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14,654,849 | 14,654,272 | 1 | 2 | 14,651,884 | train | <story><title>USPS loses millions each year on local delivery of mail from abroad (2014)</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the-postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from-china/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cujo</author><text>Forgive my ignorance, but can&#x27;t it go the other way also?<p>A contrived example...<p>A person has $X that they spend every week at the local town restaurant. They see they can buy a cool new widget from a Chinese vendor (from the article) for $Y. Over the course of the next few weeks, said person spends a little less at the restaurant so as to save up $Y, ultimately purchasing the widget once enough money is saved.<p>In this example the person is contributing less to the local economy.</text></item><item><author>scribu</author><text>How do you figure?<p>The surplus comes from the fact that US buyers don&#x27;t have to pay a percentage to the intermediary, so they can spend it on other things, like going out to a local restaurant more often.</text></item><item><author>hueving</author><text>The global economy sure, but not the US economy.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>Also the seller&#x27;s claim that direct doesn&#x27;t add anything to the economy is false. That surplus will be directed elsewhere, hopefully to something more productive than what has become an unnecessary intermediary.</text></item><item><author>csydas</author><text>&gt; All of this is little comfort to McGrath, who chafes at the thought of the Postal Service helping Chinese merchants poach his customers. “All of us sellers are selling a lot of Chinese goods in America but at least we’re creating jobs, making money, and adding to the economy,” he said. “But when people buy direct from China that’s adding nothing to the American economy.”<p>I understand the seller&#x27;s frustration - their means of supporting themselves has been taken away, but I&#x27;m not sure I buy the argument that we need the intermediary just to &quot;add to the economy&quot;. To me it just seems like an unsustainable business model that was destined to die once global communication became much easier, not just because of the various treaties and agreements of postal services.<p>The moment that chinese sellers could get a site available to a global audience, the need for an intermediary vanished; before you essentially paid for the connection; an extra $18 on a remote controlled toy boat was paying for access to the seller&#x27;s inventory, supplied by his Chinese connections.<p>Now, there&#x27;s no need for that connection or that warehouse - the visibility for any foreign seller is much greater, even to the point that it probably would still be valuable even without the USPS trade deal.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate, but this just seems like a model that was destined to die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bearcobra</author><text>It can, and gets even more complicated when that widget was available locally for $Z and $Y &lt; $Z. Was $Z so much greater than $Y that the person would have never started to save for it? Or did $Y mean they were able to start spending at the restaurant again sooner? How do you calculate the value of the cool new widget once the person has it?</text></comment> | <story><title>USPS loses millions each year on local delivery of mail from abroad (2014)</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the-postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from-china/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cujo</author><text>Forgive my ignorance, but can&#x27;t it go the other way also?<p>A contrived example...<p>A person has $X that they spend every week at the local town restaurant. They see they can buy a cool new widget from a Chinese vendor (from the article) for $Y. Over the course of the next few weeks, said person spends a little less at the restaurant so as to save up $Y, ultimately purchasing the widget once enough money is saved.<p>In this example the person is contributing less to the local economy.</text></item><item><author>scribu</author><text>How do you figure?<p>The surplus comes from the fact that US buyers don&#x27;t have to pay a percentage to the intermediary, so they can spend it on other things, like going out to a local restaurant more often.</text></item><item><author>hueving</author><text>The global economy sure, but not the US economy.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>Also the seller&#x27;s claim that direct doesn&#x27;t add anything to the economy is false. That surplus will be directed elsewhere, hopefully to something more productive than what has become an unnecessary intermediary.</text></item><item><author>csydas</author><text>&gt; All of this is little comfort to McGrath, who chafes at the thought of the Postal Service helping Chinese merchants poach his customers. “All of us sellers are selling a lot of Chinese goods in America but at least we’re creating jobs, making money, and adding to the economy,” he said. “But when people buy direct from China that’s adding nothing to the American economy.”<p>I understand the seller&#x27;s frustration - their means of supporting themselves has been taken away, but I&#x27;m not sure I buy the argument that we need the intermediary just to &quot;add to the economy&quot;. To me it just seems like an unsustainable business model that was destined to die once global communication became much easier, not just because of the various treaties and agreements of postal services.<p>The moment that chinese sellers could get a site available to a global audience, the need for an intermediary vanished; before you essentially paid for the connection; an extra $18 on a remote controlled toy boat was paying for access to the seller&#x27;s inventory, supplied by his Chinese connections.<p>Now, there&#x27;s no need for that connection or that warehouse - the visibility for any foreign seller is much greater, even to the point that it probably would still be valuable even without the USPS trade deal.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate, but this just seems like a model that was destined to die.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scribu</author><text>You&#x27;re right, it could go both ways.<p>I guess the question then is: do we have a way of predicting which way it will go?</text></comment> |
32,412,680 | 32,410,629 | 1 | 3 | 32,394,195 | train | <story><title>Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor</title><url>https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/area-5150-8088-mph-gets-a-successor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drivers99</author><text>Can’t wait to check this out on my IBM PC (5150) with CGA which is my first computer that I still have. (Some of the RAM is bad though so if it needs the full 640k like 8088MHz did I might need to repair it.)<p>Then again 8088MHz worked well for me because I lost the RGBI monitor for it at some point and that demo is designed for composite.<p>Getting files to the PC is an interesting challenge. Have to copy from Windows 10 or 7 to a USB drive and movie that to a PC I have with a serial port and Windows XP and then transfer the demo with Hyperterm in Windows and Telix in MS-DOS on the PC side via null modem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>illys</author><text>If you can put USD 50-100 in your antics, you may add an XT-IDE ISA card with a Compact Flash adapter.<p>The one I have has a slot in the backside metal bracket: I can load a Compact Flash (1 GiB, FAT-32 formatted) in a modern PC with a USB adapter, then I insert the Compact Flash in the back of my IBM PC and switch it on with new fresh data and software.<p>Note that the Compact Flash is seen by DOS (6.2 in my case) as a hard disk drive, you may boot on it. It may also co-exist with an MFM harddrive: in my case, the MFM drive is C: and boots, the Compact Flash is D:.<p>It is a very convenient setup to make the IBM PC a smooth place in our modern IT world.</text></comment> | <story><title>Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor</title><url>https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/area-5150-8088-mph-gets-a-successor/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drivers99</author><text>Can’t wait to check this out on my IBM PC (5150) with CGA which is my first computer that I still have. (Some of the RAM is bad though so if it needs the full 640k like 8088MHz did I might need to repair it.)<p>Then again 8088MHz worked well for me because I lost the RGBI monitor for it at some point and that demo is designed for composite.<p>Getting files to the PC is an interesting challenge. Have to copy from Windows 10 or 7 to a USB drive and movie that to a PC I have with a serial port and Windows XP and then transfer the demo with Hyperterm in Windows and Telix in MS-DOS on the PC side via null modem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hyperdimension</author><text>Adding to the other comments, there are also SD card&#x2F;flash drive-based &#x27;floppy disk&#x27; hardware emulators available on eBay. They even have buttons on the front so you can cycle through, e.g. all thirteen floppies of Windows 3.1. :)<p>There&#x27;s one piece of hardware (3.5&quot;
hardware emulator) whose clones are popular enough to even have third-party customizable firmware on github!<p>I own one, but unfortunately, I can&#x27;t remember the name of this hardware nor the alternate firmware off the top of my head. When I get to a computer I will check my ebay history.<p>Even though it&#x27;s physically a 3.5&quot; &#x27;drive,&#x27; with the IDC-style connector, the alternate firmware lets you emulate various disk geometries, and I believe the 3.5&quot; and 5.25&quot; signals are electrically compatible.<p>It&#x27;s an extremely useful piece of hardware, especially if you&#x27;re <i>already</i> getting software in the form of floppy disk images from a place like winworldpc.</text></comment> |
14,629,393 | 14,629,336 | 1 | 2 | 14,628,980 | train | <story><title>Who Americans spend their time with</title><url>https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HJFYm4uQ-</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nopinsight</author><text>Longitudinal data would be informative. I strongly suspect people spent less time alone in the past.
(Note: The X-axis is age.)<p>My theories:<p>* Multitude of choices given to us by technology have led to fewer things we pay attention to in common with our friends and neighbors. Thus, fewer shared loci of interaction. Career specialization is another key contributing factor.<p>* More recently, dopamine rush generated by endless new contents tailored to our preferences has made real-world interactions and activities dull by comparison. More people choose to spend time alone with that rush. In the long run, it might result in weaker social ties and less healthy psychology for some&#x2F;many people.<p>Research has shown that strong social ties are important for mental and even physical health.<p>How do we design technologies and social institutions to help connect people in the real world and alleviate the problems?</text></comment> | <story><title>Who Americans spend their time with</title><url>https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HJFYm4uQ-</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>examancer</author><text>These are some of the worst designed charts. I had to download the CSV to figure out that the x-axis is age.<p>Once I figured it out the bottom right chart was chilling.</text></comment> |
13,487,496 | 13,487,172 | 1 | 3 | 13,485,919 | train | <story><title>Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”</title><url>https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-on-writing-well/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x1798DE</author><text>I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on &quot;clutter&quot;, Zinsser picks out this passage from <i>Walden</i> as his exemplar of &quot;uncluttered English&quot;:<p>&quot;I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.&quot;<p>Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &quot;front&quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.<p>That said, I really do want to get better at non-fiction writing, specifically technical writing, but I haven&#x27;t found any good recommendations for &quot;canonical&quot; books on technical writing. If anyone can suggest a decent, pragmatic (as opposed to Strunk-and-White style prescriptivism) introduction to technical writing specifically, I&#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacampbell</author><text><i>&quot;I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.&quot;
Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &quot;front&quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.</i><p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s difficult for educated native English speakers. Walden was written in 1854, and most people who went to high school in an English speaking country would have some exposure to Shakespeare which is 250 years older than that - so I really don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s very archaic. Are you a non-native speaker? You write English completely fluently but if you&#x27;ve had no real exposure to the literature I can understand why you might find it hard going.<p>I haven&#x27;t taken English since high school, and had no &quot;liberal education&quot; at university, and I did just fine with the audiobook (ie the whole thing was read aloud to me). I am not going to pretend it&#x27;s easy to understand as modern, informal speech but it certainly wasn&#x27;t arduous.</text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”</title><url>https://www.robinwieruch.de/lessons-learned-on-writing-well/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>x1798DE</author><text>I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on &quot;clutter&quot;, Zinsser picks out this passage from <i>Walden</i> as his exemplar of &quot;uncluttered English&quot;:<p>&quot;I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.&quot;<p>Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of &quot;front&quot; as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.<p>That said, I really do want to get better at non-fiction writing, specifically technical writing, but I haven&#x27;t found any good recommendations for &quot;canonical&quot; books on technical writing. If anyone can suggest a decent, pragmatic (as opposed to Strunk-and-White style prescriptivism) introduction to technical writing specifically, I&#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cgh</author><text>I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve seen it before, but The Economist&#x27;s style guide is my usual resource: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;styleguide&#x2F;introduction" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;styleguide&#x2F;introduction</a></text></comment> |
4,681,902 | 4,681,886 | 1 | 3 | 4,681,412 | train | <story><title>Turning to the past to power Windows' future: An in-depth look at WinRT</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bztzt</author><text>Ever since Windows 8 was first shown to the public back in June 2011 people have speculated about / been confused about what relation the "new system" has to the existing Windows, technically - is "Metro" a thin layer over "Desktop" Windows, like Media Center or Bob? Or is it the reverse, the desktop some virtual-machine environment on top of the "new system", like Mac OS "classic mode"? Or are they two systems running side-by-side?<p>In fact it's none of those things - the new environment/UI isn't a new shell running on top of, underneath, or alongside the existing shell. Rather, it's a set of new features added and refactorings made to every layer of the existing system, together with a set of <i>policies</i> designed to create the effect of a fresh new environment by encouraging/enforcing a path through only the "new" parts of each layer.<p>So, for example, the app permissions / sandbox that new-style apps run in is actually a new general low-level system feature that desktop apps can use too - IE10 desktop uses it for "Enhanced Protected Mode". But this isn't really being publicized or promoted because why would desktop app developers rewrite their code to work with it? Similarly the windows that new-style apps run in aren't being controlled by some separate window manager, they are just regular windows (HWND) in the existing window manager - but that window manager has new features for smoother composition/animation and touch manipulation of windows, and new security features to enforce Z-order rules so apps can't pop up windows on top of new-style apps or steal focus or whatever. Most of the new WinRT APIs aren't available to desktop apps but there is no <i>fundamental</i> purely technical reason they can't be. And so on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Turning to the past to power Windows' future: An in-depth look at WinRT</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Hominem</author><text>It seems like a good iterative approach to me. Classic desktop apps can still run, but it seems clear they are no longer preferred. WinRT offers an interface over Win32, a skim coat to even out all the cracks, quirks and special cases that have appeared over the years. At some point down the line you can jettison Win32 altogether and replace it with whatever you want, or even leave it in place.</text></comment> |
20,658,035 | 20,657,118 | 1 | 3 | 20,656,929 | train | <story><title>Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency</title><url>https://polyarch.co/rice-university-research-heat-into-light/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>apo</author><text>The title is misleading. The full title is:<p>&gt; Researchers at Rice University developed a method to convert heat into light that could boost solar efficiency from 22% to 80%<p>The conditional tense signals that the researchers didn&#x27;t actually do so, but that the study might enable it. The article re-iterates that this is speculation:<p>&gt; The implications of their discovery are significant. Research from Chloe Doiron, a Rice graduate student, revealed that 20% of industrial energy consumption is wasted through heat. It could also mean an increase in the efficiency of solar cells, which are currently only 22% efficient at their peak. Recycling the thermal energy from solar cells using carbon nanotube technology could increase the efficiency to 80% according to the researchers. ...</text></comment> | <story><title>Rice University researchers propose a way to boost solar efficiency</title><url>https://polyarch.co/rice-university-research-heat-into-light/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>That really needs some editing, it reads like gibberish.<p>Just go to the source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.rice.edu&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;rice-device-channels-heat-into-light&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.rice.edu&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;12&#x2F;rice-device-channels-heat-i...</a></text></comment> |
37,046,228 | 37,039,357 | 1 | 2 | 37,036,339 | train | <story><title>Traffic safety “nudges” can cause number of crashes to increase (2022)</title><url>https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abm3427</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duffpkg</author><text>This is reminiscent of an experience we had at ClearHealth with managed hospital aesthetics. Not a scientific study in any sense, but as part of rebranding a hospital group, the color scheme was changed from a neutral green to a much brighter orange. The change coincided with a small but meaningful increase in mortality for procedures done on the associated floor. Enough that we reverted to the older aesthetic. The mortality change reverted as well. Chalked it up to coincidence. This process then repeated at two other separate campuses. I can&#x27;t rule out this was some sort of reverse &quot;Hawthorne Effect&quot; where our communications about the change were the source of the problem but it bothered me enough to mostly put an end to our appetite for large scale aesthetic redesigns.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bobsoap</author><text>Color has a measurable effect on humans. There&#x27;s an extensive body of research on the psychological effects of color; every designer worth their salt knows this. The fields of branding and marketing use color purposefully every day as well.<p>Green has a soothing, calming effect on people because it&#x27;s most common in our natural surroundings. For example, TV shows use &quot;green rooms&quot; filled with plants (and sometimes even painted green) to calm down guests before they go on stage for this very reason.<p>Orange, on the other hand, excites people and can elevate their heartbeat. It&#x27;s a cross between red (hot-blooded, passion, rage) and yellow (energy, happiness, attention). You could say it encourages your emotions to interfere with rational thought.<p>So you can keep your appetite for large-scale redesigns! Just add a step to incorporate color psychology.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_psychology" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Color_psychology</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Traffic safety “nudges” can cause number of crashes to increase (2022)</title><url>https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abm3427</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>duffpkg</author><text>This is reminiscent of an experience we had at ClearHealth with managed hospital aesthetics. Not a scientific study in any sense, but as part of rebranding a hospital group, the color scheme was changed from a neutral green to a much brighter orange. The change coincided with a small but meaningful increase in mortality for procedures done on the associated floor. Enough that we reverted to the older aesthetic. The mortality change reverted as well. Chalked it up to coincidence. This process then repeated at two other separate campuses. I can&#x27;t rule out this was some sort of reverse &quot;Hawthorne Effect&quot; where our communications about the change were the source of the problem but it bothered me enough to mostly put an end to our appetite for large scale aesthetic redesigns.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>6510</author><text>A factory here, a few decades ago spend 150 k to select a color scheme for maximum productivity. No one believed in it but one investor insisted because he used the service before and the consultant had a lot of numbers to show.<p>50 cm above the floor the wall had 6 washed out grayish colored bars 20-25 cm width with green and orange slightly brighter. I didn&#x27;t notice a productivity gain but it did allow excellent peripheral vision.</text></comment> |
35,284,256 | 35,283,076 | 1 | 2 | 35,277,660 | train | <story><title>Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more</title><url>https://frame.work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squarefoot</author><text>&quot;We’ve partnered with Cooler Master to create an awesome new way to re-use your Framework Laptop Mainboards: a transparent, small form factor case. This will be available this Spring for $39 USD.&quot;<p>This is the way.<p>More vendors should do that. A huge load of obsolete but perfectly working laptop mainboards could be repurposed to other uses. Need a small system to set up a service on a LAN but don&#x27;t want to feed scalpers by buying their outrageously overpriced Raspberry PIs? What about reusing the board from that old EeePC many of us already have, etc?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>2muchcoffeeman</author><text>The product page for the case also links to a 3D printed case in the framework GitHub <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.work&#x2F;au&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;cooler-master-mainboard-case" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.work&#x2F;au&#x2F;en&#x2F;products&#x2F;cooler-master-mainboard-ca...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more</title><url>https://frame.work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>squarefoot</author><text>&quot;We’ve partnered with Cooler Master to create an awesome new way to re-use your Framework Laptop Mainboards: a transparent, small form factor case. This will be available this Spring for $39 USD.&quot;<p>This is the way.<p>More vendors should do that. A huge load of obsolete but perfectly working laptop mainboards could be repurposed to other uses. Need a small system to set up a service on a LAN but don&#x27;t want to feed scalpers by buying their outrageously overpriced Raspberry PIs? What about reusing the board from that old EeePC many of us already have, etc?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>porphyra</author><text>The $449 Intel 1340p or AMD Ryzen mainboard seems to be attractively priced against other barebones mini PCs and the Mac Mini too!</text></comment> |
23,546,596 | 23,546,792 | 1 | 3 | 23,545,698 | train | <story><title>Google bans ZeroHedge and The Federalist from its ad platform</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/google-bans-zerohedge-and-the-federalist-from-its-ad-platform.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>refurb</author><text>I love Zerohedge, but let me explain why before you condemn me.<p>What I like about Zerohedge is that I actually hear about things before the major media covers it. If I go to CNN, Foxnews or other networks, they all cover the exact same thing. And they are also slow. It&#x27;s not unusual for Zerohedge to cover something half a day before the big boys.<p>Now, when I read Zerohedge, I put on my filters. They love to interpret news in the worst possible and highly-conspiratorial light. Gold price drops? Must be an international cabal led by Elon Musk or some other nonsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>svaha1728</author><text>Yup. The first story they had on Covid-19 was January 2, and it was followed by a series of alarmist headlines with great photos and videos every week. That said, it was real. It took a while before it was headline news elsewhere.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google bans ZeroHedge and The Federalist from its ad platform</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/google-bans-zerohedge-and-the-federalist-from-its-ad-platform.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>refurb</author><text>I love Zerohedge, but let me explain why before you condemn me.<p>What I like about Zerohedge is that I actually hear about things before the major media covers it. If I go to CNN, Foxnews or other networks, they all cover the exact same thing. And they are also slow. It&#x27;s not unusual for Zerohedge to cover something half a day before the big boys.<p>Now, when I read Zerohedge, I put on my filters. They love to interpret news in the worst possible and highly-conspiratorial light. Gold price drops? Must be an international cabal led by Elon Musk or some other nonsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mc32</author><text>And for the love of all that’s dear, don’t read the utter garbage that is the comments section. They do not censor, which I like, but man oh man, do trolls thrive there...</text></comment> |
31,319,823 | 31,319,884 | 1 | 2 | 31,319,179 | train | <story><title>NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers</title><url>https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S5474</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goatcode</author><text>Coming from a country that has this, there should be caution: it gets more affordable, but you get what you pay for. In my country of origin, you get a partially-paid-for ride to the emergency room, where you pay for things like casts, non-ward rooms, dental care out of pocket. There is no prescription coverage. There is no optometry coverage. I would wait significant chunks of a year for procedures and diagnostics. To cover the things that aren&#x27;t covered, most have private insurance through work or also out of pocket.<p>Since moving to the US, it is more expensive (than next to nothing), but I actually get good care. Several conditions that were ignored or misdiagnosed for me are now cured. My life might be significantly shorter had I not come here.<p>If NY does this, the near zero chance of my moving there ever would go to absolute 0. It is a terrible system for any place that does not have infinitesimal state or national government expenses and more-than-60% kind of taxes (e.g., Scandinavian countries).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mtalantikite</author><text>&gt; If NY does this, the near zero chance of my moving there ever would go to absolute 0.<p>Are they proposing kicking you off your insurance? From the bill:<p>&gt; SUMMARY OF SPECIFIC PROVISIONS:<p>Every New York resident will be eligible to enroll, regardless of age, income, wealth, employment, or other status. There would be no network restrictions, deductibles, or co-pays. Coverage would be publicly funded. The benefits will include comprehensive outpatient and inpatient medical care, long-term care, primary and preventive care, prescription drugs, laboratory tests, rehabilitative, dental, vision, hearing, etc. all benefits required by current state insurance law or provided by the state public employee package, Family Health Plus, Child Health Plus, Medicare, or Medicaid, and others added by the plan.<p>As someone that has lived in NYC for 15 years, I&#x27;d really love to see this happen.<p>Edit:<p>&gt; Private insurance that duplicates benefits offered under New York Health could not be offered to New York residents.<p>So yes, I guess it would be kicking those off of their current private insurance. It sounds like it&#x27;d force private insurers to offer plans that would augment off of a base of public care.<p>I&#x27;m still fine with this.</text></comment> | <story><title>NY Senate Bill S5474 proposing a universal single payer health plan for NYers</title><url>https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/S5474</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goatcode</author><text>Coming from a country that has this, there should be caution: it gets more affordable, but you get what you pay for. In my country of origin, you get a partially-paid-for ride to the emergency room, where you pay for things like casts, non-ward rooms, dental care out of pocket. There is no prescription coverage. There is no optometry coverage. I would wait significant chunks of a year for procedures and diagnostics. To cover the things that aren&#x27;t covered, most have private insurance through work or also out of pocket.<p>Since moving to the US, it is more expensive (than next to nothing), but I actually get good care. Several conditions that were ignored or misdiagnosed for me are now cured. My life might be significantly shorter had I not come here.<p>If NY does this, the near zero chance of my moving there ever would go to absolute 0. It is a terrible system for any place that does not have infinitesimal state or national government expenses and more-than-60% kind of taxes (e.g., Scandinavian countries).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manuelabeledo</author><text>I come from a country with universal healthcare too, and my experience is the opposite.<p>Yes, to this day, it doesn’t cover dental or vision, which is BS if you ask me, and there is some co-pay for certain prescriptions; regardless, it is a fantastic system, and I miss it so much every time I need to go to the doctor here in the US. The main reason is uncertainty: in the US, I can <i>never</i> know how much something is going to be, even if it starts as a mere visit to a family doctor, because there are uncountable variables that may factor in the final cost.<p>As a result of this, I try to avoid going to the doctor as much as I can, and it makes me think about all the people who really cannot afford healthcare, and don’t qualify for Medicare either.</text></comment> |
37,529,013 | 37,528,839 | 1 | 2 | 37,527,720 | train | <story><title>I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Znafon</author><text>&quot;Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day.<p>My idea was to take this code and spruce it up for Uber’s use case.&quot;<p>&quot;My first reaction was to publish the code on Github.&quot;<p>I’m very surprised by this, isn’t the code property of Box, or Uber? The author does not mention their authorisation before releasing it under MIT license.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bastawhiz</author><text>Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn&#x27;t want it.<p>If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn&#x27;t originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.</text></comment> | <story><title>I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it</title><url>https://basta.substack.com/p/no-sacred-masterpieces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Znafon</author><text>&quot;Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day.<p>My idea was to take this code and spruce it up for Uber’s use case.&quot;<p>&quot;My first reaction was to publish the code on Github.&quot;<p>I’m very surprised by this, isn’t the code property of Box, or Uber? The author does not mention their authorisation before releasing it under MIT license.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sidewndr46</author><text>I believe this kind of story is the kind that gives most legal counsel nightmares.</text></comment> |
3,945,850 | 3,945,593 | 1 | 2 | 3,944,970 | train | <story><title>Abraham Lincoln Filed A Patent For Facebook In 1845</title><url>http://natestpierre.me/2012/05/08/abraham-lincoln-patent-facebook/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Kevin_Marks</author><text>I contacted the curator at the Lincoln Museum by email. His response:<p>This is entirely a hoax. Clever, too. We have an official stastement to that effect due within the hour. -James<p>James M. Cornelius, Ph.D.
Curator, Lincoln Collection
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library &#38; Museum
112 N. Sixth St.
Springfield, IL 62701-1310 217.785.7954
<a href="http://www.alplm.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.alplm.org</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Abraham Lincoln Filed A Patent For Facebook In 1845</title><url>http://natestpierre.me/2012/05/08/abraham-lincoln-patent-facebook/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ynniv</author><text>A few people in the other submission have suggested that this is a hoax. The photos may have been rehashed from period publications, there is no mention of this patent application in the well documented life of Lincoln, and it is rather convenient that the means of proper documentation was left at home.<p>But what a yarn! It takes gumption to start off a tall tale with a circus man. And it plays into the "execution is everyhing" mentality. The OT should consider starting a gazette of his own!</text></comment> |
29,727,400 | 29,727,065 | 1 | 2 | 29,725,505 | train | <story><title>Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong</title><url>https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-information-science-feedback-wrong-covid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>godelski</author><text>I think what many here and the writers of the article are missing is that you can both be truthful and misleading. These are not mutually exclusive. Let&#x27;s start with the title: &quot;The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science&quot;. If you just read this (titles are very important and most people only read these) what will you take away? What the authors are trying to say is that this one study has problems.<p>But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don&#x27;t say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic. The study being wrong doesn&#x27;t question _if_ masking is effective, but _how_ effective. There&#x27;s a major difference in these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts and don&#x27;t know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this study is bad we get to question all the others.<p>So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much? Harder to say. There&#x27;s a few old sayings such as &quot;the devil never tells a full lie&quot; or &quot;the devil sows doubt&quot; (often with truth). These are the errors that the authors are making here.<p>I would conclude that they aren&#x27;t inaccurate, but are misleading.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>umvi</author><text>&gt; which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view)<p>This in itself is a tricky claim to make with confidence. I agree we know certain types of masks (N95) are highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness <i>if</i> worn properly.<p>But... in the context of the article you referenced, are you prepared to defend the claim that cloth masks which haven&#x27;t been washed for months and are frequently touched, adjusted, and worn incorrectly by kids and teens are &quot;highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness&quot;?</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong</title><url>https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-information-science-feedback-wrong-covid/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>godelski</author><text>I think what many here and the writers of the article are missing is that you can both be truthful and misleading. These are not mutually exclusive. Let&#x27;s start with the title: &quot;The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science&quot;. If you just read this (titles are very important and most people only read these) what will you take away? What the authors are trying to say is that this one study has problems.<p>But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don&#x27;t say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic. The study being wrong doesn&#x27;t question _if_ masking is effective, but _how_ effective. There&#x27;s a major difference in these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts and don&#x27;t know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this study is bad we get to question all the others.<p>So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much? Harder to say. There&#x27;s a few old sayings such as &quot;the devil never tells a full lie&quot; or &quot;the devil sows doubt&quot; (often with truth). These are the errors that the authors are making here.<p>I would conclude that they aren&#x27;t inaccurate, but are misleading.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crisdux</author><text>You are coming to this article with your own biases. You seem to be basing your analysis that we &quot;know&quot; masking is highly effective. That is not true. The evidence used to justify this policy is low quality(don&#x27;t you remember the CDC hair salon study) and dependent on the precautionary principle. High quality evidence on masking has either low effect sizes or is inconclusive. It is certainly not settled science.</text></comment> |
28,042,446 | 28,042,706 | 1 | 2 | 28,033,810 | train | <story><title>The quiet battle raging around open banking</title><url>https://sifted.eu/articles/open-banking-finance-battle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rendall</author><text>I didn&#x27;t understand that article. Maybe I don&#x27;t have enough context.<p><i>&quot;share their bank data with other parties&quot;</i><p>What? Who wants to share their what now with whom? Why would they do that?<p><i>&quot;Fintechs like Plaid, TrueLayer and Tink have founded their businesses on providing access to regulated banking data for a fee..&quot;</i><p>What data? Aggregated? Individual banking? What regulated data? What regulations?<p><i>&quot;Under current banking regulation, raw data must be provided for free to consumers via an official application programming interface (or API). As a result, the apps pick up the cost on behalf of their users.&quot;</i><p>What? My bank doesn&#x27;t offer an API. I have no idea what that last sentance even means. What cost?<p>It really seems like the article assumes a lot of background knowledge. Anybody have an ELI5 link?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rojeee</author><text>All banks in the EU must offer a data and payments API. The APIs are standardised and must allow third party service providers - which themselves must be regulated - to be able to build services using these APIs. With a user&#x27;s authorisation, said service provider can view transaction data or initiate a payment, for example. The specific regulation is called &quot;payment services directive 2&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>The quiet battle raging around open banking</title><url>https://sifted.eu/articles/open-banking-finance-battle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rendall</author><text>I didn&#x27;t understand that article. Maybe I don&#x27;t have enough context.<p><i>&quot;share their bank data with other parties&quot;</i><p>What? Who wants to share their what now with whom? Why would they do that?<p><i>&quot;Fintechs like Plaid, TrueLayer and Tink have founded their businesses on providing access to regulated banking data for a fee..&quot;</i><p>What data? Aggregated? Individual banking? What regulated data? What regulations?<p><i>&quot;Under current banking regulation, raw data must be provided for free to consumers via an official application programming interface (or API). As a result, the apps pick up the cost on behalf of their users.&quot;</i><p>What? My bank doesn&#x27;t offer an API. I have no idea what that last sentance even means. What cost?<p>It really seems like the article assumes a lot of background knowledge. Anybody have an ELI5 link?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nextgrid</author><text>&gt; What? Who wants to share their what now with whom? Why would they do that?<p>Accounting or budgeting services for example.<p>&gt; What data? Aggregated? Individual banking?<p>TrueLayer &amp; Plaid are gateways that translate bank&#x27;s individual APIs into a single common one, and their clients pay them for the privilege (typically a monthly fee per active account connected).<p>&gt; What regulated data? What regulations?<p>There are EU regulations that force each bank to provide an API to any AISP (account information services provider) or PISP (payment initiation service provider). The (A|P)ISP can request the end-user&#x27;s consent (typically via OAuth) to access this data.<p>&gt; My bank doesn&#x27;t offer an API.<p>This is why I dislike the name <i>Open</i> Banking. It&#x27;s not actually open. You have to either to through tons of regulatory BS to become an AISP or go through a gatekeeper like TrueLayer or their competitors (which will happily &quot;lend&quot; you their AISP license). Fortunately, there are modern banks such as Monzo or Starling which allow the end-user to use the API to access their own account, but technically this has nothing to do with Open Banking (even though it&#x27;s often the same API).</text></comment> |
6,290,402 | 6,290,104 | 1 | 3 | 6,289,770 | train | <story><title>Humor: Interview with an Ex-Microsoftie Who Used to Name OS Folders</title><url>http://secretgeek.net/ex_ms.asp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhauer</author><text>Amusing, but the standard Unix file system is nothing to be too proud of. I&#x27;d very much like to see a file system layout re-imagined for the 2010s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mintplant</author><text>Binaries? Libraries? Let&#x27;s stick &#x27;em in `&#x2F;usr`! Oh, but where do user files go? I know, `&#x2F;home`! What about all this other stuff? Eh, `&#x2F;etc` will do. Unless it won&#x27;t, in which case `&#x2F;var` is the obvious solution. Or maybe even `&#x2F;opt`, if we&#x27;re feeling especially hip today.</text></comment> | <story><title>Humor: Interview with an Ex-Microsoftie Who Used to Name OS Folders</title><url>http://secretgeek.net/ex_ms.asp</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bhauer</author><text>Amusing, but the standard Unix file system is nothing to be too proud of. I&#x27;d very much like to see a file system layout re-imagined for the 2010s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmelendez</author><text>I am agreed. Although the last time I heard about a major attempt for a modern file system was in Longhorn and all we know how that ended.<p>I guess there are still some fears to try it again, considering that current file systems in mainstream OS&#x27; are &quot;good enough&quot;.</text></comment> |
4,178,308 | 4,178,320 | 1 | 2 | 4,177,605 | train | <story><title>Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses</title><url>https://coinbase.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DrJokepu</author><text>While I'm not a big fan of BitCoin, I don't think this is a very good argument. You could use the same argument for banks and "get robbed". Why doesn't this happen to banks?</text></item><item><author>trotsky</author><text><p><pre><code> 1. Start centralized bitcoin depository.
