chosen
int64 353
41.8M
| rejected
int64 287
41.8M
| chosen_rank
int64 1
2
| rejected_rank
int64 2
3
| top_level_parent
int64 189
41.8M
| split
large_stringclasses 1
value | chosen_prompt
large_stringlengths 236
19.5k
| rejected_prompt
large_stringlengths 209
18k
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
34,728,843 | 34,728,712 | 1 | 3 | 34,726,735 | train | <story><title>GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices</title><url>https://twitter.com/webology/status/1623722731819659269</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcchambers</author><text>We have done the same at Zendesk. We&#x27;ve reduced our office footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to work in an office environment.<p>I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes.</text></item><item><author>softwaredoug</author><text>I really liked Shopify&#x27;s remote model of not closing offices, but turning them into &quot;ports&quot; for teams in major cities to get together throughout the year for planning, team building, and retreats. You had an official place to get together, enjoy the perks of tech company offices, but with the intention of deep short bursts of interaction rather than focused work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CydeWeys</author><text>&gt; I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes.<p>Oh for sure it doesn&#x27;t make any sense, and is driven solely by the inertia of already having the office space. You&#x27;d let it go over time as leases lapse until you&#x27;re down to just a tiny amount that&#x27;s facing high utilization.</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices</title><url>https://twitter.com/webology/status/1623722731819659269</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dcchambers</author><text>We have done the same at Zendesk. We&#x27;ve reduced our office footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to work in an office environment.<p>I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes.</text></item><item><author>softwaredoug</author><text>I really liked Shopify&#x27;s remote model of not closing offices, but turning them into &quot;ports&quot; for teams in major cities to get together throughout the year for planning, team building, and retreats. You had an official place to get together, enjoy the perks of tech company offices, but with the intention of deep short bursts of interaction rather than focused work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ilyt</author><text>Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days</text></comment> |
19,657,645 | 19,657,097 | 1 | 2 | 19,656,812 | train | <story><title>GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47907370</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dlgeek</author><text>&quot;I&#x27;m embarrassed to say, on the very next day Chris&#x27;s very own code grid was found in the back of his address book. It was almost like Chris Sievey was going, &#x27;There you go, now we&#x27;ve all had our fun, there&#x27;s the explanation.&#x27;&quot;<p>And they say the universe doesn&#x27;t have a sense of irony...</text></comment> | <story><title>GCHQ Cracks Frank Sidebottom's Codes</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47907370</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paulgb</author><text>If Frank Sidebottom is an unfamiliar name, I recommend the short audiobook Frank by Jon Ronson as an entertaining story. Jon played keyboards in his band and is an entertaining writer.</text></comment> |
19,920,168 | 19,919,745 | 1 | 3 | 19,905,865 | train | <story><title>Mac: Keyboard Shortcuts Killed by Bug</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2019/03/03/last-week-on-my-mac-keyboard-shortcuts-killed-by-bug/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freditup</author><text>It&#x27;s a bug for sure, but conclusions like this are over the top for a single small bug:<p>&gt; This isn’t an Apple which has any concern over the quality of its products, or for its users. It’s just another leviathan corporation which has stopped caring or taking pride. One small bug reveals a deep and pervasive problem.<p>I&#x27;d rather see a more measured approach to drawing conclusions from a single anecdote.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>falcolas</author><text>Straws break camel&#x27;s backs. You can be sure this isn&#x27;t the only, the first, or even the last time this particular developer has found a major bug. It&#x27;s also safe to assume that past bugs they have reported (especially small usability bugs like this) have languished, or been closed as &quot;will not fix&quot;.<p>At some point, the back is broken, the developer gives up on trying to help an obscenely profitable company QA their own products, and rants about the lack of care being shown.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mac: Keyboard Shortcuts Killed by Bug</title><url>https://eclecticlight.co/2019/03/03/last-week-on-my-mac-keyboard-shortcuts-killed-by-bug/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freditup</author><text>It&#x27;s a bug for sure, but conclusions like this are over the top for a single small bug:<p>&gt; This isn’t an Apple which has any concern over the quality of its products, or for its users. It’s just another leviathan corporation which has stopped caring or taking pride. One small bug reveals a deep and pervasive problem.<p>I&#x27;d rather see a more measured approach to drawing conclusions from a single anecdote.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>Yeah the &quot;Apple doesn&#x27;t care about users&quot; line of thinking for one use case or bug here or there is a bit much.<p>Personally I&#x27;ve introduced bad ... choices because I cared about users a few times. It just was a mistake on my part, and yet the whole time I was thinking &quot;this will be better for the user&quot;.</text></comment> |
15,137,711 | 15,137,609 | 1 | 2 | 15,137,265 | train | <story><title>Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-apple-iowa-welfare-20170829-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>farnsworth</author><text>I&#x27;m a programmer. Every time I go home to Iowa, people try to tell me that Iowa is now a booming tech hub, with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple &quot;offices&quot;, and that I should get a job there. I try to explain why I probably won&#x27;t end up there, but the point is that they are extremely proud of all of these data centers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>posguy</author><text>Yeah, a datacenter hires a few Networking&#x2F;Sysops people, but not so much programmers, as that is one of those things that isn&#x27;t quite so location sensitive.</text></comment> | <story><title>Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-apple-iowa-welfare-20170829-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>farnsworth</author><text>I&#x27;m a programmer. Every time I go home to Iowa, people try to tell me that Iowa is now a booming tech hub, with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple &quot;offices&quot;, and that I should get a job there. I try to explain why I probably won&#x27;t end up there, but the point is that they are extremely proud of all of these data centers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davis</author><text>Yup. This is about half of the conversations I have with my family whenever I visit for the holidays.</text></comment> |
12,431,666 | 12,431,525 | 1 | 3 | 12,429,349 | train | <story><title>How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3</title><url>https://www.quantstart.com/articles/How-to-Learn-Advanced-Mathematics-Without-Heading-to-University-Part-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mungoid</author><text>I really hope this doesn&#x27;t come across as brash. I don&#x27;t mean it to, but I must disagree with your assertions (In my case at least). Learning advanced mathematics without university is completely possible. Because it is at your own learning pace. Not one of a University.<p>I graduated several years ago with a BS in Computer Science, with a Focus on Networking. And during that time, I held 3 part time jobs while also being a math tutor. Almost none of the math I use today as a physics developer was learned from schools. I also never had that piece of mind you mentioned, because I was constantly juggling several things at once while going to school. My knowledge of advanced mathematics at the time of my graduation was pretty non existent. I think the most advanced math I had was Algebra 2 or something like that, and the Professors just basically read verbatim from the book.<p>A few years after Uni, I started teaching myself Calc, Trig, Vector maths, Diff Eq and Physics strictly from what I have found on various sites, software and books. Because of that, I ended up getting a physics simulation developer position at a software company. Because in my companies view, being able to teach yourself all that math is much more impressive than being taught from a University.<p>I hated math during High School and College, but since then, I have found that I absolutely love math, and I will never stop trying to learn or do new things. My degree was two small lines on my CV, while about 50% of what I had on my CV was all learned on my free time, by myself.<p>So learning math without a College or University is totally possible, and in my situation, worked way better. Sites like Khan Academy, Wolfram, Youtube, etc. all give you the resources and leave it up to you to progress at your own pace, for free.</text></item><item><author>yodsanklai</author><text>&gt; How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s even possible. Learning maths requires much work, time and dedication. Doing so alone must be very difficult.<p>There are several things universities provide that are hard to replicate alone: a degree, which gives you access to a job, motivation, learning environment, and &quot;peace of mind&quot;.<p>What I mean by peace of mind is that, when you&#x27;re a student, your job is to study, that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re expected to do and normally your degree will give you access to a job (esp. if your university is reputable).<p>Now suppose someone learns advanced maths on their own. There&#x27;s a huge opportunity cost. Not only it takes a lot of time, and the few lucrative jobs that make use of maths are in finance. I suspect financial institutions are very conservative and rarely recruit someone without a proper academic background.<p>An other thing when learning things alone, is that your job is twofold. You must be teacher and student at the same time. You need to find the material, impose yourself some pacing, decide when it&#x27;s ok to move on etc... It may be ok when you want to learn a new technique in a field you already know, but something as broad as &quot;learning advanced mathematics&quot; seems impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sixo</author><text>I don&#x27;t mean to be rude by saying this, but the truly-difficult advanced math - the stuff that&#x27;s really hard to build an understanding of by yourself, because it&#x27;s fairly distantly separated from any obvious applications or anything you&#x27;d readily have experience with, and heavily obfuscated (to newcomers) by the notation and pedantic proof-focused thoroughness (appropriate for academic math, less so for applications) - starts a few courses <i>after</i> Diff eq.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University – Part 3</title><url>https://www.quantstart.com/articles/How-to-Learn-Advanced-Mathematics-Without-Heading-to-University-Part-3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mungoid</author><text>I really hope this doesn&#x27;t come across as brash. I don&#x27;t mean it to, but I must disagree with your assertions (In my case at least). Learning advanced mathematics without university is completely possible. Because it is at your own learning pace. Not one of a University.<p>I graduated several years ago with a BS in Computer Science, with a Focus on Networking. And during that time, I held 3 part time jobs while also being a math tutor. Almost none of the math I use today as a physics developer was learned from schools. I also never had that piece of mind you mentioned, because I was constantly juggling several things at once while going to school. My knowledge of advanced mathematics at the time of my graduation was pretty non existent. I think the most advanced math I had was Algebra 2 or something like that, and the Professors just basically read verbatim from the book.<p>A few years after Uni, I started teaching myself Calc, Trig, Vector maths, Diff Eq and Physics strictly from what I have found on various sites, software and books. Because of that, I ended up getting a physics simulation developer position at a software company. Because in my companies view, being able to teach yourself all that math is much more impressive than being taught from a University.<p>I hated math during High School and College, but since then, I have found that I absolutely love math, and I will never stop trying to learn or do new things. My degree was two small lines on my CV, while about 50% of what I had on my CV was all learned on my free time, by myself.<p>So learning math without a College or University is totally possible, and in my situation, worked way better. Sites like Khan Academy, Wolfram, Youtube, etc. all give you the resources and leave it up to you to progress at your own pace, for free.</text></item><item><author>yodsanklai</author><text>&gt; How to Learn Advanced Mathematics Without Heading to University<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s even possible. Learning maths requires much work, time and dedication. Doing so alone must be very difficult.<p>There are several things universities provide that are hard to replicate alone: a degree, which gives you access to a job, motivation, learning environment, and &quot;peace of mind&quot;.<p>What I mean by peace of mind is that, when you&#x27;re a student, your job is to study, that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re expected to do and normally your degree will give you access to a job (esp. if your university is reputable).<p>Now suppose someone learns advanced maths on their own. There&#x27;s a huge opportunity cost. Not only it takes a lot of time, and the few lucrative jobs that make use of maths are in finance. I suspect financial institutions are very conservative and rarely recruit someone without a proper academic background.<p>An other thing when learning things alone, is that your job is twofold. You must be teacher and student at the same time. You need to find the material, impose yourself some pacing, decide when it&#x27;s ok to move on etc... It may be ok when you want to learn a new technique in a field you already know, but something as broad as &quot;learning advanced mathematics&quot; seems impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aluhut</author><text>I wish I could make the jump again. When I was a kid, I loved Math. I even got one of this badges that were so popular in my east block country, for being the best kid in Math for my whole year group. Then we moved to Germany. Math level was far below mine, I got bored, started to do other stuff and lost it when they overtook me. Growing up and work did the rest. I lost it. When I had&#x2F;have to do some math I&#x27;m doing what is needed but this creative spark you need is gone. Now I find it very complicated to get even into the syntax...I fix most of my problem through the net. It&#x27;s like losing a friend whose face you&#x27;ve already forgotten.</text></comment> |
24,299,254 | 24,295,605 | 1 | 2 | 24,293,507 | train | <story><title>Band-Limiting Procedural Textures</title><url>https://iquilezles.org/www/articles/bandlimiting/bandlimiting.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CyberDildonics</author><text>This was called frequency clamping in the book &#x27;advanced renderman&#x27; which talks a lot about procedural textures.<p>A simple way to think about it is to imagine a pattern of thin black and white stripes. If you go far enough away from the pattern, there will be multiple black and white stripes in the same pixel. When they are smaller than a pixel the average color will be grey. Knowing this, you can fade to grey as the stripes get tiny instead of arriving at grey from heavy sampling.</text></comment> | <story><title>Band-Limiting Procedural Textures</title><url>https://iquilezles.org/www/articles/bandlimiting/bandlimiting.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nwhitehead</author><text>This is awesome! This reminds me of MinBLEP audio synthesis of discontinuous functions (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~eli&#x2F;papers&#x2F;icmc01-hardsync.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~eli&#x2F;papers&#x2F;icmc01-hardsync.pdf</a>). Instead of doing things at high sampling rate and explicitly filtering, generate the band-limited version directly.<p>In the article, talking about smoothstep approximation of sinc: &quot;I&#x27;d argue the smoothstep version looks better&quot; Why would this be? I would have thought the theoretically correct sinc version would look nicer.</text></comment> |
17,017,625 | 17,012,010 | 1 | 3 | 17,008,909 | train | <story><title>Open sourcing Terratest: tools for testing infrastructure code</title><url>https://blog.gruntwork.io/open-sourcing-terratest-a-swiss-army-knife-for-testing-infrastructure-code-5d883336fcd5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brikis98</author><text>I&#x27;m one of the creators of Terratest. Happy to answer questions.<p>The main question I&#x27;ve seen so far seems to be how Terratest compares with various &quot;spec&quot; tools (e.g., inspec, serverspec). Most of the spec tools focus on checking the properties of a single server or resource. For example, is httpd installed and running? Terratest is largely for end-to-end, acceptance style testing, where you deploy your real infrastructure, in a real environment (e.g., AWS), and test the infrastructure actually works as expected.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say you wanted to test a module for running Vault (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;terraform-aws-vault" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hashicorp&#x2F;terraform-aws-vault</a>), which is a distributed secret store. With a spec tool, you might test a single Vault node to check that Vault is installed and the process is running. With Terratest, you&#x27;d check that the whole Vault cluster deployed correctly, bootstrapped itself (including auto-discovery of the other nodes), that you can initialize the cluster, unseal it store data, retrieve data, and so on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Open sourcing Terratest: tools for testing infrastructure code</title><url>https://blog.gruntwork.io/open-sourcing-terratest-a-swiss-army-knife-for-testing-infrastructure-code-5d883336fcd5</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>It&#x27;s weird to think of infrastructure&#x2F;deploy automation in terms of &quot;testing&quot;. Yes, you are always testing things, but not always in the &quot;func test&quot; sort of way. There&#x27;s automation testing, and there&#x27;s testing of automation, and there&#x27;s tests that are part of automation. Terratest seems to be the second, but it&#x27;s the third one I think is most useful.<p>If you build your infrastructure&#x2F;deploy automation correctly, you should be able to redeploy your full stack all the time, and when it succeeds, throw traffic at it, and if you don&#x27;t detect any anomalies, make that the new production service. On the detection of anomalies you simply move the traffic back to the previously deployed incarnation (or re-deploy the old incarnation, if necessary). For sufficiently large systems this gets more complicated as you can&#x27;t just duplicate your resources, but the smaller pieces that have actually changed can be shifted around.<p>The idea of a &quot;rollback&quot; is really just &quot;return to a previously known good state&quot;, but it&#x27;s misleading. It was previously good <i>before now</i>. Now things have changed, and it might not still be good. So just as much as you can test newly deployed changes before you make it the production service, you should probably also test the <i>previously deployed changes</i> to make sure they will work again if pressed back into service. So, regression testing for infrastructure, I guess. (You&#x27;d do this if you were building a physical product like a network appliance to make sure your old appliances still work with newer software releases, but we rarely think of software-derived infrastructure this way)</text></comment> |
9,041,017 | 9,040,855 | 1 | 3 | 9,040,090 | train | <story><title>Deleting any Facebook album</title><url>http://www.7xter.com/2015/02/how-i-hacked-your-facebook-photos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>Holy heck, $12.5K? That&#x27;s one heck of a nice bug bounty program Facebook has there. That is likely more than the black market would pay for this, or at least a lot less hassle (plus the black market might have little interest as this cannot be used for hijackings, just trolling&#x2F;harrassment).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I doubt the &quot;black market&quot; would pay much of anything for this bug, because, like most severe web vulnerabilities, it has no half-life.</text></comment> | <story><title>Deleting any Facebook album</title><url>http://www.7xter.com/2015/02/how-i-hacked-your-facebook-photos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>Holy heck, $12.5K? That&#x27;s one heck of a nice bug bounty program Facebook has there. That is likely more than the black market would pay for this, or at least a lot less hassle (plus the black market might have little interest as this cannot be used for hijackings, just trolling&#x2F;harrassment).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsacco</author><text>It&#x27;s not very useful to compare bug bounty payouts to what the &quot;black market&quot; would pay for a vulnerability.<p>Let&#x27;s look through the challenges of selling a vulnerability that allows for arbitrary account takeover (much more serious than this):<p>0. Find the vulnerability. Assume that no one will find it by the time you find a third party buyer.<p>1. Look for a buyer. If you&#x27;re not well-connected, you might stumble into an FBI honeypot (a sting operation) because you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re doing. But let&#x27;s assume you know what you&#x27;re doing and you find a buyer.<p>2. You negotiate a price. You don&#x27;t receive much more than Facebook would pay you (if they even give you that much) for a few reasons:<p>a. The vulnerability can only be used on Facebook, so it&#x27;s not vendor agnostic (compare Heartbleed, Shellshock);<p>b. The vulnerability has an extremely small window of capitalization - it <i>will</i> be discovered within a week of use, maybe less. The Facebook incident response team is <i>spectacular.</i><p>c. You need to figure out a sufficient monetization strategy for distributing malware or spam using profiles that are taken over using this vulnerability. You have a week of use, much less if you try to take over accounts too aggressively. Now you&#x27;re going up against all of Facebook&#x27;s other protections - once you have the account, spreading malware will either be algorithmically discovered by Facebook or reported by other users.<p>With an organized crime unit composed of professional hackers, this might pay off. Maybe. And that is for one of the most serious bugs you can find. You&#x27;re better off just taking what Facebook (generously) gives you.<p>The classical fallacy people fall into is believing that a web application vulnerability is worth much, especially the variety most tech companies have to offer. It&#x27;s certainly serious, yes, but it&#x27;s only worth what a market will pay for it. It&#x27;s worth a lot to Facebook for brand integrity. It&#x27;s not worth a lot to hackers looking to make money.<p>The only web applications that might be worth real money would be banks or government institutions (or similar platforms). <i>Real</i> money is found in vulnerabilities on desktop clients, especially memory corruption vulnerabilities, or in ubiquitous software that affects servers. You want to be able to compromise a user for use in a botnet or distribute malware to steal their money or personal information. Alternatively, you want to be able to attack, say, 30% of the websites on the internet with a wide variety of options after you get in.<p>Examples include:<p>• Vulnerabilities in Flash.<p>• Vulnerabilities in Python, Ruby or corresponding web frameworks.<p>• Code execution in iOS that allows a jailbreak (most sources indicate the going price for this is $500,000). Other vulnerabilities as well, such as compromising app store receipts or in-app purchase checks.<p>• Vulnerabilities in Android, up to and including code execution.<p>• A game over flaw in any number of ubiquitous software packages used on Linux servers with root access.<p>• A sandbox escape in OS X or Windows (you&#x27;ll be paid more for Windows but both are lucrative).</text></comment> |
10,323,966 | 10,323,468 | 1 | 2 | 10,323,454 | train | <story><title>The model minority is losing patience</title><url>http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21669595-asian-americans-are-united-states-most-successful-minority-they-are-complaining-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rsy96</author><text>One reason that Asians outperform other racial groups in the United States is overlooked in the article: the difficulty of immigration. Most whites and blacks are born within the US, and Hispanics are either born or move into the US by simply crossing a land border. For Asians to come to the US, they have to cross the Pacific Ocean. In order to do that, they have to be either rich (at least middle class), highly educated, or extremely adventurous and self motivating. The Pacific Ocean filters out many would-be Asian Americans that would have lowered the average of the &quot;modelness&quot; of the group.</text></comment> | <story><title>The model minority is losing patience</title><url>http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21669595-asian-americans-are-united-states-most-successful-minority-they-are-complaining-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stared</author><text>See also a longer text on the same problem: &quot;The Myth of American Meritocracy&quot; (2012) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theamericanconservative.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-myth-of-american-meritocracy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theamericanconservative.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-myth-of-...</a> (or, as I would summarize it, &quot;why Asians are the new Jews&quot;).</text></comment> |
12,422,031 | 12,421,711 | 1 | 2 | 12,420,683 | train | <story><title>Nano to remain in GNU</title><url>https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2016-08/msg00045.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwertyuiop924</author><text>This is good news: It&#x27;s also good to actually see RMS actually compromising.<p>Also, nano is actually a useful tool, despite its reputation as the editor for those who don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing. It&#x27;s an excellent editor for quick edits that aren&#x27;t worth pulling up emacs for. Although I would never reccomend it for Real Work, that&#x27;s not really its intent. And it owns its field, having crushed all competition save vi, which is really in its own class.<p>Also, nano is frankly a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for: It&#x27;s just not programmable, which is a necessity in editors these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krylon</author><text>&gt; as the editor for those who don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing<p>To be honest, I <i>do</i> think of nano as exactly that. Let&#x27;s say &quot;the editor for newbies&quot;, which sounds slightly less condescending.<p>Being the editor for newbies is not a bad thing. There are, at any given point, many newbies who just want to make that one change to that one configuration file without learning a whole programmer&#x27;s text editor. There are, by now, probably plenty of people of who use GNU&#x2F;Linux just to surf the web and read their email (and run LibreOffice or GIMP), who don&#x27;t ____ing care about text editors except for that one time they need to add an entry to crontab or sudoers or something.<p>If you have never touched vi before, its user interface at first seems like a slap in the face (to put it mildly). Having used vim as my editor of choice for a couple of years at one time, I still remember, vividly, the first time I tried to use it. It was no fun at all. The same goes for emacs (which I love dearly).<p>If you want to do serious programming &#x2F; system administration, learning one of the advanced editors is - at the very least - good advice. But these days, such people are probably in the minority, even on GNU&#x2F;Linux. And having an editor the rest of the population can use without requiring a Ph.D. in emacsology is a Good Thing, IMHO. It&#x27;s not something one should feel sorry or condescending about.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nano to remain in GNU</title><url>https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/nano-devel/2016-08/msg00045.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwertyuiop924</author><text>This is good news: It&#x27;s also good to actually see RMS actually compromising.<p>Also, nano is actually a useful tool, despite its reputation as the editor for those who don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing. It&#x27;s an excellent editor for quick edits that aren&#x27;t worth pulling up emacs for. Although I would never reccomend it for Real Work, that&#x27;s not really its intent. And it owns its field, having crushed all competition save vi, which is really in its own class.<p>Also, nano is frankly a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for: It&#x27;s just not programmable, which is a necessity in editors these days.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2bitencryption</author><text>In a way, maybe it&#x27;s good it&#x27;s not programmable. This ensures that on any machine or environment you see Nano, you can expect it to behave exactly the same. If you want something super customizable you can just use vi(m) or emacs.<p>Nano is like Windows Notepad but for the CLI. It does one thing one thing only, no matter where you are.</text></comment> |
34,139,887 | 34,140,160 | 1 | 2 | 34,139,048 | train | <story><title>How to Befriend Crows</title><url>https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/109571409346371116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prox</author><text>My amateur theory is that talking makes you less likely to be a predator. You basically say “here I am”, Predators tend to be quiet and sneak up on their prey. I think the tone does indeed help somewhat in my experience.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>I can vouch for this approach. I lived in the territory of a couple of ravens (close relatives of crows; just as smart and twice as large) and it took me maybe 18 months to build a close relationship.<p>I started out just talking to them and throwing whole peanuts (roasted, unsalted) on the ground while I was doing it. They looked at me warily and did not come close. Later on, the peanuts would disappear, but I was never sure why. This period lasted months.<p>Eventually they would come down when I threw a peanut and approach it warily. If it was closer than 15 or 20 feet to me, I&#x27;d have to back away to give them enough room. Then I could throw another peanut near (but not at!) them and they&#x27;d walk over to get it.<p>After many more months of this (six, I&#x27;d guess) they were somewhat less wary of me and would hang out on our back fence sometimes. So we worked out a ritual. I would place a piece of food on the fence rail and back away; they&#x27;d hop over and get it. As he suggested, I would talk with them as I did it. I&#x27;m sure the words didn&#x27;t matter, but I suspect the tone did, and it helped me focus on being soothing with voice, body language, and behavior.<p>Toward the end of my time there we got so that one of them would take high-value food, like a chicken bone with bits of meat left on it, straight out of my hand. That one, who we called George, would happily sit pretty close to me after eating. Out of arm&#x27;s reach, of course; they were still a bit wary. But it would settle down and chill out. Truly a magical experience to just hang out with a big, smart bird like that. You looking at one another, both trying to figure out exactly what the other&#x27;s deal is. And me, at least, knowing, that I&#x27;d never fully know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lisper</author><text>Yes, of course. Your tone has to convey not only, &quot;I am not a predator&quot; but also &quot;I do not perceive you as a threat, and so the purpose of my vocalization is not to scare you away because I perceive <i>you</i> as a threat, and if you come close I am likely to try to harm you in order to defend myself.&quot;<p>In nature, the Bayesian prior on an entity that is not a member of your species, or even your tribe, seeking an interaction with you that will ultimately be to your benefit is very, very low.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Befriend Crows</title><url>https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/109571409346371116</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prox</author><text>My amateur theory is that talking makes you less likely to be a predator. You basically say “here I am”, Predators tend to be quiet and sneak up on their prey. I think the tone does indeed help somewhat in my experience.</text></item><item><author>wpietri</author><text>I can vouch for this approach. I lived in the territory of a couple of ravens (close relatives of crows; just as smart and twice as large) and it took me maybe 18 months to build a close relationship.<p>I started out just talking to them and throwing whole peanuts (roasted, unsalted) on the ground while I was doing it. They looked at me warily and did not come close. Later on, the peanuts would disappear, but I was never sure why. This period lasted months.<p>Eventually they would come down when I threw a peanut and approach it warily. If it was closer than 15 or 20 feet to me, I&#x27;d have to back away to give them enough room. Then I could throw another peanut near (but not at!) them and they&#x27;d walk over to get it.<p>After many more months of this (six, I&#x27;d guess) they were somewhat less wary of me and would hang out on our back fence sometimes. So we worked out a ritual. I would place a piece of food on the fence rail and back away; they&#x27;d hop over and get it. As he suggested, I would talk with them as I did it. I&#x27;m sure the words didn&#x27;t matter, but I suspect the tone did, and it helped me focus on being soothing with voice, body language, and behavior.<p>Toward the end of my time there we got so that one of them would take high-value food, like a chicken bone with bits of meat left on it, straight out of my hand. That one, who we called George, would happily sit pretty close to me after eating. Out of arm&#x27;s reach, of course; they were still a bit wary. But it would settle down and chill out. Truly a magical experience to just hang out with a big, smart bird like that. You looking at one another, both trying to figure out exactly what the other&#x27;s deal is. And me, at least, knowing, that I&#x27;d never fully know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oasisbob</author><text>Makes sense to me. Crows have caught me tree climbing under them during their evening flights to the communal roost, the result was always a chaotic mess. They just couldn&#x27;t leave it alone. Without fail, eventually one crow would notice and start the alarm call, then the hundreds of crows arriving at the situation would break off flight and begin mobbing as well.<p>I must have seemed very novel and sneaky.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RuOVY4r9ipg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RuOVY4r9ipg</a></text></comment> |
7,804,805 | 7,804,363 | 1 | 2 | 7,803,896 | train | <story><title>Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Critic, Is Now Building Azure</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/05/mark-russinovich/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>&gt; “I ranted at some of the architects when I was at Microsoft. They were constraining the sorts of things you could do,” Brown told us in 2012. “Microsoft likes to do a really big up-front design, where they define the physics of a new universe. They birth this new universe, and they say: ‘This is how you do it’–instead of starting out with something simple and letting people show them how it should be done.”<p>I really hope this advice is taken by others, particularly the Windows team. Powershell is a golden example of this. Great idea, piping around objects instead of text, but wait, they must be .NET objects. So the entirety of the language community cannot participate other than Microsoft languages.<p>I&#x27;m hoping they revitalize the command line taking this advice, start with something simple and let others build on top of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MattRogish</author><text>Absolutely.<p>MS is full of architecture astronauts (along with super smart people, who do useful things - but the arch people are in charge) that sit around and contemplate all these bizarre use cases for things that no one actually has. Then, since MSFT believes they have little&#x2F;no competition in the space, they spend years developing this grand vision and dumping it on their customers, who then attempt to figure out what parts of this vision are useful and what parts are bunk.<p>Microsoft then looks at what happens, sees the work arounds, and rewrites the whole thing again to accommodate not only those use cases, but a whole host of other imagined ones, too.<p>Lather, rinse, repeat.<p>Open source generally doesn&#x27;t have this problem, as a) some developer was scratching their own itch, so the problem is real b) doesn&#x27;t have unlimited time and budget, so they have to keep it small and evolve, and c) relies on developer&#x27;s contributions, so it has to be marketable.<p>Open source : Microsoft :: Lean startup : Waterfall</text></comment> | <story><title>Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Critic, Is Now Building Azure</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2014/05/mark-russinovich/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Touche</author><text>&gt; “I ranted at some of the architects when I was at Microsoft. They were constraining the sorts of things you could do,” Brown told us in 2012. “Microsoft likes to do a really big up-front design, where they define the physics of a new universe. They birth this new universe, and they say: ‘This is how you do it’–instead of starting out with something simple and letting people show them how it should be done.”<p>I really hope this advice is taken by others, particularly the Windows team. Powershell is a golden example of this. Great idea, piping around objects instead of text, but wait, they must be .NET objects. So the entirety of the language community cannot participate other than Microsoft languages.<p>I&#x27;m hoping they revitalize the command line taking this advice, start with something simple and let others build on top of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ygra</author><text>PowerShell also plays nicely with COM and WMI. It&#x27;s not all .NET objects you interact with. (Well, technically it is, due to PSObjects wrapping everything, but that&#x27;s another matter.)<p>How would you do it, though? Pipe around JSON or XML? Then you just have data structures, but not objects. They can&#x27;t have methods and if they could, what language would they be written in?</text></comment> |
7,851,052 | 7,851,065 | 1 | 3 | 7,850,613 | train | <story><title>HipHop: A "Popcorn Time" for music</title><url>http://gethiphop.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angusb</author><text>I know that there&#x27;s a kick to be got out of circumventing the draconian rules big music&#x2F;film industry lobby into law, but what do the writers think about independents that they effectively take down in the same blow? This is a genuine question, not an attack.<p>I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time studying&#x2F;writing&#x2F;playing music and through that have got to personally know many of the most talented and versatile musicians I&#x27;ve ever come across. These people are skilled like Douglas Crockford, John Resig, you name it. But they have to make the assumption that the music they want to do - their own music - will never make any money in a recorded format, forcing them to do wedding gigs during the day instead.<p>I&#x27;m interested to know what people think about this. Do people think that the end (taking power away from big music industry) justifies the loss for those small-time players, or is it something that simply hasn&#x27;t been considered at all?<p>Do you have a justification for saying that all music should be free, or is it just that it would be nice if all music was free?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krig</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;m interested to know what people think about this. Do people think that the end (taking power away from big music industry) justifies the loss for those small-time players, or is it something that simply hasn&#x27;t been considered at all?<p>My opinion: The end justifies the loss.<p>Secure and private file sharing is going to be essential for ensuring liberty in the future. I am absolutely convinced about that. You can&#x27;t have that and make piracy impossible at the same time. The people who make tools for circumventing digital restrictions today are doing the groundwork for essential technology of the future.</text></comment> | <story><title>HipHop: A "Popcorn Time" for music</title><url>http://gethiphop.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angusb</author><text>I know that there&#x27;s a kick to be got out of circumventing the draconian rules big music&#x2F;film industry lobby into law, but what do the writers think about independents that they effectively take down in the same blow? This is a genuine question, not an attack.<p>I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time studying&#x2F;writing&#x2F;playing music and through that have got to personally know many of the most talented and versatile musicians I&#x27;ve ever come across. These people are skilled like Douglas Crockford, John Resig, you name it. But they have to make the assumption that the music they want to do - their own music - will never make any money in a recorded format, forcing them to do wedding gigs during the day instead.<p>I&#x27;m interested to know what people think about this. Do people think that the end (taking power away from big music industry) justifies the loss for those small-time players, or is it something that simply hasn&#x27;t been considered at all?<p>Do you have a justification for saying that all music should be free, or is it just that it would be nice if all music was free?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>massappeal</author><text>I&#x27;m not involved with this project at all, but I do think you raise some interesting points.<p>First of all lets acknowledge the fact that if these tracks are on Youtube, they are publicly available for free, and unless they are registering 100k+ views per song, these artists are not making any money off these tracks.<p>Second, musicians taking wedding gigs and whatnot to supplement their creative careers is not a result of piracy; musicians, filmmakers and photographers have been doing that since always and probably always will.<p>Third, if these musicians are resorting to private functions like weddings to finance their creative career, its likely that they don&#x27;t have a wide enough fan base and revenue stream for a product like this to significantly affect them.<p>In my opinion.</text></comment> |
