The worst situation I've encountered is after a large conference when everyone is leaving the hotel at once. An elevator quickly fills up on the way down, but then wastes time stopping at every subsequent floor with a call, even though no one else can fit inside. At each floor the elevator stops, the doors open, the waiting people see it's already packed, the doors close, and this repeats on the next 15 floors before finally reaching the bottom where everyone gets off. If the algorithm could know an elevator is completely full and only stop at its destination floors rather than every floor along the way with a call, it would be far more efficient.
There’s also a strategy to jump the line. Say there’s a talk that just took place on the top floor roof deck of a small ~20 floor building. People who don’t want to wait in line with a hundred people, can take the stairs down one level, call the elevator on the way up to enter the car before it is filled, ride it up one level*, and then ride it all the way down to the ground floor.
To prevent a riot, the building should probably deploy an employee with a fire key to manually operate the elevator.
* Elevators will answer an up button call while it is going to meet a down call from the top floor, but they will answer that call before filling any new down instructions, so you do have to ride to the top first.
Many buildings permit stairwell entry, but limit stairwell exit for fire code (1st) and security reasons (2nd). You'll want to check to see that you can exit at floor n-1 before attempting this, or you'll be riding the stairs all the way down.
I used to work in a shiny new LEED certified government building here in DC. My office was on the second floor. I had to take a elevator every day because the only stairs were for fire use. So frustrating.
Also works for Buses and Trains. Go one stop the opposite way, then go back. This may take a couple minutes longer, but you'll have a seat for the rest of the journey.
I have seen elevators, usually in a big building with a lot of elevators, that do act that way (presumably using weight sensors?). I’ve read that some elevators also have a “kid mode” that does the opposite: if some kid pushes all the buttons as they leave (just for the lolz), the elevator cancels the calls.
It would have to be done by weight. If you had a button to not allow stopping for others, people would abuse it. If it was a camera, security issue. Presumably if somebody is moving a piano or something else heavy it'll be fine
You could also detect when the elevator call button gets pressed again right after the elevator has left a floor. That means someone wasn't able to get on the elevator (and is now waiting for the next one).
I mean this in the nicest way possible. Do you see all these cloud photo/video leaks like from robot vacuums or whatever and think they don't know it can be done locally?
Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.
Are you kidding? An astrophysicist that could come up with a new model that explains the current data would win a Nobel prize and earth shattering levels of notoriety.
The data found doesn't contradict the big bang in any shape or form. It does challenge beliefs around black hole formation.
The reason for the big bang model is because based on all our measurements of all the visible universe, it appears that everything is spreading out. Any new model needs to explain why it is the universe appears to be spreading out.
There's not a scientist alive that wouldn't like to discover that "actually a fundamental principle about my field of study is completely wrong". But that takes hard work, evidence, and models which better fit than the previous ones did. You need to find something that can't be explained with the old model and can only be explained with the new model.
The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.
What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
> The predictions of this theory continually fail.
No they don't. There are surprising and unexplained aspect (why is the expansion currently accelerating? That's an unknown afaik). But the baseline prediction and observation that the universe is expanding have yet to see any sort of contradicting evidence.
> The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.
That's just hogwash from answers in genesis. Name an example of a black hole that "shouldn't exist" according to the big bang theory.
> What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin
The big bang says nothing about the origin of the universe. It is merely a description of the current observable universe. We don't know what caused the big bang, if this is the only big bang, or if the universe is actually infinite in size. We don't know if our current observable region is just one in a cosmos of regions.
> but was created by God?
God doesn't exist, so no. But even if I granted god does exist, it could be completely compatible with the big bang as being the ultimate cause of it or some earlier event which triggered it. Certainly god as envisioned through fundamentalist Christianity is incompatible with the big bang, there is a mountain of evidence against that god.
> How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
That's what they do. You have a completely false notion of what scientists and astrophysicists are doing. They aren't trying to "fit to the model" they are trying to expand understanding and change the model to match observations. There's no dogma in science and they get the most excited when something unexplained is observed.
