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Please check out our side project, OhLife (from MeetingMix, YC S08) - sgupta http://ohlife.com/ ====== aw3c2 Quick first glance feedback on the page, take it or leave it: a) "the easiest way to" lowercase start and then "Write your life story" uppercase start. Seems weird to me. The other way around or both uppercase. b) Top bar seems empty, maybe an actual logo (that adds some other color/shade) would chance that. c) "See an example" needs no-Javascript fallback. I assumed a video behind it. Pleasant surprise to see something that finally showed me what it is all about. I strongly suggest not hiding that. It is below the break for me and adds a lot. d) Ned Flanders takes away the credibility and earnesty the page build up so far. Bad! e) "private, secure, & friendlier", the comma after secure seems out of place to me. I am not an english native but from what I know it would be more normal without it. "friendlier" is not a word, is it? Also, how is it secure if you do not tell me how you actually secure it (both for normalos and hackers please)...? f) entry is a bad empty word. I guess you already tried to find a better one. Can't think of one myself. :-( g) "a personal journal that you'll love to use" = you love the journal "why you'll love us" = you love the company h) "Oh snap, remember this?" same as Ned, does not fit the otherwise very noble theme at all. i) The open book has a weird shape. Does not feel right to me. Maybe if it was taller? x) No privacy policy (as a techie "only you can see your entries" screams for encryption against YOU (and/or hackers, this is important)), no contact, no nothing to make it human. y) Privacy tainted by Google Analytics. ~~~ ugh Re: e) (This is purely my personal opinion, but …) Anyone who uses the serial comma [1] must be seriously insane. How can you? Doesn’t your brain explode? (Calm down, calm down … [2] … there, better.) Friendlier is indeed a word, the comparative of friendly. Amazing idea, by the way, beautifully executed and immediately captured my imagination. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma> [2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g> ------ adammichaelc I notice that a huge part of my daily life is recorded in email conversations with other people -- it would be cool if I could forward a conversation to post@ohlife.com and it would automatically make it a part of my journal and make it aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Great job on the execution of this app. I have talked to others who have had this same idea, but their execution was ugly/unexcting/etc. This is clean and simple. ~~~ jbail Taking your thought a step further, let's also save the comments you make on others' blogs and bring them into your journal/blog as well. At the end of the day, I don't need another blog or a slight variation on blogging technology. I need something that basically blogs for me. If I can add value to my site by adding comments like this one to other people's sites (then pressing this "magic" button (maybe a bookmarket?) to automatically save it as part of my blog), that'd be pure awesomeness. Beyond saving boatloads of time for everyone who used it, it would create a more connected blogosphere by allowing people to link their commenter accounts (like HN, Reddit, etc) to their primary blog...effectively giving people more ownership over the things they write on others blogs, increasing author recognition, etc. ~~~ Lewisham _I need something that basically blogs for me._ Tumblr is pretty close to doing this, but the problem is its just context-free noise. It's echoes from a very, very noisy set of interactions that you perform. I had a Tumblr blog that harvested photos, blog posts, Twitter, last.fm etc etc. and it all meant absolutely nothing. This isn't really blogging, it's journaling. Writing a diary is supposed to be therapeutic because you're writing down the things you dare not talk about with others (maybe not even your SO). It's not about what you do, it's about how you feel. That's why I would like to see encryption mentioned somewhere, and pushed hard. I wrote one entry to see how it works, but I'm going to disable the notifications until I know that my personal outpourings are not actually being read by others. ------ sgupta Hey HN - we made this in our spare time, just because it was something we wanted to use. When we told some friends about the idea though they wanted to use it too, so we decided to release it. Many thanks for checking it out. ~~~ evandavid I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software. ~~~ evandavid That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to seeing where this idea goes. ------ pesco Accept PGP-encrypted mail seamlessly and you won't need a privacy policy except for those who like throwing their lifelog at random strangers. Be sure to use PGP/MIME to include the old message in your mailing. Of course, setting up PGP, let alone remembering the passphrase (gasp) is a lot to ask of the typical user who needs to use his mail client as a text editor. Otherwise, it's a cute idea, really. Please excuse cynicism. ------ ryanwaggoner The design is beautiful, but why would I use this over WriteRoom? For years now, I've been writing at least 500 words in WriteRoom every single weekday, and I'm closing in on a year of doing it (and a bunch of other habits) without missing a single day. It's not that hard, I know I'll probably never lose my entries (time machine + dropbox backups), and my privacy is more assured. I'm just not sure I see the advantage here... ~~~ Terry_B Writeroom + timemachine + dropbox. I don't think you're the target market :) ~~~ ryanwaggoner Touché. Can't believe I didn't stop to think about this :) ------ iampims No privacy policy is a no go for me. ~~~ KevinMS I have never read a privacy policy, EVER. Am I missing something good? If they violate their own privacy policy do I have legal recourse? And is it even possible to write a privacy policy without loopholes? ------ mrduncan First of all, fantastic design! Is there any way to export posts - for example, if I wanted to share them with a significant other or another family member? Also, and this is mainly curiosity, how do you handle sending posts from the past for the first few days where there really isn't much history? ~~~ sgupta Thank you! We don't have export yet, but we've definitely wanted to share some of our entries with close friends and family too. We'll be brainstorming around this! Regarding past history: For your first week, we just send you your entry from the previous day. After you've been using it for a week though, and some history has built up, we'll show you entries from a week ago (and then a month ago, etc.). Thanks for checking it out - really appreciate it! ------ thingie It'd be nice to have some export feature. After few months, if I will use this, you are going to have quite a lot of entries from me, and all of them are important to me, I don't want to lose them, so I'd like to be able to easily make backups to my own computer. ------ jasongullickson Pardon my French but; fucking beautiful. ------ vessenes I like it, and I signed up. I don't want to get emailed at 8pm -- that's after my internet cutoff, so I faked a timezone. But, it would be nice to just choose a time. Also, who did your webdesign? I like it! ~~~ sgupta We'll be adding the ability to change when the email is sent, and it should be out by next week. Clever workaround though! And thanks for the design compliment! We did it all in-house, so we really appreciate the kind words. ------ pclark This is really cool. I'm curious if _you_ can read the entries? ~~~ sgupta Thanks for the kind words! We're currently working on encrypting the entries - this is an MVP and we initially wanted to see if people like the idea. ~~~ martey It does say on the home page that "Only you can see your entries." If they are not currently encrypted, that would seem to be untrue. ~~~ colonelxc Even if they do encrypt it, they will have to be able to decrypt them server side to send you your month old posts. That means the owners are technically capable of also reading all of your posts. ~~~ mbenjaminsmith That's not entirely true. If this were purely a web-accessible blog, there's no reason you couldn't encrypt/decrypt this in the client (sending and storing encrypted text). You'd have to throw out email posting in that case though. ~~~ andreyf I think you're on to something. I look forward to the day when we are shocked by unencrypted private data accessible on the server as we do un-hashed passwords. ~~~ dublinclontarf There are a number of online password stores where all the information is only decrypted on the client. Nothing new, just not widespread. Can't remember the name. ------ hooande OhLife is one of the few apps that I use every day. If you've ever tried to keep a journal or any kind of organized daily log, I highly recommend it. ------ mdolon I'm going to try to call this one now: my gut instinct says this will be a huge success. Hopefully I remember to check back a few months down the line to see how my prediction faired. Great work guys! Edit: I just noticed lists I email don't get formatted correctly. It's slightly annoying for such an otherwise beautifully designed layout. ------ ajcronk There is a typo in the url at the end of the How did your day go? email. Should be ohlife.com/today, not ohlife.come/today ~~~ sgupta Thanks for the heads up! ------ a3_nm How exactly is this service better than, say, a simple text file on my own machine with a daily reminder set up through some other means? Why would I want to use some third-party website for something so simple that I might as well do it myself? I can see some pretty annoying downsides (need to have a crypto layer because I don't want you to be able to read my journal, need to export regularly the data to my own computer because I don't want you to be able to lose my journal), but no real advantages (it's not even more convenient!). In any case, I believe that the two following statements, at least, are plain wrong: \- "The easiest way to write your life story": no, the easiest way is to fire up a text editor and start writing. \- "Only you can see your entries": should read "Only you and us can see your entries". ------ d0m I'm not really sure I would use this. However, I really love the website design.. It's so clean. The colors are nice. The forms are simple. Maybe a little video would be nice on the frontpage. ------ blitzo You wanna drop that ned flander out, not everyone know him ------ proexploit I like it. Many times I've wanted to start a journal, just to record memories, but I detest writing. This makes it feel easy. We'll see how it goes. ------ pesco In reaction to the fact that I adore the idea despite the fundamental privacy problem (see earlier comment), here is my spin on the theme in the form of two really simple Unix shell scripts. :) <http://www.khjk.org/log/2010/jul/journal.html> Thank you for the inspiration! ------ cvg Really like the simplicity of the idea and clean look of the site. Already replied to the welcome message - waiting for it to post to the site. I like the daily emails as I don't visit too many sites daily, apart from HN and Gmail. This will be an easy way to log all that I'm up to. I'm not sure how regularly I'll do this, but time will tell. ------ fizzfur great now I have des'ray in my head. interesting idea... I'll give it a go for a while until someone realises I email myself everyday. Does it get angry if I don't reply? mini feedback on home page: The 'see example' link needs to scroll the page down for me, I didn't spot the page grow and was waiting for it to load. ------ yequalsx I think the vertical spacing between the various components is too much. If you could move things up a bit it would work real well. The colors, fonts, and graphics are very soothing and welcoming. I just didn't expect to scroll down so much. ------ techietim I know your homepage says that all your posts are private, however, adding a privacy policy page which outlines that in legal speak would probably be good idea. Otherwise, this looks great, and I'm looking forward to using it! ~~~ alttab Yes, please! Tell me in no uncertain terms you will not give away, sell, or crawl my data. I will then use it as a personal journal for work purposes. Perfect for filling out during the morning with a cup of coffee. ------ Glide Love the design. I just signed up. Can't wait to see how well it'll help me keep a journal. One thing I noticed: on the login page can you make pressing tab in the login box go directly to the password input box? ------ cheesey Pleasing, private posterous? ~~~ sami_b That is what I was also thinking. You could do that on Posterous with privacy on, you can also attach files to the email. ------ dublinclontarf "Once you have a few entries here, we recommend printing them out, sitting by a fireplace, and reading them in Morgan Freeman’s voice: " Like a twinkie, like a twinkie. ------ Tichy Ok, nice enough, but why would I mail my private thoughts to the cloud? Writing a small script that mails a random email by me to myself should be easy enough. ------ yeti Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life (tracking a new fitness program) Thanks guys ------ chamza Love the idea. Good work fellas ------ faramarz Very cool. Does that mean YC has a vested interest in your side project? ------ someone_here May I ask how this is different from, say, private wordpress.com blogs? ~~~ pclark I think they clearly articulate this on the home page

Kinect automation controller, sparked by HN, adds WebGL, available for purchase - nitrogen http://nitrogen.posterous.com/webgl-new-features-added-to-kinect-powered-ho ====== carbon14 Watched the video. Looks very solid. I'm interested in getting this setup for my HTPC/server and lamps. It could certainly save some energy as well as look cool.

New data supports finding that 30% of servers are ‘comatose’ [pdf] - r721 http://anthesisgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Case-Study_DataSupports30PercentComatoseEstimate-FINAL_06032015.pdf ====== dang Url changed from [http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937408/data- center/1-i...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937408/data- center/1-in-3-data-center-servers-is-a-zombie.html), which points to this.

Amazon S3: New pricing model - unfoldedorigami http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/05/01/amazon-s3-new-pricing-model/ ====== vlad Additional info (from the e-mail I received) in case anybody cares: "P.S. Please note that the reduced bandwidth rates shown above will also take effect for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS. The bandwidth tier in which you will be charged each month will be calculated based on your use of each of these services separately, and could therefore vary across services." ------ yaacovtp Can anyone tell me what bandwidth costs a month once you need over a terabyte a month? How would you host a 5-10 mb movie that may be viewed millions of times without using a 3rd party video host like youtube etc? ~~~ especkman Lots of dedicated hosts will include a 2-5 TB of transfer a month for $100-500. Media temple will sell 1TB chunks on shared hosting for $20/month. I've seen dedicated hosts that price bandwidth above their included allotment at $500 per TB. You can also buy based on peak bandwidth. You'll see quite a range depending on business models, peak transfer caps, etc. Mediatemple, for example, is clearly hoping that most people will never need their full allotment, and when they do, they only need it occasionally.

The Secret Lives of NYC Mega-Projects - aaronbrethorst http://gizmodo.com/the-photographer-who-documents-the-secret-life-of-nyc-m-1697968505 ====== partisan I recently spoke to a few people who have worked on these large scale municipal projects. We think we have a hard time managing active software projects. These projects have change orders alone worth well into the 10s of millions. There are so many moving parts, literally, that it is a miracle they get completed at all. I don't find the choice of photos particularly inspiring, from an artistic sense, but it is nice to have a peak into that world. ------ danjayh These projects are amazing. Seeing the work that goes into just a single subway line makes it absolutely mind blowing to me that China has managed to build entire metropolises, complete with subway systems, in well under a decade. These photos are absolutely fantastic, and I'm happy to have had the opportunity to see some of what goes into this kind of work.

First photograph of light as both a particle and wave (2015) - ThomPete http://m.phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html ====== msimpson This article is much more clear on what the image actually represents: [http://www.livescience.com/50019-image-light-wave- particle.h...](http://www.livescience.com/50019-image-light-wave- particle.html) "A clever technique and an ultrafast electron microscope have caught an image of light behaving as both particle and wave at the same time. Here, the wave nature is demonstrated in the wavy upper portion, while the particle behavior is revealed below, in the outlines showing energy quantization." Credit: Fabrizio Carbone/EPFL Also, this was all published on March 2, 2015. ------ deckar01 It took me a few reads for this to sink in. Quantum interference causes standing waves. Electron-photon particle collisions cause detectable energy release. The particle collisions occur in an interference pattern. ~~~ EarthIsHome Yes, and the colors describe the speeds of the particles as a result of tbe electron-photon collisions. It's not necessarily the particles we're seeing, just the particle behaviors from their collisions. ------ _nalply Swiss here. The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where this experiment has been carried out, is one of the two federal institutes of technology, the other one is the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_F%C3%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_F%C3%A9d%C3%A9rale_de_Lausanne) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich) ------ nsxwolf It didn't explain the picture. ~~~ leksak Yeah, I don't know how to interpret it. It's not immediately obvious to me that I'm looking at a wave and particles at the same time. ~~~ URSpider94 What the image represents is the energy loss/gain of a whole bunch of electrons that interact one at a time with a light wave traveling along a tiny metal wire (we call this kind of captive light wave a "phonon"). For each electron fired at the wire, it can either pass through unscathed, or it can interact with an electron and scatter off with a different energy, like two billiard balls hitting each other. The collision is fundamentally a collision between two particles. However, the fact that the properties of the collisions vary sinusoidally along the length of the wire imply that the photon is also acting like a wave oscillating up and down the wire. I disagree that this is the "first time" that we've observed simultaneous wave-particle behavior, you can see the same thing by firing photons at two narrowly-placed slits. This results in a diffraction pattern as if the photons were interfering like waves, but we can confirm that we're detecting single photons at the detector, and you can even confirm that each photon travels through one slit or the other ... See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double- slit_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment) ~~~ AnimalMuppet One nit: A phonon is a vibration of a lattice, not light. ~~~ URSpider94 Yep, that should have said "plasmon". I messed up all of my comments on this thread. A plasmon isn't technically light either, it's an oscillation of the electric field in a conductor -- but it has wave/particle duality like a photon. ------ emerongi It's hard to grasp what was really captured on that image, but this still doesn't rule out the pilot wave theory. I think it's misleading to call it a photograph of light "as both a particle and wave". ------ amelius I have a question about QM, which perhaps somebody here can answer: Is quantization an inherent property of the photon, or is it a property of the material (or of the interaction with it)? ~~~ URSpider94 The other answers posted here are not quite right. Light energy is indeed inherently quantized, and a photon is one quantum of light. In other words, you can't have a half-photon of light, only even multiples. Einstein wrote the equation "E = h*(nu)", where h is the so-called "Planck's constant", and nu is the frequency of light. Translated, this means that each photon carries an amount of energy proportional to its frequency, higher- frequency photons (IR -> red -> blue -> UV -> X-ray) carry more energy. tl;dr: Quantization is an inherent property of light. ~~~ amelius > E = h*(nu) Yes, but the question is whether that is due to the material not being able to produce non-quantized photons. Stated differently, suppose we had a different way of generating photons, then could we theoretically create them in a non- quantized way? ~~~ lisivka Yep. They called "radiowaves". ~~~ amelius Sounds logical, but then again, how fundamental is the "Q" in "QM"? ~~~ lisivka Extremely. Broken quanta will release its energy. Check solitons (example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD32kkoFU3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD32kkoFU3Y) ). Soliton wave can cross ocean, but if you broke it pattern, you will have regular waves, not a half of solition. ------ shshhdhs This is really cool! What's the reason for the blue & violet colors to be raised more than others in the wave? Is it just the timing of the snapshot? As in, another picture might show another color at the top of the wave? Or is the standing wave "stuck" in that position? ~~~ mdturnerphys That's just the color scale they've used for the z axis. ------ mzs [https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/epfd- tfe0301...](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/epfd- tfe030115.php) ------ Koshkin > _an exchange of energy "packets" (quanta) between electrons and photons_ I thought that photons _are_ the energy quanta (that electrons can _absorb_ or lose). ------ posterboy Darn the ambiguous english language, do they mean the photograph is a particle-wave? because that wouldn't be a first. /s

Ask HN: What are the best Bay Area programming meetups? - fuqted Specifically for someone looking to learn. I&#x27;m in Oakland and pretty open as far as languages go.<p>What meetups do you guys go to? ====== dhruvkar The east bay python meetup is pretty relaxed, and has grown quite a bit in the last year. It's at Lost and Found on Telegraph on the 1st Tuesday of every month. [http://meetu.ps/e/.chxnhlyvpbcb/9Plqj/a](http://meetu.ps/e/.chxnhlyvpbcb/9Plqj/a) ~~~ fuqted Ok, I'll check that out thanks. I've gone to the weekly Js meeting at L & F.