2. Fail to provide any loss protection.
3. "get hacked"
4. Profit.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brian_cloutier</author><text>FDIC Insurance, lots of regulation, and criminal liability.</text></comment> | <story><title>Coinbase (YC S12) seeks to bring Bitcoin to the masses</title><url>https://coinbase.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DrJokepu</author><text>While I'm not a big fan of BitCoin, I don't think this is a very good argument. You could use the same argument for banks and "get robbed". Why doesn't this happen to banks?</text></item><item><author>trotsky</author><text><p><pre><code> 1. Start centralized bitcoin depository.
2. Fail to provide any loss protection.
3. "get hacked"
4. Profit.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fromhet</author><text>The difference between the bitcoin banks/cloud wallets has been that the bitcoin counterparts seldom have any law or big organization to back them but only a few hackers with a bitcoind and a web servers. Some, like the old mybitcoin.com, have been hacked mysteriously with little data released, but only millions of $ worth of bitcoins gone forevermore.</text></comment> |
38,641,336 | 38,641,321 | 1 | 2 | 38,641,105 | train | <story><title>Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)</title><url>https://janezhang.ca/work/tekken/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BaculumMeumEst</author><text>One thing that&#x27;s very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don&#x27;t capture all the strategic implications of move properties.<p>The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a strong punish.<p>But many moves that are highly disadvantageous on block are not punishable when used at their furthest effective range, because the opponent does not have a far reaching &amp; fast enough move to punish it.<p>At higher levels of play, this kind of knowledge of move properties is actually used against you. There are characters who have uninterruptable block strings that ends in a disadvantageous move, but the string has significant pushback on block.<p>Players will use these strings to push the opponent to a deliberate spacing where it looks like they can land a long range normal to punish the last move of the blockstring. But the string is designed to place the opponent just outside of the range of that normal, where it looks like it will connect, but it it will not. In this situation, the person who did the &quot;unsafe&quot; blockstring can watch their opponent&#x27;s character model, visually confirm the startup animation of the attempted punish, and punish _that_ move&#x27;s recovery on reaction. Tricky tricky!</text></comment> | <story><title>Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)</title><url>https://janezhang.ca/work/tekken/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JKCalhoun</author><text>I kind of noped out of the fighting game craze when they descended on the arcades in the 90&#x27;s (?). To my eye they had abandoned the twitchy interactivity I had come to expect playing standard arcade games like Tempest, etc. Rather than a fire button and a spinner you had a joystick plus what amounted to a numpad of buttons. It seemed like maybe a game accountants or payroll managers would enjoy.<p>(To this day, though I have built close to a dozen MAME cabinets, I have never included the numpad of buttons you would need to play fighting games. Besides never getting into the genre, I think they clutter up the console and create confusion for other games: Metal Slug as an example, which of these six buttons is the grenade button?)<p>&lt;rant \&gt;<p>Reading this article gives me a new appreciation for the fighting game genre. I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering. (Still not sure it&#x27;s my kind of game though.)</text></comment> |
41,244,295 | 41,243,878 | 1 | 2 | 41,242,400 | train | <story><title>Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms</title><url>https://wdwnt.com/2024/08/disney-dismissal-wrongful-death-lawsuit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shiroiushi</author><text>&gt;They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss.<p>When has that ever happened? I can&#x27;t think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.</text></item><item><author>thih9</author><text>In general I agree, except perhaps &quot;Disney can only win.&quot;. They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss.<p>Their service is hospitality and the message they&#x27;re sending here is very much inhospitable. It might turn into a meme, like &quot;Cancel your Disney+ before visiting Disney IRL&quot;. It might make people hesitate and&#x2F;or choose a different holiday destination. Etc.</text></item><item><author>tgsovlerkhgsel</author><text>The bug in the legal system is that by filing this motion&#x2F;claim, Disney can only win.<p>In the unlikely best case, they get the case dismissed, but even in the most likely case that the motion is denied, they win by wearing down their opponent who has much more limited resources and is personally affected by the case dragging out, i.e. more likely to accept a (lower) settlement than without this tactic. The only downside is a tiny bit of legal costs.<p>Courts should be able to issue sanctions&#x2F;extra damages for the use of such tactics. If using such a tactic turned the claim from &quot;you killed this person negligently&quot; to &quot;you killed this person negligently, then willfully tried sleazy tricks to create additional suffering for the husband&quot;, and had the potential to double the award, companies would be much less eager to play this game.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rinzler89</author><text><i>&gt;When has that ever happened? I can&#x27;t think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.<p></i><p>Exactly. VW shortened the lifespan of millions of Europeans with their Diesel gate and their finances are still solid. Ikea and Oil companies destroy the environment all the time and saw no financial hit from the PR issues. Nike, Apple and other major manufacturers are known to have used sweatshop labor and also saw no financial consequences.<p>Consumers just don&#x27;t seem to care enough about the PR of $COMPANY as long as their contempt with how the $PRODUCT they bought works and serves them well.</text></comment> | <story><title>Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms</title><url>https://wdwnt.com/2024/08/disney-dismissal-wrongful-death-lawsuit/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shiroiushi</author><text>&gt;They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss.<p>When has that ever happened? I can&#x27;t think of any time when a company lost enough PR to actually significantly affects its financials, much less put it out of business.</text></item><item><author>thih9</author><text>In general I agree, except perhaps &quot;Disney can only win.&quot;. They can lose PR; enough that the company might consider this an overall loss.<p>Their service is hospitality and the message they&#x27;re sending here is very much inhospitable. It might turn into a meme, like &quot;Cancel your Disney+ before visiting Disney IRL&quot;. It might make people hesitate and&#x2F;or choose a different holiday destination. Etc.</text></item><item><author>tgsovlerkhgsel</author><text>The bug in the legal system is that by filing this motion&#x2F;claim, Disney can only win.<p>In the unlikely best case, they get the case dismissed, but even in the most likely case that the motion is denied, they win by wearing down their opponent who has much more limited resources and is personally affected by the case dragging out, i.e. more likely to accept a (lower) settlement than without this tactic. The only downside is a tiny bit of legal costs.<p>Courts should be able to issue sanctions&#x2F;extra damages for the use of such tactics. If using such a tactic turned the claim from &quot;you killed this person negligently&quot; to &quot;you killed this person negligently, then willfully tried sleazy tricks to create additional suffering for the husband&quot;, and had the potential to double the award, companies would be much less eager to play this game.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roshin</author><text>Bud light is a famous recent example. Of course, the company is large enough that it didn&#x27;t make the company bankrupt, but it hurt them</text></comment> |
26,202,807 | 26,195,782 | 1 | 3 | 26,192,988 | train | <story><title>I built ByteDance's censorship machine</title><url>https://www.protocol.com/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine-2650611161</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>svieira</author><text>&gt; As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it&#x27;s walking a tightrope every second.<p>For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent &quot;because you have to &#x2F; to play the game&quot; the game plays you. There is no one &quot;too big&quot; to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they &quot;have to&quot; build the tools because they don&#x27;t have the &quot;power&quot; to push back or because &quot;it really is that bad this time&quot;. But some things don&#x27;t have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or &quot;it really is that bad this time&quot;, censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_.<p>For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Political_power_grows_out_of_the_barrel_of_a_gun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Political_power_grows_out_of_t...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120107141633&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vaclavhavel.cz&#x2F;showtrans.php?cat=clanky&amp;val=72_aj_clanky.html&amp;typ=HTML" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120107141633&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vaclav...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Power_of_the_Powerless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Power_of_the_Powerless</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>&gt;&gt; As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it&#x27;s walking a tightrope every second.<p>And just to use the same quote. This sentence is just a spin to say the least. Before TikTok, ByteDance&#x27;s main product was Jinri Toutiao, which translate as Today&#x27;s Headlines. It was Number one &quot;news&quot; Apps in China.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Toutiao" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Toutiao</a></text></comment> | <story><title>I built ByteDance's censorship machine</title><url>https://www.protocol.com/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine-2650611161</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>svieira</author><text>&gt; As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it&#x27;s walking a tightrope every second.<p>For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent &quot;because you have to &#x2F; to play the game&quot; the game plays you. There is no one &quot;too big&quot; to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone tells themselves that they &quot;have to&quot; build the tools because they don&#x27;t have the &quot;power&quot; to push back or because &quot;it really is that bad this time&quot;. But some things don&#x27;t have to be built (or built in the centralized, controllable way that they are). And when centralization is required or &quot;it really is that bad this time&quot;, censorship should be widely publicized and discussed both in real time and with regular retrospectives on decisions to censor that are _public_.<p>For those in dictatorships: All is not lost, regardless. [2][3]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Political_power_grows_out_of_the_barrel_of_a_gun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Political_power_grows_out_of_t...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120107141633&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vaclavhavel.cz&#x2F;showtrans.php?cat=clanky&amp;val=72_aj_clanky.html&amp;typ=HTML" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20120107141633&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vaclav...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Power_of_the_Powerless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Power_of_the_Powerless</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>908B64B197</author><text>The question is what should we, western nations, do about this?<p>Should we keep hiring, sponsoring and giving away residency to engineers who made the decision to help building these platforms? Or collectively decide not to reward these behaviors?</text></comment> |
4,855,347 | 4,853,919 | 1 | 2 | 4,853,441 | train | <story><title>Why I Sold My Startup Instead Of Taking VC Money</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/why-i-sold-my-startup-instead-taking-vc-money</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wrath</author><text>Congratulations... Having gone through a very similar situation I have to say it was the best decision I've made. I sold my first company for less then I could have had if I would have taken the "chance" of going the VC route... but what that enabled me to do (as you have mentioned) is to pay off my house and put a descent chunk of money aside. Most importantly though, it gave me the freedom to try new things once I decided to leave the company that purchased us. Instead of looking for a salary that would pay my mortgage, put food on our table, and pay my monthly expenses (e.g. 100k +), I could manage well on a salary of 35-40k.<p>Bottom line, for me is that financial security makes me sleep well at night.<p>My original startup also gave me insight on what I loved to do in a startup and what I didn't love. I personally joined a startup as employee #1 and helped grow the company to where we are today.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why I Sold My Startup Instead Of Taking VC Money</title><url>http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/why-i-sold-my-startup-instead-taking-vc-money</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Thanks for this Ross. Its always an interesting choice (and its good to have a choice!) I recall when my CEO got an offer to buy the company in the late 90's and turned it down because he was fixated on going public. Even later it wasn't clear if that was the 'right' financial choice or not, but as a VC funded company it really drove a wedge between him and the board. That was a really high price to pay.<p>You didn't mention the size of your team at the time of the sale, was it just you? You and a co-founder? How did they feel one way or the other about the choices?</text></comment> |
29,583,145 | 29,582,532 | 1 | 2 | 29,581,514 | train | <story><title>NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ny-man-pleads-guilty-in-20-million-sim-swap-theft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krebsonsecurity</author><text>That&#x27;s nice to hear. So the SIM swappers have to double their bribes.<p>I think the best solution is to cut the mobile providers out of the equation altogether. I&#x27;ve long advised removing your phone number from anything you can, or at least substituting a voip service that can&#x27;t be social engineered over the phone. Some services don&#x27;t let you use voip services for multi-factor or signup, so your mileage may vary.<p>Also, it&#x27;s important where possible to use types of multi-factor that don&#x27;t rely on your phone number. The tricky part is, so many sites will let you reset your password if you can receive a link via SMS at the phone number on file for the account. Which means anyone who SIM-swaps you then can reset the passwords on those accounts that allow SMS resets (which is a lot, still).</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Tangentially, the FCC is forcing the hand of mobile carriers on this. T-Mobile <i>just the other day</i> has updated their policy so that two employees must be present and part of the process to swap a customer’s SIM. The perils of your phone number being your identity.<p>Refreshing to see these active theft and wire fraud prosecutions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DarylZero</author><text>You must have to pay more than double to bribe two people simultaneously -- since each one then has to rely on an extra person to cover up the corruption.</text></comment> | <story><title>NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ny-man-pleads-guilty-in-20-million-sim-swap-theft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krebsonsecurity</author><text>That&#x27;s nice to hear. So the SIM swappers have to double their bribes.<p>I think the best solution is to cut the mobile providers out of the equation altogether. I&#x27;ve long advised removing your phone number from anything you can, or at least substituting a voip service that can&#x27;t be social engineered over the phone. Some services don&#x27;t let you use voip services for multi-factor or signup, so your mileage may vary.<p>Also, it&#x27;s important where possible to use types of multi-factor that don&#x27;t rely on your phone number. The tricky part is, so many sites will let you reset your password if you can receive a link via SMS at the phone number on file for the account. Which means anyone who SIM-swaps you then can reset the passwords on those accounts that allow SMS resets (which is a lot, still).</text></item><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Tangentially, the FCC is forcing the hand of mobile carriers on this. T-Mobile <i>just the other day</i> has updated their policy so that two employees must be present and part of the process to swap a customer’s SIM. The perils of your phone number being your identity.<p>Refreshing to see these active theft and wire fraud prosecutions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>menage</author><text>One of the advantages of using Google Fi as your phone provider on a Google phone: there&#x27;s no SIM, and you have to log in to the phone on your Google account in order to transfer phone&#x2F;SMS service there. So an attacker can&#x27;t use a SMS hijack to steal 2FA codes unless they&#x27;ve already compromised your Google account (which is hopefully a higher bar than convincing some random phone shop employee).</text></comment> |
32,218,132 | 32,218,001 | 1 | 3 | 32,216,700 | train | <story><title>Kubernetes for Developers Who Know How to Develop</title><url>https://blog.ali.dev/engineering/2022/01/13/k8s-for-developers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>daenz</author><text>I&#x27;m going to post my unsolicited opinion about K8s here, as an SWE+SRE who used it heavily for about 1.5 years on GCP.<p>It&#x27;s a very cool system. I completely understand why people half-jokingly call it a &quot;distributed operating system.&quot; It does a lot of things related to the lifecycles of various state (secrets, storage, config, deployments, etc).<p>However, I believe it goes way too far into putting infrastructure into non-cloud-managed state machines. Things that exist in most modern clouds are being <i>reinvented</i> in K8s. What&#x27;s more, is that K8s objects are being created as interfaces to the underlying cloud objects. So you now have 2 layers of abstractions, each with their own quirks. It&#x27;s too much.<p>Not to mention that IaC for K8s is extremely immature. This will improve, yes, for some definition of &quot;improve.&quot; But if you&#x27;ve ever written Helm charts that integrate with Terraform, you&#x27;ll know about all the spinning plates you have to keep balanced.<p>It&#x27;s not a system I see sustaining into the long term future. Google may continue to use and support it forever, but afaik, they are the most invested in its success. Other cloud platforms, like AWS, seem to be focusing on not re-inventing all of their cloud offerings in K8s.</text></comment> | <story><title>Kubernetes for Developers Who Know How to Develop</title><url>https://blog.ali.dev/engineering/2022/01/13/k8s-for-developers/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rschachte</author><text>I’ve been working on a Kubernetes cluster for my home network. I know a lot of people hate on Kubernetes, but it’s pretty cool and not too bad to even get started from scratch with Kubeadm.<p>I think the constant thought in the back of my mind is… Docker containers and Nginx is definitely enough for my needs. At work, it’s a different story, but more most things, it can be over kill.</text></comment> |
2,497,473 | 2,497,297 | 1 | 2 | 2,497,100 | train | <story><title>Geohot Chimes In</title><url>http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shareme</author><text>its not speculation, they passed CC numbers in the clear over SSL instead of hashing them..</text></item><item><author>praptak</author><text>This is interesting: <i>"Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client. But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client(can't trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?"</i><p>I wonder if he's <i>purely</i> speculating or maybe knows something more. It's also good to see he can at least still talk about Sony security in general (or can he?)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pilif</author><text>And how would you use that hashed CC number on the server? Unhashing (impossible)? Send the hash to the CC company (good luck)?<p>Do you mean they should have pre-encrypted the CC number before encrypting it again in the standard SSL transaction?<p>Would that have helped? Because if the PS3 knows how to encrypt and you own the server, decrypting is as trivial as just looking at the plain text<p>For people who don't own the server and are listening in SSL is enough and for people with access to the server neither SSL nor any other encryption is enough.<p>They have done a lot of things wrongly, but this IMHO is not one of them.</text></comment> | <story><title>Geohot Chimes In</title><url>http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-news.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shareme</author><text>its not speculation, they passed CC numbers in the clear over SSL instead of hashing them..</text></item><item><author>praptak</author><text>This is interesting: <i>"Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client. But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client(can't trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?"</i><p>I wonder if he's <i>purely</i> speculating or maybe knows something more. It's also good to see he can at least still talk about Sony security in general (or can he?)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nsfmc</author><text>"in the clear over ssl instead of hashing them"? am i missing something here?
is ssl insecure? is there some way to charge a credit card that doesn't actually involve sending the <i>number</i> to anybody?</text></comment> |
25,596,495 | 25,595,799 | 1 | 3 | 25,595,416 | train | <story><title>SolarWinds hackers were able to access Microsoft source code</title><url>https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/12/31/microsoft-internal-solorigate-investigation-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vthallam</author><text>&gt; This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code. So viewing source code isn’t tied to elevation of risk<p>I don&#x27;t know how much of this is true. Wouldn&#x27;t it be helpful for bad actors to understand how Windows defenses work looking at the code thereby increasing the risk?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwheeler</author><text>It is generally accepted in the security community that hiding source code does <i>not</i> provide security.<p>The principles for developing secure software were identified in the 1970s by Saltzer and Schroeder, and they&#x27;re still true today. One of those principles is &quot;open design&quot;, that is, don&#x27;t depend on design secrecy for security of the system. Instead, depend on secrecy of things that are trivially changed (like private keys and passwords). Then, when the secret is exposed (or you think it might be), you quickly change all the secrets and there&#x27;s no problem. One source of this paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~evans&#x2F;cs551&#x2F;saltzer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~evans&#x2F;cs551&#x2F;saltzer&#x2F;</a><p>In the case of Windows, the source code is not really secret anyway. Most governments have continuous access to the source code, typically through the Microsoft Government Support Program (GSP) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;securityengineering&#x2F;gsp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;securityengineering&#x2F;gsp</a>
Many businesses and universities also have access to Windows source code. You can see various programs to provide such access in different cases via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;sharedsource&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;sharedsource&#x2F;</a> In addition, Microsoft employs a huge number of employees who have access to its source code, and you can&#x27;t really keep a secret long when a large number of people know the secret. Efforts like bribes, appeals to patriotism, etc. will eventually successfully get someone to reveal a secret if there&#x27;s a large enough group, especially since it&#x27;s relatively easy to identify who works for Microsoft or otherwise might have such access.<p>If that&#x27;s not enough, Microsoft distributes executables, and disassembers &amp; decompilers can provide enough information for static analysis anyway. So you could re-derive what you need to attack Windows if you needed the source code for some reason.<p>Anyone who depends on secrecy of code to provide security is in trouble. Typically the real reason to keep (some) code secret is to support certain proprietary business models and to meet certain legal obligations, and are not really about security.<p>Note that Microsoft understands this; they&#x27;re quite clear in stating that the security of Windows does not depend on keeping its source code a secret.</text></comment> | <story><title>SolarWinds hackers were able to access Microsoft source code</title><url>https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/12/31/microsoft-internal-solorigate-investigation-update/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vthallam</author><text>&gt; This means we do not rely on the secrecy of source code for the security of products, and our threat models assume that attackers have knowledge of source code. So viewing source code isn’t tied to elevation of risk<p>I don&#x27;t know how much of this is true. Wouldn&#x27;t it be helpful for bad actors to understand how Windows defenses work looking at the code thereby increasing the risk?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thisiszilff</author><text>I&#x27;d imagine the answer is yes, viewing the source code would increase the risk relative to an attacker that did not have access to the source code, but the statement is saying that whatever risk assessment Microsoft does already assumes attackers have knowledge of source code. EG, they are conservative and do not rely on source code secrecy when making any security evaluations.</text></comment> |
12,499,648 | 12,499,237 | 1 | 2 | 12,495,025 | train | <story><title>South Park's creators on how the series has evolved</title><url>http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/09/south-park-20th-anniversary-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>This kind of reminds me of something Louis CK said during this talk about George Carlin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R37zkizucPU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R37zkizucPU</a><p>He talks about how he got good at standup after 15 years of doing the same thing. He threw away all his material (material he&#x27;d been working on for 15 years) and just started trying different things. Then he started throwing away his material every year and creating new material. He noticed that he got better and better by doing this.<p>This also reminded me of another anecdote I&#x27;d heard somewhere where you have a pottery class with 20 students.<p>The class was split: 10 students would make a new sculpture every day while the other 10 would have to produce only 1 sculpture for the class (which of course would represent all the extra planning and execution that went into the solo sculpture). At the end of the quarter, the 10 people who made something new every day and then threw it away were far better at sculpting, while everyone in the other group made something kind of shitty and spent a lot of time doing it.<p>So maybe it&#x27;s not &quot;lack of planning&quot; quite so much as willingness to kill your darlings, again and again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blowski</author><text>This is probably true for going from novice to mediocre in many things, and there might be some skills where you can become great by constantly starting again.<p>But in software development, the most valuable skills you learn are not those you pick up when throwing a quick CRUD app together, but those you learn when debugging, refactoring and optimising legacy code.<p>I see too many junior devs get frustrated with something, throw it away, only to rebuild it with very similar problems because they didn&#x27;t really understand the root cause in the first place.</text></comment> | <story><title>South Park's creators on how the series has evolved</title><url>http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/09/south-park-20th-anniversary-interview</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>This kind of reminds me of something Louis CK said during this talk about George Carlin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R37zkizucPU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R37zkizucPU</a><p>He talks about how he got good at standup after 15 years of doing the same thing. He threw away all his material (material he&#x27;d been working on for 15 years) and just started trying different things. Then he started throwing away his material every year and creating new material. He noticed that he got better and better by doing this.<p>This also reminded me of another anecdote I&#x27;d heard somewhere where you have a pottery class with 20 students.<p>The class was split: 10 students would make a new sculpture every day while the other 10 would have to produce only 1 sculpture for the class (which of course would represent all the extra planning and execution that went into the solo sculpture). At the end of the quarter, the 10 people who made something new every day and then threw it away were far better at sculpting, while everyone in the other group made something kind of shitty and spent a lot of time doing it.<p>So maybe it&#x27;s not &quot;lack of planning&quot; quite so much as willingness to kill your darlings, again and again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcmatterson</author><text>I started doing something similar with the small amount of UI work I do, modeled after [1] (a great watch, BTW). For example, my flow for app icons is like so:<p>1. Spend some tiny amount of time building the simplest thing that represents your idea on an artboard. The focus here is to function as a first step, not to strive for perfection.<p>2. Identify one thing to change (shapes, colours, font, etc).<p>3. Duplicate the whole artboard, and tweak that one thing on the copy.<p>4. GOTO 2. Keep looking back at previous artboards and don&#x27;t be afraid to revert if you notice that you&#x27;ve been off course for the past few iterations. Never delete an artboard, just go back and fork.<p>5. Stop when there&#x27;s nothing immediately obvious to tweak.<p>It&#x27;s a simple workflow that produces much better results than endlessly tweaking a single artboard, and you can see your evolution over time, so it&#x27;s easier to identify the things that work &#x2F; don&#x27;t work to improve your skills the next time around.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;113751583" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;113751583</a></text></comment> |
11,874,032 | 11,873,193 | 1 | 2 | 11,872,856 | train | <story><title>BlackBerry hands over user data to help police 'kick ass,' insider says</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/blackberry-taps-user-messages-1.3620186</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>Searched Linkedin for people with titles containing &quot;Public Safety Operations&quot; and who work, or have worked, at Blackberry.<p>One of them is now the &quot;Manager of Law Enforcement Operations&quot; at Kik. She describes her job as involving creating and fostering &quot;positive working relationships with law enforcement and government agencies worldwide,&quot; and prides herself on &quot;successfully manag[ing] large-scale projects from start to finish while hitting targets&quot;. <i>Shudders.</i><p>It&#x27;s amusing that the state has coerced private companies into running its apparatus. Has anybody studied the implicit &quot;tax rate&quot; across economies including such costs of regulation, compliance and state security?</text></comment> | <story><title>BlackBerry hands over user data to help police 'kick ass,' insider says</title><url>http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/blackberry-taps-user-messages-1.3620186</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Sir_Substance</author><text>I really don&#x27;t understand how RIM manages to consistently misunderstand their target market so badly.<p>Not that they have many (or any) fans left, but back when they were the bees knees, they were used by and often mandatory company phones for government departments and fortune 500 companies exactly because they were considered the apex of mobile security.<p>I know it&#x27;s been a while since they were the apex of anything but jesus guys, at least pretend to try or something.</text></comment> |
37,370,018 | 37,369,432 | 1 | 3 | 37,368,099 | train | <story><title>Hacking the Timex m851</title><url>https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/timex.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nxobject</author><text>Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) is: when running at a low-power mode at 32kHz, it consumes an astoundingly low 9 <i>micro</i>amps. [1] How much do you think you could get done with a cycle budget of 32k per second?<p>That, and alongside 48K ROM and 2K RAM, you get 3 timers, a UART, and an A&#x2F;D converter.
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id002478.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FirmwareBurner</author><text><i>&gt;Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) </i><p>Would it blow your mind that such ultra-frugal 8-bit parts have been available for about 30 years now?<p>Those Seiko-Epson chips, alongside with EM-Swatch, and OKI-Casio chips, were used in all kinds of timekeeping, calculator, thermometers, and all kinds of cheap low-power widgets with segment LCD displays that need to run years on a single button cell.<p>I have a calculator and a digital fever thermometer(the stick-type ones for the armpit or anus) that&#x27;s over 15 years old, also using on one of those Seiko-Epson chips and it&#x27;s still running on the same 1.5v button-cell that it came with, which is mind blowing when you factor in the charge decay of the lithium cell over time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hacking the Timex m851</title><url>https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/timex.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nxobject</author><text>Part of the magic is how bonkers frugal the Epson SoC (PN S1C88349) is: when running at a low-power mode at 32kHz, it consumes an astoundingly low 9 <i>micro</i>amps. [1] How much do you think you could get done with a cycle budget of 32k per second?<p>That, and alongside 48K ROM and 2K RAM, you get 3 timers, a UART, and an A&#x2F;D converter.
