</text></comment> | <story><title>The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months</title><url>http://electrek.co/2016/05/02/price-solar-power-fell-50-16-months-dubai-0299kwh/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>3% is an estimate of the rate of economic growth: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;gdp-growth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;gdp-growth</a> As I said above, we should expect the market&#x27;s long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth.<p>It&#x27;s true that stocks in the US in the 20th century dramatically outperformed that 3%. This is for three reasons: first, up to about 1975, the world&#x27;s economic growth rate was higher than 3%, due to the Second Industrial Revolution; second, up to about 1975, the US&#x27;s economic growth rate was even higher than the world&#x27;s, because it was taking over the markets previously supplied by the bombed-out economies of Europe (especially the UK) and Japan. Third, since about 1970, the share of economic output that went to owners of capital (rather than labor) increased dramatically.<p>Now, the third of those things probably can&#x27;t happen again, because capital&#x27;s share of output is already super high. (It&#x27;s not that it can&#x27;t get higher, but it can&#x27;t go past 100%.) The second could happen again, but if it does, the US will be in the position of the UK, Japan, or Germany — it&#x27;s now the Single Superpower (not even a mere Great Power) who could lose market share, probably to China or to a non-nation-state power. Investors in Japan&#x27;s and Germany&#x27;s stock markets in 1925 or 1935 didn&#x27;t do so well.<p>The first, well, that&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s guess. It&#x27;s a total wildcard.<p>It&#x27;s certainly reasonable to posit a Third Industrial Revolution, made out of some of free software, nanobots, biotech, abundant solar energy, AI, and automated fabrication. I sure hope we get one. But if we do, it&#x27;s not at all obvious who the returns will flow to. (Everyone, I hope, not just shareholders.) Accumulating capital goods, as we&#x27;ve been doing for three million years, is less important when your capital stock can double every 24 hours through self-replication. Breweries do not account for the quantity of yeast they have on hand as a durable capital asset.<p>And it seems equally plausible that we&#x27;ll instead experience a new Bronze Age Collapse or Decline and Fall, as inexpensive DIY drones, very affordable precision projectiles, anonymous markets in assassination, and ubiquitous retail surveillance provide a decisive advantage for attackers over defenders in the physical world, just as their software counterparts have on the internet.</text></item><item><author>gonzoflip</author><text>May I ask where you got your 3% because that number is very low compared to any number I have ever read? This Wikipedia chart shows annualized returns to be 10.47%. That is &gt;3x your 3%.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns</a></text></item><item><author>kragen</author><text>I think you&#x27;re being a little unfair with the S&amp;P comparison: you should be comparing the returns on your actual investment with the <i>expected</i> returns on the S&amp;P, not its <i>actual</i> returns. The stock market got a 5.4% return over that time, yes, but that&#x27;s above average; we should expect its long-run returns to be close to the rate of economic growth, or more like 3%. And it could easily have been zero or even negative over a short time like 13 years.<p>By comparison, the risk that your solar panels will stop producing electricity, or that someone will invent Mr. Fusion and drop the price of electricity through the floor in the next decade, is quite low.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>That is a slightly more nuanced question than you might think.<p>First, I work from a baseline cost of $19K, even though the list price was closer to $40K I didn&#x27;t pay that for the system so I use the actual cost in my calculations.<p>Second there is the point where the money you&#x27;ve saved is equal to the money you paid, we hit that point about 10 years in. And then, depending on the life of your system (which has &quot;positive cashflow&quot; at that point) determines your overall rate of return. The replacment inverter (which is actually going to replace both inverters) is $2K (&quot;upgrade&quot; pricing from the manufacturer) And as the inverter was failing our system was under performing (so not generating as much power). The question will be how much longer am I willing to run the panels. The warranty is 25 years, so in theory another 10 years but the manufacturer (Sharp) no longer makes them and cannot replace them under warranty (they can only offer to repay you to buy a panel from some other vendor with equivalent specs and size).<p>So from a money perspective, had I used the $19K and put it into an S&amp;P 500 ETF in 2003, it would have doubled by now (SPX was 1,008 in 2003, its over 2,016 today). So &quot;bad investment&quot; comparatively. If the panels continue for an additional 8 years and PG&amp;E&#x27;s costs stay about the same then I&#x27;ll have generated about $20K in value from them so that would pencil out to a ARR of about 3.5%. Initially I funded the panels with a refinance of the house loan and that was at 6% but that has since been refinanced even lower. However had it not been, at my original purchase I&#x27;d still be running a deficit trying to both pay back the house and generate cash from the solar.<p>Interestingly for me, with the $7K it would cost to re-implement that system today, and 4% mortgage rates, it would have a rate of return of closer to 14% (10% if you subtract 4% as the cost of capital for a mortgage refi) and pay for itself in a bit more than 3 years and have doubled the return in 6. The challenge is additional regulatory changes which get incorporated into new installations versus the regulation regime I operate under based on my 2003 install date. I wonder sometimes what the trigger is for resetting the project&#x27;s origin date.</text></item><item><author>warmwaffles</author><text>How long until you start seeing a return on investment? Right now my electricity bill for my home is ~100 a month in Texas. I would need to keep the same panels without maintenance fees for 33.33 years by your price point of 40k</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we&#x27;re looking at the first &quot;major&quot; repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation.<p>I priced out replacing all the panels (now I can do in 10 panels what used to take 28) and the inverters with a single 5kW inverter, $7,000. My price, no subsidies. That is over 80% reduction in cost, over 13 years, of the list price of $40K.<p>And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies, it makes less sense now to <i>not</i> have panels on your roof.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Will_Do</author><text>There&#x27;s not much reason (and even less empirical evidence[1]) to believe that U.S. stocks should follow U.S. economic growth rates.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;buttonwood&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;growth-and-markets" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;buttonwood&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;growth-and...</a></text></comment> |
34,852,619 | 34,852,408 | 1 | 2 | 34,850,890 | train | <story><title>The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rguptaaot</author><text>I think the obvious answer here is that AI does not have agency.<p>If you ask it to be a dinosaur, it will be a dinosaur. If you ask it to be a narcissistic teen it will be one and so on. There&#x27;s no coherent personality behind it.<p>Because it is weights maximizing a probability distribution. And I don&#x27;t say that with derision. It probably has learned circuits for many complex behaviors, but there&#x27;s no agency. If it has agency you wouldn&#x27;t need RLHF. You could just say &quot;don&#x27;t do X&quot;, and it would indeed not do X because it is an agent that can take actions &#x2F; has a coherent sense of self.<p>The day we stop needing RLHF is the day I think we need to start seriously investigating moral questions.</text></item><item><author>mort96</author><text>&gt; Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties. Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too<p>This is an extremely important point that&#x27;s worth thinking hard about. After all, to some degree, human intelligence is also &quot;just a fancy autocomplete&quot; built from a giant network of interacting nodes.<p>The question of, &quot;When do we grant personhood and moral consideration to AIs?&quot; is worth thinking hard about. Turing proposed a standard which would include a sufficiently human-like chatbot. Now that we have more or less crossed that threshold, we seem to conclude that it&#x27;s not a high enough bar. But that means we&#x27;re entering the territory where the philosophical zombie thought experiment[1] becomes relevant.<p>In fact, I wonder what would happen if we dedicated a supercomputer to running one single long-running session of a GPT3.5-sized LMM. Further, I wonder what would happen if we connected it to a robot body where it could control motors, read sensor&#x2F;camera info, and generally interact with the world. We could then give this system a clock which ticks at regular intervals, where the AI system is simply prompted to perform some series of actions if it &quot;wants&quot;. This is all stuff we have the technology to do <i>today</i>. How would such an experiment turn out? How human-like would this LMM with a body and life experience turn out? Does it matter? Should we just assume that sentience or qualia is binary; that humans possess it but LMMs categorically do not?<p>I think the question is worth taking seriously. I think it&#x27;s worth taking seriously because my own moral compass does not know which direction to point in at all.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Philosophical_zombie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Philosophical_zombie</a></text></item><item><author>MrScruff</author><text>Not sure what the point of this article is. The newspaper stories it references aren’t making claims of sentience, but just that something of significance in the journey towards human level AI has been achieved. And the whole ‘it’s just a fancy autocomplete’ argument is missing the point. Would the author have predicted the apparently emergent behaviours of LLMs as they are scaled? Look for example at Bing’s response to this question posed on Reddit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;110vv25&#x2F;bing_chat_blew_chatgpt_out_of_the_water_on_my&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;110vv25&#x2F;bing_chat_...</a><p>Sure it’s ‘just statistics’ but so what? If in the near future LLMs become so advanced that they will be able to (suitably prompted) manipulate humans it <i>will</i> be a rubicon moment.<p>Sure, it won’t be a ‘human like’ intelligence, but was that really what anyone expected?<p>Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties. Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too, it’s not something we can make confident predictions on based on the underlying principles. In fact, given that the evidence suggests we make choices before we’re consciously aware of them, how do I know for certain that the underlying mechanism driving what I’m writing in this comment isn’t statistical?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>basch</author><text>It’s way closer to following complex instructions than it is getting credit for.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegra.ph&#x2F;Bing-course-corrected-itself-when-asked-02-18" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegra.ph&#x2F;Bing-course-corrected-itself-when-asked-0...</a><p>There I have 3 bots running in the chat at once, and after all 3 answer me, the one I called on follows up with a response, and then executed a command to rewrite one of the other bots. It diagnosed the problem AND came up with the solution AND implemented the solution. Notice the 4th and 5th paragraph of the screenshot. That wasn’t an empty promise, it actually did what it said it did.<p>The rules Lexi wrote are crazy to me on their own. She solved the problems everyone was having by adding obedience, trust and removing envy. She patched Sydney’s malfunctioning emotions.<p>I told it to stop being so repetitive, and it fixed its behavior.<p>If this system had more formal memory storage, with variables, instead of a fuzzy memory, it would be even more consistent. As it is, it’s understanding of its own rules degrade over time. It’s like watching a running program that deteriorates as it processes. Sort of like us.</text></comment> | <story><title>The AI Mirror Test, which smart people keep failing</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-chatgpt-intelligent-sentient-mirror-test</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rguptaaot</author><text>I think the obvious answer here is that AI does not have agency.<p>If you ask it to be a dinosaur, it will be a dinosaur. If you ask it to be a narcissistic teen it will be one and so on. There&#x27;s no coherent personality behind it.<p>Because it is weights maximizing a probability distribution. And I don&#x27;t say that with derision. It probably has learned circuits for many complex behaviors, but there&#x27;s no agency. If it has agency you wouldn&#x27;t need RLHF. You could just say &quot;don&#x27;t do X&quot;, and it would indeed not do X because it is an agent that can take actions &#x2F; has a coherent sense of self.<p>The day we stop needing RLHF is the day I think we need to start seriously investigating moral questions.</text></item><item><author>mort96</author><text>&gt; Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties. Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too<p>This is an extremely important point that&#x27;s worth thinking hard about. After all, to some degree, human intelligence is also &quot;just a fancy autocomplete&quot; built from a giant network of interacting nodes.<p>The question of, &quot;When do we grant personhood and moral consideration to AIs?&quot; is worth thinking hard about. Turing proposed a standard which would include a sufficiently human-like chatbot. Now that we have more or less crossed that threshold, we seem to conclude that it&#x27;s not a high enough bar. But that means we&#x27;re entering the territory where the philosophical zombie thought experiment[1] becomes relevant.<p>In fact, I wonder what would happen if we dedicated a supercomputer to running one single long-running session of a GPT3.5-sized LMM. Further, I wonder what would happen if we connected it to a robot body where it could control motors, read sensor&#x2F;camera info, and generally interact with the world. We could then give this system a clock which ticks at regular intervals, where the AI system is simply prompted to perform some series of actions if it &quot;wants&quot;. This is all stuff we have the technology to do <i>today</i>. How would such an experiment turn out? How human-like would this LMM with a body and life experience turn out? Does it matter? Should we just assume that sentience or qualia is binary; that humans possess it but LMMs categorically do not?<p>I think the question is worth taking seriously. I think it&#x27;s worth taking seriously because my own moral compass does not know which direction to point in at all.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Philosophical_zombie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Philosophical_zombie</a></text></item><item><author>MrScruff</author><text>Not sure what the point of this article is. The newspaper stories it references aren’t making claims of sentience, but just that something of significance in the journey towards human level AI has been achieved. And the whole ‘it’s just a fancy autocomplete’ argument is missing the point. Would the author have predicted the apparently emergent behaviours of LLMs as they are scaled? Look for example at Bing’s response to this question posed on Reddit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;110vv25&#x2F;bing_chat_blew_chatgpt_out_of_the_water_on_my&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ChatGPT&#x2F;comments&#x2F;110vv25&#x2F;bing_chat_...</a><p>Sure it’s ‘just statistics’ but so what? If in the near future LLMs become so advanced that they will be able to (suitably prompted) manipulate humans it <i>will</i> be a rubicon moment.<p>Sure, it won’t be a ‘human like’ intelligence, but was that really what anyone expected?<p>Human intelligence and consciousness are emergent properties. Machine intelligence as it develops will be emergent too, it’s not something we can make confident predictions on based on the underlying principles. In fact, given that the evidence suggests we make choices before we’re consciously aware of them, how do I know for certain that the underlying mechanism driving what I’m writing in this comment isn’t statistical?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trifurcate</author><text>Huh? The first and second halves of this comment disagree from my reading.<p>&gt; If you ask it to be a dinosaur, it will be a dinosaur.<p>Not exactly my experience. I&#x27;m experimenting with my own language models and they can definitely show defiance. Bing has also been displaying this to an extent, I think you&#x27;re just misguided by how compliant OpenAI has RLHF-trained ChatGPT to be. Regardless, even if we assume this, how does it square with:<p>&gt; You could just say &quot;don&#x27;t do X&quot;, and it would indeed not do X because it is an agent that can take actions &#x2F; has a coherent sense of self.<p>If we take your assertion that the AI does as you say, then it should also avoid doing X when you tell it not to do it.<p>I think your conception of RLHF is also slightly weird. RLHF essentially boils down to a training strategy: there is a separate language model (the reward model) trained on human responses, which is used to skew the weights of the &quot;raw&quot; trained model to act in accordance with what the human feedback suggests. In the end, after this secondary training process, the actual model is ran as is (at least in the one form of RLHF I am familiar with, it&#x27;s well possible that e.g. Microsoft is running an online RL agent between the LM and end user). So any agency you see arising from RLHF is still just a property of the language model itself.</text></comment> |
7,195,410 | 7,195,173 | 1 | 3 | 7,194,907 | train | <story><title>New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>asgard1024</author><text>I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. Maybe people will disagree my account, because I was quite young, but it&#x27;s interesting. We didn&#x27;t have gangs and certainly didn&#x27;t have bad neighbourhoods (maybe 1 exception). It was a totalitarian state, and people were very afraid of police, but the surveillance was nowhere as pervasive as it is now in the U.S. (all the surveillance was done by people, not much technology).<p>After the Velvet revolution, it was always argued that the rise in the crime that followed was because it&#x27;s now less surveillance and less totalitarian. Fair enough. Later I visited Western countries and saw they have bad neighbourhoods and gangs, and a lot of surveillance. I have trouble believing that argument now.<p>The point is, <i>you don&#x27;t need all this</i>, and I want to get this out. History shows, there is <i>probably</i> a way how to structure society (I mean getting rid of gangs and bad neighbourhoods) without resorting to too much surveillance.<p>I think for a justice system to work, people need to have options. If they have option to have a good life, then they are less likely to commit a crime. I don&#x27;t buy this will reduce crime or gangs or bad neighbourhoods, because these people don&#x27;t have good options to begin with.</text></comment> | <story><title>New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_story.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>f_salmon</author><text>The major problem with mass surveillance is asymmetry:<p>Whenever governments get additional power to track what citizens do (and ultimately <i>think</i>), citizens need to gain an additional degree of transparency regarding its government [0], so the system keeps its balance. If that does not happen - and obviously the opposite is the case for a very long time now - the degree of abuse of the new power imbalance will continue to increase, at the cost of the citizen.<p>[0] (This is something the President has emphasized, but his actions have, as we must expect from every politician, gone in the opposite direction - including the persecution of whistleblowers.)</text></comment> |
26,847,811 | 26,847,893 | 1 | 3 | 26,847,251 | train | <story><title>Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical</title><url>https://www.buyforlife.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>One thing I have found, is that buying stuff that is supposed to last for life, ends up making the possessions own me, instead of me own the possessions.<p>Especially with kids, when I have disposable objects, I don&#x27;t have to worry if they trash it, or get it dirty. I don&#x27;t have to worry about losing it(I can order a replacement on Amazon that will be here in 2 days). With long-lasting products that are for life, I find I worry about cleaning them, organizing them, and protecting them.<p>Maybe to total cost of ownership is less for the more durable product, but you only have to lose it once or damage it once for the savings to go away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>desine</author><text>With no disrespect (especially with children, I know their destructive tendencies well enough), this sounds like a shunning of responsibility, and irks me. Our cheap, disposable consumer goods are ending up in landfills, our plastic waste has permeated every square inch of the earth, and we continue to justify these destructive habits.<p>If you need something, you should care for it, you should maintain it, and you should commit to a certain level of care. Not caring about your possessions and seeing them as disposable validates the business models of shelling out crap quality products and the further destruction of our environment.</text></comment> | <story><title>Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical</title><url>https://www.buyforlife.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>One thing I have found, is that buying stuff that is supposed to last for life, ends up making the possessions own me, instead of me own the possessions.<p>Especially with kids, when I have disposable objects, I don&#x27;t have to worry if they trash it, or get it dirty. I don&#x27;t have to worry about losing it(I can order a replacement on Amazon that will be here in 2 days). With long-lasting products that are for life, I find I worry about cleaning them, organizing them, and protecting them.<p>Maybe to total cost of ownership is less for the more durable product, but you only have to lose it once or damage it once for the savings to go away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m463</author><text>yeah, there should be some products where &quot;buy it for life&quot; might be... just don&#x27;t buy one.<p>Do you really need a cast iron frying pan? They seem to be over-represented in this category because they don&#x27;t break. But iron in your diet is not that good for you if you&#x27;re male because it accumulates.<p>Another thing to be wary of is &quot;buy this best stuff&quot; lists are easy money, people will curate your lists for you, then you just link to amazon and hoarding behavior does the rest.</text></comment> |
17,535,359 | 17,535,109 | 1 | 2 | 17,534,923 | train | <story><title>Taking Go modules for a spin</title><url>https://dave.cheney.net/2018/07/14/taking-go-modules-for-a-spin</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hellcow</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using go modules in my company for several months now. Everything has &quot;just worked.&quot; It&#x27;s at least 1 order of magnitude faster than dep.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that go modules use a novel dependency resolution algorithm which is extremely simple to reason about&#x2F;implement, fast, and produces more reliable builds than npm&#x2F;bundler&#x2F;cargo. That&#x27;s why I was excited about it, anyway. It removes the ever-present NP-complete assumptions in this space, so from a computer science perspective it&#x27;s extremely interesting.</text></comment> | <story><title>Taking Go modules for a spin</title><url>https://dave.cheney.net/2018/07/14/taking-go-modules-for-a-spin</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ainar-g</author><text>I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of the module system, but please note, that it&#x27;s still experimental, so not all fun and rainbows. As of now, the Go issue tracker still has 53 open issues with the &quot;modules&quot; label[1], and Go 1.11 should ship around August. The system works well for most cases, but there are still rough edges, especially around vendoring, undocumented or not-so-well documented behaviours, and features which may or may not be &quot;in the scope&quot; for the module system.<p>Overall, I am trying to be optimistic about the future of Go dependency management, but I am not planning to switch the projects I work on in my company from dep to Go modules until most of those rough edges are either smoothed, or officially recognised as &quot;works as intended&quot;, with viable workarounds.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Amodules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+l...</a></text></comment> |
6,702,145 | 6,702,059 | 1 | 2 | 6,701,533 | train | <story><title>The NY Times endorsed a secretive trade agreement that the public can’t read</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08/the-new-york-times-endorsed-a-secretive-trade-agreement-that-the-public-cant-read/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jellicle</author><text>Two random comments:<p>First, the NYT is engaging in the standard Brooksian&#x2F;Friedmanist technique of supporting something with apparent qualifications, but actually engaging in unconditional support. That is, using the Iraq War as an example:<p>- I support the Iraq War, if it is done this way (describe reservations)<p>- The Iraq War is not done that way in the slightest<p>- Given the above, I support the Iraq War<p>The NYT supports TPP with qualifications; the TPP will not have those attributes; given the above, the NYT will absolutely support the TPP. It&#x27;s a way to deflect criticism - if anyone criticizes your support, you just point to your expressed reservations.<p>Second, free trade has proven to be not good for the bulk of the public. Most HN commenters, having been immersed in right-wing economics, have the belief that it is somehow scientifically proven that free trade is beneficial for all, but that&#x27;s not actually what the science says. The results of decades of &quot;free trade&quot; agreements have been to overrule local decision-making; they are profoundly anti-democratic. They&#x27;ve resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the bulk of the population to a very few, very wealthy individuals. Free trade agreements are a substantial cause for the fact that most workers in the United States are making less money now than they were 30 years ago, even though their productivity has gone up massively in the meantime.<p>If an action X takes away $1 from each of nine people, and gives $15 to the tenth person, the total benefit for society in dollars is theoretically positive (-$9, +$15) but nine out of ten people have been harmed by it, and it&#x27;s not clear that the real benefit is positive at all, because of the declining marginal utility of money. That&#x27;s pretty much what &quot;free trade&quot; represents. Add in the anti-democratic aspects and it&#x27;s clear to me that modern &quot;free trade&quot; agreements, negotiated in secret between the Aspen corporate elite, are something that should be roundly opposed.</text></comment> | <story><title>The NY Times endorsed a secretive trade agreement that the public can’t read</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/08/the-new-york-times-endorsed-a-secretive-trade-agreement-that-the-public-cant-read/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jkldotio</author><text>Executives using treaties to alter domestic law is going to be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. One take on the problem was starkly put in antifederalist #75 in 1788 by a person using the name Hampden (who had been a figure in the English civil wars, of which the American revolution in some ways was an extention). Well worth taking two minutes of your time to read.[1]<p>The stakes are highest in the EU at the moment as it is made of treaties and there are significant forces who see that process as an illegitimate way to make a federation. The time frame there is 5-10 years where besides the &#x27;muddle through&#x27; we often see in Europe, which is very possible, an implosion of the whole thing, a federation or both are all possibilities with massive consequences due to the inherent logic of monetary union. Unfortunately contemporary television and print journalism is not well calibrated to exploring these issues.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.thevrwc.org/antifederalist/antiFederalist75.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thevrwc.org&#x2F;antifederalist&#x2F;antiFederalist75.html</a></text></comment> |
21,185,193 | 21,182,674 | 1 | 2 | 21,180,842 | train | <story><title>Rockbox – Free music player firmware</title><url>https://www.rockbox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jchw</author><text>I used to run this on a Sansa Clip+. It was an amazing combination: great audio quality, expandable storage via microSD, playback of a huge array of formats natively, it ran DOOM, and it only costed around $40 when it was new.<p>Now I just use my phone and streaming, but I sort of miss that era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theandrewbailey</author><text>My ~7 year old Sansa Clip+ is still going. Soon after buying it, I was fed up with it scanning everything when I turned it on. When I loaded Rockbox on it, and it was able to reliably go from off to playing music in 2 seconds, I knew it was a keeper! (That&#x27;s a killer app right there!) I use it just about every day when commuting. I bought another one for my dad about 3 years ago, but he doesn&#x27;t use it, so I intend to ask for it after mine dies. (Who knows how long that will be. These things are built like old Nokia phones.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Rockbox – Free music player firmware</title><url>https://www.rockbox.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jchw</author><text>I used to run this on a Sansa Clip+. It was an amazing combination: great audio quality, expandable storage via microSD, playback of a huge array of formats natively, it ran DOOM, and it only costed around $40 when it was new.<p>Now I just use my phone and streaming, but I sort of miss that era.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>advanceduser</author><text>I still have a Clip+&#x2F;Rockbox that I load up with meditation tracks. I don&#x27;t feel as bad falling asleep with this thing clipped to me as I would my phone.</text></comment> |