8,837,700 | 8,837,698 | 1 | 2 | 8,836,763 | train | <story><title>On El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, Climb Thought to Be Toughest Progresses Slowly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/sports/on-el-capitans-dawn-wall-two-climbers-make-slow-progress-toward-a-dream.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Intermernet</author><text>For anyone after numbers supporting the claim that this may be the worlds hardest free climb, consider this. The hardest climbs in the world (using US grading system) are graded 5.15c . These currently exist as isolated pitches of less than 150 feet.<p>The Dawn Wall has 19 pitches (15 have now been completed). at least 6 of these pitches are graded 5.14 and above, and most of the remainder are 5.13 . These are <i>all</i> very hard pitches.<p>The overall difficulty of a multi-pitch climb (using the US grading system) isn&#x27;t really based on the grade of the hardest pitch. Completing this climb is the equivalent of doing 19 <i>very</i> hard climbs in a row, with 6 of them being accessible to a handful of <i>very</i> dedicated climbers in the world.<p>Here&#x27;s some videos from 2013 (yes, they&#x27;ve been working on this for a very long time) <a href="http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/exclusive-dawn-wall-project-videos-sharma-caldwell-jorgeson" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rockandice.com&#x2F;lates-news&#x2F;exclusive-dawn-wall-pro...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weaksauce</author><text>5.12 is a grade that someone needs to be fairly dedicated and skilled to achieve.<p>5.13 is something that very few dedicated climbers will get to.<p>5.14 is elite territory and you are in the top few percent of climbers world wide.<p>5.15 is like climbing glass, hung at a 45 degree overhang.<p>the dawn wall has 7 pitches of 5.13 climbing and 7 pitches of hard 5.14 climbing... plus &quot;filler&quot; 5.11 and 5.12 climbing for the other 20ish pitches. I have been climbing for years and have only climbed a handful of 5.12 climbs... it&#x27;s really, really hard. to say that this is hard is an understatement.<p>edit: the grades came from the YDS which was the yosemite decimal system(actually started at tahquitz before royal robbins went to yos). there are classes of climbing grades where class 1 is walking to get the mail, class 3 is some scrambling but if you slipped you&#x27;d be ok usually, class 4 is where you&#x27;d probably get really hurt or die if you fell at the wrong time but the climbing is not super hard, class 5 was subdivided into a decimal rating from 5.0 to 5.9. There were climbs in Tahquitz that were the standard of difficulty for these grades. The trough was 5.0(modern 5.4) all the way up to open book which was 5.9 and considered to be the pinnacle of human achievement.<p>After a while humans got stronger, and the equipment got better, and technique got refined so they opened up the YDS to be open ended as it is today with grades greater than 5.9. they initially stuck with whole numbers but eventually they decided that there needed to be a finer grained approach to grading. thus every grade after 5.10 was given a letter grade from a to d. each letter grade is roughly equivalent to a number grade below 5.10(going from 5.8 to 5.9 is roughly equivalent to going from 5.10a to 5.10b in terms of relative increased difficulty) and each letter grade can take months or years to get strong&#x2F;technical enough to ascend.<p>all this was said to drive home the fact that what they are doing is amazing and defies belief. they are climbing multiple pitches of climbs that are 24 &quot;grades&quot; harder than what was once thought of as the hardest someone could ever climb.</text></comment> | <story><title>On El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, Climb Thought to Be Toughest Progresses Slowly</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/sports/on-el-capitans-dawn-wall-two-climbers-make-slow-progress-toward-a-dream.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Intermernet</author><text>For anyone after numbers supporting the claim that this may be the worlds hardest free climb, consider this. The hardest climbs in the world (using US grading system) are graded 5.15c . These currently exist as isolated pitches of less than 150 feet.<p>The Dawn Wall has 19 pitches (15 have now been completed). at least 6 of these pitches are graded 5.14 and above, and most of the remainder are 5.13 . These are <i>all</i> very hard pitches.<p>The overall difficulty of a multi-pitch climb (using the US grading system) isn&#x27;t really based on the grade of the hardest pitch. Completing this climb is the equivalent of doing 19 <i>very</i> hard climbs in a row, with 6 of them being accessible to a handful of <i>very</i> dedicated climbers in the world.<p>Here&#x27;s some videos from 2013 (yes, they&#x27;ve been working on this for a very long time) <a href="http://www.rockandice.com/lates-news/exclusive-dawn-wall-project-videos-sharma-caldwell-jorgeson" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rockandice.com&#x2F;lates-news&#x2F;exclusive-dawn-wall-pro...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nether</author><text>Also, 5.10 used to be considered the hardest climb humanly possible. Today, 5.12 is achievable by many climbers after years of practice. 5.14 routes are doable by a small subset, this is where anatomy and sheer innate talent begin to elevate the elite from the hard workers. Beyond 5.14, it&#x27;s the best of the super climbers who also have some amount of luck in that they had the right nerves and physical preparation to dyno a 5.15 move once, but perhaps not every time. These are the climbs that can&#x27;t be consistently repeated successfully even by the best.</text></comment> |
26,963,812 | 26,963,693 | 1 | 3 | 26,960,976 | train | <story><title>Calibre – E-Book Management</title><url>https://calibre-ebook.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>&gt; Compared to modern UI&#x2F;UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am<p>Because most average users of any software absolutely fall in that bucket. My mom can use the Facebook app on her phone just fine, but I wouldn&#x27;t even dare to suggest that she try to convert an eBook on Calibre and transfer it to her Kindle.</text></item><item><author>tomc1985</author><text>Calibre&#x27;s UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO<p>Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI&#x2F;UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am</text></item><item><author>mattkevan</author><text>Calibre is great. There’s a real lack of good quality ebook software and Calibre is an essential do-everything toolkit.<p>The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom.<p>As a UX designer it gave me some trouble at first, but now I’ve genuinely come to appreciate it. There’s no way the interface could be ‘improved’ by conventional standards of aesthetics or usability without losing the thing that makes it special in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfranz</author><text>I earnestly think it&#x27;s motivation and there&#x27;s this societal pressure that software &quot;is too hard.&quot; Just like your mom can use the Facebook app just fine. I have trouble using it, I&#x27;m worried anything I type into a box will turn into a public post with notifications going into everyone&#x27;s inbox, and I&#x27;ve also mostly avoided it for over a decade. My grandmother over a decade ago figured out how to buy a webcam, install it, and use the software when grand kids were born.</text></comment> | <story><title>Calibre – E-Book Management</title><url>https://calibre-ebook.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paxys</author><text>&gt; Compared to modern UI&#x2F;UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am<p>Because most average users of any software absolutely fall in that bucket. My mom can use the Facebook app on her phone just fine, but I wouldn&#x27;t even dare to suggest that she try to convert an eBook on Calibre and transfer it to her Kindle.</text></item><item><author>tomc1985</author><text>Calibre&#x27;s UI is an artifact from a superior and more civilized time, IMHO<p>Extremely functional and just a little bit incomprehensible. Compared to modern UI&#x2F;UX which just slaps me with how stupid it thinks I am</text></item><item><author>mattkevan</author><text>Calibre is great. There’s a real lack of good quality ebook software and Calibre is an essential do-everything toolkit.<p>The interface, however, is like some incredible piece of outsider art, gloriously free of best practice, convention or accepted wisdom.<p>As a UX designer it gave me some trouble at first, but now I’ve genuinely come to appreciate it. There’s no way the interface could be ‘improved’ by conventional standards of aesthetics or usability without losing the thing that makes it special in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>And yet, Facebook app is actually more complex (and arguably, chaotic and ever changing) UI - but she handles it fine. So does everyone.</text></comment> |
20,712,700 | 20,711,170 | 1 | 2 | 20,708,928 | train | <story><title>People Simply Empty Out (1986)</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/people-simply-empty-out.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blunte</author><text>Sometimes I do wonder... how many people I see with regular jobs feel like they are using 10% of their abilities at those jobs? At this very moment I am making an effort to re-enter the corporate world... studying Python or Ruby or Elixir any of the other 5 languages I have used in the last 10 years to convince a company that I can do their work. But inside, I know I&#x27;m doing it 99% for the money. It&#x27;s only because I didn&#x27;t run the gauntlet in the past and strike out on my dreams with 150% effort (I tried once, at probably 90% effort. I failed.)<p>I had a friend and consulting boss who once told me, &quot;I don&#x27;t care what work I do; it&#x27;s just a day job, and it&#x27;s money.&quot; And as with people who can happily do hookup after hookup on Tinder, I sometimes wish I were like them. But when you really care about shit, it ties you up. And when the stuff you care about is just one or two cogs in a big machine that isn&#x27;t really worth supporting, you die slowly for a wage.<p>My advice to young people (those of you who are in your first 5 years of employment) is to realize now that unless you want to become a business owner or want to do 12+ years of good effort in one of the big 5 (4?) consulting firms, you should just never grow your personal cost of living and instead focus on doing stuff you love - money be damned. You may just find yourself in the enviable position where doing the thing you loved resulted in a windfall (Google bought you), or at least funds you 5+k&#x2F;mo while you travel the many other awesome parts of the world which cost way less than the US and western Europe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spyckie2</author><text>From the point of view of the individual, do what you love.<p>From the point of view of the working world, do what people pay for.<p>From the point of view of simple optimization with no bias, find the ideal intersection of both.<p>From the point of view of taking it easy in life, find the highest value, lowest energy activity.<p>From the point of view of working on impossible problems that you find fulfillment, put yourself in situations that are constantly above your capacity and fight for every step of the way.<p>Or, just do what you think is best according to what you know, no need for &quot;absolute best&quot; ways to approach life.<p>But while doing that, remember to be happy with what you have at present.</text></comment> | <story><title>People Simply Empty Out (1986)</title><url>http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/people-simply-empty-out.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blunte</author><text>Sometimes I do wonder... how many people I see with regular jobs feel like they are using 10% of their abilities at those jobs? At this very moment I am making an effort to re-enter the corporate world... studying Python or Ruby or Elixir any of the other 5 languages I have used in the last 10 years to convince a company that I can do their work. But inside, I know I&#x27;m doing it 99% for the money. It&#x27;s only because I didn&#x27;t run the gauntlet in the past and strike out on my dreams with 150% effort (I tried once, at probably 90% effort. I failed.)<p>I had a friend and consulting boss who once told me, &quot;I don&#x27;t care what work I do; it&#x27;s just a day job, and it&#x27;s money.&quot; And as with people who can happily do hookup after hookup on Tinder, I sometimes wish I were like them. But when you really care about shit, it ties you up. And when the stuff you care about is just one or two cogs in a big machine that isn&#x27;t really worth supporting, you die slowly for a wage.<p>My advice to young people (those of you who are in your first 5 years of employment) is to realize now that unless you want to become a business owner or want to do 12+ years of good effort in one of the big 5 (4?) consulting firms, you should just never grow your personal cost of living and instead focus on doing stuff you love - money be damned. You may just find yourself in the enviable position where doing the thing you loved resulted in a windfall (Google bought you), or at least funds you 5+k&#x2F;mo while you travel the many other awesome parts of the world which cost way less than the US and western Europe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomanybeersies</author><text>I like working. It doesn&#x27;t need to be on a project of passion either, I enjoy digging holes as a labourer just as much as I enjoy working on an interesting engineering problem. As long as it&#x27;s useful work, I&#x27;m reasonably happy. The worst I&#x27;ve ever felt in a job is working on doomed or failed projects, where none of your work ever comes to light. It&#x27;s a waste of time and a waste of my life.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t say that I live to work, and I definitely need my breaks, but I haven&#x27;t been without a job for more than 2 months since I was 15. If I made a windfall, I couldn&#x27;t quit my job and travel the world for a decade, I&#x27;d go crazy. On the other hand, I have some friends who simply don&#x27;t like working. They can&#x27;t hold down a job for more than 6 months, and just bounce around doing whatever odd jobs they find.</text></comment> |
32,464,178 | 32,464,169 | 1 | 2 | 32,462,275 | train | <story><title>Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory</title><url>https://toolguyd.com/milwaukee-tool-new-usa-factory/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gurumeditations</author><text>American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.<p>There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.</text></item><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it&#x27;s a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn&#x27;t an enlightened return to domestic production.</text></item><item><author>stacktrust</author><text>A handful of DeWalt power tools are &quot;assembled from global materials&quot; in USA, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Jackson, TN Air compressors
Hempstead, MD Drill and saw components
Charlotte, NC Cordless drills, screwdrivers
Greenfield, IN Grinder, recip saws, hammer drills</code></pre></text></item><item><author>blt</author><text>This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news.<p>Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I&#x27;ve noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia.<p>It feels like the remaining made-in-USA tools are those where the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t need to do much more than maintain some old machines and keep them fed with raw materials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwiswell</author><text>&gt; A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products.<p>So like Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA Tencor? The global leaders in semiconductor machinery are predominantly American, with honorable mentions for the Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Dainippon Screen) and Dutch (ASML, ASMI).<p>Most of the equipment is made stateside, e.g. Applied Materials manufacturing is in Austin.<p>&gt; America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.<p>The &quot;America is doomed!&quot; rhetoric is older than the hills and, while we are in decline as the global hegemon, economically we are still as vibrant as ever. Last year KLA Tencor opened a second headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan... not in China.</text></comment> | <story><title>Milwaukee Tool Raises the Bar with New USA Factory</title><url>https://toolguyd.com/milwaukee-tool-new-usa-factory/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gurumeditations</author><text>American manufacturing looks like low-wage workers making $12 an hour (a few years ago) making windshields. A real American manufacturing renaissance would be German, with high skilled trained professionals designing, building, and operating advanced machines to create complex products. Basically what the Chinese are continually getting better at.<p>There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids, let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator. This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.</text></item><item><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>That manufacturing process is the result of bean counters determining it&#x27;s a waste to ship boxed products that are 50% air overseas in a container. Ship the broken down components instead with denser packing and have a minimum wage worker bolt it together stateside. It isn&#x27;t an enlightened return to domestic production.</text></item><item><author>stacktrust</author><text>A handful of DeWalt power tools are &quot;assembled from global materials&quot; in USA, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.allamericanmade.com&#x2F;where-are-dewalt-tools-made&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> Jackson, TN Air compressors
Hempstead, MD Drill and saw components
Charlotte, NC Cordless drills, screwdrivers
Greenfield, IN Grinder, recip saws, hammer drills</code></pre></text></item><item><author>blt</author><text>This is good news, but Milwaukee is primarily a power tool company. Bringing power tool manufacturing back to the USA would be much bigger news.<p>Project Farm is a YouTube channel that reviews tools. I&#x27;ve noticed that most of the made-in-USA products are relatively simple - hand tools, drill bits, adhesives, lubricants, and so on. Any complex assembly that includes electronics is almost invariably made in Asia.<p>It feels like the remaining made-in-USA tools are those where the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t need to do much more than maintain some old machines and keep them fed with raw materials.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawaylinux</author><text>&gt; There is no hope. America can’t even agree on giving community college to poor kids,<p>Working on factory production lines does not require a bachelor&#x27;s degree. Germany isn&#x27;t assembling cheap power tools either. One reason is that labor costs are too high, and requiring low skill jobs have a college degree does the opposite of helping that.<p>&gt; let alone training a generation of toolmakers, electronic engineers, programmers, and every other profession involved in making things out of atoms more complex than a handtool or a radiator.<p>This isn&#x27;t true. USA has some of the best EEs and programmers in the world.<p>&gt; This country is dying and wildly unstable politically.</text></comment> |
25,103,316 | 25,103,306 | 1 | 2 | 25,101,766 | train | <story><title>UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030: FT</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-autos/uk-to-ban-sale-of-new-petrol-and-diesel-cars-from-2030-ft-idUSKBN27U0DG</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gambiting</author><text>I live in the UK and I&#x27;m 100% for it in theory, but 100% against it in practice.<p>I currently have an electric vehicle - the only kind of usage scenario where it works and is absolutely brilliant is charging at home. That&#x27;s about it. Public charging is a joke, vast majority of stations either don&#x27;t work, are occupied most of the time, or cost so much money to use that it would literally be cheaper to drive a diesel car.<p>We visited our friends some time ago in London for a few days(before lockdown). They live in an apartment so no way I could run a cable to the parking space. No problem I thought - there&#x27;s a Shell station nearby with a charging point, several ChargeYourCar points at car park not far away, and I could see on ZapMap that there were two charging points on the street - and worst case scenario there are rapid chargers along the way at few motorway stops.<p>We got there and basically - all ChargeYourCar points were out of order for 3 days we were there, the 2 charging points on the street were only for permit holders(something that ZapMap didn&#x27;t mention), and the one single charging point at the Shell station nearby was occupied every single time I checked. So we stopped at the motorway services in the end, where they had 4 rapid charging points - all taken. We waited 30 minutes for someone to leave, once they left the car wouldn&#x27;t connect - had to ring up the number on the charger, finally the customer service advisor restarted the point for me and it started charging. Only another 45 minutes of waiting and we had enough charge to get home. Oh and the charge was literally £0.49&#x2F;kWh(I pay £0.05&#x2F;kWh at home on a night tariff) - I had a Qashqai 1.6dCi few years ago that I could fill up for that much and drive down to london and back.<p>Again, the car itself is brilliant. It is the future. I have no idea how people still drive around in cars that burn anything to move - they are loud, having to have gears is stupid, having to keep buying fuel is stupid.<p>And yet.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I&#x27;m eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.</text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology.<p>What&#x27;s disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together.<p>It&#x27;s seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is &quot;let&#x27;s burn stuff&quot;. We can do better than that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>&gt;I can&#x27;t imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I&#x27;m eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.<p>They have much longer than 9 years to get the infrastructure right.<p>The average car age in the US is roughly 12 years old. I imagine is is roughly the same in the UK. That means even if they stop selling new ICE cars in 2030 the average car might still be an ICE into the 2040s. Assuming no further restrictions it probably wouldn&#x27;t be until the 2050s that it would become truly difficult to find a used ICE car.<p>Obviously the UK would need to improve in the meantime, but they would basically have 30 years to get their EV infrastructure into the position it works for every car owner.</text></comment> | <story><title>UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030: FT</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/britain-autos/uk-to-ban-sale-of-new-petrol-and-diesel-cars-from-2030-ft-idUSKBN27U0DG</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gambiting</author><text>I live in the UK and I&#x27;m 100% for it in theory, but 100% against it in practice.<p>I currently have an electric vehicle - the only kind of usage scenario where it works and is absolutely brilliant is charging at home. That&#x27;s about it. Public charging is a joke, vast majority of stations either don&#x27;t work, are occupied most of the time, or cost so much money to use that it would literally be cheaper to drive a diesel car.<p>We visited our friends some time ago in London for a few days(before lockdown). They live in an apartment so no way I could run a cable to the parking space. No problem I thought - there&#x27;s a Shell station nearby with a charging point, several ChargeYourCar points at car park not far away, and I could see on ZapMap that there were two charging points on the street - and worst case scenario there are rapid chargers along the way at few motorway stops.<p>We got there and basically - all ChargeYourCar points were out of order for 3 days we were there, the 2 charging points on the street were only for permit holders(something that ZapMap didn&#x27;t mention), and the one single charging point at the Shell station nearby was occupied every single time I checked. So we stopped at the motorway services in the end, where they had 4 rapid charging points - all taken. We waited 30 minutes for someone to leave, once they left the car wouldn&#x27;t connect - had to ring up the number on the charger, finally the customer service advisor restarted the point for me and it started charging. Only another 45 minutes of waiting and we had enough charge to get home. Oh and the charge was literally £0.49&#x2F;kWh(I pay £0.05&#x2F;kWh at home on a night tariff) - I had a Qashqai 1.6dCi few years ago that I could fill up for that much and drive down to london and back.<p>Again, the car itself is brilliant. It is the future. I have no idea how people still drive around in cars that burn anything to move - they are loud, having to have gears is stupid, having to keep buying fuel is stupid.<p>And yet.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine that the UK government and the private sector will get their act together and somehow, in 9 years, the infrastructure will be amazing, and they will find answers to questions like how do you charge at an apartment or a house with no dedicated parking space. I&#x27;m eagerly awaiting to hear about these solutions.</text></item><item><author>LeoPanthera</author><text>This may be a bit off-topic, but these comments are really eye-opening. I had no idea that anti-EV sentiment was so strongly held. Especially among HN users, who you would assume would be more likely to see the benefits of new technology.<p>What&#x27;s disappointing is that all the talking points are the same-old tired fossil fuel propaganda from a decade ago. We have made progress, and we can make more progress if we all pull together.<p>It&#x27;s seems crazy that in the 21st century the best option we have for the storage and transfer of energy is &quot;let&#x27;s burn stuff&quot;. We can do better than that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>russli1993</author><text>Nio&#x27;s car is capable of battery swapping. There is a swap station and a robotic arm take out the battery from your car a change a new one in 3 mins. What is interesting is that they have this program where when you buy a car, you don&#x27;t buy the battery, you pay a price for the car, then a subscription fee for the battery. And then you can do unlimited free changes at these battery stations. The idea is that you use the entire battery like &quot;fuel&quot;. You don&#x27;t care the ownership of a battery. They make sure the battery is always healthy and full of charge. It also allow you to upgrade to a bigger capacity battery on your car just buy changing a tier in the subscription. Back then nio cars were launched with 75kw battery. Now users can upgrade their car to a 100kw battery by changing a tier of the sub on their phone and pay more monthly fee. Oh you can also downgrade the tier too, say you don&#x27;t need the single charge range of the 100kw, you can switch to the 75kw and have lower per month fee. China population mostly live in dense apartments, and many old apartments cannot be retrofited with car chargers. This is vastly different from the US where people live in houses. This system allow nio cars to be used like gas cars. And if your swap speed is fast, you don&#x27;t need as many &quot;energy refill&quot; stations. The way I see it, it&#x27;s really hard to get ev charging speed equal to gas refills. But it&#x27;s not technically difficult to a build a robot that changes out battery fast. There was another car company that made a prototype battery change station that can swap battery in 1 mins. And you can always charge the battery as well. So fast charging, destination charging, at home charging for the capable. The combination is able to cover more scenarios and more flexibility. I think it will be interesting to see how this system gets developed in the future. See if it could work well. It will bring a new solution to this industry problem. So far, it seems to work well for both nio and consumers.</text></comment> |
35,660,086 | 35,660,294 | 1 | 2 | 35,658,796 | train | <story><title>Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate</title><url>https://www.chronicle.com/article/ban-on-tenure-for-new-faculty-hires-passes-texas-senate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ok_dad</author><text>Tenured researchers shouldn&#x27;t be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master&#x27;s in CS with some sort of &quot;teaching extension&quot; on it and I&#x27;ll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching!<p>Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!</text></item><item><author>orange_joe</author><text>I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noisenotsignal</author><text>My university had lecturers that were precisely this (masters in CS, focused on teaching intro undergrad courses).<p>However, I think there is still a lot of benefit from having researchers teach upper level courses. Firsthand experience in research brings an additional dimension that can be appreciated by students who are beyond the introductory level.<p>There are also tenured professors who are good at both research and teaching!</text></comment> | <story><title>Ban on Tenure for New Faculty Hires Passes Texas Senate</title><url>https://www.chronicle.com/article/ban-on-tenure-for-new-faculty-hires-passes-texas-senate</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ok_dad</author><text>Tenured researchers shouldn&#x27;t be teaching, IMO. They can be doing research full-time, and leave teaching to those who care to teach. I, personally, dislike research, but I would love to become a CompSci professor and teach the next generation of software developers and technologists. The problem is, I do NOT want to do research. Give me a Master&#x27;s in CS with some sort of &quot;teaching extension&quot; on it and I&#x27;ll go teach and the researchers can go do important work researching!<p>Edit: for the upper division courses, researchers certainly should have some involvement, I agree with several of you on that point!</text></item><item><author>orange_joe</author><text>I’m skeptical that tenure is good for students, I knew so many teachers that just didn’t much care for their work and probably would have been fired if not for tenure. I understand the arguments in favor of tenure, particularly when it comes to recruitment, but given the bloated pipeline into academia, I’m not sure they hold.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usrusr</author><text>I believe that this is yet another case of middle ground being the best: leave the bulk of teaching to specialists, but keep the research professors doing courses close to their actual field. Don&#x27;t underestimate how educative teaching can be for the teacher. But this is certainly no big insight. Or are there places that do not, at least to some amount, do it like this?</text></comment> |
24,354,380 | 24,354,230 | 1 | 2 | 24,353,686 | train | <story><title>Supercomputer analysis of Covid-19 leads to new theory</title><url>https://elemental.medium.com/a-supercomputer-analyzed-covid-19-and-an-interesting-new-theory-has-emerged-31cb8eba9d63</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>woeirua</author><text>Seems like it should be really straightforward to determine if this hypothesis is right by measuring bradykinin levels in Covid patients versus non-Covid patients.<p>One thing that I think strongly suggests that this hypothesis is wrong is that there is no strong relation between ACE-inhibitors and Covid mortality. Indeed, most of the studies that I&#x27;ve seen suggest that ACE-inhibitors have a somewhat protective effect whereas ARBs actually seem to have a minor detrimental effect [1]. So for the article to claim that covid behaves pharmacologically like ACE-inhibitors seems wrong at face value.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nejm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1056&#x2F;NEJMoa2007621" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nejm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1056&#x2F;NEJMoa2007621</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Supercomputer analysis of Covid-19 leads to new theory</title><url>https://elemental.medium.com/a-supercomputer-analyzed-covid-19-and-an-interesting-new-theory-has-emerged-31cb8eba9d63</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hellofunk</author><text>&gt; Interestingly, Jacobson’s team also suggests vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN. Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming. The researchers note that vitamin D has already been shown to help those with Covid-19. The vitamin is readily available over the counter, and around 20% of the population is deficient. If indeed the vitamin proves effective at reducing the severity of bradykinin storms, it could be an easy, relatively safe way to reduce the severity of the virus.</text></comment> |
10,450,954 | 10,450,287 | 1 | 2 | 10,450,142 | train | <story><title>Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/morocco-poised-to-become-a-solar-superpower-with-launch-of-desert-mega-project</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Dinoso</author><text>One key motivator for Morocco to seek alternatives to Oil, is it&#x27;s neighbor and arch enemy Algeria. Think of it like USA vs Russia and their race to be the Nr 1. All the advancement in telecommunication, Space, Robotics..etc are partly due to this race. Algeria actively supports separatists in the Sahara (Polisario front) for independence. Algeria was a very rich country until the recent demise of Oil price. Morocco has to compete with a neighbor with a very big budget and a military that is buying more and more sophisticated equipment and arsenal. Alternatives had to be found. So for energy, independence is a must have for Morocco, dictated by a geo-political environment that is not stable and very volatile.</text></comment> | <story><title>Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/morocco-poised-to-become-a-solar-superpower-with-launch-of-desert-mega-project</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oska</author><text>Links to more information:<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ouarzazate_solar_power_station" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ouarzazate_solar_power_station</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;P131256?lang=en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldbank.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;P131256?lang=en</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrel.gov&#x2F;csp&#x2F;solarpaces&#x2F;project_detail.cfm&#x2F;projectID=270" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrel.gov&#x2F;csp&#x2F;solarpaces&#x2F;project_detail.cfm&#x2F;projec...</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gulfbusiness.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;saudis-acwa-power-wins-1-7bn-euro-morocco-solar-power-deal&#x2F;#.VLJ4byvF_8Z" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gulfbusiness.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;saudis-acwa-power-wins-1-7bn...</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acwapower.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;14&#x2F;acwa-power-ouarzazate.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acwapower.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;14&#x2F;acwa-power-ouarzazate.ht...</a></text></comment> |
37,018,418 | 37,018,566 | 1 | 2 | 37,016,842 | train | <story><title>E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters</title><url>https://abolish.social/@_/110828271798284741</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notatoad</author><text>developing for esp32 is <i>way</i> more difficult than developing for raspi. raspi lets you basically treat it like a normal computer, you can use standard python and sqlite and install whatever nonsense you want from pip and basically assume it will run whatever your laptop can. it means you can hire kids straight out of school, or outsource to india, and whoever you get can work on it without really any concern - it&#x27;ll run whatever crap you give it.<p>esp32 is embedded enough that you have to develop for it like you develop embedded software - you need to do things like think about how much ram you&#x27;re using that you just don&#x27;t have to on raspi.</text></item><item><author>xeckr</author><text>&gt;RPIs are out of stock because they&#x27;re useful - this company found a use for them.<p>While I sympathize with this sentiment, it should be noted that their use case could have been most likely accomplished with something like an ESP32, which is only slightly more difficult to work with but boasts a bulk price of $1-3 a pop.<p>Using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this is a bit like flying a private jet to get to the grocery store.</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>&gt; When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products.<p>What a strange complaint. RPIs are out of stock because they&#x27;re useful - this company found a use for them. Really the issue isn&#x27;t one of who&#x27;s buying, but rather an issue of the Foundation not making enough of their wildly successful product. Seems like a high-quality problem.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine the Foundation being up in arms over someone finding a use for their product. The more users, the better the economy of scale, the cheaper the product is for everyone.<p>&gt; Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went.<p>Well, into the backend, the integration, the mechanical engineering - the myriad other things that mark the difference between a fun thing you made at home and a product you sell to the public.<p>&gt; After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of?<p>Again, economics of scale. One product that&#x27;s more capable than any one person needs - but has a bigger audience - is likely cheaper than a niche one that&#x27;s &#x27;right-sized.&#x27;<p>Your remote control doesn&#x27;t need a Cortex M0 but they&#x27;re cheaper than an 8051 now.<p>&gt; Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.<p>So can anyone who hit &#x27;add to cart.&#x27; Especially since they only have like 500-1000 scooters per city in which they operate. That&#x27;s not exactly Apple-scale orders.<p>The issue is supply, not demand.</text></item><item><author>samtho</author><text>This would be hilariously satirical if it were not true and it highlights much of what is wrong with tech.<p>A benture capital subsidized micro mobility startup pulls out of a major city ostensibly because threshold for potential profit has been crossed and they’ve determined they cannot adjust their pricing to get the right numbers on their spreadsheet (note: this likely part of the reason why so many of these companies have trouble converting people to yearly plans, why bother if your market can be dropped with such swift indifference?). After pulling out of the market they leave their trash, that were assets a few days previous, scattered amongst the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust. When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products. Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went. After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of? Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.<p>This all makes me irrationally irritated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>superdisk</author><text>Problem: We need to outsource the software to India.<p>Solution: Put a way overpowered computer in the product so they can program it.<p>Ridiculous problem with a ridiculous solution. Are they allergic to any level of correctness? Sometimes I&#x27;m ashamed to be in this industry.</text></comment> | <story><title>E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters</title><url>https://abolish.social/@_/110828271798284741</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>notatoad</author><text>developing for esp32 is <i>way</i> more difficult than developing for raspi. raspi lets you basically treat it like a normal computer, you can use standard python and sqlite and install whatever nonsense you want from pip and basically assume it will run whatever your laptop can. it means you can hire kids straight out of school, or outsource to india, and whoever you get can work on it without really any concern - it&#x27;ll run whatever crap you give it.<p>esp32 is embedded enough that you have to develop for it like you develop embedded software - you need to do things like think about how much ram you&#x27;re using that you just don&#x27;t have to on raspi.</text></item><item><author>xeckr</author><text>&gt;RPIs are out of stock because they&#x27;re useful - this company found a use for them.<p>While I sympathize with this sentiment, it should be noted that their use case could have been most likely accomplished with something like an ESP32, which is only slightly more difficult to work with but boasts a bulk price of $1-3 a pop.<p>Using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this is a bit like flying a private jet to get to the grocery store.</text></item><item><author>arcticbull</author><text>&gt; When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products.<p>What a strange complaint. RPIs are out of stock because they&#x27;re useful - this company found a use for them. Really the issue isn&#x27;t one of who&#x27;s buying, but rather an issue of the Foundation not making enough of their wildly successful product. Seems like a high-quality problem.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine the Foundation being up in arms over someone finding a use for their product. The more users, the better the economy of scale, the cheaper the product is for everyone.<p>&gt; Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went.<p>Well, into the backend, the integration, the mechanical engineering - the myriad other things that mark the difference between a fun thing you made at home and a product you sell to the public.<p>&gt; After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of?<p>Again, economics of scale. One product that&#x27;s more capable than any one person needs - but has a bigger audience - is likely cheaper than a niche one that&#x27;s &#x27;right-sized.&#x27;<p>Your remote control doesn&#x27;t need a Cortex M0 but they&#x27;re cheaper than an 8051 now.<p>&gt; Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.<p>So can anyone who hit &#x27;add to cart.&#x27; Especially since they only have like 500-1000 scooters per city in which they operate. That&#x27;s not exactly Apple-scale orders.<p>The issue is supply, not demand.</text></item><item><author>samtho</author><text>This would be hilariously satirical if it were not true and it highlights much of what is wrong with tech.<p>A benture capital subsidized micro mobility startup pulls out of a major city ostensibly because threshold for potential profit has been crossed and they’ve determined they cannot adjust their pricing to get the right numbers on their spreadsheet (note: this likely part of the reason why so many of these companies have trouble converting people to yearly plans, why bother if your market can be dropped with such swift indifference?). After pulling out of the market they leave their trash, that were assets a few days previous, scattered amongst the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust. When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products. Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went. After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of? Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.<p>This all makes me irrationally irritated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LordShredda</author><text>Take the money from the raspis and put it in a decent developer, then fire him once you unleash the scooters and break even after a couple months?
