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22,196,567 | 22,196,885 | 1 | 2 | 22,196,240 | train | <story><title>IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-30/ibm-names-arvind-krishna-as-ceo-rometty-to-retire-at-year-s-end</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>From the CNBC article covering this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-steps-down-arvind-krishna-to-take-over.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;30&#x2F;ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-steps-...</a><p>&gt;In a release, Rometty described Krishna as a “brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain”<p>Sounds like IBM&#x27;s strategy is going all in on buzzwords.</text></comment> | <story><title>IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-30/ibm-names-arvind-krishna-as-ceo-rometty-to-retire-at-year-s-end</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>krn</author><text>Another Indian-born tech CEO? It&#x27;s incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until 2018). I wonder how much it&#x27;s a cultural thing.</text></comment> |
13,207,423 | 13,207,538 | 1 | 3 | 13,206,431 | train | <story><title>Student Lets Thief Steal His Phone, Spies on Him for Documentary [video]</title><url>http://www.boredpanda.com/find-my-phone-thief-stolen-smartphone-spying-cerberus-anthony-van-der-meer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pascalmemories</author><text>My guess is the &#x27;new owner&#x27; was involved in trafficking people for sex exploitation (the overnight journey to the shelter in France - somewhere vulnerable people could be easily tricked with a work offer and easily moved within the EU due to the lack of internal borders).<p>Meeting the &#x27;Russian&#x27; woman and going along with her irrational story and the suggestion of drugs being supplied and her &#x27;loving&#x27; him all sounds like an exploitative relationship. Consistent with a sex trafficker.<p>Swapping SIMs (to change phone identity - albeit poorly) and only using for a few weeks indicates someone used to taking steps to avoiding tracking&#x2F;identification. Not someone new to criminal activity nor evading detection.<p>Being overnight at homeless shelters suggests he was more likely exploiting women at these shelters rather than him being homeless and sleeping there (I&#x27;m astonished the filmmaker started for feel sorry for him at the idea he was homeless - that&#x27;s just naive; this was someone already demonstrated to be heavily involved in criminality).<p>Trying to confront him at the property and finding an aggressive person with a strong smell of drugs at least gave a reality check. This is a dangerous criminal and it was reckless to go near him.</text></comment> | <story><title>Student Lets Thief Steal His Phone, Spies on Him for Documentary [video]</title><url>http://www.boredpanda.com/find-my-phone-thief-stolen-smartphone-spying-cerberus-anthony-van-der-meer/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I enjoyed that. I was in a free ranging discussion back around the time Snowden made his move and we talked about constructing a laptop with a cellphone embedded inside of it such that it would record things that went on around it. We figured we could remove the hard drive and replace it with the guts of a cell phone and an SSD equivalent storage. Then use the existing laptop&#x27;s Wifi antenna as a (likely not great) cell phone antenna. The idea being that you could download analytics from it if it was seized at border crossings or searched.<p>No, I never had the courage to actually try something like that. This phone hack seems like a modest equivalent with the exception that the phone could be unhacked by a forced OS wipe.<p>That said, the effectiveness of this as a surveillance tool was pretty eye opening. It seems possible that the criminal in this story steals phones every couple of weeks and puts their sim card into it, use it for a while, and then resell it. Which is pretty good operational security when you think about it (caveat keeping the same sim card) Mapping the meta data and contacts for this person then lets you know who else is in their community.<p>So with law enforcement powers you could presumably &quot;seed&quot; the stolen phone market with pre-compromised phones and develop a pretty quick understanding of who the criminals were, their infrastructure for moving phones around, etc. Which would make it pretty straight forward to roll up these criminal networks. Of course when it became known that the police were seeding the stolen phone market with &#x27;mark&#x27; phones it would probably cut down on the number of phones stolen. But if you have prepared for that and are now supplying a line of cheap &quot;new&quot; burner phones in the shops that you have compromised. Well it is scary how effective that might be.<p>Now you tie that analysis with the fact that the Paris attackers all had burner phones and you start to see how such actions by the authorities would be justified to law makers.</text></comment> |
28,767,205 | 28,767,475 | 1 | 3 | 28,762,362 | train | <story><title>It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated</title><url>https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1445424833181925376</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zeroxfe</author><text>I really think that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. Learning this the hard way in my 40s, it&#x27;s been really life changing for me. Particularly when you&#x27;re depressed, demotivated, find yourself procrastinating, etc.<p>You can try this yourself -- the next time you&#x27;re feeling demotivated, start with the smallest amount of tiny measurable action. If you can&#x27;t get out of bed, move your fingers, shake your head, work your way up to standing up, walking, leaving your house, and very slowly building momentum.<p>If you&#x27;re procrastinating about work, start with opening up a terminal, launch your editor, write one tiny snippet of code that just compiles, add another snippet, build momentum.<p>You&#x27;ll find yourself making excuses, telling yourself that none of this matters, or that you&#x27;re too tired, or that you&#x27;re not in the mood. Accept the thoughts and push through the actions.<p>Very quickly, as the dopamine hits from these tiny successes arrive, you&#x27;ll find your attitude changing, and this turns into a feedback loop where you end up performing more actions, further improving your mood and attitude.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>npunt</author><text>&quot;Motion before emotion&quot; is a great little mantra to get you started on whatever - waking up, exercise, writing, working, etc.<p>Emotions are sometimes helpful, but in the case of starting things they&#x27;re usually wrong.</text></comment> | <story><title>It is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated</title><url>https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1445424833181925376</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zeroxfe</author><text>I really think that action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. Learning this the hard way in my 40s, it&#x27;s been really life changing for me. Particularly when you&#x27;re depressed, demotivated, find yourself procrastinating, etc.<p>You can try this yourself -- the next time you&#x27;re feeling demotivated, start with the smallest amount of tiny measurable action. If you can&#x27;t get out of bed, move your fingers, shake your head, work your way up to standing up, walking, leaving your house, and very slowly building momentum.<p>If you&#x27;re procrastinating about work, start with opening up a terminal, launch your editor, write one tiny snippet of code that just compiles, add another snippet, build momentum.<p>You&#x27;ll find yourself making excuses, telling yourself that none of this matters, or that you&#x27;re too tired, or that you&#x27;re not in the mood. Accept the thoughts and push through the actions.<p>Very quickly, as the dopamine hits from these tiny successes arrive, you&#x27;ll find your attitude changing, and this turns into a feedback loop where you end up performing more actions, further improving your mood and attitude.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karmakaze</author><text>My favorite way when I&#x27;m not up to doing something is to merely prepare an environment for the thing I&#x27;m not going to do right now in the simplest ways. Create a new empty directory not even thinking about its name. CD into it, leave a terminal tab in that directory. Maybe I&#x27;ll copy&#x2F;paste a config&#x2F;makefile or something and search&#x2F;replace the copied name with the arbitrary directory name. And so on.<p>Some point along the way, I&#x27;ll care. Whether it&#x27;s the dumb name I picked, or some specific thing in the config&#x2F;makefile I want a certain way--I&#x27;ve been tricked.</text></comment> |
19,931,534 | 19,931,695 | 1 | 2 | 19,930,819 | train | <story><title>Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdonis</author><text>We already know how to safely operate nuclear power plants: the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents. We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators back in the 1970s, when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity. Or we could have done it after Three Mile Island (which harmed no members of the general public but clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn&#x27;t is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem.<p>Furthermore, even the operational problem is now nonexistent with newer reactor designs. Older designs, like the reactors at Three Mile Island, required the operators to correctly execute a fairly complex procedure in the event of a problem to prevent the reactor from being severely damaged or destroyed; the TMI operators failed to do that. Also, as Fukushima showed, older reactor designs require reliable backup power for decay heat removal. Newer designs have neither of those requirements; you can literally pull the shutdown switch and walk away and there will be no problem.<p>So while I don&#x27;t disagree with what you say about complex systems in general, I don&#x27;t think nuclear reactors, with today&#x27;s designs, are even that complex. We know how to design and build them so that it is impossible to operate them unsafely. We just don&#x27;t have the political will to do it.</text></item><item><author>jwr</author><text>I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I&#x27;m reading &quot;Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies&quot; by Charles Perrow and it&#x27;s scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power.<p>By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of &quot;close calls&quot; that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence.<p>I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow&#x27;s book.<p>One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>&gt; no incidents<p>I would respectfully suggest that you read the book I quoted. I also thought there were &quot;no incidents&quot;. The book is from 1983, so it specifically describes the 70s and early 80s. There were plenty of incidents and accidents, it&#x27;s just that few of them resulted in major releases of radioactive material. My take on this after reading about some details is that we were just lucky.<p>Some might say it is outdated — but I followed up on some of the stories described there and checked more recent developments. Specifically, the San Onofre plant which gets a mention in the book. You can read about it on Wikipedia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station#Shutdown,_2012_and_closure,_2013" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...</a> — now tell me that we know what we&#x27;re doing and that we &quot;know how to safely operate nuclear power plants&quot; after reading things like:<p>&gt; On investigation, the replacement steam generators from 2011 in both units were found to show premature wear on over 3,000 tubes, in 15,000 places.[47] Plant officials pledged not to restart until the causes of the tube leak and tube degradation were understood.<p>Other honorable mentions:<p>&gt; &quot;The firm Bechtel was ... embarrassed in 1977, when it installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel backwards&quot; at San Onofre<p>&gt; In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data.<p>Again, I am not against nuclear power. I&#x27;m just pointing out that we have way too much hubris and the rosy picture of &quot;no incidents&quot; is not entirely true.<p>Also, which newer designs do you mean?</text></comment> | <story><title>Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment</title><url>https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2019/may/nuclear-power-limits.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdonis</author><text>We already know how to safely operate nuclear power plants: the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents. We could have imposed a similar level of discipline on civilian nuclear power plant operators back in the 1970s, when commercial plants started being built in the US in quantity. Or we could have done it after Three Mile Island (which harmed no members of the general public but clearly showed inadequacies in the way civilian nuclear plants were operated). The fact that we didn&#x27;t is a political problem, not a technical or operational problem.<p>Furthermore, even the operational problem is now nonexistent with newer reactor designs. Older designs, like the reactors at Three Mile Island, required the operators to correctly execute a fairly complex procedure in the event of a problem to prevent the reactor from being severely damaged or destroyed; the TMI operators failed to do that. Also, as Fukushima showed, older reactor designs require reliable backup power for decay heat removal. Newer designs have neither of those requirements; you can literally pull the shutdown switch and walk away and there will be no problem.<p>So while I don&#x27;t disagree with what you say about complex systems in general, I don&#x27;t think nuclear reactors, with today&#x27;s designs, are even that complex. We know how to design and build them so that it is impossible to operate them unsafely. We just don&#x27;t have the political will to do it.</text></item><item><author>jwr</author><text>I have conflicted thoughts on this. On one hand, nuclear energy seems to be the only way we have right now to at least try to avoid the oncoming climate catastrophe. On the other hand, I&#x27;m reading &quot;Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies&quot; by Charles Perrow and it&#x27;s scary. Really scary. The combination of very complex systems with interactions that no one understands and greed, poor oversight, and other human behaviors results in something we should be afraid of. And yet, we might have no choice but to use nuclear power.<p>By the way, official statistics are one thing (I used to love quoting them as well), but if you look at the number of &quot;close calls&quot; that we had and if you look into the causes behind various incidents, a different picture emerges and you might lose some of the confidence.<p>I also now think that anyone taking part in the discussion should read Perrow&#x27;s book.<p>One thought I had while reading the book is that these days it might make sense to try to model these complex systems and run simulations to at least try to discover the unexpected interactions and mitigate them. Similar to (for example) how FoundationDB was developed. Simulations on that scale were likely difficult or impossible at the time when most nuclear plants were designed, but with modern computing power we might have better ways of reducing the problem domain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gpm</author><text>&gt; the US Navy has been doing so for decades with no incidents.<p>The USS Seawolf, Theodore Roosevolt, Swordfish, Proteus, Puffer, and Long Beach all had publicly known incidents involving the release of radioactive material... and given the navy&#x27;s (legitimate) tendency to classify stuff I see little reason to believe this is the extent of the issues.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lutins.org&#x2F;nukes.html#subs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lutins.org&#x2F;nukes.html#subs</a></text></comment> |
17,123,776 | 17,123,667 | 1 | 3 | 17,123,412 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: What is good business advice for independent mobile app developers?</title></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lwansbrough</author><text>This is probably not what you&#x27;re looking for, because it&#x27;s very specific practical advice, but it&#x27;s particularly valuable all the same: check out SKStoreReviewController on iOS. We utilized it and our reviews grew from ~250 in the first ~5 months to over 27,000 two months later. Of course there has been growth with our app, as well, but the scale at which we saw reviews come in after implementing the UI was incredible: over 1k new reviews within hours.<p>I say all this because ratings have a huge impact on your app store listing position, and any small developer can benefit from such a boost immensely.<p>If you&#x27;re building on Android too, this functionality unfortunately doesn&#x27;t exist, however we have also seen a considerable boost in reviews after implementing our own UI which asks users to review (and allows them to press a button to go to the store.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: What is good business advice for independent mobile app developers?</title></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cageface</author><text>As in selling your own apps? Seriously my advice would be give it up. You can make a good living writing apps for other people but the app store is a very very unfriendly place for indie app developers. Your odds of making enough to keep food on the table are much better in other niches.</text></comment> |
8,345,066 | 8,344,245 | 1 | 3 | 8,343,884 | train | <story><title>Rust lifetimes: Getting away with things that would be reckless in C++</title><url>http://www.randomhacks.net/2014/09/19/rust-lifetimes-reckless-cxx/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>missblit</author><text>In C++ if the string is a rvalue reference you could std::move it into part of the return value. Think a signature like<p><pre><code> template&lt;typename T&gt;
std::pair&lt;std::string, std::vector&lt;std::string_view&gt;&gt;
tokenize_string(T &amp;&amp;str);
</code></pre>
This would be efficient when the user passes a temporary, and it would be safe.<p>Which isn&#x27;t to say the Rust solution isn&#x27;t totally cool. Being able to easily check this class of errors at compile time is probably a lot nicer than needing to learn all the relatively complicated parts that would go into a easy to use &#x2F; safe &#x2F;efficient &#x2F; still slightly weird C++ solution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rust lifetimes: Getting away with things that would be reckless in C++</title><url>http://www.randomhacks.net/2014/09/19/rust-lifetimes-reckless-cxx/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bsaul</author><text>Which makes me wonder :<p>1&#x2F; could you build the same unsafe behiavor in Rust if you wanted to by not specifying lifetime constraints ?<p>2&#x2F; If yes, shouldn&#x27;t lifetime constraints be mandatory ?</text></comment> |
24,118,085 | 24,118,006 | 1 | 2 | 24,116,775 | train | <story><title>The mesmerizing geometry of Malaysia’s most complex cakes</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kek-lapis-sarawak</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qubex</author><text>&gt; <i>the Sarawak government designated it as a “protected geographical indicator,” decreeing that true kek lapis Sarawak can only be made within state borders</i><p>I love stuff like this... a governmental body’s deliberate grab for <i>extra-</i>territorial authority. We have similar things in Italy (D.O.C.: <i>Denominazione di Origine Controllata</i>, meaning “Name with a Controlled Origin”) but at least that’s substantiated by a E.U.-level authority. I suppose in this case it is supported by national authority, but the funny thing is that it’s only within the confines of a higher authority that <i>grants</i> these powers to its lower constituents that such powers can exist (or within the context of international trade deals). A better term than the active-voice ‘<i>designated</i>’ might’ve been the mixed active&#x2F;passive-voice “<i>requested, and was granted</i>”, but I’m probably splitting hairs here.<p>I spent quite a while in Malaysia back in the early-to-mid 2000s, but I never actually tried this. The ingredients don’t sound super-appetising to me.<p>EDIT: fixed formatting &amp; punctuation.</text></comment> | <story><title>The mesmerizing geometry of Malaysia’s most complex cakes</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/kek-lapis-sarawak</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>9nGQluzmnq3M</author><text>Kueh lapis is delicious, but by local standards eye-wateringly expensive due to the effort involved, even when it&#x27;s just &quot;regular&quot; layer cake and not further remixed like the Sarawak variant. With a minimum wage of RM 1100&#x2F;mo, that RM250 cake is a week&#x27;s income.<p>Some well-known local chains if you&#x27;re even in the region:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lavender.com.my&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lavender.com.my&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bengawansolo.com.sg&#x2F;cat_signature_range.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bengawansolo.com.sg&#x2F;cat_signature_range.aspx</a><p>In the spirit of HN, perhaps there&#x27;s room for a startup to automate the process with robotics and 3D printing...</text></comment> |
3,641,517 | 3,641,420 | 1 | 3 | 3,641,184 | train | <story><title>I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine</title><url>http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potatolicious</author><text>Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a <i>lot</i> of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine</title><url>http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Permit</author><text>Wow, that's truly incredible. I didn't realize anyone had reached this point. I'm excited to see this stuff progress, but I can't help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be created by this.</text></comment> |
8,715,116 | 8,715,093 | 1 | 2 | 8,714,846 | train | <story><title>We Can't Trust Uber</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/opinion/we-cant-trust-uber.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text><i>Uber argues that it’s doing only what other technology companies regularly do. That may be true but it only underlines why we need oversight mechanisms that cover all of them.</i><p>Such as?<p>If you&#x27;re giving your data freely to companies, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.<p>Imagine a hypothetical oversight mechanism, then imagine the consequences to tech companies. Imagine the consequences to startups. Not Uber; I&#x27;m talking about tiny, early-stage startups.<p>Airbnb and Dropbox have enriched my life. I&#x27;d hate for regulatory burden to prevent such startups from forming in the first place.<p>This isn&#x27;t a hypothetical concern. The finance industry is so regulated that you can&#x27;t easily form a finance startup without having a lot of connections or a lot of money. Same for the healthcare sector, as far as I&#x27;ve heard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdrothrock</author><text>&gt; If you&#x27;re giving your data freely to companies, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.<p>This argument doesn&#x27;t make much sense to me.<p>What if I said,<p>&gt; If you&#x27;re giving your money freely to banks, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.<p>I think the crux of the issue is that if I get a car ride with Uber, I have a reasonable expectation that I am paying for the service of a car ride. There is no reasonable expectation on my part that I&#x27;m giving them money for a car ride AND ALSO giving them the information about me&#x2F;my ride to use freely, regardless of what the TOS may say.<p>The expectation on the customer&#x27;s part is that ride remain private, much like anything that goes on in the doctor&#x27;s office. The reality, of course, does not match that expectation, which is why I think there should be some hypothetical oversight mechanism that manages the differences between the customer&#x27;s expectation and Uber&#x27;s reality.<p>Just because Uber has data on me doesn&#x27;t mean that I have given it to them to do whatever they want with it.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Can't Trust Uber</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/opinion/we-cant-trust-uber.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sillysaurus3</author><text><i>Uber argues that it’s doing only what other technology companies regularly do. That may be true but it only underlines why we need oversight mechanisms that cover all of them.</i><p>Such as?<p>If you&#x27;re giving your data freely to companies, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.<p>Imagine a hypothetical oversight mechanism, then imagine the consequences to tech companies. Imagine the consequences to startups. Not Uber; I&#x27;m talking about tiny, early-stage startups.<p>Airbnb and Dropbox have enriched my life. I&#x27;d hate for regulatory burden to prevent such startups from forming in the first place.<p>This isn&#x27;t a hypothetical concern. The finance industry is so regulated that you can&#x27;t easily form a finance startup without having a lot of connections or a lot of money. Same for the healthcare sector, as far as I&#x27;ve heard.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text><i>&gt; If you&#x27;re giving your data freely to companies, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.</i><p>&quot;If you&#x27;re taking patent medicines freely, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.&quot;<p>&quot;If you&#x27;re eating tainted meat freely, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.&quot;<p>&quot;If you&#x27;re driving on roads used by other drivers in poorly maintained cars freely, I don&#x27;t understand what kind of oversight mechanism could or should protect you.&quot;<p>Etc. etc. etc.</text></comment> |
15,300,257 | 15,300,173 | 1 | 2 | 15,299,442 | train | <story><title>Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum</title><url>https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-eth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeontech</author><text>Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, &quot;Mimsy Were The Borogroves&quot; [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.<p>I still have not been able to figure out if there&#x27;s actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there&#x27;s nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn&#x27;t help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that&#x27;s true about any highly technical subject though.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;lpg=PA181&amp;dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;pg=PA181#v=onepage&amp;q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;lpg=PA181&amp;dq=...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chc4</author><text>I&#x27;m one of those people that get it, so I&#x27;ll try to explain it without going off the deep end and waxing poetically about planets or whatever.<p>Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. To that end, it&#x27;s a tightly integrated set of different features that play into that: an identity system so that all the apps can refer to the same people by the same handle, a typed RPC network for easy message sending, and an append-only log of all events that platform handles being the most important parts.<p>Right now you can build decentralized apps like Mastodon, except they 1) take hours to setup a node, along with having to know arcane Linuz sysadmining 2) aren&#x27;t actually decentralized, but federated. Urbit wants to make it easy to setup your own server, which runs as a node for all these decentralized apps (instant messaging, Twitter, etc.), along with be useful for server-y things like aggregate APIs (email, Facebook).<p>There&#x27;s not actually anything that amazing about Urbit once you figure it out. It just wants everyone to be able to run their own server, and make it easy to build decentralized apps that talk to other Urbit servers. The important part is that somehow, they saw how bad trying to do that currently is, said &quot;let&#x27;s rewrite everything&quot;, &#x2F;and then did&#x2F;. It&#x27;s like reading about Oberon or Plan9&#x2F;Inferno.<p>Edit: This post is probably the worst introduction to Urbit imaginable. It basically is a technical spec for bootstrapping a PKI over Ethereum, and you should expect about as much as if you got linked something from BitTorrent about that. It assumes domain knowledge from both Urbit and Ethereum (both of which are terrible to explain), and &#x2F;doesn&#x27;t actually matter&#x2F; for most people interested in Urbit. Please don&#x27;t use this as the benchmark for &quot;babies first urbit intro&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum</title><url>https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-eth/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeontech</author><text>Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, &quot;Mimsy Were The Borogroves&quot; [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.<p>I still have not been able to figure out if there&#x27;s actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there&#x27;s nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn&#x27;t help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that&#x27;s true about any highly technical subject though.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;lpg=PA181&amp;dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;pg=PA181#v=onepage&amp;q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com&#x2F;books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&amp;lpg=PA181&amp;dq=...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>olympus</author><text>Urbit has been around for a few years and has done nothing to clear up the confusion around it. I think at this point it is safe to say that any claims of Urbit being a revolutionary form of computing are hogwash.<p>This is probably similar to how Scientology got started. Nobody really believes in it, but are too afraid to strongly denounce it because they don&#x27;t want to be the one who &quot;doesn&#x27;t get it.&quot; So they all just go along and get sucked further along down the rabbit hole. The difference between Scientology and Urbit is that Scientology managed to rope in a few celebrities and gained some sustaining mass. If Urbit wants to make it big, they should pay Zuckerberg and Musk to evangelize it, and then everyone will be falling all over themselves to be part of it.</text></comment> |
15,187,320 | 15,186,988 | 1 | 2 | 15,185,015 | train | <story><title>Dhall: a programmable configuration language that is not Turing-complete</title><url>https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sly010</author><text>Every configuration documentation is full of wagely defined or undefined combination of options and &quot;this-flag-cannot-be-used-together-with-that-flag&quot; clauses. Often these things are not even documented but are implicit.<p>e.g. in systemd service definitions depending on your service &quot;Type&quot; the meaning and the validity of the other properties change. (e.g. Type=oneshot cannot have ExecStart)<p>Statically typed languages allow you to create very elegant configuration DSLs so the user cannot create invalid programs (where invalid can mean whatever the DSL creator wants). But most software is written to read shitty (untyped) configuration languages.<p>I always wished config files were not a soup of magic keywords but typed datastructures (talking to you, every yaml configuration file ever). It looks like Dhall is just a statically typed and functional language that allows you to create a nice typed DSLs to generate always valid config files. It&#x27;s at least worth a closer look.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dhall: a programmable configuration language that is not Turing-complete</title><url>https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang/blob/master/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>man-and-laptop</author><text>Subtraction:<p><pre><code> let pred = λ(n : Natural) → (Natural&#x2F;fold n { prev : Natural, next : Natural } (λ(p : { prev : Natural, next : Natural }) → { prev : p.next, next : p.next + +1}) { prev : 0, next : 0 }).prev
in λ(x : Natural) → λ(y : Natural) → Natural&#x2F;fold y Natural pred x
</code></pre>
The Ackermann function:<p><pre><code> let iter = λ(f : Natural → Natural) → λ(n : Natural) → Natural&#x2F;fold n Natural f (f (1))
in λ(m : Natural) → Natural&#x2F;fold m (Natural → Natural) iter (+ +1)
</code></pre>
Save the above to &#x27;ack&#x27; and run the following:
$ dhall &lt;&lt;&lt; &#x27;.&#x2F;ack 10 10&#x27;
It&#x27;s going to take a while before it finishes.<p>This language is close to Turing complete.</text></comment> |
19,471,688 | 19,471,757 | 1 | 2 | 19,471,291 | train | <story><title>Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-23/apple-s-reinvention-as-a-services-company-starts-for-real-monday</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ksec</author><text>I continue to wonder why they don&#x27;t have or push iPhone as a Services ( The iPhone Upgrade Programme ) and continue to rely on mostly Carriers for Financing.<p>By offering iPhone up to a 4 years terms and bundled with AppleCare+ Thief and Loss and iCloud Backup. With Optional Apple Music, Apple News Magazine, Apple TV and Apple Game. All paid via an Apple Branded Credit Card within Apple Pay backed by Goldman Sachs.<p>You could have the iPhone Services starting at ~$35&#x2F;Month even for an iPhone XS Max. If you add up all the other &quot;Services&quot; pack. That is roughly $75&#x2F;month for the Full Apple Experience.<p>~$40 to even $100 a month is affordable to a lot of people. And my guess this could be part of the reason why Apple has been pushing the prices of iPhone.<p>There is another advantage to Apple, this strategy requires huge cash flow and can not be easily copied by its competitor. Apple would be effectively trading its immediate return of cash from selling product for long term customer lock in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmalynin</author><text>Huh, I dont know where you are, but here in the States I got my iPhone through 0% financing (amortized over 2 years) program that allows you to get a new phone every year and comes bundled with AppleCare+</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-23/apple-s-reinvention-as-a-services-company-starts-for-real-monday</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ksec</author><text>I continue to wonder why they don&#x27;t have or push iPhone as a Services ( The iPhone Upgrade Programme ) and continue to rely on mostly Carriers for Financing.<p>By offering iPhone up to a 4 years terms and bundled with AppleCare+ Thief and Loss and iCloud Backup. With Optional Apple Music, Apple News Magazine, Apple TV and Apple Game. All paid via an Apple Branded Credit Card within Apple Pay backed by Goldman Sachs.<p>You could have the iPhone Services starting at ~$35&#x2F;Month even for an iPhone XS Max. If you add up all the other &quot;Services&quot; pack. That is roughly $75&#x2F;month for the Full Apple Experience.<p>~$40 to even $100 a month is affordable to a lot of people. And my guess this could be part of the reason why Apple has been pushing the prices of iPhone.<p>There is another advantage to Apple, this strategy requires huge cash flow and can not be easily copied by its competitor. Apple would be effectively trading its immediate return of cash from selling product for long term customer lock in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>Not only is Apple not doing this, but even much more services-focused companies aren&#x27;t doing it, either. Why doesn&#x27;t Amazon have a version of Kindle Unlimited where you get a free Kindle (with automatic replacement after depreciation, and required return if&#x2F;when you unsubscribe)? (Maybe even bundle that into a higher tier of Amazon Prime.) Why doesn&#x27;t Google&#x27;s Stadia subscription come with free Chromecasts and a &quot;Google Play Unlimited&quot; access to games? Etc.</text></comment> |
25,637,934 | 25,637,162 | 1 | 3 | 25,632,847 | train | <story><title>Open-source RGB lighting control for keyboards, fans, etc</title><url>https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chuckdries</author><text>If you&#x27;re in this thread &quot;I built a PC, all my stuff has RGB, it&#x27;s fine but I don&#x27;t get it&quot;, try setting them all to the same color - you might be surprised how nice it looks. I set everything to white, but my roommate has a nice shade of purple he uses for everything. My real golden rule is absolutely no motion. Can&#x27;t stand cycling rainbows or whatever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrps</author><text>I normally never have any RGB components in my personal builds but I was asked to build my niece a gaming rig for Christmas, figuring a kid would probably like a bit more of a blinged out system I sprung for RGB fans, RAM, water-cooler, and PSU and set them all to a light pink (the case is mint green, her other favorite color) and I have to say it turned me around on RGB lighting. It looked super clean and minimal once I tuned the brightness and color.<p>The only downsides I encountered were color matching among different components, it was a bit tedious. The other was the control software (gigabyte fusion 2.0) was very touchy, at one point I had to do a hard reset and wait for the caps to drain before I could get the LEDs functional again.<p>Edit: typo</text></comment> | <story><title>Open-source RGB lighting control for keyboards, fans, etc</title><url>https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chuckdries</author><text>If you&#x27;re in this thread &quot;I built a PC, all my stuff has RGB, it&#x27;s fine but I don&#x27;t get it&quot;, try setting them all to the same color - you might be surprised how nice it looks. I set everything to white, but my roommate has a nice shade of purple he uses for everything. My real golden rule is absolutely no motion. Can&#x27;t stand cycling rainbows or whatever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wlesieutre</author><text>I let my CPU fan do its default color changing rainbow, buuuut only because it&#x27;s under my desk where I can&#x27;t see it. If nothing else, I can quickly glance down there and see if the computer is powered on.<p>AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors, I guess the market for enthusiast range parts has decided that we want RGB hardware.<p>Personally I think case aesthetics peaked around the Antec P180 which looked like brushed metal fridge and was one of the first cases to care about sound isolation. No window panel, so nobody cares how much of a mess my wiring is, and I can buy the RAM that&#x27;s on sale instead of the one with color coordinated heatspreaders.<p>But if other people are into that, power to them.<p>Someday I&#x27;d like to do a &quot;desktop literally built into the desk top&quot; build and ditch the suspended computer mount completely, assuming I still even want to have a full desktop computer 10 years from now.</text></comment> |
16,558,971 | 16,558,964 | 1 | 2 | 16,558,660 | train | <story><title>Why ‘your’ programmers just want to code</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/why-your-programmers-just-want-to-code-36da9973388e</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>overgard</author><text>I think there&#x27;s a bit of learned helplessness, but I also think that a lot of this is <i>because</i> of agile (or more specifically, scrum), not in spite of it.<p>The amount of micro-management that goes into most programmers day to day work makes it extremely hard to be innovative, because you essentially have to justify what you&#x27;re working on daily -- and any creative person knows that not every idea pans out. You need managerial support to occasionally make mistakes.<p>There have been a lot of times in other jobs where we&#x27;d have a slack in our schedule and I used the down time to make a change that was really necessary and took a minimal amount of time, mentioned it in a standup meeting, and got blasted for not working on our &quot;commitments&quot; for the &quot;sprint&quot; (even when I had nothing to do).<p>Companies always talk about wanting ideas from workers and how important innovation is, but they&#x27;re not willing to extend the trust to their people to create an environment where that can happen. People naturally become disengaged when they&#x27;re not trusted or valued.<p>The worst part is that it&#x27;s not just management creating this mentality, it&#x27;s the other programmers. I&#x27;ve noticed that younger more inexperienced programmers tend to crave the structure of agile, whereas the older more experienced programmers chafe at it. I think if programming had more of a culture of apprenticeship and mentorship, and a deeper appreciation that this is hard and it takes a long time to get good at it, our industry would be a lot healthier.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why ‘your’ programmers just want to code</title><url>https://hackernoon.com/why-your-programmers-just-want-to-code-36da9973388e</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmartrican</author><text>As a veteran in this field, I find myself not trying to ask permission as much for new ideas that I can do on my own. Multiple times in the past I have done my own ideas,while getting feedback from peers and those that are affected, but generally leaving management out of it and not seeking permission. Some ideas panned out, some did not. But I had a great time, got satisfaction from my work, grew and learned. Then other times I would get into this mode where I want to get permission and let managers in on what I am doing. At first it starts out OK. You scale back your ideas due to their concerns. Then you get redirected... &quot;maybe later but now i want you do focus on this&quot;. Eventually it leads to a new job. I think this article helped me pinpoint this pattern, even though I suspected it.<p>It is a balancing act. You do not want to waste company time with oddball ideas, and some of your ideas will be oddball. You need to seek feedback on them so that they can be improved. You need freedom to try them out, and fail. I think this article is good for both managers and developers. Developers should know that this pattern is real, and there are things you can do to protect yourself from going down this path. For me, its basically not always asking for permission to try stuff out... take a risk and believe in yourself, but also get feedback to filter out oddball ideas that waste time.</text></comment> |
29,767,349 | 29,615,758 | 1 | 2 | 29,610,302 | train | <story><title>Zig: Drop MinGW-w64</title><url>https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9998</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iopq</author><text>Rust on Windows used to run on Mingw, but has since moved on<p>It made it a lot easier in many ways to just compile a thing and have it work without thinking about mingw and interfacing C from mingw</text></comment> | <story><title>Zig: Drop MinGW-w64</title><url>https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9998</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jbk</author><text>That’s the opposite of our experience on VLC and Firefox was sharing our opinion: mingw-w64 people are skilled, nice and very clever and think about all use cases.<p>This is how we are able to support configurations that even MS does not support…<p>Also, a contrario from what this threads seems to say, the Windows SDK headers are faaaar from being open source compatible</text></comment> |
16,046,645 | 16,044,984 | 1 | 2 | 16,044,255 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: 2018 resolutions?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlmartin</author><text>Less consuming, more creating. Doesn&#x27;t matter what it is, doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wallflower</author><text>Good luck! We can all do this. Create and create and you will eventually catch up with your taste.<p>I have a personal theory that unhappiness is due to too much consumption, not enough personal creation. Even if it just a sketchnote or a doodle... that is enough.<p>&gt; Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.<p>&gt; We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.<p>-Ira Glass<p>Video version:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;E1oZhEIrer4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;E1oZhEIrer4</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: 2018 resolutions?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>mlmartin</author><text>Less consuming, more creating. Doesn&#x27;t matter what it is, doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hardfire</author><text>I had to log in to HN just to upvote this comment!!! Haven&#x27;t done that in years.