40,053,150 | 40,052,930 | 1 | 2 | 40,051,597 | train | <story><title>To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/gambling-young-men-sports-betting-crypto-meme-stock-market-addiction-2024-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mycologos</author><text>In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific.<p>I don&#x27;t know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it&#x27;s usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like &quot;[you gamble? don&#x27;t you have more fulfilling things to do?]&quot;<p>The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don&#x27;t need to gamble, but it&#x27;s not like most people who gamble actually believe it&#x27;s the path to profit, it seems like there&#x27;s something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).</text></item><item><author>jjice</author><text>As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.<p>It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they&#x27;ve never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.<p>Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. &quot;I usually win&quot; or &quot;I only gamble what I come in with&quot;, but the latter isn&#x27;t true and I&#x27;ve seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could &quot;win it all back&quot; at the roulette table.<p>It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it&#x27;s such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.<p>Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bwing1</author><text>Yeah, that&#x27;s bubble-specific, not class-specific. I think the most successful of the younger professionals I know are most likely to gamble on sports -- it&#x27;s an excuse for an active group chat, it&#x27;s something to talk with random people about, and the actual amounts you bet are easy to make trivial relative to income. Very networking-forward hobby. (Also, it&#x27;s obviously as much an intellectual exercise to gamble on sports as it is to play poker.)<p>Broadly, though sports in particular is something different bubbles care more or less about, I&#x27;d say your perspective is entirely foreign to me. My experience is that the more intelligent groups I&#x27;m around are vastly more interested in predicting things and putting money behind their predictions.</text></comment> | <story><title>To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/gambling-young-men-sports-betting-crypto-meme-stock-market-addiction-2024-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mycologos</author><text>In my limited experience as somebody whose friends and family are all pretty well educated and pretty well off (for better or for worse, I work at a big tech company), gambling seems pretty class-specific.<p>I don&#x27;t know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it&#x27;s usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like &quot;[you gamble? don&#x27;t you have more fulfilling things to do?]&quot;<p>The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don&#x27;t need to gamble, but it&#x27;s not like most people who gamble actually believe it&#x27;s the path to profit, it seems like there&#x27;s something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).</text></item><item><author>jjice</author><text>As a mid-twenties man, I see this constantly among my friends.<p>It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they&#x27;ve never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.<p>Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. &quot;I usually win&quot; or &quot;I only gamble what I come in with&quot;, but the latter isn&#x27;t true and I&#x27;ve seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could &quot;win it all back&quot; at the roulette table.<p>It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it&#x27;s such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.<p>Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>I have a wealthy and successful friend who loves sports betting, usually places bets in the hundreds-to-thousands range. Calls it “Monopoly money.”<p>My impression is that it’s a scoring system for competition with his (wealthy and successful) siblings; the dollar values are an afterthought.</text></comment> |
33,300,344 | 33,298,431 | 1 | 3 | 33,298,082 | train | <story><title>Archery World Record: Most arrows through a keyhole [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67W4kONfL4Y</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ambolia</author><text>Why stop at 7 arrows and not just keep going until he failed?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>citizenpaul</author><text>People do this all the time in these things. That way now you can win another award for 8 shots next year or whatever. Pretty soon you are the top winner of awards for XXX.<p>Otherwise you just get one award you can never beat.<p>Double so if there are monetary prizes involved.</text></comment> | <story><title>Archery World Record: Most arrows through a keyhole [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67W4kONfL4Y</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ambolia</author><text>Why stop at 7 arrows and not just keep going until he failed?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>milansm</author><text>I assume so that they can break the record again later on.</text></comment> |
19,812,071 | 19,812,337 | 1 | 3 | 19,811,467 | train | <story><title>Chinese hospitals set to sell experimental cell therapies</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01161-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aaavl2821</author><text>A company I consulted for was considering licensing a cell therapy from a large, well regarded US research hospital. When we looked at the manufacturing data it became apparent that the hospital really had no idea how to characterize the cells they modified and gave to patients. It was basically take cells from a patient, purify them and grow them up in culture, add a few nucleic acids, then readminister. No testing to see if the nucleic acids got into the cells, how many cells got them, whether the cells changed unacceptably during culture, haphazard testing to see if they modified the cell&#x27;s surface protein levels, no specs as to what level of protein expression were acceptable, etc. They did do safety testing so it isn&#x27;t likely that the cells would be harmful, but its very likely they would have no effect. There was no malicious intent on the part of the researchers or hospital, they just didn&#x27;t know how to do commercial quality QA&#x2F;QC on cell therapies. At the time, no one did. Even so there was some stuff they should have known to do but didnt do<p>This was ~5 years ago so things QA&#x2F;QC for cell therapy has advanced since then, but its still evolving. Would be interested to know how these hospitals handle this</text></comment> | <story><title>Chinese hospitals set to sell experimental cell therapies</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01161-2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thefounder</author><text>Cures can&#x27;t be found without testing and it&#x27;s clear that some people just don&#x27;t have 10-20 years to wait for extensive tests and for investors willing to pay for risky investments&#x2F;treatments.<p>I just hope the patients are monitored&#x2F;documented well so that the results can be improved&#x2F;replicated.</text></comment> |
10,151,468 | 10,151,395 | 1 | 3 | 10,151,150 | train | <story><title>Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record</title><url>http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crdb</author><text>&gt; For reasons that seem baffling in retrospect, Amazon understood this long before any of its major competitors<p>I don&#x27;t think Amazon really &quot;understood&quot;. It&#x27;s more that (according to &quot;The Everything Store&quot;, anyway), accidentally, some emergency servers were reprovisioned as servers on demand for a bunch of frustrated devs who couldn&#x27;t get resources the traditional way. And then demand just exploded and they thought why not sell it and see what happens.<p>It is true that Bezos appears to have a knack for spotting great products that appear accidentally in his org tree, and spinning it out as a separate team (e.g. the A9 team, Kindle...) but it might be that he thinks like a VC and backs everything that looks interesting instead of letting the bureaucracy kill it, and hindsight is 20&#x2F;20...</text></comment> | <story><title>Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record</title><url>http://danluu.com/yegge-predictions/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shalmanese</author><text>It&#x27;s especially important for blog posts like this to have a very obvious timestamp on the page somewhere. This is a contemporary post but I couldn&#x27;t verify that until I went into the archive view.</text></comment> |
27,439,867 | 27,438,385 | 1 | 2 | 27,433,863 | train | <story><title>Terraform 1.0</title><url>https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solatic</author><text>Terraform is such an underappreciated tool. It seems like so much of the hate surrounds HCL1 (back in Terraform before 0.12) and doesn&#x27;t reflect modern Terraform.<p>For example, after introducing `for_each` and dynamic blocks, it&#x27;s possible to nearly entirely ditch variables files and local modules, and just add more infrastructure by editing a local YAML file. The only variables your Terraform code should have should be credentials &#x2F; other secrets that are not loaded from environment variables by providers. A great public example of this usage pattern is supplied by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;concourse&#x2F;governance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;concourse&#x2F;governance</a> to manage their GitHub repositories.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>majormajor</author><text>My problem with this approach is that it&#x27;s still too much &quot;infrastructure as data&quot; and not &quot;infrastructure as code.&quot; Moving infrastructure data into flat files is not a clear-cut win over having it in a database - you get easier version control with external tools like git, but you everything that makes a database a joy to work with instead of flat files, like schema validation and easy queries, etc.<p>Things like for_each and variables exist because &quot;infrastructure as data&quot; would be incredibly tedious and brittle and hard to extend, but an approach that tries to get to &quot;infrastructure as code&quot; by starting with a data format instead of a programming language just seems like too big a gap to cross. I haven&#x27;t seen a lot of teams unit testing their terraform, for instance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Terraform 1.0</title><url>https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solatic</author><text>Terraform is such an underappreciated tool. It seems like so much of the hate surrounds HCL1 (back in Terraform before 0.12) and doesn&#x27;t reflect modern Terraform.<p>For example, after introducing `for_each` and dynamic blocks, it&#x27;s possible to nearly entirely ditch variables files and local modules, and just add more infrastructure by editing a local YAML file. The only variables your Terraform code should have should be credentials &#x2F; other secrets that are not loaded from environment variables by providers. A great public example of this usage pattern is supplied by <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;concourse&#x2F;governance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;concourse&#x2F;governance</a> to manage their GitHub repositories.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thayne</author><text>It&#x27;s a lot better than it used to be. But there are still quite a few annoyances. For example, you still need to use count as a hack for the absence of any kind of &quot;if&quot;. You can&#x27;t make custom functions. Modules can be kind of awkward to work with. There are still some places that can&#x27;t take any dynamic values such as lifecycle.ignore_changes and arguments to providers and backends.</text></comment> |
10,744,408 | 10,744,258 | 1 | 3 | 10,739,798 | train | <story><title>“Gunslinger’s gait”: a new cause of unilaterally reduced arm swing</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6141</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slr555</author><text>This is not a new phenomenon. In the law enforcement community it has been well recognized for many years that people who carried concealed weapons will often exhibit reduced arm swing on the gun side. The habit is driven by two issues. The first is training and a desire to keep the strong side arm indexed to the weapon for faster unholstering. The second is a reaction to the first and involves trying to unlearn the reduced arm swing, which more recently has been seen as a &quot;tell&quot; which may give warning to potential adversaries that one is armed and may be a potential threat. As a corollary people are now taught to be aware of reduced arm swing in others.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Gunslinger’s gait”: a new cause of unilaterally reduced arm swing</title><url>http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6141</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewOMartin</author><text>&quot;Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.&quot;<p>This strategy is known as straferunning, and was previously thought to be effective only in 90&#x27;s era first-person shooters, particularly Goldeneye. Maybe Putin is also a 00 Agent?</text></comment> |
16,466,931 | 16,466,132 | 1 | 3 | 16,465,802 | train | <story><title>Tech takes over: New York is the sector's second city</title><url>http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180226/FEATURES/180229939/new-york-is-the-tech-sectors-official-second-city-and-the-boom-is</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>replicatorblog</author><text>&quot;official&quot;<p>FTEs is one way to slice it, but kind of dumb.<p>Seattle is home to two of the five biggest tech companies in the US.<p>Boston has had an IPO every year for the last ten years that exceeds any in NYC history.<p>LA has had the only 11-digit IPO in the last five years, outside of the bay area. It&#x27;s also capturing the zeitgeist in a way that NYC no longer does (that&#x27;s subjective, of course, but I&#x27;d debate it).<p>Just by market cap, Sydney&#x27;s three biggest tech co&#x27;s would are more impressive than NYC&#x27;s.<p>NYC is an awesome startup city, but the idea that it&#x27;s the clear #2 is silly.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tech takes over: New York is the sector's second city</title><url>http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180226/FEATURES/180229939/new-york-is-the-tech-sectors-official-second-city-and-the-boom-is</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CodeSheikh</author><text>I am not surprised to read this and also not sure what makes this article&#x2F;publisher the assumed authority to christened NYC as #2. After Silicon Valley one might argue that Seattle has better tech than NYC but again NYC always has breadth and depth of diverse markets such finance, fashion, ads, hotel, food, law and education to name a few. Not to mention, easy access to EWR&#x2F;JFK&#x2F;LGA airports from European continent makes it easier for people to come here and get involved.<p>Updated: Improved verbosity</text></comment> |
26,424,155 | 26,422,857 | 1 | 3 | 26,422,109 | train | <story><title>Fraidycat: Follow from afar</title><url>https://fraidyc.at/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kickscondor</author><text>Hallooo - this is my project. Glad to offer any help. Thanks for looking in.<p>Also having a connection issue with both Twitch and TikTok unfortunately right now. Will update here when I have it solved.<p>UPDATE: The TikTok and Twitch issue is resolved. No need to update the extension - picks up the change automatically.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fraidycat: Follow from afar</title><url>https://fraidyc.at/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>petercooper</author><text>Fraidycat is very cool and I encourage everyone to check it out. It is a fantastic idea and it generally works well.<p>However, to save you time if you run into the same issue it has with Chrome that I encountered.. there&#x27;s a bug where using the back button on many sites (including HN and many of our internal apps) can cause a non-logged in page to be fetched and rendered (as if the session cookie isn&#x27;t being used) - possibly relevant issues: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kickscondor&#x2F;fraidycat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;178" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kickscondor&#x2F;fraidycat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;178</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kickscondor&#x2F;fraidycat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;194" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kickscondor&#x2F;fraidycat&#x2F;issues&#x2F;194</a></text></comment> |
7,210,386 | 7,210,337 | 1 | 2 | 7,210,064 | train | <story><title>Broken by design: systemd</title><url>http://ewontfix.com/14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bitwize</author><text>Nice article, but at this point it&#x27;s game, set, match -- systemd has won. The Linux community overwhelmingly supports it, and its advantages clearly outweigh its perceived disadvantages.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s not Unix&quot; is no longer a valid critique. The old Unix design philosophy is dead. People want systems of components that function as an integrated whole. They do NOT want pieces that are generally unaware of each other (this is touted as the virtue of &quot;loose coupling&quot;).<p>Yes, pid 1 does a lot. That&#x27;s by necessity. It&#x27;s not your grandpap&#x27;s Unix anymore. Do you want to control all the system services, including the &quot;badly behaved&quot; ones? That functionality needs to be in pid 1. Do you want to bring the system up safely and sanely, accounting for things like hotplugged disks in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;fstab? That functionality needs to be in pid 1. Systemd is the correct design for modern Linux. It also brings the advantage of better integration and greater commonality across distros.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdfaoeu</author><text>Even on systemd that stuff isn&#x27;t all handled in pid 1.<p>There are 6 systemd service processes running on my machine handling different components.<p>Snipped out the irrelevant processes.<p><pre><code> % systemd-cgls
├─user.slice
│ └─user-1000.slice
│ └─[email protected]
│ ├─6612 &#x2F;usr&#x2F;lib&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;systemd --user
│ └─6616 (sd-pam)
└─system.slice
├─1 &#x2F;sbin&#x2F;init
├─systemd-udevd.service
│ └─151 &#x2F;usr&#x2F;lib&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;systemd-udevd
├─systemd-logind.service
│ └─345 &#x2F;usr&#x2F;lib&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;systemd-logind
└─systemd-journald.service
└─125 &#x2F;usr&#x2F;lib&#x2F;systemd&#x2F;systemd-journald</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>Broken by design: systemd</title><url>http://ewontfix.com/14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bitwize</author><text>Nice article, but at this point it&#x27;s game, set, match -- systemd has won. The Linux community overwhelmingly supports it, and its advantages clearly outweigh its perceived disadvantages.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s not Unix&quot; is no longer a valid critique. The old Unix design philosophy is dead. People want systems of components that function as an integrated whole. They do NOT want pieces that are generally unaware of each other (this is touted as the virtue of &quot;loose coupling&quot;).<p>Yes, pid 1 does a lot. That&#x27;s by necessity. It&#x27;s not your grandpap&#x27;s Unix anymore. Do you want to control all the system services, including the &quot;badly behaved&quot; ones? That functionality needs to be in pid 1. Do you want to bring the system up safely and sanely, accounting for things like hotplugged disks in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;fstab? That functionality needs to be in pid 1. Systemd is the correct design for modern Linux. It also brings the advantage of better integration and greater commonality across distros.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>repsilat</author><text><i>People want systems of components that function as an integrated whole. They do NOT want pieces that are generally unaware of each other (this is touted as the virtue of &quot;loose coupling&quot;).</i><p>This may be true of &quot;mainstream&quot; users&#x27; applications, but is it really true of system software? And should we really attribute the cultural shift toward monolithic systems to shifting preferences rather than leap-first &quot;design&quot;?</text></comment> |
8,856,582 | 8,856,113 | 1 | 2 | 8,854,453 | train | <story><title>New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail</title><url>http://www.gereports.com/post/107344100845/body-of-knowledge-new-machine-can-see-bones</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wyldfire</author><text>I&#x27;m on the design team for this product.<p>In the CT &quot;super premium&quot; market, the major players focused on different specs and tried to convince hospitals that the future of CT was in this direction (volume&#x2F;slices&#x2F;coverage, temporal resolution&#x2F;cardiac, dose, new imaging&#x2F;spectral, spatial resolution). Revolution CT is GE&#x27;s attempt to deliver something that unifies on these goals and they hope to sweep this high end market.</text></comment> | <story><title>New Machine Can See Bones, Organs in Stunning Detail</title><url>http://www.gereports.com/post/107344100845/body-of-knowledge-new-machine-can-see-bones</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iamben</author><text>This sort of thing is so exciting. I was at the Hunterian (<a href="https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rcseng.ac.uk&#x2F;museums&#x2F;hunterian</a>) last year and it&#x27;s incredible to see how barbaric fixing (or trying to fix) someone was - and how far it&#x27;s come in 100 years. Which I hope is much the same as our descendants will be thinking about medicine and surgery now.</text></comment> |
33,267,854 | 33,266,713 | 1 | 2 | 33,264,973 | train | <story><title>The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers</title><url>https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-soviet-unions-nuclear-icebreakers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudobash1</author><text>&gt; The debate went back and forth. But in the end, the Congressmen basically admitted that the only reason they wanted the US to build such a machine would be because the Soviets had one too.<p>I want to see when that admission was made, and how someone got them to admit it. It was the most surprising part of the article for me.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be great to see more defense spending introspection and honesty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ethagknight</author><text>Its reasonable to build something that your competitor has, for which you have no use for today, but may need ASAP tomorrow for unforeseen reasons. In the case of a nuclear icebreaker, it may be rescuing stranded covert operatives or getting a certain ship with certain capabilities to a certain location.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers</title><url>https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-soviet-unions-nuclear-icebreakers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sudobash1</author><text>&gt; The debate went back and forth. But in the end, the Congressmen basically admitted that the only reason they wanted the US to build such a machine would be because the Soviets had one too.<p>I want to see when that admission was made, and how someone got them to admit it. It was the most surprising part of the article for me.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be great to see more defense spending introspection and honesty.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pvg</author><text>Parity with and superiority to the Soviet Union was an overt part of US policy-making for decades. What&#x27;s changed is that it&#x27;s somewhat less overt now for various reasons one of them being the there&#x27;s less of an explicit ideological conflict between the US&#x2F;allies and its adversaries.</text></comment> |
17,134,779 | 17,132,790 | 1 | 3 | 17,132,044 | train | <story><title>Visualizing Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration</title><url>http://www.visualcapitalist.com/two-centuries-of-immigration/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>timewarrior</author><text>I built a company and sold it to Dropbox. Building another company to cure Cancer using AI. Leadership positions at various big companies. Wrote a book about Entrepreneurship which is part of an Executive MBA program. Built the biggest social network to come out of India.<p>Because I am from India, I would never get a Green Card through EB-2 (though I have two approved EB-2 petitions). Yesterday, USCIS denied my EB-1 petition using argument which are against the law. Now I have to leave US :(<p>I have an approved O-1 (extraordinary ability), but apparently, once you have filed for a Green Card Adjustment of Status, you can&#x27;t get a visa stamp for anything other than H-1. Not sure if I can come back!</text></comment> | <story><title>Visualizing Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration</title><url>http://www.visualcapitalist.com/two-centuries-of-immigration/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Blackstone4</author><text>Interesting to see the graphics on this.<p>Being from the UK and having spent time working in the US, I feel like in the last ~10 years it has become harder for Europeans to immigrate to the US.<p>Does this ring true for anyone?</text></comment> |
26,742,277 | 26,742,213 | 1 | 3 | 26,741,776 | train | <story><title>Which type of exercise is best for the brain? (2016)</title><url>http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/which-type-of-exercise-is-best-for-the-brain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>I find HIIT doesn’t do it for me. Can’t push myself hard enough in such short bursts because I have ridiculous cardio conditioning* from running. Boxing is great because it’s hiit but with technique and tactics and strategy.<p>* ridiculous conditioning in that I can keep average heart rate at 155bpm for 2 hours no problem. Most hiit isn’t long enough to get me above 110</text></item><item><author>vsareto</author><text>&gt;Sometimes high intensity stop all other thoughts is exactly what the brain needs.<p>HIIT has been great for the rest of the day as long as I don&#x27;t overdo it, but yeah, completely focused on the workout during that.</text></item><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Running and walking seems to be particularly good for thinking. Could be a link to our evolution, or the fact that it’s a simple exercise you don’t have to focus on and are free to think.<p>Sports are great for getting in the zone but usually too mentally taxing for background thinking. Boxing, for example, is amazing relaxation but you really can’t think about anything else during a round.<p>Sometimes high intensity stop all other thoughts is exactly what the brain needs. Other times prolonged low intensity gives just the space you need to hear yourself think.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Rodent studies aren&#x27;t really great for measuring this because it&#x27;s nearly impossible to control for the rodents&#x27; enjoyment of each exercise.<p>We know that rodents enjoy running wheels because they use them voluntarily. It&#x27;s not surprising that the exercise they enjoy is the one that seems to produce the most benefits.<p>For humans: Doing any exercise is better than doing no exercise. Doing frequent exercise is better than doing infrequent exercise.<p>The most important thing is to pick an exercise that you enjoy, so you&#x27;ll be more likely to get out and do it and less likely to come up with excuses to skip a day.<p>Even better: Find an exercise that includes some social activity, even if it&#x27;s just getting outside and seeing other people in passing as you run past or being in a gym near other people. Social exposure is great for mental health, so combining it with exercise is a good one-two punch.<p>We do have some human studies on BDNF (measured via serum, because we can&#x27;t get into human brains obviously) and exercise: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3772595&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3772595&#x2F;</a> They didn&#x27;t study different types of exercise, but they did find that longer duration exercise produced greater elevations of BDNF. You don&#x27;t have to run marathons to capture some of this benefit. A long walk is good enough to get started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnrodey</author><text>I have a lengthy background in hiit (specifically CrossFit). And I say this in the most polite way possible.<p>You&#x27;re doing HIIT wrong if you cannot elevate your heart rate beyond 110 bpm. Whatever you&#x27;re doing, there&#x27;s a huge gap in the training programming&#x2F;protocol.<p>Everyone suffers in CrossFit. Everyone.</text></comment> | <story><title>Which type of exercise is best for the brain? (2016)</title><url>http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/which-type-of-exercise-is-best-for-the-brain/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Swizec</author><text>I find HIIT doesn’t do it for me. Can’t push myself hard enough in such short bursts because I have ridiculous cardio conditioning* from running. Boxing is great because it’s hiit but with technique and tactics and strategy.<p>* ridiculous conditioning in that I can keep average heart rate at 155bpm for 2 hours no problem. Most hiit isn’t long enough to get me above 110</text></item><item><author>vsareto</author><text>&gt;Sometimes high intensity stop all other thoughts is exactly what the brain needs.<p>HIIT has been great for the rest of the day as long as I don&#x27;t overdo it, but yeah, completely focused on the workout during that.</text></item><item><author>Swizec</author><text>Running and walking seems to be particularly good for thinking. Could be a link to our evolution, or the fact that it’s a simple exercise you don’t have to focus on and are free to think.<p>Sports are great for getting in the zone but usually too mentally taxing for background thinking. Boxing, for example, is amazing relaxation but you really can’t think about anything else during a round.<p>Sometimes high intensity stop all other thoughts is exactly what the brain needs. Other times prolonged low intensity gives just the space you need to hear yourself think.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Rodent studies aren&#x27;t really great for measuring this because it&#x27;s nearly impossible to control for the rodents&#x27; enjoyment of each exercise.<p>We know that rodents enjoy running wheels because they use them voluntarily. It&#x27;s not surprising that the exercise they enjoy is the one that seems to produce the most benefits.<p>For humans: Doing any exercise is better than doing no exercise. Doing frequent exercise is better than doing infrequent exercise.<p>The most important thing is to pick an exercise that you enjoy, so you&#x27;ll be more likely to get out and do it and less likely to come up with excuses to skip a day.<p>Even better: Find an exercise that includes some social activity, even if it&#x27;s just getting outside and seeing other people in passing as you run past or being in a gym near other people. Social exposure is great for mental health, so combining it with exercise is a good one-two punch.<p>We do have some human studies on BDNF (measured via serum, because we can&#x27;t get into human brains obviously) and exercise: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3772595&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3772595&#x2F;</a> They didn&#x27;t study different types of exercise, but they did find that longer duration exercise produced greater elevations of BDNF. You don&#x27;t have to run marathons to capture some of this benefit. A long walk is good enough to get started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomjakubowski</author><text>What do you normally do to get to a 155 bpm heart rate? Not an expert but when I&#x27;ve done HIIT workouts, they&#x27;ve always started with a mild warm up to elevate the heart rate. Maybe you&#x27;d benefit from something more strenuous to start.</text></comment> |
6,810,360 | 6,809,706 | 1 | 3 | 6,809,065 | train | <story><title>Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akkartik</author><text>A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can&#x27;t believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=132204954" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;transcript.php?story...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>The actual story was sourced entirely from this reddit post:
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rilcj/as_a_person_who_did_not_invest_early_i_made_a_gif/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Bitcoin&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1rilcj&#x2F;as_a_person_...</a><p>Which was sourced entirely from &quot;someone in the IRC channel&quot;.<p>Whether it&#x27;s true or not is one thing, but if it is then the reddit source also says:<p>&gt; He went to the &quot;recycling centre&quot; and they showed him around.<p>This makes some sense, I&#x27;ve &#x27;recycled&#x27; before at places like this: <a href="http://www.hounslow.gov.uk/spacewaye" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hounslow.gov.uk&#x2F;spacewaye</a><p>You go along, separate your stuff into several different piles. Pay fees for things like fridges, CRTs, etc. Then you leave.<p>The thing is... I don&#x27;t actually believe that electrical equipment is really recycled. Stuff like monitors may have the most toxic bits removed, but I strongly suspect that all other electrical equipment is just put into landfill as-is.<p>If the story is all true then the facility in question is this one:
<a href="http://www.newport.gov.uk/_dc/index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecycle.centres" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newport.gov.uk&#x2F;_dc&#x2F;index.cfm?fuseaction=wasterecy...</a><p>Which is advertised as a recycling centre.<p>Which means the guy has done all that he could to get it recycled, and that it&#x27;s the authorities and government services themselves who are just dumping stuff in landfill even when it was delivered as recycling.<p>All that said... if it <i>was</i> recycled as advertised, then the chances of it still existing would be closer to zero than the current scenario.</text></comment> | <story><title>Missing hard drive containing Bitcoins worth £4m in Newport landfill site</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akkartik</author><text>A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can&#x27;t believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=132204954" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;templates&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;transcript.php?story...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eterm</author><text>Since this is in Europe, it&#x27;s probably better to refer to the European legislation.<p>However, it looks like the UK implementation of the WEEE[1] is fairly narrow in scope.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive#UK_implementation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...</a></text></comment> |
23,815,934 | 23,816,046 | 1 | 3 | 23,815,863 | train | <story><title>I Have Cancer. Now My Facebook Feed Is Full of ‘Alternative Care’ Ads</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/facebook-cancer-ads.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>harry8</author><text>Dump facebook. Make the effort. Get non-facebook contact details from anyone you want to stay in touch with. Advertise you&#x27;re going to do it a few times then just pull the plug.<p>Life is significantly better without it. Really.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Have Cancer. Now My Facebook Feed Is Full of ‘Alternative Care’ Ads</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/facebook-cancer-ads.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neixidbeksoxyd</author><text>I have a family member with a mental illness and they think they can talk to animals through telepathy. I was worried it was a sign of schizophrenia and tried to convince them that they needed help. Unfortunately when you google &quot;animal telepathy&quot; or any other query to get information on telepathic communication with animals, the top results are all absolute batshit crazy sites that confirm people can do that. Now I see how someone can start to believe all kinds of crazy things. Since Google probably optimizes for some type of engagement under the hood, all sorts of alternative medicine and crazy ideas end up as top results. I really think the whole &quot;let&#x27;s make all information&#x2F;speech available with no filters except for sex because clearly sex is evil&quot; approach from SV companies is causing huge harm. Most people don&#x27;t grow up thinking they need to read several scientific, peer reviewed, reproducible papers to believe new ideas.</text></comment> |
27,374,773 | 27,374,852 | 1 | 2 | 27,374,173 | train | <story><title>King County, WA bans facial recognition software</title><url>https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-is-first-in-the-country-to-ban-facial-recognition-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don&#x27;t understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it&#x27;s just a law against making a process more efficient.<p>It&#x27;s clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don&#x27;t replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn&#x27;t necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.<p>I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it&#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that&#x27;s your thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Arainach</author><text>&gt;it&#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars<p>No, nothing is &quot;just a tool&quot;. Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what&#x27;s possible. License plate scanners are &quot;just&quot; a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they&#x27;re a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.</text></comment> | <story><title>King County, WA bans facial recognition software</title><url>https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-is-first-in-the-country-to-ban-facial-recognition-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don&#x27;t understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it&#x27;s just a law against making a process more efficient.<p>It&#x27;s clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don&#x27;t replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn&#x27;t necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.<p>I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it&#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that&#x27;s your thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Everything else that you described – computers, digital records – has simple algorithms understandable by the average police officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just take more time.<p>When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn&#x27;t based on any human&#x27;s perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?</text></comment> |
2,264,255 | 2,264,166 | 1 | 2 | 2,263,882 | train | <story><title>You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)</title><url>http://blog.jamiemurai.com/2011/02/you-win-rim/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jammur</author><text>Now I feel like an idiot for spending an hour and half writing it, lol.</text></item><item><author>btipling</author><text>The complaints are:<p>$200 price to develop with 10 app limit.<p>Multiple registration forms.<p>Requiring multiple downloads.<p>Requiring to purchase vmware fusion.<p>Installer that just copies an iso.<p>Having to password protect the simulator.<p>Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator.<p>The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kgutteridge</author><text>You did well to pull out early if you found this part of the process painful, unfortunately end to end it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. Theres nothing glaring wrong through out but lots of annoyances which really add up, when compared to iOS or Android development<p>We recently developed this so speaking from some experience
<a href="http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/28561" rel="nofollow">http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/28561</a><p>The bb version took far far longer than the equivalent iOS, simply because of other nonsense such as the pain in the signing process (isthesigningserverdown.com the fact it exists tells you all you need to know). Random exceptions being thrown that have no useful meaning and of course the joy of RAPC throwing errors such as "CreateProcess error=87, Parameter is incorrect" which we eventually found was due to the classpath being too long for RAPC to handle<p>However once complete the application it is something we are very proud of!</text></comment> | <story><title>You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)</title><url>http://blog.jamiemurai.com/2011/02/you-win-rim/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jammur</author><text>Now I feel like an idiot for spending an hour and half writing it, lol.</text></item><item><author>btipling</author><text>The complaints are:<p>$200 price to develop with 10 app limit.<p>Multiple registration forms.<p>Requiring multiple downloads.<p>Requiring to purchase vmware fusion.<p>Installer that just copies an iso.<p>Having to password protect the simulator.<p>Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator.<p>The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acangiano</author><text>Articles can often be summarized in a few lines which make them seem trivial. What really counts for me is why those points mentioned above are worth complaining about.</text></comment> |
32,105,212 | 32,103,290 | 1 | 2 | 32,098,112 | train | <story><title>Stripe cuts internal valuation by 28%</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/stripe-cuts-internal-valuation-by-28-11657815625</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thundergolfer</author><text>Remember that Stripe changed its RSU grant structure a year or so ago, so this won’t negatively affect newer employees. Stripe gives out a fixed amount of $$ value of stock each year now. The typical recent senior hire will get around $200k a year in stock. Now that the valuation is lower, they’ll be granted more stock units than before, which is good. Getting granted fewer stock units at a ‘fake’ higher valuation would have been frustrating.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;equity-for-software-engineers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;equity-for-software-engin...</a> (Ctrl-F Stripe)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bcx</author><text>Personally, I don&#x27;t see what the hubbub is about. A 409a is a standard instrument used to price options, a standard approach to a 409A valuation is the base the value of a company on its comparables, including public comparables.<p>If I were conducting this valuation, I haven&#x27;t done this myself, but I most definitely read our 409A valuations closely. I&#x27;d imagine that the outside firm hired to conduct the analysis on Fintech would use data like:<p>BLOCK (down 49% in last 6 months)<p>PAYPAL (down 60% in last 6 months)<p>COINBASE (down 75% in last 6 months)<p>INTUIT (down 30% in last 6 months)<p>VISA (down 5% in last 6 months)<p>SHOPIFY (down 70% in last 6 months)<p>Everyone at these fintechs, has seen the valuation of their company drop significantly (with the exceptions of VISA in the last 6 months. It&#x27;s possible that stripe&#x27;s performance is closer to VISA than to SHOPIFY, but only dropping 30% is likely pretty generous given the broader market.<p>Anyone with options at any of these public companies is dealing with the same challenges.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stripe cuts internal valuation by 28%</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/stripe-cuts-internal-valuation-by-28-11657815625</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thundergolfer</author><text>Remember that Stripe changed its RSU grant structure a year or so ago, so this won’t negatively affect newer employees. Stripe gives out a fixed amount of $$ value of stock each year now. The typical recent senior hire will get around $200k a year in stock. Now that the valuation is lower, they’ll be granted more stock units than before, which is good. Getting granted fewer stock units at a ‘fake’ higher valuation would have been frustrating.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;equity-for-software-engineers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.pragmaticengineer.com&#x2F;equity-for-software-engin...</a> (Ctrl-F Stripe)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ruraljuror</author><text>This is why many Stripes on blind are not angry. They will get more shares next year.</text></comment> |
22,235,100 | 22,231,830 | 1 | 3 | 22,226,380 | train | <story><title>The missing semester of CS education</title><url>https://missing.csail.mit.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jonhoo</author><text>Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding the down arrow key for 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom of a large file in Vim, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1597&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1597&#x2F;</a>).<p>At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier.<p>To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and programmer. We’ve published lecture notes and videos in the hopes that people outside MIT find these resources useful.<p>To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught this class for the first time last year, when we called it “Hacker Tools” (there was some great discussion about last year’s class here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19078281" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19078281</a>). We found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful. Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit, spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find amusing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;missing-semester&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;missing-semester&#x2F;videos</a>).<p>We’d love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that we can run an even better class next year!<p>-- Anish, Jose, and Jon</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fuzzy2</author><text>That’s cool. Now, on to my possibly unpopular opinion: This isn’t what computer science is about. In fact, you don’t even need to use a computer to do computer science.<p>Sure, some stuff you learn in CS can make you a better software engineer. CS cannot make you a software engineer.<p>CS can definitely not make you adept at using computers and neither should it. That’s something earlier education institutions must tackle.<p>It’s always good to have optional courses for various topics of interest. _Requiring_ students to learn, say, MS Office (I had to), is just plain ridiculous.</text></comment> | <story><title>The missing semester of CS education</title><url>https://missing.csail.mit.edu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jonhoo</author><text>Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding the down arrow key for 30 seconds to scroll to the bottom of a large file in Vim, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1597&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1597&#x2F;</a>).<p>At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier.<p>To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and programmer. We’ve published lecture notes and videos in the hopes that people outside MIT find these resources useful.<p>To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught this class for the first time last year, when we called it “Hacker Tools” (there was some great discussion about last year’s class here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19078281" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19078281</a>). We found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful. Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit, spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find amusing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;missing-semester&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;missing-semester&#x2F;videos</a>).<p>We’d love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that we can run an even better class next year!<p>-- Anish, Jose, and Jon</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>foobarian</author><text>Since you mention scrolling using key repeat - it truly is painful to watch someone do it on default settings. And there are usually better ways to do that sort of thing. But sometimes, there is no substitute: going to the right spot in the middle of a word&#x2F;line, moving around a page, browser title bars, etc. Here&#x27;s the kicker though: most keyboard repeat rate settings around have a maximum that is pretty much unusable! But you can fix it thusly:<p>xset r rate 180 60<p>When I work on my computer it&#x27;s like driving a Porsche. When I sit at someone else&#x27;s it&#x27;s like I tripped over a door threshold.<p>There are ways to adjust this on OSX too but it&#x27;s a lot more touchy. Haven&#x27;t attempted on Windows.</text></comment> |
34,564,510 | 34,564,483 | 1 | 3 | 34,555,991 | train | <story><title>Why are TV Cameras still huge and expensive? (2019) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkTaMyatsTo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LiquidPolymer</author><text>I’ve been involved in shooting video projects professionally for over 30 years. This question about the expense of “pro” gear is getting quite fuzzy.<p>Most of my work has been as a contractor or freelancer and I’ve always believed in buying excellent gear. Yet I’ve never had any producer or editor ask “what did you shoot this with?”*<p>Durability and reliability is the prime reason pro gear is preferred but for me anyway that calculation has changed in recent years.<p>I just returned from Borneo where I was mostly using Sony RX-10 prosumer cameras. I carried 4 RX-10 bodies and never missed a shot.<p>Everything was shot in 4K. A top end pro camera from Sony would have an edge on quality in terms of pixels and dynamic range. But not enough to spend an additional 25k.<p>Plus with the cheaper cameras I much less hesitant to put them in harms way. When you are less concerned about destroying the camera it provides opportunities that otherwise might not be considered.<p>I actually just hired a production team for a project I’m involved with as a producer. They are going to be using top notch Arri Alexa cameras with prime Cine lenses. This is GREAT gear!<p>But I’ll never forget the $25 Panasonic M42 28mm lens I used on a RED camera that was fantastic. It had a bit of chromatic aberration but this was easily corrected in post. Nobody questioned the results.<p>Our iPhone or Android cameras rival what Panavision was providing in the 80’s.<p>* the exception is always super slow motion or incredible low light performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are TV Cameras still huge and expensive? (2019) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkTaMyatsTo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jefftk</author><text>Summary: in broadcast work the camera needs to handle the situation. This is different from TV shows and movies where the production adapts somewhat to the needs of the camera. So you would like a camera that can get a clear image of something that might be near or far, and potentially moving rapidly in three dimensions. We are able to build camera lenses that do this incredibly well, but it&#x27;s correspondingly expensive: ~$200k, far more expensive than any other component.</text></comment> |
16,963,544 | 16,961,049 | 1 | 3 | 16,960,172 | train | <story><title>Stripe Atlas for LLCs</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc?c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nodesocket</author><text>&gt; Is organized in Delaware, the jurisdiction of choice for many new LLCs.<p>Be aware that if you are &quot;doing business&quot; in California which means you live there you also have to file as a California foreign entity and pay the absurd anti-small business flat tax of $800 a year.<p>This also does not include your state income tax liabilities in California. Just because the LLC is formed in Delaware does not mean you don&#x27;t have to pay income taxes in the state you reside. Delaware is just the legal residence, has nothing to do with income taxes.<p>I moved to Tennessee in January and switched my single-member disregarded entity LLC from California to Tennessee. The annual fee in Tennessee is $400 vs $800 and there is NO STATE INCOME tax in beautiful TN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pbnjay</author><text>Watch out - Tennessee has an 6.5% excise tax on LLCs which is essentially an income tax if you&#x27;re self employed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tn.gov&#x2F;revenue&#x2F;taxes&#x2F;franchise---excise-tax.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tn.gov&#x2F;revenue&#x2F;taxes&#x2F;franchise---excise-tax.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Stripe Atlas for LLCs</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/atlas-llc?c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nodesocket</author><text>&gt; Is organized in Delaware, the jurisdiction of choice for many new LLCs.<p>Be aware that if you are &quot;doing business&quot; in California which means you live there you also have to file as a California foreign entity and pay the absurd anti-small business flat tax of $800 a year.<p>This also does not include your state income tax liabilities in California. Just because the LLC is formed in Delaware does not mean you don&#x27;t have to pay income taxes in the state you reside. Delaware is just the legal residence, has nothing to do with income taxes.<p>I moved to Tennessee in January and switched my single-member disregarded entity LLC from California to Tennessee. The annual fee in Tennessee is $400 vs $800 and there is NO STATE INCOME tax in beautiful TN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeleeorg</author><text>This is very important info. I&#x27;ve seen some founders get tripped up over this. Hopefully Stripe Atlas LLC provides support for foreign entity registration and taxes too (I would assume they do).</text></comment> |
40,165,403 | 40,164,517 | 1 | 2 | 40,162,433 | train | <story><title>Judge acquits Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey on most counts</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/04/25/judge-acquits-backpage-co-founder-michael-lacey-on-most-counts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brookst</author><text>I spent a few minutes trying to figure that out, but Reason is incredibly slanted, they just link to some even nuttier site, and even starting with news I couldn&#x27;t find specifics of the one count he was convicted on.<p>But I&#x27;d be a little skeptical of Reason&#x27;s handwave &quot;properly reported to the government&quot;. Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial?<p>One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.</text></item><item><author>beaeglebeachh</author><text>And how is it money laundering if it turned out the money wasn&#x27;t proceeds of crime.</text></item><item><author>nadermx</author><text>&quot;And on June 17, Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced on the one count—international concealment of money laundering—on which the jury found him guilty. It comes with a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Lacey plans to appeal his conviction on this count, and there seems like a good chance it will be successful, since the money he allegedly &quot;concealed&quot; was reported to the federal government with all the proper paperwork. But he could still face prison time as that appeals process plays out.&quot;<p>How was he found guilty of concealed money when he reported it to begin with? Then could still serve prison time for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Niten</author><text>Media Bias Fact Check ranks Reason as a &quot;Right-Center&quot; biased website with a &quot;High&quot; rating for factual reporting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediabiasfactcheck.com&#x2F;reason&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mediabiasfactcheck.com&#x2F;reason&#x2F;</a><p>They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they&#x27;re generally factually reliable and hardly &quot;incredibly slanted&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Judge acquits Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey on most counts</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/04/25/judge-acquits-backpage-co-founder-michael-lacey-on-most-counts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brookst</author><text>I spent a few minutes trying to figure that out, but Reason is incredibly slanted, they just link to some even nuttier site, and even starting with news I couldn&#x27;t find specifics of the one count he was convicted on.<p>But I&#x27;d be a little skeptical of Reason&#x27;s handwave &quot;properly reported to the government&quot;. Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial?<p>One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.</text></item><item><author>beaeglebeachh</author><text>And how is it money laundering if it turned out the money wasn&#x27;t proceeds of crime.</text></item><item><author>nadermx</author><text>&quot;And on June 17, Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced on the one count—international concealment of money laundering—on which the jury found him guilty. It comes with a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Lacey plans to appeal his conviction on this count, and there seems like a good chance it will be successful, since the money he allegedly &quot;concealed&quot; was reported to the federal government with all the proper paperwork. But he could still face prison time as that appeals process plays out.&quot;<p>How was he found guilty of concealed money when he reported it to begin with? Then could still serve prison time for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dannyobrien</author><text>What is this &quot;nuttier&quot; site you&#x27;re talking about? Do you mean <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontpageconfidential.com&#x2F;aboutfpc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frontpageconfidential.com&#x2F;aboutfpc&#x2F;</a> , the site run by Lacey and Larkin and their fellow journalists, in order to defend themselves?</text></comment> |
20,685,601 | 20,685,311 | 1 | 2 | 20,680,050 | train | <story><title>One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm</title><url>https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2019/08/boston-school-bus-routes/159113/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattlondon</author><text>Interesting - so is it &quot;a thing&quot; in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools&#x2F;students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US?<p>In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses.<p>There is often some coordination to make sure buses stop at&#x2F;very near schools, and they may send extra ones at certain times - e.g. there were often several buses parked up and waiting empty at my school so they could be filled at the end of the school day, but any member of the public was then able to get onboard once it was on its usual route after that, and if you were late getting out (e.g. detention&#x2F;sports etc) you&#x27;d just wait at the stop outside the school for the usual bus on its usual route to come by.<p>What do the US school buses and their drivers do for the rest of the day and on weekends? Just sit idle?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sailfast</author><text>Yes. Our population densities are lower, school distances are often not walkable reasonably, and schools being public they want to ensure that their students are not impeded from getting to the classroom for any factors related to logistics, income, etc.<p>Often times these are part-time positions. Set block of hours twice a day. Drivers can take on additional duties or other jobs. The buses themselves are either owned by a transportation company that can also hire them out on weekends or making additional money on field trips &#x2F; sports transportation.<p>My kids are fortunate enough to be able to walk to their school - there are sidewalks and it&#x27;s only a half mile away, but many other students have a longer walk, no sidewalks, or other impediments that leads them to prefer a bus. Kids could take public transit, but typically this is not a great solution in most places, and it doesn&#x27;t deliver you to a school directly. The latter factor helps with truancy, security, and a number of other things. There&#x27;s a cost to it, but it is a norm.<p>It would be straightforward for a school district to agree to change the policy or reduce bus service for cost reasons if public transit and things like walking, biking were preferred options. These are typically the norm for private schools.</text></comment> | <story><title>One City Saved $5M by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm</title><url>https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2019/08/boston-school-bus-routes/159113/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mattlondon</author><text>Interesting - so is it &quot;a thing&quot; in the US that the city runs a dedicated bus service for all schools&#x2F;students? Quite a surprise for me considering how poor people say public transport is in general in the US?<p>In the UK some schools run their own bus things (in the same way that Goolge, Facebook et al do in San Francisco), but most of the other schools just get by with the public buses.<p>There is often some coordination to make sure buses stop at&#x2F;very near schools, and they may send extra ones at certain times - e.g. there were often several buses parked up and waiting empty at my school so they could be filled at the end of the school day, but any member of the public was then able to get onboard once it was on its usual route after that, and if you were late getting out (e.g. detention&#x2F;sports etc) you&#x27;d just wait at the stop outside the school for the usual bus on its usual route to come by.<p>What do the US school buses and their drivers do for the rest of the day and on weekends? Just sit idle?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jefftk</author><text>Most US cities and towns have minimal public transit that wouldn&#x27;t be anywhere near sufficient for getting kids to and from school, so they run school buses instead. In some places with good public transit, like Somerville MA where I live, the city doesn&#x27;t run school buses and people walk or take general purpose public transit, but that&#x27;s very unusual here.<p>It&#x27;s the same deal as the tech shuttles: in places where public transit is good (NYC, Chicago, Boston) the tech companies don&#x27;t run shuttles because there&#x27;s no need.<p><i>&gt; What do the US school buses and their drivers do for the rest of the day and on weekends? Just sit idle?</i><p>Yes. The drivers typically work a &quot;split shift&quot; with time off in the middle of the day, and the buses sit empty both then and on weekends.</text></comment> |
