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34,863,299 | 34,863,141 | 1 | 2 | 34,862,607 | train | <story><title>I still Lisp (2021)</title><url>https://betterprogramming.pub/why-i-still-lisp-and-you-should-too-18a2ae36bd8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaze</author><text>I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it.<p>Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projects on GitHub under themetaschemer. Still though I’m struck by the ratio of lisp project articles vs lisp praising articles hitting HN’s front page.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>(I&#x27;ve done a lot of Lisp, for money, and for open source platform&amp;community buildout.)<p>HN articles about exotic things, not just Lisp, do seem to get upvoted disproportionately.<p>Also, PG declared Lisp as something you&#x27;re <i>supposed</i> to think is important or a superpower, and I&#x27;ve wondered whether that also contributes to some upvotes on HN.<p>But I&#x27;m not aware that a single one of the bajillion YC startups used Lisp.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s like an admirable religious dogma that a congregation affirms each weekend, and then promptly forgets about for the rest of the week.</text></comment> | <story><title>I still Lisp (2021)</title><url>https://betterprogramming.pub/why-i-still-lisp-and-you-should-too-18a2ae36bd8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gaze</author><text>I have a suspicion that outside of the 10 people writing lisp seriously—shirakumo, stylewarning, lispm, and some others— there’s more characters of prose praising lisp being written than lisp being written. It’s a great language. I really like it and am using it for some projects. I just want people to actually use it rather than talking about using it.<p>Edit: I’m wrong in the present case! Author has some cool projects on GitHub under themetaschemer. Still though I’m struck by the ratio of lisp project articles vs lisp praising articles hitting HN’s front page.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>floren</author><text>I think Lisp has a sort of cachet to it, &quot;lost secret of the ancients scorned by foolish mortals,&quot; that draws a lot of people to talk about it endlessly and speculate about how important it is instead of just... using it. I used to see the same thing in the Plan 9 community where people loved to post on the mailing list about all their grand plans for doing stuff with Plan 9, but they never even installed the goddamn thing! If they had, they&#x27;d have realized it has some neat ideas but it&#x27;s also just a software system, and a rough-around-the-edges research system at that. Similarly, Lisp is just a programming language, and regardless of how many blog posts you read about it, you&#x27;ll still have to actually <i>make the program</i> in the end.</text></comment> |
33,726,170 | 33,725,372 | 1 | 2 | 33,716,486 | train | <story><title>Life as a door-to-door salesman</title><url>https://www.tampabay.com/narratives/2022/11/17/whats-it-like-work-door-door-sales-job/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>Argh, I hate the solar salesmen. We get them all the time during the warm season. I have a hard time going the rude route and just shutting the door on them, but I&#x27;m improved a lot in shutting down their arguments with three sentences of my own stats. Pretty quickly they know I&#x27;ve run the numbers, figured out why it doesn&#x27;t make sense for me, and I&#x27;ve shut down all arguments they want to make. Usually they just say &quot;Wow, it sounds like you&#x27;re already given this a lot of thought.&quot; Umm, yeah, yeah I have. I wanted the numbers to work. I tried to convince myself. Even with Project Solar pricing, it does&#x27;t work for me. So it sure as hell won&#x27;t work if I pay your prices that give you such a nice commission.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shiftpgdn</author><text>I just tell them I already signed a contract with the last solar salesman and they’re coming tomorrow to install it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Life as a door-to-door salesman</title><url>https://www.tampabay.com/narratives/2022/11/17/whats-it-like-work-door-door-sales-job/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rootusrootus</author><text>Argh, I hate the solar salesmen. We get them all the time during the warm season. I have a hard time going the rude route and just shutting the door on them, but I&#x27;m improved a lot in shutting down their arguments with three sentences of my own stats. Pretty quickly they know I&#x27;ve run the numbers, figured out why it doesn&#x27;t make sense for me, and I&#x27;ve shut down all arguments they want to make. Usually they just say &quot;Wow, it sounds like you&#x27;re already given this a lot of thought.&quot; Umm, yeah, yeah I have. I wanted the numbers to work. I tried to convince myself. Even with Project Solar pricing, it does&#x27;t work for me. So it sure as hell won&#x27;t work if I pay your prices that give you such a nice commission.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tedmiston</author><text>Nothing wrong with just not answering. How long are they really going to stand there waiting?</text></comment> |
11,519,194 | 11,518,727 | 1 | 3 | 11,518,680 | train | <story><title>The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe (2005)</title><url>http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nxzero</author><text>Related topic is the &quot;Great Dying&quot; which killed the majority of Native Americans:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;gunsgermssteel&#x2F;variables&#x2F;smallpox.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pbs.org&#x2F;gunsgermssteel&#x2F;variables&#x2F;smallpox.html</a><p>Of note is how smallpox was used as a weapon:<p>&gt;&gt; &quot;You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians, by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.&quot; — Jeffery Amherst<p>Sources:<p>Disease as a weapon against Native Americans
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_American_disease_and_epidemics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Native_American_disease_and_...</a><p>Smallpox Blankets
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cherokeeregistry.com&#x2F;index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=407&amp;Itemid=617" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cherokeeregistry.com&#x2F;index.php?option=com_content&amp;vie...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe (2005)</title><url>http://www.historytoday.com/ole-j-benedictow/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>halov</author><text>&quot;If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place.&quot;</text></comment> |
12,823,170 | 12,822,702 | 1 | 2 | 12,822,148 | train | <story><title>Neural Enhance – Super Resolution for images using deep learning</title><url>https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ENGNR</author><text>We enhanced the image like on CSI and look, the defendants face!<p>&quot;Because my photos were used heavily in the dataset...&quot;<p>Jury: So guilty</text></comment> | <story><title>Neural Enhance – Super Resolution for images using deep learning</title><url>https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nullc</author><text>Comparison using nearest neighbor, instead of a more reasonable linear filter, or-- heaven forbid-- some edge basic directed interpolator... is a little cheaty.</text></comment> |
12,958,118 | 12,956,797 | 1 | 2 | 12,956,143 | train | <story><title>Whatsapp: Video Calling</title><url>https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000629/WhatsApp-Video-Calling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sschueller</author><text>Same day we have this article &quot;Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps (npr.org)&quot; in the front page of HN.<p>I know Facebook claims to use Whisper systems encryption but how can we blindly trust that this is actually implemented in a closed source system?<p>Stallman and others have been warning us for many years and we have been brushing it off. Now Snowden pretty much confirmed most of it but we keep going and entangling our wold more into these services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cyph0n</author><text>There are two things that make me trust WhatsApp more than the competition:<p>1. In the UAE, where VoIP is illegal, the government was not able to selectively block voice traffic since it is indistinguishable from text traffic. So they had to ask WhatsApp to block voice functionality whenever a user is in the UAE.<p>2. If you lose your phone, you cannot recover your messages. Now, you may claim that they&#x27;re just not providing a frontend option to do this, but would that make financial sense? You are potentially losing users who want their messages backed up so you can... falsely claim that you don&#x27;t store messages?<p>3. Similar to 2), WhatsApp desktop cannot work without your phone being connected, again because that&#x27;s the only way to access your messages.</text></comment> | <story><title>Whatsapp: Video Calling</title><url>https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000629/WhatsApp-Video-Calling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sschueller</author><text>Same day we have this article &quot;Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps (npr.org)&quot; in the front page of HN.<p>I know Facebook claims to use Whisper systems encryption but how can we blindly trust that this is actually implemented in a closed source system?<p>Stallman and others have been warning us for many years and we have been brushing it off. Now Snowden pretty much confirmed most of it but we keep going and entangling our wold more into these services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nux</author><text>It&#x27;s simple. People are oblivious or just don&#x27;t give a shit.
As long as they can share their cat pictures and so on, it&#x27;s all fucking dandy.<p>Something really bad needs to happen to move things in the right direction. Snowden was not enough, clearly.</text></comment> |
19,690,538 | 19,689,932 | 1 | 3 | 19,689,554 | train | <story><title>Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update</title><url>https://bluesabre.org/2019/04/18/xubuntu-19-04-the-exhaustive-update/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yagodragon</author><text>What really sets me off with linux DE&#x27;s is how poorly they handle dpi scaling on external monitors. I recently bought a 24&quot; 2560 × 1440 monitor for my 15.6 laptop running Ubuntu Mate 18.04. This is what i went through just to make it work.<p>1. Plugged the hdmi, everything looks so small.
2. Mate desktop had HiDPI support but only by a scaling factor of 2. Now everything looks very large.
3. I have to manually change the fonts dpi settings. Chrome and some other apps look good but the menus, file manager and firefox are still upscaled.
4. I manually change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to make firefox look good.<p>Finally, the result looks very unpolished. The menus are still largely upscaled and some apps like vlc won&#x27;t even scale at all. My laptop&#x27;s screen can&#x27;t be used as a secondary screen because everything is upscaled, not to mention that i have to manually undo all those steps to revert everything back to &quot;normal&quot; for my 15.6&quot; laptop screen. I eventually wrote some scripts with dconf to automate the proccess but it&#x27;s just not good.<p>Does anyone have experience with external monitors and linux desktops? How does xfce or kde handle this? I tried gnome that supports fractional scaling and it&#x27;s way better than mate. Now the problem is that i only have 8GB of ram and gnome shell is known to be a ram hog.</text></comment> | <story><title>Xubuntu 19.04: The Exhaustive Update</title><url>https://bluesabre.org/2019/04/18/xubuntu-19-04-the-exhaustive-update/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>virtualpain</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure whether Xubuntu includes KDE&#x27;s stuff or people here confused between Xubuntu and Kubuntu?</text></comment> |
3,170,281 | 3,169,841 | 1 | 2 | 3,169,516 | train | <story><title>Apple's iTV: Apps Are the New Channels</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/apps_are_the_new_channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>I agree that this is the direction Apple will probably take, but I'm not sure I like it.<p>When I sit down on the couch my brain thinks "I want to watch The Walking Dead" not "I want to watch AMC's The Walking Dead."<p>Think of how poor the interface would be on the TiVo if, instead of show titles, you were presented first with folders of television networks to select from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>luigi</author><text>We may start seeing shows as apps, not channels as apps. So I can get The Walking Dead app, or the Battlestar Galactica app.<p>Television networks are like book publishers. They're not really needed anymore when content creators can sell their stuff directly to a willing audience.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's iTV: Apps Are the New Channels</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/apps_are_the_new_channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>I agree that this is the direction Apple will probably take, but I'm not sure I like it.<p>When I sit down on the couch my brain thinks "I want to watch The Walking Dead" not "I want to watch AMC's The Walking Dead."<p>Think of how poor the interface would be on the TiVo if, instead of show titles, you were presented first with folders of television networks to select from.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jodrellblank</author><text>It would be like the Windows Start Menu where you had the likes of Start -&#62; Programs -&#62; Muffleklumpf Software Ltd -&#62; Picture Editor.<p>It led to a searchable start menu.</text></comment> |
26,193,508 | 26,193,498 | 1 | 2 | 26,190,403 | train | <story><title>Checked C</title><url>https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cwfowler</author><text>Non-standard is one of the biggest drawbacks of Rust. If there were a standard and <i>independent</i> Rust equivalents of gcc, clang, icc and Visual C, then the decision to <i>try out</i> Rust would be easier.<p>One reference implementation is a lock-in, not only technologically, but also socially in terms of a community that is too monolithic for its own good.</text></item><item><author>pornel</author><text>I don&#x27;t expect it to get traction.<p>• C is valued for being super portable and compatible with every platform, including legacy ones, but this applies to specifically C89 or C90, and nothing else. As soon as you embrace new features, it&#x27;s not your universal C any more. You&#x27;re going to need newer compilers, new tooling, and that&#x27;s almost like starting with a new language.<p>• C users have mostly self-selected themselves to like C the way it is: a small, flexible, zero-overhead language that isn&#x27;t C++. Addition of checked containers, generics, and restrictions on pointer arithmetic, etc. make checked C not feel like C any more.<p>• Checked C still needs refactoring of the code. For large established codebases this is still a lot of work, and still a risk of introducing new bugs. It&#x27;s very tempting to settle on just running one more analyzer, sanitizer or fuzzer instead.<p>And in the end with all this effort, back-compat break, whole-codebase refactoring you&#x27;re still left with the old C, with headers and include paths, sloppy macros, ancient stdlib, painful dependency management, etc.<p>If you&#x27;re going to rewrite C incrementally to a more complex dialect, and require a newer non-standard compiler for it, you may as well run c2rust on it first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elteto</author><text>I would say give it time, you can&#x27;t measure Rust with this yardstick (yet), Rust is a baby in terms of age.<p>Let&#x27;s not forget that C is ~50 years old and yet having reliable, open-source, high-quality compilers is a thing of the past 20 years or so. Clang was born in the 2000&#x27;s, GCC is much older but it wasn&#x27;t that great of a compiler for some time. Same with VS.</text></comment> | <story><title>Checked C</title><url>https://github.com/microsoft/checkedc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cwfowler</author><text>Non-standard is one of the biggest drawbacks of Rust. If there were a standard and <i>independent</i> Rust equivalents of gcc, clang, icc and Visual C, then the decision to <i>try out</i> Rust would be easier.<p>One reference implementation is a lock-in, not only technologically, but also socially in terms of a community that is too monolithic for its own good.</text></item><item><author>pornel</author><text>I don&#x27;t expect it to get traction.<p>• C is valued for being super portable and compatible with every platform, including legacy ones, but this applies to specifically C89 or C90, and nothing else. As soon as you embrace new features, it&#x27;s not your universal C any more. You&#x27;re going to need newer compilers, new tooling, and that&#x27;s almost like starting with a new language.<p>• C users have mostly self-selected themselves to like C the way it is: a small, flexible, zero-overhead language that isn&#x27;t C++. Addition of checked containers, generics, and restrictions on pointer arithmetic, etc. make checked C not feel like C any more.<p>• Checked C still needs refactoring of the code. For large established codebases this is still a lot of work, and still a risk of introducing new bugs. It&#x27;s very tempting to settle on just running one more analyzer, sanitizer or fuzzer instead.<p>And in the end with all this effort, back-compat break, whole-codebase refactoring you&#x27;re still left with the old C, with headers and include paths, sloppy macros, ancient stdlib, painful dependency management, etc.<p>If you&#x27;re going to rewrite C incrementally to a more complex dialect, and require a newer non-standard compiler for it, you may as well run c2rust on it first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bitexploder</author><text>What an interesting take. Go, Python, Ruby and countless other languages only have one implementation and real community. I don’t think this is a real concern for most developers. As long as the language solves their problems and is well maintained with a community that trusts the language maintainers.</text></comment> |
14,727,991 | 14,727,727 | 1 | 3 | 14,726,647 | train | <story><title>Loudness (2007)</title><url>http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismealy</author><text>It&#x27;s not just about volume. Tracks mastered with a ton of compression trick your brain into sounding louder than they really are, which is great for a song or two (or if you want pay people to pay attention to your tv commercial), but for listening to a whole album it wears you out. If you have an album you love but somehow never make it all the way through this is probably why. The perception of full volume gets your lizard brain aroused, which is great if you&#x27;re in the club, but not if you&#x27;re in the mood to listen to the first three Led Zeppelin records in a row.<p>On the other hand, older recordings with more dynamic range might sound thin at low volume, but are much richer at higher volumes (you can hear the individual instruments better and feel the space in the sound). If you try comparing older and newer masterings at a good volume the newer mastering usually sounds kinda mushy.</text></comment> | <story><title>Loudness (2007)</title><url>http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thatswrong0</author><text>This is pretty funny to me because I mostly listen to (and produce) electronic music.. and there are pretty much no rules when it comes to electronic music and loudness. Stupidly loud music can actually sound pretty dang good [0][1]. The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS.<p>If you have the right source material, you can brickwall the hell out of tracks and not notice the distortion.. or perhaps the distortion will even add pleasant artifacts. One of the more prominent issues with making things stupid loud is intermodulation distortion, but that really only becomes noticeable when you have pure tones or vocals being mashed into the limiter. If the source material is already distorted (think screechy dubstep synths), then it probably don&#x27;t matter.<p>But yeah, when you&#x27;re dealing with more traditional kinds of music, which often times involves vocals or a lot more subtlety to the timbre of the instruments, brickwalling is probably not the best call. It seems that the Search and Destroy &quot;remaster&quot; sounding terribly distorted was intentional.. but IMO it&#x27;s not very listenable nor does the distortion really bring the grungy character than I think they were going for. It just sounds bad.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;moodygood&#x2F;mtgfyt-vol1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;moodygood&#x2F;mtgfyt-vol1</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY</a></text></comment> |
1,311,703 | 1,311,702 | 1 | 2 | 1,311,391 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Are you with me? Leaving Facebook. </title><text>I'll be deactivating my Facebook account (tainting what I need to) and removing as much information there as possible within the week.<p>I'm not a hardcore privacy advocate, but I joined Facebook with the understanding that some of what data placed there would stay private. That is what we agreed to.<p>Facebook has repeatedly violated that trust.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmelbye</author><text>No, I'm really happy with the service that they provide. If there's something that's actually private, I'm not going to be posting it on the Internet in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>araneae</author><text>I agree with you generally, but the most damning information about me that's on Facebook was posted by other people.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Are you with me? Leaving Facebook. </title><text>I'll be deactivating my Facebook account (tainting what I need to) and removing as much information there as possible within the week.<p>I'm not a hardcore privacy advocate, but I joined Facebook with the understanding that some of what data placed there would stay private. That is what we agreed to.<p>Facebook has repeatedly violated that trust.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmelbye</author><text>No, I'm really happy with the service that they provide. If there's something that's actually private, I'm not going to be posting it on the Internet in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamesjyu</author><text>Hear hear to that! I'm always puzzled by all these privacy nuts that go on and on about privacy problems with social media sites like Facebook. If something is absolutely private and you do not want to share it outside of one or two people, DO NOT put it on a social media site! Period.<p>In fact, I would go as far as to say never put any critically sensitive information on the web.</text></comment> |
21,482,162 | 21,482,192 | 1 | 2 | 21,481,305 | train | <story><title>Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-08/delays-in-boeing-max-return-began-with-near-crash-in-simulator</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>FWIW, the near-crash in the simulator was apparently not directly related to MCAS, but occurred when Boeing &quot;simulated what would happen if gamma rays from space scrambled data in the plane’s flight-control computers.&quot;<p>&gt; <i>In one scenario, the plane aggressively dove in a way that mimicked what happened in the crashes on the grounded jetliner, the people said. While such a failure had never occurred in the 737’s history, it was at least theoretically possible.</i><p>&gt; <i>Because at least one of the pilots who flew the scenario in a simulator found it difficult to respond in time to maintain control of the plane, it needed to be fixed, according to two people familiar with the results.</i><p>However, the next sentence seems to belie the implication that this was just an edge case:<p>&gt; <i>The answer was to modernize what was a relatively antiquated design on the 737.</i><p>So, of all the things that caused Boeing&#x2F;FAA to realize and the accept the 737 needed to modernize its decades-old design, it was a simulated edge case involving &quot;gamma rays from space&quot;? Hate to be overly cynical, but that sounds like the kind of CYA thing you&#x27;d say when you don&#x27;t want to admit it you made a huge mistake by deferring modernization in the first place, of which the MCAS concept was a major and disastrous symptom.</text></comment> | <story><title>Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-08/delays-in-boeing-max-return-began-with-near-crash-in-simulator</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zaroth</author><text>The can of worms has been officially opened, and this may turn out to be a case study in how bad software and outsourcing your centers of excellence can bankrupt a company.<p>If TFA is to believed, Boeing has embarked on a project to take what is currently a master-slave failover design and jury-rig it into a master-master real-time system. This is based on bad performance in the simulator—not because of MCAS—but while testing errant memory errors from a simulated gamma ray strike!<p>The obvious question of how can dual-master ever work when they disagree if there isn’t a 3rd source of truth to vote out the failure? This means the software running in both computers has to somehow agree which one is wrong, while one of them is in a potential failure state. This... isn’t how flight control systems are designed from first principals.<p>I’m not a flight system designer, but there must be hundreds of physical, electrical, and architectural considerations taken at every point in the design process which enable multi-master controllers with the ability to vote out a failure. Everything from the particular sensor suite, the number of sensors, the way they are wired, the way data is acquired and bused through the system, the timing and synchronization of the system clocks, the way that control outputs are calculated, queued, and ultimately issued to downstream controllers... none of the necessary pieces will be in place in a system which up until now makes you select a single master controller before embarking on your flight.<p>The only conclusion I can reach is that Boeing has lost its mind, and this project is absolutely doomed to fail. The architecture that Boeing has apparently committed itself to now is extremely difficult to design from first principals and a blank slate. I just don’t see how it’s something that can realistically be papered onto a legacy dual-computer system after the fact.<p>The part in TFA about “adding a wire” practically made me spit out my coffee. The sheer level of arrogance that Boeing management must have to think this would be possible - is just a classic example of an elitist MBA management group totally disconnected from any technical domain expertise. Boeing said they would have this ready for certification <i>by the end of this year</i>?!</text></comment> |
29,470,027 | 29,469,757 | 1 | 2 | 29,467,494 | train | <story><title>PCB Business Card</title><url>https://github.com/Hanqaqa/PCB_Business_Card</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>utopcell</author><text>What, it doesn&#x27;t run Linux [1] ?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirtythreeforty.net&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-business-card-runs-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirtythreeforty.net&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-business-c...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avian</author><text>Ah, good old 2019. A time when micros were still throw-away trinkets, not a rarity with a 80 week factory lead time.</text></comment> | <story><title>PCB Business Card</title><url>https://github.com/Hanqaqa/PCB_Business_Card</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>utopcell</author><text>What, it doesn&#x27;t run Linux [1] ?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirtythreeforty.net&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-business-card-runs-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thirtythreeforty.net&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;my-business-c...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throaway46546</author><text>&gt;It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card’s shell.<p>No way I&#x27;m plugging a business card into my computer.</text></comment> |
23,936,620 | 23,935,838 | 1 | 2 | 23,931,789 | train | <story><title>Buy on Google is now open and commission-free</title><url>https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-commission/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t seem to solve the main problem I have with Amazon: even when I know exactly what I want, it&#x27;s impossible to find. Amazon hides the thing you want behind the items they want you to buy instead, and they allow fakes and spammers to flourish. They never have the right aspects in their search filters, either. Looks like Google is the same way. I can&#x27;t find an A19 LED light bulb with 2700K color temperature and CRI 90 or better. I&#x27;m going to have a much better experience in an actual store.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrweasel</author><text>They may have changed it, but a few years back I did product feeds to Amazon and had to read the documentation. Basically Amazon will only search the title of the product page, nothing else.<p>That&#x27;s why the title of the products are stupid long with everything crammed in. But yeah, you can find anything on Amazon, the site is basically broken unless you know the exact thing you want, brand, name and all.<p>It&#x27;s not even that good at searching books anymore.</text></comment> | <story><title>Buy on Google is now open and commission-free</title><url>https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-commission/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t seem to solve the main problem I have with Amazon: even when I know exactly what I want, it&#x27;s impossible to find. Amazon hides the thing you want behind the items they want you to buy instead, and they allow fakes and spammers to flourish. They never have the right aspects in their search filters, either. Looks like Google is the same way. I can&#x27;t find an A19 LED light bulb with 2700K color temperature and CRI 90 or better. I&#x27;m going to have a much better experience in an actual store.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikelward</author><text>If I search for Pixel 3 case on Amazon, it will also return Pixel 3 XL cases.<p>If I search for 1440p IPS monitor, it will mix in some monitors that aren&#x27;t 1440p, and some that aren&#x27;t IPS.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s because they don&#x27;t want to solve the problem, because they don&#x27;t care, or because somehow having customers need to spend more time on Amazon to research their purchases perversely leads to people spending more time on Amazon seeing other items they might also later buy.</text></comment> |
2,586,171 | 2,585,998 | 1 | 2 | 2,585,962 | train | <story><title>Italian seismologists to be tried for manslaughter</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/italian_seismologists_to_be_tr.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alexqgb</author><text>This isn't the first time Italy has reduced itself to the status of reactionary backwater by attacking scientists, Galileo being a case in point.<p>In the wake of that travesty, Louis XIV didn't have a hard time convincing Cassini to abandon his post in Bologna and emigrate to France, where he could continue his work safely. Given the extraordinary military advantage conveyed by Cassini's work in improving cartography through increasingly sophisticated astronomical observation, the Netherlands and England were quick to join the seventeenth-century's war for technical talent.<p>Not grasping the extent to which the world was passing it by, the Papacy kept Galileo's works on the list of banned books until the mid-nineteenth century. By the time they came off, Italy's once formidable lead had been squandered permanently.<p>File this current fiasco under 'lessons not learned'.</text></comment> | <story><title>Italian seismologists to be tried for manslaughter</title><url>http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/05/italian_seismologists_to_be_tr.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gacba</author><text>As a former science major, this kind of stuff is scary...<p>1) Scientists, with a crapton of data, interpret results to the best of their ability.<p>2) Scientists report results, with caveats, to Country.<p>3) Country reported results to Public, (possibly without caveats) in an effort to "look good".<p>4) Public ignored caveats (if given), took Scientists words as absolute proof.<p>5) Public ignored Common Sense during what must have been a major seismic event, and instead of blaming themselves, blame the Scientists.<p>Oh, what a demon Science hath wrought.</text></comment> |
26,805,122 | 26,805,056 | 1 | 3 | 26,804,791 | train | <story><title>Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>varispeed</author><text>The problem is that people are conditioned to think that if something is published then most likely it is real.
Maybe we need to overhaul our education system and teach people about manipulation techniques, how to spot manipulative language, how to cross reference interesting information, how to assess whether the source is trustworthy and so on. Then teach about existence of PR agencies who create fake accounts and play certain characters to create an opinion.