The issue here is the months long wait I assume</text></comment> |
25,057,736 | 25,057,420 | 1 | 3 | 25,057,153 | train | <story><title>Charles Darwin’s hunch about early life was probably right</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201110-charles-darwin-early-life-theory</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cblconfederate</author><text>for those impatient like me (aaargh!):<p>&gt; Darwin was proposing that life began, not in the open ocean, but in a smaller body of water on land, which was rich in chemicals</text></comment> | <story><title>Charles Darwin’s hunch about early life was probably right</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201110-charles-darwin-early-life-theory</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rtx</author><text>When I learnt about all the great scientist in school I was always amazed by their brilliance. However I always felt something was missing, what was so different about them that they were able to achieve so much.<p>Even though I had heard Newton&#x27;s quote about standing on shoulder of giants I was never able to understand it fully till much later.<p>All these brilliant discovery had a thread going back to the beginning of our civilization.</text></comment> |
22,101,444 | 22,101,447 | 1 | 2 | 22,098,808 | train | <story><title>LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/20/lastpass_outage/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filipn</author><text>So glad I switched to 1Password, haven&#x27;t had an issue since. They provide an easy transfer of your passwords from LastPass, you can just follow their guide and be done in 5 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deepspace</author><text>I was a longtime LastPass customer, but the service just kept getting worse and worse, to the point where a year ago I realized I was spending more time fighting the user interface than it was saving me. And their support was absolutely useless.<p>So I also switched over to 1Password, and never looked back. It is such a refreshing and trouble free experience compared to LP, and the few times I needed to ask a question, their support team got right back to me with the correct answer the first time.</text></comment> | <story><title>LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/20/lastpass_outage/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>filipn</author><text>So glad I switched to 1Password, haven&#x27;t had an issue since. They provide an easy transfer of your passwords from LastPass, you can just follow their guide and be done in 5 minutes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.1password.com&#x2F;import-lastpass&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikedilger</author><text>Bitwarden is also very good</text></comment> |
25,671,398 | 25,671,314 | 1 | 2 | 25,669,864 | train | <story><title>Poll: Switching from WhatsApp</title><text>So many choices, so much discussion. Looking for the &quot;Wisdom of the Crowd&quot; from the HN community. Other options in the comments would be welcome</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>incrudible</author><text>I like to think the problem is that &quot;the nerds&quot; have failed the rest of the people. People used to listen to us about computer stuff. Then computers became usable without us. Then smartphones arrived. We gladly were relieved of our obligations, but also of our influence.<p>It&#x27;s too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be &quot;sort of concerned&quot; about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would&#x27;ve taken the market by storm.</text></item><item><author>jbotz</author><text>Well, I don&#x27;t know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. <i>Everybody</i> has WhatsApp... it&#x27;s assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp.<p>What&#x27;s more, several cell phone operators&#x27; plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.<p>So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I&#x27;m still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can&#x27;t disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.<p>[Edit] When I delete my account I&#x27;m going to lose old conversations, but that doesn&#x27;t bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there&#x27;s really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.</text></item><item><author>apexalpha</author><text>Where is the &quot;Don&#x27;t switch&quot; option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they&#x27;re part of what I would call &quot;critical social infrastructure.&quot;<p>Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don&#x27;t like the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>randomsearch</author><text>I think it’s simpler. Boycotts don’t work at an individual level. I have been boycotting nestle for decades. Can’t say they’ve become less evil. That’s because the marginal effect is negligible for them and strongly negative for the individual (assuming you’re a fan of Kit Kat’s).<p>Network effects amplify the marginal impact on the individual, because they lead to a monopoly with no true competition. Sure, you can leave whatsapp for signal, but you can’t talk to that community group on WhatsApp from signal. From an individual’s point of view the market power is an absolute monopoly.<p>The only solution to these problems is organising to the level of a mass boycott, or regulatory intervention. The former is impossible because too many people don’t care about the company’s behaviour (not because they’re ignorant, they just don’t care) and the latter is slow and a very hard and unfun pursuit for campaigners.<p>Nothing we say to non nerds will be of sufficient magnitude on an individual level. It’d have to be collective action.<p>Personally I’m far more worried about Facebook undermining democracy right now. That’s sufficient reason to shut them down.</text></comment> | <story><title>Poll: Switching from WhatsApp</title><text>So many choices, so much discussion. Looking for the &quot;Wisdom of the Crowd&quot; from the HN community. Other options in the comments would be welcome</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>incrudible</author><text>I like to think the problem is that &quot;the nerds&quot; have failed the rest of the people. People used to listen to us about computer stuff. Then computers became usable without us. Then smartphones arrived. We gladly were relieved of our obligations, but also of our influence.<p>It&#x27;s too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be &quot;sort of concerned&quot; about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would&#x27;ve taken the market by storm.</text></item><item><author>jbotz</author><text>Well, I don&#x27;t know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. <i>Everybody</i> has WhatsApp... it&#x27;s assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp.<p>What&#x27;s more, several cell phone operators&#x27; plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.<p>So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I&#x27;m still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can&#x27;t disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.<p>[Edit] When I delete my account I&#x27;m going to lose old conversations, but that doesn&#x27;t bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there&#x27;s really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.</text></item><item><author>apexalpha</author><text>Where is the &quot;Don&#x27;t switch&quot; option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they&#x27;re part of what I would call &quot;critical social infrastructure.&quot;<p>Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don&#x27;t like the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raziel2p</author><text>Eh, it&#x27;s not like &quot;the nerds&quot; can build a better product in terms of UX anyway, and definitely can&#x27;t market it better.<p>Besides, who says &quot;the nerds&quot; are trustworthy anyway? They keep arguing among each other about which operating system or programming language is best, and why should we take their advice when software security vulnerabilities keep being discovered?<p>Not disagreeing with your point - it&#x27;s become too easy to just randomly click &quot;agree&quot; on any TOS and trade away your privacy&#x2F;security for convenience - but don&#x27;t make it an &quot;us vs them&quot; type of thing. To me, this is purely corporate interest being prioritized ahead of public needs because most politicians either have no spine or answer to lobbyists more than the common person.</text></comment> |
21,471,898 | 21,471,877 | 1 | 2 | 21,465,446 | train | <story><title>Is Inequality Inevitable?</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vannevar</author><text>It&#x27;s not part of the model because, if you&#x27;re studying how wealth gets distributed rather than how it is produced, it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that your disquiet at this notion comes from the possibility that everyone is creating their own wealth, and to some extent that is no doubt true. But if you start with the simplifying assumption that everyone&#x27;s wealth creation ability is equal, and you just look at distribution, and you find that your model pretty accurately reproduces the real-world distribution of wealth, it&#x27;s at least some evidence that wealth-creation ability is not that different from person to person, and what&#x27;s driving inequality is the distribution mechanism.<p>Since virtually all human traits follow a Gaussian distribution, it seems like whatever the wealth-building factor is, it would also follow a Gaussian distribution. But wealth follows more of a power law distribution. You never encounter anyone 1000 times taller than average, but there are many people 1000 times wealthier than average. This casts some doubt that wealth accumulation is down to individual human ability.<p>Couple that with the micro-economic observation that someone with 1 million dollars is astronomically more likely to make another million dollars than someone with 100 dollars, even if the two people are otherwise identical, and it seems pretty unlikely that wealth creation has much to do with the distribution we see.</text></item><item><author>SiVal</author><text>There is a popular political perspective that rules on campus these days that treats wealth as something that just magically exists and is simply &quot;redistributed&quot; by one means or another like, say, a phase change in physics where no magnetism&#x2F;charge&#x2F;energy&#x2F;etc. is ever created or consumed. I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition to redistributing it. Not part of the model.<p>And the idea that things have a &quot;true&quot; value, the one put on them by enlightened campus philosophers, so a transaction not controlled by the wise and just will have a winner and a loser. I waited for the idea that I, shoeless but with ten loaves of bread, and you, hungry but with ten pairs of shoes, might reasonably value bread and shoes differently and BOTH win from the &quot;redistribution&quot; of bread and shoes, but it was not part of the model.<p>But their model (which they claim &quot;reproduces inequality with unprecedented accuracy&quot;) could also (they claim) be fitted to a variety of different observed power law distributions when its parameters were adjusted, and the more parameters, the better the fit became. Yes, and they could probably get their model to describe the frequency distribution of English vocabulary (also a power law), with remarkable accuracy which probably does say something about economics but maybe not as much as they seem to think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>username90</author><text>&gt; Since virtually all human traits follow a Gaussian distribution, it seems like whatever the wealth-building factor is, it would also follow a Gaussian distribution. But wealth follows more of a power law distribution. You never encounter anyone 1000 times taller than average, but there are many people 1000 times wealthier than average.<p>This is nonsense. Lets take an easy example, books, people don&#x27;t want to waste their time reading bad books so only the most palatable books gets a good amount of sales. This means that a small difference in skill leads to a large difference in sales, which would recreate the power-law of wealth creation. Similar arguments can be made about engineering skills, management skills etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Is Inequality Inevitable?</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vannevar</author><text>It&#x27;s not part of the model because, if you&#x27;re studying how wealth gets distributed rather than how it is produced, it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that your disquiet at this notion comes from the possibility that everyone is creating their own wealth, and to some extent that is no doubt true. But if you start with the simplifying assumption that everyone&#x27;s wealth creation ability is equal, and you just look at distribution, and you find that your model pretty accurately reproduces the real-world distribution of wealth, it&#x27;s at least some evidence that wealth-creation ability is not that different from person to person, and what&#x27;s driving inequality is the distribution mechanism.<p>Since virtually all human traits follow a Gaussian distribution, it seems like whatever the wealth-building factor is, it would also follow a Gaussian distribution. But wealth follows more of a power law distribution. You never encounter anyone 1000 times taller than average, but there are many people 1000 times wealthier than average. This casts some doubt that wealth accumulation is down to individual human ability.<p>Couple that with the micro-economic observation that someone with 1 million dollars is astronomically more likely to make another million dollars than someone with 100 dollars, even if the two people are otherwise identical, and it seems pretty unlikely that wealth creation has much to do with the distribution we see.</text></item><item><author>SiVal</author><text>There is a popular political perspective that rules on campus these days that treats wealth as something that just magically exists and is simply &quot;redistributed&quot; by one means or another like, say, a phase change in physics where no magnetism&#x2F;charge&#x2F;energy&#x2F;etc. is ever created or consumed. I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition to redistributing it. Not part of the model.<p>And the idea that things have a &quot;true&quot; value, the one put on them by enlightened campus philosophers, so a transaction not controlled by the wise and just will have a winner and a loser. I waited for the idea that I, shoeless but with ten loaves of bread, and you, hungry but with ten pairs of shoes, might reasonably value bread and shoes differently and BOTH win from the &quot;redistribution&quot; of bread and shoes, but it was not part of the model.<p>But their model (which they claim &quot;reproduces inequality with unprecedented accuracy&quot;) could also (they claim) be fitted to a variety of different observed power law distributions when its parameters were adjusted, and the more parameters, the better the fit became. Yes, and they could probably get their model to describe the frequency distribution of English vocabulary (also a power law), with remarkable accuracy which probably does say something about economics but maybe not as much as they seem to think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>username90</author><text>&gt; someone with 1 million dollars is astronomically more likely to make another million dollars than someone with 100 dollars, even if the two people are otherwise identical<p>I&#x27;m not sure this is correct, at least not on average. Take two average persons, give one of them a million dollar, then watch what their net income is the next 10 years. I&#x27;d bet that the one you gave a million dollars will have used up a large part of it thus having a huge net loss while the one you didn&#x27;t give anything will still be roughly at zero.<p>Edit: This study shows that people significantly reduce their income after winning the lottery, suggesting that there is a negative correlation between wealth and earnings given that everything else is the same.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w21762.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w21762.pdf</a></text></comment> |
12,819,675 | 12,819,026 | 1 | 2 | 12,818,617 | train | <story><title>Incident Report: Inadvertent Private Repository Disclosure</title><url>https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-private-repository-disclosure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Hovertruck</author><text>We received an email from Github yesterday informing us that one of our repositories had been accessed by a third party due to this issue. While it&#x27;s not a fun notification to receive, it definitely made our general security paranoia feel justified – we&#x27;re lucky that from the get-go we&#x27;ve held best practices around keeping secrets out of the codebase. Obviously we still dedicated time as a team to prune through our repository history with a fine-toothed comb for anything that could potentially be a vulnerability, as we take this very seriously.<p>One of our engineers came up with a useful script to grab all unique lines from the history of the repository and sort them according to entropy. This helps to lift any access keys or passwords which may have been committed at any point to the top.<p>I think this is a great example to illustrate the tough edges of security to less experienced engineers. Github will most likely never let something like this happen to you, but on the off-chance that they do it&#x27;s great to be prepared. Additionally, the response from Github was very well received. No excuses, just a thorough explanation of what happened.<p>I also can&#x27;t help but mention that we&#x27;re hiring, if you&#x27;d like to work at an organization that values security and data privacy very highly. :) usebutton.com&#x2F;join-us</text></comment> | <story><title>Incident Report: Inadvertent Private Repository Disclosure</title><url>https://github.com/blog/2273-incident-report-inadvertent-private-repository-disclosure</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jorge_leria</author><text>Github takes security seriously, this disclosure post is a proof of that.</text></comment> |
23,949,202 | 23,948,827 | 1 | 3 | 23,948,206 | train | <story><title>Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them</title><url>http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2020/06/banks-are-slow-to-increase-rates-on.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>save_ferris</author><text>This seems like pretty typical market behavior to me. Are we really surprised that banks are taking the opportunity to increase their profits by choosing not to pass down all savings to customers?<p>The same exact thing happens with gas stations. The price of gas never falls quite as fast or far for the consumer as it does for the retailer, but gas stations will instantly respond to price increases. I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>learnstats2</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t this just prove that there is not a competitive market in these industries?<p>If I - and everyone else - could quickly identify which bank&#x2F;gas station was acting in my interest without colluding, I would immediately switch.<p>The fact that prices are quick to rise but slow to fall is dependent on consumer apathy and monopolistic behaviour&#x2F;collusion.<p>It might be typical market behaviour, but it&#x27;s not the perfect market that economists commonly base their models on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them</title><url>http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2020/06/banks-are-slow-to-increase-rates-on.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>save_ferris</author><text>This seems like pretty typical market behavior to me. Are we really surprised that banks are taking the opportunity to increase their profits by choosing not to pass down all savings to customers?<p>The same exact thing happens with gas stations. The price of gas never falls quite as fast or far for the consumer as it does for the retailer, but gas stations will instantly respond to price increases. I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leetrout</author><text>I heard this story &#x2F; explanation before:<p>You own a gas station and you want to fill up your tanks so you call the distributor and pay $1 &#x2F; gallon. You then sell that for $1.10 &#x2F; gallon making a 10% profit.<p>Now prices of crude doubles and you have 1000 gallons left to sell. It’s going to cost you $2 &#x2F; gal to refill so you immediately raise your price to prevent a loss and cover the next fill.<p>I don’t know how accurate that is to the real situation gas stations face but I’d never thought of it in terms of selling higher to afford the next bulk delivery.</text></comment> |
13,025,774 | 13,025,092 | 1 | 2 | 13,024,967 | train | <story><title>Humble Book Bundle: Unix</title><url>https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SwellJoe</author><text>I think the best of these books (at least of the ones I&#x27;ve read) are in the $15 tier. Several of the books in the lower tiers are ones I&#x27;d recommend skipping and go to online resources, instead. It may not still be so, but when I last looked at the O&#x27;Reilly bash books, many years ago, the TLDP bash programming HOWTOs were more pragmatic and easy to follow (I think that&#x27;s here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;HOWTO&#x2F;Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;HOWTO&#x2F;Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;abs&#x2F;html&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tldp.org&#x2F;LDP&#x2F;abs&#x2F;html&#x2F;</a> ). I guess UNIX in a Nutshell was good in its day, but is quite old now, even in its 4th edition.<p><i>DNS &amp; BIND</i> is one I recommend to anyone who ever has to touch anything related to networks, because so many problems I have seen in my 20 years of troubleshooting network problems have come down to someone not understanding DNS. It&#x27;s well-written, covers the how and why, and covers everything from &quot;I have one website&quot; to &quot;I run a dozen data centers with thousands of zones and thousands of queries per second&quot; (and the authors have significant experience at all of those levels).<p>And <i>Essential System Administration</i> is a classic, though a bit dated the last time I looked at it (I mean, the core services and concepts it covers are relatively timeless, but it&#x27;s missing a lot of modern cloud and service-based concepts).<p>That said, nearly all of these were first written (their first editions) when O&#x27;Reilly was publishing incredibly high quality books; well above anyone else in the industry, particularly for OSS and Free Software topics. So, probably a good value, if you haven&#x27;t already read them and don&#x27;t have a good foundation of knowledge of these topics.</text></comment> | <story><title>Humble Book Bundle: Unix</title><url>https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bathory</author><text>My biggest gripe with this bundle is that they are all digital. I&#x27;d rather have less books but then in a printed format. I have noticed that I can&#x27;t concentrate on reading books when they are presented to me on my computer screen. I do have a kindle (1st or 2nd generation) and that device doesn&#x27;t support PDF well, furthermore it is rather slow. It works fine for regular books though, where I don&#x27;t have to flip through chapters back and forth often.</text></comment> |
2,603,974 | 2,604,006 | 1 | 2 | 2,603,684 | train | <story><title>Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It</title><url>http://jtaby.com/2011/05/31/google-chrome-why-i-hate-it-and-continue-to-use-it.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtaby</author><text>Thanks a lot for your comment, callahad. I'll try to respond to your comments.<p>1. You're right, I hadn't actually noticed that until after I wrote the blog post. I think it's because I hide the Dock by default (still doesn't explain why I didn't notice it in the app switcher)<p>My point was, there are three places to manage downloads. I have to manually close the Downloads bar. Worst of all (and this is something I forgot to point out in the post) is that closing the downloads bar actually makes the browser window smaller!<p>2. You're right, there are nice parts of having the preferences be in the tab.<p>3. I didn't mean the search field covers search results, it covers the website's UI. Here's another example of it blocking the UI, this time in github: <a href="http://cl.ly/1t450T1S0s2J2V0I3O1W" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/1t450T1S0s2J2V0I3O1W</a></text></item><item><author>callahad</author><text>There are a couple of things to point out jtaby's critique of Chrome:<p>1. <i>There's no small, unobtrusive way to monitor the progress of downloads.</i><p>Actually, in OS X, the Chrome icon in the dock has a small pie chart overlay during downloads that indicates both the number of pending downloads as well as the aggregate progress of all downloads. If your dock is hidden, you can quickly and easily check the progress by hitting Cmd-Tab. In Windows 7, the "tile" in the Windows "Dock" fills from left to right, like a progress bar, to show the aggregate status of downloads. You can also click on the in-progress download, dismiss the dialog, and the file will open once the download completes.<p>2. <i>The large number of options makes finding what you want hard.</i><p>As mentioned, the search feature is handy, but not always sufficient. One nice aspect that gets overlooked is that the in-tab preferences are fully addressable: you can actually link to specific pages and panels. Though this doesn't help you find a preference in the first place, it does make communicating the location of known preferences much simpler.<p>3. <i>The search field covers the content of the site, if you were searching and a match was under the field, or you wanted to click a link/button under the search field, you’re out of luck.</i><p>Actually, the search field will intelligently slide out of the way to reveal matched content that it covers. If you need to click something underneath it, you can hit Escape to dismiss it, and your previously entered text will be saved and pre-filled the next time you hit Cmd-F.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treeface</author><text>I see your point about #3, but to be honest, I've been using Chrome since v1 and I have never once had this be an issue. Not a single time. There is simply never a case where what I'm searching for is in the very top right 10 pixels of a page. In your github example, why would you ever be searching for "dashboard", "inbox", "account settings", or "log out"?<p>Also I don't really understand your complaint about the bookmarks bar. Why do you have it up at all if you don't like the UI? If I want to go to a bookmarked page, I hit ctrl-shift-b to bring up the bar or, much more often, I open a new tab. I think the thing that separates Chrome from other browsers is the huge content real estate, and keeping the bookmarks bar up there takes away from this in a big way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It</title><url>http://jtaby.com/2011/05/31/google-chrome-why-i-hate-it-and-continue-to-use-it.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jtaby</author><text>Thanks a lot for your comment, callahad. I'll try to respond to your comments.<p>1. You're right, I hadn't actually noticed that until after I wrote the blog post. I think it's because I hide the Dock by default (still doesn't explain why I didn't notice it in the app switcher)<p>My point was, there are three places to manage downloads. I have to manually close the Downloads bar. Worst of all (and this is something I forgot to point out in the post) is that closing the downloads bar actually makes the browser window smaller!<p>2. You're right, there are nice parts of having the preferences be in the tab.<p>3. I didn't mean the search field covers search results, it covers the website's UI. Here's another example of it blocking the UI, this time in github: <a href="http://cl.ly/1t450T1S0s2J2V0I3O1W" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/1t450T1S0s2J2V0I3O1W</a></text></item><item><author>callahad</author><text>There are a couple of things to point out jtaby's critique of Chrome:<p>1. <i>There's no small, unobtrusive way to monitor the progress of downloads.</i><p>Actually, in OS X, the Chrome icon in the dock has a small pie chart overlay during downloads that indicates both the number of pending downloads as well as the aggregate progress of all downloads. If your dock is hidden, you can quickly and easily check the progress by hitting Cmd-Tab. In Windows 7, the "tile" in the Windows "Dock" fills from left to right, like a progress bar, to show the aggregate status of downloads. You can also click on the in-progress download, dismiss the dialog, and the file will open once the download completes.<p>2. <i>The large number of options makes finding what you want hard.</i><p>As mentioned, the search feature is handy, but not always sufficient. One nice aspect that gets overlooked is that the in-tab preferences are fully addressable: you can actually link to specific pages and panels. Though this doesn't help you find a preference in the first place, it does make communicating the location of known preferences much simpler.<p>3. <i>The search field covers the content of the site, if you were searching and a match was under the field, or you wanted to click a link/button under the search field, you’re out of luck.</i><p>Actually, the search field will intelligently slide out of the way to reveal matched content that it covers. If you need to click something underneath it, you can hit Escape to dismiss it, and your previously entered text will be saved and pre-filled the next time you hit Cmd-F.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>callahad</author><text><i>Worst of all is that closing the downloads bar actually makes the browser window smaller!</i><p>It actually doesn't -- or at least, it doesn't seem to on the Dev Channel or Canary. If there's enough screen real estate, the downloads panel grows out of the bottom of the window, and shrinks away when dismissed. The viewport retains the same dimensions before and after.<p>If there isn't enough space below the window, the panel does indeed overlay the bottom ~47px of content, but in that case, dismissing it doesn't change the size of the window, restoring the viewport to its previous size.<p>That's the most frustrating thing about Chrome: it's inconsistently polished, and in many cases, it feels like its relationship to ChromeOS is akin to the tail wagging the dog.</text></comment> |
35,164,950 | 35,164,825 | 1 | 3 | 35,162,458 | train | <story><title>Two U.S. men charged in 2022 hacking of DEA portal</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/two-us-men-charged-in-2022-hacking-of-dea-portal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>&gt; because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name.<p>Is the implication here that the US gov has broad access to accounts IDs-&gt;IP address which access social media accounts? Or can the FBI&#x2F;three letter agencies can go to Twitter&#x2F;FB&#x2F;etc (or some NSA db) and ask which accounts logged in via x IP address? Or, less conspiratorial, the investigators had some leads on x group of accounts -&gt; got warrants for account IP addresses -&gt; confirmed hypothesis.</text></item><item><author>curmudgeon22</author><text>&gt;The government alleges the defendants and other members of ViLE use various methods to obtain victims’ personal information, including:<p>-tricking customer service employees;<p>-submitting fraudulent legal process to social media companies to elicit users’ registration information;<p>-co-opting and corrupting corporate insiders;<p>-searching public and private online databases;<p>-accessing a nonpublic United States government database without authorization<p>-unlawfully using official email accounts belonging to other countries.<p>&gt;Prosecutors say they tied Singh to the government portal hack because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name. When they raided Singh’s residence on Sept. 8, 2022 and seized his devices, investigators with Homeland Security found a cellular phone and laptop that allegedly “contained extensive evidence of access to the Portal.”<p>&gt;The complaint alleges that between February 2022 and May 2022, Ceraolo used an official email account belonging to a Bangladeshi police official to pose as a police officer in communication with U.S.-based social media platforms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CapstanRoller</author><text>The US government requires that all ISPs install wiretapping devices as a precondition for doing business.<p>Failure to install and maintain wiretapping devices incurs a penalty of $130,000 per day, with a maximum of $1,325,000 per violation (unlimited violations).<p>Assume every ISP is compromised and that every government agency can see everything.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communications_Assistance_for_...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Two U.S. men charged in 2022 hacking of DEA portal</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/two-us-men-charged-in-2022-hacking-of-dea-portal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmix</author><text>&gt; because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name.<p>Is the implication here that the US gov has broad access to accounts IDs-&gt;IP address which access social media accounts? Or can the FBI&#x2F;three letter agencies can go to Twitter&#x2F;FB&#x2F;etc (or some NSA db) and ask which accounts logged in via x IP address? Or, less conspiratorial, the investigators had some leads on x group of accounts -&gt; got warrants for account IP addresses -&gt; confirmed hypothesis.</text></item><item><author>curmudgeon22</author><text>&gt;The government alleges the defendants and other members of ViLE use various methods to obtain victims’ personal information, including:<p>-tricking customer service employees;<p>-submitting fraudulent legal process to social media companies to elicit users’ registration information;<p>-co-opting and corrupting corporate insiders;<p>-searching public and private online databases;<p>-accessing a nonpublic United States government database without authorization<p>-unlawfully using official email accounts belonging to other countries.<p>&gt;Prosecutors say they tied Singh to the government portal hack because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name. When they raided Singh’s residence on Sept. 8, 2022 and seized his devices, investigators with Homeland Security found a cellular phone and laptop that allegedly “contained extensive evidence of access to the Portal.”<p>&gt;The complaint alleges that between February 2022 and May 2022, Ceraolo used an official email account belonging to a Bangladeshi police official to pose as a police officer in communication with U.S.-based social media platforms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bagels</author><text>Fbi asks twitter, Facebook etc who used this ip address. They will probably tell them. If they don&#x27;t, it gets a subpoena, and then they get the accounts. It&#x27;s regular everyday police work. No secret spy programs required.</text></comment> |
14,142,924 | 14,142,588 | 1 | 2 | 14,141,454 | train | <story><title>A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overcast</author><text>According to comments, it was nowhere near vertical, which is why they didn&#x27;t show it from a side angle. Apparently indicator light goes off at 30 degrees, indicating imminent engine stall.</text></item><item><author>hermitdev</author><text>Boeing also did a near-vertical take off in the 787 during their initial tests (and a few times after at air shows) This video [1] from a past Paris air show, shows a 787 ready for a delivery to Vietnam Airlines doing a very aggressive &amp; short (but not vertical take off). Pretty ballsy to do such a thing in such an expensive jet that&#x27;s on its way to delivery to a client.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B5_8D8HCnS4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B5_8D8HCnS4</a></text></item><item><author>kordless</author><text>This was done in Seattle: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE</a></text></item><item><author>kpao</author><text>It&#x27;s an everyday occurrence during the development of our app (Infinite Flight).<p>We often get customers complaining about a misplaced sticker on a livery, a missing exit door in a particular variant of a the 737-900... That type of stuff is easily verifiable. But for things like the airplane not behaving in a way they expect in certain conditions, or perhaps a wrong approach speed or angle, discussions usually start with:
&quot;We tuned the airplane based on information available to us at the time we built the airplane. We are happy to make any changes based on an actual report from one or more pilots flying on this airplane, or better yet, the aircraft manual if you can get your hands on one.&quot;<p>The discussion usually ends there :)<p>One we get often is about why it&#x27;s possible to do a barrel roll in a jet liner in Infinite Flight. We simply point them to the video of that test pilot who did one in a 707 ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nprecup</author><text>I&#x27;m assuming you mean angle of attack, not flight path angle. The aircraft could certainly be capable of a 60 degree climb until it slowed down enough that it couldn&#x27;t maintain a low enough angle of attack. It probably could only sustain something less than a 30 degree climbing flight path angle (while empty), as that would be pushing the limit of the thrust to weight ratio. That being said cameras can be used in ways that make things look much more dramatic than they actually were.<p>As a side note, at 30 degrees AoA the aircraft will not be able to continue flying anyway, the wings will have stalled well before that, and the pilot would be made painfully aware of this fact through stick shakers, aural warnings, and very rough tail buffet.<p>I&#x27;m a flight test engineer, so this stuff is what I get to do for work! :)</text></comment> | <story><title>A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95985</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>overcast</author><text>According to comments, it was nowhere near vertical, which is why they didn&#x27;t show it from a side angle. Apparently indicator light goes off at 30 degrees, indicating imminent engine stall.</text></item><item><author>hermitdev</author><text>Boeing also did a near-vertical take off in the 787 during their initial tests (and a few times after at air shows) This video [1] from a past Paris air show, shows a 787 ready for a delivery to Vietnam Airlines doing a very aggressive &amp; short (but not vertical take off). Pretty ballsy to do such a thing in such an expensive jet that&#x27;s on its way to delivery to a client.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B5_8D8HCnS4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=B5_8D8HCnS4</a></text></item><item><author>kordless</author><text>This was done in Seattle: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ra_khhzuFlE</a></text></item><item><author>kpao</author><text>It&#x27;s an everyday occurrence during the development of our app (Infinite Flight).<p>We often get customers complaining about a misplaced sticker on a livery, a missing exit door in a particular variant of a the 737-900... That type of stuff is easily verifiable. But for things like the airplane not behaving in a way they expect in certain conditions, or perhaps a wrong approach speed or angle, discussions usually start with:
&quot;We tuned the airplane based on information available to us at the time we built the airplane. We are happy to make any changes based on an actual report from one or more pilots flying on this airplane, or better yet, the aircraft manual if you can get your hands on one.&quot;<p>The discussion usually ends there :)<p>One we get often is about why it&#x27;s possible to do a barrel roll in a jet liner in Infinite Flight. We simply point them to the video of that test pilot who did one in a 707 ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sharlin</author><text>The video is filmed from a distance using a long telephoto lens, compressing the perspective. The 2011 movie <i>Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy</i> used the trick in a similar scene to a great dramatic effect [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;this-dramatic-shot-was-done-with-a-2000mm-lens&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;25&#x2F;this-dramatic-shot-was-done...</a></text></comment> |
32,974,235 | 32,970,703 | 1 | 3 | 32,969,692 | train | <story><title>On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have survived into modern times</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/86995.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bhauer</author><text>&gt; <i>A handful of grumpy old gits know that if you pick the right languages, and the right tools, you can build something to replace this 2nd level system in the same types of tools as the first level system, and that you don’t need all the fancy scaling infrastructure because one modern box can support a million concurrent users no problem, and a few such boxes can support tens of hundreds of millions of them, all in something in the corner of one room, with an uptime of decades and no need for any cloud.</i><p>I suppose I am a grumpy old git, then, although I did not think of myself that way until recently. In the past decade or two, I&#x27;ve seen computer science lose its collective appreciation of the staggering potential of hardware. This has steadily resulted in software being built with tremendously over-engineered, hyper-complicated, cloud-first architectures that barely match the throughput of a single box running a high-performance platform (and for the record, &quot;high performance&quot; can still be relatively ergonomic via Java, C#, Rust, and so on).<p>The scale of hardware, clock cycles, bits per second of bandwidth, etc., being squandered on modern cloud-first highly complicated architectures boggles the mind.<p>I fear there is no strength behind any pendulum swing back to architectural simplicity, appreciation of the available capacity of hardware and how to use it, and local-first.</text></comment> | <story><title>On the strange joys of mainframe OSes that have survived into modern times</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/86995.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>magic_hamster</author><text>This actually got me fairly curious as to what the big difference is between mainframes and regular ol&#x27; micros. I don&#x27;t think I ever used a proper mainframe, and I honestly wanted to know more. The author keeps building up to this massively different, otherworldly system, and then just finishes without ever answering.<p>I did feel some contempt towards certain developers (who dare call themselves software engineers) and there was definitely an &quot;old man yelling at cloud&quot; undercurrent. If only I could learn something of merit, that would have been worth it.<p>So I guess it&#x27;s up to us plebs to go and see what makes mainframes so different. How the &quot;weird&quot; custom architectures work. What&#x27;s it like to work on one and write code for it.</text></comment> |
20,508,393 | 20,507,510 | 1 | 2 | 20,505,867 | train | <story><title>I Took Apple To Court And Won, Twice</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/cgi7ro/i_took_apple_to_court_and_won_twice_water_damaged/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeonM</author><text>&gt; Maybe it&#x27;s because I live in Silicon Valley<p>That may be the reason. I live in the Netherlands and I have had consistent terrible experience with Apple store repair service.<p>&gt; It took three weeks, but in the end I basically had a new laptop, except the screen.<p>For professional use, that is just unacceptable. If you rely on your computer for income, you can&#x27;t wait that long.<p>That is the reason why any Apple product will never be &#x27;pro&#x27;. Regardless of how nice the hardware is, if it breaks I need a repair or replacement device <i>immediately</i>. IFAIK Apple does not offer such service (unless you have &gt;50 devices).<p>Other brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) offer on-site same day repair service. They send someone to your location and if they can&#x27;t fix it on site, they&#x27;ll give you a replacement&#x2F;loaner. For me, that service is well worth the cost. If only Apple would offer that.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Maybe it&#x27;s because I live in Silicon Valley, but my repair experience with Apple has been quite different. I took my six year old laptop in for a recall on the video card, which required a logic board replacement. They did that at no charge. In the process, they broke the power unit, so they replaced that and my six year old battery, both at no charge. They also replaced the top case at no charge while doing the second repair because they said they damaged it during repair. I never even saw the damage or had to complain.<p>It took three weeks, but in the end I basically had a new laptop, except the screen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>statictype</author><text>Ditto.<p>Three weeks ago my Macbook Pro&#x27;s keyboard (with the butterfly design) became completely unusable after 6 months of being mostly unusable.<p>Not only did the authorized service provider (Apple doesn&#x27;t have its own presence where I live) take more than a week to get it replaced, they refused to do it under warranty because there were some scratch marks on the side of the laptop.<p>They told me to contact Apple Support if I wanted to dispute that.<p>After spending 6 days haggling with Apple Support and being bounced from agent to agent, I was finally told that they cannot replace under the existing Apple Care warranty because of the scratches on the side.<p>I then asked them to give me, in writing, a note explaining that they were denying me service under warranty for the keyboard issue.<p>That seems to have done the trick.