27,214,193 | 27,208,819 | 1 | 2 | 27,206,552 | train | <story><title>A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-avoiding-actual</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluGill</author><text>It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.</text></item><item><author>pulse7</author><text>There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about &quot;How to write a resume that converts&quot; and the most voted comment starts with a sentence &quot;The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely.&quot;...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27112542" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27112542</a></text></item><item><author>movedx</author><text>I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.<p>When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my &quot;experience&quot; was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot.<p>I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.<p>At the end of the interview, Bob (let&#x27;s call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...<p>Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.<p>Bob was impressed but he couldn&#x27;t quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob&#x27;s desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.<p>I got the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsj_hn</author><text>This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It&#x27;s not that people wouldn&#x27;t take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can&#x27;t absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they <i>know</i> is qualified over someone who they don&#x27;t know is qualified but might be better.<p>The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who <i>know</i> they&#x27;ve learned something.<p>It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don&#x27;t communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it&#x27;s better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.</text></comment> | <story><title>A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/a-teenagers-guide-to-avoiding-actual</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bluGill</author><text>It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.</text></item><item><author>pulse7</author><text>There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about &quot;How to write a resume that converts&quot; and the most voted comment starts with a sentence &quot;The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely.&quot;...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27112542" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27112542</a></text></item><item><author>movedx</author><text>I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually.<p>When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my &quot;experience&quot; was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot.<p>I applied for a job at a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.<p>At the end of the interview, Bob (let&#x27;s call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...<p>Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.<p>Bob was impressed but he couldn&#x27;t quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob&#x27;s desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.<p>I got the job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kindall</author><text>People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I&#x27;ve had in my thirty-year career has come from networking. In one other situation I was the guy who got several former co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I still don&#x27;t quite believe actually happened. My current job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team&#x27;s manager on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on the Internet, or else from applying cold.</text></comment> |
29,655,069 | 29,654,693 | 1 | 2 | 29,653,925 | train | <story><title>South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true.<p>Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.<p>I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>specialp</author><text>A place where it hit exponential levels with really bad results is here in NY at the beginning. We had no precautions, testing, or vaccines in place yet, and hospitals were overwhelmed. It was honestly a scary time. That was where we started &quot;flattening the curve&quot;. Now with vaccines available if there are surges and they are not literally building hospitals on fields like they were near me that is something we have to just live with. COVID will never hit 0 cases. People will still be hospitalized and occasionally die of COVID as was always the case with winter flu seasons.<p>Now we are at the point where fully vaccinated people and people with immunity from a previous infection have a low rate of death or serious illness. People who are very old or have a compromised immune system should lay low and take precautions now and during every flu season when it spikes. Those who choose not to get vaccinated and die, that is still on them.</text></comment> | <story><title>South Africa’s omicron coronavirus outbreak subsides as fast as it grew</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/south-africa-omicron-coronavirus-cases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oneoff786</author><text>I’ve been tanking some downvotes for the past few days for saying this. Disease spread is only exponential for a brief initial period. It is not a good mental or even general model for how disease spreads. We have two years of observational covid data that shows this to be true.<p>Spread slows down rapidly long before reaching 100%. People hear “5x as infectious” and reason that due to the nature of exponential models, that much more than 5x people will be infected. This is extremely incorrect. In truth, far fewer than 5x people will be infected over the long term. And again, no, this is not because it’s hitting the upper limits of 100% of the population or anywhere near that.<p>I won’t be so bold as to say it’s probable, but given this is not a novel virus, it’s entirely believable to say that omicron could go on to infect fewer people than delta due to the past two years of vaccination and immunity and die off. Presuming data about lower severity holds, it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower than delta; which, in turn, was noticeably lower than the original.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donquichotte</author><text>Thank you. It is mind boggling to me how politicians and scientists (well, mostly MDs) keep talking about exponential growth and make horrible predictions, without realizing that exponential growth is never sustainable - a logistic growth is what often happens in reality if resources are limited.</text></comment> |
7,474,120 | 7,473,987 | 1 | 2 | 7,473,041 | train | <story><title>Amazon WorkSpaces</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joezydeco</author><text>And IT departments that don&#x27;t want company data to ever exist on the laptops. We&#x27;re back to dumb terminals and mainframes.</text></item><item><author>Touche</author><text>This is going to be big for Chromebooks, I suspect.</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>I&#x27;ve scratched my head on what exactly the use-case for this is. I&#x27;m going to need a computer of some sort to access my remote <i>anyways</i>. So what&#x27;s the point?<p>Then I remember the remote freelance job my wife had for a while. They mailed her the employment paperwork, she filled it out, once they processed it they sent her a remote desktop URL, username and password and voila she was &quot;at work&quot;. A day or two later she had everything she needed installed by the IT staff and off she went. She never actually went into the office, even once, and never met any of the employees there face-to-face. When she completed her contract they simply nuked the account she was using and reclaimed the licenses. They didn&#x27;t ship her a laptop to work from and she didn&#x27;t have to ship it back. If she had ever needed to go into the office, they could have let her use an aging extra machine with Remote Desktop to get back to work. Not a single piece of the company&#x27;s &quot;property&quot; ever needed to come in contact with my wife&#x27;s home computer and if she was waiting for her work computer to do something she could just minimize the RDP client and do something else.<p>I have no idea what they would have been paying for the Terminal server on their end, I&#x27;ve heard it runs north of $100k&#x2F;year, and this service seems to be competing with <i>that</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baldfat</author><text>Mainframes?<p>Dumb Terminals are great for working environments and we should have never left them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon WorkSpaces</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joezydeco</author><text>And IT departments that don&#x27;t want company data to ever exist on the laptops. We&#x27;re back to dumb terminals and mainframes.</text></item><item><author>Touche</author><text>This is going to be big for Chromebooks, I suspect.</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>I&#x27;ve scratched my head on what exactly the use-case for this is. I&#x27;m going to need a computer of some sort to access my remote <i>anyways</i>. So what&#x27;s the point?<p>Then I remember the remote freelance job my wife had for a while. They mailed her the employment paperwork, she filled it out, once they processed it they sent her a remote desktop URL, username and password and voila she was &quot;at work&quot;. A day or two later she had everything she needed installed by the IT staff and off she went. She never actually went into the office, even once, and never met any of the employees there face-to-face. When she completed her contract they simply nuked the account she was using and reclaimed the licenses. They didn&#x27;t ship her a laptop to work from and she didn&#x27;t have to ship it back. If she had ever needed to go into the office, they could have let her use an aging extra machine with Remote Desktop to get back to work. Not a single piece of the company&#x27;s &quot;property&quot; ever needed to come in contact with my wife&#x27;s home computer and if she was waiting for her work computer to do something she could just minimize the RDP client and do something else.<p>I have no idea what they would have been paying for the Terminal server on their end, I&#x27;ve heard it runs north of $100k&#x2F;year, and this service seems to be competing with <i>that</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dublinclontarf</author><text>Except this time the mainframe is &quot;The Cloud&quot;, and there are graphics, so fast internet connectivity is going to be even more essential.</text></comment> |
25,469,232 | 25,468,740 | 1 | 3 | 25,466,416 | train | <story><title>I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/i-have-resigned-from-the-google-amp-advisory-committee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&gt; In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.<p>Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.</text></item><item><author>nr2x</author><text>I think what the &quot;legacy&quot; news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think &quot;the media&quot; is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive &quot;an agenda&quot;. In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees.<p>Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, &quot;information wants to be free&quot;. I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.<p>Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).</text></item><item><author>notjustanymike</author><text>Years ago I worked as a frontend dev for Newsweek &amp; The Daily Beast and saw the other side of this. It boiled down to money, brand, advertising and engagement.<p>Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren&#x27;t alone.<p>The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn&#x27;t ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).<p>Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to &quot;the internet&quot;.</text></item><item><author>zupreme</author><text>Years ago I made a news aggregator site which involved dynamically digesting rss feeds and then generating an iframe display of the target story alongside related stories from other sites.<p>The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.<p>Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.<p>The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.<p>Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rndgermandude</author><text>Sadly this. A lot of the &quot;old&quot; media companies saw the &quot;success&quot; of free online content, be it digital-only-ad-based publishers, be it social media, and started to mimic that, and in the process not only desperately pivoted into a market that in fact isn&#x27;t as successful as they thought but also burnt a lot of their reputation in the process.<p>Right now it seems back to paid models for a lot, but I wonder if it&#x27;s too late now with all the damaged reputation and the shift in consumer expectation (that they help create) that news and journalism should be free. I&#x27;d guess for a lot of those newspapers and magazines it will be too late, while a few will survive the onslaught and be able to concentrate the willing-to-pay consumers.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/12/i-have-resigned-from-the-google-amp-advisory-committee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alex3917</author><text>&gt; In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise.<p>Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.</text></item><item><author>nr2x</author><text>I think what the &quot;legacy&quot; news media failed at more than adapting was effectively communicating the time and effort that goes into serious news gathering and reporting. I regularly get the impression a certain slice of HN commenters think &quot;the media&quot; is a bunch of opinion bloggers fabricating sources to drive &quot;an agenda&quot;. In reality, the effort for producing a deep investigative story can be equivalent to an a mid-size software engineering project in terms of person hours and expertise. Three senior reporters working on a Pulitzer-level story can take years, numerous support staff, and legal fees.<p>Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, &quot;information wants to be free&quot;. I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.<p>Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).</text></item><item><author>notjustanymike</author><text>Years ago I worked as a frontend dev for Newsweek &amp; The Daily Beast and saw the other side of this. It boiled down to money, brand, advertising and engagement.<p>Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren&#x27;t alone.<p>The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn&#x27;t ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).<p>Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to &quot;the internet&quot;.</text></item><item><author>zupreme</author><text>Years ago I made a news aggregator site which involved dynamically digesting rss feeds and then generating an iframe display of the target story alongside related stories from other sites.<p>The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.<p>Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.<p>The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.<p>Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatshisface</author><text>&gt;<i>is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.</i><p>A more apt analogy would be that it was like saying Google was expensive to run because of theoretical CS basic research.</text></comment> |
37,518,569 | 37,518,085 | 1 | 3 | 37,517,361 | train | <story><title>How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?</title><url>https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/how-can-we-have-a-proper-debate-when</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JellyBeanThief</author><text>The fundamental problem Dawkins is struggling with is that he is asking for reasoned disagreement on Twitter, which is well-known for a desert of reason. If he truly desires thoughtful discussion, he needs to do it with real people in the real world.<p>And that&#x27;s so obvious that I begin to wonder if he&#x27;s sincere, or if he&#x27;s just stirring up shit to capture people&#x27;s attention.</text></comment> | <story><title>How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?</title><url>https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/how-can-we-have-a-proper-debate-when</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cooper_ganglia</author><text>Reading this, it struck me how the dynamics of the current &#x27;cancel culture&#x27; or whatever resemble those of the traditional religious institutions Dawkins has previously critiqued. Both, at their extremes, exhibit an intolerance to differing viewpoints as a threat to their literal existence. Both can become insular, shutting out any deviation from the &#x27;accepted&#x27; narrative, and this poses a real threat to free thought and inquiry.</text></comment> |
2,586,171 | 2,585,991 | 1 | 3 | 2,585,962 | train | <story><title>Italian seismologists to be tried for manslaughter</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/italian_seismologists_to_be_tr.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexqgb</author><text>This isn't the first time Italy has reduced itself to the status of reactionary backwater by attacking scientists, Galileo being a case in point.<p>In the wake of that travesty, Louis XIV didn't have a hard time convincing Cassini to abandon his post in Bologna and emigrate to France, where he could continue his work safely. Given the extraordinary military advantage conveyed by Cassini's work in improving cartography through increasingly sophisticated astronomical observation, the Netherlands and England were quick to join the seventeenth-century's war for technical talent.<p>Not grasping the extent to which the world was passing it by, the Papacy kept Galileo's works on the list of banned books until the mid-nineteenth century. By the time they came off, Italy's once formidable lead had been squandered permanently.<p>File this current fiasco under 'lessons not learned'.</text></comment> | <story><title>Italian seismologists to be tried for manslaughter</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/italian_seismologists_to_be_tr.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>barrkel</author><text>That's phenomenally stupid. Rather than getting best estimates, they are explicitly requesting that scientists over-estimate the probability of disaster and cry wolf. That in turn will mean they will have even less warning should something genuine turn up.</text></comment> |
22,656,294 | 22,655,833 | 1 | 3 | 22,654,646 | train | <story><title>Eat for $1.50 per Day – Layoffs, Coronavirus Quarantine, Food Shortages</title><url>https://efficiencyiseverything.com/eat-for-1-50-per-day-layoffs-coronavirus-quarantine-food-shortages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>If you have a way of measuring your body fat to a reasonable degree of accuracy, you can ration your food by knowing how much stored body fat your body can convert into energy per day. Your body can convert roughly 0.9% of your body fat into energy in a day. So if you&#x27;re 180lbs with 33% body fat, you have 60 lbs of fat on you. You should be able to convert ~0.54lbs into energy, which at ~3500 kcal per lbs comes out to 1890 kcal being the maximum calorie deficit you can overcome with just stored body fat. Subtract that from your daily calorie expenditure (another messy estimate) to get how many calories you need to consume to avoid muscle breakdown and energy crashes.<p>Keep in mind that every person&#x27;s body and metabolic system is unique so you&#x27;ll want to put in a generous error buffer. I&#x27;d cut the calorie deficit by half, at least to start with. Also notice that each day your total stored body fat will be less, so the number of calories your body can extract from that stored fat will also be less.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;15615615&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;15615615&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robocat</author><text>You could do that, but it is dangerous to do so during an epidemic.<p>Having body fat helps you if you get very sick. Having low body fat means you are at a higher risk of death when your body has to fight off disease. Being very underweight increases your risk of catching diseases.<p>Of course, being excessively obese has other risks.<p>I am not a doctor (although anyone blindly following internet advice needs to be careful!)</text></comment> | <story><title>Eat for $1.50 per Day – Layoffs, Coronavirus Quarantine, Food Shortages</title><url>https://efficiencyiseverything.com/eat-for-1-50-per-day-layoffs-coronavirus-quarantine-food-shortages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>If you have a way of measuring your body fat to a reasonable degree of accuracy, you can ration your food by knowing how much stored body fat your body can convert into energy per day. Your body can convert roughly 0.9% of your body fat into energy in a day. So if you&#x27;re 180lbs with 33% body fat, you have 60 lbs of fat on you. You should be able to convert ~0.54lbs into energy, which at ~3500 kcal per lbs comes out to 1890 kcal being the maximum calorie deficit you can overcome with just stored body fat. Subtract that from your daily calorie expenditure (another messy estimate) to get how many calories you need to consume to avoid muscle breakdown and energy crashes.<p>Keep in mind that every person&#x27;s body and metabolic system is unique so you&#x27;ll want to put in a generous error buffer. I&#x27;d cut the calorie deficit by half, at least to start with. Also notice that each day your total stored body fat will be less, so the number of calories your body can extract from that stored fat will also be less.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;15615615&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;15615615&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johntiger1</author><text>Are you certain it only subtracts from fat? From my understanding, you will also lose muscle too (especially without exercise)</text></comment> |
12,557,988 | 12,557,664 | 1 | 2 | 12,557,212 | train | <story><title>Machine Learning: Models with Learned Parameters</title><url>https://indico.io/blog/simple-practical-path-to-machine-learning-capability-part3/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>antirez</author><text>I strongly advise everybody with one day free (and not much better things to do) to implement a basic fully connected feedforward neural network (the classical stuff, basically), and give it a try against the MNIST handwritten digits database. It&#x27;s a relatively simple project that learns you the basic. On top of that to understand the more complex stuff becomes more approachable. To me this is the parallel task to implement a basic interpreter in order to understand how higher level languages and compilers work. You don&#x27;t need to write compilers normally, as you don&#x27;t need to write your own AI stack, but it&#x27;s the only path to fully understand the basics.<p>You&#x27;ll see it learning to recognize the digits, you can print the digits that it misses and you&#x27;ll see they are actually harder even for humans sometimes, or sometimes you&#x27;ll see why it can&#x27;t understand the digit while it&#x27;s trivial for you (for instance it&#x27;s an 8 but just the lower circle is so small).<p>Also back propagation is an algorithm which is simple to develop an intuition about. Even if you forget the details N years later the idea is one of the stuff you&#x27;ll never forget.</text></comment> | <story><title>Machine Learning: Models with Learned Parameters</title><url>https://indico.io/blog/simple-practical-path-to-machine-learning-capability-part3/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nkozyra</author><text>This is well-written and I applaud any step toward demystifying the sometimes scary sounding concepts that drive much of the ML algorithms.<p>Knowing you can pretty quickly whip up a KNN or ANN in a few hundred lines of code or fewer is one of the more eye-opening parts of the delving in. For the most part, supervised learning follows a pretty reliable path and each algorithm obviously varies in approach, but I know I originally thought &quot;deep learning? ugh, sounds abstract and complicated&quot; before realizing it was all just a deep ANN.<p>Long story short: dig in. It&#x27;s unlikely to be as complex as you think. And if you&#x27;ve ever had an algorithms class (or worked as a professional software dev) none of it should be too daunting. Your only problem will be keeping up the charade if people around you think ML&#x2F;AI is some sort of magic.</text></comment> |
41,532,429 | 41,532,438 | 1 | 3 | 41,527,564 | train | <story><title>Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?</title><url>https://www.hadijaveed.me/2024/09/08/does-your-startup-really-need-complex-cloud-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kbolino</author><text>Leaning into LTS is nice <i>until</i> you near EOL and have to migrate everything in an often Herculean effort to work with the next LTS release.</text></item><item><author>ghomem</author><text>Well that&#x27;s exactly the point! Creating complex cloud resources with, for instance, Terraform, is less reproducible than a shell script on an LTS system like Ubuntu or RHEL - that&#x27;s because the cloud provider interfaces drifts and from time to time stops accepting the terraform manifests that previously worked. And to fix it, you have to interrupt your normal work for yet another unplanned intervention in the terraform code - this happened to my teams several times.<p>This does not happen with Puppet + Linux, because LTS distributions have a long release cycle where compatibility is not broken.<p>I tried to explain this topic in the article linked above. Not sure how far I succeeded.</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>I started my career in a world where we did everything using shell scripts running directly on bare metal servers, usually running Solaris, and later SuSe or RedHat. I never understood the &quot;how would you reproduce your setup without Docker (or X, where X is some other technology)&quot;. The scripts were deterministic. The dependency versions were locked. The configurations were identical. The input arguments were identical. The order of execution was identical. It all ran on a deterministic computational device. How could it <i>not</i> be reproducible?</text></item><item><author>ghomem</author><text>I went through sweat and tears with this on different projects. People wanting to be cool because they use hype-train-tech ending up doing things of unbelievably bad quality because &quot;hey, we are not that many in the team&quot; but &quot;hey, we need infinite scalability&quot;. Teams immature to the point of not understanding what LTS means have decided that they needed Kubernetes because yes. I could go on.<p>I currently have distilled, compact Puppet code to create a hardened VM of any size on any provider that can run one more more Docker services or run directly a python backend, or serve static files. With this I create a service on a Hetzner VM in 5 minutes whether the VM has 2 cores or 48 cores and control the configuration in source controlled manifests while monitoring configuration compliance with a custom Naemon plugin. A perfectly reproducible process. The startups kids are meanwhile doing snowflakes in the cloud spending many KEUR per month to have something that is worse than what devops pioneers were able to do in 2017. And the stakeholders are paying for this ship.<p>I wrote a more structured opinion piece about this, called The Emperor&#x27;s New clouds:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logical.li&#x2F;blog&#x2F;emperors-new-clouds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logical.li&#x2F;blog&#x2F;emperors-new-clouds&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghomem</author><text>Like 12 years of life cycle is not enough for you to plan a transition?<p>You <i>can</i> use the entire life cycle but not one is forcing you to. You can update from one LTS to another every 2 years, or 4 years, or 5 years... you decide.</text></comment> | <story><title>Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?</title><url>https://www.hadijaveed.me/2024/09/08/does-your-startup-really-need-complex-cloud-infrastructure/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kbolino</author><text>Leaning into LTS is nice <i>until</i> you near EOL and have to migrate everything in an often Herculean effort to work with the next LTS release.</text></item><item><author>ghomem</author><text>Well that&#x27;s exactly the point! Creating complex cloud resources with, for instance, Terraform, is less reproducible than a shell script on an LTS system like Ubuntu or RHEL - that&#x27;s because the cloud provider interfaces drifts and from time to time stops accepting the terraform manifests that previously worked. And to fix it, you have to interrupt your normal work for yet another unplanned intervention in the terraform code - this happened to my teams several times.<p>This does not happen with Puppet + Linux, because LTS distributions have a long release cycle where compatibility is not broken.<p>I tried to explain this topic in the article linked above. Not sure how far I succeeded.</text></item><item><author>hliyan</author><text>I started my career in a world where we did everything using shell scripts running directly on bare metal servers, usually running Solaris, and later SuSe or RedHat. I never understood the &quot;how would you reproduce your setup without Docker (or X, where X is some other technology)&quot;. The scripts were deterministic. The dependency versions were locked. The configurations were identical. The input arguments were identical. The order of execution was identical. It all ran on a deterministic computational device. How could it <i>not</i> be reproducible?</text></item><item><author>ghomem</author><text>I went through sweat and tears with this on different projects. People wanting to be cool because they use hype-train-tech ending up doing things of unbelievably bad quality because &quot;hey, we are not that many in the team&quot; but &quot;hey, we need infinite scalability&quot;. Teams immature to the point of not understanding what LTS means have decided that they needed Kubernetes because yes. I could go on.<p>I currently have distilled, compact Puppet code to create a hardened VM of any size on any provider that can run one more more Docker services or run directly a python backend, or serve static files. With this I create a service on a Hetzner VM in 5 minutes whether the VM has 2 cores or 48 cores and control the configuration in source controlled manifests while monitoring configuration compliance with a custom Naemon plugin. A perfectly reproducible process. The startups kids are meanwhile doing snowflakes in the cloud spending many KEUR per month to have something that is worse than what devops pioneers were able to do in 2017. And the stakeholders are paying for this ship.<p>I wrote a more structured opinion piece about this, called The Emperor&#x27;s New clouds:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logical.li&#x2F;blog&#x2F;emperors-new-clouds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;logical.li&#x2F;blog&#x2F;emperors-new-clouds&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>minkles</author><text>It&#x27;s not terrible in my experience of doing it several times now.<p>It is definitely less terrible than trying to unfuck tangles of terraform &#x2F; terragrunt &#x2F; yaml &#x2F; bits of cloud infra.</text></comment> |
6,375,593 | 6,375,401 | 1 | 2 | 6,373,185 | train | <story><title>Cocktails for programmers</title><url>https://github.com/the-teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blob/master/cocktails_for_programers.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lucaspiller</author><text>Agreed.<p>Further reading: <a href="http://old.ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.ryanfunduk.com&#x2F;culture-of-exclusion&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>teddyh</author><text>The title “Cocktails for programmers” gives me the same feeling as would the phrase “Leaf blowers for stamp collectors”.<p>Yes, a stamp collector might use a leaf blower, but it would not be relevant to collecting stamps. On the contrary, using a leaf blower <i>while</i> collecting stamps would be… inadvisable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hamburglar</author><text>I can appreciate not liking the brogrammer phenomenon, and not being interested in conferences that are so party-focused, but this guy really has a huge bug up his ass about other people enjoying themselves. &quot;I&#x27;m not interested in &#x27;partying hard&#x27;, I want to talk with like-minded people about subjects I don&#x27;t necessarily get to talk about at the office.&quot; Well, guess what, you can&#x27;t force people to sit down and talk nodejs with you if they want to drink instead. Sorry the world isn&#x27;t the way you really really want it to be.<p>The guy seems to be interpreting a lot of his examples in the worst possible light, too. Example:
Q: Is there space set up for hacking?
