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35,425,987 | 35,425,314 | 1 | 2 | 35,424,678 | train | <story><title>Alibaba breaks itself up in six</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/30/alibaba-breaks-itself-up-in-six</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to contrast China&#x27;s approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmoriarty</author><text>There&#x27;s no bright, clear separation between governments and corporations in America.<p>Corporate execs regularly get jobs in government, and often wind up &quot;regulating&quot; the very industries&#x2F;companies they came from. It&#x27;s also an open secret in Washington that when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs in the very companies they regulated or provided government contracts to.<p>It&#x27;s a revolving door between corporations and governments, and it&#x27;s misleading to think the one is truly separate from the other.<p>A better model is to look at the corporate-government interaction as competing elites vying with one another for money, power, and influence, and just as often collaborating with each other on shared interests.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alibaba breaks itself up in six</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2023/03/30/alibaba-breaks-itself-up-in-six</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting to contrast China&#x27;s approach of not allowing business to operate within the plane of power in which the government does, vs. the United States, which has companies whose power is certainly on the level of many state governments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>To me the complicating factor is “why”. I’m not sure why China as a government makes the calls it does.<p>It’s not clear to me that those aren’t just as self serving as say a big company in the us operating freely and so on.</text></comment> |
17,106,803 | 17,106,117 | 1 | 3 | 17,103,280 | train | <story><title>$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts</title><url>http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>staplers</author><text><p><pre><code> when it comes to customer support
</code></pre>
Do they have customer support? Last time I used my google account (a few years ago) to attempt to buy a Nexus, my transaction was flagged as fraud and I was locked out of my account.. I tried for a few days to find a way to contact anyone from Google.. never happened..<p>I eventually gave up and bought an iPhone and it was ironically the best thing that could have happened in that scenario.</text></item><item><author>tedivm</author><text>When I was in college I had a website that I ran google ads on. I let a balance build up over time so I could use the money to buy school books. When I attempted to cash out Google (which up until that time had no problem profiting off of my site) decided that I was part of a clickfraud ring and refused to pay out the money. There was no way to appeal.<p>Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won&#x27;t touch Google&#x27;s Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mherdeg</author><text>&gt; Do they have customer support?<p>Two effective strategies I have seen are:<p>(1) Contact a friend who works at Google and show them the comical chain of correspondence showing how your simple, silly problem got even sillier over time. Convince your friend or friends to show an interest in the problem
internally.<p>(2) Write a blog post about the problem and circulate it on social media (news.ycombinator and &#x2F;r&#x2F;programming front pages seem to work great).</text></comment> | <story><title>$11M settlement reached with Google regarding terminated AdSense accounts</title><url>http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>staplers</author><text><p><pre><code> when it comes to customer support
</code></pre>
Do they have customer support? Last time I used my google account (a few years ago) to attempt to buy a Nexus, my transaction was flagged as fraud and I was locked out of my account.. I tried for a few days to find a way to contact anyone from Google.. never happened..<p>I eventually gave up and bought an iPhone and it was ironically the best thing that could have happened in that scenario.</text></item><item><author>tedivm</author><text>When I was in college I had a website that I ran google ads on. I let a balance build up over time so I could use the money to buy school books. When I attempted to cash out Google (which up until that time had no problem profiting off of my site) decided that I was part of a clickfraud ring and refused to pay out the money. There was no way to appeal.<p>Honestly, to this day, I am still far less likely to use Google services (I won&#x27;t touch Google&#x27;s Cloud, for instance) because of how bad that experience was. The stress of being a college student who needed that money was definitely a multiplier, but at the end of the day I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to expect Google to do the right thing when it comes to customer support- especially when they can directly profit by hurting them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>markdown</author><text>&gt; Do they have customer support?<p>Their free services have no direct support channels, as expected. I wouldn&#x27;t provide free support for free services either.<p>I&#x27;ve received excellent support from Google for GSuite&#x2F;Google Apps and Google Cloud over the years, both via chat and calls, usually out of their Ireland office.<p>I live in Fiji and my account with them isn&#x27;t worth all that much (~$100&#x2F;month).</text></comment> |
10,249,375 | 10,248,111 | 1 | 3 | 10,248,084 | train | <story><title>AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/17/avg-privacy-policy-browser-search-data</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Stratoscope</author><text>I hate antivirus software with a passion. I&#x27;ve wasted too many weeks of my life hacking around bugs that antivirus programs introduced into my customers&#x27; systems.<p>A couple I&#x27;ve dealt with in the last six months:<p>McAfee Antivirus causes applications built with Unity 4 to fail when they call WWW.LoadFromCacheOrDownload() on a large asset bundle. This API call downloads a temp file and then renames the file to move it into the cache. But McAfee also opens the file for a virus scan. For a large file, the virus scan may not complete before Unity tries to rename the file, so the rename fails and you never get the asset bundle.<p>For one client I fixed this by patching Unity&#x27;s .exe file to add a retry loop on the rename call. Unity 5 also works around this issue with the same retry loop.<p>AVG Antivirus causes updates to fail for applications that use wyUpdate. wyUpdate calls the CreateMutex() function in the Windows API to make sure another updater instance isn&#x27;t already running. Bizarrely, when AVG is installed, CreateMutex() returns the wrong value, so wyUpdate thinks another instance is running and bails out. No updates for you!<p>Going back a few years, I tried NOD32 after some friends recommended it. It seemed fine, except the Alt+Tab key no longer worked. It was a known bug, unfixed for some time.<p>About 5-6 years ago, McAfee had a known bug - unfixed for nearly a year - than under some circumstances it would erase the entire hard drive. This was the ultimate in virus protection!</text></comment> | <story><title>AVG can sell your browsing and search history to advertisers</title><url>http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/17/avg-privacy-policy-browser-search-data</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>TAM_cmlx</author><text>As a possible note of interest, I had to disable AVG in order to read this article.</text></comment> |
20,754,492 | 20,749,689 | 1 | 2 | 20,747,997 | train | <story><title>Chandrayaan-2 Update: Lunar Orbit Insertion</title><url>https://www.isro.gov.in/update/20-aug-2019/chandrayaan-2-update-lunar-orbit-insertion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swatkat</author><text>Here&#x27;s a nice orbit simulation for Chandrayaan-2 mission: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sankara.net&#x2F;chandrayaan2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sankara.net&#x2F;chandrayaan2.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thunderbong</author><text>The multiple loops are not for gravity assist (or gravitational slingshot [0]) as I had initially thought. It is for the Oberth Effect [1], which I only got to know of today.<p>From the Wikipedia article -<p>&gt;&gt; Oberth maneuver, is a maneuver in which a spacecraft falls into a gravitational well, and then accelerates when its fall reaches maximum speed. The resulting maneuver is a more efficient way to gain kinetic energy than applying the same impulse outside of a gravitational well.<p>&gt;&gt; In some cases, it is even worth spending fuel on slowing the spacecraft into a gravity well to take advantage of the efficiencies of the Oberth effect.<p>Fascinating! To say the least!<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gravity_assist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gravity_assist</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Oberth_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Oberth_effect</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Chandrayaan-2 Update: Lunar Orbit Insertion</title><url>https://www.isro.gov.in/update/20-aug-2019/chandrayaan-2-update-lunar-orbit-insertion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swatkat</author><text>Here&#x27;s a nice orbit simulation for Chandrayaan-2 mission: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sankara.net&#x2F;chandrayaan2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sankara.net&#x2F;chandrayaan2.html</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bdamm</author><text>It&#x27;s a really nice tool, I had several ah-hah moments!<p>Does anyone know what the teleportation glitch is right at Lunar capture?</text></comment> |
32,136,019 | 32,135,187 | 1 | 2 | 32,133,345 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Typograms, Markdown-like renderer for ASCII diagrams</title><url>https://code.sgo.to/typograms/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ErikCorry</author><text>This is pretty nice if you have an editor with block mode (like vim) and you are faster with a keyboard than a mouse (most programmers). It integrates well with text based version control and degrades gracefully in that users who don&#x27;t have the tools and are just looking at the source can probably still read it, and even edit it.<p>I tried using this for the control flow diagrams in V8&#x27;s regexp implementation, which are documented with ASCII art in jsregexp.cc
Results are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;erikcorry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1548954799290421249" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;erikcorry&#x2F;status&#x2F;1548954799290421249</a><p>This link explains it better than the page HN links to: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.sgo.to&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;typographic-diagrams.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.sgo.to&#x2F;2022&#x2F;06&#x2F;20&#x2F;typographic-diagrams.html</a><p>It would be an improvement for the page that HN links to if the HTML snippet was surrounded by &lt;body&gt;&lt;&#x2F;body&gt; so it worked out of the box.<p>Tips:<p>Don&#x27;t use underscores for horisontal lines - use dashes (minus signs).<p>A vertical arrow that points at a text will collide with the text unless you add a blank line.<p>Rounded corners are nice. You get these by using . (period) or &#x27; (single quote) instead of + (plus) to join lines. Use period to join to a vertical line below the horizontal line, and single quote to join to a vertical line above the horizontal line.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Typograms, Markdown-like renderer for ASCII diagrams</title><url>https://code.sgo.to/typograms/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcpst</author><text>Could have something a little more usable if you pasted into a tool like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asciiflow.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asciiflow.com&#x2F;</a> and then copied your edits back into source.<p>Or an editor plugin with something like the automatic table formatting you get with emacs org-mode.</text></comment> |
19,272,570 | 19,272,452 | 1 | 3 | 19,271,132 | train | <story><title>Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your WiFi passwords, stored in the clear</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sleepybrett</author><text>Anyone who recovers my discarded lightbulb from the dump, JTAGs it and pulls my wifi name and password, does all the work to track down where my wifi network is in the city serviced by that particular dump, parks outside my place and joins my wifi can have anything they can get off my network.</text></comment> | <story><title>Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your WiFi passwords, stored in the clear</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grendelt</author><text>Don&#x27;t use smart bulbs. Bulbs burn out. Use smart sockets and &quot;dumb&quot; bulbs. Don&#x27;t put disposable things on your network.</text></comment> |
33,087,159 | 33,086,726 | 1 | 2 | 33,085,649 | train | <story><title>Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j-krieger</author><text>The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pclmulqdq</author><text>This is, I think, the single biggest factor in the proliferation of cheating. Most cheaters are smart enough to do the math on how they should win at the sport, or is smart enough to hire someone who can do the math. In other words, cheaters are rational actors.<p>Allowing people back into the sport swings the EV math heavily in favor of cheating if the penalty isn&#x27;t massive given that the chance of getting caught is so low (as long as you know what you&#x27;re doing). The only way to make the EV of cheating negative is to make the sanction very, very bad. Losing all of your future earnings from the sport is a good way to do that.<p>I used to run Magic: the Gathering tournaments, and there was a tremendous amount of &quot;minor&quot; cheating - forgetting the rules when it benefits them, shuffling in suspicious ways, peeking at opponents decks, etc. Many competitive players even openly admitted to doing this. Even if a tournament official could call them on the cheating and disqualify them (which was frowned upon without hard evidence), they would likely not be suspended from sanctioned play at all unless the evidence was overwhelming. Several famous cheaters did it many times and got caught several times. Minor cheating was very common as a result.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j-krieger</author><text>The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>antiterra</author><text>The admissions were from when he was 12 and 16; many so societies generally believe in redemption from childhood transgressions.</text></comment> |
24,829,499 | 24,829,402 | 1 | 2 | 24,828,509 | train | <story><title>Better Git diff output for Ruby, Python, Elixir, Go</title><url>https://tekin.co.uk/2020/10/better-git-diff-output-for-ruby-python-elixir-and-more</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>duckerude</author><text>I tried to figure out why the extensions aren&#x27;t configured by default.<p>I found a 2011 patch&#x2F;proposal to make it the default, which appears to have stranded: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;[email protected]&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;[email protected]...</a><p>With some discussion by the patch&#x27;s author of possible downsides (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;[email protected]&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;[email protected]...</a>):<p>&gt; I think it could be a problem in the future if the builtin userdiff drivers started growing more invasive options, like automatically claiming to be non-binary (i.e., setting diff.cpp.binary = false by default). In other words, I think we have two options:<p>&gt; 1. Builtin drivers like &quot;cpp&quot; can stay minimal, only setting funcname and color-words headers that aren&#x27;t going to produce terrible results if we are wrong about detecting by extension.<p>&gt; 2. We force the user to identify file types manually, so we can&#x27;t be wrong. The &quot;cpp&quot; diff driver means &quot;you are a text C file&quot;, and if a user mis-marks a binary file with that diff driver, they are the one who is wrong.<p>&gt; So if it&#x27;s an either&#x2F;or situation, we should decide not only that extension auto-detection is a good feature, but that it trumps adding more advanced features to the builtin drivers in the future.<p>&gt; Or we could decide that the extensions really are good enough, and if you really do have binary files named &quot;foo.c&quot;, it&#x27;s your problem to override the defaults with &quot;*.c -diff&quot;.<p>There might be more recent discussion that I didn&#x27;t find.</text></comment> | <story><title>Better Git diff output for Ruby, Python, Elixir, Go</title><url>https://tekin.co.uk/2020/10/better-git-diff-output-for-ruby-python-elixir-and-more</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nikeee</author><text>I use delta as a diff tool:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dandavison&#x2F;delta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dandavison&#x2F;delta</a><p>It also offers contextual information as well as side-by-side diffs. For syntax highlighting, it uses the same as bat (the cat clone).</text></comment> |
27,706,180 | 27,705,977 | 1 | 2 | 27,704,883 | train | <story><title>Flipper Zero: How it’s made and tested</title><url>https://blog.flipperzero.one/electronics-testing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>For those wondering what it is, &quot;Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool for pentesters and geeks in a toy-like body&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flipperzero.one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flipperzero.one&#x2F;</a><p>It has a bunch of receiver&#x2F;transmitter hardware and software. Definitely looks fun to play with!</text></comment> | <story><title>Flipper Zero: How it’s made and tested</title><url>https://blog.flipperzero.one/electronics-testing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cstrat</author><text>I loved their post on the iButton. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.flipperzero.one&#x2F;taming-ibutton&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.flipperzero.one&#x2F;taming-ibutton&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;ve never actually come across this interface. It&#x27;s not common in Australia, I still really enjoyed the write up and seeing how they overcame the difficulties.</text></comment> |
40,588,214 | 40,588,458 | 1 | 2 | 40,587,685 | train | <story><title>Stable Audio Open</title><url>https://stability.ai/news/introducing-stable-audio-open</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Uehreka</author><text>&gt; The new model was trained on audio data from FreeSound and the Free Music Archive. This allowed us to create an open audio model while respecting creator rights.<p>This feels like the “Ethereum merge moment” for AI art. Now that there exists a prominent example with the big ethical obstacle (Proof of Work in the case of Ethereum, nonconsensual data-gathering in the case of generative AI) removed, we can actually have interesting conversations about the ethics of these things.<p>In the past I’ve pushed back on people who made the argument that “generative AI intrinsically requires theft from artists”, but the terrible quality of models trained on public domain data made it difficult to make that argument in earnest, even if I knew I was right in the abstract.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stable Audio Open</title><url>https://stability.ai/news/introducing-stable-audio-open</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mg</author><text>When they released Stable Audio 2.0, I tried to create &quot;unusual&quot; songs with prompts like &quot;roaring dragon tumbling rocks stormy morning&quot;. The results are quite interesting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MarekGibney&#x2F;videos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@MarekGibney&#x2F;videos</a><p>I find it fascinating that you can put all information needed to recreate a whole complex song into a string like<p><pre><code> rough stormy morning car rocks hammering
drum solo roaring dragon downtempo
audiosparx-v2-0 seed 5
</code></pre>
This means a whole album of these songs could easily fit into a single TCP&#x2F;IP packet.<p>If a music genre evolves in which each song is completely defined by its title, maybe it will be called &quot;promptmusic&quot;.<p>I will try the new model with the same prompts and upload the results.</text></comment> |
35,410,641 | 35,409,946 | 1 | 2 | 35,408,249 | train | <story><title>For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US</title><url>https://www.popsci.com/environment/renewable-energy-generation-coal-2022/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>This would have happened a bit earlier if the most efficient and long-lasting solar panels, monocrystalline silicon, had been developed by US manufacturers instead of by Chinese ones. All the tariffs applied by state and federal regulators on the import of these panels have been about slowing the rate of solar PV production in the USA on behalf of the fossil fuel and investor-owned utility sectors.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;14&#x2F;the-weekend-read-chinas-monocrystalline-boom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;14&#x2F;the-weekend-read-chin...</a><p>Claims that these tariffs have some human rights motivations are nonsensical, would the US block imports of Saudi oil over human rights abuses there? Of course not - but silicon solar panels, oh my!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;exclusive-us-blocks-more-than-1000-solar-shipments-over-chinese-slave-labor-2022-11-11&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;exclusive-us-blocks-more...</a><p>It&#x27;s no surprise that the pushback by politicians owned by investors in fossil fuels and utilities has been so intense - energy is one of the most lucrative investments, and it&#x27;s rather difficult to control and meter the flow of sunlight to homes, in comparison to natural gas or crude oil.<p>Notably, the USA has no R &amp; D programs or subsidy programs like the CHIPS act (for semiconductors for computation, not for power production) aimed at rapidly expanding monocrystalline silicon production.</text></comment> | <story><title>For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US</title><url>https://www.popsci.com/environment/renewable-energy-generation-coal-2022/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tjbiddle</author><text>My comment isn&#x27;t directly related to the OP, but figured it&#x27;d be an interesting insight to share as it&#x27;s very recent for me.<p>Just finished a motorbike trip in Laos. Fun fact, their largest export is electricity.<p>Would&#x27;ve never guessed that, right?<p>90% of the electricity they generate is exported to neighboring countries - mostly Thailand.<p>80% is renewable - Go Laos!<p>But wait, it may be renewable... but turns out the government is corrupt and constantly sells rights to the highest bidder wanting to build a dam for hydroelectric wherever they want, and usually without any sort of environmental survey - oops. It&#x27;s the driest country I&#x27;ve been to in a while, many villages had their water access completely destroyed due to upstream dams.<p>Just a cautionary tale as &quot;renewable&quot; doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean better - green-washing is absolutely still a thing out there and we should be sure to thoroughly vet information before assuming it&#x27;s more viable solution for us.</text></comment> |
23,929,247 | 23,928,423 | 1 | 2 | 23,926,289 | train | <story><title>Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/garmin-services-and-production-go-down-after-ransomware-attack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can&#x27;t see my history, surprised they don&#x27;t cache that locally).<p>Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can&#x27;t say the same about my friends iWatches&#x2F;fitbits or even some stuff on various stuff of iPhones and my pixel.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petee</author><text>Garmin Connect app won&#x27;t even show you data sync&#x27;d from a watch unless its online and connected. Simple things like hours slept, or miles walked will not show. Right now it just has a &quot;server maintenance&quot; message, and won&#x27;t show anything that uses a graph, or historical data...nothing is stored locally.<p>On my recent hiking trip, the watch had no problem recording and sync&#x27;ing tracks, but the connect app refused to render any of that data until mobile data was connected again.</text></comment> | <story><title>Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/garmin-services-and-production-go-down-after-ransomware-attack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can&#x27;t see my history, surprised they don&#x27;t cache that locally).<p>Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can&#x27;t say the same about my friends iWatches&#x2F;fitbits or even some stuff on various stuff of iPhones and my pixel.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjsir911</author><text>I was give a garmin vivofit 3 as a gift and was soured by the fact that I had to create an account and log in <i>to set the time</i>.<p>I&#x27;ve been very slowly working on a fork of gadgetbridge[1] to support the vivofit 3 for a while now and can successfuly set the time with no account!<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mjsir911&#x2F;gadgetbridge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mjsir911&#x2F;gadgetbridge</a></text></comment> |
30,104,818 | 30,104,784 | 1 | 2 | 30,087,783 | train | <story><title>The case against masks at school</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/kids-masks-schools-weak-science/621133/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>[ EDIT: other commenters response to this comment made me go look up some original research on the topic. As a result, I fully retract what I&#x27;ve said below. I found several papers that report substantial restrictions of airflow from wearing a correctly fitted N95 mask.<p>I was wrong, and I apologize for the misinformation. I did try to explicitly say that I was not doubting someone&#x27;s experiences, but I apologize for appearing to do that too. I&#x27;ve left the text up because that seems more honest. ]<p>I do not want to seek to diminish your very real anxiety and panic issues.<p>But you should be aware that there is no actual reduced inflow of air due to mask wearing, certainly not one that you would detect physiologically. In 2020, there were numerous demonstrations of this, both with actual measurements (lung volume, blood oxygen etc.) and with more anecdotal illustrations such as vigorous exercise even while wearing multiple masks.<p>Your mental conditions matter, and I hope you are able find ways to live reasonably happily without too much anxiety.</text></item><item><author>hydrok9</author><text>How about if you have anxiety issues and the reduced inflow of air from masks gives you panic attacks? This has been my life for this pandemic. I take medication but it does not stop them 100% from happening, and I have to use anti-anxiety techniques most times I put one on to stop from being overwhelmed by anticipation. Does anyone care about people like me? It sure feels like they don&#x27;t. And I have seen my physical and mental condition degrade largely due to this (I was never personally panicked by the virus itself). There are others like me and it is deeply upsetting that we have to suffer like this.</text></item><item><author>spookthesunset</author><text>For two years we’ve been asked to park our problems and to act like literally all that matters is the spread of Covid. Nothing else matters. Just a myopic fixation on the spread of one highly infectious respiratory virus.<p>Even a year after vaccines we are still being asked to treat Covid like it is the #1 priority in our lives. More important than our well being, our mental health, our communities, our children, or anything else.<p>Heaven help you if your value system is incompatible with such an idea. Be prepared to be yelled at, called names, lose your career, and become marginalized.</text></item><item><author>throwaway22032</author><text>This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which &quot;drop everything&quot; makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we&#x27;d do it naturally.<p>But in general, looking at life from a perspective of &quot;what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have&quot; is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.<p>I tend to think that people who operate in this way are subhuman, in the genuine sense of the word - they seem more like bureaucratic automatons than living beings with spirits and hopes and dreams.<p>Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. The piano is what life is, life is not simply breathing and eating.</text></item><item><author>criddell</author><text>My kids attend a university in Canada and live in residence on campus. They have had incredibly strict rules around masking and gatherings. It&#x27;s clear that they are only considering one variable - number of infections - and it seems like they aren&#x27;t considering any other factors.<p>For example, in the dorm there is a common area with a piano. Because of COVID, playing that piano is banned. Even if there was a reasonable danger of contracting COVID from a piano, there are also mental health benefits to playing music. It doesn&#x27;t feel like the piano ban is in the best interests of the people who live there and I don&#x27;t think the people who set the rules care because they can&#x27;t measure that. They can only measure infections.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tintor</author><text>You must be joking!
Have you tried exercising with surgical mask or N95 respirator?