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id002478.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;global.epson.com&#x2F;products_and_drivers&#x2F;semicon&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;id...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adhesive_wombat</author><text>There&#x27;s an ultra-low power mode in newer TMS430s, and you can use an external ultra-low-power RTC.<p>From memory, it&#x27;s under 100nA on paper, including things like the power switch leakage. Crazy stuff.</text></comment> |
25,999,950 | 25,997,206 | 1 | 2 | 25,994,051 | train | <story><title>We Test PCIe 4.0 Storage: The AnandTech 2021 SSD Benchmark Suite</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/print/16458/2021-ssd-benchmark-suite</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>Few notable things that I didn&#x27;t realise with Modern SSD.<p>1. Extremely Power Efficient. They have come a long way with idle power and power management. Even on the Desktop where Energy efficiency isn&#x27;t much of a concern. There used to be a time where SSD are 1W+ even when idling.<p>2. The amount of idle time, so these IO traces shown most of the time SSD isn&#x27;t doing anything at all.<p>3. Read Latency are now extremely good. We are talking about sub 100us and sub 200us in 99th percentile. To the point Optane doesn&#x27;t provide any meaningful differences in consumer usage. We will find out soon when Billy mentioned he will be testing Optane PX5800, I cant wait to see that. I should also note before someone jump in about Optane&#x27;s Random Read Write advantage in QD1, I still dont believe it matters in consumer usage beyond the current NAND SSD performances.<p>I think with coming PCI-E 5.0 Drive we have a roadmap that has pretty much &quot;solved&quot; the performance category if we haven&#x27;t already done so. What I want to see is slower, but large capacity SSD that is more affordable. But apart from some unforeseeable market condition, I dont see anything on the roadmap or forecast that could bring us 4TB SSD for sub $200 within the next 4 years. We seems to be entering the end of the S Curve where improvement ( cost reduction ) will be slower.</text></comment> | <story><title>We Test PCIe 4.0 Storage: The AnandTech 2021 SSD Benchmark Suite</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/print/16458/2021-ssd-benchmark-suite</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RachelF</author><text>Good to see a thorough benchmark and a good writeup. Many &quot;tech&quot; sites now just repeat manufacturers press releases. Not Anandtech.</text></comment> |
30,109,754 | 30,108,261 | 1 | 2 | 30,087,783 | train | <story><title>The case against masks at school</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/kids-masks-schools-weak-science/621133/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watersb</author><text>I actually want to hear good reasons for avoiding vaccinations, because many people care a lot about that.<p>I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won&#x27;t help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, <i>if</i> a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.<p>This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it&#x27;s no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.<p>What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?</text></item><item><author>colpabar</author><text>&gt; Gosh, it&#x27;s like vaccines work and that&#x27;s the way out of this.<p>You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I&#x27;d just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing <i>anyone</i>, or encouraging a productive discussion? I&#x27;d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I know I am.<p>In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying &quot;gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don&#x27;t want to go to jail&quot; or &quot;gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don&#x27;t want HIV.&quot;<p>I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn&#x27;t assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.</text></item><item><author>perardi</author><text>NYTimes has a pretty good source on this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;us&#x2F;covid-hospitals-near-you.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;us&#x2F;covid-hospitals-...</a><p>I&#x27;ll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.<p>Gosh, it&#x27;s like vaccines work and that&#x27;s the way out of this.</text></item><item><author>lr1970</author><text>&gt; They&#x27;d also know that pretty much the only condition we&#x27;re treating nowadays is Covid.<p>This statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospitalized for medical reasons other than covid. Recorded deaths do not differentiate between &quot;died from covid&quot; and &quot;died while covid positive&quot; making death statistics hard to interpret. In general, compared to the situation on the ground in March-April 2020 this time the covid load on NYC hospital system is lighter.<p>The biggest challenge is staffing shortages in the hospitals due to general burn-out, people being on sick leave due to spreading omicron. Noticeable percentage of nurses were laid off because of the vaccine mandate (i am not judging the mandate, just stating the consequence).<p>SOURCE: several physician relatives and friends working in NYC hospitals (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn).</text></item><item><author>taylodl</author><text>General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they&#x27;d realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They&#x27;d also know that pretty much the only condition we&#x27;re treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors.<p>And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They&#x27;re watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we&#x27;ve had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring&#x2F;resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.<p>We&#x27;re walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that&#x27;s not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn&#x27;t gone away and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.<p>You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they&#x27;re not having kids. I don&#x27;t think this is a short-term aberration. We&#x27;re a population literally in decline.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwawaythekey</author><text>Just today Sweden&#x27;s health agency advised against the vaccine for kids<p>&gt; STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;europe&#x2F;sweden-decides-against-...</a><p>I&#x27;m not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.</text></comment> | <story><title>The case against masks at school</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/kids-masks-schools-weak-science/621133/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watersb</author><text>I actually want to hear good reasons for avoiding vaccinations, because many people care a lot about that.<p>I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won&#x27;t help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.<p>I don&#x27;t agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, <i>if</i> a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.<p>This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it&#x27;s no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.<p>What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?</text></item><item><author>colpabar</author><text>&gt; Gosh, it&#x27;s like vaccines work and that&#x27;s the way out of this.<p>You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I&#x27;d just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing <i>anyone</i>, or encouraging a productive discussion? I&#x27;d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I know I am.<p>In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying &quot;gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don&#x27;t want to go to jail&quot; or &quot;gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don&#x27;t want HIV.&quot;<p>I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn&#x27;t assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.</text></item><item><author>perardi</author><text>NYTimes has a pretty good source on this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;us&#x2F;covid-hospitals-near-you.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;us&#x2F;covid-hospitals-...</a><p>I&#x27;ll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.<p>Gosh, it&#x27;s like vaccines work and that&#x27;s the way out of this.</text></item><item><author>lr1970</author><text>&gt; They&#x27;d also know that pretty much the only condition we&#x27;re treating nowadays is Covid.<p>This statement might be true for your location but is not true in general. Here in New York City hospitalizations due to covid are not very high and going down quickly. Elective surgeries and procedures go on as scheduled. ICUs are not overrun with covid specific cases. Majority of the patients with positive PCR test are hospitalized for medical reasons other than covid. Recorded deaths do not differentiate between &quot;died from covid&quot; and &quot;died while covid positive&quot; making death statistics hard to interpret. In general, compared to the situation on the ground in March-April 2020 this time the covid load on NYC hospital system is lighter.<p>The biggest challenge is staffing shortages in the hospitals due to general burn-out, people being on sick leave due to spreading omicron. Noticeable percentage of nurses were laid off because of the vaccine mandate (i am not judging the mandate, just stating the consequence).<p>SOURCE: several physician relatives and friends working in NYC hospitals (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn).</text></item><item><author>taylodl</author><text>General observation from reading the comments - the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they&#x27;d realize those friends are swamped and burned-out. They&#x27;d also know that pretty much the only condition we&#x27;re treating nowadays is Covid. Surgeries are continuing to be postponed - including surgeries that can lead to worse problems down the road such as removing cancerous tumors.<p>And it gets worse. My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies and not just because of the course load. They&#x27;re watching how medical professionals are being treated and saying screw it! This should concern us all because we&#x27;ve had a marked uptick of medical professionals retiring&#x2F;resigning since the pandemic started and now the pipeline is thinning out.<p>We&#x27;re walking headlong into a disaster and nobody seems to care. And that&#x27;s not even dealing with the problem of Global Climate Change which, guess what? Still hasn&#x27;t gone away and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much interest in caring about that either, not that there ever was.<p>You can see what our child-bearing aged children think of all this - they&#x27;re not having kids. I don&#x27;t think this is a short-term aberration. We&#x27;re a population literally in decline.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ifyoubuildit</author><text>Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.<p>A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.<p>Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.<p>You&#x27;ve probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don&#x27;t agree with this.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;71&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm7104e1_w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;71&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...</a></text></comment> |
37,427,330 | 37,427,515 | 1 | 3 | 37,426,223 | train | <story><title>Searx is no longer maintained</title><url>https://github.com/searx/searx/commit/276ffd3f01cdd823f75676c51231fad4040059d3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kornhole</author><text>In addition to SearxNG, Librex is another authoritative metasearch engine I use. It is configurable in different ways and includes torrents.<p>Brave, Quant, Yandex, and Mojeek are other centralized engines that do not rely on Google or Bing TMK.<p>I also run Yacy.net instance which is decentralized and federated. I crawl the sites I want to include as do the other operators. It is good for non-authoritative searches for topics that might be suppressed in centralized search engines.</text></comment> | <story><title>Searx is no longer maintained</title><url>https://github.com/searx/searx/commit/276ffd3f01cdd823f75676c51231fad4040059d3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazypython</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Kagi.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Kagi.com</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metaphor.systems">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metaphor.systems</a> have been doing a great job for me</text></comment> |
20,002,373 | 20,000,469 | 1 | 2 | 19,999,554 | train | <story><title>Hong Kong activists wanted by police gain protection in Germany</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/world/asia/hong-kong-china-germany-activists.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tomte</author><text>And, preposterously, America has given political asylum to German home-schoolers a few years ago.</text></item><item><author>Iv</author><text>“If the German government thinks that the Hong Kong judiciary is independent, they would not grant me refugee status,”<p>I just want to point out that refugee status is given on a case by case basis. Even with an independent judiciary, if your laws oppress some people, refugee status can be obtained. Europe has accepted refugees from USA during McCarty&#x27;s era.<p>Accepting a refugee from another nation does have diplomatic meaning but is does not automatically mean that they will dismiss each other judgements automatically.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>Is that bad?<p>Someone wants to educate their children at home, in Germany that&#x27;s not ok. In the US it is, so in the US they get some level of asylum.<p>These folks aren&#x27;t some terrorists, they&#x27;re not hurting anyone... seems like a situation where there are two different approaches, not some serious crime.<p>It also is a case by case basis so who knows if it holds up in court for long.<p>Edit: Looks like they lost the asylum part of their bid:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;home-schooling-german-family-allowed-stay-us&#x2F;story?id=22788876" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;US&#x2F;home-schooling-german-family-allow...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Hong Kong activists wanted by police gain protection in Germany</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/world/asia/hong-kong-china-germany-activists.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Tomte</author><text>And, preposterously, America has given political asylum to German home-schoolers a few years ago.</text></item><item><author>Iv</author><text>“If the German government thinks that the Hong Kong judiciary is independent, they would not grant me refugee status,”<p>I just want to point out that refugee status is given on a case by case basis. Even with an independent judiciary, if your laws oppress some people, refugee status can be obtained. Europe has accepted refugees from USA during McCarty&#x27;s era.<p>Accepting a refugee from another nation does have diplomatic meaning but is does not automatically mean that they will dismiss each other judgements automatically.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mieseratte</author><text>&gt; And, preposterously, America has given political asylum to German home-schoolers a few years ago.<p>Why preposterously?</text></comment> |
27,985,003 | 27,983,225 | 1 | 3 | 27,979,399 | train | <story><title>No-code startup Bubble raises $100M</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/no-code-startup-bubble-raises-100-mln-in-round-led-by-insight-partners-2021-07-27/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zubairlk</author><text>It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users.<p>We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble.<p>Specialising exclusively in bubble now.<p>A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps.<p>There was a census recently.
~75% clients are startup&#x2F;MVPs
~25% SME making business tooling<p>Out client portfolio is similar.<p>I&#x27;ve hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained them in 2 weeks. And now have them working on a customer production app.<p>I&#x27;ve also taught bubble bootcamps. After 8 weeks of weekly 2 hour zoom sessions, I doubt you&#x27;ll get much progress in a coded bootcamp. But these guys were building their app ideas. All sorts of backgrounds. Accountant. Art student. Podcast editor etc.<p>I have a client who needs a quick 2 week MVP. Done.
I have a client whose 40+ employees use bubble app daily across four counting. Core business tooling.<p>The four pieces needed for a web app are
Design
Logic
Data
Hosting.<p>Bubble combines all that and reduces the barrier to entry.<p>No need to make comments like the famous Dropbox comment. Why not just SSH sftp xyz.<p>NoCode is definitely rising. We have won bids against coding agencies due to cost&#x2F;time. The competing coded agency suggested 3 months. I quoted 2 months.<p>The day rate is somewhat similar. The speed is much faster. Very much needed for MVPs<p>That being said. There are drawbacks. You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. However, bubble&#x2F;NoCode is more suited to small teams (afaict yet)<p>Feel free to ask me anything.<p>Bubble.io coach, bootcamp instructor, agency owner here. Bubble all day every day.<p>Email : [email protected]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I think two things are simultaneously true about no-code apps:<p>1) They really are a fast way to get an MVP that can be shown to investors and customers and even process customer transactions for simple businesses. Many simple businesses don&#x27;t fit into pre-packaged SaaS platforms like Shopify, but don&#x27;t really need a fully custom solution built from the ground up. No-code is good for these.<p>2) No-code quickly hits a wall when things start to get more complex or as the scale grows. At some point, trying to coerce the no-code solution into doing what you need becomes increasingly painful and a custom solution becomes necessary.<p>In reality, I think many small businesses and simple startups are actually a good fit for no-code websites. The Wordpress analogy is a good comparison because we all know how unnecessary it is to write a blogging platform from scratch in 2021 (unless for hobby, of course). Likewise, it&#x27;s going to become silly to write a custom backend and frontend solution for a client whose entire business is basically a couple of web forms and simple workflows.<p>It&#x27;s all about picking the right tool for the job, and no-code tools can be the right tool for many jobs.<p>But they&#x27;re not the right tool for <i>every</i> job. Knowing the difference is important.</text></comment> | <story><title>No-code startup Bubble raises $100M</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/no-code-startup-bubble-raises-100-mln-in-round-led-by-insight-partners-2021-07-27/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zubairlk</author><text>It seems like all the comments here are from non bubble users.<p>We have worked on over 20 client projects in the past 1.5 years using bubble.<p>Specialising exclusively in bubble now.<p>A way to describe the platform would be WordPress for Web Apps.<p>There was a census recently.
~75% clients are startup&#x2F;MVPs
~25% SME making business tooling<p>Out client portfolio is similar.<p>I&#x27;ve hired fresh graduates in Pakistan, trained them in 2 weeks. And now have them working on a customer production app.<p>I&#x27;ve also taught bubble bootcamps. After 8 weeks of weekly 2 hour zoom sessions, I doubt you&#x27;ll get much progress in a coded bootcamp. But these guys were building their app ideas. All sorts of backgrounds. Accountant. Art student. Podcast editor etc.<p>I have a client who needs a quick 2 week MVP. Done.
I have a client whose 40+ employees use bubble app daily across four counting. Core business tooling.<p>The four pieces needed for a web app are
Design
Logic
Data
Hosting.<p>Bubble combines all that and reduces the barrier to entry.<p>No need to make comments like the famous Dropbox comment. Why not just SSH sftp xyz.<p>NoCode is definitely rising. We have won bids against coding agencies due to cost&#x2F;time. The competing coded agency suggested 3 months. I quoted 2 months.<p>The day rate is somewhat similar. The speed is much faster. Very much needed for MVPs<p>That being said. There are drawbacks. You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way. However, bubble&#x2F;NoCode is more suited to small teams (afaict yet)<p>Feel free to ask me anything.<p>Bubble.io coach, bootcamp instructor, agency owner here. Bubble all day every day.<p>Email : [email protected]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>knighthack</author><text>&gt; You can throw 30 software engineers and have a system and increase velocity that way.<p>This makes absolutely no sense at all. You obviously have not read _The Mythical Man-Month_, and judging by what you&#x27;ve written I completely doubt the entirety of what you&#x27;ve said.<p>Speed is one thing. The long-term maintainability and usability of a system is another thing altogether. I have serious doubts about this &#x27;no code&#x27; movement.</text></comment> |
38,336,019 | 38,336,176 | 1 | 2 | 38,334,126 | train | <story><title>From airlines to ticket sellers, companies fight U.S. to keep junk fees</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/19/companies-lobbyists-fight-junk-fees/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xrd</author><text>I&#x27;m in a hotel in Clearwater Florida right now.<p>The coffee shop added an automatic and mandatory 19% gratuity. I always thought I was only forced to pay 18%!<p>The buffet this morning did the same thing. The receipt says &quot;18% is gratuity, 1% is for operating costs.&quot;<p>I thought paying for a meal included the operating costs. I&#x27;m shocked to find out those were provided for free up to this point, I feel so grateful that the restaurants didn&#x27;t need to pass these on to me.<p>And, I&#x27;m a little surprised that neither of these two experiences required anything from the servers other than handing me or my kids a drink.<p>I assume this is because this hotel probably has a lot of tourists from countries where they don&#x27;t tip. And, I always tip my barista at least 20% but that&#x27;s because I go to the same place and know them beyond just as a server, and a hotel in Clearwater will never foster that relationship between anyone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_huayra_</author><text>Mandatory gratuity and the &quot;operating cost&quot; charges can be declined unless it is clearly listed and displayed before ordering (and even then it can arguably be declined). This is why you see &quot;mandatory X% gratuity for Y reasons&quot; on menus (e.g. for large groups). If you knew this terrible gratuity beforehand, then you&#x27;re basically stuck (or can walk away before ordering). However, if they sprung this on you without clear notice, <i>you don&#x27;t have to pay it</i>.<p>This comes down to the same reason why when you click &quot;buy&quot; on some website, they can&#x27;t say &quot;oh look we added a secret X% f** you fee!&quot;. Similarly, this is the reason why when you negotiate a rate with a lawyer, accountant, gardener, or other professional, they can&#x27;t add random fees that weren&#x27;t discussed. My climbing gym has had big signs up and has sent myriad emails over the past few months leading up to a new credit card processing fee for this very reason.<p>If you had great service, I would still recommend fighting this and then tipping the server directly with cash. These &quot;mandatory tips&quot; don&#x27;t go to the server, but are usually pooled and mostly taken by management. If the restaurant is one of the few ones that is equitable between the staff members (e.g. if the tip gets automatically split between front and back of house), then that might be the one exception where paying a surprise mandatory fee would be okay.</text></comment> | <story><title>From airlines to ticket sellers, companies fight U.S. to keep junk fees</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/19/companies-lobbyists-fight-junk-fees/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xrd</author><text>I&#x27;m in a hotel in Clearwater Florida right now.<p>The coffee shop added an automatic and mandatory 19% gratuity. I always thought I was only forced to pay 18%!<p>The buffet this morning did the same thing. The receipt says &quot;18% is gratuity, 1% is for operating costs.&quot;<p>I thought paying for a meal included the operating costs. I&#x27;m shocked to find out those were provided for free up to this point, I feel so grateful that the restaurants didn&#x27;t need to pass these on to me.<p>And, I&#x27;m a little surprised that neither of these two experiences required anything from the servers other than handing me or my kids a drink.<p>I assume this is because this hotel probably has a lot of tourists from countries where they don&#x27;t tip. And, I always tip my barista at least 20% but that&#x27;s because I go to the same place and know them beyond just as a server, and a hotel in Clearwater will never foster that relationship between anyone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Please file a complaint with the FTC. They need every data point possible. I’ll Venmo you for your time (a coffee ;) if needed (currently sitting in a bar on St Pete Beach).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportfraud.ftc.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportfraud.ftc.gov&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
24,962,404 | 24,960,272 | 1 | 2 | 24,959,947 | train | <story><title>New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1</title><url>https://youtube-dl.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl has been throwing the error:<p>&quot;&quot;token&quot; parameter not in video info for unknown reason; please report this issue on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug</a>&quot;<p>Considering the current political climate, youtube-dl is going to be my (and many&#x27;s) literal weapon of choice against disinformation operations. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me asks, what if that&#x27;s <i>the reason why</i> youtube videos are suddenly breaking yt-dl? Making a video analysis tool unavailable during one of the most unstable times in history is beyond negligent, it&#x27;s the kind of mendacity that polarizes and radicalizes people.<p>Surely an innocent mistake, that happened at the precise moment, at the worst possible time, affecting the one thing opposition would use, and with complete deniability.<p>&quot;Oops.&quot; Indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SllX</author><text>The barbarians aren’t at the gate, Genghis Khan ain’t riding across Central Asia, Japan is unified, America isn’t in the midst of a civil war, and Europe is trying this union thing on to see how that goes, and the relative fallout if it doesn’t work out looks fairly minor compared to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, two World Wars and the Iron Curtain.<p>I know I know, recency bias and all that, but the world is pretty great these days, even if 2020 seems a low point in our lives.</text></comment> | <story><title>New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1</title><url>https://youtube-dl.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl has been throwing the error:<p>&quot;&quot;token&quot; parameter not in video info for unknown reason; please report this issue on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yt-dl.org&#x2F;bug</a>&quot;<p>Considering the current political climate, youtube-dl is going to be my (and many&#x27;s) literal weapon of choice against disinformation operations. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me asks, what if that&#x27;s <i>the reason why</i> youtube videos are suddenly breaking yt-dl? Making a video analysis tool unavailable during one of the most unstable times in history is beyond negligent, it&#x27;s the kind of mendacity that polarizes and radicalizes people.<p>Surely an innocent mistake, that happened at the precise moment, at the worst possible time, affecting the one thing opposition would use, and with complete deniability.<p>&quot;Oops.&quot; Indeed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>christocracy</author><text>&gt; one of the most unstable times in history<p>I can think of far more unstable times <i>in history</i> than the times we’re living in now, recent examples being WW1 &amp; 2, nuclear threat during the Cold War.</text></comment> |
23,511,982 | 23,512,115 | 1 | 3 | 23,497,026 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Tips for students before starting their first job</title><text>Hi, I&#x27;m 19 and currently in my second CS semester. I&#x27;ve got some projects on my portfolio, did some internships and will start an job as an research assistant at an institute next semester. However, I really have no clue how I can prepare myself enough before landing my first job after university. The only things I can find are: build a portfolio and contribute to open-source.<p>Which advice did&#x2F;would have helped you landing your first job after university? And whats your best tip for life in general?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapitalistCartr</author><text>A few useful phrases to memorize:<p>When someone asks for information, rather than try to answer immediately, or rush to research, ask, &quot;When do you need that by?&quot; Even if they tell you it&#x27;s urgent, it causes them to consider.<p>&quot;Sure, I&#x27;d be glad to. Just let my boss know you need me.&quot; If they hem and haw, be suspicious.<p>&quot;What budget is that coming out of?&quot;<p>Other useful tidbits: Politics is a euphemism for, someone&#x27;s ego will otherwise get hurt. Tangentially, your ego <i>isn&#x27;t</i> you. Don&#x27;t let it getting hurt affect your thinking.<p>Most people are naturally good; the one&#x27;s who aren&#x27;t work hard to position themselves in a position handling communications. So be careful to route communications as directly as allowed, and regularly check what&#x27;s incoming.<p>Faith is blind, trust is earned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awillen</author><text>PM here: I agree completely. A lot of PMs aren&#x27;t great with phrasing requests, and they come off sounding way more urgent than they are. I used to be guilty of this, and I thought it was great how responsive the engineers were until a manager told me I was disrupting their schedules with all of my urgent requests. We solved that one pretty quickly by agreeing I&#x27;d specify the timeline for eng requests, and for things that were big and urgent, I&#x27;d check with team lead&#x2F;manager before asking. If any of those engineers had asked me how urgent things were, we wouldn&#x27;t have run into that problem (which is not to say it&#x27;s their fault - it was my job to give that context - just to say that an inexperienced PM won&#x27;t mind you asking about timing&#x2F;urgency at all and you may save him issues down the line).</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Tips for students before starting their first job</title><text>Hi, I&#x27;m 19 and currently in my second CS semester. I&#x27;ve got some projects on my portfolio, did some internships and will start an job as an research assistant at an institute next semester. However, I really have no clue how I can prepare myself enough before landing my first job after university. The only things I can find are: build a portfolio and contribute to open-source.<p>Which advice did&#x2F;would have helped you landing your first job after university? And whats your best tip for life in general?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapitalistCartr</author><text>A few useful phrases to memorize:<p>When someone asks for information, rather than try to answer immediately, or rush to research, ask, &quot;When do you need that by?&quot; Even if they tell you it&#x27;s urgent, it causes them to consider.<p>&quot;Sure, I&#x27;d be glad to. Just let my boss know you need me.&quot; If they hem and haw, be suspicious.<p>&quot;What budget is that coming out of?&quot;<p>Other useful tidbits: Politics is a euphemism for, someone&#x27;s ego will otherwise get hurt. Tangentially, your ego <i>isn&#x27;t</i> you. Don&#x27;t let it getting hurt affect your thinking.<p>Most people are naturally good; the one&#x27;s who aren&#x27;t work hard to position themselves in a position handling communications. So be careful to route communications as directly as allowed, and regularly check what&#x27;s incoming.<p>Faith is blind, trust is earned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nlawalker</author><text>In the same vein as these - when someone asks if something can be achieved, unless the answer is &quot;No, because the physical laws of our universe prevent it,&quot; then the answer is &quot;Yes, with the following assumptions, caveats and tradeoffs...&quot;</text></comment> |
34,968,661 | 34,968,720 | 1 | 2 | 34,968,295 | train | <story><title>We will not ‘walk out’ of UK, nor comply with any request to bypass encryption</title><url>https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/uk-undermine-encryption</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TamDenholm</author><text>&gt; If the UK government really wants to follow through with their plans, they need to set up a Great Firewall - just like China - to block their citizens from accessing encrypted services like Tutanota.<p>We (the UK) already have a great firewall. Try to access thepiratebay.org or other pirate sites, or other sites that the UK gov deems inappropriate (CP obviously), etc. Its just a case of encroaching that same system just a little further, step by step.<p>People only tend to fight back when large sweeping one-off changes come in. If you consistently and repeatedly wear the other side down, you eventually get your way. How many times did the house of commons vote on brexit? How many times did the US congress vote on Kevin McCarthy becoming speaker? Yeah, as long as you just keep on and on about it, you get your way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lapser</author><text>&gt; Try to access thepiratebay.org or other pirate sites, or other sites that the UK gov deems inappropriate (CP obviously), etc.<p>I don&#x27;t know about the &quot;other sites&quot;, but tpb isn&#x27;t part of any &quot;Great Firewall&quot;. It&#x27;s just ISPs have been required to update their DNS servers to _not_ resolve the DNS record. Even then, there are still quite a few ISPs that have not implemented it. It&#x27;s why changing your DNS servers to something like Google or Cloudflare means you can easily access tpb.<p>So blocked websites in the UK are nowhere near on the same level as the Great Firewall.<p>My guess is those other sites are a bit more sophisticated, or if not, ISPs are willing to comply easier.</text></comment> | <story><title>We will not ‘walk out’ of UK, nor comply with any request to bypass encryption</title><url>https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/uk-undermine-encryption</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TamDenholm</author><text>&gt; If the UK government really wants to follow through with their plans, they need to set up a Great Firewall - just like China - to block their citizens from accessing encrypted services like Tutanota.<p>We (the UK) already have a great firewall. Try to access thepiratebay.org or other pirate sites, or other sites that the UK gov deems inappropriate (CP obviously), etc. Its just a case of encroaching that same system just a little further, step by step.<p>People only tend to fight back when large sweeping one-off changes come in. If you consistently and repeatedly wear the other side down, you eventually get your way. How many times did the house of commons vote on brexit? How many times did the US congress vote on Kevin McCarthy becoming speaker? Yeah, as long as you just keep on and on about it, you get your way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>Wasn&#x27;t there a law passed that you need to provide ID before your ISP will serve porn sites? Or was that just a proposal? Either way, the powers that be are thirsting for a Great Firewall, an end to net neutrality, and backdoors to encryption.</text></comment> |
26,696,997 | 26,696,483 | 1 | 2 | 26,694,221 | train | <story><title>Tesla owners asking what happens if 'full self driving' isn't real</title><url>https://jalopnik.com/tesla-owners-take-to-reddit-asking-what-happens-if-full-1846553907</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>987yghj</author><text>He&#x27;s an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal.<p>We need more people like him in charge.</text></item><item><author>mike_d</author><text>He is an &quot;idea guy.&quot; At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day.<p>SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>I can&#x27;t decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he&#x27;s been saying, or knows that he can&#x27;t deliver anytime soon but has some end game planned. Surely the AI developers understand the issues that still have be resolved for safe driverless operation. They must have seen their own and the customer test videos that look terrifying. There&#x27;s a 1000 fold increase in ability needed from &#x27;intelligent lane assist&#x27; to your car dropping your kids off at hockey practice then picking you up from work by itself.<p>Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they&#x27;ve delivered but government won&#x27;t let customers use it.</text></item><item><author>noodlesUK</author><text>I think most people who specialize in this area on HN know that L5 (or even L4) on existing vehicles on the road today is unlikely to happen. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush.<p>Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.<p>It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unityByFreedom</author><text>He ran PayPal for 6 months and then got the boot.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tesla owners asking what happens if 'full self driving' isn't real</title><url>https://jalopnik.com/tesla-owners-take-to-reddit-asking-what-happens-if-full-1846553907</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>987yghj</author><text>He&#x27;s an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal.<p>We need more people like him in charge.</text></item><item><author>mike_d</author><text>He is an &quot;idea guy.&quot; At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day.<p>SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.</text></item><item><author>helsinkiandrew</author><text>I can&#x27;t decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he&#x27;s been saying, or knows that he can&#x27;t deliver anytime soon but has some end game planned. Surely the AI developers understand the issues that still have be resolved for safe driverless operation. They must have seen their own and the customer test videos that look terrifying. There&#x27;s a 1000 fold increase in ability needed from &#x27;intelligent lane assist&#x27; to your car dropping your kids off at hockey practice then picking you up from work by itself.<p>Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they&#x27;ve delivered but government won&#x27;t let customers use it.</text></item><item><author>noodlesUK</author><text>I think most people who specialize in this area on HN know that L5 (or even L4) on existing vehicles on the road today is unlikely to happen. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush.<p>Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers.<p>It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fr2null</author><text>I personally feel like we need more people like him to bring ideas and advice to people in charge. However, I would like the people that are actually in charge to be more careful and responsible.</text></comment> |
39,856,779 | 39,856,072 | 1 | 2 | 39,852,879 | train | <story><title>Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?</title><url>https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/03/28/blobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMM_386</author><text>Hmm ... &quot;proto-danksharding&quot; which activated the &quot;blobscriptions protocol&quot; so that blobs are &quot;much cheaper than calldata&quot;, all of this helping it to become an &quot;L2-centric ecosystem&quot;. In the end, this leaves them &quot;not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PufPufPuf</author><text>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if all that was just a made up jargon and this was a joke article. But again, it&#x27;s about blockchain, so the line is thin.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here?</title><url>https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/03/28/blobs.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMM_386</author><text>Hmm ... &quot;proto-danksharding&quot; which activated the &quot;blobscriptions protocol&quot; so that blobs are &quot;much cheaper than calldata&quot;, all of this helping it to become an &quot;L2-centric ecosystem&quot;. In the end, this leaves them &quot;not confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m sold ... just tell me where to transfer the money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everfree</author><text>The actual quote is &quot;we are not *currently* at the point where we can be confident enough in the complex code of an optimistic or SNARK-based EVM verifier&quot;. The article seems to imply that &quot;in the end&quot;, they will be.</text></comment> |
24,370,381 | 24,370,445 | 1 | 2 | 24,369,233 | train | <story><title>Daniel Stenberg (curl) has been denied entry to the US for 870 days</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/us-visa.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MattyMc</author><text>Canada is benefiting substantially from the recent US immigration policies. My Ai team at Microsoft Canada was stacked with talent, all immigrants, and most expressed to me that they would have “normally gone to the US.”<p>I don’t have to remind this community of the laundry list of tech giants started by immigrants. However, if anyone outside the US is reading this we’d love to have you in Canada. Come here, please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codetrotter</author><text>I’ve been thinking about going to Canada for a long while, and this might sound silly but I was wondering, do people on HN who have immigrated to Canada arrange a lot ahead of time like doing interviews with companies via teleconferencing? Or do you go there to meet people in person first and to investigate opportunities? Or something else?<p>And when you did go, did you get a job at the company you thought you were going to work for, or did you have to interview with other companies instead?<p>Furthermore, has anyone here had the misfortune of trying to immigrate but ending up not finding work and having to cancel their immigration plans? If so, what were your experiences like and what would you do different this time?</text></comment> | <story><title>Daniel Stenberg (curl) has been denied entry to the US for 870 days</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/us-visa.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MattyMc</author><text>Canada is benefiting substantially from the recent US immigration policies. My Ai team at Microsoft Canada was stacked with talent, all immigrants, and most expressed to me that they would have “normally gone to the US.”<p>I don’t have to remind this community of the laundry list of tech giants started by immigrants. However, if anyone outside the US is reading this we’d love to have you in Canada. Come here, please.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angst_ridden</author><text>The current approval time for residency applications is 49 months.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s less for straight-up worker visas, though.<p>EDIT: I was not sufficiently precise. I&#x27;m not speaking of Express Entry &#x2F; skills-based applications here. If you have a high score in the CRS system, you are eligible for other programs which may be much faster.</text></comment> |
17,400,398 | 17,399,913 | 1 | 3 | 17,397,852 | train | <story><title>Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/25/mumbai-india-bans-plastic-bags-and-bottles</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vishaltelangre</author><text>Instead, government could&#x27;ve imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.<p>I agree that &quot;we&quot;, the people need to take a pledge to stop using plastic as much as we can. But if there&#x27;s no restriction put on giant FMCG companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Patanjali, Netsle, Procter and Gamble, etc. from supplying their products wrapped in plastic, I consider all of these government initiatives merely as a gimmick.<p>EDIT 1:
Another comment I left on this thread - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17400028" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17400028</a>.<p>EDIT 2:
In India, plastic is a major contributor of blocking sewers and rivers, especially in rainy seasons. Another important problem plastic waste produces is that since government bodies (such as, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, etc.) are unable to dump and&#x2F;or recycle plastic waste properly, it is accidentally consumed by animals and is the major reason for their deaths. Another issue is that, often &quot;dumping waste&quot; is considered as &quot;burning&quot; it. Burning plastic waste disturbs healthy air and is a major factor among others responsible for the increased air pollution in Indian cities recently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text><i>&gt;Instead, government could&#x27;ve imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.</i><p>Broadly speaking, that would be a terrible backwards step for the environment. Plastic packaging often reduces waste by protecting the product from spoilage and damage.<p>A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It&#x27;s a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping.<p>Many people argue that milk should be sold in re-usable glass containers rather than disposable bottles or cartons, but the environmental case is really marginal. The glass bottle is considerably more energy-intensive to produce and transport, with more energy used to collect and wash it for re-use. Returnable glass bottles are often worse than disposable plastic if the transport distance is too great and&#x2F;or the breakage rate is too high. In many cases, the best option is reusable plastic bottles, which are less energy-intensive to manufacture, lighter to transport and more durable than glass.<p>Plastic is a wonderful material that has an important role to play in a sustainable economy. There has been a huge increase in the quality and availability of bio-based and biodegradable plastics in the packaging industry. We have irrationally demonised a very useful material, creating a huge distraction from much more serious environmental problems.<p>If you buy a beef steak wrapped in plastic, the problem is the steak, not the wrapper. The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce. As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/25/mumbai-india-bans-plastic-bags-and-bottles</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vishaltelangre</author><text>Instead, government could&#x27;ve imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away.<p>I agree that &quot;we&quot;, the people need to take a pledge to stop using plastic as much as we can. But if there&#x27;s no restriction put on giant FMCG companies such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Patanjali, Netsle, Procter and Gamble, etc. from supplying their products wrapped in plastic, I consider all of these government initiatives merely as a gimmick.<p>EDIT 1:
Another comment I left on this thread - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17400028" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17400028</a>.<p>EDIT 2:
In India, plastic is a major contributor of blocking sewers and rivers, especially in rainy seasons. Another important problem plastic waste produces is that since government bodies (such as, municipal corporations, gram panchayats, etc.) are unable to dump and&#x2F;or recycle plastic waste properly, it is accidentally consumed by animals and is the major reason for their deaths. Another issue is that, often &quot;dumping waste&quot; is considered as &quot;burning&quot; it. Burning plastic waste disturbs healthy air and is a major factor among others responsible for the increased air pollution in Indian cities recently.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>omk</author><text>AFAIK product packing is also included in the ban.<p>The articles here state that plastic used for storage and packing of goods is also banned. Including packing of tooth brushes.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.firstpost.com&#x2F;india&#x2F;maharashtra-ban-war-on-plastic-bags-and-throwaways-are-an-indulgence-but-a-guiltless-dependence-on-straws-will-sink-the-planet-4576851.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.firstpost.com&#x2F;india&#x2F;maharashtra-ban-war-on-plast...</a>
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepressjournal.in&#x2F;mumbai&#x2F;maharashtra-plastic-ban-all-you-need-to-know-about-the-ban&#x2F;1253541" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepressjournal.in&#x2F;mumbai&#x2F;maharashtra-plastic-ba...</a></text></comment> |
35,953,830 | 35,953,568 | 1 | 2 | 35,953,171 | train | <story><title>Server-sent events</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_wizard</author><text>I know alot of websites and engineers use Websocket for <i>push only</i> data. SSE is tailored made for real time one sided updates!<p>In fact, I think it made a better chat protocol, when we built a chat system at a previous job, similar to Slack. We ended up leveraging SSE to push updates to channels and traditional HTTP requests to send data to the server, resulting in lower latency and less overhead on the server side. We did this because we found the following to be true:<p>- At any given time, there are far more people reading chat messages than writing them<p>- What matters is that updates after being sent to everyone else is that their pretty close to instantaneous but you had a 500ms window to allow for the server to receive a new message and then propagate it out. Therefore, for the sender, you update the UI optimistically so they aren&#x27;t waiting for a response, and everyone else will get it in ~500ms and its imperceptible<p>- one downside: its harder (we never figured it out before I left) to do indicators for when someone is typing. That really does seem to require two way real time connections</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twic</author><text>The big problem i&#x27;ve run into with SSE is the connection limit [1]:<p>&gt; Warning: When not used over HTTP&#x2F;2, SSE suffers from a limitation to the maximum number of open connections, which can be specially painful when opening various tabs as the limit is per browser and set to a very low number (6). The issue has been marked as &quot;Won&#x27;t fix&quot; in Chrome and Firefox. This limit is per browser + domain, so that means that you can open 6 SSE connections across all of the tabs to www.example1.com and another 6 SSE connections to www.example2.com. (from Stackoverflow). When using HTTP&#x2F;2, the maximum number of simultaneous HTTP streams is negotiated between the server and the client (defaults to 100).<p>The natural way to use SSE is to create an EventSource on each page. If you do this, and your user opens six tabs, they can now no longer make HTTP requests to your site. Not just SSE requests, any HTTP requests at all!<p>It&#x27;s also quite natural, i think, to want to use multiple separate streams. It&#x27;s very convenient to write separate endpoints for various kinds of data that a page might want, for example one for streaming numerical data, one for control messages, and one for descriptive events; or one for each panel on a dashboard. Here, you can hit the limit on a single page.<p>I wrote a thin layer over my HTTP server&#x27;s APIs which lets me write a single handler which can send events via either SSE or a websocket. Then, when i build a page, i use websockets, but if i want to debug, i can still use curl to make a normal HTTP request. Also, other apps can use SSE to pull data, which only requires an HTTP client, not a websocket client.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;EventSource" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;EventSource</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Server-sent events</title><url>https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_wizard</author><text>I know alot of websites and engineers use Websocket for <i>push only</i> data. SSE is tailored made for real time one sided updates!<p>In fact, I think it made a better chat protocol, when we built a chat system at a previous job, similar to Slack. We ended up leveraging SSE to push updates to channels and traditional HTTP requests to send data to the server, resulting in lower latency and less overhead on the server side. We did this because we found the following to be true:<p>- At any given time, there are far more people reading chat messages than writing them<p>- What matters is that updates after being sent to everyone else is that their pretty close to instantaneous but you had a 500ms window to allow for the server to receive a new message and then propagate it out. Therefore, for the sender, you update the UI optimistically so they aren&#x27;t waiting for a response, and everyone else will get it in ~500ms and its imperceptible<p>- one downside: its harder (we never figured it out before I left) to do indicators for when someone is typing. That really does seem to require two way real time connections</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>franky47</author><text>One major issue I encountered with SSE is dealing with reconnection. WebSocket makes it very easy to detect differences between a loss of network connectivity, a server dying, and a client exiting properly (eg: closing the tab), on either side of the socket.<p>Maybe there are facilities to do so with SSE that I don&#x27;t know of, but my experience in reliable server-to-client-only comms with it has been a bit rough.</text></comment> |
31,069,186 | 31,066,902 | 1 | 2 | 31,066,534 | train | <story><title>Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/04/17/twitter-takeover-musk-dorsey-board-tweets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerojero</author><text>I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.<p>It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.<p>I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.<p>To me, saying &quot;the board is at fault&quot; and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It&#x27;s the benevolent dictator story.<p>To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcstl</author><text>The issue here is that you&#x27;re ignoring completely how Twitter was built, and how things like Twitter get built.<p>It&#x27;s very easy now to say that everyone should get a say in what is done with Twitter, but back when Twitter was first launched what most people thought was that Twitter was <i>stupid</i> and would never get off the ground. I mean, who&#x27;d want a service where you can write only an amount of characters so short you can say nothing of substance?<p>It was people like Dorsey who bit the bullet and actually built the thing, which only <i>later</i> was proven to have potential. Never mind that people could be right - Twitter <i>could</i> be a stupid idea and it could have blown up in the founders&#x27; faces. It would be <i>very good</i> in that case that we didn&#x27;t have a &quot;truly public form of ownership&quot; in that case - then it would have failed without damaging anyone but the founders.<p>But you can&#x27;t get that protection to society without the flipside. If everyone gets protected from the blow-ups, then you need to make the people who create the ideas that seem very stupid but actually work out in a huge way be rewarded proportionately to how much everyone was wrong about the idea. Which is, thankfully, how it works.<p>The idea that Twitter should be &quot;truly public&quot; because the content there is user-generated ignores that there would be no Twitter and none of that user-generated content in the first place without a small group of people taking the risk to build something everyone considered &quot;stupid&quot;. The idea that people who take that risk should have the fruits of their risk-taking taken from them for their success just means that such risks would not be taken.<p>Socialization - such as what you propose - is the flip side of corporate bailouts, and just as wrong: Bailouts make society liable for a business&#x27;s failure while making the business the sole beneficiary of its own success, while socialization punishes the founders for succeeding while making them the sole holders of liability for failing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board</title><url>https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/04/17/twitter-takeover-musk-dorsey-board-tweets/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerojero</author><text>I find the question of ownership to be really interesting for a platform like twitter that relies, entirely, on user-generated content.<p>It seems to me like share-holder ownership is pretty incapable of dealing with the complexities of being such a global and influential platform. The plutocratic model of 1 share 1 vote and financialization of what is pretty much seen and used as a public service really gets in the way of turning the platform into something that could be truly useful for humanity.<p>I think we are very much due on a change of paradigm when it comes to these sort of services. What is it that twitter users want, what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication), what do workers of the platform want? All of these stakeholders should have a say in what is done with twitter.<p>To me, saying &quot;the board is at fault&quot; and thinking it could be better as a privately owned corporation is also missing the target. Of course, I think these tech billionaires think they can make better decisions for everyone and so to them it is obvious that a truly public form of ownership would be a mistake. It&#x27;s the benevolent dictator story.<p>To finalise, it would be interesting to see an exploration on technologies that could help stake-ownership management so that we can have firms that are capable of making decisions that make people happier and societies a better place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>riffic</author><text>&gt; what do governments want (many politicians use twitter as an official means of communication)<p>This needs to be changed; ideally governments would contribute directly into a digital commons directly from their own official web presence. We&#x27;ve had the answer since 2008 for this too - the federated social web.<p>public communications funded with public money should occur via public infrastructure. Twitter could be in the business of selling this (their hosted software on custom domains) to public agencies, institutions, groups, or anyone who just wants ownership of their own ActivityPub interoperable namespace.<p>EDIT: No one asked me but I just want to remind everyone here that Bluesky, a vaporware <i>&quot;protocol&quot;</i> initiative, is not doing anything of value.</text></comment> |
28,219,315 | 28,218,442 | 1 | 2 | 28,207,105 | train | <story><title>Why do so many people move to the Falkland Islands? (2009)</title><url>https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/05/why-do-so-many-people-move-to-the-falkland-islands.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zingar</author><text>&quot;...(the only access to the islands) is to have a pre-arranged job contract with a company that has signed a form of bond taking responsibility for you&quot;<p>That sounds like all British immigration rules. My employer had to apply for my visa and had to pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front before I could move for a job in London. If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.<p>It&#x27;s a bizarre system but it seems like this reporter doesn&#x27;t know how normal it is. I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.<p>(Likewise for Europe and the US)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mellosouls</author><text>It sounds perfectly reasonable.<p>Barring exceptional circumstances, presumably the employer takes the decision to recruit externally for cost-cutting reasons; it&#x27;s important then that the hidden costs of healthcare etc are not passed on to the tax payer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why do so many people move to the Falkland Islands? (2009)</title><url>https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/05/why-do-so-many-people-move-to-the-falkland-islands.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zingar</author><text>&quot;...(the only access to the islands) is to have a pre-arranged job contract with a company that has signed a form of bond taking responsibility for you&quot;<p>That sounds like all British immigration rules. My employer had to apply for my visa and had to pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front before I could move for a job in London. If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.<p>It&#x27;s a bizarre system but it seems like this reporter doesn&#x27;t know how normal it is. I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.<p>(Likewise for Europe and the US)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmm</author><text>Is it bizarre? Sounds like similar rules to anywhere - no country wants to let in people who can&#x27;t support themselves.</text></comment> |
20,083,758 | 20,083,156 | 1 | 2 | 20,082,610 | train | <story><title>China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-02/china-s-spending-30-billion-to-assemble-its-electric-detroits</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dhruvrrp</author><text>I remember reading a few months (?) ago that China was looking to consolidate the electric vehicle industry because the government incentives led to 500+ manufacturers who like to &quot;move-fast and break things&quot; and caused problems like vehicle fires.<p>imo that would mean a lot of these towns wouldn&#x27;t be in business for very long.<p>Edit: found the discussion <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19617681" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19617681</a></text></comment> | <story><title>China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-02/china-s-spending-30-billion-to-assemble-its-electric-detroits</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>melling</author><text>More global R&amp;D is a great thing!<p>Hopefully, India soon joins in. Their economy is starting to grow like China’s. Between the two, that’s 1&#x2F;3 of the world’s population.</text></comment> |
25,338,041 | 25,337,488 | 1 | 3 | 25,336,294 | train | <story><title>SpaceX gets $886M from FCC to subsidize Starlink in 35 states</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/spacex-gets-886-million-from-fcc-to-subsidize-starlink-in-35-states/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>My recent employer was one of the ISP providing rural telecom service. These subsidies accounted for a hefty percentage of our income and the company was still perpetually on the edge of failure. Most of our competitors were in similar situations, loaded down with breathtakingly large amounts of debt and expensive to maintain decaying infrastructure, much of it purchased from the Baby Bells when they got out of the market. I can&#x27;t say that the company was particularly well run but am certain that without the government subsidies, the business would collapse and large numbers of rural customers would be without telecom services, which extend beyond just internet access.<p>Not sure what Starlink&#x27;s existence is going to do to the company. Offering 25 Mbps aDSL with low reliability isn&#x27;t going to compete very well if a customer can get 100 Mbsp service for a similar price and higher reliability. On the other hand, this might be justification the company can use to stop servicing the most expensive of the rural accounts to service while focusing on small town gigabit service that can compete with a reasonable expense to service.</text></item><item><author>liquidise</author><text>This headline is only part of the story, looks like ~10 ISP&#x27;s were awarded sizable subsidies.<p>While i am not a fan of subsidies in general, the ISP space is particularly tricky for free-market forces to ensure competition. The capital requirements are overwhelming in many cases for a traditional startups, leaving the only other option as local&#x2F;municipal votes, which have been successful in some areas.<p>Long-term, i could see internet access to receive utility status in the states. Until that happens, funding ISP competition, particularly in rural areas feels like a wise move.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nevdka</author><text>The infrastructure those companies have built already exists, and the subsidies are mostly going to pay debt. If the subsidies stopped, the companies would go bankrupt. Their assets would be sold to another company, likely at a price less than the debt. The new company could therefore have a lower debt burden, and wouldn&#x27;t necessarily need the subsidies to provide the same level of service. The subsidies are stopping the market from efficiently allocating capital.</text></comment> | <story><title>SpaceX gets $886M from FCC to subsidize Starlink in 35 states</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/spacex-gets-886-million-from-fcc-to-subsidize-starlink-in-35-states/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>My recent employer was one of the ISP providing rural telecom service. These subsidies accounted for a hefty percentage of our income and the company was still perpetually on the edge of failure. Most of our competitors were in similar situations, loaded down with breathtakingly large amounts of debt and expensive to maintain decaying infrastructure, much of it purchased from the Baby Bells when they got out of the market. I can&#x27;t say that the company was particularly well run but am certain that without the government subsidies, the business would collapse and large numbers of rural customers would be without telecom services, which extend beyond just internet access.<p>Not sure what Starlink&#x27;s existence is going to do to the company. Offering 25 Mbps aDSL with low reliability isn&#x27;t going to compete very well if a customer can get 100 Mbsp service for a similar price and higher reliability. On the other hand, this might be justification the company can use to stop servicing the most expensive of the rural accounts to service while focusing on small town gigabit service that can compete with a reasonable expense to service.</text></item><item><author>liquidise</author><text>This headline is only part of the story, looks like ~10 ISP&#x27;s were awarded sizable subsidies.<p>While i am not a fan of subsidies in general, the ISP space is particularly tricky for free-market forces to ensure competition. The capital requirements are overwhelming in many cases for a traditional startups, leaving the only other option as local&#x2F;municipal votes, which have been successful in some areas.<p>Long-term, i could see internet access to receive utility status in the states. Until that happens, funding ISP competition, particularly in rural areas feels like a wise move.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevin_thibedeau</author><text>I&#x27;d love to get 25Mb DSL but you can&#x27;t get that in the US where you&#x27;re lucky to have anything above 4Mb. Not all of us need 100Mb+ internet access.</text></comment> |
21,078,636 | 21,075,329 | 1 | 2 | 21,071,890 | train | <story><title>WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>streetcat1</author><text>The only difference between wework and amazon is the way they finance their money-losing ventures.<p>Wework does that via the private market, hence the game is up when it needs access to the public markets.<p>Amazon does that via AWS. AWS is the money that fuels the eCommerce side. The game will be up when:<p>1) Kubernetes will move AWS customers back to on-prem, or at least turn clouds into a commodity. Amazon knows that and this is the reason for the push toward lockin (aka lambda &#x2F; serverless).<p>2) Amazon will be divided into two companies.</text></item><item><author>hef19898</author><text>Totally agree with the last pint, people completely tend to ignore the effort and attention to detail Amazon puts into executive and planning. That plus a very sound strategy. Also Amazon was profitable, even if just barely, for the most time while growing appr. 20% constantly. Not comparable to, say, WeWork from what I know. But it shows how powerful that narrative can be.</text></item><item><author>resfirestar</author><text>&gt;The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.<p>That&#x27;s what the article says:<p>&gt;At first, with companies like Walmart and Amazon, predatory pricing can seem smart. The entire retail sector might be decimated and communities across America might be harmed, but two day shipping is convenient and Walmart and Amazon do have positive cash flow. But increasingly with cheap capital and a narrow slice of financiers who want to copy the winners, there is a second or third generation of companies asking Wall Street to just ‘trust me.’<p>It&#x27;s not that WeWork is the same as Amazon, it&#x27;s that WeWork is symptomatic of a bubble caused by investors looking to copy Amazon&#x27;s success without understanding why it succeeded.</text></item><item><author>legitster</author><text>&gt; WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.<p>&gt; This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.<p>This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.<p>&gt; The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.<p>A bold assumption with no citations. There are just as many counterfactuals to this strategy as there are examples. The scooter market is an especially bad - there is so much capital from so many companies - if you were trying to establish monopolies that would be a bad bet.<p>&gt; Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example.<p>The subprime crisis is completely unrelated! And if anything it was proof that <i>money-making</i> assets should be scrutinized more.<p>WeWork is a garbage, charlatan company. But don&#x27;t misunderstand what is happening here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chx</author><text>Kubernetes is only a threat in that it is a buzzword much as cloud is a buzzword. The cloud and Kubernetes both are used to sell a triple fallacy: You need to care about scaling from day one, there is an easy way to scale, this way is the cloud&#x2F;Kubernetes.<p>For almost all startups their app would run comfortably on a single dedicated server. This has been true for many, many years but only the YAGNI greybeards would go with it. Maybe two HA but even HA is overhyped, it&#x27;s cheaper to be down. Down is part of this industry, you <i>will</i> be down in many circumstances anyways so perhaps don&#x27;t chase a unicorn? Of course, above a certain size, two servers make sense but ... don&#x27;t overdo it even then. You don&#x27;t need microservices, you don&#x27;t need containers. All of this is unnecessary hype. (And yes, both of you who works at a large enough company where being down is enough of a problem that it worths engineering about: good for you. I have architected a Top 100 website myself and we still didn&#x27;t use more than a dozen servers and that included the staging infra.)<p>Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame from 2015 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;garybernhardt&#x2F;status&#x2F;600783770925420546?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;garybernhardt&#x2F;status&#x2F;600783770925420546?...</a><p>&gt; Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say &quot;your data set fits in RAM&quot;, you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.<p>Very strongly related: a terabyte of RAM in just 16 modules so it fits most server boards is now under $5000 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory.net&#x2F;product&#x2F;p00926-b21-hp-1x-64gb-ddr4-2933-lrdimm-pc4-23466u-l-quad-rank-x4-replacement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;memory.net&#x2F;product&#x2F;p00926-b21-hp-1x-64gb-ddr4-2933-l...</a><p>Final shot, codinghorror of StackOverflow fame: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;codinghorror&#x2F;status&#x2F;347070841059692545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;codinghorror&#x2F;status&#x2F;347070841059692545</a></text></comment> | <story><title>WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism</title><url>https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>streetcat1</author><text>The only difference between wework and amazon is the way they finance their money-losing ventures.<p>Wework does that via the private market, hence the game is up when it needs access to the public markets.<p>Amazon does that via AWS. AWS is the money that fuels the eCommerce side. The game will be up when:<p>1) Kubernetes will move AWS customers back to on-prem, or at least turn clouds into a commodity. Amazon knows that and this is the reason for the push toward lockin (aka lambda &#x2F; serverless).<p>2) Amazon will be divided into two companies.</text></item><item><author>hef19898</author><text>Totally agree with the last pint, people completely tend to ignore the effort and attention to detail Amazon puts into executive and planning. That plus a very sound strategy. Also Amazon was profitable, even if just barely, for the most time while growing appr. 20% constantly. Not comparable to, say, WeWork from what I know. But it shows how powerful that narrative can be.</text></item><item><author>resfirestar</author><text>&gt;The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.<p>That&#x27;s what the article says:<p>&gt;At first, with companies like Walmart and Amazon, predatory pricing can seem smart. The entire retail sector might be decimated and communities across America might be harmed, but two day shipping is convenient and Walmart and Amazon do have positive cash flow. But increasingly with cheap capital and a narrow slice of financiers who want to copy the winners, there is a second or third generation of companies asking Wall Street to just ‘trust me.’<p>It&#x27;s not that WeWork is the same as Amazon, it&#x27;s that WeWork is symptomatic of a bubble caused by investors looking to copy Amazon&#x27;s success without understanding why it succeeded.</text></item><item><author>legitster</author><text>&gt; WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.<p>&gt; This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.<p>This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.<p>&gt; The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.<p>A bold assumption with no citations. There are just as many counterfactuals to this strategy as there are examples. The scooter market is an especially bad - there is so much capital from so many companies - if you were trying to establish monopolies that would be a bad bet.<p>&gt; Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example.<p>The subprime crisis is completely unrelated! And if anything it was proof that <i>money-making</i> assets should be scrutinized more.<p>WeWork is a garbage, charlatan company. But don&#x27;t misunderstand what is happening here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rossdavidh</author><text>It&#x27;s interesting that you bring up the importance of AWS to Amazon, nowadays, because...companies like Uber, Lyft, and WeWork spend a lot on AWS.<p>In other words, like Yahoo getting a lot of their late-90&#x27;s advertising from dot-com bubble companies that evaporated in 2001, AWS is massively exposed to the current bubble in &quot;we have so much VC cash we don&#x27;t know what to do with it&quot; companies. When that goes away (i.e. the next downturn), AWS will lose a huge chunk of their business all at once. It will be interesting to see what Amazon&#x27;s bottom line looks like at that point.</text></comment> |
19,778,526 | 19,777,607 | 1 | 3 | 19,773,826 | train | <story><title>Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/europe/finland-hobbyhorse-girls.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>So as an occasional (male) rider of real horses, there&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve always wondered about: how did the recreation become so gendered?<p>Up until about the middle of the 20th century there was still utilitarian and military horse riding. Men would learn to ride. Now it seems to be culturally associated almost entirely with young upper-middle-class girls or middle-aged women. Is this the result of toy marketing (My Little Pony from the 80s onwards), or high society, or something else?<p>What interests me about this Finnish subculture is that it&#x27;s perfectly cloned the &quot;horse culture&quot;, just without any actual horses. It&#x27;s very close to a cargo cult. Possibly Finland is too cold to have a regular horse culture?</text></comment> | <story><title>Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/europe/finland-hobbyhorse-girls.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>le-mark</author><text>My kids have these stick horses, a relative got them for a Christmas gift some years ago. They never play with them. The stick is long and counter balances the head so you have to sort of squeeze your legs together to actually ride the thing. Looks like these horses have shorter sticks, and are balanced so they&#x27;re rideable in a much more natural way.<p>It certainly never occurred to me this simple refinement could make an annoying experience into something a kid could actually enjoy.</text></comment> |
4,410,520 | 4,410,545 | 1 | 3 | 4,410,350 | train | <story><title>T-mobile password reset does not allow you to type the letter "V"</title><url>http://support.t-mobile.com/message/163958#163958</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MichaelGG</author><text>Apparently to prevent paste. Their CheckEnter.js file has:<p><pre><code> function keyDown(a) {
if (a.keyCode == 86) {
a.preventDefault()
}
}
</code></pre>
And that's assigned to onkeydown...<p>Funny enough, elsewhere in their code, they do explicitly check for Ctrl &#38; V/C.</text></comment> | <story><title>T-mobile password reset does not allow you to type the letter "V"</title><url>http://support.t-mobile.com/message/163958#163958</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skanuj</author><text>Try using special characters - It will just omit some special characters and save the password with that character omitted. And yes, T-mobile sent back my password in clear-text, and that's how i know.</text></comment> |
37,348,772 | 37,348,733 | 1 | 2 | 37,347,447 | train | <story><title>Organic Maps</title><url>https://organicmaps.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bertil</author><text>I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.<p>I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that <i>not</i> a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.<p>A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tazjin</author><text>I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just didn&#x27;t exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite some time.<p>Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were &quot;wrong&quot;. They were seeing data with multiple post codes for the same building!<p>For the record: This is valid in the UK, as there&#x27;s a maximum number of households per post code or something like that.<p>Not sure how that ended eventually, left a few years ago, but I just checked and those post codes now exist.</text></comment> | <story><title>Organic Maps</title><url>https://organicmaps.app/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bertil</author><text>I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.<p>I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that <i>not</i> a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.<p>A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jesterson</author><text>&gt; I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly<p>Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever.<p>&gt; designers like to say that users are always right?<p>It&#x27;s just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position they have the right to tell people how they should interact, conveniently forgetting the service will be used by all groups of people, not just IT geeks.</text></comment> |
17,304,803 | 17,304,744 | 1 | 3 | 17,302,301 | train | <story><title>Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/12/netflix-and-alphabet-will-need-to-become-isps-fast/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pascalxus</author><text>This the end of innovation in online videos: &quot;When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.&quot;<p>Sounds like this is the end of TV and Online video watching as we know it. Oh well, time to start reading books again ~ they&#x27;ll never be able to take that from us.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dsabanin</author><text>I just fail to see how Comcast or Verizon are going to be selling you their internet connection if you won&#x27;t be able to connect to the things you want to connect to (like Netflix, iTunes, YouTube) through them. Especially on higher plans, people buy a lot of bandwidth so that they can stream videos, that&#x27;s how ISPs up-sell to them. If they start throttling, they&#x27;ll be selling an empty bucket, and it&#x27;s not going to be very easy.<p>To me it seems like this might just revive competition between ISPs, by separating those who do the shady things and those who don&#x27;t.<p>I&#x27;m curious how this is going to play out, it may not be all bad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/12/netflix-and-alphabet-will-need-to-become-isps-fast/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pascalxus</author><text>This the end of innovation in online videos: &quot;When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.&quot;<p>Sounds like this is the end of TV and Online video watching as we know it. Oh well, time to start reading books again ~ they&#x27;ll never be able to take that from us.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>Is it? Startups manage to continue to exist on the Google Play Store and on the iOS App Store, even though Apple and Google directly compete with many of their offerings. Consumers basically have just two choices for mobile platform, but somehow that&#x27;s enough competition to keep the kind of behavior you talk about in check.</text></comment> |
41,189,952 | 41,187,695 | 1 | 2 | 41,186,310 | train | <story><title>Argdown, like Markdown for argument mapping</title><url>https://argdown.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stared</author><text>From time to time, I see a tool to present a discussion as a tree with arguments for and against it.<p>Unless it is a school essay, arguments don&#x27;t go that way.<p>It is usually harder to encompass what a node (an atomic fact) is and what a link is (it usually goes beyond &quot;support&quot; and &quot;counter&quot;). Very often, this structure is not a tree. Maybe a DAG with weighted edges, but if it were that straightforward - knowledge graphs would simply work.<p>Instead of rehashing the same tree approach, we should adopt something closer to an LLM-embedding approach - for a given statement, we should have &quot;relevant statements&quot; with an additional dimension if it supports, counters, expands, provides an example, and so on. In this case, it wouldn&#x27;t even be a DAG.</text></comment> | <story><title>Argdown, like Markdown for argument mapping</title><url>https://argdown.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>davidpfarrell</author><text>Ha I thought it was a tool for managing complex args for command-line tools</text></comment> |
37,062,990 | 37,062,360 | 1 | 2 | 37,060,226 | train | <story><title>Intel's GPU Drivers Now Collect Telemetry, Including 'How You Use Your Computer'</title><url>https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intels-gpu-drivers-now-collect-telemetry-including-how-you-use-your-computer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&gt;I don&#x27;t understand the need to include &quot;the types of websites you visit&quot; in GPU driver telemetry.<p>Do you visit Youtube and Twitch other streaming services often? Focus on video decoding.<p>Do you visit sites that heavily utilize graphics[1]? Focus on 3D acceleration.<p>There are reasons this data can be useful, especially since Intel wants to unfuck their otherwise imperially fucked drivers. Websites aren&#x27;t just plain text with window dressing anymore, they are entire programs unto themselves.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026592">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026592</a></text></item><item><author>pptr</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand the need to include &quot;the types of websites you visit&quot; in GPU driver telemetry.<p>AMD&#x27;s telemetry doesn&#x27;t seem to include that:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;user-experience-program.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;user-experience-program...</a><p>I couldn&#x27;t figure out what telemetry is collected by Nvidia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HeckFeck</author><text>Do they need telemetry to know this? I could ask around, but I don&#x27;t think <i>anyone</i> exists who doesn&#x27;t game and also watch video on the same system.<p>Should Creative also track my listening habits, to determine whether soundcard development resources need pooled into system sounds or MP3 decoding? Wouldn&#x27;t that be a tad silly of them?<p>It seems a bit post-facto to me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Intel's GPU Drivers Now Collect Telemetry, Including 'How You Use Your Computer'</title><url>https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/intels-gpu-drivers-now-collect-telemetry-including-how-you-use-your-computer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Dalewyn</author><text>&gt;I don&#x27;t understand the need to include &quot;the types of websites you visit&quot; in GPU driver telemetry.<p>Do you visit Youtube and Twitch other streaming services often? Focus on video decoding.<p>Do you visit sites that heavily utilize graphics[1]? Focus on 3D acceleration.<p>There are reasons this data can be useful, especially since Intel wants to unfuck their otherwise imperially fucked drivers. Websites aren&#x27;t just plain text with window dressing anymore, they are entire programs unto themselves.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026592">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37026592</a></text></item><item><author>pptr</author><text>I don&#x27;t understand the need to include &quot;the types of websites you visit&quot; in GPU driver telemetry.<p>AMD&#x27;s telemetry doesn&#x27;t seem to include that:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;user-experience-program.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amd.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;legal&#x2F;privacy&#x2F;user-experience-program...</a><p>I couldn&#x27;t figure out what telemetry is collected by Nvidia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>You could gather that information by just reporting anonymous internal telemetry about what kind of computational work the GPU is doing.</text></comment> |
5,735,419 | 5,735,010 | 1 | 2 | 5,734,680 | train | <story><title>Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/19/dear-american-consumers-please-dont-start-eating-healthfully-sincerely-the-food-industry/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcampbell1</author><text>I have a solution to the obesity epidemic, that would be realistic to implement. Right now the factors for what we analyse in nutrition is calories, macro nutrient content, and micronutrient content. What we really care about is satiation and satiety. These are words that no one talks about, and but get to the core of the issue. If I eat this food, how many calories will I consume before feeling full?(satiation). After eating this food, how long until I feel the need to eat again? (sateity).<p>Unfortunately the research and measurements of these values is thin. We need to fix that. We already know things like whole milk better provides satiation and sateity than skim milk, and children that drink whole milk actaully have less obesity than skim milk drinkers.<p>If we just measured and labeled foods with a sateity/satiation index (what we really care about), then people would actually have a chance to pick better foods. Right now it is damn near impossible to determine if eating eggs and bacon for breakfast is more likely to drive over eating vs cereal. It can be measured, but we just don't do it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Dear American Consumers: Please don’t start eating healthfully</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/05/19/dear-american-consumers-please-dont-start-eating-healthfully-sincerely-the-food-industry/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>Interesting.<p>Over the years, this is the third or fourth version of this same story that I've read.<p>Read one on low carbs. Read one on low fat. Now this one.<p>The assumption here, as it was in the others, is that we now know what works and what doesn't. And that forces beyond our control conspire to keep us fat. In this version, the thesis is that some form of certification system for marketing to children can cure the obesity epidemic.<p>Beats me. But I'll bet twenty bucks that a decade or two from now we'll be reading the same type of article, only with different kinds of suggested cures.<p>I'm of the opinion that there is nothing wrong, or rather that the population is acting entirely naturally and appropriately given their adaptation to specific evolutionary conditions, which have changed drastically in the last 100 years. I doubt controlling marketing material will have a long-lasting effect, but anything is worth a shot. It is a very serious problem.<p>Looking at the recent past, I'd be just a bit more humble about it.</text></comment> |
36,090,195 | 36,090,239 | 1 | 2 | 36,088,135 | train | <story><title>Biosphere 2</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>handsclean</author><text>I visited this and thought it was very cool. A few random comments:<p>- It’s underlaid by a dense sprawl of machinery the size of a football field, which is constantly working to create and maintain the above biomes.<p>- The “lungs” are auditorium-sized rooms with a ceiling that’s free to rise and fall as air pressure changes due to temperature, reducing stress on the structure. You can walk up inside it, with air rushing past you in the connecting tunnel.<p>- There’s a library at the top of a short tower, maybe two stories. We were told the crew didn’t use it because food and oxygen deprivation kept them too weak to climb the stairs.<p>- Golf cart sized air vents create what really gets subconsciously recognized as natural wind, not artificial blowing. It was so pleasant that I’ve become determined to replicate it in my home someday.<p>- There wasn’t a predecessor, “biosphere 1” refers to Earth.</text></comment> | <story><title>Biosphere 2</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>It&#x27;s so weird that Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) was brought on to manage this project for two years from 1994 to 1996.</text></comment> |
36,081,721 | 36,079,146 | 1 | 2 | 36,067,958 | train | <story><title>JJ: JSON Stream Editor</title><url>https://github.com/tidwall/jj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j1elo</author><text>I&#x27;ll take the chance to bring attention to the maintenance issues that &#x27;jq&#x27; has been having in the last years [1]; there hasn&#x27;t been a new release since 2018, which IMO wouldn&#x27;t necessarily be a bad thing if not for the fact that the main branch has been collecting improvements and bug fixes [2] since then.<p>A group of motivated users are currently talking about what direction to take; a fork is being considered in order to unlock new development and bug fixes [3]. Maybe someone reading this is able and willing to join their efforts.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2305">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2305</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;pull&#x2F;1697">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;pull&#x2F;1697</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2550">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;stedolan&#x2F;jq&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2550</a></text></comment> | <story><title>JJ: JSON Stream Editor</title><url>https://github.com/tidwall/jj</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cristoperb</author><text>I like jq, but jj is so fast it is my go-to for pretty printing large json blobs. Its parsing engine is available as a standalone go module, and I&#x27;ve used it in a few projects where I needed faster parsing than encoding&#x2F;json:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tidwall&#x2F;gjson">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tidwall&#x2F;gjson</a></text></comment> |
18,914,445 | 18,913,845 | 1 | 2 | 18,911,284 | train | <story><title>U.S. Now Says All Online Gambling Illegal, Not Just Sports Bets</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/u-s-now-says-all-online-gambling-illegal-not-just-sports-bets</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cphoover</author><text>Sheldon Adelson = Big GOP money.<p>&quot;Adelson&#x27;s newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was the only major newspaper nationwide to endorse Trump.[42][43]<p>Adelson was also the largest donor to Trump&#x27;s inaugural celebrations, with a $5 million donation to the celebrations.[44]&quot;
-- Wikipedia</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Now Says All Online Gambling Illegal, Not Just Sports Bets</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/u-s-now-says-all-online-gambling-illegal-not-just-sports-bets</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coralreef</author><text>In contrast: &quot;The Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for states to legalize sports betting, striking down a 1992 federal law that had prohibited most states from authorizing sports betting.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;14&#x2F;politics&#x2F;sports-betting-ncaa-supreme-court&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;14&#x2F;politics&#x2F;sports-betting-ncaa-...</a></text></comment> |
23,874,472 | 23,874,265 | 1 | 3 | 23,870,339 | train | <story><title>Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/carolineodonovan/coronavirus-schools-teachers-fear-for-their-lives</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eaandkw</author><text>I have pretty much given up on everybody at this point. I have already pulled my kid from school and will not send them back. I am in a single income family and I am now working from home.<p>All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.<p>So good luck everyone with the education system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>I think one of the things that has been so disheartening to me about the pandemic is that it has shown how we just can&#x27;t really <i>do</i> anything anymore in the US.<p>I mean, just look at PPE. I understand being a little flat footed when the pandemic first started, but it&#x27;s been nearly 6 months now. I would have expected mass mobilization to pump out N95 masks, gloves, gowns, face shields, etc. by the millions. I mean, look how many heavy military vehicles the US managed to build during WWII, and then consider we can&#x27;t even build <i>masks</i> of sufficient quantity.<p>And this just follows an ever growing set of problems that the US has just oddly accepted without the political will to do anything, things like our totally f&#x27;d healthcare system, mass shootings, climate change, etc.<p>I disagree, though, with the sibling comment that says &quot;Don&#x27;t give up! Don&#x27;t withdraw!&quot; It&#x27;s not like there aren&#x27;t other functioning societies in the world that are way less broken than the US. Staying behind in some mythical &quot;fight&quot; is just misplaced patriotism IMO. There are other countries that live the <i>ideals</i> that I used to associate with America (real freedom, upward mobility, democracy, rule of law, etc.) much better than the US does these days.</text></comment> | <story><title>Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk</title><url>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/carolineodonovan/coronavirus-schools-teachers-fear-for-their-lives</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eaandkw</author><text>I have pretty much given up on everybody at this point. I have already pulled my kid from school and will not send them back. I am in a single income family and I am now working from home.<p>All actions and purchases at this point are to help us to become more independant from the system. Society and government at large has shown itself to be unreliable and undependable. I am also making longer term plans to move out of my current state.<p>So good luck everyone with the education system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cool_dude85</author><text>Not sure where you&#x27;re from, but in many places, &quot;society and government&quot; has not failed people the same way it has in the US. Even within the US there are some places where local and state government have performed much better than places like Florida or NYC.<p>That is to say, the problem is not, conceptually, &quot;society and government&quot;, but instead, the American society and American government we have today. Don&#x27;t give up! Don&#x27;t withdraw! Organize and fight to improve the systems that are exacerbating this crisis.</text></comment> |
24,739,070 | 24,738,579 | 1 | 2 | 24,738,206 | train | <story><title>Nine in ten adults think buying latest smartphone is waste of money</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-mobile-waste-of-money-report-b837371.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>So fully 10% of the adult populatiom thinks buying the latest iPhone <i>isn&#x27;t</i>? Thats a rather healthy market for any luxury good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LatteLazy</author><text>No. Fully 10% think that AND admit it. Another 20% think it but like to pretend otherwise. Another 10% think it&#x27;s a waste of money, but since it&#x27;s their company paying for it are happy to accept. And another 20% think it would be crazy to pay 1000 pounds for a phone, but then follow up and explain they got a great deal and only pay 100 a month extra for the next 24 months plus 250 up front.<p>That&#x27;s why apple is a trillion dollar company.</text></comment> | <story><title>Nine in ten adults think buying latest smartphone is waste of money</title><url>https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-mobile-waste-of-money-report-b837371.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>So fully 10% of the adult populatiom thinks buying the latest iPhone <i>isn&#x27;t</i>? Thats a rather healthy market for any luxury good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madeofpalk</author><text>Count me as one of the 80% that thinks its a waste, but does it anyway. A little bit of introspection is valuable.</text></comment> |
16,564,761 | 16,563,478 | 1 | 3 | 16,563,349 | train | <story><title>Picat: A Logic-Based, Multi-Paradigm, Programming Language</title><url>http://picat-lang.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>afaz</author><text>Picat is a pragmatic mix of several programming paradigms, and it supports both directional and non-directional computing.<p>Pattern-matching is directional. Consider the following predicate definitions:<p>p([a,b|_]) =&gt; true.<p>q([X,X]) =&gt; true.<p>A call p(L) succeeds only when L has at least two elements and the first two elements are a and b, respectively. A call q(L) succeeds only when L has exactly two identical elements.<p>Functions are directional. In Prolog, the length(L,N) predicate can be used to compute the length of L and can also be used to create a list of a given length N. In Picat, you need to use function new_list(N) to create a list, and use function len(L) to compute the length of L.<p>Loops are directional. Unlike in ECLiPSe-CLP where it is possible to iterate over a list that is to be created, in Picat the collection of every iterator must be fixed.<p>Unification is non-directional. A call X = Y is like an equality constraint over terms. Built-ins predicates, such as member(X,L) and append(L1,L2,L3), are defined by using unification, and can be used in the same way as in Prolog.<p>Constraints are non-directional. While a unification X = Y has a unique solution when it succeeds, a system of constraints may have multiple solutions. Picat provides a built-in, called solve, that calls the imported solver to search for a satisfactory or an optimal solution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Picat: A Logic-Based, Multi-Paradigm, Programming Language</title><url>http://picat-lang.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>EtDybNuvCu</author><text>Interesting syntax. Can Picat programs be run backwards or in other-than-expected directions, as in Prologs and Kanrens? This relational aspect is the killer feature of logical languages, and it would be unfortunate if Picat doesn&#x27;t have it.</text></comment> |
34,303,697 | 34,303,026 | 1 | 2 | 34,287,615 | train | <story><title>Undo codes for Japanese elevator floor buttons</title><url>https://soranews24.com/2017/08/18/the-secret-undo-codes-for-japanese-elevator-floor-buttons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pronlover723</author><text>Other things about Japanese elevators<p>99% the &quot;close door&quot; button works immediately. Vs say USA where 80% are not even connected and where some are connected but the door doesn&#x27;t respond for 1-2 seconds?<p>95% there are no light sensors, only pressure sensors. I&#x27;m guessing in the USA those are mandatory that there is a light sensor that if interrupted, causes the doors to open. In Japan those mostly don&#x27;t exist, there is only a pressure sensor<p>In Japan it&#x27;s not uncommon to have someone exit the elevator and just as they exit, press the close button so the door will close immediately behind them. This is a &quot;sorry I interrupted your time by having to stop the elevator&quot; gesture. This wouldn&#x27;t work in the USA because the light sensors would trigger the doors reopening.</text></comment> | <story><title>Undo codes for Japanese elevator floor buttons</title><url>https://soranews24.com/2017/08/18/the-secret-undo-codes-for-japanese-elevator-floor-buttons/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>I remember a long time ago encountering an elevator (in the US) where the physical buttons were the push on&#x2F;push off type so you could cancel using another press, and they also popped back out once the desired floor was reached. Anyone else remember that type of control? It&#x27;s probably from the 40s&#x2F;50s. I haven&#x27;t seen one since.</text></comment> |
24,911,957 | 24,911,523 | 1 | 2 | 24,910,778 | train | <story><title>Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²</title><url>https://semianalysis.com/apples-a14-packs-134-million-transistors-mm2-but-falls-far-short-of-tsmcs-density-claims/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I found this to be a pretty confusing article. I get that they are analyzing the new node, which is great, but the editorializing seems a bit premature to me.<p>I also don&#x27;t think the author understood the TMSC presentation. TMSC clearly said that is used a &quot;model&quot; of a typical SOC of 60% logic, 30% SRAM, and 10% analog. Then they said that for each category of thing, you could expect 1.8x, 1.35x, and 1.2x of shrink. If you do the math, that means an overall shrink for a &#x27;typical&#x27; SOC that conforms to their model would be 1.57x (approximately).<p>That Apple achieved 1.49x would suggest they got 95% of the process shrink effectiveness.<p>Then there is the cost per die and thus cost per transistor discussion. It is important to remember that this is likely the most expensive these wafers will ever be. The reasoning for that statement is that during a process node life-cycle the cost per wafer is set initially to capture &quot;early movers&quot; (who value density over cost). Much like any product where competition will emerge &quot;later&quot; there is a window early on to recapture value which can pay back your R&amp;D and capital equipment investments. As a result the vendor sets the price as high as possible to make that repayment happen as quickly as possible. Once paid back, the price provides profit as long as it can be supported in the presence of other competitors (in this case, I would guess that role is played by Samsung). The GSA uses to publish price surveys of wafers on various nodes over time but they don&#x27;t seem to do that any more. Anyway, so the cost per transistor will go down from this point but how much depends on how much margin is in the current wafer price.<p>So I agree that the cost per transistor is not going down as quickly as it has in the past, and its possible that this node may not get to be as low as the previous node. I&#x27;m curious how it compares when you look at 7nm introduction price per transistor vs todays price per transistor. And if you get the same ramp with the 5nm node what that would mean.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s A14 Packs 134M Transistors/mm²</title><url>https://semianalysis.com/apples-a14-packs-134-million-transistors-mm2-but-falls-far-short-of-tsmcs-density-claims/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>topspin</author><text>I really appreciate this analysis and the straightforward top line number 134e6&#x2F;mm^2. The usual &quot;node&quot; figure is utterly meaningless; an electrical engineer couldn&#x27;t care less about &quot;feature&quot; size (whatever that means.) What is the count of discrete components in a given area? There are 40 billion 5nm (the supposed &quot;node&quot; of these chips) squares in a millimeter of area. That&#x27;s <i>two orders</i> of magnitude more dense than 134 million.<p>The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components.</text></comment> |
33,670,252 | 33,669,855 | 1 | 3 | 33,667,270 | train | <story><title>Tree views in CSS</title><url>https://iamkate.com/code/tree-views/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>deergomoo</author><text>This is very clever, and it’s nice that it’s fully accessible and requires no JS.<p>However, looking at that final CSS just makes me wish that we added new interface elements to HTML far more often. Folks run rings around themselves to implement things that have been in any desktop UI toolkit worth its salt since the 90s.</text></comment> | <story><title>Tree views in CSS</title><url>https://iamkate.com/code/tree-views/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>franciscop</author><text>I made another totally different kind of &quot;tree view&quot; in CSS a while back, in this case to see some kind of JSON-html tree into a tree:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;francisco.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;tree&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;francisco.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;tree&#x2F;</a><p>It <i>was</i> a fork of a much earlier project but I improved it a lot IIRC; unfortunately I lost the original source and now chances of finding it are very small (unless someone here knows it!)</text></comment> |
27,124,436 | 27,122,322 | 1 | 3 | 27,114,138 | train | <story><title>3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dakota (2020)</title><url>https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/26/triceratops-skull-found-south-dakota-sent-missouri/3441540001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diplodocusaur</author><text>I was hoping for full pics of the dino but got a picture of Britain&#x27;s Queen Elizabeth II</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyingq</author><text>The article on the college&#x27;s website has a few pictures: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.wcmo.edu&#x2F;campus-life&#x2F;westminster-college-undergraduate-researchers-discover-triceratops-during-annual-dig-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.wcmo.edu&#x2F;campus-life&#x2F;westminster-college-underg...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dakota (2020)</title><url>https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/26/triceratops-skull-found-south-dakota-sent-missouri/3441540001/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>diplodocusaur</author><text>I was hoping for full pics of the dino but got a picture of Britain&#x27;s Queen Elizabeth II</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bosswipe</author><text>A Google Image search for &quot;triceratops Grand River National Grassland&quot; turned up a bunch of images.</text></comment> |
35,907,195 | 35,906,978 | 1 | 2 | 35,904,118 | train | <story><title>IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX</title><url>https://unchainedcrypto.com/irs-files-44-billion-claims-against-bankrupt-ftx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I sincerely hope that I never meet Sam Bankman Fried, because if I did I do not know what I would do but it certainly wouldn&#x27;t be legal.<p>I was stupid and thought that the 7+% interest I was getting from Gemini+GUSD+Genesis Holdings was a good idea, I put a good chunk of money in there, and as of right now the status for that appears to be in &quot;limbo at best&quot;. It&#x27;s particularly upsetting, because this all unfolded right after I got fired from my last job, when I really needed my liquid money to pay for things like &quot;my mortgage&quot; and &quot;food&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m fine now fiscally, and even wasn&#x27;t in too much trouble back in November [1], but it make me lose multiple nights of sleep worrying about stuff, and also made me feel like an idiot for ever thinking that cryptocurrency was a good idea.<p>[1] I have a good chunk of money stashed in stocks&#x2F;ETFs, which I could have liquidated for money, but the market was pretty far down so I would have had to take a big haircut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prepend</author><text>I’m sorry for your loss but I’m really amazed you thought that 7% yield from savings at a time of 0% interest rates was anything other than a fabrication.<p>I looked at these and they were so absurd there was no way I would invest. No fundamentals. No audit. No insurance. No stable company or bank.<p>What was your thought process in putting funds here? Did you think it would just take longer to explode and you would be able to withdraw before? Did you genuinely believe?</text></comment> | <story><title>IRS files $44B claims against bankrupt FTX</title><url>https://unchainedcrypto.com/irs-files-44-billion-claims-against-bankrupt-ftx/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>I sincerely hope that I never meet Sam Bankman Fried, because if I did I do not know what I would do but it certainly wouldn&#x27;t be legal.<p>I was stupid and thought that the 7+% interest I was getting from Gemini+GUSD+Genesis Holdings was a good idea, I put a good chunk of money in there, and as of right now the status for that appears to be in &quot;limbo at best&quot;. It&#x27;s particularly upsetting, because this all unfolded right after I got fired from my last job, when I really needed my liquid money to pay for things like &quot;my mortgage&quot; and &quot;food&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m fine now fiscally, and even wasn&#x27;t in too much trouble back in November [1], but it make me lose multiple nights of sleep worrying about stuff, and also made me feel like an idiot for ever thinking that cryptocurrency was a good idea.<p>[1] I have a good chunk of money stashed in stocks&#x2F;ETFs, which I could have liquidated for money, but the market was pretty far down so I would have had to take a big haircut.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cwkoss</author><text>FTX failure isnt a cryptocurrency problem, its a plain old boring case of financial mismanagement and fraud.<p>Good reminder to all here that if you don&#x27;t hold they private keys to your crypto, all you have is an IOU from a risky new business.</text></comment> |
35,759,280 | 35,758,966 | 1 | 2 | 35,754,793 | train | <story><title>Get The TLDR Of Any YouTube Video</title><url>https://www.you-tldr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathfailure</author><text>It looks like making videos became your profession, since you expect monetization of your video views.<p>And I, as a viewer, simply don&#x27;t want... professional content.<p>I want to watch videos made by hobbyists for the sake of fun and to inform&#x2F;debate&#x2F;educate.<p>So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.</text></item><item><author>AkBKukU</author><text>I am a person who produces videos to publish on Youtube, and I want to add a different perspective to this.<p>Here is where we are currently at:
- Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock.
- Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships.
- Everyone complains about the sponsors, they call creators shills and sponsorblock is gaining traction to block them.
- Smaller creators shift to being dependent on direct support (Patreon, etc.)<p>Here is where we are going:
- People complain a video is too long, so they extract the data directly avoiding youtube.
- The creators don&#x27;t get ads, don&#x27;t get people to understand the effort put in and support directly, and don&#x27;t get views. The videos just don&#x27;t get watched.<p>A feedback loop is happening here where every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible. The fact that anyone here is willing to pay for this service that will destroy the last shreds of this is extremely disheartening.<p>If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gcanyon</author><text>Then don&#x27;t watch professional content. But remember that a <i>ton</i> of the content on YouTube that might seem to be non-professional, or that started out non-professional, now is generated by a large group of people, because it requires a <i>lot</i> more work to produce good quality content than one hobbyist can devote to the cause.<p>Kurzgesagt started with a small group, but now numbers 64.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how many people are on the Answers with Joe team, but it&#x27;s more than a few.<p>The first Crash Course video from 11 years ago lists 13 people in the credits.<p>So my guess is that there is much more &quot;professional&quot; content than might be obvious.</text></comment> | <story><title>Get The TLDR Of Any YouTube Video</title><url>https://www.you-tldr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathfailure</author><text>It looks like making videos became your profession, since you expect monetization of your video views.<p>And I, as a viewer, simply don&#x27;t want... professional content.<p>I want to watch videos made by hobbyists for the sake of fun and to inform&#x2F;debate&#x2F;educate.<p>So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.</text></item><item><author>AkBKukU</author><text>I am a person who produces videos to publish on Youtube, and I want to add a different perspective to this.<p>Here is where we are currently at:
- Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock.
- Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships.
- Everyone complains about the sponsors, they call creators shills and sponsorblock is gaining traction to block them.
- Smaller creators shift to being dependent on direct support (Patreon, etc.)<p>Here is where we are going:
- People complain a video is too long, so they extract the data directly avoiding youtube.
- The creators don&#x27;t get ads, don&#x27;t get people to understand the effort put in and support directly, and don&#x27;t get views. The videos just don&#x27;t get watched.<p>A feedback loop is happening here where every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible. The fact that anyone here is willing to pay for this service that will destroy the last shreds of this is extremely disheartening.<p>If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AkBKukU</author><text>&gt; So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.<p>By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests.<p>By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just &quot;stealing&quot; content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn&#x27;t.<p>The videos aren&#x27;t put out for free, they are put out with a contract with Youtube to advertise on it. Youtube pays to host and you split the ad revenue when the creator is paid. Your hypothetical successful &quot;hobbiest for the sake of fun&quot; would either not enter the partner program and let Youtube keep all of the ad revenue they will run anyway, or enter the partner program and disable monetization and abuse Youtube for content hosting without delivering anything back to them. Obviously, neither of these happens in practice and if the latter started becoming common the ability to do it would be taken away or other penalties like making the creator pay to host imposed.<p>&quot;There&#x27;s no such thing as a free lunch.&quot;</text></comment> |
8,467,756 | 8,467,546 | 1 | 2 | 8,466,441 | train | <story><title>iPad Air 2</title><url>http://www.apple.com/ipad-air-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kaolinite</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised nobody is talking about the Apple SIM which personally I feel is one of the most incredible features they&#x27;ve shipped this year: no more SIM cards, just pick the carrier you want in the Settings app and you&#x27;re signed up. Fed up with them? Switch carrier in an instant. Going abroad? Switch to a local carrier. Just wow. I really hope they bring this to iPhone.<p><a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-air-2/wireless/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;ipad-air-2&#x2F;wireless&#x2F;</a> (near the bottom, search for &quot;Apple SIM&quot;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eloisant</author><text>With a regular SIM, I can put any SIM from any carrier, and they don&#x27;t have to be blessed by Apple.<p>I&#x27;m not going to let go this freedom, thank you. I&#x27;d rather have a physical operation to do than give even more control to Apple.</text></comment> | <story><title>iPad Air 2</title><url>http://www.apple.com/ipad-air-2/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kaolinite</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised nobody is talking about the Apple SIM which personally I feel is one of the most incredible features they&#x27;ve shipped this year: no more SIM cards, just pick the carrier you want in the Settings app and you&#x27;re signed up. Fed up with them? Switch carrier in an instant. Going abroad? Switch to a local carrier. Just wow. I really hope they bring this to iPhone.<p><a href="http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad-air-2/wireless/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;uk&#x2F;ipad-air-2&#x2F;wireless&#x2F;</a> (near the bottom, search for &quot;Apple SIM&quot;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Matoso</author><text>On the other hand I&#x27;m grandfathered in to an unlimited data plan, If the Apple SIM isn&#x27;t a swappable card I doubt I&#x27;d be able to get unlimited with it.<p>For that matter I&#x27;m also not seeing verizon listed as a participating provider, which seems to be cutting out a previously supported demographic.</text></comment> |
6,957,672 | 6,957,681 | 1 | 2 | 6,957,423 | train | <story><title>Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acheron</author><text>75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1] Only Turing has been &quot;pardoned&quot;.<p>My understanding [2] is that the &quot;pardon&quot; implies there was nothing wrong with the law as such, just that Turing is forgiven for having broken it. So while I guess this is better than nothing, I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s really the way to go about it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhansrd/text/130719-0001.htm#13071970000373" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publications.parliament.uk&#x2F;pa&#x2F;ld201314&#x2F;ldhansrd&#x2F;t...</a><p>[2] I am not a lawyer, nor British, so give my understanding as much weight as it deserves...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcrh</author><text>Something in what you wrote reminds me of the many men shot for &quot;cowardice&quot; during WWI, some of whom were pardoned[1].<p>Many of those shot were suffering from PTSD (then called shell shock).<p>It is painful to consider the unjust fate of many people in the past, and even those alive today (would you care to take a walk in the Congo or Rwanda and discuss justice with those you might meet? Or perhaps take a walk in Syria?).<p>I really don&#x27;t wish to contradict the sentiment of your statement, but only to say that &quot;justice&quot; is sometimes a luxury, and one which we should try to provide for everyone.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/hundreds-of-soldiers-shot-for-cowardice-to-be-pardoned-412066.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk&#x2F;this-britain&#x2F;hundreds-o...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Royal pardon for codebreaker Alan Turing</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25495315</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acheron</author><text>75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1] Only Turing has been &quot;pardoned&quot;.<p>My understanding [2] is that the &quot;pardon&quot; implies there was nothing wrong with the law as such, just that Turing is forgiven for having broken it. So while I guess this is better than nothing, I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s really the way to go about it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhansrd/text/130719-0001.htm#13071970000373" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publications.parliament.uk&#x2F;pa&#x2F;ld201314&#x2F;ldhansrd&#x2F;t...</a><p>[2] I am not a lawyer, nor British, so give my understanding as much weight as it deserves...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbrew</author><text>So much this. It drives me nuts that the narrative on this issue always seems to boil down to the idea that Turing somehow <i>earned</i> not being persecuted for being gay through his efforts in the war and the injustice was that the government didn&#x27;t live up to its end of the bargain, not the fact that he and many others were driven to suicide or horrible lives by this terrible law.</text></comment> |
38,225,643 | 38,225,534 | 1 | 2 | 38,224,950 | train | <story><title>Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/apple-discriminated-against-us-citizens-in-hiring-doj-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomohelix</author><text>Reading into the press release, there is a distinction that probably escapes most native citizens here: they are talking about EB2 visa, not H1B. PERM certification is not the same labor certification done in H1B.<p>PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process and it costs a lot more money than anything related to H1B. The reason is because it leads to a green card, not just a work permit. Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters. The money is paid upfront and USCIS then look into it and approves PERM on a case by case basis often taking a year or more. Then when the PERM passes, the applicant can finally get on the green card backlog and wait a few more years, or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...<p>This is to say the quality of applicants here is very high and Apple actually felt it was worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars on each of them just for a green card gamble, which the employee can get then quit Apple immediately after and nothing can be done to them because they are now a permanent resident. No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>This.<p>If the PERM process at Apple is anything like what I saw at Facebook a couple of years ago, then all these “applicants” are actually people already working at the company on non-immigrant visas whom the company wants to retain.<p>There is no reason to assume that they’re being paid any less than others at Apple. They’re already in the country and have been doing the work for years. Why not give them a path to a green card? Why make the company jump through hoops like having to advertise a position that’s not actually open?<p>I’ll admit that I’m biased because I was in this process at one point. But the notion that I was taking the job of a native-born American was ridiculous because I had been doing the job in London before. So if anything, I brought a UK job to USA. And to turn that into a green card, the company would have to advertise the job on their website. It makes no sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple discriminated against US citizens in hiring, DOJ says</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/apple-discriminated-against-us-citizens-in-hiring-doj-says/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomohelix</author><text>Reading into the press release, there is a distinction that probably escapes most native citizens here: they are talking about EB2 visa, not H1B. PERM certification is not the same labor certification done in H1B.<p>PERM is a much more rigorous and demanding process and it costs a lot more money than anything related to H1B. The reason is because it leads to a green card, not just a work permit. Often, it requires an advance degree and higher qualification than H1B too, PhDs or experienced masters. The money is paid upfront and USCIS then look into it and approves PERM on a case by case basis often taking a year or more. Then when the PERM passes, the applicant can finally get on the green card backlog and wait a few more years, or a decade if you were born in the wrong place...<p>This is to say the quality of applicants here is very high and Apple actually felt it was worth it to invest tens of thousands of dollars on each of them just for a green card gamble, which the employee can get then quit Apple immediately after and nothing can be done to them because they are now a permanent resident. No such thing as wage depression or abuse at this point because they are for all legal purposes, an equal to any American once they have EB2.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfadsadsf</author><text>You are writing like we are talking about rocket scientists.<p>PERM applies to both EB2 and EB3 (so in real world anyone making from as low as $50k+&#x2F;year depending on role qualifies) and most bodyshops apply for green card for all employees - it&#x27;s just part of business cost. For EB2 PhD is not needed - MS from online paper mill is enough. For EB3, any degree works.<p>It&#x27;s not tens of thousands in cost - it&#x27;s below $10k all in. PERM Fees to USCIS are around $1200.<p>The whole system is abused to the end and need to be completely gutted and redone so high end engineer working for Google making $700k was differentiated from Wipro employee making $80k. Right now they are in the same queue. Prevailing wage is a joke as it does not include stock options and does not reflect real salary levels.</text></comment> |
33,615,979 | 33,615,910 | 1 | 2 | 33,613,525 | train | <story><title>Activision Blizzard Is Trying to Stop a Union Vote at Its Albany Office</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgv48/activision-blizzard-is-trying-to-stop-a-union-vote-at-its-albany-office</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sakos</author><text>Guild Wars is the only game made by an &quot;ex-Blizzard&quot; staffed studio that I feel has had any significant amount of success. Just goes to show how much these things are collaborative efforts that rely on a particular environment to come together.</text></item><item><author>jimbob45</author><text>It&#x27;s not just that the old guard are gone, it&#x27;s that they&#x27;ve been gone for a very long time. Here&#x27;s a chart from 2011 showing where everyone went.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-HZGjc0LkXXw&#x2F;UYwB9YaXFRI&#x2F;AAAAAAAAAuM&#x2F;0XCw50tEy64&#x2F;s1600&#x2F;blizzards-dna-pcgamer.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-HZGjc0LkXXw&#x2F;UYwB9YaXFRI&#x2F;AAAAAAAAA...</a></text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>I adored Blizzard&#x27;s output for ~20 years - I have every collectors edition they released from Warcraft III to Overwatch - but I&#x27;m basically done. The scandals, the shitty monetization, and the half-baked products all point to a radically different culture and company than the one that released Starcraft in 1998. No king reigns forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerglingu</author><text>Not quite the same as an entirely ex-Blizzard staffed group of people, but Riot Games and League of Legends as well. Tom Cadwell[0] was there from the very beginning of League&#x27;s life and has had considerable influence over the development and growth of the game. Before that, he was on Warcraft 3&#x27;s development team and supposedly (supposedly because I can&#x27;t remember despite being on the War3 forums, and can&#x27;t find evidence of it) had a hand in developing its fairly successful esports scene. And before that, he was actually one of the first Starcraft pro gamers in the late 90&#x27;s, just before the explosion of esports in South Korea.<p>He&#x27;s kind of a one-man army, but his influence definitely has shaped the more popular games and industry landscape today.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.riotgames.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;who-we-are&#x2F;riot-games-leadership&#x2F;tom-cadwell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.riotgames.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;who-we-are&#x2F;riot-games-leadershi...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Activision Blizzard Is Trying to Stop a Union Vote at Its Albany Office</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgv48/activision-blizzard-is-trying-to-stop-a-union-vote-at-its-albany-office</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sakos</author><text>Guild Wars is the only game made by an &quot;ex-Blizzard&quot; staffed studio that I feel has had any significant amount of success. Just goes to show how much these things are collaborative efforts that rely on a particular environment to come together.</text></item><item><author>jimbob45</author><text>It&#x27;s not just that the old guard are gone, it&#x27;s that they&#x27;ve been gone for a very long time. Here&#x27;s a chart from 2011 showing where everyone went.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-HZGjc0LkXXw&#x2F;UYwB9YaXFRI&#x2F;AAAAAAAAAuM&#x2F;0XCw50tEy64&#x2F;s1600&#x2F;blizzards-dna-pcgamer.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-HZGjc0LkXXw&#x2F;UYwB9YaXFRI&#x2F;AAAAAAAAA...</a></text></item><item><author>AlexandrB</author><text>I adored Blizzard&#x27;s output for ~20 years - I have every collectors edition they released from Warcraft III to Overwatch - but I&#x27;m basically done. The scandals, the shitty monetization, and the half-baked products all point to a radically different culture and company than the one that released Starcraft in 1998. No king reigns forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kevingadd</author><text>GW was very much a result of the founders attempting to recreate all the good things (at least in their opinion) about Blizzard&#x27;s work environment without carrying over the bad things. They put a lot of thought into things like code ownership policies, schedules and even office floor plans.</text></comment> |
1,041,898 | 1,041,909 | 1 | 2 | 1,041,744 | train | <story><title>Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All</title><url>http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceval</author><text>I'm trying to teach myself statistics (for social sciences) right now. I got two books (Agresti &#38; Finlay along with Knoke, Bohrnstedt &#38; Mee) but both seem to be written in jargon instead of English.<p>Does anyone have recommendations for statistics books that are actually written in English?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kqr2</author><text>Zed actually recommends quite a few books in his post:<p><pre><code> * Statistics; by Freedman, Pisani, Purves, and Adhikari. Norton publishers.
* Introductory Statistics with R; by Dalgaard. Springer publishers.
* Statistical Computing: An Introduction to Data Analysis using S-Plus; by Crawley. Wiley publishers.
* Statistical Process Control; by Grant, Leavenworth. McGraw-Hill publishers.
* Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences; by Agresti, Finlay. Prentice-Hall publishers.
* Methods of Social Research; by Baily. Free Press publishers.
* Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS; by Venables, Ripley. Springer publishers.</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All</title><url>http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceval</author><text>I'm trying to teach myself statistics (for social sciences) right now. I got two books (Agresti &#38; Finlay along with Knoke, Bohrnstedt &#38; Mee) but both seem to be written in jargon instead of English.<p>Does anyone have recommendations for statistics books that are actually written in English?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thomaspaine</author><text>Funny you should ask, I just ordered a copy of a stats textbook I used back in undergrad because I remember thinking that it was pretty clearly written with lots of examples. It's "Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists" by walpole . If you get a used 7th edition instead of the 8th, it's $10 instead of like $100. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Statistics-Engineers-Scientists-7th/dp/0130415294/ref=cm_cr_dp_orig_subj" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Statistics-Engineers-Scien...</a><p>Introductory Econometrics by Woolridge is a pretty readable econometrics text you should also check out, since it'll be especially applicable for social science: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Econometrics-Approach-Applications-Solutions/dp/0324581629/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&#38;s=books&#38;qid=1263067238&#38;sr=8-3" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Econometrics-Approach-App...</a></text></comment> |
3,625,644 | 3,625,460 | 1 | 2 | 3,624,360 | train | <story><title>Who Expected That? Extreme close-ups create a Klein Bottle.</title><url>http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/02/23/who-expected-that/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>Is it common to refer to the Möbius strip as a 2D surface? You can't uniquely identify each point on its surface using only two dimensions, so I wouldn't call it a 2D surface at all. It lives in 3D, therefore it is a 3D surface, no?</text></item><item><author>wisty</author><text>Well, a Möbius strip is a 2D surface that can't fit in 2 dimensions. Knots are 1D, and won't fit in 2 dimensions.</text></item><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>"a Klein bottle, which is a two-dimensional surface that can’t be squeezed into three dimensions, but fits perfectly well in nine (or for that matter in four). "<p>I'm having trouble squeezing this concept into my mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfranke</author><text><i>You can't uniquely identify each point on its surface using only two dimensions</i><p>Yes you can. Run a sharpie along the bottom edge of the paper so that it bleeds onto both sides of the paper. Now tape the ends of the strip together with a half twist to make a Möbius strip. Place a point anywhere on the strip. Draw a line through that point such that the line meets both edges of the strip at a right angle. Measure the distance along that line between your point and the darkened edge; call this <i>x</i>. Now, hold the Möbius strip in your left hand so that you're pinching it by the tape. With your right hand, run your finger along the strip, starting from the tape and moving to the right. Measure how far you have to move your finger in order to reach the line you drew; this could require up to two loops around the strip. Call this distance <i>y</i>. The tuple (x,y) uniquely identifies your point.</text></comment> | <story><title>Who Expected That? Extreme close-ups create a Klein Bottle.</title><url>http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/02/23/who-expected-that/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>Is it common to refer to the Möbius strip as a 2D surface? You can't uniquely identify each point on its surface using only two dimensions, so I wouldn't call it a 2D surface at all. It lives in 3D, therefore it is a 3D surface, no?</text></item><item><author>wisty</author><text>Well, a Möbius strip is a 2D surface that can't fit in 2 dimensions. Knots are 1D, and won't fit in 2 dimensions.</text></item><item><author>grannyg00se</author><text>"a Klein bottle, which is a two-dimensional surface that can’t be squeezed into three dimensions, but fits perfectly well in nine (or for that matter in four). "<p>I'm having trouble squeezing this concept into my mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bmm6o</author><text>It's commonly called a non-orientable 2 dimensional manifold. Locally, it looks like a smooth deformation of the plane. The non-orientable bit is what distinguishes it (globally) from something more like a cylinder.</text></comment> |
39,212,923 | 39,212,298 | 1 | 2 | 39,209,814 | train | <story><title>DeepSeek Coder: Let the Code Write Itself</title><url>https://deepseekcoder.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rickstanley</author><text>Hello, I would like to take this opportunity and ask for help here, about using A.I. with my own codebase.<p>Context:
I missed [almost] the entire A.I. wave, but I knew that one day I would have to learn something about and&#x2F;or use it. That day has come. I&#x27;m allocated in one team, that is migrating to another engine, let&#x27;s say &quot;engine A → engine B&quot;. We are looking from the perspective of A, to map the entries for B (inbound), and after the request to B is returned, we map back to A&#x27;s model (outbound). This is a chore, and much of the work is repetitive, but it comes with its edge cases that we need to look out for and unfortunately there isn&#x27;t a solid foundation of patterns apart from the Domain-driven design (DDD) thing. It seemed like a good use case for an A.I.<p>Attempts: I began by asking to ChatGPT and Bard, with questions similar to: &quot;how to train LLM on own codebase&quot; and &quot;how to get started with prompt engineering using own codebase&quot;.<p>I concluded that, fine-tuning is expensive, for large models, unrealistic for my RTX 3060 with 6Gb VRAM, no surprise there; so, I searched here, in Hacker News, for keywords like &quot;llama&quot;, &quot;fine-tuning&quot;, &quot;local machine&quot;, etc, and I found out about ollama and DeepSeek.<p>I tried both ollama and DeepSeek, the former was slow but not as slow as the latter, which was <i>dead slow</i>, using a 13B model. I tried the 6&#x2F;7B model (I think it was codellama) and I got reasonable results and speed. After feeding it some data, I was on my way to try and train on the codebase when a friend of mine came and suggested that I use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), I have yet to try it, with a setup Langchain + Ollama.<p>Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences to share?<p>I&#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WeMoveOn</author><text>&gt; much of the work is repetitive, but it comes with its edge cases<p>for the repetitive stuff, just use copilot embedded in whatever editor you use.<p>the edge cases are tricky, to actually avoid these the model would need an understanding of both the use case (which is easy to describe to the model) and the code base itself (which is difficult, since description&#x2F;docstring is not enough to capture the complex behaviors that can arise from interactions between parts of your codebase).<p>idk how you would train&#x2F;finetune a model to somehow have this understanding of your code base, I doubt just doing next token prediction would help, you&#x27;d likely have to create chat data discussing the intricacies of your code base and do DPO&#x2F;RLFH to bake it into your model.<p>look into techniques like qlora that&#x27;ll reduce the needed memory during tuning. look into platforms like vast ai to rent GPUs for cheap.<p>RAG&#x2F;Agents could be useful but probably not. could store info about functions in your codebase such as the signature, the function it calls, its docstring, and known edge cases associated with it. if you don&#x27;t have docstrings using a LLM to generate them is feasible.</text></comment> | <story><title>DeepSeek Coder: Let the Code Write Itself</title><url>https://deepseekcoder.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rickstanley</author><text>Hello, I would like to take this opportunity and ask for help here, about using A.I. with my own codebase.<p>Context:
I missed [almost] the entire A.I. wave, but I knew that one day I would have to learn something about and&#x2F;or use it. That day has come. I&#x27;m allocated in one team, that is migrating to another engine, let&#x27;s say &quot;engine A → engine B&quot;. We are looking from the perspective of A, to map the entries for B (inbound), and after the request to B is returned, we map back to A&#x27;s model (outbound). This is a chore, and much of the work is repetitive, but it comes with its edge cases that we need to look out for and unfortunately there isn&#x27;t a solid foundation of patterns apart from the Domain-driven design (DDD) thing. It seemed like a good use case for an A.I.<p>Attempts: I began by asking to ChatGPT and Bard, with questions similar to: &quot;how to train LLM on own codebase&quot; and &quot;how to get started with prompt engineering using own codebase&quot;.<p>I concluded that, fine-tuning is expensive, for large models, unrealistic for my RTX 3060 with 6Gb VRAM, no surprise there; so, I searched here, in Hacker News, for keywords like &quot;llama&quot;, &quot;fine-tuning&quot;, &quot;local machine&quot;, etc, and I found out about ollama and DeepSeek.<p>I tried both ollama and DeepSeek, the former was slow but not as slow as the latter, which was <i>dead slow</i>, using a 13B model. I tried the 6&#x2F;7B model (I think it was codellama) and I got reasonable results and speed. After feeding it some data, I was on my way to try and train on the codebase when a friend of mine came and suggested that I use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), I have yet to try it, with a setup Langchain + Ollama.<p>Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences to share?<p>I&#x27;d appreciate it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anotherpaulg</author><text>You could try using aider [0], which is my open source ai coding tool. You need an OpenAI API key, and aider supports any of the GPT 3.5 or 4 models. Aider has features that make it work well with existing code bases, like git integration and a &quot;repository map&quot;. The repo map is used to send GPT-4 a distilled map of your code base, focused specifically on the coding task at hand [1]. This provides useful context so that GPT can understand the relevant parts of the larger code base when making a specific change.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paul-gauthier&#x2F;aider">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paul-gauthier&#x2F;aider</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aider.chat&#x2F;docs&#x2F;repomap.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aider.chat&#x2F;docs&#x2F;repomap.html</a></text></comment> |
18,533,572 | 18,531,934 | 1 | 2 | 18,530,906 | train | <story><title>First gene-edited babies claimed in China</title><url>http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181126/p2g/00m/0fe/047000c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xenadu02</author><text>Almost certainly not; improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans.<p>Most mouse models don&#x27;t replicate in other animals either.</text></item><item><author>buboard</author><text>oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation&#x2F;turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20985</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29379017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29379017</a></text></item><item><author>skosuri</author><text>The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave new world I guess, whether we like it or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jtsummers</author><text>You have to live to reproductive age for your genes to carry on. So a genetic difference that improves outcome for adults, but harms children won&#x27;t be carried on as often (per other comments, this one may improve memory--in mice--but has negative effects related to resisting common diseases like the flu). On the other hand, genes related to cancer perpetuate because their impact often is felt <i>after</i> primary reproductive age (at least historical reproductive age, since we&#x27;ve started having children later in life over the last century).<p>Additionally, nothing <i>has</i> to be selected (evolutionarily speaking). It&#x27;s a stochastic process. We could be one base-pair swap away from perpetual youth, and never see it because it just doesn&#x27;t happen (or when it did happen they died from other circumstances before reproducing sufficiently to spread the genes wide enough to be useful).</text></comment> | <story><title>First gene-edited babies claimed in China</title><url>http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20181126/p2g/00m/0fe/047000c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xenadu02</author><text>Almost certainly not; improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans.<p>Most mouse models don&#x27;t replicate in other animals either.</text></item><item><author>buboard</author><text>oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation&#x2F;turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20985</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29379017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29379017</a></text></item><item><author>skosuri</author><text>The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave new world I guess, whether we like it or not.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carlmr</author><text>&gt;improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans.<p>What if it makes people more scared, because they can remember past experiences better. This could lead to less procreation and thus inverse selection pressure.<p>Only because a trait is superficially good it doesn&#x27;t mean nature would select for it.</text></comment> |
33,482,317 | 33,479,861 | 1 | 2 | 33,479,378 | train | <story><title>So today musl discovered a longstanding bug in Linux's ELF loader</title><url>https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/1588592850715172865</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nraynaud</author><text>I think those people doing alternative libc, compilers, etc. are also doing a great secondary job at dusting some very stable corners of Linux. And a third very big value is all those blog posts they generate to educate all of us lay people on some details of the system.</text></comment> | <story><title>So today musl discovered a longstanding bug in Linux's ELF loader</title><url>https://twitter.com/RichFelker/status/1588592850715172865</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>arjvik</author><text>Could you explain why the kernel needs two copies of ELF loading code?<p>I thought dynamically linked binaries are still ELF, but have special code to load shared object files into the right places in memory.</text></comment> |
17,110,401 | 17,110,226 | 1 | 2 | 17,107,866 | train | <story><title>Why a Dutch court stopped high school students from swapping schools (2017)</title><url>https://medium.com/social-choice/why-a-dutch-court-stopped-high-school-students-from-exchanging-schools-1315303a48b6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ardit33</author><text>&quot;the superhero movie is a rather American genre&quot; . - Lol<p>Sure, where did Zeus, Promethues, Thor, and countless of other &#x27;gods&#x2F;titans&#x2F;demi-gods&#x27; heroes come from?<p>Almost all, either European and non European countries have their Mythological beings, (either gods, super human heros, etc...).<p>The US is just good at creating commercial versions of them and putting them in film, the but concept of &#x27;an hero&#x27; is as old as humanity itself.</text></item><item><author>dnautics</author><text>I think it&#x27;s that Americans distrust elites who purport to make decisions on their behalf. American are not objectivist hyperindividualists, they are social creatures that thrive on the narrative of the greater good (the superhero movie is a rather American genre). But American history is littered with questionable judgements of the elites - tuskeegee syphilis experiments, internment of Japanese Americans, various middle East interventions, bailouts post 2008 crash, Vietnam war... Etc.<p>The American &quot;way&quot; traditionally is that social justice is an individual responsibility. You can see this residually in traditional volunteer fire departments and social clubs like knights and rotary which used to be mutual benefit clubs, providing for members in the event of sickness etc.</text></item><item><author>elygre</author><text>As a European exchange student, I took a sociology class as a senior in a US high school. Our teacher ran an experiment with &quot;money&quot;, where those with lots of &quot;money&quot; were allowed to change the rules for each round, creating an unfair playing ground favoring the rich.<p>I objected to the game and the rules, and did not want to play. After the game, in class, he commented that &quot;Exchange students always object that the rules are unfair, while local students always accept that the rich get to set them.&quot;<p>Without even knowing where people are from, I sense a similar trend in this discussion: Europeans are more willing (trained and socialized) to sacrifice individual preferences in favor of the &quot;greater good&quot;.<p>(Your mileage will vary. Not exact science. Not science at all. Just a feeling.)<p>(Edit: Spelling)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemothekid</author><text>&gt;Sure, where did Zeus, Promethues, Thor, and countless of other &#x27;gods&#x2F;titans&#x2F;demi-gods&#x27; heroes come from?<p>That&#x27;s odd that you would outright deny American culture influence on stories like Thor. Not to mention the countless other Superhero movies which are strictly American. Next,the value we place on our superheroes reflect American culture. I&#x27;d be hard pressed to call the classical Greek stories of Zeus or Prometheus &quot;superheroes&quot;. Zeus wasn&#x27;t exactly an upstanding role model.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why a Dutch court stopped high school students from swapping schools (2017)</title><url>https://medium.com/social-choice/why-a-dutch-court-stopped-high-school-students-from-exchanging-schools-1315303a48b6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ardit33</author><text>&quot;the superhero movie is a rather American genre&quot; . - Lol<p>Sure, where did Zeus, Promethues, Thor, and countless of other &#x27;gods&#x2F;titans&#x2F;demi-gods&#x27; heroes come from?<p>Almost all, either European and non European countries have their Mythological beings, (either gods, super human heros, etc...).<p>The US is just good at creating commercial versions of them and putting them in film, the but concept of &#x27;an hero&#x27; is as old as humanity itself.</text></item><item><author>dnautics</author><text>I think it&#x27;s that Americans distrust elites who purport to make decisions on their behalf. American are not objectivist hyperindividualists, they are social creatures that thrive on the narrative of the greater good (the superhero movie is a rather American genre). But American history is littered with questionable judgements of the elites - tuskeegee syphilis experiments, internment of Japanese Americans, various middle East interventions, bailouts post 2008 crash, Vietnam war... Etc.<p>The American &quot;way&quot; traditionally is that social justice is an individual responsibility. You can see this residually in traditional volunteer fire departments and social clubs like knights and rotary which used to be mutual benefit clubs, providing for members in the event of sickness etc.</text></item><item><author>elygre</author><text>As a European exchange student, I took a sociology class as a senior in a US high school. Our teacher ran an experiment with &quot;money&quot;, where those with lots of &quot;money&quot; were allowed to change the rules for each round, creating an unfair playing ground favoring the rich.<p>I objected to the game and the rules, and did not want to play. After the game, in class, he commented that &quot;Exchange students always object that the rules are unfair, while local students always accept that the rich get to set them.&quot;<p>Without even knowing where people are from, I sense a similar trend in this discussion: Europeans are more willing (trained and socialized) to sacrifice individual preferences in favor of the &quot;greater good&quot;.<p>(Your mileage will vary. Not exact science. Not science at all. Just a feeling.)<p>(Edit: Spelling)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>I suppose that the popularity of the superhero genre in comic books started with Superman, then continued with Captain America, and other indigenous characters.<p>Characters of the Norse pantheon is a much-much later addition.</text></comment> |
11,076,484 | 11,076,545 | 1 | 3 | 11,076,192 | train | <story><title>Twitter’s User Growth Goes Nowhere as It Meets Revenue Expectations of $710M</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/twitters-user-growth-goes-nowhere-as-it-meets-revenue-expectations-of-710m/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>curiousDog</author><text>Why on earth is wall street so hung up on user growth? Don&#x27;t they still have a ton of monetization opportunities? I see no where near the amount of ads as facebook and I hear their ad targeting is pretty bad right now and despite all this, their revenue isn&#x27;t bad at all.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter’s User Growth Goes Nowhere as It Meets Revenue Expectations of $710M</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/twitters-user-growth-goes-nowhere-as-it-meets-revenue-expectations-of-710m/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danharaj</author><text>the sentiment i&#x27;ve gathered from people who use twitter professionally, namely journalists and the like, is that an algorithmic timeline would completely destroy the value proposition for them. twitter is such a nice little social media app that i find it disturbing to see it bullied by wall street. such is the fate of a publicly traded company. if it were a private company that could focus on being profitable without growing extravagantly and taking over the world like Facebook or Google, it could focus on providing its unique value to its most important users.<p>i think of all the social media platforms i use, twitter is the one that most tremendously contributes to society. twitter, far more than facebook in my opinion, democratizes the dissemination of ideas and information.</text></comment> |
13,812,359 | 13,812,503 | 1 | 3 | 13,811,418 | train | <story><title>The Uber Conflation</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-conflation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crabasa</author><text><i>On the flipside, I, for one, view Uber’s regulatory maneuvering in a much more positive light. After all, thinking about the “spirit of the law” can lead to a very different conclusion: the purpose of taxi regulation, at least in theory, was not to entrench local monopolies but rather to ensure safety. If those goals can be met through technology — GPS tracking, reputation scoring, and the greater availability of transportation options, particularly late at night — then it is the taxi companies and captured regulators violating said spirit.</i><p>I agree with this. Taxi regulations might have started with noble intentions, but quickly evolved into protecting a monopoly at the expense of consumers.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Uber Conflation</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-conflation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>The most critical quote from the article: &quot;Kalanick’s mistake was in not clearly defining, communicating, and enforcing accountability on actions that pushed the line but had nothing to do with the company’s regulatory fight. In fact, it was even more critical for Uber than for just about any other company to have its own house in order; the very nature of the company’s business created the conditions for living above the law to become culturally acceptable — praised even.&quot;<p>This seems like an excellent description of the problem: if you&#x27;re going to run a company that intentionally pushes the boundaries of specific regulatory restrictions (in order to demonstrate a better result that can only happen without them, to get popular backing for removing them), then you need to draw a clear internal dividing line between the risky actions taken in support of that goal and all the other areas in which the company should act as a model for upstanding behavior.</text></comment> |
10,861,966 | 10,857,957 | 1 | 3 | 10,857,646 | train | <story><title>Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35251484</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikegerwitz</author><text>Let&#x27;s start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower.<p>What&#x27;s more concerning about these data aren&#x27;t these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren&#x27;t (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system.<p>Any entity knowing that I have even turned on my PC---without explicit action to notify someone of such, such as posting this message or sending e-mail---is a privacy violation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>petke</author><text>Such statistics would be very useful to society. Tracking people as a group to figure out how they behave. Its only when the tracking targets individuals that it get creepy.<p>&quot;New York&#x27;ers goes to the toilet x times a day&quot; is fine vs &quot;John Doe goes to the toilet x times a day&quot; is not.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35251484</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikegerwitz</author><text>Let&#x27;s start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower.<p>What&#x27;s more concerning about these data aren&#x27;t these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren&#x27;t (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system.<p>Any entity knowing that I have even turned on my PC---without explicit action to notify someone of such, such as posting this message or sending e-mail---is a privacy violation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cm2187</author><text>What I would like to know if how much of this tracking is not blocked by installing something like Spybot&#x27;s Anti-Beacon (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safer-networking.org&#x2F;spybot-anti-beacon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safer-networking.org&#x2F;spybot-anti-beacon&#x2F;</a>) and using a Local Account. If all it takes is to install a similar tool when I buy a new machine, it&#x27;s not a big deal. There are many other tools I need to install anyway (winrar, etc).</text></comment> |
19,429,362 | 19,427,947 | 1 | 3 | 19,427,332 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Drogon – A C++14/17 based high performance HTTP application framework</title><url>https://github.com/an-tao/drogon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>This is cool, and I like it. Very Haskell like, which is a compliment in my book.<p>But one thing that surprises me is that folks are essentially sleeping on HTTP&#x2F;2. HTTP&#x2F;2 is just a hell of a lot better in most every dimension. It&#x27;s better for handshake latency, it&#x27;s better for bandwidth in most cases, it&#x27;s better for eliminating excess SSL overhead and also, it&#x27;s kinda easier to write client libraries for, because it&#x27;s so much simpler (although the parallel and concurrent nature of connections will challenge a lot of programmers).<p>It&#x27;s not bad to see a new contender in this space, but it&#x27;s surprising that it isn&#x27;t http&#x2F;2 first. Is there a good reason for this? It&#x27;s busted through 90% support on caniuse, so it&#x27;s hard to make an argument that adoption holds it back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HippoBaro</author><text>The reason is that HTTP&#x2F;2 will be short-lived. Most of its potential (protocol multiplexing, mainly) is wasted because it still runs over TCP&#x2F;IP. HTTP&#x2F;3 will correct that with QUIC. I think we can except HTTP&#x2F;3 to really see widespread adoption.
HTTP&#x2F;1.1 will remain ubiquitous though because there&#x27;s a gazillion box that only speaks that.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Drogon – A C++14/17 based high performance HTTP application framework</title><url>https://github.com/an-tao/drogon</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KirinDave</author><text>This is cool, and I like it. Very Haskell like, which is a compliment in my book.<p>But one thing that surprises me is that folks are essentially sleeping on HTTP&#x2F;2. HTTP&#x2F;2 is just a hell of a lot better in most every dimension. It&#x27;s better for handshake latency, it&#x27;s better for bandwidth in most cases, it&#x27;s better for eliminating excess SSL overhead and also, it&#x27;s kinda easier to write client libraries for, because it&#x27;s so much simpler (although the parallel and concurrent nature of connections will challenge a lot of programmers).<p>It&#x27;s not bad to see a new contender in this space, but it&#x27;s surprising that it isn&#x27;t http&#x2F;2 first. Is there a good reason for this? It&#x27;s busted through 90% support on caniuse, so it&#x27;s hard to make an argument that adoption holds it back.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stock_toaster</author><text>One possibility is that HTTP&#x2F;2 is much more work to implement, and since it isn’t &#x2F;absolutely&#x2F; required for base “serve a thing” functionality, it maybe be left to be implemented later.</text></comment> |
6,549,327 | 6,549,247 | 1 | 3 | 6,548,692 | train | <story><title>How the .0001% Made Its Money</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-the-0001-made-its-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adventured</author><text>Bill Gates shouldn&#x27;t be listed as someone who inherited his wealth: he did not inherit it.<p>The $100 billion he&#x27;ll give away was of his own creation, spurred from effort of his own mind, from a company born of his own fingers and imagination.<p>We&#x27;re having this conversation thanks to the Internet, probably via relatively inexpensive tools&#x2F;gadgets. Which means we&#x27;ve all inherited an extraordinary privilege - courtesy of the immense efforts of countless others and countless invested wealth - that I would argue is drastically beyond anything Gates had the benefit of despite his family. What have you done with it? (rhetorical)<p>The privilege we&#x27;re all enjoying right now - all of this easily accessible, relatively cheap, amazing technology - is beyond anything being born to a successful Seattle lawyer is worth. Why aren&#x27;t we all millionaires N times over? If you understand that point, then you understand why Gates deserves credit for his wealth.<p>His mother didn&#x27;t make the deal with IBM (in fact Ballmer was arguably most instrumental in the nuanced legal structure that gave Microsoft its position), and his mother didn&#x27;t execute and build software for 30 years against tremendous odds and competition either. Is your theory that Bill Gates should be penalized for being born into a family and situation that was not of his own choosing? Such that you pretend his wealth wasn&#x27;t of his own creation and is null and void, because his father was a lawyer (remind me again what making $100k a year as a lawyer in 1970 has to do with your son generating a $100 billion fortune in 2000, seems to me there are a lot of extraordinary steps required to get from one to the other no matter how good your first step is, whether you&#x27;re Steve Jobs or Bill Gates).<p>There are 9 million millionaires in the US currently, and this country has been rich for a long time now. Why aren&#x27;t we drowning in Bill Gates clones? The answer is obvious.<p>Any idea how many successful lawyer sons didn&#x27;t generate $100 billion in wealth the last 40 years? All of them but one. Gates is one in a million even by that narrow-down.<p>I&#x27;d counter argue that Buffett would have been successful regardless of his father being a Congressman (it&#x27;s absurd to think that a one term trip to DC is what made Buffett what he is). Indeed, using Buffett as an example is the absolute worst thing you could do: the market doesn&#x27;t care if your daddy was a Congressman, it was his massive results that spoke volumes, got people to invest with him over time, and made him rich. Some of his shareholders held for decades. It was his understanding of how to make money, and his ability to sell that vision, that scored his first investments. Even doctors don&#x27;t like to lose $100k to some idiot kid, no matter who their father is (his father wasn&#x27;t that important, and his grandfather&#x27;s stores weren&#x27;t that wildly successful).<p>Or did you think people were buying Berkshire at $100 because his daddy was a a borderline irrelevant Congressman for one term?</text></item><item><author>firstOrder</author><text>The first paragraph says:
&gt; The popular view of America&#x27;s upper class is that of an ossified aristocracy. But research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shakes up this view, at least among America&#x27;s richest individuals.<p>Not much has shaken up this view. Half of the list inherited $400 million or more upon turning 18. Even the other half of the list are from among a small percentage of America&#x27;s upper middle class.<p>#1 Bill Gates. Father a wealthy lawyer. His grandfather was a national bank president. He went to an elite private grammar school, which had teletypes and computer timesharing back in the 1960s. His mother was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM - a helpful thing for a son who became a billionaire by riding IBM&#x27;s coattails. Despite all of this, he is still on the bootstrapped, self-made side of the F400 list. He is not one of the heirs.<p>Next is Warren Buffett. His father was a congressman. His grandfather owned a string of stores. And so on.<p>The rest of the top ten are the Waltons, who inherited Wal-Mart on birth, the Koch brothers, who inherited an oil company on birth, plus Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg. Ellison and Bloomberg are the only middle class people on the list.<p>I do think there are new trends happening at this level, but they don&#x27;t point to what the blog post authors are pointing to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>recuter</author><text>Buffet made his initial nut by raising a sort of &quot;Friends &amp; Family&quot; round for a mini-hedge-fund type thing. You can read about his wealthy Aunts and extended family in Snowball.<p>He was doing this on the side while working at his daddys Buffett-Falk &amp; Co as an investment salesman. He did well and after stalking Graham was able to get a gig in NYC for a few years before returning to running &quot;mini-hedge-fund&quot; type partnerships in his hometown.<p>So being a son of a congressman surely helped in raising many many millions of dollars from the Nebraska elite. I would even argue its almost a necessary but insufficient condition for making his initial fortune - he got dealt a great hand but he also played it very very well.</text></comment> | <story><title>How the .0001% Made Its Money</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-the-0001-made-its-money/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adventured</author><text>Bill Gates shouldn&#x27;t be listed as someone who inherited his wealth: he did not inherit it.<p>The $100 billion he&#x27;ll give away was of his own creation, spurred from effort of his own mind, from a company born of his own fingers and imagination.<p>We&#x27;re having this conversation thanks to the Internet, probably via relatively inexpensive tools&#x2F;gadgets. Which means we&#x27;ve all inherited an extraordinary privilege - courtesy of the immense efforts of countless others and countless invested wealth - that I would argue is drastically beyond anything Gates had the benefit of despite his family. What have you done with it? (rhetorical)<p>The privilege we&#x27;re all enjoying right now - all of this easily accessible, relatively cheap, amazing technology - is beyond anything being born to a successful Seattle lawyer is worth. Why aren&#x27;t we all millionaires N times over? If you understand that point, then you understand why Gates deserves credit for his wealth.<p>His mother didn&#x27;t make the deal with IBM (in fact Ballmer was arguably most instrumental in the nuanced legal structure that gave Microsoft its position), and his mother didn&#x27;t execute and build software for 30 years against tremendous odds and competition either. Is your theory that Bill Gates should be penalized for being born into a family and situation that was not of his own choosing? Such that you pretend his wealth wasn&#x27;t of his own creation and is null and void, because his father was a lawyer (remind me again what making $100k a year as a lawyer in 1970 has to do with your son generating a $100 billion fortune in 2000, seems to me there are a lot of extraordinary steps required to get from one to the other no matter how good your first step is, whether you&#x27;re Steve Jobs or Bill Gates).<p>There are 9 million millionaires in the US currently, and this country has been rich for a long time now. Why aren&#x27;t we drowning in Bill Gates clones? The answer is obvious.<p>Any idea how many successful lawyer sons didn&#x27;t generate $100 billion in wealth the last 40 years? All of them but one. Gates is one in a million even by that narrow-down.<p>I&#x27;d counter argue that Buffett would have been successful regardless of his father being a Congressman (it&#x27;s absurd to think that a one term trip to DC is what made Buffett what he is). Indeed, using Buffett as an example is the absolute worst thing you could do: the market doesn&#x27;t care if your daddy was a Congressman, it was his massive results that spoke volumes, got people to invest with him over time, and made him rich. Some of his shareholders held for decades. It was his understanding of how to make money, and his ability to sell that vision, that scored his first investments. Even doctors don&#x27;t like to lose $100k to some idiot kid, no matter who their father is (his father wasn&#x27;t that important, and his grandfather&#x27;s stores weren&#x27;t that wildly successful).<p>Or did you think people were buying Berkshire at $100 because his daddy was a a borderline irrelevant Congressman for one term?</text></item><item><author>firstOrder</author><text>The first paragraph says:
&gt; The popular view of America&#x27;s upper class is that of an ossified aristocracy. But research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shakes up this view, at least among America&#x27;s richest individuals.<p>Not much has shaken up this view. Half of the list inherited $400 million or more upon turning 18. Even the other half of the list are from among a small percentage of America&#x27;s upper middle class.<p>#1 Bill Gates. Father a wealthy lawyer. His grandfather was a national bank president. He went to an elite private grammar school, which had teletypes and computer timesharing back in the 1960s. His mother was on the board of United Way with the CEO of IBM - a helpful thing for a son who became a billionaire by riding IBM&#x27;s coattails. Despite all of this, he is still on the bootstrapped, self-made side of the F400 list. He is not one of the heirs.<p>Next is Warren Buffett. His father was a congressman. His grandfather owned a string of stores. And so on.<p>The rest of the top ten are the Waltons, who inherited Wal-Mart on birth, the Koch brothers, who inherited an oil company on birth, plus Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg. Ellison and Bloomberg are the only middle class people on the list.<p>I do think there are new trends happening at this level, but they don&#x27;t point to what the blog post authors are pointing to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dustinrodrigues</author><text>It&#x27;s not that he inherited his wealth, it&#x27;s that he grew up in a privileged environment that gave him opportunities most other people didn&#x27;t have.</text></comment> |
32,685,834 | 32,679,667 | 1 | 2 | 32,678,091 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?</title><text>During the &#x27;90s and the early &#x27;00s, dedicated soundcards were in-demand components in much the same way GPUs are today. From what I know, Creative won, on-board sound became good enough sometime between Windows XP and Windows 7, and the audio enthusiasts moved on to external DACs and $2000 headphones. Today Creative still sells soundcards, but none of them appear to be substantial improvements over previous models.<p>So what other reasons could have caused the decline in interest? Was there nothing that could be improved upon? Were there improvements on the software side that made hardware redundant and&#x2F;or useless? Is there any other company besides Creative, however large or small, still holding the torch for innovating in this space?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>speeder</author><text>The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn&#x27;t because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.<p>When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.<p>But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...<p>After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.<p>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.<p>Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.<p>EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.<p>As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joe91</author><text>This is nonsense. The main reason behind the demise of dedicated sound cards: motherboard sound chipsets got &quot;good enough&quot;. The value add wasn&#x27;t adding enough value any more because you can get decent sound quality just by using the default sound output provided by your motherboard.<p>3D sound and other processing got baked into middleware for games because it became trivial to do all of the processing in software - and the processing became more advanced than anything that the sound card vendors were offering (and they didn&#x27;t move quickly enough anyway).<p>Pro audio vastly progressed past anything that is possible to provide in fixed silicon. For input, dedicated USB (and ethernet) audio interfaces progressed to the point where it would be ridiculous to provide such functionality on a general &quot;sound card&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s just evolution - there just isn&#x27;t a compelling enough niche for a dedicated sound card any more.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Whatever happened to dedicated sound cards?</title><text>During the &#x27;90s and the early &#x27;00s, dedicated soundcards were in-demand components in much the same way GPUs are today. From what I know, Creative won, on-board sound became good enough sometime between Windows XP and Windows 7, and the audio enthusiasts moved on to external DACs and $2000 headphones. Today Creative still sells soundcards, but none of them appear to be substantial improvements over previous models.<p>So what other reasons could have caused the decline in interest? Was there nothing that could be improved upon? Were there improvements on the software side that made hardware redundant and&#x2F;or useless? Is there any other company besides Creative, however large or small, still holding the torch for innovating in this space?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>speeder</author><text>The main reason for their death in my opinion, is the DRM-driven (although MS claim it wasn&#x27;t because of DRM) changes to Windows drivers rules.<p>When DVDs and HDMI were becoming popular, and Windows Vista was launched, a lot of restrictions were put on drivers, I saw many people defending them claiming it was for better stability, avoiding blue screens and so on.<p>But a major thing the restrictions did, was restrain several of the sound cards features, most notably their 3D audio calculations that were then just starting to take off, people were making 3D audio APIs that intentionally mirrored 3D graphics API with the idea you would have both a GPU and a 3D audio processor, and you would have games where the audio was calculated with reflections, refractions and diffractions...<p>After that, the only use of sound cards became what the drivers still allowed you to do, that was mostly play sampled audio, so sound cards became kinda pointless.<p>Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.<p>Yamaha still manufactures sound card chips, and their current ones have way less features than the ones that they made during the sound card era.<p>EDIT: also forgot to point out the same restrictions kinda killed analog video too, for example before the restrictions nothing prevented people from sending arbitrary data to analog monitors, so you could have monitors with non-standard resolutions, non-square pixels, unusual bit depths (for example SGI made some monitors that happily accepted 48 bits of color) or not even having pixels at all (think vectrex) and so on. All this died and in a sense also affected video development, some features that video cards were getting at the time were removed and hardware design moved to a narrower path, more compatible with MS rules.<p>As for what the restrictions have to do with DRM: the point was not allow people to intercept audio and video using analog signals with perfect quality, since this would be an easy way to go around the DRM built-in on HDMI cables.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rocket_surgeron</author><text>&gt;Gone are the days of 3D audio chips, or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.<p>Modern CPUs can ether do or emulate this, probably using less power than a sound card.<p>Very, very, few people have their PCs connected to an AV receiver or multichannel speakers, but positional audio is still widely supported in Windows applications using Xaudio2.<p>The reasons sound cards went away is the use cases went away:<p>1. People who want high quality recording shifted to firewire and later high-speed USB external audio interfaces. No matter how hard you try an external metal box with multiple inputs and outputs will always be better than a PCI&#x2F;PCIe card inside a PC for recording. Rare use case in the recording world for sound cards.<p>2. Gamers who want 3d&#x2F;positional audio either use headphones, find the 5.1 integrated outputs to be adequate, or like me, run a digital audio cable to a surround sound receiver. Rare use case in the gaming world for sound cards.<p>Dolby Atmos is awesome for positional audio in games but there are multiple less expensive and more accessible methods for surround audio nowadays. Decent positional audio can be experienced using a laptop and headphones-- no sound card required.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamingwiki.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glossary:Surround_sound" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcgamingwiki.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Glossary:Surround_sound</a><p>Back in the sound card days you had to squint on the back of the box and ask &quot;is this creative 3d? aureal?&quot; nowadays you just plug in 5.1 to your PC&#x27;s onboard audio, tell windows you have 5.1, and it works (mostly).</text></comment> |
35,785,581 | 35,784,146 | 1 | 2 | 35,782,825 | train | <story><title>SIMD with Zig</title><url>https://www.openmymind.net/SIMD-With-Zig/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kookamamie</author><text>Nice. It would be even nicer, if Zig would support hot-dispatch for SIMD, i.e. the idea that the compiler can emit multiple versions of the same function&#x2F;code for a number of vector widths simultaneously and the runtime selects the best (widest) option available for the hardware running the code - this is something ISPC does and is incredibly useful for targeting a range of architectures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>exDM69</author><text>The issue with runtime instruction set detection and dynamic dispatch is that it needs to be at a rather coarse level to be beneficial.<p>Take a simple 4-wide dot product for example, on x86_64 you&#x27;d have 3-4 different implementations (SSE2, SSE3 w&#x2F; hadd, SSE4.2 w&#x2F; dpps). But the function itself is just a few clock cycles, and calling it via function pointer will eliminate any gains and you might as well compute it with a scalar loop at that point.<p>This is further compounded by inhibiting compiler optimizations. You can&#x27;t use the dot product function in higher level code expecting it to be inlined and further optimized (which is really the key to performance) if it&#x27;s behind a dynamic dispatch.<p>A sufficiently smart compiler could maybe propagate the dynamic dispatch above, so that all the dot products get inlined but all code using dot product would get emitted multiple times with different dot product implementations, with the dynamic dispatch only at the top level. This has a slight risk of combinatorial explosion, but there really aren&#x27;t that many combinations of supported ISAs in real hardware out there.<p>Another option you can use without any special compiler support is to take all your performance sensitive parts and pack them into a shared object&#x2F;dll, compile multiple versions with different compiler options and choose the correct dll at runtime. Or even build the entire executable a few times and have some kind of launcher pick the correct one.</text></comment> | <story><title>SIMD with Zig</title><url>https://www.openmymind.net/SIMD-With-Zig/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kookamamie</author><text>Nice. It would be even nicer, if Zig would support hot-dispatch for SIMD, i.e. the idea that the compiler can emit multiple versions of the same function&#x2F;code for a number of vector widths simultaneously and the runtime selects the best (widest) option available for the hardware running the code - this is something ISPC does and is incredibly useful for targeting a range of architectures.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndyKelley</author><text>This is called [function multi-versioning](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ziglang&#x2F;zig&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1018">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ziglang&#x2F;zig&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1018</a>).</text></comment> |
5,815,256 | 5,815,019 | 1 | 2 | 5,814,755 | train | <story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>I wish they would dedicate more time to improving cl.exe and link.exe in terms of performance and language support and less time with these hokey team visualization gimics.<p>Every release since 2008 has been getting slower and slower for C++, the C compiler is awful, PGO instrumentation in Win8 is less capable, and there's no equivalents in the Windows ecosystem to gcc's likely/unlikely, oprofile, or valgrind.<p>It's at the point now where developing on Windows vs Linux is a serious performance and security impediment due to their withering native toolchain. But I guess nobody over there gets promoted for fixing the hard stuff.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/06/03/visual-studio-2013.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GravityWell</author><text>No mention at all about missing C++11 features. I hope their continued silence is not an indicator of nothing to come.
<a href="http://cpprocks.com/c11-compiler-support-shootout-visual-studio-gcc-clang-intel/" rel="nofollow">http://cpprocks.com/c11-compiler-support-shootout-visual-stu...</a><p>It should be noted that features listed as included in the VS2012 Nov CTP, such as initializer lists, variadic templates, etc., should not in my view be listed. The CTP does not work via the Visual Studio interface, but only from the command line compiler. And the CTP is not included in either Update 1 or Update 2.<p>Meanwhile GCC and Clang are both feature complete:
<a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&#38;px=MTM1NTg" rel="nofollow">http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&#38;px=MTM1N...</a>
<a href="http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GCC-4-8-1-is-C-11-feature-complete-1875093.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/GCC-4-8-1-is-C-11-fea...</a></text></comment> |
21,598,169 | 21,596,031 | 1 | 3 | 21,594,596 | train | <story><title>Microsoft's “Love” of Linux</title><url>http://pedrocr.pt/text/microsofts-love-of-linux/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>I’m honestly surprised that Microsoft aren’t working with Linux vendors in an attempt to solve Linux problems <i>by</i> more deeply integrating Windows-styled solutions into Linux, such that the Linux <i>client</i> ecosystem becomes more dependent on the Windows <i>infrastructure</i> ecosystem. That’d be the natural Azure-focused equivalent to “embrace, extend, extinguish.”<p>For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along. I could totally see Microsoft releasing some FOSS Linux über-network-client-daemon that combines DNS, NMBD, and Bonjour resolution together (sort of like Apple’s mDNSResolver) in an attempt to “clean up” that mess—where, just by coincidence, parts of the SMB stack begin to seep directly into the operation of the system. Then a subsumption for Kerberos+libpam+GSSAPI that also supports NTLM; etc. until eventually Linux ends up needing to talk to a real Active Directory Domain Controller to boot. Might be Microsoft’s one, might be a Linux FOSS one—either way, it gives Microsoft an advantage.<p>...but, so far as I can tell, they’re <i>not</i> doing this. I wonder why not?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eikenberry</author><text>&gt; For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along.<p>Systemd has fixed this as well. Using systemd&#x27;s networking stack DNS becomes completely seamless with the rest of the system. It&#x27;s not quite 100% baked for average desktop users, but all the components are there and work great. You&#x27;ll see distros switching to it soon... particularly workstation oriented ones as the wifi stack is soooo much nicer.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft's “Love” of Linux</title><url>http://pedrocr.pt/text/microsofts-love-of-linux/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>I’m honestly surprised that Microsoft aren’t working with Linux vendors in an attempt to solve Linux problems <i>by</i> more deeply integrating Windows-styled solutions into Linux, such that the Linux <i>client</i> ecosystem becomes more dependent on the Windows <i>infrastructure</i> ecosystem. That’d be the natural Azure-focused equivalent to “embrace, extend, extinguish.”<p>For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along. I could totally see Microsoft releasing some FOSS Linux über-network-client-daemon that combines DNS, NMBD, and Bonjour resolution together (sort of like Apple’s mDNSResolver) in an attempt to “clean up” that mess—where, just by coincidence, parts of the SMB stack begin to seep directly into the operation of the system. Then a subsumption for Kerberos+libpam+GSSAPI that also supports NTLM; etc. until eventually Linux ends up needing to talk to a real Active Directory Domain Controller to boot. Might be Microsoft’s one, might be a Linux FOSS one—either way, it gives Microsoft an advantage.<p>...but, so far as I can tell, they’re <i>not</i> doing this. I wonder why not?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zymhan</author><text>&gt; ...but, so far as I can tell, they’re not doing this. I wonder why not?<p>Because maybe, just maybe, they&#x27;re a tad bit less evil?</text></comment> |
39,135,638 | 39,135,148 | 1 | 3 | 39,134,349 | train | <story><title>Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again</title><url>https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PretzelPirate</author><text>They should auction it off. For pickup only, of course.<p>I&#x27;d like to own the first helicopter on Mars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oliwary</author><text>Show HN: This website is served from a helicopter on Mars</text></comment> | <story><title>Due to blade damage, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will not fly again</title><url>https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PretzelPirate</author><text>They should auction it off. For pickup only, of course.<p>I&#x27;d like to own the first helicopter on Mars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caseysoftware</author><text>That&#x27;s an amazing idea.<p>Not only could they have fun with that stage but it&#x27;d be a fun race to see who could get it for them. Then have a big show when it&#x27;s brought back to Earth and delivered to the owner.<p>I could see SpaceX and FedEx team up for some amusing PR on that one.</text></comment> |
14,806,963 | 14,806,998 | 1 | 2 | 14,806,440 | train | <story><title>Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]</title><url>https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sharemywin</author><text>I still go back to this paper for questions about decentralized storage:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;is-decentralized-storage-sustainable.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;is-decentralized-storage-sustai...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darawk</author><text>I think this argument fails even by its own standards. It applies equally well to Bitcoin mining, and while there is clearly some centralization there, it is still quite decentralized. At least, decentralized &#x27;enough&#x27;. Secondly, storage is fundamentally different than other commodities. The decentralized storage market is more like AirBnB, where you&#x27;re consuming the excess capacity of capital. Most people have tons of storage already that they&#x27;re not using. Extracting rents from that space is found money, and therefore they have inherently lower costs than anyone supplying storage in a commercial way.</text></comment> | <story><title>Filecoin: A Decentralized Storage Network [pdf]</title><url>https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sharemywin</author><text>I still go back to this paper for questions about decentralized storage:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;is-decentralized-storage-sustainable.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;is-decentralized-storage-sustai...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>calafrax</author><text>There is another macro-economic issue here:<p>With a decentralized trustless system you have to assume a higher failure rate for nodes than with a central trust based system.<p>If you assume a higher failure rate you have to replicate data more extensively to achieve reliability.<p>If you have to replicate data more extensively then decentralized will always be more expensive than centralized.</text></comment> |
11,840,927 | 11,840,786 | 1 | 2 | 11,840,455 | train | <story><title>Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters</title><url>http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/results-votes-june-5th-2016-in-switzerland/42153620</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akerro</author><text>As already mentioned, you&#x27;re ignoring a fact that even by working there for 10 years, it&#x27;s close to impossible to buy a part of land and build a house anywhere near a city. Land and house prices are too high to stay there for live. It&#x27;s only profitable to live there, make savings and buy 2-3 houses in Uk&#x2F;Germany for it. Like two of my co-workers did.</text></item><item><author>s3nnyy</author><text>Switzerland is the only country in the world that implements direct democracy. You can really feel the difference to the rest of Europe. Swiss more often than not stand behind decisions made by their government. When talking about their politicians, the Swiss say &quot;WE decided that ...&quot; whereas e.g., Germans say: &quot;THEY decided that ...&quot;<p>If you look for a coding job in Europe, Zurich is a great place to live and is the only place where net-salaries are on par with the Bay Area: You can expect to get 7000 - 12000 CHF &#x2F; month after taxes. If you are from the EU and thinking to move, you find my email address in my Hacknews profile. Also you can read here why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90#.fnug055jh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>funkyy</author><text>Or you can buy studio in the city and huge farm house with land 1 hour drive away... Then weekends spend in your farm house and weekdays in your studio... It would be close enough to pop in in week days also. 1 hour drive aint bad.</text></comment> | <story><title>Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters</title><url>http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/results-votes-june-5th-2016-in-switzerland/42153620</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akerro</author><text>As already mentioned, you&#x27;re ignoring a fact that even by working there for 10 years, it&#x27;s close to impossible to buy a part of land and build a house anywhere near a city. Land and house prices are too high to stay there for live. It&#x27;s only profitable to live there, make savings and buy 2-3 houses in Uk&#x2F;Germany for it. Like two of my co-workers did.</text></item><item><author>s3nnyy</author><text>Switzerland is the only country in the world that implements direct democracy. You can really feel the difference to the rest of Europe. Swiss more often than not stand behind decisions made by their government. When talking about their politicians, the Swiss say &quot;WE decided that ...&quot; whereas e.g., Germans say: &quot;THEY decided that ...&quot;<p>If you look for a coding job in Europe, Zurich is a great place to live and is the only place where net-salaries are on par with the Bay Area: You can expect to get 7000 - 12000 CHF &#x2F; month after taxes. If you are from the EU and thinking to move, you find my email address in my Hacknews profile. Also you can read here why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90#.fnug055jh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>I&#x27;ve never understood why people believe&#x2F;feel that buying land and&#x2F;or a house is the pinnacle of... something. Sure, it gives the person a feeling of control and stability. But rooting oneself in one labor market (vs. being mobile) decreases one&#x27;s employment options and therefore their salary. It&#x27;s also very risky, as it&#x27;s the equivalent of putting one&#x27;s eggs in one basket and leaves their financial wellbeing in the hands of the real estate market.<p>Renting is, unfortunately and quite inaccurately, viewed as &quot;throwing money away.&quot; The real estate industry does a great job brainwashing people that they should buy, buy, buy, that buying a house is a great investment and a very good way to build wealth. İt&#x27;s probably one of the greatest lies perpetuated in modern times.</text></comment> |
25,379,260 | 25,379,089 | 1 | 2 | 25,377,695 | train | <story><title>Google Stories</title><url>http://stories.google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sktrdie</author><text>It’s pretty cool. If you make a url return data that is visually aligned with “a story protocol” google will put it at top of relevant search results.<p>Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.<p>Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.<p>I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.</text></item><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Am I the only one who, after reading the landing page, still has no idea what this is? I’ve been watching “immersive” websites for quite some time, mostly marketing-ish websites but also sometimes some special purpose pages from National Geografic or NYT.<p>What exactly is this? A JavaScript&#x2F;CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?<p>I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ljm</author><text>So, another AMP-style thing where Google uses their platform and network effect to further encroach on the open web and turn it into the Google web?<p>The quote you see at first is: &quot;Stories meet their widest audience ever.&quot;<p>Given that the widest audience is anyone who wants to search for something, this seems like a massive anti-trust bait.<p>Also, hard-pass on the continual dumbing down of content to contribute to the phenomenal attention deficit modern social media has introduced.</text></comment> | <story><title>Google Stories</title><url>http://stories.google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sktrdie</author><text>It’s pretty cool. If you make a url return data that is visually aligned with “a story protocol” google will put it at top of relevant search results.<p>Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.<p>Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.<p>I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.</text></item><item><author>stingraycharles</author><text>Am I the only one who, after reading the landing page, still has no idea what this is? I’ve been watching “immersive” websites for quite some time, mostly marketing-ish websites but also sometimes some special purpose pages from National Geografic or NYT.<p>What exactly is this? A JavaScript&#x2F;CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?<p>I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ilamont</author><text>&gt; If you make a url return data that is visually aligned with “a story protocol” google will put it at top of relevant search results.<p>Seems like it would be a magnet for low-value SEO content and outright scams.</text></comment> |
41,014,762 | 41,008,620 | 1 | 3 | 41,006,308 | train | <story><title>Debugging an evil Go runtime bug: From heat guns to kernel compiler flags (2017)</title><url>https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Terr_</author><text>&gt; Over the course of 22 kernel builds, I managed to simplify the config so much that the kernel had no networking support, no filesystems, no block device core, and didn’t even support PCI (still works fine on a VM though!).<p>Flashbacks to a job where I was asked to figure out why a newer kernel was crashing. This was a very frustrating time, because I had (have) basically zero real C&#x2F;C++ experience but I&#x27;d helped out with Bitbake recipes and everyone else was busy or moved to other projects.<p>To cut a multiweek tale of dozens of recompilations short: The kernel was fine. The headless custom hardware was fine. The problem was a hypervisor misconfiguration, overwriting part of the kernel address space. All of our kernels have been corrupt, but this was the first one where the layout meant it mattered.<p>A month of frustration, two characters to fix, the highest ratio I&#x27;ve encountered so far.<p>My reward for struggling through a complex problem I was unqualified for? &quot;Great, now we need to backport security patches from the main Linux kernel to the SoC vendor&#x27;s custom fork...&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Debugging an evil Go runtime bug: From heat guns to kernel compiler flags (2017)</title><url>https://marcan.st/2017/12/debugging-an-evil-go-runtime-bug/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BobbyJo</author><text>This is honestly wild. 99% of devs would have found a work around and moved on. Going so far as to create a multi-kernel test bench to narrow down the source of the instability is a level of dedication I have not personally seen, and I respect it.</text></comment> |
24,396,884 | 24,396,282 | 1 | 2 | 24,394,195 | train | <story><title>With a simple piece of paper, engineers create self-powered, wireless keyboard</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/your-next-digital-tablet-could-be-made-paper-180975727/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Angostura</author><text>I believe it is called &quot;humour&quot;</text></item><item><author>martyvis</author><text>From the article :&quot;So, the next time you’re about to crumple up a piece of paper and pitch it into the trashcan, you might want to think twice. You could very well be tossing out an important piece of technology&quot;<p>Why do reporters still persist with these silly signoffs, that are actually wrong. ( They do it on the evening news as well as these pop science things). The paper you throw in the bin today is actually of no further use to anyone. Just like the glass of water you are drinking isn&#x27;t going to be used to make hydrogen gas for a car, nor sandcastle you just built for silicon in the latest integrated circuit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pacamara619</author><text>Doesn&#x27;t that involve funny things?</text></comment> | <story><title>With a simple piece of paper, engineers create self-powered, wireless keyboard</title><url>https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/your-next-digital-tablet-could-be-made-paper-180975727/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Angostura</author><text>I believe it is called &quot;humour&quot;</text></item><item><author>martyvis</author><text>From the article :&quot;So, the next time you’re about to crumple up a piece of paper and pitch it into the trashcan, you might want to think twice. You could very well be tossing out an important piece of technology&quot;<p>Why do reporters still persist with these silly signoffs, that are actually wrong. ( They do it on the evening news as well as these pop science things). The paper you throw in the bin today is actually of no further use to anyone. Just like the glass of water you are drinking isn&#x27;t going to be used to make hydrogen gas for a car, nor sandcastle you just built for silicon in the latest integrated circuit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>msla</author><text>It would be nice if journalists were better at it.<p>It would be even nicer if they were better at reporting facts.</text></comment> |
9,280,327 | 9,280,186 | 1 | 2 | 9,279,639 | train | <story><title>Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction</title><url>http://www.inform7.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mundo</author><text>If this piques your interest and you&#x27;re interested in programming history, you will very likely enjoy reading about the Zork Implementation Language and the Z-machine, on which Inform is based:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Z-machine</a>
And the original spec for game authors from Infocom is quite entertaining:
<a href="http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xlisp.org&#x2F;zil.pdf</a><p>Good stuff. More generally, if you want a short (&lt;1hr) and amusing example of IF, try this:
<a href="http://pr-if.org/play/violet/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pr-if.org&#x2F;play&#x2F;violet&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction</title><url>http://www.inform7.com</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>limelight</author><text>Has anyone used something like this for non-fictional contexts? I&#x27;m really enthusiastic about the future of interactive journalism, particularly in terms of tailoring journalist narratives to each reader.<p>For example, I think coverage around the announcement of a new tax plan should adjust to the given user (ex. &quot;Under Clinton&#x27;s plan, your taxes will increase by 5%, to $14,000 annually.&quot;). Unfortunately, there just don&#x27;t seem to be many good tools for allowing non-programmers to encode manipulable facts into their narratives.</text></comment> |
1,321,128 | 1,321,093 | 1 | 3 | 1,320,949 | train | <story><title>Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?</title><url>http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/why_arent_there.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ja30278</author><text>I've been increasingly wondering about this, and I'm not sure I agree with the article.<p>Schneier asserts that "It's hard to sneak terrorists into the U.S.", which is hard to swallow given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border every day. Why would a terrorist fly into a major US airport, when he could just as easily fly into Mexico and then walk across the border (carrying as much cargo as he liked). Think of the vast drug shipments that cross this border, and then tell me that sneaking across a small suitcase of biological agents would be difficult.<p>I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school.<p>It's also increasingly bizarre to me that terrorists would target airports or airplanes at all. Airports are the one place where security is most concentrated. Practically speaking, blowing up a plane is probably the most difficult option you could choose if you wanted to kill 300 people. Why not pick one of the other myriad unguarded 'soft' targets where people gather?<p>Either terrorists are incredibly stupid, vanishingly small in number, or both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Anon84</author><text><p><pre><code> given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants
coming across the Mexican border every day.