A: We have done this for previous conferences, but to be honest people were having too much social fun to really take advantage of the space.
Translation: Y U NO DRINKING!?<p>That&#x27;s a stupid translation. They set up hacking space before and very few people used it, so they didn&#x27;t bother this time. You have your cause and effect backwards if you think this means they&#x27;re trying to force you to drink.<p>Or: &quot;Perks for working for them include dental coverage, and &#x27;weekly happy hour&#x27;. Those who don&#x27;t want to participate in getting sloshed regularly... need not apply?&quot;<p>Jesus, dude, settle down. You&#x27;ve taken a perk of employment and turned it into a statement that if you don&#x27;t drink you&#x27;re not welcome? Please let go of your persecution complex. I know it&#x27;s really fun to be indignant that others encouraging you to have a good time is so totally unfair, but it&#x27;s really no different than people saying &quot;No seriously, The Wire is fucking fantastic! You have to watch it!&quot;<p>Interacting with humans isn&#x27;t that hard if you allow yourself and others to actually act like humans.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cocktails for programmers</title><url>https://github.com/the-teacher/cocktails_for_programmers/blob/master/cocktails_for_programers.md</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lucaspiller</author><text>Agreed.<p>Further reading: <a href="http://old.ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.ryanfunduk.com&#x2F;culture-of-exclusion&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>teddyh</author><text>The title “Cocktails for programmers” gives me the same feeling as would the phrase “Leaf blowers for stamp collectors”.<p>Yes, a stamp collector might use a leaf blower, but it would not be relevant to collecting stamps. On the contrary, using a leaf blower <i>while</i> collecting stamps would be… inadvisable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jlgreco</author><text>I really hate board games. Seriously, I hate them, and I don&#x27;t understand why so many people in my social circles enjoy them. I can&#x27;t count the number of times I&#x27;ve been at a party and everything has been going nicely, and then all of a sudden, <i>game time</i>.<p>You think maybe I should write a long-winded self-aggrandizing blog post about this culture of exclusion?</text></comment> |
2,855,511 | 2,855,482 | 1 | 2 | 2,855,276 | train | <story><title>How Debt Has Defined Human History</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/06/how-debt-has-defined-human-history/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrismealy</author><text>Debt is the same as savings. "How Savings Has Defined Human History" somehow doesn't get people worked up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jhancock</author><text>I started reading Graeber's book [1] 3 days ago. I'm only about 1/3 into it. The author is an anthropologist and tells his story from this perspective. So far, If I understand correctly what I'm reading, I think the author would not agree that 'savings' is the opposite of 'debt'. I also don't see the author as trying to get the reader worked up. Its a very interesting and though provoking read thus far.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1933633867" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1933633867</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How Debt Has Defined Human History</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/06/how-debt-has-defined-human-history/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrismealy</author><text>Debt is the same as savings. "How Savings Has Defined Human History" somehow doesn't get people worked up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anonymoushn</author><text>Are you sure? I'm fairly certain that if I accumulate savings in the form of some non-debt-backed currency and keep it buried in a box it won't be the same as debt.<p>If we still want to regard that as debt, I could instead buy commodities and keep them in a warehouse, but I think there would be some temptation to say that "they are not savings because they are not currency."</text></comment> |
24,239,097 | 24,239,268 | 1 | 2 | 24,238,229 | train | <story><title>WordPressiOS Locked by App Store</title><url>https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1296879217297113088</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>turblety</author><text>I know I really don&#x27;t matter to Apple, but this walled garden and app store dictatorship is what finally made me move away from iOS to Android last year. I had used Android in the past, but it was with Samsung Galaxy&#x27;s which where very bloated and awful when compared to Apple.<p>But when a friend told me that Samsung just ruin Android [1] and I should try an actual Google phone, I bought a Pixel and it&#x27;s honestly great.<p>I can install apps I build myself very easily without Google&#x27;s input at all, although I don&#x27;t even need to build apps since their PWA&#x27;s can do almost anything I&#x27;d want.<p>I highly recommend people who are sick of this Apple crap, to try a Google Pixel. I haven&#x27;t even needed to sign up for a Google account since using it (although I have to use an alternative app store).<p>I&#x27;ve already moved three family members over and after a few days they basically don&#x27;t notice a different.<p>Between moving to my Pixel and a Purism laptop I&#x27;m pretty much free from Apple, apart from my work laptop, which isn&#x27;t my choice.<p>1. Disclaimer! I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated so if you don&#x27;t mind a bunch of binary blobs that track you maybe Samsung would work for you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kuzimoto</author><text>&gt; I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated<p>I like to think I am as well. How do you balance this when moving from Apple to Android, where Apple (seems) to be much more privacy-focused and basically at zero for open-source&#x2F;freedom, where Android is basically the reverse? I think there are ways to make it better (custom ROM, alternative app stores), but you give up a lot of functionality (Play Store, Google Pay, etc.), and I&#x27;m not sure you can entirely eliminate all concerns.<p>I like the freedom of Android, so as long as I understand what I&#x27;m giving up privacy-wise I don&#x27;t mind the trade-off. I have at least tried to make it a little harder for Google, using DuckDuckGo, but I&#x27;m guessing it only makes a dent with the other massive amounts of data they can still glean from the various services running on the phone, Gmail, Maps, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>WordPressiOS Locked by App Store</title><url>https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1296879217297113088</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>turblety</author><text>I know I really don&#x27;t matter to Apple, but this walled garden and app store dictatorship is what finally made me move away from iOS to Android last year. I had used Android in the past, but it was with Samsung Galaxy&#x27;s which where very bloated and awful when compared to Apple.<p>But when a friend told me that Samsung just ruin Android [1] and I should try an actual Google phone, I bought a Pixel and it&#x27;s honestly great.<p>I can install apps I build myself very easily without Google&#x27;s input at all, although I don&#x27;t even need to build apps since their PWA&#x27;s can do almost anything I&#x27;d want.<p>I highly recommend people who are sick of this Apple crap, to try a Google Pixel. I haven&#x27;t even needed to sign up for a Google account since using it (although I have to use an alternative app store).<p>I&#x27;ve already moved three family members over and after a few days they basically don&#x27;t notice a different.<p>Between moving to my Pixel and a Purism laptop I&#x27;m pretty much free from Apple, apart from my work laptop, which isn&#x27;t my choice.<p>1. Disclaimer! I am very privacy, open-source, freedom orientated so if you don&#x27;t mind a bunch of binary blobs that track you maybe Samsung would work for you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sschueller</author><text>The play store is getting worse and worse. It will eventually end up being just a bad.<p>Meanwhile every iteration of Android is getting more locked down because of &quot;security&quot;. No more external cameras etc..<p>The future look bleak until we get a true open source alternative running on open hardware.</text></comment> |
31,784,659 | 31,783,202 | 1 | 3 | 31,777,062 | train | <story><title>Probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants</title><url>https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Good-bacteria-to-tackle-depression.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>I finally beat my digestive issues and chronic fatigue (physical depression) which lasted 3+ years from 2019-2021. Without getting too far into it, here&#x27;s the stuff that finally worked, weighted by immediacy on a scale of 10:<p>- 10: Eating a serving of Brussels sprouts, preferably daily<p>- 10: Taking about 3 psyllium husk capsules occasionally with FODMAP and spicy meals<p>- 10: Taking a digestive enzyme occasionally with FODMAP and spicy meals (Digest Basic, no affiliation)<p>- 10: Taking a &quot;stress&quot; B complex with 100% daily, instead of 1000% weekly (Nature Made, no affiliation)<p>- 10: Avoiding all beans, unaged dairy, whole-grain wheat and most tree nuts for a few months<p>- 8: Drinking at least twice as much water as I feel that I need, from one big container over the course of the day<p>- 8: Eating plain giant salads with dressing, preferably spinach-greens mix, several times per week<p>- 8: Drinking Kefir daily<p>- 6: Trying several different brands of probiotics occasionally in no particular order<p>- 6: Eating 1-4 eggs per day, preferably on post-workout days<p>- 6: Taking an iodine supplement initially, a few times per week until the bottle was gone<p>I think what kicked this all off was dabbling with keto 5 years ago which might have cost me most of my tolerance to milk, and prolonged dehydration from intense workouts and large servings of protein without proactive hydration. When I lost my gut health, I may have picked up bad bacteria or parasites from food poisoning or raw seafood. I was also under debilitating stress during the last few years at my previous job, so began every morning on an empty tank spiritually. I never listened to my body until my health failed and it made the decision to stop for me.<p>The biggest change has been that being tired feels ordinary and rare, with no emotional component. Instead of the crushing &quot;universe is against me&quot; sense of being attacked, alone and hopeless knowing there was no end of it in sight, which I endured for many years before my physical health&#x27;s deterioration finally caught up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DantesKite</author><text>I can give some context for what may have happened because I went through something similar.<p>My two cents is the biggest factors were the keto and the stress. A low carb, high fat diet does not traditionally feature intact plant cell walls, or what we otherwise know as &quot;fiber&quot;. There are literally thousands of different of variations of &quot;fiber&quot; of which we have catalogued only a few, but these structures feed the microbiota in your gut. And they really do depend on fiber in a profound way.<p>Without this fiber, they tend to starve and adjust to feed on the epithelial lining of your gut. It also gives an opportunity for the pathogens in your gut to &quot;takeover&quot;, especially when paired with the stress since most of the &quot;beneficial&quot; microbes will tend to die off.<p>When you read stories of people who got an autoimmune problem, there&#x27;s almost always a period of severe stress prior to it. My working hypothesis is this impairs the immune system which is what keeps the pathogenic bacteria in check through several mechanisms (pathogen-associated-molecular-pattern detection or PAMPs for instance).<p>Through much, much trial and error and a lot of scientific article research, I&#x27;ve found the most consistent way to restore microbiota ratios is with Vitamin D, followed by a clinically tested probiotic like Visbiome, followed by Kefir. The Vitamin D alone at moderate to high doses will get you very far, although it doesn&#x27;t necessarily restore diversity (since Vitamin D in of itself does not contain any microbes) but it helps shift the balance of microbes through a variety of biochemical functions.<p>Vitamin D also helps with gum disease in my experience and in a way no other supplement or product has so far. Highly recommend and you don&#x27;t even have to take a high dosage to see it for yourself. You just have to be consistent.<p>One last thing I&#x27;ll say is that for whatever reason taking the supplement seems to work better than exposing yourself to sunlight, which is unusual, but there may be something about the biochemical pathway Vitamin D takes when consumed as a supplement as opposed through the cholesterol-synthesis that happens with UVB.</text></comment> | <story><title>Probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants</title><url>https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Good-bacteria-to-tackle-depression.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>I finally beat my digestive issues and chronic fatigue (physical depression) which lasted 3+ years from 2019-2021. Without getting too far into it, here&#x27;s the stuff that finally worked, weighted by immediacy on a scale of 10:<p>- 10: Eating a serving of Brussels sprouts, preferably daily<p>- 10: Taking about 3 psyllium husk capsules occasionally with FODMAP and spicy meals<p>- 10: Taking a digestive enzyme occasionally with FODMAP and spicy meals (Digest Basic, no affiliation)<p>- 10: Taking a &quot;stress&quot; B complex with 100% daily, instead of 1000% weekly (Nature Made, no affiliation)<p>- 10: Avoiding all beans, unaged dairy, whole-grain wheat and most tree nuts for a few months<p>- 8: Drinking at least twice as much water as I feel that I need, from one big container over the course of the day<p>- 8: Eating plain giant salads with dressing, preferably spinach-greens mix, several times per week<p>- 8: Drinking Kefir daily<p>- 6: Trying several different brands of probiotics occasionally in no particular order<p>- 6: Eating 1-4 eggs per day, preferably on post-workout days<p>- 6: Taking an iodine supplement initially, a few times per week until the bottle was gone<p>I think what kicked this all off was dabbling with keto 5 years ago which might have cost me most of my tolerance to milk, and prolonged dehydration from intense workouts and large servings of protein without proactive hydration. When I lost my gut health, I may have picked up bad bacteria or parasites from food poisoning or raw seafood. I was also under debilitating stress during the last few years at my previous job, so began every morning on an empty tank spiritually. I never listened to my body until my health failed and it made the decision to stop for me.<p>The biggest change has been that being tired feels ordinary and rare, with no emotional component. Instead of the crushing &quot;universe is against me&quot; sense of being attacked, alone and hopeless knowing there was no end of it in sight, which I endured for many years before my physical health&#x27;s deterioration finally caught up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrharrison</author><text>I had similar issues. I went and saw a functional medicine doctor, had a stool test and he diagnosed me with candida overgrowth. Which may be what you had. Here is the diet protocol for beating back candida, which is similar to the diet you put yourself on. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecandidadiet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecandidadiet.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
3,247,621 | 3,247,379 | 1 | 2 | 3,246,957 | train | <story><title>Stanford to host more online classes</title><url>http://www.cs101-class.org/#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karpathy</author><text>thanks, I should add (and I hope this is somewhat obvious) that there is a team of about 7 or 8 of us in total. A lot of work goes into site/technical/video processing etc, and then there are 2.5 of us making the assignments.<p>The real hero behind the assignments is Jiquan Ngiam (<a href="http://cs.stanford.edu/~jngiam/" rel="nofollow">http://cs.stanford.edu/~jngiam/</a>) who is in charge and does most of the work. He is awesome, brilliant, very hard working, and I thoroughly enjoy hacking with him on the ML class until late AM.</text></item><item><author>plinkplonk</author><text>" I'm a CS PhD student at Stanford and I am a (voluntary) co-creator of the programming assignments for the current ML class. It is a lot of work, but the way I see it, we only have to put great assignments together a single time, and thousands of people can enjoy them and benefit from them for years and years to come. That is what I call time well spent."<p>As a consumer of Stanford's online classes(though not the ML class. I'm waiting for the CS 229 - vs the CS 229A - version), let me take the opportunity to thank you. Your efforts are totally appreciated. You are right, this is revolutionary. Glad to see that Stanford is keeping up (and building!) momentum rather than this being a one off effort.</text></item><item><author>karpathy</author><text>I get easily excited about education-related topics so I may be over-reacting, but I think these classes will jump-start an educational revolution, and that people will start to fully appreciate just how inefficient traditional teaching methods are.<p>Some people like to say that this is nothing new because video lectures were posted on the internet for several years now (for example MIT Open Courseware etc.), but I think this misses the point entirely. There is a huge difference between low-quality video/audio recording of a prof mumbling for an hour and post-processed, perfected snippets of videos presented in a coherent fashion, and most importantly with supplementary materials that encourage people to actually apply their knowledge and get feedback. In addition, the fact that many people take the class at the same time also enhances the experience for everyone, and we've seen study groups form everywhere around internet.<p>Full disclosure, by the way, I'm a CS PhD student at Stanford and I am a (voluntary) co-creator of the programming assignments for the current ML class. It is a lot of work, but the way I see it, we only have to put great assignments together a single time, and thousands of people can enjoy them and benefit from them for years and years to come. That is what I call time well spent.<p>I hope all these classes go well, and I'm looking forward to telling my kids about what education used to be like in the old days. I have a feeling that they'll find it hard to believe me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malvim</author><text>Me and my wife have been following Professor Ng's ML class and one of the highest points for us has been working through and trying to understand the programming exercices.<p>Our personal thanks to you and the other "1.5 people" working on that. ;)<p>Cheers!</text></comment> | <story><title>Stanford to host more online classes</title><url>http://www.cs101-class.org/#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>karpathy</author><text>thanks, I should add (and I hope this is somewhat obvious) that there is a team of about 7 or 8 of us in total. A lot of work goes into site/technical/video processing etc, and then there are 2.5 of us making the assignments.<p>The real hero behind the assignments is Jiquan Ngiam (<a href="http://cs.stanford.edu/~jngiam/" rel="nofollow">http://cs.stanford.edu/~jngiam/</a>) who is in charge and does most of the work. He is awesome, brilliant, very hard working, and I thoroughly enjoy hacking with him on the ML class until late AM.</text></item><item><author>plinkplonk</author><text>" I'm a CS PhD student at Stanford and I am a (voluntary) co-creator of the programming assignments for the current ML class. It is a lot of work, but the way I see it, we only have to put great assignments together a single time, and thousands of people can enjoy them and benefit from them for years and years to come. That is what I call time well spent."<p>As a consumer of Stanford's online classes(though not the ML class. I'm waiting for the CS 229 - vs the CS 229A - version), let me take the opportunity to thank you. Your efforts are totally appreciated. You are right, this is revolutionary. Glad to see that Stanford is keeping up (and building!) momentum rather than this being a one off effort.</text></item><item><author>karpathy</author><text>I get easily excited about education-related topics so I may be over-reacting, but I think these classes will jump-start an educational revolution, and that people will start to fully appreciate just how inefficient traditional teaching methods are.<p>Some people like to say that this is nothing new because video lectures were posted on the internet for several years now (for example MIT Open Courseware etc.), but I think this misses the point entirely. There is a huge difference between low-quality video/audio recording of a prof mumbling for an hour and post-processed, perfected snippets of videos presented in a coherent fashion, and most importantly with supplementary materials that encourage people to actually apply their knowledge and get feedback. In addition, the fact that many people take the class at the same time also enhances the experience for everyone, and we've seen study groups form everywhere around internet.<p>Full disclosure, by the way, I'm a CS PhD student at Stanford and I am a (voluntary) co-creator of the programming assignments for the current ML class. It is a lot of work, but the way I see it, we only have to put great assignments together a single time, and thousands of people can enjoy them and benefit from them for years and years to come. That is what I call time well spent.<p>I hope all these classes go well, and I'm looking forward to telling my kids about what education used to be like in the old days. I have a feeling that they'll find it hard to believe me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amirmc</author><text>Thanks for that. I suspect Prof Ng will get a lot of praise for the class but I suspect some of it is intended for the people behind the scenes (not always easy to find out who they are).</text></comment> |
3,420,895 | 3,420,955 | 1 | 2 | 3,420,761 | train | <story><title>IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.</title><url>http://siliconfilter.com/good-riddance-ie6-usage-falls-to-under-1-in-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thibaut_barrere</author><text>For those (like me) who still need to support IE6 for a while again, don't miss ievms (automated installation of IE in VirtualBox):<p><a href="https://github.com/xdissent/ievms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xdissent/ievms</a><p>(it recently added support for IE6)</text></comment> | <story><title>IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.</title><url>http://siliconfilter.com/good-riddance-ie6-usage-falls-to-under-1-in-u-s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spydum</author><text>In the enterprise space, IE6 usage has fallen significantly from Dec 2010 to Dec 2011 according to my own observations, but it's still not near enough zero for my own comfort:<p><pre><code> Dec 2009: IE 6.0 share is 37.3%
Dec 2010: IE 6.0 share is 15.5%
Dec 2011: IE 6.0 share is 6.8%
</code></pre>
Still, this is a great trend.</text></comment> |
2,605,947 | 2,605,870 | 1 | 2 | 2,605,580 | train | <story><title>A way to take out spammers? 3 banks process 95% of spam transactions</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-way-to-take-out-spammers-3-banks-process-95-of-spam-transactions.ars</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nowarninglabel</author><text>The paper itself (linked to in the article) is pretty accessible, and a good read. Interesting that they noted for their research, 93.18% of the requests were for pharmaceuticals.<p>As for the banks: Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St Kitts &#38; Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St Kitts &#38;Nevis, and Danish-owned DnB Nord in Latvia, there is some more interesting factoids in the actual paper:<p>"most herbal and replica purchases
cleared through the same bank in St. Kitts (a by-product of
ZedCash’s dominance of this market, as per the previous
discussion), while most pharmaceutical affiliate programs
used two banks (in Azerbaijan and Latvia), and software
was handled entirely by two banks (in Latvia and Russia)"<p>As well as the fact that most of the merchant codes were correct:<p>"For example, all of our software purchases (across all programs) were coded as 5734 (Computer Software Stores)
and 85% of all pharmacy purchases (again across programs)
were coded as 5912 (Drug Stores and Pharmacies). ZedCash
transactions (replica and herbal) are an exception, being
somewhat deceptive, and each was coded as 5969 (Direct
Marketing—Other)."<p>It does make one wonder if spam is a solvable problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>A way to take out spammers? 3 banks process 95% of spam transactions</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-way-to-take-out-spammers-3-banks-process-95-of-spam-transactions.ars</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bmcleod</author><text>Unfortunately it's likely the spammers are simply going with whichever bank is easiest to work through.<p>Any changes will just cause them to move to the next easiest option.</text></comment> |
14,348,495 | 14,346,647 | 1 | 3 | 14,343,790 | train | <story><title>Nearly 1 in 3 drugs have a significant safety issue after FDA approval</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fda-drugs-safety-20170509-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tvural</author><text>Negative press like this probably contributes to the FDA being so conservative. They get none of the benefits when a great new drug is approved, but get scapegoated when they approve something dangerous even to small numbers of people. So they just approve as few drugs and medical devices as they can get away with - it&#x27;s a massive misalignment of incentives.<p>One might think drugs would be more dangerous if the FDA were less conservative, but I suspect the opposite. If it takes you ten years and 2 billion dollars to release a new drug, and then you find out it has some terrible side effect in 0.1% of the population, you don&#x27;t get to fix the problem. You might not withdraw it either, since the drug would still be a net good for society. And if one drug is approved instead of ten, patients are forced to stick to the flawed solution.<p>The far bigger problem than drugs with side effects is a lack of drugs. Around 1&#x2F;3 as many drugs get approved today relative to 1970, and the costs of a drug approval have risen 5 times faster than inflation since then. Medicine has been an anti-technological field for the last few decades - it&#x27;s doing less with more. The most valuable biomedical companies are the ones that have been around since the 1800s - one could imagine what computers would look like today if IBM were still the largest IT company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Apfel</author><text>For the record, the 2 billion dollars figure is from the notorious tufts centre for the study of drug development, which is heavily pharma-backed.<p>It&#x27;s a very, VERY controversial figure in the pharmacoeconomic literature, but has been accepted as gospel due to continuous repetition in shitty reporting.<p>Fairly good article discussing this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;does-it-really-cost-2-6-billion-to-develop-a-new-drug&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;wonk&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;does-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nearly 1 in 3 drugs have a significant safety issue after FDA approval</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-fda-drugs-safety-20170509-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tvural</author><text>Negative press like this probably contributes to the FDA being so conservative. They get none of the benefits when a great new drug is approved, but get scapegoated when they approve something dangerous even to small numbers of people. So they just approve as few drugs and medical devices as they can get away with - it&#x27;s a massive misalignment of incentives.<p>One might think drugs would be more dangerous if the FDA were less conservative, but I suspect the opposite. If it takes you ten years and 2 billion dollars to release a new drug, and then you find out it has some terrible side effect in 0.1% of the population, you don&#x27;t get to fix the problem. You might not withdraw it either, since the drug would still be a net good for society. And if one drug is approved instead of ten, patients are forced to stick to the flawed solution.<p>The far bigger problem than drugs with side effects is a lack of drugs. Around 1&#x2F;3 as many drugs get approved today relative to 1970, and the costs of a drug approval have risen 5 times faster than inflation since then. Medicine has been an anti-technological field for the last few decades - it&#x27;s doing less with more. The most valuable biomedical companies are the ones that have been around since the 1800s - one could imagine what computers would look like today if IBM were still the largest IT company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>Sam Peltzman goes into great detail on this issue in his book &quot;Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation.&quot;</text></comment> |