Switch generic icon to negative feedback for non-https sites - diafygi https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087 ====== codezero There have been a few times when I've got a legitimate red icon for bad certificates and what not. Pushing this to the rest of the web will mean I'll miss real errors through the noise because they happen so infrequently that I'll just stop checking if every website has a red icon. ~~~ briansmith Browsers completely stop the page from loading and show a full-page error for a certificate error. There's a huge difference between that and a small icon in the location bar. Plus, if the red icon that is suggested in that bug report is too loud, a less loud indicator could be used instead. There's a lot more to designing a UI for this than just changing the icon. For example, when you type "foo.com" into the address bar, browsers generally default to "[http://foo.com"](http://foo.com") instead of "[https://foo.com."](https://foo.com.") And, consequently, browsers tend to show "[http://foo.com"](http://foo.com") as "foo.com" to suggest that you don't need to type the "[http://"](http://") part. All of that needs to change to become a lot smarter in order for this type of idea to succeed. However, it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to consider making all those changes. In fact, I think these changes should be a high priority for browsers makers. tl;dr: I suggest people brainstorm ways to improve upon the idea to make it workable, instead of trying to shoot it down. ~~~ codezero Honestly, I'd prefer a heuristic that could determine whether https was significant on the current URL. Are there submitted values, cookies of importance, get parameters? There are a lot of reasons https is important and there are a lot of places where it's totally not important. If you draw people's attention to something that isn't seriously important, then those times when the whole screen sends a warning you go, "oh well, I had that red warning going all along and it didn't matter, so why do I care?" I am saying that by pushing a warning where it's not necessary, you diminish the value of any warning. ~~~ briansmith > There are a lot of places where it's totally not important. See my other replies on this page for some reasons why I think there are no pages where HTTPS is not important. I agree with you regarding the UI issues and the potential to generate apathy by crying wolf. That's why I think that the specifics of the linked-to proposal won't work. But, I think the general idea is worth investigating. It just requires some user research. Also, the fact that browsers support a non-HTTPS mode at all is really the bigger UI issue. Imagine if HTTPS was the only option. The biggest UI security problems would instantly vanish! That's a big reason why a lot of people are actively working so hard on finding ways to make HTTPS work for everybody on every site. ------ mplewis Putting a red icon on 90% of all websites means the meaning of the icon will just saturate and people won't pay attention to the red icon any more. ~~~ briansmith FWIW, ~33% of all pages are loaded over HTTPS already in Firefox, according to the metrics collected by the browser. And, over 50% of all HTTP requests (including subresources like images and scripts embedded on a page) are over HTTPS, again according to the usage data collected by the browser. ~~~ scrollaway I'd be willing to bet quite high all these HTTPS requests are all on the same specific services (facebook, gmail, google would already take most of them). ------ danso No. Not all sites exchange data worth the SSL-layer...let's say, 30-50% of the sites...that means for roughly half a user's non-email/social-networking web- browsing, they're going to either be saturated with a warning message that, if psychology research is to believed, is going to be promptly ignored like your apartment's super-sensitive smoke detector or the boy watching out for wolves. What's the actual reasoning in OP's mind here? That the average web user is someone who, when the computer gives some warning sign that is disconnected from any kind of discernable threat, that the user will automatically take it seriously? That they'll demand to know why they're in danger, and then will rise up and petition the Internet regulatory commission to make all sites do what it takes to make that red icon go away, and the web will be more secure? I don't want to be overtly negative towards well-intended idealism, but this is such a bizarrely naive viewpoint that it must be openly challenged. That, and it just blithely ignores all the research showing what happens when humans are overloaded with impotent warning signs. This is the kind of idealism- without-consequences that can end up causing more harm than good. ~~~ scrollaway This is not a user-oriented proposal, this is clearly directed at the website owners which are not going to want _their_ users to see red stuff on the URL bar. ~~~ danso Not a bad strategy. Until the website owners take the path of least resistance between: A. Reconfiguring their stack to use SSL. B. Putting a Javascript-powered banner helpfully informing all Firefox users that their browser has a security flaw ("that's why that red icon is there") and they should follow the included hyperlinks to install the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Chrome and then delete Firefox from their systems. ~~~ scrollaway That B strategy might have worked a few years back for grandmas that got Firefox installed by their geeky grandson, but Firefox is popular now. And people (geek or no geek) don't like being told the stuff _they_ use is not good. Here's an experiment you can do at home: Try telling an emacs user Vim is better. ------ omni Why should my blog of static pages need to be served over HTTPS to avoid having Firefox slap a scary red icon next to it? ~~~ scrollaway Why shouldn't it is the real question. There's a parallel universe where ssh is plaintext, and only "sensitive commands", such as "sudo", are encrypted. In that universe though, plaintext HTTP doesn't exist and they're making fun of us. ~~~ mynameisvlad Because no sensitive content is being transferred. Why put the extra hassle of getting and installing a non-self-signed certificate for a blog where the user doesn't even submit data? There's no reason for that connection to be secure. ~~~ scrollaway > Because no sensitive content is being transferred. You're answering "why" instead of answering "why not" again. "Why should you lock your door if you don't have anything expensive?" Plaintext HTTP should not exist, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. I wouldn't have to come up with elaborate scenarios where having HTTPS from the get go would have saved lives, and you wouldn't have to come up with crazy "but that'll never happen" retort to them. Unfortunately, plaintext HTTP exists, so here we are, with me telling you that the pro-gay rights piece you wrote on your static blog contains keywords that make it be viewed as extremism/terrorism by Russia's automated monitoring systems and anyone reading it gets immediately added to a watchlist. Unfortunately, a few of your readers are from russia and six months later those readers join a political protest against the killing of kittens or something. Their government notices that and makes sure to "take action". And to think HTTPS could have avoided that. ~~~ Yver > "Why should you lock your door if you don't have anything expensive?" Locks come standard on every door, they don't expire after a given time and every child knows how to use them. See how your comparison to acquiring, setting up and maintainning an SSL certificate is nonsensical? > And to think HTTPS could have avoided that. If the NSA tags people who look for info on TOR as extremists, an hypothetical state might tag people who use HTTPS. And to think that HTTP could have avoided that! I mean, if every argument is an hypothetical, anything is possible. ~~~ scrollaway If HTTPS is used globally, people can't be flagged for using it (or the flags end up being useless). Right now, you are correct, people could hypothetically be flagged for using HTTPS. This would not happen if every static blog and what not out there would use it. Thank you for reinforcing my point, I appreciate the help. ------ rcthompson What about warning the user when they start to type in a login box on a non- https site? Browsers should already know what is a login box, since they know how to prompt you to remember the password. ~~~ timmclean Sort of like what IE used to do the first time you submitted a form? [http://bmlinks-committee.jbmia.or.jp/eng/image/EnDlg03.gif](http://bmlinks- committee.jbmia.or.jp/eng/image/EnDlg03.gif) ~~~ scrollaway Talk about full circle. ------ john2x The proposed icon is hard to parse. Better an open lock? And maybe in orange instead of jarring red. Or even better, make the secure icon something universally positive, like a green smiley face or a check mark. Then the insecure icon can be an orange sad face or X mark. (Lock icon can be ambiguous to non-techies. i.e. why is the url locked? or is that a suitcase/purse?) ------ Karunamon Greeaaaat. Just what everyone needs. An extra expense and further entrenchment of our exploitative CA system. I like this idea, but not when it puts more money in the pocket of the CAs. ~~~ scrollaway If a better/broader alternative to CAs comes along and is adopted (say, such as SPDY), I take it the icon would behave the same way. Your comment is really unwarranted... Not to mention this is just some random guy. It's not like mozilla is actually thinking about this (they really should). ~~~ Karunamon >Your comment is really unwarranted... Not really - changes like this don't exist in a vacuum. Anything that makes the existing CA's more indispensable (say, by driving customers their way by making it appear bad to not do business with them) is a net negative. ------ kbaker They should at least wait for DANE + DNSSEC, which is a tangible (and free) alternative to the CA system, even though it would still be quite a bit of effort. I'd be curious to know how this would affect local servers in the intranet. Surely we wouldn't want to have to start issuing certs for everything inside the firewall as well? I think this is a bit too shortsighted of a bug report. Anyways, since this is not an official proposal, I think it will just be closed as invalid by Mozilla. ------ peterkelly I vote for the NSA logo

Michael Arndt to Write Screenplay for Star Wars: Episode VII - jwallaceparker http://starwars.com/news/michael-arndt-to-write-screenplay-for-star-wars-episode-vii.html ====== lazugod ...you posted this eleven times. ~~~ dfc Twelve times. I flagged 11 of them.

The New Mind Control: How the Internet Flips Elections and Alters Our Thoughts - Jerry2 https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts ====== dc2 "Google and its top executives donated more than $800,000 to President Barack Obama and just $37,000 to his opponent, Mitt Romney." Did you just Alter My Thoughts? How much of that $837,000 was Google versus its top executives (based on their personal preferences)?

