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The SSD Endurance Experiment: Testing data retention at 300TB - gabriel34 http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-testing-data-retention-at-300tb ====== gabriel34 "The data we've collected suggests that modern SSDs can easily survive many years of typical desktop use. Even TLC-based offerings should have more than enough endurance to handle what the vast majority of consumers will throw at them." That settles it for me

One Big Net for Everything - ghosthamlet https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08864 ====== black_puppydog Is it just me or does the abstract become a bit uncanny just by the constant use of "ONE"? Maybe it was the ambient jazz I was listening to while reading the abstract... :D

How DAOs Can Replace Corporations and Traditional Governments - llSourcell http://llsourcell.svbtle.com/how-daos-can-replace-corporations-and-traditional-governments ====== rverghes Let's say we have a small town of 1000 people. How exactly will "the technology behind Bitcoin" run this town? Deal with garbage, water, police? ~~~ hawleyal I think it's not actually how the activities of governing are carried out. It's more about how personal representation is authenticated yet anonymized. That's the reason the author brings up voting.

What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - spenrose http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics#ans873950 ====== spenrose Thought much of this applied to the mindset of a programmer entering their second decade of work. "the biggest misconception that non-mathematicians have about how mathematicians think is that there is some mysterious mental faculty that is used to crack a problem all at once. In reality, one can ever think only a few moves ahead, trying out possible attacks from one's arsenal on simple examples relating to the problem, or using analogies with other ideas one understands."

Facebook Hacker Cup Finals: A Champion is Crowned - atularora http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150106829298920 ====== csmajorfive Unsurprisingly, the guy who consistently dominates TopCoder is the champion. [http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574...](http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=10574855) ~~~ enomar Interesting he's also a Googler: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g2y8n/googler_p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g2y8n/googler_petr_mitrichev_wins_facebook_hackathon_5/)

Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund - Tenoke https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/andrew-ng-is-raising-a-150m-ai-fund/ ====== cr0sh I look at announcements like this, and past ones about Ng, and I always marvel at how things have gone since I took and completed his 2011 ML Class... That was one helluva course, challenging and interesting, and fun all at the same time (and so much "concretely" \- lol). From what I understand, that course is still available thru Coursera (which Ng booted up after the ML Class experiment; Udacity was Thrun's contribution after his and Norvig's AI Class, which ran at the same time in 2011). ~~~ narvind Nice. I wrote down my thoughts after taking his new DL course. Hope it helps you all :) [https://medium.com/towards-data-science/thoughts-after- takin...](https://medium.com/towards-data-science/thoughts-after-taking-the- deeplearning-ai-courses-8568f132153) ~~~ fizwhiz Excellent review! I haven't taken Ng's original ML course and noticed that you mentioned it would be a pre-requisite to taking any DL course (whether fast.ai or Ng's DL course). Care to elaborate why? ------ KasianFranks "Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets" \- this is key. ~~~ elmar Looks like Data sets are going to be the moat of AI companies. ~~~ danohu open/free data sources are likely to become very important. AI hasn't yet been super-important in the open data world, but I'd expect it to gain a lot of prominence as time goes by. ~~~ FLUX-YOU Starting a data set company would probably be a good idea. Necessarily has some humans labeling them, but you could probably build a lot of tools around it to make it as smooth as possible. Also, task rabbit and Amazon turk workers could be used. ------ beambot Makes sense. As one of the most public personas in AI, he probably gets pitched _frequently_ by AI startups. Might as well let someone else bankroll his dealflow while collecting 2% annual management fees and participate in the upside via carry a decade later. ------ tabeth I'm curious to the opinions of people here on companies collecting data to build data sets vs. privacy. ~~~ Eridrus Privacy activists have long ignored any benefits of data collection and as we continue to extract more and more value from data this should become more evident and we will be forced to start discussing concrete harms rather than people's general discomfort. ~~~ canoebuilder Aside from running large scale analyses over large health data sets, what are some examples where the value derived from large aggregations of personal data is dispersed widely through a society rather than being captured mostly by a single corporation or organization? ~~~ stevenhuang Building large data sets doesn't necessarily mean from personal data. Look at open-data initiatives such as [http://open.canada.ca/en/open- data](http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data) . Lots of potential for useful tools to be created if the data is there, which won't happen if even benign data like that are kept under wraps/not collected. ------ valgor >Ng told me that his personal goal is to help bring about an AI-powered society. Anyone have links to interviews or information on Ng's vision? I'd love to hear the details. ~~~ Barrin92 not sure if there's a transcript anywhere but he gave a lecture on his broad views in a Stanford lecture [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EiKfQYZXc) ------ fiatjaf If he had called it AICOIN he could have raised much more. ~~~ thinbeige My thought before opening this thread. I thought the AI hype is over again but apparantly not. ~~~ ThomPete Andrew NG believes that AI is just as important as electricity. I tend to agree. ------ wyldfire Aside: how do you pronounce his surname? ~~~ sh33mp He spent a couple of years in Singapore, so I'm going by the pronunciation there. (May be different in different regions, and I'm not sure about his preferred pronunciation now). It would do something like this: Start with the word "urn". Now don't drag it out, make it short. Make the "n" and "ng" sound at the end (urng). Now take out the "r" sound (uhng). It seems like Americans do tend to pronounce it "ehng" instead. ~~~ Danihan In the video it sounds like "ooge". Similar to "rouge" or "stooge" but cropped short. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUO3Pk0nOCM) ~~~ white-flame Sounds like "ng" to me. In english, we can say "mmm" or "nnnn" as drawn-out sounds on their own, just do the same with "ng". ------ ryanSrich Slight side topic: Has anyone gone through the new deeplearning.ai track on Coursera yet? Wondering how difficult it is for someone that can write code, but never had any formal academic training in CS. ~~~ kovek Hey Ryan, I see this question asked very often in the last year or two. I am not an expert on deep learning, nor have I taken the deeplearning.ai track, but am currently learning about the topic. Some of the resources out there have nice primers. I think you need to be somewhat comfortable with understanding the usual log/exp functions for the very base, understand calculus, with partial derivatives, and be used to linear algebra and matrix operations. Some good understanding of statistics could be useful as well when learning about ML. I don't think that a good background in CS is necessary for this stuff. This has not much to do with programming languages, operating systems, Turing completeness. Maybe having a good base in algorithms could be useful for _implementing_ the libraries to make sure they are optimal. I was wondering why do people ask this question (or ask about resources on learning about this topic in general), when answers on this are so easily findable online. ------ sandGorgon > _Many of these funds are putting time and resources into securing data sets, > technical mentors and advanced simulation tools to support the unique needs > of AI startups_ What are "advanced simulation tools" ? something like [https://github.com/marcotcr/lime](https://github.com/marcotcr/lime) ? ~~~ tachyonbeam Simulated worlds / games like the OpenAI gym and DeepMind lab come to mind: [https://gym.openai.com/](https://gym.openai.com/) [https://github.com/deepmind/lab](https://github.com/deepmind/lab) ------ Quintus_ Is it likely that I (and other Andrew Ng 'fans') will be able to buy stock in his company? ~~~ forgotmysn there is usually a minimum investment amount. for a fund of this size, im guessing it would be around $5m ~~~ tachyonbeam I find this really frustrating about tech investing. Much of the early investment opportunities are only available to the richest. It's an insider's game. ~~~ likelynew I don't think it is not unique to tech investing, but it is true for all small companies. ~~~ padobson Or big companies. If you wanted a chance to profit from Snap, Square, Twitter or (coming soon) Pinterest, you had to be a high level investor. I believe most regulations that block this kind of investment are done in the name of protecting the little guy. ~~~ goobynight They are done in order to protect the little guy, due to the high risk associated with the high reward. Otherwise, you will get people that have negative net worth, maybe $20k in credit card debt + student loans that they pay minimums on, and a few kids dumping a year of savings into Snapchat and losing it all. While it sucks for small players that are ok with high risk investing (and would be ok losing it), there just isn't a way to stop the flood of stupid that would come with it. Probably the closest thing I've seen to being able to invest in something like this is cryptocurrecy, ------ PopsiclePete "During an earlier conversation, Ng told me that his personal goal is to help bring about an AI-powered society." So is this Elon Musk's arch-nemesis? ~~~ Tenoke Andrew NG is mostly talking about society powered by current techniques, which Musk also likes. Musk's worry is over the potential once/if we've advanced the technology enough (which given current progress and open avenues for research isn't too far-fetched of an expectation). ------ justboxing Is AI the new Social? ~~~ jraines SoMoLo --> AIVRCoin doesn't quite jump off the powerpoint slide as well though ------ panabee one of the best ways to monetize education is with student investments instead of student payments. YC is doing this with startup education. ------ Jdam Lol, even Filecoin outraised that Fund ------ ktta Offtopic, but this amp page is the cleanest page I've ever seen. I would love to just use the amp version for all TechCrunch pages. Anyone in the mood to make a chrome extension? (I'm on desktop, and the results are still clean without adblocker) ~~~ taytus Plug: We are on it :) [https://roboamp.com](https://roboamp.com) ------ SoMisanthrope Go, Andrew, go!!!

Ask YC: Are you a talented developer in the Bay Area? - hv23 I'm looking for a talented technical co-founder in the Silicon Valley/ Bay Area to join my team to work on product development for a consumer-facing web startup over the next few months (June-September).<p>I've been developing an intriguing idea for the past month or so, and based on the significant interest that I've gotten from student incubators and other individuals with whom I've been discussing the concept, now am extremely confident about its viability. I am convinced about the short and long-term potential of this business to change a market that I (and millions of others) are passionate about -- sports.<p>While I won't go into detail here, we will seize on emerging social media trends to deliver a great communication platform to sports fans. At the same time, I've conceived an effective monetization scheme that goes beyond the traditional Web 2.0-throw-some-advertising-on-the-site tactic.<p>My tech background is significant enough to where I'm not just another "business guy" with a half-baked idea -- engineering student at an Ivy League, work at a top tech blog (rhymes with "ElecMunch"), work at an early-stage venture capital firm.<p>Based on what I've seen and read, I believe that it would take no more than a few weeks (rough timeframe) to build and release an alpha version of the product. While this is, by no means, a trivial stage, the real work would begin there.<p>Trust me when I say that I understand the importance - rather, the essentiality- of great developers on a team. You'd come on board as an equal member and receive significant equity in this startup. Once an initial proof-of-concept is developed and funding is raised, expect to receive a competitive salary and benefits. I understand all the odd roles that a startup requires of its founders; I'll ensure that all you have to worry about is focusing on good problem-solving and coding (and drinking good beer!). Ideally, you are comfortable working in the LAMP stack, have an understanding of database technology, and have experience using languages of your choice to build robust, scalable web applications. While experience isn't necessary, ability is.<p>Please contact me via email at harishv@seas.upenn.edu or give me a call at (408) 802-2008 to discuss this further. If you think you even MIGHT be interested in being involved in this high-potential project, get in touch -- I'd love to hear from you! Win, lose or draw, this will be a great experience for all involved! ====== Mystalic Sounds like PR bull, sorry. The best "recruiting" posts on HR/YC are the ones that have wit, humor, and most of all, go directly to the points. You do lay out you're qualified, though. ------ signa11 older advert by the same folks: <http://programmermeetdesigner.com/listing/view/2490> ------ alaskamiller Nice. A Harker grad. ------ davidmathers People are voting this up? wtf?

Ask HN: Does anyone do business with the VC that stitched up the Facebook guy? - andrewstuart "The Social Network" movie shows how the VC's put together a contract that effectively took almost all the shares away from Facebook's co-founder.<p>Does anyone do business with that VC now? If yes, then why? Surely that's the biggest dirty deal in the history of technology startups? ====== smanek Peter Thiel (the 'don' of the paypal mafia) was the first outside investor, to the best of my knowledge. He is still a very active and respected angel. Diluting Eduardo Saverin was almost certainly Zuckerberg's doing (or at least he didn't object), since Zuck had (and still has) board control. Don't feel too bad for Saverin though. He sued, got ~5% of the company, and is now a billionaire at FB's current valuation. ------ garrettgillas Eduardo Saverin made more money from being "screwed out" of Facebook than almost anyone on earth will ever make in their entire lives (About 2.3 billion). Yeah, I feel really bad for him. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin> ------ callmeed These companies do <http://www.foundersfund.com/portfolio.php> ------ anonaccount1234 Peter Thiel is one of the biggest investors in the industry. And while I am sure the events didn't go down exactly as they did in the movie, I am sure he had no problem screwing someone out of all those shares. Unfortunately, that's business. Everyone is out for themselves. ~~~ iuguy Perhaps this is one of the biggest reasons not to take funding if you can afford it. To quote wargames, the best way to win is not to play. ~~~ l0nwlf > To quote wargames, the best way to win is not to play. How is this relevant here ? ------ alextingle They're all like ferrets in a bag. ------ haploid I think you should do a little more research into the actual events of the Saverin/Facebook story. Ben Mezrich's book, and Aaron Sorkin's writing are particularly fictionalized when it comes to this aspect of the story. May I suggest "The Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick for a slightly more legitimate history of the company. ~~~ tapiwa Totally recommend that book too. The fully story is a bit more complicated than you can squeeze into a hollywood movie. Well, you can say the same about the book, but you do have to start somewhere.

How to manage old, unmotivated, change resisting programmers? - panjaro ====== twunde To be clear, your "old" programmers should be among your most valuable employees as they should know what pitfalls to avoid, what the warning signs are and should know a great deal of design patterns or tricks to help improve your project. Motivating older programmers is different from motivating younger programmers. They've seen layoffs, acquisitions, failing companies. They've also seen multiple project management philosophies come and go and generally aren't impressed with agile and scrum. Most older programmers I've worked with want some combination of the following: money, being able to do good quality work and good work-life balance. They're unlikely to pull all-nighters or work more than 40 hours because at this point they've seen how destructive and ineffective those are. To motivate them you can offer flexible hours, remote working privileges, vacation time. You can also check with them to see if they want to explore different roles (would they want to do some project management? UX design? devops/system administration? Also you are doing regular 1:1s, right?) Now you may encounter some problems with these older programmers learning new technologies (I had a former COBOL programmer give up on web services even though he was using Microsoft COM apis on a regular basis). In these cases, there are two good solutions. 1) Spend extra time with the programmer, mapping the terminology they're learning with the terminology they're familiar with. 2) Have them work on different projects that are more closely aligned with their current skills. ------ partisan Let's start removing "old" from the list of things we want to filter out of our workforce. Age discrimination is real and it surfaces in the most insidious ways such that adding it to a list of negative traits just seems natural. ~~~ panjaro we don't want to filter out, but manage. ~~~ Someone Your question implicitly suggests that you wouldn’t have problems managing _young_ , unmotivated, change resisting programmers. If so, do you think there is an innate difference between old unmotivated, change resisting programmers and young unmotivated, change resisting ones, or could your attitude towards the two groups be different? ~~~ muzani Young people generally don't resist change because change benefits them. People who have invested 5 years into an obsolete skillset are most resistant to change. ------ playing_colours I did not have experience with the whole team or department consisting of such guys, my situation was just several individuals (and I could not just fire them) within overall good collective. My appoach was to be very straightforward in communications, no motivational bullshit and no teaching tone. Just straight to what I expect from them to deliver. And I tried to give them tasks that are less related to critical core functionality - more like admin tools, etc. Do not expect any wonders from them, and you cannot just change them - try to reduce risks,harm, and demotivation they can bring and treat them as adults. ~~~ jermaustin1 That is exactly what the manager at my last company did. Unless the workload was too great for the rest of the team to do alone, the more aged members of the team worked on internal tools (unless those were too high profile). ------ LarryMade2 What sort of change? Have you asked them what they don't like about the change? - Just letting them say their peace to the right people will alleviate some of their anxiety, especially if the concerns are repeated and addressed or at least responded to. Does it clearly solve problems in the existing system? - Show them the pain categories in the old system that the new one will address, features that work better or are easier to maintain. Are you giving them enough learning/experiential on the new system? - Let them try out new methods on the new system such as testing solutions that they feel might not work, so they can see all is good, or really less impossible they may have thought. Once they feel effective on implementing the change then they will better cope with what needs to be done and work toward it. ------ andrei_says_ I’d type out an answer but I just saw Sandi Metz’ amazing talk on influence in the context of software teams. Highly recommended. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzWLGMtXflg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzWLGMtXflg) As for the rest, I’d take a step back and check if it is possible that the “old, unmotivated, change-resisting” could be possibly judgments (hint: they are) and what did they result from. Example: I requested that we make changes X, Y and Z, and Peter refused on the premise that ... (to replace “change-resistant”) Also, Peter is 45. (To replace “Old”) Working with judgments is difficult because they close the possibility for dialogue. Working with observations opens possibilities for inquiry. Also, even programmers can feel when they’re being judged, so there’s that. ------ SirLJ Lead by example e.g. don't ask them to do stuff you wont and make it about the team, if they like to be part of it, they have to pull their weight and have to have the backs of their coworkers... If the team does poorly, most likely will be disbanded, so they'll have a vested interest to stay together and for the people who don't want to be part of it, you as a manager have to find them a better fit in another team in the company and replace them with a better fitted employees... ------ superbrama First, check if old person really does want to grind hard on coding. If not, there could be issues that came up or accumulated over time. Burnout is most likely example - how many humans do well staring at code for decades? Not all programmers become more productive over time. Just an anecdote really but surely this is the case for many. ------ raarts Get someone older than you to manage them. ------ neofrommatrix Is this at Oracle? :-) ~~~ csnewb Sounds a lot like the other old school tech companies as well: IBM/Cisco/HP/Intel/etc...

Who is inflating the oil bubble? - ideas101 http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/jun/03bubble1.htm ====== marvin I don't think this is a bubble at all. It seemed ridiculous to me that 30-40 year oil futures were valued at 50$ a barrel when most scientific theories of oil production dictate a dramatic decline in worldwide production during the next few years. In fact, I played with the idea of speculating on the 10-year price of oil a few years ago, but my understanding of markets at the time was not good enough to realize that there was actually a thriving futures market. Gasoline can't be stored for more than a few months, and getting hold of and selling physical crude oil is probably more hassle than it's worth. Perhaps the current development is a bit of an overcompensation..but not much of an overcompensation. The current price of oil is probably higher than is dictated by supply and demand, but when it comes to futures, a correction up has been in the coming for a long time. Unless all speculators are certain that we will have a dramatic increase in fuel-efficiency (on the order of 50% over the next ten years) across all markets that buy fuel, there is no hope that there will be an abundancy of oil in the future. Add this to the fact that China and India are expected to consume more oil in the future, and things look very different. I think what has happened is that speculators have finally realized this, and that the current price spike is caused by "speculators" correcting the price up to a realistic level. This is how markets are supposed to work, and no new laws or political hand-wringing will be able to do anything about it. Saying that this is a bubble seems like wishful thinking. When politicians start investigations to check out whether this is the case, there should be reason to worry. Actual bubbles are rarely identified with this great unity. If they are so certain, why don't the ambitious politicians of the US short crude oil futures for a few billion dollars? I think that would be quite an interesting spetacle. ------ josefresco Answer: Speculators. Not a lot of meat in that article, cool motorcycle though!

Microsoft Is Interested in Buying Stake in Dailymotion - richardknop http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/microsoft-is-interested-in-buying-stake-in-dailymotion/ ====== ToastyMallows Kind of a misleading title, Microsoft is interested, it hasn't been approved at all. > In April 2013, Yahoo was about to acquire 75 percent of Dailymotion for $200 > million. Yet, the French government suspended the deal as the state still > owns 27 percent of Orange. “Montebourg didn’t want to let it go to the > Americans,” a source told TechCrunch at the time — Arnaud Montebourg is the > French Minister of Industrial Renewal. Who knows, the same thing could happen this time. Looks like Microsoft is looking for it's own YouTube. ~~~ nolok Government didn't want to sell, but the current talk with Microsoft is explicitly about Orange keeping majority ownership but finding an international partner. Source in french: [http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2014/02/25/orange...](http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2014/02/25/orange- confirme-discuter-avec-microsoft-d-une-cession-partielle-de- dailymotion_4372864_651865.html) ------ ar7hur _> "Dailymotion is one of France’s biggest Internet successes"_ That tells a lot about France's so called "successes" (I'm French btw) ~~~ thisiswrong Maybe because the french encourage healthy competition [1] rather than US- style 'free-market' monopolies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast... [1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/business/France-Takes- Aim-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/business/France-Takes-Aim-at- Amazon-to-Protect-Local-Bookshops.html?_r=0) ~~~ nemothekid From the first line: >French lawmakers on Thursday took aim at Amazon to protect local bookshops by voting through a law that bars online booksellers from offering free delivery to customers on top of a maximum 5 percent discount on books. Now as I understand it, competition is supposed to help the consumer, and the French government essentially did something anti-consumer. I understand your need to go on your "anti-US" soapbox, but your post is outrageous. In what was is Google a monopoly? Last I checked Bing had a 20% marketshare. ~~~ adventured Besides, Google won the search market due to a _massively_ superior product. The race wasn't even remotely close, they demolished the competition with an easier, faster, better offering in every possible respect. What alternative is thisiswrong proposing one wonders: that the government should have forced dramatically inferior products on consumers at gun point? Quotas on how often consumers can use Google? It'd be laughable if it weren't such a dark perspective. ------ noir_lord The title here is misleading they are looking for Minority partners for investment for international growth. It would be an interesting position for Microsoft to take particularly as they seem to be going all in on mobile. As an aside I prefer dailymotion in just about every way to youtube so I hope they do well. ------ higherpurpose Is Microsoft on a mission from NSA to buy all European companies, or something? Skype, Nokia, Dailymotion... ~~~ Encosia Microsoft (like Apple, Google, etc) has a large portion of their profits stuck overseas and can't repatriate that money without paying US income taxes on it. That's why spending the money internationally is appealing to them. ~~~ vorador Does it mean that they can't pay dividends using their oversea money? ~~~ Encosia I only understand the broad strokes well enough to say for certain. My assumption is that they can do anything they want with the "Double Irish" money, but they avoid bringing it back into the US if at all possible since they'd have to pay corporate income tax on it at that point. ------ hahla Id be interested in seeing statistics on how many Dailymotion uploads are adult content vs higher value non-adult content. The only time I see Dailymotion links are for videos containing ripped adult scenes from TV/Movies.. ------ fidotron These positions by countries that like to reduce foreign ownership of non- critical businesses strike me as bizarre. It radically reduces the market value of the business, and thus greatly reduces their ability to raise money and grow organically. No coincidence such markets tend to have a reputation as being nightmares to attempt to grow in. ~~~ hrktb It usually prevents the business' core from going away (if Microsoft moves the headquarter to London or Seattle for instance). The point would be less to preserve market value than jobs, technical expertise and surrounding ecosystem. Not that I strongly agree with this line of thinking, I'm unopiniated at best. ------ mckee1 The title here is completely wrong. The article mentions that they are potentially in talks to buy a stake in DailyMotion, but nowhere does it state that MSFT will be buying them for certain. ~~~ beauzero I think that is what "interested" means. ------ jacquesm After the debacle around Yahoo buying a majority share I'm somewhat surprised that Microsoft would still be interested. ------ piyush_soni And possibly thinking of having their own 'YouTube'?

Software Should Be Easier to Build, Not Harder - ern http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/blogs/software-should-be-easier-to-build-not-harder-my-dream-for-the-future-of-development ====== flukus TFA and all the comments their essentially conflate complexity with more typing. Webforms might be easy to drag and drop, but it is much more complex than MVC. That's when things are going right, when things are going wrong Webforms becomes exponentially more complex. MS developers also rarely know about tools like Gtk and Qt, which is much friendlier for building desktop front ends than drag and drop tools ever were.

WePay and DailyBooth Hackathon - RyanAmos http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=138815859500979 ====== zaveri For those of you who dont have FB or dont want to login: Time Saturday, November 13 at 12:00pm - November 14 at 12:00pm Location WePay HQ 455 Portage Ave Ste B Palo Alto, CA Created By Sophie Monroe, Bill Clerico More Info Join us for our first ever 24 hour hackathon! WePay founders will be holding a start up workshop for tips on how to start your own company. Rasmus Lerdorf will be available to help you with the WePay API as well as any of your PHP questions. It's going to be 24 hours full of hacking, food, music and awesome prizes in the awesome new WePay HQ (we have an Oasis, no big deal.) What more could you ask for? We'll have an IRC channel setup, and maybe some sort of video stream, if you'd like to participate remotely. Stay tuned. See you there! ------ blaines Asks me to login to facebook... Um no. ~~~ tudorachim Why not? ~~~ blaines All I have is a four word title... I don't really have an incentive to login to facebook. Plus sometimes it's really inconvenient on a mobile device. Better: link to web page, Twitter, or blog post. Best: link to above and title "WePay and DailyBooth Hackathon - Nov. 13 - 14" ~~~ bullrunbear whiney? ------ levirosol We've been working with the WePay API, integrating it into Scoreyard, for the past few weeks. I can't make the in person event, but can be available on IRC / Email / Skype for a good portion of the hackathon to provide some Rails support. I'd be interested in a Justin.TV stream of the workshop presentations too.

Ask HN: Most successful SaaS pricing structure you've found? - bookjunkie13 Details like how much more revenue a product can bring by charging 99cents instead of $1 fascinate me,and I&#x27;m curious to see how that translates to the SaaS world. Thanks! ====== petervandijck Generally: \- 79$ (solve a business problem and its worth it. There's no difference between 29 or 39 or 79 for a business user with a credit card.) \- $399 (basically max to buy without approval if you're a manager, anything below 500$.) \- enterprise (aka call us, you'll need approval for this internally.) You could add a 799 plan here, or a 1999 plan, etc. You want to stay away from 9$ and such unless you're selling to consumers, not businesses, in very high quantities (eg. you're netflix). ~~~ wmboy Nice and concise answer! Just wondering if you can give some reasoning behind this? e.g. if approval is usually needed for purchases over $500, wouldn't they have to ask for approval if they're making a purchase that's essentially going to cost $4,788 out of the annual budget (if it's a $399/mo SaaS web app)? ~~~ petervandijck No, it's 500$ "at the time" approval. (Companies are simple-minded.) If I am a manager and my credit card gets charged 399$ each month, that registers as 12 separate purchases in pretty much everyone's rulebook. The way it works is this: as a larger company, you want your people to be able to get their work done, that includes making purchases. You also want to set some rules around larger purchases (multiple 1000s of dollars), else people will end up throwing money away. So you set a fairly arbitrary rule that says "a manager of level X can spend up to level Y without approvals". That's how you keep your business running but are fiscally responsible. As a SaaS selling to businesses, you create TRUE business value (let's say you make my operation better someway, or save us time), and I pay you. As a manager, the difference between 50$ and 500$ is invisible to me. With just 10 people reporting to me, I am likely spending 200, 300K/month (salaries, overhead, business costs, ...). The only thing I care about is not having to deal with the purchasing department or legal, because I know that will suddenly turn this quick and easy purchase of business value into a month-long process and it will cost me more time than I get value out of it. (aka it's no longer worth it). And finally, now that you are charging $79 or $399, you can spend a significant amount of money (let's say 3 times monthly cost) on customer acquisition and create a proper business. ------ jasonkester My lesson is that you need to A/B test everything, since the thing that works is never what you think will work. For example, this terrible wall-of-text absolutely destroyed a pretty 37 Signals-esque 3-column pricing chart in A/B testing: [https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx](https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx) I didn't believe it, so I tweaked it and ran the test again. Exactly the same result. So those paragraphs stay, with the same unordered order, goofy typography and everything else. Nobody touch anything! It's perfectly balanced at its local maxima. ~~~ xavierwjc How much of a difference does the A/B test show for two very different pricing pages? ------ narrowrail In the B2B space, it really bothers me when pricing is listed for a service where the expectation is to be a long-term customer, but pricing is listed per month. It's doubly aggravating when the price isn't rounded to the nearest $10 (e.g. don't price the iPhone SE as $399 b/c that's $400). Cloudflare, while far from the only perpetrator, is the my most recent experience with this crap. If I'm evaluating CDNs, it's not like I want to switch such a service monthly. I have to believe we are all trying to please the bean-counters w/in our own orgs, but it is almost insulting. ~~~ tixocloud Prices ending in 9 are mostly a psychological play on buyers. Coupled with the fact that most of us read from left to right, we're more likely to believe $399 to be much less than $400. Something like a Jedi mind trick if you will. As for monthly pricing, I'd say it's more to make buyers perceive affordability and deemphasize the much larger annual price even if annual contracts are available. Whether it works better, I'm not too sure. ~~~ vram22 >Prices ending in 9 are mostly a psychological play on buyers. Right, always thought so. Find it a bit irritating, in fact. Though, to be fair, I don't think that all of the people/companies who sell products, and use prices ending in 9, do it for that reason. Pretty sure many of them just use it out of habit / conditioning, due to seeing that kind of pricing everywhere they look. E.g. Recently saw, on a blog I read often, another regular reader commenting that they would buy some product or service if it was available for $99. Did a double take for a minute - why would anyone deliberately say 99 when 100 (a round figure) is the more obvious choice? Then realized it must be for the reason I surmised above.

A brief guide to mathematical writing [pdf] - spacehacker http://www.pamitc.org/documents/mermin.pdf ====== spacehacker I also found the advice for technical writing at the end of this MIT lecture by Professor Patrick Winston to be very valuable: [https://youtu.be/bQI0OmJPby4?t=2703](https://youtu.be/bQI0OmJPby4?t=2703)

3D printed luxury homes for hermit crabs - Mordor http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130728-3d-printed-luxury-homes-for-hermit-crabs.html ====== pallian Now this is brilliant!

Web start-up Path to pay $800k to settle privacy charges - laurencei http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/web-startup-path-to-pay-800k-to-settle-privacy-charges-20130204-2duad.html ====== joshbaptiste <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5151230>

Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set - graystevens https://doublepulsar.com/important-information-about-microsoft-meltdown-cpu-security-fixes-antivirus-vendors-and-you-a852ba0292ec ====== mesofile It's worth noting that Windows Update may also fail to apply the Meltdown/Spectre patch if other conditions aren't met. Some are mentioned on the KB page [1] but they don't mention another common scenario, which is that if your system firmware is not ready to accept the update, Windows Update will not apply it, and _it won't tell you_ that it's not applying it -- it will simply say 'Your device is up to date'. I had to dig around to find a page [2] that had some useful instructions allowing me to find out what the actual status of my Windows install was. I'm grateful to the author of that page, they provided critical info that neither Microsoft nor my machine's manufacturer did. I wish I could say that it boggles my mind that they could be so hushmouthed on the subject of a vulnerability this severe. Of course, my OEM (Lenovo) has not released an update for my Windows laptop (Yoga 900) since 2016, and as of today their support page [3] on Meltdown/Spectre does not indicate that they plan to do so. I'm posting this partly in anger/despair, partly in the hope that I'm wrong and that someone will pop up to comment and tell me there's a fix. There is a Linux BIOS for this machine but it's old and I don't know if it will actually address this issue. [1] [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892) [2] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of- meltd...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-meltdown-and- spectre-vulnerability-advisories-patches-and-updates/) [3] [https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282](https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282) ~~~ Karnickel I know I won't get any updates for the system for my 2012 Dell XPS 8500 (256 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, i7 CPU - I don't see a need for an upgrade, it's all there). Does that mean I'll just be left out cold? That's how I understand it. When I run the Microsoft Powershell plugin that they made available to check the protection status (`Get-SpeculationControlSettings`) I get a "True" for 3 of 8 items (only showing those 3): Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is present: True Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is enabled: True ~~~ mey Same boat for my XPS 8700, also kept around for same reason. 24gb ram i7 4th gen. Great for development, including VM work. Unless I was regularly doing video transcoding or heavy CAD work, it's more than fast enough. Contacted Dell support and confirmed they will not be releasing a BIOS update for the system. First harm to me from this issue. Not sure if it means I will have to join a class action against Dell or Intel ~~~ ac29 Might want to check again tomorrow. My Dell Desktop (Ivy Bridge/3rd Gen era) received a BIOS update today, specifically noting "Update to the latest CPU microcode to address CVE-2017-5715." It updates the ME firmware too for those recent bugs. ~~~ mey Thanks for the heads, I'll keep an eye out, but it's not listed on the following consumer systems list [http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln308587/micro...](http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln308587/microprocessor- side-channel-vulnerabilities--cve-2017-5715--cve-2017-5753--cve-2017-5754--- impact-on-dell-products?lang=en) ------ gtirloni “Customers will not receive the January 2018 security updates (or any subsequent security updates) and will not be protected from security vulnerabilities unless their antivirus software vendor sets the following registry key” Another incentive to stop using questionable AV software (since this was implemented because they can't get their act together). ~~~ craftyguy No, another incentive to stop using Windows. 3rd party applications should NOT be responsible for insuring that the OS can receive critical security updates, and Microsoft should not be relying on 3rd party applications to determine whether or not their customers receive critical OS security updates (and of all things, hilariously defaulting to 'no') ~~~ bitwize Windows isn't going anywhere, if for no other reason than because Microsoft Excel is basically electronic paper to the business world -- and there is simply no adequate substitute for it. (No, neither OpenOffice Calc nor any of the Web-based offerings -- including Microsoft's own -- count.) Coping with Windows is a fact of life. Get used to it. ~~~ viraptor There's MS Excel (and office) for Mac and Wine supports Office 2013. The situation is getting better every year. ~~~ petecox And MS Office for Android. ------ photon-torpedo So finally there's a way to disable updates on Windows 10... ;) ------ cube2222 I think at this time if you're on windows 10 you should really just use Defender. It works well, they are actively developing it, and the new white list based directory protection is kinda neat if you're scared of ransomware. ~~~ lostmsu What feature are you talking about specifically? ~~~ cube2222 Here you are: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/10/23/stopping...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/10/23/stopping- ransomware-where-it-counts-protecting-your-data-with-controlled-folder- access/) ------ discreditable > The compatibility registry key exists for a reason. I know. I can also see > it’s a messy hacky fix. But it needs an end of life date I couldn't agree more. As I've been devising a patching plan over the past few days I couldn't help but wonder "how long will I have to do this"? My hope is that in future OS releases (say, Windows Client/Server 1803) the mitigations will be default-on for clean installations (minimally). ------ zengid Do I have to do anything if I'm just using Windows Defender? ~~~ graystevens Nope, Windows Defender has already set the registry key, and you should be good to go. For the rest of you, there is a good public document[0] that is being regularly updated on the status of each of the AV products out there. [0][https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLpzAtckQxYiuirADzf3cL42FQ/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true) ~~~ Multicomp Does Microsoft Security Essentials fall under Windows Defender for the purposes of this article? ------ ENOTTY Wow using a hypervisor to inject below the kernel to avoid KPP is nuts. Never knew the AVs did that. What are they going to do when Microsoft begins to use Hyper-V to enforce CredGuard[1]? [1]: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ash/2016/03/02/windows-1...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ash/2016/03/02/windows-10-device- guard-and-credential-guard-demystified/) ~~~ ENOTTY Turns out nested virtualization is a thing. Jesus. ------ hungerstrike My windows 10 machines will not receive the update automatically for some reason. I think it is because I had defender completely disabled via group policy since it interferes with some of my development activities surrounding node.JS. However I was able to install the security update manually from the Microsoft Windows update catalog download site. I did this after enabling defender briefly and updating it to ensure that the registry key was written. ~~~ inetknght I'm real curious what kind of development you're doing with node.JS where Windows Defender causes trouble. ~~~ Arnavion The real-time scanning slows down processes that access a large number of files, like code compiles in general and importing node modules in particular. ~~~ inetknght I haven't noticed Windows Defender causing significant slowdowns for processes which access lots of files except when it does a full system scan (which is _not_ often). Even then, it's only barely noticeable. ~~~ serf I've disabled defender due to high CPU usage on machines that had to slice mpegs into jpegs with near constant work. The machine was slicing up 11 channels of 24fps videos into jpegs, so 264 jpegs/s at 720p and 24 bit color. I've had friends and coworkers that have hit the same CPU issues with big git repos and defender. It seems like Defender has problems with getting hit with tons of small files in quick succession, but really I know very little about it. ------ unstatusthequo Finally a fix for forced reboots! ~~~ B1FF_PSUVM You could still get the reboots without updates ... which is what I've been getting for a few weeks now on a cheap tablet: loads update, reboots in the night, update fails. Rinse, repeat. (I don't care, an update took down the sound last year. For all I know the next one will make the gizmo totally malfunction ... MS don't care for that cheapo segment either, the wanton demands for disk space are astounding, and they refuse to use their own exFat format on additional storage. Truly ready to ascend to Oracle level, they are.) ~~~ Feniks Throw Enterprise LTSB on old/low spec hardware. Thats my preferred Win10: stable, bloat free and it only gets the updates beta tested by the regular users. ~~~ Piskvorrr "Windows 10 LTSB is only available as part of Windows 10 Enterprise. And Windows 10 Enterprise is only available to an organization with a volume licensing agreement, or through a new $7 per month subscription program." Seriously? An OS of which you need an obscure, hard-to-get version, special messing around in power tools, and still might break randomly? This role reversal happening in the last 10 years is sad, really. ------ kabdib Yeah, had me confused for a while. Easy to set with a group policy, though. Still, could have been better communicated. ------ j-c-m Another consequence of this is that windows will disable updates when you do not have any anti-virus software running as well. ------ medlazik Slightly OT if I may: Is there any reason to use anything else than Defender these days? Chrome+uBlock, good email security and update practices, Defender just in case, do we need more? ~~~ 0xfeba No, not that I am aware of. 3rd party AV are liabilities at this point. [https://www.pcworld.com/article/3020327/antivirus- software-c...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3020327/antivirus-software- could-make-your-company-more-vulnerable.html) ~~~ the8472 Defender can be seen as merely being the lesser evil. Consider CVE-2017-0290[0], which was caused by the MsMpEng process running a custom unsandboxed javascript interpreter with system privileges to evaluate untrusted code for maliciousness. Remotely exploitable over many unsolicited channels. Pretty much the worst kind of exploitability. Of course other AVs have done quite similar mistakes. [0] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=12...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=1252&desc=5)

City living 'makes it harder to concentrate' - amirmc http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21506132 ====== keithpeter " _Concentration is improved when people's senses are aroused, says Dr Linnell, but if this becomes excessive it seems to have the opposite effect and reduces the ability to focus on a single task._ " Something to be said for the suburbs!

Say “no” to import side‐effects in Python - chrismorgan http://chrismorgan.info/blog/say-no-to-import-side-effects-in-python.html ====== einhverfr I do most of my work with Perl, rather than Python, but in Perl there are several kinds of stock import-level side-effects which are actually quite helpful. These are pretty light-weight though. They boil down to: 1\. Global lexical changes to Perl. Sometimes this is the whole point of an import (for example Carp::Always, which typically turns any warning or exception string into a full stack dump). I can't imagine doing something like this in Python. However making soemthing like this work properly without breaking too many things requires a heck of a lot of forethought Yes, even Carp::Always may break something. 2\. Manipulation of the importing module's symbol table. This is important for lexical extensions to Perl that you don't want to be global (for example Moo, Moose, and PGObject::Util::DBMethod). Among other things this allows MOPs to be added with greater sophistication than the language typically allows. I am not a Python guru but I could imagine metaprogramming side effects to be useful in setting up a consistent and powerful environment. The problem the author describes is something which is different though, which not only is a side effect issue but also a violation of separation of concerns. There are certain problems you do not want to solve at import time, and connecting with/configuring external components is almost always one of them. Why? Because integration with external components is almost always something you want the fine-tuning and decision-making to reside with the application developer. That's very different than setting up a consistent lexical programming environment for use (which is what the acceptable side effects do). ~~~ chrismorgan In Python, side-effects are simply not acceptable at all. One should instead put the code with the side-effect in a function and call it. This is the approach taken by gevent, which allows you to replace the entire I/O stack. But importing it does not effect the change; you must explicitly call code to do that. This is done thus: from gevent.monkey import patch_all patch_all() c.f. [http://www.gevent.org/gevent.monkey.html](http://www.gevent.org/gevent.monkey.html) ~~~ ta0967 from __future__ import print_function ~~~ makomk As I understand it, "from __future__ import ..." statements are actually a special type of statement that doesn't actually import a module at all - they just use similar syntax for compatibility reasons. There is an actual __future__ module, also for compatibility reasons, but importing it has no side-effects. ~~~ chrismorgan Future statements do import something as well, when run, but their primary purpose is changing the behaviour of the compiler _for the current file_. They have no behaviour outside of that file, so that is not a publicly visible side-effect. ------ lambda On one machine I tried, help('modules') actually worked successfully with no substantial delays or apparent side effects. On another, it apparently tried to set up an MPI cluster: *** The MPI_Init() function was called before MPI_INIT was invoked. *** This is disallowed by the MPI standard. *** Your MPI job will now abort. [hostname:14114] Abort before MPI_INIT completed successfully; not able to guarantee that all other processes were killed! On a third, I get the following and then it just hangs: Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 15:40:47) [GCC 4.8.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> help('modules') Please wait a moment while I gather a list of all available modules... /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gobject/constants.py:24: Warning: g_boxed_type_register_static: assertion 'g_type_from_name (name) == 0' failed import gobject._gobject /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot register existing type 'GtkWidget' g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot add class private field to invalid type '<invalid>' g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot add private field to invalid (non-instantiatable) type '<invalid>' g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_type_add_interface_static: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_INSTANTIATABLE (instance_type)' failed g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: cannot register existing type 'GtkBuildable' g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_type_interface_add_prerequisite: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_INTERFACE (interface_type)' failed g_type = info.get_g_type() /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi/module.py:171: Warning: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed g_type = info.get_g_type() ------ aptwebapps This in no way invalidates the point of the post, but I can't imagine going back to installing everything globally instead of using virtualenv. If you do that, at least you won't have every package you every looked at in your path. ~~~ marcosdumay I just can't get to use some modules within virtualenv. They seem to create more problems than using systemwide. ~~~ pekk Which ones? You can get some help. Learning virtualenv is a smart long-term move ~~~ aptwebapps If you're on a Mac, good luck getting pip to install mysql-python. I use Macports for that. ~~~ jaegerpicker This isn't a good solution. I pip install mysql-python several times a week on my mac ( I use different venv's for different branches and we have several different services that I work on in a given week, thus I'm installing packages via pip A LOT) and we always install it in a venv. Sure it can be a bit of a pain but it's well worth it IMO. Our steps to always get it working: make sure mysql_config is in your path env variable, make sure the xcode command line tools are probably installed, and make sure the mysql command line client is setup and working correctly locally. Past that is just works for us on Mac OS X 10.7+. I think 10.6 and earlier also work but I'm not sure. ~~~ aptwebapps I couldn't ever get it to compile, but I haven't tried in a while. I don't actually need it much these days as I'm using Postgres for most things. I'm sure there are other packages that are similar: not so easy to get working with pip but not impossible. ------ jzwinck Of course you should do this in any language. I once used a Ruby library that, when loaded, would try to connect to a database on a remote machine. Programs which required this library would take several seconds to display their --help output. Because of that and similar incidents, I've learned to import argparse up front but nothing else unless necessary. Once argument parsing is done, then importing other modules begins. ~~~ rcfox > I once used a Ruby library that, when loaded, would try to connect to a > database on a remote machine. How is that at all acceptable? I can't believe that a library that phones home would gain any sort of popularity. I can't say I know much of anything about the Ruby community, but if they've conditioned you to jump through hoops like importing modules at specific times to avoid delays, that is a serious problem. Conditional/delayed imports have their place, but they should be relatively rare. ~~~ liveoneggs install my module! Also.. trust me because it's totally safe. curl [http://foo.com/tBrwn](http://foo.com/tBrwn) | bash [http://rvm.io/rvm/install](http://rvm.io/rvm/install) ~~~ Karunamon Out of curiosity, what would be better to handle the case of RVM? It's explicitly user space software, and unprivileged user space software at that, so having it require admin interaction (i.e. touching the system package manager) to install seems like a sledgehammer where a flyswatter would do. They could use a VCS repo of some kind, but that doesn't handle the various folder and script installs that need to happen - and also doesn't help if there isn't that specific VCS on the system. Upstream security is less of a concern since that hotlink just points to raw code on Github, and over HTTPS no less. So what are the negatives here? For software like RVM, this seems like the best, most portable solution that works for the most people. ~~~ liveoneggs being on github and using https doesn't guarantee anything, obviously. If you look at the actual script it contains a ton of sudo and also additional curl commands. The chain of security is very lacking. ------ dpwm It's also worth stressing that even if import side-effects are always going to be fast and not kill the interpreter, they are still a terrible idea. Even spawning objects that are referenced in modules can have some rather unpleasant properties. The __del__ method will likely never get reliably called and other behaviours that work great in scripts break in subtle ways, especially with a KeyboardInterrupt. Threading and multiprocessing will leave processes running using 100% cpu. Trying to debug these things gets insane, as you can often only find them as the interpreter is dying. I think import side-effects can be tempting because Python is often introduced using a scripting-oriented approach. Combined with Python following the principle of least surprise, most people doing this won't even realise that it's wrong. This does seem to be a rather common anti-pattern. ------ ThePhysicist Putting side effects in the __init__ code seems to become quite fashionable these days but is a pretty bad idea since it removes the possibility to "just" import the functionality defined by the module without performing any initialization. Personally, I always try to avoid having a system that relies on some global configuration (like e.g. Django, Matplotlib or Flask do). In matplotlib for example this causes a lot of problems, since importing the pylab module will automatically (among other things) load and initialize a backend, which is then set in stone for the rest of the session. IMHO, the way to go here instead is dependency injection: Inject the configuration into the module through a function or class method (e.g. Flask.initialize({config state}). Wrapping all module functionality that depends on configuration in a class is a good idea here since it allows you to use multiple configurations in parallel and makes your code more modular. As an example, in BlitzDB (a document-oriented database for Python, [https://github.com/adewes/blitzdb](https://github.com/adewes/blitzdb)) there is no global configuration at all, so you can initialize and use multiple backends in parallel as you please without worrying about side effects. SQLAlchemy does it in a similar way btw. ~~~ davmre FYI, it is possible to call Matplotlib in an 'object-oriented' way without global state; though it's a bit more cumbersome than just using the pylab interface. See [http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/webapp_demo.ht...](http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/webapp_demo.html) for an example. ------ taejo Agreed. Twisted's behaviour of installing a reactor on import has caused me problems which could be worked around by importing conditionally or at a later time, but in cases like this, where one is importing modules dynamically, one doesn't know ahead of time which workarounds one needs. ~~~ jzwinck Twisted's problem is the good old singleton (anti-)pattern. There can only be one reactor ever, and most galling of all, it can never be restarted once stopped. ~~~ thristian It should be said that Twisted has put a lot of effort into making it possible to making it possible to deal with multiple reactors (mostly so they can run their test suite including all their supported reactors), and even to make it possible to unit-test Twisted code without a reactor at all (by having standardized mocks for the various things the reactor does). Of course, that doesn't help the mountains of code written for Twisted that expect a singleton reactor, so we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Perhaps in the Brave New World of Python 3, where Twisted is just an implementation detail of the asyncio module, life will be better. ~~~ jzwinck Why can't we at least restart a stopped reactor? That seems possible without breaking compatibility. ------ gbog For those not in the knowing, avoiding import side effect means never having top level code in any python module except class, functions and constant definitions, other imports and the occasional if name = main. And constants must be built-in types. ------ kzrdude Qt and Gtk seem to be the problem here, and they won't change. They aren't python modules as much as they are application frameworks and assume to be in full control. Gtk calls sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8") when imported, changing the way your strings behave in the whole process. ~~~ chrismorgan With regards to Qt, the problem is not Qt but rather that something else is actually trying to _use_ Qt at a time when it shouldn't. pygtk setting the default encoding to UTF-8 is concerning—if true, that is certainly bad behaviour. ~~~ ghfdaghkj I haven't used GTK in a long time, but when I was using it, I was under the impression that pygtk was being deprecated, and everyone should be using GObject-Introspection instead. ~~~ chrismorgan I dunno—I was making assumptions, not being very familiar with the GTK scene in Python. ~~~ kzrdude Not me either anymore. I tried to port to introspection + Gtk3 but ran into problems with widget subclasses and no documentation to resolve it with. ~~~ phaylon I only extensively used it from Perl and Vala, but with GObject-Introspection I tend to more often look at the original library documentation than something language specific. This can be a disadvantage at first, but for me it turned out more convenient, since GIR-inflated bindings can be more complete, as long as the inflation supports the features the API describes. They also tend to be more consistent in their differences to the original. The problem about documentation seems to be the usual dilemma that as soon as you know enough to implement an API browser reading GIR that outputs the API in your language, you know enough about how the bindings work themselves to just use the original documentation. ~~~ kzrdude well it doesn't really explain how to port from pygtk or how python classes interact with g-i. ~~~ phaylon That is true, and unfortunately I have used Python only sparingly until now, and have no experience using PyGtk at all. I took a quick look at PyGObject[0] (unsure if that is what one would actually use for this), and the most helpful part seems to be [1], giving some hints on extending GObject.Object, which should be translatable to extending other existing GObject type classes. As for porting, I agree that can be a pain in that case. When bindings move from a manual implementation to inflating it from an external description. You often end up with good tutorials for the first, and good API reference for the second. If I need to understand other kinds of Gtk bindings, I search for examples on custom TreeModels or other potentially messy things like that to get a feel for it. [0] [https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/PyGObject?action...](https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/PyGObject?action=show&redirect=PyGObject) [1] [http://python- gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/objec...](http://python- gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/en/latest/objects.html) ------ Terr_ If there's one thing I've learned from working with old PHP codebases, it's that side-effects from include/require are a horrible horrible idea. I'm OK with Java's static-initializers, but that's because they've got a whole bunch of rules around them preventing common kinds of abuse. ------ IgorPartola I am an author of a library [1] that does this. I understand the what the OP is talking about and agree with it, but like anything for me the rule is "(1) Don't do dangerous behavior X. (2) If you are an expert, do dangerous behavior X sparingly and with caution." Mind you, my library does not connect to a database, or any such crazy thing. It simply creates a singleton which is then useful throughout your application. There would be very few cases where you would not want that singleton and you would want your own instance. If so, you are free to completely ignore the created singleton and make your own instance. The creation process is also idempotent, except the data you put into that singleton; that data is a special case: it is your explicit responsibility to namespace it, which is indeed the whole point of this library. I feel pretty good about this thing. [1] [https://github.com/ipartola/groper](https://github.com/ipartola/groper) ~~~ halostatue Thinking about it, I do the same thing with my Ruby library mime-types[1]. The library is only useful if you load some data into its registry, so it does so automatically, unless you specify RUBY_MIME_TYPES_LAZY_LOAD in the environment. I've just put myself a task to reverse the behaviour so that lazy loading is the default. [1] [https://github.com/halostatue/mime- types](https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types) ------ atilaneves I have the unfortunate "luck" to be using a Python library at work that _loves_ to use import side-effects. Importing it like God intended makes it parse command-line arguments and fail if it doesn't like what was passed in. And that's just the start. Nearly every __init__.py has code in it, including class definitions. I have no idea why. ~~~ mercurial It's like programmers who find out about metaprogramming. Usually they grow out of it. ~~~ atilaneves I haven't grown out of metaprogramming at all. I just try and use it only when it's the best option. Usually because it means reducing duplication. I liked metaprogramming to an extent in C++. I _love_ it in D. ~~~ gbog Replace "best option" with "only practical option" and you're good to go. ~~~ einhverfr That may depend on the language you are using. ------ Chris_Newton Would anyone like to share their experiences avoiding this sort of problem in the context of web frameworks and building the back end for larger web sites/apps? As an example for discussion, the first time I wrote a Flask-based back-end, I backed myself into a corner almost immediately in the following way. Firstly, the WSGI file that the web server uses to start the application followed the suggestion in the Flask docs by doing this: # webserverseesthis.wsgi from yourapplication import app as application That’s not so bad, but then I started doing application configuration and loading various Flask plug-ins as side effects of that import: # yourapplication/__init__.py app = Flask("yourapplication") # Do some general application configuration. app.config.from_pyfile("/path/to/configuration/file") # Set up some overarching security things that modify application behaviour. from flaskext.securityplugin import SecurityPlugin sp = SecurityPlugin(app) This seemed at the time like the obvious place to put such things, but of course, this is really just a variation on the mistake we’re discussing here. To compound the error, I then used Flask’s decorators to wire up routes from various URLs to the relevant parts of my code. Those decorators work on the application object (sticking with ideas common to many Python web frameworks and avoiding getting into anything more Flask-specific like blueprints) so I was effectively creating circular dependencies from almost everything to that top-level package: # yourapplication/pages/home.py from yourapplication import app @app.route('/') def home_page(): # Render home page and then from the top-level package onto almost everything so all those decorators could take effect: # After setting up the application object in yourapplication/__init__.py import yourapplication.pages.home Now, as long as this kind of code only ever runs as a WSGI application behind a web server, you get away with these dependencies up to a point. In practice, your WSGI set-up imports the top-level application package, which in turn sets up the application object everything is going to depend on and only then imports all the supporting modules/packages, and everything “works”. However, as soon as you want to write tests or otherwise reuse any of the code in a different context, the entire system is a big bowl of spaghetti with all the usual problems. The moment you import any part of the system to run a unit test on something in it, you get much of the rest of the system as well, complete with the side effects of any imports therein. This was of course all horribly naïve on general programming principles, but the nature of these frameworks tends to push in this direction, and even Flask’s own documentation features various simple examples that follow a similar approach, so I’ll forgive myself for falling into the trap the first time. I’ve since experimented with various techniques to break the cycles and avoid the side effects on imports, with some success, but frankly I’ve never found a satisfying, general strategy for organising larger code bases built around a web framework. How is everyone else doing this? ~~~ hcarvalhoalves The example on the Flask tutorial with the app at module level is really only viable if you cram everything inside one module, it gets old soon. You should use a factory pattern, like this: def app_factory(config): app = Flask("yourapplication") app.config.from_pyfile(config) # ... return app Then whenever you need access to your app object, you use the provided proxy: from flask import current_app as app You can't use it at module level though (because there isn't an application context setup by that time), so this doesn't work: @app.route('/') def home_page(): # ... Instead, hook up views inside your app factory: def app_factory(config): # ... app.route('/')(somemodule.home_page) # ... For the test suite, you can now instantiate apps with a different configuration: from flask import current_app as app from myfoo import app_factory import unittest class MyFooTest(unittest.TestCase): # ... if __name__ == '__main__' test_app = app_factory(test_config) # The app proxy will point to that inside test cases unittest.main() TL;DR: The factory pattern is your friend. Parametrize all the things. Avoid singletons at module level, this leads to spaghetti. If you need convenience, create proxies. ~~~ Chris_Newton _You should use a factory pattern, like this: [...] You can 't use it at module level though (because there isn't an application context setup by that time), so this doesn't work: [...] Instead, hook up views inside your app factory: [...]_ That’s basically what I did on my second iteration. It is an improvement in some respects, particularly breaking the circular dependencies caused by using the decorators on the global application singleton. On the other hand, now you need some variation of God Object that not only imports all your modules that used to have decorators but also knows enough about their internal implementation to set up the routes and things like pre- and post-request logic directly on the application object you get back from the factory. The next logical step after that then seemed to be having each module/package that contains views or similar logic provide some sort of initialization function that is declared when you import the module and takes an application object as a parameter. Then we can use app.add_url_rule and friends to wire up the various handlers within each package/module but decoupled from any sort of global application object that needs the circular import. This is the tidiest style I’ve found so far, and all my Flask projects in recent years have used something broadly like it. It does only require one import followed by one initialization call for each package/module, which logically seems to be as good as we can get, given that our starting point is a desire to avoid including any initialization implicitly within the import itself and to avoid depending on global singletons. Somehow, it still doesn’t quite feel right for some reason. I think it’s because even with that general design, I’ve still got a recurring pattern in each of how I create these modules and how I import and then initialize them. My instinct says we ought not to need that extra boilerplate in a highly dynamic language like Python, but I’ve yet to find any alternative that is neater in general. At least in the most simple cases this only adds a couple of extra lines (converting the decorators to an init function in each package/module, and then calling that function at the top level after importing the package/module), which is clearly better than the earlier, more highly connected designs. ------ adamcharnock Can anyone suggest best practice alternatives to import side-effects? ~~~ deckiedan Don't run any functions at the root level of your module. Instead, if you really need long-lasting objects which get initiated once, then use an object, and put any initialisation stuff in it's `__init__` method. Then the module can be imported whenever, but your initialisation stuff is only called when the user of your library creates a new instance of that class. For bonus points, make your classes able to be used with the `with ...` syntax, so then lifetime is kept to a minimum, and errors/whatever are dealt with by default. If you really really need to monkey around and take control of the whole python interpreter (gevent, twisted, and possibly some GUI frameworks come to mind...) then don't do that at import time, do it with a `run_forever()` or `take_control` type function. But yes, a virtualenv for every project does help a lot with not accumulation cruft. ~~~ zipfle I sometimes make calls to collections.namedtuple and other class building functions at the same time as the rest of my definitions. ~~~ rcfox If you pass verbose=True to namedtuple(), you can see that it's essentially just defining a new class. This is something that people already do at the top level of a module. ------ TazeTSchnitzel This is one reason why I prefer Haskell ;) ~~~ mercurial I think most statically typed languages don't care for this kind of shenanigans. ~~~ pcwalton In addition to the many other languages listed here, Go allows side effects on import. ~~~ colin_mccabe That's interesting. I can see the motivation... it's helpful to have modules come into the world fully initialized, and initialization often involves side effects. Is Rust going to allow side effects on initialization? ~~~ pcwalton No. Having module import perform side effects delays program startup unnecessarily and makes the semantics of the program depend on the order in which modules got initialized, which is confusing. ------ Hello71 $ echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches $ time python2 -c 'help("modules")' >/dev/null /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gobject/constants.py:24: Warning: g_boxed_type_register_static: assertion 'g_type_from_name (name) == 0' failed import gobject._gobject python2 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null 1.58s user 0.23s system 69% cpu 2.626 total $ time python3 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null python3 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null 2.00s user 0.17s system 74% cpu 2.928 total $ time python2 -c 'help("modules")' >/dev/null /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/gobject/constants.py:24: Warning: g_boxed_type_register_static: assertion 'g_type_from_name (name) == 0' failed import gobject._gobject python2 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null 1.26s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 1.375 total $ time python3 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null python3 -c 'help("modules")' > /dev/null 1.75s user 0.09s system 99% cpu 1.852 total perhaps your issue is having too many things installed? ~~~ chrismorgan The laptop I'm working on was decent when new, six years ago, but is now not the fastest thing on the block. It has certainly collected quite a lot of things there (mostly from system packages), but it is probably just one or two things that are spending most of the time (excluding I/O time). It's interesting; now that I've tried running it a few more times, `help('modules')` on my Python 2.7 is getting down to six or so seconds. (On Python 3 it takes around 0.15 seconds.)

Ask HN: Fastest way to get X/Y position of text/text-based shape in screenshot? - nkkollaw down vote favorite I&#x27;m trying to create a script for Linux that will detect where the text cursor is. This should be done in maximum 1 second. In order to implement this, the best solution seems to be to programmatically add some text via xdotool, take a screenshot via some other utility, try to figure out the position of that text, and then remove the text we&#x27;ve inserted using xdotool again.<p>I tried inserting a random string (like &lt;-- CURSOR HERE). Using Tesseract 4 it takes about 20 seconds to find the position of the string, although it&#x27;s very precise in terms of pixel coordinates. I was not able to use whitelisting (in version 4 of Tesseract) to narrow result to specific letters or digits only, which I assume would speed up processing.<p>I don&#x27;t know what font the user will be using, but every font has dashes and slashes, so I could create some sort of shape (for instance, |&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|), and use some library to detect that shape. What would be a good choice?<p>I don&#x27;t care about what&#x27;s on the rest of the screen: it could be more text, images, etc. I only need o know where my random string is (&lt;-- CURSOR HERE, |&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|&#x2F;\|, or can you think of anything else), and get its X&#x2F;Y position in pixels. ====== ainiriand Do this look like Stackoverflow to you? ~~~ nkkollaw > Do this look like Stackoverflow to you? You're right, it don't. It ain't, even.

FB Executive Supported India’s Modi, Disparaged Opp. In Internal Messages - johnx123-up https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-executive-supported-indias-modi-disparaged-opposition-in-internal-messages-11598809348 ====== rudiv The article didn't mention it, but it's relevant that after the news of this broke in India, the lady in question filed multiple police complaints alleging online harassment. These complaints were targeted at anonymous Twitter accounts that had tweeted abuse at her, but also at a journalist who maintains he has never interacted with her in any capacity online or offline and simply posted a set of questions he wished to pose to his Facebook. The Committee to Protect Journalists has come out in support of that person, who has filed a counter-complaint alleging criminal intimidation. ------ blackoil Corruption of the political values in Indian politics, media and public in general is surprising. Religious fanatism is on the rise, earlier taboos like horse-trading of elected members is completely normal and is popularised as a master-stroke by the media. ------ S53Vflnr4n Facebook executive who shared anti-Muslim post apologises: Report Ankhi Das apologised to company staff for post that dubbed Muslims in India a 'degenerate community', BuzzFeed reports. [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/facebook-executive- sh...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/facebook-executive-shared-anti- muslim-post-apologises-report-200827063537453.html) Facebook & Twitter is a disease. ------ mriyaz Net neutrality promised by FB has gone to the dogs.Money comes before ethics. ------ known What else can we expect when 50% Ministers in Modi Cabinet are Brahmin while they're just 3% in India [https://twitter.com/0x101/status/1298928597730594816](https://twitter.com/0x101/status/1298928597730594816) ------ 0xy Remember this the next time HN commentators decide that Facebook should be the arbiter of truth and censor those who make "factually incorrect" statements. Of course Facebook is politically biased. ~~~ klyrs There's a more reasonable middle ground where independent fact checkers take that on -- that at least has a chance to get monitary influence out of the picture ~~~ newen Independent fact checkers are never independent. There is a lot of money and power to be made in being arbiters of truth. ~~~ klyrs Nothing exists in a void, duh. My point is that one can strive for fact checkers who are independent _of Facebook_. ~~~ 0xy Independent fact checkers are no better than Facebook, in fact in some cases are worse. Politifact, Buzzfeed and Washington Post are all included in the program and none of those are neutral. Politifact regularly spins political "fact checks", and will nuke evidence of their false claims from the internet (including from Archive.org) when they've been caught out. The number one problem with these fact checkers is that statements usually cannot be proven to the standard they advertise. When Trump speaks, it's usually saturated in hyperbole, exaggeration, imprecise language and metaphors. Politifact use this ambiguity to their advantage to achieve their political goals, usually by labeling a statement false because the figure was off by 2% or Politifact assumed context from a statement that was never given. If Trump says 37% of people do X, and Politifact posts "actshually, this is FALSE because it's only 35.78%", then that adds precisely nothing and is a clarification without meaning. In fact, Politifact regularly labels factual statements false if they think some factors behind the numbers invalidate the argument made (which is patently ridiculous, especially when you talk about statistics). "Fact checking" is so wishy-washy, subjective and rife with politically biased grifters that nobody should be trusted with the censorious power that Facebook bestows upon these biased entities. ------ ponker I have criticized Trump in internal messages at work, that doesn’t mean my employer is structurally biased against the Trump administration. Not sure this would even be the case if I was CEO. The CEO of any company votes one way or the other but that doesn’t mean the company is biased. Overall I think FB is fucked here, they have created a problem they can’t solve. They have created a large pool of basically everyone’s thoughts at all times, and now people want very specific things removed from that pool, and nobody can agree what those things are. ~~~ Simulacra IMO politics should be kept out of work, unless it's part of your job.

Ask HN: Any startups working to capitalize on the coming privacy boom? - hoodoof Big opportunities are opening up for companies in a position to offer services free of government snooping. Are any startups in the community specifically oriented to this market positioning?<p>Any big company or non- U.S. government seems likely to ask the question &quot;If we move our tens of thousands of users to service X or service Y (i.e. gmail or Oracle)&quot; will our data be gathered by the U.S. government? If the answer is yes, or &quot;maybe&quot; then surely they&#x27;ll look for &quot;snoop free&quot; alternatives.<p>Is anyone working to become the snoop free alternative? ====== codex Is the privacy boom a foregone conclusion? The Internet has a history of overreactive paranoia when it comes to change. Example #1: I remember a huge privacy backlash when the first social networking site opened. It was a combination of Facebook and Linkedin, yet it was _more_ private than either of them. People were absolutely livid about the privacy implications. This site, Six Degrees, opened in 1998-fifteen years ago, and shutdown soon thereafter. However, over time, the boogeyman many feared never materialized, and people became more open about sharing online. Example #2: Later, when the DMCA was proposed, it was claimed that it would be the death of the Internet. The DMCA has been law for more than a decade, and the Internet still lives. So, based on past examples, I predict that people will stop caring about NSA- type programs when no harm ends up coming to them from wholesale data screening on the part of the government. Once can only be afraid of so many things at a time, and new scares will eventually pop up. ------ ecto We (SpiderOak) have been working on a framework called Crypton[1] for the last few months that allows you to create cryptographically secure web apps. We're trying to get the 0.2 release and new website[2] out this week. I'm currently the only dev on the project and we could always use more eyeballs. I'm working through a code review right now to improve the existing features, but I'm also half way done implementing shared containers and realtime public key messaging. The idea is that you don't new to understand the crypto if you use the framework. We are in the process of getting a professional security audit. [1] [https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton](https://github.com/SpiderOak/crypton) [2] [https://crypton.io](https://crypton.io) ~~~ hoodoof What about the security of the host your system is running on? ~~~ ecto This is obviously an issue. Users are never going to read and verify every line of code that comes over the wire, so in the end it comes down to trust and vigilant sysadmins. ------ DigitalSea I don't think any service can claim to be 100% secure from NSA spying. Are we forgetting the claims that the submarine USS Jimmy Carter is used to tap into under sea fiber optic cables to intercept traffic from numerous web services and communications? Considering military technology is most likely 5 to 10 years ahead of civilian technology, we can't assume anything is secure or private any more. In computing power years, 5 years is a long time to research, test and refine hardware capable of breaking supposedly secure encryption schemes. So while some startups might claim to be NSA snooping free, they don't control the traffic while in transit, it's that middle-layer that's free game for the NSA to tap into and store without anyone being any wiser. Having said that I have seen tonnes of services start to capitalise on the whole NSA fiasco, namely Duck Duck Go and their billboard ads propping themselves up as a secure Google alternative. And while they might not store searches, that doesn't stop the Government from doing it... ~~~ conformal i think it's more like 10-20 years ahead, but point taken :) ~~~ DigitalSea Yeah, I didn't know the exact figure. I just knew it was quite ahead of public technology, it's quite a gap when you're talking about hardware and scary as well. ------ bredren While there may be more opportunity in focusing specifically on privacy, our startup, Gliph, has explored this space quite a bit. We built Cloaked Email [0], which provides privacy over email. We also built a novel system for connecting with people without revealing personal information. [1] Focusing specifically on data privacy, we currently provide a robust cross- platform secure messaging tool that allows users to turn off password reset. Another startup to look at is Abine, though their solutions are not focused on encryption. I believe that all startups will need to take privacy into account and wrote so much in a guest blog entry for TRUSTe titled "Make Privacy a Strategic Asset for your Startup." [2] [0] [http://lifehacker.com/5935180/gliph-creates-disposable- email...](http://lifehacker.com/5935180/gliph-creates-disposable-email- addresses-for-private-messages-and-encrypted-chats) [1] [http://blog.gli.ph/2012/05/31/introducing-gliph-app- version-...](http://blog.gli.ph/2012/05/31/introducing-gliph-app- version-1-2-powerful-privacy-for-iphone/#lockdown) [2] [http://www.truste.com/blog/2012/06/06/guest-blog-make- privac...](http://www.truste.com/blog/2012/06/06/guest-blog-make-privacy-a- strategic-asset-for-your-startup/) ------ rsync Happy Birthday, hoodoof - it already exists: [http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt](http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt) Actually I just reread the title. We've been doing this since 2001, so we're _not_ a startup. Never mind. ~~~ mvanveen Doesn't this beg the question about larger issues, e.g. NSA man-in-the-middle attacks? I think rsync.net's warrant canary is top-notch and a leading example of a good privacy / transparency policy put into practice, but it's just one piece of a much larger set of strategies, no? Anyone presenting a silver bullet, much less circumstances where trust of another entity is required, is somewhat dubious. I think answers to said larger strategies are largely missing and the OP's question is probably speaking to these as of yet outstanding issues. ~~~ rsync Well, a deeper strategy would be to avoid a suspect technology (SSL, PKI in general) and rely on something both simpler and (we think) more secure: SSH. Unless your system is rooted, or the NSA is building backdoors into _all_ operating systems, you have good assurance about the safety of your SSH connection. So, setting aside our firm for a moment, the general case would be a rational endpoint that you control (maybe us, maybe S3, whatever), a secure channel (SSH) and good encryption tools (duplicity, git-annex[1], hashbackup, truecrypt). So while I _was_ being flip in my original response to the OP, I am now seriously proposing that this all already exists and can be procured from many different providers - a lot of whom can and should be considered "nsa friendly" or even outright hostile. [1] [http://git-annex.branchable.com/encryption/](http://git- annex.branchable.com/encryption/) ~~~ hoodoof It's fairly easy isn't it to get access to the hard disk of a hosted machine? ------ pallavkaushish SmartSignin ([https://smartsignin.com)is](https://smartsignin.com\)is) a young startup and has been focusing on Privacy and security since its inception. Most of the security conscious people won't trust any Single Sign-On application as they have single point of failures but with SmartSignin there is no single point of failure. We are so sure about our technology that we even guarantee you 100% privacy and security (literally!!). How we do it? Firstly, we follow client side encryption. Secondly, we don't store anything in plain text on our server, everything is encrypted (actually we hardly store anything). Thirdly, with the help of our patent pending SmartKey technology we are able to manage encryption keys so effectively that even if a hacker gets into our server he will only find junk and useless data which he won't be able to use. We have something apart from password called cryptphrase which is required to login and it helps in generating the private key of the user to decrypt his data. As only user knows the cryptphrase no one apart from the user can see his data thus giving him complete privacy. Nobody not even NSA or people at SmartSignin can see the critical information of users. And if you think we are bluffing check the following post: [http://blog.smartsignin.com/how-to-troll- nsa-and-take-comple...](http://blog.smartsignin.com/how-to-troll-nsa-and-take- complete-control-of-your-privacy/) It might look cocky if we say we are hackproof but theoretically we are. Check us out. :) ------ lsiebert It's not the U.S. Government you really have to worry about. It's Transnational corporations. You pass a law saying that the U.S. Government can't do the NSA firehouse drinking, it stops. To stop a corporation you have to consider it's relationship with other companies. Can it get the same info by having a subsidiary or partner elsewhere? So then you ban it from receiving such information in the US. So it moves outside the US, and still does it. And all the time that their vast databases are generating revenue they have a firehouse. Not of data, but of money for lobbyists, campaign contributions, think tanks, advisers to NGOs and international trade groups, and so on. And it's not enough for you to say no, even if all the above is true. Your friends want to post a pic of you to facebook. Metadata about everyone you know is also metadata about your interactions with them. Or heck, maybe you want to say no, but you can't. Your company says you have to friend them as part of your contract. And I am sure that isn't all the scenarios. Protection from corporations is where the privacy boom is going to be. Privacy will be something you have to afford. There will be free, targeted ad supported services, perhaps even locked down proprietary devices, and they will be lauded for how they help the poor get online. Oh and once that data is out there, saying it's anonymous but being about to identify you from your browser profile or whatever, it's never going to be deleted. ------ mvanveen A "snoop free alternative" demands a transparent implementation that can be verified. Otherwise, how can we trust the claims of being "snoop free"? The extent that we can verify a system is the extent to which we can trust it. This makes me think that free/open source software solutions are going to become an integral piece of whatever solution such companies are attempting to offer. Going a bit further on the idea of verification, I'm curious why there aren't any organizations or companies I'm aware of which are dedicated to providing this sort of verification of open source systems out in the wild. Is it just that most of the talent for this capability is sequestered into the infosec consulting market, for example, or does it have to do with the difficulty of actually verifying said systems? Are all of these entities instead focusing on the offensive and just selling off 0day exploits? ~~~ avifreedman Finding the problems with FOSS (or really any body of closed or open source or object code) usually requires at least challenging assumptions (not "oh yeah I sort of see what's going on" but digging in) or real creativity. The thing that seems to drive that is profit or geek-respect motive, so the folks doing said verification would need to be probably not your average bear doing a job or even person pretty interested but multitasking. I think it'd be hard to find and manage such a work and/or volunteer force at scale well enough to really think that a creative and hard-core security review had been accomplished. ------ kyzyl Well I can't say for sure about anything strictly US based, but up here in Canada I happen to know of one effort that is underway to move large corporate clients to a more private setup. Apologies for being cryptic, but I can't say much more than that. I can say it has big backing, and is designed to take advantage of the fact that Canada's privacy laws haven't quite degraded to where we're in a situation like the US. Not quite yet. The hope is that by doing things somewhat more 'right' now-- ahead of the legal curve--down the road clients _may_ not end up in as tight a situation as they are in the US legal framework. But, yes, people are working on it. ~~~ conformal i would not count on the canadian government not running a system that is substantially similar to the usg. intelligence services often aren't concerned with laws, so expecting legal protection matters is a very much misguided path. ~~~ kyzyl Sorry for the delay. I agree. If a powerful government wants to get something, it generally will get it. However, I think there are a couple of small differences here: 1\. This venture is backed by a _private_ fibre network. This means that all (most) of the traffic for these large clients will still be very accessible nationwide, but will not be subject to internet backbone taps (within Canada or otherwise). 2\. Canada's legal system is still a ways away from the US, although Harper is trying his damnedest to change that. To my knowledge, it's still significantly harder to obtain legal wiretaps, especially _blanket_ wire taps, than it is in the US. Naturally, legals systems can change, but for now people are trying to work within the system and stay ahead of the curve. 3\. Again, a private network. This means that even in the eventuality that intelligence services were doing illegal surveillance, it's a bit harder for them to access the network without the companies and their clients knowing. That said, if Canada keeps going in the direction it is going, it probably won't matter. I'm just mentioning that people are indeed trying something in this space. Like all ventures, they are by no means guaranteed success. ------ samspenc A friend of mine told me about Unsene: [https://unsene.com/](https://unsene.com/) They are a chat service that does in-browser encryption of messages. They have an Indiegogo project: [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unsene- secure-and-private-...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unsene-secure-and- private-chat-calls-and-photo-and-file-sharing) (I am NOT affiliated with the project, but have played with it and heard about it from a friend who knows some of the people working there.) ~~~ tptacek Unsene is comical. [http://unsene.com/blog/2013/06/15/is-most-encryption- broken/...](http://unsene.com/blog/2013/06/15/is-most-encryption- broken/#awesm=82ef32ff7c8b689b8139ce2c1bfd0da4) "4096-bit XAES", and 2048 bit RSA. ------ chadkruse Thanks for asking the question and interested in the discussion, but something tells me the startup community is going to be relearning the dynamics of "regulatory risk" with this one. Move fast. ~~~ hoodoof I don't understand, can you explain? ~~~ _sh Perhaps that any attempt to subvert snooping by the government will simply be made illegal? ~~~ hoodoof Maybe the startup opportunities will now be in Europe. Perhaps the silicon valley capital will see the scale of the opportunity and fund euro companies that can live outside the U.S regulatory domain. ~~~ chadkruse Was mainly commenting that we don't how THE MAN will react. New Congress soon, new President soon enough...all could quickly change and new legislation could kill/amplify any business going after this "problem". Maybe it's systemic and ripe for disruption. Maybe Bernie Sanders will have a smackdown this week and the privacy issue is moot. We don't know what lawmakers might do = regulatory risk. Was just suggesting investors might use that lens...if that's the route a startup takes. ~~~ Torkild Elections never truly change anything though. ~~~ hoodoof Companies with hundreds of billions in cash in the bank do change things. ------ snikch I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Kim Dotcom’s Mega yet. [https://mega.co.nz/#privacycompany](https://mega.co.nz/#privacycompany) ------ syassami Over at @ [http://curvechat.com/](http://curvechat.com/) we have are developing custom communication protocols using vetted cryptography practices and collaboration from [http://cryptocode.com/about.html](http://cryptocode.com/about.html) Right now we focus on private solutions but may make the transition to more public options soon. ------ ekianjo The thing is, even non-US governments appear to be snooping on their people and companies (as we have learnt, following the NSA scandal), so I am sure if there is really a safe haven out there? And as someone else said, governments make laws, and can declare it illegal to prevent snooping from their secret agencies. The best you can do is use strong encryption, but even that is not 100% sure it's enough. ------ enterthemist We are working on a simple end-to-end encrypted email solution with the encryption being nearly completely transparent to the user (i.e. simple enough for the average person to use). Furthermore, with our solution, if the government ordered us to help, we couldn't. Even more, if they steal your computer, plant malware, or do any number of other shady tactics they wont be able to access your email. ~~~ bigiain Don't under-estimate rubber hose cryptography. I'm under no doubt whatsoever that if the NSA show up and grab all my hardware, and wave their $5 wrench menacingly, I'll give them all the keys/passphrases they ask for. I'm "sure enough" though, that they can't read my EncFS/GPG/TrueCrypt protected data without me knowing about it. Not even the data synced to Dropbox/GoogleDrive/Jottacloud. ~~~ enterthemist > I'm under no doubt whatsoever that if the NSA show up and grab all my > hardware, and wave their $5 wrench menacingly, I'll give them all the > keys/passphrases they ask for. True enough, but we could also implement a duress code which would wipe data of your choosing and unlock the rest. There has also been some research into learned passwords (passwords which you dont consciously know, but rather exist in a mannerism of yours. e.g. the path your eyes take when trying to read some lines of code). That aside, no solution today protects against this including your truecrypt partition. > I'm "sure enough" though, that they can't read my EncFS/GPG/TrueCrypt > protected data without me knowing about it. If they plant malware on your computer (without you knowing about it) would you still be so sure? ------ paulrademacher The real opportunity here is probably in the other direction: companies to feed the U.S. government's insatiable appetite for private data. ~~~ hoodoof So perhaps all startups should include in their pricing table a "Direct feed/backdoor" option ( __*only available to NSA) for millions of dollars? ~~~ DigitalSea It's a morally bad idea, but from a business plan perspective a really good idea if anyone were to do such a thing... ~~~ bdcravens Never ending demand, and practically limitless budget - sounds like the perfect customer. ------ olegp At StartHQ ([https://starthq.com](https://starthq.com)) we've added the country and hosting company, as well as a list of alternatives, to every SaaS provider in our directory. So, while we're still hosted on Amazon in the US ourselves, we are helping users find snoop free alternatives to services they're using today. ------ hoodoof Perhaps a set of carefully thought out assertions/documentation that suppliers are required to sign to guarantee their services are not monitored. Maybe there is a commercial opportunity in facilitating that. ~~~ avifreedman For havenco.com we are thinking that a cooperating group of privacy-concerned service operators could audit each others' assertions. The specific concern is that it's really untested whether one could be compelled legally to keep updating warrant canaries. However, external auditing if it can be done without compromising the security or privacy of the systems at hand could give an extra level of certainty that the provider is trustworthy the claims that they are certifying. For modern devops-y infrastructure deployed from repositories of code and configs, it should be doable to have some level of auditing that the infrastructure as deployed represents the desired config state. That is how Akamai, for example, ran/runs its ESSL network - auditing that the deployed machines are per config, no local disk logging or core dumping, auditing before keys are deployed to let machines come into the system. Yes, there are also cameras and intrusion detection on the cabinets but it's really the software layer that provides the security. And now with chef, puppet, salf, cfengine, etc it is probably possible to build something to bring this level of auditing to almost any modern web service. ------ Kiro The privacy boom won't happen, sorry. Most people have already forgotten about the NSA snooping. But anyway, here you go: [https://heml.is/](https://heml.is/) ------ replax A friend just told me about zenmate.io , however, i dont see their advantage over a vpn, aside that it's free for now. big drawback: you dont control it, so you have to Trust them with security.. ------ benwerd At latakoo ([http://latakoo.com](http://latakoo.com)) we're building video codecs with built-in strong encryption, for enterprise use. ------ avifreedman havenco.com just released a web site for its relaunch. First services (coupon codes going out starting next week) will be VPN with web proxy today and then adding a ToR-like but commercially supported option, and storage with plans that include combined storage in S3-compatible buckets as well as private LAFS clusters. Distributed hosting in a secure way to support private mail, IM, rss, discussion, and other apps is on the table after that. ------ delimitted We have been working on HushTunnel since SOPA.

Sequoia to lead $500 million round in driverless startup from Google, Uber execs - theCricketer https://www.ft.com/content/e29f1686-1397-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e ====== dannykwells [https://outline.com/ba8YDN](https://outline.com/ba8YDN)

Raspberry Pi 3 based home automation with Node.js and React Native - sconxu https://github.com/deepsyx/home-automation ====== pjungwir This looks like a lot of fun! Using a RaspPi is really attractive to me because you can make everything interoperate, and nothing depends on some company's servers. I've done two Pi projects now that I keep meaning to blog about. One was a sprinkler control system. My old system was dying, and not very flexible, so I decided to run everything off a Pi. The tricky part was driving 13 sprinkler lines with 24V AC current. I bought a 16-relay board and eventually got it wired up. For someone with little electronics experience, there was a lot to learn. [1] is an attempt before I realized I had to use the relays. Eventually I got it working and used it all summer. With cron, I can schedule things however I want! The second is a security camera for a vacation rental home, and is not quite done yet. The hardware side was not challenging at all, but I still need to work out how to copy the images up to S3 or a Linode. I'm using MotionEyeOS and it doesn't seem to know how to do that itself. One of the big reasons I went with a Pi is I didn't want to pay or rely on someone else's servers. Also I wanted to avoid the security problems that have been in the news lately. I don't want inbound traffic to my LAN; I'd rather push the video somewhere else. It took me a long time to figure out worthwhile uses for a Pi. A friend of mine loves using these things for media servers and CI servers and whatnot, but to me it's only satisfying if it's something where you actually _need_ the miniature scale. Also a Pi really hits the sweet spot for me in terms of hardware-vs-software. I'm sure I could have done the first project with an Arduino, but using ssh, cron, and python was really nice. [1] [http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/50435/driving...](http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/50435/driving-24vac- sprinkler-solenoids-through-uln2003a) ~~~ haroldp I too replaced my dying PoS Rainbird irrigation controller with a raspberry pi and a relay board. > With cron, I can schedule things however I want! Wait, are you not using sprinklers_pi[1]? I highly recommend it. I have more home pi/arduino/IoT projects coming up, but I am thinking it's going to be a lot of work _integrating_ them. I'd like one home app/page that integrates them all. 1\. [https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi/wiki](https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi/wiki) ~~~ kzisme What did you dislike about your Rainbird system ? ~~~ twothamendment I installed my own sprinklers and drip - 22 zones of it. A Rainbird controller was going to be nearly $300. I went with a pi and loved it. Then came the real problem - I put the home on the market and ended up replacing my pi with a rainbird for the next people. Why? I kinda wanted to keep my setup and buyers didn't know what to think of it. After I swapped it out I missed quite a few things - controlling it from my phone, from home or remote, being able to pull up a graph and see how long each zone ran. I wasn't in the mood to get up at 3am to see if the rainbird was working so I crossed my fingers and hoped it would work at least until the house sold. Setting up all my zones was a lot faster on the pi than it was with cranky dials and buttons on the rainbird. I won't miss it. ------ redsummer I managed to get bilingual voice activation (Alexa and Siri/HomeKit - maybe Google Home in future) working with Home Assistant, homebridge, pi-mote, raspberry pi 3 and four energenie sockets. (In the US I guess you could use etekcity sockets) [https://home-assistant.io](https://home-assistant.io) [https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge](https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge) [https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER314](https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER314) [https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER002-4](https://energenie4u.co.uk/catalogue/product/ENER002-4) I wouldn't call it simple to set up, but it was cheap - about £70 (not including Alexa device, which could even be the same pi - [https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample- app/wiki/Raspberry...](https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample- app/wiki/Raspberry-Pi) ) ~~~ SEJeff I literally clicked into the comments here to mention how awesome Home Assistant is at things exactly like this. Glad to see I am not the only happy user / occasional contributor! ~~~ JshWright Home Assistant has a staggeringly large base of contributors. I think that's in part because there are a ton of individual use cases that spark a contribution, but I think it also speaks to how well Paulus handles contributions. ~~~ SEJeff Couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for fixing the timing attack issues wrt HASS :) ------ linker3000 There's some really useful stuff going on there - nice write-up. Anyone getting into this field should take a look at Peter Scargill's Tech Blog - he has published details and code for a home control system centered around a Pi using MQTT with a range of modules (mostly ESP8266). The most interesting recent stuff is on control, monitoring and dashboard design for phone and Web apps - his work on the dials and gauges is very good. Pete also takes a regular look at other non-Pi platforms from an IoT control perspective. [http://tech.scargill.net/](http://tech.scargill.net/) ------ deepsyx Hello and thanks for the post! I'm the author of this repo. I would be happy to answer any questions :) Also any feedback/ideas are greatly appreciated! ~~~ ohitsdom Nice work! Did you consider building this on top of Home Assistant? ~~~ deepsy Thank you! Actually I did. However I wanted to try out new technologies and since I haven't used React Native, I decided to try it out. I really like doing things from scratch, the whole networking and the bare bones. I could probably buy cheaper ready solutions, but electronics/software are some of my hobbies. ------ dnadler Cool! I'm doing something similar, but more from the data-analysis side of things for my condo's efficiency. I've been trying to keep a blog of my progress, if anyone is interested, though please forgive the poor grammar / stream-of-consciousness in the posts... I've been writing quickly to get caught up. [https://dan-nadler.github.io/](https://dan-nadler.github.io/) ~~~ deepsy Looks interesting, bookmarked it for later reading :) I noticed that you have sensor in all parts of the house from the images. I wonder how did you solve the wiring issue? I mean I'm looking for a cheap way to connect all sensors, but avoid putting wires everywhere. ~~~ dnadler Yeah, that's a problem I'm still working on solving. Initially, I had planned to wire through the basement, but getting through the floor turned out to be a littler more difficult than I had hoped. At the moment, the wires are run under carpet and behind furniture. I just ordered another Pi (and am looking at cheaper boards) to set up another 'base station' to reduce the amount of wires I need to get full coverage. ------ tete Hope that doesn't sound bad, it's not meant to be, but am I the only one who doesn't see a lot of "automation" there? Looks more like monitoring and control, on which you could of course build automation, but I personally am also not sure where to head on that one. Nevertheless: Cool project! :) ------ Freestyler_3 Ok, Here is what I have been thinking of: a PI, many sensors and controls. the pi to do the things the pi always does. the sensors to sense room temp. in each room. And this is the hardest one, flow control per radiator. I want that I can set room temp schedules, and can go off schedule using the app (manual intervention) When the current temp in any room is below the set temp for that room the heater system turns on The rooms that are already above their set temp have the radiators turned down. Why? Because I don't like to waste heat to a room I don't enter 90% of the day. And when my living room has reached the target temp there is always a room that is either still stone cold or feels like sauna. The hardest part about this is the controllable radiator valves, the rest already exists. ~~~ bloaf I have a lot of similar ideas. The one constant problem I keep running into is the amount of work it would be to get power to all those devices. I'd absolutely love if it were possible to power + network all the devices via PoE, but those adapters are so expensive. If anyone knows of a good Pi-like board that runs off PoE out of the box, let me know. ~~~ Freestyler_3 Yeah you always need some cables if you don't want to change batteries all the time, and wifi is convenient but its better to use wired. I think there are 2 options, 1 you run everything on the network. 2 you use PI's io to directly control/sense. The power either comes from pi, poe or a separate adapter (either at pi running with other wires or near radiator) ------ geomark Nice project. Mine isn't quite so ambitious (yet). I just need to monitor water pumps. Does anyone have a suggestion for a water flow sensor? I need to detect if there is water present at the pump input. So far the only thing I've been able to get my hands on is a water flow meter [1]. But it's overkill because I don't need to measure flow rate, only presence of water. [1] [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Black-G1-Inch-Water-Flow- Hal...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Black-G1-Inch-Water-Flow-Hall-Effect- Sensor-Switch-Flow-Meter-Counter-1-60L-min-Waterproof/32674346412.html) ~~~ Herodotus38 Could you use something to measure resistance? Like two wires, so when immersed resistance drops? ~~~ geomark I'm sure that would work, at least initially. I'm concerned about reliability. My water has very high levels of calcium carbonate which quickly scales up everything. I think the electrodes wouldn't last long. A nonintrusive solution would be great. I've seen nonintrusive water flow sensors that use ultrasound to detect the flow of water. They are industrial devices and their price makes them unsuitable for my use. ~~~ JohnHenrySDM There are cheaper optical water level sensors in the aquarium trade that might work for you. Check out the Tunze Osmolator as an example. It could easily be connected to a GPIO on the pi. ~~~ geomark That's a very interesting idea. Thanks for the suggestion. It is still invasive since I have to cut the intake pipe and insert a section with the sensor installed in it. But it is more flexible since I can install it in any size pipe. And for my use case of a 1 inch input pipe it can be cheaper than my current solution. For example [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/15mA-5V-Optical-Infrared- Wat...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/15mA-5V-Optical-Infrared-Water-Liquid- Level-Sensor-Liquid-Water-Level-Control-Switch-Favorable-Level- Sensors/32752456624.html) Although, I wonder if scaling (as in hard water scale) is still going to be an issue. ------ ryfm Cool, working on a similar project, but having a different stack 1\. Z-wave switches/outlets/locks - all lamps, receptacles and locks controlled by Vera Edge; 2\. DSC alarm system - door/flood sensors, integrated with Vera; 3\. Nest cameras - not integrated; 4\. Nest thermostat - integrated with Vera and Alexa; Currently trying to integrate Vera and Alexa to have fully voice- controlled home. ~~~ Klathmon If you are somewhat of a "programmer" you can complete that integration using a RPI and a software package called "Home Assistant". They have links between Vera and the Echo along with a TON of other things. ~~~ ryfm Yes, that's what I'm going to do. ------ deepsy I just added a video! [https://youtu.be/wh0OoLUTeM8](https://youtu.be/wh0OoLUTeM8) ------ wiradikusuma anyone know good but cheap WiFi/Bluetooth-enabled adapter(?) for lightbulbs? e.g. so I can use any machine (not just Pi) that supports WiFi/Bluetooth to control (at least on/off) the bulb. so: wall --> adapter --> lightbulb ~~~ luma The Sonoff is a $5 WiFi relay with an embedded ESP8266 that is programmable via Arduino (and several other dev platforms), allowing you to control the relay via HTTP/REST/MQTT/etc. [https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-wifi-wireless- switch.html](https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-wifi-wireless-switch.html) ~~~ gm-conspiracy What about something like that for dimmable lamps, bulbs (triac instead of relay)? ------ z3t4 any ideas how to run cables ? im currently using radio but it can be noisy with many units. ~~~ deepsy This is one of my main issues as well! At this point the whole hardware is located close to each other, so the cable management is fine, but I would like to put sensors in other parts of my flat. One of my thoughts is to use UTP/FTP cable, as it has 8 wires and it's pretty thin (and not that ugly). ------ nialv7 Why is everyone trying to write everything in JS nowadays...? ~~~ detaro For the specific project, the question is answered in the readme. ~~~ j_s Specifically: _Since I 'm pretty familiar with javascript and its ecosystem_ ------ aarondf FYI: This was submitted two other times in the past 19 hours, making this the third. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491012) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485444](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13485444) ~~~ dang A small number of reposts are ok if an article hasn't had significant attention yet: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). This helps give good articles more than one chance at getting on the front page. Otherwise it's too much of a lottery. It's too bad that the author's Show HN wasn't the one that made it, but at least the project is getting attention now. ------ brian_herman RRRRR GGGGG BBBBBB this is awesome!

VLC for iOS returns on July 19, rewritten and fully open-sourced - Lightning http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/18/vlc-for-ios-will-return-to-the-app-store-on-july-19-full-re-write-open-source-licensed-under-mplv2-and-gplv2/ ====== antr I'm a big fan of VLC, it's been my default video app since I can remember. Can't wait to see it again on iOS. The "big" feature I would like to see is some kind of "super-easy" drag and drop feature where I could easily send video files to my iPad/iPhone without doing the whole Browser->IP:Port->Choose file, etc. A "video file right click -> VLC -> Send file to iPad (upload in background)" would put a smile on my face. ~~~ mehrzad >it's been my default video app since I can remember. Curious as to what you think about MPlayer, MPC-HC, or mpv, which have mostly taken the crown in nerd circles as being the de facto video players. ~~~ Camillo I don't want to go off-topic, but since VLC developers are reading this thread, here's where MPlayer (I use MPlayerX) is still better than VLC: \- MPlayer starts much faster. \- MPlayer loads videos much faster. \- MPlayer has very convenient shortcuts for skipping forward or backward by 10 seconds (just press the right or left arrow), which are a godsend when you're watching something in a foreign language and you need to hear a sentence again. VLC's shortcuts (command-option-arrow) are far less convenient, harder to remember, and VLC reacts to them _much_ more slowly, which makes it incredibly inconvenient. There has been some improvement over the last few years: seeking hardly used to work at all in VLC, while now it works, albeit slowly. However, it's not enough to beat MPlayer. There may be other reasons to prefer MPlayer, but they become more subjective. The ones I mentioned above are areas where VLC is objectively inferior. It would be great if it could be further improved. ~~~ hrktb I've been using both for weird format files and codecs (anything more or less standard is streamed to the tv directly) and felt that VLC tends to try as much as possible to read everything, while MPlayerX is more tolerant towards garbage in the stream and won't bother recovering mildly invalid data. Part of the lag in VLC when starting a stream might come from a more heavy handed init process. This can be a curse or a blessing, I'm happy both approaches are available. ------ cube13 So how exactly has the licensing issue been resolved? Has the core VLC library been re-licensed or dual licensed under the Mozilla license? ~~~ jbk See my blogposts on LGPL relicensing of VLC engine [http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/I-did- it](http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/I-did-it) Note that the relicensing was not done for the iOS port. And the app above the VLC engine is dual licensed GPLv2/MPLv2 ~~~ air Bradley Kuhn (who has worked for FSF for license stuff) says LGPL does not help. [http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/11/22/vlc- lgpl.html](http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/11/22/vlc-lgpl.html) ~~~ chj Oh, then fuck FSF and drop LGPL. It's their product after all. If they can get a license change, they can get another, can't they? ~~~ justincormack But as Bradley says if this was the reason for the license change why did they not switch to eg BSD? Something that would solve the problem definitively. ------ kzahel I was trying to install VLC on my android nexus 4 the other day and apparently it's not in the Play store? I ended up installing "Joe VLC" instead. I wonder if there will be an official android release? ~~~ jbk We are not happy yet on the quality of VLC for Android, so it is not out of beta. However, you can try yourself here: [http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/armv7-android/VLC- debug-...](http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/armv7-android/VLC- debug-20130714-0125.apk) ~~~ fpgeek Are there any plans to make the Play Store beta available to North American users? From what I recall, the issue was not having NA devices to test against. It seems like the gaps in chipsets and devices have narrowed (e.g. Qualcomm chipsets used more widely as LTE spreads, US Note 2 using Exynos 4 like the international versions, etc.) so I was wondering if anything had changed on that front. ------ mtgx Have they made the Android app excellent yet? Last I checked it was still nowhere as good as MX Player performance wise. I'm just saying they might want to fix that before venturing into other platforms, especially platforms that have been very _hostile_ towards them in the past. ~~~ jbk Those things are orthogonal. This is a false dichotomy. Some people focusing on one platform does not block other to focus on another one... ------ GuiA "VideoLAN revealed some very exciting news today: VLC for iOS will be back in Apple’s App Store by tomorrow (July 19). The company tells TNW the app will be available for free worldwide" The original iOS port was made by Applidium; is this still Applidium, or a separate VideoLan initiative? ~~~ feepk 75% are written by me with major contributions by [https://twitter.com/gpinigin](https://twitter.com/gpinigin) and some improvements by Applidium :) So, it's a VideoLAN initiative. ------ SEJeff I'd really love to see this integrate with the newish BitTorrent sync: [http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html) ------ joejohnson I couldn't tell from the article: is there a way to stream files over afp? ~~~ lechevalierd3on No support of AFP. SMB could show up in a later version. ------ sz4kerto That's all good and fine, but I've backed the Kickstarter project for porting VLC to Windows RT, and... where is it? ~~~ jasonlotito You probably missed it then: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for- the-n...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new- windows-8-user-experience-metro/posts/505512) Unless you were being facetious. ------ Diamons I much prefer OPlayer. Great features, plays nearly any file I throw at it, and supports WiFi transfers. ~~~ johnpowell OPlayer has smoother playback for me. I just tried VLC and the first video I tried it said the hardware was to slow to play it. I'm using a 4G iPod Touch. So I converted some some videos with Handbreak using the iPod Touch preset. I tried about ten converted videos and none of them played smoothly. OPlayer handles all of them. ~~~ reiichiroh Does OPlayer have AC3 support? ~~~ autodidakto Like all the other iOS apps, it had to remove ac3 support. Oplayer has been my favorite, since it's slowly implementing all the esoteric features I use vlc for, including subtitle font size adjustment, etc (though it's not all the way there.). ------ emehrkay Is network streaming when you can browse windows (smb) shares via vlc? If so, that would be amazing ~~~ jbk We are working on that for a later version :) ~~~ emehrkay Let me pay for this app to help you guys out. I love VLC ~~~ feepk VLC is free (both as in beer and in speech) and will always be :) However, you can donate to our non-profit organization, which e.g. paid the iPad I used for development, as well as a whole lot of other things around VLC and further VideoLAN projects. ------ mrmondo As far as I can see it's not in the Australian App Store. ------ phatle I checkout the source code, build base on guide but fail:( ~~~ lechevalierd3on Follow this guide to build [http://wiki.videolan.org/IOSCompile/](http://wiki.videolan.org/IOSCompile/) Make sure you brew install is fine (brew doctor). It works quite simply. ------ kansas VLC app used to drain my battery. I moved to Plex and Tonido after the removal. Hopefully this release doesn't drain the battery. ~~~ 0x0 As I understand, VLC is unable to leverage the hardware codecs of the iPhone, because it doesn't use the official media frameworks, so it has to run stuff less efficiently in software. ~~~ jbk No, it's just that the official frameworks are either all or none. VideoToolbox framework exist but is private so far. ------ captiva12 Instead of downloading media to your iPhone you can use Tonido iOS ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonido-file-access-music- vid...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonido-file-access-music- video/id388726418?mt=8)) app to play/stream pretty much all the video formats directly from your PC, Mac or Linux (or) you can use the app to download the media and play with VLC. ~~~ untog Pretty different use case, IMO. Streaming is far less useful on the go than playing locally stored files. (and I can only assume you are involved with Tonido, given that half your HN posts are promoting using it) ~~~ publicfig Not only that, but one of their submissions is for a "Top Apps" post, that includes Tonido in it.

Ask HN: How to make self-hosted software without open sourcing it? - picklevick Are there examples of ways one can make software that companies can host internally without open sourcing the code to said software?<p>Looking for some guidance as to how to be able to do that.<p>Cheers ====== numpad0 License under proprietary terms? Like “This software is copyrighted by Picklevick Corp, you don’t hold any rights we grant you mere permissions to use it. Don’t poke your head around it”. You can’t have GPLv2/v3 or similarly licensed components in it though. If you do and later caught, you’ll be obligated to either cease its use and distribution, or completely revise your term and supply the source code to recipients(you don’t have to put it on the Internet) ------ wmf Don't ship the source code? ~~~ picklevick How would I give users the ability to self-host the software then? ~~~ lordkrandel Either you use a compiled language like C/C++ and distribute the binaries or you obfuscate the source when you distribute it.

GitHub is Eating the World - erickerr http://erickerr.com/github-is-eating-the-world ====== maxdemarzi I built a poc for something like this using github data, but it didn't really go anywhere. <http://getvouched.com> and <http://getvouched.com/visualizations> ------ 5vforest Isn't the "search for developers by GitHub profile" what GitHire.com was doing? And then they realized that it was "too hard" to find devs in the SF Bay Area, where they're in high demand?

PHP.net receives facelift - andrelaszlo http://www.php.net/?beta=1 ====== refrigerator Didn't this happen ages ago? ~~~ andrelaszlo Probably, if you say so. I didn't see it before and it's in "beta" so I figured it must be recent.

Statistician Who Debunked Sexist Myths About Skull Size and Intelligence - pseudolus https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/alice-lee-statistician-debunked-sexist-myths-skull-size-intelligence-180971241/ ====== gwern Too bad she was wrong (which is not a surprise when you read OP's description of her ludicrous research - so you criticize direct measurements of brain volume as biased and offer as a replacement... some facial measurements, of range-restricted unrepresentative samples, by someone with her own axe to grind in a statistically-meaningless stunt? wow) and her debunking has been debunked. We have enormous brain imaging datasets now and the connection between human brain size and and intelligence is borne out in every sample and is real: most recently [https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/08/Gid...](https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/08/Gideon-et-al.-2018.pdf) (not to mention the more obvious between-species correlations and other within-species correlations, most notably recently in dogs: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-018-01234-1](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-018-01234-1) ).

Really – Open Source Back End for Realtime Apps in Scala - AhmedSoliman http://really.io ====== AhmedSoliman We are looking for Scala contributors, if you are interested, please sign up and we will contact you for code access.

Resources for monitoring the swine flu epidemic - eduardoflores http://tedchris.posterous.com/insightful-resources-for-monitoring-the-swine ====== Dilpil Is it really a mystery as to why the flu is more deadly in Mexico than in the US? Have factors such as quality of medical care been taken into account yet? ~~~ magoghm In Mexico you can buy antibiotics over the counter without any prescription. I suspect the victims just tried to cure themselves without seeing a physician.

Bitcoin Core Developers Join MIT's Media Lab - pash http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2015/04/joining-mit-media-lab-digital-currency.html ====== pash Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, and Cory Fields are the three principal developers of Bitcoin Core, the network's reference client. They were previously employed by the Bitcoin Foundation. Brian Forde, the director of the Media Lab's new Digital Currency Initiative [0], wrote a blog post with a few more details about why they brought in Gavin, Wladimir, and Cory [1]. 0\. [https://medium.com/@medialab/launching-a-digital-currency- in...](https://medium.com/@medialab/launching-a-digital-currency- initiative-238fc678aba2) 1\. [https://medium.com/@medialab/welcome-to-the-mit-media-lab- ga...](https://medium.com/@medialab/welcome-to-the-mit-media-lab-gavin-wlad- and-cory-977ae418c084)

Xidel: process HTML/XML/JSON using CSS, XPath, XQuery or pattern templates - fiatjaf http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html ====== fiatjaf GitHub repo: [https://github.com/benibela/xidel](https://github.com/benibela/xidel)

mParticle Raises $15M to Help Mobile Marketers Manage Their Data - mkatz0630 http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/mparticle-series-a/ ====== thewarrior Semi-Rant incoming. The analytics landscape is now dizzyingly diverse with n-different providers that do almost the same thing with some minor twist. As a dev its frustrating to keep piling on more and more analytics into our apps just because of some tiny need. There's already so much data being collected which I doubt is being put to full use. The marketers need 3 SDKs for their attributions , the product managers need 3 SDKs for targeting , tracking and whatever else. And now we have mParticle , so we can send data only to mParticle and then send it onwards to possibly 10 other analytics providers. And soon we'll have an aggregator on the other side of the data pipeline as well that gives you a unified dashboard of all your analytics dashboards. Ofcourse , to say that we might not really need all this bloat in terms of app size , code size and bandwidth , no well that would be blasphemy. Almost the entire app traffic ends up being mirrored to the analytics platforms such that they have almost everything thats already there in the backend. Because that's the easy way out. So its not just events , even things which we could track in the app end up getting replicated wasting needless bandwidth. And the events themselves keep changing and they're tracked in some spreadsheet somewhere that itself changes every few weeks. And you just keep moving keys and values around in needless busy work. It's still so frustrating. I so wish a lot of the analytics code could be generated automatically based on some schema + annotations to your app code. Well I don't have much time to comment. I gotta go integrate yet another analytics tool that just came up. ~~~ gk1 > And soon we'll have an aggregator on the other side of the data pipeline as > well that gives you a unified dashboard of all your analytics dashboards. This already exists: [https://www.singular.net](https://www.singular.net) ------ gk1 The article didn't make it clear to me what exactly they do, and neither did their homepage, but I think I got it: Segment.com for mobile apps. ~~~ mkatz0630 we are focused on improving data control, and reducing integration complexity for mobile marketers & developers. much has been written about the differences between the companies. [http://qr.ae/RgVfw7](http://qr.ae/RgVfw7) ------ shawndumas So glad to see mParticle doing well.

Show HN: New Take on API Documentation Design - zzen http://blog.apiary.io/2014/03/21/Re-API-Design-for-Humans/ ====== Mahrew This looks fucking great! ~~~ zzen Thanks Mahrew! A lot of time went into this, we're all pretty excited at Apiary.

Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014) - networked http://pcmonk.me/2014/04/01/why-dont-we-have-a-general-purpose-tree-editor.html? ====== m1el Emacs has ParEdit minor mode which _is_ a general-purpose tree editor. [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit) edit: paredit demos: Productive Emacs: Paredit [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1WBsI3gdDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1WBsI3gdDE) Emacs Rocks! Episode 14: Paredit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6h5dFyyUX0) ~~~ jamesrcole How good is it? I've never used it and I'm genuinely curious. ~~~ TeMPOraL Pretty good, it almost make you feel you're working on trees and not text. Takes a few moments to get used to. I recommend what I did: take a bunch of Lisp code, strip it out of parenthesis (M-x replace-string, replace ( and ) with empty strings), and then use Paredit commands to restore the original tree structure. I spent less than an hour simply doing this exercise again and again, and it was enough to become a proficient user. ~~~ kovek Good exercise. Thank you! Also, there are alternatives. What do you think about them? ~~~ TeMPOraL Don't know of any (could you name them?), so I don't have any opinion. ------ audunw I've been thinking about this constantly for the last 2-3 years. I'm working on something which might lead to this. What I've concluded, is that we don't have a good representation for a general purpose tree editor to work on. Roughly speaking, S-expressions are just a bit too simple, and XML is way too complicated. General purpose plain text editors work so well because we've agreed on a common representation (more or less), which is easy for text. But as soon as you want to move to useful, common tree-structures, you have to agree on both representation and semantics, which makes it much harder. One challenge we need to solve is - what level do you want to work on? Let's say you're working on some code. You may want to treat functions and blocks as a tree structure, but you want to treat simple mathematical expressions as text. Where this threshold is, is entirely context-dependent. The editor needs to understand the language and be able to expand text into its tree structure, or collapse the tree into its text representation, at any node in the tree. This implies that we need to agree on a common format for defining the conversion (parsing _and_ generating) between text and trees. We'd probably also need a package system which contains common definitions for all major languages. ~~~ rini17 While we might have some common idea what is text, we definitely not have common semantics! The resulting situation isn't so much different from trees. And what do you mean by "s-expressions just too simple"? Isn't simplicity something to strive for? ~~~ audunw > And what do you mean by "s-expressions just too simple"? Isn't simplicity > something to strive for? I should stress "a bit". Actually, looking closer at s-expressions right now (I was writing based on what I remembered), I'd like to flip that statement. S-expressions are just a bit more complex than what I have in mind. Or alternately: they're equivalent under some trivial transformation. It depends on how you look at things - there are supposedly many different implementations of s-expressions, which support different fundamental data types. The basic idea is simpler. There are no fundamental data types, just nodes. For example a 'bit' is a node which can contain one of two child nodes ('one' or 'zero'). Any tree which represents data in memory on a computer can be expanded down to a collection of bits. Though in a text representation or tree editor the user will generally have collapsed the tree such that they don't see individual bits. What I have in mind could look more complex than s-expression in a different context though: the text file representation of the trees may have more syntactic sugar than s-expressions in lisp. The representation isn't significantly different, but the focus is. I'm focusing more on things related to type theory, schemas, how to represent patches/diffs, standardizing parsing/generation and other transforms, etc. ~~~ rini17 I have reread your text several times, and don't get it. What do you gain by having no fundamental datatypes, only bits? What syntactical sugar is not expressible by s-expression + transformation rules? I am working on something like that too, and I'm completely fine with symbols (with their arbitrary definition by lisp and user) being the fundamental elements. ~~~ TuringTest > What do you gain by having no fundamental datatypes, only bits? I'd say what you gain is reusability, mostly. When you impose a datatype on data, it comes with a series of constraints and expectations, so you can only use the data in the ways prescribed by its type. If the data doesn't have attached a type of is own, you can use it in different ways at different contexts - this can be valuable for data transformation processes, such as compilation or system interfaces. I suppose you could get the same effect by casting the data to a new type when you change it to a new context. I've read a bunch about applying semiotics theory to programming, and changing the meaning of the symbols "on the go" is closer to the way we think (inferring meanings from the signs adequate to the current context) than the old mathematical approach of "every datum has one well-defined type, and only one". ------ stcredzero The key insight of this post for me is this: Code editing _is_ tree editing! The reason why code is edited in text editors, is that tree editing interfaces are fundamentally difficult to do well, and often have to be carefully tuned to the properties of the particular trees and editing tasks. (Simple examples: Huge fanout vs. at most 2 children. Very large information-rich nodes vs. tiny nodes.) In the early days of programming text editors, we dealt with this difficulty by exploiting the human brain's mechanisms for dealing with serialized trees -- which is to say the human brain's facilities for processing language and reading and writing text. By doing this, we could represent all kinds of hierarchically structured code, and let the human brain process it. But even in these early days, we started bringing in visual aids for reading structure: indentation and braces. Now, if you look at modern IDEs, you'll find even more geometric/visual representation of the tree structure of code, in the form of collapsible tree controls operating on the code. This isn't to naively say that graphical programming is the way to go, since the potential for interrelation and complexity of structure in code is far too high to comfortably represent in 2 or even 3 dimensions. The way forward is to be able to dynamically visualize very specific contexts. (One example I can think of of the top of my head, would be to quickly visualize all "subscribers" of an Observer, then be able to visualize the 2nd order "users" of those subscribers. Another would be to visualize patterns in code supporting dataflows as an explicit flow graph.) ~~~ unhammer def f = x = readline; g x def g x = print x; f ~~~ TeMPOraL Not 100% sure how to interpret this piece of code, but my naive interpretation gives this AST: (def f () (let ((x (readline))) (g x))) (def g (x) (print x) (f)) Writing in Lisp can open one's eyes about the underlying structure of the code. ~~~ unhammer My point was that "Code editing is tree editing" sounds a bit like if you can understand the syntax tree, you understand what the code does – which isn't true here. Trees don't show the recursion[1], and a tree-view of code (with e.g. folding) might even give a false impression that what's inside one branch is somehow self-contained. Ie. Turing Machines are more expressive than CFG's :-) Not that tree-view's aren't helpful (indentation is important, and editing Lisp with paredit is a real joy), but there's much more to code-editing than tree-manipulation. [1] Unless your "tree"-view is actually a lazy call-graph … ------ chriswarbo I think it's important to distinguish between "tree-structured data" and "tree-structured UI"; many of the suggestions here and in the article's comments mention s-expressions (or alternatives e.g. using indentation or similar); many others mention diagramming/mindmapping tools. I think the real issue is how disconnected such approaches are from each other: why can't I press a key and have my parenthesised expression be expanded into a tree, or press another button to collapse a sub-tree down into a parenthesised expression? I imagine a decent tree editor would let me: \- Navigate and edit the structure and its contents in a linear representation, like using paredit on an s-expression. \- Navigate and edit the structure and its contents in a more "tree-like" representation, e.g. as boxes+arrows, or nested boxes. \- Toggle between display modes on a per-term basis, e.g. using boxes+arrows for the top-level (say, function definitions in a Lisp file) and s-expressions for the contents. \- Fold/unfold terms/trees (code folding, but for expressions rather than lines) \- Allow plugins/preferences tailored for particular trees, e.g. syntax colouring for programming language parse trees. As a more elaborate idea, we could allow plugins to extend the tree/graph structure with "virtual" nodes, e.g. linking names to their definitions, documentation, tests, etc. as if they were code-folded parts of the source code. ~~~ junke > Fold/unfold terms/trees (code folding, but for expressions rather than > lines) Emacs can hide/show blocks in Lisp expressions (and others). Install HideShow ([https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HideShow](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HideShow)). I personally never use it, generally the right solution is to refactor (but there might be good use cases too). > As a more elaborate idea, we could allow plugins to extend the tree/graph > structure with "virtual" nodes, e.g. linking names to their definitions, > documentation, tests, etc. as if they were code-folded parts of the source > code. Basically, when working from Emacs through Slime, the Common Lisp backend (called Swank) injects such metadata to the runtime objects (source file if a file exists, original code, documentation). You could define your very own properties if you want, like how a particular form should be displayed to the user. What already exists, for example, is a way to define custom indentation rules for macros, which are used on the Emacs side to indent your code as you wish. Slime also decorates values in the buffer so that they act as "presentation" objects ([https://www.common- lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Presentat...](https://www.common- lisp.net/project/slime/doc/html/Presentations.html)). ~~~ chriswarbo > Emacs can hide/show blocks in Lisp expressions (and others). Install > HideShow > ([https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HideShow](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HideShow)). Yes, I've used it before and it's quite nice. I've not used Slime, or done any Common Lisp programming for that matter. I do love Emacs, and calling out to a sub/inferior-process for language- specific info is a good idea; it can just be frustrating to actually get the darn things to work though. After failing to get Geiser to work for Racket, or ghc-mod || intero || dante for Haskell, I've resigned myself to being happy with just syntax colouring :( ------ jcoffland Trees are graphs with out cycles but you always end up adding cycles. Code is no exception. There have been endless attempts to create coding systems based on graphs. These systems promise extraordinary modularity and reusability and an ease of programming which will allow anyone to construct complex software with a few clicks and drags. So far everyone of these systems that I have seen in the last 25 years has fallen short of its promises. If you pay attention to these characteristics you will begin to notice the regularity with which such systems crop up and die. In my experience there's no use trying to talk enthusiasts out of this idea. I even attempted such a system myself many years ago. It's almost a rite of passage. The reason tree editors (aka graph editors with out cycles, yet) don't work is similar to why we use relational DBs, instead of more the natural interpretation of data as graphs, boils down to, graph algorithms are slow and complex. In practice the added complexity outweighs the perceived benefits. The way people currently edit code, although not perfect, actually works really well. You have to weigh the costs of moving away from a simple system that works against the benefits and complexity of the new system. ~~~ anigbrowl How do you feel about tools like Reaktor, which I assure you works very well indeed? ~~~ jcoffland Reaktor is a audio program. There is actually a long history of this type of app working well. PD is an early example. This is indeed a limited type of programming. Above I was referring to attempts to apply this idea to general programming. I'm not saying such systems are impossible just that it's a bad idea to assume it will make the programmer's life easier. ~~~ anigbrowl That's not very responsive. Reaktor's primary purpose is to produce audio, but it also allows one to build sequencers, user interfaces, graphics (eg spectrograms, from DSP primitives by build your own FFT modules) and all sorts of other tools. Besides, why is audio somehow an inferior sort of data processing? ------ dahart One huge question to ask is why you need an editor specifically for a tree. Do you want a gui, or a format? If you need a gui, you are automatically in domain-specific territory. If you only need a format, maybe you don't need a tree editor at all. Excel is a great tool for making trees; just add a column that names your parent. I used Excel to create a prototype of an event driven animation sequencing engine for a Disney game. It was more of a state machine / directed graph than a tree, but the only constraint there is data, not the editor. The prototype was later replaced (after the game using Excel shipped) with a gui based tree editor, but not something that could be called "general purpose". I've long thought that hierarchical file formats come with some pretty bad downsides, from both sides, usage and implementation. You don't need a hierarchical format as long as you are willing to name all nodes and not allow anonymous nodes. Once you do that, you can have a flat file structure with fields that reference other nodes. Once you do that, XML feels crazy. Easier to implement parsers that don't have to do overblown amounts of dynamic memory allocation, easier for humans to read & follow, easier to share references or allow non-tree structures, etc. etc. ~~~ weberc2 > If you need a gui, you are automatically in domain-specific territory. The author specifically describes a platform in which domain specific concerns are facilitated by plugins, so I don't see why we are "automatically in domain-specific territory". One could easily envision classes of plugins for drawing nodes and edges (perhaps a canvas DSL), plugins for enforcing the domain's specific rules, etc. ~~~ dahart I appreciate the reply, but I humbly suggest that nothing is solved by saying "just use plugins". You can't build a good plugin architecture in the first place without understanding the problem domain & workflow. This is not a new idea, people have tried it before. If there was a decent solution it would already exist. People have tried to make general purpose graph editors & tree GUIs & layout engines, and there have been a bunch of people that thought they were being smart by architecting it to accept plugins. There's a reason you've never heard of any of them; nothing was general purpose enough to stick around, and applications that didn't try to be "general purpose" have vastly superior UI/UX. I spent several years building a tree editor (the animation sequencing project I mentioned earlier). I've also used well known tree editors in node-based gui apps for decades. (Check out programs for film & game production like Nuke, Maya & Houdini -- they are tree editors.) Simply put, there are not enough commonalities between applications in different domains to make it worth building a shared "general purpose" editor. The workflows, problems, and schemas are too distinct. The tree isn't even close to the hard part anyway. ------ stupidcar We do: [http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) ~~~ baldfat Seems like a enhanced personal wiki and away from PIM style and more added MindMap style. I would say this is not a tree editor. ~~~ Aardappel It allows you to edit a tree structure. Unlike most tree editors, which lay out the tree in one dimension, this uses 2 dimensions. How is that not a tree editor other than it looking unfamiliar to you? ------ enord We do, it's called "the file system". Folders and directories galore. If you dont like folder icons and rectangular windows, navigate with MC. The problem is not trees, they are readily available in many formats. The problem is schemas. If there are no rules on the branches everything becomes "Old_stuff" or "important_work" or whatever people do to their document folders as the tide turns. You need trees layered over trees to provide some structure and get that sweet workflow QC. Graph-homomorphisms between trees that is, or slice categories over whatever structure you need to maintain. Trees (or graphs) in semantic/syntactic relationships stacked as high as you can muster. Usually this is presented as a two-layered structure-tree+data-tree system in end user applications, with a fixed semantic tree depending on the domain in application. The trick is finding the balance between end-user configurability of layers n+1 and the required knowledge to design useful structures. People who edit layer 2 should probably be domain experts, and layers 3 and above are best left to programmers and computer scientists. If this was a solved problem, nobody would buy CRUD-software, and a good half of us would be looking for work. ------ throwanem I think we don't have a general-purpose tree editor for two reasons: 1\. Nobody knows what it should look like. 2\. Nobody knows how it should work. I fear this article has left me as much in the dark on these points as I was before I read it. Perhaps someone else here will find something in it I missed. ~~~ supergreg FWIW the editor in Chromium's and Firefox's developer tools are pretty good. I'd really like to see something like that as a standalone tool for both trees and XML and see how far it can be taken. ~~~ therealmarv For XML you may want to take a closer look at XML Marker 1.1 (it's old, freeware and Windows but still better than many other tools) and maybe Eclipse. ~~~ dTal I think that sums it up. We really can't top crufty old Windows freeware? There is a _gaping_ hole in the market. ~~~ therealmarv The last time I worked on complex XML I even used XML Marker with WINE... it works there. If you want the Mercedes of XML editors you should take a look at Oxygen XML editor (this is not free but runs on more platforms than Windows). ~~~ xchaotic +1 for OxygenXML - it is very actively developed and has its own CSS engine that goes above and beyond what browsers can do. So you can style your tree with CSS. ------ GedByrne For the programming use case there is also Leo. [http://leoeditor.com/](http://leoeditor.com/) Leo is of particular interest because it automatically syncs between the tree and code files: [http://leoeditor.com/tutorial- programming.html](http://leoeditor.com/tutorial-programming.html) The approach is documented here: [http://leoeditor.com/appendices.html#the- mulder-ream-update-...](http://leoeditor.com/appendices.html#the-mulder-ream- update-algorithm) ~~~ BeetleB Leo is fairly cool. Been around forever, but not many people know about it. I'm a heavy Emacs and Org mode user. But at this time I've given up on being proficient in Emacs-Lisp and how it ties to the whole Emacs ecosystem. So I searched for a self-extensible editor in Python, and find Leo. I haven't taken the time to learn it really well, but I did fiddle with some tree editing in Python with it, and it works as advertised. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd spend most of my time porting over the cool aspects of Emacs to Leo. Unfortunately, the documentation/web site is very opaque. Not so bad that it's useless, but bad enough that if anyone wants to learn it well they'll have to do a lot of Google searching (in the mailing list) or code browsing. Also, to be frank, it's not a great editor compared to Vim/Emacs. But that should be easily fixable with scripting/code changes. ------ al2o3cr FWIW, comparing my experiences with several different "graphical equation editors" (fundamentally a flavor of tree-editor) versus editing LaTeX code directly, the tree editor loses every time. Yes, the tree editor is capable of providing an amazingly efficient interface for modifying parts of an existing expression - but when you start restructuring the whole expression things get messy fast. The plain code method is a bit rougher to read / enter in simple cases, but since it's just text in a text editor it doesn't have the same complexity escalation when doing unusual reorganizations. ~~~ jessriedel This sounds like something that can only be true for equations below some size. If you're trying to manipulate a sufficiently large equation, it has to be automated, so directly editing text is bound to lose (however clunky the automated method may be). So maybe your experience is just that equations rarely get large enough to make it worth it to use a graphical editor? For instance, doesn't the fact that people do pure algebra with Mathematica (forgetting about all the numerics, integrals, etc.) demonstrate that TeX loses for sufficiently large equations? Even if one only needs to use one or two functions with a very obvious tree interpretation (e.g., distributing multiplication over addition), Mathematica beats TeX for large enough equations. What graphical equation editors have you used? This was what turned up when I searched google: [http://equalx.sourceforge.net](http://equalx.sourceforge.net) ~~~ leni536 I regularly edit large equations in LaTeX. I don't see how it's not manageable, just break your equations into multiple lines. \begin{equation} H_n(i) = \begin{cases} \left( H_{n-1}(i)_2, H_{n-1}(i)_1 \right) & 0 \le i < 2^{2(n-1)} \\ \left( H_{n-1}(i-2^{2(n-1)})_1, H_{n-1}(i-2^{2(n-1)})_2 + 2^{n-1} \right) & 2^{2(n-1)} \le i < 2 \cdot 2^{2(n-1)} \\ \left( H_{n-1}(i-2\cdot2^{2(n-1)})_1 + 2^{n-1}, H_{n-1}(i-2\cdot2^{2(n-1)})_2 + 2^{n-1} \right) & 2 \cdot 2^{2(n-1)} \le i < 3 \cdot 2^{2(n-1)} \\ \left( - H_{n-1}(i-3\cdot2^{2(n-1)})_2 + 2^{n}-1, - H_{n-1}(i-3\cdot2^{2(n-1)})_1 + 2^{n-1}-1 \right) & 3 \cdot 2^{2(n-1)} \le i < 4 \cdot 2^{2(n-1)} \\ \end{cases} \end{equation} > For instance, doesn't the fact that people do pure algebra with Mathematica > (forgetting about all the numerics, integrals, etc.) demonstrate that TeX > loses for sufficiently large equations? I use Mathematica, and I just use the plaintext Mathematica syntax for large equations too. I also break these into multiple lines. ~~~ jessriedel > regularly edit large equations in LaTeX. I don't see how it's not > manageable, just break your equations into multiple lines. I understand how to indent TeX, but when you have a hundred algebraic terms it's very unwieldly, and Mathematica becomes clearly superior (for me) just to visualize it. Anyways, it sounds like you're just saying you haven't found the graphical visualization for equation trees to be useful, so you stick with the linear representation, but the manipulations of those trees (by mathematica, or some other dedicated editor) is still useful. In this case I would add that we would probably still need some sort of visualization aid for sufficiently large equations, and that the tools are just not good right now. After all, much/most code is written in normal (linear) text editors, but some people still do find it useful to "collapse" sections of code, corresponding to branches of the tree structure induced by indentation. Many people don't bother with this right now because it can cause headaches that simple scrolling does not, but better tools may change this. ------ nathell This reminded me of Leslie Lamport's (of LaTeX fame) paper "How to write a 21st century proof" [0], where he argues that we should explicitly structure proofs as trees. [0]: [http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf](http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf) ------ haldean Interestingly, visual programming and tree-editing has actually gained a lot of traction with non-programmers. Tons of the big video and audio production suites (off the top of my head: Houdini, Max MSP, Grasshopper, Nuke, Blender's node editor) are DAG-based authoring tools, and are a joy to use. As a person interested in programming language design, that makes me wonder if visual programming might be the sort of thing that we as programmers don't use because it is, in some sense, "beneath us". You can argue that the complexity of a standard Max patch is much lower than your production system, but many production systems are "render database to JSON", which seems far less complex than, say, a feature film, many of which are made almost entirely in Houdini. ------ neonnoodle See to me the problem is the notion of tree structure itself. Forgive me because I don't know the correct mathematical way to talk about this: a tree is a particular type of network in which nodes can have only one direct parent and thus only share siblings with the descendants of that single parent. What we are really lacking is a good network editor, which would encompass not only trees but also more complex rhizomatic network structures. I think Ted Nelson's ZigZag structure is the closest anyone has come as yet, but manipulating those is NOT user friendly (to say the least). Visualization of multidimensional networks is difficult on many levels, particularly UI. At a certain point you probably come up against hard cognitive limits of human thought. ~~~ TuringTest There's a core abstraction lurking behind tools like ZigZag, the Leo editor, hashtags, and C pointers/linked structures. The hyperlink as the base abstraction allowed us to store and navigate individual nodes in a hypertext, but it doesn't work well for collections - thus it provides limited support for programmatic access. Conversely, pointers & references in programming languages allow for easy handling/transformation of large structures (either loops or recursive traversal), but there have never been a really good visual representation beyond a few nodes, and are difficult to navigate. A good tool should be based on an abstraction that worked well for linking information at separate places in the data space, and for retrieving collections as a whole. I have my ideas for how that abstraction should work, and even may develop a product around it eventually. ;-) ~~~ _mhr_ Can I email you? I'm working on similar ideas. I can't find an email address. My email address is in my profile. ~~~ TuringTest Sure! I've just emailed you from my personal mail account. ------ deckar01 [https://github.com/gephi/gephi](https://github.com/gephi/gephi) > Gephi is an award-winning open-source platform for visualizing and > manipulating large graphs. ~~~ mrmondo I use Gephi quite frequently, it's interface leaves a bit to be desired but I've quite often quickly dumped some data into it and come up with some interesting relationships I wouldn't have thought of until it was visualised in Gephi. ~~~ deckar01 It would be quite possible to develop a plugin that provides a user input oriented editing experience. ------ jacquesm This has been here before: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7511979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7511979) It's an unresolved problem as far as I know. Lots of partial solutions. I ran into this again recently because I use tree editors extensively (mostly leo) for my daily routine and was searching for a better (more structured) replacement but I haven't found anything yet that beats leo. Emacs org mode is reportedly extremely powerful as well but I have yet to invest significant time into it (there is only so much time...). ~~~ progman I use org mode every day. It actually is a tree editor. You can fold and unfold entries, move whole subtrees into deeper/higher levels, etc. The tree editor however is just one of many org features. ------ tunesmith A lot of tree editors aren't sufficient because he's asking about DAGs. Most tree-editing software only lets you have multiple children per parent, but you also need to allow multiple parents per child. [http://flyinglogic.com/](http://flyinglogic.com/) is on the right track. JVM cross platform and commercial. Curious how jetbrains MPS could improve on something like that. ------ jokoon Isn't XML already a tree? Joke aside, graphs are far from being trivial to represent as a data structure, and their use are so various that you can hardly edit a graph using text alone. Even a visual editor would require to be tailored to different work you do with graphs. ------ d0lph Workflowy is pretty nice, it exports to plain text and xml. [https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/) ~~~ justanotheratom I wish for something more sophisticated than workflowy, but I can't stop using it! ~~~ iza Try [https://dynalist.io](https://dynalist.io) ------ rexpop And then there is Gingko[1], a beautiful, keyboard-shortcutted, markdown- enabled tree editor that exports to html, markdown, LaTeX, docx, impress.js, and json. Gingko provide templates for Timelines, Screenplays, GTD and Academic papers, but I can imagine using it for complex formal proofs — I mostly use it for Microscope[2] and worldbuilding[3]. Right now it doesn't have any programmatic/computing capacity, but Gingko is eminently user friendly, so if Adriano[4] ever implemented a plugin system (or if someone wrote a Gingko-node-crunching chrome extension) I would imagine it to be a very enjoyable interface for editing trees. 1\. [https://gingkoapp.com/?ref=f32636d1](https://gingkoapp.com/?ref=f32636d1) 2\. [http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/](http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/) 3\. [https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding) 4\. [https://twitter.com/adrianoferrari](https://twitter.com/adrianoferrari) Disclosure: I don't have any affiliation with Gingko, but that is my referral link. ;) ------ wdfx [http://www.yworks.com/products/yed](http://www.yworks.com/products/yed) and GraphML ? ~~~ smarinov yed is the best tool for the job I've used so far, so I'm glad someone already mentioned it. ~~~ wdfx I have found it most handy for visualising data that I've dumped elsewhere in a simple format such as .tgf (generated dependency diagrams etc). ------ Animats There have been pure S-expression editors in LISP. INTERLISP worked that way. Yet EMACS, which is a text editor which knows a little about S-expressions, won out. INTERLISP's LISP editor had features never seen since, such as "Make this code subexpression a standalone function". This would pull the subexpression out and make it a named function, inserting the correct calls with the correct arguments in the original code. The inverse operation, "expand this function here", was also available. This eased refactoring. There don't seem to be tree-oriented editors for XML. Or HTML. Or even JSON. That would be useful. At least the tree structure would always be correct. More effort is going into figuring out how to parse "bad JSON" than into writing editors for it. ~~~ thfuran >features never seen since, such as "Make this code subexpression a standalone function". This would pull the subexpression out and make it a named function, inserting the correct calls with the correct arguments in the original code. Isn't that a pretty basic refactoring feature of most IDEs? ------ fiatpandas Architects and the like already work with a really great tree editor called Grasshopper. Easy to see cross sections through your tree as you are arranging components and relationships L->R or T->B, so there is potential to have very clear hierarchies depending on the style of the user. Also, I've been impressed with a lot of the invention that has happened around Grasshopper's UX + UI. I've been really surprised to see the design community emerge with the best graph programming editor, as opposed to something much more developer focused. It is of course not general purpose because you have to have Rhino to use it, but it can be used for general purpose programming since you can create custom components with .NET, ignoring most of the pre-built ones that are focused on parameterized geometry. ------ robochat42 I found myself thinking of something like Treeline when he describes what he wants. [http://treeline.bellz.org/](http://treeline.bellz.org/) ------ amelius Don't we have various LISP editors that are basically just that? ------ lebski88 This is a part of what we're working on at atomist - [https://www.atomist.com/](https://www.atomist.com/) We're imagining the idea that your whole development flow is expressible in terms of trees and expressions that we can use to navigate those trees. Say for example a webhook pushes a commit event. We can navigate from that commit, into the chat channel associated with it. Find the repo that contains it. Associate it with the build and link the two together in chat or, most relevant to this article, navigate into the code itself and perform an action such as changing the code or opening a PR with a suggested edit and comment. The interesting thing is that it's trees the whole way down. We can use the same expression to reach across all all kinds of events or to pick out individual tokens or structures inside the code. There's lots of information on our blog: [https://the- composition.com/](https://the-composition.com/) We've open sourced a lot of our core work at: [https://github.com/atomist](https://github.com/atomist) and are also interested in talking to teams about joining out alpha (see atomist.com) It's a really interesting problem to be working on. ------ imode honestly, let's go a step further and make it a general purpose graph editor! practical purposes abound, sure, but I'd just like to see the intermediate notation that pops out if someone were to attempt to design one. I don't think it'd be like graphviz.. ------ chriswarbo Surprised nobody's mentioned Boxer, or some other boxes-in-boxes representation [http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/boxer.pdf](http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/boxer.pdf) Blockly ( [https://developers.google.com/blockly](https://developers.google.com/blockly) ) is also similar, but I think it's a bit too specific: \- Only one type of block is needed, to represent a generic "node" in the tree. Distinctions can be added by plugins, if desired for some particular language. \- The idea of "interlocking" can be discarded, since a general tree editor should allow arbitrary edits to arbitrary trees (in the same way that a general text editor should allow any text to be inserted anywhere in a file/buffer). Plugins can add it back for particular languages. \- Nesting should be the only relationship; it subsumes "sitting beside" (like Blockly assignments) or "wrapping around" (blockly loops). \- No need to distinguish between editable/immutable values; everything is editable. As a baby step towards the author's goal, how about an s-expression editor which displays boxes-in-boxes instead of parentheses? The editing commands could be exactly the same as e.g. Emacs+paredit, the only difference would be that indentation begins at the left edge of the current box, rather than at the left edge of the screen. For example, we would have to discard the indentation of an expression like: (foo (bar baz) (quux foobar)) Instead we would align "foobar" to be in the same box as "quux", e.g. +-------------------------+ | +-------+ +---------+| |foo |bar baz| |quux || | +-------+ | foobar|| | +---------+| +-------------------------+ Note that I don't recommend using ASCII to draw the boxes (except maybe as a proof-of-concept). Once we have such an editor, we could start to extend it with features like coloured boxes for syntax colouring, structure-checkers (e.g. "if" should have 3 children, etc.). More radical extensions can then support pulling the boxes out into a more traditional tree structure. ~~~ chriswarbo After some Googling I've come across [http://foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/](http://foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/) which includes a hack for giving nested s-expressions different colours and hiding the parentheses. This sort of "tree view", combined with paredit's "tree editing", might go some way towards faking a tree editor. Maybe this could be combined with [https://github.com/jacksonrayhamilton/context- coloring](https://github.com/jacksonrayhamilton/context-coloring) and either [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigraphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigraphics) or the new cairo support for drawing pretty borders? ------ charlieflowers I have wondered this exact same thing! I assumed tree editors did exist, and I was excited that all I needed to do was go find them. But Google did not come through for me. Even a basic tree editor would be very powerful. Especially if you could run code from a repl that would change the tree (I know, that's no longer basic ... but it would let the graphical portion be basic, which might help it be bootstrapped into existence). ~~~ ako Outliners? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner)) Heavy user of outline view in MS-word here, which is basically a tree editor for text documents. ------ YeGoblynQueenne >> We need a solid, simple program that can simply edit trees. I might be misunderstanding this but a "tree" is a graph, so formally a tuple G = {V,E} where V a set of vertices {a,b,c,....} and E a set of tuples: {{a,b}, {b,c},...} so that each a,b,c,... are vertices in V. So for instance, the graph: a | / \ b c | | d e Would be written as {{V,E}: V = {a,b,c,d,e}, E = {{a,b},{a,c},{b,d},{c,e}}} possibly accompanied by a statement as to whether edges are directed or not. That's a simple, intuitive, light-weight notation that is very easy to manipulate in a text editor, so that's probably why nobody has bothered to write a special-purpose program for it. And if you want a graphical representation there's always tools like graphviz, so our graph can be written in dot-language as: digraph{ a->b a->c b->d c->e } Also, I don't understand why a tool to manipulate graphs, rather than just represent them, would be any different than a proof assistant or a theorem prover. ~~~ vog _> {{V,E}: V = {a,b,c,d,e}, E = {{a,b},{a,c},{b,d},{c,e}}} possibly accompanied by a statement as to whether edges are directed or not._ From a math notation point of view, this statement is not needed. If your edges are directed, denote your edges not as sets (which are always unordered in math), but as ordered pairs instead: {{V,E}: V = {a,b,c,d,e}, E = {(a,b),(a,c),(b,d),(c,e)}} ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne Thanks. Or you can always use what I think is slightly informal notation, where a directed edge is notated as a -> b (I've seen that in textbooks, but I'm not sure where it's coming from). ~~~ vog Haven't seen this notation in text books so far, but I guess one of the following 3 things happened: (1) The notation a->b was defined as a simple shorthand, i.e. a->b := (a,b). (2) The notation a->b was defined to be the graph consisting of just a, b and the edge, i.e. a->b := ({a,b}, {(a,b)}) ... this may be followed by some algebraic rules about how to combine small graphs to build larger graphs. (3) The notation a->b may be a somewhat misused notation for functions, meaning the only possible function from set {a} to set {b}, i.e. the function that maps a to b. If you define a function to be a relation (i.e. a set of pairs) where the first elements are unique, then this is acually equal to {(a,b)}, i.e. the set containing exactly this one pair. Interpretation (3) might look somewhat contrieved, but it actually isn't that much of a stretch, given the connections between graph theory and function structures through category theory. ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne I believe it's (1) and I think it might originate in Judea Pearl's textbook on causality [1], particularly the section on the IC algorithm. I've also encountered it in a bunch of papers on graph reconstruction, by Wermuth, Lauritzen, Spirtes and Glymour (not all in one go, I don't think). For instance, see [2]. I guess it's convenient notation for a typical step in those algorithms, where two edges are oriented towards a common vertex- shown as A -> B <\- C or similar. That's a little more concise than {(A,B),(C,B)} but also more intuitive when the intention is to show how to (re)construct a graph from dependence relations, as those algorithms usually do. ___________________ [1] Causality; models, reasoning and inference: [http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/](http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/) [2] A Fast Algorithm for Discovering Sparse Causal Graphs; Peter Spirtes & Clark Glymour: [http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1316&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1316&context=philosophy) ------ staz Is it me or is this article reposted every four months? Does it show that there is a fundamental need that is still unmet? ------ scythe Think of this in terms of ordinal numbers. When you have _text_ , you can interpret the string as a number and you can count the possible files: "0x01", "0x02", ... "0x0101", "0x0102", ... "0x010101", ... -- all of the possible files are enumerated by a _single_ increasing sequence. This corresponds to the ordinal "omega-0". When you have a _table_ , you can interpret each _row_ as a number and now you have an arbitrary number of infinite increasing sequences, but you can imagine a transfinite "sequence of sequences" that counts the tables with 1 row, then the tables with 2 rows, and so forth. This is a single infinite increasing sequence of infinite increasing sequences, which corresponds to the ordinal "omega-0 squared". But when you have a _tree_ , there's an infinite increasing sequence corresponding to... every single finite tree! In fact, there are _multiple_ increasing sequences corresponding to every finite tree, and infinite sequences associated to those sequences, and... anyway, tree-counting functions are very hard to define at all, but with a little bit of work in combinatorics you'll find something called a "Veblen function" which is defined so that the _parameter_ of the function is the number of _levels_ of recursion of infinitary functions applied to themselves, and then the fixpoint of the Veblen function itself is the Feferman-Schutte ordinal, which cannot even be _defined_ in first-order logic! One example of the horror that results from counting trees is Kruskal's theorem: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal's_tree_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal's_tree_theorem) In other words, trees, which can encode arbitrary structure, are much more difficult to do math on than tables and flat files, which can only encode simple structures. ------ peterhil There is the Dot language: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_\(graph_description_language\)) The files can be viewed with Graphviz. ------ bluetwo Honestly, if I'm trying to organize some concepts into a tree, I'll go into Word, open a blank document, and switch to Outline mode. Not the most complex solution but also super easy to use. Tab to indent, shift-tab to unindent. Select-drag-and-drop... etc. ------ lcedp Take a look at Parinfer[0]. It's for Lisp editing, but S-expressions are as general as it gets. Also you can use Ranger[1] or Finder or NERDTree with Vim/Nvim to utilize your file system as a tree structure and afterwards "extract" it with tree[2] [0] [https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/#introduction](https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/#introduction) [1] [http://ranger.nongnu.org/](http://ranger.nongnu.org/) [2] [http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/](http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/) ------ gcatlin I don't want a general purpose tree editor. I want a general purpose text editor that understands the semantics of the text I'm editing. One that understands all the various not-necessarily-sexp-based code I'm editing _is_ a tree and supports (ParEdit style) operations on that tree. Especially with languages in the Algol/C family. I think this can be accomplished (eventually) via language servers and editors that speak the Language Server Protocol (LSP) [0]. But I don't need a UI oriented around visually displaying tree-like things. Expanding / collapsing nodes is very meh. Moving / splitting / joining nodes is _much_ more interesting and useful. As a simple concrete example: changing the order of the parameters (and their type) in a function definition. Wouldn't it be great to 'swap-with-prev-node' or 'swap-with-next-node' rather than copy/paste and dealing with commas? The same operations could swap the order of two fields in a struct or two functions or two classes or _any_ pair of adjacent nodes in a tree. Or how about moving an 'if' block inside the 'for' block that follows it? Just execute the 'move-node-inside-next-node' (or whatever) command. This only requires editors that (indirectly) understand the semantics of the text you're editing. Thus far the biggest barrier is all wheel re-invention needed for the cartesian product of all editors and all languages. But that's the wrong approach. We need each language to provide a tool that each editor can use via a common protocol. This is precisely the point of the LSP. The functionality only needs to be written once per language and per editor. This is totally tractable. I don't know if LSP currently supports the specific tree-manipulation functionality I mentioned, but I'm confident it could. Does anyone knowledgeable about LSP know if this is already possible, feasible, and/or generally desirable? Are there deal breakers that make this hard / not worthwhile? [0] [http://langserver.org/](http://langserver.org/) ~~~ chriswarbo Keep in mind that it's pretty trivial (if laborious) to make parsers/pretty- printers between your language of choice and s-expressions, which would allow a generic tree editor to work on your language. Note that you _don 't_ need a fleshed-out, implementation-friendly _abstract_ syntax tree (e.g. "(definition (name foo) (type (function int int)) (arguments ((name x) (type int))) (body ...))"); you just need a parse tree of the tokens (e.g. (def foo ((int x)) ...)). I agree that the existing silos of VisualStudio, Eclipse, Netbeans, jEdit, Emacs, Vi, etc. is a bad thing, and initiatives like LSP are is a step in the right direction. Another nice approach that I came across recently is [https://github.com/CarlOlson/structured- editing](https://github.com/CarlOlson/structured-editing) . This also uses a separate process to get information about code, but uses "spans" (start position, end position, label, extra info) which seem to be in between strings and syntax trees. For example a span might encompass a class definition; another span covers a method inside that class; another covers a statement in that method; another covers a function call in that statement; another covers the function name in that call, and it's extra info includes the location where that function is defined, its type, etc. ------ janci Somewhat related: I was overwhelmed by complexity of web CMS solutions. I needed something very very simple, that gets the task done (user-editable webpage content). I represent the web by a tree, every node has metadata (id, type, title) and data. Nodes can be persisted (ie. as json text files, or in database table) and browsed (parent to children and back). Admin UI is very simple: in the left pane there is the tree browser, works like filesystem browser - you can open "folders" (nodes with subnodes) and "files" (leaf nodes). Each node shows specific editor for it's type, that usually consist of few form fields. ~~~ buovjaga If I understand you correctly, ProcessWire has such an admin UI out of the box: [https://processwire.com/](https://processwire.com/) You can build your own admin UI, if you want as it's all done with the same API you use to build your sites. ------ RushPL Author of code2flow here ([https://code2flow.com](https://code2flow.com)) - I think you could use my tool to easily create many types of trees. It's not generic, as in, it is focused on charting programs/algorithms and workflows but I've seen people (ab)use it for many different use cases, like so: [https://code2flow.com/fRRlCK](https://code2flow.com/fRRlCK) ------ tonetheman Little Outliner 2 is pretty good. [http://littleoutliner.com/](http://littleoutliner.com/) Made by Dave @ scripting.com ~~~ mrmondo Went to try it out but it requires signing into your twitter account and they get access to: \- Update your profile. \- Post Tweets for you. That's not cool. ~~~ matthewn OWL is a nifty fork of Dave Winer's work that stores all data locally and doesn't require a Twitter account. [https://github.com/interstar/OWL](https://github.com/interstar/OWL) ~~~ tonetheman That looks interesting. It also has a web.py server that can be used to store data on a server somewhere. Good stuff. ------ solomatov We have it. It's called JetBrains MPS: [https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/](https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/) ------ panic Because we don't have a general-purpose tree file format. ~~~ selectnull XML? ~~~ bullen [http://rupy.se/logic.jar](http://rupy.se/logic.jar) More than tree structured XML, this also provides node graph XML visual editing. ------ Philipp__ This certainly is good question. But, the fact that we don't have one yet maybe tells us that we haven't defined what it should be and what kind of problem it should solve. I mean, I like the idea a lot! Used MindNode, but I found it very bound to specific type of problems. It is visualization tool. And Emacs is just too much. I use it from time to time, but I would like nice native general purpose text editor with Tree capability and Markdown support. ------ elcapitan This may sound cruel, but you can use OmniOutliner as a tree editor and transform the XML to your target with your favorite xml transformation method. ------ ChicagoDave I have a startup called Wizely, which is a social wisdom network. The iOS (phone) app (in development) will have a tree editor. I'm also developing a tablet version that would be bigger and more "touch-friendly". A full browser/desktop version isn't in the works, but if things roll out according to plan, it would be an important addition to our process. ------ chriswarbo Something slightly more hardcode: [http://hazelgrove.org](http://hazelgrove.org) \- structured editing via a formal calculus of actions which provably maintains correctness. Whilst a cool idea, and a nice foundation for actions, it certainly suffers from being clunky UI-wise, so doesn't solve the author's problem directly. ------ lowmagnet The author's use of "sufficient cause" brought to mind Sciral's Flying logic[0] which does some basic logic and sufficient cause in terms of Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. It's also useful for a number of other logical structures, like trees. [0] [http://flyinglogic.com](http://flyinglogic.com) ------ mdemare A tree is a pair of a value and a list of trees. The "list of trees" part is what's constant about trees; the value is what makes it hard. What's a value? A name? A string? A text? Either a text, or a name and a map of strings to strings (simplified HTML)? A General Purpose Tree Editor would have to handle all those cases, and a whole lot more. ------ l0ner What comes to my mind is the Eclipse Modeling Framework. It's not exactly light-weight, but it always worked pretty well for my use cases. Throw a model at it (XML schema, annotated Java, ...) and it generates a Java implementation including a tree-based editor; certainly good enough for prototyping purposes. ~~~ jventura I'm curious about your use cases, as I do not seem to find much information about model-driven development out there. Can you elaborate a little bit more about what you do with EMF? I'm asking this on the perspective of someone who is about to teach model- driven software engineering for a semester but cannot find much pratical use for it.. ------ dustingetz imagine you had about ten excel tables linked in a graph, any interesting visualization or analysis involves querying it like a database, and many databases are very rigid in terms what they can store, not flexible like excel. Semantic web stores (triple stores) are mostly schemaless and solve the rigidity but they had their own problems [1], datomic's 5-store model maybe fixes them? So maybe we will see an excel-for-graphs based on datomic someday soon. I'm working on this problem so if anyone has any interest in discussing this you should email me! It's a really interesting problem because excel-for- graphs would be an amazing starting point for building CRUD apps. [1] can anyone help me with clarity here as to why triple stores failed? Is it because no :db/retract and no time axis so cache consistency problems? or a deeper reason? ------ arxpoetica I've brought up this issue before in the context of GraphQL's declarative data: [https://github.com/facebook/graphql/issues/237#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/facebook/graphql/issues/237#issuecomment-270195701) ------ holy_jeebus If you can do queries AND have a GUI option that seems logical to me. Looking back at my history this topic hits me right in the feels... [http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/25-formula_queries/](http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/25-formula_queries/) ------ zubat Trees are not all alike and I think this stops most such plans. Some trees have types and tags, quoting of other trees, container patterns that are representable as a tree but unpleasant to edit. And we get stuck on that and say "Let's have a syntax." And then we're back to text again. ------ rijoja Did anybody get the source code to run? I've been trying to test it out for a long time but never really gotten anywhere. Is there anybody that is good at functional programming that could help me out? It's surely funny if there can be so many comments and nobody even ran the program. ------ bigmanwalter [http://jsoneditoronline.org/](http://jsoneditoronline.org/) It's only for JSON but you can write a small script to convert it to whatever format you want. ------ loevborg I'd even be happy to have just a simple general-purpose text-ui tree viewer. There's tree(1) and ncdu(2) but they doesn't really work for anything except directory trees. ------ samirillian I think this problem is closely related to the perennial "optimal to-do list" problem. A to-do list is a tree. If you have a good tree editor, you have a good to-do list app. ------ freeduck Pretty much any code editor with a jump to source, is a user friendly graph editor. And with refactoring tools, a good debugger and compiler I can't see what is missing ~~~ throwanem Not all graphs are expressed as code, or should be. ~~~ TeMPOraL Also, code in most languages is pretty far from being a tree on the surface. Not to mention that "jump to source", et al. depend on particular _semantics_ of the code. So by itself, those features don't make a general-purpose tree editor. ------ digi_owl I must admit i have no clue what the author is actually asking for. If he is asking for away to organize various bits of text etc, is that not basically a directory tree stuffed with files? ------ goerz Isn't this just what's known as an Outliner (e.g. OmniOutliner, but various other programs exist)? ------ slezyr orgzly (open outliner saves in org mode for Android) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orgzly&hl=...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orgzly&hl=en) ------ jerf Because the use case of "edit all graphs" is too divergent to be solved by one program. For simplicity, let me start with just trees. What kind of trees have we got? Well, we've got programming language ASTs. In these trees, nodes tend to have only two or three children, each of which is probably a short word or a number, but they can easily extend hundreds of levels deep, or even thousands. (Before you disagree with this, go take a look at the dump of the AST of a modestly complicated Python function or something. Many programming language grammars are not optimized for this representation and end up with _way_ more intermediate grammar nodes than you'd expect, which all seem like they'd be really easy to "just" collapse, but that causes its own problems.) The naive and obvious representations of all of this are difficult to navigate and consume the vast majority of the screen with whitespace. It rapidly becomes clear you need a specialized mechanism for dealing with this... then after a few iterations, if you do it right, you discover that you've reinvented... the original textual representation. (This is not proof that textual representation is optimal in general. You can correctly argue that you end up there because the entire language was designed with that in mind in the first place, and that a language designed to be graph-based in the first place may work better. However, your tree viewer doesn't have any of the latter _that doesn 't already have a special-purpose viewer_ built for it, which your putatively generic code isn't going to compete with.) Database rows are just a graph, right? Well, that's one top-level node for the result that contains the rows, and then, oh, let's say 25,000 identically- structured children. How are you going to navigate that? Are you going to introduce a "paging" concept? If so, you're going to complicate the other uses of this generic editor that don't need it. How about rich text? Rich text is just a tree. But is your generic tree editor going to require sub nodes for "bold"? For that matter, how does your generic editor handle either of "text <b>bold</b> more text" or "text <span class='arbitrary_class'>span</span> more text"? There's a lot of different rules that people may want to apply to tree nodes; do those look like one, two, or three nodes in your editor? I can make a case for all three, for instance, for the first one (imagine the word bold is bold in the first one, it's a rich text display): * text bold more text * text (bold) bold more text * text (bold) bold * more text (Note the new asterisk on the third line of the last one; it's a new node. In the first one, we have "special" nodes that can be embedded, whereas others probably can't be; that's a heck of a concept to write into your generic editor and will have huge ramifications in all sorts of other places, not least of which is the graph data representation and API. In the second one we somehow have "embedded" nodes, which has the same problems, except it has _different_ massive effects on the graph data structure and API. The third is conceptually simplest in a lot of ways, but maps neither to HTML nor to the human's internal representation very well.) Now, how do your choices that you made for this rich text application map back to the other types of graphs you may want to support? Because each of those three choices will have different implications if you then try to support RDF graphs in the same visual layout. Speaking of RDF... have you considered the visual differences between ordered trees and unordered trees? Box & line graphs naturally represent unordered children, outline views impose a view of order even if one doesn't exist, other layouts may have other consequences. You can't just let the decision about outline vs. box & line be determined by the orderedness of the nodes either, because there may be other properties of the graph that may be unsuitable for. And then, of course, there's the graphs that you want to view as box & line diagrams, the ones you want to have fully manual layout for vs. the ones you want some degree of automation. And you've to deal with the boxes that are way too big for the display because they contain several dozen kilobytes of plain text. Can your boxes contain subgraphs within them? And under _any_ display methodology (graphs, outlines, whatever), what does it look like when you have a node with 25,000 incoming links? Does that work well with graphs that have only a few nodes like that? What about graphs like friend networks on Facebook that consist almost entirely of nodes that have hundreds of links? Note that when you've seen graphs of Facebook, they never much resemble, say, LabView diagrams, they're always these very zoomed-out representations with only entire regions colored and being discussed. How is your generic graph editor suitable for use on programming languages doing with this graph? The theme here is not "unsolvable problem". The theme here is "unresolvable conflicts between different use cases". In an individual context, these issues are solvable, and have been reasonably solved. But trying to create a generic "graph" editor is, well, given the genericness of the term "graph" basically trying to create a generic "editor". ------ kibrad seems like the next trello can be trello with graphs, diagrams and trees ------ arc_of_descent Thanks to this post I found out about TreeSheets. Looks interesting. ------ thwee789 Check out Freemind. It's been collecting dust on the shelves. ------ osxman Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties (book) is a good start for better understanding/defining trees. [http://a.co/9eVzvji](http://a.co/9eVzvji) ~~~ petepete There's a very useful chapter in Karwin's SQL Antipatterns on this topic too. ------ eschaton Lisp Machines had general tree editing facilities. ------ viach Isn't that called Outliner? ------ thwee789 Check out Freemind ------ philip4534 Freeplane? ------ abhishivsaxena Check gingko, which is more focussed on docs, but is a tree editor at its core. [https://gingkoapp.com/](https://gingkoapp.com/) Used it at university for notes, and is great for quick revisions before the exams too! ~~~ baldfat Looks great but it only does text. The link speaks of beyond ASCII. For this the old school PIM were better at storage of thoughts. ~~~ rexpop "old school PIM"? Wikipedia and I find this ambiguous [1]. 1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIM) ------ ClayFerguson To me it's shocking that there's nothing for editing XML that equates to an editable tree GUI interface where nodes and properties can be rendered onto something resembling a document but yet browsable (by expanding and collapsing node) with the same paradigm of a file-system browser gui. I'm working on this myself actually, in meta64.com (see it on github, because the site is not always live, and is experimental). I am using JCR as the back end data storage but seriously considering adding a feature so support direct XML editing. XML and also REST are highly structural, and yet everyone seems to just use syntax-highlighting text editors to edit them rather than something more akin to a tree-based browser, that would render something more friendly looking (with expand/collapse capability). Think of it like this, you have seen RSS XML before right? You have also seen web sites that RENDER the RSS feed into a document-looking thing. That's what i'm getting at. Going from editing this stuff as a text file, to something much more advanced, like a tree-browser. Maybe there are some things i'm not aware of, like perhaps even an Atom Editor plugin or whatever, but I don't think there's anything in wide use or i'd know about it, having been a web developer for 25yrs now. ------ singularity2001 Blasphemy: All xml editors are General Purpose Tree Editors

Fur – WebGL - radley http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/fur/ ====== hernan604 +1 for artificial fur