Being true to the resolution, wrote something - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;avinash.com.np&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;A-resolution-that-makes-sense.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;avinash.com.np&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;01&#x2F;A-resolution-that-makes-sen...</a></text></comment> |
23,860,095 | 23,860,364 | 1 | 3 | 23,859,401 | train | <story><title>Twitter is at its best when verified accounts can’t tweet</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-unverified-takeover/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Funes-</author><text>It&#x27;s almost as if the media was taking advantage of our psychological shortcomings and invading our personal lives for profit, at the expense of our well-being, eh?<p>The Internet used to be a refuge from the corporate public sphere; now it&#x27;s its home.</text></item><item><author>sambroner</author><text>My twitter feed was pretty slow without the Blue Checks. The dialogue was <i>way more in the middle</i>. There was suddenly little conversation about today&#x27;s meme (cake? idk.) The whole thing felt pretty civilized.<p>It made me realize how much <i>content</i> these twitter blue checks are creating. It&#x27;s <i>crazy</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulgb</author><text>The model I use for making sense of Twitter is that most of the blue check dialogue is just bringing the people-fighting-on-cable-news dynamic to the internet. Personalities on both sides of every debate have a symbiotic relationship where they have inane arguments because that&#x27;s what gets boosted and gives them more visibility.<p>Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they&#x27;re following the news and instead they&#x27;re watching a wrestling match.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter is at its best when verified accounts can’t tweet</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-unverified-takeover/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Funes-</author><text>It&#x27;s almost as if the media was taking advantage of our psychological shortcomings and invading our personal lives for profit, at the expense of our well-being, eh?<p>The Internet used to be a refuge from the corporate public sphere; now it&#x27;s its home.</text></item><item><author>sambroner</author><text>My twitter feed was pretty slow without the Blue Checks. The dialogue was <i>way more in the middle</i>. There was suddenly little conversation about today&#x27;s meme (cake? idk.) The whole thing felt pretty civilized.<p>It made me realize how much <i>content</i> these twitter blue checks are creating. It&#x27;s <i>crazy</i>.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imiric</author><text>Very well put. Though there is still some refuge in smaller online communities, if you know where to look. If you limit your exposure to specific places and avoid the rampant toxicity elsewhere, it&#x27;s not that bad. :)</text></comment> |
33,725,599 | 33,725,334 | 1 | 2 | 33,724,337 | train | <story><title>2 Years at Twitter</title><url>https://eed3si9n.com/2years-at-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gravypod</author><text>There are many people who are commenting that this is so much work for 20m lines of code, they&#x27;re reinventing the wheel, they should have just bought something off the shelf, etc.<p>Two things to consider:<p>1. It is sometimes hard to buy things that works well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;nothing-works&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;nothing-works&#x2F;</a><p>2. The productivity gains of something like Bazel and Pants are pretty amazing if you are working within a monorepo.<p>It is very difficult to understand how big these two things play into these decisions. Having ~20 people manage build tooling, build caching, source control, CI (build+test), and building release artifacts (which it sounds like Pants did) is not a bad deal.<p>Consider:<p>1. GitLab will charge you $20&#x2F;month&#x2F;user.<p>2. If you have 2000 SWEs you&#x27;ll pay 40k&#x2F;month just to have access to the website.<p>3. You&#x27;ll still need to hire a person or two to negotiate the purchasing of the GitLab.<p>Now remember that GitLab might not be prefect for your use case. GitLab doesn&#x27;t increase the performance of builds on your laptop by sharing a cache with all engineers. There&#x27;s also a limit to the mount of data you can store for source + build artifacts (50GB). The CI runners they host for you are very expensive for how slow the machines are ($10&#x2F;1000 minutes).<p>Sure, you can do things like run your own GitLab runners but now you&#x27;re back to running your own infrastructure which is an engineer&#x27;s job. Sure, you could save money by using Gitea or something that if free but again hosting your own infra. As soon as you have someone managing that infrastructure they&#x27;re bound to say &quot;how else can I save time and money&quot; and at a certain scale these things become reasonable or even required.</text></comment> | <story><title>2 Years at Twitter</title><url>https://eed3si9n.com/2years-at-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ralph84</author><text>Another company that copied the engineering practices of Google without the profitability to support a huge internal tools team.</text></comment> |
9,764,896 | 9,764,858 | 1 | 3 | 9,764,286 | train | <story><title>Apple's Indies</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/6/23/apples-indies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>This is pretty ridiculous. There&#x27;s very little comparison.<p>1. Apple didn&#x27;t respond to a letter from Taylor swift in &lt; 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let&#x27;s not forget it&#x27;s rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn&#x27;t been considering this for weeks already.<p>2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It&#x27;s simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.<p>3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>It&#x27;s nonsensical to compare to brick-and-mortar stores. We didn&#x27;t go from brick-and-mortar to the App Store. We went from direct internet sales, where we got to build whatever we wanted, ship updates instantaneously, and keep 98% of the revenue, to the App Store.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's Indies</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/6/23/apples-indies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>This is pretty ridiculous. There&#x27;s very little comparison.<p>1. Apple didn&#x27;t respond to a letter from Taylor swift in &lt; 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let&#x27;s not forget it&#x27;s rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn&#x27;t been considering this for weeks already.<p>2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It&#x27;s simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.<p>3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jediMac</author><text>Agreed. One other thing to note—Apple doesn&#x27;t prohibit timed trials of content. In fact, Apple supports it and builds in free subscriptions. What they prohibit is apps that completely stop working after a trial period. But they allow apps to have some functionality cease after an introductory period.</text></comment> |
24,032,114 | 24,032,279 | 1 | 2 | 24,028,062 | train | <story><title>When I raised my B2B SaaS’s prices</title><url>https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/when-i-raised-my-b2b-saass-prices/7017</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>harryf</author><text>As an occasional B2B SaaS buyer, the key point in getting your pricing right &#x2F; wrong is knowing where the limits are for;<p>a) I can just get this on my company credit card without needing approval<p>b) OK for this price it&#x27;s going to show up as a line somewhere in a budget and &#x2F; or I&#x27;m going to have to get approval from my boss ( 1-2 meetings work )<p>c) For THAT price I need to trigger a whole enterprise process, have a ton of meetings, make the case<p>Mostly you want to stay in a) for volume sales. Once you start getting into b) and c) you start needing support agreements, enterprise sales people etc. plus b) and c) make work for the customers that are your &quot;adopters&quot; in the enterprise - they need to love your product for that to happen.</text></comment> | <story><title>When I raised my B2B SaaS’s prices</title><url>https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/t/when-i-raised-my-b2b-saass-prices/7017</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrott</author><text>As the price goes up we tend to get larger organisations as customers. Unfortunately, they are also more likely to ask for custom legals, T&amp;Cs, and security audits. In all cases, I say no. That may change in the future.<p>this was a particularly interesting bit. I&#x27;ve got a feeling that the organizations that care about custom legal and security audits can be charged way more than $50 a month. If people are caring about that you&#x27;re probably beyond a developer with the corporate card in terms of who is buying.</text></comment> |
9,790,539 | 9,790,392 | 1 | 2 | 9,789,960 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub</title><url>https://a-sf-mirror.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>Why Github? Copying from one commercial provider to another doesn&#x27;t solve the fundamental problem. Using git helps, but most of those old repos will never get cloned.<p>In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrollaway</author><text>&gt; In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.<p>So fix it in 10 years. Git makes that easy.<p>Point me to a <i>good</i> alternative to github that matches all your ideals. A <i>free</i> alternative to github - free as in beer, unless you&#x27;re willing to fund this effort yourself, of course?<p>We migrated one of our projects from Sourceforge to Github, and all the stallmen came out of their rock to tell us how Github is evil, how Savannah is the only true alternative, pah. &quot;Absolute freedom of software&quot; is nice but it&#x27;s not the only requirement. Savannah has the usability of a rusty wrench and will probably shut down without warning long before Github &quot;turns evil&quot;.<p>Some people are just so far detached from reality when suggesting that stuff isn&#x27;t perfect. Github is pretty damn amazing. If you want to use foss alternative like Gitlab, more power to you, but that doesn&#x27;t make them ideal in every situation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub</title><url>https://a-sf-mirror.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>Why Github? Copying from one commercial provider to another doesn&#x27;t solve the fundamental problem. Using git helps, but most of those old repos will never get cloned.<p>In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goldfeld</author><text>Ten years from now for all we know we could all have so much cheap storage and bandwidth and good, open p2p software that all coders get to archive their own full copy of github&#x27;s repos. So the focus should be on getting today&#x27;s job done now.</text></comment> |
27,526,438 | 27,523,684 | 1 | 2 | 27,520,806 | train | <story><title>Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo</title><url>https://www.gq.com/story/johnny-knoxvilles-last-rodeo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>Hadn&#x27;t seen that before!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PocAbbm9GnA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PocAbbm9GnA</a></text></item><item><author>actusual</author><text>My favorite jackass prank was the Valentine&#x27;s day card pasted to the hotel wall. The gag was simple, but incredibly well executed. The Valentine&#x27;s day card was supposed to be written to Jackass stars from someone staying in the hotel, and the hand written scrawl would get progressively smaller as the &quot;writer&quot; ran out of room on the card, which caused the reader to lean in closer and closer to finish reading it. Then WHAM a giant boxing glove would fly out of the card, punching the reader in the face.<p>Long live Johnny Knoxville, American hero.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iamacyborg</author><text>I don&#x27;t think anything will ever beat the steve-o ceiling fan stunt for me, it&#x27;s just so stupidly absurd.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uPkf6DTG8wQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uPkf6DTG8wQ</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo</title><url>https://www.gq.com/story/johnny-knoxvilles-last-rodeo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonplackett</author><text>Hadn&#x27;t seen that before!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PocAbbm9GnA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PocAbbm9GnA</a></text></item><item><author>actusual</author><text>My favorite jackass prank was the Valentine&#x27;s day card pasted to the hotel wall. The gag was simple, but incredibly well executed. The Valentine&#x27;s day card was supposed to be written to Jackass stars from someone staying in the hotel, and the hand written scrawl would get progressively smaller as the &quot;writer&quot; ran out of room on the card, which caused the reader to lean in closer and closer to finish reading it. Then WHAM a giant boxing glove would fly out of the card, punching the reader in the face.<p>Long live Johnny Knoxville, American hero.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aseipp</author><text>Ryan getting immediately hit without even saying a word makes me laugh every single time.</text></comment> |
38,559,207 | 38,559,541 | 1 | 2 | 38,530,893 | train | <story><title>Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/light-can-travel-backward-in-time-sort-of/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameshart</author><text>What is the purpose of this kind of science journalism?<p>The basic structure of the piece is to put a claim in the headline that sounds like a sci-fi breakthrough, then spend the article explaining that this isn’t actually a sci-fi breakthrough.<p>Like, the entire article here is basically saying ‘there is such a thing as a time mirror. No, it doesn’t make light travel back in time.’<p>What it <i>doesn’t</i> do is remotely explain what a time mirror <i>is</i> and what it actually <i>does</i> do. No, ‘scientists made a time mirror out of a metamaterial that uses capacitive switches to add and remove matter’ does not answer what a time mirror <i>is</i>.<p>I can tell you I made a florb warper out of a piece of zinc suspended in a cup of tea and you’re still none the wiser what a florb warper is or what it means for florbs to get warped. But please don’t get the wrong idea - it’s nothing like the warp drive from Star Trek! After all, it uses tea and zinc, not dilithium! Still, we can headline the article about it ‘Scientists test warp device’.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aranchelk</author><text>Agreed on the first point, the headline and lead-in are grossly sensationalized, but later they do pretty clearly explain what’s going on.<p>The article’s author says the “time mirror” means you send a signal into the experimental setup of wave guides e.g. “a-b-c” and it comes back “c-b-a”.<p>Furthermore, when the researchers introduce interference during the reversal they don’t see superposition as you might expect (wave-like behavior), but kinetic interactions (signals are acting like a collection of particles).<p>It may not be true (we know a large percentage of papers can’t be replicated I.e. they’re bullshit), and I have no context to know how important that finding would be, but it is explained.</text></comment> | <story><title>Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/light-can-travel-backward-in-time-sort-of/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jameshart</author><text>What is the purpose of this kind of science journalism?<p>The basic structure of the piece is to put a claim in the headline that sounds like a sci-fi breakthrough, then spend the article explaining that this isn’t actually a sci-fi breakthrough.<p>Like, the entire article here is basically saying ‘there is such a thing as a time mirror. No, it doesn’t make light travel back in time.’<p>What it <i>doesn’t</i> do is remotely explain what a time mirror <i>is</i> and what it actually <i>does</i> do. No, ‘scientists made a time mirror out of a metamaterial that uses capacitive switches to add and remove matter’ does not answer what a time mirror <i>is</i>.<p>I can tell you I made a florb warper out of a piece of zinc suspended in a cup of tea and you’re still none the wiser what a florb warper is or what it means for florbs to get warped. But please don’t get the wrong idea - it’s nothing like the warp drive from Star Trek! After all, it uses tea and zinc, not dilithium! Still, we can headline the article about it ‘Scientists test warp device’.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>icambron</author><text>Completely agree about the headline and lead, but if you slog through it, the article did an ok job explaining the concept:<p>&gt; The trick is to create a certain kind of reflection. First, imagine a regular spatial reflection, like one you see in a silver-backed glass mirror. Here reflection occurs because for a ray of light, silver is a very different transmission medium than air; the sudden change in optical properties causes the light to bounce back, like a Ping-Pong ball hitting a wall. Now imagine that instead of changing at particular points in space, the optical properties all along the ray’s path change sharply at a specific moment in time. Rather than recoiling in space, the light would recoil in time, precisely retracing its tracks, like the Ping-Pong ball returning to the player who last hit it. This is a “time reflection.”<p>&gt; To do so, physicist Andrea Alù and his colleagues devised a “metamaterial” with adjustable optical properties that they could tweak within fractions of a nanosecond to halve or double how quickly light passes through.<p>So you have some volume of material and wave of light is passing through it. You alter the material everywhere in that volume so that the light does a 180 at every point along the wave at the same instant, reversing the stream of light. Any signal encoded in the light comes back in the opposite order you put it in, like you played a recording backward, or popped a stack until it was empty.</text></comment> |
16,909,519 | 16,909,027 | 1 | 3 | 16,908,506 | train | <story><title>Fast website link checker in Go</title><url>https://github.com/raviqqe/muffet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jchw</author><text>I find the use of rake to be kind of unorthodox, and yet I don&#x27;t know what else you&#x27;d use in the Go world, other than maybe just Makefiles. Any particular reason to choose Rake? It&#x27;s probably not easy to get it running on Windows based on my experience playing with Rails on Windows.<p>Other than that it looks quite useful, and it&#x27;s definitely something to keep in the tool belt. Bonus points for the subtle Undertale references too :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beefsack</author><text>When I&#x27;ve been working in Go projects which required external helpers of some sort, I&#x27;ve always just written them as separate Go binaries because they&#x27;re relatively simple and quick to get up and running.<p>I&#x27;ve started doing this for my Rust projects too because Rust is becoming a really nice language for writing these sorts of things, and having a separate binary as a Rust file in src&#x2F;bin is convenient.<p>Often you want to use some logic from the main application in your tasks and using the same language streamlines that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fast website link checker in Go</title><url>https://github.com/raviqqe/muffet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jchw</author><text>I find the use of rake to be kind of unorthodox, and yet I don&#x27;t know what else you&#x27;d use in the Go world, other than maybe just Makefiles. Any particular reason to choose Rake? It&#x27;s probably not easy to get it running on Windows based on my experience playing with Rails on Windows.<p>Other than that it looks quite useful, and it&#x27;s definitely something to keep in the tool belt. Bonus points for the subtle Undertale references too :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eloff</author><text>I use matr[1], which is lets you define your build functions&#x2F;tasks as ordinary go functions. There&#x27;s a complementary library for issuing shell commands.<p>I like keeping just one language and tooling, but the biggest benefit to me is I&#x27;m always forgetting the arcane bits of shell syntax, and using Go saves me from having to search it all the time. Despite being more verbose than bash, I find it saves me time overall.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matr-builder&#x2F;matr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matr-builder&#x2F;matr</a></text></comment> |
41,174,188 | 41,173,927 | 1 | 3 | 41,173,161 | train | <story><title>Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts</title><url>https://1fps.video/</url><text>I wanted to show you something I was hacking on for the last few weeks.<p>I tired of sharing screen via Google Meet with 1-hour limitation, with Zoom and 40-minute limitation, etc. With paid Slack subscription. And often times I just needed to screenshare with no audio.<p>So I ended up with my own solution - no registration, low memory, low CPU, low tek 1 fps encrypted screen sharing. Currently sharing only the main screen (good for laptop users).<p>It&#x27;s very raw in terms of infrastructure, since I&#x27;m not counting bytes (yikes!), everything works on my own dedicated server. But the service itself has been tested, we&#x27;ve been sharing screens for countless hours. All sessions last for 48 hours, then it gets removed with all remaining info.<p>Every new frame replaces the other, and everything is end-to-end encrypted so even server owners and operators won&#x27;t be able to see what are you sharing.<p>There is also no tracking, except the main page - and I use my own analytics. Sessions are not getting tracked and never will be, and observability currently is not in place.<p>Again, this is a true one-person side hacking project I hope (but I have serious doubts) I might need to scale if it&#x27;s getting traction to support more users.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>red0point</author><text>I feel like there are so many pitfalls when designing this - is there something standard and trusted (would TLS work?) that you could build your application on top of?</text></item><item><author>vngzs</author><text>Good job releasing your project! It&#x27;s a cool idea and surprisingly minimalist. That said, I&#x27;ve found a number of cryptographic flaws in the application source. This should not be used in instances where the encryption is mission-critical.<p>1) You generate a random key [0] and then feed it into PBKDF2 [1] to generate a 32-byte AES-GCM key. If you can generate 32 random bytes instead of 10 reduced-ASCII characters and a key stretch, just do that. PBKDF2 is for turning a password into a key, and it&#x27;s far from the recommended algorithm nowadays; prefer scrypt if you need to do this sort of thing.<p>2) AES-GCM with random 12-byte nonces. Never use random IVs with GCM; this breaks the authentication [2] [3]. Given the pitfalls of AES-GCM with respect to random nonces, you might prefer switching to XSalsa20+Poly1305. The advantage of XSalsa is it has an extended nonce length, so you can use random nonces without fear.<p>3) Random key derivation with a restricted character set can make brute force attacks easier. You should have a 256-bit random key, and if you want that key to be within a certain character set, then <i>encode</i> the byte output from the CSPRNG using that character set.<p>4) 1fps achieves symmetric key distribution via a URL with a fragment identifier (&quot;#&quot;) which IIRC is not sent to the server. Therefore it assumes you have a secure key distribution channel - the link contains the key, so it&#x27;s important that only the intended recipient can view the part after the &quot;#&quot;. If the server is truly malicious, it can deploy client-side Javascript to send the fragment to the server, allowing the server to access the key (and thus cleartext communication).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L99">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L99</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L287">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L287</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;475.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;475.pdf</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soatok.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;why-aes-gcm-sucks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soatok.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;why-aes-gcm-sucks&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vngzs</author><text>I assume there&#x27;s TLS in the server connection already, but the encryption here is to make the communication unavailable to the server for decryption, so &quot;bare&quot; TLS does not solve the problem.<p>With TLS you need pubkeys you can trust (the certificate authority hierarchy provides that trust for the open Internet) or you&#x27;re vulnerable to MITM. You could potentially share pubkeys using a similar out-of-band mechanism to that currently used for symmetric key distriubtion, and tunnel that TLS connection through the server&#x27;s shared comms channel. That would work OK for two parties, but it becomes significantly more cumbersome if you want three or more, since each TLS session is a pairwise key exchange. Notably, however, this would not transit secret keys through server-controlled web pages where they could be available to Javascript. Something like Noise [0] might also be useful for a similar pubkey model.<p>Unfortunately, this kind of cryptography engineering is <i>hard</i>. Key distribution and exchange is <i>hard</i>. There isn&#x27;t much of a way around learning the underlying material well enough to find this sort of issue yourself, but misuse-resistant libraries can help. Google&#x27;s Tink [1] is misuse-resistant and provides a handful of blessed ways to do things such as key generation, but I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s suitable outside of cloud deployments with KMS solutions. nacl&#x2F;secretbox handles straight encryption&#x2F;decryption with sound primitives, but it still requires a correct means of key generation [2] <i>and</i> distribution.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noiseprotocol.org&#x2F;noise.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.noiseprotocol.org&#x2F;noise.html</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tink-crypto&#x2F;tink-go">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tink-crypto&#x2F;tink-go</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pkg.go.dev&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;x&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;nacl&#x2F;secretbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pkg.go.dev&#x2F;golang.org&#x2F;x&#x2F;crypto&#x2F;nacl&#x2F;secretbox</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts</title><url>https://1fps.video/</url><text>I wanted to show you something I was hacking on for the last few weeks.<p>I tired of sharing screen via Google Meet with 1-hour limitation, with Zoom and 40-minute limitation, etc. With paid Slack subscription. And often times I just needed to screenshare with no audio.<p>So I ended up with my own solution - no registration, low memory, low CPU, low tek 1 fps encrypted screen sharing. Currently sharing only the main screen (good for laptop users).<p>It&#x27;s very raw in terms of infrastructure, since I&#x27;m not counting bytes (yikes!), everything works on my own dedicated server. But the service itself has been tested, we&#x27;ve been sharing screens for countless hours. All sessions last for 48 hours, then it gets removed with all remaining info.<p>Every new frame replaces the other, and everything is end-to-end encrypted so even server owners and operators won&#x27;t be able to see what are you sharing.<p>There is also no tracking, except the main page - and I use my own analytics. Sessions are not getting tracked and never will be, and observability currently is not in place.<p>Again, this is a true one-person side hacking project I hope (but I have serious doubts) I might need to scale if it&#x27;s getting traction to support more users.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>red0point</author><text>I feel like there are so many pitfalls when designing this - is there something standard and trusted (would TLS work?) that you could build your application on top of?</text></item><item><author>vngzs</author><text>Good job releasing your project! It&#x27;s a cool idea and surprisingly minimalist. That said, I&#x27;ve found a number of cryptographic flaws in the application source. This should not be used in instances where the encryption is mission-critical.<p>1) You generate a random key [0] and then feed it into PBKDF2 [1] to generate a 32-byte AES-GCM key. If you can generate 32 random bytes instead of 10 reduced-ASCII characters and a key stretch, just do that. PBKDF2 is for turning a password into a key, and it&#x27;s far from the recommended algorithm nowadays; prefer scrypt if you need to do this sort of thing.<p>2) AES-GCM with random 12-byte nonces. Never use random IVs with GCM; this breaks the authentication [2] [3]. Given the pitfalls of AES-GCM with respect to random nonces, you might prefer switching to XSalsa20+Poly1305. The advantage of XSalsa is it has an extended nonce length, so you can use random nonces without fear.<p>3) Random key derivation with a restricted character set can make brute force attacks easier. You should have a 256-bit random key, and if you want that key to be within a certain character set, then <i>encode</i> the byte output from the CSPRNG using that character set.<p>4) 1fps achieves symmetric key distribution via a URL with a fragment identifier (&quot;#&quot;) which IIRC is not sent to the server. Therefore it assumes you have a secure key distribution channel - the link contains the key, so it&#x27;s important that only the intended recipient can view the part after the &quot;#&quot;. If the server is truly malicious, it can deploy client-side Javascript to send the fragment to the server, allowing the server to access the key (and thus cleartext communication).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L99">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L99</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L287">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;1fpsvideo&#x2F;1fps&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;1fps.go#L287</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;475.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprint.iacr.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;475.pdf</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soatok.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;why-aes-gcm-sucks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soatok.blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;why-aes-gcm-sucks&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yyyfb</author><text>I guess TLS has a dependency on the public key infrastructure (eg Let&#x27;s Encrypt, or whoever issues wifey accepted certs). Which makes end to end encryption between users harder (most of this stuff is intended for server auth and encryption)?<p>But otherwise big +1 not to reimplement crypto when the are alternatives. Another option for secret key stuff might be ssh?</text></comment> |
21,052,685 | 21,051,725 | 1 | 3 | 21,049,822 | train | <story><title>Update from Chef</title><url>https://blog.chef.io/2019/09/23/an-important-update-from-chef/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ARandomerDude</author><text>The problem with this is the mob too quickly concludes CBP provides <i>no</i> valuable service to the nation (i.e., service worth contract support) because of a policy I don&#x27;t like. That really is unjustified, I think.<p>The same is true of law enforcement generally. Police get a lot of hate on HN because of some obviously over-the-top policies that need to be corrected. But we would have major problems without law enforcement, including CBP.<p>We should address the issues without taking them to the extremes. This applies pretty broadly in politics these days, sadly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfehring</author><text>As is often the case, it&#x27;s important to distinguish <i>absolute</i> value (the total net positive or negative created by, say, CBP or law enforcement in general) from <i>marginal</i> value (the additional net positive or negative created when you increase their funding).<p>It&#x27;s possible and rational to believe that agencies like CBP are (or would be at some level of funding) a net positive in absolute terms, while also believing that they&#x27;re a net negative at the margin. This is approximately equivalent to the belief that these agencies should exist but should be smaller than they are today.<p>Eliminating service contracts won&#x27;t &quot;bankrupt&quot; CBP and prevent it from getting anything done, but it will reduce the amount that it can do at the margin. For anyone who believes that CBP funding is a net negative at the margin, including those who believe it&#x27;s a net positive in absolute terms, this is a desirable outcome.</text></comment> | <story><title>Update from Chef</title><url>https://blog.chef.io/2019/09/23/an-important-update-from-chef/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ARandomerDude</author><text>The problem with this is the mob too quickly concludes CBP provides <i>no</i> valuable service to the nation (i.e., service worth contract support) because of a policy I don&#x27;t like. That really is unjustified, I think.<p>The same is true of law enforcement generally. Police get a lot of hate on HN because of some obviously over-the-top policies that need to be corrected. But we would have major problems without law enforcement, including CBP.<p>We should address the issues without taking them to the extremes. This applies pretty broadly in politics these days, sadly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>happytoexplain</author><text>&gt;Police get a lot of hate on HN because of some obviously over-the-top policies that need to be corrected. But we would have major problems without law enforcement<p>This seems like a fantastic leap. I think there are zero or borderline zero instances of calls, <i>even implicitly</i>, for the abolishment of law due to individual horrors.</text></comment> |