Fellow software engineers aren't incentivized to destroy their company's reputation in the same way that boards of directors have proven to be time and time again.
maybe, but the union could provide a lot of services to someone who loses their job this way (like income insurance and legal services) and could leverage collective power over companies that demonstrate a pattern of behavior.
This is something that has just never sat well with me. How exactly will the union provide this insurance? That insurance isn't free, so paid for by member dues? How many members are required to be able to afford the payout for just one member? How about the other services unions are touted as being able to provide? They all come from the same dues? I know that unions will put money into investment funds to attempt to grow the coffers, but that just means the money isn't liquid.
Unions are always touted as a panacea, but logically, it doesn't compute for me. They feel more like ponzi schemes than anything else.
that's definitely a big question and i don't pretend to have enough expertise to answer fully; however, i will point to the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan which is (per Wikipedia[1]) "one of the world's largest institutional investors [...] over $266 billion in net assets, with a one-year total-fund net return of 9.4%, and a 7.4% 10-year total-fund net return". the union runs their own investment fund; it's an extension of collective power into the financial realm.
it's an example of how a union can use collective financial power to fund the services they offer to their members. a software engineer's union could prioritize income insurance over retirement.
Yes, obviously. A question not asked as assumed a natural part of the thinking process is how many members does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? Just because other unions exists does not mean that the one that techBro Norma Rae starts is going to remain viable. How many claims can be paid out before the insurance no longer pays out? Lots of conversation left after your trite yes obviously unhelpful comment
> This is something that has just never sat well with me. How exactly will the union provide this insurance? That insurance isn't free, so paid for by member dues?
Providing insurance was one reason for the emergence and popularity of friendly societies, fraternal organizations, and trade unions in the 19th century. But out of that emerged the modern insurance industry, so you can now just buy those products directly. Unemployment insurance may be an exception, but that's because employer-mandated unemployment insurance is now so ubiquitous.
The modern "welfare state" also emerged out of those earlier grassroots movements. Now we take it for granted. One downside is that the state has largely displaced the incentive for those private societies.
And for the conspiratorial minded: that displacement was in part a deliberate attempt to limit the power of collective action and employees generally. In the early 20th century, jury awards for horrendous workplace accidents were often large and starting to threaten the bottom line. Employer-mandated workers' compensation insurance was promoted by companies as a way to limit their liability. This is why you typically cannot sue your employer for most workplace accidents if you're covered by workers' compensation. The same legislation that mandates workers' compensation insurance shields employers from liability for workplace accidents. Especially in the case of grievous injury or permanent disability, an employee likely would have gotten much greater compensation in a civil suit than what they'll get in workers' compensation. (OTOH, considering all workplace injuries and compensation together, maybe the bargain was worth it overall. Employee societies may never have achieved the degree of coverage the legal mandate did, and maybe those societies would never have been able to provide more compensation on average than employees get now.)
You can say that about a lot of things. The car was already invented, but so many new car companies struggle. Just because a thing exists does not mean someone else can come along to immediately become successful with thing.
It's not defeatism. It's doing the research to avoid unnecessary failure from over ambitiousness getting in the way of doing something the right way. This isn't a Show HN situation where you go and get some VC funding and yolo your way through it. This is something that if it's not done right it could have a greater blast radius than some VC funded startup shutting down with a "What we've learned" blog post.
Makes sense, but I haven't seen in the comments the signs of research having been done. Or maybe you were hoping that I am doing the research for you, while you brainstorm how it can't work? I am an union member, albeit not in the US, and for me it looks fine. Sample size of 1, but a sample which says it does work. Take this information as you wish.
In my petrol-powered Prius I average 52 MPG, so at the current price of gas ($2.60/gallon) I pay $0.50 to drive 10 miles - less than the listed cost to drive an electric car the same distance.
A photosensitive patch of cells could be wired directly to motor cells/muscles on the opposite side, which would allow the organism to swim toward the light (maybe useful for feeding or migrating, etc.)
They didn't need to come about at the same time. Photosensitive proteins (opsins) and cellular motility both predate multicellular life entirely. Even single-celled euglena detect light and swim toward it with no nervous system at all.
In early multicellular animals, cells were already chemically signaling their neighbors. A photosensitive cell releasing a signaling molecule near a contractile cell isn't a coordinated miracle. It is just two pre-existing cell types sitting next to each other in tissue, which is what bodies are. Natural selection then refines that crude coupling because even a tiny, noisy light response is better than none.
Each piece, light-sensitive proteins, cell-to-cell signaling, contractile cells, evolved independently and for other reasons long before being co-opted into anything resembling vision. The question "how could A and B arise simultaneously?" dissolves once neither A nor B was new.
The "wiring to muscles" is derived from the ability of adjacent cells to communicate by chemical signals.
This communication ability has evolved before the multicellular animals, in the colonies of unicellular ancestors of animals (e.g. choanoflagellates).
The intercellular communication is a prerequisite for the development of multicellularity, like a common language is a prerequisite for a group of humans to be able to work as a team.
In an unicellular organism, a part of the cell senses light and another part, like flagella or contractile filaments reacts, moving the cell. In a multicellular organism, a division of labor appears, the cells from the dorsal side of the animal sense first light and other stimuli from the environment, so some of them specialize as sensory cells. Originally, the cells from the ventral side were more effective for locomotion, by using either cilia or propulsive contraction waves, so some of them specialized for locomotion, becoming motor cells, either muscles or ciliary bands (which in many simple animals are more important than muscles).
With this division of labor, the older intercellular communication methods have been improved, resulting in synapses between the sensory cells and the motor cells, which ensure that a chemical message that is sent reaches only the intended recipient, instead of being broadcast into the neighborhood.
For better reactions to external stimuli, the behavior of the sensory cells had to be coordinated, e.g. even when light is sensed only on one end of the animal, for the entire animal to move an appropriate command must be sent to all motor cells, not only to some of them, which has lead to synapses between the sensory cells themselves, not only between sensory cells and motor cells.
Eventually, there was a further division of labor, a part of the sensory cells has specialized to be middlemen, i.e. to relay the sensory information between the cells that have actually received it and the motor cells. These third kind of cells have become neurons. Initially the neurons were in the skin, together with the sensory cells from which they had derived, but later they migrated inside the body, where eventually they formed ganglia instead of a diffuse net, because this minimizes the reaction times, by shortening the connections between neurons, leading to a centralized nervous system.
A fairly simple chemical reaction could cause an organism to turn or move toward or away from light in the ocean, with various imaginable benefits.
And note that box jellyfish have 24 eyes, some of them highly complex, but no brain. You can look into their behavior to find out what they do with the information.
Stated clearly (0) has recently started a fantastic series about evolution that aims to explain bacterial flagella. It starts from basic principles and aims to answer questions like yours in evolutionary biology.
According to the timeline it took more than a week just for Filevine to respond saying they would review and fix the vulnerability. It was 24 days after initial disclosure when he confirmed the fix was in place.
Given that the author describes the company as prompt, communicative and professional, I think it’s fair to assume there was more contact than the four events in the top of the article.
That one stumped me. Why not just encrypt with a hardcoded public key, then only the attacker can get the creds.
The simple B64 encoding didn't hide these creds from anyone, so every vendor out there's security team can collect them (e.g. thinking big clouds, GitHub, etc) and disable them.
If you did a simple encryption pass, no one but you would know what was stolen, or could abuse/sell it. My best guess is that calling node encryption libs might trigger code scanners, or EDRs, or maybe they just didn't care.
They surely seemed to be smart enough to choose encryption over encoding.
Hard to believe encryption would be the one thing that would trigger code scanners.
Also it’s not just every vendor, also every bad actor could’ve scraped the keys. I wonder if they’ve set up the infrastructure to handle all these thousands of keys…
Like what do you even do with most of it on scale?
Can you turn Cloud, AWS , AI api keys to money on a black market?
Someone could be tricked into giving their npm credentials to the attacker (e.g. via a phishing email), and then the attacker publishes new versions of their packages with the malicious diff. Then when the infected packages are installed, npm runs the malicious preinstall script which harvests secrets from the new machine, and if these include an npm token the worm can see which packages it has access to publish, and infect them too to continue spreading.