Unfortunately governments who used to rely on their own propaganda may not like it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cblconfederate</author><text>Having watched the case of the azerbaijan misinformation unfolding in twitter and facebook, i m kind of surprised why this girl was fired. If anything she was uber-productive, and her account is very accurate.<p>I would like the investigation to continue even deeper to find the motives behind facebook&#x27;s actions. This story is sadly missed in the west, a lot of crimes have been committed while the west was looking away or occupied with trivialities<p>&gt; When Zhang complained about the lack of action in another internal post in December, she received a response from Rosen that was exemplary of how Facebook justified ignoring abuses in small or poor countries that had failed to garner press attention: referring to the company’s myriad prioritization frameworks.<p>This is certainly true (and very sad) but don&#x27;t forget that evil regimes have ways to infiltrate tech companies</text></comment> |
9,466,811 | 9,465,897 | 1 | 3 | 9,464,348 | train | <story><title>Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it</title><url>http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jamesfe</author><text>I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn&#x27;t hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape.<p>A few notes:<p>- Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board<p>- We printed on tyvek for water&#x2F;rip proofing, which was interesting. It&#x27;s surprisingly hard to rip.<p>- I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever.<p>- I can&#x27;t tell, but did NZ make the cut?<p>- And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water.<p>What a great job though!<p>This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - &quot;I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000&quot; and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like &quot;Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that&#x27;s 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that&#x27;s about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asavadatti</author><text>Obligatory <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldmapswithout.nz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldmapswithout.nz&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it</title><url>http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jamesfe</author><text>I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn&#x27;t hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape.<p>A few notes:<p>- Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board<p>- We printed on tyvek for water&#x2F;rip proofing, which was interesting. It&#x27;s surprisingly hard to rip.<p>- I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever.<p>- I can&#x27;t tell, but did NZ make the cut?<p>- And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water.<p>What a great job though!<p>This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - &quot;I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000&quot; and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like &quot;Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that&#x27;s 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that&#x27;s about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dettervt</author><text>If you look at the very bottom corner of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dominik-schwarz.net&#x2F;potpourri&#x2F;worldmap&#x2F;images&#x2F;DSC_3256.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dominik-schwarz.net&#x2F;potpourri&#x2F;worldmap&#x2F;images&#x2F;DSC...</a> it looks like NZ was included, you can just see the Auckland area.</text></comment> |
18,646,780 | 18,646,698 | 1 | 3 | 18,646,485 | train | <story><title>Open Location Code</title><url>https://github.com/google/open-location-code</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nabla9</author><text>Reinventing the wheel without any clear advantage.<p>Plus codes don&#x27;t seem to have any advantage over widely used MGRS (Military Grid Reference System). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Military_Grid_Reference_System" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Military_Grid_Reference_System</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Open Location Code</title><url>https://github.com/google/open-location-code</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paulvs</author><text>A shoutout to Rober Dam who built Xaddress, &quot;Give 7 billion people an instant physical address&quot;: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xaddress.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xaddress.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
33,280,413 | 33,279,069 | 1 | 3 | 33,278,698 | train | <story><title>Another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis</title><url>https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/yet-another-scientific-body-has-debunked</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jenda_</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Annie_Dookhan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Annie_Dookhan</a><p>I find it shocking that there is no &quot;continuous quality assurance&quot; of these labs - for example, one should take the lab as a blackbox, and send 10% known-negatives, 10% known-positives, and 10% random samples from previous batches in every batch, and then evaluate a) how many known positives&#x2F;negatives turned out right, b) how many samples from previous batches return the same result.</text></comment> | <story><title>Another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis</title><url>https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/yet-another-scientific-body-has-debunked</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nova22033</author><text>Proves the main thesis of his excellent book<p>The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Cadaver-King-Country-Dentist-Injustice&#x2F;dp&#x2F;161039691X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Cadaver-King-Country-Dentist-Injustic...</a></text></comment> |
21,016,914 | 21,016,933 | 1 | 3 | 21,015,964 | train | <story><title>Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tryitnow</author><text>A few things:<p>1) That&#x27;s not what was spent, it&#x27;s what this paper projected was spent.<p>2) I think this paper is defining subsidy in a way that we don&#x27;t usually use that word. They&#x27;re calling the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change and pollution &quot;subsidies&quot;, most people would just call those things &quot;costs.&quot;<p>Using the word &quot;subsidy&quot; implies that governments are actively taking tax dollars and giving it to fossil fuel companies and consumers. That doesn&#x27;t appear to be what&#x27;s going on for the most part.<p>Look at Figure 4, the bulk of the so-called &quot;subsidies&quot; are &quot;global warming&quot; and &quot;local pollution&quot; those aren&#x27;t what most people would call subsidies, they&#x27;re costs.<p>I&#x27;m saying this just to clarify things, personally I am supportive of massive tax increases on carbon and massive subsidies for renewables.</text></item><item><author>tito</author><text>USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Glo...</a><p>&quot;hey fossil fuels, let&#x27;s 1v1&quot;
sincerely, solar<p>(From Forbes: United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>It’s an unconventional way to use “subsidy,” but I think it fits.<p>Imagine a garbage company. The government pays them so they can buy land where they dump their garbage. Obviously a subsidy.<p>Now, let’s say the government buys the land themselves then gives it to the company for dumping. No money changes hands but this is still pretty clearly a subsidy.<p>Instead of giving the company land, the government retains ownership, but lets the company dump there for free. Still a pretty clear subsidy.<p>Instead of buying the land, the government just takes it. Now no money is involved at all, but it’s still a subsidy.<p>Instead of taking the land, the government just declares that it’s legal for the garbage company to dump trash on other people’s land, and the owners just have to deal with it. This is quite different in the details from the original subsidy, but the overall effect is essentially the same.<p>Polluters are in a situation that’s exactly like this last scenario. They get to dump their trash on everyone’s property and don’t have to pay for the privilege. They’re being subsidized in an amount equal to whatever payment it would take to get everyone to willingly accept this trash.</text></comment> | <story><title>Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-19/solar-and-wind-power-so-cheap-they-re-outgrowing-subsidies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tryitnow</author><text>A few things:<p>1) That&#x27;s not what was spent, it&#x27;s what this paper projected was spent.<p>2) I think this paper is defining subsidy in a way that we don&#x27;t usually use that word. They&#x27;re calling the costs associated with anthropogenic climate change and pollution &quot;subsidies&quot;, most people would just call those things &quot;costs.&quot;<p>Using the word &quot;subsidy&quot; implies that governments are actively taking tax dollars and giving it to fossil fuel companies and consumers. That doesn&#x27;t appear to be what&#x27;s going on for the most part.<p>Look at Figure 4, the bulk of the so-called &quot;subsidies&quot; are &quot;global warming&quot; and &quot;local pollution&quot; those aren&#x27;t what most people would call subsidies, they&#x27;re costs.<p>I&#x27;m saying this just to clarify things, personally I am supportive of massive tax increases on carbon and massive subsidies for renewables.</text></item><item><author>tito</author><text>USD$5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imf.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;Publications&#x2F;WP&#x2F;Issues&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Glo...</a><p>&quot;hey fossil fuels, let&#x27;s 1v1&quot;
sincerely, solar<p>(From Forbes: United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reitzensteinm</author><text>The use of the word subsidy is a sleight of hand to double count the environmental impact of fossil fuels.<p>Not penalizing harmful externalities is bad policy. Subsidizing them is lunacy.</text></comment> |
17,229,361 | 17,228,292 | 1 | 2 | 17,226,485 | train | <story><title>Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)</title><url>http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Leon</author><text>&gt; forced upgrades<p>I think the forced upgrades were a good thing. The security model on Windows 10 and continued support of updates to 10 is overall a Good Thing for the average Windows User. The majority of users on Windows run their systems in extremely non-secure ways and skip updates and upgrades completely. This is a danger to the internet as a whole.<p>To me it ultimately comes down to this: I can&#x27;t force my older relatives to update their machines or even stop them from running ancient versions of Windows. On that front, Windows 10 made things better.</text></item><item><author>dm319</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of people on HN and reddit who don&#x27;t understand the scepticism some people have for microsoft. But actually, I wouldn&#x27;t even say things have changed that much recently - Windows 10 was born into controversy with both the forced upgrades and spying. Skype didn&#x27;t happen too long ago, nor did Nokia.<p>I also like this post here[1] from reddit about some of the earlier evils of Microsoft&#x27;s leadership.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3aicvf&#x2F;what_villain_lived_long_enough_to_see_themselves&#x2F;csd2rrl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3aicvf&#x2F;what_vill...</a><p>I know there is an open-source movement going on with MS, but I inherently don&#x27;t trust them - they&#x27;ve got prior form and still have the power to shift the software landscape even more in their favour.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Piskvorrr</author><text>Better? <i>Better</i>!?! Don&#x27;t even get me <i>started</i> on how much support time the constant stream of automated reinstalls causes, even <i>when</i> it works. (Last iteration, about a week ago: Win10 decided it dislikes Avast, reminding me very much of Windows&#x27; ancient brouhaha with DR-DOS) &quot;Yeah, yeah, you wanted to get things done, where do you want to go today and stuff, whatever. Nope, you&#x27;re gonna look at this pretty percentage for an hour and hope it doesn&#x27;t end in <i>Rolling back</i>.&quot;<p>I agree that keeping on ancient <i>Windows</i> is a chore now, and keeping systems up to date is good for the users and the Net in general; but thanks to the WinX forced-upgrade <i>and</i> the unreliable updates, I&#x27;ve deployed some more Ubuntu clients. For some mysterious reason, those don&#x27;t need to jump into your face with YOU WILL REBOOT NOW PUNY HUMAN.<p>(And really, I would <i>love</i> to have a system that has a good security model, even if that means Windows...but this is far outweighed by the abovementioned trampling of the user: whoops you turned your back for a few minutes, oh well, you didn&#x27;t need to save or close that properly anyway)</text></comment> | <story><title>Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)</title><url>http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Leon</author><text>&gt; forced upgrades<p>I think the forced upgrades were a good thing. The security model on Windows 10 and continued support of updates to 10 is overall a Good Thing for the average Windows User. The majority of users on Windows run their systems in extremely non-secure ways and skip updates and upgrades completely. This is a danger to the internet as a whole.<p>To me it ultimately comes down to this: I can&#x27;t force my older relatives to update their machines or even stop them from running ancient versions of Windows. On that front, Windows 10 made things better.</text></item><item><author>dm319</author><text>There&#x27;s a lot of people on HN and reddit who don&#x27;t understand the scepticism some people have for microsoft. But actually, I wouldn&#x27;t even say things have changed that much recently - Windows 10 was born into controversy with both the forced upgrades and spying. Skype didn&#x27;t happen too long ago, nor did Nokia.<p>I also like this post here[1] from reddit about some of the earlier evils of Microsoft&#x27;s leadership.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3aicvf&#x2F;what_villain_lived_long_enough_to_see_themselves&#x2F;csd2rrl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AskReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3aicvf&#x2F;what_vill...</a><p>I know there is an open-source movement going on with MS, but I inherently don&#x27;t trust them - they&#x27;ve got prior form and still have the power to shift the software landscape even more in their favour.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iajrz</author><text>That&#x27;s a nice take - it&#x27;s still understandable that many of us would rather be in control of the software we&#x27;re using, though, isn&#x27;t it? It&#x27;s - irksome.<p>If one of my prod servers were forcefully updated - with no warning, therefore no chance to make backups - I&#x27;d be furious. If my main dev machine was bricked as a result of forceful updates, as I seem to recall it happened to some folk...<p>It feels like they disregard users in that sense, and it&#x27;s sad.</text></comment> |
8,097,734 | 8,097,356 | 1 | 3 | 8,096,491 | train | <story><title>Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B</title><url>http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/zillow-to-buy-trulia-for-3-5-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>I interned for Redfin last summer. This is a really interesting space, and most people don&#x27;t realize that Zillow&#x2F;Trulia are operating drastically different businesses from Redfin.<p>Some background: The US real estate industry is broken up into regions (e.g. SF bay area, Orange County, Lake Tahoe, etc.). In order for a brokerage [1] to operate in a region, it needs to employ agents specifically licensed in that region, and have a real office there. Importantly, each region also has its own data feed of listings, called an MLS feed [2]. Amongst real estate agents, the MLS feed in each region is considered the primary source of real estate listings. If a house is not in the MLS, it&#x27;s not for sale. BUT, only brokerages have access to MLS feeds.<p>There is no standard for MLS software. It&#x27;s truly terrible. No joke, in some regions, the MLS service -- responsible for all real estate listings in that region -- is an archaic Windows program running on a desktop in some guy&#x27;s Lake Tahoe cabin. Generally, MLS feeds are <i>similar</i> in structure, but there is no semblance of standardization, API, or developer-friendly solution for accessing it. Every region has its own MLS feed with its own structure, access restrictions, weird rules, etc. It&#x27;s a nightmare to develop against.<p>Zillow and Trulia set out to solve this problem. They are listing aggregators, essentially filling the same role as MLS software. But because Zillow and Trulia are not brokerages, they cannot access the MLS feeds. So they have to get the data on their own. They depend on real estate agents manually inputting their listings into the Zillow&#x2F;Trulia platforms. Nowadays, most agents <i>do</i> input this data, but that was not always the case, and IIRC Zillow&#x2F;Trulia still only have something like 80% coverage compared to MLS feeds.<p>So Zillow and Trulia are simple listing services. They are basically advertising platforms for real estate agents. Their revenue model depends on agent referrals, paid listings, etc. They have no direct role in selling a house.<p>REDFIN IS A BROKERAGE. Redfin actually employs real estate agents who will help you buy a house. And instead of earning commission proportional to sale price (a huge moral hazard -- see: Freakonomics), they earn commission based on customer satisfaction. So Redfin agents are inherently motivated to work in the customer&#x27;s best interest, instead of their own, which is getting the price as high as possible.<p>Because Redfin is a brokerage, it is entirely different from Zillow and Trulia. This is the reason that you only see Redfin in &quot;some&quot; areas (although they have coverage in most major metropolitan areas at this point), while Trulia&#x2F;Zillow are nation-wide. When Redfin expands to a new area, it needs to establish an office, hire and train agents, file paperwork, etc. This takes time, but often when Redfin gets to a new area, there are already thousands of customers who have been waiting for them to launch there.<p>Also, because Redfin is a brokerage, it has access to MLS feeds. So Redfin gets its data directly from the source, instead of depending on real estate agents to enter their listings directly into its platform. Because of this, Redfin has 100% coverage in all the regions it serves, compared to ~80% (IIRC) of Trulia&#x2F;Zillow.<p>So now it looks like the market will come down to Redfin vs. Trulia&#x2F;Zillow. I&#x27;m curious to see how this plays out. On one hand, Redfin has a far more defensible model -- they have an office in every region, and actually make a lot of money from each listing. And they have a far better value proposition for the customer. Why would you use a real estate agent trying to pump the price as high as possible, when you can use one who will be paid entirely based on your satisfaction rating?<p>On the other hand, Zillow&#x2F;Trulia have wider reach. There is nothing stopping them from opening a brokerage in their most popular markets and simply copying Redfin&#x27;s model. But if they do that, they are already way far behind.<p>Personally, and I&#x27;m biased because I worked there, I think Redfin is going to &quot;win&quot; this battle. There&#x27;s no reason why Zillow&#x2F;Redfin can&#x27;t coexist harmoniously, but I expect we will see Redfin making far more money in 10+ years than Zillow.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_broker" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Real_estate_broker</a>
[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiple_listing_service</a><p>(EDIT since this is getting so many upvotes: I DO NOT SPEAK FOR REDFIN AT ALL, I DO NOT WORK FOR REDFIN. I worked there one summer last year.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tnorthcutt</author><text><i>Why would you use a real estate agent trying to pump the price as high as possible</i><p>I was surprised to read this, since I thought you&#x27;d hinted at exactly the opposite by mentioning Freakonomics. Isn&#x27;t the Freakonomics argument that an agent is incentivized to instead sell the property <i>as quickly as possible</i>, regardless of the sale price? For instance, accepting an offer that is $10k under the listing price will cost the seller $9,400 ($10,000 * 94%), but will only cost the selling agent $150 (1.5% * $10,000). If the agent&#x27;s time is worth almost anything approaching a respectable hourly rate for a sales professional, then they should pressure the seller to take the lower offer, as not doing so would likely incur significant time costs (well over $150 worth of their time) for the listing agent.<p>Is that view of things mistaken?</text></comment> | <story><title>Zillow to Acquire Trulia for $3.5B</title><url>http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/zillow-to-buy-trulia-for-3-5-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>I interned for Redfin last summer. This is a really interesting space, and most people don&#x27;t realize that Zillow&#x2F;Trulia are operating drastically different businesses from Redfin.<p>Some background: The US real estate industry is broken up into regions (e.g. SF bay area, Orange County, Lake Tahoe, etc.). In order for a brokerage [1] to operate in a region, it needs to employ agents specifically licensed in that region, and have a real office there. Importantly, each region also has its own data feed of listings, called an MLS feed [2]. Amongst real estate agents, the MLS feed in each region is considered the primary source of real estate listings. If a house is not in the MLS, it&#x27;s not for sale. BUT, only brokerages have access to MLS feeds.<p>There is no standard for MLS software. It&#x27;s truly terrible. No joke, in some regions, the MLS service -- responsible for all real estate listings in that region -- is an archaic Windows program running on a desktop in some guy&#x27;s Lake Tahoe cabin. Generally, MLS feeds are <i>similar</i> in structure, but there is no semblance of standardization, API, or developer-friendly solution for accessing it. Every region has its own MLS feed with its own structure, access restrictions, weird rules, etc. It&#x27;s a nightmare to develop against.<p>Zillow and Trulia set out to solve this problem. They are listing aggregators, essentially filling the same role as MLS software. But because Zillow and Trulia are not brokerages, they cannot access the MLS feeds. So they have to get the data on their own. They depend on real estate agents manually inputting their listings into the Zillow&#x2F;Trulia platforms. Nowadays, most agents <i>do</i> input this data, but that was not always the case, and IIRC Zillow&#x2F;Trulia still only have something like 80% coverage compared to MLS feeds.<p>So Zillow and Trulia are simple listing services. They are basically advertising platforms for real estate agents. Their revenue model depends on agent referrals, paid listings, etc. They have no direct role in selling a house.<p>REDFIN IS A BROKERAGE. Redfin actually employs real estate agents who will help you buy a house. And instead of earning commission proportional to sale price (a huge moral hazard -- see: Freakonomics), they earn commission based on customer satisfaction. So Redfin agents are inherently motivated to work in the customer&#x27;s best interest, instead of their own, which is getting the price as high as possible.<p>Because Redfin is a brokerage, it is entirely different from Zillow and Trulia. This is the reason that you only see Redfin in &quot;some&quot; areas (although they have coverage in most major metropolitan areas at this point), while Trulia&#x2F;Zillow are nation-wide. When Redfin expands to a new area, it needs to establish an office, hire and train agents, file paperwork, etc. This takes time, but often when Redfin gets to a new area, there are already thousands of customers who have been waiting for them to launch there.<p>Also, because Redfin is a brokerage, it has access to MLS feeds. So Redfin gets its data directly from the source, instead of depending on real estate agents to enter their listings directly into its platform. Because of this, Redfin has 100% coverage in all the regions it serves, compared to ~80% (IIRC) of Trulia&#x2F;Zillow.<p>So now it looks like the market will come down to Redfin vs. Trulia&#x2F;Zillow. I&#x27;m curious to see how this plays out. On one hand, Redfin has a far more defensible model -- they have an office in every region, and actually make a lot of money from each listing. And they have a far better value proposition for the customer. Why would you use a real estate agent trying to pump the price as high as possible, when you can use one who will be paid entirely based on your satisfaction rating?<p>On the other hand, Zillow&#x2F;Trulia have wider reach. There is nothing stopping them from opening a brokerage in their most popular markets and simply copying Redfin&#x27;s model. But if they do that, they are already way far behind.<p>Personally, and I&#x27;m biased because I worked there, I think Redfin is going to &quot;win&quot; this battle. There&#x27;s no reason why Zillow&#x2F;Redfin can&#x27;t coexist harmoniously, but I expect we will see Redfin making far more money in 10+ years than Zillow.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_broker" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Real_estate_broker</a>
[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multiple_listing_service</a><p>(EDIT since this is getting so many upvotes: I DO NOT SPEAK FOR REDFIN AT ALL, I DO NOT WORK FOR REDFIN. I worked there one summer last year.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swalsh</author><text>I bought my house through Red Fin. Though zillow gave some interesting data, the Red Fin experience was much better. In fact because the market is so competitive here (Boston) it was a big leg up.<p>Our house was listed on a Wednesday morning, with an open house scheduled for Saturday. Since redfin had the most up to date feed, i got an email alert right away. That night we got an early tour, and we put a bid in at list price immediately allowing them 24 hours to accept.<p>Before that we had put in 4 other offers. We kept getting beat by empty nesting baby boomers offering cash. Having that extra time was a big advantage.</text></comment> |
38,548,909 | 38,548,901 | 1 | 3 | 38,548,130 | train | <story><title>Wikifunctions</title><url>https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/12/05/introducing-wikifunctions-first-wikimedia-project-to-launch-in-a-decade-creates-new-forms-of-knowledge/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>starkparker</author><text>Previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36927695">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36927695</a><p>cf. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wikifunctions.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikifunctions:About" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wikifunctions.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wikifunctions:About</a><p>&gt; Wikifunctions is a Wikimedia project for everyone to collaboratively create and maintain a library of code functions to support the Wikimedia projects and beyond, for everyone to call and re-use in the world&#x27;s natural and programming languages.<p>It&#x27;s a support project of the Abstract Wikipedia initiative to model facts with data not specific to any spoken or written language, building on and supporting things like Wikidata.</text></comment> | <story><title>Wikifunctions</title><url>https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2023/12/05/introducing-wikifunctions-first-wikimedia-project-to-launch-in-a-decade-creates-new-forms-of-knowledge/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>solarpunk</author><text>Gonna dig deeper, but I get the sense Wikipedia is preparing a native dataformat for LLM ingestion.</text></comment> |
35,507,427 | 35,507,498 | 1 | 3 | 35,506,448 | train | <story><title>I think faster than light travel is possible [video]</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/04/i-think-faster-than-light-travel-is.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberax</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen this video a couple of days ago, and basically it can be summarized as:<p>1. Special relativity disallows FTL because it requires moving faster than light.<p>2. Which is impossible, because you&#x27;d need an infinite amount of energy to do that.<p>3. However, from the past experience with physics, we know that mathematical infinities or singularities are often just an evidence of the theory breaking down. So perhaps it&#x27;s the case here, and a more complete theory will allow to work around the infinity somehow.<p>4. The other problem is that moving faster than light will result in causality paradoxes in the Special Relativity.<p>5. However, if there exists a privileged reference frame, then this can be worked around.<p>I somewhat agree with the arguments given in the first part of the video. We do know that the relativity theory is incompatible with QM, so it&#x27;s not impossible that there is a way to work around this.<p>I&#x27;m much more skeptical of her example of a privileged frame solving the time-travel paradox. It would require some pretty un-physical behavior, like not being able to move in certain directions if you receive an FTL message.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>est31</author><text>I would also add point 3.5 which explains that there has been a historic transition (Electroweak Symmetry Breaking) where particles which were massless and travelling at the speed of light before, slowed down and attained mass due to the Higgs field condensing. As the energy that was released back then due to this transition had to be finite, the Lorentz factor argument about infinite energy can&#x27;t be entirely accurate: if the transition works in one way without involving infinite energy, it should surely work in the other way too (otherwise energy conservation would be violated).</text></comment> | <story><title>I think faster than light travel is possible [video]</title><url>http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2023/04/i-think-faster-than-light-travel-is.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyberax</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen this video a couple of days ago, and basically it can be summarized as:<p>1. Special relativity disallows FTL because it requires moving faster than light.<p>2. Which is impossible, because you&#x27;d need an infinite amount of energy to do that.<p>3. However, from the past experience with physics, we know that mathematical infinities or singularities are often just an evidence of the theory breaking down. So perhaps it&#x27;s the case here, and a more complete theory will allow to work around the infinity somehow.<p>4. The other problem is that moving faster than light will result in causality paradoxes in the Special Relativity.<p>5. However, if there exists a privileged reference frame, then this can be worked around.<p>I somewhat agree with the arguments given in the first part of the video. We do know that the relativity theory is incompatible with QM, so it&#x27;s not impossible that there is a way to work around this.<p>I&#x27;m much more skeptical of her example of a privileged frame solving the time-travel paradox. It would require some pretty un-physical behavior, like not being able to move in certain directions if you receive an FTL message.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peteradio</author><text>I can&#x27;t tell if I&#x27;m misreading point 1, barely rephrasing:<p>Special relativity disallows faster than light travel because it requires moving faster than light.<p>I can&#x27;t gain a lot of insight from that point.</text></comment> |
4,186,621 | 4,186,619 | 1 | 2 | 4,186,373 | train | <story><title>Living outside America</title><url>http://ryancarson.com/post/26296475079/living-outside-of-america</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneak</author><text>I think there's something to the not being born there that helps. #1 was a huge revelation to me (I'd like to think I'm observant and well-informed), and continues to be so to Americans I've had the opportunity to tour-guide for.<p>I'm really curious where it comes from. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of American mass-media? Every European knows the New York skyline and what "NYPD" and "FBI" mean.<p>How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I've been able to do the first 3 without leaving (perhaps because I wasn't born here), and number 4 doesn't seem so certain.<p>What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.<p>Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashishgandhi</author><text>&#62; How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?<p>That only means American culture is more exported than others in many forms like movies, TV shows, etc. People like to watch American shows, American that, American this, etc. If Honk Kong and Seoul were able to export their culture as effectively you'll know about them too. A lot of people know about Paris and Cannes in the US. Doesn't mean they are "well educated" or anything. Nor the other way around.</text></comment> | <story><title>Living outside America</title><url>http://ryancarson.com/post/26296475079/living-outside-of-america</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sneak</author><text>I think there's something to the not being born there that helps. #1 was a huge revelation to me (I'd like to think I'm observant and well-informed), and continues to be so to Americans I've had the opportunity to tour-guide for.<p>I'm really curious where it comes from. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of American mass-media? Every European knows the New York skyline and what "NYPD" and "FBI" mean.<p>How many Americans can spot the difference between Hong Kong and Seoul, or know what "BKA" stands for?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I've been able to do the first 3 without leaving (perhaps because I wasn't born here), and number 4 doesn't seem so certain.<p>What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.<p>Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwilliams</author><text>I think there is a lot more subtlety to #1.<p>I'm Australian, and despite numerous cultural shifts, when you graduate the natural place to go is Europe. The thing young Aus/NZ people do is backpack around Europe.<p>When I was growing up, I knew a lot about the US from Mass Media, but it was pretty shallow. I saw the US as a mono-culture. When I finally visited the states that's what shocked me most - it's a diverse, complex place. In many ways more so than Europe.<p>I have my doubts about #4 too.</text></comment> |
17,888,970 | 17,874,858 | 1 | 3 | 17,871,313 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node</title><url>https://bitbucket.org/liamilan/wolfram-cellular-automata</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgk284</author><text>Thanks for the kind words! Will definitely consider.</text></item><item><author>hashbig</author><text>If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.</text></item><item><author>sgk284</author><text>Liam, this is <i>incredible</i>!<p>I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here&#x27;s a little code review via video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UkVOrcS--04" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UkVOrcS--04</a><p>We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stevekrenzel&#x2F;b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c863bd066dd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stevekrenzel&#x2F;b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8...</a><p>Hope you find it helpful!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Latherus</author><text>Watching your video was like watching Bob Ross help a wine and paint class. Well done.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node</title><url>https://bitbucket.org/liamilan/wolfram-cellular-automata</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sgk284</author><text>Thanks for the kind words! Will definitely consider.</text></item><item><author>hashbig</author><text>If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.</text></item><item><author>sgk284</author><text>Liam, this is <i>incredible</i>!<p>I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here&#x27;s a little code review via video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UkVOrcS--04" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;UkVOrcS--04</a><p>We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stevekrenzel&#x2F;b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c863bd066dd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;stevekrenzel&#x2F;b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8...</a><p>Hope you find it helpful!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ObsoleteNerd</author><text>I would absolutely sub to this.</text></comment> |
32,399,549 | 32,396,831 | 1 | 3 | 32,395,518 | train | <story><title>Thank You, Firebug (2017)</title><url>https://getfirebug.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annnoo</author><text>Wow, i almost forgot about Firebug.<p>From my point of view it was really a game changer. The first time debugging and understanding web-applications became accessible. Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Firebug is the reason Firefox broke IE’s crown. On one project we had management tell us specifically <i>not</i> to support Mozilla. Fuck you man. We get the software running on Mozilla first because it’s the only place we can debug properly. Then we fix whatever IE bugs are left over by dead reconning. We’re still going to be Mozilla first, we just won’t tell you about it anymore. And you just lost some trustworthiness so good luck convincing us of something difficult next time.<p>I still think the Mozilla team did Firebug a dirty by reimplementing what was an inferior version instead of bringing it home.</text></comment> | <story><title>Thank You, Firebug (2017)</title><url>https://getfirebug.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>annnoo</author><text>Wow, i almost forgot about Firebug.<p>From my point of view it was really a game changer. The first time debugging and understanding web-applications became accessible. Probably all browser dev tools were inspired by this tool</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cockbrand</author><text>It certainly changed my life when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I do remember the exact situation when I was shown Firebug, and my realization that my live as a (then) frontend developer would change for the better from that moment on.</text></comment> |
17,503,149 | 17,503,096 | 1 | 3 | 17,493,951 | train | <story><title>Lunar mystery solved by recovery of lost Apollo mission tapes</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/09/us/apollo-moon-landings-study/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lucb1e</author><text>Summary: &quot;raw data on the temperature of the moon&#x27;s surface, as well as a few meters below it, was transmitted from the probes and recorded on magnetic tapes&quot;. Some of the tapes were not correctly archived and were only recently found. The previously available tapes showed that &quot;the moon unexpectedly rose in temperature by 1.8°F to 3.6°F near the probes. The possible reasons for this change were debated by planetary scientists for decades.&quot; Now with the new data, and because &quot;researchers were also able to look at recently acquired images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera over the two landing sites, [t]he only scenario that fits this type of warming is that the astronauts caused it. While they were driving[&#x2F;walking] over the surface, [they] disturbed the moon&#x27;s surface, which is covered in regolith, a layer of dust and debris. Images from the camera show that those paths were darker, which lowered their albedo, or ability to reflect the sun&#x27;s light into space&quot;, thereby absorbing more heat.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lunar mystery solved by recovery of lost Apollo mission tapes</title><url>https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/09/us/apollo-moon-landings-study/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bigiain</author><text>Anthropogenic Lunar Warming!<p>(Humans are the worst...)</text></comment> |
23,980,230 | 23,977,707 | 1 | 2 | 23,976,680 | train | <story><title>Firefox 79</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/07/firefox-79/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shantara</author><text>Android version comes with a completely new design, and empty &quot;What&#x27;s new&quot; section in Google Play gave no indication it&#x27;s going be such a major change.<p>Even more importantly, it has overridden data collection preferences after the update. Check &quot;Settings &gt; Data collection&quot;. I had to disable &quot;Marketing data&quot; and &quot;Experiments&quot; toggles. Not cool!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackbravo</author><text>I did get a: A major firfox update is coming! notification on my android phone that linked to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-android-upgrade-faqs?redirectslug=firefox-preview-upgrade-faqs&amp;redirectlocale=en-US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-android-upgrade...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Firefox 79</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/07/firefox-79/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shantara</author><text>Android version comes with a completely new design, and empty &quot;What&#x27;s new&quot; section in Google Play gave no indication it&#x27;s going be such a major change.<p>Even more importantly, it has overridden data collection preferences after the update. Check &quot;Settings &gt; Data collection&quot;. I had to disable &quot;Marketing data&quot; and &quot;Experiments&quot; toggles. Not cool!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldpie</author><text>I suspect that approximately no one reads that &quot;What&#x27;s new&quot; section, and they know it. Even Google just leaves it with whatever happened to be in the field in summer of 2018 when they stopped updating it.</text></comment> |
31,374,248 | 31,374,013 | 1 | 2 | 31,371,387 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?</title><text>When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place. Bootcamps weren&#x27;t a thing. Computer Science programs were still something just for the nerds. And the industry was almost entirely autodidacts like myself who grew up immersed in technology and did it for the joy of it. Fast forward a decade, and now literally everyone and their uncle wants to be a software dev, and CS programs are churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates. The thought of competing against someone credentialed with 5 years experience vs. myself with 10 years and no degree, feels hopeless. It almost seems like the path I took back then would be completely impossible today.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.<p>I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it&#x27;s the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbrew</author><text>There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator:<p>The first is that there are just a <i>lot</i> of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It&#x27;s usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it&#x27;s just been too long since they did much practical coding.<p>At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you&#x27;re done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn&#x27;t write a loop in a language they chose.<p>The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it&#x27;s just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don&#x27;t really have the luxury of having a history that&#x27;s littered with working on things they were actually excited about.<p>In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they&#x27;re passionate about were&#x2F;are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more &quot;just a job&quot; for most practitioners. And there shouldn&#x27;t really be anything wrong with that.<p>All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with <i>potential</i> a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they <i>think</i> and <i>communicate</i>. And that&#x27;s where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?</title><text>When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place. Bootcamps weren&#x27;t a thing. Computer Science programs were still something just for the nerds. And the industry was almost entirely autodidacts like myself who grew up immersed in technology and did it for the joy of it. Fast forward a decade, and now literally everyone and their uncle wants to be a software dev, and CS programs are churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates. The thought of competing against someone credentialed with 5 years experience vs. myself with 10 years and no degree, feels hopeless. It almost seems like the path I took back then would be completely impossible today.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.<p>I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it&#x27;s the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stefanos82</author><text>You said the magic word: passion!<p>For some reason they confuse passion with puppy-love or enthusiasm and they become either sarcastic with you or lose interest immediately, they interrupt the interview, and let you go without any warning.<p>Nowadays you need to go through SWAT and military training to be considered a candidate to get an email reply.<p>To me this is a clear indication that the market is extremely saturated and something big is about to happen...there&#x27;s no other logical explanation behind this madness at all levels and categories of jobs.</text></comment> |
37,073,860 | 37,072,872 | 1 | 3 | 37,071,472 | train | <story><title>Doctors on TikTok</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/medical-tiktok/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acyou</author><text>This is a hit piece with a divisive agenda. Patients vs. the health establishment. Us vs. them. I had to stop reading. I am not convinced this is widespread behavior. Yes, if I saw myself on social media without consent, I would go straight to the college or professional association with a privacy violation complaint. But this article is just trying to fuel hatred.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Quinzel</author><text>I work in operating rooms, and while I think you make a good point, I don’t entirely agree with your comment. I do think that healthcare professionals have a responsibility to be held accountable for their behaviour - and the social medical MedTok thing is disgusting, and ultimately bad for healthcare as an industry that is in the business of caring - because this is exploitation of people who are generally vulnerable in one way or another.<p>I think using surgery&#x2F;medical procedures for entertainment is unethical and irresponsible even if consent is given. Firstly in addition to privacy concerns, there is also concerns around being distracted while doing surgery, and infection control risks. For that reason, I don’t think any responsible healthcare practitioners that had their patients well-being at the forefront of their mind would be indulging in that kind of behaviour.