I train regularly with N95 since Omicron started and they definitely negatively affect airflow and aerobic exercise performance. N95 respirator even more than surgical mask. I am used to them and don&#x27;t have anxiety, but they aren&#x27;t comfortable at all. They also affect temperature of air that you are inhaling as it mixes inside the mask with the hot air that you exhale, increasing your rest and cooldown time.</text></comment> | <story><title>The case against masks at school</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/kids-masks-schools-weak-science/621133/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PaulDavisThe1st</author><text>[ EDIT: other commenters response to this comment made me go look up some original research on the topic. As a result, I fully retract what I&#x27;ve said below. I found several papers that report substantial restrictions of airflow from wearing a correctly fitted N95 mask.<p>I was wrong, and I apologize for the misinformation. I did try to explicitly say that I was not doubting someone&#x27;s experiences, but I apologize for appearing to do that too. I&#x27;ve left the text up because that seems more honest. ]<p>I do not want to seek to diminish your very real anxiety and panic issues.<p>But you should be aware that there is no actual reduced inflow of air due to mask wearing, certainly not one that you would detect physiologically. In 2020, there were numerous demonstrations of this, both with actual measurements (lung volume, blood oxygen etc.) and with more anecdotal illustrations such as vigorous exercise even while wearing multiple masks.<p>Your mental conditions matter, and I hope you are able find ways to live reasonably happily without too much anxiety.</text></item><item><author>hydrok9</author><text>How about if you have anxiety issues and the reduced inflow of air from masks gives you panic attacks? This has been my life for this pandemic. I take medication but it does not stop them 100% from happening, and I have to use anti-anxiety techniques most times I put one on to stop from being overwhelmed by anticipation. Does anyone care about people like me? It sure feels like they don&#x27;t. And I have seen my physical and mental condition degrade largely due to this (I was never personally panicked by the virus itself). There are others like me and it is deeply upsetting that we have to suffer like this.</text></item><item><author>spookthesunset</author><text>For two years we’ve been asked to park our problems and to act like literally all that matters is the spread of Covid. Nothing else matters. Just a myopic fixation on the spread of one highly infectious respiratory virus.<p>Even a year after vaccines we are still being asked to treat Covid like it is the #1 priority in our lives. More important than our well being, our mental health, our communities, our children, or anything else.<p>Heaven help you if your value system is incompatible with such an idea. Be prepared to be yelled at, called names, lose your career, and become marginalized.</text></item><item><author>throwaway22032</author><text>This is the fundamental issue with coronavirus mitigation measures. There are circumstances in which &quot;drop everything&quot; makes sense - if coronavirus were ten times more fatal, we&#x27;d do it naturally.<p>But in general, looking at life from a perspective of &quot;what is the minimum possible quality of life we can have&quot; is depressing and fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.<p>I tend to think that people who operate in this way are subhuman, in the genuine sense of the word - they seem more like bureaucratic automatons than living beings with spirits and hopes and dreams.<p>Like, yeah, I will take the risk of contracting coronavirus to play the piano, because I want the piano in my life. The piano is what life is, life is not simply breathing and eating.</text></item><item><author>criddell</author><text>My kids attend a university in Canada and live in residence on campus. They have had incredibly strict rules around masking and gatherings. It&#x27;s clear that they are only considering one variable - number of infections - and it seems like they aren&#x27;t considering any other factors.<p>For example, in the dorm there is a common area with a piano. Because of COVID, playing that piano is banned. Even if there was a reasonable danger of contracting COVID from a piano, there are also mental health benefits to playing music. It doesn&#x27;t feel like the piano ban is in the best interests of the people who live there and I don&#x27;t think the people who set the rules care because they can&#x27;t measure that. They can only measure infections.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaywalk</author><text>Pure, unadulterated BS. I was in the hospital for a few days last year (unrelated to Covid) and as part of the standard discharge process, I had to walk around (with a mask on) while my blood oxygen was measured. It was slightly low, so the nurse said &quot;take off your mask for a second&quot; and sure enough, it popped right back up to normal. She said she sees it with almost everyone.<p>You&#x27;re breathing in less air, and more CO2. There is no way it&#x27;s <i>not</i> going to have an impact.</text></comment> |
16,514,852 | 16,512,108 | 1 | 2 | 16,506,979 | train | <story><title>Amazon will stop selling Nest smart home devices</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wont-sell-nest-products-from-google-2018-3?IR=T</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyler_larson</author><text>The problem here isn&#x27;t so much that Amazon is going to hurt Google. Google will survive. But we only hear about this story because Google is who Amazon is attacking (today).<p>The bigger problem is that Amazon has set themselves up as the global arbiter of commerce, acting as a relatively neutral marketplace matching buyers to sellers worldwide, replacing many or most of the smaller commerce hubs and marketplaces that used to exist.<p>But once in that position, they exercise control over which products can be sold with the explicit intention of destroying competitors, replacing what would otherwise be a consumer favorite with their own inferior (according to market preference) alternate.<p>Everyone talks about monopolists and moral hazard and market manipulation, but Amazon seems to be the only modern company with the unique combination of dominance, confidence, and poor executive judgment to actually make it a consistent and overt company policy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philipodonnell</author><text>If you saw the article yesterday about counterfit Nests still for sale and Amazon taking no action, I think it&#x27;s actually worse than that.<p>Banning competition you don&#x27;t like is monoploistic for sure, but intentionally leaving counterfitters versions up and promoting them to searchers for those products so it damages your competitors brand is just straight up evil.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon will stop selling Nest smart home devices</title><url>http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wont-sell-nest-products-from-google-2018-3?IR=T</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyler_larson</author><text>The problem here isn&#x27;t so much that Amazon is going to hurt Google. Google will survive. But we only hear about this story because Google is who Amazon is attacking (today).<p>The bigger problem is that Amazon has set themselves up as the global arbiter of commerce, acting as a relatively neutral marketplace matching buyers to sellers worldwide, replacing many or most of the smaller commerce hubs and marketplaces that used to exist.<p>But once in that position, they exercise control over which products can be sold with the explicit intention of destroying competitors, replacing what would otherwise be a consumer favorite with their own inferior (according to market preference) alternate.<p>Everyone talks about monopolists and moral hazard and market manipulation, but Amazon seems to be the only modern company with the unique combination of dominance, confidence, and poor executive judgment to actually make it a consistent and overt company policy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gordon_freeman</author><text>This is so true! And now as they have bought Whole Foods, they can do the same thing with grocery products by having options such as WF branded ones over the competitors (stocking 365 branded Sugar and dropping Safway Signature branded Sugar) through their Amazon Fresh or Prime NOW service.</text></comment> |
41,158,576 | 41,158,399 | 1 | 2 | 41,157,595 | train | <story><title>Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers</title><url>https://kottke.org/24/07/building-lego-machines-to-destroy-tall-lego-towers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MarioMan</author><text>For anyone looking for more of this, there are several channels that are all pushing LEGO Technic to its limits, not just Brick Technology (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickTechnology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickTechnology</a>).<p>Some of my other favorites in this niche include:<p>Brick Experiment Channel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickExperimentChannel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickExperimentChannel</a><p>Dr. Engine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@DrEngine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@DrEngine</a><p>Brick Machines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickMachinesChannel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BrickMachinesChannel</a><p>Jamie&#x27;s Brick Jams: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@JamiesBrickJams" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@JamiesBrickJams</a><p>Build it with Bricks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BuilditwithBricks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@BuilditwithBricks</a><p>GazR&#x27;s Extreme Brick Machines!: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@GazRsExtremeBrickMachines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@GazRsExtremeBrickMachines</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers</title><url>https://kottke.org/24/07/building-lego-machines-to-destroy-tall-lego-towers</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ipsum2</author><text>Blog spam for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;HY6q9hwYcoc?si=VCBF2FlHADUZyH_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;HY6q9hwYcoc?si=VCBF2FlHADUZyH_1</a></text></comment> |
29,915,524 | 29,914,677 | 1 | 2 | 29,913,982 | train | <story><title>Grocery store shortages are back</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072462477/grocery-shortage-shelves-reasons</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>&gt; &quot;We&#x27;re really seeing the perfect storm,&quot;<p>If these &quot;perfect storms&quot; happen six times a year maybe it&#x27;s not the storm but their own logistics to blame?</text></comment> | <story><title>Grocery store shortages are back</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072462477/grocery-shortage-shelves-reasons</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hprotagonist</author><text><i>&quot;There are some issues with out-of-stocks, but it tends to be a situation where if you go to a store on a Tuesday night, maybe something&#x27;s out of stock, but by Wednesday sometime it&#x27;s back in store,&quot; Rose told NPR.</i><p>This describes about the “worst” i’ve seen, in new england. I had no trouble getting some fairly fussy ingredients for holiday cooking or my annual winter anti-depression baking spasms.<p>Still, march 2020 did make the point that maybe having a pantry of staples in rotation at home is a real smart idea.</text></comment> |
26,073,231 | 26,073,244 | 1 | 2 | 26,072,025 | train | <story><title>20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower</title><url>https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T273741</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zelon88</author><text>&gt; Google has a pretty extreme long-tail distribution (~15% of daily queries have never been seen before)<p>Do you have a source for this?<p>I&#x27;d be willing to bet that the ONLY reason why 15% of their daily queries &quot;haven&#x27;t been seen before&quot; is because they add un-needed complexity like fingerprinting. You&#x27;re making it seem like they&#x27;ve never seen a query for &quot;cute animals&quot; before when obviously they have. They choose to do a lot of extra leg work because of who you are.<p>So your claim that 15% of their queries have &quot;never been seen before&quot; is probably inaccurate. I&#x27;d be willing to bet that &quot;15% of their queries are unique because of the user, location, or other external factor separate from the query itself.&quot;<p>They&#x27;ve seen your query before. They&#x27;ve just never seen <i>you</i> make this query from this device on this side of town before.</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>Search is also largely read-only. The advantage Wikipedia has is that its traffic overwhelming goes to the head of the page distribution, so simple caching solutions work very well. Google has a pretty extreme long-tail distribution (~15% of daily queries have never been seen before), and so needs to do a lot of computation per query.</text></item><item><author>ShakataGaNai</author><text>Wikimedia&#x27;s infrastructure is radically different than most FAANG.<p>In large part because 99% (+&#x2F;-) of their traffic is read only. While Facebook and Google have to do heavy workloads for every click and action taken on their services, Wikimedia can cache basically everything. Allowing them to operate on a tiny fraction of the number of machines (and infrastructure) that the rest of the players do.</text></item><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>Wikimedia is unique in running some of the most popular websites with open access to almost all systems. As someone who has never been on the inside of FAANG, I found it rather interesting to browse around the backend infrastructure.<p>See, for example, their statistics at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.wikimedia.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;000000102&#x2F;production-logging?orgId=1&amp;refresh=5m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.wikimedia.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;000000102&#x2F;production-logging...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tylerhou</author><text>If you took into account user, location, etc. 15% seems too low. I almost never search for the exact same thing twice in the same location.<p>15% of the queries themselves are unique. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;search&#x2F;our-latest-quality-improvements-search&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;search&#x2F;our-latest-quality-impro...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;howsearchworks&#x2F;responses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;howsearchworks&#x2F;responses&#x2F;</a><p>I work for Google (and used to work on Search).</text></comment> | <story><title>20% of requests for Wikimedia Commons are for one image of a flower</title><url>https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T273741</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zelon88</author><text>&gt; Google has a pretty extreme long-tail distribution (~15% of daily queries have never been seen before)<p>Do you have a source for this?<p>I&#x27;d be willing to bet that the ONLY reason why 15% of their daily queries &quot;haven&#x27;t been seen before&quot; is because they add un-needed complexity like fingerprinting. You&#x27;re making it seem like they&#x27;ve never seen a query for &quot;cute animals&quot; before when obviously they have. They choose to do a lot of extra leg work because of who you are.<p>So your claim that 15% of their queries have &quot;never been seen before&quot; is probably inaccurate. I&#x27;d be willing to bet that &quot;15% of their queries are unique because of the user, location, or other external factor separate from the query itself.&quot;<p>They&#x27;ve seen your query before. They&#x27;ve just never seen <i>you</i> make this query from this device on this side of town before.</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>Search is also largely read-only. The advantage Wikipedia has is that its traffic overwhelming goes to the head of the page distribution, so simple caching solutions work very well. Google has a pretty extreme long-tail distribution (~15% of daily queries have never been seen before), and so needs to do a lot of computation per query.</text></item><item><author>ShakataGaNai</author><text>Wikimedia&#x27;s infrastructure is radically different than most FAANG.<p>In large part because 99% (+&#x2F;-) of their traffic is read only. While Facebook and Google have to do heavy workloads for every click and action taken on their services, Wikimedia can cache basically everything. Allowing them to operate on a tiny fraction of the number of machines (and infrastructure) that the rest of the players do.</text></item><item><author>IfOnlyYouKnew</author><text>Wikimedia is unique in running some of the most popular websites with open access to almost all systems. As someone who has never been on the inside of FAANG, I found it rather interesting to browse around the backend infrastructure.<p>See, for example, their statistics at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.wikimedia.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;000000102&#x2F;production-logging?orgId=1&amp;refresh=5m" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.wikimedia.org&#x2F;d&#x2F;000000102&#x2F;production-logging...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagels</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;search&#x2F;our-latest-quality-improvements-search&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;search&#x2F;our-latest-quality-impro...</a><p>&quot;There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new&quot;</text></comment> |
19,480,358 | 19,480,087 | 1 | 3 | 19,479,626 | train | <story><title>M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story (1981)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>azernik</author><text>A factor that the article doesn&#x27;t emphasize enough is the extent to which schedule pressure contributed to the bugginess of the released rifle.<p>The Kalashnikov had been designed in 1947, (hence, AK-47), but it took more than a decade before a bug-free version (the AKM) was considered reliable enough to make standard-issue. (When this article refers to &quot;AK-47s&quot;, most of the actual weapons involved were actually AKMs.)<p>The US, by contrast, had spent the decades since WWII resisting the assault rifle concept, so that when Vietnam rolled around their fantastically rich and well-funded military found its infantry outgunned by peasant militias wielding second-hand Soviet rifles. So the rifle went from initial acceptance, including these kinds of stupid last-minute design changes that are common in any project, to large-scale combat deployment within a year; normally, there would have been years of incremental usage to catch these bugs, but the rifle was so desperately needed that it was rushed to the front.<p>A book I&#x27;ve recommended in another thread, which gives a great introduction to the history and impact of the Kalashnikov in particular and assault rifles in general, is C.J. Chivers&#x27;s &quot;The Gun&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Gun-C-J-Chivers&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0743271734" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Gun-C-J-Chivers&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0743271734</a>), or this shorter-form article he wrote in response to recent msas shootings (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;world&#x2F;ak-47-mass-shootings.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2016&#x2F;world&#x2F;ak-47-mass-sh...</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story (1981)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-bureaucratic-horror-story/545153/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ethbro</author><text>I&#x27;m reading through <i>Human Error</i> by James Reason [1], on the basis of a HN recommendation. It&#x27;s been excellent so far.<p>As regards software error, we do so many things (standard style guides, pair programming, code reviews) to limit error, yet give so little thought to where and how errors come to be. And specifically, what methods would best combat them.<p>This article and the procurement process it documents is a great example of &quot;intentional but mistaken actions&quot;. Which is to say the actions taken were intentional, the actions were realized as intended, but the original formulation was flawed.<p>Reason notes these errors tend to thrive in overly compartmentalized, deep, bureaucratic environments. Everyone is doing their job, but there&#x27;s no one keeping an eye on the big picture when the train heads off the rails.<p>The difficulty, according to him, is that higher-cognitive checks needed to short circuit these kinds of errors tend to be less effective (than lower, more primitive ones). IOW, we delude ourselves that everything is fine as often as we recognize the issue.<p>I expect this is part of the secret effectiveness of pass&#x2F;fail unit testing. It&#x27;s hard to rationalize a red indicator into a green one.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Human-Error-James-Reason&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0521314194&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Human-Error-James-Reason&#x2F;dp&#x2F;052131419...</a></text></comment> |
33,968,500 | 33,968,586 | 1 | 3 | 33,948,060 | train | <story><title>A neat XOR trick</title><url>https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moloch-hai</author><text>The moral is that POPCNT is critical to zillions of massive optimizations, and omitting it from base instruction sets, as has been done over and over and then later corrected, each time at great expense, is extremely foolish. The latest offender was RISC-V, but the overwhelming majority of x86 code is still compiled to a target version lacking it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>Well, actually, in this case, no, POPCNT is unnecessary here, since you don&#x27;t actually have to count anything. you only need to know if the bitmask changed when you added a new character ;)<p>But otherwise, yes.<p>I spent quite a while optimizing GCC&#x27;s bitmap operations years ago, including implementing some new sparse bitmap types, and the sparse bitmap types i implemented ended up dependent on the speed of popcnt and friends, so yes.</text></comment> | <story><title>A neat XOR trick</title><url>https://www.mattkeeter.com/blog/2022-12-10-xor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moloch-hai</author><text>The moral is that POPCNT is critical to zillions of massive optimizations, and omitting it from base instruction sets, as has been done over and over and then later corrected, each time at great expense, is extremely foolish. The latest offender was RISC-V, but the overwhelming majority of x86 code is still compiled to a target version lacking it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gpderetta</author><text>legend say that popcnt was the &quot;NSA&quot; instruction, was heavily used for cryptographic analysis and that was kept out of common instruction sets for a long time to give NSA an advantage.<p>It is probably just a legend though.</text></comment> |
25,216,424 | 25,215,975 | 1 | 3 | 25,215,685 | train | <story><title>Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management</title><url>https://pimutils.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>There&#x27;s a large set of these developed over the years,
though I couldn&#x27;t compile a comprehensive list without taking some time.<p>Contact management (lbdb), numerous task managers, calendars, Emacs org-mode, vimwiki, schedulers, and more.<p>remind, calendar, and taskwarrior come to mind.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management</title><url>https://pimutils.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mssundaram</author><text>I&#x27;ve been looking for a kanban tool for which I can own the data (self hosted), and preferably that the data is a human manipulated format (Markdown ideally).<p>Does anyone know of something like that? I haven&#x27;t found a satisfactory solution so I&#x27;ve been building one, but I keep feeling like I&#x27;m wasting my time and that there must be something else available. In any case I am planning on releasing it as a desktop app and mobile (Android, iOS) at some point. Right now I just use Syncthing to sync across devices - you just point the app to a directory of Markdown files.</text></comment> |
33,903,158 | 33,902,437 | 1 | 2 | 33,900,122 | train | <story><title>What's Great about Julia?</title><url>https://viralinstruction.com/posts/goodjulia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoreyFieldens</author><text>Everytime Julia is mentioned on HN, I see a surprising amount of people who dislike the language for whatever reason. I understand a lot of their concerns (time to first plot, debugging sucks, IDE support isn&#x27;t amazing yet). However, I don&#x27;t see a lot of alternatives for the niche that Julia occupies. If you want to do high performance scientific computing, there aren&#x27;t a lot of options in terms of languages.<p>Python is the de facto but it&#x27;s so slow for anything that can&#x27;t be well represented as vectorized NumPy operations. There are ways around that like Numba, Jax, Cython, etc. but their use cases are pretty limited, and they don&#x27;t work well with other Python packages.<p>There is, of course, C and C++ which are commonly used to speed up Python or as standalone packages. However, C++ is such a complicated beast that writing performant and correct code takes forever. C is much more manageable, but I find that there are not a lot of scientific packages written in pure C. This isn&#x27;t even touching on the horrendous build system that is CMake.<p>Fortran is a pretty simple looking language and would probably be the closest to Julia in terms of speed and expressiveness, but the writing is on the wall and Fortran&#x27;s days are numbered. I am not aware of many new packages being developed using it.<p>Other than that, there&#x27;s languages like Rust and Go but those have ecosystems that are so small, they make Julia&#x27;s ecosystem look like Python&#x27;s. I really don&#x27;t want to spend my time as a grad student writing basic numerical libraries from scratch.</text></comment> | <story><title>What's Great about Julia?</title><url>https://viralinstruction.com/posts/goodjulia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>canjobear</author><text>As someone who has used and contributed to Julia, I find Yuri Vishnevsky&#x27;s arguments about correctness totally fatal [0]. And Yuri&#x27;s examples are not obscure, they are totally realistic scenarios where Julia silently returns wrong results in ways that may be hard to detect. I do mostly scientific computing, and the idea that I might have to retract a paper because of a bug <i>in the programming language</i> is intolerable. It doesn&#x27;t matter how beautiful and fun to write and develop the language is if it can&#x27;t be trusted to return correct results.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yuri.is&#x2F;not-julia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yuri.is&#x2F;not-julia&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
30,501,069 | 30,500,949 | 1 | 3 | 30,500,650 | train | <story><title>Germany aims to get 100% of energy from renewable sources by 2035</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomschlick</author><text>Kind of insane that they started shutting down nuclear power plants earlier this year and are now more reliant on Russian gas because of it. How is that more green?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;International&#x2F;wireStory&#x2F;correction-germany-nuclear-shutdown-story-82051054" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;International&#x2F;wireStory&#x2F;correction-ge...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thow-58d4e8b</author><text>I&#x27;m a supporter of nuclear, but this trope is overplayed. This winter Germany derived 5-10% of their electricity from natural gas - and even that is mostly due to cogeneration of heating, not for electricity needs. This cogeneration runs even if renewables provide a surplus. Calling Germany&#x27;s electricity grid is &quot;reliant on Russian gas&quot; doesn&#x27;t reflect reality</text></comment> | <story><title>Germany aims to get 100% of energy from renewable sources by 2035</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomschlick</author><text>Kind of insane that they started shutting down nuclear power plants earlier this year and are now more reliant on Russian gas because of it. How is that more green?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;International&#x2F;wireStory&#x2F;correction-germany-nuclear-shutdown-story-82051054" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;International&#x2F;wireStory&#x2F;correction-ge...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lampe3</author><text>I live in Hamburg, Germany.<p>the reactor near Hamburg was either broken or not running for some other reasons.<p>Also after 40 years of nuclear plants we still have not a good answer to the waste it produces.</text></comment> |
33,564,502 | 33,560,494 | 1 | 2 | 33,527,900 | train | <story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DannyBee</author><text>I do a <i>lot</i> of PLC work.<p>The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this. It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this.<p>As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says &quot;Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages&quot;. This is what folks use for real. I presume this means &quot;we didn&#x27;t want to pay CodeSys but you can&quot;. Or something.
That sucks.<p>Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work.<p>There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else<p>So for the intended market, this doesn&#x27;t look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud.<p>For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they&#x27;d use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfox</author><text>My experience from integrating various automation systems (typically large-ish roller conveyor systems) is that often IEC 61131 languages are actually detrimental to productivity of the PLC programmers. It is this weird turing tarpit where anything that can be expressed as ladder logic is simple and point an click (modulo the horrible UI&#x2F;UX of every single PLC IDE) but anything more complex than that is huge pain because you are constantly fighting against the dumbed-down programming model and constantly reimplementing simple algorithms that are part of standard library in essentially any other programming ecosystem. And that is just for the control of moderately complex process (eg. tracking positions of unit loads on the conveyor), any kind of communication with external world (which tends to be event based) is horrible mess in order for it to fit into the cycle based model (and the argument that it gives you predictable and consistent latency is pure hogwash, the cycle time jitter caused by branching and other threads running on the PLC&#x27;s CPU tends to be huge, at least on S7-300&#x2F;1200&#x2F;1500).</text></comment> | <story><title>Arduino unveils the Opta – “Micro PLC” for industrial IoT</title><url>https://www.hackster.io/news/arduino-unveils-the-opta-its-first-micro-plc-for-the-industrial-internet-of-things-d97f1d6b868a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DannyBee</author><text>I do a <i>lot</i> of PLC work.<p>The Arduino IDE is totally unsuitable for it. No idea what they are doing about this. It would take an amazing amount of work to fix this.<p>As for PLC functionality people actually use, the product page says &quot;Optional support for standard IEC 61131-3 PLC languages&quot;. This is what folks use for real. I presume this means &quot;we didn&#x27;t want to pay CodeSys but you can&quot;. Or something.
That sucks.<p>Maybe they are relying on MBed support as their basic realtime story but, as mentioned, their dev environment is unsuitable for this kind of work.<p>There is no mention of expected scan time for ladders or guaranteed latency for anything else<p>So for the intended market, this doesn&#x27;t look interesting so far. It seems like it will go the way of the x8 and land with a huge thud.<p>For a random person wanting an Arduino in a cabinet on a din rail, I can see maybe they&#x27;d use it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>numlock86</author><text>The target audience is &quot;industry&#x2F;professional IoT&quot;. I guess this is mainly targeted at prototyping projects or hooking something existing up to the web with some &quot;realtime&quot; I&#x2F;Os, giving people the opportunity to stick to 61131. Existing solutions that offer you BLE&#x2F;WiFi in this sector are usually terrible and just branded routers with &quot;industrial grade&quot; components. This is probably not suited for or targeted at automating your next big high-runner molding machine or high-speed motion-controlled application, as you already figured out.</text></comment> |
20,647,970 | 20,647,214 | 1 | 3 | 20,646,743 | train | <story><title>TV detector van</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agurk</author><text>I lived in a flat in England in the early 2000s which kept getting letters from the BBC saying we didn&#x27;t have a TV licence. The letters were sometimes more threatening for a period, then sometimes more reconciliatory.<p>They were also running TV adverts at the time claiming they had detector vans about, and if you didn&#x27;t have a licence you&#x27;d be caught. I did some research at the time, and it seemed that evidence from a detector van had never been submitted as evidence in court cases for those without a licence.<p>It didn&#x27;t take long to realise in the age of databases, it&#x27;s easier just to send out scary letters to all address without a registered licence and hope there will be some &#x27;conversion rate&#x27;. The effort required to actually chase on this seemed disproportional to the benefits.<p>And for those wondering, I did have a licence, it&#x27;s just the address the BBC had for the flat was subtly different to the one on the bit of paper. I had hoped that they would follow up with a more detailed investigation, so I could see how it worked and ask about the vans, but they never did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monkeynotes</author><text>The ads were hugely dystopian: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw</a><p>I am an ex-pat and as an adult I am have become quite disillusioned with the UK and glad to have gotten out a decade ago. I miss nothing about England except my friends, and I&#x27;d feel sorry for them, but they all seem mostly happy with life.<p>Paying a license to have a TV (and it&#x27;s assumed you must watch TV), opt in porn on the internet, CCTV everywhere, braying in parliament, not to mention the whole Brexit shit-show, I find little to admire about the UK.</text></comment> | <story><title>TV detector van</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agurk</author><text>I lived in a flat in England in the early 2000s which kept getting letters from the BBC saying we didn&#x27;t have a TV licence. The letters were sometimes more threatening for a period, then sometimes more reconciliatory.<p>They were also running TV adverts at the time claiming they had detector vans about, and if you didn&#x27;t have a licence you&#x27;d be caught. I did some research at the time, and it seemed that evidence from a detector van had never been submitted as evidence in court cases for those without a licence.<p>It didn&#x27;t take long to realise in the age of databases, it&#x27;s easier just to send out scary letters to all address without a registered licence and hope there will be some &#x27;conversion rate&#x27;. The effort required to actually chase on this seemed disproportional to the benefits.<p>And for those wondering, I did have a licence, it&#x27;s just the address the BBC had for the flat was subtly different to the one on the bit of paper. I had hoped that they would follow up with a more detailed investigation, so I could see how it worked and ask about the vans, but they never did.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sofaofthedamned</author><text>As a child in the 80s I remember my family being scared of this van even though it probably never existed. Because of this my mum got a pay TV instead which we had to put 50p coins in periodically that paid for both the TV rental and the license fee.</text></comment> |
26,964,284 | 26,964,183 | 1 | 3 | 26,961,189 | train | <story><title>Trans-Pacific deteriorating, brace for shipping ‘tsunami’</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/flexport-trans-pacific-deteriorating-brace-for-shipping-tsunami</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>myself248</author><text>Heh. I was just about to ask if this was another term for the bullwhip effect, and the page actually links right to it.<p>I think the overall effect is that we all have to get used to things being scarce or spotty for a while, that&#x27;s all. The era of perfect infinite next-day availability of everything has come to a pause. Be patient, adjust expectations, make do, and give the system time to recover.<p>And wherever possible, buy local, buy on-shore.</text></item><item><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>We seem to be entering a global version of The Beer Game (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Beer_distribution_game" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Beer_distribution_game</a>). The game is a training session on supply chain co-ordination designed to show effects of trying to order beer and bottles months ahead of time then demand changes etc. It&#x27;s mostly chaos<p>(I was speaking to someone who has seen their shipping from China to Europe quintuple - apparently all the containers stayed in Europe as no one wanted to send them back empty.)<p>The game is designed to show that &quot;local&quot; signals aren&#x27;t always indicative of full system - the example being that retailers etc are stockpiling right now on-shore. But this creates more demand than usual, slowing delivery. So the naive retailer will say &quot;OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order <i>4 months</i> supply ... and so it goes - an infinite bug methodology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dv_dt</author><text>One problem is that many economists will look at the resulting price inflation and treat as money supply inflation, and call on less government spending and tighter lending when really we need time and serious covid treatments for the logistics to settle down.</text></comment> | <story><title>Trans-Pacific deteriorating, brace for shipping ‘tsunami’</title><url>https://www.freightwaves.com/news/flexport-trans-pacific-deteriorating-brace-for-shipping-tsunami</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>myself248</author><text>Heh. I was just about to ask if this was another term for the bullwhip effect, and the page actually links right to it.<p>I think the overall effect is that we all have to get used to things being scarce or spotty for a while, that&#x27;s all. The era of perfect infinite next-day availability of everything has come to a pause. Be patient, adjust expectations, make do, and give the system time to recover.<p>And wherever possible, buy local, buy on-shore.</text></item><item><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>We seem to be entering a global version of The Beer Game (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Beer_distribution_game" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Beer_distribution_game</a>). The game is a training session on supply chain co-ordination designed to show effects of trying to order beer and bottles months ahead of time then demand changes etc. It&#x27;s mostly chaos<p>(I was speaking to someone who has seen their shipping from China to Europe quintuple - apparently all the containers stayed in Europe as no one wanted to send them back empty.)<p>The game is designed to show that &quot;local&quot; signals aren&#x27;t always indicative of full system - the example being that retailers etc are stockpiling right now on-shore. But this creates more demand than usual, slowing delivery. So the naive retailer will say &quot;OMG it now takes 3 months and 2x price to get widgets, I had better order <i>4 months</i> supply ... and so it goes - an infinite bug methodology.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sneak</author><text>&gt; <i>And wherever possible, buy local, buy on-shore.</i><p>Organic, local 7nm microprocessors only.</text></comment> |
24,710,832 | 24,710,396 | 1 | 2 | 24,707,407 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products</title><url>https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>driverdan</author><text>I like the concept but since it&#x27;s open to the public it will suffer from ignorance.<p>For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they&#x27;re good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.<p>The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It&#x27;s a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn&#x27;t full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.<p>This is a common issue with &quot;BIFL&quot; discussions. People overrate something because they don&#x27;t understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn&#x27;t repairable, or they don&#x27;t have experience with a higher quality item.<p>Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>floatrock</author><text>Op can&#x27;t avoid this problem if following the reviews-masquerading-as-affiliate-marketing pattern.<p>What&#x27;s needed is to turn it all upside down: rather than reviewing new products, review <i>broken</i> products.<p>Make a site about how things break -- review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that <i>haven&#x27;t</i> broken, and look at why they haven&#x27;t.<p>Repairability also comes to mind. Everything breaks eventually -- can&#x27;t cheat entropy -- but when it does, can you easily repair it? Right-to-repair movement would get in on the action.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products</title><url>https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>driverdan</author><text>I like the concept but since it&#x27;s open to the public it will suffer from ignorance.<p>For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they&#x27;re good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.<p>The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It&#x27;s a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn&#x27;t full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.<p>This is a common issue with &quot;BIFL&quot; discussions. People overrate something because they don&#x27;t understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn&#x27;t repairable, or they don&#x27;t have experience with a higher quality item.<p>Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SoSoRoCoCo</author><text>Funny you call out the Fibrox. I don&#x27;t think full-tang is a prerequisite for BIFL. Why? Because I have my grandmother&#x27;s kitchen knife from Ireland from the 1910&#x27;s and it isn&#x27;t full tang and is still a workhorse despite having the handle replaced sometime in the 70&#x27;s.<p>So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?<p>For this existential dilemma, it would be helpful if the top DIMENSIONS of quality were explored. In this case with a knife: tang, bolster, handle material, riveting, metal type, hardness, grind angle, etc are all variables that have either a PREFERENCE scale or a DURABILITY scale. I don&#x27;t think a simple NoSQL-comment-style database is sufficient to define what elements need to be considered to rank a product as high quality vs. low quality.<p>You must know about AvE&#x27;s YouTube channel, yes? He&#x27;s an engineer who deeply understands metallurgy and machining and industrial design, so he can explore these vectors of quality for power tools:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;channel&#x2F;UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA</a><p>This kind of professional analysis is needed FIRST, to determine what the key metrics are. Then the rating system should grade based on this, rather than 5-stars.<p>Five star reviews are dead. Long live multiple variables!</text></comment> |
9,470,454 | 9,470,402 | 1 | 2 | 9,470,060 | train | <story><title>My Apple Watch After 5 Days</title><url>http://www.mollywatt.com/blog/entry/my-apple-watch-after-5-days</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Osmium</author><text>I&#x27;m a big fan of &#x27;accessibility first&#x27; design. Beyond the obvious benefits to those who need them, it also creates affordances for people without disabilities too.<p>An aside, but the Bradley watch[1] mentioned looks great. Shame it&#x27;s so big.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeenwatchstore.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;the-bradley-stainless-steel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dezeenwatchstore.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;the-bradley-stainless-s...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>My Apple Watch After 5 Days</title><url>http://www.mollywatt.com/blog/entry/my-apple-watch-after-5-days</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MDCore</author><text>I am impressed and pleased that what a few years ago would have been a highly specialized disability support tool seems to now be a case of changing a few settings in a mass-produced product.</text></comment> |
10,133,439 | 10,133,367 | 1 | 2 | 10,132,991 | train | <story><title>How fixed-gear bikes can confuse Google’s self-driving cars</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/08/26/how-fixed-gear-bikes-can-confuse-googles-self-driving-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drcode</author><text>Please Google Engineers: If your car knows where bicyclists are anyways, can you please have an additional safety to stop people from opening the driver-side door, even in a parked car, if a bicyclist is actively passing the car?<p>That is probably the biggest danger to me as a bicyclist in the city: People opening doors on parked cars for me to slam into (and potentially throwing me into a lane of car traffic) Your cars could easily outperform most humans in preventing this dangerous situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaytaylor</author><text>The notion of physically preventing the doors from opening makes me uncomfortable.<p>How about instead providing some kind of warning so people will know it&#x27;s a bad time to open the door?<p>This would be some cool tech for sure!</text></comment> | <story><title>How fixed-gear bikes can confuse Google’s self-driving cars</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/08/26/how-fixed-gear-bikes-can-confuse-googles-self-driving-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drcode</author><text>Please Google Engineers: If your car knows where bicyclists are anyways, can you please have an additional safety to stop people from opening the driver-side door, even in a parked car, if a bicyclist is actively passing the car?<p>That is probably the biggest danger to me as a bicyclist in the city: People opening doors on parked cars for me to slam into (and potentially throwing me into a lane of car traffic) Your cars could easily outperform most humans in preventing this dangerous situation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>branchless</author><text>Wow this is a great thought. Imagine: cycling without worrying about being car doored.</text></comment> |
24,979,542 | 24,979,097 | 1 | 2 | 24,976,533 | train | <story><title>Scipio: A Thread-per-Core Crate for Rust and Linux</title><url>https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-scipio/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Luker88</author><text>I am a fan of the thread-per-core model, but I do not share their views on the data sharding per core<p>While it increases the data locality, I have seen a few software following this sharding model (notably scylla) that work really bad once the load is not evenly distributed across all shards<p>When that happens it can be a huge waste of resources and can give lower performance (depending on the type of load)<p>Imho unless you are absolutely sure about the type of load, leave the sharding to dividing data between servers, or have some mechanism that can shift to sharing the load between threads if the system imbalance is too great</text></comment> | <story><title>Scipio: A Thread-per-Core Crate for Rust and Linux</title><url>https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-scipio/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BenoitP</author><text>I&#x27;ll go against the grain here and say that async&#x2F;await, wether implemented by one thread-per-core like here or by stackless coroutines is not the solution.<p>Async&#x2F;await will make complexity explode because of the colored function problem [1].<p>The solution to expensive context switches is cheap context switches, plain and simple. User-mode lightweight threads like go&#x27;s, or upcoming Java&#x27;s with Loom [2] have proven that this is possible.<p>Yes, it does mean that it can only happen in a language that controls its stack (so that you can slice it off and pop a continuation on it). I sincerely believe this is Rust&#x27;s ballpark; hell they even started the project with that idea in mind.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journal.stuffwithstuff.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-color-is-your-function&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journal.stuffwithstuff.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;02&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-color-is-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jdk.java.net&#x2F;loom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jdk.java.net&#x2F;loom&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
16,295,916 | 16,295,074 | 1 | 2 | 16,289,380 | train | <story><title>Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diplomatpuppy</author><text>I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it.<p>I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about &quot;Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting&quot; and other such nonsense.<p>The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the &quot;On Timer&quot; event for it to work.<p>The users were delighted with the improvement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshMnem</author><text>That is one thing I dislike about sites that show no loading bar. On a slow connection it&#x27;s impossible to tell if the page is still loading or already failed.<p>It&#x27;s also one of the irritating things about &quot;Material Design&quot; websites, where responses to clicks are artificially delayed before speeding out with unnatural acceleration. &quot;Nothing is happening. JUST KIDDING!&quot; I&#x27;m not sure if that is to mask the slowness of mobile devices or if it&#x27;s the cause of them. It&#x27;s the animation spam[1] of the current generation of UIs.<p>* [1] &quot;Let&#x27;s make our website sparkle. It will be &#x27;delightful&#x27;.&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dynamicdrive.com&#x2F;dynamicindex3&#x2F;snow.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dynamicdrive.com&#x2F;dynamicindex3&#x2F;snow.htm</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why some apps use fake progress bars (2017)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diplomatpuppy</author><text>I had a report in Microsoft Access that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it.<p>I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about &quot;Collating data, Cross checking, Sorting&quot; and other such nonsense.<p>The report now took eight minutes to run because I had to abuse the &quot;On Timer&quot; event for it to work.<p>The users were delighted with the improvement.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrisoli</author><text>I remember reading long ago about how they did something similar at an airport(Dallas IIRC).<p>Basically, people complained about baggage claim taking too long, so they just moved the baggage claim area to the other side of the airport, so it took longer for passengers to reach it, by the time they did, their bags would already be there, so the complaints stopped.</text></comment> |
25,894,961 | 25,894,872 | 1 | 2 | 25,894,245 | train | <story><title>Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA</title><url>https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/solar-cheap-energy-coal-gas-renewables-climate-change-environment-sustainability</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbmuser</author><text>Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.</text></item><item><author>civilized</author><text>It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades &amp; the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting</text></item><item><author>travisoneill1</author><text>&gt; The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.<p>Which is why it&#x27;s not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don&#x27;t have these associated costs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway2245</author><text>Because Germany burns seven times as much fossil fuel as France.<p>This tells us that France has a cleaner energy mix than Germany, but I don&#x27;t think this cherry-picked example contributes much to the discussion otherwise, no matter how many times you repeat it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA</title><url>https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/solar-cheap-energy-coal-gas-renewables-climate-change-environment-sustainability</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cbmuser</author><text>Except that solar power isn’t an effective measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector. Nuclear is far more effective as the comparison between France and Germany shows with Germany emitting _seven_ times the emissions as France in their energy sector.</text></item><item><author>civilized</author><text>It might be the cheapest if you factor in the costs of climate change, as responsible economists have insisted for decades &amp; the fossil fuel industry has spent billions fighting</text></item><item><author>travisoneill1</author><text>&gt; The rise of variable renewable sources means that there is an increasing need for electricity grid flexibility, the IEA notes. “Robust electricity networks, dispatchable power plants, storage technologies and demand response measures all play vital roles in meeting this,” it says.<p>Which is why it&#x27;s not really the cheapest. Fossil fuel and nuclear power don&#x27;t have these associated costs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jweb_Guru</author><text>That&#x27;s an incredibly disingenuous comparison; Germany gets just 10% of its power from solar, while France gets about 75% of its power from nuclear. Once again, this is not some sort of demonstration that &quot;solar doesn&#x27;t reduce greenhouse emissions,&quot; it&#x27;s an indication that people need to start building pumped storage.</text></comment> |
30,291,606 | 30,289,286 | 1 | 2 | 30,288,540 | train | <story><title>Ray Tracing for the TI-84 CE</title><url>https://github.com/TheScienceElf/TI-84-CE-Raytracing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chunkyks</author><text>This is awesome. A bit of self-promotion: I, too, wrote a deliberately obtuse raytracer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chunky&#x2F;sqlraytracer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;chunky&#x2F;sqlraytracer</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ray Tracing for the TI-84 CE</title><url>https://github.com/TheScienceElf/TI-84-CE-Raytracing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andy0x2a</author><text>Ray tracing at 5fph, not bad at all for the hardware.
