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<story><title>Sheriff’s Office letter targets residents for ‘increased accountability’</title><url>https://www.tampabay.com/investigations/2021/07/24/pasco-sheriffs-office-letter-targets-residents-for-increased-accountability/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>This article is a prime example of law enforcement passing the buck of responsibility for their own actions to a black box system by claiming that the system&amp;#x27;s output is &amp;quot;unbiased&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;“You may wonder why you were enrolled in this program,” the letter continues. “You were selected as a result of an evaluation of your recent criminal behavior using an unbiased, evidence-based risk assessment designed to identify prolific offenders in our community. As a result of this designation, we will go to great efforts to encourage change in your life through enhanced support and increased accountability.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Last year, a Tampa Bay Times investigation revealed that the Sheriff’s Office creates lists of people it considers likely to break the law based on criminal histories, social networks and other unspecified intelligence. The agency sends deputies to their homes repeatedly, often without a search warrant or probable cause for an arrest.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now law enforcement gets to absolve themselves of accusations of bias or targetting because they assume that their computers can&amp;#x27;t be &amp;quot;biased&amp;quot;, even though they only buy systems that confirm their own hunches about which people are criminals or not.&lt;p&gt;If anyone complains, they can say they were only doing what the supposedly unbiased system told them to do, after all.</text></comment>

<story><title>Sheriff’s Office letter targets residents for ‘increased accountability’</title><url>https://www.tampabay.com/investigations/2021/07/24/pasco-sheriffs-office-letter-targets-residents-for-increased-accountability/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cartoonworld</author><text>Reading the articles, I&amp;#x27;ve found the Pasco Sheriff ILP manual[0] in question which was obtained by Tampa Bay Times. The section specifically relating to kids is on Page 70. Interesting read, though I haven&amp;#x27;t had much time to ingest all the details.&lt;p&gt;It appears as if the sheriffs have been creating dossiers since 2011. Is sheriffs really this well funded in Florida? Where i am from, the sheriff is essentially the court agent, transporting prisoners, seizing defaulted property, serving some process, etc&lt;p&gt;If you are well informed, I am interested in learning about the analytics and tools they are using. The report mentions CompStat, Problem Oriented Policing and a methodology called SARA (scan assess respond analyze) as well as post-9&amp;#x2F;11 derived information sharing developments. They have ALPR and video feeds from some in their community as well they are using, and also mention in passing facial recognition to identify the unidentified.. uh whoever.&lt;p&gt;[0] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;20412738-ilp_manual012918&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;20412738-ilp_manual0...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>NordVPN confirms it was hacked</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LennyWhiteJr</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The attacker gained access to the server — which had been active for about a month — by exploiting an insecure remote management system left by the datacenter provider, which NordVPN said it was unaware that such a system existed.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This screams for clarification and I&amp;#x27;d love for someone more knowledgeable in the area to elaborate on it. Is this common practice for data-center providers? Do I now not only have to worry about my own infrastructure security but also worry that my IaaS provider hasn&amp;#x27;t installed some backdoor to my servers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeta0134</author><text>I work for a web hosting company in the US and at least in our case, it&amp;#x27;s quite common for remote management to be enabled on pretty much all of our dedicated hardware. However, because of the inherent dangers in opening this up to the public internet, unless explicitly requested by the customer (or Managed Colocation), the NIC used for Dell iDRAC or HP iLO is on an isolated network unique to the physical datacenter. Remote access for our techs is managed through a secured bridge that requires all sorts of security hoops on our company intranet, and remote access for general internet traffic is not available due to the firewall restrictions. While it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;plausible&lt;/i&gt; for remote access to be gained this way, it is extremely unlikely and would require several exploits at different points along the path.&lt;p&gt;I cannot speak for the industry as a whole, but remote management systems like this are bound to be common; any large enough physical datacenter is going to need a more efficient way to access a misbehaving system than sending a tech physically running to the box to plug in a keyboard and mouse. It &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be extremely uncommon to have these management interfaces open to the public though, and I&amp;#x27;ll bet that&amp;#x27;s what NordVPN is surprised by. Generally these systems should be private and isolated due to the power that an attacker can wield through them.</text></comment>

<story><title>NordVPN confirms it was hacked</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>LennyWhiteJr</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The attacker gained access to the server — which had been active for about a month — by exploiting an insecure remote management system left by the datacenter provider, which NordVPN said it was unaware that such a system existed.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This screams for clarification and I&amp;#x27;d love for someone more knowledgeable in the area to elaborate on it. Is this common practice for data-center providers? Do I now not only have to worry about my own infrastructure security but also worry that my IaaS provider hasn&amp;#x27;t installed some backdoor to my servers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CiPHPerCoder</author><text>Sounds like an iDRAC exploit (assuming Dell servers).&lt;p&gt;But, yes, remote management is pretty common in datacenters. The fact that NordVPN wasn&amp;#x27;t aware of them just shows incompetence.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time</title><url>https://github.com/normal-computing/outlines</url><text>Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming.&lt;p&gt;Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.normalcomputing.ai&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;2023-07-27-regex-guided-generation&amp;#x2F;regex-guided-generation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.normalcomputing.ai&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;2023-07-27-regex-guide...&lt;/a&gt;). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We can transform this DFA into a generative model: in each state we get a list of symbols which correspond to completions that partially match the regular expression. We mask the other symbols in the logits returned by a large language model, sample a new symbol and move to the next state. The subtelty is that language models work with tokens, not symbols, so we derive a new FSM whose alphabet is the model&amp;#x27;s vocabulary. We can do this in only one pass over the vocabulary.&lt;p&gt;Generating the token masks thus only requires a dictionary lookup at each state. Our method blows other libraries like Microsoft&amp;#x27;s guidance out of the water.&lt;p&gt;From there it was only a small leap to be able to generate text that follows a JSON schema (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;json-schema.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;json-schema.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;), or is parseable into a Pydantic model (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.pydantic.dev&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;usage&amp;#x2F;models&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.pydantic.dev&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;usage&amp;#x2F;models&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;). The method works with union types, optional types, nested schemas, arrays, everything. It is guaranteed that the output is parseable.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s cool, and I&amp;#x27;ve spent a lot of time watching even tiny models output valid JSON over the weekend. Hope you will too.&lt;p&gt;I look forward to feedback, bug reports, feature requests and discussions!&lt;p&gt;Edit: Link to our pre-print explaining the method and how this can be extended to generate text that follows a Context-Free Grammar &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2307.09702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2307.09702&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>panarky</author><text>I can make GPT4 return valid JSON simply by providing examples in the system message. This works nine times out of ten.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s still probabilistic, and nine times out of ten isn&amp;#x27;t good enough.&lt;p&gt;Occasionally it will hallucinate responses like this:&lt;p&gt;{&amp;quot;key1&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;value1&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;key2&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;value2&amp;quot; for i in range(n)}&lt;p&gt;Re-prompting with the parsing error message is usually enough to get it on the second try.&lt;p&gt;But escaping double-quotes and newline characters is less reliable. Even after giving it multiple examples, it correctly escapes only about half the time.&lt;p&gt;Re-prompting for escaping errors still yields a ~50% success rate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonw</author><text>That re-prompting on error trick is what this new Microsoft library does, too: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;microsoft&amp;#x2F;TypeChat&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;microsoft&amp;#x2F;TypeChat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s their prompt for that: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;microsoft&amp;#x2F;TypeChat&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;c45460f4030938da39629d882c3e0e2c718f8680&amp;#x2F;src&amp;#x2F;program.ts#L212-L216&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;microsoft&amp;#x2F;TypeChat&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;c45460f4030938da3...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the approach using grammars (seen here, but also in things like &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;ggerganov&amp;#x2F;llama.cpp&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;1773&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;ggerganov&amp;#x2F;llama.cpp&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;1773&lt;/a&gt; ) is a much more elegant solution.</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time</title><url>https://github.com/normal-computing/outlines</url><text>Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming.&lt;p&gt;Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.normalcomputing.ai&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;2023-07-27-regex-guided-generation&amp;#x2F;regex-guided-generation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.normalcomputing.ai&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;2023-07-27-regex-guide...&lt;/a&gt;). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We can transform this DFA into a generative model: in each state we get a list of symbols which correspond to completions that partially match the regular expression. We mask the other symbols in the logits returned by a large language model, sample a new symbol and move to the next state. The subtelty is that language models work with tokens, not symbols, so we derive a new FSM whose alphabet is the model&amp;#x27;s vocabulary. We can do this in only one pass over the vocabulary.&lt;p&gt;Generating the token masks thus only requires a dictionary lookup at each state. Our method blows other libraries like Microsoft&amp;#x27;s guidance out of the water.&lt;p&gt;From there it was only a small leap to be able to generate text that follows a JSON schema (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;json-schema.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;json-schema.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;), or is parseable into a Pydantic model (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.pydantic.dev&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;usage&amp;#x2F;models&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.pydantic.dev&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;usage&amp;#x2F;models&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;). The method works with union types, optional types, nested schemas, arrays, everything. It is guaranteed that the output is parseable.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s cool, and I&amp;#x27;ve spent a lot of time watching even tiny models output valid JSON over the weekend. Hope you will too.&lt;p&gt;I look forward to feedback, bug reports, feature requests and discussions!&lt;p&gt;Edit: Link to our pre-print explaining the method and how this can be extended to generate text that follows a Context-Free Grammar &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2307.09702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;2307.09702&lt;/a&gt;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>panarky</author><text>I can make GPT4 return valid JSON simply by providing examples in the system message. This works nine times out of ten.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s still probabilistic, and nine times out of ten isn&amp;#x27;t good enough.&lt;p&gt;Occasionally it will hallucinate responses like this:&lt;p&gt;{&amp;quot;key1&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;value1&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;key2&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;value2&amp;quot; for i in range(n)}&lt;p&gt;Re-prompting with the parsing error message is usually enough to get it on the second try.&lt;p&gt;But escaping double-quotes and newline characters is less reliable. Even after giving it multiple examples, it correctly escapes only about half the time.&lt;p&gt;Re-prompting for escaping errors still yields a ~50% success rate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>padolsey</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve had more luck with getting it to output XML as (1) You can imbue XML with actual language&amp;#x2F;meaning (which LLMs adore) and (2) parsers can be made to be more forgiving. I get why people want to make JSON, but to me it&amp;#x27;s a bit like trying to get a cat to swim - you might eventually succeed, but it&amp;#x27;s not their natural inclination.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?</title><text>I feel like I have seen various waves of hype regarding programming bootcamps but the people who I have talked to about it are always people who are considering going or just graduated. Interested to hear from someone who&amp;#x27;s been out in the wild for at least a couple years.&lt;p&gt;What are you doing now? Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>abeyer</author><text>You can&amp;#x27;t work at Starbucks and read HN?&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though, after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life...and that was by far my most productive period of time as far as keeping up on general tech news, personal projects, academic research&amp;#x2F;reading&amp;#x2F;conferences, etc...&lt;p&gt;A non-code day job can be a great way to have the mental energy to spend on non-job code. :)</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>Note some selection bias may exist in the answers.&lt;p&gt;If you did a tech bootcamp three years ago and it went fantastically, you&amp;#x27;re probably reading HN today and will see and reply to this. The more success you had, the more likely you&amp;#x27;re a developer today!&lt;p&gt;If it went terribly, you might still be working at Starbucks and don&amp;#x27;t read HN very often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mabbo</author><text>&amp;gt; You can&amp;#x27;t work at Starbucks and read HN?&lt;p&gt;My point isn&amp;#x27;t that non-programmers can&amp;#x27;t or don&amp;#x27;t read HN. My point is that there are more programmers reading and posting on HN than Starbucks baristas. If you hated your boot camp, the odds of you reading HN is lower. Selection bias doesn&amp;#x27;t mean absolutes, it means probabilities.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life&lt;p&gt;I really respect that. I think I&amp;#x27;d like to do the same, but the mortgage can&amp;#x27;t be paid on minimum wage.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?</title><text>I feel like I have seen various waves of hype regarding programming bootcamps but the people who I have talked to about it are always people who are considering going or just graduated. Interested to hear from someone who&amp;#x27;s been out in the wild for at least a couple years.&lt;p&gt;What are you doing now? Do you feel that the bootcamp prepared you for the jobs you got? Do you think most of your cohort are still working as developers?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>abeyer</author><text>You can&amp;#x27;t work at Starbucks and read HN?&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though, after some early career burnout I did a stint at a restaurant job to pay the bills while I decided what I wanted to do with my life...and that was by far my most productive period of time as far as keeping up on general tech news, personal projects, academic research&amp;#x2F;reading&amp;#x2F;conferences, etc...&lt;p&gt;A non-code day job can be a great way to have the mental energy to spend on non-job code. :)</text></item><item><author>mabbo</author><text>Note some selection bias may exist in the answers.&lt;p&gt;If you did a tech bootcamp three years ago and it went fantastically, you&amp;#x27;re probably reading HN today and will see and reply to this. The more success you had, the more likely you&amp;#x27;re a developer today!&lt;p&gt;If it went terribly, you might still be working at Starbucks and don&amp;#x27;t read HN very often.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>watwut</author><text>I think that OP point was not that there is something special about Starbucks. It was that people who were unsuccessful after bootcamp or had otherwise bad experience are less likely to read these forums.</text></comment>

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<story><title>A note I sent to YCombinator</title><text>First, I guess I should say that I have started five companies. All were successful; two had successful NASDAQ small-cap IPOs.  I have also had a few books published, and spent a number of years as a widely read computer columnist in the 1980s.  Meh.&lt;p&gt;Of late, I have been doing medical technical writing for large medical companies. I&apos;m pretty financially secure, so I only work on short-term contracts, and only when I feel like it. But it does put me in the world of highly skilled contract workers, which is interesting, and the reason for this note.&lt;p&gt;First, I agree with 99% of what you say about entrepreneurship. The one thing that I would add is that people who want to be successful had better be nice people.&lt;p&gt;Smart talented people don&apos;t want to work with jerks, no matter what the compensation. Here, of course, we come to Steve Jobs. Steve asked me to come to Apple to write one of two &quot;first books&quot; about the Macintosh. (the other was written by Cary Lu, much missed.). So I spent 1983 at Apple, hanging around, being nosy.  And got to spend quite a bit of time with Steve. That made me want to start my own company…to see if I could do it and succeed. More importantly, it made me want to start a company and not be an asshole, and see if I could succeed. The answer was yes.&lt;p&gt;So it was with some interest that I looked at the job postings for the companies that you are involved with. Of the 12 companies listed, 10 of the openings were for programmers. No surprise.&lt;p&gt;The humor, to me, is in the consistency. They all want really really really really good programmers. Not one company is willing to put forth a salary number, but they all say they offer excellent compensation.  In the bay area, that must be a lot of zeros!&lt;p&gt;And most wave their hands about how hard they work. Get the code?  We intend to work you like a dog. To enrich the founders, of course.&lt;p&gt;And most offer the added incentive of equity. Although only a fool or a recent graduate would fail to realize how easily one can be washed away in later rounds.&lt;p&gt;So here we have greed and capitalism operating in its purest form.  You want to make a lot of money by funding startups. The start ups want to make a lot of money by making things.  But…as you so correctly state, the wealth will primarily be created by the programmers. And they don&apos;t have programmers! Or at least not the really really good programmers they need to make a really really big bunch of money.&lt;p&gt;If Marx were alive today...you get the idea.  It is obviously hard to exploit the working class, when the workers you need are so rare and so valuable to your aspirations.  Hence all the frenetic handwaving in the job postings on your site&lt;p&gt;I have a friend. A young man who has an international tea distribution company, which services bubble tea shops, owned by his father and other investors.  He wants business advice. I keep saying: dude, you have an international tea distribution business!  Run with it!&lt;p&gt;But I really like the guy. So I dug deep, to come up with the best business advice I could offer. I finally arrived at this: make sure that everyone who works for you, and everyone who works with you, makes a ton… an absolute boatload of money. Do that, and make sure that they really do, and you will do fine.  No worries. And you will become a better person in the process; which is the only justifiably selfish reason to be in business in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Maybe some of your companies could take those notions into their efforts to hire ditch diggers?&lt;p&gt;Doug Clapp&lt;p&gt;ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it, without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don&apos;t play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nhashem</author><text>A lot of the job postings to me from YC startups seem absurd, since a lot of them seem to be looking for &quot;expert&quot;-level roles. For example, a lot of them are looking for a &quot;growth engineer.&quot; My interpretation is that they&apos;re basically saying, &quot;We have a cool product and anyone that hears about us seems to like us, so we need someone that can write code that will help more people hear about us.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Or, more generalized: &quot;We have some huge thing we want to do, and can&apos;t do it ourselves, so we&apos;re looking for someone that can pretty much just come in and do it for us.&quot;&lt;p&gt;And all the postings offer in terms of describing/selling why such a immensely talented individual would work for them is: &quot;We&apos;re reinventing the future of everything, we work hard and play hard, we can offer competitive salary and equity.&quot;&lt;p&gt;The OP seems to feel this is borne out of some sort of maliciousness, but I really think this is mostly just cluelessness. When you get a little bit of traction and you have a little bit of money in the bank, and you&apos;re trying to go even faster and you have 20 major initiatives you want to do and you can only work on like 2 at a time, it&apos;s easy to conclude, &quot;We need to hire! We love our company, this is so much better than working at some corporate stuffy job, why wouldn&apos;t anyone think the same?&quot;&lt;p&gt;Most of these companies would probably just be better served forgetting about hiring and building out the core product until they have more product-market fit, so they have enough revenue/funding to compensate employees closer to their talent level, and have a &quot;popular&quot; brand that people would want to actively work for.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this would mean delaying that 3rd party API, or porting your applcation to iOS, or started using SEO/SEM to drive some traffic, which all have huge learning curves that are tough to navigate while you have a ton of other things to do. But if they were THAT critical, I would suggest those startups prioritize them over those other things and doing it themselves.</text></comment>

<story><title>A note I sent to YCombinator</title><text>First, I guess I should say that I have started five companies. All were successful; two had successful NASDAQ small-cap IPOs.  I have also had a few books published, and spent a number of years as a widely read computer columnist in the 1980s.  Meh.&lt;p&gt;Of late, I have been doing medical technical writing for large medical companies. I&apos;m pretty financially secure, so I only work on short-term contracts, and only when I feel like it. But it does put me in the world of highly skilled contract workers, which is interesting, and the reason for this note.&lt;p&gt;First, I agree with 99% of what you say about entrepreneurship. The one thing that I would add is that people who want to be successful had better be nice people.&lt;p&gt;Smart talented people don&apos;t want to work with jerks, no matter what the compensation. Here, of course, we come to Steve Jobs. Steve asked me to come to Apple to write one of two &quot;first books&quot; about the Macintosh. (the other was written by Cary Lu, much missed.). So I spent 1983 at Apple, hanging around, being nosy.  And got to spend quite a bit of time with Steve. That made me want to start my own company…to see if I could do it and succeed. More importantly, it made me want to start a company and not be an asshole, and see if I could succeed. The answer was yes.&lt;p&gt;So it was with some interest that I looked at the job postings for the companies that you are involved with. Of the 12 companies listed, 10 of the openings were for programmers. No surprise.&lt;p&gt;The humor, to me, is in the consistency. They all want really really really really good programmers. Not one company is willing to put forth a salary number, but they all say they offer excellent compensation.  In the bay area, that must be a lot of zeros!&lt;p&gt;And most wave their hands about how hard they work. Get the code?  We intend to work you like a dog. To enrich the founders, of course.&lt;p&gt;And most offer the added incentive of equity. Although only a fool or a recent graduate would fail to realize how easily one can be washed away in later rounds.&lt;p&gt;So here we have greed and capitalism operating in its purest form.  You want to make a lot of money by funding startups. The start ups want to make a lot of money by making things.  But…as you so correctly state, the wealth will primarily be created by the programmers. And they don&apos;t have programmers! Or at least not the really really good programmers they need to make a really really big bunch of money.&lt;p&gt;If Marx were alive today...you get the idea.  It is obviously hard to exploit the working class, when the workers you need are so rare and so valuable to your aspirations.  Hence all the frenetic handwaving in the job postings on your site&lt;p&gt;I have a friend. A young man who has an international tea distribution company, which services bubble tea shops, owned by his father and other investors.  He wants business advice. I keep saying: dude, you have an international tea distribution business!  Run with it!&lt;p&gt;But I really like the guy. So I dug deep, to come up with the best business advice I could offer. I finally arrived at this: make sure that everyone who works for you, and everyone who works with you, makes a ton… an absolute boatload of money. Do that, and make sure that they really do, and you will do fine.  No worries. And you will become a better person in the process; which is the only justifiably selfish reason to be in business in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Maybe some of your companies could take those notions into their efforts to hire ditch diggers?&lt;p&gt;Doug Clapp&lt;p&gt;ps -- All this we work really hard bullshit? As if it is a merit badge or something? Your fundees should realize that the very best code written in this century was written for the space shuttle. And the folks who wrote it, without going into too much detail, worked 40 hour weeks. And were not allowed to work more than that. Period. It is no fun to win if you don&apos;t play by the rules. A 40 hour week is a good rule. I suspect that a 36 hour week is a better rule. :-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jaems33</author><text>It&apos;s kind of ridiculous that some mod or admin must&apos;ve hidden this post because it&apos;s now missing from the front page.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ways the world improved in 2018</title><url>https://qz.com/1506764/ways-the-world-improved-in-2018-in-charts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josselex</author><text>So renwable Energy increased from 7 percent to 10 percent in 12 years with a perfect linear slope. So we just need only about 300 years till 100%. Good luck with that.&lt;p&gt;Is anybody reading these plots? This is really the worst news I read this year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Felz</author><text>Or, look at it differently: we&amp;#x27;ve increased our renewable energy capacity percentage by 42% over 12 years, even as world energy demand rose. (0.1&amp;#x2F;0.07 = 1.42)&lt;p&gt;This is great news! In about 75 years, we&amp;#x27;ll use &amp;gt;90% renewable energy. (1.42^(x&amp;#x2F;12) = 0.9&amp;#x2F;0.1)&lt;p&gt;Which of these is the better model? I don&amp;#x27;t know, I can&amp;#x27;t eyeball statistical regression on this chart. But my gut says percentage of energy use growth isn&amp;#x27;t what we should pay attention to if we want to predict the long run future. When&amp;#x2F;if renewables become far cheaper than coal, that percentage is going to skyrocket fast.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ways the world improved in 2018</title><url>https://qz.com/1506764/ways-the-world-improved-in-2018-in-charts/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>josselex</author><text>So renwable Energy increased from 7 percent to 10 percent in 12 years with a perfect linear slope. So we just need only about 300 years till 100%. Good luck with that.&lt;p&gt;Is anybody reading these plots? This is really the worst news I read this year.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackfoxy</author><text>Not only, but apparently includes bio-fuels. Sorry, but agriculture is hugely environmentally impactful. We should not be growing fuel. I think a lot of it is subsidized by governments. Extracting petroleum from the ground is going to continue to be cheap for a very long time.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source</title><url>http://www.pagetable.com/?p=894</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Patient0</author><text>&amp;quot;This will take about 16 minutes, so you probably want to switch your emulator into “Warp Mode”. &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what an equivalent guide written 30 years in the future about &lt;i&gt;today&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; software would say. &amp;quot;At this point I realised the file was encrypted with 128 bit - so I routed it through the quantum decryptor circuit to find the key&amp;quot;...</text></comment>

<story><title>Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source</title><url>http://www.pagetable.com/?p=894</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>random_upvoter</author><text>IIRC, some games for the Commodore 64 just disabled the kernal (which was mapped to address space $E000-$FFFF) to have 8 kilobytes of extra ram.</text></comment>

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<story><title>This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system</title><url>https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1489595793506029578</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disgu</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m probably in the minority here but I&amp;#x27;m at a point where I&amp;#x27;ll simply not purchase any service if I cannot use the in app form of payment. I&amp;#x27;m just done with everything else. If I miss out on something then so be it.&lt;p&gt;Have you ever bought an Adobe subscription, ever tried to cancel a New York Times subscription? Or Audible where they say &amp;quot;Well, you can cancel but then we&amp;#x27;ll also take the tokens you&amp;#x27;ve already paid for&amp;quot;? It&amp;#x27;s completely ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m so sick of 14,000 variations on cancelling things, having to click through menus, five hundred different things I have to take care of and all that crap. On iOS I can cancel anything and everything - without exception - the same way and in a few clicks. I like that and it&amp;#x27;s just something I got used to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pwinnski</author><text>I 100% agree that I am not interested in establishing new relationships with payment systems other than Apple&amp;#x27;s. Absolutely true.&lt;p&gt;BUT two things:&lt;p&gt;1. I already have relationships with some payment systems other than Apple&amp;#x27;s which I trust. Not many, but some. I mean, Amazon happens to be big enough that they are immune from this requirement, even for digital purchases, but there are plenty of other companies I would happily pay directly and trust as much as Apple.&lt;p&gt;2. This messaging requirement is just petty. It makes Apple look small and childish. It should embarrass them that this ever saw the light of day.</text></comment>

<story><title>This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system</title><url>https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1489595793506029578</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>disgu</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m probably in the minority here but I&amp;#x27;m at a point where I&amp;#x27;ll simply not purchase any service if I cannot use the in app form of payment. I&amp;#x27;m just done with everything else. If I miss out on something then so be it.&lt;p&gt;Have you ever bought an Adobe subscription, ever tried to cancel a New York Times subscription? Or Audible where they say &amp;quot;Well, you can cancel but then we&amp;#x27;ll also take the tokens you&amp;#x27;ve already paid for&amp;quot;? It&amp;#x27;s completely ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m so sick of 14,000 variations on cancelling things, having to click through menus, five hundred different things I have to take care of and all that crap. On iOS I can cancel anything and everything - without exception - the same way and in a few clicks. I like that and it&amp;#x27;s just something I got used to.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jsiepkes</author><text>Fine, but apps should be allowed to let you pay via alternative methods and also allow you to pay via Apple and charge you the 30% extra costs which Apple wants.&lt;p&gt;I highly doubt you would pay 30% more just so you can pay via Apple.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Lua: The Little Language That Could</title><url>https://matt.blwt.io/post/lua-the-little-language-that-could/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rochus</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only; Lua is also an example of excellent language design: a minimum of concepts for a maximum of expressability; it&amp;#x27;s minimal, complete and elegant.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lua is much leaner, only ~100k machine code. WAMR looks like a better candidate than Deno, but concerning performance and simplicity it has still to catch up.</text></item><item><author>rektide</author><text>Lua&amp;#x27;s presence is honestly hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs. If you needed some scripting capabilities, Lua was the way. Whether it&amp;#x27;s a webserver (nginx) or editor (vim) or a window manager (awesome), Lua was the easiest &amp;amp; best at hand option to integrate.&lt;p&gt;There is a huge opportunity, IMO, for more players here. Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this. Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brabel</author><text>I think a &amp;quot;competitor&amp;quot; to Lua would be Guile [1], but I am not sure if it gets close to Lua in terms of lightweightness... it was designed to be used in the GNU project, with similar objects as Lua: to be light, easily embeddable. It&amp;#x27;s a Scheme (Lisp) so maybe not for everyone&amp;#x27;s taste... its &amp;quot;coolest&amp;quot; use i know of is for configuring Guix [2] (the GNU version of Nix).&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;guile&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;guile&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;guix.gnu.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;guix.gnu.org&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Lua: The Little Language That Could</title><url>https://matt.blwt.io/post/lua-the-little-language-that-could/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Rochus</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only; Lua is also an example of excellent language design: a minimum of concepts for a maximum of expressability; it&amp;#x27;s minimal, complete and elegant.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lua is much leaner, only ~100k machine code. WAMR looks like a better candidate than Deno, but concerning performance and simplicity it has still to catch up.</text></item><item><author>rektide</author><text>Lua&amp;#x27;s presence is honestly hugely because it is so easy to embed in other programs. If you needed some scripting capabilities, Lua was the way. Whether it&amp;#x27;s a webserver (nginx) or editor (vim) or a window manager (awesome), Lua was the easiest &amp;amp; best at hand option to integrate.&lt;p&gt;There is a huge opportunity, IMO, for more players here. Deno definitely has some good gestures toward a this. Wasm though seems like the likely general heir, and will have many different offerings for how to do that (Deno being one!).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ufo</author><text>One of the reasons why Lua is minimal is that it makes it easier to embed. It&amp;#x27;s no coincidence :) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lua.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;cacm2011.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.lua.org&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;cacm2011.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11512-cia_vs_wikileaks</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>woodruffw</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m normally loathe to defend any aspect of the US MIC, but I &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; Pompeo&amp;#x27;s point is that Wikileaks &lt;i&gt;knowingly&lt;/i&gt; publicizes information that has already been processed into &lt;i&gt;Intelligence&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;willfully&lt;/i&gt; turns a blind eye to its role as a laundromat for hostile powers under the guise of an ideology of totally free data.&lt;p&gt;I, for one, think that all information should be free. I think Pompeo&amp;#x27;s motivations are suspect and geopolitical and I don&amp;#x27;t trust &lt;i&gt;him&lt;/i&gt; personally. However, I &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; think that Wikileaks has a myopic view of information freedom that chiefly benefits powers whose &lt;i&gt;long term&lt;/i&gt; vision is the decline of liberal democracy.</text></item><item><author>for_i_in_range</author><text>He makes an important point early on in outlining the mission of Wikileaks centering on making Data and Information freely accessible to all (the concept of Dataism, for those who have read Yuval Harrari’s &lt;i&gt;HOMO DEUS&lt;/i&gt;).&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;i&gt;processing&lt;/i&gt; of Information into &lt;i&gt;Intelligence&lt;/i&gt; that can be acted upon is what characterizes Intelligence agencies. Wikileaks does not concern itself with this phase. Yet, the CIA’s Pompeo is trying to paint a narrative that Wikileaks &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; doing this by labeling them a “non-state intelligence agency”, thereby justifying the CIA’s actions to attack Wikileaks.&lt;p&gt;In brief:&lt;p&gt;Narrative #1 - the CIA attacking an “Idealistic Free Information Publisher”.&lt;p&gt;Narrative #2 - the CIA attacking a “Non-state Dark Intelligence Agency”&lt;p&gt;The CIA is actively trying to create Narrative #2, which is a bit concerning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmix</author><text>If Wikileaks treats all leaks as equal then I don&amp;#x27;t see how this argument holds water.&lt;p&gt;Where else are we going to get insight into the globbal power &amp;quot;underworld&amp;quot;, which the intelligence community just happens to always have a finger in? Anonymous sources feeding into New York Times? Because that&amp;#x27;s all we had before and continue to have today otherwise.&lt;p&gt;People just don&amp;#x27;t like when certain inconvenient information comes out and Wikileaks didnt care about the source.&lt;p&gt;People constantly try to pin ideological stuff on Wikileaks or data leaking in general but that misses the bigger point and it&amp;#x27;s a point that extends beyond Wikileaks itself and goes into information releasing in general (we don&amp;#x27;t need to defend Assange personally or Wikileaks itself to be concerned or defend the general idea). I also highly doubt they are selectively choosing NOT to release political information... like news outlets apparently do.&lt;p&gt;But I also don&amp;#x27;t care, there&amp;#x27;s a huge amount of risk and blowback doing such a mission regardless of source or content which we should respect.&lt;p&gt;They get what they can from where ever and publish it if it has some value to the general public, and we&amp;#x27;ve gotten tons of value from Wikileaks already. So do plenty of other organizations now inspired by Wikileaks, plenty which have exposed corruption in a new way (like Panamaleaks).&lt;p&gt;The fact this sometimes can have an &amp;#x27;agenda&amp;#x27; or be exploited by the original sources will never negate the value of a neutral 3rd party who releases stuff publicly we&amp;#x27;d never see otherwise. And will continue to do so as long as operational.&lt;p&gt;My only fear is that there won&amp;#x27;t be people brave enough to do this given nation-state harassment and those who think its all a political-inspired conspiracy (which litter every social media site).</text></comment>

<story><title>CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]</title><url>https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11512-cia_vs_wikileaks</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>woodruffw</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m normally loathe to defend any aspect of the US MIC, but I &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; Pompeo&amp;#x27;s point is that Wikileaks &lt;i&gt;knowingly&lt;/i&gt; publicizes information that has already been processed into &lt;i&gt;Intelligence&lt;/i&gt;, and &lt;i&gt;willfully&lt;/i&gt; turns a blind eye to its role as a laundromat for hostile powers under the guise of an ideology of totally free data.&lt;p&gt;I, for one, think that all information should be free. I think Pompeo&amp;#x27;s motivations are suspect and geopolitical and I don&amp;#x27;t trust &lt;i&gt;him&lt;/i&gt; personally. However, I &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; think that Wikileaks has a myopic view of information freedom that chiefly benefits powers whose &lt;i&gt;long term&lt;/i&gt; vision is the decline of liberal democracy.</text></item><item><author>for_i_in_range</author><text>He makes an important point early on in outlining the mission of Wikileaks centering on making Data and Information freely accessible to all (the concept of Dataism, for those who have read Yuval Harrari’s &lt;i&gt;HOMO DEUS&lt;/i&gt;).&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;i&gt;processing&lt;/i&gt; of Information into &lt;i&gt;Intelligence&lt;/i&gt; that can be acted upon is what characterizes Intelligence agencies. Wikileaks does not concern itself with this phase. Yet, the CIA’s Pompeo is trying to paint a narrative that Wikileaks &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; doing this by labeling them a “non-state intelligence agency”, thereby justifying the CIA’s actions to attack Wikileaks.&lt;p&gt;In brief:&lt;p&gt;Narrative #1 - the CIA attacking an “Idealistic Free Information Publisher”.&lt;p&gt;Narrative #2 - the CIA attacking a “Non-state Dark Intelligence Agency”&lt;p&gt;The CIA is actively trying to create Narrative #2, which is a bit concerning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rmrfstar</author><text>The primary threat to &amp;quot;liberal democracy&amp;quot; is CIA, DHS, MI5, and MI6. It is not SVR or MSS. This has been true since the Cold War. Who did more harm to &amp;quot;liberal democracy&amp;quot;, J. Edgar Hoover (who tried to extort MLK into suicide), or KGB?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/xen_on_rpi_4/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rwmj</author><text>RPi4 is interesting because it&amp;#x27;s the first Raspberry Pi with a serious amount of RAM (8GB), moderate speed CPUs (4 x Cortex A72), that can boot and run from external USB 3 SSDs, with UAS and UEFI+ACPI. Essentially you can now use them for aarch64 server SBSA&amp;#x2F;SBBR development.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s about a third of the speed of my Intel i7 laptop from 18 months ago, which considering the incredibly low price I consider to be fantastic.&lt;p&gt;I recently got Fedora Server installed on one using Robert Grimm&amp;#x27;s instructions (linked from my blog along with other useful links here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;raspberry-pi-4-running-fedora-32&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;09&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;raspberry-pi-4-running...&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>

