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14,811,877 | 14,811,854 | 1 | 2 | 14,810,014 | train | <story><title>Writing code with multiple overlapping side effects with a straight face</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170719-00/?p=96645</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I wonder if the first one was meant to be<p><pre><code> a -= a * a;
</code></pre>
which evolved from<p><pre><code> a *= a;
</code></pre>
after the author thought &quot;I need to subtract its square from itself, not just square it&quot;. I can see how this could occur in numerical code.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed there are two opposing schools of thought on issues of &quot;insane code&quot; like this; on one side there&#x27;s &quot;use the language to the fullest if it makes sense to&quot;, and on the other is &quot;avoid anything that might be the slightest bit confusing&quot;. I think that taking either of those to their logical conclusion is not a good idea --- in the former case, you&#x27;ll end up with extremely dense and (initially) difficult-to-understand code, but the latter case will cause a gradual degradation of code into something approaching the verbosity of Asm, but with none of the benefits (e.g. &quot;ternary operators are confusing, don&#x27;t use them; multiple levels of precedence are confusing, so always fully parenthesise expressions; nested parentheses are hard to read, so don&#x27;t use them either and only do one operation per statement; boolean expressions are confusing, so always use if&#x2F;else; nested if&#x2F;else are confusing, so don&#x27;t nest and always refactor to use a function call, etc. etc.)<p>It does seem that different languages vary in where they are on this scale, with more &quot;exotic&quot; ones like APL tending highly towards the former (interesting related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13565743" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13565743</a> ) and C#&#x2F;Java towards the latter. The ideal is probably somewhere in the middle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metaobject</author><text>&quot;I&#x27;ve noticed there are two opposing schools of thought on issues of &quot;insane code&quot; like this; on one side there&#x27;s &quot;use the language to the fullest if it makes sense to&quot;, and on the other is &quot;avoid anything that might be the slightest bit confusing&quot;.<p>This is a false dichotomy. How about &quot;use the language to it&#x27;s fullest, within reason (avoiding things like multiple side effects per source line), but when non-obvious code is written, document it.&quot;<p>At least, I&#x27;d say that describes my approach.</text></comment> | <story><title>Writing code with multiple overlapping side effects with a straight face</title><url>https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170719-00/?p=96645</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>userbinator</author><text>I wonder if the first one was meant to be<p><pre><code> a -= a * a;
</code></pre>
which evolved from<p><pre><code> a *= a;
</code></pre>
after the author thought &quot;I need to subtract its square from itself, not just square it&quot;. I can see how this could occur in numerical code.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed there are two opposing schools of thought on issues of &quot;insane code&quot; like this; on one side there&#x27;s &quot;use the language to the fullest if it makes sense to&quot;, and on the other is &quot;avoid anything that might be the slightest bit confusing&quot;. I think that taking either of those to their logical conclusion is not a good idea --- in the former case, you&#x27;ll end up with extremely dense and (initially) difficult-to-understand code, but the latter case will cause a gradual degradation of code into something approaching the verbosity of Asm, but with none of the benefits (e.g. &quot;ternary operators are confusing, don&#x27;t use them; multiple levels of precedence are confusing, so always fully parenthesise expressions; nested parentheses are hard to read, so don&#x27;t use them either and only do one operation per statement; boolean expressions are confusing, so always use if&#x2F;else; nested if&#x2F;else are confusing, so don&#x27;t nest and always refactor to use a function call, etc. etc.)<p>It does seem that different languages vary in where they are on this scale, with more &quot;exotic&quot; ones like APL tending highly towards the former (interesting related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13565743" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13565743</a> ) and C#&#x2F;Java towards the latter. The ideal is probably somewhere in the middle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chii</author><text>&gt; a gradual degradation of code into something approaching the verbosity of Asm<p>there&#x27;s a simple rule of thumb - if you can&#x27;t immediately and unabmiguously deskcheck the expression as it is written, it&#x27;s too complicated and should be simplified.</text></comment> |
40,909,320 | 40,909,593 | 1 | 2 | 40,907,933 | train | <story><title>No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead</title><url>https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta8645</author><text>The Linux kernel does not require an initramfs. You can build a kernel with everything compiled in; with no modules needed at all. Initramfs is used for generic kernels where you don&#x27;t know beforehand which features will be required. This allows you to avoid wasting RAM on features you don&#x27;t use. But it is optional.</text></item><item><author>drewg123</author><text>I personally think they&#x27;re moving in the wrong direction. I&#x27;d rather have &quot;NMIRFS&quot; (no more initramfs). Eg, a smarter bootloader that understands all bootable filesystems and cooperates with the kernel to pre-load modules needed for boot and obviates the need for initramfs.<p>FreeBSD&#x27;s loader does this, and its so much easier to deal with. Eg, it understands ZFS, and can pre-load storage driver modules and zfs.ko for the kernel, so that the kernel has everything it needs to boot up. It also understands module dependencies, and will preload all modules that are needed for a module you specify (similar to modprobe).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drewg123</author><text>I realize that. But every distro I&#x27;ve used uses an initramfs, so unless you want to build your own kernels, you&#x27;re stuck with it, and the painfully slow initramfs updates when you update packages, and dkms (or similar) updates the initramfs with the newer version of your out-of-tree modules.</text></comment> | <story><title>No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead</title><url>https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ta8645</author><text>The Linux kernel does not require an initramfs. You can build a kernel with everything compiled in; with no modules needed at all. Initramfs is used for generic kernels where you don&#x27;t know beforehand which features will be required. This allows you to avoid wasting RAM on features you don&#x27;t use. But it is optional.</text></item><item><author>drewg123</author><text>I personally think they&#x27;re moving in the wrong direction. I&#x27;d rather have &quot;NMIRFS&quot; (no more initramfs). Eg, a smarter bootloader that understands all bootable filesystems and cooperates with the kernel to pre-load modules needed for boot and obviates the need for initramfs.<p>FreeBSD&#x27;s loader does this, and its so much easier to deal with. Eg, it understands ZFS, and can pre-load storage driver modules and zfs.ko for the kernel, so that the kernel has everything it needs to boot up. It also understands module dependencies, and will preload all modules that are needed for a module you specify (similar to modprobe).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>linsomniac</author><text>Is anyone really wanting to get back into the business of building their own kernels? I started using Linux heavily in &#x27;92, and I&#x27;ve built a lot of kernels, and am quite happy to not be building them anymore.</text></comment> |
3,212,503 | 3,211,286 | 1 | 3 | 3,210,836 | train | <story><title>Why the world of scientific research needs to be disrupted</title><url>http://gigaom.com/2011/10/31/why-the-world-of-scientific-research-needs-to-be-disrupted/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mironathetin</author><text>Two comments:<p>1.
Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication. As long as the reviewers don't signal white smoke, a publication is no science by definition. This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickly published junk that stirs the world but is found to be inaccurate later.<p>Can we accelerate the process of peer reviewing? I doubt that. As I have written, the reviewers are other scientists who have to find the time to read and comment new articles. The more time they spend with this, the less time they spend doing research. So the small amount of experts usually is responsible for being slow.<p>You may be quicker by internet publishing, if (IF!) you work on a highly dynamic field where other scientists are hungry for your results. As the author writes, this is the exception. Most scientific results will be useful only a long time after the publication, if they will be useful at all. In this way, science is much faster than application already.<p>2. The author writes, we could make progress faster. Please: why? It seems to be a sign of the time that we want to accelerate everything. It is most likely that this will only produce more noise. We need to slow down our lives and our thinking to stay accurate and produce real value. I am glad that science results, at least in my field, are still reliably scrutinized by many. This way I know that reading and spending the time to understand the stuff is worth my time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwern</author><text>Why do we need the process of peer review?<p>Peer review is not robust against even low levels of collusion (<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4324v1" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4324v1</a>). Scientists who win the Nobel Prize find their <i>other</i> work suddenly being heavily cited (<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110506/full/news.2011.270.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110506/full/news.2011.270.ht...</a>), suggesting either that the community either badly failed in recognizing the work's true value or that they are now sucking up &#38; attempting to look better by the halo effect. (A mathematician once told me that often, to boost a paper's acceptance chance, they would add citations to papers by the journal's editors - a practice that will surprise none familiar with Goodhart's law and the use of citations in tenure &#38; grants.)<p>Physicist Michael Nielsen points out (<a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-peer-review/" rel="nofollow">http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/three-myths-about-scientific-...</a>) that peer review is historically rare (just one of Einstein's 300 papers was peer reviewed! the famous _Nature_ did not institute peer review until 1967), has been poorly studied (<a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/21/2784" rel="nofollow">http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/21/2784</a>) &#38; not shown to be effective, is nationally biased (<a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/14/1675" rel="nofollow">http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/14/1675</a>), erroneously rejects many historic discoveries (one study lists "34 Nobel Laureates whose awarded work was rejected by peer review" (<a href="http://www.canonicalscience.org/publications/canonicalsciencereports/20082.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.canonicalscience.org/publications/canonicalscienc...</a>); Horribin 1990 (<a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/263/10/1438.abstract" rel="nofollow">http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/263/10/1438.abstract</a>) lists others like the discovery of quarks), and catches only a small fraction (<a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/280/3/237" rel="nofollow">http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/280/3/237</a>) of errors. And fraud, like the one we just saw in psychology? Forget about it (<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738" rel="nofollow">http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...</a>);<p>&#62; "A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices....When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others."<p>No, peer review is not the secret sauce of science. Replication is more like it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why the world of scientific research needs to be disrupted</title><url>http://gigaom.com/2011/10/31/why-the-world-of-scientific-research-needs-to-be-disrupted/?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mironathetin</author><text>Two comments:<p>1.
Scientists publish in slow peer reviewed journals, because scientific publication has to be peer reviewed. The reviewers are a very small selection of other scientists, who are expert in the field of the publication. As long as the reviewers don't signal white smoke, a publication is no science by definition. This way of work is important to keep quality excellent. We certainly don't need more quickly published junk that stirs the world but is found to be inaccurate later.<p>Can we accelerate the process of peer reviewing? I doubt that. As I have written, the reviewers are other scientists who have to find the time to read and comment new articles. The more time they spend with this, the less time they spend doing research. So the small amount of experts usually is responsible for being slow.<p>You may be quicker by internet publishing, if (IF!) you work on a highly dynamic field where other scientists are hungry for your results. As the author writes, this is the exception. Most scientific results will be useful only a long time after the publication, if they will be useful at all. In this way, science is much faster than application already.<p>2. The author writes, we could make progress faster. Please: why? It seems to be a sign of the time that we want to accelerate everything. It is most likely that this will only produce more noise. We need to slow down our lives and our thinking to stay accurate and produce real value. I am glad that science results, at least in my field, are still reliably scrutinized by many. This way I know that reading and spending the time to understand the stuff is worth my time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beambot</author><text>To add to that, 3. Scientists (particularly academics) should focus on a smaller number of solid, flushed-out papers rather than seeking out the minimum publishable unit. The latter seems to be a byproduct of the tenure process (IMO) and just adds noise.</text></comment> |
23,556,298 | 23,555,928 | 1 | 2 | 23,553,974 | train | <story><title>A look at the die of the 8086 processor</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2020/06/a-look-at-die-of-8086-processor.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrlonglong</author><text>You gotta love that weird segmented memory model though, to allow it to address up to 1MB of RAM using 20 lines, combining a pair of 16 bit registers to generate the 20 bit address. The Motorola 680x0 was a bit saner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kabdib</author><text>I think that the face of computing would have changed quite dramatically if Intel had decided to make the x86 segment paragraph size 256 bytes (8 bits) instead of the useless 4 bits. Imagine not having a 640K (or 1MB) ceiling (without hacks like &quot;expanded&quot; or &quot;extended&quot; memory). It would not have been a big deal for Intel to do this; I&#x27;m pretty sure they could have multiplexed four more pins worth of address lines.<p>It would have given the x86 a native 24MB address space, equal to the 68000&#x27;s physically provisioned 24 bits (which is all most 68K systems supported anyway, certainly the Atari ST and the Mac).<p>For instance, in the mid 80s, VisiCorp was trying really, really hard to fit their products into 640K. They had some whizzy stuff, but the address space problem pretty much killed them. Later, Microsoft and IBM came along, did the disgusting memory-space hacks that plagued users for a decade or more, and VisiCorp foundered.</text></comment> | <story><title>A look at the die of the 8086 processor</title><url>http://www.righto.com/2020/06/a-look-at-die-of-8086-processor.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrlonglong</author><text>You gotta love that weird segmented memory model though, to allow it to address up to 1MB of RAM using 20 lines, combining a pair of 16 bit registers to generate the 20 bit address. The Motorola 680x0 was a bit saner.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chihuahua</author><text>I wish Intel had just added some address lines and increased the price by $10 or whatever.<p>I remember writing 68k assembly code and it was very pleasant to work with. 8 address registers, 8 data registers, if you want to access memory, you just put a 32-bit address into an address register.<p>Then I read a book about 80286 assembly and though &quot;ugh this is horrible&quot; and never wrote a single line of x86 assembly code. Worrying about segments and memory models (tiny, small, medium, compact, large, huge) seemed like such a drag on programmer productivity.</text></comment> |
34,985,744 | 34,985,643 | 1 | 3 | 34,984,686 | train | <story><title>Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level</title><url>https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true&lstTestYear=2022&lstTestType=B&lstGroup=1&lstSubGroup=1&lstSchoolType=A&lstGrade=13&lstCounty=00&lstDistrict=00000&lstSchool=0000000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>If it&#x27;s &quot;normal&quot;, isn&#x27;t the conclusion then that the normal is not good?<p>The threshold is <i>extremely</i> low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn&#x27;t that they aren&#x27;t capable. It&#x27;s that the social support structures are not there.</text></item><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.<p>Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.<p>Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.” It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Why? Because they used the phrase “grade level” to describe their threshold? This metric appears to be defined as “greater than the median scoring when the metric was first established.” This years results are a little less than before the pandemic but greater than when the metric was established. It appears you can’t compare this to any other state or region, so by what measure is it “not good?”<p>The term grade level was picked to induce a sense of “not good,” because presumably the goal is 100%. But it was picked to be in the first sample less than 50%. We will never shift a metric on a presumably normal distribution that far to the right. So it’ll always look “not good.” The fact that it’s relatively stable over time means “it’s better than it was 8 years ago” and that’s about all you can really say. Given it’s seen improvement over time, albeit with slippage after the pandemic, that seems pretty excellent.</text></comment> | <story><title>Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level</title><url>https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true&lstTestYear=2022&lstTestType=B&lstGroup=1&lstSubGroup=1&lstSchoolType=A&lstGrade=13&lstCounty=00&lstDistrict=00000&lstSchool=0000000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>If it&#x27;s &quot;normal&quot;, isn&#x27;t the conclusion then that the normal is not good?<p>The threshold is <i>extremely</i> low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn&#x27;t that they aren&#x27;t capable. It&#x27;s that the social support structures are not there.</text></item><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.<p>Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.<p>Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.” It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>singlow</author><text>If nearly 50% of people perform below average is that bad?</text></comment> |
21,853,068 | 21,853,125 | 1 | 2 | 21,851,457 | train | <story><title>Normal 1: what normal maps are and how they work</title><url>https://www.artstation.com/typhen/blog/GMyG/this-is-normal-1-what-normal-maps-are-and-how-they-work</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jedimastert</author><text>Subtle (or I guess just more technical) distinction to make: the red, green, and blue components of a particular pixel in a normal maps are the &quot;x&quot;, &quot;y&quot;, and &quot;z&quot; components of the normal vector, where &quot;z&quot; is defined as the tangent to the plane the image is taken from, and x and y are relative to the image.<p>It&#x27;s basically the same thing, but might help if you&#x27;re more familiar with vector&#x2F;matrix math</text></comment> | <story><title>Normal 1: what normal maps are and how they work</title><url>https://www.artstation.com/typhen/blog/GMyG/this-is-normal-1-what-normal-maps-are-and-how-they-work</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ehnto</author><text>I&#x27;m an &quot;enterprisey&quot; software developer and have tried a few times to make a game by myself. When it comes to putting software and math to work, I&#x27;ve never been more impressed than with graphics rendering pipelines. It&#x27;s a realm of software I&#x27;m not sure I will ever dive into, just marvel from afar. I &quot;get&quot; a lot of the techniques on a conceptual level, but I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ll ever grok the code that pulls it off without spending much more time than I&#x27;m willing to commit to it.</text></comment> |
16,798,301 | 16,796,055 | 1 | 2 | 16,792,479 | train | <story><title>Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper</title><url>http://amid.fish/reproducing-deep-rl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radim</author><text><i>&quot;Switching from experimenting a lot and thinking a little to experimenting a little and thinking a lot was a key turnaround in productivity. When debugging with long iteration times, you really need to pour time into the hypothesis-forming step - thinking about what all the possibilities are, how likely they seem on their own, and how likely they seem in light of everything you’ve seen so far.&quot;</i><p>Not to glorify by-gone days, but isn&#x27;t there a certain charm to having to wait your turn to plug punch cards into a mainframe?<p>Having a &quot;single shot&quot;, with long iteration cycles, indeed does something strange to the way you approach programming and bugs and program design.<p>Anecdote: my long iteration cycles were caused by my mom restricting access to my C64. I filled page after page (paper!) with code, anxious for any chance to try it. I like to think I learned something during these &quot;mental dry runs&quot;…<p><i>On topic</i>: I wrote a rant about the &quot;Mummy Effect&quot; of trying to reproduce ML papers (which we do regularly): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rare-technologies.com&#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-between-academia-industry&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rare-technologies.com&#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-betw...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmorris</author><text>In my first programming class (1981) - FORTRAN! - we keypunched cards, handed them to a clerk to run, and waited hours for the results. We learned to be careful and to think things through. But nothing like Knuth...<p>&quot;When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s] one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a computer programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.<p>[John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.<p>And they asked him, &quot;How could you possibly do this?&quot; And he answered, &quot;When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That&#x27;s how I learned to program.&quot; [0]<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.softpanorama.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Knuth&#x2F;index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.softpanorama.org&#x2F;People&#x2F;Knuth&#x2F;index.shtml</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper</title><url>http://amid.fish/reproducing-deep-rl</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Radim</author><text><i>&quot;Switching from experimenting a lot and thinking a little to experimenting a little and thinking a lot was a key turnaround in productivity. When debugging with long iteration times, you really need to pour time into the hypothesis-forming step - thinking about what all the possibilities are, how likely they seem on their own, and how likely they seem in light of everything you’ve seen so far.&quot;</i><p>Not to glorify by-gone days, but isn&#x27;t there a certain charm to having to wait your turn to plug punch cards into a mainframe?<p>Having a &quot;single shot&quot;, with long iteration cycles, indeed does something strange to the way you approach programming and bugs and program design.<p>Anecdote: my long iteration cycles were caused by my mom restricting access to my C64. I filled page after page (paper!) with code, anxious for any chance to try it. I like to think I learned something during these &quot;mental dry runs&quot;…<p><i>On topic</i>: I wrote a rant about the &quot;Mummy Effect&quot; of trying to reproduce ML papers (which we do regularly): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rare-technologies.com&#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-between-academia-industry&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rare-technologies.com&#x2F;mummy-effect-bridging-gap-betw...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ssivark</author><text>As they say, <i>a few days in the laboratory might save a few hours in the library!</i><p>Alternately, <i>a few days of doing might save a few hours of thinking.</i> :-)</text></comment> |
31,014,732 | 31,013,782 | 1 | 2 | 31,013,326 | train | <story><title>Show HN: I made a website to search for half loaves of bread</title><url>https://halfloafnear.me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curiousfab</author><text>Realizing that you can put bread in the freezer changed my life - well, at least my bread buying habits ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trgn</author><text>We&#x27;d always eat frozen bread at my grandma&#x27;s. She&#x27;d buy a new loaf, pull an old one out of the freezer, and put the new one in. I don&#x27;t think we ever had a fresh slice of bread there. I love this memory for some reason.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: I made a website to search for half loaves of bread</title><url>https://halfloafnear.me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>curiousfab</author><text>Realizing that you can put bread in the freezer changed my life - well, at least my bread buying habits ;-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>luxurytent</author><text>Yup. I&#x27;ve been making my own bread for ~4 years, mainly due to family. When I know I have a busy week ahead or travelling, I make two loaves that weekend and freeze one. Family gets good sourdough bread, and the toast from frozen is in no way noticeably different.</text></comment> |
8,258,853 | 8,258,612 | 1 | 2 | 8,258,266 | train | <story><title>Email will last forever</title><url>http://blog.frontapp.com/email-will-last-forever/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>liotier</author><text>No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drfritznunkie</author><text>Whitfield Diffie (yes, of Diffie-Hellman), just posted to the IP list an email he pulled up from 1976(!) in response to a crappy article about VA Shiva Ayyadura &quot;inventing&quot; email. I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;s got even older emails, but the fact that he had it, was able to easily find it, and then resend it with a descendant of itself 38 years later is pretty amazing to me!<p>&quot;
A quick look at my files finds messages from from 1976 that use that format:<p><pre><code> 29-SEP-76 1935 FTP:CERF at USC-ISI Data Communication Conference&#x2F; Sept 1977
Date: 29 SEP 1976 1802-PDT
From: CERF at USC-ISI
Subject: Data Communication Conference&#x2F; Sept 1977
To: walker
cc: cerf, wd at SU-AI
22-AUG-76 0857 FTP:LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10 MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER
Date: 22 Aug 1976 (Sunday) 1155-Est
From: LEFAIVRE at RUTGERS-10
Subject: MORE ON THE LISP COMPILER
To: DIFFIE at SU-AI
</code></pre>
so I don&#x27;t see how this can be novel in 1978.<p><pre><code> Whit</code></pre>
&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Email will last forever</title><url>http://blog.frontapp.com/email-will-last-forever/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>liotier</author><text>No one mentions portability, but I believe it is a wonderful property of email - I have more than 15 years of email, moved across various servers and clients on various operating systems and it is still available and functional. What other personal communication channel is that resilient to technological change ?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnchristopher</author><text>Tongue in cheeck: paper is.</text></comment> |
17,105,452 | 17,104,866 | 1 | 3 | 17,102,981 | train | <story><title>How to Come Up with Profitable Business Ideas</title><url>https://www.indiehackers.com/round-table/how-to-come-up-with-profitable-online-business-ideas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MattRogish</author><text>For a B2B SaaS company, the easiest&#x2F;most likely[1] algorithm to succeed[2]:<p>1) Be embedded in the industry for a while<p>2) Make lots of connections, build credibility<p>3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #1<p>4) Sell to the folks you know from #2<p>5) For bonus points&#x2F;de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you&#x27;ve got an MVP built.<p>[1] Clearly this is not the <i>only</i> way to be successful, but &quot;I have a random idea lemme build it&quot; is a great way to be not successful<p>[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and&#x2F;or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ggg9990</author><text>This is exactly the recipe I used and sold a company for $10m. Also, I am a absolutely terrible programmer and v1 of the product, with which this recipe was executed, was full of copy pasted code, unhashed passwords, all of the hallmarks of terrible programming. I got to $100,000 revenue before a friend of mine joined who actually knew how to program and rewrote the whole thing (literally zero lines of my original code were preserved).</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Come Up with Profitable Business Ideas</title><url>https://www.indiehackers.com/round-table/how-to-come-up-with-profitable-online-business-ideas</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MattRogish</author><text>For a B2B SaaS company, the easiest&#x2F;most likely[1] algorithm to succeed[2]:<p>1) Be embedded in the industry for a while<p>2) Make lots of connections, build credibility<p>3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #1<p>4) Sell to the folks you know from #2<p>5) For bonus points&#x2F;de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you&#x27;ve got an MVP built.<p>[1] Clearly this is not the <i>only</i> way to be successful, but &quot;I have a random idea lemme build it&quot; is a great way to be not successful<p>[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and&#x2F;or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thelastidiot</author><text>&quot; but &quot;I have a random idea lemme build it&quot; is a great way to be not successful&quot;<p>I should print this and frame it in my home office. You rock!</text></comment> |
33,972,402 | 33,972,939 | 1 | 3 | 33,971,431 | train | <story><title>Bipartisan Legislation to Ban TikTok</title><url>https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/12/rubio-gallagher-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-ban-tiktok</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Because China is not a good example to follow. It is a dystopian state with full control of what their citizens have access to. Why would you want to have your government to choose the apps for you?</text></item><item><author>philjohn</author><text>US Tech firms products are largely banned in China, closing off a market of 1bn+ - why should Chinese firms have unfettered access to the US?</text></item><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Why not regulate how the data is used or stored, like the EU does, but ban?<p>I&#x27;m really hoping this doesn&#x27;t become a reality because if it does, we will end up with partitioned internet and stagnation.<p>People often forget that the US companies are foreign entity for most of the worlds population and with the WikiLeaks revelations we know for a fact that the US government has access to the data of American tech companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AlbertCory</author><text>Ah, it&#x27;s the old slippery-slope argument again.<p>I&#x27;m fine with banning all apps from countries that require their app-makers to share data with the government. If that requires an international treaty to codify when a company must share data (e.g. only with a criminal warrant), then great, let&#x27;s do that.<p>China would refuse to sign that treaty? Even better.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bipartisan Legislation to Ban TikTok</title><url>https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2022/12/rubio-gallagher-introduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-ban-tiktok</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Because China is not a good example to follow. It is a dystopian state with full control of what their citizens have access to. Why would you want to have your government to choose the apps for you?</text></item><item><author>philjohn</author><text>US Tech firms products are largely banned in China, closing off a market of 1bn+ - why should Chinese firms have unfettered access to the US?</text></item><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Why not regulate how the data is used or stored, like the EU does, but ban?<p>I&#x27;m really hoping this doesn&#x27;t become a reality because if it does, we will end up with partitioned internet and stagnation.<p>People often forget that the US companies are foreign entity for most of the worlds population and with the WikiLeaks revelations we know for a fact that the US government has access to the data of American tech companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>onlyrealcuzzo</author><text>When you make up 25% of the global population - it&#x27;s pretty hard for companies to compete when 25% of the global market is locked out.<p>The idea that we can allow China to ban all non-Chinese companies and then let Chinese companies &quot;freely compete&quot; with other global companies is insane, and I&#x27;m not sure why it&#x27;s been going on for 30 years.<p>I guess because China was starting from so far behind that it took 20+ years for any Chinese companies to get to a point they are literal threats to western companies.<p>If we follow down this path of allowing China to gate access to 25% of the world and having our companies compete with theirs - there will mostly only be Chinese companies left...<p>That sounds infinitely more dystopian to me.</text></comment> |
27,477,821 | 27,477,660 | 1 | 2 | 27,477,022 | train | <story><title>Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is an extremely solved problem. Unless you have a dramatically interesting solution to the real hard problem, global account <i>recovery</i>, ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that&#x27;s how you reset a login. Since you&#x27;re doing that already, &quot;Sign in with Google&quot; and &quot;Sign in with Apple&quot; are perfectly cromulent solutions and likely to continue dominating.<p>The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.<p>Meanwhile, the real market for Internet SSO is at companies, and one of the major reasons companies deploy SSO is to have policy control (particularly: onboard and offboarding) of who has access to what. A globally distributed authentication fabric is actually an anti-feature for those people.<p>The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn&#x27;t control absolutely.<p>Part of what&#x27;s happening with ideas like this, and the reason Internet identity has been such a tar pit for the last 20 years, is that there isn&#x27;t one single service model for identity. Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mondoveneziano</author><text>&gt; The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.<p>This is generally a concern I have about blockchain technology. What if it succeeds in its goal to play a major role in some sector, and something immensely important becomes attached to it.<p>Mistakes happen. Both by humans and by computers. Software having bugs, hardware failing, bits randomly changing in RAM, are all obvious and commonplace. Mitigations exist (ECC, signatures...), but never along the whole chain. For example, BTC addresses might have checksums, but if the wrong row in a database deciding the address is selected in the first place, through human, software, or hardware error, that will not matter.<p>Do we want to attach extremely important things to a system that is by design irreversible?</text></comment> | <story><title>Ethereum community has solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On</title><url>https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133086367751</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is an extremely solved problem. Unless you have a dramatically interesting solution to the real hard problem, global account <i>recovery</i>, ordinary home users are effectively tethered to their email accounts, because that&#x27;s how you reset a login. Since you&#x27;re doing that already, &quot;Sign in with Google&quot; and &quot;Sign in with Apple&quot; are perfectly cromulent solutions and likely to continue dominating.<p>The actual last thing in the world home users want is an authentication system where credential loss is literally irrevocable.<p>Meanwhile, the real market for Internet SSO is at companies, and one of the major reasons companies deploy SSO is to have policy control (particularly: onboard and offboarding) of who has access to what. A globally distributed authentication fabric is actually an anti-feature for those people.<p>The actual last thing in the world corporate users want is an authentication system their IT department doesn&#x27;t control absolutely.<p>Part of what&#x27;s happening with ideas like this, and the reason Internet identity has been such a tar pit for the last 20 years, is that there isn&#x27;t one single service model for identity. Internet identity evangelists tend to overlook the fact that people have multiple identities on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonplackett</author><text>Anyone else wondering what cromulent means: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;words-at-play&#x2F;what-does-cromulent-mean" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;words-at-play&#x2F;what-does-crom...</a></text></comment> |
18,292,761 | 18,292,478 | 1 | 3 | 18,290,256 | train | <story><title>Richard Stallman Has Announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines</title><url>https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orsenthil</author><text>&lt;pre&gt;
Rather than trying to have the last word, look for the times when there is no need to reply, perhaps because you already made the relevant point clear enough. If you know something about the game of Go, this analogy might clarify that: when the opponent&#x27;s move is not strong enough to require a direct response, it is advantageous to give it none and instead move elsewhere.