I am impressed that this is even possible with a calculator</text></comment> |
35,643,953 | 35,644,052 | 1 | 2 | 35,639,370 | train | <story><title>Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years</title><url>https://www.legittorrents.info/</url><text>I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>phpisthebest</author><text>The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads.<p>The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.</text></item><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we&#x27;re just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make&#x2F;play video games. But we&#x27;re the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.<p>Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There&#x27;s a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it&#x27;s a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can&#x27;t remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO&#x27;d that I can&#x27;t find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that&#x27;s just not possible?</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>This is wonderful sage advice:<p>&gt; <i>Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.</i><p>Be <i>very</i> cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there&#x27;s often no remaining options if you lose adsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticbull</author><text>The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren&#x27;t a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There&#x27;s no reason PayPal can&#x27;t support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before.<p>Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick&#x27;s paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1].<p>tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users&#x2F;customers don&#x27;t actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model.<p>The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn&#x27;t because it&#x27;s being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it&#x27;s just the least-worst option we&#x27;ve compromised on.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nakamotoinstitute.org&#x2F;static&#x2F;docs&#x2F;micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nakamotoinstitute.org&#x2F;static&#x2F;docs&#x2F;micropayments-and-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years</title><url>https://www.legittorrents.info/</url><text>I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>phpisthebest</author><text>The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments, not the lack of competition in Ads.<p>The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.</text></item><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we&#x27;re just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make&#x2F;play video games. But we&#x27;re the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.<p>Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There&#x27;s a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it&#x27;s a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can&#x27;t remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO&#x27;d that I can&#x27;t find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that&#x27;s just not possible?</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>This is wonderful sage advice:<p>&gt; <i>Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.</i><p>Be <i>very</i> cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there&#x27;s often no remaining options if you lose adsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ComodoHacker</author><text>If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with &#x27;viable micropayments&#x27; is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.</text></comment> |
35,752,986 | 35,753,055 | 1 | 3 | 35,752,433 | train | <story><title>An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/an-ominous-heating-event-is-unfolding-in-the-oceans/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neonate</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;8vu62" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;8vu62</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/an-ominous-heating-event-is-unfolding-in-the-oceans/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sometimeshuman</author><text>Related, days ago the BBC reported what I assumed was a typo that the ocean temperature has risen 13.8C the past ~30 years. After reading the article I tried to double check the source but couldn&#x27;t easily find it.<p>Yesterday HN&#x27;s top 30 had a similar story from some blog I had never heard of. Their source was the BBC and a paper that didn&#x27;t show 13.8C. Now we have a typo(?) spreading like a virus.<p>The chart in this Wired article shows a ~1.38C difference which is alarmingly high. What troubles me is how many people, even HN&#x27;ers, just ran with a 13.8C number without question. Am I missing something ? Is there any scientific paper showing 13.8C, which would likely kill a significant portion of marine life ? I&#x27;ll do a time-boxed (2 years) boycott of the BBC until proven otherwise.</text></comment> |
41,583,757 | 41,582,535 | 1 | 2 | 41,555,232 | train | <story><title>The Dune Shell</title><url>https://adam-mcdaniel.github.io/dune-website/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xelamonster</author><text>It&#x27;s also just absurdly verbose for a language intended mainly for manual input. I get annoyed having to type out `sudo systemctl` multiple times in a row, in Powershell every single command is at minimum that long. Which makes it way more difficult to memorize the commands too.</text></item><item><author>Brian_K_White</author><text>The problem of powershell is not merely thet it&#x27;s new and different, and not merely that you have to learn a new and different way to get a given task done.<p>Powershell makes some things possible or easier that weren&#x27;t possible or easy, but only at the expense of making other things either impossible or at least vastly less practical, and all in all it&#x27;s a bad trade off and a wrong set of priorities for the job it claims to fill, or at least for the job bash currently fills. It&#x27;s not that bash is a gold standard, just that it&#x27;s not <i>fundamentally wrong</i>.</text></item><item><author>hi-v-rocknroll</author><text>I like the ideas of Dune and Nu, which I think were trailblazed by powershell to a degree. The problems of pure *NIX pipe philosophy with text as the lingua franca were persistent parsing problems and escaping. However, the problems of going to far in the way powershell went was it was too radical having to reimagine&#x2F;replace&#x2F;relearn almost everything, and generally more difficult to accomplish simple text manipulation. Nu at least maintains most of the *NIX shell UX. Maybe at some point in the future, we will reach parity to where there will fusion of the main DSLs, shells, and programming languages into a runtime interaction system that is somewhere between psql, Erlang shell, nu, and Squeak where there is programming language-OS parity obliterating the distinctions between programming languages, command shells, and DBMS shells. One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WorldMaker</author><text>There are ton of aliases. It&#x27;s &quot;impolite&quot; [0] to use aliases in scripts and documentation so looking at PowerShell examples is way more verbose than actually using it day to day in a REPL. Sure I could write `Set-Location` a million times a day, but I just use `cd` in the old ways. Same with `Get-ChildItem`, I tend to just use `ls` myself because of ancient habits. (I find it interesting how many have been moving to `gci` instead as the more PowerShell-native `ls` alias. I&#x27;ve not been convinced to do that myself, but I think it has to do with `gci` is way more powerful than most shells&#x27; `ls` and is used to navigate everything from folder structures to object structures including that its not a bad `jq` if you convert JSON files to PowerShell objects.)<p>[0] It&#x27;s from a version of the Python ethos that code is read way more often than it is written, so when you are polishing PowerShell code to share with others you expand all the aliases so that it is easier to read.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Dune Shell</title><url>https://adam-mcdaniel.github.io/dune-website/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xelamonster</author><text>It&#x27;s also just absurdly verbose for a language intended mainly for manual input. I get annoyed having to type out `sudo systemctl` multiple times in a row, in Powershell every single command is at minimum that long. Which makes it way more difficult to memorize the commands too.</text></item><item><author>Brian_K_White</author><text>The problem of powershell is not merely thet it&#x27;s new and different, and not merely that you have to learn a new and different way to get a given task done.<p>Powershell makes some things possible or easier that weren&#x27;t possible or easy, but only at the expense of making other things either impossible or at least vastly less practical, and all in all it&#x27;s a bad trade off and a wrong set of priorities for the job it claims to fill, or at least for the job bash currently fills. It&#x27;s not that bash is a gold standard, just that it&#x27;s not <i>fundamentally wrong</i>.</text></item><item><author>hi-v-rocknroll</author><text>I like the ideas of Dune and Nu, which I think were trailblazed by powershell to a degree. The problems of pure *NIX pipe philosophy with text as the lingua franca were persistent parsing problems and escaping. However, the problems of going to far in the way powershell went was it was too radical having to reimagine&#x2F;replace&#x2F;relearn almost everything, and generally more difficult to accomplish simple text manipulation. Nu at least maintains most of the *NIX shell UX. Maybe at some point in the future, we will reach parity to where there will fusion of the main DSLs, shells, and programming languages into a runtime interaction system that is somewhere between psql, Erlang shell, nu, and Squeak where there is programming language-OS parity obliterating the distinctions between programming languages, command shells, and DBMS shells. One can dream of a future where perhaps it will be possible to write a function, library, or program in any language one chooses and call it from any other shell or language without swig or ceremony.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Vegenoid</author><text>IMO, getting comfortable with and tuning autocomplete makes this a non-issue, and the benefit of the verbose commands is that they are very discoverable.</text></comment> |
34,911,450 | 34,910,812 | 1 | 2 | 34,909,196 | train | <story><title>Probability 101, the intuition behind martingales and solving problems with them</title><url>https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/110801</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>I like to see good math topics, but I really can&#x27;t stand when the example problems are either totally fanciful or totally abstract. I&#x27;m too stupid for that. Give me an example of a practical problem in business, finance, engineering, social science, etc. that I can solve with this tool. Does the &quot;dance party&quot; problem have an analogue in real-world allocation and planning problems? Does a gambler gambling an <i>infinite</i> number of times have practical applications in finance? Etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Probability 101, the intuition behind martingales and solving problems with them</title><url>https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/110801</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spapas82</author><text>This gives a mathematical martingale. I only know the betting strategy martingale <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Martingale_(betting_system)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Martingale_(betting_system)</a></text></comment> |
16,134,562 | 16,134,656 | 1 | 2 | 16,133,646 | train | <story><title>'The desire to have a child never goes away': The Involuntarily Childless</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/the-desire-to-have-a-child-never-goes-away-how-the-involuntarily-childless-are-forming-a-new-movement</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodsanklai</author><text>42, I don&#x27;t want kids. People keep telling me that:
I&#x27;d be happier if I had one, that they thought like me until they had one, that they wished they had them sooner, or more of them and so on...<p>I like my life as it is now and don&#x27;t feel the appeal for kids. Should I take the risk because everybody says so?</text></item><item><author>Dunan</author><text>Wasn&#x27;t especting to see this kind of article referenced on HN, and it hit me hard. I&#x27;m 41, partner is too, and would give absolutely anything to have a child of my own. She was never ready until just recently.<p>I can&#x27;t even go an hour without thinking about it...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aidenn0</author><text>Two words: Hell No.<p>I&#x27;m saying that despite having kids and being glad that I made that decision. I&#x27;ve seen way too many relationships destroyed because one or both of the couple were pressured into having kids that they didn&#x27;t want. It&#x27;s not pretty.</text></comment> | <story><title>'The desire to have a child never goes away': The Involuntarily Childless</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/02/the-desire-to-have-a-child-never-goes-away-how-the-involuntarily-childless-are-forming-a-new-movement</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yodsanklai</author><text>42, I don&#x27;t want kids. People keep telling me that:
I&#x27;d be happier if I had one, that they thought like me until they had one, that they wished they had them sooner, or more of them and so on...<p>I like my life as it is now and don&#x27;t feel the appeal for kids. Should I take the risk because everybody says so?</text></item><item><author>Dunan</author><text>Wasn&#x27;t especting to see this kind of article referenced on HN, and it hit me hard. I&#x27;m 41, partner is too, and would give absolutely anything to have a child of my own. She was never ready until just recently.<p>I can&#x27;t even go an hour without thinking about it...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dqpb</author><text>Millions of years of evolution have led to you. Now you have the fascinating choice of whether or not to end this branch.</text></comment> |
39,746,692 | 39,745,596 | 1 | 3 | 39,742,188 | train | <story><title>Thoughts on the Future of Software Development</title><url>https://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/thoughts-on-the-future-of-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>visarga</author><text>&gt; 1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do. 2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.<p>I agree, but &quot;1&quot; must include all tasks where a mistake could lead to liabilities for the company, which is probably most tasks. LLMs can&#x27;t be held responsible for their fuckups, they can&#x27;t be punished, they have no body. It&#x27;s like the genie from the bottle, it will grant your three wishes, but they might turn out in a surprising way and it can&#x27;t be held accountable.<p>The same will apply for example for using LLMs in medicine. We can&#x27;t afford to risk it on AI, a human must certify the diagnosis and treatment.<p>In conclusion we can say LLMs can&#x27;t handle accountability, not even in principle. That&#x27;s a big issue in many jobs. The OP mentioned this as well:<p>&gt; even when AI coders can be rented out like EC2 instances, it will be beneficial to have an inhouse team of Software Developers to oversee their work<p>Oversight is basically manual-mode AI alignment. We won&#x27;t automate that, the more advanced an AI, the more effort we need to put in overseeing its work.</text></item><item><author>empath-nirvana</author><text>I don&#x27;t really think that thinking of LLMs and related technologies as &quot;Artificial Humans&quot; is the right way to think about how they&#x27;re going to be integrated into workflows. What is going to happen is that people are going to be adopt these tools to solve particular tasks that are annoying or tedious for developers to do, in a way similar to the way tools like Ansible and Chef replaced the task of logging into ssh servers manually to install stuff, and aws replaced &#x27;sending a guy out to the data center to setup a server&#x27; for many companies.<p>And it&#x27;s going to be done piecemeal, not all-at-once. Someone will figure out a way to get an AI to do _one_ thing faster and cheaper than a human and sell _that_. Maybe it&#x27;s automatic test generation, maybe it&#x27;s automatically remediating alerts, maybe it&#x27;s code reviews. The scope of work of what a software developer does will be reduced until it&#x27;s reduced to two categories:<p>1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do.
2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.<p>You don&#x27;t even really need to think about LLMs as AIs or conscious or whether they pass the turing test or not, it&#x27;s just like every other form of automation we&#x27;ve already developed. There are vast swathes of work that software developers and IT people did a few decades ago that almost nobody does any more because of various forms of automation. None of that has reduced the overall amount of jobs for software developers because there isn&#x27;t a limited amount of software development to do. If you make software development less expensive and easier than people will apply it to more tasks, and software developers will become _more_ valuable and not _less_.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>&gt; I agree, but &quot;1&quot; must include all tasks where a mistake could lead to liabilities for the company, which is probably most tasks<p>If you hire a junior programmer and they make a mistake, they aren&#x27;t held liable either. Sure, you can fire them, but unless there&#x27;s malice or gross negligence the liability buck stops at the company. The same can be said about the wealth of software currently involved in producing software and making decisions. The difficulty of suing Microsoft or the llvm project over compiler bugs hasn&#x27;t stopped anyone from using their compilers.<p>I don&#x27;t see how LLMs are meaningful different from a company assuming liability for employees they hire or software they run. Even if they were AGI it wouldn&#x27;t meaningfully change anything. You make a decision whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and adjust that calculation as you get more data on both benefits and risks. Right now companies are hesitant because the risks are both large and uncertain, but as we get better at understanding and mitigating them LLMs will be used more.</text></comment> | <story><title>Thoughts on the Future of Software Development</title><url>https://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/thoughts-on-the-future-of-software-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>visarga</author><text>&gt; 1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do. 2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.<p>I agree, but &quot;1&quot; must include all tasks where a mistake could lead to liabilities for the company, which is probably most tasks. LLMs can&#x27;t be held responsible for their fuckups, they can&#x27;t be punished, they have no body. It&#x27;s like the genie from the bottle, it will grant your three wishes, but they might turn out in a surprising way and it can&#x27;t be held accountable.<p>The same will apply for example for using LLMs in medicine. We can&#x27;t afford to risk it on AI, a human must certify the diagnosis and treatment.<p>In conclusion we can say LLMs can&#x27;t handle accountability, not even in principle. That&#x27;s a big issue in many jobs. The OP mentioned this as well:<p>&gt; even when AI coders can be rented out like EC2 instances, it will be beneficial to have an inhouse team of Software Developers to oversee their work<p>Oversight is basically manual-mode AI alignment. We won&#x27;t automate that, the more advanced an AI, the more effort we need to put in overseeing its work.</text></item><item><author>empath-nirvana</author><text>I don&#x27;t really think that thinking of LLMs and related technologies as &quot;Artificial Humans&quot; is the right way to think about how they&#x27;re going to be integrated into workflows. What is going to happen is that people are going to be adopt these tools to solve particular tasks that are annoying or tedious for developers to do, in a way similar to the way tools like Ansible and Chef replaced the task of logging into ssh servers manually to install stuff, and aws replaced &#x27;sending a guy out to the data center to setup a server&#x27; for many companies.<p>And it&#x27;s going to be done piecemeal, not all-at-once. Someone will figure out a way to get an AI to do _one_ thing faster and cheaper than a human and sell _that_. Maybe it&#x27;s automatic test generation, maybe it&#x27;s automatically remediating alerts, maybe it&#x27;s code reviews. The scope of work of what a software developer does will be reduced until it&#x27;s reduced to two categories:<p>1) Those tasks that it is still currently only possible for a human to do.
2) Those tasks which are easier and cheaper for a human to do.<p>You don&#x27;t even really need to think about LLMs as AIs or conscious or whether they pass the turing test or not, it&#x27;s just like every other form of automation we&#x27;ve already developed. There are vast swathes of work that software developers and IT people did a few decades ago that almost nobody does any more because of various forms of automation. None of that has reduced the overall amount of jobs for software developers because there isn&#x27;t a limited amount of software development to do. If you make software development less expensive and easier than people will apply it to more tasks, and software developers will become _more_ valuable and not _less_.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>politician</author><text>How do you negotiate for a salary when the role is to be ablative armor for the company? &quot;I&#x27;m excited to make myself available to absorb potential reputation damage for $CORP when the AI goes off the rails.&quot;</text></comment> |
17,579,313 | 17,579,210 | 1 | 3 | 17,575,635 | train | <story><title>As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1996</author><text>Great idea - note however the lack of existance of Swedish fighter jets, the low quality of Israeli ICBM, and the rarity of German submarines.<p>A government can subsidize with taxes an industry as much as it wants, and force its products down its citizens throat as much as it can: it will not be able to create quality, which is essential to get a large market demand.<p>Unless the industry is very hard to replicate for whatever reason like large capital requirements given the available technology (ex: a computer in the 1940s, sending a human to the moon in the 1960s) this create a market opportunity.<p>Natural market forces such as competition ensure the end result.<p>EDIT: My bad, I forgot about the Swedish Gripen. It exists, which is no small feat by itself! It is just low quality and rare.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen</a><p>&quot;Gripen has achieved moderate success in sales to nations in Central Europe, South Africa and Southeast Asia; bribery has been suspected in some of these procurements, but authorities closed the investigation in 2009&quot;<p>Thanks to bribery, this wonderful piece of technology could be sold to major world powers like South Africa and Hungary.</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>The solution is therefore pretty simple: taxes will subsidize &quot;industries of national interest&quot;. It is for the same reason as the US would never buy Swedish fighter jets, Israeli ICBMs or German submarines. This has been true since the beginning of the nation state.</text></item><item><author>1996</author><text>What will make even more sense is when he says to his teams: &quot;Farewell, it was really nice working with you all, too bad the foreign competition slashed prices and bankrupted us&quot;</text></item><item><author>jlmorton</author><text>Alain Charmeau spelled this out explicitly to Der Spiegel:<p>&gt; Charmeau said the Ariane rocket does not launch often enough to justify the investment into reusability. (It would need about 30 launches a year to justify these costs, he said). And then Charmeau said something telling about why reusability doesn&#x27;t make sense to a government-backed rocket company—jobs.<p>&gt; &quot;Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,&quot; he said. &quot;That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: &#x27;Goodbye, see you next year!&#x27;&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;wissenschaft&#x2F;technik&#x2F;alain-charmeau-die-amerikaner-wollen-europa-aus-dem-weltraum-kicken-a-1207322.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;wissenschaft&#x2F;technik&#x2F;alain-charmeau-di...</a></text></item><item><author>marsokod</author><text>To me this is a major reason why the reusable launchers were not developed in Europe. The concept was being studied but never gained traction.<p>One of the reason might have been vanity but if you look at it with the view point of a CEO from a European firm, reusability was a risky gamble:<p>1) In order to keep your manufacturing quality, one needs to produce a new rocket every two or three months. Beyond that, the people manufacturing it losses knowledge and unless quality assurance is increased a lot, you will losses quality.<p>2) EU was doing around 12 launches a year, and that was by being very cheap. You could plan on increasing the market share but that starts being difficult as a lot of what remains cannot use a European launcher for political reasons.<p>3) For the sake of the argument, let say cheaper price double the market share, that leaves 24 launches a year. Based on a manufacturing of 6 launchers a year, this leaves 4 launches per rocket. And that is with very optimistic numbers (doubling of marketshare, no issue with reusability).<p>4) If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense. But ideally, you want more.
5) The Airbus people have shareholders to account to, not a CEO who does not care risking going banqueroute while pursuing a dream to go on Mars.<p>So yeah, doable but much more difficult than in a market with better access to investment and to huge cash cows named NASA and DoD</text></item><item><author>bosdev</author><text>&gt; Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much.<p>It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1&#x2F;100 the cost? How many new types of satellites, technology, human transport will be created?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WJW</author><text>It is a great idea indeed, but note:<p>- The Gripen fighter jets (designed and built in Sweden) listing no less than 17 (!) current and confirmed future customers here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen#Operational_history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen#Operational...</a>. The list of nations considering buying those jets is even longer.<p>- You are either incredibly well informed or not informed at all about the quality of Israeli ICBMs, but since they are ordering submarines capable of launching ICBMs and are capable of launching satellites into orbit, the general state of Israeli ballistic capability is definitely high enough to deliver warheads anywhere on the planet.<p>- Allegedly, the latest generation of German submarines is good enough to penetrate the defenses of a US navy carrier group (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Type_212_submarine#Operations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Type_212_submarine#Operations</a>). They are in service with both the German and Italian navies with four more ordered by the Norwegians.<p>Quality helps with generating demand but it is not enough, especially when selling to governments. If you don&#x27;t believe this, please consider if SpaceX had still gotten the NSA launch contracts if SpaceX had been a Chinese or Russian company.</text></comment> | <story><title>As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>1996</author><text>Great idea - note however the lack of existance of Swedish fighter jets, the low quality of Israeli ICBM, and the rarity of German submarines.<p>A government can subsidize with taxes an industry as much as it wants, and force its products down its citizens throat as much as it can: it will not be able to create quality, which is essential to get a large market demand.<p>Unless the industry is very hard to replicate for whatever reason like large capital requirements given the available technology (ex: a computer in the 1940s, sending a human to the moon in the 1960s) this create a market opportunity.<p>Natural market forces such as competition ensure the end result.<p>EDIT: My bad, I forgot about the Swedish Gripen. It exists, which is no small feat by itself! It is just low quality and rare.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Saab_JAS_39_Gripen</a><p>&quot;Gripen has achieved moderate success in sales to nations in Central Europe, South Africa and Southeast Asia; bribery has been suspected in some of these procurements, but authorities closed the investigation in 2009&quot;<p>Thanks to bribery, this wonderful piece of technology could be sold to major world powers like South Africa and Hungary.</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>The solution is therefore pretty simple: taxes will subsidize &quot;industries of national interest&quot;. It is for the same reason as the US would never buy Swedish fighter jets, Israeli ICBMs or German submarines. This has been true since the beginning of the nation state.</text></item><item><author>1996</author><text>What will make even more sense is when he says to his teams: &quot;Farewell, it was really nice working with you all, too bad the foreign competition slashed prices and bankrupted us&quot;</text></item><item><author>jlmorton</author><text>Alain Charmeau spelled this out explicitly to Der Spiegel:<p>&gt; Charmeau said the Ariane rocket does not launch often enough to justify the investment into reusability. (It would need about 30 launches a year to justify these costs, he said). And then Charmeau said something telling about why reusability doesn&#x27;t make sense to a government-backed rocket company—jobs.<p>&gt; &quot;Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,&quot; he said. &quot;That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: &#x27;Goodbye, see you next year!&#x27;&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;wissenschaft&#x2F;technik&#x2F;alain-charmeau-die-amerikaner-wollen-europa-aus-dem-weltraum-kicken-a-1207322.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;wissenschaft&#x2F;technik&#x2F;alain-charmeau-di...</a></text></item><item><author>marsokod</author><text>To me this is a major reason why the reusable launchers were not developed in Europe. The concept was being studied but never gained traction.<p>One of the reason might have been vanity but if you look at it with the view point of a CEO from a European firm, reusability was a risky gamble:<p>1) In order to keep your manufacturing quality, one needs to produce a new rocket every two or three months. Beyond that, the people manufacturing it losses knowledge and unless quality assurance is increased a lot, you will losses quality.<p>2) EU was doing around 12 launches a year, and that was by being very cheap. You could plan on increasing the market share but that starts being difficult as a lot of what remains cannot use a European launcher for political reasons.<p>3) For the sake of the argument, let say cheaper price double the market share, that leaves 24 launches a year. Based on a manufacturing of 6 launchers a year, this leaves 4 launches per rocket. And that is with very optimistic numbers (doubling of marketshare, no issue with reusability).<p>4) If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense. But ideally, you want more.