However, I think there is a place for surgery to be shown to the general public, but from an educational perspective for both healthcare professionals that are learning, but also for people to know what happens to their bodies when they have surgery. It should not be some unknown exclusive mystery. (I think the mystery of it is what makes it appealing as a form of entertainment.)
However, I think the sharing of medical procedures should be done responsibly, and accurately, and not for entertainment - which has a tendency to overdramatise things, or misrepresent things.
My biggest daily drama in an operating room is actually often dealing with the anxiety patients have around coming in for their procedures because what they expect to happen is so warped by biased representation’s of what happens in operating rooms.
I think the article does bring to light some issues in healthcare being used as a form of entertainment</text></comment> | <story><title>Doctors on TikTok</title><url>https://thewalrus.ca/medical-tiktok/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acyou</author><text>This is a hit piece with a divisive agenda. Patients vs. the health establishment. Us vs. them. I had to stop reading. I am not convinced this is widespread behavior. Yes, if I saw myself on social media without consent, I would go straight to the college or professional association with a privacy violation complaint. But this article is just trying to fuel hatred.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bogota</author><text>We don’t need a hit piece anyone in the US shouldn’t be surprised by this. It’s the norm to deal with dismissive doctors and nurses saying inappropriate things about patients. That they are also exploiting patients for views is the least bad part about our current system.<p>That i have to go to 5 doctors to even find one who will take the time to listen to my issue is the problem.</text></comment> |
12,105,040 | 12,104,861 | 1 | 3 | 12,104,279 | train | <story><title>Congress Releases '28 Pages' That Looks for Saudi Links to Sept. 11 Hijackers</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/07/15/486198380/congress-releases-28-pages-that-looks-for-saudi-links-to-sept-11-hijackers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>founderscare</author><text>Released on a Friday (like every bad press announcement) and also while the news is saturated with the French attack in Nice. I guess they really hope no one pays much attention.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daveguy</author><text>From the article:<p>Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, said it welcomed the document&#x27;s release, which it had advocated for years.<p>The Saudi ambassador to the US:<p>&quot;Since 2002, the 9&#x2F;11 Commission and several government agencies, including the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., have investigated the contents of the &#x27;28 Pages&#x27; and have confirmed that neither the Saudi government, nor senior Saudi officials, nor any person acting on behalf of the Saudi government provided any support or encouragement for these attacks,&quot;<p>&quot;We hope the release of these pages will clear up, once and for all, any lingering questions or suspicions about Saudi Arabia&#x27;s actions, intentions, or long-term friendship with the United States,&quot; he added.<p>Just because it was released on a Friday doesn&#x27;t mean it was a bad news dump. The Saudi government has encouraged the release of the document for years because the classification was doing more damage than the document.<p>I will definitely be interested to see how independent third parties interpret the document.</text></comment> | <story><title>Congress Releases '28 Pages' That Looks for Saudi Links to Sept. 11 Hijackers</title><url>http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/07/15/486198380/congress-releases-28-pages-that-looks-for-saudi-links-to-sept-11-hijackers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>founderscare</author><text>Released on a Friday (like every bad press announcement) and also while the news is saturated with the French attack in Nice. I guess they really hope no one pays much attention.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bdcravens</author><text>&gt; while the news is saturated with the French attack in Nice<p>Plus coup in Turkey.</text></comment> |
17,230,270 | 17,228,643 | 1 | 3 | 17,221,379 | train | <story><title>The Psychology of Money</title><url>http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-psychology-of-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AnIdiotOnTheNet</author><text>&gt; When I see an expensive car the only thing I can think is &quot;wow, what a good way to blow money on useless shit&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not alone in this then. I find it incredibly odd how much money people seem willing to sink into cars. Why would anyone take out a loan to purchase an asset that will depreciate rapidly and provides practically no extra value? Why do people buy pickup trucks when they don&#x27;t need to haul things around all the time (and in fact would probably balk at the idea because it would damage the bed)? People are weird, man.</text></item><item><author>zaarn</author><text>When I see an expensive car the only thing I can think is &quot;wow, what a good way to blow money on useless shit&quot;.<p>The best car I ever had cost 5000€, used it for almost 100Mm until I switched to public transport and ended up selling it.<p>Why would I pay 60k on a car if I can get to where I want just as fast with 5k? (my only requirement is &quot;have radio, have A&#x2F;C, pass inspection for the next 10 years&quot;)</text></item><item><author>ogennadi</author><text>&gt; 3. Rich man in the car paradox.<p>&gt; When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.<p>Just realized that that is how I think... :facepalm:</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsfyu404ed</author><text>&gt;Why do people buy pickup trucks when they don&#x27;t need to haul things around all the time<p>Why do cars have a second row of seats and two doors that rarely get used? Your average Audi doesn&#x27;t exactly get used to it&#x27;s potential every day either.<p>Ignoring luxury and performance vehicles, vans, trucks and cars are all just four wheel vehicles optimized for different types and quantities of cargo.<p>&gt;(and in fact would probably balk at the idea because it would damage the bed)?<p>Cars have cup-holders yet some people refuse to eat&#x2F;drink in their cars.<p>At some point the line between needs and wants becomes blurry. When I see someone in a nice car I think &quot;good for them, I hope they enjoy having nice things&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>The Psychology of Money</title><url>http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-psychology-of-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AnIdiotOnTheNet</author><text>&gt; When I see an expensive car the only thing I can think is &quot;wow, what a good way to blow money on useless shit&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not alone in this then. I find it incredibly odd how much money people seem willing to sink into cars. Why would anyone take out a loan to purchase an asset that will depreciate rapidly and provides practically no extra value? Why do people buy pickup trucks when they don&#x27;t need to haul things around all the time (and in fact would probably balk at the idea because it would damage the bed)? People are weird, man.</text></item><item><author>zaarn</author><text>When I see an expensive car the only thing I can think is &quot;wow, what a good way to blow money on useless shit&quot;.<p>The best car I ever had cost 5000€, used it for almost 100Mm until I switched to public transport and ended up selling it.<p>Why would I pay 60k on a car if I can get to where I want just as fast with 5k? (my only requirement is &quot;have radio, have A&#x2F;C, pass inspection for the next 10 years&quot;)</text></item><item><author>ogennadi</author><text>&gt; 3. Rich man in the car paradox.<p>&gt; When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.<p>Just realized that that is how I think... :facepalm:</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>st26</author><text>I have since sold my pickup, but it was durable &amp; reliable as hell &amp; easy to work on, and it really was great when I occasionally wanted to tow something large or move something heavy &amp; dirty, most often dirt &amp; mulch. It&#x27;s the challenge of, I do certain things occasionally but not often. New plan is to rent a trailer, we&#x27;ll see how it goes.<p>Many of the benefits of a good pickup are really the benefits of a ladder frame chassis, but few non-pickups are made on a ladder frame now. 4-Runner, Xterra, it&#x27;s a short list.</text></comment> |
20,839,431 | 20,839,317 | 1 | 2 | 20,837,554 | train | <story><title>Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings</title><url>https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/737-max-boeing-s-crashes-expose-systemic-failings-a-1282869.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FabHK</author><text>&gt; What&#x27;s more, over the course of his 55 years in the profession, he [lawyer Marc Moller] [has] learned that every plane crash can be traced back to a single, simple cause.<p>I don&#x27;t know, that strikes me as nonsense. It&#x27;s precisely the interplay of many factors that lead to an accident - and if any one of them had been different, the outcome might have been different. See Reason&#x27;s &quot;swiss cheese&quot; model of accidents - all the holes have to line up [1].<p>How you can go and designate one of these holes <i>the</i> hole, the &quot;single, simple cause&quot; is beyond me. This doesn&#x27;t do the complexity of engineering justice. Might help to win cases with juries, but I don&#x27;t see how it could help to make flying safer.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Swiss_cheese_model" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Swiss_cheese_model</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Boeing's Crashes Expose Systemic Failings</title><url>https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/737-max-boeing-s-crashes-expose-systemic-failings-a-1282869.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nness</author><text>&gt; <i>Bickeböller&#x27;s complaint endangered the planned inauguration of the 787, which had already been delayed due to technical difficulties. The problems identified by the engineer, however, weren&#x27;t addressed by Boeing, which is why he turned to EASA in June. [...] In those papers, it states that management and top executives at Boeing had ordered that the coordination problems with the company&#x27;s suppliers be &quot;closed.&quot; The reason: &quot;to get the 787 production certificate.&quot;</i><p>I, for one, hope this plane never flies again.</text></comment> |
34,806,460 | 34,805,318 | 1 | 3 | 34,804,721 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process</title><url>https://github.com/matt-kimball/allocscope</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mitchs</author><text>Neat. I had made something similar for work a while back, but as a LD_PRELOAD library that intercepted calls to malloc and friends. It would add extra space to every allocation so it could add a pointer at the end that would point into a leaf node of a call graph backtrace tree it maintained. Each node in the tree had lifetime allocated&#x2F;freed block counts and bytes by code site. The cool part about it was that it barely affected the performance of the application.<p>It made its own socket and thread to listen on it. It would just dump a snapshot of tree to anything that connected. I also had some tooling that would let you diff two snapshots, since it was helpful to see if particular stimuli cause persistent extra allocations. While finding the largest outstanding delta between allocated and free bytes was great for finding leaks, sorting by lifetime count of blocks allocated was also fun. I remember some little puzzle game I enjoyed playing at the time would allocate and free tens of thousands of blocks as you dragged a line around for a second.<p>There was a tricky chicken and egg problems with LD_PRELOAD wrapping one of the allocation functions, because it was used internally by dlsym, which I was using to retrieve pointers to the proper function implementations. (calloc if I recall correctly.) I hacked around it by making my library allocate bytes out of a static char array for the calloc call that would happen while dlsym-ing for calloc. Debugging this was a nightmare, since it would break so early in the process&#x27;s lifetime that GDB breakpoints weren&#x27;t functioning. Tracking in a second process seems like a way simpler idea, and probably doesn&#x27;t have too much of an impact on performance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I wrote a tool in Rust for tracking all allocations in a Linux process</title><url>https://github.com/matt-kimball/allocscope</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>That looks quite neat.<p>Though I&#x27;m currently not on a x64 linux, and since the main selling point seems to be the TUI it would be great to have a couple screenshots, or even better a gif of an asciinema recording (or whatever people use now).</text></comment> |
39,813,207 | 39,812,718 | 1 | 3 | 39,811,604 | train | <story><title>The Format Dialog in Windows NT</title><url>https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bc_programming</author><text>I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)<p>&gt;&quot;I also had to decide how much &#x27;cluster slack&#x27; would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB.&quot;<p>NT4 didn&#x27;t support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.<p>Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn&#x27;t what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.<p>Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He&#x27;s got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what &quot;influencers&quot; do, and that&#x27;s what he is at least trying to be now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chungy</author><text>Memory is a fickle thing, but the format dialog enforcing a FAT32 limit is probably Dave&#x27;s biggest failing when it comes to telling old stories.<p>I don&#x27;t know if FAT32 was in development in late 1994, it&#x27;s possible, but it sure didn&#x27;t ship in Windows NT 4, nor the original Windows 95. Even when it did land in Windows 95 OSR2, the format command happily accepted partitions up to 128GiB; but okay, Windows 95 isn&#x27;t NT.<p>Windows 2000&#x27;s internal formatting functions appear to be the real reason FAT32 is limited to 32GiB on new formats. The GUI, format command, and diskpart are all equally incapable of creating a &gt;32GiB file system. Why? Who knows, it&#x27;s not like drives of that size or larger didn&#x27;t already exist at the time. If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB, you can even install Windows 2000 on such large volumes.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Format Dialog in Windows NT</title><url>https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bc_programming</author><text>I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)<p>&gt;&quot;I also had to decide how much &#x27;cluster slack&#x27; would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB.&quot;<p>NT4 didn&#x27;t support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.<p>Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn&#x27;t what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.<p>Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He&#x27;s got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what &quot;influencers&quot; do, and that&#x27;s what he is at least trying to be now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Maxious</author><text>&quot;vzip150.zip&quot; credited to [email protected] doesn&#x27;t mention anything about info-zip <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sac.sk&#x2F;files.php?d=7&amp;l=V" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sac.sk&#x2F;files.php?d=7&amp;l=V</a><p>Where did the covette come from then? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;windows&#x2F;dev-shows-off-the-little-red-corvette-that-designing-windows-zip-folders-bought-shares-details" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;windows&#x2F;dev-shows-off-...</a></text></comment> |
23,157,097 | 23,157,211 | 1 | 2 | 23,156,098 | train | <story><title>The Fed Will Buy Bond ETFs Now</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-12/the-fed-will-buy-bond-etfs-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yingw787</author><text>One can dream, but you can imagine if the Fed really wanted to implement UBI, it could probably do something like:<p>- Give everyone in the U.S. a guaranteed loan for $2,001, 0% interest, payable at the end of the month<p>- Before you &quot;default&quot;, enter in a &quot;negotiation&quot; where the Fed can buy back the security from you for $1, writing off &quot;the losses&quot;<p>- Do it all again the next month<p>Tada! Monetary policy as fiscal policy! If you don&#x27;t want to write it off immediately, guarantee 0% interest and have the timeline for the loan be 200 years, then write off the debt as nonpayable after death.<p>But seriously, I&#x27;m not sure if there&#x27;s a clear line between monetary policy and fiscal policy anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>User23</author><text>There never really was. It was always a charade. The only real “benefit” of the current system is that seigniorage profits are accrued by primary dealers rather than Treasury.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Fed Will Buy Bond ETFs Now</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-12/the-fed-will-buy-bond-etfs-now</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yingw787</author><text>One can dream, but you can imagine if the Fed really wanted to implement UBI, it could probably do something like:<p>- Give everyone in the U.S. a guaranteed loan for $2,001, 0% interest, payable at the end of the month<p>- Before you &quot;default&quot;, enter in a &quot;negotiation&quot; where the Fed can buy back the security from you for $1, writing off &quot;the losses&quot;<p>- Do it all again the next month<p>Tada! Monetary policy as fiscal policy! If you don&#x27;t want to write it off immediately, guarantee 0% interest and have the timeline for the loan be 200 years, then write off the debt as nonpayable after death.<p>But seriously, I&#x27;m not sure if there&#x27;s a clear line between monetary policy and fiscal policy anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MattGaiser</author><text>If inflation rises, there needs to be a mechanism to have it paid back. All the Fed QE at least theoretically goes back into the bank once markets recover and the assets purchased can be sold to make that so.<p>Who is going to buy individual loans which are never repaid if inflation starts to rise?</text></comment> |
7,359,648 | 7,359,714 | 1 | 2 | 7,359,224 | train | <story><title>WebFlow</title><url>https://webflow.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>axefrog</author><text>&quot;beautiful&quot; and &quot;responsive&quot; have become two of the biggest &quot;buzzword bingo&quot; words of the web these last few years. So many people <i>telling</i> you that their stuff is beautiful that the word starts to lose value.</text></comment> | <story><title>WebFlow</title><url>https://webflow.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>josephpmay</author><text>I love Webflow, and have used it for multiple projects, but I personally feel like it&#x27;s way too expensive. As a student, I could literarily get the entire adobe creative suite for cheaper than the Webflow plan I would need would cost. And, as I only create a few static web pages a year, there&#x27;s no way I can justify paying for Webflow.</text></comment> |
19,502,032 | 19,501,394 | 1 | 3 | 19,487,611 | train | <story><title>Calvin and Hobbes Is Great Literature</title><url>https://lithub.com/why-calvin-and-hobbes-is-great-literature/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>Something I like about Calvin and Hobbes was how I was able to change from &quot;reading it because its funny&quot; to &quot;reading it to make me think&quot; without really noticing it.<p>My favorite &quot;arc&quot; is when Calvin finds the dying raccoon, takes him in to try and save him, the raccoon dying, and realizing that even though he&#x27;s sad that the he died, he&#x27;s still glad to have met him while he had the chance.<p>Calvin coming to terms with death, and realizing that even though fatalism is basically the only inevitable outcome in the long-term, it&#x27;s important to enjoy life now and enjoy the current relationships we have is enough to get me teary-eyed (even to this day), and has greatly shaped my outlook on life, since I read it when I was really young.<p>It&#x27;s a great comic, and despite centering on a child, it does a really good job at using that kind of innocence as a means to make a commentary. Watterson resisted the urge to talk about politics or pop-culture, and instead focus on people, and as a result the comic will always be timeless to me</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>&quot;Still.. in a sad, awful, terrible way, I&#x27;m happy I met him. What a stupid world&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gocomics.com&#x2F;calvinandhobbes&#x2F;1987&#x2F;03&#x2F;16" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gocomics.com&#x2F;calvinandhobbes&#x2F;1987&#x2F;03&#x2F;16</a><p>I think that one spoke to a lot of people - it certainly speaks to me. I agree with your reading, but the last line also always said to me: it&#x27;s okay to look at something awful and call it as such. We can acknowledge it and move on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Calvin and Hobbes Is Great Literature</title><url>https://lithub.com/why-calvin-and-hobbes-is-great-literature/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>Something I like about Calvin and Hobbes was how I was able to change from &quot;reading it because its funny&quot; to &quot;reading it to make me think&quot; without really noticing it.<p>My favorite &quot;arc&quot; is when Calvin finds the dying raccoon, takes him in to try and save him, the raccoon dying, and realizing that even though he&#x27;s sad that the he died, he&#x27;s still glad to have met him while he had the chance.<p>Calvin coming to terms with death, and realizing that even though fatalism is basically the only inevitable outcome in the long-term, it&#x27;s important to enjoy life now and enjoy the current relationships we have is enough to get me teary-eyed (even to this day), and has greatly shaped my outlook on life, since I read it when I was really young.<p>It&#x27;s a great comic, and despite centering on a child, it does a really good job at using that kind of innocence as a means to make a commentary. Watterson resisted the urge to talk about politics or pop-culture, and instead focus on people, and as a result the comic will always be timeless to me</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>babblingdweeb</author><text>Thank you for sharing! I know this exact arc very well and have referenced it a few times in my life (sent to friends, talked about it, etc). Death is not usually an easy topic, so when this arc is relevant, but maybe not to death, I use it to discuss what is finite.<p>Personally, I found the the more I looked at concept of most&#x2F;all things being finite, the more appreciation for those things, people, moments, food, jobs, projects, etc I have. I haven&#x27;t become a mindful monk by any stretch, but it has both shaped and improved my outlook in many ways.</text></comment> |
23,064,502 | 23,064,197 | 1 | 3 | 23,062,072 | train | <story><title>Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective</title><url>https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pknopf</author><text>I&#x27;m not seeing a lot of hope here. There is an incredible investment in systemd by distributions, there is no turning back.<p>Help me..</text></item><item><author>zozbot234</author><text>This is yet another example of pointless incidental complexity in systemd. The whole <i>point</i> of &quot;nohup&quot;-based tools like tmux and screen is to cleanly separate the management of user sessions from the incidental mechanism of whether a remote connection is being closed (the &#x27;HUP&#x27; in nohup is short for &quot;hang up&quot; i.e. close a [possibly remote] connection). Systemd should simply acknowledge this fact and keep the user session going when a program has been launched under nohup, instead it tightly couples its own &quot;session&quot; concept to the remote connection and then adds a totally ad-hoc, hacked-together feature called EnableLinger to somehow make nohup work anyway. It&#x27;s amazing.</text></item><item><author>ttctciyf</author><text>As a somewhat dilettante and casual home sysadmin (currently) I was messing around with screen on a box downstairs and ran into this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4ldewx&#x2F;systemd_kills_screen_and_tmux_by_default_on_logout&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4ldewx&#x2F;systemd...</a><p>Namely that systemd doesn&#x27;t allow persistent processes started from the shell by default, preferring to terminate them when the user logs out.<p>This would include processes like &quot;screen&quot; whose entire raison d&#x27;etre is to persist after the user logs out. (Well, it has other uses, but this is the main one IMO.)<p>The stated workarounds - fiddling with some options like &quot;KillUserProcesses=no&quot; in logind.conf &amp;co. - have so far failed.<p>I don&#x27;t know whether this situation is a problem with systemd or the distro, but it seems very much a problem with the culture summarised by the top commenter in the above thread, of (paraphrasing) <i>glibly breaking existing workflows then casually brushing away criticism with arguments often boiling down to: &quot;this is the right way, I don&#x27;t care about tradition or protecting &#x27;incorrect&#x27; usage.&quot;</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JChase2</author><text>Slackware doesn&#x27;t use it, and Patrick Volkerding recently got a Patreon account set up so Slackware 15.0 or 14.3 will hopefully be out soonish with updated packages. I&#x27;m writing this on 14.2 and have been running it since it came out with basically no issues. Also have it on a backup server, runs great.</text></comment> | <story><title>Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective</title><url>https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pknopf</author><text>I&#x27;m not seeing a lot of hope here. There is an incredible investment in systemd by distributions, there is no turning back.<p>Help me..</text></item><item><author>zozbot234</author><text>This is yet another example of pointless incidental complexity in systemd. The whole <i>point</i> of &quot;nohup&quot;-based tools like tmux and screen is to cleanly separate the management of user sessions from the incidental mechanism of whether a remote connection is being closed (the &#x27;HUP&#x27; in nohup is short for &quot;hang up&quot; i.e. close a [possibly remote] connection). Systemd should simply acknowledge this fact and keep the user session going when a program has been launched under nohup, instead it tightly couples its own &quot;session&quot; concept to the remote connection and then adds a totally ad-hoc, hacked-together feature called EnableLinger to somehow make nohup work anyway. It&#x27;s amazing.</text></item><item><author>ttctciyf</author><text>As a somewhat dilettante and casual home sysadmin (currently) I was messing around with screen on a box downstairs and ran into this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4ldewx&#x2F;systemd_kills_screen_and_tmux_by_default_on_logout&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;programming&#x2F;comments&#x2F;4ldewx&#x2F;systemd...</a><p>Namely that systemd doesn&#x27;t allow persistent processes started from the shell by default, preferring to terminate them when the user logs out.<p>This would include processes like &quot;screen&quot; whose entire raison d&#x27;etre is to persist after the user logs out. (Well, it has other uses, but this is the main one IMO.)<p>The stated workarounds - fiddling with some options like &quot;KillUserProcesses=no&quot; in logind.conf &amp;co. - have so far failed.<p>I don&#x27;t know whether this situation is a problem with systemd or the distro, but it seems very much a problem with the culture summarised by the top commenter in the above thread, of (paraphrasing) <i>glibly breaking existing workflows then casually brushing away criticism with arguments often boiling down to: &quot;this is the right way, I don&#x27;t care about tradition or protecting &#x27;incorrect&#x27; usage.&quot;</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a-nikolaev</author><text>Void Linux, amazingly awesome distro.</text></comment> |
28,736,082 | 28,736,000 | 1 | 2 | 28,728,137 | train | <story><title>Ransomware gangs are complaining that other crooks are stealing their ransoms</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/these-ransomware-crooks-are-complaining-they-are-getting-ripped-off-by-other-ransomware-crooks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>&gt; <i>Worse than that still, imagine one of your affiliates is stupid enough to target inside Russia. You need to keep the Russians happy or all of a sudden trial or extradition become likely outcomes.</i><p>I read somewhere that a lot of these attacks are orchestrated by Russians because the Russian authorities will turn a blind eye as long as such attacks don&#x27;t hit domestic targets.</text></item><item><author>rocqua</author><text>I thiink I can see why Revil added the backdoor. It&#x27;s not to steal ransoms. It&#x27;s to prevent too juicy a target.<p>There have been reports of crews stating &quot;we won&#x27;t hit hospitals in covid&quot;. With this backdoor, if your customers hit a hospital, you can hold your promise.<p>Even worse than hospitals (from their perspective) is agitating the American intelligence services. Hit too many pipelines, or similar high-news high-impact targets and &#x27;national security threat&#x27; is your new name.<p>Worse than that still, imagine one of your affiliates is stupid enough to target inside Russia. You need to keep the Russians happy or all of a sudden trial or extradition become likely outcomes.<p>At the same time, once you have the opportunity, why not use back door for some more money.<p>Glad to see that they still aren&#x27;t fully cooperating like legal businesses yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m12k</author><text>There&#x27;s indications that the Russian intelligence services are intertwined with organized crime. The oligarchs get help laundering money out of the state, the intelligence services get untraceable money that they can use to bribe foreign assets and the organized crime syndicates get paid for their money laundering services and get a free pass from the authorities as long as they don&#x27;t inconvenience those in power too much. Seems like one of the most impressive rackets in history.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ransomware gangs are complaining that other crooks are stealing their ransoms</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/these-ransomware-crooks-are-complaining-they-are-getting-ripped-off-by-other-ransomware-crooks/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>&gt; <i>Worse than that still, imagine one of your affiliates is stupid enough to target inside Russia. You need to keep the Russians happy or all of a sudden trial or extradition become likely outcomes.</i><p>I read somewhere that a lot of these attacks are orchestrated by Russians because the Russian authorities will turn a blind eye as long as such attacks don&#x27;t hit domestic targets.</text></item><item><author>rocqua</author><text>I thiink I can see why Revil added the backdoor. It&#x27;s not to steal ransoms. It&#x27;s to prevent too juicy a target.<p>There have been reports of crews stating &quot;we won&#x27;t hit hospitals in covid&quot;. With this backdoor, if your customers hit a hospital, you can hold your promise.<p>Even worse than hospitals (from their perspective) is agitating the American intelligence services. Hit too many pipelines, or similar high-news high-impact targets and &#x27;national security threat&#x27; is your new name.<p>Worse than that still, imagine one of your affiliates is stupid enough to target inside Russia. You need to keep the Russians happy or all of a sudden trial or extradition become likely outcomes.<p>At the same time, once you have the opportunity, why not use back door for some more money.<p>Glad to see that they still aren&#x27;t fully cooperating like legal businesses yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ianhawes</author><text>It has been common knowledge for years that most malware and ransomware look for the presence of a Cyrillic keyboard and exit quietly if it’s found.</text></comment> |
32,338,462 | 32,338,098 | 1 | 3 | 32,337,520 | train | <story><title>Cut the cutesy errors</title><url>https://alexwlchan.net/2022/08/no-cute/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lammy</author><text>Firefox has one of these when a tab process crashes: &quot;Gah. Your tab just crashed.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;images&#x2F;2017-08-11-05-57-08-275c74.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;i...</a><p>I really hate the way the &quot;Gah&quot; wording feigns shock, as if Mozilla are also inconvenienced alongside me. Then the meat of the error implies I am at fault. It&#x27;s <i>my tab</i> that crashed, and I caused it to happen by doing whatever I did on whatever page I was choosing to visit. Any blame is deflected away from Firefox itself.<p>Then it makes me feel doubly bad because I immediately realize I&#x27;m getting upset at something incredibly trivial, but man it annoys me!!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrsig</author><text>Honestly, as an engineer &quot;Gah&quot; is generally what I <i>do</i> say. When I experience difficulty with software others create, when I discover frustrations with software I create, and when I discover that a customer experiencing an issue that made it out the door that clearly shouldn&#x27;t have.<p>It&#x27;s a very caveman-esque &quot;gah, thinky box no work&quot; type expression, or surprise &quot;gah! wtf just happened!?&quot;<p>Not trying to invalidate what you feel - just trying to share a different perspective. Perhaps a nudge to give the devs the benefit of the doubt that they don&#x27;t want you to feel bad things when using what they&#x27;ve poured a lot of energy into.</text></comment> | <story><title>Cut the cutesy errors</title><url>https://alexwlchan.net/2022/08/no-cute/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lammy</author><text>Firefox has one of these when a tab process crashes: &quot;Gah. Your tab just crashed.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;images&#x2F;2017-08-11-05-57-08-275c74.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;user-media-prod-cdn.itsre-sumo.mozilla.net&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;i...</a><p>I really hate the way the &quot;Gah&quot; wording feigns shock, as if Mozilla are also inconvenienced alongside me. Then the meat of the error implies I am at fault. It&#x27;s <i>my tab</i> that crashed, and I caused it to happen by doing whatever I did on whatever page I was choosing to visit. Any blame is deflected away from Firefox itself.<p>Then it makes me feel doubly bad because I immediately realize I&#x27;m getting upset at something incredibly trivial, but man it annoys me!!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tuukkah</author><text>I think &quot;your tab&quot; here implies &quot;your loss&quot; not &quot;your fault&quot;.</text></comment> |
14,771,005 | 14,769,698 | 1 | 2 | 14,769,525 | train | <story><title>Hacker's guide to Neural Networks (2012)</title><url>http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>frenchie4111</author><text>I&#x27;ve read so many of these, none of them include the information I need.<p>If someone wrote a &quot;Hackers guide to Tuning Hyperparameters&quot; or &quot;Hackers guide to building models for production&quot; I would ready&#x2F;share the shit out of those.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hacker's guide to Neural Networks (2012)</title><url>http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>NegatioN</author><text>This has been submitted quite a few times in the past: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=karpathy.github.io%2Fneuralnets&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;prefix&amp;page=0&amp;dateRange=all&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?query=karpathy.github.io%2Fneuralnet...</a></text></comment> |
36,409,466 | 36,409,164 | 1 | 2 | 36,407,850 | train | <story><title>Milk-V Mars: RISC-V credit card size SBC</title><url>https://milkv.io/mars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>synergy20</author><text>there are so many SBCs these days.<p>if you use them for hobby projects, many of them are fine.<p>if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone instead based on software maturity and community support and their ecosystem at large.<p>I really like NXP&#x27;s i.MX6&#x2F;8&#x2F;9 chips, I wish there are some i.MX SBCs as popular as RPi and Beagles, for both hobby and commercial applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>squarefoot</author><text>&gt; if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone<p>Last time I checked, Broadcom forced you to integrate their compute modules into your product because there was no way they would sell their CPUs alone, no matter how many of them one would be willing to buy. That is not normal in the industrial world. As an example, the Allwinner H3 used in a lot of boards is $5 each for 1000+ pieces at Alibaba, or $10 at Olimex in the EU in single quantity. It&#x27;s also well documented. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linux-sunxi.org&#x2F;H3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linux-sunxi.org&#x2F;H3</a><p>Things may be different with the RP2040, which is a very interesting part, but that chip has nothing in common, except the name, with the ones running the bigger Linux capable Raspberries.</text></comment> | <story><title>Milk-V Mars: RISC-V credit card size SBC</title><url>https://milkv.io/mars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>synergy20</author><text>there are so many SBCs these days.<p>if you use them for hobby projects, many of them are fine.<p>if you ever want to convert your project to something commercial, I would still consider raspberry pi and beaglebone instead based on software maturity and community support and their ecosystem at large.<p>I really like NXP&#x27;s i.MX6&#x2F;8&#x2F;9 chips, I wish there are some i.MX SBCs as popular as RPi and Beagles, for both hobby and commercial applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freedomben</author><text>I would tend to agree, but the supply limitations of the Pis has made me re-think that. I&#x27;ve heard with commercial agreements you can sometimes get Pis easier, but for launching a new product I&#x27;d be terrified that my growth would be hampered&#x2F;limited by availability of the Pi</text></comment> |