Two days later she called back and said they re-reviewed my case and were going to fix it under warranty.<p>I spent almost 2 weeks without the laptop while fighting with Apple over a pre-existing design flaw in a laptop that had extended Apple Care.</text></comment> | <story><title>I Took Apple To Court And Won, Twice</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/cgi7ro/i_took_apple_to_court_and_won_twice_water_damaged/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LeonM</author><text>&gt; Maybe it&#x27;s because I live in Silicon Valley<p>That may be the reason. I live in the Netherlands and I have had consistent terrible experience with Apple store repair service.<p>&gt; It took three weeks, but in the end I basically had a new laptop, except the screen.<p>For professional use, that is just unacceptable. If you rely on your computer for income, you can&#x27;t wait that long.<p>That is the reason why any Apple product will never be &#x27;pro&#x27;. Regardless of how nice the hardware is, if it breaks I need a repair or replacement device <i>immediately</i>. IFAIK Apple does not offer such service (unless you have &gt;50 devices).<p>Other brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) offer on-site same day repair service. They send someone to your location and if they can&#x27;t fix it on site, they&#x27;ll give you a replacement&#x2F;loaner. For me, that service is well worth the cost. If only Apple would offer that.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Maybe it&#x27;s because I live in Silicon Valley, but my repair experience with Apple has been quite different. I took my six year old laptop in for a recall on the video card, which required a logic board replacement. They did that at no charge. In the process, they broke the power unit, so they replaced that and my six year old battery, both at no charge. They also replaced the top case at no charge while doing the second repair because they said they damaged it during repair. I never even saw the damage or had to complain.<p>It took three weeks, but in the end I basically had a new laptop, except the screen.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zenexer</author><text>&gt; For professional use, that is just unacceptable. If you rely on your computer for income, you can&#x27;t wait that long.<p>This may be an unpopular opinion, and I don&#x27;t mean to sound dismissive or suggest that waiting 3 weeks is normal, but I do think it is incredibly unprofessional to rely on a single device like that for work. If it&#x27;s truly an indispensable part of your job, you should have a backup--that goes for anything, not just computers. It could be a 10-year-old hand-me-down or a cheapo Chromebook, but you should have a backup plan.<p>&gt; Other brands (HP, Dell, Lenovo) offer on-site same day repair service. They send someone to your location and if they can&#x27;t fix it on site, they&#x27;ll give you a replacement&#x2F;loaner. For me, that service is well worth the cost. If only Apple would offer that.<p>When I was first getting started as a programmer, I made most of my income by doing tech support, rather than actual programming. A large percentage of the cases were people hiring me to deal with the likes of HP, Dell, and Lenovo because their &quot;on-site same day repair services&quot; were absolute garbage about 50% of the time. You could get a laptop with a DoA hard drive, but they&#x27;d refuse to replace it unless it failed their specific check, which was always inadequate. It was normal to argue with them for 6+ hours about it. You could put a fresh drive in to demonstrate that the issue was gone, but they&#x27;d still refuse to do anything. It wouldn&#x27;t matter if it BSODed consistently with a fresh installation on their drive but not on the drive I was using for testing, or if the SMART results were the worst I&#x27;d ever seen--no test fail, no replacement.<p>&gt; IFAIK Apple does not offer such service (unless you have &gt;50 devices).<p>It varies widely depending on location. If you go to a large, busy Apple store, they tend to have a lot more parts on-hand; it doesn&#x27;t need to be in Silicon Valley as long as it&#x27;s big. If they need to order parts, they&#x27;ll give you the option to hold onto your device until the parts arrive. I&#x27;ve gotten apologies when a repair took longer than 24 hours. I tend to prefer the Microsoft store method, though: when I&#x27;ve had issues with Surface-series devices, they&#x27;ve never attempted to repair it there; they just hand me a new one. It&#x27;s hard to beat that. (I guess Apple&#x27;s approach is better if you need to recover your data, but I never save anything valuable on a single device.)</text></comment> |
11,522,931 | 11,522,163 | 1 | 2 | 11,521,009 | train | <story><title>GoBGP: BGP Implemented in Go</title><url>https://github.com/osrg/gobgp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The viewpoint you were espousing was, if I understand correctly: I should replace all my existing services with Go&#x2F;Rust equivalents, unless they handle packets directly.<p>My objection is that you are advocating this in the same narrow-focused way that people advocate node with npm, python with pip, ruby with gem: little or no cooperation with the whole system is available yet. This is perfectly fine from the point of view of a group which does one thing, but not from my point of view, running large numbers of diverse systems.<p>When libfoo gets updated, all N packages on the system which use it via dynamic linking gets the benefit as soon as the packages restart. This is highly desirable.<p>If Go-libfoo is updated, each of those N packages needs to be rebuilt, but I don&#x27;t have a programmatic way of finding out.<p>If there are N teams developing those packages, some of them will be faster off the mark than others, and now I have a window of vulnerability that is larger than the one I had when I could update libfoo on day 1.<p>You have multiplied my workload. I won&#x27;t do that without a really good reason.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>No. I&#x27;ve written SNMP from scratch in Ruby, Python, and C++. DER ASN.1 for X.509 might be treacherous (simply in the sense that any mistake you make at all will be ruinous), but that&#x27;s just not the case for SNMP&#x27;s BER.<p>The whole <i>point</i> of using Rust or Go instead of C is that the &quot;peril&quot; of implementing things like ASN.1&#x2F;BER is pretty much eliminated.<p>As for your former point: I don&#x27;t follow. Go&#x27;s deployment infrastructure is a superset of C&#x27;s, and, if you&#x27;re a masochist, almost everything in C&#x27;s deployment toolkit is available to Go projects as well.</text></item><item><author>dsr_</author><text>...well, because of the primary shortcoming of the Go system: lack of standard infrastructure to manage the inevitable updates.<p>Let&#x27;s say I have replaced bind, unbound, ntpd, postfix, openssh, dovecot, snmpd and asterisk with Go-written equivalents. Three weeks later, there is a bug found in the standard Go TLS library.<p>My distro ships all the packages noted above, but not their Go-equivalents, so my work load now includes monitoring security-announce lists for eight different products, where before I monitored the security-announce list for my distro.<p>I need to be able to rebuild all eight systems myself, rather than getting automatic package updates to my test systems, and then promoting the packages through alpha and then production. Go is nicer than some other languages about that, but it builds binaries, not packages.<p>Next:<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure you can&#x27;t build an snmpd without ASN.1 parsing, and ASN.1 parsing is the very model of a fraught and perilous splatter-fest. Will the Go ASN.1 parser be better maintained than libtasn? Maybe, maybe not. Repeat this for everything else.<p>Can these problems be solved? Sure. Are they ready right now? Not that I&#x27;m aware of. Please enlighten me, if you have good answers.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is the sort of thing Go really shines on: network and infrastructure services that would ordinarily be provided by big ugly C programs, where the latency requirements are significant but not as bad as raw packet forwarding. If your current best alternative is a C program, I&#x27;m not sure why you wouldn&#x27;t seriously consider replacing any of the following with Go (or Rust) programs:<p>* Authority DNS<p>* DNS caches<p>* ntp<p>* SMTP<p>* SSH<p>* IMAP <i>(added later)</i><p>* SNMP<p>* PBX&#x2F;Telephony<p>Fortunately, as time goes on, fewer and fewer people need to run these services at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>If the Debian people don&#x27;t want to include Go for some logistical or religious or religiously logistical reason, that&#x27;s fine with me. I don&#x27;t think people should run critical infrastructure from Debian releases --- when things go wrong, you want to be prepared to patch source on a moment&#x27;s notice, rather than waiting for the upstream synchronization dance --- but hardly anyone seems to agree with me on that, either.<p>But I notice you didn&#x27;t respond to my SNMP point, which is disappointing, because I was hoping that at least some fake Internet points might accrue to my otherwise fruitless efforts at implementing SNMP from scratch <i>three separate fucking times</i>. Can I at least be rewarded for that by winning a dumb message board argument!?<p>There&#x27;s even a cool trick to implementing BER encoders I could have talked about!<p>Instead, it looks like the thread is going to be about dynamic versus static linkinnzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.</text></comment> | <story><title>GoBGP: BGP Implemented in Go</title><url>https://github.com/osrg/gobgp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsr_</author><text>The viewpoint you were espousing was, if I understand correctly: I should replace all my existing services with Go&#x2F;Rust equivalents, unless they handle packets directly.<p>My objection is that you are advocating this in the same narrow-focused way that people advocate node with npm, python with pip, ruby with gem: little or no cooperation with the whole system is available yet. This is perfectly fine from the point of view of a group which does one thing, but not from my point of view, running large numbers of diverse systems.<p>When libfoo gets updated, all N packages on the system which use it via dynamic linking gets the benefit as soon as the packages restart. This is highly desirable.<p>If Go-libfoo is updated, each of those N packages needs to be rebuilt, but I don&#x27;t have a programmatic way of finding out.<p>If there are N teams developing those packages, some of them will be faster off the mark than others, and now I have a window of vulnerability that is larger than the one I had when I could update libfoo on day 1.<p>You have multiplied my workload. I won&#x27;t do that without a really good reason.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>No. I&#x27;ve written SNMP from scratch in Ruby, Python, and C++. DER ASN.1 for X.509 might be treacherous (simply in the sense that any mistake you make at all will be ruinous), but that&#x27;s just not the case for SNMP&#x27;s BER.<p>The whole <i>point</i> of using Rust or Go instead of C is that the &quot;peril&quot; of implementing things like ASN.1&#x2F;BER is pretty much eliminated.<p>As for your former point: I don&#x27;t follow. Go&#x27;s deployment infrastructure is a superset of C&#x27;s, and, if you&#x27;re a masochist, almost everything in C&#x27;s deployment toolkit is available to Go projects as well.</text></item><item><author>dsr_</author><text>...well, because of the primary shortcoming of the Go system: lack of standard infrastructure to manage the inevitable updates.<p>Let&#x27;s say I have replaced bind, unbound, ntpd, postfix, openssh, dovecot, snmpd and asterisk with Go-written equivalents. Three weeks later, there is a bug found in the standard Go TLS library.<p>My distro ships all the packages noted above, but not their Go-equivalents, so my work load now includes monitoring security-announce lists for eight different products, where before I monitored the security-announce list for my distro.<p>I need to be able to rebuild all eight systems myself, rather than getting automatic package updates to my test systems, and then promoting the packages through alpha and then production. Go is nicer than some other languages about that, but it builds binaries, not packages.<p>Next:<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure you can&#x27;t build an snmpd without ASN.1 parsing, and ASN.1 parsing is the very model of a fraught and perilous splatter-fest. Will the Go ASN.1 parser be better maintained than libtasn? Maybe, maybe not. Repeat this for everything else.<p>Can these problems be solved? Sure. Are they ready right now? Not that I&#x27;m aware of. Please enlighten me, if you have good answers.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is the sort of thing Go really shines on: network and infrastructure services that would ordinarily be provided by big ugly C programs, where the latency requirements are significant but not as bad as raw packet forwarding. If your current best alternative is a C program, I&#x27;m not sure why you wouldn&#x27;t seriously consider replacing any of the following with Go (or Rust) programs:<p>* Authority DNS<p>* DNS caches<p>* ntp<p>* SMTP<p>* SSH<p>* IMAP <i>(added later)</i><p>* SNMP<p>* PBX&#x2F;Telephony<p>Fortunately, as time goes on, fewer and fewer people need to run these services at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickpsecurity</author><text>He gave you a really good reason: knocking out most severe, low-level errors in high-usage, critical services. You&#x27;ll put work in for the risky ones. Why not the low-risk alternatives...</text></comment> |
30,091,380 | 30,090,338 | 1 | 2 | 30,088,446 | train | <story><title>UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubs-buy-us-wealth-management-specialist-wealthfront-14-bln-2022-01-26/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lzrs</author><text>I&#x27;ve been researching robo-advisors quite a bit recently. They are really interesting and innovative.<p>I&#x27;ll preface by saying that I have been talking to a lot of financial planners (at top-tier institutions). They basically set you up with a good set of ETFs, hedge funds, etc. and rebalance occasionally. Sometimes they do tax-loss harvesting. They also provide a few other nice little services. But at the end of the day, their fees are over 1% unless you have an ultra high net-worth.<p>In comparison, Wealthfront can automate huge strategies for a fraction of the cost (0.25%). For example:<p>- Direct Indexing (invest in an index by buying the stocks directly instead of a fund)<p>- Automatic investing, rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting (including TLHing individual stocks within an index when paired with direct indexing)<p>- Coordinating trades between retirement and taxable accounts for optimal tax savings<p>- Smart beta (a custom weighted indexing algorithm)<p>Yes, a financial planner can do all of this (although most don&#x27;t). But when they do, they just use automated software to do it. It would be impossible to implement these strategies manually. So why even go with a financial planner when Wealthfront does the same thing, but better&#x2F;cheaper?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxclark</author><text>I started with and was a Wealthfront customer for many years. I&#x27;m appreciative and credit them with starting my education and understanding on investing.<p>What caused me to leave?<p>- They aren&#x27;t global portfolio aware. Bonds belong in tax advantaged accounts, then taxable. If you&#x27;ve maxed out your 401k&#x2F;IRAs in Bonds that $ as an absolute percentage should be accounted for in your taxable portfolio construction.<p>- They don&#x27;t let you opt out of asset classes. Aka I don&#x27;t want additional REITs because I have RE exposure already.<p>- They overly hype tax loss harvesting. It&#x27;s good to have, but a byproduct of portfolio management not the goal.<p>- They launched and pushed risky products as a way to increase their fees.<p>Once you understand what&#x27;s going on under the hood this isn&#x27;t complicated to manage yourself with a few ETFs&#x2F;MFs.<p>(The direct indexing is awesome and would love to have that back)</text></comment> | <story><title>UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubs-buy-us-wealth-management-specialist-wealthfront-14-bln-2022-01-26/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lzrs</author><text>I&#x27;ve been researching robo-advisors quite a bit recently. They are really interesting and innovative.<p>I&#x27;ll preface by saying that I have been talking to a lot of financial planners (at top-tier institutions). They basically set you up with a good set of ETFs, hedge funds, etc. and rebalance occasionally. Sometimes they do tax-loss harvesting. They also provide a few other nice little services. But at the end of the day, their fees are over 1% unless you have an ultra high net-worth.<p>In comparison, Wealthfront can automate huge strategies for a fraction of the cost (0.25%). For example:<p>- Direct Indexing (invest in an index by buying the stocks directly instead of a fund)<p>- Automatic investing, rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting (including TLHing individual stocks within an index when paired with direct indexing)<p>- Coordinating trades between retirement and taxable accounts for optimal tax savings<p>- Smart beta (a custom weighted indexing algorithm)<p>Yes, a financial planner can do all of this (although most don&#x27;t). But when they do, they just use automated software to do it. It would be impossible to implement these strategies manually. So why even go with a financial planner when Wealthfront does the same thing, but better&#x2F;cheaper?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mushufasa</author><text>Many people who start off with Robos like Wealthfront actually leave once their net worth rises and pay more for human advisors.<p>If you need to invest a small&#x2F;decent amount of money into stocks, Robos work wonderfully. It&#x27;s a mass production angle -- good quality service at lower cost to many people; the Ford Model T of investing. Early robot just had a couple of investment options, and now there are more options but the same concept of limited choice at scale (Mustangs, Minvans, Trucks in my example)<p>Once you have estate planning and complicated tax issues, human advisors provide a lot of guidance to people that is hyper specific to you and your location &#x2F; niche, which Robos just don&#x27;t cover. Wealthfront, for example, won&#x27;t arbitrate a dispute between beneficiaries of a family trust.<p>I think lawyers are a good comparison here. If you need some standard cookie-cutter incorporation docs, there&#x27;s a bunch of websites where you can get some core documents for free or a few hundred dollars. But if you&#x27;re afraid of making the wrong choice, or if you&#x27;re in a situation that goes beyond the common scenarios (like M&amp;A), then you hire a lawyer to provide you personalized advice.</text></comment> |
10,663,902 | 10,663,398 | 1 | 3 | 10,652,721 | train | <story><title>The 100-Hour Rule</title><url>http://codingvc.com/the-100-hour-rule/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mightybyte</author><text>I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat &quot;while &#x27;100&#x27; is an easy-to-remember round number, it&#x27;s just an approximation&quot;, but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading.<p>The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things:<p>1. The particular activity<p>2. The abilities of the person<p>3. How much competence you consider &quot;basic&quot;<p>I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.)<p>Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of &quot;basic&quot;.<p>The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can&#x27;t possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you&#x27;re shooting for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lpolovets</author><text>(I&#x27;m the post&#x27;s author.)<p>I fully agree with you: the title is a sound byte and somewhat imprecise. Creating good titles has been an ongoing struggle for me. As an engineer, I want to be precise; as a writer, I want more readers. What I&#x27;ve learned over time is that something like &quot;The 100-hour rule&quot; performs way better than something like &quot;the speed of knowledge acquisition decelerates rapidly.&quot;<p>Hopefully the post&#x27;s gist is clear: it takes a long time to become a true expert&#x2F;master, but much less time to surpass everyone who has zero knowledge about a field.</text></comment> | <story><title>The 100-Hour Rule</title><url>http://codingvc.com/the-100-hour-rule/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mightybyte</author><text>I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat &quot;while &#x27;100&#x27; is an easy-to-remember round number, it&#x27;s just an approximation&quot;, but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading.<p>The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things:<p>1. The particular activity<p>2. The abilities of the person<p>3. How much competence you consider &quot;basic&quot;<p>I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.)<p>Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of &quot;basic&quot;.<p>The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can&#x27;t possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you&#x27;re shooting for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>credit_guy</author><text>Very insightful comment, thank you for posting it.
Let me put a positive spin on it. While the unconditional variance is so large that the statement is meaningless, if you condition on your 3 factors, I think you can obtain a pretty good predictor.<p>For example, for the combination 1. activity = running, 2. person = world champion in cycling, 3. competence = sub-3-hour marathon, then you would expect the time to be around 100 hours. Lance Armstrong fits this combination. How long he trained, we can&#x27;t know for sure, but the first google hit for (a free) marathon training program at the elite level [1] shows 85h total running time.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yourmarathontrainingplan.com&#x2F;free-training-programs&#x2F;elite&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yourmarathontrainingplan.com&#x2F;free-training-progra...</a></text></comment> |
14,454,257 | 14,454,141 | 1 | 2 | 14,453,344 | train | <story><title>Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrettShear/status/869932977492459520</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cshelton</author><text>All these ICO&#x27;s have been avoiding any SEC regulation regarding private security sales by claiming the tokens are just a method to use&#x2F;exchange services on their platform, not as an investment.<p>However, when ICO&#x27;s like this one keep happening where only 100 &quot;accounts&quot; own 99% of the ICO offering, you pretty much lose that argument of the tokens only being there for use of the platform. It&#x27;s a private security sale, and I only see one way this will end. The SEC will make a case out of one of the ICO&#x27;s 100%. They do not take advertising to unaccredited investors lightly.<p>My only suggestion, if you are involved in any way with an ICO (developer, investor on the team pre-ICO, etc.), either get out of the U.S. now and&#x2F;or make sure all operations are happening outside the U.S. I was almost involved with a company doing essentially what these ICO&#x27;s are doing (not blockchain&#x2F;crypto currencies), and fortunately I figured it out before being involved, but it did not end pretty for them. Like the IRS, the SEC&#x2F;others will come down hard, not a matter of if at this point, it&#x27;s when and who gets the beating first. They love making cases out of someone to set precedent.<p>With the general public playing into an overbought token market fueled by Asian countries for the most part, the regulators&#x2F;SEC will come down extremely hard on this.<p>I think investing in Ethereum&#x2F;Bitcoin is fine, just know what you&#x27;re doing, record your cost basis for when you bought it. And seeing first hand what the IRS does to people who avoid paying taxes, just make your life easy, when you exchange back to a currency that is considered a currency by the IRS, just pay your capital gains on it and move on with life. The IRS will catch up and many people will go to jail for tax evasion. Don&#x27;t be one of them. Obviously, all this only pertains to the U.S..<p>Also for fun, if you really want to see the hysteria around the Ethereum price right now, check out r&#x2F;ethtrader&#x2F; or even the Ethereum FB group. People are throwing their entire savings into this while not knowing anything about it besides everyone in the group hyping it up amongst themselves. It&#x27;s really sad. Ethereum is now actively pumped heavily on MLM sites&#x2F;blogs. It&#x27;s beyond gross. I believe Ethereum is an amazing project and am worried that this hype fueled hysteria, once it collapses on itself, will give Ethereum a bad reputation. It is a great protocol.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hal9000xp</author><text>I think the notion of accredited investor is very discriminatory to small investors. It&#x27;s basically says - if you already wealthy then you have an access to attractive investment opportunities with huge upside (and of course, huge risk), if you are just a middle class man then stay where you are (since your investment options with huge upside are severely limited and you don&#x27;t have enough capital to make sense from investing in index).<p>The better version of requirements for accredited investors would be some sort of exam (hard enough to make sure you have solid knowledge about financial markets, financial instruments and risk&#x2F;return relationship).</text></comment> | <story><title>Brave raises $35M in 1 min with ICO</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrettShear/status/869932977492459520</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cshelton</author><text>All these ICO&#x27;s have been avoiding any SEC regulation regarding private security sales by claiming the tokens are just a method to use&#x2F;exchange services on their platform, not as an investment.<p>However, when ICO&#x27;s like this one keep happening where only 100 &quot;accounts&quot; own 99% of the ICO offering, you pretty much lose that argument of the tokens only being there for use of the platform. It&#x27;s a private security sale, and I only see one way this will end. The SEC will make a case out of one of the ICO&#x27;s 100%. They do not take advertising to unaccredited investors lightly.<p>My only suggestion, if you are involved in any way with an ICO (developer, investor on the team pre-ICO, etc.), either get out of the U.S. now and&#x2F;or make sure all operations are happening outside the U.S. I was almost involved with a company doing essentially what these ICO&#x27;s are doing (not blockchain&#x2F;crypto currencies), and fortunately I figured it out before being involved, but it did not end pretty for them. Like the IRS, the SEC&#x2F;others will come down hard, not a matter of if at this point, it&#x27;s when and who gets the beating first. They love making cases out of someone to set precedent.<p>With the general public playing into an overbought token market fueled by Asian countries for the most part, the regulators&#x2F;SEC will come down extremely hard on this.<p>I think investing in Ethereum&#x2F;Bitcoin is fine, just know what you&#x27;re doing, record your cost basis for when you bought it. And seeing first hand what the IRS does to people who avoid paying taxes, just make your life easy, when you exchange back to a currency that is considered a currency by the IRS, just pay your capital gains on it and move on with life. The IRS will catch up and many people will go to jail for tax evasion. Don&#x27;t be one of them. Obviously, all this only pertains to the U.S..<p>Also for fun, if you really want to see the hysteria around the Ethereum price right now, check out r&#x2F;ethtrader&#x2F; or even the Ethereum FB group. People are throwing their entire savings into this while not knowing anything about it besides everyone in the group hyping it up amongst themselves. It&#x27;s really sad. Ethereum is now actively pumped heavily on MLM sites&#x2F;blogs. It&#x27;s beyond gross. I believe Ethereum is an amazing project and am worried that this hype fueled hysteria, once it collapses on itself, will give Ethereum a bad reputation. It is a great protocol.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seibelj</author><text>But if you own a token, you own nothing in the company, no equity, no promises, no contract signed, you don&#x27;t have any right to any profits and Brave can say tomorrow that all the tokens are worthless. It&#x27;s not so straight-forward that they raised investment, really they sold $35mil of a product. But IANAL, and you could easily be right, I&#x27;m just saying it isn&#x27;t so cut and dry.</text></comment> |
6,348,012 | 6,347,974 | 1 | 2 | 6,347,848 | train | <story><title>Why hardware development is hard: Verilog is weird</title><url>http://danluu.github.io/blog/2013/09/07/why-hardware-development-is-hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>austinz</author><text>The problem is that Verilog&#x2F;VHDL isn&#x27;t a &quot;programming language&quot; in the sense that C, Lisp, Haskell, or Python are programming languages. So approaching them with a programming language mindset is asking for a lot of pain and misunderstanding.<p>HDLs like Verilog and VHDL describe digital circuits, not algorithms and instructions for manipulating data. If C code is akin to instructions for getting to a grocery store and shopping for vegetables, HDL code is describing the blueprint of a house textually. Maybe the solution is building some ultra high level abstraction that can somehow encompass both problem domains, but given how difficult hardware synthesis with existing HDLs is right now I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;ll happen anytime soon. And the fact that logic takes so long to synthesize and simulate really has little to do with Verilog&#x27;s deficiencies; if anything it&#x27;s a limitation of the register-transfer level abstraction that&#x27;s currently used to design digital hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwise0</author><text>The author touches on this, when he says:<p>&quot;To write Verilog that will produce correct hardware, you have to first picture the hardware you want to produce.&quot;<p>I think that&#x27;s the crux of the issue. Most digital designers <i>do</i> have a picture of the actual hardware, as a block diagram, in their heads. When I write RTL, the process is very front-loaded: I spend hours with a pen and paper before I even sit down at the keyboard. The algorithms in question are only a small part of the work of building functioning hardware; where when designing software, I would let the compiler make decisions about how long it expects certain operations to take, and what to inline where, these are all things that I plot &quot;by hand&quot; when building hardware, before I even open a text editor.<p>I think, then, that the author kind of misses the point when he goes on to say that &quot;you have to figure out how to describe it in this weird C-like [...] language&quot; -- to be honest, that&#x27;s the same for all types of programming: when I go home and write C, I have to take abstract concepts and express them in this weird C-like language, too! Arcane syntax is irritating, but is not something fundamentally &#x27;hard&#x27; (unless it&#x27;s <i>too</i> arcane, anyway).<p>By the way -- I also often wondered &quot;why the hell does synthesis take so long?&quot;. I originally assumed it was because Xilinx&#x27;s (and Synopsys&#x27;s, and ...) software engineers were terrible and had no idea how to write efficient programs. This might be true, but I now believe is probably not the majority of it; if &quot;why&#x27;s it taking so long?&quot; is a question that interests you, I recommend looking into the VLSI CAD tools class on Coursera.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/vlsicad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;course&#x2F;vlsicad</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Why hardware development is hard: Verilog is weird</title><url>http://danluu.github.io/blog/2013/09/07/why-hardware-development-is-hard/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>austinz</author><text>The problem is that Verilog&#x2F;VHDL isn&#x27;t a &quot;programming language&quot; in the sense that C, Lisp, Haskell, or Python are programming languages. So approaching them with a programming language mindset is asking for a lot of pain and misunderstanding.<p>HDLs like Verilog and VHDL describe digital circuits, not algorithms and instructions for manipulating data. If C code is akin to instructions for getting to a grocery store and shopping for vegetables, HDL code is describing the blueprint of a house textually. Maybe the solution is building some ultra high level abstraction that can somehow encompass both problem domains, but given how difficult hardware synthesis with existing HDLs is right now I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;ll happen anytime soon. And the fact that logic takes so long to synthesize and simulate really has little to do with Verilog&#x27;s deficiencies; if anything it&#x27;s a limitation of the register-transfer level abstraction that&#x27;s currently used to design digital hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sliverstorm</author><text><i>given how difficult hardware synthesis with existing HDLs is right now I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;ll happen anytime soon</i><p>Synthesis sometimes feels like a great blind spot in the hierarchy of abstractions. It is hard, critical, and yet appears to be developed only by niche players.<p><i>the fact that logic takes so long to synthesize and simulate really has little to do with Verilog&#x27;s deficiencies</i><p>IMO it has everything to do with the open-ended nature of synthesis. When you compile software, it&#x27;s very procedural. You have a linear chain or network of paths. You construct it. You improve on it where you can. Hardware on the other hand- you have a cloud described in RTL, you construct it. That&#x27;s not hard. But when you get to improving it? It&#x27;s like the packing problem, with N elements, and to make things better every element can be substituted with a variety of different shapes!</text></comment> |
30,776,952 | 30,776,603 | 1 | 2 | 30,739,866 | train | <story><title>Verilog Is Weird</title><url>https://danluu.com/why-hardware-development-is-hard/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Taniwha</author><text>I think that really the hard part of learning to design chip stuff really is other stuff - understanding where&#x2F;how to use storage (flops) and combinatorial logic - and simultaneity: how to handle things that happen at the same time.<p>Initially you really need a strong understanding of digital logic (not a language), in particular pipelines.<p>Once you have that stuff in your head you can turn to verilog (or vhdl or whatever) and learn how to map these ideas into the language<p>In System Verilog it&#x27;s easy this is the only way to reliably make synthesisable flops:<p><pre><code> bit a, b;
always @(posedge clk)
a &lt;= b;
</code></pre>
And you can make combinatorial logic 2 ways:<p><pre><code> wire c; bit d;
assign c = a&amp;b;
always @(*)
d = a&amp;b;
</code></pre>
They&#x27;ll make the same gates, notice the use of = vs &lt;=, you typically use the always when you want something more complex<p>&quot;always X&quot; just means loop waiting for X, &#x27;*&#x27; means &quot;anything important changes&quot;<p>That&#x27;s it, the most important concepts you have to get your head around, everything else is just this at scale - also please ignore the async reset in the &quot;Verilog is Weird&quot; example - they tend to be timing nightmares in the real world, use a synchronous reset instead.<p>One more thing - Verilog is an early object oriented language - modules are objects - but they are static, the entire design can be elaborated at compile (or synthesis) time - why? because you can&#x27;t new or malloc more gates on the fly on a real chip - almost everything in verilog is static by design (it does support local variables in functions but anything that&#x27;s vaguely recursive wont make gates in synthesis)</text></comment> | <story><title>Verilog Is Weird</title><url>https://danluu.com/why-hardware-development-is-hard/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tails4e</author><text>Any idea when this was written? It seems a bit out dated, and I&#x27;m especially surprised at the mention of hardware companies not using linters, that seems insane to me. Lint, Logic Equalivance, CDC, etc are all absolutely required sanity checks on hardware design, irrespective of the language. Also SystemVerilog is quite esperessive. I definitely agree Verilog has many pitfalls you basically get used to and know to avoid, but I don&#x27;t agree that knowing in your head the hardware that will be generated is a bad thing. Knowing how the hardware will be constructed from your code is key to getting it running at 4Ghz instead of 100Mhz. What your code will infer could be less or more area efficient, etc. Modern synthesis tools do help map sometimes inefficient code to the right hardware, but still knowing what it should create is a positive thing.</text></comment> |
32,593,279 | 32,593,231 | 1 | 2 | 32,592,492 | train | <story><title>Lisp can be “hard” real time [pdf] (2000)</title><url>https://franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/jlugm00/conference/Talk14_takeuchi.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willis936</author><text>Okay, now prove that your program written in Lisp will not miss cycles regardless of the data sent to it for at least the length of the mission. The issue is in being able to prove a program is deterministic. Wildcards like schedulers and garbage collectors sharing resources with code that needs to be real time are notoriously difficult to properly set bounds on behavior.<p>If you aren&#x27;t doing that then it&#x27;s not hard real time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajross</author><text>That&#x27;s... not really a correct description of &quot;hard real time&quot;. All system architectures have performance edge cases. The idea of a &quot;hard&quot; real time system is that those be known and fully characterized, and that they can be mapped to equally-fully-characterized application requirements. That way you know all the failure modes ahead of time.<p>Not all aspects of a real time system need latency control like you&#x27;re imagining. It&#x27;s entirely possible to imagine, say, an aircraft autopilot or self-driving system (something that needs ~100ms round-trip latencies to approximate a human pilot) being implemented using a garbage collected runtime, as long as you can guarantee those GC pauses are acceptably small (lots of such systems exist).<p>The same would be a very hard ask of a piston engine controller, where the timing needs are closer to 100us. Nonetheless the (again to pick an arbitrary example) logging&#x2F;telemetry subsystem of that engine controller doesn&#x27;t need that. So as long as you have an OS that can partition the engine tasks from the low priority stuff in a reliable way, you can <i>still</i> imagine a Lisp&#x2F;Java&#x2F;.NET&#x2F;Go&#x2F;whatever runtime being used there.<p>Real time is a design philosophy, not a tech stack.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lisp can be “hard” real time [pdf] (2000)</title><url>https://franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/jlugm00/conference/Talk14_takeuchi.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willis936</author><text>Okay, now prove that your program written in Lisp will not miss cycles regardless of the data sent to it for at least the length of the mission. The issue is in being able to prove a program is deterministic. Wildcards like schedulers and garbage collectors sharing resources with code that needs to be real time are notoriously difficult to properly set bounds on behavior.<p>If you aren&#x27;t doing that then it&#x27;s not hard real time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kaba0</author><text>Why would it be hard? If anything a fat runtime makes it easier - see hard-real time JVMs used in military tech.<p>Hard real time is not too hard in general as it is usually combined with quite low performance-requirements. Boundedness itself is the important property, as opposed to soft-real time which is much more finicky (video games, audio).</text></comment> |
18,752,719 | 18,752,833 | 1 | 2 | 18,751,049 | train | <story><title>If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/#2a1c244a121c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CptFribble</author><text>When you consider the whole life cycle start to finish, nuclear power is the second safest in terms of deaths per terawatt-hour produced, only following hydroelectric power. That also includes every nuclear disaster ever.<p>Solar energy is great, we need more of it, and I think the long-term future of power includes a microwave transmission solar station at one of the Lagrange points.<p>However, when you look at the total externalities, nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest form of power that we could use in the medium term.<p>Except that everyone is afraid of it, and no one wants to spend the money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jnordt</author><text>True - however if you consider the true lifecycle from start to end (including construction costs, and decomissioning) nuclear is one of the most expensive power sources.<p>The costs for proper decomissioning of a nuclear plant and safe storage of the used materials are excluded in most analysis, as the time and cost horizon is so large.<p>On Solar Panels: there are some very interesting projects by large environmental service providers underway that use high pressure water or very high temperatures, to separate the glass from metal frame.<p>I think a similar hurdle are carbon fibres, you can&#x27;t burn or shred them (carcinogenic micro fibres).<p>There are some interesting projects that try to clean and reuse the fibres through some kind of chemical baths..but most of the old e.g. wind turbines are just stored at a giant wind turbine graveyard right know.<p>It&#x27;s a fascinating field!</text></comment> | <story><title>If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/#2a1c244a121c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CptFribble</author><text>When you consider the whole life cycle start to finish, nuclear power is the second safest in terms of deaths per terawatt-hour produced, only following hydroelectric power. That also includes every nuclear disaster ever.<p>Solar energy is great, we need more of it, and I think the long-term future of power includes a microwave transmission solar station at one of the Lagrange points.<p>However, when you look at the total externalities, nuclear is actually the safest and cleanest form of power that we could use in the medium term.<p>Except that everyone is afraid of it, and no one wants to spend the money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>starbeast</author><text>Globally, hydro is three times as risky as rooftop solar, there were ~171,000 dead from the Banquio Dam failure alone - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nuceng.ca&#x2F;refer&#x2F;risk&#x2F;risk.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nuceng.ca&#x2F;refer&#x2F;risk&#x2F;risk.htm</a><p>Also, I keep seeing figures for rooftop solar and not solar in general, and the risk for rooftop solar is due to the risk of working on a roof. If solar was mandated in new build and major roof repair, wherever it made sense to install it, this risk can be greatly reduced as the largest risk is during putting the scaffolding up and taking it down again.</text></comment> |
22,127,732 | 22,126,004 | 1 | 3 | 22,125,082 | train | <story><title>SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN in Los Angeles this Friday Jan 24</title><url>https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whoopdedo</author><text>Has anyone considered a hostile fork of .org? Set up an alternative root that initially mirrors PIR. Cache existing domains until their registration expires. Encourage domain owners to register with the fork using enticing terms. Like offering to rebate the cost of registering with PIR to be in both databases. Or offer much longer terms. Solicit ISPs to point their DNS to your root. Set a cut-off date that after which you&#x27;ll stop resolving new domains registered with PIR. Give the internet the ability to vote with their feet and wallets who gets to be in charge of the root.</text></comment> | <story><title>SaveDotOrg Protest at ICANN in Los Angeles this Friday Jan 24</title><url>https://savedotorg.org/index.php/savedotorg-protest-at-icann/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tsukurimashou</author><text>Are petitions any useful? Did they ever have any significant impact? I understand it can help to put some visibility on a problem that is not widely known, but in my mind I still see these websites and Facebook groups of people signing petitions left and right with nothing concrete behind them.<p>EDIT: I didn&#x27;t notice at first there was a rally, so I guess this is more than just a petition, but still I&#x27;m interested in other people opinion about petitions</text></comment> |
7,619,465 | 7,619,518 | 1 | 2 | 7,618,971 | train | <story><title>Capital Man: Thomas Piketty is economics’ biggest sensation and fiercest critic</title><url>http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apsec112</author><text>&quot;... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.&quot;<p>Whatever else you might say about inequality, &quot;unsustainable&quot; is an obvious falsehood.<p>Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured <i>radical</i> inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.<p>On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was <i>outsourced</i>; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could <i>keep for himself</i>.)<p>That&#x27;s some serious fucking inequality right there. And I&#x27;m certainly not saying it&#x27;s a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>msluyter</author><text>I would agree with the gist of your comment, which is that autarchy can be a stable equilibrium.<p>However, I don&#x27;t read Piketty as saying that inequality itself is unsustainable. Rather, inequality tends to undermine democracy. Thus, &quot;unsustainable&quot; here should be read to mean &quot;unsustainable in conjunction with our commonly held egalitarian, democratic values.&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Capital Man: Thomas Piketty is economics’ biggest sensation and fiercest critic</title><url>http://chronicle.com/article/Capital-Man/146059</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>apsec112</author><text>&quot;... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.&quot;<p>Whatever else you might say about inequality, &quot;unsustainable&quot; is an obvious falsehood.<p>Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured <i>radical</i> inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.<p>On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was <i>outsourced</i>; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could <i>keep for himself</i>.)<p>That&#x27;s some serious fucking inequality right there. And I&#x27;m certainly not saying it&#x27;s a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shoo</author><text>Regarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.antipope.org&#x2F;charlie&#x2F;blog-static&#x2F;2009&#x2F;11&#x2F;designin...</a><p>&gt; We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they&#x27;re all almost unrecognizably different.<p>&gt; So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?</text></comment> |
25,109,551 | 25,109,728 | 1 | 3 | 25,109,046 | train | <story><title>A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn’t Just Another Dimension</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/08/12/a-spacetime-surprise-time-isnt-just-another-dimension</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bArray</author><text>The way I like to think of it is like moving your hand through water in a swimming pool; the faster you try to move, the more the water (time) pushes against you. If you don&#x27;t try to move your hand at all, the water (time) has seemingly no affect on you. In this analogy the water itself is space and time is the measurement of movement resistance.<p>Of course there are nice little things to explore with this, like moving through running water, currents (localized loops), deep water (dense space), resistance on small vs large things, etc.<p>If we imagine on the small enough scale where we&#x27;re looking at single water molecules, resistance (time) doesn&#x27;t even mean too much. As long as your water is liquid, your little molecules are bouncing around in all directions, only tending towards a given direction with some probability. Otherwise each direction is near and damnit equally easy to travel in.<p>That&#x27;s my two cents anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ono-Sendai</author><text>This is not really an accurate analogy sorry.