<story><title>Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/xen_on_rpi_4/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vianpl</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;alpine.DEB.2.21.2007101521290.4124@sstabellini-ThinkPad-T480s&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;alpine.DEB.2.21.2007101521290.4...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers</title><url>https://www.ccn.com/monero-declares-war-asic-manufacturers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrb</author><text>As a Bitcoin miner since 2010, the hostility toward ASIC-based mining rig manufacturers has rarely made sense to me. ASICs &lt;i&gt;strengthen&lt;/i&gt; your network. The requirement to have specialized hardware to mine profitably, hence pushing miners to the highest joule&amp;#x2F;hash metric physically reachable will make a PoW-based cryptocurrency much more secure with respect to majority attacks (so-called 51% attacks.) Cryptocurrency devs should welcome and embrace ASIC miners.&lt;p&gt;By far, the majority of GPU farms mine Ethereum. This mean any GPU-mineable coin other than Ethereum is trivially vulnerable to majority attacks. The only thing preventing these attacks from happening is the financial incentives &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; performing such a purely destructive attack.&lt;p&gt;ASIC-mineable coins are safe from such attacks from GPU miners.&lt;p&gt;People point out that the high barrier of entry into ASIC manufacturing can lead to monopolies, such as Bitmain which is a quasi- (not quite) monopoly with its 70-80% market share in Bitcoin with the S9. But first and foremost, manufacturing monopolies don&amp;#x27;t matter to the &lt;i&gt;function&lt;/i&gt; of Bitcoin. A manufacturing monopoly isn&amp;#x27;t a hashrate monopoly: Bitmain cannot attack Bitcoin. They themselves only directly own &amp;lt;10% of the hashrate.¹&lt;p&gt;¹ Not to be confused with Bitmain&amp;#x27;s mining pools which represent more than a third of the hashrate. People usually misunderstand the function and nature of mining pools. End-users choose to mine at whatever pool they want. If Bitmain&amp;#x27;s pools started sending malicious mining jobs to stratum clients, the community would react and the end-users would promptly abandon them. So in practice Bitmain cannot do whatever they want for however long they want with their pools&amp;#x27; hashrate. They enjoy the privilege of representing this hashrate, and this privilege could evaporate overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pradn</author><text>Increasing collective hash-power doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily increase the decentralization guarantees of cryptocurrencies. It&amp;#x27;s more important that hashpower is distributed among many people.</text></comment>

<story><title>Monero Declares War on ASIC Manufacturers</title><url>https://www.ccn.com/monero-declares-war-asic-manufacturers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrb</author><text>As a Bitcoin miner since 2010, the hostility toward ASIC-based mining rig manufacturers has rarely made sense to me. ASICs &lt;i&gt;strengthen&lt;/i&gt; your network. The requirement to have specialized hardware to mine profitably, hence pushing miners to the highest joule&amp;#x2F;hash metric physically reachable will make a PoW-based cryptocurrency much more secure with respect to majority attacks (so-called 51% attacks.) Cryptocurrency devs should welcome and embrace ASIC miners.&lt;p&gt;By far, the majority of GPU farms mine Ethereum. This mean any GPU-mineable coin other than Ethereum is trivially vulnerable to majority attacks. The only thing preventing these attacks from happening is the financial incentives &lt;i&gt;against&lt;/i&gt; performing such a purely destructive attack.&lt;p&gt;ASIC-mineable coins are safe from such attacks from GPU miners.&lt;p&gt;People point out that the high barrier of entry into ASIC manufacturing can lead to monopolies, such as Bitmain which is a quasi- (not quite) monopoly with its 70-80% market share in Bitcoin with the S9. But first and foremost, manufacturing monopolies don&amp;#x27;t matter to the &lt;i&gt;function&lt;/i&gt; of Bitcoin. A manufacturing monopoly isn&amp;#x27;t a hashrate monopoly: Bitmain cannot attack Bitcoin. They themselves only directly own &amp;lt;10% of the hashrate.¹&lt;p&gt;¹ Not to be confused with Bitmain&amp;#x27;s mining pools which represent more than a third of the hashrate. People usually misunderstand the function and nature of mining pools. End-users choose to mine at whatever pool they want. If Bitmain&amp;#x27;s pools started sending malicious mining jobs to stratum clients, the community would react and the end-users would promptly abandon them. So in practice Bitmain cannot do whatever they want for however long they want with their pools&amp;#x27; hashrate. They enjoy the privilege of representing this hashrate, and this privilege could evaporate overnight.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madamelic</author><text>In Monero, the idea is that hash power should be spread throughout rather than consolidated and fought over by high-power people.&lt;p&gt;I see your point about ASICs raising the bar but wouldn&amp;#x27;t that put contributions out of reach of all but high-wealth or dedicated miners? Which is basically what has happened to Bitcoin. It is completely uneconomical for anyone but people with free to very cheap electricity and lots of ASICs.&lt;p&gt;I believe the point of Monero is that power shouldn&amp;#x27;t be consolidated to a single few.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Google starts blocking “uncertified” Android devices from logging in</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-starts-blocking-uncertified-android-devices-from-logging-in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktta</author><text>While people think this is a move to curl illicit app activity(which is the cover issue), I think there&amp;#x27;s a much bigger motive. It&amp;#x27;s the fight against Amazon.&lt;p&gt;Depending on how strictly this is enforced, now Amazon Fire Tablet users won&amp;#x27;t be able to use Google Play store (they were able to with an apk till now) which cuts off access to the app ecosystem on the Google Play Store.&lt;p&gt;Now there are quite a few apps on Amazon&amp;#x27;s App store[1], but obviously many users will feel the pain.&lt;p&gt;So now they will not have access to the following - Google Assistant, Google Home and Google Maps which will hurt the most.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;mobile-apps&amp;#x2F;b&amp;#x2F;ref=topnav_storetab_mas?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;node=2350149011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;mobile-apps&amp;#x2F;b&amp;#x2F;ref=topnav_storetab_mas...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yorby</author><text>Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t want their tablets to have the Play Store (they don&amp;#x27;t come with it pre-installed), I don&amp;#x27;t really get your point.</text></comment>

<story><title>Google starts blocking “uncertified” Android devices from logging in</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-starts-blocking-uncertified-android-devices-from-logging-in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktta</author><text>While people think this is a move to curl illicit app activity(which is the cover issue), I think there&amp;#x27;s a much bigger motive. It&amp;#x27;s the fight against Amazon.&lt;p&gt;Depending on how strictly this is enforced, now Amazon Fire Tablet users won&amp;#x27;t be able to use Google Play store (they were able to with an apk till now) which cuts off access to the app ecosystem on the Google Play Store.&lt;p&gt;Now there are quite a few apps on Amazon&amp;#x27;s App store[1], but obviously many users will feel the pain.&lt;p&gt;So now they will not have access to the following - Google Assistant, Google Home and Google Maps which will hurt the most.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;mobile-apps&amp;#x2F;b&amp;#x2F;ref=topnav_storetab_mas?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;node=2350149011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;mobile-apps&amp;#x2F;b&amp;#x2F;ref=topnav_storetab_mas...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yellowbeard</author><text>Great point, if this is the case, huge attack on Amazon.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dyson moves vacuum giant&apos;s HQ to Singapore</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-dyson-singapore/british-billionaire-dyson-moves-vacuum-giant-to-singapore-idUSKCN1PG205</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jayalpha</author><text>Dyson, a big Brexit supporter, plans also to build an electric car, in Singapore: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;23&amp;#x2F;dyson-to-build-electric-cars-in-singapore-with-launch-planned-for-2021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;23&amp;#x2F;dyson-to-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the way, Singapore has an EU free trade agreement.&lt;p&gt;I respect engineering and entrepreneurship. But he sounds like a hypocrite. I don&amp;#x27;t consider buying any of his products.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jen20</author><text>This is not an isolated incident when it comes to vocal supporters of Brexit. For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg&amp;#x27;s financial services company recently set up a fund in the Republic of Ireland to ensure continuing access to the European Market [1].&lt;p&gt;A simple look into Dyson&amp;#x27;s past (particularly with regards to the &amp;quot;Dyson Academy&amp;quot; in Bath) should tell you all you need to know about the man. His products are mostly garbage too - not a screw to be found.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;uk&amp;#x2F;politics&amp;#x2F;brexit-jacob-rees-mogg-scm-ireland-city-move-eu-withdrawal-dublin-a8398041.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;uk&amp;#x2F;politics&amp;#x2F;brexit-jacob-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Dyson moves vacuum giant&apos;s HQ to Singapore</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-dyson-singapore/british-billionaire-dyson-moves-vacuum-giant-to-singapore-idUSKCN1PG205</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jayalpha</author><text>Dyson, a big Brexit supporter, plans also to build an electric car, in Singapore: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;23&amp;#x2F;dyson-to-build-electric-cars-in-singapore-with-launch-planned-for-2021&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;23&amp;#x2F;dyson-to-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the way, Singapore has an EU free trade agreement.&lt;p&gt;I respect engineering and entrepreneurship. But he sounds like a hypocrite. I don&amp;#x27;t consider buying any of his products.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>devy</author><text>I own at 5 Dyson products, most of them from manufacturer refurbished programs (otherwise it&amp;#x27;s way out of my expenditure range for appliances). They are at best overrated. Take an example of Cyclone Vacuum, the brand newer Hoover cyclone vacs sold at HomeDepot I got last Black Friday for $70 is working as good but it&amp;#x27;s at least 4x cheaper.&lt;p&gt;Their air circulation fan&amp;#x2F;heater isn&amp;#x27;t as great as 5x of the price tag than competitors. Same with their blowdryers.&lt;p&gt;In short, they are hugely overpriced. Oh and, they use cheap plastic too - the air vent stand got cracked on winter and again the replacement parts are a fortune to buy.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie</title><url>https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/17/siemens-acquires-supplyframe-hackaday-tindie-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I disagree with your take on the &amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are no &amp;quot;brick and mortar&amp;quot; stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don&amp;#x27;t need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it&amp;#x27;s not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; which sometimes sucks but that&amp;#x27;s life. We don&amp;#x27;t need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for &lt;i&gt;free&lt;/i&gt;. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that&amp;#x27;s because there&amp;#x27;s more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.&lt;p&gt;Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can&amp;#x27;t be bought, and if there&amp;#x27;s enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy&amp;#x27;s homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is great news for Supplyframe.&lt;p&gt;But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The &amp;quot;makers market&amp;quot; of today doesn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack&amp;#x2F;Tandy&amp;#x2F;Dick Smiths&amp;#x2F;Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several equipment manufacturers selling into the market.&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; era, there are no profitable magazines or web sites or blogs or ANYTHING with respect to this hobby, there are NO brick and mortar retail components stores, and no equipment maker sells into this market.&lt;p&gt;So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the &amp;quot;cost&amp;quot; of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn&amp;#x27;t changed. Nor has postage or warehouse space etc. But the interesting follow on effect is that it makes no sense to pay $8000 for an advertisement (the full page price of an ad in Modern Electronics in 1980) when you might generate an additional $4K in revenue. Similarly for blogs or podcasts where 70 to 90% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network (Google, Bing, Etc.)&lt;p&gt;Open source is great, but without money people have to work other jobs and so their ability to contribute quality time to their hobbies, much less full time to them, is that much harder to do.&lt;p&gt;I used to write free lance articles for Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and others and they would pay me $600 - $800 per article. A recent article suggests that the editors for Hackaday get paid but the places they link? They just get &amp;quot;exposure.&amp;quot; (cue the Oatmeal comic on spending &amp;quot;exposure&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small. They are certainly not a &amp;quot;Radio Shack&amp;quot; level of enterprise.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; is, but there is some re-imagining, re-inventing that needs to go on here to pay these people who put in their time to make the &amp;quot;maker movement&amp;quot; work. Or it will continue to struggle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I think you have a valid point but did you experience the &amp;quot;friction free&amp;quot; experience of walking into an electronics store idly and then walking out with all of the parts to build a project that afternoon? Most mixed HW&amp;#x2F;SW hackers accumulate a &amp;quot;stash&amp;quot; of components, and from that stash one can sometimes build new projects, but for me, there is a huge impediment when I have 90% of the parts and then have to wait for the last part for a week (well I can get it in a couple of days if I pay $30 in shipping).&lt;p&gt;And the difference, for me, between user hosted content (Github and Youtube), and a magazine is that the magazine also has an editor who both made sure the article was clear and for the better magazines perhaps built the project themselves to see how it worked. There is a &lt;i&gt;ton&lt;/i&gt; of content from people who don&amp;#x27;t know what they are doing which obscures the content from people who do. It can be frustrating for people starting because there are so many variables. Did I build it wrong? Did they describe it correctly? Did I miss a step that was obvious to the writer but not me? You get a few projects that fail and you get disillusioned.&lt;p&gt;A good example of this is a high school kid I helped who was convinced they sucked at soldering because it never worked for them like it did on youtube. Except they were using silver solder &amp;quot;because that is what the hardware store had.&amp;quot; Hmmm? Obvious to someone who was taught soldering by someone who knew how to solder, but not obvious when the content creator &lt;i&gt;assumes&lt;/i&gt; everyone knows how to solder and what solders are used, so leaves that out of their presentations.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me started on Kickstarter :-) It has put more people into bankruptcy than MLM in my opinion. When you don&amp;#x27;t know what you don&amp;#x27;t know, how can you possibly predict how much money you need to deliver a random number of units of your idea?&lt;p&gt;Solid, curated, material for new people and advanced people. The stuff magazines used to provide, has made things more difficult rather than less difficult. And it is my opinion that this is at least part of the problem with declining STEM capabilities of students these days.</text></comment>

<story><title>Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie</title><url>https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/17/siemens-acquires-supplyframe-hackaday-tindie-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spoonjim</author><text>I disagree with your take on the &amp;quot;makers&amp;quot; market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are no &amp;quot;brick and mortar&amp;quot; stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don&amp;#x27;t need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it&amp;#x27;s not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt; which sometimes sucks but that&amp;#x27;s life. We don&amp;#x27;t need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for &lt;i&gt;free&lt;/i&gt;. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that&amp;#x27;s because there&amp;#x27;s more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means.&lt;p&gt;Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can&amp;#x27;t be bought, and if there&amp;#x27;s enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy&amp;#x27;s homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is great news for Supplyframe.&lt;p&gt;But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The &amp;quot;makers market&amp;quot; of today doesn&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack&amp;#x2F;Tandy&amp;#x2F;Dick Smiths&amp;#x2F;Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several equipment manufacturers selling into the market.&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; era, there are no profitable magazines or web sites or blogs or ANYTHING with respect to this hobby, there are NO brick and mortar retail components stores, and no equipment maker sells into this market.&lt;p&gt;So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the &amp;quot;cost&amp;quot; of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn&amp;#x27;t changed. Nor has postage or warehouse space etc. But the interesting follow on effect is that it makes no sense to pay $8000 for an advertisement (the full page price of an ad in Modern Electronics in 1980) when you might generate an additional $4K in revenue. Similarly for blogs or podcasts where 70 to 90% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network (Google, Bing, Etc.)&lt;p&gt;Open source is great, but without money people have to work other jobs and so their ability to contribute quality time to their hobbies, much less full time to them, is that much harder to do.&lt;p&gt;I used to write free lance articles for Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and others and they would pay me $600 - $800 per article. A recent article suggests that the editors for Hackaday get paid but the places they link? They just get &amp;quot;exposure.&amp;quot; (cue the Oatmeal comic on spending &amp;quot;exposure&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small. They are certainly not a &amp;quot;Radio Shack&amp;quot; level of enterprise.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; is, but there is some re-imagining, re-inventing that needs to go on here to pay these people who put in their time to make the &amp;quot;maker movement&amp;quot; work. Or it will continue to struggle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kragen</author><text>I think this is right. In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster&amp;#x27;s columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now Don just posts them on &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21&lt;/a&gt; and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days. (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.)&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know how much Don spends on hosting† to make &lt;i&gt;everything he&amp;#x27;s ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;m guessing it&amp;#x27;s about US$100 a month. Inflation-adjusted, that&amp;#x27;s probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee.&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;glib&amp;#x2F;waywere.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tinaja.com&amp;#x2F;glib&amp;#x2F;waywere.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people&amp;#x27;s hands; it&amp;#x27;s access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks. It&amp;#x27;s people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It&amp;#x27;s human flourishing.&lt;p&gt;So, how are we doing on that?&lt;p&gt;______&lt;p&gt;† Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft&amp;#x27;s continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.</text></comment>

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<story><title>BMW&apos;s Apple CarPlay annual fee is next-level gouging</title><url>https://www.cnet.com/g00/roadshow/news/bmw-carplay-fee-highway-robbery/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sjwright</author><text>I agree it&amp;#x27;s stupid (and there&amp;#x27;s no question this move won&amp;#x27;t survive in the long term) but there&amp;#x27;s one thing to keep in mind:&lt;p&gt;BMW&amp;#x27;s iDrive is better than CarPlay. As someone who very much likes Apple&amp;#x27;s current iOS and Mac UI, this feels absurd to say but iDrive is just that good. Of course choice always preferable, but unless CarPlay is extended to allow me to use Waze maps, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine why I&amp;#x27;d ever use it.&lt;p&gt;Unlike CarPlay, iDrive has a well-resolved, tactile and &lt;i&gt;customisable physical&lt;/i&gt; interface. It&amp;#x27;s just better suited for someone who&amp;#x27;s driving.&lt;p&gt;Tesla doesn&amp;#x27;t support CarPlay at all, but you don&amp;#x27;t hear about hoards of people boycotting Telsa: because their system is also better than CarPlay. (Though at least BMW gives you the &lt;i&gt;option,&lt;/i&gt; even if they do so in a weirdly customer-hostile way.)&lt;p&gt;The only clear advantage of CarPlay is that the software is being continually updated and improved. Perhaps when your 2018 model is seven years old, the features of CarPlay in &lt;i&gt;iOS 16&lt;/i&gt; running on your &lt;i&gt;iPhone Xs Edition&lt;/i&gt; would be preferred. And by then BMW will have been shamed into aborting this annual fee joke.</text></comment>

<story><title>BMW&apos;s Apple CarPlay annual fee is next-level gouging</title><url>https://www.cnet.com/g00/roadshow/news/bmw-carplay-fee-highway-robbery/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>skywhopper</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s so bizarre. There&amp;#x27;s no reasonable fiscal reason for BMW to require this. The only reason to implement something like this would be just to establish the precedent of paying a subscription to the carmaker so they can add on easy-to-pay-for additional features and one-time expenses later. Micropayments and loot boxes for your car.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Chris Lattner left Swift core team</title><url>https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>Apple tried to do automatic GC but did so very badly and with a language not designed for it, so they had a bad experience and were scared away.&lt;p&gt;The modern GC in java is amazingly fast and with a few tricks likely to be good enough.</text></item><item><author>eropple</author><text>An Apple C# future is a neat idea, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure how you square that with the (IMO correct) observation that allocation control really matters for quality of experience on constrained platforms.&lt;p&gt;Obviously iOS platforms are much less constrained today, but not having to run a GC is a pretty nice thing.&lt;p&gt;Maybe C# could&amp;#x27;ve been extended into that universe (I know Midori had their own variant but don&amp;#x27;t know much about it) but it seems daunting to then make that compatible.</text></item><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>I think Swift was a strategic mistake mainly due to the niche effect, even if it&amp;#x27;s a better language.&lt;p&gt;It would have been much more productive to team up with the C# team as C# is a mature language, and a combined Apple + Microsoft would have been able to compete against java (esp. with Oracle as owner of java).</text></item><item><author>techdragon</author><text>Key takeaway for me was the note that it “definitely isn’t a community designed language”. This is telling, I’ve watched a lot of neat languages over the years and absolutely none of the ones without community involvement have grown beyond the sphere of influence of their primary companies.&lt;p&gt;I like swift enough I’m learning it to build my own personal tech nerd ideal podcast client because I own apple devices and want an app that works between macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS,and watchOS. but I doubt I’ll ever use it for anything beyond this one personally motivated project. Even if i release it as an app on the store for download or purchase I don’t know if I will ever be motivated enough to build anything else using it. Because the scope is too narrow. Business work is converging on open stacks like react, and angular, and the dark horse of C# with its latest release supporting WASM web components backed by GRPC-web and a C# function driven stack from front to back, even without SQL Server costs this is a compelling ecosystem backed by PostgreSQL and other completely open source tools.&lt;p&gt;But Swift remains Apple’s language for apple stuff and… while a profitable niche, it’s still a niche.&lt;p&gt;Edit: typo fix.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>richardwhiuk</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fairly convinced that GC is the reason that Android phones need much more RAM and much more CPU to generally be worse than Apple phones in terms of performance.</text></comment>

<story><title>Chris Lattner left Swift core team</title><url>https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>Apple tried to do automatic GC but did so very badly and with a language not designed for it, so they had a bad experience and were scared away.&lt;p&gt;The modern GC in java is amazingly fast and with a few tricks likely to be good enough.</text></item><item><author>eropple</author><text>An Apple C# future is a neat idea, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure how you square that with the (IMO correct) observation that allocation control really matters for quality of experience on constrained platforms.&lt;p&gt;Obviously iOS platforms are much less constrained today, but not having to run a GC is a pretty nice thing.&lt;p&gt;Maybe C# could&amp;#x27;ve been extended into that universe (I know Midori had their own variant but don&amp;#x27;t know much about it) but it seems daunting to then make that compatible.</text></item><item><author>silvestrov</author><text>I think Swift was a strategic mistake mainly due to the niche effect, even if it&amp;#x27;s a better language.&lt;p&gt;It would have been much more productive to team up with the C# team as C# is a mature language, and a combined Apple + Microsoft would have been able to compete against java (esp. with Oracle as owner of java).</text></item><item><author>techdragon</author><text>Key takeaway for me was the note that it “definitely isn’t a community designed language”. This is telling, I’ve watched a lot of neat languages over the years and absolutely none of the ones without community involvement have grown beyond the sphere of influence of their primary companies.&lt;p&gt;I like swift enough I’m learning it to build my own personal tech nerd ideal podcast client because I own apple devices and want an app that works between macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS,and watchOS. but I doubt I’ll ever use it for anything beyond this one personally motivated project. Even if i release it as an app on the store for download or purchase I don’t know if I will ever be motivated enough to build anything else using it. Because the scope is too narrow. Business work is converging on open stacks like react, and angular, and the dark horse of C# with its latest release supporting WASM web components backed by GRPC-web and a C# function driven stack from front to back, even without SQL Server costs this is a compelling ecosystem backed by PostgreSQL and other completely open source tools.&lt;p&gt;But Swift remains Apple’s language for apple stuff and… while a profitable niche, it’s still a niche.&lt;p&gt;Edit: typo fix.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m pretty familiar with the modern Java GCs, and they&amp;#x27;re very impressive, but at the same time having to do &lt;i&gt;manifestly less work&lt;/i&gt; with ARC is probably good for responsiveness and battery life.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Electron v5.0 Timeline</title><url>https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-5-0-timeline</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kethinov</author><text>Does anyone know if the idea of creating a runtime mode for Electron is on the roadmap? (A runtime mode would be allowing multiple apps to share one installed Electron dependency rather than bundling Electron with every Electron app.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Renaud</author><text>Then you get into the issue of keeping apps and runtime in sync so you don&amp;#x27;t get issues with older apps not working well with a new version of the runtime required by newer apps...&lt;p&gt;You end-up having to keep multiple runtimes and hoping they don&amp;#x27;t step on each-other&amp;#x27;s toes...&lt;p&gt;After a while you&amp;#x27;re still downloading 200+MB runtimes to run your particular app that still requires Runtime 5.05 and hasn&amp;#x27;t been updated to work with Runtime 6.12 that is required for newer updates of an app that used to work with Runtime 5.84...&lt;p&gt;Maybe a better idea would be to make Electron&amp;#x27;s install specific to each app and only include the bits you actually need so it&amp;#x27;s a 30MB bundle instead?&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if calling for a runtime isn&amp;#x27;t going to make things worse in the long run. It &amp;#x27;s already often a pain to install an app that target any framework version in particular that may not be installed or may conflict on some user&amp;#x27;s target machines. Sometimes it&amp;#x27;s unavoidable, but I&amp;#x27;m wondering if this is really the case here.</text></comment>

<story><title>Electron v5.0 Timeline</title><url>https://electronjs.org/blog/electron-5-0-timeline</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kethinov</author><text>Does anyone know if the idea of creating a runtime mode for Electron is on the roadmap? (A runtime mode would be allowing multiple apps to share one installed Electron dependency rather than bundling Electron with every Electron app.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>twhb</author><text>Java-based GUI applications have been moving from the system&amp;#x27;s JVM to bundling one due to longstanding and seemingly unfixable reliability and ease of use problems. Why will Electron be different?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Linode GPU Instances</title><url>https://blog.linode.com/2019/06/19/introducing-linode-gpu-instances/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Who_me</author><text>Hey peeps full disclosure I work as one of Linode&amp;#x27;s RnD engineers. I want to try to get to as many of these as I can.&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest questions is why the Quadro RTX 6000? Few things:&lt;p&gt;1. Cost it has the same performance as the 8000. The difference is 8 more GB of RAM that comes at a steep premium. Cost is important to us as it allows us to be at a more affordable price point.&lt;p&gt;2. We have all heard or used the Tesla V100, and it&amp;#x27;s a great card. The biggest issue is that it&amp;#x27;s expensive. So one of the things that caught our eye is the RTX 6000 has a fast Single-Precision Performance, Tensor Performance, and INT8 performance. Plus the Quadro RTX supports INT4. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nvidia.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;dam&amp;#x2F;en-zz&amp;#x2F;Solutions&amp;#x2F;design-visualization&amp;#x2F;quadro-product-literature&amp;#x2F;quadro-rtx-6000-us-nvidia-704093-r4-web.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nvidia.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;dam&amp;#x2F;en-zz&amp;#x2F;Solutions&amp;#x2F;design-vi...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;images.nvidia.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;technologies&amp;#x2F;volta&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;tesla-volta-v100-datasheet-letter-fnl-web.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;images.nvidia.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;technologies&amp;#x2F;volta&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;tes...&lt;/a&gt; Yes, these are manufactures numbers, but it caused us pause. As always, your mileage may vary.&lt;p&gt;3. RT cores. This is the first time (TMK) that a cloud provider is bringing RT cores into the market. There are many use cases for RT that have yet to be explored. What will we come up with as a community?!&lt;p&gt;Now with all that being said, there is a downside, FP64 aka double precision. The Tesla V100 does this very well, whereas the Quadro RTX 6000 does poorly in comparison. We think although those workloads are important, the goal was to find a solution that fits a vast majority of the use cases.&lt;p&gt;So is the marketing true to get the most out of MI&amp;#x2F;AI&amp;#x2F;Etc? Do you need a Tesla to get the best performance? Or is the Tesla starting to show its age? Give the cards a try I think you&amp;#x27;ll find these new RTX Quadros with Turning architecture are not the same as the Quadros of the past.</text></comment>

<story><title>Linode GPU Instances</title><url>https://blog.linode.com/2019/06/19/introducing-linode-gpu-instances/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>picozeta</author><text>I would go with Hetzner: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hetzner.com&amp;#x2F;dedicated-rootserver&amp;#x2F;ex51-ssd-gpu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hetzner.com&amp;#x2F;dedicated-rootserver&amp;#x2F;ex51-ssd-gpu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;GTX1080 for 100$ a month. Grantend, it is older, but it still works for DL. Let&amp;#x27;s say you do 10 experiments a month for ~20 hours. Thats 0.5$&amp;#x2F;hour and I don&amp;#x27;t think it is 3 times faster.&lt;p&gt;If you then want to do even more learning the price goes even down.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;DISCLAIMER: I do not work for them, but used it for DL in the past and it was for sure cheaper than GCP or AWS. If you have to do lots of experiments (&amp;gt;year) go with your own hardware, but do not underestimate the convenience of &amp;gt;100MByte&amp;#x2F;s if you download many big training sets.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Kids Online Safety Act is still a danger to our rights online</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmclnx</author><text>I would like to know who is paying (or bribing in the US) to push these bills. Seems it is a tracking of children bill that advertising companies would love to have access to.&lt;p&gt;I am sure it will be private companies that do the tracking. Also I am sure an encryption backdoor will be built into this bill if not already.&lt;p&gt;As a parent, if you want your young child to be &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot;, keep them off line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstarfish</author><text>I haven&amp;#x27;t read the bill, but my first thought is that there&amp;#x27;s always going to be some threat to children, so any time you want to play pork barrel politics, you can trot out some nebulous child-safety bill and append riders to that.&lt;p&gt;Second thought is that this isn&amp;#x27;t about private interests (though it&amp;#x27;s possible). Big Tech moves and grows faster than the government. Arbitrary requirements are one way to papercut a larger entity into submission, like FOSTA&amp;#x2F;SESTA or 2257-- we&amp;#x27;ll give ourselves a way to take you down for &lt;i&gt;something.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case in point:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The bill holds platforms liable if their designs and services do not “prevent and mitigate” a list of societal ills: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, physical violence, online bullying and harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, and suicidal behaviors. Additionally, platforms would be responsible for patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors.&lt;p&gt;Platforms would be responsible for preventing and mitigating &lt;i&gt;anxiety.&lt;/i&gt; Platforms are prohibited from doing anything to incentivize repeat business. This is Obscenity 2.0.</text></comment>

<story><title>Kids Online Safety Act is still a danger to our rights online</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmclnx</author><text>I would like to know who is paying (or bribing in the US) to push these bills. Seems it is a tracking of children bill that advertising companies would love to have access to.&lt;p&gt;I am sure it will be private companies that do the tracking. Also I am sure an encryption backdoor will be built into this bill if not already.&lt;p&gt;As a parent, if you want your young child to be &amp;quot;protected&amp;quot;, keep them off line.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flipbrad</author><text>In the UK, the AVPA - age verification providers association (members include Experian) have been super active on the Online Safety Bill. Curious to know if there&amp;#x27;s a US involvement , too.&lt;p&gt;The media seems to have missed this - then again, these laws are their opportunity to stick the boot into Tech, and usually have carve outs and special treatment under these laws, so they&amp;#x27;re not especially incentivised to rock the boat here.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Hurricane on Saturn</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia14944.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btilly</author><text>A random note for those who might wonder what &quot;N&quot; and &quot;S&quot; mean on another planet.&lt;p&gt;Take your right hand out. Stick your thumb up. Curl your fingers around. Your thumb represents a planet&apos;s N pole, and your fingers point in the direction that the planet is spinning. (The Earth moves from W to E, and the result is that it looks like the Sun rises in the E. Sit down a globe and a flashlight if this comment makes no sense.)&lt;p&gt;For any spinning thing we can do the same exercise. Just wrap your fingers of your right hand around in the direction of the spin, stick your thumb up, and that is the North pole of that spin.&lt;p&gt;Now for the fun fact. Most of the stuff in the Solar System rotates roughly the same way. It doesn&apos;t matter whether you take the rotation of the Earth, the rotation of the Moon, the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the orbit of Saturn around the Sun, the rotation of Saturn, the orbits of Saturn&apos;s moons around Saturn - the north poles of all of these are reasonably well aligned.&lt;p&gt;They are not exactly aligned. For instance the Earth&apos;s rotational axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the axis of its orbit around the Sun. (Hence our seasons.) And not everything follows the rule. Uranus is the best-known exception. But most of it lines up fairly well.&lt;p&gt;The only actual use that I&apos;ve ever found for this fact is being able to explain to my son why the Moon rises later every night, but I&apos;ve always thought that it was pretty cool.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;EDIT:&lt;/i&gt; glurgh below corrected my understanding. It happens that for most of the planets, North corresponds to the right hand rule as I described. But that&apos;s not actually the way it is defined and Venus in particular does not work that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glurgh</author><text>This is only for minor bodies, not planets. The poles of planets are pretty much defined to be &apos;pointed the same way as the Earth&apos;s&apos;. The north pole of Venus is roughly aligned with the north pole of the Earth despite the fact that Venus&apos;s rotation is retrograde.&lt;p&gt;See&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_of_astronomical_bodies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_of_astronomical_bodies&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Hurricane on Saturn</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia14944.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>btilly</author><text>A random note for those who might wonder what &quot;N&quot; and &quot;S&quot; mean on another planet.&lt;p&gt;Take your right hand out. Stick your thumb up. Curl your fingers around. Your thumb represents a planet&apos;s N pole, and your fingers point in the direction that the planet is spinning. (The Earth moves from W to E, and the result is that it looks like the Sun rises in the E. Sit down a globe and a flashlight if this comment makes no sense.)&lt;p&gt;For any spinning thing we can do the same exercise. Just wrap your fingers of your right hand around in the direction of the spin, stick your thumb up, and that is the North pole of that spin.&lt;p&gt;Now for the fun fact. Most of the stuff in the Solar System rotates roughly the same way. It doesn&apos;t matter whether you take the rotation of the Earth, the rotation of the Moon, the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the orbit of Saturn around the Sun, the rotation of Saturn, the orbits of Saturn&apos;s moons around Saturn - the north poles of all of these are reasonably well aligned.&lt;p&gt;They are not exactly aligned. For instance the Earth&apos;s rotational axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the axis of its orbit around the Sun. (Hence our seasons.) And not everything follows the rule. Uranus is the best-known exception. But most of it lines up fairly well.&lt;p&gt;The only actual use that I&apos;ve ever found for this fact is being able to explain to my son why the Moon rises later every night, but I&apos;ve always thought that it was pretty cool.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;EDIT:&lt;/i&gt; glurgh below corrected my understanding. It happens that for most of the planets, North corresponds to the right hand rule as I described. But that&apos;s not actually the way it is defined and Venus in particular does not work that way.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cefarix</author><text>Good ol&apos; cross-product and angular momentum!</text></comment>

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<story><title>Software faults raise questions about the validity of brain studies</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-study-brain-activity-may-be-exaggerating-results/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Toenex</author><text>I spent a few years in the late 90&amp;#x27;s and early 00&amp;#x27;s working on fMRI and I&amp;#x27;ve been stunned by many of the claims that appear to arise from it&amp;#x27;s use. What&amp;#x27;s being measured relates to blood flow changes that correlate with an input block paradigm, typically from a visual stimulus. This isn&amp;#x27;t brain activity in the electrical sense but rather which areas of the brain appear to regulate their blood flow in relation to the stimulus. The assumption being that these areas require more &amp;#x27;fuel&amp;#x27; to support their increased neural activity in response to the stimulus. Or as I like to think of it, attempting to estimate your home electricity usage by monitoring your water bill. Doing so with MRI, a technology I&amp;#x27;ve spent most of my adult life analysing the data from and still can best describe what it does as &amp;#x27;magical&amp;#x27;, adding another not insignificant level of complexity.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m know there is good science going on in this field, by people that understand the limitations of the techniques and the technologies. However, I worked with psychiatrists - a clinical discipline starved of quantitative measurements until fMRI - that would happily ignore statistically significant activation in the air around the subjects head whilst laying claim as to the importance of those in the frontal cortex. Seeing the visual cortex &amp;#x27;light up&amp;#x27; in response to flashing chequerboards is one thing, isolating those areas of the brain responsible for &amp;#x27;forgiveness&amp;#x27; is something quite different.&lt;p&gt;Of course the software has bugs, I personally know people who wrote the package in question and they are extremely smart and also very human. I doubt I&amp;#x27;ve ever published a paper using software that wasn&amp;#x27;t bug ridden. That&amp;#x27;s why open source is such an important part of the process, laying bare every last detail of what was done and not just what felt worth mentioning in the paper. The medical imaging research community is particularly good at this with most of the industry software making source code available. The problem with fMRI is not the software.</text></comment>

<story><title>Software faults raise questions about the validity of brain studies</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-study-brain-activity-may-be-exaggerating-results/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jcrites</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve recently made the argument that science publications should include code and data. See comment history e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11606278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11606278&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Glad to see that concrete good is coming from such efforts:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The researchers took advantage of a recent trend toward making data open for anyone to use or analyze. They were able to download hundreds of fMRI scans used in other studies to perform their analysis.&lt;p&gt;The more data and code that&amp;#x27;s made openly available, the stronger science will be. I hope that we can work toward a future where most if not all code and data are expected socially and by funding policies to be included in the publication process.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Uber is officially a cab firm, says European court</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42423627</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dguest</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s too big to fail.&lt;p&gt;My gut reaction: There&amp;#x27;s no company the size of Uber that could die more quietly. The world&amp;#x27;s reaction would be a muffled &amp;quot;meh&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Uber doesn&amp;#x27;t even own their most important asset, which is their drivers, and if they collapse catastrophically their drivers will simply turn off the Uber app and download one of a half dozen competitors&amp;#x27; apps (if they don&amp;#x27;t already have it). For Uber customers, the transition will be even easier.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m missing something: This isn&amp;#x27;t like a car company that owns and manages factories, or like a tech company that has labs or does significant R&amp;amp;D, or even a bank that has lots of employees and owns other assets.&lt;p&gt;So genuine question: what do we loose if Uber vanishes tomorrow?&lt;p&gt;(Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I&amp;#x27;d be sympathetic to their employees who need to find new jobs, but my guess is that their skills are in relatively high demand.)</text></item><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>This is good to hear. A few weeks ago we saw the recording breaking loss, showing Uber is really undercutting everyone and operating way under costs (while slashing drivers pays and yada yada).&lt;p&gt;Uber is big, really big. But I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s too big to fail. And I think a failure will be colossal.&lt;p&gt;Has anyone noticed Lyft prices have gone way up? Like, almost standard cab fair prices in some cities? I wonder if Lyft is banking on the fact a lot of people use them so they don&amp;#x27;t use Uber, and noticing their prices are just slightly less than a regular cab. They could put them in a place where they&amp;#x27;re profitable, and charge a more traditional rate.&lt;p&gt;In the early days I knew Uber drivers who use to be cab drivers who claimed they made a ton more money than with their cab company. I doubt that&amp;#x27;s as true anymore, but once Uber fails, I bet we&amp;#x27;ll see a huge re-emergence of Cabs -- possibly alternative ride sharing apps that will put more money in the hands of drivers (where it should be).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really weird being in American cities today, because the number of cabs is significantly lower and noticeable. I saw a woman with her hand up, actually hailing a cab, and thought that was so weird. You rarely see that now. I mean it&amp;#x27;s probably better that cabs are more efficient with apps, going directly from pickup to pickup instead of burning fuel driving around, but there is still something lost with not being able to raise you hand or go to a taxi stand and get a cab in a city.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CamTin</author><text>I think you&amp;#x27;re 100% right, and there was even natural experiment confirming this when Uber (and Lyft) left Austin temporarily. Basically the city council wanted rideshare drivers to do City background checks. There was a public referendum, and Uber&amp;#x2F;Lyft said they&amp;#x27;d leave if it passed. Then it passed, and they left. Pretty much overnight there were 3-4 Austin-centric Uber competitors. Riders and drivers just switched apps. Colloquially, people would even still say &amp;quot;get an Uber&amp;quot; while using these other apps.&lt;p&gt;Eventually this was superceded by a Texas law, and Uber&amp;#x2F;Lyft came back, but the rideshare apocalypse that was predicted never came to be because there are very few barriers to entry in this market: build a relatively simple app, paste up some fliers or billboards advertising your new company to drivers and riders, and you&amp;#x27;re in business.&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, Austin has more ambitious app coders than most other random cities, so it might not be literally overnight like it was here, but it won&amp;#x27;t take that long for somebody to do the same in the rest of the country&amp;#x2F;world. On the other hand, those places likely won&amp;#x27;t lose Lyft at the same time like Austin did, so it may be a wash.</text></comment>

<story><title>Uber is officially a cab firm, says European court</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42423627</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dguest</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s too big to fail.&lt;p&gt;My gut reaction: There&amp;#x27;s no company the size of Uber that could die more quietly. The world&amp;#x27;s reaction would be a muffled &amp;quot;meh&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Uber doesn&amp;#x27;t even own their most important asset, which is their drivers, and if they collapse catastrophically their drivers will simply turn off the Uber app and download one of a half dozen competitors&amp;#x27; apps (if they don&amp;#x27;t already have it). For Uber customers, the transition will be even easier.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m missing something: This isn&amp;#x27;t like a car company that owns and manages factories, or like a tech company that has labs or does significant R&amp;amp;D, or even a bank that has lots of employees and owns other assets.&lt;p&gt;So genuine question: what do we loose if Uber vanishes tomorrow?&lt;p&gt;(Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I&amp;#x27;d be sympathetic to their employees who need to find new jobs, but my guess is that their skills are in relatively high demand.)</text></item><item><author>djsumdog</author><text>This is good to hear. A few weeks ago we saw the recording breaking loss, showing Uber is really undercutting everyone and operating way under costs (while slashing drivers pays and yada yada).&lt;p&gt;Uber is big, really big. But I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s too big to fail. And I think a failure will be colossal.&lt;p&gt;Has anyone noticed Lyft prices have gone way up? Like, almost standard cab fair prices in some cities? I wonder if Lyft is banking on the fact a lot of people use them so they don&amp;#x27;t use Uber, and noticing their prices are just slightly less than a regular cab. They could put them in a place where they&amp;#x27;re profitable, and charge a more traditional rate.&lt;p&gt;In the early days I knew Uber drivers who use to be cab drivers who claimed they made a ton more money than with their cab company. I doubt that&amp;#x27;s as true anymore, but once Uber fails, I bet we&amp;#x27;ll see a huge re-emergence of Cabs -- possibly alternative ride sharing apps that will put more money in the hands of drivers (where it should be).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really weird being in American cities today, because the number of cabs is significantly lower and noticeable. I saw a woman with her hand up, actually hailing a cab, and thought that was so weird. You rarely see that now. I mean it&amp;#x27;s probably better that cabs are more efficient with apps, going directly from pickup to pickup instead of burning fuel driving around, but there is still something lost with not being able to raise you hand or go to a taxi stand and get a cab in a city.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btbuildem</author><text>Yes exactly. The only ones who stand to lose if uber fails are the investors who put money into it. Oh boo.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The auction that set off the race for AI supremacy</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/secret-auction-race-ai-supremacy-google-microsoft-baidu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kortilla</author><text>&amp;gt; As Google and other tech giants adopted the technology, no one quite realized it was learning the biases of the researchers who built it.&lt;p&gt;Woah, this came out of nowhere and it’s completely wrong. The problem isn’t that deep learning is picking up biases of the researchers, it’s that it picks up biases from the training data.</text></comment>

<story><title>The auction that set off the race for AI supremacy</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/secret-auction-race-ai-supremacy-google-microsoft-baidu/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dfox</author><text>&amp;quot;The idea of a neural network dated back to the 1950s, but the early pioneers had never gotten it working as well as they’d hoped. By the new millennium, most researchers had given up on the idea, convinced it was a technological dead end and bewildered by the 50- year- old conceit that these mathematical systems somehow mimicked the human brain.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is not only false, but in the context actually intentional misrepresentation. Most of the issues with the model was solved by introduction of hidden layers and backpropagation learning, which is at least in my opinion required knowledge in CS since at least early 90&amp;#x27;s and probably earlier (it is not clear when the idea was formulated in usable form, put the most cited publications are from late 80&amp;#x27;s, eg. Rumelhart, D., Hinton, G. &amp;amp; Williams, R. Learning representations by back-propagating errors. Nature 323, 533–536 (1986). &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;doi.org&amp;#x2F;10.1038&amp;#x2F;323533a0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;doi.org&amp;#x2F;10.1038&amp;#x2F;323533a0&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;On the other hand obviously more complex modern approaches to the &amp;quot;throw bunch of poorly understood linear algebra at he problem&amp;quot; problem have value and there is definitive generational shift in the current &amp;quot;AI-anti-winter&amp;quot; (for lack of better word), but still...</text></comment>

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<story><title>Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders</title><url>http://blog.close.io/sales-hiring-101-for-startups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Alex_Jiang</author><text>Great post! I browsed your site some more, and found a video of a presentation you gave. Asking for the close is killer. In retrospect too many of my first couple of calls ended with... &amp;quot;So uh yeah, I&amp;#x27;ll email you I guess.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Me and my cofounder have been doing test-runs of sales just to test if there was interest in our market. We made a note to take time out of developing to call 20 vendors a day. Some things we found:&lt;p&gt;1) Doing cold alone is nerve-racking, doing sales with a friend is actually pretty fun. It&amp;#x27;s almost nostalgic of crank-calling people as a kid. You can joke about the interesting run-ins you have with vendors. My cofounder and I grab snacks and just spend an afternoon calling.&lt;p&gt;2) We rate each call with &amp;quot;likelihood ratings (1-10 rating of how the call went). These are just qualitative ratings about the disposition of the caller on the other line. Every 50 or so we take note of what language improves the mood, and what turns people off. This way we&amp;#x27;re consistently improving our pitch.&lt;p&gt;3) Early on we let the initial tone of the calls dictate their end result. Too many calls ended more abruptly than they should have.(because we perceived that the other end was too disinterested to sway.) But we quickly noted was that many of the vendors had the same objections. It was an easy fix, just come up with a list of simple, logical retorts. There&amp;#x27;s many calls that we talked out of a ditch. -It&amp;#x27;s like when you solve yourself out of a cluster-fuck in 2048 :)&lt;p&gt;4) I&amp;#x27;m not a very extroverted person, I don&amp;#x27;t have a marketing background. But I&amp;#x27;ve actually come to like the calls. The first call of the day is always the hardest. The initial dip into a chilly pool is unpleasant, but you get over it much quicker than you would think. I talked to many interesting people just through cold calls. At first I scoured my network trying to find someone to delegate this task to, now it&amp;#x27;s part of the daily work schedule.&lt;p&gt;5) Ask for the close, just let them say &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;. Don&amp;#x27;t dance around it. In the bigger picture who cares that one person said &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;TL,DR Technical Cofounders can operate telephones; thus they can make sales calls. Make a structure, log objections, find patterns. (It&amp;#x27;s fun.)</text></comment>

<story><title>Sales Hiring Guide For B2B Startup Founders</title><url>http://blog.close.io/sales-hiring-101-for-startups</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btrautsc</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t upvote this plan enough. Well done, Steli.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re transitioning into stage 2 right now which has been an exciting ride, this is basically exactly the playbook we&amp;#x27;re running.&lt;p&gt;Our biggest challenge has been finding the right combination of hunger, fearlessness, &amp;amp; cunning people to bring on as the core of our sales team (if you&amp;#x27;re out there, shoot me an email, we&amp;#x27;d &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to meet you)</text></comment>

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<story><title>PG on the cover of Forbes </title><url>http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/best-small-companies-10-y-combinator-paul-graham-disruptor.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j_baker</author><text>&quot;Y Combinator--a computer term for a program that runs other programs&quot;&lt;p&gt;Heh... completely wrong, but I suppose it&apos;s the best you can expect a non-techie/math nerd readership to get. Heck, it&apos;s probably close to the most you can expect the average programmer to get.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: And another one...&lt;p&gt;&quot;Graham met Morris, an authority on the Unix computer language&quot;</text></comment>

<story><title>PG on the cover of Forbes </title><url>http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/best-small-companies-10-y-combinator-paul-graham-disruptor.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>chaosmachine</author><text>Here is the actual cover:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://imgur.com/gOyI9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://imgur.com/gOyI9.jpg&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy</title><url>https://growth.design/case-studies/apple-privacy-policy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonhohle</author><text>I wonder what it will take for people to finally get fed up with creepy advertising companies.&lt;p&gt;I received a letter from Target that by default they’ll sell my information to unaffiliated third parties and I have to call or write a letter to opt-out. I’m sure I agreed to that at some point (and anyone signing up for a loyalty program that doesn’t cost anything should realize that’s what they are agreeing to, even if they are not explicitly told that), but perhaps they should be required to explicitly list the actual costs to the customer along side the benefits.&lt;p&gt;Last week I was picking up a prescription at CVS. In between confirming name and address and signing for payment or receipt of Rx they slipped a marketing agreement that I stupidly agreed to before realizing that it wasn’t an agreement related to the prescription purchase. So in someone’s compromised medical state (assuming), when you just want to get medicine to get back to normal they hide an agreement to sell information.&lt;p&gt;None of this improves my life. I just want to transact money for items and end the relationship until it happens again. I don’t need every advertiser knowing every one of or even habitual purchase I make.&lt;p&gt;If you work in ad-tech or are responsible for these front-end schemes to collect more information:&lt;p&gt;1: screw you&lt;p&gt;2: it’s super creepy and even if you’re not creepy, the stuff you’re working on and the people you are working for are&lt;p&gt;3: seriously, it’s really disgusting, immoral, and deceptive to find all manor of ways to trick people into agreeing to sell personal information that they assume (rightly) is private (even when done in public)&lt;p&gt;4: start leaking information on schemes, tricks, &amp;amp; loopholes so something can be done to destroy invasive ad tech</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>heavyset_go</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;None of this improves my life.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now you&amp;#x27;ll get some ads that recommender systems think they should show you, based on your shopping experience at CVS, that could be potentially embarrassing if you have anyone over, or have someone else using your devices.&lt;p&gt;I was able to guess a family member&amp;#x27;s previously private medical condition based on the ads they got while I was at their place.</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple vs. Meta: The Illusion of Privacy</title><url>https://growth.design/case-studies/apple-privacy-policy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonhohle</author><text>I wonder what it will take for people to finally get fed up with creepy advertising companies.&lt;p&gt;I received a letter from Target that by default they’ll sell my information to unaffiliated third parties and I have to call or write a letter to opt-out. I’m sure I agreed to that at some point (and anyone signing up for a loyalty program that doesn’t cost anything should realize that’s what they are agreeing to, even if they are not explicitly told that), but perhaps they should be required to explicitly list the actual costs to the customer along side the benefits.&lt;p&gt;Last week I was picking up a prescription at CVS. In between confirming name and address and signing for payment or receipt of Rx they slipped a marketing agreement that I stupidly agreed to before realizing that it wasn’t an agreement related to the prescription purchase. So in someone’s compromised medical state (assuming), when you just want to get medicine to get back to normal they hide an agreement to sell information.&lt;p&gt;None of this improves my life. I just want to transact money for items and end the relationship until it happens again. I don’t need every advertiser knowing every one of or even habitual purchase I make.&lt;p&gt;If you work in ad-tech or are responsible for these front-end schemes to collect more information:&lt;p&gt;1: screw you&lt;p&gt;2: it’s super creepy and even if you’re not creepy, the stuff you’re working on and the people you are working for are&lt;p&gt;3: seriously, it’s really disgusting, immoral, and deceptive to find all manor of ways to trick people into agreeing to sell personal information that they assume (rightly) is private (even when done in public)&lt;p&gt;4: start leaking information on schemes, tricks, &amp;amp; loopholes so something can be done to destroy invasive ad tech</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>endisneigh</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder what it will take for people to finally get fed up with creepy advertising companies.&lt;p&gt;As long as people get &amp;quot;free stuff&amp;quot; people won&amp;#x27;t get fed up.</text></comment>

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<story><title>LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment</title><url>http://lxqt.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WoodenChair</author><text>The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who&amp;#x27;s Windows 95 clone is better. It&amp;#x27;s a nice paradigm because it&amp;#x27;s familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gnome, Unity, and KDE?</text></comment>

<story><title>LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment</title><url>http://lxqt.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>uncletaco</author><text>So would that acronym be pronounced &amp;quot;looks cute&amp;quot;?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Wuffs the Language</title><url>https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-language.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oconnor663</author><text>&amp;gt; There is no operator precedence. A bare a * b + c is an invalid expression. You must explicitly write either (a * b) + c or a * (b + c).&lt;p&gt;Honestly I&amp;#x27;ve often wished for this in mainstream languages. It seems like operator precedence should go the way of bracketless if and implicit int casts. (Though I wonder if they wind up making exceptions here for chains of method calls? I guess technically those rely on operator precedence sort of?)&lt;p&gt;Edit: Yeah I see the example code has &amp;quot;args.src.read_u8?()&amp;quot;. So it looks like they figured out how to keep the good stuff.</text></comment>

<story><title>Wuffs the Language</title><url>https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-language.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>Surprisingly little discussed so far, aside from these past related threads:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Wuffs’ PNG image decoder&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26714831&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=26714831&lt;/a&gt; - April 2021 (135 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;C performance mystery: delete unused string constant&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23633583&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=23633583&lt;/a&gt; - June 2020 (105 comments)&lt;p&gt;That first one was just yesterday but this is a rare case where we would not downweight the follow-up post (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=true&amp;amp;sort=byDate&amp;amp;type=comment&amp;amp;query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hn.algolia.com&amp;#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;amp;page=0&amp;amp;prefix=true&amp;amp;sor...&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites</title><url>https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2021/04/the-government-of-canada-launches-consultation-on-a-modern-copyright-framework-for-online-intermediaries.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cashewchoo</author><text>Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I&amp;#x27;m curious as to the technical details. I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;sure&lt;/i&gt; it&amp;#x27;ll work this time.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Hrmph. Citation required.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I&amp;#x27;m not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:&lt;p&gt;* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I&amp;#x27;ve seen to a good tracker going mainstream.&lt;p&gt;* Steam has already shown how to &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; piracy to the extent that a business can. It&amp;#x27;s not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won&amp;#x27;t work in Russia. That aged well.&lt;p&gt;* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80&amp;#x2F;20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It&amp;#x27;s basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney&amp;#x27;s latest remake is.&lt;p&gt;Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it&amp;#x27;s hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FractalParadigm</author><text>&amp;gt; * Steam has already shown how to &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; piracy to the extent that a business can. It&amp;#x27;s not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won&amp;#x27;t work in Russia. That aged well.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15&amp;#x2F;month cut on the action. It&amp;#x27;s a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0].&lt;p&gt;I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it&amp;#x27;s history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they&amp;#x27;re the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven&amp;#x27;t pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn&amp;#x27;t pirate a single movie- &lt;i&gt;nobody&lt;/i&gt; I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I&amp;#x27;ve been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I&amp;#x27;ve caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can&amp;#x27;t bring myself to spend $15&amp;#x2F;month on Netflix, $12&amp;#x2F;month for Disney+, $10&amp;#x2F;month for Crave, $6&amp;#x2F;month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr&amp;#x2F;Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43&amp;#x2F;month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare).&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nymag.com&amp;#x2F;intelligencer&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;piracy-is-back.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nymag.com&amp;#x2F;intelligencer&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;piracy-is-back.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites</title><url>https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2021/04/the-government-of-canada-launches-consultation-on-a-modern-copyright-framework-for-online-intermediaries.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cashewchoo</author><text>Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I&amp;#x27;m curious as to the technical details. I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;sure&lt;/i&gt; it&amp;#x27;ll work this time.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Hrmph. Citation required.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I&amp;#x27;m not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:&lt;p&gt;* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I&amp;#x27;ve seen to a good tracker going mainstream.&lt;p&gt;* Steam has already shown how to &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; piracy to the extent that a business can. It&amp;#x27;s not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won&amp;#x27;t work in Russia. That aged well.&lt;p&gt;* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80&amp;#x2F;20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It&amp;#x27;s basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney&amp;#x27;s latest remake is.&lt;p&gt;Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it&amp;#x27;s hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gpm</author><text>&amp;gt; Where does the article mention a website-blocking system?&lt;p&gt;Read the longer version rather than the press release: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ic.gc.ca&amp;#x2F;eic&amp;#x2F;site&amp;#x2F;693.nsf&amp;#x2F;eng&amp;#x2F;00191.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ic.gc.ca&amp;#x2F;eic&amp;#x2F;site&amp;#x2F;693.nsf&amp;#x2F;eng&amp;#x2F;00191.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;d. clarify or strengthen rights holders&amp;#x27; enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory &amp;quot;website-blocking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;de-indexing&amp;quot; regime.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Concurrency in Rust</title><url>http://doc.rust-lang.org/book/concurrency.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IshKebab</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s no way to kill goroutines either. In fact, are there any systems that allow you to cleanly kill threads?</text></item><item><author>gregwebs</author><text>Send + Sync are great. The downside of concurrency in Rust is:&lt;p&gt;1) There isn&amp;#x27;t transparent integration with IO in the runtime as in Go or Haskell. Rust probably won&amp;#x27;t ever do this because although such a model scales well in general, it does create overhead and a runtime.&lt;p&gt;2) OS threads are difficult to work with compared to a nice M:N threading abstraction (which again are the default in Go or Haskell). OS threads leads to lowest common denominator APIs (there is no way to kill a thread in Rust) and some difficulty in reasoning about performance implications. I am attempting to solve this aspect by using the mioco library, although due to point #1 IO is going to be a little awkward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdtsc</author><text>Yes.&lt;p&gt;In Erlang:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; exit(kill). &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; or exit(Pid,kill).&lt;p&gt;Will kill a process. It has an isolated heap, so it won&amp;#x27;t affect other (possibly hundreds of thousands of) running processes. That memory will be garbage collected, safely and efficiently.&lt;p&gt;This will also work in Elixir, LFE and other languages running on the BEAM VM platform.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: masklinn user below pointed out correctly, the example is exit&amp;#x2F;2, that is exit(Pid,kill). In fact it is just exit(Pid, Reason), where Reason can be other exit reason, like say my_socket_failed. However in that case the process could catch it and handle that signal instead of being un-conditionally killed.</text></comment>

<story><title>Concurrency in Rust</title><url>http://doc.rust-lang.org/book/concurrency.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IshKebab</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s no way to kill goroutines either. In fact, are there any systems that allow you to cleanly kill threads?</text></item><item><author>gregwebs</author><text>Send + Sync are great. The downside of concurrency in Rust is:&lt;p&gt;1) There isn&amp;#x27;t transparent integration with IO in the runtime as in Go or Haskell. Rust probably won&amp;#x27;t ever do this because although such a model scales well in general, it does create overhead and a runtime.&lt;p&gt;2) OS threads are difficult to work with compared to a nice M:N threading abstraction (which again are the default in Go or Haskell). OS threads leads to lowest common denominator APIs (there is no way to kill a thread in Rust) and some difficulty in reasoning about performance implications. I am attempting to solve this aspect by using the mioco library, although due to point #1 IO is going to be a little awkward.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>steveklabnik</author><text>Every one I know of has regretted it, and seen it as an antipattern. For example, Java way back in 1.5: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.oracle.com&amp;#x2F;javase&amp;#x2F;1.5.0&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guide&amp;#x2F;misc&amp;#x2F;threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.oracle.com&amp;#x2F;javase&amp;#x2F;1.5.0&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;guide&amp;#x2F;misc&amp;#x2F;threadPr...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think Erlang might be okay with it, because &amp;quot;this thread can fail at any time&amp;quot; is a core value of Erlang. But it&amp;#x27;s an exception.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shadowmint</author><text>Its not a new javascript engine.&lt;p&gt;Its not a new rendering engine.&lt;p&gt;So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That&amp;#x27;s cute, but its not a new browser.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same browser with a slightly new UI.&lt;p&gt;Count me as skeptical and unexcited.&lt;p&gt;I am similarly unexcited by the &amp;#x27;it&amp;#x27;s browser&amp;#x27; webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they&amp;#x27;re dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.&lt;p&gt;(Servo, by comparison, &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lmkg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll voice a dissenting opinion.&lt;p&gt;Doing HTML and JavaScript are commodities. Given the existence of standards, there&amp;#x27;s not a lot of room for innovative behavior. Any developments (faster, new HTML standards, etc) won&amp;#x27;t impact the market unless they&amp;#x27;re in one of the major browsers. Competition is good, but there&amp;#x27;s only room in the market for a handful of rendering engines. Maybe 3-5, tops.&lt;p&gt;Conversely, UI and human interaction with the browser is a place where there&amp;#x27;s room for an unbounded number of players. This is where the competition can actually be happening. And it&amp;#x27;s where I think the competition &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be happening.&lt;p&gt;The idea of a browser as something that just renders HTML and executes JavaScript is kinda lame. I use Opera because I think it&amp;#x27;s also the browser&amp;#x27;s responsibility to include tab organization and search functionality and mouse gestures and flipping CSS in and out and synchronization. (And I like my mail integrated, but that&amp;#x27;s a personal thing.) And I want it to Just Work, instead of having to manage a half-dozen extensions.&lt;p&gt;I am guardedly optimistic about Vivaldi, because it&amp;#x27;s what I actually out of a browser. (Specifically, an updated version of Opera 12, which Opera 15+ is not.)</text></comment>

<story><title>Vivaldi – A new browser for our friends</title><url>https://vivaldi.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shadowmint</author><text>Its not a new javascript engine.&lt;p&gt;Its not a new rendering engine.&lt;p&gt;So basically its just a different UI skin on chrome. That&amp;#x27;s cute, but its not a new browser.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same browser with a slightly new UI.&lt;p&gt;Count me as skeptical and unexcited.&lt;p&gt;I am similarly unexcited by the &amp;#x27;it&amp;#x27;s browser&amp;#x27; webkits views in android and ios, for exactly the same reason; they&amp;#x27;re dime a dozen, and lack any compelling reason to switch or use.&lt;p&gt;(Servo, by comparison, &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a new rendering engine, with new features that make it extremely interesting)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sp0rk</author><text>I suppose you think every video game made using the Unreal Engine is basically the same game too, right? I can understand the disappointment that they&amp;#x27;re not creating a new JS or rendering engine, especially from a community like HN that is so technical, but it&amp;#x27;s absurd to state that this thing is not a new browser simply because it uses these existing technologies. How much end-user functionality really comes from a JS or rendering engine when it&amp;#x27;s adhering to the same standards that every other competing engine is?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dominion-voting-giuliani-trump-1.5886273</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwerty12345678</author><text>Serious Question: Why is everyone assuming they&amp;#x27;re lying? And why doesn&amp;#x27;t anyone want to &lt;i&gt;prove&lt;/i&gt; Biden won?&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, the accusations he made were completely dodged by Dominion and by Democrats (since their guy was labeled the winner by the media). I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any individual claim that was debunked via substantiating evidence. They refused to answer, refused to report it in the media, and ran full speed in the opposite direction.</text></item><item><author>wcunning</author><text>As to (3), Ken and others have also pointed out, Rudy or Sydney Powel being lawyers have a duty to know this sort of thing so there&amp;#x27;s a chance that they&amp;#x27;ll be found to have actual malice even without a finding that Rudy was knowingly lying.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Ken White has been talking about the potential for this suit for a couple weeks now. He spends a lot of time talking about what &lt;i&gt;isn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; defamation --- people use defamation suits and threats thereof to chill free speech, and he&amp;#x27;s a 1st Amendment guy --- but the Dominion cases are apparently examples of very serious defamation cases.&lt;p&gt;The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damage (there are some exceptions to (2) that aren&amp;#x27;t relevant here). Most defamation cases you hear about fall apart on (1) - they target non-falsifiable statements of opinion, which can&amp;#x27;t be defamation because they don&amp;#x27;t purport to relate an objective fact. What makes Dominion&amp;#x27;s cases terrifying is that they are chock full of purported facts, all of which are batshit, and have so devastated Dominion&amp;#x27;s reputation, in a reputation-intensive business, that it had to hire private security to protect its employees from death threats.&lt;p&gt;What makes the case challenging for Dominion is that they will almost certainly be treated as a public figure for the purposes of the case. The standard for defamation of a public figure is higher than that of a normal person; we add a condition (3): actual malice or negligence, meaning Dominion must show that Giuliani either intended to destroy Dominion&amp;#x27;s reputation by spreading facts he knew to be false, or that he was at least negligent, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it&amp;#x27;s not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker. If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s attorney Akiva Cohen analyzing the case a bit:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;AkivaMCohen&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1353700596407283721&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;AkivaMCohen&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1353700596407283721&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apsec112</author><text>The complaint by Dominion very thoroughly refutes all the accusations here, and shows convincingly that they knew they were lying. It&amp;#x27;s 107 pages and has a total of 235 footnotes: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;assets.documentcloud.org&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;20463212&amp;#x2F;rudy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;assets.documentcloud.org&amp;#x2F;documents&amp;#x2F;20463212&amp;#x2F;rudy.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dominion-voting-giuliani-trump-1.5886273</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qwerty12345678</author><text>Serious Question: Why is everyone assuming they&amp;#x27;re lying? And why doesn&amp;#x27;t anyone want to &lt;i&gt;prove&lt;/i&gt; Biden won?&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, the accusations he made were completely dodged by Dominion and by Democrats (since their guy was labeled the winner by the media). I&amp;#x27;m not aware of any individual claim that was debunked via substantiating evidence. They refused to answer, refused to report it in the media, and ran full speed in the opposite direction.</text></item><item><author>wcunning</author><text>As to (3), Ken and others have also pointed out, Rudy or Sydney Powel being lawyers have a duty to know this sort of thing so there&amp;#x27;s a chance that they&amp;#x27;ll be found to have actual malice even without a finding that Rudy was knowingly lying.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Ken White has been talking about the potential for this suit for a couple weeks now. He spends a lot of time talking about what &lt;i&gt;isn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; defamation --- people use defamation suits and threats thereof to chill free speech, and he&amp;#x27;s a 1st Amendment guy --- but the Dominion cases are apparently examples of very serious defamation cases.&lt;p&gt;The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damage (there are some exceptions to (2) that aren&amp;#x27;t relevant here). Most defamation cases you hear about fall apart on (1) - they target non-falsifiable statements of opinion, which can&amp;#x27;t be defamation because they don&amp;#x27;t purport to relate an objective fact. What makes Dominion&amp;#x27;s cases terrifying is that they are chock full of purported facts, all of which are batshit, and have so devastated Dominion&amp;#x27;s reputation, in a reputation-intensive business, that it had to hire private security to protect its employees from death threats.&lt;p&gt;What makes the case challenging for Dominion is that they will almost certainly be treated as a public figure for the purposes of the case. The standard for defamation of a public figure is higher than that of a normal person; we add a condition (3): actual malice or negligence, meaning Dominion must show that Giuliani either intended to destroy Dominion&amp;#x27;s reputation by spreading facts he knew to be false, or that he was at least negligent, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that it&amp;#x27;s not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker. If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s attorney Akiva Cohen analyzing the case a bit:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;AkivaMCohen&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1353700596407283721&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;AkivaMCohen&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1353700596407283721&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justapassenger</author><text>The process is like me demanding that you prove you aren’t pedophile, and do it only with a very specific evidence that I’ll accept.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Intel&apos;s New Low: Commissioning Misleading Core I9-9900K Benchmarks [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bD9EgyKYkU</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moconnor</author><text>I worked in HPC when NVIDIA started taking serious market share from Intel. My memory of Intel’s performance comparisons were that they were often technically unsupportable once you scratched the surface.&lt;p&gt;In one case a third party who were demonstrating how much faster Intel Xeon Phi was for deep learning admitted that they were comparing highly-optimised code to unoptimised code in their results.&lt;p&gt;This doesn’t surprise me at all.</text></comment>

<story><title>Intel&apos;s New Low: Commissioning Misleading Core I9-9900K Benchmarks [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bD9EgyKYkU</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cbg0</author><text>In text form: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.techspot.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;1722-misleading-core-i9-9900k-benchmarks&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.techspot.com&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;1722-misleading-core-i9-990...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model</title><url>https://hex-rays.com/blog/hex-rays-is-moving-to-a-subscription-model/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter. From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription costs are only a fraction of an annual salary.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind. ~$1K&amp;#x2F;year isn&amp;#x27;t out of the realm of what I pay for other tools, but it&amp;#x27;s really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get 95% of the way there without the subscription model.&lt;p&gt;IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes even more developer attention toward improving the open-source alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nekitamo</author><text>By squeezing out hobbyists and individuals, they&amp;#x27;re shooting themselves in the foot over the long term.&lt;p&gt;The only reason any corporation I worked for purchased IDA Pro licenses was because I recommended it. The only reason I recommended it is because I could (barely) afford a personal license, and play with it in my own time.&lt;p&gt;Going forward they&amp;#x27;re going to miss out on this word-of-mouth marketing, which I expect will negatively affect sales expansion going forward.</text></comment>

<story><title>Hex-rays is moving to a subscription model</title><url>https://hex-rays.com/blog/hex-rays-is-moving-to-a-subscription-model/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>As alternative tools like Ghidra or even some of the cheaper options like Hopper become more popular, I suspect Hex-Rays recognizes that corporate licenses are their bread and butter. From a business perspective it makes sense to squeeze as much out of these companies as they can get away with. The subscription costs are only a fraction of an annual salary.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this leaves the hobbyist and individuals behind. ~$1K&amp;#x2F;year isn&amp;#x27;t out of the realm of what I pay for other tools, but it&amp;#x27;s really hard to justify it when I can open Ghidra and get 95% of the way there without the subscription model.&lt;p&gt;IDA really is great for handling edge cases and obscure architectures, but I hope this last switch-up by Hex-Rays pushes even more developer attention toward improving the open-source alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjoonathan</author><text>Long ago, when I got my first paycheck, I &amp;quot;went legit&amp;quot; and bought licenses for TextMate, Sublime, and IDA. Long story short, HexRays took my $1000 and never gave me a working version of their software. Bastards. I&amp;#x27;m so glad there is an alternative now.&lt;p&gt;To this very day, whenever I&amp;#x27;m stuck slogging through the build or debug process of a Ghidra plugin that has a more mature alternative in the IDA universe, I occasionally let a tiny bit of that resentment bubble to the surface to propel me across the finish line.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Crafting Interpreters – Web Version</title><url>https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>I feel compelled to point that while I do give the book away for free which benefits lots of people, it also apparently benefits me too. Sales of the book (and my first book, &lt;i&gt;Game Programming Patterns&lt;/i&gt; which is also online for free) have been &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; better than I ever expected. I think a large part of that comes from the web edition making the book better known that it would be otherwise.&lt;p&gt;So this seems to be a strategy where everyone wins. People who can&amp;#x27;t afford it get to read it. People who can but want to see if they like it first can do that. Others who can afford it support my writing. I get a lot of readers and sales.&lt;p&gt;I stumbled onto this model completely randomly, but it seems to have worked out really well for me.</text></item><item><author>e67f70028a46fba</author><text>This is a book that, if you can afford it, should be bought on general principle. There are very few books that show how recursive descent works and this one is incredibly well done.&lt;p&gt;The fact he gives it away for free is amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shepherdjerred</author><text>Wow thanks so much for writing both of these! Game Programming Patterns helped me so much when I wrote a game engine my senior year. I read the book online and bought the physical book when I saw how useful it was. I immediately bought Crafting Interpreters when it first came out and I hope to give it a proper read through when I have some time.</text></comment>

<story><title>Crafting Interpreters – Web Version</title><url>https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>munificent</author><text>I feel compelled to point that while I do give the book away for free which benefits lots of people, it also apparently benefits me too. Sales of the book (and my first book, &lt;i&gt;Game Programming Patterns&lt;/i&gt; which is also online for free) have been &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; better than I ever expected. I think a large part of that comes from the web edition making the book better known that it would be otherwise.&lt;p&gt;So this seems to be a strategy where everyone wins. People who can&amp;#x27;t afford it get to read it. People who can but want to see if they like it first can do that. Others who can afford it support my writing. I get a lot of readers and sales.&lt;p&gt;I stumbled onto this model completely randomly, but it seems to have worked out really well for me.</text></item><item><author>e67f70028a46fba</author><text>This is a book that, if you can afford it, should be bought on general principle. There are very few books that show how recursive descent works and this one is incredibly well done.&lt;p&gt;The fact he gives it away for free is amazing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throw_m239339</author><text>Thanks. This book helped me a lot in my projects.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d like to see more books in the future about crafting relational databases (server or not). I know it&amp;#x27;s a huge endeavor, but I find techniques related to efficient file writing, data persistence, partitioning, indexing and effective datafile querying fascinating. After all, databases are also &amp;quot;mini&amp;quot; file systems.</text></comment>

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<story><title>78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis</title><url>http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don&amp;#x27;t need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they&amp;#x27;re already a Nazi! We get it.&lt;p&gt;The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tstactplsignore</author><text>At the same time, not all Nazi analogies are equally wrong- it&amp;#x27;s fallacious to claim that moustaches are evil because Nazis had them; it isn&amp;#x27;t exactly fallacious to claim that persecuting and demonizing a minority combined with enthusiastic nationalism through slowly increasing propaganda campaigns under the leadership of a charismatic leader should seem at least slightly worrying because we have Nazis as a historical example. The Nazis and the 30s and 40s can present real historical lessons- another is that in the 30s, the German Communist party declared &amp;quot;After him, us!&amp;quot; in response to Hitler&amp;#x27;s rise and their refusal to cooperate with the socialists, with the reasoning being that his disastrous short term would hasten about a communist revolution. Unfortunately, we often see the exact same argument used by both socialists and some of the more extreme Bernie Sanders fans today with regards to Trump. There are historical lessons and analogies in the past which can be genuinely useful to understanding the present. At this rate, it feels like if 1930s Germany had Godwin&amp;#x27;s law, it would have been used to quash any dissent about the &lt;i&gt;actual rise of Nazism&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>

<story><title>78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis</title><url>http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don&amp;#x27;t need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they&amp;#x27;re already a Nazi! We get it.&lt;p&gt;The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s often that, but it&amp;#x27;s often not only that. It&amp;#x27;s often a shorthand for &lt;i&gt;extreme political ideology leading to authoritarianism&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s a shorthand for a particular affective&amp;#x2F;mental state groups of people can enter into. (1) The country that became Nazi Germany was highly educated, western, democratic, and industrialized. Germans are ordinary people, just like you and me. There is nothing peculiar or special or demonizing about them, or Russians or Chinese or Cambodians or Americans or any other group containing members who have enacted mass killings and genocide.&lt;p&gt;Our species&amp;#x27; brain is wired to enable us gang-up together, feel solidarity, and take action against other groups. The way this happens fits certain functional objective patterns of behavior, and Nazis are a very prominent mental &amp;quot;attractor.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, &amp;quot;Nazi&amp;quot; has such a strong emotional connotation, it renders rational thought about such group dynamics difficult in any public communications medium.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also often used to talk about attributes and events that &lt;i&gt;are historically comparable&lt;/i&gt; to the activities of the Nazi party in its early, obscure days, before it had political power. The same group dynamics that applies to them, applies to other groups of people all throughout history. Unfortunately, the comparison it has such strong emotional connotations, the irrational feelings drown out useful rational discussion.&lt;p&gt;From what I&amp;#x27;ve seen, invocations of &amp;quot;Godwin&amp;#x27;s Law&amp;quot; are often used by people who are subject to the beginnings of the same group-dynamic negative-affective death spiral -- precisely to shut down discussion of the phenomena they are subject to. This culture sorely needs a way to calmly and meaningfully discuss such group-dynamics. If society was 1&amp;#x2F;10th as savvy about group dynamics as it is savvy about the cognitive bias caused by love and sexual desire, we&amp;#x27;d be vastly more advanced.&lt;p&gt;(1) - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11630275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11630275&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Windows 11: a survey of text boxes</title><url>https://sjmulder.nl/2021/textboxes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Windows Terminal colour dialog&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;My response upon seeing that was &amp;quot;WTF! That looks ridiculously amateurish!&amp;quot; It almost feels like it&amp;#x27;s trolling me. Even the labels somehow manage to have a different size of font than the rest of the dialog, something a noob in the 90s using Visual Basic drag-and-drop to create dialogs would not produce without expending (considerable) additional effort.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Win32 has had a much more full-featured and standard dialog for choosing colours since Windows 3.x:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;windows&amp;#x2F;win32&amp;#x2F;dlgbox&amp;#x2F;color-dialog-box&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;windows&amp;#x2F;win32&amp;#x2F;dlgbox&amp;#x2F;color-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Windows 11: a survey of text boxes</title><url>https://sjmulder.nl/2021/textboxes/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ed_elliott_asc</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand why microsoft doesn&amp;#x27;t have a small team dedicated to look and feel and just bringing it all up to date - all those control panel applets, have they finally been upgraded?</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Great Code Club</title><url>http://www.greatcodeclub.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asgard1024</author><text>Neat, but I would prefer something similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. A self-support group for people who already have personal projects, want to work on them, but are either lazy or procrastinating or paralyzed by analysis.&lt;p&gt;Although I would probably not pay money for either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zenbowman</author><text>This is exactly what we had going on with our CS reading group in LA - csrg.org&lt;p&gt;It worked a little too well, all of us got new and better jobs, and we&amp;#x27;re no longer close enough geographically to continue at the same rate as before.&lt;p&gt;The perils of success!</text></comment>

<story><title>The Great Code Club</title><url>http://www.greatcodeclub.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>asgard1024</author><text>Neat, but I would prefer something similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. A self-support group for people who already have personal projects, want to work on them, but are either lazy or procrastinating or paralyzed by analysis.&lt;p&gt;Although I would probably not pay money for either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yozhik</author><text>I had the exact same need, so I started a group with some coworkers to provide encouragement. As people shifted jobs membership has expanded to include people at several companies. We get together every other Tuesday and hack on projects, drink beer and network.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that&apos;s changing</title><url>https://keyt.com/news/money-and-business/2020/11/12/google-photos-hooked-users-with-free-unlimited-storage-now-thats-changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50&amp;#x2F;month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).&lt;p&gt;And they&amp;#x27;re not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.</text></item><item><author>part1of2</author><text>&amp;gt; Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”&lt;p&gt;Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait &amp;amp; switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elmo2you</author><text>&amp;gt; To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable&lt;p&gt;That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they&amp;#x27;ll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.&lt;p&gt;Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.&lt;p&gt;Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning&amp;#x2F;intentions). However, that&amp;#x27;s what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding&amp;#x2F;regulating absolute monopolies).</text></comment>

<story><title>Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that&apos;s changing</title><url>https://keyt.com/news/money-and-business/2020/11/12/google-photos-hooked-users-with-free-unlimited-storage-now-thats-changing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nicoburns</author><text>To be fair, Google&amp;#x27;s pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50&amp;#x2F;month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).&lt;p&gt;And they&amp;#x27;re not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.</text></item><item><author>part1of2</author><text>&amp;gt; Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”&lt;p&gt;Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait &amp;amp; switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfortuny</author><text>Well it is like an infinite order of magnitude of a difference when PROMISED otherwise.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Evolution of Code Deploys at Reddit</title><url>https://redditblog.com/2017/06/02/the-evolution-of-code-deploys-at-reddit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>siliconc0w</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s nice to have a lot of options when managing deployments. Feature flags, canary deploys, A&amp;#x2F;B or green&amp;#x2F;blue, etc. Canaries are really nice to catch the majority of deploy issues (i.e &amp;#x27;it doesn&amp;#x27;t start up&amp;#x27; errors, obvious exception spikes or performance regressions). Feature flags let you hand off control to individual product teams and encourage them to create &amp;#x27;bite sized&amp;#x27; changes which can be flagged. Blue&amp;#x2F;green is also a nice way to reduce risk given more complicated cross-service changes where having another &amp;#x27;known good&amp;#x27; copy of production around is helpful.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Evolution of Code Deploys at Reddit</title><url>https://redditblog.com/2017/06/02/the-evolution-of-code-deploys-at-reddit/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wyc</author><text>Kudos to the Reddit engineering team. I&amp;#x27;ve been really enjoying their quality posts as of late, and I wish more companies of that scale were as transparent with their engineering problems and solutions. Thank you.</text></comment>

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<story><title>US immigration enforcement used AI-powered tool to scan posts derogatory to US</title><url>https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-database-derogatory-information-giant-oak-gost/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gorbachev</author><text>There are good things about the US and bad things about the US.&lt;p&gt;Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?</text></item><item><author>justrealist</author><text>Yeah like, there is a broad class of immigrant that endlessly complains about how awful the US is an awful force in the world, and then immigrates here for a high-paying job (and continues complaining).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want them! Why should we be required to ignore their personal feelings?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a long list of people who want into the US. We should prioritize the people who actually &lt;i&gt;like&lt;/i&gt; the US, this doesn&amp;#x27;t feel controversial.</text></item><item><author>shtopointo</author><text>What am I missing here?&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it a good idea to vet people before you let them enter your country? Why would you let in someone that is hostile to your country? Especially these days with so many individuals being driven by nefarious ideologies?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unethical_ban</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m torn on the whole subject.&lt;p&gt;On one hand, techno-surveillance is scary and it rarely marches backward, so letting this happen for citizenship applications will have a chilling effect on foreign intellectuals, and train people who may consider entering this country some day not to speak their mind.&lt;p&gt;I understand the theory that we don&amp;#x27;t want people coming here who rant all day saying &amp;quot;US is a terrorist state and something should be done about it&amp;quot; on social media. But I&amp;#x27;m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.</text></comment>

<story><title>US immigration enforcement used AI-powered tool to scan posts derogatory to US</title><url>https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-database-derogatory-information-giant-oak-gost/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gorbachev</author><text>There are good things about the US and bad things about the US.&lt;p&gt;Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?</text></item><item><author>justrealist</author><text>Yeah like, there is a broad class of immigrant that endlessly complains about how awful the US is an awful force in the world, and then immigrates here for a high-paying job (and continues complaining).&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want them! Why should we be required to ignore their personal feelings?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a long list of people who want into the US. We should prioritize the people who actually &lt;i&gt;like&lt;/i&gt; the US, this doesn&amp;#x27;t feel controversial.</text></item><item><author>shtopointo</author><text>What am I missing here?&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it a good idea to vet people before you let them enter your country? Why would you let in someone that is hostile to your country? Especially these days with so many individuals being driven by nefarious ideologies?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RHSeeger</author><text>&amp;gt; Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?&lt;p&gt;This seems fairly disingenuous. Nobody said foreigners shouldn&amp;#x27;t be allowed to criticize anything. Rather, the &amp;quot;for&amp;quot; argument is that their criticism should be analyzed to see if it would be detrimental to let them into the country.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My house&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t exactly a good analogy for &amp;quot;the country&amp;quot;, but to be overly simplistic&lt;p&gt;1. Your house is an ugly color&lt;p&gt;2. Your house is a blight on the land; you should be tossed to the street and it burned to the ground&lt;p&gt;Those are both criticisms of the the house. They are entirely different things to consider when deciding whether that person should be allowed in the house.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/real-reason-outsourcing-fails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmichaud</author><text>This actually rings true to my experience. I&apos;ve been responsible for several outsourced problems, and one common factor among them is trying to get Indian programmers and PMs to just be straight with me. I&apos;ve tried being direct by telling them that it&apos;s okay to tell me if something is wrong or to give me a realistic picture of progress, and I get &quot;Yes sir, I will certainly be very honest with you, sir,&quot; but nothing changes. It&apos;s a difficult barrier. I haven&apos;t figured it out yet.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/real-reason-outsourcing-fails/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>I have mixed feelings on this, as somebody who does outsourcing from a country which is not known for failure to appreciate subtle social dynamics. (Korean has six different forms of address based on relative rank? I could &lt;i&gt;actually use&lt;/i&gt; six before lunch on a typical day at the office.)&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, we&apos;ve had outsourcing projects suffer from cultural issues. However, they&apos;re not all related to the high PDI/low PDI distinction -- some of them you could shoehorn into that, to be true, but sometimes when any engineer swears that he absolutely will have a project ready by the end of the day he is just estimating poorly rather than being overly polite.&lt;p&gt;The number one problem we have had in outsourcing to a particular country is pervasive competence issues, followed by communication issues (egads, no, Babelfish is not an acceptable way to translate engineering documents), followed by a poor mesh in management styles which is exacerbated by both of the other two. We outsource to another country, where we have not had the pervasive competence issues. Things tend to go much better there.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not going to name names, but suffice it to say they&apos;re both in that top 10 list and within a few points of each other.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: Veganize any recipe site with EatKind Chrome extension</title><url>https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eatkind-for-chrome/ngojbbddpmckcgficlhojjcabamifdmi</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mcdonje</author><text>Vegan here. Based on the screenshots, I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ll use it. It looks like it just recommends brand name products to buy.&lt;p&gt;Not all recipes call for the same substitution for the same ingredient. And not everyone has the same philosophy about how to substitute.&lt;p&gt;For instance, eggs. There are several different uses for them in recipes; binding, leavening, moisture, protein content, etc. There are several different substitutions and most do some of those things better than others. Picking a good egg substitute, or choosing to simply leave the eggs out, requires knowledge and experience, or at least a flow chart.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s enough of an art to it that I&amp;#x27;d rather see how others solved the problem than consult a browser plugin that seems geared more to sell me stuff than to help me solve problems.</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: Veganize any recipe site with EatKind Chrome extension</title><url>https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eatkind-for-chrome/ngojbbddpmckcgficlhojjcabamifdmi</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ramphastidae</author><text>This doesn’t “veganize” recipes at all — it takes a recipe URL, searches for non-vegan ingredients, and then spits out affiliate links to common vegan substitutes. Critically, it does not convert the recipe you submit to a vegan one. The “AI-based” marketing language, the affiliate links, the use of an extension … this feels a lot like spam to me.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: Appwrite – Open-Source and Self Hosted Firebase Alternative</title><url>https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>christyjacob4</author><text>Over the past few months we’ve been trying hard to make Appwrite as simple to setup and use as possible. Your candid feedback has been crucial in shaping the project and it would be great if you can share some features you’d like to see in the project going forward.&lt;p&gt;What is Appwrite ? In simplest terms, Appwrite is an open source Backend As A Service (aka BaaS). Appwrite is an all in one solution with all the essentials you need like Authentication, User Management, Realtime Databases, Webhooks, Storage, Cloud Functions, SDKs for your favourite language and it’s light weight. Appwrite even runs on a Raspberry Pi. Most importantly, Appwrite is self-hosted which means you own your data and prevent any vendor lock-ins.&lt;p&gt;Talking about Appwrite’s features - Realtime Databases and events ( Recent benchmarks have showed a single server handling 1M+ concurrent connections )&lt;p&gt;- SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, Web ( React, Angular, Vue, Svelte etc.) Python, PHP, Node, Deno, Kotlin and more&lt;p&gt;- Bring your own Database - Use your choice of SQL or MySQL databases ( MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB and more )&lt;p&gt;- Database permissions for finer tuned access control&lt;p&gt;- Storage API with built in encryption, compression and antivirus&lt;p&gt;- Bring your own Storage - Use your choice of the local filesystem, DigitalOcean Spaces, S3 or an any other storage provider of your choice&lt;p&gt;- Cloud functions with support for over 20 runtimes&lt;p&gt;- Webhooks to connect with 3rd party APIs and services&lt;p&gt;- User Management and Authentication&lt;p&gt;- Multiple authentication methods - email, 25+ OAuth providers, JWT, API Keys&lt;p&gt;- Completely stateless and extensible architecture allowing easy integration with your existing backend&lt;p&gt;- A Dashboard, CLI and VSCode extensions to manage your server and many more...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vincentmarle</author><text>I was about to throw in the towel after evaluating Firebase &amp;#x2F; Supabase last week for a new project I&amp;#x27;m working on and revert back to good o&amp;#x27;l Laravel, but Appwrite looks &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; interesting and could potentially solve my problem so I&amp;#x27;ll definitely check it out!&lt;p&gt;Just one question: is there also Postgres support?</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: Appwrite – Open-Source and Self Hosted Firebase Alternative</title><url>https://github.com/appwrite/appwrite</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>christyjacob4</author><text>Over the past few months we’ve been trying hard to make Appwrite as simple to setup and use as possible. Your candid feedback has been crucial in shaping the project and it would be great if you can share some features you’d like to see in the project going forward.&lt;p&gt;What is Appwrite ? In simplest terms, Appwrite is an open source Backend As A Service (aka BaaS). Appwrite is an all in one solution with all the essentials you need like Authentication, User Management, Realtime Databases, Webhooks, Storage, Cloud Functions, SDKs for your favourite language and it’s light weight. Appwrite even runs on a Raspberry Pi. Most importantly, Appwrite is self-hosted which means you own your data and prevent any vendor lock-ins.&lt;p&gt;Talking about Appwrite’s features - Realtime Databases and events ( Recent benchmarks have showed a single server handling 1M+ concurrent connections )&lt;p&gt;- SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, Web ( React, Angular, Vue, Svelte etc.) Python, PHP, Node, Deno, Kotlin and more&lt;p&gt;- Bring your own Database - Use your choice of SQL or MySQL databases ( MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB and more )&lt;p&gt;- Database permissions for finer tuned access control&lt;p&gt;- Storage API with built in encryption, compression and antivirus&lt;p&gt;- Bring your own Storage - Use your choice of the local filesystem, DigitalOcean Spaces, S3 or an any other storage provider of your choice&lt;p&gt;- Cloud functions with support for over 20 runtimes&lt;p&gt;- Webhooks to connect with 3rd party APIs and services&lt;p&gt;- User Management and Authentication&lt;p&gt;- Multiple authentication methods - email, 25+ OAuth providers, JWT, API Keys&lt;p&gt;- Completely stateless and extensible architecture allowing easy integration with your existing backend&lt;p&gt;- A Dashboard, CLI and VSCode extensions to manage your server and many more...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qbasic_forever</author><text>Wow, that&amp;#x27;s an impressive set of features! I remember kicking the tires on the service a year ago and liked it but didn&amp;#x27;t have a big need for it. It looks like a lot of great stuff has been added in the time since then.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>AI found a bug in my code</title><url>https://joel.tools/codegen/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>readthenotes1</author><text>Lesson: adding comments explaining what you think the code us doing today arent helpful.&lt;p&gt;Observation: many comments explaining what the code is doing don&amp;#x27;t match what the code is doing after a few check-ins. E.G., I&amp;#x27;ve seen variations on&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;Add 1 to x x+=2; &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; too many times to count.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdenton4</author><text>Usually you can check the commit history for the unexpected line to figure out what&amp;#x27;s up, though, to let you figure out if the bug is in the code or the comment.&lt;p&gt;Comments that have the same content as the code but written in English will have code drift problems. But most comments aren&amp;#x27;t like this; they can provide context or explain what&amp;#x27;s happening at a higher level, ideally.</text></comment>

<story><title>AI found a bug in my code</title><url>https://joel.tools/codegen/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>readthenotes1</author><text>Lesson: adding comments explaining what you think the code us doing today arent helpful.&lt;p&gt;Observation: many comments explaining what the code is doing don&amp;#x27;t match what the code is doing after a few check-ins. E.G., I&amp;#x27;ve seen variations on&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;Add 1 to x x+=2; &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; too many times to count.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marginalia_nu</author><text>In general, I feel comments should explain why the code is the way it is, not what it does.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable</title><text>Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses - as they should! Those numbers started getting expensive. This prompted me to try and set up a new server cluster using IPv6 exclusively, and see how far I could get before having to give in and purchase an additional v4 address.&lt;p&gt;The experiment ended much sooner than I had anticipated. Some of the road blocks I hit along the way:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; - The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via IPv6, making it impossible to download release artefacts from many projects, lots of which distribute their software via GitHub exclusively (Prometheus for instance). - The default Ubuntu key servers aren&amp;#x27;t reachable via IPv6, making it difficult to install packages from third-party registries, such as Docker or Grafana. While debugging, I noticed huge swaths of the GPG infrastructure are defunct: There aren&amp;#x27;t many key servers left at all, and the only one I found actually working via IPv6 was pgpkeys.eu. - BitBucket cannot deploy to IPv6 hosts, as pipelines don&amp;#x27;t support IPv6 at all. You can self-host a pipeline runner and connect to it via v6, BUT it needs to have a dual stack - otherwise the runner won&amp;#x27;t start. - Hetzner itself doesn&amp;#x27;t even provide their own API via IPv6 (which we talk to for in-cluster service discovery. Oh, the irony. &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; It seems IPv6 is still not viable, more than a decade after launch. Do you use it in production? If so, how? What issues did you hit?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fernandomm</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s not forget about the idea that ISPs would distribute a &amp;#x2F;56 range to residential users. You could split it in &amp;#x2F;64 ranges according to your requirements and everything would work fine.&lt;p&gt;There is only one &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; issue: all major ISPs in my country ( Brazil ) only provide a single &amp;#x2F;64. You can&amp;#x27;t get another &amp;#x2F;64 unless you upgrade to a very expensive business plan.&lt;p&gt;That makes IPv6 not only useless but also a huge security issue.&lt;p&gt;1) I can&amp;#x27;t use my Mikrotik as a firewall. Trying to split a &amp;#x2F;64 range breaks things and some devices ( specially IOT ones ) will simply not work.&lt;p&gt;2) Routers provided by the ISPs here are very limited, specially for things like firewall rules. Some of them will only provide a On&amp;#x2F;Off switch, with Off option between the default one.&lt;p&gt;Although IPV4 + NAT had some issues, it ( accidentally? ) created a safe&amp;#x2F;sane default config for non-technical users. In order to open a port and expose a device, you have to explicitly add a rule on the firewall.&lt;p&gt;IPv6 is the other way around. In practice, all devices and ports are exposed unless you explicitly block it.&lt;p&gt;In the last 3 years I&amp;#x27;ve noticed criminals focusing more and more on IPv6 scans to compromise devices and create botnets since it&amp;#x27;s much easier to find exposed&amp;#x2F;unpatched devices as most users don&amp;#x27;t understand how to correctly configure a firewall.&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, the only viable solution is to disable IPv6.</text></item><item><author>redox99</author><text>IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades.&lt;p&gt;And I don&amp;#x27;t mean adoption, I mean the standard itself.&lt;p&gt;If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4).&lt;p&gt;Not having two sets of firewall rules and two sets of everything. I always disable IPv6 because it can bite you so hard when you don&amp;#x27;t realize that you are wide open to IPv6 connections because of different firewalls.&lt;p&gt;Edit: To make everything a bit clearer, the idea with this &amp;quot;ipv4+&amp;quot; is that you don&amp;#x27;t need the complexity of running both ipv4 and ipv6 as you do now.&lt;p&gt;And regarding compatibility, with ipv4+ if you have a 0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x ip address you would be able to talk to both ipv4+ aware and legacy ipv4 devices natively without any tunneling (because you also own the legacy, non quad 0 ip address). If you don&amp;#x27;t have such &amp;quot;quad 0 ip&amp;quot; (you are 1.1.1.1.x.x.x.x), only ipv4+ aware devices would be able to to connect to you, and for you to connect to non ipv4+ aware devices you would need either tunneling, or having a secondary, cgnat, &amp;quot;quad 0 ip&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bert64</author><text>Those ISPs are broken and not following the RFCs or RIR guidelines.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing stopping you from using NAT with IPv6, people just don&amp;#x27;t do it because the only benefit of NAT is conserving limited address space. NAT on IPv6 just brings all downsides and no benefit because you (should) have no shortage of address space. In any case v6 with nat is no worse than legacy ip with nat, its just stupid because they&amp;#x27;re forcing a newer and better protocol to run in a degraded mode.&lt;p&gt;Consumer oriented routers and firewalls do not allow arbitrary inbound IPv6 connections by default, you have to explicitly enable them.&lt;p&gt;I still don&amp;#x27;t get scanned over IPv6, despite having a static &amp;#x2F;56 range for more than 10 years. Everything that&amp;#x27;s reachable over legacy IP is also reachable over v6, and i have several v6-only devices because i simply don&amp;#x27;t have enough legacy addresses for everything. Scanning v6 is extremely difficult, while the legacy blocks get scanned continuously.&lt;p&gt;Modern operating systems are not sitting there with exposed services by default, you have to manually open them up if you want. Simply connecting a win11 box to an open IPv6 connection is not going to get you joined to a botnet like connecting a winxp machine directly to a legacy connection did.&lt;p&gt;Modern devices are often exposed to hostile networks&amp;#x2F;users - every time you connect a portable device to a public wifi network you are exposing your device to the operators and other users of the network. Depending how that network is configured, you might be exposed to the internet too. You don&amp;#x27;t have any separate device between you and the hostile network, you are relying on the configuration of your machine itself.&lt;p&gt;ISP supplied routers are limited and generally garbage, this is a problem for legacy ip just as much as v6.</text></comment>

<story><title>Tell HN: IPv6-only still pretty much unusable</title><text>Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses - as they should! Those numbers started getting expensive. This prompted me to try and set up a new server cluster using IPv6 exclusively, and see how far I could get before having to give in and purchase an additional v4 address.&lt;p&gt;The experiment ended much sooner than I had anticipated. Some of the road blocks I hit along the way:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; - The GitHub API and its code load endpoints are not reachable via IPv6, making it impossible to download release artefacts from many projects, lots of which distribute their software via GitHub exclusively (Prometheus for instance). - The default Ubuntu key servers aren&amp;#x27;t reachable via IPv6, making it difficult to install packages from third-party registries, such as Docker or Grafana. While debugging, I noticed huge swaths of the GPG infrastructure are defunct: There aren&amp;#x27;t many key servers left at all, and the only one I found actually working via IPv6 was pgpkeys.eu. - BitBucket cannot deploy to IPv6 hosts, as pipelines don&amp;#x27;t support IPv6 at all. You can self-host a pipeline runner and connect to it via v6, BUT it needs to have a dual stack - otherwise the runner won&amp;#x27;t start. - Hetzner itself doesn&amp;#x27;t even provide their own API via IPv6 (which we talk to for in-cluster service discovery. Oh, the irony. &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; It seems IPv6 is still not viable, more than a decade after launch. Do you use it in production? If so, how? What issues did you hit?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fernandomm</author><text>Let&amp;#x27;s not forget about the idea that ISPs would distribute a &amp;#x2F;56 range to residential users. You could split it in &amp;#x2F;64 ranges according to your requirements and everything would work fine.&lt;p&gt;There is only one &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; issue: all major ISPs in my country ( Brazil ) only provide a single &amp;#x2F;64. You can&amp;#x27;t get another &amp;#x2F;64 unless you upgrade to a very expensive business plan.&lt;p&gt;That makes IPv6 not only useless but also a huge security issue.&lt;p&gt;1) I can&amp;#x27;t use my Mikrotik as a firewall. Trying to split a &amp;#x2F;64 range breaks things and some devices ( specially IOT ones ) will simply not work.&lt;p&gt;2) Routers provided by the ISPs here are very limited, specially for things like firewall rules. Some of them will only provide a On&amp;#x2F;Off switch, with Off option between the default one.&lt;p&gt;Although IPV4 + NAT had some issues, it ( accidentally? ) created a safe&amp;#x2F;sane default config for non-technical users. In order to open a port and expose a device, you have to explicitly add a rule on the firewall.&lt;p&gt;IPv6 is the other way around. In practice, all devices and ports are exposed unless you explicitly block it.&lt;p&gt;In the last 3 years I&amp;#x27;ve noticed criminals focusing more and more on IPv6 scans to compromise devices and create botnets since it&amp;#x27;s much easier to find exposed&amp;#x2F;unpatched devices as most users don&amp;#x27;t understand how to correctly configure a firewall.&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, the only viable solution is to disable IPv6.</text></item><item><author>redox99</author><text>IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades.&lt;p&gt;And I don&amp;#x27;t mean adoption, I mean the standard itself.&lt;p&gt;If IPv6 were IPv4 with more octets, then we would all have been using it for like a decade.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I understand it would still require some breaking changes, but it would have been a million times easier to upgrade, as it would be a kind of superset of IPv4 (1.2.3.4 can be referred as 0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4).&lt;p&gt;Not having two sets of firewall rules and two sets of everything. I always disable IPv6 because it can bite you so hard when you don&amp;#x27;t realize that you are wide open to IPv6 connections because of different firewalls.&lt;p&gt;Edit: To make everything a bit clearer, the idea with this &amp;quot;ipv4+&amp;quot; is that you don&amp;#x27;t need the complexity of running both ipv4 and ipv6 as you do now.&lt;p&gt;And regarding compatibility, with ipv4+ if you have a 0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x ip address you would be able to talk to both ipv4+ aware and legacy ipv4 devices natively without any tunneling (because you also own the legacy, non quad 0 ip address). If you don&amp;#x27;t have such &amp;quot;quad 0 ip&amp;quot; (you are 1.1.1.1.x.x.x.x), only ipv4+ aware devices would be able to to connect to you, and for you to connect to non ipv4+ aware devices you would need either tunneling, or having a secondary, cgnat, &amp;quot;quad 0 ip&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crest</author><text>RouterOS v7 supports DHCPv6 prefix delegation. You can request a delegated &amp;#x2F;64 per downstream interface and announce itself as router using these prefixes. You can still use your MikroTik device as router, stateful firewall, proxy. You don&amp;#x27;t have to mess with smaller than &amp;#x2F;64 allocations on links unless your provider forces a broken CPE on you that doesn&amp;#x27;t support DHCPv6 prefix delegation.&lt;p&gt;Have you actually seen any large scale deployments of CPEs without an active IPv6 firewall blocking incoming connections by default?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets</title><url>https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcolas</author><text>No tool will ever successfully enforce discipline. If anything, it makes people more lax.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to reason about whether this can be null, the type system takes care of that for me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about leaking memory, valgrind will let me know.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to pay attention to the road, Tesla&amp;#x27;s autopilot takes care of it for me.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;All the tools do is enforce a loop of compile -&amp;gt; make compiler happy -&amp;gt; compile.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&amp;gt; First, do no harm, then use like Light Table, Model Driven Engineering, and TLA+.&lt;p&gt;Looking at some of Uncle Bob&amp;#x27;s other posts linked from this article, I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s what he&amp;#x27;s saying. He (Uncle Bob) goes on and on about discipline, but at the same time dismisses anything that might actually force programmers to be disciplined, like type systems that force you to check references for null before dereferencing them.&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;TheDarkPath.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;TheDarkPath....&lt;/a&gt; he asks: &amp;quot;It is very risky to have nulls rampaging around the system out of control. The question is: Whose job is it to manage the nulls. The language? Or the programmer?&amp;quot; and goes on to answer: &amp;quot;Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects – not languages.&amp;quot; Then he goes ranting about programmers who don&amp;#x27;t test their code, and if only they tested, such type systems would not be needed.&lt;p&gt;Again: He dismisses the one thing that &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; forces programmers to be disciplined and instead just &lt;i&gt;wishes&lt;/i&gt; (against all evidence) that they were disciplined. To me, he seems to be saying &amp;quot;First, do no harm, then use tests, then nothing.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>Terretta</author><text>Here is the post this post is in response to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;CodeIsNotTheAnswer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;CodeIsNotThe...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don’t interpret the original piece as saying any of these tools and techniques are not useful.&lt;p&gt;I interpret it as saying average developer mindset needs to shape up.&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree. I work with guys who believe in formal reasoning tools (we collaborated with Amazon’s ARG for example[1]), and use all these tools. These guys are almost compelled to write these tools and evangelize using the tools in an effort to help, because the developers around them don’t carefully reason about their code and it makes the guys who care crazy.&lt;p&gt;So you have two camps. People who believe correctness is important, and people who think continuous deployment is an answer to bugs. The first group is trying to help the second group through tools that can become part of the SDLC.&lt;p&gt;I read “Uncle Bob” as suggesting that’s not enough, it’s not the root cause — the second group needs to care.&lt;p&gt;I see nothing in his post that suggests the tools shouldn’t be used. (“I think that good software tools make it easier to write good software.“) But if the crowds in his talks aren’t using unit tests, are they really going to be using TLA+?&lt;p&gt;First, do no harm, then use like Light Table, Model Driven Engineering, and TLA+.&lt;p&gt;I take that as his point, and it seems painfully valid.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.slideshare.net&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;AmazonWebServices&amp;#x2F;aws-reinvent-2016-automated-formal-reasoning-about-aws-systems-sec401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.slideshare.net&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;AmazonWebServices&amp;#x2F;aws-rein...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adamlett</author><text>&lt;i&gt;No tool will ever successfully enforce discipline. If anything, it makes people more lax.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;But the end goal is not disciplined programmers! It is better, safer and more timely software.&lt;p&gt;Your argument applies just as well to safety equipment in cars and on heavy equipment, and you may be right that the reduced risk of being killed or maimed makes people more lax. But you can’t argue with the results: Far fewer people do in fact get killed or maimed!</text></comment>

<story><title>Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets</title><url>https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/uncle-bob/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcolas</author><text>No tool will ever successfully enforce discipline. If anything, it makes people more lax.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to reason about whether this can be null, the type system takes care of that for me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to worry about leaking memory, valgrind will let me know.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t have to pay attention to the road, Tesla&amp;#x27;s autopilot takes care of it for me.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;All the tools do is enforce a loop of compile -&amp;gt; make compiler happy -&amp;gt; compile.</text></item><item><author>tom_mellior</author><text>&amp;gt; First, do no harm, then use like Light Table, Model Driven Engineering, and TLA+.&lt;p&gt;Looking at some of Uncle Bob&amp;#x27;s other posts linked from this article, I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s what he&amp;#x27;s saying. He (Uncle Bob) goes on and on about discipline, but at the same time dismisses anything that might actually force programmers to be disciplined, like type systems that force you to check references for null before dereferencing them.&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;TheDarkPath.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;TheDarkPath....&lt;/a&gt; he asks: &amp;quot;It is very risky to have nulls rampaging around the system out of control. The question is: Whose job is it to manage the nulls. The language? Or the programmer?&amp;quot; and goes on to answer: &amp;quot;Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects – not languages.&amp;quot; Then he goes ranting about programmers who don&amp;#x27;t test their code, and if only they tested, such type systems would not be needed.&lt;p&gt;Again: He dismisses the one thing that &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; forces programmers to be disciplined and instead just &lt;i&gt;wishes&lt;/i&gt; (against all evidence) that they were disciplined. To me, he seems to be saying &amp;quot;First, do no harm, then use tests, then nothing.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>Terretta</author><text>Here is the post this post is in response to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;CodeIsNotTheAnswer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cleancoder.com&amp;#x2F;uncle-bob&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;CodeIsNotThe...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don’t interpret the original piece as saying any of these tools and techniques are not useful.&lt;p&gt;I interpret it as saying average developer mindset needs to shape up.&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree. I work with guys who believe in formal reasoning tools (we collaborated with Amazon’s ARG for example[1]), and use all these tools. These guys are almost compelled to write these tools and evangelize using the tools in an effort to help, because the developers around them don’t carefully reason about their code and it makes the guys who care crazy.&lt;p&gt;So you have two camps. People who believe correctness is important, and people who think continuous deployment is an answer to bugs. The first group is trying to help the second group through tools that can become part of the SDLC.&lt;p&gt;I read “Uncle Bob” as suggesting that’s not enough, it’s not the root cause — the second group needs to care.&lt;p&gt;I see nothing in his post that suggests the tools shouldn’t be used. (“I think that good software tools make it easier to write good software.“) But if the crowds in his talks aren’t using unit tests, are they really going to be using TLA+?&lt;p&gt;First, do no harm, then use like Light Table, Model Driven Engineering, and TLA+.&lt;p&gt;I take that as his point, and it seems painfully valid.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.slideshare.net&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;AmazonWebServices&amp;#x2F;aws-reinvent-2016-automated-formal-reasoning-about-aws-systems-sec401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.slideshare.net&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;AmazonWebServices&amp;#x2F;aws-rein...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cloverich</author><text>This overgeneralizes. When I started using strict null checking (in Typescript) I found it had an unexpected impact: I started writing code differently. Slowly, I also began _thinking_ about it differently. Ultimately you can&amp;#x27;t _make_ someone care if they don&amp;#x27;t want to. But if they already do care, some of these tools will make them better.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer</title><url>http://blog.lambda-startup.com/2014/03/recruitment-process-for-google-job-sre.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yukichan</author><text>But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&amp;amp;E I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I&amp;#x27;d be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back.&lt;p&gt;The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it&amp;#x27;s silly and personally I don&amp;#x27;t plan at working at companies that interview this way.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?</text></item><item><author>tmhedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection.&lt;p&gt;I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on.&lt;p&gt;A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I&amp;#x27;d be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won&amp;#x27;t count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you&amp;#x27;ve decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tmhedberg</author><text>If you don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s worth your time to interview twice at the same company, then simply don&amp;#x27;t. That&amp;#x27;s a completely reasonable point of view, and I didn&amp;#x27;t mean to imply otherwise.&lt;p&gt;For what it&amp;#x27;s worth, Google has a public reputation as a great place to work and as a company that hires &amp;quot;high quality&amp;quot; engineers. Both of these things mean that some people are willing to put more effort into getting a position there. My post wasn&amp;#x27;t meant to say that he must keep trying at all costs, but just to let him know not to be discouraged if he happened to really want that job. In many places, you&amp;#x27;re dead in the water if you don&amp;#x27;t make it the first time, but Google is not like that.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I didn&amp;#x27;t see my interview process as &amp;quot;something I had to go through&amp;quot;, i.e. a laborious means to an end. I enjoyed the challenge and the opportunity to get a glimpse of a company like Google from the inside. Even when I was turned down the first time, I came away feeling glad that I had done it. It&amp;#x27;s not like I had anything to lose from trying.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?&lt;p&gt;Not in the least, nor do I feel that I am doing that. I don&amp;#x27;t work on Google+ or anything related to it. However it may look from the outside, Google is not Google+. It&amp;#x27;s a big, multifaceted organization with opportunities to work on all sorts of interesting things. Much of our work is driven directly by the engineers themselves and not by management whims. And there&amp;#x27;s plenty of mobility to change roles if you decide you don&amp;#x27;t like what you&amp;#x27;re doing.&lt;p&gt;SRE specifically has proved to be a truly interesting and unique position. There are engineering challenges that we face which quite simply don&amp;#x27;t exist anywhere else. Beyond the much-touted perks, that&amp;#x27;s what makes Google special, in my opinion, and well worth the comparatively small effort I put into getting there.</text></comment>

<story><title>Recruitment Process for a Google Site Reliability Engineer</title><url>http://blog.lambda-startup.com/2014/03/recruitment-process-for-google-job-sre.html?m=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yukichan</author><text>But why go through that? Google is just another place to work. If I got rejected from a job at HoneyWell or G&amp;amp;E I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be thinking to myself well in one more year I can try again. I&amp;#x27;d be thinking about the next place to apply and never go back.&lt;p&gt;The guy was obviously qualified for the job and they still rejected him because he got nervous. He had done well except for one and they said no. I guess if you have so many people interviewing where you have some that did better it makes sense, but it&amp;#x27;s silly and personally I don&amp;#x27;t plan at working at companies that interview this way.&lt;p&gt;Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach. You wanna be the person that has to obey Larry Page&amp;#x27;s whims and integrate Google+ into more places users don&amp;#x27;t want it?</text></item><item><author>tmhedberg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a Google SRE that had a very similar experience. My best advice would be not to sweat the rejection.&lt;p&gt;I was also contacted by a recruiter based on an open source project I had contributed to. I went through the same series of phone interviews, culminating in an on-site in NYC. I left there feeling largely positive about my chances, but a few days later, I was politely rejected. I was not that broken up about it, as I already had a job that I liked, so I just counted it as good interview practice and moved on.&lt;p&gt;A year later, almost to the day, the same recruiter called me up out of the blue and asked if I&amp;#x27;d be willing to try again. I agreed, and after an abbreviated version of the phone interview process, went to Mountain View for another on-site. Soon after, I was hired!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s actually very common for Google to reject candidates the first time around, as the interview process is deliberately tuned to produce a lot more false negatives than false positives. We have that luxury thanks to the volume of applicants we receive (there are still a surprising number of Nooglers starting each week despite the selectivity). The hiring committees recognize this tendency to reject qualified candidates and won&amp;#x27;t count you out after one try. If you got to the on-site stage, then rest assured that your interviewers took you seriously as a candidate. If you&amp;#x27;ve decided that you would really like to work at Google, you will still have a good shot if you try again in a year or so. And if not, then hopefully it was at least a fun challenge and a free trip to London.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>&amp;gt; Google isn&amp;#x27;t special. They&amp;#x27;re just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what&amp;#x27;s got into people&amp;#x27;s brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach.&lt;p&gt;It takes you a while to get to this mindset as a technology worker. Everyone&amp;#x27;s motivation is different though.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m 31, have 13 years of experience, and keep getting rejected by SpaceX for a Linux Admin job at launch operations Cape Canaveral. Yes, I&amp;#x27;m overqualified. Yes, I&amp;#x27;d be taking an enormous paycut. But I want to help send rockets to Mars damn it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not always about the money, nor about the work. Sometimes, you&amp;#x27;re simply irrational about it.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/30/20841288/jack-dorsey-ceo-twitter-account-hacked-chuckle-gang-shane-dawson-james-charles</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtempaccount1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll be interested to see the post-mortem on this breach for sure.&lt;p&gt;As an outsider, I would have thought that the Twitter security team would have a set of high-value users (with @jack being at the top of the list) who&amp;#x27;d they keep very close tabs on in terms of any unusual activity.&lt;p&gt;Realistically Twitter is where announcements are made by world leaders and major corporations, control of these accounts could have repercussions, although in this case it just seems to have been a general hack...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>harryh</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think &amp;quot;keep very close tabs on&amp;quot; can prevent an attack on an account before it happens. All it can do is help clean up the damage quickly. Which is what happened here. The offending tweets were deleted in 10-15 minutes. That&amp;#x27;s a pretty good response time.&lt;p&gt;What could prevent an attack is limiting the features available to high-value users. One could imagine, for example, limiting 3rd party API access. Depending on what actually happened here, that might have prevented this. But there is a downside of reduced functionality for the owners of the accounts in question. There&amp;#x27;s always tradeoffs.</text></comment>

<story><title>Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/30/20841288/jack-dorsey-ceo-twitter-account-hacked-chuckle-gang-shane-dawson-james-charles</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtempaccount1</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll be interested to see the post-mortem on this breach for sure.&lt;p&gt;As an outsider, I would have thought that the Twitter security team would have a set of high-value users (with @jack being at the top of the list) who&amp;#x27;d they keep very close tabs on in terms of any unusual activity.&lt;p&gt;Realistically Twitter is where announcements are made by world leaders and major corporations, control of these accounts could have repercussions, although in this case it just seems to have been a general hack...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rajesh-s</author><text>I believe they do keep close tabs on high profile accounts. I happened to notice it in my feed when the news hadn&amp;#x27;t broken out yet (took a couple of screenshots out of surprise too). The team quickly took all of it down as and when they were being posted. It lasted for about 10minutes or so. The hackers were adding mentions to other accounts which were immediately suspended by the folks at Twitter too.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How to hire low experience, high potential people</title><url>https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I&amp;#x27;ve worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a little grumpy about this &amp;quot;diamonds in the rough&amp;quot; shit. I&amp;#x27;m more concerned about what&amp;#x27;s lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don&amp;#x27;t much need to know if &amp;quot;they have a chip on their shoulders&amp;quot;. More generally: I have zero faith in anyone&amp;#x27;s ability to learn much from psychological interviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swozey</author><text>So you communicated via email and the only consideration was the quality of their sample?&lt;p&gt;Nobody at any point literally spoke to this person?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had a ton of issues at my corp of people having other people handle their interview questions, code, or having AI listen to the conversation and answer questions by text as if we prompted it. Then they show up online after being hired and they have webcam problems or never go on cam, talk as little as possible, basically never communicate to anyone really, miss a lot of meetings, etc.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had probably 5 instances of this last year we&amp;#x27;re absolutely super strict about things now. Our assumption is that they want to get in, potentially get any bonuses if there are any, get a few huge (for their call center) paychecks until they get caught. Do no or almost no work. And it&amp;#x27;s a call center you can sometimes hear tons of convos going on in the background so they&amp;#x27;re just doing this en masse.&lt;p&gt;This is happening ALL over since covid. I think some of them may have even filed unjust termination sort of things to the workforce commission but I may be wrong. Huge companies are dealing with this at a really rough scale.</text></comment>

<story><title>How to hire low experience, high potential people</title><url>https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I&amp;#x27;ve worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a little grumpy about this &amp;quot;diamonds in the rough&amp;quot; shit. I&amp;#x27;m more concerned about what&amp;#x27;s lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don&amp;#x27;t much need to know if &amp;quot;they have a chip on their shoulders&amp;quot;. More generally: I have zero faith in anyone&amp;#x27;s ability to learn much from psychological interviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strich</author><text>In a world where chat gpt exists I think even work samples are untrustworthy sources of excellence unfortunately. It would seem one has to either watch the process or devise unique and difficult to game tests.</text></comment>

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<story><title>China&apos;s Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37670842</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devy</author><text>According to the plan as stated in the article, China is planning to have its own space station in 2020. By the time ISS is scheduled to retire in 2024 [1], China could very well be the ONLY country who will have space station.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.space.com&amp;#x2F;24208-international-space-station-extension-2024.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.space.com&amp;#x2F;24208-international-space-station-exten...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>China&apos;s Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37670842</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yohann305</author><text>Am I the only one that feels that China is helping in motivating the world to put efforts into Space Exploration?&lt;p&gt;Good job on China for pulling this off and helping Mankind.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies</title><url>https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nikcub</author><text>BIP150[0] adds peer authentication, BIP151 adds encrypted peer communication. Having them implemented and enforced is probably overdue - afaik so far i&amp;#x27;ve only seen bcoin[2] implement it&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0150.mediawiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0150.mediawi...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0151.mediawiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin&amp;#x2F;bips&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bip-0151.mediawi...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bcoin-org&amp;#x2F;bcoin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bcoin-org&amp;#x2F;bcoin&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies</title><url>https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tlrobinson</author><text>If you’re concerned about this type of attack it’s pretty easy to defend against. All it takes to avoid partition is a single connection across a VPN, Tor, or even satellite (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blockstream.com&amp;#x2F;satellite&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blockstream.com&amp;#x2F;satellite&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule</title><url>http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>trimbo</author><text>I&apos;m kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly. You can&apos;t upgrade a major installed base overnight unless there&apos;s incentive. Windows Vista, for example?&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it has stumbling blocks towards achieving the upgrade. Packages you&apos;re using aren&apos;t upgraded, you have a lot of code dealing with strings, and so on. I worked on a project that tried to use Python 3.x and it was a nightmare in both regards.&lt;p&gt;In my view, Python 3 doesn&apos;t offer any major reasons to upgrade other than we&apos;ve been told to. Someone tell me: what is it that&apos;s so compelling about Python 3? For instance, when you click on &quot;What&apos;s new in Python 3&quot; on this page, the first thing in the list is &quot;print is a function&quot;. Seriously? The FIRST thing in the list is something that breaks code and has very little impact. Unicode has a lot more impact, breaks a lot more stuff, and is doable in 2.x anyway, yet is the 5th or 6th thing in the list.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;m not really sure what the devs were thinking with Python 3.x. It broke a lot of stuff but didn&apos;t break enough to make Python notably better. I was around and a heavy Python user for the 1.x -&amp;#62; 2.x upgrade. That was far easier, had some features I could really use, and there was a much smaller installed base. This time around, I just don&apos;t see the reason I should upgrade. Eventually, I imagine I will when support is so far gone that there&apos;s no choice, or there&apos;s some amazing feature that requires it.&lt;p&gt;For those of you who will respond: &quot;So don&apos;t upgrade, or switch off Python&quot;. One of those is mission accomplished. The other one remains to be seen, though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sho_hn</author><text>I haven&apos;t written any code that doesn&apos;t run on Python 3 since 2010. I&apos;m in the comfortable position of generally getting to use Python 3 for new projects (my library dependencies are met), and when I don&apos;t, the shared subset of Python 2.7 and 3 is useful enough to get the job done.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s lots of reasons I find coding in Python 3 more enjoyable and productive. Unicode by default, removing x*() functions and returning generators where appropriate instead, removing old-style classes, improved consistency in standard object interfaces/protocols, standard lib cleanups, etc. Yes, even print() - keyword args are a lot nicer than the old hackish syntax for things like the output file.&lt;p&gt;These are often called minor and &quot;no compelling reason to upgrade&quot;, but I&apos;d submit that when a language does more often what you expect it to do, when the number of gotchas you need to keep in mind is reduced significantly, that&apos;s not minor. It might not be a reason to switch a large existing codebase over, but it&apos;s certainly a reason to write the next large codebase in it, and that&apos;s what Python 3 aims at: The future of Python and its future users.&lt;p&gt;No, that doesn&apos;t make for a fast transition, but indeed, it was never expected to be (&quot;five years&quot; is the plan, we&apos;re not there yet, and things look to be on track). Eventually, there just won&apos;t be any reasons left not to use Python 3, but plenty of reasons to do so (the better core language, the sum of improvements in the standard lib, the continued maintenance), and then it&apos;ll be done.</text></comment>

<story><title>Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule</title><url>http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>trimbo</author><text>I&apos;m kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly. You can&apos;t upgrade a major installed base overnight unless there&apos;s incentive. Windows Vista, for example?&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it has stumbling blocks towards achieving the upgrade. Packages you&apos;re using aren&apos;t upgraded, you have a lot of code dealing with strings, and so on. I worked on a project that tried to use Python 3.x and it was a nightmare in both regards.&lt;p&gt;In my view, Python 3 doesn&apos;t offer any major reasons to upgrade other than we&apos;ve been told to. Someone tell me: what is it that&apos;s so compelling about Python 3? For instance, when you click on &quot;What&apos;s new in Python 3&quot; on this page, the first thing in the list is &quot;print is a function&quot;. Seriously? The FIRST thing in the list is something that breaks code and has very little impact. Unicode has a lot more impact, breaks a lot more stuff, and is doable in 2.x anyway, yet is the 5th or 6th thing in the list.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;m not really sure what the devs were thinking with Python 3.x. It broke a lot of stuff but didn&apos;t break enough to make Python notably better. I was around and a heavy Python user for the 1.x -&amp;#62; 2.x upgrade. That was far easier, had some features I could really use, and there was a much smaller installed base. This time around, I just don&apos;t see the reason I should upgrade. Eventually, I imagine I will when support is so far gone that there&apos;s no choice, or there&apos;s some amazing feature that requires it.&lt;p&gt;For those of you who will respond: &quot;So don&apos;t upgrade, or switch off Python&quot;. One of those is mission accomplished. The other one remains to be seen, though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drats</author><text>I am not sure about now, but another point is that when Python 3 was released it was slower as well, so there was hardly a reason to swap for very minor changes and no libraries. Python 3 should have been something radical like PyPy or large changes to the standard library.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/19/pentagon-psychological-operations-facebook-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilv</author><text>When I was a kid in the 1980s, we heard about Soviet government propaganda to its citizens, including via Pravda. We were also taught how great the US is, by contrast, that it doesn&amp;#x27;t do those things.&lt;p&gt;Later, I thought I&amp;#x27;d learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.&lt;p&gt;That seems like good guidance, and I&amp;#x27;d welcome an honest review that checks whether we&amp;#x27;re living up to standards that have been an inspiring part of our national character in the past, and leads to any corrective action.&lt;p&gt;Maybe US collective leadership realizes a way here that we can build upon our ancestors&amp;#x27; great ideals, and follow through further, not drop the ball.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lutger</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t really understand why not doing it to US citizens makes it ok. I can imagine one would find it permissible to use such techniques against your enemies, but this is very clearly also about your allies.&lt;p&gt;To the US, American lives are all that really matter? I mean, there&amp;#x27;s also the policy that torture is ok but not against Americans and not on US territory, hence the secret CIA torture spaces during the Gulf War and guantonomo bay (simplifying a bit here). Isn&amp;#x27;t that obviously wrong?&lt;p&gt;How can one maintain that their country is the greatest with such dubious ethics? I mean specifically using the argument &amp;#x27;doing objectionable things only to non US citizens&amp;#x27; as part of the case for America&amp;#x27;s greatness seems...odd at best. I feel like I&amp;#x27;m missing something here. A cultural gap maybe. Or is American superiority deemed so self evident that it legitimates itself in a circular justification?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want to sound combative, though I probably do, but really I want to understand how this works for Americans.</text></comment>

<story><title>Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/09/19/pentagon-psychological-operations-facebook-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neilv</author><text>When I was a kid in the 1980s, we heard about Soviet government propaganda to its citizens, including via Pravda. We were also taught how great the US is, by contrast, that it doesn&amp;#x27;t do those things.&lt;p&gt;Later, I thought I&amp;#x27;d learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.&lt;p&gt;That seems like good guidance, and I&amp;#x27;d welcome an honest review that checks whether we&amp;#x27;re living up to standards that have been an inspiring part of our national character in the past, and leads to any corrective action.&lt;p&gt;Maybe US collective leadership realizes a way here that we can build upon our ancestors&amp;#x27; great ideals, and follow through further, not drop the ball.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>unity1001</author><text>&amp;gt; Later, I thought I&amp;#x27;d learned (maybe misheard?) that US could engage in propaganda or psyops, but that there were strict rules not to do it against US citizens.&lt;p&gt;That law was repealed in 2010. Since then its all out propaganda.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?</title><url>http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drewolbrich</author><text>If you know the diameter of the observable Universe and you want to calculate its circumference with the accuracy of the diameter of a proton, the number of digits of pi that you need is 43.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gmuslera</author><text>The smallest possible distance is the Plank lenght, 1,6&lt;i&gt;10^-35 (1&lt;/i&gt;10^-15 is the diameter of a proton). And for that you only need around 60 digits of pi to calculate the circumference of the universe.&lt;p&gt;Of course, that is just for the simple operation of calculate the circumference given the diameter, more complex operations with pi may require more precision.</text></comment>

<story><title>How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?</title><url>http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drewolbrich</author><text>If you know the diameter of the observable Universe and you want to calculate its circumference with the accuracy of the diameter of a proton, the number of digits of pi that you need is 43.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mabbo</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always heard the number is around 50, but do you have any references to show that as being correct?</text></comment>

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<story><title>It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/its-surprising-how-much-small-teams-can-get-done-sam-chaudhary-of-classdojo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>maxxxxx</author><text>I used to work in small teams&amp;#x2F;companies or alone and got a lot done that way. Now I am in a big corporation and I am still stunned by the overhead there . Between coordinating with other teams, dealing with offshore teams and reporting to management you barely get any work done. And if you get anything done it&amp;#x27;s usually mediocre because there is no room for experimentation or rapid change if something doesn&amp;#x27;t work. I am just finishing a project that took 2 years. I am thoroughly convinced that the 2 developers who did most of the work could easily have done it in half the time if they didn&amp;#x27;t have to work with other teams who didn&amp;#x27;t deliver and stakeholders who couldn&amp;#x27;t make up their mind. We could just have worked through each issue but instead we had to wait for other teams and deal with their mediocre output which was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.&lt;p&gt;It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence.</text></comment>

<story><title>It’s Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done [audio]</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/its-surprising-how-much-small-teams-can-get-done-sam-chaudhary-of-classdojo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pixelpoet</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m part of a 3-man company, Glare Technologies, and we develop and market two products: a high end 3D renderer with plugins for several 3D modelling apps, and a fractal art application. We do basically everything, from the online store and website to the coding and support emails. We&amp;#x27;ve been fully independent since the beginning, around 2010.&lt;p&gt;When I hear about the development world out there, especially in America, where everyone has these crazy offices and there&amp;#x27;s just money flying everywhere and it&amp;#x27;s all growth growth growth with loads of people joining all the time, I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel it&amp;#x27;s an entirely different universe.&lt;p&gt;We could probably do better with some investment and growth, but it&amp;#x27;s great to just be a small team.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica hits new record</title><url>https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/CryoSat/Ice_loss_from_Greenland_and_Antarctica_hits_new_record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simmerup</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s plenty of billionaires creating bugout fortresses with private security contractors to keep them safe.&lt;p&gt;For the elites maybe success means something different to us.</text></item><item><author>audiodude</author><text>In 2010 we needed to act &amp;quot;before 2020&amp;quot; which seemed like plenty of time. I&amp;#x27;m convinced we already have met the &amp;quot;tipping point&amp;quot;. No one wants to say that though because it would be either admitting climate change is real, or admitting defeat.</text></item><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>I personally have zero hope that we&amp;#x27;ll succeed in mitigating &amp;quot;tipping point&amp;quot;, irreversible climate change. I&amp;#x27;m less doom-and-gloom about it than most, though, since I think we&amp;#x27;ll find ways to adapt, and a sort of apocalyptic human-ending scenario doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely to me.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, &amp;quot;adapt&amp;quot; is going to be painful. But I think it will be painful in the way the industrial revolution was painful: Lots and lots of cultural displacement, shifts in lifestyles, etc. But it&amp;#x27;ll also make some new billionaires and powerhouse industrial centers based around the need to fundamentally change our society to &lt;i&gt;stop making it worse&lt;/i&gt; and to solve the problems a heating globe produces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brtkdotse</author><text>&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s plenty of billionaires creating bugout fortresses with private security contractors to keep them safe.&lt;p&gt;Being locked in a fortress with a few dozen armed men who’s loyalty depends on “currency in a bank” having any value doesn’t seem very safe to me.&lt;p&gt;But what do I know, I’m not a billionaire.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica hits new record</title><url>https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/CryoSat/Ice_loss_from_Greenland_and_Antarctica_hits_new_record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simmerup</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s plenty of billionaires creating bugout fortresses with private security contractors to keep them safe.&lt;p&gt;For the elites maybe success means something different to us.</text></item><item><author>audiodude</author><text>In 2010 we needed to act &amp;quot;before 2020&amp;quot; which seemed like plenty of time. I&amp;#x27;m convinced we already have met the &amp;quot;tipping point&amp;quot;. No one wants to say that though because it would be either admitting climate change is real, or admitting defeat.</text></item><item><author>jvanderbot</author><text>I personally have zero hope that we&amp;#x27;ll succeed in mitigating &amp;quot;tipping point&amp;quot;, irreversible climate change. I&amp;#x27;m less doom-and-gloom about it than most, though, since I think we&amp;#x27;ll find ways to adapt, and a sort of apocalyptic human-ending scenario doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely to me.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, &amp;quot;adapt&amp;quot; is going to be painful. But I think it will be painful in the way the industrial revolution was painful: Lots and lots of cultural displacement, shifts in lifestyles, etc. But it&amp;#x27;ll also make some new billionaires and powerhouse industrial centers based around the need to fundamentally change our society to &lt;i&gt;stop making it worse&lt;/i&gt; and to solve the problems a heating globe produces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>forgetfreeman</author><text>Without exception all the folks that are going in on that particular grift are ignoring 3 really critical facts:&lt;p&gt;1. Segments of the local population are armed as well or better than their security contractors and outnumber them thousands to one.&lt;p&gt;2. None of the locals are confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded.&lt;p&gt;3. Heavy equipment is both ubiquitous worldwide and shockingly simple to operate effectively.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: Wiretap – Transparent WireGuard proxy server without root</title><url>https://github.com/sandialabs/wiretap</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>learndeeply</author><text>Hilarious name for an open source project released by a government lab.</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: Wiretap – Transparent WireGuard proxy server without root</title><url>https://github.com/sandialabs/wiretap</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jordemort</author><text>Wireproxy can do similar stuff: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;octeep&amp;#x2F;wireproxy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;octeep&amp;#x2F;wireproxy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I am a contributor to Wireproxy)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Last.fm turns 20</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23473358/lastfm-discord-bot-neil-young-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Still use last.fm. Most &amp;quot;You might like this&amp;quot; algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, &amp;quot;If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!&amp;quot; But I&amp;#x27;ve never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my last.fm history and has an understanding of the genre says &amp;quot;Gee, this guy has plenty of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and tons of doom metal on his list, but &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. &lt;i&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s intentional&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SimonPStevens</author><text>I had always assumed that recommendation algorithms didn&amp;#x27;t work on genres, but instead did a lookup based on something like:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You like X&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Person Y also likes X&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Person Y also likes Z&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I should recommended Z to you&amp;quot; (proportional to the number of people there are who liked X and Z, compared to other options)&lt;p&gt;If this is the case (and perhaps I&amp;#x27;m wrong), it&amp;#x27;s nothing to do with the algorithm not understanding the subtleties of the genre, but it&amp;#x27;s actually just that on average those subtleties disappear because they are unique to you. (Forgive me, I don&amp;#x27;t know your genres at all, but), I would guess that on average people who like Black Sabbath really do typically like Slipknot as well, and that is why the algorithm recommends them to you.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not that the algo is any worse than human recommendations, it&amp;#x27;s just that it&amp;#x27;s an average of all humans likes, which will never fit your exact personal unique preferences because they aren&amp;#x27;t you.</text></comment>

<story><title>Last.fm turns 20</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23473358/lastfm-discord-bot-neil-young-spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Still use last.fm. Most &amp;quot;You might like this&amp;quot; algorithms go straight for the low-hanging fruit, and often fail to take any kind of nuance into account.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t tell you how many of the streaming services will see my Black Sabbath play history and immediately recommend, &amp;quot;If you like Black Sabbath, you should love...Slipknot!&amp;quot; But I&amp;#x27;ve never had a real person make that mistake, because a real person who looks at my last.fm history and has an understanding of the genre says &amp;quot;Gee, this guy has plenty of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and tons of doom metal on his list, but &lt;i&gt;doesn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have Slipknot, Korn, or Pantera in his history. &lt;i&gt;Maybe that&amp;#x27;s intentional&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mahathu</author><text>&amp;gt; Human review and recommendation still beats algorithmic recommendation by a mile if you have discerning tastes&lt;p&gt;I completely agree. But last.fm doesn&amp;#x27;t do human review either, right? OTOH, I think the &amp;quot;radio&amp;quot; feature on spotify is wildly underrated. I used to spend hours compiling playlists for different moments&amp;#x2F;social settings&amp;#x2F;moods (still do, because it&amp;#x27;s fun), but picking any song&amp;#x2F;album&amp;#x2F;artist and then getting an endless stream of similar music is an amazing feature. Unfortunately, sometimes it screws up and will suggest me the same songs over and over again and there is no way to get a little more control over the algorithm.&lt;p&gt;I came to hate the Superstar cover by Sonic Youth and &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m So Tired&amp;quot; by Fugazi for those reasons. Great songs, but they just kept coming up as the first recommended track and I can&amp;#x27;t stand hearing those intro piano chords on the latter anymore!! According to my last.fm [0] I played it 50+ times and I don&amp;#x27;t even remember once seeking out that song or putting it in one of my playlists.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.last.fm&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;mahathu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.last.fm&amp;#x2F;user&amp;#x2F;mahathu&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)</title><url>https://turriate.com/articles/modern-javascript-everything-you-missed-over-10-years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BrissyCoder</author><text>&amp;gt; simplicity of the web technologies in general&lt;p&gt;Are we looking at the same web technologies here or are you from an alternative universe?</text></item><item><author>lukicdarkoo</author><text>Professionally, I do embedded and robotics, but once a year I find an excuse to create a simple web application (to stay updated). Every time, I get impressed by power and simplicity of the web technologies in general. In JavaScript those are things mentioned in the article + WebComponents. For CSS those are flexboxes, grids, and animations. In my opinion, React made a revolution with hooks and contexts. I love the direction in which the web world has been going!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rtpg</author><text>Try writing a GUI with other toolkits. Hours of tweaking random XML to try and figure out why some constraint solving thing just isn&amp;#x27;t working...&lt;p&gt;Despite all the mess, I have an easier time getting buttons on a screen and doing things sanely (once all the fuss is set up) compared to trying to get the ball rolling in Qt&amp;#x2F;GTK&amp;#x2F;etc (especially if you&amp;#x27;re not using Java or C++)</text></comment>

<story><title>Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)</title><url>https://turriate.com/articles/modern-javascript-everything-you-missed-over-10-years</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BrissyCoder</author><text>&amp;gt; simplicity of the web technologies in general&lt;p&gt;Are we looking at the same web technologies here or are you from an alternative universe?</text></item><item><author>lukicdarkoo</author><text>Professionally, I do embedded and robotics, but once a year I find an excuse to create a simple web application (to stay updated). Every time, I get impressed by power and simplicity of the web technologies in general. In JavaScript those are things mentioned in the article + WebComponents. For CSS those are flexboxes, grids, and animations. In my opinion, React made a revolution with hooks and contexts. I love the direction in which the web world has been going!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zodiakzz</author><text>I am a senior web developer with 12 years of experience, also perplexed by that statement.&lt;p&gt;Edit: The React repo is 3 million+ lines of code, written in its own niche language...</text></comment>

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<story><title>MIFARE Classic: exposing the static encrypted nonce variant [pdf]</title><url>https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1275.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>&amp;quot;Should we buy a Chinese knockoff of MIFARE Classic&amp;quot; strikes me as a self-answering question, but I guess that&amp;#x27;s why I still haven&amp;#x27;t been promoted to CISO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>turtle_heck</author><text>The end users of such cards are often not aware of the source, there&amp;#x27;s usually resellers that supply them who are always trying to save a buck here or there.&lt;p&gt;We have customers who use smartcards and we often need to read or write to them, during on-boarding they often have no clue what version or spec they are using and it often results in trial-and-error after they send us a few cards with little-to-no markings on them.</text></comment>

<story><title>MIFARE Classic: exposing the static encrypted nonce variant [pdf]</title><url>https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1275.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jeffbee</author><text>&amp;quot;Should we buy a Chinese knockoff of MIFARE Classic&amp;quot; strikes me as a self-answering question, but I guess that&amp;#x27;s why I still haven&amp;#x27;t been promoted to CISO.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dave_universetf</author><text>The paper reports that the same backdoor seems to be present in some NXP and Infineon SKUs as well, including some manufactured in Europe.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The world is run by people no smarter than you</title><url>https://www.swyx.io/no-smarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nh23423fefe</author><text>Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don&amp;#x27;t make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren&amp;#x27;t fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying &amp;#x27;I don&amp;#x27;t know&amp;#x27; isn&amp;#x27;t a death sentence.&lt;p&gt;Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being &amp;quot;caught out as an imposter&amp;quot; whatever that means.&lt;p&gt;The difference isn&amp;#x27;t smart&amp;#x2F;not smart. It&amp;#x27;s movement vs stationary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re defining &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; as some grab bag of traits that you deem virtuous. But if we use the common connotation of smart (ie. raw cognitive ability), and decouple it from wisdom, judgement, EQ, charisma, independence, self-awareness, then what you are saying is nonsense.&lt;p&gt;Dumb people don&amp;#x27;t feel imposter syndrome more than smart people. Ambition is not limited to the smart. And if anything I would say being high percentile IQ can work against your ability to learn from others because you&amp;#x27;re used to being the smartest person in the room.&lt;p&gt;Remember, the universe is big and chaotic, intelligence only enables a limited amount of optimization, and the difference between a &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; person and a &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; person is insignificant next to our evolved social capabilities that allowed us to specialize and create huge civilizations with strong safety and wellbeing guarantees. Every &amp;quot;self-made&amp;quot; millionaire and billionaire on the planet would be nothing without those base traits of the populace.</text></comment>

<story><title>The world is run by people no smarter than you</title><url>https://www.swyx.io/no-smarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nh23423fefe</author><text>Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don&amp;#x27;t make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren&amp;#x27;t fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying &amp;#x27;I don&amp;#x27;t know&amp;#x27; isn&amp;#x27;t a death sentence.&lt;p&gt;Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being &amp;quot;caught out as an imposter&amp;quot; whatever that means.&lt;p&gt;The difference isn&amp;#x27;t smart&amp;#x2F;not smart. It&amp;#x27;s movement vs stationary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tablespoon</author><text>&amp;gt; Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don&amp;#x27;t make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren&amp;#x27;t fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying &amp;#x27;I don&amp;#x27;t know&amp;#x27; isn&amp;#x27;t a death sentence.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re creating connections that don&amp;#x27;t exist between unrelated things. &amp;quot;Smart people&amp;quot; don&amp;#x27;t all have the personality traits, attitudes, and beleifs that you&amp;#x27;re attributing to them. I&amp;#x27;d say &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; and the things you describe are actually completely orthogonal.</text></comment>

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<story><title>.01% of Bitcoin holders hold 27% of all Bitcoin</title><url>https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1527661935054962688</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darawk</author><text>This is theoretically a fair criticism. But note that the 27% vs 0.01% never appears in the NBER paper. Further note the extreme limitations of any clustering based analysis. And finally, note that they do not actually identify individuals, they identify clusters, and they also treat mining pools as individuals.&lt;p&gt;I see no support for the headline number in this paper. What it appears that the people making this video did was take &amp;quot;1000 individuals&amp;quot; (which the paper defines as &lt;i&gt;clusters&lt;/i&gt; of wallets) and divide by 68 million &lt;i&gt;wallets&lt;/i&gt; in existence. What you actually get here when you do this is 0.001% vs 16%, which is reasonably close to the figured cited in the video, so is likely essentialy the calculation they did.&lt;p&gt;It should be obvious how absurd this is.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Hah, actually the exact calculation they did is 10k&amp;#x2F;68mm and 5mm&amp;#x2F;18mm. That gives you exactly 0.01% and 27%. Discrepancy resolved. This is the exact ludicrious calculation the people in this video did.</text></item><item><author>FabHK</author><text>&amp;gt; The only way you could possibly measure this ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is obviously going to ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Analyses like these are a total joke.&lt;p&gt;Why is this obviously so? Watching the video, one realises that they refer to a WSJ article that is based on a 2021 NBER paper [1].&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the NBER, London School of Economics, and MIT harbour idiots that have not heard of exchanges?&lt;p&gt;On page 5 of the paper:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Determining the concentration of ownership is more complicated than just tracking the holdings of the richest addresses, since many of the largest addresses belong to cold wallets of exchanges and online wallets, which hold Bitcoin on behalf of many investors. We develop a suite of algorithms based on graph analysis to classify addresses into those belonging to individual investors or those belonging to intermediaries. [...]&lt;p&gt;We show that the balances held at intermediaries have been steadily increasing since 2014. By the end of 2020 it is equal to 5.5 million bitcoins, roughly one-third of Bitcoin in circulation. In contrast, individual investors collectively control 8.5 million bitcoins by the end of 2020. The individual holdings are still highly concentrated: the top 1000 investors control about 3 million BTC and the top 10,000 investors own around 5 million bitcoins.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nber.org&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;w29396&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nber.org&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;w29396&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[meta note: had to revise this post several times before posting to comply with HN guidelines.]</text></item><item><author>darawk</author><text>The only way you could possibly measure this is just to look at the distribution of coins among wallets. This is obviously going to count crypto exchanges as single entities, which is absurd.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d be like counting JPMorgan as a single person when computing wealth inequality in the US. Analyses like these are a total joke.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FabHK</author><text>You might well want to criticise the paper, but I think the video is a fair representation of the contents of the paper.&lt;p&gt;Regarding the number of holders, the paper says: &amp;quot;While the original database has 896 million addresses, after we remove addresses in peeling chains we end up with 640 million addresses. Theses addresses belong to 189 million clusters, of which 116 million clusters are single-address clusters.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Not sure where the number of 68 million wallets comes from. Taking 189m as the number of holders, we&amp;#x27;d have 0.005% of BTC holders holding 27% of all BTC. But even we take that 68m &amp;quot;wallet&amp;quot; number, and assume that each holder controlled multiple wallets, say 10 on average, we&amp;#x27;d have 6.8m holders, and then 0.15% of holders controlling about 27% of BTC. Still enormous concentration.&lt;p&gt;More from the paper: &amp;quot;It is also important to note that this measurement of concentration most likely is an understatement since we cannot rule out that some of the largest addresses are controlled by the same entity. In particular, in the above calculations, we do not assign the ownership of early bitcoins, which are held in about 20,000 addresses, to one person (Satoshi Nakamoto) but consider them as belonging to 20,000 different individuals.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting part of the paper: &amp;quot;To the best of our knowledge, we have the most complete information about crypto entities that have been used in academic research up to this point. Our data cover 1,043 different entities. These include 393 exchanges, 86 gambling sites, 39 on-line wallets, 33 payment processors, 63 mining pools, 35 scammers, 227 ransomware attackers, 151 dark net market places and illegal services.&amp;quot;</text></comment>

<story><title>.01% of Bitcoin holders hold 27% of all Bitcoin</title><url>https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1527661935054962688</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>darawk</author><text>This is theoretically a fair criticism. But note that the 27% vs 0.01% never appears in the NBER paper. Further note the extreme limitations of any clustering based analysis. And finally, note that they do not actually identify individuals, they identify clusters, and they also treat mining pools as individuals.&lt;p&gt;I see no support for the headline number in this paper. What it appears that the people making this video did was take &amp;quot;1000 individuals&amp;quot; (which the paper defines as &lt;i&gt;clusters&lt;/i&gt; of wallets) and divide by 68 million &lt;i&gt;wallets&lt;/i&gt; in existence. What you actually get here when you do this is 0.001% vs 16%, which is reasonably close to the figured cited in the video, so is likely essentialy the calculation they did.&lt;p&gt;It should be obvious how absurd this is.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Hah, actually the exact calculation they did is 10k&amp;#x2F;68mm and 5mm&amp;#x2F;18mm. That gives you exactly 0.01% and 27%. Discrepancy resolved. This is the exact ludicrious calculation the people in this video did.</text></item><item><author>FabHK</author><text>&amp;gt; The only way you could possibly measure this ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is obviously going to ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Analyses like these are a total joke.&lt;p&gt;Why is this obviously so? Watching the video, one realises that they refer to a WSJ article that is based on a 2021 NBER paper [1].&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the NBER, London School of Economics, and MIT harbour idiots that have not heard of exchanges?&lt;p&gt;On page 5 of the paper:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Determining the concentration of ownership is more complicated than just tracking the holdings of the richest addresses, since many of the largest addresses belong to cold wallets of exchanges and online wallets, which hold Bitcoin on behalf of many investors. We develop a suite of algorithms based on graph analysis to classify addresses into those belonging to individual investors or those belonging to intermediaries. [...]&lt;p&gt;We show that the balances held at intermediaries have been steadily increasing since 2014. By the end of 2020 it is equal to 5.5 million bitcoins, roughly one-third of Bitcoin in circulation. In contrast, individual investors collectively control 8.5 million bitcoins by the end of 2020. The individual holdings are still highly concentrated: the top 1000 investors control about 3 million BTC and the top 10,000 investors own around 5 million bitcoins.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nber.org&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;w29396&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nber.org&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;w29396&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[meta note: had to revise this post several times before posting to comply with HN guidelines.]</text></item><item><author>darawk</author><text>The only way you could possibly measure this is just to look at the distribution of coins among wallets. This is obviously going to count crypto exchanges as single entities, which is absurd.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d be like counting JPMorgan as a single person when computing wealth inequality in the US. Analyses like these are a total joke.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>v0idzer0</author><text>Yeah I mean the post is clickbait, but crypto (which can be bought with USD) unsurprisingly has similar inequality issues to USD. But the selling point of crypto was never curing inequality. It could have never done that. So the entire post is a bit of a straw man.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for..</title><url>http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Great article. Anyone who has worked for a large, established corporation knows from personal experience that internally they are a lot like the Soviet Union, with a hierarchical structure of bureaucrats and their apparatchiks making decisions for everyone at the company.&lt;p&gt;Despite having grown to around 400 employees, Valve is evidently not like that. The author, Yanis Varoufakis, makes a compelling case that future companies may look more like it than like the traditional hierarchical corporations of today.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;PS. As someone who regularly reads the author&apos;s economics blog at &lt;a href=&quot;http://yanisvaroufakis.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://yanisvaroufakis.eu&lt;/a&gt;, finding him on Valve&apos;s corporate blog was the source of quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. (&quot;What the...? Why is Varoufakis showing up on Valve&apos;s corporate blog?&quot; was my immediate thought.) I had to do multiple double-takes before it dawned on me that, yes, he somehow works at Valve!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ralfn</author><text>One has to wonder why &quot;large&quot; companies even exist in the first place. Why a building full of freelancers could not do the exact same thing.&lt;p&gt;And then it dawned on me: Valve is providing a &quot;firewall&quot; to unfair competition, financial insecurity, brand awereness, and legal risks. And then it just gets out of the way.&lt;p&gt;Maybe, the pure existence of large corporations, is a sign of capitalism failing. Being large should not give an advantage: yet it allows for a reportaire of anti-competitive behavior.&lt;p&gt;Maybe they should do a nation wide experiment, in smaller country: what happens if you take away the legal standing of all &quot;companies&quot; and &quot;employment&quot;. What if all economic relationships can only exist between individuals?&lt;p&gt;Im not suggesting its some kind of magic bullet, i just wonder how competitive it would be. Will such a system adapt (to changes in the market) and optimize (cutting out middlemans) more quickly? Will it be truly bottom-up?</text></comment>

<story><title>Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for..</title><url>http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>Great article. Anyone who has worked for a large, established corporation knows from personal experience that internally they are a lot like the Soviet Union, with a hierarchical structure of bureaucrats and their apparatchiks making decisions for everyone at the company.&lt;p&gt;Despite having grown to around 400 employees, Valve is evidently not like that. The author, Yanis Varoufakis, makes a compelling case that future companies may look more like it than like the traditional hierarchical corporations of today.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;PS. As someone who regularly reads the author&apos;s economics blog at &lt;a href=&quot;http://yanisvaroufakis.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://yanisvaroufakis.eu&lt;/a&gt;, finding him on Valve&apos;s corporate blog was the source of quite a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. (&quot;What the...? Why is Varoufakis showing up on Valve&apos;s corporate blog?&quot; was my immediate thought.) I had to do multiple double-takes before it dawned on me that, yes, he somehow works at Valve!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sophacles</author><text>Regarding your PS: Valve hired him as &quot;cheif economist&quot;. This article explains it all:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a-strange-email/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall an HN discussion about it, but am too lazy to track it down :).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in</title><url>https://rcoh.me/posts/thoughts-on-rust-a-few-thousand-lines-in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw0u1t</author><text>One thing I don&amp;#x27;t like about Rust is how taking a slice of a string can cause a runtime panic if the start or end of the slice ends up intersecting a multi-byte UTF-8 char.&lt;p&gt;I would prefer it if this feature didn&amp;#x27;t exist at all rather than cause runtime panics.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.rust-lang.org&amp;#x2F;?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624b9ec1&amp;amp;version=stable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.rust-lang.org&amp;#x2F;?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pornel</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not a problem in practice, because you&amp;#x27;d use something like `.char_indices()` iterator, or result from a substring search, etc. to get &lt;i&gt;correct&lt;/i&gt; offsets in the first place.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not useful to blindly read at random offsets in UTF-8 strings. If it didn&amp;#x27;t panic, you&amp;#x27;d get garbage. If offsets were automatically moved to skip over garbage, you wouldn&amp;#x27;t know what you&amp;#x27;re getting, and your overall algorithm would likely end up with nonsense (duplicated or skipped chars).&lt;p&gt;For algorithms that don&amp;#x27;t care about characters or UTF-8 validity, there&amp;#x27;s zero-cost `.as_bytes()`.</text></comment>

<story><title>Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in</title><url>https://rcoh.me/posts/thoughts-on-rust-a-few-thousand-lines-in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throw0u1t</author><text>One thing I don&amp;#x27;t like about Rust is how taking a slice of a string can cause a runtime panic if the start or end of the slice ends up intersecting a multi-byte UTF-8 char.&lt;p&gt;I would prefer it if this feature didn&amp;#x27;t exist at all rather than cause runtime panics.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.rust-lang.org&amp;#x2F;?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624b9ec1&amp;amp;version=stable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.rust-lang.org&amp;#x2F;?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamegoblin</author><text>It is a common pattern in Rust to use [] for things that cannot fail and will panic otherwise and a method for things that can fail and return Option or Result.&lt;p&gt;e.g. my_hashmap[&amp;quot;foo&amp;quot;] will panic at runtime if the key &amp;quot;foo&amp;quot; is not present, or return the associated value if it is. But my_hashmap.get(&amp;quot;foo&amp;quot;) will return None if &amp;quot;foo&amp;quot; is not present and Some(value) if it is.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Yet Another &quot;People Plug in Strange USB Sticks&quot; Story</title><url>http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/yet_another_peo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Sandman</author><text>So the point of this article is that it&apos;s not stupid to plug in random USB sticks you find on the street? That&apos;s what USB sticks are for? What if you found a big slice of your favorite type of cake on a park bench, would you eat it? You wouldn&apos;t? Why not, hell, &lt;i&gt;that&apos;s what cakes are for&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Picking up random USB sticks and sticking them into your computer is the equivalent of having sex with random people you meet on the street. The only thing you can hope for if you do that is that whatever you&apos;re having as protection is going to save you from catching something nasty. But by the time you find out if your protection actually protected you or not, it might already be too late.&lt;p&gt;I agree that it would be great if our systems could save us from anything and everything malware writers can come up with. But unfortunately, they can&apos;t, so our first line of defense should just be plain old common sense.</text></comment>

<story><title>Yet Another &quot;People Plug in Strange USB Sticks&quot; Story</title><url>http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/yet_another_peo.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jberryman</author><text>Schneier seems to be mostly imagining an attack in which a USB disk is loaded with some malware, but the USB stick could be just about anything:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hackaday.com/2010/10/29/tiny-usb-business-card/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://hackaday.com/2010/10/29/tiny-usb-business-card/&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)</title><url>https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>javajosh</author><text>So this is at least in part about the &amp;quot;Monty Hall Problem&amp;quot; and why it&amp;#x27;s solution not intuitive. The article missed an important angle: when the host opens a door, he&amp;#x27;s giving you &lt;i&gt;more information&lt;/i&gt;, which explains why it&amp;#x27;s better to switch. If you&amp;#x27;re the host, you need to know which door the car is behind to do your job 2&amp;#x2F;3 of the time, to avoid revealing it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s this quality of unexpected information exchange that I find most fascinating about this particular puzzle!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haberman</author><text>When you choose the first door, you are partitioning the &amp;quot;board&amp;quot; into two parts: the door you chose, and &amp;quot;everything else&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;By opening a door, Monty lets you cover 100% of the &amp;quot;everything else&amp;quot; partition using only one guess.&lt;p&gt;So now you get to choose between partition 1, which covers 1&amp;#x2F;3 of the board, and partition 2, which covers 2&amp;#x2F;3 of the board.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)</title><url>https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>javajosh</author><text>So this is at least in part about the &amp;quot;Monty Hall Problem&amp;quot; and why it&amp;#x27;s solution not intuitive. The article missed an important angle: when the host opens a door, he&amp;#x27;s giving you &lt;i&gt;more information&lt;/i&gt;, which explains why it&amp;#x27;s better to switch. If you&amp;#x27;re the host, you need to know which door the car is behind to do your job 2&amp;#x2F;3 of the time, to avoid revealing it.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s this quality of unexpected information exchange that I find most fascinating about this particular puzzle!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dllthomas</author><text>Interestingly, if the host picks randomly (and if he reveals the car, you... start over, or you get the car, or you get nothing, or ... it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter because it happens not to have happened in the time we&amp;#x27;re considering) then you are faced with a 50&amp;#x2F;50 chance.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/07/uber-vehicle-reportedly-saw-but-ignored-woman-it-struck/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ksenzee</author><text>My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they&amp;#x27;re not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling &amp;quot;HEY!!&amp;quot; If there were a communication mechanism for &amp;quot;excuse me, the light is green now&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;oops, so sorry, didn&amp;#x27;t see you there&amp;quot; driving would be easier and more pleasant.</text></item><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a very good argument but I don&amp;#x27;t think it will come to pass, for this reason: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;pl&amp;#x2F;minor_differences&amp;#x2F;cutting_off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;pl&amp;#x2F;minor_differences&amp;#x2F;cutting_off&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I&amp;#x27;ve observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they&amp;#x27;ll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they&amp;#x27;re doing.&lt;p&gt;I hope.</text></item><item><author>splouk</author><text>Or jaywalking will become more strictly enforced with policing or physical barriers.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&amp;#x2F;journal&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;4&amp;#x2F;2&amp;#x2F;automated-vehicles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&amp;#x2F;journal&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;4&amp;#x2F;2&amp;#x2F;automated-vehic...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>joncrane</author><text>&amp;gt; And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also possible that human&amp;#x2F;pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.</text></item><item><author>GenerocUsername</author><text>And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.&lt;p&gt;I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.</text></item><item><author>freditup</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious what degree of &amp;quot;cultural context&amp;quot; is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving.&lt;p&gt;For example, in NYC, there&amp;#x27;s nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause.&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t to defend Uber, clearly their car did do the wrong thing in the Tempe situation (though I make no judgment on who was at fault). And clearly cars need to be able to handle the variety of unwritten, localized driving quirks different regions have. But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhacker</author><text>I feel like in large cities the majority of drivers actually practice &amp;quot;mean&amp;quot; driving techniques - tailgating, lane protection (preventing people from merging-in when they have to), zoom-ups near contest areas, loud-music in communities, lane weaving.. I&amp;#x27;ve left the bay area a long time ago now, but it&amp;#x27;s amazing when you live outside of that a couple years how awful people are behind the wheel. I would call it passive-aggressive behavior and it is really really bad to ones mental health. Bay area, Denver, Portland, Seattle there&amp;#x27;s a few others out west here - but make no mistake, the actions people take while driving is 100% actual jerk, not mistaken jerk.</text></comment>

<story><title>Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/07/uber-vehicle-reportedly-saw-but-ignored-woman-it-struck/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ksenzee</author><text>My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they&amp;#x27;re not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling &amp;quot;HEY!!&amp;quot; If there were a communication mechanism for &amp;quot;excuse me, the light is green now&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;oops, so sorry, didn&amp;#x27;t see you there&amp;quot; driving would be easier and more pleasant.</text></item><item><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a very good argument but I don&amp;#x27;t think it will come to pass, for this reason: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;pl&amp;#x2F;minor_differences&amp;#x2F;cutting_off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;theoatmeal.com&amp;#x2F;pl&amp;#x2F;minor_differences&amp;#x2F;cutting_off&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I&amp;#x27;ve observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they&amp;#x27;ll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they&amp;#x27;re doing.&lt;p&gt;I hope.</text></item><item><author>splouk</author><text>Or jaywalking will become more strictly enforced with policing or physical barriers.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&amp;#x2F;journal&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;4&amp;#x2F;2&amp;#x2F;automated-vehicles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&amp;#x2F;journal&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;4&amp;#x2F;2&amp;#x2F;automated-vehic...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>joncrane</author><text>&amp;gt; And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also possible that human&amp;#x2F;pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.</text></item><item><author>GenerocUsername</author><text>And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.&lt;p&gt;I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.</text></item><item><author>freditup</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious what degree of &amp;quot;cultural context&amp;quot; is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving.&lt;p&gt;For example, in NYC, there&amp;#x27;s nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause.&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t to defend Uber, clearly their car did do the wrong thing in the Tempe situation (though I make no judgment on who was at fault). And clearly cars need to be able to handle the variety of unwritten, localized driving quirks different regions have. But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>panic</author><text>Exactly! Every communication you try to make in a car can be interpreted as aggressiveness, which escalates anger on both sides. You need a way to de-escalate.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Tell HN: Instagram&apos;s API has broken, support tickets ignored, status page green</title><text>Meta offers an OAuth based API for Instagram. Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product &amp;amp; daily operations.&lt;p&gt;Beginning Friday evening (US time), a critical endpoint in this API has broken. The endpoint creates long-lived access tokens, so it is in the critical path for almost any company using the API.&lt;p&gt;I find it disappointing that a leading technological company does not acknowledge a bug that&amp;#x27;s been reported to them several times more than 24 hours ago, even if to say that&amp;#x27;s it&amp;#x27;s being investigated.&lt;p&gt;The endpoint: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;instagram-basic-display-api&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;long-lived-access-tokens#get-a-long-lived-token&lt;p&gt;Currently the API returns a Bad Request with a wrong error message (the endpoint should support &amp;quot;GET&amp;quot;): ``` { &amp;quot;message&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Unsupported request - method type: get&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;type&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;IGApiException&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;code&amp;quot;: 100, &amp;quot;fbtrace_id&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;AuDYqK74IrT9Yt2Sx51UlP6&amp;quot; } ```&lt;p&gt;I have opened a bug report but received no response. Facebook&amp;#x27;s status page shows all green in the API section: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;metastatus.com&amp;#x2F; There are several Meta Developers Community threads with no response</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>i386</author><text>this is easy to say as a comment on HN but unavoidable to a large degree for businesses in the marketing and social media space.</text></item><item><author>nkozyra</author><text>&amp;gt; Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product &amp;amp; daily operations.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully not their entire product. The first rule is don&amp;#x27;t build your company on the back of another, but I think the most important part is that if you &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; use another company, make sure you&amp;#x27;re fine if they disappear one day.&lt;p&gt;The last time Facebook made major changes (ostensibly as a response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff, but that was just an excuse) a bunch of people got burned.&lt;p&gt;My company did too but we always kept ourselves in a place where if it vanished we&amp;#x27;d be - at worst - inconvenienced.&lt;p&gt;This approach came because early on I was burned by Twitter changes that were more impactful.&lt;p&gt;Most recent Twitter changes prove that even paying for access provides no guarantees.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dylan604</author><text>you play in the mud, you&amp;#x27;re going to get dirty. if your entire marketing company focuses on social, then why that doesn&amp;#x27;t fall into &amp;quot;all eggs, one basket&amp;quot; concept is beyond me. Sure, it&amp;#x27;s much easier to get a company rolling when you have to do nothing but use the product of someone else as the core of your business, but why that&amp;#x27;s not an immediate red flag to someone in that position is something i just don&amp;#x27;t understand.</text></comment>

<story><title>Tell HN: Instagram&apos;s API has broken, support tickets ignored, status page green</title><text>Meta offers an OAuth based API for Instagram. Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product &amp;amp; daily operations.&lt;p&gt;Beginning Friday evening (US time), a critical endpoint in this API has broken. The endpoint creates long-lived access tokens, so it is in the critical path for almost any company using the API.&lt;p&gt;I find it disappointing that a leading technological company does not acknowledge a bug that&amp;#x27;s been reported to them several times more than 24 hours ago, even if to say that&amp;#x27;s it&amp;#x27;s being investigated.&lt;p&gt;The endpoint: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.facebook.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;instagram-basic-display-api&amp;#x2F;guides&amp;#x2F;long-lived-access-tokens#get-a-long-lived-token&lt;p&gt;Currently the API returns a Bad Request with a wrong error message (the endpoint should support &amp;quot;GET&amp;quot;): ``` { &amp;quot;message&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Unsupported request - method type: get&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;type&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;IGApiException&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;code&amp;quot;: 100, &amp;quot;fbtrace_id&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;AuDYqK74IrT9Yt2Sx51UlP6&amp;quot; } ```&lt;p&gt;I have opened a bug report but received no response. Facebook&amp;#x27;s status page shows all green in the API section: https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;metastatus.com&amp;#x2F; There are several Meta Developers Community threads with no response</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>i386</author><text>this is easy to say as a comment on HN but unavoidable to a large degree for businesses in the marketing and social media space.</text></item><item><author>nkozyra</author><text>&amp;gt; Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product &amp;amp; daily operations.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully not their entire product. The first rule is don&amp;#x27;t build your company on the back of another, but I think the most important part is that if you &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; use another company, make sure you&amp;#x27;re fine if they disappear one day.&lt;p&gt;The last time Facebook made major changes (ostensibly as a response to the Cambridge Analytica stuff, but that was just an excuse) a bunch of people got burned.&lt;p&gt;My company did too but we always kept ourselves in a place where if it vanished we&amp;#x27;d be - at worst - inconvenienced.&lt;p&gt;This approach came because early on I was burned by Twitter changes that were more impactful.&lt;p&gt;Most recent Twitter changes prove that even paying for access provides no guarantees.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Waterluvian</author><text>Yeah, I don’t think it’s right to say “never try.” It’s more, “never lose sight at how brittle your business is. The other company owes you nothing if it’s not written in a contract. You aren’t a victim when it breaks your business.”</text></comment>

train

<story><title>The browser&apos;s biggest TLS mistake</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/browsers-biggest-tls-mistake</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coffee--</author><text>It was years in the making for Firefox to be able to do &amp;quot;intermediate preloading&amp;quot; - we [0] had to make the policy changes for all intermediates to be disclosed, and then let that take effect [1].&lt;p&gt;Preloading like this shouldn&amp;#x27;t be necessary, I agree with the author, but worse than this is any bug report of &amp;quot;Works in Chrome, not in Firefox.&amp;quot; Prior to this preloading behavior shipping in Firefox 75, incorrectly-configured certificate chains were a major source of those kind of bugs [2].&lt;p&gt;[0] This was me (:jcj) and Dana [1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;Security&amp;#x2F;CryptoEngineering&amp;#x2F;Intermediate_Preloading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;Security&amp;#x2F;CryptoEngineering&amp;#x2F;Intermed...&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;security&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;preloading-intermediate-ca-certificates-into-firefox&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&amp;#x2F;security&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;preloading-inte...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>The browser&apos;s biggest TLS mistake</title><url>https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/browsers-biggest-tls-mistake</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dochne</author><text>It still remains a mystery to me why browsers felt they should &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; this server misconfiguration.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s particularly vexing to me as the main reason that people end up with misconfigured servers at all is because after they&amp;#x27;ve configured their new cert (incorrectly) their web browser gives them a tick and they think they&amp;#x27;ve done it right - after all, why wouldn&amp;#x27;t they?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/business/tesla-autopilot-investigation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matt123456789</author><text>The question is, how much of that is Tesla’s fault? They’re an EV company, not a psychology consultancy. We don’t hold gun manufacturers or alcohol companies liable when people do stupid things with their products, despite the best efforts of their marketing divisions. Granted “pull trigger get bullet” is much simpler than the Autopilot response.</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>I suspect humans are really bad when they only have to sorta pay attention and it results in just not paying attention a great deal of the time.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure that&amp;#x27;s fixable on the human end.</text></item><item><author>yawaworht1978</author><text>The absolving argument that it&amp;#x27;s still the drivers responsibility to intervene has flown out of the window with this request. The federal safety agency is not having any of that excuse anymore.&lt;p&gt;They might find that Tesla did no wrong here, further enabling Tesla to get away with this. But this looks a lot like they want to regulate the feature a bit more. If self regulation via companies and humans does not work, the government will step in.&lt;p&gt;Curious to see the outcome, they haven&amp;#x27;t ordered the immediate disablement of the feature, they might have a neutral view.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SerLava</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;doing a stupid thing&amp;quot; though&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally any life form has a slower reaction when they have to notice an issue and start to take motor control. Versus already being in control and simply not causing the issue.&lt;p&gt;They are not just &amp;quot;an EV company&amp;quot; they are making a guidance system for thousands of high speed metal death machines. They BETTER consult some psychologists. This is a really bizarre thing to say.</text></comment>

<story><title>Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/business/tesla-autopilot-investigation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matt123456789</author><text>The question is, how much of that is Tesla’s fault? They’re an EV company, not a psychology consultancy. We don’t hold gun manufacturers or alcohol companies liable when people do stupid things with their products, despite the best efforts of their marketing divisions. Granted “pull trigger get bullet” is much simpler than the Autopilot response.</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>I suspect humans are really bad when they only have to sorta pay attention and it results in just not paying attention a great deal of the time.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure that&amp;#x27;s fixable on the human end.</text></item><item><author>yawaworht1978</author><text>The absolving argument that it&amp;#x27;s still the drivers responsibility to intervene has flown out of the window with this request. The federal safety agency is not having any of that excuse anymore.&lt;p&gt;They might find that Tesla did no wrong here, further enabling Tesla to get away with this. But this looks a lot like they want to regulate the feature a bit more. If self regulation via companies and humans does not work, the government will step in.&lt;p&gt;Curious to see the outcome, they haven&amp;#x27;t ordered the immediate disablement of the feature, they might have a neutral view.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>We ask airplane makers to make adjustments to better indicate problems &amp;#x2F; auto pilot status when humans don&amp;#x27;t do the right thing all the time. And that&amp;#x27;s for professionals who get tons of training.&lt;p&gt;We have all sorts of car &amp;#x2F; road safety features because humans are bad at driving.&lt;p&gt;We can&amp;#x27;t reprogram the humans, can change the environment they operate in.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>An exploratory statistical analysis of the 2014 World Cup Final</title><url>https://beta.deepnote.com/article/statistical-analysis-of-2014-world-cup-final</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rjtavares</author><text>Ok, so something I wrote years ago hit the HN front page. This is what it feels, uh?&lt;p&gt;I also have a github with more notebooks about football here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;rjtavares&amp;#x2F;football-crunching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;rjtavares&amp;#x2F;football-crunching&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you gave any questions about football analytics, hit me up.&lt;p&gt;(Gmail and Twitter are the same name as my HN account, if you prefer email or DM)</text></comment>

<story><title>An exploratory statistical analysis of the 2014 World Cup Final</title><url>https://beta.deepnote.com/article/statistical-analysis-of-2014-world-cup-final</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LanceH</author><text>Germany 2014 was about the best I&amp;#x27;ve seen the game played.&lt;p&gt;Something I watch that seems to differentiate players and teams at every level is what happens on the first touch when receiving a pass. When you first start watching this, you&amp;#x27;ll notice that as you move up the ranks, the ball just sticks to a pro&amp;#x27;s feet, preferably in front of them a couple feet away where they are ready to play it again. Watching Germany that year, their first touch was not merely excellent, but aggressively so. They took the ball and instead of settling it, turned it into a rolling ball in the direction they wanted to play. Or a first touch pass. Speaking in wild generalities here and I don&amp;#x27;t have numbers to back it up.&lt;p&gt;Statistically I would guess that their second touch was on average farther away from them than other teams of comparable level, while still being under control.&lt;p&gt;It reminded me of Tiger Woods when he burst onto the scene. He played the game far more aggressively and relied on his skills to keep him safe rather than traditional shot selection. Germany 2014 decided these slightly riskier touches are consistently possible in the long run and the benefit outweighs the risk.&lt;p&gt;It also seemed that with the aggressive play, there is just &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; football played -- more chances. The more chances that are generated, the more it favors the better team.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve be a pretty avid reader of the Economist for a number of years. It doesn&amp;#x27;t align exactly with my political values but I&amp;#x27;ve always found the writing to be of high quality, even if I don&amp;#x27;t agree with their opinions per-se. I feel like it has a good selection of articles on local and geo-politics, culture, technology, and of course finance&amp;#x2F;economics. In the last year, I&amp;#x27;ve found the quality of it to have plummeted. I&amp;#x27;m not sure whether it&amp;#x27;s a changing of the guard and the new generation of journalists doesn&amp;#x27;t mesh with my sensibilities anymore, or perhaps my radar for spotting narrative manipulation and tabloid click-bait has grown more pronounced with all the journalistic malpractice in recent years. Either way, I&amp;#x27;ve not found myself enjoying it as much as I used.&lt;p&gt;As such, I&amp;#x27;m debating on an alternative that fills the niche it has beside my morning coffee. My question to you all is, does anyone have favorite of theirs that is comparable in quality, breadth, and is available in print not just digital? Preferably something with a UK&amp;#x2F;Euro&amp;#x2F;Global focus, not just US. Anything that keeps me relatively well informed, while sparking some intellectual curiosity, and teaching me something I didn&amp;#x27;t already know.&lt;p&gt;So far the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the Jacobin, le Monde Diplomatique, and the New Statesman are all in the running, so I&amp;#x27;d like opinions from readers of those and how it compares. Tech-first magazines are also interesting to me, but I&amp;#x27;d like at least some political news scattered within if possible.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it&amp;#x27;s declined in quality.&lt;p&gt;And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don&amp;#x27;t see it at all.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it&amp;#x27;s always been. Sometimes I think the way it characterizes something is missing part of the full picture, but it&amp;#x27;s always been that way. Journalists are fallible humans, they aren&amp;#x27;t gods, and it&amp;#x27;s not like there was some mythical past where they always got things right.&lt;p&gt;I can totally understand people not enjoying it as much as they grow older, simply because you come to mistrust journalism more in general, or shift in your ideological viewpoint so it becomes less agreeable. Readers change.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;m getting tired of this trope that it&amp;#x27;s the Economist that&amp;#x27;s been changing, that&amp;#x27;s been getting worse. It just doesn&amp;#x27;t make any sense. It&amp;#x27;s the same journalism it&amp;#x27;s always been. For every article you take issue with, I&amp;#x27;m sure you&amp;#x27;d find just as many from 20 or 30 years ago.&lt;p&gt;I suppose it&amp;#x27;s just part of a general narrative of declinism, how everything used to be so much better and the world is crumbling. But in this case, I just don&amp;#x27;t see it. You might not like the magazine anymore and that&amp;#x27;s fine, but I think there&amp;#x27;s a good chance it&amp;#x27;s you who has changed, not the magazine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidhyde</author><text>I agree that The Economist has not been declining. I believe that what is really happening is that, at some point, a reader will eventually come across an article where they are particularly knowledgable about the subject matter. To their horror, they proceed to read an article that is “fraudulent by omission”. The cherry picked facts (which are correct) are chosen to fit a narrative. Every article read after this is mired by scepticism and therefor the perceived decline of the publication. This is what happened to me back in 2015 and try as I might, I just couldn’t get back into reading that magazine. I really miss those ignorant days of blissful intellectual smugness though.&lt;p&gt;It’s like watching a movie where you only ever see the good side of the hero. Viewers do not want you to change their mind half way through or cause them to be confused by the muddy reality of things.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve be a pretty avid reader of the Economist for a number of years. It doesn&amp;#x27;t align exactly with my political values but I&amp;#x27;ve always found the writing to be of high quality, even if I don&amp;#x27;t agree with their opinions per-se. I feel like it has a good selection of articles on local and geo-politics, culture, technology, and of course finance&amp;#x2F;economics. In the last year, I&amp;#x27;ve found the quality of it to have plummeted. I&amp;#x27;m not sure whether it&amp;#x27;s a changing of the guard and the new generation of journalists doesn&amp;#x27;t mesh with my sensibilities anymore, or perhaps my radar for spotting narrative manipulation and tabloid click-bait has grown more pronounced with all the journalistic malpractice in recent years. Either way, I&amp;#x27;ve not found myself enjoying it as much as I used.&lt;p&gt;As such, I&amp;#x27;m debating on an alternative that fills the niche it has beside my morning coffee. My question to you all is, does anyone have favorite of theirs that is comparable in quality, breadth, and is available in print not just digital? Preferably something with a UK&amp;#x2F;Euro&amp;#x2F;Global focus, not just US. Anything that keeps me relatively well informed, while sparking some intellectual curiosity, and teaching me something I didn&amp;#x27;t already know.&lt;p&gt;So far the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the Jacobin, le Monde Diplomatique, and the New Statesman are all in the running, so I&amp;#x27;d like opinions from readers of those and how it compares. Tech-first magazines are also interesting to me, but I&amp;#x27;d like at least some political news scattered within if possible.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it&amp;#x27;s declined in quality.&lt;p&gt;And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don&amp;#x27;t see it at all.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it&amp;#x27;s always been. Sometimes I think the way it characterizes something is missing part of the full picture, but it&amp;#x27;s always been that way. Journalists are fallible humans, they aren&amp;#x27;t gods, and it&amp;#x27;s not like there was some mythical past where they always got things right.&lt;p&gt;I can totally understand people not enjoying it as much as they grow older, simply because you come to mistrust journalism more in general, or shift in your ideological viewpoint so it becomes less agreeable. Readers change.&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;m getting tired of this trope that it&amp;#x27;s the Economist that&amp;#x27;s been changing, that&amp;#x27;s been getting worse. It just doesn&amp;#x27;t make any sense. It&amp;#x27;s the same journalism it&amp;#x27;s always been. For every article you take issue with, I&amp;#x27;m sure you&amp;#x27;d find just as many from 20 or 30 years ago.&lt;p&gt;I suppose it&amp;#x27;s just part of a general narrative of declinism, how everything used to be so much better and the world is crumbling. But in this case, I just don&amp;#x27;t see it. You might not like the magazine anymore and that&amp;#x27;s fine, but I think there&amp;#x27;s a good chance it&amp;#x27;s you who has changed, not the magazine.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwr</author><text>Same here — I don&amp;#x27;t see a decline in quality of the articles. I am annoyed (and refuse to use) their new phone app, which runs animated ads in articles, so that part is going downhill like everything else in the ad world. But the journalism seems to be good.&lt;p&gt;I carefully read articles about my country to check for inaccuracies, and sometimes ask people from other countries about other articles. The result of these checks is always the same: the journalism is solid, facts are presented well, the articles are always slightly condescending and overuse the word &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;. If the &amp;quot;shouldism&amp;quot; annoys you, you can always easily skip these parts.&lt;p&gt;I continue to subscribe, because it&amp;#x27;s pretty much the only thing out there.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Study shows &apos;alarming&apos; level of trust in AI for life and death decisions</title><url>https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/study-shows-alarming-level-of-trust-in-ai-for-life-and-death-decisions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>batch12</author><text>&amp;gt;For that first part, though, what does that even mean? The military isn&amp;#x27;t gamifying things and giving folks freaking XBox achievements for racking up killstreaks or anything. It&amp;#x27;s just the same game people have been playing since putting an atlatl on a spear, a scope on a rifle, or a black powder cannon on a battlefield. How to attack the enemy without being at risk. Is it unethical for a general officer to be sitting in an operations center directing the fight by looking at real-time displays? Is that a &amp;quot;video game?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not the same thing. Not even close. Killing people is horrible enough. Sitting in a trailer, clicking a button and killing someone from behind a screen without any of the risk involved is cowardly and shitty. There is no justification you can provide that will change my mind. Before you disregard my ability to understand the situation, I say this as a combat veteran.</text></item><item><author>psunavy03</author><text>&amp;gt; Granted, the idea of someone playing video games to kill real people makes me angry and decision making around drone strikes is already questionable.&lt;p&gt;For that first part, though, what does that even mean? The military isn&amp;#x27;t gamifying things and giving folks freaking XBox achievements for racking up killstreaks or anything. It&amp;#x27;s just the same game people have been playing since putting an atlatl on a spear, a scope on a rifle, or a black powder cannon on a battlefield. How to attack the enemy without being at risk. Is it unethical for a general officer to be sitting in an operations center directing the fight by looking at real-time displays? Is that a &amp;quot;video game?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The drone strikes in the Global War on Terror were a direct product of political pressure to &amp;quot;do something, anything&amp;quot; to stop another September 11th attack while simultaneously freaking out about a so-called &amp;quot;quagmire&amp;quot; any time someone mentioned &amp;quot;boots on ground.&amp;quot; Well, guess what? If you don&amp;#x27;t want SOF assaulters doing raids to capture people, if you don&amp;#x27;t want traditional military formations holding ground, and you don&amp;#x27;t want people trying to collect intelligence by actually going to these places, about the only option you have left is to fly a drone around and try to identify the terrorist and then go whack him when he goes out to take a leak. Or do nothing and hope you don&amp;#x27;t get hit again.</text></item><item><author>batch12</author><text>So the study[0] involved people making simulated drone strike decisions. These people were not qualified to make these decisions for real and also knew the associated outcomes were also not real. This sounds like a flawed study to me.&lt;p&gt;Granted, the idea of someone playing video games to kill real people makes me angry and decision making around drone strikes is already questionable.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Our pre-registered target sample size was 100 undergraduates recruited in exchange for course credit. However, due to software development delays in preparation for a separate study, we had the opportunity to collect a raw sample of 145 participants. Data were prescreened for technical problems occurring in ten of the study sessions (e.g., the robot or video projection failing), yielding a final sample of 135 participants (78.5% female, Mage = 21.33 years, SD = 4.08).&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41598-024-69771-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41598-024-69771-z&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>t-3</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; &amp;gt;&amp;gt; For that first part, though, what does that even mean? The military isn&amp;#x27;t gamifying things and giving folks freaking XBox achievements for racking up killstreaks or anything. It&amp;#x27;s just the same game people have been playing since putting an atlatl on a spear, a scope on a rifle, or a black powder cannon on a battlefield. How to attack the enemy without being at risk. Is it unethical for a general officer to be sitting in an operations center directing the fight by looking at real-time displays? Is that a &amp;quot;video game?&amp;quot; &amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s not the same thing. Not even close. Killing people is horrible enough. Sitting in a trailer, clicking a button and killing someone from behind a screen without any of the risk involved is cowardly and shitty. There is no justification you can provide that will change my mind. Before you disregard my ability to understand the situation, I say this as a combat veteran. &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Respectfully, whether or not an action is cowardly is not a factor that should ever be considered when making military decisions (or any other serious decision). With that being said, my uncle was a military drone pilot in the 80s-90s and he said it&amp;#x27;s pretty much exactly like a video game, and doing well does give achievements in the form of commendations and promotions.</text></comment>