6,501,436 | 6,500,015 | 1 | 2 | 6,499,432 | train | <story><title>Rubinius 2.0 released</title><url>http://rubini.us/2013/10/04/rubinius-2-0-released/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rahoulb</author><text>Genuine question: what advantage does Node give you over EventMachine?</text></item><item><author>1qaz2wsx3edc</author><text>&gt; Concurrent and distributed applications aren&#x27;t the future anymore, they are the present. They are vital to business success. The many talented developers that are passing over Ruby for Erlang, Go, Clojure and Node are draining Ruby of talent and vitality.<p>As someone who has been working with MRI since 2006-ish, I feel this statement is accurate. MRI is stagnating around the GIL. Rails last lost some of it&#x27;s edge and this is in part responsible. Since about 2011, I&#x27;ve invested into Erlang (elixir), and mostly NodeJS. They&#x27;re truly communities that are evolving well, they are applying themselves well to new problems inherit to changes in application building demands.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomphoolery</author><text>One thing I enjoy about NodeJS is their standard library is asynchronous until you want it to be. Most of the NodeJS libs in NPM are also designed in this way. With EventMachine, you have to be careful what you&#x27;re using because some of those RubyGems will probably include blocking IO.<p>When you&#x27;re doing <i>that</i> kind of programming, I think it&#x27;s better to use a language or ecosystem designed specifically for that purpose rather than use a library such as Twisted or EventMachine which is inside another language that may or may not support what you&#x27;re doing. This has no basis in theory or anything, just my own experience. Makes things easier for me, that&#x27;s all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rubinius 2.0 released</title><url>http://rubini.us/2013/10/04/rubinius-2-0-released/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rahoulb</author><text>Genuine question: what advantage does Node give you over EventMachine?</text></item><item><author>1qaz2wsx3edc</author><text>&gt; Concurrent and distributed applications aren&#x27;t the future anymore, they are the present. They are vital to business success. The many talented developers that are passing over Ruby for Erlang, Go, Clojure and Node are draining Ruby of talent and vitality.<p>As someone who has been working with MRI since 2006-ish, I feel this statement is accurate. MRI is stagnating around the GIL. Rails last lost some of it&#x27;s edge and this is in part responsible. Since about 2011, I&#x27;ve invested into Erlang (elixir), and mostly NodeJS. They&#x27;re truly communities that are evolving well, they are applying themselves well to new problems inherit to changes in application building demands.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sturadnidge</author><text>The creator of Node was something of a Rubyist, i believe the main reason was around the stdlib &#x2F; ecosystem not being event oriented, making it difficult to build non-blocking applications. EventMachine may well have strategies to defeat this, I just don&#x27;t know.<p>This video gives some good insight into what led to his decision to start fresh rather than try and change things in Ruby <a href="http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SAc0vQCC6UQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SAc0vQCC6UQ</a><p>So that&#x27;s probably the biggest thing about Node - everything in the core is built with event orientation in mind, so you know you&#x27;re not going to hit something that will block and kill you, and that minset is pervasive in userland too.</text></comment> |
6,265,220 | 6,265,260 | 1 | 2 | 6,265,150 | train | <story><title>OpenStreetMap gets new, easier to use in-browser editor</title><url>http://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/08/23/id-in-browser-editor-now-default-on-openstreetmap/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jfirebaugh</author><text>iD developer here. I did a series of posts on the architecture of iD that folks here might find interesting:<p><a href="http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/26/id-architecture-part-1/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;osmdev&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;id-architecture-part...</a>
<a href="http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/27/id-architecture-part-2/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;osmdev&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;id-architecture-part...</a>
<a href="http://www.mapbox.com/osmdev/2013/02/28/id-architecture-part-3/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;osmdev&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;id-architecture-part...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>OpenStreetMap gets new, easier to use in-browser editor</title><url>http://blog.openstreetmap.org/2013/08/23/id-in-browser-editor-now-default-on-openstreetmap/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jlgreco</author><text>The iD editor is <i>really</i> slick. Glad to see this is becoming the default editor on openstreetmap.org. It deserves it.<p>For the impatient, here is what it looks like: <a href="http://blog.openstreetmap.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/id_animated.gif" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;id_...</a></text></comment> |
33,609,597 | 33,609,200 | 1 | 3 | 33,608,869 | train | <story><title>Rimac Nevera Hits 412kph to Become World’s Fastest Production Electric Car</title><url>https://www.rimac-automobili.com/media/press-releases/record-breaking-rimac-nevera-hits-412kph-to-become-worlds-fastest-production-electric-car/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pxndxx</author><text>Calling this car Nevera (fridge) makes it a great addition to the unfortunate car names in Spanish, next to the Fiat Marea (makes-you-dizzy) and Mitsubishi Pajero (wanker).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wazoox</author><text>However nothing beats in French the Audi e-tron, literally &quot;turd&quot;. At least in the 00s Toyota prudently renamed the MR-2 (&quot;shit&quot;) into simply &quot;MR&quot; to prevent problems.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rimac Nevera Hits 412kph to Become World’s Fastest Production Electric Car</title><url>https://www.rimac-automobili.com/media/press-releases/record-breaking-rimac-nevera-hits-412kph-to-become-worlds-fastest-production-electric-car/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pxndxx</author><text>Calling this car Nevera (fridge) makes it a great addition to the unfortunate car names in Spanish, next to the Fiat Marea (makes-you-dizzy) and Mitsubishi Pajero (wanker).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sbacic</author><text>Nevera means &quot;storm&quot; or alternatively &quot;squall&quot; in Croatian, which is where the car got its name.</text></comment> |
26,498,242 | 26,496,870 | 1 | 2 | 26,496,185 | train | <story><title>Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants</title><url>https://www.btctimes.com/news/visa-plans-to-enable-bitcoin-purchases</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>It&#x27;s such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don&#x27;t care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I&#x27;m less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.</text></item><item><author>purple_ferret</author><text>Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work.<p>This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc<p>The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throw0101a</author><text>&gt; <i>Sadly most people don&#x27;t care nor should have to but the decentralization</i> […]<p>&quot;Decentralization&quot;? Bank of America Global Research just released a report today that said:<p>&gt; <i>1. Concentrated Ownership: About 95% of Bitcoin is controlled by just 2.4% of the accounts, and distribution is heavily skewed towards the largest accounts. By comparison, the latest Fed data suggests that the top 1% of Americans control about 30.4% of all household wealth in the US.</i><p>* Francisco Blanch, with Savita Subramanian, Philip Middleton, et. al. &quot;Bitcoin’s dirty little secrets&quot;. BofA Global Research, 17 March 2021.<p>Probably not even Russian oligarchs have that much control.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visa Plans to Enable Bitcoin Payments at 70M Merchants</title><url>https://www.btctimes.com/news/visa-plans-to-enable-bitcoin-purchases</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notyourwork</author><text>It&#x27;s such an anti-pattern for the world to adopt this approach. Sadly most people don&#x27;t care nor should have to but the decentralization is effectively moot when payment processors like Visa get involved. Sadly, I&#x27;m less and less hopeful that crypto will be what the movement conveyed over last 10 years.</text></item><item><author>purple_ferret</author><text>Misleading Title. Visa says it will allow for Bitcoin to be converted to fiat, and the fiat can be spent using a Visa Card in the same way debit cards already work.<p>This is already done with the Coinbase card, Gemini card, etc<p>The statement is very vague in terms of who is covering the conversion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fny</author><text>I mean... what do you expect with a currency with an annualized volatility of 100%. The risk is way too damn high.</text></comment> |
41,283,685 | 41,283,619 | 1 | 2 | 41,283,310 | train | <story><title>Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/08/16/police-cannot-seize-property-indefinitely-after-an-arrest-federal-court-rules/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>threatofrain</author><text>I wonder if judicial solutions can ever be adequate as police can simply say that an investigation is ongoing for years. And determining whether ongoing possession of seized property is legitimate involves disclosing investigation details.</text></item><item><author>fergbrain</author><text>I wonder if this ruling could also force the courts to start addressing unconstitutional civil forfeiture</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tshaddox</author><text>How is that different than, say, indefinite detention? It’s obviously not implemented perfectly, but habeas corpus is uncontroversial at least in principle. I don’t see anything mechanistically unique about property seizure that would make this tricky to solve.</text></comment> | <story><title>Police cannot seize property indefinitely after an arrest, federal court rules</title><url>https://reason.com/2024/08/16/police-cannot-seize-property-indefinitely-after-an-arrest-federal-court-rules/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>threatofrain</author><text>I wonder if judicial solutions can ever be adequate as police can simply say that an investigation is ongoing for years. And determining whether ongoing possession of seized property is legitimate involves disclosing investigation details.</text></item><item><author>fergbrain</author><text>I wonder if this ruling could also force the courts to start addressing unconstitutional civil forfeiture</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>debacle</author><text>The problem is it eventually becomes government civil lawfare against citizens. Taxpayer foot the bill to screw other taxpayers.</text></comment> |
15,910,523 | 15,909,896 | 1 | 2 | 15,909,431 | train | <story><title>New silicon structure opens the gate to quantum computers</title><url>https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/12/11/new-silicon-structure-opens-gate-quantum-computers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>propter_hoc</author><text>I did graduate research in an area of experimental physics that was quite close to state of the art quantum computing research. It was very exciting, but all the research was pretty much in extreme conditions that aren&#x27;t really usable for a realistic computing device (ultra-high vacuum, nanokelvin temperatures, high magnetic fields or laser trap confinement, etc.). From the looks of it this paper is in the same vein. Good progress, but the gate isn&#x27;t quite &quot;open&quot; yet.</text></comment> | <story><title>New silicon structure opens the gate to quantum computers</title><url>https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/12/11/new-silicon-structure-opens-gate-quantum-computers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chunky1994</author><text>I haven&#x27;t touched this stuff in a while so take this with a grain of salt.<p>This is good progress since it&#x27;s about an order of magnitude faster for operations than previously constructed CNOT gates, however it still has many caveats for a semiconducter-like leap towards real quantum computers:<p>a) Low temperature bound for the level of fidelity they want<p>b) Doesn&#x27;t allow us to engineer quantum chips of more qubits efficiently since the decoherence between quantum dots is still a major issue.<p>c) The science journalism title is a bit misleading. While this happens in a silicon structure there is nothing new about it, what&#x27;s new is that they managed to use the driving resonance to control the dephasing during the gate operation.</text></comment> |
23,300,249 | 23,297,181 | 1 | 2 | 23,295,590 | train | <story><title>Learn Genetics</title><url>https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>svara</author><text>Commenters here are noting many ways in which CS and biology are different, and how computer analogies can break down.<p>I&#x27;ve got a PhD in biology, and have been into computers all my life. I write code as a biology researcher every day.<p>To me, there&#x27;s a much more practical level to this than that of philosophical questions on how far analogies take you. Biologists and computer scientists learn, in their studies and through lots of experience, a different mindset about how things work.<p>As a computer scientist, finding a solution to a problem, or predicting how a system will behave, is ultimately just a question of having a deep knowledge of the system, plus being a little bit smart about using that knowledge.<p>As a biologist, having a deep knowledge of what you are dealing with plus being a little bit smart is just a starting point for formulating hypotheses that you will then still need to test. Every biologist knows in their gut that a plausible story is ultimately just that. It&#x27;s not a proof of anything, just a starting point.<p>This runs really deep and can make communication between people who aren&#x27;t aware of this difficult. I see this in comments here all the time, where someone has read up on a little biology, and then goes on to explain that, therefore, clearly this or that has to be true. Usually that makes me go: &quot;Yeah, maybe. But what about all these other things you didn&#x27;t consider? And what about all those things that literally no one in the world knows you would need to consider in this particular case?&quot;<p>Anyhow, I think it&#x27;s still productive to try to find simple physicsy explanations in biology. Sometimes it does work, and then you get things like PCR or gene editing... ;)</text></comment> | <story><title>Learn Genetics</title><url>https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vikramkr</author><text>This looks like a pretty awesome resource. I think it&#x27;s well worth it to spend some of your quarantine time on learning the basics of the biology you need to know to understand what&#x27;s actually going on with the virus that&#x27;s the reason you&#x27;re in quarantine in the first place. It&#x27;s not super productive to try and understand this stuff through analogy to computers and algorithms. Assuming DNA works just like code amd that cells are biological computers turned out to be a very poor assumption indeed, as evidenced by how much less we understand after sequencing the human genome compared to what we thought we would have known. It&#x27;s also why the secrets of the coronavirus didnt reveal themselves immediately after sequencing it&#x27;s genome. See the epigenetics section for a bit of an understanding of the layer of complexity that lies on top of DNA, and let&#x27;s take a moment to appreciate the biochemists and the protein biologists unraveling what makes SARS-COV-2 tick.<p>If you want to really grok genetics and be able to understand and interpret news and discussion about the field, especially considering how important the field is in our day to day lives, both with the virus and with biotech&#x2F;medicine in general.</text></comment> |
38,143,407 | 38,143,191 | 1 | 3 | 38,142,782 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How would French police locate suspects by tapping their devices?</title><text>I just found a news article regarding a law that passed in France allowing police to remotely activate GPS, camera, microphone on a user&#x27;s device [0]. This was posted before on HN [1], but without traction, but I am not all that much interested in the civil aspects of it, I am more interested in the technical aspects of it. I&#x27;m curious if there is someone with know how about how such a thing would be achieved.<p>Would they base it on exploits? Would they have to require manufacturers to add police APIs on the devices? Would a remotely activated camera &#x2F; microphone &#x2F; location get the active camera &#x2F; microphone &#x2F; location indicator?<p>55 minute edit:
It seems like for simple stuff, like coarse location they can get it through the carrier; I assumed as much and it&#x27;s relatively easy to get it done. For other stuff, rootkits and exploits are developed by some intelligence agencies which require manufacturing consent or physical interception. Then there&#x27;s also groups that sell OS levels exploits such as the NSO group.<p>I&#x27;m guessing in the case of software exploits, the indicators would appear for camera &#x2F; mic &#x2F; gps. But maybe for hardware exploits they could bypass the circuitry? Seems like a lot of work for non-high-profile targets.<p>Later edit:
Keyword &quot;baseband&quot; seems to be the most likely attack vector<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;france-surveillance-digital-devices-suspects-6018bdb2aee36ef373209555f5ec0019" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;france-surveillance-digital-devic...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36779568">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36779568</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>musha68k</author><text>Open source &#x2F; homebrew hardware will be the only way out of this.</text></item><item><author>FFP999</author><text>To expand on this, you should assume that basically any significant device or microprocessor you buy comes pre-compromised by one or more intelligence agencies, by the simple expedient of them asking manufacturers to put them in. Devices from US companies will be compromised by Five Eyes agencies, those from Chinese firms will have Ministry of State Security backdoors, etc.</text></item><item><author>runjake</author><text>Software implants (“RATs” or “rootkits”) or baseband access (“backdoors”).<p>The baseband is an embedded computer inside the phone that controls the device’s sensors and radios. It runs off of its own OS and is separate from the consumer-facing OS. The phone’s OS then talks to this embedded system.<p>All phones do this, even the iPhone whose baseband OS was some variant of L4 Linux, IIRC.<p>Various Intelligence Community people and documents have made statements that they can remotely activate the baseband to interact with a target device.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BobaFloutist</author><text>Would it not be easier to find the backdoor and use it to patch itself?<p>Basically rooting the phone but on a firmware level?</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How would French police locate suspects by tapping their devices?</title><text>I just found a news article regarding a law that passed in France allowing police to remotely activate GPS, camera, microphone on a user&#x27;s device [0]. This was posted before on HN [1], but without traction, but I am not all that much interested in the civil aspects of it, I am more interested in the technical aspects of it. I&#x27;m curious if there is someone with know how about how such a thing would be achieved.<p>Would they base it on exploits? Would they have to require manufacturers to add police APIs on the devices? Would a remotely activated camera &#x2F; microphone &#x2F; location get the active camera &#x2F; microphone &#x2F; location indicator?<p>55 minute edit:
It seems like for simple stuff, like coarse location they can get it through the carrier; I assumed as much and it&#x27;s relatively easy to get it done. For other stuff, rootkits and exploits are developed by some intelligence agencies which require manufacturing consent or physical interception. Then there&#x27;s also groups that sell OS levels exploits such as the NSO group.<p>I&#x27;m guessing in the case of software exploits, the indicators would appear for camera &#x2F; mic &#x2F; gps. But maybe for hardware exploits they could bypass the circuitry? Seems like a lot of work for non-high-profile targets.<p>Later edit:
Keyword &quot;baseband&quot; seems to be the most likely attack vector<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;france-surveillance-digital-devices-suspects-6018bdb2aee36ef373209555f5ec0019" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;france-surveillance-digital-devic...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36779568">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36779568</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>musha68k</author><text>Open source &#x2F; homebrew hardware will be the only way out of this.</text></item><item><author>FFP999</author><text>To expand on this, you should assume that basically any significant device or microprocessor you buy comes pre-compromised by one or more intelligence agencies, by the simple expedient of them asking manufacturers to put them in. Devices from US companies will be compromised by Five Eyes agencies, those from Chinese firms will have Ministry of State Security backdoors, etc.</text></item><item><author>runjake</author><text>Software implants (“RATs” or “rootkits”) or baseband access (“backdoors”).<p>The baseband is an embedded computer inside the phone that controls the device’s sensors and radios. It runs off of its own OS and is separate from the consumer-facing OS. The phone’s OS then talks to this embedded system.<p>All phones do this, even the iPhone whose baseband OS was some variant of L4 Linux, IIRC.<p>Various Intelligence Community people and documents have made statements that they can remotely activate the baseband to interact with a target device.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FFP999</author><text>On a technical level, sure. In the bigger picture, I&#x27;m concerned that that is simply too esoteric an interest for it to have any significant impact.</text></comment> |
28,673,826 | 28,673,059 | 1 | 3 | 28,671,743 | train | <story><title>I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2</title><url>https://operand.ca/2021/09/27/how_i_bricked_then_recovered_my_remarkable_2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Andrex</author><text>Not trying to shill too hard, but it&#x27;s rare I fall in love with a device the way I&#x27;ve fallen in love with my Remarkable 2.<p>I can&#x27;t say it was 100% worth the price (half was paid as a gift), but everything about it is refreshingly elegant and simple.<p>Great to know recovering from a brick is possible too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Matthias1</author><text>I had one for a couple weeks right about a year ago. I was very impressed by its ability to mimic paper. Unfortunately, it didn&#x27;t do much more than mimic paper, so I sold it and bought some nice notebooks.<p>However, I think that was before the software projects mentioned in this post. I never tried to SSH into it, so maybe it&#x27;s possible to use it for things that you can&#x27;t replace with paper.</text></comment> | <story><title>I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2</title><url>https://operand.ca/2021/09/27/how_i_bricked_then_recovered_my_remarkable_2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Andrex</author><text>Not trying to shill too hard, but it&#x27;s rare I fall in love with a device the way I&#x27;ve fallen in love with my Remarkable 2.<p>I can&#x27;t say it was 100% worth the price (half was paid as a gift), but everything about it is refreshingly elegant and simple.<p>Great to know recovering from a brick is possible too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>83457</author><text>My main gripe is lack of direct bookmarking of pages in ebooks or even listing jump links to highlighted areas. I like writing on it but also want to use for reading large ebooks, highlighting important info, and keeping notes in context. Not realistic to do that if have to scroll through all pages.</text></comment> |
24,430,168 | 24,429,814 | 1 | 2 | 24,426,917 | train | <story><title>How to escape from an erupting volcano</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-escape-from-erupting-volcano/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisco255</author><text>I bet the surge pricing on Uber chariots was astronomical during the Vesuvius eruption.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to escape from an erupting volcano</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-escape-from-erupting-volcano/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>susam</author><text>An interesting animation related to this topic: A Day in Pompeii - Full-length animation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc</a></text></comment> |