&lt;&#x2F;pre&gt;<p>I had to deal with someone who thought that having the last word is &quot;a thing&quot;. So, he will never give up on any discussion without adding a last reply. It is hard to deal with such people.<p>On the game of go, can someone illustrate how it is advantageous to not have the last word?<p>Also, I am not sure if this example will convince a last-word-wrong-doer, they are in for an emotional satisfaction, not a rational one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fusiongyro</author><text>I&#x27;m a beginner at Go but I think it is fascinating and full of real-life lessons like this.<p>In general, strong play has a lot of forcing moves that demand responses. Being obsessed with having the last word is akin to allowing the other player to dictate when and where you will play, which is a substantial advantage for the other player. Go is won by area, not capture, so often a weak-looking sketch of territory is more effective than a lot of direct squabbling over little stones.<p>It&#x27;s also easy to overplay. Being greedy is a good way to lose everything in Go. So a good game can have the flavor of a negotiation. There are even a lot of standard trades that aim for equality between the players.</text></comment> | <story><title>Richard Stallman Has Announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines</title><url>https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>orsenthil</author><text>&lt;pre&gt;
Rather than trying to have the last word, look for the times when there is no need to reply, perhaps because you already made the relevant point clear enough. If you know something about the game of Go, this analogy might clarify that: when the opponent&#x27;s move is not strong enough to require a direct response, it is advantageous to give it none and instead move elsewhere.
&lt;&#x2F;pre&gt;<p>I had to deal with someone who thought that having the last word is &quot;a thing&quot;. So, he will never give up on any discussion without adding a last reply. It is hard to deal with such people.<p>On the game of go, can someone illustrate how it is advantageous to not have the last word?<p>Also, I am not sure if this example will convince a last-word-wrong-doer, they are in for an emotional satisfaction, not a rational one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nrobinaubertin</author><text>In the game of go, if your opponent plays a weak attack move that you can ignore, you basically have won a turn (by playing elsewhere).
If he tries to invade your territory and doesn&#x27;t realize that he cannot create a living group inside it, it&#x27;s just like he gave you a prisoner.</text></comment> |
18,790,607 | 18,789,398 | 1 | 2 | 18,789,071 | train | <story><title>CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets</title><url>https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1079144491238469638</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CydeWeys</author><text>I was visiting my SO&#x27;s parents in Portland for the holidays when this happened. Their cable TV stopped working for at least two days and we all got an emergency services text with the local emergency number because 911 wasn&#x27;t going to work. (At least their Internet through CenturyLink remained working.)<p>This also happened to coincide with them receiving a notice of a $50&#x2F;month increase on their bill from CenturyLink, as well as my SO giving them a Roku for the holidays and setting them up with streaming services, which they got lots of practice using in the two whole days the cable TV didn&#x27;t work.<p>Guess who&#x27;s cutting the cord and switching to Internet-only service from Verizon FIOS at a much cheaper rate now?<p>This is what happens when you treat IT like a cost center and don&#x27;t provide the necessary funds to tackle technical debt and keep your services up and running: You get huge costly outages revealing your basic incompetence and customers fleeing to superior competitors forever.</text></comment> | <story><title>CenturyLink 911 outage was caused by a single network card sending bad packets</title><url>https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1079144491238469638</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carlsborg</author><text>How does a single network card emitting bad packets effect other sites?<p>&gt; investigations into the logs, including packet captures, was occurring in tandem, which ultimately identified a suspected card issue in Denver, CO. Field Operations were dispatched to remove the card. Once removed, it did not appear there had been significant improvement; however, the logs were further scrutinized .. to identify that the source packet did originate from this card.<p>&gt; Support shifted focus to the application of strategic polling filters along with the continued efforts to remove the secondary communication channels between select nodes.<p>And then<p>&gt; By 2:30 GMT on December 29, it was confirmed that the impacted IP, Voice, and Ethernet Access services were once again operational. Point-to-point Transport Waves as well as Ethernet Private Lines were still experiencing issues as multiple Optical Carrier Groups (OCG) were still out of service.<p>And finally<p>&gt; The CenturyLink network is not at risk of reoccurrence due to the placement of the poling filters and the removal of the secondary communication routes between select nodes.<p>Looks like the root cause analysis has a way to go. Addendum says:<p>&gt; The CenturyLink network continued to rebroadcast the invalid packets through the redundant (secondary) communication routes.. These invalid frame packets did not have a source, destination, or expiration and were cleared out of the network via the application of the polling filters and removal of the secondary communication paths between specific nodes. <i></i><i></i>The management card has been sent to the equipment vendor where extensive forensic analysis will occur regarding the underlying cause, how the packets were introduced in this particular manner.<i></i><i></i> The card has not been replaced and will not be until the vendor review is supplied. There is no increased network risk with leaving it unseated. <i></i><i>At this time, there is no indication that there was maintenance work on the card, software, or adjacent equipment.</i><i></i> The CenturyLink network is not at risk of reoccurrence due to the placement of the poling filters and the removal of the secondary communication routes between select nodes.</text></comment> |
18,548,825 | 18,548,523 | 1 | 2 | 18,547,745 | train | <story><title>Two Cybercrime Rings and Eight Defendants Indicted for Digital Advertising Fraud</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-international-cybercriminal-rings-dismantled-and-eight-defendants-indicted-causing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcampbell1</author><text>The interesting thing about ad fraud is the people that lose have no ability to police the problem. Ad networks get paid for fraud. Intelligent ad buyers that use cost-per-acquisition targeting, don&#x27;t care because they just bid lower if the traffic is a mix of fraud.<p>The losers are unsophisticated ad buyers such as the brand advertisers that use ad agencies to fill their ads with garbage traffic. Proctor and Gamble has recently figured that internet display is pretty much worthless. The other losers are legit publishers. I am perfectly happy to pay $0.50 a click with half the traffic being fraud, as I am willing to pay $1.00 a click for legit traffic from legit publishers. I get the same result, buy my money gets split 50&#x2F;50 between legit publishers and crooks.<p>I am mostly a dev, but have bought more than $1M in advertising on multiple platforms. The biggest joke I have ever seen was AppNexus. It was like 70% or more fraud, and it was the most obvious crap imaginable. For instance, all clicks coming from 8 month old user agents for evergreen browsers.<p>Google Adwords and Double Click have been mostly clean. I&#x27;d say 85-90%. I do see stuff that is obvious bullshit from time to time, and it goes away pretty quickly and but Google doesn&#x27;t refund the money. I don&#x27;t really care... they make it so we can police it pretty well. Facebook ads are completely clean, but they don&#x27;t run a network.<p>The simple rule for picking a ad platform is: if it isn&#x27;t loaded with performance advertisers (CPA), then stay the hell away.</text></comment> | <story><title>Two Cybercrime Rings and Eight Defendants Indicted for Digital Advertising Fraud</title><url>https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-international-cybercriminal-rings-dismantled-and-eight-defendants-indicted-causing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cal5k</author><text>The most interesting part for me:
&quot;Furthermore, the defendants leased more than 650,000 Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, assigned multiple IP addresses to each datacenter server, and then fraudulently registered those IP addresses to make it appear that that the datacenter servers were residential computers belonging to individual human internet users who were subscribed to various residential internet service providers.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s... really smart. A lot of companies use services like MaxMind to do this. I wonder how difficult it is to get a GeoIP data correction request approved:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.maxmind.com&#x2F;geoip-data-correction-request&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.maxmind.com&#x2F;geoip-data-correction-request&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
21,406,118 | 21,405,300 | 1 | 2 | 21,401,198 | train | <story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdfellow</author><text>I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.</text></item><item><author>WrtCdEvrydy</author><text>I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.</text></item><item><author>drblast</author><text>Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine.<p>I know what I&#x27;m doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don&#x27;t have to. But it has the enviable property of &quot;no server administration required&quot; which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA.<p>The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.<p>But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ako</author><text>Maybe you can use Access as the front end to SQLite?<p>During my internship 25 years ago I build a system to register aircraft accidents and near accidents. This system used access 1.0 (Windows 3.1) as the front end, storing the data in Oracle 6, I think connected through Odbc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die</title><url>https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdfellow</author><text>I wonder how much effort it would take to build a desktop application providing a similar user experience to Access, using SQLite.</text></item><item><author>WrtCdEvrydy</author><text>I wonder if sqlite could become this in the future.</text></item><item><author>drblast</author><text>Huh, similar story here. The nuclear department on my carrier needed to produce this monthly report for training hours that would take them a ton of manual effort. There was no budget at all for any kind of automation but Access was on every machine.<p>I know what I&#x27;m doing with databases. I never want to use Access if I don&#x27;t have to. But it has the enviable property of &quot;no server administration required&quot; which meant that we could backup the DB to a shared drive and people after me could modify the thing without being a DBA.<p>The amount of time that database saved really is mind-boggling.</text></item><item><author>jotakami</author><text>A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.<p>But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_AzMoo</author><text>Why would you do that though? The underlying database technology is not really one of the problems access has.</text></comment> |
31,089,811 | 31,089,667 | 1 | 2 | 31,087,262 | train | <story><title>Leaked Game Boy emulators for Switch were made by Nintendo, experts suggest</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/leaked-game-boy-emulators-for-switch-were-made-by-nintendo-experts-suggest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Firmwarrior</author><text>I learned about this when I read the book &quot;Console Wars&quot;<p>Nintendo has always been all about artificial scarcity and increasing their products&#x27; value that way, ever since the early 80s<p>If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.</text></item><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>I’ll never understand why Nintendo doesn’t do a subscription to play any old game older than say three generations.<p>Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.<p>There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.<p>You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RajT88</author><text>When you think of &quot;Playing a long game&quot; when applied to a tech company, you probably think &quot;longer than the next year&quot;. Maybe you think &quot;the next 5 years&quot;.<p>Nintendo was founded in 1889. They are for sure playing a long game measured in decades. They definitely don&#x27;t obey the same &quot;laws of physics&quot; other console manufacturers seem beholden to.<p>It&#x27;s unwise to think Nintendo is acting out of ignorance.</text></comment> | <story><title>Leaked Game Boy emulators for Switch were made by Nintendo, experts suggest</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/04/leaked-game-boy-emulators-for-switch-were-made-by-nintendo-experts-suggest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Firmwarrior</author><text>I learned about this when I read the book &quot;Console Wars&quot;<p>Nintendo has always been all about artificial scarcity and increasing their products&#x27; value that way, ever since the early 80s<p>If Nintendo put out a subscription service with 3500 games, it would de-value all those games in the long run even though it might earn more revenue for the next few years.</text></item><item><author>endisneigh</author><text>I’ll never understand why Nintendo doesn’t do a subscription to play any old game older than say three generations.<p>Nintendo is in the best position - since they never focused on specs all of their consoles are easily emulate-able.<p>There’s really no excuse. Even from a revenue perspective I’m confident they’d make more money this way. Make it so it works on any device - again Nintendo can do this because the consoles don’t require great computers to emulate.<p>You probably could run 100 gba emulators simultaneously at 120fps on a modern commodity desktop.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phatfish</author><text>There is also the issue that most of those 3500 are never going to played for more than 5 minutes and will just be there as a curiosity.<p>There are the classics still worth playing, and the cult titles that hit some nostalgia button for a significant number of people. Beyond those it&#x27;s just not worth it for Nintendo to even format a jpeg of the box art.<p>Personally I prefer a curated list with the scans of the manual and some history behind the game like they provide now. Otherwise you are in decision paralysis looking at 1000s of titles with no clue which is worth your time.<p>Them trying to ring out more money on top of the base Switch Online subscription for N64 games is my main issue. If they had not done that I would likely have subscribed again. The drip feed is a little too slow also, but I don&#x27;t have the free time anyway so it&#x27;s not a deal breaker.<p>As it stands I&#x27;ll wait for my Steam Deck and not be able to decide which ROM to play on there ;)</text></comment> |
38,279,891 | 38,279,925 | 1 | 2 | 38,279,073 | train | <story><title>Iowa teen grew 7k pounds of veggies, then gave them all away</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/11/14/iowa-teen-farmer-donate-garden/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ourmandave</author><text>A few of my co-workers have gardens and around mid-season they&#x27;ll bring in a bags and bags of vegetables they couldn&#x27;t give away to friends and family.<p>And it always seems to be squash and zucchini.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josefresco</author><text>Home vegetable gardeners are hilarious (my own family included)<p>They&#x27;re like &quot;Hey I&#x27;m going to grow some vegetables this year&quot;.<p>Then on a late summer day they&#x27;re like: &quot;So uhh yeah, I have a problem. Do you happen to need 47 pounds of squash?&quot;</text></comment> | <story><title>Iowa teen grew 7k pounds of veggies, then gave them all away</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/11/14/iowa-teen-farmer-donate-garden/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ourmandave</author><text>A few of my co-workers have gardens and around mid-season they&#x27;ll bring in a bags and bags of vegetables they couldn&#x27;t give away to friends and family.<p>And it always seems to be squash and zucchini.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jihadjihad</author><text>I grew one zucchini plant this year, it took up about 15 sqft and produced squash for weeks. I like zucchini but when you get a plant or two that is just prolific, there&#x27;s just only so many ways to cook it and only so much of it you can eat.<p>My grandparents grew 30 tomato plants and had so many that even after canning over 100 quarts of tomato sauce they still couldn&#x27;t keep up with all the tomatoes on the vines.</text></comment> |
22,786,656 | 22,786,713 | 1 | 2 | 22,786,439 | train | <story><title>Expanded access programs for Remdesivir</title><url>https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on-covid-19-from-our-chairman-and-ceo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cm2187</author><text>Stupid question in case anyone here has a medical background.<p>I was under the impression that covid19 was a two step process. First the virus infects and attacks the protective layer of the lungs (causing cough and fever). Then, the damage done to the protective layer of the lungs results in an infection &#x2F; pneumonia, and that&#x27;s where people have respiratory problems and may be in critical condition. But at this stage the viral load is low and the virus isn&#x27;t the problem anymore, the pneumonia is [1].<p>This is why I thought Pr Raoult was advocating for the use of chloroquine in the early days of the disease, combined with prompt testing.<p>But it seems that anti-virals (like the study mentioned in this post and other studies in the US and Europe) are tested on patients in critical phase, i.e. with serious cases of pneumonia. Am I missing something or should we not expect anti-virals to be of much use in those cases, as it is too late, we are not dealing with a virus but with a pneumonia?<p>[1] see this useful video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BtN-goy9VOY</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Expanded access programs for Remdesivir</title><url>https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on-covid-19-from-our-chairman-and-ceo</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aluminussoma</author><text>Remdesivir was one of the earliest promising candidates to treat covid-19 since it had promising results - in the lab - against other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. It did not have results in humans because those viruses went away before in vivo testing could be performed.<p>Will it work? If it was a runaway success, I would have expected any of the current clinical trials to be cut short as the difference between placebo and non-placebo patients would have been obvious. That hadn&#x27;t happened. I&#x27;m still hoping it has some positive effect.<p>The drug also had to administered through an IV over several days. It is not a pill you take. If it works, this makes treatment a little bit more difficult. You can&#x27;t just give patients a pill and send them home.</text></comment> |
26,026,676 | 26,025,879 | 1 | 2 | 26,024,541 | train | <story><title>A tool to create slides using Markdown easily for you</title><url>https://github.com/hiroppy/fusuma</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teknopaul</author><text>Slides that are text only distract the audience.<p>They read the text.<p>Slides that are non-self-explanatory images, _require_ the audience to listen to the speaker.<p>Try it. Put two circles on the screen and see what people do. They look at you for explanation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Complexicate</author><text>Spot on about using little to no text.<p>TedX has a pretty good style-guide about slides [1]:<p><i>What goes in my slides?</i><p>•Images and photos: To help the audience remember a person, place or thing you mention, you might use images or photos.<p>- People will understand that the images represent what you’re saying, so there is no need to verbally describe the images onscreen.<p>•Graphs and infographics<p>- Keep graphs visually clear, even if the content is complex. Each graph should make only one point.<p>•No slide should support more than one point.<p><i>What should the slides look like?</i><p>•Use as little text as possible -- if your audience is reading, they are not listening.<p>•Avoid using bullet points. Consider putting different points on different slides.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.ted.com&#x2F;tedx&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;tedx_speaker_guide.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.ted.com&#x2F;tedx&#x2F;manuals&#x2F;tedx_speaker_guide.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>A tool to create slides using Markdown easily for you</title><url>https://github.com/hiroppy/fusuma</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>teknopaul</author><text>Slides that are text only distract the audience.<p>They read the text.<p>Slides that are non-self-explanatory images, _require_ the audience to listen to the speaker.<p>Try it. Put two circles on the screen and see what people do. They look at you for explanation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cmehdy</author><text>I&#x27;ve got to reference Patrick Wilson&#x27;s &quot;How To Speak&quot; course from MIT OpenCourseWare here[0]. An hour of life well spent!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Unzc731iCUY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Unzc731iCUY</a></text></comment> |
34,627,103 | 34,627,290 | 1 | 3 | 34,623,007 | train | <story><title>C was not created as an abstract machine</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CAsAbstractMachine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>torstenvl</author><text>&gt; <i>Rather than dereferencing an invalid pointer doing &quot;whatever this CPU does&quot;, suddenly all C implementations now have to do whatever, for example, a VAX did.</i><p>Dereferencing an invalid pointer <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> do &quot;whatever this CPU does,&quot; it does completely unpredictable things. I think that&#x27;s part of the problem (to the extent it&#x27;s a problem)</text></item><item><author>Karellen</author><text>&gt; The determined refusal of the specification to tie this abstract machine in concrete CPUs is the source of a significant amount of frustration in people who would like, for example, for there to be some semantics attached to what happens when you dereference an invalid pointer. They note that actual CPUs running C code all have defined semantics, so why can&#x27;t C?<p>Because while all CPUs running C code have defined semantics for any given construct, not all CPUs have <i>the same</i> defined semantics.<p>Making C adhere to one CPU architecture for the sake of convenience would make implementations for other CPU architectures decidedly <i>inconvenient</i>. Rather than dereferencing an invalid pointer doing &quot;whatever this CPU does&quot;, suddenly all C implementations now have to do whatever, for example, a VAX did.<p>It would mean that C code running on simple CPUs without memory protection would have to look out for invalid pointer derefs (how?) and simulate access violations if one were mandated by the spec. Or, if the spec said that the address space should be treated as a flat memory area all of which is accessible by any pointer, modern implementations would have to simulate that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arnsholt</author><text>But that&#x27;s the thing: dereferencing an invalid pointer is undefined behaviour, which means the compiler is allowed to assume it never happens; a C program executing undefined behaviour is _invalid C_. Thus, any time you dereference a pointer you also implicitly proimise the compiler that this pointer will _never_ be an invalid pointer. Same with signed arithmetic: you are telling the compiler that your arithmetic is guaranteed to never overflow.<p>Whether this is a good or bad thing is of course a legitimate (and good!) question, but for writing C today that&#x27;s how the language is specced and a reality the programmer needs to take care to avoid, just like a bunch of other things that C leaves to the programmer like remembering to clean up allocated resources when they&#x27;re no longer needed.</text></comment> | <story><title>C was not created as an abstract machine</title><url>https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CAsAbstractMachine</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>torstenvl</author><text>&gt; <i>Rather than dereferencing an invalid pointer doing &quot;whatever this CPU does&quot;, suddenly all C implementations now have to do whatever, for example, a VAX did.</i><p>Dereferencing an invalid pointer <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> do &quot;whatever this CPU does,&quot; it does completely unpredictable things. I think that&#x27;s part of the problem (to the extent it&#x27;s a problem)</text></item><item><author>Karellen</author><text>&gt; The determined refusal of the specification to tie this abstract machine in concrete CPUs is the source of a significant amount of frustration in people who would like, for example, for there to be some semantics attached to what happens when you dereference an invalid pointer. They note that actual CPUs running C code all have defined semantics, so why can&#x27;t C?<p>Because while all CPUs running C code have defined semantics for any given construct, not all CPUs have <i>the same</i> defined semantics.<p>Making C adhere to one CPU architecture for the sake of convenience would make implementations for other CPU architectures decidedly <i>inconvenient</i>. Rather than dereferencing an invalid pointer doing &quot;whatever this CPU does&quot;, suddenly all C implementations now have to do whatever, for example, a VAX did.<p>It would mean that C code running on simple CPUs without memory protection would have to look out for invalid pointer derefs (how?) and simulate access violations if one were mandated by the spec. Or, if the spec said that the address space should be treated as a flat memory area all of which is accessible by any pointer, modern implementations would have to simulate that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kps</author><text>C <i>did</i> do ‘whatever this CPU does’, and then the ANSI C committee broke that (probably by accident). That&#x27;s what the headline post is about: “Those origins of C were there first”.</text></comment> |
12,469,874 | 12,469,876 | 1 | 2 | 12,468,726 | train | <story><title>Six big economic ideas [pdf]</title><url>http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/econbriefs.pdf?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eternauta3k</author><text>If this sparks your interest in economics, I highly recommend looking at Econtalk: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives.html</a><p>I love the episodes with Mike Munger, because they usually cover basic economic concepts (and also Mike has a great rapport with the host Russ).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JackFr</author><text>Agree about EconTalk, though not as big a Mike Munger fan. (I am partial to Richard Epstein as a guest.)<p>I cannot speak more highly of the host. Among podcasts about ideas, Russ Roberts is absolutely remarkable and unique in his willingness and ability to give a good-faith, sympathetic venue for ideas with which he disagrees. While he is willing to push back against ideas he doesn&#x27;t agree with, he is always pleasant and always reminds the listener (and himself) that he is also subject to confirmation bias.<p>And while the focus is economics and public policy, he will interview nearly anyone with something to talk about. I can&#x27;t begin to list the things I&#x27;ve learned about bees, the potato chip and snack food industry, prison gangs, etc. Well worth anyone&#x27;s time.</text></comment> | <story><title>Six big economic ideas [pdf]</title><url>http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/econbriefs.pdf?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eternauta3k</author><text>If this sparks your interest in economics, I highly recommend looking at Econtalk: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econtalk.org&#x2F;archives.html</a><p>I love the episodes with Mike Munger, because they usually cover basic economic concepts (and also Mike has a great rapport with the host Russ).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>Strong agree on Econtalk. I don&#x27;t share Russ Roberts politics, but I think this is one of those cases where the ideological friction makes things better, because I&#x27;m regularly surprised by where conversations on the show go.</text></comment> |
4,378,508 | 4,378,307 | 1 | 2 | 4,377,887 | train | <story><title>Greg Kouri, PayPal co-founder, dies at 51</title><url>http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/13/2949900/greg-kouri-paypal-co-founder-dies.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>waldr</author><text>I really shocked and really saddened by this, I spoke to Greg just a few weeks ago. He had contacted me after seeing our startup featured in TWiST.<p>He was a smart, genuine guy that really cared about helping us. From what I'd picked up he was a close friend to Elon Musk and had backed him @ zip2, paypal, tesla and space x.<p>He gave us some great advice, and took a lot of time out to make intro's and give us feedback.</text></comment> | <story><title>Greg Kouri, PayPal co-founder, dies at 51</title><url>http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/13/2949900/greg-kouri-paypal-co-founder-dies.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rabble</author><text>He listed himself as an investor in PayPal on his angel list profile. <a href="https://angel.co/greg-kouri" rel="nofollow">https://angel.co/greg-kouri</a><p>As somebody who has a complicated relationship with a well known startup's founding, it's tricky to explain sometimes. Important and early roles are held by many, the title founder is tricky and often contested. What's worse the media usually has incentive to make everybody in to a 'founder'.</text></comment> |
35,379,120 | 35,376,688 | 1 | 3 | 35,370,972 | train | <story><title>How to Read MySQL EXPLAINs</title><url>https://planetscale.com/blog/how-read-mysql-explains</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>denton-scratch</author><text>My first experience with Oracle (this was a long time ago, and I suspect they didn&#x27;t even call it EXPLAIN). Anyway, I found it significantly better and clearer than the EXPLAIN output from Postgres or MySQL.<p>There was a query being emitted by the anti-fraud software of a certain well-known US bank, that was taking 45 minutes to run, which didn&#x27;t please the fraud team. This fraud team weren&#x27;t highly-paid elites; they were drudge workers, as much at risk of burnout as anyone.<p>Anyway, I was tasked with fixing this (low-importance) problem. I managed to figure out what the problem was with the query, with the help of EXPLAIN. I reconstructed the query so it ran in less than 10 seconds, and submitted the patch.<p>It took two months for the DBAs to let me add the requisite index to production. They&#x27;d given me a copy of the production database, eventually, so I could test my change, and make sure it didn&#x27;t break anything else; but they still held it back. DBAs were very anally-retentive in those days.<p>I got no credit for that (except from myself :-). I&#x27;m happy to pat myself on the back for reducing the query time from absurd to reasonable, and by a factor of 1&#x2F;270.<p>I&#x27;ve never used Oracle since, by the way; it&#x27;s always looked to me like a blind alley. But $FINCORP used to like Oracle, and the Oracle DBAs were treated like ghodz.</text></comment> | <story><title>How to Read MySQL EXPLAINs</title><url>https://planetscale.com/blog/how-read-mysql-explains</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SeanA208</author><text>What&#x27;s the best resource for the equivalent of this page but for Postgres?</text></comment> |
27,970,389 | 27,970,290 | 1 | 3 | 27,968,203 | train | <story><title>Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little</title><url>https://dankennedy.net/2020/12/09/blogging-is-dead-long-live-blogging-or-why-the-substack-hype-is-much-ado-about-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don&#x27;t want to pay $2&#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &quot;newspaper&quot;.<p>The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.<p>Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it&#x27;ll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day&#x27;s editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn&#x27;t really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.<p>An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lazare</author><text>&gt; The key issue is that people don&#x27;t want to pay $2&#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &quot;newspaper&quot;.<p>...actually, I&#x27;d *VASTLY* rather pay a small monthly fee to a small number of writers I care about, than a larger fee for a collection of writers that I don&#x27;t.<p>More to the point, I <i>am</i> doing that, and a fair number of other people are too. If baffles me to see someone advancing the argument that &quot;people don&#x27;t want to...&quot; and then listing something which people are very much currently choosing to do. Many people want to do exactly that! (Although I think we agree that the number of people is unlikely to be enough to be truly disruptive.)<p>&gt; Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate<p>Very possibly, but if so, I expect the people enjoying their current business model will simply migrate to a competitor. $5&#x2F;month for a writer I truly love is a reasonable ask. $5&#x2F;month split across six writers, only one of whom I particular care for is in many ways less attractive; I may be getting more writing but the writer is getting less.<p>Aggregation is not obviously the only business model that makes sense here, and I think Medium - and come to that, the news industry as a whole - shows off its weaknesses very clearly.<p>I think the <i>real</i> weakness of Substack is not that &quot;nobody wants what they&#x27;re selling&quot;, but that they have very little moat. Substack doesn&#x27;t need to worry that Yglesias will realise that actually he hates making more money than the entire NYT editorial board combined and quits blogging to go back to the traditional media; Substack needs to worry that he&#x27;ll jump to his own platform and avoid their fairly hefty monthly cut.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why the Substack hype is much ado about very little</title><url>https://dankennedy.net/2020/12/09/blogging-is-dead-long-live-blogging-or-why-the-substack-hype-is-much-ado-about-very-little/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dash2</author><text>Yeah, this is basically correct. The key issue is that people don&#x27;t want to pay $2&#x2F;month to twenty different writers. They want to pay $20&#x2F;month to a single organization which has a hundred writers, also known as a &quot;newspaper&quot;.<p>The logic is simple: an individual writer is always relatively niche. Niche means small audience. Small audience means you have to charge more per person to cover your costs.<p>Maybe Substack will go the Medium way and try to aggregate, or encourage its writers to aggregate. If so, then it could succeed, but it&#x27;ll succeed by becoming a newspaper. The problem is that the NYT, Guardian, Mail etc. have a lot of experience at doing aggregation well. (Each day has an appropriate mix of home, foreign, finance, and sports. The day&#x27;s editorial chimes with what the front page journalists wrote about. Long run investigations are funded in the hope of big payoffs. Et cetera.) Medium hasn&#x27;t really broken through, I think Substack would struggle.<p>An alternative is the status quo: Substack is a perfectly viable blogging tool, where aspiring journalists and writers like me [1] give away content for free, in the hope of breaking through to the next level, and where a few people make a good living. But if so Substack will fit into the existing landscape, rather than disrupting it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyclif.substack.com</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Gravityloss</author><text>I get it why readers can&#x27;t pay individual writers <i>in the newspaper world</i>. That&#x27;s because it only makes sense to print and deliver one kind of identical newspaper and deliver that to everyone. The printing is done with plates. You make one plate per page (well a few pages at a time) and you use that plate to print thousands of copies of the page. The page contains an assortment of articles. The newspaper is physically delivered to homes and news stands.<p>Now we&#x27;re in the internet. There are no such constraints. Why not just pay directly per article?<p>Spotify for example collects money but distributes it to artists, per-listen. Spotify has basically almost all the music in the world. And other services have it too. Anybody can upload to Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or what you have. So Spotify is not really doing curating or having a quality standards or an editor anything, like a newspaper, it&#x27;s just a way to collect and distribute money.<p>There is the still-unloved problem of curation. You could use humans for good curation but discoverability is quite bad.<p>(Edit: yes in the newspaper world there is the syndication, Reuters, AFP etc, too, and staff writers etc, it&#x27;s a bit more complicated.)</text></comment> |
3,244,025 | 3,243,457 | 1 | 3 | 3,243,187 | train | <story><title>Ask PG: Could we have the SOPA censorship label up on HN's logo today?</title><text>http://americancensorship.org/</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coderdude</author><text>One of the few sites where people <i>really</i> care about this issue and half the comments in this thread are people wondering why we should even bother. I'd laugh if I wasn't so disappointed in you.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask PG: Could we have the SOPA censorship label up on HN's logo today?</title><text>http://americancensorship.org/</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Achshar</author><text>if google, yahoo, ebay, reddit, mozilla, zynga, AOL, twitter, facebook, linkedIn, etc can do it then i can't see why HN (being all about dev and startup community) can't do it.</text></comment> |
13,503,019 | 13,502,656 | 1 | 3 | 13,501,762 | train | <story><title>Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/23/mac-sales-declined-nearly-10-last-year-as-lenovo-dell-and-others-gained-ground/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jclardy</author><text>Makes sense with Apple&#x27;s current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13&quot; Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13&quot; Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen.<p>The 12&quot; MacBook is there...but it is a super niche product compared to the old Air or even the old Pro. It&#x27;s performance is probably enough for most people, but at that point you could just buy a cheaper windows ultrabook and get similar or better performance for a much lower price.<p>A huge market for Apple used to be college students. Now in 2017 what Apple laptop do they buy? an underpowered MacBook, or an overpriced pro? The best solution for most is buying an older model, but part of the appeal of buying a Mac is having the &quot;latest&quot; thing.<p>Then you get to desktops...and there isn&#x27;t much to say there. Apple just doesn&#x27;t do them anymore.<p>This is coming from someone that has used a Mac for the past 10 years and is typing on a 2016 pro. It is nice, but connectivity wise it is too far ahead of its time. In 1-2 years it will be fine, but right now it is just in early adopter territory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brianolson</author><text>The world still isn&#x27;t ready for a machine with only USB-C&#x2F;thunderbolt-3. The aren&#x27;t docks good enough with the right features or port combinations. The myriad of USB-C adaptors is only barely in place, some positions in that market have only one or two options without the depth of a mature market. USB-C&#x2F;thunderbolt-3 _could be_ great, it could be the greatest docking connector yet, but until the right dock exists I shouldn&#x27;t get a new MBP because I have a dozen legacy devices on my desk to connect.