What is really happening is that everything (atoms etc..) are made of fields in which disturbances&#x2F;patterns travel at the speed of light. When an object is moving through space, the fields have to move extra far to cover the distance through space, as well as to do the usual oscillations&#x2F;vibrations&#x2F;movements that give timing effects. This is where time dilation comes from. It&#x27;s best understood with the reflecting-mirror-as-clock thought experiment.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn’t Just Another Dimension</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/08/12/a-spacetime-surprise-time-isnt-just-another-dimension</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bArray</author><text>The way I like to think of it is like moving your hand through water in a swimming pool; the faster you try to move, the more the water (time) pushes against you. If you don&#x27;t try to move your hand at all, the water (time) has seemingly no affect on you. In this analogy the water itself is space and time is the measurement of movement resistance.<p>Of course there are nice little things to explore with this, like moving through running water, currents (localized loops), deep water (dense space), resistance on small vs large things, etc.<p>If we imagine on the small enough scale where we&#x27;re looking at single water molecules, resistance (time) doesn&#x27;t even mean too much. As long as your water is liquid, your little molecules are bouncing around in all directions, only tending towards a given direction with some probability. Otherwise each direction is near and damnit equally easy to travel in.<p>That&#x27;s my two cents anyway.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>appleflaxen</author><text>ahh. let&#x27;s call your spacetime water something that evokes these qualities...<p>&quot;ether&quot;!<p>(this is not meant to be substantive criticism of your idea; I just think it&#x27;s funny how much this sounds like the 19th century concept of ether that was abandoned)</text></comment> |
18,058,858 | 18,059,036 | 1 | 2 | 18,058,748 | train | <story><title>SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/9/24/17895332/siriusxm-pandora-acquisition-music-streaming</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chollida1</author><text>Poor Pandora and their investors. This is for about a quarter of what they were worth just 4 years ago.<p>Saddly this is almost all self inflicted.<p>While Spotify, Apple music and Google music really worked hard to get people to actually pay for the service Pandora continued to act like it was a VC backed company in hyper growth mode long after that was the case.<p>They fought with the record labels longer than most of their competitors did to their own determent and they didn&#x27;t end up getting any concessions for their extra effort.<p>And when everyone else was letting you select any music you wanted in playlist, they insisted on staying radio style only.</text></comment> | <story><title>SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/9/24/17895332/siriusxm-pandora-acquisition-music-streaming</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wil421</author><text>Cancelling Sirus is always interesteing. I always say I don’t want to pay the $90 or however much for 6 months of access. No $50 is also too high. How about $30? Ok sure I’ll pay.<p>I think Sirus only makes money off the folks who forget to cancel after the promotional period. It’s like $20 a month and I’ve forgot to do it my self for a couple months.<p>Pandora always had the best selections on their radio channels. Spotify is not as good for random radio selections. I would never pay for Pandora after having so much music available on Spotify or Apple Music.</text></comment> |
35,017,061 | 35,016,538 | 1 | 2 | 35,014,728 | train | <story><title>I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>I find the combination of using emacs daily with handwriting his books bizarre. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s that he separates the two activities, but it&#x27;s funny to go &quot;OK, I&#x27;m going to abandon the super optimized text editor I&#x27;m using to go write text for my job.&quot;</text></item><item><author>consumer451</author><text>I found this answer pretty interesting:<p>&gt; DavidGan1x<p>&gt; I seem to remember seeing the transcripts for the Baroque Cycle were all handwritten. Are you still handwriting your books and if so, what advantages do you think it has over using a computer?<p>&gt; NealStephenson<p>&gt; Mostly handwritten, yes. It&#x27;s slower, and so each sentence spends longer in the buffer before it gets written out, so first draft quality is higher.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enneff</author><text>From previous interviews I have seen him say his process for writing those books was to hand write them for the first draft and then transcribe them into emacs as part of the editing process. Seems pretty sensible to me; get the thoughts on the page without an easy way to fuss over the exact prose, and then labour over the exact structure and phrasing later.</text></comment> | <story><title>I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA</title><url>https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11h6hg5/i_am_neal_stephenson_scifi_author_geek_and_now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>I find the combination of using emacs daily with handwriting his books bizarre. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s that he separates the two activities, but it&#x27;s funny to go &quot;OK, I&#x27;m going to abandon the super optimized text editor I&#x27;m using to go write text for my job.&quot;</text></item><item><author>consumer451</author><text>I found this answer pretty interesting:<p>&gt; DavidGan1x<p>&gt; I seem to remember seeing the transcripts for the Baroque Cycle were all handwritten. Are you still handwriting your books and if so, what advantages do you think it has over using a computer?<p>&gt; NealStephenson<p>&gt; Mostly handwritten, yes. It&#x27;s slower, and so each sentence spends longer in the buffer before it gets written out, so first draft quality is higher.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ploum</author><text>I’m myself a writer, geek and my hobby is developing free software. I do every text&#x2F;blog post in Neovim, including emails with Neomutt. I do everything in console. Using the bépo layout (which is dvorak for French).<p>I write my books, my journal and my zettelkasten with an Azerty mechanical typewriter.<p>I think I do really understand his philosophy…</text></comment> |
34,814,688 | 34,813,312 | 1 | 3 | 34,800,157 | train | <story><title>A hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/revealed-disinformation-team-jorge-claim-meddling-elections-tal-hanan</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BXLE_1-1-BitIs1</author><text>US representatives and senators who spoke up against Israeli settlements tended to lose against opponents with AIPAC funding. It&#x27;s been going on for decades.<p>What we now see is an evolution into social media.<p>Al Jazeera had prepared a story on the tentacles AIPAC had into US politics, but at the time Mohammed bin Salman was making serious noises about invading Qatar,one of the reasons being Al Jazeera&#x27;s reportage.<p>The story was dropped and MbS was persuaded to back off.</text></comment> | <story><title>A hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/revealed-disinformation-team-jorge-claim-meddling-elections-tal-hanan</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r721</author><text>Another discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34803779" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34803779</a></text></comment> |
23,556,205 | 23,553,115 | 1 | 3 | 23,537,774 | train | <story><title>A grandmaster who got Twitch hooked on chess</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/hikaru-nakamura-twitch-chess</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yanu-3452</author><text>Unironically chess is an e-sport and this recent explosion is because Hikaru, Botez, Hess et al. have woken up to that idea and embraced it.<p>The best computers can easily beat the top humans just as an aimbot could beat Navi easily at CS:GO.<p>So the focus in chess has moved away from manually exploring to find optimal plays and new opening styles as was the trend in the 19th century chess rennaisance to a focus on preparation so that a player can quickly find best moves, under significant pressure, in any given match.<p>That makes it much more like a strategy game.<p>Embracing memes makes it more accessible to viewers who are used to watching hearthstone, csgo, league, dota or other esports and it&#x27;s been really fun to watch.<p>I started watching chess on twitch a while ago during the Tata steel tournament and I thought back then it would quickly grow if they focused their commentary on casual level viewers and it&#x27;s been fantastic to have been proved correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyBelow</author><text>&gt;So the focus in chess has moved away from manually exploring to find optimal plays and new opening styles as was the trend in the 19th century chess rennaisance to a focus on preparation so that a player can quickly find best moves, under significant pressure, in any given match.<p>There is a certain skill level, which I want to say is somewhere around 1400 to 1500 but it has been over a decade so don&#x27;t quote me on that, where most the players at that level seem to focus on memorizing openings.
It ended up being what separates them from the players a one to two hundred points lower. This leaves them vulnerable to a bit of a hack, as using a non-standard opening can completely remove any usefulness of their memorized openings. It almost disorients them and makes it much more likely for them to make a mistake that can then overcome the disadvantage of such a non-standard opening. I loved playing in this area as I hated memorizing openings so I just used non-standard openings to not to avoid having to. Eventually I hit the ranking where players were good enough to take advantage of my non-standard opening more than any advantage from disorienting them and I quit playing because the only option to advance would&#x27;ve been to go back and memorize openings.</text></comment> | <story><title>A grandmaster who got Twitch hooked on chess</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/hikaru-nakamura-twitch-chess</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Yanu-3452</author><text>Unironically chess is an e-sport and this recent explosion is because Hikaru, Botez, Hess et al. have woken up to that idea and embraced it.<p>The best computers can easily beat the top humans just as an aimbot could beat Navi easily at CS:GO.<p>So the focus in chess has moved away from manually exploring to find optimal plays and new opening styles as was the trend in the 19th century chess rennaisance to a focus on preparation so that a player can quickly find best moves, under significant pressure, in any given match.<p>That makes it much more like a strategy game.<p>Embracing memes makes it more accessible to viewers who are used to watching hearthstone, csgo, league, dota or other esports and it&#x27;s been really fun to watch.<p>I started watching chess on twitch a while ago during the Tata steel tournament and I thought back then it would quickly grow if they focused their commentary on casual level viewers and it&#x27;s been fantastic to have been proved correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bradly</author><text>I got into Chess a couple years ago and Twitch and YouTube were a huge part of it. I had gotten started watching Ben Finegold&#x27;s kids classes. Getting to see grandmasters play and hear their thoughts and ask them questions is an unbelievable resource. I was surprised how good Chess was as a spectator sport.</text></comment> |
37,018,415 | 37,018,124 | 1 | 3 | 37,016,431 | train | <story><title>Tim Hunkin (Secret Lives of Machines)</title><url>https://www.timhunkin.com/control/o_about_the_site.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>6502_blitbit</author><text>Let me try to give you a sense of Tim’s ability to captivate people’s interest in the mundane all around us and inspire people to want to know ‘how’ even more than you thought was possible. I grew up in an engineering household in the 70s&#x2F;80s. Dad was an ME that worked on some pretty revolutionary stuff (VTOL aircraft) and he brought home a computer in 1983. I was immersed in engineering 24&#x2F;7, knew I wanted to be a programmer by 13 and was deeply interesting in tearing things apart to see how they worked. Then in my freshman year in college I stumbled on the secret life of machines bbc series and it absolutely blew me away. Tim had a way of deconstructing the everyday things around us (fax machines, telephony, washing machines, etc). I thought I had an already abnormal passion to learn how things worked and Tim showed me another universe. His deadpan, matter of fact, understated and expert ways of presenting things inspired me in ways that made me what I am today. I’ve been fortunate to work with world class engineers at FAANGs for the last 15 years and I can easily say that Tim is _the_ engineer’s engineer. Thank you Tim.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tim Hunkin (Secret Lives of Machines)</title><url>https://www.timhunkin.com/control/o_about_the_site.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chiph</author><text>Tim also operates the Novelty Automation arcade in London. When I return to the UK, it&#x27;s at the top of my list of things to see. His machines have his amazing sense of satire<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ort-VEOZ0iI">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ort-VEOZ0iI</a></text></comment> |
17,133,787 | 17,133,231 | 1 | 3 | 17,131,691 | train | <story><title>How to become a part-time programmer</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vemv</author><text>I&#x27;ve done this for a number of years. This would be my current advice:<p>- Don&#x27;t try it on-site (unless they specifically were seeking a consultant beforehand). It&#x27;ll just create resent.<p>- Therefore go for remote jobs. Which don&#x27;t need to be advertised as such - strong applicants can negotiate a remote arrangement.<p>- Don&#x27;t bill by the hour, but daily. Leaving your earnings aside, this approach puts the focus in work days, not hours (duh), therefore you aren&#x27;t framed as a &#x27;part-time&#x27; contributor.<p>- When asked how many hours your work day takes, reply &quot;as much as needed&quot;. This would be in fact a honest response. Some days (especially as you join a team) you&#x27;ll need 6-8h&#x2F;d to perform acceptably. Gradually you&#x27;ll be able to deliver the same in 3-5h&#x2F;d.<p>- The key part is, employer&#x2F;client is only aware (in principle) of days and results (tickets closed, commits pushed, meetings attended, etc). Again this is not hiding the truth - it is focusing on the results.<p>- Do keep track internally of your time spent per day, and have some way to graph your productivity vs. the time spent. That graph can eventually save your ass!<p>- Be aware that (at least IME), even if spending as little as 3 effective hours per day, a large chunk of your day can revolve around work, especially if you interact with a typical team. This includes being available in Slack, for meetings etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mseebach</author><text>Especially in terms of resentment, it seems risky to conflate &quot;remote&quot; and &quot;part time&quot;, especially without very clear boundaries. This is exactly the fear many managers have about remote work: that it gradually slides into part time work. It&#x27;s not at all generally accepted that if you can do &quot;a days work&quot; in three hours, you get to take the rest of the day off.<p>If you want to decouple hours spent from your earnings without risking resentment, you need to find a way to bill firm fixed price for well-defined deliverables. This is very difficult and risky, to say the least (but very valuable if you can pull it off).<p>I don&#x27;t agree with the assertion that a negotiated part time agreement with clearly defined boundaries (&quot;John works Tuesdays, Thursday and Friday and isn&#x27;t expected to be available on email or Slack, except under the same kinds of emergencies when we&#x27;d call people on weekends&quot;) necessarily created resentment outside of how other workplace status dynamics might create resentment -- meaning, something your boss should manage, and if they can&#x27;t, that person shouldn&#x27;t be your boss.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to become a part-time programmer</title><url>https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vemv</author><text>I&#x27;ve done this for a number of years. This would be my current advice:<p>- Don&#x27;t try it on-site (unless they specifically were seeking a consultant beforehand). It&#x27;ll just create resent.<p>- Therefore go for remote jobs. Which don&#x27;t need to be advertised as such - strong applicants can negotiate a remote arrangement.<p>- Don&#x27;t bill by the hour, but daily. Leaving your earnings aside, this approach puts the focus in work days, not hours (duh), therefore you aren&#x27;t framed as a &#x27;part-time&#x27; contributor.<p>- When asked how many hours your work day takes, reply &quot;as much as needed&quot;. This would be in fact a honest response. Some days (especially as you join a team) you&#x27;ll need 6-8h&#x2F;d to perform acceptably. Gradually you&#x27;ll be able to deliver the same in 3-5h&#x2F;d.<p>- The key part is, employer&#x2F;client is only aware (in principle) of days and results (tickets closed, commits pushed, meetings attended, etc). Again this is not hiding the truth - it is focusing on the results.<p>- Do keep track internally of your time spent per day, and have some way to graph your productivity vs. the time spent. That graph can eventually save your ass!<p>- Be aware that (at least IME), even if spending as little as 3 effective hours per day, a large chunk of your day can revolve around work, especially if you interact with a typical team. This includes being available in Slack, for meetings etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>itamarst</author><text>I&#x27;ve done it on site, as have other people I know, with no resentment by anyone. Depends on organization, maybe.</text></comment> |
2,017,837 | 2,017,156 | 1 | 2 | 2,017,086 | train | <story><title>An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon</title><url>http://git-scm.com/appeal</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>Man, people really hate that Wikipedia fund drive. It really worries me how people have no trouble with ads blaring music and obscuring the text of pages they are reading, or with advertisers dictating what content can and cannot be published, but everyone gets super upset when the guy who started the website puts his picture at the top and says, "hey guys, providing a free encyclopedia costs money, mind chipping in $10?".<p>You know you can just click the "X" and it goes away, right?<p>(Just out of curiosity, do people get this upset when NPR and PBS do their fund drives? Or because you are getting a lunchbox for your $100 donation, it's not as annoying? The outrage just confuses me.)</text></comment> | <story><title>An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon</title><url>http://git-scm.com/appeal</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>seiji</author><text>It's a joke parodying <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US" rel="nofollow">http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US</a><p>I can't imagine Scott or a tiny git website is in need of money.<p>Amusingly, if you try to enter an amount greater than $25000, google checkout just dies.</text></comment> |
35,355,981 | 35,355,953 | 1 | 2 | 35,355,729 | train | <story><title>Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65110744</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kubb</author><text>BBC journos have a specific editorial style, and no doubt it influenced this headline, but this isn&#x27;t to &quot;protect food heritage&quot;.<p>Food and drink accounts for a quarter of Italy&#x27;s GDP. It&#x27;s about money. Italy has a far-right government, which is extremely open to lobbying from that sector, and &quot;heritage&quot; is aligned with their nationalistic stance.<p>Try to look a bit deeper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lm28469</author><text>You don&#x27;t have to be &quot;far right&quot; or &quot;nationalistic&quot; to not want to destroy your economy</text></comment> | <story><title>Italy moves to ban lab-grown meat to protect food heritage</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65110744</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kubb</author><text>BBC journos have a specific editorial style, and no doubt it influenced this headline, but this isn&#x27;t to &quot;protect food heritage&quot;.<p>Food and drink accounts for a quarter of Italy&#x27;s GDP. It&#x27;s about money. Italy has a far-right government, which is extremely open to lobbying from that sector, and &quot;heritage&quot; is aligned with their nationalistic stance.<p>Try to look a bit deeper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scratcheee</author><text>Yeah, pretty dubious phrasing. On the other hand, &quot;protect food heritage&quot; is so obviously a reframing that I didn&#x27;t even concider that as the whole story.</text></comment> |
13,920,677 | 13,920,723 | 1 | 2 | 13,919,115 | train | <story><title>Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaredklewis</author><text>Your interpretation of the 5th amendment is quite different than it has been historically interpreted by the courts.<p>For example, in a trial, the prosecutor might subpoena some documents and you cannot refuse to turn over those documents, unless doing so would trigger a 5th amendment assertion. Turning over the documents implicitly testifies to at least two important pieces of information: that the documents exist and that you know about the documents.<p>So if you&#x27;re asked for the documents and the prosecution has no evidence that the documents exist or that you know about them, the 5th will cover you.<p>However if during a police interrogation you admit that the documents exist, when they are subpoenaed, you can&#x27;t withhold evidence.<p>I imagine that the 5th will work much the same with passwords. If it is known that you have the ability to unlock the device, refusing to do so will be withholding evidence.<p>However if revealing the password implicitly reveals the hitherto unknown information that you know the password, 5th will work.</text></item><item><author>smsm42</author><text>This reads as extremely bizarre. I mean, reading the fifth amendment makes it pretty clear - no one should be compelled to witness against oneself. However, it looks like the current executive and judicial are thinking &quot;well, those Founders were just idiots for putting such an amendment in, clearly it&#x27;d be much easier to prosecute people if we could compel them to witness against themselves, so why don&#x27;t we just ignore it and put people in jail indefinitely until they agree to witness against themselves?&quot;. Terrifying that it is so easy for them to completely ignore all constitutional protections.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sir_Substance</author><text>So here&#x27;s my concern: guy&#x27;s now been in jail without charge for 18 months. The prosecutors say his guilt is a foregone conclusion, but apparently it&#x27;s not foregone enough that they&#x27;re willing to go ahead and prosecute without the contents of his hard drive. They&#x27;re gonna hold off until they get what they need.<p>We&#x27;re starting to get to the edge of the point where this guy might legitimately forget his password. I think we can assume the FBI has been running a common passwords&#x2F;dictionary attack with common password symbol substitutions for the last 18 months, and apparently they haven&#x27;t found the answer, so this password is probably a pretty good one that&#x27;s not based on a word or even a sentence.<p>If he stays in jail without trial for another two years and then says &quot;I can&#x27;t remember my password any more&quot;, what should we do?</text></comment> | <story><title>Man jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives loses appeal</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-jailed-indefinitely-for-refusing-to-decrypt-hard-drives-loses-appeal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaredklewis</author><text>Your interpretation of the 5th amendment is quite different than it has been historically interpreted by the courts.<p>For example, in a trial, the prosecutor might subpoena some documents and you cannot refuse to turn over those documents, unless doing so would trigger a 5th amendment assertion. Turning over the documents implicitly testifies to at least two important pieces of information: that the documents exist and that you know about the documents.<p>So if you&#x27;re asked for the documents and the prosecution has no evidence that the documents exist or that you know about them, the 5th will cover you.<p>However if during a police interrogation you admit that the documents exist, when they are subpoenaed, you can&#x27;t withhold evidence.<p>I imagine that the 5th will work much the same with passwords. If it is known that you have the ability to unlock the device, refusing to do so will be withholding evidence.<p>However if revealing the password implicitly reveals the hitherto unknown information that you know the password, 5th will work.</text></item><item><author>smsm42</author><text>This reads as extremely bizarre. I mean, reading the fifth amendment makes it pretty clear - no one should be compelled to witness against oneself. However, it looks like the current executive and judicial are thinking &quot;well, those Founders were just idiots for putting such an amendment in, clearly it&#x27;d be much easier to prosecute people if we could compel them to witness against themselves, so why don&#x27;t we just ignore it and put people in jail indefinitely until they agree to witness against themselves?&quot;. Terrifying that it is so easy for them to completely ignore all constitutional protections.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mickronome</author><text>There are, as far as I can tell some weaknesses in that argument, at least from a lay perspective.<p>- There must be evidence that I can unlock the device for the two situations to be equivalent, and the request must be for specific documents known to exist. If they don&#x27;t exist all evidence found must be invalidated because the cause for the search was invalid.<p>- If evidence of ability to unlock the device does not exists, but the assumption is that since it&#x27;s mine I can unlock it, I think the analogy is slightly flawed. Since the ask is now not about producing a specific thing I&#x27;m known to possess, I&#x27;m indirectly being asked to produce a document (password), albeit not in material form but typed on a keyboard. Since it&#x27;s never been proved that I actually am able to open it, the situation is not equivalent, but more like there being a safe in my house that nobody has seen me open, no key is know to exist, but since I own the house I am assumed to be able to open it, and I&#x27;m held in contempt because I say I can&#x27;t or won&#x27;t open it. It&#x27;s not too uncommon for a house to contain a safe the current owner can&#x27;t open, but it does not lead to the same situation since it can usually be forced open. The only difference with good encryption is that the option to use force has become increasingly impotent.<p>- Unlocking a computer without proper limits and auditing of the search is also more like being asked to give access to any document storage rooms I own or have access to. Reason being that unlocking a device will in many cases give access to more than the bare contents of the drive, giving access to emails, Dropbox, and other logged on applications and sessions. Since parallel construction appear to be a thing, it&#x27;s ripe for abuse.<p>Maybe there needs to be a process where independent auditors can, under surveillance of the defendants lawyer produce named documents from seized evidence, as giving police and&#x2F;or prosecutors blanket access to devices entire content could create lots of opportunities to create parallel construction stories for any content found not under the current warrant, and as bizarre parallel construction is, it appears to have been used.</text></comment> |
41,221,536 | 41,221,498 | 1 | 3 | 41,220,764 | train | <story><title>Google is killing one of Chrome's biggest ad blockers</title><url>https://www.pcworld.com/article/2423294/google-is-killing-one-of-chromes-biggest-ad-blockers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hosteur</author><text>Why do tech savvy people still use a browser from an ad company?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>allkindsof</author><text>Better development tools than Firefox. In terms of usability and performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google is killing one of Chrome's biggest ad blockers</title><url>https://www.pcworld.com/article/2423294/google-is-killing-one-of-chromes-biggest-ad-blockers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hosteur</author><text>Why do tech savvy people still use a browser from an ad company?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnnyanmac</author><text>Same as non-tech saavy. They may try to get around it, but convinience still trumps customizability and control for many. That&#x27;s why there&#x27;s still a signifigant IOS&#x2F;Mac OS even among techies.</text></comment> |
16,561,242 | 16,560,999 | 1 | 2 | 16,560,189 | train | <story><title>Enemy within: gut bacteria drive autoimmune disease</title><url>https://news.yale.edu/2018/03/08/enemy-within-gut-bacteria-drive-autoimmune-disease</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kzrdude</author><text>I see a lot about autoimmune disease on Hacker News. I guess that it&#x27;s a wide medical area, that many can relate to?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Daishiman</author><text>It&#x27;s a set of conditions where most doctors&#x27; best answers are &quot;beats me&quot;, where conditions are extremely variable from individual to individual, and where lifestyle changes can have drastic differences in outcome.<p>It is the ideal playground for the lifestyle hacker.</text></comment> | <story><title>Enemy within: gut bacteria drive autoimmune disease</title><url>https://news.yale.edu/2018/03/08/enemy-within-gut-bacteria-drive-autoimmune-disease</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kzrdude</author><text>I see a lot about autoimmune disease on Hacker News. I guess that it&#x27;s a wide medical area, that many can relate to?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scorpioxy</author><text>That and probably most people with autoimmune diseases have been surprised how little is known about these diseases. Just getting diagnosed with one often takes months if not years and multiple specialists all telling you that it&#x27;s &quot;all in your head&quot;.<p>Also hearing that there&#x27;s nothing that can be done except watch your body deteriorate is a slap in the face to any one. What you&#x27;re left with is trying the &quot;unconventional&quot;.</text></comment> |
36,323,446 | 36,323,421 | 1 | 2 | 36,321,783 | train | <story><title>Gandi.net – Pricing Update</title><url>https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmcCUA7Q58rKFka7Gfz8aaspeqg5iKNB6BvABrUfpMXeue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breput</author><text>The text in the link was sent to Gandi users via email today, although they purposefully buried the significant domain registration price increases with the GandiMail bs text.<p>The actual price increases are listed here[0].<p>For example, currently a .com domain can be renewed for $17.75&#x2F;year (tax inclusive - I personally renewed a .com domain for the maximum of 4 years tonight). After the increase this will be $23.99&#x2F;year (26% increase).<p>I&#x27;ve been a long time (sometime prior to 2007) Gandi customer and ignored previous discussion concerns[1], but this will be the last time I renew my domains with Gandi. The v4-&gt;v5 user interface change was painful at first, but they have fixed most of those UX issues - at least as far as the DNS support, which is all I really use. But their service is definitely not worth the premium.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-july-usd-renew-price-increase.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-july-usd-renew-p...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35080777">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35080777</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SCdF</author><text>They got me, I thought the price hikes were specifically for things I didn&#x27;t care about, because of all of the gandimail stuff. Without HN I wouldn&#x27;t have even noticed.<p>Looking at my last invoice, I paid ~£26&#x2F;year for a .info domain. If I&#x27;m reading this right, it&#x27;s now ~£36&#x2F;yr.<p>That&#x27;s a ~40% increase.<p>Glad I renewed for nine years last year.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gandi.net – Pricing Update</title><url>https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmcCUA7Q58rKFka7Gfz8aaspeqg5iKNB6BvABrUfpMXeue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>breput</author><text>The text in the link was sent to Gandi users via email today, although they purposefully buried the significant domain registration price increases with the GandiMail bs text.<p>The actual price increases are listed here[0].<p>For example, currently a .com domain can be renewed for $17.75&#x2F;year (tax inclusive - I personally renewed a .com domain for the maximum of 4 years tonight). After the increase this will be $23.99&#x2F;year (26% increase).<p>I&#x27;ve been a long time (sometime prior to 2007) Gandi customer and ignored previous discussion concerns[1], but this will be the last time I renew my domains with Gandi. The v4-&gt;v5 user interface change was painful at first, but they have fixed most of those UX issues - at least as far as the DNS support, which is all I really use. But their service is definitely not worth the premium.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-july-usd-renew-price-increase.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gandi.net&#x2F;static&#x2F;documents&#x2F;2023-july-usd-renew-p...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35080777">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35080777</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdrzn</author><text>.com are $9.73 &#x2F; year on PorkBun, and they renews at $9.73<p>Not affiliated, just a happy customer.</text></comment> |
2,172,876 | 2,171,909 | 1 | 2 | 2,171,439 | train | <story><title>Android Market Web Store just Launched</title><url>http://market.android.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bjonathan</author><text>This Market is a good news BUT it seems so much like an unfinish product. That another proof of the difference in the attention to details between iOS and Android.<p>This is a screenshot of the Market from France: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/lchpI.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/lchpI.jpg</a><p>Half the page is in the french, half the page is in english and IMO the worst is the "~" before the price (they convert $/€ so it's ROUGH price wtf! ). The website doesnt feel that it can be trust IMO if you look to it like a John Doe.<p>This is definitely a step in the good direction but please Google please polish a little more your android products so that they appeal the masses!!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usaar333</author><text>While the localization issues are embarrassing, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the store; it's extremely fast, easy to navigate and feels quite polished.<p>The '~' has exited in Android for a while (before it would just list it in whatever foreign currency the developer accepts). Given that the currency conversion is passed on to the customer (whether that's a good idea is another story), the '~' is important to signal that currency conversion is occurring.</text></comment> | <story><title>Android Market Web Store just Launched</title><url>http://market.android.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bjonathan</author><text>This Market is a good news BUT it seems so much like an unfinish product. That another proof of the difference in the attention to details between iOS and Android.<p>This is a screenshot of the Market from France: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/lchpI.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/lchpI.jpg</a><p>Half the page is in the french, half the page is in english and IMO the worst is the "~" before the price (they convert $/€ so it's ROUGH price wtf! ). The website doesnt feel that it can be trust IMO if you look to it like a John Doe.<p>This is definitely a step in the good direction but please Google please polish a little more your android products so that they appeal the masses!!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>estel</author><text>In fairness, their announcement does say:
"We are releasing the initial version of Android Market on the Web in English and will be extending it to other languages in the weeks ahead."</text></comment> |
17,005,136 | 17,004,162 | 1 | 2 | 17,003,555 | train | <story><title>Intel's New Optane 905P Is the Fastest SSD</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-optane-ssd-905p,36990.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chacham15</author><text>Im not sure this is true. Looking at the graph, the 970 outperforms the optane for sequential reads whereas the optane outperforms in the 4k random read&#x2F;write range. So, it would seem that cases which are more sequential than random which include watching&#x2F;streaming video&#x2F;assets would run faster on the 970. So video game enthusiasts would still prefer the 970. If you&#x27;re running a database, that 4k random read rate would seem to boost performance by quite a margin. Or am I missing something?</text></item><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised that many people don&#x27;t realize that Optane to SSD for consumer computers is similar to SSD to HDD. Consumer computers don&#x27;t run workloads with QD 32. Their workloads are overwhelmingly low-threaded, so random performance for low queue depths is what matters. And Optane beats even best SSDs by a large margin.<p>I guess that modern SSD are just so fast, that going faster is not that big deal. But if you want the best SSD for non-server workloads, Optane is a way to go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulmd</author><text>Normal consumer workloads are heavily biased towards 4K random performance (especially read). Sequential performance is largely inconsequential, both because it&#x27;s rare (how often do you really suck in a full 20+ GB file at a single go?) and because consumer SSDs are fast <i>enough</i> at sequential performance that it&#x27;s not really a bottleneck. 500 MB&#x2F;s sustained is really fast enough for most users.<p>Streaming video from the internet does not use the SSD at all, and a high-quality 1080p video file is maybe 5-10 MB&#x2F;s of bitrate, you can easily pull that off a spinning HDD that was manufactured 20 years ago.<p>Video editing at 4K or 8K is one of the few use-cases where NVMe&#x27;s sequential performance does provide a big benefit... assuming you are not editing using proxies.<p>Optane&#x27;s QD=1 random-4K performance does present an opportunity for big speedups on consumer use-cases. But Intel really has to get the prices down if they want to see consumer adoption, right now there is an obvious benefit to cheaper SATA SSDs that allow you to get more data off spinning-rust drives vs a smaller, massively expensive Optane drive (even if it is incredibly fast).</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel's New Optane 905P Is the Fastest SSD</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-optane-ssd-905p,36990.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chacham15</author><text>Im not sure this is true. Looking at the graph, the 970 outperforms the optane for sequential reads whereas the optane outperforms in the 4k random read&#x2F;write range. So, it would seem that cases which are more sequential than random which include watching&#x2F;streaming video&#x2F;assets would run faster on the 970. So video game enthusiasts would still prefer the 970. If you&#x27;re running a database, that 4k random read rate would seem to boost performance by quite a margin. Or am I missing something?</text></item><item><author>vbezhenar</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised that many people don&#x27;t realize that Optane to SSD for consumer computers is similar to SSD to HDD. Consumer computers don&#x27;t run workloads with QD 32. Their workloads are overwhelmingly low-threaded, so random performance for low queue depths is what matters. And Optane beats even best SSDs by a large margin.<p>I guess that modern SSD are just so fast, that going faster is not that big deal. But if you want the best SSD for non-server workloads, Optane is a way to go.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edgineer</author><text>Video game loading is not improved past SATA SSD speeds, so there would be no difference between a 970 and Optane there. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ecCA0gx_eZk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ecCA0gx_eZk</a></text></comment> |
20,082,580 | 20,082,806 | 1 | 3 | 20,080,410 | train | <story><title>Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-economy/factory-activity-shrinks-across-asia-global-recession-fears-mount-idUSKCN1T40EI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coolaliasbro</author><text>These considerations are requisite only in a capitalist system. In other economic models it is not a given that ”[i]nvestors...need to decide which businesses are viable... Workers need to consider career changes.&quot; In fact, the division between investors on the one hand and workers in the other is a large part of this problem. If we socialized gains and privatized losses (in the sense of never bailing out those agents that got themselves into bad situations), these cycles would at worst be much less severe and frequent.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Whether or not this is the start is not so important, but remember it&#x27;s been a while since the last one, and it&#x27;s a common thing to occur in the economy, or any other ecological system.<p>It&#x27;s also something that has an important role. Investors at some point need to decide which businesses are viable, which are not. Workers need to consider career changes. Corporate entities need to consider which projects are worthwhile. All those kinds of decisions are put to the test when not everything can be given a long horizon.<p>Finally, there is a twist this time. We&#x27;ve been running a financial experiment with few parallels over the last decade or so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shanusmagnus</author><text>If we socialized gains and privatized losses, there&#x27;d be less severe cycles because there&#x27;d be less economy to have cycles on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Global recession fears grow as factory activity shrinks</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-economy/factory-activity-shrinks-across-asia-global-recession-fears-mount-idUSKCN1T40EI</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coolaliasbro</author><text>These considerations are requisite only in a capitalist system. In other economic models it is not a given that ”[i]nvestors...need to decide which businesses are viable... Workers need to consider career changes.&quot; In fact, the division between investors on the one hand and workers in the other is a large part of this problem. If we socialized gains and privatized losses (in the sense of never bailing out those agents that got themselves into bad situations), these cycles would at worst be much less severe and frequent.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>Whether or not this is the start is not so important, but remember it&#x27;s been a while since the last one, and it&#x27;s a common thing to occur in the economy, or any other ecological system.<p>It&#x27;s also something that has an important role. Investors at some point need to decide which businesses are viable, which are not. Workers need to consider career changes. Corporate entities need to consider which projects are worthwhile. All those kinds of decisions are put to the test when not everything can be given a long horizon.<p>Finally, there is a twist this time. We&#x27;ve been running a financial experiment with few parallels over the last decade or so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyBelow</author><text>&gt;In other economic models it is not a given<p>Yes, because they tend to go straight down the tube because when you socialize gains and privatize losses people don&#x27;t do more than the minimum they can get away with.</text></comment> |