5) The Airbus people have shareholders to account to, not a CEO who does not care risking going banqueroute while pursuing a dream to go on Mars.<p>So yeah, doable but much more difficult than in a market with better access to investment and to huge cash cows named NASA and DoD</text></item><item><author>bosdev</author><text>&gt; Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much.<p>It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1&#x2F;100 the cost? How many new types of satellites, technology, human transport will be created?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marsokod</author><text>The Gripen is not Swedish?<p>Competition works when the market is open. But the space market is far from being open. Even building a satellite without including an ITAR or EAR part was politically impossible a few years ago for an EU company.</text></comment> |
26,898,612 | 26,898,668 | 1 | 2 | 26,891,811 | train | <story><title>Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tGr5lGf7</author><text>Cellebrite doesn&#x27;t even have a bug bounty programme or contact to report their bugs.<p>Last year I&#x27;ve managed to gain partial access to one of their systems and it took me weeks emailing their internal email addresses to finally fix the bug. They were total ass about it.<p>Now I&#x27;ve got complete access to their entire database and I don&#x27;t know what do. Can HN advise?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vorpalhex</author><text>Well definitely don&#x27;t share it with DDOS secrets, news outlets or any other major company that would potentially report on it. That would be very bad press for Cellebrite, and if they connected it to you they could be very annoying - though again, they would need pretty good evidence connecting it to you and things like TOR and proper privacy practices would make that very difficult. So definitely don&#x27;t do that, or use something like tails to post it to multiple SecureDrop outlets.</text></comment> | <story><title>Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tGr5lGf7</author><text>Cellebrite doesn&#x27;t even have a bug bounty programme or contact to report their bugs.<p>Last year I&#x27;ve managed to gain partial access to one of their systems and it took me weeks emailing their internal email addresses to finally fix the bug. They were total ass about it.<p>Now I&#x27;ve got complete access to their entire database and I don&#x27;t know what do. Can HN advise?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sneak</author><text>This definitely isn&#x27;t a trap.</text></comment> |
8,140,173 | 8,140,112 | 1 | 2 | 8,136,819 | train | <story><title>Researcher’s death shocks Japan</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/08/researchers-death-shocks-japan.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zeratul</author><text>I think posts like that should be accompanied with some tools that help to deal with grief or suicidal thinking.<p>Here is an online grief support group:<p><a href="http://www.onlinegriefsupport.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.onlinegriefsupport.com&#x2F;</a><p>Here is a phone number to a grief counseling group for those in US:<p>1-800-260-0094<p>Here is online suicide support group:<p><a href="http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org&#x2F;GetHelp&#x2F;LifelineCha...</a><p>Here is a suicide prevention lifeline for those in US:<p>1-800-273-8255<p>[EDIT: suicide is a very complex disease that is far from being understood. I&#x27;m sure that prof. Yoshiki Sasai had to deal with much, much more than just two retracted articles.]</text></comment> | <story><title>Researcher’s death shocks Japan</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/08/researchers-death-shocks-japan.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skosuri</author><text>This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made.<p>First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some of the most ambitious and amazing directed differentiation of stem cells into neural tissues including the retina (see an old news story here [1]). Whether or not he was deeply involved in this latest STAP cell controversy is immaterial to the tremendous contributions his lab has made to the field.<p>Second, we should be more careful on how we as a scientific community react to scientific scandal. Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley DevBio Prof, HHMI, Founder of PLoS), who&#x27;s father committed suicide in a similar incident many years ago, had some poignant comments [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.michaeleisen.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=1619</a></text></comment> |
7,279,271 | 7,279,158 | 1 | 2 | 7,278,784 | train | <story><title>Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/harvard-supercomputing-cluster-hijacked-to-produce-alt-cryptocurrency/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>heydenberk</author><text>I&#x27;m hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won&#x27;t be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not.<p>EDIT: Reversible computing (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reversible_computing</a>) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tromp</author><text>From the README of my &quot;Cuckoo Cycle&quot; Proof-of-Work at <a href="https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tromp&#x2F;cuckoo</a> :<p>Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little power.<p>Cuckoo Cycle represents a breakthrough in three important ways:<p>1) it performs only one very cheap siphash computation for about 3.3 random accesses to memory,<p>2) its memory requirement can be set arbitrarily and doesn&#x27;t allow for any time-memory trade-off.<p>3) verification of the proof of work is instant, requiring 1 sha256 and 42 siphash computations.<p>Runtime in Cuckoo Cycle is completely dominated by memory latency. It promotes the use of commodity general-purpose hardware over custom designed single-purpose hardware.<p>Other features:<p>4) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph.<p>5) it has a natural notion of (base) difficulty, namely the number of edges in the graph; above about 60% of size, a 42-cycle is almost guaranteed, but below 50% the probability starts to fall sharply.<p>6) running time for the current implementation on high end x86 is under 24s&#x2F;GB single-threaded, and under 3s&#x2F;GB for 12 threads.<p>7) making cuckoo use a significant fraction of the typical memory of a botnet computer will send it into swap-hell, and likely alert its owner.</text></comment> | <story><title>Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/harvard-supercomputing-cluster-hijacked-to-produce-alt-cryptocurrency/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>heydenberk</author><text>I&#x27;m hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won&#x27;t be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not.<p>EDIT: Reversible computing (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reversible_computing</a>) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chc</author><text>How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I&#x27;m not the world&#x27;s leading expert, but I don&#x27;t see a way around that.</text></comment> |
36,051,336 | 36,051,351 | 1 | 3 | 36,051,185 | train | <story><title>A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health</title><url>https://www.thecompanion.app/philip-k-dick-psychosis/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>roody15</author><text>Interesting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :&#x2F;.</text></comment> | <story><title>A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health</title><url>https://www.thecompanion.app/philip-k-dick-psychosis/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nologic01</author><text>Some people live at the cusp of the abyss but they are kind enough to dispatch so that we the rest dont have to</text></comment> |
2,984,416 | 2,984,295 | 1 | 3 | 2,984,021 | train | <story><title>In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jellicle</author><text>What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science.<p>For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y in the paper by providing the paper with a fully pre-digested story to perhaps rewrite, or perhaps not.<p>The words "narrative science" appear 14 times in that story, including such clunkers as "To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story. It even includes pricing: hey readers, this is not only cool and will win the Pulitzer Prize, but it's cheap too! No mention of competitors... It reads like an ad because it is an ad.<p>This story was provided, probably almost word for word, by a PR person to the NYT reporter.<p>I'm not sure if computer-generated text will be better or worse than the media system we have now.</text></comment> | <story><title>In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>talbina</author><text>Did they write an entire two page article while ignoring the real leader in this space, in my opinion: <a href="http://statsheet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://statsheet.com/</a></text></comment> |
14,106,577 | 14,102,598 | 1 | 2 | 14,100,254 | train | <story><title>An Alternative Approach to Rate Limiting</title><url>https://medium.com/figma-design/an-alternative-approach-to-rate-limiting-f8a06cf7c94c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sulam</author><text>There&#x27;s a fixed memory solution that doesn&#x27;t suffer from the boundary condition that allows you to double the rate. It&#x27;s pretty straightforward, so I&#x27;ll describe it in prose, since it&#x27;s 6am and I&#x27;d rather not get the code wrong. :)<p>The approach uses a ring buffer. If you&#x27;re not familiar with them, they are a fix-sized array or linked list that you iterate through monotonically, wrapping around to the beginning when you are at the limit. Our ring buffer will hold timestamps and should be initialized to hold 0&#x27;s -- ensuring that only someone with a time machine could be rate limited before they send any requests. The size of the buffer is the rate limit&#x27;s value, expressed in whatever time unit you find convenient.<p>As each request comes in, you fetch the value from the buffer at the current position and compare it to current time. If the value from the buffer is more than the current time minus the rate limit interval you&#x27;re using, then you return a 420 to the client and are done. If not, their request is ok and you should serve it normally, but first you store the current time stamp in the buffer and then advance the counter&#x2F;index.</text></comment> | <story><title>An Alternative Approach to Rate Limiting</title><url>https://medium.com/figma-design/an-alternative-approach-to-rate-limiting-f8a06cf7c94c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>irgeek</author><text><i>In response, we implemented a shadow ban: On the surface, the attackers continued to receive a 200 HTTP response code, but behind the scenes we simply stopped sending document invitations after they exceeded the rate limit.</i><p>And right there they broke the service for legitimate users. Totally unacceptable collateral damage IMHO.</text></comment> |
28,823,890 | 28,821,914 | 1 | 2 | 28,809,195 | train | <story><title>My Emotions as a CEO</title><url>https://ryancaldbeck.co/2021/10/08/my-emotions-as-a-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zemvpferreira</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry this person has had such a negative experience of the job. I can relate to some of it, but as a former CEO (up to a team of 20-30) I&#x27;ve not felt lonely or jealous. Does he really think a desire to leave is unique to the c-suite? Apallingly out of touch.<p>In my experience you get what you sign up to take. As CEO of a company that&#x27;s taken tens of millions in funding you a) are indepently wealthy b) have other options for fulfilling work c) can apply a massive amount of control to your everyday circumstances. Don&#x27;t feel like reading 500 emails a day? Delegate more effectively. Feel lonely? Should have made some fucking true friends in your life. Feel an unbearable desire to quit? Figure it out or, you know, quit. I did.<p>Founder-CEO is a great privilege of a job and this self-pity party is unbecoming of a leader. You don&#x27;t have to be happy all the time but you do have to face the fact you&#x27;ve chosen this life again and again over many options most people will never have the privilege of having. It&#x27;s not a life sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darkerside</author><text>I read your post before the article, and based on your post, the article is not at all what I expected. The author was clearly respectful and appreciative of the opportunity he was given. This was an honest appraisal of the emotions he felt during that time, which were often not positive. It&#x27;s the type of vulnerability that we should probably encourage from our leaders, but we are often too immature to handle it.<p>Your post to me smacks of toxic positivity. It&#x27;s ok to admit that not everything is great (even though we are just about all of us on this forum lucky and blessed). It&#x27;s the human condition, and nobody is exempt.<p>BTW, you do realize he has stepped down and this is a retrospective, right?</text></comment> | <story><title>My Emotions as a CEO</title><url>https://ryancaldbeck.co/2021/10/08/my-emotions-as-a-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zemvpferreira</author><text>I&#x27;m sorry this person has had such a negative experience of the job. I can relate to some of it, but as a former CEO (up to a team of 20-30) I&#x27;ve not felt lonely or jealous. Does he really think a desire to leave is unique to the c-suite? Apallingly out of touch.<p>In my experience you get what you sign up to take. As CEO of a company that&#x27;s taken tens of millions in funding you a) are indepently wealthy b) have other options for fulfilling work c) can apply a massive amount of control to your everyday circumstances. Don&#x27;t feel like reading 500 emails a day? Delegate more effectively. Feel lonely? Should have made some fucking true friends in your life. Feel an unbearable desire to quit? Figure it out or, you know, quit. I did.<p>Founder-CEO is a great privilege of a job and this self-pity party is unbecoming of a leader. You don&#x27;t have to be happy all the time but you do have to face the fact you&#x27;ve chosen this life again and again over many options most people will never have the privilege of having. It&#x27;s not a life sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>Did we read the same article? I didn&#x27;t interpret it as a pity-party at all. I haven&#x27;t been a CEO, but I have been in upper management, and that has been stressful enough for me to know that being a CEO is the last thing I could do.<p>I just thought this post was an honest discussion of one person&#x27;s emotions, and I didn&#x27;t feel that it was too strong one way on the positives or the negatives. If anything I found it helpful putting into context some of my own emotions that I have in leadership positions.</text></comment> |
2,810,560 | 2,810,526 | 1 | 2 | 2,810,373 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Pump, a dead simple Pythonic abstraction of HTTP.</title><url>http://adeel.github.com/pump/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>justin_vanw</author><text>"What WSGI should have been."<p>Well, not at all. Pump is what werkzeug, webob, and other more friendly wrappers on WSGI already are. Basically pointless duplication of work, without understanding why WSGI can't be this simple.<p>One basic reason that WSGI can't be as simple as just returning a dictionary is that you don't necessarily want the entire body of your response pre-computed before starting to return data to the client. What about long running connections? What if you want to return the head of the response immediately, so the client can start pulling css and js while you compute the body of the response? What if you want to do chunked encoding to support long polling connections, or responses where you don't know the response size beforehand?<p>Pump is basically doing what lots of other things already do, except without quite understanding HTTP quite as well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Pump, a dead simple Pythonic abstraction of HTTP.</title><url>http://adeel.github.com/pump/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>collint</author><text>The Rack style API is nice for the simplicity. I &#60;3 it.<p>The Rack style api is NOT a great representation of the HTTP protocol. Specifically anything with a streaming or chunked response.<p>start_response/yield may not be the absolute best API for this, I haven't thought to much about that. But if you go look into what was done in Rails 3.1 for chunked responses you may realize it's not actually too great.</text></comment> |
11,393,891 | 11,393,620 | 1 | 3 | 11,393,074 | train | <story><title>The Basics of Web Application Security</title><url>http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philjr</author><text>I say this with a lot of respect, but this seems pretty noddy for a Martin Fowler article. There&#x27;s not a lot of meat here and I really don&#x27;t consider myself an app sec expert :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephenboyd</author><text>It says &#x27;basics&#x27; right there in the title. Everyone has to start somewhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Basics of Web Application Security</title><url>http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philjr</author><text>I say this with a lot of respect, but this seems pretty noddy for a Martin Fowler article. There&#x27;s not a lot of meat here and I really don&#x27;t consider myself an app sec expert :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abraae</author><text>Article was well worth while just to learn about Little Bobby Tables. Still laughing. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;327&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;327&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
24,820,358 | 24,819,258 | 1 | 2 | 24,818,172 | train | <story><title>A legislative path to an interoperable internet</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-interoperable-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munfred</author><text>Here is the full text of the ACCESS Act of 2019 bill: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;senate-bill&#x2F;2658&#x2F;text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;senate-bill&#x2F;265...</a><p>I highly recommend that everyone reads it - it is extremely short, well written, and probably the single most important piece of legislation to HN folks in the past decade.<p>As the bill is right now, it require communications platforms with 100M monthly active users in the US to make their services interoperable with other platforms. The bill presumes that platforms using open protocols already (like email) are fine. Facebook and it’s messenger platform is likely to be the only one meeting the threshold.<p>I&#x27;m not American, but if you are and you care, I would suggest you to call your representative and explain why you support (or not) this bill. Remember that as it goes through congress, it can, and most likely will, be heavily edited or gutted to fit the many competing interests whispering in their ears. If you think the bill is good as is, tell them that! Personally, I think the bill is perfect, except for the 100M user threshold to start demand compatibility, which I think should be lowered to 10M.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jkarneges</author><text>&gt; the bill is perfect, except for the 100M user threshold to start demand compatibility, which I think should be lowered to 10M<p>I kinda like the high number, as it means the spirit is to prevent monopolies, which is one of the most compelling reasons for regulations to exist. Make the number too low, and it would invite criticism from people about regulations being overbearing. I don&#x27;t know if that number is 100M, 10M, or 1M, but just something to be mindful about.<p>My sense is that if Facebook is legally forced to interop, then all other smaller&#x2F;future players will voluntarily interop anyway.</text></comment> | <story><title>A legislative path to an interoperable internet</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/legislative-path-interoperable-internet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munfred</author><text>Here is the full text of the ACCESS Act of 2019 bill: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;senate-bill&#x2F;2658&#x2F;text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;116th-congress&#x2F;senate-bill&#x2F;265...</a><p>I highly recommend that everyone reads it - it is extremely short, well written, and probably the single most important piece of legislation to HN folks in the past decade.<p>As the bill is right now, it require communications platforms with 100M monthly active users in the US to make their services interoperable with other platforms. The bill presumes that platforms using open protocols already (like email) are fine. Facebook and it’s messenger platform is likely to be the only one meeting the threshold.<p>I&#x27;m not American, but if you are and you care, I would suggest you to call your representative and explain why you support (or not) this bill. Remember that as it goes through congress, it can, and most likely will, be heavily edited or gutted to fit the many competing interests whispering in their ears. If you think the bill is good as is, tell them that! Personally, I think the bill is perfect, except for the 100M user threshold to start demand compatibility, which I think should be lowered to 10M.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vsskanth</author><text>Can interoperability and data portability still be legislatively mandated if APIs were ruled copyrightable in the Supreme Court (Oracle vs Google) ?<p>Can monopolies go further and claim their user graph and user data is also under copyright ?</text></comment> |
4,438,609 | 4,438,551 | 1 | 2 | 4,436,867 | train | <story><title>Dark matter scaffolding of universe detected for the first time</title><url>http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/20623-dark-matter-scaffolding-of-universe-detected-for-the-first-time</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeggers5</author><text>It would be amazing if somebody could answer this too. If I turn a lamp on and off in a sealed room of mirrors, why doesn't the light just keep bouncing off the walls and illuminate the room?</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>Same place sunlight goes.</text></item><item><author>mkup</author><text>(A bit off-topic question to physics expert on HN)<p>I've read that supermassive black hole accretion is the most energy-effective process of mass to energy conversion in the Universe (50% efficiency or so).<p>I'm just curious: Where does all that energy go? Extremely powerful jets of radiation are emitted into the intergalaxy space and then what? Does it just disappear? Isn't this energy responsible for Universe expansion? It must push galaxies away from each other, right?</text></item><item><author>InclinedPlane</author><text>Science!<p>We can tell how much dark matter is out there because we can "weigh" it through indirect measures. And then we can take different theories of dark matter (such as, say, the theory that it's all just a bunch of interstellar orphaned planets and "black dwarfs" and what-have-you made up of ordinary matter) and figure out what sorts of implications that would have, make predictions on observable effects of those different models and then test those predictions. And that is precisely what happened about 20-30 years ago. A lot of work was done to pin down what type of dark matter makes up the majority of it out there.<p>For example, you can point a telescope at a set of neighboring galaxies and look for brightening effects due to gravitational micro-lensing from a chance alignment of a "macho" (e.g. orphaned gas giant planet) along the line of sight. Surveys were set up and indeed found that there were orphaned "macho" objects in our galaxy, but the statistics showed that they were orders of magnitude too rare to make up the bulk of dark matter we know about from other studies. Another line of evidence involves studying the large-scale structure of the Universe (e.g. the layout of galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc.) and comparing it with various computer simulations of models with different assumptions on the composition of the mass of the Universe (e.g. 100% "ordinary" baryonic matter, various percentages of "special" dark matter such as cold and hot dark matter, WIMPs, etc.)<p>From this and many other lines of evidence we came up with very strong evidence that the vast majority of the mass budget of the Universe is in the form of so-called "cold dark matter" which is composed of weekly interacting massive particles other than neutrinos (neutrinos are dark matter, but we've been able to place an upper limit on how much they contribute to the dark matter budget of the Universe, because they are detectable to a degree, and it's only a fraction).<p>So that's it, just a simple matter of comparing the predictions of different theories with observations and eliminating the theories that do not predict what we actually see out there in the Universe.</text></item><item><author>ok_craig</author><text>There's one thing I don't understand about the mystery of dark matter. I don't understand why the simple explanation for it isn't just that it's regular matter that is not stars. Maybe there are just bajillions of planets and dust clouds out there. Matter that isn't directly circling stars, thus not reflecting light. Why is the popular assumption that if the mass isn't stars or things in orbit of stars, that it must be a mystery substance? I assume there's scientific reasoning behind this, but I've never heard it explained before. If someone could fill me in, that would be awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codeflo</author><text>Well yes, when the light hits a mirror, a certain percentage (say 95% of the energy) bounces back, which can hit another mirror and so forth. There's no limit, but after a few dozen bounces, the remaining light is virtually undetectable.<p>Really, the exact same thing happens in a standard white painted room, the two differences being that the mirrors reflect more of the light (so that a dimmer light source will suffice to reach the same level of illumination), and that the reflection is directed instead of diffuse (this only changes the shape of the reflected light, not its amount). Maybe you can explain what's confusing you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dark matter scaffolding of universe detected for the first time</title><url>http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/20623-dark-matter-scaffolding-of-universe-detected-for-the-first-time</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeggers5</author><text>It would be amazing if somebody could answer this too. If I turn a lamp on and off in a sealed room of mirrors, why doesn't the light just keep bouncing off the walls and illuminate the room?</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>Same place sunlight goes.</text></item><item><author>mkup</author><text>(A bit off-topic question to physics expert on HN)<p>I've read that supermassive black hole accretion is the most energy-effective process of mass to energy conversion in the Universe (50% efficiency or so).<p>I'm just curious: Where does all that energy go? Extremely powerful jets of radiation are emitted into the intergalaxy space and then what? Does it just disappear? Isn't this energy responsible for Universe expansion? It must push galaxies away from each other, right?</text></item><item><author>InclinedPlane</author><text>Science!<p>We can tell how much dark matter is out there because we can "weigh" it through indirect measures. And then we can take different theories of dark matter (such as, say, the theory that it's all just a bunch of interstellar orphaned planets and "black dwarfs" and what-have-you made up of ordinary matter) and figure out what sorts of implications that would have, make predictions on observable effects of those different models and then test those predictions. And that is precisely what happened about 20-30 years ago. A lot of work was done to pin down what type of dark matter makes up the majority of it out there.<p>For example, you can point a telescope at a set of neighboring galaxies and look for brightening effects due to gravitational micro-lensing from a chance alignment of a "macho" (e.g. orphaned gas giant planet) along the line of sight. Surveys were set up and indeed found that there were orphaned "macho" objects in our galaxy, but the statistics showed that they were orders of magnitude too rare to make up the bulk of dark matter we know about from other studies. Another line of evidence involves studying the large-scale structure of the Universe (e.g. the layout of galaxies, galaxy clusters, etc.) and comparing it with various computer simulations of models with different assumptions on the composition of the mass of the Universe (e.g. 100% "ordinary" baryonic matter, various percentages of "special" dark matter such as cold and hot dark matter, WIMPs, etc.)<p>From this and many other lines of evidence we came up with very strong evidence that the vast majority of the mass budget of the Universe is in the form of so-called "cold dark matter" which is composed of weekly interacting massive particles other than neutrinos (neutrinos are dark matter, but we've been able to place an upper limit on how much they contribute to the dark matter budget of the Universe, because they are detectable to a degree, and it's only a fraction).<p>So that's it, just a simple matter of comparing the predictions of different theories with observations and eliminating the theories that do not predict what we actually see out there in the Universe.</text></item><item><author>ok_craig</author><text>There's one thing I don't understand about the mystery of dark matter. I don't understand why the simple explanation for it isn't just that it's regular matter that is not stars. Maybe there are just bajillions of planets and dust clouds out there. Matter that isn't directly circling stars, thus not reflecting light. Why is the popular assumption that if the mass isn't stars or things in orbit of stars, that it must be a mystery substance? I assume there's scientific reasoning behind this, but I've never heard it explained before. If someone could fill me in, that would be awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>Mirrors are not perfect reflectors; some light will be absorbed.</text></comment> |
32,550,750 | 32,550,813 | 1 | 2 | 32,550,211 | train | <story><title>The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool</title><url>https://adguard.com/en/blog/smart-tv-ad-blocking.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rendall</author><text>&gt; <i>Some may argue that there&#x27;s no need to be dramatic and that there&#x27;s nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then.</i><p>Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it&#x27;s something else I&#x27;m canceling and going back to P2P. Fuck &#x27;em.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>1ncorrect</author><text>Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.<p>It indiscriminately pollutes the environment, and inflicts harm on non participants by incentivising unbridled data collection.</text></comment> | <story><title>The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool</title><url>https://adguard.com/en/blog/smart-tv-ad-blocking.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rendall</author><text>&gt; <i>Some may argue that there&#x27;s no need to be dramatic and that there&#x27;s nothing wrong in seeing an occasional ad every now and then.</i><p>Oh, no, I am very dramatic about this. I will go to any lengths not to see advertising. I will entirely forgo any platform that shows me even one ad, especially when I pay them. Amazon Prime video is already pushing it with their preroll previews. The second it&#x27;s something else I&#x27;m canceling and going back to P2P. Fuck &#x27;em.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unclebucknasty</author><text>It&#x27;s the principle.<p>This probably sounds over the top, but at some point it feels like they&#x27;re saying they own you. You&#x27;re paying them for one service, and they&#x27;ll unilaterally decide it&#x27;s not enough and they are going to make more money on you. But they don&#x27;t do it via a price increase that gives you a fair opportunity to decide on the value exchange. They just start shoving this stuff on you.<p>And worst of all, it&#x27;s your time they&#x27;re taking to do it. The one thing there&#x27;s never enough of, and that you&#x27;ll never get back.</text></comment> |
27,812,555 | 27,807,753 | 1 | 3 | 27,792,366 | train | <story><title>A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution</title><url>https://blog.jreypo.io/2021/07/09/a-look-into-cbl-mariner-microsoft-internal-linux-distribution/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vermilingua</author><text>A MS dev writing a blog on building MS’ own distro of Linux on his _Macbook_ must have Ballmer sweating bullets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubermonkey</author><text>Fortunately, nobody has to care what Ballmer thinks anymore.<p>IMO he, even moreso than BillG, was the animus behind the insanely cultish POV that MSFT had for a long, long time. As recently as 2009, working there led otherwise smart people to say really dumb things for, I guess, political reasons.<p>I&#x27;m in the project management space. We have a product that compliments Project Server, and early on we did lots of joint deals with MSFT&#x27;s Proj Server unit. Even well after the introduction of the iPhone -- which, for most phone makers, was a serious wakeup call about what you could do with a phone -- they acted like it was a personal insult every time they saw a professional associate using something other than Windows Mobile. &quot;Get one of these! It&#x27;s just as good!&quot;<p>Keep in mind that, in 2009, WinMo was a complete dumpster fire. App availability was awkward (no built-in stores yet), but there were MONSTROUS gaps in capability in the devices out of the box. For example, the native mail client couldn&#x27;t do IMAP. But sure, it&#x27;s &quot;just as good&quot;.<p>iPods -- which were really ubiquitous -- set them off, too. And if you mentioned having a PlayStation, they&#x27;d want to know why you didn&#x27;t have an XBox instead. They had &quot;amnesty barrels&quot; you could throw away your non-MSFT tech in. It was really, really, really goofy and rah-rah and honestly creepy.<p>You notice how, today, MSFT actually understands they&#x27;re part of a diverse computing landscape? Sharepoint actually works on non-MSFT browsers, for example. Office 365 runs like a champ in pretty much ANY decent browser, on any platform. I can run a real iOS build of Office on my iPad, and the Mac version is really great.<p>ALL OF THIS is post-Ballmer.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution</title><url>https://blog.jreypo.io/2021/07/09/a-look-into-cbl-mariner-microsoft-internal-linux-distribution/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vermilingua</author><text>A MS dev writing a blog on building MS’ own distro of Linux on his _Macbook_ must have Ballmer sweating bullets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>discordance</author><text>Many people at Microsoft use Macs. It’s not a big deal.</text></comment> |
25,920,127 | 25,919,628 | 1 | 3 | 25,900,461 | train | <story><title>The No-Order File System (2012)</title><url>http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vijayc/nofs.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>That&#x27;s progress.<p>I&#x27;ve previously suggested that operating systems should have stronger file integrity guarantees. &quot;Unit&quot; files (rewriting replaces the whole file atomically, no reader ever sees a partially written file). That&#x27;s the default. &quot;Log&quot; files (always end at a clean end point, don&#x27;t tail off into junk). &quot;Temp&quot; files (disappear on reboot). And, for databases, &quot;Managed&quot; files.<p>Managed files have more I&#x2F;O functions. In particular, you get two completion events on writes - &quot;copy complete&quot; (the caller can reuse the buffer) and &quot;safely stored&quot; (the data has reached its final resting place, all links are complete, etc.). Programs like databases would use that. Those are the semantics databases want, and struggle to get by flushing, waiting, and various workarounds.<p>When I mention this, what usually happens is that people get lost in complicated workarounds for simulating unit files. Different approaches are needed for Linux, Windows, NTFS, and various VM systems. This should Just Work.<p>This isn&#x27;t my invention; it&#x27;s from Popek&#x27;s kernel in 1985 at UCLA, later seen as UCLA-Locus and as an IBM product. They had explicit commit and revert functions for file systems. I&#x27;d suggest having the default be commit on normal close or normal program exit, but if the program aborts or crashes or is killed, unit files don&#x27;t commit and remain unchanged.</text></comment> | <story><title>The No-Order File System (2012)</title><url>http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vijayc/nofs.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pwinnski</author><text>It&#x27;s a fascinating concept, but nothing seems to have happened in the eight years since.<p>This seems like it might gain a bit of performance in exchange for slightly-higher filesystem overhead, though it&#x27;s not clear there are any stats on either. It&#x27;s also not clear how exactly performance increases would surface: are reads slower but writes faster?</text></comment> |
25,235,670 | 25,233,168 | 1 | 3 | 25,232,290 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler – Free D&D map maker</title><url>https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24188557" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24188557</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Dungeon Map Doodler – Free D&D map maker</title><url>https://dungeonmapdoodler.com/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Shared404</author><text>A great tool, I used it a fair amount while running some D&amp;D games for family.<p>If I were to make one request, it would be the ability to export to PDF, with the ability to choose paper sizes. I wind up fighting with getting the maps sliced up in other programs in order to get sizing right (EDIT: For printing).</text></comment> |
20,308,138 | 20,307,804 | 1 | 2 | 20,306,732 | train | <story><title>NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to Titan</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/titan-saturn-nasa-dragonfly/592882/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cwkoss</author><text>In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly.<p>Conversely, on Titan, we won&#x27;t need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS&#x27;s most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan&#x27;s methane sea. High spin up cost, but cheap super-conduction environment once you&#x27;re up.</text></item><item><author>rzimmerman</author><text>A flying drone is a really solid idea for a Titan lander for a couple reasons:<p>* The surface atmosphere density is higher than Earth&#x27;s (1.5 atm)<p>* Gravitational force is much lower (0.15g)<p>* We don&#x27;t know a lot about the surface composition or topography, so wheels and motors represent a challenge<p>* Visibility may be poor, making visual navigation tricky (though that&#x27;s also a problem for a flying vehicle I suppose)<p>I&#x27;ve heard people ask about &quot;why a nuclear power source?&quot; Saturn is 10x as far from the sun as Earth, so sunlight is about 1&#x2F;100th as bright. In addition, Titan&#x27;s atmosphere blocks most of that. There really isn&#x27;t any other realistic option.<p>I hope it works and they take videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gene-h</author><text>Interestingly they actually exploit these cold temperatures to keep things cool. The Dragonfly Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer(DraGNS)&#x27;s gamma ray detector is mounted outside.[0] In most other probes the detector would need to kept cold with a cryocooler.