And everyone should hold off on the 12&quot; Macbook until the next revision when it gets thunderbolt-3.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/23/mac-sales-declined-nearly-10-last-year-as-lenovo-dell-and-others-gained-ground/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jclardy</author><text>Makes sense with Apple&#x27;s current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13&quot; Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13&quot; Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen.<p>The 12&quot; MacBook is there...but it is a super niche product compared to the old Air or even the old Pro. It&#x27;s performance is probably enough for most people, but at that point you could just buy a cheaper windows ultrabook and get similar or better performance for a much lower price.<p>A huge market for Apple used to be college students. Now in 2017 what Apple laptop do they buy? an underpowered MacBook, or an overpriced pro? The best solution for most is buying an older model, but part of the appeal of buying a Mac is having the &quot;latest&quot; thing.<p>Then you get to desktops...and there isn&#x27;t much to say there. Apple just doesn&#x27;t do them anymore.<p>This is coming from someone that has used a Mac for the past 10 years and is typing on a 2016 pro. It is nice, but connectivity wise it is too far ahead of its time. In 1-2 years it will be fine, but right now it is just in early adopter territory.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feross</author><text>&quot;If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer&quot; - Dominic Tarr<p>The 12&quot; Macbook is the best computer I&#x27;ve ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion.<p>The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12&quot; is that if software runs well on your computer, you <i>know</i> it&#x27;s guaranteed to run extra buttery-smooth on other computers, which all have beefier CPUs and GPUs.</text></comment> |
18,530,039 | 18,529,801 | 1 | 2 | 18,526,392 | train | <story><title>The strange postulated link between the human mind and quantum physics (2017)</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bascule</author><text>This article covered more than I was expecting, but still manages to squeeze a small amount of substance into a relatively large article. Here&#x27;s a tl;dr:<p>- Penrose and Hameroff postulate microtubules might have quantum mechanical behavior in their Orch-OR hypothesis. This hypothesis was refuted by Max Tegmark in the 90s. Penrose doesn&#x27;t care and keeps preaching his hypothesis, and has not put forth any new scientifically compelling arguments in the past 2 decades.<p>- Photosynthesis is shown to be quantum mechanical. I&#x27;m not sure quantum mechanical behavior in plants is the best argument that quantum mechanics are responsible for consciousness.<p>- Fischer hypothesizes that phosphate ions in biological cells might exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical behavior, but is wary about any link to &quot;quantum consciousness&quot;.<p>This is pretty much all of the substance of the article.<p>Even if there were a conclusively demonstrated link between quantum mechanical behavior in human cells (there isn&#x27;t), using that to argue that our brains are quantum computers and that consciousness is a fundamentally quantum phenomenon would be a huge non sequitur.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mannykannot</author><text>Furthermore: &quot;Photosynthesis is shown to be quantum mechanical&quot; - well, yes, just like everything else in physics, with the possible exception of those issues, like black holes, where gravity is dominant. The quantum-mechanical basis of chemistry has been included in high-school chemistry curricula for at least half a century, so it would be quite remarkable if photosynthesis were a exception.<p>While it is possible that the human mind has no classical-approximation explanation, the equating-of-ignorance argument, stated in the article&#x27;s subtitle, is no reason to think it is so (and quantum mechanics is much better understood than the human mind, anyway.)</text></comment> | <story><title>The strange postulated link between the human mind and quantum physics (2017)</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bascule</author><text>This article covered more than I was expecting, but still manages to squeeze a small amount of substance into a relatively large article. Here&#x27;s a tl;dr:<p>- Penrose and Hameroff postulate microtubules might have quantum mechanical behavior in their Orch-OR hypothesis. This hypothesis was refuted by Max Tegmark in the 90s. Penrose doesn&#x27;t care and keeps preaching his hypothesis, and has not put forth any new scientifically compelling arguments in the past 2 decades.<p>- Photosynthesis is shown to be quantum mechanical. I&#x27;m not sure quantum mechanical behavior in plants is the best argument that quantum mechanics are responsible for consciousness.<p>- Fischer hypothesizes that phosphate ions in biological cells might exhibit distinctly quantum mechanical behavior, but is wary about any link to &quot;quantum consciousness&quot;.<p>This is pretty much all of the substance of the article.<p>Even if there were a conclusively demonstrated link between quantum mechanical behavior in human cells (there isn&#x27;t), using that to argue that our brains are quantum computers and that consciousness is a fundamentally quantum phenomenon would be a huge non sequitur.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SubiculumCode</author><text>What do you think of this paper?<p>Nuclear Spin Attenuates the Anesthetic Potency of Xenon Isotopes in Mice: Implications for the Mechanisms of Anesthesia and Consciousness.<p><i>Xenon is an elemental anesthetic with nine stable isotopes. Nuclear spin is a quantum property which may differ among isotopes. Xenon 131 (Xe) has nuclear spin of 3&#x2F;2, xenon 129 (Xe) a nuclear spin of 1&#x2F;2, and the other seven isotopes have no nuclear spin. This study was aimed to explore the effect of nuclear spin on xenon anesthetic potency.<p>CONCLUSIONS: Xenon isotopes with nuclear spin are less potent than those without, and polarizability cannot account for the difference. The lower anesthetic potency of Xe may be the result of it participating in conscious processing and therefore partially antagonizing its own anesthetic potency. Nuclear spin is a quantum property, and our results are consistent with theories that implicate quantum mechanisms in consciousness.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29642079" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;29642079</a></text></comment> |
7,239,811 | 7,239,882 | 1 | 2 | 7,239,407 | train | <story><title>How I want to write Node: Stream all the things</title><url>http://caolanmcmahon.com/posts/how_i_want_to_write_node_stream_all_the_things_new/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ixmatus</author><text>Forgive me for being &quot;That Guy&quot; but I really think Javascript is ill-suited for this paradigm!<p>Streams, honestly, are hard to keep straight when the program gets big without a stronger type system. IMHO.<p>Some really sharp people have been working on stream computing software in Haskell for a while - Gabriel&#x27;s Pipes package is a good example of generalized stream computing with <i>strong</i> equational reasoning as its foundation.<p>Maybe if you <i>really</i> want to try and do this in Node you can gain some inspiration from his journey: <a href="http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackage.haskell.org&#x2F;package&#x2F;pipes</a></text></comment> | <story><title>How I want to write Node: Stream all the things</title><url>http://caolanmcmahon.com/posts/how_i_want_to_write_node_stream_all_the_things_new/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>glenjamin</author><text>If you&#x27;re doing Node.js, Caolan&#x27;s async library is pretty much part of the standard toolkit.<p>I know Caolan&#x27;s been thinking about this and reworking it for a while, so I&#x27;ll be interested to see whether it manages to see significant takeup.</text></comment> |
35,863,499 | 35,863,216 | 1 | 3 | 35,860,401 | train | <story><title>Canada extends copyright protection another 20 years to meet trade obligation</title><url>https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-extends-copyright-protection-another-20-years-to-meet-new-trade/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dionidium</author><text>I don&#x27;t think you need to invoke the power of evil corporations to explain why this gets so little pushback in the public discourse.<p>Matthew Yglesias did a tweet thread a while back arguing that copyright terms should be shorter and the responses were instructive. People -- regular people -- have a pretty deep intuition that if you create something, then it belongs to you -- forever. The Jeffersonian notion that copyright exists only to incentivize new works is to most folks an odd one. His mentions filled up with authors arguing that their great-grandkids should enjoy the fruits of their labor, sentiments that garnered broad support from basically everyone except copyright law nerds (like myself).</text></item><item><author>greatgib</author><text>Terrible how commercial lobbies are now able to hurt populations like that so easily to defend their own interests with very little oversight.<p>It is not like a decision of the citizens that was debated in an assembly, just we do things because they were decided in secret international meetings or corrupted politicians.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>retrac</author><text>That has not been my experience; I&#x27;ve brought up copyright a fair bit in conversations over the years (much to the chagrin of my friends, acquaintances and coworkers, I&#x27;m sure). I&#x27;ve literally never met anyone who thinks the great-grandchildren of an author should be financially compensated for their great-grandparents&#x27; work. That very scenario is usually the example I bring up -- the old &quot;If I built and installed a plumbing fixture, should my great-grandkids be able to collect licence fees on its use?&quot; analogy is persuasive. I do agree people generally think that an intellectual work created is rightfully the property of the creator -- but most don&#x27;t extend that much past death.</text></comment> | <story><title>Canada extends copyright protection another 20 years to meet trade obligation</title><url>https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-extends-copyright-protection-another-20-years-to-meet-new-trade/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dionidium</author><text>I don&#x27;t think you need to invoke the power of evil corporations to explain why this gets so little pushback in the public discourse.<p>Matthew Yglesias did a tweet thread a while back arguing that copyright terms should be shorter and the responses were instructive. People -- regular people -- have a pretty deep intuition that if you create something, then it belongs to you -- forever. The Jeffersonian notion that copyright exists only to incentivize new works is to most folks an odd one. His mentions filled up with authors arguing that their great-grandkids should enjoy the fruits of their labor, sentiments that garnered broad support from basically everyone except copyright law nerds (like myself).</text></item><item><author>greatgib</author><text>Terrible how commercial lobbies are now able to hurt populations like that so easily to defend their own interests with very little oversight.<p>It is not like a decision of the citizens that was debated in an assembly, just we do things because they were decided in secret international meetings or corrupted politicians.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WeylandYutani</author><text>Most people receive a salary. They don&#x27;t own their work. No different from the people who work at Disney studios.</text></comment> |
15,253,618 | 15,253,472 | 1 | 2 | 15,253,394 | train | <story><title>Alphabet considers Lyft investment of about $1B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/alphabet-is-said-to-consider-lyft-investment-of-about-1-billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Bahamut</author><text>It’s interesting to see Lyft doing well here - the news was quite bad for Lyft it seemed just a year ago or so, with Uber dominating headlines and in users’ minds of those inclined to use ride sharing as well as such rumors circulating such as Lyft failing to find a buyer. Fast forward after numerous gaffes on Uber’s side including the former CEO, and there seems to be a lot of good will that has shifted to Lyft. Doesn’t necessarily mean Lyft will thrive, but it looks a lot more promising than a year ago.</text></comment> | <story><title>Alphabet considers Lyft investment of about $1B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/alphabet-is-said-to-consider-lyft-investment-of-about-1-billion</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SilasX</author><text>To address the elephant in the room:<p>&gt;Alphabet is also an Uber shareholder through its GV venture capital arm, but Waymo, a unit of Alphabet, is currently suing Uber over self-driving car technology. As the relationship has deteriorated, Waymo signed a partnership with Lyft to work together on testing autonomous vehicles.</text></comment> |
20,714,959 | 20,715,053 | 1 | 2 | 20,713,886 | train | <story><title>Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet</title><url>https://fightthefuture.org/article/twitter-is-trying-to-erase-the-past/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hacknat</author><text>I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human.<p>Edit:<p>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?</text></item><item><author>romaaeterna</author><text>Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can&#x27;t just &quot;start a competitor&quot; to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai).<p>If we&#x27;re going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.<p>It&#x27;s not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.<p>EDIT:<p>Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.<p>1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.<p>2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.<p>3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.<p>4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.<p>Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter&#x27;s users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prepend</author><text>In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction.<p>I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted.<p>The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated.<p>I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;274564&#x2F;monthly-active-twitter-users-in-the-united-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;274564&#x2F;monthly-active-tw...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;47&#x2F;201" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;47&#x2F;201</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet</title><url>https://fightthefuture.org/article/twitter-is-trying-to-erase-the-past/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hacknat</author><text>I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human.<p>Edit:<p>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?</text></item><item><author>romaaeterna</author><text>Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can&#x27;t just &quot;start a competitor&quot; to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai).<p>If we&#x27;re going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.<p>It&#x27;s not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.<p>EDIT:<p>Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.<p>1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.<p>2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.<p>3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.<p>4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.<p>Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter&#x27;s users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Mirioron</author><text>Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old. People only have so much time in the day and all the other ways that people engage in politics compete with Twitter and the like. And it seems that Twitter and the like have won that competition. This means that a large chunk of political discourse now happens on services like Twitter.</text></comment> |
27,887,973 | 27,887,545 | 1 | 2 | 27,884,233 | train | <story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwalter</author><text>What I want to know is how does this issue impact the notion that we all seem to buy into that we should &quot;follow the science&quot;.<p>Scientists themselves have a hard time &quot;following the science&quot;. Add to it the observation that when an issue is getting lots of attention outside of academia, then there are usually some really strong incentives (profit, prestige) associated with doing the science and applying it (e.g., epidemiological science during a global pandemic).<p>The question seems not to be about how can normal people &quot;follow the science&quot; but rather, why should normal people trust at all that any touted science is anything more than bullshit spouted by highly-motivated sophists?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>read_if_gay_</author><text>&gt; why should normal people trust at all that any touted science is anything more than bullshit spouted by highly-motivated sophists?<p>In the current climate, frankly I think it&#x27;s absurd that we&#x27;re putting so much trust in science, or rather what it has become.<p>The fundamental problem is that science as in the method is absolutely worth putting your trust in, but a lot of what&#x27;s sold as Science^TM has diverged from it far enough to be worthless. However, it still bears the same name and borrows its credibility. There are countless examples even from the places one would think to be the most trustworthy.<p>What science as in the method hinges on as opposed to Science^TM is <i>verifiability</i>. Disciplines that aren&#x27;t easily verified suffer from the replication crisis to the point where it&#x27;s basically synonymous. I would go as far as arguing that unless something has been verified several times it should be nothing more than a hypothesis. Note how popular science media are basically living off doing the opposite (though I don&#x27;t think much better can be expected from the media honestly.)<p>Math and social sciences form the two ends of the verifiability (and reproducibility) scale. CS is close enough to math that it&#x27;s not a dumpster fire like psychology but I would say we&#x27;re still suffering a lot of BS research. To fix this we need actual rigor, more openness about the methods, and frankly, motivation to reproduce results.</text></comment> | <story><title>Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?</title><url>https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sjwalter</author><text>What I want to know is how does this issue impact the notion that we all seem to buy into that we should &quot;follow the science&quot;.<p>Scientists themselves have a hard time &quot;following the science&quot;. Add to it the observation that when an issue is getting lots of attention outside of academia, then there are usually some really strong incentives (profit, prestige) associated with doing the science and applying it (e.g., epidemiological science during a global pandemic).<p>The question seems not to be about how can normal people &quot;follow the science&quot; but rather, why should normal people trust at all that any touted science is anything more than bullshit spouted by highly-motivated sophists?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aabaker99</author><text>I think this is a very important question. This is something that I struggle with.<p>I have read a lot of papers. I generally think science can be a force for good. I understand analytic methods developed by or used in papers from my field of interest. I generally believe that those methods are capable of answering important and interesting questions.<p>In my view, the problem is that you can&#x27;t know if an article is good or bullshit until you sit with it for, say, at least 2 or 3 hours (some papers even more). And that is for someone with my background. I tried to do this same thing when I had an undergraduate level of education and it (a) took me a lot longer (at least 10x), and (b) I missed a lot of the mistakes&#x2F;scams&#x2F;lies that I would not miss now. (I&#x27;m sure I am not able to detect some bullshit even still.)<p>We should follow the good science. We should not follow the bullshit science. This sounds hard because science, being more technical, is harder to vet. But upon further reflection, it seems that society hasn&#x27;t figured out how to deal with much simpler lies, either.</text></comment> |
35,878,091 | 35,878,222 | 1 | 2 | 35,877,545 | train | <story><title>Patent for attention-based sequence transduction neural networks (2019)</title><url>https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jackson__</author><text>&gt;2018-06-28 - Application filed by Google LLC<p>2019-10-22 - Application granted<p>Should probably put a (2019) in the title. Furthermore considering how fast the ML space moves, the fact that google hasn&#x27;t used this to create a model significantly better than competitors seems to show that the patented architecture did not perform better than others.</text></comment> | <story><title>Patent for attention-based sequence transduction neural networks (2019)</title><url>https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>happytiger</author><text>Can’t wait to see the patent system break under AI. It’s time for patents to go away or at least lower the timeframes of protection so we don’t stifle the innovation waves that are inevitably coming.<p>Whole areas will be off limits and dominated by a few companies — the patent system is a system for the olden times.<p>The patent system unfairly enforced incumbent advantage and needs to be reformed.</text></comment> |
24,573,471 | 24,572,282 | 1 | 2 | 24,570,690 | train | <story><title>California to Require All New Vehicles Be Zero-Emission by 2035</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-23/california-to-phase-out-gasoline-cars-by-2035-governor-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>njarboe</author><text>I agree. How about the radical move of deciding not to shut down a large nuclear power plant in California in 2025[1] that could power millions of these cars, carbon free. Trying to fix climate change without nuclear power is likely impossible at this point, but very few climate change activists support it.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant</a></text></item><item><author>bootlooped</author><text>Pre-industrial CO2 levels were 300ppm. In my lifetime I saw us cross 400ppm of CO2; I may very well see it cross 500ppm before I die.<p>This move feels radical, but I don&#x27;t see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we&#x27;re on we&#x27;ll just sleepwalk into oblivion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epistasis</author><text>I think you&#x27;ve got that a bit reversed, trying to fix climate change <i>with</i> nuclear is a bit impossible at this point. We can&#x27;t build it!<p>Why is this plant shutting down? Not because of some sort of hate of nuclear technology, as many would have us believe.<p>No, the real reason this plant is shutting down is because, like every other thermal generation plant, extending its lifetime past the original license means complying with environmental impact laws on waste heat. Once-through waste heat systems are no longer legal [1]. So why not just build a waste heat system and keep it running? Because when the utility tried to come up with one, the cost of <i>the cooling system alone</i> ran into the billions of dollars!<p>Much better to just by a few billion dollars worth of batteries and site them on location. At current costs, today, $1B gets you 5GWh at 1.25GW, roughly. The very cheapest estimate for a cooling system was $7B and they ran to over $10B for a new cooling system [2]. So even without the inevitable cost overruns, one could purchase 35-50GWh and 9-12GW of batteries.<p>A 40GWh&#x2F;10GW battery would be a far better grid asset for California, and massive increase reliability far beyond what Diablo Canyon could ever produce.<p>When the mere cooling system for nuclear is more expensive than a better battery, the technology is dead, dead, dead. We don&#x27;t need it and we have better alternatives.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanluisobispo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;environment&#x2F;article39459930.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sanluisobispo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;environment&#x2F;article...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waterboards.ca.gov&#x2F;water_issues&#x2F;programs&#x2F;ocean&#x2F;cwa316&#x2F;rcnfpp&#x2F;docs&#x2F;subbechcom_111314.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.waterboards.ca.gov&#x2F;water_issues&#x2F;programs&#x2F;ocean&#x2F;c...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>California to Require All New Vehicles Be Zero-Emission by 2035</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-23/california-to-phase-out-gasoline-cars-by-2035-governor-says</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>njarboe</author><text>I agree. How about the radical move of deciding not to shut down a large nuclear power plant in California in 2025[1] that could power millions of these cars, carbon free. Trying to fix climate change without nuclear power is likely impossible at this point, but very few climate change activists support it.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant</a></text></item><item><author>bootlooped</author><text>Pre-industrial CO2 levels were 300ppm. In my lifetime I saw us cross 400ppm of CO2; I may very well see it cross 500ppm before I die.<p>This move feels radical, but I don&#x27;t see how we avert catastrophe without moves that feel radical. If we keep plodding down the course we&#x27;re on we&#x27;ll just sleepwalk into oblivion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dv_dt</author><text>Personally I don&#x27;t support it because the plant is on an earthquake fault, the design lifetime of that plant is near the end of life anyway, upgrade of nuclear plants has gone bad in CA before[1], and finally the upgrade resources could be better applied to renewable resources.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...</a></text></comment> |
40,000,518 | 39,999,061 | 1 | 3 | 39,972,047 | train | <story><title>Stolen masterpieces that are still missing</title><url>https://www.thecollector.com/stolen-masterpieces-famous-artworks-missing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lqet</author><text>&gt; Spitzweg’s piece is often seen as comedic because of the old umbrella that’s shown as magically floating in the air.<p>Isn&#x27;t it completely obvious that the umbrella is attached to the ceiling by strings, and that it hangs there because the roof leaks?</text></comment> | <story><title>Stolen masterpieces that are still missing</title><url>https://www.thecollector.com/stolen-masterpieces-famous-artworks-missing/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>doosdoos</author><text>The thief of the Ghent Altarpiece was a big fan of the detective books on Arsene Lupin. In real Lupin style, he sent 14 letters to the paintings&#x27; owners containing all kinds cryptic hints about the location of the work, before dying unexpectedly. Right before his dead, the thief confesses to his lawyer he had stolen the work. He still tries to give some more details, but it is too late and he passes away.</text></comment> |
27,338,946 | 27,333,773 | 1 | 2 | 27,333,772 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Kalk, A calculator with math syntax, complex numbers</title><url>https://kalk.strct.net</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismorgan</author><text>I immediately found a few Unicode features I hoped were supported but aren’t.<p>Superscripts: firstly numerals, like 3² = 9, but ideally then letters as well, e.g. 3ⁱ = 3^i. Might be suitable to support superscripts to define nth roots, too, e.g. ⁵√. tan¯¹ can be a thing too.<p>Subscripts: same deal; log₂ 31 = log(31, 2).<p>Proper arithmetic operators: times (×), minus (−), division (÷). Also fraction slash (⁄), which can be preceded and succeeded either by normal numerals (e.g. 12⁄34) or by superscripts and subscripts (e.g. ⁵⁶⁄₇₈). (Full font support for fraction slash is weak, but generally tolerable even if imperfect.) Also the prebaked fractions like ½ and ⅜.<p>Also mixed fractions: I reckon 1 2&#x2F;3 should be parsed as 1+2&#x2F;3, not 12&#x2F;3. Them Unicode fractions can join in here too, with 1⅔ (using a prebaked fraction) being 1+2&#x2F;3, or 1²³⁄₄₅ (using superscript, fraction slash, subscript) being 1+23&#x2F;45.<p>Cubic and quartic roots: ∛ and ∜.<p>At this point it’s worth just looking through the whole <i>Symbol, Math</i> Unicode category and implementing everything applicable. Hmm, set operations, lots of fun symbols there.<p>Lots of fun spaces too, e.g. where I wrote log₂ 31 earlier I wanted to use NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE after the ₂, but alas, HN normalises it to a plain old space. That space gets used as a number grouping separator especially, avoiding the whole ,&#x2F;. localisation problem without being too wide.</text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Kalk, A calculator with math syntax, complex numbers</title><url>https://kalk.strct.net</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paddim8</author><text>kalk is a calculator that has syntax highlighting, automatically turns names into symbols (eg. sqrt to √), supports math-like syntax (eg. f(x) = x(2sinx + 3) , estimation of derivatives and integrals, complex numbers, and runs in the browser using WebAssembly.</text></comment> |
31,247,844 | 31,247,830 | 1 | 2 | 31,247,296 | train | <story><title>Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign</title><url>https://wildbit.com/blog/postmark-has-been-acquired-by-activecampaign</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbStavola</author><text>Extremely mixed feelings on this one.<p>On one hand, it&#x27;s awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.<p>On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.<p>An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn&#x27;t spoil the bushel. It&#x27;s probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don&#x27;t have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I&#x27;ve ever seen was &quot;upgrade to our $90&#x2F;mo plan and manage it on your own.&quot;<p>Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can&#x27;t help but be a little cautious. I&#x27;ve been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pascal07</author><text>Hey there, Rian here (Head of Product at Postmark). We definitely understand the &quot;mixed feelings&quot; response for an acquisition like this. A couple things I want to reiterate:<p>* The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!<p>* We definitely don&#x27;t plan to change any of the things we do to ensure the highest deliverability in the industry. We are not, for example, making any changes to the manual approval process—that will definitely continue.<p>Also keep an eye on the FAQ as we will be updating it throughout the day: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarkapp.com&#x2F;postmark-activecampaign-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarkapp.com&#x2F;postmark-activecampaign-faq</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign</title><url>https://wildbit.com/blog/postmark-has-been-acquired-by-activecampaign</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbStavola</author><text>Extremely mixed feelings on this one.<p>On one hand, it&#x27;s awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.<p>On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.<p>An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn&#x27;t spoil the bushel. It&#x27;s probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don&#x27;t have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I&#x27;ve ever seen was &quot;upgrade to our $90&#x2F;mo plan and manage it on your own.&quot;<p>Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can&#x27;t help but be a little cautious. I&#x27;ve been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Belphemur</author><text>I agree with you, such a bittersweet taste in the mouth.<p>I don&#x27;t think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark.<p>Postmark care about deliverability not about &quot;engagement&quot;. Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.<p>How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?<p>I truly hope they won&#x27;t touch their acquisition and let it run how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn&#x27;t make sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other big names.</text></comment> |
24,764,259 | 24,762,094 | 1 | 2 | 24,761,105 | train | <story><title>Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins</title><url>https://heap.io/blog/engineering/applying-textbook-data-structures-for-real-life-wins</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nraynaud</author><text>A few years back I had a traveling salesperson problem, I googled a bit, and somehow didn&#x27;t find anything interesting, so I just created a random loop, and randomly mutated it until it got better. A few months ago I discovered a neat little heuristic: the best loop never self-intersect. And a few days ago, I found that there is a definite algorithm that gives a result whose worst case is bounded WRT to the optimal.<p>My question is how do you find all those algorithms? Wikipedia never really feel like a good introductory nor discovery place. In particular, some problems have been perfectly studied by scholars, but you don&#x27;t find them because you have not found the keywords that will direct google in your search. And I am not a researcher, so I don&#x27;t keep a tab on a domain, I&#x27;m a jack of all trades, I work on a wide set of things.</text></comment> | <story><title>Applying Textbook Data Structures for Real Life Wins</title><url>https://heap.io/blog/engineering/applying-textbook-data-structures-for-real-life-wins</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bunsenmcdubbs</author><text>Hey, author here! I&#x27;ve been working on infrastructure and database-y things at Heap for the last couple years, ranging from improving Postgres performance and availability to building out services (like this one!) and refactoring, encapsulating, and optimizing core systems.<p>I&#x27;ll try to answer any questions about the post (technical or otherwise).<p>Edit: added more details about me.</text></comment> |
20,374,270 | 20,374,038 | 1 | 2 | 20,373,800 | train | <story><title>“Essentials of Garbage Collectors” full course is now available</title><url>http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/courses/essentials-of-garbage-collectors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codetrotter</author><text>I went to buy it and first it said the price was 140 NOK, but after I add it to cart and sign in to my existing Udemy account it wanted to charge me 165 NOK.<p>That’s not a huge difference, and I know these things are beyond your control. But that’s the sort of thing that makes me decide not to buy.<p>I wish Udemy weren’t so weird about their prices. Change the price and make it more expensive because I log in. No thanks, Udemy.</text></comment> | <story><title>“Essentials of Garbage Collectors” full course is now available</title><url>http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/courses/essentials-of-garbage-collectors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ameyv</author><text>Looks good.<p>Can you also share, which new topics&#x2F;lectures are u going to cover? Any roadmap for this course in mind?<p>Do you also have any hands on coding exercises?<p>Lacks content and some exercises..for now.. definitely will keep eye on this.. will buy..</text></comment> |
8,587,213 | 8,586,815 | 1 | 2 | 8,585,483 | train | <story><title>Half a decade with Go</title><url>http://blog.golang.org/5years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go&#x27;s adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer.<p>Some people see languages as a bag of features (immutability! generic programming! laziness! operator overloading! algebraic types! hindley-miller type inference! pattern matching! exceptions! manual memory management!). See <a href="http://yager.io/programming/go.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yager.io&#x2F;programming&#x2F;go.html</a> for an example of that line of thinking.<p>Those people won&#x27;t get Go.<p>Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It&#x27;s about making good trade offs.<p>A trade off is: you get something but you also loose something.<p>I use Go because it made the biggest number of good trade offs.<p>Or to put it differently: I program in Go because when writing code, it irritates me less than other languages.<p>If you want a longer explanation of that: <a href="http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;commandcenter.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;less-is-exponentia...</a></text></item><item><author>wyager</author><text>What do you think is worthwhile about Go? I agree that the tooling is nice, but beyond that, there is nothing interesting to me. Goroutines aren&#x27;t interesting; languages like Erlang and Haskell got green threads right many years before Go was on the scene.</text></item><item><author>ansible</author><text><i>At launch, there was a flurry of attention. Google had produced a new programming language, and everyone was eager to check it out. Some programmers were turned off by Go&#x27;s conservative feature set—at first glance they saw &quot;nothing to see here&quot;...</i><p>This was totally me. I am very much a programming language aficionado (or maybe just a dilettante), and when I first read about Go, I dismissed it quickly. I&#x27;d mostly been using Lua at the time, and didn&#x27;t really understand what was different with goroutines vs. coroutines.<p><i>After the initial release, it took us a while to properly communicate the goals and design ethos behind Go. Rob Pike did so eloquently in his 2012 essay Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering and more personally in his blog post Less is exponentially more. Andrew Gerrand&#x27;s Code that grows with grace (slides) and Go for Gophers (slides) give a more in-depth, technical take on Go&#x27;s design philosophy.</i><p>It was Rob Pike&#x27;s essay that caused me to investigate it again.<p>I have been quite impressed with lots of little details that have been &#x27;fixed&#x27; (relative to C) in Go. Such as how variables are declared, the module system, and much more. And I was and continue to be impressed with the associated tooling.<p>I hope that if Go has just one lasting legacy in the history of programming, it will be how it pushed forward people&#x27;s expectations of what a good language ecosystem should provide.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>&gt; You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go&#x27;s adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer.<p>This line of thinking serves more to call in to question the engineering and management cultures we have than it does to reflect poorly on Haskell and Erlang, and if it&#x27;s true that Go&#x27;s essential strength compared to them is that it is well-fitted to these cultures, that&#x27;s not particularly flattering, however locally practical it may be.</text></comment> | <story><title>Half a decade with Go</title><url>http://blog.golang.org/5years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>You should ponder why Erlang or Haskell achieved a fraction of Go&#x27;s adoption despite being on the market 20+ years longer.<p>Some people see languages as a bag of features (immutability! generic programming! laziness! operator overloading! algebraic types! hindley-miller type inference! pattern matching! exceptions! manual memory management!). See <a href="http://yager.io/programming/go.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yager.io&#x2F;programming&#x2F;go.html</a> for an example of that line of thinking.<p>Those people won&#x27;t get Go.<p>Designing a language is not about cramming every feature you can think of. It&#x27;s about making good trade offs.<p>A trade off is: you get something but you also loose something.<p>I use Go because it made the biggest number of good trade offs.<p>Or to put it differently: I program in Go because when writing code, it irritates me less than other languages.<p>If you want a longer explanation of that: <a href="http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;commandcenter.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;less-is-exponentia...</a></text></item><item><author>wyager</author><text>What do you think is worthwhile about Go? I agree that the tooling is nice, but beyond that, there is nothing interesting to me. Goroutines aren&#x27;t interesting; languages like Erlang and Haskell got green threads right many years before Go was on the scene.</text></item><item><author>ansible</author><text><i>At launch, there was a flurry of attention. Google had produced a new programming language, and everyone was eager to check it out. Some programmers were turned off by Go&#x27;s conservative feature set—at first glance they saw &quot;nothing to see here&quot;...</i><p>This was totally me. I am very much a programming language aficionado (or maybe just a dilettante), and when I first read about Go, I dismissed it quickly. I&#x27;d mostly been using Lua at the time, and didn&#x27;t really understand what was different with goroutines vs. coroutines.<p><i>After the initial release, it took us a while to properly communicate the goals and design ethos behind Go. Rob Pike did so eloquently in his 2012 essay Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering and more personally in his blog post Less is exponentially more. Andrew Gerrand&#x27;s Code that grows with grace (slides) and Go for Gophers (slides) give a more in-depth, technical take on Go&#x27;s design philosophy.</i><p>It was Rob Pike&#x27;s essay that caused me to investigate it again.<p>I have been quite impressed with lots of little details that have been &#x27;fixed&#x27; (relative to C) in Go. Such as how variables are declared, the module system, and much more. And I was and continue to be impressed with the associated tooling.<p>I hope that if Go has just one lasting legacy in the history of programming, it will be how it pushed forward people&#x27;s expectations of what a good language ecosystem should provide.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wcummings</author><text>I get the impression some of the folks in the Golang crowd are &quot;Blub&quot; programmers [1]. It&#x27;s not so much a matter of simplicity and trade-offs as it is a matter of &quot;I don&#x27;t need things I don&#x27;t know about&quot;, which isn&#x27;t a good argument to use Golang.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html</a></text></comment> |