4,322,349 | 4,322,293 | 1 | 2 | 4,321,558 | train | <story><title>Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting</title><url>http://baligu.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-dont-remember-seeing-this-before-at.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ralfn</author><text>Thats a little dramatic.<p>CL isnt popular here in Holland, but i was under the impression, it was ebay meets dating, using a 200 byte php forum file, that looked so old, you would just assume encodimg errors.<p>Why are you getting your panties in a twist? What import role does this site play in your life or that of others?</text></item><item><author>ChrisNorstrom</author><text>Wow. Under the disguise of a pseudo-charity, Craigslist just revealed it's true intentions. They foolishly just opened themselves up to a lot of hate and possibly gave people a huge reason to try out competitors. This may be the beginning of the end of Craigslist's Empire. This is usually how it starts, users being held hostage, increased control, and decreased satisfaction with the service with no way out due to network effects.<p>We all believed in Craigslist and this is our reward? WE built up Craigslist to be what it is and now we're held hostage for it? I feel like a fool, why do we keep falling for this? Help the little grow until he becomes king and screws us all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stellar678</author><text>Craigslist is gigantic in big US metro areas.<p>It's pretty much the standard way to find a place to live, to find an employee or a job, to buy and sell used cars, etc... etc...<p>It's also known for having 3 times higher revenue-per-employee than Google even though the vast majority of activity on the site is free.</text></comment> | <story><title>Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting</title><url>http://baligu.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-dont-remember-seeing-this-before-at.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ralfn</author><text>Thats a little dramatic.<p>CL isnt popular here in Holland, but i was under the impression, it was ebay meets dating, using a 200 byte php forum file, that looked so old, you would just assume encodimg errors.<p>Why are you getting your panties in a twist? What import role does this site play in your life or that of others?</text></item><item><author>ChrisNorstrom</author><text>Wow. Under the disguise of a pseudo-charity, Craigslist just revealed it's true intentions. They foolishly just opened themselves up to a lot of hate and possibly gave people a huge reason to try out competitors. This may be the beginning of the end of Craigslist's Empire. This is usually how it starts, users being held hostage, increased control, and decreased satisfaction with the service with no way out due to network effects.<p>We all believed in Craigslist and this is our reward? WE built up Craigslist to be what it is and now we're held hostage for it? I feel like a fool, why do we keep falling for this? Help the little grow until he becomes king and screws us all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dbecker</author><text>the "ebay meets dating" impression is not correct. Craigslist is closer to an "Online Classified Ads" which is popular for posting jobs, apartment rentals, cars, sporting equipment, musical instruments, and pretty much everything else you might post in a classified ad.<p>I'm told it is one of the 100 most popular sites on the internet (and one of the 50 most popular in the US).<p>One of the reasons people feel strongly about it the platform nature. If you don't like the Craigslist interface for finding apartments, you don't have much choice. That is where everyone lists their apartments. Similarly, it is the first place everyone lists apartments because it is widely known that this is where users check.<p>For that reason, it's been hard for competitors to get any traction... even when the competitor has better technology.</text></comment> |
35,606,530 | 35,606,453 | 1 | 2 | 35,597,346 | train | <story><title>Implementers, Solvers, and Finders</title><url>https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-finders.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dgreensp</author><text>A lot of start-ups in my experience see all their engineers as “high-autonomy feature implementors.” It’s not really autonomy in the sense of power or choice, though, just being left alone to implement features. The thing is, “features” are product-level things that require technical design as well as implementation. Product design and implementation and technical design and implementation are all different things. Even within programming, implementation has sub-problems that require creativity. I implemented a Java VM, once, for example, and it was really fun. So it’s not necessarily the case that once something is a matter of “implementation” it is just straightforward work to give to a junior programmer, or that implementing things is boring.<p>What sucks is, for example, being good at technical design but that not being valued. And management being disconnected from employees, which is not unique to software companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Implementers, Solvers, and Finders</title><url>https://rkoutnik.com/2016/04/21/implementers-solvers-and-finders.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>montecarl</author><text>This post made me realize why I am hesitant to leave my role in a struggling start up. I get paid to discover what our problems are and solve them as fast as possible which leads me to constantly learning new skills and fully owning our product and R&amp;D output. I like that more than the lack of job security and must be why I&#x27;ve been so resistant to searching for a new more secure position.</text></comment> |
37,308,302 | 37,307,304 | 1 | 2 | 37,304,306 | train | <story><title>Stringzilla: Fastest string sort, search, split, and shuffle using SIMD</title><url>https://github.com/ashvardanian/Stringzilla</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Aardwolf</author><text>Python factorial on big integer is natively as fast as a good C++ implementation of factorial. So clearly the interpreter supports using fast underlying implementations of things<p>Any idea why python str.find is 100x-1000x slower? Seems like something the interpreter should also hand to an underlying implementation, which could not be that slow.</text></comment> | <story><title>Stringzilla: Fastest string sort, search, split, and shuffle using SIMD</title><url>https://github.com/ashvardanian/Stringzilla</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmatthews</author><text>I realize &quot;speed is a feature&quot;, but it&#x27;s rare when that is THE feature. :)</text></comment> |
38,872,930 | 38,872,378 | 1 | 2 | 38,871,987 | train | <story><title>Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone</title><url>https://www.clicks.tech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomasreimers</author><text>Would seriously consider buying this if it were a case with a back-sliding landscape keyboard. Something like:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;img&#x2F;resize&#x2F;fd8703ad0b0ec545ac98701c396e4cb217cac0df&#x2F;hub&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;18&#x2F;7298c7a1-bb76-11e2-8a8e-0291187978f3&#x2F;35034955-7.jpg?auto=webp&amp;fit=crop&amp;height=900&amp;width=1200" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;img&#x2F;resize&#x2F;fd8703ad0b0ec545ac98701c39...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cududa</author><text>The Palm Pre was my dream phone</text></comment> | <story><title>Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone</title><url>https://www.clicks.tech/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomasreimers</author><text>Would seriously consider buying this if it were a case with a back-sliding landscape keyboard. Something like:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;img&#x2F;resize&#x2F;fd8703ad0b0ec545ac98701c396e4cb217cac0df&#x2F;hub&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;18&#x2F;7298c7a1-bb76-11e2-8a8e-0291187978f3&#x2F;35034955-7.jpg?auto=webp&amp;fit=crop&amp;height=900&amp;width=1200" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnet.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;img&#x2F;resize&#x2F;fd8703ad0b0ec545ac98701c39...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>valianteffort</author><text>I think the camera bumps kind of prevent this without turning the phone into a literal brick. Would have to be more like a clamshell&#x2F;folio type case like with the iPads.<p>That said the keyboard in OP looks so unbelievably fucking stupid and impractical I can&#x27;t understand how it made it to production.</text></comment> |
9,874,824 | 9,873,987 | 1 | 3 | 9,873,792 | train | <story><title>Singleton Pattern in Go</title><url>http://marcio.io/2015/07/singleton-pattern-in-go/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>colin_mccabe</author><text>It&#x27;s funny how you can take an obvious antipattern (global variables) and turn it into a pattern by giving it a cool new name like &quot;Singleton&quot;. In this spirit, I propose &quot;the ProgramCounterAmbulator&quot; as a cool new name for &quot;goto.&quot;<p>Actually, gotos are usually less harmful than globals. At least they don&#x27;t interfere with unit testing the way globals tend to.</text></comment> | <story><title>Singleton Pattern in Go</title><url>http://marcio.io/2015/07/singleton-pattern-in-go/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pcwalton</author><text>Your &quot;check-lock-check&quot; code is probably broken (depending on the intricacies of Golang&#x27;s memory model). If the compiler or CPU reorders any stores to the fields of &quot;instance&quot; after the assignment to &quot;instance&quot; itself, other threads could start working with a partially uninitialized object. Once() uses atomics on the fast path for a reason.</text></comment> |
35,686,229 | 35,686,160 | 1 | 2 | 35,685,635 | train | <story><title>Deleting System32\curl.exe</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/04/24/deleting-system32curl-exe/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kypro</author><text>Probably the xx in the domain.<p>In the UK where 20% of the internet is blocked – it&#x27;s surprising you haven&#x27;t experienced this before. Call your service provider and tell them you want access to adult material.</text></item><item><author>circuit10</author><text>Vodaphone blocks this site for being “18+ content”, I guess because of “hacking” or something? There’s no explanation or option to report a false positive and they want you to put in credit card details to confirm your age to unlock it<p>(I don’t need tips to get around this or anything, I can just connect to another network or use a VPN)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>&gt; In the UK where 20% of the internet is blocked<p>This sounds like an extreme over-estimate. <i>Some</i> ISP&#x27;s, mostly mobile ones, default to blocking &quot;adult material&quot; unless you tell them to turn that off. <i>Some</i> of the larger ISPs are under court order to block some specific other content (Pirate Bay in particular; my old ISP was one of them, my current ISP happily lets me access it, not that I&#x27;ve ever done so other than to see if it&#x27;s blocked).<p><i>Most</i> ISPs block at most a tiny set of sites and personally in 23 years of using UK ISPs I&#x27;ve never &quot;organically&quot; run into those blocks (as in, no site I actually had any interest in accessing has been blocked; I&#x27;ve only seen them when checking whether people were right that a specific site was blocked). And yes, that includes visiting sites with &quot;adult material&quot; without running into any blocks.<p>I do have a VPN, so it&#x27;d take me as long to bypass as it takes me to press one button in my browser address bar, but I only need <i>that</i> to evade IP region&#x2F;country blocks - never needed it to get around UK filtering.</text></comment> | <story><title>Deleting System32\curl.exe</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/04/24/deleting-system32curl-exe/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kypro</author><text>Probably the xx in the domain.<p>In the UK where 20% of the internet is blocked – it&#x27;s surprising you haven&#x27;t experienced this before. Call your service provider and tell them you want access to adult material.</text></item><item><author>circuit10</author><text>Vodaphone blocks this site for being “18+ content”, I guess because of “hacking” or something? There’s no explanation or option to report a false positive and they want you to put in credit card details to confirm your age to unlock it<p>(I don’t need tips to get around this or anything, I can just connect to another network or use a VPN)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Karellen</author><text>&gt; Probably the xx in the domain.<p>According to the `considered-18` post linked by a sibling comment:<p>&gt; It shows that this filter is for this specific host name only [daniel.haxx.se], not for the entire haxx.se domain.<p>So, even more of a WTF.</text></comment> |
7,354,436 | 7,354,415 | 1 | 3 | 7,354,214 | train | <story><title>Dark spot under cockpit of A-10s</title><url>http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2078/dark-spot-under-cockpit-on-a-10s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>larrydag</author><text>The A-10 is one on of the aircraft that is on the list for retirement from the US Air Force. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#Proposed_retirement" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunder...</a><p>The A-10 is a cold war designed attack jet to be used to take out Soviet tanks. Its really good at slow (relatively) , guided, precise air-to-ground strikes. I think it would make a good candidate for a new class of a drones fleet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jfb</author><text>Yeah, possibly. What is indisputable is that the mooted replacement (the F-35) is as useless as tits on a boar for close ground support.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dark spot under cockpit of A-10s</title><url>http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2078/dark-spot-under-cockpit-on-a-10s</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>larrydag</author><text>The A-10 is one on of the aircraft that is on the list for retirement from the US Air Force. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#Proposed_retirement" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunder...</a><p>The A-10 is a cold war designed attack jet to be used to take out Soviet tanks. Its really good at slow (relatively) , guided, precise air-to-ground strikes. I think it would make a good candidate for a new class of a drones fleet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ericcumbee</author><text>My dad always said that he&#x27;d take one A-10 covering him over an entire squadron of F-16s.</text></comment> |
21,373,504 | 21,373,425 | 1 | 2 | 21,373,301 | train | <story><title>Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golden-rice-delay-cost-millions-of-lives-child-blindness</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tjawirklich</author><text>For all the promises mentioned around this crop, this was surprising to read in the article:<p>&#x2F;quote<p>As Stone and Glover point out, it is still unknown if the
beta carotene in Golden Rice can even be converted to
Vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children.<p>&#x2F;endquote<p>Given the advertising as a solution to the issue and all the surrounding hullabaloo, the fact that it is still not proven to do what it espouses--is pretty damning.</text></comment> | <story><title>Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/26/gm-golden-rice-delay-cost-millions-of-lives-child-blindness</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wwarner</author><text>Sorry, very inadequate treatment of this story. Golden rice is intellectual property, whose seeds are no longer owned by the farmer who grows them, but by whoever is selling it.<p>Think about it, can the root of the problem be the nutritional value of rice, when no rich country needs to license a foreign company&#x27;s intellectual property to feed itself?</text></comment> |
39,287,080 | 39,286,186 | 1 | 2 | 39,271,449 | train | <story><title>The Ladybird browser project</title><url>https://ladybird.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jug</author><text>It&#x27;s been so inspiring to see him and his crew of hackers build a new, independent browser from scratch. I must admit I didn&#x27;t think it was possible on this small scale in terms of man hours and funding.<p>However, the thought has also crossed my mind if we&#x27;re finally seeing fruits of browsers being better standardized on &quot;95%&quot;+ of the popular features -- and if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back. While the web is of course still evolving, it feels more &quot;settled in&quot; than 10-15 years ago.<p>There&#x27;s also the factor that past developers didn&#x27;t have the more complete roadmap set when they initially planned browser design, but now we have huge amounts of web standards already there AND also know how popular they got over time i.e. what to prioritize to support a modern web. One might superficially think there&#x27;s simply more of everything, but I also think ideas that can be discarded. Just imagine that Internet Explorer had XSLT support, and FTP was common once upon a time!<p>It would be interesting to hear more about their own thoughts on these topics!<p>Edit: My bad; XSLT is still commonly supported and by all major browsers but a rarely used feature and stuck in limbo in XSLT 1.0. So it&#x27;s probably among those things that can be safely omitted for quite some time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awesomekling</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s been so inspiring to see him and his crew of hackers build a new, independent browser from scratch. I must admit I didn&#x27;t think it was possible on this small scale in terms of man hours and funding.<p>Thanks jug! I&#x27;m super proud of all the folks who have worked on it with me :^)<p>&gt; However, the thought has also crossed my mind if we&#x27;re finally seeing fruits of browsers being better standardized on &quot;95%&quot;+ of the popular features -- and if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back. While the web is of course still evolving, it feels more &quot;settled in&quot; than 10-15 years ago<p>This is definitely true! I&#x27;ve worked on browsers on and off since 2006, and it&#x27;s a very different landscape today. Specs are better than ever and there&#x27;s a treasure trove of tests available.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Ladybird browser project</title><url>https://ladybird.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jug</author><text>It&#x27;s been so inspiring to see him and his crew of hackers build a new, independent browser from scratch. I must admit I didn&#x27;t think it was possible on this small scale in terms of man hours and funding.<p>However, the thought has also crossed my mind if we&#x27;re finally seeing fruits of browsers being better standardized on &quot;95%&quot;+ of the popular features -- and if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back. While the web is of course still evolving, it feels more &quot;settled in&quot; than 10-15 years ago.<p>There&#x27;s also the factor that past developers didn&#x27;t have the more complete roadmap set when they initially planned browser design, but now we have huge amounts of web standards already there AND also know how popular they got over time i.e. what to prioritize to support a modern web. One might superficially think there&#x27;s simply more of everything, but I also think ideas that can be discarded. Just imagine that Internet Explorer had XSLT support, and FTP was common once upon a time!<p>It would be interesting to hear more about their own thoughts on these topics!<p>Edit: My bad; XSLT is still commonly supported and by all major browsers but a rarely used feature and stuck in limbo in XSLT 1.0. So it&#x27;s probably among those things that can be safely omitted for quite some time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sph</author><text>It is not any easier, because we still have a monopoly running the show, only it&#x27;s not called Microsoft anymore.<p>If anyone threatens Google position, they can literally throw money at the problem, invent some overcomplicated standard, implement it in Blink, and have the competition chase them. It doesn&#x27;t need to go through W3C either, if it works in Chrome, all web developers will adopt it and any smaller engine will necessarily have to support it or risk losing whatever little market share they have left.<p>Having control of the internet now is of greater strategic importance than it was 20-30 years ago when Microsoft was king of the hill.</text></comment> |
39,558,827 | 39,556,898 | 1 | 2 | 39,553,801 | train | <story><title>Financial systems take a holiday</title><url>https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/financial-systems-take-a-holiday/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mason55</author><text>&gt; <i>Why can&#x27;t I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on Saturday?</i><p>Markets have chosen to concentrate trading to specific hours so as to concentrate liquidity and to help out the professional traders. If everyone&#x27;s trading 24&#x2F;7 then it means you need to be prepared to trade 24&#x2F;7. Having defined market hours means defined hours in which important things can happen. And since the people who work in the market can also define the hours, they&#x27;ve chosen to give themselves reasonable working hours.<p>In a world where the major markets are trading 24&#x2F;7, traders need to be at their desk 24&#x2F;7.<p>&gt; <i>Why can&#x27;t I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?</i><p>Instant money transfer means instantly draining someone&#x27;s bank account with no recourse. Checks have plenty of opportunities to stop the money, so you can write a check on a Sunday as easily as a Wednesday. Wires are more irreversible and so you can only send those when the bank is open and there&#x27;s someone to double check any suspicious behavior.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&gt; Financial systems are inseparably computer systems. Most similarly important computer systems don’t take holidays. Google doesn’t take holidays… or doesn’t seem to, from the perspective of a typical user, at any rate.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be better for users if our financial systems worked like the Google example? Why can&#x27;t I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on Saturday? Why can&#x27;t I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday? Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around or whatever these banks&#x27; excuse is?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seydor</author><text>Crypto trades 24&#x2F;7 and I don&#x27;t see anyone complaining or liquidity problems. Lots of people can&#x27;t trade in the public markets because they are at work those hours. Let&#x27;s just admit it s all a legacy antiquated system instead of finding excuses for its shortcomings</text></comment> | <story><title>Financial systems take a holiday</title><url>https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/financial-systems-take-a-holiday/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mason55</author><text>&gt; <i>Why can&#x27;t I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on Saturday?</i><p>Markets have chosen to concentrate trading to specific hours so as to concentrate liquidity and to help out the professional traders. If everyone&#x27;s trading 24&#x2F;7 then it means you need to be prepared to trade 24&#x2F;7. Having defined market hours means defined hours in which important things can happen. And since the people who work in the market can also define the hours, they&#x27;ve chosen to give themselves reasonable working hours.<p>In a world where the major markets are trading 24&#x2F;7, traders need to be at their desk 24&#x2F;7.<p>&gt; <i>Why can&#x27;t I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday?</i><p>Instant money transfer means instantly draining someone&#x27;s bank account with no recourse. Checks have plenty of opportunities to stop the money, so you can write a check on a Sunday as easily as a Wednesday. Wires are more irreversible and so you can only send those when the bank is open and there&#x27;s someone to double check any suspicious behavior.</text></item><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>&gt; Financial systems are inseparably computer systems. Most similarly important computer systems don’t take holidays. Google doesn’t take holidays… or doesn’t seem to, from the perspective of a typical user, at any rate.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be better for users if our financial systems worked like the Google example? Why can&#x27;t I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on Saturday? Why can&#x27;t I move money from one bank account to another on Sunday? Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around or whatever these banks&#x27; excuse is?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimmydorry</author><text>Except sophisticated traders are allowed to trade outside of market hours (after hours markets are a thing). When news drops, price is absolutely affected in the after-hours market.<p>It&#x27;s only the regular Joe&#x27;s that are not allowed the priviledge to trade at all hours.</text></comment> |
38,533,976 | 38,533,921 | 1 | 2 | 38,531,235 | train | <story><title>Mtn Dew Raid Q&A [pdf]</title><url>https://www.mountaindew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MTN-DEW-RAID-QA.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>explaininjs</author><text>Is there anything at all interesting or controversial about paying to have more access to a provider’s services? It’s basically the businesses model for everything for all of time.</text></item><item><author>corobo</author><text>ZachBussey (a popular streamer in the category of streamer news) listed the issues wrong with this campaign on Reddit.<p>Notably the false positive rates and the fact that the method used is basically spam, except Twitch got paid to allow it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LivestreamFail&#x2F;comments&#x2F;188of4y&#x2F;comment&#x2F;kbndiv3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LivestreamFail&#x2F;comments&#x2F;188of4y&#x2F;com...</a><p>Any other bots doing what the mtn dew bot is doing would likely catch a sitewide ban..<p>E: There&#x27;s a more structured argument on X, with screenshots of the bot&#x27;s messaging too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zachbussey&#x2F;status&#x2F;1730742056899805377" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zachbussey&#x2F;status&#x2F;1730742056899805377</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpm</author><text>Spamming advertising in chat is a bannable offense. Chat is a space free of ads, because there is no way to opt out without closing chat, and if I do that, I have literally no reason to watch the streamer on Twitch, since I can probably catch their VOD on YouTube the next day. If I want to watch the streamer on Twitch ad free, I subscribe, which kicks 50% or 30% over to Twitch to pay to keep the lights on. The comments by this bot announcing this campaign probably got it flagged to Twitch by thousands of viewers and banned in thousands of channels, because it&#x27;s the same behavior seen by other bots trying to entice you with &quot;free gaming gear&quot; or &quot;hot singles in your area&quot;.<p>The AI scanning as part of this campaign is happening whether someone opts in or not. And what the streamer opts into is nothing more than being used as an advertising vessel for bad sugar water for free.<p>Pepsico is free to issue Twitch bounties for certain things or buy normal ad slots for pre-rolls or mid-stream ads if they want to remind everyone that their neon green slop exists.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mtn Dew Raid Q&A [pdf]</title><url>https://www.mountaindew.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MTN-DEW-RAID-QA.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>explaininjs</author><text>Is there anything at all interesting or controversial about paying to have more access to a provider’s services? It’s basically the businesses model for everything for all of time.</text></item><item><author>corobo</author><text>ZachBussey (a popular streamer in the category of streamer news) listed the issues wrong with this campaign on Reddit.<p>Notably the false positive rates and the fact that the method used is basically spam, except Twitch got paid to allow it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LivestreamFail&#x2F;comments&#x2F;188of4y&#x2F;comment&#x2F;kbndiv3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LivestreamFail&#x2F;comments&#x2F;188of4y&#x2F;com...</a><p>Any other bots doing what the mtn dew bot is doing would likely catch a sitewide ban..<p>E: There&#x27;s a more structured argument on X, with screenshots of the bot&#x27;s messaging too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zachbussey&#x2F;status&#x2F;1730742056899805377" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zachbussey&#x2F;status&#x2F;1730742056899805377</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_jones</author><text>Companies are probing the boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable for AI. Sports illustrated recently used AI generated avatars to publish AI written articles as if they were written by real people. They didn’t announce it they just did it and got caught. ESPN took a TNT video from several years ago and used AI to fabricate key details and appear as if it was under the ESPN brand. They didn’t announce it they just did it and got caught.<p>While this particular usage is less about a specific AI act and yes buying increased access on social media (where most users naively assume fair access) isnt new - I personally and fucking terrified of where we’ll be at just a year from now.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;amp&#x2F;economy&#x2F;sports-illustrated-found-publishing-ai-generated-stories-photos-and-authors" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;newshour&#x2F;amp&#x2F;economy&#x2F;sports-illustrated-...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsonline.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;sports&#x2F;nba&#x2F;bucks&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;espn-posts-damian-lillard-sound-bite-with-digitally-fabricated-details&#x2F;71359588007&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jsonline.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;sports&#x2F;nba&#x2F;bucks&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;e...</a></text></comment> |
39,287,446 | 39,287,286 | 1 | 2 | 39,286,269 | train | <story><title>Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark</title><url>https://theprivacydad.com/final-decision-on-chromebook-case-in-denmark/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway71271</author><text>Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy.<p>The amount of incompetence is beyond reason.<p>My daughter(12)&#x27;s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called &#x27;safe exam browser&#x27; that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard.<p>Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class.<p>I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ho_schi</author><text>As far as I know Sweden is rolling back[1]large parts of the <i>digitalization</i> at schools. Not just because of cloud usage, maintenance and incompetence.<p>The digital devices harm learning. Sweden will spend 60 million for reintroducing actual books, focus on actual reading and writing (important for learning and motoric ability).<p>I’m not surprised. While I’m sceptic about many positions of Manfred Spitzer [2] (University of Ulm) I’m afraid that he is right in many areas. A tablet is not the tool to discover the world for a child. They need to view, touch, smell and focus on matters.<p>Putting aside that Apple (iPad), Google (Chromebook) and Microsoft (Surface) just want to train child’s to depend on their stuff forever. We can still introduce computers at the age of 12 and the kids will adapt - and teach required basics (control your data, understand technic on high level, touch-typing, how you can access knowledge…and that a lot of companies and people are hostile).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2023&#x2F;sep&#x2F;11&#x2F;sweden-says-back-to-basics-schooling-works-on-paper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2023&#x2F;sep&#x2F;11&#x2F;sweden-says-ba...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Manfred_Spitzer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Manfred_Spitzer</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark</title><url>https://theprivacydad.com/final-decision-on-chromebook-case-in-denmark/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway71271</author><text>Schools+laptops is absolutely crazy.<p>The amount of incompetence is beyond reason.<p>My daughter(12)&#x27;s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called &#x27;safe exam browser&#x27; that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard.<p>Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class.<p>I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caldarons</author><text>As someone who went to a high school (Italy) where in the first two years each student had a laptop they could use in the classroom, I agree that having a computer per student is a bad idea.<p>In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn&#x27;t really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn&#x27;t like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.<p>Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn&#x27;t good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.<p>Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It&#x27;s bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.<p>So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).</text></comment> |
3,848,032 | 3,847,817 | 1 | 2 | 3,847,469 | train | <story><title>What it takes to build great machine learning products </title><url>http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/great-machine-learning-products.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gfodor</author><text>A great and insightful article. A common theme I've seen in practice is folks who have a deep understanding of ML often run straight to applying the most sophisticated algorithms possible on raw data. On the other hand, people who know a bit about ML but understand the domain better start by applying intuition to data cleansing and then follow up with simpler algorithms. Without fail the latter group ends up with better results.</text></comment> | <story><title>What it takes to build great machine learning products </title><url>http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/great-machine-learning-products.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tgflynn</author><text>I agree that the big wins in machine learning/(weak)AI are probably going to come more from figuring out how to better apply existing models and algorithms to real problems rather than from improving the performance of the algorithms themselves.<p>That said one shouldn't underestimate the amount of commonality between problems that to some people may appear unrelated. For example this post talks about the gains in machine translation performance from including larger contexts. The same principle applies to many other sequence learning problems. For example you have a very similar issue with handwriting recognition where it is often not possible (even for a human) to determine the correct letter classification for a given handwritten character without seeing it within the context of the word.</text></comment> |
2,630,632 | 2,630,610 | 1 | 2 | 2,630,502 | train | <story><title>An eruption from the Sun that happened today</title><url>http://youtu.be/Hyi4hjG6kDM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Very cool. Its amazing what we don't know about the star sitting just 8 light minutes away from us.<p>For jnorthrop generally these events are effectively deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere, however we don't know what we don't know. Its hard to estimate whether or not any one of the extinction events this planet has experienced over the past was caused by solar activity.<p>I would hope it would add impetutus to efforts to surviving large changes in the Earth's envioronment by creating completely controlled environments (ideally across several planetary bodies) but I have low expectations that it will.<p>One of the science stories I've been following for a while has been the growing body of evidence that a magnetic pole reversal [1] is becoming more likely. (Note there was a hoax around it changing instantly in 2012 which has been pretty thoroughly debunked). One thing that is pretty well understood is that during reversals the magnetosphere is greatly reduced [2] which suggests that the simulataneous occurence of a CME and a reversal of the poles resulting in a reduced magnetosphere would be something to write home about.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magneticfield.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magnet...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/Nature425.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.off-ladhyx.polytechnique.fr/people/willis/papers/...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>An eruption from the Sun that happened today</title><url>http://youtu.be/Hyi4hjG6kDM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skrebbel</author><text>Damn, I read "One of the coolest eruptions from Sun you'll ever see. This happened today."<p>I was like finally, closures in java!</text></comment> |
28,638,702 | 28,638,548 | 1 | 2 | 28,632,565 | train | <story><title>Facebook paid billions to spare Zuckerberg in data suit, shareholders allege</title><url>https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/21/facebook-paid-billions-extra-to-the-ftc-to-spare-zuckerberg-in-data-suit-shareholders-allege-513456</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>missedthecue</author><text>the Secret Service has an annual budget of almost $2.5 billion (though they do have some responsibilities aside from protecting POTUS)</text></item><item><author>93po</author><text>If you want a few guys for security at any given time, and you want security 24&#x2F;7, and you need security at multiple locations, then this all adds up really fast.<p>3 people in three shifts is 9 people needed per day. Given that people aren&#x27;t going to work 7 days a week, you need extra people for coverage and weekend shifts. Let&#x27;s be conservative and say 15 total. This is per location. Office, house, second house. That&#x27;s 45 people. That&#x27;s $266k per year in cost per person. Given the expenses of the motor pool, motor pool maintenance, travel accommodations and expenses for personal, the admin overhead of managing 45 people, etc etc this sounds fairly reasonable to me. If I was a billionaire I&#x27;d be spending at least that much too.</text></item><item><author>hintymad</author><text>FB also pays $12M a year for Zuckerberg&#x27;s security details? In comparison, Amazon pays $1.2M for Bezos. So, I was wondering what kind of security could possibly cost $12M. Sounds like a tax-free way of spending on house decoration?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&gt; the Secret Service has an annual budget of almost $2.5 billion (though they do have some responsibilities aside from protecting POTUS)<p>In much the same way that the USMC has some functions besides providing West Wing sentries.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook paid billions to spare Zuckerberg in data suit, shareholders allege</title><url>https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/21/facebook-paid-billions-extra-to-the-ftc-to-spare-zuckerberg-in-data-suit-shareholders-allege-513456</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>missedthecue</author><text>the Secret Service has an annual budget of almost $2.5 billion (though they do have some responsibilities aside from protecting POTUS)</text></item><item><author>93po</author><text>If you want a few guys for security at any given time, and you want security 24&#x2F;7, and you need security at multiple locations, then this all adds up really fast.<p>3 people in three shifts is 9 people needed per day. Given that people aren&#x27;t going to work 7 days a week, you need extra people for coverage and weekend shifts. Let&#x27;s be conservative and say 15 total. This is per location. Office, house, second house. That&#x27;s 45 people. That&#x27;s $266k per year in cost per person. Given the expenses of the motor pool, motor pool maintenance, travel accommodations and expenses for personal, the admin overhead of managing 45 people, etc etc this sounds fairly reasonable to me. If I was a billionaire I&#x27;d be spending at least that much too.</text></item><item><author>hintymad</author><text>FB also pays $12M a year for Zuckerberg&#x27;s security details? In comparison, Amazon pays $1.2M for Bezos. So, I was wondering what kind of security could possibly cost $12M. Sounds like a tax-free way of spending on house decoration?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>The Secret Service is one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, responsible for investigating most financial and computer crimes. They have thousands of investigators and over 100 field offices in the U.S. (more than the FBI).</text></comment> |
21,249,126 | 21,249,124 | 1 | 3 | 21,246,518 | train | <story><title>Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2019/10/apple-of-2019-is-linux-of-2000.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text><i>Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.</i><p>That&#x27;s where I&#x27;m stuck. We&#x27;re all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I&#x27;m no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I&#x27;d say about Mac OS: &quot;this is what an operating system should be&quot;. Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don&#x27;t say that anymore. Too much half-assed shit, and yada yada, no need to repeat it here; macOS ain&#x27;t what it used to be. But what else am I going to use? I keep rootin&#x27; for Linux, but every time I boot one of my VMs, well, it ain&#x27;t replacing macOS just yet. Windows (at least the NT variants) when I worked for MSFT was a perfectly servicable operating system. It wasn&#x27;t Unix, but it was better than classic Mac OS, and pretty damned solid. But I have to use Windows 10 at work now, and I fucking hate it. Again, no need to repeat it all here, I just do.<p>Yeah, Mac hardware sucks, too. I guess when my 2012 retina dies, I&#x27;ll have to...oh, wait a minute, I&#x27;m still plugging away on a seven year old laptop? That I&#x27;ve dragged all over God&#x27;s creation and use daily? Still as functional as the day I bought it? I dunno, <i>will</i> I find a better alternative come replacement time? Or has the quality of everything else gone down, too? I know, I know, X1 Carbon, XPS; but then my gut seems to think that I hear just as much complaining about those, too.<p>So in truth, when the 2012 MBP dies, I have no idea what I&#x27;m going to do to replace it.<p>EDIT: thanks, folks. Don&#x27;t know why I hadn&#x27;t considered used 2015. If a 2012 is fine, I ought to be tickled with a 2015, right? :-)<p><i>Sidenote: &quot;which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space.&quot; Unless you&#x27;re using Python, I think the author wants to replace &quot;indentation&quot; with &quot;incantation&quot;.</i></text></item><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I&#x27;m now dual-booting Ubuntu&#x2F;Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15&quot;.<p>What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I&#x27;ve got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn&#x27;t work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn&#x27;t work. Eventually, give up.<p>Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that the grass isn&#x27;t greener on the other side. Macs <i>are</i> regressing, but the grass isn&#x27;t greener on <i>either</i> side. Let&#x27;s stop pretending otherwise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FPGAhacker</author><text>Find a used 2015 mbp. I love mine (15 inch, mid 2015).<p>I probably would have upgraded for a better gpu, but the keyboards are too iffy for me. I shed a lot, and if dust&#x2F;detritus is the mbp keyboard killer, it will never work for me.<p>Honestly I mostly use my iPad now. Work-work is still a dell laptop with win 10, and is daily torture to use. Mostly from all the corporate spyware my employer loads it down with.<p>At home, even for coding, I use the iPad second gen 12.9 and a vps.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000</title><url>https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2019/10/apple-of-2019-is-linux-of-2000.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text><i>Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.</i><p>That&#x27;s where I&#x27;m stuck. We&#x27;re all-in at our house on Apple stuff. I&#x27;m no Windows hater per se, hell, I used to work at Microsoft and my wife still does. And there was a time that I&#x27;d say about Mac OS: &quot;this is what an operating system should be&quot;. Oh, you most certainly disagree, but bear with me. I don&#x27;t say that anymore. Too much half-assed shit, and yada yada, no need to repeat it here; macOS ain&#x27;t what it used to be. But what else am I going to use? I keep rootin&#x27; for Linux, but every time I boot one of my VMs, well, it ain&#x27;t replacing macOS just yet. Windows (at least the NT variants) when I worked for MSFT was a perfectly servicable operating system. It wasn&#x27;t Unix, but it was better than classic Mac OS, and pretty damned solid. But I have to use Windows 10 at work now, and I fucking hate it. Again, no need to repeat it all here, I just do.<p>Yeah, Mac hardware sucks, too. I guess when my 2012 retina dies, I&#x27;ll have to...oh, wait a minute, I&#x27;m still plugging away on a seven year old laptop? That I&#x27;ve dragged all over God&#x27;s creation and use daily? Still as functional as the day I bought it? I dunno, <i>will</i> I find a better alternative come replacement time? Or has the quality of everything else gone down, too? I know, I know, X1 Carbon, XPS; but then my gut seems to think that I hear just as much complaining about those, too.<p>So in truth, when the 2012 MBP dies, I have no idea what I&#x27;m going to do to replace it.<p>EDIT: thanks, folks. Don&#x27;t know why I hadn&#x27;t considered used 2015. If a 2012 is fine, I ought to be tickled with a 2015, right? :-)<p><i>Sidenote: &quot;which listed the magical indentation that purges reserved space.&quot; Unless you&#x27;re using Python, I think the author wants to replace &quot;indentation&quot; with &quot;incantation&quot;.</i></text></item><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Meh. I bailed out of the Mac ecosystem last year, as my mid-2012 retina Macbook was finally getting too creaky, and the latest Mac hardware was a regression in many respects, while simultaneously utterly unaffordable. I&#x27;m now dual-booting Ubuntu&#x2F;Windows 10 on a Dell XPS 15&quot;.<p>What this experience has taught me is that computing in 2019 basically sucks. The problems with 2000-era Linux, as described in the article, are very similar to the problems with 2019-era Linux. External monitors are a particular pain point for me. I&#x27;ve got an HDPI laptop and I want to plug into an old non-HDPI era monitor. Doesn&#x27;t work. Spend the next 10 hours poking around forums, trying weird XWindows options, installing Wayland, etc. Still doesn&#x27;t work. Eventually, give up.<p>Windows 10 works marginally better. Both remain vastly inferior to MacOs.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that the grass isn&#x27;t greener on the other side. Macs <i>are</i> regressing, but the grass isn&#x27;t greener on <i>either</i> side. Let&#x27;s stop pretending otherwise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>augstein</author><text>Just get a 2015 MBP. These are the last ones with MagSafe and more than Thunderbolt 3 ports.</text></comment> |