Which is better on Android: divide by 2 or shift by 1? - zdw https://jakewharton.com/which-is-better-on-android-divide-by-two-or-shift-by-one/ ====== anyfoo Thorough work. Going back to the premise, I want to offer an alternative viewpoint by asking whether, in the case of binary trees implemented by arrays, “integer division by 2” of the array index is necessarily the best interpretation of what you are trying to do here? Instead, you can also see the array index as a bit string, where every bit tells you which path to go down, left or right. In that case, “shifting right by one bit” moves you up to the parent. “Shifting left” moves you down to the left child. Flipping one bit flips you over to the other child. Bit wise operations indeed seem more natural with that interpretation. A lot of “power of 2” multiplication/division has similar interpretations. For example, when walking page tables, you could see walking down the levels as “dividing by the size of the granule”, or simply as “shifting right to select the index on that level”. No contest on anything where the power of 2 is coincidence, i.e. for non “computery” things where there is no such underlying structure. ~~~ yiyus I had a slightly similar experience at work. We deal a lot with angles and binary angles are often the most efficient representation. Many colleagues find it annoying because they insist on converting every binary angle to radian or degrees, but if you actually interpret the bits as successive divisions of a circumference, I actually find the binary representation way more intuitive than a floating point number. ~~~ slavik81 That method is exactly equivalent to using revolutions as the unit with a fixed-point numeric representation. Maybe your skeptical colleagues would find that perspective more palatable? ~~~ yiyus That's some good advice. Unfortunately, most of the people I work with do not have a computer science background (they are materials scientists and mechanical engineers), so they are not familiarized with fixed-point arithmetic neither. ------ twoodfin I appreciate the thorough exploration and resulting detail in this article. Still, I find it a little sad that either the state of our toolchains or the perception thereof prevent it from being self-evident that basic strength reduction will always happen, and developers need not worry about the cost of expressing simple arithmetic operations in the clearest way. ~~~ bsder I would go further in that many programmers don't understand the difference between logical and arithmetic operations and why they exist. I have had to puzzle over far too much code doing adds/subtracts/multiplies/divides instead of and/or/xor/shift _FAR_ too often. I blame Java not having an unsigned type. There are apparently some weird tricks you can do with arithmetic in Java that operate on things like an unsigned type without having to go up to the next higher integer width. ~~~ vbezhenar What exactly do you miss in Java? It's possible to treat int as unsigned for all the necessary operations. ~~~ blibble plus Java's had various unsigned integer operations on Integer for years ------ lgessler Question from a perf noob: it seems like this in principle only shows that there's no difference for a Pixel 3 because other Android machines could have processors that have/lack an optimization for shift or divide. Couldn't a different Android phone have different performance characteristics? ~~~ lgg It is not that the processor that contains an optimization per se. The thing to understand is that shift is fundamentally a simpler operation than multiply... a shift can be implemented with a few transistors per bit and done in a single cycle trivially. A multiply unit takes tons of transistors, and often takes multiple cycles (this is a trade off you make when you design a multiply unit, you can save space by making it work on smaller integers and reusing it multiple times over several cycles to do multiplies of larger integers, just you like you iteratively multiply digits one you do it on paper by hand). Even on processors that have single cycle multipliers it takes a lot more power to do a multiply than a shift because of all the extra hardware you need to engage. Since shifts are fundamentally simpler than multiplies it always makes sense to do this transform. This is one of a number of transforms that are generally called "strength reductions" <[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_reduction>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_reduction>), converting for a more general expensive operation into a more constrained cheaper operation. In this case it is the equivalent to knowing that if you want to multiply a number by 10 you can just add a 0 at the beginning instead of having to write all the work by hand. The only reason not to do this transform would be if you had a CPU that literally does not have a shift operation, but I cannot think of any such part. Even if you did have such a part, the odds are you could emulate a shift using other other instructions and still outperform the multiply. This has been a standard optimization for half a century. The original C compiler for the PDP-11 did these transforms even when you turned off optimizations <[http://c-faq.com/misc/shifts.html>](http://c-faq.com/misc/shifts.html>). ~~~ cogman10 > This has been a standard optimization for half a century. The original C > compiler for the PDP-11 did these transforms even when you turned off > optimizations Consider this, a common easily applied optimization that compilers have been doing for half a century MAY have made it's way into modern CPUs. Transistors aren't nearly as power hungry as you paint them and CPUs aren't nearly as bad at optimization. There is no reason to switch a multiply or divide for a shift. The ONLY reason to make that switch is if you are dealing with the simplest of processors (Such as a microwave processors). If you are using anything developed in the last 10 years that consumes more than 1W of power, chances are really high that the you aren't saving any power by using shifts instead of multiples. It is the sort of micro-optimization that fundamentally misunderstands how modern CPUs actually work and over estimates how much power or space transistors actually need. ~~~ reitzensteinm Since it's what I'm typing this on, let's look at Skylake. Multiply: Latency 3, Throughput 1 Shift: Latency 1, Throughput 2 If the ALU contained an early out or fast path for simpler multiplies, the latency would read 1-3. You can verify this by looking at div, which does early out and has a latency of 35-88. Any compiler that doesn't swap a multiply to a shift when it can is negligent. [https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf](https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf) ------ necovek I am really struggling to understand the benchmark output quoted. Can anyone elaborate what does benchmark=3/4 ns mean, and the count? Is the set-up part of the benchmark (test structure suggest not, but just to make sure)? The only way I can read it is that 4000 divisions takes 4ns, and 4000 shift- rights takes 3ns, but that only has 1 digit of precision, which makes it unusable for comparison, but even then suggests a 25%/33% difference, which is not insignificant. Also, the VM seems to optimise multiply out, so it must be doing it for a reason. ~~~ thechao It's definitely not 4000 divisions per 4ns — that'd imply a terahertz computer. I think it's saying that the amortized cost of 4000 divisions is 4ns per division. Small integer division is an "easy win" for a dedicated HW path, so it doesn't surprise me that it's only a little slower than a shift-right. Variable length right shifts aren't that fast. ~~~ bonzini It's not small integer division that is being benchmarked, the JIT compiler has reduced it to an addition, a conditional move and a right shift. This sequence is then benchmarked against the right shift. ~~~ saagarjha ART is an AOT complier, is it not? ~~~ monocasa It's both AOT and JIT. [https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/jit- compiler](https://source.android.com/devices/tech/dalvik/jit-compiler) ~~~ pjmlp With a PGO cache updated across execution runs and devices (since Android 10 PGO data is shared across the Play Store). ~~~ ignoramous For anyone like me wondering what a PGO is: [https://source.android.com/devices/tech/perf/pgo](https://source.android.com/devices/tech/perf/pgo) ------ MithrilTuxedo Now I'm wondering if there's a power usage difference between the two. It stands to reason that if two operations take the same amount of time, but one requires more transistors to compute, power usage should diverge. ~~~ wmf For scalar instructions, most of the energy is consumed in scheduling not executing them. This means that cycles is a good proxy for total energy. ------ saurik Everyone is talking about this microoptimization on the math of the access but all I can think about is how the data structure you are building using this is probably memory bandwidth limited and powers-of-two storage is almost definitely going to cause some kind of cache line aliasing, so maybe you should try something non-obvious like "division by 3" (after doing three key comparisons instead of one) and see if it makes your algorithm much much faster than messing around with a division by 2; there was even some good analysis of this effect a while back I can reference. [https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/30/binary-search-is-a- pathologic...](https://pvk.ca/Blog/2012/07/30/binary-search-is-a-pathological- case-for-caches/) ------ sambe Am I mis-reading this? The article keeps claiming there is no difference but the way I read it the compiler(s) are transforming mul/div to shifts. i.e. it very likely _is_ faster on the hardware but it won't matter for this particular toolchain because of the conversion. ~~~ chrisseaton > Am I mis-reading this? The article keeps claiming there is no difference but > the way I read it the compiler(s) are transforming mul/div to shifts. i.e. > it very likely is faster on the hardware but it won't matter for this > particular toolchain because of the conversion. There is no difference... because of the conversion. ~~~ sambe Right: for now, in certain situations, on the tested toolchain. Even ignoring those caveats, several commentators seem to have got the impression that this applies to the CPU. ~~~ uluyol These types of transformations are simple to detect, well known, and applied by ~every compiler. Unless you have evidence otherwise (ASM differences or benchmarks), there is no use in manually transforming your arithmetic into something more complex but faster. The compiler will do it for you. ~~~ sambe I think that's a point which is bordering on religious - many people would debate trusting the compiler, especially over time and more complex situations. I'd certainly tend to agree with you in general but more for the reason that the compiler can abstract over hardware changes across time. I'd take that benefit over the risk of the optimisation not being applied for most code I write - non-optimisations would be considered bugs and probably/eventually fixed. I'd strongly disagree the code is more complex (in this case). ~~~ merlincorey It especially seems religious to me because it's saying that somehow "/ 2" is simpler than ">> 1" because it has one less character for the symbol, and because division is a more commonly known operator to most people than bitwise shifting. It seems to me that they are equally simple if we assume that programmers dealing with low level or performance intensive code know what a bitwise shift is and ignore the extra character, then they are literally equivalently complicated expressions with 1 symbol and 1 value applied to the symbol. ~~~ kadoban Code does not happen in a vacuum. Which is more understandable/simple depends on the domain of the code in question. Usually that's going to be the multiply or the divide. ~~~ merlincorey Right, but my statement was that the domain would be low level or performance intensive code -- do you disagree that in that domain they are equally simple? ------ remcob Another fast way to double a number is to add it to itself. ~~~ fyp Isn't that the wrong direction for the optimization? I would assume you would want to compile adding two numbers into shifting by one, not the other way around. (I know nothing about hardware, it just intuitively seems like moving a bunch of bits over by 1 should be faster than dealing with xor and carries) ~~~ jcranmer In hardware terms, adders are simpler than shifters. You can usually do both in a single cycle, but it's going to be lower power to do the add instead of the shift. To put this in more concrete terms: an N-bit adder involves N 1-bit stages to add each bit, and then a 1-bit carry network on top of that, which has N stages in it. So overall, it's O(N) in terms of hardware. An N-bit shift unit is going to use lg N N-bit muxes--or O(N lg N) in terms of hardware. Total gate delay in both cases is O(lg N), but adders have O(N) hardware (and thus energy consumption) while shifters have O(N lg N). A secondary consequence of being larger area is that a superscalar architecture may choose to have one execution unit that has an adder and a shifter and a second that only has the adder. So an addition may schedule better than a shift, since there are more things it can execute on. ~~~ Tuna-Fish > To put this in more concrete terms: an N-bit adder involves N 1-bit stages > to add each bit, and then a 1-bit carry network on top of that, which has N > stages in it. So overall, it's O(N) in terms of hardware. O(N) adders cannot meet the latency demands of modern high-frequency CPUs. The actual complexity of adders in real CPUs is usually O(N²). ------ Animats He did this in Java? In one case, running on an emulator? That's removed too far from the hardware for this kind of benchmarking. Try in a hard-compiled language. Using shifts for constant divide has been a compiler code generator optimization for decades. This is not something programmers have needed to worry about in source code for a long time, unless targeting some small microcontroller that lacks fast divide hardware. ~~~ pjmlp Java is a hard-compiled language on Android since version 5.0. ART, which replaced Dalvik on 5.0 (available as experimental on 4.4), was AOT only up to version 7.0. As it was proven that Android users lack the patience of a C++ developer when updating their apps, Google adopted another approach with version 7.0. A multi-tier compiler infrastructure, composed by a very fast interpreter hand written in Assembly for fast startup, a JIT compiler for the first optimization level, with gathering of PGO data, then the AOT compiler runs in the background and when the device is idle gets that PGO data and just like a C++ compiler with PGO data, outputs a clean AOT compiled binary for the usual user workflow. In case of an update or changes in the workflow that trigger the execution of code that wasn't AOT compiled, the process restarts. As means to reduce this kind of de-optimizations, since Android 10 those PGO files are uploaded into the Play Store and when a user installs an application that already has PGO data available, it is downloaded alongside the APK and the AOT compiler can do its job right from the start. In any case, he used _dex2aot_ which is the AOT compiler daemon on Android. Microsoft has gone through similar process with .NET for UWP, with the main difference that the AOT compiler lives on the Microsoft store and what gets downloaded is already straight binary code. Apparently mixing language capabilities with toolchains keeps being an issue. ------ renewiltord How come the division is almost the same as the shifting? Is the CPU pipelining the operations between iterations of the loop or something? There is a direct data-dependency in those operations but not between iterations so perhaps that's it? AFAIK there's no fused add-shift op that could be used. ------ esnellman Given the number of execution loops. The profiler applied an optimization. Don't expect this optimization during initial executions or seldom used code or cases where properties of the method do not allow it to be optimized; be it on Android VMs or JVMs. ------ pacman83 Apart from the fact that compilers are really good and generally will choose the best option for you, it seems like it boils down to what processor is used. On Android aren't ARM processors the most common? ~~~ pjmlp Yes, followed by some Intel and MIPS survivors. ------ jejones3141 If it's signed int, unless you know the value is positive you can't just shift right 1--if the result of the shift is negative, you have to add 1. ~~~ chrisseaton Can't you do an arithmetic shift-right? That takes the sign into account. ~~~ jcranmer No. An arithmetic shift right does a division that rounds down; an integer division operation instead truncates (rounds to zero). The easiest example is -1 / 2: -1 / 2 is 0, but -1 ashr 1 is -1. To replace a signed division with ashr, you have to know that for all negative inputs, the value of the bits shifted out are all 0. ------ Too I thought this discussion was settled 30 years ago? Write what you want to do, not how to do it. There is no difference. ------ nicetryguy ...So the Dalvik VM sucks? ~~~ pjmlp Yes it sucks, that is why it was replaced by ART on Android 5.0. ~~~ nicetryguy Ah, i haven't kept up. Anyway, a right bit shift should absolutely be quicker than floating point or even integer division. If it isn't, that is an implementation problem. ~~~ pjmlp ART as of Android 10, combines an hand written interpreter in Assembly, a JIT compiler that generates PGO data as well, and an AOT PGO based optimizing compiler capable of doing bounds check elision, de-virtualization, auto- vectorization, escape analysis and a couple of other traditional optimizations. The PGO metadata files also get shared across devices via the Play Store as means to steer the AOT compiler into the optimal level of optimization across all users of the application. I assume that at the current level of ongoing ART optimizations, the team would consider that a compiler bug. ~~~ nicetryguy Awesome info! Thanks! What would you recommend for an IDE? I used Eclipse some years ago. Is that still common? I may want to experiment with some Android flavored Java again. ~~~ pjmlp Android Studio is the official IDE, it is a merge of InteliJ with Clion and Google specific plugins. ------ madhato Is there an advantage of using multiply by .5 versus divide by 2? ~~~ fox8091 Multiply by 0.5 would be slower, as it's a floating point operation rather than simple arithmetic. ------ nipxx if these kinds of optimizations make a difference for your applications write it in native code, dammitl ~~~ pjmlp Which pretty much means Assembly, given that Java and Koltin go through JVM and DEX bytecodes to machine code, and C and C++ on Android go through LLVM bitcode to machine code. ------ temac TLDR: it is the same, like it should. We are in 2020. Don't shift by 1 instead of /2 if you mean to /2. ~~~ OrgNet lol... if you care about optimizing, you should care about all possible optimizations... (even if most of today's platforms don't) ~~~ temac Yeah but you should also then understand what will yield real results, and >>1 instead of /2 has become useless to write manually a long time ago, whereas e.g. continuous memory is more important than ever. You will not optimize a lot by attempting micro techniques from 30 years ago. Other random example: in some edge cases, integer division replacement by a multiplication _can_ still be relevant today (depends on if its a constant, the compiler, and if nothing optimized also on the exact processor, though, because last models are already ultra-fast with the real integer divide instructions), but I suspect in 15 years (maybe even 10) this will be completely irrelevant, at least for high perf targets. ------ drivebycomment News at 11 - someone learned strength reduction exists, which have been in use for the past 4 decades. ~~~ anyfoo Had you read the article, you would have known that the question answered here was whether, and where in the process, strength reduction was actually applied. ------ fefe23 A few points. 1\. Looking at the Java bytecode is practically meaningless, you would have to look at the machine code the JIT is creating. 2\. A division by 2 is identical to a shift right by 1 only if the integer is unsigned. Java integers are signed. Try this program in C to see for yourself: int foo(int a) { return a/2; } int bar(int a) { return a>>1; } Run gcc -S -O2 to get assembly output in text form. Basically, the problem is this: 5/2 -> 2 (ok, rounds down) 5>>1 -> 2 (ok, same) -5/2 -> -2 (ok, rounds down) -5>>1 -> -3 (oops!) 3\. The question is really about the JIT backend for the target platform, which means CPU platform, not OS platform. So "on Android" does not make much sense here, as Android exists for x86 and ARM and those JIT backends might behave differently. ~~~ anyfoo All things directly addressed by the article. ------ devit Honestly, it's hard to read this article and not question the author's mental state or intelligence. He literally presents x86 and ARM assembly dumps where shift right generates one instruction, and divide generates that same instruction plus several others. Then, he feels the need to run an unnecessary benchmark (most likely screwing it up somehow) and concludes there is no difference! But how can there possibly be no performance difference, in general, between the CPU running an ALU instruction and running that same instruction plus several other ALU instructions?!? It's almost unbelievable. As to how he screwed up the benchmark, my guesses are that either he failed to inline the function (and the CPU is really bad), or failed to prevent the optimizer from optimizing the whole loop, or didn't run enough iterations, or perhaps he ran the benchmark on a different VM than what produced the assembly (or maybe somehow the CPU can extract instruction level parallelism in this microbenchmark, but obviously that doesn't generalize to arbitrary code). ~~~ brianyu8 While I think that there is merit to your argument, I feel like it could have been presented without questioning the author's intelligence or mental state.

WinAntiRansom – Prevents encryption of your files - spaceboy https://www.winpatrol.com/winantiransom/ ====== eyer2016 Lol

Leaked north korean documentary exposes western propaganda. - daralthus http://superchief.tv/leaked-north-korean-documentary-exposes-western-propaganda-and-its-scary-how-true-it-is/ ====== draq How do you imagine a world without "propaganda"? Mine would be one without this documentary. ------ stefantalpalaru It's propaganda about propaganda and it seems targeted at westerners. Too many sensitive subjects for Dear Leader's flock. ------ bediger4000 The definition of "reality tee vee" given: shows about "talentless narcissists who like to talk about themselves and go shopping". This is the kind of material that has endeared North Korea to propaganda cognoscenti everywhere. ------ ericxb The film was produced in New Zealand. Here is a link to a video report which includes an interview with the producer: [http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz/Media-3-Season-1-Ep-16/tabid/59/ar...](http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz/Media-3-Season-1-Ep-16/tabid/59/articleID/8890/MCat/540/Default.aspx) ------ calciphus Let's take a moment here and wonder a "documentary team" in a country with the kind of dictatorial control that North Korea has would have access to so much American TV footage. "Leaked"? You mean "released by the North Korean government"? ~~~ ChuckMcM If you read the back story the translator believes exactly that, which is to say that the DPRK created it for westerners. What is interesting is that the website its on has completely bought into the message. They say things like "And jesus, is it on the f&k*g money." That suggests that it was targeted exactly to the sort of non-critical thinker/reader that the site "superchief" represents, and by all indications manages to hit on all of the sensitive spots. That is the point of propaganda, and whether it is anti-Semitic white supremacist crap or DPRK crap it requires that the person reading it check their assumptions at the door.

Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of - slinky http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/16/cloud-computing-for-the-rest-of-us ====== 51Cards I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever" ~~~ JonnieCache _> cloud computing -- that catchall phrase corporations use to describe services delivered via the Internet_ With this line they are streets ahead of most pure tech sites in terms of accuracy. ~~~ ch0wn I love Dropbox for not using this horrible term. ~~~ nbashaw Horrible term? Just because it's the catch phrase du jour doesn't mean it's totally meaningless. I get annoyed with the buzz and malapropism just as much as the next guy, but like it or not, cloud computing is a major global phenomenon. ~~~ iamdave It IS a meaningless phrase in the sense that it's being used. When I was studying network engineering, "the cloud" used to encompass the broader network environment that INCLUDED the Internet as an extension of your enterprise infrastructure. Now? It's a hyperbolic, singular phrase that is limited to using the internet as an extension of your operating system without fully explaining or at least detailing for the end user why it matters. Especially in the case of those god.awful Microsoft commercials. In their case, the way it's presented, the cloud is nothing less synonymous with social networking. Change your Facebook status from Windows? That's the cloud. Upload a picture to Flickr? That's the cloud. It's no better than that phase of 'web 2.0' that was nothing more than superficial design elements that included shiny buttons, dropping vowels and slapping the term 'beta' on everything. The web is cyclical and this is the latest cycle. While that in and of itself isn't BAD per se, it's a phrase that's come synonymous with "rockstar" and "ninja" when talking about hiring developers. A total and complete non sequitur. ------ SwellJoe I've been shocked at how often I see the Dropbox icon on friend's systems. I no longer live in silicon valley, and so I am completely out of the echo chamber (except what I read here at HN). These are not nerds, not techies, and not people who follow TechCrunch. These are artists, musicians, old folks, nomads, and all sorts of folks that just don't do technology. But, they get Dropbox. Admittedly, my parents aren't using Dropbox, but my parents don't read CNN.com, either, and I can't imagine what they would even use Dropbox for. I can't even get them to use flickr for photos, despite buying them a digital camera (my mom still uses a film camera when she travels because she's afraid she'll lose or break the digital one). If I could invest in Dropbox, I would. But, that wasn't always true. I met Drew at a YC party before they had anything to show, and were still figuring out the diffing/versioning problems, and all the underlying hard problems. And, I came away thinking, "Well, that's been done before. A lot. And it never went anywhere." I had even built a little web-based file manager and sharing app as a RoR practice app, a couple weeks before. So, I thought I knew a business that wouldn't go anywhere when I saw it. I thought highly of Drew, but not much of the idea. I was obviously very wrong about the idea. Anyway, my point is, Dropbox hasn't been something "you've never heard of" for quite some time. ~~~ daeken My dad is using Dropbox to share his songs. He saves to Dropbox, and then shares links on Facebook. All his masters are backed up there as well. ------ krschultz Major news outlet learns about cheaper way to share files from their intern who uses it at school like everyone else: News at 11 ------ rayvega >> _"...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."_ Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding. I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product. ~~~ bradleyland Someone questioned whether Dropbox could compete with Amazon at scale, but decided to delete it. This is a really valid question. I recalled a while back that Backblaze asked a similar question and came up with a really cool solution. [http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a- budget-h...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how- to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/) I see this as Dropbox's future. PaaS is good for getting started, but with numbers like what's shown in that blog post, it's hard to argue that something like S3 is really priced at commodity levels. ------ 6ren counterpoint: Dropbox is a great product, clever tech, insightful marketing etc. Even the YC application was great. And I think there's a large market (even its present size is more than enough to sate my own avarice), but... it doesn't seem that it could become a truly _huge_ company (like Xerox, Google), without launching a series of increasingly unrelated products. Though perhaps that's true of many huge companies (e.g. Apple, Sony, HP - even Microsoft has Office). ~~~ lemon_pie possibly. that said, 100m in revenue 4 years after launch with a fairly unbounded market (every consumer), looks like quite the promising start. ~~~ 6ren > Benioff predicts sales could hit $100 million this year. (The company > declined to comment.) Unfortunately, a prediction; and also by someone not privy to actual figures... > Dropbox reportedly experiences well over 10 times year-over-year growth... Sounds pretty good! > ...and positive cash flow. The mildest expression of profitability possible. Though I'm pretty sure they're doing way better than >0. From scanning many acquisitions, my feeling is of the order of $200 million. Though I'm basing that mainly on business acquisition (e.g. by Oracle), so I might be very off for consumer acquisitions (considering youtube, facebook, twitter etc). ~~~ wlievens With their kind of scalability, any positive cash flow is awesome news. ------ spatten When we were trying to figure out if Dropbox would be a good sync tool for Leanpub, Peter went in to a local coffee shop and asked a bunch of people if they'd ever heard of Dropbox. All of the baristas and everyone else in their 20s had, and had accounts. About half of the people 30 or older had heard of it, and most of them had accounts. We were pretty impressed with the numbers, and we ended up going with Dropbox, and we've never regretted it. ------ technomancy > The hottest startup you've never heard of I wish this were true; unfortunately I hear lots and lots about them when they run a "spam your friends for more free space" promotional. ~~~ jrockway Get better friends. ------ justinxreese Expected an article from 4 years ago... ------ djacobs Excellent, if my non-technical friends ever ask why I don't go to mainstream media for tech news, I'll point them to this article. ------ danielha My dad uses Dropbox and I didn't even tell him about it. Such a badass company. ~~~ rokhayakebe Even more badass is your dad. ------ flexd My mom came to me earlier asking me to help her install Dropbox. She's about as informed about computer stuff as i am about fashion. That's a good sign for Dropbox :-) ~~~ Tomek_ My mom did the same, except she called using Skype :) ------ zaidf While I'm sure Dropbox has their work cut out, you know they are onto something when you run into their flyers outside college dorms cross country in Chapel Hill, NC. ~~~ tom_b Hey, there are even old boring people walking around on campus who are users . . . heck, even in _Carrboro_ If it wasn't a HIPPA issue, we might be using Dropbox for more internal projects here Love, love, love dropbox. You undergrad at Sitterson? ~~~ zaidf Nah, just got my communications(!) degree and moved up to NYC :) ------ zandorg Today I was at a University small business lecture. Someone asked one of the entrepreneurs "What was your biggest mistake?". The guy said his laptop had been stolen, but luckily it was all auto-backed up onto Dropbox. A nice anecdote and good press! ------ jprobert I love dropbox and we use it personally and for our company (we are paid subscribers). But it seems to me that this space has fewer barriers to entry than say Groupon. People argue that Groupon has little barriers to entry but the fact is that it cost a lot to sell and get merchants on board. Dropbox is a very unique and helpful product but what will stop the competition from creating something similar and possibly better? ------ joeag Now is maybe the really scary time for Dropbox - here come the "me too's" including corporates who will say "Hey looks like people are starting to want this file storage and sharing thingy" - we can do that too and offer it to our own customers. Should be interesting. ~~~ DufusM Microsoft already tried their hand at it with Windows Live Mesh. Technically Apple's MobileMe is the same thing. The 'corporates' are already on it :) ------ didip Dropbox is awesome, I use it, I love it. I had the same thought as SwellJoe around early 2008: That's been done, it ain't gonna go anywhere big. Obviously failed prediction on my part. So the question is, what made Dropbox successful? There are plenty of players in this area (some of them are older than dropbox): box.net, mozy.com, Windows Live mesh, backblaze. Furthermore, techies can easily do backup to their own S3 account, but they love Dropbox. What's the success factors? YC? Being MIT graduates? The clever "Tell your friends and get more space for free" email? The market is just HUGE? I know that 1 of them is using Python. =) ------ orionlogic I like Dropbox but i use it less often. What i am waiting for is the same solution from Apple. Their cloud facility has been just finished and they will probably offer similar service not later than this year. It might not start as pure storage facility but will start by account and device activation from cloud, iphoto & music backup and then after figuring out how this cloud thing work will probably offer similar subscription fee based service. After all why they still didn't buy Dropbox? Probably they are working on it. ------ sunqiang There is a PyCon video about Dropbox: PyCon 2011: How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped <http://pycon.blip.tv/file/4878722/> ------ bfe I'm glad the article pointed out the cartoon dinosaur riding a shark on the jobs page, even though they mistook it as not taking things seriously, instead of convincingly signalling, by the fact of its nature and presence (as an awesome and surprising drawing on a recruitment page that's subversive of conventional expectations for a potential employer), the claim made in the heading on that page, that Dropbox is a pretty sweet place to work. ------ ubercore We've been using it for our band, and it's been working great. A really useful tool that the non-techy members have had no trouble adopting. ------ RRiccio Dropbox it's certainly one of the most helpful startups for the average guy. I put into use at the last company I was working for (a non-tech company) and everyone got immediately hooked on Dropbox. It made their file-sharing much easier. So I honestly understand this article, even though for us it's been around for so long. ------ akent Any media outlet tempted to use a "you've never heard of" headline should seriously reconsider. Guaranteed to irritate everyone who HAS heard of it instantly. ~~~ whatusername I heard a radio report in NZ over summer about the kids these days using words like Cool and Wicked in ways that weren't their original meaning. Someone deserves a medal for epic trolling. (I don't know what the station was -- I was in a hire car and channel surfing and decided to listen to the news broadcast) ------ kylelibra This is why traditional / mainstream media is fighting a battle to remain relevant. ~~~ Vivtek This they call fighting? ~~~ Tomek_ Certainly better than their previous attempts: [http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon- february-28-2011/the-b...](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon- february-28-2011/the-biggest-newser) ------ jpr Finally something I can be hipster about. ------ petervandijck Eh, "you've never heard of"? ~~~ Florin_Andrei It's CNN, it's for normal people. ~~~ petervandijck Ah normal people. Got it.