Employee Scheduling - weitzj https://developers.google.com/optimization/scheduling/employee_scheduling ====== duxup Technical solution aside: I wrote a schedule for a team of ~20 co-workers for a 24/7 support shop. This required people change shifts / sleep schedules often. The schedule was a point of contention for years. After I volunteered to write the schedules, in 3 months I had everyone happy. It was not hard.....but.... The catch was that I did it manually for a month at a time with a wide ranging amount of changing priorities that would be hard to program ... and the key was COMMUNICATION, and working with people and their personal preferences. ~~~ cosmodisk One of the senior teachers in my school used to organise schedule for 1000 pupils and 50+ teachers. With some minor things everything worked pretty damn well.Then they decided to get some software to do the same.Never ended up working... ~~~ duxup Humans might be kinda slow and expensive, but their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them dynamically, filter out absurd results before applying them, and etc is pretty amazing. Like if someone comes to me and says "what if we... did X with the schedule". I could tell them how to do that and not to right away. The code would have to be changed / rewritten and tested and fail at it each time... so much mess. Especially when scheduling other humans... the humans being scheduled can smell a computer scheduling a mile away and IMO they expect the worst at that point. They're not necessarily wrong. ~~~ marcosdumay > their ability to handle a lot of variable data and inputs and weigh them > dynamically I dunno. Computers are pretty good at this one too, on different kinds of variance and weights. The largest problem I see is that everyone is discussing "either or" on this thread, while the clear winner is both. ~~~ bumby I was reading some old literature a few months ago on this related to police staffing where union issues had to be taken into account. It seems adding social penalties is a way to do this algorithmically ~~~ tonyarkles You’re giving me flashbacks to some software I worked on a while ago that had to use rules from three different collective agreements from nursing unions. Turns out writing business logic for rules that aren’t internally consistent is a challenge, and unlike most LOB projects I’ve worked on, the procedure _can not_ be amended until the next round of bargaining. ------ johnjwang We run into this for customer support (www.assembled.com) and one of the things we've learned is that the ability to solve the fully constrained problem in the real world is not quite enough, at least for our customers. Quite often, people are looking for the right set of constraints to apply so they're kind of running a meta problem on top of the NSP. How many back-to- back shifts should I allow? Should people's shifts always start at the same time? Can I give some people regular 9-5 schedules? All of the above questions will decrease the strict optimality of the solution, but increase the happiness and long term retention of your workforce. Thus, the question really become, how much do each of these cost in terms of optimality and what are the tradeoffs. We've found that developing a very fast heuristic algorithm for the NSP allows people to iterate quickly on these types of questions (even though it's not quite as optimal as a SAT solver). We use a greedy algorithm with a heuristic that is relatively specific to our problem domain to ensure that we have a reasonable combination of speed and optimality. ------ petters State of the art for employee scheduling seems to be column generation; see benchmarks here: [http://www.schedulingbenchmarks.org/nurse.html](http://www.schedulingbenchmarks.org/nurse.html) Here is an open-source column generation solver that currently achieves the best solutions on that benchmark: [https://github.com/PetterS/monolith/tree/master/minimum/line...](https://github.com/PetterS/monolith/tree/master/minimum/linear/colgen) ~~~ microcolonel Thank you for the pointers! I've been interested in crew scheduling systems for my company to make effective use of personnel. Is the problem of producing ideal time slots for appointments requiring a crew (pattern of ordered and unordered availability) very different? ~~~ petters Perhaps not very different, but each problem formulation has its own complication. For column generation, specifically, the routine that generates the columns incorporates a lot of problem-specific information. The rest of the solver is more general. ------ dzink We had to find a solution for doctors to manage 22 different peers distributing 30 shifts a month. The schedule had to abide by each employees vacation requests and distributed undesirable shifts like weekends and holidays in some equitable manner, and be easily interpreted by staff. The solution was an excel spreadsheet with a lot of auto-fill logic and formulas to show shift and burden counts for each doctor so the person managing the sheet could move around shifts when needed and ensure equitable distribution still remained. Excel really helped where python and other tools would require a lot more code and be a lot less flexible to operator changes. ~~~ hipjiveguy Since it's a spreadsheet, is there any way you can share it? I assume the Dr's names could be easily changed so it's generic? ------ simulate I built a web interface for this type of nurse scheduling optimization. Mine uses CPLEX instead of the CP-SAT solver but the Python set up is very similar. Here's the web interface to the nurse scheduler: [https://forio.com/app/showcase/nurse- scheduling/](https://forio.com/app/showcase/nurse-scheduling/) and here are some other optimization examples: [https://forio.com/products/epicenter/example- applications/](https://forio.com/products/epicenter/example-applications/) ~~~ 6510 [https://forio.com/app/showcase/nurse- scheduling/nurses.html?...](https://forio.com/app/showcase/nurse- scheduling/nurses.html?Gloria) Thursday, 02:00 to 08:00 — Emergency Thursday, 08:00 to 12:00 — Oncology Thursday, 12:00 to 18:00 — Oncology Friday, 08:00 to 12:00 — Emergency ~~~ toxik Turns out Gloria is an incredibly hard worker. ~~~ blindfly It's the pandemic thing everyone's working overtime ------ ytjohn I get the point is to show a problem solving technique, but I'm either missing something, or they are missing a constraint. In several solutions, a nurse works shift 2 one day, then shift 0 the next. In fact, Nurse 3 keeps getting stuck with the back to back shifts. ~~~ cerved Are you referring to the first model? Only 5/5184 solutions are displayed. There's no objective function and the branching is probably defaulting to a simple systematic search with min domain, min value heuristic. If these are the first 5 solutions in the search tree, it's not surprising that nurse 3 keeps getting stuck with back to back shifts (does not work day 3) ~~~ Tarq0n They listed the constraint of no back-back shifts in the text but didn't implement it as a constraint. ~~~ cerved By back to back, do you mean nurse 3 works shift 2 day 1 and shift 0 day 2? Or that nurse 3 always works two days in a row in the listed solutions? The example doesn't mention back to back shifts, only that a nurse can at most work one shift a day which in turn implies the constraint that no nurse can work shifts back to back (in the same day). One could easily add the constraint that a nurse scheduled on shift 2 cannot work shift 0 the next day. ------ Dowwie Any thoughts about the scheduling projects open sourced by staffjoy a few years ago, regarding the relevant schedule optimizers chosen? [https://github.com/Staffjoy](https://github.com/Staffjoy) ~~~ philip1209 Hey - I was the primary author of Staffjoy! We had a few different algorithm iterations. One of our biggest learnings was that it's hard to build a generalized auto-scheduling algorithm. While most companies have similar needs at a surface level - things like local labor laws, cross-functional roles, breaks, and business quirks mean that you end up customizing the algorithm for most customers. For the best auto-scheduling - Kronos is the incumbent, and Legion.co is probably the most advanced disruptor. ~~~ Dowwie Thanks for replying! You gave money back to investors and open sourced your work. That's commendable behavior! I never forgot that story. As usual, the solution seems straightforward from 30,000 feet but once we go into the details, it turns out to be much more complicated. Noted about Kronos and Legion. Have you done any further scheduling related work since Staffjoy? ------ reportgunner This looks nice but actually doesn't adress the actual challenges of scheduling. It's rather easy to generate a schedule and most of the feasible variants are available online already (there aren't infinite possibilities on how to schedule shifts) - you fit it to a 7 day or a 28 day (or a multiple of 7) cycle and then copy paste. The scheduling challenges occur when people need to take unexpected vacations or during vacation period when staffing is low. Another challenge is the skill level of the individual employees which is usually not binary - can do work / cannot do work - since employees come to work to perform tasks and they don't always learn all of the tasks the first day. ------ froindt I have been building a employee scheduling system in a factory environment. New employees need to be trained on machines, for a certain number of shifts, with a limit of how many employees can train on a machine at a time. A question becomes "how many new employees could we handle?". I looked at some solutions, but landed on an Excel spreadsheet with a small macro for spreadsheet setup, conditional formatting to call out an employee being allocated to 2 positions on the same shift, and a visual way to show for each operator, how long it takes to be fully trained. HR or a manager can setup training schedules by manually allocating people to training slots. There were some constraints the business wanted (train on machine #1 before #2, do 2 days of training if you haven't already trained on _x_ machine). They would have been hard to accommodate in a way the end user could configure, so I have a notes section they can fill in (and they have to manually observe these constraints). Totally open to other ideas people have on how to approach the proble. ~~~ mushufasa This sounds like a good solution to me. I can imagine some HN readers might comment 'ew Excel!' but it truly is the right tool for something where you have to transparently demonstrate the logic to non-technical stakeholders in a way they can easily edit and adapt. Of course, you could build or buy a web app that handles this specific scenario more powerfully and scaleably, but if this is a quarterly problem rather than a everyday problem then the additional overhead of the different interface / logins may not be worthwhile. My only comments would be 1) macros are too hard for nontechnical users in my experience, even just w/r/t setup (excel prompts you a security warning to enable macros that is scary). I think you could maybe do this using the what-if analysis tables, simple ifelse formulas, and conditional formatting. 2) another improvement might be a cloud-based version where there is a link at which others can easily view + collaborate, like Google Sheets or Airtable. I think Excel is supposed to have this feature as part of the 365 subscription but I've never used it. ------ saagarjha I’m a bit uncertain about what Google OR-Tools is…it _seems_ to be some sort of framework for solving optimization problems, but based on the example here I am curious how general such a tool can be, as normally I find that a “drop in” algorithms framework is generally quite difficult to make or use. Is anyone using this for something useful? Does it perform faster than a hand- rolled implementation tailored to the problem? Is it easier to use? ~~~ radomir_cernoch Exactly my thinking. <disclaimer>I work in a company that deals exclusively with OR. This means that we might be overly specialized for this product.</disclaimer> I see OR-Tools as an educational product. The tool is easy to start tinkering with and it has superb documentation - even for people not specialized in combinatorial optimization. ~~~ 7thaccount Can you link to your company. I've always thought it would be cool to 100% work on LP, MIP, and Nonlinear models. Do y'all use CPLEX/GUROBI for the big stuff and Prolog for more discreet items? ------ tgflynn Employee scheduling seems to be a problem common to a large number of businesses. Are the needs of most small/medium businesses currently being met in this area or is there an opportunity for providing tools in this space ? ~~~ ses1984 My sister is in charge of scheduling physicians for shifts and on call for a large hospital and she has a really hard time. She does it manually with the help of a spreadsheet. She engaged with some software company to help and after many hours of work she still uses the spreadsheet. Part of the problem is that some senior physicians do whatever they want and aren't interested in playing fair. They'll call her the day before a holiday and tell her they're not coming in, and my sister is left trying to figure out the least shitty way to cover the gap. ~~~ emmelaich See my link above for KHE. It also does nursing schedules which may help you. ------ samsquire I've used ORTools to schedule tasks to be done in parallel. it's really simple. [https://github.com/samsquire/devops- schedule](https://github.com/samsquire/devops-schedule) ------ guiriduro Would also be interested in a compare and contrast with open source optaplanner [https://www.optaplanner.org/learn/useCases/employeeRostering...](https://www.optaplanner.org/learn/useCases/employeeRostering.html) ------ mighty_plant Google or-tools are quite fun although a little bit of a pain to setup and get started at least if you want to use the JVM and support different OS. Just to share a little anecdote about my use case: The department I work in consists of about 40 developers and once a year we had a day together just to form new teams in a self organized manner. Management wanted about one third of a team to move to a different team to spread and gather knowledge but completely backed off during that day. We had a special coach and scrum masters supporting us but still it was very exhausting and a lot of the developers didn't like it. The devs that showed motivation to change teams were more or less forced to go to the teams which were disliked the most (either because of their domain or the already present members). So in the end there was not much rotation and the whole thing was quite expensive so that this year it was cancelled. That's when I started to use Google or-Tools to write a little tool that suggests teams based on some constraints like size, at least one experienced dev / software architect per team and an optimization function based on preferences of each dev for a certain domain as well as their sympathy towards other devs When I announced it it got almost no attention and was dismissed as "inhuman". ------ cerved I'm glad to see the domain of constraint programming and operational research in general generate interest so I thought I would take the opportunity to share some links and resources I have found useful. Personally, I've spent most of my time on the routing (TSP, VRP, VRPTW) side of things using CP (OscaR-CP). Discrete optimization and constraint programming can be a bit difficult to get into. There are two great free online courses on Coursera that do a good job at introducing the topic. _Discrete Optimization_ [https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete- optimization](https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization) I don't remember the exact content of this course but I believe it covers the basics in a few different methodologies. _Basic Modeling for Discrete Optimization_ [https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic- modeling](https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic-modeling) This is a great course by Peter Stuckey that uses MiniZinc. The MiniZinc programming language is a great starting point that teaches you to think of solving discrete optimization problems only in terms of modelling the problem. Håkan Kjellerstrands blog is another great resource [http://www.hakank.org/](http://www.hakank.org/) It contains hundreds of different models for a large variety of different solvers. Chances are that he has created a model for your solver for a similar problem. Two books worth mentioning are: _Handbook of Constraint Programming_ _Principles of Constraint Programming_ Other solvers/frameworks: _The OscaR library_ [https://bitbucket.org/oscarlib/oscar/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/oscarlib/oscar/wiki/Home) My personal favorite. An OR framework written entirely in Scala. As such it's an absolute joy to work with and the internals are (relatively speaking) easier to understand. _GeCode_ [https://www.gecode.org/](https://www.gecode.org/) Another extremely potent solver. Exclusively CP based. _Mini-CP_ [https://minicp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://minicp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) An extremly lightweight CP solver, designed for educational purposed to expose how a CP solver works without obfuscating performance optimizations found in research/production solvers. _MiniZinc_ [https://www.minizinc.org/](https://www.minizinc.org/) A solver agnostic constraint modelling languages, designed to interface a given optimization model with different solvers. A few notable researches: Phil Kilby Pascal Van Hentenryck Paul Shaw Laurent Perron - OR-tools Peter Stuckey - MiniZinc Pierre Schaus - OscaR, Mini-CP Renaud Hartert - OscaR I also want to make a plug for the work of the Uppsala University optimization group [http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/optimisation/](http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/optimisation/) Especially the work of Pierre Flener, Gustav Björdal and Justin Pearson who I've had the pleasure to work with during my masters thesis on vehicle routing using CP. ------ whatever1 IBM makes an even faster (than google or) cp optimizer [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08247.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08247.pdf) ------ closeparen My team used to have an absolutely wild script for oncall scheduling. People would enter their availability weeks, and then we'd run a genetic algorithm, scoring the fitness of each schedule "offspring" according to the number of availabilities violated and then making random mutations to the most promising. It would slam CPU for several hours and still produce clearly ridiculous solutions. Brute force would have been better. I'll have to play with this. ------ asah Happy user here! I've used it for a couple of projects. Here's an open source solver for a fun presumably-NP casual video game: [https://github.com/asah/tents-and-trees](https://github.com/asah/tents-and- trees) As with other solvers, it can be a little difficult to debug, so I recommend starting small and adding constraints and known test examples. ------ jonbaer Maybe a little OT, but why aren't the OR-tools in general more focused (or more "marketed") towards GPU/TPU clouds since they seem like the exact problems which they are made for? More focus seems to be towards TF/PT/NN and not the real problems like what OR-tools and solvers in general push for. ~~~ mochomocha Typical algorithms solving combinatorial problems are usually heavily branching, so not so much vectorizable. For example for a branch-and-cut MIP solver, you could run the LP-relaxed problems on GPU, but most of the logic lives in branching and cutting heuristics that are much harder to parallelize. ------ michaelt I see their documentation also covers routing vehicles across multiple deliveries, with time windows. Can someone who's tested this stuff out advise on how many deliveries it can handle at a time? The examples only list trivial problems, but that might just be to keep the examples short. ~~~ nappy-doo I can chime in. Googler here, who knows the OR team very well. They are solving EXTREMELY large problems for customers. I can't tell you who, and I can't tell what problems, but they are among the biggest OR problems you can imagine. (No, I don't mean within Google, although they solve scheduling problems there as well.) EDIT: There are articles: [https://cloud.google.com/press- releases/2020/0120/lufthansa](https://cloud.google.com/press- releases/2020/0120/lufthansa) [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/19/lufthansa-taps-googles- cloud...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/19/lufthansa-taps-googles-cloud-tech- to-mitigate-impact-of-flight-delays.html) ~~~ apelapan The articles are more statement of ambition than indication of actually "solving problems". I will follow whatever information gets out about this project with great interest. The big challenge in making something like this actually work, are not the fancy hightech bits. Dealing with humdrum data integrations and torrential rates of change in rules and constraints, sourced from hundreds of mostly non- technical people across dozens of independent departments is where it gets hard. ------ tracker1 Now do that with a few thousand employees, vacation request ranking/status and three different sets of thousands of pages of union contracts. The above is something I actually worked on before.. The bitter irony, is they all just traded their vacation weeks as it came up anyway. ------ IndexPointer Well now I want to spend a few hours using it to solve the peaceable queens problem: [https://youtu.be/IN1fPtY9jYg](https://youtu.be/IN1fPtY9jYg) ~~~ cerved Sounds similar to n-Queens, check out [http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens.py](http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens.py) [http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens2.py](http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens2.py) [http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens3.py](http://www.hakank.org/google_or_tools/nqueens3.py) for inspiration ~~~ hakank Actually, the Peaceable Army (or Armies) of Queens problem is a separate problem and much harder than the n-queens problem. Here is a MiniZinc model: [http://hakank.org/minizinc/peaceableArmyOfQueens.mzn](http://hakank.org/minizinc/peaceableArmyOfQueens.mzn) , and a Picat model: [http://hakank.org/picat/peaceableArmyOfQueens.pi](http://hakank.org/picat/peaceableArmyOfQueens.pi) (Also: Thanks for your links to my site.) ------ coleca Interesting project, I'd like to see it take into account decades of ambiguous union contracts, past practices, seniority, preferences, time off requests, preferences, training and certification levels, and not to mention the various local, state and federal labor laws. Scheduling isn't an easy problem to solve in the real world vs the lab where there are far less constraints and consequences for getting it wrong. Kronos (kronos.com) is the recognized leader in this space and even their software has a hard time keeping it all straight. ~~~ cerved CP solvers are excellent at handling side constraints, at least as long as they can be expressed as a boolean, discrete or linear relation. ------ polotics Can someone chime in on how this compares with the software that takes part in the yearly planning competition, eg. FastDownward etc. What subset of PDDL is supported? ~~~ lsuresh The CP-SAT solver would be used for combinatorial optimization problems. These solvers are very different than the ones you'd use for planning problems a la PDDL. ------ jbkiv Great find, thank you. I ended up playing with the tools they provide. I always loved solving optimization problems and this page ia a gem, I did not know it existed. ~~~ cerved You should check out [http://www.hakank.org/](http://www.hakank.org/) for a fantastic resource of optimization models for a huge variety of solvers and problems ------ graycat WOW! There is still some interest in optimization? I'm shocked! The message long was "Operations Research is dead." Gee, I got started in OR (operations research) at FedEx, covered a lot from some of the best people in grad school, taught it as a prof in B-school, and applied it to US national security and some commercial problems. Good to see the interest in some of the flight operations work for Lufthansa -- I was considering (no great progress) some of those problems at FedEx! One commercial problem was allocating marketing resources for some banks. I was given the formulation, 0-1 integer linear programming with 600,000 variables and 40,000 constraints. I derived some non-linear duality theory, used the IBM OSL (Optimization Subroutine Library), and in 500 iterations found a feasible solution with the objective function guaranteed to be within 0.025% of optimality! Another commercial problem was some more marketing optimization. It was also 0-1 integer linear programming, but surprisingly it was just a problem in least cost network flows. That is also linear programming, but there the simplex algorithm takes on a special form where a basis is a spanning tree of arcs in the network. A simplex pivot is to add an arc to the tree, thus, yielding a circuit, and running flow around the circuit in the direction that saves money and removing from the circuit, thus, making a tree again, one of the first arcs where the flow goes to zero. There is a cute variation of the algorithm due to W. Cunningham (one of my profs) based on his _strongly feasible basis_ , that avoids cycling. A super nice point about the simplex problem on least cost network flows is if all the arc capacities are whole numbers and if start with an integer basic feasible solution, then the simplex algorithm will automatically maintain an integer basic feasible solution and terminate with an integer solution. It is good to suspect that a lot of integer linear programming problems are actually just such network flow problems or nearly so. Once I used that stuff to say, for NASA, how to assign signals to satellite channels to minimize some signal interference -- it was an example of the _bottleneck assignment_ problem which should be solvable very quickly by some _post optimality_ tweaking with the network simplex algorithm. I enjoyed using the IBM OSL, but IBM withdrew it from marketing in about 2003, maybe in favor of marketing C-PLEX. But it appears that at about 2004 IBM donated the source of the OSL (with lots of pieces, network flow, stochastic programming, etc.) to Riverware which might distribute the open source. I got started with the OSL when I was in an AI group at IBM's Watson lab where the OSL was written. The Watson lab long had some high expertise in optimization -- Gomory (cutting planes, Gilmore-Gomory column generation, etc.) was head of the lab; there was Phil Wolfe (the Wolfe dual, etc.), Ellis Johnson (group theory and integer programming), etc. So, in particular, if still want to do some OR and optimization, get some quite well written software, and save some money, then might look into getting all the IBM OSL code open source. ~~~ tgflynn > The message long was "Operations Research is dead." Could you elaborate on why that was perceived to be the case ? It seems like the number of applications is very large and I suspect the technology is under-exploited outside of very large organizations. ~~~ graycat Of course _optimization_ went back at least to Newton and his work to find the shape of a frictionless wire that would let a bead slide down in least time. That problem was a seed for the field of _calculus of variations_ and later deterministic optimal control. But the _optimization_ of operations research was different, e.g., less central use of calculus: Some of the surprising history is in a book review at [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2975180?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2975180?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) And that is not really the beginnings of such things since there was the Kantorovich work on the cutting stock problem. In that book review will see that linear programming (LP) had a launch as a big splash. Broadly it appeared that LP was so close to so many important practical problems -- military, commercial, maybe more -- that it was bound to become a big thing for a long time. And, can check, IIRC several Nobel prizes in Economics were given for LP and more topics in optimization applied to economics. And there are connections with _two sided_ optimization, i.e., the theory of two person games (e.g., paper, scissors, rock) since the basic saddle point result, IIRC first proved by von Neumann, follows easily from the duality part of basic theory of LP. So, again LP looked good. Can't leave out the Hugh Everett work: He had a company around DC working on military problems -- best allocation of resources. Everett's theorem is a cute version of Lagrange multipliers and supposedly the foundation of his Lambda Corporation. Yes, that Everett, physics student of J. Wheeler where Everett worked up the _many worlds_ interpretation of quantum mechanics. Operations research had a more general big push during WWII, e.g., with some of the work of F. Dyson. So, by the 1950s, it looked like operations research (OR) and its tools of optimization, especially LP, were to be _big things_. Problems: (1) Real Problems. What real problems were to be solved? Too commonly the problems were not really _linear_ or were linear but linear _integer_ (which led to the question of P versus NP). (2) Data. Too often it was a struggle to get the needed real data. (3) Software. The IBM OSL I mentioned was good software, and so are C-PLEX, Gurobi, and more, but in the 1950s the software situation was grim. (4) Computing. The 1950s computers, e.g., the IBM 709, were clumsy to use, slow, and expensive. Then (1)-(4) too easily resulted in projects with not so good fits with reality, over budget, and later than promised. Reputation fell. Another problem, no surprise, was that the real business problem commonly evolved faster than the optimization software could keep up. But for selected and sufficiently valuable applications, e.g., running an oil refinery, by 1970 LP could be a big money maker. There were claims that companies that mixed animal feed did well with LP in, say, the 1970s or so. In the 1980s the situation on LP software and computing was good enough to permit some better -- project time and budget -- results on real problems. By the 1980s, B-school accreditation called for a course in LP. So, a lot of B-school students got a good introduction to LP. But there was very little down to essentially no instruction to turn out well _skilled_ professionals in OR or LP. The college profs concentrated on publishing papers, e.g., about P versus NP, and were discouraged from working on real, non-academic problems from outside academics, i.e., were not like MDs in medical teaching/research hospitals who were also _clinical_ and professional. So, the OR/LP workers who were available still needed some years of _hands on experience_ to become competent professionals for important practical applications. The standard attitude in the C-suites was a special case of C-suite attitudes more generally -- don't spend money on chancy, risky stuff. Instead, if there is to be a development project, then time, budget, good ROI, etc. needed to be reliable. So, in the C-suites, LP and OR got reputations as "dead fields", flops. Or maybe no middle manager ever got fired declining to pursue an OR/LP project. Neither the C-suite nor a middle manager wanted to have their career at risk from an OR/LP project they didn't understand. The problem of P versus NP also hurt: Or, the dream was that in business we should need only to _formulate_ an optimization problem, type that into some software to get the problem ready for some _solver_ software, and then have the solver produce an optimal solution quickly and reliably. Well, with the P versus NP issue, we saw that at least for now such a _solver_ was asking for too much. [My experience was that it was usually necessary and effective to take the problems one by one and exploit special structure.] Giving up that way was mostly a mistake: If the real business problem is a $100 million project, an optimal solution might save $15 million, the problem is a case of NP-complete so that saving all the $15 million to the last penny, guaranteed, in reasonable time, is also in this particular case (not necessarily the worst case of the P versus NP issue) not reasonable but saving $14 million is reasonable, then still commonly people regarded the challenge of P versus NP and showing that anything about optimization for the real problem was unreasonable and would also believe that the challenge of P versus NP meant that the $14 million was also beyond hope. People just gave up. But in broad terms from 100,000 feet up, the original observation that business needs optimization was correct then and still, now. For such problems, a lot of what has long been known in LP and optimization more generally is uniquely powerful, relevant stuff. So, there's money to be saved. The main question is, do C-suites want to fund the relevant projects? My guess is that the C-suites and middle managers have not changed much and, no, rarely want to fund the relevant projects. ------ ralaruri Google OR tools was an excellent resource when I was trying to solve a p-median problem in Python for my operations research course in school. [https://github.com/ralaruri/Pmedian/blob/master/PMedianRamzi...](https://github.com/ralaruri/Pmedian/blob/master/PMedianRamziEditFinal.py) ------ weitzj I would imagine that this tool would be helpful if you connect it with a social graph, i.e. self organizing Facebook groups which help each other take care of each other’s children during the Corona outbreak or schedule incident response teams in an organization,like:” who has to work together? Are there any hidden connections between employees?” ------ dghughes The problem with employee schedules where employees work in shifts is communication. At one place it was done using Excel as I'm sure it's still done today in many organizations. You always have two people trading shifts but never telling anyone. Then the one who was supposed to work doesn't show up they forgot they traded shifts. Human nature is half the problem. ------ pimlottc Are there any good projects that implement this in a user-friendly system that allows schedulers to choose from multiple options and make adjustments based day-to-day conditions? Algorithms like this look cool but can end up being too rigid for many real- world scenarios. You can’t just take the output and force everyone to follow that schedule. ~~~ londons_explore One option for real world use is to take the rigid schedule, and tell people that if they don't like it they need to find swaps with other people. Make the fill schedule visible to all so people can easily find swaps by hand. Always pay the original shift owner for the shift, and preferably, don't even keep records or who really did the shift (doing so opens you up to liability if employees swap in some way that is illegal, such as doing not enough shifts to qualify for medicare/benefits/whatever). Tell them that it is critical someone fills every one of their shifts, but it needn't be them. Employees will end up bartering, swapping, paying for others to fill their shift, etc. Overall, most shifts will get filled, and most people will be happy. You run the small risk that an employee will deliberately use the ability to swap to work some illegal shift pattern, and then prosecute you over it. So far, it's never gone far. ~~~ lonelappde Admitting you pressure your employees (not independent (sub)contractors) to pay off part of their wage to do their job? Offloading your logistical planning work to staff and not paying them for the time spent? This is begging for a NLRB lawsuit and I hope someone wises up. ~~~ londons_explore True, although from what I've seen it's actually rare for money to change hands. There seems to be quite an honor code - "I'll do your shift this time, as long as you remember that next time I want the day off.". The only time people get upset is if someone trades a bunch of shifts, then quits. People who don't like that have the option of just not swapping shifts though. ~~~ jessaustin I don't believe that's "the only time people get upset". Even if no one ever quits, this has got to be causing lots of drama. In most places I've worked, managers did management and hourly workers did not. When you want to abuse an hourly worker like this, you have to move them to a salary. Traditionally that salary would be a bump up from their 40-hour wage. ------ mark_l_watson Really nice. OR is not my field, and when I must dabble, in the past, I always used MiniZinc constraint solving language (sometimes with Python bindings). On the page above the linked page, on Google’s OR tools, there is mention that their tools won four gold medals in the MiniZinc completions. ~~~ cerved Not just this year but the last couple of years ------ mcguire " _OR-Tools is open source software for combinatorial optimization, which seeks to find the best solution to a problem out of a very large set of possible solutions._ " ------ lonelappde Why was the title changed to something less informative? ------ JustSomeNobody This doesn’t take into account certain people are more productive when paired up (and less productive when paired with other people). ~~~ cerved No it doesn't. It's an extremely basic model to introduce the CP-SAT solver to people with little to no experience in scheduling problems or CP. Pairing up people based on such criteria requires turning the problem into a MOCO or incorporating it with the current objective function. ------ whatsmyusername “Every day, each shift is assigned to a single nurse, and no nurse works more than one shift” WeirdChamp ------ lazycrazyowl How does it compare with Gurobi optimiser ? ------ aerovistae What is this? There's no introduction ~~~ cerved It's an example model of how to use the or-tools CP-SAT solver to solve employee scheduling problems. It's part of the or-tools library which is a framework for solving scheduling, routing and other NP-hard discrete optimization problems [https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/over...](https://developers.google.com/optimization/introduction/overview) ------ westurner From "Ask HN: What algorithms should I research to code a conference scheduling app" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15267804) : > _Resource scheduling, CSP (Constraint Satisfaction programming) CSP: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_satisfaction_problem) Scheduling (production processes): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(production_process...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_\(production_processes\)) Scheduling (computing): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_\(computing\)) ... To an OS, a process thread has a priority and sometimes a CPU affinity. From [http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.python.omaha+pysche...](http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.python.omaha+pyschedule#query:list%3Aorg.python.omaha%20pyschedule+page:1+mid:enenp7smhvr5636g+state:results) : Pyschedule: \- Src: [https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule](https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule) _ From [https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule](https://github.com/timnon/pyschedule) : > _pyschedule is python package to compute resource-constrained task > schedules. Some features are: \- precedence relations: e.g. task A should be done before task B \- resource requirements: e.g. task A can be done by resource X or Y \- resource capacities: e.g. resource X can only process a few tasks Previous use-cases include: \- school timetables: assign teachers to classes \- beer brewing: assign equipment to brewing stages \- sport schedules: assign stadiums to games _ ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slurm_Workload_Manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slurm_Workload_Manager) : > _Slurm is the workload manager on about 60% of the TOP500 supercomputers.[1] Slurm uses a best fit algorithm based on Hilbert curve scheduling or fat tree network topology in order to optimize locality of task assignments on parallel computers.[2]_ ... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve_scheduling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve_scheduling) : > _[...] the Hilbert curve scheduling method turns a multidimensional task > allocation problem into a one-dimensional space filling problem using > Hilbert curves, assigning related tasks to locations with higher levels of > proximity.[1] Other space filling curves may also be used in various > computing applications for similar purposes.[2]_ ------ MatthewWilkes DevRel was a mistake.

Tiled Shadow Maps - gfosco http://www.jasonnall.com/polar/ ====== kevingadd Interesting approach. I'd be shocked if an algorithm based on two polar transforms, plus resampling, was ever faster than more traditional raycasting based algorithms (see <http://www.redblobgames.com/articles/visibility/> for one detailed example) - especially given that you can do the raycasting algorithm entirely in hardware now on pretty much any machine, including the resampling. Maybe you could do the polar transforms in a pixel shader to make up the difference? The transform also seems to introduce a not-insignificant amount of error, which is unfortunate if you want to use visibility data for AI (in which case you want full precision at whatever your target resolution is). ~~~ JasonSage Obviously a hardware accelerated implementation would be ideal if not required, which is why I was going to first implement this in a shader, if possible. The artifacts you mention are sort-of inherent in shadow maps, and depend on the resolution of shadow map you are working with. The demonstration I did had a lot of error, but you can see at the bottom some examples of higher resolution test cases which have significantly less error. ~~~ kevingadd If you use a raycasting method, you can rasterize a shadow map with exactly the amount of precision you need and not have any artifacts (for 2d, of course - for 3d the necessary amount of precision is hard to calculate and sometimes prohibitive). My old game Chimaera ( <http://www.luminance.org/chimaera.html> ) did this - lightmap rendered at full screen resolution (1-1 mapping) in full precision, with an on-demand raycasting solution for offscreen pixels. A raycasting method also allows you to cache the shadow data for static geometry and static light sources, which can be a big win for complex scenes. (I think maybe you could cache the polar data, but it wouldn't be as easy since you can't just translate by x&y like you can with a normal 2D perspective?) ~~~ JasonSage For line of sight you couldn't cache, no, but for static lighting you certainly could. ------ 0x0 Instead of converting to polar and back again, could you do something similar by "raytracing" a 2d line from each tile to the players position backwards; starting in the middle and stepping out toward the target tile in a bresenheim-type stepping, marking as shadows after touching an obstacle? If you start by stepping around the outer edges, you'd fill most of the tiles in one pass, and then you could probably interpolate or re-trace for any missing pixels? (Edit: I guess you'll lose the nice shades-of-grey effect that the article's bitmap processing technique yields) ~~~ JasonSage I assume you mean for generating the shadow map before it is scaled and pixelized? I'm not familiar with techniques for doing such a thing. You could probably step through each object and draw lines from the corners based on the angle between the player tile and the object. The approach I listed would actually save you from testing every single object—as soon as a black pixel is detected in an algorthm, it moves to the next line, meaning that the number of objects that may exist in that direction at a greater distance is completely irrelevant. ~~~ 0x0 I guess I was thinking something like this: [http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Eliglos...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Eligloscode) (the second example, "raycasting"). You'd work on the "native tile resolution". I.e. you just "swipe" lines starting at the player position to the edge of the map, in a circle; as soon as you hit an obstacle tile, you stop marking the tiles ("pixels") on the line as lightened. No need to do any per-object iteration (as long as the tile map contains object references in tile positions) ~~~ JasonSage This works, but gives you no indication of whether the tile is partially visible or not, much less how visible. An accurate indication of this would require many more rays and a lot of processing. ~~~ 0x0 Right. I was thinking about whether there could be a way to apply your technique, without having to do the polar + cartesian conversions. ------ blackhole My own approach to this problem would be to consider each tile as a square polygon, then simply project the vertices outward from the light source. Then you take the resulting triangles and rasterize them on to an image scaled such that each pixel represents a tile and use antialiasing (or simply rasterize them on to an image 8 times as large as you need it and scale down, which is essentially the same thing). This gives you roughly the same end result, but would allow you to hardware accelerate almost every single aspect and avoids all the artifacts of shadowmapping. Notably, by restricting each polygon to a square, the projection could be done entirely as a vertex shader, without requiring geometry shaders. This would likely be vastly more efficient due to taking advantage of hardware acceleration. ~~~ JasonSage Depends on how much of this algorithm you can heft onto the hardware. I'd like to see a polar coordinate textures and operations on graphics cards in the future. Thanks for reading! ~~~ blackhole Even if you moved the polar coordinate shift to the hardware, you're doing pixel ray operations on the texture, followed by rasterization. I do vertex operations only, which are vastly fewer in number even in a worst case scenario, and then rasterize that. I'm willing to bet that even if we implemented this on the CPU, my algorithm would still be significantly faster and more accurate. Furthermore, your algorithm would struggle to take into account soft shadows, which actually become a noticeable problem in certain situations in large tilemaps when you have very large light radii. I think the polar coordinate transformation trick is really cool, but I feel like this is the wrong use for it. This is essentially a solved problem using polygons in 2D lighting engines already - to make it work for tiles, you simply scale down and back up to map to tiles. I have to admit I'm sorely tempted to implement this in WebGL just to see what happens. ~~~ JasonSage I don't deny that simple 2d operations would be faster nor do I claim this to be a fast solution, I simply wrote the idea as it came to me and I have taken no time to implement it yet nor to compare it with other techniques in any detail. As always, thank you for reading and for your thoughts. ------ etcet This kind of Field of View algorithm is integral to any roguelike and there's a variety of methods for achieving the results [0]. I'd be interested in how this algorithm holds up against the usual raycasting or shadow casting. My intuition is that it'd be slower (especially with a 1024px shadow map resolution) due to it being based on pixels rather than grid values. [0] [http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Field_o...](http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Field_of_Vision) ~~~ JasonSage I'll take a look at the algorithm—thanks for sharing. I fully intend to update this article later to give some details on how it performs. ------ darklajid If you're not averse to C#: Eric Lippert has a series about visibility in a rogue-like game (it's either/or, no shadows, but still a nice read) on his blog: [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/12/12/shado...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/12/12/shadowcasting- in-c-part-one.aspx) ------ w0utert Interesting approach, but like some others I'm wondering if this is the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of thing, especially since you are working with a tile based grid. Probably a combination of 2d portals and raycasting would do the same trick, but more efficiently. I also think it would be easier to implement, and more flexible if you want to have moving obstacles. Most of this stuff is standard fare in even the simplest of 3d engines and well documented, the 2d case would actually be a simplification of those algorithms. Nonetheless I think your solution is pretty clever and interesting, so kudos for that. ~~~ JasonSage Thanks! ------ ralphleon What are the games featured in the screenshots? ~~~ usea The one on the left is Project Zomboid <http://projectzomboid.com/blog/> while the one on the right is from LambdaRogue <http://lambdarogue.net/> ~~~ ralphleon Thanks! I have a soft spot in my heart for isometric adventure games. ------ JTxt Interesting idea. I have wondered about this problem too. Thanks for sharing. ~~~ JasonSage Thanks for looking. :) ------ RBerenguel Interesting way to solve the problem. Just as curiosity, have you ever checked the ascii roguelike "Brogue"? It has a kind of line-of-sight and color scales. ~~~ JasonSage Nope, I'm still fairly new to the indie/rogue community, so I'm still familiarizing with a lot of it. I'll take a look. Thank you for reading! ~~~ RBerenguel Give it a play. For me it's a "beautiful" roguelike. Like making a simpler, more straightforward Nethack and somehow adding it stunning... ascii graphics :D

Simple C++ Project Makefile Template - ArashPartow http://www.partow.net/programming/makefile/index.html ====== aaronchall It's redirecting straight to google, I think... but the page seems right according to curl... ~~~ ArashPartow seems ok to me, are you getting a 404 error something similar?

New JavaScript Presentation Component – Tons of Online Demos - danbeall http://spread.grapecity.com/spreadjs/views/ ====== danbeall Spread.Views is a one-of-a-kind data layout and presentation component for JavaScript developers. Quickly create grid, calendar, trellis, masonry, card, news feed, and time line views from data. Tons of demos online and free download available. ------ bhupeshmahotra Modern look & feel with fast rendering. Thumbs up! ------ ielbaytam nice. all-in-one and fast. ------ jennylynn99 Very fast.

