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23,424,488 | 23,424,560 | 1 | 2 | 23,424,351 | train | <story><title>US schools lay off hundreds of thousands</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-teachers-insig/u-s-schools-lay-off-hundreds-of-thousands-setting-up-lasting-harm-to-kids-idUSKBN23B39R</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>viburnum</author><text>You know who’s not laying off anyone? The military. Local funding of schools is ridiculous. Education benefits the whole nation. Educational investments shouldn’t be dictated by transient economic conditions.</text></comment> | <story><title>US schools lay off hundreds of thousands</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-teachers-insig/u-s-schools-lay-off-hundreds-of-thousands-setting-up-lasting-harm-to-kids-idUSKBN23B39R</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>avsteele</author><text>Title: about teachers. Anecdotes: about teachers.<p>Buried in the article:
<i>Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Brown University, said she believes most of the 469,000 laid off in April were non-teacher personnel, as districts tend to fire teachers last</i><p>If schools aren&#x27;t open, a lot of janitorial, cafeteria worker, etc... are probably being laid off.</text></comment> |
2,531,618 | 2,531,463 | 1 | 2 | 2,531,419 | train | <story><title>The Co-Founder Mythology</title><url>http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder-mythology/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>I wouldn't say partnerships <i>can't</i> work out -- they obviously do, often enough -- but I would say that they can fail no matter how much you believe yours won't, so it's a really good idea to have a backup plan just in case, no matter how long you've known your friend for or what you've been through together.<p>I got my eyes opened on this last year. I was part of a pretty tight-knit group of friends. Some of us decided to get together and apply to YC. It's a good thing that didn't go very far, because a few months later, one of our group got in pretty serious trouble with the law. I took the view that he was a good person that didn't deserve to have a bad decision follow him around the rest of his life; my girlfriend and I attended his court dates and argued for his parole, and when he was released, we moved him to our area and helped him get back on his feet.<p>Our previously close-knit group of friends, it turns out, were really unhappy about that. They quit talking to us altogether, even though, as climbing partners, we've been responsible for each-others' lives on several occasions, and have generally been there for each-other through good times and bad.<p>Never saw that coming. Suddenly partnerships looked a lot less wise afterward.</text></comment> | <story><title>The Co-Founder Mythology</title><url>http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder-mythology/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jd</author><text>I hate to say this here, but msuster is the one VC out there who really knows how things work and talks straight -- and the one I'd really want to go to bat for me. There is no sugar coating or extra idealism, but he's not limited to just software stuff either. In fact, I'd argue that makes him a better investor since he understands other industries -- and many of the dynamics in software are no different than other places.<p>To the specifics: I think when you are hacking on something large you need external motivation. Since the YCombinator model is to start with little upfront investment until you are "ramen profitable" you basically end up with a couple of people in a room hacking on something until it is presumably worth something (of course, valuations are notoriously difficult in software -- esp. social software). Since people don't get a lot done on their own, the purpose of a co-founder is for the motivational factor. If you were an uber-hacker (e.g. Drew Houston comes to mind) probably you don't need anyone else. You can build a functional prototype, get investment, hire, etc.<p>There is also the problem of the "idea." Although there are lots of loosy goosy "idea" people, there are also a fair number of talented hackers without any practical ideas -- and you really need to have a practical idea to have a startup. While personally I think you are usually better focusing on a problem domain where you have experience and there is a clear need, there are certainly cases where a hacker needs a co-founder simply to provide that interface layer between code and real life. As an example, anyone who has been in the industry for awhile will note just how terrible at design many otherwise very talented programmers are.<p>Anyways, I found this extraordinarily inspiring as a single founder YC reject who has been doing reasonably well w/o any YC support.</text></comment> |
23,935,123 | 23,934,941 | 1 | 3 | 23,928,666 | train | <story><title>Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A hardware device to connect remote teams</title><text>Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;m Andy, one of the founders at Sidekick (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekick.video&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekick.video&#x2F;</a>). Sidekick is a new hardware device built to connect remote teams with an always-on video call.<p>Sidekick sits on your desk next to your computer — with Sidekick you just turn to your teammates and talk, as if you&#x27;re in the same room.<p>Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. After fleeing NYC to return to our childhood homes, we quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal. We were missing out on all the spontaneous conversations and camaraderie that occur when we&#x27;re in the same room. We knew we needed to simulate being in the same room to build our company.<p>Initially we built Sidekick just for ourselves, but many of the founders in our YC batch wanted to try it out! We realized that our founding team wasn&#x27;t an anomaly for wanting an always-on video device — we pivoted from our previous idea to start working on Sidekick to help the other founders in our batch.<p>Sidekick works best with fast-paced teams that need to be constantly communicating — founders are a great example. We&#x27;re working with 25 YC founding teams along with experimental product teams at Store No. 8 and Brex. That being said, Sidekick isn&#x27;t for everyone! If you don&#x27;t really want to talk to your team during the day, Sidekick probably isn&#x27;t a great fit.<p>We talked to many teams that tried to hack together a solution with Zoom on an iPad. From the teams we spoke to, we learned that it&#x27;s really hard to consistently get the team in the room at the same time. Users are constantly leaving the room for other meetings but for everyone still in the room, it seems like nobody wants to use it because it&#x27;s empty. This causes a negative feedback loop where even more people leave the room and the hacked together solution quickly becomes useless.<p>Sidekick is built to maximize the chances that you&#x27;re not in the room alone. Unlike other jerry-rigged solutions, it treats &quot;always-on&quot; as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we&#x27;ve made are:<p>- Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.<p>- Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as &quot;in a meeting&quot;. This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you&#x27;re in a meeting, but you&#x27;ll be back soon if someone needs you. We&#x27;re also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as &quot;in a meeting&quot;<p>On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.<p>Our customers pay for Sidekick with a subscription model and we have a special promotion until Aug 1st for $25&#x2F;user&#x2F;month. The hardware comes for free and we handle all the shipping. We went with this model because we want our customers to pay us for the experience, not the hardware. We didn&#x27;t want customers to have to think about whether they wanted to buy a pricy new device when the real question should be whether they want to try the experience.<p>We believe that working in the same room is part of the secret sauce to building an awesome company. We want all teams to be able to have access to that experience.<p>I really love this community and I&#x27;m excited to share Sidekick with all of you. We&#x27;d love to hear your feedback, particularly if you&#x27;re working on a team that misses being in the same room. Feel free to ask any questions — I&#x27;ll be around to answer anything you want to throw our way.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>Why is everybody in here being such an asshole to this company? Has the HN culture seriously changed this much? Is the lockdown just pickling everybody&#x27;s minds?<p>They&#x27;re trying something. If you don&#x27;t like it, give constructive criticism, but this hostility is unhelpful and unwelcome.<p>&gt;Why is it a Samsung device?<p>I worked on a startup which was a video chat project similar to this with a different target. We also used an existing hardware device. Why? Because tech support is hard, and tech supporting hundreds of different combinations of people&#x27;s hardware is a project itself. We bought tablets, loaded our app onto them, and that was our hardware device. Yeah, we wanted to make our own device eventually, but we weren&#x27;t at the point of sending a team to China to do it yet, and that&#x27;s what it would have taken.<p>--<p>Stop this. This is not HN&#x27;s culture. If you want to offer constructive criticism, then fine. If you want to be a jerk to somebody about their product then go somewhere else. If you are thinking you want to make an alt account to be a jerk to somebody about their product, then go somewhere else even faster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frankdenbow</author><text>Agree with you that we should be gentler on people when they are just introducing ideas to the world. I disagree that this is not HN&#x27;s culture. Example, read the dropbox launch thread, among many others. Usually when I come to HN I expect the top comment to be some pseudo-intellectual takedown of someone else&#x27;s hard work.</text></comment> | <story><title>Launch HN: Sidekick (YC S20) – A hardware device to connect remote teams</title><text>Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;m Andy, one of the founders at Sidekick (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekick.video&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekick.video&#x2F;</a>). Sidekick is a new hardware device built to connect remote teams with an always-on video call.<p>Sidekick sits on your desk next to your computer — with Sidekick you just turn to your teammates and talk, as if you&#x27;re in the same room.<p>Like many of you all, we were recently forced to start working remotely because of COVID. After fleeing NYC to return to our childhood homes, we quickly realized that starting a company while remote was brutal. We were missing out on all the spontaneous conversations and camaraderie that occur when we&#x27;re in the same room. We knew we needed to simulate being in the same room to build our company.<p>Initially we built Sidekick just for ourselves, but many of the founders in our YC batch wanted to try it out! We realized that our founding team wasn&#x27;t an anomaly for wanting an always-on video device — we pivoted from our previous idea to start working on Sidekick to help the other founders in our batch.<p>Sidekick works best with fast-paced teams that need to be constantly communicating — founders are a great example. We&#x27;re working with 25 YC founding teams along with experimental product teams at Store No. 8 and Brex. That being said, Sidekick isn&#x27;t for everyone! If you don&#x27;t really want to talk to your team during the day, Sidekick probably isn&#x27;t a great fit.<p>We talked to many teams that tried to hack together a solution with Zoom on an iPad. From the teams we spoke to, we learned that it&#x27;s really hard to consistently get the team in the room at the same time. Users are constantly leaving the room for other meetings but for everyone still in the room, it seems like nobody wants to use it because it&#x27;s empty. This causes a negative feedback loop where even more people leave the room and the hacked together solution quickly becomes useless.<p>Sidekick is built to maximize the chances that you&#x27;re not in the room alone. Unlike other jerry-rigged solutions, it treats &quot;always-on&quot; as a first-class problem to solve. Some examples of product decisions we&#x27;ve made are:<p>- Push notifications to minimize being alone in the room - when someone joins as the first person in the room, we send a notification to the rest of the team. We want to get other teammates in the room ASAP because the room is only useful with more than one person.<p>- Meeting mode - when you have a normal Zoom meeting with someone outside of your team, you can mark yourself as &quot;in a meeting&quot;. This silences the mic and speakers on Sidekick while also setting a status informing your team that you&#x27;re in a meeting, but you&#x27;ll be back soon if someone needs you. We&#x27;re also releasing Google Calendar integration soon, allowing Sidekick to automatically mark itself as &quot;in a meeting&quot;<p>On average our users are in their Sidekick rooms for 6 hours a day. They turn it on first thing when they sit down in the morning and leave it on throughout all their meetings during the day.<p>Our customers pay for Sidekick with a subscription model and we have a special promotion until Aug 1st for $25&#x2F;user&#x2F;month. The hardware comes for free and we handle all the shipping. We went with this model because we want our customers to pay us for the experience, not the hardware. We didn&#x27;t want customers to have to think about whether they wanted to buy a pricy new device when the real question should be whether they want to try the experience.<p>We believe that working in the same room is part of the secret sauce to building an awesome company. We want all teams to be able to have access to that experience.<p>I really love this community and I&#x27;m excited to share Sidekick with all of you. We&#x27;d love to hear your feedback, particularly if you&#x27;re working on a team that misses being in the same room. Feel free to ask any questions — I&#x27;ll be around to answer anything you want to throw our way.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>Why is everybody in here being such an asshole to this company? Has the HN culture seriously changed this much? Is the lockdown just pickling everybody&#x27;s minds?<p>They&#x27;re trying something. If you don&#x27;t like it, give constructive criticism, but this hostility is unhelpful and unwelcome.<p>&gt;Why is it a Samsung device?<p>I worked on a startup which was a video chat project similar to this with a different target. We also used an existing hardware device. Why? Because tech support is hard, and tech supporting hundreds of different combinations of people&#x27;s hardware is a project itself. We bought tablets, loaded our app onto them, and that was our hardware device. Yeah, we wanted to make our own device eventually, but we weren&#x27;t at the point of sending a team to China to do it yet, and that&#x27;s what it would have taken.<p>--<p>Stop this. This is not HN&#x27;s culture. If you want to offer constructive criticism, then fine. If you want to be a jerk to somebody about their product then go somewhere else. If you are thinking you want to make an alt account to be a jerk to somebody about their product, then go somewhere else even faster.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>turtlebits</author><text>The oversell is the issue for me. It’s essentially an video conferencing Android app, but instead of putting it on the Play store, they are making you lease the hardware. In the features, I don’t see any exceptional features that make it stand out over any other “meet” app.</text></comment> |
35,758,169 | 35,757,147 | 1 | 3 | 35,756,071 | train | <story><title>The curious side effects of medical transparency</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/the-curious-side-effects-of-medical-transparency</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>derbOac</author><text>My experience is in psychiatry and behavioral health, where this issue becomes particularly acute. So much of this field depends on notes and reports — it&#x27;s not that there aren&#x27;t test results and so forth but so much of it depends on behavioral observations and the content of what clients and their loved ones and others are saying.<p>The fundamental issue is one of audience. You always have an audience in any writing, and with healthcare notes this is especially true. The problem arises when you try to deny this, and in the process make everyone your audience, as what writing you need for one reader is very different from the writing you need for another reader.<p>In psychiatry this is especially problematic because you&#x27;re essentially always trying to maintain rapport and a relationship with a client, and there are times when the most tactful and therapeutic thing to do is to withhold information at a moment, or even more often, present that information in a very specific way. The way you communicate with a patient is part of your job. You wouldn&#x27;t behave toward a colleague in the same way you would a patient, but that&#x27;s essentially what you&#x27;re asked to do with open notes.<p>I can imagine the criticisms this might invite — that what I&#x27;m saying is an example of how patronizing psychiatry can be at times — but I think there&#x27;s no way around this. I highly doubt you want your therapist talking to you like you like they would a close friend or colleague, for example, and no professional therapist would do that.<p>Open notes are this sort of weird wormhole through the provider-patient relationship boundaries that typically exist, and in my experience they just lead to this odd coded language in notes, or pushing discussions offline into verbal discussions between colleagues, or something.<p>I do think patient records should be available to them, but I agree with others that it might be better to have certain levels of firewall for different types of notes. Some a patient might get immediately; others they might have to make a request for, or something.<p>It&#x27;s a difficult needle to thread, but I&#x27;m not sure radical record transparency always everywhere is quite optimal.</text></comment> | <story><title>The curious side effects of medical transparency</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/the-curious-side-effects-of-medical-transparency</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wcerfgba</author><text>Perhaps the opposite virtue of transparency is confidentiality: either or both can be good depending on the context, but sometimes they are mutually exclusive.</text></comment> |
33,096,131 | 33,095,022 | 1 | 3 | 33,093,941 | train | <story><title>I don’t believe in sprints</title><url>https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-don’t-believe-in-sprints/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hurril</author><text>This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish.<p>Sprints are not made to help organize things, they&#x27;re a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability.<p>This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and that is the tradeoff. Plus: people actually seldomly take the optimum routes in the first place.<p>Nobody has to like it, this is probably not the best method and maybe it&#x27;s not even good. But the author misses the point completely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xxEightyxx</author><text>It&#x27;s all about how everything is implemented. I&#x27;ve worked in places where sprints were hard deadlines and there was no acceptable reason for missing said deadlines. We worked 12-15 hour days, including working weekends to try and meet our release schedules.<p>Run into a blocker? Too bad, should have seen it coming during our scrum meetings and follow-up refinements.<p>We engineers had two business analysts, a scrum master, and two managers that resided &quot;above&quot; us in rank all working to keep the &quot;flow&quot; of the sprints alive to help ensure we meet our deadlines.<p>It was the most stressful tech job&#x2F;environment I&#x27;ve ever been part of and everything was micro-managed by said 5 people to the point that they were blockers to our progress - scheduling multiple meetings everyday that would easily consume 3-4 hours.<p>Our backlog would grow everyday as everyone scrambled to finish tasks and our architecture was a patch-work of systems that only one person truly understood because he had been with the company since it&#x27;s inception.<p>I was hired as a senior engineer along with three other mid-level engineers - all three quit within four months. I left after six.<p>Sprints&#x2F;agile&#x2F;scrums are generally a good thing IF and ONLY IF you have a capable manager&#x2F;scrum master leading and organizing the team who truly understands time management and finnicky nature of software development. Otherwise, it quickly falls off the rails and leads to churn and burn.</text></comment> | <story><title>I don’t believe in sprints</title><url>https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-don’t-believe-in-sprints/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hurril</author><text>This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish.<p>Sprints are not made to help organize things, they&#x27;re a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability.<p>This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and that is the tradeoff. Plus: people actually seldomly take the optimum routes in the first place.<p>Nobody has to like it, this is probably not the best method and maybe it&#x27;s not even good. But the author misses the point completely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PaulHoule</author><text>I&#x27;ve worked in places where the cycle to integrate work was more than six months. In a situation like that you often don&#x27;t really know how to build the product at all and the six months can stretch to anywhere between 8 months and 18 months.<p>It is true though that springs bring in their own problems. For instance I worked on one project with two week sprints where it took a 2-3 day batch job to generate a database&#x2F;a.i. model. This had a bit of Gannt chart character in that it had to be managed in terms of calendar time instead of punchclock time. If you didn&#x27;t start the database build early enough you would predictably blow the sprint.<p>At the same place there were a few different teams with their own sprint schedules and the system was able to turn a 1 day delay into a 4 week delay as one blown sprint caused another blown sprint.<p>Another problem is how you organize work that has a pipeline structure. Is a tester expected to test work in the same sprint it is being developed in? What does a developer do when a feature is under test?<p>What really kills teams is a lack of trust. With the six month build cycle you can put off conflicts that a sprint cycle forces you to confront every two weeks. I think sprints are popular with some because it gives developers some space to be inflexible, but it is harmful for the business. Sometimes there is a feature the business needs right now and it could have it right now if you add 2 days to the sprint.</text></comment> |
14,633,420 | 14,633,413 | 1 | 2 | 14,633,010 | train | <story><title>Diving into the world of hash tables</title><url>http://www.zeroequalsfalse.press/2017/02/20/hashtables/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>VHRanger</author><text>If you care about performance, it&#x27;s important to note how the underlying representation of a dictionary data structure.<p>For instance, the unordered_hash_map in C++ is based around a linked list of key&#x2F;value pair buckets. This means iterating through the keys or values is very slow (lots of cache misses!), but insertion is fast. Retrieving a key is O(logn) but a very slow O(logn), because of the cache misses.<p>Other implementations is to keep a sorted vector of keys and a respective vector of values. There&#x27;s loki::assocvector, booost::flat_unordered_map that do this for instance. Now insertion is slow, but iteration and retrieval are very fast (a fast O(logn) by binary search with few cache misses). It&#x27;s also memory efficient, since no pointers between elements.<p>If you have one big dictionary you would use throughout an application, and know the data up front, a good strategy is to reserve the necessary memory in an array, fill it with keys&#x2F;values, sort it once over the keys and coindex the value array. Now you have a memory efficient and extremely fast dictionary data structure.<p>One other strategy any intermediate coder can implement is to have two unsorted coindexed arrays. You don&#x27;t even need a hash function for this. Now iterating and insertion through the table is extremely fast, and it is memory efficient, but finding a key is just a fast O(n). So this is good for smaller tables. In C++ you could implement it as a std::pair&lt;vector&lt;key&gt;, vector&lt;value&gt;&gt;. If you need a quick small map in a function this is often the fastest data structure you can implement without too many headaches.</text></comment> | <story><title>Diving into the world of hash tables</title><url>http://www.zeroequalsfalse.press/2017/02/20/hashtables/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>emeraldd</author><text>This is one of those data structures that everyone should try building at least once, kind of like linked lists, etc. Semi-unrelated, I built a couple of toy implementations a few years ago using the same basic ideas:<p>* This one is the my original written in something halfway resembling scheme:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;Bootstrap-Scheme&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;hash.scm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;Bootstrap-Scheme&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master...</a><p>* And this implementation is part of a half finished byte code scheme that I haven&#x27;t touched in a few years. Another project I need to get back to.
Interface: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;insomniac&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;include&#x2F;hash.h" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;insomniac&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;in...</a>
Internals: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;insomniac&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;libinsomniac_hash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;arlaneenalra&#x2F;insomniac&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;li...</a><p>They were kind of fun to build and I&#x27;d recommend giving, especially if you have some skill but don&#x27;t <i>think</i> you have the chops. To get a working toy isn&#x27;t really all that hard once you understand the principals.</text></comment> |
25,849,754 | 25,849,594 | 1 | 2 | 25,848,369 | train | <story><title>Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxpja/gigantic-asshole-ajit-pai-is-officially-gone-good-riddance-time-of-your-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rubyist5eva</author><text>People keep saying killing net neutrality was bad...but has there been actually been anything tangible that came out of killing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wilde</author><text>All of the ISPs merged with media companies, instituted data caps, and then exempted their in house media from the data caps.<p>So yeah, fairly substantial.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;net-neutrality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;net-neutrality</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone</title><url>https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxpja/gigantic-asshole-ajit-pai-is-officially-gone-good-riddance-time-of-your-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rubyist5eva</author><text>People keep saying killing net neutrality was bad...but has there been actually been anything tangible that came out of killing it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ASalazarMX</author><text>Here in Mexico, the biggest cellular company, Telcel, offers packages with &quot;Unlimited Social Networks&quot;. Unlimited, in their language, means Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter don&#x27;t count towards your data limit.<p>This seemed like a good thing, but with the announce of WhatsApp sharing data with Facebook, many people have changed to Telegram or Signal. Some of them will return to WhatsApp because switching actually costs them money.<p>Like USA, Mexico was unable to stop legislation against net neutrality. The erosion it&#x27;s just starting.</text></comment> |
29,836,604 | 29,836,499 | 1 | 2 | 29,835,933 | train | <story><title>Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda</title><url>https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-pentagon-and-cia-have-shaped-thousands-of-hollywood-movies-into-super-effective-propaganda/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>heavyset_go</author><text>Once this was pointed out, I can&#x27;t unsee it. It&#x27;s kind of ruined movies that involves the military or military equipment for me, since it can be really obvious when creators toe the line for the military. When I see military equipment my gut reaction is to anticipate the other shoe dropping, and to look for shoehorned hero worship or some good-versus-evil plot point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cm2187</author><text>I think Hollywood is lot less subtle now at trying to push political propaganda than it was ever then, except that wokeism is the theme of the day. In some instances it has completely taken over the plot, like in the last season of Fargo, to the point of becoming some sort of unwatcheable catechism.</text></comment> | <story><title>Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda</title><url>https://worldbeyondwar.org/the-pentagon-and-cia-have-shaped-thousands-of-hollywood-movies-into-super-effective-propaganda/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>heavyset_go</author><text>Once this was pointed out, I can&#x27;t unsee it. It&#x27;s kind of ruined movies that involves the military or military equipment for me, since it can be really obvious when creators toe the line for the military. When I see military equipment my gut reaction is to anticipate the other shoe dropping, and to look for shoehorned hero worship or some good-versus-evil plot point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaxHoppersGhost</author><text>Americans love that stuff though, it’s not necessarily propaganda forced down our throats. We’d still want to see the badass, all American commando on a 100 kill streak.</text></comment> |
21,861,880 | 21,861,353 | 1 | 2 | 21,859,645 | train | <story><title>Why Creativity Is a Numbers Game (2015)</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/why-creativity-is-a-numbers-game/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vezycash</author><text>&gt;creative greatness appears to be doing things differently<p>I&#x27;ve done things differently just out of boredom caused by doing a task, the same way repeatedly.<p>Example: I sometimes get tired of a particular food and tweak it by adding a new ingredient or eating it with something different.<p>&gt;Edison was unlucky—he failed to invent fuel cells. The first comercially successful fuel cells were developed in the mid-twentieth century, long after Edison moved on to pursuing other ideas.
&gt;Edison always had somewhere to channel his efforts whenever he ran into temporary obstacles<p>This is completely different from the &quot;Edison never gave up and kept working till he succeeded&quot; talks.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why Creativity Is a Numbers Game (2015)</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/why-creativity-is-a-numbers-game/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adzm</author><text>Personally I feel that creativity is something like saturating a solution with ideas until you get that one seed crystal and then everything just comes together. If it wasn&#x27;t already full of thoughts and ideas already, that seed would simply dissolve.</text></comment> |
25,003,786 | 25,003,833 | 1 | 2 | 25,001,173 | train | <story><title>San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-05/san-francisco-voters-approve-taxes-on-ceos-big-businesses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ransom1538</author><text>&quot;It&#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.&quot;<p>SF resident for 15 years until I left.<p>I walked around and talked to homeless. From the dozens I have talked with:<p>1. They are not from SF.<p>2. They were homeless somewhere else and it sucked.<p>3. Pan handling cash is easy. $100+ a day.<p>4. The SF programs kick ass. Suboxone clinics, Free cell phones, free bus passes, monthly stipends $$, even occasional housing<p>5. The police do not hassle much, you can shoot up on the street no problem.<p>It is a system designed to create more homelessness.</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>San Francisco&#x27;s solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don&#x27;t work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn&#x27;t always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It&#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smsm42</author><text>So we have:<p>1. A lot of rich residents and rich companies which supply the city budget with sweet sweet tax money<p>2. A lot of programs and NGOs that draw large budgets to helping the homeless<p>3. Political climate that encourages spending money on helping the homeless without requiring anything from them, basically free money<p>4. Generous programs providing various freebies for homeless people, and no consequences for any behavior short of major robbery (yes, shoplifting is allowed too unless it&#x27;s over $900)<p>5. Mild weather that makes living on the street possible year around<p>And we&#x27;re wondering why homelessness has not disappeared? There&#x27;s nobody that is interested in it disappearing, that&#x27;s why. Well, at least nobody whose opinion matters, anyway. There&#x27;s a lot of people interested in allocating and spending budgets on fighting homelessness, these aren&#x27;t people interested in doing something that will make it stop once and for all.</text></comment> | <story><title>San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-05/san-francisco-voters-approve-taxes-on-ceos-big-businesses</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ransom1538</author><text>&quot;It&#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.&quot;<p>SF resident for 15 years until I left.<p>I walked around and talked to homeless. From the dozens I have talked with:<p>1. They are not from SF.<p>2. They were homeless somewhere else and it sucked.<p>3. Pan handling cash is easy. $100+ a day.<p>4. The SF programs kick ass. Suboxone clinics, Free cell phones, free bus passes, monthly stipends $$, even occasional housing<p>5. The police do not hassle much, you can shoot up on the street no problem.<p>It is a system designed to create more homelessness.</text></item><item><author>GhostVII</author><text>San Francisco&#x27;s solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don&#x27;t work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn&#x27;t always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It&#x27;s insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy population can&#x27;t figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>runarberg</author><text>Speaking as someone that lived in van in SF for 6 month before I left for immigration reasons:<p>1. I’m not from SF, I came there to live with my partner who was in school there but we couldn’t afford a place to rent.<p>2. I’ve never been homeless anywhere else and I wouldn’t have been homeless in SF if rent was fair.<p>3. I’ve never pan handled, but I didn’t need to. Dumpster diving is easy, there is plenty of free food options (including free farm stand with organic vegetables; I also cooked for food not bombs but that was more for the fun then the food).<p>4. Didn’t get any free phones, paid for my own bus fairs (or just jumped the muni).<p>5. Police never hassled me too much. Only one time when I parked near Dolores Park too see if they had their porta potties open all night (they didn’t). Police advised us to stay out of this neighborhood. We did and moved back to a friendlier neighborhood in the lower mission.<p>6. Showering is impossible for the homeless. I could really only shower and shave once a week. I had to wait in a line for a ticket at a charity and then wait there for an hour or two at a cramped space for my turn. Sometimes I would sneak at my the campus of my partner’s school and steal a shower.<p>Speaking from experience the only thing that is creating the homelessness in SF is lack of reasonable, affordable, and accessible housing options.</text></comment> |
21,887,015 | 21,885,868 | 1 | 2 | 21,885,680 | train | <story><title>Announcing the New PubMed</title><url>https://becker.wustl.edu/news/announcing-the-new-pubmed/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akinhwan</author><text>I&#x27;m actually part of the team developing the new PubMed. Very curious and interested to know what the hacker news community thinks and feels about their experience. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.gov&#x2F;labs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.gov&#x2F;labs</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Announcing the New PubMed</title><url>https://becker.wustl.edu/news/announcing-the-new-pubmed/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nahikoa</author><text>PubMed is an incredibly useful resource. I&#x27;ve found that it is fairly common for my psychiatrist and GP to be relatively unaware of the latest studies and treatments.<p>Of course, reading through abstracts and papers requires a critical eye into the statistics, methodology, and funding. The Cochrane Reviews are similarly awesome.</text></comment> |
27,739,193 | 27,739,164 | 1 | 2 | 27,736,485 | train | <story><title>Canada battles more than 180 wildfires with hundreds dead in heat wave</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/07/04/1013026434/canada-battles-more-than-180-wildfires-with-hundreds-dead-in-heat-wave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newleaf</author><text>As an insurance policy, where would be the best places to live or buy land now given forecasted trends? I’m primarily thinking of the US, but interested any idea (well, maybe not Siberia…)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mastax</author><text>I&#x27;d usually suggest someplace away from the equator to get cooler temperatures, and close to a large body of water to reduce temperature swings. Good supply of fresh water is a plus as well. Lower population density reduces the risk of social unrest.<p>Great lakes, Maine, Northern Europe, Japan, Southern Chile, New Zealand?<p>Of course, what BC is experiencing right now demonstrates that it may be more complicated or impossible to predict.</text></comment> | <story><title>Canada battles more than 180 wildfires with hundreds dead in heat wave</title><url>https://www.npr.org/2021/07/04/1013026434/canada-battles-more-than-180-wildfires-with-hundreds-dead-in-heat-wave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>newleaf</author><text>As an insurance policy, where would be the best places to live or buy land now given forecasted trends? I’m primarily thinking of the US, but interested any idea (well, maybe not Siberia…)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asdfasgasdgasdg</author><text>Ultimately, anywhere that is relatively wet and&#x2F;or not located in a forest is probably decently safe from forest fires. In terms of safety from heat waves, there are a few good hedges: a very well insulated house, ideally with some sort of reflective roof. A backup battery system that allows you to run independently in the case of a grid failure. Solar panels that work when the grid is off, which have excess capacity. Redundant cooling systems? If you really wanna go crazy, build a small underground bunker like Colin Furze did.<p>With these things in place I think you&#x27;ll be safe enough during any foreseeable heat waves. You still wouldn&#x27;t be able to go outside on really hot days, but you wouldn&#x27;t likely die due to overheating.</text></comment> |
21,109,050 | 21,109,103 | 1 | 2 | 21,108,021 | train | <story><title>Berlin Key</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_key</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umanwizard</author><text>Well, TIL. Never realized this was a US-specific thing.</text></item><item><author>wazoox</author><text>I&#x27;ve never seen that outside the US. Keyholes both sides of the door, everywhere. When it&#x27;s closed, you need a key or you don&#x27;t get out.</text></item><item><author>umanwizard</author><text>What country do you live in? In the US, almost every door I’ve ever seen can be unlocked from the inside (but not the outside) without a key.</text></item><item><author>chrisseaton</author><text>&gt; As it&#x27;s impossible to leave the building without a key in case of a fire.<p>Isn&#x27;t that the case for most doors that lock? You can&#x27;t leave through my (brand new, to-code) front door from inside without a key to unlock it first.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t be secure if you could open it without a key - isn&#x27;t that the whole point of a lock with a key?</text></item><item><author>odiroot</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised some houses still use this. As it&#x27;s impossible to leave the building without a key in case of a fire.<p>I suspect it may even be illegal today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lillesvin</author><text>It&#x27;s definitely not US specific. Here in Denmark it&#x27;s standard that the front door opens from the inside without a key. Same goes for at least Luxembourg and Germany as far as I know.</text></comment> | <story><title>Berlin Key</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_key</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>umanwizard</author><text>Well, TIL. Never realized this was a US-specific thing.</text></item><item><author>wazoox</author><text>I&#x27;ve never seen that outside the US. Keyholes both sides of the door, everywhere. When it&#x27;s closed, you need a key or you don&#x27;t get out.</text></item><item><author>umanwizard</author><text>What country do you live in? In the US, almost every door I’ve ever seen can be unlocked from the inside (but not the outside) without a key.</text></item><item><author>chrisseaton</author><text>&gt; As it&#x27;s impossible to leave the building without a key in case of a fire.<p>Isn&#x27;t that the case for most doors that lock? You can&#x27;t leave through my (brand new, to-code) front door from inside without a key to unlock it first.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t be secure if you could open it without a key - isn&#x27;t that the whole point of a lock with a key?</text></item><item><author>odiroot</author><text>I&#x27;m surprised some houses still use this. As it&#x27;s impossible to leave the building without a key in case of a fire.<p>I suspect it may even be illegal today.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sharlin</author><text>Add Finland to the list. Pretty much all of Central and Northern Europe I believe. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a residential exterior door that needs a key to open from the inside.</text></comment> |
21,633,533 | 21,633,547 | 1 | 2 | 21,632,108 | train | <story><title>Nerd Fonts</title><url>https://www.nerdfonts.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I don’t understand at all.<p>Can someone explain why you’d want icons in the monospace font you use for development?<p>I thought those icons were mainly for building websites. But those are usually triggered with a CSS class, not embedded in source code.<p>What am I missing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fimdomeio</author><text>you can use them on the terminal. there are projects like lsd[1] and vim-devicons[2] that use them.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Peltoche&#x2F;lsd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Peltoche&#x2F;lsd</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanoasis&#x2F;vim-devicons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ryanoasis&#x2F;vim-devicons</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Nerd Fonts</title><url>https://www.nerdfonts.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I don’t understand at all.<p>Can someone explain why you’d want icons in the monospace font you use for development?<p>I thought those icons were mainly for building websites. But those are usually triggered with a CSS class, not embedded in source code.<p>What am I missing?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghostbrainalpha</author><text>Watch this 30 second video and you will see why it is awesome to have icons in your terminal.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NESi45Q2mHg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NESi45Q2mHg</a><p>Apologies in advance if the music is not to your taste.</text></comment> |
12,465,031 | 12,464,886 | 1 | 2 | 12,464,129 | train | <story><title>Ford Acquires Chariot (YC W15)</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/ford-mobility-solutions-acquires-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mox1</author><text>I find it very interesting and frankly quite stupid that Ford is attempting to become an Uber &#x2F; Silicon Valley &#x2F; Technology type company[1]. They practically made the auto industry and have been a leading manufacturer for ~100 years. But lets drop and forget all that, technology is cool!<p>I predict that in 5-10 years this will really come back to haunt them. I was planning to buy some Ford stock for a while, but after seeing this shift, not touching it with a 10ft pole.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2016-09-09&#x2F;ford-ceo-on-a-move-to-mobility-services-ride-sharing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2016-09-09&#x2F;ford-ceo-on-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pb</author><text>In ten years, all auto makers will either be tech companies, or they will be out of business. I&#x27;m impressed that GM and Ford have the foresight to understand this.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ford Acquires Chariot (YC W15)</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/ford-mobility-solutions-acquires-chariot/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mox1</author><text>I find it very interesting and frankly quite stupid that Ford is attempting to become an Uber &#x2F; Silicon Valley &#x2F; Technology type company[1]. They practically made the auto industry and have been a leading manufacturer for ~100 years. But lets drop and forget all that, technology is cool!<p>I predict that in 5-10 years this will really come back to haunt them. I was planning to buy some Ford stock for a while, but after seeing this shift, not touching it with a 10ft pole.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2016-09-09&#x2F;ford-ceo-on-a-move-to-mobility-services-ride-sharing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;videos&#x2F;2016-09-09&#x2F;ford-ceo-on-...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mkagenius</author><text>One of the biggest reason big companies fail is they get disrupted by smaller players mainly because they are not able to do new innovative things on their own because of drag of a giant company.</text></comment> |
23,288,007 | 23,284,598 | 1 | 2 | 23,274,668 | train | <story><title>What a typical serverless architecture looks like in AWS</title><url>https://medium.com/serverless-transformation/what-a-typical-100-serverless-architecture-looks-like-in-aws-40f252cd0ecb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zimbatm</author><text>Please don&#x27;t do this.<p>I have seen this in practice. A simple CRUD app split across literally 100 of &quot;re-usable&quot; repositories. The business logic is all over the place and impossible to reason about. Especially with step-functions, now the logic is both in the code and on the cloud-level. Each developer gets siloed into their little part and not able to run the whole app locally.<p>The whole thing could easily fit in a single VM as a Rails or Django application.<p>The only one that will be happy about this is AWS and contractors because it&#x27;s a guaranteed lock-in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ledauphin</author><text>What you (and many others here) are objecting to is completely orthogonal to serverless as an architecture.<p>There&#x27;s nothing about serverless that requires separate repositories or even microservices. I know because I have built a 50,000 line serverless application that is a single repository and deploys functionally as a monolith.<p>We also don&#x27;t use step functions heavily, because, like you say, that&#x27;s basically a cloud-specific DSL that you could write in a real programming language with only slightly worse visibility.<p>Serverless is, plain and simple, about passing immutable &quot;partial computation&quot; state through events and keeping all mutable long term state in a database.</text></comment> | <story><title>What a typical serverless architecture looks like in AWS</title><url>https://medium.com/serverless-transformation/what-a-typical-100-serverless-architecture-looks-like-in-aws-40f252cd0ecb</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zimbatm</author><text>Please don&#x27;t do this.<p>I have seen this in practice. A simple CRUD app split across literally 100 of &quot;re-usable&quot; repositories. The business logic is all over the place and impossible to reason about. Especially with step-functions, now the logic is both in the code and on the cloud-level. Each developer gets siloed into their little part and not able to run the whole app locally.<p>The whole thing could easily fit in a single VM as a Rails or Django application.<p>The only one that will be happy about this is AWS and contractors because it&#x27;s a guaranteed lock-in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>The whole &quot;serverless&quot; fad is about lock-in.<p>I also really wish they would not have squatted that term. It should refer to decentralized P2P systems which are truly serverless.</text></comment> |
3,498,952 | 3,498,617 | 1 | 3 | 3,497,816 | train | <story><title>FileSonic disables all filesharing</title><url>http://www.filesonic.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>moe</author><text><i>This is just a real observation.</i><p>Your observation is correct, but I'd interpret it differently: The answer should not be to ban MegaUpload.
The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.<p>There's a <i>huge</i> market of people who pirate content not because they're unwilling to pay for it, but simply because it's either impossible or extremely inconvenient to get legally.</text></item><item><author>necro</author><text>Don't kill the messenger, but here is a real scenario.<p>My "friend" used to use megaupload, filesonic, and other services to watch all his tv content every night, and even paying for a megaupload account (never putting any money back to the creators of content). It was really convenient and the price was right. Now without it, even in the last few days, the pain point has shifted enough that he started buying the seasons of shows he is interested in on itunes. (giving a cut to the creators)<p>There was a point even a year ago that he could get the latest film on piratebay so easily that there was no point going to the theatre. Now it seems a little harder to find the releases, or at least more inconvenient, so my friend has gone to the movies a lot more.<p>Now I personally get the whole internet freedom side of things, but at the same time I have seen my friend screw the content creators out of their cut because some middle man made it a lot more convenient to get the content.<p>I get the idea that some people have used these services for personal content, but if the business model of a service is _primarily_ around the sharing of copyrighted content then something should be done. And especially if the service pays the uploader based on how popular the stolen content they upload is.<p>At least in my friends case, he spent $100 on itunes in the last day, _only_ because megaupload was not there, and there was enough pain to look for another source.<p>If there are millions of people out there like my friend, that is a lot more revenue for the creators/studios.<p>And no, I'm not a troll from the film industry. This is just a real observation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a5seo</author><text>&#62; The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.<p>One thing that makes this hard in reality is that ANY service where people have to pay means people have to SHOP. Which means they have to make decisions about what entertainment products to buy, and at what price. And since these are "experience goods" you can't judge them until you've paid for them. In my book, that means means this particular type of "shopping" REALLY sucks.<p>So the fact that "shopping-just-sucks" (and especially for experience goods) is the TRUE friction that any hypothetical as-easy-as-Megaupload services need to overcome. A big draw of Megaupload (I say this never having heard of it before this week) is you can consume whatever you want and there's no downside to a bad choice.<p>So I'm not sure how any alternative service avoids the Shopping For Entertainment Products Sucks Syndrome unless they get some reasonably-priced all-you-can-eat plan that makes a lot (80%?) of commercial content available under one roof.</text></comment> | <story><title>FileSonic disables all filesharing</title><url>http://www.filesonic.com/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>moe</author><text><i>This is just a real observation.</i><p>Your observation is correct, but I'd interpret it differently: The answer should not be to ban MegaUpload.
The answer must be to provide legal services that are at least as convenient as MegaUpload.<p>There's a <i>huge</i> market of people who pirate content not because they're unwilling to pay for it, but simply because it's either impossible or extremely inconvenient to get legally.</text></item><item><author>necro</author><text>Don't kill the messenger, but here is a real scenario.<p>My "friend" used to use megaupload, filesonic, and other services to watch all his tv content every night, and even paying for a megaupload account (never putting any money back to the creators of content). It was really convenient and the price was right. Now without it, even in the last few days, the pain point has shifted enough that he started buying the seasons of shows he is interested in on itunes. (giving a cut to the creators)<p>There was a point even a year ago that he could get the latest film on piratebay so easily that there was no point going to the theatre. Now it seems a little harder to find the releases, or at least more inconvenient, so my friend has gone to the movies a lot more.<p>Now I personally get the whole internet freedom side of things, but at the same time I have seen my friend screw the content creators out of their cut because some middle man made it a lot more convenient to get the content.<p>I get the idea that some people have used these services for personal content, but if the business model of a service is _primarily_ around the sharing of copyrighted content then something should be done. And especially if the service pays the uploader based on how popular the stolen content they upload is.<p>At least in my friends case, he spent $100 on itunes in the last day, _only_ because megaupload was not there, and there was enough pain to look for another source.<p>If there are millions of people out there like my friend, that is a lot more revenue for the creators/studios.<p>And no, I'm not a troll from the film industry. This is just a real observation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dereg</author><text>While there is a large black market of people pirating content, it is unclear as to whether that market would be willing to enter the legal market at any price point.<p>Improving the distribution system is not a source of explosive growth, rather, it is I disagree with your assertion that the content industry is requisite for mere survival industry. There's no potential for explosive growth because piracy is an income problem, not an internet problem. Cracking down on file-sharing sites will not solve the problem because the illegal activity merely shifts elsewhere. Improving distribution systems will not solve the problem because free is still cheaper than not-free.</text></comment> |
22,966,663 | 22,964,532 | 1 | 3 | 22,963,765 | train | <story><title>Xubuntu 20.04</title><url>https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-20-04-released/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ikurei</author><text>&gt; Users with AMD graphics may experience significant graphical issues<p>Then, in the bug (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu&#x2F;+bug&#x2F;1873895" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.launchpad.net&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;+source&#x2F;xserver-xorg-video...</a>):<p>&gt; This only happens when the secondary external display is operating at a different pixel width to the internal.<p>Isn&#x27;t this a fairly common usecase? My whole company works on high-density laptop displays connected to cheaper 1080p displays. It surprised me to see this kind of bug in a final Xubuntu release, although the bug report says the issue is in the AMD driver.<p><i></i>*<p>I love Xubuntu, I´ve always appreciated its stability, simplicity and flexibility. It has gotten a bit behind in features, when I use it now I miss a good Exposé-like feature, but it´s not that big of a deal.<p>The thing that keeps me on Mac or Windows most of the time is solid support for high density displays. I can´t get Linux to look quite as good as Windows, and nowhere as good as MacOS, on a 4k display or retina display, without having to go very deep into experimental features and patches... and I don´t want to do that.<p>Have you noticed that experience improving lately?</text></comment> | <story><title>Xubuntu 20.04</title><url>https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-20-04-released/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>greendave</author><text>I&#x27;ve found xfce 4.14 to be a very nice update from 4.12 (which was in 18.04). Glad to see it will be getting a lot more exposure now via xubuntu.</text></comment> |
4,498,101 | 4,497,817 | 1 | 3 | 4,497,461 | train | <story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mnutt</author><text>It would hurt founders' perceptions but wouldn't actually decrease any individual founder's chances of success. YC would just accept a bunch of people who aren't likely to get funded.<p>What would happen if you split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan, and placed founders into the groups post-interview? People who were placed in YC Classic could continue to have the expectation of ~100% demo day success they do now, while the people placed in YC Black Swan would be told "I find your idea interesting and we'll let you in but don't expect funding after demo day." People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.<p>There are a bunch of problems with this approach, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if way more than 30% of YC Black Swan was funded.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: <i>It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.</i><p>Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.<p>I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are <i>potential founders</i>; and that their primary concern is <i>themselves</i>, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.<p>You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you worry about you'll find that <i>all</i> the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brc</author><text>The problem is you are applying post-hoc analysis.<p>While a theme was that the outsized returns can come from ideas which sound bad, it doesn't necessarily say that <i>all</i> outsized returns come from bad-sounding ideas.<p>Not only that, but I think reading the essay will show that the outsized returns are not known until several years after demo day.<p>Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. In the Venn intersection between bad-sounding-ideas and good-ideas - the 'bad sounding and not good' is a much bigger area.<p>To me, the entire essay is about making sure that institutionally, the bad-sounding-but-ultimately-good ideas are not left out. Trying to further identify and silo them at application stage would be even more fraught.</text></comment> | <story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mnutt</author><text>It would hurt founders' perceptions but wouldn't actually decrease any individual founder's chances of success. YC would just accept a bunch of people who aren't likely to get funded.<p>What would happen if you split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan, and placed founders into the groups post-interview? People who were placed in YC Classic could continue to have the expectation of ~100% demo day success they do now, while the people placed in YC Black Swan would be told "I find your idea interesting and we'll let you in but don't expect funding after demo day." People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.<p>There are a bunch of problems with this approach, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if way more than 30% of YC Black Swan was funded.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: <i>It would hurt YC's brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.</i><p>Paul, you're sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.<p>I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are <i>potential founders</i>; and that their primary concern is <i>themselves</i>, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole. You're damn right that it would hurt YC's brand if 70% of each class didn't survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.<p>You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they're all you worry about you'll find that <i>all</i> the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xianshou</author><text>I love this idea, because it addresses the two fundamental issues at play here: the social and the financial. Considering YC as a single entity, the optimal funding strategy must take into account both the power law on returns and the prestige of the program. If YC loses its place as the most prominent and well-respected startup incubator, the Dropboxes and Airbnbs of the future will either forgo the application or suffer from lack of investor interest. If YC limits itself to only those companies that have an extremely high chance of getting funded, the outliers will never find a way in.<p>Let's say that p_accept is the probability that YC accepts the founders of the next Dropbox. YC itself cannot optimize for p_accept because of the factors mentioned above: instead, it has to optimize for p_apply * p_accept * p_fund, the product of the chances that those golden founders will apply to the program, be accepted, and find the funding they need to grow and thrive.<p>With the hypothetical YC / YC Black Swan split, the original YC can optimize for p_apply * p_fund, and YC Black Swan can optimize for p_accept. Not only that, but since all Black Swan candidates would have started as applicants to YC, Black Swan's p_apply would equal that of the original YC. Numerate investors with the same sense of the power law as pg would take care of Black Swan's p_fund.<p>Thus, all the prestige, cultural appeal, and midsize exits would derive from the original YC, but all the power-law returns would emerge from Black Swan.<p>So, pg, new business model?</text></comment> |
41,191,596 | 41,191,208 | 1 | 3 | 41,184,359 | train | <story><title>NASA says Boeing Starliner astronauts may fly home on SpaceX in 2025</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-spacex.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xattt</author><text>Inflammable means flammable? What a country!<p>&#x2F;s</text></item><item><author>_joel</author><text>They also wrapped their avionics cables in flammable tape and had to redo everything. The original, approved tape was still available, not a supply issue. I think that is pretty telling.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>I think many might not be aware of Starliner&#x27;s sordid history. It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. Their pad abort test (where you simulate a launch abort while on the launch pad) resulted in only 2 of the 3 parachutes deploying in beyond optimal conditions. NASA considered that such a resounding success that they let them completely skip the far more challenging in-flight abort test. Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures literally identical to the ones that have now left these astronauts stranded.<p>If SpaceX or another company had remotely similar results, they would never have been greenlit. For instance in spite of a flawless pad abort test, NASA required SpaceX also carry out an in-flight abort. And that&#x27;s completely reasonable - you don&#x27;t simply skip tests, even with optimal performance. Skipping tests following suboptimal performance is simply unjustifiable. And so I think we&#x27;re largely looking at another Challenger type disaster caused by a disconnect between management (and likely political appointees) versus engineering staff, rather than inherent risk. But this is not a vessel that should have ever had a single human anywhere near it, and so their official comments (and even actions) on the situation are going to be heavily biased due to their own behaviors.</text></item><item><author>GMoromisato</author><text>I listened to the whole conference and here&#x27;s my impression:<p>1. NASA manager Steve Stich said there&#x27;s a relatively wide &quot;band of uncertainty&quot; in how risky a Starliner return is. Some (many?) NASA engineers are at the high end of the band and are advocating a return on Dragon instead. Boeing is obviously at the low end of the band and thinks it is a low risk.<p>The problem is, the data doesn&#x27;t rule out either side of the band. So they are trying to get more data to narrow the uncertainty (in either or both directions). [Interestingly enough, the data from the White Sands testing made them <i>more</i> worried because it revealed the Teflon seal deformation.]<p>But my sense is that if they don&#x27;t narrow the uncertainty (i.e., convince the NASA engineers) then they will very likely choose a Dragon return. That is, it sounds like if nothing changes, the astronauts are coming down on Dragon.<p>2. Stich said they need to decide by mid-August, in order to have time to prepare the Crew-9 launch for Sept 24th. So we&#x27;ll know by then.<p>3. They emphasized that (a) the thruster problems are all fixable (given time), and (b) that even if Starliner returns without a crew, they will have learned enough from the test to potentially certify the capsule for regular service. This is probably the only way they&#x27;ll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing&#x27;s losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.<p>4. In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2. If Starliner were the only vehicle available, NASA and the astronauts would absolutely take the small risk and come down with a crew. But since Dragon is available, I think NASA is thinking, &quot;why take the risk?&quot;<p>5. There&#x27;s a huge difference between how NASA engineers and lay people look at this issue. Many people (particularly on Twitter) have a binary safe&#x2F;not-safe view of the situation. Either Starliner is safe or it is not. Either the astronauts are stranded or they are not. But the engineering perspective is all about dealing with uncertainty. What is the probability of a bad result? Is the risk worth the reward? Even worse, everything is a trade-off. Sometimes trying to mitigate a risk causes an unintended effect that increases risk (e.g., a bug fix that causes a bug).<p>I don&#x27;t envy the engineers, either at NASA or at Boeing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>huppeldepup</author><text>We should coax them into using coax instead.</text></comment> | <story><title>NASA says Boeing Starliner astronauts may fly home on SpaceX in 2025</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa-spacex.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xattt</author><text>Inflammable means flammable? What a country!<p>&#x2F;s</text></item><item><author>_joel</author><text>They also wrapped their avionics cables in flammable tape and had to redo everything. The original, approved tape was still available, not a supply issue. I think that is pretty telling.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>I think many might not be aware of Starliner&#x27;s sordid history. It has failed essentially every qualification test in various ways. Their pad abort test (where you simulate a launch abort while on the launch pad) resulted in only 2 of the 3 parachutes deploying in beyond optimal conditions. NASA considered that such a resounding success that they let them completely skip the far more challenging in-flight abort test. Their first automated mission to the ISS completely failed and did not make it to the station. NASA finally required a redo from Boeing and their second one did make it to the ISS, but only after experiencing widespread leaks and thruster failures literally identical to the ones that have now left these astronauts stranded.<p>If SpaceX or another company had remotely similar results, they would never have been greenlit. For instance in spite of a flawless pad abort test, NASA required SpaceX also carry out an in-flight abort. And that&#x27;s completely reasonable - you don&#x27;t simply skip tests, even with optimal performance. Skipping tests following suboptimal performance is simply unjustifiable. And so I think we&#x27;re largely looking at another Challenger type disaster caused by a disconnect between management (and likely political appointees) versus engineering staff, rather than inherent risk. But this is not a vessel that should have ever had a single human anywhere near it, and so their official comments (and even actions) on the situation are going to be heavily biased due to their own behaviors.</text></item><item><author>GMoromisato</author><text>I listened to the whole conference and here&#x27;s my impression:<p>1. NASA manager Steve Stich said there&#x27;s a relatively wide &quot;band of uncertainty&quot; in how risky a Starliner return is. Some (many?) NASA engineers are at the high end of the band and are advocating a return on Dragon instead. Boeing is obviously at the low end of the band and thinks it is a low risk.<p>The problem is, the data doesn&#x27;t rule out either side of the band. So they are trying to get more data to narrow the uncertainty (in either or both directions). [Interestingly enough, the data from the White Sands testing made them <i>more</i> worried because it revealed the Teflon seal deformation.]<p>But my sense is that if they don&#x27;t narrow the uncertainty (i.e., convince the NASA engineers) then they will very likely choose a Dragon return. That is, it sounds like if nothing changes, the astronauts are coming down on Dragon.<p>2. Stich said they need to decide by mid-August, in order to have time to prepare the Crew-9 launch for Sept 24th. So we&#x27;ll know by then.<p>3. They emphasized that (a) the thruster problems are all fixable (given time), and (b) that even if Starliner returns without a crew, they will have learned enough from the test to potentially certify the capsule for regular service. This is probably the only way they&#x27;ll be able to keep Boeing as a provider. A redo of this mission would cost Boeing half a billion dollars, easy. And since the contract is fixed-price, this would just add to Boeing&#x27;s losses. So I expect they will certify Starliner even if it comes down without a crew.<p>4. In some ways, Starliner is being held to a higher standard than Dragon Crew-2. If Starliner were the only vehicle available, NASA and the astronauts would absolutely take the small risk and come down with a crew. But since Dragon is available, I think NASA is thinking, &quot;why take the risk?&quot;<p>5. There&#x27;s a huge difference between how NASA engineers and lay people look at this issue. Many people (particularly on Twitter) have a binary safe&#x2F;not-safe view of the situation. Either Starliner is safe or it is not. Either the astronauts are stranded or they are not. But the engineering perspective is all about dealing with uncertainty. What is the probability of a bad result? Is the risk worth the reward? Even worse, everything is a trade-off. Sometimes trying to mitigate a risk causes an unintended effect that increases risk (e.g., a bug fix that causes a bug).<p>I don&#x27;t envy the engineers, either at NASA or at Boeing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cnlevy</author><text>To fix your word, just wrap it in-flammable tape.
Not sure it&#x27;s going to work, thats what they did with Starliner anyways.</text></comment> |
24,452,359 | 24,452,028 | 1 | 2 | 24,451,469 | train | <story><title>Snowden criticises Amazon for hiring former NSA boss</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54106863</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mikece</author><text>The former NSA boss was hired to close future deals between Amazon and the DOD for AWS. The DoD, and the NSA in particular, have had a close relationship with Microsoft going back to the 80s so the Pentagon selecting Microsoft for JEDI was always the default in my mind. Hiring Alexander is an attempt to make inroads with the active duty brass to spread the Good News about AWS. Even at a salary in the seven figures it’s a lot less expensive than advertising and litigation.</text></comment> | <story><title>Snowden criticises Amazon for hiring former NSA boss</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54106863</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>boomboomsubban</author><text>It seems strange that this article does not actually embed the tweets mentioned, nor do they link to his Twitter page. Other recent stories seem fine using that technique.<p>My cynical side wonders if Snowden&#x27;s other recent tweets denouncing Assange&#x27;s ongoing show trial are to blame.</text></comment> |
11,349,913 | 11,349,921 | 1 | 3 | 11,349,597 | train | <story><title>Obama Has Gotten 3,000+ Tweets about Encryption. Let’s Double That</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/obama-has-gotten-3000-tweets-about-encryption-lets-double</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>afarrell</author><text>Rather than sending a message to a president who no longer has any elections left and has less than a year in office, wouldn&#x27;t it make more sense to look up your legislators[1] and write letters to them?<p>1&#x2F;3rd of US senators and all representatives have an election coming up. They care more about voters than they do about Apple&#x27;s $38 Billion[2] in liquid assets, so they need to be convinced that votes are on the side of sound security.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstates.org&#x2F;find_your_legislator&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstates.org&#x2F;find_your_legislator&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycharts.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;AAPL&#x2F;cash_on_hand" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycharts.com&#x2F;companies&#x2F;AAPL&#x2F;cash_on_hand</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Obama Has Gotten 3,000+ Tweets about Encryption. Let’s Double That</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/obama-has-gotten-3000-tweets-about-encryption-lets-double</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>JustSomeNobody</author><text>I don&#x27;t encrypt because I have something to hide. I encrypt because I don&#x27;t want anyone to tell me I can&#x27;t hide anything.</text></comment> |
32,173,882 | 32,173,869 | 1 | 3 | 32,171,632 | train | <story><title>Visa changes chargeback dispute program</title><url>https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/blog/bdp/2022/06/15/what-every-merchant-1655330664445.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericmcer</author><text>I’m totally opposed to predatory student loans, but your point seems kinda light on logic. If the number of student loans being discharged was “infinitesimally small” and we can assume prohibiting bankruptcy drove the number of delinquent loans down even lower, why are student loan repayments considered a huge issue?</text></item><item><author>thathndude</author><text>I am a consumer protection attorney who does work advocating for individuals with credit card and debit card disputes.<p>I’m pretty opposed to this change, even though it’s veiled in terms of fairness. The fact is, the banks and Visa are far too quick to deny disputes.<p>This reeks of all of the times that an industry foists some type of “protection“ on consumers to address some alleged abuse of the system.<p>For example, you used to be able to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. Then the industry made up a BS narrative that people were taking out tons of loans, getting their degrees, and then filing for bankruptcy em masse. It was a lie. The number of people who are filing for bankruptcy and getting student loans discharged was infinitesimally small. But that didn’t stop them from lobbying Congress for modifications that prohibit the discharge of student loans in bankruptcy. And, well, you know how the rest goes.<p>My point is, the alleged abuse is almost certainly a very small, or even, non-issue. But these changes will have dramatic, negative repercussions on a large swath of customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>Since it&#x27;s nearly impossible now to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, lenders have 0 incentive to do any due diligence on borrowers. Quite the opposite, their only incentive is to get students to take out heaps of loans that will keep them in debt servitude for a lifetime. This is why you have cooking schools, where most jobs barely pay more than minimum wage, charging many 10s of thousands of dollars but all students can get loans.<p>If bankruptcy was a possibility lenders would be much more cautious about tuition rates and potential for a borrower to actually pay it back.</text></comment> | <story><title>Visa changes chargeback dispute program</title><url>https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/blog/bdp/2022/06/15/what-every-merchant-1655330664445.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericmcer</author><text>I’m totally opposed to predatory student loans, but your point seems kinda light on logic. If the number of student loans being discharged was “infinitesimally small” and we can assume prohibiting bankruptcy drove the number of delinquent loans down even lower, why are student loan repayments considered a huge issue?</text></item><item><author>thathndude</author><text>I am a consumer protection attorney who does work advocating for individuals with credit card and debit card disputes.<p>I’m pretty opposed to this change, even though it’s veiled in terms of fairness. The fact is, the banks and Visa are far too quick to deny disputes.<p>This reeks of all of the times that an industry foists some type of “protection“ on consumers to address some alleged abuse of the system.<p>For example, you used to be able to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. Then the industry made up a BS narrative that people were taking out tons of loans, getting their degrees, and then filing for bankruptcy em masse. It was a lie. The number of people who are filing for bankruptcy and getting student loans discharged was infinitesimally small. But that didn’t stop them from lobbying Congress for modifications that prohibit the discharge of student loans in bankruptcy. And, well, you know how the rest goes.<p>My point is, the alleged abuse is almost certainly a very small, or even, non-issue. But these changes will have dramatic, negative repercussions on a large swath of customers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Being unable to discharge a loan means you can offer them to people who you expect to go bankrupt.<p>Rather than trying to limit losses it’s an attempt to expand the industry.</text></comment> |
21,591,129 | 21,589,457 | 1 | 3 | 21,588,663 | train | <story><title>PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>Couldn’t you basically start any website and pay users $200 and get as many users as you want?</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>$4 billion acquisition price &#x2F; 17 million monthly active users [0] = $235.29 per active monthly user<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;10556&#x2F;pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;10556&#x2F;pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thesausageking</author><text>That&#x27;s literally what PayPal did. They gave users $20 if you created an account. Over time, they lowered it to $10 and then $5. The program cost them ~$70m, but let them grow at 7-10% &#x2F; day. They went from 800k accounts in March of 2000 to 4m in September, and then 11m in September of 2001.</text></comment> | <story><title>PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>Couldn’t you basically start any website and pay users $200 and get as many users as you want?</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>$4 billion acquisition price &#x2F; 17 million monthly active users [0] = $235.29 per active monthly user<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;10556&#x2F;pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;10556&#x2F;pdf</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smt88</author><text>Yes, but when potential investors or acquirers were doing their diligence, they&#x27;d find out that your cost of user acquisition was extremely high.<p>It&#x27;s likely Honey did have a high cost of acquisition, but nowhere in the ballpark of $200&#x2F;user.</text></comment> |
22,517,631 | 22,517,629 | 1 | 2 | 22,517,113 | train | <story><title>Ethernet will never work (1974)</title><url>https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1236356815626981376</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ColinWright</author><text>From the middle of that thread[0] we discover that the original author of the original memo commented on it in 2008[1]. That follow-up is definitely worth reading to better understand the context of the memo.<p>Not reading the follow-up and still criticising&#x2F;laughing at the original memo is thoroughly unjust. I&#x27;ve submitted[2] the follow-up as a separate item if people want to comment on it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_space_train&#x2F;status&#x2F;1236373295429226496" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_space_train&#x2F;status&#x2F;1236373295429226496</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1xz13&#x2F;in_1974_xerox_parc_engineers_invented_ethernet&#x2F;c043yl0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1xz13&#x2F;in_1974_x...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22517640" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22517640</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Ethernet will never work (1974)</title><url>https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1236356815626981376</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>QuesnayJr</author><text>Bachrach gave an account of writing the memo on Reddit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1xz13&#x2F;in_1974_xerox_parc_engineers_invented_ethernet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1xz13&#x2F;in_1974_x...</a><p>According to his account, the original version of Ethernet had the problems he outlined in his memo, but in response the Ethernet designers made changes to account for them.</text></comment> |
29,786,104 | 29,785,772 | 1 | 2 | 29,783,585 | train | <story><title>C Runtime Overhead (2015)</title><url>http://ryanhileman.info/posts/lib43</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josefx</author><text>&gt; I happened to run strace -tt against my solution (which provides microsecond-accurate timing information for syscalls)<p>Weirdly I always found the timing results of strace at under one millisecond generally unreliable, it just seemed to add too much overhead itself.<p>Also making system calls from your own code varies between prohibited and badly supported on most OSes. Some see calls that didn&#x27;t pass through the system libc as a security issue and will intercept them, while Linux may just silently corrupt your process memory if you try something fancy as the Go team had to find out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scottlamb</author><text>josefx&gt; Also making system calls from your own code varies between prohibited and badly supported on most OSes. Some see calls that didn&#x27;t pass through the system libc as a security issue and will intercept them, while Linux may just silently corrupt your process memory if you try something fancy as the Go team had to find out.<p>On Linux, making syscalls directly is fine. Good point about other platforms, but many people only care about Linux, for better or worse. And the author&#x27;s last paragraph (quoted below) suggests using an alternate&#x2F;static-linking-friendly libc, not making direct syscalls yourself. Presumably on platforms where those alternate libcs aren&#x27;t available, you continue using the standard libc.<p>ryanhileman&gt; If you&#x27;re running into process startup time issues in a real world scenario and ever actually need to do this, it might be worth your time to profile and try one of the alternative libc implementations (like musl libc or diet libc).<p>IMHO, the Go vDSO problem [1] wasn&#x27;t due to making direct syscalls but basically calling a userspace library without meeting its assumptions. I&#x27;d describe Linux&#x27;s vDSO as a userspace library for making certain syscalls with less overhead. (If you don&#x27;t care about the overhead, you can call them as you&#x27;d call any other syscall instead.) It assumed the standard ABI, in which there&#x27;s a guard page as well as typically a generous amount of stack to begin with. Golang called into it from a thread that used Go&#x27;s non-standard ABI with less stack space available (Go&#x27;s own functions check the stack size on entry and copy the stack if necessary) and no guard page. On some Linux builds (with -fstack-check, apparently used by Gentoo Hardened ), it actually used enough stack to overflow. Without a guard page, that caused memory corruption.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20427" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;issues&#x2F;20427</a></text></comment> | <story><title>C Runtime Overhead (2015)</title><url>http://ryanhileman.info/posts/lib43</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josefx</author><text>&gt; I happened to run strace -tt against my solution (which provides microsecond-accurate timing information for syscalls)<p>Weirdly I always found the timing results of strace at under one millisecond generally unreliable, it just seemed to add too much overhead itself.<p>Also making system calls from your own code varies between prohibited and badly supported on most OSes. Some see calls that didn&#x27;t pass through the system libc as a security issue and will intercept them, while Linux may just silently corrupt your process memory if you try something fancy as the Go team had to find out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mananaysiempre</author><text>Umm, what’s the story with Go on Linux? My understanding is that Linux explicitly supports making syscalls from your own code, it’s just that on platforms where the syscall story is a giant mess (32-bit x86) the prescription is to either use the slow historical interface (INT 80h) or to jump to the vDSO (which will do SYSENTER or SYSCALL or whatever—SYSENTER in particular has the lovely property of <i>not saving the return address</i>, so a common stub is pretty much architecturally required[1]).<p>If I’m guessing correctly about what you’re referring to, the Go people did something in between, got broken in a Linux kernel release, complained at the kernel people, the kernel got a patch to unbreak them. The story on MacOS or OpenBSD, where the kernel developers will cheerfully tell you to take a hike if you make a syscall yourself, seems much worse to me.<p>(And yes, I’d say there <i>is</i> a meaningful difference between a couple of instructions in the vDSO and Glibc’s endless wrappers.)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;[email protected]&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;Pine.LNX.4.44.0212172225410.136...</a><p>ETA: Wait, no, I was thinking about the Android breakage[2]. What’s the Go story then?<p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;scm&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;git&#x2F;tip&#x2F;tip.git&#x2F;commit&#x2F;?id=30bfa7b3488bfb1bb75c9f50a5fcac1832970c60" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;scm&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;git&#x2F;tip&#x2F;tip.git&#x2F;...</a></text></comment> |
25,545,113 | 25,544,470 | 1 | 2 | 25,543,839 | train | <story><title>Computer science is not software engineering</title><url>https://swizec.com/blog/computer-science-is-not-software-engineering</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>As a non-CS engineer who writes software for a living, I can definitely say that there are times that I wish I had formal training in algorithms, parallel data structures, compilers, operating systems and hardware. There are many times that I need to rewrite my code because of non-adequate design. Other times I reach corner cases that take me too long to debug, only to realize much later that there was a lower-level explanation for the unexpected behavior.</text></item><item><author>fennecfoxen</author><text>“Software engineering” in practice is 90% about keeping your stuff organized well enough that you and others can comprehend it, make sure it does what it intends, and use and and extend it. That extends to making project plans to begin with, and any documentation.<p>That’s hard to teach as a separate thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swat535</author><text>I graduated with a CS degree and a minor in Web Services and Applications. Let me tell you that whilst those topics are useful, they were pretty tailored and if I&#x27;m being 100% honest, I don&#x27;t even recall the majority of them.<p>My day to day job is piping APIs together and making sure we deliver features on time.<p>On the rare occasion that I need to use a data structure or an algorithm to optimize for Time Space complexity, I&#x27;ll either use a community built package or a language level feature. I&#x27;ll never invent my own because whatever I come up with will be half baked anyway.<p>Knowing all the above is useful for passing interviews but not much use in your everyday life unless you are doing something other than SWE such as R&amp;D or data science.<p>Just my 2c.</text></comment> | <story><title>Computer science is not software engineering</title><url>https://swizec.com/blog/computer-science-is-not-software-engineering</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whatever1</author><text>As a non-CS engineer who writes software for a living, I can definitely say that there are times that I wish I had formal training in algorithms, parallel data structures, compilers, operating systems and hardware. There are many times that I need to rewrite my code because of non-adequate design. Other times I reach corner cases that take me too long to debug, only to realize much later that there was a lower-level explanation for the unexpected behavior.</text></item><item><author>fennecfoxen</author><text>“Software engineering” in practice is 90% about keeping your stuff organized well enough that you and others can comprehend it, make sure it does what it intends, and use and and extend it. That extends to making project plans to begin with, and any documentation.<p>That’s hard to teach as a separate thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mannykannot</author><text>Congratulations! By not dismissing these temporary setbacks as being just the way things are, you have the right attitude to become even more successful at what you do.<p>There seems to be lots of information, of the sort you are interested in, available on the internet (I won&#x27;t recommend anything specific as there is <i>too</i> much!) One can learn a lot simply by digging deeper into the specific issues that one has encountered, especially as you begin to see the links between them.</text></comment> |
22,291,523 | 22,288,048 | 1 | 2 | 22,281,975 | train | <story><title>Alpine.js: A minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup</title><url>https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>calebporzio</author><text>Hi, creator of Alpine here.<p>Alpine comes out of the server-rendered-app (Laravel&#x2F;Rails&#x2F;Django) and static site context. It&#x27;s important to recognize that.<p>To me, Alpine fills a hole in between vanilla JS (or jQuery) and large v-dom frameworks like Vue&#x2F;React.<p>I personally think the complexity&#x2F;overhead of Vue&#x2F;React&#x2F;Etc. doesn&#x27;t justify its value in a lot of cases for me. Often, I&#x27;m adding simple interactions to server-rendered pages. Things like dropdowns, modals, dynamic inputs, other reactive doo-dads...<p>By using something like Alpine, I get to keep the data-driven reactivity and declarative template expressions of VueJs, but without all the overhead. (and without a virtual-dom)<p>I thought Stimulus would be the framework for me, but I personally felt I was doing too many manual DOM-manipulations and my code felt more imperative than I like.<p>In my opinion, Alpine is unique in these ways:<p>- You can use it without maintaining a separate JS file or &lt;script&gt; tag (although you can easily break code out into separate files and such if you need to)<p>- It doesn&#x27;t use a virtual-dom at all and uses MutationObserver to react to DOM manipulations from outside JS (something like Turbolinks, third-party libs, or your own hand-written JS). This makes it very resilient. It won&#x27;t crumble if you touch the real DOM.<p>- It&#x27;s lightweight. It&#x27;s under 5kb g-zipped.<p>- It has a really nice API for listening for and dispatching native browser Event&#x2F;CustomEvents rather than using its own event system. This makes it a really powerful tool for interacting with third-party libs.<p>It&#x27;s not a tool for everyone. It&#x27;s not a Vue or React killer. (although it might be a Stimulus killer lol)<p>If it speaks to you, great. You and I are similar.<p>If not, understandable too. Different tools for different contexts.<p>Thanks everyone for chiming in!</text></comment> | <story><title>Alpine.js: A minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup</title><url>https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lf-non</author><text>Pretty much all mainstream frontend libraries have moved away from dom based templating (or augmenting dynamic behavior through attributes) for good reason. It simply becomes unmaintainable for anything more complex than basic interactivity.<p>This approach can&#x27;t leverage type systems for javascript (like TS, BS, flow etc.)<p>It is easy to end up with mistakes that don&#x27;t surface as javascript errors and are swallowed completely.<p>You hit weird quirks when browser injects additional nodes (eg. tbody in tables) or restructures invalid markup (eg. div inside p).<p>Ostensibly this approach would help with progressive enhancement, but too often careless usage results in flashes of broken UI which would then fix themselves when javascript kicks in. Then you need hacks to circumvent those with hacks like ng-cloak.<p>Also, in an ideal world this would help with handoff when working with web-designers who are familiar with only html&#x2F;css but that rarely happens in practice. Every time a web-designer rearranges things in the dom hierarchy the parent-child associations break and that again needs comprehensive testing.<p>Having worked with applications written using knockoutjs as well angular 1 (both of which used similar approaches) which organically grew over multiple years and (to put gently) didn&#x27;t age gracefully, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend this approach to anyone.<p>If you can&#x27;t (or don&#x27;t want to) go down the road of a full SPA but do want to build interactive applications with non-trivial amounts of javascript, lit-element [1], Vue [2], Strudel [3] and SPF [4] are much better solutions.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lit-element.polymer-project.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lit-element.polymer-project.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vuejs.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vuejs.org&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strudeljs.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strudeljs.org&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;spfjs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;spfjs</a></text></comment> |
25,756,656 | 25,751,541 | 1 | 2 | 25,744,661 | train | <story><title>I received my first donation on my open-source side project</title><url>https://gourav.io/blog/first-donation-on-open-source-side-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>susam</author><text>I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can&#x27;t make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the hosting cost.<p>Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project because I don&#x27;t work much on it these days apart from cleaning up spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think an important side effect of the donations is that it provides some additional motivation to continue working on the project and develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can find the time for it.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathb.in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathb.in&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;daveinstpaul&#x2F;status&#x2F;1345082256361193473" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;daveinstpaul&#x2F;status&#x2F;1345082256361193473</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bigiain</author><text>So that&#x27;s 2 donations in 8 years - or about 0.25 donations per year. And _three_ donations in the last year!<p>Or 1200% YoY growth!<p>(VCs please form an orderly queue...)</text></comment> | <story><title>I received my first donation on my open-source side project</title><url>https://gourav.io/blog/first-donation-on-open-source-side-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>susam</author><text>I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can&#x27;t make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the hosting cost.<p>Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project because I don&#x27;t work much on it these days apart from cleaning up spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think an important side effect of the donations is that it provides some additional motivation to continue working on the project and develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can find the time for it.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathb.in&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathb.in&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;daveinstpaul&#x2F;status&#x2F;1345082256361193473" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;daveinstpaul&#x2F;status&#x2F;1345082256361193473</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akersten</author><text>What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with? That&#x27;s a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side project I hadn&#x27;t really considered.</text></comment> |
26,163,296 | 26,163,405 | 1 | 2 | 26,155,350 | train | <story><title>What I Worked On</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/worked.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xapata</author><text>&gt; So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.<p>Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>This is a good essay.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological&#x2F;self-help literature around being your &quot;true self&quot;, where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston&#x27;s commmencement address [1] - &quot;That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.&quot; Or Steve Jobs [2] - &quot;Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don&#x27;t ignore reality either - that&#x27;d be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2013&#x2F;drew-houstons-commencement-address" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2013&#x2F;drew-houstons-commencement-address</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singjupost.com&#x2F;full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-speech-at-stanford-2005&#x2F;?singlepage=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singjupost.com&#x2F;full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aloha</author><text>I mean, they have for all of us at some point.<p>No, not for great wealth perhaps, but using myself as an example - the fact that I&#x27;m in my own apartment across the country from where I grew up, with an engineering job, that pays well enough for me to afford an expensive pocket computer cum telephone to write this on - anyone of those things alone would have blown the mind of 18 year old me - all three of them as one combined train is astonishing in hindsight. If I look at all the just that I&#x27;ve done in the last 20 years, I&#x27;m ought to be astonished, I&#x27;ve been stupendously lucky.<p>Now for a moment, look at all the dots connected to get where we are technologically over the last, 20, 40, 80, 120 years. For example just in communications, In 120 years we went from messages for the average person taking months to span the globe, to a situation where the average person in any country, can phone another average person in most any other country at anytime day or night without difficulty - that alone is astonishing to me. Never mind all the other improvements we&#x27;ve watched blink into existence.<p>The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them.</text></comment> | <story><title>What I Worked On</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/worked.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xapata</author><text>&gt; So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.<p>Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>This is a good essay.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to contrast it with some of the psychological&#x2F;self-help literature around being your &quot;true self&quot;, where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston&#x27;s commmencement address [1] - &quot;That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.&quot; Or Steve Jobs [2] - &quot;Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don&#x27;t ignore reality either - that&#x27;d be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it credit for.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2013&#x2F;drew-houstons-commencement-address" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2013&#x2F;drew-houstons-commencement-address</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singjupost.com&#x2F;full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungry-stay-foolish-speech-at-stanford-2005&#x2F;?singlepage=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;singjupost.com&#x2F;full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-hungr...</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mizzao</author><text>Here&#x27;s a good argument why the dots will connect eventually as long as you keep doing interesting things. One of my favorite books: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidepstein.com&#x2F;the-range&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidepstein.com&#x2F;the-range&#x2F;</a></text></comment> |
4,575,589 | 4,575,075 | 1 | 3 | 4,574,907 | train | <story><title>French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push</title><url>http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3400404/french-govt-use-postgresql-libreoficce-in-free-software-adoption-push/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cs702</author><text>The upfront costs of migration (including retraining, coping with missing features, and solving a wide variety of little compatibility issues as they arise) will surely exceed what it would have cost the French Government to stay on Microsoft Office for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: will the upfront cost and disruption be worth it?<p>The data presented by the city of Munich six months ago provides compelling evidence that the answer is a resounding YES: the <i>recurring savings</i> from migration will exceed its upfront costs.[1]<p>The city of Munich identified three types of cost savings: (1) it no longer has to pay for license upgrades, eliminating a significant recurring cost forever; (2) its desktop software and hardware no longer have to be updated as frequently, reducing another significant recurring cost forever; and (3) surprisingly, Munich claims its IT department is fielding fewer user complaints with free software, reducing another major cost forever.<p>--<p>Edit: There's an additional benefit from migration not mentioned by Munich which I think will become very important over time. According to this article, the French government intends to reinvest "between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save" on contributing to the development of the applications they use, so they will have <i>direct, hands-on input</i> into which features get added to such applications and even how such features are implemented. The French government, in other words, will become a 'co-owner' of these Free Software applications, giving them more control over their own IT future. How much is <i>that</i> worth?<p>--<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3787539</a></text></comment> | <story><title>French Government To Use PostgreSQL, LibreOffice In Free Software Adoption Push</title><url>http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3400404/french-govt-use-postgresql-libreoficce-in-free-software-adoption-push/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sheff</author><text>I remember reading about a largeish legacy French government system migrating to Postgres a couple of years ago, so maybe they've decided Postgres fits the bill for most scenarios they need a DB for.<p>According to these slides [1] that system did about a billion SQL statements a day at the time, so pretty good going.<p>[1] <a href="http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_PostgreSQL_migration.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/1/1c/PGDayEU2010_CNAF_Post...</a></text></comment> |
7,124,291 | 7,122,483 | 1 | 2 | 7,122,228 | train | <story><title>Introducing Backer: crowd funding for features</title><url>https://backer.app.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>quadrangle</author><text>This is NOT a new idea. This is just a feature-focused threshold system the same as using Kickstarter. There are also tons of feature focused sites.<p>Here&#x27;s the exact same thing already: <a href="http://catincan.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catincan.com&#x2F;</a>
There&#x27;s also tons of bounty-style feature systems like <a href="http://www.freedomsponsors.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freedomsponsors.org&#x2F;</a><p>I could go on and on. There&#x27;s no particular reason this variation is going to fail, but it&#x27;s not new. The only thing notable is the no-fee for Open Source. The Bitcoin focus isn&#x27;t even remarkable, because there&#x27;s <a href="http://bitcoinstarter.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinstarter.com&#x2F;</a><p>Oh, and the idea-validation is already inherent to crowdfunding. Anyway, I wish people didn&#x27;t keep wheel reinventing all the time. At least recognize it.</text></comment> | <story><title>Introducing Backer: crowd funding for features</title><url>https://backer.app.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iandanforth</author><text>I think this is really cool! I can see these campaigns dropping into one of two buckets. 1. Funding to pay for development time and 2. Validating the idea. I think it&#x27;s up to the campaign runner to determine how much to ask for for bucket 1 type campaigns, but it could be <i>immensely</i> helpful for Backer to offer clear guidance for the second.<p>For example, lets say I have an existing user base of 100,000 people, and I normally charge $15 &#x2F; m for my service, of which 5% of my users actually pay. What is a sufficient contribution to validate the idea of a new feature for the paid version? For the free version? Over time, finding the proper heuristics&#x2F;weightings for Backer users could be very very helpful.</text></comment> |
27,414,377 | 27,414,125 | 1 | 3 | 27,412,587 | train | <story><title>Remove left turns for less dangerous city traffic</title><url>https://theconversation.com/sick-of-dangerous-city-traffic-remove-left-turns-161397</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burlesona</author><text>One of the best ways to eliminate left turns is to replace four way intersections with roundabouts. This has the advantage of working even where there isn’t a grid to facilitate the “3 right turns” strategy.<p>For a great description of why this is so effective, see the recent freakonomics podcast:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;roundabouts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;roundabouts&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Zababa</author><text>As a French, it&#x27;s really surprising to see how other people from other countries aren&#x27;t used to roundabouts. I really like how diverse roundabouts are here. Some are arranged like gardens, some have flowers, some have sculptures, some have decorations made by the local school.<p>A funny anecdote: we used to go to Pontarlier from time to time because our grandparents had a house here. Every time we went, we saw that [1] awful roundabout. A few years ago, it was elected as the ugliest roundabout in France.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr&#x2F;image&#x2F;Zb2s5pOo3hJVEKBZ-7DHxvCo0GA&#x2F;930x620&#x2F;&#x2F;filters:format(webp)&#x2F;regions&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;5edf4dc101648_andre_malraux_masque-3419997.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr&#x2F;image&#x2F;Zb2s5pOo3hJVEK...</a><p>(Edit: I&#x27;ve edited the link to point the correct roundabout. The previous link was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf1am.autojournal.fr&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;rond-point-pouce-740x410.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf1am.autojournal.fr&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;9&#x2F;2018...</a>)</text></comment> | <story><title>Remove left turns for less dangerous city traffic</title><url>https://theconversation.com/sick-of-dangerous-city-traffic-remove-left-turns-161397</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>burlesona</author><text>One of the best ways to eliminate left turns is to replace four way intersections with roundabouts. This has the advantage of working even where there isn’t a grid to facilitate the “3 right turns” strategy.<p>For a great description of why this is so effective, see the recent freakonomics podcast:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;roundabouts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;roundabouts&#x2F;</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alksjdalkj</author><text>I&#x27;m a little skeptical that it would be safer for pedestrians and bikes. Bikes need to merge with traffic already in the roundabout instead of simply going straight through an intersection, and pedestrians would need to always check for oncoming cars rather than being able to mostly rely on lights telling them when they can cross.<p>But then most of my experience with roundabouts is with large, multilane roundabouts so the traffic is still pretty fast - maybe smaller roundabouts with significantly slower traffic would be safer than I&#x27;m picturing.</text></comment> |
5,528,282 | 5,528,247 | 1 | 3 | 5,527,610 | train | <story><title>Top Coders Can Now Get Agents</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/silicon-valley-goes-hollywood-top-coders-can-now-get-agents</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ctide</author><text>What's the difference between 10X Management and any other consulting agency? The article seemed to fluff it up a lot, but the fundamentals seemed the same. Just that the developer is a contractor for the agency instead of on salary?</text></comment> | <story><title>Top Coders Can Now Get Agents</title><url>http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/silicon-valley-goes-hollywood-top-coders-can-now-get-agents</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>malandrew</author><text>Amy Jackson has been using this model for designers for a while now[0]. Glad to see developers are now getting some talent agent options.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/AJacksonTalent" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/AJacksonTalent</a></text></comment> |
39,456,441 | 39,456,075 | 1 | 2 | 39,455,131 | train | <story><title>Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>floatrock</author><text>Here&#x27;s the real punchline:<p>&gt; Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt&#x27;s case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.<p>Here&#x27;s a glimpse into our Kafka-esque AI-powered future: every corporate lawyer is now making sure any customer service request will be gated by a chatbot containing a disclaimer like &quot;Warning: the information you receive may be incorrect and irrelevant.&quot; Getting correct and relevant information from a human will be impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OnionBlender</author><text>If that is such a perfect way to avoid getting sued, why don&#x27;t they put that on every page of their website and train all of their customer service staff to say that when they talk to customers?</text></comment> | <story><title>Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>floatrock</author><text>Here&#x27;s the real punchline:<p>&gt; Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt&#x27;s case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.<p>Here&#x27;s a glimpse into our Kafka-esque AI-powered future: every corporate lawyer is now making sure any customer service request will be gated by a chatbot containing a disclaimer like &quot;Warning: the information you receive may be incorrect and irrelevant.&quot; Getting correct and relevant information from a human will be impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unsupp0rted</author><text>That&#x27;s why I get all my questions answered by CC&#x27;ing [email protected] and [email protected]</text></comment> |
21,503,114 | 21,501,791 | 1 | 3 | 21,492,049 | train | <story><title>Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese</title><url>https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-translations-into-japanese/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>corey_moncure</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen Let&#x27;s Plays of the Japanese translation of Portal and felt that it misses the sardonic notes of GLaDOS&#x27; script, and as a result falls completely flat. In my opinion, this aspect is essential to the Portal experience. It&#x27;s not that I couldn&#x27;t think of how to express certain lines in Japanese, rather it just seemed that the translation team didn&#x27;t get the jokes at all.<p>That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult. Sometimes you&#x27;re lucky and there&#x27;s a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that&#x27;s recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category. All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.<p>Having grown up with &quot;spoony bard&quot;, &quot;this guy are sick&quot; and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren&#x27;t a one-way street.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gambiting</author><text>I remember being shocked when I watched Shrek for the first time in English - all the jokes were different than how I remembered it(I watched it in Polish for the first time)! But well, thinking about it, that makes perfect sense - English jokes translated literally into Polish wouldn&#x27;t have been anywhere near as funny - so the translators took a bit of a creative liberty and changed them to work with Polish audiences, even inserting some Polish pop-culture references where appropriate. And yeah, I remember it being incredibly funny and in comparison the English version is just....different(not to mention all the voices are just....wrong lol).<p>It brings up an interesting question though - do we care about the outcome(the film being funny) or about being &quot;correct&quot;. After all, Polish translation of Shakespeare doesn&#x27;t change the meaning just to be more relatable to Poles. But then again, books like Harry Potter had plenty of changes to work in Polish(like the Sphinx&#x27;s riddle being completely different in Polish just so it would make any sense - I would argue that one was kind of necessary though).</text></comment> | <story><title>Games with Famous Bad Translations into Japanese</title><url>https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-translations-into-japanese/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>corey_moncure</author><text>I&#x27;ve seen Let&#x27;s Plays of the Japanese translation of Portal and felt that it misses the sardonic notes of GLaDOS&#x27; script, and as a result falls completely flat. In my opinion, this aspect is essential to the Portal experience. It&#x27;s not that I couldn&#x27;t think of how to express certain lines in Japanese, rather it just seemed that the translation team didn&#x27;t get the jokes at all.<p>That said, translating jokes can be very, very difficult. Sometimes you&#x27;re lucky and there&#x27;s a low hanging fruit to grab, a pun that works in both source and target languages, or a similar idiom that&#x27;s recognizable if you switch out a word with another one in the same category. All too often with language pairs as distant as English and Japanese, you just end up writing your own joke.<p>Having grown up with &quot;spoony bard&quot;, &quot;this guy are sick&quot; and many other memorable zingers, it is somehow ironic, somehow comforting, to know that bad translations aren&#x27;t a one-way street.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reificator</author><text>Ouch. Portal is one of my favorites, but partly because I really loved GLaDOS. (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System)<p>Without her constant prodding at you, I think the game would lose both charm and player motivation. I&#x27;d imagine the pacing takes a hit as a result.<p>Here&#x27;s one of my favorite examples of a bad translation to English: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gFg6QOlV-EE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gFg6QOlV-EE</a><p>It&#x27;s an NES game, but before I spoil it for you, try to figure out which one by letting the music play out.</text></comment> |
9,602,450 | 9,602,414 | 1 | 2 | 9,602,092 | train | <story><title>BingoCardCreator.com Sale Page</title><url>http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software-business-in-education-niche-25k-gross-mo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon8418</author><text>I thought Patio11 was an A&#x2F;B optimization, strategy god...<p>Why did he abandon BCC?<p>Reminds me of Tim Ferris and Rich Dad Poor Dad.... those guys make their money selling their brand, seminars, ebooks, etc. and not via the methods&#x2F;techniques they preach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nate</author><text>Focus.<p>It takes a lot of effort to keep multiple projects in the air. Even something that &quot;runs itself&quot; never really does. I&#x27;ve got Draft going while I work on Highrise, and Draft works very well on its own, but I still have to deal with support requests, downtime, upgrades, refunds, and more.<p>The guy wants to focus on his other projects. Patrick&#x27;s never hidden the fact that selling Bingo Cards isn&#x27;t as lucrative as his other projects. He&#x27;s super honest and open about what goes down. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bingocardcreator.com&#x2F;stats" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bingocardcreator.com&#x2F;stats</a> Tons of good lessons he&#x27;s learned that he&#x27;s now applied to other business via consulting, Appointment Reminder, and now at Starfighter (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;announcing-starfighter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;09&#x2F;announcing-starfighter&#x2F;</a>)<p>Look at 37signals. They decided they needed to focus on Basecamp to make it as good as they want. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;37signals.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;37signals.com&#x2F;</a><p>We all should be shedding more and more stuff in our lives to focus on the bits we want to grow and see further through. Nothing at all wrong about that.</text></comment> | <story><title>BingoCardCreator.com Sale Page</title><url>http://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/3745-software-business-in-education-niche-25k-gross-mo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anon8418</author><text>I thought Patio11 was an A&#x2F;B optimization, strategy god...<p>Why did he abandon BCC?<p>Reminds me of Tim Ferris and Rich Dad Poor Dad.... those guys make their money selling their brand, seminars, ebooks, etc. and not via the methods&#x2F;techniques they preach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>URSpider94</author><text>Opportunity cost. He has other projects that offer greater opportunity and which he is more passionate about. He&#x27;s written about this repeatedly.</text></comment> |
36,599,209 | 36,599,171 | 1 | 3 | 36,598,618 | train | <story><title>Germany Achieves Record 57.7% Renewable Energy Share for First Half of 2023</title><url>https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sparkling</author><text>Why are people so obsessed with &quot;solar roadways&quot; or &quot;solar train tracks&quot;? This is a joke, a gimmick, it makes absolutely no sense. Well, except for the startups that are getting massive subsidies and grants for these clown projects.<p>There are still millions of open-space square meters all over the country. Think of flat-roof warehouses, supermarkets, parking facilities and more. Those places are easy to access, easy to install, easy to maintain. These train track installments however.... hard to install, require non-standardized panel sizes, non-standard wiring, special equipment, are in a dusty&#x2F;dirty uncontrollable environment, maintenance is only possible in coordination with the train company. My guess is that these things are 4-5x more expensive on a per kwH basis, if you consider the total cost of ownership.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>In the meantime, Switzerland is installing solar panels on train tracks [0] instead of, I don&#x27;t know, people&#x27;s roofs. There is so much promising tech coming out in terms of energy storage and we&#x27;re seeing almost zero investment from governments. Everything&#x27;s backwards.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;98944-switzerland-installing-solar-panels-gap-between-train-tracks.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;98944-switzerland-installing-s...</a></text></item><item><author>Aachen</author><text>Electricity, maybe. Energy? I wish.<p>This headline would be more true if we had transportation fully electrified and all buildings heated with heat pumps, but last I heard the proposed law to require the latter transition to be <i>started</i> in 2024 was dropped again, and they&#x27;re also still debating about <i>starting</i> to require transitioning the combustion engine fleets to electric by, what was it, 2030?<p>I also still see stickers here, calling for the closure of a nuclear plant in Belgium. These people live near one of the biggest coal mines and power plants, but tihange is what scares them.<p>Looks like we&#x27;ll have to dig in our own pockets if we want to be part of the solution, government isn&#x27;t going to do it, even in a principalistic country as Germany. We&#x27;ll get to +3°C or something but at least you can tell the kids of 2060 that you at least did what you could...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lopis</author><text>The people from Solar Roadways actually got support from several governments in the US. It&#x27;s totally bonkers. They never had a proper functioning system. The whole idea is ridiculous and people pointed it out since the beginning. But it generated so much news that governments were so ready to jump on it. And they are STILL at it. So here we are, 10 years later, and still talking about putting solar panels in places where they will: break, get very dirty, be hard to fix and replace. We can&#x27;t have good things because money and politics talk, not science.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2OLnfNrCQM4">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2OLnfNrCQM4</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Germany Achieves Record 57.7% Renewable Energy Share for First Half of 2023</title><url>https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2023/german-net-power-generation-in-first-half-of-2023-renewable-energy-share-of-57-percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sparkling</author><text>Why are people so obsessed with &quot;solar roadways&quot; or &quot;solar train tracks&quot;? This is a joke, a gimmick, it makes absolutely no sense. Well, except for the startups that are getting massive subsidies and grants for these clown projects.<p>There are still millions of open-space square meters all over the country. Think of flat-roof warehouses, supermarkets, parking facilities and more. Those places are easy to access, easy to install, easy to maintain. These train track installments however.... hard to install, require non-standardized panel sizes, non-standard wiring, special equipment, are in a dusty&#x2F;dirty uncontrollable environment, maintenance is only possible in coordination with the train company. My guess is that these things are 4-5x more expensive on a per kwH basis, if you consider the total cost of ownership.</text></item><item><author>lopis</author><text>In the meantime, Switzerland is installing solar panels on train tracks [0] instead of, I don&#x27;t know, people&#x27;s roofs. There is so much promising tech coming out in terms of energy storage and we&#x27;re seeing almost zero investment from governments. Everything&#x27;s backwards.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;98944-switzerland-installing-solar-panels-gap-between-train-tracks.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;98944-switzerland-installing-s...</a></text></item><item><author>Aachen</author><text>Electricity, maybe. Energy? I wish.<p>This headline would be more true if we had transportation fully electrified and all buildings heated with heat pumps, but last I heard the proposed law to require the latter transition to be <i>started</i> in 2024 was dropped again, and they&#x27;re also still debating about <i>starting</i> to require transitioning the combustion engine fleets to electric by, what was it, 2030?<p>I also still see stickers here, calling for the closure of a nuclear plant in Belgium. These people live near one of the biggest coal mines and power plants, but tihange is what scares them.<p>Looks like we&#x27;ll have to dig in our own pockets if we want to be part of the solution, government isn&#x27;t going to do it, even in a principalistic country as Germany. We&#x27;ll get to +3°C or something but at least you can tell the kids of 2060 that you at least did what you could...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atoav</author><text>Solar train tracks or roadways are a dumb person&#x27;s idea what innovation looks like.</text></comment> |
6,831,894 | 6,831,539 | 1 | 3 | 6,830,566 | train | <story><title>Amazon Prime Air</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/b?ref_=tsm_1_tw_s_amzn_mx3eqp&node=8037720011</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnriot</author><text>Dropbox is for people that can&#x27;t use rsync+git. For the unix-competent, it&#x27;s not particularly difficult and we managed for many years with the previous tools, rsync+svn or even rsync+cvs</text></item><item><author>esusatyo</author><text>Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.</text></item><item><author>jmduke</author><text>(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I&#x27;m learning of Prime Air.)<p>I&#x27;m somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like &quot;I wonder how they&#x27;ll handle adverse weather&quot; (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like &quot;As soon as one of these kills a dog it&#x27;s done for&quot;. What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure&#x27;s sake? This feels like science fiction in the best way possible.<p>I have no idea whether or not this will work, but I sure hope it does. It&#x27;s incredibly exciting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sanderjd</author><text>Yeah I really miss the good old days when I could take some pictures and all I had to do to send them to my mom was provision a server with a static IP address I could send her along with some links to rsync tutorials. Can&#x27;t believe Dropbox had to come around and make everything so much harder...</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon Prime Air</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/b?ref_=tsm_1_tw_s_amzn_mx3eqp&node=8037720011</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnriot</author><text>Dropbox is for people that can&#x27;t use rsync+git. For the unix-competent, it&#x27;s not particularly difficult and we managed for many years with the previous tools, rsync+svn or even rsync+cvs</text></item><item><author>esusatyo</author><text>Hacker News on Dropbox: Why would anyone want this? I can do this already with my home PC, all I need to do is install package xyz and let it run in the background. How does this handle duplicates, this is doomed to fail.</text></item><item><author>jmduke</author><text>(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I&#x27;m learning of Prime Air.)<p>I&#x27;m somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like &quot;I wonder how they&#x27;ll handle adverse weather&quot; (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like &quot;As soon as one of these kills a dog it&#x27;s done for&quot;. What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure&#x27;s sake? This feels like science fiction in the best way possible.<p>I have no idea whether or not this will work, but I sure hope it does. It&#x27;s incredibly exciting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>8bitpony</author><text>Guess what? There are millions of people that can&#x27;t use rsync + git.</text></comment> |
12,312,531 | 12,311,927 | 1 | 3 | 12,311,559 | train | <story><title>Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there&#x27;s a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.<p>This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>speleding</author><text>We don&#x27;t need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to &quot;pay for the other dude in the car&quot;.</text></comment> | <story><title>Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nkoren</author><text>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there&#x27;s a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms.<p>This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agumonkey</author><text>What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they&#x27;re skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).</text></comment> |
15,970,965 | 15,970,023 | 1 | 3 | 15,967,619 | train | <story><title>Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/19/google-will-turn-on-native-ad-blocking-in-chrome-on-february-15/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Artlav</author><text>They are all probably too rich to understand the concept of paying for mobile data.</text></item><item><author>wst_</author><text>I still find it amusing that they consider auto-play video OK as long as it&#x27;s muted. Sound is the problem, but so is auto-playing itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>It&#x27;s really, really dumb, but video is actually far more bandwidth efficient than the alternative everyone uses, which are multi-MB GIF files. I don&#x27;t know enough about the file format, but I suspect it would be difficult to download the first frame of a GIF then immediately stop downloading the rest of the file (which would probably be the best of both worlds).</text></comment> | <story><title>Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/19/google-will-turn-on-native-ad-blocking-in-chrome-on-february-15/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Artlav</author><text>They are all probably too rich to understand the concept of paying for mobile data.</text></item><item><author>wst_</author><text>I still find it amusing that they consider auto-play video OK as long as it&#x27;s muted. Sound is the problem, but so is auto-playing itself.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baby</author><text>I pay 12-15 pounds per month here in the UK, for unlimited calls and internet in the world. (I think in Europe I can call any european number for free, but in outside of it I might be limited to free calls to the UK only.)<p>France was even cheaper with the Free provider. They have 2 euros plans that are useful for most usages. (Internet cap is low but if you use more they charge you cheap fees.)<p>The US prices were insane for not much.</text></comment> |
26,811,875 | 26,809,533 | 1 | 2 | 26,808,427 | train | <story><title>The first 18 months of a startup</title><url>https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1382351985584721926</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that&#x27;s OK.<p>The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours?<p>So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the context when you decide which advice to lean into.</text></comment> | <story><title>The first 18 months of a startup</title><url>https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1382351985584721926</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>josh_carterPDX</author><text>There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing, &quot;GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR PRODUCT&#x2F;SERVICE!&quot; Everything else is just iteration.</text></comment> |
25,421,382 | 25,421,276 | 1 | 2 | 25,419,487 | train | <story><title>U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/12/u-s-treasury-commerce-depts-hacked-through-solarwinds-compromise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jtsummers</author><text>The insistence on the stupidly long passwords and 30-60 day expiration times created <i>so</i> many weaknesses. People choose obvious patterns for their passwords to get around it. Like `1q2w3e4r!Q@W#E$R`. Then they shift by one each time they have to update, by the time they get across the keyboard they can restart (or twice, in which case you swap the shift to the first half instead of second half). Or, this was fun, my first gov&#x27;t job the guy had stored passwords on a sticky underneath the keyboard (I changed them all). They also used a shared account for admin stuffs, even though we were all given an admin token (like the smart card or CAC for regular login, but with admin credentials and issued separately).<p>In theory, the DOD CAC system (they&#x27;ve gotten better over the years) eliminates the need for passwords entirely, but somehow most teams never tie their system to it properly.</text></item><item><author>random5634</author><text>A couple of quick notes:<p>1) The OPM hack and now this all illustrate - if govt gives itself the big backdoors into everything, it&#x27;s likely they will give it to russia, criminals, ex-boyfriends stalking ex-girlfriends etc.<p>2) My own impression of govt IT is largely security theatre in the area I was involved. In particular such massive complexity that agency staff think going around the rules is normal, because it&#x27;s the only way to actually get work done. And then such glaring weaknesses that no one cares to fix. With google I&#x27;ve had one password for 20 years (my google account) which allows a hardware key for 2FA or google authenticator with what I imagine is sensible monitoring, new device authentication etc (I find this pretty secure).<p>Govt you are forced to write down these insanely long passwords with super complexity that cannot be cut and pasted that change very 30 or 60 days.<p>Because lost passwords are so common in these settings, the password reset process is usually a MASSIVE weakspot. I&#x27;ve seen it just be a phone call to a third party, you give them your username, they give you a new temp password - that&#x27;s literally it. And the passwords end up everywhere. In lots of documents that float around, emailed around etc etc. And lots of password sharing when you get locked out of a tool and it will take a long time to get a new account setup (months). Pretty soon the procedures manual also gets you root access to everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vngzs</author><text>NIST no longer suggests such a rotation policy. They have accepted that it weakens security.<p>Anecdotally, colleagues have successfully lobbied to drop (or not enforce) password expiration policies from other government bodies on the strength of this recommendation from NIST.</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/12/u-s-treasury-commerce-depts-hacked-through-solarwinds-compromise/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jtsummers</author><text>The insistence on the stupidly long passwords and 30-60 day expiration times created <i>so</i> many weaknesses. People choose obvious patterns for their passwords to get around it. Like `1q2w3e4r!Q@W#E$R`. Then they shift by one each time they have to update, by the time they get across the keyboard they can restart (or twice, in which case you swap the shift to the first half instead of second half). Or, this was fun, my first gov&#x27;t job the guy had stored passwords on a sticky underneath the keyboard (I changed them all). They also used a shared account for admin stuffs, even though we were all given an admin token (like the smart card or CAC for regular login, but with admin credentials and issued separately).<p>In theory, the DOD CAC system (they&#x27;ve gotten better over the years) eliminates the need for passwords entirely, but somehow most teams never tie their system to it properly.</text></item><item><author>random5634</author><text>A couple of quick notes:<p>1) The OPM hack and now this all illustrate - if govt gives itself the big backdoors into everything, it&#x27;s likely they will give it to russia, criminals, ex-boyfriends stalking ex-girlfriends etc.<p>2) My own impression of govt IT is largely security theatre in the area I was involved. In particular such massive complexity that agency staff think going around the rules is normal, because it&#x27;s the only way to actually get work done. And then such glaring weaknesses that no one cares to fix. With google I&#x27;ve had one password for 20 years (my google account) which allows a hardware key for 2FA or google authenticator with what I imagine is sensible monitoring, new device authentication etc (I find this pretty secure).<p>Govt you are forced to write down these insanely long passwords with super complexity that cannot be cut and pasted that change very 30 or 60 days.<p>Because lost passwords are so common in these settings, the password reset process is usually a MASSIVE weakspot. I&#x27;ve seen it just be a phone call to a third party, you give them your username, they give you a new temp password - that&#x27;s literally it. And the passwords end up everywhere. In lots of documents that float around, emailed around etc etc. And lots of password sharing when you get locked out of a tool and it will take a long time to get a new account setup (months). Pretty soon the procedures manual also gets you root access to everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Covzire</author><text>Indeed. Sports Team + Year, Season + Year, Company + Year or some other such combination should get you a good 10% or more of your users with only a few dozen permutations.<p>They wrote 60 days into FEDRAMP I believe, something I jaw-droppingly realized last year sometime. Whoever is writing these policy frames don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing. NIST did away with those periodic password change recommendations for a very good reason but IMO they need to now recommend the opposite, directly, because the constant password changes are doing real harm.</text></comment> |
22,020,418 | 22,020,059 | 1 | 2 | 22,019,597 | train | <story><title>A billion medical images are exposed online</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/10/medical-images-exposed-pacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prostheticvamp</author><text>An odd line from the article, wherein it states that security researchers don’t blame vendors, but the physicians and hospitals that fail to properly secure the software.<p>I have never, in all my years of working in healthcare, seen a hospital or physicians office directly install and manage PACS. They pay a third-party - usually the vendor - to install, configure, and walk them through it. Maybe a behemoth system like Northwell has the IT bench to do it themselves, but that would be the exception.<p>So allow me to rephrase slightly: “technologically inept organization pays vendor to make machine go vroom. Vendor leaves keys in ignition. Damn that technologically inept organization.”<p>To take a 10,000-foot view of the situation, though:<p>Healthcare-related technologically was largely pushed on the industry via legislation. Said legislation was almost entirely stick, no carrot. The result was healthcare organizations with a gun to their head to buy from a handful of vendors, with no real ROI to be seen from it - aka, the government outsourcing its costs to private industry, and throwing pork to some major health IT firms along the way. When a technology is forced on you at a loss, from a vendor with little incentive to optimize ease of use or utility, you get a terrible piece of shit that no one wants to invest more time and money into than absolutely needed. That’s going to show itself in a myriad of ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>txcwpalpha</author><text>I’ve been the IT vendor in this scenario. While I’m sure there are plenty of inept vendors not doing their part to ensure the systems they implement are secure, a big part of it is doctors and their work culture.<p>Many doctors see themselves as too important to deal with security. They have an attitude of “I went to school for medicine, not computers! How dare you ask me to use a computer.” They are not only technologically inept, they are proud of it. And I’m not just talking about refusing to use complicated software. I’m talking about doctors that insist that they shouldn’t be forced to use passwords (not even complicated passwords; ANY passwords). And in most of the organizations I have dealt with, doctors are the most important people in the organization and have final say on anything, which often means that the security department’s efforts are all overridden by doctors that can’t be arsed to even type in a password before using their EMR, and don’t even dream of something more complicated like asking them to use multi-factor auth.<p>I once worked at a hospital where a doctor was looking at porn at work, clicked a phishing link, and gave up his network credentials. An attacker then used those credentials to breach the network and siphoned several hundred thousand dollars from the financial system (wiring money to himself). Security detected this and disabled his account. 20 minutes later the doctor had called the CEO, yelled at him (“how dare you lock me out of my account!”) who then called security to yell at us and insist we re-enable his account. The doctor was never reprimanded (for falling for phishing or for the porn) meanwhile the security team got a stern talking to and was instructed to never disable a doctor’s account again.<p>Healthcare is a different world for security. You have to acknowledge that yes, patient safety is more important than security, but oftentimes these doctors take it to an extreme and they are very difficult to work with. I have never met a group of people more elitist and “too important to be bothered” by security than doctors.</text></comment> | <story><title>A billion medical images are exposed online</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/10/medical-images-exposed-pacs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prostheticvamp</author><text>An odd line from the article, wherein it states that security researchers don’t blame vendors, but the physicians and hospitals that fail to properly secure the software.<p>I have never, in all my years of working in healthcare, seen a hospital or physicians office directly install and manage PACS. They pay a third-party - usually the vendor - to install, configure, and walk them through it. Maybe a behemoth system like Northwell has the IT bench to do it themselves, but that would be the exception.<p>So allow me to rephrase slightly: “technologically inept organization pays vendor to make machine go vroom. Vendor leaves keys in ignition. Damn that technologically inept organization.”<p>To take a 10,000-foot view of the situation, though:<p>Healthcare-related technologically was largely pushed on the industry via legislation. Said legislation was almost entirely stick, no carrot. The result was healthcare organizations with a gun to their head to buy from a handful of vendors, with no real ROI to be seen from it - aka, the government outsourcing its costs to private industry, and throwing pork to some major health IT firms along the way. When a technology is forced on you at a loss, from a vendor with little incentive to optimize ease of use or utility, you get a terrible piece of shit that no one wants to invest more time and money into than absolutely needed. That’s going to show itself in a myriad of ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>christophilus</author><text>I completely agree. I have friends in the medical field, and they hate their computer systems. One of them spends almost as much time on data entry as he does with his patients. He has to double and sometimes triple enter data. He’s probably going to end up hiring someone to do that full time, which is so obviously a totally broken system.</text></comment> |
6,494,019 | 6,492,772 | 1 | 3 | 6,492,060 | train | <story><title>Twitter files S-1 with the SEC</title><url>http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513390321/d564001ds1.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robszumski</author><text>I&#x27;m mostly interested in the non-financials in the document. On the top of the list is this:<p>&quot;We have implemented a disaster recovery program, which allows us to move production to a back-up data center in the event of a catastrophe. Although this program is functional, we do not currently serve network traffic equally from each data center, so if our primary data center shuts down, there will be a period of time that our products or services, or certain of our products or services, will remain inaccessible to our users or our users may experience severe issues accessing our products and services.&quot;<p>One of the most technically advanced software companies is still operating a <i>single</i> critical datacenter instead of many at once?</text></comment> | <story><title>Twitter files S-1 with the SEC</title><url>http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513390321/d564001ds1.htm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>capex</author><text>Somewhat tangentially, I feel Twitter sort of stopped innovating after they got big. If Google as a search engine can do Gmail, Glass and driverless cars, why has Twitter made tweeting the only business they do?</text></comment> |
30,789,441 | 30,789,349 | 1 | 3 | 30,776,276 | train | <story><title>Hacked GDB Dashboard Puts It All on Display</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2022/03/22/hacked-gdb-dashboard-puts-it-all-on-display/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>enragedcacti</author><text>There are a lot of these types of tools already in the reverse engineering community (in order of lowest chance of breaking when you throw really weird stuff at it, in my experience):<p>GEF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gef.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;master&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gef.readthedocs.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;master&#x2F;</a><p>PWNDBG: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pwndbg&#x2F;pwndbg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pwndbg&#x2F;pwndbg</a><p>PEDA: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;longld&#x2F;peda" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;longld&#x2F;peda</a><p>They also come with a slew of different features to aid in RE&#x2F;exploit dev, but many of them are also useful for debugging really weird issues.<p>Also if you don&#x27;t need all the info these provide or just want to augment them, the tool you are looking for is &quot;hook-stop&quot; which allows you to execute a string of commands every time GDB pauses program execution.</text></comment> | <story><title>Hacked GDB Dashboard Puts It All on Display</title><url>https://hackaday.com/2022/03/22/hacked-gdb-dashboard-puts-it-all-on-display/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skywal_l</author><text>Nice! There is already a TUI in gdb albeit not as good looking. For more info, there is a quick talk about it and other niceties that you may not know about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=PorfLSr3DDI</a></text></comment> |
20,281,628 | 20,277,525 | 1 | 3 | 20,277,115 | train | <story><title>What's Salesforce?</title><url>https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>Hi, I&#x27;m one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I&#x27;ve always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the &quot;business people&quot; always used.<p>Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com</a>), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.<p>The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. &quot;add a column to the `Leads` table&quot;), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. &quot;I want to display this data in this view&quot;). I&#x27;ve previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it&#x27;s always frustrating because I can&#x27;t customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.<p>To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).<p>Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :)<p>(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flukus</author><text>&gt; To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).<p>That&#x27;s the theory, in practice companies end up paying through the nose for an army of salesforce consultants, same as with every other &quot;zero code&quot; platform.</text></comment> | <story><title>What's Salesforce?</title><url>https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvdhsu</author><text>Hi, I&#x27;m one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I&#x27;ve always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the &quot;business people&quot; always used.<p>Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tryretool.com</a>), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc.<p>The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. &quot;add a column to the `Leads` table&quot;), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. &quot;I want to display this data in this view&quot;). I&#x27;ve previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it&#x27;s always frustrating because I can&#x27;t customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool.<p>To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers).<p>Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :)<p>(Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reallydontask</author><text>Just skimmed your article but you showed a screenshot of Dynamics 365 as a CRM system and then went on to talk about Salesforce as much more than just CRM.<p>Pretty much anything that Salesforce does, Dynamics 365 does too, so perhaps not the best screenshot of a bread and butter CRM system.</text></comment> |
19,585,131 | 19,584,959 | 1 | 3 | 19,583,821 | train | <story><title>I'm Joining CloudFlare</title><url>https://words.steveklabnik.com/i-m-joining-cloudflare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is a genre of post that I&#x27;ve never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company?<p>It&#x27;s obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were working on it, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable. It&#x27;s an experience I&#x27;d prefer not to repeat.<p>There are lots of excellent people taking all sorts of jobs at all sorts of places, and, unless those jobs involve, I don&#x27;t know, mechanizing payday loans to squeeze poor people or hacking the phones of people the government of Bahrain doesn&#x27;t like, nobody needs to justify them. Some of these posts seem like they might be good examples of content actually better delivered in a tweet.<p>It&#x27;s possible that I just don&#x27;t think Cloud Flare has earned the spotlight Klabnik is giving here. Who knows. But I felt the same way when Yegge announced his job at Grab --- just, &quot;why am I reading this?&quot; I&#x27;m sometimes reminded of the way Anthony Bourdain described the trailing years of Mario Batali&#x27;s tenure at Food TV (Batali was a &quot;lion&quot; but not in a good way). Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>libria</author><text>What exactly is the confusion here? That people share things on their own blog? Or that people vote it up on HN?<p>If the former, people share all sorts of oddities in their own personal space especially life-changing events of which career moves is one.<p>If the latter, a lot of people follow &quot;developer influencers&quot; to keep up on the cutting edge trends. I&#x27;m personally keeping an eye on the Rust Book and hoping it maintains its high quality so that&#x27;s my investment in this. I&#x27;d go the other way and say it would be borderline irresponsible of him not to publicly state he&#x27;s moving off Mozilla&#x27;s payroll b&#x2F;c of so many of us depending on his super-active involvement in and documentation of Rust.<p>&gt; why am I reading this?<p>Yeah, why? A better question is, why are you commenting on not wanting to read it instead of just skipping and moving on?</text></comment> | <story><title>I'm Joining CloudFlare</title><url>https://words.steveklabnik.com/i-m-joining-cloudflare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This is a genre of post that I&#x27;ve never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company?<p>It&#x27;s obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were working on it, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable. It&#x27;s an experience I&#x27;d prefer not to repeat.<p>There are lots of excellent people taking all sorts of jobs at all sorts of places, and, unless those jobs involve, I don&#x27;t know, mechanizing payday loans to squeeze poor people or hacking the phones of people the government of Bahrain doesn&#x27;t like, nobody needs to justify them. Some of these posts seem like they might be good examples of content actually better delivered in a tweet.<p>It&#x27;s possible that I just don&#x27;t think Cloud Flare has earned the spotlight Klabnik is giving here. Who knows. But I felt the same way when Yegge announced his job at Grab --- just, &quot;why am I reading this?&quot; I&#x27;m sometimes reminded of the way Anthony Bourdain described the trailing years of Mario Batali&#x27;s tenure at Food TV (Batali was a &quot;lion&quot; but not in a good way). Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kentonv</author><text>&gt; did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?<p>I don&#x27;t think any of us at Cloudflare had any idea Steve was writing this.<p>Similarly, no one at Cloudflare asked me to write <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017-03-13-joining-cloudflare" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sandstorm.io&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017-03-13-joining-cloudflare</a> back when I joined, and I can&#x27;t recall if I even told anyone I was writing it. That post also hit #1 on HN, which, honestly, was a huge surprise to me -- I didn&#x27;t think it was that interesting, for similar reasons to what you say. I wrote it because it seemed like an obviously sensible thing to announce, but not really for attention-getting purposes...<p>I guess people are free to upvote what they think is interesting?</text></comment> |
10,857,325 | 10,857,175 | 1 | 2 | 10,856,554 | train | <story><title>The man who studies the spread of ignorance</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>The biggest problem we have today is that uninformed people form such a large percentage of the voting pool.<p>The best solution I&#x27;ve heard so far: on the age of 18, you will be given the following choice: a free scooter, or voting rights.</text></comment> | <story><title>The man who studies the spread of ignorance</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomp</author><text>I know it&#x27;s popular in certain circles to oppose, shame and attack Trump, but when you really think about it, <i>all</i> politicians do this, none of them is using facts in their campaign.</text></comment> |
35,757,994 | 35,756,223 | 1 | 3 | 35,711,067 | train | <story><title>Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game Carmageddon</title><url>https://github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ghusbands</author><text>Carmageddon (and 2) seemed to have a physics engine qualitatively different to the modern norm, seemingly modelling the time of impact and the impulse response to that, rather than correcting everything after intersection has already happened. It also seemed to have different static and sliding friction and modelled air friction and wheel dynamics to the extent that a power-up increasing acceleration and grip could make your car flip up like a hot rod.<p>It made a huge difference to the feel of the physics and made things far less springy and slippery than box3d, havok and almost every modern game that uses a dynamic physics engine.<p>This did mean that you could sometimes do things that made the physics take a noticeable amount of time and cause lag, but it also made things feel far more real than any physics engine I&#x27;ve seen since.<p>Hopefully, someone will be able to reproduce that, now.<p>Edit: I believe it even incidentally reproduced the intermediate axis theorem [1] on cars spinning through the air, presumably as an emergent phenomenon, which I&#x27;ve not seen any other physics engine do.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tennis_racket_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tennis_racket_theorem</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jeff-1amstudios</author><text>Dethrace author here: I was lucky enough to talk to a couple of the original engineers. They also thought looking back that it was the vehicle physics engine that made the game so fun to play. Once you’d got over the initial excitement of running over pedestrians at least!</text></comment> | <story><title>Dethrace: Reverse engineering the 1997 game Carmageddon</title><url>https://github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ghusbands</author><text>Carmageddon (and 2) seemed to have a physics engine qualitatively different to the modern norm, seemingly modelling the time of impact and the impulse response to that, rather than correcting everything after intersection has already happened. It also seemed to have different static and sliding friction and modelled air friction and wheel dynamics to the extent that a power-up increasing acceleration and grip could make your car flip up like a hot rod.<p>It made a huge difference to the feel of the physics and made things far less springy and slippery than box3d, havok and almost every modern game that uses a dynamic physics engine.<p>This did mean that you could sometimes do things that made the physics take a noticeable amount of time and cause lag, but it also made things feel far more real than any physics engine I&#x27;ve seen since.<p>Hopefully, someone will be able to reproduce that, now.<p>Edit: I believe it even incidentally reproduced the intermediate axis theorem [1] on cars spinning through the air, presumably as an emergent phenomenon, which I&#x27;ve not seen any other physics engine do.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tennis_racket_theorem" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tennis_racket_theorem</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orbital-decay</author><text>This was my immediate thought when I saw this. Car collision physics seems to be mostly in src&#x2F;DETHRACE&#x2F;common&#x2F;car.c and src&#x2F;DETHRACE&#x2F;common&#x2F;crush.c.</text></comment> |
13,093,038 | 13,092,756 | 1 | 2 | 13,092,330 | train | <story><title>Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/business/media/canadian-journalists-detention-at-us-border-raises-press-freedom-alarms.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exolymph</author><text>&gt; I asked what would happen if I didn&#x27;t turn the password over and just went back home to the US, they told me they&#x27;d seize the device and put me in prison until they break into it.<p>I guess it depends on how much you care about your personal info or how sensitive your data is, but I wouldn&#x27;t budge based on this. I&#x27;d say, &quot;Okay, I want to talk to the American embassy,&quot; then wait it out.<p>Edit: To be clear, this would be my response without knowing anything about the relevant Canadian law — since I don&#x27;t – because the statement sounds like a lie. LE lies all the time. Indefinite imprisonment of a random person? Nah. And breaking into a locked phone is actually very difficult — see Apple versus FBI.</text></item><item><author>jliptzin</author><text>Don&#x27;t be fooled, Canadian border patrol proudly engages in this as well. I was recently driving across the border to Montreal on vacation when Canadian border agents, in addition to searching my car and personal belongings, demanded to see my cell phone and turn over the password. I simply asked why, since I didn&#x27;t think I was doing anything suspicious, at which point the agent angrily responded &quot;because I can and now I&#x27;m going to search it extra thoroughly.&quot; I asked what would happen if I didn&#x27;t turn the password over and just went back home to the US, they told me they&#x27;d seize the device and put me in prison until they break into it. So, I gave the password, 3 agents took it in the back for 45 minutes, came back and questioned me about some texts I had with a friend from months ago who was talking about marijuana, and eventually let me pass to Canada. Hopefully they didn&#x27;t hold on to all my personal data or install backdoors but just in case I wiped the phone and reinstalled from a backup.<p>In any case, this was extremely intrusive and I couldn&#x27;t stop thinking about it the whole trip. I wondered what would happen if I had actually forgotten my phone password - just weeks before I changed from a 6 digit numeric code to a longer alphanumeric and almost forgot it since it had been a while since the last time I restarted my phone requiring password entry. I had a lot of very private photos and conversations on there with my SO. Definitely ruined my whole vacation.<p>Edit: Also, they didn&#x27;t just stick to private photos and messages, they even opened up dating apps checking for messages there, opened up unread snap and kik messages too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>empressplay</author><text>You&#x27;re under the mistaken impression that when you enter a border crossing you can turn around and go home without the permission of the country you&#x27;re attempting to enter.<p>This is not true. You&#x27;ve already entered the country, and so the border staff (US, Canadian, whoever) can indeed detain you, throw you into immigration detention, take all your stuff, really whatever they want. You don&#x27;t have any rights. You could call your embassy, but they will tell you that so long as the other country is following its own laws, you&#x27;re stuck, and they can&#x27;t help you.<p>If you don&#x27;t like it, don&#x27;t go.</text></comment> | <story><title>Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/business/media/canadian-journalists-detention-at-us-border-raises-press-freedom-alarms.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exolymph</author><text>&gt; I asked what would happen if I didn&#x27;t turn the password over and just went back home to the US, they told me they&#x27;d seize the device and put me in prison until they break into it.<p>I guess it depends on how much you care about your personal info or how sensitive your data is, but I wouldn&#x27;t budge based on this. I&#x27;d say, &quot;Okay, I want to talk to the American embassy,&quot; then wait it out.<p>Edit: To be clear, this would be my response without knowing anything about the relevant Canadian law — since I don&#x27;t – because the statement sounds like a lie. LE lies all the time. Indefinite imprisonment of a random person? Nah. And breaking into a locked phone is actually very difficult — see Apple versus FBI.</text></item><item><author>jliptzin</author><text>Don&#x27;t be fooled, Canadian border patrol proudly engages in this as well. I was recently driving across the border to Montreal on vacation when Canadian border agents, in addition to searching my car and personal belongings, demanded to see my cell phone and turn over the password. I simply asked why, since I didn&#x27;t think I was doing anything suspicious, at which point the agent angrily responded &quot;because I can and now I&#x27;m going to search it extra thoroughly.&quot; I asked what would happen if I didn&#x27;t turn the password over and just went back home to the US, they told me they&#x27;d seize the device and put me in prison until they break into it. So, I gave the password, 3 agents took it in the back for 45 minutes, came back and questioned me about some texts I had with a friend from months ago who was talking about marijuana, and eventually let me pass to Canada. Hopefully they didn&#x27;t hold on to all my personal data or install backdoors but just in case I wiped the phone and reinstalled from a backup.<p>In any case, this was extremely intrusive and I couldn&#x27;t stop thinking about it the whole trip. I wondered what would happen if I had actually forgotten my phone password - just weeks before I changed from a 6 digit numeric code to a longer alphanumeric and almost forgot it since it had been a while since the last time I restarted my phone requiring password entry. I had a lot of very private photos and conversations on there with my SO. Definitely ruined my whole vacation.<p>Edit: Also, they didn&#x27;t just stick to private photos and messages, they even opened up dating apps checking for messages there, opened up unread snap and kik messages too.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jliptzin</author><text>Actually if I were alone I would have done that just to prove a point, but I was with my SO and I didn&#x27;t want to ruin his vacation as well.</text></comment> |
32,706,479 | 32,706,039 | 1 | 2 | 32,693,220 | train | <story><title>A hormone may boost cognition in Down syndrome</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hormone-may-boost-cognition-in-down-syndrome/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>GordonS</author><text>&gt; Six out of seven patients improved their cognitive tests by 20 to 30 percent<p>My 9 year old daughter has Down&#x27;s Syndrome, and this is the most exciting paper I&#x27;ve seen! I know we&#x27;re a long, long way off any kind of treatment being available for people with Down&#x27;s, but still, I can&#x27;t help but feel some hope.<p>BTW, you can AMA about Down&#x27;s here if you want!</text></comment> | <story><title>A hormone may boost cognition in Down syndrome</title><url>https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hormone-may-boost-cognition-in-down-syndrome/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gavinray</author><text>If anyone&#x27;s curious, for a period of several months I administered a GnRH daily for health purposes (Triptorelin)<p>Don&#x27;t have down&#x27;s syndrome. Likely on the autism spectrum. Didn&#x27;t notice any significant cognitive benefits.</text></comment> |
12,902,724 | 12,902,120 | 1 | 3 | 12,901,139 | train | <story><title>A Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language</title><url>http://waterstechnology.com/waters/feature/2476518/the-infancy-of-julia-an-inside-look-at-how-traders-and-economists-are-using-the-julia-programming-language</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>This is digital Stockhold syndrome.<p>Excel is something managers and executives can understand, so it became the default language for data analysis. Now technologists trapped using it have to create ex post facto justifications for why it&#x27;s really &quot;just misunderstood.&quot;<p>Excel is massively slow, makes it easy for beginners to make massive mistakes, computes lots of types in very odd manners, performs floating point operations wrong, and leads to spaghetti code that is a rat&#x27;s nest of incomprehensible cross-references.<p>Worst of all, the lack of code path visibility usually leads to a bus factor of 1.<p>Sure, one <i>can</i> learn to operate Excel for data analysis with a decent level of efficiency, in the same manner one <i>can</i> cross the Pacific in a canoe, but both are still terrible tools for the job.</text></item><item><author>valarauca1</author><text>The reason for this is simple. Excel is<p>1. An incredibly powerful tool.<p>2. No bar of entry (cost aside, true in corporate environment).<p>3. Very gradual learning curve.<p>4. The efficiency gain vs time invested is exponential.<p>Power Excel users, much like their VIM&#x2F;Emacs counter parts don&#x27;t use a mouse. It is just keyboard short cuts [1][2]. This makes them insanely productive.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jFSf5YhYQbw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jFSf5YhYQbw</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0nbkaYsR94c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0nbkaYsR94c</a></text></item><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>Most financial firms need their quants to worry less about the new programming language hotness, and more about moving entire systems off unbelievably complicated Excel spreadsheets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Everybody&#x27;s right. Excel is a powerful, flexible tool that also has almost no guard rails and all but begs people to make profound mistakes and huge messes. There&#x27;s too many people who sneer at spreadsheets when they should be using them, and there&#x27;s too many people who use them when they shouldn&#x27;t.<p>No contradictions.<p>It would be interesting to see if anyone could get some power Excel users together and construct a next-generation spreadsheet that encouraged better practices and worked to prevent huge messes. Spreadsheets are like SQL, where the initial release was so far ahead of its time that it managed to entrench itself into the very fabric of computing, even though it&#x27;s long overdue for a reimagining.</text></comment> | <story><title>A Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language</title><url>http://waterstechnology.com/waters/feature/2476518/the-infancy-of-julia-an-inside-look-at-how-traders-and-economists-are-using-the-julia-programming-language</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>This is digital Stockhold syndrome.<p>Excel is something managers and executives can understand, so it became the default language for data analysis. Now technologists trapped using it have to create ex post facto justifications for why it&#x27;s really &quot;just misunderstood.&quot;<p>Excel is massively slow, makes it easy for beginners to make massive mistakes, computes lots of types in very odd manners, performs floating point operations wrong, and leads to spaghetti code that is a rat&#x27;s nest of incomprehensible cross-references.<p>Worst of all, the lack of code path visibility usually leads to a bus factor of 1.<p>Sure, one <i>can</i> learn to operate Excel for data analysis with a decent level of efficiency, in the same manner one <i>can</i> cross the Pacific in a canoe, but both are still terrible tools for the job.</text></item><item><author>valarauca1</author><text>The reason for this is simple. Excel is<p>1. An incredibly powerful tool.<p>2. No bar of entry (cost aside, true in corporate environment).<p>3. Very gradual learning curve.<p>4. The efficiency gain vs time invested is exponential.<p>Power Excel users, much like their VIM&#x2F;Emacs counter parts don&#x27;t use a mouse. It is just keyboard short cuts [1][2]. This makes them insanely productive.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jFSf5YhYQbw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jFSf5YhYQbw</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0nbkaYsR94c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;0nbkaYsR94c</a></text></item><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>Most financial firms need their quants to worry less about the new programming language hotness, and more about moving entire systems off unbelievably complicated Excel spreadsheets.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>valarauca1</author><text>You are projecting so hard I could show PwerPoints off your forehead. I take it you are rather unhappy in your line of work?<p>I&#x27;m just a lowly DBA re-posting and summarizing comments [1] for karma.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12448545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12448545</a></text></comment> |
38,057,816 | 38,054,630 | 1 | 3 | 38,052,416 | train | <story><title>React use C</title><url>https://github.com/elnardu/react-use-c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>junon</author><text>TL:DR it&#x27;s a meme.<p>The context here (as I understand it) is that Next.js, a popular React-like framework that allows (in a way) coding both the server and browser portions of a web app in one codebase, such that each portion is extracted at runtime and automatically wired up via API calls. This is a simplification but it&#x27;s how you can think of it.<p>They&#x27;ve now introduced an even tighter way of introducing server code into what are otherwise frontend React components by piggie backing off the old &quot;use strict&quot; directive syntax, called &quot;use server&quot;, allowing you to interleave - directly and inline - the client and browser code.<p>Many a meme have been created, half-jokingly comparing it to PHP, ranging from the supportive jest, to the very seriously critical, as one would expect the internet to do.<p>Some of those memes have been in the form of &quot;use ___&quot;, such as &quot;use binary&quot;, &quot;use php&quot;, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t use frontend frameworks much these days so maybe someone can correct me on some of this, but hopefully this helps explain it a bit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextjs.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;app&#x2F;api-reference&#x2F;functions&#x2F;server-actions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextjs.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;app&#x2F;api-reference&#x2F;functions&#x2F;server-a...</a></text></item><item><author>cultofmetatron</author><text>I&#x27;ve been out of the node community for over 5 years but this seems in line with the &quot;hurr durr use javascript for everything!!&quot; crew. can someone tell me if this is a parody cuz I seriously can&#x27;t tell anymore?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sebastianconcpt</author><text>Rauch made a meme generator now<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samgen.vercel.app&#x2F;GYVwdgxgLglg9mABAITnA1gWwIYCd0AUA3ogM4A2IA5ogL4CUiRAUIorgKZQi5IGttEAHgBGIKFAQDBiYHFyYAgtHhgAvEWykAnpEQFGagHxNpMxACIQpDmQ64AbvYsBuMzOwB3bDChkAjuQABgCSAHIAygCiAEoAKojhcQDyKGhYeOik%2BhTUjABqigAyAKpREfoAJES5VAwuQW7mdLRmRu7CqBg4%2BCEQCIgA9O0yQoNiEggjiPTMtEA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samgen.vercel.app&#x2F;GYVwdgxgLglg9mABAITnA1gWwIYCd0AUA3...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>React use C</title><url>https://github.com/elnardu/react-use-c</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>junon</author><text>TL:DR it&#x27;s a meme.<p>The context here (as I understand it) is that Next.js, a popular React-like framework that allows (in a way) coding both the server and browser portions of a web app in one codebase, such that each portion is extracted at runtime and automatically wired up via API calls. This is a simplification but it&#x27;s how you can think of it.<p>They&#x27;ve now introduced an even tighter way of introducing server code into what are otherwise frontend React components by piggie backing off the old &quot;use strict&quot; directive syntax, called &quot;use server&quot;, allowing you to interleave - directly and inline - the client and browser code.<p>Many a meme have been created, half-jokingly comparing it to PHP, ranging from the supportive jest, to the very seriously critical, as one would expect the internet to do.<p>Some of those memes have been in the form of &quot;use ___&quot;, such as &quot;use binary&quot;, &quot;use php&quot;, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t use frontend frameworks much these days so maybe someone can correct me on some of this, but hopefully this helps explain it a bit.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextjs.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;app&#x2F;api-reference&#x2F;functions&#x2F;server-actions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextjs.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;app&#x2F;api-reference&#x2F;functions&#x2F;server-a...</a></text></item><item><author>cultofmetatron</author><text>I&#x27;ve been out of the node community for over 5 years but this seems in line with the &quot;hurr durr use javascript for everything!!&quot; crew. can someone tell me if this is a parody cuz I seriously can&#x27;t tell anymore?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sophiebits</author><text>One clarification: client and server code are never mixed within the same file. &quot;use server&quot; can only be used in server files and marks code that the client can call back into.</text></comment> |
14,537,569 | 14,537,100 | 1 | 2 | 14,536,410 | train | <story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alaskamiller</author><text>Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it&#x27;s a great space. There&#x27;s a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There&#x27;s a big stage area and the corners are furnished to be pretty cozy.<p>Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live&#x2F;work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.<p>The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.<p>I&#x27;ve been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I&#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.<p>I&#x27;ve built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.<p>Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000&#x27;s, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010&#x27;s with streaming Netflix.<p>And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.<p>No ones goes to the office anymore, it&#x27;s too lonely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavel_lishin</author><text>&gt; <i>The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.</i><p>Isn&#x27;t that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home.<p>&gt; <i>I&#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.</i><p>I&#x27;m glad that&#x27;s working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I&#x27;m on-call that week.</text></comment> | <story><title>Automattic is closing its San Francisco office as most employees work remotely</title><url>https://qz.com/1002655/the-company-behind-wordpress-is-closing-its-gorgeous-san-francisco-office-because-its-employees-never-show-up/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alaskamiller</author><text>Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it&#x27;s a great space. There&#x27;s a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There&#x27;s a big stage area and the corners are furnished to be pretty cozy.<p>Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live&#x2F;work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at.<p>The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up.<p>I&#x27;ve been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I&#x27;ve built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM.<p>I&#x27;ve built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore.<p>Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000&#x27;s, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010&#x27;s with streaming Netflix.<p>And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant.<p>No ones goes to the office anymore, it&#x27;s too lonely.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andygcook</author><text>I don&#x27;t think this is WordPress employees taking a mile when given an inch by working remotely all the time. I believe WordPress encourages employees <i>not</i> to regularly go to the office. The reason being is they don&#x27;t want a small faction of the company to become essentially collocated while the rest of the company is distributed, thus breaking their communication flows. Remote works for WordPress because almost all communication gets archived in Slack, email or p2 (their internal social network built on WordPress). Anyone can see what&#x27;s going on or get caught up asynchronously. It&#x27;s pretty much guaranteed that in a collocated environment some of that communication would happen offline IRL, and others would miss out on it.</text></comment> |
10,985,468 | 10,985,576 | 1 | 3 | 10,984,775 | train | <story><title>GitHub Outage</title><url>https://github.com/#2016-01-27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceptes</author><text>Every time this happens people make clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose. But once GitHub comes back up, everyone just gets back to work, trusting and relying on it as much as ever. Eventually it goes down again, and we come back to complain. Convenience is the only thing that we seem to value. (I&#x27;m no different, which makes my comment completely hypocritical.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spb</author><text>&gt; clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose<p>Yeah, but they&#x27;d be wrong about that purpose.<p>Distributed systems used by people (eg. email, BitTorrent) always have their major hubs (Gmail, The Pirate Bay). That&#x27;s understandable: no product reaches critical mass without a main stream. The strength of a distributed system isn&#x27;t that it has no points of failure: it&#x27;s that, in the event of a significant failure in an established node (eg. TPB&#x27;s downtime at the end of 2014), the community can retarget around a new solution (eg. KickassTorrents) at the point in which the inconvenience of the downtime outweighs the inconvenience of switching habits, without a significant dip in service associated with the switch.<p>In contrast, a truly centralized system like BitKeeper would just outright <i>block</i> progress if the central node were to deny access (which was, of course, the purpose that led to devs like Linus Torvalds changing their focus for a few months, so they they could scale back to full kernel production as they constructed a workable alternative, in Git).</text></comment> | <story><title>GitHub Outage</title><url>https://github.com/#2016-01-27</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Perceptes</author><text>Every time this happens people make clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we&#x27;re all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose. But once GitHub comes back up, everyone just gets back to work, trusting and relying on it as much as ever. Eventually it goes down again, and we come back to complain. Convenience is the only thing that we seem to value. (I&#x27;m no different, which makes my comment completely hypocritical.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niutech</author><text>Companies&#x2F;people don&#x27;t learn on their mistakes. Almost everything is on GitHub nowadays. This makes it a SPOF even if Git itself is distributed. More companies should host their projects on premises. There are good open source alternatives to GitHub: Apache Allura, Fossil, GitBucket, GitLab, Phabricator, and Redmine.</text></comment> |
31,960,529 | 31,959,227 | 1 | 2 | 31,957,118 | train | <story><title>Goodbye, Feedly</title><url>https://erikgahner.dk/2022/goodbye-feedly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blacklight</author><text>RSS is basically impossible to monetize. It&#x27;s a protocol to access content. Monetizing RSS is like trying to monetize HTTP.<p>The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can&#x27;t offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they&#x27;ve come up with...<p>Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I&#x27;m not among those people, and many other people are not.<p>I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn&#x27;t need and never asked for.<p>I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don&#x27;t want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.<p>Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don&#x27;t have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I&#x27;m not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.</text></item><item><author>longrod</author><text>Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?<p>Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.<p>What the author labels as &quot;cluttered&quot; is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that&#x27;s just UI.<p>I am not saying don&#x27;t move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don&#x27;t really make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavel_lishin</author><text>&gt; <i>The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can&#x27;t offer.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if I agree; I pay Newsblur a yearly fee because it&#x27;s worth it to me having a centralized web-app that I don&#x27;t have to self-host (and consequently, don&#x27;t have to worry about paying for, or hitting rate limits, etc.) with a nice UI and a few features like sorting by folder.<p>Granted, I have no idea how much it costs to run Newsblur; I certainly hope they&#x27;re at least breaking even. I also don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m a typical-enough user.</text></comment> | <story><title>Goodbye, Feedly</title><url>https://erikgahner.dk/2022/goodbye-feedly/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>blacklight</author><text>RSS is basically impossible to monetize. It&#x27;s a protocol to access content. Monetizing RSS is like trying to monetize HTTP.<p>The problem is that companies try to monetize RSS, and the only way of doing so is to provide features that RSS can&#x27;t offer. AI-curated feeds, integrations with X or Y, nudges to let go of RSS entirely for some applications and instead use whatever integration they&#x27;ve come up with...<p>Some people may be happy with this. Some people may only care about the information they eventually get, not HOW they get it. But I&#x27;m not among those people, and many other people are not.<p>I personally felt very annoyed by Feedly nagging me on a daily basis to upgrade in order to get features that I didn&#x27;t need and never asked for.<p>I feel like being approached every day by a dude who wants to sell me a vaccum cleaner that I don&#x27;t want. And of course I understand that they also need to make money, but they should also respect those who simply want an RSS reader and are insensitive to all these campaigns.<p>Thats the reason why I moved from Feedly to a self-hosted Miniflux instance (and Nextcloud News before it). If I host it myself, then I don&#x27;t have to pay anyone for hosting my feeds, and I&#x27;m not supposed to be targeted by marketing campaigns to pull money out of my wallet on a daily basis.</text></item><item><author>longrod</author><text>Going through the article I realized this attitude is what eventually kills some really good software. If a software does what you expect it to do and does it well but includes a few prompts here and there for marketing purposes...is that really so bad?<p>Live and let live, I say. Not everyone is running a charity and Feedly is nowhere even near the top of the list of software ripping off their users or selling their data to make money.<p>What the author labels as &quot;cluttered&quot; is really not that cluttered at all. It looks much better than an completely empty list in the alternative they prefer. But that&#x27;s just UI.<p>I am not saying don&#x27;t move to another alternative. I am just saying that the reasons the author is calling Feedly out for are unjustified and don&#x27;t really make sense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Deletionk</author><text>I&#x27;m using the Feedly app not paid since Google shut down theirs.<p>I have no clue what you mean.<p>Where do they show this daily?<p>And don&#x27;t get me wrong, you traided self management against a nag pop up? It&#x27;s your choice but Feedly still does it with a reasonable offering.<p>And I actually thinking about going pro to remove all the rumor news shit I don&#x27;t care and the cve feature sounds nice as well.</text></comment> |
14,980,666 | 14,980,634 | 1 | 3 | 14,979,979 | train | <story><title>US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons</title><url>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cuba-us-diplomats-go-deaf-state-department-sonic-weapon-heather-nauert-donald-trump-raul-castro-a7885551.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapperdapper</author><text>Interesting one. I remember I went to the local One Stop with my son - he was about 15 at the time. He couldn&#x27;t bear standing outside - he said the noise was unbearable. I said &quot;what noise&quot;?<p>Apparently they used some kind of sonic device that emits sound that can only be heard by teenagers, and it was incredibly effective - they wouldn&#x27;t hang around outside the shop more than a moment longer than necessary. I do wonder whether it caused any damage though?<p>One Stop was later bought by Tesco and they got rid of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ourmandave</author><text>That&#x27;s the Mosquito Anti Loitering Device<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.movingsoundtech.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.movingsoundtech.com&#x2F;</a><p>It a high frequency that only young ears can hear that sounds like the whine of a mosquito. Old ears lose frequency range so aren&#x27;t bothered. It&#x27;s not harmful, just annoying.</text></comment> | <story><title>US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons</title><url>http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cuba-us-diplomats-go-deaf-state-department-sonic-weapon-heather-nauert-donald-trump-raul-castro-a7885551.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zapperdapper</author><text>Interesting one. I remember I went to the local One Stop with my son - he was about 15 at the time. He couldn&#x27;t bear standing outside - he said the noise was unbearable. I said &quot;what noise&quot;?<p>Apparently they used some kind of sonic device that emits sound that can only be heard by teenagers, and it was incredibly effective - they wouldn&#x27;t hang around outside the shop more than a moment longer than necessary. I do wonder whether it caused any damage though?<p>One Stop was later bought by Tesco and they got rid of it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chardok</author><text><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Mosquito" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Mosquito</a><p>Teens also have used this frequency as a ringtone in class as most teachers couldn&#x27;t hear it.</text></comment> |
24,478,932 | 24,478,684 | 1 | 3 | 24,476,300 | train | <story><title>Unusual Features of SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Lab Modification</title><url>https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X1_8aRb3bDu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannykwells</author><text>Not to ad hom the piece, but Miles Guo, funder of this work, is a controversial Steve Bannon associate and Chinese billionaire in exile. So, you know, might have an axe to grind.<p>Also, for a different, and published, perspective, see this piece:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41591-020-0820-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41591-020-0820-9</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mathw</author><text>I&#x27;ll definitely take the paper from Nature Medicine over the article by someone associated with Steve Bannon. I simply do not believe it is plausible that this many scientists are in on the massive cover-up that would be required to hide such evidence.</text></comment> | <story><title>Unusual Features of SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Lab Modification</title><url>https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X1_8aRb3bDu</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dannykwells</author><text>Not to ad hom the piece, but Miles Guo, funder of this work, is a controversial Steve Bannon associate and Chinese billionaire in exile. So, you know, might have an axe to grind.<p>Also, for a different, and published, perspective, see this piece:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41591-020-0820-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41591-020-0820-9</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dfischer</author><text>That’s enough to cause a leak in facts in my book. The straw that broke the camels back.</text></comment> |
22,316,165 | 22,316,230 | 1 | 2 | 22,315,920 | train | <story><title>DNSSEC root key signing ceremony postponed because they can't open a safe</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/13/iana_dnssec_ksk_delay/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Foxboron</author><text>&gt;during what was apparently a check on the system on Tuesday night – the day before the ceremony planned for 1300 PST (2100 UTC) Wednesday – IANA staff discovered that they couldn’t open one of the two safes. One of the locking mechanisms wouldn’t retract and so the safe stayed stubbornly shut.<p>I clicked randomly around in the linked livestream from November and came across what seems to be them having problems with Safe 2. I&#x27;m amazed this is streamed and they are actively showing the written pads towards the camera.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;erfsFJsapAs?t=680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;erfsFJsapAs?t=680</a></text></comment> | <story><title>DNSSEC root key signing ceremony postponed because they can't open a safe</title><url>https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/13/iana_dnssec_ksk_delay/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>erik_seaberg</author><text>I&#x27;m reminded of a story about Google&#x27;s internal password vault outage, where restoring service required opening a safe whose combination was of course in the password vault.</text></comment> |
10,834,575 | 10,834,033 | 1 | 3 | 10,828,089 | train | <story><title>What's new in Unicode 9.0</title><url>http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2016/01/whats-new-in-unicode-90.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edent</author><text>We managed to get Power Symbols into Unicode (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unicodepowersymbol.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unicodepowersymbol.com&#x2F;</a>) and it was all sparked by a conversation on HN <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6828102" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6828102</a></text></comment> | <story><title>What's new in Unicode 9.0</title><url>http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2016/01/whats-new-in-unicode-90.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chris_wot</author><text>I&#x27;m currently refactoring LibreOffice code around font handling, and I have to say text is <i>complicated</i>. I&#x27;ve had to do a lot of reading about Windows, Unix and OS X font and text handling, and to be honest I really think so far that Apple has the cleanest platform for handling text.<p>I could be wrong about this, and happy to be challenged (actually, I welcome it with some reasoning because I&#x27;m still getting my head around all the systems fully). Anyway, just an aside.</text></comment> |
30,881,741 | 30,881,586 | 1 | 3 | 30,878,489 | train | <story><title>A few things to know before stealing my 914</title><url>https://www.hagerty.com/media/advice/a-few-things-to-know-before-you-steal-my-914/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>On the actual flip side, there are plenty of people who properly maintain vintage sports cars instead of just talking about how much they know about them.<p>I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.<p>The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned&#x2F;maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking &quot;my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn&#x27;t properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it&quot; are purely owner error &#x2F; strongly counter-indicate &quot;I know a ton about cars.&quot;</text></item><item><author>theluketaylor</author><text>On the flip side, I know a ton about cars and actually own a german sports car of roughly this vintage and this rings incredibly true (and also hilarious). My car can&#x27;t be locked due to fear of it never opening again, starting the engine requires a delicate balance of the right amount of throttle and prayers the battery has enough charge, and selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.<p>The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>This is one of my favorite styles of writing. I have absolutely no clue what this person is talking about and have no interest in cars, yet I read every single word.<p>I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You&#x27;re Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>theluketaylor</author><text>The locks are stupidly expensive, like $1000 a door. I&#x27;d rather just not lock it. The starting issues are due to the carb needing a rebuild. It&#x27;s on my list, but there are bigger fish to fry. The battery is due to it being a former race car with a tiny, super light battery. It&#x27;s only designed to crank the engine a few times before it&#x27;s dead to save weight. 1st gear in non-syncro, so it&#x27;s for sure not that. It&#x27;s likely the linkage, but that&#x27;s a big job and won&#x27;t be worth doing for a few years along with a few other things at the same time.<p>It&#x27;s a cheap vintage car that isn&#x27;t worth spending any real money on. I could pour $40,000 into getting into concours shape, but it would only add 2-3 grand worth of value. Instead I drive and enjoy it.</text></comment> | <story><title>A few things to know before stealing my 914</title><url>https://www.hagerty.com/media/advice/a-few-things-to-know-before-you-steal-my-914/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>KennyBlanken</author><text>On the actual flip side, there are plenty of people who properly maintain vintage sports cars instead of just talking about how much they know about them.<p>I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.<p>The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned&#x2F;maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking &quot;my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn&#x27;t properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it&quot; are purely owner error &#x2F; strongly counter-indicate &quot;I know a ton about cars.&quot;</text></item><item><author>theluketaylor</author><text>On the flip side, I know a ton about cars and actually own a german sports car of roughly this vintage and this rings incredibly true (and also hilarious). My car can&#x27;t be locked due to fear of it never opening again, starting the engine requires a delicate balance of the right amount of throttle and prayers the battery has enough charge, and selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.<p>The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.</text></item><item><author>gkoberger</author><text>This is one of my favorite styles of writing. I have absolutely no clue what this person is talking about and have no interest in cars, yet I read every single word.<p>I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You&#x27;re Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>The-Bus</author><text>I think a faculty at a Motorsports Engineering School probably knows how to maintain vintage sports cars. Just because they own the car does not mean they need to maintain it.<p>This is also a humor article.</text></comment> |
11,136,707 | 11,136,667 | 1 | 3 | 11,136,399 | train | <story><title>Linode Security Advisory</title><url>https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-retrospective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text><i>Update: also, read this comment</i> right away. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11136948" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11136948</a><p>I find this update very hard to follow. Can someone tell me if I&#x27;m misreading it? I&#x27;m going to quote it twice, and then attempt to summarize:<p><i>After examining the image from our July investigation, we discovered software capable of generating TOTP codes if provided a TOTP key. We found software implementing the decryption method we use to secure TOTP keys, along with the secret key we use to encrypt them. We also found commands in the bash history that successfully generated a one-time code. Though the credentials found were unrelated to any of the unauthorized Linode Manager logins made in December, the discovery of this information significantly changed the seriousness of our investigation.</i><p>and then:<p><i>The findings of our security partner’s investigation concluded there was no evidence of abuse or misuse of Linode’s infrastructure that would have resulted in the disclosure of customer credentials. Furthermore, the security partner’s assessment of our infrastructure and applications did not yield a vector that would have provided this level of access.</i><p><i>Linode’s security team did discover a vulnerability in Lish’s SSH gateway that potentially could have been used to obtain information discovered on December 17, although we have no evidence to support this supposition. We immediately fixed the vulnerability.</i><p>Here is my read of what this says; I&#x27;d like to know if I&#x27;m wrong.<p>&quot;One of our customers got owned up in July, and gave us an attacker source address within Linode. We pickled up the attacker&#x27;s host. In December, we examined the pickled host, and found secrets related to the way we store 2FA credentials, indicating that our credentials database may have been compromised. In conclusion: we have no idea how that could have happened.&quot;<p>Am I missing something else?</text></comment> | <story><title>Linode Security Advisory</title><url>https://blog.linode.com/2016/02/19/security-investigation-retrospective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noir_lord</author><text>Not sure what to think about Linode anymore, on the one hand from a pure reliability point of view they have been bullet proof, had a few issues during the DDoS in December and I&#x27;ve always found their support to be good (the few times I&#x27;ve used them in 7 years).<p>On the other hand they&#x27;ve had security issues fairly regularly and their response to the DDoS was pretty poor.<p>That said if I was a cynic I&#x27;d say they probably have one of the best setups for dealing with future attacks (old joke about never firing an employee who made an expensive mistake because he&#x27;ll never make that mistake again) and <i>finally</i> seem to be taking security seriously, for me the list of changes all sound good (particulary open sourcing Linode Manager and tokenising CC&#x27;s had to reset a card because of them once before).<p>We are slowly moving a lot of stuff back to a DC up the road but we still have some stuff with them.</text></comment> |
17,463,399 | 17,463,549 | 1 | 3 | 17,463,161 | train | <story><title>U.S. employment conditions compare poorly to the rest of the developed world</title><url>https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/05/is-it-great-to-be-a-worker-in-the-us-not-compared-with-the-rest-of-the-developed-world/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>virmundi</author><text>What I don&#x27;t understand, and you may say that it&#x27;s the intrenched powers keeping the status quo, is why the US picks such poor implementations of certain ideas.<p>The article mentions low collective bargaining. Our model, as an American, is pretty much one union per vertical. There is the Teamsters. There are no unions that compete with the Teamsters. I believe that Germany has unions that fight each other for contracts and membership. At the same time our model is one filled with corruption. (Though I&#x27;ve never heard many complain about IBREW corruption.) Our auto union would rather see the company disappear than reduce wages, or have some of their members dismissed. All the while it&#x27;s common to hear stories of the Auto Workers Union defending drunk forklift drivers making north of 90k a year.<p>If it is just institutional power, why do we defend or allow this? I was watching Killer Mike on Colbert just now. He complained about the plight of blacks in poor communities. It seems like they are a microcosm of the general problems facing this country. He talked about how the governments kept people down. When he mentioned the communities affected (an abridged list I&#x27;m sure), they all had democratically elected officials by that community. The party hadn&#x27;t changed in 60 years. Why do they, and the US in general, allow these failures to continue? Tribalism?</text></comment> | <story><title>U.S. employment conditions compare poorly to the rest of the developed world</title><url>https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/05/is-it-great-to-be-a-worker-in-the-us-not-compared-with-the-rest-of-the-developed-world/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>snarfy</author><text>&gt; The United States and Mexico are the only countries in the entire study that don’t require any advance notice for individual firings.<p>This is why I never feel bad for quitting a job without giving the expected two week notice. They don&#x27;t give you any notice when they fire you.</text></comment> |
28,392,716 | 28,392,388 | 1 | 2 | 28,391,531 | train | <story><title>Ruby Is Still a Diamond</title><url>https://medium.com/retention-science/ruby-is-still-a-diamond-b789d2661266</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FigurativeVoid</author><text>The company I work for re-implemented out entire platform with Ruby on Rails. Even though it&#x27;s not super new, everyone has really fallen in love with ruby. The gem ecosystem and the community are great. Ruby is an absolute joy to program in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zionic</author><text>&gt; Ruby is an absolute joy to program in.<p>Really? At my company it seems like 90% of the tests are catching things that would be caught automatically if we had used a proper language with strong types&#x2F;compiler.<p>IMO Ruby is slow, not particularly beautiful (yes, this is subjective), and seems optimized for shoving crappy REST endpoints out the door as quickly as possible.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ruby Is Still a Diamond</title><url>https://medium.com/retention-science/ruby-is-still-a-diamond-b789d2661266</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FigurativeVoid</author><text>The company I work for re-implemented out entire platform with Ruby on Rails. Even though it&#x27;s not super new, everyone has really fallen in love with ruby. The gem ecosystem and the community are great. Ruby is an absolute joy to program in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codeduck</author><text>Rubygems is one of the best packaging systems I&#x27;ve used.</text></comment> |
17,271,947 | 17,270,482 | 1 | 3 | 17,269,938 | train | <story><title>Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok</title><url>https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psychometry</author><text>Technically, they&#x27;re both wrong. Button labels should be verbs. The Cancel - Open example from OS X is the right way to do a dialog box.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>udkyo</author><text>It&#x27;s awkward sometimes. AWX: &quot;Are you sure you want to cancel? Cancel&#x2F;Proceed&quot;<p>e.g. Cancel cancelling &#x2F; proceed to cancel. To me, that always seemed like a place where a simple &quot;Yes&#x2F;No&quot; would be more appropriate.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok</title><url>https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psychometry</author><text>Technically, they&#x27;re both wrong. Button labels should be verbs. The Cancel - Open example from OS X is the right way to do a dialog box.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tridentlead</author><text>Not really, Ok can be a verb. You can “Ok” a change.</text></comment> |
579,500 | 579,315 | 1 | 2 | 579,105 | train | <story><title>Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife</title><url>http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060301/confessions_Printer_Friendly.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sutro</author><text>This is one of the better pieces linked to from HN in some time, yet most of the comments here are critical of either the author or her husband or both. Critics, please raise your hands if either you or your spouse has raised $10M in a depressed economy, nationally launched a new consumer product into a hyper-competitive industry, and achieved multi-million dollar revenues while trying to hold a marriage and family together. Anyone? Bueller?</text></comment> | <story><title>Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife</title><url>http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060301/confessions_Printer_Friendly.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>christofd</author><text>What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his brand, because he didn't specify the contract under which they created design work for him, is telling. He seems like an energetic and very creative sales guy, who burns easily through money, but doesn't look at details enough. Also, his staff turnover rate doesn't sound good either.<p>Why is he always so unstable? Come on, if you have an account like Costco or 7Eleven, you are making money. You should be able to run a stable business taking it from there - but then the job is not about being that creative anymore but about operations (just like in a big company).<p>An entrepreneur friend of mine, who has been in business for over 40 years always says: "It's not what you make, it's what you keep!". Entrepreneurship does not need to be this extreme as it's portrayed here. I know enough company owners that coach sports for youth teams on the weekends and spend enough time with family.</text></comment> |
33,977,162 | 33,977,036 | 1 | 2 | 33,974,265 | train | <story><title>Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>What I&#x27;m worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says &quot;Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps.&quot; App developers have a lot more influence on mobile devices than they do on desktop OSes. This change would shift even more power to those large developers.<p>You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google.</text></item><item><author>themagician</author><text>Honestly, Apple could simply do exactly what they do for macOS now. The two are close enough to a merge at the architectural level that it would not be difficult. macOS is one step away from removing the ability to install unsigned software by default.<p>If you want to run unsigned software or extensions you will have to boot into a recovery console and change the security model. The warning dialogs will be enough to discourage most use. Things like ApplePay and iCloud may be disabled depending how far you reduce security, but you&#x27;ll be able to do whatever you want.<p>I think it be a great solution to have a more uniform solution across all devices and platforms. It would create a boom in the hacker community, while still keeping &gt;99.99% of users running from sealed system snapshots.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>Yet another example of the Facebook boogeyman being trotted out in an effort to explain why lack of user freedom, lack of consumer choice and anticompetitive business practices are actually good for the customers that are being fleeced by them.<p>This didn&#x27;t happen on Android, macOS, or Windows, despite all of them allowing alternative app stores.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple to allow outside app stores in overhaul spurred by EU laws</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slg</author><text>What I&#x27;m worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says &quot;Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps.&quot; App developers have a lot more influence on mobile devices than they do on desktop OSes. This change would shift even more power to those large developers.<p>You can say a lot of negative things about Apple, but their incentives lined up with the end users more often than companies like Meta and Google.</text></item><item><author>themagician</author><text>Honestly, Apple could simply do exactly what they do for macOS now. The two are close enough to a merge at the architectural level that it would not be difficult. macOS is one step away from removing the ability to install unsigned software by default.<p>If you want to run unsigned software or extensions you will have to boot into a recovery console and change the security model. The warning dialogs will be enough to discourage most use. Things like ApplePay and iCloud may be disabled depending how far you reduce security, but you&#x27;ll be able to do whatever you want.<p>I think it be a great solution to have a more uniform solution across all devices and platforms. It would create a boom in the hacker community, while still keeping &gt;99.99% of users running from sealed system snapshots.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>satvikpendem</author><text>&gt; <i>What I&#x27;m worried about is if the next time we open WhatsApp we see a splash message that says &quot;Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are moving to the Meta Store! Please restart your phone and follow these easy steps to continue using these apps.&quot;</i><p>Why do people continue to tout this as some sort of gotcha? Android has multiple app stores yet this doesn&#x27;t occur.<p>However, what I <i>do</i> like is that if I want to download some other client for Instagram from F-Droid for example, I can, unlike in the Apple App Store. Currently I use one that blocks apps, enhances image quality on upload and download, etc. Not really possible on iOS.</text></comment> |
9,576,343 | 9,576,072 | 1 | 2 | 9,574,604 | train | <story><title>Snowden Sees Some Victories, from a Distance</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/world/europe/snowden-sees-some-victories-from-a-distance.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dimino</author><text>Almost everyone I talk to in person thinks Snowden is a criminal. These people believe the US government was caught doing something it shouldn&#x27;t have, but Snowden himself is a bad guy to these folks because he&#x27;s seen as betraying his country.<p>I think HN is much more pro-Snowden than the general population is, but I think the general population doesn&#x27;t deny the value of exposing what the US government did. I live in DC however, so there&#x27;s certainly a pro-government feeling in this down, possibly more so than many other places in the US.<p>Edit: To add some support for my anecdotes, here&#x27;s a somewhat recent poll I found from April 21st citing 64% of people hold a negative opinion of Snowden [0].<p>[0] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;edward-snowden-unpopular-at-home-a-hero-abroad-poll-finds" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;edward-snowde...</a></text></item><item><author>jgrahamc</author><text>I sometimes think that HN is pro-Snowden. Are there folks here who see him as less a hero more a villain?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derf_</author><text>Would this be the same population polled in 2010 when 41% of them could not name the vice president of the United States in an open-ended (not multiple choice) question? [0] Or last September when 64% of them could not name the three branches of government? [1] (35% could not name a single one)<p>My favorite poll is this one: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewinternet.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;americans-privacy-strategies-post-snowden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewinternet.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;americans-privacy-stra...</a><p>Buried near the bottom is, &quot;60% believe it is acceptable to monitor the communications of American leaders.&quot;<p>Raise your hand if you think it&#x27;s good for a healthy democracy for the executive branch to monitor the private communications of congresspeople, senators, and federal judges?<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewforum.org&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;28&#x2F;u-s-religious-knowledge-survey-who-knows-what-about-religion&#x2F;#Nonreligious" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewforum.org&#x2F;2010&#x2F;09&#x2F;28&#x2F;u-s-religious-knowledge-s...</a><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org&#x2F;americans-know-surprisingly-little-about-their-government-survey-finds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org&#x2F;americans-know-su...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Snowden Sees Some Victories, from a Distance</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/world/europe/snowden-sees-some-victories-from-a-distance.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dimino</author><text>Almost everyone I talk to in person thinks Snowden is a criminal. These people believe the US government was caught doing something it shouldn&#x27;t have, but Snowden himself is a bad guy to these folks because he&#x27;s seen as betraying his country.<p>I think HN is much more pro-Snowden than the general population is, but I think the general population doesn&#x27;t deny the value of exposing what the US government did. I live in DC however, so there&#x27;s certainly a pro-government feeling in this down, possibly more so than many other places in the US.<p>Edit: To add some support for my anecdotes, here&#x27;s a somewhat recent poll I found from April 21st citing 64% of people hold a negative opinion of Snowden [0].<p>[0] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;edward-snowden-unpopular-at-home-a-hero-abroad-poll-finds" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;edward-snowde...</a></text></item><item><author>jgrahamc</author><text>I sometimes think that HN is pro-Snowden. Are there folks here who see him as less a hero more a villain?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atom-morgan</author><text>&gt; These people believe the US government was caught doing something it shouldn&#x27;t have, but Snowden himself is a bad guy to these folks because he&#x27;s seen as betraying his country.<p>That logic should scare the living hell out of people.</text></comment> |
19,974,000 | 19,973,630 | 1 | 2 | 19,971,924 | train | <story><title>Technical Debt</title><url>https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kashyapc</author><text>[I recall posting this here in the past, but worth re-posting.]<p>The &quot;handy rule&quot; from the book <i>Team Geek</i> -- the newer edition is called <i>Debugging Teams</i>[1]. It&#x27;s from chapter &quot;Offensive versus Defensive work&quot;:<p><i>[...] After this bad experience, Ben began to categorize all work as either “offensive” or “defensive.” Offensive work is typically effort toward new user-visible features—shiny things that are easy to show outsiders and get them excited about, or things that noticeably advance the sexiness of a product (e.g., improved UI, speed, or interoperability). Defensive work is effort aimed at the long-term health of a product (e.g., code refactoring, feature rewrites, schema changes, data migra- tion, or improved emergency monitoring). Defensive activities make the product more maintainable, stable, and reliable. And yet, despite the fact that they’re absolutely critical, you get no political credit for doing them. If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still. And to make wordplay on an old maxim: “Perception is nine-tenths of the law.”</i><p><i>We now have a handy rule we live by: a team should never spend more than one-third to one-half of its time and energy on defensive work, no matter how much technical debt there is. Any more time spent is a recipe for political suicide.</i><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920042372.do" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920042372.do</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CodeMage</author><text><i>&gt; If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still.</i><p>This is precisely what bothers me about the vast majority of software out there. It&#x27;s hard to find software that doesn&#x27;t suffer from what I call, for lack of a better name, &quot;forced evolution&quot;: the devs keep fiddling with the UI and adding new features of dubious usefulness. Meanwhile, the quality slowly, but surely deteriorates: the software gets bloated, runs slower, becomes harder to use, etc.</text></comment> | <story><title>Technical Debt</title><url>https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kashyapc</author><text>[I recall posting this here in the past, but worth re-posting.]<p>The &quot;handy rule&quot; from the book <i>Team Geek</i> -- the newer edition is called <i>Debugging Teams</i>[1]. It&#x27;s from chapter &quot;Offensive versus Defensive work&quot;:<p><i>[...] After this bad experience, Ben began to categorize all work as either “offensive” or “defensive.” Offensive work is typically effort toward new user-visible features—shiny things that are easy to show outsiders and get them excited about, or things that noticeably advance the sexiness of a product (e.g., improved UI, speed, or interoperability). Defensive work is effort aimed at the long-term health of a product (e.g., code refactoring, feature rewrites, schema changes, data migra- tion, or improved emergency monitoring). Defensive activities make the product more maintainable, stable, and reliable. And yet, despite the fact that they’re absolutely critical, you get no political credit for doing them. If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still. And to make wordplay on an old maxim: “Perception is nine-tenths of the law.”</i><p><i>We now have a handy rule we live by: a team should never spend more than one-third to one-half of its time and energy on defensive work, no matter how much technical debt there is. Any more time spent is a recipe for political suicide.</i><p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920042372.do" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;0636920042372.do</a></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WrtCdEvrydy</author><text>&gt; If you spend all your time on them, people perceive your product as holding still<p>I&#x27;ve always found this hilarious... we spend thousands on hiring developers and one of the primary goals is to find a well rounded person who is okay doing maintenance tasks and ensuring proper code quality and knows how to write effective tests. A short time later, I come on to a project just for a status update and find the developers cutting tests and maintenance tasks at the orders of the PO who then complains that tickets are getting larger and larger.</text></comment> |
12,256,619 | 12,256,548 | 1 | 3 | 12,254,504 | train | <story><title>AI’s Language Problem</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602094/ais-language-problem/?set=602129</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikpukinskis</author><text>No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don&#x27;t understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I&#x27;m not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they will only be able to understand us to the extent that they have body parts and social experiences that are analogous to ours.<p>This isn&#x27;t an engineering problem, it&#x27;s a philosophical problem: We are blind to most things. We can only see what we can relate to personally. We can use language and other symbol systems to expand our understanding by permuting and recombining our personal experiences, but everything is grounded in our interactive developmental trajectory.<p>The kitten-in-a-cart experiment demonstrates this clearly: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;the-seriously-creepy-two-kitten-experiment-1442107174" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;the-seriously-creepy-two-kitten-exper...</a> Interaction is crucial for perception. Sensation is not experience.<p>And here&#x27;s the rub: Once you give an AI an animal-like personal developmental trajectory to use for grounding the semantics of their symbol systems, you end up with something which is not particularly different or better than a human cyborg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>I believe we can get AI from just text. Obviously that won&#x27;t work for babies, because babies get bored quickly looking at text. AIs can be forced to read billions of words in mere hours!<p>Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words. The famous example is the vector &quot;king&quot; minus the vector for &quot;man&quot; plus &quot;woman&quot; equals &quot;queen&quot;. It&#x27;s learning the meaning of words, and the relationships between them.<p>Recurrent NNs, using similar techniques, but with much more complexity, can learn to predict the next word in a sentence very well. They can learn to write responses that are almost indistinguishable from humans. And it&#x27;s incredible this works at all, given RNNs have only a few thousand neurons at most, and a few days of training, compared to humans&#x27; billions of neurons trained over a lifetime.<p>All of the information of our world is contained in text. Humans have produced billions of books, papers, articles, and internet comments. Billions of times more information than any human could read in their entire lifetime. Any information you can imagine is contained in text somewhere. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s necessary for AIs to be able to see, or interact with the world in any way.<p>If you can predict the word a human would say next, with enough accuracy, then you could also produce answers indistinguishable from theirs. Meaning you could pass the Turing test, and perform any language task they could do just as well. So language prediction alone may be sufficient for AGI.<p>This is the theory behind the Hutter Prize, which proposes that predicting (compressing) wikipedia&#x27;s text is a measure of AI progress. The Hutter Prize isn&#x27;t perfect (it&#x27;s only a sample of wikipedia, which is very small compared to all the text humans have produced), but the idea is solid.</text></comment> | <story><title>AI’s Language Problem</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602094/ais-language-problem/?set=602129</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>erikpukinskis</author><text>No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don&#x27;t understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I&#x27;m not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they will only be able to understand us to the extent that they have body parts and social experiences that are analogous to ours.<p>This isn&#x27;t an engineering problem, it&#x27;s a philosophical problem: We are blind to most things. We can only see what we can relate to personally. We can use language and other symbol systems to expand our understanding by permuting and recombining our personal experiences, but everything is grounded in our interactive developmental trajectory.<p>The kitten-in-a-cart experiment demonstrates this clearly: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;the-seriously-creepy-two-kitten-experiment-1442107174" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.gizmodo.com&#x2F;the-seriously-creepy-two-kitten-exper...</a> Interaction is crucial for perception. Sensation is not experience.<p>And here&#x27;s the rub: Once you give an AI an animal-like personal developmental trajectory to use for grounding the semantics of their symbol systems, you end up with something which is not particularly different or better than a human cyborg.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digitalarborist</author><text>It&#x27;s probably a mistake to assume that just because it&#x27;s the way we do it that it has to be the way machines do it. Although that&#x27;s usually the initial assumption. In the early days of flight most attempts were based on birds, similarly submersible vehicles were based on fish. We know now it&#x27;s better to use propellers. It could be we just haven&#x27;t found what is analogous to a propeller for the AI world.</text></comment> |
10,224,292 | 10,223,275 | 1 | 2 | 10,222,831 | train | <story><title>JS Sequence Diagrams – UML Sequence Diagram in SVG from Text</title><url>http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>octygen</author><text>When I was at Disney back in 2011, we used this daily for a year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.websequencediagrams.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.websequencediagrams.com&#x2F;</a><p>If you have a good tech architect running a meeting this tool is great to create sequence flows on the fly. It&#x27;s also got great builtin features like exporting and an API for integration.<p>Last but not least, it has the Rational Rose theme @haddr mentioned but my personal favorite is boring ol&#x27; Blue Modern</text></comment> | <story><title>JS Sequence Diagrams – UML Sequence Diagram in SVG from Text</title><url>http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tobych</author><text>Is this the same syntax that PlantUML uses?
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plantuml.com&#x2F;sequence.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plantuml.com&#x2F;sequence.html</a></text></comment> |
41,532,848 | 41,532,521 | 1 | 2 | 41,524,298 | train | <story><title>DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine</title><url>https://www.diypresso.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ManDeJan</author><text>A neat project for sure but as it stands this has major safety issues. The control logic is able to lock up and keep the boilers heating element in an forever &quot;on&quot; state till something snaps. I couldn&#x27;t find a mention of safety in the manual nor see any mechanical safety failsafes in case of overheating.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelt</author><text><i>&gt; I couldn&#x27;t [...] see any mechanical safety failsafes in case of overheating.</i><p>On the assembly instructions, page 39 shows the boiler assembly has a therm-o-disc thermostat fixed to the top. It&#x27;s not labelled, you just have to recognise it. The schematic on page 44 shows it&#x27;s wired in series with the boiler&#x27;s heater. That provides redundancy for the main temperature control, which is presumably the microcontroller sensing from the PT1000<p>Page 32 also describes the installation of an overpressure valve (which appears to return water to the cold tank?)<p>The machine does lack hardware run-dry protection though; as far as I can tell, it relies on a load cell to detect if there&#x27;s water in the tank. If you ran it without water to conduct heat from the heating element to the thermostat, the thermostat wouldn&#x27;t function. So it&#x27;s not entirely safe, as you say.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diypresso.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2024&#x2F;05&#x2F;2024-05-27-manual_diyPresso_One.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;diypresso.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2024&#x2F;05&#x2F;2024-05-27-...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>DiyPresso: DIY Espresso Machine</title><url>https://www.diypresso.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ManDeJan</author><text>A neat project for sure but as it stands this has major safety issues. The control logic is able to lock up and keep the boilers heating element in an forever &quot;on&quot; state till something snaps. I couldn&#x27;t find a mention of safety in the manual nor see any mechanical safety failsafes in case of overheating.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nabilhat</author><text>A thermal fuse isn&#x27;t for overpressure control, it&#x27;s intended to trip before a physical overpressure control vents superheated steam. Both provide failover redundancy independent of operational heater controls.<p>There isn&#x27;t enough detail of the boiler to tell if there&#x27;s an overpressure relief valve. The boiler can&#x27;t be made safe without one. If they&#x27;re cheap enough to be standard in cheap knockoff moka pots one should be here...<p>This machine&#x27;s wiring diagram shows an unlabelled shape wired in series with what might possibly be the heating element and a shape with &quot;ssr&quot; in its label. Which places the first unlabelled shape in the right place to be a thermal fuse or switch. If they&#x27;re cheap enough to be standard in Mr Coffee machines one should be here...<p>Safety discussion in this project is conspicuously absent. Knowledgable users shouldn&#x27;t be making assumptions like this about safety features. Assumptions and safety aren&#x27;t compatible. Average users should be informed in detail about the safety features they&#x27;re tasked with assembling.</text></comment> |
25,465,002 | 25,465,000 | 1 | 2 | 25,464,475 | train | <story><title>Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature</title><url>https://thebigtech.substack.com/p/facebook-criticising-apples-ios-14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amatecha</author><text>I miss the late-90&#x27;s web pretty much every day :(</text></item><item><author>headmelted</author><text>The web used to <i>have</i> ads, not <i>be</i> ads. Now it&#x27;s permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for.<p>Whether it&#x27;s Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web&#x27;s a broken pay-to-win mess and I don&#x27;t see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.</text></item><item><author>ogre_codes</author><text>Facebook and Google have completely smashed the online advertising industry. The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all the profit out of the room. The Open Web is a total shambles because of nonsense from Google and Facebook so many companies don&#x27;t even have an alternative to fall back on... Now Facebook is claiming they are defending small business. What a joke.<p>Anything which causes Facebook to make this much noise must be good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpetry</author><text>I dont miss popups or popunders. Popup blockers had not been able to block every one, it was so annoying.</text></comment> | <story><title>Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature</title><url>https://thebigtech.substack.com/p/facebook-criticising-apples-ios-14</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amatecha</author><text>I miss the late-90&#x27;s web pretty much every day :(</text></item><item><author>headmelted</author><text>The web used to <i>have</i> ads, not <i>be</i> ads. Now it&#x27;s permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for.<p>Whether it&#x27;s Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web&#x27;s a broken pay-to-win mess and I don&#x27;t see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.</text></item><item><author>ogre_codes</author><text>Facebook and Google have completely smashed the online advertising industry. The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all the profit out of the room. The Open Web is a total shambles because of nonsense from Google and Facebook so many companies don&#x27;t even have an alternative to fall back on... Now Facebook is claiming they are defending small business. What a joke.<p>Anything which causes Facebook to make this much noise must be good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>It was awful then too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8</a></text></comment> |
33,725,604 | 33,725,190 | 1 | 2 | 33,724,759 | train | <story><title>Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing</title><url>https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nehal3m</author><text>Hah, you can&#x27;t make this stuff up.<p>6.
Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing (newlearningonline.com)
33 points by indy 1 hour ago | hide | 5 comments<p>7.
Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (stackoverflow.blog)
329 points by TangerineDream 7 hours ago | hide | 189 comments</text></comment> | <story><title>Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing</title><url>https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>svnt</author><text>Socrates seems here he is mostly expressing the frustration that he cannot entrain a book into his methods, and that their authors cannot keep pace with him in dialogue.<p>But that was never the point of writing. The point is to use some small fraction of sensory+cognitive function to give yourself access to a separable, durable, redundant, and location-independent form of information.<p>Not touched on here but in other recent books is the possible loss of sensory+cognitive function that comes with simply learning to read and write in the first place. It’s possible this is the origin of the myth of Odin sacrificing an eye to read the runes.</text></comment> |
11,003,773 | 11,003,369 | 1 | 3 | 11,002,963 | train | <story><title>Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women-labor-work-force.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>visualsearchsv</author><text>I wish that NYTimes would differentiate between Individual indian States. Individual states have significant autonomy and depending upon the government elected can range from moderate to leftist. Largest indian states have populations similar to large nations such as Mexico ~ Maharashtra. And have huge variation in metrics like literacy rates ranging from 93% (Kerala ~ Canada ) to 63% (Bihar ~ Philippines).<p>~ is used to show country with similar population.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Indian_states_ranking_by_literacy_rate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Indian_states_ranking_by_liter...</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;indian-summary" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;indian-summary</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women-labor-work-force.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>shortsightedsid</author><text>The problem with India is that no stereotype really exists. For every truth, the opposite is also true. I wonder why the NY Times, the BBC etc.. focus so much on the negative. Does the idea of India go synonymously with poverty for them?<p>Yes. India has enormous challenges. But the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty in just 25 years.<p>It&#x27;s time the narrative changes.</text></comment> |
2,534,054 | 2,533,874 | 1 | 3 | 2,533,655 | train | <story><title>Y Combinator Accepts Record 60+ New Startups For Summer 2011</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/10/y-combinator-accepts-record-60-new-startups-for-summer-2011/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>As of last batch, which had 45 startups in it, we were able to give everyone the attention they needed, as measured by the results (= most observers thought w2011 was the best batch so far).</text></item><item><author>staunch</author><text>This makes YC a lot less interesting to me. Being one of ~150 founders vying for attention/advice/mindshare of YC is just not very compelling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daniel_levine</author><text>I am obviously a fan of YC. But, I would caution putting too much weight on what investors tell you or even their investment activity. At this point you are such a big deal, there is incentive to tell you whatever you want to hear.<p>Interestingly, much like investment portfolios (and most other things), investor opinion quality falls under some distribution. The opinions of a very small number of very no-nonsense, intelligent ones is probably the best indicator of batch quality. The rest matter very little.<p>On a related note, I think the distribution curve for YC batches probably shifts a minute amount to the right each batch but mostly fattens. Then, the range of investor opinions coupled with a growing positive bias creates what seems like a uniform larger shift to the right. Just speculation though.</text></comment> | <story><title>Y Combinator Accepts Record 60+ New Startups For Summer 2011</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/10/y-combinator-accepts-record-60-new-startups-for-summer-2011/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>As of last batch, which had 45 startups in it, we were able to give everyone the attention they needed, as measured by the results (= most observers thought w2011 was the best batch so far).</text></item><item><author>staunch</author><text>This makes YC a lot less interesting to me. Being one of ~150 founders vying for attention/advice/mindshare of YC is just not very compelling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fleaflicker</author><text>How can you judge a class so quickly? I think it's impossible to evaluate a class until 3+ years after YC.</text></comment> |
11,372,416 | 11,371,373 | 1 | 2 | 11,370,550 | train | <story><title>Fight</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/sports/boxing-youngstown-anthony-taylor-hamzah-aljahmi.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>padobson</author><text><i>Youngstown was a pugnacious steel city of 167,000 when Loew was born, with boxing clubs anchored in many neighborhoods. [...] A half-century later, Youngstown is down to a population of 65,000, a hemorrhaging of 100,000 people caused by steel-plant closings, a failure to diversify and the absence, so far, of a sustainable second act.</i><p>This is a fairly common story in the fighting world. The strength it takes to literally get punched in the face and keep moving forward is built as much by life circumstance as training.<p>I live in Warren, OH, about 10 minutes from Taylor&#x27;s home. I moved back here after I graduated in college in 2008. While building my career as a developer, I spent time working in a call center and breaking down cardboard on an assembly line at a local automotive plant.<p>In those places, the lack of hope is thick in the air. Attitudes are negative, humor is sarcastic and caustic, and dreams are sparse. Just about every business around here has it. Poor service is expected and understandable, frustration is inevitable, and poverty is cyclical.<p>It&#x27;s a common story in the rust belt. Hopes and dreams are one of Warren&#x27;s biggest exports - college graduates who never return, pro athletes who don&#x27;t look back, and successful entrepreneurs who struggle to find markets and skilled labor in the city limits to re-invest their fortunes. Instead they make donations. Their new businesses are built elsewhere. You&#x27;ll count as many missions and soup kitchens downtown as you will shops and restaurants.<p>Hamzah Aljahmi and Anthony Taylor are both tragic figures. Aljahmi was killed pursuing his dream, while Taylor&#x27;s dreams, undeterred by his physical deficits and crushing poverty, are now forever tainted. Like so many other would-be dreamers in Warren, he&#x27;ll have to fight off the encroaching bitterness or risk being consumed by it. If that happens, his best scenario is a few acidy laughs on an assembly line. If he overcomes this tragedy, his best case scenario is escape to a fighting life in Las Vegas.<p>I&#x27;ll be rooting for him. I hope to watch him on pay-per-view someday. In the meantime, I&#x27;ll be here, programming remotely, spending my spare cycles daydreaming about solutions to the despair of our common hometown.</text></comment> | <story><title>Fight</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/sports/boxing-youngstown-anthony-taylor-hamzah-aljahmi.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>luso_brazilian</author><text>A beautiful read. A barely related event is the fighter that chose to tap out (signaling that he gave up) instead of knocking out his clearly inferior opponent (and risk injuring him or causing permanent damage).<p>The commentary along with the video can be seen here [1] and it&#x27;s refreshing to see that people still have empathy and care about others.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mmafighting.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;5736360&#x2F;morning-report-ufc-fighter-taps-out-dana-white-faber-ludwig-cormier-henderson-renzo-gracie-mma-news" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mmafighting.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;5&#x2F;21&#x2F;5736360&#x2F;morning-report-...</a></text></comment> |
26,344,890 | 26,344,877 | 1 | 3 | 26,343,394 | train | <story><title>US Senators call on FCC to raise broadband definition to 100Mbs down and up</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ortusdux</author><text>My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110&#x2F;month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$&#x2F;month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulirwin</author><text>It is frustrating that people in an area with 1Gbps down are able to sign up for Starlink while I&#x27;m still waiting. I would pay $500&#x2F;mo for Starlink right now.<p>Currently paying $45&#x2F;mo for &quot;20Mbps&#x2F;2Mbps&quot; VDSL, $70&#x2F;mo for &quot;25Mbps&#x2F;5Mbps&quot; fixed wireless, and $110&#x2F;mo for 100GB of 45Mbps&#x2F;10Mbps LTE with $10&#x2F;10GB overage, to barely stay online in semi-rural America, and I&#x27;m technically even in a greater metro area. The only way I can have a reliable video call is by using LTE data.<p>The fact that my household meets the current FCC definition of broadband, such that companies feel like they don&#x27;t have to invest further because they&#x27;ve met their goal, would be laughable if it weren&#x27;t so infuriating. I would be over the moon excited for 25Mbps reliable upload, and 100+Mbps download.</text></comment> | <story><title>US Senators call on FCC to raise broadband definition to 100Mbs down and up</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ortusdux</author><text>My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110&#x2F;month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$&#x2F;month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wjp3</author><text>Just adding another data point: AT&amp;T fiber - 1G&#x2F;1G for $115&#x2F;mo. Austin, TX.<p>Edit: actually get those speeds both ways (~980&#x2F;980)</text></comment> |
30,742,164 | 30,742,333 | 1 | 2 | 30,742,073 | train | <story><title>Show HN: Typebeat: Keyboard-controlled music sequencer, sampler, and synth</title><url>https://github.com/kofigumbs/typebeat</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hkgumbs</author><text>Hi HN! I’ve been working on Typebeat for a year and a half, and I decided yesterday to make the code public. There’s also a website where you can download the macOS build and try an online demo:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typebeat.kofi.sexy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;typebeat.kofi.sexy</a><p>The project was initially conceived as “vim for music”. All of Typebeat is controlled by the 30 main character keys on the computer keyboard. The result is a workflow that’s a little tricky to learn but fast to use once mastered. (So I suppose I nailed the vim experience in that regard.) If you’d like to see how I use it at top speed, you can check out this 2-minute jam I made recently:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RT0qUB4gbas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RT0qUB4gbas</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Show HN: Typebeat: Keyboard-controlled music sequencer, sampler, and synth</title><url>https://github.com/kofigumbs/typebeat</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tiborsaas</author><text>I&#x27;m a long time bedroom producer and I find this tool an interesting concept, but I couldn&#x27;t get through the initial step to create a 4&#x2F;4 kick loop. There&#x27;s too much internal state going on with no indicators about what&#x27;s active or what mode I&#x27;m in that it feels more like a memory game than a fun music toy. Maybe it&#x27;s not a coincidence I&#x27;m not a vim&#x2F;emacs fan? :D<p>What I&#x27;d add is a few tutorial videos to explain the basic concepts from scratch.</text></comment> |
39,547,921 | 39,542,376 | 1 | 2 | 39,538,670 | train | <story><title>Look, ma, no matrices</title><url>https://enkimute.github.io/LookMaNoMatrices/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skhunted</author><text>Your comment is interesting to me. A few days ago someone asked why math classes don’t the how and why and rather tend to just present the formulas for the operations and tell people to compute. Here you are focusing on what the operations do rather than on why they work. It’s an interesting contrast and one that teachers of mathematics have to balance. The two questions,<p>How does it work?<p>Why does it work?<p>Can’t always both be answered well in a given course.</text></item><item><author>rhelz</author><text>Geometric Algebra was a complete mystery to me until I finally realized: it is just polynomial multiplication, but with some quantities for which the order of multiplication matters, and which have a weird multiplication table: i*i = 1, i*j = -j*i. That&#x27;s it. Most intros present geometric product of two vectors:<p>(x1*i + y1*j) * (x2*i + y2*j)<p>as some deep mysterious thing, but its just the same FOIL polynomial multiplication you learned in freshman algebra:<p>(x1*i + y1*i)(x2*i+y2*j) = x1*x2*i*i + x1*y2*i*j + y1*x2*j*i + y1*y2*j*j<p>= (x1*x2 + y1*y2) + (x1*y2 - y2*x1)*i*j<p>The quantity in the first parenthesis, above, is the our old familiar dot product. The quantity in the second parenthesis is our old friend the cross product, but expressed in a new dimension whose basis is i*j, and which--unlike the cross product--generalizes to any number of dimensions. In GA its called the &quot;wedge product&quot;.<p>Once you &quot;get&quot; that, you find that doing things like deriving rotation formulas, etc, become easy, because you can apply all the skills you developed in algebra to solving geometric problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aleph_minus_one</author><text>&gt; A few days ago someone asked why math classes don’t the how and why and rather tend to just present the formulas for the operations and tell people to compute.<p>The lecturer typically do know quite well the how and why, but teaching these points takes a lot of time (you also have to explain a lot about the practical application until you are able to explain why this mathematical structure is helpful for the problem).<p>Since lecturers are typically very short of time in lectures, they teach the mathematics in a concise way and trust the students to be adults, capable of going to the library, and reading textbooks about the how and why by themselves if they are interested in this. At least in Germany, there is the clear mentality that if you are not capable of doing this, a university is a wrong place for you; you should better get vocational training instead.</text></comment> | <story><title>Look, ma, no matrices</title><url>https://enkimute.github.io/LookMaNoMatrices/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skhunted</author><text>Your comment is interesting to me. A few days ago someone asked why math classes don’t the how and why and rather tend to just present the formulas for the operations and tell people to compute. Here you are focusing on what the operations do rather than on why they work. It’s an interesting contrast and one that teachers of mathematics have to balance. The two questions,<p>How does it work?<p>Why does it work?<p>Can’t always both be answered well in a given course.</text></item><item><author>rhelz</author><text>Geometric Algebra was a complete mystery to me until I finally realized: it is just polynomial multiplication, but with some quantities for which the order of multiplication matters, and which have a weird multiplication table: i*i = 1, i*j = -j*i. That&#x27;s it. Most intros present geometric product of two vectors:<p>(x1*i + y1*j) * (x2*i + y2*j)<p>as some deep mysterious thing, but its just the same FOIL polynomial multiplication you learned in freshman algebra:<p>(x1*i + y1*i)(x2*i+y2*j) = x1*x2*i*i + x1*y2*i*j + y1*x2*j*i + y1*y2*j*j<p>= (x1*x2 + y1*y2) + (x1*y2 - y2*x1)*i*j<p>The quantity in the first parenthesis, above, is the our old familiar dot product. The quantity in the second parenthesis is our old friend the cross product, but expressed in a new dimension whose basis is i*j, and which--unlike the cross product--generalizes to any number of dimensions. In GA its called the &quot;wedge product&quot;.<p>Once you &quot;get&quot; that, you find that doing things like deriving rotation formulas, etc, become easy, because you can apply all the skills you developed in algebra to solving geometric problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhelz</author><text>&#x2F;&#x2F; focusing on what the operations do rather than why &#x2F;&#x2F;<p>YMMV, of course, but in general, I always found it easier to understand the <i>why</i> once I understood the <i>what</i> and the <i>how</i>, rather than the other way around.</text></comment> |
36,169,959 | 36,169,472 | 1 | 2 | 36,168,468 | train | <story><title>Effect of repeated low-level red light on myopia prevention</title><url>https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804215</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rngname22</author><text>You gotta dig into supplement 1 to find the treatment:<p>&quot;) Input power &lt;100VA, input voltage: AC10V-240V, 50Hz&#x2F;60Hz
版本号 8 : 2.0，20200120 版
2) Low-level single-wavelength red-light wavelength: 650nm±10nm
3) Diameter of low-level single-wavelength red-light cursor: 7mm±3mm, spot at the observation port: 10mm ± 2mm
4) Light source output power: 2.0mW±0.5mW; At a distance of 100mm: 1.07-1.42mw<p>...the intervention group are treated with the intervention instrument twice a day from Monday to Friday, three minutes each time, with an interval of at least 4 hours (morning break before school and afternoon break before school), under the supervision of the school teacher&#x2F;coordinator in addition to routine study and life. All children have a unique corresponding personal account and password. They need to swipe the card and log in the system for verification before starting the intervention device.... the optical energy will stop automatically after three minutes of use, leave the blue eye patch, close your eyes and rest for 3-5 minutes until the light spots before your eyes disappear.&quot;<p>^ So it sounds like the students might even have light spots (temporary blindness)? for a few minutes after the treatment.<p>No use of near-infrared (in the 850nm range), only red light (in the 650 range), so if attempting to recreate at home make sure the red light therapy device is in 650 not red + infrared combination as many are. Though if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>I use red and NIR for collagen boosting on the skin but had until now been too afraid to directly expose my closed eyelids w&#x2F;o protective goggles as I noticed light spots (I use a close-up helmet). Taking the leap of faith and using light therapy to the point that I have light spots for a few minutes after treatment as described in the study is a leap of faith that I&#x27;m afraid may be beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hollerith</author><text>&gt;if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>Infrared in the eye causes cataracts, a fact that is all over Google search results. Workers in steel mills for example are about 26 times more likely to need cataract surgery than others their age, but maybe it is not the near-infrared fraction doing that?<p>I&#x27;ve seen many studies of the effects of red light on the eye, but none of the effects of NIR on the eye, but in avoiding exposing the eyes of experimental human subjects to NIR, maybe researchers are using an overabundance of caution?</text></comment> | <story><title>Effect of repeated low-level red light on myopia prevention</title><url>https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2804215</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rngname22</author><text>You gotta dig into supplement 1 to find the treatment:<p>&quot;) Input power &lt;100VA, input voltage: AC10V-240V, 50Hz&#x2F;60Hz
版本号 8 : 2.0，20200120 版
2) Low-level single-wavelength red-light wavelength: 650nm±10nm
3) Diameter of low-level single-wavelength red-light cursor: 7mm±3mm, spot at the observation port: 10mm ± 2mm
4) Light source output power: 2.0mW±0.5mW; At a distance of 100mm: 1.07-1.42mw<p>...the intervention group are treated with the intervention instrument twice a day from Monday to Friday, three minutes each time, with an interval of at least 4 hours (morning break before school and afternoon break before school), under the supervision of the school teacher&#x2F;coordinator in addition to routine study and life. All children have a unique corresponding personal account and password. They need to swipe the card and log in the system for verification before starting the intervention device.... the optical energy will stop automatically after three minutes of use, leave the blue eye patch, close your eyes and rest for 3-5 minutes until the light spots before your eyes disappear.&quot;<p>^ So it sounds like the students might even have light spots (temporary blindness)? for a few minutes after the treatment.<p>No use of near-infrared (in the 850nm range), only red light (in the 650 range), so if attempting to recreate at home make sure the red light therapy device is in 650 not red + infrared combination as many are. Though if you Google you can find plenty of studies and resources suggesting NIR can be safe and effective for the eyes as well.<p>I use red and NIR for collagen boosting on the skin but had until now been too afraid to directly expose my closed eyelids w&#x2F;o protective goggles as I noticed light spots (I use a close-up helmet). Taking the leap of faith and using light therapy to the point that I have light spots for a few minutes after treatment as described in the study is a leap of faith that I&#x27;m afraid may be beyond me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>someweirdperson</author><text>&gt; You gotta dig into supplement 1 to find the treatment: &quot;[...] Light source output power: 2.0mW±0.5mW; At a distance of 100mm: 1.07-1.42mw&quot;<p>Elsewhere it said class 2, which would be &lt; 1 mW. A laser pointer.<p>&gt; I use red and NIR for collagen boosting on the skin but had until now been too afraid to directly expose my closed eyelids w&#x2F;o protective goggles as I noticed light spots (I use a close-up helmet). Taking the leap of faith and using light therapy to the point that I have light spots for a few minutes after treatment as described in the study is a leap of faith that I&#x27;m afraid may be beyond me.<p>That&#x27;s a lot more power. I would avoid anything outside of the visible range and lasers with too much power. For those natural self protection mechanism probably only kicks in when its too late.</text></comment> |
30,660,146 | 30,658,503 | 1 | 3 | 30,655,455 | train | <story><title>Walgreens replaced some fridge doors with screens, and some shoppers hate it</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-screens/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinlloyd</author><text>I just want Haagen Dazs ice cream. But I cannot see which freezer it is actually in until the ad stops, then it states it is in this particular freezer. But it isn&#x27;t because they ran out and an employee hasn&#x27;t restocked.<p>Next the doors on the freezer will lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.<p>Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don&#x27;t look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.<p>I am so glad I am getting old and will die soon so I don&#x27;t have to live in this dystopian hellhole the new generation are creating for us.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thedrbrian</author><text>&gt; Next the doors on the freezer will lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.
Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don&#x27;t look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.<p>I’m getting vibes of DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE and Sony’s advert patent
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2012-08-24-sony-patent-wants-to-make-advertising-more-interactive.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;2012-08-24-sony-patent-wants-to-mak...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Walgreens replaced some fridge doors with screens, and some shoppers hate it</title><url>https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-screens/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>justinlloyd</author><text>I just want Haagen Dazs ice cream. But I cannot see which freezer it is actually in until the ad stops, then it states it is in this particular freezer. But it isn&#x27;t because they ran out and an employee hasn&#x27;t restocked.<p>Next the doors on the freezer will lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.<p>Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don&#x27;t look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.<p>I am so glad I am getting old and will die soon so I don&#x27;t have to live in this dystopian hellhole the new generation are creating for us.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>screamingninja</author><text>Reminds me of that episode of Black Mirror - Fifteen Million Merits</text></comment> |
15,570,857 | 15,570,550 | 1 | 2 | 15,570,235 | train | <story><title>IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers</title><url>http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-scientists-say-radical-new-in-memory-computing-architecture-will-speed-up-computers-by-200-times</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otakucode</author><text>This is the promise of memristors. Despite innumerable articles being written about neuromorphic architectures like they&#x27;ll be something miraculous, this ability to change from functioning as a bit of memory to being a bunch of functional logic on the fly at the speed of a memory read? That&#x27;s going to be crazy. It will open up possibilities that we probably can&#x27;t even imagine right now.<p>I&#x27;ve never understood why people don&#x27;t get more excited about memristors. They could replace basically everything. Assuming someone can master their manufacture, they should be more successful than transistors. Of course, I&#x27;m still waiting to be able to buy a 2000 ppi display like IBM&#x27;s R&amp;D announced creating back in the late 1990s or so... so I guess I&#x27;d best not hold my breath.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nyolfen</author><text>&gt; I&#x27;ve never understood why people don&#x27;t get more excited about memristors.<p>personally, mostly because i&#x27;ve been seeing articles about how they&#x27;re <i>just about</i> to totally upend computing for the last ten years</text></comment> | <story><title>IBM scientists say radical new ‘in-memory’ architecture will speed up computers</title><url>http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-scientists-say-radical-new-in-memory-computing-architecture-will-speed-up-computers-by-200-times</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>otakucode</author><text>This is the promise of memristors. Despite innumerable articles being written about neuromorphic architectures like they&#x27;ll be something miraculous, this ability to change from functioning as a bit of memory to being a bunch of functional logic on the fly at the speed of a memory read? That&#x27;s going to be crazy. It will open up possibilities that we probably can&#x27;t even imagine right now.<p>I&#x27;ve never understood why people don&#x27;t get more excited about memristors. They could replace basically everything. Assuming someone can master their manufacture, they should be more successful than transistors. Of course, I&#x27;m still waiting to be able to buy a 2000 ppi display like IBM&#x27;s R&amp;D announced creating back in the late 1990s or so... so I guess I&#x27;d best not hold my breath.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>farresito</author><text>I can&#x27;t talk for other people, but I personally don&#x27;t try to get over-excited over anything unless I see a working proof of concept where the advantages are clear. It&#x27;s kinda unfortunate, because there&#x27;s great work being done in research that I should probably feel much more excited about, but I&#x27;m continuously bombarded with new discoveries that I never hear about again.</text></comment> |
23,805,922 | 23,802,611 | 1 | 2 | 23,801,903 | train | <story><title>Why are toys such a bad business?</title><url>https://diff.substack.com/p/why-are-toys-such-a-bad-business</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbro</author><text>Because most toy companies don&#x27;t &#x2F; can&#x27;t understand vertical integration and increasing value capture.<p>Or, in other words, they don&#x27;t have their own version of this strategy chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_chart.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_cha...</a> (Disney corporate synergy, dated 1957)<p>Your primary consumer has the attention span of a 10-year-old, and no disposable income. Why are we surprised this is a terrible industry?<p>A smarter approach would be what Tim Sweeney is talking about with Fortnite (and Amazon infamously does): you have to do everything you can to pivot any initial success into a durable advantage, by aggressively expanding into adjacent opportunities, even if they&#x27;re very different businesses (e.g. movie theaters).<p>They&#x27;ve made token moves towards this with the physical toy + computer game mash-up genre, but from an external perspective I don&#x27;t think any of them quite <i>get</i> how it&#x27;s supposed to work. Efforts seem under -capitalized &#x2F; -resourced &#x2F; -inspired.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philwelch</author><text>&gt; Or, in other words, they don&#x27;t have their own version of this strategy chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_cha.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_cha...</a>. (Disney corporate synergy, dated 1957)<p>I really love that chart because it tells you so much about the company culture that drew it up. Almost any other company would draw this diagram in some depressingly corporate way, but Disney drew it as a cartoon with little characters running around. It&#x27;s a corporate strategy, expressed in concrete terms, in a way that demonstrates that the company was still run by artists.</text></comment> | <story><title>Why are toys such a bad business?</title><url>https://diff.substack.com/p/why-are-toys-such-a-bad-business</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbro</author><text>Because most toy companies don&#x27;t &#x2F; can&#x27;t understand vertical integration and increasing value capture.<p>Or, in other words, they don&#x27;t have their own version of this strategy chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_chart.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnaugust.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;07&#x2F;disney_cha...</a> (Disney corporate synergy, dated 1957)<p>Your primary consumer has the attention span of a 10-year-old, and no disposable income. Why are we surprised this is a terrible industry?<p>A smarter approach would be what Tim Sweeney is talking about with Fortnite (and Amazon infamously does): you have to do everything you can to pivot any initial success into a durable advantage, by aggressively expanding into adjacent opportunities, even if they&#x27;re very different businesses (e.g. movie theaters).<p>They&#x27;ve made token moves towards this with the physical toy + computer game mash-up genre, but from an external perspective I don&#x27;t think any of them quite <i>get</i> how it&#x27;s supposed to work. Efforts seem under -capitalized &#x2F; -resourced &#x2F; -inspired.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fanf2</author><text>The most common example of being in two businesses is the toy&#x2F;cartoon pairing, e.g. Transformers or He Man or My Little Pony or Care Bears. These work well because you can keep selling the cartoons on repeat for years, and they act as ads for the toys.</text></comment> |
7,390,242 | 7,390,215 | 1 | 2 | 7,390,186 | train | <story><title>Seattle's University Bridge still operates on Compaq 8080 and 5.25" Floppy disks</title><url>http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2014/03/12/no-more-5-12-floppy-disks-university-bridge-openings-will-take-longer-as-city-updates-computer-wiring/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nostromo</author><text>The original article is much more interesting and informative:
<a href="http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/03/seattles-university-bridge-undergoing-a-reboot/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.seattletimes.com&#x2F;today&#x2F;2014&#x2F;03&#x2F;seattles-univers...</a><p>It also includes a picture of the computer:
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/oK0eknm.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oK0eknm.jpg</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Seattle's University Bridge still operates on Compaq 8080 and 5.25" Floppy disks</title><url>http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2014/03/12/no-more-5-12-floppy-disks-university-bridge-openings-will-take-longer-as-city-updates-computer-wiring/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>timr</author><text><i>&quot;you probably would have assumed there were sophisticated systems at work.&quot;</i><p>That bridge was built at the turn of the century. I&#x27;m surprised to hear there&#x27;s a computer involved at all.</text></comment> |
3,115,882 | 3,114,981 | 1 | 2 | 3,114,239 | train | <story><title>Who killed videogames?</title><url>http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>I have to wonder when this whole trend is going to come crashing to a halt. When, if ever, the social-gaming population will wake up one day and think, perhaps aloud, and perhaps at great volume, "What the <i>fuck</i> am I doing with my life? <i>Why</i> do I need more virtual corn patches?" And, perhaps, "You know what? I'm not accepting the Facebook invitation into little Mikey's mafia family. Fuck that noise. I'm out."<p>By this, what I really mean is: when someone finally gets sick of Farmville, is he going to move on to the next Farmville, or is he burned out on the genre for good? Seems like there should be a "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" dynamic at work with players of these games. Which would mean that the genre is destined for oversaturation and burnout, and that there will be diminishing returns awaiting any marginal entrants into the field.<p>I'm sure the genre, as a whole, is still growing by leaps and bounds. But do we have any leading indicators about the playerbase? Such as their likelihood to be investing in more than one time-sinkey social game at a time? Or their likelihood to pick up another after quitting the first?<p>I'm not wishing for the demise of the genre, but rather, am hoping that it'll hit a plateau from which it will be forced to innovate, experiment, and evolve. Seems to me that the cold, reductionist design philosophy of addiction-by-the-numbers should eventually dig its own grave in the form of mass player burnout on games produced as such. Then again, that's never happened with casinos. So this may be woefully naive thinking on my part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucasjung</author><text>I had an experience similar to what you describe (waking up and thinking "What the <i>fuck</i> am I doing with my life?"), but it predates these games.<p>I was in college (can't remember which year, probably my junior year) and my roommates and I were all hooked on Diablo II. So were our friends across the hall. We'd often play together as a group on the LAN, but we also enjoyed playing independently. We all played on headphones so as to not have the sounds of several simultaneous games clashing.<p>One afternoon, we were all playing simultaneously but independently. I decided to take a break, paused my game, removed my headphones, and stood up. Then I heard it: the sounds of rapid clicking coming from my roommates' mouses (and the mouses of the guys across the hall--we usually kept our doors open). I had decided to take a break right then because I had just leveled up, and that fact combined with the sound of the clicking gave me a moment of clarity: the whole game consisted of me clicking a mouse as fast as I could in order to make an arbitrary number (experience points) go up. Everything else is just embellishment. The fundamentals are: you click the mouse, the number goes up.<p>I felt like one of those lab rats or monkeys that has two buttons: one that delivers a serving of food, and another that stimulates its pleasure centers. They starve to death because they neglect the food button in favor of the pleasure button. Except I was worse, in a way: I wasn't getting a jolt to my pleasure centers, I was just watching a meaningless number get higher. Of course, I wasn't completely neglecting my well-being, either, but I was wasting a lot of time that could have been spent on more rewarding pursuits.<p>I uninstalled the game immediately and gave it away as fast as I could. I didn't give up video games, because not all games are such complete wastes of time, but ever since then I have set the bar very high for any game I play (similar to the post by snprbob86 about strict selection criteria). I'm especially watchful for signs that a game is just an exercise in "repeat simple task, increment arbitrary number."</text></comment> | <story><title>Who killed videogames?</title><url>http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>I have to wonder when this whole trend is going to come crashing to a halt. When, if ever, the social-gaming population will wake up one day and think, perhaps aloud, and perhaps at great volume, "What the <i>fuck</i> am I doing with my life? <i>Why</i> do I need more virtual corn patches?" And, perhaps, "You know what? I'm not accepting the Facebook invitation into little Mikey's mafia family. Fuck that noise. I'm out."<p>By this, what I really mean is: when someone finally gets sick of Farmville, is he going to move on to the next Farmville, or is he burned out on the genre for good? Seems like there should be a "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" dynamic at work with players of these games. Which would mean that the genre is destined for oversaturation and burnout, and that there will be diminishing returns awaiting any marginal entrants into the field.<p>I'm sure the genre, as a whole, is still growing by leaps and bounds. But do we have any leading indicators about the playerbase? Such as their likelihood to be investing in more than one time-sinkey social game at a time? Or their likelihood to pick up another after quitting the first?<p>I'm not wishing for the demise of the genre, but rather, am hoping that it'll hit a plateau from which it will be forced to innovate, experiment, and evolve. Seems to me that the cold, reductionist design philosophy of addiction-by-the-numbers should eventually dig its own grave in the form of mass player burnout on games produced as such. Then again, that's never happened with casinos. So this may be woefully naive thinking on my part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zipdog</author><text>If you look backwards, people have always been quite happy to enjoy fairly simple games with a mild social component. I`m thinking of card games, boules/boche, dominoes. Everywhere I`ve been I`ve seen people spending an afternoon playing these games with a few other people. So as long as onlne addictive games come close to that experience (which doesn`t really offer more than a pleasant time passing and a few jokes with others), they are not going to crash.</text></comment> |
35,614,341 | 35,614,244 | 1 | 2 | 35,610,168 | train | <story><title>Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance</title><url>https://openfolder.sh/heroku-anti-dx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EntrePrescott</author><text>Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku&#x27;s downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem.<p>There&#x27;s one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line:<p>&gt; &quot;In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development&quot;<p>Was it? Really? I mean, I&#x27;m not saying the author did anything wrong in choosing Heroku at the time (after all, who could have known back then what a dumpster fire Heroku would turn out to be), and the commercial success Heroku achieved before going down the gutter shows that it must have had some good reasons going for it, at least on paper before the users are confronted with problems that make them judge the situation differently…<p>… but I don&#x27;t really get where that &quot;pretty much the only option&quot; vibe would come from. Maybe It&#x27;s just me having completely different selection criteria, but from my perspective, there were lots of other options to &quot;get started with web-development&quot; and Heroku was just one among many. I don&#x27;t see at all by what measure Heroku would have seemed like &quot;pretty much the only option&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danjac</author><text>Let&#x27;s say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you&#x27;ve worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it&#x27;s 2018, what are your options?<p>There&#x27;s the zoo of AWS. Maybe there&#x27;s something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here, and AWS can be daunting even to experienced developers.<p>You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you&#x27;ll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that&#x27;s yet another learning curve.<p>Render launched in 2019. Fly.io came out 2020. As far as I remember, there wasn&#x27;t a competitor that offered the sheer convenience for the hobbyist beginner on the level of Heroku.</text></comment> | <story><title>Heroku has been running a second copy of my scheduler instance</title><url>https://openfolder.sh/heroku-anti-dx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EntrePrescott</author><text>Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku&#x27;s downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem.<p>There&#x27;s one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line:<p>&gt; &quot;In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development&quot;<p>Was it? Really? I mean, I&#x27;m not saying the author did anything wrong in choosing Heroku at the time (after all, who could have known back then what a dumpster fire Heroku would turn out to be), and the commercial success Heroku achieved before going down the gutter shows that it must have had some good reasons going for it, at least on paper before the users are confronted with problems that make them judge the situation differently…<p>… but I don&#x27;t really get where that &quot;pretty much the only option&quot; vibe would come from. Maybe It&#x27;s just me having completely different selection criteria, but from my perspective, there were lots of other options to &quot;get started with web-development&quot; and Heroku was just one among many. I don&#x27;t see at all by what measure Heroku would have seemed like &quot;pretty much the only option&quot;?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jazzyjackson</author><text>Assuming they wanted a webserver + database and wanted to learn web stuff, not server admin &#x2F; unix stuff to configure a LAMP stack or whathaveyou + certbot etc. Deploying on your own domain of legitimately daunting without a lot of prerequisite knowledge. Heroku automated a lot of that and some people learned it as the only way to deploy without learning the manual process first, and that&#x27;s fine IMO.</text></comment> |
24,885,923 | 24,885,329 | 1 | 2 | 24,882,921 | train | <story><title>YouTube-dl is now part of GitHub/dmca.git</title><url>https://github.com/github/dmca/tree/416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DavideNL</author><text>Would it not be possible to move to some decentralized Github alternative?</text></item><item><author>xg15</author><text>It&#x27;s a fun hack, but to those thinking about streisanding the source: The strength of ytdl and other downloaders isn&#x27;t their source code, it&#x27;s the extensive library of scrapers that are tailor-made for individual sites.<p>The devs have to constantly maintain and update those to keep working when a site changes its design.<p>So if the takedown manages to stop ongoing development on ytdl then even existing copies will become mostly useless pretty quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xg15</author><text>You mean something like... got? ;)<p>But I agree with the sibling posts, while decentralised change tracking is pretty much the original idea of git, all the project management stuff (issues, comments, membership&#x2F;permissions, discoverability) are a lot harder to decentralize.<p>I also don&#x27;t think the MPAA or whoever else would be very impressed by that if the end result is still illegal activity: If the developers are known, then they&#x27;d either have to pass on the project to someone else or risk liability, whether their project repo is centralised or not.</text></comment> | <story><title>YouTube-dl is now part of GitHub/dmca.git</title><url>https://github.com/github/dmca/tree/416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DavideNL</author><text>Would it not be possible to move to some decentralized Github alternative?</text></item><item><author>xg15</author><text>It&#x27;s a fun hack, but to those thinking about streisanding the source: The strength of ytdl and other downloaders isn&#x27;t their source code, it&#x27;s the extensive library of scrapers that are tailor-made for individual sites.<p>The devs have to constantly maintain and update those to keep working when a site changes its design.<p>So if the takedown manages to stop ongoing development on ytdl then even existing copies will become mostly useless pretty quickly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metters</author><text>There was a hackernnews article about a decentralised github (not yt-dl) yesterday:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874994" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874994</a></text></comment> |
27,291,391 | 27,291,355 | 1 | 2 | 27,289,924 | train | <story><title>Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-snaps-up-james-bond-owner-mgm-845-bln-streaming-war-heats-up-2021-05-26/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DrBazza</author><text>&gt; Piracy is competition to bad content behavior<p>I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.<p>Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.<p>If we&#x27;d had easy free sharing of movies, it&#x27;s not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it&#x27;s honey pot torrents all over the place.<p>No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable&#x2F;satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP&#x2F;USD a month is utterly absurd.<p>Frankly, I&#x27;m glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I&#x27;m actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are &quot;free to air&quot; in my country.</text></item><item><author>WarOnPrivacy</author><text>&gt; We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution.<p>Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It&#x27;s a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.</text></item><item><author>scyzoryk_xyz</author><text>So what we&#x27;re seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930&#x27;s-1950&#x27;s. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple&#x27;s VOD.<p>We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kangaroozach</author><text>We have not yet approached the pre-streaming willingness to pay (WTP). People used to pay $150 to $200 plus onDemand for the whole package with their cable provider. Today you can have YouTubeTV, HBO, Netflix, Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+, and Spotify for less than that. So perhaps the average will hover around $100 with many paying closer to $200 a month. We are creeping back up to those numbers because people will pay.</text></comment> | <story><title>Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-snaps-up-james-bond-owner-mgm-845-bln-streaming-war-heats-up-2021-05-26/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DrBazza</author><text>&gt; Piracy is competition to bad content behavior<p>I really wish we had the bandwidth we have now, back in the Napster-era.<p>Napster, and others forced, persuaded and cajoled the music industry to consolidate, whether they liked it or not, on Spotify, and iTunes.<p>If we&#x27;d had easy free sharing of movies, it&#x27;s not hard to envisage something similar to what we see now in the music industry forced on the movie companies. Now it&#x27;s honey pot torrents all over the place.<p>No customer wants to spend X on Shudder, Y on Netflix, and Z on Prime, plus Hulu, HBO, and your cable&#x2F;satellite fee either. Paying 200 GBP&#x2F;USD a month is utterly absurd.<p>Frankly, I&#x27;m glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I&#x27;m actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are &quot;free to air&quot; in my country.</text></item><item><author>WarOnPrivacy</author><text>&gt; We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution.<p>Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It&#x27;s a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.</text></item><item><author>scyzoryk_xyz</author><text>So what we&#x27;re seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930&#x27;s-1950&#x27;s. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple&#x27;s VOD.<p>We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>johnchristopher</author><text>&gt; Frankly, I&#x27;m glad I have a waning interest in modern movies as I get older, and I&#x27;m actually more interested in watching old black and white movies that are &quot;free to air&quot; in my country.<p>My mother recently gave me a sub-account to Netflix and while I was thrilled to rewatch some shows I liked (like the OA or good old star trek) I was quickly submerged by the sheer amount of YA novels adapted in TV shows or movies that are really mediocre. Now I see there&#x27;s a lot of content on Netflix but I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe.</text></comment> |
39,393,682 | 39,393,821 | 1 | 2 | 39,391,688 | train | <story><title>Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification</title><url>https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/02/magika-ai-powered-fast-and-efficient-file-type-identification.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stevepike</author><text>Oh man, this brings me back! Almost 10 years ago I was working on a rails app trying to detect the file type of uploaded spreadsheets (xlsx files were being detected as application&#x2F;zip, which is technically true but useless).<p>I found &quot;magic&quot; that could detect these and submitted a patch at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=78797" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=78797</a>. My patch got rejected for needing to look at the first 3KB bytes of the file to figure out the type. They had a hard limit that they wouldn&#x27;t see past the first 256 bytes. Now in 2024 we&#x27;re doing this with deep learning! It&#x27;d be cool if google released some speed performance benchmarks here against the old-fashioned implementations. Obviously it&#x27;d be slower, but is it 1000x or 10^6x?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ebursztein</author><text>Co-author of Magika here (Elie) so we didn&#x27;t include the measurements in the blog post to avoid making it too long but we did those measurements.<p>Overall file takes about 6ms (single file) 2.26ms per files when scanning multiples. Magika is at 65ms single file and 5.3ms when scanning multiples.<p>So Magika is for the worst case scenario about 10x slower due to the time it takes to load the model and 2x slower on repeated detection. This is why we said it is not that much slower.<p>We will have more performance measurements in the upcoming research paper. Hope that answer the question</text></comment> | <story><title>Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification</title><url>https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/02/magika-ai-powered-fast-and-efficient-file-type-identification.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stevepike</author><text>Oh man, this brings me back! Almost 10 years ago I was working on a rails app trying to detect the file type of uploaded spreadsheets (xlsx files were being detected as application&#x2F;zip, which is technically true but useless).<p>I found &quot;magic&quot; that could detect these and submitted a patch at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=78797" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.freedesktop.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=78797</a>. My patch got rejected for needing to look at the first 3KB bytes of the file to figure out the type. They had a hard limit that they wouldn&#x27;t see past the first 256 bytes. Now in 2024 we&#x27;re doing this with deep learning! It&#x27;d be cool if google released some speed performance benchmarks here against the old-fashioned implementations. Obviously it&#x27;d be slower, but is it 1000x or 10^6x?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metafunctor</author><text>I&#x27;ve ended up implementing a layer on top of &quot;magic&quot; which, if magic detects application&#x2F;zip, reads the zip file manifest and checks for telltale file names to reliably detect Office files.<p>The &quot;magic&quot; library does not seem to be equipped with the capabilities needed to be robust against the zip manifest being ordered in a different way than expected.<p>But this deep learning approach... I don&#x27;t know. It might be hard to shoehorn in to many applications where the traditional methods have negligible memory and compute costs and the accuracy is basically 100% for cases that matter (detecting particular file types of interest). But when looking at a large random collection of unknown blobs, yeah, I can see how this could be great.</text></comment> |
29,071,549 | 29,065,684 | 1 | 3 | 29,064,233 | train | <story><title>C++ Coroutines Do Not Spark Joy</title><url>https://probablydance.com/2021/10/31/c-coroutines-do-not-spark-joy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpderetta</author><text>There were three competing coroutines designs in front of the standard committee: stackful coroutines, from boost; C#-like stackless coroutines from MS; and zero-overhead stackless coroutines initially from chriskohlhoff (but then picked up by many others).<p>After a <i>lot</i> of back and forward, the committee decided to pick the most proposal (i.e. the MS one) with the most complete implementation and potentially less ambitious. These are both good good features, but we ended up with a very complex, hard to use, design that requires unspecified compiler magic to remove all overhead.<p>Interestingly enough the committee went in the opposite direction for networking recently rejection the battle tested ASIO, again from chriskohlhoff, for a yet unproven design initially from Facebook, now Nvidia.<p>edit: personally I&#x27;m a huge fan of stackfull coroutines, but I could have lived with zero overhead stackless coroutines. The current design is IMHO the worst solution. Then again, sometimes it is better to ship something than argue forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ot</author><text>I&#x27;ve been on the fence for a while about coroutines, but I have to say that libraries like folly coro do a very good job at hiding all the complexity (the library itself though is somewhat impenetrable).<p>Facebook is very invested in coroutines, all major internal libraries at this point have a coroutine interface (in particular Thrift auto-generates coro client interfaces), and they have enjoyed wide adoption, way beyond the small cabal of C++ gurus.<p>Personally what sold me is cancellation handling. It really is magical.<p>Are your concerns about frame allocation? Is this something that the nanosecond-latency crowd particularly cares about? :)</text></comment> | <story><title>C++ Coroutines Do Not Spark Joy</title><url>https://probablydance.com/2021/10/31/c-coroutines-do-not-spark-joy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gpderetta</author><text>There were three competing coroutines designs in front of the standard committee: stackful coroutines, from boost; C#-like stackless coroutines from MS; and zero-overhead stackless coroutines initially from chriskohlhoff (but then picked up by many others).<p>After a <i>lot</i> of back and forward, the committee decided to pick the most proposal (i.e. the MS one) with the most complete implementation and potentially less ambitious. These are both good good features, but we ended up with a very complex, hard to use, design that requires unspecified compiler magic to remove all overhead.<p>Interestingly enough the committee went in the opposite direction for networking recently rejection the battle tested ASIO, again from chriskohlhoff, for a yet unproven design initially from Facebook, now Nvidia.<p>edit: personally I&#x27;m a huge fan of stackfull coroutines, but I could have lived with zero overhead stackless coroutines. The current design is IMHO the worst solution. Then again, sometimes it is better to ship something than argue forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Longhanks</author><text>Eric Niebler recently switched from Facebook to NVIDIA. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.</text></comment> |
36,689,174 | 36,683,133 | 1 | 2 | 36,682,403 | train | <story><title>Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy</title><url>https://oldbytes.space/@48kRAM/110695813509755748</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th...</a><p>That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.</text></item><item><author>llm_nerd</author><text>Seems trite. No one is running their display at 800x600 so apps aren&#x27;t building for it.<p>And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>housemusicfan</author><text>&gt; That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.<p>The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the &quot;Search&quot; function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I&#x27;ll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.</text></comment> | <story><title>Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy</title><url>https://oldbytes.space/@48kRAM/110695813509755748</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zamalek</author><text>The article also fails to mention the toolbar gore that was easily possible with Word: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th...</a><p>That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.</text></item><item><author>llm_nerd</author><text>Seems trite. No one is running their display at 800x600 so apps aren&#x27;t building for it.<p>And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dingaling</author><text>I can&#x27;t see how the Ribbon is any better than hunt-and-peck menus. If you can&#x27;t see what you want on the current Ribbon view you have to click along the various arbitrary Ribbontabs until you find it. But wait, some of them have subsidiary Ribbontabtabs!</text></comment> |
29,736,277 | 29,735,574 | 1 | 2 | 29,734,021 | train | <story><title>Japan HP accidentally deleted 77TB data in Kyoto U. supercomputing system</title><url>https://www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/whatsnew/information/detail/211228056999.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>doctor_eval</author><text>So this is something I’ve never understood. If you modify a shell script while it’s running, the shell executes the modified file. This normally but not always causes the script to fail.<p>Now I’ve known about this behaviour for a very long time and it always seemed very broken to me. It’s not how binaries work (at least not when I was doing that kind of thing).<p>So I guess bash or whatever does an mmap of the script it’s running, which is presumably why modifications to the script are visible immediately. But if a new file was installed eg using cp&#x2F;tar&#x2F;unzip, I’m surprised that this didn’t just unlink the old script and create a new one - which would create a new inode and therefore make the operation atomic, right? And this (I assume) is why a recompiled binary doesn’t have the same problem (because the old binary is first unlinked).<p>So, how could this (IMO) bad behaviour be fixed? Presumably mmap is used for efficiency, but isn’t it possible to mark a file as in use so it’s cant be modified? I’ve certainly seen on some old Unices that you can’t overwrite a running binary. Why can’t we do the same with shell scripts?<p>Honestly, while it’s great that HP is accepting responsibility, and we know that this happens, the behaviour seems both arbitrary and unnecessary to me. Is it fixable?</text></item><item><author>rvnx</author><text>I really appreciate the announcement from Hewlett Packard, which is very apologetic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp&#x2F;services&#x2F;comp&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;file_loss_insident_20211228.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp&#x2F;services&#x2F;comp&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;file_loss_i...</a><p>They do not try to blame it on complex systems or other factors.<p>Users lost 1 day and 1&#x2F;2 of recent work (which doesn&#x27;t seem to be that bad).<p><pre><code> About file loss in Luster file system in your supercomputer system, we are 100% responsible.
We deeply apologize for causing a great deal of inconvenience due to the serious failure of the file loss.
We would like to report the background of the file disappearance, its root cause and future countermeasures as follows:
We believe that this file loss is 100% our responsibility.
We will offer compensation for users who have lost files.
[...]
Impact:
--
Target file system: &#x2F;LARGE0
Deleted files: December 14, 2021 17:32 to December 16, 2021 12:43
Files that were supposed to be deleted: Files that had not been updated since 17:32 on December 3, 2021
[...]
Cause:
--
The backup script uses the find command to delete log files that are older than 10 days.
A variable name is passed to the delete process of the find command.
A new improved version of the script was applied on the system.
However, during deployment, there was a lack of consideration as the periodical script was not disabled.
The modified shell script was reloaded from the middle.
As a result, the find command containing undefined variables was executed and deleted the files.
[...]
Further measures:
--
In the future, the programs to be applied to the system will be fully verified and applied.
We will examine the extent of the impact and make improvements so that similar problems do not occur.
In addition, we will re-educate the engineers in charge of human error and risk prediction &#x2F; prevention to prevent recurrence.
We will thoroughly implement the measures.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wongarsu</author><text>&gt; isn’t it possible to mark a file as in use so it’s cant be modified?<p>That&#x27;s the route chosen by Windows for binary executables (exe&#x2F;dll) and various other systems. Locking a file against writes, delete&#x2F;rename or even read is just another flag in the windows equivalent of fopen [1]. This makes for software that&#x27;s quite easy to reason about, but hard to update. The reason why you have to restart Windows to install Windows updates or even install some software is largely due to this locking mechanism: you can&#x27;t update files that are open (and rename tricks don&#x27;t work because locks apply to files, not inodes).<p>With about three decades of hindsight I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s a good tradeoff. It makes it easy to prevent the race conditions that are an endless source of security bugs on unix-like systems; but otoh most software doesn&#x27;t use the mechanism because it&#x27;s not in the lowest-common-denominator File APIs of most programming languages; and MS is paying for it with users refusing to install updates because they don&#x27;t want to restart their PC.<p>1: Search for FILE_SHARE_DELETE in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;api&#x2F;fileapi&#x2F;nf-fileapi-createfilea" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;win32&#x2F;api&#x2F;fileapi&#x2F;n...</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Japan HP accidentally deleted 77TB data in Kyoto U. supercomputing system</title><url>https://www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/whatsnew/information/detail/211228056999.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>doctor_eval</author><text>So this is something I’ve never understood. If you modify a shell script while it’s running, the shell executes the modified file. This normally but not always causes the script to fail.<p>Now I’ve known about this behaviour for a very long time and it always seemed very broken to me. It’s not how binaries work (at least not when I was doing that kind of thing).<p>So I guess bash or whatever does an mmap of the script it’s running, which is presumably why modifications to the script are visible immediately. But if a new file was installed eg using cp&#x2F;tar&#x2F;unzip, I’m surprised that this didn’t just unlink the old script and create a new one - which would create a new inode and therefore make the operation atomic, right? And this (I assume) is why a recompiled binary doesn’t have the same problem (because the old binary is first unlinked).<p>So, how could this (IMO) bad behaviour be fixed? Presumably mmap is used for efficiency, but isn’t it possible to mark a file as in use so it’s cant be modified? I’ve certainly seen on some old Unices that you can’t overwrite a running binary. Why can’t we do the same with shell scripts?<p>Honestly, while it’s great that HP is accepting responsibility, and we know that this happens, the behaviour seems both arbitrary and unnecessary to me. Is it fixable?</text></item><item><author>rvnx</author><text>I really appreciate the announcement from Hewlett Packard, which is very apologetic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp&#x2F;services&#x2F;comp&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;file_loss_insident_20211228.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iimc.kyoto-u.ac.jp&#x2F;services&#x2F;comp&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;file_loss_i...</a><p>They do not try to blame it on complex systems or other factors.<p>Users lost 1 day and 1&#x2F;2 of recent work (which doesn&#x27;t seem to be that bad).<p><pre><code> About file loss in Luster file system in your supercomputer system, we are 100% responsible.
We deeply apologize for causing a great deal of inconvenience due to the serious failure of the file loss.
We would like to report the background of the file disappearance, its root cause and future countermeasures as follows:
We believe that this file loss is 100% our responsibility.
We will offer compensation for users who have lost files.
[...]
Impact:
--
Target file system: &#x2F;LARGE0
Deleted files: December 14, 2021 17:32 to December 16, 2021 12:43
Files that were supposed to be deleted: Files that had not been updated since 17:32 on December 3, 2021
[...]
Cause:
--
The backup script uses the find command to delete log files that are older than 10 days.
A variable name is passed to the delete process of the find command.
A new improved version of the script was applied on the system.
However, during deployment, there was a lack of consideration as the periodical script was not disabled.
The modified shell script was reloaded from the middle.
As a result, the find command containing undefined variables was executed and deleted the files.
[...]
Further measures:
--
In the future, the programs to be applied to the system will be fully verified and applied.
We will examine the extent of the impact and make improvements so that similar problems do not occur.
In addition, we will re-educate the engineers in charge of human error and risk prediction &#x2F; prevention to prevent recurrence.
We will thoroughly implement the measures.</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kragen</author><text>This behavior in shell scripts predates mmap. In very early versions of Unix it was arguably even useful; there was a goto command which was implemented by seeking on the shell-script file descriptor rather than as a shell builtin, for example. I don&#x27;t know of any use for it since the transition to the Bourne shell, but my knowledge is far from comprehensive. (I suppose if your shell script is not small compared to the size of RAM, it might be undesirable to read it all in at the start of execution; shar files are a real-life example even on non-PDP-11 machines.)<p>As I understand it, the reason for ETXTBSY (&quot;on some old Unices...you can&#x27;t overwrite a running binary&quot;) was to prevent segfaults.<p>cp usually just opens the file O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC, which seems like the wrong default; Emacs for example does create a new file and rename it over the old one when you save, usually, allocating a new inode as you say. By default it makes an exception if there are other hardlinks to the file.<p>Btrfs and xfs have a &quot;reflink&quot; feature that allows you to efficiently make a copy-on-write snapshot of a file, which would be ideal for this sort of thing, since the shell or whatever won&#x27;t see any changes to the original file, even if it&#x27;s overwritten in place. Unfortunately I don&#x27;t think you can make <i>anonymous</i> reflinks, so for the shell to reflink a shell script when it starts executing it would need write access to somewhere in the filesystem to put the reflink, and then it would need to know how to find that place, somehow. And of course that wouldn&#x27;t help if you were running on ext4fs or, I imagine, Lustre, though apparently an implementation was proposed in 02019: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.lustre.org&#x2F;Lreflink_High_Level_Design" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.lustre.org&#x2F;Lreflink_High_Level_Design</a></text></comment> |
17,043,704 | 17,043,528 | 1 | 2 | 17,043,150 | train | <story><title>Man Allegedly Used Change of Address Form to Move UPS Headquarters</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/10/610102872/man-allegedly-used-change-of-address-form-to-move-ups-headquarters-to-his-apartm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marme</author><text>The change of address form at USPS is laughably unsecure. All it takes is $1 and anyone can write any address and forward all the mail for 1 year to any other address. There is no verification of ID and the only warning you get is a post card at the original address telling you the mail is being forwarded but by then it is already too late as mail is already being routed to the new address. Even if you called immediately to stop it some of your mail would end up at the new address</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrischen</author><text>Postal mail is insecure yet companies and services like to rely on it as the authoritative form of notice and communication. That and also giving out info over the telephone.<p>On one hand we have PCI-compliance, SSL encryption, and on the other hand we have a phone call (unecrypted, easily tappable anywhere along the thousands of miles of wire) where companies expect to call me and assume it&#x27;s secure enough for me to 1) know that it&#x27;s definitively them and 2) not have some support agent steal my credit card information&#x2F;private information.</text></comment> | <story><title>Man Allegedly Used Change of Address Form to Move UPS Headquarters</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/10/610102872/man-allegedly-used-change-of-address-form-to-move-ups-headquarters-to-his-apartm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marme</author><text>The change of address form at USPS is laughably unsecure. All it takes is $1 and anyone can write any address and forward all the mail for 1 year to any other address. There is no verification of ID and the only warning you get is a post card at the original address telling you the mail is being forwarded but by then it is already too late as mail is already being routed to the new address. Even if you called immediately to stop it some of your mail would end up at the new address</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>koboll</author><text>There&#x27;s a new feature they just rolled out that emails you images of the mail whenever it comes. Just as little security. You can spy on someone&#x27;s mail indefinitely and they&#x27;d be none the wiser.</text></comment> |
23,802,355 | 23,800,988 | 1 | 3 | 23,800,878 | train | <story><title>Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective (2013)</title><url>http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2013/03/22/modes-medians-and-means-an-unifying-perspective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bo1024</author><text>One can generalize this approach further to take any given loss function, not just a p-norm, and ask what statistic is achieved by minimizing loss.<p>A field that studies this is called property elicitation, from the idea that the loss function elicits a certain kind of prediction be it mean, mode, etc.<p>This field actually originated with human experts like weather forecasters - what is a loss function (or “scoring rule”) that incents them to predict accurately? Squared loss is good if by accurately we imply we want the mean.<p>One fact people find surprising is that squared loss is not the only one that elicits the mean. There is an entire family of losses that do, including KL divergence.</text></comment> | <story><title>Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective (2013)</title><url>http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2013/03/22/modes-medians-and-means-an-unifying-perspective/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ogogmad</author><text>Interestingly, since the L^1 discrepancy is convex, it&#x27;s possible to analytically minimize it by using the <i>subdifferential</i>, and thereby prove that its minimum is attained at the median. The subdifferential is a set-valued generalisation of the derivative to all convex functions, including non-differentiable ones. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subderivative" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subderivative</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;towardsdatascience.com&#x2F;beyond-the-derivative-subderivatives-1c4e5bf20679" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;towardsdatascience.com&#x2F;beyond-the-derivative-subderi...</a><p>Whenever the subdifferential of a convex function at a point includes 0, that point is a global minimum of the function.</text></comment> |
12,416,717 | 12,416,662 | 1 | 2 | 12,416,597 | train | <story><title>Linux.Rex.1 – A multifunctional self-replicating Trojan for Linux written in Go</title><url>http://vms.drweb.com/virus/?_is=1&i=8436299&lng=en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>f2f</author><text>This is not the first malware to use the Go language. Here is the first, from 2012:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.symantec.com&#x2F;connect&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;malware-uses-google-go-language" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.symantec.com&#x2F;connect&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;malware-uses-google-go...</a><p>i believe at the same time symantec decided to block every binary compiled with Go&#x27;s compiler. because that was easiest.</text></comment> | <story><title>Linux.Rex.1 – A multifunctional self-replicating Trojan for Linux written in Go</title><url>http://vms.drweb.com/virus/?_is=1&i=8436299&lng=en</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stock_toaster</author><text>Maybe soon we will have some malware written in rust.
You know, for security.</text></comment> |
30,866,017 | 30,862,596 | 1 | 2 | 30,860,859 | train | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Facebook Dying?</title><text>I&#x27;m not talking about Meta the company, but rather thier Facebook property. I&#x27;ve been on for about 13 years. My newsfeed lately is a graveyard only populated by ads and some groups I belong to. The only friends left are narcissists or people selling something. I&#x27;m not motivated to post anything because I get much less engagement in the form of likes or comments than I used to. Just curious if this is just me or everyone knows it&#x27;s dying.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>OhSoHumble</author><text>A twelve year old laughed at me for using Facebook - and I mean a genuine, mirthful, hearty laugh. I&#x27;m thirty. If I&#x27;m being laughed at by someone from generation Z for using Facebook... how will Facebook grow? And I don&#x27;t even use Facebook that much; most of my social activity occurs on Discord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcv</author><text>I don&#x27;t mind being on a platform that&#x27;s not used by 12 year olds. I&#x27;m looking for interesting social&#x2F;political&#x2F;philosophical&#x2F;technological content and engagement, and I suspect only a minority of teenagers are really interested in that.<p>And while teenagers are on Discord, my impression is that their content there isn&#x27;t great either. The interesting stuff on Discord is also mostly from 40-somethings.<p>Thing is, facebook has never been a great place for these things. I still have a FB account, but I haven&#x27;t checked it in years, and back in the days when I did, there was only one person posting really interesting stuff. Everything else was just lame crap. For a while, I set FB to notify me when that guy posted anything and just ignored everything else, but I really wish he&#x27;d just post on a better platform.</text></comment> | <story><title>Ask HN: Is Facebook Dying?</title><text>I&#x27;m not talking about Meta the company, but rather thier Facebook property. I&#x27;ve been on for about 13 years. My newsfeed lately is a graveyard only populated by ads and some groups I belong to. The only friends left are narcissists or people selling something. I&#x27;m not motivated to post anything because I get much less engagement in the form of likes or comments than I used to. Just curious if this is just me or everyone knows it&#x27;s dying.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>OhSoHumble</author><text>A twelve year old laughed at me for using Facebook - and I mean a genuine, mirthful, hearty laugh. I&#x27;m thirty. If I&#x27;m being laughed at by someone from generation Z for using Facebook... how will Facebook grow? And I don&#x27;t even use Facebook that much; most of my social activity occurs on Discord.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiscariot</author><text>12 year-olds have always laughed at Facebook and instead used, X (kik, Snap, Tiktok, etc). They are a fickle bunch with no interest in being on the same platform as their parents. This is not anything new.<p>I&#x27;d argue that the NYT&#x27;s war on FB and Apple&#x27;s policies around privacy (e.g. &quot;Tracking your data&quot; when FB and &quot;Enhancing your user experience&quot; when APPL).</text></comment> |
12,792,465 | 12,792,236 | 1 | 3 | 12,788,922 | train | <story><title>Next.js – A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps</title><url>https://zeit.co/blog/next</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>idbehold</author><text>One thing that is never explained in these universal&#x2F;isomorphic react frameworks&#x2F;boilerplates is how to make a fetch() against your own server (e.g. a relative route). There&#x27;s this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;next#data-fetching-is-up-to-the-developer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;next#data-fetching-is-up-to-the-develop...</a><p>But what if my component looks like this:<p><pre><code> import React from &#x27;react&#x27;
export class exports React.Component {
static async getInitialProps () {
const res = await fetch(&#x27;&#x2F;api&#x2F;user&#x2F;123&#x27;)
const data = await res.json()
return { username: data.profile.username }
}
}</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>girvo</author><text>I like how react-server[0] deals with it; by having the `when` and `listen` callbacks expecting a promise, it becomes simple to `fetch()` any data you want server-side, including relative routes<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;react-server.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;react-server.io&#x2F;</a></text></comment> | <story><title>Next.js – A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps</title><url>https://zeit.co/blog/next</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>idbehold</author><text>One thing that is never explained in these universal&#x2F;isomorphic react frameworks&#x2F;boilerplates is how to make a fetch() against your own server (e.g. a relative route). There&#x27;s this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;next#data-fetching-is-up-to-the-developer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zeit.co&#x2F;blog&#x2F;next#data-fetching-is-up-to-the-develop...</a><p>But what if my component looks like this:<p><pre><code> import React from &#x27;react&#x27;
export class exports React.Component {
static async getInitialProps () {
const res = await fetch(&#x27;&#x2F;api&#x2F;user&#x2F;123&#x27;)
const data = await res.json()
return { username: data.profile.username }
}
}</code></pre></text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JungleGymSam</author><text>Yes, exactly! I&#x27;ve basically done only IT for the past 10 years and what little experience I have in web dev was with PHP in the good ol&#x27; days.<p>I want to get started with vue.js but there is NO mention of how to get data from a database. It is assumed the reader knows exactly what to do.<p>What you described is basically how I imagined it would work but I&#x27;ve just not been in this world for so long that I haven&#x27;t been able to find the answer. (How to get data from a database with a system like vue.js.)</text></comment> |
33,183,119 | 33,182,160 | 1 | 3 | 33,177,034 | train | <story><title>Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies</title><url>https://digiday.com/media/apple-is-quietly-pushing-a-tv-ad-product-with-media-agencies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw10920</author><text>Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there&#x27;s no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.<p>&gt; that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks<p>First of all, I straight-up don&#x27;t believe this. I had very little exposure to TV&#x2F;movies&#x2F;books&#x2F;the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don&#x27;t understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.<p>Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve <i>that</i>. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.</text></item><item><author>nscalf</author><text>I don&#x27;t find this particularly morally dubious. These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers. Disney owns about 1&#x2F;3 of all box office revenue. The government has shown they&#x27;re unwilling to break up monopolies, or even really limit them in any meaningful way.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t quite know my feelings on this yet, but there is something real about some shows and movies being part of the milieu. Something doesn&#x27;t sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks. It feels like you have to make more money to live in the same society.</text></item><item><author>belval</author><text>I know it&#x27;s morally dubious, but I&#x27;m completely back in pirateland because of all the changes&#x2F;price hikes&#x2F;partitioning in the streaming space. My interests make it so I only watch 1-2 shows per platform so I&#x27;d be approaching ~100$&#x2F;month.<p>And even if I was swimming in money, it&#x27;s often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex&#x2F;Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding <i>where</i> the content I want is.<p>One example is Rick and Morty, it&#x27;s made by Adult Swim, but they don&#x27;t have a streaming service in Canada. It seems to be on Primevideo but under a different system than their regular content. The other way to watch it is to buy it from my cable provider (I don&#x27;t have cable). So to watch a 20-minutes animated show I&#x27;d have to take a +40$ subscription.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>samatman</author><text>&gt; <i>there&#x27;s no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.</i><p>Copyright anarchy and copyright abolition are absolutely coherent moral frameworks.<p>I have a magnet link. It brings me information. You don&#x27;t want me to have that information? Up yours.<p>Oh you <i>made</i> it did you? Should&#x27;ve thought about my BATNA before deciding how to put it on the market.<p>For the record, I&#x27;m quite a bit more moderate than this would imply. But copyright is a weird wrinkle to &quot;encourage the useful arts and sciences&quot;, it&#x27;s has no basis in natural rights, the opposite in fact: the State intervenes in my natural right to do things with my own computer and the Internet connection I pay for, in order to encourage the making of more cinema and so on.</text></comment> | <story><title>Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies</title><url>https://digiday.com/media/apple-is-quietly-pushing-a-tv-ad-product-with-media-agencies/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw10920</author><text>Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or even education, there&#x27;s no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.<p>&gt; that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks<p>First of all, I straight-up don&#x27;t believe this. I had very little exposure to TV&#x2F;movies&#x2F;books&#x2F;the internet growing up, and yet I feel virtually no disconnect with my friends and co-workers - even when I don&#x27;t understand a particular cultural reference they make, they either explain it and we engage in a fun tangent about it, or we just laugh and move on.<p>Second, even if that were true - then the problem is that culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve <i>that</i>. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.</text></item><item><author>nscalf</author><text>I don&#x27;t find this particularly morally dubious. These companies are approaching monopoly powers and using it to squeeze consumers. Disney owns about 1&#x2F;3 of all box office revenue. The government has shown they&#x27;re unwilling to break up monopolies, or even really limit them in any meaningful way.<p>Also, I don&#x27;t quite know my feelings on this yet, but there is something real about some shows and movies being part of the milieu. Something doesn&#x27;t sit quite right about repeatedly increasing the pricing via anti-consumer acquisitions on products that are contributing a substantial part of how the society collectively feels and thinks. It feels like you have to make more money to live in the same society.</text></item><item><author>belval</author><text>I know it&#x27;s morally dubious, but I&#x27;m completely back in pirateland because of all the changes&#x2F;price hikes&#x2F;partitioning in the streaming space. My interests make it so I only watch 1-2 shows per platform so I&#x27;d be approaching ~100$&#x2F;month.<p>And even if I was swimming in money, it&#x27;s often easier to just download the shows I want and watch them on Plex&#x2F;Jellyfin than trying to navigate the (often ad-riddled) interfaces of the various platforms and finding <i>where</i> the content I want is.<p>One example is Rick and Morty, it&#x27;s made by Adult Swim, but they don&#x27;t have a streaming service in Canada. It seems to be on Primevideo but under a different system than their regular content. The other way to watch it is to buy it from my cable provider (I don&#x27;t have cable). So to watch a 20-minutes animated show I&#x27;d have to take a +40$ subscription.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>senko</author><text>&gt; Nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted entertainment products. Unlike, say, having access to food or water, or <i>even education</i>, there&#x27;s no coherent moral framework that says that you are obligated to the latest TV shows or movies under your own terms.<p>Yet educational books are copyrighted all the same, and scientific journals fight tooth and claw from preventing open access even if morally they should (eg. when publishing results of research paid for by public months).<p>You just drew an imaginary line (entertainment products) to defend an artificial law (copyright). Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.<p>Copyright creates an artificial scarcity (literally, in the 21st century, where copying is costless). Compare that with natural laws, such as against killing, stealing, etc, known for thousands of years, with obvious reasons for existence.<p>We can argue to what extent copyright promotes creation, and we can agree to respect it because of its positive effects (if any).<p>But we should never mistake the &quot;nobody has the right to obtain copyrighted works&quot; dogma for a law of nature.<p>&gt; culture is being built off of copyrighted works in the first place. Solve that. Doing otherwise shows that this is just a convenient excuse to secure access to personal entertainment.<p>What is culture if not total sum of all art, science, and other human accomplishments? And as we now stand, all modern art (and much of science) is being locked up behind copyright for decades.<p>Solve that.</text></comment> |
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