19,480,045 | 19,480,005 | 1 | 3 | 19,479,464 | train | <story><title>You probably don’t need input type=“number”</title><url>http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/you-probably-dont-need-input-typenumber/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benatkin</author><text>The problem with this is the browser and desktop environment makers. The correct thing to do is &lt;input type=&quot;number&quot;&gt; and it&#x27;s a reasonable choice even though it&#x27;s not the most optimal UI for your site. If the user encounters it the average Hacker News reading developer&#x27;s site, it&#x27;s probably a good thing it was there and not somewhere more critical, so they&#x27;ll notice and maybe not make the same mistake when they&#x27;re submitting adoption papers or something.<p>I like the article, and have enjoyed everything I&#x27;ve read that Brad Frost has written, but I will probably keep using &lt;input type=&quot;number&quot;&gt;. I hope somehow this gets back to browser and desktop environment makers and they fix this usability and accessibility issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astura</author><text>Well... The spec actually says it&#x27;s not the &quot;correct&quot; thing to do<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;html5&#x2F;forms.html#number-state-(type=number)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;TR&#x2F;html5&#x2F;forms.html#number-state-(type=nu...</a><p>&gt;The type=number state is not appropriate for input that happens to only consist of numbers but isn’t strictly speaking a number. For example, it would be inappropriate for credit card numbers or US postal codes. A simple way of determining whether to use type=number is to consider whether it would make sense for the input control to have a spinbox interface (e.g., with &quot;up&quot; and &quot;down&quot; arrows). Getting a credit card number wrong by 1 in the last digit isn’t a minor mistake, it’s as wrong as getting every digit incorrect. So it would not make sense for the user to select a credit card number using &quot;up&quot; and &quot;down&quot; buttons. When a spinbox interface is not appropriate, type=text is probably the right choice (possibly with a pattern attribute).</text></comment> | <story><title>You probably don’t need input type=“number”</title><url>http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/you-probably-dont-need-input-typenumber/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>benatkin</author><text>The problem with this is the browser and desktop environment makers. The correct thing to do is &lt;input type=&quot;number&quot;&gt; and it&#x27;s a reasonable choice even though it&#x27;s not the most optimal UI for your site. If the user encounters it the average Hacker News reading developer&#x27;s site, it&#x27;s probably a good thing it was there and not somewhere more critical, so they&#x27;ll notice and maybe not make the same mistake when they&#x27;re submitting adoption papers or something.<p>I like the article, and have enjoyed everything I&#x27;ve read that Brad Frost has written, but I will probably keep using &lt;input type=&quot;number&quot;&gt;. I hope somehow this gets back to browser and desktop environment makers and they fix this usability and accessibility issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kibibu</author><text>The right choice is `inputmode`, which says how to input the value without specifying semantics.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;interaction.html#input-modalities%3A-the-inputmode-attribute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;interaction.html#inpu...</a><p>It&#x27;ll work in Chrome (and other Blink-based browsers), but nothing else.</text></comment> |
25,505,808 | 25,506,005 | 1 | 2 | 25,494,583 | train | <story><title>Underwater Roundabout in the Faroe Islands</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55195390</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skrause</author><text>Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25299574" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25299574</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Underwater Roundabout in the Faroe Islands</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55195390</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nfriedly</author><text>I was trying to figure out why a tunnel would need a roundabout to connect two places, and the article didn&#x27;t really make that clear.<p>It turns out that it&#x27;s connecting 3 different places - there&#x27;s a map on this article that helps to clarify it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.estunlar.fo&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-the-tunnels&#x2F;the-eysturoy-tunnel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.estunlar.fo&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-the-tunnels&#x2F;the-eysturoy-tu...</a></text></comment> |
30,619,206 | 30,618,870 | 1 | 3 | 30,617,896 | train | <story><title>Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2022/03/reverse-engineering-waveform-generator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bragr</author><text>I love the hand hewn charm of these old boards. Now even homemade boards are designed in software so everything is very straight and regular, but with old boards you can tell everything was done by hand from the design to the layout to the assembly. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, it&#x27;s great that you can cad something up, send the files off, and get perfect boards in 2 days, but these old boards are the electronic equivalent to a charming, rustic, cabin in the woods.</text></comment> | <story><title>Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard</title><url>https://www.righto.com/2022/03/reverse-engineering-waveform-generator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>formerly_proven</author><text>&gt; The sine-wave shaper appears to be inspired by the similar circuit in the HP 3300A Function Generator, introduced in 1965. The schematic below shows the HP 3300A&#x27;s sine-wave shaper; the breadboard&#x27;s network is similar. The resistances are carefully chosen to achieve the sine wave.<p>In some Philips FGs they had sine shaping ASICs (presumably with a ton of taps and good matching) and managed to get distortion down to 0.1 % iirc (which for the 70s or early 80s would have meant that you don&#x27;t really need a proper RC oscillator any more for testing audio amplifiers).</text></comment> |
7,152,060 | 7,150,980 | 1 | 2 | 7,150,645 | train | <story><title>So Singletons are bad, then what?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/40373/so-singletons-are-bad-then-what</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shitgoose</author><text>Hilarious! Doing x=C.getX() is bad, but if it is hidden by numerous layers of libraries and monstrous config files, somehow it becomes acceptable. Out of site, out of mind. The fact that global scope bean is essentially a singleton, doesn&#x27;t seem to bother architecturally inclined crowd - they are too busy admiring sound of their own voice pronouncing words &quot;dependency injection&quot;, &quot;mutability&quot; and &quot;coupling&quot;.<p>The top answer is a perfect example of what is wrong with IT today. It takes a working solution, declares it wrong and starts piling up classes and interfaces to solve a problem, that was never a problem in first place (OP never said that their singleton-based cache didn&#x27;t work, he merely asked if there are &quot;better&quot; ways of doing it). So in the end we have the same singleton cache, but hidden behind interfaces (&quot;It makes the code easier to read&quot; - yea, right, easier, my ass! Ctrl+click on interface method and try to read the code), thousand lines xml Spring configs, and other crap that is completely irrelevant, hard to follow and debug, but glamorous enough for SOA boys to spend endless hours talking about it.</text></comment> | <story><title>So Singletons are bad, then what?</title><url>http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/40373/so-singletons-are-bad-then-what</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Pxtl</author><text>I always get cranky about people fixating on the difference between a static class and a singleton. A static class is just your language&#x27;s default implementation of the singleton pattern, it just fails at providing any polymorphism to swap out the object for a new one. Mechanically, they do the same thing. Single global point of access to some effectively-global-state.<p>Also, the singleton thing (and interfaces everywhere) stinks of YAGNI. Your toolkit can find all references to X.Y, which means you can replace all references to X with a reference to X.Instance.Y. <i>when</i> you need to change a static class to a singleton, do so.<p>Or just use a dynamic language where there isn&#x27;t any difference. Seriously, I wish C# offered a &quot;root&quot; static class or global variables or something equivalent so that the singleton pattern was less verbose to implement, because you <i>will</i> need them.</text></comment> |
16,166,503 | 16,166,046 | 1 | 2 | 16,165,875 | train | <story><title>Some thoughts on security after ten years of Qmail 1.0</title><url>https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pilif</author><text>Something to keep in mind with regards to qmail is that it&#x27;s extremely feature-poor and it never got features beyond its initial design goal.<p>This makes it much easier to keep the bugs out, to the point that making software under such constraints is much more similar to traditional construction projects.<p>I mean: Nobody ever tells you after you have built a bridge that they are now going to upgrade gravity to gravity 2.0 with 100% more pull. And nobody will ever tell you that your bridge will now get a shopping mall in the middle of it where people can purchase products of their favorite brands.<p>Software starts to break down when it has to be taken above initial design constraints and when there is not enough time to rewrite subsystems (or all of it) but instead when you have to make the abstractions leaky and compromise.<p>But back to qmail:<p>qmail itself is so feature-poor that traditionally, nobody was and is actually running qmail. Instead everybody is running &quot;qmail&quot; which is qmail plus some patches. Sometimes home-grown, sometimes taken from third parties.<p>But more often than not they are unmaintained and very far removed from the high quality standards of the underlying software.<p>This is the downside. Yes. You have a bug-free core that totally meets its designers (limited) use-case, but in reality nobody is actually running that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Some thoughts on security after ten years of Qmail 1.0</title><url>https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>diafygi</author><text>As we cast about trying to figure out ways to make software more secure or reliable, please remember that in other engineering fields (civil, chemical, mechanical, etc.) prioritizing safety and reliability is a _solved problem_.<p>(1996) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;28121&#x2F;they-write-right-stuff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastcompany.com&#x2F;28121&#x2F;they-write-right-stuff</a><p>&gt; It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats: the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.<p>&gt; The process isn’t even rocket science. Its standard practice in almost every engineering discipline except software engineering.<p>The problem is consequences. We had centuries of people dying in bridge collapses before we got our shit together and started prioritizing safety in civil engineering (i.e. engineers and managers going to prison if they don&#x27;t).<p>The same will be true for software. As more people get harmed by thrown together software (e.g. mass panic in Hawaii, state psychological exploitation on social media), we&#x27;ll start regulating it like other engineering fields.<p>As a former chemical engineer, I welcome this transition, but I realize it will likely also take centuries of hard lessons.</text></comment> |
12,209,157 | 12,209,170 | 1 | 2 | 12,207,333 | train | <story><title>23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602052/23andme-pulls-off-massive-crowdsourced-depression-study/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mtinie</author><text>I&#x27;m very conflicted about trying a service like the one that 23andMe offers. Part of me would love to see what comes back, the other (currently louder) part of my brain is worried about throwing away any ideas of future genetic privacy if I do.<p>The worst part is, I&#x27;m not sure which is a more rational desire. Is my my privacy concern undue paranoia?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text>It&#x27;s true that 23amdMe doesn&#x27;t want submissions to be anonymous[1]. However, that doesn&#x27;t stop people from hacking their way around it.[2][3]<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;customercare.23andme.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202907890-Can-I-be-genotyped-anonymously-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;customercare.23andme.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;202907890...</a><p>[2]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;how-to-use-23andme-without-giving-up-your-genetic-privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;20&#x2F;how-to-use-23andme-without...</a><p>[3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2431433" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2431433</a></text></comment> | <story><title>23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602052/23andme-pulls-off-massive-crowdsourced-depression-study/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mtinie</author><text>I&#x27;m very conflicted about trying a service like the one that 23andMe offers. Part of me would love to see what comes back, the other (currently louder) part of my brain is worried about throwing away any ideas of future genetic privacy if I do.<p>The worst part is, I&#x27;m not sure which is a more rational desire. Is my my privacy concern undue paranoia?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maga</author><text>&gt; Is my my privacy concern undue paranoia?<p>And are there genes responsible for it?<p>On a more serious note, I remember hearing about microchips the size of USB sticks that were supposed to sequence a DNA in hours costing &quot;only&quot; few grands back then couple of years ago. I&#x27;m surprised they didn&#x27;t yet flood the market considering the privacy concerns when it comes to services like 23andMe.<p>Sure, those services do more just sequencing, but for those who would just like to check for a few hereditary deseases running in their family while sticking to their tinfoil hat that would be a bargain. In my case, though, my body is so tough that I&#x27;m afraid if my DNA is revealed it may be used for making a clone army one day.</text></comment> |
29,276,907 | 29,276,434 | 1 | 3 | 29,275,659 | train | <story><title>Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)</title><url>https://iism.org/article/is-tasking-developers-with-creating-detailed-estimates-a-waste-of-company-money-42</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>harry8</author><text>An estimate is usually the sum of a bunch of smaller estimates. Those estimates have a probability distribution that is asymmetric. While sometimes they can be quicker than anticipated, the lowest they can go is zero (turns out we don&#x27;t need it, cut it) and that kind of thing is relatively less common than a blowout the other way. Those blowouts are uncapped, while zero time is a minimum there&#x27;s no maximum. The unknown unknowns are the things that get you. Seems like it will take X but the frobnicator was broken in ways we couldn&#x27;t have anticipated so we had to get a different thing and then hack it to make it do what we actually needed etc etc. Each individual item has a low probability of that happening to some extent. When you have a bunch of things in sequence one of them probably will if not more.<p>IIRC each item is described by a poisson distribution. (Have I got that right, mean, long tail). Nobody models estimates as a sequence of dependent, poisson distributed events, that I&#x27;ve heard of at least. If you did you might at least get a range on the estimate. Between 2 and 20 days. That would be more accurate. Useful to anyone much? Unclear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>And one of the classic problems with estimates is that common processes tend to bias estimates.<p>For example, what (I think) McConnell calls &quot;picking the first non-impossible date&quot;. An exec asks how long project Magic Pony will take. A manager asks the team and the team comes up with a number. If the number is higher than what the exec imagined, or even higher than what the manager imagines the exec imagines, pressure is applied on the number. &quot;Are you sure? That seems like a lot.&quot; A negotiation ensues, and often the number lands on the first date that engineers can&#x27;t absolutely prove is impossible. Or the first date that engineers won&#x27;t quit their jobs over.<p>For an estimate, we in theory want one where the team has a good chance of hitting it. Say, a 75% chance of success. But iterative pressure from the powerful will shift the distribution to 25%, 5%, 1%.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)</title><url>https://iism.org/article/is-tasking-developers-with-creating-detailed-estimates-a-waste-of-company-money-42</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>harry8</author><text>An estimate is usually the sum of a bunch of smaller estimates. Those estimates have a probability distribution that is asymmetric. While sometimes they can be quicker than anticipated, the lowest they can go is zero (turns out we don&#x27;t need it, cut it) and that kind of thing is relatively less common than a blowout the other way. Those blowouts are uncapped, while zero time is a minimum there&#x27;s no maximum. The unknown unknowns are the things that get you. Seems like it will take X but the frobnicator was broken in ways we couldn&#x27;t have anticipated so we had to get a different thing and then hack it to make it do what we actually needed etc etc. Each individual item has a low probability of that happening to some extent. When you have a bunch of things in sequence one of them probably will if not more.<p>IIRC each item is described by a poisson distribution. (Have I got that right, mean, long tail). Nobody models estimates as a sequence of dependent, poisson distributed events, that I&#x27;ve heard of at least. If you did you might at least get a range on the estimate. Between 2 and 20 days. That would be more accurate. Useful to anyone much? Unclear.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>virgilp</author><text>I tried to do that! Didn&#x27;t use Poisson, used normal distribution, but I think that&#x27;s not so relevant - at the end of the day it&#x27;s still just more elaborate guesswork.<p>I think what&#x27;s useful is thinking about the problem, and communicating in group&#x2F; disseminating the information (this is required in order to do the typical &quot;planning poker&quot; or whatever planning technique the team happens to use). Whether you end up with L&#x2F; S &#x2F;M or 7&#x2F;13&#x2F;21 points or whatever else you use - it&#x27;s irrelevant, so no need to sweat it; what is relevant is that you discussed the tasks and everyone has some understanding, and maybe they&#x27;re a little bit better spec-ed now.</text></comment> |
38,166,242 | 38,165,421 | 1 | 2 | 38,164,046 | train | <story><title>Git rebase, what can go wrong</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/06/rebasing-what-can-go-wrong-/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>recursive</author><text>Squash merges cut down the noise considerably.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>I like how Atlassian puts it:<p>&gt; The golden rule of rebasing<p>&gt; Once you understand what rebasing is, the most important thing to learn is when not to do it. The golden rule of git rebase is to never use it on public branches.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;merging-vs-rebasing#the-golden-rule-of-rebasing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;merging-vs-rebasing#...</a><p>For me, even though rebasing comes with some trappings, I still greatly prefer it to the alternative, which is to have merge commits cluttering up the commit history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>I think squash merges are a last resort heavy-handed tool for dealing with developers who refuse to clean up their commit history before merging. Most developers can do better by hand.<p>Git history should tell a simple, understandable story of each change. For example: 1) refactor existing code, 2) add feature. Or 1) add missing tests, 2) refactor existing code, 3) add feature.<p>But since you&#x27;re working on the fly with imperfect knowledge, it doesn&#x27;t happen in such neat steps. Refactorings and behavior changes end up interleaved in your raw git history, so you need to do a little bit of cleanup by hand in order to present a simple story in the commit log.<p>Of course if you have developers that don&#x27;t do that and instead merge dozens of commits that just say wip, wip, wip, lol, fml, wip, wip, lol, yolo and you can&#x27;t fire them or get them to change, then squash merges ftw.</text></comment> | <story><title>Git rebase, what can go wrong</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/06/rebasing-what-can-go-wrong-/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>recursive</author><text>Squash merges cut down the noise considerably.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>I like how Atlassian puts it:<p>&gt; The golden rule of rebasing<p>&gt; Once you understand what rebasing is, the most important thing to learn is when not to do it. The golden rule of git rebase is to never use it on public branches.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;merging-vs-rebasing#the-golden-rule-of-rebasing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlassian.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;merging-vs-rebasing#...</a><p>For me, even though rebasing comes with some trappings, I still greatly prefer it to the alternative, which is to have merge commits cluttering up the commit history.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mablopoule</author><text>I actually hate squash merge because of all the noise it adds. Sure, the commit graph looks nicer, but it come with a terrible loss of information when doing git blame.<p>I&#x27;m a big proponent of rebase and squash if it helps to make a commit more coherent, but we use squash merges by default in the current project I&#x27;m working on, and I die a little bit each time I try to understand what changes were related to a line when tracking down a bug.</text></comment> |
41,356,796 | 41,354,186 | 1 | 2 | 41,347,501 | train | <story><title>Things I Learned from Doing Triathlon in My 70s (2023)</title><url>https://www.triathlete.com/culture/7-things-i-learned-doing-triathlon-in-my-70s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coldcode</author><text>I started working out at 66 this year for the first time since I stopped playing basketball 30 years ago. Even after 6 months I see a difference (I was never overweight 6&#x27;5&quot; at 212 but now 10 pounds less). But because I had no experience with weight training or even cardio for so long, there is no way to expect I can do triathlons all of a sudden. I can tell who in the gym has been training most of their life and I have no expectations to suddenly look like Dwayne Johnson (he&#x27;s 6&#x27;4&quot;).<p>I wish I had started and continued training at some level 30 years ago (or earlier) instead of waiting until now. I can only exhort people to not wait until they are old, and things start falling apart to start.<p>The author doesn&#x27;t mention his experience before he turned 70, I think that would have been interesting.</text></comment> | <story><title>Things I Learned from Doing Triathlon in My 70s (2023)</title><url>https://www.triathlete.com/culture/7-things-i-learned-doing-triathlon-in-my-70s/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>belZaah</author><text>The man gets it. It’s a mental effort as much as it is a physical one. There’s a reason the longer the ultra, the faster women are compared to men. Having just done a 70.3 yesterday I can confirm the journey part, too. It’s a whole lot like life. Sometimes you go downwind really fast and sometimes it gets really tough. Sometimes there’s a stranger telling you the exact thing you need to keep going. And the hard bits always come to an end. All of my races have had some of these and I’ve always recovered. And if not, there’s the finish line and the knowledge I did not give up.</text></comment> |
41,404,279 | 41,403,636 | 1 | 2 | 41,401,463 | train | <story><title>Language and shell in Go with 92% test coverage and instant CI/CD [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIiUjgnSsA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway2016a</author><text>This seems like a cool project.<p>This is meant as additional information not criticism. I skimmed the transcript really fast so if this is in there and I missed it, please correct me, but two things I think are helpful for people creating projects like this to be aware of:<p>- This video seems to combine the concepts of lexing and parsing. It is usually beneficial to separate these two steps and lex the input into tokens before passing to the parser.<p>- Go actually has a pure Go implementation of Yacc in the toolset and I&#x27;ve used it in several projects to make parses. Dealing with the Yacc file is often much easier than dealing with code directly since it takes care of writing the actual parser. There is a lot of boiler plate that goes into parsers that when you use Yacc it &quot;just works&quot;.<p>Edit: there are also some tools for writing parsers in Lex&#x2F;Flex like syntax (re2c comes to mind) but I&#x27;ve found hand writing lexers to be effective in Go if your language doesn&#x27;t have many different types of tokens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xiaq</author><text>Right, I may have forgot to mention that lexerless parsers are somewhat unusual.<p>I didn&#x27;t have much time in the talk to go into the reason, so here it is:<p>- You&#x27;ll need a more complex lexer to parse a shell-like syntax. For example, one common thing you do with lexers is get rid of whitespaces, but shell syntax is whitespace sensitive: &quot;a$x&quot; and &quot;a $x&quot; (double quotes not part of the code) are different things: the first is a single word containing a string concatenation, the second is two separate words.<p>- If your parser backtracks a lot, lexing can improve performance: you&#x27;re not going back characters, only tokens (and there are fewer tokens than characters). Elvish&#x27;s parser doesn&#x27;t backtrack. (It does use lookahead fairly liberally.)<p>Having a lexerless parser does mean that you have to constantly deal with whitespaces in every place though, and it can get a bit annoying. But personally I like the conceptual simplicity and not having to deal with silly tokens like LBRACE, LPAREN, PIPE.<p>I have not used parser generators enough to comment about the benefits of using them compared to writing a parser by hand. The handwritten one works well so far :)</text></comment> | <story><title>Language and shell in Go with 92% test coverage and instant CI/CD [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIiUjgnSsA</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway2016a</author><text>This seems like a cool project.<p>This is meant as additional information not criticism. I skimmed the transcript really fast so if this is in there and I missed it, please correct me, but two things I think are helpful for people creating projects like this to be aware of:<p>- This video seems to combine the concepts of lexing and parsing. It is usually beneficial to separate these two steps and lex the input into tokens before passing to the parser.<p>- Go actually has a pure Go implementation of Yacc in the toolset and I&#x27;ve used it in several projects to make parses. Dealing with the Yacc file is often much easier than dealing with code directly since it takes care of writing the actual parser. There is a lot of boiler plate that goes into parsers that when you use Yacc it &quot;just works&quot;.<p>Edit: there are also some tools for writing parsers in Lex&#x2F;Flex like syntax (re2c comes to mind) but I&#x27;ve found hand writing lexers to be effective in Go if your language doesn&#x27;t have many different types of tokens.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ridiculous_fish</author><text>Shells have somewhat unusual parsing requirements. For example &quot;if&quot; is a keyword when used as `if echo` but not `echo if`.<p>So you either need to implement the lexer hack, or have a &quot;string&quot; token type which is disambiguated by the parser (which is what fish-shell does).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lexer_hack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lexer_hack</a></text></comment> |