Ask HN: Living as a hacker in the bay area. - dvcat I will be moving to the bay area once I graduate in a few months. One of the big plus points for me to move to the bay area will be to try to interact and learn from a bunch of smart people by going to hacker dojos, user group meets and conferences (mainly in machine learning and other data related things). My day job will involve some travel (within the bay area) so I probably have to get a car. Keeping this in mind, can people comment on some good places where I should live, how much I can expect to pay each month in food, rent, utilities, insurance etc (I want to keep irrelevant expenses as low as possible just because I want to save some $$$ for a rainy day), things I should sign up for to get to know about hacker like events (apart from read HN)?<p>Thanks! ====== steventruong Rent has gone up significantly in the past year or two. Especially in the city (SF). If you're trying to keep expenses down, find as cheap as possible (while livable) studio or room up with roommates. Otherwise rent can be quite expensive if you never lived in this area. The best way you can see how much rent costs for the conditions of the places is to just browse through craigslist for a feel (it'll be better than any numbers I throw out here). San Francisco: <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/> Peninsula which includes Silicon Valley: <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/> Best places to live are San Francisco or Palo Alto. If you can't afford either, live in nearby cities. Mountain View is a great alternative to Palo Alto that is more affordable. Having said that, if you're willing to commute via public transit or by car, it matters less. Just be aware rush hour can be brutal between SF and the Valley. There are a TON of events both in the valley and in SF. For language specific events/meetups, most of the better ones are in the city i.e. python meetup, php meetup, etc... For hacker mixers and various other speaking events, those are more in the valley. There are usually some sort of event happening at Microsoft and Google as well that you can look out for including GTUG at Google. The best way I find events outside of people sending me links or what not is to join meetup groups via meetup.com, join the StartupDigest email list, join Plancast and follow people/friends, and browse Eventbrite. Once you're here, you'll be plugged into more private events and stuff as well, that aren't found in the above. Hope that helps. ------ murrain For housing, check out <http://www.padmapper.com>

Bringing improved PDF support to Google Chrome - jancona http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/bringing-improved-pdf-support-to-google.html ====== s3graham Oh sweetness. I was using this [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhg...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn) but the plugin seems better. Only problem is that now .doc/.ppt via extension is gone because I had to disable it to get plugin support. Need a rev of that extension to remove pdf support, and then we're saved! Update: hmm, miss regular context menu too. ~~~ e40 I disabled the extension, but pdf's just download... I have 6.0.437.1, which should be the dev channel version. Windows. Ideas? ~~~ rictic You also need to go to chrome://plugins and enable the experimental PDF plugin. ~~~ e40 Thanks! ------ mattchew This is fantastic news--mostly because of the sandboxing. Once burned, twice shy--I'm not allowing 3rd party plugins in my main browser any more. But I'm willing to trust Google to sandbox these features correctly. (Don't let me down, guys.) ------ singular Brilliant. The idea that loading a PDF won't cause a horrible browser freeze- up then require controls unrelated to the rest of the browsing experience is quite a lovely one. I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' side of their business? ~~~ sliverstorm > I wonder what impact this will have on scribd, at least the 'avoid pdf pain' > side of their business? There's a way to answer that. What is their userbase like, and do they run Chrome? If the primary browser is still IE (and it kind of seems to me like 'easing PDF pain' is incongruous with people who have total understanding and control of their interaction with the internet) then scribd will be safe for... how long did it IE6 last? Probably about that long. ~~~ singular True, true. Perhaps Google can use this as a selling point to ordinary users? Though of course a large number of these are going to be using computers at work which usually means IE[6-8]. ------ timdorr The one thing that I've _hated_ about Chrome is now fixed. I never have a reason to go back to Firefox now. See ya, Mozilla! ~~~ pavs There are plugins both in Chrome and FF where any PDF links automatically opens it up using google docs. Much more faster smoother than native PDF loading. I just tried out this new integrated PDF on Chrome Dev channel (6.0437.1), and as mentioned it doesn't have all the PDF features, it loads PDFs on the left hand corner, instead of center. Much much faster though. ~~~ btmorex My experience has been that downloading + opening pdfs with a decent pdf viewer is much faster than google docs. I personally use evince, but probably anything other than acrobat would work. ------ riobard The rendering quality is sub-standard compared to Safari on OS X at the moment, but I'm really excited there is another browser vendor trying to solve this problem! ------ InclinedPlane I like this so far. On a few experiments it rendered pdfs well, very fast, and didn't feel nearly as clunky as reading a pdf in the browser usually does. ------ devinus Looks like it's using at least libtiff and lcms from running `strings` on the plugin... ------ ramidarigaz Mmmm... Sounds really cool. Waiting on the Linux version. ------ sliverstorm I can't decide if Chrome is leading the way, or pulling ahead, but the gap is widening considerably. I, for one, welcome our small round red-yellow-green-blue overlords. ~~~ wyclif Chrome 5.0.375.70 on Ubuntu Lucid still leaks memory terribly, forcing me to kill processes (tabs). Anyone here with insight on this? ~~~ sliverstorm I have been running the dev build for a long time (6.0) and I leave it and some particular tabs open for days at a time, never had a problem. ~~~ sliverstorm I forgot to clarify, running the dev build on Ubuntu. I am using 10.04 right now.

The Systemd Project Forks the Linux Kernel - dezgeg http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20150330#community ====== hleszek Checking the calendar: not yet first april... ~~~ computer Looks like a weekly magazine, so this edition would cover April 1st. ------ sspiff This is not the real systemD repository. This is just some random guy on the internet who snagged the GitHub username "systemdaemon". Have a look here: [https://github.com/systemdaemon](https://github.com/systemdaemon) A profile created two weeks ago, with a single repository, 0 stars and 1 commit over its entire lifetime. This is a transparant hoax, and I don't understand how Distrowatch (and the HN community) has not seen through it yet... ~~~ 616c Thanks for shedding real data on the issue. I was skeptical myself. I checked out Poettering's Google+ profile and see no mention of this yet, and I was kind of surprised. ------ 616c I am kind of disappointed that there is some baity qualities to this article, specifically referencing how Linus chewed out a systemd developer. He did that, but I recall it not being directly related to his work on systemd and it negatively impacting the kernel. Kay Sievers is a well-known problem causer as Linus is concerned, so this is not news. Keep in mind if you find the mailing list thread referred to, Greg Hartmann (gregkh), the release maintainer of the Linux kernel, arguably part of the inner echelons, is responsible for the kdbus branch eventually getting merged into the mainline kernel, that is the kernel driver that will internalize dbus as a main (if not only) IPC of the kernel and reducing the overheard of using dbus now (reducing 12 operations per dbus call to 3 inside the kdbus driver, IIRC from Lennart's video). Again, this is the work of Lennart Poettering pulseaudio fame, and now much more heated systemd fame. So to pretend the Linux kernel is opposed systemd work is not truthful. Some core devs have taken it on and are staking themselves on it. If this gregkh tidbit does not make that obvious I do not know what does. Can someone who knows more comment on what the substantive changes are thus far? Is the kdbus work a prime motivator of this? I love systemd hate as much as the next guy, but I was hoping we would get more facts from the HN crowd. (EDIT: I know I will get downvoted, but I do use systemd and I am not its biggest fan; I just used Arch and got used to it; everyone has a right to choose their tools, and init systems ain't different.) ------ thaumaturgy Debian forums concludes it's a joke too: [http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=121167](http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=121167) _sigh_ Guess my news blackout period is gonna have to start extending from March 30 to April 2 now. Lame. ------ joosters They're planning on getting rid of NetworkManager, so they can't be _completely_ evil :-) ~~~ digi_owl Bah, sounds like a cure worse than the disease. ------ raverbashing Here's a group that can take criticism nicely... Let's feign surprise. Of course the kernel is GPL and forking is allowed, but I have yet to see such an idiotic case of tail wagging the dog. Maybe the guy that wanted to "prove" he's better at managing the Redis than Antirez is a strong contest ------ fsniper April fools or the real intension faces water at last? ~~~ networked >[...] According to Ivan Gotyaovich, one of the developers working on systemd[...] I'd say it's a prank but I don't think it's April 1st anywhere in the world yet. ~~~ digi_owl A quick search comes up blank on that name. ~~~ palmer_eldritch Just a quick note about that name "Ivan Gotyaovich": Got ya! -ovitch. It sounds much more like a prank than a real name. ~~~ slikts Yeah, there's no such surname as "Готяович"; it's made up. ------ simgidacav The fork won't last long I guess... ------ hias so they finally jumped the shark ;-)

Social experiment - single thoughts on programming that made an impact - RiderOfGiraffes With the indulgence of the regulars, I'd like to try an experiment. Recently, as a result of an item here, I read an article from which a single line has stuck. It wasn't the most profound, it wasn't the most amusing, it wasn't even necessarily the most valuable, but it's one that has immediately made me think differently, and will be with me a long time.<p>I'd like to create a collection of such things. I'm pretty sure things that affect you guys will be of varying value, but if we make a list and then let them float up and down as they get modded, maybe we'll get something interesting.<p>Replies are discouraged. These will not be universal truths, they will not be unarguable, but I suggest that this is not the place. Perhaps if you <i>really</i> disagree you can blog about it and submit a link. But perhaps not here - perhaps as a main item.<p>Worth a try? Who will play along? I'll start ... ====== RiderOfGiraffes You can't make your program run faster, you can only make it do less. ------ anamax Almost any problem can be solved by adding a level of indirection. Almost every program can be sped up by removing a level of indirection. ------ reddiar The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can't see the problem at all : B. Kernighan ------ bayareaguy The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there. -- Gordon Bell ------ anamax Someone reading/modifying a program is never as smart as the person who wrote it, even if they're the same person. ------ anamax If you don't know the tradeoffs that you're making, how do you know that you're making the right ones? ------ asimjalis Make it beautiful even if you are just hacking together a quick spike. ------ hboon Make it run, make it right, make it fast. In that order. ------ anamax All programming is an exercise in caching.

Show HN - SuggestMeLearn, My first web application - hhimanshu - After starting and quitting so many times, I finally decided to start small project and created SuggetMeLearn - This is my first ever attempt to a complete web application - The idea is to - let people suggest the way they learnt a particular language or technology - let people seeking to learn decide based on the suggestion to pick resources and start learning rather than browsing through infinite search results. - people can vote if they think they also believe that a particular suggestion is a great resource(and suggestions are sorted by votes) - All suggestions are welcome. - URL : http://suggestmelearn.appspot.com/ ====== tstegart Clickable link: <http://suggestmelearn.appspot.com/> Good luck! ------ nurik I love it! We are doing a similar thing here in Germany. Would you be interested in working together on the project? ~~~ hhimanshu Hi Nurik! Sure, let me know how can I help! ------ Kevindish Super cool, but miss a lot of data, maybe you should start by filling something out yourself.. :) ~~~ hhimanshu I will definitely add some more content. thank you ------ rcavezza Hey - one small bug I found, when I suggest a resource, i can upvote my own suggestion. You do allow only one upvote, though. Seems like the error is that the initial suggestion doesn't count as an upvote. This is a nice start. Are you testing any assumptions with this first version? Also, may also want to add something that auto finds urls and auto changes them to links. ~~~ hhimanshu Hey rcavezza, I fixed the bug that you found, now you can no longer upvote your own suggestion. Thank you for pointing that out I will look for auto url finder thing now Thanks again!

The Facebook of China - GBond http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1715041/print ====== smoody formatted version of the article with photos: [http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist- networ...](http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist- networks.html)

