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<story><title>Gitly: A light and fast GitHub/GitLab alternative written in V lang (pre-alpha)</title><url>http://gitly.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazy_horse</author><text>Could someone explain to me why, after seeing how many exaggerated claims the author has made, they have invested their time into building up a community around it?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy&amp;#x27;s work.&lt;p&gt;In this instance, the demo won&amp;#x27;t even load for me and the documentation page can&amp;#x27;t be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?&lt;p&gt;Promises, promises.</text></item><item><author>kvark</author><text>Looks like V author&amp;#x2F;community is on the track to rewrite the world. Expect operating system stuff next? I&amp;#x27;m shocked by how quickly it goes along, though. Gitly is quite usable already, and I appreciate the swiftness. I&amp;#x27;d think that Rust community is rewriting the world, but it&amp;#x27;s happening at much slower pace. Is V&amp;#x27;s basis strong enough to do this? Seeing the issues like [1] (about the basic memory management stuff) open makes me suspicious.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;vlang&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;6456&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;vlang&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;6456&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vlang1dot0</author><text>Yeah, it&amp;#x27;s absolutely wild. Even the main contributors don&amp;#x27;t really know what they&amp;#x27;re talking about, they just regurgitate the party line.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;hUXR6s3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;hUXR6s3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;For instance, when asked how the memory management system works, here you see a team member give the standard response: the compiler inserts calls to free when it detects the variable is no longer used. This seems reasonable to anyone who hasn&amp;#x27;t thought much about PL&amp;#x2F;compilers before. But when pressed further, you see Alex admit &amp;quot;most stuff is simply cloned ATM&amp;quot; which is in stark contrast to the &amp;quot;autofree handles 90-100% of objects for you&amp;quot; on their homepage.&lt;p&gt;Or this where Alex shows he has no idea what UB is?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mbLtASH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;imgur.com&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;mbLtASH&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;UB is a property of the language&amp;#x27;s abstract machine. Common C UB like dereferencing a null pointer or signed integer overflow has well defined semantics on basically any commodity hardware manufactured in three decades and yet it is still UB not because of the runtime properties but because the C abstract machine says it can&amp;#x27;t happen and compilers are free to optimize based on that assumption. For a language that compiles to C and claims no UB, the author should have a much better understanding of this.</text></comment>

<story><title>Gitly: A light and fast GitHub/GitLab alternative written in V lang (pre-alpha)</title><url>http://gitly.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crazy_horse</author><text>Could someone explain to me why, after seeing how many exaggerated claims the author has made, they have invested their time into building up a community around it?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy&amp;#x27;s work.&lt;p&gt;In this instance, the demo won&amp;#x27;t even load for me and the documentation page can&amp;#x27;t be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?&lt;p&gt;Promises, promises.</text></item><item><author>kvark</author><text>Looks like V author&amp;#x2F;community is on the track to rewrite the world. Expect operating system stuff next? I&amp;#x27;m shocked by how quickly it goes along, though. Gitly is quite usable already, and I appreciate the swiftness. I&amp;#x27;d think that Rust community is rewriting the world, but it&amp;#x27;s happening at much slower pace. Is V&amp;#x27;s basis strong enough to do this? Seeing the issues like [1] (about the basic memory management stuff) open makes me suspicious.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;vlang&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;6456&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;vlang&amp;#x2F;v&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;6456&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemo1618</author><text>I confess that I&amp;#x27;ve found it both enraging and depressing to see that the &amp;quot;bootstrapped-by-hype&amp;quot; model works even in &lt;i&gt;programming language development&lt;/i&gt;, which I had (naively, I guess) assumed would be more immune to that sort of thing. I suppose the field is composed of fallible humans just like any other.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How to Get into VR</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-into-vr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the high &lt;i&gt;romanticism&lt;/i&gt; of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues &amp;quot;VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events&amp;quot;, but what is it doing &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO)&lt;p&gt;AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; and already implemented on your phones&amp;#x2F;PCs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattnewport</author><text>We have paying customers for our VR surgical training - ossovr.com - I left the games industry in 2014 to work on non games VR applications because I believed (and still believe) that commercial applications of VR will be more profitable in the near term than games. Architecture is another field that is seeing rapid adoption of VR as a real business tool and not just a gimmick.</text></comment>

<story><title>How to Get into VR</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-into-vr/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>minimaxir</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The development of VR has been surprisingly tied to science fiction. Authors in the field have envisioned the futures that engineers set out to build&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the high &lt;i&gt;romanticism&lt;/i&gt; of VR one of the reasons why I am highly skeptical of the industry. The article argues &amp;quot;VR will also enable immersive concerts, reinvented museums, and live, court-side sporting events&amp;quot;, but what is it doing &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; outside of games, which have been hit-or-miss? (the Samsung Gear VR commercials make VR look ridiculous, IMO)&lt;p&gt;AI is a similarly romantic industry, but the difference is that there are many practical, non-gimmicky applications of AI &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt; and already implemented on your phones&amp;#x2F;PCs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thenayr</author><text>One good example as of late is The Wave VR. &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;thewavevr.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;thewavevr.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;A crossover between game &amp;#x2F; social experience &amp;#x2F; musical fantasy. They have live shows once a week and have been gaining momentum within the VR community quite rapidly.&lt;p&gt;Important to remember we are quite literally still just beyond the one year mark since consumer VR devices hit the market. It will only get better.&lt;p&gt;I agree the Gear is not where VR is going in the future. You need full room-scale immersion to really &amp;quot;feel&amp;quot; like you are experiencing something truly new and exciting. 360 sports videos are NOT the future of VR.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Tribalism is the enemy within</title><url>http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/439</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fwez</author><text>Tribalism in politics leads to identity politics rather than governance politics. I grew up in Lebanon where there is no single religious majority. Political discourse has mostly been about how different factions (sunni, shia, maronite christian, orthodox christians, etc.) should be represented within the ruling coalition. Deadlocks are common and appropriation of ministries is mostly based on sectarian identity rather than competence. Discourse is rarely about fiscal, educational, or health policy. I think a similar unhealthy situation can exist within open source projects or professional organizations.</text></comment>

<story><title>Tribalism is the enemy within</title><url>http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/439</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mkr-hn</author><text>Tribalistic thinking is something I&apos;ve been trying to break myself of over the last few years.&lt;p&gt;When I avoid it, I end up being better off. I used to be firmly in the &quot;all conservative republicans are gibbering idiots&quot; camp, but was able to break out and have a genuinely useful discussion with one.&lt;p&gt;He and I still don&apos;t agree on most things, but we did convince each other of a few things (he no longer believes atheists are inherently amoral, which I consider a big success). Tribalism wouldn&apos;t permit that.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Introduction to Statistical Learning</title><url>http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dnquark</author><text>Hastie and Tibshirani teach a free course based on this book on Stanford&amp;#x27;s OpenEdX (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;online.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;courses&amp;#x2F;sohs-ystatslearning-statistical-learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;online.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;courses&amp;#x2F;sohs-ystatslearning-stat...&lt;/a&gt;). I highly recommend taking this course or reading the book before delving into ESL. IMO, ESL is excellent as a reference, but trying to learn by reading it linearly is not an optimal time investment.&lt;p&gt;Now if only a similar course existed for Wasserman&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;All of Statistics...&amp;quot;</text></comment>

<story><title>Introduction to Statistical Learning</title><url>http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryankupyn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a big fan of ISL - one of the best intro machine-learning oriented textbooks out there IMO. If you&amp;#x27;re looking for book that still offers a broad survey while going a bit deeper into the math, I recommend Elements of Statistical Learning as well (they share 2 authors):&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;~hastie&amp;#x2F;Papers&amp;#x2F;ESLII.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;~hastie&amp;#x2F;Papers&amp;#x2F;ESLII.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Ending Bitcoin Support</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marshray</author><text>Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the &amp;#x27;sentimental&amp;#x27; category as well.&lt;p&gt;Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy.&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.</text></item><item><author>0xcafecafe</author><text>Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.</text></item><item><author>nulagrithom</author><text>&amp;gt; What future does an asset have if people don&amp;#x27;t actually buy stuff with it?&lt;p&gt;I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You&amp;#x27;re not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though.&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there&amp;#x27;s some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-dot-org&amp;#x2F;bitcoin.org&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-dot-org&amp;#x2F;bitcoin.org&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;fil...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>montrose</author><text>This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You&amp;#x27;re a great person, but you&amp;#x27;re just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange.&lt;p&gt;What future does an asset have if people don&amp;#x27;t actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CPLX</author><text>Gold has &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; demand though in jewelry. It&amp;#x27;s distributed and longstanding and it has utility. People wear it and use it in real life and value it and wish to keep it in order to look at it and possess it.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s as tangible as anything else. Nobody would say that there&amp;#x27;s no demand for musical instruments, or baseballs, because they are optional parts of life that aren&amp;#x27;t food or shelter.&lt;p&gt;Gold has intrinsic value in part because people seem to intrinsically like it for what it actually is, not just it&amp;#x27;s utility in exchange. That&amp;#x27;s fundamentally different.</text></comment>

<story><title>Ending Bitcoin Support</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>marshray</author><text>Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the &amp;#x27;sentimental&amp;#x27; category as well.&lt;p&gt;Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy.&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.</text></item><item><author>0xcafecafe</author><text>Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.</text></item><item><author>nulagrithom</author><text>&amp;gt; What future does an asset have if people don&amp;#x27;t actually buy stuff with it?&lt;p&gt;I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You&amp;#x27;re not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though.&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there&amp;#x27;s some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-dot-org&amp;#x2F;bitcoin.org&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;bitcoin-dot-org&amp;#x2F;bitcoin.org&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;fil...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>montrose</author><text>This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You&amp;#x27;re a great person, but you&amp;#x27;re just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange.&lt;p&gt;What future does an asset have if people don&amp;#x27;t actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emodendroket</author><text>&amp;gt; Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in some system of tokens issued by some ancient priesthood.&lt;p&gt;I mean, in this respect the analogy to gold is not an awful fit.</text></comment>

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<story><title>One week of empathy training</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swebs</author><text>&amp;gt;In much of the world accessibility is a legal requirement&lt;p&gt;This is very true for the USA, but not so much elsewhere. It&amp;#x27;s common in Europe for buildings to have no wheelchair access at all.</text></item><item><author>sago</author><text>An excellent blog post. I found the experience of being a wheelchair user a little amusing.&lt;p&gt;It is very unusual for companies or organisations to deny being accessible. In much of the world accessibility is a legal requirement, but it is very rare that it is precisely defined. So it is a very different matter whether that accessibility is adequate.&lt;p&gt;If the author had been in a chair, they would likely have found that the ramps up to the dais are far too steep, and require them to be manhandled up in full view of everyone. Some ramps may have been temporary and split, preventing powered chairs from using them. Or the ramp might have been ostensibly owned, but misplaced when it comes to be needed. They may well have discovered that the only accessible bathroom is in the bowels of the building, frequently used for convenience by nondisabled people, require a key from reception, is used as a store room, or is part of a regular bathroom behind an inaccessible automatic closing door. Were gradients in the outdoor landscape too difficult? Could all the doors be opened while having hands on both wheels to move the chair? Were refreshments accessible? Were tables the right shape to get a wheelchair under them? What about a powered chair?&lt;p&gt;I completely agree and sympathise that the range of disabilities is much broader than physical disability. But I think we should be careful of assuming even physical disability has been cracked. I think it is essential that more people have experience of navigating space in wheelchairs. In my experience it is much much more difficult than I would ever have assumed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adestefan</author><text>Much of this is thanks to the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) which will celebrate it&amp;#x27;s 30th anniversary next year. I can remember how much people despised that the government was forcing another regulation on the poor businesses and how the world was going to come crashing down as a result. But here we are with at least a mediocre of accessibility and much of it can be traced back to the ADA.</text></comment>

<story><title>One week of empathy training</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/07/i-feel-hopeless-rejected-and-a-burden-on-society-one-week-of-empathy-training/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swebs</author><text>&amp;gt;In much of the world accessibility is a legal requirement&lt;p&gt;This is very true for the USA, but not so much elsewhere. It&amp;#x27;s common in Europe for buildings to have no wheelchair access at all.</text></item><item><author>sago</author><text>An excellent blog post. I found the experience of being a wheelchair user a little amusing.&lt;p&gt;It is very unusual for companies or organisations to deny being accessible. In much of the world accessibility is a legal requirement, but it is very rare that it is precisely defined. So it is a very different matter whether that accessibility is adequate.&lt;p&gt;If the author had been in a chair, they would likely have found that the ramps up to the dais are far too steep, and require them to be manhandled up in full view of everyone. Some ramps may have been temporary and split, preventing powered chairs from using them. Or the ramp might have been ostensibly owned, but misplaced when it comes to be needed. They may well have discovered that the only accessible bathroom is in the bowels of the building, frequently used for convenience by nondisabled people, require a key from reception, is used as a store room, or is part of a regular bathroom behind an inaccessible automatic closing door. Were gradients in the outdoor landscape too difficult? Could all the doors be opened while having hands on both wheels to move the chair? Were refreshments accessible? Were tables the right shape to get a wheelchair under them? What about a powered chair?&lt;p&gt;I completely agree and sympathise that the range of disabilities is much broader than physical disability. But I think we should be careful of assuming even physical disability has been cracked. I think it is essential that more people have experience of navigating space in wheelchairs. In my experience it is much much more difficult than I would ever have assumed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SmellyGeekBoy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a requirement for new buildings. It just happens that a lot of European buildings are very old and difficult to modify.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Introducing the New Commodore 64</title><url>http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tesseract</author><text>&amp;#62; the landscape needs a new &quot;creative computing&quot; competitor&lt;p&gt;I hadn&apos;t really thought of it this way before, but there is one. Arduino.</text></item><item><author>marcusestes</author><text>Cramming a modern PC into a vintage C64 reproduction really is a terrible idea. But as an old Commodore / Amiga fanboy I have to admire Barry Altman (CEO of Commodore USA) for attempting to reawaken the brand.&lt;p&gt;After the sad bankruptcy spiral and eventual shutdown of Commodore the trademarks ended up in the possession of a company based in the Netherlands called Tulip Computers (Now Nedfield) who makes commodity PC workstations. The did a little cheapo licensing of the brand here and there but basically showed no intention of breathing life into the brand again.&lt;p&gt;Mr. Altman appears to have incorporated Commodore USA with the sole purpose of attaining trademark licenses and attempting to tap into the large and very latent Commodore enthusiast market.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&apos;t feel like he&apos;s going to succeed. But I applaud him for trying. Now that Steve Jobs&apos; face has taken the place of Big Brother in that 1984 ad, it feels to me that the landscape needs a new &quot;creative computing&quot; competitor. The Commodore brand could be such a cool fit, if they only had a decent product.&lt;p&gt;They should reproduce the 4000 / Video Toaster combo: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymVNhy4dw8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymVNhy4dw8&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drblast</author><text>Yeah, Arduino does have that same spirit.&lt;p&gt;The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.</text></comment>

<story><title>Introducing the New Commodore 64</title><url>http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_C64.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tesseract</author><text>&amp;#62; the landscape needs a new &quot;creative computing&quot; competitor&lt;p&gt;I hadn&apos;t really thought of it this way before, but there is one. Arduino.</text></item><item><author>marcusestes</author><text>Cramming a modern PC into a vintage C64 reproduction really is a terrible idea. But as an old Commodore / Amiga fanboy I have to admire Barry Altman (CEO of Commodore USA) for attempting to reawaken the brand.&lt;p&gt;After the sad bankruptcy spiral and eventual shutdown of Commodore the trademarks ended up in the possession of a company based in the Netherlands called Tulip Computers (Now Nedfield) who makes commodity PC workstations. The did a little cheapo licensing of the brand here and there but basically showed no intention of breathing life into the brand again.&lt;p&gt;Mr. Altman appears to have incorporated Commodore USA with the sole purpose of attaining trademark licenses and attempting to tap into the large and very latent Commodore enthusiast market.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&apos;t feel like he&apos;s going to succeed. But I applaud him for trying. Now that Steve Jobs&apos; face has taken the place of Big Brother in that 1984 ad, it feels to me that the landscape needs a new &quot;creative computing&quot; competitor. The Commodore brand could be such a cool fit, if they only had a decent product.&lt;p&gt;They should reproduce the 4000 / Video Toaster combo: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymVNhy4dw8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymVNhy4dw8&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>evanrmurphy</author><text>Could you recommend resources for learning more about Arduino? Is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.arduino.cc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.arduino.cc/&lt;/a&gt; a good place to start?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud</title><url>https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crb</author><text>There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2]. And you can of course run your own on GCE, even to the extent of 24&amp;#x2F;7 commercial support - you can run EnterpriseDB from Cloud Launcher [3].&lt;p&gt;And, you can also run Kubernetes on AWS - we have a group focused on making sure it&amp;#x27;s an excellent experience.&lt;p&gt;I work for Google Cloud Platform; ping me if you&amp;#x27;d like more help with either option.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elephantsql.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014-11-17-google-compute-engine.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elephantsql.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014-11-17-google-compute-e...&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aiven.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aiven.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; [3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;launcher&amp;#x2F;solution&amp;#x2F;public-edb-ppas&amp;#x2F;edb-postgres-enterprise?q=enter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;launcher&amp;#x2F;solution&amp;#x2F;public-edb-ppas&amp;#x2F;e...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>waffle_ss</author><text>I tried Google Container Engine (GKE) and really liked it - it&amp;#x27;s the best cloud solution for deploying Docker to production in my opinion, mainly due to its use of Kubernetes. Unfortunately in my Web apps I make heavy use of Postgres-specific features, and since Cloud SQL only supports MySQL, Google Cloud is a total non-starter for me.&lt;p&gt;So for now I&amp;#x27;m on AWS, using Postgres on RDS and deploying containers with ECS. ECS is a lot simpler than Kubernetes, but since my apps are pretty simple (a half dozen task definitions), it&amp;#x27;s not a big deal. I really hope Google adds Postgres to Cloud SQL at some point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waffle_ss</author><text>&amp;gt; There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL&lt;p&gt;I did check out ElephantSQL but my pricing needs are somewhere between their $100 and $20 plans and there seems to be a lack of configurability compared to RDS&amp;#x27;s parameter groups (e.g. enabling extensions).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; you can also run Kubernetes on AWS&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had success turning up Kubernetes clusters on AWS for demo purposes, but I really don&amp;#x27;t want to manage a k8s cluster myself (anecdotes I&amp;#x27;ve read about etcd failures &amp;#x2F; partitions especially scare me). Also I use Terraform for provisioning, and kube-up.sh is not something that fits into that paradigm. I&amp;#x27;ve also made the mistake running kube-up.sh with the wrong arguments after a previous invocation that had created a cluster, which caused it to try and create a new cluster, which wiped the local cache of the previous cluster I had made, making kube-down.sh unable to automatically clean up the old cluster (so I had to do it manually in the AWS console).&lt;p&gt;The other thing I tried was the kube-aws CoreOS tool, which is nice, but it comes baked with a 90-day expiration due to TLS certificate expiration, so I&amp;#x27;d have to set up some sort of PKI process to make that production-ready. All in all just too much work for a single person trying to deploy a small number of containers for small to medium sized projects; if I was a medium-sized company with hundreds of containers and some dedicated DevOps resources maybe it would be worth it, but for myself I&amp;#x27;d prefer a turn-key solution like ECS or GKE.</text></comment>

<story><title>Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud</title><url>https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>crb</author><text>There are vendors running managed Postgres services on Google Cloud Platform, like ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2]. And you can of course run your own on GCE, even to the extent of 24&amp;#x2F;7 commercial support - you can run EnterpriseDB from Cloud Launcher [3].&lt;p&gt;And, you can also run Kubernetes on AWS - we have a group focused on making sure it&amp;#x27;s an excellent experience.&lt;p&gt;I work for Google Cloud Platform; ping me if you&amp;#x27;d like more help with either option.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elephantsql.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014-11-17-google-compute-engine.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.elephantsql.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014-11-17-google-compute-e...&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aiven.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aiven.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; [3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;launcher&amp;#x2F;solution&amp;#x2F;public-edb-ppas&amp;#x2F;edb-postgres-enterprise?q=enter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cloud.google.com&amp;#x2F;launcher&amp;#x2F;solution&amp;#x2F;public-edb-ppas&amp;#x2F;e...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>waffle_ss</author><text>I tried Google Container Engine (GKE) and really liked it - it&amp;#x27;s the best cloud solution for deploying Docker to production in my opinion, mainly due to its use of Kubernetes. Unfortunately in my Web apps I make heavy use of Postgres-specific features, and since Cloud SQL only supports MySQL, Google Cloud is a total non-starter for me.&lt;p&gt;So for now I&amp;#x27;m on AWS, using Postgres on RDS and deploying containers with ECS. ECS is a lot simpler than Kubernetes, but since my apps are pretty simple (a half dozen task definitions), it&amp;#x27;s not a big deal. I really hope Google adds Postgres to Cloud SQL at some point.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanp2k2</author><text>IMO one of the benefits of a platform service is that you get the whole platform from one vendor, so if you&amp;#x27;re having some problem, you can work with one vendor to sort it out. Trying to get Google support to work with a 3rd-party vendor and my hypothetical company on an issue sounds like a nightmare. There are already many other options for platform services which provide e.g. Everything you&amp;#x27;d need to run a Rails app in dev and prod, so that&amp;#x27;s where the bar is.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/technology/elizabeth-holmes-sentence-theranos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moralestapia</author><text>He may go for it but I don&amp;#x27;t think he will succeed.&lt;p&gt;Come on, this is a guy who had:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated. * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide. * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president). * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it. * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday. * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one&amp;#x27;s sarcasm) &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; And he &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; managed to f*ck it up. I don&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.</text></item><item><author>geraldwhen</author><text>I’d wager bankman-fried is going to disappear, or mysteriously die in India.&lt;p&gt;Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.</text></item><item><author>ryoshu</author><text>FTX is over $1 billion and the table maxes out at $550 million, so that should be fun. Lawmakers should revisit that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>In a previous thread, I had this at &amp;quot;more than 10 years, less than 60&amp;quot; (yeah, that&amp;#x27;s an easy bet to make!). The core driver of the sentence is probably the guidelines 2B1.1 table, which scales sentencing levels by economic losses. She was convicted for something like $140MM in fraudulent losses, which by themselves ask for a 24-level escalation (the table maxes out in the mid-40s).&lt;p&gt;By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that&amp;#x27;s an unjust outcome; the &amp;quot;lenient&amp;quot; option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tracked down the prosecutor&amp;#x27;s sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The PSR (the court&amp;#x27;s own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P&lt;p&gt;But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>narrator</author><text>Ramesh (&amp;quot;sunny&amp;quot;) at Theranos got $40 million bucks when he cashed out after a brief period of working at a dot com startup and he blew most of it on his divorce and Theranos. On the upside, he got to date 19 year old Holmes. People are alleging that SBF being romantic partners with Alameda&amp;#x27;s chief trader Elisson was also a bad idea for similar reasons.&lt;p&gt;Btw, does anyone know where the heck Elisson went? I haven&amp;#x27;t seen any articles specifying her current whereabouts.</text></comment>

<story><title>Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/technology/elizabeth-holmes-sentence-theranos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moralestapia</author><text>He may go for it but I don&amp;#x27;t think he will succeed.&lt;p&gt;Come on, this is a guy who had:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated. * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide. * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president). * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it. * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday. * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one&amp;#x27;s sarcasm) &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; And he &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; managed to f*ck it up. I don&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.</text></item><item><author>geraldwhen</author><text>I’d wager bankman-fried is going to disappear, or mysteriously die in India.&lt;p&gt;Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.</text></item><item><author>ryoshu</author><text>FTX is over $1 billion and the table maxes out at $550 million, so that should be fun. Lawmakers should revisit that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>In a previous thread, I had this at &amp;quot;more than 10 years, less than 60&amp;quot; (yeah, that&amp;#x27;s an easy bet to make!). The core driver of the sentence is probably the guidelines 2B1.1 table, which scales sentencing levels by economic losses. She was convicted for something like $140MM in fraudulent losses, which by themselves ask for a 24-level escalation (the table maxes out in the mid-40s).&lt;p&gt;By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that&amp;#x27;s an unjust outcome; the &amp;quot;lenient&amp;quot; option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tracked down the prosecutor&amp;#x27;s sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The PSR (the court&amp;#x27;s own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P&lt;p&gt;But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jongjong</author><text>They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles.&lt;p&gt;Same can be said about people who gave them money. It&amp;#x27;s just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It&amp;#x27;s scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.</text></comment>

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<story><title>YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgpk5/youtube-is-removing-nootropics-channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joew42k</author><text>Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody&amp;#x27;s stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.&lt;p&gt;This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It&amp;#x27;s the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.&lt;p&gt;If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)&lt;p&gt;My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I&amp;#x27;ll shout &amp;quot;i told you so&amp;quot; from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JackCh</author><text>The &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;my preferred definition of censorship specifies that it can only be done by governments, and [company] is not a government&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; rhetoric that always appears with these sort of stories is truly tiring and pedantic. Nobody here thinks that youtube is a government. The problem isn&amp;#x27;t people thinking that youtube is a government; the problem is people thinking that censorship is something only a government can do, or thinking that because censorship is legal (when done by corporations) people shouldn&amp;#x27;t complain when it happens. Many things that are legal are worth complaining about.&lt;p&gt;With regard to the rest of your comment, I&amp;#x27;m not confident breaking up the google &amp;#x27;monopoly&amp;#x27; would actually solve this problem. If you spun youtube off as its own company distinct from the rest of google, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it still have a virtual monopoly on this user-uploaded online video space? How would you actually solve that? Split youtube itself into several &amp;quot;Baby Youtubes&amp;quot;? How would that work, which one would get the domain name?</text></comment>

<story><title>YouTube Is Removing Some Nootropics Channels</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgpk5/youtube-is-removing-nootropics-channels</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joew42k</author><text>Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website. Nobody&amp;#x27;s stopping makers of these videos from hosting the videos themselves.&lt;p&gt;This is not censorship in the way we have traditionally understood. It only feels like it because Youtube is where the biggest audience is. It&amp;#x27;s the same whenever Facebook penalizes a post in the timeline, or whenever Google hides content from the search results. They feel like a the phone company or the post office - neutral platforms where people expect the right to free speech. In reality, they are publishers that exercise editorial discretion.&lt;p&gt;If we had focused on building decentralized platforms with interoperability and open standards, this wouldn&amp;#x27;t be an issue. Instead, you all wanted to make money. (Understandable)&lt;p&gt;My proposal - the government should recognize that network effects produce defacto monopolies, and use existing anti-trust law to break up these behemoth platforms, or force regulation on them.&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, I&amp;#x27;ll shout &amp;quot;i told you so&amp;quot; from my lonely, facebookless, linux-powered compound.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>&amp;gt; Youtube is a private company and can do whatever they want with their own website.&lt;p&gt;A big chunk of our culture is hosted by that company. Not sure if that makes a difference, but imho, it should.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Belgian farmer accidentally moves French border</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56978344</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>317070</author><text>This is so ironic. There is already a movie (Rien a Declarer &amp;#x2F; Nothing to declare) whose main premise is a guy spending his nights slightly moving the border between France and Belgium: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Q6MljTh0kws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Q6MljTh0kws&lt;/a&gt; (This extract is French only unfortunately :( )&lt;p&gt;Trailer: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4&lt;/a&gt; (With English subtitles)&lt;p&gt;But, as someone who grew up less than 100 meters from this border, I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this stuff actually happens all over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gumby</author><text>I have a friend who grew up in France (well, except for her kitchen which was in Belgium); she went to school in Belgium, crossing the border (which in those days had a gate) twice each day.&lt;p&gt;I just imagine the guards opening the gate for a little girl with a school satchel. The bollards which held the gate are still there.</text></comment>

<story><title>Belgian farmer accidentally moves French border</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56978344</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>317070</author><text>This is so ironic. There is already a movie (Rien a Declarer &amp;#x2F; Nothing to declare) whose main premise is a guy spending his nights slightly moving the border between France and Belgium: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Q6MljTh0kws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Q6MljTh0kws&lt;/a&gt; (This extract is French only unfortunately :( )&lt;p&gt;Trailer: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=piQPaxlZWu4&lt;/a&gt; (With English subtitles)&lt;p&gt;But, as someone who grew up less than 100 meters from this border, I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure this stuff actually happens all over.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ad404b8a372f2b9</author><text>Aaah I was going to post that :D! It stars one of my favorite comedic actors, Benoît Poelvoorde who is belgian. I&amp;#x27;d encourage anyone with a taste for foreign films to check out &amp;quot;C&amp;#x27;est arrivé près de chez vous&amp;quot; (Man Bites Dog in english) another great movie of his (features lots of violence and serious themes, not a family movie).</text></comment>

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<story><title>What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/11/15949750/research-gerrymandering-wisconsin-supreme-court-partisanship</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bradleyjg</author><text>This is an interesting article, but the headline is deceptive. The article doesn&amp;#x27;t answer that question it poses. The reason the Supreme Court granted cert is because the court below, which in this case was a special 3 judge district court panel whose opinions skip the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of the challengers.&lt;p&gt;If the Supreme Court had not granted cert it would have meant that this lower court opinion would have in effect (but not technically) stood as a nationwide precedent modifying existing Supreme Court decisions.</text></comment>

<story><title>What convinced the Supreme Court to take the Wisconsin gerrymandering case?</title><url>https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/11/15949750/research-gerrymandering-wisconsin-supreme-court-partisanship</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>j_s</author><text>Re-posting my comment on &lt;i&gt;Math Professor Fighting Gerrymandering with Geometry&lt;/i&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=13713252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=13713252&lt;/a&gt; 4 months ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;[...] a need for expert witnesses who understand the mathematical concepts applicable to gerrymandering. To meet that need, she’s spearheaded the creation of a five-day summer program at Tufts [the first in a series of regional trainings] that aims to train mathematicians to do just that&lt;p&gt;[...] over 900 people have indicated their interest by signing up for a mailing list&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tufts.us15.list-manage.com&amp;#x2F;subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7aa8ab22ea62&amp;amp;id=a979bdf71d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tufts.us15.list-manage.com&amp;#x2F;subscribe?u=3529c170e5d9b7...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the end of that article, calling out the &amp;quot;efficiency gap&amp;quot; as the spark for work towards a mathematical definition of &amp;quot;compactness&amp;quot; satisfying districting requirements in a way that is convincingly explainable as fair:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Recently there was a big media sensation in Wisconsin around something called the &amp;quot;efficiency gap.&amp;quot; It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Mice live longer when inflammation-boosting protein is blocked</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02298-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>olalonde</author><text>Excerpt from a book I just read, The Renaissance Diet 2.0:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What about all those cancer studies [about artificial sweeteners] in rats? The first study that initiated this scare was done in the 1970s, and saccharin at high doses was found to cause bladder cancer in rats. Pretty scary, except that in the early 2000s, it was shown that this reaction to saccharin was unique to rats and mechanistically impossible in humans. To illustrate the point, it has also been shown that vitamin C increases tumor growth in rats and mice, but does not seem to have tumor growth effects in humans.&lt;p&gt;Just sharing as a reminder that studies on animals do not necessarily translate to humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hombre_fatal</author><text>The translation rate is surprisingly bad.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Analysis of animal-to-human translation shows that only 5% of animal-tested therapeutic interventions obtain regulatory approval for human applications&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;journals.plos.org&amp;#x2F;plosbiology&amp;#x2F;article?id=10.1371&amp;#x2F;journal.pbio.3002667&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;journals.plos.org&amp;#x2F;plosbiology&amp;#x2F;article?id=10.1371&amp;#x2F;jou...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Mice live longer when inflammation-boosting protein is blocked</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02298-5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>olalonde</author><text>Excerpt from a book I just read, The Renaissance Diet 2.0:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What about all those cancer studies [about artificial sweeteners] in rats? The first study that initiated this scare was done in the 1970s, and saccharin at high doses was found to cause bladder cancer in rats. Pretty scary, except that in the early 2000s, it was shown that this reaction to saccharin was unique to rats and mechanistically impossible in humans. To illustrate the point, it has also been shown that vitamin C increases tumor growth in rats and mice, but does not seem to have tumor growth effects in humans.&lt;p&gt;Just sharing as a reminder that studies on animals do not necessarily translate to humans.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Terr_</author><text>&amp;gt; To illustrate the point, it has also been shown that vitamin C increases tumor growth in rats and mice, but does not seem to have tumor growth effects in humans.&lt;p&gt;Worth noting that regular (non-GMO) mice can synthesize their own vitamin-C without needing it &amp;quot;pre-made&amp;quot; in their diet, unlike [clarification-edit: some but not all] primates (i.e. humans) and sporadic clusters of animals.&lt;p&gt;In other words, there are already some pretty important differences between how the two species process normal amounts of that nutrient.</text></comment>

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<story><title>FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank</title><url>https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23016.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goodoldneon</author><text>Why is &amp;quot;too much money&amp;quot; a thing? If a bank only wants $100 million in deposits, but customers deposit $150 million, why can&amp;#x27;t the bank set the extra $50 million to the side and pretend like it doesn&amp;#x27;t exist until customers want to withdraw it?</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>I have some family who (with some other partners) founded a small community bank that has grown over the years.&lt;p&gt;They expanded in some areas by buying other small community banks, specifically in areas where there was a big increase in income in the local area (from mineral rights, etc).&lt;p&gt;The smaller banks that they bought were in a situation where suddenly they had large amounts of cash incoming, and customers who were paying off &amp;#x2F; not taking out loans like they used to.&lt;p&gt;They didn’t have the reach (mostly confined to a small rural region) to use that cash to give out loans elsewhere so they looked to merge or be bought by someone who did.&lt;p&gt;Until I heard about those banks I hadn’t considered “too much money” was a problem.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>An explainer post [1] connected to that Tweet is something I found extremely informative (assuming it&amp;#x27;s accurate):&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.&lt;p&gt;- As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital. As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS) with these deposits for their hold-to-maturity (HTM) portfolio.&lt;p&gt;- 97% of these MBS were 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.&lt;p&gt;- The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration &amp;quot;risk-free&amp;quot; bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.&lt;p&gt;- This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually.&lt;p&gt;- However, yesterday afternoon, SVB announced that they had sold $21bn of their Available For Sale (AFS) securities at a $1.8bn loss, and were raising another $2.25bn in equity and debt. This came as a surprise to investors, who were under the impression that SVB had enough liquidity to avoid selling their AFS portfolio.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jamiequint&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1633956163565002752&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jamiequint&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1633956163565002752&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaycroft</author><text>Because now the bank has to pay interest to depositors of $150M instead of $100M, which means that they&amp;#x27;ll pay a lower, less competitive rate. So, in order to keep customers, banks are incentivized to lend out any and all spare cash for whatever yield that they can get, in order to give attractive rates to depositors. Losing customers though shouldn&amp;#x27;t really be a problem for the bank, after all, those customers did deposit &amp;quot;too much&amp;quot; money - once enough have left to seek higher yields elsewhere, there will be less cash on the sidelines, and so higher yields for the remaining customers. I suppose if your whole philosophy is &amp;quot;growth at any cost&amp;quot;, and you&amp;#x27;re measuring growth not just by AUM but also by number of customers, you get excess risk taking and yield chasing.</text></comment>

<story><title>FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank</title><url>https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23016.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>goodoldneon</author><text>Why is &amp;quot;too much money&amp;quot; a thing? If a bank only wants $100 million in deposits, but customers deposit $150 million, why can&amp;#x27;t the bank set the extra $50 million to the side and pretend like it doesn&amp;#x27;t exist until customers want to withdraw it?</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>I have some family who (with some other partners) founded a small community bank that has grown over the years.&lt;p&gt;They expanded in some areas by buying other small community banks, specifically in areas where there was a big increase in income in the local area (from mineral rights, etc).&lt;p&gt;The smaller banks that they bought were in a situation where suddenly they had large amounts of cash incoming, and customers who were paying off &amp;#x2F; not taking out loans like they used to.&lt;p&gt;They didn’t have the reach (mostly confined to a small rural region) to use that cash to give out loans elsewhere so they looked to merge or be bought by someone who did.&lt;p&gt;Until I heard about those banks I hadn’t considered “too much money” was a problem.</text></item><item><author>somenameforme</author><text>An explainer post [1] connected to that Tweet is something I found extremely informative (assuming it&amp;#x27;s accurate):&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;- In 2021 SVB saw a mass influx in deposits, which jumped from $61.76bn at the end of 2019 to $189.20bn at the end of 2021.&lt;p&gt;- As deposits grew, SVB could not grow their loan book fast enough to generate the yield they wanted to see on this capital. As a result, they purchased a large amount (over $80bn!) in mortgage backed securities (MBS) with these deposits for their hold-to-maturity (HTM) portfolio.&lt;p&gt;- 97% of these MBS were 10+ year duration, with a weighted average yield of 1.56%.&lt;p&gt;- The issue is that as the Fed raised interest rates in 2022 and continued to do so through 2023, the value of SVB’s MBS plummeted. This is because investors can now purchase long-duration &amp;quot;risk-free&amp;quot; bonds from the Fed at a 2.5x higher yield.&lt;p&gt;- This is not a liquidity issue as long as SVB maintains their deposits, since these securities will pay out more than they cost eventually.&lt;p&gt;- However, yesterday afternoon, SVB announced that they had sold $21bn of their Available For Sale (AFS) securities at a $1.8bn loss, and were raising another $2.25bn in equity and debt. This came as a surprise to investors, who were under the impression that SVB had enough liquidity to avoid selling their AFS portfolio.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jamiequint&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1633956163565002752&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;jamiequint&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1633956163565002752&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jellicle</author><text>Well, yes, if your bank is receiving too many deposits and you didn&amp;#x27;t want to be vulnerable to a SVB-style failure, then you could:&lt;p&gt;- set your rate of paid interest on demand deposits quite low - what&amp;#x27;s going to happen, some people will pull their deposits? That&amp;#x27;s fine, that&amp;#x27;s what you want.&lt;p&gt;- re-deposit those excess deposits at other banks, taking only their meager interest payments on demand deposits&lt;p&gt;The math here works fine. As long as there&amp;#x27;s some difference between the rate you&amp;#x27;re paying on deposits and what you&amp;#x27;re getting, no matter how small, you&amp;#x27;re fine. And if you need cash quickly, hey, those are DEMAND deposits at other banks, you should be able to withdraw them immediately. You can spread the risk of a run on your bank around to every other bank.</text></comment>

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<story><title>How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)</title><url>https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a-successful-freelance-business-as-a-software-developer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shubb</author><text>To share a failure - back in 2015, I tried to set up as a freelancer and ended up going back to perm&amp;#x2F;employed work about a year later.&lt;p&gt;Between subcontracting from established freelancer friends and reaching out to my network I was able to get a few projects, and things were progressing nicely but then my biggest single client had some internal issues and basically didn&amp;#x27;t pay me for 6 months.&lt;p&gt;My financial situation going into freelancing was not good - I had some debt going in, and then put some incidental expenses like visiting a customer&amp;#x27;s city and staying in a (cheap and amazingly nasty) hotel for a few weeks on a credit card. The gap between invoicing the work and getting paid was too much and I realised I needed reliable cash flow.&lt;p&gt;They say the main reason businesses fail is lack of capital. Turns out starting a business with negative capital is hard. Too hard for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wila</author><text>The moment a customer does not pay a bill within the specified terms is the moment you must stop working for them.&lt;p&gt;This also means that you must invoice regularly.&lt;p&gt;Learned that the hard way.</text></comment>

<story><title>How to start a successful freelance business as a software developer (2017)</title><url>https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-start-a-successful-freelance-business-as-a-software-developer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shubb</author><text>To share a failure - back in 2015, I tried to set up as a freelancer and ended up going back to perm&amp;#x2F;employed work about a year later.&lt;p&gt;Between subcontracting from established freelancer friends and reaching out to my network I was able to get a few projects, and things were progressing nicely but then my biggest single client had some internal issues and basically didn&amp;#x27;t pay me for 6 months.&lt;p&gt;My financial situation going into freelancing was not good - I had some debt going in, and then put some incidental expenses like visiting a customer&amp;#x27;s city and staying in a (cheap and amazingly nasty) hotel for a few weeks on a credit card. The gap between invoicing the work and getting paid was too much and I realised I needed reliable cash flow.&lt;p&gt;They say the main reason businesses fail is lack of capital. Turns out starting a business with negative capital is hard. Too hard for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcv</author><text>It helps to have a financial buffer. When I started freelancing in 2012, I could do so while keeping the unemployment benefits I got for getting fired in the bankruptcy of my last employer (they survived and actually had a healthy business, but they&amp;#x27;d made some poor financial decisions driven by a bug in their home-made accounting system). I ended up not really going anywhere that first year, got a few minor gigs, but after a year I got approached by a recruiter for a bigger client, and that took off. I&amp;#x27;ve been doing half-year to year-and-a-half projects for various large client, including a railway company and 4 banks.&lt;p&gt;But I rely a lot on recruiters finding me on LinkedIn. I hate LinkedIn with its dark patterns, but it&amp;#x27;s where 90% of my work comes from, so I don&amp;#x27;t complain too hard.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S</title><url>https://bookriot.com/unbanned-books/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I like to use &amp;quot;The Turner Diaries&amp;quot; as a kind of litmus test for people who don&amp;#x27;t want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, &amp;quot;The Turner Diaries&amp;quot; is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym.&lt;p&gt;The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that is thought to have inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing. It&amp;#x27;s a pretty famously banned book.&lt;p&gt;The reason I like to use this as a litmus test is that people often say something like &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m against banning books&amp;quot; but what they mean is &amp;quot;I am for things I like&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s not surprising, almost everyone is for things they like. If you were really against banning books then it&amp;#x27;s strange that you only take this position for literature you like.&lt;p&gt;I personally don&amp;#x27;t think The Turner Diaries should be made available to children and teens. I don&amp;#x27;t see what good that would do. But then, I also don&amp;#x27;t go around saying I&amp;#x27;m against book banning. I think some books are appropriate for young people and some aren&amp;#x27;t and that we should ban the inappropriate books from contexts where young people would plausibly encounter them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vincent-manis</author><text>Libraries can and do choose what books to keep in their collection. If a library chooses not to acquire a book, that isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily `banning&amp;#x27;. If I write a book on dog poop art, a library may well decide that nobody is going to want to read it, and that acquiring the book would be a waste of budget and of shelf space.&lt;p&gt;Banning can best be thought of as external. If a library has a book, and a politician (e.g., library board or school board member) demands the book be removed, that is a call for the book to be banned.&lt;p&gt;Not all banning is external, to be sure. A library that refused to acquire books of interest to people of color, or to LGBTs, can definitely be said to be banning books. Librarians I have known have pretty much all had the opinion that, as much as possible, acquisitions should be responsive to the needs of the community, and would not be supportive of policies like that.&lt;p&gt;As for the Turner Diaries, I&amp;#x27;d echo the OP that, even if a library chose to include it in its collection (and thus spend money on it that would not be available to spend on other books), it should be held in a Special Collections division, available only on request. But my guess is that my dog poop art book would get more circulation than the Turner Diaries.</text></comment>

<story><title>Brooklyn Public Library offers access to banned ebooks to teens across the U.S</title><url>https://bookriot.com/unbanned-books/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ALittleLight</author><text>I like to use &amp;quot;The Turner Diaries&amp;quot; as a kind of litmus test for people who don&amp;#x27;t want to ban books. I notice that, while all of the books this article calls out specifically are available at the Brooklyn Public Library - per their online catalog, &amp;quot;The Turner Diaries&amp;quot; is not and neither are any books by its author - either his real name or pseudonym.&lt;p&gt;The Turner Diaries, for reference, is a white supremacist novel that is thought to have inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing. It&amp;#x27;s a pretty famously banned book.&lt;p&gt;The reason I like to use this as a litmus test is that people often say something like &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m against banning books&amp;quot; but what they mean is &amp;quot;I am for things I like&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s not surprising, almost everyone is for things they like. If you were really against banning books then it&amp;#x27;s strange that you only take this position for literature you like.&lt;p&gt;I personally don&amp;#x27;t think The Turner Diaries should be made available to children and teens. I don&amp;#x27;t see what good that would do. But then, I also don&amp;#x27;t go around saying I&amp;#x27;m against book banning. I think some books are appropriate for young people and some aren&amp;#x27;t and that we should ban the inappropriate books from contexts where young people would plausibly encounter them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bmacho</author><text>&amp;gt; The reason I like to use this as a litmus test is that people often say something like &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m against banning books&amp;quot; but what they mean is &amp;quot;I am for things I like&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I am positive that 98%+ of people that state the former mean the former.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Type Punning Functions in C</title><url>http://www.evanmiller.org/type-punning-functions-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pklausler</author><text>If your C compiler doesn&amp;#x27;t complain bitterly to you about an incompatible pointer type on that assignment, get a better C compiler. If your C compiler does complain bitterly about it, heed those warnings or expect no sympathy.&lt;p&gt;If you write this in production code, and don&amp;#x27;t get sent home that day in tears, your company&amp;#x27;s code review process has failed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MaulingMonkey</author><text>&amp;gt; If your C compiler doesn&amp;#x27;t complain bitterly to you about an incompatible pointer type on that assignment, get a better C compiler.&lt;p&gt;The example code uses C style casts, which is C-speak for &amp;quot;fuck off compiler I know what I&amp;#x27;m doing.&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;d like to see what warnings your compiler produces. VS2015 &amp;#x2F;W4 &amp;#x2F;ANALYZE produces nothing, and neither do clang nor GCC from the looks of it.&lt;p&gt;That people C cast without knowing what they&amp;#x27;re doing is rather unfortunate tragedy. That this is a common enough problem, that the Win32 API is littered with backwards compatability hacks where someone C-casted away ABI differences turns it into a statistic.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If you write this in production code, and don&amp;#x27;t get sent home that day in tears, your company&amp;#x27;s code review process has failed.&lt;p&gt;Assuming we&amp;#x27;re talking &amp;quot;well meaning newbie&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;sanity hating self-flagellating freak and&amp;#x2F;or undefined behavior worshiping cultist&amp;quot;, I prefer to carefully explain that they&amp;#x27;ve invoked undefined behavior, that undefined behavior leads to crunching to find optimizer induced heisenbugs in the weeks before we ship, and to impress upon them that this is why we never cast away even &amp;quot;trivial&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; function pointer differences. And then, when they ask what the &lt;i&gt;correct&lt;/i&gt; thing to do is, point out the API docs and header both have this little &amp;quot;WINAPI&amp;quot; annotation they can use. Hey! No more casts! &lt;i&gt;Easier&lt;/i&gt; than the casts too. Win&amp;#x2F;win.&lt;p&gt;However, if we &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; talking about the &amp;quot;sanity hating self-flagellating freak and&amp;#x2F;or undefined behavior worshiping cultist&amp;quot;, I can only recommend nuking the site from orbit. It&amp;#x27;s the only way to be sure. If their home isn&amp;#x27;t part of the radioactive crater, you didn&amp;#x27;t use large enough nukes, and your company&amp;#x27;s code review process has failed.</text></comment>

<story><title>Type Punning Functions in C</title><url>http://www.evanmiller.org/type-punning-functions-in-c.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pklausler</author><text>If your C compiler doesn&amp;#x27;t complain bitterly to you about an incompatible pointer type on that assignment, get a better C compiler. If your C compiler does complain bitterly about it, heed those warnings or expect no sympathy.&lt;p&gt;If you write this in production code, and don&amp;#x27;t get sent home that day in tears, your company&amp;#x27;s code review process has failed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;If your C compiler doesn&amp;#x27;t complain bitterly to you about an incompatible pointer type on that assignment, get a better C compiler.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeah? So which compiler do you have in mind exactly we should use?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynx23</author><text>If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out&amp;#x2F;signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move. Then my bank wanted a signature. And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature. After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn&amp;#x27;t sign, that is a problem.&lt;p&gt;So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data.&lt;p&gt;And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights...&lt;p&gt;And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.</text></item><item><author>CipherThrowaway</author><text>Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations?&lt;p&gt;What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout &amp;quot;look what you made them do!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly it is everyone&amp;#x27;s fault except the bad actors themselves.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Imagine a market in which companies charge a lot of hidden fees behind their customers&amp;#x27; back, and users are not happy when they realize after the fact. The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance.&lt;p&gt;Companies with tons of hidden fees decide to keep them but force you to read all the fees on every page of the menu before you can see the rest of the text, in the most annoying way possible, and promote the idea that the issue is not the extravagant fees, nor the fact that the companies hide them before and had to be forced by law to warn you about them, no the problem is a law that force them to tell you what you&amp;#x27;re getting into before it&amp;#x27;s too late !&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s, essentially, what&amp;#x27;s happening. And we have people complain that companies need to display their fees.&lt;p&gt;On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it&amp;#x27;s in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don&amp;#x27;t understand the position they&amp;#x27;re defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law.&lt;p&gt;To each their own belief about which category PG fits into.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HelloNurse</author><text>Incompetent lawyers and managers did a half-assed job, and some exemplary fines will motivate them with respect to the other half.</text></comment>

<story><title>Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law</title><url>https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lynx23</author><text>If it only were that simple. When the GDPR came out, a lot of confusion and misunderstanding ensued. Not only regarding the damn cookie banner. Even totally legitimate health-care providers started to collect signatures to be on the safe side. I still rememeber receiving a basic GDPR training where we were told that opt-out&amp;#x2F;signing is only necessary if the entity is planning to do weird stuff with your data. IOW, if someone wants you to sign, they plan a bad move. Then my bank wanted a signature. And a month later, one of my healthcare providers wanted a signature. After a chat with him, I learnt that his lawyer told him to collect the signatures just in case, and made him believe that if someone doesn&amp;#x27;t sign, that is a problem.&lt;p&gt;So now we have this situation where providers were trained to play the GDPR in such a way that they will never have a problem, no matter what they actually do with the data.&lt;p&gt;And consumers are pissed because they are made to sign things which essentially reduce their rights...&lt;p&gt;And if someone (like me) thinks the EU did a half-assed job there, the downvotes rain in.</text></item><item><author>CipherThrowaway</author><text>Agree. How much corporate propaganda are people consuming that legislators are seen as wholly responsible for the bad behavior and malicious compliance actions of corporations?&lt;p&gt;What does it say about the relationship between businesses and consumers that the first response to this bad behavior is to shout &amp;quot;look what you made them do!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly it is everyone&amp;#x27;s fault except the bad actors themselves.</text></item><item><author>nolok</author><text>Imagine a market in which companies charge a lot of hidden fees behind their customers&amp;#x27; back, and users are not happy when they realize after the fact. The law is updated to say you are not allowed to charge the user a fee unless you tell him in advance.&lt;p&gt;Companies with tons of hidden fees decide to keep them but force you to read all the fees on every page of the menu before you can see the rest of the text, in the most annoying way possible, and promote the idea that the issue is not the extravagant fees, nor the fact that the companies hide them before and had to be forced by law to warn you about them, no the problem is a law that force them to tell you what you&amp;#x27;re getting into before it&amp;#x27;s too late !&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s, essentially, what&amp;#x27;s happening. And we have people complain that companies need to display their fees.&lt;p&gt;On this issue in the group that complain about the cookie law there are some people who are very wrong on purpose because it&amp;#x27;s in their interest, and some people who are very wrong because they genuinely don&amp;#x27;t understand the position they&amp;#x27;re defending, complaining about being made aware of the fee, instead of the fees themselves or the fact that the companies hide them if not forced by law.&lt;p&gt;To each their own belief about which category PG fits into.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orwin</author><text>I kinda hate saying this, but Microsoft (or at least github) got it right in a week. Some OSS publishers also got it right, like nexedi, and some i&amp;#x27;m sightly upset with (gitlab) but it is true that for the commercial internet it seems to be invasive. I do not use the commercial internet much, and like any person with greasemonkey, i took a rainy afternoon to remove the most annoying banners (i think now i use a plugin that does it for me).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Why I chose Electron.js for my side business</title><url>https://getloaf.io/blog/why-i-chose-electronjs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sdwolfz</author><text>No matter how much I hate the bloat, and no matter how much I don&amp;#x27;t like JavaScript as and language due to it&amp;#x27;s behaviour around type coercion, I can&amp;#x27;t help it but to agree with everything in this article. Reusing the frontend skills I learned throughout the years to build desktop apps when needed, instead of having to learn an OS toolkit (and in the case of linux, multiple desktop environments, neve mind Wayland vs X) is the difference between shipping something and not shipping at all.&lt;p&gt;Learning takes time and effort, and the more general the tool I use the better.&lt;p&gt;If I had to implement a desktop app tomorrow, I would default Electron, no contest.&lt;p&gt;A bit of an aside, but I was thinking lately, it would be great for linux to have an SSD benchmarking app, just like CrystalDiskMark, I would never attempt to implement something like this in Qt or GTK, there&amp;#x27;s just too much to learn beforehand compared to simply going with CSS, wrapping the fio command in a JavaScript shell call then publishing everything as an appimage. This way I know it will work everywhere and it will have a consistent look and feel everywhere. I might actually set this up as a weekend project sometime next month. Without Electron it would take me months of intense dedicated time, which I would rather spend on something else.</text></comment>

<story><title>Why I chose Electron.js for my side business</title><url>https://getloaf.io/blog/why-i-chose-electronjs/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jfengel</author><text>For me the big win is that it feels familiar to users. It&amp;#x27;s not a native app, but it looks like their native browser.&lt;p&gt;Users are acutely sensitive to apps that feel right. It&amp;#x27;s something Java learned the hard way, or not at all: there&amp;#x27;s an uncanny valley if you get it wrong, and users hate that. Native apps will always be better than a web app, but a web app will be better than an app that doesn&amp;#x27;t really have a home on any platform.&lt;p&gt;It would have been great if users were willing to say, &amp;quot;Oh, I know this, it&amp;#x27;s a Swing app, just like the one I used on my Mac&amp;#x2F;PC&amp;#x2F;Linux&amp;#x2F;etc.&amp;quot; But Swing never really succeeded, and web browsers did.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes</title><url>http://www.creativeapplications.net/windows/hartverdrahtet-infinite-complexity-in-4096-bytes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>haberman</author><text>I&apos;m pretty proud of my programming skills. I&apos;ve worked in everything from assembly to JavaScript, JIT compilers to websites to large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems. etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;But demoscene programming is still the one thing that leaves me totally in awe, feeling like I wouldn&apos;t even know where to start to achieve what these guys pull off. Even if I could imagine fitting all those drawing and sound generation routines into 4k, how on &lt;i&gt;earth&lt;/i&gt; would you script the whole thing in that little space? How would you encode and execute the sequence of camera paths, music events, and synchronize light flashes with the music? And make it consistent in time, as opposed to depending on the speed of the CPU? I just can&apos;t even imagine what the main loop would look like.</text></comment>

<story><title>Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes</title><url>http://www.creativeapplications.net/windows/hartverdrahtet-infinite-complexity-in-4096-bytes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vmind</author><text>Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>

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<story><title>JavaScript for Data Science</title><url>http://js4ds.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beforeolives</author><text>I know that data science is a broad and somewhat vague term but this -&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; We will cover: Core features of modern JavaScript Programming with callbacks and promises Creating objects and classes Writing HTML and CSS Creating interactive pages with React Building data services Testing Data visualization Combining everything to create a three-tier web application &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; - this isn&amp;#x27;t data science.</text></comment>

<story><title>JavaScript for Data Science</title><url>http://js4ds.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danpalmer</author><text>I don’t want to repeat the old and tired JavaScript hate, but this just isn’t a great idea.&lt;p&gt;I’d suggest that there are 3 important primitives for data science: flexible numeric types, fast math&amp;#x2F;algorithm libraries, and data manipulation being easy.&lt;p&gt;JavaScript doesn’t really have any of these. Numbers are 64bit floats only - no integers, no big numbers. There aren’t equivalents to Numpy&amp;#x2F;Pandas&amp;#x2F;Scikit Learn, and the lack of standard library and expressiveness in data manipulation in the language makes basic tasks harder.&lt;p&gt;JavaScript has its uses, but there’s really no reason to force data science be one of them.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Taiwan bans recruitment for jobs in China</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Taiwan-bans-recruitment-for-jobs-in-China-to-combat-brain-drain</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Apocryphon</author><text>Nice post about how Taiwan&amp;#x27;s work environment is sadly missing its potential:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19492995&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19492995&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; komali2 on March 26, 2019 | parent | un‑favorite | on: Google will open a new office complex and add hund...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;Last year, the project trained about 5,000 students in AI technology and 50,000 digital marketers.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;I feel like Taiwan represents a talent opportunity like no other. I dream of starting an engineering company there that is literally a clone of some upcoming business model, and doing nothing but capping the work week at 40 hours and guaranteeing 4 weeks vacation. I could snipe the best talent on hand in the country, which is at the very least equal to some of the best silicon valley has to offer, at nearly half the rates. Lord forbid we target foreign contracts and the company can pay near US rates. I&amp;#x27;d pilfer everyone&amp;#x27;s engineering department ;)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Overworked, underpaid, extremely competent was my experience of Taiwanese engineering. Google is good to step up in Taiwan - I believe it will pay dividends for them. I wonder what the Google work culture and salaries are like for their Taipei 101 office engineers? Last I checked it was about 2,000$&amp;#x2F;month for entry level.</text></comment>

<story><title>Taiwan bans recruitment for jobs in China</title><url>https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Taiwan-bans-recruitment-for-jobs-in-China-to-combat-brain-drain</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>belval</author><text>I understand the why, but I feel like they could also ask TSMC to pay their workers more.&lt;p&gt;Say India did the same for software engineers leaving for the US, we&amp;#x27;d see it as government overreach.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Readability</title><url>http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/readability.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>It&apos;s slick, but does anyone else see the irony in the fact that they&apos;re not only running banner ads on the Readability site itself, but also (subtly) in the sites they&apos;re stripping the ads from?&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s worth pointing out that, like it or not, we&apos;re not really &lt;i&gt;entitled&lt;/i&gt; to escape banner advertising.</text></comment>

<story><title>Readability</title><url>http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/readability.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spydez</author><text>Interesting note, for those of you uninterested in karma or user names, the bookmarklet will hide both. You&apos;ll still have your voting arrows and the comment text; you just won&apos;t know what everyone else thought of the comment (aside from their placement relative to each other).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s pretty neat to go on a big thread and hit the bookmarklet. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>The True Cost of Bitcoin Transactions</title><url>http://moneyandstate.com/the-true-cost-of-bitcoin-transactions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmorici</author><text>There is a small faction of the Bitcoin community working exceptionally hard to prevent any block size increase. I find their motives really baffling. They had some legitimate arguments a few years ago when discussion of this issue first started but those have all since been superseded by improvements in the protocol like xthin.&lt;p&gt;They now resort to distasteful tactics by running anyone out of town that even so much as suggests a block size increase. They are also working overtime to censor any comments that challenge their world view on the &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin sub reddit which is why you see such hostile comments mentioned by the OP in response to users asking about slow transactions. &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin is now just an echo chamber where yes men regurgitate the agenda of a select few. Eeveyone else is shadow banned.&lt;p&gt;edit: anyone that doubts this go make a comment in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin that contains the word &amp;quot;censorship&amp;quot; then view the page in incognito mode. The comment is immediately hidden by the automoderator. It really is nuts.&lt;p&gt;Article about the history of censorship in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@johnblocke&amp;#x2F;a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43#.ihsr0xkhf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@johnblocke&amp;#x2F;a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>decker</author><text>Follow the money, it&amp;#x27;s not baffling at all.</text></comment>

<story><title>The True Cost of Bitcoin Transactions</title><url>http://moneyandstate.com/the-true-cost-of-bitcoin-transactions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pmorici</author><text>There is a small faction of the Bitcoin community working exceptionally hard to prevent any block size increase. I find their motives really baffling. They had some legitimate arguments a few years ago when discussion of this issue first started but those have all since been superseded by improvements in the protocol like xthin.&lt;p&gt;They now resort to distasteful tactics by running anyone out of town that even so much as suggests a block size increase. They are also working overtime to censor any comments that challenge their world view on the &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin sub reddit which is why you see such hostile comments mentioned by the OP in response to users asking about slow transactions. &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin is now just an echo chamber where yes men regurgitate the agenda of a select few. Eeveyone else is shadow banned.&lt;p&gt;edit: anyone that doubts this go make a comment in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin that contains the word &amp;quot;censorship&amp;quot; then view the page in incognito mode. The comment is immediately hidden by the automoderator. It really is nuts.&lt;p&gt;Article about the history of censorship in &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;bitcoin &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@johnblocke&amp;#x2F;a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43#.ihsr0xkhf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@johnblocke&amp;#x2F;a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>knocte</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s really baffling, I perceived quite the opposite.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Just use Postgres</title><url>https://mccue.dev/pages/8-16-24-just-use-postgres</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adityapatadia</author><text>Almost all statements about MongoDB are wrong.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You know exactly what your app needs to do, up-front&lt;p&gt;No one does. Mongodb still perfectly fits.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You know exactly what your access patterns will be, up-front&lt;p&gt;This one also no one knows when they start. We successfully scaled MongoDB from a few users a day to millions of queries an hour.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You have a known need to scale to really large sizes of data&lt;p&gt;This is exactly a great point. When data size goes to a billion rows, Postgres is tough. MongoDB just works without issue.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You are okay giving up some level of consistency&lt;p&gt;This is said for ages about MongoDB. Today, it provides very good consistency.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is because this sort of database is basically a giant distributed hash map.&lt;p&gt;Putting MongoDB in category of Dynamo is a big mistake. It&amp;#x27;s NOT a giant distributed hash map.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Arbitrary questions like &amp;quot;How many users signed up in the last month&amp;quot; can be trivially answered by writing a SQL query, perhaps on a read-replica if you are worried about running an expensive query on the same machine that is dealing with customer traffic. It&amp;#x27;s just outside the scope of this kind of database. You need to be ETL-ing your data out to handle it.&lt;p&gt;This shows the author has no idea how MongoDB aggregation works.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want fresh grads to use SQL just because they learn relations (and consistency and constraints and what not). It&amp;#x27;s perfectly fine to start on MongoDB and make it the primary DB.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orf</author><text>&amp;gt; This is exactly a great point. When data size goes to a billion rows, Postgres is tough.&lt;p&gt;You’ve been led astray. You can handle a billion rows on a developer laptop, let alone a production grade instance.</text></comment>

<story><title>Just use Postgres</title><url>https://mccue.dev/pages/8-16-24-just-use-postgres</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adityapatadia</author><text>Almost all statements about MongoDB are wrong.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You know exactly what your app needs to do, up-front&lt;p&gt;No one does. Mongodb still perfectly fits.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You know exactly what your access patterns will be, up-front&lt;p&gt;This one also no one knows when they start. We successfully scaled MongoDB from a few users a day to millions of queries an hour.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You have a known need to scale to really large sizes of data&lt;p&gt;This is exactly a great point. When data size goes to a billion rows, Postgres is tough. MongoDB just works without issue.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You are okay giving up some level of consistency&lt;p&gt;This is said for ages about MongoDB. Today, it provides very good consistency.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is because this sort of database is basically a giant distributed hash map.&lt;p&gt;Putting MongoDB in category of Dynamo is a big mistake. It&amp;#x27;s NOT a giant distributed hash map.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Arbitrary questions like &amp;quot;How many users signed up in the last month&amp;quot; can be trivially answered by writing a SQL query, perhaps on a read-replica if you are worried about running an expensive query on the same machine that is dealing with customer traffic. It&amp;#x27;s just outside the scope of this kind of database. You need to be ETL-ing your data out to handle it.&lt;p&gt;This shows the author has no idea how MongoDB aggregation works.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want fresh grads to use SQL just because they learn relations (and consistency and constraints and what not). It&amp;#x27;s perfectly fine to start on MongoDB and make it the primary DB.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rastignack</author><text>&amp;gt; This is exactly a great point. When data size goes to a billion rows, Postgres is tough. MongoDB just works without issue.&lt;p&gt;Is it though ? Maybe 5-10 years ago it was.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Julian Assange Status – Time since last proof of life: 46 days</title><url>http://assange.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jlmorton</author><text>Isn&amp;#x27;t the simple answer that the embassy of Ecuador in London cut off his access to the Internet? The embassy announced they had restricted his access to the Internet beginning October 17th.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;19&amp;#x2F;wikileaks-ecuador-julian-assange-internet-access&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;oct&amp;#x2F;19&amp;#x2F;wikileaks-ecua...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Julian Assange Status – Time since last proof of life: 46 days</title><url>http://assange.net/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>For the record, it looks like things are actually moving, with the Swedish prosecutor finally meeting him at the embassy (and without his lawyer): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;nov&amp;#x2F;14&amp;#x2F;julian-assange-to-face-swedish-prosecutors-over-accusation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theguardian.com&amp;#x2F;media&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;nov&amp;#x2F;14&amp;#x2F;julian-assange...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Richard Bartle releases his classic “Designing Virtual Worlds” book for free</title><url>https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/08/richard-bartle-designing-virtual-worlds-free-book.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DylanBohlender</author><text>Richard Bartle is a luminary in the field of game design. He invented a system for classifying gamers&amp;#x27; preferred game actions called the &amp;quot;Bartle taxonomy&amp;quot;, which helps game designers understand player motivations better. Think of it like user personas in software development - Killers love competition, Explorers love discovery, Achievers love mastery, and Socializers play games for social reasons. When designing a game for mass appeal it&amp;#x27;s often important to make sure players of all stripes find reasons to enjoy it, and Bartle&amp;#x27;s taxonomy is a great framework for analyzing how different types of players will interact with a game.&lt;p&gt;You can take an online version of the Bartle taxonomy questionnaire to get your own results here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matthewbarr.co.uk&amp;#x2F;bartle&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matthewbarr.co.uk&amp;#x2F;bartle&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mettamage</author><text>Psychologists could learn a lot from humans if they&amp;#x27;d start building games and observe them.&lt;p&gt;Also, game-designers could learn a lot from psychologists. Whenever I heard Bartle&amp;#x27;s taxonomy for the first time during a game studies course, my question was (and still is): why is a taxonomy the best way to capture this? In a personality research course it became clear to me that the biggest successful models are dimensional in nature (e.g. five factor model&amp;#x2F;big 5) they are not taxonomies.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love for more psychologist&amp;#x2F;personality researchers to team up with game-designers. I think it could advance some scientific discoveries into human behavior.</text></comment>