16,074,674 | 16,074,173 | 1 | 2 | 16,073,745 | train | <story><title>Productivity in 2017: analyzing 225 million hours of work time</title><url>http://blog.rescuetime.com/225-million-hours-productivity/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Let me try to save you all a year of therapy sessions:<p>You do not have a time problem. You have an energy problem. We. Have an energy problem.<p>The reason you only get three hours of stuff done on Saturday and then you ‘waste’ the rest of the day is because you had three hours of energy. The rest of the day you’re just filling time. Not because you’re bad, or lazy, or selfish. Because you’re spent.<p>The difference between productive people and you is not time management. Their skill is in dealing with taxing experiences. They avoid it, delegate it, or confront it on their own terms at the time of their choosing. Some shift their perspective to make it less taxing (not everyone hates weeding). And when they run out of energy they <i>engage in activities that recharge them instead of filling time</i> or merely drain them slower (see also: me and video games or TV)<p>If you know where to look, we already know this subconsciously. A bunch of industry Best Practices are more time consuming but less energy intensive than the alternative. We balk at scheduling two difficult tasks in the same time interval even though they both “only” take less than half of your time. A task that takes four hours might leave you exhausted, and all you can do for the rest of the day is read email and code reviews and browse Hacker News. Nobody can rearrange your schedule or demean youbinto anything productive during that time. If you try you’ll just make mistakes. Which is why you’re trying to Do No Harm by “goofing off”. You already know this you just don’t have the words like “self-care” to express it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Productivity in 2017: analyzing 225 million hours of work time</title><url>http://blog.rescuetime.com/225-million-hours-productivity/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ivm</author><text>This article is a nice reminder that RescueTime keeps all your computer usage history (including site URLs) on their servers and can access it at any time.<p>But there are Selfspy[0], ManicTime[1] (Windows), and Qbserve[2] (Mac, my app) for private productivity tracking.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;selfspy&#x2F;selfspy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;selfspy&#x2F;selfspy</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manictime.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.manictime.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qotoqot.com&#x2F;qbserve&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
17,391,288 | 17,390,684 | 1 | 3 | 17,389,842 | train | <story><title>Model predicts we're the only advanced civilization in the observable universe</title><url>https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/6/22/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raducu</author><text>Actually Fermi&#x27;s paradox makes total sense to me:<p>- Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.<p>- Presume that we are not special at all and there exist more technological advanced civilizations that predate us by at least a couple million years<p>- Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe<p>If you accept the 3 presuppositions, the only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we&#x27;re the first(very unlikely).<p>Or you can choose to attack any of the presuppositions, but that&#x27;s also very hard in my humble oppinion.</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>Yes, the Drake equation seems quite pointless because multiplying many unknowns by one another doesn&#x27;t reduce uncertainty, it increases it. I don’t know anything about the history of the Drake equation, but it looks possible it was devised to demonstrate the unknownability of the result, rather than a tool to help find it.<p>Also, the article seems to use &quot;our galaxy&quot; and &quot;the universe&quot; as interchangeable terms, which of course they are not.<p>I don’t see how the Fermi paradox is a paradox: given the distances involved and what we know about the speed of light, an alien civilization would have had to develop a very long time ago in order to send signals that we would be able to detect today. Just because, maybe, no civilization was able to do that a billion years ago doesn’t mean nothing happened since (as you say, at least we happened).<p>We just don’t know.</text></item><item><author>frisco</author><text>So, I read this paper and was pretty unconvinced. I think the premise of using a Monte Carlo analysis is flawed because <i>of course</i> multiplying together wide ~iid distributions that have big near-zero components asymptotes to zero; unless I&#x27;m misunderstanding something, this is essentially the central limit theorem. (All of the parameter samples below 1e0 drag the total outcome towards zero since probabilities are bounded &gt;= 0) Thus, the real information is still strongly dominated by beliefs about the width and centering of the distributions, which we still don&#x27;t know, and as long as enough of the parameters have high uncertainty with some potentially having near-zero values, the result will always tend towards zero.<p>I think what this analysis tell us is that if you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to get better, more specific values for the parameters, the Drake Equation is just a bad tool.<p>Also, the Drake Equation doesn&#x27;t describe the number of alien civilizations, it describes the likely number of civilizations. Thus, extremely pessimistic estimates have to somehow correct for the fact that we know N is not zero, since we are here. That seems like a highly informative update that is not addressed in an interesting way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krapp</author><text>&gt; Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.<p>You&#x27;re not assuming that it is, you&#x27;re assuming that if it can be, it must be.<p>Which assumes that every part of the milky way is equally amenable to colonization, as if the galaxy were merely points laid out on a Cartesian grid, and that any species capable of colonizing one star must continue to colonize them all.<p>You must consider the case of technologically advanced species incapable of colonizing other stars, and technologically advanced species capable of colonizing other stars, but unwilling to do so on a large scale, or attempts at large scale colonization which fail across a scale of millions of years or even attempts to hide the obvious presence of such colonization from observers.<p>&gt;Presume that we are not special at all and there exist more technological advanced civilizations that predate us by at least a couple million years<p>Ok.<p>&gt;Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe<p>By humans, given that we only recently became aware that extrasolar planets are even a thing, and have only been studying the universe with anything but optical telescopes for less than a century, and don&#x27;t even know what the signs of &quot;large scale colonization&quot; would look like. No. Why?<p>&gt;Or you can choose to attack any of the presuppositions, but that&#x27;s also very hard in my humble oppinion.<p>Any argument can seem airtight when you refuse to consider more than a single case to be valid.</text></comment> | <story><title>Model predicts we're the only advanced civilization in the observable universe</title><url>https://www.universal-sci.com/headlines/2018/6/22/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>raducu</author><text>Actually Fermi&#x27;s paradox makes total sense to me:<p>- Presume that even with something like travel at 1% o speed of light, the Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.<p>- Presume that we are not special at all and there exist more technological advanced civilizations that predate us by at least a couple million years<p>- Presume such a large scale colonization would be easy to observe<p>If you accept the 3 presuppositions, the only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we&#x27;re the first(very unlikely).<p>Or you can choose to attack any of the presuppositions, but that&#x27;s also very hard in my humble oppinion.</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>Yes, the Drake equation seems quite pointless because multiplying many unknowns by one another doesn&#x27;t reduce uncertainty, it increases it. I don’t know anything about the history of the Drake equation, but it looks possible it was devised to demonstrate the unknownability of the result, rather than a tool to help find it.<p>Also, the article seems to use &quot;our galaxy&quot; and &quot;the universe&quot; as interchangeable terms, which of course they are not.<p>I don’t see how the Fermi paradox is a paradox: given the distances involved and what we know about the speed of light, an alien civilization would have had to develop a very long time ago in order to send signals that we would be able to detect today. Just because, maybe, no civilization was able to do that a billion years ago doesn’t mean nothing happened since (as you say, at least we happened).<p>We just don’t know.</text></item><item><author>frisco</author><text>So, I read this paper and was pretty unconvinced. I think the premise of using a Monte Carlo analysis is flawed because <i>of course</i> multiplying together wide ~iid distributions that have big near-zero components asymptotes to zero; unless I&#x27;m misunderstanding something, this is essentially the central limit theorem. (All of the parameter samples below 1e0 drag the total outcome towards zero since probabilities are bounded &gt;= 0) Thus, the real information is still strongly dominated by beliefs about the width and centering of the distributions, which we still don&#x27;t know, and as long as enough of the parameters have high uncertainty with some potentially having near-zero values, the result will always tend towards zero.<p>I think what this analysis tell us is that if you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to get better, more specific values for the parameters, the Drake Equation is just a bad tool.<p>Also, the Drake Equation doesn&#x27;t describe the number of alien civilizations, it describes the likely number of civilizations. Thus, extremely pessimistic estimates have to somehow correct for the fact that we know N is not zero, since we are here. That seems like a highly informative update that is not addressed in an interesting way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>&gt; Milky Way is colonizable in a couple of million years.<p>I have two takes on it:<p>1) We don&#x27;t know the possible implication of new discoveries. Well, actually we get some glimpse of it, for example with nuclear or biological weapons around, it is fairly easy to wipe out a large part of the population. The more advanced the technology becomes it seems there is a higher chance of it blowing up in our faces and us destroying ourselves. So the galaxy could be colonizable in a few million years, but any civilization headed closer to that ability, gets closer (and faster) to its own destruction as well.<p>&gt; The only logical conclusion is that there are no other technologically advanced species in the Milky Way or that we&#x27;re the first(very unlikely).<p>Given my other pessimistic take on it (1), I would say it likely there were (are) quite a few technologically advanced species, but they&#x27;ve wiped themselves out or will do so before the reach the ability to colonize planets in other galaxies.<p>2) Another take on it is these civilization have to share the same physics and chemistry that we do. And maybe there is just a limit that gets achieved and long term colonization or fast travel is just no possible. That is there are no shortcuts like wormholes, Alcubierre drives, antigravity and other such things. We&#x27;ve been used to seeing huge leaps in technology and science in the last 1000 years, so it&#x27;s tempting to extrapolate and but maybe we are close to reaching a wall. So there are quite a few civilizations out there but they&#x27;ve flown probes in their own start system, now developed internet and are sharing pictures of alien cats, hanging out on their version of Facebook and watching their alien Netflix, and of course discussing their equivalent of Fermi&#x27;s Paradox on online forums. All without a chance of ever leaving their neighborhood.</text></comment> |
21,457,102 | 21,457,076 | 1 | 3 | 21,456,399 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How is your mental health?</title><text>How and how well do you keep track of your mental health, particularly for those with a history of mental health issues, and those with a family history of mental issues.<p>As for me I like to think that I try really hard to monitor my mental health, I suffer from anxiety disorder and my father and mother both had mental health issues at one point in their life, which makes me constantly fear for my mental health and hence my monitoring of my mental state of mind like a hulk.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>apexkid</author><text>Use the following strategies:
1. Meditate daily for 15 minutes. Try vedic indian meditations.
2. Keep track of your mood using some app.
3. If your mood is bad for consistently 3 days, then open pastebin and write down about everything you are feeling and going in your head.<p>Most small problems with mental health can be dealt by bringing in consciousness. Simple example, whenever you are feeling nervous, force you brain to just observe whats going on in your body instead of being an active participant in the process. You will immediately realize you start feeling less nervous. Similarly, you can try for anxiety.<p>For more serious problems, it is best to seek medical help on periodic basis. A meetup with doctor every 3 months is reasonable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnFen</author><text>I love your comment. Especially this:<p>&gt; Most small problems with mental health can be dealt by bringing in consciousness.<p>I think that what I do is, in the end, the same as you -- I just do it a little differently. Years ago, I developed a habit of questioning why I&#x27;m doing whatever I&#x27;m doing -- particularly if what I&#x27;m doing is unusual or emotional.<p>The key, for me, is that the question and answers are intended to bring light on things to make the unconscious conscious. The answer should be accepted as a point of information and without judgement (actually doing that is hard, though, and comes with practice).<p>Once you have an idea of what&#x27;s happening with you, you are in a better position to notice and work on actual issues, if they exist.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How is your mental health?</title><text>How and how well do you keep track of your mental health, particularly for those with a history of mental health issues, and those with a family history of mental issues.<p>As for me I like to think that I try really hard to monitor my mental health, I suffer from anxiety disorder and my father and mother both had mental health issues at one point in their life, which makes me constantly fear for my mental health and hence my monitoring of my mental state of mind like a hulk.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>apexkid</author><text>Use the following strategies:
1. Meditate daily for 15 minutes. Try vedic indian meditations.
2. Keep track of your mood using some app.
3. If your mood is bad for consistently 3 days, then open pastebin and write down about everything you are feeling and going in your head.<p>Most small problems with mental health can be dealt by bringing in consciousness. Simple example, whenever you are feeling nervous, force you brain to just observe whats going on in your body instead of being an active participant in the process. You will immediately realize you start feeling less nervous. Similarly, you can try for anxiety.<p>For more serious problems, it is best to seek medical help on periodic basis. A meetup with doctor every 3 months is reasonable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Quiza12</author><text>I second the writing. Having it on page, whatever the worry&#x2F;worries, makes it tangible in a way that can be &quot;solved.&quot;</text></comment> |
27,407,197 | 27,406,757 | 1 | 3 | 27,403,352 | train | <story><title>Google can't pass its own page speed test</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ns4t1z/oc_google_cant_pass_its_own_page_speed_test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric__cartman</author><text>The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I&#x27;m a zoomer and wasn&#x27;t even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept. But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites.<p>This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that&#x27;s not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.</text></item><item><author>alpaca128</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test.<p>Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX?<p>You&#x27;ll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can&#x27;t render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of &quot;tradeoff&quot; every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser&#x27;s job of arranging the 20 layers of &lt;div&gt;s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails.<p>And I&#x27;m absolutely not surprised Google&#x27;s pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dale_glass</author><text>The memory requirements for graphics changed dramatically.<p>A screen at 1024x768, 16 bit color is 1.5 MB.<p>A screen at 3840x2160, 24 bit color is 24 MB. 32 MB if using 32 bit color.<p>Add to it that graphics became more plentiful with increased bandwidth, and low color GIFs are out of fashion, and you very easily see the memory usage grow by several times just from that fact alone.<p>Older operating systems also didn&#x27;t have a compositor. They told the application: &quot;this part of your window has just been damaged by the user dragging another window over it, redraw it&quot;.<p>Modern operating systems use a compositor. Every window is rendered in memory then composed as needed. This makes for a much nicer experience, but the memory cost of that is quite significant.<p>Take a webpage, and just give the mouse wheel a good spin. It should render lightning fast, which probably means the browser has a good chunk if not all of the page pre-rendered and ready to put on the screen in a few milliseconds. This also is going to take a lot of memory.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google can't pass its own page speed test</title><url>https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/ns4t1z/oc_google_cant_pass_its_own_page_speed_test/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric__cartman</author><text>The amount of bloat in modern websites always amazed me. I remember the first computer I ever had, a hand me down from my parents with 512MB of ram and a single core 1.6GHz cpu (yes I&#x27;m a zoomer and wasn&#x27;t even born in the good ole days of dialup internet and Windows 95) and all websites I visited ran just fine. I could open many browser tabs and do all the things one normally does in a website. The only main difference maybe is that video playback nowadays is done at much higher resolutions and bitrate. And web apps were a very new (or maybe even non-existent) concept. But still, nowadays I see my web browser using 1GB+ of memory with a few tabs open containing some newspaper articles and perhaps a couple other misc non media heavy websites.<p>This is madness. When not using an ad blocker, the amount of data that a regular website loads that&#x27;s not relevant for what you need to read (so no text and images included) is huge. I can understand why some complex web apps like Google Docs or whatever the cloud version of MS Office is called may be quite more resource intensive than a magazine article, but there is no reason why a newspaper or cooking recipe site should use memory in the hundreds of megabytes, when the useful content itself that the reader cares about is maybe (with images included) a couple megabytes in total.</text></item><item><author>alpaca128</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s causing a fair amount of panic, because 96% of sites fail the test.<p>Good. That sounds like a realistic estimation of the number of slow and bloated websites. What good are nice animations and designs when they destroy the UX?<p>You&#x27;ll never see someone gaming in 4k with hardware that can&#x27;t render it with more than 15FPS. Yet we see that kind of &quot;tradeoff&quot; every time we browse the web. Users get loading times for the site itself, then processing of JS to redundantly do the browser&#x27;s job of arranging the 20 layers of &lt;div&gt;s, then loading animations for the actual contents, and then a couple seconds after that you might get the first thumbnails.<p>And I&#x27;m absolutely not surprised Google&#x27;s pages fail this test as well; Everything from Google Images to YouTube got increasingly worse with every new design iteration, with both slower loading times as well as an increase in breakage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>john-doe</author><text>An empty Google Docs document (read-only) is 6.5MB, making 187 requests…</text></comment> |
13,515,112 | 13,515,163 | 1 | 2 | 13,514,566 | train | <story><title>Building a One-Person SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement</title><url>https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-offers-a-profound-sense-of-personal-achievement/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ggregoire</author><text>I&#x27;m building mine since September, I can confirm.<p>1) Using all the knowledges and skills I developed during 5 years as an employee to finally build my own SaaS is a very great feeling.<p>2) Building a one man SaaS forces you to leave your comfort zone. I&#x27;ve learned new languages&#x2F;frameworks. I&#x27;ve learned about security and infrastructure (I use a dozen of AWS services, I&#x27;ve never touched AWS before that). I&#x27;ve written a CLI to deploy my front-end on S3. I&#x27;ve learned how to integrate a billing system. I&#x27;ve learned to study my market and my competitors, to make a roadmap and prioritize the tasks, to find a good domain name, to find my first beta testers. I&#x27;ve learned how to create a legal entity in France and get some financial helps. I&#x27;ve never learned as much as in the last 5 months.<p>3) Being able to work when, where and how you want is an amazing thing. Not having to debate during long meetings and convince all your colleagues about every business, UX, technical or design choices feels so much more productive. Having to make all the tough decisions alone teaches you a lot.<p>Even if my SaaS doesn&#x27;t become successful, I will regret nothing, it&#x27;s the best experience in my career.</text></comment> | <story><title>Building a One-Person SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement</title><url>https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-offers-a-profound-sense-of-personal-achievement/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gizmo</author><text>This is another attempt to shell shovels during a gold rush, where the HN audience can play the role of the starry eyed rubes dreaming of easy riches. There is no substance here, just a totally unsupported claim that building a SaaS app (of all things!) will bring profound personal meaning in your life. The only reason this post exists is to get people to sign up for his community thing.<p>If anybody wants real advice, I got some for free: less talk, more product. You don&#x27;t need any of the services people are trying to sell you. Build a product. Add Stripe. Profit. Not exactly rocket science.</text></comment> |
18,354,557 | 18,354,032 | 1 | 2 | 18,351,685 | train | <story><title>A Gentle Visual Intro to Data Analysis in Python Using Pandas</title><url>https://jalammar.github.io/gentle-visual-intro-to-data-analysis-python-pandas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mefis</author><text>How does Pandas compare to R&#x27;s Tidyverse?<p>Tidyverse was super easy to pick up, and I can do almost anything I want with. Why would I want to switch to Panda?<p>Has anyone tired the python tydiverse port? How does it compare to the original?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wenc</author><text>Echoing other comments, Tidyverse is somewhat more coherent (aided significantly by magrittr&#x27;s %&gt;% operator). Beginners might get tripped up by Non-Standard Evaluation (NSE), which is a little unintuitive, but there are packages to help with that.<p>The Pandas&#x27;s API is a generalized solution to complicated, variegated use cases and its syntax reflects that (it was also hemmed by strictures of Python). There are several indexing methods, several ways to slice, several ways to do apply&#x27;s, all of which behave slightly differently. Even expert Pandas users have trouble remembering the syntax for all of these, so they typically have a Pandas API browser window open or a printed cheat sheet pasted on some corkboard. Pandas definitely takes longer to get used to than Tidyverse but the payoff is that you get to use Python, which is a somewhat &quot;deeper&quot; language than R.<p>R is great for interactive work, and for data munging jobs that don&#x27;t interact too much with non-R libraries. However Python is sinply more versatile end-to-end.<p>I used to start my interactive analysis in R and port to Python for production, but these days I start in Python straight away so there&#x27;s no impedance mismatch. I&#x27;ve personally found that writing production code in Python (and by extension Pandas) to be much more pleasant than in R, even with Tidyverse.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Gentle Visual Intro to Data Analysis in Python Using Pandas</title><url>https://jalammar.github.io/gentle-visual-intro-to-data-analysis-python-pandas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mefis</author><text>How does Pandas compare to R&#x27;s Tidyverse?<p>Tidyverse was super easy to pick up, and I can do almost anything I want with. Why would I want to switch to Panda?<p>Has anyone tired the python tydiverse port? How does it compare to the original?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peatmoss</author><text>The Tidyverse is more coherent and is generally bigger than what’s just in Pandas (R’s Tidyverse; I haven’t used the Python port).<p>If you already have a good grasp of Python, sure why not learn Pandas too? In my case, I’m reasonably ambidextrous in Python and R but find myself not reaching for Python unless there are colleague &#x2F; deployment considerations that remove R as an option. The reason? R’s Tidyverse is pretty awesome, and reflects one of the better parts of the R language, namely the meta programming that is a holdover from Scheme’s influence on R.<p>Now, if you don’t already know Python and don’t have some other reason (such as specific deployment considerations or a team of Python collaborators) to learn? I don’t think so. Python is a fine language, just as R is a fine language. You’re already getting things done in R.<p>If you want a mental challenge, or to get in on the ground floor of something that might be the future, learn Julia, or F#, or (my favorite) Racket. Or heck, learn Spark, or a new modeling method.</text></comment> |
17,208,452 | 17,204,435 | 1 | 2 | 17,203,825 | train | <story><title>My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0</title><url>https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/06/01/Julia-Favourite-New-Things.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ScottPJones</author><text>The creators of Julia have been focusing on technical, numerical, scientific computing first, however, the language was always intended to also be a good general purpose programming language (which it is) [I was lucky enough to attend Jeff Bezanson&#x27;s Ph.D. thesis defense at M.I.T. 3 years ago - and was able to ask him that question there].
I used to be a full-time C&#x2F;C++ programmer, focused on performance of large systems, however, since learning Julia I haven&#x27;t had to go back to writing C or C++ even once in over 3 years, since I can write even the sort of low-level code I typically do in Julia, faster and easier than in other languages, and get the same performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0</title><url>https://white.ucc.asn.au/2018/06/01/Julia-Favourite-New-Things.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>twic</author><text>&gt; It will be interesting to see exactly how <i>nothing</i> and <i>missing</i> play out in-practice. I feel like if all things go well, then in most circumstances operating with a <i>missing</i> should return a missing (i.e. properation), and operating with a <i>nothing</i> should throw an error (Much like a NullReferenceError).<p>We all know that having a null value in your language is a mistake, but i have to admit that it had not occurred to me that the fix was to have <i>two</i> null values.</text></comment> |
3,610,157 | 3,609,983 | 1 | 2 | 3,609,569 | train | <story><title>Oracle v. Google: "the value of this case keeps getting smaller and smaller"</title><url>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120218041255197</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>grellas</author><text>I began my legal career working for several years at in Big Law. In one case, a stultifying bureaucratic management for a major steel company was building a new plant. After hiring a firm out of the midwest to manage the construction on a fixed-fee contract, it proceeded to make life miserable for that firm by making never-ending revisions to the project plans throughout the course of construction and this not only caused that firm to incur cost overruns but also had the effect of causing substantial delays in getting the work done. Everything was done through a multi-layered committee committee structure, with memos continually being circulated about needs to separate the "wheat from the shaft" and like gems. When it was all done, this mega-sized steel company went out and hired a professional hatchet firm to assemble a "delay damages report" (I don't remember the exact name but I am sure it was much more high-toned than my description here). It then used this report to send a demand letter to the midwest firm, claiming that their management of the construction project was inept and that it had to pay millions of dollars in damages on account of the delays in construction. When they refused, they got sued for the claimed damages.<p>I can still vividly remember how, as a young lawyer, I was so stunned by the sheer <i>phoniness</i> of this so-called expert report - here were a bunch of bungling, bureaucratic committee types who couldn't make a key decision to save their lives using a sham report to try to lay the blame for their own faults at the feet of an innocent firm that had simply done its job. <i>Everything</i> in that report was couched in passive voice and dressed in self-important language - to a point where you had no idea who had done what but had only a vague sense that this or that "had transpired" with this or that result "having ensued." What is worse, the report was replete with dishonest (and obviously deliberate) renderings of key facts and with conclusions that could only be reached by the most absurd disregard of logic imaginable. I remember thinking to myself: "this is the suit-and-tie version of a stick-up in some back alley." And the case worked out true to form, with what must have appeared to be surreal results from the viewpoint of the midwest firm's executive management. Six lawyers and four paralegals were assigned to the case. Thousands of boxes of documents were assembled with lawyers and paralegals being tasked to go through each document mindlessly summarizing it on a "digest sheet," with the results ultimately to be compiled into an omnibus analysis report that could in turn be used by competing experts to attempt to rebut the absurdities of the original report. Thousands of hours of billable time racked up and this process was maybe 10 or 15% done when I decided to do a very careful analysis of a relatively few key documents only, to put the story in a context that readily demonstrated the sham nature of the "delay damages report," to summarize everything in a 50-page write-up, and to give that to the partner in charge. Within a short time, the executive management of our client used that write-up to meet face-to-face with their counterpart executives on the other side and the case quickly settled for a very modest money payment. What a mess, I thought at the time, and all from a phony expert report.<p>As the facts are emerging in Oracle's attack upon Google, it is clear that there are many complex elements here by which Android might ultimately be found to infringe upon Java in this or that respect but it is equally clear that, <i>when it is all put in context</i>, the damage claims being asserted by Oracle are about as phony as one could imagine. This Groklaw piece does a splendid job of picking the high points from the critique that Google's lawyers have put together to decimate the report of Oracle's key damages expert. All I could think of as I read this was how this sort of phony "expert analysis" remains as prevalent as it did back in my early days of lawyering (over 30 years ago) - different legal context, different facts, same exact techniques, same sort of hired guns. It is enough to give anyone a very jaded view of law and how its outworkings can harm people. Here, Google is more than capable of being able to afford to hire the best in order to defend itself. But what does an average person or company do when faced with such situations? It is truly dismaying to contemplate.<p>Oracle will of course fight to resist Google's challenges to its damages claims and it will be up to the judge to decide. But the judge recently warned Oracle that this cycle will likely be its last chance to fix the problems with its expert's report (see <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500459" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500459</a> for a detailed analysis of this) and so this will soon reach a decisive point. The result will be, I believe, that Oracle will get its day in court but will only be able to proceed with a much-stripped-down version of its claims - something that might hurt Google a bit financially but will pose no real threat to the Android platform as a whole and will amount in time to nothing more than a blip on the radar.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>esja</author><text>Thanks so much for the time you put into your posts. They always teach me something.<p>The overall theme brought this to mind:<p>"If you give me six lines &#60;of code&#62; written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu</text></comment> | <story><title>Oracle v. Google: "the value of this case keeps getting smaller and smaller"</title><url>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120218041255197</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>grellas</author><text>I began my legal career working for several years at in Big Law. In one case, a stultifying bureaucratic management for a major steel company was building a new plant. After hiring a firm out of the midwest to manage the construction on a fixed-fee contract, it proceeded to make life miserable for that firm by making never-ending revisions to the project plans throughout the course of construction and this not only caused that firm to incur cost overruns but also had the effect of causing substantial delays in getting the work done. Everything was done through a multi-layered committee committee structure, with memos continually being circulated about needs to separate the "wheat from the shaft" and like gems. When it was all done, this mega-sized steel company went out and hired a professional hatchet firm to assemble a "delay damages report" (I don't remember the exact name but I am sure it was much more high-toned than my description here). It then used this report to send a demand letter to the midwest firm, claiming that their management of the construction project was inept and that it had to pay millions of dollars in damages on account of the delays in construction. When they refused, they got sued for the claimed damages.<p>I can still vividly remember how, as a young lawyer, I was so stunned by the sheer <i>phoniness</i> of this so-called expert report - here were a bunch of bungling, bureaucratic committee types who couldn't make a key decision to save their lives using a sham report to try to lay the blame for their own faults at the feet of an innocent firm that had simply done its job. <i>Everything</i> in that report was couched in passive voice and dressed in self-important language - to a point where you had no idea who had done what but had only a vague sense that this or that "had transpired" with this or that result "having ensued." What is worse, the report was replete with dishonest (and obviously deliberate) renderings of key facts and with conclusions that could only be reached by the most absurd disregard of logic imaginable. I remember thinking to myself: "this is the suit-and-tie version of a stick-up in some back alley." And the case worked out true to form, with what must have appeared to be surreal results from the viewpoint of the midwest firm's executive management. Six lawyers and four paralegals were assigned to the case. Thousands of boxes of documents were assembled with lawyers and paralegals being tasked to go through each document mindlessly summarizing it on a "digest sheet," with the results ultimately to be compiled into an omnibus analysis report that could in turn be used by competing experts to attempt to rebut the absurdities of the original report. Thousands of hours of billable time racked up and this process was maybe 10 or 15% done when I decided to do a very careful analysis of a relatively few key documents only, to put the story in a context that readily demonstrated the sham nature of the "delay damages report," to summarize everything in a 50-page write-up, and to give that to the partner in charge. Within a short time, the executive management of our client used that write-up to meet face-to-face with their counterpart executives on the other side and the case quickly settled for a very modest money payment. What a mess, I thought at the time, and all from a phony expert report.<p>As the facts are emerging in Oracle's attack upon Google, it is clear that there are many complex elements here by which Android might ultimately be found to infringe upon Java in this or that respect but it is equally clear that, <i>when it is all put in context</i>, the damage claims being asserted by Oracle are about as phony as one could imagine. This Groklaw piece does a splendid job of picking the high points from the critique that Google's lawyers have put together to decimate the report of Oracle's key damages expert. All I could think of as I read this was how this sort of phony "expert analysis" remains as prevalent as it did back in my early days of lawyering (over 30 years ago) - different legal context, different facts, same exact techniques, same sort of hired guns. It is enough to give anyone a very jaded view of law and how its outworkings can harm people. Here, Google is more than capable of being able to afford to hire the best in order to defend itself. But what does an average person or company do when faced with such situations? It is truly dismaying to contemplate.<p>Oracle will of course fight to resist Google's challenges to its damages claims and it will be up to the judge to decide. But the judge recently warned Oracle that this cycle will likely be its last chance to fix the problems with its expert's report (see <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500459" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500459</a> for a detailed analysis of this) and so this will soon reach a decisive point. The result will be, I believe, that Oracle will get its day in court but will only be able to proceed with a much-stripped-down version of its claims - something that might hurt Google a bit financially but will pose no real threat to the Android platform as a whole and will amount in time to nothing more than a blip on the radar.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>meow</author><text>Once this case ends - one way or the other - will Oracle be able to sue Google again by picking up some more patents (from its 500 odd java patents) ? Or is this case the end of suing based on Java related patents...</text></comment> |
16,903,108 | 16,903,182 | 1 | 2 | 16,902,361 | train | <story><title>How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nabla9</author><text>The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy.<p>The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down.<p>The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year after year. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;img&#x2F;GCP2017&#x2F;PNG&#x2F;s09_FossilFuel_and_Cement_emissions_1990.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;img&#x2F;GCP2017&#x2F;PNG&#x2F;s09_FossilFuel_an...</a> Economic downturn was the only thing causing temporary decline.<p>It looks like clean energy reduces the demand in developed countries, thus reducing the prices of hydrocarbons. It will not reduce the CO2 emissions globally, it just moves them from the developed world to the developing world. Maybe it slows down CO2 emission growth rate?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;learnmore&#x2F;more_warning_signs.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;learnmore&#x2F;more_warning_signs.shtm...</a><p>---<p>EDIT: Just to point out how complex the dynamics between clean energy, hydrocarbons and policy are, here is nice recent research paper from Acemoglu and Rafey:<p>Mirage on the Horizon: Geoengineering and Carbon Taxation
Without Commitment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;14855" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;14855</a><p>&gt;Abstract: We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and may decide to switch to cleaner technology. A benevolent social planner sets carbon
taxes without commitment. Higher future carbon taxes both reduce emissions given technology
and encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner technology. Geoengineering advances, which
reduce the negative environmental effects of the existing stock of carbon, decrease future carbon
taxes and thus discourage private investments in conventional clean technology. We characterize
the conditions under which these advances diminish—rather than improve—environmental quality
and welfare.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scarblac</author><text>This is why the only way to deal with climate change is countries with carbon reserves deciding to leave it in the ground.<p>If they don&#x27;t, there is so much demand for the stuff (burning it is so incredibly useful) that it&#x27;ll all be burned.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nabla9</author><text>The interesting question is what effect clean energy has to the usage of hydrocarbons. Will it bring reduce global demand or just reduce the price of energy.<p>The good news is: CO2 emission intensity is going down globally and emissions per capita in US, China and EU28 are going down.<p>The bad news are: Emissions per capita are still going up globally, and hydrocarbon usage and CO2 emissions are breaking records year after year. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;img&#x2F;GCP2017&#x2F;PNG&#x2F;s09_FossilFuel_and_Cement_emissions_1990.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;img&#x2F;GCP2017&#x2F;PNG&#x2F;s09_FossilFuel_an...</a> Economic downturn was the only thing causing temporary decline.<p>It looks like clean energy reduces the demand in developed countries, thus reducing the prices of hydrocarbons. It will not reduce the CO2 emissions globally, it just moves them from the developed world to the developing world. Maybe it slows down CO2 emission growth rate?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;learnmore&#x2F;more_warning_signs.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;folk.uio.no&#x2F;roberan&#x2F;learnmore&#x2F;more_warning_signs.shtm...</a><p>---<p>EDIT: Just to point out how complex the dynamics between clean energy, hydrocarbons and policy are, here is nice recent research paper from Acemoglu and Rafey:<p>Mirage on the Horizon: Geoengineering and Carbon Taxation
Without Commitment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;14855" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;14855</a><p>&gt;Abstract: We show that, in a model without commitment to future policies, geoengineering breakthroughs can have adverse environmental and welfare effects because they change the (equilibrium) carbon taxes. In our model, energy producers emit carbon, which creates a negative environmental externality, and may decide to switch to cleaner technology. A benevolent social planner sets carbon
taxes without commitment. Higher future carbon taxes both reduce emissions given technology
and encourage energy producers to switch to cleaner technology. Geoengineering advances, which
reduce the negative environmental effects of the existing stock of carbon, decrease future carbon
taxes and thus discourage private investments in conventional clean technology. We characterize
the conditions under which these advances diminish—rather than improve—environmental quality
and welfare.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Symmetry</author><text>If clean energy manages to get cheap enough eventually it will be easier to synthesize simple hydrocarbons out of atmospheric and water than to drill them out of the group and we can end up carbon neutral as a whole. We&#x27;ll see how cheap midday solar ends up when the price finishes dropping.</text></comment> |
13,564,313 | 13,563,116 | 1 | 2 | 13,562,822 | train | <story><title>The Great Crime: How an American Diplomat Resisted the Armenian Genocide</title><url>https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/03/the-great-crime/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hospes</author><text>Thanks for sharing this.<p>Leslie Davis was truly a great diplomat and an incredible human being.<p>Until Genocides are not widely recognized and stopped. Those who commit them are not punished, they are going to happen again, as they did during 20th century.