14,067,818 | 14,066,620 | 1 | 3 | 14,064,096 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?</title><text>How do you still use bookmarks? How do you organize them? Why are they useful to you?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cyph0n</author><text>I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.<p>For instance, maybe I&#x27;m looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing &quot;postgres&quot; and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years. Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I&#x27;m searching that brings back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)<p>My collection is at least 9 years old now. I&#x27;ve been maintaining the same Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to version. Now it&#x27;s seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases when I prefer to use Chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aplaice</author><text>&gt; From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.<p>In case people are not aware of this, prepending a * to your query will make Firefox search _only_ in your bookmarks:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Browser.urlbar.match.url" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Browser.urlbar.match.url</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Basic-Browsing&#x2F;Awesome-Bar-Search-your-Firefox-bookmarks-history-and-tabs-from&#x2F;ta-p&#x2F;1485#w_changing-results-on-the-fly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Basic-Browsing&#x2F;Awesome-Bar-Se...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?</title><text>How do you still use bookmarks? How do you organize them? Why are they useful to you?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cyph0n</author><text>I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection.<p>For instance, maybe I&#x27;m looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing &quot;postgres&quot; and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot of time over the years. Another cool thing is when a bookmark pops up when I&#x27;m searching that brings back memories. If the site is still up, I get a free trip down memory lane :)<p>My collection is at least 9 years old now. I&#x27;ve been maintaining the same Firefox database over the years by migrating it manually from version to version. Now it&#x27;s seamless thanks to Firefox Sync. I get my bookmarks on my PC, laptop, and my phone. I have an Xmarks account as a backup, and for cases when I prefer to use Chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reitanqild</author><text><i>For instance, maybe I&#x27;m looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing &quot;postgres&quot; and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears.</i><p>Same here. Sometimes you find something really useful but you forget to bookmark (or in my case: add to pinboard). Then a few days later I realize and after a couple of minutes googling to no effect I start typing the parts I remember and FF narrows down until I find it. It also let me search for stuff that google at least until recently would ignore.</text></comment> |
19,047,383 | 19,047,038 | 1 | 3 | 19,045,578 | train | <story><title>Stealing the Enemy's Urban Advantage: The Battle of Sadr City</title><url>https://mwi.usma.edu/stealing-enemys-urban-advantage-battle-sadr-city/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edraferi</author><text>&gt; [JAM] Snipers would also shoot at the crane cable or the lone soldier that was forced to climb a ladder to unhook each concrete wall. Special operations forces snipers were extremely useful in a counter-sniper role. Nevertheless, there were situations where confirmed snipers and fighters that could not be engaged by US snipers had to be targeted with air-delivered, precision-guided bombs or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rounds that could penetrate the buildings’ layers of concrete. One instance that required a concrete-penetrating option was when a JAM sniper occupied and fortified one of the few five-story buildings north of the Gold Wall was being constructed and at a key intersection where he was able to engage the wall-building team. Direct fire placed on the building did not affect the sniper’s fortified position. 1-68 CAB’s solution was to drop the building using the GMLRS. But for the duration of the Battle of Sadr City, coalition forces used fewer than three mortar or artillery fire missions because of the risk of collateral damage, the prospect of injuring civilians, and the potential political ramifications both locally for the government of Iraq and internationally for political support to the coalition forces.<p>Don&#x27;t bring a sniper rifle to a combined-arms fight, I suppose. It&#x27;s interesting &amp; typical of modern war that the politics of the fight constrain the weapons choice much more than the tactical situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcranmer</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s interesting &amp; typical of modern war that the politics of the fight constrain the weapons choice much more than the tactical situation.<p>Not just modern war, but pretty much for most of history.<p>Clausewitz&#x27;s maxim that &quot;war is a continuation of policy by other means&quot; ought to be interpreted as a reminder that war is (or at least should be) subservient to the political goals that are fueling war, and that the military needs to be a tool, not a driver, of the government&#x27;s foreign policies. Sadly, not all governments do a good job of remembering this fact, and that is often where the great military failures start from.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stealing the Enemy's Urban Advantage: The Battle of Sadr City</title><url>https://mwi.usma.edu/stealing-enemys-urban-advantage-battle-sadr-city/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edraferi</author><text>&gt; [JAM] Snipers would also shoot at the crane cable or the lone soldier that was forced to climb a ladder to unhook each concrete wall. Special operations forces snipers were extremely useful in a counter-sniper role. Nevertheless, there were situations where confirmed snipers and fighters that could not be engaged by US snipers had to be targeted with air-delivered, precision-guided bombs or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rounds that could penetrate the buildings’ layers of concrete. One instance that required a concrete-penetrating option was when a JAM sniper occupied and fortified one of the few five-story buildings north of the Gold Wall was being constructed and at a key intersection where he was able to engage the wall-building team. Direct fire placed on the building did not affect the sniper’s fortified position. 1-68 CAB’s solution was to drop the building using the GMLRS. But for the duration of the Battle of Sadr City, coalition forces used fewer than three mortar or artillery fire missions because of the risk of collateral damage, the prospect of injuring civilians, and the potential political ramifications both locally for the government of Iraq and internationally for political support to the coalition forces.<p>Don&#x27;t bring a sniper rifle to a combined-arms fight, I suppose. It&#x27;s interesting &amp; typical of modern war that the politics of the fight constrain the weapons choice much more than the tactical situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RobertoG</author><text>&gt;&gt;&quot;[..] typical of modern war the politics of the fight constrain the weapons choice much more than the tactical situation. &quot;<p>That&#x27;s a luxury that you only can afford when the asymmetry of force is huge and you are going to win anyway.</text></comment> |
15,995,446 | 15,995,476 | 1 | 2 | 15,994,294 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Has working remotely harmed your career growth?</title><text>There’s a lot of talk about remote work nowadays. But has the lack of being able to be with co-workers harmed your career over the long run? Especially if the team is a mixture of remote and co-located people? How have you tried to mitigate that?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>remote_gal</author><text>Working remotely pretty much destroyed my career for two reasons: (1) my networking opportunities plummeted to zero and (2) I was fired for reasons I believe could have been avoided if I had worked in an office and had stronger relationships with more co-workers.<p>My remote job was at a fully distributed company with good compensation.<p>I worked there for about five years, receiving only positive reviews.<p>Groups in the company worked in a very silo-ed manner — there was not a lot of work overlap or cross-team communication. But I loved my team and work so it was fine with me.<p>Once the company started struggling, they re-organized our group several times, and eventually a non-technical manager with more seniority than me was brought in.<p>Although I was highly effective, well-reviewed, and never had issues with other managers, the non-technical manager and I dealt with all of the classic issues that come up in this scenario: unrealistic deadlines and expectations, scope creep, etc. I tried to deal with this in an ego-less, professional manner, but he took our issues personally and lobbied HR to have me fired.<p>At that point, after all of the re-organizations, I was the only dev left on my team, and my other managers who I had good relationships with had moved on. I had no one to vouch for me. I believe that if I had worked in an office, in a less silo-ed manner, I would have had more opportunities to network with other developers within the company and my accomplishments would have been more visible, which would have at least allowed me to switch teams.<p>Instead, I was quietly led out the back door and disappeared.<p>In a remote company it&#x27;s a lot easier to be fired. It&#x27;s a lot more difficult to resolve interpersonal issues over IRC than face-to-face. There is a huge amount of value to passing people randomly in the hallway, by &quot;the watercooler,&quot; or at a social event. These kinds of relationships are critical and are just not replicable via remote work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>remote_gal</author><text>The last thing I&#x27;ll add since edits don&#x27;t seem to be working ...<p>My advice to you is that unless you are at the end of your career, or value working from home over your career prospects for family or health reasons, avoid working 100% remotely, even in fully distributed companies. The ideal is a situation where you work in an office, but have a flexible schedule where you can work from home 1-2 days a week, or 1-2 months a year.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Has working remotely harmed your career growth?</title><text>There’s a lot of talk about remote work nowadays. But has the lack of being able to be with co-workers harmed your career over the long run? Especially if the team is a mixture of remote and co-located people? How have you tried to mitigate that?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>remote_gal</author><text>Working remotely pretty much destroyed my career for two reasons: (1) my networking opportunities plummeted to zero and (2) I was fired for reasons I believe could have been avoided if I had worked in an office and had stronger relationships with more co-workers.<p>My remote job was at a fully distributed company with good compensation.<p>I worked there for about five years, receiving only positive reviews.<p>Groups in the company worked in a very silo-ed manner — there was not a lot of work overlap or cross-team communication. But I loved my team and work so it was fine with me.<p>Once the company started struggling, they re-organized our group several times, and eventually a non-technical manager with more seniority than me was brought in.<p>Although I was highly effective, well-reviewed, and never had issues with other managers, the non-technical manager and I dealt with all of the classic issues that come up in this scenario: unrealistic deadlines and expectations, scope creep, etc. I tried to deal with this in an ego-less, professional manner, but he took our issues personally and lobbied HR to have me fired.<p>At that point, after all of the re-organizations, I was the only dev left on my team, and my other managers who I had good relationships with had moved on. I had no one to vouch for me. I believe that if I had worked in an office, in a less silo-ed manner, I would have had more opportunities to network with other developers within the company and my accomplishments would have been more visible, which would have at least allowed me to switch teams.<p>Instead, I was quietly led out the back door and disappeared.<p>In a remote company it&#x27;s a lot easier to be fired. It&#x27;s a lot more difficult to resolve interpersonal issues over IRC than face-to-face. There is a huge amount of value to passing people randomly in the hallway, by &quot;the watercooler,&quot; or at a social event. These kinds of relationships are critical and are just not replicable via remote work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ravenstine</author><text>It&#x27;s both fortunate and unfortunate that forming relationships with people has more impact on job security than actual performance. That&#x27;s been my experience, anyway. It works on at least two tiers; people in charge of companies are inclined to hire people they like(we&#x27;re all tribalistic human apes), and even if they end up not liking you they will hesitate to fire you if that choice will be unpopular with the rest of your team.<p>I know that analysis seems Machiavellian to some extent, but it&#x27;s the honest truth. Society is never going to be a true meritocracy unless it&#x27;s run by robots(and even then probably not), but I wouldn&#x27;t want it to be like that anyway. As humans, we should be allowed to have other redeeming qualities work for us as long as we are forced to work for a living.</text></comment> |
17,057,993 | 17,057,071 | 1 | 3 | 17,050,994 | train | <story><title>The Sound of Madness</title><url>https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-sound-of-madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>As someone who normally doesn&#x27;t have the self-talk module running, I was amazed to learn that most people have it running all the time. I only use the module when writing, otherwise my consciousness is normally non-verbal.<p>I suspect it is related, but when I read I don&#x27;t hear the words unless I deliberately choose to read the text in my head, otherwise my process is written word -&gt; concept.</text></item><item><author>mirimir</author><text>Good article.<p>But it doesn&#x27;t mention the self-talk aka &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; that virtually everyone hears. And a key insight is that it&#x27;s not <i>our</i> consciousness. It&#x27;s basically just recordings that get played back on queue. A central aspect of meditation is becoming aware of that voice as something distinct from self.<p>So anyway, it&#x27;s best to think &quot;Thanks for sharing :)&quot; and then to do something intentional.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>It seems to be similar with mental pictures.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ&#x2F;generalizing-from-one-example" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ&#x2F;generalizi...</a><p>&quot;The debate [over mental imagery] was resolved by Francis Galton (...). Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn&#x27;t. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn&#x27;t had simply assumed everyone didn&#x27;t, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.&quot;<p>Personally, I&#x27;m someone with small-talk module running almost constantly, verbalizing most of my thinking and reading. On the other hand, I have very low capability of forming mental images.<p>I wonder how many other things in brain are like that, widely differing between people.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Sound of Madness</title><url>https://harpers.org/archive/2018/06/the-sound-of-madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>As someone who normally doesn&#x27;t have the self-talk module running, I was amazed to learn that most people have it running all the time. I only use the module when writing, otherwise my consciousness is normally non-verbal.<p>I suspect it is related, but when I read I don&#x27;t hear the words unless I deliberately choose to read the text in my head, otherwise my process is written word -&gt; concept.</text></item><item><author>mirimir</author><text>Good article.<p>But it doesn&#x27;t mention the self-talk aka &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; that virtually everyone hears. And a key insight is that it&#x27;s not <i>our</i> consciousness. It&#x27;s basically just recordings that get played back on queue. A central aspect of meditation is becoming aware of that voice as something distinct from self.<p>So anyway, it&#x27;s best to think &quot;Thanks for sharing :)&quot; and then to do something intentional.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lambdanaut</author><text>Even further-leaning on that spectrum, I have an acquaintance with complete Aphantasia.<p>He lives life with a complete inability to experience anything that is not happening at that moment. He cannot picture his mother&#x27;s face. He can&#x27;t recall his life. He can&#x27;t get a song stuck in his head. He can&#x27;t hear any words in his head at all.<p>And yet he&#x27;s an incredibly talented musician, writer, and teacher. When he sits at his piano, the music just happens. He can only compose while working at the instrument.</text></comment> |
2,925,270 | 2,924,854 | 1 | 2 | 2,924,455 | train | <story><title>Jobs has lighted our way</title><url>http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/08/25/jobs-has-lighted-our-way/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>loup-vaillant</author><text>Exactly. The iPad is optimized for <i>consumption</i>. For production, however, the iPad is worth next to naught.<p>I guess it fits well with the rest of our society. Sigh.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>As far as I am concerned the iPad is the ultimate general purpose media consumption device: web browsing, video, Kindle ebooks, games etc.</text></item><item><author>WA</author><text>So what do you do on your iPad then except for surfing the web? I'm really curious as I don't see the point of an iPad right now.</text></item><item><author>jinushaun</author><text>I too was skeptical, having seen Microsoft fail at selling a tablet so many times, but bought one anyway so that I could use it as a "development device". I was shocked to find that only weeks later I preferred using the iPad over my computers most of the time. If it wasn't for coding, Office or Photoshop--aka making things--I would be iPad full time.<p>Jobs really did what Gates couldn't with a tablet. Microsoft has been trying to sell tablets since Windows XP with absolutely no success. Jobs rightly showed that you can't cram a desktop OS into a tablet and call it a proper tablet. Their tablets never felt right because you always wished you had a mouse, keyboard and right click available to get anything done. With MS tablets, users felt like something was taken away. With the iPad, users felt like they had something added.</text></item><item><author>technoslut</author><text>It's amazing how many times I hear this same story about the iPad. When Jobs first introduced it I was skeptical. After seeing how adults and children alike have taken to this device, it yet again proves that Jobs can see what others do not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnaffle</author><text>GarageBand: <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/garageband.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/garageband.html</a><p>IMS-20: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJSyPW4BFgo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJSyPW4BFgo</a><p>nLog: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkjiSIPF-Ho" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkjiSIPF-Ho</a><p>Not to mention iWork and a host of other apps.<p>Yes, the iPad is really good for consumption, but it's quite good at production as well. And it will get better with time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jobs has lighted our way</title><url>http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/08/25/jobs-has-lighted-our-way/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>loup-vaillant</author><text>Exactly. The iPad is optimized for <i>consumption</i>. For production, however, the iPad is worth next to naught.<p>I guess it fits well with the rest of our society. Sigh.</text></item><item><author>arethuza</author><text>As far as I am concerned the iPad is the ultimate general purpose media consumption device: web browsing, video, Kindle ebooks, games etc.</text></item><item><author>WA</author><text>So what do you do on your iPad then except for surfing the web? I'm really curious as I don't see the point of an iPad right now.</text></item><item><author>jinushaun</author><text>I too was skeptical, having seen Microsoft fail at selling a tablet so many times, but bought one anyway so that I could use it as a "development device". I was shocked to find that only weeks later I preferred using the iPad over my computers most of the time. If it wasn't for coding, Office or Photoshop--aka making things--I would be iPad full time.<p>Jobs really did what Gates couldn't with a tablet. Microsoft has been trying to sell tablets since Windows XP with absolutely no success. Jobs rightly showed that you can't cram a desktop OS into a tablet and call it a proper tablet. Their tablets never felt right because you always wished you had a mouse, keyboard and right click available to get anything done. With MS tablets, users felt like something was taken away. With the iPad, users felt like they had something added.</text></item><item><author>technoslut</author><text>It's amazing how many times I hear this same story about the iPad. When Jobs first introduced it I was skeptical. After seeing how adults and children alike have taken to this device, it yet again proves that Jobs can see what others do not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>That's what <i>I</i> use it for - other people can be very creative with them, notable the artist David Hockney:<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11666162" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11666162</a></text></comment> |
17,133,912 | 17,133,575 | 1 | 2 | 17,133,227 | train | <story><title>How We Found Great Talents for Our Remote Company Without Spending a Fortune</title><url>http://blog.nightwatch.io/finding-remote-employees</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nottorp</author><text>Let&#x27;s see... i have a FB account for keeping in touch with some non technical friends who don&#x27;t know better. I am in no groups and post nothing. Filtered out?<p>Now about your form:<p>Why would I like to work at ... whatever your company was called? You offer remote (big plus) and perhaps you pay well enough. (opens the main web page) Other reasons, no - you seem to be spammers so the only reason I&#x27;d work there is money.<p>Coolest things you&#x27;ve ever done work wise? Legit ISH but you&#x27;re filtering out competent people that did their job well at a boring job. Does writing a (admittedly pretty simple) kernel driver without having access to the hardware and having it work with (i think) just one modification count?<p>Coolest things you&#x27;ve done privately? None of your bussiness.<p>What are your prospects, dreams or expectations, career wise? No one in their right mind will answer honestly here, they will insert some canned interview lie.<p>The remote question is legit, but it filters out everyone who has worked in an office and got sick of it. Only people who have worked remotely can answer something meaningful here. Expect another interview lie here.<p>Btw my answer is &quot;the most challenging thing is to pry out all the information you need out of people, and you need to be proactive about that&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>How We Found Great Talents for Our Remote Company Without Spending a Fortune</title><url>http://blog.nightwatch.io/finding-remote-employees</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ddorian43</author><text>Carefull of too much &quot;extensive application form&quot;, it may bite you. Takes time to fill those forms and then get an automated &quot;no thanks&quot;, can be discouraging.<p>Point is to reduce friction but not too much. (code this big function before applying).<p>I would add a salary-range too. As insanely cool the work may be, your kids&#x2F;landord don&#x27;t care that you&#x27;re saving&#x2F;changing the world.<p>Example: Coolest things can be in the resume, what would you like is usually the job-description&#x2F;role etc, can you work remote (I already have x years remote in my resume) in same&#x2F;different timezones .<p>Many forms double the things that already are listed in the resume (all questions taken from the form are listed in my resume).</text></comment> |
6,344,848 | 6,344,929 | 1 | 3 | 6,344,649 | train | <story><title>NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/tech-industry-tainted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>frio</author><text>Speaking as a foreigner, I now have very little trust for basically any major US tech corporation. The NSA claims it deals responsibly with data relating to US citizens: I&#x27;m not a US citizen.<p>I plan on spending the next few months moving most of my accounts back to self-hosted, or at least hosted nationally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwh</author><text>That&#x27;s the part that&#x27;s always amused me. They claim they only spy on foreigners, which is well, me. Reassuring stuff.</text></comment> | <story><title>NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/tech-industry-tainted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>frio</author><text>Speaking as a foreigner, I now have very little trust for basically any major US tech corporation. The NSA claims it deals responsibly with data relating to US citizens: I&#x27;m not a US citizen.<p>I plan on spending the next few months moving most of my accounts back to self-hosted, or at least hosted nationally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>UVB-76</author><text>Ditto. I can&#x27;t believe &quot;we only spy on communications involving foreigners&quot; is actually an acceptable argument in the United States.</text></comment> |
8,740,061 | 8,740,115 | 1 | 3 | 8,739,865 | train | <story><title>The bad side of systemd: two recent systemd failures</title><url>http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdCrashAndMore</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ultramancool</author><text>I&#x27;m no fan of systemd, but do we really need to be nitpicking its every failing? The alternatives are certainly not perfect either. If you don&#x27;t like it, don&#x27;t use it. Many distros are still committed to supporting other init systems along side systemd and many BSDs have a very good philosophy with things like this and may be worth a look too.<p>Can we just agree to move on? I&#x27;m sick of the endless banter. If you like systemd, use it, if you don&#x27;t like it, don&#x27;t. If you think it needs more time to mature, stay away from it for a while and experiment occasionally. That&#x27;s my plan at least.</text></comment> | <story><title>The bad side of systemd: two recent systemd failures</title><url>http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdCrashAndMore</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lstyls</author><text>How much of the blame should systemd be taking for these bugs? Unless the same segfault is happening on other distros, this seems like a problem in Fedora rather than systemd.<p>I suppose this does give some substance to the systemd criticisms that it is too system-critical for a process that is technically outside of the Linux kernel.</text></comment> |
2,984,162 | 2,983,964 | 1 | 3 | 2,983,884 | train | <story><title>Eliezer Yudkowsky: Is That Your True Rejection?</title><url>http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/07/eliezer-yudkowsky/is-that-your-true-rejection/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It's about how those properties come together into groups. I have found, again and again, that when people organize into large groups and form systems of getting along it never works. The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. I don't think there is any intervention, nature or nurture, that would change this. To feel otherwise, to me, would be to say that there is a perfect person. That seems more than a little scary. I find our defects, when working together, give us adaptability. Counter-intuitively, I believe that the properties most of us would desire in a population are probably reverse-correlated to growth and evolution. [insert long explanation about the value of variance across multiple dimensions here]<p>Representative democracies are kind of a hack to this law. You try to pick somebody to represent you and make decisions, you split up powers among various competing branches of government, etc. What is happening in the west, though, is the idea of a "restart" is mostly gone. It's just the same guys wearing different hats that take turns ruling.<p>But to me these are properties of how systems of people operate. The word "government" has little to do with it. The reason to fight as hard as possible for individual freedom has nothing to do with selfishness: the more freedom the individual retains, the less the stakes are, and the slower the process of system corruption becomes. My ultimate rejection would be a demonstration of a stable, creative, dynamic, adaptive, and productively chaotic society of non-trivial size that had been in existence for more than a century or so. Hate to set the bar that high. Need to think about that some more to see if I could make my position more logically approachable.</text></comment> | <story><title>Eliezer Yudkowsky: Is That Your True Rejection?</title><url>http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/07/eliezer-yudkowsky/is-that-your-true-rejection/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mkopinsky</author><text>The article he's responding to is at <a href="http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liberty-and-science/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liber...</a></text></comment> |
23,377,090 | 23,376,931 | 1 | 3 | 23,375,791 | train | <story><title>Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy</title><url>https://linuxreviews.org/Qt_Could_Go_Proprietary,_KDE_Relationship_And_Qt-Based_Free_Software_In_Jeopardy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>Stallman&#x27;s position is pretty extreme. One can reasonably object to proprietary code in all sorts of domains, such as medical devices say, but it seems a bit much to say that <i>all</i> proprietary code is necessarily unethical.<p>The GameBoy used proprietary software. Was that unethical?</text></item><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&gt; I was very surprised by that sentence, because &quot;immoral commercial software&quot;<p>Being commercial is independent to being proprietary; there is a lot of non-commercial proprietary software and there is also some commercial free software. Regarding the immorality, it is definitely common to justify the necessity of free software on the grounds that proprietary software is immoral towards the users: they cannot know, verify, or control what the program does to them. In the writings of Richard Stallman you certainly find the notion that free software is a necessity precisely because proprietary software is unethical.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text><i>&gt; I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral.</i><p>I was very surprised by that sentence, because &quot;immoral commercial software&quot; is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the <i>lack</i> of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don&#x27;t build it up into a strawman.<p>I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&gt; while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license.<p>I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.<p>Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data.<p>Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enriquto</author><text>&gt; Stallman&#x27;s position is pretty extreme.<p>Stallman&#x27;s position is not extreme. It is consistent and firm, but he tries to reach a reasonable compromise. In political parlance you could say that he&#x27;s a reformist, not a radical. Notice that he argues that it is OK to use proprietary softare, for example for developing free software if it is the only option, or for communicating with other people that cannot use free software at the moment (e.g., zoom meetings). If that is the case, he urges you to at least tell your colleagues from time to time that there are other options and that you would prefer to use free software:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;saying-no-even-once.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;saying-no-even-once.html</a><p>The linked text is very clear and cannot be construed at all as &quot;extreme&quot;. At the same time, he holds that while we can reach temporary compromises, proprietary software is always unethical and that we should strive towards freer options.</text></comment> | <story><title>Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy</title><url>https://linuxreviews.org/Qt_Could_Go_Proprietary,_KDE_Relationship_And_Qt-Based_Free_Software_In_Jeopardy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>Stallman&#x27;s position is pretty extreme. One can reasonably object to proprietary code in all sorts of domains, such as medical devices say, but it seems a bit much to say that <i>all</i> proprietary code is necessarily unethical.<p>The GameBoy used proprietary software. Was that unethical?</text></item><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&gt; I was very surprised by that sentence, because &quot;immoral commercial software&quot;<p>Being commercial is independent to being proprietary; there is a lot of non-commercial proprietary software and there is also some commercial free software. Regarding the immorality, it is definitely common to justify the necessity of free software on the grounds that proprietary software is immoral towards the users: they cannot know, verify, or control what the program does to them. In the writings of Richard Stallman you certainly find the notion that free software is a necessity precisely because proprietary software is unethical.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text><i>&gt; I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral.</i><p>I was very surprised by that sentence, because &quot;immoral commercial software&quot; is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the <i>lack</i> of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don&#x27;t build it up into a strawman.<p>I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&gt; while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license.<p>I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.<p>Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data.<p>Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fsflover</author><text>Yes, it was. The developers of any proprietary software have unjust power over its users, i.e. they could implement any anti-features they wanted and the users cannot not do anything about it. In this sense, the users do not own the device if it runs proprietary software.</text></comment> |