The ad tech renaissance - taylorbuley http://bokonads.com/the-ad-tech-renaissance/ ====== oxymoron I'll concede that the analysis isn't completely without merit, but having spent the last few years in ad tech, I sincerely hope that there won't be a revival. It's a race to the bottom. Publishers are struggling and are increasingly willing to accept ever more outrageous ad products. Advertisers are desperate for advertising that actually works, but will mostly only do what agencies tell them, and the agencies are only interested in maximizing their own margins. In the middle we've got any number of middle men scrambling for some pieces of the cake, sometimes but usually not providing some value, leaving the publishers with a pathetic fraction of the advertiser spend. So essentially we've got a whole bunch of companies with no growth desperately vying for the attention of 23-year old media buyers who in turn are mostly interested in getting someone to take them clothes shopping and picking up the bill. These companies are doing it mostly by doing ever more intrusive things, since advertisers can't accept that the reason their ads don't perform is that nobody wants their stuff and keeps looking for a silver bullet. I've come to believe that the only reasonable justification for most advertising is that it's in some sense a way for other industries to subsidize journalism. Since that's going away, I'm looking forward to the inevitable ad tech carnage ahead, and if a potential next wave actually brings higher quality advertising and better end user experiences I'll happily eat my shoes. ~~~ vosper All of this, plus the vast amounts of bot traffic that no one wants to look too closely at, because everyone except the advertiser is making money off of it... ~~~ ec109685 Bot traffic is accounted for in the price advertisers pay for ads. Advertisers don't run unprofitable ads. ~~~ simo7 Advertisers do run unprofitable ads and marketing campaigns all the times. And they are fine with that too. That's the case of VC-backed startups: they accept a negative ROI to get the chance to start making money one day. Then you have the less consciuous ones, which might be big brands who want to experiment a bit with new media/ad formats. In any case, if you think about it, the real losers are...the honest publishers. Because the money on the table is not increased by fraud, it's just shared in a way that takes something away from good publishers to bad/fake ones. ~~~ ec109685 I agree honest publishers are at a definite disadvantage. Advertisers aren't because the roi calculation they come up with judges their campaigns based on its performance, which incorporates good and bad clicks over time. ------ djur I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant effect on the online advertising industry? Are there any serious proposals to deal with them other than continuing the ad-blocker-blocker-blocker... arms race? It seems that there's an increasing understanding among publishers that low- quality and intrusive ads encourage their visitors to use ad blockers or another site. Several relatively high-profile sites (like The New Yorker) have stopped using networks like Outbrain and Taboola. (Obnoxious ads from the latter, along with autoplaying video ads on numerous sites, resulted in me finally installing an ad blocker after resisting for years.) Adblock Plus offered a way forward with its "Acceptable Ads" program but it seems like that has been roundly rejected by both advertisers and blocker users. Maybe publishers and advertisers could work together to develop a stricter set of advertising guidelines that show respect for users? I suppose such a program is essentially doomed without cooperation from Google and Facebook, and I don't know if they'd be willing to work with the little fish (or each other). It seems like an intractable problem. I'm not convinced technology (machine learning! the solution to all problems!) is capable of providing the solution. ~~~ tomjen3 The problem is that most ads suck. Facebook knows more about me than I do, but they can't come up with ads for things I want. What possible chance does a random newspaper have? ~~~ pascalxus I completely agree. 99.99% of the ads I see on facebook are for things I don't want. They really need to get more AI and more information about the user for better targeting. They may have world class targeting, but it still sucks compared to advertisement that can read my mind (doesn't exist yet). ~~~ pdkl95 A common misconception is that targeting is about _your_ interests. An AI won't select ads for things you want. Instead, it will use all of that tracking data to select ads that are more effective at misleading you or _changing_ your interests. ~~~ tomjen3 What is easiest? Sell me things that I already want but don't know about, or changing my interests and then convince me to buy a particular product? Incidentally 5 years after moving into an apartment I still need a good curtain for the kitchen. If I see an ad for a place I can upload measurements and get the results sent to me I would be very happy to pay. ------ niftich _> The end of impressions and banners in favor of views and "publisher rendered" (aka native) creative_ Native advertising, which I'd re-phrase as 'sponsored content' or 'content placement', I can actually enjoy, if the sponsorship is made clear and the topic is genuinely relevant to the audience. After all, who better to tell what kinds of content readers want to see besides the publisher who puts it out there? But it _has_ to fit -- out-of-place content will be painfully obvious, and cause further user aversion for ads. But the thing is: all of this can be accomplished without ad networks that track your travels through the web. The client can engage the publisher directly or through a broker. Where does that leave today's adtech? ~~~ andygates That seems unduly optimistic. The content will be uploaded from the same old terrible content farms, and be the same old rubbish only with a heavier local server load. ------ soared Very interesting read, thanks OP! I've started using some platforms with integrated ml, and it seems to be much better. Its difficult to get used to starting a campaign, and instead of meticulously setting up targeting (males, $50k income, denver, into football and skiing, etc) the ml lets you just .. upload an ad and a web page. No targeting. Click GO and it will find your customers. If Google or facebook can get into this space they'll succeed greatly because they have so much data and users already trust them. ~~~ mars4rp can you please name those platforms ??? ~~~ soared I'm at an agency and have access to some closed betas, but I've been pretty impressed with StackAdapt for their native. They just added video and display I believe but I haven't used them. You do a little bit of manual targeting but their ml really does well. ~~~ fumar When you say "does well," what type of goal or kpi are referring to? ~~~ soared White paper downloads for elderly people. For some reason their interface underreports conversions though. But we've tied their traffic directly to purchases! One note though.. like some other channels you're buying a mixed bag. There is a lot of low quality traffic, but the diamonds in the rough do make up for it. ------ keldaris Since there's rarely any widely interpretable public data available, articles like this and many others are my best gauge for noting that even the Internet advertising industry itself recognizes that it's dying. This is very pleasant to observe. Personally, I can't remember the last ad I've seen while browsing. The combination of AdBlock Origin (with a very generous combination of various blocklists), Ghostery / Privacy Badger and NoScript effectively renders most adtech useless. The few remnants that refuse to be blocked I happily skip outright rather than enable. As far as I'm concerned, the only acceptable form of advertising consists of things like hardware companies supplying free samples to review sites without any preconditions and even there a slippery slope exists, as evidenced by the sad state of the games "journalism" industry, where corruption is endemic. And the best part is that, unlike many political and social issues, users really do have all the power here, and it's trivially easy to exercise it. Install a few trusted browser extensions and you've helped hasten the demise of a harmful parasite of an industry, and improved your own security at the same time. And nowadays it's easy to persuade even non-technical users to do this due to how disgusting and intrusive ads have become. ~~~ kirso Congratulations! You are in the 10% of people who have adblock :) Within the 600B advertising industry. You get the point right? Normal people think different. In addition, mobile is overtaking everything and adblocking there is more tricky, thats why Facebook is generating 80%+ of their revenues via mobile ads (fun fact, in 2010 it was 0%). You can ask your parents for instance whether they know how to limit ad tracking. ------ lcw I _feel_ like another piece missing from why these companies are "flat" year over year is the fact that they are running into a wall of what people will tolerate. I don't think that there will be a renaissance like the author concludes. As a guy who worked in ad tech these tricks have been exhaustively tried. I think right now the industry trend is to pay for premium content rather then be inundated with Ads especially when it comes to games, video and music. I imagine we will see this pattern continue especially with the mobile gaming industry figuring out the key to everyone's wallet: in app purchases. ------ manigandham This article is mostly bullshit. AppNexus is one of the major SSPs (sell-side platforms) but they still have major fraud and legacy tech issues. They are also one of the primary causes of miserable user experiences across the web. They will not be part of any adtech renaissance. Google won't flinch if margins really do go down to single-digit margins. They're already built for worse conditions than today and are just pacing the market, as seen with the whole header bidding scenario. They also have Google Cloud rapidly scaling and will likely be a bigger source of revenue than their entire ads division in a few years. Meanwhile AppNexus can barely survive on their current margins and will be out of business if it hits single-digits. The disintermediation mentioned in this article will also apply just as harshly to AppNexus. The lame insights about machine learning and formats aren't anything special. This is why Google and Facebook get all the money already, because they have a much faster, cleaner, more relevant, and more effective ad experiences. The renaissance is already here and it's getting increasingly harder to compete with these data behemoths. It's not impossible though and there are several niche focused ad startups, but there's no big sea change about to happen. This is all just business as usual. ------ awongh This is a space I wish I knew more about- but it seems like it has it's own sub-culture that to me, is hard to parse. Can someone tell me what some of the things are that he refers to in this article? \- dfp, dsp, ssp, gdn, dbm, adx, dcm, dfp Is there a good technical-minded rundown of all the players in the ecosystem and what they do? Internet ad industry information is impossible to google because it mostly turns up spam..... ~~~ wastedhours I've tried to find a long form piece on it (ideally a physical book as reference), but failed. DSP: Demand Side Platform, is the tool agencies and advertisers use to buy the ad spots automatically based on tracking profiles. SSP: Supply Side Platform, is the tool publishers use to sell their ad spots (publishers push an impression to an SSP, a DSP will evaluate it and an agency will buy an ad on it - Google is main SSP and DSP [I think?] so people are wary about them.) DFP: DoubleClick for Publishers perhaps, as in, ad tech for media sites to manage the display process (guess it could be called Google's SSP). DBM: DoubleClick Bid Manager, is Google's DSP ADX: guessing just an ad exchange, so a place advertisers and publishers do the deal. GDN: Google Display Network, posh AdSense where you can place your ads across 3rd party sites, not just the SERP. Then we get into the world of Header Bidding (which, as far as I understand it, is even more tech to bypass your usual SSP/DSP process to get the best deal from different ad exchanges) and that whole murky world... I've only been on the advertiser end, speccing a programmatic campaign through a specialist agency. It makes me nervy as our only marketing attribution is last touch and that rarely works with broad reach display. Retargeting is a much more valuable one to explore. If anyone would be interested in a guide, I can look to put one together with definitions and a few anecdotes from some players? Username @ gmail. ~~~ ssharp I think it's worth adding how DSPs and ADXs fit together. There are only a handful of ad exchanges out there -- Google ADX, OpenX, AppNexus, etc. Some brands and agencies are large enough to buy inventory directly through these but for most brands and agencies, it's too expensive and cumbersome to do so. This is where DSPs fit in. DSPs buy large batches of inventory from the ad exchanges and resell them to brands and agencies and try to add value where they can. ------ intrasight I've come to believe that this isn't a technology problem. It's a people problem - specifically a "publisher people are lazy" problem. That lazyness made them hand their value over to Google and Facebook, and now there's just no easy way to get it back. ------ cm2012 85% of new ad dollars are going to fb and google. Everyone else is fighting for scraps. ~~~ kirso Not actually true, these scraps are still worth billions => google AppLovin ------ petercooper I know it's not for everyone but I hope more publishers can work out a shift to a no-graphics-needed-to-render-this "advertisers<->publishers" approach. Are your readers the sort of people advertisers want to connect with? Great! Sell space and support to them. Or is your audience so diverse and ephemeral that advertisers don't care? Move into publishing stuff that's useful to an audience advertisers value, because when everyone else is slipping down the ladder, it's a great time to try climbing it. ------ na85 >The internet needs an ad tech renaissance, one based on creating real value for publishers and marketers, Could not disagree more. Advertising as a whole needs to die in ignominy. Obviously that'll never happen, but we should be working towards ways to make advertising obsolete or unprofitable, and we should be ostracizing people like the author who try to or want to make things better for advertisers. The promise of the internet was users as first-class citizens, not users as mindless consumers of hostile advertising. ~~~ SerLava Hostile advertising and advertising in general aren't the same thing. I'd be the first to point out that advertising has motivated a wide array of terrible things, especially in the last few years. But advertising at its barest sense can be and usually is a net positive force. ~~~ na85 >Hostile advertising and advertising in general aren't the same thing. Are you sure? ~~~ SerLava Good point. ------ monochromatic We don't need an ad tech renaissance. We need to burn it to the fucking ground. ~~~ HugoDaniel ^ this. ------ majewsky > The tracking tech renaissance FTFY ------ TheAdamist I don't know if it was due to manual ad reviewers being on holiday or what, but i was getting a bunch of ad hijacking or malvertisements over the weekend from legit websites. If even legit sites can't keep up with this then no wonder everyone is running ad blockers just to keep safe from legit sites. ------ dedalus really nice article detailing some nuances ~~~ dedalus really surprised by the downvote without any reason. so much for tolerance of opposite views. The author is an authority in adtech (CEO of App Nexus). I expressed an opinion of the piece (which you are free to disagree with and maybe the disagreement is downvoting??) ------ fieryeagle Very good read that highlighted the current state of the industry - G and FB reign as kings. I'd expect the fraud cycle to restart in gaming industry seeing that display and mobile are essentially saturated.

Ask HN: Best encrypted cloud storage option? - kotrunga What is the best option for storing my files in the cloud, completely encrypted and secure?<p>Not like Dropbox, or other services where a government entity could force the company in giving up someone&#x27;s files. Completely secure.<p>If rolling my own from home is the best option, any software recommendations?<p>Thanks! ====== nokcha I use Tarsnap for storing backups of my files. Data is encrypted client-side, so the server can't decrypt it. Tarsnap is designed for backups, though, not for general file storage. Some encrypted cloud storage offerings are mentioned here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451396) ------ mtmail I'm using [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/features.html) incremental backup with GnuPG encryption.

Show HN: Yet another Hacker News Reader for Android. - jamhed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ncom.yahn Hopefully doesn&#x27;t suck. ====== lumelet Switching between article and comments and display of nested comments are great.

Is Artificial Intelligence Good? - Anon84 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2019/10/14/is-artificial-intelligence-good/#6073e28e6f70 ====== motivic Are nuclear bombs good? In the end it largely depends on how they are used.

How Google Deals With A Recession - nreece http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/how-google-deals-with-a-recession-goog ====== nostrademons I just tried the same query he has in the screenshot - no ads in the suggest box. Same with a bunch of other queries that I thought would likely come with ads.

Things a text editor must do - davweb http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/11/verity_stob_text_editor/ ====== bcoates Before you all get too angry about the scandalous lies about your favorite editor note that this is a Verity Stob column. If you're reading it for a sober, fair-minded review of the various tradeoffs involved in the very serious business of text editing, you're doing it wrong. ~~~ michael_h I'm not sure how someone can read past ...press Ctrl + Shift + L (if you are following along on your Mac, just press squiggle squoggle shift Home) and not pick up that this is _satire_ , or perhaps just plain humo(u)r. ~~~ yen223 It's so obviously satire - I mean, which Mac has a Home button amirite? ~~~ Samuel_Michon My Apple keyboard has a 'Home' key... [http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...](http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT1216/Pasted%20Graphic.png) (And of course, all iOS devices have a 'Home' button.) ------ kaoD The article could've been titled "I hate emacs for no particular reason". It's probable more accurate. ------ jussij > It turns out that my brain was only fitted with 72 bytes of "finger memory"; > furthermore it turns out to be EPROM, not Flash. I need to wipe out all the > WordStar keystrokes from 1986 (Ctrl+Y to delete a line, anyone?) before I > can add any more, and I have lost the ultra-violet wiping-out gadget (ask > your dad) needed to achieve this. If he'd taken a look at the Zeus editor he would have found all the features mention (except the multi-cursor thing) and by selecting the WordStar key mapping, he wouldn't even have to erase the EPROM in his fingers. Jussi Jumppanen Author: Zeus ~~~ lotsofcows Verity Stob is a laaaadddddy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Stob> ~~~ jussij My apologies to Verity for the gender error. ------ jtheory I must say this isn't nearly as funny as much of the Verity Stob posts, but no problem. Mostly I was amazed to see that the _same_ horrible bug in Notepad++ that seriously bit me once (the text replacement buffer silently truncated... aargh!) is the one mentioned here. ~~~ JonnieCache It's hard to beat her history of computing, "8086 and all that" [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/22/verity_stob_8086_and_all_that_revisited/) ------ Jgrubb I'm often taken a bit back by how bad text looks in screenshots of Windows whatever. I really wouldn't want to look at that all day. Just my preference... ~~~ swah It's ok - we feel the same about OSX font rendering. ------ NateDad I like Sublime, but I think it's criminal that it can't show line endings. That's right up there with syntax highlighting in my list of must-have features. How often do line endings screw you? Since I tend to work on a lot of cross platform stuff, for me, it's all the time. I pretty much keep Notepad++ around just so I can pop things into it to look at their line endings. ~~~ thezoid I'm pretty sure you can turn that on. Though I think it shows all whitespace characters unless he's changed some more recently. ------ Samuel_Michon _"Another giveaway [of Sublime's Mac influences]: Sublime comes with a set of colour schemes with names like Dawn, Expresso Libre, Monokai, Slush & Poppies and the Smell of Napalm in the Morning (I may have made one of those up). Contrast this with an equivalent list from a Windows product (in fact Delphi VCL skins): Carbon, Charcoal Dark Slate, Emerald Light Slate, Golden Graphite, Slate Classico and Dark Beige Slate Classico Carbon (I may have made one of those up)."_ To me, the second list comes off as more Mac themed. _Carbon_ is a set of Mac APIs, _Charcoal_ was the system font for Mac OS 8, and _Graphite_ was the nickname of the Power Mac G4. As for the first list, OS X has a desktop picture of poppies and Expresso[sic] could be Java inspired (like Cocoa, Gianduia, Espresso, Chocolat, Cappuccino, etc.) I doubt Apple would call anything 'Libre' in their English branding or documentation. ------ Ensorceled Well. At least he was pretty clear this was all his opinion. But that's a couple of minutes of my life I'd like to get back. I'm soOOooo glad I learned ed as my first editor which lead to a 30 year love affair with vi. Both of those editors sound painful to use. ~~~ swah OTOH Vimscript is painful to use compared to Python... ~~~ MatthewPhillips That's a feature, instead of customizing your text editor you spend your time coding the thing you originally wanted to code. ~~~ swah Heh, that's true. But most Vim users also want customization, as shown by bundles like <http://vim.spf13.com/>. ------ malux85 "No support for Object Pascal ... minus 1 million points" "How can I possibly use this as an IDE for theregister.co.uk backend systems when it doesn't support _object pascal_ " Get off my lawn! What smells like Mustard? The president is a demi-crat! ------ binarymax I will say TexPad is an amazing editor (as long as you don't need to do any unicode). Like verity I've been using it for many many years, and I have yet to find a replacement that I enjoy as much. When I switched to Linux, I tried to learn all kinds of emacs and vi, and never enjoyed them as much. LightTable seems like it will finally answer my prayers, however. ------ mattfieldy For an article that prefaces it's dialogue with a desire to "leave the right- thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality", it reads like opinionated tosh. How the author arrived at these six criteria as a reasonable litmus test for the applicability and usefulness of a text editor absolutely boggles the mind. ~~~ alanctgardner2 Verity is usually satirical; at best he's overblown and ridiculous. I don't think the Reg's editorial staff expects you to take this as gospel, it's mostly for entertainment value. ------ jhawk28 Sublime Text 3 fixes most of the problems mentioned in the article. It starts up fast, handles large files better. Still no option to show newline characters. ------ oneeyedpigeon Sublime is generally great, but it desperately needs one fix before I'll ever really love it: make page up/down commutative. ------ martinced What an opinionated piece of crap TFA is. This kind of stuff is precisely why I stopped reading The Reg a long time ago. Seriously: _"4. The editor should contain no implementation of Lisp."_ Why do they do that? Because of course Emacs totally rocks in their last example, where you need to apply the same modification to various lines (in Emacs you'd probably use a macro repeating some search and replace using a quick Lisp substitution). How do you even want to talk with people who argue for their own limitation? Appeal to authority: I urge people to read _"Beating the average"_ from pg. ~~~ lotsofcows It's a joke! How is it possible, given the URL, that it's the Reg, the author's name, the layout and the content to miss that it's a joke? This particular line is a reference to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule>

Letters and Symbols: How I designed the Keen IO logo - micahwolfe https://keen.io/blog/43496487388/letters-and-symbols-how-i-designed-the-keen-io-logo ====== alexdevkar The more I hear from designers, the more I realize how much more thought I should be putting into design choices. ~~~ mwetzler no kidding. The branding process was much longer than any of us expected (fellow Keen IO employee here). So much to think about, from Tshirts to favicon.