[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jhuapl.edu&#x2F;techdigest&#x2F;TD&#x2F;td3403&#x2F;34_03-Lorenz.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jhuapl.edu&#x2F;techdigest&#x2F;TD&#x2F;td3403&#x2F;34_03-Lorenz.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>NASA plans to launch a spacecraft to Titan</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/titan-saturn-nasa-dragonfly/592882/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cwkoss</author><text>In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly.<p>Conversely, on Titan, we won&#x27;t need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS&#x27;s most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan&#x27;s methane sea. High spin up cost, but cheap super-conduction environment once you&#x27;re up.</text></item><item><author>rzimmerman</author><text>A flying drone is a really solid idea for a Titan lander for a couple reasons:<p>* The surface atmosphere density is higher than Earth&#x27;s (1.5 atm)<p>* Gravitational force is much lower (0.15g)<p>* We don&#x27;t know a lot about the surface composition or topography, so wheels and motors represent a challenge<p>* Visibility may be poor, making visual navigation tricky (though that&#x27;s also a problem for a flying vehicle I suppose)<p>I&#x27;ve heard people ask about &quot;why a nuclear power source?&quot; Saturn is 10x as far from the sun as Earth, so sunlight is about 1&#x2F;100th as bright. In addition, Titan&#x27;s atmosphere blocks most of that. There really isn&#x27;t any other realistic option.<p>I hope it works and they take videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajmurmann</author><text>Hah, I was always intrigued by the idea of placing solar cells on the bright side of Mercury and servers on the dark side. I wonder what other good options might exist in the solar system.</text></comment> |
32,070,507 | 32,070,682 | 1 | 2 | 32,070,067 | train | <story><title>Domino's spent $50.4M on TV ads to brag about $100k donation</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/sqnla7/dominos_spent_504_million_and_counting_on_tv_ads/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismorgan</author><text>There’s something like that in Heinlein’s <i>The Man Who Sold the Moon</i>, after the explosion of a space station and ship; in a company meeting:<p>—⁂—<p><i>“Very well. Now the public relations report—let me call attention to the first item, gentlemen. The vice-president in charge recommends a schedule of annuities, benefits, scholarships and so forth for dependents of the staff of the power satellite and of the pilot of the Charon: see appendix ‘C’.”</i><p><i>A director across from Harriman—Phineas Morgan, chairman of the food trust, Cuisine, Incorporated—protested, “What is this, Ed? Too bad they were killed of course, but we paid them skyhigh wages and carried their insurance to boot. Why the charity?”</i><p><i>Harriman grunted. “Pay it—I so move. It’s peanuts. ‘Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain.’”</i><p><i>“I wouldn’t call better than nine hundred thousand ‘peanuts,’” protested Morgan.</i><p><i>“Just a minute, gentlemen—” It was the vice-president in charge of public relations, himself a director. “If you’ll look at the breakdown, Mr. Morgan, you will see that eighty-five percent of the appropriation will be used to publicize the gifts.”</i><p><i>Morgan squinted at the figures. “Oh—why didn’t you say so? Well, I suppose the gifts can be considered unavoidable overhead, but it’s a bad precedent.”</i><p><i>“Without them we have nothing to publicize.”</i><p><i>“Yes, but—”</i><p>—⁂—<p>(Harriman then insists on <i>not</i> settling with a woman who gave birth as the satellite blew up and is suing for half a million due to birth defects, saying that in the long run any compromise or settlement would be dearer than fighting it, even with possible bad publicity; and they should buy the judge if necessary.)<p>I greatly enjoy this story for its keen assessment of the social and <i>business</i> factors to such progress, through its main character Harriman. Indeed, the best science fiction does tend to contain rather a lot of social study.</text></comment> | <story><title>Domino's spent $50.4M on TV ads to brag about $100k donation</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/sqnla7/dominos_spent_504_million_and_counting_on_tv_ads/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>No, they spent several times $50.4M on TV ads to promote their brand to try to increase food sales. $50.4M of that happened to be on ads that featured a $100k donation.<p>That part of the cost of their $50+M ad campaign was a $100k donation is no more interesting or relevant than how much they spent on animation to make their Noid ads or how much they spent to pay actors in their ads.</text></comment> |
3,192,200 | 3,190,605 | 1 | 2 | 3,189,919 | train | <story><title>My offer to Google Reader</title><url>http://fury.com/2011/11/my-offer-to-google-reader/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>confusedreader</author><text>Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really understand the huge community backlash to the Reader rework. I spend hours in reader every day, and it wasn't until they added in G+ that it actually became easy to share.The addition made it so I could share within a community I was already involved in rather then a few people in some disconnected Reader community. From my perspective they actually removed the useless and unnecessary functions that made the old reader impossible to use to actually share content. I see it as a good first step, and when G+ actually has a solid API to build upon, they can evolve Reader to use it.<p>Also, rabble rabble rabble too much white space rabble rabble rabble. I tried some of the community created userscripts to see if the "UI improvements" people were making actually helped and in the large part they don't as the people writing them don't seem to understand UI design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jamiecon</author><text>Normally I'm the person who makes this type of comment. I'm not a fan of resistance to change, or contrariness in general - especially the particularly annoying and overly dramatic Internet Blogger brands.<p>However for me the crucial missing feature is being able to view and comment on your friends' shared items within Reader.<p>I'm completely OK with Google requiring me to have a Google+ account, and see the sense in the merging of the two 'social networks'. I'm also fine with my shares appearing on Google+. I'm happy to configure a Circle to handle my shares.<p>But there's no way for me to read the items that my friends who are Google Reader users have shared _within_ Reader, as either individual or merged RSS feeds. This is something I used to be able to do, and now I can't - with no replacement.<p>That's why the backlash is justified in this case.<p>PS - Google you could make me happy just by having a 'Friends shared items' menu item which aggregates Google+ shares from Reader. That's all it would take.<p>I'll have fond memories of pressing 'Shift + S', C, and typing a message to a small group of mates for a while though. Those were the days!</text></comment> | <story><title>My offer to Google Reader</title><url>http://fury.com/2011/11/my-offer-to-google-reader/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>confusedreader</author><text>Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really understand the huge community backlash to the Reader rework. I spend hours in reader every day, and it wasn't until they added in G+ that it actually became easy to share.The addition made it so I could share within a community I was already involved in rather then a few people in some disconnected Reader community. From my perspective they actually removed the useless and unnecessary functions that made the old reader impossible to use to actually share content. I see it as a good first step, and when G+ actually has a solid API to build upon, they can evolve Reader to use it.<p>Also, rabble rabble rabble too much white space rabble rabble rabble. I tried some of the community created userscripts to see if the "UI improvements" people were making actually helped and in the large part they don't as the people writing them don't seem to understand UI design.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joebadmo</author><text>I agree that the backlash is partly just aversion to change, and partly the fact that we're in a usability canyon because of the transition, but that the integration with the G+ sharing model means a better, more granular future for sharing, which is good.<p>I wrote a whole post defending the change here: <a href="http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the-new-google-reader" rel="nofollow">http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...</a><p>Regarding the visual design, I hope they'll take cues from the Gmail redesign, which hit a really great balance between clean whitespace-full minimalism and density configurability.</text></comment> |
20,486,474 | 20,486,508 | 1 | 2 | 20,485,508 | train | <story><title>Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi</title><url>https://potatofrom.space/post/viasat-airline-free-wifi-stunnel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>UperSpaceGuru</author><text>Wow, this was an amusing read. I actually helped architect part of the system that was bypassed at LiveTV (now Thales).
We had some serious hackers on the team and discussed how much probing &amp; prodding it would take to find vulnerabilities like this, but made the conclusion anyone doing this should be worried about more serious consequences. I for one, wouldn’t attempt this myself on the aircraft. The hacker side of me finds this Amusing, but I hope the author doesn’t face more serious consequences, primarily for having made this public knowledge. I have a sense the defense company that now owns the system being bypassed&#x2F;broken will not find it amusing in the least bit.<p>Disclaimer: opinions above are my own. I do not speak for or on behalf of any party in the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xfitm3</author><text>We shouldn&#x27;t let defense companies push around the general public. I&#x27;m glad that the author is willing to shoulder that risk, we need more people like them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stunnel and Airline Wi-Fi</title><url>https://potatofrom.space/post/viasat-airline-free-wifi-stunnel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>UperSpaceGuru</author><text>Wow, this was an amusing read. I actually helped architect part of the system that was bypassed at LiveTV (now Thales).
We had some serious hackers on the team and discussed how much probing &amp; prodding it would take to find vulnerabilities like this, but made the conclusion anyone doing this should be worried about more serious consequences. I for one, wouldn’t attempt this myself on the aircraft. The hacker side of me finds this Amusing, but I hope the author doesn’t face more serious consequences, primarily for having made this public knowledge. I have a sense the defense company that now owns the system being bypassed&#x2F;broken will not find it amusing in the least bit.<p>Disclaimer: opinions above are my own. I do not speak for or on behalf of any party in the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nextgrid</author><text>I don’t think the fact that it’s a defense company is relevant. The company wouldn’t use the same “security” measures if actual defense was at stake.<p>This system was built with certain specifications and down to a certain price.</text></comment> |
15,830,333 | 15,829,649 | 1 | 3 | 15,827,177 | train | <story><title>The Great American Single-Family Home Problem</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/business/economy/single-family-home.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unitedcountry.com&#x2F;CountryHomes&#x2F;img&#x2F;Country_Homes_7.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unitedcountry.com&#x2F;CountryHomes&#x2F;img&#x2F;Country_Homes_...</a><p>and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmgsite.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;Presidio-Landmark-0031.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmgsite.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;Presidio-...</a><p>and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;2&#x2F;23&#x2F;Hong_Kong_Skyline_Restitch_-_Dec_2007.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;2&#x2F;23&#x2F;Hong_Kon...</a><p>The problem is that someone who moves to the first type of place doesn&#x27;t want to have to move again when it turns into the second type of place, and someone who moves to the second type of place doesn&#x27;t want to move again when it turns into the third type of place. It&#x27;s not entirely unreasonable.</text></item><item><author>leggomylibro</author><text>People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you&#x27;re about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about &#x27;right&#x27;, &#x27;wrong&#x27;, &#x27;moral&#x27;, it all goes out the window.<p>It really sucks that so much of peoples&#x27; value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn&#x27;t need shelter to live reasonably well.<p>So let&#x27;s be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don&#x27;t really have a good alternative that wouldn&#x27;t lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they&#x27;re not in the class that owns multiple houses, they&#x27;re already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyjg</author><text>I rent my apartment. I know that I might have to move. The people that own the building might want to do something else with it and since they own it that&#x27;s their choice.<p>Single family homeowners own their own homes. It can&#x27;t get sold out from underneath them. But they don&#x27;t own the plots next store or across the street. If their happiness with their living situation is dependent on those plots having the same buildings on them then they need to buy those plots too. Then they get to decide what happens to them.<p>A homeowner NIMBYite is exactly the same as a renter that agitates for imposing rent control.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Great American Single-Family Home Problem</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/business/economy/single-family-home.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unitedcountry.com&#x2F;CountryHomes&#x2F;img&#x2F;Country_Homes_7.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unitedcountry.com&#x2F;CountryHomes&#x2F;img&#x2F;Country_Homes_...</a><p>and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmgsite.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;Presidio-Landmark-0031.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cmgsite.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;Presidio-...</a><p>and some people want to live in a place that looks like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;2&#x2F;23&#x2F;Hong_Kong_Skyline_Restitch_-_Dec_2007.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;2&#x2F;23&#x2F;Hong_Kon...</a><p>The problem is that someone who moves to the first type of place doesn&#x27;t want to have to move again when it turns into the second type of place, and someone who moves to the second type of place doesn&#x27;t want to move again when it turns into the third type of place. It&#x27;s not entirely unreasonable.</text></item><item><author>leggomylibro</author><text>People are selfish; if they make a big investment and you&#x27;re about to reduce its value, they will fight tooth and nail. Any conversation about &#x27;right&#x27;, &#x27;wrong&#x27;, &#x27;moral&#x27;, it all goes out the window.<p>It really sucks that so much of peoples&#x27; value is often tied up in a single property. It would be a gobsmackingly terrible investment decision, if you didn&#x27;t need shelter to live reasonably well.<p>So let&#x27;s be clear. These people are being incredibly selfish, and that is reprehensible. But they also don&#x27;t really have a good alternative that wouldn&#x27;t lose them a lot of money in a time where, if they&#x27;re not in the class that owns multiple houses, they&#x27;re already struggling. And that is sort of ameliorating imo.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Groxx</author><text>Not entirely unreasonable, definitely. But it seems somewhat expect-able over the course of a lifetime. A lifetime ago the world was a rather different place, and I imagine the same was true of the lifetime before that.<p>Seems like you either stay and fight (which history implies does not work) or keep moving to new similar-to-before places. Always. Expecting otherwise is not entirely reasonable either.</text></comment> |
21,230,810 | 21,229,452 | 1 | 2 | 21,227,961 | train | <story><title>Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20910330/mastercard-stripe-ebay-facebook-libra-association-withdrawal-cryptocurrency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lucasverra</author><text>David Marcus update [1] :<p>Special thanks to @Visa and @Mastercard for sticking it out until the 11th hour. The pressure has been intense (understatement), and I respect their decision to wait until there’s regulatory clarity for @Libra_ to proceed, vs. the invoked threats (by many) on their biz.<p>I would caution against reading the fate of Libra into this update. Of course, it’s not great news in the short term, but in a way it’s liberating. Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you’re on to something when so much pressure builds up.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidmarcus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182775728431087623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidmarcus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182775728431087623</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Illniyar</author><text>Since Libra isn&#x27;t distributed, in the sense that anyone can start mining it, one of the key premises for its trust was that governance and operation will be handled by a group of powerful and trustworthy companies.<p>The more companies leave the initiative the more centralized it becomes and the less its trust model is valid. If only Facebook remains it isn&#x27;t any different than a simple virtual currency (like the discontinued Facebook Credits).<p>And to preempt the argument that visa and mastercard aren&#x27;t trustworthy - there is an inherent trust that most people give to big companies because their processes and checks and balances developed over years to be robust - usually from having to handle lawsuits and regulations which small companies rarely do.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and eBay exit Facebook’s Libra project</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/11/20910330/mastercard-stripe-ebay-facebook-libra-association-withdrawal-cryptocurrency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lucasverra</author><text>David Marcus update [1] :<p>Special thanks to @Visa and @Mastercard for sticking it out until the 11th hour. The pressure has been intense (understatement), and I respect their decision to wait until there’s regulatory clarity for @Libra_ to proceed, vs. the invoked threats (by many) on their biz.<p>I would caution against reading the fate of Libra into this update. Of course, it’s not great news in the short term, but in a way it’s liberating. Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you’re on to something when so much pressure builds up.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidmarcus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182775728431087623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;davidmarcus&#x2F;status&#x2F;1182775728431087623</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>john_moscow</author><text>The fate of Libra isn&#x27;t tied to Visa&#x2F;Mastercard&#x27;s withdrawal. It&#x27;s ultimately about whether there is a market for a new mechanism for international money transfers.<p>As someone who runs a business that has (small) offices both in EU and North America, let me share a quick overview of the current state of things.<p>When you want to transfer a non-trivial amount of money between 2 countries, you have likely received it in the originating country&#x27;s currency and are planning to spend it in the destination currency. Now because you don&#x27;t want to pay ~3% currency exchange fees to your bank, the only reasonable way to do this is to get an account with a business forex broker, that will offer you a rate in the ballpark of 0.5% off the spot price. You will have to do the KYC&#x2F;AML [0], but the complexity of the whole transfer is basically this:<p>1. Do a domestic wire to your broker&#x27;s office in the originating economic zone.<p>2. Wait for them to call you and confirm the exchange rate.<p>3. Receive a domestic wire from the broker&#x27;s office in the destination economic zone.<p>You often need to show the invoices&#x2F;contracts showing the origin of the funds and the purpose of the transfer, but if you are running a legitimate business that pays taxes, you will need those for accounting reasons anyway.<p>Now the 0.5% fee charged by the forex trader (that is bound to a bunch of rules and regulations making it harder for it to run away with your funds) is not worth putting your trust into a fully automated distributed ledger, where a lost password or a hacked computer could permanently eat away your money without any legal recourse.<p>So the only potential audience of a new international coin would be people actively trying to evade KYC&#x2F;AML and that&#x27;s exactly why the governments will do their best to prevent it from getting adoption (which is very easy since you can outright ban the fiat endpoints in your jurisdiction).<p>On the other end, there&#x27;s a bunch of people who have never written a response to an AML inquiry and have hardly done any business outside of their own state, that are hoping to get rich quick by grabbing a stake at something they haven&#x27;t fully researched and later reselling it at a profit to someone who will actually need it. I wouldn&#x27;t see any reason for it to be successful long-term, sorry.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Know_your_customer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Know_your_customer</a></text></comment> |
33,649,271 | 33,648,930 | 1 | 2 | 33,648,341 | train | <story><title>Tailscale Funnel</title><url>https://tailscale.com/blog/introducing-tailscale-funnel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anderspitman</author><text>This is huge. One of the last major missing features from Tailscale IMO. I maintain a list of tunneling solutions[0]. Personally, I think the future of p2p networking and selfhosting may be through tunneled, SNI-routed TLS connections (exactly what Tailscale just announced). It solves IP exhaustion, NAT, and IP privacy at the cost of an extra hop and no UDP.<p>The big question is going to be pricing. The current top player in this space is Cloudflare Tunnel, which is a loss-leader product that technically forbids selfhosting anything other than HTML sites.<p>Selfhosting media can use tons of bandwidth. Any service that doesn&#x27;t charge per GB is incentivized to limit your speeds.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tjoff</author><text>&gt; It solves IP exhaustion, NAT, and IP privacy at the cost of an extra hop and no UDP.<p>That is awfully expensive for something ipv6 already solves minus the privacy part. I don&#x27;t see how it can be considered &quot;huge&quot;. A slight convenience maybe?<p>Also, routing everything through a 3rd party is a massive downside.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tailscale Funnel</title><url>https://tailscale.com/blog/introducing-tailscale-funnel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anderspitman</author><text>This is huge. One of the last major missing features from Tailscale IMO. I maintain a list of tunneling solutions[0]. Personally, I think the future of p2p networking and selfhosting may be through tunneled, SNI-routed TLS connections (exactly what Tailscale just announced). It solves IP exhaustion, NAT, and IP privacy at the cost of an extra hop and no UDP.<p>The big question is going to be pricing. The current top player in this space is Cloudflare Tunnel, which is a loss-leader product that technically forbids selfhosting anything other than HTML sites.<p>Selfhosting media can use tons of bandwidth. Any service that doesn&#x27;t charge per GB is incentivized to limit your speeds.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;anderspitman&#x2F;awesome-tunneling</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>So basically that would mean a cloudflare for P2P, though maintaining data privacy at least.<p>It’s better than no P2P but IPv6 solves exhaustion and NAT without the performance hit or protocol limitations and with no extra third party intermediary in the way.<p>BTW this maintains data privacy but you can still tell a whole whole lot from metadata.<p>On the flip side it would prevent the kind of “griefing” with DDOS that happens every once in a while with self hosted and P2P things. It’s not that common unless you are engaging with certain communities but it is an inherent Internet architectural flaw that this kind of works around (at a cost).</text></comment> |
11,985,718 | 11,985,479 | 1 | 3 | 11,985,261 | train | <story><title>Cheap HDMI capture for Linux</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/cheap-hdmi-capture-for-linux</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesfmilne</author><text>You can also use devices that are USB Video Class (UVC) compliant, thus which don&#x27;t require any drivers.<p>libuvc can be used to capture from these devices:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ktossell&#x2F;libuvc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ktossell&#x2F;libuvc</a><p>You can get cheap off-brand UVC USB grabbers, or you can get higher quality gear, like the AJA U-TAP:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aja.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;u-tap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aja.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;u-tap</a><p>Admittedly though I haven&#x27;t seen anything that comes close to £45 :-)</text></comment> | <story><title>Cheap HDMI capture for Linux</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/cheap-hdmi-capture-for-linux</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SoapSeller</author><text>Cool hack, but the part about the cost of off-the-shelf solutions is wildly wrong - Blackmagic&#x27;s HDMI capture solutions can be purchased for less than 145usd for pci-e and 200usd for usb3 and they have free drivers&amp;sdk for linux.</text></comment> |
20,205,093 | 20,204,729 | 1 | 2 | 20,204,393 | train | <story><title>I don’t need The Onion, I have China Daily</title><url>https://www.guyhance.com/2019/06/i-dont-need-the-onion-i-have-china-daily/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>VanPossum</author><text>Since we&#x27;re on the topic of underhanded media manipulation, I&#x27;ll just leave this here:<p>I saw this entry skyrocket its way to position #2 on the front page, and within minutes, despite have 130+ upvotes and 30+ comments within 1 hour it is now suddenly 11 pages down, at position 340 (as of this post). As you can see this submission does not have any remark from mods and is not marked &quot;[Flagged]&quot; or anything...</text></comment> | <story><title>I don’t need The Onion, I have China Daily</title><url>https://www.guyhance.com/2019/06/i-dont-need-the-onion-i-have-china-daily/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Shivetya</author><text>So a modern day Baghdad Bob?<p>For those laughing, just remember this when a politician comes forward and wants to protect you from fake news. It can happen anywhere, it just does not need to happen all at once for it to come into being.</text></comment> |
24,931,975 | 24,931,599 | 1 | 2 | 24,916,016 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Jack-of-all-trades of HN, how do you approach job search?</title><text>I have enough experience under my belt to feel comfortable approaching fuzzy engineering problems that span relatively unfamiliar domains but I feel it&#x27;s quite difficult to convey this when applying for positions.<p>I&#x27;m also sure to fail googlable technical questions so I was wondering how others might approach this.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>&gt; <i>Curious if I&#x27;m alone in this?</i><p>I think most people underestimate their networks. Not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but you&#x27;ve worked with people, right? Hopefully not been a complete ass :) ? Done work on a team with or adjacent to them?<p>That&#x27;s a start!<p>Networks aren&#x27;t created overnight, and people try to hack them poorly all the time.<p>Think about it like a garden, not a project. It can&#x27;t be created overnight: the right way is repeatedly, but at a low-intensity, tending to it.<p>Set yourself a goal: reach out to one person you&#x27;ve previously worked with on LinkedIn a week. Don&#x27;t ask for a job. Just say you were thinking of them, {insert memory, if you have one}, and hope they&#x27;re doing well. If they reply, maybe steer the convo to what technologies or challenges they&#x27;re working on now...<p>I get it. I&#x27;m an introvert too. I&#x27;m €®£÷ing <i>terrible</i> with people. But it&#x27;s improveable with repeated effort, like anything else.<p>A few ideas (in preferred order): (1) Take coffee (or now, Zoom?) with folks to catch up, (2) Volunteer with tech groups (pref charities, in tech, with people you want to network with, not just you giving free labor, and make sure to introduce yourself and talk about what you do), (3) Attend tech meetups (eh... unless you&#x27;re presenting, this can be a waste of time), (4) Attend conferences (again, be seen, introduce yourself. Many are remote and free this year, good for attending, bad for networking)<p>The end goal is that if that person thinks &quot;I need someone to X&quot; then your name pops into their head. If you haven&#x27;t talked to them in 5 years, that&#x27;s not going to happen.</text></item><item><author>msluyter</author><text><i>If you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues to get leads and jobs from.</i><p>Clearly I&#x27;ve failed here. I&#x27;ve kept in touch with a few folks from previous jobs via LinkedIn or whatnot, but as a network, I&#x27;d describe it as &quot;thin and weakly connected.&quot; Part of that is due to being an introvert and generally terrible at maintaining long term human connections. And part of it is a certain indifference I&#x27;ve had in the past to actively managing my career, which in an of itself is a result of how generally easy it&#x27;s been to find work. Curious if I&#x27;m alone in this?</text></item><item><author>gregjor</author><text>I’m almost 60, lots of various technical experience in my 40 year programming career. I’m busier than ever with freelance work.<p>Don’t try to join startups or cool SV companies unless you have an inside track. Their recruiting and hiring practices are mostly geared to ensure “culture fit.” That’s code for young single male who will work 12 hrs&#x2F;day and think free beer and pizza makes it cool.<p>Focus on measurable accomplishments rather than languages, frameworks, tech buzzwords.<p>Learn to solve business problems rather than “engineering problems.” No one needs 2,000 more lines of Javascript. Lots of companies need business problems addressed.<p>If you’re applying for jobs you’re hobbling yourself. If you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues to get leads and jobs from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mud_dauber</author><text>I was standing at a gas station in rural New Mexico a few weeks ago when my phone buzzed. It was a LI note from an ex-colleague that I hadn’t seen in 12 years, wanting to know if I was available. I’m meeting her team in a few days.<p>Just being a good human being will get your far in life irrespective of tech stacks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Jack-of-all-trades of HN, how do you approach job search?</title><text>I have enough experience under my belt to feel comfortable approaching fuzzy engineering problems that span relatively unfamiliar domains but I feel it&#x27;s quite difficult to convey this when applying for positions.<p>I&#x27;m also sure to fail googlable technical questions so I was wondering how others might approach this.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>&gt; <i>Curious if I&#x27;m alone in this?</i><p>I think most people underestimate their networks. Not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but you&#x27;ve worked with people, right? Hopefully not been a complete ass :) ? Done work on a team with or adjacent to them?<p>That&#x27;s a start!<p>Networks aren&#x27;t created overnight, and people try to hack them poorly all the time.<p>Think about it like a garden, not a project. It can&#x27;t be created overnight: the right way is repeatedly, but at a low-intensity, tending to it.<p>Set yourself a goal: reach out to one person you&#x27;ve previously worked with on LinkedIn a week. Don&#x27;t ask for a job. Just say you were thinking of them, {insert memory, if you have one}, and hope they&#x27;re doing well. If they reply, maybe steer the convo to what technologies or challenges they&#x27;re working on now...<p>I get it. I&#x27;m an introvert too. I&#x27;m €®£÷ing <i>terrible</i> with people. But it&#x27;s improveable with repeated effort, like anything else.<p>A few ideas (in preferred order): (1) Take coffee (or now, Zoom?) with folks to catch up, (2) Volunteer with tech groups (pref charities, in tech, with people you want to network with, not just you giving free labor, and make sure to introduce yourself and talk about what you do), (3) Attend tech meetups (eh... unless you&#x27;re presenting, this can be a waste of time), (4) Attend conferences (again, be seen, introduce yourself. Many are remote and free this year, good for attending, bad for networking)<p>The end goal is that if that person thinks &quot;I need someone to X&quot; then your name pops into their head. If you haven&#x27;t talked to them in 5 years, that&#x27;s not going to happen.</text></item><item><author>msluyter</author><text><i>If you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues to get leads and jobs from.</i><p>Clearly I&#x27;ve failed here. I&#x27;ve kept in touch with a few folks from previous jobs via LinkedIn or whatnot, but as a network, I&#x27;d describe it as &quot;thin and weakly connected.&quot; Part of that is due to being an introvert and generally terrible at maintaining long term human connections. And part of it is a certain indifference I&#x27;ve had in the past to actively managing my career, which in an of itself is a result of how generally easy it&#x27;s been to find work. Curious if I&#x27;m alone in this?</text></item><item><author>gregjor</author><text>I’m almost 60, lots of various technical experience in my 40 year programming career. I’m busier than ever with freelance work.<p>Don’t try to join startups or cool SV companies unless you have an inside track. Their recruiting and hiring practices are mostly geared to ensure “culture fit.” That’s code for young single male who will work 12 hrs&#x2F;day and think free beer and pizza makes it cool.<p>Focus on measurable accomplishments rather than languages, frameworks, tech buzzwords.<p>Learn to solve business problems rather than “engineering problems.” No one needs 2,000 more lines of Javascript. Lots of companies need business problems addressed.<p>If you’re applying for jobs you’re hobbling yourself. If you have years or decades of experience you should have a large network of colleagues to get leads and jobs from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cushychicken</author><text><i>I think most people underestimate their networks. Not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but you&#x27;ve worked with people, right? Hopefully not been a complete ass :) ? Done work on a team with or adjacent to them? That&#x27;s a start!</i><p>This is absolutely spot on advice.<p>Having a career network is roughly equivalent to saying &quot;I have former coworkers that would say that I am competent and pleasant to work with&quot;.<p>There doesn&#x27;t need to be some intense relationship that persists past working together. Just shared work experience, and a track record of jobs well done on your part. : )</text></comment> |
9,249,483 | 9,249,467 | 1 | 2 | 9,247,978 | train | <story><title>The decline in unionization has fed the rise in incomes at the top</title><url>http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/jaumotte.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Devthrowaway80</author><text>The wealthy in the US have successfully lobbied for &quot;Right to Work&quot; legislation and have managed to pump out anti-union propaganda that is being parroted in this thread for decades. This costs money and effort. Why do you suppose they have done this? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because it benefits the individual worker? Or because it allows them to keep a larger share of the output of the economy?<p>Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?<p>Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren&#x27;t enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn&#x27;t really mean shit unless you&#x27;re from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many &quot;I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built&quot; posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tveita</author><text>Target shows its employees anti-union propaganda videos. It&#x27;s interesting how it presents a union as a big bad &quot;other&quot; that would necessarily work against its members&#x27; interests, and to see many of the familiar arguments cast in a ham-handed way towards retail employees. Do we also believe in the 10x retail employee, or do we agree that retail is a sector where employees have a lot to gain from collective bargaining?<p><a href="http://gawker.com/5811371/heres-the-cheesy-anti-union-video-all-target-employees-must-endure" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;5811371&#x2F;heres-the-cheesy-anti-union-video-...</a><p><a href="http://gawker.com/behold-targets-brand-new-cheesy-anti-union-video-1547193676" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gawker.com&#x2F;behold-targets-brand-new-cheesy-anti-union...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The decline in unionization has fed the rise in incomes at the top</title><url>http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/jaumotte.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Devthrowaway80</author><text>The wealthy in the US have successfully lobbied for &quot;Right to Work&quot; legislation and have managed to pump out anti-union propaganda that is being parroted in this thread for decades. This costs money and effort. Why do you suppose they have done this? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because it benefits the individual worker? Or because it allows them to keep a larger share of the output of the economy?<p>Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?<p>Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren&#x27;t enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn&#x27;t really mean shit unless you&#x27;re from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many &quot;I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built&quot; posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>UmDieWelt</author><text>You are right that the current state won&#x27;t last long. Computer science enrollments are skyrocketing, and businesses and government alike are pushing hard for even more people to flood the industry.</text></comment> |
