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chosen int64 353 41.8M	rejected int64 287 41.8M	chosen_rank int64 1 2	rejected_rank int64 2 3	top_level_parent int64 189 41.8M	split large_stringclasses 1 value	chosen_prompt large_stringlengths 236 19.5k	rejected_prompt large_stringlengths 209 18k
21,175,236	21,174,218	1	2	21,172,622	train	<story><title>Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-farmer-wang-englin-study-law-16-years-chemicals-corporation-qinghua-group-dump-chemical-a7566911.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>both my father and a dear friend gave me some great advice... &quot;if you can, go to law school. even if you&#x27;re not a practicing lawyer, it&#x27;s very useful to know how they think.&quot;<p>one friend commented &quot;law school teaches you about the operating system of society&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tasty_freeze</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand how this is great advice. You might as well say: if you can, go to med school so that when you have to deal with the medical establishment, you know how it works. Spend years as a carpenters apprentice so when you buy a house you will be able to recognize the quality&#x2F;problems it has. etc</text></comment>	<story><title>Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-farmer-wang-englin-study-law-16-years-chemicals-corporation-qinghua-group-dump-chemical-a7566911.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retrocryptid</author><text>both my father and a dear friend gave me some great advice... &quot;if you can, go to law school. even if you&#x27;re not a practicing lawyer, it&#x27;s very useful to know how they think.&quot;<p>one friend commented &quot;law school teaches you about the operating system of society&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>solidsnack9000</author><text>I&#x27;ve been reading &quot;Lectures on Jurisprudence&quot;, a collation of lecture notes from a course Adam Smith gave in the 1760s. It is somewhat puzzling phrasing but seems to be a very structured introduction to the law, addressing questions like:<p>* What are the ways recognised by the law in which people acquire property? One way is simply by holding it for a long time; another is by receiving it, as through an inheritance; a third is when property results from other property, as when an apple tree produces apples.<p>* What do &quot;rights&quot; mean in a legal context and where do they originate from? Some are intrinsic, some are the result of agreements.<p>* What are the laws of marriage and inheritance and how have they changed over time?</text></comment>
34,928,132	34,928,331	1	2	34,909,169	train	<story><title>Gluon, a high-performance IMAP library</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/gluon-imap-library</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meghan_rain</author><text>&gt; IMAP clients typically refer to messages by their “sequence number”, the message’s position in a mailbox. The first message has the sequence number “1”, the second “2”, and so on. If a client wants to mark a message as “read”, it will send a command to the server such as “mark message 5 as read”. But what if another client deleted the fourth message in the mailbox? The sequence numbers of all messages after the deleted message will be shifted down by one; the client that sent the “mark message 5 as read” command now refers to a different message than it intended.<p>&gt; IMAP servers (which include applications such as the Proton Mail Bridge) need to be able to handle this situation. When one client moves messages into or out of a mailbox, the server needs to notify all other clients of the changes so that they can update their own view of the mailbox. And until the clients have received the update, the server needs to remember what each client thinks the mailbox looks like to correctly interpret the client’s commands.<p>Holy F what a clusterfuck</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throw0101c</author><text>&gt;&gt; <i>IMAP clients typically refer to messages by their “sequence number”</i> […]<p>&gt; <i>Holy F what a clusterfuck</i><p>Or you could use the unique identifier of the message (UID) instead of the sequence number:<p>&gt; <i>Messages in IMAP4rev1 are accessed by one of two numbers; the unique identifier or the message sequence number.</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc3501#section-2.3.1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc3501#section-2.3.1</a><p>&gt; <i>A 32-bit value assigned to each message, which when used with the unique identifier validity value (see below) forms a 64-bit value that MUST NOT refer to any other message in the mailbox or any subsequent mailbox with the same name forever.</i><p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc3501#section-2.3.1.1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfc-editor.org&#x2F;rfc&#x2F;rfc3501#section-2.3.1.1</a><p>The designers of the IMAP protocol aren&#x27;t as dumb as the above quotation would have you to believe and multi-client operations were thought of.</text></comment>	<story><title>Gluon, a high-performance IMAP library</title><url>https://proton.me/blog/gluon-imap-library</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>meghan_rain</author><text>&gt; IMAP clients typically refer to messages by their “sequence number”, the message’s position in a mailbox. The first message has the sequence number “1”, the second “2”, and so on. If a client wants to mark a message as “read”, it will send a command to the server such as “mark message 5 as read”. But what if another client deleted the fourth message in the mailbox? The sequence numbers of all messages after the deleted message will be shifted down by one; the client that sent the “mark message 5 as read” command now refers to a different message than it intended.<p>&gt; IMAP servers (which include applications such as the Proton Mail Bridge) need to be able to handle this situation. When one client moves messages into or out of a mailbox, the server needs to notify all other clients of the changes so that they can update their own view of the mailbox. And until the clients have received the update, the server needs to remember what each client thinks the mailbox looks like to correctly interpret the client’s commands.<p>Holy F what a clusterfuck</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ketralnis</author><text>Pretty much no client or server uses it that way though. The UID extension is more or less required these days.<p>But IMAP is pretty twisted in other ways too. IMAP is _not_ a request-response protocol like you might think from other protocols. It looks like it at first because you can say things like (from memory, not the real protocol):<p><pre><code> &gt; cmd1 LIST (here cmd1 is a request&#x2F;response identifier chosen by the client; the server sends responses prefixed by this identifier) &lt; cmd1 LIST RESPONSE... </code></pre> But you can also multiplex many simultaneous commands like<p><pre><code> &gt; cmd1 LIST folder1 &gt; cmd2 LIST folder2 &gt; cmd3 LIST folder3 &lt; cmd3 LIST folder3 RESPONSE... &lt; cmd1 LIST folder1 RESPONSE... &lt; cmd2 LIST folder2 RESPONSE... </code></pre> (note that they can come out of order)<p>But it gets weirder because you can receive _unsolicited_ responses. Sometimes you want that like<p><pre><code> &gt; cmd1 WATCH folder1 (starts a watch which may have responses but not immediately) &gt; (do other stuff) &lt; * NEW MESSAGE folder1 DATA... (some time later) &lt; * FLAGS CHANGE folder1 DATA... (much more time later) </code></pre> (the * means that you didn&#x27;t ask for this so it&#x27;s not prefixed by an ID that you gave) Here it&#x27;s sort of solicited or at least something you did on purpose, but there are other more complicated cases where you&#x27;ll receive data that you never asked for. Again from loose memory but an example might be<p><pre><code> &gt; cmd1 OPEN folder1 &gt; (do stuff with folder1) (much later) &lt; * CLOSING folder1 WAS DELETED </code></pre> That means that your client needs to always be listening for data on the socket and reading it out even if the client is sitting in the background, and that if you send a command you might receive responses to other previous or unsolicited commands before the response to the command you just sent.<p>It&#x27;s a cool way to do what it wants to do for GUI clients in particular because IMAP and GUIs have the same event-oriented model. But it makes implementing IMAP as a library a little more difficult because you need bidirectional hooks into the containing application. And you can&#x27;t easily just have a `if POP3 then... else if IMAP4 then...` abstraction layer without some work to make it happen. Heck even just having a function that returns the list of messages requires a background thread and a little bit of lying about what&#x27;s happening underneath. Leaving data on the socket unconsumed can get you disconnected by keepalive checks so the background task is required if you want to avoid that (which by observing mail.app it seems to just accept the disconnection and reconnect when it happens). Python has an imap library in the stdlib which &quot;avoids&quot; this by being so low-level that it sidesteps some of the issues by making you implement request&#x2F;response on top of it, and its model also makes perfect IDLE implementation difficult (maybe impossible? but I didn&#x27;t put enough time into it to prove this).<p>Because of the complication many GUI clients don&#x27;t actually support the liveness built in to the protocol. They just ignore any reponses they didn&#x27;t ask for, don&#x27;t use WATCH&#x2F;IDLE, and do the 15 minute polling cycle as if they were POP3. The protocol has all of the tools to have the liveness of Google Docs but I&#x27;m not aware of any GUIs that use it right.</text></comment>
19,399,266	19,398,061	1	2	19,397,572	train	<story><title>Face detection library with speed of 1500FPS</title><url>https://github.com/ShiqiYu/libfacedetection</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lettergram</author><text>The number is of frames (or faces?) per second is meaningless without context...<p>- Detect at least one face in a frame (count)<p>- Detect all the faces in a frame (count)<p>- Detect the location of the first face in a frame<p>- Detect the location of all the faces in a frame<p>- Is the resolution 64x64 or 1028x1028<p>- Is it only finding some of the faces (what’s the accuracy)<p>- 1500FPS on what hardware<p>Anyone have the paper, otherwise, why is this here?<p>Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary proof, I don’t even see a README.</text></comment>	<story><title>Face detection library with speed of 1500FPS</title><url>https://github.com/ShiqiYu/libfacedetection</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>comboy</author><text>From 128x96 image. Another way to look at it is that on RPi you can handle 5 frames per second with 640x480, which probably means one frame every few seconds with the full RPi camera resolution. Sounds like the same results as python with opencv?</text></comment>
21,987,053	21,986,753	1	3	21,985,532	train	<story><title>Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-51020564</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>55555</author><text>Misleading stats too.<p>I&#x27;ve seen countless articles mention that 500,000,000 animals have died. I was skeptical as to how you could even devise such a number reliably so I looked into the source of this statistic. First off, this number was devised by a single Uni professor. How? He multiplied the square-mile density of each species by the amount of territory that&#x27;s burned. Secondly, and he notes this in his estimate, it&#x27;s 500,000,000 &quot;killed _or affected_&quot;, not just killed. Third, for almost all species, there are no density figures, so he just picked the number 10 (lol, yes, seriously). Fourth, roughly 30% of those estimated animals are birds, of which other experts say 99% would survive because, ya know, they can fly away. Of the other 70%, many others would have just walked or slithered or run and gotten away from the fire.<p>Basically some guy just made up a number of animals that exist and everyone else just assumed that 100% of them were killed. Terrible &quot;science.&quot;<p>Many bigger news sites have braced themselves for pushback on this stat by adding &quot;and plants&quot; (&quot;500,000,000 animals and plants&quot;) so that their use of the statistic can&#x27;t be criticized later.</text></comment>	<story><title>Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-51020564</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thomasfoster96</author><text>As the BBC article suggests, generally the most accurate maps of where recent fires are and how much they’ve burnt are the state government fire or emergency services websites. Unfortunately they are state-by-state (which isn’t usually a problem, but does mean there’s not a good whole-of-Australia map), and some of them show all emergencies, not just fires.<p>ACT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;esa.act.gov.au" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;esa.act.gov.au</a><p>New South Wales: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfs.nsw.gov.au&#x2F;fire-information&#x2F;fires-near-me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rfs.nsw.gov.au&#x2F;fire-information&#x2F;fires-near-me</a><p>Northern Territory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pfes.nt.gov.au&#x2F;incidentmap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pfes.nt.gov.au&#x2F;incidentmap&#x2F;</a><p>Queensland: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au&#x2F;map&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au&#x2F;map&#x2F;Pages&#x2F;default.aspx</a><p>South Australia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cfs.sa.gov.au&#x2F;site&#x2F;home.jsp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cfs.sa.gov.au&#x2F;site&#x2F;home.jsp</a><p>Tasmania: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fire.tas.gov.au&#x2F;Show?pageId=colGMapBushfires" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fire.tas.gov.au&#x2F;Show?pageId=colGMapBushfires</a><p>Victoria: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emergency.vic.gov.au&#x2F;respond&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emergency.vic.gov.au&#x2F;respond&#x2F;</a><p>Western Australia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emergency.wa.gov.au" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.emergency.wa.gov.au</a></text></comment>
25,911,921	25,911,755	1	3	25,894,420	train	<story><title>PfSense Is Closed Source</title><url>https://github.com/rapi3/pfsense-is-closed-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csdreamer7</author><text>&gt; do not contribute to open source projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.<p>GPL software is still open source. The problem is when you contribute to a private company&#x27;s MIT or Apache licensed software.<p>I would change that to:<p>&#x27;do not contribute to permissively licensed projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.&#x27;</text></item><item><author>vinceguidry</author><text>I feel like by this point, in 2021, if you are a developer making contributions to &quot;open source,&quot; and you&#x27;re still getting surprised by these sorts of shenanigans, you only have yourself to blame.<p>This happens So. Freaking. Often. Companies take open source software private All The Damn Time. They hire the key devs away with just enough money. Then they release another version under a different license. And before you know it a previously open source project is now all but closed source.<p>It doesn&#x27;t even have to be with shenanigans this nefarious. Once you have the two or three devs all you have to do is release a value-added component and all but cripple the community one. <i>It&#x27;s roughly a million times cheaper than an acquisition.</i><p>If you want your hard-earned contributions to avoid this fate, <i>do not contribute to &quot;open source&quot; projects</i>. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that. Otherwise your work <i>will</i> end up being coopted by a profit-seeking enterprise.<p>Open source is the domain of large companies building fiefdoms. Just look at all those Apache projects and who contributes to them and who they&#x27;re for. You would have to pay me big bucks to contribute to that ecosystem.<p>GPL or bust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SAI_Peregrinus</author><text>Much of the internet makes fun of &quot;choosing beggar&quot; &quot;influencers&quot; who want to pay people with &quot;exposure&quot; instead of money. Permissive licenses are the reverse: they&#x27;re asking others to pay you only in &quot;exposure&quot; instead of money. If expect to gain any return (other than some CV padding and personal satisfaction) due to contributing to permissively licensed projects you&#x27;re a sucker. Permissively licensed software is charity work. It&#x27;s good, useful work in many cases, but it&#x27;s not going to make you money.<p>Give money and time to causes you support. Go contribute to the BSDs. Volunteer at your local animal shelter. But don&#x27;t think that you&#x27;re going to get rich from it. You&#x27;ll save some puppies and help some people (and maybe some megacorps) but that&#x27;s all you can expect.</text></comment>	<story><title>PfSense Is Closed Source</title><url>https://github.com/rapi3/pfsense-is-closed-source</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csdreamer7</author><text>&gt; do not contribute to open source projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.<p>GPL software is still open source. The problem is when you contribute to a private company&#x27;s MIT or Apache licensed software.<p>I would change that to:<p>&#x27;do not contribute to permissively licensed projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.&#x27;</text></item><item><author>vinceguidry</author><text>I feel like by this point, in 2021, if you are a developer making contributions to &quot;open source,&quot; and you&#x27;re still getting surprised by these sorts of shenanigans, you only have yourself to blame.<p>This happens So. Freaking. Often. Companies take open source software private All The Damn Time. They hire the key devs away with just enough money. Then they release another version under a different license. And before you know it a previously open source project is now all but closed source.<p>It doesn&#x27;t even have to be with shenanigans this nefarious. Once you have the two or three devs all you have to do is release a value-added component and all but cripple the community one. <i>It&#x27;s roughly a million times cheaper than an acquisition.</i><p>If you want your hard-earned contributions to avoid this fate, <i>do not contribute to &quot;open source&quot; projects</i>. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that. Otherwise your work <i>will</i> end up being coopted by a profit-seeking enterprise.<p>Open source is the domain of large companies building fiefdoms. Just look at all those Apache projects and who contributes to them and who they&#x27;re for. You would have to pay me big bucks to contribute to that ecosystem.<p>GPL or bust.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bosswipe</author><text>The tern Open Source was created to combat the GPL&#x27;s perceived corporate unfriendliness.</text></comment>
16,414,005	16,412,868	1	3	16,412,263	train	<story><title>Rust things I miss in C</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-things-i-miss-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chucksmash</author><text>Tangential, but if you&#x27;re looking for a project to do as you learn Rust, there&#x27;s an ongoing Operating Systems class being taught at Stanford in Rust right now[1]. The &quot;Ferris Wheel&quot; portion of assignment #1 was particularly useful for language knowledge; 25 source files which you must make compile&#x2F;not compile&#x2F;pass tests (along the lines of the Ruby&#x2F;Kotlin Koans), along with a test harness you can run locally.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.stanford.edu&#x2F;class&#x2F;cs140e&#x2F;syllabus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.stanford.edu&#x2F;class&#x2F;cs140e&#x2F;syllabus&#x2F;</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Rust things I miss in C</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/rust-things-i-miss-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adwhit</author><text>For more detail into the porting effort, I recommend taking a look at these slides, taken from a talk the author gave last year:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~federico&#x2F;blog&#x2F;docs&#x2F;fmq-porting-c-to-rust.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.gnome.org&#x2F;~federico&#x2F;blog&#x2F;docs&#x2F;fmq-porting-c-t...</a><p><i>&quot;Rust revived my interest in maintainership. It is very empowering to finally have a good language that I can use at the level of the stack where I work.&quot;</i></text></comment>
8,091,563	8,091,294	1	3	8,090,996	train	<story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fred_durst</author><text>I&#x27;ll bring up a point here only because I feel like the HN crowd is on the younger side. Its not until your late 20&#x27;s and really 30&#x27;s that you start to find out about and see people you&#x27;ve known in the past that were intelligent, productive people who&#x27;s lives have been completely destroyed due to their drug addictions. And yes, I&#x27;ve certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they were&#x2F;are addicted to marijuana. It definitely happens, don&#x27;t kid yourself.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the correct solution is to criminalize it, but please keep in mind that drugs change who you are. That is truly the unique thing about them compared to other addictions. And again, if you think heavy marijuana use doesn&#x27;t change a person, you don&#x27;t know any heavy marijuana users.<p>For example, banning alcohol and marijuana probably isn&#x27;t going to work, but selling bottles of cheap vodka at the grocery store 24&#x2F;7 is setting up a lot of people who are trying to get clean to fail.</text></item><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&#x27;t understand it&#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pessimizer</author><text>As an obvious counterpoint: I&#x27;m pushing 40, have known dozens of people who have smoked every day since their teens. I&#x27;ve noticed absolutely no difference between their success rates and the success rates of others. Many of them are highly successful and productive, and some even blame much of their success on their pot smoking. The people that I saw fall apart were the alcoholics, junkies, and cokeheads, going between jail, rehab, and prison - and often coffins.<p>I think that you yourself will be surprised when it&#x27;s more accepted by law - you&#x27;ll find that many people you know and respect smoke, and they keep it from you because they&#x27;re afraid of your judgment.<p>edit: There&#x27;s actually one difference that I&#x27;ve noticed between my pot smoking and non pot smoking friends - the smokers tend to be small business owners, contractors and freelancers more often than the non-smokers, who are more wage-laborers. I don&#x27;t have a theory about it, but I&#x27;ve noticed.</text></comment>	<story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fred_durst</author><text>I&#x27;ll bring up a point here only because I feel like the HN crowd is on the younger side. Its not until your late 20&#x27;s and really 30&#x27;s that you start to find out about and see people you&#x27;ve known in the past that were intelligent, productive people who&#x27;s lives have been completely destroyed due to their drug addictions. And yes, I&#x27;ve certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they were&#x2F;are addicted to marijuana. It definitely happens, don&#x27;t kid yourself.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the correct solution is to criminalize it, but please keep in mind that drugs change who you are. That is truly the unique thing about them compared to other addictions. And again, if you think heavy marijuana use doesn&#x27;t change a person, you don&#x27;t know any heavy marijuana users.<p>For example, banning alcohol and marijuana probably isn&#x27;t going to work, but selling bottles of cheap vodka at the grocery store 24&#x2F;7 is setting up a lot of people who are trying to get clean to fail.</text></item><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&#x27;t understand it&#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>indlebe</author><text>&gt;And yes, I&#x27;ve certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they are addicted to marijuana.<p>Is the evidence available strong enough to suggest that it&#x27;s the marijuana causing this? Marijuana is often used by those suffering from depression and anxiety as a form of self-medication.<p>In BC, Canada the province&#x27;s leading medical doctors have come out in strong support of legalization.</text></comment>
6,191,743	6,191,870	1	2	6,190,552	train	<story><title>The president is wrong: The NSA debate wouldn’t have happened without Snowden</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/09/the-president-is-wrong-the-nsa-debate-wouldnt-have-happened-without-snowden/?tid=rssfeed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brownbat</author><text>These political discussions on HN are awkward, and I wish they&#x27;d stop.<p>It&#x27;s not because political discussions aren&#x27;t important, they are, but because I don&#x27;t think this is a useful place to have them.<p>Counterarguments are self-censored, because any moderates calmly pointing out hyperboles tend to be downvoted by the more passionate participants in the discussion.<p>With the moderates bowing out, online voting systems quickly gel into two extremes, maybe a far right and a far left. That&#x27;s not sustainable though, one side quickly gets bigger and wins. The losing side now is best off self-censoring, because why get downvoted when you can just comment on other topics? You eventually get a political monoculture representing one extreme, with no voices of opposition or moderation.<p>No moderation system has yet promoted any useful political dialogue, because you can&#x27;t convince the 5% of people who are most emotional to rate argument quality independently of personal beliefs.<p>That&#x27;s why, in general, I&#x27;m opposed to the political pulpit of HN, even for positions I agree with. It&#x27;s a bad medium for good discussions on issues of significant controversy.<p> (What&#x27;s admittedly tricky is sometimes a political monoculture is the correct result. If someone made arguments on behalf of the KKK, we don&#x27;t need a full and fair debate providing a false equivalence between both sides. One side is just wrong. The problem is, with politics, everyone thinks they&#x27;re arguing against someone else who is just wrong, just like the KKK. There&#x27;s no objective way to determine whether or not both sides of a discussion hold merit worthy of a full debate, or whether we should just downvote one side out of the discussion before it leaves the gate.)</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>For me, Obama has become inaudible; I don&#x27;t care anymore about what he says.<p>I&#x27;m more interested in his actions; among these we find (by decreasing order of importance):<p>- use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians, &quot;suspected terrorists&quot; or their children (cf. the murder of 16 years old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki)<p>- the detention, and ruthless and aggressive prosecution of Bradley Manning<p>- force-feeding Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike, depriving them of even the right to end their own life<p>I&#x27;m not a US citizen, so what I think about Obama really doesn&#x27;t matter; but he must have set some kind of record in the amount of goodwill he was able to destroy during his time in office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sage_joch</author><text>Snowden unveiled a horrifying truth about our government: widespread surveillance has been combined with a class of officials who do not face consequences for breaking the law. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s hyperbolic to say that the Constitution is facing an existential threat. Normally I would be sympathetic to the view that politics should stay off HN. But this feels different. I would hope that people wouldn&#x27;t self-censor their counter-arguments, however. The possibility that things aren&#x27;t quite as bad as I suspect helps me sleep at night. And the truth is, there is reason for hope.</text></comment>	<story><title>The president is wrong: The NSA debate wouldn’t have happened without Snowden</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/09/the-president-is-wrong-the-nsa-debate-wouldnt-have-happened-without-snowden/?tid=rssfeed</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brownbat</author><text>These political discussions on HN are awkward, and I wish they&#x27;d stop.<p>It&#x27;s not because political discussions aren&#x27;t important, they are, but because I don&#x27;t think this is a useful place to have them.<p>Counterarguments are self-censored, because any moderates calmly pointing out hyperboles tend to be downvoted by the more passionate participants in the discussion.<p>With the moderates bowing out, online voting systems quickly gel into two extremes, maybe a far right and a far left. That&#x27;s not sustainable though, one side quickly gets bigger and wins. The losing side now is best off self-censoring, because why get downvoted when you can just comment on other topics? You eventually get a political monoculture representing one extreme, with no voices of opposition or moderation.<p>No moderation system has yet promoted any useful political dialogue, because you can&#x27;t convince the 5% of people who are most emotional to rate argument quality independently of personal beliefs.<p>That&#x27;s why, in general, I&#x27;m opposed to the political pulpit of HN, even for positions I agree with. It&#x27;s a bad medium for good discussions on issues of significant controversy.<p> (What&#x27;s admittedly tricky is sometimes a political monoculture is the correct result. If someone made arguments on behalf of the KKK, we don&#x27;t need a full and fair debate providing a false equivalence between both sides. One side is just wrong. The problem is, with politics, everyone thinks they&#x27;re arguing against someone else who is just wrong, just like the KKK. There&#x27;s no objective way to determine whether or not both sides of a discussion hold merit worthy of a full debate, or whether we should just downvote one side out of the discussion before it leaves the gate.)</text></item><item><author>bambax</author><text>For me, Obama has become inaudible; I don&#x27;t care anymore about what he says.<p>I&#x27;m more interested in his actions; among these we find (by decreasing order of importance):<p>- use of drones to indiscriminately kill civilians, &quot;suspected terrorists&quot; or their children (cf. the murder of 16 years old American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki)<p>- the detention, and ruthless and aggressive prosecution of Bradley Manning<p>- force-feeding Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike, depriving them of even the right to end their own life<p>I&#x27;m not a US citizen, so what I think about Obama really doesn&#x27;t matter; but he must have set some kind of record in the amount of goodwill he was able to destroy during his time in office.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pessimizer</author><text>Politics isn&#x27;t a linear continuum from right to left, and the position between two extremes isn&#x27;t necessarily more rational, even if the positions at the two extremes that you have chosen to represent right and left are both wrong.</text></comment>
22,633,981	22,630,986	1	3	22,626,346	train	<story><title>Linux maintains bugs: The real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated (2018)</title><url>https://blog.farhan.codes/2018/06/25/linux-maintains-bugs-the-real-reason-ifconfig-on-linux-is-deprecated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelmrose</author><text>It&#x27;s not that it doesn&#x27;t play fair. Sun published under a license that made inclusion in the kernel impossible thus the current developers are bound by the same decisions regardless of their opinion on the matter.<p>Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&#x27;s magical thinking.<p>It is entirely acceptable that they aren&#x27;t responsible for out of tree code working but it would be great if they didn&#x27;t deliberately sabotage other projects which is what they did here.<p>&gt;My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?<p>The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.</text></item><item><author>sheepdestroyer</author><text>ZFS is not user land. It&#x27;s kernel code but without being in the kernel. So it has to be built separately and may not even be compliant with GPL (still has to be tested in court AFAIK). Linux&#x27;s promise to not break userspace is just that, It can not be held responsible for code that should be in the kernel but does not play fair with the license.</text></item><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&#x27;s a great theory, but Linus picks and chooses when to decide it&#x27;s outrageous to make changes that break userland tools based on his personal preferences. They intentionally broke ZFS - then Linus follows up with a wildly inaccurate statement about why he thinks nobody should use ZFS.<p>It&#x27;s difficult to take him seriously when he picks and chooses when to enforce his supposed &quot;never break userland&quot; ethos.</text></item><item><author>fargle</author><text>This is <i>highly</i> biased opinion piece. I like BSD. I liked pre-Oracle Solaris. And I like Linux at lot too.<p>And it is factually inaccurate. Deprecation of ifconfig is a distro issue. &quot;Linux&quot; did not deprecate it. And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn&#x27;t handle multiple IP addresses. In fact it can, I still use it 50% of the time. Works fine for setting and displaying multiple addresses.<p>The Debian maintainers wanted to drop it, and the other distros all followed suit a couple years later. Good information and links here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;633087&#x2F;where-is-the-statement-of-deprecation-of-ifconfig-on-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;633087&#x2F;where-is-the-statem...</a><p>&quot;Linux maintains known bugs – and actively refuses to fix them. In fact, if you attempt to fix them, Linus will curse at you, as manifest by this email.&quot;<p>That is a bold statement but is not at all supported by the linked email. You&#x27;ll see Linus cursing at a bad patch that would break something in userland, not for &quot;maintaining a bug&quot;. He&#x27;s preventing at least two bugs (unnecessary change to behavior and ENOENT is indeed the wrong return value). I think I liked the old Linus better...<p>So it&#x27;s a shame. I&#x27;d love to read a series about BSD, but this is really just inaccurate propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inshadows</author><text>&gt; The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.<p>While Oracle keeping the code under incompatible license for more than 10 years is totally OK.</text></comment>	<story><title>Linux maintains bugs: The real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated (2018)</title><url>https://blog.farhan.codes/2018/06/25/linux-maintains-bugs-the-real-reason-ifconfig-on-linux-is-deprecated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelmrose</author><text>It&#x27;s not that it doesn&#x27;t play fair. Sun published under a license that made inclusion in the kernel impossible thus the current developers are bound by the same decisions regardless of their opinion on the matter.<p>Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&#x27;s magical thinking.<p>It is entirely acceptable that they aren&#x27;t responsible for out of tree code working but it would be great if they didn&#x27;t deliberately sabotage other projects which is what they did here.<p>&gt;My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?<p>The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.</text></item><item><author>sheepdestroyer</author><text>ZFS is not user land. It&#x27;s kernel code but without being in the kernel. So it has to be built separately and may not even be compliant with GPL (still has to be tested in court AFAIK). Linux&#x27;s promise to not break userspace is just that, It can not be held responsible for code that should be in the kernel but does not play fair with the license.</text></item><item><author>tw04</author><text>That&#x27;s a great theory, but Linus picks and chooses when to decide it&#x27;s outrageous to make changes that break userland tools based on his personal preferences. They intentionally broke ZFS - then Linus follows up with a wildly inaccurate statement about why he thinks nobody should use ZFS.<p>It&#x27;s difficult to take him seriously when he picks and chooses when to enforce his supposed &quot;never break userland&quot; ethos.</text></item><item><author>fargle</author><text>This is <i>highly</i> biased opinion piece. I like BSD. I liked pre-Oracle Solaris. And I like Linux at lot too.<p>And it is factually inaccurate. Deprecation of ifconfig is a distro issue. &quot;Linux&quot; did not deprecate it. And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn&#x27;t handle multiple IP addresses. In fact it can, I still use it 50% of the time. Works fine for setting and displaying multiple addresses.<p>The Debian maintainers wanted to drop it, and the other distros all followed suit a couple years later. Good information and links here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;633087&#x2F;where-is-the-statement-of-deprecation-of-ifconfig-on-linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;serverfault.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;633087&#x2F;where-is-the-statem...</a><p>&quot;Linux maintains known bugs – and actively refuses to fix them. In fact, if you attempt to fix them, Linus will curse at you, as manifest by this email.&quot;<p>That is a bold statement but is not at all supported by the linked email. You&#x27;ll see Linus cursing at a bad patch that would break something in userland, not for &quot;maintaining a bug&quot;. He&#x27;s preventing at least two bugs (unnecessary change to behavior and ENOENT is indeed the wrong return value). I think I liked the old Linus better...<p>So it&#x27;s a shame. I&#x27;d love to read a series about BSD, but this is really just inaccurate propaganda.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wtallis</author><text>&gt; Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It&#x27;s magical thinking.<p>It&#x27;s not magical thinking. A work can be a derivative of multiple other works. It&#x27;s completely plausible that adding Linux stuff to ZFS can make it a derivative work of Linux <i>in addition</i> to being a derivative work of whatever else it is already a derivative work of. There&#x27;s room for debate about how much Linux stuff (and of what nature) something like ZFS can incorporate before it becomes a derivative work according to copyright law and the GPLv2, but you cannot dismiss the idea outright.</text></comment>
37,274,559	37,272,980	1	2	37,272,611	train	<story><title>Fish – A friendly interactive shell</title><url>https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dinckelman</author><text>I&#x27;ve used fish for about 5 years now, and I don&#x27;t really wanna go back. Out of the box, without any addons at all, it does everything my old zsh setups did, with a package manager and plugins. The only change I&#x27;ve made to it was spacefish (now starship.rs)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LibertyBeta</author><text>Same story here. But I recently moved to Tide prompt. It&#x27;s pure fish and really amazingly fast.</text></comment>	<story><title>Fish – A friendly interactive shell</title><url>https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dinckelman</author><text>I&#x27;ve used fish for about 5 years now, and I don&#x27;t really wanna go back. Out of the box, without any addons at all, it does everything my old zsh setups did, with a package manager and plugins. The only change I&#x27;ve made to it was spacefish (now starship.rs)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stavros</author><text>You may also want to try z, and, err... I don&#x27;t have my config with me, but I have a plugin that notifies me if a long-running background command finishes, which is really handy.</text></comment>
9,173,413	9,173,179	1	2	9,172,373	train	<story><title>The new MacBook</title><url>https://www.apple.com/macbook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>USB-C as the &quot;one connector to rule them all&quot; is the big news. That&#x27;s the end of MagSafe and the exploding era of USB-C docking stations that work for multiple devices.<p>I think we&#x27;ll start to see an era of expandable computing coming up soon: USB-C is a perfect connector to push your data and state into a larger desktop experience. Why not carry around your laptop in tablet form when you are mobile? [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://grack.com/blog/2015/01/16/usb-31-ara-are-the-convergence-end-game/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grack.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;usb-31-ara-are-the-converg...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Finbarr</author><text>Seems like there are some new $79 adapters to split out the USB-C port into power, usb and av[1]&#x2F;vga[2].<p>[1] <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;product&#x2F;MJ1K2AM&#x2F;A&#x2F;usb-c-digital-av...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://store.apple.com/us/product/MJ1L2AM/A/usb-c-vga-multiport-adapter" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;product&#x2F;MJ1L2AM&#x2F;A&#x2F;usb-c-vga-multip...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>The new MacBook</title><url>https://www.apple.com/macbook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>USB-C as the &quot;one connector to rule them all&quot; is the big news. That&#x27;s the end of MagSafe and the exploding era of USB-C docking stations that work for multiple devices.<p>I think we&#x27;ll start to see an era of expandable computing coming up soon: USB-C is a perfect connector to push your data and state into a larger desktop experience. Why not carry around your laptop in tablet form when you are mobile? [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://grack.com/blog/2015/01/16/usb-31-ara-are-the-convergence-end-game/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grack.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;usb-31-ara-are-the-converg...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshvm</author><text>It also looks like (finally) the complete modularisation of the power supply. You should be able to have a localised wall cable, power brick and separate USB cable to the computer. In principle this should mean an end to ridiculously overpriced power supplies (currently north of £60). It&#x27;s even more galling given that they realised the cables were so poorly made that US customers have a special return program for fraying while the rest of the world doesn&#x27;t - hooray for litigation culture?<p>The new 29W brick currently costs £40 and the 2m USB-C cable £25. Typically it&#x27;s not the brick that fails, it&#x27;s the poor strain relief on the laptop cable. Being able to replace just the cable with (probably) an aftermarket product is a massive step up.</text></comment>