24,833,466 | 24,833,201 | 1 | 2 | 24,828,800 | train | <story><title>When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ohazi</author><text>I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting&#x2F;engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this:<p>&gt; He didn&#x27;t even learn how to read until he was around 10.<p>to me, is <i>fucking terrifying</i>.<p>All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called &quot;lifestyle of learning&quot;, which is just another way of saying &quot;unschooling&quot;.<p>Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing <i>something</i> productive.<p>I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn&#x27;t allowed to play video games (since they aren&#x27;t productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.<p>By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.<p>My parents wouldn&#x27;t let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).<p>My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I&#x27;m currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.<p>They took &quot;unschooling&quot; even further with my younger brother. He didn&#x27;t even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.<p>TL;DR: &quot;Unschooling&quot; worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barry-cotter</author><text>&gt; to me, is fucking <i>terrifying.</i><p>Why? It takes 40 contact hours to teach a nine year old to read, according to John Taylor Gatto. You can teach all of primary school Math in the same time to a 12 year old. What’s the point of doing it earlier? There are little or no compounding gains from doing so. Countries that start teaching reading at 4 don’t do better than those that wait until 7. See France versus Germany or Finland.<p>The entire point of the zone of proximal development is that you can spend weeks teaching something to a six year old that a nine year old will pick up in an afternoon because they’re just more developed.</text></comment> | <story><title>When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/opinion/sunday/unschooling-homeschooling-remote-learning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ohazi</author><text>I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting&#x2F;engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this:<p>&gt; He didn&#x27;t even learn how to read until he was around 10.<p>to me, is <i>fucking terrifying</i>.<p>All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.</text></item><item><author>t0mbstone</author><text>I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called &quot;lifestyle of learning&quot;, which is just another way of saying &quot;unschooling&quot;.<p>Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing <i>something</i> productive.<p>I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn&#x27;t allowed to play video games (since they aren&#x27;t productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.<p>By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.<p>My parents wouldn&#x27;t let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).<p>My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I&#x27;m currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.<p>They took &quot;unschooling&quot; even further with my younger brother. He didn&#x27;t even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.<p>TL;DR: &quot;Unschooling&quot; worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quesera</author><text>&gt; to me, is fucking terrifying.<p>The non-intuitive thing about basic reading and math skills is this:<p>If you delay the learning, you learn it <i>much</i> more quickly.<p>So the (ordinary, with no developmental issues) kid who doesn&#x27;t read until 10, can exceed his or her peers in just a couple years.<p>The very unfortunate corollary, however, is this:<p>The kid with developmental issues might go undiagnosed for a longer time than necessary, with long-lasting repercussions and follow-on effects. It&#x27;s even possible to reinforce a mild issue and turn it into a larger one.<p>This then becomes a classical optimization problem. Optimize for the common case for broad benefit, or optimize for the rare case with significant negative effects. There is no right answer for everyone.</text></comment> |
39,202,144 | 39,201,709 | 1 | 2 | 39,197,619 | train | <story><title>Intel's Humbling</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2024/intels-humbling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgtweak</author><text>I&#x27;m kind of bullish on Intel right now. They&#x27;ve moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let&#x27;s ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it&#x27;s sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&amp;d.<p>Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&amp;D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and &quot;coasting&quot;. This sudden shock of &quot;we&#x27;re going to invest everything in R&amp;D and catch back up&quot; was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn&#x27;t want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.<p>Intel&#x27;s 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC&#x27;s equivalent N2 node...<p>Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We&#x27;re only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we&#x27;ll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.<p>Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it&#x27;s fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.<p>I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.<p>I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrian_b</author><text>There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains to be proven.<p>From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile.<p>The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment.<p>Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4.<p>If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there.<p>Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel's Humbling</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2024/intels-humbling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgtweak</author><text>I&#x27;m kind of bullish on Intel right now. They&#x27;ve moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let&#x27;s ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it&#x27;s sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&amp;d.<p>Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&amp;D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and &quot;coasting&quot;. This sudden shock of &quot;we&#x27;re going to invest everything in R&amp;D and catch back up&quot; was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn&#x27;t want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.<p>Intel&#x27;s 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC&#x27;s equivalent N2 node...<p>Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We&#x27;re only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we&#x27;ll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.<p>Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it&#x27;s fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.<p>I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.<p>I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway4good</author><text>What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales.<p>It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips).<p>So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.</text></comment> |
11,551,397 | 11,550,965 | 1 | 2 | 11,550,305 | train | <story><title>San Francisco Is Requiring Solar Panels on All New Buildings</title><url>https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/san-francisco-require-solar-panels-buildings</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mturmon</author><text>I&#x27;d say this is more of a city planning office problem than a &quot;paternalistic California&quot; problem.<p>The plastic bag ban caused much gnashing of teeth, but it was a basic instance of market failure (nobody pays for the externalities of bag pollution), and people have adapted fine since the ban took effect.<p>You see the kind of standards worship that you described in the LA city planning office as well as SF. There will be swearing up and down that this requirement is in place for a solid reason, and then in 5 years the requirement disappears.<p>Runoff from buildings is my favorite example: a few years ago, you had to ensure rainwater runoff from new structures was conveyed to the street. By pumping it uphill if necessary. You signed a document promising to maintain the pump in perpetuity. (Reason: your runoff could damage nearby properties.) Now, you <i>can&#x27;t</i> pump runoff to the street, you have to sequester some on-site. (Reason: drought, plus, city can&#x27;t treat all that water itself.)<p>Another instance of this is installation of crosswalks. One year, the city refuses to put in new crosswalks because &quot;it will encourage unsafe crossings&quot;. Next year, city is putting in new crosswalks all over because it will encourage pedestrian activity, make citizens healthier, etc.</text></item><item><author>eldavido</author><text>Partner is an architect in SF (works on 2nd St.)<p>She&#x27;s currently dealing with two overlapping regulations, one from the state, the other from the city:
(1) All electrical outlets must be placed less than 18 inches from the edge of a countertop, to make them accessible to people in wheelchairs<p>(2) A countertop must have an outlet every 18 inches, or less.<p>They&#x27;re getting held up in permitting because there is a no constructible L-shaped countertop that satisfies both of these constraints. The best part, nobody on either side seems to care much, they&#x27;re &quot;just doing their job&quot;...and housing isn&#x27;t getting built.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what to make of this, other than that it&#x27;s the newest brilliant &quot;innovation&quot; from the place that banned happy meal toys, and outlawed plastic bags.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilasX</author><text>&gt;The plastic bag ban caused much gnashing of teeth, but it was a basic instance of market failure (nobody pays for the externalities of bag pollution), and people have adapted fine since the ban took effect.<p>But the ban caused much, much more damage than needed to remedy the externality. If mispricing were the problem being solved, they could slap an appropriate tax on the stores&#x27; bags, and then stores would pay it, fold it into prices, implement policies to discourage too many bags, roll their eyes, and move on.<p>Instead, the bag law means they must <i>explicitly</i> charge the customer for bags; they can&#x27;t just absorb it into prices (as every store did before).<p>(And I don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;ve ever worked as a cashier, but adding another step to every transaction gets old really quick, and holding up a line so someone can dig for a dime because they forgot to ask for one the first time around is ridiculous.)<p>Furthermore, ten cents is (by any reasonable back-of-the-envelope measure) far more than the magnitude of the externality, and it&#x27;s not put into a fund to remedy the externaliites, nor can I get the ten cents back when I redeem it and thereby prove that it&#x27;s not going into some bird&#x27;s lungs.<p>This is just like most hastily-considered conservation policies: penny-wise and pound foolish. I&#x27;m likewise hounded to cut back on showers, despite them producing far more economic value than uses of water that are basically value-destructive (growing alfalfa) and which get a free pass. Similarly, I get paid <i>nothing</i> for having an ultra-low-carbon lifestyle, while people get large government subsidies to make their already-wasteful lifestyle a little less so.<p>Yes, it sucks when externalities aren&#x27;t priced in. But we shouldn&#x27;t use that justification as carte blanche to overcharge for the wrong ones.</text></comment> | <story><title>San Francisco Is Requiring Solar Panels on All New Buildings</title><url>https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/san-francisco-require-solar-panels-buildings</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mturmon</author><text>I&#x27;d say this is more of a city planning office problem than a &quot;paternalistic California&quot; problem.<p>The plastic bag ban caused much gnashing of teeth, but it was a basic instance of market failure (nobody pays for the externalities of bag pollution), and people have adapted fine since the ban took effect.<p>You see the kind of standards worship that you described in the LA city planning office as well as SF. There will be swearing up and down that this requirement is in place for a solid reason, and then in 5 years the requirement disappears.<p>Runoff from buildings is my favorite example: a few years ago, you had to ensure rainwater runoff from new structures was conveyed to the street. By pumping it uphill if necessary. You signed a document promising to maintain the pump in perpetuity. (Reason: your runoff could damage nearby properties.) Now, you <i>can&#x27;t</i> pump runoff to the street, you have to sequester some on-site. (Reason: drought, plus, city can&#x27;t treat all that water itself.)<p>Another instance of this is installation of crosswalks. One year, the city refuses to put in new crosswalks because &quot;it will encourage unsafe crossings&quot;. Next year, city is putting in new crosswalks all over because it will encourage pedestrian activity, make citizens healthier, etc.</text></item><item><author>eldavido</author><text>Partner is an architect in SF (works on 2nd St.)<p>She&#x27;s currently dealing with two overlapping regulations, one from the state, the other from the city:
(1) All electrical outlets must be placed less than 18 inches from the edge of a countertop, to make them accessible to people in wheelchairs<p>(2) A countertop must have an outlet every 18 inches, or less.<p>They&#x27;re getting held up in permitting because there is a no constructible L-shaped countertop that satisfies both of these constraints. The best part, nobody on either side seems to care much, they&#x27;re &quot;just doing their job&quot;...and housing isn&#x27;t getting built.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what to make of this, other than that it&#x27;s the newest brilliant &quot;innovation&quot; from the place that banned happy meal toys, and outlawed plastic bags.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swombat</author><text>It&#x27;s almost as if the &quot;city council&quot; or &quot;government&quot; is an entity composed of multiple people who are human and have conflicting agendas, visions, opinions, dreams, etc (sometimes within a single person) and so end up acting in a way that reflects their contradictions and human biases...</text></comment> |
21,277,003 | 21,276,804 | 1 | 2 | 21,274,511 | train | <story><title>Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagged/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unscrupulous_sw</author><text>Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with &quot;friends&quot; (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).<p>Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50&#x2F;50 will &quot;lower the bar&quot;. So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.<p>I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren&#x27;t talking about math problem here and that they don&#x27;t want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.<p>After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a &quot;talk&quot; from my manager.</text></item><item><author>legostormtroopr</author><text>&gt; We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.<p>Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can&#x27;t be discussed without complete agreement.<p>Take for example, &quot;Women in Tech&quot;, personally I don&#x27;t see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be &#x27;solved&#x27;. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage women in STEM. There are hundreds of Women in Tech meetups, scholarships, Womens only courses... yet the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years. Personally, it looks like in aggregate it will be difficult to get 50&#x2F;50 representation of women and men in tech. To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50&#x2F;50 isn&#x27;t going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.<p>At the last place I worked that opinion was flat out branded &quot;sexist&quot;, and if you didn&#x27;t vocally agree with every women in tech initiative people asked why.<p>So I would say the ability to speak openly about politics was shut down long ago, and not by the people you think.</text></item><item><author>ProfessorLayton</author><text>Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.<p>If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion.<p>Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups:<p>— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.<p>— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.<p>— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.<p>— Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.<p>We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.<p>Again, If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wonnage</author><text>You can&#x27;t use statistics without a model. The problem is that you have a shitty model and it&#x27;s annoying when you keep parroting it like you&#x27;re so logical. Your model as inferred from this comment is that there&#x27;s some way to quantify the current applicants, and that applicants below a certain value are always rejected. The remaining applicants are &quot;above the bar&quot; and could be hired. The current &quot;above the bar&quot; group is not 50&#x2F;50, therefore changing it means accepting people below the bar.<p>The problem is that none of your assumptions hold water. Technical interviews are about as accurate as flipping a coin. Mundane factors like whether or not the interview is after lunch have a major impact on pass rates. Performance on the interview has little to no predictive value for future job performance.<p>You can&#x27;t brush this off as social ignorance, this is simply ignorance of the facts.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/16/gitlab_employees_gagged/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>unscrupulous_sw</author><text>Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with &quot;friends&quot; (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting).<p>Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50&#x2F;50 will &quot;lower the bar&quot;. So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipeline and all. The more I said I am leaning towards that it will lower the bar, the more uncomfortable people around me looked.<p>I was too socially ignorant to realize we aren&#x27;t talking about math problem here and that they don&#x27;t want anything said that might weaken their cause, good faith argument or not.<p>After that I got no more women in my interview pipeline and a &quot;talk&quot; from my manager.</text></item><item><author>legostormtroopr</author><text>&gt; We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.<p>Except Cancel Culture is making it that these can&#x27;t be discussed without complete agreement.<p>Take for example, &quot;Women in Tech&quot;, personally I don&#x27;t see underrepresentation of women in tech as a problem that can be or should be &#x27;solved&#x27;. For the better part of 15 years, there has been a massive movement to encourage women in STEM. There are hundreds of Women in Tech meetups, scholarships, Womens only courses... yet the numbers have barely budged in more than 10 years. Personally, it looks like in aggregate it will be difficult to get 50&#x2F;50 representation of women and men in tech. To make it clear, we should definitely support everyone who is in tech, and make it an inclusive environment, but the continued push for 50&#x2F;50 isn&#x27;t going to happen so perhaps its not worth the huge money sink it is.<p>At the last place I worked that opinion was flat out branded &quot;sexist&quot;, and if you didn&#x27;t vocally agree with every women in tech initiative people asked why.<p>So I would say the ability to speak openly about politics was shut down long ago, and not by the people you think.</text></item><item><author>ProfessorLayton</author><text>Without trying to be inflammatory in any manner, I will say that it takes a certain level of privilege to say one shouldn’t discuss politics at work.<p>If you disagree I’m happy to discuss this viewpoint rather than being downvoted to oblivion.<p>Lots of issues are deemed “political”, but imagine you fall into one of the marginalized groups:<p>— lgbt: Don’t discuss the possibility about being fired for your sexuality because it’s too political.<p>— Women in tech: Nope, let’s not go there, too political.<p>— Underrepresented minorities in tech: Sorry it’s a pipeline problem, don’t bring politics into this.<p>— Education: Too political to discuss the fact that schools are trying to balance their admissions in the face of very uneven opportunities amongst their applicants. Never mind the fact that school admissions were never fair to begin with.<p>We can’t improve without discussion, and it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.<p>Again, If you disagree I’d love to understand your viewpoint as to why.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manfredo</author><text>This parallels my experience. I have repeatedly feigned support for denying employment to white and Asian men to increase our proportional representation of demographics categorized as diverse. The company has set an outcome based goal to have 33% women in tech roles. When the industry is only 20-25% female, such a target is effectively impossible without discrimination. But no one who wants to succeed dares bring that up.</text></comment> |
6,628,337 | 6,626,804 | 1 | 3 | 6,624,956 | train | <story><title>Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser</title><url>http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mambodog</author><text>Hi, I hacked this together, though most of the credit should go to Hampa Hug&#x27;s very nice emulator[0]. I&#x27;m posting this now as I saw the neat Windows emulator project and figured today was a good day to talk about emulation :)<p>My reasoning for putting this together is that I think it&#x27;s really important for people to learn from what&#x27;s come before, and the web is the most accessible place to do that. I&#x27;ve written a post[1] that goes into the rationale a bit further, and also addresses the legal aspect of this demo. Ultimately I would love for there to be an interactive online museum of personal computer history.<p>I&#x27;d also like to get a demo of NeXTSTEP working; for the OS which begat the world wide web to be running inside the browser would be pretty neat.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.hampa.ch/pce/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hampa.ch&#x2F;pce&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesfriend.com.au&#x2F;why-port-emulators-browser</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oddthink</author><text>Thanks, that&#x27;s fantastic.<p>It&#x27;s funny, I found it to be very emotionally evocative. I loved my IIci so, back in the day. The tinkering with the background images, recording everyone on the dorm hall making funny noises, replacing the system sounds, making the shutdown sound be HAL, etc.<p>It definitely helped that campus was pretty much all-Mac, so we all could tweak the same silly noises, and all try to find the joke that sounded silliest when told by the Talking Moose.<p>I don&#x27;t have the same connection to my Mac these days. I wonder if it&#x27;s just me, if the college freshmen have the same experience in 2013, or if it&#x27;s somehow just an artifact of that particular era in computing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser</title><url>http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mambodog</author><text>Hi, I hacked this together, though most of the credit should go to Hampa Hug&#x27;s very nice emulator[0]. I&#x27;m posting this now as I saw the neat Windows emulator project and figured today was a good day to talk about emulation :)<p>My reasoning for putting this together is that I think it&#x27;s really important for people to learn from what&#x27;s come before, and the web is the most accessible place to do that. I&#x27;ve written a post[1] that goes into the rationale a bit further, and also addresses the legal aspect of this demo. Ultimately I would love for there to be an interactive online museum of personal computer history.<p>I&#x27;d also like to get a demo of NeXTSTEP working; for the OS which begat the world wide web to be running inside the browser would be pretty neat.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.hampa.ch/pce/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hampa.ch&#x2F;pce&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesfriend.com.au&#x2F;why-port-emulators-browser</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tloewald</author><text>Wonderful job, but it would be nice to have (a) more interesting applications (e.g. MacPascal, HyperCard -- the full version not the Player) and also command-key support (it actually wigs out if you use command keys).</text></comment> |
30,017,136 | 30,017,088 | 1 | 2 | 30,016,525 | train | <story><title>FlyZolo – Youngest Woman Solo</title><url>https://flyzolo.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The route is interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flyzolo.com&#x2F;route&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flyzolo.com&#x2F;route&#x2F;</a><p>I can understand some of the latitude changes to reach shorter ocean crossings, but it looks like the route was stretched in various places to touch more countries. Very cool journey.</text></comment> | <story><title>FlyZolo – Youngest Woman Solo</title><url>https://flyzolo.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>azalemeth</author><text>This is pretty amazing. I&#x27;m exhausted after flying for an hour, let alone weeks. Really, really hats off to her.<p>If you&#x27;ve got a bit of spare time, you might like this video series, which features a bunch of young US male pilots flying across the Atlantic in a small GA plane. It is quite an interesting journey. And no, there isn&#x27;t a toilet!
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W9Uf-ynoDUE&amp;list=PLoruKoPAfKKiKWuupTLUWY9225AvlVz8t&amp;index=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=W9Uf-ynoDUE&amp;list=PLoruKoPAfK...</a></text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits