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<story><title>A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server</title><url>http://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/719/a-survival-guide-for-the-small-mail-server</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I think it is absolutely hilarious (and infuriating) that in their opening paragraph they forgot to list spam blacklists, like themselves, as being perhaps the biggest hurdle for small companies and individuals running mail servers.&lt;p&gt;I ran a mail server for almost five years, and 9&amp;#x2F;10 of the issues I had to resolve were various anti-spam blacklists or individual hosts blocking our emails and then having customers complaining because we never emailed them.&lt;p&gt;There was never any reason given for the blocks, and our logs didn&amp;#x27;t show any outgoing spam. However all of these spam blacklists would accept a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; if you didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait the 24-72 hours for them to unblock you. Essentially it is a shakedown.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve just given up self-hosting and I recommend others do the same. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t the spam, it is how much time you&amp;#x27;ll waste fighting the anti-spam blacklists and large email hosts. A job better left to e.g. SendGrid or SES.&lt;p&gt;PS - We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eps</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The subject is self-hosting a &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;_small_&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; email server. When you get into 10K&amp;#x2F;day range, you are bound to have false positive spam reports - both automatic and from pissed users - and this in turn can lead to RBL listings.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been running a mail server since 2004 and not once had I have any issues with RBLs. It&amp;#x27;s a low-volume server though, perhaps several thousand emails per month.</text></comment>

<story><title>A Survival Guide for the Small Mail Server</title><url>http://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/719/a-survival-guide-for-the-small-mail-server</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I think it is absolutely hilarious (and infuriating) that in their opening paragraph they forgot to list spam blacklists, like themselves, as being perhaps the biggest hurdle for small companies and individuals running mail servers.&lt;p&gt;I ran a mail server for almost five years, and 9&amp;#x2F;10 of the issues I had to resolve were various anti-spam blacklists or individual hosts blocking our emails and then having customers complaining because we never emailed them.&lt;p&gt;There was never any reason given for the blocks, and our logs didn&amp;#x27;t show any outgoing spam. However all of these spam blacklists would accept a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; if you didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait the 24-72 hours for them to unblock you. Essentially it is a shakedown.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve just given up self-hosting and I recommend others do the same. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t the spam, it is how much time you&amp;#x27;ll waste fighting the anti-spam blacklists and large email hosts. A job better left to e.g. SendGrid or SES.&lt;p&gt;PS - We sent tens of thousands of emails a day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vacri</author><text>I have this problem at one company at the moment. We use gmail with spf and dkim, and have a low mail count and no mass marketing that I&amp;#x27;m aware of. We&amp;#x27;re on two blacklists. One gives zero reason for being on it, and has a &amp;#x27;contact us for reevaluation&amp;#x27; form which I&amp;#x27;ve submitted. No feedback, no change, no idea what to do next.&lt;p&gt;The other blacklist suggests that it&amp;#x27;s our commercial site that&amp;#x27;s hosted with a provider who uses linode, and the linode CIDR block our company website is on has been &amp;#x27;banned with no recourse to remove&amp;#x27; due to the huge amounts of spam it has sent. For that list, it apparently doesn&amp;#x27;t matter that our mail comes from google, not linode. When I get some free time, I&amp;#x27;ll try to move that website.&lt;p&gt;What do you do when the vigilantes screw you?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/tesla-co-founder-and-cto-jb-straubel-stepping-down/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>randomsearch</author><text>Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail?&lt;p&gt;Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that?&lt;p&gt;Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a much worse place. Why is Tesla, which has done a lot for humanity and is a key advancement in tackling climate change, hated so much? Why not save your hate for companies damaging democracy or workers rights, which seem like more serious charges?</text></comment>

<story><title>Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/tesla-co-founder-and-cto-jb-straubel-stepping-down/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iknowstuff</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going to miss his detailed, technical answers to questions during Q&amp;amp;As. He&amp;#x27;s been with Tesla since the beginning, for 15 years, and seems to be departing on good terms though.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok</title><url>https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/record-labels-dig-their-own-grave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kromem</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not committing suicide - it&amp;#x27;s just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them.&lt;p&gt;When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it&amp;#x27;s game over.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven&amp;#x27;s symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it&amp;#x27;s something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it&amp;#x27;s extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn&amp;#x27;t recapturing that magic.&lt;p&gt;A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s neat, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t replace me&amp;quot; without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.&lt;p&gt;Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.</text></item><item><author>majormajor</author><text>Interestingly, labels playing games about releasing albums is an old trick for various old reasons too. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;music&amp;#x2F;musicblog&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;apr&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;artists-held-hostage-labels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;music&amp;#x2F;musicblog&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;apr&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;arti...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&amp;#x2F;azafar&amp;#x2F;what-happens-when-your-favorite-artist-is-legally-unable-to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&amp;#x2F;azafar&amp;#x2F;what-happens-when-your-favor...&lt;/a&gt; for a couple old references&lt;p&gt;A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.&lt;p&gt;But this &amp;quot;record industry is committing suicide&amp;quot; story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the &amp;quot;hollywood is committing suicide&amp;quot; story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what&amp;#x27;s going to change? There&amp;#x27;s still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; different than the old boss?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vlunkr</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s wishful thinking, but I don&amp;#x27;t believe this will happen, and unless I&amp;#x27;m mistaken, there&amp;#x27;s absolutely 0 evidence for it. People are usually attached to the artist when it comes to music. You buy a Bowie album because it has his name on it. You learn about them, look forward to their future work, maybe go see them live, etc.&lt;p&gt;Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don&amp;#x27;t know, maybe, who cares?</text></comment>

<story><title>Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok</title><url>https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/record-labels-dig-their-own-grave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kromem</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not committing suicide - it&amp;#x27;s just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them.&lt;p&gt;When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it&amp;#x27;s game over.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven&amp;#x27;s symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it&amp;#x27;s something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it&amp;#x27;s extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn&amp;#x27;t recapturing that magic.&lt;p&gt;A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s neat, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t replace me&amp;quot; without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.&lt;p&gt;Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.</text></item><item><author>majormajor</author><text>Interestingly, labels playing games about releasing albums is an old trick for various old reasons too. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;music&amp;#x2F;musicblog&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;apr&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;artists-held-hostage-labels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;music&amp;#x2F;musicblog&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;apr&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;arti...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&amp;#x2F;azafar&amp;#x2F;what-happens-when-your-favorite-artist-is-legally-unable-to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.buzzfeed.com&amp;#x2F;azafar&amp;#x2F;what-happens-when-your-favor...&lt;/a&gt; for a couple old references&lt;p&gt;A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.&lt;p&gt;But this &amp;quot;record industry is committing suicide&amp;quot; story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the &amp;quot;hollywood is committing suicide&amp;quot; story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what&amp;#x27;s going to change? There&amp;#x27;s still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; different than the old boss?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>winternett</author><text>The recording industry is notorious for pay for play schemes.&lt;p&gt;The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.&lt;p&gt;The industry has found that social media&amp;#x27;s dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.&lt;p&gt;The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is &amp;quot;Is the platform really helping me?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that&amp;#x27;s true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Rethinking the computer ‘desktop’ as a concept</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-work-anymore-d276271bfa40</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rakoo</author><text>Because in practice if you don&amp;#x27;t push people to update, they just don&amp;#x27;t update. And then complain about bugs, security issues, bad performance, missing features, etc... all available in the updates they have been postponing for years.</text></item><item><author>amelius</author><text>&amp;gt; If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background.&lt;p&gt;How did we update software in the 80s? Simple, by taking an action: inserting the floppy with the new software, starting the update program, etc.&lt;p&gt;Why can&amp;#x27;t it be like that? (Except the floppies replaced by opening a menu and clicking &amp;quot;update&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;Why do updates have to be performed at a pace controlled by the vendor of the software and why do I need to be reminded about updates?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll just install them when I think I need them, thank you.</text></item><item><author>blowski</author><text>It’s a balance though isn’t it. If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background. Even you might want more prompts in some situations.&lt;p&gt;Maybe some applications could have an alert mode, similar to logging levels. But then it will probably get more buggy.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I rarely get annoyed by the number of popups in most of my software. I’ll happily take a few extra dialog boxes for extra control.</text></item><item><author>KeepFlying</author><text>That dialog also invokes so many issues with computers today.&lt;p&gt;When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don&amp;#x27;t want to update it, I don&amp;#x27;t want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way.&lt;p&gt;And same when I close a program, as the author hits on very well.&lt;p&gt;Basically, the computer&amp;#x2F;program&amp;#x2F;etc always wants me to do something for it, but it never asks for those things at an opportune time.&lt;p&gt;No, I don&amp;#x27;t want to update my computer right now, and no, updating overnight tonight isn&amp;#x27;t good either because I need to keep this program running until tomorrow. I understand that your new UX is better for me, and I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;ll love it, but forcing that on me right now is preventing me from doing what I need to do. I see your error dialog describing some odd issue, but I don&amp;#x27;t have time to triage that right now and decide to take the time to fix it.&lt;p&gt;I wish software would respect the human element more. My time and attention is valuable, please don&amp;#x27;t interrupt it carelessly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KeepFlying</author><text>I 100% feel this pain. And for security updates and major fixes, I see the need for frequent updates.&lt;p&gt;Though setting aside practicality for a bit I wish we would design software to be more backwards compatible so old versions of things could continue to work for longer. I shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to buy a new phone every three years, for example.&lt;p&gt;Also for a tool like Audacity, I rarely need to update it. It doesn&amp;#x27;t depend on a service, so I don&amp;#x27;t need to worry about an API falling out of support and he security risks are much lower. I wish we could design more of our software to work this way.&lt;p&gt;Obviously for internet connected things like browsers this isn&amp;#x27;t possible as the security impacts are significantly higher, but why should I need to update Word every month if I don&amp;#x27;t plan to use the online components, for example.</text></comment>

<story><title>Rethinking the computer ‘desktop’ as a concept</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui-doesnt-work-anymore-d276271bfa40</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rakoo</author><text>Because in practice if you don&amp;#x27;t push people to update, they just don&amp;#x27;t update. And then complain about bugs, security issues, bad performance, missing features, etc... all available in the updates they have been postponing for years.</text></item><item><author>amelius</author><text>&amp;gt; If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background.&lt;p&gt;How did we update software in the 80s? Simple, by taking an action: inserting the floppy with the new software, starting the update program, etc.&lt;p&gt;Why can&amp;#x27;t it be like that? (Except the floppies replaced by opening a menu and clicking &amp;quot;update&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;Why do updates have to be performed at a pace controlled by the vendor of the software and why do I need to be reminded about updates?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll just install them when I think I need them, thank you.</text></item><item><author>blowski</author><text>It’s a balance though isn’t it. If they hide everything away so as to respect your time, then another user will be frustrated by the constant magic going on in the background. Even you might want more prompts in some situations.&lt;p&gt;Maybe some applications could have an alert mode, similar to logging levels. But then it will probably get more buggy.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I rarely get annoyed by the number of popups in most of my software. I’ll happily take a few extra dialog boxes for extra control.</text></item><item><author>KeepFlying</author><text>That dialog also invokes so many issues with computers today.&lt;p&gt;When I open a program, I want to use that program. I don&amp;#x27;t want to update it, I don&amp;#x27;t want to see all the new features, I want to USE it. I opened it because I had a task to complete and all this junk is getting in my way.&lt;p&gt;And same when I close a program, as the author hits on very well.&lt;p&gt;Basically, the computer&amp;#x2F;program&amp;#x2F;etc always wants me to do something for it, but it never asks for those things at an opportune time.&lt;p&gt;No, I don&amp;#x27;t want to update my computer right now, and no, updating overnight tonight isn&amp;#x27;t good either because I need to keep this program running until tomorrow. I understand that your new UX is better for me, and I&amp;#x27;m sure I&amp;#x27;ll love it, but forcing that on me right now is preventing me from doing what I need to do. I see your error dialog describing some odd issue, but I don&amp;#x27;t have time to triage that right now and decide to take the time to fix it.&lt;p&gt;I wish software would respect the human element more. My time and attention is valuable, please don&amp;#x27;t interrupt it carelessly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>catlifeonmars</author><text>Worse, they use that out of date software to run web servers, databases, etc. The next thing you know, millions of peoples PII is leaked.&lt;p&gt;I also wonder if there is a liability component to this that makes force updating a common pattern.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Smog in our brains</title><url>http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/smog.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>observation</author><text>You should be worried about IAQ - indoor air quality.&lt;p&gt;This is because you spend 90% of your time indoors.&lt;p&gt;It is also because IAQ is far worse than outdoor air quality. The kitchens of most homes would be closed down by inspectors if they were commercial.&lt;p&gt;Correctly ventilating a home with a ERV&amp;#x2F;HRV, bathroom ventilation and oven hood (harder than it sounds because many designs are snake oil) solves the problem. Few people have gone to such lengths, not even the wealthy.&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Building Performance Podcast&amp;quot; has more information if anybody&amp;#x27;s interested. There&amp;#x27;s a lot of good information online from US government websites.&lt;p&gt;Most American homes share a leaky wall with their garage. A garage with shelves of highly toxic substances that offgas through the wall when the weather gets hotter.&lt;p&gt;I intend to design my home so it does not contain these drawbacks.</text></comment>

<story><title>Smog in our brains</title><url>http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/smog.aspx</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Terr_</author><text>I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if some future historians are able to look back at modern cities the same way that we look at granny pictures of a soot-streaked city of the industrial revolution.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, some of them thought that it was bad to have all that stuff around, but most thought it wasn&amp;#x27;t too serious compared to the immediate economic benefit it brought.&amp;quot;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first &apos;Full Self-Driving&apos; fatality</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2024/tesla-full-self-driving-fatal-crash/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ra7</author><text>These two were idiots, but this highlights the dangers of L2 driver assistance systems (misleadingly marketed as &amp;quot;Full Self Driving&amp;quot;) that requires driver attention at all times to prevent accidents. It gives you a false sense of security and there&amp;#x27;s no guarantee you&amp;#x27;ll take over in time to prevent an accident.&lt;p&gt;If you give dumb toys to people, they will use it in dumb ways. This is why Waymo&amp;#x2F;Google abandoned their driver assistance efforts a decade ago and jumped straight to driverless. That turned out to be a masterstroke in terms of safety.</text></item><item><author>redserk</author><text>&amp;gt; Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit — a level of intoxication that would have hampered his ability to maintain control of the car, experts said.&lt;p&gt;The details make this seem less of an autonomous driving issue and more of an incredibly irresponsible operation issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LeFantome</author><text>I totally agree with what you say. Certainly “Full Self Driving” should be illegal marketing for level 2 autonomy.&lt;p&gt;That said, cars are dumb toys to give people. Certainly access to cars is dangerous for people that are going to use them while drunk. “Sense of security” or not, why were these guys in control of a vehicle?&lt;p&gt;While autonomous vehicles are not ready, this event just cements the need for them in my mind. I expect that they have already saved more lives than they have cost. Some continue to insist that replacing human drivers is a high bar. In edge cases and for the best drivers, it is. Collectively though, evidence suggests that the bar is very low and that we have already surpassed it.&lt;p&gt;At this point, it is more of a “fairness” or “control” issue who gets hurt by autonomy than it is aggregate safety by the numbers. In this case, thankfully, it sounds like it was fair.</text></comment>

<story><title>Tesla worker killed in fiery crash may be first &apos;Full Self-Driving&apos; fatality</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2024/tesla-full-self-driving-fatal-crash/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ra7</author><text>These two were idiots, but this highlights the dangers of L2 driver assistance systems (misleadingly marketed as &amp;quot;Full Self Driving&amp;quot;) that requires driver attention at all times to prevent accidents. It gives you a false sense of security and there&amp;#x27;s no guarantee you&amp;#x27;ll take over in time to prevent an accident.&lt;p&gt;If you give dumb toys to people, they will use it in dumb ways. This is why Waymo&amp;#x2F;Google abandoned their driver assistance efforts a decade ago and jumped straight to driverless. That turned out to be a masterstroke in terms of safety.</text></item><item><author>redserk</author><text>&amp;gt; Von Ohain and Rossiter had been drinking, and an autopsy found that von Ohain died with a blood alcohol level of 0.26 — more than three times the legal limit — a level of intoxication that would have hampered his ability to maintain control of the car, experts said.&lt;p&gt;The details make this seem less of an autonomous driving issue and more of an incredibly irresponsible operation issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>redserk</author><text>This is more than Tesla and it&amp;#x27;s claims of &amp;quot;full self driving&amp;quot; though. People publish videos about doing reckless stuff with lane centering and adaptive cruise control tech in other vehicles as well.&lt;p&gt;This is a large issue that will take more than action against any individual manufacturer to solve.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Mac Pro Review</title><url>http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yapcguy</author><text>I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.</text></item><item><author>leephillips</author><text>AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.</text></item><item><author>M4v3R</author><text>AnandTech hardware and Ars Technica&amp;#x27;s software (especially OS X) reviews are works of art by themselves. The level of details that goes into these pieces is nothing short of amazing. They are examples of tech journaling done right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS.&lt;p&gt;Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge).&lt;p&gt;These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy (&amp;quot;I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too).&lt;p&gt;And they attribute their popularity to some BS &amp;quot;reality distortion&amp;quot; effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market.&lt;p&gt;So, &amp;quot;fawning over Apple&amp;quot; justs translates to &amp;quot;did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them&amp;quot;.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Mac Pro Review</title><url>http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yapcguy</author><text>I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.</text></item><item><author>leephillips</author><text>AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.</text></item><item><author>M4v3R</author><text>AnandTech hardware and Ars Technica&amp;#x27;s software (especially OS X) reviews are works of art by themselves. The level of details that goes into these pieces is nothing short of amazing. They are examples of tech journaling done right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makomk</author><text>I can see why. They&amp;#x27;ve been quite selective in what they compare the Mac Pro to in this review, for instance, because otherwise it wouldn&amp;#x27;t have come out so well. When they&amp;#x27;re arguing that it doesn&amp;#x27;t need expandability, they compare it to laptops and desktops that aren&amp;#x27;t expandable. Yet when it comes time to justify the pricing, they exclusively compare it to workstations that are aimed at a completely different market to desktops or laptops and have far more expansion options because that market expects them. If they compared the pricing to desktops and laptops or the expansion options to workstations, the Mac Pro would look a lot worse.</text></comment>

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<story><title>My thoughts on OCaml</title><url>https://osa1.net/posts/2023-04-24-ocaml-thoughts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spqr233</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t the author really gave Ocaml a chance. He argues that every language needs to have interfaces. I agree somewhat with that statement, but I think the truer statement is to say that every language needs to have some way of defining composition at a structural level.&lt;p&gt;An interface allows you to pass different &amp;quot;structures&amp;quot; to the same function so long as they adhere to the same spec. In Ocaml this is accomplished through modules, functors, and module signatures. Ocaml&amp;#x27;s module signature can play the same exact role as interfaces in Haskell, Rust or F#.&lt;p&gt;The module system is arguably more expressive than what can be accomplished to interfaces. To give an example, Ocaml suffers from the same problem as rust does with having two standard implementations of a async runtime. Just like rusts: tokio and async-std, ocaml has Lwt, Async, (and newly added to the mix Eio).&lt;p&gt;Whereas in rust most libraries just implement one of these systems, and you&amp;#x27;ll have to use compiler directives to support both. Ocaml&amp;#x27;s module system means that you can describe the async runtime as a signature and make your entire library generic to the async runtime it runs on top of. Most of the well-used libraries do this, and so you don&amp;#x27;t have to worry too much about which runtime you decide to use.&lt;p&gt;Clearly, a language that can do that must have in some place a system that can replace interfaces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hardwaregeek</author><text>Politely, I feel like this is the issue with OCaml as a community. You gave a beautiful answer about programming language design and composition. But how does it feel to write the language? How can you print a user defined data type? From reading around, it seems like your options are: explicitly pass a print function for that specific type, use a third party library for printing, or (my &amp;quot;favorite&amp;quot;) don&amp;#x27;t. Or how does it feel to write a function that takes a generic that can be printed, checked for equality, and read? Or to convert one type into another type?&lt;p&gt;And we&amp;#x27;re still talking about semantics here. How does it feel to use the language server? How does it feel to read the code? To build the language? Ultimately that&amp;#x27;s what users judge a language on. Yes, Rust in some ways has a worse form of abstraction. It is global, not fully generic and doesn&amp;#x27;t allow for overloading. But it creates a user experience that is nicer. It lets a user print something and compare two variables and do type conversions without having to scratch their head, read a forum post and import a library.</text></comment>

<story><title>My thoughts on OCaml</title><url>https://osa1.net/posts/2023-04-24-ocaml-thoughts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spqr233</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t the author really gave Ocaml a chance. He argues that every language needs to have interfaces. I agree somewhat with that statement, but I think the truer statement is to say that every language needs to have some way of defining composition at a structural level.&lt;p&gt;An interface allows you to pass different &amp;quot;structures&amp;quot; to the same function so long as they adhere to the same spec. In Ocaml this is accomplished through modules, functors, and module signatures. Ocaml&amp;#x27;s module signature can play the same exact role as interfaces in Haskell, Rust or F#.&lt;p&gt;The module system is arguably more expressive than what can be accomplished to interfaces. To give an example, Ocaml suffers from the same problem as rust does with having two standard implementations of a async runtime. Just like rusts: tokio and async-std, ocaml has Lwt, Async, (and newly added to the mix Eio).&lt;p&gt;Whereas in rust most libraries just implement one of these systems, and you&amp;#x27;ll have to use compiler directives to support both. Ocaml&amp;#x27;s module system means that you can describe the async runtime as a signature and make your entire library generic to the async runtime it runs on top of. Most of the well-used libraries do this, and so you don&amp;#x27;t have to worry too much about which runtime you decide to use.&lt;p&gt;Clearly, a language that can do that must have in some place a system that can replace interfaces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>v0idzer0</author><text>Came here to make this exact point. But I totally agree with all of his other complaints. It’s a good list of the cons, but ignored the many pros</text></comment>

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<story><title>I Don&apos;t Want Your Fucking App</title><url>http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edent</author><text>(I&apos;m the creator of the site)&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve noticed - and I may be wrong - that all the folk in the UK are unfazed by the swearing and have reacted quite positively either in person or on Twitter.&lt;p&gt;The Americans, by contrast, seem a lot more upset about the swearing. I wonder why that is?&lt;p&gt;Either way, I do wonder if some sections of the tech community are to... corporate in their approach to language. Look at the fuss when Linus went on a rant about Nvidia. That&apos;s how people speak in real life when they are angry or passionate. We shouldn&apos;t lose that simply because of a perceived lack of professionalism.&lt;p&gt;The swearing, in my tumblr&apos;s case, is designed to be repetitious to the point of banality. It is, if you like, an exercise in over-reaction.</text></item><item><author>Wintamute</author><text>How about we drop the prudishness, and discuss the points raised by the article? Seriously, what&apos;s with all the language moralising? This guys is totally free to make his points colourfully and passionately however he wants to. If it upsets you so much (it really shouldn&apos;t) then don&apos;t read it. His word choices are not hate speech or discriminatory so the fact that they may offend your sensibilities has precisely zero relevance to anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelfeathers</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The Americans, by contrast, seem a lot more upset about the swearing. I wonder why that is?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a prudish streak in the US that I really believe comes from the fact that the country was originally settled by people too religious and too concerned with overtly moral social interaction to be tolerated in 17th century England.&lt;p&gt;That may seem like too easy an explanation but I really do think there is some truth to it. Despite the excesses in American culture, that sort of casual swearing still gets backlash when it goes beyond people who are familiar with each other.</text></comment>

<story><title>I Don&apos;t Want Your Fucking App</title><url>http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edent</author><text>(I&apos;m the creator of the site)&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve noticed - and I may be wrong - that all the folk in the UK are unfazed by the swearing and have reacted quite positively either in person or on Twitter.&lt;p&gt;The Americans, by contrast, seem a lot more upset about the swearing. I wonder why that is?&lt;p&gt;Either way, I do wonder if some sections of the tech community are to... corporate in their approach to language. Look at the fuss when Linus went on a rant about Nvidia. That&apos;s how people speak in real life when they are angry or passionate. We shouldn&apos;t lose that simply because of a perceived lack of professionalism.&lt;p&gt;The swearing, in my tumblr&apos;s case, is designed to be repetitious to the point of banality. It is, if you like, an exercise in over-reaction.</text></item><item><author>Wintamute</author><text>How about we drop the prudishness, and discuss the points raised by the article? Seriously, what&apos;s with all the language moralising? This guys is totally free to make his points colourfully and passionately however he wants to. If it upsets you so much (it really shouldn&apos;t) then don&apos;t read it. His word choices are not hate speech or discriminatory so the fact that they may offend your sensibilities has precisely zero relevance to anything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>obviouslygreen</author><text>While I have no idea about other places (unfortunately), as an American, I find my countrymen (oh crap, should that be countrypersons?!) are indeed eye-rollingly oversensitive about profanity and political correctness in general.&lt;p&gt;It ends up being a good measure of a social situation. As soon as I decide I&apos;m around people that might be interesting, I will slowly decrease the child-friendliness of my language. The subtle reactions to the first use of &quot;fuck&quot; tells you a lot about how open-minded people are likely to be.&lt;p&gt;I can understand being careful in your use of language in corporate environments, simply because -- at least here -- offending the wrong people with colorful expression can easily compromise your employment or promotion opportunities. Granted, I&apos;d say that&apos;s not a great environment to work in, but some people don&apos;t have quite the flexibility in what they can do or where they can do it in terms of taking or leaving job opportunities.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Helping Cairo, the rendering library</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/helping-cairo.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>Unfortunate reality is that Cairo project doesn&amp;#x27;t want to be helped.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been checking Cairo from time to time for a very long time. There was a period of active development because it was used by FireFox and, I think, had at least one dev working on it paid by Intel.&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s no indication that the project wants your help. See &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cairographics.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cairographics.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; and try to find the part that tells you how to submit a patch. To submit a bug you need to use a mailing list or antiquated bugzilla instance.&lt;p&gt;Cairo is ostensibly a Gnome-affiliated project as it&amp;#x27;s used in Gtk. Federico is a big deal in Gnome project.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s telling that he had to setup up essentially a personal fork of Cairo on gitlab to do any work.&lt;p&gt;At this point in time, moving the code officially to GitHub (or GitLab) from anongit.freedesktop.org should be a no brainer if your goal is to have contributors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tetromino_</author><text>You are claiming that Cairo doesn&amp;#x27;t want to be helped, but your actual complaint seems to be that Cairo uses a development workflow that you personally dislike and see as old-fashioned.</text></comment>

<story><title>Helping Cairo, the rendering library</title><url>https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/helping-cairo.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kjksf</author><text>Unfortunate reality is that Cairo project doesn&amp;#x27;t want to be helped.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been checking Cairo from time to time for a very long time. There was a period of active development because it was used by FireFox and, I think, had at least one dev working on it paid by Intel.&lt;p&gt;But there&amp;#x27;s no indication that the project wants your help. See &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cairographics.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cairographics.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; and try to find the part that tells you how to submit a patch. To submit a bug you need to use a mailing list or antiquated bugzilla instance.&lt;p&gt;Cairo is ostensibly a Gnome-affiliated project as it&amp;#x27;s used in Gtk. Federico is a big deal in Gnome project.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s telling that he had to setup up essentially a personal fork of Cairo on gitlab to do any work.&lt;p&gt;At this point in time, moving the code officially to GitHub (or GitLab) from anongit.freedesktop.org should be a no brainer if your goal is to have contributors.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>newnewpdro</author><text>They talk about patch submission in the downloads page git subsection, and the documentation page welcomes contributions in the first paragraph.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t speak for the Cairo project, but some projects prefer there to be a slight barrier to patch submissions to improve the signal:noise ratio. Anyone vested in a well-formed patch should be motivated enough to send an email to either a mailing list or any of the developers found in the git commit history. Reviewing patches takes significant time, so it can make sense to require the submitter to invest a bit of time before consuming yours as maintainer.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Target=&quot;_blank&quot; – An underestimated vulnerability (2016)</title><url>https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the-most-underestimated-vulnerability-ever/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Nagyman</author><text>I think&amp;#x2F;hope Chromium&amp;#x27;s recent announcement about &amp;quot;Expanding user protections on the web&amp;quot;, addresses the redirect issue:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; When the user interacts with content, things can also go wrong. One example that causes user frustration is when clicking a link opens the desired destination in a new tab, while the main window navigates to a different, unwanted page. Starting in Chrome 65 we&amp;#x27;ll also detect this behavior, trigger an infobar, and prevent the main tab from being redirected. This allows the user to continue directly to their intended destination, while also preserving the context of the page they came from.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.chromium.org&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;expanding-user-protections-on-web.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.chromium.org&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;expanding-user-protections...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Target=&quot;_blank&quot; – An underestimated vulnerability (2016)</title><url>https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/256-targetblank---the-most-underestimated-vulnerability-ever/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rdslw</author><text>Google considers (1) it unfixable:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Unfortunately, we believe that this class of attacks is inherent to the current design of web browsers and can&amp;#x27;t be meaningfully mitigated by any single website; in particular, clobbering the window.opener property limits one of the vectors, but still makes it easy to exploit the remaining ones.&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sites.google.com&amp;#x2F;site&amp;#x2F;bughunteruniversity&amp;#x2F;nonvuln&amp;#x2F;phishing-with-window-opener&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sites.google.com&amp;#x2F;site&amp;#x2F;bughunteruniversity&amp;#x2F;nonvuln&amp;#x2F;ph...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>Anecdotally I&amp;#x27;ve spoken to people who compete with Amazon private label in electronics and they tell me Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t care about quality, and that the factories they were buying from were known to be lower quality.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.</text></item><item><author>VBprogrammer</author><text>To be fair, Samsung had to scrap a whole phone model because of battery problems. The Boeing 787 suffered with problems of batteries catching fire (and according to some reports still does). It&amp;#x27;s a tricky problem to avoid.</text></item><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>They recalled a quarter million power banks because they were catching fire.&lt;p&gt;Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t have better quality control than anyone else.</text></item><item><author>jastanton</author><text>The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.</text></item><item><author>password1</author><text>&amp;gt; Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.&lt;p&gt;It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US&amp;#x2F;EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It&amp;#x27;s the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US&amp;#x2F;EU.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;their own&lt;/i&gt; name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.&lt;p&gt;Obviously it&amp;#x27;s grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it&amp;#x27;s an improvement.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spare_account</author><text>The issue, then, is how do I guarantee that the Anker branded product I&amp;#x27;m buying through Amazon is genuinely Anker manufactured. I&amp;#x27;m of the understanding that Amazon comingle stock from different supply chains in their warehouses so presumably I can&amp;#x27;t trust them to be supplying genuine hardware.</text></comment>

<story><title>Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>Anecdotally I&amp;#x27;ve spoken to people who compete with Amazon private label in electronics and they tell me Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t care about quality, and that the factories they were buying from were known to be lower quality.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.</text></item><item><author>VBprogrammer</author><text>To be fair, Samsung had to scrap a whole phone model because of battery problems. The Boeing 787 suffered with problems of batteries catching fire (and according to some reports still does). It&amp;#x27;s a tricky problem to avoid.</text></item><item><author>ikeboy</author><text>They recalled a quarter million power banks because they were catching fire.&lt;p&gt;Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t have better quality control than anyone else.</text></item><item><author>jastanton</author><text>The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.</text></item><item><author>password1</author><text>&amp;gt; Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.&lt;p&gt;It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US&amp;#x2F;EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It&amp;#x27;s the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US&amp;#x2F;EU.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.</text></item><item><author>Pxtl</author><text>Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;their own&lt;/i&gt; name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.&lt;p&gt;Obviously it&amp;#x27;s grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it&amp;#x27;s an improvement.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VRay</author><text>AmazonBasics isn&amp;#x27;t any more trustworthy than any of the junk you find on AliExpress or at Wal-Mart&amp;#x2F;Target&amp;#x2F;Best Buy. (Except that it has a good return policy backing it, I think)</text></comment>

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<story><title>WebAssembly techniques to speed up matrix multiplication</title><url>https://jott.live/markdown/mm_wasm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>Another technique is to transpose the left matrix so each dot product is scanned in row-order and hence more cache friendly.&lt;p&gt;Another one I tried ages ago is to use a single loop counter and &amp;quot;de-interleave&amp;quot; the bits to get what would normally be 3 distinct loop variables. For this you need to modify the entry in the result matrix rather than having it write-only. It has the effect of accessing like a z-order curve but in 3 dimensions. It&amp;#x27;s a bit of overhead, but you can also unroll say 8 iterations (2x2x2) which helps make up for it. This ends up making good use of both caches and even virtual memory if things don&amp;#x27;t fit in RAM. OTOH it tends to prefer sizes that are a power of 2.</text></comment>

<story><title>WebAssembly techniques to speed up matrix multiplication</title><url>https://jott.live/markdown/mm_wasm</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zwieback</author><text>Very cool!&lt;p&gt;My question: will this kind of thing become more mainstream? I&amp;#x27;ve seen the web emerge, go from static pages to entire apps being delivered and executed in the browser. The last bastion of native apps and libraries seems to be highly optimized algorithms but maybe those will also migrate to a deliver-from-the-web and execute in some kind of browser sandbox.&lt;p&gt;Java promised to deliver some version of native code execution but the Java app&amp;#x2F;applet idea never seemed to take off. In some ways it seems superior to what we have now but maybe the security concerns we had during that era held Java back too much. Or am I misunderstanding what WebAssembly can bring to the game?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Swedes rebelling against a cashless society (2018)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43645676</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>johnlorentzson</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m Swedish and this stuff makes me really worried. Especially since the main way for two people to exchange small amounts of money is through a proprietary app that uses a proprietary ID system (owned by a for-profit company) that only runs on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.&lt;p&gt;I really hope this trend dies off, a cash-less society is a terrible idea.&lt;p&gt;I will say, however, that buses not taking cash is perfectly fine. They use NFC&amp;#x2F;RFID ticket cards which can&amp;#x27;t identify you. Not being able to buy tickets with cash is a little less fine.</text></comment>

<story><title>Swedes rebelling against a cashless society (2018)</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43645676</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>notRobot</author><text>Being able to pay through cards and phones is super convenient, but cash should never not be an option.&lt;p&gt;Card companies, payment apps and banks are constantly tracking your purchases and profiling you. This data can be leaked&amp;#x2F;stolen&amp;#x2F;sold, and is always available to governments and those in&amp;#x2F;with power.&lt;p&gt;Cash is (almost completely) anonymous. You should always be able to pay with cash if you want.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple Reports Second Quarter Results</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smiley1437</author><text>How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s departure?&lt;p&gt;The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;thinness at the expense of everything else&amp;#x27; mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robenkleene</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;qz.com&amp;#x2F;376041&amp;#x2F;the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-charts&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;qz.com&amp;#x2F;376041&amp;#x2F;the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-cha...&lt;/a&gt;), there was an impression at the Apple that the future of the Mac is iOS. Then that growth leveled off, and now iPad looks more like a comparable category to Macs (see the more recent Six Colors graphs &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sixcolors.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;apples-record-second-quarter-in-charts&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sixcolors.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;apples-record-second-quar...&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive&amp;#x27;s had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.&lt;p&gt;Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...&lt;p&gt;The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &amp;amp;$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I&amp;#x27;d personally consider the start of the dark years (and I&amp;#x27;d also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that&amp;#x27;s the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple Reports Second Quarter Results</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smiley1437</author><text>How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s departure?&lt;p&gt;The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;thinness at the expense of everything else&amp;#x27; mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vulcan01</author><text>Speculation on why Jony Ive pursued &amp;quot;thinness above everything&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick&lt;p&gt;- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner&lt;p&gt;- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive&lt;p&gt;- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive&lt;p&gt;- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn&amp;#x27;t stop.&lt;p&gt;- snowball effect and we got those horrible products&lt;p&gt;- he had to leave to stop the cycle</text></comment>

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<story><title>Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks</title><url>http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits&lt;p&gt;The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things.&lt;p&gt;I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it&apos;s not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we&apos;re not praising people who might actually need help.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know. I probably didn&apos;t say that as well as I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>Part of me has the reaction you labeled prudish, too. The other part of me thinks this is sort of a rich-people&apos;s problem caused by a cognitive surplus and a societal decision to subsidize whatever he is doing right now, probably because he is a student. Yeah, Minecraft might be wasted time, but it isn&apos;t obviously more wasted than time spent acing the heck out of a degree in Studio Art. [I&apos;m slagging excessively on art degrees. I simulated logic circuits for my Computer Engineering courses -- built an entire CPU, one line of VRML or whatever it is called at a time. It &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; has no practical application because it was thirty years behind state of the art, but it was a learning experience.]&lt;p&gt;Besides, the nice thing about students is that they have the rest of their lives to do something important.&lt;p&gt;I mean, personal experience here: to at least some degree, what I will do today is important: I&apos;m helping a company help their thousands of customers help their millions of customers. Yay. If you were to flip back five years to the second, I think I was probably in a WoW raid. And there were spreadsheets for that WoW raid, and a complicated compensation system to maximize participation from 60+ participants (40 on any given night), and political issues, and blah blah blah. Five years later, does anyone remember that we killed the dragon and got the purple pixels in 3 hours instead of in 5 because of obsessive optimization? Probably not. Did obsessive optimization really help me out in the intervening five years? Oh heck yes. Is it going to help my client out today? Oh heck yes, except 5% of &quot;really freaking big number&quot; is better than 5% of what my sales are.&lt;p&gt;Who knows where this kid will be in five years? He could be an architect. He could be a project lead. He could do something &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; important, like being a dad.</text></comment>

<story><title>Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks</title><url>http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/28/working-computer-mad.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits&lt;p&gt;The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things.&lt;p&gt;I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it&apos;s not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we&apos;re not praising people who might actually need help.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t know. I probably didn&apos;t say that as well as I could.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Volscio</author><text>Maybe you&apos;re on the wrong forum. Hackers do stuff just because they&apos;re curious.&lt;p&gt;[edit: he should have a monetization strategy!!]</text></comment>

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<story><title>Why Many Cities Have No Money</title><url>http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vvpan</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it&amp;#x27;s city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store, swimming pool, park, woods is an easy _walk_ away. The traffic through the town was even disallowed, which opened up a giant traffic-free area for us to play around as kids and elderly to use for socializing and to run their errands. For ease of visualizing here&amp;#x27;s an aerial photo of said town in early 00s: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;sj9t3Jy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;sj9t3Jy.jpg&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>csydas</author><text>I live in Russia at the moment and probably the most startling thing is how well planned many of the cities and towns are and how very clearly these cities were not made for cars. While it&amp;#x27;s a hassle for vehicle traffic because the roads were never designed to handle everyone owning a car, the benefit is that no matter where you live there is a shop nearby for essentials (groceries, clothing stores, repairs, cafe&amp;#x27;s, etc), transit is readily availble even in the smallest of towns and fairly affordable. I spent time in Pereslavl-Zalessky about 140 km north of moscow and was surprised that even a relatively small town had faster and more regular public transit than most of the cities I&amp;#x27;ve lived in in the US.&lt;p&gt;Granted it all comes with a slight adjustment to get used to some of the holdovers of life in the USSR, but when I lived in Seattle, it used to be if I missed the bus I had to wait ~30+ minutes for the next one home, and I needed to plan whether I&amp;#x27;d take a side trip to get groceries or not, adding an additional mile or two to my walk home. Here it&amp;#x27;s nice to just be able to walk a few hundred meters at most to the nearest store for groceries.</text></comment>

<story><title>Why Many Cities Have No Money</title><url>http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vvpan</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t say much about mathematics of taxes described in the article, but I always thought that Soviet Union got a lot of it&amp;#x27;s city planning very much right. Even a small town is built as a relatively tight formation of high-rises, yet leaving plenty of public space and greenery in the middle. The quality of life in the town that I grew up in is super high, because everything one might need: school, hospital, store, swimming pool, park, woods is an easy _walk_ away. The traffic through the town was even disallowed, which opened up a giant traffic-free area for us to play around as kids and elderly to use for socializing and to run their errands. For ease of visualizing here&amp;#x27;s an aerial photo of said town in early 00s: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;sj9t3Jy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;sj9t3Jy.jpg&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sologoub</author><text>Well, they got walkability mostly right, but living in those panel boxes was still not great. I&amp;#x27;d never want to go back to that...&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find the 5-8 story setups of cities like Paris, Barcelona or Rome much more appealing - enough density to make all the good things like walkability and local cafes happen, but no blocked out sun (Like in NYC) or need to climb to 20th floor when the elevator gives out for the nth time.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian</title><url>https://jonathancarter.org/2024/08/29/orphaning-bcachefs-tools-in-debian/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peppermint_gum</author><text>&amp;gt;not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit&lt;p&gt;It feels like whenever the author of bcachefs comes up, it&amp;#x27;s always because of some drama.&lt;p&gt;Just the other day he clashed with Linus Torvalds: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;CAHk-=wj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v=VAsBceWCRLhWxy7_-QnSa1Ng@mail.gmail.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;CAHk-=wj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v=VAsB...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My reading is that he&amp;#x27;s very passionate, so he wants to &amp;quot;move fast and break things&amp;quot; and doesn&amp;#x27;t get why the others aren&amp;#x27;t necessarily very happy about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ants_everywhere</author><text>Hey at least it&amp;#x27;s not the worst behavior we&amp;#x27;ve seen from a Linux file system creator...&lt;p&gt;I thought Carl Thompson&amp;#x27;s response was very good and constructive: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;[email protected]&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;1816164937.417.1724473375169@ma...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I don&amp;#x27;t understand is that IIUC Kent has his development git history well broken up into small tight commits. But he seems to be sending the Linux maintainers patches that are much larger than they want. I don&amp;#x27;t get why he doesn&amp;#x27;t take the feedback and work with them to send smaller patches.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The culture at Google (where Kent used to work) was small patches, although that did vary by team. At Google you have fleet-wide control and can roll back changes that looked good in testing but worked out poorly in production. You can&amp;#x27;t do that across all organizations or people who have installed bcachefs. Carl pointed out that Kent seemed to be missing some social aspects, but I feel like he&amp;#x27;s also not fully appreciating the technical aspects behind why the process is the way it is.</text></comment>

<story><title>Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian</title><url>https://jonathancarter.org/2024/08/29/orphaning-bcachefs-tools-in-debian/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peppermint_gum</author><text>&amp;gt;not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit&lt;p&gt;It feels like whenever the author of bcachefs comes up, it&amp;#x27;s always because of some drama.&lt;p&gt;Just the other day he clashed with Linus Torvalds: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;CAHk-=wj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v=VAsBceWCRLhWxy7_-QnSa1Ng@mail.gmail.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lore.kernel.org&amp;#x2F;lkml&amp;#x2F;CAHk-=wj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v=VAsB...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My reading is that he&amp;#x27;s very passionate, so he wants to &amp;quot;move fast and break things&amp;quot; and doesn&amp;#x27;t get why the others aren&amp;#x27;t necessarily very happy about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ralferoo</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s very clear from that thread that he doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the purpose of the stable branch. It doesn&amp;#x27;t mean &amp;quot;stable&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;the best possible experience&amp;quot;, it means it as in &amp;quot;this code has been tested for a long period of time with no serious defects found&amp;quot; so that when the stable branch is promoted to release, everything has undergone a long testing period by a broad user base.&lt;p&gt;If there is a defect found, the change to a stable branch should literally be the minimal code change to fix the reported issue. Ideally, if it&amp;#x27;s a newly introduced issue (i.e. since being on the stable branch), the problematic code reverted and a different fix to the original defect applied instead (or left if it&amp;#x27;s deemed less of an issue than taking another speculative fix). Anything that requires a re-organisation of code, by definition, isn&amp;#x27;t a minimal fix. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s the correct long-term solution, but that can be done on the unstable branch, but for the stable branch, the best fix is the simplest work around. If there isn&amp;#x27;t a simple work around, the best fix is to revert everything back to the previous stable version and keep iterating on the unstable branch.&lt;p&gt;The guy even admits it as well with his repeated &amp;quot;please don&amp;#x27;t actually use this in production&amp;quot; style messages - it&amp;#x27;s hard to give a greater indication than this that the code isn&amp;#x27;t yet ready for stable.&lt;p&gt;I can understand why from his perspective he wants his changes in the hands of users as soon as possible - it&amp;#x27;s something he&amp;#x27;s poured his heart and soul and he strongly believes it will improve his users&amp;#x27; experience. It&amp;#x27;s also the case that &lt;i&gt;he&lt;/i&gt; is happy running the very latest and probably has more confidence in it that an older version. The rational choice from his perspective is to always use the latest code. But, discounting the extremely unlikely situation that his code is entirely bug free, that just means he hasn&amp;#x27;t yet found the next serious bug. If a big code change is rushed out into the stable branch, it just increases the likelihood that any serious bug won&amp;#x27;t have the time it needs in testing to have the confidence that&amp;#x27;s the branch is suitable for promotion to release.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Stop Using the Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy</title><url>http://www.joshlehman.com/thoughts/stop-using-the-cup-of-coffee-vs-0-99-cent-app-analogy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>If I see something that is both &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;in-app purchases&amp;quot;, it already &lt;i&gt;greatly&lt;/i&gt; reduces the chance I&amp;#x27;ll even bother to download because &lt;i&gt;so damned many&lt;/i&gt; of these are just &lt;i&gt;terrible&lt;/i&gt; experiences. On the off chance I bother to look one step further and preview the &amp;quot;top in-app purchases&amp;quot;, I usually see something totally unsurprising like the absurd &amp;quot;$9.99 gem bags&amp;quot; or whatever.&lt;p&gt;Please, please just start charging for apps again. I &lt;i&gt;specifically&lt;/i&gt; search for &amp;quot;pay once and never again&amp;quot; apps now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Stanleyc23</author><text>I know people who have worked in the big mobile gaming companies and I can tell you that you&amp;#x27;re not in their target revenue generating demographic. They have those gem bags for the &amp;#x27;whales&amp;#x27; that will spend hundreds or even thousands on a game to offset all other lower or zero ROI users.&lt;p&gt;Power law strikes again.</text></comment>

<story><title>Stop Using the Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy</title><url>http://www.joshlehman.com/thoughts/stop-using-the-cup-of-coffee-vs-0-99-cent-app-analogy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>If I see something that is both &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;in-app purchases&amp;quot;, it already &lt;i&gt;greatly&lt;/i&gt; reduces the chance I&amp;#x27;ll even bother to download because &lt;i&gt;so damned many&lt;/i&gt; of these are just &lt;i&gt;terrible&lt;/i&gt; experiences. On the off chance I bother to look one step further and preview the &amp;quot;top in-app purchases&amp;quot;, I usually see something totally unsurprising like the absurd &amp;quot;$9.99 gem bags&amp;quot; or whatever.&lt;p&gt;Please, please just start charging for apps again. I &lt;i&gt;specifically&lt;/i&gt; search for &amp;quot;pay once and never again&amp;quot; apps now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanalltogether</author><text>If Apple and Android had a separate search&amp;#x2F;install&amp;#x2F;purchase experience based around demoing games and unlocking the full version, I would buy so much more then I currently do.</text></comment>

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<story><title>To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/to-protect-against-weaponized-drones-we-must-understand-their-key-strengths</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>The article has a good intro, and then never goes on to discuss the &amp;quot;key strengths&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s just clickbait. They&amp;#x27;re also late to the party on this. The US professional military has been discussing this for over a decade.&lt;p&gt;There have already been more than a half dozen articles on drones in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College&amp;#x27;s journal. &amp;quot;The coercive logic of militant drone use&amp;quot; [1] is worth reading. This covers how non-state groups have used drones, what worked and what didn&amp;#x27;t. The US Army is unused to fighting under a hostile sky, and now, a few times, they&amp;#x27;ve had to. &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;In 2017, then commander of US Special Operations Command General Raymond A. Thomas noted, “[the] most daunting problem [of 2016] was an adaptive enemy who, for a time, enjoyed tactical superiority in the airspace under our conventional air superiority in the form of commercially available drones and fuel-expedient (?) weapons systems, and our only available response was small arms fire.”&lt;/i&gt; They also mention a drone disabling an Israeli naval vessel in 2006.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s been a lot more military use of drones than is generally realized. Much of it is for recon. Commercial hobbyist drones are more than good enough for finding out what the enemy is up to, and most drone use by militant groups is for that.&lt;p&gt;So far, that article indicates, drones have been unable to yield a decisive advantage in any conflict. At least to militant groups.&lt;p&gt;Not many people read Parameters. That paper has only 65 downloads. More should.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;press.armywarcollege.edu&amp;#x2F;cgi&amp;#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=3069&amp;amp;context=parameters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;press.armywarcollege.edu&amp;#x2F;cgi&amp;#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>To protect against weaponized drones, we must understand their key strengths</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/to-protect-against-weaponized-drones-we-must-understand-their-key-strengths</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ProjectArcturis</author><text>Drones are the new aircraft carriers. That is, pre-WWII, the dominant naval ship was the battleship. Heavily armored, with enormous guns, military planners expected that the battle for the Atlantic and Pacific would be carried out by these monsters slugging it out. Though there were hints that planes could be quite effective against ships, few admirals realized that the longer range of an aircraft carrier would make the battleships effectively obsolete in ship-ship battles. And after all, they&amp;#x27;d spent a ton of money producing those battleships, and developing doctrine. Would you really want to throw that all away on some newfangled novelty?&lt;p&gt;After Pearl Harbor, it became clear that the answer should have been Yes.&lt;p&gt;Drones offer overwhelming advantages -- they&amp;#x27;re cheap and disposable. A drone generally costs less than the US missile used to shoot it down. You can lose 100 of them, and there will be no lives lost on your side.&lt;p&gt;During WWII, by 1943 the European theater was essentially decided, except for a lot of killing. The US was producing tanks and planes so quickly that it was simply mathematically impossible for the Germans to counter them. Will the same thing happen when China decides to throw its manufacturing capacity into war drones?</text></comment>

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<story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&amp;#x27;t understand it&amp;#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&amp;#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&amp;#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fred_durst</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll bring up a point here only because I feel like the HN crowd is on the younger side. Its not until your late 20&amp;#x27;s and really 30&amp;#x27;s that you start to find out about and see people you&amp;#x27;ve known in the past that were intelligent, productive people who&amp;#x27;s lives have been completely destroyed due to their drug addictions. And yes, I&amp;#x27;ve certainly had friends who are 40+ and barely hold down a job and live off friends and family because they were&amp;#x2F;are addicted to marijuana. It definitely happens, don&amp;#x27;t kid yourself.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if the correct solution is to criminalize it, but please keep in mind that drugs change who you are. That is truly the unique thing about them compared to other addictions. And again, if you think heavy marijuana use doesn&amp;#x27;t change a person, you don&amp;#x27;t know any heavy marijuana users.&lt;p&gt;For example, banning alcohol and marijuana probably isn&amp;#x27;t going to work, but selling bottles of cheap vodka at the grocery store 24&amp;#x2F;7 is setting up a lot of people who are trying to get clean to fail.</text></comment>

<story><title>The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don&amp;#x27;t understand it&amp;#x27;s effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can&amp;#x27;t think of even one legitimate reason for it&amp;#x27;s prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggy2011</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve heard anti legalisation advocates suggest that prohibition of alcohol would indeed be a positive thing and were alcohol a new drug then it should be criminalised. However prohibition attempts (of alcohol) are doomed to fail because of how much drinking is entwined with our culture. For example pubs or bars being focal points of the community, wine being a common meal accompaniment etc. Marijuana doesn&amp;#x27;t have the same culture built around it , except for a minority of stoners.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Why there isn’t an Apache Arrow article in Wikipedia</title><url>https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Open source projects are particularly tricky for Wikipedia. There are tens of thousands of them. Their owners are often passionate. They compete with each other, so there&amp;#x27;s incentive to write hard-to-adjudicate competing claims. Many have commercial backing, which further warps incentives. The projects themselves are highly technical; many, like Arrow, are software development tools and components. There are few authoritative sources that reliably track open source projects. Keeping up involves directly following bug trackers and message boards and then synthesizing a narrative, which is the definition of &amp;quot;original research&amp;quot;, forbidden in the encyclopedia.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s likely that Arrow does deserve a WP article. But Arrow&amp;#x27;s sponsors misunderstand more about Wikipedia than Wikipedia does about Arrow. Writing a defensible article about their project will require work; in particular, they&amp;#x27;re going to need to spend the time tracking down authoritative sources for why Arrow is notable, and those claims will probably need to be something more persuasive than &amp;quot;hundreds of companies use it&amp;quot;; hundreds of companies use all sorts of things that don&amp;#x27;t, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t, be featured in their own encyclopedia articles.&lt;p&gt;I understand the impulse behind &amp;quot;this project is important; it should have a Wikipedia article&amp;quot;. But when you take a step back and accept what Wikipedia actually is, rather than what you think it should be, you&amp;#x27;re left with the question: do we really need to feature this particular piece of software in its own encyclopedia article? 20 years from now, will people still be getting value from it? Whatever value that might be, will it outweigh the 20 years of other people&amp;#x27;s volunteer efforts to maintain the article, keeping it free of vandalism and ensuring that it doesn&amp;#x27;t surreptitiously turn into a promotion piece for some company or another?&lt;p&gt;The answers might be &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. But I don&amp;#x27;t see much evidence in this piece considered the questions.&lt;p&gt;Lots of things that don&amp;#x27;t seem deserving have in-depth Wikipedia coverage. Many of those things probably really don&amp;#x27;t belong in an encyclopedia! But there are two sides to this problem: the merit of the topic, and the cost, in volunteer time, of including them. A marginal topic can be defensible if it&amp;#x27;s easy to reliably cover it. A seemingly important technical topic might not be if the only way to say anything interesting about it is to write original research directly into its article.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Late edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A useful tip for getting your open source project covered in its own Wikipedia article: don&amp;#x27;t have the Chief Marketing Officer of the company that owns the project write the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Analemma_</author><text>This is a great comment; I&amp;#x27;ll just add one other thing, which is something I&amp;#x27;ve mentioned before in arguments about Wikipedia: Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s goal is verifiability, NOT truth. &amp;quot;Truth&amp;quot; is &lt;i&gt;explicitly&lt;/i&gt; a non-goal of the Wikipedia project. For any given subject, Wikipedia is not meant to provide the truth about that subject, it&amp;#x27;s meant to be a summary and distillation of the existing reliable sources about it. If there are none, that&amp;#x27;s neither Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s fault nor its problem.&lt;p&gt;You can take issue with this goal, but that&amp;#x27;s how it works, and it&amp;#x27;s also how encyclopedias have always worked.</text></comment>

<story><title>Why there isn’t an Apache Arrow article in Wikipedia</title><url>https://www.dremio.com/why-apache-arrow-wikipedia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Open source projects are particularly tricky for Wikipedia. There are tens of thousands of them. Their owners are often passionate. They compete with each other, so there&amp;#x27;s incentive to write hard-to-adjudicate competing claims. Many have commercial backing, which further warps incentives. The projects themselves are highly technical; many, like Arrow, are software development tools and components. There are few authoritative sources that reliably track open source projects. Keeping up involves directly following bug trackers and message boards and then synthesizing a narrative, which is the definition of &amp;quot;original research&amp;quot;, forbidden in the encyclopedia.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s likely that Arrow does deserve a WP article. But Arrow&amp;#x27;s sponsors misunderstand more about Wikipedia than Wikipedia does about Arrow. Writing a defensible article about their project will require work; in particular, they&amp;#x27;re going to need to spend the time tracking down authoritative sources for why Arrow is notable, and those claims will probably need to be something more persuasive than &amp;quot;hundreds of companies use it&amp;quot;; hundreds of companies use all sorts of things that don&amp;#x27;t, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t, be featured in their own encyclopedia articles.&lt;p&gt;I understand the impulse behind &amp;quot;this project is important; it should have a Wikipedia article&amp;quot;. But when you take a step back and accept what Wikipedia actually is, rather than what you think it should be, you&amp;#x27;re left with the question: do we really need to feature this particular piece of software in its own encyclopedia article? 20 years from now, will people still be getting value from it? Whatever value that might be, will it outweigh the 20 years of other people&amp;#x27;s volunteer efforts to maintain the article, keeping it free of vandalism and ensuring that it doesn&amp;#x27;t surreptitiously turn into a promotion piece for some company or another?&lt;p&gt;The answers might be &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. But I don&amp;#x27;t see much evidence in this piece considered the questions.&lt;p&gt;Lots of things that don&amp;#x27;t seem deserving have in-depth Wikipedia coverage. Many of those things probably really don&amp;#x27;t belong in an encyclopedia! But there are two sides to this problem: the merit of the topic, and the cost, in volunteer time, of including them. A marginal topic can be defensible if it&amp;#x27;s easy to reliably cover it. A seemingly important technical topic might not be if the only way to say anything interesting about it is to write original research directly into its article.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Late edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;A useful tip for getting your open source project covered in its own Wikipedia article: don&amp;#x27;t have the Chief Marketing Officer of the company that owns the project write the article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re basically into the deletionist vs. inclusionist debate that is at least somewhat orthogonal to what laypeople think of as notability. Is a Pokemon character notable. Not really?? But because of the enthusiastic fan base tons have been written about them.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, whether you&amp;#x27;re talking open source projects beyond the big names, corporate executives, or just people who are reasonably well known within fairly large communities, there just isn&amp;#x27;t a lot of independently sourced published material about them, especially in mainstream pubs--which (somewhat both understandably and ironically) Wikipedia tends to prefer. You even have people with tons of hits on Google but there isn&amp;#x27;t a ton of info &lt;i&gt;about&lt;/i&gt; them online.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?</title><url>http://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-economist-too-far/238050</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mentos</author><text>Anyone that hasn&amp;#x27;t yet, check out Black Mirror on Netflix. It has a lot of ideas in it that I am surprised to see in a show in 2016.&lt;p&gt;I love Elon Musk but I think he is solving the wrong problem when it comes to making human beings a space faring species. The fragility of human flesh is the barrier to colonizing space. You can try to solve this problem by wrapping it in a contained atmosphere or wait a thousand years and send humans to Mars in a different kind of space ship. One made of metal and silicon that can recharge its batteries so long as it has a line of sight on a distant star.. maybe as the article says: &amp;quot;a robotic body [standing] roughly two millimeters tall&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The greatest challenge we face is keeping this incubator called Earth alive long enough for us to develop the technology to abandon our flesh. But I imagine if that day ever comes what it means to be human will have been destroyed in the end anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mburns</author><text>&amp;gt;or wait a thousand years and send humans to Mars in a different kind of space ship.&lt;p&gt;Pardon the pun, but why on Earth should we wait 1000 years (or whatever it actually takes) for something when we don&amp;#x27;t have to?&lt;p&gt;Our fragile human flesh in a contained atmosphere works well enough and we&amp;#x27;re roughly capable of doing it now, give or take a couple decades.&lt;p&gt;Then we have 900+ years to improve the containers we use to maintain our preferred atmosphere while waiting for whatever form this futuristic species you describe takes.</text></comment>