37,850,931	37,850,259	1	3	37,848,212	train	<story><title>Starlink Direct to Cell</title><url>https://direct.starlink.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sangnoir</author><text>&gt; Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps<p>You should try WhatsApp - there really are not many messenger choices when you have unreliable 2G(!) connectivity. For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.</text></item><item><author>LeifCarrotson</author><text>But low-bandwidth text is all I need. I guess I won&#x27;t be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice).<p>I don&#x27;t need to be able to stream Netflix when I&#x27;m in the backcountry, it&#x27;s just that my wife insists I need to be able to get a helicopter if I break my leg.<p>Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it&#x27;s trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...</text></item><item><author>blhack</author><text>This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you&#x27;re out in the country and can see the sky.<p>Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. This is very cool, though.<p>Here is when this was announced: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs</a><p>Pretty cool! Also kindof funny to see the TMobile CEO trying to hype people up and Elon sortof reigning it in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelnos</author><text>&gt; <i>For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.</i><p>WhatsApp was built with low-bandwidth&#x2F;high-latency&#x2F;high-packet-loss in mind well before Meta acquired them.<p>I suppose we can give them vague amounts of credit for not making those use cases worse since the acquisition.</text></comment>	<story><title>Starlink Direct to Cell</title><url>https://direct.starlink.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sangnoir</author><text>&gt; Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps<p>You should try WhatsApp - there really are not many messenger choices when you have unreliable 2G(!) connectivity. For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.</text></item><item><author>LeifCarrotson</author><text>But low-bandwidth text is all I need. I guess I won&#x27;t be renewing my subscription for my InReach Mini forever (although that form factor is pretty nice).<p>I don&#x27;t need to be able to stream Netflix when I&#x27;m in the backcountry, it&#x27;s just that my wife insists I need to be able to get a helicopter if I break my leg.<p>Now we need app developers to log off their fiber-served wifi when writing messenger apps, and log into a high-latency, low-bandwidth, high-packet-loss network instead so Messages will actually open instead of whatever it&#x27;s trying to do to upload my location history and download contact pictures...</text></item><item><author>blhack</author><text>This is for very low bandwidth text communications when you&#x27;re out in the country and can see the sky.<p>Stuff like this has existed from companies like garmin for some time. This is very cool, though.<p>Here is when this was announced: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qzli-Ww26Qs</a><p>Pretty cool! Also kindof funny to see the TMobile CEO trying to hype people up and Elon sortof reigning it in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ale42</author><text>Any idea how it compares to Signal? They should be essentially using the same protocol. I also used it with good results with slow connectivity, but never tried on bad 2G...</text></comment>
38,189,289	38,189,349	1	3	38,188,938	train	<story><title>Banning E2EE is stupid</title><url>https://github.com/davidchisnall/banning-e2ee-is-stupid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_time</author><text>Arguing in good faith against the lawmakers who are perfectly aware of the the gaping holes in their own arguments is too common in this field IMO.<p>If we want to protect the right to encryption and (pseudo)anonimity to the degree we have it now, we have to appeal to emotion. Just like how &quot;child advocacy&quot; groups tried to make you into a monster if you think blanket scanning of all data on our computing devices is a bit too far gone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>The challenge there is that &quot;protect the children&quot; and &quot;terrorists&quot; weigh more heavily on a moral level than &quot;protect my privacy&quot;.</text></comment>	<story><title>Banning E2EE is stupid</title><url>https://github.com/davidchisnall/banning-e2ee-is-stupid</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_time</author><text>Arguing in good faith against the lawmakers who are perfectly aware of the the gaping holes in their own arguments is too common in this field IMO.<p>If we want to protect the right to encryption and (pseudo)anonimity to the degree we have it now, we have to appeal to emotion. Just like how &quot;child advocacy&quot; groups tried to make you into a monster if you think blanket scanning of all data on our computing devices is a bit too far gone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>j45</author><text>Some argue you have to appeal to lawmakers to make a law that prevents breaking encryption. Perhaps the avoidance of political engagement by tech inclined folks is contributing to or at least allowing some of this to progress a lot eaiser.<p>A key part of this issue is learning about the frequency with which this type of legislation is brought up over and over again and how it might be new to some not not everyone.<p>Perhaps bureaucracies are counting on people relatively new to encryption erosion not having context that they are far from alone.</text></comment>
35,561,709	35,553,679	1	3	35,552,378	train	<story><title>Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now</title><url>https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-runtime-open-source-download/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptato</author><text>For Morrowind it didn&#x27;t just upgrade the rendering, it completely changed the aesthetic of the scene. Is that on purpose? At that point you can&#x27;t call the results better, only different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jandrese</author><text>It seems like the big change is that the light sources now actually emit light so the scene becomes a lot brighter. Maybe part of the process should be turning down global illumination? That might make dark corners even more dark however, and &quot;hidden&quot; clues that were supposed to be difficult to see may become outright invisible.</text></comment>	<story><title>Nvidia RTX Remix Runtime Open Source Available Now</title><url>https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/rtx-remix-runtime-open-source-download/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptato</author><text>For Morrowind it didn&#x27;t just upgrade the rendering, it completely changed the aesthetic of the scene. Is that on purpose? At that point you can&#x27;t call the results better, only different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mordae</author><text>It ended up looking similar to Oblivion. So I&#x27;d wager a guess that it was the intended aesthetic, only limited by the older technology.<p>The only authority here would be the original designers.</text></comment>
32,004,520	32,004,364	1	3	32,003,266	train	<story><title>Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?</title><text>Hi HN, I&#x27;ve just got out of a meeting and like almost every non-technical meeting I have next to no idea what the discussion was about.<p>I find a lot of non-technical meetings go something like this:<p>&quot;Hi guys, as you might be aware [Robert Smith] of the [communications department] has recently released his [quarterly review] of our ongoing [transformation strategy]. We&#x27;ve received a lot of positive feedback so far, but I wanted to give you all an opportunity to share your thoughts in this meeting. Would anyone like to go first?&quot;<p>Then about half of the team (normally the same people) will jump into the discussion and somehow seem to know what the hell is going on.<p>Meanwhile I&#x27;m there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?<p>Occasionally someone will ask what the [transformation strategy] is, but typically it won&#x27;t be answered in a way that helps me understand what&#x27;s going on because even more names and departments will be dropped and the strategy itself will be described in such a vague way that it means nothing.<p>I guess a concrete example that comes to mind was from a place I worked previously where they would talk about their &quot;omnichannel&quot; strategy a lot. Whenever someone asked what &quot;omnichannel&quot; meant it was described in a way that seemed to mean nothing, &quot;a multichannel sales strategy&quot;, etc. About 6 months into the job I finally figured out we were just using it to refer to some extra functionality that we were working on that would allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores. But this was never how it was referred to in corporate meetings.<p>Am I the only one who experiences this? I can&#x27;t work out if there&#x27;s a part of my brain that&#x27;s missing that prevents me from understanding what&#x27;s being discussed in these meetings or if this is a common experience. I&#x27;m very practically minded which probably doesn&#x27;t help, but I worry I&#x27;m not making enough of an effort to understand what&#x27;s happening in the business outside my personal bubble.<p>Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand what&#x27;s happening in corporate meetings?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>It&#x27;s kind of deliberate. there&#x27;s bullshitters, and bullshit-takers, and you are in the latter group. Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings. That said, quite a few managers are just high on their own supply and chasing a fashionable idea or doing a poor job of trying to explain whatever they were told in their last meeting. You don&#x27;t have to assume malice.<p>You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly &#x27;I love [the strategic thing] but I&#x27;ve struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?&#x27; which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don&#x27;t have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.<p>Keep notes on different people&#x2F;ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you&#x27;ll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what&#x27;s just the corporate cheer squad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>This is a painfully cynical worldview. If you find yourself in a company where management is this ineffective, get out. Or at least move to a different department where people are genuinely working together. Companies (or departments) wouldn&#x27;t actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.<p>&gt; Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings.<p>No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.<p>&gt; You can try using some BS of your own<p>Please don&#x27;t do this. Believe it or not, it&#x27;s actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.<p>Engineers who try to &quot;play politics&quot; usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people&#x27;s ability to see right through it. You may think you&#x27;re just playing the game, but I guarantee it&#x27;s coming off as patronizing to the genuine employees around you. Those genuine employees are the people you need to build trust with, and these political manipulation games will only do the opposite.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.<p>Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material. Doing anything resembling this will destroy your reputation at the company in short order. Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.</text></comment>	<story><title>Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?</title><text>Hi HN, I&#x27;ve just got out of a meeting and like almost every non-technical meeting I have next to no idea what the discussion was about.<p>I find a lot of non-technical meetings go something like this:<p>&quot;Hi guys, as you might be aware [Robert Smith] of the [communications department] has recently released his [quarterly review] of our ongoing [transformation strategy]. We&#x27;ve received a lot of positive feedback so far, but I wanted to give you all an opportunity to share your thoughts in this meeting. Would anyone like to go first?&quot;<p>Then about half of the team (normally the same people) will jump into the discussion and somehow seem to know what the hell is going on.<p>Meanwhile I&#x27;m there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?<p>Occasionally someone will ask what the [transformation strategy] is, but typically it won&#x27;t be answered in a way that helps me understand what&#x27;s going on because even more names and departments will be dropped and the strategy itself will be described in such a vague way that it means nothing.<p>I guess a concrete example that comes to mind was from a place I worked previously where they would talk about their &quot;omnichannel&quot; strategy a lot. Whenever someone asked what &quot;omnichannel&quot; meant it was described in a way that seemed to mean nothing, &quot;a multichannel sales strategy&quot;, etc. About 6 months into the job I finally figured out we were just using it to refer to some extra functionality that we were working on that would allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores. But this was never how it was referred to in corporate meetings.<p>Am I the only one who experiences this? I can&#x27;t work out if there&#x27;s a part of my brain that&#x27;s missing that prevents me from understanding what&#x27;s being discussed in these meetings or if this is a common experience. I&#x27;m very practically minded which probably doesn&#x27;t help, but I worry I&#x27;m not making enough of an effort to understand what&#x27;s happening in the business outside my personal bubble.<p>Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand what&#x27;s happening in corporate meetings?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>anigbrowl</author><text>It&#x27;s kind of deliberate. there&#x27;s bullshitters, and bullshit-takers, and you are in the latter group. Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings. That said, quite a few managers are just high on their own supply and chasing a fashionable idea or doing a poor job of trying to explain whatever they were told in their last meeting. You don&#x27;t have to assume malice.<p>You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly &#x27;I love [the strategic thing] but I&#x27;ve struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?&#x27; which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don&#x27;t have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.<p>Keep notes on different people&#x2F;ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you&#x27;ll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what&#x27;s just the corporate cheer squad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>734129837261</author><text>&quot;I really love your strategic approach, and I think we should seamlessly impact our intrepid cloud-ready technology with another meeting to go more in depth. I would like you, or John Smith from Marketing, to restore backward-compatible partnerships between our team leads. That way we can continually seize efficient human capital. That will really synergise with our stakeholders. What do you think?&quot;<p>And you can respond to whatever they say with a thinking nod while stroking your chin. And street-kids would say &quot;bet&quot;, you simply say &quot;hmhm, very agile.&quot;<p>You&#x27;ll be CEO in no-time.</text></comment>
30,860,811	30,860,885	1	2	30,858,202	train	<story><title>The Uselessness of Phenylephrine</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenylephrine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edmundsauto</author><text>What makes you say the FDA is actively adding poison to other drugs, are there first hand sources from them? This sounds like it could also be a case where they want to lower opiate consumption, and so adding some Tylenol increases pain relief without increasing opiate intake.<p>I am not sure that’s wise policy, but if you don’t think Tylenol is all that bad (again, I’m not sufficiently informed to say this, but the FDA obviously thinks it’s safe), then it’s not a bad overall policy.<p>It sounds like it could be either situation, I’m just looking for more evidence before making up my mind. (Yes, I am aware the US government poisoned people during prohibition in this exact manner, but I dispute that has any relevance as the decision makers and cultural awareness is very different now. We’ve come a long way since the 30s)</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>&gt; doesn&#x27;t get you high.<p>this is the big one. Phenyl-epinephrine doesn&#x27;t work at all, it&#x27;s consistently failed to outperform placebo, and the only reason it&#x27;s on the market is because the FDA doesn&#x27;t like pseudo-ephedrine (sudafed) because it can be used as a precursor for meth. Same reason they&#x27;ve required individual blister packs for sudafed (if only there was some illicit drug which gave you the focus and drive to perform repetitive tasks for hours on end...)<p>Same thing for imodium. The reason all of a sudden it&#x27;s in blister packs? People found a way to abuse it and the FDA is going to ruin it for the rest of us.<p>In the case of acetaminophen, the FDA actively uses it as a poison to &quot;discourage&quot; addicts from taking large doses of painkillers or cough syrup. The point is explicitly that if you take too much, you&#x27;ll burn out your liver, the FDA is actively inserting poison into the medicine to &quot;discourage abuse&quot;.<p>In all of these cases, the common factor is that it makes things much more annoying or even dangerous&#x2F;lethal for average people, while addicts are completely unaffected. No opiate addict in the world is going to get clean because of <i>individual pill blister packaging</i>. Meth addicts will just pop some pills and churn through the sudafed blister packaging, etc.<p>I am waiting for the other shoe to drop on imodium, now that the FDA is targeting it, it can&#x27;t be too long until it&#x27;s behind the counter or pulled entirely. And as someone who (TMI warning) suffers from what I&#x27;d term as moderately frequent IBS (never diagnosed but maybe I should) that&#x27;s really going to suck for me.<p>The FDA is simply an instrument of drug-war policy, they&#x27;re not oriented towards patient care and outcomes at all.</text></item><item><author>caymanjim</author><text>&gt; OTC medicines that by current standards would not be made OTC<p>Acetaminophen would almost certainly be in this category, if it could even get FDA approval at all. The effective dose is dangerously close to a toxic dose that causes liver damage, and not comfortably-far from the LD50. The only reasons acetaminophen is OTC is that it&#x27;s been informally grandfathered in, makes an absolute fortune for pharmaceutical companies, and doesn&#x27;t get you high.</text></item><item><author>dataangel</author><text>I&#x27;ve recently had to deal with the medical profession a lot more than in the past and I&#x27;m finding this sort of thing everywhere. OTC medicines that by current standards would not be made OTC, <i>surgeries</i> that are extremely common but have never had quality randomized trials, official sounding diagnoses that on inspection are actually defined as &quot;we have no idea&quot;, lack of consensus about how to treat some of the most common conditions in the human population (e.g. back pain), medical device approvals abusing the shortcut of being &quot;substantially similar&quot; to an existing device to evade regulatory scrutiny, the complete lack of enforcement of what goes in supplements... I feel like my entire understanding of the medical system in the US was a lie. We&#x27;re constantly touting that we have the most advanced technology but if you have a complex condition you are likely to fall prey to multiple kinds of grift.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samtho</author><text>Why can you go to the store and buy rubbing alcohol to drink? It’s primary ingredient is just ethanol. The FDA literally mandates that the ethanol is not able to be safely consumed and is cut with poison that is not easily separated from ethanol.<p>Similarly, cutting opioids with Tylenol is not actually intended to be a deterrent to someone who gets their hands on the pills rather it deters people involved with illicit drug manufacture and distribution from using it as a base to grind up and sell.<p>Tylenol is really not super safe, at least by todays approval standards. Most official sources, which unsurprisingly have a huge bias towards Tylenol’s safety, state that allergic reactions are very uncommon, but recent meta-analysis’ are beginning to uncover that mild to moderate allergic reactions to acetaminophen is more common that originally thought. It does not get reported because if you’re already feeling like crap when you take it, some mild itchiness, redness, and discomfort would not be out of the ordinary without the Tylenol. As mentioned before, the toxic dose is much too close to the effective dose, I’ve heard from medical professionals that doubling a single recommended dose on extra strength Tylenol is enough to cause long-term damage to your liver. On top of all that, the fact that it is a weak pain reliever at best would solidly put this as a drug that’s not super useful.<p>I have a very low opinion of how we go about drug policy in the US. I am on a very controlled medication due to a sleep disorder (that causes hypersomnia) which I cannot go off for safety reasons. I also cannot get it filled more than 24 in advance without complicated authorization procedures that must be completed in the correct order. It’s a goddamn mess and serves only as a punishment to law-abiding patients for needing this medication. It also does nothing to curb illicit use because synthesis of a more potent product is so trivial.<p>This is an example of poorly targeted legislation, which was put into place because it’s the only thing they could exert control over. It does not further the stated goals of drug enforcement because it’s so easy to manufacture this stuff and the resulting product is so easy to move, bad actors can simply avoid this system. While I’m spending 3 hours every month orchestrating the complicated dance of my prescription between my providers, the pharmacy, and my insurance, someone is making a batch of shake-and-bake meth in about 3 minutes.</text></comment>	<story><title>The Uselessness of Phenylephrine</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenylephrine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edmundsauto</author><text>What makes you say the FDA is actively adding poison to other drugs, are there first hand sources from them? This sounds like it could also be a case where they want to lower opiate consumption, and so adding some Tylenol increases pain relief without increasing opiate intake.<p>I am not sure that’s wise policy, but if you don’t think Tylenol is all that bad (again, I’m not sufficiently informed to say this, but the FDA obviously thinks it’s safe), then it’s not a bad overall policy.<p>It sounds like it could be either situation, I’m just looking for more evidence before making up my mind. (Yes, I am aware the US government poisoned people during prohibition in this exact manner, but I dispute that has any relevance as the decision makers and cultural awareness is very different now. We’ve come a long way since the 30s)</text></item><item><author>paulmd</author><text>&gt; doesn&#x27;t get you high.<p>this is the big one. Phenyl-epinephrine doesn&#x27;t work at all, it&#x27;s consistently failed to outperform placebo, and the only reason it&#x27;s on the market is because the FDA doesn&#x27;t like pseudo-ephedrine (sudafed) because it can be used as a precursor for meth. Same reason they&#x27;ve required individual blister packs for sudafed (if only there was some illicit drug which gave you the focus and drive to perform repetitive tasks for hours on end...)<p>Same thing for imodium. The reason all of a sudden it&#x27;s in blister packs? People found a way to abuse it and the FDA is going to ruin it for the rest of us.<p>In the case of acetaminophen, the FDA actively uses it as a poison to &quot;discourage&quot; addicts from taking large doses of painkillers or cough syrup. The point is explicitly that if you take too much, you&#x27;ll burn out your liver, the FDA is actively inserting poison into the medicine to &quot;discourage abuse&quot;.<p>In all of these cases, the common factor is that it makes things much more annoying or even dangerous&#x2F;lethal for average people, while addicts are completely unaffected. No opiate addict in the world is going to get clean because of <i>individual pill blister packaging</i>. Meth addicts will just pop some pills and churn through the sudafed blister packaging, etc.<p>I am waiting for the other shoe to drop on imodium, now that the FDA is targeting it, it can&#x27;t be too long until it&#x27;s behind the counter or pulled entirely. And as someone who (TMI warning) suffers from what I&#x27;d term as moderately frequent IBS (never diagnosed but maybe I should) that&#x27;s really going to suck for me.<p>The FDA is simply an instrument of drug-war policy, they&#x27;re not oriented towards patient care and outcomes at all.</text></item><item><author>caymanjim</author><text>&gt; OTC medicines that by current standards would not be made OTC<p>Acetaminophen would almost certainly be in this category, if it could even get FDA approval at all. The effective dose is dangerously close to a toxic dose that causes liver damage, and not comfortably-far from the LD50. The only reasons acetaminophen is OTC is that it&#x27;s been informally grandfathered in, makes an absolute fortune for pharmaceutical companies, and doesn&#x27;t get you high.</text></item><item><author>dataangel</author><text>I&#x27;ve recently had to deal with the medical profession a lot more than in the past and I&#x27;m finding this sort of thing everywhere. OTC medicines that by current standards would not be made OTC, <i>surgeries</i> that are extremely common but have never had quality randomized trials, official sounding diagnoses that on inspection are actually defined as &quot;we have no idea&quot;, lack of consensus about how to treat some of the most common conditions in the human population (e.g. back pain), medical device approvals abusing the shortcut of being &quot;substantially similar&quot; to an existing device to evade regulatory scrutiny, the complete lack of enforcement of what goes in supplements... I feel like my entire understanding of the medical system in the US was a lie. We&#x27;re constantly touting that we have the most advanced technology but if you have a complex condition you are likely to fall prey to multiple kinds of grift.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CamperBob2</author><text><i>What makes you say the FDA is actively adding poison to other drugs, are there first hand sources from them?</i><p>&quot;Not everyone thought it was a good idea to make alcohol deadly, when making it illegal hadn’t stopped drinkers, and New Jersey Senator Edward I. Edwards called it “legalized murder.” However, the Anti-Saloon League persisted, arguing that legal alcohol had killed many more in its day than denatured alcohol would kill during the transition to a teetotaling world. “The Government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable when the Constitution prohibits it,” said advocate Wayne B. Wheeler. “The person who drinks this industrial alcohol is a deliberate suicide… To root out a bad habit costs many lives and long years of effort…”&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;3665643&#x2F;deadly-drinking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;3665643&#x2F;deadly-drinking&#x2F;</a></text></comment>
30,859,361	30,859,682	1	2	30,858,202	train	<story><title>The Uselessness of Phenylephrine</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenylephrine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammock</author><text>Many Americans have difficulty obtaining ID, because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining government-issued photo ID card.<p>Underlying documents required to obtain ID cost money, a significant expense for lower-income Americans. The combined cost of document fees, travel expenses and waiting time are estimated to range from $75 to $175.<p>The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office.</text></item><item><author>ericbarrett</author><text>Why not get a non-motorist ID card? Every US state has these; here&#x27;s Washington&#x27;s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.wa.gov&#x2F;driverslicense&#x2F;gettingidcard.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.wa.gov&#x2F;driverslicense&#x2F;gettingidcard.html</a></text></item><item><author>techsupporter</author><text>&gt; With explanation in abstract that its easier to buy meth than pseudoephedrine.<p>People may laugh at this, as they should since it is an absurd situation, but this isn&#x27;t entirely wrong.<p>Neither my wife or I drive and during the pandemic she gave up her license after getting an appointment at the DOL was difficult. Both of us carry US passport cards as our ID.<p>This has resulted in several situations where we&#x27;ve been turned down for purchasing restricted items like alcohol or drugs containing pseudoephedrine, particularly the latter, because a passport card can&#x27;t be scanned by the usual point of sale systems. There are a couple of places in Seattle that are happy to accept a passport card but even at them it&#x27;s sometimes been dependent on who is working the counter that day.</text></item><item><author>p_l</author><text>The lack of availability of proper pseudoephedrine in USA led to situation where there are papers describing how to turn <i>methamphetamine</i> into pseudoephedrine, not the other way around.<p>With explanation in abstract that its easier to buy meth than pseudoephedrine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ericbarrett</author><text>That&#x27;s true and all, but the person I was replying to already has a federal passport, which suffices for all levels of state ID.</text></comment>	<story><title>The Uselessness of Phenylephrine</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenylephrine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hammock</author><text>Many Americans have difficulty obtaining ID, because they cannot afford or cannot obtain the underlying documents that are a prerequisite to obtaining government-issued photo ID card.<p>Underlying documents required to obtain ID cost money, a significant expense for lower-income Americans. The combined cost of document fees, travel expenses and waiting time are estimated to range from $75 to $175.<p>The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office.</text></item><item><author>ericbarrett</author><text>Why not get a non-motorist ID card? Every US state has these; here&#x27;s Washington&#x27;s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.wa.gov&#x2F;driverslicense&#x2F;gettingidcard.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dol.wa.gov&#x2F;driverslicense&#x2F;gettingidcard.html</a></text></item><item><author>techsupporter</author><text>&gt; With explanation in abstract that its easier to buy meth than pseudoephedrine.<p>People may laugh at this, as they should since it is an absurd situation, but this isn&#x27;t entirely wrong.<p>Neither my wife or I drive and during the pandemic she gave up her license after getting an appointment at the DOL was difficult. Both of us carry US passport cards as our ID.<p>This has resulted in several situations where we&#x27;ve been turned down for purchasing restricted items like alcohol or drugs containing pseudoephedrine, particularly the latter, because a passport card can&#x27;t be scanned by the usual point of sale systems. There are a couple of places in Seattle that are happy to accept a passport card but even at them it&#x27;s sometimes been dependent on who is working the counter that day.</text></item><item><author>p_l</author><text>The lack of availability of proper pseudoephedrine in USA led to situation where there are papers describing how to turn <i>methamphetamine</i> into pseudoephedrine, not the other way around.<p>With explanation in abstract that its easier to buy meth than pseudoephedrine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>Do you have any specific citations on that?<p>I find it a credible claim. There was a story a few years back which made the rounds that ... turned out to be a case of fraud.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.miamiherald.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;national&#x2F;article186044173.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.miamiherald.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;nation-world&#x2F;national&#x2F;articl...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;mark-damico-johnny-bobbitt-kate-mcclure-gofundme-guilty-20211122.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inquirer.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;mark-damico-johnny-bobbitt-kat...</a><p>That said, given frictions of obtaining ID and necessity of having same, I could well believe that this is an issue.</text></comment>
16,771,985	16,771,376	1	3	16,768,953	train	<story><title>Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fermienrico</author><text>Old instructional videos so much more informative than today’s. They’re so simple. Clear narration, simple animations, music is appropriate and minimal. They don’t overload our senses in the way modern videography does. It seems to me that everything today is optimized for the highest cognitive load - sort of similar to the “loudness war” in music, but for videos. Popular videos on YT are optimized for clicks and likes and subscribes.<p>For example, compare Mythbusters first season vs the last. Another example is “The secret life of Machines”; amazing BBC series on how things work.<p>I love old videography so much. I could watch highly technical instructional videos like this all day without fatigue. Such a great pleasure. Thank for sharing this!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rangibaby</author><text>Old technical writing is the same. Check out this camera repair manual from the 80s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;36tlkpnrsbmszar&#x2F;nikon_fe-fe2.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;36tlkpnrsbmszar&#x2F;nikon_fe-fe2.pdf?d...</a><p>Clear, easy to understand. A patient person without any prior knowledge of cameras or tools could follow the instructions in here and completely disassemble and reassemble the camera as well as troubleshooting any problems with it.<p>I think the reason is A) there was no internet! These books and TV shows were as good as it got. No googling if you have any questions.<p>B) They had to appeal to a lot of people. Now the audience is bigger and everything is more niche. General TV has deteriorated to news entertainment, sports, and reality shows, because that is all anyone who watches TV now is interested in.<p>I was shocked at how good this segment from the &quot;glory days&quot; of TV was: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;eDw5Y8qSmBk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;eDw5Y8qSmBk</a><p>It&#x27;s interesting and well researched. They spent plenty of money doing locations etc. Network TV just isn&#x27;t this good anymore.</text></comment>	<story><title>Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fermienrico</author><text>Old instructional videos so much more informative than today’s. They’re so simple. Clear narration, simple animations, music is appropriate and minimal. They don’t overload our senses in the way modern videography does. It seems to me that everything today is optimized for the highest cognitive load - sort of similar to the “loudness war” in music, but for videos. Popular videos on YT are optimized for clicks and likes and subscribes.<p>For example, compare Mythbusters first season vs the last. Another example is “The secret life of Machines”; amazing BBC series on how things work.<p>I love old videography so much. I could watch highly technical instructional videos like this all day without fatigue. Such a great pleasure. Thank for sharing this!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Stratoscope</author><text>If you like old instructional videos and documentaries, the Internet Archive has a bunch of them, particularly in the Prelinger Archives.<p>Here are a few favorites...<p>Private Life of a Cat (silent): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;PrivateL1947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;PrivateL1947</a><p>Back of the Mike: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Backofth1938" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Backofth1938</a><p>How a Watch Works: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;HowaWatc1949" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;HowaWatc1949</a><p>Using the Bank: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Usingthe1947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Usingthe1947</a></text></comment>
40,197,573	40,196,751	1	2	40,195,480	train	<story><title>Open-source alternative to Heroku, Vercel, and Netlify</title><url>https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>Would be great to see a comparison to some better known alternatives like<p>- Dokku [0]<p>- CapRover [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caprover.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caprover.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woudsma</author><text>It seems similar to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swarmlet.dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swarmlet.dev</a> as well (I’m the author). I’ve since abandoned the project for different reasons. Currently I’m using Dokku, and have been using it for ~8 years. It’s a lovely project and pretty mature. I would recommend Dokku to anyone who wants to do (cheap) self-hosting!</text></comment>	<story><title>Open-source alternative to Heroku, Vercel, and Netlify</title><url>https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sixhobbits</author><text>Would be great to see a comparison to some better known alternatives like<p>- Dokku [0]<p>- CapRover [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dokku.com&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caprover.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caprover.com&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcarmo</author><text>I should add one to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piku.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piku.github.io</a> (spoiler - this doesn&#x27;t use Docker at all)</text></comment>
20,632,823	20,632,848	1	2	20,630,319	train	<story><title>Arend: Theorem Prover Based on Homotopy Type Theory by JetBrains</title><url>https://arend-lang.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jey</author><text>Wow, JetBrains has a whole HoTT and Dependent Types Research Group: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.jetbrains.org&#x2F;groups&#x2F;group-for-dependent-types-and-hott" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.jetbrains.org&#x2F;groups&#x2F;group-for-dependent-ty...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Arend: Theorem Prover Based on Homotopy Type Theory by JetBrains</title><url>https://arend-lang.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ocfnash</author><text>Wow, I am delighted to see this!<p>However I cannot find a precise reference for the chosen type theory.<p>E.g., is univalence a theorem in their type theory? I presume it is given that they say their language has &quot;syntax similar to cubical type theory&quot; but I could not say for sure.<p>What I&#x27;m looking for is a reference containing the actual typing rules, like this one for Coq: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coq.inria.fr&#x2F;refman&#x2F;language&#x2F;cic.html#typing-rules" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coq.inria.fr&#x2F;refman&#x2F;language&#x2F;cic.html#typing-rules</a><p>rather than the syntax of the language used for building these terms.</text></comment>
28,538,598	28,538,540	1	3	28,537,707	train	<story><title>Apple blocked the FlickType Watch keyboard then announced a clone of it</title><url>https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-watch-keyboard-then-announced-a-clone-of-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwthere</author><text>Meh. The problem is FlickType requires network access during use. The App store licensing is ok with keyboards, it&#x27;s not ok with keyboards that get network access. This, Apple perceives as a major privacy issue-- one for the possibility of keylogging, but also for the broader possibility of the always-on logging that the weather apps are infamous for.<p>edit: Sorry, I didn&#x27;t include the source, the Developer License Agreement. Here&#x27;s a link (relevant section on page 23) -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-developer-program&#x2F;Apple-Developer-Program-License-Agreement-20210607-English.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-de...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jclardy</author><text>You’ll be surprised to know that Apple is quite fine with keyboards using network access. That is literally why the “Full Access” switch exists. Without it, the keyboard is fully sandboxed. It can receive input from the container app, but nothing can get out. It is surprisingly a user choice, something Apple will rarely give up on iOS.<p>The rejection was only because the app existed on the Apple Watch, and it was only rejected after the reviewer knew the new Apple watch would include the same feature (Note, you can’t use this feature on &lt; 2021 apple watches, you have to pay to play.)</text></comment>	<story><title>Apple blocked the FlickType Watch keyboard then announced a clone of it</title><url>https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-watch-keyboard-then-announced-a-clone-of-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwthere</author><text>Meh. The problem is FlickType requires network access during use. The App store licensing is ok with keyboards, it&#x27;s not ok with keyboards that get network access. This, Apple perceives as a major privacy issue-- one for the possibility of keylogging, but also for the broader possibility of the always-on logging that the weather apps are infamous for.<p>edit: Sorry, I didn&#x27;t include the source, the Developer License Agreement. Here&#x27;s a link (relevant section on page 23) -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-developer-program&#x2F;Apple-Developer-Program-License-Agreement-20210607-English.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-de...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danachow</author><text>You’re kidding right? There is no such restriction on keyboards. How do you think the Bitmoji keyboard works?</text></comment>
10,044,868	10,044,584	1	3	10,044,047	train	<story><title>Why Not Insider Trade on Every Company?</title><url>http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-11/why-not-insider-trade-on-every-company-</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It&#x27;s actually still possible to perform a specific type of legal insider trading.<p>Example: you are an executive at E Corp and the company will announce its acquisition in two months. You had previously set up planned trades to sell x number of shares each month before then. Because the acquisition is at a premium on the current price, you will make much less money if you go forward with your trades before the announcement. So, what do you do? You cancel the trades.<p>Was this insider trading according to the SEC? Surprisingly, no! Even though you&#x27;re profiting from insider information, the SEC rules are such that for insider trading to occur, you actually need a trade.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loophole:_canceling_plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...</a><p>Martha Stewart did exactly this before her company was acquired earlier this year:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZikHCpP.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZikHCpP.jpg</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text>What was that about how most problems in Computer Science can be solved with an additional level of indirection? Maybe the same is true for Insider Trading? Instead of buying options on the stock of a company, use options on the stock of another company that owns options on the 1st company. Perhaps derivatives have gotten so complicated in recent years as a means of hiding insider trading? (Perhaps there are quants with Comp Sci degrees figuring out ways to make detection of insider trades an NP-Complete problem?)</text></comment>	<story><title>Why Not Insider Trade on Every Company?</title><url>http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-11/why-not-insider-trade-on-every-company-</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It&#x27;s actually still possible to perform a specific type of legal insider trading.<p>Example: you are an executive at E Corp and the company will announce its acquisition in two months. You had previously set up planned trades to sell x number of shares each month before then. Because the acquisition is at a premium on the current price, you will make much less money if you go forward with your trades before the announcement. So, what do you do? You cancel the trades.<p>Was this insider trading according to the SEC? Surprisingly, no! Even though you&#x27;re profiting from insider information, the SEC rules are such that for insider trading to occur, you actually need a trade.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loophole:_canceling_plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...</a><p>Martha Stewart did exactly this before her company was acquired earlier this year:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZikHCpP.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;ZikHCpP.jpg</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsjoerg</author><text>That&#x27;s not insider trading! That&#x27;s insider cancelling!<p><i>totally</i> different</text></comment>