</code></pre>
The words missing there are "poor Latin" (immigrants). Coyotes are not stupid and want to be left (more or less) alone and free to conduct their business. They "self-police" themselves by selecting who they carry across the border, choosing:<p>1. People they can trust not to create problems along the way<p>2. People that will try to stay out of trouble in the US (if you're successful, you're more likely to try to get your family in as well and recommend the same coyote. If you're caught (specially early on) you might turn them in.<p>3. People that don't look suspicious (that might be undercover law enforcement, for ex)<p>And above all, they <i>KNOW</i> that the day a terrorist attack within the US is traced back to them public outrage would make law enforcement come down on them with the heat of 1000 suns and the border would be closed tighter than Scrooges coin purse.<p>Smuggling in illegal aliens is illegal... but smuggling in terrorists is illegal, dangerous and extremely bad for business.<p>The same thing applies to drug smugglers as well. Collaborating with terrorism isn't in their best interest.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?</title><url>http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/why_arent_there.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ja30278</author><text>I've been increasingly wondering about this, and I'm not sure I agree with the article.<p>Schneier asserts that "It's hard to sneak terrorists into the U.S.", which is hard to swallow given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border every day. Why would a terrorist fly into a major US airport, when he could just as easily fly into Mexico and then walk across the border (carrying as much cargo as he liked). Think of the vast drug shipments that cross this border, and then tell me that sneaking across a small suitcase of biological agents would be difficult.<p>I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school.<p>It's also increasingly bizarre to me that terrorists would target airports or airplanes at all. Airports are the one place where security is most concentrated. Practically speaking, blowing up a plane is probably the most difficult option you could choose if you wanted to kill 300 people. Why not pick one of the other myriad unguarded 'soft' targets where people gather?<p>Either terrorists are incredibly stupid, vanishingly small in number, or both.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DrSprout</author><text>What you're missing is that nothing occurs in a vacuum. People don't like being associated with terrorists, especially not people helping immigrants across the border. If you go to Latin America, they're often even more bigoted than Americans are - and I'm not talking about gringos. The level of hatred for blacks is positively revolting from a North American perspective.<p>So Mexico really isn't a great entry point for a dark-skinned Arab, unless he speaks Spanish with a flawless accent (though given the variety of Spanish accents, that's not necessarily that hard.)<p>&#62;I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school.<p>If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack.</text></comment> |
28,874,717 | 28,874,125 | 1 | 3 | 28,870,464 | train | <story><title>Tech compensation in 2021</title><url>https://jacobian.org/2021/oct/13/tech-salaries-2021/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franciscop</author><text>Everything else being the same, it&#x27;s better to make 300k than 175k&#x2F;year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don&#x27;t normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don&#x27;t get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).<p>So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.</text></item><item><author>eminence32</author><text>It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the &quot;maximize salary&quot; game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they&#x27;re doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.<p>But it&#x27;s not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don&#x27;t think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don&#x27;t feel like you have to chase every last dollar.</text></item><item><author>throwaway2016a</author><text>20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something &quot;very wrong&quot;<p>I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.<p>Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?<p>Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;Greater-Boston-Area&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;Greater-Bo...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vincnetas</author><text>i had to read this twice to make sure i was reading it correctly:<p><pre><code> and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k
</code></pre>
this really triggered me. you basically say its ok to do shady things as long as you give something to the poor. sounds so much like &quot;indulgence&quot; in Christian churches where you could pay off your sins. sad.<p>i&#x27;d say money is not a permission for you to do bad things, and it should not make you fell better about bad things you did (and continue to do) just by giving some of the money away.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Indulgence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Indulgence</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Tech compensation in 2021</title><url>https://jacobian.org/2021/oct/13/tech-salaries-2021/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franciscop</author><text>Everything else being the same, it&#x27;s better to make 300k than 175k&#x2F;year. And not everything is the same, normally in those better paid jobs you have better Engineers, a lot of challenging problems, many nice perks, etc. What you don&#x27;t normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week. Also you don&#x27;t get highly ethical companies, just average ones at that (and it might actually be better to donate the diff between 300k and 175k vs working in a slightly more ethical place for 175k).<p>So as far as general advice goes, it makes sense to recommend trying to get those FAANG jobs if you can.</text></item><item><author>eminence32</author><text>It seems like a lot of HN readers are continually playing the &quot;maximize salary&quot; game and use like articles like this one to figure out how well they&#x27;re doing. If you want to play that game, then good luck, have fun. I understand the desire.<p>But it&#x27;s not for everyone. Are you able to live comfortably on $175k per year? Do you enjoy what you do and the people that you work with? If so, I don&#x27;t think there should be any shame in staying where you are. Don&#x27;t feel like you have to chase every last dollar.</text></item><item><author>throwaway2016a</author><text>20 years experience, two books under my belt, and lead architect (with a CTO title) on several good sized projects and most I have ever gotten in $175k... every time I see an article like this, I think I am doing something &quot;very wrong&quot;<p>I live about 40 miles outside of Boston.<p>Edit: Looking at levels.fyi for Boston that actually puts me above the median[1]. Why the heck is Boston so low compared to other markets?<p>Edit 2: Boston, MA and Denver, CO on Levels.fyi are both a median $159k but due to cost of living, that $159k in Denver is the same as $211k in Boston. I.e. adjusted for the cost of living, Denver pays 25% better.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;Greater-Boston-Area&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.levels.fyi&#x2F;Salaries&#x2F;Software-Engineer&#x2F;Greater-Bo...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tubby12345</author><text>&gt;What you don&#x27;t normally have is flexibility to negotiate special conditions e.g. 4day work week<p>This isn&#x27;t true. Google allows you to &quot;scale&quot; your work (eg 80% pay for 80% time).</text></comment> |
13,745,911 | 13,746,045 | 1 | 3 | 13,742,917 | train | <story><title>Same-sex marriage linked to decline in teen suicides</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/same-sex-marriage-linked-to-decline-in-teen-suicides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it really bizarre that a site which says it&#x27;s &quot;championing freedom, smaller government&quot; is so stridently against same-sex marriage.<p>I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.<p>Bringing it back to the original topic a bit, it&#x27;s sad that people&#x27;s reactions are so predictable. People in favor of same-sex marriage think this study is great. People who oppose it think it sucks. How boring! Show me someone in favor of same-sex marriage who thinks this study is terrible, or someone against who thinks the study is really good.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>When I read studies like this, one of the first things I like to do is look around for critiques.<p>On conservative commentary website Stream.org, statistician William M. Briggs (who, take it for what it&#x27;s worth, opposes same-sex marriage) offers a critique of the study&#x27;s methodology and conclusion, as well as the conclusion that the study expressly does not make, but that the headlines have made:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-marriage-laws-reduce-teen-suicide-rates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-mar...</a><p>A few interesting snippets from his critique:<p>&gt; A weighted 8.6% to a weighted 8%, they say. This is a 7% reduction, all right, but a minor tweak in the actual weighted number. The numbers are weighted averages across several states and the result of a statistical model called a linear regression. The 0.6 drop is not observed, but is the output from a model.<p>&gt; The numbers within states is anything but straightforward (the authors provide graphs). For instance, some states show reported suicide attempts increasing after gmarriage (New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, for example). The graphs also indicate a general decline in rates before gmarriage and continuing afterwards (see their Fig. 3).<p>&gt; putting Ebola in the model works equally well with gmarriage to explain the data. So do the disasters of those crashing Malaysian airliners, or the fighting in Ukraine and Crimea. So does the 2014 Winter Olympics!<p>One other point that Briggs makes only indirectly, but bears mentioning, is that measuring the number of self-reported unsuccessful suicide attempts only provides us with part of the picture; we can&#x27;t make any firm conclusions about what its rise or fall says about suicide prevention unless we also know the number of _successful_ suicide attempts. For instance, it might be the case that some suicide prevention factor reduces the likelihood that any given suicide attempt is successful. Maybe hospitals have gotten better at reducing the mortality rate of intentional overdoses. In such a case, the rate of suicide attempts might remain relatively flat, but the rate of unsuccessful suicide attempts would rise, and the rate of successful suicide attempts would fall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>judah</author><text>&gt;&gt; &quot;I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.&quot;<p>Small government conservative here. It&#x27;s actually pretty simple:<p>Small government: the government should stop meddling in marriage altogether. It&#x27;s a social and often religious institution.<p>Freedom: We take seriously the founders&#x27; belief that government should not infringe on religious liberty.</text></comment> | <story><title>Same-sex marriage linked to decline in teen suicides</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/same-sex-marriage-linked-to-decline-in-teen-suicides/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>This is a bit of a tangent, but I find it really bizarre that a site which says it&#x27;s &quot;championing freedom, smaller government&quot; is so stridently against same-sex marriage.<p>I can only conclude that some people have a radically different idea of &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;smaller government&quot; than I do.<p>Bringing it back to the original topic a bit, it&#x27;s sad that people&#x27;s reactions are so predictable. People in favor of same-sex marriage think this study is great. People who oppose it think it sucks. How boring! Show me someone in favor of same-sex marriage who thinks this study is terrible, or someone against who thinks the study is really good.</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>When I read studies like this, one of the first things I like to do is look around for critiques.<p>On conservative commentary website Stream.org, statistician William M. Briggs (who, take it for what it&#x27;s worth, opposes same-sex marriage) offers a critique of the study&#x27;s methodology and conclusion, as well as the conclusion that the study expressly does not make, but that the headlines have made:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-marriage-laws-reduce-teen-suicide-rates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stream.org&#x2F;no-a-study-did-not-show-that-same-sex-mar...</a><p>A few interesting snippets from his critique:<p>&gt; A weighted 8.6% to a weighted 8%, they say. This is a 7% reduction, all right, but a minor tweak in the actual weighted number. The numbers are weighted averages across several states and the result of a statistical model called a linear regression. The 0.6 drop is not observed, but is the output from a model.<p>&gt; The numbers within states is anything but straightforward (the authors provide graphs). For instance, some states show reported suicide attempts increasing after gmarriage (New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, for example). The graphs also indicate a general decline in rates before gmarriage and continuing afterwards (see their Fig. 3).<p>&gt; putting Ebola in the model works equally well with gmarriage to explain the data. So do the disasters of those crashing Malaysian airliners, or the fighting in Ukraine and Crimea. So does the 2014 Winter Olympics!<p>One other point that Briggs makes only indirectly, but bears mentioning, is that measuring the number of self-reported unsuccessful suicide attempts only provides us with part of the picture; we can&#x27;t make any firm conclusions about what its rise or fall says about suicide prevention unless we also know the number of _successful_ suicide attempts. For instance, it might be the case that some suicide prevention factor reduces the likelihood that any given suicide attempt is successful. Maybe hospitals have gotten better at reducing the mortality rate of intentional overdoses. In such a case, the rate of suicide attempts might remain relatively flat, but the rate of unsuccessful suicide attempts would rise, and the rate of successful suicide attempts would fall.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tharre</author><text>&gt; Stream offers a rich and lively source for breaking news, <i>Christian inspiration</i> and conservative commentary<p>Seems religiously motivated to me, as you&#x27;d expect. Nothing extraordinary.</text></comment> |
7,092,980 | 7,093,028 | 1 | 2 | 7,092,008 | train | <story><title>You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist</title><url>http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>azakai</author><text>Without some notion of absolute numbers, the comparison is pointless.<p>Last I heard, both of those causes of death are almost negligible compared to things like heart disease, cancer, and car accidents. So I have some doubt about this statement by the author<p>&gt; The point of the quote is to focus people on sources of mortality society-wide, because this focus can guide public policy efforts at reducing death.<p>With that said, yes, people are irrationally afraid of death by terrorism. But comparing that to their chance of death by cop is not illustrative. Comparing to their chance of death by traffic accident would be more relevant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text><i>Comparing to their chance of death by traffic accident would be more relevant.</i><p>Not really. The increases in LEA capabilities and militarized tactics took a massive leap post 9&#x2F;11 largely based on the idea of preventing terrorism. If those impacts are now causing more harm than the thing they are intended to prevent, then there is a clear problem and highlighting it shows that such a response is wrongheaded.<p>The other causes of death in this case are not relevant at all to the point, however the broader approach would advocate that the more frequent causes of death should be addressed before other less probable causes of death.</text></comment> | <story><title>You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist</title><url>http://www.cato.org/blog/youre-eight-times-more-likely-be-killed-police-officer-terrorist</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>azakai</author><text>Without some notion of absolute numbers, the comparison is pointless.<p>Last I heard, both of those causes of death are almost negligible compared to things like heart disease, cancer, and car accidents. So I have some doubt about this statement by the author<p>&gt; The point of the quote is to focus people on sources of mortality society-wide, because this focus can guide public policy efforts at reducing death.<p>With that said, yes, people are irrationally afraid of death by terrorism. But comparing that to their chance of death by cop is not illustrative. Comparing to their chance of death by traffic accident would be more relevant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danenania</author><text>It&#x27;s relevant because a vastly expanded police presence has been erected in response to terrorism, but police are statistically more dangerous to the population than terrorists.<p>If we want to stop terrorism without trading it for something worse, we need to deal with the root of the problem: an aggressive, imperialistic foreign policy that costs more that we can afford, makes us insecure, and benefits only a tiny elite.</text></comment> |
4,877,854 | 4,877,441 | 1 | 2 | 4,876,506 | train | <story><title>Git Tips And Workflows</title><url>http://durdn.com/blog/2012/12/05/git-12-curated-git-tips-and-workflows/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>Has anybody seen a "git for people who have no idea how to use git" tutorial?<p>I use git for keeping track of some personal projects, but the extent to which I understand how to use it is:<p>"git commit origin master"<p>We had a hackathon this weekend, and our team had three people on it. I wanted to make it so that they could also commit code into the same repo (I think this it the right term?), but had absolutely no idea how to actually make this happen, and googling didn't seem to give answers that were geared towards somebody with my level-of-understanding of git.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pydave</author><text>When I started with git, I really enjoyed the PeepCode Git Internals book: <a href="https://peepcode.com/products/git-internals-pdf" rel="nofollow">https://peepcode.com/products/git-internals-pdf</a><p>It's $12 (or $9 according to the preview) and the first thing it tells you to do is forget everything you know about source control. If you know SVN and want to use that knowledge to learn Git, I don't think you'd like this book. If you think knowing the underlying data model will help you be more effective with git, this book is for you.<p>The book has lots of diagrams and I thought it was pretty well written (and not too slow).<p>I use git for personal projects (not production code). Unlike many who think git is a hostile hateful thing, I think git has a brilliant command-line user interface. I don't know if this book made me that way, but I also use Vim so that might explain it (again, I disagree with the prevailing opinion of hostile hateful thing).</text></comment> | <story><title>Git Tips And Workflows</title><url>http://durdn.com/blog/2012/12/05/git-12-curated-git-tips-and-workflows/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>Has anybody seen a "git for people who have no idea how to use git" tutorial?<p>I use git for keeping track of some personal projects, but the extent to which I understand how to use it is:<p>"git commit origin master"<p>We had a hackathon this weekend, and our team had three people on it. I wanted to make it so that they could also commit code into the same repo (I think this it the right term?), but had absolutely no idea how to actually make this happen, and googling didn't seem to give answers that were geared towards somebody with my level-of-understanding of git.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xxbondsxx</author><text>There is always:<p><a href="http://try.github.com" rel="nofollow">http://try.github.com</a><p>For an interactive tutorial on adding files and the like. It gives a pretty file-centric view of the whole operation though... I'm working on a branch-centric tutorial here:<p><a href="http://petercottle.com/gitGraph/src/index.html?demo" rel="nofollow">http://petercottle.com/gitGraph/src/index.html?demo</a><p>But it's not done yet (levels in the works)</text></comment> |
4,545,893 | 4,545,911 | 1 | 2 | 4,545,625 | train | <story><title>Kaspersky researcher cracks Flame malware password</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/091812-kaspersky-flame-262531.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xal</author><text>&#62; The hash - 27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa - was resolved to the plain text password 900gage!@# by Bestuzhev.<p>What? How did they crack this if brute force failed? That's scary as hell.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>miles</author><text>Not only that: "<i>Kaspersky analyst Dmitry Bestuzhev cracked the hash for the password Sept. 17 just hours after Symantec put out a public request for help</i>"<p>How is it possible to crack 900gage!@# in a few hours?</text></comment> | <story><title>Kaspersky researcher cracks Flame malware password</title><url>http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/091812-kaspersky-flame-262531.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xal</author><text>&#62; The hash - 27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa - was resolved to the plain text password 900gage!@# by Bestuzhev.<p>What? How did they crack this if brute force failed? That's scary as hell.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WestCoastJustin</author><text>Unreal that he was able to crack it so fast.. a little scary really! He might have access to precomputed password hashes in a database. For example, you create a massive password list and compute all the hashes, save them in a database, why would you compute these hashes and throw away the results each time. You might just say "select plain_text from results where hash = '27934e96d90d06818674b98bec7230fa';". Just a guess though.</text></comment> |
14,225,358 | 14,225,253 | 1 | 3 | 14,223,020 | train | <story><title>The Boring Company [video]</title><url>https://boringcompany.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickjarboe</author><text>When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won&#x27;t happen for a long time and we will have a good stretch of city living. I love cities, but having millions of people concentrated enough to be killed by a single device; this is very different world than the one humans evolved in.</text></item><item><author>mirimir</author><text>&gt; Mostly because they live&#x2F;work in areas that aren&#x27;t dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don&#x27;t want to deal with transfers.<p>Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>You&#x27;re asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live&#x2F;work in areas that aren&#x27;t dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don&#x27;t want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but ultimately, these people aren&#x27;t going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit your ideas of engineering efficiency.<p>The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?</text></item><item><author>pnathan</author><text>This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people.<p>If he&#x27;s looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.<p>edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It&#x27;s difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there&#x27;s no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can&#x27;t happen. Musk might be able to drive some significant improvements there. No idea. But tunneling itself is not a reason to knock an idea beyond the cost and geoengineering involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>obmelvin</author><text>That&#x27;s such a terrible reason not to live in a city. I don&#x27;t see how it is significantly more likely for only a single incident like that to happen. If we really have a catasophre or act of war it will likely effect larger regions than just a single city.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Boring Company [video]</title><url>https://boringcompany.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nickjarboe</author><text>When a city in America is destroyed by a nuclear explosion, Americans will re-learn why suburbia was so popular. Hopefully this won&#x27;t happen for a long time and we will have a good stretch of city living. I love cities, but having millions of people concentrated enough to be killed by a single device; this is very different world than the one humans evolved in.</text></item><item><author>mirimir</author><text>&gt; Mostly because they live&#x2F;work in areas that aren&#x27;t dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don&#x27;t want to deal with transfers.<p>Well, suburbanization was a totally dumbass move. Maybe instead of building tunnels, we could be rebuilding cities. We could be designing them to be attractive enough that people would want to live there.</text></item><item><author>whack</author><text>You&#x27;re asking the wrong question. There are over a hundred million Americans who commute long distances in their car. Mostly because they live&#x2F;work in areas that aren&#x27;t dense enough to have good last-mile public transit, and they don&#x27;t want to deal with transfers. You can lecture them all you want, but ultimately, these people aren&#x27;t going to downgrade their lifestyle just to fit your ideas of engineering efficiency.<p>The real question is: is this new solution more efficient than the current alternative of driving on the highway?</text></item><item><author>pnathan</author><text>This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people.<p>If he&#x27;s looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network.<p>edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It&#x27;s difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there&#x27;s no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can&#x27;t happen. Musk might be able to drive some significant improvements there. No idea. But tunneling itself is not a reason to knock an idea beyond the cost and geoengineering involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>Sure, maybe that was part of it. Interstates were, for sure. But then, the Soviets were building huge warheads, which could take out metro regions.</text></comment> |
33,847,548 | 33,847,319 | 1 | 2 | 33,846,723 | train | <story><title>MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot</title><url>https://futurism.com/msn-is-publishing-more-fake-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>civilized</author><text>I&#x27;m confused about what &quot;the rules&quot; are for fake news. Once we a week we go to the supermarket, and lining the checkout aisle we see tabloids peddling what seem to be obviously false celebrity gossip stories, but presented as news. This has been going on for as long as I can remember - so, at least 30 years.<p>I guess we&#x27;re supposed to be alarmed here because MSN was once not a tabloid? Not that I would know, I&#x27;ve never read it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DemocracyFTW2</author><text>Some people have been alarmed about this and did drag publishers to the courts over fake news parading as truth for much longer than three decades. That it has been having a constant presence for as long as you can think and doesn&#x27;t do harm to you personally doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not a societal problem. Car exhausts haven&#x27;t killed you in the past and have been around for ages, so... more car exhausts should be no problem, no? Especially when I choose to ignore them?</text></comment> | <story><title>MSN replaced journalists with AI publishing fake news about mermaids and Bigfoot</title><url>https://futurism.com/msn-is-publishing-more-fake-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>civilized</author><text>I&#x27;m confused about what &quot;the rules&quot; are for fake news. Once we a week we go to the supermarket, and lining the checkout aisle we see tabloids peddling what seem to be obviously false celebrity gossip stories, but presented as news. This has been going on for as long as I can remember - so, at least 30 years.<p>I guess we&#x27;re supposed to be alarmed here because MSN was once not a tabloid? Not that I would know, I&#x27;ve never read it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bombcar</author><text>Amusingly enough if you actually <i>read</i> the tabloids (or at least decades ago this was true) they often were just reprints of actual small-time news stories; the tabloids basically made the front cover out of &quot;Bob in Bobville said what his brother done got et by a hornytoad&quot;.</text></comment> |
31,549,865 | 31,549,877 | 1 | 3 | 31,549,199 | train | <story><title>Apple’s hidden flight tracker app</title><url>https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-hidden-flight-tracker-app-397982fcc0d</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ronyfadel</author><text>Made me smile :D
The person who made this at Apple worked on this directly in front of me.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s hidden flight tracker app</title><url>https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-hidden-flight-tracker-app-397982fcc0d</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>peanut_worm</author><text>I feel like Apple has a hard time making all of the features of their products easily discoverable.</text></comment> |
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