12,636,411 | 12,636,126 | 1 | 2 | 12,634,590 | train | <story><title>I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.</title><url>https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anexprogrammer</author><text>The only way to win is not to play. I&#x27;m past 50. I&#x27;m not overly fussed about dying, it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s avoidable. I&#x27;m not overly fussed about how either as I&#x27;ll get what I&#x27;m given. Of course I&#x27;d prefer a pain-free exit rather than a 2 year painful decline to incoherent as my father had. Unless you go in your sleep I suspect all routes have pain as the final memory. I have no fear of any of it.<p>The only thing actually on my radar is being aware I have limited time, and am past half-way.<p>For those who die slowly, or lose faculties, the process seems unfair. For those who have a sudden exit the event seems unfair and can leave much unresolved and unsaid.<p>Euthanasia, to me, seems to be the least worst option if I should ever find myself facing a drawn out exit. I get a bit frustrated those professing relgion like to play the &quot;you must not&quot; card. It&#x27;s not their business unless I share their belief, which I don&#x27;t.<p>So I&#x27;ll get the exit the universe decides. One day I&#x27;ll be part of a star.</text></item><item><author>arkades</author><text>&gt; hard to fear it more than any other thing that can kill me - a stroke, a car accident, etc.<p>Hm. I wonder your age. Young folk seem to think death impossibly foreign, and fear it &#x2F; ignore it all equally. Older folk, that have had more first-hand experience with the decline of the flesh in themselves and those they grew up with, have more an appreciation for the difference between an abrupt death in a car accident, and a slow dissolution like cancer. Quite a lot of people fear dying more than they do death.</text></item><item><author>fsloth</author><text>We all die at some point. While I too abhor cancer I find hard to fear it more than any other thing that can kill me - a stroke, a car accident, etc. The universe is out to get us - we&#x27;ve evolved into tough bastard but we&#x27;ve not defeated mortality.</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe&#x2F;hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc.<p>I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.<p>Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.<p>Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FireBeyond</author><text>I&#x27;m a geek, and a paramedic.<p>I entirely agree - prolonged suffering is not life, it&#x27;s misery. That decision should belong to people going through this, and not anyone else (they can discuss with those they feel appropriate).<p>One of the most memorable transports I ever did was for a woman with terminal metastatic cancer, taking her home where her husband had set up a bed in the living room so she could watch the sunrise.<p>To understand the amount of pain she was in - the movement of the ambulance driving her home about 20 miles exacerbated her pain such that her morphine dose which was already at 450mg&#x2F;day was pushed to 600mg&#x2F;day.<p>For comparison, if you&#x27;re a 200lb person with a broken bone, you will likely get 15mg.<p>I have seen the prolonged suffering patients, and their families. Whatever happens, it&#x27;s not easy.</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm choosing euthanasia etd 1pm. I have no last words.</title><url>https://twitter.com/hintjens/status/783254242052206592</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anexprogrammer</author><text>The only way to win is not to play. I&#x27;m past 50. I&#x27;m not overly fussed about dying, it&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s avoidable. I&#x27;m not overly fussed about how either as I&#x27;ll get what I&#x27;m given. Of course I&#x27;d prefer a pain-free exit rather than a 2 year painful decline to incoherent as my father had. Unless you go in your sleep I suspect all routes have pain as the final memory. I have no fear of any of it.<p>The only thing actually on my radar is being aware I have limited time, and am past half-way.<p>For those who die slowly, or lose faculties, the process seems unfair. For those who have a sudden exit the event seems unfair and can leave much unresolved and unsaid.<p>Euthanasia, to me, seems to be the least worst option if I should ever find myself facing a drawn out exit. I get a bit frustrated those professing relgion like to play the &quot;you must not&quot; card. It&#x27;s not their business unless I share their belief, which I don&#x27;t.<p>So I&#x27;ll get the exit the universe decides. One day I&#x27;ll be part of a star.</text></item><item><author>arkades</author><text>&gt; hard to fear it more than any other thing that can kill me - a stroke, a car accident, etc.<p>Hm. I wonder your age. Young folk seem to think death impossibly foreign, and fear it &#x2F; ignore it all equally. Older folk, that have had more first-hand experience with the decline of the flesh in themselves and those they grew up with, have more an appreciation for the difference between an abrupt death in a car accident, and a slow dissolution like cancer. Quite a lot of people fear dying more than they do death.</text></item><item><author>fsloth</author><text>We all die at some point. While I too abhor cancer I find hard to fear it more than any other thing that can kill me - a stroke, a car accident, etc. The universe is out to get us - we&#x27;ve evolved into tough bastard but we&#x27;ve not defeated mortality.</text></item><item><author>LeanderK</author><text>This keeps me up at night. I hope the collective advancement in science makes it possible to defeat cancer some day. I believe&#x2F;hope that my contribution as a insignificant CS-student helps somebody develop tools that help somebody researching etc.<p>I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.<p>Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.<p>Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fsloth</author><text>It&#x27;s pretty obvious to me most people debating how unethical euthanasia is have no exposure to needlessly prolonged suffering or just favor dogmatic cruelty over humane treatment of people. The kind of folks who think mother Theresa was a saint with her horror houses of suffering.</text></comment> |
1,922,439 | 1,922,455 | 1 | 2 | 1,922,306 | train | <story><title>Faking it.</title><url>http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/11/19/faking-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>winternett</author><text>It think "fake buzz" is killing the Internet's credibility. I actually think that spending tons of time tweeting and posting testimonials on sites [rather than working on making better products and services] is exactly what's killing the quality of goods and services in society these days. Fake testimonials are for "As Seen On TV" ads, but for a reliable and trustworthy company that plans on longevity, I think its a 100% bad move. Let the real and unbiased testimonials from people about your business be REAL and UNBIASED if you plan on thriving in the long run of business life.<p>Think about it this way, if testimonials are rigged, what metrics are companies then using to improve their products? Testimonials influence and taint the opinions of others.<p>This is the reason why some people have 100,000 followers on Twitter, because they work for an AD agency that creates phony accounts and then adds those users in order to "Fake" the idea that the account is truly popular. This reduces the credibility of your Twitter account and your entire presence on the Internet.<p>Do you get jealous because a friend or competitor has more "followers" than you? You shouldn't. you should congratulate them instead. You never know how or why they got there, and they may be behind you the next day.<p>"Faking it until you make" it is not a good way to go. You should generate real metrics, a real reputation, and a solid product or service, thats the only way to sustained and long-term success, and its always been that way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Faking it.</title><url>http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2010/11/19/faking-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acabal</author><text>This is more or less what I did with my site, Scribophile. The site is based on writers critiquing the writing of others, with a point system to make sure everyone gets critiques. When I just started, it was kind of a chicken-and-egg problem: without existing work to critique, nobody could earn points to post their own writing; but without points, nobody could post their own work for critique. And worst of all, without an existing user base, there would be nobody around to critique writing that was posted.<p>I solved this problem by basically faking it. When the site just started, I let people post writing without spending points. I would then personally critique that writing myself through several fake accounts. These critiques not only made new members feel as if there was already a community in place (thus encouraging them to stay), but they also made sure that people felt as if the site was useful, and made them want to contribute with critiques of their own. I don't write for pleasure, but I posted some works I had written just for the occasion. I didn't care about the critiques they received; the important part was making people think there was a community already there. I also recruited some friends who weren't really writers to participate on the site at the beginning to solidify the illusion of an existing community.<p>I also had a general "company" user account that I used to interact with everyone on a site-support level. This gave the illusion that there was more than one person behind the scenes. At the time I felt that having a web site that seemed to be run by a proper company instead of a guy in his basement went a long way for credibility. I never gave away the fact that it was just me. I would sign all support requests with "Scribophile Support" instead of "Alex."<p>As time went on and the site grew, I stopped critiquing by hand, thanked my non-writer friends for helping me and told them they didn't have to participate in the site any more, and eventually stopped using the "company" account in favor of my personal one. Everyone now knows that I'm the owner of the site and the guy behind the scenes. I sign support requests with my name instead of "Support."<p>I have no doubt that if I hadn't "faked it" in the beginning, the site would never have gotten the traction that it now has. It was essential for getting a community site bootstrapped with a $0 marketing budget and the chicken-and-egg problem that all community sites face.</text></comment> |
29,593,001 | 29,591,337 | 1 | 3 | 29,591,071 | train | <story><title>Introduction to WebAssembly Components</title><url>https://radu-matei.com/blog/intro-wasm-components/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Asraelite</author><text>From what I&#x27;ve seen of wit (called &quot;witx&quot; back when I last used it) it seems to be pretty skewed towards using Rust as inspiration for its design, even though it&#x27;s meant to be language agnostic. The syntax is not far off from being a one-to-one copy of Rust.<p>Some examples: `foo: bar` for type annotations, `-&gt;` for return types, `enum { a, b }` for C-style enums, `variant { a(b, c) }` for tagged unions, `type a = b` for type aliases, `_` for placeholder types. Its implementation of WASI even uses `-&gt; expected&lt;_, errno&gt;` for most of its return signatures, imitating Rust&#x27;s Result.<p>I really like Rust&#x27;s type system and syntax, and none of these design decisions are bad in their own right, I just get the impression that other language communities are not having enough influence in the design of WebAssembly compared to Rust.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introduction to WebAssembly Components</title><url>https://radu-matei.com/blog/intro-wasm-components/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iamricks</author><text>I feel like Web Assembly is hard to understand if you don&#x27;t have a background in systems programming.<p>Coming from web dev what are some good resources to get me to a point where i can better bridge the gap?<p>I just started learning Rust a few days ago (Doing adventofcode in Rust) but i don&#x27;t really know what path to take to be able to build something useful with Web Assembly</text></comment> |
12,419,597 | 12,419,628 | 1 | 2 | 12,418,788 | train | <story><title>The Math Myth</title><url>http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/09/the_math_myth.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>This largely matches my experience - as a software engineer, I spend probably &lt; 1% of my time doing math more complex than arithmetic and simple mathematical logic - but it&#x27;s missing something crucial:<p>In a market economy, basically all returns come from <i>marginal</i> gains. The vast majority of your lifetime income will come from a dozen or fewer opportunities that you happen to be in a position to take advantage of, whether it&#x27;s a new job offer or a high-profile project you volunteer for or a startup that takes off. You will qualify for those opportunities based on the skills you have <i>that other people don&#x27;t have</i>. They will make money for the organization because of features or insights that your competitors lack. Your customers will buy it because it lets them do things that they couldn&#x27;t otherwise do.<p>The stuff that you and everyone else spends 99% of your time doing is economically irrelevant. You probably still need to do it (though if you can program a computer to do it, you have a huge leg up on competitors), but it doesn&#x27;t get you anywhere.<p>Ironically, this is one of those insights that a good understanding of math will give you. The common-sense understanding is that we should be teaching what the majority of people are doing; the data says that we should be teaching what the majority of people are <i>not</i> doing but desire the results of.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Bahamut</author><text>There is more to math than just calculations, algebra, geometry, etc. Logic, and reasoning through choices &amp; the effects of those choices are vital math skills as well, and for many people in math, they don&#x27;t manifest until one takes a few rigorous proof-based classes, where one often sees new approaches to arriving at concepts they know, and how to properly get to a conclusion from a particular point.<p>I wish these skills were emphasized more earlier in people&#x27;s education, they are important skills for maximizing success IMO.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Math Myth</title><url>http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/09/the_math_myth.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>This largely matches my experience - as a software engineer, I spend probably &lt; 1% of my time doing math more complex than arithmetic and simple mathematical logic - but it&#x27;s missing something crucial:<p>In a market economy, basically all returns come from <i>marginal</i> gains. The vast majority of your lifetime income will come from a dozen or fewer opportunities that you happen to be in a position to take advantage of, whether it&#x27;s a new job offer or a high-profile project you volunteer for or a startup that takes off. You will qualify for those opportunities based on the skills you have <i>that other people don&#x27;t have</i>. They will make money for the organization because of features or insights that your competitors lack. Your customers will buy it because it lets them do things that they couldn&#x27;t otherwise do.<p>The stuff that you and everyone else spends 99% of your time doing is economically irrelevant. You probably still need to do it (though if you can program a computer to do it, you have a huge leg up on competitors), but it doesn&#x27;t get you anywhere.<p>Ironically, this is one of those insights that a good understanding of math will give you. The common-sense understanding is that we should be teaching what the majority of people are doing; the data says that we should be teaching what the majority of people are <i>not</i> doing but desire the results of.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ologn</author><text>In the spirit of what you&#x27;re saying - it&#x27;s possible ten people will be taught undergrad level math and only one will use it - but economically, that one person&#x27;s added production value could pay for the education of all ten and then some.<p>The article speaks about Sputnik and one of the world&#x27;s richest men, mathemetician and retired hedge fund manager Jim Simons notes that he is one of the first students to have benefited from the post-Sputnik STEM student grants. He also mentioned how many people in the US were getting doctorates in mathematics in the year Sputnik went up - I&#x27;m looking at the list of names right now and it is much less than 300. So the additional NSF funding etc. that paid for his doctorate resulted in the billions his hedge fund made.</text></comment> |
24,762,108 | 24,762,013 | 1 | 3 | 24,761,430 | train | <story><title>Spotify, Ever the Fans of Openness</title><url>https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/10/12/spotify-songshift</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>echelon</author><text>I fucking hate the modern Internet. Everybody takes and nobody gives. We&#x27;ve regressed from the 90&#x27;s&#x2F;00&#x27;s.<p>These platforms only care about lock-in. Spotify doesn&#x27;t really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.<p>All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users. They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible. Customers that don&#x27;t complain about lack of features.<p>I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fractionalhare</author><text>The beauty of this comment is that it&#x27;s probably serious, but it also perfectly satirizes HN&#x27;s nostalgia for the 90s internet and software.<p>We started with Spotify pulling a douchey anticompetitive move, and ended up at<p><i>&gt; Spotify doesn&#x27;t really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.</i><p>Somewhere along the way we&#x27;ve gotten lost. The only convenience of Spotify over Winamp is &quot;social sharing&quot;? Am I taking the bait here or do you actually believe this? <i>How</i> can you believe this?<p>What about the convenience of being able to play a massive amount of music without having to download and store it on your device? What about facilitating new music discovery? How did you come up with social sharing of all things as the honorable mention Spotify has over Winamp, when the latter is desktop software that requires you to manage all your music on your own?<p>I can understand if you don&#x27;t personally value Spotify because you like owning media with no restrictions. But I can&#x27;t understand being in denial about inarguable, significant conveniences offered by the platform.</text></comment> | <story><title>Spotify, Ever the Fans of Openness</title><url>https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/10/12/spotify-songshift</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>echelon</author><text>I fucking hate the modern Internet. Everybody takes and nobody gives. We&#x27;ve regressed from the 90&#x27;s&#x2F;00&#x27;s.<p>These platforms only care about lock-in. Spotify doesn&#x27;t really add anything. The only convenience over Winamp is social sharing.<p>All of the platforms are catered to mass audiences anyway and suck for power users. They only want to extract money and are doing it the easiest way possible. Customers that don&#x27;t complain about lack of features.<p>I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>longerthoughts</author><text>&gt; I posit that nobody in any of these orgs deeply cares about music.<p>I know people who work for “these orgs” and most (albeit not all) deeply care about music. Some were previously full-time musicians. Many make music as a passion&#x2F;hobby but never pursued it professionally. Some are ashamed of or uncertain about the impact they’re having on music and the industry. Some seem to genuinely believe they’re helping push music forward. None of them are perfect stewards for music or the music industry, but none are the cold, greedy caricatures you’re imagining. I can only speak for the people I’ve met and they may not be representative, but the bar you set was “nobody” and it’s just not that simple.</text></comment> |
24,654,925 | 24,653,812 | 1 | 3 | 24,651,981 | train | <story><title>The internet needs our love</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/09/30/the-internet-needs-our-love/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisflude</author><text>I get the impression that Mozilla is a bloated organisation that&#x27;s resting on goodwill it built up back when Firefox was a compelling user experience.<p>I think one of the main reasons anyone uses Firefox nowadays is because they believe in the mission and find good values alignment with a player that has more independence than Google.<p>With a constant string of red flags and negative press, I wonder what the next version of Mozilla will look like. Personally, I wouldn&#x27;t bet on them surviving and thriving for much longer.<p>I feel a core part of the Firefox-using crowd vouch for it because they believe in the Mozilla mission from years back, and feel a strong value alignment with the company. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ve got enough goodwill built up to ride things out forever.</text></item><item><author>ConsiderCrying</author><text>There&#x27;s also this fun story [0], which was discussed here [1]. Fits nicely with Mozilla saying: &quot;We’re here to prove that you can have an ethical tech business.&quot; Start by caring for your workers first, instead of giving pay raises to CEOs, under whose leadership the company&#x27;s been struggling.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;20&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;1528219&#x2F;firefox-usage-is-down-85-despite-mozillas-top-exec-pay-going-up-400" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;20&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;1528219&#x2F;firefox-usa...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24563698&amp;ref=hvper.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24563698&amp;ref=hvper.com</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chungus_khan</author><text>Part of the problem here though is that there are exactly three meaningfully fully independent web browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Everything else is beholden to one of those three, nearly all of them Chrome. Making a browser engine is an unbelievably massive undertaking, and every browser that deviates from its upstream has two choices: deviate mostly cosmetically and add new features or remove unsavory features, or deviate substantially and be left thoroughly in the dust by the rapid pace of the living web. Google will make decisions that benefit them as the leading ad provider and data seller, Apple will make decisions that benefit them as a hardware and platform vendor, and Mozilla is left, regardless of their values, as the only browser vendor with decision-making power that isn&#x27;t using their browser as a means to another business goal.<p>The real problem is though as always: users don&#x27;t actually think very much about what browser they use. The vast majority of Google Chrome and Safari users don&#x27;t use those browsers because of performance or features, they use them because that&#x27;s the one they know about. Safari comes with your computer and Google pesters you to install Chrome at all times.<p>My point being: Mozilla does need to figure out a way to get people&#x27;s attention, and IMO it should involve an expression of the values people associate with them, but it needs to stand to actually draw attention towards them and those values.</text></comment> | <story><title>The internet needs our love</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/09/30/the-internet-needs-our-love/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisflude</author><text>I get the impression that Mozilla is a bloated organisation that&#x27;s resting on goodwill it built up back when Firefox was a compelling user experience.<p>I think one of the main reasons anyone uses Firefox nowadays is because they believe in the mission and find good values alignment with a player that has more independence than Google.<p>With a constant string of red flags and negative press, I wonder what the next version of Mozilla will look like. Personally, I wouldn&#x27;t bet on them surviving and thriving for much longer.<p>I feel a core part of the Firefox-using crowd vouch for it because they believe in the Mozilla mission from years back, and feel a strong value alignment with the company. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ve got enough goodwill built up to ride things out forever.</text></item><item><author>ConsiderCrying</author><text>There&#x27;s also this fun story [0], which was discussed here [1]. Fits nicely with Mozilla saying: &quot;We’re here to prove that you can have an ethical tech business.&quot; Start by caring for your workers first, instead of giving pay raises to CEOs, under whose leadership the company&#x27;s been struggling.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;20&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;1528219&#x2F;firefox-usage-is-down-85-despite-mozillas-top-exec-pay-going-up-400" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;20&#x2F;09&#x2F;23&#x2F;1528219&#x2F;firefox-usa...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24563698&amp;ref=hvper.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24563698&amp;ref=hvper.com</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prox</author><text>Often CEOS don’t know when to quit. I don’t mean they aren’t competent, but they simply aren’t the right one for the job and they don’t want to leave, or unable to change their ways.<p>I really wish Firefox the best but even though I love their blogs and how they communicate, their branding needs adaption as well recapture the hearts of developers and the crowd.</text></comment> |
13,011,328 | 13,009,831 | 1 | 2 | 13,008,620 | train | <story><title>Microsoft planning to enable x86 on ARM64 emulation in Windows 10 by Fall 2017</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-x86-on-arm64-emulation-a-windows-10-redstone-3-fall-2017-deliverable/#ftag=RSSbaffb68</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matt_wulfeck</author><text>&gt; <i>Continuum -- the capability that will allow Windows 10 Mobile devices to connect to external displays and keyboards -- is going to be a key for the company</i><p>This actually sounds like a very good move by Microsoft. Just issue people a phone and they will do all their work on that. There&#x27;s really no need for giant workstations anymore, and I think this will be more successful than a Chromebook-type thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft planning to enable x86 on ARM64 emulation in Windows 10 by Fall 2017</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-x86-on-arm64-emulation-a-windows-10-redstone-3-fall-2017-deliverable/#ftag=RSSbaffb68</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>glandium</author><text>Anyone else reminded of FX!32 on Windows NT for Alpha? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FX!32" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;FX!32</a></text></comment> |
15,985,164 | 15,983,294 | 1 | 2 | 15,983,211 | train | <story><title>Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet</title><url>https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bennettfeely</author><text>At the bottom of this thread is a comment by &#x27;AmIFirstToThink&#x27; which has been inexplicably marked &quot;dead&quot;. It seems to be the only reply as of writing this that makes the connection of Schmidt&#x27;s stepping down to his strong bets during the 2016 election.<p>A little-noticed WSJ piece from October would support that idea:<p>&gt; [Google] Employees donated $1.6 million to her campaign, about 80% more than the amount given by workers at any other corporation, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt helped set up companies to analyze political data for the campaign. Mr. Schmidt even wore a badge labeled “STAFF” at Mrs. Clinton’s election-night bash.<p>&gt; His support of the losing side didn’t go unnoticed among the victors. As President-elect Donald Trump was preparing for a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower not long before his inauguration, he asked strategist Stephen Bannon whether Mr. Schmidt was “the guy that tried to help Hillary win the election,” according to someone who heard the conversation.<p>&gt; “Yes,” said Mr. Bannon. “Yes, he is.”<p>&gt; Google, one of the most powerful players in Washington in recent years, is now facing the consequences of its lost political clout—and is moving mountains to regain it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;googles-dominance-in-washington-faces-a-reckoning-1509379625" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;googles-dominance-in-washington...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet</title><url>https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2017/1221.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rajnathani</author><text>&gt; Alphabet expects that its board will appoint a new, non-executive chairman at its next meeting in January, meaning that it will join the ranks of Apple and Microsoft as major companies with non-executive chairman.<p>Could someone provide some context around this topic of executive&#x2F;non-executive chairpersons?<p>Edit: The above quote is taken from the original link which this HN post pointed to - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;eric-schmidt-is-stepping-down-as-the-executive-chairman-of-alphabet.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;eric-schmidt-is-stepping-dow...</a></text></comment> |
17,375,794 | 17,374,608 | 1 | 2 | 17,370,469 | train | <story><title>The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/562556/cleveland-balloonfest/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mnctvanj</author><text>The thing that strikes me is how deep the pathos about Cleveland runs as the newscasters hype the event (&quot;Cleveland is no longer the mistake by the lake!&quot; as the balloons fly). And that everyone seemed so entirely sure that dumping a million balloons into the sky would somehow make everyone stop laughing at the city. And then of course they all landed in the lake anyway.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of 1986 [video]</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/562556/cleveland-balloonfest/?single_page=true</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikestew</author><text>&quot;As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.&quot;
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0742671&#x2F;quotes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0742671&#x2F;quotes</a></text></comment> |
30,215,608 | 30,215,371 | 1 | 2 | 30,214,371 | train | <story><title>Serenity OS: Interview</title><url>https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adamgordonbell</author><text>Host here. Serenity is amazing.<p>But also big props to Andreas for speaking so candidly about the back story of Serenity. I feel like there are certain things we don&#x27;t talk about in tech and that can change.<p>I love the idea that programming, esp side projects, can be a therapeutic thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Serenity OS: Interview</title><url>https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mythz</author><text>It&#x27;s been inspiring watching SerenityOS come to life with every update.<p>One of the things I look forward to at the start of every month is SerenityOS&#x27;s monthly update, this was the latest January 2022 update where they&#x27;ve done a port of Half Life and their continual improvements to their libGL implementation:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DL-RCV5a-C4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DL-RCV5a-C4</a><p>Due to the sheer gravity of the task it may not ever become a mainstream OS but because its entire source code is built from scratch and all maintained within the same repo, it&#x27;s easily able to prototype new OS features you&#x27;re unlikely to see anywhere else. In that regard it&#x27;s possibly the easiest codebase to prototype new OS features given you can make changes to any part of the OS &amp; view changes immediately.</text></comment> |
24,051,435 | 24,050,566 | 1 | 3 | 24,049,428 | train | <story><title>Math Overflow users resolve PhD thesis crisis</title><url>https://mathoverflow.net/questions/366765/issue-update-in-graph-theory-different-definitions-of-edge-crossing-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>The walled garden sweet spot<p>Stack overflow and it&#x27;s cousin sites have many serendipities like this - and I happily conjecture this happens more here than facebook or twitter.<p>I think the reason is that despite being a walled garden (ie proprietary) it still has a promise to open up the content and makes effort to moderate and grow the community - in other words what they are really selling is not the SEO but the sweet spot between &quot;anyone posts anything&quot; of an &quot;ideal&quot; internet where no rentiers exist but no one can find anyone else, and the much more corporate hand of Facebook.<p>I am not sure reddit exists in this sweet spot either - mostly because there is just sooo much reddit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shog9</author><text>A couple relevant bits of info about MathOverflow:<p>- The site is operated by Stack Overflow&#x2F;Exchange, but is <i>owned</i> by MathOverflow, Inc a non-profit corporation[0]. As such, it retains the right to exist independently of the Stack Overflow company - to my knowledge, it is the only public Stack Exchange site for which this is true.<p>- Like all public Stack Exchange sites, authors retain ownership of their work, which is published under a CC-BY-SA license. Regular archives are uploaded to Archive.org and can be obtained there or via Bittorrent[1]<p>In short, not a walled garden, and not Stack Overflow&#x27;s garden.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.mathoverflow.net&#x2F;questions&#x2F;969&#x2F;who-owns-mathoverflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.mathoverflow.net&#x2F;questions&#x2F;969&#x2F;who-owns-mathove...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;stackexchange" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;stackexchange</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Math Overflow users resolve PhD thesis crisis</title><url>https://mathoverflow.net/questions/366765/issue-update-in-graph-theory-different-definitions-of-edge-crossing-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lifeisstillgood</author><text>The walled garden sweet spot<p>Stack overflow and it&#x27;s cousin sites have many serendipities like this - and I happily conjecture this happens more here than facebook or twitter.<p>I think the reason is that despite being a walled garden (ie proprietary) it still has a promise to open up the content and makes effort to moderate and grow the community - in other words what they are really selling is not the SEO but the sweet spot between &quot;anyone posts anything&quot; of an &quot;ideal&quot; internet where no rentiers exist but no one can find anyone else, and the much more corporate hand of Facebook.<p>I am not sure reddit exists in this sweet spot either - mostly because there is just sooo much reddit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dirlewanger</author><text>Both reddit&#x2F;SO and say, classic forums, each have their own method of content discovery (reddit&#x2F;SO always prioritize new items, forums push you to long-running threads), but both have their blind spots. With reddit you can end up with a lot of duplicates because a subreddit&#x27;s dashboard decays stuff pretty fast based on the frequency of posts. It makes long-running discussion impossible. With forums you can have your long-running discussions, but you sometimes have to wade through page after page to find those specials nuggets of info.</text></comment> |
40,226,860 | 40,227,267 | 1 | 2 | 40,225,228 | train | <story><title>2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report [pdf]</title><url>https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/T5be/reports/2024-dbir-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>er0k</author><text>Kelly Shortridge&#x27;s post about the DBIR is great <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kellyshortridge.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;shortridge-makes-sense-of-verizon-dbir-2024&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kellyshortridge.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;posts&#x2F;shortridge-makes-sens...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report [pdf]</title><url>https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/T5be/reports/2024-dbir-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ffpip</author><text>Direct link - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.verizon.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;resources&#x2F;T5d2&#x2F;reports&#x2F;2024-dbir-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.verizon.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;resources&#x2F;T5d2&#x2F;reports&#x2F;2024...</a><p>From the title, it seemed that Verizon had published a postmortem of a recent data breach incident they had</text></comment> |
15,095,086 | 15,095,067 | 1 | 2 | 15,094,529 | train | <story><title>Amazon cuts Whole Foods prices</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/08/24/amazons-takeover-of-whole-foods-begins-monday-and-youll-see-changes-right-away/?utm_term=.f02c44b3de6a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Most Whole Foods stores I’ve seen aren’t exactly hurting for business and the parking lot is basically full. If their stuff becomes cheaper, that’ll drive demand way up, at which point they’ll need to have more ways to buy. That might mean building more stores but my guess is that Amazon is expecting <i>online</i> shopping to go up once it becomes a bit too crowded at the actual stores.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cuchoi</author><text>Anecdotal evidence but the Whole Foods I have visited in the Boston area are a lot less crowded than other supermarkets.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon cuts Whole Foods prices</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/08/24/amazons-takeover-of-whole-foods-begins-monday-and-youll-see-changes-right-away/?utm_term=.f02c44b3de6a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>Most Whole Foods stores I’ve seen aren’t exactly hurting for business and the parking lot is basically full. If their stuff becomes cheaper, that’ll drive demand way up, at which point they’ll need to have more ways to buy. That might mean building more stores but my guess is that Amazon is expecting <i>online</i> shopping to go up once it becomes a bit too crowded at the actual stores.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&gt; <i>If their stuff becomes cheaper, that’ll drive demand way up, at which point they’ll need to have more ways to buy</i><p>Or resolve the bottlenecks.</text></comment> |