How Militaries Should Plan for AI - jonbaer https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/how-militaries-should-plan-for-ai ====== CitizenTekk We cannot stop technology, for as we know, we'll heading to a star "war"-ish era if that happen. One thing we must do is, if military will use it to betterment of humanrace and not extinction, then why not? The innovation of technology today also produce psychopats on our way.

Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness on 1956 Episode of I’ve Got a Secret - barredo http://laughingsquid.com/lincoln-assassination-eyewitness-on-1956-episode-of-ive-got-a-secret/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+laughingsquid+%28Laughing+Squid%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ====== JangoSteve This is amazing, I had never even connected the two points of data in such a way as to realize that someone alive when Lincoln was president would still be alive when TV is on the market. Aside from the intense tobacco ads (the big banner and the participation gift), I find it interesting that they were playing for the amount of $80. Accounting for inflation, that's around $650 in today's dollars. Meanwhile these days, game shows play for a top prize usually around $10k to $1mil per episode. I guess in 1956, TV itself was enough to keep people entertained and tuned in. I wonder if 50 years from now, they'll be playing for people's lives or something equally crazy to keep jaded video audiences tuned in. ~~~ burgerbrain Actually, there are still plenty of gameshows around where people play for (generally) sub-thousand dollar prizes. Cash Cab (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_Cab>) comes to mind. $50 payouts on that show are actually surprisingly common, although that is considered doing poorly. I suspect that the perception of the cash prize size is related to the perceived commitment the contestant has to put forward. So they are fairly large on shows the contestant has to go out of their way to be a part of, but low on shows where the contestant just happens to "stumble upon" the contest. ~~~ JangoSteve That's a very good point, and Cash Cab is sweet. Also, I was under the impression that the people guessing in that gameshow were celebrities. Are there any game-shows today that play for sub-thousand-dollar prizes with celebrities? ------ kbutler It's interesting to note links to historical events by very young observers. The last of the civil war widows passed away only a few years ago (2008). As young women, they married octogenarian civil war veterans - and continued receiving the widow's pension for decades... [http://www.radiodiaries.org/transcripts/OtherDocs/civilwar.h...](http://www.radiodiaries.org/transcripts/OtherDocs/civilwar.html) <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/national/16widow.html> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins> ------ xefer I'm reminded of this: "Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had served on the bench into the nineteen-thirties, had in his long lifetime shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and also our new incumbent, John F. Kennedy." "Old Country" by Roger Angell. The New Yorker; September 11, 2006 [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911ta_talk_an...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911ta_talk_angell) ~~~ strait He lived long enough into the era where his speech or interview could have been filmed. I couldn't find anything on YouTube; perhaps he was too frail by the 1930's to be doing such things. I like finding these old film clips featuring performances from ancient legends. Thomas Edison (born 1847) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftii6D68Veo&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftii6D68Veo&feature=related) Sir Ian Hamilton (born 1853) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRruY4WRjw> ------ siglesias I know this is what is referred to in Midnight in Paris as "Golden Age Thinking," but I can't fight the feeling when I see television programs and interviews in the 50s and 60s that the level of "popular" discourse was much higher then than it is now. That is, interviewees of all ages are much more well spoken, articulate, and informed. I can't imagine the panel of American Idol judges (much less the audience) being able to drill down so quickly to a historical event like that, or even care to take a serious crack at it. Am I off? Ex, a 60s era CBS documentary on rock--fair from and to both sides: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSq1ca__cRA> ~~~ neonscribe Did you notice the last word spoken by the host Garry Moore was "withal", meaning "nevertheless". Can you imagine a game show host using the word today? ~~~ jerf Yes. Or rather, the temporally-updated equivalent. Withal sounds erudite because _now_ it's dead, and a sign of sophistication to know the word at all. Much less so then, albeit perhaps not zero. The problem with some modern game shows isn't vocabulary. It isn't even necessarily spectacle _qua_ spectacle, because if they could have done it and afforded it in the 50s their shows would have been bigger, too. Humans haven't changed in the past 60 years. The problem with modern game shows is something more like they have more resources than they know what to do with, competing against ten other shows with the same "problem". I'm not convinced there's a good argument for modern people being more relatively degenerate than people of old... the set of which, I would remind you, _really does_ include actual, factual people who considered combat to the death fit entertainment. ------ hugh3 "But apart from that, Mr Seymour, how was the play?" ------ hook I think Matt Damon has a time machine. ~~~ hugh3 The Matt Damon looking guy is fifties game show fixture Bill Cullen: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cullen> and he looks less Matt Damonish in higher resolution. ~~~ pyre He looks more like Drew Carey at that resolution. ------ starpilot On a related note, the last surviving Civil War veteran (though he never saw combat) also died in 1956. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson> ~~~ splat Interestingly, the last widow of a Civil War veteran died only three years ago. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins> ------ ck2 It's easy to forget the United States is "only" 235 years old. Columbus sailed over TWICE as long ago. Some countries would laugh at that <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+oldest+countries> (added: _actually, wait a sec, Wolfram is very wrong, Portugal Italy and Spain all existed when Columbus first sailed_ ) Mechanical steam power, automobiles, airflight, television, computers and landing on the moon was all accomplished in that relatively tiny timeframe of US existence. ~~~ justincormack Italy did not exist then as a country. It was unified by Garibaldi in 1861. Portugal is older, Spain, depends how you count it, but it was Castile and Aragon until 1469, and Granada was reconquered in 1492... ------ scottyallen Wow, that's truly fascinating. Seeing that 5 minute clip gives me a much better feeling for how long ago Lincoln's death really was. Deeply understanding timelines was always my weakness when it came to history, which is part of why high school history was thoroughly boring to me. Now I can saw, when my parents were 5, they saw a really old guy on TV who was 5 when he saw Lincoln shot. A lot more digestible than 1865 or 146 years ago. ~~~ matt1 Hey, just a quick plug: I run a web app called Preceden [1], which specializes in creating multilayered timelines. You could easily use it to plot the significant events in your life and anyone else's to see how they overlap. Lots of teachers use it to solve the same problem you have had; visualizing time can be very difficult without the right tools. [1] <http://www.preceden.com> Edit: Just for fun, here's a timeline of the Civil War, Mr Seymour's life, the I've Got a Secret Episode, and today's date using Preceden: [http://preceden.com/timelines/15108-i-ve-got-a-secret--- linc...](http://preceden.com/timelines/15108-i-ve-got-a-secret---lincoln- assassination) ~~~ alanfalcon Very cool tool. But it appears that the "article appears on Hacker News" is cut off. ~~~ matt1 Thanks -- FYI you can scroll over by dragging the timeline around. Edit: Added a 25 year zoom level to the timelines, which makes this timeline (and I'm sure others) fit better. ------ cma If you are older than 23, you have been around for more than 10% of the US's history since the constitution was ratified. Pretty crazy to think about. The oldest living American has been around for more than 50% of it. ------ dabent The fact that I could see an eyewitness to that event was overshadowed by the huge cigarette ads. It reminds me of the current state of online ads, only it's huge banners for electronic cigarettes instead. ~~~ there i'm currently reading _the master switch_ (<http://amzn.to/qvgGrx>) which talks about how early radio and tv were forbidden to have commercials because they were supposed to be public services, but that programs could be sponsored like you see in the video. in early radio, companies weren't allowed to directly mention their products, so for example, gillette's first radio ad was a lecture on the history of beards. after seeing that video, i much prefer commercials to that style of sponsored programming. when a commercial comes on, you can get up and do something else, change the channel, or mute it. with sponsored programs, everything is so integrated that it makes it hard to ignore. ~~~ chollida1 Non minified and non link code to the above amazon link: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKTK/> ------ DanielBMarkham Wow, this is amazing. I can't help but want to ask him questions -- what was DC like during and after the war? How did Marylanders view the assassination (after all, Booth hid out in MD for most of his run.) Did the huge numbers of Union troops make a lasting impact on DC? Did his family know people on both sides of the war? Did he see any of the heroes from war later on in his life? Attend a speech they made or a book-signing? Did he see Grant on any of his famous carriage rides through the city? Know anybody who had personally spoken with any of the presidents? (Back then you could just show up at the WH and ask for an audience.) What did he think of the many civil war reunions and joint parades that previous fighters from both sides participated in? You know, there's a finite number of these questions, and they can be broken down into an ontology and recorded. You could even make such and information system interactive, and 3D. It's a shame we don't have startups that could record and organize this same type of information from present-day folks who witnessed history -- like those that saw the D-Day invasion, or the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. We are losing precious pieces of our past, and we have tech that could make a big difference here. We spend more time worrying about polygon counts on shooters and less time about capturing these incredible stories that are disappearing all around us. ~~~ matt1 Similar to this idea, Steven Spielberg established a foundation called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to interview holocaust and warcrime survivors. According to their about page, they've done over 52,000 video testimonials so far. You can check it out on the University of Southern California's website here: <http://dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/> ------ tormentor Its amazing we actually got to see an eyewitness of something this historical on tv. The fact that tech had evolved this fast in this man's 96 years of life is amazing in itself. Just imagine going from a time where you didn't have electricity in your home to having a camera recording you. The cigarette ads are irrelevant.

LLVM’s garbage collection facilities and SBCL’s generational GC - lispm https://medium.com/@MartinCracauer/llvms-garbage-collection-facilities-and-sbcl-s-generational-gc-a13eedfb1b31 ====== pcwalton > I hope I explained why “one size fits all” does not really do it in garbage > collection. Great to see people acknowledge this. Garbage collection is full of tradeoffs; be skeptical of any claims to the contrary. I also like the way the author emphasizes the importance of inline bump allocation in the nursery. In the fast path, allocation of memory doesn't need to be any more than 5 or 6 instructions. This speed advantage is huge, and GC schemes that throw it away need to have a _very_ good reason for doing so. ~~~ maximilianburke > In the fast path, allocation of memory doesn't need to be any more than 5 or > 6 instructions. This speed advantage is huge, and GC schemes that throw it > away need to have a very good reason for doing so. I have some experience writing garbage collectors and with the situations I was targeting the handful of instructions quickly fades when multiple threads come into the equation. 1\. Using atomics for bumping the pointer had some luck but contended atomics on the platforms I was targeting meant that the low-instruction-count allocation was still slow. 2\. Using locks (futex-style) was slow, as expected. 3\. The best results I found for my use case (precise garbage collector for a runtime targeting video game consoles) resulted in per-thread nursery-type allocation arenas, selected by TLS, with no locks in the fast-path. This was slower than the ideal single-threaded fast path because of the TLS overhead. ~~~ pcwalton Yeah, the canonical solution for multithreaded GC is the third option (TLABs). The TLS overhead is annoying, but on some architectures you can get away with burning a register to save the TLS load. It might well be worth it on AArch64, with its 32 GPRs... (TLABs are the recommended solution for multithreaded malloc implementations like jemalloc and tcmalloc as well.) ~~~ cwzwarich AArch64 has a dedicated register (TPIDR_EL0) for TLS. ~~~ pcwalton Didn't know that, thanks! ------ eschew At least two of the article's statements about LLVM are false. In particular: 1) LLVM doesn't place any restrictions on how a language runtime allocates memory. 2) LLVM doesn't "expect" a stack map -- it provides infrastructure to compute them if the front end wants to, but the front end is completely free to ignore that infrastructure. ~~~ fao_ Are those corrections to the incorrect statements, or the incorrect statements themselves? It's not very clear, I'm sorry. ~~~ sinistersnare So I wouldnt say that LLVM places restrictions, but I will say a little of my experience doing LLVM + BoehmGC BoehmGC uses the stack for its root set (where it starts to find live memory). With LLVM, you dont ever need to explicitly use the stack, you can use registers for everything and make LLVM figure out if it should go on the stack or not. If you want to use Boehm with LLVM, you are forced to explicitly allocate everything on the stack, and not just on a register, so that Boehm is guaranteed to find the memory. So I wouldnt say restriction, but definitely you need to think about how LLVM operates with the GC and other runtime components of your language. ------ twoodfin I love the idea of a “liberal” GC that occasionally throws away bits of memory still in use in the name of raw performance for restartable tasks. ~~~ johncolanduoni How do you know when to restart the task? Or that your output isn’t the product of an out of range memory access? ~~~ eslaught You unmap the memory when you free it so that it causes a segfault if you access it, and then if a segfault occurs you know something went wrong. ~~~ littlestymaar > so that it causes a segfault if you access it No, this is UB. It can cause a segfault, but it can also allow _bad things_ ™ to happen. ~~~ barrkel Let's be clear on the difference between C and C++ undefined behaviour, and machine behaviour that GCs and runtimes can use for implementation. It is not unusual to rely on triggering a hardware exception in runtimes and GCs, up to and including segfaults. For example, a check for safepoint might be implemented by attempting to read a particular address. When the GC needs to stop the world, it could change the protection bits on the page that contains that address. This technique minimizes the amount of code in the safepoint test and doesn't require any branching logic. See e.g. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46394575/safepoints- in-j...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46394575/safepoints-in-jvm) Another technique: a runtime can support dynamic growth of the stack by keeping an unmapped or protected page at the limit, and extending it when hit. This is how stacks work on Windows, and it relies on help from codegen: compilers targeting Windows need to generate code that performs a loop touching every page in its stack frame allocation one at a time in allocation order, if the stack frame is larger than the page size. See e.g. [https://geidav.wordpress.com/tag/stack- probing/](https://geidav.wordpress.com/tag/stack-probing/) ------ masklinn > Another example where you want to keep for-GC bookkeeping overhead in > mainline code low is if you can “GC-by-fork”, which is basically throwing > away processes as they would need to GC That's one of the common options in Erlang/Elixir: spawn a worker process for each task with a `min_heap_size` high enough that most workloads would not trigger a collection (the default is fairly low), let it die after it's handled the request. More complex/memory intensive tasks will fall through to normal GC-ing behaviour once they breach the `min_heap_size` limit. ------ Tarean > it is copying, however other passes that just punch holes into existing > cards (to wipe pointers that are not pointed to anymore without moving a lot > of memory) have and will be added I have a basic understanding about card tables and promotion but couldn't find anything about hole punching. Pretty sure I have heard the term before and was just as confused, could someone point me into the right direction for this? From context I'd guess that it means the gc doesn't copy unless x% of the block is unused? ~~~ cracauer I use the "punch holes" phrase in the following situation: \- GC is copying/compacting \- GC is at least slightly conservative \- allocation is fast/inline/increment-only \- that leaves you in a situation where you cannot move/compact some part of the heap You cannot move the possibly (conservatively) pointed to thing because you cannot adjust the pointer to it (because it might be a non-pointer thing such as an integer. Now you have some GC unit worth of space occupied by one unmovable object, otherwise it's empty space backed by physical pages. What do you do with the rest of the space? In a C/malloc scheme you are aware of such holes and fill them from new allocations. When you have a fast allocation scheme not involving complex code to find holes you will keep these "hole" as long as the conservative-pointer looking thing exists. You do wipe all the other pointerish things in that GC area, though, so that they don't hold down additional space. Still, now you "waste" a whole GC card worth of physical RAM on a single object, the tradeoff being that you do not want to move to an allocation scheme that spends time thinking about fragmentation. You could use the empty space in those GC cards as a target for the next moving GC, however that has drawbacks as you know continue to have to special- treat such regular objects co-located with possibly conservatively pointed to objects. If there is a better term than "punching holes" for this I would be interested. ETA: now that I think about it, you could give back all physical pages in that GC card that do not contain the held down object. This assumes that GC card size is more than one VM page. ------ cracauer (author here) Just wanted to say that I have seen the comments and will address them when I have a chance. My post turned out to be a lot more popular than I anticipated and I was busy yesterday and today. I wrote most of this in summer 2017, so given the popularity I will also provide a refresh with today's state of LLVM. Please keep corrections to my post coming, the time to determine and influence GC design restrictions in LLVM is now. Before a popular GCed language comes along and then tramples whatever its current GC happens to be into the status quo.

Android is Winning - speg http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/android-is-winning/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 ====== factorialboy Of course Android wins as a platform. Apple still makes good money for share- holders. Win-win?

Coco Color – A coloring stylus for kids - hughnjbell http://cococolor.com ====== psychogenic Not sure what I think of a tablet "coloring book" but the tech is intriguing... According to [https://cococolor.com/pages/instruction#best- results](https://cococolor.com/pages/instruction#best-results) it seems the apps just listen in on the mic and the stylus emits some sort of (ultra?) sound/sequence of audio pulses for each of the 4 buttons. Anyone know if that's correct? If so, I wonder what the frequency is... are all Android devices responsive to these sub/ultra sonics?

Music streaming platforms' audience sizes compared - marcadam http://www.ventureharbour.com/which-music-discovery-platform-has-the-most-effective-marketing/ ====== quahada Among the bleeding edge tech community, Deezer and Spotify are considered the poster children. It's interesting how big Pandora's following is, and how this will change over time as awareness for the newer services builds among the general population. It will also be interesting to see a trend comparison of pure internet radio platforms, like Pandora and Songza. ~~~ marcadam Yep - the thing about these numbers are that they're obviously based on _registered_ users, not active users. For example, which Spotify may have 33 million users, only 20 million of those are active. Pandora may have an impressive 150 million registered users, but I imagine the drop off rate of active users is relatively high given the increase in popularity of other services. ~~~ quahada yeah, and with these streaming services there's also free vs paid users. And Pandora is not profitable. I believe Pandora loses money with each user- hour, which means more users == more losses.