Hitler used Armenian Genocide to convince others that atrocities committed by Nazis are going to be forgotten. Hitler&#x27;s quote: &quot;Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?&quot;<p>It is a shame that US did not officially recognize Armenian Genocide yet, even though most of the civilized world did and most of the US State legislatures did.<p>Germany was one of the main allies of Ottoman Empire when Armenian Genocide occurred and they only recognized Armenian Genocide of 1915 in 2016. 101 years after it happened.<p>Edit: Typos.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Great Crime: How an American Diplomat Resisted the Armenian Genocide</title><url>https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/03/the-great-crime/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ASpring</author><text>On this topic, I highly recommend Samantha Power&#x27;s book &quot;A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide&quot; which details the United States inability to respond promptly to the many cases of genocide over the past century.</text></comment> |
20,985,797 | 20,985,897 | 1 | 3 | 20,984,691 | train | <story><title>Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>They recalled a quarter million power banks because they were catching fire.<p>Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn&#x27;t have better quality control than anyone else.</text></item><item><author>jastanton</author><text>The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.</text></item><item><author>password1</author><text>&gt; Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.<p>It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US&#x2F;EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It&#x27;s the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US&#x2F;EU.<p>It&#x27;s exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it&#x27;s <i>their own</i> name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it&#x27;s an improvement.<p>Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VBprogrammer</author><text>To be fair, Samsung had to scrap a whole phone model because of battery problems. The Boeing 787 suffered with problems of batteries catching fire (and according to some reports still does). It&#x27;s a tricky problem to avoid.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>They recalled a quarter million power banks because they were catching fire.<p>Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn&#x27;t have better quality control than anyone else.</text></item><item><author>jastanton</author><text>The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.</text></item><item><author>password1</author><text>&gt; Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.<p>It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US&#x2F;EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It&#x27;s the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US&#x2F;EU.<p>It&#x27;s exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it&#x27;s <i>their own</i> name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it&#x27;s an improvement.<p>Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jandrese</author><text>The other vendors who bought from that factory and rebranded them had the same problem did not issue a recall.</text></comment> |
37,230,058 | 37,230,207 | 1 | 3 | 37,229,898 | train | <story><title>A state official refused to release water for West Maui fires</title><url>https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/a-state-official-refused-to-release-water-for-west-maui-fires-until-it-was-too-late/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggm</author><text>There is a quite common &quot;design feature&quot; in official functions which says if you stick to a rulebook you can be covered for indemnity and if you divert from a rulebook you are on your own. It stops risky behaviour. It is designed to stop things like Chernobyl.<p>In some situations, it turns into a flaw. &quot;Computer says no&quot;<p>This played out in Queensland over a flood which had a dam release issue, and went to law between 2 agencies, the government overall, and the affected businesses and householders who were flooded. The case had to be tried in another states courts, to avoid systematic bias issues.<p>Of course you need to stick to the rulebook. But the rulebook needs to be written to handle unforseen situations, which might be hard, but not impossible. Put it up the food chain, or provide from some limited relief from risk.<p>So, the emergency sirens weren&#x27;t used because &quot;they aren&#x27;t for this function&quot; and now we have &quot;can&#x27;t approve the water release&quot; -Sounds like the reaction of somebody who is concerned they will answer for a decision not explicitly covered in the rulebook.<p>Or, they simply didn&#x27;t understand their role, and their authority to act. Which of course, should be explained in the rulebook.<p>[edit: people are pointing out there were huge risks in using the sirens, and the rulebook was really explicit, and the community understood their narrow intent. So, its probably a bad example of my hypothesised &quot;rulebook says no&quot; thing]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>threeseed</author><text>&gt; So, the emergency sirens weren&#x27;t used<p>They weren&#x27;t used because the website [1] specifically says that in the event of a siren you should &quot;if you in a low laying area near the coastline; evacuate to high grounds, inland&quot;.<p>This would directly route people <i>towards</i> the fire not away. And given that tsunamis can sometimes trigger fire it easily could have caused confusion in some.<p>It definitely wasn&#x27;t a clear decision as some like to make out.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dod.hawaii.gov&#x2F;hiema&#x2F;all-hazard-statewide-outdoor-warning-siren-system&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dod.hawaii.gov&#x2F;hiema&#x2F;all-hazard-statewide-outdoor-wa...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A state official refused to release water for West Maui fires</title><url>https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/a-state-official-refused-to-release-water-for-west-maui-fires-until-it-was-too-late/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggm</author><text>There is a quite common &quot;design feature&quot; in official functions which says if you stick to a rulebook you can be covered for indemnity and if you divert from a rulebook you are on your own. It stops risky behaviour. It is designed to stop things like Chernobyl.<p>In some situations, it turns into a flaw. &quot;Computer says no&quot;<p>This played out in Queensland over a flood which had a dam release issue, and went to law between 2 agencies, the government overall, and the affected businesses and householders who were flooded. The case had to be tried in another states courts, to avoid systematic bias issues.<p>Of course you need to stick to the rulebook. But the rulebook needs to be written to handle unforseen situations, which might be hard, but not impossible. Put it up the food chain, or provide from some limited relief from risk.<p>So, the emergency sirens weren&#x27;t used because &quot;they aren&#x27;t for this function&quot; and now we have &quot;can&#x27;t approve the water release&quot; -Sounds like the reaction of somebody who is concerned they will answer for a decision not explicitly covered in the rulebook.<p>Or, they simply didn&#x27;t understand their role, and their authority to act. Which of course, should be explained in the rulebook.<p>[edit: people are pointing out there were huge risks in using the sirens, and the rulebook was really explicit, and the community understood their narrow intent. So, its probably a bad example of my hypothesised &quot;rulebook says no&quot; thing]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>legitster</author><text>&gt; There is a quite common &quot;design feature&quot; in official functions which says if you stick to a rulebook you can be covered for indemnity and if you divert from a rulebook you are on your own.<p>The reason that I don&#x27;t find discussions of the Trolley Problem very interesting is that we as a society have largely solved for it already: If you take responsibility and change the default state, it is your fault - if you leave it alone, it is nobody&#x27;s.</text></comment> |
12,467,442 | 12,467,445 | 1 | 2 | 12,466,983 | train | <story><title>Apple Is Said to Be Rethinking Strategy on Self-Driving Cars</title><url>http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/apple-is-said-to-be-rethinking-strategy-on-self-driving-cars.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jerry2</author><text>This was obviously a controlled leak by Apple... it was released in after-hours on a Friday and was leaked to an Apple friendly journalist.<p>I think the scale of this downsizing is being underestimated. I think Apple car is dead.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Is Said to Be Rethinking Strategy on Self-Driving Cars</title><url>http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/apple-is-said-to-be-rethinking-strategy-on-self-driving-cars.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IBM</author><text>This report refers to the earlier Bloomberg report but basically contradicts it [1]. In that report they said the strategy was shifting towards making the underlying tech for self-driving rather than a car, but that never made any sense to me.<p>The value in the business to Apple will be in the design, interior, and performance of the vehicle. Self-driving technology is going to be a commodity; buyers are certainly not going to be evaluating the self-driving capabilities when deciding which car to buy. The most important part is making a nice car, the self-driving tech is an implementation detail (and it will be like deciding whether to use Bluetooth and&#x2F;or Wi-Fi for a wireless protocol like AirPlay). Many companies are working on self-driving tech, including Uber which Apple is indirectly an investor in now (and won&#x27;t be competing with each other, like Google). There will be plenty of time to work on it internally, license&#x2F;buy it or collaborate with someone like Uber. Their development efforts should be focused on everything else (like manufacturing processes to enable scale and avoid Tesla&#x27;s problems), that&#x27;s what their business will really be about.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-07-28&#x2F;apple-taps-blackberry-talent-as-car-project-takes-software-turn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-07-28&#x2F;apple-taps...</a></text></comment> |
25,217,041 | 25,217,093 | 1 | 3 | 25,216,610 | train | <story><title>An upcoming story about Coinbase</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012afc25d27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avolcano</author><text>This is an odd thing to see widely published. I&#x27;m at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn&#x27;t go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn&#x27;t been published yet, especially when we hadn&#x27;t even seen it in full.<p>It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this, drawing attention to a story that might not even get that much traction. It seems like it would have been much easier to just let that story go out and respond with a simple &quot;We&#x27;ve investigated this before and dispute the claims, except for these few unfortunate stories we can confirm happened, and here&#x27;s how we will prevent them in the future.&quot; What on earth do they gain with a preemptive memo like this? Are they really scared of their employees leaking this? Would anyone even pick up a story of &quot;someone&#x27;s about to publish a bad article about Coinbase&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacker</author><text><i>It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this, drawing attention to a story that might not even get that much traction.</i><p>It&#x27;s hard for me to imagine an NYT story getting less traction than a Coinbase post, though. So is this really drawing attention to the story? Maybe this is just drawing more attention to Coinbase&#x27;s version of the story, rather than the NYT&#x27;s version.<p>Basically, if you&#x27;re going to end up publishing a counterargument to an upcoming news story, why not publish the rebuttal first? Maybe the tradition of waiting for a bad newspaper article, then immediately publishing a rebuttal, is an artifact of the olden days when there were no corporate blogs and social media, when there was no way to bring attention to a pre-rebuttal.</text></comment> | <story><title>An upcoming story about Coinbase</title><url>https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012afc25d27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>avolcano</author><text>This is an odd thing to see widely published. I&#x27;m at a company that had a rather detailed negative article written about us, and we were warned about it internally shortly before it was published, after the reporter had contacted us with details and questions. However, we didn&#x27;t go public with a reaction until after it was out, since it seemed rather pointless to respond to something that hadn&#x27;t been published yet, especially when we hadn&#x27;t even seen it in full.<p>It is odd to me that they would preemptively go loud on this, drawing attention to a story that might not even get that much traction. It seems like it would have been much easier to just let that story go out and respond with a simple &quot;We&#x27;ve investigated this before and dispute the claims, except for these few unfortunate stories we can confirm happened, and here&#x27;s how we will prevent them in the future.&quot; What on earth do they gain with a preemptive memo like this? Are they really scared of their employees leaking this? Would anyone even pick up a story of &quot;someone&#x27;s about to publish a bad article about Coinbase&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fatbird</author><text>Everyone who has read this and then reads the NYT story will do the latter with the former in mind. As much as possible, they&#x27;re anticipating what the story will reveal and getting their objections on the record so that a reader can&#x27;t help but view the story&#x27;s assertions in light of the responses they&#x27;ve already read.<p>Moreover, getting in front of this means adopting a stance of openness and transparency that, in itself, seems quite laudible. As a PR strategy, this is good work, especially for a company that&#x27;s already raised its profile on these topics earlier in the year.<p>Whether it&#x27;s cynical PR strategy or sincere crisis management is left for the reader to decide.</text></comment> |
2,874,112 | 2,874,203 | 1 | 2 | 2,873,795 | train | <story><title>Someone patented linked lists</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpark</author><text>This is not a patent on the linked list. It's a patent on a modification of the linked list that provides a secondary (and possibly tertiary, etc.) traversal path.<p>The patent should not have been granted, and should be deemed invalid if it ever goes to court, but it is not a patent on just the linked list. The anti-patent crowd makes themselves look bad by trotting out examples like this and being deceptive about the actual content of the patent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xilun0</author><text>At first I thought that too. But within 1 or 2s, I remembered that linked lists have never been limited to single linked lists (except maybe in poor quality courses), multiple linked lists have been around since Unix and very very probably before, have nothing inherently special, so it's absolutely all right to both simply call them "linked list" (like the patent properly does in its title) and to consider them as CS 101.<p>The patent is both obviously invalid and properly named "Linked List". That it is does not cover the single linked list special case does not changes this fact. The title is neutral, and <i>you</i> are inferring an anti-patent tendency from a neutral reporting (from which crowd btw?). I would be hugely curious to hear on which base you inferred that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Someone patented linked lists</title><url>http://www.google.com/patents?id=26aJAAAAEBAJ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dpark</author><text>This is not a patent on the linked list. It's a patent on a modification of the linked list that provides a secondary (and possibly tertiary, etc.) traversal path.<p>The patent should not have been granted, and should be deemed invalid if it ever goes to court, but it is not a patent on just the linked list. The anti-patent crowd makes themselves look bad by trotting out examples like this and being deceptive about the actual content of the patent.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sophacles</author><text>Sorry, but Linked List is class of similar things -- Single-, Double-, Multiple-linkings are all part of the Linked List genre. Just because you associate Linked List strongest with the singly-linked list does not mean that other forms of the same thing, all of which qualify as linked list, can't be called it as well. You are just being disingenuous -- stop it, that is not cool.</text></comment> |
22,877,373 | 22,877,547 | 1 | 2 | 22,875,106 | train | <story><title>Emacs: The most successful malleable system</title><url>https://malleable.systems/blog/2020/04/01/the-most-successful-malleable-system-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrec</author><text>Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things; what you get out of the box with vscode beats laborious customization by expert hands in emacs 9 times out of 10. Emacs still does some fundamentals better (undo), can be used in a terminal and, if you avoid bloatware like spacemacs, also offers better performance. If one is willing to ignore the spyware and proprietary component aspects, vs code by now is a better choice even for most power users, IMO.</text></item><item><author>dmortin</author><text>The defaults. They aren&#x27;t very good, IMO. Many users don&#x27;t want to spend time with customizing, they want a system which works instantly with language plugins, and so on. VSCode does a very good job at that.<p>Emacs is for people who like to deeply personalize their editors. That&#x27;s why I use it. But it takes time and learning elisp and many people are unwilling to do that.</text></item><item><author>svat</author><text>While I am a fan of Emacs (IMO any one of Org, AUCTeX, or Magit is in itself a worthwhile reason to use Emacs, though of course the ease of customizing nearly anything with just a few lines of elisp is the main comfort), I think it&#x27;s also worth looking at lessons from the <i>failures</i> of Emacs — what prevents or prevented Emacs from being even more successful? (As the post says, Emacs&#x27;s &quot;success&quot; is only when considered relative to other malleable systems.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agentultra</author><text>&gt; Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things<p>I&#x27;ve been impressed that VSCode has managed to implement features Emacs has had for decades. One day it might catch up as long as MS keeps pumping millions into its development.<p>For me though it&#x27;s still not even close.</text></comment> | <story><title>Emacs: The most successful malleable system</title><url>https://malleable.systems/blog/2020/04/01/the-most-successful-malleable-system-in-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrec</author><text>Even if you are an elisp expert, emacs is by now quite inferior to VSCode for most things; what you get out of the box with vscode beats laborious customization by expert hands in emacs 9 times out of 10. Emacs still does some fundamentals better (undo), can be used in a terminal and, if you avoid bloatware like spacemacs, also offers better performance. If one is willing to ignore the spyware and proprietary component aspects, vs code by now is a better choice even for most power users, IMO.</text></item><item><author>dmortin</author><text>The defaults. They aren&#x27;t very good, IMO. Many users don&#x27;t want to spend time with customizing, they want a system which works instantly with language plugins, and so on. VSCode does a very good job at that.<p>Emacs is for people who like to deeply personalize their editors. That&#x27;s why I use it. But it takes time and learning elisp and many people are unwilling to do that.</text></item><item><author>svat</author><text>While I am a fan of Emacs (IMO any one of Org, AUCTeX, or Magit is in itself a worthwhile reason to use Emacs, though of course the ease of customizing nearly anything with just a few lines of elisp is the main comfort), I think it&#x27;s also worth looking at lessons from the <i>failures</i> of Emacs — what prevents or prevented Emacs from being even more successful? (As the post says, Emacs&#x27;s &quot;success&quot; is only when considered relative to other malleable systems.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taeric</author><text>I find this hard to believe. Not that you may like one over the other, but that one is superior.<p>Getting used to tramp, magit, and eshell has effectively made it so I will be in Emacs forever. Adding in developer modes helps. Same for org. But really it is the seamless eshell ability to &quot;cd &#x2F;ssh:mycomputer&#x2F;&quot; and not with about reconnecting a terminal over and over that is something I don&#x27;t want to leave.</text></comment> |
24,805,214 | 24,803,473 | 1 | 2 | 24,802,829 | train | <story><title>Tinnitus Treatment from Neuromod</title><url>https://www.lenire.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quaffapint</author><text>I&#x27;ve often wondered why sometimes it&#x27;s worse than others. It&#x27;s always there. I always hear the ringing, but most times I can ignore it, but there are other times it just seems so much louder.<p>I would like to know what all those triggers are so I can try to avoid them. Some are obvious - real loud noises, heavy exercise, etc, but others not so much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Twirrim</author><text>I&#x27;ve been dealing with it for nearly 20 years now.<p>I&#x27;m apparently fairly adept at putting it to the background these days, because I mostly don&#x27;t notice it except for when it&#x27;s particularly quiet, or something specifically triggers my awareness of it. Certain sounds in certain frequency ranges trigger it off too. My youngest kid had a playful shriek thing she did that would palpably hurt me and cause it to kick off.<p>Seeing this post on HN itself is triggering and I&#x27;m now very conscious of the high pitched ringing sound.<p>I would be willing to pay good money to be cured of this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tinnitus Treatment from Neuromod</title><url>https://www.lenire.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quaffapint</author><text>I&#x27;ve often wondered why sometimes it&#x27;s worse than others. It&#x27;s always there. I always hear the ringing, but most times I can ignore it, but there are other times it just seems so much louder.<p>I would like to know what all those triggers are so I can try to avoid them. Some are obvious - real loud noises, heavy exercise, etc, but others not so much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Thaxll</author><text>I have really strong tinnitus either when:<p>- I did not sleep enough<p>- I wake up in the middle of my sleep<p>- I drink a lot of alcohol<p>- There is a lot of noise arround me<p>- In few cases it&#x27;s just random and get stronger for no apparent reasons</text></comment> |
35,215,523 | 35,212,892 | 1 | 3 | 35,209,982 | train | <story><title>Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally</title><url>https://thenybble.de/posts/json-analysis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jahewson</author><text>I had to parse a database backup from Firebase, which was, remarkably, a 300GB JSON file. The database is a tree rooted at a single object, which means that any tool that attempts to stream individual objects always wanted to buffer this single 300GB root object. It wasn’t enough to strip off the root either, as the really big records were arrays a couple of levels down, with a few different formats depending on the schema. For added fun our data included some JSON serialised inside strings too.<p>This was a few years ago and I threw every tool and language I could at it, but they were either far too slow or buffered records larger than memory, even the fancy C++ SIMD parsers did this. I eventually got something working in Go and it was impressively fast and ran on my MacBook, but we never ended up using it as another engineer just wrote a script that read the entire database from the Firebase API record-by-record throttled over several days, lol.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wruza</author><text>The decision they made to store potentially multigigabyte-sized backups into a single json is just idiotic, to begin with.</text></comment> | <story><title>Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally</title><url>https://thenybble.de/posts/json-analysis/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jahewson</author><text>I had to parse a database backup from Firebase, which was, remarkably, a 300GB JSON file. The database is a tree rooted at a single object, which means that any tool that attempts to stream individual objects always wanted to buffer this single 300GB root object. It wasn’t enough to strip off the root either, as the really big records were arrays a couple of levels down, with a few different formats depending on the schema. For added fun our data included some JSON serialised inside strings too.<p>This was a few years ago and I threw every tool and language I could at it, but they were either far too slow or buffered records larger than memory, even the fancy C++ SIMD parsers did this. I eventually got something working in Go and it was impressively fast and ran on my MacBook, but we never ended up using it as another engineer just wrote a script that read the entire database from the Firebase API record-by-record throttled over several days, lol.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>I&#x27;ve used ijson in Python for this kind of thing in the past, it&#x27;s pretty effective: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;ijson&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;ijson&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
36,311,601 | 36,311,759 | 1 | 3 | 36,310,619 | train | <story><title>Microsoft is bringing GPT-4 to US Government agencies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-07/microsoft-offers-powerful-openai-technology-to-us-government-cloud-customers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrackerFF</author><text>I work for a gov. agency, and we&#x27;re in the midst of a project (with your typical MBB consulting firms) to map the use of generative AI&#x2F;ML tools, and what possible benefits there are.<p>One immediate internal benefit would be the information retrieval bit - you kind of get rid of the &quot;data&quot; barrier, which involves knowledge in databases&#x2F;SQL etc.<p>Gov. agencies typically have lots of bureaucrats with deep domain knowledge in laws, regulations, and whatever the field they&#x27;re working on - but limited data knowledge. And instead of relying on analysts etc. to retrieve the needed information, these LLMs could bypass that step.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s not entirely that straight forward - as you&#x27;d need to validate the things the LLM serves you, but that&#x27;s one of the ideas. Leadership have been discussing AI&#x2F;ML non-stop for the past 6-7 months, and it seems like these kinds of FOMO projects are popping up everywhere...good times for the consulting firms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taeric</author><text>I&#x27;m not clear on the immediate benefit there. You are asserting it is easier to get answers out, as opposed to having to learn a query language?<p>If so, I think that makes sense. With the &#x2F;major&#x2F; caveat that you are also making it even easier to get incorrect data out. No?</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft is bringing GPT-4 to US Government agencies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-07/microsoft-offers-powerful-openai-technology-to-us-government-cloud-customers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TrackerFF</author><text>I work for a gov. agency, and we&#x27;re in the midst of a project (with your typical MBB consulting firms) to map the use of generative AI&#x2F;ML tools, and what possible benefits there are.<p>One immediate internal benefit would be the information retrieval bit - you kind of get rid of the &quot;data&quot; barrier, which involves knowledge in databases&#x2F;SQL etc.<p>Gov. agencies typically have lots of bureaucrats with deep domain knowledge in laws, regulations, and whatever the field they&#x27;re working on - but limited data knowledge. And instead of relying on analysts etc. to retrieve the needed information, these LLMs could bypass that step.<p>Of course, it&#x27;s not entirely that straight forward - as you&#x27;d need to validate the things the LLM serves you, but that&#x27;s one of the ideas. Leadership have been discussing AI&#x2F;ML non-stop for the past 6-7 months, and it seems like these kinds of FOMO projects are popping up everywhere...good times for the consulting firms.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mchaver</author><text>It might be ok if that data gets validated by experts in the same field, but there have been plenty of stories about lawyers and professors who failed to even review the output they use. Color me skeptical.</text></comment> |
23,277,676 | 23,276,045 | 1 | 3 | 23,273,758 | train | <story><title>Employers are rethinking open-plan office design</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/05/open-office-design-coronavirus-risk-safe-workplace-health/611299/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>So one thing that bothers me about this is they talk about not going back to cubicles and creating transparent dividers. I do not like this not one bit, I enjoy the privacy and distraction blocking of a cubicle, an office would be optimal but a cubicle is preferable to the open office hellscape that was looming before Corona stopped it.<p>But going from open office to plexiglass dividers seems to be far worse than a cubicle in every conceivable way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baron_harkonnen</author><text>Open offices are, and have always been about, control. Not about productivity, but exclusively about control (well maybe with a touch of thrift thrown in there).<p>We say this all the time but act as if it&#x27;s some secret, or just a cynical remark, but it&#x27;s not either of these. As a general rule your boss likes that you can feel their perpetual gaze as you work, even if in practice it means you are working less.<p>Because of course you aren&#x27;t working all the time, and of course you are not 100% being productive. Everyone knows this. It is not a secret that even the most productive engineer spends a huge amount of office time doing nothing.<p>No worker (as I general rule, I know there are exceptions) prefers open offices to either cubicles or real offices (I wonder how many HN have ever had these?). Nobody feels that they work their best when someone is watching them. Everyone knows that part of working in an open office is figuring out how to create the illusion that you are working.<p>The only reason to have an open office is because the people making the decision for how the office should be, and the people reporting to them, do in fact like to watch you work, because they like the control that they feel when they do this.<p>Please let&#x27;s stop pretending that we don&#x27;t all understand exactly what open offices are about.</text></comment> | <story><title>Employers are rethinking open-plan office design</title><url>https://www.citylab.com/life/2020/05/open-office-design-coronavirus-risk-safe-workplace-health/611299/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>So one thing that bothers me about this is they talk about not going back to cubicles and creating transparent dividers. I do not like this not one bit, I enjoy the privacy and distraction blocking of a cubicle, an office would be optimal but a cubicle is preferable to the open office hellscape that was looming before Corona stopped it.<p>But going from open office to plexiglass dividers seems to be far worse than a cubicle in every conceivable way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>onemoresoop</author><text>Yeah, the transparent modern panopticon. They think that when people feel watched produce more. Im in no way more productive this way. I have to make a hard effort to zone out into coding, and this effort is consuming a lot of energy in itself. I think its our time to bargain and not allow this to happen when we all go back to work. I hope for partial or full time work from home setup. The value extraction machine should keep that in mind</text></comment> |
31,640,948 | 31,639,436 | 1 | 3 | 31,638,648 | train | <story><title>In Defense of OpenStreetMap's Data Model</title><url>https://stevecoast.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-openstreetmaps-data</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TuringTest</author><text>But you don&#x27;t need to complicate the storage format to fix a problem like that. You can build validation tools that will check whether the stored data conforms to the correct specified geometry, and only emit valid polygons to later tools in the pipeline when they do.<p>&quot;Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send&quot; is still a good principle. The problem with rejecting invalid structures at the data storage format instead of a later validation step is that it hurts flexibility and extensibility. If later on you need a different type of polygon that would be rejected by the specification, you&#x27;ll need to create a new version of the file format and update all tools reading it even if they won&#x27;t handle the new type, instead of just having old tools silently ignoring the new format that they don&#x27;t understand.</text></item><item><author>RicoElectrico</author><text>The proposed improvements would obsolete a bunch of problems such as broken polygons [1] which happen regularly. They would also make processing OSM more accessible without needing to randomly seek over GBs of node locations just to assemble geometries which takes a significant runtime percentage of osm2pgsql.<p>For me Steve Coast lost his credibility when he joined the closed and proprietary what3words.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OSM_Inspector&#x2F;Views&#x2F;Multipolygons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OSM_Inspector&#x2F;Views&#x2F;Mult...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seoaeu</author><text>&gt; &quot;Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send&quot; is still a good principle.<p>No, it is a terrible principle which produces brittle software and impossible to implement standards. The problem is that no one actually follows the “be strict in what you send” part, and just goes with whatever cobbled together mess the other existing software seems to accept. Before long, a spec compliant implementation can’t actually understand any of the messages that are being sent<p>&gt; just having old tools silently ignoring the new format that they don&#x27;t understand.<p>This sounds like another headache. I don’t want my tools silently breaking.</text></comment> | <story><title>In Defense of OpenStreetMap's Data Model</title><url>https://stevecoast.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-openstreetmaps-data</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TuringTest</author><text>But you don&#x27;t need to complicate the storage format to fix a problem like that. You can build validation tools that will check whether the stored data conforms to the correct specified geometry, and only emit valid polygons to later tools in the pipeline when they do.<p>&quot;Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you send&quot; is still a good principle. The problem with rejecting invalid structures at the data storage format instead of a later validation step is that it hurts flexibility and extensibility. If later on you need a different type of polygon that would be rejected by the specification, you&#x27;ll need to create a new version of the file format and update all tools reading it even if they won&#x27;t handle the new type, instead of just having old tools silently ignoring the new format that they don&#x27;t understand.</text></item><item><author>RicoElectrico</author><text>The proposed improvements would obsolete a bunch of problems such as broken polygons [1] which happen regularly. They would also make processing OSM more accessible without needing to randomly seek over GBs of node locations just to assemble geometries which takes a significant runtime percentage of osm2pgsql.<p>For me Steve Coast lost his credibility when he joined the closed and proprietary what3words.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OSM_Inspector&#x2F;Views&#x2F;Multipolygons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OSM_Inspector&#x2F;Views&#x2F;Mult...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxerickson</author><text>The &quot;expression&quot; layer of the data model has had 20 years to evolve and has largely been static for a decade.<p>Making everything slower and harder to retain flexibility you don&#x27;t need isn&#x27;t a great tradeoff.</text></comment> |
15,183,182 | 15,181,972 | 1 | 3 | 15,180,860 | train | <story><title>Radar reveals two moons orbiting asteroid Florence</title><url>https://astronomynow.com/2017/09/05/radar-reveals-two-moons-orbiting-asteroid-florence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaquers</author><text>Is the &#x27;light&#x27; reflecting off the asteroid emitted from the sun? I had never seen or even knew radar could distinguish value like what is shown here.<p>I suppose terrestrial radar looks at much smaller objects and what it sees is emitted from the tower and bounced back in a straight line so that sort of makes sense.<p>More info on the observatory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldstone_Solar_System_Radar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldstone_Solar_System_Radar</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wiredfool</author><text>Here&#x27;s a good explainer on what you&#x27;re actually seeing in the radar image: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.planetary.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;emily-lakdawalla&#x2F;2011&#x2F;3248.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.planetary.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;emily-lakdawalla&#x2F;2011&#x2F;3248.ht...</a><p>* The signal is emitted from a radar installation on the earth, and reflected back to another dish.<p>* Brightness is reflected signal strength. So surfaces that are perpendicular to us will reflect better. The less the surface normal points to us, the less reflection we see.<p>* Up&#x2F;Down is Time axis. The points closer to us will return sooner than points farther away.<p>* Left&#x2F;right is Doppler shift. Parts of the asteroid that are rotating away from us will show up on one side, parts rotating towards us will show up on the other side.<p>(this is the vertically oriented image).</text></comment> | <story><title>Radar reveals two moons orbiting asteroid Florence</title><url>https://astronomynow.com/2017/09/05/radar-reveals-two-moons-orbiting-asteroid-florence/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jaquers</author><text>Is the &#x27;light&#x27; reflecting off the asteroid emitted from the sun? I had never seen or even knew radar could distinguish value like what is shown here.<p>I suppose terrestrial radar looks at much smaller objects and what it sees is emitted from the tower and bounced back in a straight line so that sort of makes sense.<p>More info on the observatory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldstone_Solar_System_Radar" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goldstone_Solar_System_Radar</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>db48x</author><text>No, that&#x27;s not showing light reflected from the sun. In the still image, the radar source (aka Earth) is to the left; in the animation it&#x27;s at the top.<p>In the still image, the vertical dimension is the bearing of the transmitted radar signal, while the horizontal dimension is distance away from Earth, as computed by the time of flight of the radar signals. In the animation those are swapped.</text></comment> |
8,631,268 | 8,631,370 | 1 | 2 | 8,631,022 | train | <story><title>Node.js in Flame Graphs</title><url>http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/11/nodejs-in-flames.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thedufer</author><text>&gt; It’s unclear why Express.js chose not to use a constant time data structure like a map to store its handlers.<p>Its actually quite clear - most routes are defined by a regex rather than a string, so there is no built-in structure (if there&#x27;s a way at all) to do O(1) lookups in the routing table. A router that only allowed string route definitions would be faster but far less useful.<p>I can&#x27;t explain away the recursion, though. That seems wholly unnecessary.<p>Edit: Actually, I figured that out, too. You can put middleware in a router so it only runs on certain URL patterns. The only difference between a normal route handler and a middleware function is that a middleware function uses the third argument (an optional callback) and calls it when done to allow the route matcher to continue through the routes array. This can be asynchronous (thus the callback), so the router has to recurse through the routes array instead of looping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quotemstr</author><text>Of course there&#x27;s a faster way! Combine all the routes into a DFA, then run the DFA over the URL. It&#x27;s guaranteed to run in constant space and O(n) (n=URL length) time! The union of any set of regular languages is itself a regular language.<p>You can use Ragel[1] to build your automaton.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.colm.net&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;ragel&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Node.js in Flame Graphs</title><url>http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/11/nodejs-in-flames.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thedufer</author><text>&gt; It’s unclear why Express.js chose not to use a constant time data structure like a map to store its handlers.<p>Its actually quite clear - most routes are defined by a regex rather than a string, so there is no built-in structure (if there&#x27;s a way at all) to do O(1) lookups in the routing table. A router that only allowed string route definitions would be faster but far less useful.<p>I can&#x27;t explain away the recursion, though. That seems wholly unnecessary.<p>Edit: Actually, I figured that out, too. You can put middleware in a router so it only runs on certain URL patterns. The only difference between a normal route handler and a middleware function is that a middleware function uses the third argument (an optional callback) and calls it when done to allow the route matcher to continue through the routes array. This can be asynchronous (thus the callback), so the router has to recurse through the routes array instead of looping.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewvc</author><text>A lot of people here are right, the right way is with an NFA. I just want to add that the solution is not even hard, you can do it with string concatenation and capture groups using regexps. Regexps are NFAs, and are highly optimized C code in just about every JS engine.<p>If I have the routes &#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar and &#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar&#x2F;(\d+) I can generate the regexp ((^\&#x2F;foo\&#x2F;bar$)|(^\&#x2F;foo\&#x2F;bar\&#x2F;\d+$))<p>I&#x27;m not at all surprised, the quality of software in node is pretty low, I&#x27;ve seen numerous issues in node libs being just as boneheaded. I swear, the fact that the express devs overlooked a key optimization is crazy. Rails, by way of example, uses the Journey engine to solve this problem (<a href="https://github.com/rails/journey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rails&#x2F;journey</a>)</text></comment> |
8,906,159 | 8,905,621 | 1 | 2 | 8,905,471 | train | <story><title>Robert Morris: All About Programming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/aap.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>allendoerfer</author><text>&gt; My father tried to interest me in programming somewhat before high school; it didn&#x27;t work, and I didn&#x27;t continue then.<p>I suspect, that it almost never works that way. Learning programming or hacking as a child is all about figuring it out on your own, doing something, what your parents or your teachers can not understand, defining your own identity.<p>That is why I doubt that all the programs in the US, which try to teach children programming, will work. They might teach some concepts, but in the end i fear, that they will hinder the children to aspire a career in the field. I see a bad parallel to beauty contests, were parents try to live their dreams through their children.<p>Of course it is never black and white, but I think you have to be ultra careful with stuff like this. I think naturally interesting, open platforms are a better way to get children to dig deeper. Minecraft is a perfect example.</text></comment> | <story><title>Robert Morris: All About Programming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/aap.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bcd21</author><text>&quot;Not wanting to look like a loser to the people I most admired, I was pretty late in admitting the obvious about math.&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t understand this part, what&#x27;s the obvious thing about math he was late in admitting?
Were the Bell labs people right in his opinion or not?</text></comment> |
Subsets and Splits