9,754,718 | 9,754,640 | 1 | 2 | 9,752,974 | train | <story><title>The town that banned Wi-Fi</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/21/the-town-that-banned-wi-fi</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beloch</author><text>&quot;None of which gets round the core issue: if EHS is real, I asked Diane, then why has it not shown up in formal experiments? “I encourage scientists to go to where we are and measure the environment,” she replied. “Don’t try to pretend that you’re God and expose us to different frequencies in a lab. That’s like taking someone and breaking their legs and asking how much it hurts.”&quot;<p>Right, so we can&#x27;t actually test your crippling sensitivity to EMF in a lab even though, if it&#x27;s as bad as you say it is, a double blind test to see if you could reliably tell when a radio in a shoe-box is switched on ought to be good enough.<p>---<p>&quot;the lack of proof from major studies is merely evidence of a conspiracy between interested parties. “Conventional government-funded science isn’t a reliable indicator of health defects,” she told me. “There’s a vested interest in keeping the truth out of circulation.&quot;<p>So, beyond the fact that willing test subjects are hard to find, there&#x27;s a conspiracy to cover up evidence showing people really are &quot;sensitives&quot;.<p>---<p>&quot;Like Meckna, Dacre felt that there were people claiming to be electrosensitive who were nothing of the sort, who were queering the pitch for the others: “You can tell at once who is just pretending,” she said. &quot;<p>Even better, the test subjects we can round up are likely fakers!<p>---<p>&quot;“See those?” he asked.<p>“Aeroplane trails?”<p>“Not contrails – chemtrails,” he said. “The government sprays the air – it gets in the atmosphere.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “The world needs to know what’s happening here.” &quot;<p>My suspicions about what&#x27;s really going on here are beginning to coalesce...</text></comment> | <story><title>The town that banned Wi-Fi</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/21/the-town-that-banned-wi-fi</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mistercow</author><text>&gt;He held a meeting with some electrosensitives, and didn’t tell them he had a mobile phone in his pocket. “They noticed at once. After that I was convinced.<p>Ah the good ol&#x27; base rate fallacy.<p>I can predict with around 90% accuracy whether a given American adult has a cellphone on their person, simply by always answering &quot;yes&quot;.<p>But I doubt you&#x27;d be impressed if I pointed at a random stranger and said &quot;That guy has a cell phone&quot;.</text></comment> |
2,820,700 | 2,820,746 | 1 | 2 | 2,820,605 | train | <story><title>Airbnb Victim Speaks Again: Homeless, Scared And Angry</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/airbnb-victim-speaks-again-homeless-scared-and-angry/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bignoggins</author><text>I'm using airbnb in Berlin right now. Two days ago I received a knock on my door. Turns out it was the real owner of the apartment and he had the Paperwork to prove it. Fortunately he was nice enough to let us stay without compensation. When I went to the airbnb website to try and call them all I got was a web message box. I filled out a message and sent it on its way but that's a pretty lousy system. Luckily for me my situation is nowhere as bad as ej but airbnb really needs a 24 hour hotline. I've had many good experiences but all it takes is that one time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dlss</author><text>Exactly.<p>Based on EJ's description of AirBnB customer service, and the <i>2,000,000</i> bookings the founders cited earlier today, we'd be fools to think this was the first time someone broke the law using AirBnB -- I'm guessing the others just gave up on support after being ignored, and focused on talking to the police.<p>The real black eye here is the kind of support EJ received <i>before</i> she wrote her blog post -- most people can't write that well and don't have readers who will submit the story to HN.</text></comment> | <story><title>Airbnb Victim Speaks Again: Homeless, Scared And Angry</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/airbnb-victim-speaks-again-homeless-scared-and-angry/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bignoggins</author><text>I'm using airbnb in Berlin right now. Two days ago I received a knock on my door. Turns out it was the real owner of the apartment and he had the Paperwork to prove it. Fortunately he was nice enough to let us stay without compensation. When I went to the airbnb website to try and call them all I got was a web message box. I filled out a message and sent it on its way but that's a pretty lousy system. Luckily for me my situation is nowhere as bad as ej but airbnb really needs a 24 hour hotline. I've had many good experiences but all it takes is that one time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shadowflit</author><text>Just to clarify, since it took your second comment to get me to this understanding -<p>Someone who was not the real owner of the apartment (presumably thief/criminal) put the place up on AirBnB. You unknowingly rented the place from this person, and during your stay, the real owner showed up and asked what you were doing in his house?</text></comment> |
4,576,416 | 4,576,062 | 1 | 2 | 4,575,201 | train | <story><title>Mathematics at Google </title><url>http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38331.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>Seeing PageRank discussed reminds me of a piece of fun trivia. The idea for PageRank came out of the success of the Science Citation Index, which ranks papers according to how often they have been cited. The idea of trying to study the structure of citations in academia came out of people who were inspired by a 1948 essay, <i>As We May Think</i>.<p>But that essay's main topic was an imagined technology called memex, to be implemented with an automated indexing system and microfilm. This technology is the first description of hypertext, which inspired multiple technologies. The second successful consumer application that I'm aware of that used hypertext was the web. (The first was HyperCard from Apple.)<p>Thus Google started as the application of one set of techniques inspired by <i>As We May Think</i> to a technology that was also inspired by <i>As We May Think</i>.<p>See <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?single_page=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-ma...</a> for the essay itself. Do keep in mind that it was written one year after the transistor was invented, but the author already had 2 decades of experience with computing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mathematics at Google </title><url>http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38331.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j2kun</author><text>Look at the slide entitled Gmail (5), and compare the picture with the first graph on my blog post <a href="http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/the-perceptron-and-all-the-things-it-cant-perceive/" rel="nofollow">http://jeremykun.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/the-perceptron-and...</a><p>It just goes to show, Google steals content without attribution just like everyone else.</text></comment> |
25,802,695 | 25,802,234 | 1 | 3 | 25,801,426 | train | <story><title>Running a fake power plant on the internet for a month</title><url>https://grimminck.medium.com/running-a-fake-power-plant-on-the-internet-for-a-month-4a624f685aaa</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waihtis</author><text>I run a honeypot software company, with our customers being mid-large enterprises. While the case presented here is certainly interesting, it&#x27;s actually fairly uncommon for companies to run internet-facing honeypots, mostly due to it being a huge resource sink, and it&#x27;s fairly difficult to learn anything truely useful from observing attacks coming from (mostly) bots.<p>The more interesting use case for most is planting these in your network internals, which gives an added benefit of early, high-fidelity threat detection in addition to the &quot;threat intelligence&quot; bonuses. It&#x27;s not completely trivial to set up, but can be a reasonably quick way to build good detection capability into even very disparate environments.<p>A vast majority of organizations still lack good situational awareness of their infrastructures and this is one way of improving on that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>A fun example of a honeypot was that placed by Cliff Stoll in 1986 on a computer system at Lawrence Berkeley when trying to get a repeated attacker to stay on the line long enough to be traced, as described in <i>The Cuckoo&#x27;s Egg</i> and portrayed in this PBS NOVA recreation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Running a fake power plant on the internet for a month</title><url>https://grimminck.medium.com/running-a-fake-power-plant-on-the-internet-for-a-month-4a624f685aaa</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>waihtis</author><text>I run a honeypot software company, with our customers being mid-large enterprises. While the case presented here is certainly interesting, it&#x27;s actually fairly uncommon for companies to run internet-facing honeypots, mostly due to it being a huge resource sink, and it&#x27;s fairly difficult to learn anything truely useful from observing attacks coming from (mostly) bots.<p>The more interesting use case for most is planting these in your network internals, which gives an added benefit of early, high-fidelity threat detection in addition to the &quot;threat intelligence&quot; bonuses. It&#x27;s not completely trivial to set up, but can be a reasonably quick way to build good detection capability into even very disparate environments.<p>A vast majority of organizations still lack good situational awareness of their infrastructures and this is one way of improving on that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wwv25</author><text>Did you plant internally to detect malicious actors from within the organization or as a way to definitively detect external actors who have presumably entered the network through an exploit?</text></comment> |
27,149,031 | 27,148,852 | 1 | 2 | 27,133,954 | train | <story><title>Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong</title><url>https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/05/12/randal-otoole-gets-high-speed-rail-wrong/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DominikPeters</author><text>Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if those people are frequent users. I’ve always regretted when I’ve chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get stuck in traffic, and you can’t properly do laptop work. I once took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>perardi</author><text>As someone who had the distinct pleasure of some long bus rides in college:<p>I would rather staple myself to the bottom of a semi than ride a bus between 2 cities. I’d rather hitchhike, end up temporarily imprisoned in a grain silo, and fight free using my wits and a corn cob than ride a bus again. If my choice was a bus or simply never traveling again: well welcome to my cloister.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.news-gazette.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;suburban-express-shuts-down&#x2F;article_e83c7a83-2d70-500f-9858-fff69b7cd08f.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.news-gazette.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;suburban-express-shuts-dow...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Getting High-Speed Rail Wrong</title><url>https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/05/12/randal-otoole-gets-high-speed-rail-wrong/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DominikPeters</author><text>Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if those people are frequent users. I’ve always regretted when I’ve chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get stuck in traffic, and you can’t properly do laptop work. I once took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dougmwne</author><text>I&#x27;m not quite as down on busses, but trains really are vastly more comfortable. After a bus ride I am physically tired because I need to engage my core to stay balanced through the bumps and turns. On a train you can actually rest.</text></comment> |
24,723,965 | 24,722,261 | 1 | 3 | 24,718,078 | train | <story><title>We Hacked Apple for 3 Months</title><url>https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iJohnDoe</author><text>Apple only paid them $52k? Apple is a trillion dollar company. These hackers saved them easily millions of dollars in expenses.<p>China or North Korea could easily allocate a much larger team to something like this and disrupt Apple (not for bug bounties). Although, China and North Korea dedicate their resources to financial fraud where there is real money to be had.<p>Apple is a tightwad joke. If they laid out a scope of work for a professional pen testing company that included pen testing their 17.0.0.0&#x2F;8 range then that contract would easily have been in the hundreds of thousands.<p>I’m sure foreign adversaries will take notice now. Apple’s cybersecurity posture has always been very weak. It’s known they don’t dedicated any resources to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoblessWonder</author><text>Late reply: They just paid for 28 more issues, running total is now $288,500.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;samwcyo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1314310787243167744" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;samwcyo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1314310787243167744</a></text></comment> | <story><title>We Hacked Apple for 3 Months</title><url>https://samcurry.net/hacking-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>iJohnDoe</author><text>Apple only paid them $52k? Apple is a trillion dollar company. These hackers saved them easily millions of dollars in expenses.<p>China or North Korea could easily allocate a much larger team to something like this and disrupt Apple (not for bug bounties). Although, China and North Korea dedicate their resources to financial fraud where there is real money to be had.<p>Apple is a tightwad joke. If they laid out a scope of work for a professional pen testing company that included pen testing their 17.0.0.0&#x2F;8 range then that contract would easily have been in the hundreds of thousands.<p>I’m sure foreign adversaries will take notice now. Apple’s cybersecurity posture has always been very weak. It’s known they don’t dedicated any resources to it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoblessWonder</author><text>But that is the thing... their official Bug Bounty program scope didn&#x27;t include most of these exploits so any payments&#x2F;awards would have to be made outside of the traditional system and thus probably take more senior approval&#x2F;time to make payments. They knew that they would possibly not get paid for them but took the risk anyways. I have a feeling they will end up getting at least a hundred thousand dollars total.</text></comment> |
14,461,741 | 14,461,426 | 1 | 2 | 14,461,097 | train | <story><title>Hidden Away for 28 Years, Tiananmen Protest Pictures See Light of Day</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/world/asia/china-tiananmen-1989-photographs.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>SurrealSoul</author><text>Kind of a personal story, but my fiancé is from Beijing. She found out about Tiananmen square about a year ago. She only knew that she shouldn&#x27;t ask about the Tiananmen incident growing up and that it was a bad thing that happened.<p>She has been in the states for several years now and when she found out what really happened with our even blurry images and stories we have now it really changed her perspective on things.<p>Even though its 28 years old, many of the younger generations don&#x27;t know a thing about what happened, regardless if it&#x27;s censored in their country or not.<p>History should not be censored like this. You should not have to move out of country to know what your country has done. I am extremely grateful for the brave photographer preserving his images for the world.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hidden Away for 28 Years, Tiananmen Protest Pictures See Light of Day</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/world/asia/china-tiananmen-1989-photographs.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blackbagboys</author><text>An inspiring collection of photos, but I&#x27;d bet it attracts little interest outside a few select, irrelevant circles. One of the most heartbreaking thing about the massacre is not just that the mass murderers who ordered it were never held responsible but that today it barely even tarnishes their reputations, while the memory of their victims has been thoroughly suppressed.</text></comment> |
9,995,466 | 9,995,666 | 1 | 2 | 9,994,963 | train | <story><title>What the ad blocker debate reveals</title><url>http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danr4</author><text>It&#x27;s rather simple in my mind.<p>Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.<p>You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.<p>Don&#x27;t want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.<p>Want to make money? try a subscription model.<p>Why can&#x27;t you have both? Welcome to the real world.<p>[EDIT]:<p>This was the previous opening sentence:
<i>&quot;Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free.&quot;</i><p>I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it&#x27;s trying to deliver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nursie</author><text>I think it&#x27;s simple too, but doesn&#x27;t need a meatspace analogy like that.<p>I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes.<p>That&#x27;s it.<p>(oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)</text></comment> | <story><title>What the ad blocker debate reveals</title><url>http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveals/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danr4</author><text>It&#x27;s rather simple in my mind.<p>Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.<p>You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.<p>Don&#x27;t want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.<p>Want to make money? try a subscription model.<p>Why can&#x27;t you have both? Welcome to the real world.<p>[EDIT]:<p>This was the previous opening sentence:
<i>&quot;Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free.&quot;</i><p>I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it&#x27;s trying to deliver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>austenallred</author><text>This comment rubs me in the wrong way.<p>Content creators aren&#x27;t &quot;putting it up for free&quot; - they&#x27;re putting it up with ads attached. They&#x27;re certainly not &quot;throwing it over your fence.&quot; They&#x27;re not injecting their articles into your browser, you&#x27;re going to a URL to request them. <i>You</i> seek the content out.<p>So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that&#x27;s your prerogative, but don&#x27;t pretend like you&#x27;re the victim in this.<p>And also don&#x27;t pretend like it&#x27;s the company&#x27;s fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don&#x27;t get to choose other companies&#x27; business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they&#x27;re not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn&#x27;t be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.</text></comment> |
9,243,150 | 9,243,170 | 1 | 2 | 9,242,379 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Do you take nootropics?</title><text>What do you think about them?<p>Which ones do you take?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewton</author><text>&gt;Regardless, my experience was that its only value is the placebo effect. If a substance actually does anything real, and there is potential for a pharmaceutical company to patent and profit from it, then you can generally rest assured that it will be scheduled to require a doctor&#x27;s prescription. For just about everything, the over-the-counter options consist of vitamins and quackery. So either blatantly break the law, or don&#x27;t.<p>Just a counter-point. Melatonin is OTC in the US (sadly not where I live) and the efficacy of melatonin on sleep quality is pretty hard to dispute.
It&#x27;s not what you&#x27;d normally call a nootropic maybe, but having melatonin on hand has significantly improved my life<p>Edit: oh. Yeah. Of course, Adrafinil is OTC in the US too and that&#x27;s the prodrug for Modafinil. Definitely not placebo either</text></item><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I took piracetam years ago when I was considering a career change and prepping for the LSAT exam. I believe that its legal history is somewhat similar to ephedra... 10-15 years ago you could buy it over-the-counter or online, but since then it&#x27;s been taken off the market in the U.S.<p>Regardless, my experience was that its only value is the placebo effect. If a substance actually does anything real, <i>and there is potential for a pharmaceutical company to patent and profit from it</i>, then you can generally rest assured that it will be scheduled to require a doctor&#x27;s prescription. For just about everything, the over-the-counter options consist of vitamins and quackery. So either blatantly break the law, or don&#x27;t.<p>As an aside, what is the point of taking a serious nootropic for software development? Typically, a coder&#x27;s problem isn&#x27;t failure to get into a groove once they have uninterrupted time. The typical problem is not having uninterrupted time in the first place. Like most people here, probably, I work in an open floor plan environment. I&#x27;m subject to constant &quot;drive-by&quot; interruptions that could have been handled better via email, and a neverending roar all around me as colleagues literally scream at each other about Reddit memes or video games or the latest superhero movie.<p>Do you have a <i>drug</i> that would allow me to completely shut off my hearing, peripheral vision, and other sensory input? So that I can work without having to blast music through $300 noise-canceling headphones (which itself impairs focus, but is the lesser of all evils)? If so, then I would gladly break the law to find a pharmaceutical escape from contemporary office plans that sacrifice productivity for the ability to squeeze headcount into the smallest possible space.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>driverdan</author><text>Melatonin and DHEA are hormones and are OTC. But just because they&#x27;re OTC doesn&#x27;t mean they should be taken lightly. Hormones are highly regulated in our bodies and taking extra can cause decreased natural production.<p>Adrafinil is not OTC, it is unregulated. That means you can sell it in the &quot;research chemical&quot; grey market but not as a drug.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Do you take nootropics?</title><text>What do you think about them?<p>Which ones do you take?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lewton</author><text>&gt;Regardless, my experience was that its only value is the placebo effect. If a substance actually does anything real, and there is potential for a pharmaceutical company to patent and profit from it, then you can generally rest assured that it will be scheduled to require a doctor&#x27;s prescription. For just about everything, the over-the-counter options consist of vitamins and quackery. So either blatantly break the law, or don&#x27;t.<p>Just a counter-point. Melatonin is OTC in the US (sadly not where I live) and the efficacy of melatonin on sleep quality is pretty hard to dispute.
It&#x27;s not what you&#x27;d normally call a nootropic maybe, but having melatonin on hand has significantly improved my life<p>Edit: oh. Yeah. Of course, Adrafinil is OTC in the US too and that&#x27;s the prodrug for Modafinil. Definitely not placebo either</text></item><item><author>StevePerkins</author><text>I took piracetam years ago when I was considering a career change and prepping for the LSAT exam. I believe that its legal history is somewhat similar to ephedra... 10-15 years ago you could buy it over-the-counter or online, but since then it&#x27;s been taken off the market in the U.S.<p>Regardless, my experience was that its only value is the placebo effect. If a substance actually does anything real, <i>and there is potential for a pharmaceutical company to patent and profit from it</i>, then you can generally rest assured that it will be scheduled to require a doctor&#x27;s prescription. For just about everything, the over-the-counter options consist of vitamins and quackery. So either blatantly break the law, or don&#x27;t.<p>As an aside, what is the point of taking a serious nootropic for software development? Typically, a coder&#x27;s problem isn&#x27;t failure to get into a groove once they have uninterrupted time. The typical problem is not having uninterrupted time in the first place. Like most people here, probably, I work in an open floor plan environment. I&#x27;m subject to constant &quot;drive-by&quot; interruptions that could have been handled better via email, and a neverending roar all around me as colleagues literally scream at each other about Reddit memes or video games or the latest superhero movie.<p>Do you have a <i>drug</i> that would allow me to completely shut off my hearing, peripheral vision, and other sensory input? So that I can work without having to blast music through $300 noise-canceling headphones (which itself impairs focus, but is the lesser of all evils)? If so, then I would gladly break the law to find a pharmaceutical escape from contemporary office plans that sacrifice productivity for the ability to squeeze headcount into the smallest possible space.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coryl</author><text>I have a weird experience with melatonin. It puts me out quickly, but I wake up about 4-5 hours later in a half drugged state. For the next few hours I&#x27;m awake but drowsy.</text></comment> |
17,359,862 | 17,359,879 | 1 | 2 | 17,359,145 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: How to start working as a contractor?</title><text>I was offered a job as a contractor by a big company in Canada. The pay is good, around $100,000 CAD ($55&#x2F;h). But so far I have only worked as permenant employees. What are your experiences working as contractor? What are to be expected?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>aliencat</author><text>The flexible hour and no much supervision sounds excellent! Does that mean you can come to work late or leave work early as long as you work for 8 hours a day?</text></item><item><author>ztoben</author><text>I contracted for about 8 months through a large staffing firm. A few things I liked:<p>* Hours were fairly flexible<p>* Not too much supervision, was mostly given things to work on and expected to finish them in a certain amount of time<p>* Didn&#x27;t get pulled in to as many meetings in the office<p>* The pay was excellent<p>Some things I didn&#x27;t like:<p>* No&#x2F;little vacation&#x2F;pto&#x2F;sick<p>* If you don&#x27;t work, you don&#x27;t get paid (if you&#x27;re paid hourly)<p>* No&#x2F;little job security. I was around for 2 rounds of layoffs and had a young child at home, so this wasn&#x27;t ideal<p>At the end of the day it made more sense for me to go back to a normal employment role due to family and a few other factors with job security. I did enjoy my time as a contractor though. Enough so that I still pick up hours through some old employers occasionally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goatlover</author><text>I think it means you work whenever you want as long as the job is done on time. If you&#x27;re working remote with little supervision, then it makes no sense to stick to an 8 hour 9 to 5 schedule, unless that&#x27;s your optimal working window.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: How to start working as a contractor?</title><text>I was offered a job as a contractor by a big company in Canada. The pay is good, around $100,000 CAD ($55&#x2F;h). But so far I have only worked as permenant employees. What are your experiences working as contractor? What are to be expected?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>aliencat</author><text>The flexible hour and no much supervision sounds excellent! Does that mean you can come to work late or leave work early as long as you work for 8 hours a day?</text></item><item><author>ztoben</author><text>I contracted for about 8 months through a large staffing firm. A few things I liked:<p>* Hours were fairly flexible<p>* Not too much supervision, was mostly given things to work on and expected to finish them in a certain amount of time<p>* Didn&#x27;t get pulled in to as many meetings in the office<p>* The pay was excellent<p>Some things I didn&#x27;t like:<p>* No&#x2F;little vacation&#x2F;pto&#x2F;sick<p>* If you don&#x27;t work, you don&#x27;t get paid (if you&#x27;re paid hourly)<p>* No&#x2F;little job security. I was around for 2 rounds of layoffs and had a young child at home, so this wasn&#x27;t ideal<p>At the end of the day it made more sense for me to go back to a normal employment role due to family and a few other factors with job security. I did enjoy my time as a contractor though. Enough so that I still pick up hours through some old employers occasionally.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdocherty</author><text>That is pretty specific to the role. I have done contract work where I just had to get stuff done in and couldn&#x27;t bill more than 40 hours a week. Other roles were up to 45 hours a week but had to have ass in seat in office mon-friday 8-5</text></comment> |
9,764,896 | 9,764,847 | 1 | 2 | 9,764,286 | train | <story><title>Apple's Indies</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/6/23/apples-indies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>This is pretty ridiculous. There&#x27;s very little comparison.<p>1. Apple didn&#x27;t respond to a letter from Taylor swift in &lt; 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let&#x27;s not forget it&#x27;s rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn&#x27;t been considering this for weeks already.<p>2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It&#x27;s simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.<p>3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>It&#x27;s nonsensical to compare to brick-and-mortar stores. We didn&#x27;t go from brick-and-mortar to the App Store. We went from direct internet sales, where we got to build whatever we wanted, ship updates instantaneously, and keep 98% of the revenue, to the App Store.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple's Indies</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/6/23/apples-indies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>This is pretty ridiculous. There&#x27;s very little comparison.<p>1. Apple didn&#x27;t respond to a letter from Taylor swift in &lt; 24 hours - this had been building for a week or two as large indie labels made their opinions public and let&#x27;s not forget it&#x27;s rumoured that Apple was having difficulty signing any indie labels. I would be shocked if Apple hadn&#x27;t been considering this for weeks already.<p>2. App devs - of which I am one - get a decent deal. It&#x27;s simple, clear cut, and quite high especially when compared with how things are in brick and mortar stores.<p>3. There is no comparison here anyway. When Apple TELLS developers that you can only have your apps on the store if you give up 3 months of revenue then there is one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hahainternet</author><text>1. Apple explicitly responded directly to Taylor Swift.<p>2. App devs get a decent deal, but restrictions like taking a cut of all purchases done through an app are very distasteful.</text></comment> |
21,057,314 | 21,056,708 | 1 | 3 | 21,050,536 | train | <story><title>Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?</title><url>https://thehustle.co/graphing-calculators-expensive/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clamprecht</author><text>In prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say &quot;NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR&quot; as its startup message, so they wouldn&#x27;t take it during a random search.<p>I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.</text></item><item><author>jmcphers</author><text>You can easily store notes on a TI calculator. I had a TI-85 in college, and was occasionally guilty of writing TI-BASIC programs to make tests easier (for example, I had one which computed Euler&#x27;s method).</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added.<p>As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don&#x27;t want to deal with people having internet access and notes.<p>Now if Apple&#x2F;Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn&#x27;t easily break out of, maybe things will change.<p>But until then, they&#x27;re going to require devices without internet and note taking.<p>Edit: Since everyone is replying &quot;you can store notes!&quot;, yes, you can, but most test proctors know about the programs and make you clear your memory before a test.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lenova</author><text>I fascinated by the hinted-at backstory here. Would you mind sharing how you came to program in prison? Was it before, or during your time that you learned?</text></comment> | <story><title>Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end?</title><url>https://thehustle.co/graphing-calculators-expensive/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clamprecht</author><text>In prison, only non-programmable calculators were allowed. A friend somehow had gotten a TI-85 in. I programmed it to say &quot;NON-PROGRAMMABLE CALCULATOR&quot; as its startup message, so they wouldn&#x27;t take it during a random search.<p>I also wrote a basic stock portfolio manager - this was the only chance I had to program during my 5 years there.</text></item><item><author>jmcphers</author><text>You can easily store notes on a TI calculator. I had a TI-85 in college, and was occasionally guilty of writing TI-BASIC programs to make tests easier (for example, I had one which computed Euler&#x27;s method).</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This can be summed up pretty easily. The TI graphing calculator has no internet access and no ability to store notes. Neither ability can be easily added.<p>As long as that is the case, they will win, because the test companies don&#x27;t want to deal with people having internet access and notes.<p>Now if Apple&#x2F;Android made a simple way for a test proctor to put your phone into a single app only that you couldn&#x27;t easily break out of, maybe things will change.<p>But until then, they&#x27;re going to require devices without internet and note taking.<p>Edit: Since everyone is replying &quot;you can store notes!&quot;, yes, you can, but most test proctors know about the programs and make you clear your memory before a test.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lancebeet</author><text>This doesn&#x27;t seem to be an entirely American phenomenon. Gottfrid Svartholm, one of the founders of PirateBay, had significant issues getting a graphing calculator for self-study in Swedish prison. Graphing calculators were apparently deemed a security risk.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;file.wikileaks.org&#x2F;file&#x2F;anakata&#x2F;13.1_GSW_09042013_APPEAL_Calculator_ENGLISH.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;file.wikileaks.org&#x2F;file&#x2F;anakata&#x2F;13.1_GSW_09042013_AP...</a></text></comment> |
10,010,114 | 10,010,059 | 1 | 2 | 10,009,569 | train | <story><title>In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-dont-cry-for-lions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>namecast</author><text>The paragraph before the one you just quoted:<p>&quot;We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.&quot;<p>And the paragraph directly after:<p>&quot;And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.&quot;<p>&quot;Please don&#x27;t care about the animals in my country more than you care about me and my countrymen&quot; is a reasonable request. I don&#x27;t see anything terrible about it. I&#x27;m not sure why you dropped the surrounding context.</text></item><item><author>charlesray</author><text>&gt;Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.<p>So don&#x27;t learn from our mistakes, basically?<p>This is among the most ignorant things I have ever read. Terrible article from a person with a terrible mentality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>charlesray</author><text>The sad truth is...we DO care about their people. And there is simply more we can do for their lions than their people. Because you can pass a law saying &quot;don&#x27;t kill lions,&quot; you can ban the trade of lion carcasses&#x2F;trophies&#x2F;etc., and you can make a big dent in the numbers of lions killed. But how are we supposed to help feed their people when their corrupt as fuck government takes all of our aid? This isn&#x27;t the real world we live in, guys.</text></comment> | <story><title>In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-dont-cry-for-lions.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>namecast</author><text>The paragraph before the one you just quoted:<p>&quot;We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.&quot;<p>And the paragraph directly after:<p>&quot;And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.&quot;<p>&quot;Please don&#x27;t care about the animals in my country more than you care about me and my countrymen&quot; is a reasonable request. I don&#x27;t see anything terrible about it. I&#x27;m not sure why you dropped the surrounding context.</text></item><item><author>charlesray</author><text>&gt;Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.<p>So don&#x27;t learn from our mistakes, basically?<p>This is among the most ignorant things I have ever read. Terrible article from a person with a terrible mentality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>StavrosK</author><text>I don&#x27;t think people care more about animals than about people. It was a cruel way to kill an animal, that&#x27;s what&#x27;s riling people up. If you baited a person and shot them with a bow and arrow, and then hired hunters to track them down and kill them, people would be much more outraged.<p>You can&#x27;t easily compare &quot;unprovoked cruelty against animals&quot; with &quot;everyday life below the poverty line&quot;.</text></comment> |