2,097,895 | 2,097,825 | 1 | 3 | 2,097,618 | train | <story><title>Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery</title><url>http://io9.com/5731129/drunken-scientists-pour-alcohol-on-superconductors-and-make-an-incredible-discovery</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexophile</author><text>The superconductor proceeded to text its ex-girlfriend all night.<p>Couldn't help it. But I did try and find a more sober analysis of what was going on as it seemed that the only accurate words in the title were "scientists" and "superconductor." All I found was a press release from NIMS saying they would announce at ASC2010.<p>"The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS; President: Sukekatsu Ushioda) has discovered that alcoholic beverages, including red wine, beer, and others, are effective in inducing superconductivity in Fe(Te,S), which is an iron-based superconductivity related substance. This result was obtained in research by a team headed by Dr. Yoshihiko Takano, Group Leader of the Nano Frontier Materials Group of the NIMS Superconducting Materials Center (Managing Director: Hiroaki Kumakura)."<p><a href="http://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2010/07/p201007270.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2010/07/p201007270.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make an incredible discovery</title><url>http://io9.com/5731129/drunken-scientists-pour-alcohol-on-superconductors-and-make-an-incredible-discovery</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>burgerbrain</author><text>Ok, I've got to ask: is there anything red wine <i>won't</i> do? Maybe scientists should start investigating it for use as an alternative to fossil-fuels as well? ;)</text></comment> |
14,006,819 | 14,006,733 | 1 | 3 | 14,006,199 | train | <story><title>Tech Workers' Values</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/tech-workers-values</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>civilian</author><text>My main objection to unions is that, once they&#x27;re in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.<p>This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.<p>I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I&#x27;ve gotten over my college-era &quot;can&#x27;t pay for anything&quot; attitude, and I&#x27;m willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I&#x27;m also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don&#x27;t need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.</text></item><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text><i>We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they&#x27;d like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn&#x27;t the perfect metaphor for this, but it&#x27;s not far off.</i><p>If it&#x27;s going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.<p>I&#x27;ve argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is &quot;we&#x27;re too special for a union.&quot; Which is bogus on it&#x27;s face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn&#x27;t exist.<p>If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I&#x27;m wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.<p>edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it&#x27;s most high profile members.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>&gt;My main objection to unions is that, once they&#x27;re in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.<p>Bargaining <i>collectively</i> is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tech Workers' Values</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/tech-workers-values</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>civilian</author><text>My main objection to unions is that, once they&#x27;re in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.<p>This is not just a tech-unions-related complaint, this is a critique of unions as a whole. But yeah.<p>I think that tech workers are in a special place because we have a lot of disposable income. I&#x27;ve gotten over my college-era &quot;can&#x27;t pay for anything&quot; attitude, and I&#x27;m willing to pay for content that could be gotten for free. Entertainment was the first one, but now I&#x27;m also supporting some people on patreon and donating to causes. We don&#x27;t need a union to drive that-- we can just remind tech workers that if we all donate a little, we can make big changes.</text></item><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text><i>We believe that employees should come together and clearly define the values and policies they&#x27;d like to see their companies uphold. A tech union isn&#x27;t the perfect metaphor for this, but it&#x27;s not far off.</i><p>If it&#x27;s going to do anything but be window dressing then it needs to have the teeth of union - so just call it what it is.<p>I&#x27;ve argued for a while that tech workers need a union, but the chorus on HN and other places is &quot;we&#x27;re too special for a union.&quot; Which is bogus on it&#x27;s face - otherwise SAG for example wouldn&#x27;t exist.<p>If this moves the needle on a union then great, but I&#x27;m wary of the source being a pure power move (which all unions are - rightfully). I think whomever leads this needs to be above reproach in every sense as an advocate for the tiny introverted developer.<p>edit: I should note that the reason SAG worked is because some of the highest profile actors joined in the early days and arranged to collectively bargain for the rest of the group. It will probably work best if you get the top 50 most high profile developers (Eg. Carmack) to join and then advocate for the small guy. Sadly, in reality, a union is only as good as it&#x27;s most high profile members.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alphonsegaston</author><text>You can create a union to reflect whatever values (e.g. negotiating compensation) you see fit. Don&#x27;t believe the narratives proffered by anti-union forces for their own benefit. Actors are all in unions and employ an entire sub-class of workers (agents) to negotiate compensation for them.</text></comment> |
37,314,331 | 37,314,521 | 1 | 2 | 37,308,747 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Why did Python win?</title><text>I started programming in ~2013 in JavaScript. I’ve since learned and tried a handful of languages, including Python, but JavaScript was always my favorite. Just within the last year I learned Ruby, and I was blown away by how fun and easy to use it is. At the present time, I’m starting all my new projects in Ruby.<p>My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new, dynamically typed, “English-like” languages. And for a while these languages had similar popularity.<p>Now Ruby is still very much alive; there are plenty of Rails jobs available and exciting things happening with Ruby itself. But Python has become a titan in the last ten years. It has continued to grow exponentially and Ruby has not.<p>I can guess as to why (Python’s math libraries, numpy and pandas make it appealing to academics; Python is simpler and possibly easier to learn; Rails was so popular that it was synonymous with Ruby) but I wasn’t paying attention at that time. So I’m interested in hearing from some of the older programmers about why Ruby has stalled out and Python has become possibly the most popular programming language (when, in my opinion, Ruby is the better language).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CTmystery</author><text>I&#x27;ll bite on &quot;just a fad in webdev circles&quot;, in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I&#x27;m sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.</text></item><item><author>moonchrome</author><text>Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I&#x27;ve rarely seen ruby before RoR and I&#x27;ve seen python all over.<p>Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia.<p>I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator).<p>Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.<p>Python was used for creating build systems.<p>Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting.<p>Python was big before numpy&#x2F;ML.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstrauser</author><text>I see what you mean, but I counter with Plone. It&#x27;s been around for 24 years, and the annual Plone Conference is coming up in a couple months. Still, you don&#x27;t see a whole lot of new Plone sites rolling out these days, and there&#x27;s no Automattic-scale company with click-here-to-deploy convenience.<p>Nothing against Plone (although I was very happy to put its foundation layer, Zope, in my rear view mirror). It&#x27;s a fine program that&#x27;s very good at what it does. But just because something&#x27;s been around a while doesn&#x27;t mean that it&#x27;s still vibrant and growing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Why did Python win?</title><text>I started programming in ~2013 in JavaScript. I’ve since learned and tried a handful of languages, including Python, but JavaScript was always my favorite. Just within the last year I learned Ruby, and I was blown away by how fun and easy to use it is. At the present time, I’m starting all my new projects in Ruby.<p>My impression is that in the ‘00s, Python and Ruby were both relatively new, dynamically typed, “English-like” languages. And for a while these languages had similar popularity.<p>Now Ruby is still very much alive; there are plenty of Rails jobs available and exciting things happening with Ruby itself. But Python has become a titan in the last ten years. It has continued to grow exponentially and Ruby has not.<p>I can guess as to why (Python’s math libraries, numpy and pandas make it appealing to academics; Python is simpler and possibly easier to learn; Rails was so popular that it was synonymous with Ruby) but I wasn’t paying attention at that time. So I’m interested in hearing from some of the older programmers about why Ruby has stalled out and Python has become possibly the most popular programming language (when, in my opinion, Ruby is the better language).</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CTmystery</author><text>I&#x27;ll bite on &quot;just a fad in webdev circles&quot;, in case you are serious and not trolling. Railsworld is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Rails this year. As I&#x27;m sure you know, Rails is built on Ruby. 20 years does not fit my definition of fad.</text></item><item><author>moonchrome</author><text>Ruby was never similar in popularity to Python. It was just a fad in webdev circles. I&#x27;ve rarely seen ruby before RoR and I&#x27;ve seen python all over.<p>Python was popular as a teaching language, how it gained a foothold in academia.<p>I remember 20 years ago when I was starting out it was popular for game scripting (Lua was more embeddable but python was also used). plenty of first class interfacing methods to native code (still remember c++ boost shipping python binding generator).<p>Many tools shipped python as an embedded scripting language.<p>Python was used for creating build systems.<p>Not to mention any distro out there ships python, it replaced perl in that regard. Batteries included and being available helped it become the norm for random scripting.<p>Python was big before numpy&#x2F;ML.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JAlexoid</author><text>Just because there are people who still use it, doesn&#x27;t make the statement that RoR was a fad less true. RoR was &quot;the thing that everyone was using&quot; at one point. It was that for several years. Anyone who&#x27;s anyone was building stuff with Rails.<p>Now it&#x27;s probably the third option, when building websites... and a fourth option, when building APIs.</text></comment> |
30,149,670 | 30,149,875 | 1 | 2 | 30,147,379 | train | <story><title>My dishwasher won’t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi</title><url>https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/1487947074901463040</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jancsika</author><text>&gt; To be fair, it could also get functionality updates<p>This is an important point that owners[1] sometimes miss.<p>For example, if the owner makes a deal to partner with the maker of a particular detergent tab, the owner could create a new feature that only works with those tabs and not regular powder detergent.<p>1: Owner: the person who owns the firmware being sent over WiFi.</text></item><item><author>pmontra</author><text>To be fair, it could also get functionality updates. For example they could upload a new totally different UX loved by the designers and that nobody else understands how to use ;-)</text></item><item><author>michaelt</author><text><i>&gt; The Wi-Fi is useful [...] Performs updates, etc.</i><p>Ah yes, get wifi so your dishwasher can get security updates, which you need because your dishwasher is on wifi.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>Looks like a Miele. That menu can be exited (the image where it says &quot;Software Update&quot;, the tiny bit on the right... that&#x27;s a scroll bar of multiple options including the ability to exit this menu), but it does imply that the dishwasher is already connected to Wi-Fi and that it has determined that there is an update available.<p>There are few times that a dishwasher is interacted with, if not when you go into the menu to start it then when? It&#x27;s just asking &quot;Do you want to do this now?&quot; if not that is fine (the menu can be exited), but now you know to do it later.<p>Alternatively as the dishwasher clearly is on Wi-Fi already (the only way it would know there&#x27;s an update), one can use the Miele@Home app to perform the update at a more convenient time.<p>I have a Miele dishwasher, it is connected to Wi-Fi (on a VLAN with other white goods, outbound connections to certain domains only). The Wi-Fi is useful... the dishwasher auto-doses the powder, rinse aid, salt, etc... and can let me know the levels of those. In addition it tells me when the cycle is done. Performs updates, etc. There&#x27;s a Home Assistant integration too, but I&#x27;ve not done that (my VLAN setup prevented it!).<p>PS: If you&#x27;re of the opinion that a dishwasher doesn&#x27;t need to be on Wi-Fi and you wouldn&#x27;t connect it... then great, that&#x27;s another way not to be asked to do an update. This dishwasher isn&#x27;t going to ask to connect to Wi-Fi, it&#x27;s something you choose to do (something that takes a degree of determination I might add).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ff317</author><text>Yeah but usually what happens is that no new development of that sort occurs during the (intentionally limited by cheaped-out hardware design) lifetime of the appliance. If they do push any updates, they&#x27;ll either be to fix security problems (only if you&#x27;re lucky enough that they get fixed at all), or they&#x27;ll push some horrible software feature users didn&#x27;t ask for which worsens their experience vs how it operated when purchased and brings new bugs. Appliance manufacturers are terrible at firmware&#x2F;software. You get all the downsides and none of the upsides.</text></comment> | <story><title>My dishwasher won’t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi</title><url>https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/1487947074901463040</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jancsika</author><text>&gt; To be fair, it could also get functionality updates<p>This is an important point that owners[1] sometimes miss.<p>For example, if the owner makes a deal to partner with the maker of a particular detergent tab, the owner could create a new feature that only works with those tabs and not regular powder detergent.<p>1: Owner: the person who owns the firmware being sent over WiFi.</text></item><item><author>pmontra</author><text>To be fair, it could also get functionality updates. For example they could upload a new totally different UX loved by the designers and that nobody else understands how to use ;-)</text></item><item><author>michaelt</author><text><i>&gt; The Wi-Fi is useful [...] Performs updates, etc.</i><p>Ah yes, get wifi so your dishwasher can get security updates, which you need because your dishwasher is on wifi.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>Looks like a Miele. That menu can be exited (the image where it says &quot;Software Update&quot;, the tiny bit on the right... that&#x27;s a scroll bar of multiple options including the ability to exit this menu), but it does imply that the dishwasher is already connected to Wi-Fi and that it has determined that there is an update available.<p>There are few times that a dishwasher is interacted with, if not when you go into the menu to start it then when? It&#x27;s just asking &quot;Do you want to do this now?&quot; if not that is fine (the menu can be exited), but now you know to do it later.<p>Alternatively as the dishwasher clearly is on Wi-Fi already (the only way it would know there&#x27;s an update), one can use the Miele@Home app to perform the update at a more convenient time.<p>I have a Miele dishwasher, it is connected to Wi-Fi (on a VLAN with other white goods, outbound connections to certain domains only). The Wi-Fi is useful... the dishwasher auto-doses the powder, rinse aid, salt, etc... and can let me know the levels of those. In addition it tells me when the cycle is done. Performs updates, etc. There&#x27;s a Home Assistant integration too, but I&#x27;ve not done that (my VLAN setup prevented it!).<p>PS: If you&#x27;re of the opinion that a dishwasher doesn&#x27;t need to be on Wi-Fi and you wouldn&#x27;t connect it... then great, that&#x27;s another way not to be asked to do an update. This dishwasher isn&#x27;t going to ask to connect to Wi-Fi, it&#x27;s something you choose to do (something that takes a degree of determination I might add).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bee_rider</author><text>And just general bug updates. Remember how buggy appliances used to be, back in the bad old days when they were too simple to run whole operating systems? A couple months after release these things will be mostly free of glitches!</text></comment> |
4,819,854 | 4,819,559 | 1 | 2 | 4,819,145 | train | <story><title>Elon Musk - The Future of Energy and Transport [video]</title><url>http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonebrunozzi</author><text>Before thinking about enhancing tranportation, we should ask ourselves IF we need to travel more.
In the last five years I took 500 flights (all on economy class except for two), and I also took about 100 train rides.
For "short" trips (&#60;600-700 km or 400-500 miles) train might be slightly slower, but there's essentially no dead time and it's cheaper (no rush to the airport, no stupid security checks at the airport, no weather affecting the trip, no big delays, no taxi trip from arriving airport to city center). As a consequence, we should "aggregate" airports and use them only for long range travel, and revert to rail or road for shorter trips. By doing this, we would maximize the frequency and availability of flights from these mega-airports.
Then, by simply providing more leg space, power, and possibly internet connection, we could make flights "suck less".
This is doable now. Any other technology would take decades to develop.
And again, most people don't need to travel NY to Hong Kong in 3 hours. Most people need to travel cheaply, and possibly in a green way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Elon Musk - The Future of Energy and Transport [video]</title><url>http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jd</author><text>Mirror: <a href="http://78.47.91.45/201211_musk.mp4" rel="nofollow">http://78.47.91.45/201211_musk.mp4</a></text></comment> |
23,181,247 | 23,181,627 | 1 | 2 | 23,179,629 | train | <story><title>OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic</title><url>https://www.elle.com/culture/a32459935/onlyfans-sex-work-influencers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>econcon</author><text>As I read some women in the article are making as much as a talented ivy league graduate who joins a tech company.<p>It seems amoral to prevent them from making money, why don&#x27;t we see it as a talent as we see &quot;tech jobs&quot; as talent?<p>Can it really do more damage than what tech companies specially one who pedal ads and sell customer data and give people anxiety?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GaryNumanVevo</author><text>Sex work is work all the same. From a normative standpoint, we ought to support sex workers directly, rather than the studios and production companies that are often exploitative.<p>OnlyFans seems to get rid of the middlemen in the porn &#x2F; cam girl industry, I think that&#x27;s a massive benefit for sex workers today.</text></comment> | <story><title>OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic</title><url>https://www.elle.com/culture/a32459935/onlyfans-sex-work-influencers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>econcon</author><text>As I read some women in the article are making as much as a talented ivy league graduate who joins a tech company.<p>It seems amoral to prevent them from making money, why don&#x27;t we see it as a talent as we see &quot;tech jobs&quot; as talent?<p>Can it really do more damage than what tech companies specially one who pedal ads and sell customer data and give people anxiety?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lovegoblin</author><text>&gt; why don&#x27;t we see it as a talent as we see &quot;tech jobs&quot; as talent?<p>Good damned question. Sex work is work.</text></comment> |
35,830,185 | 35,830,616 | 1 | 2 | 35,826,946 | train | <story><title>Element is one of fourteen messaging apps blocked by Central Indian Government</title><url>https://element.io/blog/india-bans-flagship-client-for-the-matrix-network/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NayamAmarshe</author><text>&gt; Signal is e2ee.<p>That still does not change anything though. The backend is unverifiable, that&#x27;s a fact. Why talk about E2EE, I wasn&#x27;t really talking about that.<p>Signal for a whole year was running a different server code and nobody even could tell that they added some cryptocoin stuff. On top of that, metadata, server connection and anything other than the message content is all at the mercy of the server owner.</text></item><item><author>jraph</author><text>Signal is e2ee. The point of e2ee is that you can <i>not</i> trust the backend code (except for clear data it actually manipulates - which is still an issue indeed - Message contents are encrypted though)<p>This is the case for any e2ee solutions. For instance my company develops CryptPad [1], which is a full open source office suite with e2ee. The server admins can&#x27;t access your content and you don&#x27;t need to trust the backend, which just passes messages and store encrypted messages. This is the whole point. e2ee has drawbacks: it&#x27;s very difficult, if not impossible, to provide indexed search for encrypted content on the server, the client needs to do it which might be impractical.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptpad.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptpad.org&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>NayamAmarshe</author><text>Nobody can verify backend code though, that&#x27;s always an issue.</text></item><item><author>jraph</author><text>&gt; This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.<p>Not really. At least, I&#x27;m not convinced. Signal for instance does not have public channels like Matrix has, maybe that&#x27;s the big difference. Signal&#x27;s code can also be audited if in doubt (well, actually, Signal could always provide altered binaries on the App Store and Google Play Store, you&#x27;d have to build it yourself to be sure - though they do have reproducible builds for Android [1]).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>prmoustache</author><text>&gt;Some of the mobile applications that have been blocked include Crypviser, Enigma, Safeswiss, Wickrme, Mediafire, Briar, BChat, Nandbox, Conion, IMO, Element, Second line, Zangi, Threema, and others.<p>&gt; While investigating one of these channels, it was discovered that the app did not have a representative in India, making it challenging to monitor activities on the platform.<p>This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e12e</author><text>&gt; That still does not change anything though.<p>Of course it does. Just like PGP works fine over untrusted channels - like if I posted a gnupg ascii-armored message here.<p>e2ee makes <i>all</i> the difference - if two trusted and mutually authenticated clients are communicating with proper e2ee - the best an attacker can do is traffic analysis and denial of service...?</text></comment> | <story><title>Element is one of fourteen messaging apps blocked by Central Indian Government</title><url>https://element.io/blog/india-bans-flagship-client-for-the-matrix-network/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NayamAmarshe</author><text>&gt; Signal is e2ee.<p>That still does not change anything though. The backend is unverifiable, that&#x27;s a fact. Why talk about E2EE, I wasn&#x27;t really talking about that.<p>Signal for a whole year was running a different server code and nobody even could tell that they added some cryptocoin stuff. On top of that, metadata, server connection and anything other than the message content is all at the mercy of the server owner.</text></item><item><author>jraph</author><text>Signal is e2ee. The point of e2ee is that you can <i>not</i> trust the backend code (except for clear data it actually manipulates - which is still an issue indeed - Message contents are encrypted though)<p>This is the case for any e2ee solutions. For instance my company develops CryptPad [1], which is a full open source office suite with e2ee. The server admins can&#x27;t access your content and you don&#x27;t need to trust the backend, which just passes messages and store encrypted messages. This is the whole point. e2ee has drawbacks: it&#x27;s very difficult, if not impossible, to provide indexed search for encrypted content on the server, the client needs to do it which might be impractical.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptpad.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cryptpad.org&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>NayamAmarshe</author><text>Nobody can verify backend code though, that&#x27;s always an issue.</text></item><item><author>jraph</author><text>&gt; This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.<p>Not really. At least, I&#x27;m not convinced. Signal for instance does not have public channels like Matrix has, maybe that&#x27;s the big difference. Signal&#x27;s code can also be audited if in doubt (well, actually, Signal could always provide altered binaries on the App Store and Google Play Store, you&#x27;d have to build it yourself to be sure - though they do have reproducible builds for Android [1]).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>prmoustache</author><text>&gt;Some of the mobile applications that have been blocked include Crypviser, Enigma, Safeswiss, Wickrme, Mediafire, Briar, BChat, Nandbox, Conion, IMO, Element, Second line, Zangi, Threema, and others.<p>&gt; While investigating one of these channels, it was discovered that the app did not have a representative in India, making it challenging to monitor activities on the platform.<p>This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akvadrako</author><text>First, it doesn&#x27;t matter a lot if the backend is verifiable with E2E, that&#x27;s the point.<p>Second, some sensitive parts of Signal backend are verifiable, assuming Intel is not compromised, because they use Intel SGX.</text></comment> |
9,457,309 | 9,457,138 | 1 | 2 | 9,456,931 | train | <story><title>Reproducible Builds in Go</title><url>http://go-talks.appspot.com/github.com/davecheney/presentations/reproducible-builds.slide</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davecheney</author><text>Hi HN,<p>There was a video recorded at this meetup, but I&#x27;m not in control of that.<p>In the mean time, the getting started document [1] is the contents of the &quot;demo time&quot; slide.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;constabulary&#x2F;gb&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;getting-started.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;constabulary&#x2F;gb&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;getting-start...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Reproducible Builds in Go</title><url>http://go-talks.appspot.com/github.com/davecheney/presentations/reproducible-builds.slide</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ghodss</author><text>One major limitation of this approach is that any project that wishes to vendor or lock their dependencies can no longer be used as a dependency for another project. From the gb GitHub:<p>&gt; A project is the consumer of your own source code, and possibly dependencies that your code consumes; nothing consumes the code from a project.<p>This seems to imply that any code <i>outside</i> of a project (i.e. the code inside vendor&#x2F;src) has no recourse for indicating the versions of their dependencies. This is nice in that it simplifies the problem, but to completely remove the ability for any and all libraries to indicate the versions of their dependencies seems unnecessarily restrictive. If I build a library for others to use, and I have a dependency, I want to be be able to lock to a specific version, or at least give my preference for a version.<p>Of course, this creates its own issues - what do you do when two libraries depend on two different versions of the same library? (Also known as the diamond dependency problem.) This is where the Go culture helps, where as long as you pick a later version, things are likely to work. But I&#x27;d rather have the tooling let me detect the two versions that the two libraries want, show that there is a mismatch, and give me the ability to override and pick one (probably the later one). Instead, the gb approach eliminates the ability for the libraries to even have the ability to indicate what version they would prefer, which makes it even more difficult to get a bunch of libraries that share dependencies to work correctly together.<p>godep (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;godep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;godep</a>) seems to have the best compromise: vendor dependencies without path rewriting (though with GOPATH rewriting), but also keep track of their versions in a Godep.json file. You can gracefully pick between conflicting versions upstream if need be.</text></comment> |
35,350,561 | 35,350,634 | 1 | 2 | 35,349,608 | train | <story><title>Gpt4all: A chatbot trained on ~800k GPT-3.5-Turbo Generations based on LLaMa</title><url>https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alchemist1e9</author><text>I’ll ask a dumb question. On another of the numerous LLM related posts I was asking if any of the self host-able open model can do code summaries at close to the quality of GPT 3.5 turbo. I was basically told nowhere close yet.<p>Can this potentially do that?<p>Ideally I’d like to have it generate descriptions of large amounts of code but would rather not burn tokens and lose privacy via OpenAI api. But I’d gladly keep a high end GPU burning on such task , even if that was actually slightly more expensive.<p>Edit: To clarify I do this partially now on batches of code via openAI api currently. It’s around 1-3 cents for a typical 400-800 line source code file. And I don’t mean feeding the full code base in as a single input.</text></item><item><author>2bitencryption</author><text>Having spent quite a bit of time playing around with llama.cpp, alpaca.cpp, loras, and the many other llama-based weights lately, here is my impression:<p>The biggest deal with this isn&#x27;t the published lora adapter (which seems limited to llama 7b), but the cleaned training data, which is likely better than the previous data sets used to train the alpaca-inspired loras that have been publicly released so far. [0]<p>If you&#x27;re really limited to running &quot;just&quot; llama 7b, this is great for you. But the biggest value will be when people inevitably release lora adapters for the 13b, 30b, and 65b, based on this training data (assuming it really is better than the previously released adapters).<p>[0] admittedly, this is based off anecdotes and github issues, and not real measurements. but smarter people than I have claimed the currently most popular loras were trained on messy data, and have started an effort to clean that data and retrain. So if the training data in this repo is high quality like the authors claim, it will benefit models of all sizes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2bitencryption</author><text>Here&#x27;s my experience, having used llama+lora 7b, 13b, and 30b, on both cpu and gpu:<p>On gpu, processing the input prompt, even for huge prompts, is almost instant. Meaning, even if your prompt is huge, it will start generating new tokens <i>after</i> your prompt very quickly. On a rented A6000 gpu, using llama+lora 30b, you can use huge prompts and it will start giving a new output right away.<p>On cpu (i.e. the project llama.cpu), it takes a very, very long time to process the input prompt, before it begins to generate new tokens. Meaning, if you provide a huge copy&#x2F;paste of code, it will take a long time to ingest all that input, before it begins outputting new tokens.<p>Once it finally starts outputting new tokens, the rate is surprisingly fast, not much slower than gpu.<p>I wish I knew the reason for this, but I&#x27;m not an expert :) I&#x27;ve just seen this in practice.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gpt4all: A chatbot trained on ~800k GPT-3.5-Turbo Generations based on LLaMa</title><url>https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alchemist1e9</author><text>I’ll ask a dumb question. On another of the numerous LLM related posts I was asking if any of the self host-able open model can do code summaries at close to the quality of GPT 3.5 turbo. I was basically told nowhere close yet.<p>Can this potentially do that?<p>Ideally I’d like to have it generate descriptions of large amounts of code but would rather not burn tokens and lose privacy via OpenAI api. But I’d gladly keep a high end GPU burning on such task , even if that was actually slightly more expensive.<p>Edit: To clarify I do this partially now on batches of code via openAI api currently. It’s around 1-3 cents for a typical 400-800 line source code file. And I don’t mean feeding the full code base in as a single input.</text></item><item><author>2bitencryption</author><text>Having spent quite a bit of time playing around with llama.cpp, alpaca.cpp, loras, and the many other llama-based weights lately, here is my impression:<p>The biggest deal with this isn&#x27;t the published lora adapter (which seems limited to llama 7b), but the cleaned training data, which is likely better than the previous data sets used to train the alpaca-inspired loras that have been publicly released so far. [0]<p>If you&#x27;re really limited to running &quot;just&quot; llama 7b, this is great for you. But the biggest value will be when people inevitably release lora adapters for the 13b, 30b, and 65b, based on this training data (assuming it really is better than the previously released adapters).<p>[0] admittedly, this is based off anecdotes and github issues, and not real measurements. but smarter people than I have claimed the currently most popular loras were trained on messy data, and have started an effort to clean that data and retrain. So if the training data in this repo is high quality like the authors claim, it will benefit models of all sizes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aunty_helen</author><text>We&#x27;re a long long long way off that. So check back in two months.<p>Jokes aside, the limiting factor will be either a technique to pack all of the code into smaller tokens like semantic search (someone else will be able to comment on this as that&#x27;s the limit of my understanding) or GPU memory for input tokens.<p>Buying a &quot;high end GPU&quot; isn&#x27;t buying a 4090 or even two, it&#x27;s 250k on a DGX unit and putting it in a datacentre.