Evaluation and euthanization of a dangerous honeybee colony [video] - CaliforniaKarl https://youtu.be/O4ldpyIE5t4 ====== pks016 Surprised to see this here. I used to work in a bee lab. I understand what kind of aggression he's talking about. I don't have experience with Malipona but dorsata are aggressive like this. That's usual for them. Really difficult to handle. Sad to see euthanizing the colony. When colony becomes super-aggressive in a neighbourhood, it's a difficult decision to make. One way is to transfer the colony to another location and monitor it's behavior. ~~~ oh_sigh He mentions that as an option in the video, which is possible since he is located in the relatively remote areas of northwestern NJ, but you still need almost 2 months to let the hive re-queen, and there's still the possibility of them finding unsuspecting victims (e.g. hunters). ~~~ pks016 Yeah. In bee keeping it becomes a trade-off I guess. Generally, bees won't attack someone unless there's unusual activity or disturbance in colony. Or sometimes this kind of aggression is the inherent property of the colony due to their life history and genetics of queen. ------ vikramkr His very next video shows a hive behaving normally and the difference is stark [0]. One thing to keep in mind for those conflicted about killing off the colony "just" because it's aggressive: honeybees aren't native to here. They were brought here by humans as domesticated animals. You're not hurting a native species or negatively impacting the local ecology - you're protecting the genetics of a domesticated animal imported for honey production, and preventing harm to others caused by an out of control bee hive. It's not the same as killing wolves because they're aggressive where you're messing with the local ecology - honey bees aren't from the US. [0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2O15qfA6Eo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2O15qfA6Eo) ------ caiobegotti That's kind of sad... I'm really into bees and I totally understand the decision of euthanizing the hive but, still... This is one of the reasons I love melipona so much, stingless bees depending on the species can be as productive as these nasty bees from the video (given eco-restrictions, local market etc). The reason these bees are used is because the market got so used to them over the centuries in Europe and it was built around its production rate of honey but if stingless bees were to have the same incentives they would be as much if not more productive. I consider these western honey bees to be invasive species and many melipona can't fight them successfully. Besides, of course, the whole ecology reasoning behind it as stingless bees sometimes are the only ones who can polinate local species (at least here in Brazil they are super essential and I am glad their hives are growing in popularity honey-wise). Poor bees... ~~~ Timpy I understand the decision too, you can tell the guy in the video is really torn about this. He's frustrated but it was clearly a hard decision, he kept justifying it to the camera but I think he was really justifying it to himself. ------ tw04 FYI: soapy water kills hornets too - the soap coats their abdomen and they suffocate. After trying to take out a nest and having an unexpected gust of wind blow a can of RAID back in my face I decided to look for non-toxic alternatives to kill off hornets. A squirt gun filled with a mix of warm water and dawn dish soap works better than RAID ever did, and if you have an old school super soaker you can spray from a heck of a lot farther away. ~~~ ed25519FUUU Does this work for paper wasps as well? ~~~ tw04 Yup! Now that you mention it, it was actually paper wasps I was trying to kill in the RAID incident. I've used it for both. ------ andrewksl I have always been enamored by hive insects like ants and bees. Each individual's understanding, effect, even its optical view of the world is minuscule. The scope and of the individual's existence is so tiny, that the mark it makes on the world is a floating point rounding error. In spite of that, the collective is enough to dominate a kitchen or farm or jungle many orders of magnitude larger. It knows to attack an intruder. It can give a hairless ape with years of training and three layers of protective equipment a really hard time. Hell, it can make a stir in that apex predator's society by reputation alone. Maybe I find the magnificent result of their cooperation inspiring in its implications for humanity and the greater galaxy. Maybe I'm just a weird nerd that knows what supervillain theme I would pick if this computer stuff doesn't work out. ~~~ elwell How about hives of H20 molecules? Those things can work together to take out many thousands of people! ------ motoboi Somewhere out there is a video of the Super AGI who controls the universe discussing if they should euthanize this universe or not, because humans are too aggressive and don't love mathematics enough to have any future. \-- "What if we dispatch the queens?" \-- "We already did that a couple of centuries ago. Didn't help." ~~~ eitland FWIW there are at least a couple of old stories about the world being drowned, in at least one of them it is because of the behavior of the humans. It doesn't however include detergent. ~~~ firethief That's explained by the Anthropic Principle. In the universes where the almighty added surfactants, we wouldn't be here talking about it. ------ dj_gitmo For anyone looking for wholesome bee-saving content with a Cajun accent check out JPthebeeman [https://www.youtube.com/user/JPthebeeman](https://www.youtube.com/user/JPthebeeman) ~~~ moolcool Bush Bee Man is great as well [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC0xzN4rrvqvNdZRGFPn- rg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC0xzN4rrvqvNdZRGFPn-rg) ~~~ elliekelly The Bush Bee Man is a true "hacker" too. He's always tinkering with random pieces of junk to make the exact tool he needs for his beekeeping. ------ ballenf This is another miracle of the Youtube algorithm. I was recommended this video 2 days ago after having never watched a single bee-anything related video. And I watched every second of that video with rapt attention. Only problem is now I'm getting of bunch of beekeeping videos and I still have zero interest in the field. ~~~ schintan you click on the three dots on some of the recommended videos and choose "Not Interested" in case you want to stop the recommendations. ~~~ JoelMcCracken I keep trying this with Jordan Peterson videos, but somehow YT thinks I still want to see them. ~~~ highstep Eventually it'll work. I managed to get rid of Jordan Peterson this way. ------ zxcvbn4038 Worst thing I ever did on youtube was watch a video review of a drone (remote control flying toy). Suddenly my youtube home is flooded with drone videos, half the ads are for drones, and outside of youtube I’m suddenly seeing drone ads all over the place. I watched another youtube video of a couple indigenous guys building a pool, and suddenly my wife (who watched the video with me but who does not use the same device as me) starts seeing similiar videos in in her youtube home. ~~~ jtbayly What does that have to do with this video? ~~~ chris_wot He’s getting bee videos. ------ phyzome That transition around 20 minutes to a normal beehive was amazing, even though I have experience hanging around bees. ------ arm85 That's funny, I just saw this suggested to me too, but I'm a beekeeper, so I wasn't expecting this to appear here. ~~~ bredren In the video, the beekeeper says that the bees are acting very aggressively. As a layman, I can not tell the difference based on what I'm seeing. Would you please describe how these bees are acting visibly different from a 'normal' hive? What did you think about his decision to first try to replace the queen, but ultimately destroy the colony? ~~~ arm85 Well the video at 3 minutes in, with the Bees flying all over the camera and attempting to sting him. You can see them flying towards the chap, and you can tell when they're doing that that, there's some intent that they want to sting you. I've noticed that they like to go for the face. Probably something to do with the chaps breath. I went on a year long bee keeping course and I've had my hives just for this season. The hives that I have...I thought were much more aggressive than the hive I looked after on my course, But they're no where near as aggressive as those bees. I had a short period of them being more aggressive, and I think that was due to them taking nectar from oil seed rape (A variety of canola) or the sugared water that I was giving them. They've much calmed down now. Compared with when the guy is meters away from the problem hive, with mine when I've cracked the hive open, doing an inspection, and I'm accidentally squishing them all over the place. I have a few trying to sting me, but not in the numbers that he's seeing. I'm actually working about 10 meters away from my hive, in my garden now, and I'm not seeing any bees at all. The only bit of wisdom that I could add to this discussion is that, on my course, I was told that the more genetic variation the bees have the more aggressive they are. If you import a queen from Italy, from an Italian variety, for the first year they'll be calm, but when you get subsequent generations of queens from that Italian queen they get more aggressive. I guess hybrid vigour makes them aggressive. I suppose especially so with hybrid varieties from Africa (Africanised), but I've not heard much about them in my local area. ~~~ obscura As I understand it, they instinctively go for the head and eyes of predators. This is definitely an immensely aggressive hive. In my limited experience, even the ones I've seen opened up and worked on were not as bad as this. ------ labawi Autor claims "soap" is not toxic. Real soap is not really toxic, but what he is using is dishwashing detergent, which is usually notably toxic and not biodegradable. I wouldn't pour a bottle of it my back yard. Also, it typically coats greasy surfaces, and probably waxes as well. It makes it easier to wash off grease, but if you don't/can't, the detergent stays there. ------ randyzwitch Wearing 3 layers of clothes and still getting stung. I can't even imagine trying to stay calm, even with the thought of protective clothing ~~~ zaroth That was one of the interesting parts to me, how he kept consciously reminding himself he was safe (even though literally under attack) and then leaving the area to make an important decision so as not to be making it under the stress of the moment. ------ monoideism Another very interesting YouTube channel dealing with bees, wasps, and hornets is: [https://www.youtube.com/user/628DirtRooster](https://www.youtube.com/user/628DirtRooster) He removes pest bee colonies from homes and businesses, saving them and relocating them whenever possible. ~~~ cameron_b That is such a great channel. His talk-me-through style enabled me to catch my first swarm. ~~~ monoideism Very cool! ------ dorusr Why is it called euthanasia, when the bees cannot give consent? Isn't this just "Killing a dangerous hive"? I get it sounds less nice, but saying "euthanizing" is just deceitful language. Words have meaning. ~~~ chris_wot Gaining consent is voluntary euthanasia. You can have non-voluntary euthanasia. However, you are correct that this isn’t euthanasia but for a different reason - you euthanise something to put it out of unbearable suffering. This is extermination, not euthanasia. ~~~ jgwil2 It's pretty common to refer to destroying an aggressive dog, for example, as euthanasia. This is an analogous situation, particularly given that, as pointed out elsewhere, honeybees are domesticated animals. I think this could fall under euthanasia for behavioral problems. ~~~ chris_wot I think that's a mistake in terminology. The dog is not suffering, others are suffering. Normally when I hear reports of dogs being killed due to aggression, the word I hear is "killed" or "destroyed". I think it does actually matter. Killing because of aggressive behaviour is execution, not euthanasia. ------ EamonnMR Funny, I just read Robbing The Bees which was a pretty good account of the practice and history of beekeeping, but lost me in its final chapter which listed bonkers alternative medicine based on honey and wax. ------ 1MachineElf YouTube recommended me this video last night. Nothing I usually watch has anything to do with the subject of this video, so it was an odd recommendation. Strange to see it here on HN too. ~~~ glenstein I'm seeing this throughout the thread, and also in the youtube comments. I wonder, do the youtube recommendations 'discover' that a video is going to be a hit, and then share it with tons of users regardless of their watch history? ------ emsign That's how I imagine what normal beekeeping is like. ------ YetAnotherNick How did he put bees back into the hive? Looking at the attack it was not looking like they would go back by themselves. ~~~ tectec What I gathered from the video is that he taped the entrances shut at night when most of the bees were inside the hive. Any bees that happened to be outside of the hive when he euthanized it would die eventually from hunger since they didn't have access to a hive anymore. ------ aimor I like the YouTube auto-caption: [Music] ------ exikyut Oh wow. Wowowow. This actually worked: Open the developer console and paste this in: var context = new AudioContext(); var videos = document.getElementsByTagName("video"); var audioElement = context.createMediaElementSource(videos[0]); context.destination.channelCount = 1; audioElement.connect(context.destination); The audio will now be in both channels. From: [https://mikedombrowski.com/2019/03/fix-youtube-mono-one- ear-...](https://mikedombrowski.com/2019/03/fix-youtube-mono-one-ear-audio/) ~~~ sidpatil Hmm, not sure what issue you were having. I already hear the audio in both channels without that script. ~~~ bogwog The first ~2-3 minutes only have audio in one channel ~~~ exikyut Oh. My ears weren't going to wait to find out. (I needed to raise the one remaining channel to an uncomfortable level to hear properly.) ------ crimsonalucard5 I wonder what will happen if you use one of those electric fly swatters. ------ forgotmypw17 Euthanizing of Dangerous Bee Hive (2020) Euthanizing of Dangerous Human Hive (2120)

The costs of continuous integration - kyllikki http://vincentsanders.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/strive-for-continuous-improvement.html ====== sc2001 To the first pain point - there's a good "scm sync configuration" Jenkins plugin (however it's not saving history...)

SixCalifornias - initiative to create six states - ca98am79 http://sixcalifornias.info/ ====== someguyonhn I find it really odd that anyone would actually think something like this would work. Firstly, California would have to agree to break itself into 6 states. Even if that happened, those six states, which as far as America is concerned are still all part of California, would then need to convince Congress (which are the representatives of the rest of the country with a disproportionate representation of tiny states) to allow them to join the Union. Asking Congress to let 5 extra states join the Union is pretty much asking every state if it's cool that California gets 10 new Senators and 5 new Congressman. It seems odd that anyone would think Congress would be okay with that, especially when it doesn't seem to benefit the country at all. I also think it's funny that they've hired a PR firm[1] that handles "luxury hotels and resorts"[2], and "Luxury Real Estate Developments and Private Residence Clubs"[2] to contact for information. I can't think of any successful, attempting to be grassroots movement, created to try to improve the lives of others, that hired a PR firm from the start. [1] - The for press inquiries link at the bottom of their landing page [2] - The PR company's clients section [http://www.seahorsepr.com/clients/clients.htm](http://www.seahorsepr.com/clients/clients.htm) ------ belluchan California is a beautiful state and I never want to see it broken up. Joshua Trees, Lake Tahoe, the coast of Mendocino, in fact all of Highway 1, Alpine, Torrey Pines, Russia River, the rocky hills of North County San Diego, Red Woods and Big Sur, San Francisco, Balboa Park, White Sands, Death Valley, and on and on. The many missions. The many universities. Between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, California touches more minds and hearts than any other place in the world. This state is amazing, so diverse and rich in culture. This six state initiative is such an embarrassment. People that advocate something like this are so out of touch with reality. The New York Times brought this up when they were referring to the weird rich kids that live in the bay area. I'd support California becoming it's own sovereign state before I'd support breaking it up. ~~~ Xdes Breaking up the state will provide better democratic representation. ~~~ belluchan I'm not sure how that couldn't be an argument to break up all the large states. It would just turn the senate into another house of representatives. And it's a weird way to fix the senate if you wanted it to be fixed. You should instead get the congress to move over to a parliamentary system where all percentages of votes are counted instead of a plurality takes all. You could ask for more senators. And then you will not be breaking up my home state with these outsider ideas. All of these solutions are about as likely to pass: nil chance. And I'll fight tooth and nail to keep help keep this state together. ~~~ Xdes >I'm not sure how that couldn't be an argument to break up all the large states It might be worth considering some kind of population density clause for when the number of constituents to representatives reaches a ridiculous value. >You should instead get the congress to move over to a parliamentary system where all percentages of votes are counted instead of a plurality takes all. This kind of a fix isn't pragmatic and will have a bigger disruption than breaking up one state. It's not like the geography is going to change because the lines are redrawn. >And then you will not be breaking up my home state with these outsider ideas. Have you considered whether other residents of the state share your view? Maybe the larger metropolitan areas are alright keeping around the sparser rural areas, but not the inverse? ------ krupan I grew up in Washington state and there were periodic calls to divide it vertically down the middle so that those in the (less populous) eastern (largely Republican) half of the state could be more independent of the (more populous, largely Democrat) western half of the state. The kicker was the proposed name for the new state: Lincoln. ~~~ ds9 To clarify, under that proposal, the "new" state (Lincoln) would be the eastern one and the western one would be still called Washington. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_%28proposed_Northweste...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_%28proposed_Northwestern_state%29) ------ Glyptodon I completely agree that California should be broken in to n states, where 2 <= n <= 8. However, I, and I suspect most people, would draw the lines differently. In fact, I think most people will agree with the concept of breaking CA into multiple states, but at the same time I think most Californians would rather stay as one state than create new states with boundaries that annoy them. ------ smtddr I already debated this before... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940199) I hope this doesn't pass because I know how the lines will be drawn. The rich, privileged will be grouped together and will take advantage of the poor. ~~~ javert The poor have nothing for the rich and privileged to take advantage _of_. It can only ever happen in the other direction. ~~~ dragonwriter So, labor is a new concept to you? ------ logfromblammo Well, there _is_ probably a greater cultural gap between San Francisco and Los Angeles than exists between Fargo and Little Rock. And I do have a preference for smaller and more responsive polities. But with my foil hat on, I realize that this is a play by non-Californians to manipulate national politics at the expense of the states. I'll only support it if they do California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New York at the same time. ~~~ psuter I find the idea that political and cultural boundaries should align to be a very sad and unimaginative one. (Not suggesting you hold an opposite view.) ~~~ sp332 How else could you do it? Tax only the people in favor of infrastructure improvements and prevent everyone else from using them? Only arrest people using recreational drugs if they voted against legalization? ~~~ someguyonhn You could do it the way it is done now. Geographically. ~~~ sp332 What does geography have to do with good government? ~~~ someguyonhn Geography has everything to do with government. Where you are geographically determines how you are governed and who governs you. psuter said, "I find the idea that political and cultural boundaries should align to be a very sad and unimaginative one." Which I took to mean that psuter believes realigning CA along cultural or political boundaries (like saying, "republicans over here, democrats over there") is very sad and unimaginative. To which you responded "How else could you do it? Tax only the people in favor of infrastructure improvements and prevent everyone else from using them? Only arrest people using recreational drugs if they voted against legalization?" Which is why I tried to answer your question "How else could you do it?" by pointing out another way it can be done is, you keep things the way they are now meaning, you arrest, tax, and govern everyone equally depending on where they are standing (some things being illegal in some jurisdictions and not in others). It seems like there's some sort of breakdown in understanding between the two of us here. ------ jack-r-abbit I could see (but not really support) a reasonable argument for making a North California & South California. It is a pretty big land mass with a large population. But I think 6 is overkill. ------ Sharlin Why? ~~~ jaibot 12 Senators, for a start. ~~~ vladd In Switzerland, some cantons (their equivalent of a state) decided to split. Before they had 2 votes each in the Council of States; after the split, each half-canton got 1 vote each - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland#Half- can...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantons_of_Switzerland#Half-cantons) . It would be fair to split California into 2 and then each half would get 1 senator. Otherwise you might try to play the population card, but other states would need to approve (or could veto) the process. ~~~ dragonwriter > It would be fair to split California into 2 and then each half would get 1 > senator. Er, even split into 6 states with two senators, California would be _underrepresented_ compared to many other states. Plus, the one thing that the Constitution expressly prohibits doing even by Constitutional amendment is changing the distribution of Senators to something where states would not have equal representation. (You can _take away all the power of the Senate_ by Constitutional amendment, but you can't stop it from representing the states equally.) ------ lurkinggrue This is such a bad idea! Water rights anyone? ~~~ dragonwriter Yeah, that's one area where this would be the opposite of local control, as it would essentially federalize the California water issues that aren't already federal (since interstate compacts must be approved by Congress.) ------ cobolorum ITT: people who believe there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats.

I “Leaked” the story about the Biometric EarPods. But I’m not proud of it - kunle http://earpodsecret.tumblr.com/post/84812960647/sorry ====== msvan It's not the OP's fault, it's lack of integrity in the press. You start by propagating a rumor on some insignificant source like Secret, then a blogger picks it up. The blogger gets noticed by people on Twitter, who catch the attention of some small news source. Bigger newspapers notice that the story is blossoming in the lower echelons and they pick it up. Suddenly, something which carries zero truth has become fact in a cascade of increasing credibility. This is the problem with modern online media. When more clicks mean more money, the incentives will favor rumors and lies. And this doesn't only happen by accident, as in the OP's case, but it's done over and over again by media manipulators who have realized that it's a bug in the system that's easily abused for fun and profit. ~~~ nathancahill > "lack of integrity in the press" > "macRUMORS.com" ~~~ jareds I enjoy reading macRUMORS.com. The name says it all, it's interesting to see what people think will happen but I don't rely on anything I see on the site. I would hope this is how all of their readers act. ~~~ debt I think this highlights something I've thought about recently. I've realized reading the "news" is a skill. Particularly, HN. As a reader, you need to be able to quickly differentiate what matters and what doesn't; what's bias and what's not, what has actual substance and what doesn't; and what the stories mean in the grand scheme. Also, and most importantly, you have to be able to _move on_. It's so easy to get distracted and sucked into the k-hole of news. News should educate and inform your worldview. But remember there's plenty of unsubstantiated ruminations and pointless, heavily-biased garbage out there. Modern civilization is extremely complex; so much so that even seemingly cut- and-dry news stories are simply beyond full comprehension and understanding of what _actually_ is going on. My reading strategy for news is to allow a particular story to be substantiated by more than a few known trusted sources, but, again, to remember that it's just a distant narrative and to move on. The Ukraine situation is a great example. I'm not from the Ukraine and don't know many Ukrainians so for me it's just another news story. It brings up interesting geopolitical, human rights and economic problems but for me it's still a distant narrative. I have friends who are in the same position as me, but seem to believe it's the beginning of WWIII; again, flying down the news k-hole. Or the ferry disaster in South Korea. Or the Malaysian flight disaster. All sad but intriguing(they both raise questions such as: how could these happen? why did the leadership respond they way they did?), but one can only speculate on the implications what these stories _mean_ beyond them being tragedies. People will write speculations about these events; I can't let someone's speculation or assumptions to run wild within my mind because it's just not news. Again, it's important to differentiate real news from everything else. ------ jhh There's really no need to apologize for this in my opinion. If people decide to trust a complete non-source that's their problem. It's actually a fascinating demonstration of the dynamics of these rumors. ~~~ mortenjorck It’s a long shot that the poster would have actually endangered anyone’s position at Apple, but I suppose it’s already a somewhat long shot that he managed to nail both the patent and an area of expertise of a recent hire, all without any prior context. Given that, I think this was the right thing to do. ~~~ mikeash Even if it did manage to get somebody at Apple in trouble, the fault lies entirely with Apple laying down false accusations with insufficient evidence, not with the guy who made a lucky guess and didn't even do it intentionally. ~~~ Nexxxeh Yes, but Apple's actual shitty behaviour or this hypothetical shitty behaviour might stop someone putting food on the table. If someone loses their job over this, the fact it's just Apple being arseholes won't be of much comfort to the newly unemployed (unless it's a lucrative wrongful dismissal suit I guess.) Does anyone have any confidence in Apple doing the right thing by its employees or indeed customers? ~~~ mikeash I don't mean to imply that Apple wouldn't do it. Just saying that if we're assigning blame, that's where it should go. As for putting food on the table, in general I'd agree, but do ex-Apple employees in SV really have trouble finding new jobs? ~~~ mynewwork They do if they want to work for Google, Adobe, Intel... [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/technology/settlement- sili...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/technology/settlement-silicon- valley-antitrust-case.html) [http://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google- to-...](http://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to-cancel- its-plan-to-open-a-paris-office/) ~~~ mikeash 1\. That's not being done anymore. 2\. Even if it was, it didn't apply to people who have been fired. 3\. Even if it did, there are lots of other places for programmers to work. ------ glenra The thing is that made-up or not, this is a _really good idea_. An idea whose time has come. Something like it is probably inevitable. Everywhere you go, you see people walking around with Apple headphones in their ears much of the time. The hardware connected to those headphones doesn't merely send music out to the ears from the phone, it also accepts signals in the other direction to enable microphone input and a few buttons for pause/play and volume up/down. So sending other sorts of signals back doesn't require any new hardware on the phone. There currently exist devices that take body temperature by sticking a sensor in the ear. Apple has a history of sticking all sorts of tiny sensors in their phones to enable new software features. So why not an earbud thermometer? If they stuck a temperature sensor in the headphone it would enable these features: (1) an plain old on-demand thermometer app. Think you might have a fever? There's an app for that! Wonder what temperature it is outside? Same app! A temperature sensor inside the phone mostly tells you how hot the battery and processor are but a temperature sensor in the earbud tells you your own temperature (when you're wearing them) or the ambient local temperature (when you take them out). Both are useful information. (2) A background thermometer-based health check. Listen to music on headphones and the iPhone can warn you if you have a fever or are overheating during a workout. Even without more speculative features - blood sugar or blood pressure testing - this is _doable_. Somebody will make this product. ~~~ encoderer Meh, I think the idea is thin. So I can have biometrics info only when i _stick something in my head_? Quantified Self or whatever you want to call it is certainly big business, but it NEEDS passive data collection to ever be a mainstream success. Thus the fitbit, and possibly the iWatch. "Just stick these sensors in your ears" is not a good solution to this. And "All the info you want about what your body is doing while you listen to music" is not exactly what I'm going after when I use these apps. ~~~ glenra Having the _option_ of getting biometrics when you _stick something in your head_ doesn't prevent getting data other ways too. Me, I listen to podcasts for an hour a day or so while my phone is in my pocket and the only thing touching my body directly is the earbuds. It'd be easy for the phone to be passively collecting data during that time - any time I'm listening to something via headphones - and it wouldn't require me to change my behavior or carry yet another device around. I live in New York, so I listen via earbuds while I take the subway. In California a lot of people listen via earbuds while they go jogging or work out at the gym. There are almost certainly _enough_ people who listen via earbuds daily to make that feature "a mainstream success", even if it doesn't match your own use case. If you never use the earbuds, you don't have to buy the earbuds that do biometric monitoring. Or you can ignore that feature. There already exist apps that check your pulse (using the camera) and that check your sleeping patterns (you leave the phone charging on your bed; it uses the motion sensor). This would be just one more _option_ along those lines. But I'm curious: What _would_ you consider "a good solution to this"? ~~~ encoderer Something you can wear passively. Like a watch, bracelet, hell a toe ring. But earbuds are an awful UX for a sensor IMO. ------ roderickm Biometric EarPods are real -- but the product is called The Dash, made in Munich by Bragi. The Dash monitors movements like pace, steps, cadence and distance as well as heart rate, oxygen saturation and energy spent. Two tiny LEDs emit low intensity red and infrared light into the capillaries in the ear. The optical reflection of the emitted light reveal the relative amount of red and white blood cells more than 50 times every second. A precise heart rate and oxygen saturation level is calculated with the data. The Dash Kickstarter is already fully funded; I'm a backer waiting with eager anticipation. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash- wir...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash-wireless- smart-in-ear-headphones) ~~~ gmisra I wouldn't go as far as to say they are "real" yet - they are still working on the prototype: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash- wir...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash-wireless- smart-in-ear-headphones/posts) ------ stevenp If anything, this story calls out the sensationalism of a tech press that just sucks up anything it can find and runs with it as a story. We've seen unsubstantiated "reporting" of Apple rumors like this for years, and these stories never add anything valuable to the discussion. I'm glad this fake rumor got so much traction. Maybe enough people have egg on their faces that we will do better in the future. But probably not. ~~~ chucknelson > Maybe enough people have egg on their faces that we will do better in the > future. But probably not. This definitely won't do anything to stem the unsubstantiated rumors. It's all about page views and entertainment. There is an audience for these types of things (that is probably growing?), so it will continue. I'm sure many, like myself, don't care if they are fake either. Much of it is just something somewhat entertaining to read when browsing the web. ------ dclowd9901 The part toward the end where he talks about Apple hiring someone who deals with biometrics makes you wonder why more companies don't "float" ideas to see how much traction they might get with the market. An easy and cheap way to see if there's even a market for an idea. Yeah, you tip your hand a bit toward the competition, but if you're truly good at what you do, the competition doesn't matter anyway. ~~~ aaronem > makes you wonder why more companies don't "float" ideas to see how much > traction they might get How do you know they don't? Whether to test the waters of consumer reception, or to decoy me-too competitors into doing something foolish, it's too good an idea to pass up, and I think it's reasonable to suspect Apple of having done both in the past -- see, for example, the persistent rumors around the "Apple Phone" which cropped up a couple of years before the iPhone did, and the similar rumors around the "iWatch", which, being the bad idea it is, seems less likely to materialize with every passing day, but which has certainly convinced Samsung et al that it's worth investing in that bad idea just in case Apple knows something they don't. ------ _Adam This was obviously fake because measuring blood pressure isn't something you can do via the ear canal in a non-intrusive way. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#Measurement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_pressure#Measurement) Kind of sad that even a single person believed this. Why is everyone so willing to forego scepticism? ~~~ DanBC Suitably advanced technology is magic and so most people (who don't really know what blood pressure is, nor how it's measured) will be happy to believe that some widget you can plug into your smart phone will do all kinds of stuff. Also, UK papers are happy to fill their pages with nonsense. They are not saying it's true. They are reporting someone else saying it's true. ------ jobu This makes me wonder how many actual products were dreamed up "on the shitter". ~~~ maccard I keep a notebook in the bathroom... ~~~ gonzo in case you run out of TP? ------ jamesaguilar Companies could start "leaking" things via secret to make it useless as a means of real leaking. Personally, I think that in this new information age, that is going to be the only way to get privacy, either for corps or individuals. Decreasing the signal is infeasible, but increasing noise is certainly possible. ------ pistle See, these great ideas will now come to market, save numerous lives and improve quality of life for people, and you're going to get nothing. I have an idea. We come up with a shitter station for you since this is where your great ideas come from. We'll serve you up with food and fun. You just make the business you do. ------ maw The article reads like an excerpt from Foucault's Pendulum if perhaps a bit less sinister. ------ cmer I told my wife's uncle about the biometric EarPods. He happens to be one of the most renown ear specialist in the world. His response: it actually makes sense, it's 20 year old technology. Apparently, you can measure things like oxygen from your ears. Quite possibly other stuff as well. I personally think it's be a great to see something like this exist one day. ------ gaze Don't apologize. This is hilarious. ------ danielrm26 Noble words, and quite possible. But it also sounds like a great way of protecting his leak source. Either way, good form. ------ bdcravens I think people have become numb to "Apple leaks" given the volume. For a while the Yahoo homepage had a Kardashian article EVERY SINGLE DAY. Now, it seems that iPhone 6 "news" is in the same situation on the site. Correlate from that what you will. ------ mesozoic Good. These "news" outlets need to learn how to source their news correctly and not from some anonymous online crap. Hopefully egg on their face here makes them think a little harder about using stuff like this as a source in the future. ------ adestefan This makes me think of the State Farm commercial, "They can't put anything on the Internet that isn't true." Bonjour indeed. ------ mdesq Possibly a real leak now trying to be disguised as an external fake leak? ------ mantrax5 This is the most responsible and humble disclosure of a fake leak I've seen in my life. Even though this guy/gal started it all, if we felt a little more responsible about the effect of the words we say and write like that, it'd be a better world out there. It's easy to just wave your hand and say it's just bullshit rumor, but yes, it does have effect on people at Apple and the industry as a whole. The very fact of realizing this is more than most people can understand. ~~~ normloman They didn't intentionally start a rumor. They didn't even try to make it sound realistic. Shouldn't we blame the press instead, for lending credibility an unsubstantiated rumor by an anonymous source? ------ dirkgently >but I’m still sorry for any stress I caused anybody at Apple or who works with Apple. Wow.

How Carnegie Mellon Created a More Inclusive Hackathon - socialengineer https://plus.google.com/u/0/100523810376335283165/posts/NJKcmsB99Aa ====== jessepollak At the Claremont Colleges (outside of LA, includes Pomona, Harvey Mudd, CMC, Scripps, and Pitzer), we've had success with almost the exact same strategy. At our last hackathon, we had a similar turnout (150+) and ratio (>1/3 women). Just to emphasize again the key things that worked for us: * a commitment to beginners from the start * a week of 2-hour classes (Hack Week) on building web applications from scratch targeted at non-developers * a focus on learning rather than winning (although, we did advertise prizes) * helpful mentors on call through out the tutorials and hackathon * providing healthy food for those who wanted it * having a diverse set of organizers, mentors and company reps who participants feel comfortable approaching during _and before_ the hackathon to allay concerns about their participation In my opinion, every single one of these things makes hackathons a better experience for _everyone_ , so there's no reason not to do them. To say the least, we've had no problem with scaring away the typical "hackathon types" and this year, we're hoping to get close to a 50% ratio. ------ Permit This is an excellent post and it's a shame it seems to be getting flagged. Not only does it address problems in diversity in technology, but it provides concrete, repeatable steps to help improve the situation. It sounded like the hackathon was better for all involved, and not only the people they sought to include. ~~~ jessepollak I would guess that it set off the voting ring detectors (rather than people manually flagging it; that would be pretty fucked up). Sometimes, for posts like this that seem beneficial for everyone, I wish PG could just manually disable them...but that's a slippery slope to say the least. ------ minikites > We told people what a hackathon was. - We didn't tell people about the type > of person that we expected at a hackathon. That's a good way to be inclusive in general, not just for hackathons.

Go vs. Crystal Performance - open-source-ux https://ptimofeev.com/go-vs-crystal-perfomance/ ====== systemvoltage I am not an expert at this but I want to inquire: \- Everytime there is any kind of benchmark between 2 or more languages, there is always a caveat - "Not a fair comparison" or the algorithm isn't right. What, then, is a good way to compare languages? After all, they are not apples-oranges comparison. They are a tool to get things done. It is like I am comparing 2 different brands of hammers. Sure the grip is different, the shape of the head is different, but if we are testing a particular aspect of nailing - say nails/sec, then it is worth investigating which one is better. One hammer takes a lot of expertise to use it and yet another one is easy to use. So, then, write those pros and cons down, it doesn't make the comparison a worthless activity which is the cliche response to benchmarks - developer time matters and not the language. What is a good way to compare 2 languages. Say Python vs. C? Are there standard implementations of algorithms (e.g. Mandelbrot) or something like that we can use and definitively compare the speed? Shouldn't we have standards around these benchmarks? Some kind of a ISO implementation of an algorithm reviewed by experts that can be used for benchmarking? For majority of programmers, the speed doesn't quite matter. But that discussion is off the table and orthogonal. Sure for most things, I personally pick up Python and it is the fastest way to develop for me. But there are many reasons why we should compare languages and these concerns are shouldn't stop us from evaluating objectively. ~~~ espadrine > _What, then, is a good way to compare languages?_ Digging into details and yielding very specific conclusions. Let’s take the example benchmarks. The first one, Fibonacci, can only be properly assessed by inspecting the assembly. It is an analysis of _compiler output_ , not of the language, not even of compiler optimizations. It therefore only measures the CPU speed of function calls, and one compiler outputs a different set of assembly instructions: • Go (go tool objdump fib) is all like “CMPQ JBE(label(morestack)) … LEAL(-1,cx) MOVL(cx) CALL(fib) …×3 ADDL(-2,cx) MOVL(cx) CALL(fib) MOVL ADDL …×3 RET label(morestack) CALL(morestack) JMP”. • Crystal (crystal build --emit=asm fib.cr) is all like “subl(1) …×6 callq(fib) …×1 subl(2) …×7 callq(fib) movl addl …×6 addq retq” for the recursive condition. So the conclusion is that Go outputs less instructions, but has to maintain its segmented stacks (useful for goroutines, its lightweight threading system) on every call, while Crystal uses the standard assembly calling system with little overhead beyond light dynamic typechecks. So there is a language-motivated difference: calls in Go are a tiny bit more expensive, but built-in lightweight threads consume little memory because their stack can increase dynamically according to use[0]. The second benchmark, HTTP servers, has everything to do with the implementation of the default library, and nothing to do with either the language or the compiler. And I presume Crystal is backed by an optimized C library for TCP[1] while Go is probably a full reimplementation of TCP and HTTP. [0]: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-stacks-are-handled-in- go/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-stacks-are-handled-in-go/) [1]: [https://github.com/crystal- lang/crystal/blob/master/src/sock...](https://github.com/crystal- lang/crystal/blob/master/src/socket/tcp_socket.cr) ~~~ abainbridge > Go outputs less instructions, but has to maintain its segmented stacks I think they dropped segmented stacks in 2014: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Vers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_\(programming_language\)#Version_history) The stack can still grow, but contiguously. I'm not sure if there are any instructions required to monitor the stack size and grow if it needed. ~~~ amscanne > CMPQ JBE(label(morestack)) … ^^ It's still the preamble for most functions :) ------ totalperspectiv Completely anecdotal: \- In my small benchmarks, Crystal is very fast \- In benchmarks not my own, Crystal is very fast \- Crystal has a very nice batteries included stdlib. Benchmarks that aren't mine: [http://lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/fast-high-level- programming-...](http://lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/fast-high-level-programming- languages) The only other language that is high level in its ballpark is D. ~~~ mratsim Benchmarking strings is often benchmarking memory allocation speed or the GC. If you manipulate strings day in day out in your workflow, the first thing you do is remove all those allocations and for what is left you use a memory pool. The speedup could easily go into the 20x in any language. It's actually one of the area where Python or JS can beat statically typed languages, they focused a lot into optimizing strings while statically typed languages often leave that as an exercise to the reader. ~~~ throwaway894345 > It's actually one of the area where Python or JS can beat statically typed > languages, they focused a lot into optimizing strings while statically typed > languages often leave that as an exercise to the reader. I think this has more to do with writing the string handling functions in heavily-optimized C rather than in Python/JS than it does with memory tricks, but I'll happily accept correction. ~~~ mratsim Yes low-level C + retaining memory around in the GC. The second part avoids many malloc/free that may be hidden in destructors in low-level languages. ------ cfors Sounds like another win for languages with an LLVM backend. Definitely excited to see this language grow, especially as it has generics already. Does anybody use Crystal professionally here? Any thoughts so far if so? ~~~ mauricio We run it in production. Our apps are mostly Ruby but we have been rewriting services in Crystal. Originally we were attracted by the speed and type checks, but one surprising benefit has also been the reduced memory consumption. It's difficult to compare directly, but in some cases it cosumes 10x less memory and performs around 20-35x better. Even I/O bound services are sped up since we can take advantage of Crystal's concurrent fibers (rumored to come in Ruby 3.0). The main downside has been the somewhat frequent deprecations of methods and changes to the standard lib. But it's mostly due to the preparation to launch 1.0. ~~~ Exuma Is there any web framework for it, like rails? That's really the main reason I use ruby is because as a single developer it's amazingly fast to set up new apps (admin panels, reporting panels, sales funnels, etc). The out-of-the-box functionality of rails makes this super painless. I'd LOVE to use something faster but I don't really want to have to custom write a lot of things (CSRF, sessions, cookies, blah blah). Also, how do you handle jobs with Crystal? Sidekiq being the common one for ruby. ~~~ paulcsmith Hello! I'm the creator of the Lucky web framework [https://luckyframework.org](https://luckyframework.org). I've been building it for about 3 years and we've got a number of people using it in production. It still lacks some features found in bigger frameworks, but is nearing 1.0 and gaining many new contributors that are helping us fill in the gaps. Feel free to hop on our chatroom to ask questions about it. We try to be super friendly and love answering questions and getting feedback [https://gitter.im/luckyframework/Lobby](https://gitter.im/luckyframework/Lobby) ~~~ Exuma Awesome, thanks!! What would you say the top 2-3 missing things are currently? ~~~ paulcsmith Right now I'd say we need to make it easier to work with nested params so you can easily save Parent + (n) children. Easier handling of uploaded files is another big one. It's being actively worked on right now. There are a few more escape hatches that are needed when you need to break out of the framework. But overall it is fairly full featured. You can check out our roadmap to 1.0 here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYzx37Kq5h7iLH9SQTFyXNwb...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EYzx37Kq5h7iLH9SQTFyXNwby2xVvzuRUlMuxcoktx8/edit) ------ awb This is a pretty basic benchmark, but there are more robust ones for Crystal and others here: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) Under Filters you can select the languages / frameworks that are of interest to you. For example Go seems to have several implementations that beat Crystal: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r19&hw=ph&test=fortune&l=zdjvnj-1r) Having programmed in both though, I far prefer the language / idea of Crystal for innovation. But it is hard to beat the performance and explicit nature of Go for production applications. ~~~ throwaway894345 The non-recursive Go fibonacci implementation computes in ~160ms and uses only 1.5mb on my MacBookPro (and I can get the binary size down to 850K by stripping symbols and using the println builtin instead of fmt.Println). This microbenchmark seems to tell us more about function call overhead than it does about typical application performance. Further, while I don't doubt that Crystal binary sizes are smaller in general, I don't think we can get much information about binary sizes from these micro- toy-sized programs. For example, the Go version shaved off a full mb by using the `println` builtin rather than `fmt.Println`, probably because the former pulls in more of the runtime than the latter. These toy benchmarks are very sensitive to these kinds of things, and the size of the runtime is going to be a trivial portion of the size of any real application anyway. ------ zelly Benchmarks don't matter. It's 2020. We use Stock Price Driven Development now. The main reason to use Swift is Apple created it. The main reason to use Go is it's the first two letters of Google. The main reason to use Python is Google hired GvR in the 2000s and created momentum. The main reason to use Kotlin is Google announced at I/O 2017 its support in Android Studio. Get with the times gramps. ~~~ 7532yahoogmail Wow. No. Engineering school was/is supposed to help us (you) move beyond cynical judgements to thinking. ~~~ crimsonalucard5 I could care less if a statement was positive or negative what is important is if the statement has a realistic possibility of being true. If anything Engineering school should have taught you how to logically observe situations rather than viewing things through an optimistic or cynical lens. ------ dcu the HTTP benchmark is not fair since the crystal implementation is setting the content type explicitly while the Go implementation is auto detecting it. ~~~ Thaxll Indeed the benchmark was dismissed on Reddit coupe of days ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h0knmi/go_vs_c...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h0knmi/go_vs_crystal_performance/) ~~~ dgb23 The repost[0] in r/golang shows similar critiques. This perf comparison is naive on many levels. \- binary size (static vs. dynamic linking) \- recursion is not idiomatic in go, it is assumed that you write imperative for loops. \- mathematical functions like the Fibonacci sequence are a rather atypical computation use-case for a Go program (I don't know about Crystal). Tree/graph traversal/mutations would be a more fitting test. Or generally something that is composed of dynamically growing and shrinking slices and maps. \- http test apparently cannot be reproduced, some get better results for Go, some for Crystal. \- http tests w/o involving some parsing/marshaling/serialization or something along those lines aren't that useful. You usually want to either read or send some JSON string or similar. [0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/h0kogq/go_vs_crysta...](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/h0kogq/go_vs_crystal_performance/) ~~~ yxhuvud Recursion is really not the idiomatic way to solve most things in Crystal either, not that it make the test relevant. ------ euph0ria Why doesn't Crystal use more than 100% CPU like Go does if the server has 8 cores? Why didn't both languages max out the cores? Is it because the params to WRK was within what one core could handle in Crystal? ~~~ WatchDog It seems crystal is single threaded by default. Although you can configure it to use more threads. [https://crystal-lang.org/2019/09/06/parallelism-in- crystal.h...](https://crystal-lang.org/2019/09/06/parallelism-in-crystal.html) ~~~ euph0ria Yeah, but in a benchmark it seems strange that he doesn't restrict both to use just one CPU or unlimited.. kind of compares apples/oranges. ------ karmakaze I've taken Crystal out for a spin with a number of popular and less popular frameworks. Even for my small test application, edit/compile/run times were slow. Only the thinnest frameworks like Kemal seem tolerable to me. I really do hope that the compiler gets faster and the larger frameworks figure out how to compile faster. These are the benchmarks that matter to me before I'd make a recommendation. ~~~ Trasmatta My understanding is that the compiler performance issues in Crystal are sort of inherent to the language design and making it much faster will be very hard. I believe it's related to Crystal's type inference -- it has to traverse every code branch to ensure type safety. I believe explicitly typing everything is supposed to help, but I'm not sure by how much (especially if you have dependencies that aren't doing that). ~~~ entha_saava maybe LLVM as well.. ------ danielsokil Here Is a Gist where I compare Crystal, Go, OCaml including compile time. [https://gist.github.com/s0kil/155b78580d1b68768a6c601a66f8e2...](https://gist.github.com/s0kil/155b78580d1b68768a6c601a66f8e29b) ~~~ dleslie Why did you combine compile time and execution time? ~~~ danielsokil The idea is to have a balance of compilation + runtime performance. ------ piinbinary I wonder how the GC pause times and throughput compare. My understanding is that Go sacrifices some compute performance for better GC pause times. ~~~ dgb23 > better GC pause times What does that mean exactly / in this case? My assumption is that "better" means more predictable. Or does it mean straight up fewer/shorter? ~~~ recursivecaveat Go sacrifices basically every other GC metric to minimize average pause times. Sortof a 'if you can't succeed, redefine success' mentality if you will. ~~~ sharpy That's not necessarily a bad thing for writing web services. I used to spend a fair bit of time tuning JVM to achieve acceptable tail latencies for Java services, not to mention once in a while, they would need to be tuned again... Not so with Go. ~~~ apta Java now has two low latency collectors: ZGC and Shenandoah. ------ seabass It seems strange that Crystal would not utilize more than 100% of the CPU in the HTTP benchmark given that it ran on an 8-core machine and with fibers should be able to split the load across multiple cores. What explanation is there for that? Also, it's impressive that while using one third of the CPU Crystal outperformed the Go HTTP server on throughput. ~~~ yxhuvud Because currently Crystal is singlethreaded. You only get multithreading if you compile with -Dpreview_mt . I suppose it will be on by default at some later point. ------ jjtheblunt Might binary size comparisons be misleading, unless the Crystal binary is statically linked, as presumably the Go binary is? ------ samuell Anybody knows the status of light-weight threads, channels and automatic multiplexing ("mapping") of light-weight threads on operating system threads in Crystal? (This has been promised to come in Crystal (as opposed to pretty much any other language than Go), but has always seemed to be "yet to come"). ~~~ mauricio It's available [https://crystal- lang.org/reference/guides/concurrency.html](https://crystal- lang.org/reference/guides/concurrency.html). Fibers (like goroutines) are scheduled by Crystal and map to system threads. The work on parallelism is available as a compile-time flag, but not yet GA: [https://crystal-lang.org/2019/09/06/parallelism-in- crystal.h...](https://crystal-lang.org/2019/09/06/parallelism-in-crystal.html) ~~~ kodablah One wonders, once it is GA, if there is value in a Go transpiler. There is a lot of useful software in Go land that would be immediately useful for Crystal devs, and Go itself is not too complicated to map to another language with the same features (a few of the runtime features will have to be emulated). ~~~ unixhero How would this be achieved? Could you expand a little on this idea? ~~~ kodablah Literally convert Go code to Crystal code. I have not looked into Crystal enough to confirm it's features are a superset of Go's. For example, I saw that Kotlin w/ the advent of their coroutines, had most of Go's features so I wrote a transpiler[0] that got pretty far (can run all of this [0]). I abandoned the project because I have abandoned the JVM. 0 - [https://github.com/cretz/go2k](https://github.com/cretz/go2k) 1 - [https://github.com/cretz/go2k/tree/master/compiler/src/test/...](https://github.com/cretz/go2k/tree/master/compiler/src/test/go) ------ dzonga I always find these benchmarks superficial. unless you're doing some serious number crunching, it doesn't make sense. people need to start bench marking languages on speed of development, developer ergonomics, error reporting, ease to deploy etc. ------ mikece Tangent: would technical writers please stop using the phrasing “is X times smaller” when “is one Xth the size” is more accurate? I had to read the reference to “Crystal’s binary size is 5 times smaller than Go’s” twice to realize it was 0.2x and not 5x. ~~~ jiofih I don’t get it. “5x smaller” and “0.2x the size” are the same. Can you explain then what do you expect to be the meaning of “two times smaller”? ~~~ mikece Clarity of language for one thing, but also that "times" is indicative of multiplication so "five times" anything has to be bigger[1]. One fifth is far clearer as there's no way to interpret that other than being a _part_ of the size of the reference, ergo, smaller. Is it impossible to understand? No, but it's poor style for technical writing. [1] I'm ignoring the case of decimal math since the reference in this case is always the whole integer 1. ~~~ jiofih I don’t know under which rock you’ve been hiding but “x times faster/smaller” has been in common use for _decades_ , including technical writing. Everyone understands it as 1/X, there is absolutely no confusion. ------ skyzyx Without having done _any_ of my own research, I’m initially skeptical of Crystal’s binary size. I initially saw something similar with Swift, but that’s just because the runtime is external to the binary. ------ pier25 Now compare Crystal with Nim. ~~~ nobleach I want to say this: [https://framework.embarklabs.io/news/2019/11/18/nim-vs- cryst...](https://framework.embarklabs.io/news/2019/11/18/nim-vs-crystal- part-1-performance-interoperability/index.html) was published on HN at one point. Regardless, it's a decent rundown. ~~~ pier25 Oh wow I expected Nim to be at least as fast as Crystal. ~~~ mratsim Nim JSON parser is not optimized, it was mostly written for maintenance (for example it allocates a Table per node in the json file) I.e. the difference in speed here is a difference in elbow grease. I have yet to come into an optimization problem where you cannot reach the speed you can achieve in C in Nim. ------ gigatexal Interesting. But more important is how productive can I be and how expansive is the ecosystem? What’s the developer experience like? Is the community welcoming? ------ decafbad I suggest the word femtobenchmark for this kind of work. ------ strictfp Consider using wrk2 in order to avoid coordinated omission. ------ sbmthakur Has anyone compared Crystal and Rust on similar lines? ~~~ tracker1 Did a rust build with the following... fn fibonacci(n: u32) -> u32 { match n { 0 => 1, 1 => 1, _ => fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2), } } fn main() { println!("{}", fibonacci(47)); } size: 2.67kb time: 7.391s I think rust wins :-D \--- edit: not sure if I used valgrind/massif right, but the largest values in the output file. mem_heap_B=1816 mem_heap_extra_B=32 I think this means it stayed under 2k ram? ~~~ sk0g Wouldn't processing time depend on your CPU, and unless you run the benchmarks in the article, this comparison would be meaningless? ~~~ tracker1 Don't have a go environment setup, but could do that. The executable size and memory use was also lower. ~~~ sk0g Well to be honest, Go binary sizes are always going to be big, to the benefit of ease of development and deployment. Memory usage, I don't know. The Fibonacci benchmark code was a bit... shit. Do you want to send over your Rust code in a Gist or something, and I can compile and compare? ~~~ tracker1 It's in the comment above... ------ poorman I'm still waiting for someone to write an LLVM backend for Go. ~~~ hootbootscoot gollvm? vs gogcc. that's why i said "an IR interface" when someone asked about transpiling crystal to go and vice-versa. ------ ed25519FUUU It’s always interesting when people compare Go to other languages they always use file size of binary, as if that’s something that anyone in modern professional engineering considers. Another good example would be to statically cross-compile a non-contrived program into ARM64, 32-bit linux, and Darwin without needing google! And if you think you have your binary statically linked, go test it in the “scratch” docker image. You may be surprised at how difficult it really is. ~~~ pjmlp Sure we do, I have spent the last week trying to upload 10 MB files in a quite slow uplink, and yes in Europe, suburban area of a German town. First reason why people uninstall apps on mobile devices is app size. ~~~ sk0g Are mobile apps the target market for Go? CI/CD takes care of upload for the dev side at least. It would be handy to have a compile time flag indicating the desired file size optimisation level still, with tradeoffs being ease of debugging, and performance. ~~~ pjmlp Given that gomobile exists, maybe. CI/CD is something almost unknown outside HN bubble. Also that was just two examples, here are another two, cost of production for USB Armoury keys running Go bare metal, or download costs for WebAssembly modules written in Tiny Go. ~~~ sk0g Are you sure re: CI/CD? I was looking around the job market recently, and every role was interested in my experience in it, since they were using it too. To be honest, that could be self-selecting, as my resume likely attracts companies similar to ones I have worked at. I still do hear about microservices, CI/CD a whole lot in job descriptions etc, but whether they are already practicing it (well), is another question... I was going to suggest TinyGo! I mainly work on a backend system, so I guess we have different priorities and needs. The embedded work I have done has all been C/ ASM, though it could be fun to revisit with Go. ~~~ sfkdjf9j3j In terms of sheer numbers, I would guess that at least a plurality of websites are running old versions of PHP and are released via FTP. But I don't think that's really meaningful or interesting to worry about, since those services aren't even considering the tooling decisions we're talking about.

Uploaded Ring footage reportedly provides location to the square inch - smacktoward https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/ring-used-parties-swag-to-build-700-police-partnerships-report-finds/ ====== detaro This article seems to describe that Gizmodo wrote an article - that should be the submission instead (if it hasn't been already)

There is nothing cute about innumeracy - fmihaila https://www.ft.com/content/3174d5ce-30e7-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a ====== hackuser Is there a way non-subscribers can read it? ~~~ grzm You can use the "web" link beneath the submission title. It will bring you to Google search results that should include a link to the submission. IIRC, this works for me only sometimes with ft.com. It worked for me in this case. Hopefully it'll work for you.

Show HN: Javelin Browser - nubela http://javelinbrowser.com?material-design ====== TheCraiggers I've been using your browser for a couple months now (I think I saw it mentioned on Android Police if you're curious) and I've been liking it. It looks slick, and works exactly how I think it should. The one problem I have with it is one I'd like other opinions on, both for my curiosity and your benefit. Frankly, it's not my daily driver because I don't know who you are and don't trust you. Using a (no offense) no-name browser is somewhat of a risk as the developer could potentially be recording personal info. Of course, I have no guarantee that Mozilla isn't either. However, and yes I'm fully aware of how silly this sounds, I trust Mozilla despite never looking at their code or knowing any of the developers. I'm guessing privacy is important to you (since you have the option of using a VPN service as IAP) so I'm curious how you would allay my fears of using a random browser from someone other than the big three. Either way, I wish you luck. ~~~ nubela I'm also the developer of [http://getgom.com](http://getgom.com) (VPN as a Chrome extension using SPDY SSL proxies), and as a fellow Singaporean when our government openly does surveilance, I __completely__ understand where you are coming from. To be fair, I'm not sure how I can solve his problem though. Open sourcing could be a plausible answer. But fighting Google Play clones and what-not is really time-consuming and as an indie dev, my time can be better spent. What do you suggest? ~~~ hackoder What's stopping clones from replicating your UI right now? Are you concerned with loss of IAP revenue to clones? I would suggest you open source it under a non-commercial license. Also, take a look at how some successful android open source projects are run. In particular, I like XPrivacy ([https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy](https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy)). This is an excellent app. Open source with optional purchase, similar to yours. Personally, I paid the $6 they charge because I'd rather not compile the src myself. You've already had a lot of downloads and are an established app. Clones can't replicate that.. If you are a recognized dev on xda, with your own thread for discussion, feature requests, bug reports etc, no clones will be able to replace that aspect even if they can clone your app. You should be able to get more downloads/purchases from privacy-aware users. And you can have donations for feature requests if you want. Just some thoughts.. best of luck with the app! ~~~ teddyh > […] _open source it under a non-commercial license_ […] A non-commercial license is _not_ , in any sane definition of the term, an “open source” license¹. ① [http://opensource.org/osd#fields-of- endeavor](http://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor) ------ nubela Developer here! I've been working on Javelin since Feb this year and this is the 4th iteration, and on Reddit (r/android), and just a quick interesting byte. Javelin actually started as a "porn" browser! See: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1xblv9/hey_reddit_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1xblv9/hey_reddit_so_i_created_an_android_browser_for/) PS: I'm headed to SF in October, anyone wanna grab a beer/coffee? I'm contactable at hello@javelinbrowser.com ~~~ higherpurpose I remember that one, and I remember thinking that it looked pretty good, but will fail because of the name. Good to see you changed it. ~~~ bfung Javelin still has a simple innuendo back into it's roots ;) ------ ClifReeder I notice that you use www.theverge.com in a number of the screenshots for Javelin. The writers at The Verge, the developers that build the site, the designers that make it beautiful - are all paid through ad revenue. Please consider at least adding the ability to whitelist sites if you are going to bundle ad block. *Full disclosure - I am a developer at Vox Media, the publisher of The Verge. ~~~ korzun I don't think this mobile browser is going to make a dent in The Verge's ad revenue. ~~~ Tossrock The Verge has about 45% mobile traffic: [https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com](https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com) If large numbers of people were to start using Javelin, it could certainly affect revenue. ~~~ korzun > If large numbers of people were to start using Javelin If. ~~~ V-2 This is why I am against including ad-block as a default. People who don't install AdBlock (mostly don't know how, or can't be bothered) play an important role. Adblocking should be an opt-in. ------ this_user Why would I want to use a browser made by a group that is seemingly mostly preoccupied with design judging from your website? You don't even disclose who is really behind this project. Especially browser security is more important than ever. When using one made by Google or Mozilla I can be sure that they do take security seriously, have the necessary experience, technical know-how and manpower to deal with vulnerabilities in a timely manner. ------ robotfelix To me, including "mobile-first" as one of your key value proposition seems a little odd. My immediate reaction was to wonder whether any mobile browsers _aren 't_ mobile-first? From my (incomplete) knowledge of smartphone browsers they all feature interfaces designed for smartphones and smartphones alone. There must be a better word to use in your tagline - I notice you decided on using "Truly Mobile" further down ;) ~~~ zevyoura I think the implication is that Chrome & Safari are both mobile editions of desktop apps, which is true to some extent. ------ phpnode I think you're making a mistake by offering this for free. The kind of people who care enough about their web experience to install a new browser are the kind of people who won't mind parting with a few £$€ to do so. To be profitable, free apps must target the broader market, but this is a relatively niche product. I don't think you'll get enough IAP fast enough to be sustainable. ~~~ nubela Why do you think Javelin is not suited for the broad market? ~~~ phpnode Because the average user doesn't even know what a web browser is, they just open up "the internet" on their phone. They are not going to _change_ something that they're not even aware of. It's also demonstrably true that the average user doesn't know or care about privacy enough to make this choice anyway. You don't have the resources to change either of these things. So, disregard the average user. Market this as a paid product which offers a superior web browsing experience for the technology connoisseur and the privacy concious. These people, on average, have a lot more money, are easier to sell this product to, and don't mind paying. Another reason to just charge money for this is that this provides assurances about your income stream which should mean that you are less likely to consider anti-user practises in order to generate income at some point in future. ------ blntechie I used it for about 3-4 months when 'Stack' was introduced but went back to Link Bubble + Chrome. I couldn't exactly remember why I went back to LB + Chrome but mostly due to 'Stack' being too rigid to my liking compared to Link Bubble (back button not closing the stack, no easy jumping between stacks, scrolling and stack animations kind of wonky etc.) All things said, I loved the browser experience. Especially easy access to bookmarks on right edge swipe and always available refresh button. I will definitely try it again. Speed dial looks good. Edit: Just installed again and wow!! It totally looks different from the version I used some time back. Looks more slick and pretty now. Will definitely try again. Especially the 'Stack' behavior. ~~~ jonalmeida I'm on a Nexus 5 and have major memory leak issues with LB (I've reported them) if you keep the "bubble" open for too long. Chrome is very heavy as well in general, so Javelin is a really nice refresher what a fast browser feels like. I just bought the pro version and I'm going to use it for a while before I comment more on it. ~~~ blntechie I use a Nexus 5 as well but have not personally encountered the memory leak issue with Link Bubble. But I don't keep the bubbles open very long as well. I just went ahead and bought the Javelin Pro version as well. I like what developer is doing here. ------ zanethomas I'm interested but don't want to use the "play" store. Can you provide some other download link? ~~~ ikt Why don't you want to use the play store? Just wondering is all. ~~~ niklasni1 Personally, I don't have Google Apps on my phone at all. If it's not in F-Droid or available as an apk from the developer, it doesn't get installed. ~~~ eli That seems limiting. Is it because you don't trust Google? ~~~ junto You are forced to have a Google account to use Google Play. Once you have a Google account on your phone it is privacy game over. ~~~ eli I think that's a _little_ bombastic. So is that a custom ROM or stock Android with no account set? Seems like if you deeply distrust Google you probably wouldn't want to run Android at all. ~~~ junto You misunderstand me. I was simply articulating what I assumed the poster meant by his comment: Personally, I don't have Google Apps on my phone at all. If it's not in F-Droid or available as an apk from the developer, it doesn't get installed. I personally have a stock Nexus 4 and accept that I'm simply a Google commodity. I accept that by having a Google Account on my phone means that Google are tracking everything I do, who I talk to, who I message, every website I visit and every opinion and iota of information about me, even some that they have extrapolated about me that I personally didn't realise, Google already knows. I accept that if Google knows this, the NSA can also get hold of this information relatively easily. However, I don't work for any company of NSA interest. I have no threatening political or religious affiliations. I don't pose a threat to the status quo. I am not a wolf. I am a sheep. Therefore, my privacy can be traded for free Google features - slurp... @niklasni1 though probably does care, which is why he doesn't use Google Play, because then he would need a Google account on his phone, that subsequently would be tracked by Google wherever he goes. Maybe @niklasni1 has a networking job for a European satellite provider that the NSA finds interesting. Maybe he is worried about being tasked. In which case, it isn't bombastic at all. ------ shock It looks very good. It's a pity it only syncs with Chrome and not with Firefox. ~~~ tempestn Agreed! I'd give it a try right now, but Firefox sync is a must-have for me. In fact, I'm considering giving up Dolphin Browser, even though I prefer it to Firefox for Android, because their "Dolphin Connect" Firefox add-on noticeably bogs down the browser, to the point where I often have it disabled. ------ darklajid I would - without trying to bash the project - like to understand what lures people into using this app? I understand that I'm not the target here - I dislike Chrome/Chromium and I am a happy Firefox user. But what drives people to use this browser? The UI alone? Maybe it would be something I can recommend to family and friends? Any decent, concise "This is why I like/use this thing" story? ------ l33tbro Awesome browser. But why use "gorgeous" as a descriptor? It's become such a meaningless term in tech, even when Jobs was still peddling it about. It seems trivial, but seeing that word often is a red flag for an uninspired product. You guys have done great work, so I'm surprised your marketing isn't as great as the browser. Best of luck ------ instakill Ha! Reddit definitely doesn't look that great on mobile. ~~~ TulliusCicero Yeah, isn't that a reddit-specific app? ~~~ kevincrane Yeah, it's "Reddit Is Fun" (my favorite reddit app I've used) [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en) ------ jessedhillon I like it a lot. But I have a tangential question: has anyone found a good writeup on rise of the use of adjectives like gorgeous, stunning, beautiful, amazing to describe apps? Aside from my personal opinion, I'd like to know if anyone else has observed and written about this trend. ~~~ AdamFernandez I have not seen a write up on this, but whenever I see it, it seems strange. Calling your own app 'gorgeous' or 'stunning' may come off as conceited. Those are subjective terms. If the UX is positively impacted by the appearance, call that out in the copy. I think it would be better to let your users gush over the appearance of the app using subjective terms in reviews or testimonials. ------ gegtik This addresses a pain point I didn't even realize I had -- waiting for the browser context switch followed by waiting for the page to load, followed by impatiently scrolling the page while it continues to parse, sometimes causing janky scroll teleporting as images are embedded above my viewport. This is simply fantastic. Pro purchased. One suggestion -- if it is possible to insert yourself as two entries on the Open With page, it would be nice to have the option to click a link and open with "Javelin" or "Javelin (Reader Mode)" (I'm talking about the android system popup for handling mime types) ------ jonalmeida Just out of curiosity, what are you using to parse the reading view of a webpage. It seems really fast so I doubt you're using Readability; probably some local library? ------ samsaga2 Please, don't use automatic translator. The text: "Jabalina es una hermosa, móvil-en primer lugar, y el pensamiento para navegadores de Android" It has no sense. ~~~ Zardoz84 Using automatic translator back to english : "Believes that the first and the Android browser - Javelin nice phone" Really DON'T USE AUTOMATIC TRANSLATOR! Also, nice browser. I trying it, mainly by the "block ads" feature ------ ezequiel-garzon You had me at "reading mode". I can't believe text wrap, pervasive in smart- and not-so-smart-phones of yore, is today considered a rarity. Thankfully I'm not alone [1]. [1] [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=62378) ~~~ drcode It would fantastic (and easy, technically, I think) to add a link to "reading mode" that starts text-to-speech. ------ shreeshga Just curious, which browser engine does it use? ------ fdsary Wow, this makes me want to ditch my iPhone... ------ microsby0 Any thoughts of an iOS version as well? This really makes me jealous of Android users ------ Miraries Any particular reason it's not compatible with OnePlus One and Nexus 10 on Google Play? I get it if tablets aren't supported. I could get the apk but I was wondering... If testing is the reason, I can help. ~~~ nubela I have no idea to be honest, Google Play does that sometimes. ------ roryokane Bug reports for the developer nubela: Swipe from the left to open the menu, then scroll down, so that part of the text is cut off, then swipe to the left to close the menu part of the way, but drag your finger back right before the menu closes. If you now scroll, the cut-off text is still visible, creating weird visual artifacts. This goes away when you close the menu completely and reopen it. When I edit the title and URL of a bookmark, the buttons are “Cancel” and “Edit”. I think “Save” would work better. I feel like what I am doing is already “editing”, since I chose “Edit” to get here. I tried to set Javelin as the default browser, but when the browser list popped up, by reflex I hit Just Once instead of Always. But Javelin still said “Javelin is now your default browser”. (Then I realized what had happened and went back and did it again.) If possible, Javelin should detect when the user clicked the wrong button. If that is not possible, maybe you should show a small picture of the Always button before showing the dialog, to remind the user to hit that button. In the page describing the Pro features, one of them is choosing your homepage. But I can already do that in the free version. It works when I go to Settings > Change homepage. Javelin doesn’t support a blank homepage. I tried setting the homepage to nothing (“”) or to “about:blank”, but either way, the homepage just becomes “Webpage not available”. The error shows because Javelin is automatically adding an “[http://”](http://”) before “about:blank” – “about:” pages should have no protocol. I tried to press and hold on the icons (the eye icon and share icon) in the toolbar to see a tooltip describing what they do. However, those icons don’t have tooltips. I would have liked to have been able to see a “Reading Mode” tooltip when I pressed and held on the eye icon instead of having to actually press it to find out. The icons in the toolbar for reading mode have the same problem. When there are no tabs, I see a message “Javelin Browser, flies.” The message confused me a bit because it is ungrammatical. It should be either “Javelin Browser flies.” or “Javelin Browser – it flies.” I couldn’t get Javelin Sync to work at all. I authorized it for my Google account and saw the message saying I have been sent an email. But my bookmarks are still the default Javelin ones (minus the ones I manually deleted); none of them are my Chrome for Android bookmarks. This is still the case even after I “Sync bookmarks now” – though since that command gives no feedback, I couldn’t tell whether it worked. (I didn’t install the desktop Chrome extension linked in the email because I don’t want that home page, but the email said my device was already synced, so that shouldn’t make a difference.) So either your Sync is broken or there is another step that you forgot to mention, like “wait one hour” or “restart your phone” or something. In the menu on the left, the checkboxes look a little weird, because it is a blue checkmark on a turquoise background. I can see it, but I think they would look better if you made the check-marks very light gray, a color closer to the text but still distinct from it. When I logged into a site, I got two dialog boxes asking me to save the password. The first was a generic Android one like in Google Chrome. I clicked Not Now, and then Javelin showed its colorful one at the bottom. You should hide the default one so that only the Javelin one shows. I couldn’t figure out how to activate the “Fullscreen Browsing” that you show in one of your website’s screenshots. I tried scrolling through web pages, and I looked at all the settings, but I never had the Action Bar and the soft buttons displaying but transparent like in the screenshot. The soft buttons are always visible. I can hide the Action Bar completely with that setting, but then I can’t open it all from within the app, and that’s different from the screenshot anyway. It’s not described as a Pro feature on the Enable Javelin Pro page either. You should make it more obvious how to enable that mode, or remove the screenshot if that feature is now gone. This is a big list of bugs, many tiny ones and some big ones, but I’m still trying out Javelin for now – you haven’t driven me back to Chrome yet. I am especially interested in your Adblock and full-screen features (so it’s too bad I can’t figure out how to use full-screen). I wish you luck with developing your browser. ~~~ nilkn Something I noticed is that when I open several pages in Stack view externally from the app, then open the Stack in the full browser, the tabs don't properly get thumbnails until I manually switch to them all. Regardless, this is clearly a forward-thinking mobile browser, more so than Chrome, and so I support it wholeheartedly. ------ spihn3 Adblock and readability feature integration is great! As a developer, could I ask you how you are implementing the readability feature? Is this done client side? ------ grumblestumble Very minor nitpick: Your usage of "thought out" comes across as stilted and unprofessional. I'm guessing English isn't your native language? ~~~ anigbrowl I disagree. It's an unconventional usage but one that struck me as both deliberate and effective. BTW almost all people in Singapore grow up speaking English, it's the common language of 4 ethnic groups and is used on all signs, government correspondence and so forth. ~~~ wingerlang I disagree. I made me re-read the sentence more than once, and I still think it doesn't feel right. ~~~ random_ind_dude I feel "well thought-out" would be a better way to phrase it. ------ cmdrfred Looks good. Adblock integration is a nice touch, thats pretty much my first line of defence when it comes to anti-malware on the systems I administrate. ~~~ dmix Toggling JS off also makes mobile browsing super-fast and much safer. I wish it was easy to toggle on/off. Mobile chrome is a couple clicks. ~~~ cmdrfred I wish I had the option if I disabled JS on my work machines none of the insurance company portals would work. ------ joshvm My only criticism is that the icon is practically a mirror image of Telegram, but that's not exactly your fault. Is there a way to save pages for offline viewing? ------ maxpert It's not material design! Nothing accept colors is material design. No animations, no guidelines nothing! ------ Kiro What rendering engine are you using? ~~~ nubela AOSP webview ~~~ higherpurpose Did you fix this? (should be fixed in 4.4+ webview, I think, if that's what you're using for all supported devices) [https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2014/...](https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2014/09/15/major- android-bug-is-a-privacy-disaster-cve-2014-6041) ~~~ aeling Just tested (using ejj.io/SOP.php), Javelin on my Note 3 isn't vulnerable. ------ thrush Slightly unrelated question, but is there an equivalent for iOS app extensions on Android? ~~~ nubela Intents could be the answer. See [http://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents- filter...](http://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents-filters.html) ------ shekhar101 Desktop chrome sync and native ad-block! Woooha! I'm sold! ------ ahstilde I like it a lot! Any way you could have it sync with Firefox? ~~~ nubela The API is there but it's closed for now as it is just not ready for other developers (too raw). Also, not a firefox user myself. ------ tambourine_man Ironically, I get a blank page on my iPhone ------ anishkothari Looks great! I'm going to try this out ------ ultim8k Kudos man! It really looks beautiful. ------ N0RMAN Why do you offer it for free? ~~~ nubela There is a Pro upgrade as an IAP. There's also an in-built proxy/vpn service in the browser. This is how I see myself growing Javelin down the road with the browser as the razor, and value-added services as the blade. ~~~ icambron I obviously haven't thought about this as long as you have, but offhand I think that model is a mistake. Only a small subset of people (and perhaps a bunch of companies) want things like proxy support or VPNs or other extra services. Most people just want to browse the web, so you're limiting your market a lot. (I do think you could make value-added browser services a business, but you'd have to go to enterprises to do it.) ~~~ juliangoldsmith That assumes that his main goal is to make a profit, rather than just put out a good product which generates a little bit of passive income. ~~~ icambron I don't see why. Passive income vs profit is not really dichotomy; passive income is a question of how much work you put in, whereas profit is how much you make _relative_ to how much you put in. Regardless of how you structure your commitments, more profit is better than less profit. You could argue that to be successful at generating a passive income of any magnitude, you'd be better off selling value-added services on top of a free browser rather than just selling a browser. I'd be curious to hear that argument, because the opposite seems true: making freemium work means that you need to invest not just in making a great free product that people will use, but also invest in creating enough additional value to make the sale. Thus I think wanting a lower commitment to the company actually says you should just sell the browser. ------ robinhoodexe Looks pretty slick!

Why do so many bad drivers have luxury cars? A new study blames disagreeable men - wisemang https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/01/30/why-do-so-many-bad-drivers-have-luxury-cars-a-new-study-blames-disagreeable-men.html ====== croissants The actual abstract [1] is much more informative: > In a representative sample of Finnish car owners (N = 1892) we connected the > Five‐Factor Model personality dimensions to driving a high‐status car. > Regardless of whether income was included in the logistic model, > disagreeable men and conscientious people in general were particularly > likely to drive high‐status cars. The results regarding agreeableness are > consistent with prior work that has argued for the role of narcissism in > status consumption. Regarding conscientiousness, the results can be > interpreted from the perspective of self‐congruity theory, according to > which consumers purchase brands that best reflect their actual or ideal > personalities. An important implication is that the association between > driving a high‐status car and unethical driving behaviour may not, as is > commonly argued, be due to the corruptive effects of wealth. Rather, certain > personality traits, such as low agreeableness, may be associated with both > unethical driving behaviour and with driving a high‐status car. There is also this...interesting sentence in the paper's discussion section: > The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most > traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars. [1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31797376](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31797376) ~~~ beerandt >> The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars. ------ JackFr > The link between conscientious personality traits and interest in high- > status cars was found among both men and women. In contrast, the connection > between self-centred personality traits and high-status cars was only found > among men, not women. Lönnqvist has no clear answer as to why this is the > case. Here's an idea -- because it's all p-hacked nonsense. The abstract leaves out 1) how this population of 1892 was acquired. 2) what the definition of a high status car is -- is it equivalent to the cost or is it an arbitrary split on make/model? 3) the actual statistical tests and their results. While we see N at 1892, what were the sub-populations. Presumably N[high_status] is low relative to N, which would go along way to explaining the high 'conscientious' result -- that they are both meaningless statistical artifacts. > The present study was motivated by the authors' everyday experience of most > traffic violations being committed by male drivers of high‐status cars. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman This is bad work. ------ strict9 Finally, a study to explain something most people know-- drivers of BMWs, SUVs, and Teslas are usually more aggressive to others on the road. This bad and unsafe behavior by these drivers is usually more pronounced toward a pedestrian or cyclist. ~~~ anchpop > BMWs, SUVs, and Teslas are usually more aggressive to others on the road I've never heard this stereotype of Tesla drivers. I normally associate aggressive driving (and not signalling) with really big, high above the ground cars and trucks. ~~~ forgottenpass >I've never heard this stereotype of Tesla drivers. Really? Tesla drivers are like 2% tech enthusiasts and 90% the kind of people seeking the latest and greatest flashy car. ~~~ nickthegreek In Ohio I find Tesla's to be some of the slowest drivers. I am constantly on their ass on the on ramps. It infuriates me cause I know they could accelerate faster than everyone else around them. ~~~ lostlogin What sort of car do you drive? ~~~ bluGill The cheapest worn out beater I could find. I can get up to freeway speed, but I need my foot all the way to the floor for the entire on ramp. When sports cars (always sports cars) with great acceleration don't accelerate until the very end they make it so I'm the one trying to merge at 30 mph (50km/h). My car isn't my status symbol. My bank account is enough that I don't worry about downturns too much and I'll be able to retire to a nice life in the future (assuming civilization doesn't collapse) ------ paulgb I only read the Star piece, not the study, but I'm surprised there's no mention of the theory that men who can afford nice cars are less likely to find a ticket economically meaningful. (This doesn't explain the gender gap, I admit) ~~~ ahoy I imagine wage disparity b/t men and women is part of it: I'd bet more men drive luxury cars than women b/c more men than women are paid enough to afford them. ------ pid_0 Why just men though? Anyone can be disagreeable and plenty of people who drive nice cars are not men. Can't tell you how many non-male tesla and BMW drivers cut me off without a signal. ------ minikites Rich people are more likely to literally take candy from a baby: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra- klein/post/study-r...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra- klein/post/study-rich-more-likely-to-take-candy-from- babies/2011/08/25/gIQAXE0beR_blog.html) Being rich is directly correlated with a loss of empathy, so this study is no surprise. ------ seattle_spring Anecdote incoming: In South Seattle, it definitely isn't just "white men in fancy cars" that are doing the most dangerous of driving. My guess is that the higher the loan value is when compared to the driver's income, the worse the driver will be. Ex: $20k/yr guy driving $45k loan V8 Mustang would be a much worse driver than $100k/yr guy who owns his BMW outright. Side-note: I do not drive a luxury car, for those about to presume. ------ kleer001 I'd buy that. Disagreeable people tend to get what they want more often. The most disagreeable people tend to be men. Also luxury car drivers tend to be worse drivers just by driving those cars alone. [https://clark.com/cars/study-expensive-cars-road- manners/](https://clark.com/cars/study-expensive-cars-road-manners/) ~~~ kazinator Disagreeable people get what they want in the short term, but they hamper themselves in the long run. When you're disagreeable, people will tend give you what you want to get you out of their hair, but in parallel to that, their minds begin forming ideas about how to avoid or minimize future interactions with you. And that's going to have the effect of you not getting what you want from _those_ people any more; you will have find new people to get what you want. People also talk: if you're disagreeable to someone, that will not remain a secret that is just between you and then. They will likely be sharing their experience with others, which will warn those others about interacting with you. So, if we take that into account, being disagreeable no longer seems like a clear-cut optimization of getting what you want as a long-term strategy. Thus, although the "squeaky wheel gets a greasing", we also have it that "you catch more flies with honey". ~~~ piptastic I don't think this is necessarily true. I've seen plenty of disagreeable people making it much further than their "nicer" counterparts over a longer period of time. In business, politics, etc. ~~~ swat535 That's because they usually have money, connections and resources. A homeless disagreeable person isn't going anywhere in life. Disagreeable only works when you have leverage. ------ gnicholas ...in Finland. It would be interesting to know how car-buying behaviors (and brand popularity) differ across countries and cultures. Might be the same all over the world, or it could be very different. But why wait to find out, when you can put up an overbroad headline and get lots of clicks now? ------ NoblePublius It’s not news that disagreeableness correlates with success and income. ------ aphistic I guess disagreeable is one way to say "entitled". ------ _bxg1 One benefit of driving a piece of junk is that when one of these people is riding your bumper, you can tap your brakes without fear because they have much more to lose than you do. ~~~ vsareto Naturally if they have a dashcam (which they can afford to), they then have evidence you're brake checking them ~~~ stewartm In the UK in general, you run into the back of someone, it is your fault in the eyes of the insurers. If you hit someone due to them brake checking, you were driving too close. ~~~ _bxg1 This is my internal logic too. Although upon some quick Googling I was surprised to find that in the U.S. it's a legal gray-area which varies from state to state. ------ rhacker > less empathy, they are more disagreeable, and they are more willing to fight In other words, it's a period of high job growth. I've noticed this in my dad and many men - when they have a job, they are like this. Women have it too, but there is less ego driving the entirety of their personality. ~~~ bryanrasmussen maybe it's a time of high job stress, I know when I'm stressed or going through a miserable time (and I mean exceptionally stressing, exceptionally miserable) I have less empathy - especially for anyone making time even a tiny bit less easy than it could be because I am already going through a lot - I am less agreeable because I am miserable tired and pissed off about the stuff I'm going through, and I want to punch the first person who gets in my face. ------ totalZero As a society, we should stop whining about competitive people and learn how to either (a) deal with them or (b) beat them fair and square. ~~~ sidlls One way to “deal with them” is harsh penalties for their bad behavior. ~~~ totalZero You can't harshly penalize people for simply being disagreeable, and we already have traffic laws. Many academic papers have been written on correlations between old age and bad driving. Yet when The Star writes about those papers, it chooses to blame the "transportation gap." [https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/24/transportation-g...](https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/24/transportation- gaps-keep-seniors-driving-too-long-study.html) The root article of this thread is just a bunch of virtue signaling nonsense that falls under the umbrella of a cultural attack on men.

A Black Mississippi Judge's Speech to 3 White Murderers - shawndumas http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/02/12/385777366/a-black-mississippi-judges-breathtaking-speech-to-three-white-murderers ====== b6 I hope justice was done. I also hope that someday we won't particularly care about the ethnicity of the judge, or of the victim, or of the perpetrators of the crime. In my view, that would be moving even further away from the way things used to be. > A warning to readers: He uses the word "nigger" 11 times. I'm not sure what to think about this. I grew up in the south, in a deeply racist community, but I think it's been over 25 years since I heard anyone use that word to demean a black person. But is there any adult who hasn't heard it used hundreds or thousands of times by black people themselves? This seems like a trigger warning, but I have no idea who it might be intended to warn. Who exactly would be offended?