2,075,951 | 2,075,819 | 1 | 2 | 2,075,235 | train | <story><title>Mac App Store: Open for Business</title><url>http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rudd</author><text>I will say this: Apple is not afraid to leave old technology behind. While website XYZ aims to support multiple versions of every browser, including those released a decade ago (IE6), Apple won't even support Leopard with its new store, which was the version that came with the Mac I got just over a year ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>axomhacker</author><text>Supporting old browsers by XYZ: you have to, to profit.<p>Supporting old OS by Apple: of course they want you to upgrade, to profit.<p>I would not say that's because Apple is brave, it makes business sense.</text></comment> | <story><title>Mac App Store: Open for Business</title><url>http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>rudd</author><text>I will say this: Apple is not afraid to leave old technology behind. While website XYZ aims to support multiple versions of every browser, including those released a decade ago (IE6), Apple won't even support Leopard with its new store, which was the version that came with the Mac I got just over a year ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inovica</author><text>If you look at the history of Apple this is something that they do often when they believe in something strongly. Removing the floppy drive, being one that I remember very strongly. I feel Leopard support would have been useful, however I'm sure they have a good reason for it. I actually welcome the App Store and I have some ideas for Mac-specific apps that would be very difficult to market for the money they would achieve and hopefully this will be a good route to market</text></comment> |
41,788,529 | 41,788,317 | 1 | 2 | 41,761,409 | train | <story><title>Gustav Klimt's Obsession with Gold</title><url>https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/gustav-klimt-gold-2543498</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>As the son of two artists, both of whom never liked gold, Klimt is a strange breed: My parents have made a ton of murals, jam-packed with gold. Not because they wanted but because rich people(the type of people who want murals in their homes and can afford it) love it as an expression of their financial status. Both of them hated much of those murals and I can only name a handful of works they truly liked, at the end of the day, the customer is always right. And having seen much of their work(and taking some part on a few occasions circumstantially since I can&#x27;t draw a single line to save my life), I completely agree with them. We have a word which roughly translates to mobbaroque in English. In almost all cases, this is exactly what it is.<p>Having said that, my mom specifically has a few favorite artists, Klimt being one of them. Over the years she&#x27;s been asked to make dozens of Klimt replicas(The Kiss probably accounting for 80% of them) and she&#x27;s loved doing all of them. I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious. Not only that but made them look incredible. Admittedly I never looked all that deep as to why he was &quot;obsessed&quot; with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mannyv</author><text>Mobbaroque -&gt; Mob Baroque.<p>To me that&#x27;s New York Italian, with lots of marble, gold, and extreme decor. It&#x27;s a big marble tub with gold fixtures and maybe a couple of statues hanging around for good measure...in a marble&#x2F;gold&#x2F;mirrors bath.</text></comment> | <story><title>Gustav Klimt's Obsession with Gold</title><url>https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/gustav-klimt-gold-2543498</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>axegon_</author><text>As the son of two artists, both of whom never liked gold, Klimt is a strange breed: My parents have made a ton of murals, jam-packed with gold. Not because they wanted but because rich people(the type of people who want murals in their homes and can afford it) love it as an expression of their financial status. Both of them hated much of those murals and I can only name a handful of works they truly liked, at the end of the day, the customer is always right. And having seen much of their work(and taking some part on a few occasions circumstantially since I can&#x27;t draw a single line to save my life), I completely agree with them. We have a word which roughly translates to mobbaroque in English. In almost all cases, this is exactly what it is.<p>Having said that, my mom specifically has a few favorite artists, Klimt being one of them. Over the years she&#x27;s been asked to make dozens of Klimt replicas(The Kiss probably accounting for 80% of them) and she&#x27;s loved doing all of them. I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious. Not only that but made them look incredible. Admittedly I never looked all that deep as to why he was &quot;obsessed&quot; with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Daub</author><text>You may appreciate the following anecdote about Picasso. He was offered a lot of money to make a sculpture entirely in hold. His response was ‘Great! I will paint it black!’.</text></comment> |
28,766,918 | 28,765,823 | 1 | 2 | 28,759,492 | train | <story><title>My Logging Best Practices (2020)</title><url>https://tuhrig.de/my-logging-best-practices/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>One thing I noticed in one of the article&#x27;s examples is that the log contained an example user&#x27;s PII:<p><pre><code> INFO | User registered for newsletter. [user=&quot;Thomas&quot;, email=&quot;[email protected]&quot;]
</code></pre>
Ruh-roh! You now have a potential privacy incident ready to occur, if an inadvertent log leak ever happens. I think, at least these days, one vital component of any logging API is the ability to flag particular bits of information as PII so that it can get handled differently upon output, storage, or ingestion by other tools. For example, if the users&#x27;s actual E-mail address is not specifically useful for debugging, do you need to display it in the default visualization of the log?<p>I think in 2020, with companies&#x27; privacy practices getting more and more scrutiny, any logging best practices doc should at least mention treatment of PII.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Yuuup! I&#x27;ve been looking through the Epik dump [1] and there&#x27;s all sorts of PII where it shouldn&#x27;t be. Logs for sure. Also object dumps as text fields. [2] And the most impressive mistake is logging every failed login attempt with the login and password. There are a ton of entries where people put the password in the username field and vice versa, so it&#x27;s basically a big database of passwords of frequent users.<p>There are also a ton of tables where they made a backup copy of the table and just left it in the database for years. Ditto switching to new coce but not cleaning up the old data. So even data that would normally be removed due to, say, expiring domains ends up being preserved.<p>I recommend digging through it to anybody who is sad about the systems you run at work. It&#x27;s such a fractal set of fuckups that I promise you&#x27;ll feel better about your legacy systems.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddosecrets.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Epik" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ddosecrets.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Epik</a><p>[2] in PHP serialization format: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PHP_serialization_format" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PHP_serialization_format</a></text></comment> | <story><title>My Logging Best Practices (2020)</title><url>https://tuhrig.de/my-logging-best-practices/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>One thing I noticed in one of the article&#x27;s examples is that the log contained an example user&#x27;s PII:<p><pre><code> INFO | User registered for newsletter. [user=&quot;Thomas&quot;, email=&quot;[email protected]&quot;]
</code></pre>
Ruh-roh! You now have a potential privacy incident ready to occur, if an inadvertent log leak ever happens. I think, at least these days, one vital component of any logging API is the ability to flag particular bits of information as PII so that it can get handled differently upon output, storage, or ingestion by other tools. For example, if the users&#x27;s actual E-mail address is not specifically useful for debugging, do you need to display it in the default visualization of the log?<p>I think in 2020, with companies&#x27; privacy practices getting more and more scrutiny, any logging best practices doc should at least mention treatment of PII.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mholt</author><text>Ah yeah, that&#x27;s why in Caddy 2 while we do emit full details from HTTP requests in our structured JSON logs, you have the ability to traverse into each log message and replace or delete data within it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caddyserver.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;caddyfile&#x2F;directives&#x2F;log#filter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;caddyserver.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;caddyfile&#x2F;directives&#x2F;log#filter</a></text></comment> |
8,654,990 | 8,654,930 | 1 | 2 | 8,654,497 | train | <story><title>CSS Stats</title><url>http://cssstats.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mxpxrocks10</author><text>hey CSS Stats - let me know if we can sponsor you. chris at maxcdn com - can get you an account right now.</text></comment> | <story><title>CSS Stats</title><url>http://cssstats.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sorahn</author><text>This is awesome in a &quot;now I want to spend ages refactoring my CSS to make my numbers look awesome&quot; kind of way.</text></comment> |
38,491,534 | 38,491,551 | 1 | 3 | 38,489,307 | train | <story><title>Accidental database programming</title><url>https://sqlsync.dev/posts/stop-building-databases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>Genuinely curious why not just cache the relevant bits in LocalStorage &#x2F; SessionStorage? I seem to remember Chrome trying to add a literal SQL database to the browser, but it never panned out, localStorage became king. I don&#x27;t mean to downplay the usefulness, just I usually opt for what the browser gives me. I&#x27;m huge on WASM and what it will do for the browser as it matures more (or grows in features).</text></item><item><author>neilk</author><text>I’m familiar with this project - the creator is a friend. I’ll try to get him on here to answer questions.<p>He’s a seasoned database architect. With SQLsync he’s made a way for frontend developers to query and update a remote database as if it was completely located right in the browser. Because it basically is. The power of WASM makes it possible to ship a whole SQLite database to the browser. The magic is in how it syncs from multiple clients with a clever but simple reactive algorithm.<p>It’s a radical attack on the whole problem. Much of our work as developers is about syncing data. When you start looking at React and REST APIs as a kind of sync procedure, this approach can open a lot of new possibilities. You don’t have to write a weird bespoke database of trees of objects fetched and cached from the API any more. You can just update and query it locally, with all the power of a relational database.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>carlsverre</author><text>Good question.<p>First to address the main point: why not cache the relevant bits in some kind of local storage. SQLSync plans on doing this, specifically using OPFS for performance (but will have fallbacks to localstorage if needed).<p>Second to address the question of why not use built in kv stores or browser side databases. One answer is another question: how do you solve sync?<p>One approach is using a data model that encodes conflict handling directly, like CRDTs. This approach is easier to put into general kv stores, as syncing requires simply exchanging messages in any order. I find this solution is well suited to unstructured collaboration like text editing, but makes it harder to coordinate centralised changes to the data. Centralised changes are nice when you start introducing authentication, compaction, and upgrades.<p>Another approach is doing something similar to how Git Rebase works. The idea is to let the application state and server state diverge, and then provide an efficient means for the app to periodically reset to the latest server state and replay any unacked mutations. This approach requires the ability to re-run mutations efficiently as well as efficiently track multiple diverging versions of the database state. It&#x27;s certainly possible to build this model on top of local storage.<p>For SQLSync, I found that by controlling the entirety of SQLite and the underlying storage layer I was able to create a solution that works across platforms and offers a fairly consistent performance profile. The same solution runs in native apps, browser sessions (main thread or workers), and on serverless platforms. One of my goals is to follow the lead of SQLite and keep my solution fairly agnostic to the platform (while providing the requisite hooks for things like durable storage).</text></comment> | <story><title>Accidental database programming</title><url>https://sqlsync.dev/posts/stop-building-databases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giancarlostoro</author><text>Genuinely curious why not just cache the relevant bits in LocalStorage &#x2F; SessionStorage? I seem to remember Chrome trying to add a literal SQL database to the browser, but it never panned out, localStorage became king. I don&#x27;t mean to downplay the usefulness, just I usually opt for what the browser gives me. I&#x27;m huge on WASM and what it will do for the browser as it matures more (or grows in features).</text></item><item><author>neilk</author><text>I’m familiar with this project - the creator is a friend. I’ll try to get him on here to answer questions.<p>He’s a seasoned database architect. With SQLsync he’s made a way for frontend developers to query and update a remote database as if it was completely located right in the browser. Because it basically is. The power of WASM makes it possible to ship a whole SQLite database to the browser. The magic is in how it syncs from multiple clients with a clever but simple reactive algorithm.<p>It’s a radical attack on the whole problem. Much of our work as developers is about syncing data. When you start looking at React and REST APIs as a kind of sync procedure, this approach can open a lot of new possibilities. You don’t have to write a weird bespoke database of trees of objects fetched and cached from the API any more. You can just update and query it locally, with all the power of a relational database.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justincormack</author><text>There is a literal SQL store in the browser its the sqlite Wasm port. Its just panning out a little differently.</text></comment> |
27,323,348 | 27,323,031 | 1 | 2 | 27,322,533 | train | <story><title>Why Is JRuby Slow?</title><url>https://earthly.dev/blog/jruby/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>habibur</author><text>Here&#x27;s the summary: Ruby like most of all other Linux applications from that age was written to run in multi-process mode for parallelism, instead of being multi threaded.<p>But running multi-process is heavy on the JVM as it has to load the virtual machine and JIT for every process start, special when the processes are short lived.<p>Java solves it by encouraging running things as multi-threaded instead of multi-processed.<p>But Ruby wasn&#x27;t built to run multi-threaded. And CRuby even if can run threads, does it by implementing a global thread lock. Aka, only one thread can run in a process at a time. The other threads have to wait until it finishes.<p>It looks like the multi-process implementation is good enough for CRuby and JRuby&#x27;s attempt to turn it into multi threaded application didn&#x27;t improve things.<p>Solution is to build a JVM that can load the virtual machine, JIT and execute applications fast enough like C programs.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Is JRuby Slow?</title><url>https://earthly.dev/blog/jruby/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>crazy5sheep</author><text>There&#x27;s once I was running some jruby stuff in jenkins during a build, the job kept on hanging on some stage, I thought there must be bug somewhere, I forced kill it a couple of times with no success, but kept the last one running before I head home. Then after a couple of hours, I found out an email said the built was passed... eventually, I had figured out that jruby was using &#x2F;dev&#x2F;random, since jenkins was running in vm, so no enough entropy was generated. after force mounting &#x2F;dev&#x2F;random to urandom, the hanging issue just disappeared.</text></comment> |
31,539,555 | 31,537,631 | 1 | 2 | 31,536,414 | train | <story><title>Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health</title><url>https://www.bramadams.dev/projects/invest-in-lights</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elabajaba</author><text>As someone who had Lifx due to them not needing a controller, don&#x27;t buy them their software sucks. It worked fine for months at a time, but would then decide it no longer wanted to obey commands and you&#x27;d have to re-pair it, which usually took 30 minutes and 5 failed attempts where it would fail during the setup process after resetting the bulb.<p>Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you&#x27;d have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).<p>Eventually my bulbs died and I haven&#x27;t gone back to smart lighting yet (though I&#x27;m considering ordering some hue or Ikea bulbs).<p>If you check &#x2F;r&#x2F;lifx on Reddit it&#x27;s basically filled with people complaining about lifx&#x27;s awful software.</text></item><item><author>sampo</author><text>Philips Hue: You can use the phone app to control individual bulbs directly with bluetooth, but for more control you need also the Hue brigde, which talks to the bulbs over Zigbee (a wireless protocol), and to your phone app over your wifi. For initial setup, the bridge needs an internet connection, but otherwise it will work as long as your home wifi is up, even if there is no connection to outside internet. The features (timed schedules, scenes) live in the Hue brigde, so everything works also without outside internet.<p>LIFX: No Zigbee, no bridge. These bulbs connect to your 2.4GHz home wifi. More advanced features (schedules, scenes) live in the LIFX company server, so won&#x27;t work without internet connection. But without outside internet connection, you can still use the phone app via your wifi router to control the color and brightness of individual bulbs. If you&#x27;re a home automation hobbyist, you can give color and brightness commands to LIFX bulbs over your 2.4Ghz wifi, so you can program your own timed schedules that would work without outside internet connection.<p>Other smart bulbs: Cheaper. Philips Hue and LIFX are the two most expensive.<p>I understand LIFX is best for bright colors. But Philips Hue bulbs don&#x27;t contain just RGB leds, but also leds for white and warn white, so the bulb may have 5 different types of leds. So Philips might produce better near-white &quot;natural&quot; light than same colors produced by combining only red,green,blue leds. Not sure if this matters to everyone or only to some lighting connoisseurs.</text></item><item><author>bubblethink</author><text>Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don&#x27;t want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.</text></item><item><author>lawkwok</author><text>Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them.<p>The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming.<p>Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room.<p>The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmos17</author><text>In my experience the ikea bulbs are also awful, constant unpairing requiring multiple attempts to re-pair with the remote, especially if you have multiple bulbs in close proximity. In the end I gave up and just use them as normal bulbs. It would be a nice setup if it worked though, having a dedicated remote control is much more convenient than using a phone imo.</text></comment> | <story><title>Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health</title><url>https://www.bramadams.dev/projects/invest-in-lights</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>elabajaba</author><text>As someone who had Lifx due to them not needing a controller, don&#x27;t buy them their software sucks. It worked fine for months at a time, but would then decide it no longer wanted to obey commands and you&#x27;d have to re-pair it, which usually took 30 minutes and 5 failed attempts where it would fail during the setup process after resetting the bulb.<p>Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you&#x27;d have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).<p>Eventually my bulbs died and I haven&#x27;t gone back to smart lighting yet (though I&#x27;m considering ordering some hue or Ikea bulbs).<p>If you check &#x2F;r&#x2F;lifx on Reddit it&#x27;s basically filled with people complaining about lifx&#x27;s awful software.</text></item><item><author>sampo</author><text>Philips Hue: You can use the phone app to control individual bulbs directly with bluetooth, but for more control you need also the Hue brigde, which talks to the bulbs over Zigbee (a wireless protocol), and to your phone app over your wifi. For initial setup, the bridge needs an internet connection, but otherwise it will work as long as your home wifi is up, even if there is no connection to outside internet. The features (timed schedules, scenes) live in the Hue brigde, so everything works also without outside internet.<p>LIFX: No Zigbee, no bridge. These bulbs connect to your 2.4GHz home wifi. More advanced features (schedules, scenes) live in the LIFX company server, so won&#x27;t work without internet connection. But without outside internet connection, you can still use the phone app via your wifi router to control the color and brightness of individual bulbs. If you&#x27;re a home automation hobbyist, you can give color and brightness commands to LIFX bulbs over your 2.4Ghz wifi, so you can program your own timed schedules that would work without outside internet connection.<p>Other smart bulbs: Cheaper. Philips Hue and LIFX are the two most expensive.<p>I understand LIFX is best for bright colors. But Philips Hue bulbs don&#x27;t contain just RGB leds, but also leds for white and warn white, so the bulb may have 5 different types of leds. So Philips might produce better near-white &quot;natural&quot; light than same colors produced by combining only red,green,blue leds. Not sure if this matters to everyone or only to some lighting connoisseurs.</text></item><item><author>bubblethink</author><text>Is there any friendly alternative to these home automation things ? I would like to try some stuff but I don&#x27;t want to spend a weekend creating vlans or fighting google play services, alexa etc.</text></item><item><author>lawkwok</author><text>Phillips Hue lights are something you think is a luxury until you get them.<p>The ability to have light change colour temperature or dim depending on the time is so calming.<p>Whenever I revert back to the non—colour-temperature-adjusted light, I feel like I’m in an operating room.<p>The only thing I would note is that they are dimmer than regular lights. Having dim lights in the middle of the day really makes me sleepy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dbttdft</author><text>&gt; Their bulbs also sometimes just ignored commands, so you&#x27;d have to just spam power off or the color you were trying to choose until it finally worked (this was in a room with the bulb and a hard wired wifi AP). The app was also slow and took awhile to start (on flagship Android phone at the time).<p>Sounds about right.</text></comment> |
25,050,200 | 25,050,628 | 1 | 2 | 25,049,079 | train | <story><title>Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/10/apple-unveils-m1-its-first-system-on-a-chip-for-portable-mac-computers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>293984j29384</author><text>8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..</text></item><item><author>ameen</author><text>I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming:<p>There&#x27;s a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-air" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-air</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;13-inch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;13-inch</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;mac-mini" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;mac-mini</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ph_</author><text>I had a quad-core Mini with 16GB in 2011. Almost 10 years later we should be much further, especially as the Intel Mini allows up to 64GB. (Which you probably would use only if you upgraded the memory yourself).</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers</title><url>https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/10/apple-unveils-m1-its-first-system-on-a-chip-for-portable-mac-computers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>293984j29384</author><text>8GB and 16GB configurations seem more than enough..</text></item><item><author>ameen</author><text>I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming:<p>There&#x27;s a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-air" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-air</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;13-inch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;macbook-pro&#x2F;13-inch</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;mac-mini" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;buy-mac&#x2F;mac-mini</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonplackett</author><text>They&#x27;ve also halved the 2 base SSDs to 256&#x2F;512<p>I thought with the last update they&#x27;d finally seen the light and moved to 512&#x2F;1tb, now we&#x27;re back with the silly 256gb.<p>If you factor in having to upgrade ram to 16gb and ssd to 512 it&#x27;s only £100 shy of the old price. Good, but not as good as it looked to begin with.</text></comment> |
14,977,341 | 14,974,182 | 1 | 3 | 14,973,706 | train | <story><title>Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE</title><url>http://www.lazarus-ide.org</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rcarmo</author><text>I mentioned Lazarus in other threads a few days ago (since my kids are playing around with it) and it&#x27;s great to see it as a top-level post. Some random thoughts:<p>- It&#x27;s somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app (besides RealBasic&#x2F;Xojo which I&#x27;ve yet to try - was put off by their mandatory registration)<p>- I wish we had RAD environments like this for more languages (Racket, Python, etc. - even JS).<p>- On the Mac, installation is a bit fiddly. It needs a little polish and support (a standalone, integrated bundle would be better, or at the very least a unified installer).<p>- We&#x27;ve been retrofitting web UIs to desktops to such an extent (I&#x27;m looking at you, Electron) that the tiny, supremely efficient apps Lazarus spits out put the last couple of years into stark perspective (2GB RAM used by Slack, etc.)<p>I love Lazarus, and hope it helps resurrect the RAD approach for other languages - if anyone knows of any similar environments (besides QtCreator, etc.), could you share the links?</text></comment> | <story><title>Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE</title><url>http://www.lazarus-ide.org</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samuell</author><text>Lazarus&#x2F;FPC checks so many nice boxes:<p>[x] Statically compiled<p>[x] Native UI on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Typically compiled without code changes on Linux&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;Win<p>[x] Small binaries<p>[x] No GC<p>[x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax<p>[x] Still, doesn&#x27;t rely on indentation for nested blocks<p>[ ] (Fill in)</text></comment> |
14,144,388 | 14,143,388 | 1 | 2 | 14,142,120 | train | <story><title>Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-announces-react-fiber-a-rewrite-of-its-react-framework/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nightski</author><text>The benefits you acknowledge (distribution) are not because of the tech but in spite of it.<p>At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity.<p>It will never happen though.<p>* EDIT: This comes from someone who uses React, Redux, webpack, etc.. daily</text></item><item><author>acemarke</author><text>Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur.<p>Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We&#x27;ve just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser.<p>Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMake, QMake, Tup, Bash scripts, Maven, Gradle, Ant, Buck, or something else? The build tool question is _totally_ solved, right? :)<p>Yes, the JS community has been reinventing a number of wheels. Yes, the browser environment and JS standard lib have weaknesses. On the other hand, it&#x27;s also allowed developers to build useful applications that are immediately distributable to pretty much anyone who has an internet connection.</text></item><item><author>metalliqaz</author><text>I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control.<p>Its amazing to me that the autoconf&#x2F;automake&#x2F;libtool system for making write-once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today&#x27;s standards.<p>Every year the hot libraries change, the build tools change, the metalanguages, the data formats, even the damn paradigms change. Each generation requires more layers trying to fix up the underlying evil that nobody who soaks themselves in the matter will admit: the browser is a bad app platform and javascript is a bad language. Both have been pressed into serving a purpose for which neither were designed.</text></item><item><author>acemarke</author><text>I&#x27;ll repeat the comment I made in the &quot;React 15.5&quot; thread a couple weeks ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14063818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14063818</a>):<p>For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that&#x27;s going on, Lin Clark&#x27;s recent talk on &quot;A Cartoon Intro to Fiber&quot; at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There&#x27;s a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 migration is at [2], and the follow-up issue discussing the plan for the &quot;addons&quot; packages is at [3].<p>I&#x27;ll also toss out my usual reminder that I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links</a> . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reactiflux.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reactiflux.com</a> .<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;react-implementation.md#react-fiber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8854" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8854</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;9207" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;9207</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>julian_1</author><text>No-one could even agree on making HTML5 valid XML - in order to leverage all the tools and knowledge that exist in that space.<p>Not that I even like XML. But having another XML dialect that&#x27;s not actual XML shows that the only hope is to build valid tools and abstractions on top of all the crud.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-announces-react-fiber-a-rewrite-of-its-react-framework/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nightski</author><text>The benefits you acknowledge (distribution) are not because of the tech but in spite of it.<p>At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity.<p>It will never happen though.<p>* EDIT: This comes from someone who uses React, Redux, webpack, etc.. daily</text></item><item><author>acemarke</author><text>Your comment seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur.<p>Application development is complex, period. Posix development is complicated. Qt is big and complicated. Makefiles are complicated. Autotools is complicated. Big Java server apps are complicated. C++ is complicated. We&#x27;ve just hit the point where people are trying to do the same thing in a browser.<p>Would you prefer to build your application using Make, Scons, Waf, CMake, QMake, Tup, Bash scripts, Maven, Gradle, Ant, Buck, or something else? The build tool question is _totally_ solved, right? :)<p>Yes, the JS community has been reinventing a number of wheels. Yes, the browser environment and JS standard lib have weaknesses. On the other hand, it&#x27;s also allowed developers to build useful applications that are immediately distributable to pretty much anyone who has an internet connection.</text></item><item><author>metalliqaz</author><text>I admire your exceptional work cataloguing these resources. However, just one look at that giant horde of links is, to me, a perfect demonstration of why the front-end development ecosystem is way out of control.<p>Its amazing to me that the autoconf&#x2F;automake&#x2F;libtool system for making write-once-run-everywhere *nix applications is downright simple by today&#x27;s standards.<p>Every year the hot libraries change, the build tools change, the metalanguages, the data formats, even the damn paradigms change. Each generation requires more layers trying to fix up the underlying evil that nobody who soaks themselves in the matter will admit: the browser is a bad app platform and javascript is a bad language. Both have been pressed into serving a purpose for which neither were designed.</text></item><item><author>acemarke</author><text>I&#x27;ll repeat the comment I made in the &quot;React 15.5&quot; thread a couple weeks ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14063818" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14063818</a>):<p>For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that&#x27;s going on, Lin Clark&#x27;s recent talk on &quot;A Cartoon Intro to Fiber&quot; at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There&#x27;s a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 migration is at [2], and the follow-up issue discussing the plan for the &quot;addons&quot; packages is at [3].<p>I&#x27;ll also toss out my usual reminder that I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links</a> . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reactiflux.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reactiflux.com</a> .<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;react-implementation.md#react-fiber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;markerikson&#x2F;react-redux-links&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8854" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;8854</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;9207" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;react&#x2F;issues&#x2F;9207</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZenoArrow</author><text>&gt;&quot;At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative.&quot;<p>You mean like Dart?<p>Besides, languages that target WebAssembly are almost certainly going to evolve to fit that space.</text></comment> |
33,114,630 | 33,113,146 | 1 | 3 | 33,110,031 | train | <story><title>UK Plans for Three-Hour Power Blackouts in Event of Gas Shortages</title><url>https://news.sky.com/story/energy-crisis-plan-for-three-hour-power-blackouts-to-prioritise-heating-in-event-of-gas-shortages-12713253</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jeffalyanak</author><text>I recently built a small home solar battery system with the goal of keeping my low-power DC devices charged and running during outages like this. I&#x27;ve only been running it for a few months now, but I&#x27;ve been using it to keep all of my USB devices charged during that time.<p>In an actual power outage, I can even plug in my modem, router, and AP—using DC barrel jacks for the modem and router and a DIY PoE injector for the AP—so as long as the upstream infrastructure is still powered I&#x27;ll be able to keep working.<p>Since I rent, I can&#x27;t do a roof-mount or grid-tie system, so I opted instead to build a 12V DC system. I purchased a used solar panel and I&#x27;ve assembled a ~0.5kWh battery from used packs.<p>I&#x27;m using insulated nickel strips to pass the solar panel cables through a closed closed window in a way that doesn&#x27;t require drilling holes and has a minimum impact on the insulation seal of the window (although insulation in the UK really sucks anyway).<p>Most of the fittings and wiring have been used and come mostly from automotive scrap (an advantage of using common 12&#x2F;24V standard fittings), so the financial cost has been very low. That said collecting use battery packs, testing cells, and assembling them into new battery packs certainly takes time.</text></comment> | <story><title>UK Plans for Three-Hour Power Blackouts in Event of Gas Shortages</title><url>https://news.sky.com/story/energy-crisis-plan-for-three-hour-power-blackouts-to-prioritise-heating-in-event-of-gas-shortages-12713253</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gizajob</author><text>If you want to know the result of successive Tory governments and forty years of deregulation and mismanagement, then power blackouts and people not being able to heat their homes is it. The Tory agenda now seems fixed upon ensuring the very rich have everything and everyone else has absolutely nothing.</text></comment> |
17,890,419 | 17,889,159 | 1 | 3 | 17,887,285 | train | <story><title>Full Ethereum blockchain now available as a BigQuery public dataset</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/ethereum-bigquery-public-dataset-smart-contract-analytics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zone411</author><text>It&#x27;s not that difficult, just a bit annoying, to get the full Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains running locally and create a database-type access. You will probably spend more time waiting for the download to finish than actually writing code. Bitcoin is a little harder than Ethereum because of the format changes and that might require using an older version (at least that&#x27;s what I did).</text></comment> | <story><title>Full Ethereum blockchain now available as a BigQuery public dataset</title><url>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/ethereum-bigquery-public-dataset-smart-contract-analytics</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>CobrastanJorji</author><text>I don&#x27;t follow cryptocurrency news, but the example query of cost transferred sums is interesting. What the heck happened around July 2nd?</text></comment> |
25,703,695 | 25,702,389 | 1 | 2 | 25,701,053 | train | <story><title>Next Gen Static Blogging</title><url>https://inoads.com/articles/2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>susam</author><text>Note that closing &lt;&#x2F;p&gt; tags are optional<i>†</i>, so one can be an HTML purist and still write a decent HTML document with a relatively clean markup like this:<p><pre><code> &lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
&lt;html lang=&quot;en&quot;&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Lorem Ipsum&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Lorem Ipsum&lt;&#x2F;h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Duis id maximus tortor. Sed nisi ante, fermentum vel nunc
et, tincidunt sagittis magna. In ultrices commodo lacus, id
tristique ipsum euismod laoreet.
&lt;p&gt;
Maecenas at neque posuere, aliquet erat at, vehicula est.
Duis aliquet elit et arcu laoreet, id pulvinar eros pretium.
Quisque consectetur, enim semper facilisis feugiat, velit
sapien semper arcu, eu mollis libero est et odio.
&lt;p&gt;
Curabitur fringilla interdum ante vel ultricies. Mauris
volutpat nisi sed turpis elementum elementum. Mauris nec
eleifend lorem. Sed ac vulputate libero.
</code></pre>
A valid HTML5 document does not require<i>†</i> explicit &lt;head&gt;, &lt;body&gt;, or the closing &lt;&#x2F;p&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;html&gt; tags. See the spec for optional tags at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#optional-tags" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#optional-...</a> for more details. Similarly, the markup for lists and tables can be cleaned up too because the closing &lt;&#x2F;li&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;tr&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;th&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;td&gt; tags are optional<i>†</i>.<p>Note that the opening &lt;html&gt; tag is optional<i>†</i> too but I retained it in the above example to specify the lang attribute otherwise the W3 markup validator warns, &quot;Consider adding a lang attribute to the html start tag to declare the language of this document.&quot;<p><i>† These tags are optional provided certain conditions are met. See the spec for full details. In practice, one rarely has to worry about these conditions.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismorgan</author><text>And since we’re talking about optional things:<p><pre><code> &lt;link rel=&quot;stylesheet&quot; href=&quot;&#x2F;style.css&quot; &#x2F;&gt;
&lt;meta name=&quot;viewport&quot; content=&quot;initial-scale = 1.0,maximum-scale = 1.0&quot; &#x2F;&gt;
</code></pre>
Trailing slashes on HTML tags are useless. They’re <i>allowed</i> on void elements, for XML compatibility, but are by definition simply ignored. I recommend against including them, because they’re simple visual noise, and misleading because they don’t actually close tags—you can only use them on on elements that are defined as having no children.<p>(Note that I say <i>HTML</i> tags; on foreign elements—meaning inline SVG and MathML—trailing slashes <i>do</i> make tags self-closing, XML-style.)<p>Also since I’m writing, that viewport declaration is wonky. It should have device-width, and it should not have maximum-scale which is user-unfriendly.<p>All up:<p><pre><code> &lt;link rel=&quot;stylesheet&quot; href=&quot;&#x2F;style.css&quot;&gt;
&lt;meta name=&quot;viewport&quot; content=&quot;device-width,initial-scale=1&quot;&gt;
</code></pre>
And for completeness, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#elements-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#elements-...</a> defines void and foreign elements.</text></comment> | <story><title>Next Gen Static Blogging</title><url>https://inoads.com/articles/2020-01-09-Next-Gen-Static-Blogging</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>susam</author><text>Note that closing &lt;&#x2F;p&gt; tags are optional<i>†</i>, so one can be an HTML purist and still write a decent HTML document with a relatively clean markup like this:<p><pre><code> &lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
&lt;html lang=&quot;en&quot;&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Lorem Ipsum&lt;&#x2F;title&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;Lorem Ipsum&lt;&#x2F;h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Duis id maximus tortor. Sed nisi ante, fermentum vel nunc
et, tincidunt sagittis magna. In ultrices commodo lacus, id
tristique ipsum euismod laoreet.
&lt;p&gt;
Maecenas at neque posuere, aliquet erat at, vehicula est.
Duis aliquet elit et arcu laoreet, id pulvinar eros pretium.
Quisque consectetur, enim semper facilisis feugiat, velit
sapien semper arcu, eu mollis libero est et odio.
&lt;p&gt;
Curabitur fringilla interdum ante vel ultricies. Mauris
volutpat nisi sed turpis elementum elementum. Mauris nec
eleifend lorem. Sed ac vulputate libero.
</code></pre>
A valid HTML5 document does not require<i>†</i> explicit &lt;head&gt;, &lt;body&gt;, or the closing &lt;&#x2F;p&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;html&gt; tags. See the spec for optional tags at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#optional-tags" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;html.spec.whatwg.org&#x2F;multipage&#x2F;syntax.html#optional-...</a> for more details. Similarly, the markup for lists and tables can be cleaned up too because the closing &lt;&#x2F;li&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;tr&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;th&gt;, &lt;&#x2F;td&gt; tags are optional<i>†</i>.<p>Note that the opening &lt;html&gt; tag is optional<i>†</i> too but I retained it in the above example to specify the lang attribute otherwise the W3 markup validator warns, &quot;Consider adding a lang attribute to the html start tag to declare the language of this document.&quot;<p><i>† These tags are optional provided certain conditions are met. See the spec for full details. In practice, one rarely has to worry about these conditions.</i></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cwackerfuss</author><text>Frontend developer here --<p>Although you could omit the closing tags, I don&#x27;t see the benefit of doing so. If you know HTML, nesting is fundamental and not explicitly closing dom nodes would lead to confusion. You would also need to concern yourself with the &quot;certain conditions&quot; that must be met for it to work. Consistency and clarity over brevity!</text></comment> |
10,269,121 | 10,269,128 | 1 | 2 | 10,268,538 | train | <story><title>The strange economics of open-source software</title><url>http://www.philipotoole.com/the-strange-economics-of-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brc</author><text>I don&#x27;t find it strange at all, and looking at a proper classical economist - they would have no trouble explaining it.<p>Most people, when understanding economics tend to make the jump directly to money&#x2F;cash when explaining prices and market action.<p>But to be correct you have to look at utility. There&#x27;s little question as to why companies install open source software - the TCO can be lower. But why do people contribute their time in building it?<p>The answer is that the reward of being part of an OSS team brings great utility to a developer, and this is true even for marginally successful OSS projects. So people exchange their time for intangibles like reputation, credibility markers ( the author casually drops in which projects he is involved in) as well as the ability to leverage involvement into actual cash like well paid consultant gigs, books or successful blogs.<p>So there isn&#x27;t any strangeness going on at all. OSS makes sense from a company point of view, and it makes sense from an individual developer point of view.</text></comment> | <story><title>The strange economics of open-source software</title><url>http://www.philipotoole.com/the-strange-economics-of-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dfc</author><text>Wow, I was expecting a little more economics in a post titled &quot;the strange economics of OSS.&quot; It is too bad the post makes such grand claims without any modicum of effort to back them up with data; these are very interesting research questions. The two most hand wavy claims have to be &quot;it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available&quot; and &quot; it is at larger, older firms, that the least amount of open-source software is written.&quot; As far as the former goes you really have to ignore Apple&#x27;s ecosystem, video games and anything related to industrial automation or espionage in order to make such a claim. As far as the latter claim goes IBM, Intel, Oracle, HP, Texas Instruments etc are often at the top of contributions to the Linux kernel by company. To be honest thee latter claim is rather empty without some methodological framework that defines &quot;older company&quot; and &quot;most open source software.&quot;</text></comment> |
26,522,015 | 26,522,081 | 1 | 3 | 26,521,936 | train | <story><title>Police warn students to avoid Sci-Hub</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/education-56462390</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Bootvis</author><text>Discussed before: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26517220" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26517220</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Police warn students to avoid Sci-Hub</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/education-56462390</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tim333</author><text>Odd warning. I get the impression the police have not tried using sci-hub. They should give it a go!<p>&gt;If you&#x27;re tricked into revealing your log-in credentials, whether it&#x27;s through the use of fake emails or malware, we know that Sci-Hub will then use those details<p>I mean sci-hub doesn&#x27;t do that. If they warn about anything it should maybe be that torrenting copyrighted stuff could make you liable for prosecution. Or that torrenting papers may be a gateway drug to torrenting MS Office which may well have malware.</text></comment> |
21,708,809 | 21,708,763 | 1 | 3 | 21,708,328 | train | <story><title>Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huffmsa</author><text>There has been sea ice in the Arctic for well under 50% of the planets history.<p>Life thrived<p>The Sahara desert was a grassland 5000-10000 years<p>Life thrived.</text></item><item><author>aidenn0</author><text>When Henri was suggesting to use specific models for specific predictions, he added this note:<p>&gt; Note to reader: I was going to use Arctic sea ice in 2100 as an example, but there probably won’t be any lol</text></item><item><author>jml7c5</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure if he&#x27;ll pop in here, but one of the co-authors (Henri Drake) has a comment thread on &#x2F;r&#x2F;science if anyone wants to ask any questions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e63ic5&#x2F;of_17_climate_models_published_between_the_early&#x2F;f9no11k&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e63ic5&#x2F;of_17_clima...</a><p>EDIT:<p>Here is some of the code used in the paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hausfath&#x2F;OldModels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hausfath&#x2F;OldModels</a><p>Here is a blog post on the paper, written by one of the authors: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclimate.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-good-have-climate-models-been-at-truly-predicting-the-future&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclimate.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-go...</a><p>EDIT AGAIN:<p>The &quot;supporting information&quot; .docx at the bottom of this page has a lot more detail, for those (like me) who can&#x27;t get past the paywall ( :-&#x2F; ): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2019GL085378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2019...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>losteric</author><text>Life will undoubt survive our mistakes.<p>The question is whether <i>we</i> will. Civilization is a fragile thing.</text></comment> | <story><title>Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/even-50-year-old-climate-models-correctly-predicted-global-warming</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>huffmsa</author><text>There has been sea ice in the Arctic for well under 50% of the planets history.<p>Life thrived<p>The Sahara desert was a grassland 5000-10000 years<p>Life thrived.</text></item><item><author>aidenn0</author><text>When Henri was suggesting to use specific models for specific predictions, he added this note:<p>&gt; Note to reader: I was going to use Arctic sea ice in 2100 as an example, but there probably won’t be any lol</text></item><item><author>jml7c5</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure if he&#x27;ll pop in here, but one of the co-authors (Henri Drake) has a comment thread on &#x2F;r&#x2F;science if anyone wants to ask any questions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e63ic5&#x2F;of_17_climate_models_published_between_the_early&#x2F;f9no11k&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;science&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e63ic5&#x2F;of_17_clima...</a><p>EDIT:<p>Here is some of the code used in the paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hausfath&#x2F;OldModels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hausfath&#x2F;OldModels</a><p>Here is a blog post on the paper, written by one of the authors: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclimate.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-good-have-climate-models-been-at-truly-predicting-the-future&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.realclimate.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;how-go...</a><p>EDIT AGAIN:<p>The &quot;supporting information&quot; .docx at the bottom of this page has a lot more detail, for those (like me) who can&#x27;t get past the paywall ( :-&#x2F; ): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2019GL085378" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;abs&#x2F;10.1029&#x2F;2019...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gowld</author><text>Most people are interested in a particular subset of life thriving.</text></comment> |
3,439,708 | 3,439,550 | 1 | 2 | 3,439,318 | train | <story><title>The myth of Japan's failure</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-story-of-japans-economic-success.html?pagewanted=print</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbesto</author><text>Let's look at one metric that supersedes all (in my opinion):<p>According to, Japan's unemployment rate has been no higher than 6% over the last 32 years (1980-2012).It's currently at 4.5%[1]<p>Compare that to the US, who's unemployment rate has been at worst 10% over the last 32 years (1980-2012). It's currently at 8.5%[2]<p>Why does this supersede most other stats? Because we simply need to keep people busy "doing things", otherwise (as you're seeing in the US) riots/protests break out, crime goes up (crime is largely a result of poverty), and people don't have the means to keep themselves healthy. What more do you need from a society? I understand people will say "but we need growth". I ask why? What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?<p>[1]<a href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate" rel="nofollow">http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate</a>
[2]<a href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate" rel="nofollow">http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...</a><p>edit: 32 years...doh!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>It reminds me of my first time visiting South Korea. While there I observed people who's job it was to wear a cute uniform and bow to cars entering the parking garage at the local department store, people hired by companies to stand in the aisles at the local supermarket holding packs of coffee or shampoo or whatever and dance to loud techno music (usually young women in short skirts and thigh high boots, bizarre to see families shopping for vegetables, fighting their way around scantily clad 20 year olds in the middle of a dance routine around the cabbage aisle), and other similar, "keep people busy" type jobs. I'd be highly surprised if these folks made more than $3-4/hr, not even remotely a living wage.<p>- checking on the numbers, the minimum wage in South Korea for 2011 was about $3.75. I'm guessing when I first went there in 2003, it was even lower.<p>- in 2006 I visited and remember having to make my way around a gauntlet of guys in doorman uniforms, who's job it was to bow to people entering the hotel, and another guy who's job it was to push the "up" button to request an elevator. That's it, that was his entire job. For eight hours a day, he stood outside of the elevators, waiting for guests, and pushed the only button to request an elevator (there was no down button the hotel I was staying in).<p>So yes, while the unemployment figures were pretty good, the actual "work" that people were doing was essentially meaningless.<p>I've never been to Japan, but I'd be highly surprised if there weren't similar analogues.</text></comment> | <story><title>The myth of Japan's failure</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/the-true-story-of-japans-economic-success.html?pagewanted=print</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mbesto</author><text>Let's look at one metric that supersedes all (in my opinion):<p>According to, Japan's unemployment rate has been no higher than 6% over the last 32 years (1980-2012).It's currently at 4.5%[1]<p>Compare that to the US, who's unemployment rate has been at worst 10% over the last 32 years (1980-2012). It's currently at 8.5%[2]<p>Why does this supersede most other stats? Because we simply need to keep people busy "doing things", otherwise (as you're seeing in the US) riots/protests break out, crime goes up (crime is largely a result of poverty), and people don't have the means to keep themselves healthy. What more do you need from a society? I understand people will say "but we need growth". I ask why? What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?<p>[1]<a href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate" rel="nofollow">http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/unemployment-rate</a>
[2]<a href="http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate" rel="nofollow">http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-r...</a><p>edit: 32 years...doh!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kiba</author><text><i>Because we simply need to keep people busy "doing things"</i><p>I suppose we could employ people to dig holes and pay them for the job of digging holes for no purpose. That's not productive or is a good use of their time, unless it is spent digging useful holes. That's because we have a million other things that people could do help and help out. All we need to do is figure out how to employ people.<p><i>I ask why? What is the end result of growth that makes societies "better"?</i><p>Less time spent on farming, manufacturing, servicing, and generally working. More time for leisure and family, increased well being, increased lifespan(more is always better), supposedly.<p>However, we're not good at figuring out what we want in life and thus not spend time on leisure, family, hobbies, and things that are fun. Instead, we seeks certain job because they're prestigious, buy things merely for status symbol effect, and so on.</text></comment> |
27,930,043 | 27,929,662 | 1 | 3 | 27,928,464 | train | <story><title>Bringing supply chain security features to the Go community</title><url>https://github.blog/2021-07-22-github-supply-chain-security-features-go-community/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leo_bloom</author><text>GitHub&#x27;s dependabot is causing a ton of &quot;spam&quot; in our frontend (Angular) repositories, as it seemingly opens 1-5 PRs per day to bump random dependencies. I really hope this does not become common practice for our Go repositories.<p>Is there an option to tell dependabot &quot;make one PR per week at most, please, and bundle your changes&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>greysteil</author><text>PM for security products at GitHub here (and one of the original authors of Dependabot).<p>Sorry to hear that. I wouldn&#x27;t expect us to be telling you about 1-5 security issues a day - do you maybe have (non-security) version updates enabled? If so and they feel like spam to you I&#x27;d recommend turning them off. (I wish I had a better suggestion, but until Dependabot supports grouped updates it sounds like it just isn&#x27;t right for you.)<p>Dependabot doesn&#x27;t support grouped updates yet but we hear the feedback and the team wants to work on them. Most of the investment in Dependabot recently gone towards improving our infrastructure and improving the experience for security updates. The team is still relatively small (it&#x27;s 7 people), and supporting a service like this at GitHub scale is hard, but we&#x27;re keen to keep improving.</text></comment> | <story><title>Bringing supply chain security features to the Go community</title><url>https://github.blog/2021-07-22-github-supply-chain-security-features-go-community/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leo_bloom</author><text>GitHub&#x27;s dependabot is causing a ton of &quot;spam&quot; in our frontend (Angular) repositories, as it seemingly opens 1-5 PRs per day to bump random dependencies. I really hope this does not become common practice for our Go repositories.<p>Is there an option to tell dependabot &quot;make one PR per week at most, please, and bundle your changes&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gherkinnn</author><text>Here&#x27;s some information on these &quot;vulnerabilities&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overreacted.io&#x2F;npm-audit-broken-by-design&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overreacted.io&#x2F;npm-audit-broken-by-design&#x2F;</a><p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned, there&#x27;s no need for Dependabot to create PRs. The notifications in the security tab are enough. Mark the unnecessary ones as benign.</text></comment> |
36,884,801 | 36,884,149 | 1 | 3 | 36,882,467 | train | <story><title>Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)</title><url>https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-app-store-wechat-china</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>game_the0ry</author><text>When the west opened trade to China, policy experts assumed China would become more liberal like the west. Instead, the west is becoming more like China. [1, 2, 3]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-web-integrit...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;ready-for-your-eye-scan-worldcoin-launches-but-not-quite-worldwide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2023&#x2F;07&#x2F;ready-for-your-e...</a><p>[3] (countless more examples, especially recently...)</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)</title><url>https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-app-store-wechat-china</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>joshstrange</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure this article has the slam dunk it thinks it does. Those aren&#x27;t &quot;apps&quot; they are at best &quot;web apps&quot;. They use a JS framework and some special markup from what I can tell. In this sense WeChat is more akin to a web browser than having multiple &quot;apps&quot; inside it.<p>&gt; Since these are “apps within an app”, many of these mini-programs are flouting the App Store rules since they were not downloaded from the App Store.<p>I mean Drafts has the ability to download actions (not sure if that is the right term) which are JS that run inside the app. I think this is fine and doesn&#x27;t skirt any rules, I don&#x27;t see why WeChat is all that different.<p>All that said, of course Apple is going to make exceptions for WeChat the same way it makes various concessions to other countries.</text></comment> |
23,843,256 | 23,843,430 | 1 | 2 | 23,839,212 | train | <story><title>AWS Copilot</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-aws-copilot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>realharo</author><text>I feel like trying to use a &quot;dumb&quot; declarative config language for everything is part of the problem.<p>The domain is not simple enough for that, so you end up with all kinds of weird scripts around it all, or other templating&#x2F;codegen solutions, plus all kinds of ad-hoc conventions that are extremely easy to break and very annoying to navigate.<p>Having a full blown statically typed language like TypeScript - where things can reference each other strongly (not just by names and other strings), naming conventions can be encoded in functions (or even enforced by types), and structures on <i>every</i> level (even your project-specific ones) have a well-defined and checked schema - would help a lot in my opinion.<p>Maybe deno could find a use in this niche.</text></item><item><author>noisy_boy</author><text>Not directly related to copilot but in context of ever increasing yml&#x2F;json configurations for cloud apps, am I the only one who feels overwhelmed with the configuration options? I see tons of articles with just drop this json here and that yml there and run this cli command - where is the reference for these json&#x2F;ymls? Does everyone fully know&#x2F;understands the structure&#x2F;options? How do people keep track of the changes to that between upgrades? I feel increasingly dumb the more I see these configs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrollaway</author><text>You&#x27;re (accidentally, I think?) describing Pulumi in striking detail.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pulumi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pulumi.com&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>AWS Copilot</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-aws-copilot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>realharo</author><text>I feel like trying to use a &quot;dumb&quot; declarative config language for everything is part of the problem.<p>The domain is not simple enough for that, so you end up with all kinds of weird scripts around it all, or other templating&#x2F;codegen solutions, plus all kinds of ad-hoc conventions that are extremely easy to break and very annoying to navigate.<p>Having a full blown statically typed language like TypeScript - where things can reference each other strongly (not just by names and other strings), naming conventions can be encoded in functions (or even enforced by types), and structures on <i>every</i> level (even your project-specific ones) have a well-defined and checked schema - would help a lot in my opinion.<p>Maybe deno could find a use in this niche.</text></item><item><author>noisy_boy</author><text>Not directly related to copilot but in context of ever increasing yml&#x2F;json configurations for cloud apps, am I the only one who feels overwhelmed with the configuration options? I see tons of articles with just drop this json here and that yml there and run this cli command - where is the reference for these json&#x2F;ymls? Does everyone fully know&#x2F;understands the structure&#x2F;options? How do people keep track of the changes to that between upgrades? I feel increasingly dumb the more I see these configs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codebeaker</author><text>It sounds like you&#x27;re describing HashiCorp&#x27;s HCL2 and Terraform Configs which are at least a <i>graph</i>.<p>I find using AWS without Terraform to be nearly impossible.</text></comment> |
37,478,277 | 37,477,817 | 1 | 2 | 37,473,933 | train | <story><title>The Power of Prolog</title><url>https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/facets</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xlii</author><text>Prolog is awesome and I recommend learning it if only for kicks and experiencing foreign programming paradigm. Many concepts are expressed in a completely different and (when paradigm &quot;kicks in&quot;) are arguably much simpler.<p>E.g. in Prolog you don&#x27;t usually operate on collection but instead provide information what the collection item actually is and then let the implementation figure it out. Drawing dependency tree is an effect of 3 rules: what is an entity, how to figure out that entity X and Y have relation, how to represent it.<p>I have 2 gripes with it, though. One is that it&#x27;s difficult and thus it&#x27;s hard to convince people to learn&#x2F;use it. Second - I didn&#x27;t yet found way to seamlessly integrate it into other apps (I know that FFI is an option, but it doesn&#x27;t convince me as production ready).<p>For the last couple months I&#x27;ve been looking for some more &quot;production&quot; Prolog alternatives but what I found so far (LispWorks, Franz Allegro CL) costs a kidney and is not integration friendly.<p>If anyone has success integrating Prolog in modern software please share, I&#x27;m really curious.
I&#x27;m also looking for some GUI solutions in it as XPCE doesn&#x27;t work on Mac :(<p>Oh, and check out the Swish for online notebook:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swish.swi-prolog.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swish.swi-prolog.org</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vintagedave</author><text>&gt; If anyone has success integrating Prolog in modern software please share<p>This doesn&#x27;t directly answer you, but Prolog was used by David Hovell the Windows NT network configuration to enforce consistency [1][2].<p>I&#x27;ve heard it&#x27;s been removed since, so doesn&#x27;t count as &quot;modern&quot;. It&#x27;s a _beautiful_ application of Prolog though.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36821871">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36821871</a> which leads to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20030218034509&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.research.microsoft.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;dtg&#x2F;davidhov&#x2F;pap.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20030218034509&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.resear...</a> -- very worth reading!
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14046420">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14046420</a></text></comment> | <story><title>The Power of Prolog</title><url>https://www.metalevel.at/prolog/facets</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xlii</author><text>Prolog is awesome and I recommend learning it if only for kicks and experiencing foreign programming paradigm. Many concepts are expressed in a completely different and (when paradigm &quot;kicks in&quot;) are arguably much simpler.<p>E.g. in Prolog you don&#x27;t usually operate on collection but instead provide information what the collection item actually is and then let the implementation figure it out. Drawing dependency tree is an effect of 3 rules: what is an entity, how to figure out that entity X and Y have relation, how to represent it.<p>I have 2 gripes with it, though. One is that it&#x27;s difficult and thus it&#x27;s hard to convince people to learn&#x2F;use it. Second - I didn&#x27;t yet found way to seamlessly integrate it into other apps (I know that FFI is an option, but it doesn&#x27;t convince me as production ready).<p>For the last couple months I&#x27;ve been looking for some more &quot;production&quot; Prolog alternatives but what I found so far (LispWorks, Franz Allegro CL) costs a kidney and is not integration friendly.<p>If anyone has success integrating Prolog in modern software please share, I&#x27;m really curious.
I&#x27;m also looking for some GUI solutions in it as XPCE doesn&#x27;t work on Mac :(<p>Oh, and check out the Swish for online notebook:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swish.swi-prolog.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swish.swi-prolog.org</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bjackman</author><text>&gt; If anyone has success integrating Prolog in modern software please share, I&#x27;m really curious.<p>Not sure if these count but:<p>- Gerrit&#x27;s submit predicates are configured in Prolog. (Edit: deprecated!)<p>- An internal product I worked with at Google is built around a Datalog knowledge base that gets codegen&#x27;d. Then you can query it directly or use a UI to generate queries.<p>Both of these seem to work nicely but they&#x27;re pretty limited use cases.<p>My experience with Prolog at university was that it was pretty fun but there&#x27;s just no way I would wanna use it for anything that isn&#x27;t inherently Prolog-shaped. As soon as we were implementing nontrivial stuff in it the abstraction leaked like a sieve and you felt mostly like you were hacking against the backtracking algorithm rather than taking any actual advantage of the language.</text></comment> |
12,500,524 | 12,499,148 | 1 | 2 | 12,495,628 | train | <story><title>Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/1386711/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>Well, they certainly didn&#x27;t under-sensor the thing. The big model Velodyne LIDAR, a small LIDAR looking upward, stereo cameras in all directions, and probably some radars.<p>The big rotating Velodyne thing has got to go. But so far, nobody who claims to have a suitable solid-state 3D LIDAR is actually shipping. Quanergy claimed a solid-state LIDAR suitable for automotive use [1][2] and showed it at CES, but never shipped. Their web site hasn&#x27;t been updated since 2015. They were aiming at a price point around $100.<p>Advanced Scientific Concepts has a suitable LIDAR that costs far too much. Space-X uses an ASC unit on the Dragon capsule for docking. ASC announced they were getting into automotive in 2012 but never shipped.[3]<p>Somebody is going to do this soon. The technology works. It&#x27;s a cost problem. Once the cost comes down, cars can have multiple LIDARs (at least fore and aft) near the top of the windshield and rear window. This gets rid of all that topside gear.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quanergy.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quanergy.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2016&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;s6726-louay-eldada-quanergy-systems.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2016&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;s6726...</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedscientificconcepts.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;automotive.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedscientificconcepts.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;autom...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jhayward</author><text>Quanergy raised $90 million on a $1.5 billion valuation last month. They announced products at $250 &#x2F;unit and $100 &#x2F; unit starting production in Q4 with full capacity Q1 2017.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;self-driving-car-quanergy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;22&#x2F;self-driving-car-quanergy&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Uber starts self-driving car pickups in Pittsburgh</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/1386711/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>Well, they certainly didn&#x27;t under-sensor the thing. The big model Velodyne LIDAR, a small LIDAR looking upward, stereo cameras in all directions, and probably some radars.<p>The big rotating Velodyne thing has got to go. But so far, nobody who claims to have a suitable solid-state 3D LIDAR is actually shipping. Quanergy claimed a solid-state LIDAR suitable for automotive use [1][2] and showed it at CES, but never shipped. Their web site hasn&#x27;t been updated since 2015. They were aiming at a price point around $100.<p>Advanced Scientific Concepts has a suitable LIDAR that costs far too much. Space-X uses an ASC unit on the Dragon capsule for docking. ASC announced they were getting into automotive in 2012 but never shipped.[3]<p>Somebody is going to do this soon. The technology works. It&#x27;s a cost problem. Once the cost comes down, cars can have multiple LIDARs (at least fore and aft) near the top of the windshield and rear window. This gets rid of all that topside gear.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quanergy.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quanergy.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2016&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;s6726-louay-eldada-quanergy-systems.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;on-demand.gputechconf.com&#x2F;gtc&#x2F;2016&#x2F;presentation&#x2F;s6726...</a>
[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedscientificconcepts.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;automotive.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.advancedscientificconcepts.com&#x2F;applications&#x2F;autom...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spade</author><text>Since self-driving cars are still a new experience for most people, all of that visible topside gear might give riders a sense of security.</text></comment> |
9,676,608 | 9,676,589 | 1 | 2 | 9,675,386 | train | <story><title>Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?</title><url>http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28266341/why-has-apple-spawned-so-few-startups</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ridiculous_fish</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked at both Apple and Google, as a SWE. I found very few engineers at either company who are phoning it in. There is great passion in both organizations. I also found engineers to be very vocal internally at both companies, Apple at least as much as at Google. Apple engineers absolutely do not &quot;fall in line&quot; without a fight.<p>Google is definitely more open in the way you describe, both in terms of collaborating internally and externally. &quot;Googlers switch products often&quot; matches my experience. The transfer process is easy, and hiring managers are welcoming.<p>The downside is that your team is constantly in flux, making it harder to build relationships or friendships. It is not healthy for a team to be constantly changing; it&#x27;s better to have stable teams, where contributors can develop deep expertise and collaborative relationships.<p>At Apple, you have greater chances for meaningful ownership. Software teams are generally smaller, so your responsibilities are broader. Product direction is top down, so what you work on is more likely to actually ship.<p>Google&#x27;s &quot;bottom up&quot; culture makes it easier to start up a project. But it also results in duplication, and a sense that the company isn&#x27;t really committed to your product. My work at Apple mostly shipped, but my work at Google was mostly scrapped. It&#x27;s frustrating to work on projects that are cancelled, through no fault of your own.</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>Working backbreaking hours with bad work&#x2F;life balance is considered unGoogley. There are sometimes when people burn the midnight oil, but in general Googlers don&#x27;t work 60hr weeks.<p>I think the primary difference may come down to a culture of secrecy. Openness breeds cross fertilization, couple that with very few restrictions on Googlers in working on side projects, open source，and collaborating outside Google and it it&#x27;s easy to see why so many Googlers are lured away by the allure of startups.<p>As for Googlers being unhappy with their projects, there&#x27;s two answers. One, google culture permits challenging your management and product vision even as far as calling out VPs, so people here are constantly voicing their criticisms instead of falling in line. That can breed dissatisfaction especially if your criticisms are later proven right.<p>The other is that Googlers switch products often when they get bored. It&#x27;s easy for people to get unhappy when you switch from development to maintenance. I think this is very healthy，enduring people working on a product are enthusiastic. If your jet collecting a paycheck while dreaming of more interesting stuff better to go do interesting stuff.<p>The level of secrecy and compartmentalization in Apple sounds like hell to me.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>&gt; My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>I have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are at Apple and you&#x27;re wrong about the &#x27;go home to your family.&#x27; At least the friends I have (mostly nerds admittedly) are routinely in the 60-70 hours mark (have only one exception and he&#x27;s worked at Apple since the 1980s). But they seem to like it.<p>&gt; It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>This feels more like Google propaganda. My impression is that google folks seem to work a lot less (long hours its true, but less) than the Apple folks. Unlike Apple I <i>only</i> know nerds at google -- no marketing or business folks, so it could be different.<p>But of my google friends there are two groups: the übernerds who get to work on whatever they like (basically research) and they seem to have a lot of fun. A bunch of them are former colleagues from PARC and MIT, so they are doing the same kind of work we did years ago -- probably Microsoft research is the same.<p>The rest are doing product work of some sort of another and none of them seem particularly happy. A lot of them are on the market (I have hired a couple). It feels like Google has reached the microsoft phase: they have two real cash cows and are struggling to find more. Product managers have a lot of sway. They aren&#x27;t really organized like an effective business.<p>Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves. My Apple friends, even those deep in the bowels of tools or drivers, amazingly are still super excited by the Apple products (I guess they would have given up by now if not).</text></item><item><author>Eric_WVGG</author><text>(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)<p>My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>I could be totally wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codesushi42</author><text>I&#x27;m curious which years you were at Google? The bottom-up culture has been dead for the past 2 years, and a deluge of projects were canned in the past 12-18 months. There&#x27;s really zero chance now of starting your own project at G and building a team around it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Has Apple Spawned So Few Startups?</title><url>http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28266341/why-has-apple-spawned-so-few-startups</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ridiculous_fish</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked at both Apple and Google, as a SWE. I found very few engineers at either company who are phoning it in. There is great passion in both organizations. I also found engineers to be very vocal internally at both companies, Apple at least as much as at Google. Apple engineers absolutely do not &quot;fall in line&quot; without a fight.<p>Google is definitely more open in the way you describe, both in terms of collaborating internally and externally. &quot;Googlers switch products often&quot; matches my experience. The transfer process is easy, and hiring managers are welcoming.<p>The downside is that your team is constantly in flux, making it harder to build relationships or friendships. It is not healthy for a team to be constantly changing; it&#x27;s better to have stable teams, where contributors can develop deep expertise and collaborative relationships.<p>At Apple, you have greater chances for meaningful ownership. Software teams are generally smaller, so your responsibilities are broader. Product direction is top down, so what you work on is more likely to actually ship.<p>Google&#x27;s &quot;bottom up&quot; culture makes it easier to start up a project. But it also results in duplication, and a sense that the company isn&#x27;t really committed to your product. My work at Apple mostly shipped, but my work at Google was mostly scrapped. It&#x27;s frustrating to work on projects that are cancelled, through no fault of your own.</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>Working backbreaking hours with bad work&#x2F;life balance is considered unGoogley. There are sometimes when people burn the midnight oil, but in general Googlers don&#x27;t work 60hr weeks.<p>I think the primary difference may come down to a culture of secrecy. Openness breeds cross fertilization, couple that with very few restrictions on Googlers in working on side projects, open source，and collaborating outside Google and it it&#x27;s easy to see why so many Googlers are lured away by the allure of startups.<p>As for Googlers being unhappy with their projects, there&#x27;s two answers. One, google culture permits challenging your management and product vision even as far as calling out VPs, so people here are constantly voicing their criticisms instead of falling in line. That can breed dissatisfaction especially if your criticisms are later proven right.<p>The other is that Googlers switch products often when they get bored. It&#x27;s easy for people to get unhappy when you switch from development to maintenance. I think this is very healthy，enduring people working on a product are enthusiastic. If your jet collecting a paycheck while dreaming of more interesting stuff better to go do interesting stuff.<p>The level of secrecy and compartmentalization in Apple sounds like hell to me.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>&gt; My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>I have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are at Apple and you&#x27;re wrong about the &#x27;go home to your family.&#x27; At least the friends I have (mostly nerds admittedly) are routinely in the 60-70 hours mark (have only one exception and he&#x27;s worked at Apple since the 1980s). But they seem to like it.<p>&gt; It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>This feels more like Google propaganda. My impression is that google folks seem to work a lot less (long hours its true, but less) than the Apple folks. Unlike Apple I <i>only</i> know nerds at google -- no marketing or business folks, so it could be different.<p>But of my google friends there are two groups: the übernerds who get to work on whatever they like (basically research) and they seem to have a lot of fun. A bunch of them are former colleagues from PARC and MIT, so they are doing the same kind of work we did years ago -- probably Microsoft research is the same.<p>The rest are doing product work of some sort of another and none of them seem particularly happy. A lot of them are on the market (I have hired a couple). It feels like Google has reached the microsoft phase: they have two real cash cows and are struggling to find more. Product managers have a lot of sway. They aren&#x27;t really organized like an effective business.<p>Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves. My Apple friends, even those deep in the bowels of tools or drivers, amazingly are still super excited by the Apple products (I guess they would have given up by now if not).</text></item><item><author>Eric_WVGG</author><text>(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this)<p>My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”<p>It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.<p>I could be totally wrong about this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cromwellian</author><text>I think that&#x27;s true but scrap and pivot is generally what the startup experience is like, so if you aren&#x27;t accustomed to failure and throwing away work and uncertainty as to whether you&#x27;ll ship, you might not like the startup experience.</text></comment> |
11,489,123 | 11,487,530 | 1 | 2 | 11,470,520 | train | <story><title>Founder of Blackwater's Drive to Build a Private Air Force</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2016/04/11/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-drive-to-build-private-air-force/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>numair</author><text>This story is written with such an incredibly obnoxious and sensationalist slant, like most things written about Erik Prince and Blackwater. You&#x27;d think they had uncovered evidence he was working on contract for ISIS or something.<p>America&#x27;s use of PMCs is as old, actually older, than the country itself. Many of the issues that led to Blackwater&#x27;s infamy from their time in Iraq were directly caused by State Department incompetence (I doubt anyone would want to argue that the US State Department is an efficient, well-run, non-politicized entity). Erik Prince is not some crazy Christian zealot out to wage a holy war; if anything, he provided the US government with unique capability that they desperately needed, and things would have probably been far messier if he hadn&#x27;t been involved in Iraq.<p>I see nothing evil or nefarious about a defense contractor commissioning efficient tactical aircraft for anti-terrorism and civil defense operations. The fact that it&#x27;s Erik Prince, and the mass media has painted him as the evil overlord that caused all of our problems in Iraq, doesn&#x27;t make it any different. It would be strange if someone who was highly competent and specialized in defense operations, who had enough money, WASN&#x27;T building these sorts of things.<p>Look, I&#x27;m mad about what the US government did in Iraq. Everyone should be. We shouldn&#x27;t have even gone there. But none of this is Erik Prince&#x27;s fault.<p>Venture capital firms have &quot;scouts,&quot; giving them access to deals they&#x27;d otherwise overlook or couldn&#x27;t access. The US defense and intelligence communities have people like Erik Prince.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddellacosta</author><text>I suppose your perception that the piece was slanted means you didn&#x27;t read it, but it outlines very clearly a number of illegal or unethical actions Mr. Prince and others took including<p>- hiding his agenda from FSG which included violating U.S. defense export regulations, culminating in being stripped of control over operations at FSG<p>- failing to disclose to FSG that he had an ownership stake in Airborne while negotiating contracts with them as a representative of FSG<p>- as a part-owner of Airborne, actively encouraging the company to violate Austrian statutes on production and export of military-grade aircraft<p>...and more I&#x27;m probably missing, and that doesn&#x27;t even take into account his failure to actually deliver to his &quot;clients&quot; as outlined in the piece.<p>Now if you have legitimate counterpoints in response to the items raised in the article, I&#x27;d love to hear them, but your comment is the textbook definition of a strawman. As far as I can tell this piece is just exposing the truth about who Erik Prince is, and you&#x27;re right that he&#x27;s not a Christian zealot out to wage a holy war: he is actually an opportunistic parasite who takes advantage of power imbalances in areas in crisis, manipulates organizations to further his own personal profit without any sense of right or wrong informing his decisions, and actively skirts legal restrictions around the world as he sees fit. He certainly doesn&#x27;t come off as competent in any way.<p>If anything, the right-wing should be <i>more</i> concerned than the left that someone as ethically challenged as Prince is engaging in the activities he&#x27;s engaging in--it makes them look even worse. Why are you being an apologist for this kind of scumbag?</text></comment> | <story><title>Founder of Blackwater's Drive to Build a Private Air Force</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2016/04/11/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-drive-to-build-private-air-force/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>numair</author><text>This story is written with such an incredibly obnoxious and sensationalist slant, like most things written about Erik Prince and Blackwater. You&#x27;d think they had uncovered evidence he was working on contract for ISIS or something.<p>America&#x27;s use of PMCs is as old, actually older, than the country itself. Many of the issues that led to Blackwater&#x27;s infamy from their time in Iraq were directly caused by State Department incompetence (I doubt anyone would want to argue that the US State Department is an efficient, well-run, non-politicized entity). Erik Prince is not some crazy Christian zealot out to wage a holy war; if anything, he provided the US government with unique capability that they desperately needed, and things would have probably been far messier if he hadn&#x27;t been involved in Iraq.<p>I see nothing evil or nefarious about a defense contractor commissioning efficient tactical aircraft for anti-terrorism and civil defense operations. The fact that it&#x27;s Erik Prince, and the mass media has painted him as the evil overlord that caused all of our problems in Iraq, doesn&#x27;t make it any different. It would be strange if someone who was highly competent and specialized in defense operations, who had enough money, WASN&#x27;T building these sorts of things.<p>Look, I&#x27;m mad about what the US government did in Iraq. Everyone should be. We shouldn&#x27;t have even gone there. But none of this is Erik Prince&#x27;s fault.<p>Venture capital firms have &quot;scouts,&quot; giving them access to deals they&#x27;d otherwise overlook or couldn&#x27;t access. The US defense and intelligence communities have people like Erik Prince.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yardie</author><text> &gt; he provided the US government with unique capability that they desperately needed, and things would have probably been far messier if he hadn&#x27;t been involved in Iraq.<p>I have many friends and family that have participated in Iraq II and Afghanistan. They see PMCs as morale destroyers. While they are getting paid E-4 rates, or higher, the PMCs are getting paid 4-5x that for doing the same damn job!<p>They&#x27;ve had to learn to do more with less while the PMCs show up with shiny new toys all the time. And if that wasn&#x27;t enough they were getting calls or letters from home saying their benefits had been cut, allowances were down, etc. Then the DoD was &quot;winding down&quot; it&#x27;s campaigns by replacing enlistees with even more PMCs. Suddenly, guys that wanted to make a career in the armed forces, and had planned to stay 10-20 years, couldn&#x27;t re-up. In the end few of them felt they had no choice but to join Academy or Blackwater since job prospects back home were so meager.<p>They were making things so much better in Iraq the PM wanted them out of his country because of the unaccountability and civilian deaths directly attributable to them. Shooting civilians in the street is the first thing I think of when the word Blackwater comes up.</text></comment> |
9,537,323 | 9,537,129 | 1 | 2 | 9,537,009 | train | <story><title>Implementation of Hex Grids</title><url>http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/implementation.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iffz</author><text>Don&#x27;t skip the absolute awesome &quot;main page&quot; where everything is extensively explained with interactive javascript samples.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redblobgames.com&#x2F;grids&#x2F;hexagons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redblobgames.com&#x2F;grids&#x2F;hexagons&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Implementation of Hex Grids</title><url>http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/implementation.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qzervaas</author><text>I built my first iOS game[1] last year using Amit&#x27;s original hexagon guide. This new guide would have been useful too. Still makes for good reading now.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexiledgame.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexiledgame.com</a></text></comment> |
37,394,352 | 37,394,396 | 1 | 2 | 37,394,275 | train | <story><title>GitHub was down</title><url>https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/smdz34v7j8q0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FrostKiwi</author><text>Glad to see the status page being honest and reflective of reality for a change.</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub was down</title><url>https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/smdz34v7j8q0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FrostKiwi</author><text>Ohh, back up for me here in Japan. GitHub&#x27;s incident team is on crack, that turn around time is quite something. Definitely some impressive stuff.</text></comment> |
15,203,855 | 15,203,675 | 1 | 2 | 15,202,734 | train | <story><title>Ontario unveils plan for government chain of marijuana stores</title><url>https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-unveils-plan-for-government-chain-of-cannabis-stores/article36210217/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>I&#x27;m a Toronto native. These are the forces driving this decision:<p>1. Provincial government is cash poor. The LCBO is a huge source of cash, what government would give up another source? This isn&#x27;t taxes, this is profit. &quot;Isn&#x27;t this just another tax?&quot; One might ask, but no it&#x27;s not. The reason is that Ontario has fewer alcohol distribution centres than a free market would provide. Most people just do a bigger alcohol run and drive &#x2F; walk &#x2F; drive further than their American counterparts. There&#x27;s queuing occasionally, but usually only before long weekends or holidays.<p>2. The current dispensaries are run by criminals. The optics of giving a windfall to law breakers aren&#x27;t great. The police keep shutting them down, and they keep popping up. I&#x27;m not bashing them, I think cannabis should have been legalized a long time ago and I think it&#x27;s unconscionable that we have Canadians addicted to heroin because they were given opioids instead of pot, because pot requires a huge hassle to get approved, and I think dispensaries alleviate that stress, but some operations are <i>huuuuge</i> and most certainly are funnelling money into real criminal organizations.<p>3. The union at the LCBO is huge and powerful. The jobs, even seasonal ones, pay well and Ontarians aren&#x27;t outraged because the staff is generally competent and friendly and the stores are clean.<p>4. Controls over potency are a real problem in the current dispensaries and because of the sketchiness of the current people involved and their distribution networks, the government would have to get involved auditing anyway.<p>I hope that they keep the stores open every day of the week. Many Canadians use pot outside the medical system, but for medical reasons and fast access will mean the black market will finally collapse. I also hope there will be a system for legitimizing certain strains that gain popularity in the US, like the LCBO does for wine.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ontario unveils plan for government chain of marijuana stores</title><url>https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario-unveils-plan-for-government-chain-of-cannabis-stores/article36210217/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com&</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JPKab</author><text>I live in Colorado.<p>I think they are really blowing it by making the stores government owned.<p>In Colorado, the stores are privately owned but very, very strictly regulated. Plants are tracked with an RFID all the way to the products derived from them, with a full chain of custody all the way to purchase.<p>Only adults 21 and up can enter them, with a strict dual-check of identification (once to enter, and again when paying the cashier).<p>The various shops actually end up being very different from each other in surprising ways. They all adhere to the regulations, but some are much larger and more corporate feeling, with lower prices, while others are boutique, specialize in higher quality product, and priced higher.<p>The pace with which new products can be introduced is much faster due to potential producers not having to negotiate with a giant bureaucracy to get a product on the shelves.</text></comment> |
20,650,370 | 20,650,107 | 1 | 3 | 20,647,592 | train | <story><title>Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning</title><url>http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,356,024.PN.&OS=PN/10,356,024&RS=PN/10,356,024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is ridiculous. We had shadow banning on reddit in 2007, four years before this was ever filed. In fact, we met with Facebook and told them about it before 2011, and they hadn&#x27;t considered it before that. I&#x27;m pretty sure reddit is where they got the idea...<p>To be fair, there was no public record of it until 2012 or so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Figs</author><text>&gt; To be fair, there was no public record of it until 2012 or so<p>I&#x27;m not sure if reddit <i>publicly acknowledged it</i> before then, but it was certainly <i>known</i> that you were doing it. (It was also pretty damned obvious that you guys were fucking with vote counts -- e.g. &quot;66% like it&quot; on every post -- among other questionable anti-spam tactics...)<p>The earliest record I can find of the idea being discussed on reddit -- there might be earlier ones, this was just the earliest I&#x27;ve been able to dig up so far -- was in a suggestion by user ltbarcly back in June 2007:<p>&gt; A better idea is a silent ban. Let him post comments, and show him those comments, but just leave them out for everyone else.<p>Source, as preserved by archive.org: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070604141333&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;info&#x2F;1vcyp&#x2F;comments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070604141333&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com...</a><p>There are also blog posts complaining about it from well before 2012 -- e.g. here&#x27;s one from 2010: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stochasticgeometry.ie&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;silently-banned-reddit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stochasticgeometry.ie&#x2F;2010&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;silently-banned-...</a><p>The comments on it even use the term &quot;shadowbanned&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook has been granted patent on shadow banning</title><url>http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,356,024.PN.&OS=PN/10,356,024&RS=PN/10,356,024</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jedberg</author><text>This is ridiculous. We had shadow banning on reddit in 2007, four years before this was ever filed. In fact, we met with Facebook and told them about it before 2011, and they hadn&#x27;t considered it before that. I&#x27;m pretty sure reddit is where they got the idea...<p>To be fair, there was no public record of it until 2012 or so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Meekro</author><text>vBulletin (a forum package like phpBB, but not open source and you had to pay for it) had a shadowban feature they called &quot;Tachy Goes to Coventry&quot; and there are references to it as far back as 2003.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.vbulletin.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;general&#x2F;chit-chat&#x2F;75468-tachy-goes-to-coventry" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.vbulletin.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;general&#x2F;chit-chat&#x2F;75468-ta...</a></text></comment> |
10,365,597 | 10,365,361 | 1 | 2 | 10,364,197 | train | <story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is <i>very</i> different.<p>Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.<p>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.<p>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulsutter</author><text>Number of employees doesn&#x27;t scale up with the number of messages hitting queues.<p>No those acres of employees at Twitter are showing each other powerpoint presentations, ordering lunch for each other, and subdividing again and again tiny slivers of functionality into more and more product management teams, none of whom have sufficient authority to make any material improvement to the product.</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>petercooper</author><text>I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is <i>very</i> different.<p>Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they&#x27;re almost always one-to-very-many.<p>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that&#x27;s 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group conversations).</text></item><item><author>amix</author><text>I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.<p>I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inthewoods</author><text>WhatsApp also appears, at the moment, to have a much simpler business model - you buy it. No advertising technology, no audience&#x2F;data teams and, probably most significantly, no sales team to go out and get people to use the platform. And no big agency handholding people, no data scientists, no customer success account managers. I&#x27;d be curious to see what the breakdown is between tech and sales at Twitter.</text></comment> |
8,685,988 | 8,685,733 | 1 | 2 | 8,682,782 | train | <story><title>The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/11/30/the-saddest-thing-i-know-about-the-integers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>I went looking for examples of what you were talking about and discovered that, amazingly enough, a <i>single</i> human voice can even reliably produce overtones! I&#x27;m guessing these are very different, though, than what you&#x27;re talking about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i61_JNc_Nc&amp;t=1m25s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2i61_JNc_Nc&amp;t=1m25s</a><p>I&#x27;d love to hear some examples of a barbershop n-tet doing it too, I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s even better. But when I search for &#x27;barbershop overtones&#x27; it&#x27;s all music by groups <i>called</i> The Overtones :)</text></item><item><author>depoll</author><text>Welcome to the world of Barbershop music (one of my primary hobbies) ;) Unlike a piano, which must be tuned and which has a temperament that is fixed from chord to chord in a piece, the human voice can make minute adjustments to come as close as possible to those nice integer ratios (both in the fundamental and in the upper partials produced by their voices). When we do, we are rewarded with (sometimes screaming loud) overtones caused by the constructive interference between the sounds being produced by each of the four parts.<p>As this article points out, it&#x27;s mathematically impossible to perfectly tune some of these intervals, but depending on the relationships between the notes being sung, you can tune to one singer or the other. It takes a lot of practice and a good ear, but the resulting effect is pretty darned cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>depoll</author><text>If you&#x27;re curious about overtone singing, listen to this -- it&#x27;s insane: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vC9Qh709gas</a><p>The principle is actually the same -- she is modifying her singing apparatus to emphasize different upper partials that are already in her voice. Barbershoppers do this as well, though less explicitly (we do vowel matching, which helps emphasize upper partials to produce greater ring).<p>Here&#x27;s a video from a perennial favorite quartet (the Gas House Gang): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvYT_yWiLqU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pvYT_yWiLqU</a> The top&#x2F;tenor note is often the same note as the primary overtone produced by the other 3 parts (adding further emphasis to the overtone), but this effect is what gives barbershop the quality of sounding like more than 4 voices, and produces the &quot;ring&quot; in the sound.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers</title><url>http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2014/11/30/the-saddest-thing-i-know-about-the-integers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>I went looking for examples of what you were talking about and discovered that, amazingly enough, a <i>single</i> human voice can even reliably produce overtones! I&#x27;m guessing these are very different, though, than what you&#x27;re talking about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i61_JNc_Nc&amp;t=1m25s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2i61_JNc_Nc&amp;t=1m25s</a><p>I&#x27;d love to hear some examples of a barbershop n-tet doing it too, I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s even better. But when I search for &#x27;barbershop overtones&#x27; it&#x27;s all music by groups <i>called</i> The Overtones :)</text></item><item><author>depoll</author><text>Welcome to the world of Barbershop music (one of my primary hobbies) ;) Unlike a piano, which must be tuned and which has a temperament that is fixed from chord to chord in a piece, the human voice can make minute adjustments to come as close as possible to those nice integer ratios (both in the fundamental and in the upper partials produced by their voices). When we do, we are rewarded with (sometimes screaming loud) overtones caused by the constructive interference between the sounds being produced by each of the four parts.<p>As this article points out, it&#x27;s mathematically impossible to perfectly tune some of these intervals, but depending on the relationships between the notes being sung, you can tune to one singer or the other. It takes a lot of practice and a good ear, but the resulting effect is pretty darned cool.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>Overtone singing itself isn&#x27;t very common in barbershop music, but their harmonies certainly make use of overtones. Here&#x27;s a performance of a song called Play That Barbershop Chord (a stable in the genre). It&#x27;s not instructive, but it&#x27;s got some great harmonies: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bYnRkwpco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=F5bYnRkwpco</a><p>Here&#x27;s a fairly technical article about three different seventh chords, one (the harmonic seventh) being the so-called barbershop seventh chord. There are embedded YouTube videos with computer-generated audio samples. <a href="http://www.garygarrett.me/?p=1575" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.garygarrett.me&#x2F;?p=1575</a></text></comment> |
11,230,110 | 11,230,076 | 1 | 2 | 11,229,700 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Which successful startups were rejected by YC?</title><text>And if the founders or anyone in the YC jury read this: what was the reason?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ig1</author><text>Companies which have publicly disclosed that were rejected by YC and have since raised &gt;$20m:<p>* Chartboost<p>* Sendgrid<p>* LightSail<p>I&#x27;ve seen it claimed that Couchbase should be on this list, but I&#x27;ve never seen a primary source which verifies that they were rejected from YC.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Which successful startups were rejected by YC?</title><text>And if the founders or anyone in the YC jury read this: what was the reason?</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mhluongo</author><text>BlockCypher[1] has written about this. I think SnapCard did something similar, though the closest I can find is an article about the laundry service they started[2].<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.blockcypher.com&#x2F;what-adam-saw-that-sam-didnt-a0c500dda70#.iwao2hq2x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.blockcypher.com&#x2F;what-adam-saw-that-sam-didnt-a0...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;11&#x2F;superhero-laundry-founders-launch-startup-to-prove-a-point-then-shut-it-down-once-they-succeed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pando.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;11&#x2F;superhero-laundry-founders-laun...</a><p>EDIT - Citations</text></comment> |
41,467,108 | 41,464,595 | 1 | 2 | 41,426,898 | train | <story><title>Understanding the Y Combinator</title><url>https://8dcc.github.io/programming/understanding-y-combinator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lacker</author><text>It&#x27;s a shame that I like Y Combinator the organization so much, because I find the y combinator as a programming concept to be aesthetically displeasing.<p>It only makes sense in the untyped lambda calculus, where types are all conflated and errors are forbidden. It relies on the fact that you can take any x and &quot;apply x to itself&quot;. These properties are essentially gimmicks of the untyped lambda calculus. It&#x27;s like the saying &quot;Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.&quot; The untyped lambda calculus, they made it even simpler.<p>Yes, you can reduce everything to a very tiny number of combinators, but at the cost of making everything ugly. It is much cleaner to use Lisp and reduce everything to a slightly larger set of primitives. Ironically (?) one of the best explanations of this is PG&#x27;s own The Roots Of Lisp - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;myl&#x2F;llog&#x2F;jmc.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu&#x2F;myl&#x2F;llog&#x2F;jmc.pdf</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Understanding the Y Combinator</title><url>https://8dcc.github.io/programming/understanding-y-combinator.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tromp</author><text>Note that with the standard representation of natural numbers in lambda calculus, the Church numerals [1], you don&#x27;t even need the Y combinator to implement factorial:<p><pre><code> fac = λn.λf.n(λf.λn.n(f(λf.λx.n f(f x))))(λx.f)(λx.x)
</code></pre>
For example, applied to Church numeral 3 this gives (with F=(λf.λn.n(f(λf.λx.n f(f x))))):<p><pre><code> fac 3 = \f. F (F (F (\x.f))) 1
= \f. 1 (F (F (\x.f)) 2)
= \f. 1 (2 (F (\x.f) 3))
= \f. 1 (2 (3 ((\x.f) 4)))
= \f. 1 (2 (3 f))
</code></pre>
which is the Church numeral for 1*2*3 = 6.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Church_encoding" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Church_encoding</a></text></comment> |