9,795,176 | 9,795,146 | 1 | 2 | 9,794,694 | train | <story><title>U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s</title><url>http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/fracking-manufacturing-costs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bobjordan</author><text>Shenzhen China factory owner here.<p>The costs are definitely rising in China for English speaking technical labor such as the engineers we need. We compete with companies like Apple and all the other foreign companies rushing to China these days to keep them employed. But we are still talking much lower salaries overall, for example, $30,000 USD&#x2F;year for a degreed Sr. Electrical design engineer with 20 years experience.<p>Regarding rents, the Shenzhen central business section rents are expensive now and cost&#x2F;sqft comparable to anywhere else. However, good industrial space is still far cheaper, for example, I just leased an additional 12,000 sqft high quality assembly space with low ESD floors in a technical park along with 8 dorm rooms to sleep up to 32 people (4 per room - last owner had 8 per room). Lease on this new space cost me $3500 per month. There is also a kitchen ran by the tech park where they serve 3 hot buffet style meals per day for $2&#x2F;day&#x2F;worker. I&#x27;m not aware of anyplace in USA where you can lease a space like this for $0.29 per square foot nor get a buffet meal for $0.66 cents nor have door rooms for workers. Now, it is competitive to find this space and you need to lease when you find it not wait 1 day, it took us 4 months searching and we lost several spaces waiting 1-2 days, but it exists.<p>But ultimately what is far cheaper here in China and the main reason I must remain here to make money is for the lower cost of the materials required to actually build the products.<p>There is a critical mass of suppliers here where you can find half dozen capable suppliers for nearly anything you&#x27;d need to buy. For example we do a lot of custom molded plastic parts and many times I can make multiple cavity hard (300K shot life) injection mold tools for plastics for $3K-$5K USD and it would cost 5x or even 10x as much to buy them in USA. No less, bolts, nuts, screws, electronics all vastly cheaper here.<p>Lastly, as someone else noted, the cost of shipping is much cheaper when you originate your shipping quotes from a Chinese account, especially for air shipping to USA, rates originating from my China company&#x27;s Fedex account is routinely 50% cheaper than what Fedex quotes in the USA. This really adds up when you need to ship stuff around the world quickly.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Manufacturing costs are almost as low as China’s</title><url>http://fortune.com/2015/06/26/fracking-manufacturing-costs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>unquietcode</author><text>There are health and environmental costs to fracking which are not being adequately addressed, and which are unsurprisingly ignored by this article. China was able to get a leg up through dirty coal and oil operations, but there are consequences to this. Some of their cities are today near uninhabitable, some are just unbearably smoggy. We definitely do not want to pat ourselves on the back for an economic boom that scars our country&#x27;s land and water resources and affects the air water of countless individuals (citizens!). If we&#x27;re going to build our economy on fracking, it should be heavily regulated. No entity should have the right to pump unknown chemicals into the ground with impunity and without oversight. And even with oversight--BP Horizon and every other avoidable oil disaster of the last 10 years.</text></comment> |
33,709,622 | 33,709,647 | 1 | 2 | 33,709,255 | train | <story><title>Adobe now requires you to purchase a subscription to rotate PDF pages</title><url>https://merveilles.town/@vladh/109388897488336869</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SllX</author><text>For anyone on a Mac: all of these features in the screenshot are free with Preview. I assume OP is not, but something people should keep in mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Etheryte</author><text>I wish this got talked about more, Preview is both crazy good and free. You can split PDFs apart, merge multiple different ones into one file, use password protected files, edit and annotate them, add your signature, and so much more. Best of all, it just works, all the time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Adobe now requires you to purchase a subscription to rotate PDF pages</title><url>https://merveilles.town/@vladh/109388897488336869</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SllX</author><text>For anyone on a Mac: all of these features in the screenshot are free with Preview. I assume OP is not, but something people should keep in mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>uniqueuid</author><text>Stuff people don&#x27;t know about Preview.app:<p>- Paste images that were copied to the clipboard. Just open Preview and press CMD-N<p>- Split, re-arrange and merge PDF documents. Just drag pages into the sidebar<p>- Sign documents. Click the annotation button in the menu bar, sign either on touchpad, ipad or hold an ink signature on paper into the webcam.<p>- OCR (new with macOS ventura). Just click&#x2F;drag&#x2F;double-click on text in images.<p>What more did I forget?</text></comment> |
14,036,550 | 14,036,491 | 1 | 3 | 14,031,452 | train | <story><title>Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award</title><url>https://news.mit.edu/2017/tim-berners-lee-wins-turing-award-0404</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubot</author><text>I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL&#x27;s architectural concepts.<p>For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don&#x27;t understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.<p>It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes &lt;select&gt; boxes usable? That&#x27;s an example of the principle of least power.<p>I recommend reading his book &quot;Weaving the Web&quot; [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web.<p>I&#x27;m very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality.<p>People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don&#x27;t see that much about TBL.<p>Ditto in the CS community. &quot;HyperText&quot; used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don&#x27;t talk about it anymore.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-with-alan-kay&#x2F;240003442" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-wit...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny&#x2F;dp&#x2F;006251587X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...</a></text></item><item><author>madiathomas</author><text>This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people&#x27;s lives.<p>EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambler</author><text><i>&gt;For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don&#x27;t understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.</i><p>Kay&#x27;s criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn&#x27;t criticize it as a repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts <i>is</i> a VM -- and badly designed one at that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award</title><url>https://news.mit.edu/2017/tim-berners-lee-wins-turing-award-0404</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chubot</author><text>I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL&#x27;s architectural concepts.<p>For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don&#x27;t understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.<p>It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes &lt;select&gt; boxes usable? That&#x27;s an example of the principle of least power.<p>I recommend reading his book &quot;Weaving the Web&quot; [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web.<p>I&#x27;m very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality.<p>People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don&#x27;t see that much about TBL.<p>Ditto in the CS community. &quot;HyperText&quot; used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don&#x27;t talk about it anymore.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rule_of_least_power</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-with-alan-kay&#x2F;240003442" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drdobbs.com&#x2F;architecture-and-design&#x2F;interview-wit...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny&#x2F;dp&#x2F;006251587X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...</a></text></item><item><author>madiathomas</author><text>This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people&#x27;s lives.<p>EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kolme</author><text>&quot;The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.&quot;<p>-- Alan Kay<p>That quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody&#x27;s perfect.</text></comment> |
13,131,654 | 13,131,443 | 1 | 2 | 13,130,865 | train | <story><title>'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience</title><url>http://shivankaul.com/blog/2016/12/07/clean-your-desk-yet-another-amazon-interview-experience.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too.<p>We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.</text></item><item><author>leeter</author><text>I&#x27;m glad you&#x27;re fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I&#x27;ve ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me.<p>Side note: The most frustrating interview I&#x27;ve ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.</text></item><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.<p>edit: I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;ll be an official announcement, but as of right now we&#x27;re pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.<p>For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It&#x27;s a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they&#x27;d show some bias for action. Oops.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rublev</author><text>&gt;We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.<p>That&#x27;s funny. I don&#x27;t know a single person who enjoyed interviewing at Amazon, and the one guy that did who got in quit a few weeks later and still won&#x27;t stop talking about how bad it was until he&#x27;s blue in the face. It was such a bad experience it seems to have partially fused with his identity!<p>Seems like every once in awhile there&#x27;s some article taking a crap on Amazon, and then these types of green comments coming to the rescue.</text></comment> | <story><title>'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience</title><url>http://shivankaul.com/blog/2016/12/07/clean-your-desk-yet-another-amazon-interview-experience.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>Can you share some details about why you found it so frustrating? Believe it or not, most software devs at Amazon REALLY CARE about interviewing, are happy here, and want to find others too.<p>We are taught in an internal interviewing class (which is not mandatory unfortunately) that making sure the candidate has a great experience is just as important as getting good data on the candidate.</text></item><item><author>leeter</author><text>I&#x27;m glad you&#x27;re fixing it, but having been through a second round interview where I was flown out to Amazon in Seattle. I will still never interview with Amazon again. It was the second most frustrating interview I&#x27;ve ever been in. It was clear to me that 4 of my interviewers had no intention of even considering me.<p>Side note: The most frustrating interview I&#x27;ve ever had was with Microsoft Boulder: they just flat out insulted me in the interview and questioned why anyone would hire me based on not getting their trick question. That said my interviews with Microsoft Redmond were lovely.</text></item><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.<p>edit: I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;ll be an official announcement, but as of right now we&#x27;re pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.<p>For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It&#x27;s a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they&#x27;d show some bias for action. Oops.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tubasaur</author><text>Not mandatory? In my time at Lab126 (a couple of years ago now), you <i>had</i> to take Making Great Hiring Decisions before you were ever included on an interview loop.</text></comment> |
38,336,600 | 38,336,670 | 1 | 3 | 38,335,850 | train | <story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who <i>really</i> needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.<p>Even if the allegations of &quot;traumatizing content&quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattdeboard</author><text>Your critique of the article is sensible to a point. But your analysis is incomplete. I’m gonna lay out a few predicates hopefully we can all agree on as true, then get to my point.<p>First, hopefully you can agree that, fundamentally, the company paying these child workers is trading money for labor. (This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a fact of labor markets.)<p>Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.<p>Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.<p>Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action.<p>Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out &amp; undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives.<p>With these predicates laid out, my point: The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.<p>The rawness of the deal only becomes apparent when we start to inspect why material conditions are such that this deal — trading an hour of labor for $2 to a company serving a multi-billion-dollar market — is enticing to <i>children</i>.<p>In other words, this article, in <i>my</i> analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.</text></comment> | <story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who <i>really</i> needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.<p>Even if the allegations of &quot;traumatizing content&quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>I have every reason to assume the traumatising content examples are the point of the data classification exercise — I mean, filtering such content is probably the single largest expense of large forums and social media sites, so of course loads of people would want to train an AI to do it for them.<p>As for giving people agency over their working conditions… I don&#x27;t know — every so often there&#x27;s an argument about prostitution, where people argue against it because it&#x27;s dangerous, and then someone points out how all work carries some risk and someone says something about capitalism forcing men to effectively sell their lungs to coal mines which are much more dangerous than women selling their bodies, and everyone gets cross and a few months later there&#x27;s a similar debate like nobody learned anything.</text></comment> |
18,660,193 | 18,660,333 | 1 | 3 | 18,658,684 | train | <story><title>The Cube Rule of Food Identification (2017)</title><url>http://cuberule.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jetrink</author><text>Sandwiches are like fascism. In <i>Ur-Fascism</i>, Umberto Eco talks about the difficulty of defining the &quot;know it when you see it&quot; category of fascism. We start with a set of concrete examples and we seek to define the category based on the qualities shared by those examples. One example might have qualities A and B, a second B and C and a third, C and D. The first thing shares no qualities with the last, but they all belong to the same category by a kind of transitivity. Sandwich is an agglomeration of qualities that tend to cluster together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mark-wagner</author><text>In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein&#x27;s response to this problem are the concepts of &quot;language games&quot; and &quot;family resemblance.&quot; From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;wittgenstein&#x2F;#LangGameFamiRese" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;wittgenstein&#x2F;#LangGameFam...</a>:<p>&gt; Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game’, so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).<p>&gt; There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI 66).</text></comment> | <story><title>The Cube Rule of Food Identification (2017)</title><url>http://cuberule.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jetrink</author><text>Sandwiches are like fascism. In <i>Ur-Fascism</i>, Umberto Eco talks about the difficulty of defining the &quot;know it when you see it&quot; category of fascism. We start with a set of concrete examples and we seek to define the category based on the qualities shared by those examples. One example might have qualities A and B, a second B and C and a third, C and D. The first thing shares no qualities with the last, but they all belong to the same category by a kind of transitivity. Sandwich is an agglomeration of qualities that tend to cluster together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwaltrip</author><text>And thus, upon this realization, the sandwich app developers became utterly distraught, tearing their clothing and covering themselves in ashes.</text></comment> |
6,770,803 | 6,769,879 | 1 | 3 | 6,768,936 | train | <story><title>What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call</title><url>http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcenedella</author><text>I disagree with this point, which is not supported by the facts:<p>&quot;The press are now all over the OFA team and criticising their ability to procure technical solutions or web services (rightly or wrongly). But in this case, obviously we’re a third party service provider so this really has nothing to do with the President’s team’s ability to execute.&quot;<p>It is indeed a reflection of the President&#x27;s team&#x27;s ability to execute when they reach out to a vendor on a Friday for a Monday call, mangle the details so that the vendor and the audience have mis-set expectations, and, most importantly, did not do testing to determine whether or not their event will reflect well on their boss and organization.<p>They&#x27;ve done these calls before - for example, after the State of the Union: <a href="http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/02/obama-doing-ofa-call-after-state-of-the-union-156672.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.politico.com&#x2F;politico44&#x2F;2013&#x2F;02&#x2F;obama-doing-ofa-c...</a> -- so dropping this order in the lap of a new vendor with 72 hours to go almost guarantees that some mistake will happen.<p>I understand this is OFA, not the White House, and perhaps for a seat-of-the-pants campaign style event under normal circumstances, this would be excusable.<p>But these are not normal circumstances.<p>When your boss is under fire for his rollout of the most important government tech program since the Moon landing, and you arrange a call to discuss that rollout, it is imperative that you make sure the technology works. Guaranteed. No questions asked.<p>If you can&#x27;t guarantee that, then don&#x27;t use that vendor, don&#x27;t do the event as a conference call, or don&#x27;t do the event.<p>Why? The resulting PR mess, which might not be germane to a start-up tech audience, but is very germane to the Office of The President, will come and will be costly.<p>The post serves to reinforce the image of a management team around the President that does not understand that making very urgent requests of technologists does not mean that the technology will automatically obey.</text></comment> | <story><title>What happens when the U.S. President uses your startup for a conference call</title><url>http://blog.mixlr.com/2013/11/what-happens-when-the-president-barack-obama-uses-your-startup-for-a-conference-call/?</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>biot</author><text>If I were their VP of Engineering, the questions jmilloy asked would be top of mind for a post mortem.<p>I&#x27;d also raise the issue of whether the $9.99 all-you-can-eat plan should have a specific limit in terms of absolute number of live connections. From their pricing page, it looks like OFA could have just used the Basic (free) plan. Even still, they will never recoup their costs from this one call even if OFA remains a $9.99&#x2F;month subscriber for a decade. If &quot;We worked all weekend...&quot; means two engineers worked 4 hours Saturday and 4 hours Sunday, that&#x27;s 8 hours&#x2F;engineer * 2 engineers * $100&#x2F;hour = $1600 of time was spent. That&#x27;s 13 years at $10&#x2F;month, not even factoring in infrastructure or bandwidth costs from the call itself. And I&#x27;m guessing that estimate is an order of magnitude less than the actual time spent. If I were a potential customer evaluating providers, I would be scared off by your current offer of what appears to be unlimited usage and unlimited priority support for $10&#x2F;month as I&#x27;d have serious doubts of your ability to remain in business a year from now.<p>No doubt the effort invested in preparation for the OFA call will pay dividends for future scalability, but I doubt the people at OFA would have blinked an eye if you told them that there&#x27;s a $5 CPM rate for connections beyond the first 100. 140K connections would have been a paltry $700. Obviously, only an analysis of your customer usage patterns would indicate whether you&#x27;d impact any serious customers if the basic plan was capped at 100 simultaneous live listeners, with additional tiers for higher peak use. Check out PubNub&#x27;s pricing model for peak connections as this model makes financial sense: <a href="http://www.pubnub.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pubnub.com&#x2F;pricing</a></text></comment> |
37,041,260 | 37,041,529 | 1 | 3 | 37,040,681 | train | <story><title>Raku: A language for gremlins</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/raku-a-language-for-gremlins/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:<p>1. How much should the language surprise you?<p>2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?<p><pre><code> surprising
^
|
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|
delight &lt;------+------&gt; horrify
|
|
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v
unsurprising
</code></pre>
Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it&#x27;s a delight.<p>Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It&#x27;s like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, &quot;Yes, it&#x27;s weird. Isn&#x27;t that grand!&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toast0</author><text>The problem is those are subjective axes. And things can both delight and horrify; I wrote some javascript once where I did document.write = function ... which is kind of delightful in that I was able to do what I needed as a result, but also pretty horrifying :)<p>Other people I showed it to felt it was more on the horrifying side, but like I said, it&#x27;s subjective.</text></comment> | <story><title>Raku: A language for gremlins</title><url>https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/raku-a-language-for-gremlins/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>One way you might arranging programming languages in a 2D space is with two axes:<p>1. How much should the language surprise you?<p>2. When the language does surprise you, should it delight you or horrify you?<p><pre><code> surprising
^
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|
|
delight &lt;------+------&gt; horrify
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v
unsurprising
</code></pre>
Only a sadist would deliberately design a language for the top right quadrant, but there are many esoteric languages in there. I think most people tacitly assume that all well-behaved languages belong on the bottom left: the language should rarely suprise you but in the rare case it does, hopefully it&#x27;s a delight.<p>Raku seems to overtly aim for the mostly-unoccupied top left. It&#x27;s like the designers and users (two sets with apparently very large overlap) all think, &quot;Yes, it&#x27;s weird. Isn&#x27;t that grand!&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cogman10</author><text>I mean, it was &quot;Perl 6&quot; so is it really surprising that Perl devs wanted a language that looks nothing like any other language?<p>Perl has it&#x27;s own healthy share of &quot;delightful surprises&quot; and Raku was mostly designed to eliminate perl&#x27;s horrifying surprises.</text></comment> |
22,371,272 | 22,368,847 | 1 | 2 | 22,366,474 | train | <story><title>Lambda School’s Misleading Promises</title><url>https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>songzme</author><text>I&#x27;m not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help.<p>Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;San-Jose-C0D3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;San-Jose-C0D3</a><p>I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going &quot;ahhh&quot; when something clicked for them.<p>Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tmpz22</author><text>FAANGM has left us with an impression that if you build a decent product you will magically make so much money that you can divert portions of it to a fancy office, great salaries, open source and other philanthropic causes, with no consequences. The truth is few industries carry that much of a margin especially when VC, founders, and seniors, take so much off the top.<p>It&#x27;s my opinion that some companies should never be done for profit, particularly Political Tech but also other social tech including portions of ed tech.<p>These industries should be left for FI&#x2F;RE folks who are rewarded with various social credits, like awards, tax credits, and peer validation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lambda School’s Misleading Promises</title><url>https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>songzme</author><text>I&#x27;m not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help.<p>Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;San-Jose-C0D3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetup.com&#x2F;San-Jose-C0D3</a><p>I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going &quot;ahhh&quot; when something clicked for them.<p>Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>20years</author><text>This is awesome! I love hearing that others are doing this. I do something similar but I run after school clubs. I work mostly with 5th through 8th graders and run clubs 5 days per week in 5 different local schools.<p>It is a lot of work but so rewarding and I feel it has made me a better developer. I myself have learned so much from doing it. I have met so many amazing kids &amp; parents too and it&#x27;s made me a much bigger part of my community.</text></comment> |
26,604,072 | 26,603,367 | 1 | 2 | 26,601,841 | train | <story><title>BPF for storage: an exokernel-inspired approach</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12922</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtallis</author><text>There&#x27;s also some interest in making eBPF the standard for computational storage [1]: offloading processing to the SSD controller itself. Many vendors have found that it&#x27;s easy to add a few extra ARM cores or some fixed-function accelerators to a high-end enterprise SSD controller, but the software ecosystem is lacking and fragmented.<p>This work may be a very complementary approach. Using eBPF to move some processing into the kernel should make it easier to later move it off the CPU entirely and into the storage device itself.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nvmexpress.org&#x2F;bringing-compute-to-storage-with-nvm-express&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nvmexpress.org&#x2F;bringing-compute-to-storage-with-nvm-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgerdts</author><text>The draft spec is here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snia.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;technical_work&#x2F;PublicReview&#x2F;SNIA-Computational-Storage-Architecture-and-Programming-Model-0.5R1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.snia.org&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;technical_work&#x2F;Publ...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>BPF for storage: an exokernel-inspired approach</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12922</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtallis</author><text>There&#x27;s also some interest in making eBPF the standard for computational storage [1]: offloading processing to the SSD controller itself. Many vendors have found that it&#x27;s easy to add a few extra ARM cores or some fixed-function accelerators to a high-end enterprise SSD controller, but the software ecosystem is lacking and fragmented.<p>This work may be a very complementary approach. Using eBPF to move some processing into the kernel should make it easier to later move it off the CPU entirely and into the storage device itself.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nvmexpress.org&#x2F;bringing-compute-to-storage-with-nvm-express&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nvmexpress.org&#x2F;bringing-compute-to-storage-with-nvm-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Can I get Postgres running on a RAID controller while we’re at it?</text></comment> |
11,034,613 | 11,033,977 | 1 | 2 | 11,032,270 | train | <story><title>No More Deceptive Download Buttons</title><url>https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-download-buttons.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Firstly, this will work on ad networks other than Google, so it&#x27;&#x27;s more broad reaching than anything they could do just within AdSense. This is good.<p>Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the way to stop these adverts is for them to cost the advertiser (in either money or time) without giving them the reward of revenue. If the ads stop working then people won&#x27;t have a reason to make them. By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn&#x27;t stop.<p>This is a good move by Google.</text></item><item><author>whyleyc</author><text>This is a joke right ? We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices.<p>Since Google clearly has the tech to detect this they should be implementing it at source on the advertisers (malvertisers). Instead they are pushing this down to the publishers and hitting them with penalties.<p>It&#x27;s a clever ploy in some ways - Google gets the revenue from the ads and also the kudos from Joe Public for &quot;being on the side of the consumer&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalkin</author><text>&quot;more broad reaching than anything they could do just within AdSense&quot;<p>... as long as you don&#x27;t care about browsers which don&#x27;t run Google&#x27;s Safe Browsing service.<p>You know another way to stop these ads? Make available an advertising network which doesn&#x27;t serve them. Website owners who don&#x27;t want to install malware on their users&#x27; computers - which is probably most of us - would prefer that network to the others. As-is, with even Google&#x27;s network serving up malicious ads, the choice for a website that wants to run display ads appears to be either build out a sales team &amp; manage inventory itself, or accept that some percentage of its users will get scammed.</text></comment> | <story><title>No More Deceptive Download Buttons</title><url>https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2016/02/no-more-deceptive-download-buttons.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Firstly, this will work on ad networks other than Google, so it&#x27;&#x27;s more broad reaching than anything they could do just within AdSense. This is good.<p>Secondly, and arguably more importantly, the way to stop these adverts is for them to cost the advertiser (in either money or time) without giving them the reward of revenue. If the ads stop working then people won&#x27;t have a reason to make them. By stopping the ads in AdSense rogue advertisers would just change to a different ad network. The problem wouldn&#x27;t stop.<p>This is a good move by Google.</text></item><item><author>whyleyc</author><text>This is a joke right ? We run Adsense display ads on our site and have to spend significant time every day reviewing and blocking new ads which try to use these deceptive practices.<p>Since Google clearly has the tech to detect this they should be implementing it at source on the advertisers (malvertisers). Instead they are pushing this down to the publishers and hitting them with penalties.<p>It&#x27;s a clever ploy in some ways - Google gets the revenue from the ads and also the kudos from Joe Public for &quot;being on the side of the consumer&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>clinta</author><text>This does not make any sense. Advertisers paying per view do not get charged for a view if crome prevents the user from viewing the page.<p>The good news here is we now have official admission by google that allowing adsense ads without filtering is dangerous. And those of us who do not have sophisticated techniques that can detect deceptive ads have no choice to but to block the entire network serving them, if we want to be secure.</text></comment> |
12,880,201 | 12,880,112 | 1 | 2 | 12,879,419 | train | <story><title>Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison</title><url>https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison&#x27;s (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce.<p>Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It&#x27;s the answer for &quot;how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?&quot; Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day.<p>Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many &quot;Salesforce.com administrators&quot; are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku.<p>So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. &quot;Difficult with alternatives&quot; becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don&#x27;t exist, or that Salesforce invented them (<i>cough</i> heroku).<p>Maybe you&#x27;ve heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being &quot;enterprise&quot; they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google &quot;Dreamforce 2016&quot; if you want to see just how cult like it&#x27;s all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It&#x27;s funny how much shared DNA they have though.</text></item><item><author>tinbad</author><text>Every enterprise I have worked at&#x2F;with had Salesforce, but I&#x27;ve never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it&#x27;s one of those companies that&#x27;s good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for simple 1-page microsites.</text></item><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I&#x27;d highly suggest &quot;The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn&#x27;t think he&#x27;s Larry Ellison).&quot;<p>Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you&#x27;ve read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing.<p>I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply <i>no way</i> other than lock-in and being dicks that they&#x27;ll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they&#x27;re out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle&#x27;s history is worth knowing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gaius</author><text>ApEx (Application Express) is an Oracle product, more like a visual RAD tool for the web. Did Salesforce really call their scripting language the same thing??</text></comment> | <story><title>Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison</title><url>https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison&#x27;s (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce.<p>Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It&#x27;s the answer for &quot;how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?&quot; Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day.<p>Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many &quot;Salesforce.com administrators&quot; are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku.<p>So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. &quot;Difficult with alternatives&quot; becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don&#x27;t exist, or that Salesforce invented them (<i>cough</i> heroku).<p>Maybe you&#x27;ve heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being &quot;enterprise&quot; they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google &quot;Dreamforce 2016&quot; if you want to see just how cult like it&#x27;s all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It&#x27;s funny how much shared DNA they have though.</text></item><item><author>tinbad</author><text>Every enterprise I have worked at&#x2F;with had Salesforce, but I&#x27;ve never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it&#x27;s one of those companies that&#x27;s good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for simple 1-page microsites.</text></item><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I&#x27;d highly suggest &quot;The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn&#x27;t think he&#x27;s Larry Ellison).&quot;<p>Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you&#x27;ve read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing.<p>I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply <i>no way</i> other than lock-in and being dicks that they&#x27;ll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they&#x27;re out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle&#x27;s history is worth knowing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AJ007</author><text>I noticed in the last couple of years as geographically and social circle unrelated friends who were in sales suddenly were working for SalesForce. I imagined they just ramped up their own sales force.<p>From a business standpoint they are big enough to just buy companies. From a longer term tech standpoint it is harder to guess what could happen. The analogy of drug companies doing leveraged buyout of pharmaceuticals with patents nearing a sunset date seems to apply here.</text></comment> |
27,515,016 | 27,515,218 | 1 | 3 | 27,514,188 | train | <story><title>Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life</title><url>https://insidermag.net/survey-shows-people-no-longer-believe-working-hard-will-lead-to-a-better-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulluuk</author><text>I don&#x27;t really know the stats, but I&#x27;m curious if this is true. Yes, GDP has been going up for a long time in many countries, and so the &quot;average wealth&quot; of each generation is going up.<p>However, is the same true for purchasing power?<p>Sometimes you hear about these mythical stories of janitors who could afford to actually buy a house, despite having two children and their partners being stay-at-home moms.<p>And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents because they can&#x27;t afford to rent a studio.<p>Like I said, and I can&#x27;t find good stats on this online. If you have any stats on which you based your comment, I&#x27;d love to see them!</text></item><item><author>throwaway0a5e</author><text>How much social mobility we talking?<p>Statistically nobody goes from trailer park to billionare by working hard.<p>You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments.<p>edit: I&#x27;m only talking about the US</text></item><item><author>wishigotitfree</author><text>Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one&#x27;s parents&#x27; education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual&#x27;s future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn&#x27;t BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. In my opinion, that&#x27;s a good thing, as recognizing the true state of things is the first step to improving them, and this combination of consciousness and lived experience can prove to be potent immunization against bad faith actors who want to maintain the illusion of widespread social mobility.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>faitswulff</author><text>The Wall Street Journal has a great infographic here comparing how many hours of worth it would take to pay median rent today versus in 1968: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-much-does-the-federal-minimum-wage-buy-you-now-vs-then-11614866413" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;how-much-does-the-federal-minim...</a><p>Spoiler: it’s not pretty.</text></comment> | <story><title>Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life</title><url>https://insidermag.net/survey-shows-people-no-longer-believe-working-hard-will-lead-to-a-better-life/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulluuk</author><text>I don&#x27;t really know the stats, but I&#x27;m curious if this is true. Yes, GDP has been going up for a long time in many countries, and so the &quot;average wealth&quot; of each generation is going up.<p>However, is the same true for purchasing power?<p>Sometimes you hear about these mythical stories of janitors who could afford to actually buy a house, despite having two children and their partners being stay-at-home moms.<p>And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents because they can&#x27;t afford to rent a studio.<p>Like I said, and I can&#x27;t find good stats on this online. If you have any stats on which you based your comment, I&#x27;d love to see them!</text></item><item><author>throwaway0a5e</author><text>How much social mobility we talking?<p>Statistically nobody goes from trailer park to billionare by working hard.<p>You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments.<p>edit: I&#x27;m only talking about the US</text></item><item><author>wishigotitfree</author><text>Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one&#x27;s parents&#x27; education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual&#x27;s future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn&#x27;t BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. In my opinion, that&#x27;s a good thing, as recognizing the true state of things is the first step to improving them, and this combination of consciousness and lived experience can prove to be potent immunization against bad faith actors who want to maintain the illusion of widespread social mobility.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wishigotitfree</author><text>&gt; Yes, GDP has been going up for a long time in many countries, and so the &quot;average wealth&quot; of each generation is going up.<p>GDP does not correlate to &quot;average wealth&quot; and is itself a dubious measure for economic progress depending on what figures you pick to calculate it.<p>Also, no matter what metric you use, the &quot;average wealth&quot; of the younger generations, particularly millennials, is not in fact higher than their predecessors. The level of their productivity is a historical high point, but this is infamously contrasted by stagnating wages, assets, and by some metrics even overall quality of life.</text></comment> |
28,798,453 | 28,797,825 | 1 | 3 | 28,797,129 | train | <story><title>Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Win-10,11/macOS/Linux on Linux</title><url>https://github.com/wimpysworld/quickemu</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acatton</author><text>While I appreciate the effort, and the code is very readable. I just want to give a friendly warning that these shell scripts just download random stuff from the internet and run this random stuff without checking any integrity&#x2F;signature.<p>Apart from that, I will definitely use that project as a documentation for &quot;how to run MacOS&#x2F;Windows in KVM&quot;. Cool project :) .</text></comment> | <story><title>Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Win-10,11/macOS/Linux on Linux</title><url>https://github.com/wimpysworld/quickemu</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alufers</author><text>What I would really like to exist, is a VM image for Windows 10, without all the telemetry, updates and anti-virus software. I hate that when I need to test something on IE, my laptop&#x27;s fans start spinning up, and the VM is unusable, because Microsoft decided its a good time to scan the whole disk and consume all the vCPUs allocated to the vm.</text></comment> |
35,029,657 | 35,029,574 | 1 | 3 | 35,028,499 | train | <story><title>Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify</title><url>https://www.asiamarkets.com/chinese-banks-cause-alarm-as-capital-flight-measures-intensify/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>It&#x27;s not stupid. It&#x27;s bold and almost risk-free. The US aren&#x27;t the only people allowed to do proxy wars.</text></item><item><author>ChemSpider</author><text>That possibility makes me really nervous. A few weeks ago I was pretty sure that Beijing would not be <i>that</i> stupid, and simply stick with sending tons of dual-use goods, to keep up the plausible deniability.<p>But Chinese rockets hitting Ukrainian kids in Kyiv&#x2F;Europe? That would trigger dramatic sanctions. I don&#x27;t think that is priced into the current world stock market.</text></item><item><author>foota</author><text>Could be in preparation for supplying arms to Russia.</text></item><item><author>andy_ppp</author><text>Are the increasingly tight capital controls a precursor to a war with Taiwan or because the CCP expects some other shock to occur? Is their economy expected to crash for some other reason or is this simply dictatorships love centralised control over everything especially capital?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JasonFruit</author><text>&gt; It&#x27;s not stupid. It&#x27;s bold and almost risk-free.<p>It&#x27;s stupid and risky for either the US or China to escalate a war that threatens to become a global conflict between nuclear powers. I wish saner heads urging restraint would prevail.</text></comment> | <story><title>Chinese banks cause alarm as capital flight measures intensify</title><url>https://www.asiamarkets.com/chinese-banks-cause-alarm-as-capital-flight-measures-intensify/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pessimizer</author><text>It&#x27;s not stupid. It&#x27;s bold and almost risk-free. The US aren&#x27;t the only people allowed to do proxy wars.</text></item><item><author>ChemSpider</author><text>That possibility makes me really nervous. A few weeks ago I was pretty sure that Beijing would not be <i>that</i> stupid, and simply stick with sending tons of dual-use goods, to keep up the plausible deniability.<p>But Chinese rockets hitting Ukrainian kids in Kyiv&#x2F;Europe? That would trigger dramatic sanctions. I don&#x27;t think that is priced into the current world stock market.</text></item><item><author>foota</author><text>Could be in preparation for supplying arms to Russia.</text></item><item><author>andy_ppp</author><text>Are the increasingly tight capital controls a precursor to a war with Taiwan or because the CCP expects some other shock to occur? Is their economy expected to crash for some other reason or is this simply dictatorships love centralised control over everything especially capital?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zigurd</author><text>Globalization is sponsored by the US, and the US could reverse that. Without US defense of oil shipping routes, China sucks oil through a long, thin straw from an unreliable partner.<p>Just those two factors amount to material risk.</text></comment> |
32,430,316 | 32,429,371 | 1 | 3 | 32,423,074 | train | <story><title>So you have decided to start a free software consultancy</title><url>https://ariadne.space/2022/08/11/so-youve-decided-to-start-a-free-software-consultancy.../</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nibbleshifter</author><text>&gt; For serious engagements, pricing should be defined as a function of the value gained for the client from the engagement. For example, if the client saves $250k as a result of the engagement, then you should charge a percentage of that savings.<p>Optimyze (later acquired by Elastic) initially tried this pricing model and found that enterprise orgs simply wouldn&#x27;t go for it, despite the cost being effectively &quot;free&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>claudiulodro</author><text>Big companies hate rev share, which is essentially what value based pricing model is. Rev share pricing is great for getting small, money-conscious people in the door, but there is a threshold as you get larger where it becomes more cost-effective for the client to go with standard billing.<p>Substack&#x27;s been running into this problem, where it&#x27;s easy to get people to try it out, but as a content creator gets popular the rev share amount becomes greater than the cost to hire an agency and &quot;self-host&quot;. Someone making $1mm&#x2F;yr is going to chafe at a $200k rev share when an agency at $50k&#x2F;yr retainer can do a similar job.<p>Unrelated to that but related to the main topic: it&#x27;s interesting that people treat FOSS consulting as a weird beast and ignore the thousands of successful WordPress&#x2F;Drupal&#x2F;etc. consultants and agencies. There&#x27;s a lot to be learned from analyzing their strategies!</text></comment> | <story><title>So you have decided to start a free software consultancy</title><url>https://ariadne.space/2022/08/11/so-youve-decided-to-start-a-free-software-consultancy.../</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nibbleshifter</author><text>&gt; For serious engagements, pricing should be defined as a function of the value gained for the client from the engagement. For example, if the client saves $250k as a result of the engagement, then you should charge a percentage of that savings.<p>Optimyze (later acquired by Elastic) initially tried this pricing model and found that enterprise orgs simply wouldn&#x27;t go for it, despite the cost being effectively &quot;free&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>karaterobot</author><text>Can&#x27;t really blame them. They just want to know how much it&#x27;s going to cost them. Somebody is trying to allocate a budget for this project, and they ask &quot;what&#x27;s it going to cost?&quot; and the answer can&#x27;t be &quot;the result of a function whose inputs are undefined at this time&quot;.</text></comment> |
9,517,659 | 9,517,330 | 1 | 2 | 9,517,069 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How much money does an average VC make?</title><text>How much money does an average VC make ? And how much does the top VCs make and how much personal wealth do they accumulate over their tenure as a VC.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SeoxyS</author><text>VCs raise large funds from institutional investors (pensions funds, university endowments, etc.) called Limited Partners (LP). Typically, the VC (also known as General Partner, GP) contributes 1-5% of the fund out of their own pocket, with the rest coming from the LPs.<p>VCs are paid in two ways:<p>1) Management fees. 2%&#x2F;year of funds under management is common. (Over the ~10yr life of a fund, that&#x27;s ~20% of the capital.)<p>2) Carried interest. This is a share of the profits on the fund before the money is returned to investors. The typical number here is 20%.<p>So, let&#x27;s imagine a fictional $1B fund. Here&#x27;s how the numbers might work out.<p>Y-0: Fund is raised. VC contributes $10M for 1% of the fund.<p>Y-0: 2% management fees are used to cover expenses &#x2F; pay VCs.<p>Y-1~2: Fund invests in stuff, takes additional 2% management fees every year.<p>Y-2~9: Fund is depleted for new investments. Continues to take 2% management fees every year.<p>Y-10: Fund&#x27;s last investments exit. Overall, the fund returns a 50% profit ($1.5B, with $500M in profit). VCs take $15M for their original contribution, and an additional $100M in carried interest. So far, they&#x27;ve also taken $200M in management fees (2% a year for 10 years). Total profit: $305M.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ptrklly</author><text>I&#x27;d add a few points:
1) management fees typically decline after the first few years of the Fund, rather than staying at 2% for the entire 10 years. This is to reflect the fact that partners are expected to do more work during the sourcing and diligence portion of a Fund&#x27;s life (typically defined as an &quot;investment period&quot; after which they&#x27;re not allowed to make new investments), and that helping portfolio companies and helping achieve exits takes less time &#x2F; staff &#x2F; expense. The GP also typically raises subsequent funds once the investment period is over, the management fees of which helps to fund their overall budget.<p>2) On the carried interest often the VC fund can only earn that <i>after</i> they&#x27;ve returned a certain amount to Limited Partners (called a &quot;preferred return&quot;, and typically ~8%; if they don&#x27;t return an 8% IRR to LPs, they only get the management fee and whatever they earn on their own out-of-pocket contribution.<p>In general I&#x27;d just add that this is a highly negotiated point for each Fund and differs from firm to firm and fund to fund.<p>Source: I work as an advisor to investors who participate as LPs in VC funds.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How much money does an average VC make?</title><text>How much money does an average VC make ? And how much does the top VCs make and how much personal wealth do they accumulate over their tenure as a VC.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>SeoxyS</author><text>VCs raise large funds from institutional investors (pensions funds, university endowments, etc.) called Limited Partners (LP). Typically, the VC (also known as General Partner, GP) contributes 1-5% of the fund out of their own pocket, with the rest coming from the LPs.<p>VCs are paid in two ways:<p>1) Management fees. 2%&#x2F;year of funds under management is common. (Over the ~10yr life of a fund, that&#x27;s ~20% of the capital.)<p>2) Carried interest. This is a share of the profits on the fund before the money is returned to investors. The typical number here is 20%.<p>So, let&#x27;s imagine a fictional $1B fund. Here&#x27;s how the numbers might work out.<p>Y-0: Fund is raised. VC contributes $10M for 1% of the fund.<p>Y-0: 2% management fees are used to cover expenses &#x2F; pay VCs.<p>Y-1~2: Fund invests in stuff, takes additional 2% management fees every year.<p>Y-2~9: Fund is depleted for new investments. Continues to take 2% management fees every year.<p>Y-10: Fund&#x27;s last investments exit. Overall, the fund returns a 50% profit ($1.5B, with $500M in profit). VCs take $15M for their original contribution, and an additional $100M in carried interest. So far, they&#x27;ve also taken $200M in management fees (2% a year for 10 years). Total profit: $305M.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>charlesdm</author><text>One thing to consider is that this is the story when you join an existing VC firm as a partner.<p>In a way, a lot of these funds are entrepreneurial ventures as well. It&#x27;s not too hard, for 1-2 people who knows plenty of wealthy individuals, to raise a $25-50M fund. You&#x27;d be amazed at how much money is available in the world (pension funds, wealthy families, endowments, etc etc)<p>So, the math tends to be a 2-20 (management fee &#x2F; carry).<p>Let&#x27;s say this fund returns $100m over a period of 5 years:<p>Fund size: $50M.
Y1-5: Management fee (used for salaries + general expenses), 2%: $1M per annum (- expenses, e.g. secretary, travel, etc). To be divided between two partners. For a small fund, this is probably $200-300k per annum, per partner. Not bad, but not amazing either, given you just spent 1-2 years raising all that money.<p>When the fund is liquidated, the fund managers receive 20% of the capital gain. They first return the $50m initial capital, and then get 20% of the $50m they made, i.e. $10M (split between both partners).<p>Partners usually also invest some of their own money. It&#x27;s rare to see funds where the principals don&#x27;t have capital invested (this aligns incentives)<p>Edit: same math applies to private equity funds, where deals tend to be less risky than in VC. (for the fund, not the acquired company)</text></comment> |
24,370,291 | 24,369,496 | 1 | 2 | 24,365,479 | train | <story><title>Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/goldman-backed-startup-optimizely-to-be-acquired-by-episerver</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell.<p>Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they&#x27;ve built simply can&#x27;t satisfy the projections they&#x27;ve made to justify their valuation?<p>Which is to say: would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn&#x27;t pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?<p>I see why customers would have a strong preference! But it&#x27;s less clear to me what the right decision for the business is. But I&#x27;m just asking!</text></item><item><author>richardfeynman</author><text>I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most &quot;hot startup&quot; lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5&#x2F;5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Dropbox).
Of course, Optimizely&#x27;s success was&#x27;t guaranteed. In 2015, the company abandoned the self-serve market that had driven its original momentum and pivoted instead to vague and indefinite enterprise offerings that were (and are) hidden behind schizophrenic marketing, an impossible sales process, terrible customer service and a general approach of trying to extract the maximum amount of money from clients rather than providing them with value. From 2015 on, everything (including the internal culture) became mumbo-jumbo, a cloud of dishonesty. I used to be able to explain what Optimizely did to my grandmother; now I don&#x27;t even really understand it myself.<p>Th Episerver acquisition is indeed a bad exit, and I think I will lose &gt;$100k in stock I exercised (which is OK, I&#x27;ll be fine). But I hope all readers will take from this saga a lesson in humility and the pitfalls of intellectual dishonesty and hubris. Just because your startup is skyrocketing isn&#x27;t enough. Success is not guaranteed. Your company&#x27;s leadership needs to be honest with itself, which Optimizely&#x27;s leadership was not. They need to be humble and work hard, which Optimizely did not do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelnos</author><text>It&#x27;s possible to do both. At Twilio we started as a self-service, developer-focused company. Today we have many large enterprise customers (and spend a lot of effort to court those kinds of customers), but we still have a huge number of small developers, and one-person hobby shops can and do still easily set themselves up to use our platform. We <i>have</i> added some enterprise-only features, which I sometimes have mixed feelings about, but everything that&#x27;s traditionally been available to non-enterprises is still available to anyone with a credit card.<p>I completely agree with you on (at least in terms of Twilio&#x27;s experience):<p>&gt; <i>would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn&#x27;t pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?</i><p>We were definitely going to hit a ceiling if we didn&#x27;t add enterprise features and work on getting all the various certifications that large companies will require to even start talking to you, and build a sales force that knew how to sell to larger companies. If we hadn&#x27;t done all that, we&#x27;d be a much smaller company today, and likely a competitor would have done it instead and eaten our lunch.</text></comment> | <story><title>Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/goldman-backed-startup-optimizely-to-be-acquired-by-episerver</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I have a sort of general question about this narrative, which seems to apply to lots of startups that begin as self-service, developer-focused projects and end in enterprise hell.<p>Is it not the case that these startups begin developer-facing, get market traction, are lavishly funded, and then discover that the self-service offering they&#x27;ve built simply can&#x27;t satisfy the projections they&#x27;ve made to justify their valuation?<p>Which is to say: would Optimizely be doing much better if they hadn&#x27;t pivoted into enterprise hell? Or would they be a much smaller company?<p>I see why customers would have a strong preference! But it&#x27;s less clear to me what the right decision for the business is. But I&#x27;m just asking!</text></item><item><author>richardfeynman</author><text>I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most &quot;hot startup&quot; lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5&#x2F;5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Dropbox).
Of course, Optimizely&#x27;s success was&#x27;t guaranteed. In 2015, the company abandoned the self-serve market that had driven its original momentum and pivoted instead to vague and indefinite enterprise offerings that were (and are) hidden behind schizophrenic marketing, an impossible sales process, terrible customer service and a general approach of trying to extract the maximum amount of money from clients rather than providing them with value. From 2015 on, everything (including the internal culture) became mumbo-jumbo, a cloud of dishonesty. I used to be able to explain what Optimizely did to my grandmother; now I don&#x27;t even really understand it myself.<p>Th Episerver acquisition is indeed a bad exit, and I think I will lose &gt;$100k in stock I exercised (which is OK, I&#x27;ll be fine). But I hope all readers will take from this saga a lesson in humility and the pitfalls of intellectual dishonesty and hubris. Just because your startup is skyrocketing isn&#x27;t enough. Success is not guaranteed. Your company&#x27;s leadership needs to be honest with itself, which Optimizely&#x27;s leadership was not. They need to be humble and work hard, which Optimizely did not do.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>richardFINEman</author><text>I worked at Optimizely for 4 years and can tell you that pivoting to Enterprise has been one of the best company decisions.<p>One of the important distinctions between Optimizely and most developer-first platforms is that experimentation is a hard practice to pick up. Most companies have difficulties getting their programs off the ground and keeping them funded, let alone grow or scale them. Small digital businesses struggle more for several reasons: 1) they have few resources, so teams are understaffed and resources are pulled easily, 2) they have little money, so the percentage uplifts are rarely motivating, 3) they have little traffic, so it is harder to get a statistically significant measure in their experiments<p>Because of these issues, Optimizely always had really poor retention in the SMB space. Nonetheless, the SMB customers helped Optimizely build up a brand name, build up legions of practitioners, and get the skills and experience to go after the Enterprise market. When Optimizely started acquiring enterprise customers, retention improved substantially.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that there aren&#x27;t lots of problems with Enterprise sales and that Optimizely didn&#x27;t make tons of cultural mistakes in that pivot. But on the core financials, Enterprise kept Optimizely afloat. The problem wasn&#x27;t the pivot to enterprise, but the trade-offs that were mismanaged along the way. The path to enterprise was inevitable and correct.</text></comment> |
5,630,618 | 5,630,675 | 1 | 2 | 5,630,445 | train | <story><title>Avoiding Burnout</title><url>http://andrewdumont.me/avoiding-burnout</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielRibeiro</author><text>I remember reading this published insight[1] from Marissa Mayer a few months ago:<p><i>Burnout is caused by resentment</i><p>Which sounded amazing, until this guy who dated a neuroscientist commented[2]:<p><i>No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.<p>Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.<p>During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.<p>For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.<p>That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.</i><p>Then I finally realized how many times I've burnt out in my life, and I became much better into avoiding it. Which is really hard to do.<p>And it seems to me that this is one of the many points that Ben Horowitz talks about on his <i>What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology</i>[3]<p>[1] <a href="http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment.html" rel="nofollow">http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment.html#comment-478842490" rel="nofollow">http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/" rel="nofollow">http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-diff...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Avoiding Burnout</title><url>http://andrewdumont.me/avoiding-burnout</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dangero</author><text>These ideas all seem like bandaids to me if they aren't personal goals that you care about. I've seen studies that show that burnout is caused by sustained imbalance between your personal goals and how you're living your life. This can also happen retro actively. For example, if you were to find out that you weren't going to get paid for a job you'd been working the last 6 months on, you would almost instantly be burned out. That is, if you were doing it for the money of course. Your personal goal is to spend a certain percentage of your time on things that will increase your wealth, and if you weren't to get paid, the sudden overwhelming sense of losing six months would burn you out immediately.<p>Likewise in a startup, I think the studies would say that you find yourself burned out because at some point, something inside you says, "80 hours a week for the last year wasn't really completely in line with all my personal goals. I have a goal to have personal relationships, spend time with my family, and exercise, yet this startup is the only thing I've been doing." At some point a voice inside says, "It wasn't worth it."<p>People have very different goals, so results will vary as to what causes burnout, but as a boss, something I know will cause burnout is anything that will pull the rug out from under an employee regarding benefits that they expected to receive. For startups this is super tricky because some employees are expecting an IPO with big payouts, and when they get disillusioned about that, there's really no way to stop the burnout.</text></comment> |
12,060,267 | 12,059,454 | 1 | 3 | 12,058,045 | train | <story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soham</author><text>Interesting and valid points. I have some things to add.<p>Disclaimer first: I&#x27;m a technical interview coach. We run <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com</a>, which provides structured and intense group programs for early and mid-career software engineers, with the sole purpose of preparing for technical interviews.<p>In an ideal world, brushing up is all what it should take before going into interviews. Practicing Software Engineers shouldn&#x27;t need to spend months working through books and courses. Interviewers should be thoughtful enough to interview for the thought process and experience, more than DS and Algos.<p>Trouble is:<p>* Many interviewers are not that thoughtful. Even for the most well-meaning ones, it takes a few interviews to truly be good at judging someone in those 30 to 60 minutes. If a candidate is caught into the cross-hairs of an interviewer&#x27;s learning curve, that candidate is not going to get a fair evaluation. Preparation helps in that situation.<p>* With the plethora of prep material available for past several years, the bar for interviewing has just moved higher and higher at good companies. If you look at G and F (and some others), there is no way you can get away with just knowing the basics of trees and binary searches. It just takes time.<p>e.g. If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don&#x27;t know that Heap sort is the best way to do it, you&#x27;ve lost the interview no matter how clear your thought process is. Not because the interviewer is not watchful. But because your competition has solved it with Heap Sort. So even if both of you demonstrated a clear thought process, the other person gets the job, because s&#x2F;he is more prepared.<p>* It takes a certain level of life-confidence to just go to an interview with what you know and take the rest head-on. Many people don&#x27;t have that kind of confidence. Many many engineers are introverts, and to borrow an analogy from sales, they are artists, not hunters. They are equally ambitious as hunters, but their confidence comes from systematic, extensive, honest preparation, and not from experience thinking on the feet. That prep easily takes months, especially when they are doing it part-time.<p>* Most CS colleges do not actually prepare their students for interviews. Some top ones do, but a large majority of them are not calibrated to churning out students capable of handling interviews at top tech companies. If you went to one of those colleges, and want to try for better companies, you have to prepare explicitly and separately. You have to re-learn CS with a level of specificity, intensity and extensiveness that your school never provided. Yes, you only have to do it once, but that one time, it may take many months.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.<p>I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&#x27;s experience now, but I don&#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&#x27;t feel they need a month&#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!<p>I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.<p>I&#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&#x27;s on your resume you&#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>optimusclimb</author><text>&gt; e.g. If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don&#x27;t know that Heap sort is the best way to do it, you&#x27;ve lost the interview no matter how clear your thought process is. Not because the interviewer is not watchful. But because your competition has solved it with Heap Sort. So even if both of you demonstrated a clear thought process, the other person gets the job, because s&#x2F;he is more prepared.<p>Sadly, there&#x27;s a ton of very qualified software engineers that make up this &quot;competition&quot; that you speak of, and still lose. Meanwhile, there&#x27;s another group of people that realize how ridiculous proving yourself in that way every few years throughout the course of one&#x27;s career is, become sales engineers, and make more money. They also don&#x27;t have to have a whiteboard pissing contest anymore over such things.<p>I really wonder if lawyers who have been practicing for 7 years, or consultants from the Bain&#x27;s and McKinseys of the world get asked questions about classes they took in junior year of undergrad when they interview.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon software engineer interview</title><url>http://sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soham</author><text>Interesting and valid points. I have some things to add.<p>Disclaimer first: I&#x27;m a technical interview coach. We run <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;InterviewKickstart.com</a>, which provides structured and intense group programs for early and mid-career software engineers, with the sole purpose of preparing for technical interviews.<p>In an ideal world, brushing up is all what it should take before going into interviews. Practicing Software Engineers shouldn&#x27;t need to spend months working through books and courses. Interviewers should be thoughtful enough to interview for the thought process and experience, more than DS and Algos.<p>Trouble is:<p>* Many interviewers are not that thoughtful. Even for the most well-meaning ones, it takes a few interviews to truly be good at judging someone in those 30 to 60 minutes. If a candidate is caught into the cross-hairs of an interviewer&#x27;s learning curve, that candidate is not going to get a fair evaluation. Preparation helps in that situation.<p>* With the plethora of prep material available for past several years, the bar for interviewing has just moved higher and higher at good companies. If you look at G and F (and some others), there is no way you can get away with just knowing the basics of trees and binary searches. It just takes time.<p>e.g. If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don&#x27;t know that Heap sort is the best way to do it, you&#x27;ve lost the interview no matter how clear your thought process is. Not because the interviewer is not watchful. But because your competition has solved it with Heap Sort. So even if both of you demonstrated a clear thought process, the other person gets the job, because s&#x2F;he is more prepared.<p>* It takes a certain level of life-confidence to just go to an interview with what you know and take the rest head-on. Many people don&#x27;t have that kind of confidence. Many many engineers are introverts, and to borrow an analogy from sales, they are artists, not hunters. They are equally ambitious as hunters, but their confidence comes from systematic, extensive, honest preparation, and not from experience thinking on the feet. That prep easily takes months, especially when they are doing it part-time.<p>* Most CS colleges do not actually prepare their students for interviews. Some top ones do, but a large majority of them are not calibrated to churning out students capable of handling interviews at top tech companies. If you went to one of those colleges, and want to try for better companies, you have to prepare explicitly and separately. You have to re-learn CS with a level of specificity, intensity and extensiveness that your school never provided. Yes, you only have to do it once, but that one time, it may take many months.</text></item><item><author>geoelectric</author><text>I&#x27;m all for interview prep, but this sounds like a fairly standard tech company loop.<p>I usually take a few days to brush up on algorithms and structures for the first one I do in a batch, and have some canned answers for the personal questions, but otherwise go in with what I know. Some of that&#x27;s experience now, but I don&#x27;t remember any point in my career where I&#x27;d have done something this extensive. I hope the poster doesn&#x27;t feel they need a month&#x27;s prep every time they want to go test the waters on the job market!<p>I do agree with the frequent recommendations for Cracking the Coding Interview. As a lead who interviews frequently, my biggest tip is to be honest about what you do and don&#x27;t know--take what you do know right to the limit then talk about how you&#x27;d figure out the rest given normal professional time and resources.<p>I&#x27;m not usually grading someone on whether they can solve my specific problem so much as whether I think they&#x27;re someone I can work with while they do it. That said, if it&#x27;s on your resume you&#x27;d better be able to talk intelligently about it to whatever level makes sense for your experience. I definitely probe around that stuff to figure out if I can trust the rest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SonOfLilit</author><text>&gt; e.g. If they ask you to merge sorted arrays and you don&#x27;t know that Heap sort is the best way to do it<p>Sorry, I&#x27;m confused. I love heaps, but... what&#x27;s wrong with this simple O(n+m) time and space solution, that I can easily prove is the theoretical limit (because the output size is O(n+m))?<p><pre><code> def merge_sorted(a, b):
result = []
la, lb = len(a), len(b)
ia, ib = 0, 0
while ia &lt; la or ib &lt; lb:
if ib &gt;= lb:
result += a[ia:]
break
if ia &gt;= la:
result += b[ib:]
break
if a[ia] &lt;= b[ib]:
result.append(a[ia])
ia += 1
else:
result.append(b[ib])
ib += 1
return result
assert merge_sorted([], []) == []
assert merge_sorted([1, 2, 3], []) == [1, 2, 3]
assert merge_sorted([], [1, 2, 3]) == [1, 2, 3]
assert merge_sorted([1, 3, 5], [2, 4]) == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
assert merge_sorted([2, 4], [1, 3, 5]) == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
assert merge_sorted([1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3]) == [1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3]</code></pre></text></comment> |
28,876,109 | 28,873,937 | 1 | 2 | 28,852,811 | train | <story><title>IBM Computing Cheese Cutter Restoration [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulAJ</author><text>Just for anyone coming to this who, like me, assumed that &quot;IBM Cheese Cutter&quot; was a nickname for some 1970s bit of computer hardware that hung off the side of an S&#x2F;360.<p>This is a device for cutting big round &quot;wheels&quot; of cheese. It dates from the 1910s, and would have been used in retail outlets selling cheese. In those days cheese was sold wholesale in big &quot;wheels&quot;: round blocks of cheese weighing maybe 70 or 80 lb. (High-end cheese is still sold this way, if you really want to buy that much of it).<p>A retail customer would ask the counter-clerk for 6 oz of Gorgonzola, and he would pull out one of these big wheels, probably with a segment already cut out for previous customers, and slice off 6 oz.<p>Problem: how to get exactly 6 oz first time. Customers don&#x27;t want a couple of little chunks added to make up the weight, and slicing off chunks from what you cut to bring the weight back down is wasteful because nobody wants the scraps. Solution: this machine. It has a lever for setting the original weight of the wheel, and another for the weight the customer wants. A nifty bit of mechanical analogue computer underneath rotates the cheese by exactly the right amount.</text></comment> | <story><title>IBM Computing Cheese Cutter Restoration [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>musicale</author><text>Sadly, modern devices from the likes of Apple don&#x27;t even grate cheese properly. Yet.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;apple-patent-cheese-grater-iphone&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macrumors.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;apple-patent-cheese-gra...</a><p>also:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=s29YZqe9Cso" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=s29YZqe9Cso</a></text></comment> |
19,583,817 | 19,584,155 | 1 | 3 | 19,582,056 | train | <story><title>Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/video-games-layoffs-union.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianhel</author><text>And the type of software people make for free is not the same software people get paid to create.<p>I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.</text></item><item><author>slg</author><text>&gt;In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible.<p>This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don&#x27;t have to pay people to do that, so the pay for people to do it professionally would naturally be low in a free market system.<p>Do you know another profession like that? Software development. People spend countless hours working on open source software for free just because they like it. The open source community saves businesses billions in labor costs every year. Would anyone suggest we get rid of the open source community so developers could be better compensated? We are just lucky enough that the global demand for general software development is much
higher than the demand for video game development or theater&#x2F;TV&#x2F;movies that it can offset these other factors.</text></item><item><author>derefr</author><text>&gt; the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of &#x27;passion&#x27;<p>So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs.<p>In all these cases, you can quash <i>supply</i>; or you can <i>constrain</i> and <i>regulate</i> the way that the supply supplies, so that it doesn’t hurt people in the process; but—even in the most totalitarian state you can imagine—you can’t quash demand. Humans gonna want what humans gonna want.<p>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to <i>pay</i> to do that. Because of that, they see any <i>job</i> where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. Because, in essence, they’re taking the original trade they had in mind (paying to reach an audience) and then balancing out an increase in the troublesomeness of doing that, with a payment for dealing with that troublesomeness that moves the needle all the way from “paying for” to “being paid for.”</text></item><item><author>CM30</author><text>&gt; For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand<p>This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few &#x27;passion&#x27; driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten more are lining up for the &#x27;opportunity&#x27;.<p>You can see this in all manner of arts or entertainment based fields, since there are far more people wanting to become artists&#x2F;musicians&#x2F;writers&#x2F;whatever than there is demand for their services. You can see it in journalism, where in many cases organisations will try and get work done for free, and will pay so little that living off said wages is virtually impossible in a major city if you don&#x27;t have a trust fund (though admittedly the huge increase in competition from the internet puts pressure there). And I even recall people saying it&#x27;s one reason teaching wages aren&#x27;t too high either.<p>Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of &#x27;passion&#x27;, and to go where their skills are appreciated&#x2F;where they&#x27;re treated better&#x2F;fairly compensated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>archgoon</author><text>People would not want to build banking software for a specific company; however, if banks were to describe their problems in a sufficiently well defined way, people would cheerfully build various &#x27;bank frameworks&#x27; for free. Some college student would happily have it on their resume.<p>This of course would have to have banks be more open about how they operate, so it probably won&#x27;t happen.<p>This is to say, it&#x27;s not really the type of software that is the issue, but rather lack of openness about the problem domain.</text></comment> | <story><title>Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/video-games-layoffs-union.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adrianhel</author><text>And the type of software people make for free is not the same software people get paid to create.<p>I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.</text></item><item><author>slg</author><text>&gt;In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to pay to do that. Because of that, they see any job where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible.<p>This is true for any job that is just an extension of a hobby. People put on local community theater productions in their spare time because they find it fun and fulfilling. You don&#x27;t have to pay people to do that, so the pay for people to do it professionally would naturally be low in a free market system.<p>Do you know another profession like that? Software development. People spend countless hours working on open source software for free just because they like it. The open source community saves businesses billions in labor costs every year. Would anyone suggest we get rid of the open source community so developers could be better compensated? We are just lucky enough that the global demand for general software development is much
higher than the demand for video game development or theater&#x2F;TV&#x2F;movies that it can offset these other factors.</text></item><item><author>derefr</author><text>&gt; the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of &#x27;passion&#x27;<p>So the “practical” solution is to change human nature? That doesn’t sound right. It’d be like saying that the practical solution to human trafficking is for people to stop visiting prostitutes; or that the solution to gangs’ drug income is for people to stop buying drugs.<p>In all these cases, you can quash <i>supply</i>; or you can <i>constrain</i> and <i>regulate</i> the way that the supply supplies, so that it doesn’t hurt people in the process; but—even in the most totalitarian state you can imagine—you can’t quash demand. Humans gonna want what humans gonna want.<p>In this case, the demand is “the ability to express myself to a huge audience.” People are willing to <i>pay</i> to do that. Because of that, they see any <i>job</i> where they get to do it as a net positive, even if the job is horrible. Because, in essence, they’re taking the original trade they had in mind (paying to reach an audience) and then balancing out an increase in the troublesomeness of doing that, with a payment for dealing with that troublesomeness that moves the needle all the way from “paying for” to “being paid for.”</text></item><item><author>CM30</author><text>&gt; For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand<p>This is basically the reason for low wages in quite a few &#x27;passion&#x27; driven industries. If a job is something enough people want to do, then talent is cheap and plentiful and companies can provide low wages and poor conditions that for every person who quits, ten more are lining up for the &#x27;opportunity&#x27;.<p>You can see this in all manner of arts or entertainment based fields, since there are far more people wanting to become artists&#x2F;musicians&#x2F;writers&#x2F;whatever than there is demand for their services. You can see it in journalism, where in many cases organisations will try and get work done for free, and will pay so little that living off said wages is virtually impossible in a major city if you don&#x27;t have a trust fund (though admittedly the huge increase in competition from the internet puts pressure there). And I even recall people saying it&#x27;s one reason teaching wages aren&#x27;t too high either.<p>Unionisation may help, but the only practical solution is for people to stop taking on terrible jobs because of some sense of &#x27;passion&#x27;, and to go where their skills are appreciated&#x2F;where they&#x27;re treated better&#x2F;fairly compensated.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>excalibur</author><text>&gt; I bet few people would be eager to develop banking software on their free time for instance.<p>If a bank found someone who was eager to develop its software for free, it would have a pretty good reason to question their motives.</text></comment> |
13,699,004 | 13,699,132 | 1 | 2 | 13,697,771 | train | <story><title>What I Heard from Trump Supporters</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrs235</author><text>If you want to see some cognitive gear grinding and confusion, if you run into anyone that believes that vaccinations should be mandated by law, ask them &quot;if it&#x27;s my body, isn&#x27;t it my choice?&quot;</text></item><item><author>spaceman_2020</author><text>What gets my goat is the kind of shouting down I get whenever I take any contrarian stance on non-GMO foods, or God forbid, vaccination.<p>I <i>know</i> that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there <i>might</i> be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science.<p>My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.</text></item><item><author>cylinder</author><text>Same thing, even with long-time friends, if I am trying to counter their hysteria (they&#x27;re reading and sharing &quot;fake news,&quot; too, and I just want to point out the inaccuracy of their statements or test them with logic, I&#x27;m called an &quot;alt-right fascist.&quot;<p>Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn&#x27;t matter what side you are on.</text></item><item><author>Yhippa</author><text>This one gave me the most pause:<p>&gt; “Silicon Valley is incredibly unwelcoming to alternative points of view. Your curiosity, if it is sincere, is the very rare exception to the rule.”<p>Substitute &quot;Silicon Valley&quot; for any major liberal enclaves, like universities and cities, and I think you see the same thing. I am skeptical by nature and try to take a scientific view of new ideas. However I feel like I get shouted down every time I merely bring up a contrarian view. People start throwing link after link of facts and don&#x27;t want to even reason about ideas. It&#x27;s hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eridius</author><text>No it&#x27;s not.<p>It&#x27;s not about your body. It&#x27;s about the society you&#x27;re a part of and herd immunity. If you choose not to vaccinate, you are putting <i>everyone else</i> at risk.<p>So yeah, you can choose not to vaccinate, but you need to understand that if you do so, the rest of society has a right (and in many cases an <i>obligation</i>) to say &quot;we don&#x27;t want you here, if you&#x27;re not vaccinated (for any reason other than medically unfit to be vaccinated) then you don&#x27;t get to participate in our society, you don&#x27;t get to put our members at risk, and you need to stay the hell away from us&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Heard from Trump Supporters</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrs235</author><text>If you want to see some cognitive gear grinding and confusion, if you run into anyone that believes that vaccinations should be mandated by law, ask them &quot;if it&#x27;s my body, isn&#x27;t it my choice?&quot;</text></item><item><author>spaceman_2020</author><text>What gets my goat is the kind of shouting down I get whenever I take any contrarian stance on non-GMO foods, or God forbid, vaccination.<p>I <i>know</i> that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there <i>might</i> be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science.<p>My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.</text></item><item><author>cylinder</author><text>Same thing, even with long-time friends, if I am trying to counter their hysteria (they&#x27;re reading and sharing &quot;fake news,&quot; too, and I just want to point out the inaccuracy of their statements or test them with logic, I&#x27;m called an &quot;alt-right fascist.&quot;<p>Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn&#x27;t matter what side you are on.</text></item><item><author>Yhippa</author><text>This one gave me the most pause:<p>&gt; “Silicon Valley is incredibly unwelcoming to alternative points of view. Your curiosity, if it is sincere, is the very rare exception to the rule.”<p>Substitute &quot;Silicon Valley&quot; for any major liberal enclaves, like universities and cities, and I think you see the same thing. I am skeptical by nature and try to take a scientific view of new ideas. However I feel like I get shouted down every time I merely bring up a contrarian view. People start throwing link after link of facts and don&#x27;t want to even reason about ideas. It&#x27;s hopeless and I end up keeping my mouth shut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Marcus316</author><text>Let&#x27;s push the thought experiment a bit. Let&#x27;s suppose you have the option to opt-out from vaccination.<p>If the premise is that you are responsible for your own body, then shouldn&#x27;t you also be responsible for any consequences that occur as a result of your choice to opt-out?<p>As a non-vaccinated person, carrying a disease that would normally be vaccinated against, can you be held responsible in the event that the disease you carry infects, for instance, a child that is not yet old enough to be vaccinated against that particular disease, or infects someone who was unable to be vaccinated due to other medical reasons? Should you be fined or prosecuted in the event that your choice to opt-out can be directly linked to a significant health event?<p>It&#x27;s hard to talk about disease on an individual basis. A person&#x27;s choices with respect to their own health has an impact on the individuals around them, and I do think that people should be mindful of the community when making lifestyle choices. I&#x27;m not saying a person shouldn&#x27;t make their own choices, but should accept that those choices aren&#x27;t just going to affect their own individual health in many cases.</text></comment> |
29,332,906 | 29,332,063 | 1 | 2 | 29,330,599 | train | <story><title>Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/samsung-plans-17-billion-chip-plant-in-taylor-texas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josaka</author><text>After the TX grid failure last winter, it&#x27;s probably not a coincidence that Samsung&#x27;s new facility will be near ERCOT&#x27;s operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid&#x27;s stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from what Samsung was reported to have lost due to the grid failure ($270m).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>msisk6</author><text>The ERCOT campus has their own generation capability along with sitting between two distribution grids. Same with their DR site in Bastrop. In the case of a black start condition (grid totally down), ERCOT would need to come up first to coordinate the grid restoration.<p>Taylor is an ideal place for a large manufacturing operation since it&#x27;s close to major highways and railroads, not too far from Austin, and land is very cheap.</text></comment> | <story><title>Samsung plans $17B chip plant in Taylor, Texas</title><url>https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/samsung-plans-17-billion-chip-plant-in-taylor-texas/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josaka</author><text>After the TX grid failure last winter, it&#x27;s probably not a coincidence that Samsung&#x27;s new facility will be near ERCOT&#x27;s operation center in Taylor, which manages the TX grid, and will likely be the last load to shed when the grid&#x27;s stressed. Used to work in the Austin fab, and the amount of money lost per minute in a power failure is mind boggling. The tax breaks Taylor offered ($314m) are not that different from what Samsung was reported to have lost due to the grid failure ($270m).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bell-cot</author><text>This...but did Samsung quietly negotiate a &quot;any further energy supply f*ck-ups are 100% on YOUR dime&quot; deal with the State of Texas, or what? By several accounts, the TX grid got darn close to collapse last winter - at which point &quot;ERCOT Op Center is next door, and we get top priority&quot; would not get you a single erg.</text></comment> |
3,326,523 | 3,323,817 | 1 | 3 | 3,322,957 | train | <story><title>CNET Injecting Malware into Downloads</title><url>http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>forcer</author><text>Press release from the CNET few minutes ago:<p>A note from Sean
Download.com Developer Community,<p>My last communication to you was shortly after we launched the Download.com Installer in late summer. At that time I asked for patience as we began work to deliver a mutually beneficial model to market.<p>We are on the verge of fulfilling our vision of coming to market with an installer model that delivers files faster and more efficiently to users, while enabling developers to a) opt-in to the Installer, b) influence the offers tied to their files, c) gain reporting insight into the download funnel, and d) share in the revenue generated by the installer. However, due to some press that surfaced yesterday and the potential for subsequent misinformation, I am reaching out now to address that press and to provide a progress report on the upcoming launch:<p>First, on the press that surfaced yesterday: a developer expressed anger and frustration about our current model and how his file was being bundled. This was a mistake on our part and we apologize to the developer and user communities for the unrest it caused. As a rule, we do not bundle open source software and in addition to taking this developers file out of the installer flow, we have gone in and re-checked all open source files in our catalog. We take feedback from our developer &#38; user communities very seriously and take pains to both act on it and respond in a timely manner.<p>With that, I want to share progress made thus far: This week we will launch the alpha phase of our new installer. This alpha phase is intended to test the tech and do QA, and will roll through the next few weeks to ensure that our installer is bug free. Between this week and the end of January we will be completing the necessary engineering and administrative work to roll out our beta, which will include a small group of developers who've agreed to participate in the beta launch. Our goal is to exit beta by end of February and have the necessary systems in place to enable opt-in, influence over advertising offers (for those offers that impact your product), download funnel reporting and revenue share back to you, the developers. In the weeks/months following the full release, we will continue to iterate on the model, adding more features to the Installer and bringing greater efficiency to our own download funnel (read: increased install conversion).
The initial feedback from developers on our new model has been very positive and we are excited to bring this to the broader community as soon as possible. More communication will follow as we move into Q1, and until then, thank you for continuing to work with Download.com.<p>Sincerely,<p>-- Sean</text></comment> | <story><title>CNET Injecting Malware into Downloads</title><url>http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggy2011</author><text>When it comes for Windows software I only use 2 types,
Open source software downloaded from the projects website directly or fully paid up commercial software.<p>I never install anything from ad banners</text></comment> |
15,218,425 | 15,218,132 | 1 | 2 | 15,217,112 | train | <story><title>MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mhalle</author><text>As a Senior House alum and former instructor at MIT, what bothers me the most is how MIT is teaching horrible standards of ethical behavior through their actions.<p>Improper use of metadata to track down individuals in a confidential survey about mental health and substance abuse would end a scientist&#x27;s career. MIT did it.<p>Collective punishment of a group for the actions of a few is an educational and social antipattern. MIT did it.<p>An &quot;end justifies means&quot; mentality is a classic tool used by the strong against the powerless. MIT embraced it.<p>Removing completely innocent people from their homes and their supportive social structure, while MIT&#x27;s right, would face justified outrage in any public context.<p>Using these tools on anyone, let alone the students you thought brilliant and worthy enough to admit, teaches a mindset abusive of power and lacking in humanity. A mindset that is all too common in our society.<p>MIT has plenty of honorable and fair people. If they didn&#x27;t know enough to stand up for Senior House specifically, why didn&#x27;t they stand up against the tools that the administration used that they know are wrong?<p>I have found &quot;we teach as we live, we live as we teach&quot; a pretty powerful and positive philosophy.</text></comment> | <story><title>MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>otakucode</author><text>As college morphs into High School+, and society extends their definition of &#x27;childhood&#x27; to cover up to age 25, steps will be taken to destroy the autonomy and personality of these &#x27;children.&#x27; Children are entitled no rights, no difference of opinion from them is respected, and any degree of control over them, no matter how extreme, is always seen as warranted.</text></comment> |
37,803,999 | 37,803,699 | 1 | 3 | 37,798,329 | train | <story><title>”Be Useful”</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/10/06/1203694351/arnold-schwarzenegger-has-one-main-guiding-principle-be-useful</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chmod600</author><text>Both concepts can be true. A lot of people, especially in the developed world, have way more opportunities than they realize. Those that take on some (often very modest) risk to exercise those opportunities are self-made.<p>It would be ridiculous to say that Picasso didn&#x27;t make a painting because someone else supplied the paint. He&#x27;s the one that saw the paint and the canvas and put them together in a unique way.</text></item><item><author>padolsey</author><text><i>&gt;I hate when someone says, &quot;Oh, Schwarzenegger is the perfect example of a self-made man&quot; because I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m a creation of my parents. I&#x27;m a creation of my coaches, my teachers. I have been helped by my training partners, by my friends. Especially when I think about coming to America, it was Joe Wheeler that helped me to come over here, got me the airline ticket, helped me get the apartment and the car. The people of California voted for me to be governor of California. So I didn&#x27;t become governor because I&#x27;m self-made; I became governor because people voted for me.</i><p>I love this humility and wish more people would have it. Even if you weren&#x27;t supported by individuals, it is due to the society around you, its infrastructure, its structure, its technology, that you are able to be a &quot;success&quot;. We are the product of things we had no control over initially. Yet people still say &quot;self made&quot; ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnny99k</author><text>Because what you are describing is literally what happens in all situations for everything, it shouldn&#x27;t even factor into success. It&#x27;s a given that to be successful, there are external entities involved (infrastructure, people).<p>I suppose if you get a PHD, you should be thanking the factory worker that was responsible for the paper in your diploma. Should you also thank Bill Gates for providing the operating system and software that allowed you to write your thesis?<p>Instead, it&#x27;s being used as a tactic to cut down anyone that is successful (you didn&#x27;t earn that success, it was the people around you).<p>If success were that easy, everyone would be successful..but this just isn&#x27;t reality.</text></comment> | <story><title>”Be Useful”</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2023/10/06/1203694351/arnold-schwarzenegger-has-one-main-guiding-principle-be-useful</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chmod600</author><text>Both concepts can be true. A lot of people, especially in the developed world, have way more opportunities than they realize. Those that take on some (often very modest) risk to exercise those opportunities are self-made.<p>It would be ridiculous to say that Picasso didn&#x27;t make a painting because someone else supplied the paint. He&#x27;s the one that saw the paint and the canvas and put them together in a unique way.</text></item><item><author>padolsey</author><text><i>&gt;I hate when someone says, &quot;Oh, Schwarzenegger is the perfect example of a self-made man&quot; because I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m a creation of my parents. I&#x27;m a creation of my coaches, my teachers. I have been helped by my training partners, by my friends. Especially when I think about coming to America, it was Joe Wheeler that helped me to come over here, got me the airline ticket, helped me get the apartment and the car. The people of California voted for me to be governor of California. So I didn&#x27;t become governor because I&#x27;m self-made; I became governor because people voted for me.</i><p>I love this humility and wish more people would have it. Even if you weren&#x27;t supported by individuals, it is due to the society around you, its infrastructure, its structure, its technology, that you are able to be a &quot;success&quot;. We are the product of things we had no control over initially. Yet people still say &quot;self made&quot; ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xcde4c3db</author><text>Picasso was the son of an accomplished painter and art professor, who tutored him from a young age. That&#x27;s not the sort of opportunity that&#x27;s all around average people.</text></comment> |
36,378,349 | 36,377,581 | 1 | 2 | 36,376,111 | train | <story><title>Falcon LLM – A 40B Model</title><url>https://falconllm.tii.ae/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elahieh</author><text>Is there a guide out there for dummies on how to try a ChatGPT like instance of this on a VM cheaply? eg pay $1 or $2 an hour for a point and click experience with the instruct version of this. A docker image perhaps.<p>Reading posts on r&#x2F;LocalLLAMA is people’s trial and error experiences, quite random.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhl</author><text>For Falcon specifically, this is easy, it&#x27;s embedded here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;falcon#demo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;falcon#demo</a> or you can access the demo here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;spaces&#x2F;HuggingFaceH4&#x2F;falcon-chat" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;spaces&#x2F;HuggingFaceH4&#x2F;falcon-chat</a><p>I just tested both and it&#x27;s pretty zippy (faster than AMD&#x27;s recent live MI300 demo).<p>For llama-based models, recently I&#x27;ve been using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;turboderp&#x2F;exllama">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;turboderp&#x2F;exllama</a> a lot. It has a Dockerfile&#x2F;docker-compose.yml so it should be pretty easy to get going. llama.cpp is the other easy one and the most recent updates put it&#x27;s CUDA support only about 25% slower and generally is a simple `make` with a flag depending on which GPU you support you want and has basically no dependencies.<p>Also, here&#x27;s a Colab notebook that should let shows you run up to 13b quantized models (12G RAM, 80G disk, Tesla T4 16G) for free: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;1QzFsWru1YLnTVK77itWEASCPnIH7IDPo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;1QzFsWru1YLnTVK77itW...</a> (for Falcon, replace w&#x2F; Koboldcpp or ctransformers)</text></comment> | <story><title>Falcon LLM – A 40B Model</title><url>https://falconllm.tii.ae/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elahieh</author><text>Is there a guide out there for dummies on how to try a ChatGPT like instance of this on a VM cheaply? eg pay $1 or $2 an hour for a point and click experience with the instruct version of this. A docker image perhaps.<p>Reading posts on r&#x2F;LocalLLAMA is people’s trial and error experiences, quite random.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshka</author><text>Take a look at youtube vids for this. Mainly because you&#x27;re going to see people show all the steps when presenting instead of skipping them when talking about what they did. E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KenORQDCXV0">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KenORQDCXV0</a></text></comment> |
35,836,759 | 35,836,698 | 1 | 2 | 35,836,541 | train | <story><title>When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”</title><url>https://blog.zulip.com/2023/05/04/when-free-forever-is-4-months/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stanmancan</author><text>Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.<p>Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.<p>Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.</text></item><item><author>jxf</author><text>This blog post is from the &quot;never let a competitor&#x27;s mistake go unnoticed&quot; school of thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bb88</author><text>Yeah, not sure about this either. What it does do is to make me think about the free tier for apps I use, and then wondering what I will do if that free tier becomes more expensive than the value I get out of it.<p>This reminds me of the love&#x2F;hate relationship I have with the Fusion 360 free tier, and maybe even some paid tiers where lifetime is not really lifetime.</text></comment> | <story><title>When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”</title><url>https://blog.zulip.com/2023/05/04/when-free-forever-is-4-months/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stanmancan</author><text>Not sure I totally agree. Capitalizing on a competitors mistake is kind of slimy; calling out their poor business practices is not.<p>Users will invest their time and resources into using your product based on the promise that it’s free forever. Changing your mind later puts the burden on them to figure out how to move forward.<p>Even if I was a free user and I was considering a paid plan that type of dishonesty would make me move to a competitor. What else will they change their mind on? No thanks.</text></item><item><author>jxf</author><text>This blog post is from the &quot;never let a competitor&#x27;s mistake go unnoticed&quot; school of thought.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tough</author><text>They should at least grandfathered any users on the -free forever- plan</text></comment> |
14,596,623 | 14,596,665 | 1 | 2 | 14,596,529 | train | <story><title>Uber rolls out in-app tipping</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/06/20/uber-rolls-out-in-app-tipping-for-drivers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bpicolo</author><text>Why not just raise the prices a bit again? Now I&#x27;m worried I&#x27;ll get down-starred for not tipping on Uber, which is just kind of annoying. I feel like not requiring a tip is Uber&#x27;s biggest differentiator</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RunawayGalaxy</author><text>You answered your own question. Why raise prices and risk losing customers when they can just use widely accepted social pressure to coerce you into subsidizing their cost of doing business for free?</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber rolls out in-app tipping</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/06/20/uber-rolls-out-in-app-tipping-for-drivers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bpicolo</author><text>Why not just raise the prices a bit again? Now I&#x27;m worried I&#x27;ll get down-starred for not tipping on Uber, which is just kind of annoying. I feel like not requiring a tip is Uber&#x27;s biggest differentiator</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spaceflunky</author><text>Uber is going to use tipping as excuse to lower payouts to drivers.<p>If drivers get 80% of the fare now, they&#x27;ll get 70% of the fare in a couple months because Uber will argue that drivers get tips now, which more than compensate for that loss.</text></comment> |
17,732,813 | 17,732,593 | 1 | 3 | 17,731,883 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Curl for GraphQL with autocomplete, subscriptions and GraphiQL</title><url>https://github.com/hasura/graphqurl</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nojvek</author><text>To be honest, I find graphql syntax really weird. What you get back is json, why not make the query language json itself? So all the existing json processing tools on the frontend just work.<p>With the weird syntax, now you need a parser and checker, and you need to write some boilerplate for doing mutation syntax.<p>There’s a reason why everyone and their dog invented ORMs. So you could live in an object world and everything would just work. SQL translation magic would be just an abstraction.<p>GraphQl has some nice things, I.e you only fetch what you need, and the fact that that it exposes a service as a graph. However I’m not sold that it’s a big improvement over simple REST.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Curl for GraphQL with autocomplete, subscriptions and GraphiQL</title><url>https://github.com/hasura/graphqurl</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peterjmag</author><text>This is awesome! I particularly like being able to spin up a local instance of GraphiQL against any endpoint (with auth headers and everything). I tried it with GitHub&#x27;s GraphQL API, and it took me less than a minute to get going.</text></comment> |
18,784,911 | 18,783,533 | 1 | 2 | 18,781,657 | train | <story><title>Over half of older US workers are pushed out of longtime jobs before they retire</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/older-workers-united-states-pushed-out-of-work-forced-retirement</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndyMcConachie</author><text>I hate this attitude among Americans. Like there is some strategy you can play that will make sure you won&#x27;t get screwed over in life, and that if you do get screwed over in life it&#x27;s because your strategy was wrong.<p>It has so much more to do with luck than I think people like you are willing to admit. Where is the compassion in your writing? This story is about people losing their jobs simply because they&#x27;re old and used up by a society that doesn&#x27;t give a shit. And here you are talking about strategies for success. It&#x27;s gross.</text></item><item><author>apatters</author><text>If you&#x27;re currently an employee, start thinking by your 40s about how you could become your own boss.<p>By 50, if you&#x27;ve played your cards right, you have a lot of connections, a lot of expertise, and you&#x27;ve become rather expensive to employ.<p>So you do attract attention from the cost cutters wherever you work. But it also means that you might deliver more business value as a consultant than as a full-time employee anyway.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people who got ahead of this trend, they planned for it, and made it work. They prepared for a long time and then they left. Instead of treading water in the same job for another decade, they semi-retired into consulting.<p>You do it when you&#x27;re prepared, you&#x27;ve done your homework, and you can name a couple of companies where you have contacts that would probably be interested in retaining you. Often, your first customer is your former employer. Because if you were doing an essential job, they probably won&#x27;t be well prepared for it, and they&#x27;ll want to re-hire you on a consulting basis to oversee the transition.<p>You end up getting less total compensation from them, but you get paid at a higher rate per unit of your time. Then you string together a few other gigs. If you can&#x27;t get as much work as you want you at least have some flexibility, maybe you end up spending the winters in a low cost country or something.<p>The key is in the preparation and paying attention to the right details while you&#x27;re still in corporate. If you do it right, it can actually help your interests stay aligned with your employer&#x27;s throughout your entire career. If they have cost pressures your switch to consulting can be a win for them too.<p>Like a lot of things in life, the key is to know when to quit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>Please keep nationalistic slurs far away from Hacker News, regardless of who you have a problem with.<p>In addition, please review <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a> and follow all the rules when posting here. They include:<p>&quot;<i>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that&#x27;s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.</i>&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Over half of older US workers are pushed out of longtime jobs before they retire</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/older-workers-united-states-pushed-out-of-work-forced-retirement</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndyMcConachie</author><text>I hate this attitude among Americans. Like there is some strategy you can play that will make sure you won&#x27;t get screwed over in life, and that if you do get screwed over in life it&#x27;s because your strategy was wrong.<p>It has so much more to do with luck than I think people like you are willing to admit. Where is the compassion in your writing? This story is about people losing their jobs simply because they&#x27;re old and used up by a society that doesn&#x27;t give a shit. And here you are talking about strategies for success. It&#x27;s gross.</text></item><item><author>apatters</author><text>If you&#x27;re currently an employee, start thinking by your 40s about how you could become your own boss.<p>By 50, if you&#x27;ve played your cards right, you have a lot of connections, a lot of expertise, and you&#x27;ve become rather expensive to employ.<p>So you do attract attention from the cost cutters wherever you work. But it also means that you might deliver more business value as a consultant than as a full-time employee anyway.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people who got ahead of this trend, they planned for it, and made it work. They prepared for a long time and then they left. Instead of treading water in the same job for another decade, they semi-retired into consulting.<p>You do it when you&#x27;re prepared, you&#x27;ve done your homework, and you can name a couple of companies where you have contacts that would probably be interested in retaining you. Often, your first customer is your former employer. Because if you were doing an essential job, they probably won&#x27;t be well prepared for it, and they&#x27;ll want to re-hire you on a consulting basis to oversee the transition.<p>You end up getting less total compensation from them, but you get paid at a higher rate per unit of your time. Then you string together a few other gigs. If you can&#x27;t get as much work as you want you at least have some flexibility, maybe you end up spending the winters in a low cost country or something.<p>The key is in the preparation and paying attention to the right details while you&#x27;re still in corporate. If you do it right, it can actually help your interests stay aligned with your employer&#x27;s throughout your entire career. If they have cost pressures your switch to consulting can be a win for them too.<p>Like a lot of things in life, the key is to know when to quit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apatters</author><text>What you&#x27;ve done here is create multiple strawmen, attribute them to me, and then rationalize this fictional version of me as a &quot;typical American.&quot; It&#x27;s very insulting.<p>Nowhere did I say luck doesn&#x27;t play a part. Nowhere did I say I lack compassion for the people in the article. Nowhere did I say that I think things are fine as they are.<p>The reality of the business world today is that employment is at-will. There&#x27;s nothing stopping employers doing the things described in this article. So I offered up a way that people I know have managed to improve their career outcomes. Having several consulting clients is often a lower-risk approach to the later stages of your career than depending on one employer for all of your income. This is a forum dedicated to entrepreneurship so I think my comments are appropriate here.</text></comment> |