<story><title>Study shows &apos;alarming&apos; level of trust in AI for life and death decisions</title><url>https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/study-shows-alarming-level-of-trust-in-ai-for-life-and-death-decisions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>batch12</author><text>&amp;gt;For that first part, though, what does that even mean? The military isn&amp;#x27;t gamifying things and giving folks freaking XBox achievements for racking up killstreaks or anything. It&amp;#x27;s just the same game people have been playing since putting an atlatl on a spear, a scope on a rifle, or a black powder cannon on a battlefield. How to attack the enemy without being at risk. Is it unethical for a general officer to be sitting in an operations center directing the fight by looking at real-time displays? Is that a &amp;quot;video game?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not the same thing. Not even close. Killing people is horrible enough. Sitting in a trailer, clicking a button and killing someone from behind a screen without any of the risk involved is cowardly and shitty. There is no justification you can provide that will change my mind. Before you disregard my ability to understand the situation, I say this as a combat veteran.</text></item><item><author>psunavy03</author><text>&amp;gt; Granted, the idea of someone playing video games to kill real people makes me angry and decision making around drone strikes is already questionable.&lt;p&gt;For that first part, though, what does that even mean? The military isn&amp;#x27;t gamifying things and giving folks freaking XBox achievements for racking up killstreaks or anything. It&amp;#x27;s just the same game people have been playing since putting an atlatl on a spear, a scope on a rifle, or a black powder cannon on a battlefield. How to attack the enemy without being at risk. Is it unethical for a general officer to be sitting in an operations center directing the fight by looking at real-time displays? Is that a &amp;quot;video game?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The drone strikes in the Global War on Terror were a direct product of political pressure to &amp;quot;do something, anything&amp;quot; to stop another September 11th attack while simultaneously freaking out about a so-called &amp;quot;quagmire&amp;quot; any time someone mentioned &amp;quot;boots on ground.&amp;quot; Well, guess what? If you don&amp;#x27;t want SOF assaulters doing raids to capture people, if you don&amp;#x27;t want traditional military formations holding ground, and you don&amp;#x27;t want people trying to collect intelligence by actually going to these places, about the only option you have left is to fly a drone around and try to identify the terrorist and then go whack him when he goes out to take a leak. Or do nothing and hope you don&amp;#x27;t get hit again.</text></item><item><author>batch12</author><text>So the study[0] involved people making simulated drone strike decisions. These people were not qualified to make these decisions for real and also knew the associated outcomes were also not real. This sounds like a flawed study to me.&lt;p&gt;Granted, the idea of someone playing video games to kill real people makes me angry and decision making around drone strikes is already questionable.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Our pre-registered target sample size was 100 undergraduates recruited in exchange for course credit. However, due to software development delays in preparation for a separate study, we had the opportunity to collect a raw sample of 145 participants. Data were prescreened for technical problems occurring in ten of the study sessions (e.g., the robot or video projection failing), yielding a final sample of 135 participants (78.5% female, Mage = 21.33 years, SD = 4.08).&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41598-024-69771-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41598-024-69771-z&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure how this is different to conventional air support or artillery in an asymmetric conflict. A-10 and F-16 pilots weren&amp;#x27;t seriously worried about being shot down in Afghanistan, but I know plenty of infantrymen who have nothing but gratitude for the pilot who got them out of a tight spot. Do those pilots become more moral if your enemy has decent anti-air capability?</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)</title><url>http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>d--b</author><text>I often find myself slacking when I have to write code I am ashamed of.&lt;p&gt;Writing new stuff from scratch is fun, I have zero problem being motivated to code things that are hard or challenging. And I can keep focusing for a long time.&lt;p&gt;However, if my task is to shoehorn some code that I know to be crap into my project for x or y reason, oh boy, then I can drag my feet for a looooooooong time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>btilly</author><text>Having to wade through code I hate has the same effect on me. Doubly so if I have to test it in an environment I hate. Triply so if I am trying to accomplish a goal I don&amp;#x27;t care about.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s one of the reasons why I don&amp;#x27;t like working on UIs. The code tends to be messy. I often have to test in environments like IE for Windows. And I don&amp;#x27;t actually care about how things work as long as they work.</text></comment>

<story><title>Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls (2013)</title><url>http://bookofhook.blogspot.com/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>d--b</author><text>I often find myself slacking when I have to write code I am ashamed of.&lt;p&gt;Writing new stuff from scratch is fun, I have zero problem being motivated to code things that are hard or challenging. And I can keep focusing for a long time.&lt;p&gt;However, if my task is to shoehorn some code that I know to be crap into my project for x or y reason, oh boy, then I can drag my feet for a looooooooong time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iamcasen</author><text>This. 100%! I find whenever I have a career crisis, or lack of motivation, it is because of this right here.&lt;p&gt;So much code no matter where you go will be something like this. You&amp;#x27;ll have to make something work even though all the code surrounding your feature is a dumpster fire that is so hard to predict, that you&amp;#x27;ll pull your hair our worrying about all the ways your feature will break.&lt;p&gt;When I get to build a new system from scratch? It&amp;#x27;s a breeze! I get thousands of times the amount of work done in the same amount of time.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>The Future of the Web Is on the Edge</title><url>https://deno.com/blog/the-future-of-web-is-on-the-edge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisl9029</author><text>The architecture I eventually ended up with for my product (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reflame.app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reflame.app&lt;/a&gt;) involves:&lt;p&gt;1. A strongly consistent globally replicated DB for most data that needs fast reads (&amp;lt;100ms) but not necessarily fast writes (&amp;gt;200ms). I&amp;#x27;ve been using Fauna, but there are other options too such as CockroachDB and Spanner, and more in the works.&lt;p&gt;2. An eventually consistent globally replicated DB for the subset of data that does also need fast writes. I eventually settled on Dynamo for this, but there are even more options here.&lt;p&gt;I think for all but the most latency-sensitive products, 1. will be all they need. IMHO the strongly consistently replicated database is a strictly superior product compared to databases that are single-region by default and only support replication through read-replicas.&lt;p&gt;In a read-replica system, we have to account for stale reads due to replication delays, and redirect writes to the primary, resulting in inconsistent latencies across regions. This is an extremely expensive complexity tax that will significantly increase the cognitive load on every engineer, lead to a ton of bugs around stale reads, and cause edge case handling code to seep into every corner of our codebase.&lt;p&gt;Strongly consistently replicated databases on the other hand, offer the exact same mental model as a database that lives in a single region with a single source of truth, while offering consistent, fast, up-to-date reads everywhere, at the cost of consistently slower writes everywhere. I actually consider the consistently slower writes also a benefit since it doesn&amp;#x27;t allow us to fool ourselves into thinking our app is fast for everybody, when it&amp;#x27;s only fast for us because we placed the primary db right next to us, and forces us to actually solve for the higher write latency using other technologies if our use case truly requires it (see 2.).&lt;p&gt;In the super long term, I don&amp;#x27;t think the future is on what&amp;#x27;s currently referred to as &amp;quot;the edge&amp;quot;, as this &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t extend nearly far enough. The true edge is client devices: reading from and writing to client devices is the only way to truly eliminate speed-of-light induced latency.&lt;p&gt;For a long time, most truly client-first apps have been relegated to single-user experiences due to how most popular client-first architectures have not had an answer for collaboration and authorization, but with this new wave of client-first architectures solving for collaboration and authorization with client-side reads and optimistic client-side writes with server-side validation (see Replicache), I&amp;#x27;ve never been more optimistic about the future (an open source alternative to Replicache would do wonders to accelerate us to this future. clientdb looks promising).</text></item><item><author>jensneuse</author><text>Instead of &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot;, a lot of websites should just have 3 locations (us,eu,apac) with a non geo replicated Serverless database in each region. At least that&amp;#x27;s what we&amp;#x27;re building at WunderGraph (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wundergraph.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wundergraph.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;). Edge sounds super cool, but if you take state and consistency into consideration, you just can&amp;#x27;t have servers across the globe that also replicate their state consistently with low latency. TTFB doesn&amp;#x27;t matter as much as correctness. And if stale content is acceptable, then we can also just push it to a CDN. Most importantly, you&amp;#x27;d want to have low latency between server and storage. So if your servers are on the &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot;, they are close to the user, but (randomly) further away from the database. Durable objcets might solve this, but they are nowhere near a postgres database. I think the &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot; is good for some stateless use cases, like validating auth and inputs, etc., but it won&amp;#x27;t make &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; services, even serverless in &amp;quot;non-edge&amp;quot; Locations obsolete. You can see this on Vercel. Serverless for functions, server side rendering, etc. and cloudflare workers for edge middleware. But they explicitly say that your serverless functions should be close to a database if you&amp;#x27;re using one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ihattendorf</author><text>FYI your light&amp;#x2F;dark mode icon is off-center for me. Fedora 36&amp;#x2F;Firefox.&lt;p&gt;Also at some window heights, the &amp;quot;Deployed with Reflame in x ms&amp;quot; box obscures the &amp;quot;Have questions? Let&amp;#x27;s chat!&amp;quot; text without generating a scrollbar.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Future of the Web Is on the Edge</title><url>https://deno.com/blog/the-future-of-web-is-on-the-edge</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lewisl9029</author><text>The architecture I eventually ended up with for my product (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reflame.app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reflame.app&lt;/a&gt;) involves:&lt;p&gt;1. A strongly consistent globally replicated DB for most data that needs fast reads (&amp;lt;100ms) but not necessarily fast writes (&amp;gt;200ms). I&amp;#x27;ve been using Fauna, but there are other options too such as CockroachDB and Spanner, and more in the works.&lt;p&gt;2. An eventually consistent globally replicated DB for the subset of data that does also need fast writes. I eventually settled on Dynamo for this, but there are even more options here.&lt;p&gt;I think for all but the most latency-sensitive products, 1. will be all they need. IMHO the strongly consistently replicated database is a strictly superior product compared to databases that are single-region by default and only support replication through read-replicas.&lt;p&gt;In a read-replica system, we have to account for stale reads due to replication delays, and redirect writes to the primary, resulting in inconsistent latencies across regions. This is an extremely expensive complexity tax that will significantly increase the cognitive load on every engineer, lead to a ton of bugs around stale reads, and cause edge case handling code to seep into every corner of our codebase.&lt;p&gt;Strongly consistently replicated databases on the other hand, offer the exact same mental model as a database that lives in a single region with a single source of truth, while offering consistent, fast, up-to-date reads everywhere, at the cost of consistently slower writes everywhere. I actually consider the consistently slower writes also a benefit since it doesn&amp;#x27;t allow us to fool ourselves into thinking our app is fast for everybody, when it&amp;#x27;s only fast for us because we placed the primary db right next to us, and forces us to actually solve for the higher write latency using other technologies if our use case truly requires it (see 2.).&lt;p&gt;In the super long term, I don&amp;#x27;t think the future is on what&amp;#x27;s currently referred to as &amp;quot;the edge&amp;quot;, as this &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t extend nearly far enough. The true edge is client devices: reading from and writing to client devices is the only way to truly eliminate speed-of-light induced latency.&lt;p&gt;For a long time, most truly client-first apps have been relegated to single-user experiences due to how most popular client-first architectures have not had an answer for collaboration and authorization, but with this new wave of client-first architectures solving for collaboration and authorization with client-side reads and optimistic client-side writes with server-side validation (see Replicache), I&amp;#x27;ve never been more optimistic about the future (an open source alternative to Replicache would do wonders to accelerate us to this future. clientdb looks promising).</text></item><item><author>jensneuse</author><text>Instead of &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot;, a lot of websites should just have 3 locations (us,eu,apac) with a non geo replicated Serverless database in each region. At least that&amp;#x27;s what we&amp;#x27;re building at WunderGraph (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wundergraph.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wundergraph.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;). Edge sounds super cool, but if you take state and consistency into consideration, you just can&amp;#x27;t have servers across the globe that also replicate their state consistently with low latency. TTFB doesn&amp;#x27;t matter as much as correctness. And if stale content is acceptable, then we can also just push it to a CDN. Most importantly, you&amp;#x27;d want to have low latency between server and storage. So if your servers are on the &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot;, they are close to the user, but (randomly) further away from the database. Durable objcets might solve this, but they are nowhere near a postgres database. I think the &amp;quot;edge&amp;quot; is good for some stateless use cases, like validating auth and inputs, etc., but it won&amp;#x27;t make &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot; services, even serverless in &amp;quot;non-edge&amp;quot; Locations obsolete. You can see this on Vercel. Serverless for functions, server side rendering, etc. and cloudflare workers for edge middleware. But they explicitly say that your serverless functions should be close to a database if you&amp;#x27;re using one.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anonymousDan</author><text>Good post. Do you have any resources describing the &amp;#x27;new wave of client-first architectures&amp;#x27; you mention? I&amp;#x27;m struggling to understand how you can do client-side authorization securely.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986</title><url>https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-set-outsell-cds-first-time-since-1986-2545781</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzs</author><text>Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid &amp;#x27;80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986.&lt;p&gt;It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.&lt;p&gt;In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.&lt;p&gt;It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today&amp;#x27;s prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.&lt;p&gt;Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.&lt;p&gt;The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elpj.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elpj.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cosmotic</author><text>If only there were a durable music format that had absolute perfect quality, didn&amp;#x27;t need special handling, no DRM, no compression artifacts, was stereo, and handled frequencies all the way down and all the way up to where humans can hear. Oh, the CD!</text></comment>

<story><title>Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986</title><url>https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-set-outsell-cds-first-time-since-1986-2545781</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tzs</author><text>Is anyone working on a reasonably priced turntable to play vinyl discs without degrading them? In the mid &amp;#x27;80s, Finial Technology announced such a turntable, and had a working unit at CES in 1986.&lt;p&gt;It had a stylus that contained laser interferometers that could very accurately and precisely measure the distance from the stylus to the grove walls. It kept the stylus near, but &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; touching, the groove, getting the audio signals from the variations in the distance to the groove.&lt;p&gt;In addition to not causing any wear, I remember reading an article back then in one of the audiophile magazines that said it also made records that had already been played many times on regular turntables and were degraded sound new, because the Finial could use a part of the groove farther down than had been used by the regular stylus, and so was not worn.&lt;p&gt;It was going to be pretty expensive, around $8000 at today&amp;#x27;s prices, so was probably only going to be affordable to radio stations, archivists, and high end audiophiles. Then they got hit with the double whammy of a major recession and the rapid replacement of a large chunk of the vinyl market by CDs.&lt;p&gt;Finial was liquidated in 1989, and their patents ended up at a Japanese company. Development continued in Japan, and eventually resulted in a product [1]. They seem to be around $15000.&lt;p&gt;The Library of Congress and a couple of other places have a system that can recover the sound for vinyl records and old wax cylinders what works by photographing the grove through a confocal microscope. The thousands of photographs are then analyzed to figure out the audio signal. This is still research level stuff, I believe, not aimed toward producing a commercial product, and so would be even farther out of reach for consumers than the laser interferometer turntables are.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elpj.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elpj.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KiSM</author><text>The ELP Japan has some pretty back drawbacks other than price...&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t work with coloured vinyl and it&amp;#x27;s worse than regular turntables when it comes to dust since it just reads it instead of potentially moving it away&lt;p&gt;There are some videos about it on YouTube and it looks like you have to meticulously clean your vinyl before playing it.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-environment-pediatrics-idUSKBN1762ZK</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdog</author><text>Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren&amp;#x27;t great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.</text></item><item><author>xroche</author><text>Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year (&lt;i&gt;), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study)&lt;p&gt;To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. But this is the least deadly energy, even safer than wind or solar power (&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;p&gt;(&lt;i&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;environment&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;jun&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;european-coal-pollution-premature-deaths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;environment&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;jun&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;european...&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;/i&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nextbigfuture.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;update-of-death-per-terawatt-hour-by.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nextbigfuture.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;update-of-death-per-ter...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mpweiher</author><text>Dunno. The &lt;i&gt;Tsunami&lt;/i&gt; killed upwards of 15000 people. I don&amp;#x27;t have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you.&lt;p&gt;One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged&amp;#x2F;destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards).&lt;p&gt;Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima.&lt;p&gt;Odd. That.</text></comment>

<story><title>Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-environment-pediatrics-idUSKBN1762ZK</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pdog</author><text>Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren&amp;#x27;t great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.</text></item><item><author>xroche</author><text>Closing nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal power plants is simply criminal. In Europe, coal pollution kills ~20,000 people each year (&lt;i&gt;), nuclear never killed a single person, and no study could ever provide any mortality increase due to nuclear energy (outside the Tchernobyl accident, which killed between 200 and 4000 people depending on estimations, after 20 years of study)&lt;p&gt;To be clear: nuclear is not the perfect solution, is not a renewable energy, and will have to be replaced by something else in the future. But this is the least deadly energy, even safer than wind or solar power (&lt;/i&gt;)&lt;p&gt;(&lt;i&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;environment&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;jun&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;european-coal-pollution-premature-deaths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;environment&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;jun&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;european...&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;/i&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nextbigfuture.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;update-of-death-per-terawatt-hour-by.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nextbigfuture.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;update-of-death-per-ter...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bpodgursky</author><text>Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60&amp;#x27;s technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980&amp;#x27;s and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dangling by a Trivial Feature</title><url>http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fatbird</author><text>Any implementation must accept that you will lose users this way. You can&apos;t implement every &apos;trivial&apos; feature possible in order to avoid shedding users; implementing one way precludes a different way that also sheds users. Overall, you try to maximize the number of users that you don&apos;t shed, but that&apos;s it. And in fact, you&apos;re frequently better off shedding users willy-nilly, iteratively finding what the core features are that build a userbase, and forgetting about all the rest.&lt;p&gt;This post is a prescription for paralytic featur-itis.</text></comment>

<story><title>Dangling by a Trivial Feature</title><url>http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jthurman</author><text>As someone who sells software online, the most horrifying thing about this scenario is that the user is very unlikely to ever tell me why they moved on, and so I&apos;m terrifyingly unlikely to ever know that this trivial feature is missing.&lt;p&gt;This literally keeps me awake at night.&lt;p&gt;Statistic: it takes roughly 200 non-converting free trial downloads of my software to get one data point of feedback telling me why they decided not to buy.</text></comment>

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<story><title>We need to make adulthood more desirable</title><url>https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/sunday-firesides-we-need-to-make-adulthood-more-desirable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clarkdale</author><text>Another difference is between suburbian adult lives and high-desity city adult lives. Compare an adult life in NYC or Chicago (or many European cities) and those people have easier access to visit with friends, stay out after work, see exhibits, try new restaurants. Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home.&lt;p&gt;Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults.&lt;p&gt;I wish this article was longer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>galfarragem</author><text>&amp;gt; I wish this article was longer&lt;p&gt;I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this &amp;quot;elephant in the room&amp;quot; clearly defined and identified - not because the article proposed great solutions. Anyway, the author will see the traffic spike.. Let&amp;#x27;s wait for a longer article.</text></comment>

<story><title>We need to make adulthood more desirable</title><url>https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/sunday-firesides-we-need-to-make-adulthood-more-desirable/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>clarkdale</author><text>Another difference is between suburbian adult lives and high-desity city adult lives. Compare an adult life in NYC or Chicago (or many European cities) and those people have easier access to visit with friends, stay out after work, see exhibits, try new restaurants. Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home.&lt;p&gt;Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults.&lt;p&gt;I wish this article was longer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisseaton</author><text>&amp;gt; Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home.&lt;p&gt;Is this genuinely how you imagine life in the suburbs? You don’t think anyone socialises here or takes part in any culture?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Sergey Aleynikov Loses in Goldman Fight Over Fees</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-03/ex-goldman-programmer-s-legal-fee-advance-rejected.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rayiner</author><text>The Delaware law provisions in question exist because the officers and directors of a corporation are often sued for the alleged misconduct of the corporation itself, and it&amp;#x27;s reasonable in those circumstances for the corporation to pay for their defense.&lt;p&gt;A VP at Goldman is, I think, the third lowest ranking front-office position. Not only is it not the sort of &amp;quot;officer&amp;quot; that Delaware law contemplates, but it&amp;#x27;s also not the sort of context Delaware law contemplates. Aleynikov wasn&amp;#x27;t accused of wrongdoing in his official capacity as an officer of the corporation. That might be something like a CEO being accused of funneling contracts to his brother&amp;#x27;s company. Aleynikov was accused of wrongdoing that was incidental to his employment.</text></comment>

<story><title>Sergey Aleynikov Loses in Goldman Fight Over Fees</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-03/ex-goldman-programmer-s-legal-fee-advance-rejected.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spindritf</author><text>They&amp;#x27;re all vice presidents there? American Psycho is becoming truer every day.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;the ruling gives Goldman an incentive to keep the ambiguous language in place so it can reserve the right to make “unpredictable post hoc determinations about which former employees should be advanced attorney’s fees and which shouldn’t,” Fuentes wrote.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there&amp;#x27;s some selection bias going, or I&amp;#x27;m a contrarian, but somehow dissents usually make more sense than rulings.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: Convert a number to an approximated text expression</title><url>https://github.com/tokenmill/numberwords</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>albertzeyer</author><text>If you don&amp;#x27;t want it approximate, but exact, this is still a tricky non-trivial ambiguous problem. And this problem often comes up in text normalization for NLP task (e.g. speech recognition, or text-to-speech).&lt;p&gt;For Python, for English, there is the inflect library: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pypi.org&amp;#x2F;project&amp;#x2F;inflect&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pypi.org&amp;#x2F;project&amp;#x2F;inflect&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: Convert a number to an approximated text expression</title><url>https://github.com/tokenmill/numberwords</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ramshorns</author><text>One other aspect of approximated numbers is whether the author wants to emphasize that the number is large or small. &amp;quot;Less than&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;almost&amp;quot; carry different connotations.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-one-bankrupt-1.5014522</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Why is that a problem?</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>&amp;gt; There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.&lt;p&gt;I think the principal problem here is that those places aren&amp;#x27;t on Mars.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X): There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that. A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it. This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously. Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-simulation-hi-seas-nasa-hawaii&amp;#x2F;553532&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-sim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually not even the sort of thing I&amp;#x27;m talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;, Mars is hopeless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danpalmer</author><text>Musk wants to &amp;quot;save humanity&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;He believes that the biggest risk to humanity is that we&amp;#x27;re currently all on one planet. This means global warming, nuclear war, pandemics, zombies, etc, could basically wipe out humanity.&lt;p&gt;If he can get humans living on Mars, that means that destroying life on a planet no longer destroys humanity, and that is a very significant levelling up to human survival. Getting people to Mars, to learn how to settle permanently there is a first step. Getting re-usable rockets is a first step even before that. Most things related to SpaceX that Musk does are essentially steps on the path to making this happen.&lt;p&gt;He may or may not be on the right track, and even if it&amp;#x27;s a good idea he might be doing it the wrong way, but everything is consistently focused around making this happen. For this, further developing the mid-west, terraforming Arizona, or colonising the bottom of the sea are all insufficient to achieve the goal.</text></comment>

<story><title>Mars One, which offered 1-way trips to Mars, declared bankrupt</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-one-bankrupt-1.5014522</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lisper</author><text>Why is that a problem?</text></item><item><author>bane</author><text>&amp;gt; There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that.&lt;p&gt;I think the principal problem here is that those places aren&amp;#x27;t on Mars.</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>One indication that no one is even remotely ready to think seriously about colonizing Mars (including Space X): There are vast tracts of uninhabited land on earth, notably in the American West. Colonizing those would be vastly easier than colonizing Mars, and yet no one is even talking about that. A self-sustaining colony in the middle of the Nevada desert that was able to get by with &lt;i&gt;no&lt;/i&gt; outside help for a few years would be about 1% as hard as colonizing Mars, and yet no one has done it, and no one AFAIK is planning to do it. This to me is the smoking gun that no one is really taking Mars colonization seriously. Everyone is caught up in the sexiness and glamour and no one wants to get down in the dirt and solve the really hard problems of how humans are actually going to survive when they are totally isolated from civilization for years.&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know about the HI-SEAS project. That was not isolated nor self-sustaining, and it only lasted 8 months.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-simulation-hi-seas-nasa-hawaii&amp;#x2F;553532&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;science&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;mars-sim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually not even the sort of thing I&amp;#x27;m talking about. Forget simulating Mars. I want to see someone just colonize an uninhabited part of &lt;i&gt;Earth&lt;/i&gt; without relying on help from the outside without any other constraints. Until we can do &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt;, Mars is hopeless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nkrisc</author><text>If you want to study Mars, actually being there opens up new avenues of study. If you&amp;#x27;re going to study Mars from Earth, it doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense to do it from the Nevada desert.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Debugging Node.js in Production</title><url>http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/12/debugging-nodejs-in-production.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ameen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never understood JScripters&amp;#x27; insistence on anonymous functions instead of named ones.&lt;p&gt;As someone just delving into Node from another platform what&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;proper best practices&amp;quot;-based JS patterns?</text></item><item><author>z3t4</author><text>&amp;quot;Name your functions&amp;quot;: Easier to know what the code does, flattens the &amp;quot;Christmas tree from hell&amp;quot;, no need for ugly closures, + Makes it&amp;#x27;s easier to debug. Anonymous functions is probably the most abused syntax in JavaScript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nawitus</author><text>Lambdas make code really easy to read compared to making the reader skip around the code. In addition, it reduces boilerplate code and requires less time to be spent on naming functions. Of course, it all depends on situation. Simple logic which is not beneficial elsewhere can be implemented as an anonymous function in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;For example: if(objects.find(object =&amp;gt; object.id === id)) {}</text></comment>

<story><title>Debugging Node.js in Production</title><url>http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/12/debugging-nodejs-in-production.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ameen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never understood JScripters&amp;#x27; insistence on anonymous functions instead of named ones.&lt;p&gt;As someone just delving into Node from another platform what&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;proper best practices&amp;quot;-based JS patterns?</text></item><item><author>z3t4</author><text>&amp;quot;Name your functions&amp;quot;: Easier to know what the code does, flattens the &amp;quot;Christmas tree from hell&amp;quot;, no need for ugly closures, + Makes it&amp;#x27;s easier to debug. Anonymous functions is probably the most abused syntax in JavaScript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aus_</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;callbackhell.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;callbackhell.com&lt;/a&gt; is a good starting point.</text></comment>

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<story><title>A Mechanism for Long Covid</title><url>https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thenerdhead</author><text>&amp;gt; The cause of PASC is currently debated but likely involves several different components, including: viral dissemination and persistence, immune activation and dysregulation (e.g. clotting, autoantibodies and reactivation of pre-existing latent viruses), cell death and tissue damage, and long-lasting cellular changes (e.g. epigenetic changes, senescence, fibroproliferation, metabolism alterations) (3). However, at present we lack an integrative understanding of how these disease components interact to cause the variable symptomology of PASC. Based on studies on acute COVID-19, PASC and the related myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME; chronic fatigue syndrome), we hypothesize that an inflammatory acid-base disruption underpins PASC and that viral proteins, both acutely and persistently-expressed, cause disease symptomology through disseminated tissue damage and inflammatory acid-base disruptions.&lt;p&gt;Seems like an explanation for the body compensating for hypoxic-environments by changing its acid-base. But what is fundamentally causing these environments?&lt;p&gt;Focusing on sleep, diet&amp;#x2F;hydration, and exercise are your three major ways to combat long covid. The latter (exercise) is heavily controversial in the long covid &amp;#x2F; ME&amp;#x2F;CFS communities, but would help moderate your acid-base over the long term if you can push through the pain&amp;#x2F;fatigue&amp;#x2F;etc.&lt;p&gt;The author suggests a few things helped them. Deep breathing, diet changes surrounding acidic foods, and stretching.&lt;p&gt;My personal experience with two bouts of long covid (14 months and 7 months) has me still believing that microclots and nitric oxide deficiency being the key factors in my recovery. I&amp;#x27;ve recovered twice now and back to pre-covid ability. It took me two years of constant exercise to build back to where I was. A modern Sisyphean task at that.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC9212559&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC9212559&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adinb</author><text>&amp;gt; but would help moderate your acid-base over the long term if you can push through the pain&amp;#x2F;fatigue&amp;#x2F;etc.&lt;p&gt;Pushing through is part of the problem. The crash that comes from pushing is the real problem --all kinds of blood markers go amuck after exertion (especially anything aerobic &amp;gt;10m, like a cardio pulmonary exercise test) and stay amuck for about a week. And the more you try to do during the crash the longer or worse the crash becomes. Pushing regardless of crash status, like in graded exercise therapy, has actually caused ME&amp;#x2F;CFS&amp;#x2F;Long Covid baseline symptoms to become worse semi-permanently.</text></comment>

<story><title>A Mechanism for Long Covid</title><url>https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thenerdhead</author><text>&amp;gt; The cause of PASC is currently debated but likely involves several different components, including: viral dissemination and persistence, immune activation and dysregulation (e.g. clotting, autoantibodies and reactivation of pre-existing latent viruses), cell death and tissue damage, and long-lasting cellular changes (e.g. epigenetic changes, senescence, fibroproliferation, metabolism alterations) (3). However, at present we lack an integrative understanding of how these disease components interact to cause the variable symptomology of PASC. Based on studies on acute COVID-19, PASC and the related myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME; chronic fatigue syndrome), we hypothesize that an inflammatory acid-base disruption underpins PASC and that viral proteins, both acutely and persistently-expressed, cause disease symptomology through disseminated tissue damage and inflammatory acid-base disruptions.&lt;p&gt;Seems like an explanation for the body compensating for hypoxic-environments by changing its acid-base. But what is fundamentally causing these environments?&lt;p&gt;Focusing on sleep, diet&amp;#x2F;hydration, and exercise are your three major ways to combat long covid. The latter (exercise) is heavily controversial in the long covid &amp;#x2F; ME&amp;#x2F;CFS communities, but would help moderate your acid-base over the long term if you can push through the pain&amp;#x2F;fatigue&amp;#x2F;etc.&lt;p&gt;The author suggests a few things helped them. Deep breathing, diet changes surrounding acidic foods, and stretching.&lt;p&gt;My personal experience with two bouts of long covid (14 months and 7 months) has me still believing that microclots and nitric oxide deficiency being the key factors in my recovery. I&amp;#x27;ve recovered twice now and back to pre-covid ability. It took me two years of constant exercise to build back to where I was. A modern Sisyphean task at that.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC9212559&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC9212559&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mancerayder</author><text>&amp;gt; nitric oxide deficiency&lt;p&gt;Wasn&amp;#x27;t there something around Cialis &amp;#x2F; Viagra being explored for covid recovery? Since those drugs act on that, maybe there&amp;#x27;s a potential connection?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Chickens Prefer Attractive People</title><url>https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens-evolution-eggs-food/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>meitham</author><text>&amp;quot;For instance, chickens can recognize up to 30 other individual chickens, and chicks imprint the image of their mother between 24 to 36 hours of hatching&amp;quot; Back in 1993 I sold a messaging Egyptian red dove, and its white dove wife separately. The messaging dove expectedly came back within 3 weeks, but I was surprised it couldn&amp;#x27;t distinguish its wife! It decided a newly bought white dove, which looked like its wife, was his wife and it the bullying didn&amp;#x27;t stop until she obliged.</text></comment>

<story><title>Chickens Prefer Attractive People</title><url>https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens-evolution-eggs-food/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tzahola</author><text>Hm. If only my grandma still had that chicken coop in the backyard, I could make a chicken-based Tinder crawler and get rich.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip</title><url>https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2021/10/takua-on-m1-max.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MangoCoffee</author><text>&amp;gt;in order to give the M1 Max some real competition, one has to skip laptop chips entirely and reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max&lt;p&gt;this is really interesting</text></comment>

<story><title>Rendering on the Apple M1 Max Chip</title><url>https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2021/10/takua-on-m1-max.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dnautics</author><text>&amp;gt; There’s really no way to understate what a colossal achievement Apple’s M1 processor is; compared with almost every modern x86-64 processor in its class&lt;p&gt;On the other hand I&amp;#x27;m sure there&amp;#x27;s more than a few chipheads out there who are saying &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s about time&amp;quot;, there was a longstanding prediction that the arm architecture would overtake x86.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Massive: The asm.js Benchmark</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/massive-the-asm-js-benchmark/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>I agree. asm.js has several strengths over NaCl and even PNaCl:&lt;p&gt;* It is just JavaScript, so any browser can execute asm.js code, but it can be AOT compiled by some browsers for extra performance - This means &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; browser supports asm.js, and supports it today&lt;p&gt;* It doesn&amp;#x27;t require a new runtime or API, merely using the existing web APIs&lt;p&gt;* It is simple for other browser vendors to implement, and isn&amp;#x27;t reliant on a single implementation&lt;p&gt;* It can interface with existing JavaScript code, so it can use JS libraries and, similarly, JS code can use asm.js libraries&lt;p&gt;* It is a completely open standard&lt;p&gt;* It is architecture-independent (so&amp;#x27;s PNaCl, though)</text></item><item><author>higherpurpose</author><text>I prefer asm.js over NaCl, especially when NaCl has been available for years, and Google still supports the ARM architecture poorly, and as a second class citizen in NaCl.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unacceptable that a &amp;quot;browser-os&amp;quot; that should have no problem being architecture agnostic, &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; gives Intel an edge with ChromeOS, because not all NaCl apps work on ARM Chromebooks. Seriously, how &lt;i&gt;crazy&lt;/i&gt; is that?&lt;p&gt;I can understand ARM not having a serious chance on Windows laptops because of all the legacy x86 programs, but at worst it should be equal with x86 running an OS such as Chrome OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leoc</author><text>&amp;gt; asm.js has several strengths over NaCl and even PNaCl&lt;p&gt;Why should we have to choose one or the other? Content negotiation is your friend.&lt;p&gt;Of that liast, I think only 1 and maybe 4 are real strengths.&lt;p&gt;Strength 1 means that old browsers or browsers from uncooperative vendors can still run applications at some level of performance (which might or might not be a usable level). Probably more important, tbh, is that it alters users&amp;#x27; perceptions of who is to blame for poor support. It seems that when a site runs fast on browser A but slowly on browser B the user tends to blame browser B, but when a site runs fast on browser A but not at all on browser B the user tends to blame the site owner. When users correctly allocate blame to uncooperative browser vendors this provides the impetus for browser vendors to reform their ways and&amp;#x2F;or for users to switch browsers.&lt;p&gt;As to point 2, the fact that asm.js means that authors and tools don&amp;#x27;t have to target a new runtime language is a pretty mixed blessing, because perforce it means that they have to continue targeting the old one, which is JS. When did &amp;quot;here, compile to a subset of this old high-level scripting language and we&amp;#x27;ll try to get the performance back using the latest in JIT and specialisation&amp;quot; become a reasonable candidate for a portable assembler system? Like a dog walking on its hind legs, it&amp;#x27;s impressive that asm.js works as well as it does, but that doesn&amp;#x27;t actually make it a reasonable approach. It only makes technical sense as part of a heroic effort to provide backwards-compatibility with JS-only browsers (see strength 1).&lt;p&gt;A completely open standard? Has there been any sign that Google is frustrating or actively opposing efforts to standardise NaCl&amp;#x2F;PNaCl? It seems that there&amp;#x27;s simply been no external effort to standardise it or interest in standardising it. Since &amp;quot;Web standards&amp;quot; are, to a good first approximation, a sock-puppet for the browser-vendor oligopoly this basically means that the other browser vendors have no desire for NaCl to become standardised. So I don&amp;#x27;t see how browser vendors telling us that NaCL is bad because Mr. Socky won&amp;#x27;t approve use of it is anything other than a childish deception. Let the other vendors make a serious, good-faith effort to standardise NaCL&amp;#x2F;PNaCl then we&amp;#x27;ll talk about lack of standardisation.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: additionally, notice how &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s a black box&amp;quot; has quietly disappeared from the list of the other browser vendors&amp;#x27; complaints against NaCl? C or C++ pushed through LLVM then Emscripten and ground up into asm.js is surely just as opaque to the site users as the same C or C++ pushed through LLVM and emitted as a PNaCl or NaCl binary. But it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; black box, so that&amp;#x27;s OK.</text></comment>

<story><title>Massive: The asm.js Benchmark</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/massive-the-asm-js-benchmark/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>I agree. asm.js has several strengths over NaCl and even PNaCl:&lt;p&gt;* It is just JavaScript, so any browser can execute asm.js code, but it can be AOT compiled by some browsers for extra performance - This means &lt;i&gt;every&lt;/i&gt; browser supports asm.js, and supports it today&lt;p&gt;* It doesn&amp;#x27;t require a new runtime or API, merely using the existing web APIs&lt;p&gt;* It is simple for other browser vendors to implement, and isn&amp;#x27;t reliant on a single implementation&lt;p&gt;* It can interface with existing JavaScript code, so it can use JS libraries and, similarly, JS code can use asm.js libraries&lt;p&gt;* It is a completely open standard&lt;p&gt;* It is architecture-independent (so&amp;#x27;s PNaCl, though)</text></item><item><author>higherpurpose</author><text>I prefer asm.js over NaCl, especially when NaCl has been available for years, and Google still supports the ARM architecture poorly, and as a second class citizen in NaCl.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s unacceptable that a &amp;quot;browser-os&amp;quot; that should have no problem being architecture agnostic, &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; gives Intel an edge with ChromeOS, because not all NaCl apps work on ARM Chromebooks. Seriously, how &lt;i&gt;crazy&lt;/i&gt; is that?&lt;p&gt;I can understand ARM not having a serious chance on Windows laptops because of all the legacy x86 programs, but at worst it should be equal with x86 running an OS such as Chrome OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>I agree with these points. There is at least one major flaw, though: asm.js can probably never be made into a truly &lt;i&gt;multithreading&lt;/i&gt; platform (without becoming a really ugly hack), where I can see that happen for NaCl. This is a pity, because multithreading is something you need for making responsive applications (GUI not hanging when a computation occurs in the background). Yes, there&amp;#x27;s webworkers, but I don&amp;#x27;t consider them a multithreading solution, because they don&amp;#x27;t allow a shared address space for inter-thread communication (only message-passing). This can be detrimental for performance, because the &amp;quot;structural sharing&amp;quot; paradigm becomes useless.&lt;p&gt;I think that a base-language without support for garbage collection would be preferable. The main advantage is that multithreading is easier to implement. (Any language built on top of this language could implement its own garbage collection, in principle.)</text></comment>

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<story><title>SSH Agent Restriction (new in OpenSSH 8.9)</title><url>https://www.openssh.com/agent-restrict.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>runlevel1</author><text>My need for agent forwarding has almost completely vanished since `ProxyJump` was added a few years ago.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Host *.example.com User runlevel1 IdentityFile ~&amp;#x2F;.ssh&amp;#x2F;id_rsa-foo ProxyJump [email protected] &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; So when I SSH to &lt;i&gt;qux.example.com&lt;/i&gt;, it first SSHs to &lt;i&gt;[email protected]&lt;/i&gt; then through it to &lt;i&gt;[email protected]&lt;/i&gt; and my agent is used on each individually.&lt;p&gt;So there&amp;#x27;s no ssh-agent socket on the intermediate jump box.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: More examples here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;OpenSSH&amp;#x2F;Cookbook&amp;#x2F;Proxies_and_Jump_Hosts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikibooks.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;OpenSSH&amp;#x2F;Cookbook&amp;#x2F;Proxies_and_J...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: For folks stuck on older SSH clients, you can do this with `ProxyCommand ssh -W ...` instead (also shown in the previous link) which is actually what ProxyJump is doing under-the-hood anyhow. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openssh&amp;#x2F;openssh-portable&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;d9dbb5d&amp;#x2F;ssh.c#L1233&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openssh&amp;#x2F;openssh-portable&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;d9dbb5d&amp;#x2F;ssh...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>SSH Agent Restriction (new in OpenSSH 8.9)</title><url>https://www.openssh.com/agent-restrict.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>staticassertion</author><text>Another thing that would be extremely helpful is improved logging. If the ssh-agent logged the entity that was attempting to hijack the connection it would be pretty easy to write detection logic for weird shit.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ll probably publish about this in the next few months, my colleague added some logging and we wrote ~10 detections on the process tree + IPC signatures. It makes the entire attack extremely dangerous for an attacker.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Clear is better than clever [pdf]</title><url>https://dave.cheney.net/paste/clear-is-better-than-clever.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>auggierose</author><text>&amp;gt; To be clear, I don’t mean to dismiss the work of a lone programmer toiling on programs without anyone to pair with or learn from. I’ve been that person many times in my career as a programmer, it’s not fun.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say it&amp;#x27;s a lot of fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noxToken</author><text>Definitely fun, but also slightly nerve-racking. A new project, script, or proof of concept left entirely up to you. The canvas is completely blank. Your initial code will probably be the seed for whatever this is for months or years to come. Remember all that trash you talked about the poor decisions everyone who came before you made? It&amp;#x27;s your turn. Don&amp;#x27;t screw it up.&lt;p&gt;Tangentially related for some of the younger devs: The predecessors on your project &lt;i&gt;probably&lt;/i&gt; weren&amp;#x27;t idiots. It&amp;#x27;s possible, but they were likely working with a different set of requirements under a different scope. Even the code that it morphed into over time was probably a good enough decision for the constraints at the time.</text></comment>

<story><title>Clear is better than clever [pdf]</title><url>https://dave.cheney.net/paste/clear-is-better-than-clever.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>auggierose</author><text>&amp;gt; To be clear, I don’t mean to dismiss the work of a lone programmer toiling on programs without anyone to pair with or learn from. I’ve been that person many times in my career as a programmer, it’s not fun.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say it&amp;#x27;s a lot of fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ahartmetz</author><text>It completely depends on the quality of your collaborators. Are they good developers, do they have somewhat compatible views, and are they reasonably friendly? I prefer working in a highly capable group.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Using a tiny HC32L110 ARM chip</title><url>https://spritesmods.com/?art=hc32l110&amp;page=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foldr</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s phrases like &amp;quot;some shady Chinese-language Windows-program&amp;quot;. There are hints of a certain kind of English language chauvinism throughout the article. It&amp;#x27;s not surprising that a Chinese product aimed at the Chinese market is documented in Chinese. This doesn&amp;#x27;t make it obscure or shady.&lt;p&gt;As an imaginative exercise, try replacing &amp;#x27;Chinese&amp;#x27; with English&amp;#x2F;American and see how the article reads.</text></item><item><author>zibzab</author><text>Looks interesting, although I am not sure if it is worth the trouble for hobbyist who can buy similar SOCs in much more friendly packages.&lt;p&gt;A commenter compalined about his &amp;quot;negative and accusatory language&amp;quot;. Where does he see that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sprite_tm</author><text>FWIW, I&amp;#x27;m more concerned with the fact that it&amp;#x27;s a Windows program (the closed-source-ness and seeming unavailability of the programming protocol makes it shady, imo) rather than it being Chinese. I&amp;#x27;ll modify the text a bit to reflect that.</text></comment>

<story><title>Using a tiny HC32L110 ARM chip</title><url>https://spritesmods.com/?art=hc32l110&amp;page=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foldr</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s phrases like &amp;quot;some shady Chinese-language Windows-program&amp;quot;. There are hints of a certain kind of English language chauvinism throughout the article. It&amp;#x27;s not surprising that a Chinese product aimed at the Chinese market is documented in Chinese. This doesn&amp;#x27;t make it obscure or shady.&lt;p&gt;As an imaginative exercise, try replacing &amp;#x27;Chinese&amp;#x27; with English&amp;#x2F;American and see how the article reads.</text></item><item><author>zibzab</author><text>Looks interesting, although I am not sure if it is worth the trouble for hobbyist who can buy similar SOCs in much more friendly packages.&lt;p&gt;A commenter compalined about his &amp;quot;negative and accusatory language&amp;quot;. Where does he see that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nebalee</author><text>Seeing as he appears to favor FLOSS software (GCC, Make, OpenOCD), the shadiness comment may as well be directed at the Windows-program part.</text></comment>

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<story><title>NeurIPS 2023 Posters Cluster Visualization</title><url>https://neurips2023.vizhub.ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>weekay</author><text>Also a app to search and chat with papers &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;neurips-papers-by-metaphor&amp;#x2F;id6473820677&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;neurips-papers-by-metaphor&amp;#x2F;id6...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>NeurIPS 2023 Posters Cluster Visualization</title><url>https://neurips2023.vizhub.ai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tudorw</author><text>Wow, love this, thanks, such a broad subject that interdisciplinary opportunities must abound. Work like this combined with the huge amount of effort in open source work to move quickly from examples in papers to running code makes for an exciting future.&lt;p&gt;Visualising this volume of data on a mobile device is always going to be challenging, personally I&amp;#x27;m hoping that moves in AR, Rollup&amp;#x2F;Folding Displays and projected screens will shift things towards larger screens. Mobile phones are cool, but you lose a lot of interaction potential moving from a 27&amp;quot; screen to 6&amp;quot;.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Europe drastically cut its energy consumption this winter</title><url>https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/04/05/europe-drastically-cut-its-energy-consumption-this-winter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Etheryte</author><text>Not some of the heat, all of the heat save for what your body generates and such was from neighbors. In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you. In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.</text></item><item><author>dvh</author><text>Not to brag but this winter I didn&amp;#x27;t turn on radiator once. The temperature never dropped below 20°C inside (I live in a flat that few years ago had 10cm of isolation added to it). Yes I know, some of the heat was probably from neighbors but I can&amp;#x27;t do anything about that. I also shortened hot showers to minimum and wore warm underwear and sweater. The winter was quite warm [1], coldest was around -5°C&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.shmu.sk&amp;#x2F;sk&amp;#x2F;?page=1&amp;amp;id=klimat_operativneudaje1&amp;amp;identif=11968&amp;amp;rok=2023&amp;amp;obdobie=1991-2020&amp;amp;sub=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.shmu.sk&amp;#x2F;sk&amp;#x2F;?page=1&amp;amp;id=klimat_operativneudaje1&amp;amp;id...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfourb</author><text>I have been a renter for most of my adult life and I own several apartments that I would argue are &amp;quot;reasonably managed&amp;quot; and I am not aware that a landlord (in Germany) can prevent tenants from &amp;quot;leeching&amp;quot; heat from neighboring apartments. A renter usually has to guarantee a reasonable minimum temperature in the apartment, as well as regular fresh air, both to prevent mold. But the level of heating required for this is way below 20°C.&lt;p&gt;Also: I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that in most reasonable scenarios not heating one apartment in a house that has a decent outer layer of insulation would overall reduce energy input, because the overall average temperature would decline and heat would propagate more efficiently between apartments than to the outside. But I&amp;#x27;m no expert so what do I know.</text></comment>

<story><title>Europe drastically cut its energy consumption this winter</title><url>https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/04/05/europe-drastically-cut-its-energy-consumption-this-winter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Etheryte</author><text>Not some of the heat, all of the heat save for what your body generates and such was from neighbors. In most reasonably managed apartment buildings what you did is forbidden because it means your neighbors just have to heat more since their walls will leak heat to you. In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.</text></item><item><author>dvh</author><text>Not to brag but this winter I didn&amp;#x27;t turn on radiator once. The temperature never dropped below 20°C inside (I live in a flat that few years ago had 10cm of isolation added to it). Yes I know, some of the heat was probably from neighbors but I can&amp;#x27;t do anything about that. I also shortened hot showers to minimum and wore warm underwear and sweater. The winter was quite warm [1], coldest was around -5°C&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.shmu.sk&amp;#x2F;sk&amp;#x2F;?page=1&amp;amp;id=klimat_operativneudaje1&amp;amp;identif=11968&amp;amp;rok=2023&amp;amp;obdobie=1991-2020&amp;amp;sub=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.shmu.sk&amp;#x2F;sk&amp;#x2F;?page=1&amp;amp;id=klimat_operativneudaje1&amp;amp;id...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ericpauley</author><text>&amp;gt; In total it rarely ends up being an energy save because the losses are bigger this way than if everyone kept a uniform temperature.&lt;p&gt;Really? GP is effectively acting as an apartment-size layer of insulation between neighbors and the outside. Put another way, if everyone did what GP did (for instance, lower thermostat to 20C) the entire building would be cooler and use less energy. Perhaps GP’s behavior even encouraged others to lower their thermostat because of higher electric bills!</text></comment>

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<story><title>Koo, India’s free-speech Twitter alternative</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2021/how-koo-became-a-right-wing-darling-in-india/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>as300</author><text>I get the impression reading articles like this that the farm bills would &lt;i&gt;certainly&lt;/i&gt; negatively impact farmer. See this quote from the article:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The country’s capital city has seen over four months of protest after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government enacted agricultural laws that would adversely affect farmers across India.&lt;p&gt;However, from speaking to people and watching interviews where people discuss *the actual bill itself*, the only answer I ever hear is something along the lines of, &amp;quot;this bill *could potentially* lead to things that are bad.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m asking from a place of good-faith here, but what separates claims that the farm bill is bad from blatant fear-mongering?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mathemagical</author><text>Here is an article that goes into a lot of historical context and explains what is happening. It&amp;#x27;s a bit long but does a good job of explaining all the nuances, so it&amp;#x27;s worth reading to the end.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fairobserver.com&amp;#x2F;region&amp;#x2F;central_south_asia&amp;#x2F;atul-singh-manu-sharma-india-farmers-protests-agriculture-sector-reform-green-revolution-history-15201&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fairobserver.com&amp;#x2F;region&amp;#x2F;central_south_asia&amp;#x2F;atul-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Koo, India’s free-speech Twitter alternative</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2021/how-koo-became-a-right-wing-darling-in-india/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>as300</author><text>I get the impression reading articles like this that the farm bills would &lt;i&gt;certainly&lt;/i&gt; negatively impact farmer. See this quote from the article:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The country’s capital city has seen over four months of protest after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government enacted agricultural laws that would adversely affect farmers across India.&lt;p&gt;However, from speaking to people and watching interviews where people discuss *the actual bill itself*, the only answer I ever hear is something along the lines of, &amp;quot;this bill *could potentially* lead to things that are bad.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m asking from a place of good-faith here, but what separates claims that the farm bill is bad from blatant fear-mongering?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strategyanalyst</author><text>There is fear that this will reduce the degree of government subsidies that farmers recieve.&lt;p&gt;Current yields of Indian crops aren&amp;#x27;t stagnant, but there are fears that water levels are too low to keep them rising fast enough for the coming rise in demand.So too much land on water consuming paddy crops may be bad in long run. Bill tries to push towards diversification by introducing agri markets that may raise investment in nontraditional crops.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;amp.scroll.in&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;821052&amp;#x2F;punjab-is-set-for-record-rice-production-this-year-but-at-a-heavy-price&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;amp.scroll.in&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;821052&amp;#x2F;punjab-is-set-for-record...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fear is also that this will hit farmers in state of Punjab and Northern UP the most. They rely on a system of guaranteed crop buying by government. Moving to market model may lead to changes that proponents say will raise their income but they believe it will lead to corporations eating away the profits.</text></comment>

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<story><title>All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people</title><url>https://medium.com/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I know exactly how it happens. Engineering projects take a long time. 90% of the effort lives in the basement where nobody can see it; getting data from some other system, optimizing queries, spinning up the servers... nothing at all user-facing. So to the untrained eye, 90% of the time, programmers are doing nothing. And that 90% can be weeks, months, even years.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any of this is unique to software engineering, either. You don&amp;#x27;t just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow. To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project. Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough. (Because there is always &amp;quot;that one guy&amp;quot; who actually isn&amp;#x27;t doing anything. And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)&lt;p&gt;As for why we spend money hiring people that don&amp;#x27;t actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people&amp;#x27;s work... I think it&amp;#x27;s just loss aversion in action. If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money&amp;#x27;s going. But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they&amp;#x27;re stealing from you and must be punished! It is human nature.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what we did in the past that&amp;#x27;s different from today. Somehow we got to the moon. But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees. I don&amp;#x27;t have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects. And, you know, we&amp;#x27;re not really doing them anymore. I wonder what changed. Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.</text></item><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>&lt;i&gt;they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute &amp;quot;project accountability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lr4444lr</author><text>Well for one, this whole &amp;quot;agile&amp;quot; concept of changing things midstream can&amp;#x27;t be helping. No one says once a bridge is 20% built. Hmm... You know what, more height to avoid noise and smog problems in fact seems to be a better focus than high vehicular weight. Let&amp;#x27;s start making those adjustments and expect to stick to our time, cost, and quality estimates.&lt;p&gt;Outside of a few niche areas, calling what&amp;#x27;s going on in software &amp;quot;engineering&amp;quot; seems laughable to me, and I never refer to myself with that term.</text></comment>

<story><title>All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people</title><url>https://medium.com/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I know exactly how it happens. Engineering projects take a long time. 90% of the effort lives in the basement where nobody can see it; getting data from some other system, optimizing queries, spinning up the servers... nothing at all user-facing. So to the untrained eye, 90% of the time, programmers are doing nothing. And that 90% can be weeks, months, even years.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think any of this is unique to software engineering, either. You don&amp;#x27;t just one day decide to build a bridge and show up at the bank of the river with a cement mixer tomorrow. To someone that wants to drive over the river, it looks like no progress is being made on the project. Hence, lots of meetings (delaying the project further) to make sure everyone is working hard enough. (Because there is always &amp;quot;that one guy&amp;quot; who actually isn&amp;#x27;t doing anything. And it looks the same as someone who is working hard to an outsider.)&lt;p&gt;As for why we spend money hiring people that don&amp;#x27;t actually do anything, tracking the progress of other people&amp;#x27;s work... I think it&amp;#x27;s just loss aversion in action. If you spend 10% of the day working on timesheets and pay an additional employee to check up on them... you know where your money&amp;#x27;s going. But if someone just shows up to work and does nothing, then they&amp;#x27;re stealing from you and must be punished! It is human nature.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what we did in the past that&amp;#x27;s different from today. Somehow we got to the moon. But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing seems like it requires 30,000 employees. I don&amp;#x27;t have much hope for the future generation of megaprojects. And, you know, we&amp;#x27;re not really doing them anymore. I wonder what changed. Or maybe looking back at the all the achievements of the entire human race at once makes it difficult to put the present day into perspective.</text></item><item><author>noonespecial</author><text>&lt;i&gt;they have innate understanding that being observed working is more valuable than the results of their work.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen coders who knew this by heart forget this less than 5 years after entering management and become champions of forcing everybody into the office for 8:30 stand-ups and time tracking systems that enforce minute by minute &amp;quot;project accountability&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know exactly how this happens, all I know is its like a damn force of nature. The only thing I&amp;#x27;ve ever seen kill morale and tank projects faster is random periodic layoffs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>radiospiel</author><text>A manager must be able to answer the question &amp;quot;Are we on time? Do we need additional resources?&amp;quot;. This happens to help a project, not to delay it. If a good team of developers estimates the effort needed for anyone task with a 20% accuracy (which would be very good indeed), that can make a 9 month project being 2 months late, which might or might not be acceptable.&lt;p&gt;If developer teams would be treated like the blackbox they apparently want to be treated as would mean that whoever is managing procuesses would fly blind just hoping for the best - but the organization as a whole needs to be understanding what is going on right now.&lt;p&gt;Time tracking can be a surveilling tool, but it can also be a tool to improve things - someone could find out that a team is running over capacity, and consequently assign more resources to the task at hand or redefine the task.&lt;p&gt;And, well, for morning standups: when done right they are a valuable tool for efficient communication, and probably better than having people chasing each other for hours on end. IMHO an organisation should agree on a communication strategy that is the most efficient and helpful for it. It is not a religious belief that a standup meeting must be done first thing in the morning, I think that tends to conflict w&amp;#x2F;the teams personal schedules the least.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/filing-taxes-in-japan-is-a-breeze-why-not-here.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caseysoftware</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s good evidence for this. That was part of the reason the Feds pushed employers to do withholding &amp;quot;on our behalf&amp;quot; during the 1930s. Prior to that, taxes were filed quarterly and then only a small % of people. But people actually saw how much they paid.&lt;p&gt;Withholding was a clever and subtle way for us to never see part of our paycheck so then any tax return we get feels like a bonus when it was actually just an interest free loan to the government.&lt;p&gt;Another way to look at it.. people here talk about $Xk that they make but it&amp;#x27;s always pre-tax. Ask the same people what they make post-tax and I&amp;#x27;d wager less than a quarter can answer it accurately.</text></item><item><author>pharrlax</author><text>Overlooked in this article and comments is the influence of one man -- Grover Norquist.&lt;p&gt;He runs an extremely influential organization that administers a sort of purity pledge that, for most Republican candidates for Congress, is necessary to sign in order to avoid being primaried.&lt;p&gt;He has decided that making taxes easier to do would make people more okay with tax increases, and so he has decreed that support for the kind of systems other countries use is a violation of this pledge. His excuse is that such a system would effectively slightly increase taxation by preventing people from getting away with taking erroneous deductions. This excuse is obvious, total bullshit.&lt;p&gt;Grover Norquist wants taxes to be painful because he wants people to dislike government and the concept of taxation in general. Thus, Republicans in Congress must take the same opinion or risk having their purity stamp revoked. Thus, no reforms get passed.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is one area Trump can do some good; certainly he&amp;#x27;s much less beholden to the traditions that bind the old guard (for better or for worse).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kelnos</author><text>Yep, it&amp;#x27;s all just psychological warfare.&lt;p&gt;The destruction of the tax prep industry in the US would make me so happy that it would overshadow any negative feelings I might have about my tax payments being more transparent to me.&lt;p&gt;The numbers quoted in the article are insane. Over $10 billion that could be spent on actual useful economic output, wasted. Hours and hours of individuals&amp;#x27; time, wasted. It&amp;#x27;s disgusting.&lt;p&gt;In some ways I find the preservation of the tax prep industry to be even worse than Trump&amp;#x27;s recent attempts to protect&amp;#x2F;resurrect coal industry jobs.</text></comment>

<story><title>Filing Taxes in Japan Is a Breeze. Why Not in the US?</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/filing-taxes-in-japan-is-a-breeze-why-not-here.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>caseysoftware</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s good evidence for this. That was part of the reason the Feds pushed employers to do withholding &amp;quot;on our behalf&amp;quot; during the 1930s. Prior to that, taxes were filed quarterly and then only a small % of people. But people actually saw how much they paid.&lt;p&gt;Withholding was a clever and subtle way for us to never see part of our paycheck so then any tax return we get feels like a bonus when it was actually just an interest free loan to the government.&lt;p&gt;Another way to look at it.. people here talk about $Xk that they make but it&amp;#x27;s always pre-tax. Ask the same people what they make post-tax and I&amp;#x27;d wager less than a quarter can answer it accurately.</text></item><item><author>pharrlax</author><text>Overlooked in this article and comments is the influence of one man -- Grover Norquist.&lt;p&gt;He runs an extremely influential organization that administers a sort of purity pledge that, for most Republican candidates for Congress, is necessary to sign in order to avoid being primaried.&lt;p&gt;He has decided that making taxes easier to do would make people more okay with tax increases, and so he has decreed that support for the kind of systems other countries use is a violation of this pledge. His excuse is that such a system would effectively slightly increase taxation by preventing people from getting away with taking erroneous deductions. This excuse is obvious, total bullshit.&lt;p&gt;Grover Norquist wants taxes to be painful because he wants people to dislike government and the concept of taxation in general. Thus, Republicans in Congress must take the same opinion or risk having their purity stamp revoked. Thus, no reforms get passed.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is one area Trump can do some good; certainly he&amp;#x27;s much less beholden to the traditions that bind the old guard (for better or for worse).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djstein</author><text>&amp;gt;Ask the same people what they make post-tax and I&amp;#x27;d wager less than a quarter can answer it accurately. just sad. so many people skip basic budgeting..</text></comment>

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<story><title>Web3 Is Bullshit</title><url>https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?</text></item><item><author>Barrin92</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the best, most concise things I&amp;#x27;ve read in a while. People are trying to move from a world in which compute resources are efficient and almost limitless to a world of scarcity because they want to build an economic system where you can trade your fortnite skins for online currency. Creating economic ownership schemes of things that nobody needs to own because they&amp;#x27;re not scarce in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>captainbland</author><text>Of course. It&amp;#x27;s even more clear with NFTs: people aren&amp;#x27;t spending thousands of dollars on low-quality NFT sprites because they think they&amp;#x27;re sound investments or artworks that are that unique and enjoyable in and of themselves. It&amp;#x27;s people with serious wealth, people who have benefited from scarcity in other domains, trying to promote a system of artificial scarcity in the digital art world. Artificial scarcity that they will later profit off of. This is why they attach huge prizes to what is really worthless crap in order to generate hype and adoption.</text></comment>

<story><title>Web3 Is Bullshit</title><url>https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?</text></item><item><author>Barrin92</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600 from the 1970s except it runs on casino chips that cost $500 a pop and every few minutes we have to reload it like a slot machine to buy a few more cycles. That anyone could consider this to be the computational backbone to the new global internet is beyond laughable. We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the best, most concise things I&amp;#x27;ve read in a while. People are trying to move from a world in which compute resources are efficient and almost limitless to a world of scarcity because they want to build an economic system where you can trade your fortnite skins for online currency. Creating economic ownership schemes of things that nobody needs to own because they&amp;#x27;re not scarce in the first place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dekervin</author><text>if you are joking, I hope you realize you have stumbled on a real epiphany, and keep pulling the thread.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m pretty interested in finding a fully remote company, that hires for a 4-day workweek (as opposed to 5).&lt;p&gt;How can someone (in Europe) find such employers?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>vinay_ys</author><text>In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay. In the last two decades I&amp;#x27;ve been in the industry, I knew very junior people (early in their career) and very senior people doing 3-4 day workweek due to personal reasons in pretty much every company I worked in. It wasn&amp;#x27;t a big deal. Ability to take 3-6 month long unpaid breaks (sabbaticals), 4 weeks of PTOs, plus sick&amp;#x2F;carer leaves are quite standard in most good tech companies.&lt;p&gt;During Covid, many companies started doing rest&amp;#x2F;reset days every quarter that is basically a forced holiday for everyone together (no FOMO, no pressure to check emails, attend calls etc). Some companies have started to do rest&amp;#x2F;reset week every quarter! (because they think its necessary given their higher stress level work).&lt;p&gt;Getting time off isn&amp;#x27;t that hard. What is actually hard is getting high-quality work (where you get back as much as you give), satisfying work and a great team to do it with. Without great work and team, but have lot of PTO&amp;#x2F;perks etc it becomes very unsatisfying and not able to sustain interest.&lt;p&gt;I also see many companies screwing up by not investing in talent&amp;#x2F;skill development activities (not the typical corp L&amp;amp;D where they organise a workshop with some random person who seems very preachy and doesn&amp;#x27;t really practice). I wish they did this better and enabled people to manage their personal time better on their own.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Taylor_OD</author><text>&amp;gt; In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think most companies will let you. I tried to negotiate this many times in the past for engineers and it was never successful. Even for companies that otherwise were very flexible or knew that a 4 day work week was the only way to afford someone they wanted to hire.&lt;p&gt;Many tech companies will do this and its worth asking. But most is not really accurate.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ask HN: Companies hiring for a 4-day workweek?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m pretty interested in finding a fully remote company, that hires for a 4-day workweek (as opposed to 5).&lt;p&gt;How can someone (in Europe) find such employers?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>vinay_ys</author><text>In most tech companies you can negotiate a lower number of days per week for lesser pay. In the last two decades I&amp;#x27;ve been in the industry, I knew very junior people (early in their career) and very senior people doing 3-4 day workweek due to personal reasons in pretty much every company I worked in. It wasn&amp;#x27;t a big deal. Ability to take 3-6 month long unpaid breaks (sabbaticals), 4 weeks of PTOs, plus sick&amp;#x2F;carer leaves are quite standard in most good tech companies.&lt;p&gt;During Covid, many companies started doing rest&amp;#x2F;reset days every quarter that is basically a forced holiday for everyone together (no FOMO, no pressure to check emails, attend calls etc). Some companies have started to do rest&amp;#x2F;reset week every quarter! (because they think its necessary given their higher stress level work).&lt;p&gt;Getting time off isn&amp;#x27;t that hard. What is actually hard is getting high-quality work (where you get back as much as you give), satisfying work and a great team to do it with. Without great work and team, but have lot of PTO&amp;#x2F;perks etc it becomes very unsatisfying and not able to sustain interest.&lt;p&gt;I also see many companies screwing up by not investing in talent&amp;#x2F;skill development activities (not the typical corp L&amp;amp;D where they organise a workshop with some random person who seems very preachy and doesn&amp;#x27;t really practice). I wish they did this better and enabled people to manage their personal time better on their own.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pm215</author><text>My experience is limited (couple of UK companies), but I&amp;#x27;ve twice been able to negotiate down to 4 days as an existing employee without much difficulty, but found it much harder (failed) to negotiate starting at 4 days with a new employer.</text></comment>

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<story><title>StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacoblyles</author><text>No nesting. Is this 2004?&lt;p&gt;How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomdale</author><text>Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It&apos;s especially hard to come back later and see what&apos;s new.&lt;p&gt;Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically.&lt;p&gt;If, however, you&apos;d like to &lt;i&gt;change&lt;/i&gt; the topic, there&apos;s a &quot;Reply as New Topic&quot; button to the right of every post. This allows you to create a new thread, with a new topic. Metadata about this forked topic is saved, so that future readers can easily bounce between related threads, while still having every message in sequence about the same &quot;topic.&quot;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, this approach maintains the simplicity of flat discussion with the ability to fork topics of nested threads, without the complexity.</text></comment>

<story><title>StackExchange Founder Vows to Reinvent Online Discourse</title><url>http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/discourse/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacoblyles</author><text>No nesting. Is this 2004?&lt;p&gt;How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>I&apos;ve built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly.&lt;p&gt;My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of argument is valuable, but generally it&apos;s just a strain on the social fabric without a lot of upside.</text></comment>