You will probably be able to find a service that would sign a confidentiality agreement and provide you with this service for less than 250k.</text></comment> |
40,705,654 | 40,704,423 | 1 | 3 | 40,704,191 | train | <story><title>Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drannex</author><text>This is quite possibly the best possible news I have heard yet from proton, and makes me feel much more likely to recommend them. This is wonderful news.</text></comment> | <story><title>Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonaharagon</author><text>I&#x27;ve always worried that Proton might succumb to the enshittification that seems to eventually plague all tech companies. This news makes me a lot more optimistic that won&#x27;t be the case.</text></comment> |
8,689,422 | 8,687,288 | 1 | 2 | 8,687,168 | train | <story><title>Show HN: HackerSurf – All the hacker jobs in one place</title><url>http://hacker.surf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yellowapple</author><text>Y&#x27;all should throw in jobs.perl.org so that us Perl hackers aren&#x27;t left out to dry ;)</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: HackerSurf – All the hacker jobs in one place</title><url>http://hacker.surf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iM8t</author><text>This will be quite useful for me, thanks!<p>If I apply to work at a company remotely - how do I know that I&#x27;m not getting screwed over (not paid)? I&#x27;m 19 and some of my friends have gotten screwed over by a few foreign employers whilst working remotely. Do You have any tips to find a good place?</text></comment> |
10,852,966 | 10,853,233 | 1 | 2 | 10,849,458 | train | <story><title>The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier</title><url>http://edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>&gt;What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong?<p>Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass.<p>I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.<p>There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats.<p>The former think they&#x27;re saving the world, while the latter are just making money off of the former. It&#x27;s the same business model as religion and global warming.</text></item><item><author>tim333</author><text>3) Because it&#x27;s a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don&#x27;t understand computers for answers?</text></item><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>The real question for me is:<p>What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and&#x2F;or enslave us?<p>Possible answers:<p>1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation.<p>2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force.<p>3) ?</text></item><item><author>tsunamifury</author><text>I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It&#x27;s simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevitably lead to disappointment [1].<p>Jaron has observed this several times and rightly seems to be tired of repeating the same naive cycle.<p>As I&#x27;m just now entering my second cycle and watching tech repeat itself again -- I&#x27;m beginning to understand his weariness.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-overvaluation-trap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-overvaluation-trap</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>There are predictions and there are predictions. There will always be those predicting that strong AI is a decade away, right until the point when the last group is actually right about it.<p>But there&#x27;s a different kind of &quot;prediction&quot;, which I think is the type those smart people subscribe to - that we are on the path to an AI, that there&#x27;s nothing that would make it impossible to achieve as the technology progresses (a reminder: we have a working example that intelligence can be built - our brains). Of course there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Personally, the most probable is that our civilization ends before we reach the necessary level - because of war, or all the economic and political shenanigans we see every day.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier</title><url>http://edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>&gt;What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong?<p>Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass.<p>I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.<p>There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats.<p>The former think they&#x27;re saving the world, while the latter are just making money off of the former. It&#x27;s the same business model as religion and global warming.</text></item><item><author>tim333</author><text>3) Because it&#x27;s a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don&#x27;t understand computers for answers?</text></item><item><author>IanDrake</author><text>The real question for me is:<p>What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and&#x2F;or enslave us?<p>Possible answers:<p>1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation.<p>2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force.<p>3) ?</text></item><item><author>tsunamifury</author><text>I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It&#x27;s simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevitably lead to disappointment [1].<p>Jaron has observed this several times and rightly seems to be tired of repeating the same naive cycle.<p>As I&#x27;m just now entering my second cycle and watching tech repeat itself again -- I&#x27;m beginning to understand his weariness.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-overvaluation-trap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-overvaluation-trap</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>So their predictions are wrong, but yours are correct? You can&#x27;t argue against someone else by saying all predictions are unreliable, and then insert your own predictions instead.<p>And nice, you managed to cram global warming denial in there too.</text></comment> |
12,050,108 | 12,049,993 | 1 | 2 | 12,049,386 | train | <story><title>NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-06/nasa-images-show-toxic-air-challenge-choking-indian-subcontinent</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wrong_variable</author><text>The Irony !<p>When I went to India, I though to my-self the living standard in the villages were HIGHER then the cities.<p>The air in the villages were clean - it was much cooler weather due to not being trapped in the congested cities.<p>The village people though I was crazy to think that their village was a paradise, and everyone wanted to move to the city.<p>I think its a serious lack of education that India&#x2F;Bangladesh will not learn easily. A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously, unfortunately.<p>We are talking about a country where chain smoking is really common !<p>And no I a person from the sub-continent so I am not being racist, just pointing out some of the terrible facts about why I am terrified of going back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavanred</author><text>I do not think it is crazy for people of villages to think moving to the city is a good idea. It might seem pristine and like paradise to a person from a city visiting a village but for a person living in a village its a different story. It&#x27;s not the environmental paradise they are trying to escape from, its mostly lack of opportunity. Most villages in India are agriculture based, and most of central and southern India does not have perennial rivers and solely depend on monsoons for irrigation. So, if monsoon fails (less or more than expected), so does their income for he year. Not to mention lack of education, transport, banking etc. I have been to villages where even now if you need education beyond middle school, you need to leave the village for a neighboring town. Not to mention the social pressures such as not having equal opportunities for women in villages where as in a city, it is common place and generally socially accepted for women to have jobs and careers.<p>I agree about smoking though, and specially the prevalence of the cheap cigarettes called &quot;beedis&quot;, these are simply tobacco rolled over in a tobacco leaf and do not even have filters. Being very cheap, it is consumed by the poorer people and when coupled with lack of education, I assume does contributes to lot of smoking related diseases.</text></comment> | <story><title>NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-06/nasa-images-show-toxic-air-challenge-choking-indian-subcontinent</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wrong_variable</author><text>The Irony !<p>When I went to India, I though to my-self the living standard in the villages were HIGHER then the cities.<p>The air in the villages were clean - it was much cooler weather due to not being trapped in the congested cities.<p>The village people though I was crazy to think that their village was a paradise, and everyone wanted to move to the city.<p>I think its a serious lack of education that India&#x2F;Bangladesh will not learn easily. A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously, unfortunately.<p>We are talking about a country where chain smoking is really common !<p>And no I a person from the sub-continent so I am not being racist, just pointing out some of the terrible facts about why I am terrified of going back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chdir</author><text>Vehicular pollution, construction dust, diesel generators are a common problem in almost all big cities in India.<p>However you are looking at the advantages of villages as a visitor with a point of view towards being closer to nature. There are other problems in villages that you probably won&#x27;t encounter unless you live there on a day to day basis. Finally, grass is always greener on the other side (holds true for both villages &amp; city dwellers).<p>&gt; A large number of people need to die due to cancer for it be taken seriously<p>Cancer isn&#x27;t uncommon in villages and city pollution isn&#x27;t the only cause.</text></comment> |
4,423,305 | 4,422,817 | 1 | 3 | 4,422,345 | train | <story><title>Microsoft gets a new logo for the first time since 1987</title><url>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2018972097_microsoftlogo23.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quarterto</author><text>I... don't hate it. What's wrong with me? It's bold, it's fresh, it does a pretty damn good job of shrugging off the Microsoft of the past 25 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>I love the whole direction of Microsoft's graphic design these days, and I've had Macs at home exclusively for at least 10 years.<p>I think Microsoft is doing a great job of trading on the emotional value of colors. Apple rebuilt their company by bringing color to computing (remember the iMac and iBook), but then went away from that in almost every way, sucking the color out of all their products except for a few iPods. It's very sleek and elegant, but let's face it, colors are fun too.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft gets a new logo for the first time since 1987</title><url>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2018972097_microsoftlogo23.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quarterto</author><text>I... don't hate it. What's wrong with me? It's bold, it's fresh, it does a pretty damn good job of shrugging off the Microsoft of the past 25 years.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>discreteevent</author><text>I don't like it. I like mimimalism but this clean minimal look that's virtually everywhere (as people try to outdo each other in simplicity) is just a fashion. You know already that there is going to be a backlash against this as there always has been in the past (how long did the Bauhaus last?) and then this will be outdated. Also the primary colours are a bit sixties'ish and shortly will look just as dated as anything from that time. Its just the wheel going around with some hailing each revolution as, well, a revolution!</text></comment> |
32,256,669 | 32,253,704 | 1 | 3 | 32,252,485 | train | <story><title>Notre Dame rises again</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2022/02/notre-dame-rises-again</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pen2l</author><text>I was fortunate enough to visit it the year before it caught on fire.<p>It&#x27;s just a cathedral, I thought, just an attraction to check off from my &#x27;list of things to see&#x27; so I visited it on a whim really on a lazy Sunday afternoon while I was around the area. Oh man, there is something about it, the grandness, the structure. The rebuild appears to going for a very faithful reconstruction of what it was before.<p>Definitely go see it if you get the chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>regentbowerbird</author><text>And if you are in Paris and can&#x27;t visit Notre-Dame because it is under renovation, maybe go see some other gothic cathedrals that are less than an hour away by train, such as Beauvais&#x27; or Chartres&#x27;.<p>For what my opinion is worth, I was awestruck by Beauvais&#x27; cathedral personally (even though, or especially because, I visited a fair number of period churches). Its nave is incredibly high, high enough that the aisles vaults by themselves are higher than some entire churches. It&#x27;s also only halfway done, which is somewhat disappointing from an architectural perspective but fascinating from an archeological perspective: half the Carolingian cathedral is still there, which is a rarity.</text></comment> | <story><title>Notre Dame rises again</title><url>https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2022/02/notre-dame-rises-again</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pen2l</author><text>I was fortunate enough to visit it the year before it caught on fire.<p>It&#x27;s just a cathedral, I thought, just an attraction to check off from my &#x27;list of things to see&#x27; so I visited it on a whim really on a lazy Sunday afternoon while I was around the area. Oh man, there is something about it, the grandness, the structure. The rebuild appears to going for a very faithful reconstruction of what it was before.<p>Definitely go see it if you get the chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mytailorisrich</author><text>The interior of the &quot;Sainte-Chapelle&quot;, which is nearby is even more breathtaking, IMHO. Both deserve a visit.</text></comment> |
33,693,071 | 33,691,093 | 1 | 2 | 33,688,913 | train | <story><title>We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult</title><url>https://labskausleben.bearblog.dev/youre-in-a-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peepee1982</author><text>A lot of people here seem to be offended by this essay because of the literal definition of the term &quot;cult&quot; and start looking for potential cults they may be part of. I think they are mistaken.<p>To me, this essay clearly speaks about the maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general during childhood and adolescence which causes us to suppress our feelings and authentic selves and treat the pain of it with medication, distraction, and OCD behaviors instead of healthy emotional release.<p>But I might just be projecting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deltarholamda</author><text>&gt;maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general<p>We adapted to the world through our families and society. A human alone 50,000 years ago was a delicious meal, not a rugged individualist.<p>I would suggest that anything that encourages you to live an atomized life is maladaptive. We can get away with some degree of that now, but only due to thousands of years of various cult-like behaviors that built the world to be more fit for humans.</text></comment> | <story><title>We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult</title><url>https://labskausleben.bearblog.dev/youre-in-a-cult/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peepee1982</author><text>A lot of people here seem to be offended by this essay because of the literal definition of the term &quot;cult&quot; and start looking for potential cults they may be part of. I think they are mistaken.<p>To me, this essay clearly speaks about the maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general during childhood and adolescence which causes us to suppress our feelings and authentic selves and treat the pain of it with medication, distraction, and OCD behaviors instead of healthy emotional release.<p>But I might just be projecting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcv</author><text>While reading it, I couldn&#x27;t help but think: but what if <i>this</i> is the cult?<p>I&#x27;ve got to admit I have no idea what the difference is between brainwashing and deprogramming.</text></comment> |
31,665,357 | 31,665,288 | 1 | 3 | 31,664,748 | train | <story><title>Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)</title><url>https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DicIfTEx</author><text>And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sschueller</author><text>Thank you Tesla for replacing hardware buttons with menu driven touch screens and autopilot that will drive you home safely. Additionally thank you for causing such a hype that other car manufacturers feel like they missed the boat and are copying these brilliant features. &#x2F;s</text></comment> | <story><title>Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in U.S. (2016)</title><url>https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DicIfTEx</author><text>And a sizeable portion of that medical error is due to poor device UX: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_XJbwN6EZ4I</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cnity</author><text>This is a fantastic video that I&#x27;d never seen before (as a programmer who largely focuses on building user interfaces!) Thanks.</text></comment> |
14,188,274 | 14,187,896 | 1 | 2 | 14,187,026 | train | <story><title>How I learned React Native in a weekend and shipped an app</title><url>http://vasir.net/blog/programming/react-native-beginner-tutorial-overview</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cableshaft</author><text>I have prior ios experience and was able to get the view side of React Native working without much problems, but once I started needing to store something on the device (especially trying to understand Redux and other similar solutions), I hit a pretty solid wall in my development and eventually put it on the backburner.<p>It looks like you might have been able to bypass this in your app, but if not, how did you approach that aspect of it?</text></comment> | <story><title>How I learned React Native in a weekend and shipped an app</title><url>http://vasir.net/blog/programming/react-native-beginner-tutorial-overview</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>esturk</author><text>Prior iOS development certainly helps a lot. From my experience, a lot of time were spent debugging on Xcode to build the app itself.</text></comment> |
11,788,628 | 11,788,485 | 1 | 2 | 11,788,101 | train | <story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WildUtah</author><text>The US tax code heavily punishes companies that hold cash in a variety of ways. The motive is to subsidize banks by requiring companies to rely on short term debt for operations. It&#x27;s the biggest and most lucrative of subsidies for the banking industry and laundering such subsidies is how many bankers get rich. For instance, Mitt Romney made his money that way.<p>(The main tax code subsidies here are the business interest loophole and the accumulated earnings tax)<p>Usually a big company holds almost no liquid assets and hands profits out to bondholders and shareholders or invests actively to grow, even in unrelated businesses. That&#x27;s to avoid tax penalties.<p>Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the like are holding masses of cash outside the USA. Gridlock in Washington and a stagnant and irrational corporate tax code make it very hard to bring cash home to invest for American companies. Therefore you find tech companies with few overseas expenses exporting services and accumulating cash they can&#x27;t bring home.<p>(The main tax issue here is the non-territorial tax system in the USA. All other developed countries have a territorial system.)<p>Other countries can see this is a problem that kills jobs and wages at home so they don&#x27;t do it. Obama has tried to fix it and Trump&#x27;s main tax proposal is aimed at it, but both parties in Congress block change. Republicans don&#x27;t want to hand Obama a victory and would rather hand out goodies to donors with loopholes than simplify taxes and Democrats just want to punish profitable multinationals even if it kills jobs.<p>And Wall Street is very mercurial with credit for tech companies, especially growing ones, so they can&#x27;t rely on the banking subsidies.<p>The result is that tech giants are the only companies with a reason to accumulate cash so they overwhelmingly are the only ones that do so.<p>In summary, this is a government regulatory policy that creates cash rich tech companies. It&#x27;s a result of bad decisions on Capitol Hill, not on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. It is not a stock valuation or corporate strategy issue.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boxy310</author><text>There was a very interesting article in the NY Times earlier this year about this subject:<p>&quot;For other industries, though, a dollar of savings is worth a lot more than itself. For pharmaceutical companies, a dollar in savings is worth $1.50. For software firms, it’s even higher: more than $2. This means that investors are behaving as if they trust the executives in these industries, like Larry Page of Alphabet, to be smarter about using that money than the investors themselves could be. ...<p>&quot;Why? The answer, perhaps, is that both the executives and the investors in these industries believe that something big is coming, but — this is crucial — they’re not sure what it will be. Through the 20th century, as we shifted from a horse-and-sun-powered agrarian economy to an electricity-and-motor-powered industrial economy to a silicon-based information economy, it was clear that every company had to invest in the new thing that was coming. These were big, expensive investments in buildings and machinery and computer technology. Today, though, value is created far more through new ideas and new ways of interaction. Ideas appear and spread much more quickly, and their worth is much harder to estimate.&quot;<p>Source: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;why-are-corporations-hoarding-trillions.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;why-are-corporati...</a><p>The implication is that big tech companies see some very disruptive trends coming down the pipeline, but they&#x27;re not sure which specific idea or ideas should take most of the investment, and they&#x27;re hedging their bets by hoarding cash for now. Maybe when the AI&#x2F;automation revolution kicks into high gear, we&#x27;ll finally see what they spend all this money on.</text></comment> |
12,394,765 | 12,392,245 | 1 | 2 | 12,391,430 | train | <story><title>Google+ Redesigned</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley/posts/AnaA1XCANWm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mahn</author><text>I mean, engineers are generally pretty smart people, I don&#x27;t think anybody within the company thinks Google+ is killing it. But the thing is, I would imagine that if you work at Google you are going to work on &quot;unsexy&quot; products too. Working on Google+ today is probably not worse than say working on the Ads Platform or some random internal reporting tool. It&#x27;s not super mega exciting, but it&#x27;s a job and you get paid.</text></item><item><author>awesomerobot</author><text>What&#x27;s it like to work on the Google+ team? are they all kind of blindly into it, or is there any sort of &quot;yeah yeah, we know&quot; there? I guess it&#x27;s an exciting challenge maybe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cromwellian</author><text>Actually, I&#x27;d say that the infrastructure and tools work being done on Google+ for the Web are bleeding edge and some of the more exciting stuff being done, so it&#x27;s not unsexy.<p>Look at how fast the new + loads, and open up the sources tab in your browser and look at how the JS is split. The way Closure Compiler is slicing up the app into tons of tiny individually loadable, optimized and minified chunks is very awesome. Google+ photos on the Web works the same way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google+ Redesigned</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+DanielleBuckley/posts/AnaA1XCANWm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mahn</author><text>I mean, engineers are generally pretty smart people, I don&#x27;t think anybody within the company thinks Google+ is killing it. But the thing is, I would imagine that if you work at Google you are going to work on &quot;unsexy&quot; products too. Working on Google+ today is probably not worse than say working on the Ads Platform or some random internal reporting tool. It&#x27;s not super mega exciting, but it&#x27;s a job and you get paid.</text></item><item><author>awesomerobot</author><text>What&#x27;s it like to work on the Google+ team? are they all kind of blindly into it, or is there any sort of &quot;yeah yeah, we know&quot; there? I guess it&#x27;s an exciting challenge maybe?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awesomerobot</author><text>Yes, of course I&#x27;m sure the actual work is valuable as an employee... and to say you&#x27;re working on the Google+ team is to say you&#x27;re working at Google, which is hugely valuable on its own.<p>I&#x27;m more wondering if there&#x27;s some goal they&#x27;re all working towards... what&#x27;s their mission as a team? What&#x27;s the morale like? Is there a lot of pressure on them to perform better?</text></comment> |
34,212,693 | 34,212,573 | 1 | 2 | 34,212,012 | train | <story><title>ElonJet Wrapped 2022</title><url>http://elonjet.net/wrapped22/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tacoman</author><text>The website says:<p>~ 1,895 tons of CO2 emissions.<p>According to the EPA (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;greenvehicles&#x2F;greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;greenvehicles&#x2F;greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...</a>): &quot;A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.&quot;<p>So about 420 cars worth of emissions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aeroman</author><text>Another way to think about it is in terms of average person years<p><pre><code> American: ~15 tonnes CO2 per year - 126 years
European: ~10 tonnes CO2 per year - 190 years
World average: ~5 tonnes CO2 per year - 379 years
</code></pre>
This one plane emits many lifetimes of CO2 per year.<p>I don&#x27;t think this accounts for non-CO2 impacts either (e.g. contrails). Multiply the years by about 2 as an estimate of that.</text></comment> | <story><title>ElonJet Wrapped 2022</title><url>http://elonjet.net/wrapped22/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tacoman</author><text>The website says:<p>~ 1,895 tons of CO2 emissions.<p>According to the EPA (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;greenvehicles&#x2F;greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;greenvehicles&#x2F;greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...</a>): &quot;A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.&quot;<p>So about 420 cars worth of emissions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hammock</author><text>Can we also get this for leaders of Congress, Taylor Swift, Al Gore, etc?</text></comment> |
21,126,065 | 21,124,647 | 1 | 3 | 21,121,395 | train | <story><title>EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49884827</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daleharvey</author><text>I have noticed this as well. Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views (see any thread on gender equality). The EU is being positioned as a liberal organisation (whether it truly is or not) so in every EU related thread the free speech &#x2F; anti regulation commentators come out in force</text></item><item><author>DavidHm</author><text>This might be a personal impression, but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to wrap my head about whether that&#x27;s different than the negative response about any regulation in general (including the US one), and I feel like it is more negative; as for why, I would only be speculating.</text></item><item><author>deanclatworthy</author><text>I don’t share the scepticism shared by other commenters. No matter how you look at this it’s a step in the right direction. We have needed this legislation for at least ten years now. Hopefully it will be iterated on and improved if manufacturers try to find ways around it. The EU has shown it’s willing to legislate in many areas for the better (and worse).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zenst</author><text>Alas when society feels fit to label things one way or another , they overlook the actual action and detail and with that, if it is something good (like this) they are sceptical and focus upon bad aspects and ignore the whole.<p>But when politics drives and runs with left&#x2F;right mentality, they end up disenfranchising common sense more often than not and you end up politically with a seesaw effect - you get a controlling party that is one way, then after a while you end up with a party the other way to restore balance.<p>This is one of those wonderful moments in which the result is common sense on so many levels that we should (sure many do) see it for what it is - something wonderful.<p>But everybody has a bad day, political things of any form can bring out the worst in all of us, but decorum upon this forum, does a better job than most in regulating those aspects. For that, let us be thankful as I can only imagine the Twitter flavours of this very subject being played out and shudder.<p>But credit when it is due - thank you EU for this.</text></comment> | <story><title>EU brings in 'right to repair' rules for appliances</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49884827</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>daleharvey</author><text>I have noticed this as well. Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views (see any thread on gender equality). The EU is being positioned as a liberal organisation (whether it truly is or not) so in every EU related thread the free speech &#x2F; anti regulation commentators come out in force</text></item><item><author>DavidHm</author><text>This might be a personal impression, but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to wrap my head about whether that&#x27;s different than the negative response about any regulation in general (including the US one), and I feel like it is more negative; as for why, I would only be speculating.</text></item><item><author>deanclatworthy</author><text>I don’t share the scepticism shared by other commenters. No matter how you look at this it’s a step in the right direction. We have needed this legislation for at least ten years now. Hopefully it will be iterated on and improved if manufacturers try to find ways around it. The EU has shown it’s willing to legislate in many areas for the better (and worse).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Iv</author><text>That&#x27;s what I assume as well.<p>But maybe that&#x27;s also what it feels like to become as relevant int he tech world as the US. There is no shortage of US-bashing in international tech discussions. As long as it stays good spirited, I don&#x27;t mind.</text></comment> |
35,213,004 | 35,208,843 | 1 | 3 | 35,207,390 | train | <story><title>How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments re: Internet Archive</title><url>http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/17/heres-how-to-participate-in-mondays-oral-arguments/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jl6</author><text>As a strong supporter of the Internet Archive’s primary mission, I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis. The IA must now hope for some creative judicial interpretation to save them.<p>It’s doubly frustrating because I think the publishers would have let the IA fly under the radar had they stuck to lending on a strictly one-digital-loan for one-physical-copy basis. The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness. They poked the hornet’s nest. IMHO they should have immediately apologised, leant into it being an honest mistake during a unique historical event, and come to some minor financial settlement. Instead, they and the EFF are doubling down and risk being flattened with a severe bill for compensation.<p>I absolutely would support legislation to properly recognize CDL as a lawful function of libraries. Instead, all our hopes are pinned on the judicial branch doing the job of the legislative branch.<p>P.S. Donate to the IA here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ta20230318</author><text>While you are correct on the tactical level, with this I do not agree:<p>&gt; The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness.<p>NO! It was a moment of sanity prompted by an exceptional situation in an absolutely insane world, a world that pretends to value property yet undermines property using IP. It is IP that is the real madness. It is IP that is used to suck every drop of life out of culture the same way Exxon sucks oil out of the ground. And it is IP that is used to bind people when other measures are not effective.<p>I get that the thought that the world is absolutely insane and absurd may not be a popular idea in the startup space which relies on a blind optimism, but IP is simply part of the cancer afflicting this world.<p>You are correct that it was a tactical mistake that endangered the rest of the project but the values that prompted that decision are some of the values that should guide us in building a better world if we want to stand any chance of avoiding a Black Mirror like dystopia on the path towards which the world is very much on.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments re: Internet Archive</title><url>http://blog.archive.org/2023/03/17/heres-how-to-participate-in-mondays-oral-arguments/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jl6</author><text>As a strong supporter of the Internet Archive’s primary mission, I am saddened to say that the prosecution appears to have a strong case here. Controlled Digital Lending is a controversial legal theory, not something that has any clear statutory basis. The IA must now hope for some creative judicial interpretation to save them.<p>It’s doubly frustrating because I think the publishers would have let the IA fly under the radar had they stuck to lending on a strictly one-digital-loan for one-physical-copy basis. The National Emergency Library was a serious lapse of judgement - a moment of madness amongst a backdrop of widespread Covid madness. They poked the hornet’s nest. IMHO they should have immediately apologised, leant into it being an honest mistake during a unique historical event, and come to some minor financial settlement. Instead, they and the EFF are doubling down and risk being flattened with a severe bill for compensation.<p>I absolutely would support legislation to properly recognize CDL as a lawful function of libraries. Instead, all our hopes are pinned on the judicial branch doing the job of the legislative branch.<p>P.S. Donate to the IA here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>Very little of what the IA does is strictly kosher under current law more or less anywhere in the world. They&#x27;ve mostly gotten away with it because, for example, they&#x27;ve mirrored websites that the owners put out in public and generally respect even retroactive requests to take them down. And, as you say, lending out 1 digital for 1 physical is reasonable enough that it&#x27;s easy enough to believe publishers would overlook.<p>(And, yes, they&#x27;re a library&#x2F;archive but that basically means nada in the digital world.)</text></comment> |
24,518,902 | 24,518,680 | 1 | 2 | 24,514,702 | train | <story><title>John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougmwne</author><text>I&#x27;d say that is the same as a dead end. Right now this is a very expensive, multi-billion dollar toy with toy demonstrator apps and proof of concept games. It needs to be a game changer and the future of something or the research funding and developer ecosystem are going to dry up. And given the amount that Facebook must be losing on the Quest 2 and the all-in nature of this launch, if this doesn&#x27;t take off now, the runway for Oculus at FB may be over.</text></item><item><author>criddell</author><text>&gt; Time to see for myself if this is the computing future or an evolutionary dead end.<p>There&#x27;s a third possibility - VR is finally here and consumer market is what it is. It&#x27;s not going to take over the world but it isn&#x27;t going away either.</text></item><item><author>dougmwne</author><text>This talk was such a treat. After all the carefuly crafted hype from Zuck and the gang, Carmack threw huge bucket of cold water on everything. I think it&#x27;s just wonderful that he&#x27;s allowed to speak so openly, about the things he&#x27;s proud of, the things he thinks are failures, internal politics, the possibilities for improvement, the real hard physical limits VR is running into, and his growing pessimism for the future of VR. I could really hear it in his talk why he moved on to spend more time on his next passion.<p>Since it sounded to me like the low hanging mobile VR fruit has been picked, I went ahead and pre-ordered my very first HMD afterwards. Time to see for myself if this is the computing future or an evolutionary dead end.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koiz</author><text>&gt;Right now this is a very expensive, multi-billion dollar toy with toy demonstrator apps and proof of concept games.<p>We are far past tech demos and concept games.</text></comment> | <story><title>John Carmack’s presentation at Facebook Connect [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dougmwne</author><text>I&#x27;d say that is the same as a dead end. Right now this is a very expensive, multi-billion dollar toy with toy demonstrator apps and proof of concept games. It needs to be a game changer and the future of something or the research funding and developer ecosystem are going to dry up. And given the amount that Facebook must be losing on the Quest 2 and the all-in nature of this launch, if this doesn&#x27;t take off now, the runway for Oculus at FB may be over.</text></item><item><author>criddell</author><text>&gt; Time to see for myself if this is the computing future or an evolutionary dead end.<p>There&#x27;s a third possibility - VR is finally here and consumer market is what it is. It&#x27;s not going to take over the world but it isn&#x27;t going away either.</text></item><item><author>dougmwne</author><text>This talk was such a treat. After all the carefuly crafted hype from Zuck and the gang, Carmack threw huge bucket of cold water on everything. I think it&#x27;s just wonderful that he&#x27;s allowed to speak so openly, about the things he&#x27;s proud of, the things he thinks are failures, internal politics, the possibilities for improvement, the real hard physical limits VR is running into, and his growing pessimism for the future of VR. I could really hear it in his talk why he moved on to spend more time on his next passion.<p>Since it sounded to me like the low hanging mobile VR fruit has been picked, I went ahead and pre-ordered my very first HMD afterwards. Time to see for myself if this is the computing future or an evolutionary dead end.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text><i>&gt; It needs to be a game changer and the future of something or the research funding and developer ecosystem are going to dry up.</i><p>I hate that we live in a world so dominated by network effects, economies of scale, corporate consolidation, and shareholder value that there are fewer and fewer realms where &quot;small success&quot; still exists.</text></comment> |