35,246,647	35,242,207	1	3	35,241,212	train	<story><title>Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI</title><url>https://virtualface.app</url><text>After playing with AI Avatars (like many of us I guess around here), I started to wonder if we could instead bring real value to people by producing affordable professional head-shots using a combination of Dreambooth and ControlNet.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s only the beginning and there are still many imperfections, but the foundational tech behind this (Dreambooth and ControlNet) are only respectively 6 months and 1.5 month old, and already delivers pretty amazing results.<p>I came up with this little service &quot;Virtual Face&quot; and I&#x27;m looking for feedback if some of you are willing to try it (you can use the HUNTER50 coupon to get 50% off, can&#x27;t make it free to try yet since the running costs are still non-negligible).<p>Cheers, Pierre</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I usually hate dumping on Show HNs, but given the societal impacts of this, I feel the need to be blunt. Call me old fashioned, call me a luddite, whatever, but I hate this.<p>So now <i>even our profile pictures</i> aren&#x27;t really us, but just some pseudo-reality version of who we think we are. And I know I know, people will argue that makeup&#x2F;airbrushing&#x2F;photoshop&#x2F;facetune has been going on forever, but at some point I feel like we cross the line where it&#x27;s no longer &quot;reality with some touchups&quot;, but instead it&#x27;s &quot;complete fantasy made to mimic reality&quot;.<p>I just feel like AI is shooting us head first down this state where reality and fantasy are evermore difficult to differentiate, and I don&#x27;t like the implications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>barrell</author><text>I get the concern here, and emotionally I share it. Half of my contacts now have very strange AI avatars as their profile pictures and I still recoil a little every time I see them (the avatars). I think it&#x27;s a slippery slope and I don&#x27;t like where it seems to be going.<p>However, rationally, it&#x27;s not like humanity has had picture perfect representations of themselves for very long. For most of our evolution, we relied on paintings &amp; sculptures, which it was up to the artist (or the commissioner) to decide on how &#x27;real&#x27; they were, and they were almost always &quot;complete fantasy made to mimic reality&quot;.<p>From this lens, the use of unedited real photos of you was the strange period of time, not this AI age we seem to be headed into.<p>Maybe that helps put your mind a little at ease, maybe it just confuses you more (definitely the latter for me)</text></comment>	<story><title>Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI</title><url>https://virtualface.app</url><text>After playing with AI Avatars (like many of us I guess around here), I started to wonder if we could instead bring real value to people by producing affordable professional head-shots using a combination of Dreambooth and ControlNet.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s only the beginning and there are still many imperfections, but the foundational tech behind this (Dreambooth and ControlNet) are only respectively 6 months and 1.5 month old, and already delivers pretty amazing results.<p>I came up with this little service &quot;Virtual Face&quot; and I&#x27;m looking for feedback if some of you are willing to try it (you can use the HUNTER50 coupon to get 50% off, can&#x27;t make it free to try yet since the running costs are still non-negligible).<p>Cheers, Pierre</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I usually hate dumping on Show HNs, but given the societal impacts of this, I feel the need to be blunt. Call me old fashioned, call me a luddite, whatever, but I hate this.<p>So now <i>even our profile pictures</i> aren&#x27;t really us, but just some pseudo-reality version of who we think we are. And I know I know, people will argue that makeup&#x2F;airbrushing&#x2F;photoshop&#x2F;facetune has been going on forever, but at some point I feel like we cross the line where it&#x27;s no longer &quot;reality with some touchups&quot;, but instead it&#x27;s &quot;complete fantasy made to mimic reality&quot;.<p>I just feel like AI is shooting us head first down this state where reality and fantasy are evermore difficult to differentiate, and I don&#x27;t like the implications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peteralaoui</author><text>It&#x27;s not the first time that I hear that, thanks for your radical candor :) and to be frank too, I was also sharing that feeling of a fantasy made to mimic reality when I started this project.<p>It all started when we started to argue with my family members on which avatars looked more like me. It made me realize that we were much more sensitive than I thought about our self-image. Me and my partner would pick different pictures in a set of 10 samples ^^ as if we had two slightly different perceptions of reality.<p>Now, I changed my mind slightly and tend to see these models as an another type of compression of information. Almost like a new censor of data.</text></comment>
11,723,313	11,723,140	1	2	11,722,573	train	<story><title>The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>two2two</author><text>TSA is the number one reason why I don&#x27;t fly and drive instead. From my POV most of the world&#x27;s industries have progressed positively, but not air travel. I took a train a couple of years ago and it was a beautiful example of old merging with new. Walking through an antique of a train station, iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant.<p>At that point I realized that air travel is by far the worst traveling experience money can pay for.<p>If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as &quot;fly at your own risk&quot; &quot;no lifeguard on duty&quot;, aka no TSA b.s., I&#x27;d happily take the &quot;at your own risk&quot; option rather than the TSA controlled situation we&#x27;re subjected to currently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cloudjacker</author><text>I arrive at the airport in a Lyft.<p>I walk up to the security checkpoint checkpoint, where I show the agent my phone. They see my boarding pass with the green checkmark and send me to the empty TSA Pre line.<p>I walk through the metal detector with no adjustments to my attire.<p>I am at the gate in 5 minutes.<p>I like how trains basically let you show up last minute, and a 3 hour train ride actually means a 3 hour train ride, compared to airport, checkpoints and boarding time, possibly waiting on the runway, and air time.<p>But you really just need to upgrade your travel accommodations to make your airport experience more seamless.</text></comment>	<story><title>The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them</title><url>http://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>two2two</author><text>TSA is the number one reason why I don&#x27;t fly and drive instead. From my POV most of the world&#x27;s industries have progressed positively, but not air travel. I took a train a couple of years ago and it was a beautiful example of old merging with new. Walking through an antique of a train station, iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant.<p>At that point I realized that air travel is by far the worst traveling experience money can pay for.<p>If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as &quot;fly at your own risk&quot; &quot;no lifeguard on duty&quot;, aka no TSA b.s., I&#x27;d happily take the &quot;at your own risk&quot; option rather than the TSA controlled situation we&#x27;re subjected to currently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CheckHook</author><text>&gt; iPhone in hand, with my digital ticket ready to board; so easy and pleasant.<p>Most airlines provide the same digital boarding passes, I often travel with my pass added to Apple Wallet.<p>&gt; If an alternative airport wanted to do things a little different, such as &quot;fly at your own risk&quot; &quot;no lifeguard on duty&quot;, aka no TSA b.s., I&#x27;d happily take the &quot;at your own risk&quot; option rather than the TSA controlled situation we&#x27;re subjected to currently.<p>The problem here is that it&#x27;s not just &quot;your own risk&quot; if that plane is directed at a populated area.</text></comment>
14,248,835	14,246,373	1	3	14,246,120	train	<story><title>Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO</title><url>https://blog.docker.com/2017/05/introducing-docker-new-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyingq</author><text>My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and &quot;enterprisify&quot; docker into something very different. That&#x27;s probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ralfn</author><text>&gt;&quot;enterprisify&quot; docker into something very different. That&#x27;s probably not fair though.<p>But that&#x27;s actually the industry containers are good for. Enterprise. Predictability trumps costs. The flaws of docker may over time get fixed. It&#x27;s the small companies and startups that are making a fool of themselves by pretending they extract any kind of value out of docker.<p>Imagine a large 100+ man software project that spans two years and involves four different organisations collaborating. There are at least 100+ non-technical &#x27;knowledge workers&#x27; interacting with this process. The people have the intent of &#x27;not being responsible for anything&#x27;, but establishing their position&#x2F;role so their cost&#x2F;budget is validated. You know, the typical large-scale Oracle&#x2F;Cap-Gemini&#x2F;IBM clusterfuck of incompetence.<p>But that&#x27;s the secret! They aren&#x27;t incompetent at all (as organisations). They sell something no-one else sells. They sell predictability.<p>Because for all what it&#x27;s worth: they don&#x27;t make huge architectural fuck ups. They make their deadline. And they are able to deliver something, even with this many stakeholders pissing all over the project from any direction.<p>For them, docker is brilliant. It standardizes something. It doesn&#x27;t do it very well, but that doesn&#x27;t matter. They aren&#x27;t in a low-margin world. &quot;Docker isn&#x27;t really secure, you really should run every docker image in a separate VM&quot;. Sure. These sort of people are paying 500-1000 per instance anyway. No one cares. Coordinating devops with this many stakeholders, now _thats_ expensive.<p>The quality of the actual technology (much like on the web itself) is initially irrelevant. The value is in the fact there&#x27;s a contract. A standard. Docker is a bad implementation of reasonable idea. The question isn&#x27;t if it&#x27;s a good technical choice. No, it&#x27;s not. But it&#x27;s organisational and economically more compatible with the rest of world.<p>And you know what? At least those enterprise idiots will run JVM instances on their docker images, so if they need more than three servers it&#x27;s not because they are incompetent (like every startup wasting their time on cloud orchestration stuff). At least when they pay the price in complexity for building something scalable it&#x27;s because they actually need something scalable.</text></comment>	<story><title>Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO</title><url>https://blog.docker.com/2017/05/introducing-docker-new-ceo/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyingq</author><text>My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and &quot;enterprisify&quot; docker into something very different. That&#x27;s probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vertex-four</author><text>Docker has been targeting enterprise use cases for a good while now. Frankly, aside from in development, it&#x27;s not terribly useful until you get to a certain scale which requires a certain development model (complete separation of application and storage, different teams managing different components, etc).</text></comment>
27,326,513	27,326,164	1	2	27,326,243	train	<story><title>ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login</title><url>https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient/issues/242</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IAmGraydon</author><text>Try to register a new Protonmail email address normally and you can do so without supplying too much information. Try to do so through Tor, and you will not be able to proceed without “verifying” the account with a phone number. This pattern (they want either your IP or a phone number) tells me they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities and shouldn’t be trusted with anything private. I would even go so far as to suspect Protonmail of being a honeypot. Oh…I’ll just leave this here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nexuist</author><text>&gt; they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities<p>I don&#x27;t think it means they&#x27;re interested in tying accounts to a <i>specific</i> identity, just <i>an</i> identity, to prevent bots or bad actors from signing up for thousands of accounts. This is a necessary reality of being an email provider. If you do not police your outbound mail then other mail servers will block or auto-junk your users&#x27; messages.<p>There is no way to preserve privacy while also not becoming a festering ground for Viagra spam mail.</text></comment>	<story><title>ProtonMail includes Google Recaptcha for login</title><url>https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient/issues/242</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IAmGraydon</author><text>Try to register a new Protonmail email address normally and you can do so without supplying too much information. Try to do so through Tor, and you will not be able to proceed without “verifying” the account with a phone number. This pattern (they want either your IP or a phone number) tells me they’re likely interested in tying accounts to real identities and shouldn’t be trusted with anything private. I would even go so far as to suspect Protonmail of being a honeypot. Oh…I’ll just leave this here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy-watchdog.io&#x2F;truth-about-protonmail&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gloriousternary</author><text>I&#x27;m not saying you&#x27;re wrong, but that particular source is well known for making big claims with insufficient evidence, and it reads like it was written by a conspiracy theorist. Many of the author&#x27;s claims have already been (imo, pretty solidly) refuted by Proton.<p>Disclaimer: using protonmail until my current subscription runs out, then selfhosting</text></comment>
32,074,507	32,074,427	1	2	32,070,661	train	<story><title>Nikon to stop making SLR cameras and focus on mirrorless models?</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Nikon-to-stop-making-SLR-cameras-and-focus-on-mirrorless-models</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vparikh</author><text>The mirror box &#x2F; pentaprism combo is not required. DSLR cameras were built as the technology did not exist to eliminate them. Now that processor, LCD and AF systems have caught up, the SLR is redundant.<p>The primary advantage of the SLR was that you can see the image as the lens is framing the image - a huge improvement over rangefinder systems (such as the Leica M). This allowed the use of super telephoto, wide angle, macro and tilt shift lenses to be much easer. The primary downside of the SLR was that it did not show you how the exposure was going to be recored on the film or digital sensor.<p>The mirrorless system eliminates that and now lets you see precisely how the image is framed as well as how it is exposed in real time without taking the image as the LCD and viewfinder are constantly reading from sensor. In addition you gain the possibility to handhold at much lower shutter speeds due to the mirror slap being removed and the on board sensor shift stabilization systems. DSLRs couldn&#x27;t do this and relied on lens based solutions (Olympus &amp; Pentax did have sensor shift stabilization, but it was niche and the market leaders Nikon &amp; Canon relied on lens based stabilization). Another advantage is that with the removal of the mirror box, you can have short flange distances allowing new lens designs and lens interoperability. Nikon has the shortest flange distance in the industry and has support for just about every other lens mount out their (though through third party adapters - some with full AF capability also).<p>So the DSLR, except for maybe a few niche cases is old technology that is superseded in every single way. The interesting thing will be to see how the new mirrorless cameras effect the UI and ergonomics of the camera systems. So far, the pro level systems (Z9, R5, etc..) are all still for the most part using the DSLR form factor. Especially Nikon. I actually like this, but lets see what the future holds.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vngzs</author><text>I spent some time doing press photography for concerts and couldn&#x27;t imagine shooting mirrorless during a show. High-action environments demand super low-latency, high-resolution viewfinders. No mirrorless I&#x27;ve handled so far can keep up with an optical SLR. And the crummy digital viewfinders make low-light manual focus into a painful chore.<p>The closest thing I&#x27;ve found is the Fujifilm X-Pro 3&#x27;s &quot;hybrid&quot; viewfinder. It has a Leica-style rangefinder that can, with the flip of a switch, convert into a digital image like every other mirrorless. It can even overlay the frame and a digital focus preview onto the analog image in the rangefinder as you move it around. It&#x27;s not useful for concerts - the 23.5x15.6mm sensor is too small - but I photographed some of the the 2020 protests in NYC and the extra field of view in the rangefinder is actually an advantage in that kind of hectic environment.</text></comment>	<story><title>Nikon to stop making SLR cameras and focus on mirrorless models?</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Nikon-to-stop-making-SLR-cameras-and-focus-on-mirrorless-models</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vparikh</author><text>The mirror box &#x2F; pentaprism combo is not required. DSLR cameras were built as the technology did not exist to eliminate them. Now that processor, LCD and AF systems have caught up, the SLR is redundant.<p>The primary advantage of the SLR was that you can see the image as the lens is framing the image - a huge improvement over rangefinder systems (such as the Leica M). This allowed the use of super telephoto, wide angle, macro and tilt shift lenses to be much easer. The primary downside of the SLR was that it did not show you how the exposure was going to be recored on the film or digital sensor.<p>The mirrorless system eliminates that and now lets you see precisely how the image is framed as well as how it is exposed in real time without taking the image as the LCD and viewfinder are constantly reading from sensor. In addition you gain the possibility to handhold at much lower shutter speeds due to the mirror slap being removed and the on board sensor shift stabilization systems. DSLRs couldn&#x27;t do this and relied on lens based solutions (Olympus &amp; Pentax did have sensor shift stabilization, but it was niche and the market leaders Nikon &amp; Canon relied on lens based stabilization). Another advantage is that with the removal of the mirror box, you can have short flange distances allowing new lens designs and lens interoperability. Nikon has the shortest flange distance in the industry and has support for just about every other lens mount out their (though through third party adapters - some with full AF capability also).<p>So the DSLR, except for maybe a few niche cases is old technology that is superseded in every single way. The interesting thing will be to see how the new mirrorless cameras effect the UI and ergonomics of the camera systems. So far, the pro level systems (Z9, R5, etc..) are all still for the most part using the DSLR form factor. Especially Nikon. I actually like this, but lets see what the future holds.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjav</author><text>&gt; So the DSLR, except for maybe a few niche cases is old technology that is superseded in every single way.<p>This is a one-sided comment, as you describe the advantages of mirrorless but don&#x27;t discuss the significant disadvantages.<p>With mirrorless you don&#x27;t see through the optical lens, you&#x27;re always looking at an LCD even on the viewfinder. This is not a good thing, it means the camera is always consuming battery. With a DSLR battry life is measured in months (I go on vacations and don&#x27;t even bother bringing a charger) since the camera doesn&#x27;t need to consume any power most of the time.</text></comment>
18,244,151	18,243,276	1	2	18,243,163	train	<story><title>Journal raises $1.5M to bring Google-like search to your personal life</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/journal-raises-1-5-million-to-bring-google-like-search-to-your-personal-life/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>raesene9</author><text>The challenge, for me, with a service like this is security. To effectively search all of my personal information, this service will need creds to see all of my personal data.<p>That makes this service a tempting target for attackers.<p>From an initial read through the ToS and Privacy Policy I don&#x27;t get the impression that they&#x27;re going for a zero-knowledge model where data is processed on a client, so that means that their server-side apps will need to access&#x2F;process my personal data as part of provision of the service.<p>Now I have no reason to doubt their committment to security, however I also don&#x27;t have a great deal of information that would allow me to say &quot;yep this looks like somewhere I want to trust with all my personal details&quot;<p>One recommendation I would make to the team, is provide a bit more information about the steps you&#x27;re taking to secure data processed on this service and also talk about the third party assurance that you&#x27;re getting over those controls.<p>Also (personal peeve perhaps) but that bit on the front page about &quot;industry standard encryption&quot; isn&#x27;t really useful. TLS won&#x27;t save me if the web app. has SQL Injection :)</text></comment>	<story><title>Journal raises $1.5M to bring Google-like search to your personal life</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/16/journal-raises-1-5-million-to-bring-google-like-search-to-your-personal-life/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samiur1204</author><text>Hi guys,<p>Samiur from Journal here (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usejournal.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usejournal.com</a>). We started Journal with the goal of reducing information overload, and to see what would be possible if our knowledge - about people, projects, and ideas - was connected and easily accessible.<p>We think of what we&#x27;re building as a new kind of journal. You write notes in it, save interesting links, and drop in important documents and messages for later. When you need something, ask Journal, and it helps you find it.<p>Eventually, we see it becoming a connected home to gather and share knowledge. You use the best services for issues, documents, messaging and more — and Journal ties them all together. We currently support integrations to Google (Gmail, Calendar, Drive) Slack, Dropbox (Files and Paper), Evernote, Pocket, and Atlassian (Jira and Confluence).<p>We&#x27;re coming out of community beta today, and would love to hear your feedback!<p>If you&#x27;d like an early access code, please reply to this comment.</text></comment>
25,977,301	25,976,842	1	2	25,975,110	train	<story><title>CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nataz</author><text>Ha, I&#x27;m currently a federal government program manager, so I am thinking about it from the government&#x27;s side right now.<p>I&#x27;ve also been a consultant cog in a mega-corp and run my own small consulting business, so I&#x27;ve seen it from both sides.<p>Tech folks underestimate non tech challenges (basically anything outside of their domain), and clients don&#x27;t actually know what they want. It&#x27;s an age old problem in lots of industries.</text></item><item><author>eigenvector</author><text>Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government&#x27;s side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do?<p>&quot;Because we don&#x27;t have the expertise to do software development.&quot;<p>The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if government wants to deliver high-quality IT projects they need to start developing the expertise to do it in-house.</text></item><item><author>nataz</author><text>This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set.<p>The intersection of domain expertise, contracting&#x2F;procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience.<p>Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code.</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>These contracts are generally bloated, but if you&#x27;ve never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you&#x27;re probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it&#x27;s a lot of overhead, but this isn&#x27;t a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.</text></item><item><author>didibus</author><text>I just don&#x27;t understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there&#x27;s no excuse for it to suck so bad.<p>I&#x27;m also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheColorYellow</author><text>I work in a similar sector but have a strong belief that the software delivery can and should become a capability that occurs within the government.<p>They should be diligent in what capabilities they choose to support. And ruthless in continually developing and pivoting these capabilities.<p>This is true of any large organization or enterprise that operates in a software enabled domain, so yes, most industries. The idea that software development is too difficult and should only be contracted out to fleety consultants is one that needs to be properly put to rest.<p>And to be clear, I&#x27;m not saying that consultants have no place. But for the type of technology and delivery as required by the project in the OP - there&#x27;s no excuse.</text></comment>	<story><title>CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nataz</author><text>Ha, I&#x27;m currently a federal government program manager, so I am thinking about it from the government&#x27;s side right now.<p>I&#x27;ve also been a consultant cog in a mega-corp and run my own small consulting business, so I&#x27;ve seen it from both sides.<p>Tech folks underestimate non tech challenges (basically anything outside of their domain), and clients don&#x27;t actually know what they want. It&#x27;s an age old problem in lots of industries.</text></item><item><author>eigenvector</author><text>Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government&#x27;s side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do?<p>&quot;Because we don&#x27;t have the expertise to do software development.&quot;<p>The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if government wants to deliver high-quality IT projects they need to start developing the expertise to do it in-house.</text></item><item><author>nataz</author><text>This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set.<p>The intersection of domain expertise, contracting&#x2F;procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience.<p>Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code.</text></item><item><author>mdorazio</author><text>These contracts are generally bloated, but if you&#x27;ve never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you&#x27;re probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it&#x27;s a lot of overhead, but this isn&#x27;t a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.</text></item><item><author>didibus</author><text>I just don&#x27;t understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there&#x27;s no excuse for it to suck so bad.<p>I&#x27;m also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rorykoehler</author><text>I’ve been working in enterprise&#x2F;government sector for a few years now and my observation is that they need to focus on better systems design. Everything is too convoluted. Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear is where most of the money is wasted.</text></comment>
23,350,149	23,349,573	1	2	23,345,837	train	<story><title>Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz Is Out</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/magic-leap-ceo-rony-abovitz-is-out/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alangibson</author><text>In my office there are several sets from Oculus, ML, etc. Every time one shows up, it goes like this: everyone stands around and has a go at it, then it is never touched again.<p>That&#x27;s basically the state of VR and AR as it exists today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lewton</author><text>I organized a vr party recently with my old beat up vive and people played keep talking and nobody explodes for 6 hours in a row<p>That’s the state of VR today.<p>Whenever I do VR as a social activity there’s never anyone leaving unsatisfied. And I’ve “sold” plenty of headsets that I hear reports about still getting regular use several years later<p>And now with oculus quest it’s an even easier sell<p>Every time there’s any vr related post on HN, the most upvoted comment is about VR being dead tech, all the while oculus and valve have their headsets on constant back-order<p>Maybe consider that you’re not the target audience</text></comment>	<story><title>Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz Is Out</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/magic-leap-ceo-rony-abovitz-is-out/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alangibson</author><text>In my office there are several sets from Oculus, ML, etc. Every time one shows up, it goes like this: everyone stands around and has a go at it, then it is never touched again.<p>That&#x27;s basically the state of VR and AR as it exists today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tashoecraft</author><text>Because who sits around at work on a vr headset? Vr is inherently anti (local) social. Vr is fantastic for certain things right now, sim racing being the one I’m familiar with, that it completely blows away any alternative.<p>The big issue I’ve found is the UX and software is atrocious. Things are not intuitive, there’s walled gardens (f you oculus). I’ve had so many moments of knowing what I want to do, but being totally unable to figure out how to do it.<p>I’ll be excited once Apple enters space to figure out a bunch of this stuff and the rest of the field can just copy them.</text></comment>
15,553,754	15,553,730	1	3	15,551,968	train	<story><title>No, of that I'm innocent</title><url>https://scobleizer.blog/2017/10/25/no-of-that-im-innocent-sexual-harassment-assault-accusations/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>astura</author><text>I&#x27;ll preface this with, I don&#x27;t know who this guy is and this is the first time I heard anything about this, I am unfamiliar with the allegations.<p>I am just absolutely shocked by this<p>&gt;I don’t have employees, I don’t cut checks for investment. None of the women who came forward were ever in a position where I could make or break their careers. Sexual Harassment requires that I have such power.<p>JFC, does anyone actually believe this? This is absolutely... Shocking. Disturbing... I have no words...<p>Shouldn&#x27;t he have consulted with the EEOC before making such a bold statement?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;laws&#x2F;types&#x2F;sexual_harassment.cfm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;laws&#x2F;types&#x2F;sexual_harassment.cfm</a><p>&gt;The harasser can be the victim&#x27;s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.<p>It just makes it seem like he has no idea what appropriate behavior is at all. Really takes away from his credibility. Makes me think he&#x27;s a <i>total creep</i> but thinks it&#x27;s other people who are the problem.<p>Also, it stood out to me it seems odd that he used &quot;sexual harassment&quot; as a proper noun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>openmosix</author><text>The problem is, he is one of the MOST influential people in the tech ecosystem. Yes, he is a &quot;blogger&quot;, but in many cases he could make or break a product, a startup or a career. A friend of mine startup was noticed (and acquired) by Facebook because Scoble started blogging about it and that came to the attention of Zuckerberg.<p>This guy leaves and breathes in tech conferences, as he is a regular invited speaker&#x2F;guest. I&#x27;m sure he had to see, read a million of &quot;code of conducts&quot;. The fact he claims &quot;I have no employees... I have no power&quot; is...disgusting.</text></comment>	<story><title>No, of that I'm innocent</title><url>https://scobleizer.blog/2017/10/25/no-of-that-im-innocent-sexual-harassment-assault-accusations/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>astura</author><text>I&#x27;ll preface this with, I don&#x27;t know who this guy is and this is the first time I heard anything about this, I am unfamiliar with the allegations.<p>I am just absolutely shocked by this<p>&gt;I don’t have employees, I don’t cut checks for investment. None of the women who came forward were ever in a position where I could make or break their careers. Sexual Harassment requires that I have such power.<p>JFC, does anyone actually believe this? This is absolutely... Shocking. Disturbing... I have no words...<p>Shouldn&#x27;t he have consulted with the EEOC before making such a bold statement?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;laws&#x2F;types&#x2F;sexual_harassment.cfm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;laws&#x2F;types&#x2F;sexual_harassment.cfm</a><p>&gt;The harasser can be the victim&#x27;s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.<p>It just makes it seem like he has no idea what appropriate behavior is at all. Really takes away from his credibility. Makes me think he&#x27;s a <i>total creep</i> but thinks it&#x27;s other people who are the problem.<p>Also, it stood out to me it seems odd that he used &quot;sexual harassment&quot; as a proper noun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donohoe</author><text>If I&#x27;m reading it right, is he saying he is not a &quot;sexual harasser&quot; as opposed to just a simple &quot;sexual assaulter&quot;!?<p>He should have taken his lawyers advice.</text></comment>
40,367,811	40,367,777	1	2	40,363,273	train	<story><title>Jan Leike Resigns from OpenAI</title><url>https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>My honest-to-god guess is that it just seemed like a needless cost center in a growing business, so there was pressure against them doing the work they wanted to do.<p>I&#x27;m guessing, but OpenAI probably wants to start monetizing, and doesn&#x27;t feel like they are going to hit a superintelligence, not really. That may have been the goal originally.</text></item><item><author>kamikaz1k</author><text>who is this and why is it important? [1]<p>super-alignment co-lead with Ilya (who resigned yesterday)<p>what is super alignment? [2]<p>&gt; We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. Our goal is to solve the core technical challenges of superintelligence alignment by 2027.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.leike.name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.leike.name&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;superalignment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;superalignment&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hollerith</author><text>&gt;it just seemed like a needless cost center in a growing business<p>To some of us, that sounds like, &quot;Fire all the climate scientists because they are needless cost center distracting us from the noble goal of burning as much fossil fuel as possible.&quot;</text></comment>	<story><title>Jan Leike Resigns from OpenAI</title><url>https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1790603862132596961</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>My honest-to-god guess is that it just seemed like a needless cost center in a growing business, so there was pressure against them doing the work they wanted to do.<p>I&#x27;m guessing, but OpenAI probably wants to start monetizing, and doesn&#x27;t feel like they are going to hit a superintelligence, not really. That may have been the goal originally.</text></item><item><author>kamikaz1k</author><text>who is this and why is it important? [1]<p>super-alignment co-lead with Ilya (who resigned yesterday)<p>what is super alignment? [2]<p>&gt; We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. Our goal is to solve the core technical challenges of superintelligence alignment by 2027.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.leike.name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jan.leike.name&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;superalignment&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openai.com&#x2F;superalignment&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjr00</author><text>Yeah, OpenAI is all-in on the LLM golden goose and is much more focused on how to monetize it via embedding advertisements, continuing to provide &quot;safety&quot; via topic restrictions, etc., than going further down the AGI route.<p>There&#x27;s zero chance LLMs lead to AGI or superintelligence, so if that&#x27;s all OpenAI is going to focus on for the next ~5 years, a group related to superintelligence alignment is unnecessary.</text></comment>
8,502,380	8,501,088	1	3	8,500,553	train	<story><title>CSS-only plotting</title><url>https://github.com/asciimoo/cssplot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>judofyr</author><text>Might as well use inline styling to accomplish the same (without adding tons of CSS):<p><pre><code> &lt;div class=&quot;bar-chart&quot;&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:99%&quot;&gt;99%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:50%&quot;&gt;50%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:30%&quot;&gt;30%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:90%&quot;&gt;90%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:10%&quot;&gt;10%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:70%&quot;&gt;70%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:30%&quot;&gt;30%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:90%&quot;&gt;90%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;&#x2F;ul&gt; &lt;&#x2F;div&gt;</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aleem</author><text>This gives up some flexibility. If you want to switch from horizontal to vertical you have to change a lot more code. If you want to introduce a new face style that color codes bars based on height this wouldn&#x27;t work.</text></comment>	<story><title>CSS-only plotting</title><url>https://github.com/asciimoo/cssplot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>judofyr</author><text>Might as well use inline styling to accomplish the same (without adding tons of CSS):<p><pre><code> &lt;div class=&quot;bar-chart&quot;&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:99%&quot;&gt;99%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:50%&quot;&gt;50%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:30%&quot;&gt;30%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:90%&quot;&gt;90%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:10%&quot;&gt;10%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:70%&quot;&gt;70%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:30%&quot;&gt;30%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;li style=&quot;height:90%&quot;&gt;90%&lt;&#x2F;li&gt; &lt;&#x2F;ul&gt; &lt;&#x2F;div&gt;</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rwl4</author><text>I just came here to say the same. You can accomplish the first two chart styles quite easily, though the last might be a bit more involved.</text></comment>
6,720,167	6,720,161	1	2	6,719,356	train	<story><title>The plot against France</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/opinion/krugman-the-plot-against-france.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beedogs</author><text>If these tax-less spend-less austerity morons were right about their ideology, you&#x27;d think it might have worked once in a while. But it never has, nor will it ever. Instead they&#x27;ve taken to punishing the nations that prove them wrong. Same thing is going on now in Australia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daniel-cussen</author><text>They did it in Chile after the coup (1973) and it worked...so...well. Overnight, we went from masses of public servants endlessly on strike, 400% inflation, and halfway-to-Cuba socialism to tons of public servants getting fired (none of this furlough with back pay business) and the remainder shutting up and doing their work. There was a small downtick in the economy, shortly, not unlike the downtick in US after WWI that ushered in the roaring twenties. Naturally, the economy changed drastically because of the dictatorship and foreign loans make it slightly harder to analyze, and in 1982 the economy got hit badly for pegging the currency, which is a different story. But they cut spending, lowered taxes, and it worked fantastically.<p>Ultimately, if, as a country, you&#x27;re thinking of going down the tax-less spend-more road, you have to amass enough power in the hands of the people that will carry it out (in this case a dictator) that the public sector can&#x27;t go on an endless tirade of strikes and sabotage. If not, guess what&#x27;ll happen? The essentials from among the things the government provides will be the first to go in an attempt to rile the public up. But how many cushy do-nothing bureaucrats will get fired? That&#x27;s where government spending is, in its vast majority—in the salaries of government employees. If you want to tax less and spend more, keep in mind that you&#x27;ll be going toe-to-toe with the people that run government (more-so than politicians) and that it&#x27;s a serious political battle for the country to take on.<p>So in that sense you&#x27;re right--expecting to politically shift over to tax-less spend-less policy may be fruitless and unrealistic, if only because the people one is trying to lay off will always sabotage the effort.</text></comment>	<story><title>The plot against France</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/opinion/krugman-the-plot-against-france.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>beedogs</author><text>If these tax-less spend-less austerity morons were right about their ideology, you&#x27;d think it might have worked once in a while. But it never has, nor will it ever. Instead they&#x27;ve taken to punishing the nations that prove them wrong. Same thing is going on now in Australia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noonespecial</author><text>I suspect austerity does work but has an inflection point. It can (theoretically) be used to cut outright government waste.<p>On a personal level, you might stop paying for your cable TV when money gets tight and have it make you better off. Not paying for your car and finding yourself unable to get to work would make you worse off despite the &quot;savings&quot;.<p>The trouble with politics and austerity is they always seem to end up missing the car payments and keeping the cable on.</text></comment>