Dallas Siren Hack Done by Radio, Not Computer – Dallas Observer - lightlyused http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-siren-hack-done-by-radio-not-computer-9358087 ====== lightlyused "By hijacking the signal going into the transmitter, the hacker seemingly managed to trigger all of the sirens at once." This sentence doesn't make sense, more than likely they figured out the system needed to trigger the sirens and broadcast it to trigger them. Reminds me of the old days when all it would take to hack a radio stations remote broadcast or a drive-thru order was an opened up vhf/uhf ham radio.

Pakistan blocks YouTube website - muriithi http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7261727.stm ====== Electro Hmm, I'd have thought the recordings of webcam girls and clips of porno's and people talking about sex would have been the reason. Go figure, religion doesn't censor on the basis of morals or the logic descending from their morals, but on an abstract basis of insult.

Docker: Not Even a Linker - nkurz http://adamierymenko.com/docker-not-even-a-linker ====== btrask Fantastic article. We need more deconstruction of "fads" (which I don't mean in a pejorative sense) so that we can quickly understand them without sacrificing tens of thousands of man-hours slowly coming to terms with each one. It would be much better if we could reason about the exact differences and benefits instead of getting bogged down in new terminology, etc. More examples I've been thinking about: \- Goroutines (fibers are equivalent to threads, but coroutines are different) \- Safety and the unsafe keyword in Rust (not sure but the effective difference seems to be default-allow versus default-deny) ~~~ pjmlp Regarding those two examples, more than having explanations about them, it would help if people cared about IT history and it was more accessible. Coroutines are easily explained in Modula-2 literature. Safe keyword in Rust goes back at very least to Ada and Modula-2. Also in Oberon and its derivatives, Modula-3 (which inspired C#). The literature for those systems also has lots of examples. Being an old IT dog, that started when those technologies were new it is sometimes hard to me to see how new generations fail to find such information, even though it is available on the web. I guess the main cause is thatbone needs to know what to search for. ~~~ pjc50 Tech is strangely ahistorical. Not just practitioners not reading the literature, but it seemingly being forgotten entirely. Possibly this is a side effect of so many of us being self-taught. In another thread I've just been arguing with someone who thought that the DOOM code should have been thread-safe. ~~~ wslh I would say cyclical. Every day we read about a similar framework working in a popular language when that solution already existed for long time. But this happens in other areas outside computer science. For example, modern medicine rediscovering old medicine "recipes". The problem in our field is when people talk all day about Docker while surpressing LXC from the discussion. ~~~ digi_owl I think it happens for different reasons though. With medicine it boils down to a dismissal of folk remedies as placebo. But with computing its because the old ways were developed on mainframes and minicomputers in an environment that current generation may only have heard stories about. This because the micro-computer era was pretty much a mental reboot for computing, as little if any software crossed over (until fairly recently). ------ vezzy-fnord It's been said several times before that a large incentive for Docker's adoption was to get around the dynamic linking hell that is present in most modern Unix-likes. It's funny the author mentions a "world without linkers" with my posting of an article about the TAOS operating system today. Go look there if you want some primers on achieving that. That said, the author greatly oversells Docker's novelty. ~~~ Galanwe > "the dynamic linking hell that is present in most modern Unix-likes" WTF are you talking about... There has never been a "hell" of dynamic linking problems on Unixes, this used to be a Windows problem. Even the "most modern unix-likes" doesn't make sense, since "most modern unix-likes" do not even use similar linking models. ~~~ fapjacks We have dependency management built into the package managers which hides that from us these days. Unix and Linux before package managers was kind of a pain. Now, I will totally give you that it was nothing like the "DLL hell" of Windows. ~~~ reidrac Then how can be that an incentive for Docker's adoption? Honest question; if, as you say, this is a solved problem thanks to package managers. I can't even remember the last time I had a real dependency problem deploying an application (using Debian; and CentOS before that), other than myself not doing things right (read: installing RPMs I found online and I shouldn't install). ~~~ fapjacks Well I wasn't originally speaking wrt Docker, but Docker doesn't magically lose all the hard work done by package managers. You have total access to them in your containers. ------ amirouche > Had their developers known what they were actually writing, perhaps we'd > have a lean and mean solution that did the right thing. I am surprised nobody mentionned nix, nixos and guix. ~~~ pron Can you explain what those are and what they do? ~~~ davexunit Nix and Guix are purely functional package managers, meaning that software builds are treated like a mathematical function: Input the same source code + dependencies and receive the same build as output. They have features such as reproducibile (often bit identical) builds, transactional package upgrades and rollbacks, and unprivileged package management. They solve the dynamic linking problem by allowing each package to refer _precisely_ to the dependencies that it was built with. With this mechanism in place, it becomes very easy to use applications that require different versions of some C library, or a different Ruby/Python interpreter, or whatever else. Furthermore, it can do this without relying on a specific type of file system, and without requiring that applications be run inside containers or virtual machines. This makes it very composable and general-purpose. [https://nixos.org/](https://nixos.org/) [http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/](http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/) ------ riquito > Instead of building and filing away heaps of immutable (read: security > nightmare) containers [...] Is there a consensus on what is(are) the best method(s) to handle security patches automatically in Docker? For example, the official images at [https://registry.hub.docker.com/](https://registry.hub.docker.com/) are fixed in time and you should apply security patches before using them? ~~~ amouat The official images aren't fixed in time, assuming you're pulling using a tag e.g redis:3.0. That image may be updated at any point and should be updated with minor patches and security updates. Rather than manually apply patches, just pull the image again to get the updates. If the image hasn't been updated, complain loudly. If you want your image to be "fixed in time", pull by digest instead. ~~~ riquito Thank you very much ------ craneca0 Very interesting. I'm not convinced this captures the core value of containers though. Or at least not the only core value. Calling containers an evolution of configuration management tools seems like an oversimplification just to make a point. This may be one aspect of building a micro-service driven architecture that containers make easier, but there are other very important ones. Portability comes to mind. It's not just that you can build your stack once and save it, but that you can then run that stack anywhere, and it becomes much easier to share/borrow bits and pieces of other people's stacks. ~~~ falcolas > you can then run that stack anywhere Anywhere that runs Linux, at least. > it becomes much easier to share/borrow bits and pieces of other people's > stacks. At the cost of not knowing what's really in them. ~~~ andybak To a certain degree I don't _want_ to know what's in them. If I want to add search to my stack - initially I'd rather not have to have an intimate knowledge of Elastic Search, a task queue and whatever other moving parts there are. In many cases a black box that just works would be a fantastic option. The reason hosted services are popular is for exactly this reason. A wide understanding of different technologies is a wonderful thing but sometimes you just need to ship. ------ bgilroy26 For any 'Early coders' like my self who want to learn more about linkers and loaders based on this write up, Programming from the Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett is a good book. ~~~ vezzy-fnord As well as Ian Lance Taylor's 20-part blog series on linkers: [https://lwn.net/Articles/276782/](https://lwn.net/Articles/276782/) ------ twblalock Shared libraries were considered a bad idea in Plan 9, and I really wish that point of view had made it into commercial Unix and Linux. ~~~ davexunit Shared libraries are a fantastic idea. Static linking wastes system resources and makes system-wide library updates problematic. Docker's approach to things is essentially a higher level form of static linking, which is to say that it's not a very good approach. It's papering over the package management problem. We need general-purpose package management systems that allow for different applications to use different versions of shared libraries without interference. Luckily, the Nix and GNU Guix projects solve this problem very well, if only they could get some more "mindshare." ~~~ e40 Yeah, having to rebuild every app that uses OpenSSL when a new advisory is issued... wow, that would be expensive! ~~~ adricnet Thousands of mobile app developers feel this pain now, from that particular library. Not updating these applications is not acceptable to most organizations / device operators. Just in case anyone thought the parent was sarcasm or theory, some refs: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/heartbleed-bug-apps- affe...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/heartbleed-bug-apps-affected- list/) [http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/b...](http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/bundled-openssl-library-also-makes-apps-and- android-411-vulnerable-to-heartbleed/) ------ berzemus What's with the light-grey-text-on-white-background styling ? It may look good, but it's a pain to read. ~~~ cthor It looking "prettier" is pretty arguable. The body text is as close to black as it is white. #444 is borderline acceptable. #888 is absurd. ------ kstenerud Sorry, no. I don't want a dynamic linker for my software stacks. I want a complete, ready-to-deploy chunk of code, FROZEN IN TIME, that has a known and predictable state that I can trust. If I need to apply security fixes, I'll rebuild the chunk of code, also frozen in time, and deploy. Ideally, I want no dependencies between container and host, or container and container. Or at least I want them kept to an absolute minimum. Even more ideally, I want isolation to be so complete that I'd be able to run my built stack 100 years from now and have it operate exactly the same as it does today. That's a bit hyperbolic, of course. Docker is not a linker; it is a system from which you build deployable code. In fact, there's no reason why in theory you couldn't add support to deploy Windows or BSD stacks (other than the fact that Windows and BSD kernels haven't been added yet). ------ BurritoAlPastor This is an interesting take, but it doesn't entirely make sense. Ierymenko's 'save your work' metaphor is a little misleading, since (I certainly hope) nobody is creating docker images manually. But I like his idea that dockerfile creation, by which you set up a stack in a way that's automatically reproducible, is equivalent to the role of a linker in a compiled program. Where he loses me is when he suggests that Puppet et al are closer to a 'pure' linker. Configuration management systems are doing the _same thing_ as a Dockerfile: instead of setting up your XYZ stack by hand, you write a Puppet manifest that calls the modules for XYZ and sets them up the way you need. Your final result isn't a server with the XYZ stack: it's an _abstracted process_ that will _reproduce_ your XYZ stack. The main difference is the implementation; Docker reproduces your stack in an isolated environment, and configuration management tools reproduce your stack on an arbitrary platform. But nobody thinks of Docker as a configuration management tool, and for the most part I don't think people even think of Docker as a _competitor_ to configuration management. Hell, Docker is a core component of many Puppet CI workflows. So there's something else going on here. What's the secret sauce? Is Docker just two great things (config management + virtualization) glued together so cohesively that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts? ------ d2xdy2 That's a very clever metaphor for that aspect of Docker. I hadn't considered looking at it that way before. ------ williamsharkey The author writes: "Sometimes (unless I am writing in Go) I don't want to bundle all my code together into one giant hulking binary." I am unfamiliar with Go - can someone please offer why this technique might especially desirable/feasible with Go? ~~~ agrover Go only supports static linking. No dynamic linking means no linking issues when deploying the same binary across a billion machines in the Googleplex. ------ glifchits Is "gerschnorvels" really a word in any language? ~~~ digi_owl My first though was that it was some sort of compound word. ------ leephillips According to this article, Docker is a way to save your work after configuring your server. Can't I do that with rsync -a /etc /whatever backupserver:/backups/server1 ? ~~~ fragmede First off, rsync -a / backupserver:/backups/server1 would be a better comparison; full server state never properly stays in /etc. Do you actually do that though? Multiple times a day? How easy is it to roll back to a previous state? Given Dockerfiles, a better comparison would be rsnapshot, since intermediate steps are important, and maybe that last "yum upgrade/apt-get update/whatever" broke something (on dev, of course) and you want to roll back. How do you compare two related file system images? Is there something more advanced than "diff -u"? How does that handle binaries? Will that map backwards and say what command resulted in changed binaries? Can I submit a code review for the changes between the two states like I could for a Dockerfile which is plain text? Docker isn't quite a configuration management system like Chef or Puppet, but there's a lot of overlap. ------ ForHackernews > perhaps some quantum superposition of those that has yielded a New Thing. Ugh. That's not what quantum superposition means.

Howard Schulz, CEO of Starbucks, joins Groupon's Board of Directors - mjfern http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/changes-to-the-groupon-board-of-directors/ ====== longarm It's more impressive when companies add people to their board who add a perspective other than the entrenched (dare I say evil) mindset of their competition. An example: Chipotle adding Bill Niman, an advocate against factory farming, fast food and cheap meat. A good move for Groupon would be to add someone who speaks for small businesses--the main Groupon customers-- instead of a major corporation.

Ask HN: Designing a Database - bgnm2000 I'm primarily a designer with a good amount of code experience (classes in school, messing around on my own etc.) I started to learn rails over the summer, and built one pretty messy app. That said, I'm gearing up to build my second app, this time around I've been thinking a lot about the database and how everything needs to connect etc. rather than doing it as I go.<p>So far I've drawn it on paper (looks like something out of MS Access) but I was wondering if there are any other recommended steps I should take before I start coding this all out (besides the usual flow charts etc.)?<p>Thanks!<p>-bgnm ====== tom_b Do you need your system to be transaction-oriented (think ATMs and banking) or analytic (for doing slice and dice reporting of data)? You'll do well to check out normalization for the first and understand star schemas for the second. It's awesome you are thinking about db design upfront, just think about what your data will be, how it will be used, and how you will want to move it around for your app. Don't discount not using a db at all (and I'm a db guy for work) - for one of my current projects, I'm simply dumping small data objects into individual JSON files. Easy to fetch with Ruby/Sinatra and easy for the GUI part of the app to play with (Javascript eats up JSON on that side). Not to discount Rails at all, but going with a minimal toolset like Ruby/Sinatra/Sequel might be just the ticket for you roll simple web apps really quickly. Heck, this forum uses flat files for storing submissions, comments, and user data. ~~~ bgnm2000 Thanks for the reply! I'd say the data is definitely going to be analytical - but some parts will be transaction oriented, if that makes sense (people will be able to pay for greater functionality). I don't think I know enough about flat file systems to code one up myself at this point either (not that I know enough about DB's - but enough to create something). Any good resources for understanding star schemas? ~~~ tom_b Sure, grab one of the data warehouse books from Kimball. Inmon is the other big data warehouse author out there, but I'm not as familiar with his texts. Kimball's stuff is an easy read and not platform focused in any way. If you are aiming to do business visualizations with the data, you might want to check out Stephen Few - he's written several books on business data visualization (think Tufte distilled for charts and dashboards). ------ fragmede Make sure you've read Wikipedia's article on normalizing databases. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization> ~~~ pbhjpbhj If you understand such gems as: _[For 3NF ensuring that] Every non-prime attribute is non-transitively dependent on every key of the table_ Then that's the perfect reminder article. I did an undergrad course in db design covering db normalisation (years ago) and still found that page to be a bit dense. I'd look elsewhere for a primer. <http://www.databaseprimer.com/normalization.html> is a bit too simplified but makes it easy to understand what's happening. This [http://www.databasejournal.com/sqletc/article.php/1428511/Da...](http://www.databasejournal.com/sqletc/article.php/1428511/Database- Normalization.htm) appears to be a good overview using a realistic worked example db.

It's complicated: Facebook's terrible 2018 - sahin-boydas https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2018/dec/24/facebook-2018-timeline-year-in-review-privacy-scandals ====== ethiclub Does anyone have any good devil's advocate information on Facebook? \- The company does not seem to have an appropriate ethics board (for the size of company). There is some mention of an 'ethics AI board' but no real governance over Ethical conduct and compliance. If there are internal review boards ([https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/17/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/17/facebook- ethics-but-is-it-ethical)), then it appears that they are thoroughly compromised, and not providing a level of accountability or serious thought that anyone will take seriously. \- There seems to be no intention or effort in achieving ISO standards (apart from a single ISO:27001 certification for FB Workplace, which was arguably to provide a 'feature' for the application rather than any ethical move). Granted, the value of standards and frameworks will always be in dispute, but these exist for a reason and are a neat 'package' that organizations use to ensure they are not reinventing the wheel and acknowledging a list of considerations. \- Facebook do not seem to maintain an ethics page. \- They do not seem to have an ethical voice - Nor do they appear to have anyone even pretending to have an ethical voice. PR from facebook (usually) manifests as 'We do what we do, and it's fine' rather than 'we will be introspective about this'. It seems strange that there isn't even any posturing here. \- The two types of FB employee that seem to voice insight on public forums are either a) discontent and being ignored by management or b) drinking the koolaid and refusing to admit that their practice is unethical. Ignoring Occam's razor for a moment - Surely there is something to cling on to here, to provide the principle of charity for Facebook. FB sure are making it hard for consumers to paint them in any reasonable light.

File System Hierarchy 3.0 RC1 Proposal - JustinGarrison http://www.linuxbase.org/betaspecs/fhs/fhs.html#usrshareArchitectureindependentData ====== grigio I'm still waiting `/Users` `/Applications`. Only Gobolinux has it

Name.com Responds to HTP Security Breach - Judson http://pastebin.com/We3xgT4J ====== 3JPLW Interesting that they don't talk about any action they have taken in response (beyond asking their customers to perform some action and implementing vague "security measures"). I would hope that they've identified and fixed the core security issue that HTP exploited.