31,918,731 | 31,917,519 | 1 | 2 | 31,916,864 | train | <story><title>It's worse than you think</title><url>https://ckarchive.com/b/75u7h8hkk9g9e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hgomersall</author><text>To quote Greg LeMond: it never gets easier, you just get faster. As someone who arguably has accumulated expertise, I still feel like I&#x27;m winging it a lot. The difference is I&#x27;m now winging it at the boundaries of the state of the art. It certainly doesn&#x27;t feel easier to be here than where I was 20 years ago (though I do feel to be in a better place). There&#x27;s always much more expertise I need!</text></item><item><author>akersten</author><text>Any life philosophy that helps one get through the day in a positive way is good. I do have a nit to pick with part of this one. It leans on the idea that &quot;everyone is winging it all the time&quot; and links to a Guardian opinion(?) piece where they pull quote from people who can&#x27;t read a clock or tie their shoes. I think that&#x27;s both not the right level of assumed incompetence that the author wanted to convey, but also reinforcement of a comforting excuse for failing to flourish. There <i>is</i> such a thing as expertise, and it (almost) always takes a lot of work to achieve it. So it both denigrates those who have worked hard to be competent in their field and gives aspirationals an out that potentially stunts their growth.<p>I agree that the mantra applies in some circumstances, like casual social interaction (although I&#x27;m sure there are subject matter experts in that realm too who could out-chat any of us), but applying it to your career and goals seems self-defeating to me.<p>But again, we are all different and different motivations work on each of us. Just my unsolicited opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kryogen1c</author><text>&gt; it never gets easier, you just get faster. As someone who arguably has accumulated expertise, I still feel like I&#x27;m winging it a lot.<p>Yes, I believe the gp has missed the point of the article.<p>The lesson from &quot;your to-do list isn&#x27;t difficult, it&#x27;s impossible&quot; is not nihilism. The point is not that no one is good at anything so why bother; the point is that the feeling of overwhelm, dread, and depression from an impossible- seeming to-do list is rooted in false assumptions. Your to-do list doesn&#x27;t <i>seem</i> impossibly long, it IS impossibly long! You are born with a to-do list and you will die with a to-do list - but that&#x27;s OK. We&#x27;re all in the same boat.<p>Another helpful way to think about this is a math analogy. Your knowledge is a circle or sphere that has your literal area of expertise. The more your learn, the larger it gets - but you also gain more contact with the unknown.<p>That is the lesson. Imposter syndrome demystified. Only a fool feels in complete control. One simply does what one can.</text></comment> | <story><title>It's worse than you think</title><url>https://ckarchive.com/b/75u7h8hkk9g9e</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hgomersall</author><text>To quote Greg LeMond: it never gets easier, you just get faster. As someone who arguably has accumulated expertise, I still feel like I&#x27;m winging it a lot. The difference is I&#x27;m now winging it at the boundaries of the state of the art. It certainly doesn&#x27;t feel easier to be here than where I was 20 years ago (though I do feel to be in a better place). There&#x27;s always much more expertise I need!</text></item><item><author>akersten</author><text>Any life philosophy that helps one get through the day in a positive way is good. I do have a nit to pick with part of this one. It leans on the idea that &quot;everyone is winging it all the time&quot; and links to a Guardian opinion(?) piece where they pull quote from people who can&#x27;t read a clock or tie their shoes. I think that&#x27;s both not the right level of assumed incompetence that the author wanted to convey, but also reinforcement of a comforting excuse for failing to flourish. There <i>is</i> such a thing as expertise, and it (almost) always takes a lot of work to achieve it. So it both denigrates those who have worked hard to be competent in their field and gives aspirationals an out that potentially stunts their growth.<p>I agree that the mantra applies in some circumstances, like casual social interaction (although I&#x27;m sure there are subject matter experts in that realm too who could out-chat any of us), but applying it to your career and goals seems self-defeating to me.<p>But again, we are all different and different motivations work on each of us. Just my unsolicited opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>razzimatazz</author><text>You prompted me to think of fitness - as someone who has accumulated fitness I still feel like I am suffering a lot when I run, and I can take that suffering as a bit like winging it. The difference is I am suffering&#x2F;winging it at a decent pace, I&#x27;m accustomed to what suffering&#x2F;winging it feels like and know that I don&#x27;t need to give up, I believe I can push on.<p>And indeed there is always more fitness that I need.</text></comment> |
5,781,714 | 5,781,732 | 1 | 2 | 5,780,840 | train | <story><title>Singapore to regulate high traffic websites that report on Singapore</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/net-us-singapore-internet-idUSBRE94R0G220130528</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Singapore and China are proof of two things:<p>1) Freedom is not a necessary condition for economic prosperity (which undermines a lot of American rhetoric of the last 50 years);<p>2) The global business community doesn't give a shit about democracy, as demonstrated by its rush to embrace China, the Middle East, etc, and the corresponding apologizing about their political systems.<p>I nearly puked on Metro North the other day (like a drunk Westchester teen after too much fun in Manhattan) reading an article where some commentator with business interests in China tried to downplay the free speech situation in China as "cultural differences."</text></item><item><author>revelation</author><text>Oops, the cool, tax-saving getaway is a fascist dictatorship. Who could have known.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javert</author><text>&#62; Freedom is not a necessary condition for economic prosperity (which undermines a lot of American rhetoric of the last 50 years)<p>That is demonstrably false. Everywhere you look, throughout history, the more free a country is, the more economically prosperous it becomes. In fact, _every single example_ fits this pattern. There is not a single exception.<p>China and Singapore are much more economically free than the US (and most other places), and that's why they have seen economic "miracles."<p>If your argument is, "You don't have to have 100% freedom to have economic prosperity," _that_ is true, but it's not an interesting observation. No country in history has (quite) been a utopia of freedom.<p>&#62; The global business community doesn't give a shit about democracy, as demonstrated by its rush to embrace China, the Middle East, etc, and the corresponding apologizing about their political systems.<p>You're treating the "global business community" like it's a "class," in the Marxist sense: a bunch of people who all think alike. In fact, there are just a bunch of individuals.<p>Most businessmen have similar values and ideas to the rest of the culture. Which is to say, not great, not horrible.<p>I plan to go into business eventually in some form, and I hope you don't justify punishing _me_ on the basis of your characterization of the "global business community."</text></comment> | <story><title>Singapore to regulate high traffic websites that report on Singapore</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/net-us-singapore-internet-idUSBRE94R0G220130528</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rayiner</author><text>Singapore and China are proof of two things:<p>1) Freedom is not a necessary condition for economic prosperity (which undermines a lot of American rhetoric of the last 50 years);<p>2) The global business community doesn't give a shit about democracy, as demonstrated by its rush to embrace China, the Middle East, etc, and the corresponding apologizing about their political systems.<p>I nearly puked on Metro North the other day (like a drunk Westchester teen after too much fun in Manhattan) reading an article where some commentator with business interests in China tried to downplay the free speech situation in China as "cultural differences."</text></item><item><author>revelation</author><text>Oops, the cool, tax-saving getaway is a fascist dictatorship. Who could have known.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xiadz</author><text>Come to China and see for yourself that although Chinese really improved their life standard, they also really suck at inventing anything new. I think that freedom is a prerequisite for creativity, not necessarily for prosperity in general.</text></comment> |
35,503,441 | 35,501,398 | 1 | 2 | 35,496,712 | train | <story><title>A 1.5GB string</title><url>https://blog.backslasher.net/1.5GB-string.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>berkes</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that JSON is one of the least Human Readable serialization formats.<p>It lacks comments. Has no way to offer context. Cannot impose limitations, and normalizing needs additional, often poorly supported RFCs (JSON-LD or pointers).<p>It also is a poor non-human readable format, as it lacks crucial types (datetime, decimal) is rather verbose (just imagine the terabytes bandwidth wasted, globally on all these commas and curly braces) and cannot be parsed streaming.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>Ironically, not long ago there was an article about how hard string handling is in C, so programs tend to be written to avoid manipulating strings as much as possible. In other languages, where strings are easy to use, it encourages inefficiency like this. The term &quot;stringly typed&quot; also comes to mind.<p>JSON truly is the new XML, both in terms of advantages and disadvantages. I wish people would stop using it for everything and realise that using a &quot;human-readable&quot; format for data that is 99.999999% not going to be seen by a human is absolute insanity in terms of inefficiency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>berniedurfee</author><text>Agreed. Lack of comments and lack of proper schema enforcement makes JSON a junk pile of a data format.<p>Definitely not an improvement over XML. Hopefully the next popular standard data format will learn from the past and take the best of previous attempts.</text></comment> | <story><title>A 1.5GB string</title><url>https://blog.backslasher.net/1.5GB-string.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>berkes</author><text>I&#x27;d argue that JSON is one of the least Human Readable serialization formats.<p>It lacks comments. Has no way to offer context. Cannot impose limitations, and normalizing needs additional, often poorly supported RFCs (JSON-LD or pointers).<p>It also is a poor non-human readable format, as it lacks crucial types (datetime, decimal) is rather verbose (just imagine the terabytes bandwidth wasted, globally on all these commas and curly braces) and cannot be parsed streaming.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>Ironically, not long ago there was an article about how hard string handling is in C, so programs tend to be written to avoid manipulating strings as much as possible. In other languages, where strings are easy to use, it encourages inefficiency like this. The term &quot;stringly typed&quot; also comes to mind.<p>JSON truly is the new XML, both in terms of advantages and disadvantages. I wish people would stop using it for everything and realise that using a &quot;human-readable&quot; format for data that is 99.999999% not going to be seen by a human is absolute insanity in terms of inefficiency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Someone</author><text>&gt; as it lacks crucial types (datetime, decimal)<p>Decimal is there, isn’t it, as part of ‘number’, which lumps together fixed-size integers, IEEE floats and doubles, bigints and bigfloats, and leaves it to the parser to make the right guess as to how to interpret them (often assisted by having the programmer specify a target data type)?<p>Lumping all those together as ‘number’ makes for a much simpler grammar, but I think that’s not worth it for its negative effects on interoperability. How many json parsers can (easily) read a value of <i>1234567890123456890E0000000001</i> and write back the same string to a json file?<p>Apart from datetime, I’d add duration as a basic type, too, even though that has the problem of being imprecise. Users will want to specify durations such as “1m” or “1y” (is that 365 days? 365.2425 to correct for leap years? Does it depend on interpretation by the user? is it a lunar year of 354&#x2F;355 days as in the Islamic calendar? Etc)</text></comment> |
38,410,470 | 38,410,452 | 1 | 3 | 38,407,741 | train | <story><title>Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*</title><url>https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1728126868342145481</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>One thing that makes no sense about Sam Altman hiding the Q* progress from the board is that Ilya Sutskever was part of the board too. As he is the technical lead and Altman isn&#x27;t technical at all, how would it be a secret from Sutskever?<p>NB: I know nothing about these people and don&#x27;t track it, but my consistency check failed on this claim based on the flood of news over the past week.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gexla</author><text>It makes no sense because nobody but Sam and the board knows what actually happened.<p>My guess is that they arrived to an inflection point. The company was on the cusp of taking an investment which would have valued it at 80 billion. One of the board members mentioned that self destruction would have been in line with their mission of safety for humanity. It seems like at some point you have to ditch the &quot;we&#x27;re doing this for the benefit of humanity&quot; act and act like a profit hungry machine with a startup CEO going balls out. In this case, &quot;balls out&quot; won. The board was way too late. The AGI escaped with the creation of the for-profit company.</text></comment> | <story><title>Please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q*</title><url>https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1728126868342145481</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>One thing that makes no sense about Sam Altman hiding the Q* progress from the board is that Ilya Sutskever was part of the board too. As he is the technical lead and Altman isn&#x27;t technical at all, how would it be a secret from Sutskever?<p>NB: I know nothing about these people and don&#x27;t track it, but my consistency check failed on this claim based on the flood of news over the past week.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ugh123</author><text>Maybe it wasn&#x27;t secret, and Ilya wanted to bring it to the board but Sam fought him.</text></comment> |
4,003,254 | 4,003,277 | 1 | 2 | 4,002,943 | train | <story><title>Dan Benjamin: Regarding The Talk Show</title><url>http://5by5.tv/specials/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rkudeshi</author><text>Summary for anyone who can't listen:<p>* Dan says John emailed him and just said it was time to move on and try something new. Dan says he has total respect and understanding for that.<p>* Dan says he thought if they weren't doing the show anymore, they would retire it together. Surprised and disappointed that John's doing the show on his own and re-using the name.<p>* Dan wishes they could have done one last episode to reminisce (120 previous episodes) and to thank the fans.<p>* Dan encourages fans to listen to the new show at muleradio.net.<p>* No other sordid details, just some personal anecdotes.<p>I've never listened to any 5by5 podcasts on 5by5, but Dan Benjamin comes across in this audio clip as a total class act.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwthornton</author><text>Dan has always come across as one of the classiest guys on the Internet.<p>I am genuinely sad to see this happen to him.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dan Benjamin: Regarding The Talk Show</title><url>http://5by5.tv/specials/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rkudeshi</author><text>Summary for anyone who can't listen:<p>* Dan says John emailed him and just said it was time to move on and try something new. Dan says he has total respect and understanding for that.<p>* Dan says he thought if they weren't doing the show anymore, they would retire it together. Surprised and disappointed that John's doing the show on his own and re-using the name.<p>* Dan wishes they could have done one last episode to reminisce (120 previous episodes) and to thank the fans.<p>* Dan encourages fans to listen to the new show at muleradio.net.<p>* No other sordid details, just some personal anecdotes.<p>I've never listened to any 5by5 podcasts on 5by5, but Dan Benjamin comes across in this audio clip as a total class act.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>georgespencer</author><text>Like everyone is saying, Dan comes across really well in this. I don't expect JG will ever give us his take.<p>RE: never listening to any 5by5 podcasts–I listened to The Talk Show a few times. Maybe it's because I'm used to the dogma of professional broadcasting, but I don't think you've missed out unless you like hearing a couple of guys pause a hell of a lot during an awkward conversation. Almost every episode I heard started with an entirely charmless "Uh, hello?" "Uh is this on?" scenario.<p>I guess part of the appeal was that it was folksy and just a conversation.</text></comment> |
27,642,035 | 27,641,918 | 1 | 2 | 27,641,010 | train | <story><title>Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2</title><url>https://tomtalks.blog/2021/06/microsoft-teams-2-0-will-use-half-the-memory-dropping-electron-for-edge-webview2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Native apps means essentially building at least 5 distinct apps: windows, mac, iOS, linux, android. What a mess to work with and maintain.<p>We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers and they&#x27;re very advanced and reasonably pleasant to work with these days. If you bundle the browser (electron) then you don&#x27;t have to worry about differences between browsers. So electron makes plenty of sense to developers, even although it&#x27;s an egregious resource hog.</text></item><item><author>richardstephens</author><text>Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat industry that everyone&#x27;s converged on Electron? You&#x27;d think Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it seems like my only option is IRC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jon-wood</author><text>If only Microsoft had a app development framework designed to allow developing apps for multiple mobile + desktop platforms with as much shared code as possible.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotnet.microsoft.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;xamarin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dotnet.microsoft.com&#x2F;apps&#x2F;xamarin</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft Teams 2 will use half the memory, dropping Electron for Edge Webview2</title><url>https://tomtalks.blog/2021/06/microsoft-teams-2-0-will-use-half-the-memory-dropping-electron-for-edge-webview2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>Native apps means essentially building at least 5 distinct apps: windows, mac, iOS, linux, android. What a mess to work with and maintain.<p>We already have cross-platfrom UI engines called browsers and they&#x27;re very advanced and reasonably pleasant to work with these days. If you bundle the browser (electron) then you don&#x27;t have to worry about differences between browsers. So electron makes plenty of sense to developers, even although it&#x27;s an egregious resource hog.</text></item><item><author>richardstephens</author><text>Drop Electron.... for Edge Webview2. I mean, okay sure, half the memory is an improvement. But what is going on in the chat industry that everyone&#x27;s converged on Electron? You&#x27;d think Microsoft of all companies would be able to figure out how to build native apps. If I want a chat service with native apps, it seems like my only option is IRC.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>richardstephens</author><text>I see where you&#x27;re coming from, but Microsoft already builds an entire office sweet as native apps across 4 of the 5 platforms you enumerated.</text></comment> |
3,159,476 | 3,159,530 | 1 | 2 | 3,159,187 | train | <story><title>Two amusing side channel attacks</title><url>http://syhw.posterous.com/two-amusing-side-channel-attacks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jws</author><text>Before you go shorting a USB port to "blow its specific fuse" you might look at the motherboard closely. Given that you can save money by omitting them, you'll find some motherboards do just that. There are also thermal based, self resetting fuses, so the port could come back.<p>If it's that important, fill the hole with epoxy. Thicken it to a peanut butter consistency so it doesn't run all over.</text></comment> | <story><title>Two amusing side channel attacks</title><url>http://syhw.posterous.com/two-amusing-side-channel-attacks</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jws</author><text>I'm missing something here. If you collect data up to 48kHz, then there are still 100,000 or so instructions occurring in each sample. Getting from there to breaking RSA should have some explaining.</text></comment> |
26,536,044 | 26,534,437 | 1 | 2 | 26,521,942 | train | <story><title>Whales in 19th century shared information about ship attacks</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/17/sperm-whales-in-19th-century-shared-ship-attack-information</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ramblerman</author><text>The idea of whale intelligence is super interesting and I hope we do more to understand it. But the unfortunate pseudo-scientific need for the author to push the culture&#x2F;religion angle becomes almost political at times, and seems like a stretch.<p>We should be able to determine intelligence&#x2F;communication first without antromorphizing the notion of culture.<p>Some quotes from this article, and another linked by the author [1]<p>&gt; Bound by communality, sperm-whale culture expresses a collective individuality: “We” and “us” may be more important than “I” and “me”. If that isn’t a lesson for their Homo sapiens cousins, I don’t know what is.<p>&gt; Whales and dolphins observe rituals of the dead and exhibit grief. Could they, then, express spiritual sentiment, founded on values and belief – even a sense of religion?<p>&gt; As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us.<p>&gt; Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding grounds<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;cultural-lives-of-whales-and-dolphins-hal-whitehead-luke-rendell-review" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jan&#x2F;10&#x2F;cultural-lives...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Whales in 19th century shared information about ship attacks</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/17/sperm-whales-in-19th-century-shared-ship-attack-information</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wombatmobile</author><text>&gt; As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours.<p>Oh? How old is our culture?<p>What were whales doing a million years ago that primates weren&#x27;t that qualifies as culture?</text></comment> |
27,116,830 | 27,116,431 | 1 | 2 | 27,115,809 | train | <story><title>Amazon Sidewalk</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?node=21328123011</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bijant</author><text>This is a blatant attempt at using their market power to gain a dominant position in IoT connectivity by creating a parallel Network where Net Neutrality does not apply. If this succeeds, only Amazon approved devices will be allowed on this global Network connecting only to aws provided services thereby establishing a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity.
After Apples recent move in the same direction with their „find my“ mesh network of apple devices being used to introduce a whole new mode of operation to support their Air Tags the Question of Net Neutrality has to be extended from just ISPs to Dominant Platforms that have the ability to create derivative Mesh-Networks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiofih</author><text>I’m not sure a parallel can be drawn to the Find My network. That one is purely designed for location tracking in an anonymous way, and does not have the ability to transfer data between devices or any other type of tracking.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Sidewalk</title><url>https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?node=21328123011</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bijant</author><text>This is a blatant attempt at using their market power to gain a dominant position in IoT connectivity by creating a parallel Network where Net Neutrality does not apply. If this succeeds, only Amazon approved devices will be allowed on this global Network connecting only to aws provided services thereby establishing a monopoly on non-cellular IoT connectivity.
After Apples recent move in the same direction with their „find my“ mesh network of apple devices being used to introduce a whole new mode of operation to support their Air Tags the Question of Net Neutrality has to be extended from just ISPs to Dominant Platforms that have the ability to create derivative Mesh-Networks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>contravariant</author><text>I can&#x27;t help but feel that this is only a net neutrality issue because we&#x27;ve already given up on letting people freely choose what kind of mesh-networks (if any) their devices get to participate in.</text></comment> |
16,818,630 | 16,817,771 | 1 | 2 | 16,817,234 | train | <story><title>Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03719</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hannob</author><text>The way this starts seems to tell a story that I feel is quite disconnected from reality:<p>&gt; As quantum computers have become available to the general public, the need has arisen to train a cohort of quantum programmers<p>It seems to peddle the idea that in a few years we&#x27;ll replace all normal computers with quantum computers. I don&#x27;t think this is even remotely plausible.<p>It&#x27;s still an open question whether quantum computers that do anything useful at all are feasible. But even if they are - we can safely assume that for a long time they will be expensive devices, running in complex physical experiments, that will be reserved for very special needs.<p>From all we know QCs aren&#x27;t magically faster computers that are suitable to do everything better. There are just a few very special algorithms where QCs have an advantage. That&#x27;s certainly interesting, but even if it would be possible - and that&#x27;s a big if - it&#x27;s unlikely anyone will add them to our smartphones anytime soon, simply because there&#x27;s no need for that.<p>If quantum computers arrive we&#x27;ll need a handful of specialized programmers that are familiar with their algorithms. But not masses of them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Quantum Algorithm Implementations for Beginners</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03719</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vtomole</author><text>This paper is a good example of how much progress we&#x27;ve had in quantum algorithm research since the dawn Quantum information science. Here is another good survey for people who want to learn more about quantum algorithms [0].<p>From the abstract, it seems like a resource I wish I had when I was starting to get into quantum computation.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.nist.gov&#x2F;quantum&#x2F;zoo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.nist.gov&#x2F;quantum&#x2F;zoo&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
35,591,782 | 35,590,110 | 1 | 2 | 35,589,179 | train | <story><title>FSF Slams Google over Dropping JPEG-XL in Chrome</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/FSF-Slams-Google-JPEG-XL</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This is worth looking at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caniuse.com&#x2F;jpegxl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caniuse.com&#x2F;jpegxl</a><p>Unless I&#x27;m misunderstanding that, no browser actually ever supported JPEG-XL without a flag (or at all on Safari&#x27;s cases). No OS appears to have supported it natively either[0]. The reality is that formats have a chicken &amp; egg problem. Normally Google deserves to get dunked on, but in this case, why is Google the scapegoat instead of the entire industry that didn&#x27;t adopt it? Feels like there is a bigger issue with JPEG-XL&#x27;s failure to launch, and they did more than some (Apple? Microsoft?).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_adoption" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crote</author><text>Yeah, because it is a new format. You don&#x27;t immediately publicly release support for an experimental format.<p>Chrome added support for the in-progress version of JPEG XL in April 2021. The core coding specification was finished in March 2022, and the last part of the spec wasn&#x27;t done until October 2022.<p>Chrome removed it in December 2022, citing a &quot;lack of interest from the ecosystem&quot;, despite it having support in most major image editors already. It was a new format which was rapidly being adopted and a lot of major players were very excited about it, but Chrome&#x27;s removal pretty much killed it due to their dominance in the browser space. At the time of removal, it had better support than HEIC!</text></comment> | <story><title>FSF Slams Google over Dropping JPEG-XL in Chrome</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/FSF-Slams-Google-JPEG-XL</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>This is worth looking at:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caniuse.com&#x2F;jpegxl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caniuse.com&#x2F;jpegxl</a><p>Unless I&#x27;m misunderstanding that, no browser actually ever supported JPEG-XL without a flag (or at all on Safari&#x27;s cases). No OS appears to have supported it natively either[0]. The reality is that formats have a chicken &amp; egg problem. Normally Google deserves to get dunked on, but in this case, why is Google the scapegoat instead of the entire industry that didn&#x27;t adopt it? Feels like there is a bigger issue with JPEG-XL&#x27;s failure to launch, and they did more than some (Apple? Microsoft?).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_adoption" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_a...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0x_rs</author><text>&gt;instead of the entire industry that didn&#x27;t adopt it?<p>Is this a good argument? Nobody is going to adopt something without being natively supported by browsers without ugly js hacks, and when it comes to browser standards it seems to me Google has more leverage than anybody else. Cloudinary has made a lot of posts about JPEG-XL, so you might say they&#x27;re quite biased towards it, but it also seems to me there is some interest in it by multiple companies [0, 1]. I personally very much doubt webp would be <i>anywhere</i> today without the massive (arguably deceptive) campaigning and double standards it had.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_adoption" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JPEG_XL#Industry_support_and_a...</a><p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=1178058#c16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=117805...</a></text></comment> |
39,142,482 | 39,140,169 | 1 | 2 | 39,119,198 | train | <story><title>Are we at peak vector database?</title><url>https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/01/24/are-we-at-peak-vector-db</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reissbaker</author><text>IMO we are well past peak cosine-similarity-search as a service. Most people I talk to in the space don&#x27;t bother using specialized vector DBs for that.<p>I think there&#x27;s space for a much more interesting product that is longer-lived (since it&#x27;s harder to implement than just cosine-similarity-search on vectors), which is:<p>1. Fine-tuning OSS embedding models on your real-world query patterns<p>2. Storing and recomputing embeddings for your data as you update the fine-tuned models.<p>MTEB averages are fine, but hardly anyone uses the average result: most use cases are specialized (i.e. classification vs clustering vs retrieval). The best models try to be decent at all of those, but I&#x27;d bet that finetuning on a specific use case would beat a general-purpose model, especially on your own dataset (your retrieval is probably meaningfully different than someone else&#x27;s: code retrieval vs document Q&amp;A, for example). And your queries are usually specialized! People using embeddings for RAG are generally not also trying to use the same embeddings for clustering or classification; and the reverse is true too (your recommendation system is likely different than your search system).<p>And if you&#x27;re fine-tuning new models regularly, you need storage + management, since you&#x27;ll need to recompute the embeddings every time you deploy a new model.<p>I would pay for a service that made (1) and (2) easy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peterstjohn</author><text>I no longer work there, but Lucidworks has had embedding training as a first-class feature in Fusion since January 2020 (I know because I wrapped up adding it just as COVID became a thing). We definitely saw that even with just slightly out-of-band use of language - e.g. in e-commerce, things like &quot;RD TSHRT XS&quot;, embedding search with open (and closed) models would fall below bog-standard* BM25 lexical search. Once you trained a model, performance would kick up above lexical search…and if you combined lexical _and_ vector search, things were great.<p>Also, a member on our team developed an amazing RNN-based model that still today beats the pants off most embedding models when it comes to speed, and is no slouch on CPU either…<p>(* I&#x27;m being harsh on BM25 - it is a baseline that people often forget in vector search, but it can be a tough one to beat at times)</text></comment> | <story><title>Are we at peak vector database?</title><url>https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/01/24/are-we-at-peak-vector-db</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>reissbaker</author><text>IMO we are well past peak cosine-similarity-search as a service. Most people I talk to in the space don&#x27;t bother using specialized vector DBs for that.<p>I think there&#x27;s space for a much more interesting product that is longer-lived (since it&#x27;s harder to implement than just cosine-similarity-search on vectors), which is:<p>1. Fine-tuning OSS embedding models on your real-world query patterns<p>2. Storing and recomputing embeddings for your data as you update the fine-tuned models.<p>MTEB averages are fine, but hardly anyone uses the average result: most use cases are specialized (i.e. classification vs clustering vs retrieval). The best models try to be decent at all of those, but I&#x27;d bet that finetuning on a specific use case would beat a general-purpose model, especially on your own dataset (your retrieval is probably meaningfully different than someone else&#x27;s: code retrieval vs document Q&amp;A, for example). And your queries are usually specialized! People using embeddings for RAG are generally not also trying to use the same embeddings for clustering or classification; and the reverse is true too (your recommendation system is likely different than your search system).<p>And if you&#x27;re fine-tuning new models regularly, you need storage + management, since you&#x27;ll need to recompute the embeddings every time you deploy a new model.<p>I would pay for a service that made (1) and (2) easy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jn2clark</author><text>We (Marqo) are doing a lot on 1 and 2. There is a huge amount to be done on the ML side of vector search and we are investing heavily in it. I think it has not quite sunk in that vector search systems are ML systems and everything that comes with that. I would love to chat about 1 and 2 so feel free to email me (email is in my profile).</text></comment> |