15,723,400	15,722,861	1	3	15,721,466	train	<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>I&#x27;m not even sure Google&#x27;s behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don&#x27;t neccesarily think it&#x27;s Google&#x27;s job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it&#x27;s risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).<p>To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding the aliens, I&#x27;m probably more interested in the answer &quot;Area 51&quot; than &quot;the government isn&#x27;t hiding any aliens&quot;.</text></item><item><author>muzani</author><text>My favorite example is &quot;are lemons acidic?&quot;<p>It&#x27;s full of &quot;alkaline diet&quot; sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they&#x27;re an alkaline. It&#x27;s become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy.<p>Then again the answers are so consistent and I&#x27;m so used to trusting the first page of Google that I&#x27;m almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text><i>&quot;2 Balances pH: Lemons are an incredibly alkaline food, believe it or not. Yes, they are acidic on their own, but inside our bodies they&#x27;re alkaline (the citric acid does not create acidity in the body once metabolized&quot;</i><p>That&#x27;s what I get in the answer box. Wow.<p>I think it absolutely is Google&#x27;s job to be the woo police <i>in the privileged answer box</i>. They can just choose not to display it for answers they&#x27;re not confident in owning and leave you with the general search results.<p>It probably needs to be a whitelist. Most of the time it&#x27;s wikipedia anyway (a whole other can of worms, but at least it won&#x27;t tell you that lemons are alkaline or feed your conspiracy theories)</text></comment>	<story><title>Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-featured-answers-aim-to-distill-truthbut-often-get-it-wrong-1510847867</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dTal</author><text>I&#x27;m not even sure Google&#x27;s behaviour is wrong in this instance. The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that is probably actually more interested in the woo-answer, and I don&#x27;t neccesarily think it&#x27;s Google&#x27;s job to be the woo-police (as appealing as that sounds, it&#x27;s risky unless they can do a 100% accurate job).<p>To illustrate with another example, if I ask Google where the government is hiding the aliens, I&#x27;m probably more interested in the answer &quot;Area 51&quot; than &quot;the government isn&#x27;t hiding any aliens&quot;.</text></item><item><author>muzani</author><text>My favorite example is &quot;are lemons acidic?&quot;<p>It&#x27;s full of &quot;alkaline diet&quot; sites trying to SEO itself into convincing people that lemons are good for you because they&#x27;re an alkaline. It&#x27;s become a little less inaccurate over the years but is still dodgy.<p>Then again the answers are so consistent and I&#x27;m so used to trusting the first page of Google that I&#x27;m almost convinced that lemons alkalinize your body.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DarkCrusader2</author><text>&gt; The kind of person who would google something as obvious as that<p>Yes, no kid is ever gonna google that. While we are at it, let&#x27;s show that earth is flat when someone google for image of earth&#x27;s curvature because why would you search that. You obviously are a flat-earther.</text></comment>
36,936,993	36,935,275	1	2	36,933,028	train	<story><title>Musl 1.2.4 adds TCP DNS fallback</title><url>https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2023/05/02/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robinhoodexe</author><text>We’re currently consolidating all container images to run on Debian-slim instead of a mixture of Debian, Ubuntu and alpine. Sure, alpine is small, but with 70% of our 500 container images being used for Python, R or node the final image is so large (due to libraries&#x2F;packages), that the difference between alpine (~30 MB) and debian-slim (~80) is negligible. We’ve been experiencing the weird DNS behaviour of alpine and other issues with musl as well. Debian is rock solid and upgrading to bookworm from bullseye and even buster in many cases didn’t cause any problems at all.<p>I will admit though, that Debian-slim still has some non-essential stuff that usually isn’t needed at runtime, a shell is still neat for debugging or local development. This trade off could be considered a security risk, but it’s rather simple to restrict other stuff at runtime (such as run as non-privileged, non-root user with all capabilities dropped and a read-only file system except for &#x2F;tmp).<p>It’s a balancing act between ease-of-use and security. I don’t think I’d get popular with the developers by forcing them to use “FROM scratch” and let them figure out exactly what their application needs at runtime and what stuff to copy over from a previous build stage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelvie</author><text>My biggest beef with the apt&#x2F;deb-based distros for container images is that apt-get updates installs take frustratingly long, whereas apks always tend to be near instant. I wonder what it is in the postinst and related scripts that just take so long and can&#x27;t be parallelized!<p>Most of the reason I switched from Ubuntu -&gt; Arch is that working with alpine allowed me to realize that installing packages and their dependencies don&#x27;t have to take so long.</text></comment>	<story><title>Musl 1.2.4 adds TCP DNS fallback</title><url>https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2023/05/02/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robinhoodexe</author><text>We’re currently consolidating all container images to run on Debian-slim instead of a mixture of Debian, Ubuntu and alpine. Sure, alpine is small, but with 70% of our 500 container images being used for Python, R or node the final image is so large (due to libraries&#x2F;packages), that the difference between alpine (~30 MB) and debian-slim (~80) is negligible. We’ve been experiencing the weird DNS behaviour of alpine and other issues with musl as well. Debian is rock solid and upgrading to bookworm from bullseye and even buster in many cases didn’t cause any problems at all.<p>I will admit though, that Debian-slim still has some non-essential stuff that usually isn’t needed at runtime, a shell is still neat for debugging or local development. This trade off could be considered a security risk, but it’s rather simple to restrict other stuff at runtime (such as run as non-privileged, non-root user with all capabilities dropped and a read-only file system except for &#x2F;tmp).<p>It’s a balancing act between ease-of-use and security. I don’t think I’d get popular with the developers by forcing them to use “FROM scratch” and let them figure out exactly what their application needs at runtime and what stuff to copy over from a previous build stage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rapzid</author><text>This here. Honestly most orgs with uhh.. Let&#x27;s say a more mature sense of ROI tradeoffs were doing this from pretty much the very beginning.<p>Also, Ubuntu 22.04 is only 28.17MB compressed right now so it looks equiv to debian-slim. There are also these new image lines, I can&#x27;t recall the funky name for them, that are even smaller.</text></comment>
29,459,623	29,458,806	1	2	29,458,066	train	<story><title>Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/why-we-always-endup-with-waterfall-even-scrum/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>If you can&#x27;t formulate actionable requirements, you&#x27;re either not the domain expert, or not communicating properly with the domain expert.<p>What your service looks like <i>now</i> and what it looks like in <i>five</i> years are obviously two different questions, but a proper analysis will divide the issue between <i>now</i> and <i>5 years from now</i> and come up with requirements that fill the gaps. This doesn&#x27;t mean things get set in stone and aren&#x27;t adaptable to changing needs - when this condition is identified, the manger&#x2F;developer need only apply the workflow again, and revise the specifications with the updated data, and a new development plan can be formulated. Maybe this is &#x27;agile&#x27;, but again - it speaks to the fact that waterfall is a naturally occurring phenomenon in engineering&#x2F;technical matters, and thus should be applied consistently, completely, in order to provide fruitful results.<p>&gt; You cannot analyse how users will empirically interact with a product that does not yet exist.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with this, as I believe it is very, very glib. You can of course empirically interact, <i>by wearing the user hat</i>. Too often the developer&#x2F;manager&#x2F;user hats are considered adversarial - but when the decision is made to be flexible about which of these hats one is wearing, <i>during analysis</i>, makes all the difference between whether your product is successful or not. Software is a social service - rigid developers who cannot put on the user hat, are not providing the most intrinsic aspect of that service in their field.<p>&gt;You&#x27;re presuming that it&#x27;s possible to gather the &quot;ideal requirements&quot; when the project first starts, with enough due diligence - and also, that those requirements are fixed.<p>I make the claim that this ideal <i>can</i> be attained, by ensuring that the early steps in the waterfall process are <i>actually</i> applied. You are correct in noting that &quot;when you don&#x27;t do things right, right things don&#x27;t happen&quot;, however ..</text></item><item><author>ivanbakel</author><text>&gt;This just indicates a failure to perform a proper Analysis&#x2F;Specification&#x2F;Requirements phase, with relevant qualifications steps. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a Manager or a lowly Developer - if you can&#x27;t adequately qualify the requirements and specifications, the analysis is simply not complete.<p>But that view of requirements is not borne out by the reality for most projects. You&#x27;re presuming that it&#x27;s possible to gather the &quot;ideal requirements&quot; when the project first starts, with enough due diligence - and also, that those requirements are fixed.<p>In my current job, we&#x27;re producing a service that has to court a handful of very large clients. Even if there was a well-defined idea of what the service should <i>eventually</i> look like in 5 years, a lot of feedback is required to discover how it should look <i>now</i>. Which client needs more attention? Where is the biggest opportunity for additional value? How are users <i>actually using</i> the service, ignoring what they said they were going to do with it?<p>That last part is the most important - requirements are in reality a feedback process for which the existing product is one input. You cannot analyse how users will empirically interact with a product that does not yet exist. Abstract analysis is no substitute for data.</text></item><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>&gt;The problem with waterfall to my experience is not immediately visible to developers or directly concerns developers, but rather the stakeholders and managers. Almost always, your customer doesn&#x27;t know what they want - they think they do, but they don&#x27;t and will only realize this after you finished development and have a visible system demo&#x2F;field test.<p>This just indicates a failure to perform a proper Analysis&#x2F;Specification&#x2F;Requirements phase, with relevant qualifications steps. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a Manager or a lowly Developer - if you can&#x27;t adequately qualify the requirements and specifications, the analysis is simply <i>not</i> complete.<p>Pushing the problem to or away- from Managers is just one way of saying &quot;I&#x27;m too lazy&#x2F;incompetent to adequately complete the Analysis phase, resulting in poor requirements, lacking or contradictory specifications, and no planning&quot;. Its the Analysis that needs attention, i.e. maybe nobody actually knows how to wear the Analysts hat any more ..</text></item><item><author>littlecranky67</author><text>The problem with waterfall to my experience is not immediately visible to developers or directly concerns developers, but rather the stakeholders and managers. Almost always, your customer doesn&#x27;t know what they want - they think they do, but they don&#x27;t and will only realize this after you finished development and have a visible system demo&#x2F;field test.<p>Additionally it is really hard for project management to get metrics&#x2F;early warnings if something is not going properly (no project - waterfall or agile - is without problems during its lifetime). How would you asses the quality&#x2F;progress of a project based on a couple of a specification or requirements documents 1-2years into the project with no (immediately usable) code being available? How would you asses if the approach taken after 3years in a project will be accepted by your endusers?<p>Waterfall is just a big black box to management and stakeholders with the hope that after 5years something usable will come out of it.</text></item><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>I&#x27;ve never quite understood, over 30 years of experience in software development, what problems Waterfall presented that warranted a complete refactor of software development processes such that things are now very much in cult-&#x2F;cargo-cult territory.<p>There is a natural process that every issue goes through: Analysis, Specifications, Requirement, Design .. then the Developer takes in the materials of each of these steps, does an Implementation and Testing phase .. then the issue has to be validated&#x2F;verified with a Qualification step, and then it gets released to the end user&#x2F;product owner, who sign off on it.<p>This is a natural flow of steps, and it always appears to me that the new-fangled developer cults are always trying to &#x27;prove&#x27; that these aren&#x27;t natural steps, by either cramming every step into one phase (we only do &quot;Analysis&quot; and call it Scrum) or by throwing away steps (Qualification? What&#x27;s that?) and then wondering why things are crap.<p>Too many times, projects I&#x27;ve seen fail could&#x27;ve been saved if they&#x27;d just gotten rid of the cult-think.<p>Its nice, therefore, to see someone else making the observation that Waterfall is a natural process and all the other -isms are just sugar&#x2F;crap-coating what is a natural consequence of organizing computing around the OSI model - something that has been effective for decades now, and doesn&#x27;t need improvement-from-the-youth antics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ivanbakel</author><text>&gt;but a proper analysis will divide the issue between now and 5 years from now and come up with requirements that fill the gaps<p>The issue with the Waterfall model is that this approach doesn&#x27;t work. Aiming for &quot;now&quot; means you come out with an outdated product in the future. Aiming for &quot;5 years from now&quot; means speculating on what users <i>will eventually want</i>, which is very error-prone. Trying to adjust course midway through is a nightmare - and completely defeats the point of trying to get requirements &quot;right&quot; the first time.<p>&gt;You can of course empirically interact, by wearing the user hat.<p>This is not empirical: it does not involve observation or measurement of the real world. Speculating about user behaviour is no substitute for concrete data about how users actually behave.</text></comment>	<story><title>Even with Agile and Scrum waterfall will sneak in</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/why-we-always-endup-with-waterfall-even-scrum/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>If you can&#x27;t formulate actionable requirements, you&#x27;re either not the domain expert, or not communicating properly with the domain expert.<p>What your service looks like <i>now</i> and what it looks like in <i>five</i> years are obviously two different questions, but a proper analysis will divide the issue between <i>now</i> and <i>5 years from now</i> and come up with requirements that fill the gaps. This doesn&#x27;t mean things get set in stone and aren&#x27;t adaptable to changing needs - when this condition is identified, the manger&#x2F;developer need only apply the workflow again, and revise the specifications with the updated data, and a new development plan can be formulated. Maybe this is &#x27;agile&#x27;, but again - it speaks to the fact that waterfall is a naturally occurring phenomenon in engineering&#x2F;technical matters, and thus should be applied consistently, completely, in order to provide fruitful results.<p>&gt; You cannot analyse how users will empirically interact with a product that does not yet exist.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with this, as I believe it is very, very glib. You can of course empirically interact, <i>by wearing the user hat</i>. Too often the developer&#x2F;manager&#x2F;user hats are considered adversarial - but when the decision is made to be flexible about which of these hats one is wearing, <i>during analysis</i>, makes all the difference between whether your product is successful or not. Software is a social service - rigid developers who cannot put on the user hat, are not providing the most intrinsic aspect of that service in their field.<p>&gt;You&#x27;re presuming that it&#x27;s possible to gather the &quot;ideal requirements&quot; when the project first starts, with enough due diligence - and also, that those requirements are fixed.<p>I make the claim that this ideal <i>can</i> be attained, by ensuring that the early steps in the waterfall process are <i>actually</i> applied. You are correct in noting that &quot;when you don&#x27;t do things right, right things don&#x27;t happen&quot;, however ..</text></item><item><author>ivanbakel</author><text>&gt;This just indicates a failure to perform a proper Analysis&#x2F;Specification&#x2F;Requirements phase, with relevant qualifications steps. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a Manager or a lowly Developer - if you can&#x27;t adequately qualify the requirements and specifications, the analysis is simply not complete.<p>But that view of requirements is not borne out by the reality for most projects. You&#x27;re presuming that it&#x27;s possible to gather the &quot;ideal requirements&quot; when the project first starts, with enough due diligence - and also, that those requirements are fixed.<p>In my current job, we&#x27;re producing a service that has to court a handful of very large clients. Even if there was a well-defined idea of what the service should <i>eventually</i> look like in 5 years, a lot of feedback is required to discover how it should look <i>now</i>. Which client needs more attention? Where is the biggest opportunity for additional value? How are users <i>actually using</i> the service, ignoring what they said they were going to do with it?<p>That last part is the most important - requirements are in reality a feedback process for which the existing product is one input. You cannot analyse how users will empirically interact with a product that does not yet exist. Abstract analysis is no substitute for data.</text></item><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>&gt;The problem with waterfall to my experience is not immediately visible to developers or directly concerns developers, but rather the stakeholders and managers. Almost always, your customer doesn&#x27;t know what they want - they think they do, but they don&#x27;t and will only realize this after you finished development and have a visible system demo&#x2F;field test.<p>This just indicates a failure to perform a proper Analysis&#x2F;Specification&#x2F;Requirements phase, with relevant qualifications steps. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you&#x27;re a Manager or a lowly Developer - if you can&#x27;t adequately qualify the requirements and specifications, the analysis is simply <i>not</i> complete.<p>Pushing the problem to or away- from Managers is just one way of saying &quot;I&#x27;m too lazy&#x2F;incompetent to adequately complete the Analysis phase, resulting in poor requirements, lacking or contradictory specifications, and no planning&quot;. Its the Analysis that needs attention, i.e. maybe nobody actually knows how to wear the Analysts hat any more ..</text></item><item><author>littlecranky67</author><text>The problem with waterfall to my experience is not immediately visible to developers or directly concerns developers, but rather the stakeholders and managers. Almost always, your customer doesn&#x27;t know what they want - they think they do, but they don&#x27;t and will only realize this after you finished development and have a visible system demo&#x2F;field test.<p>Additionally it is really hard for project management to get metrics&#x2F;early warnings if something is not going properly (no project - waterfall or agile - is without problems during its lifetime). How would you asses the quality&#x2F;progress of a project based on a couple of a specification or requirements documents 1-2years into the project with no (immediately usable) code being available? How would you asses if the approach taken after 3years in a project will be accepted by your endusers?<p>Waterfall is just a big black box to management and stakeholders with the hope that after 5years something usable will come out of it.</text></item><item><author>boffinAudio</author><text>I&#x27;ve never quite understood, over 30 years of experience in software development, what problems Waterfall presented that warranted a complete refactor of software development processes such that things are now very much in cult-&#x2F;cargo-cult territory.<p>There is a natural process that every issue goes through: Analysis, Specifications, Requirement, Design .. then the Developer takes in the materials of each of these steps, does an Implementation and Testing phase .. then the issue has to be validated&#x2F;verified with a Qualification step, and then it gets released to the end user&#x2F;product owner, who sign off on it.<p>This is a natural flow of steps, and it always appears to me that the new-fangled developer cults are always trying to &#x27;prove&#x27; that these aren&#x27;t natural steps, by either cramming every step into one phase (we only do &quot;Analysis&quot; and call it Scrum) or by throwing away steps (Qualification? What&#x27;s that?) and then wondering why things are crap.<p>Too many times, projects I&#x27;ve seen fail could&#x27;ve been saved if they&#x27;d just gotten rid of the cult-think.<p>Its nice, therefore, to see someone else making the observation that Waterfall is a natural process and all the other -isms are just sugar&#x2F;crap-coating what is a natural consequence of organizing computing around the OSI model - something that has been effective for decades now, and doesn&#x27;t need improvement-from-the-youth antics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LaundroMat</author><text>&quot;Software is a social service - rigid developers who cannot put on the user hat, are not providing the most intrinsic aspect of that service in their field.&quot;<p>All the more reason <i>not</i> to rely on the proper wearing of a user hat (how are you going to know, by the way?), but actually work with the users instead and spend time creating the necessary artefacts to capture their perspective as soon and as well as possible.</text></comment>
18,545,651	18,545,737	1	2	18,542,830	train	<story><title>We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly</title><url>https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megaman8</author><text>I think, what these employees don&#x27;t realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it&#x27;s goodwill with customers thus increasing it&#x27;s moat and it&#x27;s retention, as well as it&#x27;s employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days.<p>Not anymore.<p>As Google&#x27;s position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it&#x27;s slightly tarnished brand), it doesn&#x27;t need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>The &quot;values over profits&quot; approach was always more of a recruitment tool than a PR tool. It did give a nice PR boost, but realistically Google&#x27;s been the best choice of search engine since it came out in 1998. They don&#x27;t need additional customer goodwill for people to keep using them, they just need to continue to give good results for esoteric queries.<p>Since 2005, though, good engineers have had <i>lots</i> of options for where to work, many of which pay better or have more growth potential than Google. And &quot;Don&#x27;t Be Evil&quot; was a great way to persuade them to come work for Google rather than Yelp or Facebook or some hedge fund, and keep them there rather than have them go off and found their own startups that potentially could compete with Google. Because so much of their product moat depends upon technical excellence, keeping the best engineers within the company is critical for them.<p>I&#x27;ll predict that if they don&#x27;t reverse course on this, we&#x27;ll see a mini-exodus of Googlers who either end up founding their own startups or start working on political-tech projects. Ultimately I think that may be good for the world, but it&#x27;s not really in Google&#x27;s long-term interests, although perhaps at this point their moat is entrenched enough and they&#x27;re big enough that it doesn&#x27;t really matter.</text></comment>	<story><title>We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly</title><url>https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>megaman8</author><text>I think, what these employees don&#x27;t realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it&#x27;s goodwill with customers thus increasing it&#x27;s moat and it&#x27;s retention, as well as it&#x27;s employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days.<p>Not anymore.<p>As Google&#x27;s position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it&#x27;s slightly tarnished brand), it doesn&#x27;t need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whack</author><text>There&#x27;s something you&#x27;ve overlooked: companies are ultimately run by humans. Humans who make decisions at all levels of the hierarchy, in order to further their own personal priorities, even if it dramatically conflicts with the shareholders&#x27; goals of maximizing profits.<p>In some cases, the personal priorities can be personal advancement. We see this all the time when managers hire&#x2F;promote their friends, sexually harass their subordinates, and make decisions on the basis of politics as opposed to technical&#x2F;business merit.<p>And in other cases, the personal priorities can be moral values. Values such as promoting free speech, fighting censorship, protecting consumer rights, and avoiding layoffs.<p>The idea that every single decision taken by a company is perfectly optimized to maximize long term profits, is baseless. There simply does not exist any mechanism to monitor and enforce such a requirement. The shareholders have only one lever to pull: accept the current leadership team, imperfections and all. Or fire them and risk destroying the company in the resulting churn. This gives both the executives and employees tremendous leeway to prioritize values over profits, as long as they are good enough to not get fired.</text></comment>
21,528,599	21,528,503	1	3	21,525,592	train	<story><title>Brave launches 1.0</title><url>https://brave.com/brave-launches-next-generation-browser/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyborgx7</author><text>I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.</text></item><item><author>jonathansampson</author><text>Brave Ads are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn&#x27;t strike me as an &quot;escalation of hostility&quot; when you compare against the current option: forced participation, malicious ads, no revenue share, data leaked to a sea of third parties who use it for their purposes.</text></item><item><author>hinkley</author><text>You had me...<p>&gt; Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page.<p>and then you lost me. Hitting people with notifications is an <i>escalation</i> of ad hostility, not a reduction.</text></item><item><author>judah</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It&#x27;s really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today.<p>For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards:<p>- You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT&#x2F;month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator.<p>- As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you&#x27;re willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdkhadsj</author><text>Yea, I&#x27;d be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5&#x2F;m or $15&#x2F;m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume.<p>I&#x27;m a firm believer that FOSS and <i>(Internet)</i> Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote <i>(but are not solely to blame for)</i> behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate <i>(and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities)</i>.<p>I like some of Brave&#x27;s attempt. At least their doing <i>something</i>. But Ads still seem wrong to me.</text></comment>	<story><title>Brave launches 1.0</title><url>https://brave.com/brave-launches-next-generation-browser/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cyborgx7</author><text>I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.</text></item><item><author>jonathansampson</author><text>Brave Ads are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn&#x27;t strike me as an &quot;escalation of hostility&quot; when you compare against the current option: forced participation, malicious ads, no revenue share, data leaked to a sea of third parties who use it for their purposes.</text></item><item><author>hinkley</author><text>You had me...<p>&gt; Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page.<p>and then you lost me. Hitting people with notifications is an <i>escalation</i> of ad hostility, not a reduction.</text></item><item><author>judah</author><text>I&#x27;ve been using Brave rewards, both as a user and a content maker. It&#x27;s really great, and I feel this may be a reasonable alternative to the invasive trackers+ads we have today.<p>For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards:<p>- You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT&#x2F;month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator.<p>- As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you&#x27;re willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nybble41</author><text>So don&#x27;t opt-in. There are other ways to acquire BAT and support the sites you visit in Brave besides watching ads.</text></comment>
18,148,316	18,148,387	1	3	18,147,597	train	<story><title>Interpol chief Meng Hongwei vanishes on trip to China</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45761466</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sndean</author><text>SCMP says the Chinese government knows where he is: he&#x27;s under investigation [0].<p>&quot;The 64-year-old official, who is also a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Public Security, was “taken away” for questioning by discipline authorities “as soon as he landed in China” last week, according to the source.&quot;<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scmp.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;china&#x2F;diplomacy&#x2F;article&#x2F;2167213&#x2F;french-police-launch-hunt-missing-chinese-head-interpol-meng" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scmp.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;china&#x2F;diplomacy&#x2F;article&#x2F;2167213&#x2F;fr...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Interpol chief Meng Hongwei vanishes on trip to China</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45761466</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>the_duke</author><text>The more interesting question to me is, how does a country with a human rights record like China get to provide the head of Interpol?<p>edit: President is elected by the General Assembly [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interpol.int&#x2F;About-INTERPOL&#x2F;Structure-and-governance&#x2F;President" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interpol.int&#x2F;About-INTERPOL&#x2F;Structure-and-govern...</a></text></comment>
32,656,134	32,655,465	1	2	32,649,123	train	<story><title>Observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience</title><url>https://lulu.substack.com/p/joe-rogan-has-a-werewolf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>You don&#x27;t even have to go deep into the archives to feel uncomfortable with this whole world&#x27;s treatment of gender issues. Directly from this article:<p>&gt;At a long desk in the big main room sits an attractive nurse. She offers us an enhancer of B12 or NAD+, through a shot or an IV.<p>&gt;I get a shot of NAD+, which is supposed to be good for energy and metabolism. NAD stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and I don’t know what the + is. (Actually, I don’t know what any of it is, but the nurse said she takes it, and if you saw this woman, you too would ask for a shot of whatever she’s on.)<p>What are we supposed to take away from this? Is this nurse actually trained for this? If so, isn&#x27;t the author completely dismissing that training because the nurse is attractive? If not, isn&#x27;t Rogan basically just hiring a model to pump his guests full of unknown drugs? Neither option is great. And this was written by the VP of Communication for Substack and is approved by Rogan. This isn&#x27;t some unauthorized look behind the scenes. This is what they want to advertise. It just gives me the creeps.</text></item><item><author>jasonwatkinspdx</author><text>I&#x27;m not going to bother digging up the clip cuz it&#x27;s easy to find, but it pretty much tells you what you need to know about Rogan.<p>It&#x27;s him talking to Joe Diaz, where Diaz is bragging about how when he was the manager at Laugh Factory he wouldn&#x27;t book female comics unless they sucked his dick. Rogan asks him how many women he did this to and Diaz says a dozen or something, and Rogan starts hyena laughing like it&#x27;s the funniest thing he&#x27;s ever heard.<p>Rogan gets some great guests on, but don&#x27;t be fooled by his &quot;aw schucks I&#x27;m just a bro asking questions&quot; act. He knows exactly what he&#x27;s doing and he&#x27;s a lot more predatory than his on camera character.<p>Something to consider before you associate your brand with him. Probably better to find an up and rising podcast.<p>Edit: freetime2 dug up the clip below and it&#x27;s even worse than I recalled.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterisP</author><text>Well no, the way I read is quite literal without anything misogynistic - if a person is saying that they personally take X to affect their body, then the appearance of their body is some (weak but still) evidence about what effect X has, and the decision of whether you want to imitate their actions is influenced by whether you want to look like they do, whether the results they&#x27;re getting seem worth imitating. The author was apparently considering that personal experience as a user of that product (and the visible outcome) was more relevant than whatever some specialist would have read about it.<p>Like, for an example of the opposite gender, if someone you trust says they did a particular treatment to fix male pattern baldness, then it seems reasonable to put some weight in their personal experience and how their hair looks after the treatment, especially if you don&#x27;t trust the official descriptions&#x2F;PR&#x2F;advertising claims, then even small amounts of anecdotal but real evidence might seem more valuable.</text></comment>	<story><title>Observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience</title><url>https://lulu.substack.com/p/joe-rogan-has-a-werewolf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>You don&#x27;t even have to go deep into the archives to feel uncomfortable with this whole world&#x27;s treatment of gender issues. Directly from this article:<p>&gt;At a long desk in the big main room sits an attractive nurse. She offers us an enhancer of B12 or NAD+, through a shot or an IV.<p>&gt;I get a shot of NAD+, which is supposed to be good for energy and metabolism. NAD stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and I don’t know what the + is. (Actually, I don’t know what any of it is, but the nurse said she takes it, and if you saw this woman, you too would ask for a shot of whatever she’s on.)<p>What are we supposed to take away from this? Is this nurse actually trained for this? If so, isn&#x27;t the author completely dismissing that training because the nurse is attractive? If not, isn&#x27;t Rogan basically just hiring a model to pump his guests full of unknown drugs? Neither option is great. And this was written by the VP of Communication for Substack and is approved by Rogan. This isn&#x27;t some unauthorized look behind the scenes. This is what they want to advertise. It just gives me the creeps.</text></item><item><author>jasonwatkinspdx</author><text>I&#x27;m not going to bother digging up the clip cuz it&#x27;s easy to find, but it pretty much tells you what you need to know about Rogan.<p>It&#x27;s him talking to Joe Diaz, where Diaz is bragging about how when he was the manager at Laugh Factory he wouldn&#x27;t book female comics unless they sucked his dick. Rogan asks him how many women he did this to and Diaz says a dozen or something, and Rogan starts hyena laughing like it&#x27;s the funniest thing he&#x27;s ever heard.<p>Rogan gets some great guests on, but don&#x27;t be fooled by his &quot;aw schucks I&#x27;m just a bro asking questions&quot; act. He knows exactly what he&#x27;s doing and he&#x27;s a lot more predatory than his on camera character.<p>Something to consider before you associate your brand with him. Probably better to find an up and rising podcast.<p>Edit: freetime2 dug up the clip below and it&#x27;s even worse than I recalled.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Shank</author><text>&gt; If not, isn&#x27;t Rogan basically just hiring a model to pump his guests full of unknown drugs?<p>&gt; Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is a coenzyme central to metabolism. Found in all living cells, NAD is called a dinucleotide because it consists of two nucleotides joined through their phosphate groups...NAD exists in two forms: an oxidized and reduced form, abbreviated as NAD+ and NADH (H for hydrogen), respectively. [0]<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that NAD+ is well-known. Artificial supplementation I&#x27;m not so sure about, but it&#x27;s inside you already. I...somehow doubt they&#x27;re just injecting raw NAD+ but I suppose it could be?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleotide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleot...</a></text></comment>
15,982,626	15,981,047	1	2	15,979,714	train	<story><title>Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fortythirteen</author><text>Imagine if ABC&#x2F;CBS&#x2F;NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers.<p>That&#x27;s essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Steeeve</author><text>Imagine...<p>If somebody like Rush Limbaugh had a nationwide radio show where day by day he created content based on RNC talking points.<p>Or a network like Fox or MSNBC went all in on party loyalty and based all their content on party talking points.<p>Or a media conglomerate like Sinclair or Clear Channel pushed out political messaging to their affiliates in small markets that had to be aired during prime viewership.<p>oh wait...</text></comment>	<story><title>Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fortythirteen</author><text>Imagine if ABC&#x2F;CBS&#x2F;NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers.<p>That&#x27;s essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>734786710934</author><text>The writers for most prime-time sitcoms are Democrats. They do it for free.</text></comment>
23,865,746	23,865,230	1	3	23,858,590	train	<story><title>The Incredibly Stupid One</title><url>https://www.pownetwork.org/bios/h/h135.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grecy</author><text>Playing dumb works extremely well to get out of extortion attempts too.<p>I&#x27;ve driven through a stack of countries notorious for extortion by Police and Military - Congo, Nigeria, Honduras, Kenya, Guinea - just to name a few.<p>One of my tactics to avoid paying a cent is playing dumb. It&#x27;s super easy when they don&#x27;t speak English. I do my best to understand their (French&#x2F;Spanish&#x2F;Portuguese&#x2F;Whatever), all the while remaining very polite and friendly. It&#x27;s a real shame when I don&#x27;t understand they want money, and virtually always they wave me through in disgust.<p>On a two year drive from Alaska to Argentina I paid one $5 bribe.<p>In three years around Africa through 35 countries I paid once in Ivory Coast, because I was too big for my boots and let on that I speak French.<p>Playing dumb has a lot of advantages.<p>For anyone interested, here&#x27;s me dealing with a real-life extortion attempt in Nigeria [1]. This was in Nigeria, so it&#x27;s all in English, but the script is identical in any corrupt country.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7RTlDa2cg0o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7RTlDa2cg0o</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reidjs</author><text>I vaguely remember a post from you on reddit or HN or somewhere a long time ago when you were first getting ready for this trip and the responses were like &quot;You&#x27;re going to get robbed&#x2F;break down in the middle of nowhere&#x2F;You won&#x27;t find jeep parts in Africa&#x2F;Why not drive a land cruiser&#x2F;you will die in the Sahara.&quot; Glad to see you proved the naysayers wrong.</text></comment>	<story><title>The Incredibly Stupid One</title><url>https://www.pownetwork.org/bios/h/h135.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grecy</author><text>Playing dumb works extremely well to get out of extortion attempts too.<p>I&#x27;ve driven through a stack of countries notorious for extortion by Police and Military - Congo, Nigeria, Honduras, Kenya, Guinea - just to name a few.<p>One of my tactics to avoid paying a cent is playing dumb. It&#x27;s super easy when they don&#x27;t speak English. I do my best to understand their (French&#x2F;Spanish&#x2F;Portuguese&#x2F;Whatever), all the while remaining very polite and friendly. It&#x27;s a real shame when I don&#x27;t understand they want money, and virtually always they wave me through in disgust.<p>On a two year drive from Alaska to Argentina I paid one $5 bribe.<p>In three years around Africa through 35 countries I paid once in Ivory Coast, because I was too big for my boots and let on that I speak French.<p>Playing dumb has a lot of advantages.<p>For anyone interested, here&#x27;s me dealing with a real-life extortion attempt in Nigeria [1]. This was in Nigeria, so it&#x27;s all in English, but the script is identical in any corrupt country.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7RTlDa2cg0o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7RTlDa2cg0o</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iamwil</author><text>Thanks for sharing. Watched and enjoyed. How did you learn how to do that? Trial and error? Or you rode with someone else?</text></comment>
35,733,361	35,732,826	1	2	35,731,285	train	<story><title>European DSA Recipients of Services Report</title><url>https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/dsa/mt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsckboy</author><text>&gt; <i>iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store</i><p>the whole idea that applications written in software shouldn&#x27;t handle screensize differences (and dynamic changes) intelligently is just so broken. I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach like &quot;who let these people in? is the door wide open out there?&quot;<p>i mean, to each their own, that&#x27;s just me, but that&#x27;s how I feel software should be written, and while we&#x27;re at it, give the user some input&#x2F;options at runtime.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>&gt; iOS App Store: 101 million<p>&gt; iPadOS App Store: 23 million<p>Asserting that the iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store - and totally isn&#x27;t in scope for the regulations - is certainly a bold strategy.<p>I wonder why iTunes and Apple TV+ aren&#x27;t included, and why Podcasts is only counting paid subscribers. Is there some obvious reason why these kinds of services would be out of scope?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamnos</author><text>The iPad store didn&#x27;t break away from the iOS store until 2019. The original app store came out in 2008, eleven years earlier. While you have as certain point, the division is meant to highlight apps which treat the iPad as a mini laptop, with a keyboard and pencil, vs just a bigger phone. If you&#x27;ve ever coded a website to resize, that&#x27;s child&#x27;s play. to actually get an app working properly across both sizes, you&#x27;ve got to put in significant work for each. For developers that don&#x27;t want to put in that work , listing in one or the other is fine, and possible Uber the current regieme.<p> the developer for papers please&#x27;s blog about the mobile port is indicative of the work that goes into supporting other screen sizes. Asking developers to have infinite time and motivation is just not realistic. also note that it took a few years for the mobile port to be released.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dukope.com&#x2F;devlogs&#x2F;papers-please&#x2F;mobile&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dukope.com&#x2F;devlogs&#x2F;papers-please&#x2F;mobile&#x2F;</a></text></comment>	<story><title>European DSA Recipients of Services Report</title><url>https://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/dsa/mt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fsckboy</author><text>&gt; <i>iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store</i><p>the whole idea that applications written in software shouldn&#x27;t handle screensize differences (and dynamic changes) intelligently is just so broken. I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach like &quot;who let these people in? is the door wide open out there?&quot;<p>i mean, to each their own, that&#x27;s just me, but that&#x27;s how I feel software should be written, and while we&#x27;re at it, give the user some input&#x2F;options at runtime.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>&gt; iOS App Store: 101 million<p>&gt; iPadOS App Store: 23 million<p>Asserting that the iPad App Store is distinct from the iOS App Store - and totally isn&#x27;t in scope for the regulations - is certainly a bold strategy.<p>I wonder why iTunes and Apple TV+ aren&#x27;t included, and why Podcasts is only counting paid subscribers. Is there some obvious reason why these kinds of services would be out of scope?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>threeseed</author><text>iOS&#x2F;iPadOS does allow you to have one code base that dynamically responds to screen sizes.<p>But almost always the experience for iPad users is terrible.<p>Which is why Apple&#x27;s initial approach of forcing developers to build distinct iPad apps was the right one and a large reason why its tablets dominated the market versus Android competitors.</text></comment>
19,394,485	19,393,799	1	3	19,392,635	train	<story><title>US to build six nuclear power plants in India</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/build-nuclear-power-plants-india-190314072408714.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dv_dt</author><text>It&#x27;s a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. Is France, the long time operator of one of the largest fleets, afraid of nuclear - I think it is very experienced at managing nuclear, both old gen and the very newest gen reactors. And yet this article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-12-10&#x2F;french-power-costs-will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-12-10&#x2F;french-po...</a><p>France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said.<p>France should spend 1.28 trillion euros over the next four decades, mostly on clean power production and storage capacities, networks, and imports, according to a report from the country’s environment ministry. If it does this, France would progressively shut down its 58 atomic plants and renewable energy would comprise 95 percent of its electricity output by 2060, up from 17 percent last year</text></item><item><author>Alupis</author><text>&gt; I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up<p>Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering.<p>At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up. Until then, it’s PR, not energy policy.<p>Aspiration alone is no different than failure.</text></item><item><author>elsonrodriguez</author><text>&gt; India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia&#x27;s third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels.<p>One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endorphone</author><text>&quot;It&#x27;s a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering.&quot;<p>I think it&#x27;s a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry (which is huge, with a very small number of players) and the useful rubes who play along.<p>Nuclear may be a necessary part of the grid mix, but the panacea presented has never remotely been close to reality -- every build takes much longer than promised, and always, with 100% certainty, costs billions more than planned. Every build has maintenance that costs multiples of the claims, operation that is far more expensive, and with waste products that there is still no viable solution for, with an eternity of costs dragging them down. And nuclear only exists because the public subsidizes it by eschewing the need for real insurance (which would be prohibitively expensive otherwise).<p>In every economic sense nuclear has been an enormous boondoggle, and they stopped making them because every energy provider got wise. This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public -- quite the contrary, the overwhelming public sentiment had no problem with nuclear -- though that claim frequently appears. It&#x27;s bizarre.</text></comment>	<story><title>US to build six nuclear power plants in India</title><url>https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/build-nuclear-power-plants-india-190314072408714.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dv_dt</author><text>It&#x27;s a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. Is France, the long time operator of one of the largest fleets, afraid of nuclear - I think it is very experienced at managing nuclear, both old gen and the very newest gen reactors. And yet this article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-12-10&#x2F;french-power-costs-will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2018-12-10&#x2F;french-po...</a><p>France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said.<p>France should spend 1.28 trillion euros over the next four decades, mostly on clean power production and storage capacities, networks, and imports, according to a report from the country’s environment ministry. If it does this, France would progressively shut down its 58 atomic plants and renewable energy would comprise 95 percent of its electricity output by 2060, up from 17 percent last year</text></item><item><author>Alupis</author><text>&gt; I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up<p>Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering.<p>At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up. Until then, it’s PR, not energy policy.<p>Aspiration alone is no different than failure.</text></item><item><author>elsonrodriguez</author><text>&gt; India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia&#x27;s third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels.<p>One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aloer</author><text>39 billion of 1.28 trillion is 3%. Does that mean they only save 3% when betting on falling prices for renewables? For four decades? Doesn&#x27;t sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear</text></comment>
17,554,514	17,554,568	1	3	17,551,514	train	<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m3rc</author><text>I mean... sure but they&#x27;re also only willing to interact with the game when they&#x27;re making the experience bad for everyone else.</text></item><item><author>VectorLock</author><text>This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game. The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they&#x27;re cheating at is probably negligible.</text></item><item><author>exgamedev</author><text>Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.<p>You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.<p>The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It&#x27;s actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.<p>There&#x27;s no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>s_m_t</author><text>I don&#x27;t think it is really the cheaters that degrade the experience, it is the knowledge (right or wrong) that cheaters exist that reduces trust that makes for not fun experiences.<p>I&#x27;ve played online games for many thousands of hours over the past two decades and I can count the number of times I encountered a blatant cheater on my hands. Every time it actually happened people had a good laugh about it and either hopped servers or banned the person cheating. Sure I have probably unknowingly encountered a bunch of map and wall hackers but I didn&#x27;t know so it didn&#x27;t degrade my experience. For all I knew those players were just better than me, plenty of those around. Having played with some extremely high level players in various games, it actually feels like the good players are using map&#x2F;wallhacks more than the actual hackers because they have such good gamesense.<p>On the other hand, I have been accused of cheating more times than I have actually for sure encountered real cheaters. It isn&#x27;t fun when a server turns sour because everyone is accusing each other of cheating and getting salty over nothing.<p>Of course, if cheaters are allowed to completely run rampant this isn&#x27;t the case. But any game with a modicum of community power to enforce rules won&#x27;t have that problem. The major places you reliably encounter cheaters are non-private servers and matchmaking services that have essentially been abandoned by the developers.</text></comment>	<story><title>Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat</title><url>https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riots-approach-anti-cheat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>m3rc</author><text>I mean... sure but they&#x27;re also only willing to interact with the game when they&#x27;re making the experience bad for everyone else.</text></item><item><author>VectorLock</author><text>This is an interesting approach because even though they may be cheaters they are _still_ people that are interested in your game. The percent of cheaters with the objective to utterly destroy the game they&#x27;re cheating at is probably negligible.</text></item><item><author>exgamedev</author><text>Back when I worked in games we would detect cheaters and then shadow ban. Quarantine them by only matching them into games with other cheaters.<p>You may still have to ban them from certain elements of your game, like player economies (auction house, etc). But the more legitimate their experience looks the better.<p>The idea is that instead of fully banning them and triggering the next iteration of the arms race, you trap and release them into a competitive arena for cheaters. It&#x27;s actually fun for them to compete with each other at who can cheat the hardest and no one else gets hurt. We hooked them up with a community rep. They found bugs and generally improved our security. Everyone won.<p>There&#x27;s no way to win with an adversarial approach to cheating IMO, not when you let the client run on their machine</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stephengillie</author><text>Console speed-runs have different leagues where different levels of glitches are allowed - from 0% to any%. Maybe that could work here, possibly as a &quot;competitive aimbot league&quot;.</text></comment>
17,170,561	17,169,742	1	3	17,169,331	train	<story><title>Python’s For - Else</title><url>http://book.pythontips.com/en/latest/for_-_else.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>askvictor</author><text>The word else implies something different to what it does (IMHO at least). In and if&#x2F;else clause, the else happens when the primary&#x2F;expected thing doesn&#x27;t happen. I would expect that for a loop, an else clause would happen when the loop does _not_ finish normally, or if they loop is empty. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a useful clause in certain cases, but the meaning of the word used is reversed. It might be better use &#x27;then&#x27; or something like that:<p><pre><code> for i in l: print(i) then: print(&quot;iteration finished without breaking&quot;)</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimmytucson</author><text>Here’s why (Hettinger):<p>&gt; In 1991, “else” was the obvious choice because of the traditional way compilers implemented while-loops: pastebin.com&#x2F;tY35CTJ4<p>That is, “if I haven’t finished the loop, GOTO the body.”<p>He says if he had a time machine he could tell Guido in the future we’re all using structured programming so no one will find “else” intuitive; call it “nobreak” instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go#</a><p>Guido says if he had a time machine he would not have included the feature at all: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.python.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;python-ideas&#x2F;2009-October&#x2F;006157.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.python.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;python-ideas&#x2F;2009-October&#x2F;...</a><p>This whole thing was Knuth’s idea, not Guido’s: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;citeseerx.ist.psu.edu&#x2F;viewdoc&#x2F;download?doi=10.1.1.103.6084&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;citeseerx.ist.psu.edu&#x2F;viewdoc&#x2F;download?doi=10.1.1.103...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Python’s For - Else</title><url>http://book.pythontips.com/en/latest/for_-_else.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>askvictor</author><text>The word else implies something different to what it does (IMHO at least). In and if&#x2F;else clause, the else happens when the primary&#x2F;expected thing doesn&#x27;t happen. I would expect that for a loop, an else clause would happen when the loop does _not_ finish normally, or if they loop is empty. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a useful clause in certain cases, but the meaning of the word used is reversed. It might be better use &#x27;then&#x27; or something like that:<p><pre><code> for i in l: print(i) then: print(&quot;iteration finished without breaking&quot;)</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rlayton2</author><text>I&#x27;m a strong python advocate and rarely use for&#x2F;else for this exact reason. It makes <i>more</i> sense to me for it to be the other way (your way) around. I always add a comment on the else when I do too, to ensure that future readers don&#x27;t make the same mistake.</text></comment>
33,917,187	33,917,114	1	2	33,913,231	train	<story><title>Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig</title><url>https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dahfizz</author><text>Something I&#x27;ve always wondered about compilers written in their own language....<p>What is your process for compiling a new compiler? Let&#x27;s say you make a code change to the compiler. You have a compiled version of the previous compiler you can run to compile the new compiler.<p>But, by definition, the new compiler is different from the old one. Do you re-run the compilation with the new compiler? How many times?</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>It was a good day when we finally removed 100% of the C and C++ code from the D compiler and all of the runtime library (including the memory manager). The assembler code uses D&#x27;s inline assembler.<p>The <i>test</i> suite has C code in it, because of course D can compile C code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cpeterso</author><text>Rust’s documentation describes how new versions of the rustc compiler are bootstrapped:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org&#x2F;buildings&#x2F;bootstrapping.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org&#x2F;buildings&#x2F;bootstrappin...</a><p>Stage 0: The stage0 compiler is usually the current beta rustc compiler.<p>States 1: The rustc source code is then compiled with the stage0 compiler to produce the stage1 compiler.<p>Stage 2: We then rebuild our stage1 compiler with itself to produce the stage2 compiler. In theory, the stage1 compiler is functionally identical to the stage2 compiler, but in practice there are subtle differences. The stage2 compiler is the one distributed with rustup and all other install methods.<p>State 3: To sanity check our new compiler, we can build the libraries with the stage2 compiler. The result ought to be identical to before, unless something has broken.</text></comment>	<story><title>Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig</title><url>https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dahfizz</author><text>Something I&#x27;ve always wondered about compilers written in their own language....<p>What is your process for compiling a new compiler? Let&#x27;s say you make a code change to the compiler. You have a compiled version of the previous compiler you can run to compile the new compiler.<p>But, by definition, the new compiler is different from the old one. Do you re-run the compilation with the new compiler? How many times?</text></item><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>It was a good day when we finally removed 100% of the C and C++ code from the D compiler and all of the runtime library (including the memory manager). The assembler code uses D&#x27;s inline assembler.<p>The <i>test</i> suite has C code in it, because of course D can compile C code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>1. Compile the new compiler with the old compiler<p>2. Compile the new compiler with the result of (1)<p>3. Compile the new compiler with the result of (2)<p>4. Verify that (2) and (3) produce identical results</text></comment>
39,042,070	39,042,180	1	2	39,041,477	train	<story><title>Queues don't fix overload (2014)</title><url>https://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kasey_junk</author><text>This is a weird article because it points out that queues don’t solve overload but neither do load shedding or back pressure.<p>All 3 techniques are just different trade offs on what to do in the face of overload. All 3 have negative ramifications for the users of the system. Load shedding reduces availability, back pressure increases complexity and queues increase latency.<p>In “critical” systems you need all 3. And all 3 can be overloaded. Frankly, your load shedding or back pressure system is probably implemented on a queue one layer down the abstraction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dijit</author><text>I think it&#x27;s the threshold of all people to truly understand that there&#x27;s no solution to certain problems, only tradeoffs.<p>Queues are great, but can lead to catastrophic failure if you don&#x27;t have a good way of handling the queue, so making an active choice about how you handle overload is part of designing a robust and resilient system.<p>Trading off new requests for current requests is, in my experience, a valid strategy for eCommerce for example. We called it &quot;quenching&quot;.</text></comment>	<story><title>Queues don't fix overload (2014)</title><url>https://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kasey_junk</author><text>This is a weird article because it points out that queues don’t solve overload but neither do load shedding or back pressure.<p>All 3 techniques are just different trade offs on what to do in the face of overload. All 3 have negative ramifications for the users of the system. Load shedding reduces availability, back pressure increases complexity and queues increase latency.<p>In “critical” systems you need all 3. And all 3 can be overloaded. Frankly, your load shedding or back pressure system is probably implemented on a queue one layer down the abstraction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>0xbadcafebee</author><text>The only real solution to overload (that is, the eventuality of the system not having enough capacity), in modern systems, is autoscaling. Nobody seems to talk about this, I guess because it&#x27;s taken for granted? But you can literally just keep adding capacity now. We didn&#x27;t really have that before the cloud; you had the servers you bought, and maybe you&#x27;d rush to repurpose some servers to add capacity. Now an algorithm just adds servers magically when your load gets high.<p>Of course the system still has limits. But if you go from zonal to regional to global autoscaling, and you architect specifically to scale up each point in the system using autoscaling, it kind of doesn&#x27;t have a limit? (that any one product would hit, at a global level)<p>In the past I have spun up a duplicate distributed system in another region and just split the traffic between the two. IaC is crazy.</text></comment>
15,570,360	15,564,091	1	2	15,564,057	train	<story><title>SEC fines Zenefits and former CEO for misleading investors</title><url>https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/the-sec-just-fined-a-unicorn-startup-for-the-first-time</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chroem-</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting that I can&#x27;t think of any of these megagrowth tech startups that have gone off without a hitch. Zenefits, Uber, Snapchat, etc. are all in some form of trouble or another, and yet these companies are supposed to be the shining success stories that all other tech startups aspire to.</text></comment>	<story><title>SEC fines Zenefits and former CEO for misleading investors</title><url>https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/the-sec-just-fined-a-unicorn-startup-for-the-first-time</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>runesoerensen</author><text>Here&#x27;s the relevant SEC document: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;admin&#x2F;2017&#x2F;33-10429.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;litigation&#x2F;admin&#x2F;2017&#x2F;33-10429.pdf</a></text></comment>
40,168,871	40,167,332	1	2	40,163,405	train	<story><title>Open Sourcing DOS 4</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/open-sourcing-dos-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.<p>I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS&#x2F;COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).<p>It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src&#x2F;MESSAGES.<p>At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.<p>They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andsoitis</author><text>&gt; At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify.<p>Kids with a hacker mentality (let&#x27;s face it, even in the 80s those of us who hacked around with DOS etc. were the teeny tiny minority) have more options than ever before, including but not limited to FreeDOS, Linux, or a bunch of others <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_open-source_operating_systems" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_open-source_oper...</a><p>Finding it is also super easy if you have the curiosity (and of course a PC and an internet connection).</text></comment>	<story><title>Open Sourcing DOS 4</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/open-sourcing-dos-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pavlov</author><text>When I was nine years old, I liked poking around with a hex editor on my dad’s PC.<p>I didn’t speak English and MS-DOS wasn’t yet localized to Finnish in 1989, so I decided to try translating it myself with a dictionary by manually finding and replacing strings in the SYS&#x2F;COM files. The result worked and my dad was suitably impressed, if probably a bit peeved that nothing worked anymore in the shell as expected (since I had replaced all the basic command names too — “dir” became “hak” and so on).<p>It’s pretty cool to see those strings again in src&#x2F;MESSAGES.<p>At the same time, it feels a bit sad that today’s kids can’t get the same feeling that the computer is really theirs to modify. Modern operating systems don’t run binaries tampered with a hex editor. Most kids are on operating systems like iOS where they can’t even run a C compiler.<p>They can play with code in various sandboxes locally and on the web, but the computer fundamentally belongs to someone else today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zooq_ai</author><text>My favorite Hex Editor hack was when I cracked a Windows software simply by changing the instruction &quot;Equal to&quot; to &quot;Not Equal to&quot; where it matches for Software Key with user entered key.</text></comment>
41,531,298	41,529,342	1	3	41,487,848	train	<story><title>Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations</title><url>https://whiteboard.lasky.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jpl56</author><text>Nice tool! I like the human like handwriting, but I&#x27;d prefer a more adult one.<p>Writing the denominator first looks weird to me, same as writing the square root symbol after what&#x27;s under it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flareback</author><text>Looks like my 5 year old&#x27;s handwriting. Sometimes I actually have no idea what it was writing. Plus the text was overlapping at times</text></comment>	<story><title>Show HN: A whiteboard that writes math equations</title><url>https://whiteboard.lasky.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jpl56</author><text>Nice tool! I like the human like handwriting, but I&#x27;d prefer a more adult one.<p>Writing the denominator first looks weird to me, same as writing the square root symbol after what&#x27;s under it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ilasky</author><text>Agreed the ordering is a bit weird. Working on figuring out a way to adjust that. Thanks for the feedback!</text></comment>
1,182,278	1,182,292	1	2	1,181,742	train	<story><title>New IDE: code bubbles</title><url>http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pohl</author><text>I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've seen a NullPointerException on some line that was constructed by someone who loves the list of methods that automagically pops up for the dot operator:<p><pre><code> foo.bar().baz().qux() </code></pre> ...Grrrrr!</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>IDE's can be neat, but plenty of people seem to use them as crutches to keep on walking through minefields of APIs.<p>Since the IDE remembers all your parameter sequences and types there is also less incentive for developers of APIs to think ahead of time and plan their interface so it is consistent and easy to remember.</text></item><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Programming hasn't been about files for a long time now. That's the reason that we have IDEs in the first place, and why I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor.<p>Any IDE worth its salt will do all the things in that video, except for the little draggable bubbles.</text></item><item><author>Vivtek</author><text>That is a very interesting approach - instead of just presenting <i>files</i>, this IDE is already abstracting out some of the semantic structure for you and presenting code based on its <i>relationships</i>. It's meeting you halfway. <i>And</i> it keeps track of things the way you work - by explicitly acknowledging the task structure of the work, it's again meeting you halfway.<p>This is a really promising start. Very cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>If only there was some combinator for sequencing computations... then you could write:<p><pre><code> foo &#62;&#62;= bar &#62;&#62;= baz &#62;&#62;= quux </code></pre> and there would never be a NullPointerException, because the &#62;&#62;= function could react appropriately when null was encountered!</text></comment>	<story><title>New IDE: code bubbles</title><url>http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pohl</author><text>I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've seen a NullPointerException on some line that was constructed by someone who loves the list of methods that automagically pops up for the dot operator:<p><pre><code> foo.bar().baz().qux() </code></pre> ...Grrrrr!</text></item><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>IDE's can be neat, but plenty of people seem to use them as crutches to keep on walking through minefields of APIs.<p>Since the IDE remembers all your parameter sequences and types there is also less incentive for developers of APIs to think ahead of time and plan their interface so it is consistent and easy to remember.</text></item><item><author>jasonkester</author><text>Programming hasn't been about files for a long time now. That's the reason that we have IDEs in the first place, and why I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor.<p>Any IDE worth its salt will do all the things in that video, except for the little draggable bubbles.</text></item><item><author>Vivtek</author><text>That is a very interesting approach - instead of just presenting <i>files</i>, this IDE is already abstracting out some of the semantic structure for you and presenting code based on its <i>relationships</i>. It's meeting you halfway. <i>And</i> it keeps track of things the way you work - by explicitly acknowledging the task structure of the work, it's again meeting you halfway.<p>This is a really promising start. Very cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcoder</author><text>You know what's even better? When someone who writes that style of code (in C++, no less!) <i>knows</i> that one of the intermediate values could be null, so they use a set of macros involving setjmp and longjmp, and trap SIGFPE, all to implement a fragile sort of try/catch for null de-references.<p>Clever? Insane? Horribly un-portable and prone to breakage depending on compiler, libc, and OS versions? All of the above!<p>(And yes, I have seen this coding style used in multiple projects at a major corporation. It was a favorite of a coder-turned manager, which means it tended to sneak in on any project he supervised.)</text></comment>
29,698,258	29,698,319	1	2	29,697,780	train	<story><title>Risk of myocarditis following sequential COVID-19 vaccinations by age and sex [pdf]</title><url>https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonsarris</author><text>This paper essentially argues that the risk of myocarditis in under-40 males getting 2 shots is greater (perhaps much greater) than the risk of getting it from COVID. There have been similar studies before, but none (that I saw) broken down by age and sex like this.<p>It reads:<p>&gt; Despite more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. However, the notable exception was that in younger males receiving a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher following vaccination than infection, with an additional 101 events estimated following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine compared to 7 events following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.<p>This guy made a graph of their data, which makes it a little more clear:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;VPrasadMDMPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475145220618526729" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;VPrasadMDMPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475145220618526729</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jMyles</author><text>&gt; This guy made a graph of their data, which makes it a little more clear:<p>As another commenter as has pointed out, the graph in question in included in the PDF version of this preprint (which you can see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.medrxiv.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;10.1101&#x2F;2021.12.02.21267156v1.full.pdf+html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.medrxiv.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;10.1101&#x2F;2021.12.02.21267156v...</a>).<p>I want to add: &quot;this guy&quot; is Vinay Prasad, a professor of oncology at UCSF and an incredibly prescient thinker through the COVID-19 pandemic, and someone with whome I&#x27;ve had the joy to correspond and repeatedly be impressed by his straightforward, evidence-based, dry-witty way of thinking, writing, and speaking.<p>He&#x27;s a significant up-and-come in medical science, without a doubt, and someone to follow if you are interested in science-based policy.<p>We had the pleasure of hosting an AMA with him on &#x2F;r&#x2F;lockdownskepticism which you may find enjoyable and educational: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LockdownSkepticism&#x2F;comments&#x2F;m0ll33&#x2F;hi_im_vinay_prasad_from_the_university_of&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;LockdownSkepticism&#x2F;comments&#x2F;m0ll33&#x2F;...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Risk of myocarditis following sequential COVID-19 vaccinations by age and sex [pdf]</title><url>https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonsarris</author><text>This paper essentially argues that the risk of myocarditis in under-40 males getting 2 shots is greater (perhaps much greater) than the risk of getting it from COVID. There have been similar studies before, but none (that I saw) broken down by age and sex like this.<p>It reads:<p>&gt; Despite more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. However, the notable exception was that in younger males receiving a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher following vaccination than infection, with an additional 101 events estimated following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine compared to 7 events following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.<p>This guy made a graph of their data, which makes it a little more clear:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;VPrasadMDMPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475145220618526729" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;VPrasadMDMPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1475145220618526729</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ozdave</author><text>Thanks for the explanation.<p>&gt; argues that the risk of myocarditis in under-40 males getting 2 shots is greater (perhaps much greater) than the risk of getting it from COVID<p>The way I read this is the risk of myocarditis is greater with vaccination, but this does not tell me about the overall risk of serious illness&#x2F;death from Covid for vaxed VS unvaxed.<p>So - risk of myocarditis goes up - but is it still overall safer to be vaccinated for the under 40 males, or not?<p>Not pushing any angle or side here - just looking for clarity (as much as possible).</text></comment>
31,985,313	31,984,879	1	3	31,981,568	train	<story><title>SQLGlot: SQL parser, transpiler, optimizer – translate to Presto, Spark, Hive</title><url>https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>flakiness</author><text>The parser.py [1] has only 1.6k lines. And it is hand-written parser. This size is amazing if it&#x27;s really capable, but I intuitively doubt it. For example, duckdb&#x27;s select.y [2] has 3700 lines, and this is only for SELECT. ZetaSQL&#x27;s grammar file [3] is almost 10k lines.<p>The SQL is a monstrous language. Is there any trick that keeps the code simple?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tobymao&#x2F;sqlglot&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;sqlglot&#x2F;parser.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tobymao&#x2F;sqlglot&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;sqlglot&#x2F;parser....</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;third_party&#x2F;libpg_query&#x2F;grammar&#x2F;statements&#x2F;select.y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;duckdb&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;third_party&#x2F;lib...</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;zetasql&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;zetasql&#x2F;parser&#x2F;bison_parser.y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;zetasql&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;zetasql&#x2F;parser...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>SQLGlot: SQL parser, transpiler, optimizer – translate to Presto, Spark, Hive</title><url>https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RobinL</author><text>SQLGlot is great. We&#x27;ve used it to extend our FOSS probabilistic data linking library[1] so that it is now capable of executing against a variety of SQL backends (Spark, Presto, DuckDB, Sqlite), significantly widening our potential user base.<p>We implement the core statistical model in SQL, and then use SQLGlot to transpile to the target execution engine. One big motivation was to futureproof our work - we&#x27;re no longer tied down to Spark, and so when the &#x27;next big thing&#x27; (GPU accelerated SQL for analytics?) comes along, it should be relatively straightforward to support it by writing another adaptor.<p>Working on this has highlighted some of the really tricky problems associated with translating between SQL engines, and we haven&#x27;t hit any major problems, so kudos to the author!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moj-analytical-services&#x2F;splink&#x2F;tree&#x2F;splink3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;moj-analytical-services&#x2F;splink&#x2F;tree&#x2F;splin...</a></text></comment>
28,053,872	28,054,241	1	3	28,053,358	train	<story><title>Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures</title><url>https://www.gq.com/story/powerplay-tesla-musk-excerpt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>practice9</author><text>The waterfall of misinformation:<p>1) Author fabricates &quot;facts&quot; for his book<p>2) Tabloids copy those &quot;facts&quot; and add filler to fabricate outrage<p>3) Twitter outrage specialists pick these &quot;facts&quot; up and retweet<p>4) Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)</text></item><item><author>iamcreasy</author><text>I guess there are some true facts in this book but I am overall very skeptic of the picture the author is trying to paint or the conclusions he is drawing from those facts.<p>For example, the book says Elon wanted to be Apple&#x27;s CEO post Tesla acquisition on a phone call. But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management.<p>Edit: Also Tim Cook mentioned in an interview that he never spoke with Elon Musk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WA</author><text>You don’t need to read fabricated facts if you simply can follow Elon on Twitter. If you put down the rose-tinted glasses, you see that he puts out a lot of dumb stuff and many lies.</text></comment>	<story><title>Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures</title><url>https://www.gq.com/story/powerplay-tesla-musk-excerpt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>practice9</author><text>The waterfall of misinformation:<p>1) Author fabricates &quot;facts&quot; for his book<p>2) Tabloids copy those &quot;facts&quot; and add filler to fabricate outrage<p>3) Twitter outrage specialists pick these &quot;facts&quot; up and retweet<p>4) Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)</text></item><item><author>iamcreasy</author><text>I guess there are some true facts in this book but I am overall very skeptic of the picture the author is trying to paint or the conclusions he is drawing from those facts.<p>For example, the book says Elon wanted to be Apple&#x27;s CEO post Tesla acquisition on a phone call. But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management.<p>Edit: Also Tim Cook mentioned in an interview that he never spoke with Elon Musk.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belltaco</author><text>&gt;Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)<p>Not just opinion but mental disease diagnoses.</text></comment>
15,549,644	15,549,303	1	2	15,548,877	train	<story><title>Scipy 1.0 released</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-user/2017-October/037357.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nurbl</author><text>Scipy+numpy made it possible for me to mostly stop using the various weird, usually proprietary and often highly specialized data analysis applications that are entrenched in the scientific community, and work with a nice, general purpose programming language instead. It was wonderful!<p>This is close to a decade ago, it kind of blows my mind that only now scipy 1.0 is released. Not that it matters, I&#x27;m still a user, thanks team scipy!</text></comment>	<story><title>Scipy 1.0 released</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/scipy-user/2017-October/037357.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oddeyed</author><text>It&#x27;s really momentous that at LAST there is a Windows binary distribution available on PyPI. `pip install scipy numpy matplotlib` finally just works when you install Python on Windows.</text></comment>
16,300,652	16,300,599	1	2	16,299,903	train	<story><title>iMac Pro 18-core Follow Up Review</title><url>http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180202/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>plg</author><text>A lot of the negative comments wrt cost are versions of this: what a ripoff, you can get better components for way less money in some other PC and&#x2F;or if you build your own.<p>That&#x27;s nice but it&#x27;s not Apple&#x27;s market. Apple&#x27;s market is not other PCs, and it&#x27;s not build your own.<p>This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around (1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their market share has grown and it continues to grow.<p>Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that&#x27;s a ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff!<p>Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing to spend their money on Apple products.<p>They are clearly doing something right.<p>If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market. And that is ok.</text></comment>	<story><title>iMac Pro 18-core Follow Up Review</title><url>http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180202/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blt</author><text>Sounds great, but I still have trouble with the idea of a $10,000 machine that is permanently married to one monitor and unexpandable. If I&#x27;m spending that much on a computer I want PCI slots. Especially now that it&#x27;s common to keep a desktop for 5+ years.</text></comment>
4,052,521	4,052,493	1	3	4,051,546	train	<story><title>Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=live</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blitzprog</author><text>The bp editor has similar features (code bubbles), though dynamic evaluation and code bubble workspaces are still in development. And I'm pretty sure it won't cost me 300k to finish it. <a href="http://blitzprog.org/" rel="nofollow">http://blitzprog.org/</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=live</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gaius</author><text>I would love to run Light Table on a Surface <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx</a> Feature request! :-)</text></comment>