<story><title>Is This Economist Too Far Ahead of His Time?</title><url>http://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-economist-too-far/238050</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mentos</author><text>Anyone that hasn&amp;#x27;t yet, check out Black Mirror on Netflix. It has a lot of ideas in it that I am surprised to see in a show in 2016.&lt;p&gt;I love Elon Musk but I think he is solving the wrong problem when it comes to making human beings a space faring species. The fragility of human flesh is the barrier to colonizing space. You can try to solve this problem by wrapping it in a contained atmosphere or wait a thousand years and send humans to Mars in a different kind of space ship. One made of metal and silicon that can recharge its batteries so long as it has a line of sight on a distant star.. maybe as the article says: &amp;quot;a robotic body [standing] roughly two millimeters tall&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The greatest challenge we face is keeping this incubator called Earth alive long enough for us to develop the technology to abandon our flesh. But I imagine if that day ever comes what it means to be human will have been destroyed in the end anyways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>elevensies</author><text>I think brain-upload is probably the only way to do interstellar travel, even if you synthesize a new body on the other side. For someone alive today, if you want to do interstellar or non-colonization space travel, going after immorality is the best option IMO.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think that earth-preservation is a worthwhile quest on a personal level. There are dozens of people who could destroy the whole planet since the invention of nukes. And with climate change for example, any kind of proportionate action would require an agreement between giant (100M to 1B+ people) political organizations to voluntarily makes themselves less wealthy -- although making tech that is greener and cheaper&amp;#x2F;better is probably the most significantly helpful option.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Reverse Engineering a NAND Flash Device Management Algorithm</title><url>http://joshuawise.com/projects/ndfslave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwise0</author><text>Ha, yes, good point :-) I didn&amp;#x27;t write about that, but I did take some pictures of failed attempts at that.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s one of the first things I did, actually. After dumping the contents of the flash off, I went on Amazon and hit &amp;#x27;reorder&amp;#x27; on the same SD card that I&amp;#x27;d bought before. Unfortunately, it was not the same: in the picture [1], the left is the one I&amp;#x27;d purchased this time, and the right is the one I&amp;#x27;d destroyed. The deals that low-cost SD card makers get on NAND flash vary greatly from day to day, so they just manufacture based on whatever controller and flash combination they can get cheapest on any given day: even the same SKU is unlikely to stay the same internally very long.&lt;p&gt;I did also try soldering to the BGA pads on the damaged one [2] [3], but no joy: I imagine that there were some traces that went backwards on the board before going towards the controller (for instance, to meet the TSOP leads), and on inserting the SD card into my laptop, I still had no signs of life.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-11.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-11.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-13.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-13.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-15.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-15.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Coko</author><text>I realize that this whole process was more than just data recovery (it&amp;#x27;s a very valuable learning experience too), but if it was &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; about data recovery, couldn&amp;#x27;t he buy another SD card and re-solder the IC from the broken board to the new one?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>flashsd</author><text>5 minutes of googling == 6 months of reverse engineering :)&lt;p&gt;recovery tools for SM2683EN flash controller: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usbdev.ru/files/smi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usbdev.ru&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;smi&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;xor formulas and block structure for Transcend card: &lt;a href=&quot;http://flash-extractor.com/library/SM/EN2683/EN2683b%20BA__ec_de_d5_7a__2x2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;flash-extractor.com&amp;#x2F;library&amp;#x2F;SM&amp;#x2F;EN2683&amp;#x2F;EN2683b%20BA__e...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Reverse Engineering a NAND Flash Device Management Algorithm</title><url>http://joshuawise.com/projects/ndfslave</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwise0</author><text>Ha, yes, good point :-) I didn&amp;#x27;t write about that, but I did take some pictures of failed attempts at that.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s one of the first things I did, actually. After dumping the contents of the flash off, I went on Amazon and hit &amp;#x27;reorder&amp;#x27; on the same SD card that I&amp;#x27;d bought before. Unfortunately, it was not the same: in the picture [1], the left is the one I&amp;#x27;d purchased this time, and the right is the one I&amp;#x27;d destroyed. The deals that low-cost SD card makers get on NAND flash vary greatly from day to day, so they just manufacture based on whatever controller and flash combination they can get cheapest on any given day: even the same SKU is unlikely to stay the same internally very long.&lt;p&gt;I did also try soldering to the BGA pads on the damaged one [2] [3], but no joy: I imagine that there were some traces that went backwards on the board before going towards the controller (for instance, to meet the TSOP leads), and on inserting the SD card into my laptop, I still had no signs of life.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-11.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-11.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-13.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-13.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://joshuawise.com/photos/etc/sd-card/sd-fux-15.xscale.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;joshuawise.com&amp;#x2F;photos&amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sd-card&amp;#x2F;sd-fux-15.xscale.jp...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>Coko</author><text>I realize that this whole process was more than just data recovery (it&amp;#x27;s a very valuable learning experience too), but if it was &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; about data recovery, couldn&amp;#x27;t he buy another SD card and re-solder the IC from the broken board to the new one?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tytytytyty</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m always humbled when I see other peoples soldering skills. goddamn. And I love reading this type of stuff, doing things just &amp;quot;because&amp;quot;. I found a rusty usb under a overpass a few months ago, after some cleaning&amp;#x2F;soldering&amp;#x2F;tricks I was finally able to read it and it turned out to be some kids schoolwork from 3 years ago haha&lt;p&gt;on a side I would suggest posting this over at hackaday, the marketers-pretending-to-be-hackers crowd here won&amp;#x27;t appreciate this.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/maker_faire_and_science_education_american_kids_should_be_building_rockets_and_robots_not_taking_standardized_tests_.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krschultz</author><text>&apos;We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. &apos;&lt;p&gt;When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal that surrounded an egg. The metal shop teacher piled weights on everyone&apos;s in the class until the eggs broke.&lt;p&gt;In 8th grade (2001), they let us use MIG welders and the project was to make a crane with the maximum cantilever given a set of counterweights and a limited amount of 1/8&quot;x1&quot; steel. I remember the entire class standing around watching as we piled weights up until they failed spectactulary.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a coincidence that those are some of my (few) vivid memories of middle school. I remember being bored in a lot of classes that simply weren&apos;t challenging enough, but never in metal shop or science class.&lt;p&gt;They don&apos;t even have metal or wood shop in the middle school anymore. They barely have it in the high school. It&apos;s probably some combination of safety and budget, but can anyone imagine the school allowing basically 13 year olds to handle MIG welders anymore? It gets hot! Or sheet metal in 11 year olds hands? It&apos;s sharp!&lt;p&gt;By high school all of the best and brightest are maxing out AP classes for college applications. There is no time left for &apos;fun&apos; classes like metal shop if you aren&apos;t going to trade school. (That becomes quite apparent when you get to college and there are mechanical engineer majors who can&apos;t work a hand drill.)&lt;p&gt;If we lose all of this stuff, we are going to lose the next generation of engineers. FIRST robotics is a great program, but we need more things like it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smacktoward</author><text>Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now that we&apos;ve outsourced the making of things to China, there&apos;s no perceived need for learning how things are made anymore; they just &lt;i&gt;get made&lt;/i&gt;, somewhere out of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.&lt;p&gt;This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who &lt;i&gt;knew how things worked&lt;/i&gt; -- I knew how to &lt;i&gt;break&lt;/i&gt; my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to &lt;i&gt;fix&lt;/i&gt; them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That&apos;s less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D</text></comment>

<story><title>Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests</title><url>http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/maker_faire_and_science_education_american_kids_should_be_building_rockets_and_robots_not_taking_standardized_tests_.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>krschultz</author><text>&apos;We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. &apos;&lt;p&gt;When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal that surrounded an egg. The metal shop teacher piled weights on everyone&apos;s in the class until the eggs broke.&lt;p&gt;In 8th grade (2001), they let us use MIG welders and the project was to make a crane with the maximum cantilever given a set of counterweights and a limited amount of 1/8&quot;x1&quot; steel. I remember the entire class standing around watching as we piled weights up until they failed spectactulary.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a coincidence that those are some of my (few) vivid memories of middle school. I remember being bored in a lot of classes that simply weren&apos;t challenging enough, but never in metal shop or science class.&lt;p&gt;They don&apos;t even have metal or wood shop in the middle school anymore. They barely have it in the high school. It&apos;s probably some combination of safety and budget, but can anyone imagine the school allowing basically 13 year olds to handle MIG welders anymore? It gets hot! Or sheet metal in 11 year olds hands? It&apos;s sharp!&lt;p&gt;By high school all of the best and brightest are maxing out AP classes for college applications. There is no time left for &apos;fun&apos; classes like metal shop if you aren&apos;t going to trade school. (That becomes quite apparent when you get to college and there are mechanical engineer majors who can&apos;t work a hand drill.)&lt;p&gt;If we lose all of this stuff, we are going to lose the next generation of engineers. FIRST robotics is a great program, but we need more things like it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GFKjunior</author><text>My grandfather was a welder and had a workshop in the back of his house. He took pride in being able to build anything and not buy it from the store, if anything he owned ever broke he would hack it himself.&lt;p&gt;When I was a youngin, about 12, I used to watch him work for a few hours during the day then sneak back to the workshop in the middle of the night while everyone was sleeping. I would fire up the torch and start experimenting with all the scrap metals. Playing with a plasma torch at midnight with no supervision was probably very dangerous but it taught met the importance of being a builder in world of consumers.</text></comment>

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<story><title>We want to make Nix better</title><url>https://determinate.systems/posts/we-want-to-make-nix-better</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Jeaye</author><text>Writing the packaging expressions should not be harder than writing the program, for the average developer. The average developer doesn&amp;#x27;t know FP, at this point. Nix needs:&lt;p&gt;1. Approachability for those not indoctrinated in lazy, declarative, functional programming (i.e. Haskell); nope, Nix Pills are not sufficient for the average dev&lt;p&gt;2. Editor tooling to help guide the writing of expressions (just as anyone learning C# or Rust can use LSP); a better type system for Nix would help here&lt;p&gt;3. Better documentation for practical things like &amp;quot;Using Nix to manage the dependencies and package a C++ program using Meson&amp;quot;, rather than having people piece this together from a bunch of disparate docs&lt;p&gt;4. A much better CLI UX than `nix-env -qa` and the like (this is ongoing and experimental, but even that broke recently, causing lots of confusion; now it requires `nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes search nixpkgs`)&lt;p&gt;5. To seriously answer the question: is the Nix language required for the Nix packaging system to exist? Laziness is required, to some degree, but can the next iteration provide an on-ramp which doesn&amp;#x27;t involve learning a new lang and paradigm? Guix folks sure think so.&lt;p&gt;I feel like Nix folks have been focused so long on solving the tough problems of declarative, deterministic packaging that they haven&amp;#x27;t been able to focus on the UX. I also feel like folks for whom Haskell is comfortable may not realize just how absurd it feels to everyone else. Perhaps like the early days of Git.&lt;p&gt;I do really hope Nix succeeds in this, though; I&amp;#x27;ve been using it, or it&amp;#x27;s been using me, for several years. [1] and [2] for more info.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jeaye.com&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;nixos&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jeaye.com&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;nixos&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jeaye.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;nixos-revisited&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.jeaye.com&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;nixos-revisited&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>We want to make Nix better</title><url>https://determinate.systems/posts/we-want-to-make-nix-better</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>grhmc</author><text>With Eelco as a cofounder of DetSys, I feel really excited about where we&amp;#x27;re going here. I think the world is in &lt;i&gt;many&lt;/i&gt; ways primed and ready for Nix, as long as we can help Nix &amp;quot;meet them in the middle.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re working on making Nix more accessible and producing good and usable, production-ready workflows so teams can just pick it up and go. I&amp;#x27;d love to hear what y&amp;#x27;all think, to help make sure we&amp;#x27;re going in the right direction.</text></comment>

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<story><title>KeePassXC: Beware of unofficial Microsoft Store listing</title><url>https://twitter.com/KeePassXC/status/1575081535442628609</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ls65536</author><text>The KeePassXC team has also been trying to get their app into the store while this has happened. While this is nothing new in general, it&amp;#x27;s yet another &amp;quot;counterfeit&amp;quot; app proliferating in what&amp;#x27;s supposed to be considered a trusted source to be able to get your applications from.&lt;p&gt;This is a good example of how &amp;quot;app stores&amp;quot; tend to provide a false sense of security about what you&amp;#x27;re really downloading. There are clearly failures in terms of vetting what&amp;#x27;s there and towards ensuring that the user is actually getting what they think they&amp;#x27;re supposed to be getting.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the &amp;quot;app store&amp;quot; model is still generally better than downloading executable code from completely random sources (nobody should be doing that), but I&amp;#x27;m not sure there&amp;#x27;s anything more reliable (and also &amp;quot;secure&amp;quot;) here than downloading a piece of software from its official source (such as from a server under the domain of the known publisher), verifying hashes&amp;#x2F;signatures, and leaving out as many intermediaries as possible who often have motives not fully aligned with the software user. Of course, this would require users to possess and be willing to use some knowledge of basic software and data hygiene, but it seems that along the way we have somewhat given up on that and so now we&amp;#x27;re stuck trusting these intermediaries usually much more than they ought to be trusted.</text></comment>

<story><title>KeePassXC: Beware of unofficial Microsoft Store listing</title><url>https://twitter.com/KeePassXC/status/1575081535442628609</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bongobingo1</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;store&amp;#x2F;search?hl=en-gb&amp;amp;gl=gb&amp;amp;icid=CNavAppsWindowsApps&amp;amp;publisher=CoderLearn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;store&amp;#x2F;search?hl=en-gb&amp;amp;gl=gb&amp;amp;icid=...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Seems the publisher probably skates on a few other free software projects like filezilla &amp;amp; vnc. I assume the free apps are simply spyware.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Celsius Execs Cashed Out $40M in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/celsius-execs-cashed-out-bitcoin-price-crypto-ponzi-1849623526</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pazimzadeh</author><text>Crypto is like the invention of ink that cannot be erased. How that technology would weaken trust and accountability is beyond me. It&amp;#x27;s literally perfect for finance (especially once multi-sig wallets become common). If Celsius had been more all-in on crypto tech, they would have had FEWER problems.&lt;p&gt;Also, I don&amp;#x27;t know any law that exempts crypto companies from being taken to court.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t prevent it, but it gives you recourse to make yourself whole again, and in a sense prevents a lot of funny business because people are afraid of getting caught and being put in jail.</text></item><item><author>pazimzadeh</author><text>Huh? If that was true then it would be services like AAVE or Uniswap which would be bankrupt, not the centralized finance Celsius.&lt;p&gt;The idea that the traditional legal system prevents funny business with money is naive.&lt;p&gt;9&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion Accounting Black Hole &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-black-231154593.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2020-01-22&amp;#x2F;pentagon-racks-up-35-trillion-in-accounting-changes-in-one-year&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2020-01-22&amp;#x2F;pentagon-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pentagon&amp;#x27;s Defense Logistics Agency loses track of $800m &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;world-us-canada-42954050&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;world-us-canada-42954050&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Oh hey look the consequences of a monetary system that isn&amp;#x27;t backed by a legal system (that is backed up by people with guns).&lt;p&gt;The reason fiat money works is because at the end of the day if you run into trouble you have the legal system to make things right. And if the perpetrator of the crime doesn&amp;#x27;t listen to the legal system, there are people with guns&amp;#x2F;violence to back that up. That&amp;#x27;s why the whole system works -- because of the threat of violence.&lt;p&gt;Crypto doesn&amp;#x27;t have that. It has a lot of advantages (I use crypto myself) but it also has a big disadvantage, for now.&lt;p&gt;When the USA starts issuing it&amp;#x27;s own crypto they might solve this problem by requiring KYC to get the coins, but then of course you loose the anonymity aspect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; How that technology would weaken trust and accountability is beyond me. It&amp;#x27;s literally perfect for finance&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because modern legal systems and modern economies work on the assumption that malfeasance is a reason to un-do what crypto systems want to make indelible. This is an &lt;i&gt;obvious and obviously good&lt;/i&gt; thing to people who are not absorbed by this odd groupthink. That impedance mismatch is an excellent indicator of why this technology is viewed as stuff for cranks and grifters, even were there useful applications to be had for the public.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Also, I don&amp;#x27;t know any law that exempts crypto companies from being taken to court.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;...while at the same time the crypto community is wracked by disposable entities fleeing into the night, beyond any practical legal reach.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if somebody compromises your debit card, Bank of America will make you whole while they reverse the transactions on the backend.</text></comment>

<story><title>Celsius Execs Cashed Out $40M in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers</title><url>https://gizmodo.com/celsius-execs-cashed-out-bitcoin-price-crypto-ponzi-1849623526</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pazimzadeh</author><text>Crypto is like the invention of ink that cannot be erased. How that technology would weaken trust and accountability is beyond me. It&amp;#x27;s literally perfect for finance (especially once multi-sig wallets become common). If Celsius had been more all-in on crypto tech, they would have had FEWER problems.&lt;p&gt;Also, I don&amp;#x27;t know any law that exempts crypto companies from being taken to court.</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t prevent it, but it gives you recourse to make yourself whole again, and in a sense prevents a lot of funny business because people are afraid of getting caught and being put in jail.</text></item><item><author>pazimzadeh</author><text>Huh? If that was true then it would be services like AAVE or Uniswap which would be bankrupt, not the centralized finance Celsius.&lt;p&gt;The idea that the traditional legal system prevents funny business with money is naive.&lt;p&gt;9&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion Accounting Black Hole &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-black-231154593.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-...&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2020-01-22&amp;#x2F;pentagon-racks-up-35-trillion-in-accounting-changes-in-one-year&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2020-01-22&amp;#x2F;pentagon-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pentagon&amp;#x27;s Defense Logistics Agency loses track of $800m &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;world-us-canada-42954050&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;world-us-canada-42954050&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jedberg</author><text>Oh hey look the consequences of a monetary system that isn&amp;#x27;t backed by a legal system (that is backed up by people with guns).&lt;p&gt;The reason fiat money works is because at the end of the day if you run into trouble you have the legal system to make things right. And if the perpetrator of the crime doesn&amp;#x27;t listen to the legal system, there are people with guns&amp;#x2F;violence to back that up. That&amp;#x27;s why the whole system works -- because of the threat of violence.&lt;p&gt;Crypto doesn&amp;#x27;t have that. It has a lot of advantages (I use crypto myself) but it also has a big disadvantage, for now.&lt;p&gt;When the USA starts issuing it&amp;#x27;s own crypto they might solve this problem by requiring KYC to get the coins, but then of course you loose the anonymity aspect.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&amp;gt; Crypto is like the invention of ink that cannot be erased. How that technology would weaken trust and accountability is beyond me.&lt;p&gt;The other important aspect of a working financial system is the ability for a 3rd party (courts&amp;#x2F;law enforcement) to undo transactions. Crypto makes that impossible without the cooperation of the offender.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/vannevar-bush</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ricksunny</author><text>I think the most enduring mystery of #Vannevar Bush is why his name is no longer a household one today, in the way that Edison&amp;#x27;s is or that we have every reason to expect Musk&amp;#x27;s to be 80 years from now.&lt;p&gt;This is one article that speaks to that, notably writing from 1990. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.latimes.com&amp;#x2F;archives&amp;#x2F;la-xpm-1990-05-24-fi-444-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.latimes.com&amp;#x2F;archives&amp;#x2F;la-xpm-1990-05-24-fi-444-st...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I do recommend reading what remains the only biography of Vannevar, &amp;quot;Endless Frontier&amp;quot;, written by the same author as OP&amp;#x27;s article, G Pascal Zachary. It is quite good. The subject probably merits multiple biographies just as many other pivotal people in history also have multiple biographies to provide different angles or more nuance as more information comes to light.</text></item><item><author>ricksunny</author><text>I gave a talk on Vannevar Bush &amp;amp; innovation at a &amp;#x27;pop-up city&amp;#x27; just two weeks ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.google.com&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;11rXfniJtbvzAgSMv2WpxGWsRkjXucre23mtRriTtpls&amp;#x2F;edit?usp=drivesdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.google.com&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;11rXfniJtbvzAgSMv2Wpx...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;He really transformed US innovation. Some good, some questionable, and some stories probably yet to be told. Hope you enjoy. I&amp;#x27;m working on uploading the video of the talk here over the next couple of days. If any questions I&amp;#x27;ll try to field them here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tcmart14</author><text>My guess is that because Bush, from my memory of everything I learned about him, was mostly behind the scenes. Edison for example, kept himself in the news as the face of everything, even doing photo-ops to present himself as an eccentric genius. Bush was preferred to be glue behind the scenes for the most part. Probably like how we may all know Eisenhower as the face of D-Day, who yes, played a big role, but none of us probably know the name of the guy on his staff who handled every excruciating detail of the logistics of it all (which is probably one of the most impressive parts of D-Day).&lt;p&gt;Addition: Also sort of like how everyone knows Edison as the man behind the light bulb, but not very many people can name the people on Edison&amp;#x27;s team that helped with the light bulb.</text></comment>

<story><title>Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/vannevar-bush</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ricksunny</author><text>I think the most enduring mystery of #Vannevar Bush is why his name is no longer a household one today, in the way that Edison&amp;#x27;s is or that we have every reason to expect Musk&amp;#x27;s to be 80 years from now.&lt;p&gt;This is one article that speaks to that, notably writing from 1990. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.latimes.com&amp;#x2F;archives&amp;#x2F;la-xpm-1990-05-24-fi-444-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.latimes.com&amp;#x2F;archives&amp;#x2F;la-xpm-1990-05-24-fi-444-st...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I do recommend reading what remains the only biography of Vannevar, &amp;quot;Endless Frontier&amp;quot;, written by the same author as OP&amp;#x27;s article, G Pascal Zachary. It is quite good. The subject probably merits multiple biographies just as many other pivotal people in history also have multiple biographies to provide different angles or more nuance as more information comes to light.</text></item><item><author>ricksunny</author><text>I gave a talk on Vannevar Bush &amp;amp; innovation at a &amp;#x27;pop-up city&amp;#x27; just two weeks ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.google.com&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;11rXfniJtbvzAgSMv2WpxGWsRkjXucre23mtRriTtpls&amp;#x2F;edit?usp=drivesdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.google.com&amp;#x2F;presentation&amp;#x2F;d&amp;#x2F;11rXfniJtbvzAgSMv2Wpx...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;He really transformed US innovation. Some good, some questionable, and some stories probably yet to be told. Hope you enjoy. I&amp;#x27;m working on uploading the video of the talk here over the next couple of days. If any questions I&amp;#x27;ll try to field them here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>transpute</author><text>Good article, thanks.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; Bush knew how to map, build and manage the relationships and organizations necessary to get things done. He knew how to craft the human networks that could build the technological networks.. At OSRD’s height.. roughly two-thirds of the nation’s physicists were working for him.. Bush ambiguously noted that his role was far more administrative than technical: “I made no technical contribution to the war effort,” he wrote. “Not a single idea of mine ever amounted to shucks. At times, I have been called an ‘atomic scientist.’ It would be fully as accurate to call me a child psychologist.”&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>As cities grow in size, the poor &apos;get nothing at all&apos;: study</title><url>https://santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-study-prosperity-cities-benefits-few</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubano</author><text>Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can&amp;#x27;t really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office.&lt;p&gt;Why they don&amp;#x27;t kick me off is something I haven&amp;#x27;t been able to figure out, but I&amp;#x27;m grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week.&lt;p&gt;Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing &amp;quot;when cities grow&amp;quot;. What I&amp;#x27;ve seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts.&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I&amp;#x27;ve always been very much a loner so I don&amp;#x27;t really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t want to be poor like this, but I guess it&amp;#x27;s no one&amp;#x27;s fault but mine why I&amp;#x27;m in this predicament.&lt;p&gt;What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree &amp;quot;Escape&amp;quot; charge that&amp;#x27;s always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I&amp;#x27;ve moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;match&amp;quot; to the &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges.&lt;p&gt;I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I&amp;#x27;m sure think I&amp;#x27;m a super junkie who has 50 felonies.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really think it&amp;#x27;s fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that&amp;#x27;s happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don&amp;#x27;t you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren&amp;#x27;t we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways?&lt;p&gt;I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I&amp;#x27;ve applied for I&amp;#x27;ve gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Clewza313</author><text>For most employers 7 vs 50 felonies will make no difference, any number that&amp;#x27;s not zero will disqualify you.&lt;p&gt;Being upfront about your criminal record (including that it looks worse than it is) and&amp;#x2F;or explicitly targeting companies that have signed up to Ban the Box and&amp;#x2F;or the Fair Chance Pledge might help.</text></comment>

<story><title>As cities grow in size, the poor &apos;get nothing at all&apos;: study</title><url>https://santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-study-prosperity-cities-benefits-few</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cubano</author><text>Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can&amp;#x27;t really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office.&lt;p&gt;Why they don&amp;#x27;t kick me off is something I haven&amp;#x27;t been able to figure out, but I&amp;#x27;m grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week.&lt;p&gt;Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing &amp;quot;when cities grow&amp;quot;. What I&amp;#x27;ve seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts.&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I&amp;#x27;ve always been very much a loner so I don&amp;#x27;t really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff.&lt;p&gt;I really don&amp;#x27;t want to be poor like this, but I guess it&amp;#x27;s no one&amp;#x27;s fault but mine why I&amp;#x27;m in this predicament.&lt;p&gt;What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree &amp;quot;Escape&amp;quot; charge that&amp;#x27;s always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I&amp;#x27;ve moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;match&amp;quot; to the &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges.&lt;p&gt;I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I&amp;#x27;m sure think I&amp;#x27;m a super junkie who has 50 felonies.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t really think it&amp;#x27;s fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that&amp;#x27;s happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don&amp;#x27;t you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren&amp;#x27;t we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways?&lt;p&gt;I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I&amp;#x27;ve applied for I&amp;#x27;ve gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>metiscus</author><text>Have you looked into expungement? I&amp;#x27;m not super familiar with how it works and it does vary state to state but you may be able to fix some of the issues via that route. There might be some public legal aid available to help because I have heard the process can be expensive and time-consuming.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Learn to Code, It&apos;s Harder Than You Think</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2015/12/learn-to-code-its-harder-than-you-think.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulcole</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a big gulf between knowing how to code and working as a professional software developer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a writer for a marketing agency, but I write Google App Scripts, JavaScript, and PHP on a regular basis to automate tasks, try out ideas I have, etc.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no way I could work as a professional software developer, but I know how to code enough to help make my professional&amp;#x2F;personal life easier and more fun.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t there something to be said for that? Not every skill needs to lead directly to a job. Can&amp;#x27;t it just be another skill to have when you need it?&lt;p&gt;I learned to code through Codecademy and trial and error with frequent Stack Overflow searches. If I can figure it out, anyone can.&lt;p&gt;Edit: For anyone saying they would hire me, I&amp;#x27;m flattered but am very happy working as a writer who gets to program occasionally. If you&amp;#x27;re interested, here are two little projects I&amp;#x27;ve put together: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;playRollo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;playRollo.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;WriteByNumbers.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;WriteByNumbers.com&lt;/a&gt;. Feedback? Email me, [email protected].</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>empath75</author><text>As someone who &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a software developer, I can assure you that this is enough coding skill to get a job as a software developer. Being able to learn how to code is the important bit. A lot of places will expect you to learn how to do most of what you&amp;#x27;re doing as you go.</text></comment>

<story><title>Learn to Code, It&apos;s Harder Than You Think</title><url>http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2015/12/learn-to-code-its-harder-than-you-think.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulcole</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a big gulf between knowing how to code and working as a professional software developer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a writer for a marketing agency, but I write Google App Scripts, JavaScript, and PHP on a regular basis to automate tasks, try out ideas I have, etc.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no way I could work as a professional software developer, but I know how to code enough to help make my professional&amp;#x2F;personal life easier and more fun.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t there something to be said for that? Not every skill needs to lead directly to a job. Can&amp;#x27;t it just be another skill to have when you need it?&lt;p&gt;I learned to code through Codecademy and trial and error with frequent Stack Overflow searches. If I can figure it out, anyone can.&lt;p&gt;Edit: For anyone saying they would hire me, I&amp;#x27;m flattered but am very happy working as a writer who gets to program occasionally. If you&amp;#x27;re interested, here are two little projects I&amp;#x27;ve put together: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;playRollo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;playRollo.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;WriteByNumbers.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;WriteByNumbers.com&lt;/a&gt;. Feedback? Email me, [email protected].</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tfinniga</author><text>I agree.. I was talking with a CFO about one of his employees, who he called his secret weapon - an accountant with coding skills. The ability to do a regular job plus the ability to code is extremely valuable.&lt;p&gt;In architecture there is a trend of computational design - if you google for &amp;#x27;designed with grasshopper&amp;#x27;, you&amp;#x27;ll see some amazing shapes. The best designs don&amp;#x27;t come from the best programmers, they come from the best architects and designers who also know how to code.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would be possible for them to become professional programmers, but I think it&amp;#x27;s much more valuable for them to be hybrids. Not every job can benefit from coding skills, but software is eating the world and learning how to code is becoming more and more widely applicable and useful.&lt;p&gt;That said, I think most people can learn to code, but I don&amp;#x27;t think _everyone_ can learn how to code. I have worked with a few people in menial jobs that I honestly don&amp;#x27;t believe could learn how to code. I realize that this is a pedantic assertion about corner cases, but I am a programmer. :)</text></comment>

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<story><title>The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1</title><url>https://sha-mbles.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tambourine_man</author><text>This kind of thing always brings me down a bit. It&amp;#x27;s not rational, but it does.&lt;p&gt;I mean I truly admire these folks skills, the math involved is obviously remarkable.&lt;p&gt;But I think the feeling is related to not being able to rely on anything in our field. Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not security only, nothing seems to work in the long term. Imagine an engineer receiving a call at midnight about his bridge because gravity changed during daylight saving in a leap year. That&amp;#x27;s our field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WorldMaker</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s an MC Frontalot song called &amp;quot;Secrets from the Future&amp;quot; and the refrain is &amp;quot;You can&amp;#x27;t hide secrets from the future.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s something of a useful mantra to remind oneself that if &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; is a part of your threat model, yes your encryption likely isn&amp;#x27;t enough because on a long enough timescale it is likely &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; will crack it.&lt;p&gt;As with any other security issue, the question is &amp;quot;what is your threat model?&amp;quot; You can still justify encrypting your backup today if your threat model includes today&amp;#x27;s actors, however much you worry about &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;Or 10 years from now it might be the next Linear A tablets to confuse cryptoarcheologists, unreadable and untranslatable and entirely foreign. If &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot; is in your threat model, don&amp;#x27;t forget the other fun forms of entropy beyond encryption being cracked such as encodings changing, file formats falling out of service&amp;#x2F;compatibility, &amp;quot;common knowledge&amp;quot; about slang or memes lost to the ages leaving things indecipherable, and so on and so forth. Most of those things are probably unlikely on only a 10 year time horizon, but you never can tell with &amp;quot;the future&amp;quot;.</text></comment>

<story><title>The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1</title><url>https://sha-mbles.github.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tambourine_man</author><text>This kind of thing always brings me down a bit. It&amp;#x27;s not rational, but it does.&lt;p&gt;I mean I truly admire these folks skills, the math involved is obviously remarkable.&lt;p&gt;But I think the feeling is related to not being able to rely on anything in our field. Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not security only, nothing seems to work in the long term. Imagine an engineer receiving a call at midnight about his bridge because gravity changed during daylight saving in a leap year. That&amp;#x27;s our field.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>baddox</author><text>&amp;gt; Hard to justify going to the trouble of encrypting your backup. 10 years from now, it might be as good as plain text.&lt;p&gt;When has that happened? Public key cryptography and symmetric key cryptography are still doing fine as far as I&amp;#x27;m aware, and the latter doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem to be vulnerable to quantum computing.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, SHA-1 has been considered insecure for, what, at least 10 years? The fact that a cryptographic hash function has been widely considered insecure and widely recommended for deprecation a decade before a proof of concept even emerges is, to me, something to feel very good about.</text></comment>

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<story><title>What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00214-3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dopylitty</author><text>This is a really good article on the immune system.&lt;p&gt;One thing I can&amp;#x27;t help but notice though is that it only barely skirts the fact that essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection, with the possible exception of the HPV vaccine.&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of the vaccines we currently use allow infection but give the body the ability to quickly respond to and end the infection before it leads to severe disease (eg paralysis in Polio or B-cell destruction in Measles). For slowly developing viruses you may see no symptoms at all because the body is able to clear the infection but for viruses like flu and Sars-CoV-2 that attack the respiratory system it&amp;#x27;s much more difficult to prevent symptomatic disease.&lt;p&gt;Somehow there&amp;#x27;s this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.&lt;p&gt;The benefit of the vaccines is that they greatly reduce severe disease, almost eliminate death, and shorten the amount of time the virus has to reproduce so transmission and variant generation are also reduced.</text></comment>

<story><title>What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00214-3</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cloutchaser</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting reading about things other than antibody levels now in Nature as well. T-cell immunity was considered borderline conspiracy theory until recently.&lt;p&gt;I try to avoid conspiracy theories and think this was probably down to the way governments think and are advised, antibody levels mean an instant response in humans to a virus, so keeping them high during a pandemic probably made sense to advisors and politicians. But that ignores so much about the immune system.&lt;p&gt;I hope this narrative shift leads to some more nuanced decisions being made.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Introducing Go by Example</title><url>http://mmcgrana.github.com/2012/10/introducing-go-by-example.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aaronblohowiak</author><text>This is an old media presentation of something inherently interactive -- Alan Kay complains about how the wikipedia pages&apos; code examples aren&apos;t executable. There is already the well-developed &lt;a href=&quot;http://tour.golang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tour.golang.org/&lt;/a&gt;, which can be used freely.</text></comment>

<story><title>Introducing Go by Example</title><url>http://mmcgrana.github.com/2012/10/introducing-go-by-example.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pedoh</author><text>I&apos;ve never experimented with go, until now. I just ran all of the examples (found the mt=&amp;#62;fmt typo which I believe has been fixed). I think this is a great way to start, thank you for building it.&lt;p&gt;I have a few suggestions.&lt;p&gt;Make the code easily copyable. Under Chrome, at any rate, if you select the code you can&apos;t help but select your comments to the left of the code. I think that people running through the examples should type everything in line by line, but some people will prefer to copy and paste.&lt;p&gt;Also, it would be great to have some &quot;where to go from here&quot; links. I&apos;ve run the examples, now I want to write some useful code. Where should I go next?</text></comment>

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<story><title>MIT Turns Wi-Fi into Indoor GPS</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/mit-turns-wifi-into-indoor-gps</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fennecfoxen</author><text>&amp;gt; Although Chronos can run on existing Wi-Fi devices using just an app (or a firmware upgrade for an access point), each device has to undergo a one-time distance calibration.&lt;p&gt;I worked at at an indoor location-systems startup once. The real fun part of the system was integrating wifi-based location with streaming video from fixed-mount cameras to pinpoint location even better. But let me tell your right off: wifi calibration of the sort they&amp;#x27;re talking about can be incredibly obnoxious (think &amp;quot;carefully rolling a laptop in a cart at a constant speed around a space, in a grid&amp;quot;, which could easily be completed in an hour or two if you are really good at it, but might take a day or two to get right if you aren&amp;#x27;t.) Sure, this is all fine if you want to calibrate one or two indoor spaces for your automated drones, especially if you&amp;#x27;ve already got APs deployed in a location-friendly mode (i.e. more around the perimeter and less around the center, with antenna orientation to match), but don&amp;#x27;t expect to see it in a corner store near you anytime soon.&lt;p&gt;Now, if you can talk about automating the calibration you&amp;#x27;ll do quite well.</text></comment>

<story><title>MIT Turns Wi-Fi into Indoor GPS</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/mit-turns-wifi-into-indoor-gps</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdiez17</author><text>Very cool. They are using Time Difference of Arrival analysis[1], the fact that most devices have two or more antennas, and clever software to get 10-80 cm accuracy at a good enough frequency to be used as a positional reference in a quadcopter, see the paper[2] for more info&lt;p&gt;Existing indoor positioning systems such as Bluetooth LE beacons and WiFi triangulation[3] only use the RSSI value and trigonometry to figure out the position. This method is slow (5Hz or so) and the resolution of the RSSI is bad unless you sample it directly, eg with SDR (which incidentally, is what my dissertation is about!)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Multilateration#Principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Multilateration#Principle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;system&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;nsdi16&amp;#x2F;nsdi16-paper-vasisht.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usenix.org&amp;#x2F;system&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;conference&amp;#x2F;nsdi16&amp;#x2F;nsdi16...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.qualcomm.com&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;izat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.qualcomm.com&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;izat&lt;/a&gt; (unfortunately there are no public &amp;#x27;specs&amp;#x27; I can find...)</text></comment>

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<story><title>What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox</title><url>http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/03/01/what-did-not-happen-at-mtgox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>efuquen</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny how you took that last line completely out of context, the author was clearly tongue-in-cheek with that statement, here is the what comes &lt;i&gt;immediately&lt;/i&gt; after that sentence:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The community does not take itself seriously. Most importantly, no one pretends that Doge is an investment vehicle, a slayer of Wall Street, or the next Segway. No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item><item><author>nwh</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;But elliptic curve crypto is not one of these topics. If the code can generate a handful of Bitcoin account numbers and corresponding keys correctly, there is hardly any reason why it cannot do so for all account numbers and corresponding keys.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not totally true, not every input can yield a valid private key. The very upper ranges of the private key space are limited, as only integers 0x0 through 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140 are valid private keys for Bitcoin.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d have to be stupid unlucky to randomly generate an invalid private key, but it can possibly happen.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;If one must pick a cryptocurrency, the lowly dogecoin, of all things, is doing everything right. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, an ancient fork of Litecoin with a meme name is going to save us. Has absolutely no relevancy to the issue at hand of course.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwh</author><text>Eh, I hear that a lot but it&amp;#x27;s fairly far from the reality. It&amp;#x27;s a two faced presentation from that community, when the price of dogecoin goes up they get behind &amp;quot;doge to the moon&amp;quot;, if the price goes down it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;all for fun&amp;quot;. To pay for the amount of mining that is going on in altcoins, people &lt;i&gt;must&lt;/i&gt; be treating it as an investment vehicle, otherwise miners wouldn&amp;#x27;t be pulling upwards of 400BTC[0] a day out of the retched things.&lt;p&gt;[0]: Based on Middlecoin.com&amp;#x27;s performance a few weeks ago, before their hashrate dropped, they were pulling a clean 400BTC from dogecoin and friends (and this is only one single pool!). For them to be pulling 400BTC a day there must be considerably more volume going &lt;i&gt;into&lt;/i&gt; the altcoin markets beforehand. No doubt &amp;quot;investors&amp;quot; getting in on the &amp;quot;next big coin&amp;quot; and losing out.</text></comment>

<story><title>What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox</title><url>http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/03/01/what-did-not-happen-at-mtgox/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>efuquen</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny how you took that last line completely out of context, the author was clearly tongue-in-cheek with that statement, here is the what comes &lt;i&gt;immediately&lt;/i&gt; after that sentence:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The community does not take itself seriously. Most importantly, no one pretends that Doge is an investment vehicle, a slayer of Wall Street, or the next Segway. No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item><item><author>nwh</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;But elliptic curve crypto is not one of these topics. If the code can generate a handful of Bitcoin account numbers and corresponding keys correctly, there is hardly any reason why it cannot do so for all account numbers and corresponding keys.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not totally true, not every input can yield a valid private key. The very upper ranges of the private key space are limited, as only integers 0x0 through 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140 are valid private keys for Bitcoin.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d have to be stupid unlucky to randomly generate an invalid private key, but it can possibly happen.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;If one must pick a cryptocurrency, the lowly dogecoin, of all things, is doing everything right. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, an ancient fork of Litecoin with a meme name is going to save us. Has absolutely no relevancy to the issue at hand of course.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tomphoolery</author><text>Bitcoin is an experiment, it&amp;#x27;s not meant to be a new investment product. It should be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; clear to anyone involved that this is a volatile atmosphere and anything can happen. After all, it&amp;#x27;s really just a bunch of geeks with a website. There is no liability here.&lt;p&gt;That said, I do think the author was a bit naive about the Dogecoin reference. Weren&amp;#x27;t they implicated in some kind of fraud as well? Seems as though &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; is the primary reason why no one would store their life savings in Dogecoin.</text></comment>

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<story><title>We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bem94</author><text>I think a lot of the &amp;quot;oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea&amp;quot; &amp;#x2F; &amp;quot;not in my free society&amp;quot; comments are missing the point.&lt;p&gt;I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea &lt;i&gt;in this case&lt;/i&gt;, but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.&lt;p&gt;If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.&lt;p&gt;You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slowmovintarget</author><text>Things are awful because someone wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper?&lt;p&gt;I heartily disagree that anyone should &amp;quot;detect a consensus&amp;quot; from leftists preaching expropriation. That&amp;#x27;s just an ordinary activity for them. Nick Srnicek may be shouting a bit louder than most from his pulpit in The Guardian, but that has as little to do with truth as his article has to do with reason.&lt;p&gt;Google, Facebook, and Amazon are just fashionable targets for his emotional appeals for a more powerful state. He doesn&amp;#x27;t write about Monsanto in this article, even though they have an ever tightening control over the food we eat, because they aren&amp;#x27;t as well understood by the masses.&lt;p&gt;Bread and circuses. This is the circus part.</text></comment>

<story><title>We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bem94</author><text>I think a lot of the &amp;quot;oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea&amp;quot; &amp;#x2F; &amp;quot;not in my free society&amp;quot; comments are missing the point.&lt;p&gt;I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea &lt;i&gt;in this case&lt;/i&gt;, but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.&lt;p&gt;If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.&lt;p&gt;You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ckastner</author><text>&amp;gt; I think a lot of the &amp;quot;oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea&amp;quot; &amp;#x2F; &amp;quot;not in my free society&amp;quot; comments are missing the point.&lt;p&gt;They really aren&amp;#x27;t. Far larger, more entrenched monopolies have existed before; when they needed to be resolved, they were simply broken up.&lt;p&gt;Suggesting to nationalize them is not only entirely unnecessary, it contradicts decades of experience in dealing with monopolies.&lt;p&gt;IMHO, nationalizations are either bail-outs or power-grabs.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple’s Social Network</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2018/apples-social-network/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ethagknight</author><text>I don’t think he mentioned it, but the easy way for Apple to grow to a $2T company is to get my household, a typical locked-in Apple household with an iPad or iPhone for every person and a computer for each adult and an AppleTV at every TV, to start paying for ever more services through those Apple devices. TV service. Ubiquitous internet service. Financial services like payments but grow into banking. manage all my regularly scheduled bills like utilities, rent or mortgages. I would love for a trusted intermediary to handle these things.&lt;p&gt;I was recently taken aback by the amount of money I was paying for high-quality subscriptions “oh my god, I’ve paid $20&amp;#x2F;month for the last 12 months to subscribe to high quality streaming to Phish concerts via their app?!?” I signed up for it thinking I would only do it for a month. I forgot. I spent $240 on Phish audio, more than I spent on my Apple Watch. Apple’s real social network could be just getting started. Imagine if those “luxury” expenses were intermixed with a dozen other large, more legitimate bills? Apple could be processing $1000s a month per household, taking a hefty fee from some of them. And then launch a loyalty program :).&lt;p&gt;If I had to guess, I’d say this comment resembles Buffet’s view of Apple’s opportunity.</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple’s Social Network</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2018/apples-social-network/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oflannabhra</author><text>I appreciate that Ben took the time to read between the lines of what Apple has been saying, to tease out how Apple is thinking about Apple. It&amp;#x27;s clear that&amp;#x27;s why he has a successful business.&lt;p&gt;This article made me stop and think about Apple&amp;#x27;s future, and to be honest, the future of computing. I think it is clear that in 10 years mobile computing has reached maturity (which is astounding). There is no broad use-case advantage that iOS has over Android (ie, I can communicate on both of them, I can get directions on both, etc).&lt;p&gt;It seems as if we have reached a valley of sorts, in which the use-cases and potential businesses that can be built on top of a computing platform that is always connected, always with us are mostly tilled ground. Discovering and inventing new ones takes an enormous amount of effort and ingenuity. It would be easy to think that most of the disruption has already happened.&lt;p&gt;However, what surprises me is that Apple is doubling down on performance. The processing capability of iPhones continues to rise, even when we see that the software that uses that capability has diminishing returns.&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that Apple is playing the long game, and that they see the investments that they are making in performance will pay off greatly in the coming years, because suddenly our phone will be more powerful than our desktop. And, while it is easy to scoff at that as being unnecessary, I think it actually will begin to unlock new use-cases that will lead us out of the current &amp;quot;valley of diminishing returns.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The obvious candidate here is AR, but I think it actually is broader than that. It is clear that Apple is moving towards a system in which the iPhone is a computational Sun, around which multiple accessories &amp;quot;orbit&amp;quot;. I think such a system, taken into consideration along with cloud computing is actually incredibly exciting, and I think (as much as this audience might dislike it) that desktops and laptops truly are the current past.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dear Apple: Here’s How to Stop the Antitrust Investigations</title><url>https://astropad.com/dear-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gampleman</author><text>As a consumer of Apple products I am not too keen on any of these suggestions. I agree that developers for Apple&amp;#x27;s platforms would like these and perhaps there is some trickle-down effect for consumers.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 1: Enable users to set default app preferences.&lt;p&gt;Fine, but really Maps and Email is pretty much the only one I care about. This is the best suggestion of the bunch.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 2: Open up alternate payment mechanisms… without the Apple tax.&lt;p&gt;Nah. Last thing I want is to have to fill out my credit card information in every app and worry about what&amp;#x27;s going to happen with it. Apple Pay and IAP work perfectly adequately from the consumer standpoint.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 3: Allow sideloading of iOS apps.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think we have a problem with lack of iOS apps. In fact I wish App Store Review was stricter and took more issue with quality and dodgy business practices (i.e. excessive and addictive use of IAP).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.&lt;p&gt;What this is asking for is for Apple to effectively release features later or not at all. Or have some even more draconian App Store rules. I don&amp;#x27;t want every random app having full hardware access to spy on me as it pleases.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 5: Stop sherlocking third-party developers.&lt;p&gt;Right, so Apple is not supposed to give me free access to nice features so I can continue to pay money to someone else. Right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ph_</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; 1: Enable users to set default app preferences.&lt;p&gt;Fine, but really Maps and Email is pretty much the only one I care about. This is the best suggestion of the bunch.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That is what you care about, others might care about other default apps. That&amp;#x27;s why it should be freely configurable.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; 3: Allow sideloading of iOS apps.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think we have a problem with lack of iOS apps. In fact I wish App Store Review was stricter and took more issue with quality and dodgy business practices (i.e. excessive and addictive use of IAP).&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of course there is a scarcity of iOS apps. Specifically, a scarcity of good quality apps which introduce new capabilities. There is no scarcity of candy crush clones etc. But the way Apple handles the App Store, drives developers into developing me-too clones with in-app purchases.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; 4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.&lt;p&gt;What this is asking for is for Apple to effectively release features later or not at all. Or have some even more draconian App Store rules. I don&amp;#x27;t want every random app having full hardware access to spy on me as it pleases.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There might be a few APIs, where limiting public access is justified. In most cases, we are talking about access to useful and uncritical APIs. The more Apple limits access to these APIs, the more harm they do to the App eco system.</text></comment>

<story><title>Dear Apple: Here’s How to Stop the Antitrust Investigations</title><url>https://astropad.com/dear-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gampleman</author><text>As a consumer of Apple products I am not too keen on any of these suggestions. I agree that developers for Apple&amp;#x27;s platforms would like these and perhaps there is some trickle-down effect for consumers.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 1: Enable users to set default app preferences.&lt;p&gt;Fine, but really Maps and Email is pretty much the only one I care about. This is the best suggestion of the bunch.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 2: Open up alternate payment mechanisms… without the Apple tax.&lt;p&gt;Nah. Last thing I want is to have to fill out my credit card information in every app and worry about what&amp;#x27;s going to happen with it. Apple Pay and IAP work perfectly adequately from the consumer standpoint.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 3: Allow sideloading of iOS apps.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think we have a problem with lack of iOS apps. In fact I wish App Store Review was stricter and took more issue with quality and dodgy business practices (i.e. excessive and addictive use of IAP).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 4: Give third-party developers equal access to APIs.&lt;p&gt;What this is asking for is for Apple to effectively release features later or not at all. Or have some even more draconian App Store rules. I don&amp;#x27;t want every random app having full hardware access to spy on me as it pleases.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 5: Stop sherlocking third-party developers.&lt;p&gt;Right, so Apple is not supposed to give me free access to nice features so I can continue to pay money to someone else. Right.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bestnameever</author><text>&amp;gt; Nah. Last thing I want is to have to fill out my credit card information in every app and worry about what&amp;#x27;s going to happen with it. Apple Pay and IAP work perfectly adequately from the consumer standpoint.&lt;p&gt;I think the thing Astropad is missing is that the App Store is not there to just facilitate payment processing. As the name App Store describes, it is a store. Store&amp;#x27;s often have markup&amp;#x27;s of 30% or greater. That&amp;#x27;s how they make money. I guess you could argue that they have a monopoly of app stores on iOS but I&amp;#x27;m not sure that matters.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Right, so Apple is not supposed to give me free access to nice features so I can continue to pay money to someone else. Right.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t even think that is the argument. Their argument is that Apple should had tried to buy them because they came to market first. I think third-party developers should always be wary of what Apple is planning and have a plan to compete should Apple or whoever decide to expand their core functionality that mimics what they are doing.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Google CEO calls Gemini completely unacceptable, vows to make structural changes</title><url>https://www.semafor.com/article/02/27/2024/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-calls-ai-tools-responses-completely-unacceptable</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdtsc</author><text>If the results are as silly as the article suggests, I wonder if it could be deliberate sabotage. They know they can’t raise the issue normally, so go the other way, turn the dial to 11. Now it’s just ridiculous and is all over the media. The CEO himself is asking the dials to be turned back to 3.</text></item><item><author>tonymet</author><text>Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that the public did without serious reputational or occupational hazard.&lt;p&gt;The visible &amp;amp; spoken culture at Google, Meta, and most big tech companies is very much in favor of &amp;quot;anti-racism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ML-fairness&amp;quot;, though a large minority harbors criticisms in private conversation.&lt;p&gt;Any criticism of content or bias made during the bard&amp;#x2F;Gemini dogfooding phase would have been met swiftly with ostracization and possible termination.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>username332211</author><text>When you are required to listen and obey and not to think or question the difference between loyal obedience and sabotage becomes entirely theoretical.</text></comment>

<story><title>Google CEO calls Gemini completely unacceptable, vows to make structural changes</title><url>https://www.semafor.com/article/02/27/2024/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-calls-ai-tools-responses-completely-unacceptable</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rdtsc</author><text>If the results are as silly as the article suggests, I wonder if it could be deliberate sabotage. They know they can’t raise the issue normally, so go the other way, turn the dial to 11. Now it’s just ridiculous and is all over the media. The CEO himself is asking the dials to be turned back to 3.</text></item><item><author>tonymet</author><text>Having worked inside a few big tech companies, this outcome was practically inevitable. It would have been impossible for Googlers to raise the concerns that the public did without serious reputational or occupational hazard.&lt;p&gt;The visible &amp;amp; spoken culture at Google, Meta, and most big tech companies is very much in favor of &amp;quot;anti-racism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ML-fairness&amp;quot;, though a large minority harbors criticisms in private conversation.&lt;p&gt;Any criticism of content or bias made during the bard&amp;#x2F;Gemini dogfooding phase would have been met swiftly with ostracization and possible termination.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tonymet</author><text>it&amp;#x27;s about the only corrective measure that would have worked.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/the-dirty-secrets-of-a-smear-campaign</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AlbertCory</author><text>&amp;gt; When the officer left the room for a few minutes, Nada found himself alone with the case file. Desperate for answers, he riffled through it. The officer had written notes dismissing him as paranoid, Nada told me. (The local police and prosecutor declined to comment.) But the police had also obtained copies of requests for records about Lord Energy and a local mosque. Both had been filed by a Geneva-based private intelligence firm, Alp Services.&lt;p&gt;What an amazing stroke of luck! They left the room and &amp;quot;forgot&amp;quot; to bring the case file with them. I hope he thanked them afterwards.</text></comment>

<story><title>Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/the-dirty-secrets-of-a-smear-campaign</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kodah</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m all for seeing more justice around smear campaigns, however there&amp;#x27;s a long way to go. This is why I maintain a hefty chunk of skepticism around things that seem just a bit too coincidental and lack concrete, direct evidence. As the saying goes, a lie travels around the world in the time that the truth laces up it&amp;#x27;s boots.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Linux Mint Dumps Ubuntu Snap</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimhefferon</author><text>What distro? I use Ubuntu because I just want an OS, not a hobby.</text></item><item><author>Darmody</author><text>I can understand Canonical pushing for snaps. It&amp;#x27;s their product and they want it to succeed.&lt;p&gt;That said I hate their dirty ways. I find it even morally wrong. How can &amp;quot;sudo apt install chromium-browser&amp;quot; not install the apt package but install instead a snap? How I, as a user and also as a professional, trust Ubuntu if when I use their package manager I&amp;#x27;m being tricked?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t use Windows for a reason, more than one actually. I&amp;#x27;ve been using Ubuntu even with all the &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; stuff Canonical has been doing over the years but I think this is the nail in the coffin.&lt;p&gt;Right now I&amp;#x27;m using 20.04 but as soon as I finish some work I have left I&amp;#x27;ll install a fresh new distro.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dathinab</author><text>If you have linux experience Arch Linux can be a good idea.&lt;p&gt;Sure the daunting setup process would fall into the &amp;quot;a hobby&amp;quot; category but once it runs it tends to just keep running as long as you update it from time to time.&lt;p&gt;Using it now for ~5 Years and in that time I had two times problems one was that the new kernel version didn&amp;#x27;t work with my laptop and another which was fully my fault by doing some &amp;quot;special&amp;quot; boot setup with some custom self written package and not maintaining it. Oh and the only reasons they where problems was because I never setup recovery boot or boot prev. kernel version.&lt;p&gt;Besides that I remember having more work with maintaining Ubuntu when I used it ~8 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Also disclaimer I had some more work like setting up edurom with network manager without using any proper UI for it (nmtui...). It&amp;#x27;s doable but not properly documented. But non of this is a problem if you &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; use Gnome or KDE or at last part of the tooling from Gnome&amp;#x2F;KDE.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: But Fedora is probably what you are looking for. Widely used, well maintained and normally up to date.</text></comment>

<story><title>Linux Mint Dumps Ubuntu Snap</title><url>https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-dumps-ubuntu-snap/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimhefferon</author><text>What distro? I use Ubuntu because I just want an OS, not a hobby.</text></item><item><author>Darmody</author><text>I can understand Canonical pushing for snaps. It&amp;#x27;s their product and they want it to succeed.&lt;p&gt;That said I hate their dirty ways. I find it even morally wrong. How can &amp;quot;sudo apt install chromium-browser&amp;quot; not install the apt package but install instead a snap? How I, as a user and also as a professional, trust Ubuntu if when I use their package manager I&amp;#x27;m being tricked?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t use Windows for a reason, more than one actually. I&amp;#x27;ve been using Ubuntu even with all the &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; stuff Canonical has been doing over the years but I think this is the nail in the coffin.&lt;p&gt;Right now I&amp;#x27;m using 20.04 but as soon as I finish some work I have left I&amp;#x27;ll install a fresh new distro.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dima55</author><text>Just use Debian. Ubuntu is quite literally Debian+bullshit.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How Bell’s Theorem proved ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-bells-theorem-proved-spooky-action-at-a-distance-is-real-20210720/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Kranar</author><text>&amp;gt;They are identical in every way, except one is red and the other is blue. I randomly grab one in each hand and show my hands closed. Now the states of the ball are entangled: as soon as you see the color of one ball, that &amp;quot;determines&amp;quot; the color of the other.&lt;p&gt;This gets used to explain entanglement but it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. This is nothing that the ancient Greeks wouldn&amp;#x27;t have known.&lt;p&gt;Not to pick on you specifically, but do people really think it took a major revolution in physics in order to understand that if there are two balls, one is blue and one is red, then if you see one of the balls is red, you can conclude the other ball is blue?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s something that I think humans can solve at the age of 3.&lt;p&gt;The failure in your explanation is right when you state that &amp;quot;one of the balls is red and the other is blue&amp;quot;. The entire point of entanglement is that such a statement is not possible, that&amp;#x27;s a strictly classical interpretation. Rather, both balls are in a superposition of being both red and blue simultaneously, and it is not possible in principle to assign a color to either one of them until the moment a measurement is made.</text></item><item><author>tylerhou</author><text>A classical analogy for entanglement: suppose I have two balls in a bag. They are identical in every way, except one is red and the other is blue. I randomly grab one in each hand and show my hands closed. Now the states of the ball are entangled: as soon as you see the color of one ball, that &amp;quot;determines&amp;quot; the color of the other. (Not claiming that this is a perfect analogy, but I don&amp;#x27;t see where it diverges from how entangled quantum waves would behave.)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned.&lt;p&gt;The no-cloning theorem says that there exists no universal quantum machine that can perfectly clone an arbitrary quantum state. However, that does not preclude a machine that can imperfectly clone any quantum state, or machines that can perfectly clone some but not all quantum states [1]. (Clearly the information transferred to my brain is not a perfect copy of your brain&amp;#x27;s state, and your DNA is not perfectly copied every time.)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;quant-ph&amp;#x2F;9607018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;quant-ph&amp;#x2F;9607018&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not a bad analogy, but you have to be very careful here because no classical analogy can be a perfect fit for entanglement. The wave function is deeply and fundamentally different than our classical reality, and there is no way to reproduce its behavior classically. Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned. This is IMHO the single biggest disconnect between the wave function and classical reality because the nature of our (classical) existence is fundamentally intertwingled with copying (classical) information. It is happening right now even as you read this. Information is being copied out of my brain onto the internets and into your brain. At the same time, all our cells are busily copying the information in our DNA, and so on and so on.</text></item><item><author>ericb</author><text>If we were in a simulation, would the speed of light be the processing speed of the universe as each area re-renders, and spooky action at a distance be two variables pointed to the same memory location, populated with a lazy-loaded value, with copy-on-write semantics?&lt;p&gt;edit: seems like it is lazy loaded, so revised my summary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nikhilgk</author><text>&amp;gt; This gets used to explain entanglement but it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. This is nothing that the ancient Greeks wouldn&amp;#x27;t have known.&lt;p&gt;To be fair, this usually crops up in entanglement discussions to deomonstrate how it can&amp;#x27;t be used for FTL communication and not to actually explain what entanglement is.</text></comment>

<story><title>How Bell’s Theorem proved ‘spooky action at a distance’ is real</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-bells-theorem-proved-spooky-action-at-a-distance-is-real-20210720/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Kranar</author><text>&amp;gt;They are identical in every way, except one is red and the other is blue. I randomly grab one in each hand and show my hands closed. Now the states of the ball are entangled: as soon as you see the color of one ball, that &amp;quot;determines&amp;quot; the color of the other.&lt;p&gt;This gets used to explain entanglement but it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. This is nothing that the ancient Greeks wouldn&amp;#x27;t have known.&lt;p&gt;Not to pick on you specifically, but do people really think it took a major revolution in physics in order to understand that if there are two balls, one is blue and one is red, then if you see one of the balls is red, you can conclude the other ball is blue?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s something that I think humans can solve at the age of 3.&lt;p&gt;The failure in your explanation is right when you state that &amp;quot;one of the balls is red and the other is blue&amp;quot;. The entire point of entanglement is that such a statement is not possible, that&amp;#x27;s a strictly classical interpretation. Rather, both balls are in a superposition of being both red and blue simultaneously, and it is not possible in principle to assign a color to either one of them until the moment a measurement is made.</text></item><item><author>tylerhou</author><text>A classical analogy for entanglement: suppose I have two balls in a bag. They are identical in every way, except one is red and the other is blue. I randomly grab one in each hand and show my hands closed. Now the states of the ball are entangled: as soon as you see the color of one ball, that &amp;quot;determines&amp;quot; the color of the other. (Not claiming that this is a perfect analogy, but I don&amp;#x27;t see where it diverges from how entangled quantum waves would behave.)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned.&lt;p&gt;The no-cloning theorem says that there exists no universal quantum machine that can perfectly clone an arbitrary quantum state. However, that does not preclude a machine that can imperfectly clone any quantum state, or machines that can perfectly clone some but not all quantum states [1]. (Clearly the information transferred to my brain is not a perfect copy of your brain&amp;#x27;s state, and your DNA is not perfectly copied every time.)&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;quant-ph&amp;#x2F;9607018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;abs&amp;#x2F;quant-ph&amp;#x2F;9607018&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>lisper</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not a bad analogy, but you have to be very careful here because no classical analogy can be a perfect fit for entanglement. The wave function is deeply and fundamentally different than our classical reality, and there is no way to reproduce its behavior classically. Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned. This is IMHO the single biggest disconnect between the wave function and classical reality because the nature of our (classical) existence is fundamentally intertwingled with copying (classical) information. It is happening right now even as you read this. Information is being copied out of my brain onto the internets and into your brain. At the same time, all our cells are busily copying the information in our DNA, and so on and so on.</text></item><item><author>ericb</author><text>If we were in a simulation, would the speed of light be the processing speed of the universe as each area re-renders, and spooky action at a distance be two variables pointed to the same memory location, populated with a lazy-loaded value, with copy-on-write semantics?&lt;p&gt;edit: seems like it is lazy loaded, so revised my summary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tylerhou</author><text>&amp;gt; Rather, both balls are in a superposition of being both red and blue simultaneously, and it is not possible in principle to assign a color to either one of them until the moment a measurement is made.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t disagree, and (clearly) I make a measurement when I show you the color of a ball. Before I show you a ball, I would also say that the colors of the balls are in a superposition.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; major revolution in physics in order to understand that if there are two balls, one is blue and one is red, then if you see one of the balls is red, you can conclude the other ball is blue?&lt;p&gt;Entanglement is really just this simple — entanglement itself is a statement about a wave function, classical or quantum. The major revolution in physics is that &lt;i&gt;transformations&lt;/i&gt; of the wave functions do not behave as we would classically expect. Entangled particles are a tool that we can use to measure those transformations (and get surprising results).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA</title><url>https://kyso.io/eoin/rich-countries-tend-to-have-a-bigger-middle-class-except-the-usa</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yardie</author><text>In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city&amp;#x2F;state&amp;#x2F;federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can&amp;#x27;t work at all. Then, complain about the fact the government doesn&amp;#x27;t work at all. Yes, the DMV sucks, but guess what, that is the level of service voters decided they wanted and that is what the DMV can deliver based on it&amp;#x27;s funding; 1-2 hour wait times with 2 or 3 agents at the counter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ixtli</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t even get me started. I did a year and a half of university in Tokyo and I used and paid for the health care system there a few times. Cavities filled for 20 dollars at high end central Tokyo offices. Skin doctors for zero dollars and prescribed creams for 800 yen. I knew a brain surgeon there who told me that the max price you could pay for his services was equivalent to 700 dollars. He didn&amp;#x27;t even bother going to conferences in America, and this was 10 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Oh, and people love to talk about wait and access to doctors: not only did none of my experiences have a wait they didn&amp;#x27;t even have a &lt;i&gt;schedule.&lt;/i&gt; I simply walked in to an office and was seen immediately, and the Tokyo metro area has 35 million people living in it.</text></comment>

<story><title>Rich countries tend to have a bigger middle-class, except the USA</title><url>https://kyso.io/eoin/rich-countries-tend-to-have-a-bigger-middle-class-except-the-usa</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yardie</author><text>In all my travels no one is more deluded about the middle class than in the US. Healthcare is cheaper in Europe therefore it must be worse, somehow. The government is completely dysfunctional and we are worse off for it. Rather than pay slightly more to fully fund a working city&amp;#x2F;state&amp;#x2F;federal government everyone would rather pay slightly less and have a government that can&amp;#x27;t work at all. Then, complain about the fact the government doesn&amp;#x27;t work at all. Yes, the DMV sucks, but guess what, that is the level of service voters decided they wanted and that is what the DMV can deliver based on it&amp;#x27;s funding; 1-2 hour wait times with 2 or 3 agents at the counter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darksaints</author><text>The alternative view is that most Americans have only ever known one type of government: an incompetent one. We spend more per capita on Medicare than most first world countries spend on their &lt;i&gt;universal&lt;/i&gt; health care, but we only cover 15% of the population. We build roads, railroads, pipelines, and other basic infrastructure at 4-10x markup over the costs that other first world countries are paying. We spend more on education than other countries but get worse outcomes.&lt;p&gt;If you ask any underperforming manager why they are underperforming, they&amp;#x27;ll all say the same thing: not enough resources. Give me more staff, give me more budget. But they don&amp;#x27;t get it because they squander the budget they do have.&lt;p&gt;Other countries might be getting 30% more funding than the US gives their government, but the returns on that spending are 1000% more than what the US gets from their government. Fix that problem first and I think you&amp;#x27;ll be surprised at how willing people will be to fund their government appropriately.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/10/09/facebook-is-nearing-a-reputational-point-of-no-return</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d hesitate to generalize AOL&amp;#x27;s fall into Facebook&amp;#x27;s future.&lt;p&gt;AOL&amp;#x27;s core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL&amp;#x27;s value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.&lt;p&gt;And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network&amp;#x2F;platform component of AOL.&lt;p&gt;So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?&lt;p&gt;Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don&amp;#x27;t see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.</text></item><item><author>mkr-hn</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s been so long since a company reached Facebook&amp;#x27;s heights and fell that a whole generation doesn&amp;#x27;t know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarked on or unnoticed by most people. Until it changed. AOL is &lt;i&gt;around&lt;/i&gt;, as Facebook likely will be, but it&amp;#x27;ll see a similar fall, and no one will see it coming.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20110124001004&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;1999&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;14&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;america-online-is-facing-challenge-over-free-labor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20110124001004&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytime...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.</text></item><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.&lt;p&gt;The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre&amp;#x2F;Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their employer&amp;#x27;s unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag. Headwinds in M&amp;amp;A.&lt;p&gt;People didn&amp;#x27;t stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;22702798&amp;#x2F;verge-tech-survey-2021-trust-privacy-security-facebook-amazon-google-apple-pandemic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;22702798&amp;#x2F;verge-tech-surve...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>shoto_io</author><text>No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for.&lt;p&gt;But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.&lt;p&gt;And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zaphar</author><text>I actually think in a way one of Facebooks core proposition is &lt;i&gt;being&lt;/i&gt; the internet for most people which is not that far off from AOL. The similarity here is that no one knows what is going to render FB obsolete right now. Just like no one knew what was going to do the same for AOL. AOL lost in part I believe because they were not really able to transition from Dialup &amp;quot;internet&amp;quot; Provider to Content Aggregator when broadband became a thing. The value add just wasn&amp;#x27;t there.</text></comment>

<story><title>Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return</title><url>https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/10/09/facebook-is-nearing-a-reputational-point-of-no-return</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ethbr0</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d hesitate to generalize AOL&amp;#x27;s fall into Facebook&amp;#x27;s future.&lt;p&gt;AOL&amp;#x27;s core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL&amp;#x27;s value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.&lt;p&gt;And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network&amp;#x2F;platform component of AOL.&lt;p&gt;So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?&lt;p&gt;Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don&amp;#x27;t see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.</text></item><item><author>mkr-hn</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s been so long since a company reached Facebook&amp;#x27;s heights and fell that a whole generation doesn&amp;#x27;t know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarked on or unnoticed by most people. Until it changed. AOL is &lt;i&gt;around&lt;/i&gt;, as Facebook likely will be, but it&amp;#x27;ll see a similar fall, and no one will see it coming.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20110124001004&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;1999&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;14&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;america-online-is-facing-challenge-over-free-labor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20110124001004&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytime...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.</text></item><item><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.&lt;p&gt;The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre&amp;#x2F;Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their employer&amp;#x27;s unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag. Headwinds in M&amp;amp;A.&lt;p&gt;People didn&amp;#x27;t stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;22702798&amp;#x2F;verge-tech-survey-2021-trust-privacy-security-facebook-amazon-google-apple-pandemic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;6&amp;#x2F;22702798&amp;#x2F;verge-tech-surve...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>shoto_io</author><text>No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for.&lt;p&gt;But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.&lt;p&gt;And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JohnBooty</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook.&lt;p&gt;I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own.&lt;p&gt;But I still have an FB account. I don&amp;#x27;t check it very often, and I&amp;#x27;ve got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I&amp;#x27;d lose access to dozens of people I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have a great way of contacting otherwise.&lt;p&gt;History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine.</text></comment>

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<story><title>NetworkX 3.0 - create, manipulate, and study complex networks in Python</title><url>https://networkx.org/documentation/stable/release/release_3.0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>samsquire</author><text>I use NetworkX rather unusually to parse Graphviz dot specification files in my devops pipeline tool, mazzle.&lt;p&gt;They allow me to define infrastructure build instructions as a dot file that looks similar to this. It&amp;#x27;s similar to an advanced makefile.&lt;p&gt;This segment of the infrastructure specification sets a dependency on the bastion box, the vault AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and web server provisioned by terraform on the source AMI. Then it sets a dependency of uploading nodejs to the repository server and a dependency on dpkg scan packages. It also tells machines to join themselves to a Kubernetes cluster.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; digraph G { label=&amp;quot;pipeline&amp;quot;; rankdir=TB; &amp;quot;packer&amp;#x2F;source-ami*&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; { &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;bastion&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;packer&amp;#x2F;vault-ami*&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;web&amp;quot; } &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;bastion&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@repository-upload&amp;#x2F;nodejs_12.13.1_amd64&amp;quot; &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;repository&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@repository-upload&amp;#x2F;nodejs_12.13.1_amd64&amp;quot; &amp;quot;@repository-upload&amp;#x2F;nodejs_12.13.1_amd64&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@shell&amp;#x2F;dpkg-scanpackages&amp;quot; &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;web&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@ansible&amp;#x2F;kubernetes-join&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;bastion&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@ansible&amp;#x2F;kubernetes-join&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;terraform&amp;#x2F;services&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@ansible&amp;#x2F;kubernetes-join&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;@ansible&amp;#x2F;kubernetes&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;@ansible&amp;#x2F;kubernetes-join&amp;quot;; ... } &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Graph formats are really flexible and compact and I would like to see them used for more things.&lt;p&gt;A topological search solves many problems.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;devops-pipeline.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;devops-pipeline.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>NetworkX 3.0 - create, manipulate, and study complex networks in Python</title><url>https://networkx.org/documentation/stable/release/release_3.0.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>By the way if you want to explore network science but don&amp;#x27;t really know where to start, consider Gephi (currently being refactored, and just updated a few days ago) or Cytoscape (if you&amp;#x27;re more drawn to bioinformatics).&lt;p&gt;Both make it easy to load&amp;#x2F;generate standard datasets, import tabular data, and have a good selection of plugins. It&amp;#x27;s easy to kick stuff out to either from NetworkX using &amp;#x2F;gefx or graphml, and you&amp;#x27;ll be able to experiment with a wide variety of layout algorithms and metrics. If you don&amp;#x27;t find the toy&amp;#x2F;benchmark networks intuitive, considering hitting the HN API for your source material; it&amp;#x27;s a lot easier to grasp the topic by studying relationships that are already familiar.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>WildUtah</author><text>The US tax code heavily punishes companies that hold cash in a variety of ways. The motive is to subsidize banks by requiring companies to rely on short term debt for operations. It&amp;#x27;s the biggest and most lucrative of subsidies for the banking industry and laundering such subsidies is how many bankers get rich. For instance, Mitt Romney made his money that way.&lt;p&gt;(The main tax code subsidies here are the business interest loophole and the accumulated earnings tax)&lt;p&gt;Usually a big company holds almost no liquid assets and hands profits out to bondholders and shareholders or invests actively to grow, even in unrelated businesses. That&amp;#x27;s to avoid tax penalties.&lt;p&gt;Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the like are holding masses of cash outside the USA. Gridlock in Washington and a stagnant and irrational corporate tax code make it very hard to bring cash home to invest for American companies. Therefore you find tech companies with few overseas expenses exporting services and accumulating cash they can&amp;#x27;t bring home.&lt;p&gt;(The main tax issue here is the non-territorial tax system in the USA. All other developed countries have a territorial system.)&lt;p&gt;Other countries can see this is a problem that kills jobs and wages at home so they don&amp;#x27;t do it. Obama has tried to fix it and Trump&amp;#x27;s main tax proposal is aimed at it, but both parties in Congress block change. Republicans don&amp;#x27;t want to hand Obama a victory and would rather hand out goodies to donors with loopholes than simplify taxes and Democrats just want to punish profitable multinationals even if it kills jobs.&lt;p&gt;And Wall Street is very mercurial with credit for tech companies, especially growing ones, so they can&amp;#x27;t rely on the banking subsidies.&lt;p&gt;The result is that tech giants are the only companies with a reason to accumulate cash so they overwhelmingly are the only ones that do so.&lt;p&gt;In summary, this is a government regulatory policy that creates cash rich tech companies. It&amp;#x27;s a result of bad decisions on Capitol Hill, not on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. It is not a stock valuation or corporate strategy issue.</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gozur88</author><text>I think Occam&amp;#x27;s razor applies here: It&amp;#x27;s not that management teams have big plans for the money, or that they &amp;quot;believe that something big is coming, but... they’re not sure what it will be&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s that they don&amp;#x27;t know what to do with the money and there isn&amp;#x27;t much pressure to disburse it.&lt;p&gt;Cash hordes are reflected in the share price, so investors can monetize the cash by selling a few shares. If you&amp;#x27;re a &amp;quot;buy and hold&amp;quot; investor you don&amp;#x27;t want a dividend because that&amp;#x27;s a taxable event.</text></comment>

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<story><title>VC from Asia is skyrocketing</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-long-dominated-startup-fundingnow-it-has-a-challenger-1523544804</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abhiminator</author><text>I remember The Economist doing a piece on this fairly recently[0] that talked exclusively about how China&amp;#x27;s tech VCs and established corporations (referring to the likes of Alibaba&amp;#x2F;Tencent) are challenging (and to a certain extent dethroning) Silicon Valley &amp;quot;monopoly&amp;quot; when it comes to investing in innovation&amp;#x2F;R&amp;amp;D in super critical areas like A.I., for example.&lt;p&gt;One huge advantage Chinese corporations and startups have is China&amp;#x27;s super lax (non-existent, in fact) privacy and data protection laws -- enabling their companies to harvest ENORMOUS amounts of data to hone their A.I. algorithms on -- making them super attractive for investors.&lt;p&gt;Add to this China&amp;#x27;s culture of scientific inquiry, rampant IP theft from American and European corporations and startups alike, a stable administration that has made technological advancement it&amp;#x27;s razer sharp focus -- you have the perfect recipe for VCs&amp;#x27; fund to start flowing on to the next big thing with relatively fewer barriers.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.economist.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;21737075-silicon-valley-may-not-hold-its-global-superiority-much-longer-how-does-chinese-tech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.economist.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;21737075-silicon-val...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>abhinavkulkarni</author><text>I think we need to be careful about attributing all of the China&amp;#x27;s success and splurge of VC funding to IP theft, hostile domestic market for foreign players, etc. China is succeeding because it really wants to.&lt;p&gt;With manufacturing in US hollowed out in last couple of decades and China being the new global manufacturing powerhouse, it is not surprising that China is seeking smart (software&amp;#x2F;cloud&amp;#x2F;AI&amp;#x2F;robotics powered) solutions to industrialization, warehousing, transportation, supply chain, payments and other areas. Why hasn&amp;#x27;t US achieved the level of digital payment smoothness that China has been able to?&lt;p&gt;While the points you made about lax laws and blatant data privacy invasion are an contributing factors, I think you would have seen China making great strides in the above mentioned areas even if laws were enforced strictly. It&amp;#x27;s important to recognize China&amp;#x27;s technological prowess. They have similarly taken a lead in bioengineering.</text></comment>

<story><title>VC from Asia is skyrocketing</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-long-dominated-startup-fundingnow-it-has-a-challenger-1523544804</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>abhiminator</author><text>I remember The Economist doing a piece on this fairly recently[0] that talked exclusively about how China&amp;#x27;s tech VCs and established corporations (referring to the likes of Alibaba&amp;#x2F;Tencent) are challenging (and to a certain extent dethroning) Silicon Valley &amp;quot;monopoly&amp;quot; when it comes to investing in innovation&amp;#x2F;R&amp;amp;D in super critical areas like A.I., for example.&lt;p&gt;One huge advantage Chinese corporations and startups have is China&amp;#x27;s super lax (non-existent, in fact) privacy and data protection laws -- enabling their companies to harvest ENORMOUS amounts of data to hone their A.I. algorithms on -- making them super attractive for investors.&lt;p&gt;Add to this China&amp;#x27;s culture of scientific inquiry, rampant IP theft from American and European corporations and startups alike, a stable administration that has made technological advancement it&amp;#x27;s razer sharp focus -- you have the perfect recipe for VCs&amp;#x27; fund to start flowing on to the next big thing with relatively fewer barriers.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.economist.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;21737075-silicon-valley-may-not-hold-its-global-superiority-much-longer-how-does-chinese-tech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.economist.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business&amp;#x2F;21737075-silicon-val...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanmcdirmid</author><text>Laws in China are not as relevant as enforcement. Enforcement is completely contextual, if they don’t like what you are doing they’ll get you on something, so as a foreign company you have to tread much more carefully when operating in China than a Chinese company.&lt;p&gt;The legal framework in China simply isn’t very developed, that doesn’t mean you can get away with whatever you want, quite the contrary, it means you never know when the government will come down on you for violating some unwritten rule.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Boeing&apos;s folding wingtips get the FAA green light</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/18/boeing-folding-wingtips-faa-777X/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad the FAA does what they do. While it is easy to hand wave away their concerns, it is better to over-spec it now and to test the design than to just let manufacturers put &amp;quot;alpha&amp;quot; products into commercial usage and only fix them after a body-count.&lt;p&gt;If driving&amp;#x2F;vehicles&amp;#x2F;roads were held to the same or a similar standards to aircraft there might be fewer accidents and deaths today.&lt;p&gt;Ironically self-driving is held to a much higher standard than regular driving; which is appreciated but further makes one question why regular &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; vehicles are so under-regulated (the analogy that springs to my mind is when HTTPS with a self-signed certificate used to be treated much worse than regular HTTP, it took years to treat HTTP as the insecure connection it is, manual vehicles are the same way, something that has been around so long we ignore its safety issues).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sunflowerfly</author><text>Bringing the same rules to light aircraft as airliners has actually made them less safe. Bringing a new four place plane to market has been cost prohibitive. The majority of new planes built today were designed in the 50’s on slide rules. Imagine if we were all still driving 50’s era automobiles. Luckily, the FAA loosened these rules this week.</text></comment>

<story><title>Boeing&apos;s folding wingtips get the FAA green light</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/18/boeing-folding-wingtips-faa-777X/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Someone1234</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m glad the FAA does what they do. While it is easy to hand wave away their concerns, it is better to over-spec it now and to test the design than to just let manufacturers put &amp;quot;alpha&amp;quot; products into commercial usage and only fix them after a body-count.&lt;p&gt;If driving&amp;#x2F;vehicles&amp;#x2F;roads were held to the same or a similar standards to aircraft there might be fewer accidents and deaths today.&lt;p&gt;Ironically self-driving is held to a much higher standard than regular driving; which is appreciated but further makes one question why regular &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; vehicles are so under-regulated (the analogy that springs to my mind is when HTTPS with a self-signed certificate used to be treated much worse than regular HTTP, it took years to treat HTTP as the insecure connection it is, manual vehicles are the same way, something that has been around so long we ignore its safety issues).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walrus01</author><text>Not related to autonomous vehicles, but related to the risk of death for light aircraft flight vs. NASA spacecraft human-rating...&lt;p&gt;The FAA seems to be relatively OK with the current annual fatality rate for light-sport aircraft, homebuilt experimental licensed aircraft, and light aircraft in the size range of the Cessna 172. For pilots with less than 1000 hours, flying a light single engine aircraft is a relatively dangerous activity on a per-hour basis.&lt;p&gt;If human spaceflight had the same number of annual fatalities as the current number deaths in the US 48 states while flying homebuilt&amp;#x2F;kit&amp;#x2F;light sport aircraft, both NASA and the news media would be freaking out.&lt;p&gt;NASA is requiring spacex to put the Falcon9 and Dragon2 through a very expensive and rigorous period of qualification before it can carry humans on commercial launch contracts. The likelihood that there will be a totally catastrophic disaster that the launch escape system can&amp;#x27;t recover from is low, but the standard of safety (in terms of flight-hours per human per year) seems to be much, much higher than the FAA&amp;#x27;s.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Facebook Papers: dozens of stories based on whistleblower docs dropped</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-papers-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen-leaked-docs-2021-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rrrrrrrrrrrryan</author><text>&amp;gt; new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation&lt;p&gt;The proposals I&amp;#x27;ve seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn&amp;#x27;t made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.&lt;p&gt;Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I&amp;#x27;d love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.</text></item><item><author>hbn</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but think this &amp;quot;whistleblowing&amp;quot; is only good for Facebook&amp;#x27;s bottom line. I haven&amp;#x27;t seen anything pop up that&amp;#x27;s shocking or needed an internal person to be leaking it -- &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s bad for kids,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;they don&amp;#x27;t censor enough hate speech,&amp;quot; etc.&lt;p&gt;It just seems to me that it&amp;#x27;s setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don&amp;#x27;t want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don&amp;#x27;t even take the blame because &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s the law,&amp;quot; PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Steltek</author><text>Define &amp;quot;algorithmic curation&amp;quot;. It could mean any of:&lt;p&gt;- Chronological order&lt;p&gt;- Round-robin per subscription&amp;#x2F;friend (per sibling comment here)&lt;p&gt;- Upvote&amp;#x2F;downvote and vote weighting&lt;p&gt;- Brigading, sock puppets, etc&lt;p&gt;- Inlined advertisements - you may not like adtech but legality is a separate issue of debate&lt;p&gt;- Locality, proximity&lt;p&gt;- Content as it relates to time of day&lt;p&gt;Only some of these contribute to echo chambers and manipulation. I think it would be difficult to write a straight forward description that does what you would want and extremely difficult for doing what most people would want.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Facebook Papers: dozens of stories based on whistleblower docs dropped</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-papers-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen-leaked-docs-2021-10</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rrrrrrrrrrrryan</author><text>&amp;gt; new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation&lt;p&gt;The proposals I&amp;#x27;ve seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn&amp;#x27;t made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.&lt;p&gt;Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I&amp;#x27;d love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.</text></item><item><author>hbn</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t help but think this &amp;quot;whistleblowing&amp;quot; is only good for Facebook&amp;#x27;s bottom line. I haven&amp;#x27;t seen anything pop up that&amp;#x27;s shocking or needed an internal person to be leaking it -- &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s bad for kids,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;they don&amp;#x27;t censor enough hate speech,&amp;quot; etc.&lt;p&gt;It just seems to me that it&amp;#x27;s setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don&amp;#x27;t want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don&amp;#x27;t even take the blame because &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s the law,&amp;quot; PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BeFlatXIII</author><text>How will platforms based on chronological ordering handle accounts that post wildly different amounts of stuff? If I log in for the first time in three weeks, I want to see the post from someone who last logged on two weeks ago more than the spam of the daily users.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series</title><url>https://www.tor.com/2023/08/09/babylon-5-is-a-perfect-terrible-series/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>webnrrd2k</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know, I think my vote for perfect terrible series would have to go to Farscape[1].&lt;p&gt;Red Dwarf would be in the list, too, maybe as an honorable mention.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Farscape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Farscape&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emmelaich</author><text>Blake&amp;#x27;s Seven surely!&lt;p&gt;So good and so laughably amateurish and campy bad. Loved it!&lt;p&gt;Having watched most of ST (1st, TNG, V, DS9) I had no interest in Babylon5.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also Silo on now which seems similar in concept to B5. Sets and acting is ok to good but the pace is too slow.</text></comment>

<story><title>Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series</title><url>https://www.tor.com/2023/08/09/babylon-5-is-a-perfect-terrible-series/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>webnrrd2k</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know, I think my vote for perfect terrible series would have to go to Farscape[1].&lt;p&gt;Red Dwarf would be in the list, too, maybe as an honorable mention.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Farscape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Farscape&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>harrisoned</author><text>I started watching Farscape a few weeks ago after seeing many recommendations, critics, and because it&amp;#x27;s free to watch on Plex. Now i see why people say what they say.</text></comment>

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<story><title>One Job, One Pay – Globally</title><url>https://stellate.co/blog/one-job-one-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>summerlight</author><text>When it comes to equal pay in all region, I usually find that people tend to think it as Bay Area level (or at least US metro level) pay for everywhere. But a more realistic consequence would be developing country level pay for everywhere. There are tens of millions of developers outside the developed countries which will gladly accept one third of the market rate in developed countries. If you live in Europe or US and speak European languages, you gotta accept the fact that this geographical&amp;#x2F;linguistic barrier has been a critical factor for your annual salary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ajmurmann</author><text>I think it will be more differentiated than that. If you are top talent at FAANG you&amp;#x27;ll probably continue to be able to demand top comp. If the you are a mediocre dev and you&amp;#x27;re salary is only high because you are in SF, your comp will likely go down. Comp in developing countries is already going up as well as part of the remote boom. Comp in Colombia for example seems to have practician doubled in the last year.&lt;p&gt;My thoughts on this in longer form: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;amurmann.com&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;remote-labor-market-future&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;amurmann.com&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;remote-labor-market-future&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>One Job, One Pay – Globally</title><url>https://stellate.co/blog/one-job-one-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>summerlight</author><text>When it comes to equal pay in all region, I usually find that people tend to think it as Bay Area level (or at least US metro level) pay for everywhere. But a more realistic consequence would be developing country level pay for everywhere. There are tens of millions of developers outside the developed countries which will gladly accept one third of the market rate in developed countries. If you live in Europe or US and speak European languages, you gotta accept the fact that this geographical&amp;#x2F;linguistic barrier has been a critical factor for your annual salary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>craigds</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s probably something in between though. There&amp;#x27;s probably a point in between Developing Country Pay and Bay Area Pay where the company can get quality work done for the price they&amp;#x27;re willing to pay.&lt;p&gt;Obviously, they&amp;#x27;re less likely to get Bay Area developers, but I don&amp;#x27;t really see how that&amp;#x27;s a problem - there are plenty of good devs elsewhere. Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted to Being an LTS Kernel</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.1-LTS-Official</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>capableweb</author><text>Because everyone loooves Rust, you&amp;#x27;d be glad to know that this is the first Linux release with initial Rust support, so Rust is officially in the kernel now and will run on bunch of computers shortly, no matter if you want it to or not (granted you run a Linux kernel of course).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Among the key highlights for Linux 6.1 are the initial Rust infrastructure has been merged&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;review&amp;#x2F;linux-61-features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;review&amp;#x2F;linux-61-features&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted to Being an LTS Kernel</title><url>https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.1-LTS-Official</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>AstixAndBelix</author><text>Why don&amp;#x27;t Linux devs give different labels to the LTS releases? Somehow a kernel version that gets supported for 7 years is the same kind of LTS as one that gets supported for 3.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook</title><url>https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/05/06/how-big-pharma-finds-sick-users-on-facebook</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>moksly</author><text>“If you’re a drug manufacturer looking for patients”.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I’m just too Scandinavian to understand, but wouldn’t it be the other way around?&lt;p&gt;Now I also wonder if I should see a doctor. I’ve been getting a lot of “is your will in order” commercials from law firms on Facebook recently. I sure hope big tech advertising doesn’t know something I don’t.</text></comment>

<story><title>How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook</title><url>https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/05/06/how-big-pharma-finds-sick-users-on-facebook</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dools</author><text>The article seems to suggest this is a bad thing, but my first reaction is &amp;quot;fantastic&amp;quot;. Pharmaceutical companies create life saving medicines and then use advanced social media targeting to locate the people that need them.&lt;p&gt;The only bad thing about it is if those people targeted can&amp;#x27;t afford the medication, which is why healthcare needs to be a universal right.&lt;p&gt;People love to bitch about Big Pharma but I have a magical little blue tool that completely relieves my asthma, and I can buy them with absolutely no trouble at the pharmacy for about $6. My brother got diagnosed with MS recently. My aunt got diagnosed with MS 40 years ago. Thanks to the research that happened in the last 40 years, my brother&amp;#x27;s experience with MS is worlds apart (mostly because we live in Australia and he has free access to tens of thousands of dollars of treatment).&lt;p&gt;Pharmaceutical companies are responsible for developing vaccines for a global pandemic at light speed. They&amp;#x27;re great! Let&amp;#x27;s celebrate Big Pharma!&lt;p&gt;But let&amp;#x27;s also make sure that the gains from these amazing advances in technology are shared equitably.&lt;p&gt;And maybe, just maybe, if the medical companies find they need to use Facebook to shift their product, we should be looking at a more formal and closely regulated method of distribution that isn&amp;#x27;t so commercially driven.&lt;p&gt;I mean, the private sector is great at commercialisation, but is it really the be all and end all when it comes to such a crucial social function as healthcare?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Reed-Solomon coder computing one million ECC blocks at 1 GB/s</title><url>https://github.com/Bulat-Ziganshin/FastECC</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nemo1618</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve been using klauspost&amp;#x27;s Golang reedsolomon package in our distributed storage package. It runs approximately as fast (~1GB) because the hot paths are written in asm: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;klauspost&amp;#x2F;reedsolomon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;klauspost&amp;#x2F;reedsolomon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Erasure codes are pretty magical.</text></comment>

<story><title>Reed-Solomon coder computing one million ECC blocks at 1 GB/s</title><url>https://github.com/Bulat-Ziganshin/FastECC</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>planteen</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve implemented a Reed-Solomon encoder for telemetry blocks over a RF channel. There, I was using a (255, 223) code on GF(2^8). There were interleaving parameters for a telemetry &amp;quot;packet&amp;quot; but each encoding took constant O(1) time. So the overall time to encode a downlink was just O(N). What exactly is meant by &amp;quot;Reed-Solomon ECC&amp;quot;? I&amp;#x27;m guessing the code is doing something different related to data storage than what a traditional communications RS code does?</text></comment>

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<story><title>The user experience problems of quadratic voting</title><url>https://timdaub.github.io/2022/03/27/the-user-experience-problems-of-quadratic-voting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ComputerGuru</author><text>This is susceptible to ballot poisoning: lobby to put something you had no intention of doing but your opposition feels very strongly about on the ballot and then watch them waste their credits “reaffirming” the status quo of the hot-button issue while educating “your” voters to prioritize the actual issue under contention.&lt;p&gt;Imagine a ballot with one contentious question A. Opposition Y adds a question B they know will flop but is guaranteed to disproportionately attract all the attention &lt;i&gt;of the other party&lt;/i&gt; to the ballot. Party X voters waste their credits on the red herring question B (which has greater than 50% support in the overall population anyway and would never fail them) while opposition Y advises its voters to spend the credits on the actual question A they care about.&lt;p&gt;As a completely contrived example, the real question is a controversial “add a carbon tax” that could go either way and one party either adds “ban all abortions in all cases for everyone” or “ban all firearms for all people” to the ballot to misdirect. Either of these is guaranteed to disproportionately attract all the attention of one of the parties more than the other despite neither having a remote chance of passing. Because of the phrasing and the topic chosen, even if you don’t educate your voters you can rely on the fact that &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; voters simply care a lot more about the topic than yours do.</text></comment>

<story><title>The user experience problems of quadratic voting</title><url>https://timdaub.github.io/2022/03/27/the-user-experience-problems-of-quadratic-voting/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>captainmuon</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand how quadatic voting can deal with collusion. Say I want to give 4 credits to A, and a friend wants to give 4 credits to B. So each of us gives 2 votes to their preference. But if we join together, we each give 2 credits to each option, that is sqrt(2) votes. So each option gets 2*sqrt(2) ~= 2.8 votes instead. So we are strongly incentived to found a party and to pool our votes. I&amp;#x27;m not sure this is what people intended.&lt;p&gt;It also seems to punish caring strongly for a certain issue, whereas I wonder if that isn&amp;#x27;t maybe an indicator that you are informed about a topic, and thus your vote should count more rather than less?</text></comment>

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<story><title>How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-a-lawsuit-over-hot-coffee-helped-erode-the-7th/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crusso</author><text>Sorry, I&amp;#x27;m still someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t get it. Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I very carefully sipped my fresh Starbucks coffee today at the mall, I was very conscious of the fact that I had a hot beverage in my hand. If I had accidentally spilled the coffee on myself or others it could have caused some serious burns... who else&amp;#x27;s fault would it have been but my own? Would it have been Starbuck&amp;#x27;s fault? I just can&amp;#x27;t adjust my thinking to making that so.&lt;p&gt;If I had gone into Williams &amp;amp; Sonoma and carelessly stabbed someone with a kitchen knife. Would that have been W&amp;amp;S&amp;#x27;s fault? It just makes no sense to me how we want to hold others responsible for giving us what we&amp;#x27;ve asked for.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always (and I mean always; I&amp;#x27;ve long been aware about the real story) thought the comments about the coffee lawsuit were extremely cruel. &amp;#x27;Oh, hot coffee fell on her lap and burned her, and she sued for millions in damages!&amp;#x27; - hot coffee at an unreasonably high temperature fell on her lap and gave her &lt;i&gt;third-degree burns&lt;/i&gt;. To suggest she was suing over something trivial is horribly disrespectful to a woman who suffered that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemo</author><text>Read the actual trial history. Your analogies don&amp;#x27;t reflect what actually happened, which is why you can&amp;#x27;t understand it.&lt;p&gt;Liebeck was hospitalized for 8 days with multiple skin grafts. She asked asked McDonalds for medical expenses from the injury from the coffee and lost wages (&amp;lt;20k). McDonalds offered $800.&lt;p&gt;At that point she got an attorney. They tried to settle. McDonalds refused. In the trial it came out that McDonalds had more than 700 reports of medical injuries from the coffee that they were aware of. Their internal quality control manager reported that they recognized that they were posing a burn hazard to customers with the heat of their coffee, but that it was a minor concern that they were unwilling to adjust.&lt;p&gt;McDonalds admitted that not only were they burning customers who drank the coffee straight from the cup, many of whom needed medical treatment, but that this was something they were unwilling to change.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why the jury hit McDonalds with punitive damages of the profits of two day&amp;#x27;s sales of coffee (which the judge reduced). Through the whole process McDonalds was acting like a criminally negligent bully unconcerned with injuring customers. Punitive damages did correct this.</text></comment>

<story><title>How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment</title><url>http://priceonomics.com/how-a-lawsuit-over-hot-coffee-helped-erode-the-7th/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crusso</author><text>Sorry, I&amp;#x27;m still someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t get it. Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I very carefully sipped my fresh Starbucks coffee today at the mall, I was very conscious of the fact that I had a hot beverage in my hand. If I had accidentally spilled the coffee on myself or others it could have caused some serious burns... who else&amp;#x27;s fault would it have been but my own? Would it have been Starbuck&amp;#x27;s fault? I just can&amp;#x27;t adjust my thinking to making that so.&lt;p&gt;If I had gone into Williams &amp;amp; Sonoma and carelessly stabbed someone with a kitchen knife. Would that have been W&amp;amp;S&amp;#x27;s fault? It just makes no sense to me how we want to hold others responsible for giving us what we&amp;#x27;ve asked for.</text></item><item><author>TazeTSchnitzel</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always (and I mean always; I&amp;#x27;ve long been aware about the real story) thought the comments about the coffee lawsuit were extremely cruel. &amp;#x27;Oh, hot coffee fell on her lap and burned her, and she sued for millions in damages!&amp;#x27; - hot coffee at an unreasonably high temperature fell on her lap and gave her &lt;i&gt;third-degree burns&lt;/i&gt;. To suggest she was suing over something trivial is horribly disrespectful to a woman who suffered that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>DanBC</author><text>McDonalds had ignored requests from CDC about correct brew temperature of coffee. They were serving extra hot coffee despite being asked not to, and despite having had several previous accidents where people were injured.&lt;p&gt;She initially asked for her medical costs to be covered. McDonalds declined, so she went to court.&lt;p&gt;Full thickness burns are not a trivial injury. She was at risk of death. Treatment is painful and takes a long time. She would have been left with scarring and perhaps loss of function - because a fast food chain didn&amp;#x27;t care about customer safety.&lt;p&gt;Do you have access to a thermometer? Try measuring the temperature of a cup of coffee that you make at home tree minutes after you&amp;#x27;ve made it.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple’s U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/hon-hai-has-enough-ex-china-capacity-to-make-u-s-bound-products</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvduval</author><text>About 850 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty in China since the eighties. It&amp;#x27;s extraordinary. Just want to be clear the US is not exactly perfect when it comes to human rights. Sure, China had a lot they need to do better, but the improvements are incredible. In the US, look at Indian reservations, border detentions, hate groups, number of people in jail... We are not the human rights poster child.</text></item><item><author>Shivetya</author><text>I think Apple should stand by their human rights mantra and move their production out of China. It should not be a question of where they are sold, the only question a company with their supposed rights advocacy is where they are produced.&lt;p&gt;China has shown they do not value world opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javagram</author><text>“hate groups” exist in the USA because this is a free country. In places without our commitment to freedom and human rights those type of groups would have been suppressed by the government.&lt;p&gt;Edit: just to be clear some of your other points are fair although I find the “Indian reservations” a bit dated - they are treated as local sovereigns (e.g. casinos, being allowed to violate state level hunting regulations) and are even now being allowed to expand their territory in some places .</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple’s U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/hon-hai-has-enough-ex-china-capacity-to-make-u-s-bound-products</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dvduval</author><text>About 850 million people have lifted themselves out of poverty in China since the eighties. It&amp;#x27;s extraordinary. Just want to be clear the US is not exactly perfect when it comes to human rights. Sure, China had a lot they need to do better, but the improvements are incredible. In the US, look at Indian reservations, border detentions, hate groups, number of people in jail... We are not the human rights poster child.</text></item><item><author>Shivetya</author><text>I think Apple should stand by their human rights mantra and move their production out of China. It should not be a question of where they are sold, the only question a company with their supposed rights advocacy is where they are produced.&lt;p&gt;China has shown they do not value world opinion.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ralusek</author><text>850 million people have been lifted out of poverty by going through an accelerated industrial revolution similar to what lifted the West out of poverty, largely funded by the West outsourcing the labor its citizens&amp;#x27; expectations for quality of life would no longer allow.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Moskva cruiser sank while being towed in a storm – Russian Defense Ministry</title><url>https://tass.com/russia/1438045</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>Would you be able to share some light on what a cruiser is (that&amp;#x27;s how this ship is classified on wikipedia) vs another kind of ship. I am comparing to the british navy which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to have anything above destroyer (outside of aircraft carriers). In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>More like being &amp;quot;sank while being towed&amp;quot; I think? (edit: original title was &amp;quot;Cruiser &amp;#x27;Moskva&amp;#x27; sank while towing&amp;quot;) Anyway, as a former navy officer it looks very bad that the flagship of a fleet was apparently sunk by a anti ship missile (ASM) strike. Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets and while the Neptune ASM is very modern, the flagship should definitely not have been the first to be sunk.&lt;p&gt;This will be (should be) a wake up call for the rest of the fleet and keep them much further from the shore, which in turn has impact on the amount of air control the Russians can exert on the southern parts of Ukraine as apparently they have been leaning on navy vessels to provide SAM cover.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brimble</author><text>Ship class designations are weird. Russia keeps a ship or two designated as &amp;quot;battlecruisers&amp;quot; (in the WWII era, that would have meant a lightly-armored, probably fast, very large ship with battleship-class guns) that would just be called cruisers in most other navies, now. I&amp;#x27;ve seen British ships with tonnage that would put them nearly up to a WWII-era heavy cruiser (step under a battlecruiser, the smallest thing generally regarded as a &amp;quot;capital ship&amp;quot; in that era) called a destroyer (formerly that would have been a &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; smaller size of ship), these days.&lt;p&gt;From their design, the ship class in question seem to be some kind of largish general-purpose missile cruisers with substantial armament and decent anti-air&amp;#x2F;anti-missile defenses, but not intended to survive sustained fighting (their weapon placement suggests that—all those missile tubes on the deck can&amp;#x27;t possibly be safe, but it might let them cram more weapons on there cheaply)&lt;p&gt;[VERY LATE EDIT] The TL;DR here is that &amp;quot;cruiser&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;destroyer&amp;quot; and all that are nearly meaningless without context of who&amp;#x27;s doing the labeling, and when.&lt;p&gt;[ANOTHER LATE EDIT] I overstated the degree to which the Kirov class&amp;#x27; designation is misleading: its displacement &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; roughly in the range of WWII-era battlecruisers (~1&amp;#x2F;2 the displacement of an Iowa class battleship—armor is really, really heavy). It lacks battleship-class guns, but so does everything else these days and it&amp;#x27;d be kinda silly if it had them.</text></comment>

<story><title>Moskva cruiser sank while being towed in a storm – Russian Defense Ministry</title><url>https://tass.com/russia/1438045</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cm2187</author><text>Would you be able to share some light on what a cruiser is (that&amp;#x27;s how this ship is classified on wikipedia) vs another kind of ship. I am comparing to the british navy which doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to have anything above destroyer (outside of aircraft carriers). In these days and age where all war ships seem to be essentially floating missile launch platforms, what is the difference?</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>More like being &amp;quot;sank while being towed&amp;quot; I think? (edit: original title was &amp;quot;Cruiser &amp;#x27;Moskva&amp;#x27; sank while towing&amp;quot;) Anyway, as a former navy officer it looks very bad that the flagship of a fleet was apparently sunk by a anti ship missile (ASM) strike. Certainly in NATO navies you always keep a layered defense for your high value targets and while the Neptune ASM is very modern, the flagship should definitely not have been the first to be sunk.&lt;p&gt;This will be (should be) a wake up call for the rest of the fleet and keep them much further from the shore, which in turn has impact on the amount of air control the Russians can exert on the southern parts of Ukraine as apparently they have been leaning on navy vessels to provide SAM cover.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickff</author><text>Most of the other replies here say it’s all about size, and size does matter, but it’s not the whole story.&lt;p&gt;Generally, cruisers are designed with capabilities that allow them to operate anywhere on the ocean on their own, or as the lead vessels in small groups of ships (along with frigates and destroyers). Destroyers are usually smaller and have a more limited set of capabilities, and are intended to operate as ocean-going support ships in a combat group. Frigates are usually even smaller, with similar set of capabilities to a destroyer, but more limited equipment and intended to operate relatively close to their home ports.&lt;p&gt;Every navy has different sizes for each, with the USA having some of the largest ships of each designation. You should also keep in mind that each type of ship has gotten progressively larger over time; as of WWII, destroyers were roughly 2000 tons, and cruisers were about 8000 tons.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Half of all adults in the world have less than $2,300 in wealth (2016)</title><url>https://qz.com/848181/half-of-all-adults-in-the-world-have-less-than-2300-in-wealth-credit-suisse-global-wealth-report-indicates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Matt3o12_</author><text>But does this also include negative wealth? Especially in the US, it seems to me that many people have a lot of debt – staring from credit card debt to a too expensive car lease (and a new one ever 3 years) to the house they have payments on for ~50 years? This way, it seems to me that a lot of people (especially younger ones) have a wealth of ~-10,000€.</text></item><item><author>danesparza</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to point out this article consistently uses the word &amp;#x27;wealth&amp;#x27;. I take this to mean all assets owned, including cash assets.&lt;p&gt;Let that sink in a while.&lt;p&gt;That would include vehicles, houses, clothes, everything.&lt;p&gt;I am musing on this problem from my air conditioned office at work. We truly have first world problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Debt is “bad” when used for depreciating assets (cars, credit cards). Debt is “good” when used as leverage on appreciating assets (real estate) or working assets (tools, business vehicles, servers, or anything else being used to generate cash flow).&lt;p&gt;If I have an interest only loan on something like a taxi medallions (thanks Planet Money for the example!), I generate cash flow with that asset, and can walk away from the debt at any time through bankruptcy of the owning entity, that’s still positive wealth (cash flow).&lt;p&gt;The less capital you need to obtain access to greater amounts of cash flow, the better the cash on cash return&amp;#x2F;investment quality.</text></comment>

<story><title>Half of all adults in the world have less than $2,300 in wealth (2016)</title><url>https://qz.com/848181/half-of-all-adults-in-the-world-have-less-than-2300-in-wealth-credit-suisse-global-wealth-report-indicates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Matt3o12_</author><text>But does this also include negative wealth? Especially in the US, it seems to me that many people have a lot of debt – staring from credit card debt to a too expensive car lease (and a new one ever 3 years) to the house they have payments on for ~50 years? This way, it seems to me that a lot of people (especially younger ones) have a wealth of ~-10,000€.</text></item><item><author>danesparza</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to point out this article consistently uses the word &amp;#x27;wealth&amp;#x27;. I take this to mean all assets owned, including cash assets.&lt;p&gt;Let that sink in a while.&lt;p&gt;That would include vehicles, houses, clothes, everything.&lt;p&gt;I am musing on this problem from my air conditioned office at work. We truly have first world problems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rukittenme</author><text>You have to define &amp;quot;wealth&amp;quot; if you want a worthwhile answer. After all, debt is a component of a person&amp;#x27;s assets.&lt;p&gt;If you remember your accounting courses: assets are equal to the sum of all liabilities and equity. Meaning mortgage debt and home equity combine to form your total home assets. A person may have $1m in assets and $900k in liabilities. Or a person could have $200k in assets but $50k in liabilities. Which person is more &amp;quot;wealthy&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I suppose its a matter of opinion because, after all, we haven&amp;#x27;t defined a goal. Is a low debt to equity ratio desirable? Depends on what you&amp;#x27;re trying to accomplish. Is high cash flow desirable? As an end state, yes that&amp;#x27;s desirable but what if that end state requires a large amount of debt to achieve?</text></comment>

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<story><title>The End of the Bonus Culture Is Coming to Wall Street?</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/traders-unlearn-bonus-culture-as-machines-invade-wall-street</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in the industry and gotten multiple job offers over the years from them. It still blows my mind that &amp;gt;50% of your compensation is issued as a once-per-year completely-discretionary &amp;quot;bonus&amp;quot;. It mostly works fine, due to firms wanting to safeguard their reputation. But if for any reason, you piss off the wrong person or the firm has a bad year, you will lose 50% of your expected compensation... retroactively for the work you had already done in the past year... with no legal protections or recourse whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;Sure, tech companies have significant bonuses and RSUs as well. But the bonus is more limited in size. And the RSU vesting schedule is more fine-grained, explicitly defined in your employment contract, and the stock valuations are determined by the wider market.&lt;p&gt;Imagine working in finance for a year, expecting to earn $300k for a year&amp;#x27;s work, and then finding out at the end of the year that you&amp;#x27;re only going to get a fraction of that. It blows my mind that this doesn&amp;#x27;t scare more people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TrackerFF</author><text>But then again, what&amp;#x27;s the retention rate in analyst classes? Probably half of the classes quit after their analyst stint, either for greener pastures, business school, or complete career changes. Some stay for their associate roles, or come back for associate or VP after business school - if they even bother with investment banks.&lt;p&gt;Adjusting bonuses like that seems like a cruel way of enforcing &amp;quot;up or out&amp;quot;. If for whatever reason you don&amp;#x27;t like some subordinate, or think they&amp;#x27;re cut out for future promotions, just hand out mediocre bonuses until they jump ship.&lt;p&gt;I think that in banking (and many other businesses), it&amp;#x27;s entire possible to be a good &amp;#x2F; well-performing junior banker, but not necessarily have the skills of succeeding in more senior roles, where your job is very different. (e.g mostly dealing with clients)</text></comment>

<story><title>The End of the Bonus Culture Is Coming to Wall Street?</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/traders-unlearn-bonus-culture-as-machines-invade-wall-street</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whack</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve worked in the industry and gotten multiple job offers over the years from them. It still blows my mind that &amp;gt;50% of your compensation is issued as a once-per-year completely-discretionary &amp;quot;bonus&amp;quot;. It mostly works fine, due to firms wanting to safeguard their reputation. But if for any reason, you piss off the wrong person or the firm has a bad year, you will lose 50% of your expected compensation... retroactively for the work you had already done in the past year... with no legal protections or recourse whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;Sure, tech companies have significant bonuses and RSUs as well. But the bonus is more limited in size. And the RSU vesting schedule is more fine-grained, explicitly defined in your employment contract, and the stock valuations are determined by the wider market.&lt;p&gt;Imagine working in finance for a year, expecting to earn $300k for a year&amp;#x27;s work, and then finding out at the end of the year that you&amp;#x27;re only going to get a fraction of that. It blows my mind that this doesn&amp;#x27;t scare more people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>Well it goes with the culture of investment banking: high-risk, high-reward. Once you are in, of course, they give you the ol’ wink and nod about how much of that risk they are actually taking on.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your WiFi passwords, stored in the clear</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grendelt</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t use smart bulbs. Bulbs burn out. Use smart sockets and &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; bulbs. Don&amp;#x27;t put disposable things on your network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sleepybrett</author><text>Most, if not all, smart bulbs are LED bulbs&lt;p&gt;LED bulbs have very long lives.&lt;p&gt;If you want to use an RGB bulb or one of those bulbs that has adjustable white temperature, a smart socket isn&amp;#x27;t going to support that.</text></comment>

<story><title>Discarded smart lightbulbs reveal your WiFi passwords, stored in the clear</title><url>https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/fiat-lux.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grendelt</author><text>Don&amp;#x27;t use smart bulbs. Bulbs burn out. Use smart sockets and &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; bulbs. Don&amp;#x27;t put disposable things on your network.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>humantiy</author><text>That seems like just as bad of an idea. In theory the bulbs (LED) are supposed to last at least 10 years. If you use a smart socket it will stick around a lot longer. Sounds better, but look at how things have changed in the past 10-20 years in wireless tech and security alone. Personally I see the &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; bulbs and sockets as the smart choice.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Timeline of the far future</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>It will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.</text></item><item><author>21</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>improv32</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they&amp;#x27;ve done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.</text></comment>

<story><title>Timeline of the far future</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikeash</author><text>It will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.</text></item><item><author>21</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrighele</author><text>I would just change the duration of a second. It would be probably easier to change a few physics constants here and there than to fix all the broken code.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Apple M1 support for TensorFlow 2.5 pluggable device API</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codelord</author><text>M1 and AMD GPU support. I&amp;#x27;m personally more interested in the latter as I haven&amp;#x27;t yet upgraded my MacBook Pro and I expect that my Vega 20 to be faster than M1 at ML training.&lt;p&gt;The raw compute power of M1&amp;#x27;s GPU seems to be 2.6 TFLOPS (single precision) vs 3.2 TFLOPS for Vega 20. This can give you an estimate of how fast it would be for training.&lt;p&gt;Just for reference Nvidia&amp;#x27;s flagship desktop GPU(3090)&amp;#x27;s FP32 performance is 35.5 TFLOPS.</text></comment>

<story><title>Apple M1 support for TensorFlow 2.5 pluggable device API</title><url>https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rozim</author><text>I have found the M1 air fine for web browsing but kind of hard to install software on.&lt;p&gt;Following the instructions: -----&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; python -m pip install tensorflow-macos ... ERROR: Failed building wheel for numpy Failed to build numpy ERROR: Could not build wheels for numpy which use PEP 517 and cannot be installed directly&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; -----&lt;p&gt;(base) dave@daves-air ~ % uname -a&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Darwin daves-air.lan 20.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.5.0: Sat May 8 05:10:31 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.121.3~9&amp;#x2F;RELEASE_ARM64_T8101 arm64&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>What every Web Developer should know about SEO</title><url>https://www.polemicdigital.com/2015/01/every-web-developer-know-seo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mootothemax</author><text>For JavaScript-heavy sites, I still recommend following Google&amp;#x27;s AJAX-crawling guidelines, and supporting the pre-rendered view request variable _escaped_fragment_&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developers.google.com&amp;#x2F;webmasters&amp;#x2F;ajax-crawling&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can do a good enough job by sending such requests to a PhantomJS instance, waiting for the page to load, outputting the PhantomJS-rendered HTML to the browser, and saving the HTML to a cache for faster access next time.[1]&lt;p&gt;There are also plenty of SaaS apps that will handle the pre-rendering for you.&lt;p&gt;An additional bonus of doing this is that you can intercept requests from engines and services that don&amp;#x27;t support _escaped_fragment (e.g. Facebook external hit), and always ensure that you serve pre-rendered HTML to them. (e.g. by matching on the user-agent string).&lt;p&gt;[1a] One potential hitch is knowing &lt;i&gt;when&lt;/i&gt; a page has finished rendering. You could potentially set a variable in your code and have PhantomJS wait for that.&lt;p&gt;[1b] One other hitch is that it&amp;#x27;s possible for PhantomJS to time out e.g. waiting for an external JS library to load. It&amp;#x27;s sensible to check that your HTML output looks vaguely sane before sending to the browser (e.g. for Angular, make sure there are no {{ }} blocks in the HTML), and sending a temporary error code if something looks odd.</text></comment>

<story><title>What every Web Developer should know about SEO</title><url>https://www.polemicdigital.com/2015/01/every-web-developer-know-seo/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alphadevx</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m coming to the conclusion that SEO does not matter anymore, at least not this basic stuff as everyone is doing this, including your rivals, so it is really not going to get you to stand out from the crowd.&lt;p&gt;Search engines make their money from advertising your site, _not_ from sending you free traffic via SEO. So fire up your credit card and buy some Adwords in key search terms for your business, that&amp;#x27;s want they want from you. I believe we are already in the post-SEO age of the Internet, maybe we have been for a few years now.</text></comment>

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<story><title>JetBrains suspends R&amp;D activities in Russia and sales in Russia and Belarus</title><url>https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>farmerbb</author><text>Looks like they&amp;#x27;ve already removed their Russian locations from the contact page on their website.&lt;p&gt;Compare the current page [1] with the archived one [2] from three days ago&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;company&amp;#x2F;contacts&amp;#x2F;#headquarters-international-sales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;company&amp;#x2F;contacts&amp;#x2F;#headquarters-int...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20220309000203&amp;#x2F;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&amp;#x2F;company&amp;#x2F;contacts&amp;#x2F;#headquarters-international-sales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20220309000203&amp;#x2F;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.jetbr...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>JetBrains suspends R&amp;D activities in Russia and sales in Russia and Belarus</title><url>https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2022/03/11/jetbrains-statement-on-ukraine/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sam_lowry_</author><text>They never publicly announced how many employees they had in Russia, but I heard informally that they have over 5000 people there, mostly in the Saint Petersburg offices.&lt;p&gt;5000 employees with family members... even if many of them choose to quit, that&amp;#x27;s a lot of people to move across the border that can close any time.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Google’s also peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/googles-also-peddling-a-data-collector-through-apples-back-door/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidewaysloading</author><text>This is Google not only intercepting people&amp;#x27;s smartphone traffic, but a lot more:&lt;p&gt;- Google will send you a router to intercept your entire household&amp;#x27;s internet traffic on all devices with a browser (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574391?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7573819&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757439...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;- Google will send you a device that listens 24&amp;#x2F;7 to audio in the room to figure out what you are watching on TV and listening to (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574764?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7562482&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757476...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;- Google&amp;#x27;s project includes tracking of desktop and laptop internet activity via a browser extension that can basically read literally anything you do online (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574481?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7573811&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757448...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t just trying to figure out what new up-and-coming apps are going to be the next big thing, this is Google building out very far-reaching profiles of your entire household, in return for some gift cards. This is signing away your family&amp;#x27;s entire digital life (and a significant part of anyone they interact with in a browser).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curiousgal</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll go ahead and play the Devil&amp;#x27;s advocate because every constructive conversation needs one.&lt;p&gt;People who signup for this already know what they are doing and the program has a privacy section[0] saying that the data is only shared with Google which is pretty much akin to having any Smart Speaker. Not only that but it also says that the data wouldn&amp;#x27;t be used to &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;advertise to you or sell you anything&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot; which is not the case with Smart Speakers.&lt;p&gt;In essence, from a privacy point of view, when compared to having a Smart Speaker, this is better I&amp;#x27;d say.&lt;p&gt;0.&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;9028740?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7563962&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;902874...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Google’s also peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/googles-also-peddling-a-data-collector-through-apples-back-door/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidewaysloading</author><text>This is Google not only intercepting people&amp;#x27;s smartphone traffic, but a lot more:&lt;p&gt;- Google will send you a router to intercept your entire household&amp;#x27;s internet traffic on all devices with a browser (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574391?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7573819&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757439...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;- Google will send you a device that listens 24&amp;#x2F;7 to audio in the room to figure out what you are watching on TV and listening to (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574764?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7562482&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757476...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;- Google&amp;#x27;s project includes tracking of desktop and laptop internet activity via a browser extension that can basically read literally anything you do online (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;7574481?hl=en&amp;amp;ref_topic=7573811&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.google.com&amp;#x2F;audiencemeasurement&amp;#x2F;answer&amp;#x2F;757448...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t just trying to figure out what new up-and-coming apps are going to be the next big thing, this is Google building out very far-reaching profiles of your entire household, in return for some gift cards. This is signing away your family&amp;#x27;s entire digital life (and a significant part of anyone they interact with in a browser).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shittyadmin</author><text>Sounds quite similar to the way TV ratings are done - is this really such an issue? It&amp;#x27;s very much an opt in service designed to measure audiences.&lt;p&gt;Unlike hidden terms in privacy policies it&amp;#x27;s made quite clear what&amp;#x27;s going on here.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Volcanoes can affect climate</title><url>https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yongjik</author><text>The problem with climate geo-engineering solution is not that they won&amp;#x27;t work, but rather that they don&amp;#x27;t solve the problem we need to solve. As people say, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If we had stopped digging, maybe we could employ other solutions (like geoengineering) to get out of the hole.&lt;p&gt;But we&amp;#x27;re nowhere near the &amp;quot;stop digging&amp;quot; stage; in fact, we are at &amp;quot;we &lt;i&gt;might&lt;/i&gt; be digging at maximum speed now, because at least we&amp;#x27;re not digging noticeably faster every coming year&amp;quot; stage.&lt;p&gt;Whatever we do, we will need to restructure the global economy to drastically reduce CO2 emission. Any potential &amp;quot;alternative&amp;quot; solution is an auxiliary measure we could employ &lt;i&gt;on top of&lt;/i&gt; decarbonization; it cannot replace decarbonization.</text></comment>

<story><title>Volcanoes can affect climate</title><url>https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>somat</author><text>When I am in the right sort of contrary mood I like to do a little mustache twirl and boldly proclaim.&lt;p&gt;We worked hard to get the sulfur compounds out of our fuels... What if that was a long term mistake. Perhaps we should be putting extra sulfur in our jet fuels.&lt;p&gt;Acid rain was not that bad... was it?</text></comment>

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<story><title>YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. Not good for anyone.&lt;p&gt;There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatyoucantsay</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.</text></comment>

<story><title>YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieltillett</author><text>The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. Not good for anyone.&lt;p&gt;There are no easy solutions, but it would help I think if all effort was concentrated on removing hurdles rather than patching problems downstream with lazy fixes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway0255</author><text>Tell that to the white and asian males who get rejected on the basis of their race and gender despite having worked their entire lives to be the most qualified and technically adept candidate.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have.&lt;p&gt;Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists.&lt;p&gt;I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; of the conversation be about that?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users (2022)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-cookie-protection-by-default-to-all-users-worldwide/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChrisArchitect</author><text>It says &lt;i&gt;Updated Aug. 28, 2024&lt;/i&gt; - what is the update?&lt;p&gt;That they&amp;#x27;re expanding the deprecation of third-party cookies that they blogged about in December?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit&lt;/i&gt;: yes, looks like that last paragraph is the addition</text></comment>

<story><title>Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users (2022)</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-rolls-out-total-cookie-protection-by-default-to-all-users-worldwide/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryu2k2</author><text>Honestly, I barely understand how Firefox&amp;#x27;s cookie protection works anymore. It used to have the simple option to block third party cookies that I had running all day and felt good with. That was until they started becoming necessary in certain scenarios (I can&amp;#x27;t even remember the details of what that was).&lt;p&gt;And then these days I have no idea if I can just accept a website&amp;#x27;s advertising cookies and expect Firefox to block them anyways, or if clicking on such a button would disable the browser&amp;#x27;s tracking protection.</text></comment>

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<story><title>My open-source, do-it-yourself cellphone (2013)</title><url>https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/08/12/diy-cellphone/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>The actual &amp;quot;phone&amp;quot; part is what&amp;#x27;s difficult about doing this, and I&amp;#x27;d be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; impressed if someone did manage to write a full GSM stack and produce working --- if not completely legal due to all the regulations --- hardware themselves (I believe Fabrice Bellard has done something similar), but then again, most of the large manufacturers don&amp;#x27;t design and produce the GSM hardware in mass-produced phones either. As this project shows, taking an existing GSM modem and building an interface around it is not very difficult in comparison.&lt;p&gt;A comparison with a mass-produced product of similar functionality 3 years ago yields some interesting datapoints:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;?page_id=3107&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;?page_id=3107&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>My open-source, do-it-yourself cellphone (2013)</title><url>https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/08/12/diy-cellphone/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>StavrosK</author><text>This is great! Here&amp;#x27;s my (more retro) take on it:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stavros.io&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;irotary-saga&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.stavros.io&amp;#x2F;posts&amp;#x2F;irotary-saga&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m looking to make a PCB for it, as the Arduino Uno + shield is way, way too big for this. Does anyone know of a good way to do that? I looked at the SIM900 module but I was a bit intimidated by all the pins.&lt;p&gt;The OP&amp;#x27;s build seems to be using the Quectel M10, maybe it won&amp;#x27;t be too hard to get that running...</text></comment>

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<story><title>Quad9 wins appeal against Sony</title><url>https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around-in-dresden/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jug</author><text>Haha, I enjoy that Quad9 brought up the domain name in question, playing into the Streisand effect. Maybe just a little bit out of spite from having caused them such a hassle. So today I learnt about &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;canna.to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;canna.to&lt;/a&gt;. Thank you, Sony. It wouldn&amp;#x27;t have happened without you.</text></comment>

<story><title>Quad9 wins appeal against Sony</title><url>https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around-in-dresden/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>Related. Others?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Quad9 blocks pirate site globally after Sony demanded €10k fine&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=36878867&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=36878867&lt;/a&gt; - July 2023 (65 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Quad9’s Opinion of the Recent Court Ruling in Leipzig&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35971915&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35971915&lt;/a&gt; - May 2023 (84 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;DNS Resolver Quad9 Loses Global Pirate Site Blocking Case Against Sony&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35081507&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35081507&lt;/a&gt; - March 2023 (11 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Sony&amp;#x27;s Legal Attack on Quad9, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35026403&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35026403&lt;/a&gt; - March 2023 (85 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Avoid Using Quad9 DNS: They Are Going to Start Blocking Pirate Websites&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31487630&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=31487630&lt;/a&gt; - May 2022 (7 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;DNS-Resolver Quad9 Loses First Pirate Site Blocking Appeal in Germany&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29458069&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29458069&lt;/a&gt; - Dec 2021 (2 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;German Court Rules Against Internet Security Non-Profit Quad9&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29398455&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29398455&lt;/a&gt; - Nov 2021 (192 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Quad9 Files Official Objection Opposing Sony Music’s German Court Ruling&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=28434883&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=28434883&lt;/a&gt; - Sept 2021 (25 comments)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Quad9 and Sony Music: German Injunction Status&lt;/i&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27620319&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=27620319&lt;/a&gt; - June 2021 (227 comments)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-message-to-whatsapp-make-money-1533139325</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>storgendibal</author><text>Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy&amp;#x2F;squishy&amp;#x2F;learnable.&lt;p&gt;During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, and can make or break a company. Corporate planning from a cost &amp;#x2F; revenue perspective is super critical. Steering a large organization and navigating personalities and power structures in such a company is difficult and squishy.&lt;p&gt;Certainly, some MBAs are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;ve also run into plenty of engineers who are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to stereotype. When I first started business school I thought everyone would be the stereotypical investment banking jerk. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that most people were fun, &lt;i&gt;very sharp&lt;/i&gt;, pleasant, intellectually curious, and they really respected folks with a technical background. Exposure to them broadened my own worldview in a number of different ways. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to run a company. But you also don&amp;#x27;t need a CS degree from MIT to be an awesome engineer.</text></item><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that&amp;#x27;s nothing to sneeze at. It doesn&amp;#x27;t cost them $100M a month to provide the service.&lt;p&gt;I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>volgo</author><text>Just because it&amp;#x27;s hard, and the people running them are sharp and smart, doesn&amp;#x27;t make it any more righteous or normal.&lt;p&gt;Back in the Colonial times, sharp smart lads went to prestigious military schools and learned the complexities of how to subjugate conquered people. How to efficiently run a slave camp. How to squeeze every unit of labor off the peasants, etc. People went to these schools were probably very cultured, polite, and were funny and pleasant at social events. But history will judge them harshly&lt;p&gt;Would not be surprised if the same thing happened to MBAs when the tide of history turns in a few centuries. Maybe squeezing profit off of people will no longer be ethical or acceptable, even if your model is complex and intellectual</text></comment>

<story><title>Facebook’s New Message to WhatsApp: Make Money</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-new-message-to-whatsapp-make-money-1533139325</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>storgendibal</author><text>Engineer with an MBA here. My two cents: Back when I was writing code, my worldview was that if engineers ran every company, then the world would simply be a better, more rational place. Because engineering is hard and everything else is easy&amp;#x2F;squishy&amp;#x2F;learnable.&lt;p&gt;During my b-school classes, it dawned on me that things are much more complicated than I had thought. Marketing and sales are very hard, very quantitative, and can make or break a company. Corporate planning from a cost &amp;#x2F; revenue perspective is super critical. Steering a large organization and navigating personalities and power structures in such a company is difficult and squishy.&lt;p&gt;Certainly, some MBAs are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; but I&amp;#x27;ve also run into plenty of engineers who are full of sh&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. I think it&amp;#x27;s hard to stereotype. When I first started business school I thought everyone would be the stereotypical investment banking jerk. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised that most people were fun, &lt;i&gt;very sharp&lt;/i&gt;, pleasant, intellectually curious, and they really respected folks with a technical background. Exposure to them broadened my own worldview in a number of different ways. Sure, you don&amp;#x27;t need an MBA to run a company. But you also don&amp;#x27;t need a CS degree from MIT to be an awesome engineer.</text></item><item><author>russellbeattie</author><text>Whatsapp had a great business model: $1 a year. With their current 1.5 billion users, that&amp;#x27;s nothing to sneeze at. It doesn&amp;#x27;t cost them $100M a month to provide the service.&lt;p&gt;I wish more companies were like Craigslist - happy to make an great profit and a lasting business by providing basic information services for a reasonable price. Instead, a bunch of MBAs want to rule the world by focusing on growth at all costs, so they can then turn around and squeeze their locked in users for every dime possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>secfirstmd</author><text>Personally I just wish less of our world class minds were working at huge, de facto advertising companies thinking about how to monetise&amp;#x2F;track the flow of information, sneak an microsecond advantage on the stock market etc and more were solving more important stuff like climate change, disease and democracy&amp;#x2F;human rights being under retreat.&lt;p&gt;Lets be honest here, Whatsapp gathered hundreds of millions of users with a tiny team. Signal and Signal protocol made Whatsapp secure with less than 10 people on the team full time. So less than a hundred staff, 1.5 billion per year is more than enough resources to add get most of the benefits of Whatsapp to humanity. Leaving plenty of engineers, MBAs and who ever is left to go do more useful stuff.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Hidden Portals in Earth&apos;s Magnetic Field</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bitwize</author><text>&quot;Cave Johnson here. I think we found something that will help us stick it to those blowhards at Black Mesa. Turns out there&apos;s a natural portal phenomenon connecting the magnetic fields of the earth and the sun. The lab boys are still trying to figure out the properties of this thing, see how it can be exploited for science, so we need volunteers. All test subjects who want to go on an all-expense-paid trip to the surface of the sun please meet in Testing Annex 5B and await further instructions. There&apos;s $60 in it for you if you make it back alive!&quot;</text></comment>

<story><title>Hidden Portals in Earth&apos;s Magnetic Field</title><url>http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/mag-portals.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;A favorite theme of science fiction is &quot;the portal&quot;--an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed.... It turns out that they do, sort of,...&quot;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if by &quot;sort of&quot;, you mean, &quot;not at all like how science fiction uses the term&quot;. What a terrible opening.</text></comment>

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<story><title>After George Floyd’s murder, police built a surveillance machine in Minnesota</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/03/1046676/police-surveillance-minnesota-george-floyd/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rootusrootus</author><text>We really need someone to watch the watchers. Like internal affairs but not part of the police. A group that has police powers over the police but not over the citizenry, and who is not subject to police authority. Give them legally mandated access to &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; police records.&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious. Which probably means I&amp;#x27;m missing something. Or it could just be that the police apparatus is so deeply embedded into the state political system already that it&amp;#x27;s not possible to put a check on their power. Although some US states have citizen initiatives, so we could force the issue. But then again, many citizens like a strong, unaccountable police force, so that is hardly a guarantee of success.</text></comment>

<story><title>After George Floyd’s murder, police built a surveillance machine in Minnesota</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/03/1046676/police-surveillance-minnesota-george-floyd/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tremon</author><text>&lt;i&gt;spokesperson Doug Neville wrote that OSN is “not an ongoing operation.”&lt;p&gt;However, according to emails obtained and reviewed as part of our investigation, the operation does appear to be actively ongoing [..] as “OSN 2.0”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This whitewashing of illegal&amp;#x2F;unethical activities by simply renaming them is so common, it must have a name?</text></comment>

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<story><title>What I&apos;ve Learned From Female Founders So Far</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-founders-so-far</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmduke</author><text>&lt;i&gt;We want to fund more women because it&amp;#x27;s the right thing to do, but we&amp;#x27;re not doing this for diversity&amp;#x27;s sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing &amp;quot;against diversity&amp;quot; (I put that in quotes because I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of &amp;#x27;greed&amp;#x27; -- or, more charitably, economic rationality.&lt;p&gt;In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):&lt;p&gt;1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.&lt;p&gt;2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nawitus</author><text>&amp;quot;it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it&amp;#x27;s probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it&amp;#x27;s wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don&amp;#x27;t imply that, please make it clear.&lt;p&gt;If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males.&lt;p&gt;The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups.&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of all these communities like &amp;quot;AngularJS women&amp;quot;, who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that&amp;#x27;s pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you&amp;#x27;ll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.</text></comment>

<story><title>What I&apos;ve Learned From Female Founders So Far</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-founders-so-far</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmduke</author><text>&lt;i&gt;We want to fund more women because it&amp;#x27;s the right thing to do, but we&amp;#x27;re not doing this for diversity&amp;#x27;s sake alone. We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way--we want to fund the most successful startups, and many of those are going to be founded by women.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a huge thing that people seem to ignore when arguing &amp;quot;against diversity&amp;quot; (I put that in quotes because I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone actually argues against diversity -- they couch it in terms of meritocracy and egalitarianism, saying that the best people should succeed regardless of race and gender, it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.) I think Sam does a great job of presenting this as a thing of &amp;#x27;greed&amp;#x27; -- or, more charitably, economic rationality.&lt;p&gt;In my mind, there are only two real possibilities (or, perhaps more realistically, two ends of a spectrum):&lt;p&gt;1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.&lt;p&gt;2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hnnewguy</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, I don&amp;#x27;t believe that is the argument.&lt;p&gt;The argument is &amp;quot;Let&amp;#x27;s not over-compensate for historical institutional racism&amp;#x2F;sexism, and, &lt;i&gt;going forward&lt;/i&gt;, select the best candidates based on merit, regardless of gender or colour.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;You can&amp;#x27;t eliminate these issues overnight, with a rule or two.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Time-lapse video of a rocket launch seen from space</title><url>https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/amazing-time-lapse-video-of-a-rocket-launch-seen-from-space</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>viewtransform</author><text>Direct link to video &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=aJy1u-N3NY0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=aJy1u-N3NY0&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Time-lapse video of a rocket launch seen from space</title><url>https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/amazing-time-lapse-video-of-a-rocket-launch-seen-from-space</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jere</author><text>Pardon my extreme ignorance, but what is the greenish&amp;#x2F;yellowish band?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Live editing WebGL shaders with Firefox Developer Tools</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl-shaders-with-firefox-developer-tools/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chime</author><text>This looks fantastic. If I had this tool in 1995, my career trajectory might have been quite different. I loved graphics but it was so time consuming to make one change, recompile, re-run the program, and then start again to tweak 0.1 to 0.2.&lt;p&gt;With this editor, after you make the changes, do you have to copy-paste that back into your source to save it?&lt;p&gt;Slightly unrelated but seeing as how neat Firefox has become, I really feel like I need to switch back to it from Chrome. I went Netscape &amp;gt; IE &amp;gt; Maxthon &amp;gt; Firefox &amp;gt; Chrome. Chrome dev tools are good but Firefox seems even better. Anyone revert back to FF lately?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RyanZAG</author><text>Definitely back to Firefox. With all the non-standards compliant features that have been built into Chrome recently, it&amp;#x27;s a lot slower than it once was. Plus the less support Chrome gets, the less chance they have of destroying web standards. Just watching how Google handles the Android ecosystem should be enough to prove to anyone what would happen if Google had more control over the web. These days if you want an open web, you pretty much need to be at least Google-wary.&lt;p&gt;Firefox has also made leaps and bounds in memory usage and keeping the UI good looking but usable. Definitely a project worth supporting.</text></comment>

<story><title>Live editing WebGL shaders with Firefox Developer Tools</title><url>https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/11/live-editing-webgl-shaders-with-firefox-developer-tools/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chime</author><text>This looks fantastic. If I had this tool in 1995, my career trajectory might have been quite different. I loved graphics but it was so time consuming to make one change, recompile, re-run the program, and then start again to tweak 0.1 to 0.2.&lt;p&gt;With this editor, after you make the changes, do you have to copy-paste that back into your source to save it?&lt;p&gt;Slightly unrelated but seeing as how neat Firefox has become, I really feel like I need to switch back to it from Chrome. I went Netscape &amp;gt; IE &amp;gt; Maxthon &amp;gt; Firefox &amp;gt; Chrome. Chrome dev tools are good but Firefox seems even better. Anyone revert back to FF lately?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blueveek</author><text>&amp;gt; With this editor, after you make the changes, do you have to copy-paste that back into your source to save it?&lt;p&gt;Currently yes. However, we have plans to make this better soon. (we call them Project Maps, and they&amp;#x27;re on the roadmap)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Most Vegetarians and Vegans Eventually Return to Meat</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/3039505/the-vast-majority-of-vegetarians-and-vegans-eventually-return-to-meat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NhanH</author><text>One thing worth noting is that regardless of one&amp;#x27;s personal reasons to be vegan&amp;#x2F; vegetarian , being 90% vegan WILL almost always be 90% effective for said reason.&lt;p&gt;This is not to dispute anything from the article. Just a reminder that if you sympathize or relate with any cause to reduce animal product usage, you don&amp;#x27;t have to be &amp;quot;vegan&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;vegetarian&amp;quot;, just try to reduce your consumption to the point where it starts to inconvenient you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>schnevets</author><text>I wanted to cut meat for environmental purposes, so I&amp;#x27;ve started only eating it on holidays - turkey on Thanksgiving, fish on Christmas Eve, a burger&amp;#x2F;barbecue on 4th of July, buffalo wings on my birthday. I don&amp;#x27;t describe myself with the &amp;quot;V&amp;quot; word, and usually just say I &amp;quot;avoid eating meat&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;People are usually critical when I opt for vegetarian options, and then completely lighten up when I describe that I do eat meat. It&amp;#x27;s strange how defensive people get about eating meat, and how quickly they lighten up just because I eat meat 5 times a year.</text></comment>

<story><title>Most Vegetarians and Vegans Eventually Return to Meat</title><url>https://www.fastcompany.com/3039505/the-vast-majority-of-vegetarians-and-vegans-eventually-return-to-meat</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>NhanH</author><text>One thing worth noting is that regardless of one&amp;#x27;s personal reasons to be vegan&amp;#x2F; vegetarian , being 90% vegan WILL almost always be 90% effective for said reason.&lt;p&gt;This is not to dispute anything from the article. Just a reminder that if you sympathize or relate with any cause to reduce animal product usage, you don&amp;#x27;t have to be &amp;quot;vegan&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;vegetarian&amp;quot;, just try to reduce your consumption to the point where it starts to inconvenient you.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rqebmm</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve wrestled with it, and settled into prioritizing humanely-raised meat. I have far more qualms about the inhumane treatment of most farm animals than I do about the concept of raising and slaughtering animals for food.&lt;p&gt;The heuristic I apply is I only eat antibiotic free meat. It has nothing to do with animals taking antibiotics per se, but rather that large farms abuse them as it&amp;#x27;s cheaper to pump a pig full of antibiotics than it is to provide remotely sanitary living conditions, nevermind the environmental issues around creating antibiotic resistant superbugs.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Official Hacker News T-Shirt</title><url>http://teespring.com/hntees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>I kind of wish this were the top comment. It would be humorously appropriate if the top comment on the thread about the official HN t-shirt were the traditional nitpicking/point-missing type that is so commonly the top comment when people launch new technology here.</text></item><item><author>jug6ernaut</author><text>I don&apos;t really get this T, i understand its going for minimalism, but would someone who frequents HN recognize it if they did not already know its affiliation?(i wouldn&apos;t) &amp;#38; if the answer is no, then whats the point of the T?&lt;p&gt;Edit for clarity: Not knocking the cause, it is great. Just the design really, maybe im missing something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cperciva</author><text>I mean no offense, and I realize that this is your site; but I really think jug6ernaut&apos;s comment added far more value than your response.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t think jug6ernaut missed the point whatsoever, and I wouldn&apos;t characterize him as nit-picking either: The question of who is expected to understand the t-shirt and what its point is (as compared to an unbranded t-shirt) are perfectly reasonable. Personally I see nothing wrong with t-shirts which can only be understood by an &quot;in&quot; group, but that doesn&apos;t mean that there&apos;s anything wrong with asking if that was the intention.&lt;p&gt;Your reply, on the other hand, strikes me as exactly the sort of knee-jerk defensiveness which often makes me wish that submitters couldn&apos;t comment on their own posts: Not only did you fail to answer the question, but you implied that jug6ernaut was being unreasonable to even ask it.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s your site and you&apos;re entitled to encourage and discourage whichever types of posts you want -- but I think if your desire is to have a site where people engage in meaningful discussion, you made a poor choice here.</text></comment>

<story><title>Official Hacker News T-Shirt</title><url>http://teespring.com/hntees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>I kind of wish this were the top comment. It would be humorously appropriate if the top comment on the thread about the official HN t-shirt were the traditional nitpicking/point-missing type that is so commonly the top comment when people launch new technology here.</text></item><item><author>jug6ernaut</author><text>I don&apos;t really get this T, i understand its going for minimalism, but would someone who frequents HN recognize it if they did not already know its affiliation?(i wouldn&apos;t) &amp;#38; if the answer is no, then whats the point of the T?&lt;p&gt;Edit for clarity: Not knocking the cause, it is great. Just the design really, maybe im missing something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shill</author><text>I read HN nitpicking posts in the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Why are you using American Apparel for a multi-threaded shirt and not Erlang?&quot;</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Legal Gray Zone of Marijuana at Airports</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-baffling-legal-gray-zone-of-marijuana-at-the-airport-11567589405?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vonseel</author><text>I wish they would just go ahead and legalize recreational use nationwide.&lt;p&gt;As someone who binge drank &lt;i&gt;a lot&lt;/i&gt; from ~16yo to 22yo, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what kind of lunacy causes someone to think alcohol is safer or more acceptable than marijuana use. Maybe the people behind propaganda didn&amp;#x27;t like how marijuana can make people less social and more eccentric, but since drinking alcohol is seen as a way of socializing and camaraderie, it&amp;#x27;s acceptable?&lt;p&gt;The older I get the less I like alcohol. &lt;i&gt;Hangovers&lt;/i&gt; suck. I was (un)lucky enough to have a bad lifetime case of acid reflux&amp;#x2F;GERD which is exacerbated by alcohol, so between that and not liking the hangovers, I generally can&amp;#x27;t imagine being an alcoholic. But alcohol ruins a lot of lives. I don&amp;#x27;t know how many lives marijuana ruins, except maybe out of laziness or lack of motivation.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Legal Gray Zone of Marijuana at Airports</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-baffling-legal-gray-zone-of-marijuana-at-the-airport-11567589405?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gadders</author><text>Slightly Offtopic:&lt;p&gt;There was a section on a British news program this morning (Today on Radio 4) that said that UK subjects that invest in US Cannabis companies (even ones that are legal in their states) could be prosecuted in the UK under the Proceeds of Crime act. This applies even if the companies were held in a fund.&lt;p&gt;I think there are lots of grey areas when it comes to legal Marijuana.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The rise and fall of the industrial R&amp;D lab</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-rd-lab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amgreg</author><text>Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren&amp;#x27;t worth it for the research they do. It&amp;#x27;s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&amp;amp;T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it&amp;#x27;s just not worth it, so let&amp;#x27;s kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let&amp;#x27;s do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wenc</author><text>&amp;gt; other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money?&lt;p&gt;Bell Labs may not have been able to commercialize all of its discoveries, but &lt;i&gt;humanity&lt;/i&gt; certainly got a lot more than Unix and the transistor. Quote [1]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, and S. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bell Labs was also a training ground for a great many people who went on to make highly impactful discoveries [2], from Hamming to Bengio.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>The rise and fall of the industrial R&amp;D lab</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-rd-lab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amgreg</author><text>Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren&amp;#x27;t worth it for the research they do. It&amp;#x27;s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&amp;amp;T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it&amp;#x27;s just not worth it, so let&amp;#x27;s kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let&amp;#x27;s do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>criddell</author><text>I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop&amp;#x27;s book &lt;i&gt;The Dream Machines&lt;/i&gt; which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60&amp;#x27;s and 70&amp;#x27;s and into the 80&amp;#x27;s. It&amp;#x27;s a long, detailed book and I recommend it.&lt;p&gt;After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts?&lt;p&gt;I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it&amp;#x27;s similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles.&lt;p&gt;I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Work on these things</title><url>https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/work-on-these-things.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wslh</author><text>I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local&amp;#x2F;family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).&lt;p&gt;Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_fs</author><text>Are you saying that you don’t enjoy the 4 page life retelling story intermixed with countless ads and the same staged photo from 5 different angles and 4 different focal points when you just want to see the recipe? Luckily, there is an extension to parse all that out.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;sean-public&amp;#x2F;RecipeFilter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;sean-public&amp;#x2F;RecipeFilter&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Work on these things</title><url>https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/work-on-these-things.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wslh</author><text>I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local&amp;#x2F;family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).&lt;p&gt;Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gombosg</author><text>IMHO this is because of SEO. Whatever algorithms search companies make, those who exploit them (called SEO, whatever the hat color is) will have an advantage over those who don&amp;#x27;t.</text></comment>

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<story><title>I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language</title><url>https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/how-i-used-the-internet-to-painlessly-relearn-a-foreign-language-and-you-could-to-63139f0dc5b6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giorgosera</author><text>Almost a year ago I decided to start learning Russian so that I can talk with my girlfriend in her native language (the things we do for love )&lt;p&gt;Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly.&lt;p&gt;However, I got stuck after that. I couldn&amp;#x27;t see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I&amp;#x27;ve been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here&amp;#x27;s what I do:&lt;p&gt;- I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one.&lt;p&gt;And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language.&lt;p&gt;However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>interestica</author><text>This is excellent! Lots of potential here.&lt;p&gt;On mobile, I just tested the default French lesson. Right now, the &amp;#x27;dictionary&amp;#x27; seems to be displayed dependent on where the last appearance of the word in the text. This means that if I select a word in the first paragraph but the word also appears in the last paragraph, I have to scroll to the bottom to see its definition (and add it to &amp;#x27;my list&amp;#x27;). (ex: &amp;#x27;protestaires&amp;#x27; in the default FR lesson) The column, in mobile view, gets bumped to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think you have to go as far as a modal window - something as simple as &amp;#x27;position:fixed&amp;#x27; would let it pop on top of the text (though right now, the dictionary box doesn&amp;#x27;t have a defined independent class and is not contained). It&amp;#x27;s probably best for the large-screen view as well: you don&amp;#x27;t want your text body to be moving around while reading.&lt;p&gt;But seriously, this is one of the simplest, smartest and most extensible language learning tools I&amp;#x27;ve come across. Thank you for sharing it.&lt;p&gt;edit&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F; It&amp;#x27;s a FF&amp;#x2F;Webkit quirk, but because the parent element (.bx--content) has &amp;#x27;transform&amp;#x27; property applied to it, it will prevent the child div from actually responding to &amp;#x27;position:fixed&amp;#x27;.</text></comment>

<story><title>I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language</title><url>https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/how-i-used-the-internet-to-painlessly-relearn-a-foreign-language-and-you-could-to-63139f0dc5b6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>giorgosera</author><text>Almost a year ago I decided to start learning Russian so that I can talk with my girlfriend in her native language (the things we do for love )&lt;p&gt;Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly.&lt;p&gt;However, I got stuck after that. I couldn&amp;#x27;t see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I&amp;#x27;ve been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here&amp;#x27;s what I do:&lt;p&gt;- I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one.&lt;p&gt;And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language.&lt;p&gt;However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OJFord</author><text>That looks great! Definitely warrants its own submission in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;What do you have to do in order to support extra languages? Perhaps ensure font support if loading from web, and the dictionary comes from Wiktionary so you do need to know what language it is, but other than that should &amp;#x27;just work&amp;#x27;, anything else?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akjssdk</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper. It is much easier to prove that this is superconducting than to prove why. And in a sense it is a bit less relevant. Although developing a working theory for room temperature is also probably worth a Nobel prize, so I am willing to bet some theorists are also running to their blackboards as we speak.</text></item><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>This is an extremely useful summarization of the original paper.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The authors believe that the modified&amp;#x2F;strained structure of their material creates a large number of “quantum wells” between particular lead atoms and the adjacent oxygens of the phosphate groups bound to them, in effect making a two-dimensional “electron gas”. They propose that electron tunneling between these quantum wells, which are between 3.7 and 6.5 Ångstroms apart, is the superconducting mechanism. I am not enough of a solid-state physicist to judge this proposal, but the authors are making a detailed mechanistic claim that is subject to experimental proof, which is very good to see, and and they adduce a good deal of data to back it up (x-ray diffraction, EPR, and more). And they demonstrate the behaviors that a superconductor should have, such as the Meissner effect (expulsion of a magnetic field), sudden resistivity changes at a critical temperature (bizarrely high though that is in this case), current-voltage (I-V) plots at different temperatures and under different magnetic field strengths, etc. If these data reproduce, the superconductivity of this material seems beyond doubt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terr_</author><text>&amp;gt; I don&amp;#x27;t think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper.&lt;p&gt;Plus even if the proposed-mechanism is incorrect and even if the effect is not strong enough for practical engineering... There&amp;#x27;s value in a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; (if weak) superconductor which is both easy to fabricate and easy to run tests on.&lt;p&gt;It could become a starting-point for dozens of other tweaked formulations, enabling all sorts of not-so-expensive experiments and fresh data about how different parameters lead to different electromagnetic outcomes.</text></comment>

<story><title>Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akjssdk</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper. It is much easier to prove that this is superconducting than to prove why. And in a sense it is a bit less relevant. Although developing a working theory for room temperature is also probably worth a Nobel prize, so I am willing to bet some theorists are also running to their blackboards as we speak.</text></item><item><author>mmastrac</author><text>This is an extremely useful summarization of the original paper.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The authors believe that the modified&amp;#x2F;strained structure of their material creates a large number of “quantum wells” between particular lead atoms and the adjacent oxygens of the phosphate groups bound to them, in effect making a two-dimensional “electron gas”. They propose that electron tunneling between these quantum wells, which are between 3.7 and 6.5 Ångstroms apart, is the superconducting mechanism. I am not enough of a solid-state physicist to judge this proposal, but the authors are making a detailed mechanistic claim that is subject to experimental proof, which is very good to see, and and they adduce a good deal of data to back it up (x-ray diffraction, EPR, and more). And they demonstrate the behaviors that a superconductor should have, such as the Meissner effect (expulsion of a magnetic field), sudden resistivity changes at a critical temperature (bizarrely high though that is in this case), current-voltage (I-V) plots at different temperatures and under different magnetic field strengths, etc. If these data reproduce, the superconductivity of this material seems beyond doubt.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarmig</author><text>Yeah. BCS was proposed a half century after the first conventional superconductor was discovered, and even today we don&amp;#x27;t have a convincing mechanism for &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; high-Tc superconductors. But if it superconducts, it superconducts, and research into the how is useful but not a blocker to using it.</text></comment>

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<story><title>This site is no longer solar powered for now</title><url>https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/articles/this-site-is-no-longer-solar-powered-for-now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericbarrett</author><text>When I was young I ran a Team Fortress Classic server from my living room. It was hooked up to 768k SDSL (symmetric). It was 2fort-only—still a common thing in TF2—and popular enough that it was full 24&amp;#x2F;7, with a 20 player limit. Had lots of regulars, some of whom stayed in touch for years afterward. Some of the things that caused downtime:&lt;p&gt;The house&amp;#x27;s floor slab had a crack that wicked up groundwater when it rained too much, so my carpet would get mushy. Electronics off!&lt;p&gt;The anti-cheat software I ran (PunkBusters) went crazy after an update and banned anybody who connected. I noticed when my MRTG graphs flatlined.&lt;p&gt;Girlfriend once yanked out the Ethernet cable when we were having adult time. I didn&amp;#x27;t bother explaining that one to the players.&lt;p&gt;Heavy web browsing would cause lag, so I ended up learning how to do QoS via iptables (or its precursor, whose name I forgot).&lt;p&gt;At the time, the server used an astonishing &lt;i&gt;25 gigabytes&lt;/i&gt; of bandwidth a month. Always raised an eyebrow with the ISP tech when I called in, but they never complained.</text></item><item><author>ElongatedMusket</author><text>This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read.&lt;p&gt;When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That&amp;#x27;s a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ShroudedNight</author><text>I miss TFC. I remember learning how to conc-jump with the medic and figuring out the detonation points for pyro, and ultimately getting to the point where my presence was materially beneficial to my team. I never managed to get there in TF2; they had (at least at first glance - I presume the meta simply changed) blunted the ability of a single player to significantly move objectives forward. I had already been burnt by the changes between Day of Defeat, and DoD: Source, and the TF2 changes seemed to confirm that I was simply not a member of the target audience for the Source remakes.</text></comment>

<story><title>This site is no longer solar powered for now</title><url>https://www.andrewjvpowell.com/articles/this-site-is-no-longer-solar-powered-for-now/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericbarrett</author><text>When I was young I ran a Team Fortress Classic server from my living room. It was hooked up to 768k SDSL (symmetric). It was 2fort-only—still a common thing in TF2—and popular enough that it was full 24&amp;#x2F;7, with a 20 player limit. Had lots of regulars, some of whom stayed in touch for years afterward. Some of the things that caused downtime:&lt;p&gt;The house&amp;#x27;s floor slab had a crack that wicked up groundwater when it rained too much, so my carpet would get mushy. Electronics off!&lt;p&gt;The anti-cheat software I ran (PunkBusters) went crazy after an update and banned anybody who connected. I noticed when my MRTG graphs flatlined.&lt;p&gt;Girlfriend once yanked out the Ethernet cable when we were having adult time. I didn&amp;#x27;t bother explaining that one to the players.&lt;p&gt;Heavy web browsing would cause lag, so I ended up learning how to do QoS via iptables (or its precursor, whose name I forgot).&lt;p&gt;At the time, the server used an astonishing &lt;i&gt;25 gigabytes&lt;/i&gt; of bandwidth a month. Always raised an eyebrow with the ISP tech when I called in, but they never complained.</text></item><item><author>ElongatedMusket</author><text>This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read.&lt;p&gt;When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That&amp;#x27;s a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wes-k</author><text>TFC! I ran a TFC concing server from my college dorm back in 2004&amp;#x2F;2005. Been dreaming of setting up my old PC to play again.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;m a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a 24 y&amp;#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&amp;#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &amp;quot;Usher&amp;#x27;s Syndrome&amp;quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.&lt;p&gt;I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:&lt;p&gt;- Are there blind frontend engineers?&lt;p&gt;- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?&lt;p&gt;- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?&lt;p&gt;- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&amp;#x27;t do SE as I don&amp;#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&amp;#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&amp;#x27;t want it to go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&amp;#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&amp;#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&amp;#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&amp;#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &amp;quot;show up.&amp;quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddevault</author><text>Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.&lt;p&gt;I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).</text></item><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>Are you sighted?</text></item><item><author>ddevault</author><text>I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows logically, rather than spatially.&lt;p&gt;I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vimspeak.vim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;python&amp;#x2F;talkative.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;py...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytalk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytal...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it&amp;#x27;s a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you&amp;#x27;re still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cookiengineer</author><text>As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code?&lt;p&gt;I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly. Are there good reading materials on this?&lt;p&gt;Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content [1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no clue of what I wrote the day before.&lt;p&gt;[1] still alpha as hell: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;cookiengineer&amp;#x2F;stealth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;cookiengineer&amp;#x2F;stealth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys. Stay awesome!)</text></comment>

<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;m a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a 24 y&amp;#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&amp;#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &amp;quot;Usher&amp;#x27;s Syndrome&amp;quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.&lt;p&gt;I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:&lt;p&gt;- Are there blind frontend engineers?&lt;p&gt;- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?&lt;p&gt;- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?&lt;p&gt;- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&amp;#x27;t do SE as I don&amp;#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&amp;#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&amp;#x27;t want it to go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&amp;#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&amp;#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&amp;#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&amp;#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &amp;quot;show up.&amp;quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddevault</author><text>Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.&lt;p&gt;I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).</text></item><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>Are you sighted?</text></item><item><author>ddevault</author><text>I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows logically, rather than spatially.&lt;p&gt;I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vimspeak.vim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;python&amp;#x2F;talkative.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;py...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytalk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytal...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it&amp;#x27;s a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you&amp;#x27;re still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gopaz</author><text>I would love to read more about this in your blog! Sway is my daily driver and I love it!</text></comment>

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<story><title>Germany Turns to Hydrogen in Quest for Clean Energy Economy</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/germany-turns-to-hydrogen-in-quest-for-clean-energy-economy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hannob</author><text>It is often interesting how things are framed in international media when you know the local discussion.&lt;p&gt;To put this in perspective: The role of hydrogen in the German energy system is extremely small. There are a couple of test plants, but that&amp;#x27;s about it. Yeah, lately there have been a few calls for more investments in that area, some articles discussing a larger role in the future. But it&amp;#x27;s certainly not at the center of the debate. The headline seems heavily overblown.</text></comment>

<story><title>Germany Turns to Hydrogen in Quest for Clean Energy Economy</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-02/germany-turns-to-hydrogen-in-quest-for-clean-energy-economy</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scottLobster</author><text>At the end of the day it&amp;#x27;s a matter of infrastructure. BEVs benefit from a pre-established electric grid, end of story. Sure that grid might need improvements&amp;#x2F;hardening&amp;#x2F;modernization as BEVs become more popular, but the fundamental infrastructure exists.&lt;p&gt;Hydrogen needs entirely separate refineries&amp;#x2F;production facilities, specialized transport vehicles and fuel stations, all of which must be built entirely from scratch and negate many of its efficiency benefits. A viable hydrogen vehicle market would likely need tens if not hundreds of billions in initial capital just to get off the ground and be self-sustaining; and even if such an effort was politically feasible why not put that money into BEVs where it will arguably do more good?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Wargames</title><url>http://overthewire.org/wargames/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thefreeman</author><text>If you are looking for more wargames like this, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wechall.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wechall.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; has a large index and allows you to keep a persistent score based on which challenges you have completed.</text></comment>

<story><title>Wargames</title><url>http://overthewire.org/wargames/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>caffeinewriter</author><text>OverTheWire has some really fun wargames. I made it through Bandit and Leviathan not too long ago, and I only have one more challenge in Natas. They do a good job on the difficulty overall, not too difficult to start, but it ramps up pretty steadily, giving you a chance to learn. I&amp;#x27;ll have to get back on this over the weekend.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Lisp-Flavoured Erlang</title><url>http://lfe.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>softbuilder</author><text>Every time I see these (LFE, Elixir, perhaps others) mentioned I feel sad that people don&amp;#x27;t seem to see the beauty in the Erlang language itself. Learning Erlang was a watershed moment for me and it had little to do with the actor model or OTP.&lt;p&gt;That should not be meant to take away from these other projects that do interesting things. It just seems like people needlessly avoid Erlang because it&amp;#x27;s unfamiliar and they miss something amazing in the process.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sitkack</author><text>Welp, I am pretty sure the creator of LFE &amp;quot;gets&amp;quot; Erlang, as it is Robert Virding [1]&lt;p&gt;Pattern matching and immutability are pretty sweet aren&amp;#x27;t they? So is homoiconicity and macros.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;rvirding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;rvirding&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Lisp-Flavoured Erlang</title><url>http://lfe.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>softbuilder</author><text>Every time I see these (LFE, Elixir, perhaps others) mentioned I feel sad that people don&amp;#x27;t seem to see the beauty in the Erlang language itself. Learning Erlang was a watershed moment for me and it had little to do with the actor model or OTP.&lt;p&gt;That should not be meant to take away from these other projects that do interesting things. It just seems like people needlessly avoid Erlang because it&amp;#x27;s unfamiliar and they miss something amazing in the process.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fenollp</author><text>IMO Erlang needs Elixir’s `|&amp;gt;` and `with` pipes. I voiced my opinion on the ML and kind of started working on it! I need &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugs.erlang.org&amp;#x2F;plugins&amp;#x2F;servlet&amp;#x2F;mobile#issue&amp;#x2F;ERL-639&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;bugs.erlang.org&amp;#x2F;plugins&amp;#x2F;servlet&amp;#x2F;mobile#issue&amp;#x2F;ERL-639&lt;/a&gt; fixed first.&lt;p&gt;I find Erlang a harder tool to shoot yourself with than Elixir yet there are definitely some things it could improve on, and not only at the language level (always running xref on compilation would be nice).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Spotify: Droppin&apos; Some Fake Beats</title><url>https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/spotify-droppin-some-fake-beats</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ptsneves</author><text>The post and comments come out a bit unfair if you read the answer from the music author.&lt;p&gt;The music author seems to be doing the music as part of a thesis and does not dump the generated music straight from the model. Instead it uses it for ideas and cooperation, and in the end there is post production and real work. I know people doing a similar thing to learn how to write books with AI as a productive tool.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this is the real promise of AI: elevating the productivity and enabling more people. Like the internet has done, it will give voice and tools to many who could not, and a lot of those “voices” may seem of low quality, but alas such is the price.&lt;p&gt;As in every technological progression, paradigm changes happens. Some good some bad. Give yourself some agency and avoid the bad content and enjoy the good ones.&lt;p&gt;Also if you look at the YouTube videos there are comments of people genuinely liking it.</text></comment>

<story><title>Spotify: Droppin&apos; Some Fake Beats</title><url>https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/spotify-droppin-some-fake-beats</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danduma</author><text>Spotify (like other streaming services) pays about 70% of its revenue to the rights holders of the music it plays.&lt;p&gt;AI music means near-zero cost of goods sold so the full 70% can turn into profit. The incentive is so strong that it&amp;#x27;s a certainty waiting to happen.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Mozilla lays off 70</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Brokedamouth</author><text>I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500&amp;#x2F;night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_Codemonkeyism</author><text>&amp;quot;I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Mozilla was captured by career executives and people with an ageneda - and money for years was not spend on engineering but squandered. I&amp;#x27;ve been using FF since Mosaic days on and off (lately on again as Brave doesn&amp;#x27;t block more and more ads) and I&amp;#x27;m said there is no alternative (FF hangs Twitch for me for which I need to use Chrome, WHY?)&lt;p&gt;Now they lay of senior engineers.</text></comment>

<story><title>Mozilla lays off 70</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Brokedamouth</author><text>I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500&amp;#x2F;night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kamaal</author><text>Two days back I wrote this comment: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=22034293&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=22034293&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I doubt if this is just with Mozilla. Things like these are come as job perks when you enter management. And this one of the reasons why you must aspire to be a manager and not a programmer on the longer run.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures.&lt;p&gt;They will always come up with reasons why they need to do this. The most common one is they need to be fresh with brains in clouds so that they can to talk to clients etc well. And they are doing this for the employees good.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“Comrades!&amp;#x27; he cried. &amp;#x27;You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;- George Orwell.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;This is not even included in comp.&lt;p&gt;Things like this generally go in some top level budget and the are approvals are not even audited at item level spending. Like no asks if you had a $100 dinner. It just goes into a group by statement in some dashboard. This is also why so many managers spend lavishly. It&amp;#x27;s almost anonymous spending. And money once given is never asked back.&lt;p&gt;If you think this is saying something. Wait till you discover how comp works in those roles. Pretty much anything given is never audited and its given fairly unchecked. Big bonuses and stock grants are just every day activities.&lt;p&gt;As in Indian who worked in the US for a while, I&amp;#x27;ve even seen Green cards handed to manager&amp;#x27;s pets like candies. Again no asks questions, no audits done. Its just how awesome managerial jobs are.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last.&lt;p&gt;I doubt if military or any people structure works this way.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t fall for these pep talk like speeches.</text></comment>

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<story><title>An iPad Lover’s Take On The Nexus 7</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/15/omg-he-likes-it-he-really-likes-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>georgemcbay</author><text>I actually think that post-ICS and especially with Jelly Bean that Android is a superior tablet OS to iOS, at least for me. There&apos;s basically no feature on iOS that I miss when I&apos;m on Android, but a few (eg. custom keyboards, the overall intent system, etc) that I miss when I&apos;m on iOS.&lt;p&gt;iOS still kills Android for app availability though (especially when it comes to &quot;tablet optimized&quot; apps) and between that and iOS ecosystem lock-in, Android/Google still has some catching up to do to make tablets a true two-horse race.</text></comment>

<story><title>An iPad Lover’s Take On The Nexus 7</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/15/omg-he-likes-it-he-really-likes-it/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cageface</author><text>I have to give Siegler credit for actually posting an objective review of an Android device.&lt;p&gt;No matter which side you favor in the tablet wars I think you have to agree that we&apos;re better off as hackers and consumers in a market with real competition. Rather than picking sides we should be happy that Apple and Google are pushing each other to improve their hardware and software at a rate we rarely see in consumer electronics.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Nuclear is back on the table for a green future</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/business/dealbook-dc-climate-task-force.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philwelch</author><text>&amp;gt; ... I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that&amp;#x27;s probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -&amp;gt; fuel rods supply chain.&lt;p&gt;Seawater extraction is an option if that&amp;#x27;s ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Funny article in that it doesn&amp;#x27;t discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage is what I&amp;#x27;d expect to see from a &amp;#x27;paper of record&amp;#x27; like the NYTimes.&lt;p&gt;Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.&lt;p&gt;Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.&lt;p&gt;Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -&amp;gt; fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).&lt;p&gt;As far as Russia&amp;#x2F;Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West&amp;#x2F;South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that&amp;#x27;s technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nine_k</author><text>Also, reprocessing &amp;quot;nuclear waste&amp;quot; from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for &amp;quot;fast breeder&amp;quot; reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current &amp;quot;nuclear waste&amp;quot; stockpiles.&lt;p&gt;Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today&amp;#x27;s standards, and R&amp;amp;D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.&lt;p&gt;The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we&amp;#x27;ve inherited from 1970s.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Breeder_reactor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Breeder_reactor&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Nuclear is back on the table for a green future</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/business/dealbook-dc-climate-task-force.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>philwelch</author><text>&amp;gt; ... I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that&amp;#x27;s probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -&amp;gt; fuel rods supply chain.&lt;p&gt;Seawater extraction is an option if that&amp;#x27;s ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.</text></item><item><author>photochemsyn</author><text>Funny article in that it doesn&amp;#x27;t discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage is what I&amp;#x27;d expect to see from a &amp;#x27;paper of record&amp;#x27; like the NYTimes.&lt;p&gt;Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind&amp;#x2F;solar&amp;#x2F;storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible.&lt;p&gt;Much of the discussion of energy in the American media is pretty poor these days. For example, the solar tariff issue on China sourced PV - there are simply no US companies making panels of comparable quality (monocrystalline Si lasts longer and is more efficient). Concepts like requiring Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the USA if they want to sell in US markets would make sense but probably would violate some trade provision or other.&lt;p&gt;Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -&amp;gt; fuel rods supply chain. Costs vary significantly based on the purity of the ore (18% is the top, 0.1% is the economically viable limit) and like oil, uranium ore is not globally distributed (unlike sunlight and wind).&lt;p&gt;As far as Russia&amp;#x2F;Ukraine, the real agenda the US government seems to be pushing there is using that conflict to rapidly increase LNG exports to Europe from the US West&amp;#x2F;South coast, even though energy prices are spiking due to inflation (and plausibly due to exports of crude oil from the USA, allowed under that 2015 bill lifting that restriction). A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that&amp;#x27;s technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>&amp;#x27;handwave the unsolved-at-scale&amp;#x27; ? All you have to do is look at Australia:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;worlds-largest-grid-forming-battery-to-begin-construction-in-australia&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pv-magazine.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;worlds-largest-grid-f...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Battery rollout: &amp;quot;AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of more reliable analysis:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.solarfeeds.com&amp;#x2F;mag&amp;#x2F;solar-power-vs-nuclear-power&amp;#x2F;#Comparing_and_Contrasting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.solarfeeds.com&amp;#x2F;mag&amp;#x2F;solar-power-vs-nuclear-power&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court</title><url>https://medium.com/@peretzp/i-got-arrested-in-kazakhstan-and-represented-myself-in-court-d3764fb738f1#.e2fu9nw2w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know even what to make of this... The preamble suggests that Kazakhstan justice was superior to American justice, but after reading the whole story I&amp;#x27;m like... dude, grow a sense of self-responsibility. It&amp;#x27;s not like your visa expiring was a surprise... you knew exactly when it was going to happen, and YOU CHOSE to violate it without giving yourself any wiggle room. Then you willingly participated in a corrupt system, rewarding those who profit from it.&lt;p&gt;It would have been so much easier and involve less questionable ethics to just leave more than 24 hours in advance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>I find this response, and the suggestions, exemplifying why Kazakhstan justice (as expressed in the story, I don&amp;#x27;t know how it&amp;#x27;s in general) is superior to American justice.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the ability to take the law and regulations lightly, when they&amp;#x27;re not that serious, and be humane about it.&lt;p&gt;I mean writing: &amp;quot;YOU CHOSE to violate it&amp;quot;, with added emphasis, as if having a visa expiring on the same day you leave a place (and literally while you&amp;#x27;re on a vehicle leaving it) is some kind of huge crime...</text></comment>

<story><title>I got arrested in Kazakhstan and represented myself in court</title><url>https://medium.com/@peretzp/i-got-arrested-in-kazakhstan-and-represented-myself-in-court-d3764fb738f1#.e2fu9nw2w</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>exabrial</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know even what to make of this... The preamble suggests that Kazakhstan justice was superior to American justice, but after reading the whole story I&amp;#x27;m like... dude, grow a sense of self-responsibility. It&amp;#x27;s not like your visa expiring was a surprise... you knew exactly when it was going to happen, and YOU CHOSE to violate it without giving yourself any wiggle room. Then you willingly participated in a corrupt system, rewarding those who profit from it.&lt;p&gt;It would have been so much easier and involve less questionable ethics to just leave more than 24 hours in advance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awalGarg</author><text>I am gonna sound like the devil&amp;#x27;s advocate here, but I&amp;#x27;d take the risk:&lt;p&gt;He didn&amp;#x27;t intend to do anything malicious. He wasn&amp;#x27;t on drugs. Wasn&amp;#x27;t going to kill or rob anyone. He was maybe simply playing a mischievous kid, not a &amp;quot;bloody criminal&amp;quot;. Are laws really meant to be taken so rigidly? Has he actually done anything immoral (except for the bribe part, which I also confidently despise of)? Laws are meant to help people live comfortably and save the innocents from criminal. Yes he could have left 24 hours earlier, but maybe he felt it was more comfortable to leave later. He chose his comfort for the cost of absolutely nothing except not following a law, hopefully made to ultimately give comfort to people. He didn&amp;#x27;t harm anyone.&lt;p&gt;The fact that such a non-malicious &amp;quot;crime&amp;quot; (read: mischief) did not have to face the brutality given to actual criminals is enough evidence for me to believe that Kazakhstan&amp;#x27;s law is indeed superior to American law - because boy do I hear so much ill of the American law punishing innocents every other day on the internet.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?</title><url>http://www.tampabay.com/features/can-a-complete-novice-become-a-golf-pro-with-10000-hours-of-practice/1159357</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonwilk</author><text>I have been playing golf since I was 6 years old (I am now 25, running a YC company and whiteyboard). I&apos;ve played competitively, going all over the country and even got a full scholarship to a NCAA Division 1 university for the sport.&lt;p&gt;I can honestly say that this guy does not stand a chance, and here is why.&lt;p&gt;1. Golf, especially when it comes to playing professionally, is more of a mental sport than physical (both strength and muscle memory). Even if this guy can learn to hit the ball 300 yards, it will take him at least 10 years if not longer to get the mental comfort required to play effectively in front of thousands of people and successfully place or win an event.&lt;p&gt;2. The 10,000 hour rule is best applied to things like coding or langauge learning, in other words, low pressure learning environments that have structured guidelines to success. Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours. We haven&apos;t even talked about the putting green yet. Yikes&lt;p&gt;3. I&apos;ve seen this before, over a dozen times. Guy gets tired of his job, has some talent and decides to take a ton of golf lessons and practice hard to go for the tour. At least the guys Im referring to played college golf. This guy didn&apos;t so much as do that.&lt;p&gt;4. Golf is seriously hard and the difference between the best players and the mediocre pro players most of the time is just an average difference of a few shots. To shave off those few shots is next to impossible once you&apos;ve reached your peak potential.&lt;p&gt;Golf is not for everyone. This guy is wasting his time.&lt;p&gt;Update ( I forgot something):&lt;p&gt;Here is another reason why this is a pointless ambition.&lt;p&gt;5. 10,000 hours of golf is a lot different than 10,000 of something like...learning a language (we&apos;ll use this again). To become good at golf does not mean that you can sit on the driving range and hit golf balls every day until your hands bleed. To become a great player, one must get great at playing the golf course. To play one round of golf takes between 3-5 hours (depending on where you play), and there is no guarantee that those 5 hours spent on the course are in any way productive to your progress. That is not a good use of time spent in his quest for 10,000 hours. Someone could certainly guarantee that in 5 focused hours of a spanish tutoring session that they have progresses. With golf, a bad round could send you right back to the drawing board.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ctl</author><text>You&apos;ve made an extremely weak argument.&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re saying:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Golf is mostly mental.&lt;/i&gt; That certainly isn&apos;t a problem: you can train mentality. In fact what you&apos;ve just argued is that golf is &lt;i&gt;well&lt;/i&gt;-suited to be conquered purely through training (among sports). Dan would have a much harder time becoming effective in basketball, where normal-size people are at a huge disadvantage off the bat.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Golf requires feel.&lt;/i&gt; Where do you think feel comes from? (Training!) Again, you&apos;ve actually argued that golf is well-suited to Dan&apos;s approach, not the opposite.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;You&apos;ve seen this before.&lt;/i&gt; No you haven&apos;t. Come on.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Golf is hard.&lt;/i&gt; That&apos;s tautological. Anything that can reasonably be called an endeavor is in some sense infinitely hard. (Also: how do you know that shaving off those last few strokes is impossible once you&apos;ve achieved your potential? Did you dedicate &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; life to golf?)&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Sometimes you&apos;ll have a day of training that won&apos;t contribute to your progress.&lt;/i&gt; Anybody trying to learn anything will experience days like that.&lt;p&gt;This is a cool and ballsy experiment and you&apos;re being a bit of a hater. Do I think Dan will become a PGA golfer? No, but I&apos;m looking forward to seeing him try.</text></comment>

<story><title>Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?</title><url>http://www.tampabay.com/features/can-a-complete-novice-become-a-golf-pro-with-10000-hours-of-practice/1159357</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonwilk</author><text>I have been playing golf since I was 6 years old (I am now 25, running a YC company and whiteyboard). I&apos;ve played competitively, going all over the country and even got a full scholarship to a NCAA Division 1 university for the sport.&lt;p&gt;I can honestly say that this guy does not stand a chance, and here is why.&lt;p&gt;1. Golf, especially when it comes to playing professionally, is more of a mental sport than physical (both strength and muscle memory). Even if this guy can learn to hit the ball 300 yards, it will take him at least 10 years if not longer to get the mental comfort required to play effectively in front of thousands of people and successfully place or win an event.&lt;p&gt;2. The 10,000 hour rule is best applied to things like coding or langauge learning, in other words, low pressure learning environments that have structured guidelines to success. Golf, beyond mental and physical, requires great feel. To be able to know that in 15 mile an hour wind, with your ball half buried by sand, and water in front of the green, how would one hit that shot? There are millions of variations of what you could end up with on the golf course, none that could be figured out in 10,000 hours. We haven&apos;t even talked about the putting green yet. Yikes&lt;p&gt;3. I&apos;ve seen this before, over a dozen times. Guy gets tired of his job, has some talent and decides to take a ton of golf lessons and practice hard to go for the tour. At least the guys Im referring to played college golf. This guy didn&apos;t so much as do that.&lt;p&gt;4. Golf is seriously hard and the difference between the best players and the mediocre pro players most of the time is just an average difference of a few shots. To shave off those few shots is next to impossible once you&apos;ve reached your peak potential.&lt;p&gt;Golf is not for everyone. This guy is wasting his time.&lt;p&gt;Update ( I forgot something):&lt;p&gt;Here is another reason why this is a pointless ambition.&lt;p&gt;5. 10,000 hours of golf is a lot different than 10,000 of something like...learning a language (we&apos;ll use this again). To become good at golf does not mean that you can sit on the driving range and hit golf balls every day until your hands bleed. To become a great player, one must get great at playing the golf course. To play one round of golf takes between 3-5 hours (depending on where you play), and there is no guarantee that those 5 hours spent on the course are in any way productive to your progress. That is not a good use of time spent in his quest for 10,000 hours. Someone could certainly guarantee that in 5 focused hours of a spanish tutoring session that they have progresses. With golf, a bad round could send you right back to the drawing board.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noahc</author><text>I think you&apos;re missing a few key points:&lt;p&gt;1. It helps to get started out right with no bad habits to unlearn. For example, I started playing disc golf and I got on a forum and everyone said &quot;Start with a putter and nothing else.&quot; Two years later I have what might be called a fairway driver(innova Gazelle) as my fastest disc in the bag. I can play against guys that are throwing discs 2x or even 3x faster than I am and I compete against them pretty well. My shots aren&apos;t as far, but they are better shaped and more accurate. I can also putt much better than them. If you start out how he did learning how to putt first and working backwards you will have a very solid game. Did you do this?&lt;p&gt;2 You need dedicated practice, not just any practice. The time you dick around with friends, try trick shots, go out and drink some beer don&apos;t count. Most people spend a large part of their &apos;practice&apos; doing this. I was putting 1,000+ times a night to improve my putting game and that was deliberate, dedicated practice.&lt;p&gt;3.I would agree with you if you would have said, &quot;This guy has no history of sticking with anything.&quot; The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It&apos;s going to take a lot to change his behavior and stick with it. But the fact that he hasn&apos;t touched a golf club isn&apos;t going to hold him back.&lt;p&gt;I believe this guy is adding significantly to the sport of golf, human behavior research, and just doing awesome experiments. Congrats to him, and I wish him the best!</text></comment>

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<story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jc4p</author><text>Sadly VS 2013 has a huge regression which makes it a no-go for my team over at Stack Exchange, any changes made to the server settings are saved to the &lt;i&gt;project&lt;/i&gt; file rather than the per-user settings file, it&amp;#x27;s been reported but doesn&amp;#x27;t look like it&amp;#x27;s going to get fixed soon: &lt;a href=&quot;http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/800003/the-apply-server-settings-to-all-users-store-in-project-file-option-is-missing-in-vs2013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;connect.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;VisualStudio&amp;#x2F;feedback&amp;#x2F;details&amp;#x2F;8...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Visual Studio 2013</title><url>http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ColinDabritz</author><text>Another neat thing is the Visual Studio Online services: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/2013-nov-13-vso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;2013-nov-13-vso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is TFS and lots of project management tools in the cloud. TFS covers a lot of core stuff such as bug&amp;#x2F;work-item tracking, Scheduling&amp;#x2F;Planning, source control and automated builds. You get a reasonable baseline for free, and pay for usage after that.&lt;p&gt;It looks like it integrates with the Azure portal. Although a &amp;#x27;windows box&amp;#x27; is required, this integrates with the free VS2013 Express editions as well. Props to Microsoft for bringing better developer tools to their environment.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: HTTP/2 Python-Asyncio Web Microframework</title><url>https://gitlab.com/pgjones/quart</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tomchristie</author><text>Neat, good to see more `asyncio` frameworks coming along.&lt;p&gt;Python&amp;#x27;s going to have a bit of an awkward time with two completely different sets of ecosystem for threaded vs. asyncio approaches, but it&amp;#x27;s necessary progress.&lt;p&gt;One thing I&amp;#x27;d be really keen to see is asyncio frameworks starting to consider adopting ASGI as a common interface. Each of quart, sanic, aiohttp currently all have their own gunicorn worker classes, http parsing, and none share the same common interface for handling the request&amp;#x2F;response interface between server and application.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a really high barrier to new asyncio frameworks, and it means we&amp;#x27;re not able to get shared middleware, such as WSGI&amp;#x27;s whitenoise or Werkzeug debugger, or the increased robustness that shared server implementations would tend to result in.&lt;p&gt;Would be interested to know what OP&amp;#x27;s position on this is?</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: HTTP/2 Python-Asyncio Web Microframework</title><url>https://gitlab.com/pgjones/quart</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mixmastamyk</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t this what sanic was supposed to be?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;channelcat&amp;#x2F;sanic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;channelcat&amp;#x2F;sanic&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>What really caused the eurozone crisis?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16290598</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gizmo</author><text>Pretty good analysis (for an infographic).&lt;p&gt;They correctly show that government debt did not cause the current crisis but total debt did. By stating that the increase in private sector debt caused it they almost (incorrectly) imply that therefore the private sector (and the people) are to blame. Of course it&apos;s the responsibility of the government to take corrective measures to ensure long term financial stability. The European governments were completely negligent in that regard. Note also that the financial sector is not mentioned at all in this analysis.&lt;p&gt;The nasty dilemma offered at the end is a false one. First the article observes that government spending was not the cause of the crisis, and then the solution revolves around government spending? The current eurozone debates are about politics: the people in western Europe want to punish the countries they see as irresponsible. That&apos;s why we have all the talk about austerity measures. Austerity will only further cripple the economies of the GIPS countries as we&apos;ve seen during the Great Depression in the 30s. Austerity doesn&apos;t work: it leads to criminal levels of capital waste: high unemployment, low standards of living, poor liquidity, and so on.&lt;p&gt;So the question isn&apos;t &quot;Should the GIPS countries spend money to prevent a worse recession?&quot; the real question is &quot;How can the GIPS countries get the money to prevent a crushing depression and a lost generation?&quot;. There are a number of options: ECB bailout. Eurobonds. Bailout by the richer part of the eurozone. Various forms of quantitative easing. Unfortunately this is difficult as long as the people in Europe are angry at the GIPS countries. No politician is going to support a bailout at the expense of the richer countries if the people want to see blood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chernevik</author><text>But it misses other issues:&lt;p&gt;- No discussion of &quot;off balance&quot; sheet government obligations, like pensions and entitlements. These don&apos;t count as &quot;debt&quot;, as they aren&apos;t bonds, but they are long-term cash flow obligations that reduce resources available for debt service&lt;p&gt;- Likewise, no discussion of public sector compensation in excess of a position&apos;s productivity&lt;p&gt;- No discussion of economic growth rates, which expand the amount of debt a country can sustain&lt;p&gt;- No discussion of the role of low euro rates in private sector debt expansion. Markets presumed governments could and would bail out their banks, and thus didn&apos;t scrutinize bank assets for recovery values. (The graphic ignores financial sector debt, but that&apos;s debt _of_ the banks, not debt _to_ the banks.) The conflation of bank and government debt is a running theme in the euro crisis, see Sarkozy&apos;s remark that though the ECB wouldn&apos;t lend to governments it would lend to banks, and the banks would lend to governments, problem solved.&lt;p&gt;The graphic thus understates the sovereign obligations. By ignoring growth, it ignores the key variable driving differences in perceived debt sustainability. And by ignoring market preconceptions of government backstops for banks, it misses the role of the euro in those private sector debt levels.&lt;p&gt;The clue is this: why doesn&apos;t the graphic explain sovereign difficulties borrowing, evident in their rising yields? Bond buyers are saying that _governments_ won&apos;t be able to sustain their debts. That might reflect an opinion that governments will borrow unsustainably to bail out their banks. But then the solution would be to let the banks collapse and remove that possibility. But the governments can&apos;t do that because their economies are dependent on excess bank leverage for the growth they do have, and for the one source of financing they do have.&lt;p&gt;So if we agree the wicked bankers did it, we&apos;re saying that governments have been using excess bank leverage to hide the lack of fundamental growth, and extent of structural problems.&lt;p&gt;The truth is that the problem is excess leverage and spending in both public and private sectors.&lt;p&gt;P.S. It&apos;s the same story in the US, lagging by a few years and mitigated by our ability to print money.</text></comment>

<story><title>What really caused the eurozone crisis?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16290598</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gizmo</author><text>Pretty good analysis (for an infographic).&lt;p&gt;They correctly show that government debt did not cause the current crisis but total debt did. By stating that the increase in private sector debt caused it they almost (incorrectly) imply that therefore the private sector (and the people) are to blame. Of course it&apos;s the responsibility of the government to take corrective measures to ensure long term financial stability. The European governments were completely negligent in that regard. Note also that the financial sector is not mentioned at all in this analysis.&lt;p&gt;The nasty dilemma offered at the end is a false one. First the article observes that government spending was not the cause of the crisis, and then the solution revolves around government spending? The current eurozone debates are about politics: the people in western Europe want to punish the countries they see as irresponsible. That&apos;s why we have all the talk about austerity measures. Austerity will only further cripple the economies of the GIPS countries as we&apos;ve seen during the Great Depression in the 30s. Austerity doesn&apos;t work: it leads to criminal levels of capital waste: high unemployment, low standards of living, poor liquidity, and so on.&lt;p&gt;So the question isn&apos;t &quot;Should the GIPS countries spend money to prevent a worse recession?&quot; the real question is &quot;How can the GIPS countries get the money to prevent a crushing depression and a lost generation?&quot;. There are a number of options: ECB bailout. Eurobonds. Bailout by the richer part of the eurozone. Various forms of quantitative easing. Unfortunately this is difficult as long as the people in Europe are angry at the GIPS countries. No politician is going to support a bailout at the expense of the richer countries if the people want to see blood.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonnathanson</author><text>At the end of the day, the Europeans can&apos;t have their cake and it eat, too. Either the Eurozone is a truly integrated, multinational superentity, or it&apos;s a meaningless construct on top of a group of wholly independent nations. It can&apos;t be the former when things are going well, and the latter when things are going poorly. A fairweather EU / economic zone doesn&apos;t work, because it&apos;s built on a foundation of quicksand.&lt;p&gt;How can these countries rely on a cooperative economic superstructure when, beneath it all, they still see each other as competitors? Transnationalism doesn&apos;t work when you&apos;re secretly a nationalist.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Intel Responds to Complaints About Microcode Benchmarking Ban</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-microcode-benchmark-mitigation,37684.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cesarb</author><text>I saw a tweet somewhere (IIRC in the anandtech sidebar, unfortunately I&amp;#x27;m not finding it right now) where the poster speculated that it was the EULA for a beta version of the microcode which leaked into the final version.</text></item><item><author>kev009</author><text>How do you gaffe this bad? How is someone that incompetent in the decision making loop? Some random engineer creating the ucode or uploading it to the web doesn&amp;#x27;t come up with this kind of idea to change license language. These are edicts from management. I&amp;#x27;d love for that conversation to leak in full.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ksec</author><text>that was Ryan smith. chief editor of anandtech.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;RyanSmithAT&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1032546813176307712&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;RyanSmithAT&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1032546813176307712&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;and if it was true they would have said so in their reply.</text></comment>

<story><title>Intel Responds to Complaints About Microcode Benchmarking Ban</title><url>https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-microcode-benchmark-mitigation,37684.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cesarb</author><text>I saw a tweet somewhere (IIRC in the anandtech sidebar, unfortunately I&amp;#x27;m not finding it right now) where the poster speculated that it was the EULA for a beta version of the microcode which leaked into the final version.</text></item><item><author>kev009</author><text>How do you gaffe this bad? How is someone that incompetent in the decision making loop? Some random engineer creating the ucode or uploading it to the web doesn&amp;#x27;t come up with this kind of idea to change license language. These are edicts from management. I&amp;#x27;d love for that conversation to leak in full.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walterbell</author><text>Helpful side-effect of this leak: benchmark public reaction.</text></comment>