28,265,475 | 28,265,524 | 1 | 3 | 28,264,686 | train | <story><title>A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/22/in_brief_ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yawaworht1978</author><text>Wow i have never heard of that. Curious to see a link&#x2F;article on the issue, if you can provide.</text></item><item><author>SamoyedFurFluff</author><text>I mean, drug dogs are still a thing even though we know they tend to respond to owners desires regardless of if there’s drugs present.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>It&#x27;s scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It&#x27;s amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc.<p>Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots:<p>&gt; records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera.<p>So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually. I assume that means the actual audio is available and entered into evidence?<p>If humans are making the call then blaming AI seems like a stretch. That’s almost like blaming the motion detection algorithms for triggering video recordings that were later reviewed by humans. It’s still humans reviewing the recordings and making decisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DaftDank</author><text>This is a decent summary of court cases related to the dogs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nlrg.com&#x2F;criminal-law-legal-research&#x2F;bid&#x2F;84670&#x2F;CRIMINAL-LAW-UPDATE-Reliability-of-Narcotics-Dogs-to-Be-Revisited-by-U-S-Supreme-Court" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nlrg.com&#x2F;criminal-law-legal-research&#x2F;bid&#x2F;84670&#x2F;C...</a><p>I think this part is pretty key, and has always been a big open question in my mind:<p>&quot;The court further recognized a potential problem in assessing reliability related to handler cuing, as even well-trained dogs could respond to subconscious cues from their handlers. For this reason, the court determined that a critical factor in determining reliability is the record of false positive alerts made by the dog.&quot;<p>The subconscious cues, or even deliberate cues that only the handler and dog know, could allow an officer with ill intentions to make some kind of signal only known to him and the dog, which causes the dog to make an &quot;alert&quot;, giving the cop probable cause.</text></comment> | <story><title>A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/22/in_brief_ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yawaworht1978</author><text>Wow i have never heard of that. Curious to see a link&#x2F;article on the issue, if you can provide.</text></item><item><author>SamoyedFurFluff</author><text>I mean, drug dogs are still a thing even though we know they tend to respond to owners desires regardless of if there’s drugs present.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>It&#x27;s scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It&#x27;s amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc.<p>Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots:<p>&gt; records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera.<p>So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually. I assume that means the actual audio is available and entered into evidence?<p>If humans are making the call then blaming AI seems like a stretch. That’s almost like blaming the motion detection algorithms for triggering video recordings that were later reviewed by humans. It’s still humans reviewing the recordings and making decisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sennight</author><text>If you like that you&#x27;ll love the Wikipedia entry for polygraphs :)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Polygraph#Effectiveness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Polygraph#Effectiveness</a></text></comment> |
13,734,324 | 13,734,433 | 1 | 2 | 13,734,036 | train | <story><title>DNA tests show Subway sandwiches could contain just 50% chicken</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-food-1.3993967</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheCoreh</author><text>&gt; The majority of the remaining DNA? Soy.<p>The headline got me sorta terrified, imagining what sort of repugnant, monstrous creature was being grinded and mixed into my Subway sandwich. Good to know at least it&#x27;s just soy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndyNemmity</author><text>Not good for low-carb&#x2F;keto eaters. Soy has carbs, chicken doesn&#x27;t.<p>There has been some discussion regarding subway and carbs in the chicken, because their nutrition shows far fewer than some app trackers do. If it&#x27;s 50%, that&#x27;s a serious level of carbs, and makes Subway not an option.</text></comment> | <story><title>DNA tests show Subway sandwiches could contain just 50% chicken</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/marketplace-chicken-fast-food-1.3993967</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheCoreh</author><text>&gt; The majority of the remaining DNA? Soy.<p>The headline got me sorta terrified, imagining what sort of repugnant, monstrous creature was being grinded and mixed into my Subway sandwich. Good to know at least it&#x27;s just soy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>Yeah...I don&#x27;t see too much to be outraged about here. If you want to be upset about adding soy to the chicken you eat, be upset about the soy they add to the chicken before they kill it. Soy isn&#x27;t part of the natural diet for chickens, so feeding it to them means also feeding them antibiotics. If anything, lowering the percentage of chicken that&#x27;s raised in that way would make it healthier.</text></comment> |
12,117,746 | 12,116,976 | 1 | 2 | 12,114,681 | train | <story><title>Is full-time work bad for our brains?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160714-is-full-time-work-bad-for-our-brains</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubano</author><text>I&#x27;m 50yo and am still learning new shit everyday...just a month ago I bit the bullet and learned enough javasc...excuse me ECMAScript, to be pretty damn dangerous :)<p>Over the past weekend I learned docker and am now running containers all over the place...these aren&#x27;t trivial things and the speed of which I&#x27;m picking stuff up is as fast, if not faster, then it has ever been for me.<p>The point is I am 10 years older then the age this study targeted, and I find it humorous that they are telling me I am AT LEAST 25 IQ points dumber because I work 50-60 hour weeks.<p>Plus, where do I tick the box about my lifetime of pretty hardcore drug use and its supposed effects on my IQ?<p>Now I do get tired...physically tired...from the efforts required to keep up but besides that, my anecdotal experience goes against this research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rifung</author><text>&gt; my anecdotal experience goes against this research<p>There are several things wrong with your argument.<p>Even if we ignore the fact that you aren&#x27;t talking about your IQ, the fact that you learned docker or JS despite working doesn&#x27;t even go against the study: you need to compare your speed of learning after working vs while not working. Knowing only how fast you can learn after working full time isn&#x27;t enough to draw a conclusion after all..<p>Also, it&#x27;s debatable how difficult it is in terms of raw intelligence to learn JS and Docker. It could be argued that using new tools is more constrained by knowledge than by intellectual ability, and this is especially the case if you&#x27;ve learned similar things before, like another imperative language.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is full-time work bad for our brains?</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160714-is-full-time-work-bad-for-our-brains</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubano</author><text>I&#x27;m 50yo and am still learning new shit everyday...just a month ago I bit the bullet and learned enough javasc...excuse me ECMAScript, to be pretty damn dangerous :)<p>Over the past weekend I learned docker and am now running containers all over the place...these aren&#x27;t trivial things and the speed of which I&#x27;m picking stuff up is as fast, if not faster, then it has ever been for me.<p>The point is I am 10 years older then the age this study targeted, and I find it humorous that they are telling me I am AT LEAST 25 IQ points dumber because I work 50-60 hour weeks.<p>Plus, where do I tick the box about my lifetime of pretty hardcore drug use and its supposed effects on my IQ?<p>Now I do get tired...physically tired...from the efforts required to keep up but besides that, my anecdotal experience goes against this research.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Noseshine</author><text><p><pre><code> &gt; I find it humorous that they are telling me I am
&gt; AT LEAST 25 IQ points dumber
</code></pre>
They are not telling &quot;you&quot;. Statistics != &quot;everybody&quot;. No idea why you feel personally insulted. I heard x % of people are sociopaths (or insert something else bad here) - should I now complain &quot;hey, I&#x27;m <i>not</i> a sociopath (or whatever)&quot;?</text></comment> |
29,200,499 | 29,200,823 | 1 | 2 | 29,199,777 | train | <story><title>Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable</title><url>https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jagermo</author><text>Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.</text></item><item><author>daneel_w</author><text>In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our &quot;greens&quot; who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn&#x27;t because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They <i>currently</i> view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcfrei</author><text>A lot of the fuel can be recycled and doesn&#x27;t need to be stored for thousands of years. Storing the remainder underground is mostly a one-off cost except for some monitoring. It&#x27;s a solved problem and only public misconceptions about tectonics and radioactivity are holding it back.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable</title><url>https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jagermo</author><text>Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.</text></item><item><author>daneel_w</author><text>In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our &quot;greens&quot; who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn&#x27;t because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They <i>currently</i> view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oceanplexian</author><text>Why do the same debunked arguments against nuclear come up? Even if we didn&#x27;t reprocess the waste (Making the issue completely irrelevant) and had to store it, this is a solved problem. Primitive ancient civilizations were able to build structures that lasted thousands of years, I think we can handle burying some rocks in the desert in 2021.</text></comment> |
12,857,950 | 12,857,703 | 1 | 2 | 12,856,545 | train | <story><title>On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wall-street-email-idUSKBN12W4F7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smallnamespace</author><text>Time for Wikileaks to make all their internal communications public.<p>After all, don&#x27;t they believe in full transparency?</text></item><item><author>nerdo</author><text>Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]:<p>&gt; RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we&#x27;ve seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that?<p>&gt; JA: Well, I think that&#x27;s very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bartweiss</author><text>At risk of taking bait, they explicitly <i>don&#x27;t</i> believe in full transparency.<p>They&#x27;ve backed and associated with various privacy groups and suggested that individuals and groups not in the public interest deserve privacy. Assange has complicated that a little by releasing personal, unredacted emails, but it&#x27;s been their stated intent at least.<p>Give that transcript another read: &quot;organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye&quot;. That&#x27;s not decrying privacy, its decrying use of privacy to hide abusive behaviors. I haven&#x27;t seen Wikileaks accused of that; the usual accusation is that their public behaviors are politically motivated, which is very different than alleging internal corruption.</text></comment> | <story><title>On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wall-street-email-idUSKBN12W4F7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smallnamespace</author><text>Time for Wikileaks to make all their internal communications public.<p>After all, don&#x27;t they believe in full transparency?</text></item><item><author>nerdo</author><text>Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]:<p>&gt; RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we&#x27;ve seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that?<p>&gt; JA: Well, I think that&#x27;s very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,2034040,00...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text>They can be hypocrites and still accomplish their goals just fine.<p>How many people are going to avoid leaked material because Wikileaks are hypocrites?</text></comment> |
26,055,322 | 26,054,668 | 1 | 2 | 26,053,846 | train | <story><title>Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with</title><url>https://thetolkienist.com/things-j-r-r-tolkien-has-never-said-done-written-or-had-anything-to-do-with-an-on-going-series/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KineticLensman</author><text>As well as misplaced quotes, a lot or people like to identify connections between places that Tolkien lived in or visited and places in Middle Earth. Clearly, there are likely inspirations, for example, young Tolkien&#x27;s walking holiday in the Alps may have informed some of his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and World War one battlefields may have inspired the Dead Marshes and Mordor. But did &#x27;The Hollies&#x27; park in Leeds [0], where Tolkien was a professor, inspire Hollin, just outside the gates of Moria? Who can say?<p>Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.<p>[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headingleyleeds.com&#x2F;parks-hollies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headingleyleeds.com&#x2F;parks-hollies</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>101008</author><text>I may consider myself a Rowlingologist (because of JK Rowling), and it is a constant fight. A lot of places in the UK claim to have inspired JK Rowling, just because they are similar in the way they were portrayed in the films (which is very different from the books).<p>There is also the case of Livreria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, who spent years claiming JK Rowling visited it and got inspired for Hogwarts (they seem to have a similar staircase). They even held a Harry Potter event with signed books (most of them fake, probably the bookshop didnt know it, but they didnt do their dilligence).<p>Fortunatelly, Rowling denied knowing that place at all on Twitter [1], but as far as I know, the Livreria keeps telling its visitor about Rowling connection.<p>The same happens in Edinburgh (JKR city for the last 30 years), where if you do a tour, the guide will try to make a Harry Potter connection on every corner. Which is not completely true.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jk_rowling&#x2F;status&#x2F;1263377779338481665" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jk_rowling&#x2F;status&#x2F;1263377779338481665</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with</title><url>https://thetolkienist.com/things-j-r-r-tolkien-has-never-said-done-written-or-had-anything-to-do-with-an-on-going-series/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KineticLensman</author><text>As well as misplaced quotes, a lot or people like to identify connections between places that Tolkien lived in or visited and places in Middle Earth. Clearly, there are likely inspirations, for example, young Tolkien&#x27;s walking holiday in the Alps may have informed some of his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and World War one battlefields may have inspired the Dead Marshes and Mordor. But did &#x27;The Hollies&#x27; park in Leeds [0], where Tolkien was a professor, inspire Hollin, just outside the gates of Moria? Who can say?<p>Incidentally, I have lived in two of the cities that Tolkien did: Leeds and Bournemouth. As a post grad at Leeds University, the small office (just east of the current Student Union building) that I shared for a while had reputedly been used by Tolkien long before I was born. We joked that it was the inspiration for the damp, dark, twisty caves of the goblins in the Hobbit.<p>[Edit - just checked - Tolkien explicitly references his Swiss walking tour as an inspiration for parts of the Misty Mountains]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headingleyleeds.com&#x2F;parks-hollies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headingleyleeds.com&#x2F;parks-hollies</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;J._R._R._Tolkien#Youth</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p_l</author><text>I&#x27;d love if someone fact checked whether the salt mine of Wieliczka was really the inspiration for Moria (the guides do imply so, based AFAIK on a visit by Tolkien there). It does seem to fall under the &quot;likely inspiration&quot; case (if you ever visit Wieliczka, you&#x27;ll get it :D)</text></comment> |
11,282,448 | 11,282,429 | 1 | 2 | 11,281,744 | train | <story><title>February breaks global temperature records by 'shocking' amount</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/14/february-breaks-global-temperature-records-by-shocking-amount</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madaxe_again</author><text>The really sad thing is that when those forces critical to resolving this (governments, corporate interests, the majority of the global public) finally come around to the idea that climate change exists, they won&#x27;t be interested in solving it - they&#x27;ll blame their neighbours, refuse to change themselves, and will go to war.<p>Our extinction <i>is</i> coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we&#x27;ll take with us.<p>We&#x27;re just not that great, and our behaviour is &quot;primate basic&quot; to the extreme.<p>Children playing with matches.</text></item><item><author>anc84</author><text>Climate change scares me so much yet I feel completely helpless that I rather hear nothing about it. The effects have been known for years but those in power completely ignore or even sabotage attempts to act. What&#x27;s the point in hearing about it if there is practically nothing I can do but worry?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derrickdirge</author><text>Are other people made very uncomfortable by people like this looking down their nose at the entire species? I&#x27;m just not sure what these levels of defeatism and misanthropy get you.</text></comment> | <story><title>February breaks global temperature records by 'shocking' amount</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/14/february-breaks-global-temperature-records-by-shocking-amount</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madaxe_again</author><text>The really sad thing is that when those forces critical to resolving this (governments, corporate interests, the majority of the global public) finally come around to the idea that climate change exists, they won&#x27;t be interested in solving it - they&#x27;ll blame their neighbours, refuse to change themselves, and will go to war.<p>Our extinction <i>is</i> coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we&#x27;ll take with us.<p>We&#x27;re just not that great, and our behaviour is &quot;primate basic&quot; to the extreme.<p>Children playing with matches.</text></item><item><author>anc84</author><text>Climate change scares me so much yet I feel completely helpless that I rather hear nothing about it. The effects have been known for years but those in power completely ignore or even sabotage attempts to act. What&#x27;s the point in hearing about it if there is practically nothing I can do but worry?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skylan_q</author><text><i>finally come around to the idea that climate change exists</i><p>Yes... they somehow impose carbon taxes, go to climate summits and make up protocols to agree to but none of them believe in climate change.</text></comment> |
25,430,626 | 25,429,598 | 1 | 3 | 25,428,769 | train | <story><title>Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone</title><url>https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/apples-anti-tracking-plans-iphone/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LC_ALL</author><text>Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users&#x27; attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit.<p>Sent from my Thinkpad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fbelzile</author><text>&gt; <i>Their income is from selling physical devices.</i><p>Not entirely true anymore:<p>1) About $8-12 <i>billion</i> paid by Google to have their search engine default. [1]<p>2) About $20 <i>billion</i> from their 15-30% cut of third party app developers. Where the App Store is protected from competition. [2]<p>3) Apple services (like Apple TV+), which collects usage data for itself and third parties. [3]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;google-apple-search-default-8-12-billion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;25&#x2F;google-apple-search-def...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;6&#x2F;15&#x2F;21292203&#x2F;apple-app-store-ios-apps-billings-revenue-517-billion-2019-antitrust-regulation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;6&#x2F;15&#x2F;21292203&#x2F;apple-app-store-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT208511" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT208511</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone</title><url>https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/apples-anti-tracking-plans-iphone/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LC_ALL</author><text>Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users&#x27; attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit.<p>Sent from my Thinkpad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speedgoose</author><text>Why don&#x27;t they fully encrypt the icloud backups?<p>Sent from my Huawei.</text></comment> |
26,820,950 | 26,820,674 | 1 | 3 | 26,820,516 | train | <story><title>Ethereum Fork Fails on OpenEthereum</title><url>https://github.com/openethereum/openethereum/issues/353</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axiosgunnar</author><text>Can somebody explain the significance?<p>Is this related to the conflict between devs and miners where devs want to reduce the mining fees and miners responded by creating a fork?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erwan</author><text>Ethereum has different client software, they must all use the same consensus rules: produce&#x2F;gossip&#x2F;accept transactions and blocks that follow a certain format and respect certain invariants. When that specification is updated, a hard-fork occurs. It&#x27;s not a problem if all clients meet the new spec perfectly but sometimes bug happens and different clients disagree on what constitutes the canon chain. This is what happened here: the OpenEthereum client (11% of the network) has had a bug following the Berlin hard-fork (network upgrade). Nodes runnning this client are stalling at a certain block because they don&#x27;t recognize the new &quot;post-Berlin&quot; blocks as legitimate because of a bug in the implementation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ethereum Fork Fails on OpenEthereum</title><url>https://github.com/openethereum/openethereum/issues/353</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axiosgunnar</author><text>Can somebody explain the significance?<p>Is this related to the conflict between devs and miners where devs want to reduce the mining fees and miners responded by creating a fork?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yulaow</author><text>Reading the comments seems more like a technical problem on the consensus protocol of some implementation of eth nodes (in particular openethereum and geth)</text></comment> |
14,824,052 | 14,819,406 | 1 | 2 | 14,819,256 | train | <story><title>Emacs and Magit</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/727550/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnuvince</author><text>&gt; Either all of the significant contributors to Magit must sign papers with the FSF (with code from the holdouts being replaced), or an entirely new Emacs interface to Git must be written.<p>False dichotomy: GNU Emacs can simply not ship with a git porcelain.<p>Most Emacs users I know typically have dozens of packages installed from MELPA; I don&#x27;t think most users mind having to install an extra one. If an acceptable agreement regarding copyright assignment cannot be reached, I would really prefer that the status quo be maintained.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianmonk</author><text>It&#x27;s not a false dichotomy. You&#x27;re just working VERY hard at ignoring the context. The part you quoted comes right after the part that says &quot;If we want to distribute something like Magit with Emacs&quot;.<p>If you don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a worthwhile goal, that&#x27;s fine, but there is no need to blatantly misinterpret the context of the discussion here.</text></comment> | <story><title>Emacs and Magit</title><url>https://lwn.net/Articles/727550/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gnuvince</author><text>&gt; Either all of the significant contributors to Magit must sign papers with the FSF (with code from the holdouts being replaced), or an entirely new Emacs interface to Git must be written.<p>False dichotomy: GNU Emacs can simply not ship with a git porcelain.<p>Most Emacs users I know typically have dozens of packages installed from MELPA; I don&#x27;t think most users mind having to install an extra one. If an acceptable agreement regarding copyright assignment cannot be reached, I would really prefer that the status quo be maintained.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Singletoned</author><text>Yeah, maybe Magit is also the killer app for the &#x27;package&#x27; system as well.</text></comment> |
19,481,885 | 19,481,767 | 1 | 2 | 19,481,185 | train | <story><title>How Japanese Police Turned Cyber Prank into Arresting Cases</title><url>https://b.shujisado.com/2019/03/how-japanese-police-turned-cyber-prank.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ptero</author><text>I think there are two things here: first is that Japan is so safe that police is actively looking for cases to pursue. I remember reading of police putting (as a trap) a case of beer in an open car at a shopping plaza, monitoring it for a week before finally nabbing a retiree who opened a door (whether to &quot;steal&quot; the beer or just to investigate). In and of itself such safely is, IMO, something to celebrate.<p>The second is that the justice system is structured so that the state is always right and the criminal system famously has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%. Couple this with the vaguely defined laws (as cited in the article) and the desire by police to find some criminals, somewhere, and the results can be ugly. Dangerous to the bystanders at best, enabling local dictatorial powers at worst. My 2c.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Japanese Police Turned Cyber Prank into Arresting Cases</title><url>https://b.shujisado.com/2019/03/how-japanese-police-turned-cyber-prank.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scottishcow</author><text>Just to remind you all, this is coming from a country whose cybersecurity minister claims to have &quot;never touched a PC in his life&quot;.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-46222026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-46222026</a></text></comment> |
27,630,492 | 27,630,395 | 1 | 2 | 27,628,740 | train | <story><title>Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/25/blood-test-that-finds-50-types-of-cancer-is-accurate-enough-to-be-rolled-out</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Your belief has no representation in medical science, which is mostly evidence based. A lot of data has been collected on this, studies (many) have been conducted and the general consensus is that more testing absent symptoms does not lead to improved patient outcomes.<p>That you want to have some kind of theoretical argument in the face of this evidence might be interesting to you but it isn&#x27;t to me.</text></item><item><author>ggrrhh_ta</author><text>Have heard your argument on the false positives and unnecessary interventions many times.<p>It is not a good argument. In fact, it makes no sense. If you get a positive with an uncertainty in its accuracy, at the very least, the test is repeated. But even more, you can use the information from the investigation of the reason for the false positive to improve the tests in the first place. If we weren&#x27;t humans and the uncertainty of the test is known then at the very very very least you could throw a dice to decide whether you discard or not the test result.<p>If more information leads to worse decisions it just means that the noise level introduced by the test is just too high. A way to reduce the noise is two amplify the signal, and a way to amplify the signal is to look for more information (other tests, other indirect measurements: i.e., look for B if A was positive, etc.).</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do with ability, but everything to do with outcomes.<p>Those cancers where checkups are useful we already do regular screenings for.<p>For aggressive cancers - the ones that are really problematic - you would have to do such a test too frequently to make any real difference, for instance, if you were to test annually you&#x27;d be on average 6 months away from your next test, plenty of time for such a cancer to develop and kill you.<p>So this is not the kind of breakthrough that you may think it is.</text></item><item><author>reacharavindh</author><text>This is one of those medical revolutions that I am waiting dearly for.<p>Facilities that are not hospitals(to avoid the risk of occupying medical devices that sick people need) built to _regulary_ check up otherwise healthy people for preventive care.<p>Heck, I have so many alerts defined on my monitoring setup for servers to watch for signals of failure before they get too big. But, my own body is not observed until something bad needs treatment. Why can’t we observe ourselves medically and analyze that record for early signs of trouble before it becomes serious?!<p>All the advancement in technology in recent years, this ought to happen sooner than later.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>melling</author><text>Less information is better?<p>That would be a bit of a paradox in science. I suppose we might take 2 steps forward and 1 step backward in the short term. As medical science advances, hopefully we can address any shortcomings from the additional early knowledge.<p>I noticed that pancreatic is on the list. This cancer is almost always fatal because we can&#x27;t detect it early.</text></comment> | <story><title>Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/25/blood-test-that-finds-50-types-of-cancer-is-accurate-enough-to-be-rolled-out</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Your belief has no representation in medical science, which is mostly evidence based. A lot of data has been collected on this, studies (many) have been conducted and the general consensus is that more testing absent symptoms does not lead to improved patient outcomes.<p>That you want to have some kind of theoretical argument in the face of this evidence might be interesting to you but it isn&#x27;t to me.</text></item><item><author>ggrrhh_ta</author><text>Have heard your argument on the false positives and unnecessary interventions many times.<p>It is not a good argument. In fact, it makes no sense. If you get a positive with an uncertainty in its accuracy, at the very least, the test is repeated. But even more, you can use the information from the investigation of the reason for the false positive to improve the tests in the first place. If we weren&#x27;t humans and the uncertainty of the test is known then at the very very very least you could throw a dice to decide whether you discard or not the test result.<p>If more information leads to worse decisions it just means that the noise level introduced by the test is just too high. A way to reduce the noise is two amplify the signal, and a way to amplify the signal is to look for more information (other tests, other indirect measurements: i.e., look for B if A was positive, etc.).</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>Regularly checking people that are otherwise healthy for cancer will turn up a lot of cancer through false positives or slowly growing ones, will lead to a lot of unnecessary intervention and will in fact lead to a reduction in quality of life and lifespan. This is one of the reasons why exhaustive cancer screening (which was more costly in the past but could have been done) was not promoted, it had nothing to do with ability, but everything to do with outcomes.<p>Those cancers where checkups are useful we already do regular screenings for.<p>For aggressive cancers - the ones that are really problematic - you would have to do such a test too frequently to make any real difference, for instance, if you were to test annually you&#x27;d be on average 6 months away from your next test, plenty of time for such a cancer to develop and kill you.<p>So this is not the kind of breakthrough that you may think it is.</text></item><item><author>reacharavindh</author><text>This is one of those medical revolutions that I am waiting dearly for.<p>Facilities that are not hospitals(to avoid the risk of occupying medical devices that sick people need) built to _regulary_ check up otherwise healthy people for preventive care.<p>Heck, I have so many alerts defined on my monitoring setup for servers to watch for signals of failure before they get too big. But, my own body is not observed until something bad needs treatment. Why can’t we observe ourselves medically and analyze that record for early signs of trouble before it becomes serious?!<p>All the advancement in technology in recent years, this ought to happen sooner than later.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amluto</author><text>You’re making an unwarranted assumption: that the choice is between early detection <i>with current responses to detected cancers</i> and no early detection at all. Optimizing the response to an early detection will give a result no worse than either of those, since the choices of what to do include doing whatever doctors did in the studies that have poor results as well as doing nothing at all.</text></comment> |
36,205,470 | 36,203,655 | 1 | 2 | 36,203,204 | train | <story><title>Is there a wider internet outage today?</title><url>https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Is HN struggling so much due to the Apple event or is there another explanation?</text></item><item><author>brucethemoose2</author><text>I know HN is getting hugged right now, but many other websites on mobile and landline internet (in the southern US) are chugging for me.<p>A conspicuous number of services are showing outages on downdetector and thousandeyes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>I haven&#x27;t dug into the logs but I assume it&#x27;s the Apple announcement.<p>Major perf improvements are coming (fingers crossed), but alas not yet. Sorry all!</text></comment> | <story><title>Is there a wider internet outage today?</title><url>https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Is HN struggling so much due to the Apple event or is there another explanation?</text></item><item><author>brucethemoose2</author><text>I know HN is getting hugged right now, but many other websites on mobile and landline internet (in the southern US) are chugging for me.<p>A conspicuous number of services are showing outages on downdetector and thousandeyes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>entropie</author><text>I have serious routing&#x2F;peering issues all day long from germany (vodafone).<p>Dyndns is struggling also for me the entire day.</text></comment> |
16,296,167 | 16,295,679 | 1 | 2 | 16,291,866 | train | <story><title>New reports suggest limits to autonomous vehicle performance</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/have-selfdriving-cars-stopped-getting-better</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwbas1c</author><text>Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die!<p>Where&#x27;s my automatic lawn mower? Where&#x27;s my robot to unload the dishwasher and put everything away?<p>We need to find other consumer technology to use AI in before we risk our lives with self driving cars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>visarga</author><text>&gt; Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die!<p>Google can&#x27;t even make GPS mapping work perfectly - it&#x27;s apparent if you use it for a day. Not to mention that AI vision systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which means they can be hacked by external images. This paper just came out yesterday: &quot;Breaking 7&#x2F;8 of the ICLR 2018 adversarial example defenses&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1802.00420" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1802.00420</a>). The situation is dire.<p>I think they are afraid that drawing a couple of lines with a marker on a street sign might make it invisible, or turn it into another sign. They can&#x27;t defend against such attacks because the neural net doesn&#x27;t actually understand the world, it just observes patterns. Understanding requires causal reasoning.</text></comment> | <story><title>New reports suggest limits to autonomous vehicle performance</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/have-selfdriving-cars-stopped-getting-better</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwbas1c</author><text>Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die!<p>Where&#x27;s my automatic lawn mower? Where&#x27;s my robot to unload the dishwasher and put everything away?<p>We need to find other consumer technology to use AI in before we risk our lives with self driving cars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bastawhiz</author><text>On the flip side, very few people die while mowing the lawn or unloading the dishwasher. If you mow the lawn poorly, you&#x27;ll be fine. If you unload the dishwasher while drunk, there&#x27;s no risk of killing a family.<p>I know enough people that drive terribly to see the obvious benefits to autonomous driving. It doesn&#x27;t need to be perfect to have a net-positive effect on road safety, it just needs to be better than a human on average. And based on the evidence, it seems they&#x27;re doing a damn good job of achieving that goal.</text></comment> |
18,318,175 | 18,316,843 | 1 | 3 | 18,316,342 | train | <story><title>Hubble is back</title><url>https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/update-on-the-hubble-space-telescope-safe-mode</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>datahipster</author><text>Ha!<p>They were able to recover the failed backup gyroscope by executing a series of attitude maneuvers while switching between operational modes on the gyro.<p>They literally shook the spacecraft and turned the gyro off-and-on.<p>Sometimes you gotta bang on something to get it to work!<p>I would love to buy a beer for the mission operations team member who came up with that idea!</text></comment> | <story><title>Hubble is back</title><url>https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/update-on-the-hubble-space-telescope-safe-mode</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ourmandave</author><text>From this link...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubblesite.org&#x2F;the_telescope&#x2F;team_hubble&#x2F;#hubbletime" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubblesite.org&#x2F;the_telescope&#x2F;team_hubble&#x2F;#hubbletime</a><p><i>Each year astronomers from dozens of countries vie for precious minutes of Hubble&#x27;s unrivaled view of the cosmos.<p>A review committee made up of experts from the astronomical community determines which proposed observations address pressing scientific questions and make the best use of the telescope&#x27;s capabilities.<p>Each year more than 1,000 proposals are reviewed and approximately 200 are selected, which represents roughly 20,000 individual observations.</i><p>I feel bad for all the projects that got delayed. I wonder if they&#x27;ll be rescheduled, or have to be resubmitted or are just out of luck.</text></comment> |