28,706,504	28,706,846	1	2	28,692,026	train	<story><title>Why is everything so hard in a large organization?</title><url>https://graphthinking.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-is-everything-so-hard-in-large.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>It&#x27;s like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News.<p>Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in &quot;useless&quot; beaurocracy. Why can&#x27;t they just let me do it!?<p>Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad.<p>Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don&#x27;t ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots.<p>That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don&#x27;t think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>It&#x27;s hard because it&#x27;s meant to be hard.<p>Once you have a large org that&#x27;s making money, you don&#x27;t really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there&#x27;s annual filings and there&#x27;s still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better&#x2F;worse? How does this team interact with that? It&#x27;s really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time.<p>So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction.<p>The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can&#x27;t see a way to get those improvements implemented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>detaro</author><text>The main criticism of wikipedia here afaik is of &quot;deletionism&quot;, and I don&#x27;t think that framing fits for that - most people are completely happy if other people also get to make articles about their pet interests.</text></comment>	<story><title>Why is everything so hard in a large organization?</title><url>https://graphthinking.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-is-everything-so-hard-in-large.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>It&#x27;s like the complaints about Wikipedia you read on Hacker News.<p>Someone smart who knows something wants to add it and gets tangled up in &quot;useless&quot; beaurocracy. Why can&#x27;t they just let me do it!?<p>Because if they did just let people do stuff, then lots of other people you consider idiots would have already done things you consider stupid and or bad.<p>Basically everyone wants rules for the idiots so they don&#x27;t ruin things and at the same time to not be included in the list of idiots.<p>That would sound harsh though, so mostly people just moan about rules, rather than them not being exempted, but I don&#x27;t think anyone genuinely wants the rules to be dropped for everyone.</text></item><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>It&#x27;s hard because it&#x27;s meant to be hard.<p>Once you have a large org that&#x27;s making money, you don&#x27;t really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there&#x27;s annual filings and there&#x27;s still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better&#x2F;worse? How does this team interact with that? It&#x27;s really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time.<p>So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction.<p>The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can&#x27;t see a way to get those improvements implemented.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>im3w1l</author><text>Wikipedia doesn&#x27;t have an idiot problem. It has a smart people with an agenda problem.</text></comment>
12,606,615	12,605,676	1	2	12,605,421	train	<story><title>New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited UberPool in Manhattan for $200</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/09/27/unlimited-uber-rides-new-york-100-dollars-subscription-october/#4be2af4b570a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ixtli</author><text>Before you get all excited about this, it&#x27;s ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you&#x27;re paying 10 (edit: obviously 100&#x2F;20 = 5, it&#x27;s early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.<p>There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +&#x2F;- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn&#x27;t actually save a worthwhile amount of money.<p>Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here&#x27;s the link directly to the promo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;plus&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;plus&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kdamken</author><text>Also, uberpool is terrible. Can easily make a 20 minute ride 60 minutes depending on how many other fares they pick up&#x2F;drop off on the way.<p>I took one into the city once to try it out. Normally a 20 minute drive, we stopped and picked up 2 other fares. They both got dropped off before me (which is insane), and it ended up taking over an hour.<p>The worst part? The drive told me that if we dropped off one and another came up, he&#x27;d have to pick that up too before dropping me off.</text></comment>	<story><title>New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited UberPool in Manhattan for $200</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/09/27/unlimited-uber-rides-new-york-100-dollars-subscription-october/#4be2af4b570a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ixtli</author><text>Before you get all excited about this, it&#x27;s ONLY UberPOOL and your destination must start and end in Manhattan. So if you use this to commute for two weeks you&#x27;re paying 10 (edit: obviously 100&#x2F;20 = 5, it&#x27;s early. leave me alone) dollars flat for a cab ride that you share and will take longer than normal because of the overhead of splitting the ride.<p>There are certainly some people for whom this will be cost effective, especially if they spend most of their day traveling to places they can be 5-10 minutes +&#x2F;- their target arrival. However for people like me who live on the east side of Manhattan and commute to FiDi it doesn&#x27;t actually save a worthwhile amount of money.<p>Also forbes is incredibly spammy so here&#x27;s the link directly to the promo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;plus&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;plus&#x2F;newyork&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djrogers</author><text>You forgot that people commute 2 ways in your math, so 2 weeks of commutes would be 20 trips coming out to $5&#x2F;trip, not 10.</text></comment>
10,340,234	10,340,319	1	2	10,339,074	train	<story><title>Reddit Presents: Upvoted</title><url>http://upvoted.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>There was a recent allegation that the Reddit administration had encouraged vote brigading with Tom Hanks&#x27; comments: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Obafhpc.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Obafhpc.png</a><p>From the looks of the Upvoted front page, looks like they&#x27;re doing it as a content marketing strategy, which doesn&#x27;t bode well. Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors <i>despise</i>.<p>(Disclosure: although I have done a LOT of work analyzing Reddit [<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;reddit-bigquery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;reddit-bigquery&#x2F;</a>], I have not been approached to write anything for Upvoted)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexis</author><text>The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it&#x27;s so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;blog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3npxm4&#x2F;introducing_upvoted_a_redditorial_publication&#x2F;cvq6trw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;blog&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3npxm4&#x2F;introducing_up...</a><p>As for Tom, here&#x27;s what I posted on r&#x2F;defaultmods addressing that concern.<p>&gt;&gt;<p>I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site.<p>I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we&#x27;ve run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They&#x27;ve also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates&#x27; for instance had 368% higher CTR than average).<p>+That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch +Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r&#x2F;infographics +Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r&#x2F;Music thread<p>Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We&#x27;re not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look.<p>To be clear: we&#x27;re not paying them. They&#x27;re coming because we&#x27;re actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community.<p>Wynter (u&#x2F;808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We&#x27;re excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too.<p>edit: (See, I&#x27;m already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)</text></comment>	<story><title>Reddit Presents: Upvoted</title><url>http://upvoted.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>There was a recent allegation that the Reddit administration had encouraged vote brigading with Tom Hanks&#x27; comments: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Obafhpc.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Obafhpc.png</a><p>From the looks of the Upvoted front page, looks like they&#x27;re doing it as a content marketing strategy, which doesn&#x27;t bode well. Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors <i>despise</i>.<p>(Disclosure: although I have done a LOT of work analyzing Reddit [<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;reddit-bigquery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;minimaxir.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;reddit-bigquery&#x2F;</a>], I have not been approached to write anything for Upvoted)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timdorr</author><text>&gt; Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise.<p>Primarily because Buzzfeed just copy-pastes content from Reddit with minimal credit. Upvoted at least looks to be providing genuinely improved-upon content with strong attribution linkage. To me, it gets rid of a lot of the scuzzy-ness associated with Buzzfeed, so I&#x27;m all for it.</text></comment>
18,742,800	18,742,235	1	3	18,740,986	train	<story><title>What Is Glitter?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>Glitter can apparently be used to help solve crimes, according to Wikipedia&#x27;s &quot;glitter&quot; article [1]:<p>&gt; Due to its unique characteristics, glitter has also proven to be useful forensic evidence. Because of the tens of thousands of different commercial glitters, identical glitter particles can be compelling evidence that a suspect has been at a crime scene.<p>It links to this review article on glitter from a forensic point of view [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glitter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glitter</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.nfstc.org&#x2F;trace&#x2F;docs&#x2F;final&#x2F;Blackledge_Glitter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.nfstc.org&#x2F;trace&#x2F;docs&#x2F;final&#x2F;Blackledge_Glitt...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>What Is Glitter?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>&gt; I have no idea how humans figured out how to do that, or why it occurred to them to even try, but it sounds expensive.<p>I had to check this wasn&#x27;t Dave Barry writing.<p>Anyway, this seems to have genuinely been a space age invetion, aluminised mylar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BoPET" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;BoPET</a><p>(There is no item of &quot;futuristic clothing&quot; that pins a piece of visual SF to a particular point in history in the 1960s quite like this material. Especially when used for miniskirts.)</text></comment>
31,195,764	31,196,067	1	3	31,194,980	train	<story><title>Twitter admits it overstated users for years ahead of Elon Musk takeover</title><url>https://www.axios.com/twitter-overstated-users-elon-musk-deal-f7cecef1-b156-4998-91ff-37f6f56c82e0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tristanj</author><text>I looked at the actual data and concluded this is a non-story. Twitter overstated users by &lt;1% each quarter the past 2 years. That is not an egregious accounting error. This happened because they double counted users who used linked accounts.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;twitter-announces-first-quarter-2022-120000391.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;twitter-announces-first-quart...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Twitter admits it overstated users for years ahead of Elon Musk takeover</title><url>https://www.axios.com/twitter-overstated-users-elon-musk-deal-f7cecef1-b156-4998-91ff-37f6f56c82e0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>djyaz1200</author><text>Twitter needs to get smaller to get better, specifically they need only real people (no bots). While this usage misstatement is minor it points to a longstanding directional problem whereby they focused too much on vanity metrics. I&#x27;d argue this a reason why they didn&#x27;t do a better job challenged all the fake&#x2F;bot accounts because those are great at pumping up vanity metrics.</text></comment>
3,232,566	3,232,541	1	3	3,232,420	train	<story><title>Congress: Trading stock on inside information?</title><url>http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57323527/congress-trading-stock-on-inside-information/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>orijing</author><text>Another interesting point is that Congress can actually influence outcomes. For example, if you (the congressperson) have a lot of cash invested in the defense department, you'd likely push for as much defense spending as possible, even if it it's against the best interests of the nation.<p>I think it's time to end that. Public officials should not be able to influence their financial portfolio. At the very least, every trade, investment, position by an elected official should be made public so that we are aware of what we're voting for: Not a representative of ourselves, but of industry and their pockets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewfelix</author><text>That is f<i></i>*ing remarkable. In Australia there are strict rules governing conflict of interest. If there is even a hint of someone gaining financial benefit through their position they are hounded by the press and their political opposition. Of course parliamentarians find other ways to make money such as fake tenders. But it isn't as flagrant as this.<p>I really feel for you guys over in the US. These are your representatives...they sound like mafioso.</text></comment>	<story><title>Congress: Trading stock on inside information?</title><url>http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57323527/congress-trading-stock-on-inside-information/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>orijing</author><text>Another interesting point is that Congress can actually influence outcomes. For example, if you (the congressperson) have a lot of cash invested in the defense department, you'd likely push for as much defense spending as possible, even if it it's against the best interests of the nation.<p>I think it's time to end that. Public officials should not be able to influence their financial portfolio. At the very least, every trade, investment, position by an elected official should be made public so that we are aware of what we're voting for: Not a representative of ourselves, but of industry and their pockets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>espeed</author><text>You can make as much on a financial crisis as you can a bull market if you know in advance or can influence it -- this is a key component in the "Great American Bubble Machine" (<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405" rel="nofollow">http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...</a>).</text></comment>
41,342,596	41,342,593	1	3	41,341,797	train	<story><title>Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm</title><url>https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hkmaxpro</author><text>Related projects (from niri’s README):<p>PaperWM (Gnome) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paperwm&#x2F;PaperWM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paperwm&#x2F;PaperWM</a><p>karousel (KDE) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;peterfajdiga&#x2F;karousel">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;peterfajdiga&#x2F;karousel</a><p>niri (wayland) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;YaLTeR&#x2F;niri">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;YaLTeR&#x2F;niri</a><p>hyprscroller (hyprland plugin) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dawsers&#x2F;hyprscroller">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dawsers&#x2F;hyprscroller</a><p>hyprslidr (hyprland plugin) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;magus&#x2F;hyprslidr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;magus&#x2F;hyprslidr</a><p>PaperWM.spoon (MacOS) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mogenson&#x2F;PaperWM.spoon">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mogenson&#x2F;PaperWM.spoon</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm</title><url>https://spwhitton.name/tech/code/papersway/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>3np</author><text>Cool project!<p>Feedback: I highly suggest a project rename to something that does not have &quot;sway&quot; in the name. Reading the source it seems like it actully has no dependency, API compatibility, or direct interaction with either Sway, i3, or PaperWM?<p>Sway and i3 just happen to be the most well-known tiling WMs of the hour. There are a bunch of other tiling WM which seem like they will work just fine with Papersway. The docs make it seem like it should only be expected to work with Sway and i3. The possibility is high that most users will not look beyond the &quot;NAME&quot; section before bouncing if they are not already using either of those two and also already familiar with PaperWM.<p>Less urgently in the docs, it would be nice to be able to get an rough idea about what the project does and the &quot;pitch&quot; without having the reader research PaperWM first.<p>Why define it strictly in terms of other projects? Why not be usable with other tiling WMs?</text></comment>
40,694,449	40,694,429	1	2	40,690,718	train	<story><title>Engineer's solar panels are breaking efficiency records</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/solar-panels-breaking-efficiency-records</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oceanplexian</author><text>It’s only cheap if the land is free, transmission costs are free, and your power needs are intermittent. None of those are true in reality.<p>The “solar is the cheapest form of energy” is a marketing gimmick. If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>But even if we reduce installation and labor costs (and as other comments have mentioned, weight may not be the biggest factor here), my understanding is that solar is already the cheapest energy source per kW by a pretty significant margin. The problem with getting it to replace carbon-based fuel sources is all the other issues GP comment mentioned re storage, grid, etc.<p>That said, it&#x27;s not like one thing is dependent on the other, so good to see efficiency increasing regardless.</text></item><item><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>No, we have not. Half of the current cost is due to installation and labor, so any weight reductions will have a huge impact on cost. Perovskite solar cells have the opportunity to have a 10 X weight reduction.</text></item><item><author>szvsw</author><text>&gt; “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”<p>It’s so easy to forget this and the massive scale and its relevance at the massive scale of the systems we need to (and are, to some extent) roll out. It also seems promising when these breakthroughs are happening in R&amp;D groups of industry players trying to dogfood it rather than in labs.<p>At the same time though, it’s starting to feel to me, to some extent, like we have <i>kind of</i> solved solar? It’s everything else around it that needs to advance, particularly grid infra, batteries and electrifying the general class of difficult-to-electrify problems (steel, concrete, freight). I might be totally off-base and blinkered with that assessment.<p>Edit: I guess I should try to clarify my feeling after reading some of the responses below: it feels like solar tech is not really the limiting factor in renewable scaling, and that advances in solar efficiencies won’t <i>drastically&#x2F;meaningfully</i> simplify the other challenges&#x2F;limiting factors we currently face (grid infra&#x2F;batteries, electrification of mfg, duck curve, etc). Children point out that space and cost savings from efficiency gains in solar may still be significant at grid scale though! Still, this is very cool progress to read about!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pulvinar</author><text>If it&#x27;s a marketing gimmick, they&#x27;re fooling a lot large power companies:<p>&quot;Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=61424" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eia.gov&#x2F;todayinenergy&#x2F;detail.php?id=61424</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Engineer's solar panels are breaking efficiency records</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/solar-panels-breaking-efficiency-records</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>oceanplexian</author><text>It’s only cheap if the land is free, transmission costs are free, and your power needs are intermittent. None of those are true in reality.<p>The “solar is the cheapest form of energy” is a marketing gimmick. If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money.</text></item><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>But even if we reduce installation and labor costs (and as other comments have mentioned, weight may not be the biggest factor here), my understanding is that solar is already the cheapest energy source per kW by a pretty significant margin. The problem with getting it to replace carbon-based fuel sources is all the other issues GP comment mentioned re storage, grid, etc.<p>That said, it&#x27;s not like one thing is dependent on the other, so good to see efficiency increasing regardless.</text></item><item><author>mensetmanusman</author><text>No, we have not. Half of the current cost is due to installation and labor, so any weight reductions will have a huge impact on cost. Perovskite solar cells have the opportunity to have a 10 X weight reduction.</text></item><item><author>szvsw</author><text>&gt; “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”<p>It’s so easy to forget this and the massive scale and its relevance at the massive scale of the systems we need to (and are, to some extent) roll out. It also seems promising when these breakthroughs are happening in R&amp;D groups of industry players trying to dogfood it rather than in labs.<p>At the same time though, it’s starting to feel to me, to some extent, like we have <i>kind of</i> solved solar? It’s everything else around it that needs to advance, particularly grid infra, batteries and electrifying the general class of difficult-to-electrify problems (steel, concrete, freight). I might be totally off-base and blinkered with that assessment.<p>Edit: I guess I should try to clarify my feeling after reading some of the responses below: it feels like solar tech is not really the limiting factor in renewable scaling, and that advances in solar efficiencies won’t <i>drastically&#x2F;meaningfully</i> simplify the other challenges&#x2F;limiting factors we currently face (grid infra&#x2F;batteries, electrification of mfg, duck curve, etc). Children point out that space and cost savings from efficiency gains in solar may still be significant at grid scale though! Still, this is very cool progress to read about!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bruce511</author><text>While land isn&#x27;t free, solar doesn&#x27;t need land, it needs sun. By which I mean there&#x27;s an awful lot of free rooftop space available, and a lot of space which would benefit from a roof (like car parks at the mall).<p>So it&#x27;s not competing for land against say buildings or agriculture.<p>Now sure, the owner of the roof may want some rent etc, but that really doesn&#x27;t alter the cost of the energy, it just spreads the benefit.</text></comment>
21,812,562	21,811,761	1	2	21,810,145	train	<story><title>The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE)</title><url>https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keithwhor</author><text>I love this. I remember reading an anecdote of Gates discussing his relationship with Buffet — there may be a video interview — where Gates was astounded at how empty Buffet’s calendar was.<p>As a founder, I’m more of a Buffet. I schedule time when and where necessary (which is, admittedly, most of my time most weeks) but I hate feeling as if I’m restricted to obeying numbers in a database in order to function.<p>It fills me with an inordinate amount of joy to imagine the simplicity of a world in which you’d only return home to eat. I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.<p>Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings.<p>[Edit] Apparently, this anecdote is very famous and very Google-able:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;warren-buffett-taught-bill-gates-about-time-management-by-sharing-his-blank-calendar.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;warren-buffett-taught-bill-g...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BiteCode_dev</author><text>To me a calendar is not a constraint. It&#x27;s a god send. I don&#x27;t feel trapped with all the things on my calendar: I chose to put them in there so I want to do them.<p>The reason I have a calendar is not to structure my life at all. It&#x27;s just so I can forget all that stuff while I have no reason to think about it. Set it in the calendar, forget it. It will pop up in the morning, when I need it.<p>It&#x27;s so relaxing.</text></comment>	<story><title>The town's so full of these confounded dials (195 BCE)</title><url>https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/hacked-days</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>keithwhor</author><text>I love this. I remember reading an anecdote of Gates discussing his relationship with Buffet — there may be a video interview — where Gates was astounded at how empty Buffet’s calendar was.<p>As a founder, I’m more of a Buffet. I schedule time when and where necessary (which is, admittedly, most of my time most weeks) but I hate feeling as if I’m restricted to obeying numbers in a database in order to function.<p>It fills me with an inordinate amount of joy to imagine the simplicity of a world in which you’d only return home to eat. I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.<p>Wild how only a few lines of prose from people that existed thousands of years before us can evoke these sorts of feelings.<p>[Edit] Apparently, this anecdote is very famous and very Google-able:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;warren-buffett-taught-bill-gates-about-time-management-by-sharing-his-blank-calendar.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;warren-buffett-taught-bill-g...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ehnto</author><text>&gt; I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.<p>This is exactly how I spent my youth, and I try to use how I felt those moments as a comparison for how engaged I with the real world at any point. If I find myself too decoupled from real life and too deep into work, I will extract myself by leaving the house without any devices or any place to be. I love those moments. I no longer carry a smartphone with me, just a standalone smartwatch for incoming calls, so that&#x27;s actually made those moments to be any moment I&#x27;m not at my desk.<p>It&#x27;s why travel, even local travel, is so important to me. I can live moment to moment, experiencing life in simple visceral terms. How do I feel right now, and what does that make me want to do? Well, let&#x27;s do that then.</text></comment>
20,485,336	20,484,819	1	2	20,484,197	train	<story><title>Drug cartels use dollar bill serial numbers as random keys for delivery receipts</title><url>https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/1151849118790246402</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carrozo</author><text>Banksy uses a similar system to authenticate his work:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;di-faced-note.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;di-faced-note.html</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Drug cartels use dollar bill serial numbers as random keys for delivery receipts</title><url>https://twitter.com/arawnsley/status/1151849118790246402</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PeterisP</author><text>The key part here seems to be protection against all kinds of message interception attacks - if I listen in on the conversation and hear that the code is 12345678, then I can&#x27;t easily create a dollar bill with that code on it, and probably even the FBI can&#x27;t do it quickly enough for it to be useful.</text></comment>
7,226,520	7,226,238	1	3	7,225,945	train	<story><title>CandySwipe Open Letter to King regarding trademark</title><url>http://www.candyswipe.com/king.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>It would be interesting if Apple would step in here. They could, given their obscenely vague appstore &quot;rules&quot;, simply delete the CandyCrush Saga game out of the store as it is a copy of an existing game. That would force King to be a bit more creative in their copying in the future.<p>That said, &quot;protecting&quot; games has been a problem, almost literally forever. On the one hand you want folks to benefit from there work, on the other hand sometimes a &#x27;derivative&#x27; is a much much better game. So do you cut off that like we&#x27;ve done with software patents? Or not?</text></comment>	<story><title>CandySwipe Open Letter to King regarding trademark</title><url>http://www.candyswipe.com/king.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kzahel</author><text>That&#x27;s pretty dirty. If you have no legitimate claim to a trademark, just buy an existing slightly related trademark and use that!</text></comment>
15,862,914	15,863,188	1	2	15,861,224	train	<story><title>Brain abnormalities found in victims of US embassy attack in Cuba</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/06/us-embassy-attack-cuba-brain-abnormalities-victims</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>QAPereo</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microwave_auditory_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microwave_auditory_effect</a><p>This is the best bet I&#x27;ve seen since this story broke.</text></item><item><author>mccoyspace</author><text>This is such a fascinating (and disturbing) situation. And quite mysterious. High frequency ultrasound is used routinely in medicine and has never been shown to change brain tissue. Infrasound has some effect on tissue but its probably overstated. (the infamous &#x27;brown note&#x27; [1]. Other sonic weapons rely on volume&#x2F;amplitude. None of this seems to be the case here.<p>Another really interesting point is the description of the hyper localized nature of the sound -- present in one part of the room and not another. Its really hard to localize a sound signal, as anyone who has worked with parabolic speakers can attest. Yes, there can be focal points, but the sound definitely drifts out to the surrounding areas to a significant degree. One example of hyperlocalized sound perception is Lamont Young&#x27;s &#x27;Dream House&#x27; installation in NYC [2] Although not captured in video documentation, there are distinct and significant microtonal shifts that are easily perceptible as you move through the space caused by standing waves produced through the interaction of the tone generators and the architecture. But this happens within the context of a loud drone that fills the whole room. Not at all what is described by the diplomats and family members.<p>I hope they can get to the bottom of this and I hope that more information is made public.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_note" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_note</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WC6bhnu5Luc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WC6bhnu5Luc</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wybiral</author><text>If this is true there&#x27;s a way we can block the effects...<p>&gt; In 1962, Allan H. Frey discovered that the microwave auditory effect, i.e., the reception of the induced sounds by radio-frequency electromagnetic signals heard as clicks and buzzes, can be blocked by a patch of wire mesh (rather than foil) placed above the temporal lobe.<p>I&#x27;m ready <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pub&#x2F;images&#x2F;weirdalfoil_2322.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pub&#x2F;images&#x2F;weirdalfoil_232...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>Brain abnormalities found in victims of US embassy attack in Cuba</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/06/us-embassy-attack-cuba-brain-abnormalities-victims</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>QAPereo</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microwave_auditory_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Microwave_auditory_effect</a><p>This is the best bet I&#x27;ve seen since this story broke.</text></item><item><author>mccoyspace</author><text>This is such a fascinating (and disturbing) situation. And quite mysterious. High frequency ultrasound is used routinely in medicine and has never been shown to change brain tissue. Infrasound has some effect on tissue but its probably overstated. (the infamous &#x27;brown note&#x27; [1]. Other sonic weapons rely on volume&#x2F;amplitude. None of this seems to be the case here.<p>Another really interesting point is the description of the hyper localized nature of the sound -- present in one part of the room and not another. Its really hard to localize a sound signal, as anyone who has worked with parabolic speakers can attest. Yes, there can be focal points, but the sound definitely drifts out to the surrounding areas to a significant degree. One example of hyperlocalized sound perception is Lamont Young&#x27;s &#x27;Dream House&#x27; installation in NYC [2] Although not captured in video documentation, there are distinct and significant microtonal shifts that are easily perceptible as you move through the space caused by standing waves produced through the interaction of the tone generators and the architecture. But this happens within the context of a loud drone that fills the whole room. Not at all what is described by the diplomats and family members.<p>I hope they can get to the bottom of this and I hope that more information is made public.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_note" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Brown_note</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WC6bhnu5Luc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WC6bhnu5Luc</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hwillis</author><text>White matter is the deep part of the brain. Microwaves wouldn&#x27;t penetrate more than a couple cm.<p>Personally I think something much more benign is probably the answer. Maybe someone introduced drugs into their food&#x2F;water? Sometimes a noise is just a noise.</text></comment>
1,840,131	1,840,139	1	2	1,840,043	train	<story><title>Mark Zuckerberg on What Hollywood Doesn't Get About Silicon Valley</title><url>http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2010/10/mark-zuckerberg-on-what-hollywood-doesnt-get-about-silicon-valley.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>michael_nielsen</author><text>Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. I'm quite sure he's right when it comes to some people in Hollywood, possibly even many of the most powerful people. But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Sorkin is a hacker - just in a different medium.<p>None of which is to say that Sorkin's portrayal of Zuckerberg is at all accurate. In the West Wing, Sorkin once wrote: "You think I think that an artist's job is to speak the truth [but] an artist's job... is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention." I think he's quite right, but it's a heck of a philosophy if you're making a movie about someone still living.</text></comment>	<story><title>Mark Zuckerberg on What Hollywood Doesn't Get About Silicon Valley</title><url>http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2010/10/mark-zuckerberg-on-what-hollywood-doesnt-get-about-silicon-valley.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewljohnson</author><text>What most hackers don't understand is that they do in fact have deep-seated psychological motives for all the things they want to build.<p>I don't know if Sorkin's yarn was even close to reality, or whether Zuck's angst at the time was merely coincidental with the development of FaceSmash. But the motivation for building Facebook or anything else is always more complex than "I thought it would be cool."<p>Hollywood may have missed the point, but they were right to look for one.</text></comment>
41,025,906	41,025,207	1	2	41,021,366	train	<story><title>Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed</title><url>https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1814343502886477857</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rco8786</author><text>Number 4 continues to be the most surprising bit to me. I could not fathom having a process that involves deploying to 8.5 million remote machines simultaneously.<p>Bugs in code I can almost always understand and forgive, even the ones that seem like they’d be obvious with hindsight. But this is just an egregious lack of the most basic rollout standards.</text></item><item><author>mtlmtlmtlmtl</author><text>There&#x27;s at least five different things that went wrong simultaneously.<p>1. Poorly written code in the kernel module crashed the whole OS, and kept trying to parse the corrupted files, causing a boot loop. Instead of handling the error gracefully and deleting&#x2F;marking the files as corrupt.<p>2. Either the corrupted files slipped through internal testing, or there is no internal testing.<p>3. Individual settings for when to apply such updates were apparently ignored. It&#x27;s unclear whether this was a glitch or standard practice. Either way I consider it a bug(it&#x27;s just a matter of whether it&#x27;s a software bug or a bug in their procedures).<p>4. This was pushed out everywhere simultaneously instead of staggered to limit any potential damage.<p>5. Whatever caused the corruption in the first place, which is anyone&#x27;s guess.</text></item><item><author>delta_p_delta_x</author><text>The moment I read &#x27;it is a <i>content update</i> that causes the BSOD, deleting it solves the problem&#x27;, I was immediately willing to bet a hundred quid (for the non-British, that&#x27;s £100) that it was a combination of said bad binary data and a poorly-written parser that didn&#x27;t error out correctly upon reading invalid data (in this case, read an array of pointers, didn&#x27;t verify that all of them were both non-null and pointed to valid data&#x2F;code).<p>In the past ten years or so of having done somewhat serious computing and zero cybersecurity whatsoever, I have my mind concluded, feel free to disagree.<p>Approximately <i>100%</i> of CVEs, crashes, bugs, slowdowns, and pain points of computing have to do with various forms of deserialising binary data back into machine-readable data structures. All because a) human programmers forget to account for edge cases, and b) imperative programming languages allow us to do so.<p>This includes everything from: decompression algorithms; font outline readers; image, video, and audio parsers; video game data parsers; XML and HTML parsers; the various certificate&#x2F;signature&#x2F;key parsers in OpenSSL (and derivatives); and now, this CrowdStrike content parser in its EDR program.<p>That wager stands, by the way, and I&#x27;m happy to up the ante by £50 to account for my second theory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbreese</author><text>For me, number 1 is the worst of the bunch. You should always expect that there will be bugs in processes, input files, etc… the fact that their code wasn’t robust enough to recognize a corrupted file and not crash is inexcusable. Especially in kernel code that is so widely deployed.<p>If any one of the five points above hadn’t happened, this event would have been avoided. However, if number 1 had been addressed - any of the others could have happened (or all at the same time) and it would have been fine.<p>I understand that we should assume that bugs will be present anywhere, which is why staggered deployments are also important. If there had been staggered deployments, the. The damage would have happened, but it would have been localized. I think security people would argue against a staged deployment though, as if it were discovered what the new definitions protected against, an exploit could be developed quickly to put those servers that aren’t in the “canary” group at risk. (At least in theory — I can’t see how staggering deployment over a 6-12 hour window would have been that risky).</text></comment>	<story><title>Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed</title><url>https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1814343502886477857</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rco8786</author><text>Number 4 continues to be the most surprising bit to me. I could not fathom having a process that involves deploying to 8.5 million remote machines simultaneously.<p>Bugs in code I can almost always understand and forgive, even the ones that seem like they’d be obvious with hindsight. But this is just an egregious lack of the most basic rollout standards.</text></item><item><author>mtlmtlmtlmtl</author><text>There&#x27;s at least five different things that went wrong simultaneously.<p>1. Poorly written code in the kernel module crashed the whole OS, and kept trying to parse the corrupted files, causing a boot loop. Instead of handling the error gracefully and deleting&#x2F;marking the files as corrupt.<p>2. Either the corrupted files slipped through internal testing, or there is no internal testing.<p>3. Individual settings for when to apply such updates were apparently ignored. It&#x27;s unclear whether this was a glitch or standard practice. Either way I consider it a bug(it&#x27;s just a matter of whether it&#x27;s a software bug or a bug in their procedures).<p>4. This was pushed out everywhere simultaneously instead of staggered to limit any potential damage.<p>5. Whatever caused the corruption in the first place, which is anyone&#x27;s guess.</text></item><item><author>delta_p_delta_x</author><text>The moment I read &#x27;it is a <i>content update</i> that causes the BSOD, deleting it solves the problem&#x27;, I was immediately willing to bet a hundred quid (for the non-British, that&#x27;s £100) that it was a combination of said bad binary data and a poorly-written parser that didn&#x27;t error out correctly upon reading invalid data (in this case, read an array of pointers, didn&#x27;t verify that all of them were both non-null and pointed to valid data&#x2F;code).<p>In the past ten years or so of having done somewhat serious computing and zero cybersecurity whatsoever, I have my mind concluded, feel free to disagree.<p>Approximately <i>100%</i> of CVEs, crashes, bugs, slowdowns, and pain points of computing have to do with various forms of deserialising binary data back into machine-readable data structures. All because a) human programmers forget to account for edge cases, and b) imperative programming languages allow us to do so.<p>This includes everything from: decompression algorithms; font outline readers; image, video, and audio parsers; video game data parsers; XML and HTML parsers; the various certificate&#x2F;signature&#x2F;key parsers in OpenSSL (and derivatives); and now, this CrowdStrike content parser in its EDR program.<p>That wager stands, by the way, and I&#x27;m happy to up the ante by £50 to account for my second theory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thundershart</author><text>Surely, CrowdStrike&#x27;s safety posture for update rollouts is in serious need of improvement. No argument there.<p>But is there any responsibility for the clients consuming the data to have verified these updates prior to taking them in production? I haven&#x27;t worn the sysadmin hat in a while now, but back when I was responsible for the upkeep of many thousands of machines, we&#x27;d never have blindly consumed updates without at least a basic smoke test in a production-adjacent UAT type environment. Core OS updates, firmware updates, third party software, whatever -- all of it would get at least some cursory smoke testing before allowing it to hit production.<p>On the other hand, given EDR&#x27;s real-world purpose and the speed at which novel attacks propagate, there&#x27;s probably a compelling argument for always taking the latest definition&#x2F;signature updates as soon as they&#x27;re available, even in your production environments.<p>I&#x27;m certainly not saying that CrowdStrike did nothing wrong here, that&#x27;s clearly not the case. But if conventional wisdom says that you should kick the tires on the latest batch of OS updates from Microsoft in a test environment, maybe that same rationale should apply to EDR agents?</text></comment>