5,861,103 | 5,860,279 | 1 | 3 | 5,859,185 | train | <story><title>Timelapse of a supercell near Booker, Texas</title><url>http://www.mikeolbinski.com/theblog/2013/06/timelapse-of-a-supercell-near-booker-texas/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quasque</author><text>Beautiful.<p>If you enjoy this sort of thing you may like this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudappreciationsociety.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudappreciationsociety.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Timelapse of a supercell near Booker, Texas</title><url>http://www.mikeolbinski.com/theblog/2013/06/timelapse-of-a-supercell-near-booker-texas/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Todd</author><text>I flew over this area (going TX to WA) the day after this and saw a similar storm. It was absolutely mesmerizing. Discharges occurred every few seconds the entire time we flew around it--an even mixture of intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground. I&#x27;ve never seen anything like it.<p>On a related note, several days earlier, I flew from IL to LA ahead of a storm system in the Midwest and was in some roller coaster turbulence, so bad that the crew said it was rare for them. Not fun.</text></comment> |
2,985,832 | 2,985,786 | 1 | 3 | 2,985,534 | train | <story><title>LucasFilm Tells Darth Vader that Return of the Jedi Hasn’t Made a Profit</title><url>http://www.slashfilm.com/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader-that-return-of-the-jedi-hasnt-made-a-profit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mmaunder</author><text>Less than 5% of movies actually show a net income (or net profit as the article calls it). It's called Hollywood Accounting:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting</a><p>Summary:<p>-Studios create a subsidiary corporation for each movie and they almost never show a profit.<p>-The studios charge the subsidiary service fees for services performed like distribution, which lowers net income to zero or less.<p>-They do this to avoid taxation and paying royalties to actors.<p>Quote from wikipedia: "Because of this, net points are sometimes referred to as "monkey points," a term attributed to Eddie Murphy, who is said to have also stated that only a fool would accept net points in his or her contract."<p>There are many more cases like this involving high profile people including Peter Jackson:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples</a></text></comment> | <story><title>LucasFilm Tells Darth Vader that Return of the Jedi Hasn’t Made a Profit</title><url>http://www.slashfilm.com/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader-that-return-of-the-jedi-hasnt-made-a-profit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bfe</author><text>One of my intellectual property law professors, with fifty years experience in just about every kind of I.P. licensing scenario possible, all over the world, recommended it's almost always best in an I.P. license to ask for a flat fee first, and a small percentage of gross revenue with a short, hard reckoning date second. The more bargaining power you have, the higher you should bump up your position for upfront flat fee first and percentage of gross revenue second. Agreeing to a percentage of "net profits" is almost always a commitment to sue the other party down the road or get nothing. Whatever I've learned since then has left his recommendation intact.</text></comment> |
26,926,416 | 26,926,429 | 1 | 3 | 26,925,314 | train | <story><title>Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers</title><url>https://c9x.me/compile/bib/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardwaregeek</author><text>This is definitely a backend, machine code focused list. If you&#x27;re writing a compiler to WebAssembly or even the JVM you&#x27;re probably not gonna need a lot of these resources.<p>Indeed I&#x27;d argue that these lists are more for an intermediate compiler writer. Beginner compiler writers don&#x27;t need to know register allocation. They need to understand how to think about language translation, how to write an intermediate representation, how to learn a target language.<p>I&#x27;ve been toying with the idea of writing a post that goes through the thought process of translation. Specifically, how you build states, and invariants. When I write code generation I spend time thinking about the different states the stack could be in, or what invariant I need to keep across this expression (do I need to save a register or global?).<p>One simple but important example of this is realizing that given a proper, sound type checker, your code generator should almost never give errors. By the time you reach code generation you should have proven enough invariants that code generation cannot fail. This isn&#x27;t always true but I&#x27;ve found it to be the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstanley</author><text>&gt; Indeed I&#x27;d argue that these lists are more for an intermediate compiler writer. Beginner compiler writers don&#x27;t need to know register allocation.<p>I&#x27;m not disagreeing with you, but note that the title does not say it&#x27;s for beginners, it says it&#x27;s for amateurs, which is just anyone who does it for fun rather than money.</text></comment> | <story><title>Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers</title><url>https://c9x.me/compile/bib/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hardwaregeek</author><text>This is definitely a backend, machine code focused list. If you&#x27;re writing a compiler to WebAssembly or even the JVM you&#x27;re probably not gonna need a lot of these resources.<p>Indeed I&#x27;d argue that these lists are more for an intermediate compiler writer. Beginner compiler writers don&#x27;t need to know register allocation. They need to understand how to think about language translation, how to write an intermediate representation, how to learn a target language.<p>I&#x27;ve been toying with the idea of writing a post that goes through the thought process of translation. Specifically, how you build states, and invariants. When I write code generation I spend time thinking about the different states the stack could be in, or what invariant I need to keep across this expression (do I need to save a register or global?).<p>One simple but important example of this is realizing that given a proper, sound type checker, your code generator should almost never give errors. By the time you reach code generation you should have proven enough invariants that code generation cannot fail. This isn&#x27;t always true but I&#x27;ve found it to be the case.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orthoxerox</author><text>&gt; Beginner compiler writers don&#x27;t need to know register allocation. They need to understand how to think about language translation, how to write an intermediate representation, how to learn a target language.<p>I don&#x27;t think people that want to write a compiler want to end up with helloworld.c instead of helloword.exe. At least I don&#x27;t.</text></comment> |
28,576,739 | 28,576,487 | 1 | 3 | 28,575,329 | train | <story><title>India antitrust probe finds Google abused Android dominance, report shows</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/india-antitrust-probe-finds-google-abused-android-dominance-report-shows-2021-09-18/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>achow</author><text>Oct 2020<p>The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has been looking into allegations that Google creates barriers for firms wanting to use or develop modified versions of Android for smart TVs, such as Amazon Fire TV’s operating system.<p>“...I reckon that some aggrieved TV manufacturers, who cannot break out from the Google dominance, could be behind this case”<p>Google’s agreements with companies such as Xiaomi and TCL India effectively stop them from using both the Android system and a modified version of it on different devices they make.<p>For example, if a company sells smartphones based on Android, it cannot sell smart TVs running on competing platforms, such the Amazon Fire TV system.<p>And if a company’s smart TV is using the Amazon OS, then it is restricted from offering Google’s popular Play Store or the Google Maps app on its smartphones.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asiafinancial.com&#x2F;powerful-forces-behind-new-google-antitrust-case-in-india" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asiafinancial.com&#x2F;powerful-forces-behind-new-goo...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>India antitrust probe finds Google abused Android dominance, report shows</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/india-antitrust-probe-finds-google-abused-android-dominance-report-shows-2021-09-18/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>Is the Competition Commission of India (CCI) politically independent?</text></comment> |
25,172,700 | 25,172,604 | 1 | 2 | 25,171,046 | train | <story><title>Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax</title><url>https://thedriven.io/2020/11/21/shameful-victoria-follows-south-australia-and-imposes-electric-car-road-tax/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ip26</author><text>One of the simplest arguments against it to me is basically to look at the landscape. For example, in the US, ballpark 1% of cars are electric. Meanwhile, the flat federal fuel tax is not indexed to inflation &amp; hasn&#x27;t been increased in almost thirty years. Yet everyone is in this panic about how EVs are going to cause a huge revenue shortfall!? I&#x27;m not opposed to EVs paying their share, but something is rotten in Denmark.<p>Anyway, shifting fuel taxes onto tires might make sense. All cars use tires, no matter the fuel, it requires no odometer reading, and a tire has a designed application &amp; load range which ought to translate reasonably well to anticipated road wear.</text></item><item><author>horsawlarway</author><text>I&#x27;m not really sure there&#x27;s a good answer here.<p>Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you&#x27;re looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax.<p>This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric.<p>Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can&#x27;t. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.<p>And frankly, infrastructure is expensive, and governments need to plan on continuing to maintain it.<p>That said - I think the only real answer here is a more thorough overhaul of how you tax road usage. Perhaps it&#x27;s time to ditch the fuel excise tax entirely, and tax all drivers based on (vehicle weight * kms driven * some constant).<p>Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road, and drop the disparity between fuel and electric. They both use the same tires.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riversflow</author><text>2 things.
First, pretty sure it’s been discussed here previously(edit: and is down thread), but I believe the wear on the road is like the 4th power of the weight.[1] here’s a chart describing it. with that considered, I don’t think it makes sense to even really charge passenger vehicles in the US, when we have huge fleets of 80k pound big rigs on the road(and the limit is uncapped with overweight permits)—charge them.<p>Second, the problem with tires is that depending on what and where you drive you’ll use them considerably faster. I live a few miles down a very windy chip-sealed[2] road, that I have to drive down any time I go anywhere. As a result(best I can tell) my tires tend to go bald 10k-20k miles early. Chip seal is used because it is cheap, seems regressive that I’d be taxed at a higher rate for a poorer road.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;streets.mn&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs-road-damage-levels&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;streets.mn&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chipseal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chipseal</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax</title><url>https://thedriven.io/2020/11/21/shameful-victoria-follows-south-australia-and-imposes-electric-car-road-tax/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ip26</author><text>One of the simplest arguments against it to me is basically to look at the landscape. For example, in the US, ballpark 1% of cars are electric. Meanwhile, the flat federal fuel tax is not indexed to inflation &amp; hasn&#x27;t been increased in almost thirty years. Yet everyone is in this panic about how EVs are going to cause a huge revenue shortfall!? I&#x27;m not opposed to EVs paying their share, but something is rotten in Denmark.<p>Anyway, shifting fuel taxes onto tires might make sense. All cars use tires, no matter the fuel, it requires no odometer reading, and a tire has a designed application &amp; load range which ought to translate reasonably well to anticipated road wear.</text></item><item><author>horsawlarway</author><text>I&#x27;m not really sure there&#x27;s a good answer here.<p>Fuel tax is 43 cents a litre. Australian cars right now avg about 13.1 litres per 100km. So you&#x27;re looking at ~$5.6 per 100km for fuel tax.<p>This tax is adding $2.5 tax per 100km for electric.<p>Right now, EVs are absolutely creating an regressive tax situation with regards to fuel. Those who can afford to buy newer, efficient cars can usually save money on tax over those who can&#x27;t. For electric, it was worse - because they do tend to be more expensive to purchase up front, and they paid no fuel tax at all.<p>And frankly, infrastructure is expensive, and governments need to plan on continuing to maintain it.<p>That said - I think the only real answer here is a more thorough overhaul of how you tax road usage. Perhaps it&#x27;s time to ditch the fuel excise tax entirely, and tax all drivers based on (vehicle weight * kms driven * some constant).<p>Encourage drivers to move to lighter vehicles which cause less wear and tear on the road, and drop the disparity between fuel and electric. They both use the same tires.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeklaas</author><text>Good thought, but that might incentivize not replacing worn tires</text></comment> |
40,097,189 | 40,091,916 | 1 | 2 | 40,089,609 | train | <story><title>Multipath TCP for Linux (2022)</title><url>https://www.mptcp.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>If TCP had a protocol specific identifier for connections (a couple of 32-bit values, for example-- a client nonce and server nonce) rather than using the source&#x2F;destination IP addresses multi-homed hosts and seamless transition between different networks would become native features of the protocol. A client could roam between two different IP networks and TCP connections would &quot;survive&quot;, for example. (I&#x27;m oversimplifying nearly to the point of hyperbole, to be sure...)<p>(Another fun future would have been one where SCTP got widespread adoption.)</text></item><item><author>bobmcnamara</author><text>How would you change TCP?<p>Do you mean how we have to use 4 fields to track a connection - IP address and port for both ends?</text></item><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>I don&#x27;t know which makes me sadder-- IPv4 only having a 32-bit address space or TCP using the source and destination IP addresses in the connection tuple. That&#x27;s one of those &quot;if I had a time machine&quot; of things-- I&#x27;d go back and have Cert and Kahn change both of those items.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LinuxBender</author><text><i>a client nonce and server nonce) rather than using the source&#x2F;destination IP addresses multi-homed hosts and seamless transition between different networks would become native features of the protocol. A client could roam between two different IP networks and TCP connections would &quot;survive&quot;, for example.</i><p>This is mostly how Mosh [1] works and allows for IP roaming, changing IP&#x27;s, etc... without losing ones SSH session. The connection can even be interrupted for a prolonged period of time and restore on its own on a new IP seamlessly.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosh.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosh.org&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Multipath TCP for Linux (2022)</title><url>https://www.mptcp.dev/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>If TCP had a protocol specific identifier for connections (a couple of 32-bit values, for example-- a client nonce and server nonce) rather than using the source&#x2F;destination IP addresses multi-homed hosts and seamless transition between different networks would become native features of the protocol. A client could roam between two different IP networks and TCP connections would &quot;survive&quot;, for example. (I&#x27;m oversimplifying nearly to the point of hyperbole, to be sure...)<p>(Another fun future would have been one where SCTP got widespread adoption.)</text></item><item><author>bobmcnamara</author><text>How would you change TCP?<p>Do you mean how we have to use 4 fields to track a connection - IP address and port for both ends?</text></item><item><author>EvanAnderson</author><text>I don&#x27;t know which makes me sadder-- IPv4 only having a 32-bit address space or TCP using the source and destination IP addresses in the connection tuple. That&#x27;s one of those &quot;if I had a time machine&quot; of things-- I&#x27;d go back and have Cert and Kahn change both of those items.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mauriciob</author><text>How would routing be done without source&#x2F;destination? When the device changes networks, how does the origin and all routers along the way know that this device is on a new network?</text></comment> |
16,582,783 | 16,582,752 | 1 | 2 | 16,582,266 | train | <story><title>Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/google-bans-crypto-ads.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freedomben</author><text>Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that&#x27;s a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn&#x27;t demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gkoberger</author><text>They&#x27;re stopping ads, not content.<p>Content and ads are very different things. Stopping lucrative crypto ads certainly will financially hurt Google, but is definitely a win for consumers. Most crypto advertising is 100% scams. There&#x27;s a huge difference between letting someone speak their mind on your platform (content) versus accepting money to broadcast their message on your platform (ads).<p>As for content, that&#x27;s completely different (and a slippery slope). I won&#x27;t pick a side on free speech vs protecting people, but I will say I&#x27;m very glad I don&#x27;t have to choose where to draw the line.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/google-bans-crypto-ads.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freedomben</author><text>Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that&#x27;s a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn&#x27;t demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RestlessMind</author><text>My livelihood depends on online advertising and yet I have the opposite feelings. Google (and Facebook and Reddit etc) should be doing more content policing, especially for the content monetized by advertising, and should be held liable for the content which they monetize.<p>Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news &#x2F; radicalizing context coupled with attention based internet economy where the only incentive an internet content business has is to grab more and more eyeballs. Google (and others) simply shirk their failures by claiming &quot;to give users what they want&quot;, when instead their employees are busy devising more and more elaborate ways to grab someone&#x27;s eyeballs.</text></comment> |
20,868,192 | 20,868,532 | 1 | 3 | 20,867,758 | train | <story><title>ESP32/ESP8266 Wi-Fi Attacks</title><url>https://github.com/Matheus-Garbelini/esp32_esp8266_attacks</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fra</author><text>First and foremost, this speaks to the ubiquity and hacker friendliness of Espressif&#x27;s chips. Most of their competitors (I&#x27;m looking at you, Broadcom), prefer security through obscurity and make it extremely difficult to get access to chips, let alone SDKs. I am certain that similar vulnerability exist in every embedded WiFi chipset out there.<p>That being said, the status quo is completely untenable. Connectivity has become the norm in the hardware space, and it is built on a shoddy software foundation. Vendor SDKs are often best effort endeavors provided &quot;as is&quot; with no thought given to security or reliability. The results are clear: &quot;the S in IOT stands for security&quot; has become a trope, and connected cameras, locks, washing machines, and many more are getting owned on a weekly basis.<p>This will change, and whoever cracks this nut will be very successful indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stefan_</author><text>Uhh, their WiFi implementation is hacked-together old open source code distributed as statically linked binary blobs. And that is just the software part, there isn&#x27;t much visibility into the silicon side..</text></comment> | <story><title>ESP32/ESP8266 Wi-Fi Attacks</title><url>https://github.com/Matheus-Garbelini/esp32_esp8266_attacks</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fra</author><text>First and foremost, this speaks to the ubiquity and hacker friendliness of Espressif&#x27;s chips. Most of their competitors (I&#x27;m looking at you, Broadcom), prefer security through obscurity and make it extremely difficult to get access to chips, let alone SDKs. I am certain that similar vulnerability exist in every embedded WiFi chipset out there.<p>That being said, the status quo is completely untenable. Connectivity has become the norm in the hardware space, and it is built on a shoddy software foundation. Vendor SDKs are often best effort endeavors provided &quot;as is&quot; with no thought given to security or reliability. The results are clear: &quot;the S in IOT stands for security&quot; has become a trope, and connected cameras, locks, washing machines, and many more are getting owned on a weekly basis.<p>This will change, and whoever cracks this nut will be very successful indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kees99</author><text>Vulnerabilities in Broadcom&#x2F;Cypress wifi chips&#x27; firmware have been known for a while now:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.exodusintel.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;broadpwn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.exodusintel.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;broadpwn&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
15,279,839 | 15,280,076 | 1 | 2 | 15,271,160 | train | <story><title>What, exactly, do philosophers do?</title><url>https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/where-modern-philosophy-began/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>keeler</author><text>People forget that Alan Turing&#x27;s essay &quot;Computing Machinery and Intelligence&quot; was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal.<p>People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called &quot;The Laws of Thought,&quot; where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn&#x27;t something &quot;philosophers do,&quot; this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle&#x27;s logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science.<p>Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege.<p>A lot of the technology we&#x27;re using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers.<p>I&#x27;ve always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton&#x27;s time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes&#x27; physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic.<p>Of course, I don&#x27;t mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There&#x27;s something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers &quot;do&quot; would probably strike some readers here as very &quot;heads in the clouds&quot; type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you&#x27;re interested in &quot;language of thought&quot; type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole&#x27;s project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What &quot;Kind of Creatures Are We?&quot;, which is worth a look too.</text></comment> | <story><title>What, exactly, do philosophers do?</title><url>https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/where-modern-philosophy-began/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rwnspace</author><text>Disgruntled philosophy grad: not very much, in my estimation. Most of the good ones born in the last five decades have been swallowed by CS, at least in the West.<p>There&#x27;s lots I&#x27;d like to say on the topic, originating from &#x27;psychoanalysing&#x27; the field with a little too much vigor, supporting it with social-structuralist bollocks, and throwing in criticisms of the academic publishing hamster-wheel. But a simple nod is better than a rant.<p>Besides this, I think the main thing a philosopher &#x27;should do&#x27; is explicitly not just philosophy. Speaking at least two languages, being able to code, and actively participating in empirical work and creative endeavours should be seen as crucial to the education of a philosopher, for them to produce work of historical merit. The first two increase the likelihood of avoiding the Wittgensteinian errors of language and the latter two keep your brain moving and subsuming after parsing mountains of dense text.<p>Of course, if you want to be a philosophical historian, or an academic who academises in philosophy, take the well-trodden path. I think there are many philosophers who could write like wrought iron, but whose hearts just don&#x27;t seem in it. Perhaps I&#x27;m just one of those guys who enjoyed Nietzsche a bit too much.<p>Edit: I feel compelled to mention that I trust my hard knowledge of the discipline about as far as I could throw it. It&#x27;s well worth the CS-types around here taking the time to investigate the field - I recommend Kenny&#x27;s &#x27;A New History of Western Philosophy&#x27; if you&#x27;ve got time, or any old MOOC. After all, it&#x27;s probably what you&#x27;d be up to if we didn&#x27;t have computers.</text></comment> |
41,641,284 | 41,640,142 | 1 | 2 | 41,638,885 | train | <story><title>45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web</title><url>https://www.wosu.org/2024-09-24/45-years-ago-compuserve-connected-the-world-before-the-world-wide-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cdchn</author><text>A lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading&#x2F;replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings.<p>EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.</text></item><item><author>sandymcmurray</author><text>You paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, &quot;No thanks. Just pay it forward.&quot; A couple of great lessons there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrelaszlo</author><text>&gt; the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.<p>Very sad story. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;serial-swatter-who-caused-death-gets-five-years-in-prison&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;krebsonsecurity.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;07&#x2F;serial-swatter-who-cause...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web</title><url>https://www.wosu.org/2024-09-24/45-years-ago-compuserve-connected-the-world-before-the-world-wide-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cdchn</author><text>A lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading&#x2F;replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings.<p>EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.</text></item><item><author>sandymcmurray</author><text>You paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, &quot;No thanks. Just pay it forward.&quot; A couple of great lessons there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>Even free&#x2F;subscription BBSs often involved pretty expensive per-minute phone charges. Intrastate in the US could actually cost <i>more</i> than interstate. Phone calls were expensive historically. Maybe more than $1&#x2F;minute except for <i>very</i> local in today&#x27;s currency.<p>Compuserve also had different rates depending on the baud rate you connected at.<p>Having a computer and getting online was a pretty expensive hobby in the 80s and early 90s.</text></comment> |
4,394,419 | 4,394,292 | 1 | 2 | 4,393,817 | train | <story><title>Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy</title><url>http://www.joshlehman.com/thoughts/stop-using-the-cup-of-coffee-vs-0-99-cent-app-analogy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dasil003</author><text>I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress <i>their</i> garbage before you could throw <i>yours</i> in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there.<p>Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies, so I can only imagine how terrible Starbucks is by comparison in your country.</text></item><item><author>andrewfelix</author><text>Well said.<p><i>"Starbucks Craftsmanship"</i>? Please.<p>Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee.<p>I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbucks beverage.<p>EDIT: I'm talking specifically about <i>Starbacks</i>. Australia has excellent coffee. I'm drinking a lovely Sprocket coffee as I write this.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Horrifying.<p>The point about the coffee cup comparison isn't that cups of coffee are the benchmark experience for product pricing; if that were the case, my next root canal would cost $0.20.<p>The point of the coffee cup comparison is <i>marginal utility</i>: the money you spend on an expensive cup of coffee almost certainly has very little utility at the margin, because you are happy to chuck it away for a bad cup of coffee.<p>Oh, you really like Starbucks coffee? That's unfortunate, because it's pretty bad, but more importantly: you <i>militantly miss the point of the comparison</i> when you benchmark the experience of installing a new app against the enjoyment you get from a cup of coffee.<p>This place has an enormous problem with pricing and economics. Unlike Patrick, who really does sweat the fact that developers are making small fractions of their overall worth due to underpricing their offerings, I should be overjoyed at the fact that the biggest collection of new software entrepreneurs on the Internet hangs out at a meme generation engine for exploitable market inefficiencies. But unfortunately, I'm an obnoxious nerd, so all I can think to do about this is yell. ARGH.<p>A dollar at the margin for a person with a $600 phone on a $50/mo data contract is <i>not an enormous gamble</i>. It is a pittance too trivial for that person to even contextualize. The problem isn't that people are unwilling to give up $1 for apps; it's that they're hesitant to give up $0.25 for <i>anything</i> online. When you start with the understanding that there's huge impedance at "anything above free", it's clear why "$1" is not a particularly great price point, and why "better strategies to motivate people to part with $1" is a terrible meme to propagate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lobster_johnson</author><text>&#62; Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies,<p>In New York, Swedish coffee (of all things) seems to be the up-and-coming thing:<p><a href="http://www.fikanyc.com/about" rel="nofollow">http://www.fikanyc.com/about</a><p><a href="http://www.konditorinyc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.konditorinyc.com/</a><p>No idea why. Scandinavia is exotic and hip these days, probably. Then again, a lot of new Swedish things are popping up, like Swedish pizza places (which, if you haven't had it, mostly revolves around unexpected toppings such as banana, cabbage and kebab meat).</text></comment> | <story><title>Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 Cent App Analogy</title><url>http://www.joshlehman.com/thoughts/stop-using-the-cup-of-coffee-vs-0-99-cent-app-analogy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dasil003</author><text>I've been hating Starbucks since 1993 where at my first job at a movie theater we shared a trash compactor with them, and those bastards would never press the button, so you had to stand in the smelly garbage room and wait for it to compress <i>their</i> garbage before you could throw <i>yours</i> in. It would be years before I could actually afford to buy a coffee from there.<p>Now I live in London, and as far as I can tell, all the good coffee is made by Aussies, so I can only imagine how terrible Starbucks is by comparison in your country.</text></item><item><author>andrewfelix</author><text>Well said.<p><i>"Starbucks Craftsmanship"</i>? Please.<p>Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee.<p>I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbucks beverage.<p>EDIT: I'm talking specifically about <i>Starbacks</i>. Australia has excellent coffee. I'm drinking a lovely Sprocket coffee as I write this.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Horrifying.<p>The point about the coffee cup comparison isn't that cups of coffee are the benchmark experience for product pricing; if that were the case, my next root canal would cost $0.20.<p>The point of the coffee cup comparison is <i>marginal utility</i>: the money you spend on an expensive cup of coffee almost certainly has very little utility at the margin, because you are happy to chuck it away for a bad cup of coffee.<p>Oh, you really like Starbucks coffee? That's unfortunate, because it's pretty bad, but more importantly: you <i>militantly miss the point of the comparison</i> when you benchmark the experience of installing a new app against the enjoyment you get from a cup of coffee.<p>This place has an enormous problem with pricing and economics. Unlike Patrick, who really does sweat the fact that developers are making small fractions of their overall worth due to underpricing their offerings, I should be overjoyed at the fact that the biggest collection of new software entrepreneurs on the Internet hangs out at a meme generation engine for exploitable market inefficiencies. But unfortunately, I'm an obnoxious nerd, so all I can think to do about this is yell. ARGH.<p>A dollar at the margin for a person with a $600 phone on a $50/mo data contract is <i>not an enormous gamble</i>. It is a pittance too trivial for that person to even contextualize. The problem isn't that people are unwilling to give up $1 for apps; it's that they're hesitant to give up $0.25 for <i>anything</i> online. When you start with the understanding that there's huge impedance at "anything above free", it's clear why "$1" is not a particularly great price point, and why "better strategies to motivate people to part with $1" is a terrible meme to propagate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewfelix</author><text>Don't get me wrong, Aussies make amazing coffee. The best coffee comes from a portable stall outside Sydney central station <i>crafted</i> by a Polish Aussie using Campos beans.</text></comment> |
5,375,475 | 5,373,570 | 1 | 2 | 5,373,342 | train | <story><title>Sails.js: Realtime MVC framework for Node.js</title><url>http://balderdashy.github.com/sails/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peter_l_downs</author><text>This looks great! The automatic API generation is a killer feature that makes me want to try this out sometime soon. Only thing that seems strange to me is adding the &#60;resource&#62;/create, &#60;resource&#62;/update, and &#60;resource&#62;/destroy GET endpoints -- why not keep it RESTful?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikermcneil</author><text>Hey Peter-- RESTful endpoints are supported. The other options are just there for convenience while testing. You can disable those routes later if you like in your routing table. Policy mapping happens at a controller level to solve this very problem and prevent devs from inadvertently granting access to a piece of code they didn't mean to.<p># List of all users
<a href="http://localhost:1337/user" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user</a><p># Find the user with id 1
<a href="http://localhost:1337/user/1" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/1</a><p># Create a new user
<a href="http://localhost:1337/user/create?name=Fisslewick" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/create?name=Fisslewick</a>
(or send an HTTP POST to <a href="http://localhost:1337/user" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user</a>)<p># Update the name of the user with id 1
<a href="http://localhost:1337/user/update/1?name=Gordo" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/update/1?name=Gordo</a>
(or send an HTTP PUT to <a href="http://localhost:1337/user/1" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/1</a>)<p># Destroy the user with id 1
<a href="http://localhost:1337/user/destroy/1" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/destroy/1</a>
(or send an HTTP DELETE to <a href="http://localhost:1337/user/1" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:1337/user/1</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>Sails.js: Realtime MVC framework for Node.js</title><url>http://balderdashy.github.com/sails/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peter_l_downs</author><text>This looks great! The automatic API generation is a killer feature that makes me want to try this out sometime soon. Only thing that seems strange to me is adding the &#60;resource&#62;/create, &#60;resource&#62;/update, and &#60;resource&#62;/destroy GET endpoints -- why not keep it RESTful?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonny_eh</author><text>I can see the desire to be able to execute non-GET commands via the browser's address bar. Another way Sails could accomplish that would be to accept "?method=PUT|POST|DELETE" to mimic the desired HTTP method.</text></comment> |
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