20,301,684 | 20,300,516 | 1 | 2 | 20,298,653 | train | <story><title>Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/jony-ive-to-form-independent-design-company-with-apple-as-client/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bud</author><text>This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.</text></item><item><author>PunksATawnyFill</author><text>How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company&#x27;s most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple?<p>For Apple&#x27;s and consumers&#x27; sake, I hope NOT.</text></item><item><author>valine</author><text>With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&amp;D into a display that folds back on itself for the sole reason that a phone is more ascetically pleasing when the boarders are symmetrical. Even after a year and a half every phone except the iPhone has an asymmetrical chin. Will Apple still be able to make decisions like that without Ive in a leadership position? For Apple&#x27;s sake I really hope so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kllrnohj</author><text>The largest non-Apple player in the industry, Samsung, continues to ship flagship phones with a 3.5mm jack and with waterproofing that has been consistently ahead of the iPhone. Samsung Galaxy has been IP68 since the S7 in 2016. Something the iPhone didn&#x27;t achieve until the XS &amp; XS Max.<p>The idea that this was about waterproofing is a fabrication.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/jony-ive-to-form-independent-design-company-with-apple-as-client/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Bud</author><text>This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.</text></item><item><author>PunksATawnyFill</author><text>How about decisions like removing the headphone jacks from the company&#x27;s most popular music players, the very devices with which people are supposed consume the media-centric services that Tim Cook and analysts say are the future of Apple?<p>For Apple&#x27;s and consumers&#x27; sake, I hope NOT.</text></item><item><author>valine</author><text>With the iPhone X Apple put serious R&amp;D into a display that folds back on itself for the sole reason that a phone is more ascetically pleasing when the boarders are symmetrical. Even after a year and a half every phone except the iPhone has an asymmetrical chin. Will Apple still be able to make decisions like that without Ive in a leadership position? For Apple&#x27;s sake I really hope so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HeadsUpHigh</author><text>It blows my mind how people call things obsolete without replacing all of their functionality. The only reason the 3.5mm jack is considered obsolete is because Apple said so. Literally nobody had any problem with it existing up until the day Apple announced that iphone. If this isn&#x27;t the definition of sheeple then I don&#x27;t know what it is.</text></comment> |
36,516,463 | 36,516,528 | 1 | 3 | 36,497,508 | train | <story><title>Writing Python like Rust (2020)</title><url>https://oatzy.github.io/2020/05/10/writing-python-like-rust.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Turskarama</author><text>This is why I can&#x27;t help but mentally roll my eyes when people say that static typing makes programming slower.<p>It makes writing the happy path slower, but is writing the happy path _programming?_<p>By the time you have a program which is complete and (at least mostly) bug free, the static typing has saved you hundreds of hours.</text></item><item><author>ddejohn</author><text>My current role is at a company with a few hundred <i>thousand</i> lines of un-typed, undocumented, mostly un-tested Python. I get a small allowance of &quot;tech debt busting&quot; time, and it&#x27;s absurd how many bugs I find just by trying to suss out the types on a given code path. It&#x27;s maddening work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lixtra</author><text>&gt; It makes writing the happy path slower, but is writing the happy path _programming?_<p>The happy path is just fine for many cases.<p>Your home isn’t built to withstand a determined attacker with a tank. But we live in a happy world and a lot of stuff exists because people can cut corners.<p>Good managers&#x2F;programmers know where they can be sloppy and where they have to be super careful.<p>The beauty of technical debt is that it only has to be repaid in case of success.</text></comment> | <story><title>Writing Python like Rust (2020)</title><url>https://oatzy.github.io/2020/05/10/writing-python-like-rust.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Turskarama</author><text>This is why I can&#x27;t help but mentally roll my eyes when people say that static typing makes programming slower.<p>It makes writing the happy path slower, but is writing the happy path _programming?_<p>By the time you have a program which is complete and (at least mostly) bug free, the static typing has saved you hundreds of hours.</text></item><item><author>ddejohn</author><text>My current role is at a company with a few hundred <i>thousand</i> lines of un-typed, undocumented, mostly un-tested Python. I get a small allowance of &quot;tech debt busting&quot; time, and it&#x27;s absurd how many bugs I find just by trying to suss out the types on a given code path. It&#x27;s maddening work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eweise</author><text>plus modern statically typed languages have type inference so I don&#x27;t buy the argument that the happy path is faster in dynamically typed languages.</text></comment> |
8,786,445 | 8,785,873 | 1 | 3 | 8,783,495 | train | <story><title>Is Homo Economicus a Psychopath?</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-economicus-a-psychopath/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;Homo economicus, is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others.&quot;<p>For the second time today, I get to point out that in economics is neutral about &quot;best interests&quot; and is metaphorically happy to accommodate people whom consider happiness or other such &quot;soft&quot; things as part of their personal value function. If your definition of &quot;homo economicus&quot; is a psycopath... well, <i>you&#x27;re</i> the one who stuck a psychopath there, so ultimately this is a circular argument in which one asserts that economics is based on the idea of a psychopath that you put there in the first place. Not exactly a surprising result there.<p>There is absolutely no contradiction between &quot;most people act in what they believe to be their best interests&quot; and &quot;most people take care of their family&quot;, because obviously most people consider &quot;taking care of their family&quot; to be in their &quot;best interests&quot;.<p>Homo Economicus is still a fictional being, but it&#x27;s not because &quot;not everyone is a psychopath&quot;, it&#x27;s because not everyone is perfectly rational all the time, and humans do have some weaknesses on the rationality front. It was (and really is) a good <i>approximation</i> because on the whole, people <i>do</i> act amusingly rationally in a surprising array of situations. (I say &quot;amusing&quot; because they will often act perfectly rationally in some circumstance, then cite as their reason some astonishing bullshit reason. Nevertheless, their actions are often quite rational.)<p>It&#x27;s still supposed to be &quot;<i>Homo</i> Economicus&quot; and not &quot;<i>Robo</i> Economicus&quot; or &quot;<i>Vulcan</i> Economicus&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lukifer</author><text>Homo Economicus might be fictional, but Corpo Economicus and Beaureau Econonomicus are not. Whenever individuals must make decisions on behalf of organizations (public or private), they must be able to justify their actions in the rational, sometimes psychopathic, terms of their institution (to make <i>legible</i> decisions, to use Venkatesh Rao&#x27;s terminology).<p>Though economics is value-neutral when it comes to what individuals define as their best interests, institutions have their best interests defined quite explicitly, and are often indifferent to any other outcome. Applying the rational actor model to such institutions provides a great deal of cover, if not active encouragement, for maximizing the acquisition of power and resources with little regard for the irrational human processes of morality, responsibility and decency.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Homo Economicus a Psychopath?</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-economicus-a-psychopath/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;Homo economicus, is a creature of coldly calculated selfishness, dispassionately maximizing its best interests even if that comes at the expense of others.&quot;<p>For the second time today, I get to point out that in economics is neutral about &quot;best interests&quot; and is metaphorically happy to accommodate people whom consider happiness or other such &quot;soft&quot; things as part of their personal value function. If your definition of &quot;homo economicus&quot; is a psycopath... well, <i>you&#x27;re</i> the one who stuck a psychopath there, so ultimately this is a circular argument in which one asserts that economics is based on the idea of a psychopath that you put there in the first place. Not exactly a surprising result there.<p>There is absolutely no contradiction between &quot;most people act in what they believe to be their best interests&quot; and &quot;most people take care of their family&quot;, because obviously most people consider &quot;taking care of their family&quot; to be in their &quot;best interests&quot;.<p>Homo Economicus is still a fictional being, but it&#x27;s not because &quot;not everyone is a psychopath&quot;, it&#x27;s because not everyone is perfectly rational all the time, and humans do have some weaknesses on the rationality front. It was (and really is) a good <i>approximation</i> because on the whole, people <i>do</i> act amusingly rationally in a surprising array of situations. (I say &quot;amusing&quot; because they will often act perfectly rationally in some circumstance, then cite as their reason some astonishing bullshit reason. Nevertheless, their actions are often quite rational.)<p>It&#x27;s still supposed to be &quot;<i>Homo</i> Economicus&quot; and not &quot;<i>Robo</i> Economicus&quot; or &quot;<i>Vulcan</i> Economicus&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DanDanDanDan</author><text>Most people do not take care of their family because they think it&#x27;s in their best interests. They often take care of their family for myriad reasons--e.g. a moral call to selflessness, sociocultural norms, a sense of familial duty, love, etc. The language of &quot;best interests&quot; really doesn&#x27;t fit here.<p>Taking care of an ailing parent is in no way connected to maximizing one&#x27;s returns on anything (except maybe fulfilling a sense of what you &quot;ought&quot; to do).</text></comment> |
6,516,561 | 6,516,706 | 1 | 2 | 6,514,574 | train | <story><title>Nest introduces their Smoke Detector</title><url>http://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/life-with-nest-protect/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brudgers</author><text>Ambulances don&#x27;t play cello sonatas. Minefields aren&#x27;t marked with rainbows and kittens. The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.<p>When alarms don&#x27;t alarm, people often die.<p>When alarms are ignored, people often die.<p>Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.</text></item><item><author>ds9</author><text>We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn&#x27;t this obvious?<p>When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.<p>I could go on, but all this is familiar. All they need is some thoughtful UI, and the Nest model looks excellent in this respect. It does not compromise safety - it will still go off if a human doesn&#x27;t interact with it right away. It has other flaws (wifi required? no thanks; and probably expense) but this is an improvement over the &quot;dumb&quot; models.</text></item><item><author>brudgers</author><text>Read about deaths in dwelling fires here:
<a href="http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i3.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usfa.fema.gov&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;v14i3.pdf</a><p>There&#x27;s more here:
<a href="http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_structures.shtm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usfa.fema.gov&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;reports&#x2F;residential_stru...</a><p>When owners of commercial buildings disable life safety features, it is not uncommon for the Fire Marshal to require a fire watch (trained personnel on site walking around 24 hours a day) until the system is operating correctly.<p>A residential smoke alarm system without a battery as backup power source is not operating correctly[1]. A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms[2].<p>In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries - NFPA recommends changing them twice a year when clocks get reset for daylight savings time.<p>These are first and foremost alarms not detectors because there is no other annunciator device. Using the device in the way the manufacturer is suggesting - i.e disabling portions of it&#x27;s alarm system - is how people die in dwellings.<p>Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.<p>This isn&#x27;t disruption, it&#x27;s fucking stupidity.<p>[1]Outside of retrofit applications, smoke alarms are required by the National Electrical Code [NFPA 70] to be hardwired and when located in a room used for sleeping on an arc-fault protected circuit. The battery is for backup.<p>[2]Though the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours. Many building codes also require a fire extinguisher to be located in the kitchen for new construction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>impendia</author><text>&gt; Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug.<p>Making them only once every thirty minutes is a bug not a feature.<p>I was awakened in the middle of the night by one of my smoke detectors beeping once because its batteries were low. But it stopped beeping, and did not flash or give any other noticeable indication that its batteries were low. There was no way to determine which smoke detector it was. (Or at least, none that I could figure out at 2:00 am.)<p>Any possible action was useless (I had no batteries handy), so I went to bed.<p>Thirty minutes later, same thing again. Awakened, couldn&#x27;t tell by which smoke detector. I could think of nothing to do other than to remove all the batteries in all of my smoke detectors.<p>Bad UI.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nest introduces their Smoke Detector</title><url>http://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/life-with-nest-protect/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brudgers</author><text>Ambulances don&#x27;t play cello sonatas. Minefields aren&#x27;t marked with rainbows and kittens. The user interface for current smoke detectors is very thoughtful. It is based upon experience.<p>When alarms don&#x27;t alarm, people often die.<p>When alarms are ignored, people often die.<p>Making obnoxious sounds is a feature not a bug. The inconvenience of being kept awake by a smoke alarm battery tends to pale in comparison to the inconvenience of being kept dead.</text></item><item><author>ds9</author><text>We all recognize the importance of fire safety, but there is no excuse for the design of smoke and CO detectors to be so painfully obnoxious. If it motivates homeowners to disable them, it is a bad design, isn&#x27;t this obvious?<p>When one of these things has a low battery, it chirps intolerably - but only every 30 minutes!! So when this happens at night, and there are several of them in the residence, you are literally kept awake half the night, waiting by one after another, just to figure out which one needs a battery.<p>I could go on, but all this is familiar. All they need is some thoughtful UI, and the Nest model looks excellent in this respect. It does not compromise safety - it will still go off if a human doesn&#x27;t interact with it right away. It has other flaws (wifi required? no thanks; and probably expense) but this is an improvement over the &quot;dumb&quot; models.</text></item><item><author>brudgers</author><text>Read about deaths in dwelling fires here:
<a href="http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v14i3.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usfa.fema.gov&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;v14i3.pdf</a><p>There&#x27;s more here:
<a href="http://www.usfa.fema.gov/statistics/reports/residential_structures.shtm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usfa.fema.gov&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;reports&#x2F;residential_stru...</a><p>When owners of commercial buildings disable life safety features, it is not uncommon for the Fire Marshal to require a fire watch (trained personnel on site walking around 24 hours a day) until the system is operating correctly.<p>A residential smoke alarm system without a battery as backup power source is not operating correctly[1]. A smoke alarm in or near the kitchen is incorrectly placed if it is producing frequent false alarms[2].<p>In the time it takes to download and install a smartphone app, one can probably replace all their smoke detector batteries - NFPA recommends changing them twice a year when clocks get reset for daylight savings time.<p>These are first and foremost alarms not detectors because there is no other annunciator device. Using the device in the way the manufacturer is suggesting - i.e disabling portions of it&#x27;s alarm system - is how people die in dwellings.<p>Over-riding their fucking primary purpose for the fucking sake of fucking occupant convenience violates the fucking basic principles of fucking life safety.<p>This isn&#x27;t disruption, it&#x27;s fucking stupidity.<p>[1]Outside of retrofit applications, smoke alarms are required by the National Electrical Code [NFPA 70] to be hardwired and when located in a room used for sleeping on an arc-fault protected circuit. The battery is for backup.<p>[2]Though the kitchen is the most common location for a fire in dwellings, kitchen fires are among the least likely to be fatal because cooking usually is attended and occurs during waking hours. Many building codes also require a fire extinguisher to be located in the kitchen for new construction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>I think you&#x27;re missing the point people are trying to make: what matters is how people <i>actually</i> behave, not how they <i>should</i> behave. If the current design of smoke alarms causes people to disable them - irrespective of whether or not they <i>should</i> - then the design can be improved.</text></comment> |
39,534,258 | 39,533,740 | 1 | 2 | 39,532,892 | train | <story><title>Building unorthodox deep learning GPU machines</title><url>https://www.kyleboddy.com/2024/01/28/building-deep-learning-machines-unorthodox-gpus/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kookamamie</author><text>Do note that, due to NVidia&#x27;s absurd EULAs, you cannot run RTX 3090 in a data-center for compute purposes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nvidia.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;DriverDownloads&#x2F;licence.php?lang=us&amp;type=GeForce" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nvidia.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;DriverDownloads&#x2F;licence.php?l...</a>).<p>Should you care about the EULA? Not really, until you&#x27;re a business of any significant scale.</text></comment> | <story><title>Building unorthodox deep learning GPU machines</title><url>https://www.kyleboddy.com/2024/01/28/building-deep-learning-machines-unorthodox-gpus/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>verditelabs</author><text>I think I recognize the author of this from &#x2F;r&#x2F;localllama, where plenty of other people are building similar frankenstein rigs. This post only mentions Intel setups, but AMD Epyc Milan and Rome based rigs are also very viable alternatives. They&#x27;re a bit more expensive, but much better perf&#x2F;watt, and the incremental price increase after factoring in a lot of GPUs is fairly slim. With 7 PCIE bifurcators on a motherboard such as the AsRock ROMED8-2T and a 14 risers, you can get up to 14 GPUs at PCIE 4.0x8.</text></comment> |
6,271,797 | 6,271,710 | 1 | 2 | 6,271,259 | train | <story><title>NSA hacked into encrypted UN communications, leaked documents show</title><url>http://gigaom.com/2013/08/25/nsa-hacked-into-un-communications-leaked-documents-show/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scott_w</author><text>The major news is stalking love interests, not the UN. It&#x27;s news like this that gets people riled up, as it&#x27;s more easy to relate.<p>I want to know if anyone was sacked, or went to prison, over this. I refuse to believe that nobody abused this power for revenge against an ex or someone who didn&#x27;t return their affections. UK police officers have been in court for similar things e.g. looking up new partners on the criminal database</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>The stalking love interests bit puts the lie to any warrants required by the way. I&#x27;m not sure why that wasn&#x27;t brought to a more prominent notice but I&#x27;d like to see the warrant issued to spy on a spouse.</text></comment> | <story><title>NSA hacked into encrypted UN communications, leaked documents show</title><url>http://gigaom.com/2013/08/25/nsa-hacked-into-un-communications-leaked-documents-show/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scott_w</author><text>The major news is stalking love interests, not the UN. It&#x27;s news like this that gets people riled up, as it&#x27;s more easy to relate.<p>I want to know if anyone was sacked, or went to prison, over this. I refuse to believe that nobody abused this power for revenge against an ex or someone who didn&#x27;t return their affections. UK police officers have been in court for similar things e.g. looking up new partners on the criminal database</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&gt;<i>The major news is stalking love interests, not the UN. It&#x27;s news like this that gets people riled up, as it&#x27;s more easy to relate.</i><p>Yes, because god forbid an inane and infantilized population can understand the significance of actual politics without human interest stories in them...</text></comment> |
25,826,906 | 25,825,789 | 1 | 2 | 25,821,637 | train | <story><title>We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college</title><url>https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tooltower</author><text>Sorry about the completely noob question, but in your mind, do you think it actually helps these kids to separate them from their bio families in the first place?<p>What are the most common situations that require a kid to be placed in foster care?</text></item><item><author>treeman79</author><text>Adopted a teenager out of foster care.<p>None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons.<p>Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama.<p>Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely.<p>She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down.<p>She does aight these days.<p>Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jfrankamp</author><text>I can answer this, also fostered then adopted a teenager. It actually does not help the kid, its the worst thing that could happen to them except all of the alternatives. Being placed in a foster home is trauma. Getting separated from their bio family is trauma. Continuing to be physically abused (in their bio fam) is unacceptable trauma. Extended family was also a bust and resulted in more physical abuse.</text></comment> | <story><title>We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college</title><url>https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tooltower</author><text>Sorry about the completely noob question, but in your mind, do you think it actually helps these kids to separate them from their bio families in the first place?<p>What are the most common situations that require a kid to be placed in foster care?</text></item><item><author>treeman79</author><text>Adopted a teenager out of foster care.<p>None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons.<p>Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama.<p>Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely.<p>She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down.<p>She does aight these days.<p>Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>worik</author><text>The best thing to do, to help a child, is to help the family.<p>But the family is often very unattractive. Adults can be such reprobates: Drug addicted, &quot;lazy&quot;, wasteful....<p>So the state tends to remove the child and inject them into what they know is at best a failing system and at worst a fertile training ground for child abusers.<p>Better to help the families, never mind that they will have lifestyles you disapprove of. It costs a lot of money. A huge amount.<p>But it is cheaper in the long run to put aside the moral panic about the behaviour of the grown us....</text></comment> |
10,426,680 | 10,425,502 | 1 | 3 | 10,424,856 | train | <story><title>Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/western-digital-agrees-to-buy-sandisk-for-about-19-billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shas3</author><text>The consolidation in the semiconductors&#x2F;chip IP industry, thus far in 2015:<p>1. Intel-Altera: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-01&#x2F;intel-buys-altera-for-16-7-billion-as-chip-deals-accelerate" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-06-01&#x2F;intel-buys...</a><p>2. Avago-Broadcom (and earlier, Avago + LSI):
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-05-27&#x2F;avago-said-near-deal-to-buy-wireless-chipmaker-broadcom" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015-05-27&#x2F;avago-said...</a><p>3. Silicon Imaging-Lattice:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;lattice-to-buy-silicon-image-for-600-million-1422358580" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;lattice-to-buy-silicon-image-for...</a><p>4. NXP-Freescale:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;document.asp?doc_id=1327236" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;document.asp?doc_id=1327236</a><p>5. (2014) Cirrus-Wolfson:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;document.asp?doc_id=1322171" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;document.asp?doc_id=1322171</a><p>6. Avago is further looking at Xilinx, Maxim, and Renesas: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;14&#x2F;us-chipmakers-m-a-avago-idUSKBN0NZ27520150514" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;14&#x2F;us-chipmakers-m-a-...</a><p>This is one industry that is in flux ATM.<p>Edit: Further afield, though tightly coupled with this industry, on the manufacturing equipment side, Lam Research announced acquisition of KLA-Tencor today <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;semiconductor-firm-lam-research-to-buy-kla-tencor-1445419669" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;semiconductor-firm-lam-research-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/western-digital-agrees-to-buy-sandisk-for-about-19-billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sschueller</author><text>This sucks for consumers. Prices are already way to high for HDs and don&#x27;t seem to come down anymore. It is as if there is some sort of price fixing going on.</text></comment> |
12,652,399 | 12,652,536 | 1 | 2 | 12,649,734 | train | <story><title>Designing a SaaS Database for Scale with Postgres</title><url>https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/10/03/designing-your-saas-database-for-high-scalability/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>e1g</author><text>We serve enterprise customers, and use the &#x27;separate database&#x27; strategy for these reasons -<p>1. Stronger data isolation. Technically schemas provide the same level of isolation, but they are much harder to explain or defend during compliance audits.<p>2. More secure backups. Client data can be encrypted with their own key and stored as per their needs.<p>3. More useful backups. The frequency and retention of backups can vary to meet the SLA requirements (and costs). And we if something goes wrong, we can recover that particular customer&#x27;s data in isolation without impacting the rest of the application&#x2F;customers or worry about merging it in.<p>4. Secure data deletion. Many European customers demand that <i>all</i> their data is securely removed upon termination. This creates a massive problem with purging backup information if everything is in the same dump.<p>5. Independent load &amp; performance. If one customer is particularly high-load or chatty, we can move them onto a separate server where they don&#x27;t impact well behaved folks.<p>6. Easier horizontal scalability. Just move heavy loads to their own servers + read replicas.<p>7. Direct access to data. Specifically, we can use BI tools that do not understand schemas and even give direct access to clients&#x27; analysts.<p>8.Independent migration paths. Sometimes the customer&#x27;s timetable does not allow them to upgrade to the newest version right now (e.g. they are in the middle of using the app for a key process this month). We can leave their account routed to the previous version in both the codebase and the data store.<p>Out of those, the key 3 reasons are: stronger data isolation, better backup strategy, and more predictable compliance story. But that&#x27;s enterprise: even if we&#x27;re widely successful, we&#x27;ll have &quot;thousands&quot; of customers - never millions. And we can manage thousands of databases, so this architecture path is preferable to us within those boundaries.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noxee</author><text>How do you handle look ups that would require cross tenant queries? e.g. each customer has multiple devices connected devices to our system and we want to know the health (is it online, is it responding, etc).<p>The one way I&#x27;ve thought of current is either having an aggregate table in a &quot;central&quot; database that would be used to collect these kind of statistics. It would be &quot;real-time&quot; but it would be near real-time depending on the frequency of updates. The downside is you have the over head of maintaining a separate data source.<p>The other option was to just have the software set up to query each tenant at a time and take the performance&#x2F;time hit. That&#x27;s not really the best experience and probably violates the idea of data isolation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Designing a SaaS Database for Scale with Postgres</title><url>https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/10/03/designing-your-saas-database-for-high-scalability/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>e1g</author><text>We serve enterprise customers, and use the &#x27;separate database&#x27; strategy for these reasons -<p>1. Stronger data isolation. Technically schemas provide the same level of isolation, but they are much harder to explain or defend during compliance audits.<p>2. More secure backups. Client data can be encrypted with their own key and stored as per their needs.<p>3. More useful backups. The frequency and retention of backups can vary to meet the SLA requirements (and costs). And we if something goes wrong, we can recover that particular customer&#x27;s data in isolation without impacting the rest of the application&#x2F;customers or worry about merging it in.<p>4. Secure data deletion. Many European customers demand that <i>all</i> their data is securely removed upon termination. This creates a massive problem with purging backup information if everything is in the same dump.<p>5. Independent load &amp; performance. If one customer is particularly high-load or chatty, we can move them onto a separate server where they don&#x27;t impact well behaved folks.<p>6. Easier horizontal scalability. Just move heavy loads to their own servers + read replicas.<p>7. Direct access to data. Specifically, we can use BI tools that do not understand schemas and even give direct access to clients&#x27; analysts.<p>8.Independent migration paths. Sometimes the customer&#x27;s timetable does not allow them to upgrade to the newest version right now (e.g. they are in the middle of using the app for a key process this month). We can leave their account routed to the previous version in both the codebase and the data store.<p>Out of those, the key 3 reasons are: stronger data isolation, better backup strategy, and more predictable compliance story. But that&#x27;s enterprise: even if we&#x27;re widely successful, we&#x27;ll have &quot;thousands&quot; of customers - never millions. And we can manage thousands of databases, so this architecture path is preferable to us within those boundaries.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andreygrehov</author><text>&gt; 8.Independent migration paths.<p>In this case, how is the business logic (codewise) handled across different states of databases?</text></comment> |
20,898,928 | 20,896,739 | 1 | 3 | 20,860,777 | train | <story><title>Dead Malls</title><url>http://deadmalls.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codingdave</author><text>I still think a dead mall would be a great startup incubator - each small group gets its own office, tons of shared space to interact with each other, food court for local restaurants to cater to everyone, some big anchor spaces for the larger companies (or even a local data center), and even some built-in back offices for the property managers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fortran77</author><text>A good use of a dead mall is a Community College. A little ugly, perhaps, but workable. You have parking and large rooms already built out.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dead Malls</title><url>http://deadmalls.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>codingdave</author><text>I still think a dead mall would be a great startup incubator - each small group gets its own office, tons of shared space to interact with each other, food court for local restaurants to cater to everyone, some big anchor spaces for the larger companies (or even a local data center), and even some built-in back offices for the property managers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_bxg1</author><text>One in my city got acquired by the local community college and stores were turned into classrooms</text></comment> |
15,495,504 | 15,495,618 | 1 | 2 | 15,492,410 | train | <story><title>Hotswapping Haskell</title><url>http://simonmar.github.io/posts/2017-10-17-hotswapping-haskell.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teraflop</author><text>I don&#x27;t want to knock the technical achievement here -- it&#x27;s a cool hack -- but I&#x27;m really surprised that it was deemed to be the best choice for a production system.<p>In the first place, &quot;we can&#x27;t compile our code on every change because it takes too long&quot; is a really awful situation to be in. Are developers not building and testing their changes before deploying them? Can Facebook not afford a continuous integration system that can run builds in parallel? It sounds like this problem is only happening because the application is a giant monolith, but for some reason splitting it up would slow down development even more... I&#x27;m not sure I buy that reasoning.<p>The article says that &quot;Haskell’s strict type system means we’re able to confidently push new code knowing that we can’t crash the server&quot;, which is a real stretch. In addition to all of the usual ways a computation can diverge, this hot-swapping system adds a whole new variety of failure modes. The article talks about how the code needs to be carefully audited to prevent memory leaks, but it doesn&#x27;t even mention the weird things that can happen when mutable state is preserved across code modifications. Debugging is a pain when your data structures can get into states that aren&#x27;t reachable with any single version of the code. (This is a well-known issue in Linux kernel live-patching, for instance.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JonCoens</author><text>I should have emphasized the speed of deployment being a first order concern more. We certainly can (and do) build our code for every change, but not at the speed that we want to be updating.<p>We use a monorepo for all of the benefits it has, and deploying fast business logic updates this way helps mitigate one of its downsides (particularly when you&#x27;ve maximally parallelized the build). I&#x27;ve found <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;monorepo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;monorepo&#x2F;</a> to give a quick overview of how chopping up the repo would have separate downsides.<p>The section about &quot;Sticky Shared Objects&quot; speaks directly to mutable state across code modifications, just with a Haskell-minded focus.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hotswapping Haskell</title><url>http://simonmar.github.io/posts/2017-10-17-hotswapping-haskell.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teraflop</author><text>I don&#x27;t want to knock the technical achievement here -- it&#x27;s a cool hack -- but I&#x27;m really surprised that it was deemed to be the best choice for a production system.<p>In the first place, &quot;we can&#x27;t compile our code on every change because it takes too long&quot; is a really awful situation to be in. Are developers not building and testing their changes before deploying them? Can Facebook not afford a continuous integration system that can run builds in parallel? It sounds like this problem is only happening because the application is a giant monolith, but for some reason splitting it up would slow down development even more... I&#x27;m not sure I buy that reasoning.<p>The article says that &quot;Haskell’s strict type system means we’re able to confidently push new code knowing that we can’t crash the server&quot;, which is a real stretch. In addition to all of the usual ways a computation can diverge, this hot-swapping system adds a whole new variety of failure modes. The article talks about how the code needs to be carefully audited to prevent memory leaks, but it doesn&#x27;t even mention the weird things that can happen when mutable state is preserved across code modifications. Debugging is a pain when your data structures can get into states that aren&#x27;t reachable with any single version of the code. (This is a well-known issue in Linux kernel live-patching, for instance.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elihu</author><text>It kind of sounds like they&#x27;re running into some limitations of GHC: it tends to take a long time to compile stuff, and it tends to generate some very big binaries. For most applications, those aren&#x27;t major problems but in their use case (hundreds of thousands of lines of code deployed to many servers) it is an issue so they&#x27;re working around it. That allows them to keep working in the language they prefer and are productive in, which is great.<p>Improving GHC compile times and reducing the binary size would be better, but presumably a lot of work has already gone into those problems and if it were easy someone would have done it by now. As for myself, I really like using Haskell and I&#x27;m glad whenever I hear about it being used in industry.</text></comment> |