22,346,959 | 22,345,559 | 1 | 2 | 22,341,983 | train | <story><title>I Learned French in 12 Months</title><url>http://www.runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BTBurke</author><text>I don&#x27;t believe there is a shortcut for &quot;hacking&quot; languages. I&#x27;m a diplomat, and currently learning my fourth language to the C1+ level.<p>When we learn languages, it&#x27;s a full time job. It was 9 months to learn Mandarin to a B1, 6 months to a C1+ in Spanish, and I&#x27;m currently at a B1 in Estonian after 5 months.<p>There are several things I think are crucial after years of full time study (note: this assumes you&#x27;re going for professional fluency, not just touring around the country where interactions are largely scripted and predictable):<p>* There is no substitute for production - you must speak the language with a native speaker (not an app) and talk about topics that are relevant to the kind of scenarios you anticipate. We spend the first several months discussing current events in target language - at first scripted, then later free form. This builds vocabulary and helps fluency. This is quickly expanded to discussing current events in depth and participating in mock debates.<p>* Give mini presentations - target 3-5 minutes of talking about a relevant topic with little prep time. The difference between intermediate and advanced is the ability to move from discussing only facts to making a coherent argument. Native speakers will often not be able to follow your train of thought without learning to connect cause and effect using structures appropriate for your language.<p>* Interview native speakers - prepare 2-3 questions about a particular topic and check your comprehension by translating their answers to English. This obviously helps build your comprehension, but also helps to learn to &quot;automate&quot; comprehension while you are thinking about something else. If you can take notes in English while a native speaker is talking at normal speed (and achieving 90%+ accuracy), it will make it easier for you to participate in normal speed conversations.<p>* Read target language news - this is critical for expanding vocabulary and learning colocations - knowing what verbs are used in particular contexts (e.g., do they say &quot;I talked <i>with</i> X&quot; or &quot;I talked <i>to</i> X&quot;. Do they say country X shot, launched, or threw a rocket?)<p>Bottom line - language learning is not just about the number of hours you put in. The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot. You aren&#x27;t going to be fluent via Duolingo alone. You need to put in the time using structured practice with native speakers to really learn anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>namelosw</author><text>Totally agree on there is no shortcut for &quot;hacking&quot; languages. But at the same time &quot;The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot&quot; as you&#x27;ve said.<p>And also, for learning languages, one way could be significantly less painful than others.<p>I grew up in China, where almost every student struggles so much on English learning, every day. I found myself very easy to pass every exam and beating the average, without listening to the lectures or doing any homework - simply by playing video games (especially RPG). I was&#x2F;am by no means excellent at English, but it was almost a totally free perk for me.<p>Basically video games are:<p>1. Designed to be both engaging and challenging, whereas schools suck at those so much.<p>2. Have specific and meaningful targets, if you failed to understand what&#x27;s going on or what&#x27;s the mechanism you&#x27;re not likely to play along.<p>3. Including scenarios and plots. A lot of reading and listening activities. You don&#x27;t have to appoint a teacher or native speaker to talk with you. You can start anytime you want (except I have intolerant parents so I have to play it sneakily).<p>4. Cheap.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Learned French in 12 Months</title><url>http://www.runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BTBurke</author><text>I don&#x27;t believe there is a shortcut for &quot;hacking&quot; languages. I&#x27;m a diplomat, and currently learning my fourth language to the C1+ level.<p>When we learn languages, it&#x27;s a full time job. It was 9 months to learn Mandarin to a B1, 6 months to a C1+ in Spanish, and I&#x27;m currently at a B1 in Estonian after 5 months.<p>There are several things I think are crucial after years of full time study (note: this assumes you&#x27;re going for professional fluency, not just touring around the country where interactions are largely scripted and predictable):<p>* There is no substitute for production - you must speak the language with a native speaker (not an app) and talk about topics that are relevant to the kind of scenarios you anticipate. We spend the first several months discussing current events in target language - at first scripted, then later free form. This builds vocabulary and helps fluency. This is quickly expanded to discussing current events in depth and participating in mock debates.<p>* Give mini presentations - target 3-5 minutes of talking about a relevant topic with little prep time. The difference between intermediate and advanced is the ability to move from discussing only facts to making a coherent argument. Native speakers will often not be able to follow your train of thought without learning to connect cause and effect using structures appropriate for your language.<p>* Interview native speakers - prepare 2-3 questions about a particular topic and check your comprehension by translating their answers to English. This obviously helps build your comprehension, but also helps to learn to &quot;automate&quot; comprehension while you are thinking about something else. If you can take notes in English while a native speaker is talking at normal speed (and achieving 90%+ accuracy), it will make it easier for you to participate in normal speed conversations.<p>* Read target language news - this is critical for expanding vocabulary and learning colocations - knowing what verbs are used in particular contexts (e.g., do they say &quot;I talked <i>with</i> X&quot; or &quot;I talked <i>to</i> X&quot;. Do they say country X shot, launched, or threw a rocket?)<p>Bottom line - language learning is not just about the number of hours you put in. The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot. You aren&#x27;t going to be fluent via Duolingo alone. You need to put in the time using structured practice with native speakers to really learn anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rajlego</author><text>Have you heard of Stephen Krashen&#x27;s Input Hypothesis? [1] There are a couple of parts to it but it essentially says that linguistic competence (a fancy way to say your innate knowledge of a language) only increases when you take in input. If you talk all day that doesn&#x27;t really make you any better (since you don&#x27;t learn anything new) unless you use a process like deliberate feedback to be corrected. Personally I think it&#x27;s much more useful to thus focus on reading&#x2F;listening to start and then later move on to speaking&#x2F;writing. I learned Spanish through normal school and while I can speak fast the fact that I haven&#x27;t had much real input really shows since I&#x27;m generally just translating English -&gt; spanish and I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m using grammar right since I haven&#x27;t heard it enough.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Input_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Input_hypothesis</a></text></comment> |
6,551,086 | 6,549,430 | 1 | 3 | 6,548,692 | train | <story><title>How the .0001% Made Its Money</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-the-0001-made-its-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>programminggeek</author><text>&gt; The economic story of the past decades is supposed to be the death of the American Dream. Income inequality has risen, the wealth of the middle class stagnated, and stories of the poor working their way to prosperity became just stories.<p>I think the article doesn&#x27;t really do a good job to change that view. The inequality has risen and the wealth of the middle class has stagnated. This is absolutely true.<p>Things like raises are no longer the norm, bonuses in many jobs have disappeared, prices and debt have risen much faster than the rise in income. At the same time, wealthy people continue to grow their wealth.<p>The fact the top 0.0001% gained their wealth not by inheriting it doesn&#x27;t change what is happening to the poor, middle class, etc. as a result.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bedhead</author><text>The widening wealth inequality as it relates to inheritance can be explained mostly by one simple concept, something Buffett himself call the most powerful force in the universe: compounding. Wise people with money, given enough time, will rocket to become insanely wealthy. Compounding does nothing for the middle class who generally spend most of their income, and it works the opposite way for the poor who are debtors. Over time this force will make the wealth gap worse and worse, which is exactly what&#x27;s happened.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the .0001% Made Its Money</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-the-0001-made-its-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>programminggeek</author><text>&gt; The economic story of the past decades is supposed to be the death of the American Dream. Income inequality has risen, the wealth of the middle class stagnated, and stories of the poor working their way to prosperity became just stories.<p>I think the article doesn&#x27;t really do a good job to change that view. The inequality has risen and the wealth of the middle class has stagnated. This is absolutely true.<p>Things like raises are no longer the norm, bonuses in many jobs have disappeared, prices and debt have risen much faster than the rise in income. At the same time, wealthy people continue to grow their wealth.<p>The fact the top 0.0001% gained their wealth not by inheriting it doesn&#x27;t change what is happening to the poor, middle class, etc. as a result.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Samuel_Michon</author><text>&gt; The top 0.0001% gained their wealth not by inheriting it<p>How did you come to that conclusion? I looked for that in the figures, but I couldn’t find what percentage came into money from an inheritance. Perhaps it’s placed in the 12% ‘Diversified&#x2F;Other’ category, but the impression I got from the article was that they tallied how the money was earned in the first place, not where the ones holding the purse got it from.<p>I believe your interpretation of the article in this aspect is incorrect. For instance, 4 of the top 10 spots are taken up by members of the Walton family. Those people inherited their wealth from Bud and Sam Walton, the founders of Wal*Mart.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Walton_family</a></text></comment> |
834,724 | 834,791 | 1 | 2 | 834,267 | train | <story><title>Rich, Black, Flunking</title><url>http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/PrintFriendly?oid=285317</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpatru</author><text>Reminds me of a passage from Philip Greenspun's article, How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates, <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/" rel="nofollow">http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/</a>:<p>When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".<p>The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>n8agrin</author><text>Perhaps this is a tangent, but the notion of <i>...creating a cozy home for unproductive people...</i> resonated with something I learned from a kiteboard instructor, of all people:<p>When I was learning to kiteboard I was out one day for a couple hours, had a good session and decided I was ready to get out of the water. I wasn't exhausted, but I was getting tired.<p>My instructor came speeding up next to me and asked me what I was doing. I explained I was getting tired and wanted to head in. He tossed his really nice new kiteboard my way, told me to give him the old beat up kiteboard I was riding and to go back out. I was reluctant but he pushed me and I caved in. My session went from good to great, and I think my kiteboarding skills improved more in that extra hour than in many of the days prior.<p>Later that night I was telling my instructor how well I did on the newer board and how I had been ready to give up for the day. He told me "Sometimes you just have to push yourself that extra 5%, even when you think you can't." That statement has been a guiding principle throughout my life ever since.<p>Any time I feel like I'm in too much in my comfort zone, not challenging myself to learn new things, or feel I'm incapable of doing something, I remember my kiteboarder's adage and try to push myself just a little bit more. So far it seems to have worked well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Rich, Black, Flunking</title><url>http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/PrintFriendly?oid=285317</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpatru</author><text>Reminds me of a passage from Philip Greenspun's article, How to Become as Rich as Bill Gates, <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/" rel="nofollow">http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/</a>:<p>When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard." A friend of mine was a surgery resident at Johns Hopkins. He complained to one of his teachers that he was having trouble concentrating because he'd been up all night for several nights in a row. The professor replied "Oh... does your pussy hurt?" According to Business Week, Jack Welch "encouraged near-brutal candor in the meetings he held [at GE]".<p>The bottom line: self-esteem is great but beware of creating a cozy home for unproductive people with bad ideas.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gruseom</author><text>I don't think your two stories are the same thing. The MIT professor was being blunt, but not rude, and providing helpful advice (if not in a pleasant form). The medical professor was being rude to the point of abuse, and was not being helpful so much as an enforcer of the insane culture of medical training that causes residents to have to stay up for several nights in a row in the first place. (IIRC, sleep deprivation has been shown to lead to increased medical errors.)</text></comment> |
10,166,039 | 10,166,035 | 1 | 2 | 10,165,289 | train | <story><title>MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/09/03/msbuild-is-going-cross-platform-with-net-core.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BinaryIdiot</author><text>I know MSBuild gets a lot of hate but this is still great news. The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. I&#x27;m curious, when everything is finally done, what the adoption rates will be like. Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Will they avoid it because &quot;M$&quot;?<p>All good stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fiatjaf</author><text>Anyone who does not like MS because of the $ cannot at the same time like Java.</text></comment> | <story><title>MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/09/03/msbuild-is-going-cross-platform-with-net-core.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BinaryIdiot</author><text>I know MSBuild gets a lot of hate but this is still great news. The end goal of having a .Net project be compile-able on Windows, Linux and Mac is going to be awesome. I&#x27;m curious, when everything is finally done, what the adoption rates will be like. Will hard-core Linux users who used Java migrate when it makes sense? Will they avoid it because &quot;M$&quot;?<p>All good stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swozey</author><text>It will be very nice to be able to do CI&#x2F;compilation on extremely cheap and fast (to spin up) linux slaves as opposed to requiring an expensive (license, hardware) and slow (miserably slow ec2 boots) Windows servers.</text></comment> |
19,533,219 | 19,533,322 | 1 | 2 | 19,532,643 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Tinytetris – 80 x 23 Terminal Tetris</title><url>https://github.com/taylorconor/tinytetris</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bitwize</author><text>Friendly reminder: Tetris is one of the most valuable, and vigorously defended, game IPs in the world. Such aspects of the game as the dimensions of the playfield and the shapes of the tetrominoes are protected by copyrights and trademarks belonging to Tetris Holdings LLC -- and Tetris Holdings is Oracle-tier litigious. Yes, this has stood up in court. Hope you like unfriendly C&amp;Ds from powerful attorneys.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Tinytetris – 80 x 23 Terminal Tetris</title><url>https://github.com/taylorconor/tinytetris</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>legohead</author><text>There used to be a playable Tetris in the favicon, which I found from HN[1], but it looks like the website[2] is dead now :(<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3873623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3873623</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;favris.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;favris.info&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
29,394,531 | 29,393,516 | 1 | 2 | 29,391,714 | train | <story><title>Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought</title><url>https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/arcticocean</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waterthrowaway</author><text>Hello!<p>I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.<p>Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.<p>It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?<p>Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.ac.uk&#x2F;download&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;288430943.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.ac.uk&#x2F;download&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;288430943.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mempko</author><text>I am often shocked how a community like HN could have so many global warming skeptics. It doesn&#x27;t make sense to me because people who deal with software should understand complex systems. Should understand how hard understanding complex systems are. And should understand how dangerous it is to disrupt complex systems so dramatically like we did the climate.</text></comment> | <story><title>Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought</title><url>https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/arcticocean</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waterthrowaway</author><text>Hello!<p>I’m a physical oceanographer which means my job is to figure out how the water moves and delivers heat through things like math and models. Paleoclimate isn’t my expertise but I figured I’d chime in on some of the climate skepticism here.<p>Oceanographers would be the first to admit that modeling-predicting changes in the ocean is very hard. Especially more regional features like an intensified warming in the Labrador Sea. That is because even state of the art models have coarse resolution and our initial conditions for far in the past are poor. However, anthropogenic climate change is not a regional effect.<p>It’s like if first I asked you, what will happen if I hit this window with a hammer? It will break. Now what if I ask you where every piece will go?<p>Also I’ve seen in this thread people saying that global climate change has been overhyped. From the science side this paper does a great job of evaluating our models from the past:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.ac.uk&#x2F;download&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;288430943.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.ac.uk&#x2F;download&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;288430943.pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waterthrowaway</author><text>If you are interested in the irreducible imprecision of climate models this paper is fun too<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;104&#x2F;21&#x2F;8709" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;104&#x2F;21&#x2F;8709</a></text></comment> |
4,455,532 | 4,455,239 | 1 | 2 | 4,454,852 | train | <story><title>Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noonespecial</author><text><i>Storing a permanent copy rather than a buffer just large enough for streaming is a pessimization, not an optimization.</i><p>And there's my word of the day. Can't wait to go pessimize me some software systems. Heh. Theses days, it's practically my job description.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/why-johnny-cant-stream-how-video-copyright-went-insane/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>johrn</author><text>So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues.<p>I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.<p>The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.</text></comment> |
34,653,069 | 34,651,472 | 1 | 2 | 34,650,987 | train | <story><title>Expected changes with Dropbox for macOS</title><url>https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jez</author><text>A lot of people are taking this as yet another example of Dropbox changing things for no reason, but I think it’s important to make clear that in this case Apple is forcing their hand. Dropbox is being told by Apple that apps must integrate with File Provider API[1] if they want to present files that don&#x27;t exist on disk until they’re first opened.<p>This API is hamstrung and limiting, full of instabilities and quirks (designed to fit iCloud primarily but not necessarily everyone else).<p>In my opinion, the fault lies with Apple here.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;fileprovider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;fileprovider</a><p>(Full disclosure: I interned at Dropbox for 3 months 8 years ago.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>t8sr</author><text>Apple can’t (yet) stop you syncing a folder somewhere on the disk. Other services offer this feature - sync.com for example, which I switched to after Dropbox announced this change.<p>Dropbox wants to offer some features that are only available through Apple’s API. They want to be on the App Store. But they need to weigh that against what still is their primary feature, and literally how the product was described when sold. “A folder synchronized across all your devices.”<p>I am not a product manager, but I simply would not throw out my main feature and the thing that differentiates me in the market, in order to provide some features Apple wants, where the only difference between me and OneDrive is the icon.</text></comment> | <story><title>Expected changes with Dropbox for macOS</title><url>https://help.dropbox.com/installs/macos-support-for-expected-changes</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jez</author><text>A lot of people are taking this as yet another example of Dropbox changing things for no reason, but I think it’s important to make clear that in this case Apple is forcing their hand. Dropbox is being told by Apple that apps must integrate with File Provider API[1] if they want to present files that don&#x27;t exist on disk until they’re first opened.<p>This API is hamstrung and limiting, full of instabilities and quirks (designed to fit iCloud primarily but not necessarily everyone else).<p>In my opinion, the fault lies with Apple here.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;fileprovider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;fileprovider</a><p>(Full disclosure: I interned at Dropbox for 3 months 8 years ago.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shortformblog</author><text>I had frustrations with Dropbox about a lot of this when I realized they had made little public effort for Apple Silicon, but I think the fact that Dropbox is kind of stuck moving in this direction essentially highlights that Apple’s approach to cloud works for Apple … but not really anyone else.<p>I think for tools like like Box or even OneDrive, this move makes sense for, but Dropbox is intended to be a living backup of your primary folders, and that model just doesn’t fit with this.<p>This is almost bad enough to the point where the right play might be to have a machine on another platform, like Linux or Windows, manage your file sync, then to just access it on your local network. Apple really messed this up.</text></comment> |
1,955,883 | 1,955,856 | 1 | 2 | 1,955,559 | train | <story><title>Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)</title><url>http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lmkg</author><text>It's a pretty good analysis, and Assange seems to have put a lot of thought into it. However, he's making an assumption that I think is unfounded, which is treating the concentration of political power as monolithic. If you assume that an organization is concerned about the power of the organization, then I think he's correct in his logic that authoritarianism leads to conspiracy and communication is important to having power. However, if you assume that most members of an organization are concerned with personal power rather than the power of the organization, then the importance of communication goes down sharply, as the only coordination is opportunistic. A bureaucracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, is quite content without having goals, coordination, or communication[1], and can expand its authority based entirely on the mission creep of lower-level individuals within it.<p>How valuable the disruption of communication is in fighting a "regime" depends on how you model that regime. And, of course, in practice you will find that reality is some bizarre chimera of any group of models. My intuition is that Congress (plus lobbyists) act more like a decentralized bureaucracy, executive administrations act more like dictatorships that fight against each other for territory, and that the closest things we find to Assange's "banal conspiracies" are small, ad-hoc, opportunistic alignment of objectives, much smaller, less powerful, and less stable than the government as a whole.<p>[1] In fact, lack of coordination could help a bureaucracy grow by fostering redundancy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)</title><url>http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-computer-conspiracy-“to-destroy-this-invisible-government”</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CWuestefeld</author><text>tl;dr version (and it is quite long). I've copied out what I think are the key bits, the following is all quoted:<p>He begins by positing that conspiracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand, arguing that since authoritarianism produces resistance to itself -- to the extent that its authoritarianism becomes generally known -- it can only continue to exist and function by preventing its intentions (the authorship of its authority?) from being generally known. It inevitably becomes, he argues, a conspiracy ...<p>the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make "leaks" a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the <i>Collateral Murder</i> video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire ...<p>The leak, in other words, is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; Wikileaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat. As it tries to plug its own holes and find the leakers, he reasons, its component elements will de-synchronize from and turn against each other, de-link from the central processing network, and come undone.<p>... he quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s words from his 1912 Progressive party presidential platform as the epigraph to the first essay; Roosevelt realized a hundred years ago that "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," and it was true, then too, that "To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship."</text></comment> |
2,235,548 | 2,235,418 | 1 | 3 | 2,235,281 | train | <story><title>Is Scheme Faster than C?</title><url>http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dkarl</author><text>This makes me so nostalgic. Ah, to be back in school when the hardest thing I had to do was math, and I didn't have to worry about anyone wanting to modify my code or coming to me saying, "Hey, dkarl, we just signed a huge contract, and part of what we promised is that a 2 in the hundreds place of the left operand will be treated as a 3 when we do multiplication for this customer. What base? I don't know, rebel base alpha. I'm just the project manager. The product manager answers those kinds of questions. And make sure it's configurable, because the customer has been going back and forth a bit about the specifics, and we don't think we'll be able to nail them down before we deploy."</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Scheme Faster than C?</title><url>http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text><i>Out of a class of about 15 students, only one
person beat me (and only barely), and he wrote significant portions of
his program directly in Assembly Language. The next fastest after me
took nearly twice as long to do the same work.<p>...A runtime profile of my program revealed
that the majority of time was spent in the C routines "malloc" and
"free."</i><p>For all of the beginning programmers and most of the student programmers out there: Yes often a fast JIT VM might actually beat your C or get pretty close! If you ever become a good programmer, then you can do much better than the JIT in key situations.<p>EDIT: There's a self evaluation method here for aspiring C programmers. Start benchmarking your code against the same thing in LuaJIT. You're not "good" until you know how to routinely beat it by a factor approaching 2. And that's necessary, but not sufficient.</text></comment> |
12,873,033 | 12,871,673 | 1 | 3 | 12,870,811 | train | <story><title>“Ultrasonic cross-device tracking” embeds inaudible tones in advertisements</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/how-to-block-the-ultrasonic-signals-you-didnt-know-were-tracking-you/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>This is reaching the point where the only sensible policy is to flat-out prohibit all forms of adverting on any medium. Paying a company to lie to you is already a pretty bizarre idea but the invasion of privacy - online or offline - makes advertising increasingly intolerable.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Ultrasonic cross-device tracking” embeds inaudible tones in advertisements</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/how-to-block-the-ultrasonic-signals-you-didnt-know-were-tracking-you/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cooper12</author><text>Sorry but I found this to be very disappointing scarebait from Ars, who I expected to have higher standards. It doesn&#x27;t explain how common this is yet the title makes it sound like it&#x27;s super prevalent. (not to mention we&#x27;re already being tracked in other ways that are worth worrying about more) It does a horrible job at explaining what&#x27;s actually going on and why advertisers might use this instead of alternatives, in fact I still don&#x27;t know. (something about every ad containing ultrasonic sounds and everyone making their app use the microphone to constantly listen for them—I get that it&#x27;s a real thing but sounds way too contrived and complicated to be common) The title is also super clickbait and I wouldn&#x27;t characterize it as the good type of FUD. The solution they propose is a proof-of-concept patch, so not an actual functioning solution (and their extension is supposed to block ultrasonic frequencies, but advertisers will just move to audible frequencies then and mask it as music). Even if they improved the title, the article itself is flawed and is predicated on making us scared of this, even having the gall to say &quot;Now that you’re sufficiently concerned&quot;. C&#x27;mon Ars... I get wanting to point out troubling practices and increasing awareness, but at least do it in a less knee-jerk and more informative manner.</text></comment> |
10,170,091 | 10,168,866 | 1 | 2 | 10,168,170 | train | <story><title>Perl 6 hands-on tutorial – A small introduction to a big language [pdf]</title><url>http://jnthn.net/papers/2015-spw-perl6-course.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubot</author><text>Why is this surprising? Floats are defined by the hardware essentially, not the language.<p>And this is how they work: they&#x27;re binary, not decimal. Computers are binary, not decimal. 0.1 can&#x27;t be represented exactly as binary.<p>Python has a decimal type, if that&#x27;s what you want: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;2&#x2F;library&#x2F;decimal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;2&#x2F;library&#x2F;decimal.html</a><p>I consider it a basic point of computer literacy to understand this.</text></item><item><author>natch</author><text>&quot;Try 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 in some other language, then try it in Perl 6.&quot;<p>Whoa, wtf python:<p><pre><code> $ python
Python 3.4.3 (default, Jul 13 2015, 12:18:23)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.53)] on darwin
Type &quot;help&quot;, &quot;copyright&quot;, &quot;credits&quot; or &quot;license&quot; for more information.
&gt;&gt;&gt; 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3
False
&gt;&gt;&gt;</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>That decimal literals represent binary floating point numbers is defined by the language, not the hardware.<p>I consider it a basic point of language design literacy that exact decimal literals without some other indicators should not represent an inexact type that isn&#x27;t designed to represent decimal data.<p>Infuriatingly, very few languages get that right. But perl 6 isn&#x27;t unique in doing so; Scheme had been doing it right for decades.</text></comment> | <story><title>Perl 6 hands-on tutorial – A small introduction to a big language [pdf]</title><url>http://jnthn.net/papers/2015-spw-perl6-course.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubot</author><text>Why is this surprising? Floats are defined by the hardware essentially, not the language.<p>And this is how they work: they&#x27;re binary, not decimal. Computers are binary, not decimal. 0.1 can&#x27;t be represented exactly as binary.<p>Python has a decimal type, if that&#x27;s what you want: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;2&#x2F;library&#x2F;decimal.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;2&#x2F;library&#x2F;decimal.html</a><p>I consider it a basic point of computer literacy to understand this.</text></item><item><author>natch</author><text>&quot;Try 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 in some other language, then try it in Perl 6.&quot;<p>Whoa, wtf python:<p><pre><code> $ python
Python 3.4.3 (default, Jul 13 2015, 12:18:23)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.53)] on darwin
Type &quot;help&quot;, &quot;copyright&quot;, &quot;credits&quot; or &quot;license&quot; for more information.
&gt;&gt;&gt; 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3
False
&gt;&gt;&gt;</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>While defaulting to floats for rational numbers may be the default for many languages, it is by no means the only way to store them, which is why we&#x27;re talking about them. In Perl 6 they are often stored as a numerator and denominator within the Rat type, and converted for display.</text></comment> |
1,925,527 | 1,925,430 | 1 | 3 | 1,925,253 | train | <story><title>Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wheaties</author><text>This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've heard from software development circles for years and yet...<p>1. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math in charge of the algebra class? Guess what the next teacher has to deal with.<p>2. How do "normal" people in managerial roles judge competency between two people in such roles? When looking at our own industry we see how difficult it is for "normal" people to make those sorts of judgement calls. Some schools require only 2 years teaching experience before moving on to superintendent roles. Some states more. With such divergence what can we expect?<p>3. How will we measure such excellence? What metric? What new system will evolve to capitalize on this metric despite the spirit of the metric? Unintended consequences?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>There is no bureaucratic rule that can be devised that can separate good teachers from bad ones. Every such rule can and will be gamed. It's like the difference between art and porn - the difference is obvious by inspection, but impossible to codify.<p>With a free market school system, people will know who the good teachers are and will pay for them (supply and demand).<p>With a government school system, this simply will never work, because the people paying the salaries will never be the ones judging the teachers.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wheaties</author><text>This is easy to say but hard to do. "Based on excellence" is the mantra I've heard from software development circles for years and yet...<p>1. How many of us have lost productivity because some other developer ran rough-shod through code caring not for maintainability, readability, or even extensibility? Which one was praised and which one rewarded? Doesn't apply to teachers? Ever have a dud who couldn't do simple math in charge of the algebra class? Guess what the next teacher has to deal with.<p>2. How do "normal" people in managerial roles judge competency between two people in such roles? When looking at our own industry we see how difficult it is for "normal" people to make those sorts of judgement calls. Some schools require only 2 years teaching experience before moving on to superintendent roles. Some states more. With such divergence what can we expect?<p>3. How will we measure such excellence? What metric? What new system will evolve to capitalize on this metric despite the spirit of the metric? Unintended consequences?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alphaoverlord</author><text>This might sound trite, but I think the solution would be to couple standardized testing with performance based pay. Unlike code, it's hard to aim for solely short-term gains. As long as teachers aren't cheating, I can't imagine many ways to teach students that aren't inherently beneficial to the student. Teaching better study habits, etc might not be directly related to their material, but it still helps the students.<p>Also, I think there are fairly generalizable development timelines for children. While standardized testing can never be a gold standard in determining progress, I think we can both agree such testing does measure a worthwhile metric. I would definitely agree that there are edge cases, both in terms of individual students and in terms of school districts, but linking pay with progress seems on face value to be a good idea. That, plus independent school districts, is system-based evolution. Such selection depends on creating the right relationship between effort and reward.</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits