skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ? That kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is thousands of employees, it only requires a few bad people to create a situation like that.

That's mind boggling, especially since all accounts paint Steve Jobs as being an massive asshole manager, and company culture gets set by examples at the top.

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-bre...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2011/10/12/steve-j...
Reading the article it looks like we do know why:

> Neurons... transfer information about sensation and motion from peripheral parts of the body to the brain and back. By sending electro-chemical signals in the form of atomic ions, neurons can communicate great distances through the body... Most of this information is passed as sodium ions — atom-sized charged particles that pass through channels to zap from one neuron to the other. Lidocaine, a local anesthetic commonly used by dentists, blocks these sodium channels, stopping neurons from sending information to each other. That’s why they make your mouth numb, the neurons there can’t send pain sensations to your brain. They’re stopped.

> ...they [Plants] do pass information from cell to cell just like we do, via ion channels. That’s probably where lidocaine does its work in plants, blocking these channels and cutting off communication. That’s why the hair cells in the Venus flytrap can’t tell the motor cells to contract, there’s no signal being passed between them.

And ether works by blocking cell membranes in both plants and animals. I think there are some specifics about how organisms with cell walls are blocked by ether - but that's more of a "how?" rather than a "why?"

In summary: even though plants don't have nervous systems like animals, their motor functions are still ultimately controlled by ion channels with are blocked (or their cell membranes are blocked, thus blocking the ion channel) by certain anesthetics.

This post (of all things) seems to be rate limited:

> Sorry, I'm confused. What's the difference between "how" and "why" here?

We know the cause and effect behind why anesthesia works in plants: plants' motor functions are controlled by ion channels, and anesthetics block those ion channels. We know that Lidocaine blocks the sodium channels themselves, and that ether seems to block the entire cell membrane. The remaining unknown is how ether blocks the cell walls in plants.

In short the answer to why anesthetics works in plants is known: because it blocks ion channels. Saying we don't know how anesthetics work in plants is sort of like saying we don't know how asymmetric encryption works because we still haven't solved whether P = NP. There exist remaining unknowns, but we do have an understanding of why it works.
> In Canada, the copyright term is life + 50

Not for long, trump pressured us to change to life+70 which is probably coming sometime next year. :(
Why not simply improve their skill and join better companies?
In NY (and, I think, California), that's illegal.

I found this out, because at the company at which I worked, managers kept making verbal commitments, then gaslighting me about them. I could never get them to commit in writing, and my own "reflection" emails (the standard advice about this) were worthless. I considered walking around with a little digital recorder in my pocket.

But many states have explicit laws against surreptitious audio recording. I suspect that comes from politicians being caught with wires (yeah, I'm a cynic).

That's why, if you get a surveillance camera that also records audio, they will usually have a card in there that tells you to post notices if you switch on the audio recorder.
I think Adam's approach is mostly lacking deliberation, it's only after the fact that the synergy is realized but it's hard to intentionally engineer it.

I can definitely see the validity in the other school of thought though; i.e. that we should deliberately seek out synergistic talent verticals. I know this is Conor Mcgregor's approach, he's very much systems over goals (in Adam's vein, and explicitly so) but is deliberate about the specific talent stack he's working towards. Ironically it is all done towards a specific goal (to be the best fighter) although the path towards that goal is underspecified.

Here's a very common talent stack here on HN that works pretty well: math + CS + data science + one domain (e.g. finance or biology).
Hah! I use methamphetamine (desoxyn) to function!

Some irony there in complaining about the stigmatizing of a drug with high abuse potential then immediately stereotyping another.
> There’s no consequences to having a app with the word ‘fuck’ in it

I suspect that Apple has done studies and has a projected “likely lost sales” figure attributable to having an app store overrun with “mature content” apps.

(Edited: tried to clean up a clunky sentence :))
> I do think there are many challenging engineering problems along that path, and I’m not convinced it’s tractable at all, much less likely to outpace advances in battery systems.

I disagree on that last part. Fuel cell is moving at warp speed right now, and batteries are losing ground at a rapid rate. We're seeing fuel cells move into everything from e-bikes to aircraft. If there's any kind of disruptive event here, it will be fuel cells replacing batteries at a much faster rate than expected.
"If you are an Apple employee, please send this story to your upper management particularly Tim Cook."

I doubt he will care, reflected at how he manages PR when accused of international labor abuses.
Sounds like Disney.
If that was the case, health classes would censor the names of any recreationally-illegal substance. The fact is that Amphetamines are `a useful tool to preserve wakefulness`. Knowing that fact isn't inherently a promotion for the use of them.
I hear you. I stumbled into a situation of high mutual trust as well. And I saw it go down the drain over few years.

One is burned after experiencing what work could be like. But what to do - I have so no idea.
> the neighborhood doesn't want to look like an amusement park.

I do think this is where a lot of the HOA problems come from - if someone wants to put something up on their front yard or lawn, then neighbors can intervene and say you can’t do that there.

Since you bought the property and it’s yours, why do others get to have a say in it? I know I don’t give two hoots about what the neighbor does to their own home.
Pytudes: Python programs of considerable difficulty to perfect particular skills
Related: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
Yes, you should accept things over which you have no control, and you should speak up against injustice. Acceptance doesn't have to mean you can't advocate for change.
I've been ordering in way more than I would have been comfortable with pre-covid. I never blame the restaurant, especially when I see the driver taking a circuitous route, indubitably filling multiple deliveries on the way. And I don't really blame the drivers, either, because of how their pay structure translates to incentives.
2020 was a year unlike any other, but tech tools didn't change much
The poster you're responding to is dispensing advice on how to handle and escape from predators. Accusing them of victim shaming is wrong, and you're just siding supporting the predators by doing so. It's good advice.
> Which is the opposite of what TFA is trying to do: They just want Apple to make an exception for them. Not to solve the root problem

They name several apps which would seem to violate the same guideline, at worst they're asking for the same exception Apple has already given to others. An argument can be made that they're snitching on the others, but it's also an argument for consistency that one could say is the root problem.
> As of 2021, there is no realistic threat of the far left being censored

The laws from 20th-century America are still on the books and are still being enforced. I have literally heard of people who, today, cannot advocate for their far-left political views because it imperils their immigration status. Here is a reminder from the USCIS as of two months ago that membership in any Communist party causes you to be ineligible to become a permanent resident: https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-issues-policy-guidan...

Meanwhile, in the court of public opinion, here is someone self-censoring their left-but-nowhere-near-far-left position (a fairly mainstream position) and being attacked for their beliefs by a right-wing media outlet that, ordinarily, claims to support free speech: https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/30/wannabe-jeopardy-host-k...
Reading the sources, it would be more correct to say that overly cushioned shoes are the problem, not all shoes.

For running, you have to unlearn the heel strike type of stride that most people adopt when they use cushioned running shoes. You need to roll your feet as you land, just as if you were running barefoot.

I don't run much, but for walking I've preferred solid soles made from high durometer rubber for a while now, because they beat up my feet a lot less than a pair of cushioned sneakers for long walks, and it's a lot better than going barefoot in -5C weather :-)

My dad wore clogs for most of his working life. Not the old-fashioned carved wooden ones, but the type with leather uppers and a glued on anti-slip layer of rubber on thick wooden soles. He said they were the most comfortable working shoes for varied surfaces and uneven ground.
The Sound Machine

By Roald Dahl

September 10, 1949

A man named Klausner invents a machine that can hear sound the human ear cannot hear. It reproduces the sounds on a lower pitch so that human beings can hear it. With this machine he hears roses scream as his neighbor cuts them. The next morning he hears a tree scream when he cuts into it with an axe. He calls his doctor excitedly and asks him to come over at once. The doctor comes and Klausner says he wants him to listen to the tree's screams. He starts cutting into it with an axe and a large branch begins to fall. They barely get out of the way in time. He asks the doctor if he heard the scream but the doctor will not say that he did. Klausner is very upset and demands that the doctor paint the two gashes with iodine.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/09/17/the-sound-mach...
This is awesome! When the WASM effort was first announced many years ago I happened to be steeped in a ton of ruby work (the ruby/coffeescript era) and had fantasized about the far future when something like this might be a reality... and here it is!

These days I don't use ruby much at all, and I use groovy where I might have used ruby (because static types), but I still love the language and admire this effort. Awesome!
While I don't necessarily disagree, I just don't know any child "developed" enough to comprehend what you are talking about. That's usually between 11-13 months. Try explaining the notion of "working from home" and "zoom conference" and daddy talking to a man in the box to a one year old.
UBI and competition between schools can fix all that.

But naked capitalism tells women to "lean in and earn $1 for every 70 cents" instead of telling men to "lean out and earn 70c for every $1" ...and spend more time with your children, family, contributing to open source software, learning science, an instrument, hobbies, sports and exercise and doing other things not valued by the market.

UBI is far superior to both a jobs guarantee, minimum wage laws and unions in rebalancing the power dynamic between the employees and employers.

Instead, today, we are brainwashed that your worth as an individual comes from working for a corporation, and the schools train the kids to sit down and shut up for 10 hours day to do just that. Look at Finland. Or http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I want to suggest rebranding as Beige - the most harmless, boring, and forgettable "color" in the universe. But then even that would likely offend someone, somewhere, somehow.

Maybe Apple should change their name? Given what apples did for Adam & Eve?

Yes, words are important. But so is context and intention. If we keep eliminating words - removed from context and intent -then all we'll have left are emojis.

Oh wait...nevermind.

Botton line: Come on Apple, really? Of all the fights to fight in the world, this is a good one? Shame on you.
It would be helpful if I saw "free speech" being championed by anyone other than the fascists.

I used to believe free speech was a virtue. I no longer believe that because universally everyone who cares strongly about it is actually using it as cover for pushing opinions they don't like out of public discourse. If that's the result of free speech advocacy, then I don't see how I can conclude that it's good for society.
I would change the name.
Planned economy at works.
Do we take Star Trek as a authoritative source? lack of rem sleep leading to violence, anarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Terrors_(Star_Trek:_The_...
Interesting. It's annoying that the review process is so inconsistent. But although the amphetamine-based drugs listed are legal, it would be illegal to prescribe for the purpose of "staying awake", so the implication of the app's name that an "amphetamine" is a safe and legal means to "stay awake" does probably violate the spirit of the rule.
Fixed [0]. Thanks for the report. The navbar could still use a bit of love though :(.

[0]: https://github.com/artichoke/www.artichokeruby.org/pull/171
I hope he/she goes full-on public with this.
I misunderstood the point OP was making. But even interpreting "surface area" to mean "ground area", it's only right in dense areas without open land. The reason schools are built the way they are is to optimize for cost.

Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down.

When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on.

Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.
Looking at the US from the outside, it seems there are two increasingly separated views of what is true and what isn't. Each is in their own bubble. Both bubbles are around the same size.

This article is from an outlet in one bubble labeling everything from the other bubble as misinformation, and asking rethorically: 'can the divide be healed?' Without realizing they actually mean: 'how can we make them understand they are wrong?'

This happens on both sides. Until both bubbles will ask themselves: 'is it possible the other side has some points, so let's give it a good look', there will be NO healing at all.

And actually both sides are as often wrong as they are right on many issues.
I believe this particular team was a "Forgotten" team as in the Forgotten Employee (https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/), or "bullshit jobs team".

I probably will never truly understand the sufferings and misery of the author. However, the author perhaps was expecting the environment to be challenging in a positive way, with interesting work and motivated colleagues. Unfortunately for the author, the team was complete opposite of it.
Recognizing such environments is also a valuable office skill, because then you can decide for yourself if you would like to basically do nothing alongside the team or leave for greener pastures. Being new to the team and trying to make a positive change immediately will only create resistance from the peers and may lead to abuse described in the article.

Paradoxically, doing nothing and being conformant with the team nature would have led to positive reviews and much, much less overall misery.
Exactly--Jobs was a raging asshole, and that became what the managers looked up to as the example of what brings success. During my time there, the assholes were the ones rewarded and promoted, and thus became the promoters, and the people with a shred of decency and empathy who just wanted to be good and do good work were marginalized and not rewarded. It's up and down the chain from VP level down to the first level managers.
No smoke, but what about particulate matter? I understand these efficient wood burners are major urban polluters even without the smoke. They sure don't seem to smell any less.
Btw Shodan checks for the existence of the security.txt file and shows/ stores the information if it's available. Here's an example of how it looks:

https://beta.shodan.io/host/172.217.31.43#securitytxt

If you have a Shodan account you can also search the contents of the security.txt files using the "http.securitytxt" search filter. For example:

https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=http.securitytxt%3Aconta...
Fairly sure the gerrymandering will keep any sufficiently large population locations' influence minimized.
I'm very sorry to read about your experience and have seen similar stories play out at other "top" tier companies, including once myself. I thought this paragraph really stood out in your post:

"This is while the rest of the team were taking weeks and months to complete a task that takes an hour, were on vacation or just out of office or out of touch. The time they were out of office was more than 2 months in one year!"

Sounds like you were perceived as a threat to the career stability of people who have been there a long time, have figured out how to coast, and don't want a spotlight shone on their general area. This is not intended to be a justification of any part of what you experienced, but this does sound like it wasn't all personal.
But I think the point is that a bunch of anaesthetics (like halocarbon anaesthetics) very much don't bind to receptor sites in ion channels. One running hypothesis IIRC is that they intercalate into the membranes and alter their membrane fluidity... Then underpants gnomes... Then "reduced ion channel activity". Iirc We know it's not something more obvious like "conductivity of the membrane" because that's easy to measure and the effect is not enough to explain the observation.
Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?
Alcohol 120% has entered the chat. /s

I can see why Apple chooses the family friendly route and rebranding probably is the best option in this case as fighting it would most likely be futile.

I don't think they went overboard with the name in general tho. It makes sense for the app as much as the other coffee/coca branded ones do.

They explicitly chose "amphetamine" over "meth" which is a medical term and has valid uses.
We teach children how to do paperwork starting at age 5. How necessary is that?
I worked at Apple Computer long ago and overall, was abused for labor, including no December vacation, expected overtime, and getting me to design the project t-shirt and then not letting me have two of them for my trouble (insult). I was young and dealt with it. I have moved on. I am not surprised by this article.
> It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way.

efficiency doesn't stop with a building's dimensions. efficiency demands social control. it doesn't care whether that happens through self-control and self-discipline or through domination.
> If you look at schools, especially elite ones, there's a strange desire for all the kids to become leaders.

Those schools maintain their status and position by ensuring their alumni become leaders. Thus it is to their advantage.

Which brings us to the bigger picture... we live in a Darwinian word of evolve-or-die, strongest-will-survive. Thus passing on to our children the skills of leadership are part of this same desire for our children to thrive.
HOA does have what feel like arbitrary busybody restrictions, but they are also the authority that makes people remove the broken washing machine from their front yard and they are the only recourse in my region (when I lived briefly in a suburban house) for someone who refuses to do anything about their dog that barks 24/7 or flings trash into your neighboring yard. HOA fixed it for me on both occasions. The police certainly don’t care.

So people aren’t going to like the HOA. But they also offer essential recourse and order.
Most people I know who have been pro-HOA are the ones who have a say in it and are on the board, or have strong opinions on how their neighbors should outfit their own house.

The ones that hates the HOA are the ones that have paid a ton of money (I’m in the Bay Area) and can’t do as they please. Who wants to pay close to a million and have others chime in and start giving you directions on what to do to your own property.

I rent, but the principe of the HOA is a big enough leech in my mind that I’d hold out for a single home, whenever that is (if at all).
> Has Microsoft ever explored the idea of open sourcing Windows?

Good question. I have zero insight to the matter.

However, I have worked at a vendor when they decided to open source their code. It was a much smaller code base than what Windows probably is. It is quite a big effort. There can be all kind of dirty stuff in the code that you need to clean up. Either for legal reasons because you have purchased the code many years ago, but you are not allowed to publish it. So you need to dig out old contracts and have legal to check what was written when nobody even remotely thought that you could ever open source. And there might be engineering reasons that some code is so bad that you can just not show it.

Wasn't there this story some years ago that Microsoft had some odd DLL in Windows(?) that they couldn't even rebuild themselves anymore, because it required a compiler that has gone out of support years ago. I don't remember the details, but I am sure a code base with the history and size of Windows has some dark spots. Unless someone can tell me convincingly that Microsoft nowadays has a CI this that builds really everything from source in a fully reproducibly manner. I guess if they do they would have proudly reported at a software conference about it. I am not aware that they would have done that, but I am not actively following that field.
> Confidence is not correlated with accuracy.

Indeed. Quite possibly the opposite is true i.e. that inaccuracy is correlated with confidence (for second hand reports).
The Downside to Getting Out Two Covid Vaccines So Fast
“I don’t work for you”.
does the developer not let you download the app outside of the Mac App Store?
If a YEC can assemble a good argument that fits the journal's standards, they should be able to publish. Seems simple.
This is most interesting. I didn't realize Jimi Hendrix's music (at least Purple Haze) is now Public Domain in Canada.

I imagine this doesn't include his cover songs, such as those from Bob Dillan.

I have often read that Hendrix' music will never be public domain in my lifetime because of record companies buying the rights. Is any of that true?
Also common is someone with 20 years at the same company that's has been coasting. Maybe they still work on a decades old enterprise app and have no relevant recent experience.

Lots of jobs aren't all that demanding.
True, if by money, you mean enough wages to get food, clothing, and shelter. If people really loved money, you might expect a positive savings rate...
stuff like this needs to be taken to court - air out the laundry of the employer and the public will truly see the evil side of some of the greediest corporations.
If the air quality impact was limited to inside your home that would be the case.