17,371,556 | 17,370,380 | 1 | 2 | 17,369,646 | train | <story><title>Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory</title><url>https://zenmagnets.com/public-releases/6-2018-6-years-of-battle-ends-in-victory/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I like to play with liquid nitrogen. We have parties and make cocktails with it and do instant ice cream. In a couple weeks, we&#x27;re going to do a thing where we make Dippin&#x27; Dots with them. Liquid nitrogen is fun stuff.<p>It&#x27;s also dangerous, and not in obvious ways. It&#x27;s like the opposite of a cauldron of 400f peanut oil --- if that oil could also quickly asphyxiate you. And your intuition for how to mitigate the risk is bad; for instance: gloves would be a mistake. And that&#x27;s just for handling it; freeze something the wrong way and give it to a friend to ingest and you could perforate their alimentary canal.<p>Should people be able to play with LN? Absolutely.<p>Should someone start a company and sell super-fun mini-dewars to people as a novelty item, like the Soda Stream of chilling? If they did, a lot of people would get hurt.<p>I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to get LN, and I am fine with it being a little bit of a hassle to buy a pretty boring desk toy. The CPSC appeared to have been fine with that too; its problem wasn&#x27;t with you <i>owning</i> little magnets, but with companies selling them as novelty stress relieving desk devices to rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and also make excellent refrigerator art (all things on Zen Magnets current page).<p>I don&#x27;t think HN&#x27;s take on magnets and the CPSC is very sophisticated or interesting or really even all that well informed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory</title><url>https://zenmagnets.com/public-releases/6-2018-6-years-of-battle-ends-in-victory/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>flashman</author><text>People love to say that they shouldn&#x27;t be prevented from owning these toys just because some other person&#x27;s child might get injured, and I sympathise with that point of view. But at their peak, three thousand children a year were visiting emergency departments for suspected magnet ingestion (a number which declined after the CPSC ban).[1]<p>Lawn darts were banned on a mere 750 ED visits annually.[2] The fact is, we live in a society and (as with fireworks and other dangerous toys that could be labelled &#x27;adults only&#x27;) the cost of being able to have these magnets on your desk is probably dozens or hundreds of kids getting very sick.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europepmc.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;med&#x2F;29135818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europepmc.org&#x2F;abstract&#x2F;med&#x2F;29135818</a>
[2]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;31176&#x2F;how-one-dad-got-lawn-darts-banned" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;31176&#x2F;how-one-dad-got-lawn-da...</a></text></comment> |
18,811,624 | 18,807,510 | 1 | 2 | 18,807,017 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)</title><text>Please state the job location and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and&#x2F;or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn&#x27;t a household name, explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don&#x27;t reply to job posts to complain about
something. It&#x27;s off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: Try <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;</a>,
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.com&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don&#x27;t miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807015</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807016</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jashmenn</author><text>Fullstack.io | Book author | Remote | Part Time | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;</a>
Earn on order of $50k&#x2F;year by writing a programming book. We’re the authors of Fullstack React, ng-book, Fullstack Vue and we’re looking to work with authors like you to write a few new books this year.<p>Our books sell very well because:<p>- We go way beyond API docs and teach everything you need to know to build real apps.<p>- We guarantee the books and code are up to date.<p>- We invest in marketing the books (and have an active email list of over 100k)<p>- We love the topics we write about and aim to create something remarkable every time.<p>If you decided to self-publish, you may find the marketing is more than writing the book. We have an audience, and we know what they want to read - so when your book is done, we already have people who want to buy it.<p>If you decide to go with a “traditional” publisher, you may be given a mediocre editor, write your book in MS Word (ha), and earn 5-15% in royalties. With us, our editors (me) are programmers first, our tooling is dev-friendly, and our royalties are split 50&#x2F;50. (For scale, the author of Fullstack Vue earned $20k on the opening weekend.)<p>I’d specifically like to work with someone on Fullstack Go and Fullstack Rust - which is less about the respective languages and more like guides to building full-stack web applications with each, including third-party libraries, etc. But we’re also looking to write content about Python, Kubernetes, JavaScript, Elixir, etc. Anything up and coming.<p>If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, fill out the form linked below. Looking forward to hearing from you!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;</a><p>(I&#x27;ve talked more about our economics of writing books here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17015117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17015117</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jventura</author><text>This is very cool! Last year I wrote a manuscript on an hands-on approach to learning Python [0][1], going to apply on your site.. :)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joaoventura&#x2F;full-speed-python" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joaoventura&#x2F;full-speed-python</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16622038" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16622038</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)</title><text>Please state the job location and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and&#x2F;or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn&#x27;t a household name, explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don&#x27;t reply to job posts to complain about
something. It&#x27;s off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: Try <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kennytilton.github.io&#x2F;whoishiring&#x2F;</a>,
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnhired.com&#x2F;</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don&#x27;t miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807015</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18807016</a></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jashmenn</author><text>Fullstack.io | Book author | Remote | Part Time | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;</a>
Earn on order of $50k&#x2F;year by writing a programming book. We’re the authors of Fullstack React, ng-book, Fullstack Vue and we’re looking to work with authors like you to write a few new books this year.<p>Our books sell very well because:<p>- We go way beyond API docs and teach everything you need to know to build real apps.<p>- We guarantee the books and code are up to date.<p>- We invest in marketing the books (and have an active email list of over 100k)<p>- We love the topics we write about and aim to create something remarkable every time.<p>If you decided to self-publish, you may find the marketing is more than writing the book. We have an audience, and we know what they want to read - so when your book is done, we already have people who want to buy it.<p>If you decide to go with a “traditional” publisher, you may be given a mediocre editor, write your book in MS Word (ha), and earn 5-15% in royalties. With us, our editors (me) are programmers first, our tooling is dev-friendly, and our royalties are split 50&#x2F;50. (For scale, the author of Fullstack Vue earned $20k on the opening weekend.)<p>I’d specifically like to work with someone on Fullstack Go and Fullstack Rust - which is less about the respective languages and more like guides to building full-stack web applications with each, including third-party libraries, etc. But we’re also looking to write content about Python, Kubernetes, JavaScript, Elixir, etc. Anything up and coming.<p>If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, fill out the form linked below. Looking forward to hearing from you!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullstack.io&#x2F;write-a-book&#x2F;</a><p>(I&#x27;ve talked more about our economics of writing books here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17015117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17015117</a>)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wilde</author><text>This looks cool. Couple of bits of feedback on your website: the “Request for Books” link appears to be broken on the landing page you linked here. The hamburger menu in the upper right doesn’t do anything for me in iOS Safari. I have an adblocker though so maybe that’s interfering?</text></comment> |
40,717,110 | 40,716,860 | 1 | 2 | 40,714,544 | train | <story><title>What happens to latency if service time is cut in half (2022)</title><url>https://pveentjer.github.io/misc/2022/04/18/service-time-cut-in-half.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kqr</author><text>Another of those somewhat counter-intuitive results is the answer to the question &quot;how much do we need to scale up to avoid response time regression when the request rate is doubled?&quot;<p>It is very easy to blurt out &quot;well obviously we need twice the processing power!&quot; but if we scale to twice the processing power, then start accepting twice the request rate – we will actually be serving each request in half the time we originally did.<p>To many people that sounds weird; it sounds like we got something for nothing. If I invite twice as many people to a party and buy twice as many cookies, it&#x27;s not like each guest will get twice as many cookies – that just leaves the originally planned number of cookies for each guest.<p>But for response time it comes back to the first equation in TFA:<p><pre><code> T = 1&#x2F;μ · 1&#x2F;(1 - ρ)
</code></pre>
Doubling both arrival rate and maximum service rate leaves ρ – and the second factor with it – unchanged, but still halves the 1&#x2F;μ factor, resulting in half the response time.<p>The appropriate amount to scale by is the k that solves the equation we get when we set the old response time T at request rate λ equal to the one at request rate 2λ and kμ processing power. This is something like<p><pre><code> T = 1&#x2F;μ · 1&#x2F;(1 - λ&#x2F;μ) = 1&#x2F;kμ · 1&#x2F;(1 - 2λ&#x2F;kμ)
</code></pre>
but rearranges to the much simpler<p><pre><code> k = ρ + 1
</code></pre>
which a colleague of mine told me interprets intuitively as &quot;the processing power that needs to be added is exactly that which will handle an additional unit of the current utilisation on top of the current utilisation, i.e. twice as much.&quot;<p>This is mostly good news for people doing capacity planning in advance of events etc. If you run your systems at reasonable utilisation levels normally, you don&#x27;t actually need that much additional capacity to handle peak loads.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgerdts</author><text>&gt; but if we scale to twice the processing power, then start accepting twice the request rate – we will actually be serving each request in half the time we originally did.<p>Not necessarily. If processing power is increased by doubling the clock of a processor or using a hard disk that spins and seeks twice as fast, this may be the case.<p>But we all know that when you have a single threaded work item, adding a second core does not cause the single threaded work to complete in half the time. If the arrival rate is substantially lower than 1&#x2F;S, the second core will be of negligible value, and maybe of negative value due to synchronization overhead. This overhead is unlikely to be seen when doubling from 1 to 2, but is more likely at high levels of scaling.<p>If the processor is saturated, service time includes queue time, and service time is dominated by queue time, increasing processing power by doubling the number of processors may make it so that service time can almost be cut in half. How close to half depends on the ratio of queue time to processing time.</text></comment> | <story><title>What happens to latency if service time is cut in half (2022)</title><url>https://pveentjer.github.io/misc/2022/04/18/service-time-cut-in-half.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kqr</author><text>Another of those somewhat counter-intuitive results is the answer to the question &quot;how much do we need to scale up to avoid response time regression when the request rate is doubled?&quot;<p>It is very easy to blurt out &quot;well obviously we need twice the processing power!&quot; but if we scale to twice the processing power, then start accepting twice the request rate – we will actually be serving each request in half the time we originally did.<p>To many people that sounds weird; it sounds like we got something for nothing. If I invite twice as many people to a party and buy twice as many cookies, it&#x27;s not like each guest will get twice as many cookies – that just leaves the originally planned number of cookies for each guest.<p>But for response time it comes back to the first equation in TFA:<p><pre><code> T = 1&#x2F;μ · 1&#x2F;(1 - ρ)
</code></pre>
Doubling both arrival rate and maximum service rate leaves ρ – and the second factor with it – unchanged, but still halves the 1&#x2F;μ factor, resulting in half the response time.<p>The appropriate amount to scale by is the k that solves the equation we get when we set the old response time T at request rate λ equal to the one at request rate 2λ and kμ processing power. This is something like<p><pre><code> T = 1&#x2F;μ · 1&#x2F;(1 - λ&#x2F;μ) = 1&#x2F;kμ · 1&#x2F;(1 - 2λ&#x2F;kμ)
</code></pre>
but rearranges to the much simpler<p><pre><code> k = ρ + 1
</code></pre>
which a colleague of mine told me interprets intuitively as &quot;the processing power that needs to be added is exactly that which will handle an additional unit of the current utilisation on top of the current utilisation, i.e. twice as much.&quot;<p>This is mostly good news for people doing capacity planning in advance of events etc. If you run your systems at reasonable utilisation levels normally, you don&#x27;t actually need that much additional capacity to handle peak loads.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krisoft</author><text>&gt; It is very easy to blurt out &quot;well obviously we need twice the processing power!&quot; but if we scale to twice the processing power, then start accepting twice the request rate – we will actually be serving each request in half the time we originally did.<p>I don&#x27;t understand what you are saying. Are you talking about the time the request is buffered in some queue on average assuming they are arriving randomly? Or something like that?<p>Here is what I&#x27;m thinking. We are operating a hospital which does only one type of surgery which last an hour exactly. (Presumably it is a veterinary practice for spherical cows.) A fully staffed operating room can operate on 24 spherical cows a day. If due to a spherical cow jamboree we expect more patients and we set up a second operating theatre we will be able to serve 48 of them a day. But we are still serving them for an hour each. (because that is how long the operation takes.)<p>Even if we are talking about latency when 24 cows show up at the stroke of midnight to the one operating room hospital they each will be served on average in 12.5h. Same average if 48 cows show up to the two operating room hospital.<p>So what am I thinking wrong here? Is &quot;scale to twice the processing power&quot; not the same as getting a second operating room? I&#x27;m not seeing where &quot;we will actually be serving each request in half the time&quot; comes from.</text></comment> |
26,557,744 | 26,557,258 | 1 | 2 | 26,555,514 | train | <story><title>ZGC – What's new in JDK 16</title><url>https://malloc.se/blog/zgc-jdk16</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>modeless</author><text>1 ms pause times are pretty good. That&#x27;s finally getting close to the point where it may no longer be the biggest factor preventing adoption in applications like core game engine code. Although at 144 Hz it&#x27;s still 14% of your frame time, so it&#x27;s hardly negligible.<p>Even if the GC is running on an otherwise idle core there are still other costs like power consumption and memory bandwidth. So you still want to minimize allocation to keep the GC workload down.<p>For too long GC people were touting 10 ms pause times as &quot;low&quot; and not bothering to go further, but truly low pause times <i>are</i> possible. I&#x27;d love to see a new systems language that <i>starts</i> by designing for extremely low-pause GC, not manual allocation or a borrow checker. I think it would be possible to make something that you could use for real time work without having to compromise on memory safety and without having to pay the complexity tax Rust takes on for the borrow checker.</text></comment> | <story><title>ZGC – What's new in JDK 16</title><url>https://malloc.se/blog/zgc-jdk16</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vlovich123</author><text>One of the observations I&#x27;ve been making is that strategies like this of spreading the work around multiple threads almost seem to play with measurements more than necessarily improving the cost. So yes, the &quot;stop the world phase&quot; is shorter &amp; cheaper. It&#x27;s unclear the rest of the threads have more implicit overhead to support this concurrency (more book-keeping, participating implicitly in GC, etc). Supporting benchmarks of various workloads would be helpful to understand what tradeoffs were made.</text></comment> |
14,661,470 | 14,661,132 | 1 | 2 | 14,659,989 | train | <story><title>Stupidly Simple DDoS Protocol (SSDP) Generates 100 Gbps DDoS</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/ssdp-100gbps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>upofadown</author><text>&gt;It&#x27;s not a novelty that allowing UDP port 1900 traffic from the Internet to your home printer or such is not a good idea.<p>How would this even be possible? Home routers have to NAT everything. Normally you have to set up reverse NAT to get ports forwarded to the LAN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sebcat</author><text>You don&#x27;t have to have a router. The apartment building where I live have fiber, with twisted pair to each apartment. DHCP leases from the apartment gives you an external IP. It&#x27;s possible to hook up a switch and get DHCP leases for multiple devices. I assume there&#x27;s an upper limit, I&#x27;ve only tried it with two devices.<p>Now, let&#x27;s say I hook up a printer to a switch in that configuration. Is it smart enough to not respond to UPnP coming from globally routable addresses?<p>This is why ingress filtering is important.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stupidly Simple DDoS Protocol (SSDP) Generates 100 Gbps DDoS</title><url>https://blog.cloudflare.com/ssdp-100gbps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>upofadown</author><text>&gt;It&#x27;s not a novelty that allowing UDP port 1900 traffic from the Internet to your home printer or such is not a good idea.<p>How would this even be possible? Home routers have to NAT everything. Normally you have to set up reverse NAT to get ports forwarded to the LAN.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detaro</author><text>The printer is just an example - if you look at the tables with the collected data, the vast majority of devices they found are home routers.</text></comment> |
10,211,733 | 10,211,745 | 1 | 2 | 10,211,565 | train | <story><title>Python 3.5.0</title><url>https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-350/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vegabook</author><text>Agreed but does this apply in Numpy as well? Will Python matrix multiplications just work on lists of lists in which case they&#x27;re much slower? Sorry just asking from a 2.7 holdout here as this might cause me to move.</text></item><item><author>gh02t</author><text>Heh, for me it&#x27;s the matrix multiply operator. Such a minor addition will make for a pretty big improvement to my day-to-day coding experience.</text></item><item><author>ricw</author><text>By far the most exciting news here, to me, is PEP 484 typing module. Typing support would eliminate one of pythons biggest weaknesses. Furthermore, having it optional means it can remain as easy play and prototype with while becoming &quot;more professional.&quot;<p>The other features are all well rounded, with co-routines having quite some potential, though I&#x27;d have to play around with them first to assess.<p>Now if everything would please start moving on to Python 3 pretty please ;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdimov9</author><text>&quot;An upcoming release of NumPy 1.10 will add support for the new operator&quot; [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.5&#x2F;whatsnew&#x2F;3.5.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.5&#x2F;whatsnew&#x2F;3.5.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Python 3.5.0</title><url>https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-350/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vegabook</author><text>Agreed but does this apply in Numpy as well? Will Python matrix multiplications just work on lists of lists in which case they&#x27;re much slower? Sorry just asking from a 2.7 holdout here as this might cause me to move.</text></item><item><author>gh02t</author><text>Heh, for me it&#x27;s the matrix multiply operator. Such a minor addition will make for a pretty big improvement to my day-to-day coding experience.</text></item><item><author>ricw</author><text>By far the most exciting news here, to me, is PEP 484 typing module. Typing support would eliminate one of pythons biggest weaknesses. Furthermore, having it optional means it can remain as easy play and prototype with while becoming &quot;more professional.&quot;<p>The other features are all well rounded, with co-routines having quite some potential, though I&#x27;d have to play around with them first to assess.<p>Now if everything would please start moving on to Python 3 pretty please ;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwandborg</author><text>The matrix multiplication operator is not implemented for any standard python data type.<p>The matrix multiplication PEP is actually titled &quot;A dedicated infix operator for matrix multiplication&quot;, and that&#x27;s (broadly) the <i>only</i> thing that it provides. Here&#x27;s the arguments for <i>why</i> the operator should exist: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0465&#x2F;#why-should-matrix-multiplication-be-infix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;dev&#x2F;peps&#x2F;pep-0465&#x2F;#why-should-matrix-...</a><p>numpy and other libraries might&#x2F;has&#x2F;will implement the matrix multiplication infix operator for their array and matrix data types.</text></comment> |
10,896,838 | 10,896,870 | 1 | 3 | 10,896,670 | train | <story><title>Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/business/media/al-jazeera-america-to-shut-down-in-april.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you are the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world, because almost no Americans know what Al Jazeera is, and the name evokes the image backdrop of a middle eastern city most Americans can&#x27;t find on a map, discussing topics of primary interest to American Muslims and few else, while the female anchors are veiled. Not to mention it sounds like a group Americans are more familiar with that starts with &quot;Al-&quot;.<p>This is almost as bad as the Latin American failure of the Chevy Nova (Spanish: no go). They could and should have named it anything, but they really seemed to think their brand would carry any weight at all.<p>One may say this is proof that Americans don&#x27;t want truth and reason, just entertainment in their news. We do, but the simple fact is that if you fail to appeal to people&#x27;s simple desires, fears, and impulses, you will fail entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>afshin</author><text>I don&#x27;t have a strong opinion about your larger point. It might be correct, I&#x27;m still thinking it through. But the Chevy Nova thing is an urban legend:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;misxlate&#x2F;nova.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;misxlate&#x2F;nova.asp</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/business/media/al-jazeera-america-to-shut-down-in-april.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>This comes as absolutely no surprise at all. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you are the most accurate, informed, respectable news source in the world, because almost no Americans know what Al Jazeera is, and the name evokes the image backdrop of a middle eastern city most Americans can&#x27;t find on a map, discussing topics of primary interest to American Muslims and few else, while the female anchors are veiled. Not to mention it sounds like a group Americans are more familiar with that starts with &quot;Al-&quot;.<p>This is almost as bad as the Latin American failure of the Chevy Nova (Spanish: no go). They could and should have named it anything, but they really seemed to think their brand would carry any weight at all.<p>One may say this is proof that Americans don&#x27;t want truth and reason, just entertainment in their news. We do, but the simple fact is that if you fail to appeal to people&#x27;s simple desires, fears, and impulses, you will fail entirely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>molecule</author><text>&gt; This is almost as bad as the Latin American failure of the Chevy Nova (Spanish: no go)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;misxlate&#x2F;nova.asp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snopes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;misxlate&#x2F;nova.asp</a></text></comment> |
9,214,222 | 9,214,249 | 1 | 2 | 9,212,354 | train | <story><title>Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them</title><url>http://fusion.net/story/61741/hertz-cameras-in-rental-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>downandout</author><text>It is illegal to film someone without their knowledge in any area where they have an expectation of privacy. This is why, as mentioned in the article, Corvette owners were told not to use the valet video feature in their cars. As for the author&#x27;s concerns about audio, it is even more restricted than video. So, I wouldn&#x27;t be too worried about this...until a senator manages to work a law allowing rental car companies to do this into a random spending bill.</text></item><item><author>dragonwriter</author><text>If it really has no plans to use them and has spent money putting them in its cars, HTZ shareholders should be furious.<p>But, I suspect &quot;has no plans to use them&quot; means &quot;is not prepared to publicly disclose its plans for using them at this time&quot;.<p>EDIT: Actually, the article indicates that they had very firm ideas of <i>how</i> they would be used (for two-way video streaming contact with agents from the device), but that they have &quot;no plans&quot; to use them based on the fact that they currently have insufficient infrastructure -- particularly, in terms of data bandwidth to the car -- to support the intended use.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Fuzzwah</author><text>Surely fine print on your rental agreement could let you know you could be filmed.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them</title><url>http://fusion.net/story/61741/hertz-cameras-in-rental-cars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>downandout</author><text>It is illegal to film someone without their knowledge in any area where they have an expectation of privacy. This is why, as mentioned in the article, Corvette owners were told not to use the valet video feature in their cars. As for the author&#x27;s concerns about audio, it is even more restricted than video. So, I wouldn&#x27;t be too worried about this...until a senator manages to work a law allowing rental car companies to do this into a random spending bill.</text></item><item><author>dragonwriter</author><text>If it really has no plans to use them and has spent money putting them in its cars, HTZ shareholders should be furious.<p>But, I suspect &quot;has no plans to use them&quot; means &quot;is not prepared to publicly disclose its plans for using them at this time&quot;.<p>EDIT: Actually, the article indicates that they had very firm ideas of <i>how</i> they would be used (for two-way video streaming contact with agents from the device), but that they have &quot;no plans&quot; to use them based on the fact that they currently have insufficient infrastructure -- particularly, in terms of data bandwidth to the car -- to support the intended use.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drzaiusapelord</author><text>Why can&#x27;t Chevy put in some kind of &quot;beep beep you are being recorded in valet mode&quot; warning when the door is open and that mode is on. That would cover any reasonable case here.</text></comment> |
27,493,659 | 27,493,454 | 1 | 3 | 27,492,616 | train | <story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.<p>That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.<p>But most of these products&#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid&#x2F;pay for when you trade&#x2F;borrow&#x2F;lend&#x2F;invest&#x2F;stake your other tokens. Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.<p>The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&#x2F;finance.<p>Right now it just feels like pump&amp;dump&#x2F;frontrunning&#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success. It&#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treis</author><text>&gt; there really are not a lot of real world use cases.<p>It&#x27;s effectively just one. To make illegal transactions. That&#x27;s a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on. Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.<p>That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases. Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.<p>But most of these products&#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta. Tokens you get paid&#x2F;pay for when you trade&#x2F;borrow&#x2F;lend&#x2F;invest&#x2F;stake your other tokens. Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.<p>The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&#x2F;finance.<p>Right now it just feels like pump&amp;dump&#x2F;frontrunning&#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success. It&#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wyck</author><text>This opinion is really common, I used to have it but what changed my mind was realizing there are not really any &quot;real world&quot; use cases. I look at crypto as actual money, with the same definition: &quot;money is a verifiable record that is generally accepted&quot;. Money in of itself does not have any &quot;real world&quot; use cases, money is money. Money facilitates economic velocity and growth in the same way crypto does, except crypto has the potential to be more efficient and secure. One of the key reasons money exists is &quot;currency velocity&quot;, crypto improves upon this a lot. Banks make money with money, they don&#x27;t make money with real use cases. Good crypto projects act like decentralized banks, nothing more.<p>In other words ignore all the bullshit projects and look at the ones who are structured like banks, financial instruments, or risk management. Then the use cases of cypto become very clear.</text></comment> |
14,860,477 | 14,860,435 | 1 | 3 | 14,859,740 | train | <story><title>Petition to open source Flash</title><url>https://github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarym</author><text>So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying things....<p>But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML look nice you had little more than the dreaded &#x27;blink&#x27; tag to work with.<p>If it weren&#x27;t for Flash I doubt we&#x27;d have anywhere near as advanced CSS, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 bells and whistles that designers can actually use now.<p>I doubt Adobe will open source it though. They probably know there&#x27;s a whole heap of other security issues in it that&#x27;ll get found and exploited as soon as they release it. Your average user won&#x27;t be able to patch fast enough!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riffraff</author><text>I had browser games in flash that worked, now I have unity games that don&#x27;t.<p>I honestly wish we&#x27;d stuck with flash.</text></comment> | <story><title>Petition to open source Flash</title><url>https://github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jarym</author><text>So much hate for Flash. Yes it has regular security holes, is CPU hungry and a lot of people used it to create some mightily annoying things....<p>But Flash was a gift from the gods back in the early days of IE and most people forget that. If you wanted to make some HTML look nice you had little more than the dreaded &#x27;blink&#x27; tag to work with.<p>If it weren&#x27;t for Flash I doubt we&#x27;d have anywhere near as advanced CSS, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 bells and whistles that designers can actually use now.<p>I doubt Adobe will open source it though. They probably know there&#x27;s a whole heap of other security issues in it that&#x27;ll get found and exploited as soon as they release it. Your average user won&#x27;t be able to patch fast enough!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ajedi32</author><text>&gt; They probably know there&#x27;s a whole heap of other security issues in it that&#x27;ll get found and exploited as soon as they release it.<p>So wait until 2020, after all major browsers have dropped support for it. No reason to worry about vulnerabilities in software that nobody&#x27;s using in production anymore. If anyone still cares, they can always fix the security problems themselves.</text></comment> |
25,809,185 | 25,806,183 | 1 | 3 | 25,805,635 | train | <story><title>Attacking the DeFi ecosystem with flash loans for fun and profit (2020)</title><url>https://www.palkeo.com/en/projets/ethereum/bzx.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>The originally submitted paper is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2003.03810" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2003.03810</a>.</text></comment> | <story><title>Attacking the DeFi ecosystem with flash loans for fun and profit (2020)</title><url>https://www.palkeo.com/en/projets/ethereum/bzx.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qqii</author><text>Personally I found this article much clearer than the paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palkeo.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;projets&#x2F;ethereum&#x2F;bzx.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palkeo.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;projets&#x2F;ethereum&#x2F;bzx.html</a><p>You can actually follow the money yourself:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x148426fdc4c8a51b96b4bed827907b5fa6491ad0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0x148426fdc4c8a51b96b4bed827907...</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0xb8C6Ad5fE7CB6cC72F2C4196dca11FbB272A8cbF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;etherscan.io&#x2F;address&#x2F;0xb8C6Ad5fE7CB6cC72F2C4196dca11...</a><p>It looks like neither attacker was able to cash out, but the seccond attacker is moving his funds around even to this day.</text></comment> |
4,163,350 | 4,163,336 | 1 | 2 | 4,163,058 | train | <story><title>Apple Releases Dedicated iOS Podcasts App</title><url>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029?mt=8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewisham</author><text>Apple's highly questionable and deeply unfortunate skeuomorphism kick continues unabated. Now we're treated to a radio dial which died out in 1995, and playing podcasts presents a reel-to-reel, which died out in god knows when.<p>It's completely bizarre. I guess podcasts are a form of talk radio, but tying them to some ancient radio technology that anyone under the age of 18 will have never touched is mental. They're even called podcasts: they arose because of the popularity of the iPod! Insane.<p>Apple really need to sort their designers out. I wish we could somehow have Microsoft's new Metro design aesthetics on Mac OS X and iOS, then I could have the best apps and OS design, and the best UI to use with them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>siglesias</author><text>I don't think it's as heavy-handed as you suggest. Most of the app's navigation is handled by tableviews and collection views. The dial that you reference is really a sideways scrollview (albeit with a material skin)--this controls a non-skeuomorphic list in an intuitive way that isn't confined to the limitations of a physical radio's interface.<p>I'll grant that the tape deck is outdated, but it's a largely hidden little visual treat that suggests a hidden mechanism underneath AND provides visual feedback on playback speed.<p>Skeuomorphism is bad when it restricts the UI to the properties of physical objects, but in this case Apple hasn't done that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Releases Dedicated iOS Podcasts App</title><url>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029?mt=8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewisham</author><text>Apple's highly questionable and deeply unfortunate skeuomorphism kick continues unabated. Now we're treated to a radio dial which died out in 1995, and playing podcasts presents a reel-to-reel, which died out in god knows when.<p>It's completely bizarre. I guess podcasts are a form of talk radio, but tying them to some ancient radio technology that anyone under the age of 18 will have never touched is mental. They're even called podcasts: they arose because of the popularity of the iPod! Insane.<p>Apple really need to sort their designers out. I wish we could somehow have Microsoft's new Metro design aesthetics on Mac OS X and iOS, then I could have the best apps and OS design, and the best UI to use with them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glhaynes</author><text>I dunno, I think it's kinda fun. The app has some personality. I can certainly appreciate that some people don't like this style of design, but there are a lot of people who do, too. (Perhaps part of why we don't hear as much from them is because most of them don't know the word "skeumorphism"?)</text></comment> |
37,186,869 | 37,186,737 | 1 | 2 | 37,174,619 | train | <story><title>Moonbit: Fast, compact and user friendly language for WebAssembly</title><url>https://moonbitlang.com/blog/first-announce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hongbo_zhang</author><text>Hi, I am the lead of this project, you can try it now with our online IDE, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com</a> (F5 to run)<p>The docs are available <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs</a>, the compiler would be publicly available when we reach the beta status (expected to be the end of Q2 in 2024).<p>Feel free to ask me any question</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sizediterable</author><text>These are the usual questions I seek answers to first when seeing a new programming language:<p><pre><code> - What does writing asynchronous code look like
- Will it have any novel or less mainstream features, e.g.
- Algebraic effects [1]
- Contexts&#x2F;Capabilities [2]
- Linear types [3]
- Is the type system sound and does it support&#x2F;need type casts
- Does the language support interfaces&#x2F;traits&#x2F;protocols
- How rich are generics, e.g.
- Explicit variance annotations on type parameters
- Lower or upper bound constraints on type parameters
- Higher-kinded types
- Is structural vs nominal subtyping more prevalent
- Does it have algebraic data types? Generalized algebraic data types?