How to get stuff done, automatically - acoleman616 http://www.alexpcoleman.com/productivity/get-stuff-done/?hn ====== digitalsushi I get a db error with the query string referrer [http://www.alexpcoleman.com/productivity/get-stuff- done/](http://www.alexpcoleman.com/productivity/get-stuff-done/) works for me ~~~ theg2 Looks like it went under and the sites down for me. ~~~ acoleman616 Always something fun and new with the server when on HN. Working on getting it back up now... ------ startupclarity I'm sure the irony of reading these sorts of blog posts isn't lost on you all. However, I do believe that some of these strategies and techniques can actually work. I even wrote about it on the post 'how to make time for your side-project'. The key is not _just_ to break things down and to create tiny, regular actions. It's also to _start_. Most of us like to talk and talk and not actually do anything at all. This procrastination and hyperbolic discounting means that we often go for the quick fix rather than the ongoing journey to success. Starting and overcoming our own psychology is often the hardest part. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting) [http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/make-time-side- project/](http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/make-time-side-project/) ~~~ bentcorner Personally, I've found that the process of breaking down a task and writing it down is incredibly useful. As I multitask throughout the day I forget where I am in a particular task item, and having a list of things I'm supposed to do all I need to do is go to the next list item and do that. I also try to have high-level items for the day so that I know what I'm focusing on. Anything that I need to do but can't do today I put on a list for the next day. It seems to be working out alright for me. I currently just throw it all into OneNote, although it's not the greatest for dealing with lists the way I use it, but the freeform writing surface and search it provides makes up for it. ~~~ read _I forget where I am in a particular task item_ Forgetting is my number one problem right now. I also noticed there's some kind of unconscious filtering going on in your mind. Even if you write down the tasks your mind prioritizes them on its own. What I wish list software had was a way to push those less important tasks in the background. ~~~ bentcorner Be religious about writing down what you're doing, make a habit of referring to this list when you find that you're bouncing around from task to task. Sometimes I'll hit HN if I'm waiting for something to finish, and if I was in the middle of something complex I've needed to write down what I was doing, even if it was only for _literally_ a minute. Also, when incrementally learning something it can help. Writing down in your own words how something works can help you if you only have small chunks of time to learn something. ~~~ read Thanks for this, I'll try it. I found writing down things I learned (or typing them in) makes them more likely to stick in my mind. Particularly small phrases that pop out. ------ socrates1998 I have always struggled with automating my life habits. It's not that I don't have goals, I have them in plenty. I have problems with the dehumanizing, machine-like feeling it puts on life. Doing the same thing everyday at the same time sounds horrible. I don't want to program myself. I want to live my life according to how I feel at the moment. But, as you can imagine, this has created problems. You don't keep jobs by living for the moment or doing what you feel like doing. I am not sure if I have a point, but I think there is more to life than becoming a programmable robot. Maybe balance is the key. Have good habits, but try to build some flexibility into them. ~~~ monkmartinez So you say that you want to live as you feel, but this also creates problems. Emotions are the problem. Better stated, lacking control of your emotions is the problem. You are in control of your thoughts and how you react to them. Knowing this and practicing control has been life changing for me. /r/stoicism, my friend. ------ owenversteeg Site's down with a 404 for all pages right now. Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LwUoGcd...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LwUoGcds- okJ:www.alexpcoleman.com/productivity/get-stuff- done/+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us) ------ jqm Good article. Ben Franklin's schedule shot was interesting. 8-6 workday with a two hour lunch (so 8 hours of work). For some reason I always assumed people toiled very long hours back in those day. ~~~ bhousel Most people _did_ toil very long hours back then, but Franklin was one of the first to make the jump from common class into pseudo-nobility. Class mobility was a new thing back then. The idea of "work" was considered very uncool at the time, especially to upper class, or social climbers like Franklin who mixed with them. I heard somewhere that this is why old school scientific publications have names like "Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c." Because we're not _working_ , we're just _observing_. ~~~ josephjrobison A few counterpoints: "These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."[1] But also: "Based on the amount of work performed — for example, crops raised per worker — Carr (1992) concludes that in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region, “for at least six months of the year, an eight to ten-hour day of hard labor was necessary.” This does not account for other required tasks, which probably took about three hours per day. This workday was considerably longer than for English laborers, who at the time probably averaged closer to six hours of heavy labor each day."[2] [1] [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) [2][http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s- history/](http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/) ------ elwell > If you only come away with one thing after reading this, let it be this: > focus on the process. Don’t focus on your output. That kind of flies in the face of the hacker mentality and lean startup methodology. The growing trend seems to be: _focus on creating value_ ; not how many hours you spent working today. And I must agree with the trend in this case. ------ philip1209 The author added a "?hn" to the URL to track referrals from here - I believe that this violates the HN ToS and should be removed by the mods. ~~~ rockdiesel why would a referral parameter even be needed in this case? can't a person just go into their analytics and look at all the referrals from news.ycombinator.com without the need for a parameter in the URL? ------ agueroooo Any ideas about the habits of the brilliant programmers of past and present? e.g. Trovalds, Sysoev etc etc? ~~~ derekp7 There's been posts about daily habits of other accomplished persons (not necessarily programmers), and the conclusion from that discussion was that although these techniques work for them, they would not really apply in general. For example, some would have a glass of wine before starting work on a project, whereas that would put me to sleep. Some athletes eat a big steak dinner before a game, while with others it would hamper their performance. My take on it, is that people that are good at what they do are good because they are good, not because of any rituals.

Lazy Loading in Java - twotriangles http://mlapadula.com/blog/2011/08/28/lazy-initialization-in-java.html ====== sidcool Getting 404 ~~~ chromejs10 same

12 things I learned from pitching VCs this past week - scrollinondubs http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2007/12/12/lessons-from-vc-pitches/ ====== dhouston good stuff. sam altman told us the most important thing for him was to remember #8 -- they need you as much as you need them. they _want_ to believe that you're the next google; think of how much it would make their lives easier if you were, and think of how hard it would be to spend your life saying no 90+% of the time and telling people their babies are ugly. they want to say yes. i'd also say spend a lot of time coming up with a story and framing your opportunity in the biggest possible way. this was something i really underestimated -- initially we'd just show a list of features and expect everyone to arrive at the vision we had in our heads, but really it's the other way around -- the features drive a more important story and vision. a story is also a lot easier for an investor to retell and get other people excited about than a laundry list of "um, it does this, and this, and this..." remember, VCs have to then turn around and sell their own general partnership on the idea, so give them the ammo they need to do this effectively. also -- practice your pitch until it becomes mechanical. not so much by standing in front of a mirror (though that helps too) but rather by debugging it with individual angels or mentors, so that by the time you pitch the investors you really want you've already seen most of the universe of possible objections and surprises and can handle them effectively. ~~~ scrollinondubs dhouston- good call on having a big story. The VC's could literally care less about the features of your product, they want to know how it's going to be thing that will be a common-place word in 4 yrs and you have to paint that picture vividly for them. I would disagree on the pitching in front of a mirror thing. And actually i should add this as #14- I recommend that you _don't_ have a scripted pitch. Have a deck of slides that serves as a framework for the conversation but just talk about it naturally. If you truly believe in it, this should become second nature and they'll smell the candidness whereas a scripted pitch comes off as brittle and less engaging. You want it to be anything but mechanical IMHO. sean ~~~ aswanson The pimped out mouse gives you instant cred, scrollin. ------ brlewis Much of this article seems like good advice about pitching in general, not only to investors. I like it. ------ jsjenkins168 Valuable lessons, thanks for sharing them! You mention in #4 that a quality referral is critical. Do you mind sharing your experiences meeting/using a referral to get face time with VCs? ~~~ scrollinondubs sure, in generic terms. Our lawyer was instrumental in getting 3 - we splurged a bit and hired a very reputable firm in Palo Alto that is well-connected. We paid more than we would have liked for the legal work a year ago but it's paying dividends now in terms of introductions. The other intros came from just random networking. We live in AZ but I drove my truck up to SF and couch surfed the past month just going to events, shaking hands and meeting people. I had a list of people I know through various user group involvement and presence on listserv's so i contacted them and tried to have a different lunch lined up everyday. I used Meetup, Upcoming and googled "Bay Area User Groups" and tried to lineup a different event every night. I actively used Facebook and my blog to solicit intros and tell people what I was doing, switching my network to Silicon Valley temporarily and finding events via that. I met great contacts at the Startup Weekend that was held in SF. And the whole time I was writing a series of posts on my trip essentially live-blogging it to meet more contacts. You can read those here if you're interested-> <http://www.scrollinondubs.com/tags/sfroadtrip> There is no "typical intro" to describe - they happened in the most unpredictable/serendipitous ways, but having the conversation-starter of "so I drove here from Phoenix and have been sleeping on friends couches so i can be in the mix for our startup" was a powerful lead-in to be able to talk with people and get them to listen. I know PG is a big fan of the idea you should really be in the Bay Area to give your startup the best chance of success. We have our company in AZ right now and moving wasn't an option so this was the next best thing we figured we could do. Definitely very happy with the choice. sean ------ davidw > one meeting that ran 30min over- the VC was deferring calls from his wife > who was waiting for him in the parking lot Nice guy:-/ ~~~ mrtron The wifey can complain when she is driving her new Bentley. Sometimes business has to come before pleasure, I know my lady would wait in the parking lot for 3 days if she knew it was important. But if I was a VC, I would give everyone X amount of time, but have a plan B to talk all day if things went well. ~~~ davidw It would have cost him nothing (and he's the one with the money, in any case) to say "hey, I'm running late, it's important, it'll be a while longer" rather than simply not answering, as the article seems to say. ~~~ downer Ah, but interrupting business for personal _looks bad_ ; and the thing about (possibly most) women is they _want_ you to have something that's more important than them. If you drop everything for them they won't respect you. So he did the right thing from both perspectives. Which is probably why he's rich and has a (presumably) hot wife. (I know that sounds politically incorrect, but alas, reality often is. To be fair, it probably works both ways: a man won't respect a woman who drops everything for _him_ , either.) ~~~ davidw I have a hot Italian wife, and would never leave her stewing like that. It's not about dropping everything for the other person - I don't think anyone can expect that. It's about picking up the phone and saying "sorry, got to keep you waiting, it's important". Communicating and managing expectations. It's a pretty minor quibble, I guess, but it just struck me as something rude. ~~~ scrollinondubs guys, lemme clarify this- when i said "deferring calls from his wife," he was politely saying "honey, gimme 15 more min" because he was so into it. It really wasn't rude at all and perhaps I should have better explained it or left that out altogether. sean ------ edw519 On a subject overflowing with "advice", this seems like a particularly helpful post. I especially like the running theme of "putting yourself into their shoes". Great stuff! Thank you.

Show HN: Bon – programming language designed for simplicity, performance, safety - FBMachine https://github.com/FBMachine/bon ====== ngcc_hk Have a quick look. Quite easy to read. Just not sure does it have an advantage over swift which seems quite easy to read, cross 2 platform at least (linux and macOS, the windows seems not on equal footing and five code not working), target llvm. The basic features of a new language is hard as you can see the posting what expected. Macro (may not be lisp level but template), memory Managrment, purpose (embedded, os, driver and application, ai library, CUDA, mobile app etc.), library, platform, examples and q&a under stackoverflow etc. ... wonder what is the point of learning a new one. ------ ubertaco This is really neat! I'm a big fan of Crystal-lang, and I dig the similarity in the sense of "let's start with Ruby-like syntax, and add more static structure". I can see the difference here as being that Bon appears to _behave_ more like Haskell or OCaml rather than like Ruby, which means that there's still a good niche here. I hope this neat language finds success! ~~~ FBMachine Thanks, I really appreciate it! ------ chrislopez How is memory managed? I'm assuming some form of garbage collection. So this can be used in any instance C or C++ can? Can it use C and C++ libraries because it runs on clang? Sorry if these are n00b questions. Bon seems like it could be a nice mix of the wonderful syntax of a python or ruby, and the speed of a C or C++ (or at least a compiled language) ~~~ FBMachine Hi Chris, thanks for checking it out. The first code push for Bon was today, so many things are of course rough around the edges. Memory will be garbage collected, though I am aiming for zero-cost as much as possible. At the moment it just leaks memory like a sieve as I work out the semantics. You can indeed import standard c library calls by using a cdef. You can find examples in the stdlib, e.g.: cdef sqrt(x:float) -> float Thanks again for taking a look! ~~~ bendmorris What is "zero-cost" garbage collection? ~~~ swiftcoder I've seen both Rust's lifetimes/borrow-checker and Objective-C/Swift's automatic reference counting described as "zero cost" (since the bulk of the work is done at compile time). ~~~ m0th87 Rust's borrow checker is zero-cost because it's not doing runtime analysis. But it's not a garbage collector, unless you're using Steve Klabnik's "static garbage collector" terminology [1]. Reference counting is definitely not zero cost. It reduces GC runtime latency for most workloads, but not to zero, and it does so at the cost of reduced bandwidth. 1: [https://words.steveklabnik.com/borrow-checking-escape- analys...](https://words.steveklabnik.com/borrow-checking-escape-analysis-and- the-generational-hypothesis) ------ CJefferson Simplicity, performance and safety? That's everything! What's it bad at? ~~~ orthoxerox Having an stdlib, having a dependency manager and overall stability. ~~~ giancarlostoro Yeah Rust and Go (and D) all have: decent standard libraries (Go exceeds the other two, somewhat resembling Python), a package manager of sorts (Go needsa improve in this aspect, but the strong standard library makes up for it for now, and they are working on it atm), and they're all usually stable. I think the biggest game changers for any new language is a highly competitive standard library out of the box: web server of sorts that can somewhat scale out of the box is usually a must, but at least a simple enough one is ok too, file IO, crypto, etc are also useful, the less code I have to write the more productive I feel. Package management is a must too, even if primitive at first (Go's approach is clean and decentralized to some degree, I love that). ------ charlesetc It seems a bit premature to claim high performance without having a story for memory. I'm sure ocaml, swift, and basically all languages that do any type of runtime garbage collection would be significantly faster without it. ~~~ bunderbunder It's complicated. The best runtime GC nowadays tends to take on some of the performance characteristics of a stack, including that finding a new memory slot is O(1). Heap allocation in many non-GC languages, by contrast, ends up involving some sort of relatively gross search for free memory. The same mechanisms also mean that, if you aren't doing anything in particular to manage your memory layout, the GC language is likely to achieve better locality of reference at run time. This isn't to say that better performance isn't achievable in languages with manual memory management, but doing so often requires a special effort that just isn't going to happen most the time, for reasons of practicality. That said, there are certain classes of program where the story is different: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Language_Benchmar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Language_Benchmarks_Game#Benchmark_programs) ~~~ zokier I think the point was that you can make memory allocation _very fast_ if you do not care about ever freeing memory, but obviously that is not exactly sustainable strategy. So that is why making claims about performance before figuring out memory management story is bit premature. ------ Q6T46nT668w6i3m Is this an extension of Kaleidoscope (the language implemented in the LLVM tutorial)? ~~~ FBMachine I wouldn't call it an extension, but I did use the tutorial to quickly prototype from. There are still some remnants left in the code, but I don't expect much if any to be left in the near future. ------ zestyping I'm curious about scoping. How come `main` in the typeclass.bon example gets to call `norm()` unqualified? Do all the functions in all `impl` definitions just get tossed in one global namespace? If `Norm` is a class, then why are there no `Norm` objects? ~~~ perfunctory This seems to be straight from Haskell. `class` here doesn't mean what it means in oop languages. ~~~ FBMachine Yeah, 'class' in Bon defines a typeclass. While I plan on adding x.norm() as syntactic sugar for norm(x), typeclasses in general are a bit more flexible. For example, while you can use it for polymorphic operator overloading [0], you can also overload a function by changing the types of multiple parameters [1] (as in multiple dispatch). [0] [https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/master/examples/equali...](https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/master/examples/equality.bon) [1] [https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/master/examples/multip...](https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/master/examples/multiple_dispatch.bon) ~~~ bausshf You should look into UFCS from dlang, maybe that can give you some inspiration. [https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#pseudo- member](https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#pseudo-member) ------ FBMachine For those who had questions about how memory is to be managed, the documentation for that work is being tracked here: [https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/auto_mem/docs/ch02-01-...](https://github.com/FBMachine/bon/blob/auto_mem/docs/ch02-01-memory.md) Thanks for all of the feedback! ------ RivieraKid I would love if there was a language combining the strengths of Julia and Swift. Swift has: much nicer handling of optional values, static typing, better for OOP, function calls via dot notation, zero-based indexing. Julia has: better ecosystem for scientific computing, the standard library makes lot of things easier, better REPL, working with arrays is easier. (Just from the top of my head, there are other things.) ------ tropo This is a terrible name conflict. Bon, along with New B, was an immediate ancestor to C. The history gets more confusing with another Bon showing up half a century later. Bon was created for Multics by Ken Thompson. His wife Bonnie, like this other person's mother, was the inspiration for the name. Ken Thompson has naming priority. ~~~ chrislopez Ken Thompson is a person, plain and simple. He is not a god. Naming priority doesn't matter when most programmers haven't heard of old Bon. No one is going to think that new Bon is old Bon if no one knows about old Bon. Maybe there will confusion looking at the history if new Bon takes off, but when is there not in computer science? A simple footnote could suffice to avoid confusion. ------ rurban I esp. like the multiple dispatch and the unifying typesystem. I'll definitely steal something from it ------ IshKebab Looks nicely designed, but are lists really implemented as linked lists? That's surely going to be very slow. ~~~ FBMachine Thanks for checking it out. They are currently implemented similarly to OCaml, so yes they are linked lists. This was purely for simplicity (they can be implemented in a couple of lines of code with algebraic data types). Simplicity of implementation is certainly not my priority, just a short term drive, so it will be revisited in the near future. Thanks! ------ chrislopez Looks interesting! I'll give it a spin.

The State of JavaScript on Android Is Poor - megaman821 https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-in-2015-is-poor/33889 ====== voltagex_ > It just means over time you'll lose Android users as they get fed up with > the huge speed disparity (if they care, or notice) but you'll retain and > grow iOS users. > If Apple's overall market share keeps increasing, this wouldn't necessarily > be a bad strategy. Not my favorite, and not really in harmony with the > original vision for Discourse, but I'm limited in what we can do with the > resources that we have. We can't build two distinct applications (web, for > iOS, and native, for Android) without destroying the company in the process. >It could also be that over a long time scale (e.g. five years out) Android will fix this. But it clearly will not be fixed in a year or two. Sigh. I wonder if Android M has been benched. ------ voltagex_ See also [https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2935](https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2935) ------ macrael The State of JavaScript on Android Is Poor ... we need to start considering alternatives for the Discourse project. Really buried the lede there.