14,490,293 | 14,490,274 | 1 | 2 | 14,489,607 | train | <story><title>Apple Announces macOS High Sierra</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-macos-high-sierra/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kristianc</author><text>Safari is free.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>Apple products are more expensive, but you know the saying: if you&#x27;re not paying, you are the product.</text></item><item><author>clumsysmurf</author><text>&quot;Safari also now blocks auto-playing videos and will use machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site trackers so advertisers won’t be able to easily track you across sites.&quot;<p>Finally, I feel a corporation is using ML to project me, rather than sell me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pm90</author><text>I think this is kinda misleading. Sure Safari is free, but is ONLY available on OSX&#x2F;iOS which can only be obtained by purchasing apple devices. This is unlike Chrome, which is free for anyone, across any platform.<p>One of my coworkers once told me he preferred Apple products over any other vendor if only because he believes that by paying higher for apple products, he is paying for the privacy&#x2F;security aspects of having his data secure and personal. I&#x27;m not sure how much this is true, but this datapoint does seem to confirm that theory.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple Announces macOS High Sierra</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-macos-high-sierra/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kristianc</author><text>Safari is free.</text></item><item><author>pdog</author><text>Apple products are more expensive, but you know the saying: if you&#x27;re not paying, you are the product.</text></item><item><author>clumsysmurf</author><text>&quot;Safari also now blocks auto-playing videos and will use machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site trackers so advertisers won’t be able to easily track you across sites.&quot;<p>Finally, I feel a corporation is using ML to project me, rather than sell me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mnx</author><text>No, it is not. It&#x27;s part of Mac OS, which is not free. There used to be a Windows version of Safari, but that was a long time ago.</text></comment> |
17,208,485 | 17,207,165 | 1 | 3 | 17,204,879 | train | <story><title>Where did the wheel group get its name?</title><url>https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1262/where-did-the-wheel-group-get-its-name</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teddyh</author><text>Rather famously, back when “su” was still part of GNU coreutils (in 2007 it was removed from default installations, and in 2012 the code was removed from the package, since other implementations existed in other packages), GNU su did not, contrary to Unix traditional behavior, restrict the usage of “su” to members of the wheel group:<p>(Written by Richard Stallman in the manual for GNU “su”)<p>“<i>Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn&#x27;t know how to do that in Unix.)</i><p><i>However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The &quot;wheel group&quot; feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.</i><p><i>I&#x27;m on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. </i>”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.gnu.org&#x2F;old-gnu&#x2F;Manuals&#x2F;coreutils-4.5.4&#x2F;html_node&#x2F;coreutils_149.html#SEC150" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.gnu.org&#x2F;old-gnu&#x2F;Manuals&#x2F;coreutils-4.5.4&#x2F;html_nod...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Where did the wheel group get its name?</title><url>https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1262/where-did-the-wheel-group-get-its-name</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>valenciarose</author><text>Its origins are with TENEX and from there TOPS-20. TOPS-20 was ubiquitous in computer science departments in the early 80s when I worked at DEC.<p>The release of TENEX precedes the release of Unix by a year or so and the release of the first BSD by seven years. If you want the etymological roots for this, you would need to ask Dan Murphy or one of his contemporaries: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Daniel_Murphy_(computer_scientist" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Daniel_Murphy_(computer_scie...</a></text></comment> |
36,174,633 | 36,173,963 | 1 | 2 | 36,172,426 | train | <story><title>Tomb Raider</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2023/06/tomb-raider/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teddyh</author><text>Any discussion of classic <i>Tomb Raider</i> is incomplete without mentioning that the first Tomb Raider games are essentially exact copies of the original <i>Prince of Persia</i> game, translated to 3D. Not the level layout or story, but the control scheme – very distinct and not used by any other games – is <i>identical</i>. Also the standard traps are replicated, like collapsing tiles and spikes emerging from tiles.<p>Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent, and some necessary additions for 3D, like the ability to turn and jump sideways, but the rest is straight up <i>Prince of Persia</i> (the original 1989 one).</text></comment> | <story><title>Tomb Raider</title><url>https://www.filfre.net/2023/06/tomb-raider/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cubefox</author><text>My problem with the Tomb Raider design is that they swapped out Lara Croft for someone else.<p>Lara used to have the same consistent design till Tomb Raider 6 (The Angel of Darkness). Her iconic face, known from countless magazine covers, posters, ads, and even music videos (in German speaking countries she appeared in a <i>Die Ärzte</i> music video which topped the charts for weeks [1]). Her trade mark braid hair style, too. It was never just the boobs.<p>Unfortunately Tomb Raider 6 was a medium flop (due to poor gameplay). The next title, Legend, was a reboot, and they decided to change Lara&#x27;s face. In subsequent titles they changed her more and more. By the time of Tomb Raider (2013) she was replaced with a completely different person. Not even her signature braid was preserved. It was just some generic looking woman of a similar age.<p>That&#x27;s like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.<p>I would have been okay with changing Lara Croft&#x27;s not-very-realistic body proportions to something which fits the zeitgeist better. If it is so important for those people who love to complain about such stuff. Though I suspect most of the people complaining about her proportions didn&#x27;t even play the games themselves. But please at least keep her <i>face</i> and don&#x27;t change her into a completely different person.<p>(And in my opinion, keep her braid. No other character has it. Without it she is like Mario without hat, or Sonic without his red&#x2F;white shoes.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=404oPn6tudE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=404oPn6tudE</a></text></comment> |
6,672,647 | 6,671,724 | 1 | 3 | 6,671,124 | train | <story><title>Valgrind Release 3.9.0</title><url>http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/dist.news.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>Valgrind is a truly awesome product. It has saved me countless hours tracking down weird memory corruption errors.</text></comment> | <story><title>Valgrind Release 3.9.0</title><url>http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/dist.news.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chengiz</author><text>&gt; Helgrind: False errors resulting from the use of statically initialised mutexes and condition variables have been removed. False errors resulting from the use of pthread_cond_waits that timeout, have been removed.<p>Awesome. There was no good way to write suppressions for those. I&#x27;m glad this got done.</text></comment> |
41,034,967 | 41,034,777 | 1 | 2 | 41,031,037 | train | <story><title>Jiff: Datetime library for Rust</title><url>https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>I love burntsushi&#x27;s ripgrep and certainly use it all the time, calling it directly from my beloved Emacs (and I do invoke it all the time). If was using ripgrep already years before Debian shipped <i>rg</i> natively.<p>I was also using JodaTime back when some people still though Eclipse was better than IntelliJ IDEA.<p>But there&#x27;s nothing in that document that contradicts: <i>&quot;just represent duration as nanoseconds&quot;</i>.<p>Users needs to see timezones and correct hour depending on DST, sure. Programs typically do not. Unless you&#x27;re working on stuff specifically dealing with different timezones, it&#x27;s usually a very safe bet to: <i>&quot;represent duration as milliseconds&#x2F;nanoseconds&quot;</i>.<p>That humans have invented timezones and DST won&#x27;t change the physics of a CPU&#x27;s internal clock ticking x billion times per second.<p>Just look at, say, the kernel of an OS that didn&#x27;t crash on half the planet a few days ago: there are plenty of timeouts in code expressed as milliseconds.<p>Reading your comment could be misinterpreted as: <i>&quot;We&#x27;ll allow a 30 seconds cooldown, so let&#x27;s take the current timezone, add 30 seconds to that, save that time as a string with the time 30 seconds from now, complete with its timezone, DST, 12&#x2F;24 hours representation and while we&#x27;re at it maybe add exta code logic to check if there&#x27;s going to be a leap second or not to make sure we don&#x27;t wait 29 or 31 seconds, then let the cooldown happen at the &#x27;correct&#x27; time&quot;</i>. Or you could, you know, just use a freakin&#x27; 30 seconds timeout&#x2F;cooldown expressed in milliseconds (without caring about whether a leap second happened or not btw because we don&#x27;t care if it actually happens after 29 seconds <i>as seen by the user</i>).</text></item><item><author>magnio</author><text>I have seen many people downplaying the complexity of a datetime library. &quot;Just use UTC&#x2F;Unix time as an internal representation&quot;, &quot;just represent duration as nanoseconds&quot;, &quot;just use offset instead of timezones&quot;, and on and on<p>For anyone having that thought, try reading through the design document of Jiff (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;DESIGN.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;DESIGN.md</a>), which, as all things burntsushi do, is excellent and extensive. Another good read is the comparison with (mainly) chrono, the de facto standard datetime library in Rust: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.rs&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;latest&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;_documentation&#x2F;comparison&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.rs&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;latest&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;_documentation&#x2F;comparison&#x2F;i...</a><p>Stuffs like DST arithmetic (that works across ser&#x2F;de!), roundable duration, timezone aware calendar arithmetic, retrospective timezone conflict detection (!), etc. all contribute to a making the library correct, capable, and pleasant to use. In my experience, chrono is a very comprehensive and &quot;correct&quot; library, but it is also rigid and not very easy to use.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>burntsushi</author><text>I&#x27;m not sure what the issue is here exactly, but there are surely use cases where a `std::time::SystemTime` (which you can think of as a Unix timestamp) is plenty sufficient. ripgrep, for example, uses `SystemTime`. But it has never used a datetime library. Just because Jiff exists doesn&#x27;t all of a sudden mean you can&#x27;t use `SystemTime`.<p>But there&#x27;s a whole world above and beyond timestamps.</text></comment> | <story><title>Jiff: Datetime library for Rust</title><url>https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TacticalCoder</author><text>I love burntsushi&#x27;s ripgrep and certainly use it all the time, calling it directly from my beloved Emacs (and I do invoke it all the time). If was using ripgrep already years before Debian shipped <i>rg</i> natively.<p>I was also using JodaTime back when some people still though Eclipse was better than IntelliJ IDEA.<p>But there&#x27;s nothing in that document that contradicts: <i>&quot;just represent duration as nanoseconds&quot;</i>.<p>Users needs to see timezones and correct hour depending on DST, sure. Programs typically do not. Unless you&#x27;re working on stuff specifically dealing with different timezones, it&#x27;s usually a very safe bet to: <i>&quot;represent duration as milliseconds&#x2F;nanoseconds&quot;</i>.<p>That humans have invented timezones and DST won&#x27;t change the physics of a CPU&#x27;s internal clock ticking x billion times per second.<p>Just look at, say, the kernel of an OS that didn&#x27;t crash on half the planet a few days ago: there are plenty of timeouts in code expressed as milliseconds.<p>Reading your comment could be misinterpreted as: <i>&quot;We&#x27;ll allow a 30 seconds cooldown, so let&#x27;s take the current timezone, add 30 seconds to that, save that time as a string with the time 30 seconds from now, complete with its timezone, DST, 12&#x2F;24 hours representation and while we&#x27;re at it maybe add exta code logic to check if there&#x27;s going to be a leap second or not to make sure we don&#x27;t wait 29 or 31 seconds, then let the cooldown happen at the &#x27;correct&#x27; time&quot;</i>. Or you could, you know, just use a freakin&#x27; 30 seconds timeout&#x2F;cooldown expressed in milliseconds (without caring about whether a leap second happened or not btw because we don&#x27;t care if it actually happens after 29 seconds <i>as seen by the user</i>).</text></item><item><author>magnio</author><text>I have seen many people downplaying the complexity of a datetime library. &quot;Just use UTC&#x2F;Unix time as an internal representation&quot;, &quot;just represent duration as nanoseconds&quot;, &quot;just use offset instead of timezones&quot;, and on and on<p>For anyone having that thought, try reading through the design document of Jiff (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;DESIGN.md">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BurntSushi&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;DESIGN.md</a>), which, as all things burntsushi do, is excellent and extensive. Another good read is the comparison with (mainly) chrono, the de facto standard datetime library in Rust: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.rs&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;latest&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;_documentation&#x2F;comparison&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.rs&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;latest&#x2F;jiff&#x2F;_documentation&#x2F;comparison&#x2F;i...</a><p>Stuffs like DST arithmetic (that works across ser&#x2F;de!), roundable duration, timezone aware calendar arithmetic, retrospective timezone conflict detection (!), etc. all contribute to a making the library correct, capable, and pleasant to use. In my experience, chrono is a very comprehensive and &quot;correct&quot; library, but it is also rigid and not very easy to use.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tijsvd</author><text>Of course you don&#x27;t need a calendar library to measure 30 seconds. That&#x27;s not the use case.<p>Try adding one year to a timestamp because you&#x27;re tracking someone&#x27;s birthday. Or add one week because of running a backup schedule.</text></comment> |
23,801,348 | 23,800,883 | 1 | 2 | 23,792,527 | train | <story><title>Healthy Self-Doubt</title><url>https://nerdygirl.com/2020/07/02/healthy-self-doubt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Negitivefrags</author><text>Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs.<p>I see a similar sentiment all the time where people say things along the lines of &quot;Nobody really feels like an adult, we are all just muddling through&quot; etc etc.<p>Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out and are actual adults.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bArray</author><text>&gt; [..] most people really do suck at their jobs.<p>If fact, 50% of people perform below average! 50% of the population also have below average IQ.<p>&gt; Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out<p>&gt; and are actual adults.<p>I believe that everybody has an &quot;inner child&quot;, but most functioning adults have built layers around that inner self to enhance their behaviour to that of what we externally perceive as an &quot;adult&quot;.<p>Proof that most people still have that inner child can be observed in some edge cases, such as under the influence of drugs, sleep&#x2F;energy deprived, some mental deterioration conditions such as dementia - and many others. I think sometimes we see this too in viral videos where people behave strangely when presented in an unusual scenario. The mind just seems to go into a &quot;default&quot; mode.<p>I think for the most part, people generally run on auto-pilot. Like the so-called &quot;muscle memory&quot; for athletes, I believe something similar exists for most tasks a person completes day-to-day. Human behaviour more generally is likely doing this.<p>To that extent, is this seeming lack of adult-like behaviour simply a person that needs to relearn this &quot;outer shell&quot;? (Assuming they are also capable of doing so.)</text></comment> | <story><title>Healthy Self-Doubt</title><url>https://nerdygirl.com/2020/07/02/healthy-self-doubt/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Negitivefrags</author><text>Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs.<p>I see a similar sentiment all the time where people say things along the lines of &quot;Nobody really feels like an adult, we are all just muddling through&quot; etc etc.<p>Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out and are actual adults.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>&gt; Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs.<p>The question then is whether there&#x27;s a correlation between professional confidence and job performance.</text></comment> |
11,063,593 | 11,063,123 | 1 | 2 | 11,060,232 | train | <story><title>How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking</title><url>http://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>&gt; So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.<p>Good luck with that, Wired.<p>The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.<p>While you may think that you don&#x27;t care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.<p>I don&#x27;t see this ending well for any party involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elorant</author><text>$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everything.</text></comment> | <story><title>How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking</title><url>http://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>isomorphic</author><text>&gt; So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.<p>Good luck with that, Wired.<p>The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.<p>While you may think that you don&#x27;t care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.<p>I don&#x27;t see this ending well for any party involved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adt2bt</author><text>I think they&#x27;re betting the group of people who pay them $52&#x2F;year will more than make up for it, at least in the short term.</text></comment> |
30,394,444 | 30,393,840 | 1 | 2 | 30,384,223 | train | <story><title>What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings (2011)</title><url>https://kunststube.net/encoding/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oshiar53-0</author><text>Fun fact: GB 18030 is a Unicode Transformation Format.<p>Example: \N{THINKING FACE}\N{FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY}\N{FACE SCREAMING IN FEAR}\N{SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES AND THREE HEARTS}\N{PERSON DOING CARTWHEEL}\N{FACE WITH NO GOOD GESTURE}\N{ZERO WIDTH JOINER}\N{FEMALE SIGN}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}\N{EYES}\N{ON WITH EXCLAMATION MARK WITH LEFT RIGHT ARROW ABOVE}\N{SQUARED COOL}\N{VARIATION SELECTOR-16}<p>In UTF-8:<p><pre><code> 00000000: f09f a494 f09f 9882 f09f 98b1 f09f a5b0 ................
00000010: f09f a4b8 f09f 9985 e280 8de2 9980 efb8 ................
00000020: 8ff0 9f91 80f0 9f94 9bf0 9f86 92ef b88f ................
</code></pre>
In GB 18030:<p><pre><code> 00000000: 9530 cd34 9439 fc38 9530 8335 9530 d636 .0.4.9.8.0.5.0.6
00000010: 9530 d130 9530 8535 8136 a439 a1e2 8431 .0.0.0.5.6.9...1
00000020: 8235 9439 cf38 9439 e537 9439 8b32 8431 .5.9.8.9.7.9.2.1
00000030: 8235 .5</code></pre></text></comment> | <story><title>What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings (2011)</title><url>https://kunststube.net/encoding/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>torstenvl</author><text>The world of text encodings is pretty insane, especially when you start getting into the realm of what seems like endless variations on multi-level encodings, like the bajillion different character set encodings for quwei&#x2F;kuten CJK encodings.<p>I&#x27;m only scratching the surface right now, and just wrote a CPG 932 → Unicode lookup utility. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;4PYmEjQZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;4PYmEjQZ</a><p>(For internal testing, forgive any sloppiness, but feel free to use the kuten table if you happen to have a niche project with one-way mapping. The tables themselves are facts and not creative expression, so should not be copyrightable, but I&#x27;m dedicating the project to the public domain anyway.)</text></comment> |
30,542,278 | 30,541,801 | 1 | 3 | 30,540,215 | train | <story><title>Why enterprise software is bloated</title><url>https://www.mailbox.my/blog/posts/why-enterprise-software-is-bloated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adambyrtek</author><text>I know this is just an anecdote, but a good developer wouldn&#x27;t ask the manager to approve every small refactoring or expect them to understand the importance of &quot;one method in SuperFactory&quot;. They would have instead made a judgement call and taken the responsibility of doing the quick fix.</text></item><item><author>ihateolives</author><text><i>In a lot of companies, feature development trumps optimizing, refactoring or removal of legacy code.</i><p>Dev: Hey Steve, I&#x27;m working on issue #4546, but it just occured to me that that if I could just refactor that one method in SuperFactory it&#x27;d make code much cleaner and easier to reuse. Just a quick fix!<p>Manager: No. Work on #4546.<p>Dev: Sure, #4546 will be done soon, but it&#x27;d be really easy fix, it just occurred to me yesterday that there&#x27;s a better way to build things with SuperFactory.<p>Manager: No! We already closed that issue!<p>Dev: No problems. But I thought that now that I have some extra time until...<p>Manager: Look, Dave, it&#x27;s working as intended, the solution was reviewed and accepted. I will not create another task. You&#x27;ll take #7839 next!<p>[...]<p>Manager: Hey, Dave, I recall you had some ideas about SuperFactory. It&#x27;s been acting up lately, they keep creating tickets.<p>Dev: Nope. None. All gone now.<p>Manager: But you had, right?<p>Dev: Yes, but I&#x27;d have to start digging in again and I don&#x27;t have time for that.<p>Manager: Oh, ok, you&#x27;re right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>commandlinefan</author><text>&gt; wouldn&#x27;t ask the manager to approve every small refactoring<p>It becomes an issue if it takes more than a day. Scrum, Kanban, RUP, XP, waterfall - whatever &quot;methodology&quot; they say they&#x27;re following, it boils down to &quot;tell me how long this is going to take and I&#x27;ll check to see how close what you said was to the time it took&quot;. If you can make a change in an hour, sure. If it takes a day, it&#x27;s going to break your &quot;commitment&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why enterprise software is bloated</title><url>https://www.mailbox.my/blog/posts/why-enterprise-software-is-bloated/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adambyrtek</author><text>I know this is just an anecdote, but a good developer wouldn&#x27;t ask the manager to approve every small refactoring or expect them to understand the importance of &quot;one method in SuperFactory&quot;. They would have instead made a judgement call and taken the responsibility of doing the quick fix.</text></item><item><author>ihateolives</author><text><i>In a lot of companies, feature development trumps optimizing, refactoring or removal of legacy code.</i><p>Dev: Hey Steve, I&#x27;m working on issue #4546, but it just occured to me that that if I could just refactor that one method in SuperFactory it&#x27;d make code much cleaner and easier to reuse. Just a quick fix!<p>Manager: No. Work on #4546.<p>Dev: Sure, #4546 will be done soon, but it&#x27;d be really easy fix, it just occurred to me yesterday that there&#x27;s a better way to build things with SuperFactory.<p>Manager: No! We already closed that issue!<p>Dev: No problems. But I thought that now that I have some extra time until...<p>Manager: Look, Dave, it&#x27;s working as intended, the solution was reviewed and accepted. I will not create another task. You&#x27;ll take #7839 next!<p>[...]<p>Manager: Hey, Dave, I recall you had some ideas about SuperFactory. It&#x27;s been acting up lately, they keep creating tickets.<p>Dev: Nope. None. All gone now.<p>Manager: But you had, right?<p>Dev: Yes, but I&#x27;d have to start digging in again and I don&#x27;t have time for that.<p>Manager: Oh, ok, you&#x27;re right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Clubber</author><text>Yes, the general rule for me is if I see something completely whack on the ticket I&#x27;m working on, I&#x27;ll clean it up as long as I know there won&#x27;t be collateral damage. The problem comes when these systems become so complex and so old and the people working on them don&#x27;t really know what changes will affect other systems down the chain.</text></comment> |
31,030,938 | 31,030,643 | 1 | 3 | 31,029,202 | train | <story><title>Americans’ views on the war reveal a striking generational divide</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/04/02/americans-views-on-the-war-reveal-a-striking-generational-divide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ffwszgf</author><text>Most younger people are quite skeptic of mainstream media so they don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them.With the elderly it’s the opposite.<p>Further, most of the elderly lived at a time when the USSR was the clear and obvious enemy of “freedom”, so it’s not hard to fathom Russia being back into its usual shenanigans.<p>Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.<p>Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.<p>Gen Z has thus mostly understood this conflict through the propaganda wars that play out in social media and thus have conflicting and&#x2F;or “both-sides” takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ErikVandeWater</author><text>&gt; Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.<p>On the other side of things, on Reddit, nothing unfavorable about Ukraine is getting attention. You don&#x27;t see any posts about Russia gaining territory, or Zelensky censoring media outlets favorable to opposition parties.<p>And nowhere on reddit or in the media do I see a discussion of the pros and cons of a Ukrainian surrender. It&#x27;s really hard to see how Ukraine will successfully fend off a country 10x its size. (If someone has an answer as to why that might be realistic, I&#x27;m open to hear it).</text></comment> | <story><title>Americans’ views on the war reveal a striking generational divide</title><url>https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/04/02/americans-views-on-the-war-reveal-a-striking-generational-divide</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ffwszgf</author><text>Most younger people are quite skeptic of mainstream media so they don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them.With the elderly it’s the opposite.<p>Further, most of the elderly lived at a time when the USSR was the clear and obvious enemy of “freedom”, so it’s not hard to fathom Russia being back into its usual shenanigans.<p>Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.<p>Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.<p>Gen Z has thus mostly understood this conflict through the propaganda wars that play out in social media and thus have conflicting and&#x2F;or “both-sides” takes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>formerly_proven</author><text>If the Russian invasion of Ukraine has taught me anything, it&#x27;s that a) while overt Russian propaganda seems to largely fail in Europe, the more subtle suggestions are widespread b) most people have genuinely horribly bad defense takes c) there are somewhat more tankies than I expected</text></comment> |
31,893,128 | 31,891,199 | 1 | 3 | 31,874,606 | train | <story><title>Hollywood doesn’t make movies like ‘The Fugitive’ anymore (2018)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/the-fugitive-harrison-ford-25-years-later/566729/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric4smith</author><text>Unfortunately most movies these days are more about &quot;the message&quot; than a coherent story.<p>But GOOD NEWS!<p>This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched &quot;Hustle&quot;. Adam Sandler&#x27;s latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I&#x27;m not really into basketball.<p>But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.<p>The thing missing from many movies these days with &quot;the message&quot; is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.<p>And that&#x27;s the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It&#x27;s a shame really. It&#x27;s all about politics these days and making sure there is some race&#x2F;gender&#x2F;cultural representation (I&#x27;m saying this as a black guy).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>valdiorn</author><text>Someone&#x27;s been watching The Critical Drinker - but I totally agree with him as well :)<p>The lack of obstacles to overcome and the general saint-like presence of protagonists these days is miserable. It&#x27;s the same thing you see in political discourse these days; if you&#x27;re not COMPLETELY with us on every issue, you are a fascist devil. Can&#x27;t have that in your movies so you end up with perfect moral beings with no flaws.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hollywood doesn’t make movies like ‘The Fugitive’ anymore (2018)</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/the-fugitive-harrison-ford-25-years-later/566729/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eric4smith</author><text>Unfortunately most movies these days are more about &quot;the message&quot; than a coherent story.<p>But GOOD NEWS!<p>This weekend I actually found a use for Netflix and watched &quot;Hustle&quot;. Adam Sandler&#x27;s latest offering for the platform. It is an astoundingly good movie. Even more so because normally I&#x27;m not really into basketball.<p>But it was WELL written, intelligent and there were plenty of challenges for them to overcome, right down to the very last 30 seconds of the movie. Edge of the seat stuff that keeps you engaged every moment.<p>The thing missing from many movies these days with &quot;the message&quot; is that the protagonists generally have no obstacles. No problems to deal with. No hurdles to cross. No challenges. There is generally no danger to the heroes. There is just a lot of ass kicking without any preliminaries.<p>And that&#x27;s the reason why movies mostly suck these days. It&#x27;s a shame really. It&#x27;s all about politics these days and making sure there is some race&#x2F;gender&#x2F;cultural representation (I&#x27;m saying this as a black guy).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geerlingguy</author><text>This comment reminds me a lot of The Critical Drinker on YouTube. Sometimes a bit biting, but often accurate in analyzing what went wrong in some movie&#x27;s plot. One of the most egregious and frequent is having characters who basically have zero or backsliding character arcs.</text></comment> |
8,452,777 | 8,452,259 | 1 | 3 | 8,452,124 | train | <story><title>Dropbox wasn't hacked</title><url>https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/10/dropbox-wasnt-hacked/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jen729w</author><text>So ... what&#x27;s the lesson here for our non-nerdy friends &amp; family? I immediately sent my closest friends a &quot;change your Dropbox password&quot; email, which is still valid because, whether they were hacked or not, someone may now have their password. Which is probably also their password to Facebook.<p>I suppose the question is, does it <i>matter</i> if Dropbox was hacked or if these credentials were gained by some other means? The end result for a poor user^ is the same.<p>(^Not me, of course. I use 1Password.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digital-rubber</author><text>No offence, but in my humble opinion using 1password, or any password manager, does not make you a better or more secure user.<p>Perhaps even lowers your security in ways.<p>Sharing the fact (with the internet) that you use a password manager, lowered your security already, technically speaking.<p>I find the idea to use one password (and a private key etc) to protect all my other accounts and passwords a bit strange, specially synced over 3rd party servers&#x2F;services.<p>Not to mention when people use it on devices often discussed to have ways to eavesdrop on a user, android, iPhone. The security of the password vault is now equal to that of that particular device. (which could be as low as no security)</text></comment> | <story><title>Dropbox wasn't hacked</title><url>https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/10/dropbox-wasnt-hacked/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jen729w</author><text>So ... what&#x27;s the lesson here for our non-nerdy friends &amp; family? I immediately sent my closest friends a &quot;change your Dropbox password&quot; email, which is still valid because, whether they were hacked or not, someone may now have their password. Which is probably also their password to Facebook.<p>I suppose the question is, does it <i>matter</i> if Dropbox was hacked or if these credentials were gained by some other means? The end result for a poor user^ is the same.<p>(^Not me, of course. I use 1Password.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ozh</author><text>Issue explained to non-nerdy friends: <a href="http://xkcd.com/792/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;792&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
10,905,352 | 10,905,020 | 1 | 2 | 10,902,323 | train | <story><title>Netflix to block proxy access to content not available locally</title><url>http://in.reuters.com/article/us-netflix-launch-idINKCN0US23020160114</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manigandham</author><text>This is something that I run into a lot. It&#x27;s just nicer being able to click a file and play in VLC that&#x27;s more responsive, can fastforward&#x2F;rewind, play at different speeds, etc.<p>Streaming through webpages just isn&#x27;t that great for how I consume video.<p>EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.</text></item><item><author>0xffff2</author><text>Again? I used to regularly check Netflix before Pirate Bay, but it&#x27;s been so long since anything I wanted to watch was streamable on Netflix (and I&#x27;m in the US too) that I rarely bother anymore. Even at the best of times it was maybe 50&#x2F;50.<p>Hell, I torrented &quot;The Man in the High Castle&quot; even though I have Amazon Prime just because I didn&#x27;t feel like installing Silverlight. Even when you are paying for the content, it can still be easier to watch via other means.</text></item><item><author>sergiotapia</author><text>People will probably just torrent things again. In the minds of the vast majority of people piracy is a victimless crime. These people have only stopped pirating because it&#x27;s easier to pay and use Netflix. Guaranteed they&#x27;ll go back to torrenting.<p>Gabe Newell: &quot;We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,&quot; he said. &quot;If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate&#x27;s service is more valuable.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>&gt; <i>EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.</i><p>THANK YOU &lt;3.<p>I didn&#x27;t know! I was aware that I could open video streams (the old-school kind) in VLC, but I never realized it can pull a stream from YouTube video link. I see now it works great, though the video quality option is not obviously available. It can be set here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techverse.net&#x2F;play-youtube-videos-vlc-media-player&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techverse.net&#x2F;play-youtube-videos-vlc-media-playe...</a><p>From the page, under disadvantages of streaming YouTube through VLC:<p><pre><code> Disadvantage
No annotations.
</code></pre>
Like hell. It&#x27;s totally an <i>advantage</i>. Annotations on YouTube are a total mess, and they&#x27;re their worst invention, even worse than their comment section, infamous for low-quality content.<p>I absolutely <i>hate</i> streaming videos in the browser. It&#x27;s a stupid idea. Everyone uses a different player, half of them can&#x27;t handle rewinding or skipping forward, and all of them are total resource hogs. There are things that really shouldn&#x27;t be done with web technologies. Like spreadsheets, or video players. They work best if made native.</text></comment> | <story><title>Netflix to block proxy access to content not available locally</title><url>http://in.reuters.com/article/us-netflix-launch-idINKCN0US23020160114</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>manigandham</author><text>This is something that I run into a lot. It&#x27;s just nicer being able to click a file and play in VLC that&#x27;s more responsive, can fastforward&#x2F;rewind, play at different speeds, etc.<p>Streaming through webpages just isn&#x27;t that great for how I consume video.<p>EDIT: I always like to remind people that VLC can open youtube videos natively. CTRL+V and paste in url. Not perfect control but nicer than youtube player.</text></item><item><author>0xffff2</author><text>Again? I used to regularly check Netflix before Pirate Bay, but it&#x27;s been so long since anything I wanted to watch was streamable on Netflix (and I&#x27;m in the US too) that I rarely bother anymore. Even at the best of times it was maybe 50&#x2F;50.<p>Hell, I torrented &quot;The Man in the High Castle&quot; even though I have Amazon Prime just because I didn&#x27;t feel like installing Silverlight. Even when you are paying for the content, it can still be easier to watch via other means.</text></item><item><author>sergiotapia</author><text>People will probably just torrent things again. In the minds of the vast majority of people piracy is a victimless crime. These people have only stopped pirating because it&#x27;s easier to pay and use Netflix. Guaranteed they&#x27;ll go back to torrenting.<p>Gabe Newell: &quot;We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,&quot; he said. &quot;If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate&#x27;s service is more valuable.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>Netflix has really good compression though. Torrenting takes hours, makes the internet unusable in the whole house, and the quality is much worse. Netflix just works, even if multiple people are using it. And it goes straight to the TV.</text></comment> |
37,551,929 | 37,551,922 | 1 | 2 | 37,551,293 | train | <story><title>How much garden you would need to survive on</title><url>https://lifehacker.com/how-much-garden-you-would-need-to-100-survive-on-1848829190</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franciscop</author><text>100x100 meters is <i>a lot</i> of meters to be &quot;garden farming&quot;, it&#x27;s not a hobby anymore but a part-time job.</text></item><item><author>fbdab103</author><text>Not a farmer but, I think potato yields are such that is achievable if you were dedicated to the task.<p>According to[0], a hectare (100m x 100m) should yield 25,000kg in a year. That&#x27;s a whole heck of a lot of potatoes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycalculator.com&#x2F;potato-yield-calculator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycalculator.com&#x2F;potato-yield-calculator&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>syntaxing</author><text>I thought about this a lot during the peak of the pandemic. How much would you need to grow to not need to go to the grocery stores. But then I noticed, even for myself, if I eat 1 potato every meal, that’s over 1K potatoes a year. That’s a shit ton of potatoes. Include veggies, fruits, grain for chicken to make eggs, it’s really really tough to survive on your own garden. Makes me really appreciate our current food system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cvoss</author><text>And from thence comes the whole concept of &quot;it&#x27;s my job to produce way more X than I need to survive, and I will trade my surplus X for Y&quot; where Y is something you also need to survive but didn&#x27;t have time to do because of X.<p>It&#x27;s way more efficient for everybody to divide labor this way than to have each household be its own independent and self-sustaining system.</text></comment> | <story><title>How much garden you would need to survive on</title><url>https://lifehacker.com/how-much-garden-you-would-need-to-100-survive-on-1848829190</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>franciscop</author><text>100x100 meters is <i>a lot</i> of meters to be &quot;garden farming&quot;, it&#x27;s not a hobby anymore but a part-time job.</text></item><item><author>fbdab103</author><text>Not a farmer but, I think potato yields are such that is achievable if you were dedicated to the task.<p>According to[0], a hectare (100m x 100m) should yield 25,000kg in a year. That&#x27;s a whole heck of a lot of potatoes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycalculator.com&#x2F;potato-yield-calculator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;savvycalculator.com&#x2F;potato-yield-calculator&#x2F;</a></text></item><item><author>syntaxing</author><text>I thought about this a lot during the peak of the pandemic. How much would you need to grow to not need to go to the grocery stores. But then I noticed, even for myself, if I eat 1 potato every meal, that’s over 1K potatoes a year. That’s a shit ton of potatoes. Include veggies, fruits, grain for chicken to make eggs, it’s really really tough to survive on your own garden. Makes me really appreciate our current food system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fbdab103</author><text>25,000kg (68kg&#x2F;day) is a lot for a human to consume, that was just the scale given in the article.<p>Drop it by 2 orders of magnitude (10mx10m) and you are looking at 250kg &#x2F;year. Which sounds like a reasonable amount both for a large garden and human consumption.</text></comment> |
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