15,993,620	15,992,510	1	2	15,991,483	train	<story><title>By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16812152/okcupid-usernames-controversy-anonymity-privacy-dating-online</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>If you think <i>this</i> is big, by the way, make sure you take a look at their post from December 11th:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theblog.okcupid.com&#x2F;why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-message-f14d492e7853" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theblog.okcupid.com&#x2F;why-okcupid-is-changing-how-you-...</a><p>They&#x27;ve completely obliterated the way messaging works. You will never see a message from someone unless you&#x27;re either looking at their profile or you&#x27;ve &quot;liked&quot; them.<p>It&#x27;s an interesting model. But it&#x27;s also essentially driving interaction through the matching bottleneck, which is at odds with the substance-over-selfie slogan, since it turns incentives towards profile enhancement rather than investment in messaging. And it&#x27;s also the kind of change you can&#x27;t just blog-post explain away and expect to keep your existing users, just like the name change. It would be better suited for a new product than an existing one.<p>Then again, maybe dating sites work best with massive turnover in userbase anyway. And even if not, that doesn&#x27;t mean this isn&#x27;t some of the sharpest possible product management out there. At least in the sense of responding to the incentives for people who want to develop their product careers, not necessarily in terms of actually improving the product.</text></comment>	<story><title>By ditching usernames, OKCupid is removing a crucial protective barrier</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/22/16812152/okcupid-usernames-controversy-anonymity-privacy-dating-online</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oxplot</author><text>I think most people who&#x27;ve commented on the OKC post here and on their blog, are missing a few points:<p>1. Names can be faked. I don&#x27;t see any long term and practical way for OKC to enforce real names (as FB and G+ showed in the past). So this is really a non-issue.<p>2. Photos are much more problematic because it&#x27;s assumed that one cannot search based on a photo. A 5 second Google Image search on profile pictures from OKC however shows that a lot of people re-use photos they post on various social sites. It takes one of those places to have your real name next to your photo and you&#x27;re identified! Google Image search is just the tip of the iceberg. It&#x27;s getting easier and faster every day to compile database of photos and run a AI algo on it to recognize faces.<p>Any company who boasts protecting privacy of its users ought to find a way to protect against facial recognition.</text></comment>
22,369,346	22,368,007	1	2	22,367,104	train	<story><title>Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016)</title><url>https://changelog.com/podcast/201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scohesc</author><text>I thought it was always pronounced &quot;sequel-ite&quot; personally</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>I remember listening to this when it was recorded and I still remember details from it years later – probably my favorite Changelog podcast ever. It&#x27;s obviously very foolish to make software choices based on how much you like its creator as a person. But Richard Hipp comes off as a guy so likable that goshdarnit, I hope his little project succeeds. Jokes aside, though, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s entirely coincidence that SQLite, something that is so good and reliable, was made by someone who seems so conscientious and thoughtful.<p>Though I have to admit, I was and am still disappointed to learn that the official way to pronounce SQLite is &quot;S-Q-L-ite&quot;, i.e. &quot;like a mineral&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gavinray</author><text>Last month I discover NGINX is not pronounced &quot;en-jinx&quot;, and today I discover SQLite is not pronounced &quot;sequel-light&quot;.<p>2020 is turning out to be pretty terrible guys.</text></comment>	<story><title>Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016)</title><url>https://changelog.com/podcast/201</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scohesc</author><text>I thought it was always pronounced &quot;sequel-ite&quot; personally</text></item><item><author>danso</author><text>I remember listening to this when it was recorded and I still remember details from it years later – probably my favorite Changelog podcast ever. It&#x27;s obviously very foolish to make software choices based on how much you like its creator as a person. But Richard Hipp comes off as a guy so likable that goshdarnit, I hope his little project succeeds. Jokes aside, though, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s entirely coincidence that SQLite, something that is so good and reliable, was made by someone who seems so conscientious and thoughtful.<p>Though I have to admit, I was and am still disappointed to learn that the official way to pronounce SQLite is &quot;S-Q-L-ite&quot;, i.e. &quot;like a mineral&quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sweeneyrod</author><text>No love for &quot;seekwelitay&quot;?</text></comment>
6,030,745	6,030,609	1	2	6,030,320	train	<story><title>Crowd steps up to fund 'NSA-proof' app </title><url>http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201307112159-0022901</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moxie</author><text>I&#x27;d been wondering when the explosive kickstarter campaign that leverages the NSA news would appear.<p>My feelings about projects like these are always complicated. Even though it&#x27;s encouraging to see that people are excited about building secure communication platforms, my initial reaction to announcements like these is typically extreme dread.<p>There is a small community of people who have been working on secure mobile messaging for years, and unfortunately newcomers to secure communication generally fuck it up. Not only is that bad for users, but it&#x27;s bad for those of us who have put years of effort into this, because it sets a tone where users begin to assume that <i>all</i> apps which attempt to provide secure communication must have done it incorrectly, so it&#x27;s not worth using any of them.<p>I think there are probably enough apps in this space now (TextSecure, ChatSecure, Gibberbot, Silent Circle) that these folks could have probably just partnered with or contributed to an existing project in order to meet their needs. Despite the article&#x27;s subtitle, this will be far from &quot;the first secure mobile messaging system.&quot;</text></comment>	<story><title>Crowd steps up to fund 'NSA-proof' app </title><url>http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201307112159-0022901</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisballinger</author><text>Don&#x27;t trust this any more than any other closed-source &quot;encrypted&quot; communication product (like Skype). If they control both the source and the backend, how can you be sure it isn&#x27;t compromised? How can you be sure it won&#x27;t eventually be sold to the highest bidder?<p>Disclosure: I am the original author of ChatSecure, the only open source OTR+XMPP app for iOS devices.</text></comment>
24,486,743	24,483,693	1	3	24,482,538	train	<story><title>Cyberpunk 2077 Logos</title><url>https://www.valencygraphics.com/cyberpunk-2077</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Barrin92</author><text>I feel totally out of touch with all the hype around the game, in particular the aesthetic choices is actually what disappointed me the most. The name of the game, as well as the design to me looks quite literally as if someone designed the most generic &#x27;cyberpunk&#x27; game possible.<p>It looks like the cyberpunk version of GTA, which is ironic because cyberpunk is supposed to be transgressive, yet nothing what I&#x27;ve seen about the game is surprising or going into any new territory. The trailer just featured a few lines about unemployment, the most dangerous city to live in, almost as if someone had written a generic script you could apply to everything that is cyberpunk.<p>It&#x27;s a little bit like scyscrapers in Dubai, which look like someone in the 90s read sci-fi from the 60s, rather than futuristic it looks retro and nostalgic, missing the entire point.</text></comment>	<story><title>Cyberpunk 2077 Logos</title><url>https://www.valencygraphics.com/cyberpunk-2077</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>whywhywhywhy</author><text>If you like this you might also enjoy:<p>- Joseph Cross&#x27; work on Destiny <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artstation.com&#x2F;artwork&#x2F;XnGaR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artstation.com&#x2F;artwork&#x2F;XnGaR</a><p>- Designers Republic&#x27;s work on Wipeout <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pBAf4uH.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;pBAf4uH.png</a></text></comment>
9,013,273	9,013,286	1	2	9,013,211	train	<story><title>YouTube Ditches Flash, and It Hardly Matters</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-old-boss</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>geofft</author><text>One thing to note is that (last I heard) both Chrome and Firefox sandbox EME modules fairly tightly. Flash is a browser plugin, which means that it usually injects code into the browser itself, and runs with full privileges on your computer, just as much as your browser does. This is what makes Flash such fertile ground for exploits of all kinds, and also makes it bad for your privacy because it has direct access to your webcam, microphone, clipboard, supercookies, etc. — anything the browser can do, Flash can do without asking. If it asks, it&#x27;s out of the kindness of its heart, not because the browser has any say.<p>Chrome and Firefox&#x27;s sandboxes, meanwhile, are both open-source. You can inspect what powers the EME module might possibly have, and know that it can&#x27;t gain any more. A vulnerability in the code is unlikely to be able to do anything other than pirate your download of <i>Game of Thrones</i> — and that&#x27;s assuming it even has general-purpose network access. Ideally, a vulnerability would be able to do nothing other than modify the video you see, but the remote site could achieve that by encoding a modified video in the first place.<p>As far as the general moral arguments about DRM go, it&#x27;s true that the new boss is the same as the old boss. But the bulk of the EFF&#x27;s argument against Flash in this blog post is about security, not about open content, and it&#x27;s important to acknowledge that EME is a significant step forward. The new boss is sitting in a tightly locked cage.</text></comment>	<story><title>YouTube Ditches Flash, and It Hardly Matters</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-old-boss</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>slang800</author><text>And through all this effort to &quot;protect their content&quot;, they still haven&#x27;t managed to stop people from bypassing the DRM and giving the videos away for free in torrents.<p>I have a hard time seeing how implementing DRM provides any value to media companies, other than a false sense of security.</text></comment>
41,136,137	41,135,458	1	2	41,132,669	train	<story><title>Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead</title><url>https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/0OqBkS2RzWw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alphazard</author><text>&gt; I don’t believe that the “BDFL” (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project<p>It&#x27;s interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>knighthack</author><text>I&#x27;ve noticed: competent people who <i>aren&#x27;t</i> interested in leadership tend to make the best leaders.<p>As compared to people who <i>want</i> to be leaders, for the sake of being known as a &#x27;leader&#x27;, but have neither the competency nor accountability to be leaders.</text></comment>	<story><title>Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead</title><url>https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/0OqBkS2RzWw</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alphazard</author><text>&gt; I don’t believe that the “BDFL” (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project<p>It&#x27;s interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saghm</author><text>Without taking a stand on the first half of that, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s particularly surprising that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their power. I&#x27;d argue the main benefit of having a single person with the power to make a unilateral decision is that it provides a way around the gridlock that tends to occur whenever there are a wide variety of stakeholders involved;. a project whose leader feels warranted to overrule decisions that have a strong consensus is a lot less likely to build up a community to the point that anyone is aware of the project.</text></comment>
24,419,213	24,418,572	1	2	24,413,705	train	<story><title>Is the web getting slower?</title><url>https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>I didn’t touch “web dev” since php&#x2F;dream-weaver&#x2F;myspace era.<p>I started working with some web developers for a simple project recently, my mock product was built with vue.js using the standard way of “including” it: But what really threw me for a loop was that the web developers told me that that’s wrong, they are now _compiling_ (Or, semantically “packing”) JavaScript blobs to make even very simple websites.<p>I don’t know why we as a community have started doing that, but it feels like an anti-pattern, it makes adding new dependencies opaque and we can very quickly end up including dozens and dozens of lines of code which must all be rendered by every device that comes into contact with my site.<p>Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.</text></item><item><author>rhizome</author><text>Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...<i>now</i>.<p>AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn&#x27;t thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don&#x27;t forget to put CSS in there, too!<p>Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sanitycheck</author><text>So.. There are benefits to this for complex apps - but 90% (charitably) of this kind of code is not in a complex app.<p>I think it&#x27;s for two main reasons:<p>1. If you don&#x27;t use complicated new technology you won&#x27;t get a job doing web dev.<p>2. Many new JS devs don&#x27;t understand JS&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;CSS well, they only understand a particular framework - and even then not in a sufficiently deep way.<p>When you come across a seemingly normal site that requires JS in order to display anything, it&#x27;s pretty unlikely that anyone involved ever considered <i>not</i> doing it that way.</text></comment>	<story><title>Is the web getting slower?</title><url>https://www.debugbear.com/blog/is-the-web-getting-slower</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>I didn’t touch “web dev” since php&#x2F;dream-weaver&#x2F;myspace era.<p>I started working with some web developers for a simple project recently, my mock product was built with vue.js using the standard way of “including” it: But what really threw me for a loop was that the web developers told me that that’s wrong, they are now _compiling_ (Or, semantically “packing”) JavaScript blobs to make even very simple websites.<p>I don’t know why we as a community have started doing that, but it feels like an anti-pattern, it makes adding new dependencies opaque and we can very quickly end up including dozens and dozens of lines of code which must all be rendered by every device that comes into contact with my site.<p>Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.</text></item><item><author>rhizome</author><text>Yes, demonstrably and provably. Count the number of pageload indicators (spinners, throbbers...whatever you like to call them) in your daily browsing. They are everywhere...<i>now</i>.<p>AJAX (and, I suspect, the shadown DOM model) have proliferated in recent years, and there is no site design simple enough that someone hasn&#x27;t thought to put every page element behind a JS call. Don&#x27;t forget to put CSS in there, too!<p>Frontend developers are at fault for all this. There, I said it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lukeramsden</author><text>&gt; Often this happens because we want only a small bit of the functionality too.<p>To be fair, this &#x27;compiling&#x27; also allows for tree shaking, which if you use a well-structured library like lodash&#x2F;date-fns etc, allows you to get that small bit of functionality without paying for the whole library.</text></comment>
16,385,014	16,384,283	1	3	16,382,419	train	<story><title>Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition</title><url>http://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-developing.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quadcore</author><text><i>Develop strong out of sync (OOS) detection tools early, and learn how to use them.</i><p>The way lockstep work is that the clients gives themselves a rendez-vous in the future and agree to compute one turn of the game, given the players&#x27; input of that turn, at that moment. It&#x27;s very clever. The players input are sent to every clients and will be computed in the future in a deterministic way. So every client is computing the exact same game. Now if the clients doesnt compute the same game given the same players&#x27; input, the game is OOS and that basically should never happen because the game is dead.<p>To detect an OOS, a client needs to compute a hash of some relevant game data (ultimately &quot;everything&quot; ends up being represented by the position of the units (plus a dead state)), every <i>turn</i> and send them with its &quot;end of turn&quot; message to the server&#x2F;clients. If clients disagree with the value of the hash, they are OOS.<p>The cool thing with lockstep is that you can record every turn inputs (which is fairly light) and then replay the whole game - because that&#x27;s already how a game is played. So, when you have an OOS - or any bug, you can just replay the game until the OOS and try to fix it. Sometimes it doesnt work though and you may replay the game without detecting any OOS.<p>If you dont detect an OOS after a replay, you&#x27;re basically in deep shit. I mean <i>needle in a haystack of c++</i> kind of deep shit. Every client needs to dump <i>every data of every function that ever ran</i> in a log file, and then you need to reproduce the OOS and then compare the log files and then guess what caused the data to differ.</text></comment>	<story><title>Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition</title><url>http://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-developing.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xrisk</author><text>It&#x27;s a pity they aren&#x27;t releasing on Steam though. Most players aren&#x27;t going to buy the game from the Win10 store.</text></comment>
27,229,933	27,230,019	1	2	27,207,604	train	<story><title>Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists</title><url>https://nautil.us/blog/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrooched_moose</author><text>Possessing only an undergrad level of physics, I&#x27;ve never understood why this is a remotely interesting question.<p>It seems to effectively be equivalent to &quot;Imagine we have a refrigerator with a massless, frictionless motor that also doesn&#x27;t need to be plugged in. Isn&#x27;t it crazy that this refrigerator would violate the second law of thermodynamics?&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ineptech</author><text>A motor that doesn&#x27;t require energy violates the second law by definition; a selectively-enforced barrier that lets hot particles through but not cold particles didn&#x27;t obviously provably cost energy.<p>If that sounds like a cop out, remember that the Demon is a metaphor that&#x27;s supposed to represent an as-yet-undiscovered technology. Like, instead of a literal massless door that opens and closes, something like, &quot;What if we discovered a clever way of designing a little gap between two chambers and ionizing the particles such that only hot ones go through.&quot;</text></comment>	<story><title>Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists</title><url>https://nautil.us/blog/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scrooched_moose</author><text>Possessing only an undergrad level of physics, I&#x27;ve never understood why this is a remotely interesting question.<p>It seems to effectively be equivalent to &quot;Imagine we have a refrigerator with a massless, frictionless motor that also doesn&#x27;t need to be plugged in. Isn&#x27;t it crazy that this refrigerator would violate the second law of thermodynamics?&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hedora</author><text>Imagine the door had some mass and some friction, but the particles were really heavy, so even a few correct openings could create a large energy imbalance.<p>There’s no apparent relationship to the energy gain per separated particle and the energy used by the door. That makes it hard to prove it’s not generating energy.<p>That’s what makes it an interesting problem.</text></comment>
27,432,928	27,433,266	1	2	27,432,326	train	<story><title>IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>K0balt</author><text>Unless you are a wage or salary earner, it is trivially easy to avoid having to pay taxes, at least in the USA. Same with the much lauded “inheritance tax” and even, to a lesser extent, sales taxes. It costs about 4000us a year to maintain the legal structures required to pay essentially no taxes, except sales taxes in some locations. In many cases, for lower levels of income, just having a small business can negate income tax burdens.<p>Taxation always has been, and continues to be, a burden for the servile class to bear. The rich or enterprising pay taxes only when they are ill prepared or choose to, often to reduce scrutiny.<p>The &quot; I should pay more taxes&quot; rhetoric from the wealthy is merely virtue signaling, it is totally legal to pay more taxes than you owe, and you can even reclaim the money later if you need to. There is nothing preventing anyone from paying the taxes that they feel that they should owe, in excess of legal requirements.<p>By and large, sales taxes are more evenly applied, but that too is far from perfect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>md_</author><text>I think “I should pay more taxes” is generally understood as shorthand for “all people in my financial situation should pay more taxes.”<p>It’s a bit like saying “I should be required to have fire protection”, “I should be required to carry health insurance,” or “I should be required to use standard turn signals on the road.”</text></comment>	<story><title>IRS records reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax</title><url>https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>K0balt</author><text>Unless you are a wage or salary earner, it is trivially easy to avoid having to pay taxes, at least in the USA. Same with the much lauded “inheritance tax” and even, to a lesser extent, sales taxes. It costs about 4000us a year to maintain the legal structures required to pay essentially no taxes, except sales taxes in some locations. In many cases, for lower levels of income, just having a small business can negate income tax burdens.<p>Taxation always has been, and continues to be, a burden for the servile class to bear. The rich or enterprising pay taxes only when they are ill prepared or choose to, often to reduce scrutiny.<p>The &quot; I should pay more taxes&quot; rhetoric from the wealthy is merely virtue signaling, it is totally legal to pay more taxes than you owe, and you can even reclaim the money later if you need to. There is nothing preventing anyone from paying the taxes that they feel that they should owe, in excess of legal requirements.<p>By and large, sales taxes are more evenly applied, but that too is far from perfect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bryanrasmussen</author><text>&gt;it is totally legal to pay more taxes than you owe, and you can even reclaim the money later if you need to. There is nothing preventing anyone from paying the taxes that they feel that they should owe, in excess of legal requirements.<p>Gary Trudeau had a story about how he and his wife were always getting audited because they paid more taxes than people in their income bracket normally paid, so that would be one reason why you might not want to pay more than you have to.<p>also if I thought I should pay more tax I would probably also think the other people like me should pay more tax and since I am probably in competition with them over things I would not like to disarm myself unless they were likewise disarmed.</text></comment>
14,573,098	14,572,167	1	2	14,571,641	train	<story><title>Microsoft Surface Laptop Teardown</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+Teardown/92915</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmalvarado</author><text>You can&#x27;t eat your cake and have it too. Sleeker, smaller, thinner, cheaper, MOAR BATTERY.<p>That&#x27;s what the market wants. If the market wanted ClunkBox perpetual computer that was infinitely upgradeable, there would be an option out there.<p>(I&#x27;ll admit though, the glue is kind of weird. But I guess a natural progression when &quot;no one opens these things anyway&quot;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sh87</author><text>I&#x27;m okay with bulkier, replacable batteries which are reasonably cheap. Most people I know would like it too. Are we not a part of &quot;the market&quot; ?<p>As a kid I would confidently open up any electronic device without worrying too much about breaking it. A radio, tv, toys, remote controlled devices, speakers, headphones, laptops, disk drives, etc. These days I do not find myself opening up electronic devices as much. More from them fear of breaking them or the hoops that I have to go through to do it.<p>That exploration really taught me valuable things.<p>I don&#x27;t have kids yet, but if and when I do, I&#x27;d want them to open up anything that they are not sure how it works internally, under the shiny box. I am not sure if they will be as confident about opening up common device of their time be it a mac or an iPhone or a tablet or any such &quot;tightly locked&quot; device.<p>I hope I can build, nurture and keep their curiosity alive.</text></comment>	<story><title>Microsoft Surface Laptop Teardown</title><url>https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+Teardown/92915</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dmalvarado</author><text>You can&#x27;t eat your cake and have it too. Sleeker, smaller, thinner, cheaper, MOAR BATTERY.<p>That&#x27;s what the market wants. If the market wanted ClunkBox perpetual computer that was infinitely upgradeable, there would be an option out there.<p>(I&#x27;ll admit though, the glue is kind of weird. But I guess a natural progression when &quot;no one opens these things anyway&quot;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Const-me</author><text>The market for laptops is big, and it wants both of these, just different segments. There&#x27;re lots of upgradeable laptops out there, esp. in corporate segment.</text></comment>
7,643,953	7,643,935	1	2	7,643,746	train	<story><title>Speeding up and strengthening HTTPS connections for Chrome on Android</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/speeding-up-and-strengthening-https.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>This is great news.<p>ChaCha20 is a refinement of Salsa20, which is probably Bernstein&#x27;s best-known crypto design (it survived the eSTREAM contest to become one of the final portfolio ciphers). Bernstein wrote an extremely readable design paper on Salsa20:<p><a href="http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/salsafamily-20071225.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cr.yp.to&#x2F;snuffle&#x2F;salsafamily-20071225.pdf</a><p>Salsa20 is essentially a fast hash function run in a carefully designed counter mode. If you don&#x27;t care about speed, you can turn any secure hash function into a stream cipher by, for instance, running the HMAC of that hash in counter mode. Here, Bernstein has designed the Formula 1 car of hash cores to run quickly in software without side channels as the basis for a counter-mode stream cipher.<p>Poly1305 is, like the GHASH construction from GCM, a &quot;polynomial MAC&quot;, which is the modern way to say &quot;cryptographic CRC&quot;. Poly1305 was designed more carefully for software performance than GHASH. In particular, because it&#x27;s based on binary fields, for competitive performance GHASH requires either hardware support (such as the Intel CLMUL instructions) or a table-based implementation that potentially leaks secrets from cache timing. Poly1305 is based on prime fields and is fast in software on platforms without instructions tailored to it. It is also mercifully easier to code (though maybe I&#x27;m just irrationally biased against binary field polynomial math).</text></comment>	<story><title>Speeding up and strengthening HTTPS connections for Chrome on Android</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/speeding-up-and-strengthening-https.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>agl</author><text>Details: <a href="https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/27/tlssymmetriccrypto.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imperialviolet.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;tlssymmetriccrypto...</a></text></comment>
28,561,522	28,555,899	1	2	28,550,764	train	<story><title>A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design</title><url>https://search.marginalia.nu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again.<p>It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let&#x27;s say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-time respected books of the past centenary. Amazon&#x27;s algorithms constantly push to recommend the latest hot book of the year. But I don&#x27;t want that. A year is not enough time to have society determine if the material withstands time. I want something that has stood the test of time and is recommended by reputable institutions.</text></item><item><author>rchaud</author><text>The context matters. I&#x27;d happily read &quot;Top 10&quot; lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. &quot;Top 10 Prog Rock albums&quot;, while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website.<p>But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter &quot;new media&quot; blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who&#x27;s repackaged Wikipedia&#x2F;Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy writing designed to get people to &quot;share to Twitter&#x2F;FB&quot;. No passion, no expertise. Just eyeballs at any cost.</text></item><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today&#x27;s web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.</text></item><item><author>snakeboy</author><text>Wow, that&#x27;s awesome. Great work!<p>For a simple test, I searched &quot;fall of the roman empire&quot;. In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources.<p>When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle &quot;8 Reasons Why Rome Fell&quot;, then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totally useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamra</author><text>This is just a guess, but I believe that they use machine learning and rank it by the clicks. I took some coursera courses and Andrew Ng sort of suggested that as their strategy.<p>The problem is that clickbait and low effort articles could be good enough to get the click, but low effort enough to drag society into the gutter. As time passes, the system is gamified more and more where the least effort for the most clicks is optimized.</text></comment>	<story><title>A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design</title><url>https://search.marginalia.nu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again.<p>It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let&#x27;s say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-time respected books of the past centenary. Amazon&#x27;s algorithms constantly push to recommend the latest hot book of the year. But I don&#x27;t want that. A year is not enough time to have society determine if the material withstands time. I want something that has stood the test of time and is recommended by reputable institutions.</text></item><item><author>rchaud</author><text>The context matters. I&#x27;d happily read &quot;Top 10&quot; lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. &quot;Top 10 Prog Rock albums&quot;, while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website.<p>But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter &quot;new media&quot; blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who&#x27;s repackaged Wikipedia&#x2F;Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy writing designed to get people to &quot;share to Twitter&#x2F;FB&quot;. No passion, no expertise. Just eyeballs at any cost.</text></item><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today&#x27;s web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.</text></item><item><author>snakeboy</author><text>Wow, that&#x27;s awesome. Great work!<p>For a simple test, I searched &quot;fall of the roman empire&quot;. In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources.<p>When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle &quot;8 Reasons Why Rome Fell&quot;, then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totally useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amenod</author><text>&gt; is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages.<p>They do? That would explain a lot - but ironically, I can&#x27;t find a good source on this. Do you have one at hand?</text></comment>
16,775,253	16,774,968	1	3	16,774,293	train	<story><title>Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain</title><url>https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gtrubetskoy</author><text>The problem that proof-of-work blockchain solves is widely misunderstood. It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique. Prior to the publication of Satoshi&#x27;s paper we did not have a solution to this problem and for that reason it is a significant advance in technology. I wouldn&#x27;t call it crappy, it&#x27;s actually quite brilliant.<p>For a detailed description see this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grisha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;explaining-proof-of-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grisha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;explaining-proof-of-work&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>&gt; I wouldn&#x27;t call it crappy, it&#x27;s actually quite brilliant.<p>I agree with you, I always thought that the Bitcoin algorithm was very clever and &quot;mind opening&quot; in a way. It&#x27;s one of these things I&#x27;d never have thought about but almost seems obvious in hindsight. What&#x27;s even more interesting is that basically all of it is pre-existing technology: HashCash, ECC, Merkle trees etc... Just combined together in a clever way to create something that&#x27;s more than the sum of their parts.<p>Now where I become a naysayer is when we switch from the realm of intellectual curiosity and into the world of cryptocurrencies today. Being clever and innovative doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean useful or valuable. We have plenty of clever ideas out there that don&#x27;t have much of a practical use (or used to have one but are now obsolete). Duff&#x27;s Device, sleep sort, the fast inverse square root, one instruction set computers, code golf and 4KB demos ...<p>I think I do understand the technological value of Bitcoin&#x27;s PoW blockchain, I just think that its only practical use is for a tiny niche. It&#x27;s the Prolog of consensus algorithms, I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;ll be useful to some but I doubt it&#x27;s going to be the new C++. You say that &quot;It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique&quot; and it&#x27;s true but how useful or valuable is that? Is it such a huge problem in our modern society to agree on a sequence of events? Do you often program something and think &quot;man, I wish that there was a way to establish a consensus over points in time which are universally unique&quot; and 1&#x2F; there&#x27;s no other simpler solution to achieve that and 2&#x2F; a blockchain could actually solve it? There&#x27;s only a tiny gap between these two propositions.<p>But I think at this point talk is cheap and all that needs to be said about the blockchain has been said long ago and multiple times. How many billion of dollars has been poured into &quot;blockchain&quot; technology these past few years, in the form of pre-mined coins or ICOs? How many hundreds of engineers are working on those killer blockchain applications? How many high profile companies have boldly announced blockchain-related tech investments lately? So.... where are the results? How long do we wait for them until we decide that maybe it&#x27;s not that revolutionary?</text></comment>	<story><title>Systems built on trust, norms, and institutions function better than blockchain</title><url>https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gtrubetskoy</author><text>The problem that proof-of-work blockchain solves is widely misunderstood. It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique. Prior to the publication of Satoshi&#x27;s paper we did not have a solution to this problem and for that reason it is a significant advance in technology. I wouldn&#x27;t call it crappy, it&#x27;s actually quite brilliant.<p>For a detailed description see this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grisha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;explaining-proof-of-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grisha.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;explaining-proof-of-work&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragontamer</author><text>&gt; It uses proof-of-work to establish consensus over points in time which are universally unique.<p>Did we really?<p>BTC vs BCH, Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic. Sigwitx2.<p>These hardforks technically break established consensus and rely upon social means (hey everyone: switch algorithms right now!!) to stay in order. At the end of the day, it seems to me that the &quot;blockchain&quot; is only as strong as the community&#x27;s resolve to work together.<p>As far as I can tell, Bitcoin is turning into a governance structure. The current power players are the devs, who most people trust (and I see no reason not to trust them). And the social structure is organized on Github and forums.</text></comment>
22,081,161	22,081,160	1	2	22,079,253	train	<story><title>Boltzmann Brain</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zenst</author><text>I think the chance of being a Boltzmann brain is zero if you can write down &quot;I&#x27;m human&quot; on a bit of paper, paper in the room, go to another room and then return to the original room and read the paper saying exactly what you initially wrote. Whilst the memory of writing it may well be false, the paper will not be.<p>Now, a Boltzmann universe would cater for that - spooky thoughts at a distance :).</text></item><item><author>AgentME</author><text>There are similar thought experiments around complex objects suddenly coming into existence. They&#x27;re not very controversial. The Boltzmann brain thought experiment is interesting because it raises the possibility that there&#x27;s some chance that you might be a Boltzmann brain without realizing it. It&#x27;s very hard to try to figure out what the correct way to reason about this possibility is. Properly reasoning about whether you&#x27;re a Boltzmann brain, and whether you should care about that, probably involves an interesting argument around decision theory and the anthropic principle.</text></item><item><author>jancsika</author><text>Why is it not a Boltzmann rock, or a Boltzmann commemorative coin, or something else inanimate like that?<p>I thought the whole point was to give a simple metaphor for a measuring the probability that a mundane object came into being based on the widely accepted history of the universe that modern physics predicts. As opposed to just coming into its current state instantaneously based on extremely unlikely random events among its constituent atoms.<p>Or put differently (based on the Wikipedia article), if the math behind a modern physics theory means that it&#x27;s more likely the given object&#x27;s existence was due to random fluctuations then that&#x27;s a strike against adoption of that theory.<p>But if you make the object of interest a brain you get all this bikeshedding about consciousness and how do the regular brains know they&#x27;re not Boltzmann brains, etc.<p>It&#x27;d be like introducing me to your new programming language&#x27;s syntax by showing me the code for a quine instead of &quot;hello world.&quot; What is the value in doing such a thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ivalm</author><text>Boltzmann brain has a solipsistic element. It&#x27;s not just that &quot;you&quot; are a Boltzmann brain, it&#x27;s that the entire universe you&#x27;re experiencing is just a figment of your imagination. Furthermore, you don&#x27;t know how long this experience has been going on since all your memories might be entirely fake (ie maybe you came into existence a mere moment ago and will cease to exist in the next instance; you only have fakeable memories of the past, an unreliable perception of the present, and no knowledge of the future).</text></comment>	<story><title>Boltzmann Brain</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zenst</author><text>I think the chance of being a Boltzmann brain is zero if you can write down &quot;I&#x27;m human&quot; on a bit of paper, paper in the room, go to another room and then return to the original room and read the paper saying exactly what you initially wrote. Whilst the memory of writing it may well be false, the paper will not be.<p>Now, a Boltzmann universe would cater for that - spooky thoughts at a distance :).</text></item><item><author>AgentME</author><text>There are similar thought experiments around complex objects suddenly coming into existence. They&#x27;re not very controversial. The Boltzmann brain thought experiment is interesting because it raises the possibility that there&#x27;s some chance that you might be a Boltzmann brain without realizing it. It&#x27;s very hard to try to figure out what the correct way to reason about this possibility is. Properly reasoning about whether you&#x27;re a Boltzmann brain, and whether you should care about that, probably involves an interesting argument around decision theory and the anthropic principle.</text></item><item><author>jancsika</author><text>Why is it not a Boltzmann rock, or a Boltzmann commemorative coin, or something else inanimate like that?<p>I thought the whole point was to give a simple metaphor for a measuring the probability that a mundane object came into being based on the widely accepted history of the universe that modern physics predicts. As opposed to just coming into its current state instantaneously based on extremely unlikely random events among its constituent atoms.<p>Or put differently (based on the Wikipedia article), if the math behind a modern physics theory means that it&#x27;s more likely the given object&#x27;s existence was due to random fluctuations then that&#x27;s a strike against adoption of that theory.<p>But if you make the object of interest a brain you get all this bikeshedding about consciousness and how do the regular brains know they&#x27;re not Boltzmann brains, etc.<p>It&#x27;d be like introducing me to your new programming language&#x27;s syntax by showing me the code for a quine instead of &quot;hello world.&quot; What is the value in doing such a thing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vkou</author><text>Upon conclusion of this experiment, what makes you think that you&#x27;re not a Boltzmann brain that was momentarily brought into existence with a particular memory of doing that particular thing 5 minutes ago?<p>The Boltzmann brain hypothesis postulates that your perception of the past may just a randomly arranged hallucination - just a random set of memories that happened to be encoded in your brain&#x27;s neurons during it fleeting moment of consciousness.<p>I don&#x27;t believe that there is any experiment that can disprove this particular flavour of solipsism - as you cannot reliably trust any memory or sensory input.</text></comment>