<story><title>Richard Bartle releases his classic “Designing Virtual Worlds” book for free</title><url>https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2021/08/richard-bartle-designing-virtual-worlds-free-book.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DylanBohlender</author><text>Richard Bartle is a luminary in the field of game design. He invented a system for classifying gamers&amp;#x27; preferred game actions called the &amp;quot;Bartle taxonomy&amp;quot;, which helps game designers understand player motivations better. Think of it like user personas in software development - Killers love competition, Explorers love discovery, Achievers love mastery, and Socializers play games for social reasons. When designing a game for mass appeal it&amp;#x27;s often important to make sure players of all stripes find reasons to enjoy it, and Bartle&amp;#x27;s taxonomy is a great framework for analyzing how different types of players will interact with a game.&lt;p&gt;You can take an online version of the Bartle taxonomy questionnaire to get your own results here:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matthewbarr.co.uk&amp;#x2F;bartle&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matthewbarr.co.uk&amp;#x2F;bartle&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>User23</author><text>This brings back memories. I was a huge fan of the old pkmud. It had gameplay that very much anticipated today&amp;#x27;s battle royales. The various players would get teleported randomly to locations in the DIKU MUD world and then scramble to kill MOBs and collect gear to better murder the other players. Looks like it&amp;#x27;s still around[1], and for some reason my handle is an illegal name. Fascinating! Sadly, like most MUDs, the player base is nonexistent.&lt;p&gt;Most of my time though was on a deeper SillyMUD derived PK MUD called Forbidden Lands. It was neat because the focus wasn&amp;#x27;t on murder, it was just an option. So the politics and mores around killing got quite interesting.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Still KASE.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pkmud.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pkmud.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Oscilloscope watch</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-watch?ref=card</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ohazi</author><text>Oscilloscope Specifications:&lt;p&gt;Maximum Sampling rate: 4MSPS&lt;p&gt;Analog Bandwidth: ---&amp;gt; 200kHz &amp;lt;---&lt;p&gt;Arbitrary Waveform Generator Specifications&lt;p&gt;Maximum conversion rate: 1MSPS&lt;p&gt;Analog Bandwidth: ---&amp;gt; 50kHz &amp;lt;---&lt;p&gt;This is certainly not the first project in the &amp;quot;super miniaturized hardware tools&amp;quot; category, and as much as I like the idea of having a single tricorder-like device that can replace a lab full of hardware, all of the similar projects that I&amp;#x27;ve seen have fallen short in exactly the same way: analog bandwidth - the one spec that actually matters.&lt;p&gt;I would pay a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of money for a miniaturized tool that took RF performance seriously.</text></comment>

<story><title>Oscilloscope watch</title><url>http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/920064946/oscilloscope-watch?ref=card</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beloch</author><text>I had a calculator watch as a kid. Great idea, but not terribly useful due to poor ergonomics. Still, it undeniably had appeal. This is like a calculator watch for a new decade, but also for a greatly reduced audience (Fewer people use oscilloscopes than calculators). This doesn&amp;#x27;t seem likely to find much of an audience unfortunately, but a part of me still wants one!</text></comment>

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<story><title>A compact overview of JDK 21’s “frozen” feature list</title><url>https://vived.io/a-compact-overview-of-jdk-21s-frozen-feature-list-jvm-weekly-vol-138/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamandcheese</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m impressed with how Java is shaping up. With records, pattern matching, destructuring, and virtual threads all arrived or arriving, what advantages do Kotlin and Scala bring?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usrusr</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s the small things that make kotlin awesome. Not microscopic things like removing semicolons, but the left-to-right of .as?, .let and friends that allow simple things to remain simple instead of littering the code with almost-single-use names. Give those trivial intermediates a name when you think the name will be helpful, not when the syntax is unhappy without. Those aren&amp;#x27;t astronaut level language features to treat someone&amp;#x27;s Haskell-envy, but simple things that just happen to add up really well.</text></comment>

<story><title>A compact overview of JDK 21’s “frozen” feature list</title><url>https://vived.io/a-compact-overview-of-jdk-21s-frozen-feature-list-jvm-weekly-vol-138/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hamandcheese</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m impressed with how Java is shaping up. With records, pattern matching, destructuring, and virtual threads all arrived or arriving, what advantages do Kotlin and Scala bring?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matsemann</author><text>The stdlib of kotlin with immutable types, lots of good extension functions on for instance lists etc is hard to beat. Especially with the nice lambda syntax it makes it a joy to write functional code compared to streams and having to call separate functions by wrapping instead of chaining.&lt;p&gt;Operator overloading can be misused, but for certain things it makes stuff much prettier as well.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whizzkid</author><text>It is funny how my browser preferences has changed over last 5 years.&lt;p&gt;2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it.&lt;p&gt;2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web apps that only work on Chrome. ( Google Meet etc. ) I feel much much better that I am not dependent on chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mraison</author><text>It’s nice to see a bit of Safari love around here. Some sites occasionally break, but I really like the macOS&amp;#x2F;iOS integrations. SMS code autofill on desktop Safari (via Mac &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; iPhone communication) is pretty awesome.</text></comment>

<story><title>Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default</title><url>https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whizzkid</author><text>It is funny how my browser preferences has changed over last 5 years.&lt;p&gt;2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it.&lt;p&gt;2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web apps that only work on Chrome. ( Google Meet etc. ) I feel much much better that I am not dependent on chrome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>r00fus</author><text>I have mostly switched over to Firefox from Chrome for all work related stuff except for anything Google Drive related (esp. Google &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; Sites - that has resulted in lost data and a failed demo).&lt;p&gt;So yes Google, Chrome will always likely be running on my system, but in almost exactly the same place IE did 10-15 years ago. Is that something to be proud of?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Justin Amash Introduces Bill to End Civil Asset Forfeiture Nationwide</title><url>https://reason.com/2020/12/17/justin-amash-introduces-bill-to-end-civil-asset-forfeiture-nationwide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>standardUser</author><text>While I&amp;#x27;m glad to see growing support for rolling back some of the most obviously horrific excesses of the War on Drugs, we still have a generation or two of Americans who eagerly support simply destroying the lives of people involved with drugs they&amp;#x27;ve been trained to be afraid of. I mean, it&amp;#x27;s great so many people are finally willing to stop obliterating the lives of strangers who like to smoke weed instead of get drunk, but why do they still think it&amp;#x27;s OK to ruin the life of some twenty-something selling cocaine to his friends?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wcarron</author><text>I was with you until the end. You lost me at &amp;#x27;selling cocaine to his friends&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;I personally support legalizing and&amp;#x2F;or decriminalizing a significant array of drugs; but I do not think we should ever accept the distribution of drugs by non-regulated entities. Possession&amp;#x2F;consumption, fine. Distribution: Not fine. Drugs sold on the street are not tested for purity or manufacturing standards. There is no accountability, no regulated employee rights, no taxes levied, etc. Selling drugs should remain a felony.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think the gov&amp;#x27;t should grant licenses for the manufacture and distribution of these substances with rigorous controls, and adult citizens should be legally allowed to purchase an amount that is fit for personal consumption, on a schedule that would make it exceedingly difficult to resell&amp;#x2F;stash (e.g. You may purchase 1-2gs of cocaine or 2 tabs of acid every 6 months)&lt;p&gt;Obviously, we have seen problems with this, as this scheme is essentially just prescription drugs combined with Canada&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;beer stores&amp;#x27;.</text></comment>

<story><title>Justin Amash Introduces Bill to End Civil Asset Forfeiture Nationwide</title><url>https://reason.com/2020/12/17/justin-amash-introduces-bill-to-end-civil-asset-forfeiture-nationwide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>standardUser</author><text>While I&amp;#x27;m glad to see growing support for rolling back some of the most obviously horrific excesses of the War on Drugs, we still have a generation or two of Americans who eagerly support simply destroying the lives of people involved with drugs they&amp;#x27;ve been trained to be afraid of. I mean, it&amp;#x27;s great so many people are finally willing to stop obliterating the lives of strangers who like to smoke weed instead of get drunk, but why do they still think it&amp;#x27;s OK to ruin the life of some twenty-something selling cocaine to his friends?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tobylane</author><text>Hold on, that ending was a surprise. Rolling back most of the war on drugs and focusing it just on the sellers of class a drugs (once classification is corrected) is a fair summary of what most of the rest of the first world is heading towards. It’s the balanced option.</text></comment>

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<story><title>MIT and Harvard file suit against new ICE regulations</title><url>http://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-and-harvard-file-suit-against-new-ice-regulations-0708</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben7799</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredibly unfair for the the administration to target international students like this.&lt;p&gt;However Harvard and MIT aren&amp;#x27;t all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing. International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate. The higher the % of international students the school takes in the more money they take in. If these schools had to replace international students with domestic ones (even if they could) they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to get away with selecting only the highest paying students.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m from Boston, we have an incredibly high number of international students, and a lot of the interest in keeping them is about getting their money.&lt;p&gt;The Boston Globe estimates they are worth $3.6 billion dollars to the area... lots of money, lots of tuition, lots of apartment rentals, lots of bar &amp;amp; restaurant revenue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; However Harvard and MIT aren&amp;#x27;t all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing.&lt;p&gt;It’s okay to have multiple motivations.&lt;p&gt;The fact that they have a monetary incentive doesn’t detract from the good of what they’re doing. In fact, that’s partially what enables these expensive lawsuits.&lt;p&gt;We shouldn’t try to downplay good actions just because money is also involved.</text></comment>

<story><title>MIT and Harvard file suit against new ICE regulations</title><url>http://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-and-harvard-file-suit-against-new-ice-regulations-0708</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ben7799</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s incredibly unfair for the the administration to target international students like this.&lt;p&gt;However Harvard and MIT aren&amp;#x27;t all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing. International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate. The higher the % of international students the school takes in the more money they take in. If these schools had to replace international students with domestic ones (even if they could) they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to get away with selecting only the highest paying students.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m from Boston, we have an incredibly high number of international students, and a lot of the interest in keeping them is about getting their money.&lt;p&gt;The Boston Globe estimates they are worth $3.6 billion dollars to the area... lots of money, lots of tuition, lots of apartment rentals, lots of bar &amp;amp; restaurant revenue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vowelless</author><text>Yea but they are also afraid of loosing out on a generation of professors, post docs, academics, value generators, “job creators”.&lt;p&gt;It is very risky to cut out a generation of top students because the value is not just to the local Boston economy, but nationally. It’s not just cheap labor. It’s apprenticeship by the smartest in the world who will pay dividends for not only our lives but for generations.&lt;p&gt;I came as a student. I pay 6 figures in taxes. Some of my intl friends pay 7 figures and employ hundreds. I’ll have kids here that will generate enough value to do that as well.&lt;p&gt;Right now, there is a significant risk that a lot of economic value is going to be lost due to these immigration policies. That is not good for america.&lt;p&gt;It’s like a sports team: you have the ability to draft the top players from around the world for cheap. Why would you decide to boycott the draft itself and let the competitors (India, China) take those players? Especially some players that you have already trained (graduated students, post docs)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Man With 4th Amendment Written on Chest Wins Trial Over Airport Arrest</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/4th-amendment-chest-trial/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ck2</author><text>That judge with the dissent - what a moron. Maybe Rosa Parks should have protested somewhere other than the bus too eh?&lt;p&gt;Dude was braver than I&apos;ve ever been, could have ended really badly.</text></comment>

<story><title>Man With 4th Amendment Written on Chest Wins Trial Over Airport Arrest</title><url>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/4th-amendment-chest-trial/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>yock</author><text>Even though this ruling seems to be in favor of liberty, I&apos;m disheartened to read the excerpt of the appeals court ruling in the article.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;We take heed of [Benjamin Franklin&apos;s] warning and are therefore unwilling to relinquish our First Amendment protections—even in an airport.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The court finds itself tempted to set aside Constitutional language for the sake of the nebulous idea of &quot;national security.&quot; Next time they&apos;re faced with a ruling of this nature, their temptations might just get the better of them.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The .blog Bait and Switch</title><url>http://chrisschidle.com/the-dot-blog-bait-and-switch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stephenr</author><text>I wonder how much to buy &amp;quot;my.horse&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Then I can setup a sole mailbox &amp;quot;look&amp;quot;, and have it auto respond to any messages with &amp;quot;my horse is amazing&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how may will get the joke.</text></item><item><author>echelon</author><text>This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter.&lt;p&gt;You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensive than dot webcam, for instance, and I imagine dot lawyer is more expensive than dot lol.&lt;p&gt;However, if your domain name uses a word or phrase that happens to be in their &amp;quot;premium domain&amp;quot; dictionary, then they&amp;#x27;ll charge an elevated price based on heuristics similar to what yesteryear&amp;#x27;s domain squatters used. Some simple and concise domains can run hundreds of thousands of dollars.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; cheap.horse is $25&amp;#x2F;yr tiny.horse is $100&amp;#x2F;yr internet.horse is $1000&amp;#x2F;yr free.horse is &amp;quot;ask us&amp;quot; &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Controlling the TLD is the ultimate form of domain squatting.&lt;p&gt;I wonder what will happen when some of these companies go under because they can no longer afford to pay off their debts? Will those that registered domain names lose them outright? Can someone else buy the gTLD and take them all over?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Valodim</author><text>I own amazin.horse using this very concept with the &amp;quot;my&amp;quot; subdomain as my professional email address. Closest I could get. :)</text></comment>

<story><title>The .blog Bait and Switch</title><url>http://chrisschidle.com/the-dot-blog-bait-and-switch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stephenr</author><text>I wonder how much to buy &amp;quot;my.horse&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Then I can setup a sole mailbox &amp;quot;look&amp;quot;, and have it auto respond to any messages with &amp;quot;my horse is amazing&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how may will get the joke.</text></item><item><author>echelon</author><text>This seems to have become the de facto pattern with the new gTLD system. A company swoops in and buys a namespace for $200k (or more if there is a competitive bid), and they effectively turn into the cartel equivalent of the domain squatter.&lt;p&gt;You can register your new gTLD for anywhere between $1 and $100, depending on what I suppose they expect their target demographic to be willing to pay. Dot horse is more expensive than dot webcam, for instance, and I imagine dot lawyer is more expensive than dot lol.&lt;p&gt;However, if your domain name uses a word or phrase that happens to be in their &amp;quot;premium domain&amp;quot; dictionary, then they&amp;#x27;ll charge an elevated price based on heuristics similar to what yesteryear&amp;#x27;s domain squatters used. Some simple and concise domains can run hundreds of thousands of dollars.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; cheap.horse is $25&amp;#x2F;yr tiny.horse is $100&amp;#x2F;yr internet.horse is $1000&amp;#x2F;yr free.horse is &amp;quot;ask us&amp;quot; &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Controlling the TLD is the ultimate form of domain squatting.&lt;p&gt;I wonder what will happen when some of these companies go under because they can no longer afford to pay off their debts? Will those that registered domain names lose them outright? Can someone else buy the gTLD and take them all over?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewStephens</author><text>I have a .horse domain - I tried every permutation horse puns and in-jokes (my.lovely.horse, etc) but they were all taken by squatters or reserved for stupid prices.&lt;p&gt;Eventually I settled for sheep.horse, which is easy to remember but not much else.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone&apos;s wealth grow faster</title><url>https://ergodicityeconomics.com/2023/08/29/for-to-withhold-is-to-perish/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>The vast majority of people in Europe pays nowhere near half our salary in taxes. Only a few countries have &lt;i&gt;total tax wedges&lt;/i&gt; (including &lt;i&gt;employer&lt;/i&gt; payroll taxes) that reach that level for more than small minorities of the population.</text></item><item><author>jiofj</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s more like we pay half our salary in taxes and then we get terrible education and a healthcare system where you can&amp;#x27;t even get an appointment.</text></item><item><author>mschuster91</author><text>Society, at least in the classic European model, works just the same: everyone (yes, I know, there are exceptions, that&amp;#x27;s not the point) pays their share into health insurance, LTD insurance, unemployment insurance, workplace accident insurance, pension systems and a ton of other social benefit systems. And &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; benefits from this kind of collective solidarity - our societies are far less combative (both in the literal and the proverbial sense) than the US are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Try1275</author><text>I live in Austria. I pay 48% on everything above 60k € and 50% above 90k. Our VAT is 20%. Most people who can afford it pay for private doctors because it‘s almost impossible to get an appointment with one that‘s covered by normal health care.&lt;p&gt;So I guess at least for my country the statement above is somewhat true.</text></comment>

<story><title>Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone&apos;s wealth grow faster</title><url>https://ergodicityeconomics.com/2023/08/29/for-to-withhold-is-to-perish/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>vidarh</author><text>The vast majority of people in Europe pays nowhere near half our salary in taxes. Only a few countries have &lt;i&gt;total tax wedges&lt;/i&gt; (including &lt;i&gt;employer&lt;/i&gt; payroll taxes) that reach that level for more than small minorities of the population.</text></item><item><author>jiofj</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s more like we pay half our salary in taxes and then we get terrible education and a healthcare system where you can&amp;#x27;t even get an appointment.</text></item><item><author>mschuster91</author><text>Society, at least in the classic European model, works just the same: everyone (yes, I know, there are exceptions, that&amp;#x27;s not the point) pays their share into health insurance, LTD insurance, unemployment insurance, workplace accident insurance, pension systems and a ton of other social benefit systems. And &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; benefits from this kind of collective solidarity - our societies are far less combative (both in the literal and the proverbial sense) than the US are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yardstick</author><text>In the UK once you reach over ~120k GBP the total tax wedge is above 50% [1].&lt;p&gt;At 90k GBP you are paying 45%. I guess it depends on what “nowhere near half” means. 45% is close imo. Especially with VAT added in on purchases. Yes the average London wage is more like 50k GBP, but from that perspective it’s also only double the average wage before you hit 45%+ tax take.&lt;p&gt;The top UK tax rate (including employers NI etc) is ~59%.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;listentotaxman.com&amp;#x2F;?year=2022&amp;amp;taxregion=uk&amp;amp;age=0&amp;amp;time=1&amp;amp;ingr=120000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;listentotaxman.com&amp;#x2F;?year=2022&amp;amp;taxregion=uk&amp;amp;age=0&amp;amp;tim...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/should-there-be-limits-on-persuasive-technologies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>I wrote this for a related article yesterday:&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it&amp;#x27;s ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there&amp;#x27;s some kind of free market?&lt;p&gt;Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It&amp;#x27;s as if there&amp;#x27;s a line between actively lying (&amp;quot;Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them&amp;quot;) and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.&lt;p&gt;Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It&amp;#x27;s a cliché, for a good reason.&lt;p&gt;I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it&amp;#x27;s your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Of course this also applies to the free market in ideas. In what sense are people free to make up their minds if it&amp;#x27;s decided for them what they should see, whether or not the government is doing it or FB? Isn&amp;#x27;t this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we&amp;#x27;ve been pointing fingers at?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stickfigure</author><text>There is absolutely no limit to this. Putting on a suit for a financial job interview exploits the cognitive biases of interviewers. Tattoos exploit the cognitive biases of hipsters. Putting hockey-stick growth projections in pitch decks exploits the cognitive biases of VCs. Equity grants (pretty much always) exploit the cognitive biases of startup employees. Driving a fancy car exploits the cognitive biases of (a very large portion of) the dating market.&lt;p&gt;Human beings are not computers. No aspect of human behavior is perfectly logical or rational. You simply cannot ban emotional appeals in principle, because all appeals have an emotional component. This way lies a dystopia far more terrible than &amp;quot;grandpa shared some nonsense on facebook&amp;quot;.</text></comment>

<story><title>Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?</title><url>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/should-there-be-limits-on-persuasive-technologies.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>I wrote this for a related article yesterday:&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it&amp;#x27;s ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there&amp;#x27;s some kind of free market?&lt;p&gt;Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It&amp;#x27;s as if there&amp;#x27;s a line between actively lying (&amp;quot;Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them&amp;quot;) and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.&lt;p&gt;Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It&amp;#x27;s a cliché, for a good reason.&lt;p&gt;I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it&amp;#x27;s your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;Of course this also applies to the free market in ideas. In what sense are people free to make up their minds if it&amp;#x27;s decided for them what they should see, whether or not the government is doing it or FB? Isn&amp;#x27;t this the same as the authoritarian nightmares that we&amp;#x27;ve been pointing fingers at?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deegles</author><text>As an absurd example, if someone were to invent a ray-gun that reprograms people&amp;#x27;s brains with arbitrary beliefs it would be 100% unethical and illegal to use.&lt;p&gt;However, ads or fake news article that takes many exposures to reprogram you (by using the cognitive bias back channels as you mention) are perfectly fine. ¯\_(ツ)_&amp;#x2F;¯</text></comment>

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<story><title>Germany aims to get 100% of energy from renewable sources by 2035</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_dev</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve all raised our concerns about the opinions of Germans before on these threads. A brilliant scientific nation that seems to have become recently confused. Sort of like the British.&lt;p&gt;Green Gas? Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service? Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic and drawing it in to the West?&lt;p&gt;The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore -- so I&amp;#x27;m going to wait for that tide of opinion change rather than try to persuade anymore. Being naive sometimes is a luxury some can simply afford while others can&amp;#x27;t afford it. Climate change is happening and it&amp;#x27;s not going to wait for Germany, Russia has always been like Russia -- corrupt and unreliable. Amazing that Germany have considered the US a poor partner under Trump but a reliable one with Russia&amp;#x2F;Putin. France seems have better answers on how to solve energy problems than Germany.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>V1ndaar</author><text>&amp;gt; The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore&lt;p&gt;Honestly, as a German myself I&amp;#x27;m rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably not. I cannot even convince my parents (who grew up in Germany during the time when the anti nuclear sentiment really started) to rethink their anti nuclear stance (despite having a great relationship with them). I say that as a physicist that absolutely sees there are flaws with aging nuclear plants.&lt;p&gt;But people who are not able to a) appreciate the energy density of nuclear and b) see that climate change is an &lt;i&gt;urgent problem&lt;/i&gt; we face, whereas any issues from nuclear waste are &lt;i&gt;long term problems&lt;/i&gt; (not even talking about future reactor technologies etc. etc.) is just... I don&amp;#x27;t know? It sounds insane, but indoctrinated? I just utterly fail to understand.&lt;p&gt;I mean, what&amp;#x27;s the point of a &amp;quot;nuclear waste free Earth&amp;quot; if our civilization collapses due to climate change?</text></comment>

<story><title>Germany aims to get 100% of energy from renewable sources by 2035</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/germany-aims-get-100-energy-renewable-sources-by-2035-2022-02-28/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_dev</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve all raised our concerns about the opinions of Germans before on these threads. A brilliant scientific nation that seems to have become recently confused. Sort of like the British.&lt;p&gt;Green Gas? Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service? Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic and drawing it in to the West?&lt;p&gt;The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore -- so I&amp;#x27;m going to wait for that tide of opinion change rather than try to persuade anymore. Being naive sometimes is a luxury some can simply afford while others can&amp;#x27;t afford it. Climate change is happening and it&amp;#x27;s not going to wait for Germany, Russia has always been like Russia -- corrupt and unreliable. Amazing that Germany have considered the US a poor partner under Trump but a reliable one with Russia&amp;#x2F;Putin. France seems have better answers on how to solve energy problems than Germany.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ph_</author><text>France doesn&amp;#x27;t have any good answer on how to solve energy problems. Yes, they currently have a large amount of nuclear reactors - probably the most nuclear industry nation on the planet. However, most of them are aging and so far they fail to build new plants at a rate to sustain their production long term. They have 1 in construction, much delayed and with huge cost overruns. Even if they build another 10 that only delays the switch, they would have to replace 50 nuclear power plants. Their nuclear future so far depends on prolonging the run times of the existing plants.</text></comment>

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<story><title>London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/06/garden-bridge-mobile-phone-signals-tracking-london</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mattgibson</author><text>This article more or less describes what a police state would look like if the Church of England designed it. A controlled, plasticised, corporate Little England, where fun is monitored and must be of an approved nature, freedom of expression is allowed as long as you don&amp;#x27;t express anything disagreeable, and the public have no democratic rights at all.&lt;p&gt;Yet another small, sad indicator that control over the lives of Londoners and the spaces they live in is for sale to anyone with the money to buy it. “A private place operating as a public space” is not what I want to have on London&amp;#x27;s limited real estate.</text></comment>

<story><title>London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked</title><url>http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/06/garden-bridge-mobile-phone-signals-tracking-london</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wolfgke</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s why Richard Stallman correctly described mobile phones as tracking and surveillance devices:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stallman.org&amp;#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stallman.org&amp;#x2F;rms-lifestyle.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cell phones are tracking and surveillance devices. They all enable the phone system to record where the user goes, and many (perhaps all) can be remotely converted into listening devices.&amp;quot;</text></comment>

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<story><title>HiFive Unmatched – A RISC-V Linux development platform</title><url>https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mofosyne</author><text>Will RISCV have the same mess that ARM ecosystem has of not standardising or having a single BIOS or similar system... such that you have to compile a custom image for every board?&lt;p&gt;One thing PC has going for it, is that you can install one Linux distro into any PC board. This is not the same for ARM boards.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>I have two (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;hifive-unmatched&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;hifive-unmatched&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) so I guess ask me anything ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rwmj</author><text>Well that&amp;#x27;s a very good question. At the moment the reality is something of a mess, because someone looked at Arm and though that must be a good idea. Plus the RISC-V Foundation has even less control over implementers than Arm does (which doesn&amp;#x27;t have a lot).&lt;p&gt;The good news is that the foundation is defining various platform specs. For servers it&amp;#x27;ll include a standard firmware spec plus open source firmware implementation and a few other bits. Maybe working UEFI one day. (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.riscv.org&amp;#x2F;g&amp;#x2F;tech-unixplatformspec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lists.riscv.org&amp;#x2F;g&amp;#x2F;tech-unixplatformspec&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;riscv&amp;#x2F;riscv-platform-specs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;riscv&amp;#x2F;riscv-platform-specs&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;riscv-non-isa&amp;#x2F;riscv-sbi-doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;riscv-non-isa&amp;#x2F;riscv-sbi-doc&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>

<story><title>HiFive Unmatched – A RISC-V Linux development platform</title><url>https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mofosyne</author><text>Will RISCV have the same mess that ARM ecosystem has of not standardising or having a single BIOS or similar system... such that you have to compile a custom image for every board?&lt;p&gt;One thing PC has going for it, is that you can install one Linux distro into any PC board. This is not the same for ARM boards.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>I have two (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;hifive-unmatched&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rwmj.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;hifive-unmatched&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) so I guess ask me anything ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xvilka</author><text>PC BIOS and UEFI are a mess as well. They are proprietary blobs guarded by Intel and alike. At least ARM had most bootloading open with uBoot, for example. Also PC firmware code on modern platforms is often bigger than Linux kernel. Hardly a good example. I sincerely hope RISC-V will avoid relying on UEFI and opt out for something more sensible.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Running a database on EC2? Your clock could be slowing you down</title><url>https://heapanalytics.com/blog/engineering/clocksource-aws-ec2-vdso</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scarface74</author><text>Why would you run your own Postgres instance on EC2 within AWS? That kind of defeats the purpose of paying for AWS. Why not use Postgres RDS or Aurora?&lt;p&gt;It makes some sense with Sql Server and Oracle in a few cases because of licensing but hosting your own Postgres instance on AWS is the worse of both worlds -- you&amp;#x27;re paying more than with a cheaper VPS and you have to do all of the maintenance yourself and not taking advantage of all of things that AWS provides -- point in time restores, easy cross region read replicas, faster disk io (Aurora), etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>malisper</author><text>Hi. I&amp;#x27;m one of the database engineers at Heap. This is a good question. There are several reasons why we use EC2. First of all, I will say I love RDS as a product. We actually do use RDS for a number of our services. We use Postgres on EC2 only for our primary data store. As for reasons why we use EC2:&lt;p&gt;Cost - Our primary data store has &amp;gt;1 Petabyte of raw data stored across dozens of Postgres instances. The amount of data we store is at the point where RDS is too expensive for us. The cost of an instance on RDS is more than twice the cost on EC2. For example, an on-demand r4.8xl on EC2 instance costs $2.13 an hour, while an RDS r4.8xl costs $4.80 an hour.&lt;p&gt;Performance - The only kind of disk available on RDS is EBS. EBS is slow compared to the NVMe the i3s provide. We used to use r3s with EBS and got a major speedup when we switched to i3s. As a side note, the cost of an i3 is also less than the cost of an r3 with an equivalent amount of EBS.&lt;p&gt;Configuration - By using EC2 we can configure our machines in ways we wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to if we used RDS. For example, we run ZFS on our EC2 instances which compresses our data by 2x. By compressing our data, we get a major cost saving and a major performance boost at the same time! There isn&amp;#x27;t an easy way to compress your data if you use RDS.&lt;p&gt;Introspection - There are times where we&amp;#x27;ve needed to debug performance problems with Postgres and EXPLAIN ANALYZE won&amp;#x27;t suffice. A good example is we used flame graphs to see what Postgres was using CPU for. We made a small change that resulted in a 10x improvement to ingestion throughput. If you are curious, I wrote a blog post on this investigation: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;heapanalytics.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;engineering&amp;#x2F;basic-performance-analysis-saved-us-millions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;heapanalytics.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;engineering&amp;#x2F;basic-performance...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Running a database on EC2? Your clock could be slowing you down</title><url>https://heapanalytics.com/blog/engineering/clocksource-aws-ec2-vdso</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scarface74</author><text>Why would you run your own Postgres instance on EC2 within AWS? That kind of defeats the purpose of paying for AWS. Why not use Postgres RDS or Aurora?&lt;p&gt;It makes some sense with Sql Server and Oracle in a few cases because of licensing but hosting your own Postgres instance on AWS is the worse of both worlds -- you&amp;#x27;re paying more than with a cheaper VPS and you have to do all of the maintenance yourself and not taking advantage of all of things that AWS provides -- point in time restores, easy cross region read replicas, faster disk io (Aurora), etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aidos</author><text>In my experience you get much better performance outside of RDS and you can inspect and tune it better. Maybe I’m missing something and no doubt I could put more work into it but we’ve actually talked about moving our RDS dbs back to EC2 because there are plenty of queries we do that are embarrassingly slow on RDS when they shouldn’t be.&lt;p&gt;Also, you can’t replicate out of RDS. I like to know where my data is and how to bring it back online during a disaster.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Working in the Vision Pro [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV9Xy6L_rlM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FirmwareBurner</author><text>Turning your head ~90 degrees to the left just to be able to see Slack(or any other windows) is for me an productivity nerf, not a boost. What&amp;#x27;s wrong with Alt&amp;#x2F;Option - Tab instead?&lt;p&gt;In my life I experimented with 3 monitors, 2 monitors, one monitor, ultra widescreens, square aspect ratio displays, and a mix of several of those, etc. and I find the best productivity setup is when I have everything centered in my narrow&amp;#x2F;focused field of view, regardless of how many displays there are or what their aspect ratio is.&lt;p&gt;If I have too many or too wide displays, needing me to turn my head&amp;#x2F;neck to the side to see what&amp;#x27;s on them, it&amp;#x27;s just useless real estate and extra shit I have to manage and organize, wasting my brain power and concentration on managing the multi-monitor setup instead of on work.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, currently I have a single 32 inch(27 would work too) 4k display straight in front of me, and switching workspaces via Meta Key + Scroll wheel is way more desk-real-estate, monetarily and energy eficient and more ergonomic than moving my neck to another display on the side that&amp;#x27;s just sitting there displaying a picture that nobody&amp;#x27;s looking at 90% of the time.&lt;p&gt;But in a past job 12+ years ago, I loved having the two work-provided Philips 20 inch 4:3 1600x1200 IPS displays right in front of me. One of those in landscape with the IDE, the other rotated in portrait for the browser&amp;#x2F;documentation. That was peak DPI, windowing and ergonomics before 16:9 &amp;quot;HD&amp;quot; displays ruined vertical real estate and productivity with their &amp;quot;cinema&amp;quot; TV aspect ratio. Shame you can&amp;#x27;t get cheap monitors like those anymore in good condition(their CCFL lamps dimmed over time by now). Also, R.I.P. Philips display panels.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, back on topic, this video feels like justifying the purchase with flashy multi window gimmicks instead of showing actual ergonomic improvements. The proof will be in the pudding. Will the author stick to that sprawling neck twisting setup long term, or will he switch back to a more conventional setup once the novelty of his new toy wears off and his video got enough views?&lt;p&gt;FWIW 2, I have a Quest 3 for gaming, and could never use that for work due to the limited narrow FoV(~110°) that make it more like &amp;quot;binoculars vision&amp;quot; than actual virtual&amp;#x2F;augumented &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot;. And according to the experience of MKBHD(Marques Brownlee) on YT, the Apple VP has an even narrower FoV than that. Ouch! That does not sound optimistic for productivity at all. IMHO 130°+ should be the norm for FoV going forward. Anything narrower and I feel like I&amp;#x27;m wearing horse blinkers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mil22</author><text>Totally agree. I have tried multiple monitors so many times over the years but always come back to a single display, usually 24-27”.&lt;p&gt;Turning your head is a hassle. I also find &lt;i&gt;turning my eyes&lt;/i&gt; fatiguing if the angle of movement is too great. So I tend to prefer smaller, higher PPD displays over larger displays with the same resolution. I want a lot of pixels in a compact FOV.&lt;p&gt;For me, 4K 24” has been the sweet spot for desktop monitors. I currently have a 27” due to so few good 24” 4K monitors being made these days, and at the viewing distance allowed by my setup, even that is just slightly too big, such that looking to the corners can get annoying.&lt;p&gt;The PPD on these headsets still just isn’t anywhere close to the point where it can match a single high density desktop monitor, and making the virtual screen bigger or adding side screens just doesn’t work for me ergonomically.</text></comment>

<story><title>Working in the Vision Pro [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV9Xy6L_rlM</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FirmwareBurner</author><text>Turning your head ~90 degrees to the left just to be able to see Slack(or any other windows) is for me an productivity nerf, not a boost. What&amp;#x27;s wrong with Alt&amp;#x2F;Option - Tab instead?&lt;p&gt;In my life I experimented with 3 monitors, 2 monitors, one monitor, ultra widescreens, square aspect ratio displays, and a mix of several of those, etc. and I find the best productivity setup is when I have everything centered in my narrow&amp;#x2F;focused field of view, regardless of how many displays there are or what their aspect ratio is.&lt;p&gt;If I have too many or too wide displays, needing me to turn my head&amp;#x2F;neck to the side to see what&amp;#x27;s on them, it&amp;#x27;s just useless real estate and extra shit I have to manage and organize, wasting my brain power and concentration on managing the multi-monitor setup instead of on work.&lt;p&gt;FWIW, currently I have a single 32 inch(27 would work too) 4k display straight in front of me, and switching workspaces via Meta Key + Scroll wheel is way more desk-real-estate, monetarily and energy eficient and more ergonomic than moving my neck to another display on the side that&amp;#x27;s just sitting there displaying a picture that nobody&amp;#x27;s looking at 90% of the time.&lt;p&gt;But in a past job 12+ years ago, I loved having the two work-provided Philips 20 inch 4:3 1600x1200 IPS displays right in front of me. One of those in landscape with the IDE, the other rotated in portrait for the browser&amp;#x2F;documentation. That was peak DPI, windowing and ergonomics before 16:9 &amp;quot;HD&amp;quot; displays ruined vertical real estate and productivity with their &amp;quot;cinema&amp;quot; TV aspect ratio. Shame you can&amp;#x27;t get cheap monitors like those anymore in good condition(their CCFL lamps dimmed over time by now). Also, R.I.P. Philips display panels.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, back on topic, this video feels like justifying the purchase with flashy multi window gimmicks instead of showing actual ergonomic improvements. The proof will be in the pudding. Will the author stick to that sprawling neck twisting setup long term, or will he switch back to a more conventional setup once the novelty of his new toy wears off and his video got enough views?&lt;p&gt;FWIW 2, I have a Quest 3 for gaming, and could never use that for work due to the limited narrow FoV(~110°) that make it more like &amp;quot;binoculars vision&amp;quot; than actual virtual&amp;#x2F;augumented &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot;. And according to the experience of MKBHD(Marques Brownlee) on YT, the Apple VP has an even narrower FoV than that. Ouch! That does not sound optimistic for productivity at all. IMHO 130°+ should be the norm for FoV going forward. Anything narrower and I feel like I&amp;#x27;m wearing horse blinkers.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>empath-nirvana</author><text>&amp;gt; Turning your head ~90 degrees to the left just to see Slack(or any other windows) is for me an productivity nerf, not a boost.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&amp;#x27;t put slack there because I look at it all day long, but I could see leaving open something like Datadog that I look at infrequently, but it&amp;#x27;d be nice if it was just _there_ and I didn&amp;#x27;t have to go tab-hunting to find it</text></comment>

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<story><title>Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing</title><url>https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eternalban</author><text>&amp;gt; upset about was the growing reliance on ..&lt;p&gt;Then he would have freaked out over smart phones. I&amp;#x27;ve first hand seen what happens to e.g. sense of direction once use of the navigator-assist becomes habitual. Some auxiliary mental muscle atrophies in the brain.</text></item><item><author>wahern</author><text>These things aren&amp;#x27;t contradictory. Ancient Greek students used wax tablets for taking notes, etc. What Socrates (and Plato and others) were upset about was the growing reliance on permanent writing to &lt;i&gt;displace&lt;/i&gt; memorization. For example, giving a speech from notes rather than from memory; or in rhetoric citing to a work without being able to literally recite that part from memory. To the extent writing aided memorization and comprehension, they had no beef. The debate was about the nature of knowledge--whether knowledge could exist independent of an internalized form within the mind--i.e. memorization.</text></item><item><author>nehal3m</author><text>Hah, you can&amp;#x27;t make this stuff up.&lt;p&gt;6. Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing (newlearningonline.com) 33 points by indy 1 hour ago | hide | 5 comments&lt;p&gt;7. Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (stackoverflow.blog) 329 points by TangerineDream 7 hours ago | hide | 189 comments</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Broken_Hippo</author><text>You right this like people were born with some sort of innate ability, while my personal experience is that using a gas station toilet means that I have to get my bearings. I, as an adult in my mid 40&amp;#x27;s, have to actually think about which is my right and left. I also lived without a gps of any sort for most of my life: Before gps, I printed directions. Before that, I relied on maps when I could or just got lost.&lt;p&gt;A navigator of some sort means that I can make up for this shortcoming and that I can explore. It isn&amp;#x27;t perfect, but much better than my brain does on its own.</text></comment>

<story><title>Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing</title><url>https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eternalban</author><text>&amp;gt; upset about was the growing reliance on ..&lt;p&gt;Then he would have freaked out over smart phones. I&amp;#x27;ve first hand seen what happens to e.g. sense of direction once use of the navigator-assist becomes habitual. Some auxiliary mental muscle atrophies in the brain.</text></item><item><author>wahern</author><text>These things aren&amp;#x27;t contradictory. Ancient Greek students used wax tablets for taking notes, etc. What Socrates (and Plato and others) were upset about was the growing reliance on permanent writing to &lt;i&gt;displace&lt;/i&gt; memorization. For example, giving a speech from notes rather than from memory; or in rhetoric citing to a work without being able to literally recite that part from memory. To the extent writing aided memorization and comprehension, they had no beef. The debate was about the nature of knowledge--whether knowledge could exist independent of an internalized form within the mind--i.e. memorization.</text></item><item><author>nehal3m</author><text>Hah, you can&amp;#x27;t make this stuff up.&lt;p&gt;6. Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing (newlearningonline.com) 33 points by indy 1 hour ago | hide | 5 comments&lt;p&gt;7. Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (stackoverflow.blog) 329 points by TangerineDream 7 hours ago | hide | 189 comments</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tppiotrowski</author><text>Riding a bike with GPS leads me to more retention. My theory is that it&amp;#x27;s the driving speed and number of other drivers on the road that prevents our brain from retaining a route.</text></comment>

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<story><title>California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california-tried-to-save-the-nation-from-the-misery-of-tax-filing-then-intuit-stepped-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jjcon</author><text>&amp;gt; The &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all&lt;p&gt;So when the left does something you dont like, they must not be left? Smells of no true scottsman to me.</text></item><item><author>thebigman433</author><text>This is so important and I think a lot of people miss it. The &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all. They are very much invested in protecting power and wealth.&lt;p&gt;The only &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that would push against the rentiers are people who will almost never see power. However, I wouldnt say AOC winning is a &amp;quot;fluke&amp;quot;. Its definitely the exception, but progressives have been able to repeat it a few more times in democrat strongholds that have historically kept establishment candidates.&lt;p&gt;Right now the only &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; the real left has is withholding their votes from corporate dem bills like we&amp;#x27;re seeing with the BBB Act. This only even works because the rest of the party is interested in protecting power&amp;#x2F;wealth and is pretty inept at actually winning races.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>The left doesnt really have any power in the US.&lt;p&gt;What passes for the left (the socially liberal corporate elites that run most of the democratic party) are pretty much just as invested in protecting the rentiers as the right wing.&lt;p&gt;Rentier money is structurally geared towards destroying any populist politicians who threaten their rents. It was a fluke that AOC won given her &lt;i&gt;Democratic&lt;/i&gt; opponent (when she was unknown) outspent her something like 7:1. People like her arent supposed to slip through the early stage political filter.&lt;p&gt;If they do slip through there&amp;#x27;s also an enormously powerful and effective propaganda machine dedicated to character assassination.</text></item><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>Going to paraphrase a quote from a podcast that stuck with me.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What (the left) needs to do is clear out rents. Not just housing rents, but rent seekers. The economy is riddled through with people who do nothing, but get paid because structurally that’s who gets paid.&lt;p&gt;Intuit is one of those companies. They produce a few real products, QuickBooks for businesses and Mint, but overwhelmingly their money comes from the fact that they charge rent on filling your taxes. They’re a parasite on our society.&lt;p&gt;Fortunately the podcaster wasn’t talking about the US; their country was worse off than America in this area by far. But unfortunately it seems like we’re on the same glide slope if we don’t do something about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thebigman433</author><text>Im mostly comparing it to the politics of the &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; in most other first world countries. In my opinion, candidates who arent willing to support guaranteed family leave, single payer healthcare, and more progressive taxes, arent very far left.&lt;p&gt;Of course you could definitely make an argument for that being no true scottsman, so I guess it just depends on opinion.</text></comment>

<story><title>California tried to save the nation from tax filing, then Intuit stepped in</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-21/california-tried-to-save-the-nation-from-the-misery-of-tax-filing-then-intuit-stepped-in</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jjcon</author><text>&amp;gt; The &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all&lt;p&gt;So when the left does something you dont like, they must not be left? Smells of no true scottsman to me.</text></item><item><author>thebigman433</author><text>This is so important and I think a lot of people miss it. The &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all. They are very much invested in protecting power and wealth.&lt;p&gt;The only &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that would push against the rentiers are people who will almost never see power. However, I wouldnt say AOC winning is a &amp;quot;fluke&amp;quot;. Its definitely the exception, but progressives have been able to repeat it a few more times in democrat strongholds that have historically kept establishment candidates.&lt;p&gt;Right now the only &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; the real left has is withholding their votes from corporate dem bills like we&amp;#x27;re seeing with the BBB Act. This only even works because the rest of the party is interested in protecting power&amp;#x2F;wealth and is pretty inept at actually winning races.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>The left doesnt really have any power in the US.&lt;p&gt;What passes for the left (the socially liberal corporate elites that run most of the democratic party) are pretty much just as invested in protecting the rentiers as the right wing.&lt;p&gt;Rentier money is structurally geared towards destroying any populist politicians who threaten their rents. It was a fluke that AOC won given her &lt;i&gt;Democratic&lt;/i&gt; opponent (when she was unknown) outspent her something like 7:1. People like her arent supposed to slip through the early stage political filter.&lt;p&gt;If they do slip through there&amp;#x27;s also an enormously powerful and effective propaganda machine dedicated to character assassination.</text></item><item><author>ashtonkem</author><text>Going to paraphrase a quote from a podcast that stuck with me.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; What (the left) needs to do is clear out rents. Not just housing rents, but rent seekers. The economy is riddled through with people who do nothing, but get paid because structurally that’s who gets paid.&lt;p&gt;Intuit is one of those companies. They produce a few real products, QuickBooks for businesses and Mint, but overwhelmingly their money comes from the fact that they charge rent on filling your taxes. They’re a parasite on our society.&lt;p&gt;Fortunately the podcaster wasn’t talking about the US; their country was worse off than America in this area by far. But unfortunately it seems like we’re on the same glide slope if we don’t do something about it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rrrrrrrrrrrryan</author><text>&amp;gt; The &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; that has power in the US (establishment dems) barely qualify as being left at all&lt;p&gt;You seem to interpret that statement as an opinion, but it is not a subjective statement. [1]&lt;p&gt;The U.S. isn&amp;#x27;t the only democracy in the world, and if we compare the Democratic party with other political parties around the world, they are indeed barely left-of-center.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.md&amp;#x2F;PjNEF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.md&amp;#x2F;PjNEF&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Microsoft execs on Apple&apos;s music store (2003)</title><url>https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1647317806697050112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rawgabbit</author><text>Steve Jobs and Apple can put together a music store and iPod prototype that was sexy, easy to use, and wowed the music executives who knew Napster and iPods were the future. Meanwhile Microsoft still manages to infuriate their own users with things like Windows 11 start menu. Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;culture-news&amp;#x2F;itunes-10th-anniversary-how-steve-jobs-turned-the-industry-upside-down-68985&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;culture-news&amp;#x2F;itunes-10t...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>chasing</author><text>I really don’t think MS had the consumer product vision at the time to pull anything like a music store off. Apple had the vision to get from point A to point B and have huge swaths of consumers hop on board for the ride.&lt;p&gt;Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the consumer market exploded — especially after touchscreen phones hit — MS just didn’t have any good muscles to use in the fight. They’d been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they kept bringing to market was just a total mess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rospaya</author><text>&amp;gt; Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.&lt;p&gt;Can&amp;#x27;t comment on the ecosystem since back then my only option was piracy, but the second and third generation players were very good. The HD is still one of the sleekest pieces of hardware that I used. But Apple couldn&amp;#x27;t be beat at that point.</text></comment>

<story><title>Microsoft execs on Apple&apos;s music store (2003)</title><url>https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1647317806697050112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rawgabbit</author><text>Steve Jobs and Apple can put together a music store and iPod prototype that was sexy, easy to use, and wowed the music executives who knew Napster and iPods were the future. Meanwhile Microsoft still manages to infuriate their own users with things like Windows 11 start menu. Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;culture-news&amp;#x2F;itunes-10th-anniversary-how-steve-jobs-turned-the-industry-upside-down-68985&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&amp;#x2F;culture&amp;#x2F;culture-news&amp;#x2F;itunes-10t...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>chasing</author><text>I really don’t think MS had the consumer product vision at the time to pull anything like a music store off. Apple had the vision to get from point A to point B and have huge swaths of consumers hop on board for the ride.&lt;p&gt;Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the consumer market exploded — especially after touchscreen phones hit — MS just didn’t have any good muscles to use in the fight. They’d been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they kept bringing to market was just a total mess.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>junon</author><text>This. It&amp;#x27;s always been wild to me how tone deaf Microsoft has always been. I always read these internal emails thinking how wildly out of touch with their own users they are.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-refused-no-poaching-agreement-with-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>Presumably the shortage of labor was still real, and if they needed to hire people, but couldn&amp;#x27;t poach, then they hired them from the rest of the talent pool. If that&amp;#x27;s the case, then removing the &amp;quot;cold calls&amp;quot; from the talent search might have had the effect of actually driving up salaries for those not working at these companies, since potentially reduced the supply.&lt;p&gt;If that&amp;#x27;s the case, then it would not have saved money, rather, it would have had the effect of simply shifting the money from going to existing Google&amp;#x2F;Apple&amp;#x2F;etc employees to applicants from smaller firms.&lt;p&gt;That is, it changed the distribution of spending, and probably in a more egalitarian way, distributing the spending over a larger pool, instead of simply fighting over, and raising the wages, of the small group of superstars at the big companies.&lt;p&gt;These companies are spending on R&amp;amp;D and increasing the percentage year over year, they are also spending huge sums of acqui-hires, and hiring faster than the local communities, or their own office space, can handle.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that excessive salaries are actually bad for allocation. Wall Street has infamously brained drained tons of the best and brightest to figure out how to gain small efficiencies in stock trading. What discoveries might have occurred had string theorists not left to go optimize portfolios?&lt;p&gt;One thing I wouldn&amp;#x27;t call engineers is cheap. You&amp;#x27;re talking about people making upwards of $150-200k in salary, and probably up to half-million when total compensation is considered. I paid more in taxes last year than my mother earned in several years of working as a cashier. And that&amp;#x27;s pretty sad. I grew up poor so I have a different perspective on this, but I see a lot of #zeroethWorldProblems whining going on in the valley while the world around them is falling apart. It&amp;#x27;s useful to have some perspective, and honestly, if these companies are to be fined and sanctioned, I&amp;#x27;d rather the money go to poor people, instead of lawyers and techies who need to increase the bid on their studio apartment.</text></item><item><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>The worst thing about this oligopoly&amp;#x2F;cartel is that during the period they were refusing to poach, they accrued billions cash reserves while spending only a little on R&amp;amp;D (which I assume is mostly engineering salaries).&lt;p&gt;Even after the class action lawsuit is settled, it&amp;#x27;s likely the penalty won&amp;#x27;t be anywhere near the amount of profit that was illegally captured.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, think about what these companies would have chosen to work on had engineers been more expensive. Would we have seen more useful products coming out of the valley if staff allocations had worked out differently?&lt;p&gt;When people are cheap, throwing them into doomed ventures like Google Buzz or Apple&amp;#x27;s awful Samba clone isn&amp;#x27;t nearly so devastating to whatever middle manager chain dreamed them up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>efuquen</author><text>Regardless of what the ultimate consequences would have been of any price fixing scheme, do you or don&amp;#x27;t you believe it is &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt;? You can argue all day about the hypotheticals of how much or how little this all actually affected wages, but if you believe in principle that some general free market mechanism should be the determining factor in private sector wages, then you should disagree with what happened. Even if in the end it&amp;#x27;s a fight between the merely wealthy (which, btw, I don&amp;#x27;t think every engineer at Google&amp;#x2F;Apple&amp;#x2F;etc are making those top wages, at least not based off median numbers I&amp;#x27;ve seen) with the super wealthy you still had an unfair practice that skewed what should have been market wages and put more money into the pockets of the super wealthy.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s acceptable to say that this scheme was bad and wrong and also to acknowledge that there are more significant and severe wealth and wage problems in this country for a large group of people outside engineering, law, medicine, etc. and those problems need to be addressed. I don&amp;#x27;t like the attitude of saying hey, the engineers are doing pretty good guys, it&amp;#x27;s ok if the even richer take money from them they should have rightfully earned. That won&amp;#x27;t solve any problems, least of all the more severe wage discrepancies or plight of the poor.</text></comment>

<story><title>Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-refused-no-poaching-agreement-with-google/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>Presumably the shortage of labor was still real, and if they needed to hire people, but couldn&amp;#x27;t poach, then they hired them from the rest of the talent pool. If that&amp;#x27;s the case, then removing the &amp;quot;cold calls&amp;quot; from the talent search might have had the effect of actually driving up salaries for those not working at these companies, since potentially reduced the supply.&lt;p&gt;If that&amp;#x27;s the case, then it would not have saved money, rather, it would have had the effect of simply shifting the money from going to existing Google&amp;#x2F;Apple&amp;#x2F;etc employees to applicants from smaller firms.&lt;p&gt;That is, it changed the distribution of spending, and probably in a more egalitarian way, distributing the spending over a larger pool, instead of simply fighting over, and raising the wages, of the small group of superstars at the big companies.&lt;p&gt;These companies are spending on R&amp;amp;D and increasing the percentage year over year, they are also spending huge sums of acqui-hires, and hiring faster than the local communities, or their own office space, can handle.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that excessive salaries are actually bad for allocation. Wall Street has infamously brained drained tons of the best and brightest to figure out how to gain small efficiencies in stock trading. What discoveries might have occurred had string theorists not left to go optimize portfolios?&lt;p&gt;One thing I wouldn&amp;#x27;t call engineers is cheap. You&amp;#x27;re talking about people making upwards of $150-200k in salary, and probably up to half-million when total compensation is considered. I paid more in taxes last year than my mother earned in several years of working as a cashier. And that&amp;#x27;s pretty sad. I grew up poor so I have a different perspective on this, but I see a lot of #zeroethWorldProblems whining going on in the valley while the world around them is falling apart. It&amp;#x27;s useful to have some perspective, and honestly, if these companies are to be fined and sanctioned, I&amp;#x27;d rather the money go to poor people, instead of lawyers and techies who need to increase the bid on their studio apartment.</text></item><item><author>CoolGuySteve</author><text>The worst thing about this oligopoly&amp;#x2F;cartel is that during the period they were refusing to poach, they accrued billions cash reserves while spending only a little on R&amp;amp;D (which I assume is mostly engineering salaries).&lt;p&gt;Even after the class action lawsuit is settled, it&amp;#x27;s likely the penalty won&amp;#x27;t be anywhere near the amount of profit that was illegally captured.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, think about what these companies would have chosen to work on had engineers been more expensive. Would we have seen more useful products coming out of the valley if staff allocations had worked out differently?&lt;p&gt;When people are cheap, throwing them into doomed ventures like Google Buzz or Apple&amp;#x27;s awful Samba clone isn&amp;#x27;t nearly so devastating to whatever middle manager chain dreamed them up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>Not sure that the effects you theorize are true, but they&amp;#x27;re definitely possible, in the dynamic ways these shifting strategies affect real employment&amp;#x2F;resource decisions... as opposed to the simplistic &amp;quot;salary fixing&amp;quot; [sic] spin from some of the coverage.&lt;p&gt;To an extent, existing employees with stock-based compensation, and also seeking &amp;quot;purpose&amp;#x2F;control&amp;#x2F;mastery&amp;quot; satisfaction at work, share their employers&amp;#x27;&amp;#x2F;stockholders&amp;#x27; interests in quelling rampant mercenary turnover and salary-over-all bidding wars.&lt;p&gt;Another second-order beneficiary of any attempted employment cartelization could have been the startup ecosystem. As a founder or very-early employee, you &amp;quot;eat what you kill&amp;quot; rather than any industry-average salary. And, the pool of willing founders could have been expanded by missing&amp;#x2F;lower recruiting from the giants.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon 2.0</title><url>https://stupidhackathon.github.io/?2.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nailer</author><text>A couple of years ago I made a Chrome Extension that removes everyone&amp;#x27;s eyes: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;90351144&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;90351144&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;🇬🇧 people: let&amp;#x27;s do a Stupid Hackathon in London. I can probably get the joinef.com offices but the FB folks have candy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kedean</author><text>Hah. Similarly, I made a Firefox extension back in the day that replaced people&amp;#x27;s faces in photos with this face: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net&amp;#x2F;borderlands&amp;#x2F;images&amp;#x2F;5&amp;#x2F;59&amp;#x2F;Shoop-Da-Whoop.png&amp;#x2F;revision&amp;#x2F;latest?cb=20100426201515&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net&amp;#x2F;borderlands&amp;#x2F;images&amp;#x2F;5&amp;#x2F;59&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My implementation was pretty hackathon-worthy, too, if I say so myself. The shoop face would be scaled and placed only while on Facebook, using FB&amp;#x27;s own facial recognition metadata on each page.</text></comment>

<story><title>The Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon 2.0</title><url>https://stupidhackathon.github.io/?2.0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nailer</author><text>A couple of years ago I made a Chrome Extension that removes everyone&amp;#x27;s eyes: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;90351144&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;vimeo.com&amp;#x2F;90351144&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;🇬🇧 people: let&amp;#x27;s do a Stupid Hackathon in London. I can probably get the joinef.com offices but the FB folks have candy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdiez17</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know if you&amp;#x27;re joking or not, but I&amp;#x27;d totally be up for a Stupid Ideas Hackathon in London.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround</title><url>https://www.howtogeek.com/774542/windows-11-officially-shuts-down-firefoxs-default-browser-workaround/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>InitialLastName</author><text>That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.</text></item><item><author>josephcsible</author><text>Unfortunately, there&amp;#x27;s one very big reason you&amp;#x27;ll need Windows 11: that Windows 10 won&amp;#x27;t get security updates forever. After October 14th, 2025, you&amp;#x27;ll need to &amp;quot;upgrade&amp;quot; to it to stay secure.</text></item><item><author>cronix</author><text>So far in the last year or so, I&amp;#x27;ve heard 0 reasons why I&amp;#x27;d even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn&amp;#x27;t even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ArnoVW</author><text>After 30 years on Windows I switched this month to Linux, for pretty much the same reason. It&amp;#x27;s great. And it feels so &lt;i&gt;fast&lt;/i&gt;. All my software exists natively on Linux (minecraft and game emulators for the kids, KNIME, Intellij, and Blender is a lot faster on Linux). No Word or PowerPoint, but there&amp;#x27;s Libre Office and it&amp;#x27;s good enough.&lt;p&gt;Who&amp;#x27;d have thought that 2021 would be the year of Linux on the desktop. Not because it has gradually improved (it has), but because the alternative has declined so much.</text></comment>

<story><title>Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround</title><url>https://www.howtogeek.com/774542/windows-11-officially-shuts-down-firefoxs-default-browser-workaround/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>InitialLastName</author><text>That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.</text></item><item><author>josephcsible</author><text>Unfortunately, there&amp;#x27;s one very big reason you&amp;#x27;ll need Windows 11: that Windows 10 won&amp;#x27;t get security updates forever. After October 14th, 2025, you&amp;#x27;ll need to &amp;quot;upgrade&amp;quot; to it to stay secure.</text></item><item><author>cronix</author><text>So far in the last year or so, I&amp;#x27;ve heard 0 reasons why I&amp;#x27;d even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn&amp;#x27;t even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>willis936</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not old and I have lived to see this sentiment come and go at least twice before. We&amp;#x27;re still on Windows.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Epstein&apos;s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epstein-calendar-cia-director-goldman-sachs-noam-chomsky-c9f6a3ff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ntrails</author><text>I legitimately cannot comprehend that anyone believes that the guy committed suicide.&lt;p&gt;The closest I can come is believing staff were paid off to &lt;i&gt;let&lt;/i&gt; him do so, but I can only imagine the sorts of heads that would have rolled on his open and honest testimony. Yeah.</text></item><item><author>belter</author><text>A little review of the incredible coincidences that led to Epstein&amp;#x27;s death by &lt;i&gt;suicide&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;- When Epstein was placed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), the jail informed the Justice Department that he would have a cellmate and that a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes. These procedures were not followed on the night he died.&lt;p&gt;- On August 9, Epstein&amp;#x27;s cellmate was transferred, and no replacement was brought in.&lt;p&gt;- The evening of his death, Epstein met with his lawyers, who described him as &amp;quot;upbeat&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;- CCTV footage shows that the two guards failed to perform the required institutional count at 10:00 p.m. and recorded Noel briefly walking by Epstein&amp;#x27;s cell at 10:30 p.m., the last time the guards entered the tier where his cell was located.&lt;p&gt;- Through the night, in violation of the jail&amp;#x27;s normal procedure, Epstein was not checked every 30 minutes.&lt;p&gt;- The two guards assigned to check his cell overnight, Noel and Michael Thomas, BOTH fell asleep at their desk for about three hours and later falsified related records.&lt;p&gt;- Two cameras in front of Epstein&amp;#x27;s cell also malfunctioned THAT night.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Death_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#:~:text=After%20prison%20guards%20performed%20CPR,was%20a%20suicide%20by%20hanging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Death_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#:~:te...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>belter</author><text>Epstein&amp;#x27;s was the first recorded suicide at MCC in 21 years...&lt;p&gt;[1] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Metropolitan_Correctional_Center,_New_York&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Metropolitan_Correctional_Cent...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Epstein&apos;s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epstein-calendar-cia-director-goldman-sachs-noam-chomsky-c9f6a3ff</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ntrails</author><text>I legitimately cannot comprehend that anyone believes that the guy committed suicide.&lt;p&gt;The closest I can come is believing staff were paid off to &lt;i&gt;let&lt;/i&gt; him do so, but I can only imagine the sorts of heads that would have rolled on his open and honest testimony. Yeah.</text></item><item><author>belter</author><text>A little review of the incredible coincidences that led to Epstein&amp;#x27;s death by &lt;i&gt;suicide&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;- When Epstein was placed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), the jail informed the Justice Department that he would have a cellmate and that a guard would look into the cell every 30 minutes. These procedures were not followed on the night he died.&lt;p&gt;- On August 9, Epstein&amp;#x27;s cellmate was transferred, and no replacement was brought in.&lt;p&gt;- The evening of his death, Epstein met with his lawyers, who described him as &amp;quot;upbeat&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;- CCTV footage shows that the two guards failed to perform the required institutional count at 10:00 p.m. and recorded Noel briefly walking by Epstein&amp;#x27;s cell at 10:30 p.m., the last time the guards entered the tier where his cell was located.&lt;p&gt;- Through the night, in violation of the jail&amp;#x27;s normal procedure, Epstein was not checked every 30 minutes.&lt;p&gt;- The two guards assigned to check his cell overnight, Noel and Michael Thomas, BOTH fell asleep at their desk for about three hours and later falsified related records.&lt;p&gt;- Two cameras in front of Epstein&amp;#x27;s cell also malfunctioned THAT night.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Death_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#:~:text=After%20prison%20guards%20performed%20CPR,was%20a%20suicide%20by%20hanging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Death_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#:~:te...&lt;/a&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>V__</author><text>Because incompetance is often more probable than malice. Without knowing baselines, like how often these procedures were broken in general, these don&amp;#x27;t mean much. What if this happened literally every day?</text></comment>

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<story><title>BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops</title><url>https://www.buskill.in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zionic</author><text>Wouldn&amp;#x27;t it make sense to remove the battery on your laptop entirely? With a modified magsafe-like power cord any attempt to grab the machine hard-kills the system and RAM begins degrading immediately. Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker long enough to prevent freezing the RAM with compressed air to try and dump RAM via an exploit kit.</text></item><item><author>yholio</author><text>Good to have if you run a dark net marketplace or a political disident ring from public libraries.&lt;p&gt;An additional refinement is to autolock the device if a certain personal key combo (ex. Shit - vol up - vol down) is not pressed every few minutes in response to an audible click. If not unlocked in a minute or so with a complex password, the device halts to a disk encrypted state and unpowered ram, minimizing the window attackers have to recover RAM state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmorici</author><text>Devices to transfer from wall power to battery backup for transport have existed for a long time.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiebetech.com&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;hotplug-field-kit&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiebetech.com&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;hotplug-field-kit&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops</title><url>https://www.buskill.in/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zionic</author><text>Wouldn&amp;#x27;t it make sense to remove the battery on your laptop entirely? With a modified magsafe-like power cord any attempt to grab the machine hard-kills the system and RAM begins degrading immediately. Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker long enough to prevent freezing the RAM with compressed air to try and dump RAM via an exploit kit.</text></item><item><author>yholio</author><text>Good to have if you run a dark net marketplace or a political disident ring from public libraries.&lt;p&gt;An additional refinement is to autolock the device if a certain personal key combo (ex. Shit - vol up - vol down) is not pressed every few minutes in response to an audible click. If not unlocked in a minute or so with a complex password, the device halts to a disk encrypted state and unpowered ram, minimizing the window attackers have to recover RAM state.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gruez</author><text>&amp;gt;Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker...&lt;p&gt;Might as well go all in and epoxy the ram sticks&amp;#x2F;dimm slot assembly.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Amazon backs marijuana legalization, drops weed testing for some jobs</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-backs-marijuana-legalization-drops-weed-testing-some-jobs-2021-06-02/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>apexalpha</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The e-commerce company&amp;#x27;s public policy team will be actively supporting The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act), which seeks to legalize marijuana at the federal level, its consumer boss Dave Clark said in a blog post.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s so weird that these companies just publicly have full, dedicated teams to support or kill whatevers laws they feel like. Is Amazon even vaguely related to Weed?</text></comment>

<story><title>Amazon backs marijuana legalization, drops weed testing for some jobs</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-backs-marijuana-legalization-drops-weed-testing-some-jobs-2021-06-02/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Ekaros</author><text>Weed should be only first step. We should next move to legalizing and taxing all recreational drugs. I don&amp;#x27;t see why we should treat them any different from ethanol.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Fear of Apple</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/3/24/fear-of-apple</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Spooky23</author><text>Your experience is the price of admission to gain access to a global audience. The low barrier to entry is why you&amp;#x27;re fighting for pennies.&lt;p&gt;Twenty years ago when I was in high school, I worked at CompUSA. They sold a lot of software in their day... in my region of the country, 40% of software sold passed through our store&amp;#x27;s door. To sell software at CompUSA or similar retailers, you needed to interface with a publisher, who would then try to sell your software to a buyer at the store. Then you&amp;#x27;d need to print collateral, get an attractive box, duplicate physical media in quantities sufficient to stock 500 stores. At your expense.&lt;p&gt;And for all that, you&amp;#x27;d be a box on a bottom shelf somewhere.&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to actually sell software, you&amp;#x27;d need to pay for premium placement on an endcap or display. I recall one vendor who paid over $2M for premium endcaps at each store for a handwriting recognition app.&lt;p&gt;When customers were dissatisfied, or returned your software that wasn&amp;#x27;t supposed to be returnable, the store would withhold payment for your software (which was running 60-90 days late in most cases) and mail you back the resealed box at your expense, which may have contained a rock instead of your software.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to 2015, and you&amp;#x27;re paying $99 to sell software for $15 that nets you $10, which is paid promptly every month. Apple treats you like cattle, because you are in effect a cow to them... there are thousands of people like you!</text></item><item><author>firloop</author><text>This article summarizes the epitome of my experience as an Apple developer. I&amp;#x27;m 17 years old and a developer on the app store. The App Store feels opaque and like a black box where I submit builds with little to no feedback or control. I get paid when Apple decides, and could be eradicated from the App Store at a moment&amp;#x27;s notice.&lt;p&gt;I realized early on that being featured by Apple was unlikely, and have adopted a sustainable pricing model (a term I was unfamiliar with before reading this piece) to fund my development. I&amp;#x27;m certain that by charging $14.99, I stay out of the bottom 47% of developers that make less than $100 a month from the app store. I do not rely on the app store for anything. From visibility to app discovery, I feel that Apple has failed me. When I get support emails, I cannot even refund a single paying user, which means I have to send $14.99 back to the user using PayPal and eat Apple&amp;#x27;s $4.50 fee for that transaction. It&amp;#x27;s immensely frustrating and a main reason why I allow users to sign up concurrently on my website using a card (Stripe).&lt;p&gt;Every part of developing for Apple leads me to this conclusion: I do not matter. My app does not matter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kalleboo</author><text>&amp;gt; Twenty years ago when I was in high school, I worked at CompUSA&lt;p&gt;So, selling software was a PITA full of inefficiencies and middlemen. Everyone hated it.&lt;p&gt;Now, 20 years later, we live on the open web, a level playing field where anyone can experiment to their heart&amp;#x27;s content and sell what they want, how they want it.&lt;p&gt;And you wonder why people complain about Apple adding restrictions? And your answer is &amp;quot;tough luck, we have the possibility to do things better, but things were even worse 20 years ago so just suck it up&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Your experience is the price of admission to gain access to a global audience&lt;p&gt;This Hacker News comment has access to a global audience. There are fart noise videos on YouTube with access to a global audience. That means nothing anymore.&lt;p&gt;Apple also do a piss-poor job of giving that access. It&amp;#x27;s already easier to find our app via Google than searching for the literal exact app name on the App Store. Whenever you release an update theres a 1-12 hour window where people will get random error messages since there&amp;#x27;s massive CDN sync lag.</text></comment>

<story><title>Fear of Apple</title><url>http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/3/24/fear-of-apple</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Spooky23</author><text>Your experience is the price of admission to gain access to a global audience. The low barrier to entry is why you&amp;#x27;re fighting for pennies.&lt;p&gt;Twenty years ago when I was in high school, I worked at CompUSA. They sold a lot of software in their day... in my region of the country, 40% of software sold passed through our store&amp;#x27;s door. To sell software at CompUSA or similar retailers, you needed to interface with a publisher, who would then try to sell your software to a buyer at the store. Then you&amp;#x27;d need to print collateral, get an attractive box, duplicate physical media in quantities sufficient to stock 500 stores. At your expense.&lt;p&gt;And for all that, you&amp;#x27;d be a box on a bottom shelf somewhere.&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to actually sell software, you&amp;#x27;d need to pay for premium placement on an endcap or display. I recall one vendor who paid over $2M for premium endcaps at each store for a handwriting recognition app.&lt;p&gt;When customers were dissatisfied, or returned your software that wasn&amp;#x27;t supposed to be returnable, the store would withhold payment for your software (which was running 60-90 days late in most cases) and mail you back the resealed box at your expense, which may have contained a rock instead of your software.&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to 2015, and you&amp;#x27;re paying $99 to sell software for $15 that nets you $10, which is paid promptly every month. Apple treats you like cattle, because you are in effect a cow to them... there are thousands of people like you!</text></item><item><author>firloop</author><text>This article summarizes the epitome of my experience as an Apple developer. I&amp;#x27;m 17 years old and a developer on the app store. The App Store feels opaque and like a black box where I submit builds with little to no feedback or control. I get paid when Apple decides, and could be eradicated from the App Store at a moment&amp;#x27;s notice.&lt;p&gt;I realized early on that being featured by Apple was unlikely, and have adopted a sustainable pricing model (a term I was unfamiliar with before reading this piece) to fund my development. I&amp;#x27;m certain that by charging $14.99, I stay out of the bottom 47% of developers that make less than $100 a month from the app store. I do not rely on the app store for anything. From visibility to app discovery, I feel that Apple has failed me. When I get support emails, I cannot even refund a single paying user, which means I have to send $14.99 back to the user using PayPal and eat Apple&amp;#x27;s $4.50 fee for that transaction. It&amp;#x27;s immensely frustrating and a main reason why I allow users to sign up concurrently on my website using a card (Stripe).&lt;p&gt;Every part of developing for Apple leads me to this conclusion: I do not matter. My app does not matter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cbd1984</author><text>&amp;gt; Your experience is the price of admission to gain access to a global audience.&lt;p&gt;Nothing they said was inherent to the process of getting a global audience. Apple has created all of their problems they mentioned; we know this because Apple could make them all go away.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Malaysia B772 has crashed near Donetsk</title><url>http://avherald.com/h?article=47770f9d&amp;opt=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sivers</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m scheduled to be on that exact same flight in 10 days, so I&amp;#x27;m not thinking very clearly about this right now.&lt;p&gt;Can a cool disconnected mind give me a rational perspective on this?&lt;p&gt;Does logic dictate I have nothing to worry about? (&amp;quot;Lightning doesn&amp;#x27;t strike twice in the same place&amp;quot; argument.)&lt;p&gt;Or does logic say I would be smarter to lose some $$, and book a different airline and route? (&amp;quot;Lighting does strike twice in the same place&amp;quot; argument.)&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>austenallred</author><text>Chances are they won&amp;#x27;t fly in the same location. Lufthansa has already rerouted flights scheduled to go over around the eastern Ukrainian airspace, I can&amp;#x27;t imagine Malaysian not following suit. It&amp;#x27;s not like they have the best track record at the moment.&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: The FAA just prohibited flying over that airspace. So I would be blown away if your plane continued flying there.&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Air France now, too.&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: Even three Russian airlines are re-routing, which will be difficult for some flights heading west from Moscow. No word from Malaysian... they&amp;#x27;ve probably got bigger fish to fry at the moment.&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: British Airways and Air Canada, too.</text></comment>

<story><title>Malaysia B772 has crashed near Donetsk</title><url>http://avherald.com/h?article=47770f9d&amp;opt=0</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sivers</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m scheduled to be on that exact same flight in 10 days, so I&amp;#x27;m not thinking very clearly about this right now.&lt;p&gt;Can a cool disconnected mind give me a rational perspective on this?&lt;p&gt;Does logic dictate I have nothing to worry about? (&amp;quot;Lightning doesn&amp;#x27;t strike twice in the same place&amp;quot; argument.)&lt;p&gt;Or does logic say I would be smarter to lose some $$, and book a different airline and route? (&amp;quot;Lighting does strike twice in the same place&amp;quot; argument.)&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>k-mcgrady</author><text>Anytime there is a incident with a plane the reaction always seems to be intense (bordering on over-reaction) so I seriously doubt any planes will be flying within 100 miles of Ukrainian airspace from this moment forward. I would probably fly if I were you but if you are really worried and can afford not to fly the peace of mind might be worth the loss of $$.&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;Some airlines are already reacting:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A statement from Virgin Airlines says it &amp;quot;will be re-routing a small number of our flights this evening&amp;quot;.&amp;quot;</text></comment>

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<story><title>DuckDuckGo is growing fast</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/privacy-focused-search-engine-duckduckgo-is-growing-fast/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sunaurus</author><text>I love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that I&amp;#x27;m redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn&amp;#x27;t find good results for programming related queries.&lt;p&gt;I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don&amp;#x27;t get useful search results.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cmehdy</author><text>I have the opposite: I&amp;#x27;m in Canada and from France, but if I search for anything in French on ANY google (.com&amp;#x2F;.ca&amp;#x2F;.fr) I get Quebec stuff, whereas if I put the &amp;quot;France&amp;quot; filter on DDG I do get actual results for France. It has become one of the most convenient things for me when trying to find some news in each country (similarly, selecting &amp;quot;Canada&amp;quot; when searching in English or French for Canada or Quebec).</text></comment>

<story><title>DuckDuckGo is growing fast</title><url>https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/privacy-focused-search-engine-duckduckgo-is-growing-fast/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sunaurus</author><text>I love the idea of DDG, but after using it for about a year, I realized that I&amp;#x27;m redoing most of my searches with !g. DDG seems to be quite bad at searches that are in my native language and somehow also often doesn&amp;#x27;t find good results for programming related queries.&lt;p&gt;I ended up switching back to Google. It was painful from a privacy standpoint, but what good is privacy if I don&amp;#x27;t get useful search results.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OscarCunningham</author><text>Was this recent? I had the same experience but recently tried again and found that DDG was now about as good as Google. When I do try !g because DDG failed to find something then usually Google doesn&amp;#x27;t find it either.&lt;p&gt;Sadly I think that the way that DDG caught up was that Google got &lt;i&gt;worse&lt;/i&gt; because of SEO spam, while only DDG got a little better.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: SinglePage – Quickly and anonymously publish a page to the web</title><url>https://singlepage.cc/</url><text>Creating a basic webpage has become way too complicated and expensive. Often there are those times when you just want to share your thoughts with the world but don&amp;#x27;t want the overhead and complexities that come with maintaining a website. Sometimes, you have an interesting thought piece, an education article, or just a quick and simple bio page that doesn&amp;#x27;t need the heavy hand of a WordPress blog or Medium post. That&amp;#x27;s where Single Page comes in. Publish a single page instantly to the web with no fuss.&lt;p&gt;I was laid off three weeks ago from Twitter and I decided to work through a couple of my projects and this was one of them. I&amp;#x27;ve tried blogs over the years, Medium didn&amp;#x27;t feel right but yet I wanted to quickly post pages online and couldn&amp;#x27;t find an easy way to do it. So I created it.&lt;p&gt;Feedback appreciated!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>shp0ngle</author><text>One cautionary tale for you.&lt;p&gt;Justpaste.it is a page that offers exactly what you do - free, anonymous sharing of formatted pages, with images and all. Accessible at Tor, very lightweight.&lt;p&gt;Because it was so easy and anonymous, it started being used mostly by Islamic State to share their propaganda; so much that they needed to remove the &amp;quot;most popular&amp;quot; feature (as it was always either beheadings or other propaganda).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;JustPaste.it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;JustPaste.it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: ah, you have credit card info down. So it&amp;#x27;s not really as anonymous as justpaste.it, as the ISIS guys won&amp;#x27;t share their credit card. OK that can work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VikingCoder</author><text>Technology advocate: Wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be cool if there was a way to -&lt;p&gt;The real world: PORN! BEHEADINGS! BOTNETS! STATE SECRETS! DOXXING! IDENTITY THEFT! FASCISM!&lt;p&gt;Technology advocate: &amp;#x2F;sobs&amp;#x2F;</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: SinglePage – Quickly and anonymously publish a page to the web</title><url>https://singlepage.cc/</url><text>Creating a basic webpage has become way too complicated and expensive. Often there are those times when you just want to share your thoughts with the world but don&amp;#x27;t want the overhead and complexities that come with maintaining a website. Sometimes, you have an interesting thought piece, an education article, or just a quick and simple bio page that doesn&amp;#x27;t need the heavy hand of a WordPress blog or Medium post. That&amp;#x27;s where Single Page comes in. Publish a single page instantly to the web with no fuss.&lt;p&gt;I was laid off three weeks ago from Twitter and I decided to work through a couple of my projects and this was one of them. I&amp;#x27;ve tried blogs over the years, Medium didn&amp;#x27;t feel right but yet I wanted to quickly post pages online and couldn&amp;#x27;t find an easy way to do it. So I created it.&lt;p&gt;Feedback appreciated!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>shp0ngle</author><text>One cautionary tale for you.&lt;p&gt;Justpaste.it is a page that offers exactly what you do - free, anonymous sharing of formatted pages, with images and all. Accessible at Tor, very lightweight.&lt;p&gt;Because it was so easy and anonymous, it started being used mostly by Islamic State to share their propaganda; so much that they needed to remove the &amp;quot;most popular&amp;quot; feature (as it was always either beheadings or other propaganda).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;JustPaste.it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;JustPaste.it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit: ah, you have credit card info down. So it&amp;#x27;s not really as anonymous as justpaste.it, as the ISIS guys won&amp;#x27;t share their credit card. OK that can work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>psychphysic</author><text>That is one hell of a cautionary tale. Better than modern VICE.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Suspected head of $21B crime syndicate may be world’s most innovative drug lord</title><url>https://torontolife.com/city/this-man-is-the-jeff-bezos-of-the-international-drug-trade/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>version_five</author><text>I think drugs should be legal (or decriminalized) but probably with at least two categories, which no doubt causes it&amp;#x27;s own set of problems:&lt;p&gt;1. Recreational, like marijuana and alcohol and many hallucinogens, where regulating and taxing is the best solution, to deter organized crime and make sure people are getting the product they want to get&lt;p&gt;2. Harmful (and the definition is tough here) like meth and heroin, where the goal is something closer to medically supervised use, and breaking the habit where appropriate, but also making sure people are getting real drugs and not resorting to more dangerous alternatives or those of unknown origin.&lt;p&gt;The point isn&amp;#x27;t that drugs are good, it&amp;#x27;s that people will do them anyway, so how do you remove the criminal element and keep people safer under the circumstances. I agree that they shouldn&amp;#x27;t sell meth at convenience stores, but someone addicted should be able to talk to a doctor and get it, and not have to buy some dangerous unknown thing off the street.&lt;p&gt;I imagine if this happened, the next fight would be social control advocate groups pushing for currently legal drugs (alcohol) to me moved to my category 2. People&amp;#x27;s own puritan values and a hatred of the idea that someone else may be enjoying themselves in a way they don&amp;#x27;t endorse are a (the) main root cause of all the societal problems with drugs imo</text></item><item><author>cgh</author><text>Very difficult to legalize and tax meth, which is what this guy mostly sold. It’s hugely addictive and harmful, and you can make it in a home lab.&lt;p&gt;I was shocked to read in the article that one in seven Australians have tried it. Is that true? That’s a real crisis if so.</text></item><item><author>yaseer</author><text>When I see a number like $21 billion, I can&amp;#x27;t help but think of all the economic and social good from drugs being regulated, like Cannabis, Tobacco and Prostitution.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a lot of taxation money lost, a lot of policing wasted, and a lot of lives lost needlessly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dillondoyle</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s very easy to make an argument alcohol is more dangerous than heroin. &lt;i&gt;especially&lt;/i&gt; in a regulated market with clean well dosed drugs.&lt;p&gt;Alcohol already kills more people than heroin. Sure you could argue maybe perhaps more people will do heroin if it&amp;#x27;s legal, but I highly doubt that.&lt;p&gt;I 100% agree on the puritan social preaching being a hinderance to support. People don&amp;#x27;t want to &amp;quot;support someones addiction&amp;quot; which means basically no resources.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m for full legalization personally.</text></comment>

<story><title>Suspected head of $21B crime syndicate may be world’s most innovative drug lord</title><url>https://torontolife.com/city/this-man-is-the-jeff-bezos-of-the-international-drug-trade/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>version_five</author><text>I think drugs should be legal (or decriminalized) but probably with at least two categories, which no doubt causes it&amp;#x27;s own set of problems:&lt;p&gt;1. Recreational, like marijuana and alcohol and many hallucinogens, where regulating and taxing is the best solution, to deter organized crime and make sure people are getting the product they want to get&lt;p&gt;2. Harmful (and the definition is tough here) like meth and heroin, where the goal is something closer to medically supervised use, and breaking the habit where appropriate, but also making sure people are getting real drugs and not resorting to more dangerous alternatives or those of unknown origin.&lt;p&gt;The point isn&amp;#x27;t that drugs are good, it&amp;#x27;s that people will do them anyway, so how do you remove the criminal element and keep people safer under the circumstances. I agree that they shouldn&amp;#x27;t sell meth at convenience stores, but someone addicted should be able to talk to a doctor and get it, and not have to buy some dangerous unknown thing off the street.&lt;p&gt;I imagine if this happened, the next fight would be social control advocate groups pushing for currently legal drugs (alcohol) to me moved to my category 2. People&amp;#x27;s own puritan values and a hatred of the idea that someone else may be enjoying themselves in a way they don&amp;#x27;t endorse are a (the) main root cause of all the societal problems with drugs imo</text></item><item><author>cgh</author><text>Very difficult to legalize and tax meth, which is what this guy mostly sold. It’s hugely addictive and harmful, and you can make it in a home lab.&lt;p&gt;I was shocked to read in the article that one in seven Australians have tried it. Is that true? That’s a real crisis if so.</text></item><item><author>yaseer</author><text>When I see a number like $21 billion, I can&amp;#x27;t help but think of all the economic and social good from drugs being regulated, like Cannabis, Tobacco and Prostitution.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a lot of taxation money lost, a lot of policing wasted, and a lot of lives lost needlessly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cgh</author><text>Yeah, I agree on all points (I’m a proponent of legalization and live in a country with legal pot). I’ve witnessed first-hand the effects of prolonged meth addiction and it is not pretty. Your point of making it available by prescription is the good and obvious path. But will still be available as a party drug via illegal means of production and distribution.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font</title><url>http://makkuk.com/kawkab-mono/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aiaf</author><text>The font&amp;#x27;s designer here- glad you guys like it!&lt;p&gt;I wasn&amp;#x27;t ready to put this up on HN because I didn&amp;#x27;t have an English page yet, but @specifictso has gone ahead and posted it.&lt;p&gt;The font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License as mentioned.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s less than 10 Arabic monospaced typefaces out there and Kawkab Mono comes to fill a gap in this area. Might not be as highly demanded as Latin monospaced fonts, but still, it&amp;#x27;s great to have variety.&lt;p&gt;This is very much beta software as I haven&amp;#x27;t really tested the font outside of my personal setup. I&amp;#x27;ve had no type design experience prior to this project. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.</text></comment>

<story><title>Kawkab Monospaced Arabic Font</title><url>http://makkuk.com/kawkab-mono/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>omarish</author><text>Beautiful! So much more readable than the other Arabic fonts I&amp;#x27;ve seen in the past.&lt;p&gt;This is a little far fetched, but I think is a huge win for society. Better Arabic fonts = easier Arabic-only speakers to do work online = more opportunity for a huge portion of the world.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/09/the-u-s-housing-market-vs-the-canadian-housing-market/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joenot443</author><text>This is probably the most pressing topic in Canadian politics at the moment. Cost of housing, both to buy and to rent, has scaled greatly out of pace with Canadian salaries. Our PM and his cabinet recently went on a retreat with the intention of creating an action plan on how to get us pointed in the right direction. They came back empty handed. [1]&lt;p&gt;Truthfully I don&amp;#x27;t think this is an issue the federal government is in a position to solve any time soon. The long and short is that our population has grown faster than our supply of housing, COVID being an unfortunately timed disruption which further strained that supply. Nothing was built for almost a year, but the population continued to grow.&lt;p&gt;If I had a singular policy suggestion, after having talked to some friends in the industry, it would be to pump federal money into expediting site plan approvals and environmental assessments done at a county or municipal level. Some of these offices have tiny rosters who end up being the bottlenecks for enormous projects which otherwise would be breaking ground. Environmental assessments are notoriously time-consuming and particular in Canada, something we&amp;#x27;re largely very proud of. That said, I believe if there were ever a time for Canadians to be okay with cutting corners if it meant getting more of us into homes, I think it would be now. From my understanding, there are many housing projects in Ontario for which construction could begin next week, if not for the Sisyphean approval processes.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of a site plan approval process for a town in Ontario[2] - just imagine all the points in which that chain of communication can get gummed up and projects can sit idle. We&amp;#x27;re used to steps like this taking a couple weeks in tech, but in the land development industry things move s l o w.&lt;p&gt;Canadians often take pride in our ability to do things the way they&amp;#x27;re meant to be done and to follow the rules as presented, even when they might not make sense in the moment. I think occasionally our love of process can be our downfall.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.ph&amp;#x2F;CZE3y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.ph&amp;#x2F;CZE3y&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.middlesexcentre.on.ca&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;2021-07&amp;#x2F;Middlesex%20Centre%20Planning%20Guides%20-%20Site%20Plan%20Approval.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.middlesexcentre.on.ca&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;2021-0...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treespace8</author><text>At many levels Canada seems to be choking on it&amp;#x27;s own bureaucracy. We have a complete lack of intra provincial trade, including many intra provincial barriers for experts. Does Saskatchewan with a population of 1 million need its own licensing board for Psychologists? Why Can&amp;#x27;t I buy an Ontario wine in Alberta?</text></comment>

<story><title>The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market</title><url>https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/09/the-u-s-housing-market-vs-the-canadian-housing-market/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joenot443</author><text>This is probably the most pressing topic in Canadian politics at the moment. Cost of housing, both to buy and to rent, has scaled greatly out of pace with Canadian salaries. Our PM and his cabinet recently went on a retreat with the intention of creating an action plan on how to get us pointed in the right direction. They came back empty handed. [1]&lt;p&gt;Truthfully I don&amp;#x27;t think this is an issue the federal government is in a position to solve any time soon. The long and short is that our population has grown faster than our supply of housing, COVID being an unfortunately timed disruption which further strained that supply. Nothing was built for almost a year, but the population continued to grow.&lt;p&gt;If I had a singular policy suggestion, after having talked to some friends in the industry, it would be to pump federal money into expediting site plan approvals and environmental assessments done at a county or municipal level. Some of these offices have tiny rosters who end up being the bottlenecks for enormous projects which otherwise would be breaking ground. Environmental assessments are notoriously time-consuming and particular in Canada, something we&amp;#x27;re largely very proud of. That said, I believe if there were ever a time for Canadians to be okay with cutting corners if it meant getting more of us into homes, I think it would be now. From my understanding, there are many housing projects in Ontario for which construction could begin next week, if not for the Sisyphean approval processes.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s an example of a site plan approval process for a town in Ontario[2] - just imagine all the points in which that chain of communication can get gummed up and projects can sit idle. We&amp;#x27;re used to steps like this taking a couple weeks in tech, but in the land development industry things move s l o w.&lt;p&gt;Canadians often take pride in our ability to do things the way they&amp;#x27;re meant to be done and to follow the rules as presented, even when they might not make sense in the moment. I think occasionally our love of process can be our downfall.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.ph&amp;#x2F;CZE3y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.ph&amp;#x2F;CZE3y&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.middlesexcentre.on.ca&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;2021-07&amp;#x2F;Middlesex%20Centre%20Planning%20Guides%20-%20Site%20Plan%20Approval.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.middlesexcentre.on.ca&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;2021-0...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>VHRanger</author><text>I really don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s that hard to work it at the federal level.&lt;p&gt;The issue is at the municipal level (mainly), and the provincial level (less so).&lt;p&gt;Look at what California has been doing in the last 2 years. You force constraints on zoning regulations down on the lower level entities. You force permitting time limits and acceptance rates. You force a minimum level of multifamily lots per population.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really really really not as hard as it&amp;#x27;s presented. It&amp;#x27;s just in political gridlock.</text></comment>

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<story><title>UDP and me</title><url>http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=6</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>The original plan for IP was that if you created a new datagram-level protocol, you&amp;#x27;d get a new IP protocol number for it. There were a lot of those in the early days.[1] Some were just encapsulation of other protocols - Xerox Parc Universal Protocol (IP protocol #12), Ethernet over IP (#97). Others were for network routing and administration - Exterior Gateway Protocol (#8) and Dynamic Source Routing Protocol (#48). Those were all standardized numbers, and IANA still maintains that list, although most of those protocols are long dead.&lt;p&gt;UDP was a general encapsulation for doing the same thing one level higher. Instead of IP level protocol numbers, the whole thing was repeated one level higher, and there are standard UDP port numbers.[2] At the network level, there&amp;#x27;s no big gain here, and it adds another header and some overhead. But BSD and the socket interface made a big distinction between software based on existing protocols and ones using the &amp;quot;raw socket&amp;quot; interface. That pushed new work to UDP and away from the IP protocol level.&lt;p&gt;If you want to have fun with your network, crank up something that speaks ISO-TP4 (protocol #29) such as Windows 2000 and see how far the packets get. Or look at your corporate network&amp;#x27;s packet traffic and see if there&amp;#x27;s any activity on the old protocol numbers.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.iana.org&amp;#x2F;assignments&amp;#x2F;protocol-numbers&amp;#x2F;protocol-numbers.xhtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.iana.org&amp;#x2F;assignments&amp;#x2F;protocol-numbers&amp;#x2F;protocol-nu...&lt;/a&gt; [2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.iana.org&amp;#x2F;assignments&amp;#x2F;service-names-port-numbers&amp;#x2F;service-names-port-numbers.xhtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.iana.org&amp;#x2F;assignments&amp;#x2F;service-names-port-numbers&amp;#x2F;s...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>UDP and me</title><url>http://www.reed.com/blog-dpr/?page_id=6</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text>&lt;i&gt;While I’m honored whenever anybody appreciates important design choices where I’ve been involved, this is not quite right, and it’s a little embarrassing to be the inventor of something so simple.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Actually, UDP was “un-designed” by me and others. By this I mean that UDP was the final expression of a process that today we would call “factoring” an overly complex design.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actually he should not be embarrassed. Engineering at the core is taking something complex and making it simple, as simple as can be but not too simple. It takes tons of effort to simplify. That is why most engineers&amp;#x2F;developers think that complexity shows their knowledge, it is actually the direct reverse of that. But where you try to simplify you will feel currents pulling you the other way and you&amp;#x27;ll have to swim upstream for a bit.&lt;p&gt;Thank you for inventing UDP and by inventing I mean simplifying something unnecessarily complex into something usable. It has been the key to many game technologies and has made possible and been a base platform for some wonderfully complex things, simply by being simple. Complexity only through simple parts.&lt;p&gt;“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” ― Ernst F. Schumacher&lt;p&gt;“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius</text></comment>

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<story><title>China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airlines-china/china-orders-its-airlines-to-suspend-use-of-boeing-737-max-aircraft-media-idUSKBN1QS01Z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cameldrv</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s politically motivated, but IMO so is the FAA&amp;#x27;s certification and nonaction so far. Boeing promised a software fix by January, and the FAA&amp;#x27;s decision not to ground the fleet was probably informally based on that promise. Unfortunately the software fix is proving more difficult than anticipated. Regulated, safety-critical software, whose failure leads to a smoking crater full of bodies can be like that. Especially in this case where it&amp;#x27;s not going to be just a bugfix, but probably a major redesign of the concept of the MCAS.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately though there are over 5000 orders for the 737MAX. The list price is $121 million. That makes the total value of the order book $600 Billion at list prices. That&amp;#x27;s roughly the market cap of Google or Apple, and the 737MAX is extremely important to the U.S. balance of trade. There is obviously going to be a political component to any big regulatory action on it.&lt;p&gt;The FAA needs to make a major course correction here, because what&amp;#x27;s even more important long-term than a single, very popular airplane to the U.S. economy is FAA&amp;#x27;s credibility as a regulator. In most countries, FAA certification means rubber-stamp certification from the local authority. As long as it is, it&amp;#x27;s a huge advantage to the U.S. aviation industry, because the FAA can write regs that are favorable to U.S. interests. This is only true though as long as the FAA is seen to have integrity.&lt;p&gt;In this case, when it comes to that, by my reading (and I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer or an expert), the MCAS is in violation of FAR part 25.672, and the 737MAX is not airworthy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whbk</author><text>Wow, I didn&amp;#x27;t realize the software fix hadn&amp;#x27;t been rolled out prior to yesterday&amp;#x27;s crash. Yikes. Also count me among those who went through the rest of this year&amp;#x27;s (already booked) flights this morning to ensure I&amp;#x27;m not on one of these things.</text></comment>

<story><title>China orders its airlines to suspend use of Boeing 737 Max aircraft</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airlines-china/china-orders-its-airlines-to-suspend-use-of-boeing-737-max-aircraft-media-idUSKBN1QS01Z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cameldrv</author><text>Maybe it&amp;#x27;s politically motivated, but IMO so is the FAA&amp;#x27;s certification and nonaction so far. Boeing promised a software fix by January, and the FAA&amp;#x27;s decision not to ground the fleet was probably informally based on that promise. Unfortunately the software fix is proving more difficult than anticipated. Regulated, safety-critical software, whose failure leads to a smoking crater full of bodies can be like that. Especially in this case where it&amp;#x27;s not going to be just a bugfix, but probably a major redesign of the concept of the MCAS.&lt;p&gt;Ultimately though there are over 5000 orders for the 737MAX. The list price is $121 million. That makes the total value of the order book $600 Billion at list prices. That&amp;#x27;s roughly the market cap of Google or Apple, and the 737MAX is extremely important to the U.S. balance of trade. There is obviously going to be a political component to any big regulatory action on it.&lt;p&gt;The FAA needs to make a major course correction here, because what&amp;#x27;s even more important long-term than a single, very popular airplane to the U.S. economy is FAA&amp;#x27;s credibility as a regulator. In most countries, FAA certification means rubber-stamp certification from the local authority. As long as it is, it&amp;#x27;s a huge advantage to the U.S. aviation industry, because the FAA can write regs that are favorable to U.S. interests. This is only true though as long as the FAA is seen to have integrity.&lt;p&gt;In this case, when it comes to that, by my reading (and I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer or an expert), the MCAS is in violation of FAR part 25.672, and the 737MAX is not airworthy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taurath</author><text>Sadly I think it still comes down to lack of real competition - that’s why this is gonna be such a big deal, air travel safety in general is in the balance. Everyone that flys regularly should hope this is a coincidence because the supply chain isn’t there to fill in for grounded 737s - there won’t be enough planes in general.&lt;p&gt;Like the adage about owing a billion to the bank being their problem, a crash is an airlines problem, but 3 crashes of the same plane for the same reason is the air industries problem.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/03/open-source-devs-racing-build-better-versions-slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ex3ndr</author><text>We are actually trying to make open protocol in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&lt;/a&gt; with federation with &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.</text></item><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. &lt;i&gt;None&lt;/i&gt; of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up.&lt;p&gt;Gee, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your &amp;quot;integrations&amp;quot;, your &amp;quot;plugins&amp;quot;, your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts?&lt;p&gt;Some sort of &lt;i&gt;open&lt;/i&gt; protocol.&lt;p&gt;Urgh, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand why IRC isn&amp;#x27;t the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it&amp;#x27;s just people talking past each other.&lt;p&gt;Every new attempt at making &amp;quot;the slack killer&amp;quot; makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc.&lt;p&gt;PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e12e</author><text>Thank you for mentioning actor - I must have missed it the last time various open (federated) solutions were discussed.&lt;p&gt;It looks like an interesting platform, but I was a bit surprised by what I found at:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;encryption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;encryption&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;MTProto v2 Rev3 enables encryption support to replace or enchanse TLS one.&amp;quot; So far so good - here&amp;#x27;s someone that&amp;#x27;s built on top of NaCl and built a legacy-free encryption system on top of well tested, known primitives, I thought.&lt;p&gt;But: &amp;quot;Actor encrypts message with US encryption and then again encrypt with Russian encryption that in result guarantee absolute encryption streight&amp;quot; (sic).&lt;p&gt;Uh. This sounds like applying a &amp;quot;political&amp;quot; reasoning to layering security: AES might be backdoored by NSA, GOST(?) might be backdoored by the FSB -- but using both, only double-agents will be able to foil our encryption!&lt;p&gt;While the truth is probably that you&amp;#x27;re know vulnerable to buffer overflows or other more mundane software errors in the now double-sized encryption code -- and get none of the (potential) benefits of a clean, modern architecture on top of just NaCl?&lt;p&gt;In addition, it appears you &lt;i&gt;also use&lt;/i&gt; curve25591, possibly an implementation derived from NaCl:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;securing-server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;developer.actor.im&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;securing-server&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For secure communications Actor Server have to be configured with Curve25519 keys. To generate them, use actor-cli util:&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s three codebases worth of bugs, rather than one. Any plan to simplify this part?</text></comment>

<story><title>Open Sourcers Race to Build Better Versions of Slack</title><url>http://www.wired.com/2016/03/open-source-devs-racing-build-better-versions-slack/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ex3ndr</author><text>We are actually trying to make open protocol in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;actor.im&lt;/a&gt; with federation with &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;matrix.org&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that only Actor and Matrix understand importance of federation.</text></item><item><author>scrollaway</author><text>A hundred different chat systems mentioned here. &lt;i&gt;None&lt;/i&gt; of them compatible with one another. Well, I guess a couple of them have IRC gateways, but you have to actually set those up.&lt;p&gt;Gee, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be nice if you could pick and choose your UI? Pick and choose your &amp;quot;integrations&amp;quot;, your &amp;quot;plugins&amp;quot;, your client, etc without having to lose your entire userbase, history, contacts?&lt;p&gt;Some sort of &lt;i&gt;open&lt;/i&gt; protocol.&lt;p&gt;Urgh, I&amp;#x27;ve been working on this lately and the entire field is depressing. Between one side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the legitimate need for open protocols, and another side that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand why IRC isn&amp;#x27;t the end-all-be-all of group chat (and why UX matters), it&amp;#x27;s just people talking past each other.&lt;p&gt;Every new attempt at making &amp;quot;the slack killer&amp;quot; makes this problem worse, because it comes with its own protocol. Its own users. Etc.&lt;p&gt;PS: If somebody has free time to work on an open source multi-protocol group chat gateway, email me, I have something started.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dorfsmay</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s been some effort towards integration between SIP and XMPP:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7247&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7247&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency</title><url>https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3318/research-people-prefer-friendliness-trustworthiness-in-teammates-over-skill-competency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csee</author><text>Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it&amp;#x27;s asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There&amp;#x27;s little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they&amp;#x27;re well liked) before being terminated.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gorbachev</author><text>&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate&lt;p&gt;Except that you can teach them things.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to teach an unfriendly person anything, and it&amp;#x27;s impossible to teach an arrogant asshole anything at all, because they think they&amp;#x27;re better than anyone else.</text></comment>

<story><title>People prefer friendliness, trustworthiness in teammates over skill competency</title><url>https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3318/research-people-prefer-friendliness-trustworthiness-in-teammates-over-skill-competency</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>csee</author><text>Trustworthiness, sure. But not friendliness (unless it&amp;#x27;s asshole-level unfriendliness) over competence. There&amp;#x27;s little worse than a friendly but incompetent teammate, who will often get too many passes and second chances (because they&amp;#x27;re well liked) before being terminated.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take neutral friendliness, or even slightly unfriendly, + extreme competence, any day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>doteka</author><text>I don’t think that’s an opinion held by someone who actually worked with&amp;#x2F;had to manage the combination of “slightly unfriendly + extreme confidence” before. That is how you get Prima Donnas, temper tantrums during technical discussions and other fun stuff.</text></comment>

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<story><title>High-dimensional spheres are &quot;spikey&quot;</title><url>http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi-bin/PvsNP.py?SpikeySpheres#HN2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzyz</author><text>Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to inscribe a high dimensional sphere in a hypercube. As the dimension grows, the sphere/cube volume ratio gets arbitrarily small, although sphere touches the cube at every side. It seems that most of the mass of the cube was focused near vertices. This is because the side of a cube is a whole lot closer than the vertex from the center of the cube -- for instance, if we take a million-dimensional cube with a side of length 2, then the distance from the center of the cube to the side is 1, but the distance from the center to the vertex is 1000. It&apos;s not the spheres that are &quot;spikey&quot;, the cubes are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tel</author><text>One should also take a close look at the formulas for volumes of &lt;i&gt;unit-radius&lt;/i&gt; n-balls. For even numbers of dimensions it&apos;s&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; pi^(n/2)/fact(n/2) &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; which behaves very interestingly[1]. It&apos;s equal to pi in two dimensions, peaks at the 4-dimensional ball (about 1.6 pi), then is driven to effectively zero by the time you get to 20 dimensions or so (value of ~8/1000 pi).&lt;p&gt;Again, however, the radius isn&apos;t changing. I don&apos;t think of unit balls as being spiky--they&apos;re still rotationally invariant in all d rotational degrees of freedom, so calling them spiky doesn&apos;t sit well with me.&lt;p&gt;Instead, imagine you lived on a line, only walking up and back along it forever. Then, one day, someone introduced you to the plane and then a volume. These are vastly larger than the space you were afforded by the line: exponential blowup.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s also driven home by how the Lesbegue measure in d-dimensions assigns zero measure to all (d-1)-dimensional (or lesser) objects. Adding a dimension just makes space immensely larger.&lt;p&gt;And so pegging the size of our unit ball to its 1-dimensional parameter, the radius, causes its volume to vanish.&lt;p&gt;[1] Wolfram Alpha chart showing the volume of the n-sphere in units of pi &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pi%5E%28n%2F2-1%29%2FGamma%5Bn%2F2%2B1%5D+from+0+to+30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=pi%5E%28n%2F2-1%29%2FGa...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>High-dimensional spheres are &quot;spikey&quot;</title><url>http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi-bin/PvsNP.py?SpikeySpheres#HN2</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xyzzyz</author><text>Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to inscribe a high dimensional sphere in a hypercube. As the dimension grows, the sphere/cube volume ratio gets arbitrarily small, although sphere touches the cube at every side. It seems that most of the mass of the cube was focused near vertices. This is because the side of a cube is a whole lot closer than the vertex from the center of the cube -- for instance, if we take a million-dimensional cube with a side of length 2, then the distance from the center of the cube to the side is 1, but the distance from the center to the vertex is 1000. It&apos;s not the spheres that are &quot;spikey&quot;, the cubes are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jimmie</author><text>This made it click for me. Thanks for explaining.&lt;p&gt;Just to expand a bit on the vertex thing, in 2 dimensions length is sqrt(x^2 + y^2). For a square of side length 2 the distance from the center to each vertex is sqrt(1^2 + 1^2) or sqrt(2 * 1). For 3 dimensions it&apos;s sqrt(x^2 + y^2 + z^2) or sqrt(3 * 1). For one million dimensions the distance to each vertex is sqrt(1,000,000) or 1,000 while the distance to each side is still 1.</text></comment>

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<story><title>The Slippery Math of Causation</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-of-causation-puzzle-20180530/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cschmidt</author><text>Since the OP is prompted by Judea Pearl&amp;#x27;s new book, I&amp;#x27;ll ask here. There seem to be at least two schools of thought in causal statistics. The first is championed by Judea Pearl [1,2,3] and the other by Donald Rubin [4].&lt;p&gt;If I want to learn causal statistics, for use in ML, which school of thought would be more useful? I don&amp;#x27;t mean to prompt any causal flame wars, but it isn&amp;#x27;t obvious which approach is more useful.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [1] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;046509760X [2] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Causality-Reasoning-Inference-Judea-Pearl&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;052189560X [3] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Causal-Inference-Statistics-Judea-Pearl&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1119186846 [4] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Causal-Inference-Statistics-Biomedical-Sciences&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;0521885884&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>The Slippery Math of Causation</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-of-causation-puzzle-20180530/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>macawfish</author><text>Just wanted to throw out a related Quanta article about Sugihara&amp;#x27;s method: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&amp;#x2F;chaos-theory-in-ecology-predicts-future-populations-20151013&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&amp;#x2F;chaos-theory-in-ecology-predi...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sugihara&amp;#x27;s method is a way of quantifying causal relationships in nonlinear systems with attractors that would be cumbersome to model (hence the &amp;quot;equation free&amp;quot; description).</text></comment>

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<story><title>The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001918</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lofatdairy</author><text>BTW for anyone who wants to help but thinks this is mostly wetlab&amp;#x2F;drug development work. There&amp;#x27;s quite a bit of room in the space for the computer-vision side of things to improve decision-making and time to treat. I think it&amp;#x27;s mostly based on phenotyping by imaging and identifying low-specimen cultures but I might be totally wrong.&lt;p&gt;Some competitions:&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;longitudeprize.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;longitudeprize.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dpcpsi.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;AMRChallenge&amp;#x2F;Finalists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;dpcpsi.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;AMRChallenge&amp;#x2F;Finalists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some previous work using various ML piplines:&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;phastdiagnostics.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;phastdiagnostics.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;acceleratediagnostics.com&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;acceleratediagnostics.com&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;talisbio.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;talisbio.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>The antimicrobial resistance crisis needs action now</title><url>https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001918</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zosima</author><text>I am quite sure, that if a sufficient bounty was given out for developing new kinds of antimicrobials, they&amp;#x27;d be developed in no time.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that cost and risk of development and trials is too large for the current rewards, and hence there is very little new antimicrobials being developed. There are very many promising leads though, and either making development cheaper (by requiring smaller or fewer clinical trials) or ensuring good prices or bounties for successful development would likely create a plethora of antimicrobials in a quite short time frame.</text></comment>

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<story><title>A repository of beautiful photos and images</title><url>https://github.com/grantcarthew/data-stunning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retSava</author><text>If for personal use and no redistribution, I love checking &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unsplash.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unsplash.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their license is very permissive also for use in commercial settings.&lt;p&gt;(No affiliation.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seemslegit</author><text>Absolutely have your legal review unsplash license and ToS if you want to use an image of theirs in a project, I doubt they can provide meaningful defense for their &amp;quot;licensees&amp;quot; in case an author of a photo claims their work was put on unsplash without their permission and you ended up using and distributing it - this is basically the service that companies like Getty (however terrible) and Stock photo agencies provide and charge for besides the image itself.&lt;p&gt;Then there&amp;#x27;s the lack (last time I checked) of any sort of releases for all those images of people and even properties that are needed when making commercial use.</text></comment>

<story><title>A repository of beautiful photos and images</title><url>https://github.com/grantcarthew/data-stunning</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>retSava</author><text>If for personal use and no redistribution, I love checking &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unsplash.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;unsplash.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their license is very permissive also for use in commercial settings.&lt;p&gt;(No affiliation.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpowell</author><text>+1 for Unsplash. They&amp;#x27;ve got a nice little Mac app [1] that updates your desktop with random shots, too.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;unsplash-wallpapers&amp;#x2F;id1284863847?mt=12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;apps.apple.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;app&amp;#x2F;unsplash-wallpapers&amp;#x2F;id12848638...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>JavaScript Promises in Wicked Detail</title><url>http://mattgreer.org/articles/promises-in-wicked-detail/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>exogen</author><text>The situation caused by promises gaining popularity and non-IE browsers refusing to implement setImmediate is really quite ugly. setTimeout&amp;#x27;s minimum value is defined to be 4ms by the HTML5 spec, so if the browser conforms to that and your app makes heavy use of promises (using setTimeout), now you&amp;#x27;re waiting multiple screen refreshes for updates – so you don&amp;#x27;t actually want to use setTimeout. Even though the asynchronous requirement is good for developers using the promise API, it really screwed over implementors.&lt;p&gt;The setImmediate polyfills attempt a bunch of ugly fallbacks, including (depending on which one you use): yield&amp;#x2F;generators, MutationObserver, postMessage&amp;#x2F;MessageChannel, onreadystatechange, and finally setTimeout (the slowest).&lt;p&gt;IMO the browser vendors should just give in and add setImmediate – if ever there was a need for it, this is it. But maybe they consider ES6 features a good enough substitute, I don&amp;#x27;t know.</text></comment>

<story><title>JavaScript Promises in Wicked Detail</title><url>http://mattgreer.org/articles/promises-in-wicked-detail/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>enraged_camel</author><text>This is off-topic, but there seems to be this trend on HN (and probably similar sites) where a post about Topic X will get a lot of comments&amp;#x2F;views, and the following several days similar posts will appear on the front page, in the format of &amp;quot;Why You Should Never Do X&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;A Better Way to Do X&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;m wondering is whether this is some sort of bias on my part (I tend to notice them because my memory of the original post is still fresh), or whether the subsequent stories are upvoted to the front-page because people want to discuss the topic more. And from the author&amp;#x27;s perspective, whether they are writing it to take advantage of the opportunity for increased page-views.</text></comment>

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<story><title>A domain move disaster</title><url>http://www.paulingraham.com/domain-move-disaster.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxmcd</author><text>Related or not, this is certainly against the &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.painscience.com&amp;#x2F;donate-by-linking.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.painscience.com&amp;#x2F;donate-by-linking.php&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulingraham</author><text>Google certainly should penalize spammy, unnatural links ... and any attempt to get them. On the other hand, I hope it’s not against the rules to encourage relevant and earnest links. I should take the page down if there’s any doubt. Meanwhile, I’ve added a very strong warning that links should be editorially relevant and sincere.&lt;p&gt;In any case, the “donate by linking” page is quite new. The domain move disaster was months old by the time I first published it.</text></comment>

<story><title>A domain move disaster</title><url>http://www.paulingraham.com/domain-move-disaster.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maxmcd</author><text>Related or not, this is certainly against the &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.painscience.com&amp;#x2F;donate-by-linking.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.painscience.com&amp;#x2F;donate-by-linking.php&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sixQuarks</author><text>Why is that against the rules? Asking for links is not against the rules.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement</title><url>http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>archagon</author><text>Hi HN! I wanted to research more elegant ways to enable document sync and collaboration in my apps sometime last year, and ended up discovering a new class of data structure that made it possible to build collaboration into documents right on the data level, completely separate from the network architecture. (Maybe you&amp;#x27;re already familiar with CRDTs. Well, these aren&amp;#x27;t just ordinary CRDTs, but almost &lt;i&gt;meta-CRDTs&lt;/i&gt; that can represent a variety of convergent data types in a generic way. They also make it super easy to implement things like past revision viewing and delta patches.) As a proof of concept, I built a basic real-time collaborative text editor for iOS that works equally well over regular iCloud sync, CloudKit Sharing, and offline, as well as a simple mesh network simulator for macOS that has support for collaborative text editing and simple Bézier editing.&lt;p&gt;The code is strictly educational for the time being, but I&amp;#x27;m working on a Swift library that can hopefully put this stuff to use in real apps. Hope to start dog-fooding in release software by the end of the year!</text></comment>

<story><title>Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement</title><url>http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>saurik</author><text>The author is wondering why iCloud Sharing is used by so few developers; I will point out &amp;#x2F; remind that, in addition to fundamentally being an API whose usage implies &amp;quot;I will never be able to build an Android app which interoperates with this data&amp;quot; (which is already pretty damning for most developers as a door they don&amp;#x27;t want to permanently close), the first few releases of iCloud were so bad that documents and even entire clients would end up in permanently wedged states that developers could not fix for users and were so bad that at WWDC one year I remember the Apple iCloud person on stage during the &amp;quot;developer state of the union&amp;quot; talk apologizing for iCloud being so broken and begging the audience for another chance.</text></comment>

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<story><title>It&apos;s not just metadata – the NSA is getting everything</title><url>http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52913031241/its-not-just-meta-data-the-nsa-is-getting-everything</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roboneal</author><text>It also enrages me how they dismiss the metadata as a &amp;quot;nothing burger&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Does it occur to anyone how much leverage you can exert with that information alone in such areas as finance, divorce proceedings, opposition research, leak investigations, and good old fashioned blackmail?&lt;p&gt;To add to it, they don&amp;#x27;t even need a court order or oversight to do the metadata searches per Feinstein (today).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>What matters me is that most even forget to mention part of the metadata is the location of the device. With that data they can basically track everyone&amp;#x27;s location, almost as accurately as with GPS.&lt;p&gt;And such GPS tracking was just considered unconstitutional in a 9-0 decision by the Supreme Court. I really hope all this stuff gets to the Supreme Court. Even if not all of it is unconstitutional, I could see at least 80% of the policies comprised in Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act being unconstitutional.</text></comment>

<story><title>It&apos;s not just metadata – the NSA is getting everything</title><url>http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52913031241/its-not-just-meta-data-the-nsa-is-getting-everything</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roboneal</author><text>It also enrages me how they dismiss the metadata as a &amp;quot;nothing burger&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Does it occur to anyone how much leverage you can exert with that information alone in such areas as finance, divorce proceedings, opposition research, leak investigations, and good old fashioned blackmail?&lt;p&gt;To add to it, they don&amp;#x27;t even need a court order or oversight to do the metadata searches per Feinstein (today).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfortuny</author><text>If you read Soljenitsin, you realize the importance of metadata instantly: &amp;quot;why did you call X, where did you meet Y....&amp;quot;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Lenovo Computers, Soon To Be Made In America</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/02/lenovo-computers-soon-to-be-made-in-america/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mediaman</author><text>Lenovo is probably doing this for a few reasons:&lt;p&gt;* The corporate market often prioritizes speed and ease of doing business over the absolute rock-bottom cost. Local manufacturing offers advantages due to a much shortened supply chain.&lt;p&gt;* The gap between an hourly worker&apos;s wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.&lt;p&gt;* The hours of labor per assembled unit is declining due to advances in automation, rendering regional labor variances less important.&lt;p&gt;Labor is becoming less of an issue while local manufacturing continues to have major supply chain cost benefits, so Lenovo considers that the scales have tipped enough to justify a US presence for the market segment that values that responsiveness the most.</text></comment>

<story><title>Lenovo Computers, Soon To Be Made In America</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/02/lenovo-computers-soon-to-be-made-in-america/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Zak</author><text>More configurability? Great. When can I order one with a screen that isn&apos;t some low-res 16:9 TN monstrosity?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Peter Thiel: Uber is most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley [video]</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/18/technology/uber-unethical-peter-thiel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivraatiems</author><text>Notice the language here. He doesn&amp;#x27;t seem, at least from my reading, to be chastising Uber for doing things that are morally wrong. He&amp;#x27;s instead chastising them for doing morally wrong things &lt;i&gt;and not pulling it off.&lt;/i&gt; For example:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sometimes the people who break the rules win and sometimes they push it too far,&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;implying that Uber could be doing wrong things in some more correct way and continue to thrive, and that there isn&amp;#x27;t anything wrong with that. He doesn&amp;#x27;t say &amp;quot;broke rules,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;did bad things,&amp;quot; he said &amp;quot;pushed the envelope.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Look at the implication there - you can and maybe should do unethical things, break some rules, &amp;quot;push the envelope&amp;quot; with questionable behaviors as long as you get away with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>I think close to 100% of successful entrepreneurs would agree with the statement &amp;quot;You can, and must break some rule, push the envelope, and engage in questionable behavior when building a company - the challenge is in always remembering where the line is, and never crossing it.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Uber clearly crossed the line when their executives voiced out load their frustration with the media &lt;i&gt;and then continued talking&lt;/i&gt; and imagined how nice it would be to give the media a taste of their own medicine and do all sorts of reporting on &lt;i&gt;them personally&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s fine to have those little fantasies in your head - but that&amp;#x27;s as far as it can ever go. What&amp;#x27;s troubling is that the Uber exec honestly thought it was acceptable to give words to those thoughts... I&amp;#x27;m wondering if alcohol was involved.</text></comment>

<story><title>Peter Thiel: Uber is most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley [video]</title><url>http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/18/technology/uber-unethical-peter-thiel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ivraatiems</author><text>Notice the language here. He doesn&amp;#x27;t seem, at least from my reading, to be chastising Uber for doing things that are morally wrong. He&amp;#x27;s instead chastising them for doing morally wrong things &lt;i&gt;and not pulling it off.&lt;/i&gt; For example:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sometimes the people who break the rules win and sometimes they push it too far,&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;implying that Uber could be doing wrong things in some more correct way and continue to thrive, and that there isn&amp;#x27;t anything wrong with that. He doesn&amp;#x27;t say &amp;quot;broke rules,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;did bad things,&amp;quot; he said &amp;quot;pushed the envelope.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Look at the implication there - you can and maybe should do unethical things, break some rules, &amp;quot;push the envelope&amp;quot; with questionable behaviors as long as you get away with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>In the context of the rest of the video and other stuff Thiel has said, I interpreted that statement to mean that rule breaking is not necessarily immoral but a company like Uber can get carried away and what is essentially a &amp;quot;culture&amp;quot; of rule breaking meant to undermine unjust regulations becomes one meant to undermine competition at any cost.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Simple Ways of Reducing the Cognitive Load in Code</title><url>http://chrismm.com/blog/writing-good-code-reduce-the-cognitive-load/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonhohle</author><text>His second example to &amp;quot;modularize&amp;quot; a branch condition is not functionally equivalent in _most_ in-use programming languages:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; valid_user = loggedIn() &amp;amp;&amp;amp; hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) valid_data = data != null &amp;amp;&amp;amp; validate(data) if (valid_user &amp;amp;&amp;amp; valid_data) … &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Is not equivalent to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; if (loggedIn() &amp;amp;&amp;amp; hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; data != null &amp;amp;&amp;amp; validate(data)) … &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; His version will always execute `validate(…)` if `data` is not null regardless of whether the user is logged in or has the appropriate role. Not knowing the cost of `validate(…)`, this could be an expensive operation that could be avoided with short-circuiting. It also seems somewhat silly (and I know it&amp;#x27;s just a contrived example), that a validation function would not also perform the `null` check and leave that up to the caller.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>guelo</author><text>If validate() doesn&amp;#x27;t have a side effect then the short-circuiting doesn&amp;#x27;t matter. The micro-optimization of skipping the validation for performance reasons is premature optimization. If the performance optimization is necessary it should be stated more explicitly in the code then just being hidden being a &amp;amp;&amp;amp; short circuit&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve always thought this kind of short-circuiting as an implementation detail of the runtime that should not be relied on, a hack from old school C that refuses to go away. I cringe when I see code that relies on it. It is not semantically obvious when a developer intends to use the short-circuiting trick vs when it&amp;#x27;s just inadvertently there. Of course part of the reason it lives on is because of our awful popular languages that require null checks everywhere but don&amp;#x27;t provide any syntactic help for it.</text></comment>

<story><title>Simple Ways of Reducing the Cognitive Load in Code</title><url>http://chrismm.com/blog/writing-good-code-reduce-the-cognitive-load/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonhohle</author><text>His second example to &amp;quot;modularize&amp;quot; a branch condition is not functionally equivalent in _most_ in-use programming languages:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; valid_user = loggedIn() &amp;amp;&amp;amp; hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) valid_data = data != null &amp;amp;&amp;amp; validate(data) if (valid_user &amp;amp;&amp;amp; valid_data) … &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Is not equivalent to:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; if (loggedIn() &amp;amp;&amp;amp; hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; data != null &amp;amp;&amp;amp; validate(data)) … &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; His version will always execute `validate(…)` if `data` is not null regardless of whether the user is logged in or has the appropriate role. Not knowing the cost of `validate(…)`, this could be an expensive operation that could be avoided with short-circuiting. It also seems somewhat silly (and I know it&amp;#x27;s just a contrived example), that a validation function would not also perform the `null` check and leave that up to the caller.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saboot</author><text>Perhaps an alternative would be&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; valid_user = loggedIn() &amp;amp;&amp;amp; hasRole(ROLE_ADMIN) if (valid_user) { valid_data = data != null &amp;amp;&amp;amp; validate(data) if (valid_data) { ... } }&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon-flex-workers/563444/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bsg75</author><text>I doubt this is a new observation, but what strikes me is that the US employment system is based on benefits via employment (healthcare, retirement).&lt;p&gt;The current &amp;quot;gig economy&amp;quot; trend removes these benefits from employment, and with a government currently opposed to public benefits, the US could be headed towards a problem within a single generation.&lt;p&gt;This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>In the case of health insurance, it mostly came about because of wage controls during WW II. Companies couldn&amp;#x27;t offer more money in a tight labor market but they were allowed to offer fringe benefits like insurance.&lt;p&gt;401(k)&amp;#x27;s history is almost wacky. It was an obscure provision in 1978 tax law and a benefits consultant figured out a way to turn it into something that companies could easily offer to employees as a tax-advantaged benefit.&lt;p&gt;Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it&amp;#x27;s almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.</text></comment>

<story><title>I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare</title><url>https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/amazon-flex-workers/563444/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bsg75</author><text>I doubt this is a new observation, but what strikes me is that the US employment system is based on benefits via employment (healthcare, retirement).&lt;p&gt;The current &amp;quot;gig economy&amp;quot; trend removes these benefits from employment, and with a government currently opposed to public benefits, the US could be headed towards a problem within a single generation.&lt;p&gt;This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bproven</author><text>Good point..&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.&lt;p&gt;And you know who most benefits from this type of investment (basically the ones with the big money to invest with little to no real risk to their way of life). So I don&amp;#x27;t see it ending any time soon...</text></comment>

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<story><title>How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less</title><url>https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-to-unc0ver-0-day-in-4-hours-or-less.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>akersten</author><text>&amp;gt; So, to summarize: the LightSpeed bug was fixed in iOS 12 with a patch that didn&amp;#x27;t address the root cause and instead just turned the race condition double-free into a memory leak. Then, in iOS 13, this memory leak was identified as a bug and &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; by reintroducing the original bug, again without addressing the root cause of the issue. And this security regression could have been found trivially by running the original POC from the blog post.&lt;p&gt;Yikes. Especially looking at the diff of the original problematic fix, it seems like they slapped a quick patch on there and called it a day, instead of investigating to find the underlying architectural issue. Doesn&amp;#x27;t really inspire a lot of confidence that the resolution for unc0ver is any more thought-through. I wonder if they&amp;#x27;ve identified the root-cause? That&amp;#x27;d be the real interesting piece to me.</text></comment>

<story><title>How to unc0ver a 0-day in 4 hours or less</title><url>https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-to-unc0ver-0-day-in-4-hours-or-less.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>devenblake</author><text>&amp;gt; By 1 AM, I had sent Apple a POC and my analysis.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Still, I&amp;#x27;m very happy that Apple patched this issue in a timely manner once the exploit became public.&lt;p&gt;Sh- should we be happy Apple fixed this so quickly? unc0ver allows consumers to get more out of their Apple devices, and Apple&amp;#x27;s fix isn&amp;#x27;t really optional (unless you disable auto-updates and tap &amp;quot;Later&amp;quot; on every update notification). Is this exploit even an issue? Apple&amp;#x27;s probably not going to let an app exploiting this zeroday into its App Store and sideloading is difficult; it&amp;#x27;s very unlikely someone malicious is going to trick people into installing malware that uses this exploit. It sounds to me like Apple is purposefully limiting consumer freedom by actively trying to prevent jailbreaking.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Lessons Learned with Stripe Subscriptions</title><url>https://blog.cronitor.io/lessons-learned-with-stripe-subscriptions-d6c8d408eb1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>coffeemug</author><text>I work on Stripe subscriptions. Thanks for the writeup!&lt;p&gt;We have quite a bit planned to improve the subscriptions logic (including fixing the issues mentioned in the post). If you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback, please shoot me an email -- [email protected]. Would love to hear from you and work together to improve the product!</text></comment>

<story><title>Lessons Learned with Stripe Subscriptions</title><url>https://blog.cronitor.io/lessons-learned-with-stripe-subscriptions-d6c8d408eb1</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevekemp</author><text>I love the stripe API, and I like the documentation. But bear in mind you might want to avoid the subscriptions to cut down on fees.&lt;p&gt;Pretend you sell apples and oranges. If the user has 3 of each you might be tempted to bill the user for:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 3 * Apple Subscriptions (&amp;#x2F;month). 3 * Orange Subscriptions (&amp;#x2F;month). &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; Do that and the user will be billed correctly, but you&amp;#x27;ll have to pay &lt;i&gt;two&lt;/i&gt; fees. That really annoys me, as it seems like a money-grab to charge them separately not combine the two payments and then take out the fees.&lt;p&gt;(This contributed to me removing my discounted-pricing plans where you could spend £1 a month for DNS hosting, but then get additional domains at £0.50. Instead I kept everything at £1 so that I didn&amp;#x27;t have to have different subscription levels.)</text></comment>

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<story><title>Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses</title><url>https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-licenses.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mholt</author><text>Thanks for your feedback. I&amp;#x27;d like to know more.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fact that the headers aren&amp;#x27;t seen by most non-technical users is moot.&lt;p&gt;Why&amp;#x27;s that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s good to know that price isn&amp;#x27;t the bottleneck, then. Does it make any difference to know that commercially-licensed Caddy builds don&amp;#x27;t have that header?</text></item><item><author>lol768</author><text>&amp;gt; As of version 0.10.9, Caddy emits an HTTP response header, Caddy-Sponsors, which is similar to the Server header that Caddy already has, except that this one credits our sponsors who make it possible to keep Caddy free for personal use. This header cannot be removed by the Caddyfile, and its presence is required by the non-commercial EULA. This requirement is waived by the commercial license, so the header is not present in those binaries.&lt;p&gt;Really not a fan of this, guess I&amp;#x27;ll be compiling my own builds from now on.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I think charging for commercial licenses (which come with proper support) is a good business model, but my personal site shouldn&amp;#x27;t suddenly become an advertising outlet. The fact that the headers aren&amp;#x27;t seen by most non-technical users is moot.&lt;p&gt;I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here&amp;#x27;s my fork &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second edit: Accusation of trademark violation within an hour of the fork, classy! &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lol768</author><text>&amp;gt; Why&amp;#x27;s that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?)&lt;p&gt;I dislike this for a few reasons. Firstly, it honestly comes across as petty. I&amp;#x27;m using the server for personal reasons, it&amp;#x27;s for a non-commercial site which I don&amp;#x27;t make money off. I don&amp;#x27;t display ads, and suddenly I&amp;#x27;m now being forced to serve ads to my visitors. The medium of delivery is utterly irrelevant to me.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it makes it more difficult to take steps to make it less obvious which web server is being used. I&amp;#x27;d do this to make it slightly more difficult for script kiddies looking to exploit recent vulnerabiltiies - not because I think security through obscurity is a good idea.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s good to know that price isn&amp;#x27;t the bottleneck, then. Does it make any difference to know that commercially-licensed Caddy builds don&amp;#x27;t have that header?&lt;p&gt;No. The point is, you&amp;#x27;ve annoyed someone who liked your software, used it for personal use (costing you nothing) and would&amp;#x27;ve happily recommended it to colleagues.</text></comment>

<story><title>Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses</title><url>https://caddyserver.com/blog/accouncing-caddy-commercial-licenses.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mholt</author><text>Thanks for your feedback. I&amp;#x27;d like to know more.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fact that the headers aren&amp;#x27;t seen by most non-technical users is moot.&lt;p&gt;Why&amp;#x27;s that? (And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s good to know that price isn&amp;#x27;t the bottleneck, then. Does it make any difference to know that commercially-licensed Caddy builds don&amp;#x27;t have that header?</text></item><item><author>lol768</author><text>&amp;gt; As of version 0.10.9, Caddy emits an HTTP response header, Caddy-Sponsors, which is similar to the Server header that Caddy already has, except that this one credits our sponsors who make it possible to keep Caddy free for personal use. This header cannot be removed by the Caddyfile, and its presence is required by the non-commercial EULA. This requirement is waived by the commercial license, so the header is not present in those binaries.&lt;p&gt;Really not a fan of this, guess I&amp;#x27;ll be compiling my own builds from now on.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong, I think charging for commercial licenses (which come with proper support) is a good business model, but my personal site shouldn&amp;#x27;t suddenly become an advertising outlet. The fact that the headers aren&amp;#x27;t seen by most non-technical users is moot.&lt;p&gt;I find this practice pretty obnoxious to the point of looking at NGINX Plus for commercial use instead.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here&amp;#x27;s my fork &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second edit: Accusation of trademark violation within an hour of the fork, classy! &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WedgeServer&amp;#x2F;wedge&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>StavrosK</author><text>&amp;gt; And even among your technical visitors, how many of them actually inspect the response headers?&lt;p&gt;I find that a bit disingenuous. You can&amp;#x27;t both include annoying headers &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; argue that they aren&amp;#x27;t annoying anyone because nobody will see them. If nobody will see them, why add them in the first place?</text></comment>

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<story><title>Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/instagram-no-like-counter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tablethnuser</author><text>I wrote a browser extension last year to hide like counts and such from the sites I visit and it definitely changes your browsing behavior for the better. Reacting to those vanity numbers is similar to slowing down to rubberneck.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s the repo if anyone is interested. I still use it to this day but haven&amp;#x27;t worked on it in a while cuz I&amp;#x27;m learning rust.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;a13o&amp;#x2F;disengaged&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;a13o&amp;#x2F;disengaged&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/instagram-no-like-counter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mindgam3</author><text>1. Bold move in this day and age: prioritizing quality of UX over business metrics. Props to whoever at Instagram product made the call on this.&lt;p&gt;That said, if Instagram is serious about not being evil, the only option is ultimately to secede from Facebook. As long as they are part of F Corp, all of these tactics designed to recapture the Big Tech moral high ground are doomed to fail.&lt;p&gt;The only way I could see this happening is if there were mass protests of Instagram employees demanding to be made independent. Kind of like the Google employee protests but potentially aided by some well-timed regulatory pressure. Not holding my breath on that, but it&amp;#x27;s a least a theoretical possibility, right?&lt;p&gt;2. &amp;quot;Leaking&amp;quot; a design prototype to Constine at TechCrunch is a very clever way to beta test a massive product decision like this.&lt;p&gt;They know that hiding Likes will cost them engagement, which means revenue, but if they get enough good press about it, it might get the masses to start trusting facebook more, which would allow them to explain away the lower revenue numbers and avoid a potential investor revolt. By leaking the feature before it&amp;#x27;s even released, they can gauge the reaction of the market. It&amp;#x27;s quite a clever scheme, really.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, barring some kind of miracle secession play, I&amp;#x27;m sad to say that Instagram making these kinds of product decisions is like rearranging deck chairs on the ethical Titanic. But I&amp;#x27;ll give them an A for effort.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/27/three-arrows-capital-crypto-hedge-fund-defaults-on-voyager-loan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zeven7</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fascinated that some kind of place like this existed. I&amp;#x27;ve only lived in large cities and the picture I&amp;#x27;ve gotten of small towns from trips and media hasn&amp;#x27;t prepared me for the idea of a whole community that collectively buys into a get rich quick scheme.</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>That’s essentially it, a small town where everyone knew each other and all hung out in the same bars. I didn’t pay attention to which one it was, I do remember hearing crazy interest, like &amp;gt;40%. I think you also got a cut from new entrants as well, so it reeked of pyramid + ponzi.</text></item><item><author>rngname22</author><text>Could you expand a bit? It sort of sounds like you&amp;#x27;re describing a small town or a social circle &amp;#x2F; social scene where everyone got involved in some particular altcoin or something and invested a ton of their personal savings into it while encouraging others to do so as well, is that essentially it? Crazy if so.</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>A fool and their money are soon parted. The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians so it affects the rest of us. It’s not just the extra tax of having to care for the newly impoverished.&lt;p&gt;My former local community went all in on a bitcoin scam, they made commissions on new entrants so I never heard the end of it. I only talked about it when asked but my warnings not only fell on deaf ears I was effectively ostracized as people were worried that I would talk new entrants out of it. “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a no-coiner who doesn’t want you to be rich, he’s ngmi”. It was worse than Amway. Even after the crash many of them still avoided me, I guess now out of embarrassment, or worry that I would shove it in their faces like they did to me. I would never. It destroyed the community and many local businesses.&lt;p&gt;Edit: just found out which one it was, it was USI Tech. It failed 4 years ago so it’s not even part of the latest crop. Just sad that it keeps happening.</text></item><item><author>CoastalCoder</author><text>I always have mixed feelings when someone is warned about the riskiness &amp;#x2F; foolishness &amp;#x2F; stupidity of a course of action, and then suffers for it.&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there&amp;#x27;s a certain satisfaction or Schadenfreude in the sense of vindication. And it&amp;#x27;s pleasant to feel like my own wisdom or self-control has been validated.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, I know that &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; has limited wisdom &amp;#x2F; self-control &amp;#x2F; intelligence, including me. So it seems hypocritical to mock someone who trips, knowing that I&amp;#x27;m just lucky to sometimes avoid the hazards that would trip &lt;i&gt;me&lt;/i&gt; up.&lt;p&gt;In the end, about the only conclusions I&amp;#x27;m really confident in is that trouble besets us all, and usually it&amp;#x27;s good to default to kindness and sympathy.&lt;p&gt;EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: I&amp;#x27;m not saying that I want swindlers to succeed. I want such predation crushed into dust. My comment is about the people who don&amp;#x27;t intend harm to others.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bombcar</author><text>It happens &lt;i&gt;all the time&lt;/i&gt; but often the community and the physical community don&amp;#x27;t overlap, but check out &amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;MLM or other similar subreddits and there&amp;#x27;s whole groups of scammers who target particular groups (church, social, retired, veterans, etc) with particular pitches designed for that group.&lt;p&gt;Because if some rando tells you to join Amway or invest in AmCOIN™ you will tell them to get bent, but if it&amp;#x27;s a trusted friend, you&amp;#x27;re much more likely to be open.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s disgusting, but it happens. And in a small town, likely &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; goes to the same church or two, hangs out at the same bar, etc. It can spread like wildfire, though usually after the first few scams it becomes known and starts to die out a bit.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you recognize the situation and decide to &amp;quot;participate&amp;quot; (read: lose some small amount of money in the scam) to stay in the community.</text></comment>

<story><title>Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/27/three-arrows-capital-crypto-hedge-fund-defaults-on-voyager-loan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zeven7</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m fascinated that some kind of place like this existed. I&amp;#x27;ve only lived in large cities and the picture I&amp;#x27;ve gotten of small towns from trips and media hasn&amp;#x27;t prepared me for the idea of a whole community that collectively buys into a get rich quick scheme.</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>That’s essentially it, a small town where everyone knew each other and all hung out in the same bars. I didn’t pay attention to which one it was, I do remember hearing crazy interest, like &amp;gt;40%. I think you also got a cut from new entrants as well, so it reeked of pyramid + ponzi.</text></item><item><author>rngname22</author><text>Could you expand a bit? It sort of sounds like you&amp;#x27;re describing a small town or a social circle &amp;#x2F; social scene where everyone got involved in some particular altcoin or something and invested a ton of their personal savings into it while encouraging others to do so as well, is that essentially it? Crazy if so.</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>A fool and their money are soon parted. The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians so it affects the rest of us. It’s not just the extra tax of having to care for the newly impoverished.&lt;p&gt;My former local community went all in on a bitcoin scam, they made commissions on new entrants so I never heard the end of it. I only talked about it when asked but my warnings not only fell on deaf ears I was effectively ostracized as people were worried that I would talk new entrants out of it. “Don’t talk to that guy, he’s a no-coiner who doesn’t want you to be rich, he’s ngmi”. It was worse than Amway. Even after the crash many of them still avoided me, I guess now out of embarrassment, or worry that I would shove it in their faces like they did to me. I would never. It destroyed the community and many local businesses.&lt;p&gt;Edit: just found out which one it was, it was USI Tech. It failed 4 years ago so it’s not even part of the latest crop. Just sad that it keeps happening.</text></item><item><author>CoastalCoder</author><text>I always have mixed feelings when someone is warned about the riskiness &amp;#x2F; foolishness &amp;#x2F; stupidity of a course of action, and then suffers for it.&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there&amp;#x27;s a certain satisfaction or Schadenfreude in the sense of vindication. And it&amp;#x27;s pleasant to feel like my own wisdom or self-control has been validated.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, I know that &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; has limited wisdom &amp;#x2F; self-control &amp;#x2F; intelligence, including me. So it seems hypocritical to mock someone who trips, knowing that I&amp;#x27;m just lucky to sometimes avoid the hazards that would trip &lt;i&gt;me&lt;/i&gt; up.&lt;p&gt;In the end, about the only conclusions I&amp;#x27;m really confident in is that trouble besets us all, and usually it&amp;#x27;s good to default to kindness and sympathy.&lt;p&gt;EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION: I&amp;#x27;m not saying that I want swindlers to succeed. I want such predation crushed into dust. My comment is about the people who don&amp;#x27;t intend harm to others.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_jal</author><text>It happens a lot, and isolation can help keep scams going.&lt;p&gt;In case anyone has any illusions about how bad financial scamming can get, pyramid schemes famously led to civil war in Albania not that long ago.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Some private equity firms are furious over a paper in a dermatology journal</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/health/private-equity-dermatology.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumasiotes</author><text>I mean, this is close to being right, but it&amp;#x27;s wrong in every one of the details.&lt;p&gt;Crassus didn&amp;#x27;t own the fire department. Crassus owned a bunch of slaves who he had trained to put out fires.&lt;p&gt;Crassus didn&amp;#x27;t charge for extinguishing fires. If your house was on fire, Crassus took his team and negotiated &lt;i&gt;to buy your house&lt;/i&gt;. If you sold it to him, he&amp;#x27;d put out the fire. There was no flow of money from you to Crassus under any circumstances. (But he could get a low price, because the value of your house was constantly dropping while it burned.)&lt;p&gt;In imperial times, private firefighting groups were illegal since they were viewed as a potential source of rebellion. (Using your own slaves to put out fires on your own property was of course fully legal.) It&amp;#x27;s in my mind that Crassus benefited from similar laws, but he was active during the Republic. Maybe someone else knows more about the precise timings.</text></item><item><author>LaundroMat</author><text>In ancient Rome, Crassus owned the fire department. When there was a home on fire, Crassus would negotiate the price for extinguishing the fire with the owners or tenants.&lt;p&gt;Plus ça change...</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>There was an NPR (I think it was NPR) story about how medical helicopter rides have skyrocketed in cost.&lt;p&gt;The issue was a lot of private equity folks realized that you could just get in the market and if you didn&amp;#x27;t get enough rides... you just cranked up the price and went after individuals who where hardly in a position to shop around when they needed the ride.&lt;p&gt;Now there is an excess of medical helicopters, solution? Crank up the price...</text></item><item><author>aaavl2821</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t discussed much, but the healthcare provider industry has traditionally been a major sector of interest for private equity. Hospital companies like HCA, dental clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, etc.&lt;p&gt;Healthcare providers are attractive to private equity 1) because of stable, non-cyclical cash flow, 2) benefits to scale (ie better negotiating leverage with payers), 3) ability to easily increase revenue at small clinics by &amp;quot;optimizing&amp;quot; billing (ie use more lucrative codes for the same procedure) and practice management (optimizing procedure mix and scheduling) and 4) regulatory protection -- local monopolies enjoy durable economic advantages and often are politically entrenched as healthcare providers are major employers&lt;p&gt;These factors aren&amp;#x27;t limited to private equity backed healthcare, though. Even non-profits take advantage of these things (sutter health in the bay area is an example). If you&amp;#x27;re looking for why US healthcare is so expensive, this isn&amp;#x27;t a bad place to start</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ErikVandeWater</author><text>&amp;gt; Crassus didn&amp;#x27;t own the fire department. Crassus owned a bunch of slaves who he had trained to put out fires.&lt;p&gt;That sounds like he literally owned the fire department? It was just made up of slaves.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise I really found what you said very interesting!</text></comment>

<story><title>Some private equity firms are furious over a paper in a dermatology journal</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/health/private-equity-dermatology.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thaumasiotes</author><text>I mean, this is close to being right, but it&amp;#x27;s wrong in every one of the details.&lt;p&gt;Crassus didn&amp;#x27;t own the fire department. Crassus owned a bunch of slaves who he had trained to put out fires.&lt;p&gt;Crassus didn&amp;#x27;t charge for extinguishing fires. If your house was on fire, Crassus took his team and negotiated &lt;i&gt;to buy your house&lt;/i&gt;. If you sold it to him, he&amp;#x27;d put out the fire. There was no flow of money from you to Crassus under any circumstances. (But he could get a low price, because the value of your house was constantly dropping while it burned.)&lt;p&gt;In imperial times, private firefighting groups were illegal since they were viewed as a potential source of rebellion. (Using your own slaves to put out fires on your own property was of course fully legal.) It&amp;#x27;s in my mind that Crassus benefited from similar laws, but he was active during the Republic. Maybe someone else knows more about the precise timings.</text></item><item><author>LaundroMat</author><text>In ancient Rome, Crassus owned the fire department. When there was a home on fire, Crassus would negotiate the price for extinguishing the fire with the owners or tenants.&lt;p&gt;Plus ça change...</text></item><item><author>duxup</author><text>There was an NPR (I think it was NPR) story about how medical helicopter rides have skyrocketed in cost.&lt;p&gt;The issue was a lot of private equity folks realized that you could just get in the market and if you didn&amp;#x27;t get enough rides... you just cranked up the price and went after individuals who where hardly in a position to shop around when they needed the ride.&lt;p&gt;Now there is an excess of medical helicopters, solution? Crank up the price...</text></item><item><author>aaavl2821</author><text>This isn&amp;#x27;t discussed much, but the healthcare provider industry has traditionally been a major sector of interest for private equity. Hospital companies like HCA, dental clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, etc.&lt;p&gt;Healthcare providers are attractive to private equity 1) because of stable, non-cyclical cash flow, 2) benefits to scale (ie better negotiating leverage with payers), 3) ability to easily increase revenue at small clinics by &amp;quot;optimizing&amp;quot; billing (ie use more lucrative codes for the same procedure) and practice management (optimizing procedure mix and scheduling) and 4) regulatory protection -- local monopolies enjoy durable economic advantages and often are politically entrenched as healthcare providers are major employers&lt;p&gt;These factors aren&amp;#x27;t limited to private equity backed healthcare, though. Even non-profits take advantage of these things (sutter health in the bay area is an example). If you&amp;#x27;re looking for why US healthcare is so expensive, this isn&amp;#x27;t a bad place to start</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>evgen</author><text>Crassus would also negotiate deals with neighboring houses that were in danger if the fire spread. In densely-packed Rome a fire two or three houses down could suddenly make continuing to own your little piece of property a risky venture.</text></comment>

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<story><title>APIs, robustness, and idempotency</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brandur</author><text>I authored this article and just wanted to leave a quick note on here that I&amp;#x27;m more than happy to answer any questions, or debate&amp;#x2F;discuss the finer points of HTTP and API semantics ;)&lt;p&gt;An ex-colleague pointed out to me on Twitter today that there are other APIs out there that have developed a concept similar to Stripe&amp;#x27;s `Idempotency-Key` header, the &amp;quot;client tokens&amp;quot; used in EC2&amp;#x27;s API for example [1]. To my knowledge there hasn&amp;#x27;t really been a concerted effort to standardize such an idea more widely, but I might be wrong about that.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;AWSEC2&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;APIReference&amp;#x2F;Run_Instance_Idempotency.html#client-tokens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.aws.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;AWSEC2&amp;#x2F;latest&amp;#x2F;APIReference&amp;#x2F;Run_In...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>APIs, robustness, and idempotency</title><url>https://stripe.com/blog/idempotency</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vfaronov</author><text>Curious that they don’t mention HTTP conditional requests [1] even in passing. This mechanism is typically used for slightly different things, but you can, for example, make a PATCH request “idempotent” (in their sense) by adding an If-Match header to it. I’d say that Idempotency-Key itself may be considered a precondition and used with status codes 412 [2] and 428 [3].&lt;p&gt;By the way, WebDAV extended this mechanism with a general If header [4] for all your precondition needs. I’m kinda glad it didn’t catch on though...&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7232&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7232&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7232#section-4.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc7232#section-4.2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc6585#section-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc6585#section-3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc4918#section-10.4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tools.ietf.org&amp;#x2F;html&amp;#x2F;rfc4918#section-10.4&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi</title><url>https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ploxiln</author><text>This is also a problem with Square, and Stripe, and Paypal ... it&amp;#x27;s an unsolvable fraud&amp;#x2F;scammer problem.&lt;p&gt;Basically, if there was customer support that could fix the problem, then skilled scammers can get money and control out of them. They can do it a lot better than you can get your stuff re-enabled, they know just when to say what to whom.&lt;p&gt;Verizon just accepts the inefficiency, and also over-charges random customers, sometimes hands over control of a phone number to a scammer so they can get auth codes over SMS, has clueless support, etc. Google hasn&amp;#x27;t accepted this way of the world yet (but in scaling up the support has necessarily become disempowered).&lt;p&gt;It is very frustrating. It&amp;#x27;s a nature of things going mass-market. Just a few people, everything can be nice. Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems.</text></item><item><author>ronsor</author><text>This is a general issue with google. If their system decides it doesn&amp;#x27;t like you, then you&amp;#x27;re out of luck. You&amp;#x27;ll never get them to fix it.</text></item><item><author>iandanforth</author><text>The lede here is somewhat burried:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;From what I’ve since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi&lt;p&gt;This, fundamentally, is why I can’t suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Getting this fixed is actually impossible, and I say that as someone who really, truly, loves solving problems and has made a living off getting phone agents to want to help me.&lt;p&gt;We have submitted copies of his ID four times, my ID twice, multiple photos of credit cards, and various credit card statements. We’ve talked to agents and supervisors at Google Payments and Google Fi. No one is empowered to do anything, and even a well-intentioned agent doesn’t get the same answer from the “security department” twice.&lt;p&gt;I’ve since found hundreds of comments and Reddit threads from people having similar experiences, with almost zero positive conclusions.&lt;p&gt;The only suggestion of a solution we’ve been given is that he abandon both his email address and phone number of the past twenty years and start fresh.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gameswithgo</author><text>&amp;gt;it&amp;#x27;s an unsolvable fraud&amp;#x2F;scammer problem.&lt;p&gt;credit card companies and traditional banks and credit unions handle it fine.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems.&lt;p&gt;if the solution to fraud is un-fixable account freezes, you have not actually solved anything. It is fraud itself.</text></comment>

<story><title>I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi</title><url>https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ploxiln</author><text>This is also a problem with Square, and Stripe, and Paypal ... it&amp;#x27;s an unsolvable fraud&amp;#x2F;scammer problem.&lt;p&gt;Basically, if there was customer support that could fix the problem, then skilled scammers can get money and control out of them. They can do it a lot better than you can get your stuff re-enabled, they know just when to say what to whom.&lt;p&gt;Verizon just accepts the inefficiency, and also over-charges random customers, sometimes hands over control of a phone number to a scammer so they can get auth codes over SMS, has clueless support, etc. Google hasn&amp;#x27;t accepted this way of the world yet (but in scaling up the support has necessarily become disempowered).&lt;p&gt;It is very frustrating. It&amp;#x27;s a nature of things going mass-market. Just a few people, everything can be nice. Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems.</text></item><item><author>ronsor</author><text>This is a general issue with google. If their system decides it doesn&amp;#x27;t like you, then you&amp;#x27;re out of luck. You&amp;#x27;ll never get them to fix it.</text></item><item><author>iandanforth</author><text>The lede here is somewhat burried:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;From what I’ve since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi&lt;p&gt;This, fundamentally, is why I can’t suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore.&lt;p&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Getting this fixed is actually impossible, and I say that as someone who really, truly, loves solving problems and has made a living off getting phone agents to want to help me.&lt;p&gt;We have submitted copies of his ID four times, my ID twice, multiple photos of credit cards, and various credit card statements. We’ve talked to agents and supervisors at Google Payments and Google Fi. No one is empowered to do anything, and even a well-intentioned agent doesn’t get the same answer from the “security department” twice.&lt;p&gt;I’ve since found hundreds of comments and Reddit threads from people having similar experiences, with almost zero positive conclusions.&lt;p&gt;The only suggestion of a solution we’ve been given is that he abandon both his email address and phone number of the past twenty years and start fresh.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>njarboe</author><text>It is too bad that I can&amp;#x27;t pay $50 and&amp;#x2F;or go somewhere in person to try and solve serious problems. This would eliminate most scammers and give people a way to get something done when it is really serious. I would guess this is not done because the PR hit for charging to talk to a person would be bigger than just ignoring certain people&amp;#x27;s problems (or companies don&amp;#x27;t want to have divisions that make more money when the rest of the company screws up, but I doubt that).</text></comment>

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<story><title>AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eyes-supercomputer-efficiency-gains</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rektide</author><text>AMD has done extremely well with multi-chip(let) modules. Zen cores &amp;amp; zen clusters (on Core Chiplet Die, CCD) are wonderfully small, and a huge amount of the regular stuff cores do is relegated to the IO Die (CCX), which is not as cutting edge.&lt;p&gt;But wow there&amp;#x27;s a bunch of power burned on interconnect between CCDs and CCX. And now AMD&amp;#x27;s new southbridge, Promontory 21, made by Asmedia, is another pretty significant power hog, and the flagship X670 tier is powered by two of these.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s absolutely a challenge to bring power down. I&amp;#x27;m incredibly super impressed by AMD&amp;#x27;s showing, &amp;amp; they&amp;#x27;ve done very well. But they&amp;#x27;ve been making trade-offs that have pretty large net impacts, especially if we measure at idle power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>emacs28</author><text>CCX stands for Core Complex&lt;p&gt;CCD stands for Core Complex Die (and neither terms refer to the IO die)</text></comment>

<story><title>AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eyes-supercomputer-efficiency-gains</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rektide</author><text>AMD has done extremely well with multi-chip(let) modules. Zen cores &amp;amp; zen clusters (on Core Chiplet Die, CCD) are wonderfully small, and a huge amount of the regular stuff cores do is relegated to the IO Die (CCX), which is not as cutting edge.&lt;p&gt;But wow there&amp;#x27;s a bunch of power burned on interconnect between CCDs and CCX. And now AMD&amp;#x27;s new southbridge, Promontory 21, made by Asmedia, is another pretty significant power hog, and the flagship X670 tier is powered by two of these.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s absolutely a challenge to bring power down. I&amp;#x27;m incredibly super impressed by AMD&amp;#x27;s showing, &amp;amp; they&amp;#x27;ve done very well. But they&amp;#x27;ve been making trade-offs that have pretty large net impacts, especially if we measure at idle power.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrBuddyCasino</author><text>Manufacturing costs force them to go down the chiplet path. Its actually impressive they can remain competitive at all given TSMCs margin of 67%. [0] If Intel Foundry manages to keep up with TSMC, thats a lot of pricing power advantage over AMD. Or they could make lower-power CPUs that would be uneconomical for AMD.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;stocks&amp;#x2F;charts&amp;#x2F;TSM&amp;#x2F;taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing&amp;#x2F;ebitda-margin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;stocks&amp;#x2F;charts&amp;#x2F;TSM&amp;#x2F;taiwan-semicon...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Buy Newegg gear using Bitcoin</title><url>http://bitspend.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>phamilton</author><text>Here&apos;s my theory (from right field) on where the free lunch is coming from:&lt;p&gt;Bitspend is a hosting company that has invested a lot of extra rack space into mining equipment. They see the giant bubble brewing and have realized that bitcoin needs some legs to stand on. If bitcoin survives, Bitspend&apos;s mining operation makes a huge profit. If it crashes, they lose a lot. So giving people an easy way to use bitcoin as an actual currency rather than a speculative investment has a huge long term benefit for them.&lt;p&gt;Whether my theory is true or not, I think many other heavy mining operations would benefit through similar services. If there are any other big miners out there, I hope you see the value you can add to your investment by doing things like bitspend.</text></comment>

<story><title>Buy Newegg gear using Bitcoin</title><url>http://bitspend.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sdkmvx</author><text>It&apos;s interesting to see that this guy wants to transfer BTC -&amp;#62; USD in the form of Newegg shipments, but I have yet to see anyone major accept Bitcoins directly.&lt;p&gt;Newegg has something of useful value (like a hard drive). Both BTC and USD have no useful value in this sense. The actual item 1 USD is simply a piece of cotton-paper with ink on it. A BTC is a mathematical hash. Nobody major with useful objects accepts BTCs. They accept USDs.&lt;p&gt;I would think that most people trading Bitcoins are just trading it. The price goes up and up because everyone is just buying and buying so they can sell before it goes back down. At some point, enough people are going to randomly decide they&apos;re done and sell at the same time, and the transfer price will go all the way to (near) zero. I haven&apos;t seen many people actively trying to make a real economy out of it. That&apos;s why I have no confidence in Bitcoin.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Portland approves 10% cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge restaurants</title><url>https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/07/portland-approves-10-cap-on-fees-that-food-delivery-apps-can-charge-restaurants.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>labster</author><text>Because tipping restaurant staff is what normal people do when they go out to restaurants in the U.S. Those same people still prepare and package the food, even when someone else delivers it.</text></item><item><author>manigandham</author><text>Why would you tip the restaurant staff?</text></item><item><author>SheinhardtWigCo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also the 15-20% tip, of which the restaurant staff aren&amp;#x27;t getting a cent.</text></item><item><author>boring_twenties</author><text>Doordash seems to have higher menu prices than the restaurants&amp;#x27; own websites, so unless I&amp;#x27;m missing something, it seems the restaurant has the ability to choose to recoup those fees from the customer if they want to.&lt;p&gt;What gets me is that Doordash is triple dipping here. There&amp;#x27;s the fee to the restaurant, which may or may not translate to higher menu item prices. There&amp;#x27;s the fixed $2-5 delivery fee which is pretty obvious. And then there&amp;#x27;s the percentage-based fee in addition to that, 10 or 11% I believe, that&amp;#x27;s kind of hidden along with the taxes.&lt;p&gt;I mean come on. Sometimes I am willing to pay a rather high price to have my food delivered. I&amp;#x27;m not willing to have to fire up Wolfram Alpha just to determine exactly how much higher, though.</text></item><item><author>carlmr</author><text>How about you have to charge the fee to the customer. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t taking 25%. It&amp;#x27;s taking 25% from the restaurant, which means they don&amp;#x27;t have a profit margin left.&lt;p&gt;If for example the pizza is $10 at the restaurant, make that $12.50 with delivery and $10 without. That way the consumer can decide themselves if they want to pay the added amount for delivery, or if they&amp;#x27;d rather walk&amp;#x2F;drive. Right now they charge you $10 and give the restaurant only $7.50 meaning they can&amp;#x27;t make a profit on that pizza.</text></item><item><author>maltelandwehr</author><text>Next week there will be complaints that food delivery services are no longer catering to certain areas. Instead of accepting that it is just not profitable for them, journalists will label it as backslash or an act of punishment. Same thing happened in others states&amp;#x2F;cities that implemented similar rules.&lt;p&gt;The winners are people living in central areas of the city with lots of restaurants. The losers are the poorer outskirts.&lt;p&gt;I fully support the idea behind this rule. But this implementation has been proven to not work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>manigandham</author><text>People tip the waiters &lt;i&gt;when dining in&lt;/i&gt;. Depends on the location if those waiters share with the rest of the staff.&lt;p&gt;Picking up food usually has no tips. Delivery involves tipping the driver, which delivery apps already support and they don&amp;#x27;t take any fees from it.</text></comment>

<story><title>Portland approves 10% cap on fees that food delivery apps can charge restaurants</title><url>https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/07/portland-approves-10-cap-on-fees-that-food-delivery-apps-can-charge-restaurants.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>labster</author><text>Because tipping restaurant staff is what normal people do when they go out to restaurants in the U.S. Those same people still prepare and package the food, even when someone else delivers it.</text></item><item><author>manigandham</author><text>Why would you tip the restaurant staff?</text></item><item><author>SheinhardtWigCo</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also the 15-20% tip, of which the restaurant staff aren&amp;#x27;t getting a cent.</text></item><item><author>boring_twenties</author><text>Doordash seems to have higher menu prices than the restaurants&amp;#x27; own websites, so unless I&amp;#x27;m missing something, it seems the restaurant has the ability to choose to recoup those fees from the customer if they want to.&lt;p&gt;What gets me is that Doordash is triple dipping here. There&amp;#x27;s the fee to the restaurant, which may or may not translate to higher menu item prices. There&amp;#x27;s the fixed $2-5 delivery fee which is pretty obvious. And then there&amp;#x27;s the percentage-based fee in addition to that, 10 or 11% I believe, that&amp;#x27;s kind of hidden along with the taxes.&lt;p&gt;I mean come on. Sometimes I am willing to pay a rather high price to have my food delivered. I&amp;#x27;m not willing to have to fire up Wolfram Alpha just to determine exactly how much higher, though.</text></item><item><author>carlmr</author><text>How about you have to charge the fee to the customer. The issue isn&amp;#x27;t taking 25%. It&amp;#x27;s taking 25% from the restaurant, which means they don&amp;#x27;t have a profit margin left.&lt;p&gt;If for example the pizza is $10 at the restaurant, make that $12.50 with delivery and $10 without. That way the consumer can decide themselves if they want to pay the added amount for delivery, or if they&amp;#x27;d rather walk&amp;#x2F;drive. Right now they charge you $10 and give the restaurant only $7.50 meaning they can&amp;#x27;t make a profit on that pizza.</text></item><item><author>maltelandwehr</author><text>Next week there will be complaints that food delivery services are no longer catering to certain areas. Instead of accepting that it is just not profitable for them, journalists will label it as backslash or an act of punishment. Same thing happened in others states&amp;#x2F;cities that implemented similar rules.&lt;p&gt;The winners are people living in central areas of the city with lots of restaurants. The losers are the poorer outskirts.&lt;p&gt;I fully support the idea behind this rule. But this implementation has been proven to not work.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kccqzy</author><text>When you go to a restaurant, you sit down, occupy valuable table space, and have staff service you by bringing the food to you, filling your drinks, and providing you with napkins and cutlery. That&amp;#x27;s why you tip.</text></comment>

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<story><title>A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut</title><url>https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tibbon</author><text>When CEOs say they take full responsibility, I think they should take a material cut in equity and compensation. Otherwise it is just empty words for them to feel no consequences except a better balance sheet.&lt;p&gt;Or better yet, step down and let someone else run the show</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coredog64</author><text>This came up in the Patreon discussion yesterday. Twilio is giving decent severance packages (12 weeks plus week per year of service) and is accelerating vesting. Both of those impact the bottom line and should have a material impact on C-suite compensation.</text></comment>

<story><title>A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut</title><url>https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-lawson</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tibbon</author><text>When CEOs say they take full responsibility, I think they should take a material cut in equity and compensation. Otherwise it is just empty words for them to feel no consequences except a better balance sheet.&lt;p&gt;Or better yet, step down and let someone else run the show</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josho</author><text>The incentives here are wrong.&lt;p&gt;During the early phase of a company the goal is growth. Hire. Scale. Build. Win the land grab at all costs.&lt;p&gt;Years later when growth has slowed it becomes important to transition to operational efficiency. For many startups that means lowering headcount some just from attrition, but right now it seems layoffs is in style to accelerate the transition.&lt;p&gt;Regardless, investors pushed the CEO to grow fast. Under the current model it isn&amp;#x27;t fair to punish the CEO for executing on their mandate. I acknowledge it isn&amp;#x27;t fair to the employees either. Just offering a different perspective.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Plans for OCaml 4.08</title><url>https://blog.janestreet.com/plans-for-ocaml-408/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>a0</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really great seeing this contributions from JaneStreet. If you&amp;#x27;re interested in learning more about recent progress in the OCaml&amp;#x27;s ecosystem, I recommend watching this talk: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infoq.com&amp;#x2F;presentations&amp;#x2F;ocaml-browser-iot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.infoq.com&amp;#x2F;presentations&amp;#x2F;ocaml-browser-iot&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Plans for OCaml 4.08</title><url>https://blog.janestreet.com/plans-for-ocaml-408/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdonaldson</author><text>OCaml is a great pick for folks wanting to broaden their understanding of prog languages. It has its own set of sensibilities (Fp with some imperative features thown in, rather than the other way around). It&amp;#x27;ll force you to get really good with ADTs, which is a good thing.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Google Offices to Mandate Vaccines</title><url>https://www.axios.com/google-office-mandate-vaccines-covid-b29a4993-9bdd-4c15-8b8a-e94fe4240878.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panther34543</author><text>Ugg, why doesn&amp;#x27;t anybody, whether it be government officials, employers, whatever, ever consider those with natural immunity?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like some weird joke. The official CDC estimates over 115 MILLION natural infections in the U.S. alone, &lt;i&gt;and that only accounts for February 2020-March 2021&lt;/i&gt;. It doesn&amp;#x27;t account for all the infections before February 2020 (I and most of my coworkers in downtown SF got it in January) nor any of the infections of the last 4 months, so that number should probably be at 130-140 million or more.&lt;p&gt;Yet, for some unknown reason, natural infection is NEVER talked about anywhere. Why? There&amp;#x27;s an absolute ton of natural immunity that isn&amp;#x27;t being talked about or considered and it&amp;#x27;s very, very, strange. Many people have no intention of taking the vaccine because they prefer natural immunity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_djo_</author><text>Natural immunity is not as well understood as vaccine response and longevity for COVID-19. There&amp;#x27;s also increasing evidence that newer variants like Delta present a significant reinfection risk for those who were infected with the wildtype or even Alpha six or more months before.</text></comment>

<story><title>Google Offices to Mandate Vaccines</title><url>https://www.axios.com/google-office-mandate-vaccines-covid-b29a4993-9bdd-4c15-8b8a-e94fe4240878.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Panther34543</author><text>Ugg, why doesn&amp;#x27;t anybody, whether it be government officials, employers, whatever, ever consider those with natural immunity?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like some weird joke. The official CDC estimates over 115 MILLION natural infections in the U.S. alone, &lt;i&gt;and that only accounts for February 2020-March 2021&lt;/i&gt;. It doesn&amp;#x27;t account for all the infections before February 2020 (I and most of my coworkers in downtown SF got it in January) nor any of the infections of the last 4 months, so that number should probably be at 130-140 million or more.&lt;p&gt;Yet, for some unknown reason, natural infection is NEVER talked about anywhere. Why? There&amp;#x27;s an absolute ton of natural immunity that isn&amp;#x27;t being talked about or considered and it&amp;#x27;s very, very, strange. Many people have no intention of taking the vaccine because they prefer natural immunity.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thisiscorrect</author><text>Apparently 67.6% of India has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies [1]. This can&amp;#x27;t be attributed to vaccination since nowhere near that percentage of India has had a vaccine for it.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;india&amp;#x2F;india-covid-antibodies-study-intl-hnk&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;22&amp;#x2F;india&amp;#x2F;india-covid-antibodies-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell</title><url>https://github.com/nushell/nushell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anticodon</author><text>PowerShell from Microsoft is looking too alien on Unix. Just looking at the syntax I already feel uncomfortable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard for me to criticize it because I haven&amp;#x27;t used it, but it looks like it was designed by a committee and overdesigned. I.e. it wasn&amp;#x27;t created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem. It looks like some boss decided: &amp;quot;They have shells, so we should have it also. But we will make it much cooler. So, let&amp;#x27;s gather a committee of 500 of our best managers and let&amp;#x27;s decide what features it should have&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It looks artificial and inconvenient to me unlike Unix shells. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m wrong. But I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that even syntax of PS makes it harder to type the commands. Unix commands are very short (many are 2-4 letters long), all lowercase and do not contain characters which are hard to type (e.g. `-`).</text></item><item><author>jupp0r</author><text>powershell for unix is ... powershell: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;powershell&amp;#x2F;scripting&amp;#x2F;install&amp;#x2F;installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-7.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;powershell&amp;#x2F;scripting&amp;#x2F;instal...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>hyperpallium2</author><text>Need some description up front, not in the 5th section (&amp;quot;Philosophy&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nushell&amp;#x2F;nushell#philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nushell&amp;#x2F;nushell#philosophy&lt;/a&gt;). Some ideas:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;powershell for unix&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;structured pipes&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pre-parsed text&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;small, useful, typed tools loosely coupled.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skissane</author><text>PowerShell was started by a single person, Microsoft&amp;#x27;s Jeffrey Snover. As the project progressed other designers came on board but Snover remained (and remains) as Chief Architect. The design-by-committee allegation isn&amp;#x27;t being fair to him.&lt;p&gt;Part of why PowerShell may seem not quite Unix-like, is Snover didn&amp;#x27;t just look at Unix as an influence. Snover&amp;#x27;s professional background included experience with IBM OS&amp;#x2F;400&amp;#x27;s CL shell and OpenVMS&amp;#x27;s DCL, and his experience with both systems influenced PowerShell&amp;#x27;s design.</text></comment>

<story><title>GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell</title><url>https://github.com/nushell/nushell</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anticodon</author><text>PowerShell from Microsoft is looking too alien on Unix. Just looking at the syntax I already feel uncomfortable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard for me to criticize it because I haven&amp;#x27;t used it, but it looks like it was designed by a committee and overdesigned. I.e. it wasn&amp;#x27;t created from the need, like someone at Microsoft wanted to automate his work and created PS to solve his problem. It looks like some boss decided: &amp;quot;They have shells, so we should have it also. But we will make it much cooler. So, let&amp;#x27;s gather a committee of 500 of our best managers and let&amp;#x27;s decide what features it should have&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It looks artificial and inconvenient to me unlike Unix shells. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m wrong. But I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that even syntax of PS makes it harder to type the commands. Unix commands are very short (many are 2-4 letters long), all lowercase and do not contain characters which are hard to type (e.g. `-`).</text></item><item><author>jupp0r</author><text>powershell for unix is ... powershell: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;powershell&amp;#x2F;scripting&amp;#x2F;install&amp;#x2F;installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-7.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&amp;#x2F;en-us&amp;#x2F;powershell&amp;#x2F;scripting&amp;#x2F;instal...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>hyperpallium2</author><text>Need some description up front, not in the 5th section (&amp;quot;Philosophy&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nushell&amp;#x2F;nushell#philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nushell&amp;#x2F;nushell#philosophy&lt;/a&gt;). Some ideas:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;powershell for unix&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;structured pipes&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pre-parsed text&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;small, useful, typed tools loosely coupled.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>13of40</author><text>&amp;gt; They have shells, so we should have it also&lt;p&gt;The thought process was more like &amp;quot;You can either hire a dude to do it by mouse in MMC or you can get someone with a masters in CS to do it in DCOM. We need a middle ground.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Source: was in the room</text></comment>

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<story><title>Craigslist&apos;s Allegations Of &quot;Copyright&quot; Violations Thrown Out</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/04/30/craigslists-allegations-of-copyright-violations-thrown-out/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DannyBee</author><text>This is actually not a great decision so far. I skimmed the decision from PACER (so the below may be wrong or missing facts), and it looks like (and remember, this is just a preliminary decision by the court) that the court found&lt;p&gt;1. The individual posts were copyrightable&lt;p&gt;2. The compilation (whose only creativity is being organized by geographic area), was copyrightable (because &quot;“deciding which categories to include and under what name,”&quot; met the minimal level of creativity necessary for copyright)&lt;p&gt;3. Craigslist&apos;s eventually lost the copyright claims because the TOU was not an exclusive license (in the US, only an exclusive rights owner can sue for infringement, licensesees cannot)&lt;p&gt;4. Craigslist did not need to register the actual posts it&apos;s suing over, only the compilation&lt;p&gt;#1 is maybe right (i think it depends on the post)&lt;p&gt;#2 should be clearly wrong, though there is a bit of bad precedent here&lt;p&gt;#3 is good, but the judge basically suggested with the right set of words buried in the terms of use, craigslist could have transferred copyright. This is actually really dangerous in practice (you want people to know exactly what they are getting into), because you really want copyright transfers to be clear and knowing by users, and buried somewhere in a separate TOU document, plus a button says &quot;by clicking you accept the TOU&quot;, shouldn&apos;t be enough.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is just a preliminary decision based on minimal briefing, so i&apos;m hopeful the judge would have gotten it &quot;righter&quot; had those claims not been dismissed.&lt;p&gt;#4 is probably wrong, in the sense that registering &quot;craigslist.org&quot; as a compilation, should not count as registering &lt;i&gt;all the works that have ever appeared on craigslist.org&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;At best, it should be registering the works that appeared as of the copyright registration date for craigslist.org.&lt;p&gt;The compilation registered in 2012 is titled &quot;Craigslist website 2012 (Homepage and primary supporting pages)&quot;&lt;p&gt;That should not be &quot;all posts&quot;. There are also two compilation registrations for post.craigslist.org, one in 2004, one in 2008.&lt;p&gt;None of these should be sufficient to claim what they did.</text></comment>

<story><title>Craigslist&apos;s Allegations Of &quot;Copyright&quot; Violations Thrown Out</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/derekkhanna/2013/04/30/craigslists-allegations-of-copyright-violations-thrown-out/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ultimoo</author><text>&quot;Craiglist has been recognized for a failure to innovate and having among the internet’s worst terms of service’s.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Wow, that is quite a way to open an article! Isn&apos;t journalism supposed to be slightly more neutral than that. I understand that most of us (myself included) are quite against copyrighting, DRM and closed source etc. but let&apos;s not harshly rebuke a company with 30 employees [1]. Simply put, copyright is a contract between the society and an individual that encourages the individual to create, innovate and be artistic. Craigslist did things that they thought were right to protect their users&apos; and their own interests. They found a market. Padmapper used their data. Courts said it is ok to do so since they didn&apos;t the copyright to begin with. Fine, let&apos;s move on.&lt;p&gt;No reason to write such a bitter sounding article peppered with &quot;Let this be a lesson to all tech companies&quot;, &quot;hopefully this will discourage craigslist&quot;, and &quot;sledgehammer to scare innovators&quot;. tsk. tsk. Forbes.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Undiscoverable UI Madness</title><url>https://birchtree.me/blog/undiscoverable-ui-madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robenkleene</author><text>The difference between macOS and iOS isn&amp;#x27;t about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there&amp;#x27;s no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession.&lt;p&gt;macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple&amp;#x27;s provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much &lt;i&gt;effort&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it&amp;#x27;s weakest users, it&amp;#x27;s what it&amp;#x27;s more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyboardmaestro.com&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyboardmaestro.com&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;obdev.at&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;launchbar&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;obdev.at&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;launchbar&amp;#x2F;index.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robenkleene</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll add the best thing Apple could do to fix iPadOS is make the developers working on it bootstrap[0] it. E.g., by running some version of Xcode on it (or CLI tools until they have Xcode working). Those developer would then fix it right up.&lt;p&gt;I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it&amp;#x27;s a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; task for computers, everything else stems from it.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bootstrapping_(compilers)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bootstrapping_(compilers)&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>Undiscoverable UI Madness</title><url>https://birchtree.me/blog/undiscoverable-ui-madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>robenkleene</author><text>The difference between macOS and iOS isn&amp;#x27;t about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there&amp;#x27;s no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession.&lt;p&gt;macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple&amp;#x27;s provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much &lt;i&gt;effort&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it&amp;#x27;s weakest users, it&amp;#x27;s what it&amp;#x27;s more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyboardmaestro.com&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.keyboardmaestro.com&amp;#x2F;main&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;obdev.at&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;launchbar&amp;#x2F;index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;obdev.at&amp;#x2F;products&amp;#x2F;launchbar&amp;#x2F;index.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deepspace</author><text>My iPad is probably my most-used device, but it is also the device that I most often feel like throwing at a wall. Wading through quicksand is exactly how it feels like to do anything &amp;quot;advanced&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the madness that is the Files interface. Far too often I find myself selecting a file, wanting to do something simple with it (like move it to a a location managed by another app) and just being &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;stuck&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;. Again, the quicksand feeling. I just want to get to &lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;that place right over there a few steps away&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;, but there is no obvious way of getting there.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x2F;rant</text></comment>

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<story><title>How I&apos;m still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal</title><url>https://www.lucasfcosta.com/2019/02/10/terminal-guide-2019.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rhinoceraptor</author><text>Using the terminal at least makes you proficient with the lowest common denominator of tools.&lt;p&gt;I know I can SSH into any random machine, and edit a config with the copy of vi&amp;#x2F;vim it has, even if it doesn&amp;#x27;t have my fancy plugins.&lt;p&gt;And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt&amp;#x2F;Brew&amp;#x2F;etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.</text></item><item><author>plexicle</author><text>&amp;quot;Not every machine has VSCode, Sublime or Atom installed, but every machine has a terminal.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I love that the article goes from this sentence immediately to:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;These are the main programs I use to make my terminal a complete development environment:&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And proceeds to list 5 different programs, some of which are only available on macOS.&lt;p&gt;Brilliant.&lt;p&gt;Edit: One of which are only available*. My point isn&amp;#x27;t that there isn&amp;#x27;t a place for GUI and terminal, it&amp;#x27;s that &amp;quot;not every machine has x and y software&amp;quot; is a fruitless argument.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warent</author><text>Still though, the article feels overkill. I use VSCode for example and I&amp;#x27;m still comfortable enough with a terminal to vi&amp;#x2F;vim, install&amp;#x2F;update, manipulate files, search, etc. Yet I&amp;#x27;m not nearly as productive vim as I am with VSCode.&lt;p&gt;Basically it doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be an all-or-nothing sort of deal. Just find the combination that makes you productive, and if you find that your productivity is suffering because of one of your tools then address it accordingly.&lt;p&gt;So far this article reads more like a zealous hyperbolic &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter if you think you&amp;#x27;re productive. You&amp;#x27;re deceiving yourself and your tools are trash&amp;quot;</text></comment>

<story><title>How I&apos;m still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal</title><url>https://www.lucasfcosta.com/2019/02/10/terminal-guide-2019.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rhinoceraptor</author><text>Using the terminal at least makes you proficient with the lowest common denominator of tools.&lt;p&gt;I know I can SSH into any random machine, and edit a config with the copy of vi&amp;#x2F;vim it has, even if it doesn&amp;#x27;t have my fancy plugins.&lt;p&gt;And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt&amp;#x2F;Brew&amp;#x2F;etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.</text></item><item><author>plexicle</author><text>&amp;quot;Not every machine has VSCode, Sublime or Atom installed, but every machine has a terminal.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I love that the article goes from this sentence immediately to:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;These are the main programs I use to make my terminal a complete development environment:&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;And proceeds to list 5 different programs, some of which are only available on macOS.&lt;p&gt;Brilliant.&lt;p&gt;Edit: One of which are only available*. My point isn&amp;#x27;t that there isn&amp;#x27;t a place for GUI and terminal, it&amp;#x27;s that &amp;quot;not every machine has x and y software&amp;quot; is a fruitless argument.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eitland</author><text>&amp;gt; And if I get a new machine, all I have to do is install my tools via Apt&amp;#x2F;Brew&amp;#x2F;etc, clone my dotfiles repo, and run an install script.&lt;p&gt;If I get a new machine I only install&lt;p&gt;- dotnet core&lt;p&gt;- Visual Studio Code&lt;p&gt;Finished.&lt;p&gt;Both are available on all &lt;i&gt;mainstream&lt;/i&gt; platforms that you might want to use, including Linux, Windows and Mac.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Bolivia says Morales&apos; plane diverted, apparently over Snowden</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/03/us-usa-security-snowden-bolivia-idUSBRE9611AT20130703</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jgrahamc</author><text>FlightRadar24 has the recorded track of his flight, FAB1, here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flightradar24.com/#!/2013-07-02/16:35/FAB1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.flightradar24.com&amp;#x2F;#!&amp;#x2F;2013-07-02&amp;#x2F;16:35&amp;#x2F;FAB1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The odd thing about the claim that Snowden was aboard is that FAB1 took off from Vnukovo but Snowden is apparently in Sheremetyevo.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a picture of plane turning round over Austria and then descending and landing in Vienna: &lt;a href=&quot;http://i.imgur.com/cuUQkWV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;cuUQkWV.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: News reports say that FAB1 is leaving VIE shortly and it is now appearing on FlightRadar24&amp;#x27;s live view.</text></comment>

<story><title>Bolivia says Morales&apos; plane diverted, apparently over Snowden</title><url>http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/03/us-usa-security-snowden-bolivia-idUSBRE9611AT20130703</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>osivertsson</author><text>Guardian is doing pretty good live reporting on this fascinating story: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden-asylum-live&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.guardian.co.uk&amp;#x2F;world&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;jul&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;edward-snowden-a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

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<story><title>Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-04/microsoft-hopes-openai-s-chatbot-will-make-bing-smarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spion</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found the greatest success with ChatGPT when I use it as a learning &amp;#x2F; exploration tool. If there is a topic I don&amp;#x27;t know much about, I can state the question in a fairly stupid way and ChatGPT will give me vocabulary options to explore.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could describe a probabilistic process to it and ask it what kind of distribution &amp;#x2F; process it is. Then, based on the extensive words you get back, you can continue your research on Google.&lt;p&gt;As such I think search engine integration is a really great idea, looking something like the follows&lt;p&gt;-&amp;gt; user: Hey searh engine, I have a thing that can happen with certain probability of success, and it runs repeatedly every 15 minutes. Could you tell me what kind of process this is and how to calculate the probability of 5 consecutive events in 24 hours?&lt;p&gt;-&amp;gt; engine: It sounds like you are describing a Bernoulli process. In a Bernoulli process, there are only two possible outcomes for each trial: success or failure. The probability of success is constant from trial to trial, and the trials are independent, meaning that the outcome of one trial does not affect the outcome of any other trial.&lt;p&gt;Here are some results on how to calculate probability of consecutive successes in a bernouli trial (result list follows)&lt;p&gt;(Note: if you try to ask this from ChatGPT it will not actually give you a correct answer for the calculation itself as there are some subtleties in the problem. But search results of &amp;quot;bernoulli process&amp;quot; will tend to contain very reliable information on the topic)&lt;p&gt;Edit: You could even just say &amp;quot;could you give me good search queries to use for the following problem&amp;quot; and use the results of that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m3kw9</author><text>My experience is that gpt gives me a very good looking answer, but when doing a cross check, it’s often slight wrong or out right wrong</text></comment>

<story><title>Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-04/microsoft-hopes-openai-s-chatbot-will-make-bing-smarter</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>spion</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found the greatest success with ChatGPT when I use it as a learning &amp;#x2F; exploration tool. If there is a topic I don&amp;#x27;t know much about, I can state the question in a fairly stupid way and ChatGPT will give me vocabulary options to explore.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could describe a probabilistic process to it and ask it what kind of distribution &amp;#x2F; process it is. Then, based on the extensive words you get back, you can continue your research on Google.&lt;p&gt;As such I think search engine integration is a really great idea, looking something like the follows&lt;p&gt;-&amp;gt; user: Hey searh engine, I have a thing that can happen with certain probability of success, and it runs repeatedly every 15 minutes. Could you tell me what kind of process this is and how to calculate the probability of 5 consecutive events in 24 hours?&lt;p&gt;-&amp;gt; engine: It sounds like you are describing a Bernoulli process. In a Bernoulli process, there are only two possible outcomes for each trial: success or failure. The probability of success is constant from trial to trial, and the trials are independent, meaning that the outcome of one trial does not affect the outcome of any other trial.&lt;p&gt;Here are some results on how to calculate probability of consecutive successes in a bernouli trial (result list follows)&lt;p&gt;(Note: if you try to ask this from ChatGPT it will not actually give you a correct answer for the calculation itself as there are some subtleties in the problem. But search results of &amp;quot;bernoulli process&amp;quot; will tend to contain very reliable information on the topic)&lt;p&gt;Edit: You could even just say &amp;quot;could you give me good search queries to use for the following problem&amp;quot; and use the results of that.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MuffinFlavored</author><text>For me it&amp;#x27;s a weird mixup in my brain of &amp;quot;interactive Google&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I know the results I&amp;#x27;m going to get back are basically the same as if I went to Google, ran a query, it returns me their top 3-5 scraped &amp;quot;blog articles&amp;quot; based on relevancy, and then I ran it through one of those condensing&amp;#x2F;summarizing bots.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure why it&amp;#x27;s as therapeutic as it is basically interacting with a search engine.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this kind of technology will remain free for the foreseeable future. Google has to be coming up with something shortly, right? It&amp;#x27;s interactive search engine results &amp;quot;on steroids&amp;quot; (I think? I can&amp;#x27;t tell me if brain is tricking me to be biased that it&amp;#x27;s cooler&amp;#x2F;more useful than it is. Everybody I tell about it non-tech isn&amp;#x27;t that impressed&amp;#x2F;feels it&amp;#x27;s spammy&amp;#x2F;crufty&amp;#x2F;formulaic).</text></comment>

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<story><title>Understanding ProRAW</title><url>https://blog.halide.cam/understanding-proraw-4eed556d4c54</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hughes</author><text>If a mirrorless digital camera company ever made their software anywhere near as good as this, or if Apple ever brought their software expertise to a device with a full-frame format sensor and lens mount, they would absolutely dominate that market.</text></comment>

<story><title>Understanding ProRAW</title><url>https://blog.halide.cam/understanding-proraw-4eed556d4c54</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lmilcin</author><text>I find people misunderstand what RAW is about and what and who it is for.&lt;p&gt;If you think your pictures are better, you are deluding yourself the same way audiophiles moan about qualities of their high end, thousand dollar per feet audio cables.&lt;p&gt;I use RAW files and full manual because I have an actual workflow where I shoot a bunch of photos in similar setting and want to be able to create Lightroom preset and apply to all photos shot with same place, lighting and exposure.&lt;p&gt;It also sometimes saves me because when I am super clumsy and forget to calculate and adjust exposure I may get a photo that is under or overexposed a lot but for some reason I still want to keep it.&lt;p&gt;No, it is not going to let you make better pictures. If you want to make better pictures here are some things that are infinitely more productive to achieve that:&lt;p&gt;- try to do some exercises like trying to move about, compose and visualize your shot before taking the photo,&lt;p&gt;- try another exercise and for 6 months only take a single photo whenever you see an occasion to make photos,&lt;p&gt;- try another exercise and for 6 months only go about with a single primary lens (I have used original Fuji X100 to not be tempted, with great results),&lt;p&gt;- try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range,&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;p&gt;Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better.</text></comment>

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<story><title>Yield Curves Invert in U.S., U.K</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/u-k-yield-curve-inverts-for-first-time-since-financial-crisis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>The Fed does not have the tools at its disposal that it did in 2008, they have been exhausted. The leadership on either side of the 2008 transition was much better at every level. Also, 2008 was a balance sheet depression that was more tractable to fix with monetary approaches.&lt;p&gt;What is happening, right now, is literally what happened in the Great Depression (with the concurrent reemergence of nationalism) and is what led to two back-to-back world wars &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dartmouth.edu&amp;#x2F;~dirwin&amp;#x2F;Eichengreen-IrwinJEH.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dartmouth.edu&amp;#x2F;~dirwin&amp;#x2F;Eichengreen-IrwinJEH.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>tlogan</author><text>And things will be worse because China is also heading into recession.&lt;p&gt;You know, you need sell all these products to somebody... And when US consumer stops buying new iPhones (or what ever) combined with recession then situation is going be really really tough.&lt;p&gt;So this will be worse that 2008. Much worse. Back in 2008, China was growing and helping to ease the recession. I do not think China&amp;#x27;s economy will grow during this cycle.</text></item><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>Everyone serious knew that a trade war would set a recession in motion, and that it would be a trade war the US would lose because of the directionality of the trade. The thought has always been that the president was using a high leverage negotiating strategy (see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.newyorker.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-desk&amp;#x2F;for-trump-diplomacy-is-quite-literally-a-four-letter-word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.newyorker.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-desk&amp;#x2F;for-trump-diplomacy...&lt;/a&gt;, for example) to extract maximal concessions from PRC. But in the end, most of the people involving in mid and long range investment decisions thought that they could model him as a rational actor. What we are seeing is the investment community&amp;#x27;s realization this might not be true. You can look for many recent examples of shifts in investment activity (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.autoblog.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;ford-gm-preparing-for-economic-downturn&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.autoblog.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;ford-gm-preparing-for-ec...&lt;/a&gt;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ianai</author><text>Dates for WW1: 7&amp;#x2F;28&amp;#x2F;1914-11&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;1918&lt;p&gt;Dates for WW2: 9&amp;#x2F;1&amp;#x2F;1939-9&amp;#x2F;2&amp;#x2F;1945&lt;p&gt;Dates for Great Depression: 10&amp;#x2F;29&amp;#x2F;1929 to 1939</text></comment>

<story><title>Yield Curves Invert in U.S., U.K</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-14/u-k-yield-curve-inverts-for-first-time-since-financial-crisis</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>The Fed does not have the tools at its disposal that it did in 2008, they have been exhausted. The leadership on either side of the 2008 transition was much better at every level. Also, 2008 was a balance sheet depression that was more tractable to fix with monetary approaches.&lt;p&gt;What is happening, right now, is literally what happened in the Great Depression (with the concurrent reemergence of nationalism) and is what led to two back-to-back world wars &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dartmouth.edu&amp;#x2F;~dirwin&amp;#x2F;Eichengreen-IrwinJEH.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.dartmouth.edu&amp;#x2F;~dirwin&amp;#x2F;Eichengreen-IrwinJEH.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>tlogan</author><text>And things will be worse because China is also heading into recession.&lt;p&gt;You know, you need sell all these products to somebody... And when US consumer stops buying new iPhones (or what ever) combined with recession then situation is going be really really tough.&lt;p&gt;So this will be worse that 2008. Much worse. Back in 2008, China was growing and helping to ease the recession. I do not think China&amp;#x27;s economy will grow during this cycle.</text></item><item><author>throwaway5752</author><text>Everyone serious knew that a trade war would set a recession in motion, and that it would be a trade war the US would lose because of the directionality of the trade. The thought has always been that the president was using a high leverage negotiating strategy (see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.newyorker.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-desk&amp;#x2F;for-trump-diplomacy-is-quite-literally-a-four-letter-word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.newyorker.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-desk&amp;#x2F;for-trump-diplomacy...&lt;/a&gt;, for example) to extract maximal concessions from PRC. But in the end, most of the people involving in mid and long range investment decisions thought that they could model him as a rational actor. What we are seeing is the investment community&amp;#x27;s realization this might not be true. You can look for many recent examples of shifts in investment activity (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.autoblog.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;ford-gm-preparing-for-economic-downturn&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.autoblog.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;ford-gm-preparing-for-ec...&lt;/a&gt;).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>quotemstr</author><text>The great depression was after one of those wars. I think you can make a case that the global economic and social excesses of the 1920s led to a hard crash, the rise of aggressive ideological movements, and, eventually, the second world war. The first world war was something else entirely, the last gasp of the old &amp;quot;Concert of Europe&amp;quot; balance of power stuff. After the first world war, the world was a completely different place and different rules applied.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Firefox 128 enables &quot;privacy-preserving&quot; ad measurements by default</title><url>https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_way</author><text>Web needs to make money. Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?&lt;p&gt;I myself do not like ads or tracking, but we need to be realistic and there needs a way to make web sustainable.&lt;p&gt;How to do that and making sure that monopolies like Google are in check is a valid concern though, but in these conversations is the only point I hear. Ironically Google does not even need these apis because it already has so much data on users, it is primarily for smaller companies.</text></item><item><author>account42</author><text>&amp;gt; The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it is privacy-preserving.&lt;p&gt;It is strictly less privacy-preserving than not implementing this &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; that has zero benefit to the user running the browser. At the very least it pings yet another third party, most likely it effectively leaks much more.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The best objection to these proposals isn&amp;#x27;t privacy, it&amp;#x27;s that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category.&lt;p&gt;That is a very very generous assumption of the browser makers&amp;#x27; goals. Particularily when one of them IS an online advertising company and another one is almost exclusively funded by said advertising company. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.</text></item><item><author>doe_eyes</author><text>The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; privacy-preserving. The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad.&lt;p&gt;The best objection to these proposals isn&amp;#x27;t privacy, it&amp;#x27;s that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>worble</author><text>&amp;gt;Web needs to make money.&lt;p&gt;No, it doesn&amp;#x27;t. I have no issue with it making money, but that was neither the original purpose of the web nor is it an end goal for everyone using it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?&lt;p&gt;This statement is unconnected to the first. The way people just link &amp;quot;web&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;money&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;advertising&amp;quot; without even stopping to think that there might be alternatives is exactly why everything online is in such a sad state of affairs.</text></comment>

<story><title>Firefox 128 enables &quot;privacy-preserving&quot; ad measurements by default</title><url>https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>no_way</author><text>Web needs to make money. Giving tools to advertisers while making sure user privacy is preserved is better than free reign of tracking we have before, no?&lt;p&gt;I myself do not like ads or tracking, but we need to be realistic and there needs a way to make web sustainable.&lt;p&gt;How to do that and making sure that monopolies like Google are in check is a valid concern though, but in these conversations is the only point I hear. Ironically Google does not even need these apis because it already has so much data on users, it is primarily for smaller companies.</text></item><item><author>account42</author><text>&amp;gt; The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it is privacy-preserving.&lt;p&gt;It is strictly less privacy-preserving than not implementing this &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; that has zero benefit to the user running the browser. At the very least it pings yet another third party, most likely it effectively leaks much more.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The best objection to these proposals isn&amp;#x27;t privacy, it&amp;#x27;s that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category.&lt;p&gt;That is a very very generous assumption of the browser makers&amp;#x27; goals. Particularily when one of them IS an online advertising company and another one is almost exclusively funded by said advertising company. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.</text></item><item><author>doe_eyes</author><text>The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; privacy-preserving. The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad.&lt;p&gt;The best objection to these proposals isn&amp;#x27;t privacy, it&amp;#x27;s that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Opinions differ, but all major browser vendors are in the latter category.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>prepend</author><text>&amp;gt; Web needs to make money&lt;p&gt;I don’t think this is true. No one “needs” to make money. Museums don’t need to make money. OSS doesn’t need to make money.&lt;p&gt;The web has value without making money.&lt;p&gt;But even if it does make money, it doesn’t need to maximize profits at the expense of user privacy and joy.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50</title><url>https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-09-09/cia-chile-scandal-50</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>If you have fatigue from years of reading about all sorts of underhanded spy action and diplomatic choices, one noteworthy thing about this writeup is that it shows multiple US officials who seemed to be acting with integrity and admirable values.&lt;p&gt;One of the earlier times I was reading about underhandedness, it involved a US ambassador raising red flags about grave human rights abuses by the foreign gov&amp;#x27;t. For whatever reason, that ambassador was replaced by one who would publicly deny what was going on. At the time I read that (long after it happened), I paid attention to the latter, villain ambassador, but not enough attention to the earlier ambassador, who seemed to be on the right side.&lt;p&gt;A bit like the saying from Mister Rogers lore, &amp;quot;Look for the helpers.&amp;quot;[1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.goodreads.com&amp;#x2F;quotes&amp;#x2F;198594-when-i-was-a-boy-and-i-would-see-scary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.goodreads.com&amp;#x2F;quotes&amp;#x2F;198594-when-i-was-a-boy-and...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>

<story><title>The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50</title><url>https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2024-09-09/cia-chile-scandal-50</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>m_a_g</author><text>What the US did in South America is appalling, and I can&amp;#x27;t believe they got away with it.&lt;p&gt;The women of Calama have been searching for decades for their children, brothers, and husbands who disappeared during the dictatorship of Pinochet.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>TCP is an underspecified two-node consensus algorithm</title><url>https://morsmachine.dk/tcp-consensus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nh2</author><text>shutdown() and half-closes are not &amp;quot;archaic&amp;quot; features.&lt;p&gt;You need them to get even the basic stuff right (see &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.netherlabs.nl&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;18&amp;#x2F;the-ultimate-so_linger-page-or-why-is-my-tcp-not-reliable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.netherlabs.nl&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2009&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;18&amp;#x2F;the-ultimate-...&lt;/a&gt;) and you need it even more to implement &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; application layer protocols like HTTP2 (if you don&amp;#x27;t use it, you get data loss bugs like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;trac.nginx.org&amp;#x2F;nginx&amp;#x2F;ticket&amp;#x2F;1250#comment:4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;trac.nginx.org&amp;#x2F;nginx&amp;#x2F;ticket&amp;#x2F;1250#comment:4&lt;/a&gt;).</text></comment>

<story><title>TCP is an underspecified two-node consensus algorithm</title><url>https://morsmachine.dk/tcp-consensus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>teknopaul</author><text>I dont grok this, if tcp&amp;#x27;s model has fundamental problems how come the Internet works. :)&lt;p&gt;The fact that a protocol technically is not perfect and causes jip for isps does not mean the application layer has to get involved.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been writing tcp based apps for years and the stream abstraction has never failed me. After reading this I dont see why I should change that assumption? I have to rebuild connections occasionally but its never cost my application so much that an alternative more complicated abstraction layer made sense. I usually write req&amp;#x2F;response over tcp, an even more inaccurate abstraction. Occasionally nonblocking code. Never have I wanted more complexity than nio in my application layer.&lt;p&gt;Devs do know that &amp;quot;tcp is not a stream of bytes&amp;quot; but deliberately do not want to get app code involved.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>Rejected Then Recruited: Our Journey into Y Combinator</title><url>https://repl.it/site/blog/yc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>plinkplonk</author><text>&amp;quot;The YC partner I met had the feedback that an online REPL is not really a startup -- it&amp;#x27;s just a fun toy -- and that instead, I should join another company building a superficially similar technology.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Interesting, especially since PG has stated that many a good company looks like &amp;quot;just a fun toy&amp;quot; in the beginning. I&amp;#x27;d have thought that would be a heuristic YC folks keep in mind, and not use it to dismiss an idea.</text></comment>

<story><title>Rejected Then Recruited: Our Journey into Y Combinator</title><url>https://repl.it/site/blog/yc</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ciacci1234</author><text>repl.it was one of the first platforms I used as I began my journey into the tech world. I very much appreciate the hard work and hours Amjad, Haya, and the rest of the team have put into their product.&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, I take a little issue with a YC partner saying the repl.it is a &amp;quot;YC Story.&amp;quot; On the contrary, I think YC is a part of the &amp;quot;repl.it&amp;quot; story, and they were mistaken to take so long to see the value in the company.</text></comment>

train

<story><title>High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India</title><url>https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1134-6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>This headline explains my general aversion to &amp;quot;chemicals&amp;quot;. This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines.&lt;p&gt;The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives.&lt;p&gt;Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance.&lt;p&gt;If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives?&lt;p&gt;Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald&amp;#x27;s doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the FDA&amp;#x27;s (or indeed global regulators&amp;#x27;) thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk?&lt;p&gt;For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>I love this quote from E.T. Jaynes:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;A common error, when judging the effects of radioactivity or the toxicity of some substance, is to assume a linear response model without threshold (that is, without a dose rate below which there is no ill effect). Presumably there is no threshold effect for cumulative poisons like heavy metal ions (mercury, lead), which are eliminated only very slowly if at all. But for virtually every organic substance (such as saccharin or cyclamates), the existence of a finite metabolic rate means that there must exist a finite threshold dose rate, below which the substance is decomposed, eliminated, or chemically altered so rapidly that it has no ill effects. If this were not true, the human race could never have survived to the present time, in view of all the things we have been eating.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Indeed, every mouthful of food you and I have ever taken contained many billions of kinds of complex molecules whose structure and physiological effects have never been determined—and many millions of which would be toxic or fatal in large doses. We cannot doubt that we are daily ingesting thousands of substances that are far more dangerous than saccharin—but in amounts that are safe, because they are far below the various thresholds of toxicity. But at present there is hardly any substance except some common drugs, for which we actually know the threshold.&lt;p&gt;The most dangerous substances fall into a few categories. Things like insecticides (which is what this thread is about) are &lt;i&gt;designed&lt;/i&gt; to kill animals. Insects, but still, their physiology is close enough to humans. And things like heavy metals and radioactive substances. Which our ancestors weren&amp;#x27;t really exposed to.</text></comment>

<story><title>High prevalence of diabetes among people exposed to organophosphates in India</title><url>https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1134-6</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>This headline explains my general aversion to &amp;quot;chemicals&amp;quot;. This, despite the fact that everything is a chemical and that we are all little chemical machines.&lt;p&gt;The human physiology is unfathomably complex and the advent of synthetic chemistry has meant that we are now exposed to new molecules which have arisen at a rate tens, hundreds of thousands of years too early for our bodies to evolve to accommodate for them. Our exposure to these chemicals is also incredibly opaque: even eating &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; by eating fruit and veg exposes us to a multitude of chemicals that come along the pipeline including fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives.&lt;p&gt;Nature is exquisitely sensitive to chemistry - I recall reading that natural systems have evolved to exploit and dispatch behaviour based on the isotopic composition of carbon-based molecules: naturally synthesised molecules also have a different isotopic profile to artificially synthesised molecules. For the record, Carbon-13 represents ~1% of the natural isotopic abundance.&lt;p&gt;If something as granular as the isotopic distribution of elements is important to physiological systems, how can we be so complacent as to constantly pile chemicals into every aspect of our lives?&lt;p&gt;Businesses will wantonly and irresponsibly use any method to increase their bottom lines and it falls to regulators to moderate this behaviour. As an example, I recall McDonald&amp;#x27;s doping their chip oil with a known toxic organic chemical to lower the rate of thermal decomposition of their oil. This is something they could as easily avoid by replacing their oil more often, but this is costly: they instead defer this cost onto our health by exposing us to unnecessarily dangerous chemicals.&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the FDA&amp;#x27;s (or indeed global regulators&amp;#x27;) thresholds for the use of chemicals is not stringent enough - humans are living longer, how do we know that prolonged exposure to any of these individual chemicals (let alone the cocktail of all of them) over a 50-100 year period are worth the risk?&lt;p&gt;For another anecdote of irresponsible chemical usage - the onset of lung cancer through smoking underwent a stepwise increase after the tobacco industry started using phosphate fertilisers to increase their crop yield: a side effect of the fertilisers was to enrich the soil in radium which would decay down to Pollonium-210, an alpha source of Russian-assassination fame. Studies have been done on characterising the sievert profile of tobacco leaves, highlighting the risk of this but no action on the tobacco industry has been taken to mitigate this.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sebleon</author><text>Unfortunately, we are routinely exposed to thousands of synthetic chemicals daily, making it impossible to attribute future ailments to particular compounds. It&amp;#x27;s very sad that there&amp;#x27;s zero requirement to understand the long term (60 years+) effects of these new chemicals to the human body.</text></comment>