My Struggle with the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary - luu http://www.wired.com/2015/05/im-terrified-tell-people-much-make ====== dennish00a I find it interesting to read about this "taboo" because, as a scientist at a public university, the issue is...nonexistent! If you are a scientist writing grant applications with other people (the norm), then you need to know their exact salaries in order to fill out the application. This includes the salaries of people above and below you in the food chain. There is no mystery or taboo in it whatsoever. Working at a public university, the mystery factor is even lower, if possible, because all the higher salaries are published online. I remember dimly when I thought this complete transparency was strange and it made me uncomfortable. Now I don't usually give it a second thought. ~~~ geon Here in Sweden, taxable income for everyone is bublicly available. I always find it amusing/sad to read about this taboo in the US. ~~~ Cederfjard Isn't it sort of taboo here too, though? I've seen people being told to fuck off for asking that question, or at least politely declined. Even my close family have always been reluctant to divulge their exact income to me, with a few exceptions. It's not a thing that I would ask someone without feeling pretty certain they wouldn't mind. ~~~ ersii In general? Yes, it's still socially frowned upon (ie. Taboo) and socially awkward to talk about your salary or someone you knows salary in Sweden. ------ lotharbot One of the reasons I like sites like glassdoor is that it separates the judgment from the data. I don't need to know that Alice makes 22% less than Bob, and Bob makes 18% less than Claire, and therefore make personal judgments about each of my coworkers (like Alice is a pushover; Bob is mediocre; Claire is bossy.) I just need to know what the distribution is, in my company or in my industry, in order to negotiate for myself. ~~~ kirsebaer Wouldn't it be better if A, B, C, and you joined together and hired some professional lawyers and negotiators to work on your behalf (ie organized labor, union)? ~~~ mattlutze From the employer side, if one or the other is a more valuable employee, I need to be able to compensate them more so that I can ensure they stay with our team and don't go to a competitor. From the employee side, if I go out and learn new skills and abilities, I want to be able to negotiate compensation that reflects the value I bring. Particularly in creative fields like tech / IT, unionization fails both of those needs, and promotes stagnation over innovation. So, no. ~~~ sukruh Having professionals negotiate for the team doesn't necessarily mean the pay will be equal among the team. Actors, who also work in a creative field and also have vast differences in talent, use many kinds of intermediaries. ------ teekert >"Without that knowledge, I would never have known I was being suckered." Suckered by yourself you mean, and suckered by the people that never taught you the principles of a free market where the assumption is that when two parties agree, the situation is satisfactory for both. If not, there is no agreement, no deal. The other party was not suckering you, you were happy with the deal, you took it. Why do you put something as important as your salary entirely into someone else's responsibility and then complain later? Whoever raised or educated you forgot to mention some critical things to you. Like objects, people's skill have no intrinsic value. It is you and the other party that set the value to an agreeable level. Wow, you even got pissed at others that did receive the lesson in time. Well, just be happy someone taught you in the end. What helps me in negotiations is thinking not about coworkers but about how I could be working less (later in life perhaps), how my wife could be working less, how we could travel more... If only I can convince them I'm worth more. I know myself well enough to see that I need the reason to be "not just for me". I wish it was enough to just do it for me though. I do think the situation is a bit different in the Netherlands where very often there is a collective work agreement (with all wages defined) which puts people in levels. The requirements for the levels are clearly defined. At the healthcare company I work we have "key areas of responsibility tables" where you can see what to do exactly to go to the next scale. I check them before my yearly progress meeting and indicate to my boss if I should be at a higher level. Your salary within the scale is determined by the progress you make. It makes the gaps with coworkers less, still there is a lot of room for negotiation. Also we have [http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home](http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home) where everyone can enter their salary and you can look up how you are doing. That said, I find it difficult to compare directly to others. ~~~ pparkkin I think what she's referring to is a situation of information asymmetry, which puts the employee in a position of less power in the negotiation. Of course it's up to you to negotiate for yourself. That's pretty obvious. But if the other party holds more power, you're negotiating at a disadvantage. And the way I understood the article, that is what she meant by being "suckered". Being put at a disadvantage when negotiating for something important to her. ~~~ kabouseng What information assymmetry. Surely you can find out from your network what a typical salary for the position is. With sites like glassdoor you also can get a good indication of what you typically can expect. And by being savvy in the interview, you can find out of what value the position might be to the company and you can negotiate on those grounds. Sometimes the employer is in a better position, sometimes the employee. Sometimes the employer needs to fill a position urgently, has got specialised requirements or the employee is gainfully employed somewhere else and in a much better bargaining position. We really should stop playing the victim. ~~~ lsiebert If you have a network. If people in your network talk to you. If people post to glassdoor about the company. Don't make the mistake of assuming that this is true for everyone. Also remember that even if you have a network, if it is influenced by your gender (women with women friends) , or race( black people with black friends) you might not have an accurate picture. ------ daeken I've come to realize lately that I have absolutely no idea what I should be making. I know what I make and I know what I have made in the past, but I have no idea whether it's above or below average. The only way I can think of to determine my value is to go interview in a bunch of places and see what they offer. However, I have no interest in leaving my job right now, and I feel like it's dishonest to go through the process knowing that I wouldn't take anything but a ridiculously great offer. How do other folks deal with this? (Edit: Glassdoor has no decent information for my position, at any of the companies I've looked at.) ~~~ johnward My problem is that glassdoor has information for my specific position, in my city, in my company but it's double what I currently make. I don't _think_ I'm that underpaid but the taboo of employees not discussing salary leaves me without any real idea of where I really should be. I know for a fact I make more money in one quarter for the company than I earn in an entire year. I still asked for at least 20% more and am awaiting a response. Also applying for other positions. The only big increases I've ever gotten were by switching companies or bringing a competing offer to my boss. People say the latter is career suicide but they are wrong. ------ roopeshv Read all that and I still have no clue what the author is making now. ~~~ disillusioned She chickened out. But it's hard. ~~~ yitchelle Its probably a Wired policy to not disclose your salary. ~~~ sukilot Which is a situation where getting fired for breaking policy is going to be more profitable than keeping your job. ------ omahlama In my previous job at the Finnish software consulting company Futurice ([http://futurice.com](http://futurice.com)), there was a long discussion about this that ended with a volunteer-based publication of peoples salaries - around half of the 200 people opted in. The result was a bit anti-climatic: peoples wages were consistent and fair, no big drama. After switching jobs to another software consulting company Reaktor ([http://reaktor.com](http://reaktor.com)), I brought up this topic and the discussion was very similar. I decided to try a different route: I created a wiki-page called "Voluntary salary information" and added my name and salary to the top of the page. I then wrote a post to our discourse board explaining why I thought this was important. As of now there are 68 names on that list ( with only 1 obvious troll ) out of about 300 employees. Our head of HR replied to my discourse post with a detailed explanation of how peoples salaries are decided. Overall a great day for transparency. ------ mkagenius I have had three managers till now. I have asked all three what was their salary. Only one told me his salary, rest two didn't. I keep asking salaries when I become friends with my coworkers, mostly because its a taboo and hence makes it fun. It makes them laugh when I suddenly in the middle of a conversation ask their salary becuase nobody has in the 10-15 years of their careers. I am a fresher, though. ~~~ yitchelle That is interesting. Did you disclose your salary to your coworkers, and if you did, did that effect your relationship with your coworkers? ~~~ mkagenius All three of my managers know my salary (of course). Apart from that, people with whom I am close with know my salary and I know theirs. Mine is the lowest even though one of my friend is IC1 and I am IC2, others are senior to me. Some of them tell me to talk to the manager for my salary. My priority is learning, so it doesn't bother me much. But I did talk to the manager (and her manager's manager too), because if you don't, they take you for granted. By knowing I had the lowest salary gives me lot of opportunities to crack jokes :-) ~~~ yitchelle From an office scenario, having a coworker knowing your salary is very different to having a close friend knowing your salary. This is especially true if the average salary of your peers makes it difficult to have a comfortable lifestyle. Luckily for the most of the HN crowd, this is not the case. Salary is something I have an open discussion with my manager about, actually my manager encourage this type of discussion with him. This is a healthy practice. ~~~ mkagenius Oh maybe I wasn't clear, I was referring to people I am close with at work and in the same team know my salary. My salary is comfortably above market's average hence doesn't bother me much that I have the lowest in my team. Agreed, totally healthy. ------ wavefunction Transparency can only lead to a freer market, which is something many capitalists truly fear. ------ pixie_ If salaries were transparent wouldn't that create an incredible amount of animosity between co-workers? When HR has to negotiate and pay someone more to join the company everyone else is going to be extremely jealous. You think people are going to understand? They are not going to. People are not rational. It's more common sense than fear. Disclosing salaries is going to create way more social problems than it solves. Companies aren't forcing anyone to keep their salary secret. People themselves don't want their salaries disclosed, and for good reason. Kind of hard to work together when everyone is reduced to a number. ~~~ pavlov You can already see how 100% salary transparency works in Finland or Sweden. Anyone can look up a co-worker's salary from data made available by the tax office. (Of course the information is about a year out of date because it's based on tax returns.) Are employees "reduced to numbers" in Sweden and Finland? Certainly not. On the contrary, these societies are considered some of the most open and equal in the world. Maybe salary transparency has something to do with it too. ~~~ morgante Actually, I believe employees _are_ reduced to numbers in Sweden and Finland. You don't see star employees or developers making what they make in the US. Everyone is in something of an equilibrium—decent pay, but not much incentive to strive for more. ~~~ hliyan decent pay, but not much incentive to strive for more Isn't that a good thing? I mean striving for more based on _intrinsic motivation_ than financial. My observation in over the past 12 years working in the software industry is that bad motivation (both carrot and stick) tend to drive out the good (desire to build something or solve a problem). ------ godzilla82 I feel this is a faulty exercise. Would you disclose your salary if you _knew_ you made more than your peers? I guess the end effect would be, only those who _feel_ they are making less would disclose. ~~~ falcolas Because you would like to see your peers get paid equitably? They can't use your salary as leverage in their own negotiations unless they know what it is. ------ pearjuice Spoiler: at the end he still hasn't admitted what he makes at Wired. Link bait confirmed. ------ gamechangr >"Did the knowledge hurt my relationships with my coworkers? Yes. Of course it did. I felt cheated. I felt undervalued. I frankly felt I was the victim of a double standard." ~~~ hueving She failed to negotiate when she was hired. Is that really a double standard? ~~~ dmak She was saying that she was offered 35,000 less than the previous person for the same role. If she was truly valued, why was she not offered just as much if not more? ~~~ gamechangr There is quite a bit lacking from your logic. For example, maybe the previous boss had been on the job 10 years. Maybe his starting salary was also $35,000 less than when he ended, in which case they would be valued equally!! Maybe she was NOT AS GOOD. I know many people who think they are equally as good as their boss and are no where close. Maybe those with the skill to sell themselves should make more? Why is that so offensive? Maybe the whole newspaper industry has taken a major hit and the company does not have the available operational budget that they were once able to spend. It's disappointing that all of these legitimate ideas are passed over and we proceed to assume it was gender related. Really? ------ somberi In California, the salary of its state employees are publicly available here: [http://transparentcalifornia.com/](http://transparentcalifornia.com/) ~~~ dragonwriter > In California, the salary of its state employees are publicly available > here: [http://transparentcalifornia.com/](http://transparentcalifornia.com/) That's not _just_ state employees (its public employees from different public entities within the state), and its also fairly poorly aggregated from disparate sources, such that if you add all the pay and benefit columns together, they often don't match the pay + benefits (and some people who I personally know have non-zero regular pay show with zero in all pay columns, an actual number in the benefit column, and a pay + benefit that is both higher than the benefit amount (remember, all the pay columns are zero) and lower than the person's _actual_ pay before benefits. There's another similar source [0], which has slightly different coverage (but both cover state employees), which has substantially different numbers for the same years for people covered by both. Presumably, for state employees, both of those _third-party aggregators_ have done public records requests for the same public information from the State, but they've both processed it using different (and opaque) methodologies, so that no one actually using it knows what they actually mean (the latter source, by using only one number for each person, doesn't make it _as_ clear that they are doing something funky with the data; the former tries to do more, which makes it even more clear that they are doing something weird, because it makes inconsistencies visible.) They do a good job of creating the _illusion_ of readily-accessible accurate data if you are only aware of one of them and don't have any independent knowledge to verify them against. [0] [http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state- pay/arti...](http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state- pay/article2642161.html#req=employee%2Ftop%2Fyear%3D2014) ------ valdiorn What about people with very large paychecks? I don't want to make my friends uncomfortable when they realize I make literally an extra zero at the end of what they make. Should I keep my mouth shut or disclose... for their sake? ~~~ sukilot Maybe your heart is telling you that you shouldn't be _spending_ an extra 0 on yourself than your peers. If you acknowledge your incredible luck, and that there is diminishing marginal return in lavishly rewarding yourself for our efforts, and you invest the excess in meaningful projects that improve the lot of the world.... ~~~ valdiorn Your comment doesn't make much sense. I put most of my money into a savings account as I'm saving up for a house. I don't live a very frivolous lifestyle, if that's what you mean. However, I emigrated from Iceland to the UK, and some of the people I left behind do not have the luxury of doing the same, as they have families or relationships back home. How would it be fair of me to disclose my salary, just to show them what they can't have? Most people know I make good money, but maybe not exactly how much, and I try not to boast as I feel that is rude. Constantly going around telling people about my salary would probably not be well received, even if it was "in the interest of transparency of fairness"... Edit: I do not acknowledge it as luck, I worked my ass off to get where I am today! ------ wodenokoto I don't get why this is a taboo. I tell my salary to everyone who cares to listen, to the point where an employer threatened to fire me if I told my coworkers about my raise. ------ pavlov In Finland wages are public information. The tax office makes the data available yearly, so you can easily look up how much your neighbor made last year.

Show HN: URLs for form fields you don't want to answer [GitHub in comments] - humanarity https://igot99inputs.appspot.com/andthisaintone ====== omgpeaches Couldn't resist. [https://igot99inputs.appspot.com/andthisainttwo%3Cimg%20src=...](https://igot99inputs.appspot.com/andthisainttwo%3Cimg%20src=x%20onerror=alert%28%27xss%27%29%3E) ~~~ humanarity This is a really cool idea -- can you use a link shortener so that it fits? ~~~ xrstf Slashes are not possible, that makes it hard to load code from somewhere. ~~~ omgpeaches Well, you could bypass that by using String.fromCharCode() eventually? i.e. [https://igot99inputs.appspot.com/andthisainttwo<img](https://igot99inputs.appspot.com/andthisainttwo<img) src=x onerror=document.location.href=String.fromCharCode(104,116,116,112,58,47,47,119,119,119,46,103,111,111,103,108,101,46,100,101); > (that's google.com) ------ mailslut I also do not get this at all. I see what you're trying to do, but I still don't get the point. ~~~ humanarity Now you've had your pointlessness for today :) thanks for sharing! ------ humanarity And the github: [https://github.com/humanarity/igot99inputs](https://github.com/humanarity/igot99inputs) ------ fiatjaf I sincerely don't understand why you are doing this. Are you mad against forms? ~~~ humanarity Sometimes a form will not accept "NA" it requires a URL, so I made URL's that "mean" NA. Or other things!

PHP Design Patterns: An Introduction - nsnihalsahu https://leanpub.com/designpatternsphp/ ====== sprkyco [http://disqus.com/nihalsahu/](http://disqus.com/nihalsahu/) 14 years old and writing design patterns for PHP. My feelings of inadequacy cannot be put into text.

AngularJS powered mobile boilerplate app that also does offline out of the box - janjongboom https://github.com/comoyo/ffos-list-detail ====== dualogy So I'm not a mobile dev but looking into it. Can someone explain the meaning of this sentence? "It uses the HTML/CSS that all the system apps use as well, which means they're rock solid, and will have a native look 'nd feel". Wot? If there was "some HTML/CSS" that'd let me avoid Sencha or jQmobile or Dojo or whatever, that'd be pretty neat. Now I love Ratchet but it seems "yeah this is just for prototyping" and so there's no real push behind it to make it the mobile-UI lib par excellence it could otherwise easily become. So anyway, "the HTML/CSS that all the system apps use as well" --- what does this mean exactly? ~~~ sbirchall OT: Currently we are only utilising Sencha because of it's handling for native touch events on iPad/iPhone. You wouldn't happen to have come across this hurdled and cleared it in your journey, would you? That is a refactor I genuinely relish the chance to cook. ~~~ janjongboom What do you mean with 'native touch events'? The touchmove events should give you all touches etc. also on iOS. FYI: This app comes with a gesture detector (source: [https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/shared/js/ge...](https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/blob/master/shared/js/gesture_detector.js)) as well that can handle swipes, pans, multi-finger transforms. ~~~ sbirchall Sorry, to clarify I want a solution so that we do not have to bake our own - Sencha abstracts it all away and handles everything the same across all devices (so I'm led to believe by the dev that chose and implemented it - I have very little experience with it). By 'native touch events' I mean very much like the link you've provided (which is a very promising resource, so thankyou for that), in that it offers a 'doubletap', 'swipe', and 'pinch' event for instance. (So more precisely _emulating_ native touch events?). I've found a good list of libraries in my research [1] but I was wondering if anyone had specific experience that could tip the balance in favour of one lib above Sencha (which to my eyes seems bloated and awkwardly constructed). [1: <https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/Touch>] ------ killermonkeys I was ready to say that angularjs plus mobile does not work based on our experience but at least your demo works well, though I think it has few bindings. I'll try it later in android browser on froyo and see if it can handle that. We had kinda written off angularjs on mobile but have to say this looks good. ~~~ marknutter The mobile app I've been working on for a while called Kona (<http://kona.com>) is an angular.js app. It's on the Google Play store and iOS App Store. ~~~ collin128 Kona looks great. Our main app (voltageCRM.com) is built in Angular I think we're going to go that route when we go mobile. Any tips/what back end are you running? ~~~ marknutter We use a true hybrid approach for the mobile app, meaning in addition to using phonegap we also use some native UI elements; namely the top and bottom nav bars. It does add some overhead because you have to write that stuff in java/objective-c but it helps the app feel much closer to a native app than pure HTML5 does at this point. I would check out <http://trigger.io> if you're not interested in writing any native code and don't have any special requirements for your UI design. Our backend is a ruby on rails app. ------ dz0ny I want grunt :). That would make this usable as yo seed and much more modular. Where are tests? ~~~ janjongboom The only thing we'd use grunt for in this case would be to do the requirejs step; which is covered in a simple 3 line build script. It would make sense if adding stuff like coffee or LESS; but I want to keep it clean, simple and stupid. ------ kb19 When you talk about 'mobile app', are you referring to an alternative mobile site the user sees in the browser or packaging it up in something like PhoneGap (or putting it in a native WebView)? ~~~ janjongboom In this case: mobile website. This 'app' runs in the browser and all strategies used here don't rely on anything like PhoneGap. If you need access to certain PhoneGap features you can of course package the app up but it's not required at all. ~~~ kb19 Ah ok, makes sense. Good stuff! ------ paullth mobile or not, its nice to see a good example of require + angular, thanks a lot

Lamest Edit Wars - ag8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars ====== willio58 The examples here are hilarious. > Angels & Airwaves: Forty-six reverts in one hour by two editors. The point > of contention? Whether "Angels & Airwaves" is a band or "Angels & Airwaves" > are a band. (British English requires "are", as the band comprises multiple > people, while American English requires "is", as the band is a singular > entity.) ALL-CAPS edit summaries laced with profanity and death threats > liberally employed by one side. ~~~ mehrdadn I had no idea this is different in BrE and AmE! What are some other such grammatical differences? ~~~ globular-toast There are many small differences. Not grammatical but some off the top of my head: * Quite means something different. In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK", * Spelling of -ing form of words ending in l. Br: travelling, Am: traveling, * Placement of stress on multi-syllable words. It almost seems like anything British people do is the opposite in America. Br: 'adult, a'ddress, ice 'cream. Am: a'dult, 'address, 'ice cream. ~~~ bovine3dom > Quite means something different. In British "quite good" is similar to > "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK", I hear this quite a lot. In my experience we (Brits) use it mostly in your second sense, to moderate statements. We use it as an intensifier more rarely and usually in specific phrases: "quite right", "quite the ...". I believe the key difference is that we use the word with greater frequency than Americans. GLOWBE [1] is an excellent resource for checking such hunches if you are interested. [1]: [https://www.english-corpora.org/glowbe/](https://www.english- corpora.org/glowbe/) ~~~ globular-toast It depends how you say it. For me the default in British is still an intensifier, but you can signal that you're using the American way using context, tone, facial expression etc. The more important thing, I think, is that Americans don't understand the first sense at all. You have to say "pretty good" or something to have the same effect. ~~~ bovine3dom GLOWBE (which I linked above) has Americans in the wild using both senses of quite. If anything it looks like they use it as an intensifier more often than we do. Wikipedia seems to be more in line with my experience, too: > In AmE the word quite used as a qualifier is generally a reinforcement, > though it is somewhat uncommon in actual colloquial American use today and > carries an air of formality: for example, "I'm quite hungry" is a very > polite way to say "I'm very hungry". In BrE quite (which is much more common > in conversation) may have this meaning, as in "quite right" or "quite mad", > but it more commonly means "somewhat", so that in BrE "I'm quite hungry" can > mean "I'm somewhat hungry". [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_B...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English) ~~~ globular-toast GLOWBE seems to be stuff scraped from forums. Unless I'm missing something. I think there's a huge difference with how "quite" is used in written and spoken contexts. The more I think about it, I think the word can mean quite a lot of things and it's mostly driven by context and non-verbal cues. ~~~ bovine3dom Yeah, it is stuff from forums and similar places. It's interesting that you have such a different experience of it to me. ------ m463 This is a very long, debate-fueled, page. It reminds me of the page on Toilet Paper[1]. It is 35,330 bytes Meanwhile the page on Toilet Paper Orientation[2], of which there are two choices: \- OVER \- UNDER goes on and on, and manages to weigh in almost 50% larger than toilet paper at 49,667 bytes. Amusingly, "vertical" is actually mentioned, but how a hero got that in, I don't know. Probably killed or captured. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation) ~~~ YetAnotherNick Is it just me or someone else also read all the 49,667 bytes of Toilet paper orientation. ~~~ binarymax Which conclusions have you drawn and have you changed to (or solidified) the correct OVER orientation now? ~~~ 6510 I have an interesting fact not mentioned in the article. Vandals may put the end of the paper in the toilet before flushing. In the over orientation the paper hangs closer to the toilet and is less likely to break. ~~~ binarymax How many vandals are in your home? :) ------ cyborgx7 While most of these are very silly and fun, I have to admit that I do care about some of them. For example about the legitimacy of the "Nobel Prize in Economics" as a real Nobel Prize. In the end, the way history gets written is important for the propaganda of the future. And Wikipedia is the primary authority on truth in the current world. Wether we like it or not. ~~~ Tomte That ship has sailed. The Nobel Foundation lists the economics prize alongside the other ones. If it's your word against theirs, you lose. No matter how "technically right" you are. No matter what Wikipedia writes. ~~~ cyborgx7 Actually, I have found that if you point this out to people, for a lot of them it will (rightfully) diminish their trust in the institution of the Nobel Foundation, rather than increase their trust in the Economic Prize. ------ yummypaint The section on images is great. Should there be a picture of a big spider on the arachnophobia page? Which anus is most representative of humanity? The (ro)bot wars section may be of particular interest to HN ~~~ stonecharioteer I would like the photos on a phobia page to be blurred or to have a button that hides by default. I have thalassophobia and gigantophobia. It's a weird cross section of giant statues and depths. So I have a huge fear of bigass statues partially or fully submerged. So needless to day, most of the posts on /r/thalassophobia make me so scared. What if I want to reach out to that subreddit for help and support in overcoming my fear? It's extremely scary. ~~~ swiley If I where you I would open the page in elinks but I know not everyone uses that regularly and might not be familiar with it. ------ yongjik Glad to see both the Island of Dokdo (a.k.a. Takeshima) and Sea of Japan (a.k.a. the East Sea) are recognized, but it missed my favorite(?) edit war: was An(Ahn) Jung-geun, a Korean nationalist who shot and killed Japanese Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi one year before Japan's annexation of Korea, a terrorist? Should he be included in "Category: Terrorists"? You decide! ~~~ knolax Calling An Jung-Geun a terrorist would be akin to calling George Washington a terrorist. The difference between freedom fighter and terrorist may be murky to some, but generally tact dictates that you don't call someone a terrorist if his faction goes on to establish a recognized sovereign state, especially if the side he was opposing was literally comitting genocide. ~~~ lifthrasiir The word terrorist can have either a literal meaning (who intentionally uses violence for their goals) or a politically charged meaning (who does that illegitimately, with some---varying---definition of "illegitimately"). The former is very clear, while everyone will have different opinions on the latter (hey, I think the opposing state is still not compensating genocide's victims). I wouldn't mind labelling An Jung-Geun as the former for that reason, just make sure that the label is clearly documented. ~~~ dmos62 Those aren't the definitions I use. I'd argue a terrorist is someone whose goal and/or means to achieve a goal is terror. Even further off topic, but I really think we should dial down on usage of terrorist. A "terrorist" is first and foremost a criminal, the rest is sensationalization and fear mongering. ~~~ jjgreen In the UK, there are plenty of young Asian boys in prison on "Terrorist related" offences: basically watching the wrong sort of videos online. ~~~ KMag Note well: in AmE, "Asian" almost exclusively refers to East Asian or Southeast Asian origin. I can picture some of my friends back home wondering what some Japanese-Brit kids are watching that gets them in so much trouble. ~~~ jjgreen Thanks, noted. It's mostly Pakistani boys in Northern (English) cities in this situation ... ------ jedberg The saddest part about this page are the warnings and the fact that they felt these needed to exist: “This section is intended as humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community.” ~~~ notRobot It's not sad. Wikipedia is supposed to be a serious source of information, and is used by people from all over the world, many of whom may not "get" this kind of humour. The warnings make sense. ------ 6nf The lower the stakes the fiercer the competition ~~~ blaser-waffle What's that Kissinger quote? Something like "the reason fights in academia are so intense is because the stakes are so small." ------ incompatible Not an edit war, but I was amazed at the time about the discussion over the name of the Río de la Plata article, which just went on and on and on. I didn't contribute. The article at the time was just a tiny stub. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:R%C3%ADo_de_la_Plata/name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:R%C3%ADo_de_la_Plata/name) ------ throwawayjava The "Ethnic and national feuds" section seems like it gets a certain point across: things that seem silly in current context were extraordinarily important cultural touch-points at one point, and could well become so again. E.g., the U2 Irish/UK thing. Easy to laugh at today, but equally easy to understand why to some people at some point in time nationality difference between Irish and UK really mattered. Most flamewars are just real arguments that happen in the wrong time/place/tenor. OFC some examples are clearly just the product of either drugs or a bad week, or more likely both. Kind of like reading slashdot articles about "websites", hacker news articles about "capitalism", or newspaper article comment sections about "immigrants" in the late 20th/early 21st century. Or whatever. You get the point ;) ~~~ MatekCopatek Meh, dunno - a lot of people having strong opinions and emotions doesn't really mean the fact they're discussing is important. Let's say my parents are from A, I was born in B and live in C. There was an important and well known historical conflict between A, B and C fueled by nationalism at some point. I am an established artist/scientist and I don't care about my own nationality. Is it important that people flame about it on my wiki article? ------ cs02rm0 Has anyone ever made an edit on Wikipedia without someone trying to start an edit war? I think it's actually worse than StackOverflow. ~~~ kieckerjan I dread making changes to wikipedia for this reason. You invest time and energy to research something and write it up and then some semi anonymous bastard comes along and deletes it. Frustrating and a waste of effort. At least that was what I used to think until recently. I spotted such a glaring omission on the Dutch wikipedia that I felt morally compelled to remedy it myself. I did the edit and sure enough within five minutes I was alerted that someone else had edited my edit. Turns out he had just fixed a typo, sent me a thank you and added a new section of his own on something unrelated. For what it is worth, it was an uplifting little experience. ~~~ Jay2wu2u I used to contribute a lot to wikipedia in its early days in the 2000' and faced the same frustrating experience. I think this just happens to everybody, from what I heard from other editors. I would expect it to be even worse now that wp is well established and editors do not have to make a common front against academics' denigration. Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms. Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts). ~~~ ricardo81 While I used Wikipedia a lot and appreciate the generic layout which makes things easier to find, it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent content sites that provided their own value. The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web. ~~~ LyndsySimon > it still is crowdsourced content creation that killed off many independent > content sites that provided their own value. I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article. ~~~ ricardo81 Hi, no problem if you wish to call me out :-) I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable. I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links. For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations. I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up. On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text. ~~~ Jay2wu2u Note also that the centralization point is not necessarily true. On one hand, yes totally, the process of gathering knowledge is centralized on wikipedia.org . Although, it's not a place where original content is welcome, so it still links to the sources. I guess that if SEO is of concern to you, being linked by wikipedia probably have some value. On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard. Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :) ~~~ ricardo81 I wouldn't bother so much about the SEO angle as that's site owner's concern if they wish to help search engines understand them better and/or try game them - I'd say wrt search engines it's about the fact they're still the single largest primary driver in how people find new pages, and generally how sites get seen 'organically' without paying to be seen. Yes, it's cool that the entire dataset is there to be downloaded and used as you please. I have a parser written for it as part of a knowledge graph- don't get me wrong there's good things about Wikipedia I think it just came with collateral damage. Case in point is just searching for any wikipedia title and seeing where it appears in search results, also most of the "knowledge panel" results in major search engines are derived from Wikipedia/Wikidata and deprive the original content creators of their visitors. ------ paganel Re: Ányos Istvan Jedlik, I've had a uni colleague and former friend of mine who shared a given name with this inventor and whose family name was 95% similar to his, and seeing as we both live and used to study in Romania (where even the ethnic Hungarians' family names don't generally sound like this) I was curious at first what nationality he was, he told me that he's not sure either, part-Hungarian, part-Slovak. Maybe a similar approach could have been used in this inventor's case (i.e. using the "part-" thing) ~~~ MatekCopatek Kudos for trying to find a sensible solution, but most of these disputes aren't about determining which geographical area a person and/or their ancestors stem from - that would be relatively simple to resolve with sources which are typically available. Modern nationality is a highly complex topic related to not only geography, but also politics, language, religion etc. Often a dispute is not about providing information on a historical figure, but about "claiming" important people for your nation so that your collective "historical importance" is increased. ------ omega3 It makes me wonder why are editorial pieces like this one hosted on official wikipedia page. Branding a discussion as a lame diminishes the importance of the discussion. Taking as an example Chopin, the whole importance of of him being considered a Pole is reduced (you can even see it in the comments in this thread) to accusations of nationalism and tribalism. I'm worried that next time someone tries to take a more nuanced, more informed approach to editing they will stop themselves in the fear of being included in a piece like this. ~~~ huskyr Note that this article is not hosted in the official 'article' namespace, but in the 'Wikipedia' namespace (hence the Wikipedia: in the article title), which is specifically reserved for non-encyclopaedic content, including editorial pieces and opinions. ~~~ omega3 It's hosted on wikipedia.org, follows the stylesheet for Wikipedia articles and below it states: "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" ~~~ unethical_ban The point made is that it is on a kind of "meta" article. In book terms, imagine it being in some kind of "Extras" volume of the Encyclopaedia Wikipedia, not under "L" for "Lame Edit Wars". ------ namenotrequired I loved this detail under the discussion of Franz Liszt: > This Liszt is incomplete; you can help Wikipedia by trying not to expand it > further. ~~~ Tomte Some list of serial killers or so (I cannot find it) also contained a plea not to expand it. ~~~ 37 Yes, it was [0] the list of serial killers by number of victims, but since has changed [1] to say "You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries." [0] [https://i.imgur.com/hqiVtK6.png](https://i.imgur.com/hqiVtK6.png) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims) ------ gwbas1c This is dangerous: > Be careful to avoid even the semblance of taking sides in the war. If one > version was more or less accepted afterwards, it's OK to note that, but the > fact that an edit war occurred means that neither side was "in the right all > along". What about when one party is actively spreading misinformation? A statement that no one is never right in an edit war just gives misinformation credibility. (Examples could be that smoking is safe, climate change is a hoax, ect.) ~~~ chris_wot Then it’s not lame. It’s quite serious. ------ TrackerFF I'm surprised that there's no entry for "Is Finland part of Scandinavia?". Always leads to heated debates with lots of technicalities. ~~~ boomlinde As a Swede, I've honestly never heard this being debated. ~~~ freeflight As a not-Swede, I know it as a friendly joke by Scandinavia and the World [0] [0] [https://satwcomic.com/no-invitation](https://satwcomic.com/no-invitation) ------ milot The upload war for the territory of Kosovo is not a lame one, it is still a highly heated dialogue amongst politicians of both countries. While this topic had consequences during the 1999 war between Kosovo and Serbia, is still present today for which US is actively involved in this dialogue for that particular map this wouldn't classify as lame. ~~~ MatekCopatek An edit war being lame doesn't mean the article topic is lame. The lameness comes from both sides taking their own opinion and using the article to present it as the one and only truth. An atheist and a christian could have an edit war on the article of Jesus, changing it between "Son of God and our Saviour" and "fairy tale character used to control masses", which would be absolutely lame despite the objective importance of the religious figure in question. And while sensible people can at least resolve religious issues by accepting that they simply have opposing beliefs and no ability to disprove the other side, politics are even more complex in the sense that they include a lot of historical facts, not just ideological beliefs. This makes it more likely for people to feel like their truth is objective. ~~~ milot Understood, but again this is not an easy topic such as the example you gave between an Atheist and a Christian. This is something tangible which is still present and not something fictional or a belief. ~~~ MatekCopatek This is what I was referring to in my last paragraph. We didn't discover concepts like country and nation, we invented them. They're very real and have a profound effect on our lives, but at the same time they are completely fictional. If everyone ceases to believe in them, they disappear. ------ ericzawo This. This is what the internet is all about. ------ kyle-rb I enjoyed the C# section on whether it's a real sharp sign or a plain octothorpe: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars#C#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars#C#) > The issue was resolved with an e-mail exchange with Microsoft stating that > in their view it's an octothorpe symbol representing the sharp symbol, > similar to how "<=" represents the less than or equal symbol, and that thus > Microsoft does not disagree with ECMA. Written "Netscape" but pronounced > "Mozilla", eh? ------ Kyro38 Endive ou Chicon ? [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Guerres_d%27%C3...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Guerres_d%27%C3%A9dition_les_plus_futiles) ~~~ reyqn Is chicon the new chocolatine? ------ mertnesvat After reading some of them, it became obvious nationality and the race always creates a funny conflict :) In good dishes like hummus or people who accomplished something, all nationalities want to be part of their success. ------ umaar I repurposed a WebGL globe to visualise anonymous Wikipedia edits made around the world: [https://umaar.com/globe/](https://umaar.com/globe/) This is the original, which visualised tweets: [https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter](https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter) ~~~ asaibx Beautiful! Reminds me a bit of Hatnote's Listen to Wikipedia [0]. [0]: [http://listen.hatnote.com/](http://listen.hatnote.com/) ------ aaron695 Go meta meta, you know you want to - [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:La...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Lamest_edit_wars&offset=&limit=500&action=history) ------ gerdesj Well there's a thing: There are two types of vampire hunter here in the UKoGB&NI! "two opposing factions of British vampire hunters (the "orthodox" Vampire Research Society and the "revisionist" Highgate Vampire Society, " ~~~ HeadsUpHigh Die heretic! ------ reificator I'm quite fond of the Star_trek: INto DaRkneSS edit war that was covered by XCKD awhile back. [https://xkcd.com/1167/](https://xkcd.com/1167/) ------ geoffbp Oh geez, some people have a lot more spare time than me ~~~ LyndsySimon ... or some people have radically different priorities :) ------ iron0013 Wow, there are an awful lot of articles plagued by eastern European nationalists trying to re-write history and reality! ------ WCityMike "Wikipedia is a MMORPG for bureaucrats." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG) ------ skrap Most of these are about people's (or groups') nationality. Man, tribalism sucks! ~~~ noizejoy > tribalism sucks Arguably tribalism is just the consequence of our species being social animals, and therefore at the core of our essence - for better and worse ... ~~~ jccalhoun [citation needed] ~~~ noizejoy lol - were you still in wikipedia editor mode when you wrote that? Or do you really feel that my comment needed a citation here on HN (Hacker News)? And if it’s the latter, I’m genuinely curious what the proper HN etiquette would be. My comment wasn’t attempting to be particularly scholarly or to be included in a referencable work. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t know which reference to pull? Wikipedia? A highly Google ranked Psychology Today magazine article (q= difference+between+tribalism+vs+social+behaviour) ? The entire Google search result link? At least 2 of the above options might have been interpreted as condescending, and the other one an almost random pick, the randomness of it becoming a potential point of critique. So I’m genuinely curious how I might have done better. ~~~ jccalhoun It was half joking. On the serious side, I am always skeptical of claims about human nature. ~~~ noizejoy and here I thought that using “arguably” in my post would communicate that not everyone might agree. - Oh well ... ------ Jay2wu2u A funny effect of this page : it seems to me that the discussion around it on HN is way less bitterly contradictory than usual. Well, that's my impression at least, I haven't measured it. ------ anigbrowl Encyclopaedia Dramatica was an entire (and large) wiki written almost exclusively in this irreverent-to-obnoxious tone, but the entire site is offline because the administrator went to jail for something that isn't even interesting. Well, there's always [http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/) ------ schmudde Wow. This is the perfectly self-referential Wikipedia entry that post-post- modernist plebs want and deserve. ------ yitchelle How some of these edits are not attributed to trolling, I don't know. ------ mrcartmenez Oh god that was lame ------ einpoklum Not all these wars are lame: > Various supporters of the US Libertarian party (founded in > 1971) argue that they own the meaning of the word > 'libertarian', that placing it next to 'socialism' is a > contradiction in terms, and hence that libertarian socialism > (described circa 1850) cannot possibly have existed. An edit > war and request-for-deletion war ensues. The question of the meaning of "liberty" and the compatibility of liberty with socialized means of production (and the meaning of "socializing") is quite a deep subject. So, not lame. ~~~ drngdds It's still quite lame to try and get the article deleted based on that. Libertarian socialism is an ideology which exists and is noteworthy enough to get an encyclopedia article, whether or not the name is self-contradictory. ~~~ einpoklum I don't think the deletion is appropriate, but what appears to some people as petty or lame may be ideologically significant to others. ------ downshun Wasting time about wasting time. So meta. ------ 6510 These are hardly as lame as it gets. ~~~ OrgNet That is Wikipedia (you know what to do) ~~~ 6510 I gave up long ago. There are guidelines for everything but it takes 1000 times the so called established editors time to enforce them. Very few people are willing to take up tasks like that. Those who do might be unable to write articles which makes their review more of an outside look. I don't see a way to progress. Its a kind of public secret that one should avoid working on topics where editors might disagree. I find those to be the more interesting ones. ------ chkaloon I just came here because "The Intervention of the Sabine Women" is one of my favorite paintings. ~~~ ggm My mum,an art historian took us to the Louvre as kids and this picture is "nice firemen rescuing women". the gericault "raft of medusa" will always be "the Tintin picture" As well (same trip). ~~~ chkaloon I saw it at the Louvre as well. I saw it as a group of women taking charge because the men were being a-holes. ------ interblag This opinion could easily spark one of these wars, but I really wish a global community like Wikipedia wouldn't use ablest language in a title of a post like this... (caveating that I realize the concept of caring about ablest language is relatively new for most people, and that this type of language is deeply ingrained in our cultural subconscious, but it still doesn't cost much to try to avoid it where we can...) ~~~ 9nGQluzmnq3M "lame" is one of those words where virtually nobody uses it in its original sense of "unable to walk properly because of a problem with one's feet or legs". In fact, I suspect that if you polled a random set of teenage users of the word, few would even know this meaning, much less intend it when accusing a TV show, a new flavor of Doritos or their parents of being "lame". As a somewhat tenuous comparison, should we stop saying "goodbye" because it used to mean "God be with ye" and it's taking God's name in vain? ~~~ davb > As a somewhat tenuous comparison, should we stop saying "goodbye" because it > used to mean "God be with ye" ... Thanks for a wonderful piece of trivia to start the week. I had no idea this was the source of the word, but it sure was [0]. And equally fascinating, good-day [1] predates good-bye by around 400 years. [0] [https://www.etymonline.com/word/good- bye](https://www.etymonline.com/word/good-bye) [1] [https://www.etymonline.com/word/good- day](https://www.etymonline.com/word/good-day)

Ask HN: Is there a problem if STEM wages are kept low because of H1B workers? - indianface Ask HN: Is there really a problem if STEM wages are kept low because of H1B workers?<p>I guess I have trouble understanding this: Many claim that there is no shortage of STEM workers in the US. And they cite the stagnant wages for this. My question is, if there are enough STEM workers in the US, why wouldn&#x27;t they take up the jobs, even if the wages are low? Would they prefer unemployment over a low paying job?<p>On the other hand, if they prefer taking up jobs which pay higher and for which they&#x27;re also qualified, what&#x27;s the harm in that? Are they really hurt by the low STEM wages at all, then? Who is getting hurt by this system, if at all? ====== dalke There are many ways to answer. To start with, "why wouldn't they take up the jobs, even if the wages are low?" There aren't the jobs. There are twice as many workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs, and there are people working STEM jobs without degrees. The most classical economic response is that it's collective action: if no one takes a lower wage position then the wage will stay high. Remember, > the goal of many employers is to keep wages in check by using immigration to > increase the supply of workers. Alan Greenspan certainly has made this > point. Speaking at a U.S. Treasury conference on U.S. Capital Markets > Competitiveness in 2007, Greenspan argued that, "Our skilled wages are > higher than anywhere in the world. If we open up a significant window for > skilled guest workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end > the concentration of income." Greenspan believes that reducing wages for > skilled workers, including those in STEM fields, has a number of desirable > policy outcomes. Given how active many STEM employers have been in pushing > for increases in immigration, they appear to agree with the former Federal > Reserve chairman that immigration limits wage growth. - [http://cis.org/no- > stem-shortage](http://cis.org/no-stem-shortage) It is the _goal_ of most businesses to pay low wages. It is the _goal_ of employees to earn high wages. Idealistically, the government is supposed to balance these factors for the benefit of the nation as whole. Or I can answer psychologically: from the ultimatum game we know that people will reject offers which are seen as 'unfair', and we also know that people tend to rank more highly those like themselves. Hence, giving smaller amount of money to foreign workers, instead of more money to local workers, seems unfair. You could see it as class-ist: people who went to college expect to have a middle or upper-middle class job, so won't take a job which pays lower. I know one marriage which broke up partially because of this factor. Or a debt fatigue issue: paying off high student loans on a $30K/year is much harder than on $60K/year, and being in major debt for decades can wear one down and make one irritated over the situation. Or bait-and-switch: we were told that a computer engineering degree would be worthwhile, and spent years working to get the degree, only to find out we were told a lie, and now we want to take the anger out. Or a control one: a company may prefer to hire a foreign worker, whose employment and residency both depends in part on the whim of the employer, vs. a local worker who is more free to speak out about illegal or improper working conditions. (This is an aspect of keeping wages low, but I think it's important to point out in its own right.) Or a loss-of-passion issue: you implied the only tradeoff was between employment or low-paying job and that money was the key issue. If the STEM job pays too low, people will work in other fields, even if they would rather be working in the career they were trained for and love. If you need the money for your family you'll take a boring, soul sucking job for the extra $10,000/year. The exchange rate between money and happiness is not so clear cut as you suggest. ------ chrisbennet "My question is, if there are enough STEM workers in the US, why wouldn't they take up the jobs, even if the wages are low? Would they prefer unemployment over a low paying job?" They _do_ take up the resulting lower paying stem jobs if they can find them. If there isn't enough demand for STEM workers, their wages are depressed. If you make your living doing STEM stuff, this Isn't Good. It's great for employers though. That is why they love the virtual indentured servant system (H1B). Think about it. How would you feel if _your_ wages were lowered because employers colluded to lower them by saying "We don't have enough workers!." \- when there were already plenty? They just wanted _cheaper_ workers in order to accrue and even larger portion of the wealth form themselves.

Facebook acquires friend.ly - start123 http://blog.friend.ly/2011/10/facebook-friends-friend-ly/ ====== Wazzup12 Congrats to friend.ly team

An Inside Look at Anonymous, the Radical Hacking Collective - sizzle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/masked-avengers ====== phaus >Many of the country’s top security officials attended the briefing, including Alexander, Dempsey, Robert Mueller, the head of the F.B.I., and Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Gen. Martin Dempsey - Old School Armored Cavalry Officer. Knows lots about killing people, not a single thing about network security. Robert Mueller - Old School Cop. Knows lots about bank robberies. Doesn't know anything about network security nor does he care to learn about it. Janet Napolitano - Given direct authority over a large part of the federal government's cyber-defense capabilities, knows fuck-all about network security. Doesn't like using computers. Surely more than one (Alexander) actual security expert attended the meeting? ~~~ danso > _" Many of the"..."including"..._ That phrase does not preclude the attendance of other officials, some of who may be actual security experts, nor does it preclude the attendance of their staff, some of who (one would hope) most definitely are the security experts. ~~~ phaus Right, but the context of the article was using them as examples of security experts. When you give examples to support a statement, you should give the best examples you can come up with. ------ ihuman Is it just me, or is this article is more about Doyon and PLF than Anonymous? ~~~ BrandonMarc Some articles flow better when they follow a specific person / character / personality. Also, some journalists are more comfortable with this narrative form ... or may be limited in how many others they can bring into a compelling story. ------ oxryly1 Is no one left to take up the cause of defending the term "hacker" from media smearing? ~~~ PostOnce Words can, do, and should have multiple definitions. Every dictionary can tell you that. "Hacker" is the fastest, easiest way to communicate the concept of "someone who breaks into computers illegally", if you said "cracker" or anything else, no layperson would know what you're talking about. This conversation died 20 years ago. ~~~ cbd1984 Like how "gay" can mean "stupid" in some contexts, and fighting it is like sweeping back the tide, right? ~~~ dspeyer Not quite. There isn't a large group of stupid people loudly calling themselves "gay". Nor is "gay" the only widely-known English word for stupid.