25,541,902	25,541,323	1	2	25,539,586	train	<story><title>ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville</title><url>https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/12/25/att-outage-internet-down-hours-after-nashville-explosion/4045278001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elmo2you</author><text>While I&#x27;m only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&amp;T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).<p>This certainly wasn&#x27;t a small explosion, from the looks of it. But taking out a bunker .. unless you have access to weapons specially build for that purpose, good luck.<p>That AT&amp;T still went down, may just demonstrated an apparent oversight in their emergency procedures for this site. I don&#x27;t know the details, but having backup generators that rely any public infrastructure sounds like a pretty bad choice. That said, maybe those generators first burned through a decent supply of diesel fuel, only to later rely on (in this case absent) gas.<p>I have no idea how much diesel would be required to keep that site running for a prolonged period of time. Maybe such an amount could pose regulatory&#x2F;safety issues on its own. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of emergency generators is to provide power that does not depend on any external factors (maybe aside from air&#x2F;oxygen). So to me this story does sound at least a bit weird.<p>But somebody targeting that building and totally underestimating their chances, even if they may have still succeeded partially (if only by &quot;luck&quot;) .. nah, that can not surprise me at all.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>AT&amp;T says that their services went down along with the gas &amp; power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn&#x27;t sound all that targeted.</text></item><item><author>joshuakelly</author><text>This article doesn&#x27;t make this so explicit, but ATT infrastructure appears to be the intentional target of the bombing. You can see the building in the helicopter shot at the top of the NYTimes article on the story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;25&#x2F;us&#x2F;nashville-explosion.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;25&#x2F;us&#x2F;nashville-explosion.ht...</a><p>Obviously a telecommunications&#x2F;switch hub, with it being a large windowless building in a downtown core.<p>The other thing that&#x27;s particularly odd is the fact that the attackers appear to have broadcasted some sort of warning or evacuation message from the site of the bombing prior to the explosion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffbee</author><text>Facilities don&#x27;t really keep that large of an inventory of fuel on site. Usually once they start running they have to call for fuel immediately and be regularly refueled until power is restored. They don&#x27;t have a week of fuel or anything like that.<p>I don&#x27;t see why natural gas is such a bad backup for utility electric. It doesn&#x27;t share fate with the electric grid and it&#x27;s buried. Seems pretty good.</text></comment>	<story><title>ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville</title><url>https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/12/25/att-outage-internet-down-hours-after-nashville-explosion/4045278001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elmo2you</author><text>While I&#x27;m only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&amp;T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).<p>This certainly wasn&#x27;t a small explosion, from the looks of it. But taking out a bunker .. unless you have access to weapons specially build for that purpose, good luck.<p>That AT&amp;T still went down, may just demonstrated an apparent oversight in their emergency procedures for this site. I don&#x27;t know the details, but having backup generators that rely any public infrastructure sounds like a pretty bad choice. That said, maybe those generators first burned through a decent supply of diesel fuel, only to later rely on (in this case absent) gas.<p>I have no idea how much diesel would be required to keep that site running for a prolonged period of time. Maybe such an amount could pose regulatory&#x2F;safety issues on its own. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of emergency generators is to provide power that does not depend on any external factors (maybe aside from air&#x2F;oxygen). So to me this story does sound at least a bit weird.<p>But somebody targeting that building and totally underestimating their chances, even if they may have still succeeded partially (if only by &quot;luck&quot;) .. nah, that can not surprise me at all.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>AT&amp;T says that their services went down along with the gas &amp; power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn&#x27;t sound all that targeted.</text></item><item><author>joshuakelly</author><text>This article doesn&#x27;t make this so explicit, but ATT infrastructure appears to be the intentional target of the bombing. You can see the building in the helicopter shot at the top of the NYTimes article on the story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;25&#x2F;us&#x2F;nashville-explosion.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;25&#x2F;us&#x2F;nashville-explosion.ht...</a><p>Obviously a telecommunications&#x2F;switch hub, with it being a large windowless building in a downtown core.<p>The other thing that&#x27;s particularly odd is the fact that the attackers appear to have broadcasted some sort of warning or evacuation message from the site of the bombing prior to the explosion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nr2x</author><text>A guy working in this building told me they had showers to clean off radioactive fallout as the building itself could stand up to a bomb. Guy said “you’d be fucked either way” and laughed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;33_Thomas_Street" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;33_Thomas_Street</a></text></comment>
35,702,171	35,701,107	1	2	35,699,697	train	<story><title>My thoughts on OCaml</title><url>https://osa1.net/posts/2023-04-24-ocaml-thoughts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JaggerJo</author><text>I think you should give F# a shot instead.<p>1. No standard and easy way of implementing interfaces<p>No problem in F#, you have interfaces, abstract classed, ...<p>2. Bad standard library<p>In F# you have access to the full .NET standard library and ecosystem. There are also quite a lot of libraries that are especially designed to take advantage of F# (SQL libs for example).<p>3. Syntax problems<p>3.1 OCaml doesn’t have a single-line comment syntax.<p>It&#x27;s `&#x2F;&#x2F;` for single line and `(* comment *)` for n line comments in F#.<p>3.2 It has for and while, but no break and continue. So you use exceptions with a try inside the loop for continue, and outside for break.<p>Same in F#, use recursion.<p>Generally F# solves some of the issues but definitely not all of them. Some are just in the nature of the Standard ML syntax I guess.<p>4. Rest of the package is also not that good<p>- NuGet is a decent&#x2F;good package manager. - Easy to install a complete dev env. - sane build system (MSBuild) - Great out of the box support in JetBrains Rider&#x2F; Visual Studio (for Mac&#x2F; Windows) or via a VS Code plugin (Ionide).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hpstewed</author><text>I use F# at work. Really love the language but the connection to the dotnet ecosystem is a curse as much as a blessing. Having to operate in a world of nulls and exceptions can reduce&#x2F;nullify the amazing benefits of discriminated unions. Often you are back to relying on the due dilligence of other developers as a result.<p>I use a lot of rust in my spare time. The runtime guarantees it offers make other languages feel like a house of cards in comparison, including F#. I coincidentally picked up an ocaml book yesterday seeking a more &#x27;robust&#x27; alternative to F#. Unfortunately it seems as though ocaml is even more niche than F# (I doubt I&#x27;ll be working for jane street any time soon)</text></comment>	<story><title>My thoughts on OCaml</title><url>https://osa1.net/posts/2023-04-24-ocaml-thoughts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JaggerJo</author><text>I think you should give F# a shot instead.<p>1. No standard and easy way of implementing interfaces<p>No problem in F#, you have interfaces, abstract classed, ...<p>2. Bad standard library<p>In F# you have access to the full .NET standard library and ecosystem. There are also quite a lot of libraries that are especially designed to take advantage of F# (SQL libs for example).<p>3. Syntax problems<p>3.1 OCaml doesn’t have a single-line comment syntax.<p>It&#x27;s `&#x2F;&#x2F;` for single line and `(* comment *)` for n line comments in F#.<p>3.2 It has for and while, but no break and continue. So you use exceptions with a try inside the loop for continue, and outside for break.<p>Same in F#, use recursion.<p>Generally F# solves some of the issues but definitely not all of them. Some are just in the nature of the Standard ML syntax I guess.<p>4. Rest of the package is also not that good<p>- NuGet is a decent&#x2F;good package manager. - Easy to install a complete dev env. - sane build system (MSBuild) - Great out of the box support in JetBrains Rider&#x2F; Visual Studio (for Mac&#x2F; Windows) or via a VS Code plugin (Ionide).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ecshafer</author><text>F# is such a great language.<p>The fact Microsoft seems to pretend it doesn&#x27;t exist is bewildering. Surely the .Net ecosystem can have two languages being promoted.</text></comment>
2,277,853	2,277,665	1	3	2,277,449	train	<story><title>Dirty Percent</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewisham</author><text>I used to be a big fan of Gruber, but I'm getting increasingly tired of his "defend Apple at all costs" mentality.<p>When Apple was the underdog, it all seemed to be about not what was possible, but what was fair, and what was right. Now it's a "Well, of course Apple would do that, wouldn't you?"<p>And he then punts on the biggest question of all:<p><i>What if Microsoft did this with Windows, and, say, tried to require Apple to pay them 30 percent for every purchase made through iTunes on Windows? To that, I say: good luck with that.</i><p>Not "well I'd certainly write a slam piece about it", not "well, that would definitely require competition regulators", not "that would be a dick move." Just "they couldn't do it anyway, so your hypotheticals mean nothing."<p>The way I put it (crassly) is "When you're Top Dog, you don't need to play like a bitch." Which is what Apple is doing, and honestly, they're turning me off from their products. And that's not about "Oh well, Apple likes to make money, and why shouldn't they be allowed to?" It's about looking like you're above it. Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrubeck</author><text>What I like about Gruber, even when I disagree with him, is that I think he <i>understands</i>, better than any other outside commentator, how Apple's management team thinks and works. He's not a leading expert on business, or on technology, but I'd call him a leading expert on Steve Jobs' mind.<p>This understanding is part of why Gruber often seems like an Apple apologist. Even when <i>he</i> disagrees with Apple' decisions, he can generally give a good explanation of why the decision was made and why Steve and Tim and company probably think it is the right one. And of course, when he is writing from the point of view of Apple Inc., the primary question is always "What is best for Apple?"<p>(This also explains why I hate Gruber's writing about competiting companies like Microsoft and Google. I don't think he understands how <i>those</i> companies think and work at all, so his commentary on them totally lacks that insight and usefulness.)</text></comment>	<story><title>Dirty Percent</title><url>http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewisham</author><text>I used to be a big fan of Gruber, but I'm getting increasingly tired of his "defend Apple at all costs" mentality.<p>When Apple was the underdog, it all seemed to be about not what was possible, but what was fair, and what was right. Now it's a "Well, of course Apple would do that, wouldn't you?"<p>And he then punts on the biggest question of all:<p><i>What if Microsoft did this with Windows, and, say, tried to require Apple to pay them 30 percent for every purchase made through iTunes on Windows? To that, I say: good luck with that.</i><p>Not "well I'd certainly write a slam piece about it", not "well, that would definitely require competition regulators", not "that would be a dick move." Just "they couldn't do it anyway, so your hypotheticals mean nothing."<p>The way I put it (crassly) is "When you're Top Dog, you don't need to play like a bitch." Which is what Apple is doing, and honestly, they're turning me off from their products. And that's not about "Oh well, Apple likes to make money, and why shouldn't they be allowed to?" It's about looking like you're above it. Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ra88it</author><text><i>Brands like Costco and Amazon make a huge chunk of change, but you don't see them getting into petty stuff like this.</i><p>Is the following statement (from the article) false?<p><i>As for ruthless profiteering, consider that Amazon, with their e-book publishing, originally took the fat end of a 70-30 revenue split with authors.</i></text></comment>
18,843,775	18,843,421	1	2	18,837,108	train	<story><title>The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever</title><url>https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644619/soldier-weight/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sa46</author><text>Ah, an article I can comment on. I was an Infantry officer for 6 years and did all the normal schooling and a deployment.<p>This is a pretty well done article. Here&#x27;s some general ideas to keep in mind.<p>- Most dismounted missions are run from trucks or an established forward operating base, so you don&#x27;t carry a huge rucksack most of the time because you can just go back to your base.<p>- Like the article states, even a day pack with body armor gets you up to 70lbs quickly.<p>- Ammo is really heavy, it being made of lead and all. 100rds of 7.62mm ammo weighs about 7lb. You want at least 800rds per M240B.<p>- Rucksack weights are sometimes inflated because it&#x27;s a way to brag.<p>- The Marine infantry officer course requirement for 152lb load is excessive. At that weight, you can only do an admin movement on a road. All the anecdotes I found about combat loads that heavy were for an initial, short infil followed by a stationary mission.<p>I think the article nails the root cause towards heavier protective equipment. Public perception and the news cycle makes the death of American service member a bigger deal than in past conflicts.<p>It will be a long time before we get electronic mules in the Infantry. Adopting the mules adds a huge complexity budget to a simple movement. The Army decided some years ago to give every Company (~140 people) a Raven drone for recon. However, it&#x27;s a huge deal if it gets lost (if the GPS guidance were to suddenly fail), so no one ever uses them to avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.</text></comment>	<story><title>The Overloaded Soldier: Why U.S. Infantry Now Carry More Weight Than Ever</title><url>https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644619/soldier-weight/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>szopa</author><text>This sounds insane. My hobby is medium distance hiking in (say, 250 km&#x2F;155 mi na week) in the Scandinavian Arctic, so I have to carry all my food. I&#x27;m a fan of ultralight hiking, so my whole summer baggage weights around 10 kg&#x2F;20 lbs excluding water. I invested some money in lighter equipment, yes, but most of my weight savings is stuff I simply do not take with me, or things that serve in multiple roles (eg. my hiking poles double as tent poles). A common piece of advice in the ultralight community is &quot;don&#x27;t pack your fears&quot; – take only what you know you&#x27;re gonna need, avoid redundancy (and be careful not to lose your crap), and consider what you can do without (an example: you don&#x27;t really need a big ass knife).<p>Anyway, with 10 kg pack a trip is extremely physically challenging, but overall pleasant. I can actually enjoy the view, as opposed to just wanting to throw my backpack on the ground (I didn&#x27;t get to my low weight immediately, I used to carry much more before).<p>Hiking like I do, but with 100 lbs of gear sounds like a nightmare. A soldier may not care about the views, but he should watch out for people who are trying to kill him. If my experience translates at all, the weight is interfering with that goal.</text></comment>
28,905,358	28,905,398	1	3	28,895,878	train	<story><title>Interview with GDKChan, Creator of Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch Emulator</title><url>https://boilingsteam.com/an-interview-with-gdkchan-creator-of-ryujinx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kottaram</author><text>Where do I start learning about making an emulator? I would like to work with C++ if resources are available for it :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DSMan195276</author><text>I personally wrote a GB emulator, while it was a lot of work is was certainly doable compared to other options and the result is pretty satisfying. I know others have started with the NES and had similar success, so IMO either of those are not bad. There&#x27;s plenty of information out there for emulating those systems since lots of others have written emulators for them, so you should be able to find a lot to start with without too much trouble.<p>If you find those systems to be a bit too much I&#x27;ve heard that CHIP-8 is even simpler. At some point being too simple doesn&#x27;t teach you all that much, but it might help with the basic idea if you&#x27;re really lost and also take less time if you&#x27;re not looking for a long project.</text></comment>	<story><title>Interview with GDKChan, Creator of Ryujinx, the Nintendo Switch Emulator</title><url>https://boilingsteam.com/an-interview-with-gdkchan-creator-of-ryujinx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kottaram</author><text>Where do I start learning about making an emulator? I would like to work with C++ if resources are available for it :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lufte</author><text>Write a CHIP-8 emulator. I followed this [1] language-agnostic guide. It covers all the details and oddities without actually giving you the code, so you still need to make the effort to get the result.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tobiasvl.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;write-a-chip-8-emulator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tobiasvl.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;write-a-chip-8-emulator&#x2F;</a></text></comment>
22,005,950	22,004,987	1	3	21,996,406	train	<story><title>For suicide prevention, try raising the minimum wage, research suggests</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/08/794568118/raising-the-minimum-wage-by-1-may-prevent-thousands-of-suicides-study-shows</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ngngngng</author><text>I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.<p>Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is, &quot;make changes so that more people get the benefits of the booming economy.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taborj</author><text>If you want to make a significant dent in the mass shooting problem (by the way, the FBI&#x27;s crime stats page [0] is illuminating on many subjects, not the least of which is that violent crime rates are way down from earlier in the 2000s [1]), you need to start looking at why someone feels shooting up a bunch of innocent people is a valid response to whatever stressor they&#x27;re feeling. Maybe there is an income inequality, and that can cause someone to feel angry. But there&#x27;s a leap that needs to be made from &quot;angry&quot; to &quot;mass murderer&quot;, and it&#x27;d be helpful to understand why that is. I suspect it&#x27;s mental.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucr.fbi.gov&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s&#x2F;2018&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s.-2018" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucr.fbi.gov&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s&#x2F;2018&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s.-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucr.fbi.gov&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s&#x2F;2018&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s.-2018&#x2F;topic-pages&#x2F;tables&#x2F;table-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucr.fbi.gov&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s&#x2F;2018&#x2F;crime-in-the-u.s.-...</a></text></comment>	<story><title>For suicide prevention, try raising the minimum wage, research suggests</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/08/794568118/raising-the-minimum-wage-by-1-may-prevent-thousands-of-suicides-study-shows</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ngngngng</author><text>I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.<p>Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is, &quot;make changes so that more people get the benefits of the booming economy.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lsiebert</author><text>The market is great, and a lot of money from the trump tax cuts has been used for buybacks that kept prices rising, but wages have stagnated as expenses such as health care, child care, education, etc have all increased rapidly.</text></comment>
18,580,572	18,580,325	1	2	18,579,114	train	<story><title>The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/science/animal-intelligence-octopus-cephalopods.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jaggednad</author><text>One theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for a creature with hands is an evolutionary advantage, because that bigger brain allows complex behaviors that can be carried out with hands. I bet octopuses are intelligent for a similar reason. Its body is like one big hand, and there are lots of complex behaviors it can carry out with those tentacles. Similar for its color changing skin. There are many complex and useful ways that skin can be used, so it pays to have a big brain. The important point is that the bodily appendages came first, and those appendages made it actually useful to have a big brain. I find it more surprising that dolphins became intelligent, but the article is right that living in groups capable of communication and cooperation can similarly make big brains pay off, because the animal can engage in complex group behaviors.</text></comment>	<story><title>The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/science/animal-intelligence-octopus-cephalopods.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rland</author><text>Octopuses are really incredible creatures. They diverged from humans in the evolutionary tree hundreds of millions of years ago. Our common ancestor would have been a very dumb animal. Their brain structure is so different: 8 semi-autonomous tentacles, with one sort of central coordinating body. What could it possibly be like to experience the world that way? They&#x27;re probably the &quot;peak&quot; of intelligence with the most prominence, along with humans and intelligent swarming insects like bees and termites. I think it&#x27;s really interesting. Is is it really possible to measure this kind of intelligence? Can we ever know just how smart they are?<p>And, of course, they&#x27;re just interesting creatures regardless. Their bodies is flexible, yet strong, like one continuous muscle. Each tentacle has a slightly different &quot;personality;&quot; for a single octopus, some of its tentacles are more adventurous while others are more shy. They can change the color of their entire body, and do, for reasons we haven&#x27;t figured out yet. They mate once, after which the female guards the egg cache without moving from the spot until she withers away.<p>Everything I read about them absolutely floors me. They&#x27;re the closest thing we have to an intelligent alien species.</text></comment>
11,542,476	11,542,393	1	2	11,542,123	train	<story><title>Show HN: Turned Facebook Messenger into a JavaScript REPL</title><url>http://github.com/peralmq/bot-wat</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emirozer</author><text>Cool idea! But man, Gary Bernhardt&#x27;s WAT talk, even though i saw it at least 10 times, still cracks me up...</text></comment>	<story><title>Show HN: Turned Facebook Messenger into a JavaScript REPL</title><url>http://github.com/peralmq/bot-wat</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomsmeding</author><text>Happy to see that it uses the safe-eval library, which appears to fix code injection issues. Haven&#x27;t checked that well though.</text></comment>
14,977,789	14,976,465	1	3	14,973,706	train	<story><title>Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE</title><url>http://www.lazarus-ide.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brass9</author><text>&gt; [x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax<p>I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.<p>Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.<p>I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it&#x27;s glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there&#x27;s so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end&#x27;s.<p>Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.<p>As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.</text></item><item><author>samuell</author><text>Lazarus&#x2F;FPC checks so many nice boxes:<p>[x] Statically compiled<p>[x] Native UI on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Typically compiled without code changes on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Small binaries<p>[x] No GC<p>[x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax<p>[x] Still, doesn&#x27;t rely on indentation for nested blocks<p>[ ] (Fill in)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>int_19h</author><text>&gt; Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.<p>It can&#x27;t possibly, seeing how it predates C.<p>There are specific differences that set them apart, too. For example, the fact that Pascal has statement separators rather than statement terminators (and using a separator in a terminal position is usually an error, e.g. before &quot;else&quot;).<p>Pascal rather belongs to the Algol family of languages, together with C. Algol-60 is where &quot;begin&quot; and &quot;end&quot; come from.</text></comment>	<story><title>Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE</title><url>http://www.lazarus-ide.org</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>brass9</author><text>&gt; [x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax<p>I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.<p>Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.<p>I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it&#x27;s glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there&#x27;s so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end&#x27;s.<p>Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.<p>As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.</text></item><item><author>samuell</author><text>Lazarus&#x2F;FPC checks so many nice boxes:<p>[x] Statically compiled<p>[x] Native UI on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Typically compiled without code changes on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Small binaries<p>[x] No GC<p>[x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax<p>[x] Still, doesn&#x27;t rely on indentation for nested blocks<p>[ ] (Fill in)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epx</author><text>My feeling as well. In my heart I am really happy that Lazarus (and Harbour, the Clipper-compatible compiler) exist, but being rational the days of desktop applications are over.<p>Python is being run on microcontrollers these days; I actually wrestle with the non-adoption of Python (or Ruby, or Javascript, or Tcl) as 1st-class citizen language for desktop and mobile; it does not make sense for me. Certainly writing desktop&#x2F;web apps in C++ or Pascal make even less sense.<p>Perhaps I am forgetting the big number of fellow developers that work on ERP systems and outdated software, for them it is a blessing to have free tools, while in the 90s such a tool could cost $3k.</text></comment>
29,059,525	29,059,653	1	3	29,058,750	train	<story><title>Repeat Yourself, a Lot</title><url>https://tomtunguz.com/why-you-should-repeat-yourself/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thatsamonad</author><text>A somewhat related approach that I’ve found incredibly useful in my career is repeating what -others- have told you back to them, a lot.<p>It’s honestly amazing to me how much mileage I’ve gotten out of simply saying, “I heard you say X about Y. Does that sound right to you?” a couple of times during discussions just to make sure that everyone is clear that we’re all discussing the same thing.<p>It seems like “common sense” to clarify your understanding of someone else’s communication but I haven’t run into very many people who actually take the time to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>__turbobrew__</author><text>Repeating what others said back to them is called “mirroring” and is an effective technique for not only confirming your understanding but also showing others that you are actively listening.<p>I recommend reading “ Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by Chris Voss if you are interested in conversation tactics.</text></comment>	<story><title>Repeat Yourself, a Lot</title><url>https://tomtunguz.com/why-you-should-repeat-yourself/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thatsamonad</author><text>A somewhat related approach that I’ve found incredibly useful in my career is repeating what -others- have told you back to them, a lot.<p>It’s honestly amazing to me how much mileage I’ve gotten out of simply saying, “I heard you say X about Y. Does that sound right to you?” a couple of times during discussions just to make sure that everyone is clear that we’re all discussing the same thing.<p>It seems like “common sense” to clarify your understanding of someone else’s communication but I haven’t run into very many people who actually take the time to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SilasX</author><text>Similarly, if you missed a part of what someone said, repeat back everything you did hear as part of the question. It confirms you were listening and avoids an excessively long or rephrased answered.<p>For example, &quot;We reviewed &lt;garbled&gt; and found the events hadn&#x27;t been logged.&quot; -&gt; &quot;You reviewed what and found the events hadn&#x27;t been logged?&quot;</text></comment>
4,452,093	4,452,057	1	2	4,450,244	train	<story><title>What killed the Linux desktop</title><url>http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diminish</author><text>To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..</text></item><item><author>wheels</author><text>&#62; <i>I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work.</i><p>Just because it's never happened to <i>you</i> on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for <i>either</i> of the two external displays I own. <i>Both</i> worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, <i>or</i> from Linux on the same machine.<p>Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings.<p>It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>This is the money quote:<p>&#62; The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use.<p>Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and <i>philosophy</i>. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need.<p>I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what I want. I don't want to dick around with Windows managers or the like. Some do and that's fine but almost no one really does.<p>Whereas Windows and OSX can (and do) dictate a topdown vision for the desktop experience, Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? Whatever the case, this really matters for a desktop experience.<p>I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. It could be an update gone awry. It could be corp-specific modifications. It could be anything. But the point is: <i>I don't care what the problem is, I just want it to work</i>. In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. In many others too.<p>I can't describe to you how much torture it always seems to be to get anything desktop-related to work on Linux. I loathe it with a passion. I've long since given up any idea that Linux will ever get anywhere on the desktop. It won't. That takes a topdown approach, the kind that anarchies can't solve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bpatrianakos</author><text>Oh well now that you said it the argument is settled. You can't just say OS X has the poorest hardware support ever and not back it up with anything except "go buy some hardware and see what works and what doesn't". Is there maybe a table online that lists these incompatibilities you can link to? Please don't say "do some research" because the onus is on you to prove yourrself right, not on me to prove you right.<p>You also said "even compared to Linux". That's interesting. That statement there gives the impression that you're more interested in defending your own beliefs and/or choices rather than being truly interested in explaining to us what OS has objectively terrible hardware support. "even compared to Linux" sounds like something an apologist would say. Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts.<p>Me? I've used Mac, a handful of Linux distros, and Windows for a long time. I don't know which has the best or worse hardware support but I do know when someone says something based on what camp they're in rather than what the facts are.</text></comment>	<story><title>What killed the Linux desktop</title><url>http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Aug-29.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diminish</author><text>To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..</text></item><item><author>wheels</author><text>&#62; <i>I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work.</i><p>Just because it's never happened to <i>you</i> on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for <i>either</i> of the two external displays I own. <i>Both</i> worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, <i>or</i> from Linux on the same machine.<p>Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings.<p>It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.</text></item><item><author>cletus</author><text>This is the money quote:<p>&#62; The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use.<p>Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and <i>philosophy</i>. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need.<p>I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what I want. I don't want to dick around with Windows managers or the like. Some do and that's fine but almost no one really does.<p>Whereas Windows and OSX can (and do) dictate a topdown vision for the desktop experience, Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? Whatever the case, this really matters for a desktop experience.<p>I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. It could be an update gone awry. It could be corp-specific modifications. It could be anything. But the point is: <i>I don't care what the problem is, I just want it to work</i>. In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. In many others too.<p>I can't describe to you how much torture it always seems to be to get anything desktop-related to work on Linux. I loathe it with a passion. I've long since given up any idea that Linux will ever get anywhere on the desktop. It won't. That takes a topdown approach, the kind that anarchies can't solve.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rahoulb</author><text>The real difference is that on OSX is if something doesn't work it doesn't work. Under Linux it may work, or work badly, or you can probably hack it to make it work well. I used to think I liked the latter but there's something appealing about the binary clarity of OSX.</text></comment>
33,196,008	33,196,160	1	3	33,191,307	train	<story><title>Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?</title><url>https://www.getlago.com/blog/is-stripe-using-stripe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurrik</author><text>(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point.<p>At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing system for all kinds of companies at different sizes, but we were definitely focused on smaller (doing maybe $100k–$10M of ARR) SaaS companies to start. We&#x27;ve come a long way since then and now power billing for a number of large&#x2F;public companies. Atlassian, Figma, Notion and Slack are either using or migrating onto Stripe Billing today.<p>Stripe Billing is a powerful tool with a role to play in any company&#x27;s revenue management system, including Stripe&#x27;s. Newer Stripe products (such as Atlas) do build on top of Stripe Billing but we haven&#x27;t gotten around to migrating our existing stack. That said, I do have a personal goal of taking on more internal billing responsibilities over time (e.g. I think we could easily use Stripe Invoices internally today, and it&#x27;s mostly opportunity cost keeping us from actually doing so).<p>I do want to say that the specific use case covered in the post is something we have thought about a lot. I think about it as a pipeline with stages for collecting high volumes of usage events, aggregating them, mapping them to rate cards based on usage, and then producing recurring bills, collecting payment, dunning, etc... The post claims we don’t do a good job on the first two stages (collecting usage events and aggregating them) is perhaps missing that the style of percentage-based fees is a one-line addition to a Connect integration as my colleague edwinwee mentioned below. It is also possible to have a scalable usage event collection&#x2F;aggregation pipeline integrated with Stripe Billing. You can read this AWS blog post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;apn&#x2F;building-a-third-party-saas-metering-and-billing-integration-on-aws&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;apn&#x2F;building-a-third-party-saas...</a> for information about how to build such a system according to our best practices.<p>While I’m here, I’m always eager to hear feedback on Stripe Billing from folks who are using it. My email is [email protected].</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Biganon</author><text>So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.</text></comment>	<story><title>Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?</title><url>https://www.getlago.com/blog/is-stripe-using-stripe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kurrik</author><text>(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point.<p>At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing system for all kinds of companies at different sizes, but we were definitely focused on smaller (doing maybe $100k–$10M of ARR) SaaS companies to start. We&#x27;ve come a long way since then and now power billing for a number of large&#x2F;public companies. Atlassian, Figma, Notion and Slack are either using or migrating onto Stripe Billing today.<p>Stripe Billing is a powerful tool with a role to play in any company&#x27;s revenue management system, including Stripe&#x27;s. Newer Stripe products (such as Atlas) do build on top of Stripe Billing but we haven&#x27;t gotten around to migrating our existing stack. That said, I do have a personal goal of taking on more internal billing responsibilities over time (e.g. I think we could easily use Stripe Invoices internally today, and it&#x27;s mostly opportunity cost keeping us from actually doing so).<p>I do want to say that the specific use case covered in the post is something we have thought about a lot. I think about it as a pipeline with stages for collecting high volumes of usage events, aggregating them, mapping them to rate cards based on usage, and then producing recurring bills, collecting payment, dunning, etc... The post claims we don’t do a good job on the first two stages (collecting usage events and aggregating them) is perhaps missing that the style of percentage-based fees is a one-line addition to a Connect integration as my colleague edwinwee mentioned below. It is also possible to have a scalable usage event collection&#x2F;aggregation pipeline integrated with Stripe Billing. You can read this AWS blog post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;apn&#x2F;building-a-third-party-saas-metering-and-billing-integration-on-aws&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;apn&#x2F;building-a-third-party-saas...</a> for information about how to build such a system according to our best practices.<p>While I’m here, I’m always eager to hear feedback on Stripe Billing from folks who are using it. My email is [email protected].</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshpadnick</author><text>We use Stripe Billing and it&#x27;s gone very well overall, but the biggest miss for us is that Stripe conflates &quot;contract term&quot; with &quot;billing frequency.&quot; We sign up customers for annual contracts but bill them monthly, but Stripe Billing only understands the &quot;bill monthly&quot; part of that.<p>Are there any plans for first-class contract term support coming?</text></comment>

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