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v2.ocaml.org&#x2F;manual&#x2F;effects.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v2.ocaml.org&#x2F;manual&#x2F;effects.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hhvm.com&#x2F;hack&#x2F;contexts-and-capabilities&#x2F;introduction" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hhvm.com&#x2F;hack&#x2F;contexts-and-capabilities&#x2F;introdu...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austral-lang.org&#x2F;linear-types" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austral-lang.org&#x2F;linear-types</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Moonbit: Fast, compact and user friendly language for WebAssembly</title><url>https://moonbitlang.com/blog/first-announce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hongbo_zhang</author><text>Hi, I am the lead of this project, you can try it now with our online IDE, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;try.moonbitlang.com</a> (F5 to run)<p>The docs are available <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moonbitlang&#x2F;moonbit-docs</a>, the compiler would be publicly available when we reach the beta status (expected to be the end of Q2 in 2024).<p>Feel free to ask me any question</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tgv</author><text>I think people would like to know about licenses, pricing, and control over the project. Perhaps your commercial strategy doesn&#x27;t benefit from divulging that information now, but secrecy and uncertainty can kill interest.</text></comment> |
1,089,640 | 1,089,608 | 1 | 2 | 1,089,420 | train | <story><title>Black Perl</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aditya</author><text>Here's my favorite piece of perl:<p>#!/usr/bin/perl -s<p><pre><code> @x=qw/e n d/;if(
$kg){$e=13;$_="setrand(@{[int((rand)*90)]})
;K=vector(2,g,nextprime(random(10^$s)));e=$e;n=K[1]*
K[2];d=e^-1%((K[1]-1)*(K[2]-1));";s/\s//sg;for(
`echo "$_ e\nn\nd\n"|gp -q`){print$x[$j++]
,"=",`echo "10i16o$_ p"|dc`}exit}$t=
unpack'H*',join'',&#60;&#62;;$l=length$n;$y
=$e?$l-2:$l;$i="16dio";while (){$M=
($e&#38;&#38;1+int(rand 8)).(substr $t,$p
,$y or last);$i.="\U$M $k $n\E|
pc";$p+=$y}for(reverse
`echo "$i"|dc`){chop
;$d&#38;&#38;s/^(.)//||($_=
sprintf"%0${l}s"
,$_); $f
.=$_}#
print
pack
'H*'
,$f
</code></pre>
<a href="http://ftp.uk.debian.org/munitions/documents/rsafin.html" rel="nofollow">http://ftp.uk.debian.org/munitions/documents/rsafin.html</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Black Perl</title><url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yan</author><text>In Perl, just like English, this poem parses but makes no sense. :P</text></comment> |
13,791,412 | 13,790,988 | 1 | 3 | 13,783,786 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: 50 job applications, 15 interviews, 7 onsites, and no offer – what next?</title><text>&lt;Using a throwaway account for privacy&gt;<p>I have been looking to change jobs over the last 8 months. I am in a product management leadership position at my current job, and looking to shift to a similar role in either a slightly smaller company or in a different industry. However, I have found it extremely hard to accomplish this. I have no idea why I am failing in final rounds, but in most instances the feedback has been &quot;You are a great candidate, and we would like you to interview with this other role. But this particular role is not a good fit&quot;<p>What am I doing wrong ? Few facts about me&quot;
- I have over 12 years of work experience across 4 companies (well known brands)
- I am in my mid 30s - I am Indian, and FOB, with an accent (not a heavy accent though)<p>I have run completely out of ideas now. I have probably spoken with 100 people during the course of 15 interviews and I haven&#x27;t gotten any feedback on what I am doing wrong. I absolutely HATE my current job. I get depressed thinking about working in my current job for the foreseeable future. But looks like I don&#x27;t have any recourse. I am almost thinking of halting my job search and finding some kind of hobby to keep me occupied and keep my mind off work. Any advice would be appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw_xyz</author><text>Amen.<p>There are very strong racial stereotypes. They also vary by who holds them.<p>I&#x27;m a 40+ yo Russian system programmer, moved to States when I was 25, worked in a bunch of places from smaller startups to Fortune-500 shops. Here are my stereotypes:<p>* Russians are frustrated know-it-alls with strong NIH syndrom wanting to redo everything from scratch. The language barrier often makes it hard for them to clearly express their grand ideas, hence the frustration. They will solve things backwards because it&#x27;s more interesting that way.<p>* Chinese will cut corners to fit deadlines. They <i>can</i> write beautiful code, but more often than not they don&#x27;t bother and go with absolute minimal something that fits the spec.<p>* Swedes, Finns, Germans and Brits are very much OK. Easily the best in terms of working together.<p>* Canadians and Australians are solid if a bit slow.<p>* Eastern Europeans are immensely productive hacks, opinionated as hell, but very good for rapid prototyping.<p>* Indians ...<p>Now, Indians are arrogant know-it-alls that _lust_ for respect and power. Frequently the source of pointless drama in the workplace. They are very smart, write good code, but they also have very hard time admitting their mistakes. This often makes it hard to work with them as <i>colleagues</i>.<p>Stereotypes are VERY important to keep in mind, because that&#x27;s the starting point for every candidate assessment. The best the OP can do is to throw the interviewers off their footing. Say something like I&#x27;m Indian, but I was born in Argentina - and, bam, they can&#x27;t sort you in a default bucket, so they are forced to actually start assessing you from scratch. The same goes for dyeing your hair, fixing the accent, changing the name - it&#x27;s all for trying to separate yourself from a stereotype and make them view you as an <i>individual</i>.</text></item><item><author>throawayname</author><text>What are you willing to sacrifice? I can give you an answer, but you won&#x27;t like it. As an Indian man you&#x27;ll be discriminated against. Period. Lots of empirical proof for that, not just job wise but in lots of other cases (dating, etc).<p>While folks here will give you lots of tips on the professional side, here are a few actionable things you can do to minimize racial bias:<p>- Change your name to an americanized version. I know someone who did this. Lots of research that proves this point: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1mcsxdJ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1mcsxdJ</a><p>- Take acting classes and learn to speak with no accent
It wont be permanent, but you&#x27;ll be able to minimize your accent for a few hours in the interview. It&#x27;s akin to speaking with a fake French accent. See: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2loPQwy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2loPQwy</a><p>- Pay people to give you mock interviews and record them. Pay someone else to review the footage and give you interviewing tips.<p>- Improve your appearance: Bleach your hair lighter shade of brown and try to dress comfortably casual.<p>- Take some dating classes, learn to improve your confidence (or at least fake it for the in-person interview0.<p>- Improve your public speaking ability: Join a toastmasters group, get a mentor and give a few speeches.<p>A job interview is a bit like dating. If you&#x27;re getting rejected during in-person interviews, then learn to &quot;date better&quot;. A lot of racial biases here in SFbay are pretty rough. Even if you graduated top of your class at Stanford and had a successful exit you&#x27;ll be near the bottom of the pile when it comes to dating.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>appreciateya</author><text>I think this is due to &quot;saving face&quot; aspects of their culture.<p>I oversaw a team of Indian-based Indians while working for a software company in Austin, TX.<p>My stereotypical experiences:<p>- Ask an Indian if he understands something, he&#x27;ll always answer &quot;Yes&quot; even if he doesn&#x27;t understand it.<p>- Indians will not admit fault or mistakes. They seem to take it as a personal attack when you critique their work, rather than take it a suggestion for improvement.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: 50 job applications, 15 interviews, 7 onsites, and no offer – what next?</title><text>&lt;Using a throwaway account for privacy&gt;<p>I have been looking to change jobs over the last 8 months. I am in a product management leadership position at my current job, and looking to shift to a similar role in either a slightly smaller company or in a different industry. However, I have found it extremely hard to accomplish this. I have no idea why I am failing in final rounds, but in most instances the feedback has been &quot;You are a great candidate, and we would like you to interview with this other role. But this particular role is not a good fit&quot;<p>What am I doing wrong ? Few facts about me&quot;
- I have over 12 years of work experience across 4 companies (well known brands)
- I am in my mid 30s - I am Indian, and FOB, with an accent (not a heavy accent though)<p>I have run completely out of ideas now. I have probably spoken with 100 people during the course of 15 interviews and I haven&#x27;t gotten any feedback on what I am doing wrong. I absolutely HATE my current job. I get depressed thinking about working in my current job for the foreseeable future. But looks like I don&#x27;t have any recourse. I am almost thinking of halting my job search and finding some kind of hobby to keep me occupied and keep my mind off work. Any advice would be appreciated.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw_xyz</author><text>Amen.<p>There are very strong racial stereotypes. They also vary by who holds them.<p>I&#x27;m a 40+ yo Russian system programmer, moved to States when I was 25, worked in a bunch of places from smaller startups to Fortune-500 shops. Here are my stereotypes:<p>* Russians are frustrated know-it-alls with strong NIH syndrom wanting to redo everything from scratch. The language barrier often makes it hard for them to clearly express their grand ideas, hence the frustration. They will solve things backwards because it&#x27;s more interesting that way.<p>* Chinese will cut corners to fit deadlines. They <i>can</i> write beautiful code, but more often than not they don&#x27;t bother and go with absolute minimal something that fits the spec.<p>* Swedes, Finns, Germans and Brits are very much OK. Easily the best in terms of working together.<p>* Canadians and Australians are solid if a bit slow.<p>* Eastern Europeans are immensely productive hacks, opinionated as hell, but very good for rapid prototyping.<p>* Indians ...<p>Now, Indians are arrogant know-it-alls that _lust_ for respect and power. Frequently the source of pointless drama in the workplace. They are very smart, write good code, but they also have very hard time admitting their mistakes. This often makes it hard to work with them as <i>colleagues</i>.<p>Stereotypes are VERY important to keep in mind, because that&#x27;s the starting point for every candidate assessment. The best the OP can do is to throw the interviewers off their footing. Say something like I&#x27;m Indian, but I was born in Argentina - and, bam, they can&#x27;t sort you in a default bucket, so they are forced to actually start assessing you from scratch. The same goes for dyeing your hair, fixing the accent, changing the name - it&#x27;s all for trying to separate yourself from a stereotype and make them view you as an <i>individual</i>.</text></item><item><author>throawayname</author><text>What are you willing to sacrifice? I can give you an answer, but you won&#x27;t like it. As an Indian man you&#x27;ll be discriminated against. Period. Lots of empirical proof for that, not just job wise but in lots of other cases (dating, etc).<p>While folks here will give you lots of tips on the professional side, here are a few actionable things you can do to minimize racial bias:<p>- Change your name to an americanized version. I know someone who did this. Lots of research that proves this point: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1mcsxdJ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1mcsxdJ</a><p>- Take acting classes and learn to speak with no accent
It wont be permanent, but you&#x27;ll be able to minimize your accent for a few hours in the interview. It&#x27;s akin to speaking with a fake French accent. See: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2loPQwy" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;2loPQwy</a><p>- Pay people to give you mock interviews and record them. Pay someone else to review the footage and give you interviewing tips.<p>- Improve your appearance: Bleach your hair lighter shade of brown and try to dress comfortably casual.<p>- Take some dating classes, learn to improve your confidence (or at least fake it for the in-person interview0.<p>- Improve your public speaking ability: Join a toastmasters group, get a mentor and give a few speeches.<p>A job interview is a bit like dating. If you&#x27;re getting rejected during in-person interviews, then learn to &quot;date better&quot;. A lot of racial biases here in SFbay are pretty rough. Even if you graduated top of your class at Stanford and had a successful exit you&#x27;ll be near the bottom of the pile when it comes to dating.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulvs</author><text>Nice, as an Australian I concur.<p>I live in Paraguay, could anyone shed light on what stereotypical views&#x2F;biases I would experience in a job interview as an Aussie living in Paraguay?</text></comment> |
19,605,718 | 19,605,452 | 1 | 2 | 19,603,912 | train | <story><title>Norway Is Walking Away from Billions of Barrels of Oil</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-08/norway-is-walking-away-from-billions-of-barrels-of-oil-and-gas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>Everybody assumes that oil prices are going up. However, there are several large effects that could cause the price of oil to decline.<p>1. Economics predicts that the price of something will be the same as the price of its cheapest substitute. For a long time, fossil fuels were the substitute, keeping the price of renewables &amp; nuclear down to unprofitable levels. However, renewables, storage and electric cars are all rapidly decreasing in cost, depressing their prices and the prices of their substitutes.<p>2. Carbon taxes or other similar schemes are looking more likely in the future. They shift the demand&#x2F;supply curve, causing fewer barrels to be sold at higher prices, but the price doesn&#x27;t go up enough to cover the full increase, leading to depressed prices before the tax.<p>3. Economics says that the price of a commodity is the same as the marginal cost of production. In other words, the highest cost producer of oil that meets current demand makes $0 in profit, all lower cost producers make &gt;$0 profit. If demand is low, then that marginal cost is $10 Saudi oil. If demand is high, then that marginal cost is $100 Canadian oilsands oil. So if demand drops because of climate change mitigation and&#x2F;or renewable substitution and&#x2F;or electric vehicle substitution, there is supply of lower cost oil, meaning prices can drop.<p>4. We&#x27;re not running out of oil, we never have been. As mentioned in #3, the price of oil is the marginal cost of production. Anything that costs more than that price isn&#x27;t counted in reserves because it&#x27;s uneconomical to extract. So by definition we always have almost no reserves and never will have.<p>There are trillions of barrels of oil in the Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands alone that aren&#x27;t counted as reserves for this reason. We&#x27;re less than 2 price doubling periods away from making this economical, keeping a fairly low ceiling on prices.<p>And of course technology marches on, continually decreasing the price of extracting that oil...</text></item><item><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>It&#x27;s not like the oil is going anywhere, either.<p>I can imagine a point in 30 years where there are new, safer and better ways of getting the oil out, and oil is necessary for processes that don&#x27;t involve burning it into the atmosphere, and the price is considerably higher than it is now.<p>I despair of (my current home country) Australia&#x27;s attitude of digging up all the resources it possibly can and selling them for cheaper than everyone else. And being proud of this, like it&#x27;s a good thing. These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. Maybe leave some in the ground for later when the prices have gone up?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beat</author><text>What&#x27;s lost in your analysis is that oil extraction is becoming increasingly expensive. Magic tech isn&#x27;t making it cheaper; it&#x27;s making it viable at all.<p>Consider EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). This is how much energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil from the ground, whether by pumping or by melting in the case of tar sands and shale. In the 1950s, EROEI was about 100 - the energy of a barrel of oil could extract about a hundred barrels. The Canadian tar sands have EROEI of about 3.5. They weren&#x27;t profitable until oil became expensive enough to make it worthwhile.<p>Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably. Some of those &quot;trillions of barrels&quot; you talk about are in that camp. They don&#x27;t count as reserves, because they&#x27;re useless.<p>Meanwhile, oil is going to keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to extract. Offshore deep-water drilling, tar sands, stuff like that, it&#x27;s incredibly hard and often environmentally dangerous&#x2F;destructive. And renewables get cheaper and cheaper, as there&#x27;s a lot more room for improvement in technology and manufacturing scale.<p>Eventually - and I don&#x27;t think that point is far away - it will be impossible to produce fossil fuels cheaper than the cost of solar&#x2F;wind.</text></comment> | <story><title>Norway Is Walking Away from Billions of Barrels of Oil</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-08/norway-is-walking-away-from-billions-of-barrels-of-oil-and-gas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>Everybody assumes that oil prices are going up. However, there are several large effects that could cause the price of oil to decline.<p>1. Economics predicts that the price of something will be the same as the price of its cheapest substitute. For a long time, fossil fuels were the substitute, keeping the price of renewables &amp; nuclear down to unprofitable levels. However, renewables, storage and electric cars are all rapidly decreasing in cost, depressing their prices and the prices of their substitutes.<p>2. Carbon taxes or other similar schemes are looking more likely in the future. They shift the demand&#x2F;supply curve, causing fewer barrels to be sold at higher prices, but the price doesn&#x27;t go up enough to cover the full increase, leading to depressed prices before the tax.<p>3. Economics says that the price of a commodity is the same as the marginal cost of production. In other words, the highest cost producer of oil that meets current demand makes $0 in profit, all lower cost producers make &gt;$0 profit. If demand is low, then that marginal cost is $10 Saudi oil. If demand is high, then that marginal cost is $100 Canadian oilsands oil. So if demand drops because of climate change mitigation and&#x2F;or renewable substitution and&#x2F;or electric vehicle substitution, there is supply of lower cost oil, meaning prices can drop.<p>4. We&#x27;re not running out of oil, we never have been. As mentioned in #3, the price of oil is the marginal cost of production. Anything that costs more than that price isn&#x27;t counted in reserves because it&#x27;s uneconomical to extract. So by definition we always have almost no reserves and never will have.<p>There are trillions of barrels of oil in the Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands alone that aren&#x27;t counted as reserves for this reason. We&#x27;re less than 2 price doubling periods away from making this economical, keeping a fairly low ceiling on prices.<p>And of course technology marches on, continually decreasing the price of extracting that oil...</text></item><item><author>marcus_holmes</author><text>It&#x27;s not like the oil is going anywhere, either.<p>I can imagine a point in 30 years where there are new, safer and better ways of getting the oil out, and oil is necessary for processes that don&#x27;t involve burning it into the atmosphere, and the price is considerably higher than it is now.<p>I despair of (my current home country) Australia&#x27;s attitude of digging up all the resources it possibly can and selling them for cheaper than everyone else. And being proud of this, like it&#x27;s a good thing. These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. Maybe leave some in the ground for later when the prices have gone up?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alphakappa</author><text>Let’s not forget that oil is not just used as an energy source. It’s the basis of plastics, drugs, cosmetics and many more things, not all of which have substitutes.</text></comment> |
22,982,884 | 22,982,820 | 1 | 3 | 22,982,272 | train | <story><title>Contact apps won't end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/contact-apps-wont-end-lockdown-but-they-might-kill-off-democracy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>papeda</author><text>This piece seems pretty short on details for such a strong claim. As far as I can tell, all concrete objections appear in this bit of text<p>&gt; Who tells your phone that you’ve been diagnosed, for example? Given the possibility that – in a post-lockdown scenario – individuals with Covid-19 might be subjected to stigma, harassment or dismissal, they might be understandably reluctant to broadcast the fact. Then there’s the problem that not everyone has a smartphone, even though it’s commonly supposed in tech circles that they do. The pandemic has revealed that a significant minority of the population (mostly older people) still relies on olde-worlde feature phones. Moreover, it turns out that not all smartphones are created equal: one estimate is that 50% of all smartphones can’t use the proximity-sensing systems being developed by Apple and Google.<p>...which is followed by a hand-wavey &quot;I could go on but you get the point&quot;.<p>All three complaints are about how effective the solution might be, not actual reasons why it would &quot;kill democracy&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Contact apps won't end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/contact-apps-wont-end-lockdown-but-they-might-kill-off-democracy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dleslie</author><text>Such a system is just a single subpoena or a single piece of child-saving legislation away from being used by law enforcement.<p>I pity the poor sod who is incarcerated because they happened to innocently walk past the scene of a crime, and roughly fit the description of the alleged perpetrator.</text></comment> |
17,470,226 | 17,467,756 | 1 | 2 | 17,466,065 | train | <story><title>The U.S. Air Force learned to code and saved the Pentagon millions</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/40588729/the-air-force-learned-to-code-and-saved-the-pentagon-millions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yazaddaruvala</author><text>I&#x27;ve heard that the salaries of government employees are capped. I&#x27;m very curious how this will play out.<p>The Air Force can easily afford to pay Silicon Valley salaries (sure the officers who are being taught to code can be paid less), but if the Air Force is artificially limited by red-tape to offer competitive salaries, wouldn&#x27;t these software developers choose to leave as soon as they&#x27;ve learned?<p>The other issue is paying these officers competitive salaries, would have quite the ripple effect. Higher ranking officers would all need to get paid more, or software developers would need inflated ranks, but with some designation where rank did not determine command.<p>I have zero insight and am just speculating. If anyone has more insight I&#x27;d love to hear it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oliwarner</author><text>This is a bizarre thing that keeps popping up here. This assumption that as soon as somebody learns how to code, they pack up and move to the Bay Area. Since when was Silicon Valley the only place with competent software developers? We exist all over the planet, often getting paid very different amounts, and usually, yes, very much less than Bay Area developers.<p>In reality, the USAF here is competing against the cost of defence contractors. Which it turns out, is pretty easy because they&#x27;ve been charging megabucks for everything for two decades because <i>their</i> only competition has been other defence contractors. Thanks to politics, right or wrong, they&#x27;ve had no capacity to ramp-up on in-house development and submit their own bids to really compete on price.<p>I really hope we&#x27;re entering into an age of reality where public organisations (military, government, healthcare in the civilised world, etc) —and more, the people funding them— realise that in-housing development work is so much cheaper than farming it out.</text></comment> | <story><title>The U.S. Air Force learned to code and saved the Pentagon millions</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/40588729/the-air-force-learned-to-code-and-saved-the-pentagon-millions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yazaddaruvala</author><text>I&#x27;ve heard that the salaries of government employees are capped. I&#x27;m very curious how this will play out.<p>The Air Force can easily afford to pay Silicon Valley salaries (sure the officers who are being taught to code can be paid less), but if the Air Force is artificially limited by red-tape to offer competitive salaries, wouldn&#x27;t these software developers choose to leave as soon as they&#x27;ve learned?<p>The other issue is paying these officers competitive salaries, would have quite the ripple effect. Higher ranking officers would all need to get paid more, or software developers would need inflated ranks, but with some designation where rank did not determine command.<p>I have zero insight and am just speculating. If anyone has more insight I&#x27;d love to hear it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MithrilTuxedo</author><text>One thing I was disturbed by going from the US Navy to working privately in software development in Seattle is how much of a secret pay is in the private sector.<p>You can pretty much look up how much money anyone in the military makes. Base pay is trivial to look up, and all the other allowances (housing, hazard, etc.) can be looked up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dfas.mil&#x2F;militarymembers&#x2F;payentitlements&#x2F;military-pay-charts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dfas.mil&#x2F;militarymembers&#x2F;payentitlements&#x2F;militar...</a><p>The same is true in the government, AFAIK.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opm.gov&#x2F;policy-data-oversight&#x2F;pay-leave&#x2F;salaries-wages&#x2F;salary-tables&#x2F;18Tables&#x2F;html&#x2F;GS.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opm.gov&#x2F;policy-data-oversight&#x2F;pay-leave&#x2F;salaries...</a></text></comment> |
19,480,590 | 19,478,601 | 1 | 2 | 19,476,505 | train | <story><title>Untrusted – a user JavaScript adventure game</title><url>https://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alnis</author><text>Hey, (one of the) developers here.<p>It&#x27;s really exciting to see that there&#x27;s still interest in this little game Greg and I made all those years ago!<p>I wrote up a postmortem on Untrusted back in 2014 that may be of interest if you&#x27;d like to learn more about how the game was created: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alex.nisnevich.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;some_words_on_untrusted.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alex.nisnevich.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;17&#x2F;some_words_on_untr...</a><p>I&#x27;m happy to answer questions and help anyone&#x27;s who&#x27;s stuck and needs a hint, but it seems like the HN community has already been doing a good job of the latter :-)<p>I&#x27;m still experimenting with the fascinating intersection of code, games, and language. Here&#x27;s the latest thing I&#x27;m working on in the area (albeit in a very different vein, and still very much a work-in-progress): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.wordbots.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.wordbots.io&#x2F;</a><p>Alex<p>P.S. I though I&#x27;d end with a shout-out to some super-cool games by other people that have been inspired by Untrusted:
- INJECTION by TOASTEngineer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;schilcote.itch.io&#x2F;injection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;schilcote.itch.io&#x2F;injection</a>
- Programmer Adventure (interface in Russian): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmeradventure.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;programmeradventure.github.io&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Untrusted – a user JavaScript adventure game</title><url>https://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>umvi</author><text>I figured out how to do &quot;SQL Injection&quot; types of attacks against a lot of the levels. I figured this all out without examining any source, BTW - this solution was made purely from in game information. For example, I would never have known about &quot;_endOfStartLevelReached&quot; if the game didn&#x27;t complain about it being &quot;not a function&quot;<p>For example, this was my Level 12 solution:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Untrusted-Game&#x2F;d0f0e7493b39d109a5fe9f224882a2cf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;Untrusted-Game&#x2F;d0f0e7493b39d109a5fe9...</a><p>You are supposed to program a robot to traverse a maze, but instead I just ended the robot&#x27;s function so I could get access to the main scope and do whatever I want:<p><pre><code> }
});
map.placeObject(map.getWidth() - 2, 20, &#x27;greenKey&#x27;);
map.placeObject(map.getWidth() - 1, map.getHeight() - 1, &#x27;exit&#x27;);
var tmp = map._endOfStartLevelReached
&#x2F;&#x2F;Needed so the rest of the function is ignored
map = {
&quot;defineObject&quot;: () =&gt; {},
&quot;getWidth&quot;: () =&gt; {},
&quot;getHeight&quot;: () =&gt; {},
&quot;placeObject&quot;: () =&gt; {},
&quot;_endOfStartLevelReached&quot;: tmp
};
map.defineObject(&#x27;robot2&#x27;, {
&#x27;behavior&#x27;: function (me) {
}
});
</code></pre>
I hope they don&#x27;t fix this though, it was exhilarating (and rewarding) trying to outsmart the game</text></comment> |
22,032,066 | 22,032,151 | 1 | 2 | 22,031,218 | train | <story><title>Let's Reverse Engineer Discord</title><url>https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gfodor</author><text>This is common and necessary for WebRTC SFUs, which perhaps is why Discord does it to support the least common denominator of their web browser based clients.<p>Edit: Yep, I thought I remembered reading this. Their voice servers are WebRTC SFUs. So this is basically state-of-the-art when it comes to voice over WebRTC. End to end encryption in WebRTC is not possible if you are using a SFU. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.discordapp.com&#x2F;how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.discordapp.com&#x2F;how-discord-handles-two-and-half...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Let's Reverse Engineer Discord</title><url>https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coenhyde</author><text>I don&#x27;t think Discord makes any claims that the audio is P2P encrypted. There are legitimate reasons why Discord might be dropping malformed packets, apart from an indication that they are spying on you (they may be doing that too).<p>1) to improve audio quality.<p>2) to help prevent RCE attacks on the destination client.<p>3) re-encoding at lower bitrates for low bandwidth clients.<p>I don&#x27;t really see the issue here unless Discord claimed they do not decrypt the audio.</text></comment> |
178,842 | 178,816 | 1 | 3 | 178,655 | train | <story><title>Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor</title><url>http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1006-sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-of-honor</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Prrometheus</author><text>In my years as an investment banker, most of the sleep deprivation that I was subjected to was the result of poor planning (mostly by other people) and a hyper-macho, superficial culture. Now as I'm trying to rebuild my health and psyche, I realize that maybe 20% of it was necessary to accomplish some important project. The rest could have been skipped without harming the financial results of the company, though my reputation would have suffered and I might have been fired long before I quit.<p>David, if your advocacy leads to even slightly more humane workplaces, you will deserve to be hailed as a saint by millions of people.</text></comment> | <story><title>Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor</title><url>http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1006-sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-of-honor</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mhartl</author><text>This might be better titled "<i>Chronic</i> sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor", but the point is well-made. Being sleep-deprived is like being drunk: you're not competent to realize how incompetent you've become.</text></comment> |
31,477,208 | 31,476,892 | 1 | 2 | 31,473,293 | train | <story><title>Apple Cash</title><url>https://www.apple.com/apple-cash/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>basisword</author><text>I find it odd things like this, Venmo, Square cash even need to exist. There’s a reason none of them get used much (or even exist) outside the US. Just fix banking in the US and they problems they solve disappear. In the UK (and the EU I believe too) bank transfers and instant and free. Digital banks like Monzo make it even easier (through contact syncing, better UI). Third party apps need not get involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnwalkr</author><text>In Canada you’ve been able to send money to people for 15 years just by knowing their email address. You also set a security question. I also had a debit card I could use in most stores almost 30 years ago.<p>I was shocked as a young adult when I could travel in the US and use my debit card to get money at almost any atm, yet Americans had to sometimes seek out the correct ATM, even in their country.<p>I was shocked again in Japan when I moved here ten years ago when online banking was useless, transfers took up to 3 days, and most of the bank’s atms closed at 5 or 6pm. Oddly enough I could always find some atm open 24 hours that worked with my Canadian debit card, even when I could not find an atm open that worked with my Japan Post bank debit card. Those problems are all solved now, but it’s no wonder that there are now 30+ competing digital payment systems in Japan vs just a few in Canada. You also have to still really go out of your way when choosing a bank to make sure that your debit card will work overseas.<p>The original Canadian system is called Interac, and it’s nice that everyone has been able to use it for 30+ Years. I’ve never heard of anyone being blacklisted due to an error, like you hear about with PayPal and the other things that have come since then.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Cash</title><url>https://www.apple.com/apple-cash/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>basisword</author><text>I find it odd things like this, Venmo, Square cash even need to exist. There’s a reason none of them get used much (or even exist) outside the US. Just fix banking in the US and they problems they solve disappear. In the UK (and the EU I believe too) bank transfers and instant and free. Digital banks like Monzo make it even easier (through contact syncing, better UI). Third party apps need not get involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>x3ro</author><text>It is true that bank transfers are fast, instant most of the time these days. However, when people want to quickly send me money, they still usually ask for paypal, simply because it’s easier to tell someone a nickname or email address than my IBAN. not that this is an unsolvable issue, just sharing my experience from Germany.</text></comment> |
39,299,911 | 39,296,845 | 1 | 2 | 39,295,526 | train | <story><title>Automate the creation of YouTube Shorts by providing a topic</title><url>https://github.com/FujiwaraChoki/MoneyPrinter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megous</author><text>Why would one want to create more of those abominations?<p>One reason I deleted all my yt videos was because YT converted half of them to &quot;shorts&quot; without asking and with no way back, breaking all navigation and losing the readily available comment section and description.<p>Just not the way I wanted my work presented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rglover</author><text>&gt; Why would one want to create more of those abominations?<p>Because we&#x27;re regressing as a civilization and soon, content like what&#x27;s being generated here will be the only thing consumed by the majority (read: the only form of profitable&#x2F;growth-producing content).<p>I&#x27;m a major proponent of Joseph Juran style &quot;quality thinking,&quot; but sadly, that world is dead and gone on a mass consumption scale (what platforms like YouTube are geared towards these days).</text></comment> | <story><title>Automate the creation of YouTube Shorts by providing a topic</title><url>https://github.com/FujiwaraChoki/MoneyPrinter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megous</author><text>Why would one want to create more of those abominations?<p>One reason I deleted all my yt videos was because YT converted half of them to &quot;shorts&quot; without asking and with no way back, breaking all navigation and losing the readily available comment section and description.<p>Just not the way I wanted my work presented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheFreim</author><text>You used to be able to access shorts as normal videos even after they rolled out normal videos by using the original video link. Did they remove this?</text></comment> |
19,488,707 | 19,488,791 | 1 | 3 | 19,487,848 | train | <story><title>WTF Is Big O Notation?</title><url>https://rob.conery.io/2019/03/25/wtf-is-big-o-notation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpm</author><text>This seems like a good time to bring up one of my pet peeves about big O notation.<p>Every theoretical model I&#x27;ve ever seen says that indexing into n bits of memory takes O(1) time. That&#x27;s obviously impossible:<p>- The pointer you need to read is log(n) bits.<p>- The physical memory is at best O(n^(1&#x2F;3)) distance away from the CPU, and thus takes that much time to get back to you. In reality it&#x27;s probably O(n^(1&#x2F;2)) because we build on flat planes (once you start talking about petabytes of data anyways).<p>Maybe this doesn&#x27;t matter in practice, because the constants associated with these are small enough (but are they, how many memory&#x2F;disk bound applications are there? How much extra performance could we squeeze out by using 16&#x2F;32 bit pointers for small arrays?). It certainly doesn&#x27;t matter in theory where things work like we say they do regardless of the physical reality. But it annoys me that it&#x27;s so obviously wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anon946</author><text>Well, it&#x27;s &quot;wrong&quot;, but there&#x27;s the saying that all models are wrong, but some are useful. If time complexity analysis had to include physical distance, then it would perhaps be less wrong, but also much less useful.<p>That said, &quot;time complexity&quot; is a bit of a misnomer anyway. It&#x27;s often implied, but underneath, there is a specific operation. For example, when we say that merge sort is O(N lg N), we mean in number of comparison operations.</text></comment> | <story><title>WTF Is Big O Notation?</title><url>https://rob.conery.io/2019/03/25/wtf-is-big-o-notation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpm</author><text>This seems like a good time to bring up one of my pet peeves about big O notation.<p>Every theoretical model I&#x27;ve ever seen says that indexing into n bits of memory takes O(1) time. That&#x27;s obviously impossible:<p>- The pointer you need to read is log(n) bits.<p>- The physical memory is at best O(n^(1&#x2F;3)) distance away from the CPU, and thus takes that much time to get back to you. In reality it&#x27;s probably O(n^(1&#x2F;2)) because we build on flat planes (once you start talking about petabytes of data anyways).<p>Maybe this doesn&#x27;t matter in practice, because the constants associated with these are small enough (but are they, how many memory&#x2F;disk bound applications are there? How much extra performance could we squeeze out by using 16&#x2F;32 bit pointers for small arrays?). It certainly doesn&#x27;t matter in theory where things work like we say they do regardless of the physical reality. But it annoys me that it&#x27;s so obviously wrong.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mwfunk</author><text>Part of it is that there&#x27;s very casual, conversational usages of Big O vs. much more formal usages when trying to actually quantify performance.<p>Conversational Big O tends to include a lot of spherical cows (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spherical_cow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Spherical_cow</a>), because when Big O comes up in conversation, people are more likely to be talking in generalities about high level designs. More detail could be counterproductive in that context.<p>When someone is actually trying to quantify and predict performance of an algorithm, then the other extreme becomes desirable- the more detailed and specific the function, the better.</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits